She moved toward it to clean up the mess and then froze, her blood chilling as she saw it more clearly.
It was a dress; but there was still someone in it.
It was Martha Tells, and she was very clearly, very messily, deceased.
Bailey screamed.
Chapter 6
The Sheriff’s department, an ambulance, and the local paper all arrived within half an hour of Bailey’s call. She barely remembered making it. After her blind dash back to the entrance of the Caves, she had dialed 911, and then Avery, who had called her father, and the two of them had arrived on the heels of the Sheriff’s department.
Now, a smattering of locals arrived as well, gathered outside the police tape, watching and murmuring among themselves while Bailey answered a deputy’s questions as clearly as she could, barely holding herself together.
“She was there when I got to the last cave,” Bailey was saying to the middle aged Deputy, Dylan Harper, whom she’d known her entire life like everyone else in town. “I didn’t realize at first… it’s dark back there, just a little light from the lamps the TV crew set up. I thought at first it was… well, that doesn’t matter, I guess. When I got up close I could see it was her and that she was… she was…”
“It’s alright, Ms. Robinson,” Deputy Harper said. He’d never called Bailey ‘Ms. Robinson’ before. It made Bailey feel like a suspect.
Which, of course, she would have to be at least for now.
The next question confirmed it for her. “If you can recall,” Dylan said gently, “where were you before this?”
“I went to Rigby’s and Hitch-Morgan,” she said confidently. “I was supposed to arrange carpeting for the caves while Martha and Trevor did the documentary. She was insistent on it, but I told her I didn’t think it would work, but, you know, I wanted to make a good impression on everyone about the Seven Caves Touring Center and the town and… well, anyway, that took a couple of hours while we looked at carpet. I talked with Lester Rigby, and then went straight to Hitch-Morgan and talked with Lena Morgan, and then came here from there. Before that I was at Grovey Goodies with Trevor.”
Deputy Dylan took this all in stride, making notes and nodding as he did. “And Trevor Simmons,” he said after he’d finished writing, “did he go with you to Rigby’s?”
Bailey blinked, and then shook her head. “No, he… he stayed behind. But, I don’t think Trevor did this.”
“We just have to cover all the bases,” Dylan assured her, patient in the face of her plain anxiety. It was impressive, actually—there was a better than a good chance that this was the first murder investigation in Coven Grove in… well, maybe forever. Certainly not since Bailey was born. “Can you recall anyone who might have had a reason to attack Ms. Tells? Did you see any conflicts or arguments?”
Bailey sighed, and shook her head. “I’m afraid not. Really—pardon me, I don’t mean to speak ill of her—but I only knew her for a little while and she struck me as a little hard to deal with. She had a temper. So, I don’t know if I could narrow down a list of people who might have disliked her. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Dylan said. “Well, we may have more questions later. Take this,” he handed her a card, “and call us if you remember anything else. I think Ave and your Daddy are over there; why don’t you go see them, and try to take some time to process. It must have been real awful to find her like that.”
Bailey only nodded. More than awful.
“Not this girl. Somebody else. Out of towner, probably one of the crew. Or the assistant, maybe.”
“Who, Gloria?” Bailey asked.
“What’s that?” Dylan asked, frowning. “Gloria’s the assistant, right?”
“Yes,” Bailey said, “I thought you just said…” Oh. It was back, those echoing whispers. Suddenly, she could hear them again, like the volume had been turned up so slowly she hadn’t noticed. Now that she had, they were deafening. She rubbed her palms together and shook her head. “Never mind. I thought you asked me something.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of it, Ms. Robinson,” Dylan assured her. “You just stand by and rest.”
“I will, Deputy,” Bailey told him. “Thank you.”
He tipped his hat, and moved on.
Bailey tried to not-quite-run toward the line of police tape. When she was finally past it, she threw herself into her father’s arms. Ryan squeezed her tight, and then held her at arms length and peered into her eyes like he might discern how she was feeling that way. “Lord, Red; you must be shook up. You okay?”
“Not really,” Bailey said. Her throat was tight. She kept seeing Martha. And the voices she heard kept stirring her up all over again, but she couldn’t tell him about that. Not yet; not until she knew more herself. He’d only worry himself to death.
Avery hugged her next, as tight as Ryan had, and whispered to her, “Who could have done this?”
Bailey let him release her and shook her head at him, a silent answer: No idea. His lips tightened, and he stared determinedly at the cave. Bailey glanced at the entrance as well. “They’ll figure it out,” she said to him. “It’s a small town. People don’t get away with that sort of thing in places like this.”
One of the deputies was talking with Gloria. She looked pale, barely animated. Her curiosity too great, Bailey led Avery and her Father around the perimeter to get closer. They were just barely audible, but she caught bits and pieces.
“…up at the tour office,” Gloria was saying, matter-of-factly, her voice flat. “Maybe… two, or three hours ago? She wanted me to get her dress pressed and steamed. Again. I went from there to the hotel.”
“Was anyone with you?” The deputy asked.
Gloria fixed him with a flinty look of offense. “No, I was alone. But Martha was paying my salary, so, I’m jobless now, and my last boss was murdered, right? Why would I want to ruin my own career, again?”
