Tar Heart (A New Hampshire Mystery Book 3)

by Mira Gibson

  TAR HEART

  Mira Gibson

  ALSO BY MIRA GIBSON:

  The New Hampshire Mysteries

  DADDY SODA

  ROCK SPIDER

  TAR HEART

  The Kensington Killers

  COLD DARK FEAR (Prequel to The Kensington Killers Series)

  LUNATIC

  CRANK

  MANIAC

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  More Books by Mira Gibson

  Author Biography

  Prologue

  It was freezing, the moonless night deceivingly still except for the stiff wind.

  Vacantly, Rose stared at the lake shrouded in darkness, its icy surface, the snowdrift spilling out from the shore, as dread ratcheted up her spine, her heart pumping madly.

  As the frigid wind bit into her, she agonized over calling her husband and leaving another voice message. She was gripping her cell like a wishing stone, she realized, when the wind changed course, causing her hair to whip into her eyes.

  He hadn't picked up when she’d tried his cell. Dialing his office line had rendered the same result and unnerved, Rose had left a brief, frantic voice message, keeping her point cryptic while urgently demanding he get back to her.

  How much time had gone by between her first and second messages? Had minutes elapsed or hours? Anxiety was skewing her sense of time. Her mind was racing like a hamster on a wheel, spinning faulty logic, analyzing their curt exchanges in a favorable light, though she knew she was lying to herself—the hints Benjamin had dropped, the vague answers she'd offered to quell the issue, appease her husband, and put the whole matter to bed, amounted to a foregone conclusion.

  He knew.

  The wind picked up, blowing in from the lake and kicking up snow—needles whipping her face, dampening her light-auburn hair. Folding her arms, Rose hunched her shoulders. She should've thrown her coat on. A thin sweater and jeans weren't enough to keep warm on a wintery New Hampshire night.

  The floodlights over the porch cast just enough light to illuminate the backyard, the natural snow banks, the footprints and fist marks her son had left in his quest to make snowmen and angels. On several occasions he had peed along the shore, intrigued as any four-year old that the hot stream could melt the snow crust.

  He was kneeling where the drift spilled onto the frozen shore. He scooped snow into a powdery ball then chucked it into the wind. Almost before leaving his mittens, the snowball came apart, flurries raining over him. He cackled uproariously and looked at his mother, certain she would find it hilarious.

  But she was somewhere else entirely, cradling her phone to her ear, her shoulders rounded in a secretive hunch, as she paced. Her tone, ordinarily melodic and light, sounded guttural, an edge of panic cloying up her throat with every word.

  “Benjamin, please,” she insisted, her cell was ice against her cheek. “If you don't get back to me...” She had nothing to threaten. She didn’t even have a convincing explanation for her colossal mistake, one that had been years in the making. “Please, don't do this. Call me.”

  After hanging up, she switched the cell-setting from vibrate to ring, turned the volume up as loud as it would go, then clutched it worrisomely beneath her chin as if willing the device to ring, only vaguely aware Tucker was running in circles along the shore.

  This life meant everything to her. She wouldn’t let it crumble. She refused.

  Decisively, she dialed his office line and left yet another rushed, cryptic voice message, nervously fiddling with her necklace, its pendant—a relic of the life she'd traded for this one—where it rested against her collarbone.

  Roughly the size of a quarter, the heart-shaped pendant adorned with a jagged opal was one of her sister's finest. Holly had crafted it from her own design, working late into the night at her studio, determined to make her jewelry dream a reality even at the expense of her finances.

  Holly ran hot and cold with her, always had and always would. For twins, they rarely saw eye to eye. Each had a tendency to be easily sucked into arguments, going for the other's sore spots, kicking one another when they were down, perpetually raw and on guard whenever the other was near. But there had been periods of calm before each storm. And it had been during one of those rare occasions that Holly had given her the necklace.

  Where had it all gone wrong?

  And why was she now tumbling down the same pike with Benjamin?

  Secrets, she thought, tucking her cell into the back pocket of her jeans. Rose had her secrets. It was who she was. She liked them. She needed to lead that second life. The one her husband didn’t know about, the one that breathed thrill into her bones with each passing day. Except now he knew. She sensed it. And the house of cards she'd built on well-crafted lies and sheer audacity would soon come fluttering down.

  She would do anything to prevent its fall.

  With shaking hands, she pulled up Holly's contact, tapping quickly against the LCD screen, though her staccato breath obscured it with white plumes of condensation, and sent the call through.

  When she glanced up, ringtone blaring in her ear, she saw Tucker padding out onto the ice—ice she knew wasn’t safe—and bolted after him, sprinting as fast as she could, her boots punching hard against powdery snow until she reached the icy shore.

  “Tucker!”

  He turned, doe-eyed and oblivious to the danger he had placed himself in, a big smile on his face.

  “Rose?” Holly's voice came strained through the earpiece. “Did something happen? Is Tucker okay?”

