Death Night

by Ritter, Todd

  “Please,” she said, the door bouncing off her shoe. “This will only take a minute.”

  Henry wanted to keep pressing the door against her foot in the hope she’d pull it away and leave him in peace. But Deana sounded desperate. As desperate as Tosca, he noted. So he released the door, letting it drift open until there was nothing between them.

  “I know you don’t want to see me,” Deana said. “I completely understand that. Even more, I respect it. But you just vanished. I know why you did it, and I came to terms with the fact that I was never going to see you again.”

  She was on the verge of crying, the welling tears catching the light and setting off her big, blue eyes.

  “And then suddenly you’re here again. I don’t know why or for how long. But I knew that I couldn’t let you leave again without telling you how deeply sorry I am about what happened to you. He hurt you so much, Henry. You almost died. And it tears me up inside that I was in some way a part of that. I will never forgive myself, and I understand if you can’t find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  Henry remained silent, his conflicting emotions too unruly to be conveyed in mere words. He still thought about Deana often. His clumsy stakeout of her house made that embarrassingly clear. Yet he wasn’t ready to forgive her.

  Yes, he knew she wasn’t the Grim Reaper, who had killed two people and died while trying to make Henry his third victim. But Deana had provided him with one of the tools used to torment him. It wasn’t intentional on her part. At the time, she had no idea about the consequences of her actions. She was an unwilling accomplice, an innocent bystander. But Henry needed someone to blame. Now that the Grim Reaper was dead, Deana was the only person left.

  “I know what happened to you and Chief Campbell in that mill,” she continued. “People in town still talk about it. I know what happened, and I’m sorry.”

  She paused, letting the silence stretch between them, as taut and vibrating as plucked piano wire. Henry made no move to break it.

  “I want to sit down and talk about all this,” Deana eventually said. “I think it would help both of us. But not now. I need to get to work and it’s obvious I surprised you as much as you surprised me this morning. But I have an hour break at two. You can come over and we’ll talk.”

  She paused, waiting for him to respond. But Henry didn’t. He couldn’t even manage a shake of his head.

  “You need time to think about it,” Deana said, biting her lower lip expectantly. “And I know you don’t want to. But please try. It’s important.”

  She hesitated a moment, leaning in the direction of the stairwell just down the hall but keeping her eyes on Henry. No doubt she was hoping he’d agree and let her avoid the suspense of waiting. But the nod Henry gave her was one of dismissal, not affirmation, and Deana eventually drifted away from the door.

  Henry didn’t observe her progress down the hall.

  Instead, he listened.

  To the sob she tried to muffle as she hurried through the hallway. To her footfalls, getting faster once she reached the stairs. To the creak of the inn’s front door as she slipped outside.

  Only when she was gone did Henry close the door to his room. He stumbled to the bed, collapsing on top of its blanket of papers. Although his body had insisted on running on Italian time all morning, a wave of exhaustion suddenly crashed over him.

  His eyelids, as heavy as steel doors, slammed shut. His mind, having been given too much to process, simply closed down. Henry relished the dark void. He retreated into it, practically sprinting into sleep.

  When sleeping, he didn’t need to consider meeting the woman who almost helped usher in his demise. There were no decisions in sleep. Or commitments. Or pain.

  In sleep, Henry wouldn’t be aware that Deana Swan was still in love with him and that he had no idea how to deal with it.

  11 A.M.

  When they left the rec center, Kat and Nick were supposed to track down Father Ron and ask him the same questions posed to the other members of the historical society. Instead, they took a detour, driving out to Burt Hammond’s lawn-mower dealership in search of Danny Batallas. After hearing what the mayor said about him, Kat intended to get Danny’s side of the story. If something had been on the young firefighter’s mind during the party, she wanted to know what it was. Especially considering the fact that he disappeared less than an hour before the museum fire began.

  Yet when they reached the dealership on the outskirts of town—a ten-minute drive—they were told that Danny hadn’t come to work that day.

