Table of Contents
Cover
Further Titles by Betsy Thornton
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Further Titles by Betsy Thornton
The Chloe Newcombe Mysteries
THE COWBOY RIDES AWAY
HIGH LONESOME ROAD
GHOST TOWNS
DEAD FOR THE WINTER
A SONG FOR YOU
DREAM QUEEN
Stanalones
A WHOLE NEW LIFE
The Kate Waters Mysteries
EMPTY HOUSES *
* available from Severn House
EMPTY HOUSES
Betsy Thornton
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2015
in Great Britain and the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
Trade paperback edition first published 2015 in Great
Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2015 by Betsy Thornton.
The right of Betsy Thornton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Thornton, Betsy author.
Empty houses. – (Kate Waters series)
1. Murder–Investigation–Fiction. 2. Arizona–Fiction.
3. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title II. Series
813.6-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8498-5 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-601-5 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-652-6 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,
Stirlingshire, Scotland.
For Alix Jane
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks again to my weapons expert Tom Glass for his always helpful advice. Any weaponry errors I may have made have been entirely my fault.
Work, for the night is coming.
—Sacred hymn
ONE
The place was a beach town near LA; the event was lunch at La Casita, a Mexican restaurant Harry and Kate went to from time to time. Tiled floor, wooden tables and red vinyl booths. Serapes and sombreros on the walls. Kate particularly liked the caldo de queso. She was from back east and had only been in California for three months. She’d had a good job as the director of a community arts center in Vermont, but it had faded to almost nothing along with the economy until it was, in fact, nothing at all. And during this time her long-term relationship with the sculptor Rick Church had – well, she could hardly stand to think about it much.
She’d met Harry Light, a California poet, five months ago back in Vermont at a poetry workshop she’d organized, part of a series. Kate wrote poems from time to time, and he singled out a recent one of hers about the impending break-up of her long-term relationship to read at the workshop: Mother-Riddled Men are Engines of Pure Regret.
As he read her poem out loud to the workshop group, his voice had picked up not only every nuance intended by Kate but also found even more she hadn’t realized were there. He was so dynamic, seductive, so ready to show emotion.
They had a fling. After all, at this point, even though Rick was the owner of the house where they lived, he was spending four nights of the week somewhere else. Her name was Hannah.
Harry had gone back to California but called Kate several times. He commiserated with her about Rick and Hannah. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you’re better off without him. He doesn’t deserve you. Get away from the whole situation. Your job’s gone, so why stay? Come to California. We don’t have all that—’ his voice turned scornful – ‘weather.’
So she did. She got in her old Honda and drove cross-country to be with Harry Light: poet. He’d assured her there were good jobs in California, he knew all the right people, but so far nothing had transpired.
‘Patient,’ he’d always say, ‘you have to be patient.’
Harry Light, poet, was dressed in black: black jeans, black shirt – a hint of the fifties and Kerouac in the cut of the shirt. Now he looked at his watch impatiently, then looked around the crowded restaurant with disgust. ‘So?’ he said to Kate. ‘So?’
‘So, what?’ she said.
‘This was a lousy idea to come here. I should never have listened to you.’
Kate couldn’t recall it being her idea, but she arranged her face to look pleasant and non-committal. She refolded her napkin then unfolded it again. ‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘Why not?’ Harry said in fake astonishment. ‘Why not? I see people here – customers. I see lots and lots of customers, but there’s one thing I don’t see.’
Kate’s shoulder and back muscles tensed up. ‘What’s that?’
‘A waitress.’ He smashed his fist on the table, making Kate jump. Several people at other tables looked over. ‘A goddamn waitress.’ He looked around the room. His voice rose. ‘Are we fucking lepers here?’
Harry smashed his fist down on the table again. A man appeared suddenly behind his shoulder, a fit, muscular-looking man. Harry was not, after all, in the best of shape. ‘Sir?’ the man said.
Kate knew what was coming. Reaching into her purse, she pulled out her sunglasses. Ray-Bans, big and dark.
‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask y
ou to leave,’ the man said.
‘Fine.’ Harry threw down his napkin and stood up. ‘That’s fine. We were about to, anyway.’
Expression obscured by her sunglasses, Kate followed Harry through the swinging door.
