Deadly Descent (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Flipping the office sign to “closed,” I called Sam as I rushed to my Tahoe. His personal cell phone went to voicemail. “Sam, I’m heading to the St. John’s. Judy’s asked Fiona to meet her there, and claims she’s found a letter tying her to Zelda’s death. I want to ward off trouble.”

Then worried, I followed that with a call to dispatch and asked Betty Central to radio Sam to meet me at the St. Johns.

“Is it urgent?” Her voice quivered with excitement.

“Just do it Betty.”

After I reached the city limits I drove as fast as I dared. Seething over Judy’s stupidity in inviting a woman she thought had murdered her mother over to her house, I used every cuss word I’d ever heard Keith use, some of Josie’s, and a few of my own. Even though Brian had given Fiona an alibi for the night of Zelda’s murder, I didn’t trust the woman. Even if she wasn’t a killer, she was pure D crazy. No telling what she might do if Judy pissed her off. Dust roiled behind my Tahoe as I tore down the St. John’s lane. To my relief, I’d beat Fiona there.

Judy didn’t answer the doorbell. When I rang it the second time and she didn’t come, I knew something was very wrong.

Judy should have come flying out the door.

Judy should have been tugging me inside.

Judy should have been waving a letter under my nose.

I opened the door and went inside. “Judy?” I started down the hallway toward the kitchen. “Judy?” My voice strained against tight vocal cords. My stomach clamped against a bilious surge. I looked through all the rooms downstairs and went upstairs and looked in Judy’s bedroom.

No Judy. I looked in the other bedrooms, went back down the stairs and checked the rest of the house. Mindful of my training, I stepped outside, watching for any movement, hearing every sound. I checked the machine shed. No Judy.

Drawn to the barn, I slid open the door leading to the hay storage area and peered through the dusky interior.

Judy hung from a rafter. Hung like a little sack of seed.

I slowly backed outside, and vomited into a patch of weeds. My teeth chattered. I reviewed the steps for protecting a crime scene. Then paralyzed, I watched Fiona Hadley drive up and park beside my Tahoe.

A nightmare
.
A waking nightmare.

“Well, bless my soul. I didn’t know you were going to be here, Lottie.” She was all gussied up in a two-piece blue knit suit with a jaunty fedora hat. “Now what was so goddamn important that my no-count niece would interrupt Tuesday Study Club?”

I looked at her like some dumb animal.

“What’s wrong?” She stared at my face as she walked toward me. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s Judy.”

“Judy?” Her steps faltered, and she glanced at the open door to the barn. She peered through the dusty interior, saw her niece hanging there, and rushed toward her. I grabbed her hands, and held on hard.

She tried to twist away. “Help me,” she screamed. “You’ve got to help me get her down.”

“Don’t touch anything. Don’t do anything.”

“She’s my niece, you stupid arrogant bitch. My niece. All I have left of Zelda.”

“Fiona, stop. It’s a crime scene.”

“Crime scene? Crime scene? Haven’t you got a brain in your head? She’s hanged herself, and you’re responsible. You encouraged her senseless little witch hunt, and now look what you’ve done. I tried to tell you. She’s always been a mess. A total mess. And you’ve led her on, with your everlasting probing and slinking around.”

“Shut up Fiona, or I’ll arrest you for interfering with an investigation. Now get in your car and stay there. Do you understand? I’ll have you hauled off. I called Sheriff Abbott before I came. He’ll decide if it’s suicide.”

“Oh, right. In this town it’s just as likely good old Yosemite Sam will say it was an accident.”

But she went to her car. A direct order seemed to have calmed her.

I heard her sob through her rolled-up window, then Sam drove up. She jumped out, and was at his car in a flash.

“I want you to arrest Lottie Albright for driving my niece to kill herself,” she sobbed. “Arrest the incompetent fool. My sister’s dead and now my niece. Both of them within a month.”

“I want you out of here, Fiona,” Sam said. “Is Edgar home? I’ll call him to come after you. I don’t want you driving in this state of mind.”

“I’m not leaving. Not till I see that poor baby cut down off that rope.”

“We have work to do.”

“We? You’re going to let her help with this? Are you crazy?”

He whirled around and flipped his cell phone open. “Edgar? I’m afraid I have more bad news for your family. Judy St. John has been found in the barn. Hanged. Yes. Lottie’s here. And so’s Fiona. I want you to come get her.”

He hung up and walked back over to Fiona. “Get back in your car. Don’t touch anything. Don’t do anything. Edgar is on the way.”

He firmly grasped Fiona’s upper arm and escorted her to her Cadillac.

She did not go quietly. “It’s all your fault, Lottie Albright. You drove her to it. You won’t be able to show your face in this town by the time I’m through with you.”

She twisted from Sam’s grasp, slid into the driver’s seat, and pointedly locked the door. Shoulders shaking, she laid her head against the steering wheel and sobbed uncontrollably.

Then Sam turned to me, with teeth clenched.

