Jan Coffey Suspense Box Set: Three Complete Novel Box Set: Trust Me Once, Twice Burned, Fourth Victim

by Jan Coffey

  “Did you call Evans like I told you?”

  “Yup. He wasn’t at home and not up at the Inn, either. I left him messages both places.”

  As Mick picked his way through the large open sitting area, his gaze was drawn to the deep slashing cuts in the wainscot. The insides of the wood, covered by decades of stain and varnish and age, showed through startlingly white, like the flesh in a deep wound the moment before the blood comes.

  “Did you check the rest of the cottages again? Any damage anywhere else?”

  “Two have people in them. So I couldn’t check. But the rest of the cottages are okay, with all the furniture moved out and everything. They look ready to go. It’s just this baby.”

  Mick looked closely at the countertop in the small kitchenette. The same deep cuts marred the surface. They were too wide to have been done with a knife. More like a crowbar or something similar.

  “If you ask me,” Chuck said, “it looks like somebody went nuts in here.”

  “I’d say they did.” He looked up at the ceiling. The fixture was dangling down. There were big dents in the plaster on the walls, like someone had hammered again and again against the plaster. “What did you do with the crew you brought in on overtime to work on this one?”

  “I got them started on the cottage closest to the Inn’s dock.” He looked at his clipboard again. “Mombasa. They’re scraping and pulling out the carpets and the old linoleum. We could start painting in there today if you want.”

  The folding doors to a pantry closet had been ripped out and broken to pieces. Inside, all the shelving had been torn from the walls and lay scattered on the floor.

  In the bathroom, the mirror had been shattered into about a million pieces. There was glass everywhere on the ancient linoleum flooring.

  “Did you touch anything when you first came in?” Mick asked, noticing the red splatters of what very well could have been blood on the plastic shower curtain.

  “The front door. But I only got as far as the kitchen and I knew some serious shit was going on around here. I came right out and called you. Then I left the messages for Evans and put the guys to work in the other cottage. After that, I called you again to give you an update.”

  Mick reached for his cell phone and called the police.

  Nothing could have prepared him for the site and smell of the cottage’s bedroom. Blood-red paint had been splattered on the walls and part of the ceiling. There were small congealed pools of it at the base of the walls. The light fixtures had been smashed. The damage to the plaster was similar to what they’d seen in the other rooms. Across the bedroom, the sliding glass doors overlooking the lake were cracked, the fissures extending to the outside of the panes of glass like spider webs.

  “Holy shit!” Chuck motioned to the ceiling and the walls. “It looks like a butcher shop in here.”

  Mick stared at the dark splotches on the gray carpet and the stains on the wall.

  “But I’d say whoever did this thought this room was a urinal.” The smell was disgusting, and the two men backed out of the room. “Any damage outside?”

  “Nothing.”

  “When you first came in, did you use the master key?”

  “Yup. I picked it up at the Inn office. It works on all the cottages.”

  “So the place was locked?”

  “Tight as a gnat’s ass.”

  They went outside. The greenery of gently rolling hills around the lake looked like the Garden of Eden after what they’d seen inside. Of course, Mick thought, there was a snake in every garden.

  He circled the cottage with his foreman on his heels. From the shingled siding, to the high small windows, everything seemed perfectly normal from the outside. They pushed past a grove of evergreens to the edge of the lake and stopped. With the small dock behind them, Mick stared at the place. Even from this angle, all anyone could see was the cracked sliding glass door.

  “Let me see those pictures again.”

  Mick peered at the date imprinted underneath. April. Unlike the rest of the cottages, this one had been emptied of furniture when he and Chuck had gone through the places with the owner. It was easy to see the intact walls, the new carpeting in the bedroom. Evans had replaced the old flooring after the police were finished.

  Mick’s head was beginning to pound as they started back toward the cottage. Two months ago, when he had been preparing the estimate, he’d been thinking about two things: Heather’s arrival from California and his company.

  This type of job was perfect for Stone Builders. Spread over two years, the entire renovation was very manageable for a company his size. The owner wanted the cottages done first; the work on the main building, with its more serious structural repairs in addition to the cosmetic work, done during two off-season periods. They’d build a new boathouse and renovate the docks next summer. The project offered large bonuses for every month that they could finish ahead of schedule. It was ideal.

  Amid all the details and arrangements that Mick and his people had gone through, he’d put aside something that had seemed very strange to him on his initial tour of the place.

  This cottage, Serengeti, had been unavailable to the owner for months after Marilyn’s murder. Mick had been told that Stonybrook’s police had removed mountains of personal items belonging to the dead woman. Then, after the cottage had been turned back to the Inn, some minor renovations had been done. But despite the expense, Serengeti had not been rented. Why?

  “You say something, boss?”

  “Talking to myself.”

  “I oughta go check on the crew. See you in a bit.”

  Mick nodded absently and found himself standing by the front door of the cottage again. Mountains of personal items taken by the police. He recalled what Sheila had mentioned when she was cutting his hair. Certain people Marilyn entertained at the Inn.

