The cast-iron stove with its cream-colored enamel and bread-warming ovens sent off a dull, warm heat that made Libby shiver again. She stood and moved toward it, holding her hands over the stovetop as if it were an open flame. It was late spring, so a piping hot stove would be ridiculous, but even the small amount of warmth would be enough to heat tea.
Libby looked again toward the doorway leading into the hall. It seemed to be taking a long time for Reverend Mueller to find his housekeeper. She rubbed her hands together and shook out her skirts, water droplets landing on the floor. A dull sense of apprehension rose. The feeling that she wasn’t safe. Which was very odd. She was safe and in a very familiar place. Yet, something made her heart start pounding. It felt as if she’d walked into a lions’ den thinking it empty. But the lions lay in wait, ready to pounce.
She turned from the stove. A book left open on the countertop snagged her attention. The name E. A. Poe sent a chill down her spine.
Libby peered down at the book.
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins?”
Though the print was small, the words stood stark on the page, mimicking Libby’s obituary. Poe’s “The Premature Burial” was typeset at the top of the horror-filled page. She flipped the page to the end. Her eyes skimmed the words.
“There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell.”
Though Poe had penned these words over fifty years prior, Libby knew it was the voice of the obituary writer. He saw today, this existence, a place of doom and their sins—especially illuminated by the flamboyant call to repentance from Jacobus and his brother—something only paid for by the exclamation point of death.
Libby slammed the cover shut. She would never read Poe again—if she survived the night. She spun on her heel and yelped as she almost crashed into Reverend Mueller who’d come up behind her.
“I’m sorry, I—” Libby stopped.
His eyes drifted to the closed book and then back to her face. He shook his head, gray hair and side whiskers still damp from rain. “There are many suppositions as to how Edgar Allan Poe died, you know?”
Libby glanced at the book. She twisted material from her skirt and glanced at the hallway beyond the reverend.
“Did you know?” he insisted.
“No. No, I didn’t.” Libby’s voice quivered. She blinked, trying to comprehend the expression in the reverend’s eyes. Apprehension seeped into every ounce of her blood. That knowing of the truth, but the desperate desire to be wrong.
Reverend Mueller reached around her and picked up the book. His thumb traced the gold embossing of the title. “Some say he had rabies. But others say it was suicide by alcoholism. Still others surmise he may have met his death by the hand of another.”
“How sad,” Libby murmured. She eyed Reverend Mueller as he opened the book and stroked the pages as if they were the Bible itself. He raised his eyes. They were empty.
“He deserved to die, Poe did. His morbid tales of the grave, of being buried alive, it’s like sin. It suffocates one’s soul when gone unattended. I believe Poe’s went unattended, and many knew not the deeds he’d committed. Perhaps even murder itself.”
Libby took a step to the side.
“Where are you going?” Reverend Mueller tossed the book onto the countertop.
“H-home?” Libby hated the way her voice shook. Somehow, her saying the police seemed dangerous just now.
“Home?” Reverend Mueller cocked his head and smiled. This time his smile wasn’t kind, or gentle, or fatherly at all. “Didn’t you know? Didn’t you read? Tonight is your time to die.”
Chapter 38
Annalise
My brain hurts.” Garrett leaned against Annalise’s car in the parking lot of the nursing home. Doug Larson had finally returned, ending the conversation with his father. Garrett and Annalise had left the duo to themselves and exited the building.
Annalise knew what Garrett meant. But her hurt was deeper, more vulnerable. Dorothy Hayes was like her in a way, only worse. An affair, two illegitimate children, one of which—Elijah—had been taken from her and given to another woman. Perhaps different pressures, but ultimately the same purpose. To save face. To save reputation. Yet Dorothy had relinquished her son to her sister and continued her affair with Harrison, her sister’s husband. How did one—? Annalise shook her head. No. She had no right to judge or question. Here she stood next to the man who’d fathered her baby girl, and every time she saw him, her heart beat faster, her eyes skimmed his body—remembering—and most of all, the magnets that had drawn her heart toward him were still powerful. Right or wrong, the pull had increased rather than decreased.
