Hollyhock Ridge

by Pamela Grandstaff

  “I think she’s already forgotten me,” Claire said. “What’s going on?”

  “They’re making meth in that storage unit,” Melissa said. “Long as I live I’ll never forget that smell. That’s what they was making when they blowed up the house after I got Tommy out.”

  “We need to call the police.”

  “You can do whatever you want long as you leave my name out of it.”

  “I will, don’t worry.”

  “They’re evil, them meth-heads,” Melissa said. “All they want is more meth; they don’t care who they have to steal from, or hurt to get more. They’re like walking dead people with no souls; like zombies.”

  “You drop me off in town and I’ll call from a payphone,” Claire said. “Are there still payphones?”

  “Them meth-heads are the one’s you wanna avoid when you’re locked up,” Melissa said. “Them and the crack-heads are the worst. They’ll snort drain cleaner if they can get hold of it; they’d sooner gut you as look at you.”

  Claire couldn’t think of any response that wouldn’t sound feeble or patronizing. She was just sorry Melissa had come to know such things. They were quiet until Melissa dropped her off in front of the office. Claire started to say something but Melissa pulled away from the curb before she could.

  When Claire reached the door to the office, she found a note from Pip.

  “Call me” was all it said.

  Claire unlocked the door and went inside. She dialed the number to the Rose Hill Police Station and it went to voicemail.

  “Lovely,” she said, and ended the call rather than leave a message.

  “Are you working?” she texted Laurie.

  She waited five minutes but there was no response.

  She called Pip, using his mother’s house phone number. Pip could never keep a cell phone, either because he lost them or the service was disconnected for non-payment. His mother, Frieda, answered.

  “Haylo,” she said.

  “Frieda, this is Claire, is Pip around?”

  “You just missed him,” Frieda said. “He’s gone up to Knox’s house to have it out with him.”

  “Well, that’s stupid.”

  “I told him he was gonna get himself in trouble with the law again, but he’s got this fool idea that Knox owes him money for killing Courtenay.”

  “Is he planning to blackmail Knox?”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing.”

  “Well, crap,” Claire said. “How long ago did he leave?”

  “Five minutes, maybe,” Frieda said. “If you’d give that boy some of that money you owe him, he wouldn’t have to go begging Knox for it.”

  Claire ended the call rather than argue.

  ‘I’m not going to get involved,’ she told herself. ‘This is not my problem.’

  She tried to turn her mind to something else. She needed to call some law authority and report the meth lab at the storage unit. She didn’t want to call 911 from Sean’s office phone; she would have to look around town for a payphone.

  But her mind kept wandering up to Morning Glory Avenue. She thought about the dark sedan. What if Knox was paranoid enough to shoot whomever knocked on his front door? Or what if Knox’s house was currently infested with armed thugs?

  She was up and moving before she could talk herself out of it. She locked the office door behind her and called Laurie as she walked.

  Where was he?

  By the time she reached Morning Glory Avenue, hiking up the steep driveway to Knox’s house, she was out of breath. She desperately needed to start running again. Knox’s big Lincoln was parked in the driveway with Pip’s rickety old pickup behind it. There was no dark sedan in sight.

  Claire rang the doorbell and waited. She rang it again, and then knocked on the door. She waited a moment, pounded on the door, and then was surprised when it swung open.

  Claire’s pulse quickened. Despite the alarm bells sounding in her head, she pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  “Knox?” she called out. “Pip? Are you in there?”

  Her ex-husband was standing in the foyer, looking up at Knox, who was lying on his side facing the wall in the middle of the lower portion of the wide staircase. There was a huge gash across the back of his head, and the back of his shirt was soaked with blood. He was so still, and there was such an absence of Knoxness in the atmosphere, that Claire had no doubt that he was dead.

  “Pip,” she gasped. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He was like this when I got here. Claire, what’ll we do?”

  Pip’s eyes were open so wide the whites were showing all around the irises. His face was pale. He was breathing so hard he was almost hyperventilating.

