The Club (Anna Denning Mystery Book 4)

by Karin Kaufman

Anna and Liz read through the paragraph, and Liz wrote down the names of other mounds on the island, including Sithen Beg, translated as the Little Fairy Mound. The pamphlet’s author, A.E. Johnstone, was obviously a proponent of the fairies-underground theory. He even described a meeting with two particularly persuasive fairies at dusk and his near-entrapment at Sithean Mor.

  “He brought home soil from Iona,” Melinda said.

  “I found a bag of soil in that box in your father’s bedroom,” Anna said, avoiding adding that it was the box with the bones. Melinda knew.

  “The January Club has it now, and they’re welcome to it. Curt MacKenzie said this stuff was in my blood. Well, if it ever was, it’s not anymore. My dad’s insanity is not in the family and not in my blood.”

  “You said you wanted me to find your grandparents’ current addresses so you could look into their medical histories. Is that why? You thought something ran in the family?”

  “I was so confused by my nightmares. I thought . . . I don’t know. And later, seeing Sorg in that painting. I still say I saw someone in my house, but I’m not following my dad’s path. I left it behind me, and when I go back to Iowa, I’ll never think about it again.”

  The wind had picked up and was now whistling through the chimney—a desolate sound, like the howling of winter wolves. Anna thought of her woodstove, the dogs in front of it, Gene on the couch. And like Schaeffer, she wanted to ask what on earth was happening to her town. She didn’t think of herself as naive, but this occult activity—had it existed years ago? Clearly with Henry Maxwell and the January Club, it had. But it was growing now, as Liz had told Schaeffer. Evil, coldness—they were on the rise. She wrenched her gaze away from the stone fireplace and forced it back to the pamphlet and Melinda.

  “I think you’re right about this pamphlet belonging to your father,” she said. “The question is, why did he give it to Jordan?”

  “He was trying to draw him to the occult,” Melinda said with certainty. “When he sensed weakness and fear in someone, he saw opportunity. They met somehow, which wouldn’t be hard in a town the size of Elk Park, and my dad gave him this pamphlet. We’ll probably find more of my dad’s pamphlets and books here.”

  “One more thing you should hear,” Elise said. “Jordan used my last name after we moved to Elk Park. He said everything was in my name anyway, and it gave him the feeling of making a fresh start—no more Hetrick.” She walked back to the kitchen, retrieved her husband’s notebook, and worked her way through its pages.

  Standing at the table, her voice raised so all could hear, she said, “This is his last journal entry, written two weeks ago. It’s only three sentences. ‘So we’re going hunting next week. I mentioned my real name instead of Van Rossem. Should I have done that?’” Regret and fear, one expression hard on the heels of the other, crossed Elise’s face. She shut the notebook and laid it on the table. “He didn’t lie to me. He really thought he was going on a hunting trip.”

  16

  So it had all started with Jordan Hetrick. A week before his murder, he told someone his real name, his birth name. And that someone knew what Jordan Hetrick, no longer Jordan Van Rossem, had done. The thing that had caused him such shame and made him wonder if he could be forgiven. The surprise was that Hetrick hadn’t lied to Elise about the hunting trip—he really believed he was going to Wyoming—and that had to be of some comfort to her.

  Anna filled her kettle with water, set it on the stove, and glanced over her shoulder at Jackson and Riley in the backyard. It was only twelve degrees outside, but they were chasing each other in the snow, soaking up the last of the setting sun. After she and Liz had left Elise’s house, Liz had stopped at Gene’s to pick up Riley before driving her home. These days the dogs were so accustomed to spending time together that it seemed cruel to keep them apart for more than two or three hours at a time.

  While waiting for the kettle to boil, Anna booted up her laptop at the kitchen table. It was time for research. There were too many loose threads to suit her. She didn’t like these dangling story lines, these odd, unconnected pieces of the greater puzzle. She had convinced Elise to give her a sample of Hetrick’s handwriting to show the police, so one part of the mystery—who had put the scrap of paper with the name Johannes Sorg written on it in Hetrick’s shoe—might soon be solved. Hetrick had heard about Sorg from someone in the January Club, and in his last journal entry, his apprehension about the future was clear.