Garrett rubbed his hand over his eyes and dropped it, slapping it against his leg. “Man. My family history is messed up.”
Annalise nodded. “Mine too.”
Garrett elbowed her. She looked at him, his dark eyes intense and searching. “You do know we’re different, don’t you?”
“How?” Annalise once again wondered how Garrett could read her thoughts.
“’Cause. We did the right thing, really. Maybe our parents were trying to save face, and we went along, but it was right. We were kids. Raising Gia wouldn’t have been smart. I was in a reckless place, and you . . . I’d hurt you. Bad.”
Wow. Annalise hadn’t expected that from Garrett. That frank admission, taking it all on himself as if he alone were to blame.
“It wasn’t just your fault,” she replied. “I was a willing party, you know?”
Her question came out breathy. She’d been willing. She’d loved him. Maybe a young, immature love, but she had. In a way, maybe she still did.
Annalise looked away, but Garrett twisted to face her. “God can do pretty stellar things with screwed-up people.”
“God don’t make no junk.” Annalise tried for funny and flopped.
Garrett shook his head. “I mean, we can be stronger.”
“Yeah, that’d be nice.” Annalise gave him a sad smile. But, Garrett didn’t return it. He studied her face. Her breath caught and she bit her bottom lip as he drew closer. His hand rose, and he held her chin with a gentle grip between fingers and thumb.
“I used to think people who talked about God—Jesus—all that was crud. They sin, they forgive, they sin again and God gives them a free pass. But if someone else screwed up, they were judgmental and hypocritical.”
“Pretty much,” Annalise whispered, noting Garrett drawing just a bit closer.
“But that’s not true. Not of real faith. Real faith is knowing forgiveness comes, you change, and then you walk and struggle together. Jam your knees, hit your knuckles, scrapes, bruises, broken legs, whatever. Life is hard and it takes guts, faith, and a massive amount of out-of-this-world grace.”
Garrett’s words sank into her like the explanation she’d been searching for since he’d left her twelve years ago. She never expected him to be the one to deliver it. To say that forgiveness and moving on could be had without completely abandoning who you were and what had made you into who you were.
“So, to seek grace, it doesn’t mean I have to forget Gia?” It was her worst fear really, if she were honest. That to admit her past openly and before God meant to disavow her daughter as a castaway sin that should be forgotten.
“Never forget.” Garrett’s hand lifted and combed through the side of Annalise’s hair. For a moment she thought he might kiss her, might take her in his arms, but he dropped his hand and backed away. It was too soon. It was the wrong time. “Never forget our baby girl.”
The tears in his eyes said it all.
She gripped the steering wheel of her car, engine running, but she couldn’t shift it out of park. Annalise stared at the dashboard. She missed Gia, missed her original photograph of Gia, missed what was, what could have been, and now she struggled with where she might go. Gar
rett and Doug Larson had taken off together, headed for Larson’s office to go over plans for the center with a promise to meet up again at the newspaper basement. Maybe Tyler had uncovered even more pieces and it would all finally come together.
She reached for the shifter. Garrett had been hesitant to leave her alone, but she assured him she would go straight back to the newspaper. If Tyler was worth his salt, he’d still be combing through the piles of paper work, trying to find out more about Libby Sheffield. Now more than ever, Annalise wanted to know who she was and how she and the Corbin brothers’ revival fit into the story.
Annalise startled as the passenger-side door whipped open. “What?” She reached for her door handle, but the electric locks clicked and momentarily stopped her.
“Don’t.” The one word was laden with intent and made her freeze. Everything in her frantically searched her mental database. She’d planned for this moment. The moment when someone held her at knife point or gun point when they tried to abduct her. Didn’t every woman? But confusion and panic slammed into each other. Not to mention, she knew him. Not well, but she did.
