Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  In the kitchen, she laid her Ruger and Trent’s ID on the counter and took another deep breath. She glanced across the living room to the glass door and beyond, to the plastic pumpkin still hooked in the shrub. In a few minutes it would be dark. She shuddered to think what might have happened had Trent shown up in the pitch black of night.

  Paul Gilmartin had done this. Mindless of the possible dire consequences, he had sent some kid to terrify her. And probably paid Trent’s friend to do the same thing two nights ago on Bighorn Road. Was he trying to scare her for the pleasure of it? Or was he trying to scare her off?

  “The man doesn’t understand how crabby I get when someone tries to scare me,” Anna said. “Right, Jackson?” The dog’s ears shot up at the sound of her voice. He barked once, trotted back to the couch, and settled into his blanket. Thankful for Jackson’s uncanny knack for knowing when danger had passed, Anna set her phone in the middle of the table and took her seat, ready to dive once more into the Sadler library books. Her Ruger, she decided, would stay on the kitchen counter, at the ready.

  Before she could open the next book, the doorbell rang. Her head jerked and Jackson reacted to her fear by bounding for the door and placing himself, hackles raised, an inch from the knob. Anna froze.

  “It’s just me,” Liz called out.

  Immediately Jackson relaxed. He sat, his tail sweeping the floor, and Anna pushed herself out of her chair. “Coming!”

  “Sorry to bother you,” Liz said as Anna opened the door.

  “Don’t be silly.” Anna clutched Liz’s arm and pulled her inside. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you.”

  Liz caught sight of the Ruger on the counter.

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” Anna said. “What’s going on with Alex?”

  “Table,” Liz said, tilting her head. She draped her jacket across a chair, sat, and fished a notebook from her jacket pocket. “Crazy night. I posted a one-paragraph report from the jail.”

  “Already?”

  “I’m fast,” she said with a grin. “Anyway, that’s all I could legally put on my website. Alex Root turned himself in to the Elk Park Police just as I got there. That’s public information.” She crossed her arms over the table. “I was able to talk to Alex before he went in. Maddy was there, and she thought I was going to talk him out of confessing. I had the feeling they were waiting for me to arrive first.”

  “Maddy says he’s scared of Paul.”

  “Scared to death. He told me he’s scared for Maddy too.”

  “Not enough to stay out of jail and protect her.”

  “Maddy doesn’t seem to think she’s in danger. She’s worried about Alex.”

  “But why would Paul want to hurt Alex?” Anna said. “I can’t believe he’s just now finding out that Maddy’s having an affair with him.”

  “Another question. Police investigations always start with square one. So let’s start there too. Why did Russell Thurman want to hire you in the first place? We can’t seem to escape that.”

  “It’s been bugging me.” Anna took off her glasses and rubbed her fingers over her tired eyes. “I think Russell was intrigued when he couldn’t find Zoey’s family history. His and Clovis’s group was falling apart and he wanted to know why. But his real focus was Paul. He suspected Paul was connected to the Morgan-Sadler House and the Toller murder but couldn’t prove it because he couldn’t find the Gilmartin family.”

  “Maybe Russell asked Paul a question he shouldn’t have.”

  “Like why did Emerson Sadler have an Asmodeus tattoo just like Paul’s,” Anna said, putting her glasses back on.

  “Did he?”

  “Like father, like son.”

  Liz’s lip curled in disgust. “So this is a family sickness.”

  “Clovis said Russell spent a lot of time in the Morgan-Sadler library. He could have found the photo of Sadler’s tattoo, just like I did.”

  “But Sadler was in Denver when Jennifer Toller was sacrificed.”

  “Yup. Jennifer’s parents suspected Peter, but no one could prove that. For my money, Peter killed her. He found out Jennifer was having an affair with Sadler.”

  “We still don’t know why Sadler hired this young kid to run his honey farm.”

  Anna stood and began to pace from the table into the living room and back again. “Sadler fires Walter Root when Root’s making his fortune for him. Then he hires Peter Toller, who apparently knew little about making honey. Both Root and Toller end up with fat bank accounts.” She halted halfway into the living room and circled back to the table. “It reminds me of Raena and Ruby. Bribes, blackmail.”

