The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond

by Jaime Jo Wright

  Standing sentinel over his dead father was Elijah. His lean body encased in a black suit, his dark brown hair tamed with some sort of fancy pomade, and his eyes steeled with emotional fortitude.

  Libby’s mother moved toward the casket, her black dress brushing across the Oriental wool carpet, but Libby didn’t follow. Black. Mourning. It was all so dark. No wonder people avoided talk of death, and cemeteries, and Memento Mori, the photographs taken after the loved one had passed. It was morbid and unsettling.

  Glancing at the ornate mantel clock, Libby noted it had been stopped as was customary, and in this case it was halted at the approximate time of Deacon Greenwood’s death. Libby blinked away the image of the stilled clock hands. The time she’d discovered Deacon Greenwood was hardly the exact time he’d passed.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, squelching a shudder. Doctor Penchan had concluded death by asphyxiation brought on by Deacon Greenwood’s own hand. The police had questioned her, digging for answers as to why she’d been at the Greenwood home so early in the morning with Calvin. A puddle of nervous anxiety, Libby had done exactly what Paul instructed her not to do. She’d told the police everything.

  “Do you have the obituary?” they asked her.

  “No,” she’d answered. Elijah did.

  The undisguised look of disgust hurt more than she wished to admit. They believed it a ploy. A story. One of the officers even said as much.

  “Why were you at the Greenwood home?” They insisted on a more plausible answer, one that didn’t reek of Mitch Sheffield’s attempt to monopolize on a dead man’s escape from the earth.

  “I told you,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t have anything to do with your infatuation with Elijah Greenwood, would it?”

  Libby had sealed her lips in that moment. She couldn’t help it if the town knew she’d danced in Elijah’s shadow since she was young. Rumors long abounded that Libby Sheffield had put off matrimony in hopes Elijah would take notice—more than he already had. Even Elijah knew this. But Elijah also knew why Libby had such devotion. Neither of them would ever explain.

  The police wrote off her presence, and nothing was mentioned of the obituary again. Everything pointed toward a desperate man making an escape from the world.

  How did one pay respects to the family of a man who’d taken his own life? Especially when you were the only one in the room who believed, in fact, that he’d been murdered instead? Libby’s gaze darted around the room, the voices murmuring behind gloved hands positioned over mouths to discreetly converse becoming distant echoes. She blinked. The room spun, like being on a carousel. Slow, methodical, her eyes skimming the faces. What if Deacon Greenwood’s killer stood here, posing as a grieving friend while reveling in the deacon’s potential condemnation to Hell?

  Libby blinked furiously, a strong buzzing whirring in her ears, her heart colliding with her rib cage with a force far too great for her to remain standing for long. A deep breath, inhaling through her nose and letting out through her mouth. Her own gloved hand clutched her throat, willing herself to remain upright.

  She focused on her mother, who was embracing Mrs. Greenwood. Their hold was stiff and formal, that of two acquaintances who respected the hierarchy of their small town, and even appearances. What a sad waste. In a moment such as this, a grieving widow needed a dear friend, not one who led the church’s women’s club.

  “Libby.”

  His dark tone jolted Libby from her attempt to avoid a dead faint. Never mind that. She was struggling to breathe now for other reasons altogether. Libby met Elijah’s somber eyes.

  “Come” was all he said. He took her gloved hand and held it between his even as he led her to stand over his dead father. Libby restrained herself from pulling away, from making a scene. Elijah hadn’t released her hand, and she was very aware of the warmth that emanated from his grasp. She reminded herself once again it was not a hand held out of affection but a grip that insinuated much more.

  Libby focused on Deacon Greenwood as was proper, though she didn’t miss the close proximity of Elijah’s chest to her shoulder. The older man looked made of wax, and after a few days his body was already beginning to sink into itself. Flowers bordered his casket to mask the odor of death and finality.

  “I’m so sorry.” The platitude came from her heart, but it carried the same molded sound of everyone else’s sympathy.