“What do you want?” She glared at Brian, Nicole’s boyfriend. He squeezed his long legs into the passenger seat. He wasn’t armed, so Annalise waited. Didn’t overreact. Blowing a situation out of proportion into life and death was stupid and would only make things worse.
Nope. There it was.
Brian cradled a pistol against his stomach, aimed at her with the menace of an explosive firearm.
Her hand reached for the door handle.
“Don’t,” he repeated.
“You’d shoot me?” Annalise tried to hide the tremor in her voice. Online videos had stated there was a higher rate of survival if you ran from an armed gunman than if you agreed to go with them. Dodge and weave. She might get shot, but odds were in her favor she wouldn’t die.
Her gut coiled, along with every muscle in her body. Fear began to overtake logic and common sense.
“What do you want?” There it was. The shaking in her voice.
Brian noticed and pointed with the barrel of his pistol at the shifter. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Annalise didn’t comply.
“Somewhere we can talk.”
She grabbed for the door handle, slapping the automatic unlock as she did. The door flew open, and Annalise lunged to escape. Brian shoved across the console and grabbed at her. He snagged her hair and yanked her back inside the vehicle. Annalise cried out, but the nursing home parking lot was empty.
“Get in and shut your door.” Brian’s cologne filled the car. Suffocating and pungent. Annalise had no choice. His hand still held captive her hair, red strands wrapped around his fingers, the only color in a day that was cloudy and gray.
“Drive,” he commanded.
She did. Following his directions, she drove toward the old section of Gossamer Grove.
Brian’s jaw muscle twitched as he stared out the window. His silence was more unnerving than if he’d ranted and raged.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Annalise noticed her knuckles were white as she gripped the steering wheel. They passed some run-down Victorian houses from the early days of Gossamer Grove, and the car jostled as it crossed the railroad tracks. The old Greenwood Mill, its abandoned windows staring at them, whipped by on the right side of the car. “You stole Gia’s picture, didn’t you? You attacked me outside of Eugene Hayes’s trailer?”
Brian didn’t respond.
He leaned forward, peering through the windshield. The road past the woolen mill had grown rough, the asphalt buckled in places from disuse. Waving his gun toward the right, he barked, “Turn here.”
The dirt road was made of hard-packed gravel. The grasses on either side were tall, overgrown, and the trees and shrubbery resembled a Midwestern jungle. Annalise had never been here, and the No Trespassing sign indicated she didn’t have much hope of someone wandering by. The drive wound into the woods and then came out into a clearing. A pond, maybe an acre in size, met her gaze. Its edges were bordered with slimy, puffy algae, but the middle of the water was blue. A duck spooked and took off from the surface.
A nagging memory sparked in Annalise’s mind. The old revival meetings. The Corbin brothers. A tent erected by an old pond—Gossamer Pond.
Ironic.
Gossamer Pond had been forgotten for years, and now here she was, at the very place of the revival meetings—meetings that for some reason Eugene Hayes had thought important in present day.
Brian shifted in his seat and glared at her. “Why did you make me do this, huh? I tried to warn you.”
Annalise frowned. “Warn me about what? You put me in the hospital, Brian!”
Brian nodded, giving her such an incredulous look that she almost believed for a moment he was a victim of circumstances. “I didn’t want it to come to this!” He looked down at the gun in his hand. “I’m not a killer. I sell cars, for Pete’s sake.”
Annalise summoned as much calm as she could, keeping her voice low and even. “I don’t understand, Brian. Help me understand.”
“You and that stupid shelter.” Brian raked his free hand through his hair. “It all started with that, and then Eugene.”
“Eugene has nothing to do with my shelter,” Annalise argued. Maybe by proxy of being destitute, but in no other way.
“He visited Nicole.” Brian’s eyes flickered with frustration and anger. “Told her he was finding out how the Hayes family and the Greenwood family were linked. Said he looked after you all these years, and if Nicole was going to shut down your cause, he’d shut her down. He’d smear her name and let Gossamer Grove in on how the Greenwoods had a history of not really doing their duty by the community. The unreliability of their ethics.” Brian laughed. An ugly laugh that reeked of desperation.
