Death in a Difficult Position

by Diana Killian

  “It’s not snowing anymore. And we’ve still got a good two to three hours of daylight.”

  A.J. groaned.

  Jake’s smile was grimly sympathetic. “I could go on my own but I might not be able to find the house. And if we wait till tomorrow reporters are going to be wandering over the park.”

  “And this isn’t something we want advertised.”

  “Nope. For several excellent reasons.”

  A.J. sighed. “I can’t believe I’m even considering this. If I agree to lead you back there, will you give me a foot massage tonight?”

  “I’ll be happy to massage anything you like.”

  A.J. expelled a long, weary breath. “I’m going to hold you to that.” She reached for her jacket. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

  Police vehicles still crowded the little makeshift parking lot when A.J. and Jake pulled up beneath the crooked pitch pines.

  Being two counties away from home, they were far out of Jake’s jurisdiction. He got out and went to have a word with the Burlington County Sheriff’s Department officer in charge. In a couple of minutes he was back to the car where A.J. sat waiting.

  “The State and Park Police are still combing the area, but we’ve got permission to hike in.”

  “Damn.”

  Jake laughed. “Come on. We’ll be back before you know it.”

  And, in fact, they did make excellent time back up the soggy road, passing a number of troopers as they walked through the slushy drizzle.

  “There it is.” A.J. pointed to the last boarded-up structure in the straggling row that seemed to materialize out of the mist. “It’s the one with the big yard behind the stone wall.”

  They went through the opening in the wall. This time A.J. spotted an iron gate lying rusting in the tall weeds.

  “What made you pick this place?” Jake asked.

  “It was the first one we saw in reasonably good condition. The skies just opened up and we went for the first shelter that looked like it wouldn’t fall in on us.”

  “No one suggested this building specifically?”

  “It was really Simon’s call. But I don’t think Simon is in the pay of the Jersey Devil.”

  Jake, having met Simon many times, snorted.

  The porch boards squeaked noisily beneath his boots. A.J. followed more slowly. The hair on the back of her neck lifted at the memory of that creepy feeling of looking into darkness and seeing something looking back up at her.

  “Which room?” Jake called.

  “Down the hall and to the right. There’s a big hole in the floor, so be careful.”

  Jake’s mutter was lost as he moved down the hallway.

  A.J.’s nostrils twitched at the scent of moldering decay. She stared around the room, remembering back to the morning, trying to think if there had been any warning of what was coming. She could think of nothing. Everyone had seemed perfectly normal.

  Directing her flashlight through the black box of the doorway, she followed Jake down the hall. She found him kneeling beside the gaping hole in the floor, slowly sweeping his own flashlight from side to side.

  A.J. joined him, adding her beam to the darkness. The light illuminated broken chunks of concrete, wooden crates, smashed furniture, and what looked like a small pine tree growing in the wet, black earth.

  “See anything?” Jake asked.

  “Happily, no.”

  “I mean, do you see anything you might have mistaken earlier for . . .”

  He didn’t complete the thought. A.J. pointed her flashlight beam to the right. “It was standing over there in the shadows. I mean, supposing I saw anything at all. Simon called to me, and I turned away. When I looked back, it was gone.”

  “Gone? Or maybe just the way you were holding the light had changed?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I don’t believe the Jersey Devil was hiding under the house, so I’m perfectly okay with us agreeing that it was just the way the light fell.”

  Jake grunted and rose. “I might as well take a look.”

  “What?” Even A.J. winced at that note. She tried to moderate her alarm. “No. Way. No way are you going down there!”

  “It’s just a cellar. Hell, I could jump down.”

  “Have you missed the fact that half of this building fell in on that cellar?”

  “Relax. If there’s any danger I’ll stop.”

  He was already walking back to the hallway. A.J. followed. “Why? Why do you have to go down there? There’s nothing down there.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about, right?”

  “I mean nothing you need to check out. The roof could fall in on you. There could be snakes or black widow spiders or-or poison gas.”

