Exhume (Dr. Schwartzman Series Book 1)

by Danielle Girard

  “Yes. She knew how much you loved books.”

  Ava’s house was full of books. The library had somewhere close to a thousand volumes, and there were random stacks piled in each room. What did Ava mean?

  As if reading her mind, Colin said, “The ones in the white bookcase in her bedroom. She was particularly keen that you should have those. They meant so much to her.”

  Schwartzman left the office, trying to remember if she and Ava have ever talked about books. Ava had been a huge fan of music, playing every type for her niece on the old phonograph in the living room when Schwartzman was young and, later, on a sound system that she’d had installed when Schwartzman was in high school.

  Of course, Schwartzman had seen Ava reading—the house was full of books—but the idea that Ava had wanted her to pay attention to her books was a surprise. That they were in a case that Schwartzman had never even noticed was more surprising.

  Schwartzman drove directly back to Ava’s house without stopping to eat. The police cruiser was on the opposite side of the street now, and she recognized Officer Hill.

  He rolled the window down. “Morning.”

  She waved hello.

  “We just checked the perimeter, and everything is clear. As long as you’re okay, I’m going to take off. We’ll have someone back tonight.”

  She waved again and watched the cruiser drive away.

  She let herself in and checked the downstairs before going up to the bedrooms. No smell of cologne. Despite her excitement, she moved cautiously, slowly.

  She stepped into Ava’s bedroom and looked for the bookcase. She found it in the corner of the room, tucked between the window and the dressing table. Compared with many of the antique pieces in the room—and the house—the bookcase was nothing special. It stood maybe four feet tall with simple whitewashed shelves, the finish worn along the edges.

  Schwartzman drew the curtains and flipped on the light. The room was bathed in the warm, amber light of the old ceiling fixture.

  Standing in front of the bookcase, she studied the titles. On the top shelf, Allende, Kingsolver, Oates, Walker, Angelou. Books Schwartzman had, of course, read. But none of the titles conjured memories of her aunt. She knelt on the floor and pulled out the copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The binding was creased in several places. She flipped through the pages, but there were no markings, no turned-down corners. She replaced it and scanned the line of books, all paperbacks. They appeared to be lined up from shortest to tallest in no particular order. Would she need to go through each book page by page? Looking for what? Or perhaps it meant nothing at all.

  But she didn’t believe that.

  “What were you trying to tell me, Ava?”

  She ran her fingers along the spines. Books Ava had touched. Her long, lean fingers, fingers like her father’s had been, like her own, their tips curved in just slightly, making them appear slightly arthritic. The clinical term was clinodactyly, a condition that caused a curvature of the digits, though theirs was mild enough to go unnoticed unless one knew to look. To Schwartzman, they were fingers that always looked old beyond their years.

  The book heights grew steadily taller along the shelf up to a hardbound copy of The Red Tent. Tucked behind it was a short, narrow paperback. Out of place. She pulled the book out and turned it in her hands. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.

  The edges of the pages were yellowed as if it had spent a great deal of time in the sun. Schwartzman remembered the story. Girls who lived to give birth, without love, without companionship. She flipped the book open and fanned the pages. Maybe a third of the way through, a folded note fluttered out. Lined paper, one end was fringed where it had been pulled free from a small notebook.

  Her heart thudded in her chest as the paper fell to the floor.

  She jumped up at a noise from the closet.

  She flung open the door, yanked the chain to flood the tiny space with light, then kicked the hanging clothes, prepared for someone to leap out. The dresses swayed lightly, plastic and paper hangers from the dry cleaner whispering to one another.

  She shut the door firmly, locked the bedroom door, and stared at the page lying folded on the rug.

  She lifted the note.

  Ava’s neat cursive writing was visible through the back of the page. With a heavy breath, Schwartzman opened the note with trembling fingers.

  At the top, PROPERTY OF ANNABELLE SCHWARTZMAN was written in capital printed letters.

