Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  “That’s Nilla and Paxton,” Bee said. “I have to go. Please don’t say anything.”

  Anna nodded her agreement, mouthed “All right,” and watched Bee as she sprinted toward the entryway. What Bee did was none of her business.

  She heard Paxton and Nilla in the entryway and edged forward, peering at them through the sitting-room door, their figures dimly lit by the entryway windows. Paxton shook the rain from his umbrella then deposited it, still open, on the marble floor, and Nilla removed her raincoat and gave it to Bee. When Paxton railed against the unmanageable state of his muddy gravel drive, Anna’s heart dropped. She wanted—needed—to get out of Sparrow House tonight.

  She’d known since the moment she’d entered the house that something was wrong within its walls, something beyond the physical decay evident in everything from the cracked slate roof to the threadbare furniture. Sparrow House, brick, slate, and concrete though it was, suffered from a spiritual decay. Allowed to fester for decades, through succeeding generations of the Birch family, that decay had at last manifested itself. You could touch, see, and hear it.

  Paxton and Nilla, young and modern, with wireless Internet and cell phone service, were nevertheless an incomplete counterpoint to the decay. They’d shuttered the third floor and suspended a decades-old nursery in the Sparrow House aspic. They’d allowed ugly art to infest their walls. Not one thing in their house was beautiful—or, Anna believed, intended to be.

  No matter what it took—four-wheel drive engaged, all tires churning on the lawn, shrubbery sacrificed beneath them—she was getting out and going home tonight. And she was going to spend time with Gene. Talking, eating, and watching television with him. Doing normal things.

  “You have that look on your face again. Who are you thinking ’bout?” Liz asked. Striving for a blank expression, Anna failed and began to grin. Liz was joking about Gene again. The last barrier between them, of all the barriers erected by their argument the night before, had at last been breached. Things were as they should be.

  “I can’t help it, I miss him. I do fine without him for a few days when I’m at home, but here . . .” She wrapped her arms around herself. “It feels like we’ve been here forever.” Was it getting colder? She wished the Birches would rethink their habit of shutting down the furnace in May regardless of the weather.

  “Damn, the lights are off,” Anna heard Paxton say. Footsteps echoed across the entryway.

  “It’s only been a couple minutes,” Bee replied. She cast an eye toward the library as she went by the sitting-room door.

  Anna moved for the table, Jackson beside her, pressing his body against her leg. “Let’s gather what we’ve got and put the rest away.” She sat and began to scoop papers, folders, and books toward her, assembling them into neater piles so they would fit on the shelves.

  “Are we leaving?”

  “I want to type up a preliminary report first.” She detached the electric cord from her laptop and pushed the on button. “I hope the lightning didn’t fry it.”

  “I should go upstairs and get our flashlight,” Liz said. “I don’t want them to find it in Lawrence’s room.”

  “I think you should leave it.”

  “Anna, I really need that flashlight.”

  Liz was scared. Not just worried or shaken by the dark, but heart-thumping scared. Anna had never seen her like this. “Jackson and I are going with you,” she said, pushing her chair from the table and standing.

  A voice called from somewhere beyond the sitting room, and as footsteps drew closer to the library, the voice rang out again. “Hello? Anna and Liz?”

  “Nilla,” Liz whispered.

  “We’re in the library,” Anna said, moving to the library door so Nilla could see her in the thin, gray light of the window.

  Nilla took two steps forward. “There you are. Come join us.” She hailed them, one arm raised, in silhouette against the windows flanking the door. “We’re having the last of the hot coffee in the kitchen. Can you find your way?”

  “Not a problem,” Anna said. She waited until she could no longer hear Nilla’s shoes striking marble before whispering, “It’s our last night, I suppose we should.”

  “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Come on, Jackson.” Anna reached down. He’d been at her side since lightning had fractured one of the windowpanes.

  “Should he be in the kitchen with Nilla there?”

  “They’ll have to deal with it. I’m not leaving him alone in the dark.”