  She didn't respond as she waded cautiously onto the ice, her son watching her and at times clapping the snow off his mittens with no awareness the ice was thin enough to crack.

  He was ten yards away, standing where freezing lake water had seeped up onto the ice.

  “Tucker, honey, come here,” she said, reaching out for him to take hold of her hand though he was yards away, a mere shadow in darkness.

  Holly kept saying her name over and over again impatiently, but Rose was fully focused on her son, praying the ice would hold, as he shuffled playfully towards her.

  It wasn’t until she had Tucker by the arm, a breath of relief rushing out of her, that she returned the cell to her ear.

  “I can't get a hold of Benjamin,” she said urgently, Tucker skipping and bounding, though tethered in her grasp as she ushered him towards the shore. “I'm afraid I fucked everything up.”

  Holly sighed into the receiver, knowing her sister far too well to waste time trying to calm her down. Rose didn't panic except irrationally, and there was often no getting through to her. If Rose believed she'd done something to jeopardize a relationship, then Holly trusted she surely had. She'd done similar to Holly so many times it had ultimately resulted in their estrangement.

  “What do you expect me to do?” she aske
d, at a loss. “It’s not like I talk to him. He probably hates me. I thought you did too, for that matter.”

  “I don't hate you,” she murmured distractedly as she helped Tucker through the sliding glass door that connected the porch to the living room.

  Confrontational, she asked, “What did you do?” her tone stripped of its prior compassion.

  “I can't get into it.”

  “He'll come home eventually, won't he? You can talk to him then.”

  “He hasn't been home in weeks,” she said in a brittle tone, stripping Tucker out of his winter coat and snow pants, and getting him situated with his Thomas the Tank Engine toys. “I tried his office. I tried the resort. I tried his cell. There are no more numbers to try.”

  Again Holly sighed and when her voice came through it held an edge of resignation mixed with defeat.

  “Are you asking me to come over?”

  Debating, Rose made her quick way to the sliding glass door, which she'd left ajar and just as she was about to close it, she remembered Tucker’s shovel and pail in the yard.

  “I don't know,” she said, suddenly indecisive now that she had Holly in her ear. She trekked towards the pail, but didn't pick it up when she reached it. “I hate that we don't talk.”

  Holly let out a sardonic laugh, which relaxed into a carefully measured breath, and Rose expected the usual lecture over whose fault that was. “What are you really worried about, Rose? The police knocking on your door?”

  She snapped, “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Why do you think? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “I'm concerned I'm losing my husband.”

  “I thought you had gotten it together,” she said as though pained her twin was heading down a long, familiar, yet sordid road she should've outgrown by now. “You have a son, for Christ's sake.”

  Rose gazed out across the lake, scanning the darkness as if doing so would free her from every mistake she’d ever made. “I shouldn't have called you.”

  “I can't do this with you anymore. I can't go months without hearing from you then get a call in the middle of the night when you're freaking out. I can't.”

  Holly continued rattling off the countless ways her twin had disappointed her over the years, which mostly centered on the sad fact that their problems had prevented her from seeing Tucker, but Rose was suddenly distracted. The distinct sound of tires crunching over compacted snow followed by a brief flare of headlights blazing across the yard sent her heart punching up her throat. A vehicle had pulled into the driveway.

  “Holly,” she said, interrupting her sister's tirade. “I think he's here. He just pulled up. I have to go.”

  As Rose lowered her cell, Holly insisted she not hang up, but she didn’t have a choice. She killed the call and started through the snow, thoughts tangling over what to say to him, how she might convince Benjamin to stay with her, though every option seemed trite if not manipulative.

  Expecting her husband to come through the front door, she rounded the porch, snow crunching under her boots and icy wind stinging her cheeks, but before she could pad up the steps she caught sight of a figure stalking around the side of her house.

  Whoever they were, they were wearing a black ski mask.

  “Who are you?” she asked, treading cautiously, terror riding high. When she added, “Get out of here,” her voice was a frayed thread.

  “I thought we had an understanding,” said the masked figure, cocking the gun she hadn’t realized was in their hand.

  Her eyes snapped up and she instantly knew who it was and why they were here.

  Some secrets were meant to stay buried.

  “Don't do this,” she ordered, the weakness of her tone betraying her conviction. “The police are on their way.”

  “I doubt that.”

  The response was so cool that her mind felt starkly paralyzed.

  Without thought, Rose took off running. Punching her boots hard into the snow and pumping her arms, she dashed with little concern she was rushing headlong towards the ice. When she reached the lake, charging hard across its frozen surface, she nearly slipped, but righted her balance, and pressed onward.

  Whimpering and angling over her shoulder to see if they would go through with it, she felt the ice shift under her boots and in the next instant a deafening shot rang out.

  She didn't understand she'd been hit until she slammed onto the ice, skidding and gasping and praying this wouldn't be the end.

  She slid to a stop, cheek pressed to wet ice and eyes locked on the masked figure standing in shadow on the yard.