  Not late. Not out sick. Just a total no-show.

  The manager told Kat that every attempt to call him went unanswered. Kat got the same result when she called him herself, prompting her to go one step further and drive to Danny’s residence.

  His apartment—a basement unit in a house in the bad part of town—appeared to be empty. No one answered when she knocked on the door. When she crawled through the grass on her stomach to peer into the ground-level windows, she saw no sign that anyone was home.

  For the time being, Danny Batallas was missing in action and an hour had been wasted looking for him, a fact not lost on Kat as she reported the details back to Lieutenant Vasquez.

  “And that’s all we’ve got,” she said. “Please tell me you’ve made more progress.”

  “I have,” Tony replied. “Sort of. Emma Pulsifer’s story matches the one she gave you. She freely admits she left the fund-raiser before everyone else and that no one came into contact with her between then and the fire.”

  Kat, who was steering her Crown Vic down Main Street, on the way to All Saints Parish, tilted her head to pin the phone between her ear and shoulder. “It’s suspicious, I’ll give you that much. But between you and me, she couldn’t have done it. She doesn’t look strong enough to lift a stick, let alone something heavy enough to do the kind of damage that Constance Bishop suffered.”

  “I agree,” Tony said. “Which is why I stopped by Constance’s house and talked to her neighbor. Nice old man. Could talk your ear off, if you let him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That Constance left her house in the middle of the night four times last week.”

  “How does he know that?”

  “He blames insomnia,” Tony said. “I say it’s because he’s a Peeping Tom. Either way, he said she normally left around midnight. And, get this, the first three times he saw her leave, she was carrying a metal detector. Then the night before last, the metal detector was gone, replaced with a simple shovel.”

  Kat already knew what Constance had been doing and why it required a shovel. How a metal detector played a role in all of this was still a mystery.

  “I also talked to the computer guys,” Tony said, making Kat realize all the more how little she and Nick had accomplished. “There was nothing on it that would incriminate anyone. It was mostly historical society business. E?mails. Paperwork. That sort of thing.”

  “I’m assuming there wasn’t anything about Brad Ford.”

  “Nothing,” Tony said. “But I have a few guys checking on it. If someone by that name set foot in Perry Hollow in the last six months, they’ll find out about it. I also had some troopers check Constance’s phone records, both home and cell phone. There was nothing out of the ordinary, other than a flurry of calls from Emma Pulsifer early this morning.”

  “It was during the fire. I saw her make half of them.”

  “Constance, however, made one phone call last night. To a business with a French-sounding name.”

  “Maison D’Avignon?”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “Whatever that is.”

  “It’s a restaurant.”

  “Doesn’t this town have any Mexican restaurants? Those names I can pronounce. And I’d actually have a place to eat other than that poor excuse for a diner.”

  Kat interrupted him. “What time did Constance call?”

  “A little before ten o’clock.”

  “That was durin
g the Chamber of Commerce fund-raiser. I bet Constance was calling one of the guests.”

  “Well,” Tony said, “that narrows it down to only about a hundred people.”

  Kat turned right onto a side road that ran past Oak Knoll Cemetery. Just beyond it, the bell tower of All Saints Parish rose into view.

  “We’ve already talked to three of them,” she said. “And now I’m about to make it four. We’ll meet you back at the museum as soon as we can.”

  She ended the call before steering the Crown Vic to the front of the church. All Saints Parish, tall and imposing at the southern end of town, was considered the crown jewel of Perry Hollow architecture. Kat had once heard it described as the town’s version of Notre-Dame. While minuscule compared to that famed house of worship, it was still impressive. A circular stained-glass window was situated above the front door, with a matching one at the back of the building. To the right, a bell tower rose eighty feet, providing a perfect view of the town. A few gargoyles guarded the corners of the vaulted roof, which was supported by the traditional buttresses.

  “Here we are,” Kat said. “Hope your soul is in order.”

