Mystic Falls

by Vickie McKeehan

  Gemma glared at him. “Why not use volunteers then?”

  “We did. They found nothing.”

  “What about tracking their cell phones?”

  He shook his head. “Collette’s cell and purse were still at her house. So were Marnie’s. I got a warrant to look at cell phone records anyway though, and found nothing out of the ordinary. The last calls both made were to Ballard. That’s another reason I think Ballard is responsible.”

  “You seem to have all the answers, don’t you?”

  Before she got a reply, a familiar ringtone from Gemma’s cell phone interrupted their debate.

  “Is that the Foo Fighters?” Lando asked.

  “You know it is,” she uttered before glancing at the number that popped up. “This is Collette’s sister, the one who doesn’t like you very much.” She took a step back away from Lando. “Hello? Lianne? Is everything okay?”

  Lianne’s voice on the other end of the line cracked with fear. “No. I don’t know. I think I stumbled on something you ought to see.”

  Gemma kept eye contact with Lando. “Okay. I’m standing here on Water Street finishing up with Marnie’s posters. But I’m with Chief Bonner. Is it okay if I bring him along?”

  “Sure. Why not? When can you get here?”

  “We’ll see you in a few.”

  Gemma turned to Lando. “She sounded upset. We better hurry. I don’t want a third woman getting snatched.”

  They piled into Lando’s police cruiser.

  “Collette lives over on Cape Dunes,” Gemma directed.

  “I know where she lives,” Lando snapped. “The address is 432. I’ve been there before, you know, in an official capacity.”

  “I’m just trying to help. I grew up here too, you know.”

  “And left,” he pointed out.

  “I’m back now,” she tossed out.

  “But for how long?” Lando muttered under his breath. “That’s the question.”

  Gemma let out a sigh just as he pulled up to a darling little carriage house painted in white with red shutters. The plants on the porch had long since died from lack of water and care, which was a shame because it looked like Collette had enjoyed growing stuff.

  Lianne opened the door without Gemma having to knock. “I’m sorry to bother you guys like this, but I found a box in the bedroom you’ve gotta see.”

  Lando’s cop sense kicked in. “Ballard let us in here to look around the day after he reported her missing. We didn’t see anything out of the ordinary then. I took pictures to prove it.”

  “Then you didn’t look hard enough,” Lianne replied in an accusatory tone. “I’m sorry, that sounded rude. You probably wouldn’t have known what it meant even if you had found it and opened it up to look inside.”

  “What are we looking at?” Gemma wanted to know when she spotted the ordinary gray metal box sitting on the coffee table.

  “It’s where Collette kept her valuables. And it should’ve been locked up in her little safe in the closet. But it wasn’t. I found this sitting out in plain sight like someone had tried to get into it. But it takes a password to open the combination lock.”

  “So it was a strong box usually kept inside her safe?” Lando asked. “I’m telling you this wasn’t sitting out in plain sight anywhere in the house the day I did my walkthrough. And Ballard told me about the safe. He even unlocked it. That box wasn’t in there.”

  Lianne’s eyes grew wider. “Finding it out in the open wasn’t what freaked me out.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” Gemma stated, beginning to get an eerie feeling.

  “I know the password so it was easy for me to crack the combination even though it had obviously been messed up from so many attempts to try to get inside. I found two typewritten letters telling Collette she’d better watch her back.” Lianne flipped back the lid of the box and pulled out two envelopes. She handed them to Lando. “See? There are no stamps on these. They must’ve been hand-delivered or left in the mailbox or placed on her windshield or something.”

  Lando winced watching Lianne so casually handle the paper. There wasn’t much to the letters or rather the notes. They were simple one-line threats, and both said exactly the same thing, using the same wording. Soon, you’ll get what’s coming to you.

  “I don’t get it,” Gemma stated. “If someone found the box, why didn’t they just take the box with them and keep it? And what about the other stuff in here? This jade necklace has to be worth at least five hundred dollars.”

