Death Night

by Ritter, Todd

  “I need you to check out Oak Knoll Cemetery,” she told him.

  “What am I looking for?” the deputy said.

  “Disturbed graves. Signs of recent digging. Anything suspicious. I’ll meet you back at the station in twenty minutes.”

  Once Carl signed off, Kat started the car and flicked on the stereo. The coffee from the diner had worn off, and a postcaffeine crash was coming on. She needed a great song to get her energy up. What she got was “Disco Inferno” by the Trammps. Not great, even for disco, but appropriate. So Kat cranked up the volume and sang along. By the time the song ended, she was in her driveway.

  She checked her watch as she got out of the car and crossed the front yard. She couldn’t stay long. Fifteen minutes tops. She just wanted to check on James and arrange for a different babysitter, if necessary. Finding child care on short notice was one of the toughest aspects of being a single mom.

  Inside, she found her son awake and sitting on the living room couch. Scooby, his beagle, was curled up next to him. The TV was on, broadcasting one of those obnoxiously bright cartoons that were a staple of Saturday mornings. The animated creatures arguing with each other were easier to take with eight hours of sleep under her belt. Without it, they just seemed shrill and spastic.

  “Hey, Little Bear,” Kat said, tousling James’s hair. “You’re up early.”

  “I couldn’t sleep.” He yawned for added emphasis. “Not without you in the house.”

  Kat felt a familiar twinge of guilt in the pit of her stomach. It happened whenever she realized her job was affecting her son’s home life. Making it worse was James’s condition. Although he was more functional and self-reliant than many other children with Down syndrome, he still needed extra attention. When Kat couldn’t provide it, he often got sullen as a result.

  During the Olmstead case, for instance, James’s behavior had reached new and frustrating levels. When he was born, a pediatrician who specialized in children with Down syndrome said they tended to wear their hearts on their sleeves. James had decided to wear his on his fists. The result was a suspension from school, a very long grounding, and a nagging worry that more behavioral problems waited just down the road.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I had to go to work. Something bad happened.”

  She skipped over what exactly that bad thing was. She tried to shield James as best she could from the perils of her job. Still, she suspected he knew more than he let on. A mother could only have so many brushes with death before kids at school started to talk.

  “I know,” James said. “Lou told me.”

  Hearing her name, Louella van Sickle swept into the living room carrying breakfast on a tray. Professionally, she was the police station’s dispatcher. Personally, she was James’s surrogate grandmother, always willing to watch him when Kat was tied up with work. Lou was the person Kat had called at one in the morning when the museum fire broke out.

  “Your couch is lumpy,” she announced. “I didn’t get a wink of sleep.”

  “That’s funny,” Kat replied. “Neither did I.”

  Lou set the tray on the coffee table. The meal she had prepared—scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast—gave Kat another guilt twinge. Most mornings, she just let James pour his own cold cereal.

  “So how bad was the fire?”

  Kat looked at James, who ate with his eyes glued to the TV, blindly guiding a forkful of eggs into his mouth. She gestured for Lou to join her in the kitchen.

  “Listen,” she said once James was out of earshot. “It’s more than a fire. Constance Bishop was murdered in the museum last night.”

  Lou excelled at three things—gossip, offering unwarranted advice about Kat’s personal life, and being totally unflappable. Yet the news of Constance’s death turned her face a chalky white.

  “Jesus,” she said. “I thought this town was done with all that.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How are you holding up? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Kat said. “Just tired. And busy.”

  She briefly told Lou about the rest of her night. Fire. Corpse. Skeleton. She left out the fact that Henry Goll was back in town. That was information too juicy for Lou not to share.

  “I need to head back to the museum soon,” Kat finally said. “There’s still a lot of stuff to do there. So I was wondering—”

  “If I could watch James the rest of the day?”

  Kat nodded slowly. She had asked this favor of Lou on dozens of occasions. She knew that one of these days, Louella van Sickle was going to tell her no. She hoped today wasn’t that day.