  How much of this had been presented at Ted’s trial, he wondered, suddenly wishing he’d paid closer attention to the news reports.

  A few minutes later, Mick still wasn’t happy with himself when Chief Weir arrived on the scene alone.

  ~~~~

  “Did you and your brother really find them dead here?” Heather’s voice echoed though the empty house.

  Léa looked at the full garbage bag she’d brought downstairs. Leaving it by the front door, she trudged reluctantly toward the kitchen.

  She had yet to step in that room.

  About an hour ago, the two of them and Max had come over to the house. Léa had decided to bag and haul some of the trash from the upstairs while Heather and Max browsed around on their own.

  Léa stopped at the kitchen door. The instant flash of memory was painful, but she fought off the panic and the tears.

  “Yes. We stood right where we’re standing now. My father was at the kitchen table, and my mother…on the floor.” She pointed and looked away.

  The old linoleum flooring was a different ugly gray than the marbleized one she remembered from her childhood. All the kitchen cabinets were painted in a horrible shade of yellow that she realized might have started out as white some time during the years she’d been away. But a glance around the room showed that everything else seemed so much the same. The oven, the fridge, the wooden shelf on the opposite wall.

  Their mother always kept at least a dozen flower pots of African violets on that shelf. Léa could still remember standing on a kitchen chair, still recall the smell of the plants and the soil. A pyramid of empty beer cans was the decoration now.

  Léa’s gaze was drawn to the cheap metal table and the bent and broken folding chairs. They were exactly where the Hardys used to have their breakfast table and chairs.

  “Did you come back here at all after that day?”

  She shook her head. The words were slow to come. “No. Not…not once.”

  Heather turned her blue eyes on Léa’s face. “You look kinda pale. Are you sure you are not pushing yourself too much?”

  The back of her throat burned with the
surge of emotions. “I’m fine.” When the teenager’s hand gently slipped into hers, the tears escaped.

  “I am sorry, I shouldn’t have…I…” Heather cast around for words. “This is the last thing you need, somebody asking you stuff like this.”

  “No. It’s okay. I want you to ask.” Léa smiled weakly and stabbed away at the tears. “I’ve been putting off facing this room. But now, with you here, maybe I can deal with it. Maybe I can even get a little closer to figuring out who I was, and what I’ve become now. It’s okay, Heather. It’s time to let go of this.”

  Let go of this. So easy to say. Léa went to the front room and picked up some empty trash bags, some paper towels and a spray cleaner. How do you let go of something that has haunted you year in and year out for most of your life? How do you let go of such a loss?

  She started back for the kitchen, realizing that she had never even thought about who had cleaned up after her parents had been taken away. She had no idea who had washed the blood from the floor. She had no idea who had closed her mother’s eyes.

  Heather and Max had already moved into the kitchen, but Léa hesitated again in the doorway.

  She’d come back to Stonybrook with one thing on her mind. To be done with this house. To use it to help Ted. And yet she was not done with it herself. All the hurt inflicted here—all the pain endured here—had never been resolved. It lay untended, open like a deep gash, for all these years. Even now.

  Heather came over and took one of the bags and held it open. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I am. I’m ready.” Léa took the first steps in and started by clearing the shelf of its empty beer cans.

  Clean the wound.

  “Go ahead. Ask away,” she said. Heather’s expression showed her reluctance.

  “People say that every family has a skeleton in their closet. Ours happens to have lots of garbage!” Léa dropped the last can in the bag with a flourish. “Now, if only the people of Stonybrook would believe how innocent we really are.”

  “What is it about the Hardys and this town?” Heather leaned back against a cabinet, watching Léa. “I remember hearing that Marilyn and Ted eloped and never had a real wedding here. I know they lived twenty minutes away and that she only moved back after they were separated. I mean even before…well, Marilyn and the girls were murdered, there were always whispers of stuff whenever your family came up in conversation. More than what happened to your parents, I mean.”

  “There is some serious history there.” No Band-Aid can cover a twelve inch gash. Léa knew she’d have to dig deep before every piece of the dirt would be out of this wound. “I guess you could say people were even talking about the Greenwoods—that was my mother’s family—before they got going on the Hardys.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, my great grandfather Greenwood owned and ran the pharmacy in town back in the thirties, forties, and fifties.”

  “The same one that Andrew Rice runs now?”

  “The very same.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “I thought it was when I was young.” Léa sprayed a shelf and started wiping it. The fact that they had once been respectable—that her family had belonged—had lifted Léa’s spirits many times as a child.

  “What did the Greenwoods do wrong?”

  “Back in the spring of 1947 the Greenwoods’ only child, a girl who was sixteen but already very beautiful, came home from a finishing school in Connecticut pregnant.”

  “What’s so shocking about that?”

  “We’re talking 1947. Remember the time and the town. And she would never admit who the child’s father was.” There had been many times in Léa’s life when she had wanted to blame all their troubles—all their bad luck and struggling through the interim years—on Liz Greenwood’s mystery man. If he had shouldered his responsibility, if he had been there for her, perhaps if he had known. Léa straightened up from cleaning the shelf and decided that she liked this last explanation the best. It was the easiest to accept and forgive. He must not have known.