  My dear Annabelle,

  It is my greatest hope that I am seated beside you as you read this, perhaps sipping on a glass of Evan Williams (an old one) that we bought to celebrate this newly hatched plan, a way to truly be free of your past. Or, if you have planned an escape without me, that we are toasting to your present—or future—success.

  Though I know your mother wouldn’t approve, spinsterhood has its benefits. You deserve better. Perhaps a little light reading will help. P. D. James was always one of my favorites. Or maybe your tastes take more after your father . . .

  You have my eternal love,

  Ava

  Schwartzman let the letter fall to the hardwood floor and covered her mouth with her hands. The sobs shook through her sternum and rattled in her gut. Ava had been there when she first left Spencer, and she’d been preparing for Schwartzman’s future.

  How had Ava known that Spencer wouldn’t give up?

  Had Schwartzman given something away in those few conversations they had? Something that tipped Ava off to the ways he continued to torture her?

  How long had she been waiting for Schwartzman to come back for her help?

  She swiped the tears off her face and scanned the shelves for P. D. James. Found Unnatural Causes and pulled it out. Tears blurred her vision as she flipped through the pages.

  There was nothing.

  She found another James. Again nothing. And then a third.

  Nothing.

  She returned to the first and went through the book page by page. Then the second and the third. Through the windows, the sky darkened as the sun slipped behind a cloud. A gust of wind made the windows shudder in their panes.

  Shivers rolled across her shoulders and down her arms.

  After your father.

  Her memories of him reading included law journals and the New Yorker, the local papers. Her eye caught a Clive Cussler novel on the bottom shelf. Unlike the others, this was a hardback. She pulled the book out and turned it in her hands, skimmed the back cover blurb—“a deadly game of hunter and hunted.” When she tried to open the book, the pages were glued together. She tested the cover of the book, then the back, but both were sealed.

  The spine was solid. When she flipped it upside down, she saw what looked like a drawer set into the book. She pried it loose. It came out only a half inch or so before it stuck on something. Schwartzman slid a finger into the opening and worked the drawer out of the book.

  “Ava,” she whispered as the drawer came loose.

  The small cardboard drawer was filled with cash. Three separate stacks of bills. Schwartzman pulled the wedged bills out of the compartment and flipped through them. All hundreds. Easily two inches of $100 bills. How many bills in two inches? Three hundred? More? A single stack might be $30,000.

  In the drawer was a second stack of hundreds as thick as the first. The third stack was fifties. Under them a note.

  Be free, Annabelle. Love, Ava

  Beside the word love was the sign for infinity. Love to infinity. It was what her father used to say to her.

  She laughed through sobs.

  With this much money, she could truly vanish. Live in Europe or South America. Never worry about Spencer again.

  She felt slightly panicked. How could she leave everything?

  What everything?

  She had so few friends, and most of them acquaintances because she never felt truly rooted to a place, the shadow of Spencer always just over her shoulder. There was no family other than her mother, who
she had seen for ninety minutes in the past three years.

  Her career. That was what she had. It would mean leaving her career. Giving up her work.

  No. That wasn’t necessarily true. They had medical examiners in other places. It just meant starting again. More schooling, exams, licenses.

  It could be done.

  She stared down at the stacks of cash. How long had this money been hidden here, waiting for her?

  She recalled those two weeks she’d spent with Ava, their correspondence in the months when she first moved to Seattle. Encouragement about finishing medical school. Ava had been the one to recommend the University of Washington in Seattle. She put Schwartzman in contact with someone in admissions. The woman who provided Schwartzman with a list of potential scholarships, who had called her four weeks later to inform her that she was the sole recipient of a generous scholarship. Schwartzman tried to remember the name of it.

  Something clicked. That scholarship had covered her tuition, her books. Meanwhile, Ava had insisted Schwartzman let her pay for living expenses.

  “You can pay me back when you’re a doctor,” she’d said, but she hadn’t allowed that either.

