Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  Liz’s eyes widened. “Yeah?”

  “You wanted to have a look at the basement, didn’t you? We could see if Lawrence stuck the red box and ledger down there. I want to give Paxton something more than what we have in our puny folder. Come on.” Anna tossed her head toward the library door, stood, and clicked her tongue at Jackson, who hopped down from his comfortable perch on the armchair, eager to move.

  “Better not leave this in the open,” Liz said as she laid a stack of papers over the purple folder.

  “Good idea. Come on, Jackson boy.”

  “Do you know where the basement is?” Liz asked.

  “No.” Anna grinned. It didn’t matter. Getting out of the library was going to feel good.

  The two passed through the sitting room, Jackson at Anna’s side, and waited at the door to the entryway, looking and listening. Seeing that all was clear, they walked toward the staircase and veered left, heading away from the kitchen.

  “There must be a door here somewhere,” Anna whispered.

  “But Paxton and Nilla’s bedroom is back here too.”

  Anna halted. “We can’t open the wrong door. What if they’re in there?”

  “They’d kill us,” Liz said dramatically.

  “I’ll bet they’re at the corner. That way they have two windows, more light.”

  They began moving again, taking small, light steps.

  “Here,” Anna said, putting her hand on a doorknob. “This doesn’t look like a bedroom door. It’s too small.”

  She turned the knob and pushed open the door, groping with her other hand for a light switch on the wall. Her hand hit a switch and she flipped it. A bare bulb in the ceiling lit the tiny bedroom. She cast her eyes about the room—the walls marred by tobacco-colored stains, a chipped milk-glass lamp on the floor—and they came to rest on an old crib against one wall.

  Jackson padded into the room, sniffing at the floor and then at the mattress in the crib.

  “Look’s like no one’s been in here for twenty years,” Liz said from the doorway.

  Anna’s gaze rose to the aged light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. It was layered with dust, but the lightbulb in it appeared to be new. “That’s not a twenty-year-old lightbulb.”

  Liz, looking up at the fixture, took a single step into the room then quickly withdrew. Anna called Jackson to her side with a hand signal, backed out of the room, and shut the door, turning the knob as she did to keep the door from clicking loudly in the jamb.

  A few steps down the hall they found another narrow door. Anna took a deep breath and pushed it open. Below her was a wooden staircase. Judging by its length, the basement ceiling wasn’t nearly as high as the ceilings in the house’s upper floors. “This is it,” she said. She stood on the landing with Jackson and motioned for Liz to shut the door behind her. Light shone from the basement below, dimly lighting the stairs.

  Liz stood frozen at the door and whispered, “Why is the light on? Is someone down there?”

  Anna shook her head, mouthing, “I don’t know.” She arched her neck, trying to see around the short wall to her right without taking a step forward, but the wall blocked her view. “This is silly,” she said. Jackson trotted down the stairs, and she started down after him, taking care that each footfall sounded loudly on the wooden steps and calling out “Hello” as she neared the bottom.

  When they reached the concrete floor, they stopped. Anna looked to her right, out over the cluttered basement, half expecting to see Lawrence at a desk or on the floor, encircled by towers of papers. It was all one room, not broken up into smaller rooms as Anna had expected in a house built in 1911, and its ceiling was supported by concrete pillars spaced every twelve or so feet. She waited, straining to hear the soft scurrying and tiny squeaks that signified mice or rats.

  The walls were a scraped and scarred green, and the shelves had been painted a navy blue. Some of the pillars were the same intense yellow of the Forsythia Room, while others, unpainted concrete, were the only neutrals in the room. All primary colors, like the set of a horror movie from the 1960s, when they first started filming in color and were ham-handed and Technicolor-crazed with it.

  “Anna, come on,” Liz said, moving around her and past a metal, office-style desk toward a row of wooden shelves to her right. She probed the rows of open-top boxes on the shelves, tipping them downward to peer inside, moving top to bottom then left to right.

