“Is it possible he’s involved?”
“I don’t see how,” Jeffrey told her. “He’s got no connection to Abby, no reason to poison her or Cole.” He suggested, “I should just run the whole family in, split them up and see who breaks first.”
“I doubt Paul would allow that.”
“Maybe I’ll tag the old man.”
“Oh, Jeffrey,” she said, feeling protective of Thomas Ward for some unknown reason. “Don’t. He’s just a helpless old man.”
“Nobody’s helpless in that family.” He paused. “Not even Rebecca.”
Sara weighed his words. “You think she’s involved?”
“I think she’s hiding. I think she knows something.” He sat beside her at the counter, picking at his eyebrow, obviously mulling over the niggling details that had kept him up all night.
Sara rubbed his back. “Something will break. You just need to start back at square one.”
“You’re right.” He looked up at her. “It keeps going back to the cyanide. That’s the key. I want to talk to Terri Stanley. I need to get her away from Dale and see what she says.”
“She’s got an appointment at the clinic today,” Sara told him. “I had to fit her in during lunch.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Her youngest hasn’t gotten any better.”
“Are you going to talk to her about the bruises?”
“I’m in the same boat as you,” she said. “It’s not like I can back her into a corner and get her to tell me what’s going on. If it were that easy, you’d be out of a job.”
Sara had experienced her own guilt last night, wondering how she had seen Terri Stanley all these years and never guessed what was happening at home.
She continued, “I can’t really betray Lena’s confidence and for all I know, it’ll scare her off. Her kids are sick. She needs the clinic. It’s a safe place for her.” Sara assured him, “If I ever see so much as a hair disturbed on those kids, you’d better believe I’ll say something about it. She’d never leave the building with them.”
He asked, “Does she ever bring Dale with her when she comes to the clinic?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
“Mind if I stop in to talk to her?”
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that,” she said, not liking the idea of her clinic being used as a second police station.
He told her, “Dale has a loaded gun in his shop, and something tells me he doesn’t like cops talking to his wife.”
“Oh,” was all she could say. That changed things.
“Why don’t I just wait around in the parking lot for her to come out?” he suggested. “Then I’ll take her to the station.”
Sara knew this would be a lot safer, but she still didn’t relish the thought of being involved in setting up Terri Stanley for a surprise attack. “She’ll have her son with her.”
“Marla loves children.”
“I don’t feel good about this.”
“I’m sure Abby Bennett didn’t feel good about being put in that box, either.”
He had a point, but she still didn’t like it. Despite her better judgment, Sara relented. “She’s scheduled to come in at twelve fifteen.”
Brock’s funeral home was housed in a Victorian mansion that had been built in the early 1900s by the man who had run the railroad maintenance depot over in Avondale. Unfortunately, he had dipped into the railroad’s coffers in order to finance the construction and when he had been caught, the place had been sold at auction. John Brock had purchased the mansion for a ridiculously low sum and turned it into one of the nicest funeral homes this side of Atlanta.
When John died, he passed the business on to his only son. Sara had gone to school with Dan Brock and the funeral home had been on her bus route. The family lived above the business, and every weekday morning, she had cringed as the bus pulled up in front of the Brocks’ house—not because she was squeamish, but because Brock’s mother insisted on waiting outside with her son, rain or shine, so that she could kiss him good-bye. After this embarrassing farewell, Dan would clamber onto the bus, where all the boys would make smooching noises at him.
More often than not, he ended up sitting beside Sara. She hadn’t been part of the popular crowd or the drug crowd or even the geeks. Most times, she had her head in a book and didn’t notice who was sitting beside her unless Brock plopped himself down. He was chatty even then, and more than a bit strange. Sara had always felt sorry for him, and that hadn’t changed in the thirty-plus years since they had ridden to school together. A confirmed bachelor who sang in the church choir, Brock still lived with his mother.
“Hello?” Sara called, opening the door onto the grand hall that went the full length of the house. Audra Brock hadn’t changed much in the way of decorating since her husband had bought the mansion, and the heavy carpeting and drapes still fit the Victorian period. Chairs were scattered down the hall, tables with Kleenex boxes discreetly hidden beside flower arrangements offering respite for mourners.
“Brock?” she asked, setting down her briefcase on one of the chairs so that she could dig out Abigail Bennett’s death certificate. She had promised Paul Ward she would have the paperwork to Brock yesterday, but she’d been too busy to get to it. Carlos had taken a rare day off, and Sara didn’t want to keep the family waiting one more day.
“Brock?” she tried again, looking at her watch, wondering where he was. She was going to be late getting to the clinic.
“Hello?” There hadn’t been any cars parked outside, so Sara assumed there wasn’t a funeral taking place. She walked down the hallway, peering into each of the viewing parlors. She found Brock in the farthest one. He was a tall, gangly man, but he had managed to lean the entire upper part of his body into a casket, the lid resting on his back. A woman’s leg, bent at the knee stuck up beside him, a dainty, high-heel clad foot dangling outside the casket. Sara would have suspected something obscene if she didn’t know him better.
“Brock?”