  “Like I said, a health-code violation, a problem with the honey facility—”

  “No, something more significant than that. How much money are we talking about?” Anna sat, her fingers beating a rhythm on the corners of her laptop. She couldn’t see the whole picture puzzle yet—it was just out of sight—but the pieces were falling into place.

  “Hundreds of thousands for Walter, more for Peter.”

  Anna stopped tapping. “That’s not health-code money. Walter and Peter knew something.”

  Liz, nodding her head in agreement, asked, “Something about Jennifer and Sadler?”

  “A storybook,” Anna said. She drew her laptop close and clicked on the folder holding the photos Liz had taken of the Morgan-Sadler House’s stained-glass window, enlarging a photo of one section. “When I first saw that large stained-glass window in the room near the library, I thought it looked like a page from a storybook. Sadler installed it in 1984, the year after Jennifer’s murder, so maybe that’s just what it is.”

  Liz moved into the chair next to Anna’s and leaned in for a closer look at her laptop.

  “Look,” Anna said, touching a finger to the screen, “that’s a queen bee in the lower left portion of the glass. See the red dot on its back? I didn’t see that before.”

  “Red wasn’t the queen color in 1984,” Liz said. “But it was in 1983.”

  Anna continued to study the glass. Pumpkins, vines, flowers. Her heart caught in her throat. She clicked on the photo Liz had taken of the entire window and scrolled down it, counting. “Why didn’t I look at this before? Liz, there are exactly eleven pumpkins in that glass.”

  Liz grabbed the laptop and scrolled for herself, grunting in disbelief as she counted the last pumpkin.

  “The house,” Anna said as she pulled the laptop back, searching for a photo of the upper-left portion of the glass. She clicked. “That’s the Morgan-Sadler House,” she explained. Two figures, one large and one small, looked out the house’s front window. “And hives off to the right, across the top of the glass.” Her finger followed the flagstone path at back of the house to the hive farm. “Eleven hives.”

  “Eleven twice. That’s no accident. What’s this?” Liz’s eyes narrowed. “There, by one of the hives.”

  Anna enlarged the photo, trying to make out two short lines, one black and one red, inserted by the glassmaker into the green glass next to a hive. “Are those paint marks? There’s no lead came around them.”

  “They don’t look like paint. They look like glass.”

  Anna enlarged the photo again until the lines almost filled her laptop’s screen. The black line was shaped like an I, the red line like an L on its side, and the two were butted one against the other, the long part of the L disappearing behind a blue hive. “My God,” Anna gasped. “That’s a metal spike and a red leg. That’s Jennifer Toller.”

  “Is there anyone around her?” Liz asked, reaching across Anna’s arm and contracting the photo until the whole of it came into view. “Do you see anyone?”

  “Let’s check the other photos.” Anna clicked on photos of a third and fourth section. There were more flowers, more hives, more bees—none of them queens. On a fifth section, the middle right portion of the glass, she saw a figure seated on a hive, a beekeeper’s net on its head. One of the figure’s hands was pale, the other was red.

&nb
sp; “Is that the beekeeper?” Liz asked.

  “How did the glassmaker do that? Little red lines and drops. Red here and there . . .”

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

  Anna pushed back from the table, staring hard at the laptop’s screen. “Alex didn’t turn himself into the police to protect himself from Paul. He did it to keep himself in the clear tonight. Paul’s going to sacrifice Maddy.”

  21

  Anna dialed Detective Schaeffer while Liz hunted for Maddy’s number. “Do I risk phoning her and getting Paul?” Liz asked.

  Anna held up a finger. Schaeffer was on the line. A nutty, busy night, he told her. Halloween always was. Anna explained why she was calling. No, she knew he couldn’t arrest Paul on nothing more than her suspicions, but couldn’t someone watch out for Maddy tonight?

  “We’re stretched to the limits,” Schaeffer said. “Later, if things lighten up.”