  “We call the police,” Claire said, taking out her cell phone.

  “They’ll arrest me,” Pip said. “I can’t go back to jail.”

  “Wait a minute,” Claire said. “Don’t panic or you’ll do something stupid. Well, more stupid, anyway.”

  Pip pushed Claire out of the way and ran out of the house. He jumped in his truck and then backed it down the driveway, turning so sharply at the end that the truck tires screeched. He gunned it and was gone.

  Claire called the police station again, left a frantic message, and then she called the County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher. Once that was done, she turned back to look at Knox.

  The polished wooden stairs were carpeted with a plush, golden-colored Oriental runner, held down with brass rods fastened at the back of every step. The carpet stopped halfway up the stairs at a marble landing, before continuing on the other side up to the second floor. Knox’s head was resting on the third step down from the marble landing; below it, down to around mid-chest level, the carpet behind the body was stained a deep dark red. His left arm was beneath him and the other hung limp from the shoulder that was rolled toward the wall. His jacket was missing, exposing his big belly straining the buttons of his blue oxford shirt. The legs of his khakis rode up a little where he must have slid down a step or two after he fell, revealing argyle socks and brown penny loafers.

  A piece of paper was stuck to the bottom of one of his shoes. Claire took a closer look; it was a hundred-dollar bill. From the open front door a stiff wind whipped up the staircase; the bill detached and flipped in the breeze, coming to rest near the bottom step. Claire left it where it landed.

  Claire had been on enough movie sets where violence and gore were so cleverly faked that, when faced with actual blood and a dead body, it didn’t seem quite real to her. It also seemed impossible that someone she knew, albeit someone she disliked intensely, could be gone, just like that.

  A scant few weeks previously, she had socked Knox in the face for trying to swindle her parents out of their home, and then had watched, horrified, as his wife, Meredith, tried to bludgeon him to death with a collector’s coin box. There was no doubt Knox Rodefeffer had been a power-hungry, underhanded, low-down bastard, so there were plenty of people who might want him dead. Claire wondered which one he had finally pushed over the edge.

  Knox’s first wife, now a famous psychic, had allegedly conspired with him to frame and then get rid of his last mistress, Pip’s ex-girlfriend, Courtenay. His brother Trick suspected him of embezzling from and killing their aunt. His business partner, former Mayor Stuart Machalvie, was the focus of a federal investigation due to the schemes he and Knox had cooked up to line their pockets and get Knox elected senator. There were also a couple of high-level politicians who would be relieved if Knox Rodefeffer could no longer testify against them in order to save his own hide.

  Claire thought it was obvious someone hit him from behind, but if so, wouldn’t he have fallen forward? How could he have died from a wound on the back of the head, yet be lying on his side on the stairs, facing the wall? Maybe he was dazed at first, and attempted to flee up the stairs, only to pass out and fall. But his position didn’t jibe with that scenario. It was certainly a puzzle.

  She had the though
t that maybe she would just look around a little before someone from the sheriff’s office arrived. She probably had at least ten minutes.

  She went back through the hallway next to the stairway, which led to the kitchen. Everything was spotless and neat in there. The door from the kitchen to the mudroom was open, and in the mudroom there were muddy footprints on the floor. Claire could see that the deadbolt was drawn back on the door to the outside.

  There was a set of stairs on the other side of the kitchen that led to the second floor. Claire listened, but it didn’t seem like there was anyone else in the house. She didn’t imagine whoever killed Knox would want to hang out to see what happened.

  Claire went up the back stairs, which led to a long hallway. All of the doors were closed except one to what looked like Knox’s office. Inside, it looked as if Knox had just stepped away from his desk. His cell phone lay on the desk next to the documents he’d been looking at. There was a stack of bills, and the amount due on each made Claire whistle. There were also several overdue notices, and a checkbook register that displayed a negative number as the balance.

  Knox was in deep debt, no doubt about it.

  Claire plucked a tissue from a box on the desk and covered the end of her finger with it. Pressing his cell phone buttons through the tissue, she went to the call history for the day and photographed the screen with her own phone.