  As the light thrown from the entryway windows grew dim, Anna and Liz, feeling their way slowly in the dark, followed the sound of voices down the hall and into the kitchen. Anna pushed through the door, Jackson at her heel. Bee, her face lit by candles on the island, looked at Jackson and frowned.

  “I can’t leave him out there. He’s afraid of the dark.”

  Nilla chortled. “A dog afraid of the dark?”

  “He is in strange places, yes. Dogs have fears too.” Anna cast her eyes over the island, looking for clean cups among the clutter of candles, cups, and bowls. She found two cups and waited while Liz poured a few ounces into each.

  “When Paxton was a boy, he was afraid of the dark,” Nilla said, taking the stool next to Bee. “Only not in strange places, in his own house.”

  Anna caught sight of Paxton rolling his eyes. Nilla relished telling tales of Paxton’s past, and in that, Anna thought, she was more like his mother than his wife. She told her stories with a parental intent to control, even humiliate.

  “This house in the dark would scare most kids,” Anna said. She took a sip of coffee. It had long since passed hot and was now undeniably lukewarm. She set the cup on the island.

  “When our families visited,” Nilla went on, “Paxton used to ask if I could stay over. Six is young, but it’s too old for boy-girl overnights.”

  “I don’t remember being afraid of the dark,” Paxton said.

  “You were, dear.”

  “Do we have any sandwiches?” Paxton asked.

  Anna squelched a smile. Requests for food often derailed conversations. Thinking back, Paxton had interrupted several conversations that way over the past few days. Someone or something annoyed him and he held the annoyance at bay by asking for food.

  Bee rose from her stool, took a platter from the refrigerator, and returned to the island with it. “Egg salad and chicken salad. I’m afraid that’s tonight’s dinner.”

  “How are you two coming?” Paxton asked as he took hold of a sandwich.

  “We’re almost done.” For the first time, Anna wasn’t in the mood for Bee’s chicken salad. Her stomach was doing flip-flops, and hopping into her Jimmy was the only cure. She glanced down at Jackson, who had finally relaxed enough to sit by her barstool, and leaned down to give him a scratch between his ears.

  “Do you think you have enough for Ryant?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve gathered all the information we can. If Ryant wants to explore happenings in the house before and after 1970, in addition to Kurt Ellison’s death, there may be enough information to satisfy them.”

  Paxton swiveled sideways on his stool and looked Anna in the eye. “But what do you think? Do you think Ellison was murdered? Or does it at least look like that?”

  Anna hesitated. She could speak her mind or she could pretend ambivalence, leaving Paxton to come to his own conclusions from her final report. She decided to speak her mind. “I think it’s pretty clear he was murdered.”

  Silence followed her words. She looked at Nilla and Bee across the island. They stared at her, Nilla open-mouthed, Bee with a sandwich frozen inches from her face.

  Paxton, on the other hand, was ecstatic. “That’s great, fantastic!” He smiled and whooped, and candlelight gleamed off his stunted teeth.

  “Dear,” Nilla moaned.

  “You know what I mean. It’s great for us.”

  “What makes you so positive he was murdered?” Bee asked.

  “First, we fou
nd that someone, probably someone who attended that October meeting, thought Matthew Birch killed Ellison by drawing a trip wire across the stairs. Whoever it was used coded words written on several documents to pass that message along.”

  There was a long silence. Anna held tight to her coffee cup, and from the corner of her eye she saw Liz, holding a sandwich in both hands, push her thumbs into the bread.

  “Incredible,” Paxton finally said, shoving back his bangs. “That’s amazing.”

  Anna watched Paxton as his expression changed from one of shock to glee. Focused as always on selling his house, he seemed to have missed the point that she had just told him that his father was a murderer. Maybe the accusation didn’t surprise him.

  “Who did that? Who wrote the code?” Nilla demanded. “We have a right to know if someone was murdered in this house.”

  “I don’t know who wrote it.” Anna hated lying, but she knew if she told the truth, Alice’s secret might come out. Worse, her life, until now sheltered by her married name, could be in jeopardy.

