In the Winter Woods

by Isabelle Adler

  I was Porter’s closest neighbor.

  Earlier today, Monroe had dismissed my theory that whoever had sent me those notes might have been the killer. And, if Janice was to be believed, Frank hadn’t mentioned anything about getting any such messages. But it seemed to me to be too much of a coincidence for these two crimes not to be related somehow. Whoever had sent me the letters wanted me out of the cabin. Maybe they wanted the same thing from Porter? Maybe he knew who it was and confronted them just like he used to confront everybody else—this time with disastrous results?

  And if I was right and he had received anonymous notes, they’d still be at his cottage. Monroe had said they hadn’t yet searched the house, only established it hadn’t been broken into, and I doubted they’d had the chance to do another sweep afterward. If any such notes were found, the investigators would have to take a closer look in that direction, wouldn’t they?

  In retrospect, I knew what I was about to do was extremely foolish. But alcohol, desperation, and mulish stubbornness were a dangerous mix, and I wasn’t about to let sound judgment get in the way of self-vindication. In that moment, I convinced myself it was imperative that I find those letters—perhaps even a clue to the identity of their sender. After all, Porter knew everyone in the village, and he must have had a good idea as to who would send them, and why.

  I pushed away the whiskey I’d been nursing and stood up from the sofa. The room tilted a little to the side, but I refused to let it deter me.

  My main character had done his fair share of breaking and entering in the course of his long and illustrious career (usually into top-secret government facilities and enemy military bases), but it wasn’t a skill I could boast of myself. As a matter of fact, I had only a dim notion about what this endeavor should entail.

  I had enough sense left to lock the door after myself. Darkness had descended on the woods while I was busy wallowing in my misery, and it greeted me with softly falling snow and bracing chill.

  The cold helped to clear the fog from my mind, and by the time I came upon Porter’s cottage, I’d begun to question my rationale for going there.

  The house was larger than my cabin, and older, by the looks of it. The pale-blue paint had peeled in places, and the white border around the door and windows was anything but pristine. A large and heavy maple branch, brought down by the recent storm, had landed on the gable above the entrance and broken the decorative trim. Its white splinters littered the porch along with withered leaves.

  Yellow police tape wrapped the porch posts, but otherwise, there were no signs of any activity.

  I waited for a few minutes, crouching under a tall maple tree, shivering in the coat which was definitely too flimsy for the local weather. The windows were dark, and no sound came from inside. No cars were parked on the driveway, and snow was slowly covering the multiple tire marks left by the police and ambulance vehicles. Having asserted there was no one there to see me, I crept around the house toward the entrance.

  I ducked under the yellow tape as I climbed the three shallow steps up the porch. My eyes were immediately drawn to the dark stain that marred the weathered floorboards, and I couldn’t suppress an instinctive shudder. The blood had seeped into the wood, a terrible reminder of the tragedy that I suspected would never fully come off.

  Giving the stain a wide berth, I went to the door and tried the handle. I hadn’t found any latex cleaning gloves in my cabin, and that meant I had to make do with my regular thermal winter gloves to keep from accidentally leaving any fingerprints all over the crime scene.

  Unsurprisingly, the door was locked. After a few half-hearted tugs at the handle, I left it alone and continued around the porch, trying the windows. The second one on the right was closed, but neither shuttered nor latched, so I was able to push the frame up and climb inside.

  Perhaps “climb” was too generous a word for my graceless performance; nevertheless, so far, my plan had been a success. I got up from where I’d landed on the floor and dusted my jeans before taking stock of the surroundings.

  All I could see were the shadows of the furniture, slightly more solid than the darkness that enveloped the room. Somewhere to my right, a clock ticked away, measuring the seconds it was taking me to adjust to the gloom and the smell of dust.

  The floorboards creaked as I took a step inside, and then I let out a muffled curse as I promptly stubbed my toe on a table leg.

  Clearly, that Lasik procedure hadn’t covered improved night vision. But even after all those shots of whiskey, I’d retained enough presence of mind to bring a flashlight with me. If someone was stalking our cabins, I didn’t want to alert them to my being there by turning on the lights.

  I took a deep breath of stale air, reminded myself to be quieter, and dug the flashlight out of my coat pocket. The beam picked out a worn beige couch, a couple of mismatched armchairs, and shaggy throw rug that was most likely the source of the dusty odor. A large TV was tucked away into a corner on top of an opened-shelved console filled with DVD boxes. Most of the movies were either classic mysteries, spy thrillers, or porn. I tried not to think too hard about how closely Porter’s interests resembled my own—at least where the mysteries and the thrillers were concerned.

  I made a round of the room but found nothing interesting. A few old photographs hung on the walls, including a black-and-white portrait of a couple in their wedding clothes whom I assumed to be Porter’s late parents. Porter Sr. gazed at me disapprovingly from the frame, and I hastened along.

  Frank hadn’t been the neatest person, but not precisely a slob either. Where would someone like that keep anonymous letters? Would he feel compelled to hide them, even if he lived alone, or would they be piled with the rest of his mail and papers?

