The Club (Anna Denning Mystery Book 4)

by Karin Kaufman

  Contents

  Title

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Thank You

  Other Books

  Copyright

  The Club

  Karin Kaufman

  An Anna Denning Mystery

  1

  In the dim, frost-black world of our nightmares, we recognize evil. It differs from the shadows that visit our everyday dreams. And so Melinda Maxwell, asleep in the moonless hours before dawn, knew the thing that hovered by her bed, that slowly lowered its face toward hers. It had slipped the boundaries of her subconscious and taken shape.

  She grunted and flung out a hand. Her eyes opened and she struggled to focus. But the thing—was it a man?—had disappeared, falling back into the darkness behind her bed. She shrieked and threw off her covers.

  Bounding from her bed, she ran for the hall, for the light coming from under her father’s bedroom door.

  “Dad!” She hit his door with her fist and spun back to face the man, thrusting out her arms.

  He hadn’t followed. By some miracle he hadn’t followed. With her eyes locked on the doorway to her bedroom, she took hold of the doorknob.

  “Dad,” she breathed. She turned the knob. “Dad, wake up.”

  She backed into his room, feeling along the wall to her right for the light switch. But evil isn’t bound by plaster and wood—Melinda knew that. Her father had taught her. A groan escaped her lips. She hit the light switch and wheeled sharply to face the thing, striking her head on the wall behind her. “God.” She clutched the back of her head and stared into the now-lit room.

  “Dad?”

  Her father’s bed looked exactly as it had at eleven o’clock, when she had decided she’d waited long enough for him to return and was going to get some sleep. Even the box of file folders near the footboard was still there. Her eyes rose to the digital clock on his nightstand. Four o’clock in the morning.

  Still trembling, Melinda shot across the hall and flicked on the bathroom switch. Light spilled into the hallway. She headed into the dining room, kitchen, and living room, turning on lights as she went. Everywhere there was a switch, everywhere there was a lamp, her hands made light.

  “He’s not real,” she said aloud. “It was another dream. There’s no one here.” She strode back down the hall and turned on her bedroom light. The only thing out of place was her pillow. It lay on the floor where she had kicked or tossed it in her race to get out. “It was a stupid dream, that’s all.”

  She walked back to her father’s room and sat down on his bed. Four o’clock in the morning and he wasn’t home. “I could have used you, Dad. Just now, you know?”

  Why had he bothered to contact her? They were strangers living separate lives, she in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and he in Elk Park, Colorado. He still living in the house she had gladly left eleven years ago. Then suddenly he sent the invitation. My dear daughter, we need to talk. It’s a matter of urgency. He had summoned her like an attorney requesting a meeting with a client.

  In four days, he’d hardly said a word. He had shown her family papers and books and souvenirs from Scotland, and twice he had seemed on the verge of saying something important, but both times he had stopped himself and said, “But later. We’ll talk later.”

  Well, she wasn’t going to hang around much longer. Four days of pizza and warm ale for dinner—and now the nightmares, three nights in a row, each night worse than the last. Enough.

  She rose from the bed, noting with satisfaction that strength had returned to her muscles. It was good to be young. You could take anything. “Of course you’re not here, Dad,” she said, glancing about the room. “You weren’t then and you aren’t now.” She really did have to stop talking to herself. What was the point?

  An attaché case, monogrammed “H.M.”—Henry Maxwell—sat on one end of the small table her father used as a desk. She had tried to open it last night, after her father had left for “the club,” as he called it, but the locks on either side of the handle wouldn’t budge. In the mood she was in, that made the attaché a good place to start. Time to open the thing.

  Melinda headed into the kitchen, fished two kebab skewers from a drawer, returned to her father’s bedroom, and set about picking the attaché’s locks. If she scratched the lock faces, it would give her away. Her father would know what she’d been up to. “I don’t care, Dad. If you won’t talk, this is what you get.” A minute later, having twisted and turned the skewers in every conceivable way, Melinda took them back to the kitchen and exchanged them for a broad, sharp knife.

  What did he keep in that case? she wondered. Another laptop? The attaché itself was a throwback—some old, hard-shell thing—but for a fifty-two-year-old man her father was pretty computer savvy. Laptop or not, there was something in there he didn’t want her to see. The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to know what he was hiding in that case.

  Back in the bedroom, she inserted the knife where the sides of the attaché met, slid it under one lock, and pulled it forward. Nothing. “You’re always in here, Dad. A whole house to yourself but you’re always in your bedroom. If you’re not at work, you’re at that blasted club or in your bedroom. Those three places are your whole world. Remember way back when I was a kid? When I had grandparents and aunts and uncles? Before you became a monster and drove everyone away?”

  Setting the attaché on the floor, she held it in place with her foot and again inserted the knife, jamming it to the hilt. She yanked and felt something give. She yanked again and the lock snapped. She repeated the process on the other lock until it too had snapped, then put the attaché on her father’s bed.

  “I’m sorry it’s come to this. Me breaking into your things.” Melinda opened the attaché.