  Which made it all the more strange that whoever picked Hetrick up at his house on the pretense of driving to Wyoming had somehow convinced him to make a stop in the woods off Saddleback Road. How?

  Maybe Hetrick, trying to start life fresh and wanting to please someone he considered a potential friend, had been easy to convince. Hey, Jordan, let me show you something before we head up to Wyoming. Or Hey, Jordan, you’ve never hunted before, so let me show you how to sneak up on game in the woods. Or what if the driver had an accomplice? Maybe it was that accomplice, someone hiding among the snow-covered pines, who had killed Hetrick. Regardless of what happened, why was Maxwell killed later in almost the same spot?

  Anna checked her wristwatch. Gene would be over soon, working his dinner magic in the kitchen. She could make simple pasta dishes, soups, and pizza, but Gene cooked hearty winter food—buffalo steaks, pork loin, butternut squash lasagna. Only two nights had passed since their decision to have a simple, no-cost wedding at Grace Church, but in that short amount of time a calmness had come over him. The financial burden had been lifted from his shoulders, if only for a little while.

  Even yesterday morning, stopping by on his way to Buckhorn’s, crime tape still wrapped about the trees in her front yard, he hadn’t given her the I-didn’t-sign-up-for-this look, though he’d probably been tempted. Instead, he had held her, asked how she was doing, and said he would take off work early and let Jazmin close up. Her man. June couldn’t come soon enough.

  She let Jackson and Riley in through the sliding door and returned to the kitchen to pour a cup of herbal tea. Settled at the table, she wrote “Jordan Hetrick” at the top of a blank piece of paper. Nothing she’d discovered so far explained why Hetrick’s finger had ended up in Henry Maxwell’s house, but would knowing the why of it help solve Hetrick’s or Maxwell’s murder? Would knowing more about Soda Ashbrook’s brother and his black metal band help? Or knowing why Soda had followed her in her car? She doubted it.

  No, she had to go back to Hetrick once more, uncover his hidden past, and assemble the puzzle from scratch, piece by piece. Some of the pieces were peripheral—background noise that either didn’t matter or didn’t shed light on the murders of four people. For now, she would ignore those pieces. It all came down to Hetrick. He was like the trunk of a family tree. The other murders, the branches, sprang from his past in Elk Park.

  Anna jotted down the names of club members living and dead, and other names connected to the various murder cases, and then beside each name added a current and former occupation as well as any pertinent dates and facts.

  Gene knocked twice on her front door—their signal—before calling out his name and putting his key in the lock. Jackson and Riley’s ears shot upward and they dashed for the door. “Who’s that?” Anna said, egging them on. What was it about this moment, the moment Gene came to her door in the evening, that was so special? Would it ever get dull? She smiled to herself. Yeah, inevitably it would. But for now . . .

  “I hope you’re not disappointed,” Gene said. He held aloft a pizza box as he greeted the dogs with ear scratches and made his way to the kitchen. “Two nights in a row, but I’m beat.”

  Anna took down plates from a cabinet and began tearing paper towels from a roll on the counter. “There’s something you should know. I hope it doesn’t lower your opinion of me, but left to my own resources, I’ve been known to have pizza four nights in a row.”

  Gene grinned and kissed her on the cheek. “We are going to make a great husband and wife.” He tossed his chin a
t the table. “Research?”

  “Yeah, let me clear that.”

  “No, leave it. I want to hear what’s going on.”

  Anna fed Jackson and Riley, making it only slightly less likely that they’d beg for pizza during dinner, then poured two glasses of wine and sat down across from Gene, who was already lifting a sausage-heavy slice from the pizza box.

  “Are these the suspects?” he asked, motioning at Anna’s sheet of paper.

  “Suspects and victims.”

  They ate their first slices in silence—and in shocking record time—until Gene took a break from eating and asked her about the police and Dean Price. “I’m glad Schaeffer was gone by the time I got here,” he said. “Not that I don’t like him.”

  “But how many times can you meet someone over a dead body?”

