Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  “It’s something the developers could put on the walls along with the family tree. It’s disturbing enough.” She decided not to mention the article about his mother’s death. So far it hadn’t helped with her research, and it was clear from the conversation at dinner last night that Paxton didn’t like talking about her.

  He rhythmically nodded his head, a look of satisfaction on his face. “Good, good. That’s something they can get their teeth into.”

  “What do you know about the exorcism?”

  “Me?” He stopped nodding. “Nothing except what my dad told me, which wasn’t much. He wasn’t a religious man, so he didn’t like to talk about it. He thought inviting a priest into the house was like calling in the local shaman. He did it for my mother, but he hated it.”

  “Do you know what your mother was afraid of?”

  “No.” He shook his head, at first slowly, then vigorously. “No. I wish I had an idea.”

  “In the letter your father wrote to the archdiocese, he said you cried at night and told him there was ‘bad’ in the house.”

  “Wow.” A range of emotions, from wonder to melancholy, played over his face. “I have no memory of that.”

  “You weren’t quite three.” She smiled at him.

  “I remember being afraid at night, hating the dark. But what child doesn’t? Anyway, the folks from Ryant will want to see that letter, so put it to the side. And like I said, concentrate on the haunted house thing rather than the family tree.” He started for the entryway.

  “They seem to be intertwined,” Anna said, falling in alongside him. “As I research your family tree, I find information that might be useful when you talk to Ryant. But I’ll start focusing on the haunted house side of it.”

  “Good, good.” He looked over at her, puzzled that she was following him.

  Anna pointed in the direction of the kitchen. “I need to find paper towels. It’s the rain on the sill again.”

  He came to a stop, exhaled dramatically, and threw his head back, giving the ceiling a why-me expression. “Blast. I’ll get Bee.”

  “Let me do it. I’ll take a roll to the library, and Liz and I can keep an eye on the sill.” She refused to have Bee trek all the way to the library to mop up a little water. The woman seemed to do everything in the house. She was housekeeper, tour guide, cook. Did Paxton and Nilla do nothing for themselves?

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.” Paxton strode to the staircase and started jogging up the carpeted steps, elbows bent, knees high.

  “Can I grab something to eat in there?” Anna called up to him.

  “Sure, Bee usually has sandwiches in the refrigerator.” He headed right at the top of the stairs. Toward Lawrence’s room, it occurred to Anna. There was nothing else at that end of the hall but an empty bedroom, a bath, and another sitting room.

  There was no one in the kitchen, Anna discovered, which was just as well. The last time she’d entered Bee territory, she had felt Bee’s frosty indignation.

  She peered into the refrigerator. A platter piled high with sandwiches, sliced in half to make hand-sized treats, was on the top shelf. Egg salad, maybe chicken salad too. Thank you, Bee. Anna put half a dozen sandwiches on a plate, found a roll of paper towels under the sink, and made her way back to the library.

  “Did you hear Paxton a minute ago?” Anna said as she ceremoniously laid the plate on the library table. “We’re supposed to focus on the haunted stuff.”

  “Oh, yum,” Liz said, digging in. “Yeah, I heard.”

  Anna mopped the sill then chucked the wet wad onto the coffee tray and seated herself in front of her open laptop.

  “So we focus on the creepy,” Liz said. She took a bite of her sandwich and a dollop of egg salad fell to the ledger book in front of her. She wiped it clean with her fingers and pushed the book aside. “Only I think the creepy and the code are related.”

  Anna plucked what appeared to be a chicken salad sandwich from the plate. She took a bite, and the moment that bite hit her tongue, she chewed slowly to savor it. Tender chicken, fresh herbs. Something pungent, like horseradish, and a dash of lemon. On top of everything else, Bee was a great cook.

  “What do you think Bee is doing here?” she asked. “What’s a woman in her thirties with a master’s degree in library science doing cooking for the Birches?”

  Liz had already finished one sandwich and was zeroing in on another. “I have another question. Why didn’t the Birches hire her to do Lawrence’s job? Library science is all about compiling and organizing records.”

