by Loretta Ross
“That’s when you have to find new pieces. Bits and braces and flying buttresses.” Kurt touched Death’s arm to get his attention and pointed at the logo on the side of Roy’s truck. “You have to find your keystone, the one that holds all the others together.”
“And you and Nichelle?”
“We’re each other’s keystones.”
Death looked to Wren, now sitting cross-legged on the ground in the middle of the group. She’d come up with a notebook somewhere and was drawing careful diagrams under Nichelle’s direction. Her face was intent and the tip of her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth.
When they’d first met, Death had felt like a ragged collection of scraps, the broken remnants of the man he’d once been. In the space of a year he’d lost everything, even (he thought) his brother. Wren had taken those fragments and made him, somehow, whole again.
“I worry about hurting her,” he admitted to Kurt abruptly. “She woke me from a nightmare once and I almost snapped her neck. She’s promised not to wake me again, but the fear is still there. I can’t sleep in the same room with her.”
“Then sleep in separate rooms until you can. She loves you. She’ll do what you need to make it work. Just don’t fool around and put off living until it’s too late.” Kurt pinched the bridge of his nose, his face twisted in a bitter scowl. “Tony lost his keystone,” he said. “He’ll never be the same again.”
“Kurt!”
They looked up to find Nichelle waving impatiently at them.
“Come here and tell me what you think of this.”
“You’re the engineer,” he told her, but went obediently.
Death remained behind, thinking of bridges and broken stones. He thought of Wren and Randy and support systems. And he thought of Tony Dozier and the possibility that August Jones had been killed by falling masonry.
nine
The Hadleigh House auction was the largest one currently on the Keystone calendar, but it would still be several weeks before it was ready. In the meantime, there were other sales to prepare and conduct. For three days, Wren stuck with the rest of the company. With practiced efficiency, they packed up five households and sold off two more. On the fourth day, Roy took most of the sons and grandsons to conduct a livestock and farm equipment auction in the next town over while Sam went to bid on a job involving the estate of a local artist.
Wren was given Robin Keystone and sent back to the Hadleigh House to continue the work there.
While she’d been gone they’d gotten the electricity turned on, and she switched on lights against the darkness of an autumn thunder storm. There was no rain yet, but heavy clouds had turned midday to dusk. More than half of the upstairs rooms had been emptied now, and thunder rumbled and echoed through the cavernous old building. Robin was outside, cataloguing the garage and mooning over the old car parked there. Wren sat on a dusty loveseat in the first-floor conservatory and packed 1920s-era music books into boxes while the remaining strings in an ancient harp shivered and sang softly with the vibrations from the oncoming storm.
When an engine rumbled to life in the back garden, she thought at first that it was just another peal of thunder. It persisted, though, where storm sounds would have swelled and ebbed. Curious, she rose and crossed the faded rose carpet to peer out the window.
Robin Keystone was riding up through the back garden on a motorcycle, grinning maniacally as he crossed the lawn and came to a stop below her.
Wren wrestled the window up. “What … ? Where did you get that?”
He shouted out something she couldn’t hear over the engine’s roar and pointed back the way he’d come.
“Turn it off!” Wren yelled, flapping her hand at him. “I can’t hear you! Turn it off already!”
He turned it off and a momentary silence settled over the property just as the first fat raindrops fell. When he spoke, though, he was still shouting with excitement.
“Look what I found! There was a motorcycle! And it still runs, even!”
“Robin, that’s ridiculous. That can’t be part of the estate. Nothing here has been touched in decades.”
“I know! And it still runs. Can you believe it?”
“No. The gas and oil would have broken down. The spark plugs would have rusted. Someone had to have left it here recently. Where did you find it?”
“Out there in one of those sheds that are falling over.”
“The old slave quarters?”
“Is that what they are?”
“Yes. It was parked in one of those?”
“Yeah. Way back in the shadows. I only saw it because I was looking for something to lay out tools on to sort them. I was building a makeshift work bench with sawhorses and I needed a top. There was a sheet of tin in there I thought I could use, so I pulled it out and there was a motorcycle behind it.”
Like the dining room, the conservatory had a French door leading to the terrace on the south end of the house. The lock on the conservatory door had rusted, though, and they hadn’t managed to get it open yet. Rather than go around to exit through one of the other doors, Wren simply grabbed the top of the window and hoisted herself through it.
Dead grass crunched under her feet. Rain was falling faster now, cold and hard, and though there were still almost two months until November, the classic rock song flitted through her mind. Robin still straddled the bike and she circled it and him, studying it with a critical eye.
She wasn’t, by any means, an expert on motorcycles. It was a smaller model by a manufacturer whose name she didn’t recognize. The chrome was free of rust and the tires and seat upholstery were too new for the bike to have been abandoned for very long. There were screw holes in the front and back fender for license plates, but both plates were missing.
Wren sighed. “I understand you pulling it out to look at it. I probably would have done the same thing. But you really shouldn’t have, you know.” She fished her phone out of her pocket and dialed, bending over to shield it from the rain.