  Paxton reached out across the island for his wife’s hand. “Murder is what the developers wanted. We can sell the house now. My father’s dead, so what does it matter?”

  Paxton’s childish indifference was more than Anna could bear. “It matters to Ellison’s family.” She regretted her words when Paxton, looking greatly wronged, turned to her.

  “I never, never meant—”

  “Is his wife still alive?” Nilla asked. “Did they have children?”

  “We don’t know,” Liz broke in. “But any death matters to loved ones, doesn’t it?”

  Nilla drained the rest of her coffee and set the cup on the island with a loud clap. “I’ll bet it was Eric Browne. He wrote the coded words. He was the only one who came back, and he spent time in the library when he was here.”

  “When was this?” Paxton said.

  “Keep up with things,” Nilla said.

  “He asked about the others who were here in 1970,” Bee said. “He wondered if any of them had ever visited. Especially Alice Ryder—he wanted to know if she’d ever married.”

  “Had she?” Nilla asked.

  Bee lifted a shoulder. “How would I know?”

  “You know what he told me?” Nilla said, fingering the rim of her cup. “He said he knew how the legend of the Sparrow House ghost started.”

  Paxton sat bolt upright. “And?”

  “He wouldn’t say. He looked like the cat that ate the canary.”

  “He had me give him a tour of the house,” Bee said. “Which I’m expert at, of course.”

  “I remember. The whole house, even the third floor,” Nilla said.

  “What about the nursery on the first floor?” Anna asked. She felt Liz kick her ankle.

  It took a moment for the question to register with Nilla. “Wait a minute. Have you been nosing around our house?”

  “We were trying to finish our rather hazily defined job,” Anna said. “That did involve some exploring.” She turned to Bee. “Though we haven’t been to the third floor.”

  “What nursery?” Paxton asked.

  Her patience with Paxton’s chronic confusion at an end, Nilla snapped, “Wake up. That small room near the basement door.”

  “That? We meant to make that a closet years ago—clear the furniture out, paint it.”

  Reminiscing, Bee looked away to the far wall, her arms crossed, her head swaying slightly. “Eric asked me to open that door. I told him it was an empty room, and he said, ‘Rooms like that are never empty.’ I asked him what he meant and he said that room was the reason he left for Albuquerque. I thought he was high on something.”

  24

  There were loud sighs of relief and smiles all around the kitchen when the lights came on. Paxton swept crumbs from his t-shirt as Bee, ever alert to her duties, began to clear the island.

  Anna glanced from Bee to the Birches and down to the candles still burning on the island. She felt a prickling at the back of her neck. Something was coming. Rising. A hand clawing upward to break the crust of soil over a grave. “We’ll be out of here in half an hour,” she said, hopping off her barstool.

  “You’re not staying tonight?” Paxton asked.

  “I think we’ve found everything you’ll need for the developers. I’ll type my final report at home and mail it to you in two days. Your genealogy too.”

  Paxton chuckled. “I almost forgot about the family tree.”

  “Six generations,” Liz added.

  “Any surprises?” Bee asked.

  Enjoying a private joke, Nilla and Paxton let loose with a bray of laughter. Paying them no attention, Anna pushed through the kitchen door and headed for the library, Jackson and Liz close behind.

  “Slow down,” Liz said, hurrying to catch up. “Are we really leaving in half an hour?”

  “Less if I can help it.” Anna involuntarily turned her head toward the fireplace mantel as they made their way through the sitting room. The half-bear was gone. “Jesus,” she said under her breath.

  “What can I do?” Liz asked as they entered the library.

  “Make a list of everything we have in the purple folder.” Anna slid the folder across the table. “Every detail, so I can explain it all to Paxton in my report.”

  “The rosary receipt?”

  “That too. It’s the kind of thing Ryant wants.”

  “Do you feel . . . ?

  “What?”

  “Very creeped out right now?”

  Beyond creeped out, she wanted to say. She was afraid. “Yes, I feel it. Something’s about to go wrong, Liz.”

  “What if your car can’t make it down the driveway?”