  “Are you?” Elijah muttered as he surveyed his father’s face, the gray hair combed away from his strong forehead, and the straight nose Libby recalled wrinkling when he smiled.

  “Of course!” Libby cast Elijah a wary sideways glance. He had to know she didn’t kill his father or write that morbid, plagiarized obituary. Nor did she have the strength to haul the dead weight of a body by rope over rafters some feet over her head.

  “Yes. You’re sorry.” Resignation seeped into Elijah’s voice. “You’re always . . . sorry.”

  And she was. She always had been. Libby fixated on the dead man. Being alone, reading, hiding away from anything dysfunctional was her pastime of choice. Calvin was her only friend. Now she had been thrust into Deacon Greenwood’s death with a force that was entirely unwelcome.

  “I cannot believe my father would—” Elijah swallowed hard, his sentence left unfinished. “But the obituary you entrusted me with? I cannot fathom the implications of . . .” His words trailed away, as if reminding himself she was not his personal confidante. She never had been.

  Words filtered from Elijah’s mouth, and Libby leaned toward him to hear them.

  “‘Thrilling to think, poor child of sin! It was the dead that groaned within.’”

  “Pardon?” Libby’s voice notched upward a pitch.

  Elijah started, and their eyes met, locking in a mutual bewilderment. Her, for horror that Elijah whispered Poe with the finesse of a devoted reader, and he for the apparent shock that he’d spoken aloud.

  Libby said nothing but watched as Elijah’s eyes darkened, only to sense that old familiar pang as the haunted hollowness returned to them.

  “My father—he’d written it on a piece of paper. They found it beneath his feet, kicked under the straw. But it was written in his hand. It was his signature that sealed it.”

  Libby couldn’t tear her eyes from Elijah’s. Searching, aching to understand the conundrum that was the mysteriously sad and morose person she’d known since childhood. Known him in a comradery of silence. Known him as her hero and the man who would never love her, could never love her until she told the truth—her truth.

  By whoever’s hand Deacon Greenwood had died, his last and final penned words sucked the breath from Libby. The shared knowing in Elijah’s eyes was neither accusation nor empathy. It was resigned. They both knew. Oh, how they knew! Sin had a wicked way of creeping into one’s soul and tainting its edges with the inevitable groan that one carried with them, with their secrets, into the grave.

  Chapter 6

  Annalise

  Sleep was mocking her. Annalise stared at the ceiling from her bed, the moonlight setting off the old Victorian bedroom with a deep blue glow. She had been used to living alone in her childhood home for years now, ever since her parents sold it to her and moved south. But now? Annalise shot a look at the darker corners of the room. Of course, there was no one there, but she couldn’t shake the image of an old man, bandanna wrapped around his forehead, crouching in the corner. He stared at her, narrowed eyes, wrinkled skin, flipping a photograph of her between his fingers. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “Aaah!” Annalise sat up and grappled for the chain on the old-fashioned lamp by her bed. Light flooded the room. The imagined vision of Eugene Hayes dissipated.

  Annalise took a deep breath and leaned back against her pillows. She reached for her cellphone. Anything to distract herself. Pulling up Facebook, she scrolled through her newsfeed filled with pointless memes, random status updates, and pictures of family and friends. She had to get this uneasy feeling under control. Euge
ne Hayes was dead. The photographs were a mystery to the police force and probably wouldn’t ever be fully explained. It was over before it had begun, and yet . . .

  Annalise looked over at her window. Laying down her phone, she flipped back the covers and padded across the wood floor. Her hand grasped the filmy curtains and pushed them aside. She looked down at the house next door, at the window staring up at her.

  Garrett’s window.

  It was dark, as was the rest of the house. Which made sense since it was the early hours of morning yet.

  There was so much coincidence. Garrett coming home right after Eugene Hayes died in possession of that picture. The one taken at the Greenwood home when she was eighteen. How had the old man ever gotten ahold of it? Of any of them, really? But the fact that he had an obituary of a Greenwood from years past unnerved her. He’d made some sort of connection between her and them. He must have.