  “Fat chance.” Nick got out of the car and eyed the church with suspicion. “I haven’t been in a church in years.”

  “Same here.”

  Kat led the way inside, their footsteps—and Nick’s cane—echoing throughout the vast and empty space. Peering into the nave, she saw only rows of empty pews and a few candles flickering along the far wall. The area around the altar was also abandoned, populated only by a silent statue of the Virgin Mary.

  “Hello?” Kat called. “Father Ron? Are you here?”

  A voice responded, sounding tinny and distant. “Is that you, Chief?”

  “The one and only. Where are you?”

  “The bell tower. Can you come up?”

  “Sure,” Kat yelled back. “Just give me a minute.”

  The door to the tower, located to the right of the entrance foyer, was open, revealing a wooden staircase that twisted upward.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess here,” Nick said as he peered up the stairs, “and say there’s no elevator.”

  “No, there’s not,” Kat said.

  Nick turned around and, with a sigh, headed for the front door. “I’ll be in the car.”

  That left Kat to brave the staircase on her own. The steps, narrow and too rickety for comfort, hadn’t been built for daily use. A long rope hung from the church’s bell, making it easily accessible on the first floor for those who had to ring it. The stairs were for repairmen and, judging from the sloshing noises coming from the top, handy priests who sometimes gave the bell a good scrubbing. As Kat ascended, she saw drops of soapy water fall like rain past her head. A thick rivulet of water clung to the rope, riding it down to ground level.

  Kat was out of breath by the time she reached the top. She was exhausted, as well. The caffeine high from the coffee she had consumed earlier had worn off. Now she was running on fumes.

  Surveying the top of the bell tower through tired eyes, she saw a square and tiny room with open windows in all four walls that offered a bird’s?eye view of Perry Hollow. In the center of the room was the church’s bell—a brass behemoth that rivaled the Liberty Bell in sheer size. It hung from a wooden support beam over a square hole in the floor, the rope attached to it dropping far below to the church’s ground level. A thin railing that looked as solid as a bridge made of toothpicks ran around the hole’s perimeter.

  Father Ron, armed with a mop and bucket of water, greeted Kat with a benevolent nod. Still fit and handsome as he neared his seventh decade, he wore the standard short-sleeved black shirt and clergyman’s collar. Below the waist, however, was anything but traditional. Instead of dress pants, he wore jeans torn at the knees and spattered with wet spots. On his feet were Converse sneakers, also damp.

  “Hey there, Chief,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling this isn’t a social visit.”

  “I wish I could say I was here to help you clean the bell.”

  “And I wish you were here to inquire about Sunday Mass.”

  Kat didn’t go to church, at All Saints or anywhere else for that matter. Father Ron knew this and accepted it, but he still liked to apply pressure now and again. Kat never took offense. She liked the priest, understanding that they basically had the same job—convincing people to be on their best behavior. The only difference was the tools they used. Father Ron had his Bible. Kat had her Glock.

  “I didn’t know church bells got this dirty,” she said.

  “I’m doing it for Constance. She loved this church. Not for its religious significance but for its history. So when she’s buried, I want the bell to ring as loud and clear as possible.” Father Ron lifted the mop and slapped it against the outside of the bell, scrubbing in a circular pattern. “Plus, it helps take my mind off the grief. At least, I hoped it would.”

  “The two of you were close?”

  “Very. We didn’t agree on many things, truth be told. Religion. Politics. All the things intertwined between the two. But we both loved history and knew that it’s too important to be forgotten. We were kindred spirits in that regard.”

  He plunged the mop back into the bucket, leaned on the handle, and looked out one of the wide windows. Kat followed suit, seeing Perry Hollow spread out before them, as small and pretty as a village in a model railroad display. The window they were peering through faced northwest, giving them an overview of Main Street and everything to the left of it. It was a picture-perfect view. From that height, even the smoke-stained museum looked pristine.