He jumped, smacking his head against the lid. “Lord a’mighty,” he laughed, clutching his heart as the lid slammed down. “You near about scared me to death.”
“Sorry.”
“Guess I’m in the right place for it!” he joked, slapping his thigh.
Sara made herself laugh. Brock’s sense of humor matched his social skills.
He ran his hand along the shiny edge of the bright yellow casket. “Special order. Nice, huh?”
“Uh, yeah,” she agreed, not knowing what else to say.
“Georgia Tech fan,” he told her, indicating the black pinstriping along the lid. “Say,” he said, beaming a smile, “I hate to ask, but can you give me a hand with her?”
“What’s wrong?”
He opened the lid again, showing her the body of a cherubic woman who was probably around eighty. Her gray hair was styled into a bun, her cheeks slightly rouged to give her a healthy glow. She looked like she belonged in Madame Tussauds instead of a lemon-yellow casket. One of the problems Sara had with embalming was the artifice involved; the blush and mascara, the chemicals that pickled the body to keep it from rotting. She did not relish the thought of dying and having someone— worse yet, Dan Brock— shoving cotton into her various orifices so that she wouldn’t leak embalming fluid.
“I was trying to pull it down,” Brock told her, indicating the woman’s jacket, which was bunched up around her shoulders. “She’s kind of husky. If you could hold up her legs and I could pull . . .”
She heard herself saying, “Sure,” even though this was the last thing she wanted to do with her morning. She lifted the woman’s legs at the ankles and Brock made quick work pulling down the suit jacket, talking all the while. “I didn’t want to have to tote her back downstairs to the pulley and Mama’s just not up to helping with this kind of thing anymore.”
Sara lowered the legs. “Is she okay?”
“Sciatica,” he whispered, as if his mother might be embarrassed by
the affliction. “It’s terrible when they start getting old. Anyway.” He tucked his hand around the coffin, straightening the silk lining. When he was finished, he rubbed his palms together as if to wash his hands of the task. “Thanks for helping me with that. What can I do you for?”
“Oh.” Sara had almost forgotten why she came. She walked back to the front row of chairs where she had put Abby’s paperwork. “I told Paul Ward I’d bring the death certificate over to you by Thursday, but I got tied up.”
“I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” Brock said, flashing a smile. “I don’t even have Chip back from the crematorium yet.”
“Chip?”
“Charles,” he said. “Sorry, Paul called him Chip, but I guess that can’t be his real name.”
“Why would Paul want Charles Donner’s death certificate?”
Brock shrugged, as if the request was the most natural thing in the world. “He always gets the death certificates when people from the farm pass.”
Sara leaned her hand against the back of the chair, feeling the need to grab onto something solid. “How many people die on the farm?”
“No,” Brock laughed, though she didn’t see what was funny. “I’m sorry I gave you the wrong impression. Not a lot. Two earlier this year—Chip makes three. I guess there were a couple last year.”
“That seems like a lot to me,” Sara told him, thinking he had left out Abigail, which would bring the tally to four this year alone.
“Well, I suppose,” Brock said slowly, as if the peculiarity of the circumstances had just occurred to him. “But you have to think about the types of folks they’ve got over there. Derelicts, mostly. I think it’s real Christian of the family to pick up the handling costs.”
“What did they die of?”
“Let’s see,” Brock began, tapping his finger against his chin. “All natural causes, I can tell you that. If you can call drinking and drugging yourself to death natural causes. One of ’em, this guy, was so full of liquor it took less than three hours to render his cremains. Came with his own accelerant. Skinny guy, too. Not a lot of fat.”
Sara knew fat burned more easily than muscle, but she didn’t like being reminded of it so soon after breakfast. “And the others?”
“I’ve got copies of the certificates in the office.”
“They came from Jim Ellers?” Sara asked, meaning Catoogah’s county coroner.
“Yep,” Brock said, waving her back toward the hall.
Sara followed, feeling uneasy. Jim Ellers was a nice man, but like Brock he was a funeral director, not a physician. Jim always sent his more difficult cases to Sara or the state lab. She couldn’t recall anything other than a gunshot wound and a stabbing that had been transferred to her office from Catoogah over the last eight years. Jim must have thought the deaths at the farm were pretty standard. Maybe they were. Brock had a point about the workers being derelicts. Alcoholism and drug addiction were hard diseases to manage, and left untreated, they generally led to catastrophic health problems and eventual death.
Brock opened a set of large wooden pocket doors to the room where the kitchen had once been. The space was now his office, and a massive desk was in the center, paperwork heaped in the in-box.
He apologized: “Mama’s been a little too poorly to straighten up.”
“It’s okay.”
Brock went over to the row of filing cabinets along the back of the room. He put his fingers to his chin again, tapping, not opening any drawers.
“Something wrong?”
“I might need a minute to try to think of their names.” He grinned apologetically. “Mama’s so much better at remembering these things than I am.”
“Brock, this is important,” she told him. “Go get your mother.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Yes, ma’am,” Jeffrey said into the telephone, rolling his eyes at Lena. She could tell that Barbara, Paul Ward’s secretary, was giving him everything but her social security number. The woman’s tinny voice was so loud that Lena could hear it from five feet away.