  2

  “I’m Melinda Maxwell,” the woman called out. “Your friend Liz gave me your name.”

  Anna Denning slowly opened her front door. She wasn’t used to greeting strangers at seven o’clock in the morning, but mention of her friend Liz’s name acted as a secret word of sorts, an assurance that she and the stranger had some connection that would soon be discovered.

  “I’m sorry to bother you so early.”

  “Melinda Maxwell, you said?”

  “Yes, I met Liz Halvorsen at the town office yesterday. Late thirties maybe, dark brown hair, runs the website ElkNews.com, and—”

  “That’s okay, I believe you.” Anna smiled and stepped back from the door, ushering Melinda inside. “I haven’t got long, I’m afraid. I have a meeting with the Elk Park Police in forty-five minutes.”

  “Oh?” Melinda’s hand rose to her scarf.

  “Nothing serious. I’m working with them on a case.” Anna pushed shut the door then smiled again, but Melinda’s expression remained fixed.

  “Are you still a genealogist?”

  “Yes.” Anna looked to her dog, a German shepherd mix who was now sitting on the rectangle of carpet by the front door, fascinated by the early morning visitor. “That’s Jackson, and he’s a sweetheart.”

  “He looks like it.”

  “Let’s go into the kitchen,” Anna said, gesturing with her head. “A whole twelve feet away.”

  “I love open floor plans. My dad’s house is old, so it’s all closed off. Lots of small, stuffy rooms.”

  “Most old houses are like th
at.” Melinda was pink-faced from the cold wind, Anna noticed, but the skin below her eyes bore a hint of green-black, the sort of color that comes from not sleeping. “How about some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have a seat.” Anna motioned toward a small table near the kitchen island, took down a bag of coffee from a cabinet, and spooned grounds into a filter. “I’ll fix, you talk.” She glanced back at Melinda, hoping to see a small smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “Melinda?”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Melinda stirred herself, shaking her head, shifting in her seat. “I can’t believe it. It’s so awful. But it’s hard to condense, you know? I can’t make sense of it or tell you about it in a few words.”

  Anna pulled two mugs from another cabinet and set them on the table. “There’s no need. We can meet later this morning at the Buffalo Café. In fact, Liz will be there.”

  Melinda brightened. “The café’s still here? On Summit Avenue?”

  Anna nodded. “For more than twenty years.”

  “Cody the stuffed buffalo?”

  “Still outside the door.”

  “And Grace Bell?”

  “Still runs it.”

  “She must be in her sixties now.”

  “Mid-sixties, I think. I’ve never gotten an exact read on her age.”

  “I remember she’d just lost her husband when my family moved here. Did she ever remarry?”

  “No, she never did.”

  The Buffalo’s, and Grace’s, continued existence seemed to relax Melinda. She leaned back in her chair and turned her head to the coffee maker. “That smells delicious. I didn’t realize how much I needed a cup.”

  “You sound like you haven’t been in Elk Park for some time.”

  “Eleven years.”

  “What brought you back?”

  “My dad. He still lives here.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “We’re originally from Wyoming.”

  “So am I. Cheyenne.”

  Melinda raked the fingers of both hands through her straight blonde hair. “I had a nightmare early this morning. My third nightmare since I got here, actually, and it was a whopper this time.”

  “Was it?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s barely light out and here I am hopping from one subject to another.” Melinda smiled at last, but it was an artificial smile, Anna thought. One meant to reassure her that her visitor wasn’t as disoriented as she sounded.

  “You do look tired. I know how that is.” Anna poured coffee into the mugs, set the carafe back in its place, then took a seat at the table. Melinda stared at her mug, her hands playing anxiously with her scarf. What ailed this woman was more than nightmares and the loss of a few nights’ sleep. Showing up at a stranger’s house in the dark of an early January morning was a mark of desperation.

  Melinda slipped her arms out of her coat and sipped at her coffee, and through those simple, ordinary actions she seemed to gain resolve. “There are things I need to find out about my family background.”

  “That’s what I do.”

  “I haven’t seen my grandparents or aunts and uncles for eleven years. I’m not sure where they’re living now.”

  “I can probably help you with that.”

  “Four days ago I met my dad for the first time in eleven years.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “We’re not close. We haven’t been since we left Wyoming, and I’m living in Iowa now. Part of me doesn’t want to know anything about him. But my grandparents, aunts, and uncles—I’d like to see them again and find out more about their lives. I barely remember them. My dad wrote me and told me to come visit him, and I had this crazy idea that he was finally going to tell me all about my missing family, but that hasn’t happened.”

  “You want to know your ancestry.”

  “I know next to nothing about it, though I can give you the basics on my parents and grandparents—names and birth dates, and with some of them the places they were born.”

  “In most cases that’s all I need.”

  “I want to know about my family medically, too. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Their medical histories, sure.” Anna glanced at her wristwatch.

  “I’m keeping you.”

  “It’s that appointment. Can you meet me at the Buffalo about nine o’clock?” Anna stood and took her mug to the sink.