  Anna lifted a ledger-style book from one shelf and studied it in the light from a bare bulb in a ceiling fixture. Filled with column after column of numbers, it appeared to be a financial record, though not the one Lawrence had taken from the library. This one was much older. She flipped to the first page of the ledger, where someone had written, in the baroque handwriting of decades past, “January 1, 1919.”

  “What dates are you seeing?” she asked Liz.

  Liz tilted a box and grabbed a fistful of age-darkened papers. She blew on the top sheet, releasing a cloud of dust into the air. “This one is July 1, 1940.”

  Anna circled to Liz’s right and removed the top paper from another box. She ran her finger through the accumulated dust, exposing the date. “The sixties,” she said. Tossing the paper back into the box, she focused on another box two shelves below and again retrieved a paper. “This is 1968,” she said.

  She reached into another box and immediately knew Lawrence had been in it. Or someone had—recently. The top pages were free of dust. She hauled the box from the shelf, emptied its contents on the desk, and fanned out the pages.

  “What should we look for?” Liz said, tilting her head to the side and walking around to Anna’s side of the desk.

  “Any of the names we’ve come across, anything from October 1970. Or later.” She glanced up at Liz. “We’ll know if we find it.”

  Five minutes later Anna held an old receipt in her hands. From Indonesia, it was nevertheless written in English—for the tourist trade, she soon realized. On it, a shopkeeper had written “One rosary,” and across from that “$U.S. 12.50.” But it was the words scribbled in red ink beneath these notations that held Anna’s attention. She read and reread those few words, trying to comprehend the bile—or was it fear?—from which they sprang.

  “Listen to this,” she said to Liz. “‘Rosary from the pit of hell, from a degraded soul with one leg stuck in hell.’”

  “Holy cow.” Liz took the paper.

  “We need to find that red box.” Anna cast her eyes about the basement. It didn’t look like anyone had been sorting papers or doing any of the things she imagined someone assembling the Birch Papers for DU would have to do. Except for a pencil holder and stapler, the desk had been clean, unlike the table in the library. There were no stacks of papers or folders, no books, not even a lamp on the table.

  “This is intensely creepy,” Liz said, her eyes still on the receipt. “How is a rosary from the pit of hell? And who is this degraded soul?”

  Anna stared at the desk, her eyes traveling down the drawers on either side. The drawers. That’s it. She tugged open the top drawer on the right, then the drawer beneath it. Both empty. She tugged at the top drawer on the left and saw a strip of red, then more red as she yanked open the drawer.

  She lifted the box and placed it on the desk. In the same drawer was a ledger book. “Is this the ledger missing from the library?” she asked, handing it to Liz.

  Liz opened the book to the first page and immediately nodded. She folded the receipt, stuck it between the pages of the ledger, and looked down at the red box. “You notice it’s not a friendly yellow or orange,” she said, smiling weakly.

  “It’s just a box, Liz.” Anna lifted the top. “I think there were about six rosaries. It looks like they’re all here. The question is, why would Lawrence take them?”

  The muffled sound of a door slamming somewhere on the floor above caught them by surprise. It was followed by voices, a woman’s and a man’s. Jackson gave a low, soft growl and gazed at the far wall of the bas
ement.

  “Is there a vent down here?” Anna asked as she began to examine the far wall where it met the ceiling. When she looked to her right, she saw Liz waving frantically and pointing to the bottom of an open-ended pipe in a corner. It ran up through the ceiling, like a flue pipe in a massive pipe organ, making it the perfect conduit for sound.

  Anna stepped closer. The voices became louder but no clearer.

  “It’s Nilla and Paxton,” Liz said under her breath.

  “It sounds like they’re arguing.”

  “They must be in their bedroom. They wouldn’t argue in the open, would they?” Liz’s mouth popped open. “I caught that. Nilla just said ‘damn house.’”