  Anna had figured that would be his response. She hung up, her mind racing. “What do we do, Liz? We have to warn her.”

  Liz was staring at her phone. “I dialed a Gilmartin number and I think I got Paul.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I hung up. Do you think Maddy’s with him?”

  “If she really believes Alex is afraid of Paul, won’t she be afraid of him too?”

  “Maybe she’s on Summit Avenue. She seems to like it downtown. We don’t need to panic just yet.”

  Liz was casting about for something, anything. Maddy wasn’t likely to be strolling alone down Summit tonight, even with all the Halloween festivities going on there. Neither could Anna imagine Maddy at home, hosting her party. With Alex in jail, terrified of her husband, she had probably called it off. Or maybe she would wait until all her students and guests gathered in her back yard before she made her exit, leaving them with Paul.

  “Let’s sit down and examine this rationally,” Liz went on, sounding very much like Gene. “Tell me exactly why Maddy’s in danger.”

  It occurred to Anna that her friend had followed her lead in trying to track down Maddy without knowing why or understanding the urgency of the hunt. “I’m sorry, Liz.” She sat and looked at her watch. Eight o’clock. “We have time. Start with this stained-glass window.” She angled the laptop toward Liz. “Emerson Sadler had it made the year after Jennifer’s murder. I think he wanted to tell the world, in the form of a glass picture, that Peter Toller murdered Jennifer—leaving himself and his affair with her out of it. He just wanted to point the finger at Peter. See the beekeeper with blood on his hands?”

  “Why couldn’t that beekeeper be Walter Root?”

  “Remember the figures in the house? Sadler never married, he didn’t have children—none that he claimed, anyway. Those figures were Sadler and Paul. Walter Root was fired thirteen years before Jennifer’s murder. He had nothing to do with it.”

  “I still don’t understand why Sadler wouldn’t go to the police with what he knew.”

  “He couldn’t. Not without telling the world about his affair—and about the baby he rejected. What would that have done to Sadler Mountain Gold?”

  “Go on.”

  “I think Paul wants to relive his mother’s sacrifice through Maddy. His mother betrayed his father by having an affair with Sadler, and now Maddy is doing the same thing. Think about it. Why is Maddy always in red?”

  “Yeah, she is,” Liz said. “Like a marked queen bee.”

  “Red hair and nails, a brand new red car. Even her tattoo’s red—and it’s new too. Paul has been painting his wife red, just like his father painted his mother red.”

  “Paul’s probably known about Maddy and Alex’s affair since it started.”

  “Which Clovis said was at least a month ago.”

  Liz pondered the information, comparing it to what the two had already confirmed. Anna was itching to leave, to move, to do something, but Liz needed further convincing.

  “So Russell Thurman suspected Paul’s connection to Peter Toller,” Liz said. “That means Paul killed him to keep him quiet.”

  “At the hives at midnight. Reliving history.”

  “Knowing what Russell knew, why would he let Paul lure him to the hives late at night?”

  The answer was suddenly obvious to Anna. “He had help. Alex Root, I’d bet anything. Paul found out about the affair with Maddy and turned Alex—used him like a double agent.”

  “Then Alex knows what’s going to happen to Maddy tonight.”

  “Which explains why he’d rather be in jail, instead of outside, protecting her.”

  “That coward. He’s right where he belongs.”

  “He won’t stay there for long. He’ll claim he was scared of Paul, and after a few days they’ll have to let him go.”

  “Wait a minute, Anna. Paul just found out that you know his identity too. That means . . .”

  Liz didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. The student Paul had sent to her back yard was only the beginning of his plans for her. Unless he believed it was too late, that Anna had already told others his real identity, much worse would follow. “I know, Liz. I’ve thought of that.”

  “God, what a vicious circle of people,” Liz said. “Obsessed with the past, with that one horrible moment in time.”

  “The newspaper articles reported that Paul found his mother’s body, but I’m beginning to wonder if it was more than that. He may have witnessed his mother’s death, and that’s the real reason he was hospitalized.”

