“What?”
“Meredith’s body. That’s how it disappeared that morning. It must’ve been right by the tunnel’s secret opening. That’s why there weren’t any footprints.”
Silence on the line.
“Jed?”
“I’m thinkin’.”
“Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Well—”
“Where’s Samantha?”
“I don’t know.”
“Meet me at Modern Vintage.”
Click!
Harley ducked out of the alleyway and raced down the sidewalk, weaving her way through throngs of pedestrians. She dialed Beau’s number next, and left a message.
“Beau, I need you to look inside your father’s desk—the one Samantha had been refinishing. Try to find a secret drawer, something that would hold a map of the house. It may not even be there. I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like she would put it back. But anyway, there’s tunnels, Beau, going from the house to the park. I know this sounds crazy, but this is why all of the strange things have been happening there recently. And there’s a safe room where your family kept their valuables. Samantha … she’s been stealing them.”
Click.
* * *
“She ain’t here.”
Harley and Jed stood outside Modern Vintage, staring through the store’s dark storefront windows. The parade had ended, and people were making their way back to their cars, with folding chairs and coolers tucked under their arms.
“You know where she lives?” Jed asked.
“Over on Maple, a few streets down from me.”
“Let’s do it.”
72
Missing
Samantha Jacobs lived in a small white bungalow on Maple Street, a few streets down from Harley’s house. An ancient maple rose in the front yard, dwarfing the little house, already reduced by a blanket of snow and a sagging front porch. The home’s previous occupant had lived there for over fifty years before relocating to a senior care facility, now renting out the property for a meager amount.
Jed parked his police cruiser in the driveway behind a small matching garage. He grabbed a flashlight from the glove box, and he and Harley rose from the car.
“Doesn’t look like anybody’s here,” he said.
They bypassed the icy sidewalk for the grass in the front yard.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
They climbed the rickety porch steps, kicking snow with their shoes as they reached the landing.
Jed knocked on the screen door.
“Samantha?”
He knocked again.
“Samantha, it’s Sheriff Turner. Open up.”
Jed opened the screen door and banged on the front door.
“Samantha, it’s the police!”
Nothing.
Harley thought he was going to beat the door in, but instead he turned to her and said, “Let’s go check the back.”
They made their way around the side of the house and into the back yard, empty except for a ceramic bird bath covered in ice and snow.
They climbed the steps of the small back porch, and approached the door.
Jed froze beside Harley, the flashlight’s beam still suspended on the back door.
One of the glass panes was shattered and the door was ajar.
“Wait,” Jed said. “You stay here.”
“No.”
“Harley.”
“I said I’m going.”
He groaned. “Then stay behind me.”
Jed kicked the door with his boot, exposing a dark kitchen. He shone his flashlight inside, and a Formica table and chairs appeared over a black and white linoleum floor, surrounded by 1950s appliances.
“Police!” Jed yelled.
He stepped inside, and Harley followed close behind him, crunching broken glass with her boots.
Harley shivered, finding the house colder than the outside had been. If Samantha had been there, it had not been for some hours, and she had turned off the heat.
Jed located a light switch on the wall and flipped it on.
The kitchen was in perfect order.
Jed moved past the table, and through a doorway leading into the living room.
What was left of the living room.
Books were thrown from shelves and drawers pulled out, their contents spilling onto the floor. Lamps were turned over, sofa cushions upended, and pictures removed from the walls.
Jed looked at Harley over his shoulder. “Stay put.”
This time she did.
She waited as Jed went from room to room of the house, checking them. He returned to her and said, “I wonder if they found what they were lookin’ for. Whole place is trashed.”
“Did you see any valuables?”
“Nothin’.”
“Maybe they took them.”
“Don’t know.”
“I wonder if they found Samantha.”
They both stood in thought, the steam from their breaths causing the only movement in the house.
At last Jed said, “You know of anybody that was havin’ problems with Samantha?”
Harley considered. “Well, there was Justin Wheeler. I heard him threatening her inside her store earlier. He was mad she and Jennifer hadn’t let him use their things as props for his ghost tours. Plus, he accused them of slandering him to people around town.”
“And you say he was threatenin’ her?”
“He said they got what they deserved after telling lies about him around town, that he was glad their store was closing, and he wasn’t done with her yet.”
Jed removed his phone from his jacket pocket. “Hey, it’s me. I need y’all to find Justin Wheeler and pick ’im up for me. Meet me at the station. … Huh? … Yeah, Miss Knowlton, too. … All right. All right. Bye.”
He returned the phone to his pocket and looked at Harley. “You think Justin Wheeler might’ve found out about what Samantha was doin’? Maybe he wanted a cut too … or maybe he just wanted the whole lot for himself.”
“Possibly.”
73
Statute of Limitations
“Tell us where Samantha Jacobs is.”
Jed sat at a table in an interrogation room in the Notchey Creek police station. Justin Wheeler sat across from him. In the adjacent room, Harley watched through reflective glass. Jed had had the rooms installed after the Middleton murder investigation.
