Ashes To Ashes

by Gwen Hunter

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by Gwen Hunter

  The DeLande Saga:

  BETRAYAL

  FALSE TRUTHS

  LAW OF THE WILD

  • • •

  Ashlee Chadwick Davenport Novels:

  ASHES TO ASHES

  SLEEP SOFTLY

  • • •

  Rhea Lynch, MD. Series:

  DELAYED DIAGNOSIS

  PRESCRIBED DANGER

  DEADLY REMEDY

  GRAVE CONCERNS

  • • •

  Stand-alones:

  SHADOW VALLEY

  BLOODSTONE

  BLACKWATER SECRETS

  RAPID DESCENT

  ASHES TO ASHES

  eISBN 978-1-933523-60-6

  Copyright © 2010 by Gwen Hunter

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information contact Bella Rosa Books, P.O. Box 4251 CRS, Rock Hill, SC 29732.

  Or online at www.bellarosabooks.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Also available from Bella Rosa Books in Trade Paperback form:

  ISBN 978-1-933523-17-0

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010941565

  First USA printing: December 2010

  Previously published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton.

  1996; ISBN: 0340637994

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

  BellaRosaBooks and logo are trademarks of Bella Rosa Books.

  To my husband Rod –

  For being strong and determined in the face of difficulty,

  Moral and upright in the face of adversity.

  For never taking the easy way out.

  And for knowing that love is more than an emotion, it is a decision.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For help in Real Estate Developments and associated problems, I thank Ralph Norman.

  For help in Rescue Squad scenes and proper lingo, thanks go to Kenneth Craig, Ted Bowden, and Shane Stuart, and Amanda Philbeck. For periodontal disease information, thanks to Dr. Cody Fishburne. For help in veterinary scenes and information, thanks to Dr. Michael Ferguson and Dr. Eric Setzer.

  For help with horses, I thank Mike and Pam Hege, and Kathern Hege. For info about turkey-shoots, thanks go to Richard Copeland. For help with A-flats, thank you to Sheldon Timmerman.

  I thank Bob Prater, my dad, for answering a thousand questions at the drop of a hat.

  For colloquial "cuss" words, I thank Joe and Pat Gentry, Chris Cogburn, Betty Cryer, and my Maw-Maw, now deceased, Gladys Bass Hennigan.

  For reading and re-reading this book and for all the helpful suggestions, I thank my mother, Joyce Wright.

  PROLOGUE

  I invited death into my home.

  Oh, I never thought about it in exactly those terms, with exactly those words, but that’s what I did. I issued a formal invitation, then stood back and waited for death to move in, make himself at home, put up his feet and stay. Like a guest who quietly takes over, surrounding your life with his own until he belongs there as much as you, and asking him to leave is impossible.

  I did that with death. All unknowing and innocent, all guileless and full of kind intentions. And I paid the price.

  There is a price for everything. Jack taught me that. In his insistent, determined, and deliberate way, my husband taught me everything about life—and by his death, started me on the journey into the past, his past, searching for meaning amidst lies and deceit and ruin.

  The end of the journey was the same as the beginning. Death. Just death. Death of dreams. Death of illusion. Death of truth as I had known it.

  And the curious antithesis of death. Resurrection. A new beginning. Whether I wanted it or not.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jack died in late spring, when the wisteria and dogwoods no longer have blooms. When the jonquils and daffodils and early blooming irises hang, wrinkled and brown, on their stiff green stems. When the heat is bearable by day and the night breezes are enough to cool the house. When blankets are kept handy for the occasional dip in temperature that makes the gooseflesh rise by morning. Brisk. That’s what they call the time of year he left me.

  It was quick. He didn’t suffer. Dr. Hoffman told me that in the ER, where I stood afterward, shivering and blank-eyed and bewildered. He didn’t suffer. He just . . . went. A single, massive, intracranial bleed.

  He was dead when the EMTs arrived. They knew it. I could see it on their faces. A major artery had burst in his head, and he had fractured his skull when he fell. Jack was dead when he hit the floor. The blood from Jack’s ears and nose and mouth proved it. The bloody tears that seeped down his blue face confirmed it. But I was doing CPR when the medics arrived, his blood all over my mouth. Ground into my hands. And they had no choice but to continue.

  We compressed his chest. We breathed for him. All the way to the hospital emergency room where I worked as a nurse, I gave feverish orders in the back of the ambulance. Administered drugs. Shocked him over and over again.

  The EMTs, out of sympathy for me and respect for the dead, permitted my futile attempts. A paramedic or a stranger might have gone by the official protocol and forced me to ride up front, following a standardized outline, a formalized list of priorities. But I knew these guys. Had worked with them for years in the emergency room and in the field at accident scenes and drownings, crisis situations handled by the county’s volunteer Rescue Squad.