Eugene Hayes was a fighter. He had fought for her! “But—he’s dead now. Why steal my baby’s picture? Why send it to Tyler? Why out Garrett as the father? Especially since Eugene was already dead.”
Brian tilted his head as if she were stupid. He shook his head, his eyes panicked. “It’s all out of control! I broke into your house, originally to scare you off. But then I saw your baby’s picture. I took it. If you wouldn’t stop looking into Eugene, then I needed to discredit you. So people didn’t support your cause.”
Annalise returned Brian’s stare. Was the man unhinged? “Why are you so upset about the shelter? It doesn’t have anything to do with you. Is this just because of Eugene’s threats to smear the Greenwood reputation and ruin Nicole?”
“No!” Brian stretched his gun arm out and braced the gun against the dashboard as he stared out the window. “Nicole—I never wanted any of it to affect her. But your pantry and its cause, it’s been getting to her. She was almost ready to hand the property over to you and turn down Larson! And then when Eugene came, I thought Nicole might give the land to you right then and there. I talked her out of being impulsive.”
Annalise still hadn’t quite figured him out. She eyed the gun as she moved her hand for the door handle. Slowly. Ever so slowly.
“Why do you care about the land, Brian?”
Brian turned toward her, his brow furrowed. “I invested everything. Everything I own I’ve put behind Larson’s wilderness center. If Nicole and the town board grants the property to your shelter, I’ve got nothing.”
“But you wouldn’t lose your investment,” Annalise argued.
“No. But I’m so in debt, Annalise. Up to my eyeballs. The car dealership is sinking. I can’t be with Nicole, be worthy of her, if I have nothing.”
The cold realization of it all swept over Annalise. Eugene’s threat, meant to protect her, had in fact helped sway Nicole toward donating the land. Brian had to eliminate what stood in the way of his investment so he could be financially stable.
“Did you . . . kill Eugene?”
Brian reared back. “No!” But consternation spread across his face. He rubbed his palm vigorously over his eyes. When h
e dropped his hand, he stared at her. “I went to talk to him, that’s all. Just talk. After he threatened Nicole, she was upset. Do you blame her?”
No. Annalise really couldn’t blame her. Regardless of intention, Eugene hadn’t handled the sordid family history well at all. Her hand had found the door handle. But Brian’s arm dragged from the dashboard, and the gun waved in the air.
“I broke into Eugene’s trailer because I figured if I could take the proof he had of all the Greenwood scandal in Gossamer Grove, he’d have nothing to threaten Nicole with. He wouldn’t be able to undermine her position with the town, her reputation. The town board would still listen to her and respect the Greenwood name. Garrett’s indiscretions aside, it was better than Eugene’s entire family tree of unethical Greenwoods. We’d be back on track, and I could convince her to sell the land to Larson. But the old man wasn’t away as I’d thought. So I confronted him.”
“What happened?” Annalise didn’t want to know, and yet she asked anyway. She could only imagine the feisty war veteran facing down the Abercrombie & Fitch car salesman.
Brian sniffed. “The old man got so worked up! Started hollering about how this town has never lived up to its nicey-nice reputation. That they put him on the outs, chased his daughter to another state, made you an exile. Not to mention his father and then his crazy stories about the Greenwoods!”
Brian stopped, his chest heaving for breath as though he’d run a marathon. Annalise was afraid to move. The gun wobbled in his hand, which had been overtaken by tremors. A tear slid down his cheek. Brian’s upper lip curled.
“The man didn’t care. He said turnabout was fair play, and then he just—he just dropped. He had a heart attack right in front of me, waving your picture and that photo of Nicole’s dead great-great-grandfather.”
Annalise mentally filled in the gaps. So, Brian had watched Eugene die, thinking the threats, the secrets, would once again be buried. Until Eugene’s trailer was found, the pictures, the will stating she owned Eugene’s place.
The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond Page 29