  Beneath her the thin sheet of ice gave way and she plummeted into the freezing depths.

  Her last thought was of her son and the secret she had died for.

  Chapter One

  Holly Danes stood under the portico and pounded on the front door. She should’ve worn gloves. A hat would’ve been a nice touch. The tips of her ears felt numb. Before making the drive, she had shoved her revolver—a Smith & Wesson J-Frame Centerfire, as snubbed-nosed as a bulldog—down the back of her jeans. No bigger than her palm, the compact metal bastard had absorbed the freezing temperature, and because of it an icy chill was radiating from where it rested against the small of her back, contributing to the misery of this ordeal.

  Why the hell wasn’t Rose coming to the door?

  She glanced over her shoulder, scanning the dark driveway for Benjamin’s car as if she could’ve possibly missed it when she had started up the walkway. If he’d returned like Rose had mentioned when she cut their call short, it might explain why her sister wasn’t answering the door. But his vehicle wasn’t in the driveway, only Rose’s sleek BMW cloaked in eight inches of fresh snow.

  Her knuckles were chapped where they rapped again and again against the steel surface of the door, unsuspecting in its brick-red hue. By the looks of it, you’d never guess the three-story house was a fortress, the sum total of each barrier—entrance door and rear fortified with state-of-the-art locks, the windows wired with alarms as well as the cellar’s trap door round back—all masquerading as a stately Colonial home so the opposite of her own that she’d felt like a trespasser even when invited inside. Not that she had set foot in her sister’s home recently. It had been two years to the day, in fact.

  The fixture overhead dimly illuminated the window on the door, its tungsten glow causing a glare where frost had formed, but she could tell the living room lights were on. The foyer wasn’t that deep.

  Again she pounded on the door, this time with the heel of her hand to spare her frozen fingers, and called her sister’s name. She was met with silence.

  Shifting her weight, she eased back a step, mindful the landing was slick with slush over thin patches of black ice, and studied the door as if a way to break in would jump out at her.

  That’s what would be required, right? What Rose’s distressed tone had implied? The subtext of her staccato panic, the grand leap from desperately pleading for help to abandoning the request entirely had filled Holly with grim intuition.

  Estrangement hadn’t broken their connection.

  Her twin was in trouble.

  Center Harbor was a small town and last she’d heard, Benjamin had just taken over the accounting at his parents’ resort on Squam Lake. He had been sleeping there. Making excuses for his absence, he’d explained the disarray of the Wythe Resort’s bookkeeping, the importance of his new position, the money it would afford Rose and the baby.

  Standing under the portico, sensing Rose was near but unable to let her in, pitched the memory of their last encounter—the one that had ended their relationship—into the forefront of her mind.

  Benjamin was nothing if not consistent.

  He liked avoiding his family.

  Holly had sat on the living room couch listening to her sister rage at her husband over the phone in the next room, his home office. Rose’s footfall had indicated pacing—angry pattering punctuated with a stomp, turning on her heel to stampede
in a new direction. She’d probably had the receiver clamped between her cheek and shoulder, the telephone in her fist, the cord restricting her, maybe wrapping her legs, instigating her frustration, not that Holly had seen.

  Her particular brand of outrage, the shrill tone and scattered arguments, which had ranged from reasonable to hysterical—This family will fall apart if you’re not here, and What if Tucker chokes on a grape? I don’t know the Heimlich maneuver!—had tipped Holly off.

  It had taken her less than a minute to locate the evidence of her suspicion as to why Rose sounded like a jittering maniac. Hunting for the television remote controls, finding an old one in the coffee table drawer, popping the battery compartment open—Rose’s most treasured hiding spot—Holly had been confronted with the heart-sinking fact that her sister had started up again, as she stared at the 8-ball, plastic packed to the gills with cocaine. The discovery had stunned her, but the revelation that followed had been far worse.

  Rose was still breast-feeding.

  “Give me that,” she’d demanded, snatching the plastic bag, her eyes firing enraged, though the faintest hint of remorse shined through. Holly hadn’t even heard her sneak back in.

  “What about your son?” she’d shot back.

  Insisting, “This is old,” Rose had tucked the 8-ball into her pocket and tried to stare her sister down, but to Holly she’d only looked indignant.

  Holly couldn’t remember what she said next, only that she’d begun screaming accusations and Rose hadn’t held back either. When words had failed—her twin combating her every point—Holly lunged, fingernails clawing at her sister’s jeans, desperate to take the drugs as if doing so would mean Rose wasn’t a junkie, didn’t have countless stashes hidden throughout the house, wouldn’t slip into the same secretive darkness that Holly had already pulled her out of.

  Rose had slapped her so hard across the face that it rattled her brain, her tongue catching between her teeth. In an instant, her mouth had filled with blood, which trickled out the corner of her mouth as she stared in wide-eyed horror at the woman whose face she shared. In that moment, Rose had looked like a complete stranger, her eyes fixated on the 8-ball resting on the floor between them.