Gretchen Birch Boxed Set (Books 1-4)

by Deb Baker

  “I need to use your phone. I might have made a terrible mistake. A man inside might die because of me.”

  “Mr. B.? What did you do to Mr. B.?”

  Gretchen shook her head in frustration. “Not Mr. B., Anthony Thomasia. I thought he killed his wife. I hit him pretty hard with the stage gun. We have to call an ambulance.”

  “What can I do?” Julie said.

  “Stay with me. I don’t know what’s going on any more. But I’m pretty sure that Mr. B. is Richard Berringer?”

  “Impossible,” Julie said.

  “He has his grandfather’s rock collection upstairs.”

  “No!”

  “Give me the phone.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Julie keyed in the emergency number and spoke into the phone, giving their location and requesting an ambulance to assist with an injured man inside the building. “Now we can relax,” she said after hanging up.

  “Perfect. Let’s go in and wait with Andy.”

  “The ambulance attendants will take good care of him. There isn’t anything we can do. And if the man who lives upstairs really is Richard, we could be in significant danger. We need to get away.”

  Julie looked frightened and she should be. She should be, Gretchen thought. We both should be.

  Gretchen chewed the inside of her lip and considered the dilemma. There wasn’t anything she could do about Andy’s condition. And she wasn’t absolutely sure he hadn’t killed his wife. And what about Mr. B.? Owning a rock collection wasn’t enough evidence to assume that Mr. B. was a killer. Was it?

  She had made too many assumptions as it was.

  “Okay,” Gretchen said, scanning the street for signs of Mr. B. “Let’s get in your car. We’ll lock ourselves in.”

  Was that enough protection? The killer had rammed her mother’s car in an attempt to murder her. Would he do the same to them if he found them here?

  Looking up and down the street again, she didn’t see Mr. B., but he could turn a corner at any moment. Had any of the club members asked what his full name was? Yes, she remembered April had. He’d said it was a long Slavic name, that everyone called him Mr. B.

  “Where’s Caroline?” Julie asked.

  “Another long story. I’ll tell you later. Why don’t we move the car?”

  Julie nodded, checking out passing pedestrians. “I agree. We can wait down the street for the ambulance to arrive. Or drive around the block. Or something. But we shouldn’t stand in the open like sitting ducks.”

  The temporary security of Julie’s car gave Gretchen a moment to reflect on her own impulsive personality, and how much trouble she had caused. First Jerome, then Andy. She was leaving a trail of carnage behind her.

  Matt had been right all along. She shouldn’t have involved herself in police business. But to be fair, Gretchen didn’t invite threats. They appeared out of nowhere. She’d been perfectly content working on the play, minding her own business.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true. The drama of past and present mysterious murders had lured her away. She’d wanted to be enticed into something else. Anything other than directing that play.

  So she’d seen a killer in every man she encountered. She’d disarmed one and tied him up. She’d pistol-whipped another.

  Was she the crazy one?

  Julie was on the phone talking to the police, explaining that their lives were at risk, that a man might be stalking them and that they needed protection. She sounded more worried and frightened as she spoke.

  “Yes, yes, we will. No, that’s not possible.” She glanced at Gretchen and covered the phone with her hand. “I’m not going to the police station, which is what they are suggesting.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Gretchen asked, recalling that Julie had refused to go to the museum the night before because of the police. “We’ll be safest there.”

  “No. I have an issue with that. I’ll drop you off, though.”

  “Let’s stay together.”

  “Should we wait here?” Julie asked. “The officer thinks it will be fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “How about the museum?” Even if Mr. B. was Richard, the club had changed the locks to the museum and Gretchen and her mother had the only keys. “He can’t get into the museum.”

  “Great idea.” Julie gave the address to the police officer and hung up. “A police car is on the way. They said to stay inside.”

  It would be over before she knew it. In fifteen minutes the police would arrive, if they weren’t still there. Hadn’t Andy said he’s seen a cop at the museum? All her potential suspects were being rounded up. She may have been mistaken in some cases and injured the wrong people, but one of them was guilty. Anthony Thomasia, Jerome, or Mr. B. One of them was a killer.

  It was really over this time.

  Chapter 50

  “She has multiple personalities,” Richard Berringer says while the technician sits at a computer. The detective remains standing, appears detached. People probably lie to him all the time. Best to focus on the truth and keep an honest face.

  “Her head is in a good place when she remembers to take her medication,” he says, studying the black Velcro wrapped around his fingers. “But that’s hit-or-miss. When we were kids, before the meds, Rachel would do cruel things and then blame me. Everybody believed her, including my parents. She’d do horrible things to animals and kids too young to talk, then she’d blame me. She nearly suffocated herself and accused me of attempting to kill her. That was the end for me.”

  Richard hasn’t moved since he sat down in the chair, not a muscle, but the detective - what’s his name…Albright? - paces. The cop’s voice and facial features don’t display any emotion, no inflections whatsoever. He sounds like the computer program that they are running to record his blood pressure and pulse, to verify the truth.