  “It belonged to my aunt Sylvia. After she died, Collette and I split up her jewelry. There’s also a pair of diamond earrings in there worth quite a bit more than five hundred.”

  But Lando had something else on his mind besides trinkets. “Show me where you found this box.”

  Lianne took him into the master bedroom. “It was there near the blanket box, not on top but to the side, just waiting for me to find it.”

  “That definitely was not here the day I was in this house,” Lando stated.

  “What does that mean?” Gemma asked from the doorway.

  “It means somebody came back in here and put it there…recently.”

  “But they could’ve just taken the box,” Gemma pointed out again.

  “No,” Lando began. “There had to be another reason. The box was incidental. It wasn’t the reason they entered the house in the first place. I’m sorry, Lianne. But I’ll have to take the box in as evidence.”

  “Sure,” Lianne said, downhearted. “I don’t understand this at all. Collette and I are just regular people. Why would anyone want to hurt my sister?”

  Lando put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know. But I’ll do everything I can to find out.”

  “Will you be okay if we leave you here alone?” Gemma asked. “You could always come stay with me.”

  “Thanks, but I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  Once Gemma got outside though she turned to Lando. “Did you mean that in there? Will you really do everything?”

  “I’m not in the habit of lying to people, Gemma.”

  “It’s just that…if you mean it, I have some ideas.”

  Lando opened the car door for her. “It’s been a long time since we collaborated on anything and made it work.”

  “I’m willing to give it a shot if you are.”

  “Sure. What do I have to lose?”

  It wasn’t exactly a thrilling endorsement, but Gemma decided it was a first step.

  After dropping Gemma back home, Lando headed to his own house. All the while knowing exactly what he had to lose by collaborating with his ex…again. Everything. All over again.

  He sat in his driveway wondering what kind of fool he was for going anywhere near Gemma when he damned well knew better.

  Tonight, he’d been tempted to act on impulse. He’d wanted to touch her hair, to dig his fingers into those dark toffee tresses and kiss her blind. Good thing she’d broken the spell or whatever the hell you called the hold she had over him.

  What had he been thinking? How could he still feel an attraction to her after she’d broken his heart into a million pieces? The woman had walked out the door without so much as a goodbye glance. So how could he possibly consider starting up with her again? Ever. Why would he risk it?

  These days he wasn’t the risk-taker he’d once been. He was a deliberate, methodical cop. But if he planned to go near Gemma, he needed his head examined.

  Gemma Channing. What a joke. She even had to change her name from Bonner back to Channing. She was no more a Channing than he was. She was more of a Sarrazin, more like Marissa than Genevieve, and always would be. She had nothing in common with those big-city lawyer types either. Nothing. That wasn’t the free-spirited, down-to-earth girl he’d married. He remembered the day he’d discovered she worked as a corporate lawyer. He knew that had been a mistake. But she’d had to find it out on her own. It seemed now, she had.

  Back during her teen years, the girl had wanted attention from he
r mother more than anything else. Gemma had longed for dear old Mom to sit up and take notice of what she did. The little girl always had. Maybe that’s why she’d married him in the first place---to get a reaction out of Genevieve. It had certainly worked. By marrying him, Gemma had finally done something so bad it was enough to get Genevieve’s full attention.

  Walking out on him had been a way to please her mother at a time when the marriage had hit a snag, a rocky road. They’d started arguing…a lot. Butting heads over money, Genevieve, jobs, the future, you name it, they argued about it. Enter Genevieve Wentworth. One day while he’d been hard at work at the restaurant, it was as if she’d known exactly the right moment to strike, and strike Genevieve had. She’d swooped into their apartment and somehow talked Gemma into packing up her things and leaving for San Francisco.

  At the time, he’d thought Gemma had been merely in a vulnerable state. But after realizing she’d left him for good, he spent six weeks pissed off, another six making excuses for her, and then another chunk of time wondering what he’d done wrong. He let that doubt eat him up inside until he decided to stop wallowing in self-pity.