  Claire looked around the room, and noticed a painting on the floor, leaned against the wall. Above it the door to Knox’s safe was wide open. Claire peered in; it was empty.

  In the distance she heard a siren as the first county car entered the city limits. She shoved the tissue and her phone in her pocket, ran back down the hall, and down the back stairs. She ran through the kitchen, the hallway next to the stairs, and out the front door. Out of breath, her heart pounding, she sat down on the front steps, and tried Laurie again.

  It went to voicemail.

  She watched as a county car careened up Peony Street and slid around the corner of Morning Glory Avenue. After it pulled up the driveway and parked, Sarah got out of the driver’s side door. She was frowning as she walked up the path to where Claire was sitting.

  “Where’s Purcell?” Sarah asked.

  “He must be off today,” Claire said. “He’s not answering my calls.”

  “Passed out drunk’s more like it,” Sarah said, shaking her head.

  “Even a police chief gets a day off,” Claire insisted, but Sarah rolled her eyes.

  Another county car arrived, and Sarah turned to greet her team. Claire watched as they dressed in crime scene suits and paper booties.

  “Don’t leave,” she told Claire before they went inside.

  “Don’t worry,” Claire said.

  She figured Sarah would be preoccupied for a while, so she took out her phone and opened a browser. She did a search for each phone number she had found in Knox’s phone, and added the numbers and names to her contact list.

  At 8:00 a.m., Knox called the bank in Rose Hill

  At 8:19 a.m., Knox called a bank in Pittsburgh.

  At 8:32 a.m., Knox called his first wife, Anne Marie, when it would have been 5:30 a.m. in California.

  At 9:14 a.m., Knox called an attorney’s office in Morgantown.

  At 10:12 a.m., Marigold Lawson called Knox.

  At 10:28 a.m., Knox called Stuart Machalvie.

  At 12:20 p.m., Knox called Rodefeffer Realty.

  At 12:52 p.m., Pip called Knox from Frieda’s house.

  Claire wanted to write it all out and analyze the data, but she didn’t dare do that while Sarah was so close by.

  By calling his mother, she was able to find Skip, Scott’s youngest deputy, and a few minutes later he drove up in the town’s only cruiser, but seemed reluctant to come up the stairs.

  “Frank’s in Pendleton at the courthouse,” he said.

  “Sarah’s inside,” Claire said.

  He started to enter the house but Claire stopped him.

  “I wouldn’t go in there without a crime scene suit on if I were you.”

  “Oh, yeah, right,” he said.

  He looked toward the cruiser as if he longed to jump in it and drive away.

  “What do you think I ought to do?” he asked her.

  “Just wait for Sarah,” Claire said. “Keep an eye on me.”

  Skip’s eyes widened.

  “Are you a witness to the crime?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know what happened to Knox,” Claire said. “Pip found him.”

  Skip cleared his throat and his voice jumped an octave as he spoke.

  “A blow to the back of the head,” he said. “They were talking about it on the radio as I came up the hill.”

  “Pip didn’t do it,” Claire said. “You know Pip; he’s too much of a coward to kill anybody. He’s more of a pot-head than a hot-head.”

  Skip shrugged.

  “I guess I’m just crowd control,” he said.

  “I guess I’m the crowd,” Claire said. “What would you like me to do?”

  “You’re a person of interest,” Skip said. “So don’t go anywhere.”

  “Don’t worry,” Claire said. “Have you seen Laurie today?”

  Skip couldn’t look her in the eye. He cleared his throat.

  “He’s off today,” he said.

  “I know he’s got a drinking problem.”

  “He’s never come to work drunk,” Skip said. “My dad’s an alcoholic, so I’d know. They think vodka doesn’t smell but it does; I know that smell. He might be drinking, but not when he’s working. Laurie’s a good guy; we all like him.”

  “I like him, too,” Claire said.

  “How’s your dad?” Skip asked.

  “About the same.”