  Anna felt a twinge of guilt. Whatever her duties were in uncovering the legend of a haunted house, they didn’t include spying on her employers. She’d already broken their trust by sneaking into the basement, an action she had justified to herself by recalling that Bee had said nothing about the basement being off limits. “We shouldn’t be listening,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

  Liz mouthed her agreement, followed Anna back to the desk, and took the ledger in hand. Anna looked again into the red box. Why had someone exploded with such rage over the simple rosaries inside? And if they were from hell, why on earth keep them? She reached out for the rosary made of purple stones.

  “Don’t touch them,” Liz said.

  Anna drew back her hand. “They’re just rosaries. Don’t let that receipt get to you.”

  “I know, but don’t touch them.” Liz was vehement. “My grandmother used to say the devil could leave his mark on things.”

  “You don’t believe that. Inanimate objects can’t hurt us.”

  “They bother me, Anna. I don’t know why, they just do.”

  “All right, all right.” Anna put the lid back on and clasped the box to her chest. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They clambered up the stairs and listened for a moment on the landing for sounds from the hallway. Hearing nothing, Anna stuck her head out the door and looked to her left and right before signaling to Liz.

  They hurried back to the library, where Anna turned the red box on its side and dropped it behind a row of shelved books. Jackson hopped to his armchair and Liz took her seat, opened the ledger book in front of her, and began to inspect its pages.

  Anna paced the library, her mind racing. She couldn’t shake the image of the small room down the hallway, with its tattered bedding and discolored walls. Had it once been a nursery? As thrifty as the Birches were when it came to lightbulbs in Sparrow House, why were they lighting an unused room?

  The house itself seemed trapped in time, its current inhabitants doomed, through their own passivity, to the fates suffered by previous inhabitants. Repeating, repeating. Notes on blue stationery, moving paintings, drug deaths—two of them—two falls down the stairs separated by fifteen years, orange and yellow. And red. The red box, the red Buddha. “No,” she said aloud. His mercies are new every morning. The Lord was the God of new things—and of forgiving seventy times seven.

  “No what?” Liz said, looking up from the ledger.

  “I will not get trapped in this house.”

  “Did you think you would?”

  Ignoring Liz’s question, Anna took her seat at the table. “Let’s find out more about Kurt Ellison. Mitch seems to think we should know what killed him by now.”

  “He was just spouting off.” Liz shut the ledger book, pushed it to the center of the table, and moved her laptop closer. “There’s nothing special about that ledger. I don’t get why Lawrence took it.”

  “We’ll give it to Paxton when we leave. Maybe he can make sense of it.” Anna entered Ellison’s name into a search engine and browsed the results until she found a website that appeared promising. “Here’s a site called ‘The Mysterious Death of Kurt Ellison,’” she said. “We should have looked this up first thing.” She clicked on the link and watched as the page slowly loaded. “The Internet’s like molasses tonight.”

  “Both of us using the Wi-Fi doesn’t help,” Liz said as she broke her connection and lowered the screen on her laptop.

  “Here we go.” Anna began to skim the article on the site’s home page. “Wow, listen to this. ‘Why didn’t anyone at the meeting claim Ellison as a friend? Rather, when they were interviewed after his body was discovered, they wondered why he was in attendance and insisted they did not know who had brought him. Which raises a question: As paranoid as they all were, why would they have spent four days with a stranger? Remember, they were plotting what they called acts of resistance.’”

  “That’s a very good question,” Liz said.

  Anna continued to read. “Some suspect that Ellison was an informant, working for the police or even the FBI, but that still does not explain how he was allowed into the house. The only explanation is that someone there let him in, and contrary to their later statements, one or more of the meeting attendees knew Ellison.”

  She stopped and looked at Liz. “An informant. I hadn’t thought of that.” She recalled her talk with Mitch over dinner and chuckled. “Is that what Mitch meant when he said you were right to call Ellison a ghost?”

  “Yes, a ghost! A spook, as they say in the spy business.”

  “But wouldn’t Paxton have heard about this theory before? He didn’t say anything about it when we talked about Ellison.”