“Why not?” Robin demanded.
Wren, listening to her phone, held up one finger to signal him to wait.
“Hi, Cathy? This is Wren Morgan. I’m out at the old Hadleigh House. You want to send Jackson or whoever else is available out here? Robin Keystone has found an abandoned motorcycle in one of the outbuildings. It almost has to belong to the dead guy on the path.”
She thanked the dispatcher and hung up. Robin was staring at her, eyes wide.
“We need to get inside before we’re drenched,” she told him.
Finally dismounting the motorcycle, Robin balanced it on its kickstand and followed her back to the house. He gave her a boost through the window and then climbed in after.
“Do you really think it belonged to the dead guy?” he asked, excited.
Wren slid the window down just as the sky opened up. Jagged shards of lightning slashed across the dark thunderheads and rain sheeted down the glass.
“Yes, maybe. Probably. That, or … ”
“Or what?”
Heart heavy with dread, Wren turned from the storm to look at the younger man. “Death thinks August Jones was most likely murdered somewhere in this area. It’s possible the bike belonged to him.”
_____
“You couldn’t have left it somewhere dry?”
Orly Jackson stood at the music room window and stared forlornly out at the motorcycle sitting in the pouring rain.
“There wasn’t really time to find a place to put it,” Wren said. “He drove it up to the house just a couple of minutes before the downpour started.”
“He could have left it where it was.” As he spoke, the deputy tipped his head and gave Robin a dirty look.
“I didn’t know it was evidence,” the teenager defended himself. “I just thought it was part of the estate.”
“You’re a fifteen-year-old boy and you don’t know enough about motorcycles to know that an engine wouldn’t just start right up after thirty years?”
&
nbsp; “Sure, it makes sense when you stop to think about it. But I didn’t stop to think about it. I got excited! I found a motorcycle!”
“It’s not like he’s disturbed a crime scene,” Wren said. “I don’t see what harm he’s done by driving it a couple hundred yards.”
“Well, the rain has probably washed off any fingerprints, for one thing.”
“But if it belonged to the dead guy on the path, you already have his fingerprints,” Robin objected.
“Yeah. And we could have compared them to fingerprints from the motorcycle to see if it was really his.”
“Oh.”
“What did you do with the tin?” Wren asked Robin.
“What tin?” Jackson asked.
“The motorcycle was hidden behind a sheet of tin in the old slave quarters.”
“It’s still there in the building, I guess,” Robin said. “I forgot about it when I saw what was behind it.”
“So there’s what you can fingerprint,” she told the officer. “Whoever hid it had to have touched that sheet of tin.”
“Okay, but you still didn’t have to leave the motorcycle out in the rain.”
Wren looked at him from beneath lowered lids. “You’re planning on riding it down the path, aren’t you? And you’re mad because you’re going to get your butt wet.”
“I have to get it down to the road somehow. It’s not like I can pull a bike trailer up a driveway that has a big ravine across it.”
Nichelle’s plans for the bridge involved using the top deck of an old car carrier for the frame. They’d located one at a junkyard a few towns over but had yet to arrange to get it transported and put into place.
Jackson sighed. “Well, all right. I guess you’d better come show me where you found it.”
“You guys have fun,” Wren told them. “I’ll be in here if you need anything.”
“You’re not coming with us?”
“Why? I wasn’t there when he found it. I don’t see how I could help any.”
“But aren’t you curious?”
Thunder cracked and the downpour, already heavy, increased.
“Not that curious,” Wren said.
The deputy sighed again. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a pot of hot coffee when we get back?”
“Sure, if you chop me some firewood and drive into town to get coffee.” Wren laughed, not without sympathy, at his stricken expression. “I don’t live here,” she reminded him. “I’m only sorting out the contents for auction. The cookstove is a gas range and there’s no gas in the tank. And if there’s any coffee in the cupboards, it’s been there since probably the mid-sixties.”
“You’re a heartless woman,” Jackson told her.
“None of this is my fault.”
“I know that. But you don’t have to enjoy the situation quite this much.”
“Yeah. Schadenfreude is a petty thing, but it’s so very human.”
“Shaden-who?” Robin asked.
Jackson sighed again and clapped the teenager on the shoulder. “C’mon, kid. Let’s go drown ourselves in the name of duty.”
“I’ll see if I can dig you up some towels,” Wren offered.
_____
Randy parked his little blue Mustang on the town square and made a dash for the shelter of the awning that protected the front window of the Renbeau Bros. Department Store. It was one of the oldest buildings on the square, a massive brick structure with display windows on either side that ran parallel to the sidewalk before angling in toward a recessed entryway. The display window on the left was shorter than the one on the right to make room for a discreet wood-and-glass door.
A sign painted on the door’s window read Death Bogart. Private Investigations and Surety Recovery.
Randy shook the rain off his raincoat before he went inside. He hung it on a peg in the tiny vestibule and climbed a steep, narrow set of stairs to his brother’s combination office and apartment.
Death was at his desk, poring over a sheaf of oversized papers. He glanced up. “Bad?”
