Crystalline Crypt

by Mary Coley

  “Guess I’ll go back to the cabin. I hate to be a bother to the Hardestys. And my dog’s there, after all. I’ll be safe.”

  They crossed the veranda and stepped onto the well-lit yard. Shadows hovered at the edges, and the moist night air held the dusty odor of horse manure.

  Mandy peered down the side road toward her dark cabin. Why hadn’t she left a light on? She felt relaxed with Lamar standing beside her, but the thought of the empty duplex made the hair on her neck bristle.

  “Maybe I should have taken Dale up on her offer and slept upstairs,” Mandy said.

  “I’ll go in first and check it out, make sure the place is empty and the locks are secure.”

  Mandy wasn’t about to turn down his offer, but Moby’s barks as they neared the porch made it apparent there couldn’t be an intruder inside.

  “You have a dog?” Lamar asked before he stepped onto the wooden porch.

  “A stray I’m fostering just until I get back to Tulsa.” Mandy reached into her pocket for the cabin key, inserted it into the lock and shoved the door open. Moby thrust his big head through the open crack and barked again.

  “Hey, it’s okay. It’s me.” She petted the dog and pushed him back so that she could enter the cabin. Behind her, Lamar flipped the light switches, illuminating the porch light and a living room lamp. Light dispelled the room’s shadows. Mandy released her breath. As Moby sniffed Lamar, his long, hairy tail swished back and forth.

  “Hi, dog,” Lamar said, patting the top of Moby’s head and scratching his ears. “Dog sure is friendly. This breed, well, they all look alike. Good boy.” He shoved Moby away when the dog put his front paws on his chest. Lamar crossed the living room into the kitchenette and turned on the light over the sink. He opened the door to the pantry and looked in before checking the bathroom.

  Mandy flipped on the light in the bedroom.

  The carryall she’d bought at the store lay on the bed where she’d left it. Nothing in the room had been disturbed.

  “Looks fine. Nobody here but the dog.” Lamar stepped up beside her. “Will you be okay?”

  “I think so. Let’s check the adjoining door.”

  The door to the other half of the duplex was at the far end of the living room. The deadbolt was secure.

  “I’ll be fine, Lamar. Come by in the morning, I’ll probably already be up. If not, I can be ready in a few minutes.”

  “We’ll grab coffee and toast or something at the ranch house. Dale has a pot going by 5:30.”

  Mandy locked the door behind him. At the window, she watched his progress to the bunkhouse porch. Even though he was bow-legged, he walked confidently. What was his story? He’d revealed nothing about himself or his relationship with Molly or Sharon. Why had Jenna wanted her to find him?

  Only a few hours had passed since she’d talked to Will. Mike was dead after revealing Will had lied to her.

  How many times had he lied to her before this?

  Mandy let the window curtain drop and turned to the little living room. The décor could be called “Worn lodge.” The fabric of the well-used pillows on the red plaid sofa featured deer and elk, the end table lamps were made of entwined antlers, and a cowhide rug covered most of the wooden floor. Rustic shelves held books and whatnots. An old TV with a VCR sat on a low coffee table, stacks of old VCR tapes piled beside it.

  A few watercolors of stormy hillside scenes decorated the walls. An empty wooden fruit bowl was centered on the wooden dinette table. Other than a toaster and a four-cup coffee maker, the kitchen counters were bare.

  She felt sure that if she opened the cupboards, she’d find plates and glasses. There might even be food staples in the pantry and condiments in the small refrigerator. She didn’t care. She wasn’t hungry. She couldn’t be hungry when Mike’s dead face kept appearing. Her stomach roiled.

  “Here we are Moby. Need to go out? And I bet you’re hungry.” She unlocked the front door and stepped out on the porch to watch the animal sniff around the bushes and finally find a spot to do his business. The dog hurried back to the cabin, and she locked the door.

  Back inside, she poured kibble into his bowl in the little kitchen and stood back as he ate. Her thoughts buzzed around and back to Mike. When the dog had finished eating, she stooped to pet him, glad to have the distraction.

  “Okay, now where do you want to sleep?”