  “I was born and raised in Philadelphia,” Father Ron said. “It’s a nice place. Clearly a lot of history there. But I never knew what it felt like to belong to a town until I came here.”

  “Constance felt the same, I assume.”

  “This town meant the world to her. Its past, especially. She was voracious in her pursuit of learning its history, good and bad. And if you ask me, she was killed for it.”

  Kat tore her eyes away from the view and settled her gaze on the man next to her. “Why do you say that?”

  “Constance was working on something,” Father Ron said.

  “A secret project,” Kat said. “I heard. Any idea what it was?”

  “I’m afraid not. We all had theories as to what she was working on. I straight-out asked her about it. She wouldn’t tell me, but she gave me a hint.”

  “Which was?”

  “That whatever she was researching happened before the mill had been built. Before the town even existed, really.”

  Kat thought of the deed that Emma Pulsifer had so desperately tried to save. It now sat with other pieces of evidence, in worse shape than ever. Before the museum fire, she had never stopped to consider that the land Perry Hollow sat upon had existed long before the town did.

  “I don’t know much about that time period,” she said.

  “Quite frankly, neither do I. What little I do know came from Constance.”

  Father Ron lifted the mop from the bucket again. While scrubbing the bell, he gave Kat an abridged history lesson.

  “Before Irwin Perry arrived and built his mill, the area was mostly uninterrupted pine forests. There was a village—a few homes, a blacksmith, a tavern—so minuscule it didn’t even have a proper name. No one knows how long the village was here before the mill was built. I think that’s what Constance was trying to find out.”

  “But why do you think her research is what got her killed?”

  “It’s more of a hunch, really. I have nothing to back it up. But in the past few days Constance seemed suspicious, almost paranoid.”

  “Did she tell you what was troubling her?”

  “In a way, she did, although not outright,” Father Ron said. “Earlier in the week, I was in the museum doing custodial duty.”

  Kat raised her hand. “Custodial duty?”

  “Members of the historical society take turns cleaning the exhibits,” th
e priest said. “We certainly can’t pay someone else to do it, and frankly, considering the value of some of the items there, we didn’t trust anyone else.”

  “And all of you did this?” Kat asked.

  Father Ron offered a chagrined smile. “It’s a requirement of membership. We each try to come in one night a week and tidy things up. Emma Pulsifer is great at dusting. And you should see how Claude Dobson wields a vacuum cleaner.”

  “And you were cleaning when?”

  “Four nights ago,” Father Ron said. “It was around eight and Constance came out of her office. She asked me if I had been inside it recently.”

  Kat stopped him with yet another question. “She didn’t keep her office locked?”

  The priest shook his head. “She kept the door closed at all times but never locked. Anyone could enter if they wanted to. No one ever did, of course. That was considered Constance’s private space. I hadn’t gone inside, and I told her so.”

  “But she thought someone had been in there, right?”

  “That’s right,” Father Ron said. “She told me that a book on her desk had been moved at some point in the past twenty-four hours.”

  Kat wondered how Constance could have even noticed that, considering the chaotic state of her office. What was one out-of-place object in a heaping pile of files, papers, and pamphlets? She assumed that Constance realized the book had been moved because it, unlike everything else on her desk, was important enough to keep track of.

  “Did you happen to see this book?”

  “I did, but only from a distance. Constance opened her office door to point out where the book had been sitting and its new location. I was too far away to see a title, and I was afraid to ask her what it was. She was surprisingly upset about it. Kept talking about how foolish she was to leave it out like that and how she really didn’t want anyone else to see it. She seemed terrified that someone would find out what she was working on.”

  Kat had a different suggestion. “Perhaps she was just being secretive.”

  “Secrets,” Father Ron said. “Perry Hollow has a lot of them, as you well know. No one talks about them. But we know they’re there, just waiting to be dug up. I think Constance discovered something in that book of hers. Something someone wants to keep buried. And they killed her for it.”