  Movement snagged Annalise’s attention. She squinted, trying to make out the shadows, the light from her bedroom glowing behind her not helping. They didn’t get much wildlife in town, but on occasion she’d seen a white-tailed deer wandering through her yard as if lost. The dark form moved behind an evergreen bush at the corner of Garrett’s house. Poor deer. It must be as lost as she felt right now. Dislocated and wishing to return to normal.

  A cold fear coiled in her stomach. Annalise frowned, leaning closer to the window. That wasn’t a deer. She leapt backward, grabbing at the cord and tugging so the window shade slammed down onto the sill, blocking her room from the outside. The window sheers were pointless against it, and the moonlight no longer inviting. It was ominous. Revealing the form of the man crouching outside, staring up at her. Staring into her room.

  He was probably one of the many homeless—the ones she was trying to help at the food pantry. The reason she was vying for the property at the edge of town to build a shelter. So they didn’t have to wander.

  Annalise sprinted to her bed and took a flying leap onto it, making sure her feet were nowhere close enough for any imaginary man hiding under her bed to grab them. She curled her knees to her chest.

  An old man dead, one who possessed a series of photographs of her. Now a man outside of her window, watching her.

  Maybe helping these people wasn’t such a great idea after all. Not if her privacy would be invaded, not if they were going to develop some inexplicable obsession with her, and definitely not if she was going to spend sleepless nights in a lighted room praying away some unknown bogeyman.

  Chapter 7

  In the daylight, the idea of a man crouching outside her window seemed as preposterous as the idea of Eugene Hayes crouching in the corner of her bedroom. Yet, Annalise couldn’t shake that she had seen someone.

  This was all going to her head. Emotions, fears, memories? They were the fodder for imagination and illogic. Annalise sniffed, tucked an escaped strand of coppery hair back into her hair tie, and blinked rapidly as if by doing so she could clear not only her vision but also her mind.

  She allowed herself a moment to skim the morning crowd that perched at tables, along the barn-door bar, and in the cozy lounge area with stuffed couches and chairs. The double doors that led into the attached food pantry were shut, locked for the morning. The volunteers would open it at ten o’clock. Thank the Lord for the members of the local Lutheran church who had taken the pantry under their charitable wing. It would have been madness to run the coffee shop and the pantry simultaneously. But, Annalise took a sip of her wimpy caffé misto, she would have done it. Her soul resonated with those who wandered into the pantry for assistance. She may never have been in need or want of material things, but sometimes the hollowness reflected in the eyes of those in need had less to do with a warm blanket and more to do with abandonment. Rejection. Condemnation.

  God help her, she needed to quit with this introspection! Annalise gulped down the rest of the coffee and performed an overhand toss of the cup into the wastebasket a few yards away.

  “Lebron James got nothin’ on you!” One of the college-aged baristas clapped a high five with the palm she instinctively held up.

  Annalise moved her hand from the high five and finished with a short wave at Mrs. Duncan, the head of the Silver Saints Knitting Club that met in the shop every Tuesday morning. She attempted to breathe in normalcy, but her breath hitched as her eyes alighted on the far corner table.

  Her curse was muttered under her breath. The Lebron-James-touting barista shot her a surprised glance. She stifled a low chuckle.

  Yes. Yes, you all, I can sin and swear with the best of them.

  Her eyes collided with Garrett’s across the room. His muscular body draped over his chair turned backward toward the round table. His arms rested across the back of the chair, and his face was expressionless when he spotted her. The trendy blonde next to him followed his stare. Her eyes, made smoky with effortless eye-shadow application, drilled into Annalise’s.

  Annalise realized she was going to need to sit down tonight and plan for these types of moments. Garrett was back in town, whether she approved or not, and being blindsided every time she saw him wasn’t going to benefit anyone.

  Summoning courage, she decided not to duck into her office like a coward, but rather to face her fear and greet them both. It wasn’t fair she had to feel ostracized by the generational offspring of one of Gossamer Grove’s founding families. It also wasn’t fair that Nicole’s chin-length, edgy haircut was so stinking attractive that it made Annalise feel old-fashioned and far too much of a librarian with her twisted ballet bun and chunky glasses.