  “I think you have the advantage on me there.”

  “I keep expecting him to follow me around town in his squad car. No need to search for bodies—they’re in my wake.”

  “So how’s your job with the police coming?”

  “To tell you the truth, I already gave the police what they hired me to find—Elise Van Rossem’s name and address. But this morning, when Schaeffer came to investigate Dean’s death and I gave him more information on the January Club, he said, ‘Keep me informed.’” Anna paused, waiting for Gene’s reaction.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” he said. “He values your input.” He wiped sauce from his fingers and put his hand on her arm. “You’ve said this is what you want to do. More than just family trees.”

  “I want the police to hire me as a consultant. Part time at first. But maybe full time one day. It sounds farfetched, but—”

  “No, it doesn’t. You’ve got more talent for finding weird clues and fitting them all together so they make sense than anyone I’ve ever known. You start with genealogy, but you go far beyond it, in ways I don’t think the Elk Park PD can. Besides, police departments hire outside consultants all the time. I think you were made to do this. I think you were led here.”

  Anna felt tears welling in her eyes. All her fears, her worries about Gene hating her job and even wanting to call off the wedding, began to evaporate.

  “Don’t start, you’ll get me going,” he said, reaching for another slice.

  “And we’ll scare the dogs,” she said with a laugh, brushing away the tears in her eyes. “Poor Jackson and Riley.”

  “So what about Jordan Hetrick, Dean Price, and the others? Tell me what you know so far.”

  Where to start? She hardly knew. “I could do with a fresh pair of eyes on this. You were right when you said focus on Hetrick. Something happened seventeen years ago.” For the next several minutes, in between bites of pizza, Anna recapped what she knew, including the latest revelations from Elise and Melinda.

  Gene angled Anna’s notes his way and pointed at the first name below Hetrick’s. “Start with Tanner Ostberg. Tell me more about him.”

  “I don’t think Tanner cares about the club, except that it was how he got his job at the Herald. But that’s nothing to him now. The first time I was in Curt’s house, he asked Rose and Dean if they really thought Beverly Goff could contact the dead. He was dismissive of the whole thing.”

  “So why would he stay a club member?”

  “To steal from it, for one thing. I think he has an arrangement with Rose, and maybe he did with Dean too.

  “Maybe Dean wanted out.”

  “He may have had a change of heart. I’m pretty sure Tanner and Soda Ashbrook, the woman he’s having an affair with, are working together. Curt MacKenzie realized only yesterday that club gifts are ending up in the Prices’ art galleries. Though Tanner told Liz that everything the police found in his house was a gift for his wife Katie.”

  “Gifts for the wife he’s cheating on.”

  “Katie had no idea. Everything Tanner stole was in a canvas bag at the back of a closet. And I don’t think Tanner is selling stolen goods on the black market. He didn’t have enough money to bail himself out of jail.”

  “He hasn’t been tried yet. Are you sure he stole what the police found?”

  Anna pushed her plate aside and dropped her chin into her hand, pondering the question. “It’s possible someone . . . Rose maybe? Dean? One or both of them might have given him permission to take things without Curt knowing about it.”

  “That’s a good defense. If Dean or Rose told him, ‘This belongs to the club, I founded the club, you have my permission to take it out of the club house.’”

  Anna nodded. “Rose didn’t seem angry with Tanner, and Tanner was more worried about Soda Ashbrook’s reputation than anything else. I think he knows Rose is going to come to his defense. The trouble is, he stole from Curt MacKenzie’s house, and Curt’s not going to be so kind. He feels he’s been cheated out of something again.”

  “I see Tanner works for the Herald. He could be writing a story on the club. Maybe that’s another reason he’s still a member.”

  “He does strike me as an ambitious man, but I can’t believe he would have joined a year ago and not written anything yet.”

  “What about Soda Ashbrook, his partner in crime?”

  “I wonder if she’s the one who encouraged Tanner to steal from the club.”

  “The ringleader?”

  “She’s a strange one. A sad woman, really. Morbid, her brother into black metal. She should be a member of the January Club. She’d fit right in.”