  “So this was your grandmother?”

  “Yes.” Léa looked over her shoulder and found Heather cleaning off the top shelves of two of the cabinets. “You don’t have to do that.”

  Heather waved her off. “Did she keep the baby?”

  “Of course. My mother, Lynn Greenwood, was born some four months later.”

  “That hardly seems juicy enough to keep harping on after all this time.”

  “I agree. But the baby wasn’t even six months old when her mother left her baby behind and ran away.”

  “She left her baby?” Heather looked across the room at Léa.

  “My guess is that she must have been feeling some pressure in this house. And in town, too. At any rate, she was gone.” Like everything else in her past, Léa had questioned this, too. Had her mother been better off raised by the grandparents? If the unwed mother had stuck around, would she have been capable of improving her daughter’s life at all? These were answers Léa would never have. And she knew it was time she stopped asking.

  “Did she ever come back?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But the story was that four or five years later…I am not exactly sure now, but what I was told was that she was killed in a car accident on the West Coast.”

  “That’s so sad. So your mother never knew her parents?”

  Léa shook her head. “My great grandparents raised my mother. But by then, they were both pretty old. I guess they were very suspicious and very, very protective of her.”

  And they were hurt. And they were suffering. And they had lost their only child. She had never even thought of what that could be like to lose a child until she saw how such a tragedy had affected Ted. Léa understood it clearly now. She dared herself to open the fridge door and peer inside. She was relieved to find it empty.

  “‘Once burned, twice shy,’ my grandmother says,” Heather replied, going back to work on the cabinet shelves.

  “I think that’s right.”

  “When did your dad come into the picture?”

  Léa had to fight a new surge of emotions at the mention of him. She had to remind herself that he had been kind once. He had been loving. If she went back enough years, she could remember a time when he’d treated her mother right. “John Hardy came to Stonybrook back in the early sixties to run the mill. He was good looking and in his late thirties when he met my mother. He was an old bachelor.”

  “Late thirties makes him an old bachelor? I can’t wait to tell my dad that.”

  Léa smiled. “Your dad is anything but old. But my father had lived hard. There is a huge difference in the way people age when they abuse their bodies.” And his hard living had not been solely a matter of choice, either. There were many things that Léa had learned about John Hardy after going to live with Aunt Janice. There had been a tough upbringing there, too.

  “Drinking?”

  “Yes.”

  Heather nodded knowingly.

  Léa wasn’t as lucky with the oven as the fridge. She pulled out a couple of old frying pans. The top one had the remains of some prehistoric dinner in it and the other was missing its handle. She didn’t look too closely at them before dumping the whole thing into the trash bag. This was the same way she had to deal with the baggage of her father’s history. He was gone. Dead! She had to let go of the blame and the guilt and tie the knot on the bag.

  “How old was your mom when they met?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “That is very warped. He was old enough to be her father.”

  Léa nodded. Deciding to let go made it much easier on her conscience. She could talk about them now. “After being isolated and watched for most of her life, I believe she was desperate.”

  Heather jumped off the chair and moved it to another pair of cabinets. “At least, I hope he was nice to her in the beginning.”

  “I believe my mother walked into that marriage with her eyes wide open.” Léa searche
d for the right way to explain this. “It all had to do with choices. As far as my mother knew, her only two options were staying home and having her grandparents keep watch on her around the clock, or marry John Hardy. Apparently, he was about the only guy who ever showed any interest.”

  “Because he was an out-of-towner.”

  “I guess that may have been part of it.”

  “So she married him.”

  Léa nodded. “But as bad luck would have it, my great-grandmother got sick soon afterward, and they all ended up living in this house, where my mother could care for everybody. And now she had three sets of eyes watching her day and night.”

  “That’s horrible. When were you and Ted born? I mean, was everybody still living here then?”

  “I was just a baby when my great-grandfather died. After that, my great-grandmother moved to a nursing home for a couple of years before passing away. I don’t remember too much about her.” And this was so much like a Hardy and Greenwood tradition. Lynn Hardy losing people she loved. Her husband finding himself without a job soon after. The downward spiral of bad luck. Her children not old enough to defend or help her.

  “And then what happened?”

  “Ted and I grew up in this house. My father worked at the mill until it was shut down and everyone got laid off. My mother always stayed home, and we went to school like all the other kids around here.”

  Léa twisted a tie around the first full garbage bag and hauled it to the back door.

  “When you were a kid, did you know my dad?”

  “Of course.” She more than knew Mick Conklin. She couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  “Okay, so tell me. What was he like?”

  “Who?” Léa said, pretending she didn’t know who they were talking about.

  “My father!”

  “Oh. He was older…seven years older. I watched him from next-door while I was growing up. But to answer your question, he was very good looking, and he was very popular with girls. I think your grandparents had their hands full from the time he was about twelve years old.”