  “Then we’ll sit inside it and call the police. We’re getting out of here.” She grabbed stack after stack of documents, returning them to the shelves on the bookcases behind her. “I wish I’d brought my Ruger with me.”

  Five minutes later, Liz, typing faster than Anna knew she could type, finished cataloguing the items in the purple folder. “Done,” she said, saving the document to her laptop. She removed the flash drive from its slot and dropped it into her purse. “What else?”

  “Eric Browne,” Anna replied. She shoved another pile of papers onto a shelf, no longer caring to replace the documents in the same order she had found them. Hands resting on her hips, she turned to Liz. “Eric Browne asked about Alice. More than he did about the others at that meeting in 1970.”

  “Yeah, Bee just said that.”

  “And earlier, Bee said Eric had a thing for Alice. Then Alice told me that Eric and Kurt were the only decent ones in that group of eight. Her words.”

  “I know that look. What are you thinking?”

  She grabbed the last stack from the table and wedged it into a too-small space on a lower shelf. “Nilla wanted to know if Alice had married. Paxton didn’t ask.”

  “Paxton is often ‘disengaged,’ as Dan would say.”

  “Eric wanted a look at the nursery. When he visited, he specifically asked for Bee to open that door.”

  It was all falling into place. Alice had told Eric, the only one of their group she trusted, that she was pregnant with Matthew’s child. Thinking he’d lost Alice forever, he ran off to Albuquerque, and then, five years ago, he returned to Sparrow House. Did he think Alice had moved in with Matthew and that the nursery had been for their child?

  “How would Eric Browne know about a nursery in Sparrow House?” Liz asked.

  “I don’t know.” Anna knew she couldn’t say a word to Liz without breaking her promise to Alice. It was maddening. Half explaining to her, half covering up. “And I don’t know that it matters. Like you said, that nursery is a monument—to a child who died or a child who never was. If I had to guess, I’d say it was for Charlene’s baby.”

  “Anna, you’re not making any sense. Eric Browne has nothing to do with Charlene.”

  From the corner of her eye, Anna saw someone walk past the doorway between the sitting room and e
ntryway. She turned in time to see Bee latching the front door.

  Dashing through the sitting room, she gestured with her head for Bee to follow her, then shot back to the library.

  “I’m rather busy at the moment,” Bee said as she entered the room.

  “Hang on.” Anna nudged Bee away from the library door, shut it, and leaned back against it. “I have a couple questions, Bee, and you have to tell me the truth. It’s very important.”

  A look of mild disgust crossed Bee’s face. She folded her arms and tapped a shoe. “I’m not used to all this drama.”

  “I know.” Anna shoved a strand of hair behind her ear. “Just indulge me for one minute. When Eric Browne was here, did he talk to Nilla?”

  “Of course he did.”

  “I mean alone. Did they talk alone?”

  “For a couple hours, I think. Why?”

  “Did she seem different after they talked?”

  Scowling, and still offended by the chaos that had erupted in her domain, Bee thought back. “Well, yes. I guess she did. She seemed upset. Really upset, now that I think about it. But she doesn’t like thinking about the old days here.”

  “One more question. Did Paxton hire Lawrence to work here?”

  “Technically, yes, but he was recommended by Nilla.”

  “How does Nilla know him?”

  “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  Anna took several quick steps to the red box. She carefully lifted the lid and motioned for Bee to look inside.

  “I told you those rosaries were Charlene’s,” Bee said. She pulled herself to her full height. Anna again heard tapping on the library floor. “Really, I’m very busy.”

  “Have you seen this box before? Someplace other than the library. Think, please.”

  Bee exhaled loudly, her patience at an end. “For goodness’ sake. I saw it Monday in Paxton and Nilla’s room, when I brought Nilla tea because she couldn’t manage to swing her legs out of bed.”

  Anna gasped and her hand flew to her mouth. “We have to get out of here. You too, Bee.”

  “I’m not going anywhere in this weather, and you need to calm down. Are you staying tonight?” She leaned closer to the rosaries.