Outside in the warm California sun, he said disgustedly, ‘Now we’ll have to go to some crummy fast food place; it’s too late for anything else. Thanks a lot, Kate.’
Turning, he headed for his car, but Kate stayed where she was.
Harry stopped halfway and looked back. He saw: a fortiesh woman in big sunglasses. She was tall and auburn-haired with a little more make-up than his students wore. She saw that despite the fact that he told her he loved her almost every day, the expression on his face as he looked at her now appeared to be pure loathing.
This was what she had discovered about him. There were two Harrys – Harry Light and Harry Dark. Tomorrow, or even later this evening, Harry Light would show up again as if nothing had happened.
But right now it was Dark Harry.
‘Come on, come on, I don’t have all day,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a workshop at one thirty.’
‘I don’t want to go to a fast food place,’ Kate said.
‘Then where the fuck do you want to go, little miss spoiled brat!’ he shouted.
‘Nowhere. I’m not really hungry.’ She kept her voice light, airy. She was trembling now but didn’t let it show in her voice, out of some intuition that if he felt her fear, like some snarling dog, he would attack. ‘I’ll just walk back to the house. I feel like walking, anyway.’
Kate walked the three blocks back from the Mexican restaurant to the pleasant wood-frame house painted white with green trim that belonged to Harry Light. The spark that had brought her here from so far away was gone, but down the block the Pacific Ocean still glittered.
Inside she went to the bedroom closet and took down her suitcase. Most of her stuff was back in Vermont, in the attic of a friend; all she had in the world right now were the clothes hanging in a line in the closet and in one drawer of the chest of drawers, a few books, and a jar of raspberry jam, dated some years ago, made by her mother and stepfather Bill from the raspberries that grew in the patch behind their house.
She wanted to vanish into thin air – the thought of a farewell scene gave her the creeps. So many things set Harry off: inattentive clerks in stores, people who drove too slow or too fast, bad service in restaurants, inattentive colleagues at work.
Who knew what her leaving like this would do?
Because she’d found the gun.
It wasn’t even hidden, not really, just in the bottom drawer of his bedside table. She’d opened the drawer, looking for something else, and there it was. Was it loaded? How could you tell? She had little familiarity with guns – it might just as well have been a bomb. She was afraid to even touch it for fear it might go off.
But it was best to leave a note. Otherwise he might think she’d been kidnapped, had left involuntarily (such ego he had!) and involve the police. Well, maybe not, but you never knew.
Too much, she wrote. Had to leave.
Suddenly, she had a little picture of Harry after one of his workshops – she’d driven over to surprise him – talking in what seemed to her an overly intimate way to one of his students, a beautiful young woman named Anna Marie Romero. It brought back that memory of Rick, her ex, saying earnestly, ‘We didn’t plan on this happening. Hannah really admires you, Kate. She feels terrible about all of this.’
She didn’t ask Harry about Anna Marie because what would be the point? She’d already made her decision to leave him and leave him very soon.
She paused at the door on her way out, for a second imagining herself in the kitchen, smashing all the cups, the plates, the bowls; throwing the contents of the fridge on the floor in a soggy mess; then on to Harry’s office, his row of arty chapbooks full of crummy poems, everything in his desk, all ripped to bits.
But no. She got in the car, texted her artist friend Dakota in Dudley, Arizona who had promised to put her up. Harry didn’t know Dakota, or where she lived.
On my way.
Hurry, hurry, hurry. The first hour or so, tense, she kept glancing at the rear-view mirror in case he’d come back early, seen her leave, was following her. But by the time she reached Yuma, Arizona, she was more relaxed. The sun was going down in a spectacular display of orange, indigo and purple as she pulled up to the window at a McDonald’s and ordered a Big Mac, fries and a Diet Coke.
She parked her car by the kiddie play area, got out and sat on a bench near a dinosaur statue not far from her car. As she ate the greasy salty food, she watched the cars, the big trucks rocketing by, all going seventy-five, eighty miles an hour on the I-10 Freeway.
Her phone chimed. Dakota.
‘Where are you now?’
‘Yuma.’