  Anna nodded her agreement. “Instead they brought in a stranger. Paxton didn’t even hire Bee to look for proof of a haunting, and Bee knows everything about the history of Sparrow House.”

  Liz leaned sideways in the direction of the door, looking for Bee or a stray Birch in the sitting room. “I’ll bet that’s why she was so cranky when we first got here,” she said quietly.

  “And why she hates her job,” Anna added.

  They finished their sandwiches in silence, looking out the rain-streaked library window. Anna’s mind wandered to the grass, growing quickly with the surplus moisture and cool days, and the driveway, which, rutted and muddy yesterday, had to be worse today.

  She thought again about the second yellow letter and its instruction to work like a genealogist. Or was it an instruction? Could it have been a story, like the first letter? “She worked like a genealogist works,” it read. She worked. Third person, past tense, just like the first letter. It wasn’t, as Liz had said, that whoever wrote it knew she was a genealogist. Whoever wrote it was a genealogist.

  Jackson snored and puffed on his blanket. Rain or no rain, when he woke up, he needed to run outside for a while and chase a few squirrels.

  “I was thinking about that second yellow letter,” Anna said. “Genealogists start with the known, but they also start with primary documents. You asked why the shift code key would be on Matthew Birch’s birth certificate. Maybe because that certificate is a primary document, and the first one you’d look for if you were researching Matthew’s family.”

  Liz looked back from the window, rubbing the drowsiness from her eyes. Between the thunder and last night’s thuds and thumps, they’d had little sleep. “What’s the next primary document you’d look for?”

  “There are three essential records for any family tree. Birth, marriage, and death.” Anna plunked the last bite of sandwich into her mouth and started digging through the papers on the table. “I need to find Matthew’s marriage certificate.”

  Within ten minutes Anna had found the certificate. She gave a restrained victory whoop, brandished the certificate, and examined its back. At the bottom of the record she found a set of eight numbers in blue ink.

  “Now this is what we need to wake up,” Liz said, leaning over the table.

  Anna translated the numbers to letters. She plopped back in her chair, looking disdainfully at the word she had written on the manila folder: “pxughuhu.”

  “What’s that?” Liz asked.

  “It’s nothing, nonsense. We’ve got it wrong.”

  Liz angled the folder her way. “But it looks like a word. See the ‘huhu’? Nonsense doesn’t repeat letters in a pattern, only real words do. I think it’s a word but we translated it wrong.”

  Anna sighed and flipped Matthew’s marriage certificate to the front. She typed the marriage date, January 19, 1974, into her Birch file and saved it. “Paxton was born less than three months after his parents were married,” she observed.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” Nilla called she drew near the library.

  Liz put the ledger book on top of the folder, hiding the numbers. “You forgot to shut the door,” she said to Anna under her breath.

  Anna swiveled in her chair. “No bother, Nilla.”

  “I’ve been looking for Mitch. I can’t find a soul today. If you see him, would you tell him I’m looking for him? He should be in and out of the house today with flower vases, so you mig
ht hear him in the entryway.” She started to leave but twisted back and took a step toward the table. “How are things coming?” she asked, lifting her chin and peering over Anna’s shoulder at Matthew’s birth certificate.

  “Maybe you can help us,” Liz said. “Do you know where Matthew Birch’s death certificate is?”

  Nilla put a hand on her hip. “Good question. It’s been more than ten years. It could be anywhere in here.”

  Trying for an air of nonchalance, Anna leaned back and in a flat voice asked, “How well did you know him?”

  A stony expression came over Nilla’s face. Her hand dropped from her hip and dangled at her side.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” Anna said quickly. “It’s just that small pieces of information have a way of filling large blanks in the family tree.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Nilla said. “To be honest, I didn’t like him. I didn’t like being around him when I was young, or even later, when Paxton and I first started dating. I considered not going out with him because of his father. But Paxton won me over.” The buttery smile Nilla had shown Paxton at dinner last night returned.