  The parlor didn’t yield anything, so I turned down the hallway. The next two doors led to a bedroom and a large study, and I decided the latter would be a good start. No matter how driven or alcohol-fueled, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with snooping around a dead man’s bedroom.

  The study was a lot messier than the front room, filled with floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books (most of them nonfiction) and piles of folders. With this much paperwork lying around, it would take me days to go through everything.

  With only a few hours at my disposal, I decided to tackle the desk. At first, I thought someone had carelessly searched it, throwing things out haphazardly all over the top, but then I realized it was the way Frank had left it. He must have had some sort of system to navigate the chaos, but right now it was making my task almost impossible.

  I shuffled through the papers piled on the desktop around a powered-down laptop. Bills, newspaper clippings, town hall meeting minutes, and budget reports were all stacked up in seeming randomness, but there were no pieces of paper with vicious messages spelled in cut-out letters.

  Muttering under my breath, I opened the drawers one by one and sorted through them. The winter gloves proved much more cumbersome than expected, though I tried not to disturb anything more than it already was.

  The drawers held the usual junk—stationery, an assorted collection of pens and pencils, cough drops, jumbled computer cords. The bottom drawer was deeper, and there I found a half-empty bottle of Scotch. I sighed and was about to close the drawer when something shoved at the back of it caught my eye. I crouched and carefully took out a shallow rectangular metal box. It glinted dully under the light of my flashlight.

  It was one of those portable safe boxes, and predictably enough, it was locked. I shook the box, trying to guess what was inside, and heard papers shuffling.

  My heart leapt. Finally, I was getting somewhere. Even if these weren’t the letters I was hoping to discover, whatever was inside was important enough to keep under lock. Now all I had to do was find the key.

  I rummaged through the upper drawers again, this time paying closer attention to the contents, and then went through them again, more carefully, without success. The key must have been hidden somewhere else.
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  I pushed to my feet, and a floorboard creaked behind me. I froze, my heart trying its damndest to jump out of my throat as light spilled from the corridor, illuminating my compromising position.

  “Hold it,” Commissioner Monroe said, his voice irritatingly calm. “Put your hands in the air and turn around slowly.”

  Chapter Eight

  I did as I was told, turning slowly to face Monroe. I held my flashlight up in the air, its beam casting a bright spot on the ceiling, and clutched the safe box to my chest with the other hand.

  Monroe had both his gun and his own flashlight trained on me in a double grip that reminded me of cops in movies. I gulped, staring down the barrel, but he lowered it a second later.

  “Kensington,” he said wearily. “I should have known.”

  “You promised to call me Declan, remember?” I blurted and immediately winced.

  Instead of answering, Monroe flipped a switch by the door, filling the room with a dull yellowish light. I blinked slowly and lowered my hand, now that I was no longer at risk of getting shot on the spot. Judging by the look in the commissioner’s eyes, I wasn’t completely out of danger yet.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Okay, look,” I said hurriedly. “I know this looks bad. But I wasn’t going to take anything. I merely wanted to search Porter’s house for anonymous notes. You may think they’re unconnected, but I believe he must have gotten them as well. What if he’d confronted the sender, and they killed him?”

  My voice became steadier and steadier as I talked. Yes, I’d been caught red-handed, but at least Monroe was willing to listen to me as I made my case. I wondered whether he believed me, but his blue-eyed gaze was expressionless.

  “You do realize that even if you found some letters, they’d be inadmissible in court?” he asked when I finished. “As a mystery writer, I’d expect you to be familiar with the term ‘fruit of the poisonous tree.’”

  “As I said, I wasn’t going to take them. I was going to tip you off if I discovered anything.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Declan.” Monroe rolled his eyes. He finally holstered his weapon and then sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

  “Yes, a bit. But I’m not drunk.”

  “Uh-huh. Please tell me you didn’t touch anything.”

  “As you said, I’m a mystery writer. Of course I know not to touch anything.” I scoffed.

  “Apparently, that didn’t stop you from going around breaking into other people’s houses. Houses that are still active crime scenes.”

  “Okay, fair point. But you weren’t going to search it, and there could be important clues lying around in here. I had to do something to clear myself from suspicion.”

  “By breaking and entering? Good call,” he said, his voice laced with heavy sarcasm.

  I didn’t know what to say to that because, of course, he was right.

  “What makes you think I wasn’t going to search Porter’s residence?” Monroe asked, when it became clear no more explanations were forthcoming.

  “You didn’t say anything about it earlier.”

  Monroe pinched his nose. “I’m not in the habit of discussing an ongoing investigation with persons of interest, you know,” he said conversationally. “Not that you’re making it easy.”

  “You were considering it, then?” I asked, ignoring both the “person of interest” part and the implication I was somehow getting under Monroe’s skin.

  “What do you think I came here for?”

  That gave me pause.

  “I figured someone saw me creeping around the cottage and called the station.”

  He shook his head. “I was following a lead and saw your flashlight from the study window. Between that and the noise you were making pawing through that desk, I must say you’re not a very discreet burglar.”

  Gathering all my courage, I drew myself up. “Are you going to arrest me now?”