  How can his blood pressure not be through the roof? But they told him he passed the pretest with flying colors. And they have control questions. It’s all been explained to him. He’s more than willing to go along, whatever it takes to make them believe him.

  He’s careful to conceal his anger, to not let it control him. That’s how she won before, driving him to the point of explosive rage.

  “Anything to make me look bad,” he continues, trying not to reflect too carefully on his sister and the memories that are surfacing like monsters from the depths of a lagoon. “When I was a teenager, my parents had me committed to an insane asylum. As bad as it was, it was better than living in the same house with her. Two years later, I was out, but I didn’t go home. I kept in touch with my parents, though. By then they knew the truth about Rachel, but they didn’t send her away. She got shock treatments instead. At least I escaped that.”

  Richard’s voice is becoming emotion. He has pent-up anger, but he can’t let them see the rage. The detective leans against the back of a chair, hunches his shoulders forward to stretch his neck muscles. “Go on,” he says.

  “When our mother disappeared, I knew Rachel had killed her. I came back to Phoenix and told the police my suspicions, but I was the one who had been institutionalized, not Rachel. Nothing came of it.

  “Some unexplainable force wouldn’t let me leave this city. I hated the house and all its memories, but I couldn’t run away from my past. I bought the building I own now, paid it off as quick as I could. Rachel owned the family home, although she didn’t live in it. We kept our distance from each other.”

  “She didn’t bother you?”

  “Not really. She had become good at hiding the crazy side. She said she had a therapist and the right medications. I didn’t see her much. Then recently I hear that she had died.”

  The detective glances at the technician then back to Richard. “Could you get to the point, please? I understand your sister did you a huge injustice, but if she’s dead—”

  Richard shakes his head. They have to believe him! Otherwise she will have won again. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he says. “S
he had different personalities. She could be anybody she wanted to be. She killed that woman in the cemetery and faked her own death. She’s still in Phoenix but she isn’t Rachel Berringer anymore.”

  Another glance between the two men. Richard wants to rip off the polygraph equipment and run away. They aren’t believing his story. He never should have come here.

  “Explain,” Albright says.

  “Rachel isn’t really dead. I’m telling you the truth. She’s simply taken on a different personality.”

  “And what would that personality be?”

  Richard leans in closer.

  “She’s become someone else, one of our relatives,” he says. “And she will kill again, if we don’t stop her.”

  “Give me a name to go on.”

  “Julie Wicker,” Richard says.

  Chapter 51

  Gretchen unlocked the museum door, disappointed that the police weren’t there to greet them. “I’m going to wait outside,” she said, watching Julie pull a large tote out of the backseat and walk up the sidewalk toward her. The woman carried a ton of stuff. Not that Gretchen should talk. She usually had Nimrod and all his supplies with her.

  She felt a pang of loneliness, missing her lovable creatures. Wobbles and Nimrod. What a pair.

  “The police told us to wait inside,” Julie said.

  “I need fresh air. Don’t worry about me. I’ll stay close by the door.”

  “Call me when the police arrive,” Julie said. “I’ve been so busy with the play, I haven’t had time to go through the museum.”

  “Sure. Take your time, but watch out for the ghost.” Gretchen tried to make light.

  “Ghost?” Julie stopped. “I forgot that the house is supposed to be haunted.”

  Gretchen grinned. “That’s what Nina thinks. Remember? She insists that Flora’s spirit is trapped between two worlds, that she has unfinished business on earth and that her spirit needs to be reconnected somehow.”

  Reconnected to her head, Gretchen thought, but that’s morbid and Julie seems nervous as it is.

  Gretchen didn’t tell Julie that she believed right along with Nina that the house was haunted. Hadn’t strange noises alerted them to the contents of the armoire? And later hadn’t chimes warned of Jerome’s presence? If not for the intervention of the ghost, they may have been killed.

  She wasn’t ready, though, to announce it to the world.

  “Maybe I won’t go inside after all,” Julie said.

  “No, really, it’s nothing to be afraid of. If the house has a ghost, I’m sure it’s a benevolent ghost. I’ll come inside, turn on lights for you, and we’ll prove that the building is safe.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Julie stepped over the threshold.

  So did Gretchen.

  Chapter 52

  “Last year,” Richard says after Detective Albright refills their coffee cups, “she gave me my father’s rock collection.” The technician is done. Richard’s fingers are free. “I was so grateful. Finally, a piece of family history, a small treasure, for myself. But then I couldn’t help thinking that she had a motive for that generosity.”

  The detective seems to perk up at the reference to rocks and asks Richard about his father’s work, which Richard expands on. “He traveled most of the time, one geological dig after another.”

  “And the equipment? What happened to his tools?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she has them, or they still could be in the house. Nothing was ever thrown out.” That’s the truth. All those dolls and the same furnishings. The secrets are still there, too.

  “I’d like permission to search your home,” the detective says. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No,” Richard says. “All I had to hide was my institutional history and my insane sister, and even that’s out in the open now.”