  “May I ask what you didn’t like about him?” Anna said.

  Nilla raised a hand to her lips, in an unconscious move, Anna thought, to stop herself from saying what she very much wanted to say. She waged a short-lived internal battle then spoke, looking Anna directly in the eye. “Unfortunately, my father-in-law was a dangerous man.” She looked away, making it clear she would not elaborate.

  As she often did when she needed information, Anna ignored contrary body language. “Do you mean physically dangerous?”

  Nilla’s eyes shot back. “Dangerous in every way.”

  “Did he ever hurt anyone?”

  “He’s Paxton’s father, so I think you should ask him. Though he likes to plead amnesia when it comes to Matthew.” She sniffed loudly, signaling a change in subject. “About Mitch. I wanted to warn you he’s in a foul mood. He thinks I should have hired a replacement for Devin by now, can you believe it? Tell him I need to see him then ignore him.”

  Anna waited until Nilla was through the sitting room and, by the sound of her heels, into the entryway before speaking. “Now we’re supposed to look for Mitch too?” She sighed and lifted twenty or thirty papers from the open folder in front of Liz. She flipped through them, looking for something that resembled a certificate. Near the back she found it.

  “Matthew Warren Birch died June 18, 1999, in Larimer County, Colorado,” she said. “Of complications from hepatitis C.” Anna noticed the impression of a circle coming from the back of Matthew’s death certificate.

  “There’s something there, turn it over,” Liz said eagerly.

  In the lower right-hand corner of the certificate was a simple mandala, drawn in yellow and orange pencil. It was divided into eight sections, like slices of pie, with capital letters and a number written inside the four lower sections. “If you read it left to right, it says ROT3,” Anna said.

  “Yeah, it’s that same blue ink, but with some sixties doodle around it.”

  Anna squinted at the notation, her thoughts flitting around those three letters: ROT. “Rotation,” she said at last. “‘ROT’ stands for rotation, and the number after it tells you how many letters to shift.”

  “But the key we found had the letter E as number 11. That’s a shift of six numbers.”

  “Maybe it’s a double shift. Maybe I have to shift three more numbers so that pux-huhu or whatever it was makes sense.” She pushed the ledger off the purple folder, dashed out another series of numbers above the letters. “So E is no longer 11, it’s 14.”

  Using the new key, Anna translated the numbers from the back of Matthew’s marriage certificate.

  Liz tilted her head, trying to read the upside-down word. Her eyes narrowed. “Does that say what I think it says?”

  Anna nodded. “Murderer.”

  12

  Jackson tugged on his leash, his nails clicking on marble, his tail doing the helicopter twirls that came with his barely contained excitement. At the front door he sat, quivering, staring at the doorknob. “Good boy,” she said. “I didn’t even have to tell you to sit.”

  She commanded Jackson to stay and pried open the door. A light breeze carried the smell of wet gravel to the front steps. Trees, shrubs, and the roofline of Sparrow House dripped, but the puddles by the concrete urns were still. For a moment, at least, it had stopped raining.

  Jackson, tired of waiting, rose and yanked on his leash, and Anna relented. They’d both been cooped up in the mansion for too long, in danger of becoming like one of Sparrow House’s aging sofas, stuffed and frozen in time.

  She shut the door behind her, headed down the front steps, and made her way across the east lawn. When she reached the side of Sparrow House, she let Jackson off his leash. He ran ahead of her then back again, making circles on the grounds, leaping into and out of gardens framed by rose bushes and tulips.

  Anna grinned as she watched him. He missed playing with Riley, running with him in Hallett Park. All January she and Gene had taken their dogs to the park and let them run off leash—early, just before sunrise and before the joggers arrived. Riley, Gene’s big bear of a golden retriever, loved running free as much as Jackson did.

  But that had all stopped in February, when Gene became busy with Buckhorn’s and overwhelmed by the long commute to and from Loveland. Anna couldn’t shake the thought that something was bothering him—something more than the commute and the weight of his unsold house.