The Deputy took it in stride. “I have to ask, Ma’am,” he told her, scribbling on his official note pad, “it’s the job. But, it would be best if you didn’t leave town while the investigation is ongoing. Also, we don’t know for sure she was murdered. Yet.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere in any case,” Gloria said. “I’m going to help you get the bottom of this. I’m an investigative journalist, you know. Or, I was before I was Martha’s assistant.” Bailey knew it. Why the deception, though? And why go from journalist to assistant? For someone who was probably too broke to pay her nearly what she was used to, no less. Couldn’t she have just come along as a reporter to cover the event for whatever paper she worked for?
Bailey’s suspicions started to congeal.
Except, Trevor was on this side of the police line, a dozen yards away and speaking with another deputy. He kept rubbing his face, shaking his head, and fidgeting. Objectively, Bailey had to admit that he’d said some harsh things about Martha and clearly didn’t like her very much. And, there was no telling where he’d gone after Bailey left him at the bakery. The bakery ladies would know, though; or at least they’d know when he left. She didn’t see them in the small crowd. Probably they were too busy with the shop to come and ogle the scene.
The other conspicuous absence was Poppy. This sort of thing was going to shut down the tours for a good long while; she should have been out here throwing a fit about how Martha had been so rude as to die horribly at the start of prime tour season. Wasn’t she at least worried about her bottom line? Maybe she hadn’t heard yet.
Bailey tried to call her, but got no answer. Poppy’s day-to-day life was a mystery; she came and went with the tide, sometimes. She’d want to know soon, though; this was going to cost her a lot of money, and if there was one thing Poppy absolutely hated, it was losing money.
She slipped her phone back into her pocket and watched Trevor with the Deputy. She wanted to get closer, but not look like she was doing it. Biting her lip, she glanced around, and then tugged at her father’s hand. “Come on,” she said. “I don’t t
hink they need us here anymore, and we’ll just get in the way. I need to go lay down, I think.”
“Of course, Red,” Ryan said, and slipped his arm around her shoulder. He started to walk her toward the path back up to the office but she tugged him toward Trevor.
“Lets go around the crowd,” she sighed. “I’d rather not be accosted with questions. I don’t know anything more than they do at this point.”
Ryan agreed, and Avery followed them shortly as the three of them walked between two parked, white cars with the gold star of the Coven Grove Sheriff’s department emblazoned on the sides. She took them to within a few yards of Trevor’s interview. He met her eyes for just a brief second before he answered some question the deputy had asked. She strained to hear.
“I was at my hotel room,” he said. “The whole time. No one was with me, though, so I understand. It’s possible that the hotel clerk saw me walk in, but I can’t know for sure. You’ll have to ask her.”
“I’ll do that,” the deputy said. “You sure there’s no one else you talked to on the way? Even on the street. You say you walked? Which route did you take?”
“I just sort of wandered, honestly,” Trevor answered, earnestly. “I don’t recall exactly which route I took. I remember a house with a red door, though, and…”
They were out of range. Bailey wanted to stop, and go back, and listen in, but that would have been outrageously overt and Ryan would have seen right through it. She glanced up at him. Already there was a quiet light in his lined eyes, and he had his thinking face on. Avery did as well, both of them chewing things over, making their own theories.
On the walk back up, Bailey tried calling Poppy again. For the second time, she got no answer. A nervous feeling settled into her stomach. This was the sort of time when Poppy should have been hovering over every aspect of the office. Bailey hoped she was okay. She couldn’t help thinking, suddenly, that something might have happened to the woman. After all, Martha was a washed up nobody, according to Trevor and Poppy both… but Poppy had money, and a business, and traveled all over. What if Martha had just been a casualty of something else? What if Poppy had been hurt or killed or abducted? After all, she had family with money.
The other possible explanation, of course, was that Poppy had killed Martha herself, but that was the furthest thing from likely that Bailey could imagine. Poppy was an awful person at times, and she certainly had a temper. But she was driven by something far more powerful than her emotions, or any urges she might harbor toward anyone; Bailey had seen her bend over backward in pursuit of her singular principle, sacrificing everything for it.
That principle, of course, was profit; and Martha’s death would cost Poppy somewhere in the range of seventy-five thousand dollars. If anything, Poppy was probably holed up in some bar outside of town, weeping into a glass of cheap white wine and contemplating how ruined her business was going to be after this.
Only at that point did Bailey really think about it herself. She saw her dreams of taking over the tour business evaporate. Instantly, she felt guilty for it.
Martha Tells had died on their watch. That’s what mattered. That, and that somewhere in this town a murderer was running loose; someone that had desecrated her precious Caves and tainted them, in her mind, forever. And that person, she very much wanted to see brought to justice.
And, she determined at that moment, she’d do whatever she could to see that they were.
Chapter 7
The next two days were a blur to Bailey. As the person who’d found the body—no; found Martha, she couldn’t think of Martha as ‘the body’ without her chest tightening—she was both the talk of the town, and the prime witness not just for the Sheriff’s department, but for the local paper, the Coven Grove Weekly.