  He’d had to get away, to get out of Coyote Wells, and move on. His brother Luke had already jump-started his own career path toward medicine by heading off to UCLA. Luke shared an apartment there with two other roommates. At the end of the semester, when one of them quit school, Luke offered Lando the bedroom. He didn’t have to think twice about it. He’d always wanted a job in law enforcement and getting a bachelor’s degree would give him a leg up on the competition when he applied for a job.

  While Luke went to UCLA, Lando made the twenty-two-mile commute along the 110 Freeway to the Cal State campus. Taking a heavy course load each semester and his single-mindedness drove him toward a goal that allowed him to graduate in three years with a degree in criminal justice.

  And when Coyote Wells needed to add officers to their police force, he hired on, spending two years as a beat cop. That’s what he was until the day six years ago when he’d nabbed Timothy Smyth.

  He looked out the windshield of his cruiser at the front porch of the house he’d bought. He thought of it as his seaside retreat. Painted in a beigey sand color with aqua trim, the craftsman cottage sat across the street from the beach and the ocean. Every day he got to look out his living room window at that view and enjoy the waves.

  He’d put his life together the way he wanted it. He had everything he’d ever wanted. Now he realized that seeing Gemma every day could be a problem.

  There’d been a time when his one-year marriage was nothing more than a distant memory. But now he seemed to be bumping into her every time he went outside, a reminder that he’d never truly put her completely behind him, no matter how hard he’d tried.

  When he finally got out of the car and went up to the porch, he realized he needed to stop this insane fantasy. Getting back with Gemma would be a huge step backward, a mistake. They were too different, too stubborn, too set in their ways.

  As he brushed his teeth and got ready for bed, he tried to list all the reasons it was a bad idea. Even now, she was fighting him on how he’d handled the Whittaker and Hightower investigations. He didn’t like it. Her questions indicated she didn’t have a clue how hard he’d been working around the clock trying to find both women. Then there was her belief that he’d somehow screwed up Marissa’s death as well as the others. That was a slap in the face, pure and simple.

  Their butting heads was a constant reminder that their teenage marriage had gone off the rails a long time ago and shouldn’t be resuscitated. Letting it die and stay dead was the only fix that made sense, no way to recapture the feeling they’d had for each other in their youth.

  Instead of losing sleep thinking about getting it on with Gemma, his time would be better spent focusing more on Marnie and Collette.

  He crawled into bed and tried to sleep. But he had too much on his mind to let things go. Unable to close his eyes for more than a few minutes, he finally threw back the covers and reached for his jeans. There was something bugging him about what Lianne had found at the house and the only way to learn what it meant was to poke through the box again and go through Collette’s police report, the one he’d written himself after touring her house.

  Once he reached his office, he brewed a pot of coffee and took out the case book belonging to Collette that kept getting thicker by the day.

  He went back over what he knew. The lab had done Luminol testing that turned out negative for blood. The woman had left her purse and cell phone at home. Her car though had been found parked on the Rez with the keys in the ignition at the entrance to the clinic. Luke’s clinic.

  He reread the background information he had on Collette. Her last night had been routine. She’d had dinner with her on-again, off-again lover at Sweeny’s, an upscale restaurant near the lighthouse. Witnesses saw her leave with Ballard at around eight-thirty. They reported the two were in good spirits, even laughing.

  After that, Ballard claimed that in the parking lot they decided to go their separate ways because Collette was exhausted. He left in his car, Collette in hers.

  Lando knew Collette had made it back to her place because her purse and cell phone were found there. But he couldn’t discount the fact that Ballard had no alibi after that, no one to back up where he’d been all night. The businessman could’ve followed her home, the two could’ve fought there, and then Ballard killed her. But if that were the case, the evidence would show a crime scene at Collette’s house. There was nothing to suggest it. And how was Ballard able to drive two cars? Someone had to have helped him park Collette’s vehicle on the reservation. Was he dealing with two people who’d abducted her? If so, why would anyone help Ballard murder Collette?