  “The chief was always good to me; he paid the tuition my last semester at community college after my old man stole my student loan money.”

  While they waited, they talked about her dad and other people they knew. Skip still seemed like the same shy, gawky grade-schooler he had been when Claire was a teenager, just much taller. After Claire moved back, Skip’s mother had taken a liking to her Boston terrier, Mackie Pea, and had knitted her a little coat, which the little dog had almost immediately drug through the mud.

  By the time Sarah came back outside, Claire and Skip were in the front yard, passing a football he had found in the bushes. Sarah took one look at them and threw her hands up in the air. Claire had thrown a pass right as she came out; the football hit Skip in the chest and bounced off. He looked petrified; Claire wished Laurie was there to protect him.

  “You,” Sarah said as she pointed to Skip. “Get that car out of the driveway and wait for the morgue van.”

  Skip ran to the car like his shirttail was on fire.

  “You,” she pointed at Claire. “Come with me.”

  “Pip didn’t do it,” Claire said. “He found Knox. The front door was open when I got here. His truck was parked in the driveway; he wasn’t trying to hide that he was here.”

  Sarah waved that away.

  “I was with the State Police when they questioned your ex-husband after his girlfriend was murdered. He’s a beautiful specimen of manhood, but he’s got the brains of a golden retriever.”

  “Are you going to question me soon?” Claire asked. “I need to pick up my dad.”

  “Your father was a gentleman and a damn good policeman,” Sarah said. “It’s a shame what’s happened to him.”

  Claire was not used to Sarah being this personable and it made her suspicious.

  “Let’s go sit in my car,” Sarah said. “We’ll record your interview, and then later one of these yahoos will type it out for you to sign. Off the record, why were you up here?”

  Claire knew nothing she said was off the record; what was Sarah up to?

  “I called Pip’s mother and she said he had come up here to ask Knox for money. I knew it wouldn’t go well, and I wanted to …”

  What had she wanted to do?


  “Rescue him,” Sarah filled in.

  It almost seemed as if Sarah understood and empathized.

  That couldn’t be true.

  “I guess,” Claire said. “After you have a relationship with somebody … even when it ends badly …”

  “I get it,” Sarah said, and Claire could swear she looked as if she empathized. “You never quit wanting to look out for them.”

  Claire nodded, while thinking, ‘I cannot trust her. It’s got to be a trap, but it doesn’t feel fake. Is Sarah that good of an actress?’

  The questioning was straightforward and Sarah didn’t throw any curve balls. Claire told her about Knox’s altercation with the dark sedan, and regretted she hadn’t thought to record the plate number. She told Sarah about Knox pushing her in front of the car, and named Sister M-Squared as a witness.

  Claire studied the woman as they talked. Claire could see how tired she was; there were dark circles underneath her eyes and she looked a little haggard.

  Claire guessed even bitches could have sorrows.

  Afterward, Sarah gave her a ride down the hill, but detoured to Sunflower Street. She parked in front of Scott’s house, where Laurie was staying. His truck was parked out front.

  “Huh,” Claire said. “He must be home.”

  “He is,” Sarah said, and to Claire’s surprise, Sarah’s eyes filled with tears. “If you would check on him, I’d appreciate it.”

  Claire’s mouth fell open and she stared at Sarah.

  “Just make sure he’s okay,” Sarah said. “And if he’s not, take care of it as discreetly as possible. I can’t help you, but text me and let me know if he’s okay.”

  Claire took Sarah’s number and watched from the curb as she drove away. She knew Sarah and Laurie had a fling after his wife died, but it now seemed like it had meant much more to Sarah.

  What the hell?

  Claire pounded on the front door, but no one answered. It was locked with a deadbolt. She went around to the back and pounded on that door, but there was no answer. The door knob was locked but when she rattled the door, it felt like the deadbolt was not engaged. Claire took out a credit card and slid it between the door jam and door, where it caught the slanted edge of the flimsy doorknob bolt; she wriggled it back and forth until she disengaged it, and then pushed the door open.