“Bad enough. Could have been worse.” In spite of his rain gear, the younger Bogart was sopping wet. “We tell people and we tell people not to try to drive across flooded roads, and yet there’s always somebody who thinks they can make it through.”
“You get them out okay?”
Randy went through into the tiny apartment and started stripping off his clothes, but he left the door ajar so he could continue the conversation.
“Yeah. This time. Woman, two kids, and a dog. The driver’s side tire got caught on the low railing leading up to the bridge. That’s the only thing that kept them from being swept completely off the road and down into the creek.”
He toweled off and pulled on dry clothes: a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
“The cops are considering child endangerment charges. I swear, I think stupid should be against the law.” He wandered back out into the office and helped himself to coffee from the coffeemaker that sat atop a bookcase under the front windows. “What are you up to?”
“Trying to figure out where to murder someone.”
“Anybody I know?” Randy joked. “Hey! If it’s Madeline, I’ll help you get rid of the body.”
“You’d help me get rid of the body anyway,” Death said confidently.
“Yeah, probably.” Randy dragged one of the visitor chairs close to the desk, turned it around, and propped one knee on it as he leaned in to study the papers his brother had spread out. It was a plat map, he realized. A large-scale map of the area around the Hadleigh House and the veterans’ camp. “You thinking Jones was killed somewhere around there?”
“It would make sense. He got a call from someone in the area before he died. This is where the police pinged his cell phone and it’s where Dozier was supposed to be headed when, he says, he found Jones wounded by the road.”
“So what are we looking for?”
“If he got a call from the killer, chances are that it was to arrange a meeting. To commit a murder, it would have to be somewhere secluded. It would have to be somewhere that hasn’t been searched yet, because no one’s found a crime scene and there would have been a lot of blood. And it would have to be somewhere specific, probably. There’s no reason to think Jones was familiar with the area, so you’d have to give him a landmark or map reference.”
“But you wouldn’t have to kill him at the same place where you met him,” Randy pointed out. “You could say, ‘Hey, let’s go back in this really hidden part of the forest where we can talk without being seen.’”
Down in the foyer, the bell over the door jangled. The two men glanced up as heavy, slow footsteps began to climb the stairs, then returned to their conversation.
“You could, yeah,” Death agreed. “But there’s another angle to this that’s bothering me. The same thing we’re trying to figure out about the dead guy on the path. How did he get out there? It’s about fifteen miles from town. These rural areas don’t have any kind of public transportation, and there’s only one taxi. The police already talked to the driver and he never saw Jones that day. If we’re going on the assumption that he went out there to meet his killer, then how’d he get there? What happened to his transportation?”
“I can answer that.”
The person climbing the stairs, it turned out, was Chief Reynolds. He dropped into the other visitor’s chair, breathing heavily.
“Damn, son! You couldn’t have gotten an office on the ground floor?”
“Good cardiovascular exercise.” Death grinned before turning serious. “You know how Jones could have gotten out to the vets’ camp?”
Reynolds tossed an oversized black-and-white photo on top of Death’s maps.
“I’m not showing you this,” he said. “I’m just putting it down on your desk while I catch my breath.”
“Of course.” Death and Randy leaned in, heads together, to study the picture. It was a still from a gas station security camera. Two heavily bearded men
, looking uncomfortable in suits and ties, were standing beside a battered pickup truck. One leaned against the passenger door while the other pumped gas.
“That’s Jones,” Death said, indicating the passenger. “Where did this come from?”
“We’ve been studying security camera footage from area businesses for the day of the murder. This is that little mom-and-pop convenience store out on K highway.”
“09:23,” Randy said, pointing out the time stamp.
“Who’s the other guy?” Death asked.
“You don’t recognize him?”
“No. Should I?”
“Maybe not, but I thought you might have seen him around. His name is Dexter Wallace. He served with Dozier and Kurt Robinson. He was one of Zahra Dozier’s pall bearers.”
_____
Jackson had covered the motorcycle with an old tarp they found and left for town to get a motorcycle trailer to haul it with. The rain moved on and a light breeze blew in, stringing tattered clouds across the sky. The storm gave way to a bright, pretty afternoon, with sunlight glistening on the wet grass and the first-fallen leaves of autumn.
Wren was working in the parlor, beside the music room, with Robin sticking close and staying out of trouble, when they heard voices outside.
“That must be Orly back for the bike,” she said.
A loud, imperious knock sounded from the front door and she growled to herself.
“What does he need now?”
Brushing the dust from her jeans, she went down the hall to the entryway with Robin trailing along behind. Through the decorated glass of the front door she could see parts of two bodies, but not the faces attached. One was short and wore a blue shirt, the other tall and gaunt and dressed in a formal black suit. She opened the door.
“Yes?”
“We’re here to search the place,” Eric Farrington said. “Open up in the name of the law.”
“You can’t search this place,” Wren told him, disbelief in her voice. “You’re not a cop. You’re just a jail guard. And even a cop would need a warrant.”
“We have a warrant. Didn’t you see us out here searching the other day?”