  “Absolutely.” Melinda gulped her coffee, set the mug on the table, then put on her coat and started for the front door. “My dad has this old attaché case he keeps in his bedroom. I got tired of waiting to hear why he called me back to Colorado, so I opened it.”

  “Did it answer any questions?”

  “Mostly it was full of souvenirs from his trips to Scotland.”

  “Are you Scottish?”

  Melinda shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s always loved Scotland. You know how when you’re a kid you don’t care about your background?”

  Anna held the front door open, waiting for Melinda to leave so she could put on her old black fleece jacket, hop into her aging Jimmy, and white-knuckle it on the icy roads to downtown Elk Park. “Everyone’s like that, I think. I was.”

  “I care now.” Melinda at last stepped over the threshold. “It wasn’t just souvenirs in the attaché.”

  As hurried as she was, Anna couldn’t leave it at that. The question begged to be asked. “What else was in there?”

  “A finger.”

  Anna stared.

  “It has to be a fake,” Melinda said fiercely. “It’s stuffed or rubber or something. But what a sick thing to keep in an attaché case, am I right? I feel like I don’t belong to this man. Like I was stolen at birth. And I feel this”—she made fists with her hands, emphasizing the seriousness of her case—“this need to find out about him, about my family.”

  “I’ll help however I can. My fees are on my website, and—”

  “I can pay you, no problem. Let me move my car so you can get on your way.”

  With that Melinda hurried to her white SUV, which she had parked on Anna’s driveway, and Anna shut the door. “What do you think, Jackson?” Her dog sat at her feet, his tail wagging vigorously. “Two jobs today. That’s a good thing. Probably.”

  Anna slipped quickly into her fleece jacket, loaded Jackson into his bed in the backseat of the Jimmy, and hit the remote clipped to the car’s visor. She half expected to see a white SUV still on the driveway, but Melinda had driven off.

  The neighborhood streets were snow-packed, but the cold—minus fourteen degrees—added grip to the snow and made the roads passable. It was the pavement downtown, ice under a layer of powdery snow, that worried Anna.

  Fifteen minutes later, twice as long as the drive usually took her, she was on Summit Avenue, Elk Park’s main street, heading for Palmer Street and the Municipal Building. She had a 7:45 meeting with Detective Lonnie Schaeffer, a busy man who liked to schedule his day in fifteen-minute segments. With this, her third job for the Elk Park PD since last November, Schaeffer had arranged for her to be hired as a consultant, an official status that she hoped promised future work with the department.

  Last year she had located the seemingly unreachable relatives of two people, the first a man found dead in his cabin in the Elk Valley, the second a woman who had removed herself from her past so completely that, when she died, no one in the police department could find her family. In the end, Anna found her sister and the woman was able to receive a proper burial.

  Anna swung onto Palmer Street and pulled into a spot in the Municipal Building’s parking lot. The building housed Elk Park’s town office, the town council’s meeting room, and, on the fourth floor, the police department. It was the same in many small towns—one central building as a governmental office catch-all. But unlike other small towns, Elk Park sat at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, and Detective Lonnie Schaeffer had a view of the Continental Divide from his desk.

  Schaeffer was waiting when she strode into his
office, ready to hand her a black mug of steaming coffee. He had put on a few more pounds since last she’d seen him. The culprits in his weight gain, Anna suspected, were long hours and lousy food—not good for a man in his fifties.

  “Saw you get out of your car,” he said, nodding at the window overlooking the parking lot.

  “Thank you,” Anna said, taking the mug. “I didn’t get enough at home.”

  “Shall we?” Schaeffer pointed at a wooden chair in front of his desk.

  Anna had met the detective in the most intimate of circumstances—he being the man tasked with telling her that her husband, Sean, had died in a car accident—and they had become friends in the three years since that horrible moment. But on the job he was all business. He rarely cracked a smile. That was only right, Anna knew, but he had seen her at her worst, and now, when they met, she had to play the part of a calm grownup, a businesslike person, and she always sensed that he was seeing right through her.

  “This one’s a little different, Anna. This is a murder victim.” Schaeffer opened a folder and spread its contents in front of him. “Jordan Hetrick. A hiker found his body on New Year’s Day in the pine woods east of Saddleback Road.” He slid a close-up photo from the county morgue across his desk. “That’s the only photo we have. He didn’t have a driver’s license or credit card on him, just a card from the Elk Park Public Library.”

  “No photo on that, I guess.”

  “They haven’t gotten around to doing photos on library cards.”

  There were no obvious injuries to Hetrick’s face, Anna noted, though his skin had taken on the waxy patina of death. She took a sip of coffee then set the mug on Schaeffer’s desk. Something about the smell of fresh roasted coffee settled her stomach.

  Schaeffer handed Anna a sheet of paper. “A photocopy of Hetrick’s library card.”

  “Are you sure it’s his library card?”

  “The head librarian identified his morgue photo and matched it to the name on the card.”

  Anna grimaced. The morgue photo. Poor librarian.

  “The last book he borrowed was on deer and elk hunting. What we don’t know is if Jordan Hetrick is his real name.”