“That’s good,” he said. “Yes, ma’am.” He leaned his head against his hand. “Oh, excuse me— excuse—” he tried, then, “I’ve got another call. Thank you.” He hung up, Barbara’s cackling coming out of the earpiece even as he dropped the receiver back on the hook.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, rubbing his ear. “Literally.”
“She try to save your soul?”
“Let’s just say she’s really happy to be involved with the church.”
“So, she’d say anything she could to cover for Paul?”
“Probably,” he agreed, sitting back in his chair. He looked down at his notes, which consisted of three words. “She confirms what Paul said about being in Savannah. She even remembered working late with him the night Abby died.”
Lena knew that pinpointing time of death wasn’t an exact science. “All night?”
“That’s a point,” he allowed. “She also said Abby came by with some papers a couple of days before she went missing.”
“Did she seem okay?”
“Said she was a little ray of sunshine, as usual. Paul signed some papers, they went to lunch and he took her back to the bus station.”
“They could’ve had some kind of altercation during lunch.”
“True,” he agreed. “But why would he kill his niece?”
“It could be his baby she was carrying,” Lena suggested. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Jeffrey rubbed his jaw. “Yeah,” he admitted, and she could tell the thought left a bad taste in his mouth. “But Cole Connolly was pretty sure it was Chip’s.”
“Are you sure Cole didn’t poison her?
“As close to sure as I can be,” he told her. “Maybe we need to separate out the two, forget worrying about who killed Abby. Who killed Cole? Who would want him dead?”
Lena wasn’t entirely convinced of Connolly’s truthfulness about Abby’s death. Jeffrey had been pretty shaken up after watching the man die. She wondered if his conviction of Cole’s innocence was influenced by what had to have been a truly grotesque experience.
She suggested, “Maybe somebody who knew Cole had poisoned Abby decided to get revenge, wanted him to suffer the same way Abby had.”
“I didn’t tell anyone in the family that she was poisoned until after Cole was dead,” he reminded her. “On the other hand, whoever did it knew he drank coffee every morning. He told me the sisters were always on him, trying to get him to quit.”
Lena took it a step further. “Rebecca might know, too.”
Jeffrey nodded. “There’s a reason she’s staying away.” He added, “At least I hope she’s choosing to stay away.”
Lena had been thinking this same thing. “You’re sure Cole didn’t put her somewhere? To punish her for something?”
“I know you think I shouldn’t take him at his word,” Jeffrey began, “but I don’t think he took her. People like Cole know who to choose.” He leaned across his desk, hands clasped in front of him, as if he was saying something vital to the case. “They pick the ones they know won’t talk. It’s the same way with Dale picking Terri. These guys know who they can push around— who will shut up and take it and who won’t.”
Lena felt her cheeks burning. “Rebecca seemed pretty defiant. We only saw her that once, but I got the feeling she didn’t let anybody push her around.” She shrugged. “The thing is, you never know, do you?”
“No,” he said, giving her a careful look. “For all we know, Rebecca’s the one behind all of this.”
Frank stood in the doorway with a stack of papers in his hand. He said something neither one of them had considered. “Poisoning is a woman’s crime.”
“Rebecca was scared when she talked to us,” Lena said. “She didn’t want her family to know. Then again, maybe she didn’t want them to know because she was playing us.”
Jeffrey asked, “Did she seem like the type?”
“No,” she admitte
d. “Lev and Paul, maybe. Rachel’s pretty sturdy, too.”
Frank said, “What’s the brother doing living in Savannah, anyway?”
“It’s a port city,” Jeffrey reminded him. “Lots of trade still goes on down there.” He indicated the papers in Frank’s hand. “What’ve you got?”
“The rest of the credit reports,” he said, handing them over.
“Anything jump out at you?”
Frank shook his head as Marla’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Chief, Sara’s on line three.”
Jeffrey picked up the phone. “Hey.”
Lena made to leave in order to give him some privacy, but Jeffrey waved her back down in her chair. He took out his pen, saying into the phone, “Spell that,” as he wrote. Then, “Okay. Next.”
Lena read upside down as he wrote a series of names, all men.
“This is good,” Jeffrey told Sara. “I’ll call you later.” He hung up the telephone, not even pausing for a breath before saying, “Sara’s at Brock’s. She says that nine people have died on the farm in the last two years.”
“Nine?” Lena was sure she’d heard wrong.
“Brock got four of the bodies. Richard Cable got the rest.”
Lena knew Cable ran one of the funeral homes in Catoogah County. She asked, “What was the cause of death?”
Jeffrey ripped the sheet of paper off his pad. “Alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses. One had a heart attack. Jim Ellers over in Catoogah did the autopsies. He ruled them all natural causes.”
Lena was skeptical, not of what Jeffrey was saying, but of Ellers’s competence. “He said nine people in two years, living on the same place, died from natural causes?”
Jeffrey said, “Cole Connolly had a lot of drugs hidden in his room.”
“You think he helped them along?” Frank asked.
“That’s what he did with Chip,” Jeffrey said. “Cole told me that himself. Said he was tempting him with the apple, something like that.”
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