  “Poison gas?” The grin Jake threw her was very white in her flashlight beam.

  A.J. could only follow as he went outside and walked around the building to a pair of loosely hinged storm cellar doors.

  “Not locked,” Jake observed.

  “Is that the good news or the bad news?”

  Jake didn’t answer. The doors opened with a hideous screech. The cellar seemed to exhale a gust of dank, musty air.

  “What died in there?” A.J. looked at Jake. He shook his head.

  They shone their flashlights into the gloom and spotlighted a flight of rickety-looking wooden stairs.

  Jake commented, “No dust.”

  “You’re kidding, right? What do you call this stuff we’re breathing? Besides unhealthy.”

  “On the steps.”

  A.J. followed Jake’s indication and saw immediately what he meant. Though the steps were dirty, there was no untouched layer of dust. There was no real dust at all. The steps looked as though they were used on a fairly regular basis.

  “Maybe the wind blowing through the cracks in the door keeps them clean?”

  Jake made a spluttering sound. “You’re not going to be winning the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval this year, I can tell you that right now.”

  “You know what I—” A.J. broke off as Jake started cautiously down the steps. “Break a leg,” she muttered. “You probably will if you insist on going down there.”

  Jake didn’t reply.

  In a few seconds he was at the bottom and then he moved from her view, though she could still hear him, hear the sounds of him shifting broken junk out of his path.

  Then those sounds faded, too.

  A.J. looked around uneasily. The woods were crawling with law enforcement, and yet it suddenly seemed very quiet and very isolated. The sky looked white and the trees stood out like ink silhouettes.

  It began to rain again. The rain dripped from the eaves overhead and into the cellar.

  “Unfortunately the ground is too uneven to make out footprints or hoofprints or any prints.” Jake reappeared. He was holding something, a reddish scrap of material. Material or fur? The hair on the back of A.J.’s neck stood up.

  “What did you find?” she asked as Jake reached the top of the stairs.

  He held the scrap out. It looked like a patch of hair on very thin rubber.

  A.J. wrinkled her nose. “What’s that?”

  “At a guess?” Jake’s eyes were very green in the fading light. “I’d say it’s a piece of someone’s Jersey Devil costume.”

  Seventeen

  By the time A.J. and Jake got back to Burlington General Hospital they learned that Oriel had been released.

  “How did she get home?” A.J. asked at the desk. “Her car is still at the park.”

  The nurse couldn’t answer that question and was too busy with the usual weekend wounded to worry about it. She smiled apologetically and went to answer the summons of a harassed-looking doctor.

  “She could have called a cab,” Jake pointed out. “She could have called a friend.”

  “I guess that’s true. I just feel responsible.” A.J. smothered a yawn. She was so tired all she wanted to do was find someplace warm, curl up, and sleep for a thousand years.

&nbs
p; “If you want to stop by and check on her, we can do that,” Jake said as they walked back to the hospital parking lot.

  A.J. stopped walking and eyed him suspiciously. “Oh really?”

  He nodded.

  “Since when?”

  “Since when what?”

  “Since when are you so agreeable to the idea of my sleuthing that you’ll actually let me tag along?”

  Jake shrugged.

  “Ha! I know what you’re up to. You want to question Oriel and you want to use me for camouflage.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. Your presence might help put Oriel at ease. Plus, you’re trying to help Lily, right? We might find out something we both want to know.”

  Lily. It seemed like a million years ago since she had agreed to help Lily. In fact, Friday seemed like a million years ago. This had been the longest weekend of her life—and apparently it wasn’t over yet.

  “I guess so,” A.J. said. “I’ll have to follow you in my car. It’s easier than trying to figure out how to pick it up tomorrow.”

  “Sure. We can leave your car at Sacred Balance and I’ll drop you off tomorrow on my way to work.”

  A.J. agreed and pulled her keys from her pocket.