‘Three hours away. Call me when you get to town and I’ll guide you to my house. Listen, I wanted to tell you. I think I got you a job – you said you’d take anything, remember?’
‘Ah,’ said Kate.
‘It’s at the local food co-op. It’s – it’s not like just a grocery store. It’s political and stuff.’
‘Why not? Sure.’
‘See you soon, then.’
Afterwards, Kate sat for while longer. The piquant smell of burning gasoline filled the air, the night was balmy, the sky indigo and full of stars. Oddly in the dark, lit up the way it was, the McDonald’s resembled a fantasy house from a book of fairy tales. How had this happened? Everything that had seemed permanent in her life, vanishing just like that: her job, her relationship. But wait, didn’t disasters come in threes? Harry, did Harry count as number three? Maybe it was true, things were taking a turn for the better. After all she would be in a new place, a town where no one would be gossiping about Rick leaving her for another woman, that hint of glee because, before the economy went bust, she had been quite successful at her job – a person of note in the little Vermont town of Rustic.
Now she was nowhere, a woman close to forty, thoughts jumbling in her head, phrases from her possibly useless education, from her life with her mother, who read a lot and had lived in Paris as a child, and these things seemed to have no connection – ou sont les neiges d’antant and, I am dying, Egypt, dying.
Her cellphone pinged, a text coming in. More from Dakota? No, Harry. She opened it. It read:
Mistake.
TWO
Malcolm MacGregor, a detective with the Mesa Arizona police department, had lived with his wife Cindy in an older subdivision in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, for the last fifteen years, until a few months ago when Cindy had checked into a motel nearby, wrote a note saying, I’m so sorry, Mac, swallowed a whole bunch of pills, and died.
It was a shock but not a surprise. She’d been fighting depression for years. Had he not met Cindy in college, fallen for her badly, and then later married her while he was in law school, he might have finished and become an attorney like his brother Ian, instead of a detective with Mesa PD, but saving Cindy took all his psychic energy.
Now some people might say it had been for nothing, quitting law school to save Cindy. Look where he was now. But he liked police work; it had taken him away from Cindy’s problems in a way that law school could not. And he’d been handling her death as well as could be expected, hadn’t he?
Okay. He was okay.
He worked hard at work, and at home he kept busy. When, during a rare early rain, he discovered the leak in the roof of the guest bedroom (where Cindy kept the expensive exercise equipment that she never used), that very next weekend he hauled the half-full five-gallon bucket of roofing tar out of the shed in back, set the bucket by the ladder already in place against the side of the one-story stucco house and wiped his forehead – it was hot.
It was always hot in Mesa. He should have tackled this job earlier in the day, instead of finishing re-grouting the tiles in the bathroom, which had needed to be done for the last ten years. He knew that now, bu
t it was something he should have known the minute he got up – do outside chores early in the morning. It wasn’t that he didn’t know things any more, he would just forget them temporarily.
The roof sloped, ridged on the front and sides so that all the water drained to the back. When he climbed up he saw that the honeysuckle vine in the back yard had grown up on to the roof. He would have to prune it quite a bit before he could patch the leak. He climbed back down. He was already tired, in a way of being tired that had nothing to do with the fatigue of overexertion.
People kept saying to him: take some time off, relax. That was exactly the last thing he wanted to do – what he wanted to do was to go to work and stay there, preferably sleep at his desk at night in his office, bathe down the hall in the restroom. Never go back to this carnival fun-house where ghosts popped out of the walls when you least expected them.
Malcolm went back into the shed, brushing aside some insect – probably, with his luck, a brown recluse spider – and found the pruning saw. He paused. Maybe clippers would do the job better. He found the clippers, carried both tools outside, climbed back up the ladder. His plan was to fix everything that needed fixing, then put the house on the market. With the economy the way it was, it was the worst possible time to sell, but at least he had a plan.
Fix up house, move to some apartment closer to work.
Certainly not take time off. For what? But if he did take time off, his brother Ian kept saying he could go stay in his wife Sally’s investment house, down in Dudley, Arizona, a tourist town not far from the Mexican border. Maybe do a little work on that house for the rent, or maybe even not. Whatever. Just get rid of old Malcolm so we don’t have to see him all the time and worry about him.
Empty Houses Page 1