  Liz shuddered. “At thirteen.”

  Anna smacked the tabletop. “There’s going to be a third sacrifice tonight.” She sprang to her feet. “I can’t sit here as if I don’t know that. Paul might decide to play it safe and move it up from midnight.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “No. Are you coming with me?”

  Liz was already grabbing her jacket. “If you bring Jackson and your Ruger. And stop at Buckhorn’s for Gene. Why’s he doing paperwork this time of night anyway?”

  In the garage, Anna stowed the revolver beneath her seat and opened the back-seat door for Jackson. She hit the garage remote just as Liz was backing her SUV from the driveway.

  Liz pulled her car to the curb, got out, and hauled herself into the Jimmy’s passenger seat. “Gene first,” she ordered as Anna pressed down on the accelerator.

  “Off to Buckhorn’s. Help me watch for trick-or-treaters.”

  Anna sped down her street until she came to the intersection with Logan, where the houses were thicker. She slowed, her eyes darting side to side, alert for children—or drunken half-children, like Trent.

  “Who do I call?” Liz said. She was glaring down at the phone in her hand as though it could give her the answer she needed. “What about friends? Do you know anyone who knows Maddy?”

  “The woman doesn’t have any friends,” Anna replied, “or any acquaintances. I was her friend. She came to me.”

  “You can forget about blaming yourself right now.”

  When Anna pulled a sharp left, Liz lurched to the right, keeping her balance by clamping onto the strap above her window.

  “Try Clovis,” Anna said. “She’s in the directory. But don’t tell her why we need Maddy. I don’t want her or Esther going anywhere.”

  Anna made it to Summit Avenue just as Liz got hold of Clovis. The conversation lasted no more than a minute and yielded nothing.

  Costumed crowds and traffic slowed her progress, and it was several more minutes before Anna got to Buckhorn’s. She double-parked directly in front of the store, shut off the engine, and hopped out, ignoring the honking cars behind hers. “Emergency,” she shouted at the drivers.

  She hurried up to the store, realizing as she yanked on the door that Buckhorn’s had closed for the night. Past eight, of course. Scanning the aisles, she spotted a light coming from Gene’s office. He was still inside, still doing bookwork. She pounded on the front door until he stormed out of his office and up the center ai
sle for the front door, his expression of irritation melting as he neared her.

  “What is it?” he mouthed. He fumbled for his keys, a look of concern spreading across his face, and pushed open the door.

  “Can you take off?” she said. “I’ll explain in the car.” She paused. “It’s a crazy idea, and I might be wrong. But I think I’m right, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do something.”

  Gene hesitated for a fraction of a second then waved her in. “Let me get Riley and my jacket. Where are you parked?” he said as he made for his office.

  “I’m double-parked,” she shouted. “Liz is with me.”

  Gene locked up, and on seeing him at the store’s door, Liz hopped from the front seat to the rear, car horns wailing behind her. “They’re about to bring out the pitchforks,” she said as he put both Riley and Jackson in the Jimmy’s cargo area. She pulled herself into the back seat and buckled herself in.

  Gene climbed into the passenger seat and Anna drove ahead, checking her back and side mirrors. She slowed, stopped, and pulled a U-turn.

  “Watch it,” Gene said, cringing.

  “We were going in the wrong direction,” she said firmly. “Maddy’s going to be killed tonight.”

  From the corner of her eye she saw the look on his face. Surprise, concern—and perhaps the niggling idea that she was overreacting again and this time she was playing with fire. Didn’t she know that in the space of a week two people had been brutally murdered in Elk Park?

  “I know I get carried away sometimes,” she said, accelerating as she left the business district, “but I don’t imagine people’s lives in danger when they’re not.”

  Too late she saw she was about to run a red light. She slammed on the brakes, sending Gene into the dashboard.

  “Gene, are you all right?” she said, putting a hand on his arm.

  “I’m fine,” he said, pushing himself back. “I forgot the seat belt.” He reached for the belt and strapped himself in. “This is familiar, isn’t it?”