  It was the way he had stood in Buckhorn’s, staring down at his father’s ornaments and not looking up at her as she left, a mocking but gentle smile playing on his lips. A small thing, yes, but she knew him. She knew his small movements and large thoughts, his quirks and pet peeves. This small thing meant something. She had to call him tonight.

  Was something wrong with Gene’s father? Anna stopped dead in her tracks. Was that why Gene had stared at the ornaments? She immediately dismissed the idea. Gene would have told her if something was wrong with Roger. And he’d smiled when he talked about how many ornaments his father had carved since retiring.

  Then was it about their relationship? Now that he might sell his house and buy another one in Elk Park, was he rethinking how he felt about her? Lately, every time Anna mentioned how hard the commute must be for him, he changed the subject, as though he thought she was trying to goad him into living in town with her—marrying her first, of course, because that’s the only way he would live in her house.

  Her house. If they married, months or years in the future, what about her house? Wouldn’t she have to sell it? Gene would never want to start married life with her in Sean’s house.

  Jackson ran back toward her, hurdling patches of columbines and daffodils. Already the fur on his belly was wet and clumping into little spikes. But that was a small price to pay to see him so happy—and to give him some much-needed exercise.

  Anna shrugged off her gloomy thoughts and continued around the house toward the peony garden at the back. Purple and blue irises, their buds closed to the chill, appeared in two patches behind the house, and a downspout, still spitting rain, filled a puddle between the patches. Farther back, rose bushes, their stems showing more thorns than buds, grew in an oval-shaped bed.

  As she neared the garden, the lawn became uneven and pockmarked with mud. She watched Jackson, cringing as he hit puddle after puddle and mud spattered his legs. Bee would not be pleased if she didn’t clean him up before taking him back in the house. She looked down at her hiking shoes and was glad to see she’d managed to avoid most of the mud.

  Near the peony garden, Anna looked back to the house. As at the front of the house, some of the slates at the back were cracked. Wet with rain, they shone a dark gray, as though they had been swabbed with oil. The partial third floor, invisible from the front, was clearly visible here because of the two dormer windows at the corner. Someone had built two small rooms at the back, o
ver the Forsythia Room and under the mansion’s steeply pitched roof.

  It was strange not to finish out the floor, she thought. Not to put in more dormers, at least, in order to give the house a symmetrical look. The house was wrong, the rooms in it were wrong, the furniture, artwork, and handprints on the ceiling—all wrong.

  If someone asked her to explain the unease she felt in Sparrow House, she could only point to the tattered sofa and half-bear in the sitting room or the aged but still bright yellow paint on the walls of her bedroom, but it was more than that. It was the people who lived and worked in the house. They were relics. They operated espresso machines and wired the house for the Internet, but like the decor, they were tethered to the past, cobwebbed in, and Sparrow House had spun the web.

  And now, Anna felt, the past was moving in on her, inching forward, scuttling like a crab across the floor. She was a genealogist, she made her living exploring the past, but she’d never before felt the past as an approaching presence. Someone, years ago, had written “Murderer” on Matthew and Charlene Birch’s marriage certificate. Now this word from the past had made its way into the present and was threatening to drag her backward, into Sparrow House’s past.

  Anna made her way to the peony garden. She could see now that the plants bore thousands of tiny buds. In a week, if the rain ever stopped, those plants would burst with blooms. Other peonies were two weeks behind, nothing but red, claw-like leaves rising from the soil on reddish shoots.

  “Jackson!” Anna called, searching the distance for her dog. Seconds later he bounded toward her out of the thickly wooded area to the south of the garden and came to a stop at her feet. “Stay with me, boy.” She patted her leg and began to stroll around the garden, scanning the grass for anything out of place. “What was Mitch looking for over here, huh?”

  The grass was at least five inches high, a result of the endless rain and Mitch’s inability to run the mower in the sodden conditions. “He was looking here, so let’s go the other way,” she said out loud. Jackson, his eyes never leaving her, followed her steps.