  Every December, Ava had sent a check with ample money for room and board. Surely it was no coincidence that Schwartzman had gotten that scholarship. If there even was a scholarship. Ava had put her through medical school.

  Ava had sent her something each birthday, notes and a gift at Hanukkah, at Rosh Hashanah. Schwartzman had responded with quick phone calls and the rare note, always pressed for time with school and work. Ava always respectful of the crazy schedule.

  On the shelf was another hardback book that looked out of place. This one was James Patterson. Hesitant, she reached out and touched the top of the book. When she pressed down, she felt the same hard material where the pages didn’t give. “Oh, God.”

  She slid the book out and turned it over. Another drawer. She was afraid to look.

  Maybe it was a note, something else from Ava.

  But this one, too, was filled with cash. More hundreds, fifties, some twenties. She returned the drawer to the book and turned it over in her lap, read the book’s description. “On the run from a dangerous criminal . . .”

  Schwartzman held the book to her chest and let her tears fall.

  It was too much.

  How would she have reacted if Ava had given this to her in person? What could she possibly have said? How could you thank someone for this?

  Ava knew.

  She wouldn’t have been able to accept the gift. She would have told herself there was another way.

  Ava was dead now. Spencer had left Schwartzman with no choice but to accept the gift just as her aunt had wanted.

  She stacked the two books and tried to think what to do with them before deciding that they were safest back on the shelf. She spread them out, moving other books in between, and then picked up Ava’s note.

  Through the paper, she saw writing on the back side.

  P.S. I didn’t forget your mother was a reader, too.

  God, was there more?

  Her mother really wasn’t a reader. Schwartzman took books off the shelf, one at a time, thumbed through them for notes or another secret compartment until she had run out of books. The library was filled with law volumes.

  Her mother would not have read those.

  The only things Schwartzman recalled her mother reading were gardening magazines and cookbooks. She straightened the books on the shelves and went downstairs. The kitchen light was gray, the sun’s light muted by storm clouds. The house creaked above her, and she paused to listen.

  The wind. It had to be.

  Cookbooks. She opened cabinets until she found two cookbooks above the microwave. She couldn’t recall if Ava used cookbooks, but the two books were ancient. The Joy of Cooking was as old as she was or older. The other was called The Busy Woman’s Cookbook, and it couldn’t have been much newer.

  Schwartzman set The Joy of Cooking on the countertop, expecting more cash. She flipped open the book.

  Gasping, she slammed the cover closed and checked over her shoulder.

  Ava had hidden a gun in the cookbook. This was what Ava meant by the book her mother read. It had to be. Cash, a gun. All for Schwartzman. All to help her deal with Spencer. The cash might buy her freedom and time, but the gun implied something altogether different.

  An end to the running and hiding.

  Schwartzman pulled down the second cookbook and opened it. Inside was an unopened cardboard box, not much larger than a pack of playing cards. Ammunition.

  Schwartzman closed the book and reopened the first, sneaking another peek at the gun. The book in her arms, she sank onto the floor of the kitchen. The hard kitchen cabinets pressed into her spine as a reminder that this was not a dream. This was real. She had everything she needed to be rid of Spencer MacDonald once and for all.

  Had Ava expected Spencer to come after her? She couldn’t have. While Ava understood the depth of Spencer’s depravity, even she had underestimated how far he would go to get Schwartzman back.

  If Ava kept a gun for self-defense, certainly she would have kept it in her bedroom. Or at least somewhere more accessible than inside a gun-shaped cutout in a cookbook on a shelf in the kitchen.

  Schwartzman closed her eyes.

  Why hadn’t she ever come back? She might have saved Ava from Spencer.

  Instead she’d let this happen. Even if she had nothing to do with Ava’s death, she’d allowed it to occur. Spencer was too clever to get caught by the police. Even if Hal and Harper believed her, how could they catch him? How could they stop him?