When Ryan had worked for them full time it had been the Coven Grove Daily, but that changed as the Internet reached the town and made a daily paper all but obsolete. Plus there was never much news to cover in Coven Grove—fairs, contests and who won them, local political news which was repetitive after several decades of seeing the same people hold offices until they passed or retired, just like Sheriff Larson.
Now that they had the scent of a real story, reporters were clamoring to pitch their various takes on it, including Gloria Olson. In the end, it was her that won first prize and got her story printed.
It wasn’t news to Bailey that Martha Tells had been deeply in debt and hoping to reboot her career by coming home to exploit the caves, but it was news to everyone else. Overnight, it became the talk of the town—even more so than it already had been. Martha was the first murder victim in Coven Grove for as long as anyone could remember. She wasn’t the first, however. Another article detailed the other six cases in the town’s history, the last one more than eighty years ago. The strange thing, the article suggested, was that the one before it had happened only a year prior. In fact, all six of the murders of the early twentieth century were ‘suspiciously’ close together. Was Coven Grove potentially looking at a string of similar murders in the modern day?
Both articles were printed in papers that ran for two consecutive days, prompting Ryan to wonder whether the paper was going to use this event to re-re-brand themselves to a daily paper again. Either way, the two stories hurled the town into a rabid frenzy for details and gossip and very soon it was all anyone was talking about.
Bailey sequestered herself in the library. The initial enthusiasm and righteous sense of purpose she’d had about somehow single-handedly solving Martha’s murder bled away with surprising speed once she’d had a night of troubled sleep and disconcerting dreams. It was best, she decided, to keep to herself. Especially since being out about town seemed to make the voices in her head worse while being in the library gave her a desperately needed break from that maelstrom of insanity though she couldn’t figure why that would be. She was not left alone for very long. On the second day, just after lunchtime, Avery and Piper showed up to check on her. Avery was dressed a little smarter than usual, it seemed like—probably he’d been fielding questions as one of Bailey’s two ‘known associates’. Piper, of course, was nearly pregnant enough to pop already, only six months in. She managed it well, though; Piper was a woman who made pregnancy somehow look easy in her ankle length, flowing, forest green jersey knit one-piece that on anyone else would have looked like the moo-moo it technically was. But a clever braided brown leather belt and a matching brown cotton bolero turned it into something almost queenly and high fashion.
They brought the lunch that Bailey had skipped.
“I love you both so, so much,” she announced as she unwrapped the sandwich and went to work on it. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. This was from Elliot’s the deli, she assumed, and was phenomenal although that could have been her stomach talking. She liked what it was saying anyway.
Avery helped Piper into one of the chairs around the wide library table. It was littered with books about languages, iconography, and what little academic interest had been leveled at the Caves.
“So,” Avery said casually, “how are you doing?”
“I can’t imagine,” Piper said, “finding a body like that? It must have been so awful, how are you sleeping?”
Bailey chewed and swallowed while she looked from one of them to the other. There were whispers again—far in the back of her head, but noticeable, like a mosquito buzzing around her ear. “I’m okay,” she said. “It was scary, but, you know… I’m dealing. Any news?”
Avery and Piper shared a brief look, one of clear mutual concern. Avery reached across the table and touched Bailey’s arm. “You know it’s okay to not be okay, right?”
“I’m really fine,” Bailey assured him, as earnestly as she could manage. “It was terrible, of course, and scary but… I can’t just dwell on it. I’m moving forward.”
“By hiding in here?” Piper asked, grimacing as though she expected Bailey to snap at her in response.
Piper wasn’t always like that. Things m
ust have been getting worse at home. Bailey sighed, and put her sandwich down, and tucked hair behind her ears. “I’m concerned about what it’s going to do to the town. And about Martha, and her getting justice. You saw the article, right? Eighty years since there was a murder in Coven Grove. I know that Sheriff Larson has a lot of experience, and I know he even has a masters in criminal justice—”
“Er, it’s a bachelor’s,” Avery corrected; he didn’t seem confident it would be enough.
“Well, whatever—he’s been the Sheriff for a long time but… well he’s a local, born and raised here. I’m worried he just doesn’t know what to do about this. And every day he doesn’t figure this out is a day that either there’s a murderer out there on the run, getting away with what they did; or there’s a murderer in our town. And who knows who’ll be next? What if it’s a serial killer and this was just the beginning?”
The two of them stared at Bailey, eyebrows having slowly risen as she let it all out.
Bailey sighed. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”
“We can see that,” Piper said. She frowned. “You’re not okay, are you?”
Bailey waved her off and took another bite of her sandwich to avoid another rant.
“Well I haven’t been okay,” Avery said seriously. “So I’ve been thinking about all the evidence assembled so far.” It was very little. “I think we need to take a clear, critical look at everyone who associated with Martha since she arrived in town and figure out who doesn’t fit—or who might have had an agenda.”
“We’ve been compiling a list,” Piper said. She pulled something from the top of her dress, stowed presumably in the bra that covered her ample bosom. She was known to produce all manner of oddities from there; Bailey never quite got that developed, and was as mystified by this ongoing magic trick as Avery often was.
The Witching on the Wall: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 1) Page 5