  Richard is left alone while the search is arranged. The lock on the interrogation room clicks into place, trapping him. He wonders how long Rachel has been a member of the doll club, masquerading as Julie Wicker Just like Rachel to gravitate to a bunch of doll enthusiasts.

  He has nothing left to hide from the police, his soul has been stripped bare, but he’s worried anyway. What if they find something inside his house that they can use against him?

  Stranger things have happened.

  Paranoid tendencies, that’s what the doc said. Richard’s never been able to trust anybody. How can he start now?

  “Richard,” Albright says from the doorway. “I’d like you to come along with us.”

  “Of course.” Be agreeable.

  Richard sits in the back seat of a squad car. A uniformed police officer is driving. Albright gets into the passenger seat. Richard thinks of another story to tell on the way over to search his house. One he’s been saving for last. This will seal the deal. They have to believe him now.

  “One of those doll women came to the banquet hall early this morning,” he says. “I saw her go in from my window. Then, in the early morning, Rachel showed up.”

  “She did? No kidding.”

  “I thought I’d spotted her on the street outside the hall the day before, walking with some of the others, but I wasn’t certain. She’d changed her appearance. It was the eyes that gave her away. She has my mother’s eyes, the shape, the color, everything the same. But Rachel’s dead, I said to myself. I didn’t want to face the truth.”

  “That must have been a shock.”

  You bet it was. “I knew she was up to no good, either following the other woman or after me for something.” He laughs a sad sound. “With all my talk, you must think I’m paranoid.”

  “Not at all.” But he hears the agreement in the detective’s voice. “What happened next?”

  “I opened the window and told Rachel to get back in her car and get away from my building. I told her I’d call the cops. That’s when I knew for certain it was her under the dyed black hair and different clothes. She said she knew I didn’t have a phone, which was true. Hate the things. Sale people and political calls. Who needs it? I held up my television remote and told her I had bought one. She thought it was a phone in the dark and left real quick.”

  “What morning was this?”

  “This morning.”

  “This morning?” The detective swings his head to the backseat. “Are you sure?”

  “Why wouldn’t I remember when it happened? I’m telling you it was today. That’s why I came in. We have to stop her.”

  It has taken a whole lot of work to get a reaction from the detective. Finally he has one. Albright is paying attention.

  “What about the woman who went inside?” he asks Richard. “Who was she?”

  “Don’t know. They all look the same to me.”

  “What did she look like? Tall? Short? Heavy? Come on.”

  Richard describes the early-morning visitor. “Young, thirtyish, she’s the one directing the play for that bunch of doll collectors.”

  “Gretchen.”

  “You know her?”

  “Speed it up,” the detective says to the driver.

  At last! Richard thinks, Action!

  Chapter 53

  Julie placed her tote on the museum counter and looked around at the doll displays. “Caroline really does great work,” she said. “With one of the largest collections in Phoenix, this will be a wonderful museum.”

  Gretchen turned on more lights. Her eyes shifted automatically to the staircase where she’d last seen Jerome. She didn’t want to remember last night, the sheer terror as she and her mother had waited for the intruder to climb the steps.

  “Let’s go upstairs, Julie said.

  “We better wait by the door. The police will be here soon.” Gretchen had had enough of the upstairs. A skeleton found in the closet and a scuffle with an intruder were plenty for her.

  “Oh come on.”

  “No, really.”

  Julie looked up the spiral staircase. “I’m not going up alone if there’s a
ghost around. From what I’ve read, they like to roam on second stories near bedrooms.”

  Gretchen had heard that, too. And the ghostly sounds had occurred upstairs, so there must be some truth to it.

  “Most of the finished work is in the rooms down here anyway,” she pointed out to Julie. “Contemporaries are down the hall to the left, antiques to the right. But you know that.”

  “Yes.” Julie smiled. “I helped April for a few hours, but I’d like to see them again. If you hear me scream, come and save me.”

  Gretchen grinned. “Take your time.”

  While Julie explored the house, Gretchen sat down on a stool by the counter. Shouldn’t she hear ambulance sirens by now? How long had it been? It felt like hours, but had probably only been a few minute.

  Julie’s cell phone was on the counter next to the tote. She picked it up and checked the time. Almost eleven. She was impatient to put this all behind her. And to get some sleep.

  She checked the cell’s call log to get the specific time of both calls, the one requesting an ambulance for Andy and the second call requesting police protection at the museum.

  That’s odd, she thought. The calls weren’t logged.

  But Gretchen had heard Julie’s end of the conversations.

  Had she been pretending to make the calls?

  Gretchen glanced down the hall. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she called out to get a sense of Julie’s location.

  “Yes.” Julie’s voice came from one of the far rooms.

  “Take your time. The police certainly are.”

  Julie hadn’t called for help. Why?

  Then she realized that Julie had understood exactly what Gretchen meant when they met at the banquet hall and she told Julie she’d found Richard and the rock collection. Hadn’t Julie been in Tucson when they had canvassed the neighborhood and discovered personal information about Richard and Rachel? April and Nina had agreed to keep their findings a secret.

  Then how did Julie know she should be afraid of Richard? How did she know about John Swilling’s collection?