  So, out of pity, and out of custom, they let me run the code. For all the dark and lonely miles of narrow farm country roads, they let me do what I could to save a life already bequeathed to the hand of God.

  By the time we arrived I had Jack intubated with a long, firm plastic tube in his lungs, an IV in his right arm running LR—lactated ringers—and another in his left running normal saline. I never checked his pupils beyond that first time. Fixed and dilated. A certain sign of brain death. But I couldn’t let him go. Not then, when I still believed in the man I thought him to be.

  And now it was weeks later, the funeral long past. The cut flowers in their plastic urns had curled and withered, the grave where they buried Jack was no longer a fresh red scar in the green sward of cemetery lawn. The condolence calls and visits by the church members had slowed. My Nana no longer came every morning and every night to sit with me while I cried, and . . . the sun still rose in the mornings and I was still alive. And alone. The Jack I thought I knew still hadn’t come home to fill the empty place at the table. To curl around me at night spoon fashion, sharing business concerns and tidbits of his day. To make me laugh and feel safe.

  I knew he never would.

  I had been trying for the last week to find the strength to begin my life again, to pick up the shattered pieces and start over. To leave the safe confines of my home and blink my way into the bright glare of the world, like a bear emerging from hibern
ation at the end of a too-long winter.

  I had called Lynnie Bee, my supervisor, and requested an end to my leave of absence. But now that it was the day for me to return to work, to walk back into the same room where Jack had died, I found myself retreating, longing to crawl beneath the covers and hide just one more day.

  I couldn’t. I knew that. But the tears had started the moment I opened my eyes, and I had accomplished nothing, though I had been awake since long before dawn.

  I was standing in my closet, choosing a uniform from among my scant supply of "skinny clothes" in preparation for my first day back on the job, when I heard the first, faint jingle of the phone. It was followed by the even fainter, dull voice of the personal line’s answering machine.

  I seldom answered the phone anymore; even more seldom did I listen to my messages. I just didn’t have the energy to deal with the world, now that Jack was gone. But for some reason, just this once, I stepped out of my room and listened.

  The amorphous, asexual, computer-generated voice spoke its generic message and sounded its banal tone. I listened as the man on the other end changed my life—again—forever.

  "Jack. It’s Bill. Pick up the phone."

  The voice was gruff, brusque, the words commanding. Moving slowly, my bare feet on the satiny, hardwood floor, I stepped down the hallway toward the small table holding the phone and answering machine.

  "Jack, damn it, pick up the phone. I know this is your private number. I paid plenty for the listing." There was a short pause, as if Bill expected Jack to answer. "If you want to play hardball, you picked the wrong man. I have contacts you don’t know about."

  Again there was a short pause and I stopped before the old machine, chilled by the air conditioner blowing icy air beneath my T-shirt. I crossed my arms and shivered slightly.

  "It’s been six weeks, damn it. You said you only needed four. I’ve been more than fair."

  I trembled with uncertainty and the cold, lifting my right hand. It hovered over the receiver, pale and thin.

  "You promised me restitution, you thieving bastard. I’ve got a kid in med school," he added. "And if he doesn’t hear from me soon, he’ll have to drop out."

  I rested my hand on the cool plastic of the phone. The air conditioning went off, leaving the house still and icy. Jasmine, my daughter, had been adjusting the thermostat again. She and Jack liked it cold in the house. Too cold for my comfort.

  "You son-of-a-bitch! If you’re trying to get out of compensating me for damages then you’ve got a bigger fight on your hands than you ever bargained for." The pause was even longer this time, and when he spoke again, his voice was lower, a coarse growl. "It’s been six weeks, damn you," he repeated. "If you don’t pick up this phone, I’ll see you in Columbia, in front of a judge. I’ll ruin you, you sanctimonious son-of-a—"

  The machine clicked off in mid curse. The silence of the house wrapped around me, a cloak of loneliness and solitude. The cold gripped me, and raising my left hand, I adjusted the thermostat up five degrees into a more temperate zone. My heart seemed to slow, the hallway wavering around me as shadows moved and shifted. I licked my lips, salty with old tears.

  I looked again at the phone, my skin white against the maroon plastic. Dark red . . . one of Jack’s colors. Power colors, he called them. Parts of the message came suddenly clear, as if my mind dilated, focusing on the words. Depraved words, words of a madman.

  Six weeks? Jack had only been dead that long. How had . . . Bill, was it? . . . gotten the personal line’s number? It was listed in my name. Six weeks? And then other parts of the one-sided conversation began to penetrate the haze in which I had wrapped myself.

  Restitution? Jack had never cheated anyone in his life. Jack had been a saint. Tears spilled over and traced fresh tracks down my chapped face.