  I counted my heartbeats while he regarded me with those impossibly blue eyes, piercing and shrewd even in the dim lighting.

  “We’ll see,” he said finally, and then nodded to the box I was still clutching to my chest. “What have you got there?”

  His tone was anything but reassuring, but I figured him not slapping a pair of handcuffs on me and dragging me to the county jail right away was a good sign. I looked down at the box.

  “I think there are some papers inside. It might be something important. I was just looking for the key when you sneaked up behind me.”

  That probably came off far more accusatory than I had any right to be, considering the situation, but he ignored it. Instead, he reached inside his jacket inner pocket and took out a clear plastic bag.

  “This key?” He dangled the bag marked “Evidence” in front of me.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In Porter’s wallet, so it was clearly of some significance to him. It was already processed for fingerprints. Let’s see if it fits.”

  He shook the small flat key out of the bag. I set the box on the desk and took a step back as he put on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and slid the key in the lock. I had to admit I was a tiny bit impressed with his level of preparedness, but I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d been a homicide detective for years and had to know what he was doing.

  I craned my neck to see him turn the key. The lock clicked, and the lid popped open.

  “Bingo,” Monroe said softly and moved the box toward me so I could peer at the contents.

  Inside were a few letters, each tucked in their envelopes, and a couple of Polaroid snapshots. Monroe took them out and laid them all out on the desk.

  The colors on the photos were faded with time, but I instantly recognized Frank Porter. Even at eighteen, his hairline had already looked like it wouldn’t put up much of a fight against genetics, but there was no sign of his perpetual scowl. Instead, he was smiling, standing in front of a coffee shop window with his arm around the shoulders of a pretty girl. She looked to be the same age, her dark hair pulled up in a ponytail, and she wore a baggy pink sweatshirt and a pair of Levi’s.

  “Lucy Henshaw,” I whispered.

  I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, of course, but it must have been her. The great love of Frank’s life, and his biggest loss.

  Monroe turned his head to me sharply.

  “How do you know about her?”

  “I wanted to understand Porter better, so I asked around. I don’t have to tell you how people love to talk when there’s someone who’s willing to listen.”

  “Gossip sure spreads fast in Maplewood,” he muttered and returned to study the photos. I leaned over his shoulder and was momentarily distracted by the scent of his cologne.

  “Here’s what I was looking for,” he said, tapping on one of the Polaroids, and I reeled my thoughts back from the less than appropriate path they’d been taking.

  I focused on the picture he’d selected. It showed Lucy with different clothes and a shorter haircut, sitting in an armchair with a boy of about three or four on her lap. There was no notation on the photo, but the context wasn’t hard to deduce.

  “This must be Frank’s son,” I said, looking at the boy’s round face. “So Lucy didn’t terminate the pregnancy after all. And this means Frank knew about it.”

  “The Henshaws were very religious, or so I’m given to understand. They must have insisted she keep the baby, despite Porter senior’s desire to the contrary. Must be why they left town in such a hurry.”

  Monroe took the letters out of the envelopes one by one and quickly scanned them before placing them back. “These are from Lucy. She was writing to him in secret. No return address, but the postage stamp is from Pennsylvania. The last one is from more than twenty-five years ago, and it’s her telling him that she wanted nothing to do with him, and for him to forget about her and the child.”

  “Wow, that’s harsh.” Once again, I felt the reluctant stirrings of sympathy toward Frank, but then a
whole different thought struck me. “Wait, if he has a son, then that would mean…”

  “Yes,” Monroe said grimly. “I’ve spoken with Porter’s lawyer, and she confirmed he didn’t have a will. So, in accordance with state law, if this person is proved to be Porter’s biological offspring, they would inherit his entire estate.”

  I looked down at the photograph, at the little boy’s easy smile and his mother’s unhappy gaze, and something clicked in my brain.

  “You believed I was Porter’s son,” I said slowly. “That’s why you asked my sister if I was adopted. You thought…what, that I came here to kill him and collect the windfall?”

  I had no right to feel so betrayed, and yet I did. The fact that I was Monroe’s main suspect hadn’t been lost on me this morning when he’d questioned me at the office, but I’d had no idea, then, of the sort of motive he’d ascribed to me. Sure, Porter had ended up dead anyway, but the idea of me planning to murder him for cold hard cash was so much more repulsive than the suggestion I had killed him in a fit of rage over a petty disagreement.

  “I didn’t believe it,” Monroe said, and even though I had no reason to expect him to be truthful, something dark and ugly eased its clutch on my heart. “However, I couldn’t discard the possibility, however remote. You are the right age, you had a past connection to Maplewood, and you came to the village a day before Porter’s death on a pretext that some would consider, shall we say, flimsy.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  Ignoring the interruption, Monroe continued, “You have to realize how this looks. I don’t believe in coincidence, so I ran a background check on you and your parents. I didn’t find any relation whatsoever to either Frank Porter or Lucy Henshaw. It would appear you are exactly who you say you are.”

  “Of course I am,” I said irritably. “I don’t even use a pen name. My bio is on the back cover of every one of my books.”