  The drive back to Stillbrook took a little more than an hour and a half, and by the time they pulled up in front of Oriel Goode’s home, it was dark.

  The Goodes had rented one of the oldest and loveliest historical homes on the outskirts of Stillbrook. It was a charming blue gray Victorian with a pink shingled mansard roof and gobs of gingerbread trim. Fake gaslight lamps dotted the pretty front garden.

  Lights shone cheerily from behind draperies and wood smoke flavored the damp night air as A.J. and Jake walked up the rose tree-lined walk.

  A.J.’s phone chirped before they reached the front door. She checked the number.

  “Oh my gosh. It’s Andy. I never called him back about Thanksgiving.” She accepted the call. “Hey!”

  “I’m starting to take this personally,” Andy replied.

  “I know. And as much as I hate to say it, I can’t talk right now either.”

  “You’re going to have to do better than that. And why are you whispering? Are you in hiding?”

  “If I was, asking me all these questions would not be helpful.”

  “True. One question only. Are you coming to Thanksgiving dinner?”

  The front porch light went on, bathing Jake and herself in waxy light.

  “Yes,” A.J. answered, her eye on the door, which parted a cautious crack.

  “Is Jake coming with you?”

  “Yes. And that’s two questions.”

  “Three o’clock on Thursday. Good-bye, A.J.”

  “Good-bye, Andy.” A.J. pocketed her phone as Oriel opened the door the rest of the way.

  She wore a pink dressing gown. One arm rested in a sling. She gazed at them doubtfully.

  Jake glanced at A.J. Her cue, it seemed. She summoned a smile that she hoped conveyed the right mix of friendliness and concern. “Hi, Oriel. Are you all right? We were worried when we heard you’d left the hospital.”

  “I can’t stand hospitals.” Oriel looked sallow in the porch light. Her face was drawn, her eyes ringed in dark circles.

  “I hope you don’t mind our stopping by,” A.J. said. “Do you have anyone staying with you?”

  “No.” Oriel hesitated, her gaze moving from A.J. to Jake.

  “We’ll only stay a moment,” A.J. assured her.

  Oriel stepped back, wordlessly, reluctantly inviting them in. “I’m all right on my own. I was lucky. A few inches farther in, and I could have lost my arm.”

  A.J. shuddered inwardly at the thought as they followed Oriel down an entry hall painted a sunny yellow. Framed prints of Van Gogh sunflowers lined the wall.

  Oriel led them to an elegant room where a TV was turned to a reality show and a nest of blankets and pillows covered a long plaid sofa. There was a mostly untouched TV dinner on the coffee table.

  Oriel lowered herself to the sofa and pulled the blankets over her lap. “Are you here to question me about the shooting? I didn’t see anything.”

  “Wrong police force,” Jake said. “I’m not here in an official capacity. A.J. thought we should stop by to make sure you were okay.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize you two were . . .”

  A.J. sat in one of the chintz-covered chairs. Jake followed suit. “I guess I take it for granted everyone knows. But you’re still relatively new to Stillbrook. Isn’t there any kind of household staff or anyone here to look after you?”

  She wasn’t merely making conversation. Oriel did look haggard and wretched.

  “I don’t need anyone. To be honest, I prefer to be alone.”

  She rubbed her forehead tiredly. “I don’t know if this makes sense, but having people around me reminds me more that David is gone than being on my own.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Oriel acknowledged A.J.’s words with a tight nod. “It wasn’t a perfect marriage, but I don’t suppose there is any such thing.”

  What was there to say to that? Some marriages were obviously worse than others, and in her opinion Oriel’s had been in that category. A.J. knew what Jake wanted her to say, but as she had found on other occasions, sleuthing wasn’t a particularly compassionate pastime.

  It was left to Jake to speak up. “A.J. has been telling me about some of the more eventful moments of your retreat. Did you happen to see anything last night?”