  Turning, I moved down the hallway, the house still dark in the gray, post-dawn light. In the stillness of the empty house, I stepped into Jack’s office, my toes sinking into the rich pile of deep red carpet. Intended originally as a study, the office was L-shaped, built on to the front and side of the house. Jack had added onto it over the years, enlarging the space to include a small conference room, a secretary’s office, and a fireproof storage room built like a vault, keeping plans and financial records safe. Inside the small room was an old-fashioned black bank safe from the forties where Jack kept important papers. He liked—had liked—old technology, like the answering machine, his ancient adding machine, and the safe.

  Although the day-to-day business of DavInc, as Jack called his myriad real estate development companies, took place on the jobsites in various developments, the paperwork had been generated here. The brainstorming, deal making, problem solving, and long-range planning transpired here, and the legal papers were here, locked in the safe. I opened the blinds. A rosy glow brightened the rooms.

  Hunting prints hung on the paneled walls, dogs and turkeys and bucks, a seascape with sea oats waving in an invisible breeze. Photos of Jas and me. The head of the twelve-point buck I had killed took center stage of one whole wall, surrounded by dozens of Jack’s kills from over the years. None was larger than mine, a fact Jack had boasted of to his men friends without mentioning the circumstances of the accidental kill. Awards, diplomas, and maps dotted the other walls. Photos of past developments, slick advertising shots, were framed and hung between.

  Upholstered, low-backed chairs squatted in the reception area, leather-covered chairs everywhere else. The dark carpet was still marked with Jack’s footprints. His gun cabinet stood by the door to the hallway, solid and dark and ugly, filled with the handguns and antique weapons he collected. I hated having guns in the house. Jack and I had argued about their presence for years, one of the few subjects over which we ever disagreed.

  Dust lay like a fine gauze veil over everything. The room smelled musty. The business answering machine blinked a steady red rhythm. I stood over it, alien-looking in the dim light. The house was hushed around me, as if it too were curious about the machine’s recordings.

  I pressed PLAY.

  And listened to Peter Howell’s voice as he told Jack he would be in late to work in the morning. He had called at ten-fifteen P.M. the night Jack died. At that exact moment, I had been standing in a corner of the Cardiac Room in the ER, watching a first response team cut away the rest of Jack’s clothes as they worked to revive him. Watching Jack’s feet turn blue.

  Tears were trailing steadily down my face; I wiped them with shaking fingers. The next six messages were shocked calls from Jack’s subcontractors, two clients calling with condolences, and Esther, Jack’s secretary.

  And then the infamous Bill. This was a calmer Bill, his voice sounding only slightly concerned, telling Jack he appreciated the meeting on Tuesday afternoon, and the calls Jack had made to Paul Wilkes, the North Carolina governor. And he looked forward to a "resolution of the situation." All in all, it wasn’t a very helpful message.

  There were over three dozen messages covering the following weeks, weeks I had ignored the office, the development out at Davenport Hills, the business entirely. Without thinking, I picked up the pad and pen beside the phone and began making notes, just as I would have if Jack had been here. At some point, my tears dried.

  Between messages, I jotted notes in the margins, small things that needed attention, possible solutions to the site problems mentioned, though often as not, Peter Howell would leave a second message with the solution he had worked out. However, Peter himself had a problem that I should have handled weeks ago. Payments on short-term operating costs out at the development were seriously overdue. Work on roads and housing construction had been about to shut down just two weeks after Jack died.

  I sniffed. Jack didn’t believe in power of attorney for employees. He signed each check drawn on almost every account, overseeing all areas of DavInc. No bit of minutia escaped his notice. Jack had been a control freak, an A type personality, obsessive-compulsive about every aspect of his life. Yet, he had th
e charisma to pull it off without becoming an ogre.

  Even when bulldozing his way through a business meeting, forcing other, powerful men to bow to his will and preferences, he was so charming that they went away happy, convinced that Jack was a brilliant businessman who had their interests at heart. Jack always got his way.

  I smiled as I wrote up the next message, a petty complaint from some rich, whining housewife that her kitchen floor was coming up beneath the refrigerator and that her house stank. It sounded like she had a leak. A bad one apparently. I made a note to have Peter get the plumbing contractor back over there, pronto.

  Yes, Jack had always gotten his way. My Jack, who could handle anything. I looked at my ring, the two-carat diamond he had insisted I wear the night we went to tell my parents I was pregnant and that we were getting married in two weeks.

  Even then he had been certain of success. Success in winning me.

  I was nineteen, and halfway through nursing school at Presbyterian Hospital, while Jack was nearly thirty-four and never married. I had pursued him recklessly and seduced him with all the intensity of my innocent teenaged heart. He was far too old for me and guilty of disgracing the child of his business partner . . . but he was rich. And that, after all, was what mattered to my mother. The money overrode the shame. The money overrode everything. Jack had known that. And Jack had won, then as always.