  They couldn’t. She squeezed the cookbook tightly against her chest. But she could. She could stop him. She imagined holding the gun to his head. Pictured the head wounds she’d seen in the morgue. She shuddered. The damage to the brain and skull. Right-handed, her bullet would more likely strike the left hemisphere of his brain. The center for language, for logic.

  He would be dead.

  She pictured the blood splatter from a head wound.

  No. She couldn’t imagine pulling the trigger.

  Maybe there was a way to find something in his house, some evidence to prove that he was responsible for Ava’s death. Surely something there would prove his guilt. She could find it.

  And if she couldn’t?

  She lowered the cookbook, cracked the spine, and let the gun fall into her lap. It was murder. Premeditated murder. She touched the gun, fingered the ridges on the grip. A flash of heat, excitement, adrenaline. It would mean the rest of her life in prison. But where was she now, if not in prison? Spencer’s prison. South Carolina had capital punishment. Death?

  You’re not living.

  She lifted the gun and extended her arm. Imagined lining up the sight on the flesh between Spencer’s eyes. She would make certain that Ava was Spencer’s last victim.

  She would finally be free of the fear.

  37

  Charleston, South Carolina

  Schwartzman locked herself in the downstairs den, the only room on the main floor without windows other than the tiny powder room. She debated using her phone to do research. Her search history could be used against her if she was caught, but what choice did she have? She could go to the library or a public café, but not with the gun. In the end, urgency won out. Her first search request was for the date the last person was killed by capital punishment in South Carolina: 2011. That was promising. Only forty-three total since 1985. Surely, then, odds of a life in prison were higher than getting death. Lethal injection was the method used most recently. That would be preferable to electrocution.

  It took almost no time to confirm her suspicions about Ava’s gun. She recognized it as a revolver and from its size, guessed it was a .38 special. She’d seen enough of them in the files of cases she worked. The .38 had been the standard service weapon for most police departments from the 1920s to the 1990s. Even after departments replaced the .38
with pistols—San Francisco used the Sig Sauer P226, New York a Glock model—the .38 remained the most used backup weapon for police officers. Dating back to 1898, the revolver was favored for its small size—it could easily be concealed in an ankle holster under a pant leg—and for its reliability.

  Unlike pistols, revolvers almost never jammed.

  With newspaper spread across the rug, Schwartzman followed the instructions from a YouTube video to clean the gun, substituting the WD-40 for gun oil. The gun only had to work once, and everything she read online suggested that WD-40 was used extensively in the firearms industry. When that was done, she burned the paper in the fireplace, packed the gun back into the book, and replaced the book on the shelf in the kitchen while she worked her way through the rest of the house.

  Other than the gun and the ammo, there was no sign that Ava ever owned a weapon. No paperwork in her files, no cleaning supplies anywhere, nothing with the NRA logo on it. The model number on the .38 dated it back to the mid-1940s, decades before gun registry laws were introduced in 1968.

  Even if the gun was registered, matching ballistics required the gun and the bullet. That was easy to fix; Schwartzman would simply dump the gun. As her final act, Schwartzman took pictures of everything in Ava’s house with her phone. She hoped to come back, but if she couldn’t, she wanted to know what was there, exactly as she’d found it.

  Using a duffel bag from under Ava’s bed, Schwartzman packed up a change of clothes, the two hardback books from the bedroom, and the two cookbooks from the kitchen. The only other thing she took was the black-and-white photograph of her grandparents, her father, and Ava when Ava was maybe five or six and her father eight or nine.

  It was nearly two when she left the house, loading the duffel into the trunk. She wondered if Spencer was watching, but it made no difference at that point. She drove straight to the gas station, filled the tank of the rental car, and stopped at a gourmet deli for a baguette and cheese, grapes and almonds, a bottle of pinot noir, and two bottles of water. It could as easily pass for a single woman’s grocery list as sustenance for a road trip.