  “Of course I will,” Lou replied. “Although Al will be disappointed. He wanted to drive up to the Sands in Bethlehem today. Said he was in the mood for some blackjack.”

  Lou’s husband had been bitten by the blackjack bug as soon as state law was changed to allow legalized gambling. He had plenty of places to choose from. Each year, it seemed, a new casino was popping up somewhere in Pennsylvania. From the way Lou talked, all Al van Sickle wanted to do on the weekends was head to the tables.

  “I owe you one,” Kat said, knowing full well she still owed Lou for previous babysitting favors. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. Hopefully just until the afternoon.”

  “I hope so, too, for your sake. You look like the walking dead.”

  “I probably smell like it, too.” Kat sniffed her uniform, which was the same one she had worn the day before. It reeked of smoke. And sweat. And desperation, which, while technically odorless, was something Kat had smelled on suspects and first dates alike. “I’m going to take a quick shower. Go check on James.”

  “Aye, aye, captain. Any other orders?”

  “He has a science project due on Monday,” Kat said, hedging and hopeful. “You could help him with that?”

  Lou shooed her out of the kitchen with a flap of her hands. “Now you’re just pushing it.”

  Kat hurried upstairs. The shower—cold and quick—perked her up a bit. So did a clean uniform that didn’t reek. Then it was back downstairs, where James and Lou had pushed aside their empty breakfast plates for a glass jar and a book of matches. The sight caused her to halt at the bottom of the stairs.

  “What are you two doing?”

  James didn’t take his eyes off the jar. “My science project.”

  “We’re learning about oxygen,” Lou said, picking up the book of matches.

  She lit one before tilting the jar, laying the match at the bottom.

  “Now what do you think will happen once you put the lid on the jar?” she asked James.

  “I don’t know.” James stared at the flame, a triangle of orange and yellow that danced just beyond the glass. “The jar will fill with smoke?”

  “Put the lid on and find out.”

  James began to twist the lid onto the top of the jar. He didn’t even make it a full rotation before the lit match blinked out.

  “What happened?”

  “You cut off the flow of oxygen,” Lou said. “Fire needs air to burn. When it doesn’t get it, it goes out.”

  Because he was eleven—and because he was a boy—James found this trick fascinating. Kat could see the astonished gleam in his eyes from across the room as he asked, “Can I try it again?”

  “Not so fast.” Kat at last moved from the stairs to the coffee table, where she pocketed the matchbook. “I think you should come up with a different science project.”

  “But, Mom—”

  Kat cut him off with one of those sharp glances only attained through years of motherhood. “Educational or not, I don’t like the idea of you playing with matches. Especially today. Now give me a good-bye hug. I need to go back to work.”

  After James gave her a halfhearted embrace and Lou assured her everything would be fine, Kat trudged back to her Crown Vic and headed to the police station. As usual, she took the long way, rolling down the streets to make sure things were mostly in order. They appeared to be, although it was still early. Once
townsfolk woke up to the news that Constance Bishop was dead, Kat had a feeling Perry Hollow would be buzzing with activity. Tragedies did that to small towns.

  She pulled into the police station parking lot at the same time Carl did. They got out of their cars simultaneously and walked to the station’s front door.

  “Oak Knoll Cemetery is all clear,” Carl said. “No disturbed graves. Nothing suspicious. Just a bunch of souls now with the Lord.”

  That was both good and bad news. While Kat was pleased to hear that no one had defiled the graveyard, it meant Constance had found the skeleton somewhere else. Somewhere a lot harder to pinpoint.

  “You feeling up for some overtime today?”

  Carl, who was thirty but didn’t look a day over fifteen, made up in eagerness what he lacked in skill. “I’m on this case for as long as you are, Chief.”