  Nicole offered a smile as Annalise neared them. It didn’t reach her eyes, but then it wasn’t cold either. It was . . . impartial. That was the word.

  “Annalise.” Nicole tipped her head.

  “Hi.” There. That was a special kind of greeting. Annalise inwardly smacked herself. It wasn’t Nicole who made her tongue-tied. It was Garrett. Whose slouch hadn’t even bothered to straighten, or tense, or look the slightest bit stressed.

  Nicole glanced between them. “I take it you’re aware Garrett’s home.”

  “Oh, very.” Annalise nodded, offering a tight-lipped smile that didn’t try to disguise the underlying snark.

  “I’m leaving you alone,” he shrugged. As if his whole thirty-one years of maturity was diminished to a schoolboy’s challenge. His dark eyes flashed.

  Nicole eased from her chair, her lithe frame clad in blue jeans and a flowing tan cardigan that brushed her hips. The red hue of her filmy blouse matched the tone of her lips. She offered Annalise a smile even as she extended her hand to cup Annalise’s shoulder. It was friendship for show, like almost everything else in Gossamer Grove. Nicole leaned in.

  “We both know that Garrett being home may lend itself toward resurfaced hard feelings. But the past is the past, Annalise. For both of our sakes, we have critical issues to focus on, whether we agree on them or not. Many decisions are to be made, and we both have our affections for this town. Let’s keep our priorities straight, yes?”

  Annalise bit the inside of her cheek. Then her tongue. Would slapping the town’s mayor across the face be a bad idea? Yes. Probably.

  “I’ve kept my priorities straight for many years, Nicole.” Annalise looked past the woman at Garrett. “All of my priorities.”

  For a moment, a shadow flickered in his eyes. He had the decency to look down and distract himself with his coffee. Funny, how twelve years later, Nicole was still speaking for her brother. The orange T-shirt he wore stretched across his taut muscles as he lifted his cup to his mouth. His carved lips took a sip of the brew.

  Annalise swallowed, her face burning. She remembered his mouth. Why didn’t some sensory things fade with time? Garrett looked back up, and for a moment there was a plea in his eyes. The kind of pitiable plea that was fast hidden by the need to cover it, to be plastic, to carry on as though nothing ever hurt them.

  “I’ve things to do. Nice seeing you both.” Annalise waggled
her fingers as she veered back toward her office on that monumental lie. Nice wasn’t ever a word she could associate with them, unless she went way back into her vault of memories to the time when it was just Garrett and her, and a dare that turned into friendship. Before it shattered into a million irreparable pieces.

  Annalise fumbled with her phone to read the text Brent sent. She swallowed one of those lumps that lodged in a person’s throat when they didn’t want to cry and didn’t want to acknowledge emotion. But, Garrett’s presence had stirred up a hornet’s nest of feelings inside her, stinging hurt that swelled and throbbed in a rhythmic reminder of pain. Now this.

  She stared at the text.

  Hayes’s death will hit paper today. Ongoing investigation. You may be named if Tyler gets wind of the pictures. Chin up, A. We got your back.

  Tyler Darrow. He had the local newspaper just teetering on the verge of being a gossip rag, and he loved to pick at town secrets. If Tyler nosed his way in, having this story front and center for the town to read would be dreadful. A destitute elderly man dying just as Annalise was pushing the town to donate property for a shelter and to invest in those very souls? That could be beneficial to her cause, if she were heartless. Proof that Gossamer Grove needed to wake up and see the homeless!

  But then there was the issue of her pictures, splayed all over Eugene Hayes’s run-down trailer. And she? She was nowhere to be found. No aid. No assistance. No record of Annalise Forsythe ever helping the poor old soul. She didn’t practice what she preached, and the food pantry was a sham for her to skim off the top to make her coffee shop more lucrative.

  Lies. All of them. But Annalise knew Tyler well, and Tyler would spin it that way in a heartbeat. In the words of her very eternally focused Aunt Tracy, “Lord Jesus, come quickly!”