  The dog bounded to the bedroom and up onto the bed, where he circled and settled in.

  The double bed was firm, and the clean bedding smelled of lavender. Mandy’s body wanted sleep, but her mind didn’t. She wanted answers to all her questions, but without so much as a cell phone signal, finding those answers would have to wait until tomorrow.

  Mandy dozed, then startled awake in the shadowy room. Outside, an owl hooted, and insects and birds twittered. Inside the cabin, Moby snored softly, and something scratched at a wall or floor. Mice?

  In the adjacent living room, soft light filtered through the curtains. She turned on her side and stared through the open doorway at the light, hoping it might hypnotize her to sleep.

  The incoming light disappeared for an instant, then reappeared. Imagination, or had someone walked in front of the window? Her heartbeat hammered and she lay still, listening. The owl and the insects were silent; the scratching had stopped.

  A few minutes later, inside the cabin, something squeaked. She rolled out of bed and stepped to the living room doorway. The noise came from the far end of the living room. She squinted in the half light.

  The doorknob to the other half of the duplex turned.

  “Who’s there?!” she cried. Moby leaped off the bed and barked.

  The knob stopped turning.

  “Who’s there?”

  Silence.

  Moby panted and looked up at her.

  Mandy shoved a chair in front of the connecting door, checked the front door, and the window locks. In the bedroom, she jerked the blanket off the bed. In the kitchen, she dug through the drawers until she found a butcher knife. When she returned to the living room, she sank down on the sofa and turned on the television. The dog curled at her feet.

  She couldn’t fall asleep again.

  ~ Chapter 45 ~

  Sean

  Sean Wade parked under the bright mercury vapor light. Something—yellow crime tape? —fluttered in the wind at the far end of the lot, where shadows hung from the trees.

  He picked up his cell phone and made a call.

  “Sylvester,” the voice on the other end answered.

  “I’m in place. Test results?” Sean scanned the parking lot as he talked.

  “As expected. It’s our guy. Paint pigments match, framing materials are consistent. Even the wood pulp fibers are the same. Either our guy’s getting sloppy, or he thinks he’ll never get caught.”

  “After three years, we were due for a break, Si.”

  “Timing is set. The buffalo jump happens Friday at sunset.”

  Sean grunted his agreement and disconnected. The Buffalo Jump, an escarpment where Native Americans had driven herds of buffalo to their slaughter, was only a few miles from here, in the rough granite country. He’d read all about it while they searched for the location of the forger. Sy must have also been reading up on his local history to pick that term as the code name of their raid.

  He drew in a ragged breath. The timing sucked. This had all come together quickly. The coincidence of Jenna’s disappearance and the chance she was also here made him uneasy. Usually, nothing made him uneasy.

  What had Jenna gotten mixed up in? And if he believed Mandy, this was all part of the past his wife had tried so hard to keep from him. He knew some things about her past. He knew her tragedy, even though he hadn’t heard it from her. He was fine with pretending her secret was hers alone.

  She had known it was the nature of his work to learn things about people. It was all about research and connections and digging out facts people hid or intentionally omitted. Good people were not good li
ars. Bad people were tremendous liars.

  He knew Jenna was a good person. A bad person would never have tried so hard to hide something. What people thought wouldn’t matter to them. It mattered to Jenna.

  As soon as tomorrow was over, he would dedicate every hour of every day to finding her.

  Part 4 - FRIDAY

  ~ Chapter 46 ~

  Mandy

  When Lamar knocked on the door in Friday morning’s pre-dawn light, Mandy answered the door fully dressed. Moby darted out the door and circled the porch, sniffing.

  “You must be a morning person,” Lamar drawled with a slight smile.

  “As in, lark versus owl? Not really, but I didn’t sleep much after I had my late-night visitor.”

  “What?”

  Mandy explained.

  Lamar frowned. “We don’t have prowlers out here,” he said. “Doobie sees to that. He’d sound the alarm.”

  “Doobie was in the house last night when we got back. Maybe Dale left him inside. Moby was with me, though. He barked, and whoever it was left.”

  “We’ll tell Dale and Max. You’re not spending another night out here alone. You stay at the big house, or you stay with me in the bunkhouse.”