  Thunder shook the library window. Was the storm closer or farther away now? Anna wondered. She’d stopped counting the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. The roll of thunder was now a constant background noise in the house. Unless it boomed loudly or the lights flickered—as they were doing now in the sconces and lamps—she hardly noticed.

  “Paxton doesn’t strike me as someone who wants to know much about what happened back then, unless it helps him sell the house,” Liz said. “What else does that website say?”

  “Let’s see.” Anna ran her eyes down the article until she found where she’d left off. “Then it asks who at the meeting knew Ellison. It says, ‘Ellison had a degree in library science, and a week before the meeting, Birch hired him to work in the mansion’s library organizing his papers and correspondence.’”

  Anna stopped. This was new information.

  “And?”

  “So in spite of what he told the police,” Anna read, “Birch had known Ellison for at least one week. We believe it was longer than that, because Birch would not have hired a stranger to handle his personal papers. He knew and trusted Ellison. Did Ellison spy on Birch’s friends at Birch’s own request?”

  Anna leaned back in her chair, her thoughts tumbling. This was all too familiar. “Birch hired Ellison to work in this library.”

  “Creepier and creepier,” Liz said.

  “Worse than creepy. Matthew Birch hired Ellison, and a week later Ellison was dead. Paxton Birch hires Lawrence, and a week later Lawrence disappears. Things keep repeating.”

  19

  In the framed drawing behind Liz, a shadow on the glass moved. Startled, Anna jerked her head around just as Bee was entering the library from the sitting room.

  “Bee,” she exclaimed, a hand to her chest, “you’re still here.”

  “The news reported trees down on Highway 34,” she said, “so I’m staying the night. I just wondered if you ladies needed anything before I go to bed.”

  “We’re fine, thanks,” Liz said. “Do you live in Loveland?”

  “Oh, no, I’d never make it here in the winter if I did. My house is five miles east of town, just off 34.”

  “Is it bad out there?” Anna asked, her thoughts on Gene and his long drive home on that same highway.

  “It’s not good. Rain, hail, tree limbs down. Be glad you don’t have to drive home tonight.” She pulled her mouth into a grimace. “Well, I’m off. Feel free to make a snack in the kitchen. I’m sleeping in the spare bedroom at Lawrence’s end of the hall, so if you hear something, it’s just me.”


  “Thanks.” The moment Bee left the library, Anna dug for her cell phone in her purse, checked the signal bars, and punched a quick-dial button.

  “I’m calling Gene,” she said in answer to Liz’s raised eyebrows. “I want him to stay at my house tonight.” She waited several rings. “Why isn’t he answering?”

  “Maybe he’s on his way to Loveland.”

  “I’m dialing his cell phone. He should pick up wherever he is.”

  “His cell could be out because of the storm.”

  Anna checked the signal bars on her phone again. “I have service.” She decided to try his house in Loveland. If he answered there, she wouldn’t have to worry about trying to call him before he left Elk Park. She hit the button for his landline and waited, counting the rings. At ten she hung up.

  “What about his dad’s or sister’s house?” Liz said.

  “Yes!” Anna gleefully dialed Roger Westfall but soon discovered that Gene wasn’t there either, nor was he at his sister’s home just outside Elk Park. She hung up and stared at her phone, willing it to ring and display Gene’s silly grin on its screen.

  “If he’s driving he’s not going to answer his phone,” Liz said.

  “That’s true. He never answers the phone while he’s driving.” She grudgingly put her phone on the table. “I’ll call him later.”

  Liz wearily pushed herself out of her chair and walked to a bookcase. “Maybe you could find more on Ellison. I’ll run through these, see if I can find anything for Paxton.” She took an armload of documents and binders to the table then shuffled the papers into three more manageable stacks.

  “What if Ellison was an informant?” Anna asked. “Do you think Matthew invited him to the conclave to report on his friends?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “For money? He had to because he was threatened by the police or FBI?”

  “Why would the FBI care?”

  “The FBI ran counterintelligence programs against radical groups in the sixties and seventies. Wiretappings, planted information, that sort of thing.”