“I’m not sayin’ a word ’til I’ve got a lawyer,” Justin said.
Jed leaned back in his chair and gave a sigh. “Oh, Mr. Wheeler, sounds like you think you might be in some kind of trouble.”
“Like I said, I’m not sayin’ another word ’til my lawyer gets here.”
Jed motioned to one of his officers, who stood right outside the door. “Take him away. Bring in Miss Knowlton.”
“Heather?” Justin jumped up from his seat. “Heather doesn’t have anything do with this. You leave her out of it!”
“Goodbye, Mr. Wheeler,” Jed said. “And don’t worry. I’ll be catchin’ up with you later.”
A uniformed officer escorted Justin from the room. Moments later, a female officer appeared alongside Heather Knowlton. She ushered her to a seat across from Jed at the table and left.
“Miss Knowlton,” Jed said.
“Sheriff.”
“Your boyfriend—business partner, whatever you wanna call ’im—he’s gotten himself in some trouble. Not lookin’ too good. We’ve got one woman dead and two missin’. Samantha Jacobs is one of those women—and he was seen threatenin’ her recently. What can you tell us?”
Harley feared Heather would demand a lawyer too, but instead, she said, “I’ll tell you whatever you wanna know. I’m sick of being here. Sick of this town. Sick of the whole stupid thing.”
“What stupid thing?”
She threw her hands up. “The ghost tours, the legends, the—the just everything.”
“So you’re admittin’ that Mr. Whe
eler—what he’s been doin’ here—it’s all just a put-on?”
“No …” She bit her lip. “I think he believes it. Wants to believe it. The Margaret Reed story for sure—that’s got some personal meaning for him.”
“What do you mean personal?”
“Justin’s mother was a Reed. He’s one of their descendants.”
Harley and Ed had been right.
Heather continued. “Back when the Reeds still owned the land over at the park, at Briarcliffe, Justin’s great-great-great-granddad or whoever, moved away. I think he was the only one who did. And anyway, when he came back, he found the whole family had died, their land was gone—taken by the Sutcliffes. Thought they’d stolen it. And I think … well, I think Justin believes that too—and that the Briarcliffe property, the park—should be his. That it should all be his, not Beau Arson’s. And Beau’s rich and famous, doesn’t need it. It’s not right for him to have it.”
“Have y’all been sneakin’ in there somehow at night, tryin’ to scare Beau—dressin’ up like this Margaret Reed person?”
She looked up at him with surprise, then her eyebrows came together. “Dressing up? Like Margaret Reed?” She almost laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She paused in consideration. “But yeah, we did, you know, sneak in—that one time—that night they had the neighborhood association meeting. Marcus let us in. Thought it’d be funny if we crashed it. He doesn’t like it here either—doesn’t like Briarcliffe. But it was only the one time, I swear. He never let us in again after that.”
“And you never put anything in Beau Arson’s whiskey decanter? No drugs, never stole anything from him—like his watch, for example?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, never, I swear. We didn’t even go upstairs that night. Never would’ve made it. Y’all or somebody else would’ve caught us.”
Jed shifted his weight in the chair, and rested his elbows on the table. “Let’s talk about Samantha Jacobs and Jennifer Williams. What was y’all’s beef with them?”
“Beef? I-I didn’t have a beef. I mean … they seemed okay.”
“Justin?”
“Well, Justin—he didn’t—I mean, I guess he got kind of mad when they wouldn’t let us borrow some of their stuff from their store. He wanted to use it for our tours. They said no, that they wanted us to buy it, which we couldn’t afford to do, so then, well … Justin—he might not’ve acted his best after that.”
“I’ve got a witness who says he threatened Samantha.”
“He might’ve, yeah, but, I don’t know, I wasn’t there if it happened.”
“It happened,” Jed said. “When’s the last time you saw Samantha?”
“Um …” She sat in thought. Her gaze danced across the tabletop, as her mind labored with the question. “Today … um, earlier this afternoon, I guess. She was in the park, walking around. She had, uh, a backpack on, you know, like she was … I don’t know—maybe going hiking or camping or something.”
“You talk to her?”
“No, I just kind of saw her off in the distance. We were in the middle of a tour.”
“You see where she went?”
She shook her head. “I turned to look at something else, and then when I looked back again, she was gone.”
“That was all?”
“Yeah. Sort of. I mean, it was kind of weird though, you know, because it seemed like she just …”
“Just what?”
Heather’s eyes met Jed’s. “Disappeared. Like she just disappeared into thin air.”
Harley raced from the room, and rapped against the interrogation room door. A few seconds later, the door opened and Jed stepped outside in the hallway.
“Jed!” Harley whispered. “I know where to find Samantha!”
“Shh!” Jed said, pushing his index finger to his lips.
“But Jed I know where to find the tunnel!”
“Shh!” he said again. “Now, I’m right in the middle of somethin’ here. We’re finally gettin’ somewhere with this.”