  Mandy glanced at Lamar as they stepped off the porch. Was this an innocent declaration, or was he feeling something more than friendship for her? She wasn’t sure how she felt about him. In the early dawn light, the firm set of his jaw seemed strong and protective. It felt good to have him concerned about her, and not in Will’s sometimes-authoritarian way.

  Lamar wanted to help. She might have wanted to see what could happen between her and Lamar if it wasn’t for lingering thoughts of Will and an unwanted reminder that Mike—dead Mike—had seemed concerned back in Tulsa when he was lying to her. She didn’t know anything about Lamar.

  At the big house, the coffee was ready, but the kitchen was empty. Doobie padded over and sniffed them both as they entered the room.

  “Guess this answers your question about Doobie,” Lamar said as he scratched the border collie’s ears. “They left him inside last night.”

  “Looks that way.” She opened the door and let the dog out.

  “You want a bagel or some toast?” Lamar asked as he moved around the kitchen.

  “Toast is good. Thanks.”

  Lamar opened a sack of wheatberry bread and slipped two slices into the toaster.

  Ten minutes later, they piled into Lamar’s truck with a sack of food Dale had put together for Chad and left in the refrigerator. Lamar drove out of the gate and turned away from town into the broken landscape. The country western Top 40 blared on the radio. The road surface became gravel and Lamar dropped the truck’s speed to 30 mph.

  “So, what happens when you find Jenna?” Lamar asked. “If you find her.”

  The question startled her. She’d been so focused on finding her friend, she hadn’t considered what would happen next. “If she needs help, I’ll do whatever I can to help her,” she said slowly. “After that, I don’t know. I’m not sure she’ll return to Tulsa. She found a strange painting in an art gallery, and it really spooked her.”

  Lamar turned down the radio. “What type of painting?” Lamar’s look shifted away from the road. The surrounding hills and valleys glowed golden in the pre-dawn light.

  “The woman in it looked like Jenna. And she was imprisoned in a glass crypt.”

  Lamar’s look darted to her, his brow furrowed.

  “Does that mean something to you?”

  “Not sure.” He flicked on the air vents and rolled down the windows.

  An uneasy feeling settled over her. What was he hiding?

  “If your friend doesn’t want to go back to Tulsa, will you?” His eyebrows lifted.

  “I have to decide if my relationship with Will is permanently broken. And as far as a job—I’ll be starting from scratch. After the last few years in the marketing world, I don’t see spending the rest of my life trying to please company owners with ulterior motives and market products with unsubstantiated claims.”

  “Would you consider relocating?” He smiled as he drove. Dimples popped into his cheeks.

  Why did her heart thump? She didn’t see anything that looked like an invitation on his face. He was being friendly.

  “I might. I like this part of the state. Fond memories.”

  “So, you said. Tell me about your missing friend, Jenna.” He turned off the radio.

  She wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easy. “After you tell me what you know about glass crypts. Have you seen one before?”

  Lamar peered at the top of the next hill. “Only in Sleeping Beauty. Or was it Snow White? You know, the one where the prince has to kiss her?” He tossed her a grin. “So, Jenna?” he asked again.

  He was evading her question. She’d bring it up again later. “She’s beautiful and smart. She was the CFO at the marketing firm, but she isn’t a stereotypical accountant. She has a playful side, loves to joke around. We’re best friends. More like sisters. She doesn’t have any living family.”

  “Does she think of you as a sister, too?”

  “We never talk about it. Have lunch or dinner together several times a week. And Will and I get together with her and Sean on the weekends.”

  “Will is Sean’s buddy?”

  “Yeah, since high school.”

  “Jenna got along with Will?”

  Mandy thought about that one. “They didn’t not get along. Will liked her, but sometimes he seemed to resent the time she and I spent together. If Jenna and Sean were arguing, he took Sean’s side.”

  “And in all that time you spent together, she never mentioned a sister or told you about her family?”

  “No. She didn’t like to talk about the past. Her family members were all dead, under tragic circumstances. She had no interest in contacting anyone from her childhood. Said it was too painful to talk about.”