  “Good,” Kat said, nodding her approval. “While I’m over at the museum, I want you to search our records and see if any of the town’s firefighters have a rap sheet. Arson. Property destruction. Things like that.”

  Carl paused at the door, holding it halfway open. “Every firefighter?”

  He was referring to Boyd Jansen, one of the most decent and dependable men Kat had the pleasure of knowing. There was little to no chance Dutch would ever torch a building. But Larry Sheldon was an expert on arson. If he said firefighters were the prime suspects, then there had to be a good reason for it.

  “Yes,” Kat said. “Even Dutch.”

  It took Henry an hour and a half to reach his destination. He could have made it there in thirty minutes, but he meandered—half out of trepidation, half out of curiosity. He hadn’t roamed these streets in a year, and he wondered how much had changed. So as the sun rose higher over Perry Hollow, Henry traversed Main Street. He passed his old apartment over the used-book shop he had frequented almost daily. He paused in front of the vacant headquarters of the Perry Hollow Gazette, his workplace for five years. Other than the for rent sign plastered on the front door, the place looked exactly the same.

  When he veered off Main Street, his path took him directly past the burned-out history museum. Seeing its charred façade made him think of Valhalla from the Ring cycle and its spectacular destruction by flames. Although Wagner’s epic was too bombastic for his taste, Henry at least respected the opera tetralogy’s boldness. And as he moved farther up the street, he found himself humming the cycle’s “Magic Fire” leitmotif.

  The humming continued as he passed the Sleepy Hollow Inn. At that point, he could have stopped walking, stepped inside, and gone up to his room. Henry knew it’s what he should have done. He had people to interview, an article to research, a job to do.

  Yet he kept walking, moving through the town’s still-empty streets. The few people he did come into contact with were strangers who stole glances at his scars before suddenly looking away. That was no surprise. Henry hadn’t been very sociable during his time in Perry Hollow. He really only knew Kat.

  And Deana Swan, of course. The first woman he had been with since the death of his wife. The only other woman he had grown to love.

  The woman whose home he now stood in front of.

  If someone had asked Henry what he expected to get out of visiting Deana’s house, he wouldn’t have been able to answer. Closure, he supposed. Not that such a thing was possible. Henry believed that most people wore their pain for the rest of their lives. Like scars, only invisible.

  He certainly didn’t want to see Deana again, let alone talk to her. That would be too much to bear. Henry knew he wouldn’t be able to exchange quick greetings and a few minutes of chitchat. What had happened to their relationship was too dramatic—even operatic—for something as mundane as small talk.

  In truth, Henry just wanted to linger outside a place he had once known very well. He wanted to gaze up at the window of Deana’s bedroom and get a glimpse of the lilac walls beyond it. He wanted to find out if any of the good memories created there still existed or if they had all been eclipsed by the bad ones.

  So far, it was the latter. Standing ramrod straight on the sidewalk, Henry tried to summon up a bit of the love he had once felt or the happiness he had experienced. Instead, he felt nothing but anxiety. What if a neighbor spotted him and got suspicious? What if Deana did? That would be interesting, trying to explain why he was there.

  His worry was short-lived.

  And completely justified.

  For while Henry was still looking up at the house’s second floor, the door of the attached garage rose in silence. He didn’t even notice it until a vehicle emerged—a green SUV backing down the driveway.

  Seeing the vehicle, Henry made a run for it. He dashed across the driveway, trying to escape undetected. But the driver saw him, as evidenced by the twin flares of brake lights at the back of the SUV. Henry halted in the middle of the driveway, directly behind the vehicle. He raised both arms like a suspect in a cop show. Caught red-handed. The SUV’s driver-side door opened and a familiar face turned to peer out at him.

  It was Deana, looking exactly the way he remembered her. Pretty face, kind eyes, surprisingly sensual lips. Those features that Henry had found so disarming more than a year ago stopped him short once again.