“But Jed, we have to go find Samantha now!”
“Harley,” he said, pointing his finger at her. “No.”
Then he disappeared back inside the interrogation room, closing the door behind him.
Harley ran down the hallway, out the front entrance, and toward Briarwood Park.
74
Mariselle
Harley stopped at the entrance to Briarwood Park and caught her breath. With the parade having ended and foot and car traffic clogging the streets, she had run to the park on foot. Fewer streetlights lit the park than the downtown area. The trails were completely dark except for scant moonlight seeping through bare tree branches and reflecting on the snow. She removed the flashlight she always kept in her bag for emergencies.
In the wake of Jennifer Williams’s murder, Jed had closed the park, and the gates were shut to automobile traffic. However, they were easy enough to slip through on foot.
She entered the tree line and traveled down a gravel road, leading to an intersection of trails and picnic areas. With the flashlight guiding her path, she hiked her way across the clearing, her boots forging their way across sticks and gravel.
Though she was familiar with the park, she worried she might not remember the exact location where she had found Meredith’s body. In the daylight hours, it would have been much easier, with physical landmarks more visible.
Now all she had was a flashlight and intuition.
But Harley was a country girl, and an experienced hiker who had an innate sense of direction in the outdoors.
She searched her mind, trying to remember where Justin’s tour group had been the day Matilda had crashed their tour. They had been standing among a copse of maples, near the main trail. Maples were few and far between in the park, and if she could find those particular ones, she could retrace her steps to the location where Meredith Roberts’s body had been.
She stopped in the middle of a clearing, where moon and stars shone down on gray earth. Known as The Starlight Lounge, the area was popular with teenage lovers who parked their cars there on Friday nights, stealing away from the high school football games, and from their parents’ disapproval.
Her cell phone rang, and she froze on the trail. Thinking it might be Beau or Jed, she removed it from her pocket and checked the number.
A New York area code.
The number for M.R. Designs.
“Hello?” she said, smacking the phone to her ear. Her voice and hands were shaking. “This is Harley.”
She held her breath, her heart banging against her ribs like a caged animal fighting to free itself.
“Harley,” a woman said. She had a clipped northern accent. “This is Deborah Stevens of M.R. Designs in New York City. I’m one of Meredith Roberts’s partners.”
“Yes!” The words spat out with the release of her breath.
There was a slight pause on the other end of the line, then Deborah said, “Uh, yes, so I received your message—about Meredith. I only just happened to pop in to get something from my desk and … and, well, I have to admit, I thought it was kind of odd for a stranger to be calling all the way from Tennessee, asking about Meredith.” She took a breath of pause. “I mean, I did know she was traveling there last-minute, yes, but—but then I hadn’t heard from her in a few days, and … well, that in and of itself was odd. Have you seen her since?”
“No, ma’am. No, I haven’t.”
“And you said the last time you saw her was a few days ago?”
“Yes, ma’am. Please, Ms. Stevens, I don’t have much time. Do you know why Meredith was visiting here?”
A pause on the end of the line, then Deborah said, “I’m not sure I should be talking to …”
“The sheriff here is a friend of mine,” Harley said. “I’m helping him gather information.”
Another pause, then with reluctance Deborah said, “She saw something—online—traced it back to somebody who lives in your little town. Mered
ith’s an interior designer. That’s what she does. She scours the internet for good finds for her clients.”
“What was it she saw online?”
“A family heirloom.”
“A family heirloom?”
“A necklace. It’d been in her family for ages. She hadn’t seen it in years.”
“Do you think she might’ve lost it when she worked here—in Notchey Creek—all those years ago?”
“Worked there? Oh, Miss Henrickson, she never worked down there. She’s lived in New York her whole life. I know because I’ve known her for just about that long. She’s never lived anywhere else.”
“I don’t understand,” Harley said.
“The necklace … it belonged to her sister.”
“Her sister?”
“Yes, her sister, Mariselle—but everybody just called her Mary.”
“But, I …”
“Miss Henrickson, Meredith hadn’t heard from or seen her sister in over thirty years.”
Harley nearly dropped the phone, her breaths stabbing cold daggers of air into her lungs. She could not speak. The dark woods pulsated around her.
“Their parents gave it to Mariselle when she was a little girl. They were chefs—owned a restaurant here in Manhattan. Anyway, Mariselle never took the necklace off apparently. And she meant the world to Meredith. She raised her, you see, after their parents died in a car accident. Meredith was six years older, and it was just the two girls left. Meredith became Mariselle’s guardian, and I guess she was pretty tough on her—overprotective. They had a falling-out, and Mariselle ran away when she was seventeen. She never heard from her again.”
Those were the last words Harley heard before she hung up the phone.
75
Doorways
Harley felt her way along the ground, brushing away snow and leaf rot. Her gloved hands were numb from the cold, and the knees of her jeans wet with snow. With the flashlight in one hand, she cleared the ground with the other, feeling and searching for a door, some type of opening.
The Ghosts of Notchey Creek Page 25