  “How do you know she isn’t?”

  “Curt MacKenzie is a terrible liar, and he honestly didn’t know who she was.”

  Gene tapped Curt’s name. “He’s the one who hosts the club.”

  “And a bitter man. He lost out on the job of editor in chief when it was handed on a silver platter to Henry Maxwell seventeen years ago. Right now he’s in a battle with Rose over who will be the new club medium, and I’m pretty sure he’s losing.”

  “A bitter man would react badly to that kind of loss.”

  “So he had reason to kill Dean Price.”

  “He had more reason to kill his wife.”

  The skin on Anna’s arm pricked. “Rose.” Would she be next in line?

  “She was a nurse,” Gene said, reading Anna’s notes. “Where? In Elk Park?”

  Anna thought back to her second visit to Curt’s house. “Yes, Elk Park. That’s what Dean said.” She could still see Dean, unmoved by Curt’s verbal attacks on his wife, and hear Rose taunt Curt with feigned concern and unsolicited advice about his lack of metaphysical prowess. “And Dean worked for the State Public Defender’s Office in Loveland until they both retired in their mid-forties and opened their galleries.”

  Gene furrowed his brow. “Those aren’t high-money professions, and it takes a lot of money to buy or even rent four galleries on Summit Avenue.”

  “I didn’t think about that.” Anna took her purse from the kitchen counter, fumbled for her cell, then hit a quick-dial number. “I know who can tell me in one hour if the Prices bought the properties or rent them.”

  “Your Watson?” Gene said, happily detaching a cold and stringy clump of cheese from the pizza box and plopping it into his mouth.

  “We’re more like a pair of Sherlocks,” Anna said, hushing Gene with her hand when Liz answered.

  Just one minute later, Anna had her answer. Liz had looked into the Prices two days earlier, before visiting Curt’s house, and she had the facts on their galleries. Liz promised to call later with any additional information on the galleries.

  “Well, something stinks,” Anna said, hanging up. “They bought one of the galleries, Lily’s, as soon as they retired, fifteen years ago. They paid cash and it cost them $225,000.”

  Gene whistled.

  “They rent the others, and they’re in the process of buying a second gallery.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “I wonder if either one of them comes from a wealthy family.” Anna returned to the table and wrote a reminder to her
self to explore the Prices’ family trees. The sale price of Lily’s wasn’t huge, but no one of average means paid cash for a downtown business. Even Roger Westfall had rented Buckhorn’s for a decade, building it into a successful store before buying it twenty years ago.

  With a groan of stuffed satisfaction, Gene leaned back in his chair. “What about the medium, Beverly Goff?”

  “She used to be the principal of Elk Park High, which is where Jordan Hetrick went to school.”

  “And Goff died in Curt’s house.”

  “That means either someone in the club killed her or a club member let the killer into the house while the lights were out.”

  “And then let the killer back out again.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You didn’t find an extra person in the house after Goff was killed, did you? If a club member let the killer in, he or she had to let the killer back out again before the lights came on.”

  Frustrated, Anna massaged her temples. “It’s the butler in the dining room with a polo mallet.”

  Gene let loose with a boom of a laugh. “No, you’re making progress. I’ve seen you do this before.” Anna started to protest, but he interrupted her and went on. “You gather your facts, you lay them out, you explore them. They don’t make sense at first, but then it happens—you make a connection. So talk to me. Tell me what you see.”

  “All right.” Anna sat straight, squared her shoulders. “Here’s what I know. About seventeen years ago something happened. Jordan Hetrick did something so bad he feels he can’t be forgiven for it, Henry Maxwell got a job he didn’t deserve, Curt MacKenzie lost a job that by all accounts he did deserve. Fast forward to the present time. Jordan Hetrick is murdered three months after returning to Elk Park, a few days later Henry Maxwell is murdered, then Beverly Goff and Dean Price are killed.”

  “The latter three being members of the January Club.”

  “And then the club takes possession of Maxwell’s money and everything he owns but his house through a legal will. Then we have Johannes Sorg, Hetrick’s finger, the necromancy, the Scottish and Scandinavian angle.”