  “Could be, but it seems strange to me she never mentioned her sister. When Molly and Sharon disappeared, I assumed they went somewhere together. If Jenna is Molly, what happened to Sharon?”

  Lamar turned up a narrow, rutted road, the edges overgrown with tall grasses and low, spindly brush. The truck’s engine roared and the suspension creaked as the vehicle dropped into and climbed over the ruts.

  “Only Jenna can answer that.” How many times had she wished her friend would say something about her past? It couldn’t have been as ordinary as she said. “Is it much farther? Why does he live way out here, anyway?”

  Lamar shrugged. “He gave up people after Sharon and Molly disappeared. Max and Dale met, married, and lived in west Texas. Didn’t come back here until Max’s parents died. Eventually, they sold the family ranch and Max invested his share in Jandafar Hills. Tried to get Chad to go in on it and work with him, but Chad won’t set foot on the place.”

  Lamar downshifted to first gear. “The place looks like crap.” He drove through what had once been a gate, but one post was down and broken. Overgrown cedars blocked any view of the house from the former driveway. Lamar braked to a stop and tapped the horn.

  The sun had risen while they made the drive, and in the harsh glare of the morning sun, the house and yard looked bleak and uninviting.

  “Chad? It’s Lamar. You here?” Lamar called as he stepped out of the truck.

  Mandy eased out into the overgrown grass of the former yard.

  Lamar strode to the porch and rapped on the front door. “Chad? It’s Lamar.”

  He tried the front doorknob. It swung open, and he stepped inside. Mandy waited.

  A mockingbird sang his repertoire from the top of a nearby oak tree. Other birds chirped in the trees, and a hawk swooped low across the yard. Something rustled in the overgrown bushes. This area of Oklahoma was beautiful in a wild, untamed way. Standing here in this overgrown yard, with the wind blowing and clouds puffing overhead, Mandy believed it possible that a cattle drive might lumber by, or a wagon train.

  Had C
had chosen to live here in this desolate place because of a broken heart?

  A few minutes later, Lamar reappeared, his expression grim. “He’s not here. Place is a wreck, but it always is. No sign he’s even eaten a meal here lately. I put the food Dale packed in the refrigerator. This was taped outside the fridge.” He handed her an old print.

  Mandy recognized the family in the picture, standing on the porch of a cabin. She flipped it over. The single word “remember” had been printed on the back. “I found a picture of this same family in Jenna’s things.”

  Lamar raised his eyebrows. “It’s definitely the Bergen family, and that’s Molly and Sharon.”

  Mandy studied the two girls in the photo. “And if I added twenty years to this face, she could be Jenna.” Mandy tapped one girl in the photo.

  Lamar’s brow furrowed. “Then your friend Jenna isn’t Molly. That’s Sharon.”

  She’d gotten used to believing Jenna was Molly, the pretty, quiet girl unconcerned with approval and popularity. Lamar had characterized Sharon as wild, ready to try anything. If Jenna was indeed Sharon, she had changed her personality. Was that possible? Was everything she had believed about her friend wrong?

  “No sign of Chad. His truck isn’t here.”

  Mandy looked up from the picture. “Does he often disappear for a few days?”

  “I’m lucky to see him once a month. He’s a loner.”

  “You said he studies online. What else does he do when he’s not at Spark’s working on cars?”

  “I’ll show you. He’s not here, so he can’t be angry about it. Follow me.”

  Lamar led her around the house to a small building. A combination lock kept the double door latched tightly. He lifted the latch and frowned. “Now let’s see, what would he use for the combination?” He spun the dial one way, then the other, and finally moved it a few clicks back in the first direction. The padlock snapped open.

  Lamar unlatched the double door.

  Light filled the room. Roof skylights and windows high on all four walls allowed light to pour in. An easel occupied the focal point of the small space. A white cloth covered the canvas on the easel. Elsewhere around the room, stacks of canvases leaned in rows against two of the walls. Some were in early stages, with the subjects sketched lightly in pencil directly on the canvas or sketched over a backwash of blue or yellow. A third wall held only a few draped canvases. Finished paintings?