  “Last night feels like another lifetime.” When neither Jake nor A.J. responded, Oriel sighed. “You mean that kid yelling about the Jersey Devil peeking into her tent?”

  “Sure. That—or anything that struck you as suspicious.”

  “No. Of course not. There was nothing to see.”

  “You sound very sure of that. You must be aware of the report of an attempted break-in filed by your husband shortly before his death.”

  Oriel’s expression gave nothing away. “I know what you’re going to say. That it sounds too fantastic to be true. Isn’t that right?”

  Jake’s tone was neutral. “I’m not challenging the fact that your husband saw something. I’m just wondering—naturally—whether he saw what he thought he saw.”

  “The Jersey Devil.”

  “Right.”

  “I understand why David’s story seems strange to you, but if you believe in angels and miracles—and my husband did—then it makes sense to also believe in demons.”

  “Did you see this demon trying to get in through the side window?” Jake’s expression gave nothing away. But then, neither did Oriel’s.

  “No.”

  “Did anyone in the house see it besides your husband?”

  “No.” Oriel’s eyes narrowed. “There was no one else in the house. David wasn’t a fanciful man. In fact, in many ways he was one of the most practical people I ever met. He was troubled by what he saw that night—and by the other reports of this devil or demon or whatever it was. He saw it as a sign, and he was trying to make people understand what it meant.”

  Jake nodded noncommittally. “Can you think of any reason someone might wish to harm you?”

  “Me?” Oriel seemed genuinely taken aback. “No. What happened today couldn’t have been directed at me personally.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Well, it just couldn’t have been. There would be no reason for anyone to wish me harm.”

  “What about the person who killed your husband? Couldn’t he or she wish you harm?”

  Oriel stared as though she didn’t understand the question. “Why should she?” she asked at last. “I’m not standing in her way. Whatever she misguidedly blamed David for would not apply to me.”

  “Did you know your husband had been married before?”

  A.J. hadn’t been expecting Jake to go for the jugular. Not while Oriel was still on the sick list. Oriel’s eyelashes fluttered in confusion at the sudden change in tack. “Yes.”

/>   “Do you know what happened to his wife?”

  “Yes. She died.” Oriel’s throat moved. “It was a terrible tragedy. David used to say she had been the love of his life.”

  A.J. couldn’t help it. “He said that to you?” They could add tactlessness to all the rest of David Goode’s sins.

  Oriel nodded, her gaze pinned on Jake’s face as though she knew the worst was yet to come.

  “Do you know how your husband’s first wife died? At least, we think she was his first wife. Maybe not,” Jake persisted.

  “W-what do you mean?”

  “Do you know how Jill Smithy-Powell died?”

  “Who?”

  A.J. felt very sorry for Oriel. She understood that these were questions that needed to be asked, but she couldn’t help feeling that Jake might have waited until Oriel was stronger—and that he could have broken the news more gently. She didn’t like knowing that she was a party to this, although Jake hadn’t had to twist her arm to get her to come along.

  “Your husband’s previous wife. The Los Angeles heiress Jill Smithy-Powell. Your husband was a suspect in her homicide.”

  Oriel went so white A.J. was afraid she was going to faint. Jake must have thought the same thing, because he started to rise. Oriel waved him off sharply. Her face twisted, but she got it under control.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My husband’s first wife drowned. She died in a boating accident.”

  That hard smile on Jake’s face reminded A.J. of when they’d first met, when she had been a suspect in his murder investigation. Being on the receiving end of that smile was not a pleasant thing. Oriel was still blinking and biting her lip, trying to make sense of what he was telling her, trying to avoid accepting the certainty in his face.

  “Drowned, huh? Well, she was found in the bathtub. But she’d been strangled. Your husband’s first wife was heiress to the Smithy Yacht fortune.”

  “That’s . . . not . . . possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is. Your husband’s fingerprints match those of Maxwell Powell, Jill’s husband. Powell disappeared around the time of his wife’s death.”