  It didn’t make sense. None of it did. He drank another cup of coffee and dug into Marnie’s case file. Her disappearance was just as perplexing. He reread the interviews he conducted at the school. The teacher was well liked by her students and the rest of the faculty. Even Daryl Simmons didn’t seem to hold a grudge about her breaking it off with him.

  In the six years he’d had this job, there hadn’t been a single murder in Coyote Wells. Even Timothy Smyth, the serial killer, hadn’t killed anyone within five-hundred miles of here. Lando didn’t want to jump to conclusions that Collette and Marnie were dead, but it certainly wasn’t looking good for either woman.

  Maybe he needed to call in the FBI.

  7

  Gemma had already made up her mind when she got an early start to her day. She grabbed a piece of toast and dumped a fourth of her brewed coffee into a stainless-steel travel mug and added her obligatory half and half.

  Over the past few weeks, her Volvo hadn’t seen much action since she’d gotten into the habit of walking to work, or the market, or the library. But today, with errands to run she needed her wheels.

  She threw together a PB&J sandwich and some Rufus treats to go and stuffed the items down into her backpack.

  Before leaving town, she swung by Collette’s place to drop off the key to the store so Lianne could open the shop up on time.

  “Are you sure I know enough to be left alone?” Lianne said, apprehensive.

  Gemma patted her shoulder. “It’s a candy shop. You’ll be fine. Remember, the cash register is the type that tells you how much change to give back, it’s not difficult. But I probably won’t be back until late afternoon.”

  “Then have fun. What if I get into trouble, is it okay to text you?”

  “If I have cell phone service, sure. I might not.”

  Gemma didn’t feel the need to explain that going out to Mystic Falls was something she had to do. It was a memory from her youth, an out-of-the-way, off the beaten path waterfall that had meant something special to her grandmother. She had to find the reason why.

  Besides, it wasn’t much of a hardship spending the next half hour cruising down the county roads through lush green woodlands to try and recapture a childhood memor
y.

  Not everyone knew about its existence. It was a well-kept secret mainly because it hugged the boundary lines of the reservation. It wasn’t a place well-traveled by tourists, in fact it wasn’t even on any of the established maps of the area.

  Going out to Mystic Falls was the best way she could think to recapture a snippet of that day with her grandmother, a memory that seemed to get more vivid with each passing hour. For some reason, it wouldn’t leave her alone. That’s why she had to see the place again firsthand, twenty years after her first trip there.

  Following a map she’d asked Paloma to draw up, she had the Volvo heading up into the mountains through a curvy, windy two-lane blacktop that led up to the summit. From there you could see the entire valley stretched out below in a vast bouquet of spring color. The view to the west was the shimmering ocean, glowing with dappled sunshine.

  Once she reached the top, she began looking for an unpaved road at mile marker fourteen. The little green and white sign was where she pulled the Volvo onto a dirt road. It got bumpy right away, a rutted gravel lane that caused Rufus to get upset.

  “Settle down now,” Gemma cautioned. “By my calculation the waterfall is still another six and half miles on the other side of the State Park. So relax. I promise we’ll get there in one piece.”

  Coming in from the back side of the campground, she drove until the dirt road dead-ended, the same spot where a ranger station sat abandoned. Budget cuts had gutted all the manned ranger stations in this area. It would be a good spot to leave the Volvo while she hiked the rest of the way on foot.

  She got out, kept Rufus on his leash, and shouldered her pack. The spot was remote and desolate, no one around for miles. If she twisted an ankle here she’d be out of luck to make it back on her own.

  Despite the dangers, she and Rufus started walking anyway.

  The first thing she noticed, besides the giant redwoods, was the eerie silence. Or maybe it was the sudden onset of a chorus from nature. She listened to birds tweeting, crickets chirping, and leaves rustling from the pitter-patter of little squirrel feet or maybe from raccoons.