  They stared at each other, neither one speaking. Henry didn’t know what to say. Deana, he assumed, felt the same way. Her eyes flashed a hundred different emotions. Surprise. Joy. Pain. Regret.

  When she finally did speak, it was in a hoarse whisper Henry could barely hear over the steady purr of the idling SUV.

  “Henry.”

  Not a question. Not an exclamation. Just a quiet and stunned declaration that, despite being gone from her life for the past year, he still existed.

  That was more than Henry could muster. His mouth opened as words formed in the back of his throat. He felt them there, brushing his tonsils as they struggled to take shape. Instead of letting them gestate, Henry cut them off and bolted down the sidewalk.

  Deana called after him, her voice catching up to him a half-block away. “Henry! Wait!”

  But Henry had no choice. He certainly couldn’t go back and face her—not after all that he had been through. Running away was his only option. And instead of slowing down once Deana’s voice faded, Henry quickened his pace. He sprinted without slowing until he reached the Sleepy Hollow Inn, his heart pounding the entire way.

  8 A.M.

  Back at the museum, Kat found Tony Vasquez and a few of his men sifting through the debris in the gallery. All of them carted around stacks of paper the size of phone books. Occasionally, one of them would pause to riffle through the pages.

  “We got the museum’s inventory off Constance Bishop’s computer,” Tony announced. “Now we’re trying to make sure everything is still here.”

  “You think something might be missing?”

  “Possibly.” Tony peered into one of the ruined display cases. Spotting a sepia-toned photograph of workers lined up in front of the old sawmill, he crossed it off his sizable list. “Right now, we can’t rule out robbery as a motive. Whoever did this might have been in the process of stealing something when Constance barged in on him. He then struck her on the head and started the fire to cover his tracks.”

  “I don’t think the museum has anything valuable enough to warrant theft,” Kat said. “Or murder, for that matter.”

  “That’s not what the records say,” Tony said, running his thumb along the stack of paper, fluttering the pages. “Included with the inventory is the estimated value of every item.”

  He pointed to a bronze bust of Irwin Perry that now lay overturned in the display case. “That, for example, is worth two thousand dollars. There’s an Andrew Wyeth sketch in storage that’s worth twenty. Added up, the museum’s collection totaled more than five million bucks.”

  Five million dollars. Kat had no idea. She doubted most folks in town did. All this time, the museum had literally been a treasure trove.

  But not anymore. After the fire,
the majority of the museum’s collection was, if not outright ruined, at least in much worse condition than the day before. No wonder Emma Pulsifer had been adamant about trying to save a few things. If Kat had known it was all worth that much, she would have rushed into the smoldering building herself.

  “I hope they had a good insurance policy.”

  “I do, too,” Tony said. “If only we could find it.”

  “It’s not on Constance’s computer?”

  “It might be. They removed it from her office and took it to the lab to search the hard drive.”

  “Is anyone searching the office itself?”

  “Actually,” Tony said, “I thought that might be a good job for you. There’s a shitload of papers in there that need to be sorted.”

  Kat exhaled a long, tired sigh. Desk duty again. This time for real.

  “Don’t worry,” Tony added with a smirk that Kat didn’t like one bit. “You’ll have help.”

  She left the gallery and headed down the hallway. The door to the office was ajar, the police tape dangling off the frame like leftover streamers from a birthday party. Kat steeled herself with a deep breath and stepped inside.

  Constance’s office was a case study in organized chaos. There wasn’t a single square inch, it seemed, that wasn’t covered with reference materials, files, or stacks of paper two feet high. One wall contained shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling, each one weighed down by more paper and more books. Various knickknacks sat between the stacks—wood carvings, brass candle holders, figurines forged out of lead.

  The desk was equally chaotic, with teetering stacks of more books, more papers, more folders. They formed a makeshift barrier between the rest of the office and the desk chair. Kat imagined Constance spending hours behind that wall of paperwork, cut off from the rest of the world, fully immersed in the past that she loved more than the present.