“Don’t you ever, ever leave a stupid son-of-a-bitching message on my cell phone like that again, Lottie. You either have a situation, or you don’t. Our job isn’t to ‘ward off trouble.’ You’re either on a job as an historian or my deputy. As an historian you’re used to deciding what’s important. Evaluating. But, by God, as an officer of the law, I expect you to go by the book.”

My face flamed. “I would like to remind you, Sam, that just yesterday, you dismissed letters that I thought were sinister as hell.”

“Different situation entirely, Lottie.”

“It’s not. This started with a letter, too. You said I was supposed to sort before acting. Clamp down on my alleged over-active imagination. No matter what Judy thought, I knew an old letter in a trunk wouldn’t be enough to tie Fiona to Zelda’s murder, I just wanted to stop her and Judy from getting physical.”

“You don’t know jack shit, lady. Not about a letter. Not about nothing. Got that? It’s not our job to know. We collect evidence. You don’t decide. I don’t decide. You came here as my deputy. To control a situation. You were an officer of the law when you left that office. I repeat, when you are heading toward people, you’ve got a situation. Now anything else you’ve decided to think about a while, before you mention it?”

“Yes.” I didn’t like ass-eatings, but I could take them with the best. I used to think my dissertation committee members were former SS officers. “Judy said she left a message for me. But there wasn’t one, and it’s the third time I’ve run into that situation.”

He snorted. “That’s curious, but not criminal.”

***

We walked to the barn. I shuddered, and stared at Judy’s pale distorted face. Pretended to be professional, when all my senses were reeling.

“This murder is so obvious the signs would be unmistakable to an eleven-year-old reader of Nancy Drew.” Solemnly, he rubbed the side of his nose. “There’s sweeps in the dust where someone covered up footprints. Someone carried Judy in here.”

He had a faint, sad smile on his face. “Most telling of all are the footprints that aren’t here. Judy’s. Not a trace of evidence she walked in here under her own steam. Neat trick, don’t you think?”

A column of dust moved toward us. Edgar driving at least eighty miles an hour on country roads in his junky old pickup. Crazy careless. He swerved close to Fiona’s car, braked, skidded to a stop.

Fiona jumped from her car and ran to him. Edgar hugged her against his chest, they swayed from side to side, then Edgar put his arm around her, left his pickup set, and they drove off in her Cadillac.

Sam called Jim Gilderhaus, and formally asked the FBI to assist. Even though I could only hear one side of the conversation, clearly the agent was aghast that the same family was involved.

“We’re not to do a damn thing until they get here. He’s going to bring more men this time. Give this place a good going over.” Gloomily Sam looked around at the run-down farmstead. Patches of weeds swayed under the blue cloudless sky. A rabbit scuttled toward the shelter belt. We both started as a quick breeze vibrated the wind chimes on the porch.

“Sam, I can give you the time this happened within twenty minutes. Whoever killed her did it right after Judy finished talking to me this morning. Clearly they had reason to expect she wouldn’t be discovered until evening, when Max got home from the store. No one knew I was coming here except you and Judy and Betty Central.”

“Any chance you were overheard at the office?”

“No. The vault is nearly soundproof after I close the door. And if someone had heard on Judy’s end, they’d have known I was coming right away, and wouldn’t have gone through with it. They were probably outside watching through a window, waiting for her to hang up.”

***

Gilderhaus took down every word I said, but his mouth tightened with disapproval at my hopelessly tangled involvement. I was Judy’s boss, her friend, and the law enforcement officer who’d discovered the crime. Sun glinted off his silver eyeglasses, as he called to confirm that Fiona had been at the Tuesday Study Club, until Judy called her out of the meeting.

“Now about that letter. Do you know what that was about?”

“No.” I told him Judy said the rose watermark was critical, but I didn’t know why.

“OK. I want you and agent Mendoza to search for the letter, while the crime team works the barn.”

Although we started with the attic and the false bottomed trunk, I was sure Judy would’ve taken it downstairs. Had it handy, to taunt Fiona, and convince me. We couldn’t find it. I knew the killer had taken it, but it didn’t matter. Like Sam said, knowing didn’t count. My job was to follow procedure by the book, and if I had any doubts on how it should be done, Mendoza set me straight. Her dark eyes scanned like a video camera before we entered any room.

Sam and I spent a long hard day watching experts with resources our sparsely populated county would never have. They cataloged, photographed, bagged, and firmly turned away press, neighbors, and townspeople.

We finally headed for our cars. “That bitch is going to be a real problem,” he said. “Fiona’s hell on wheels, even when she isn’t all het up.”

“Don’t I know.” I got into my Tahoe. He started toward his SUV, then came back and gestured for me to lower the window so I could hear him.

“Just want you to know, Lottie, whether she’s a problem or not, no one is going to tell me who I can hire or fire. Especially not Fiona Hadley.”

“I have to quit, Sam. This is a high profile case. Lots of attention due to Brian’s campaign. It’s his mother making all these accusations with his Carlton County campaign manager cast as the villain. Keeping me around will cause you too much grief. It won’t work. We can kiss Brian’s career goodbye, of course.”

His eyes flashed. “So?”

“You may not want me gone, Sam, but Fiona does. I’ll resign right away.”

“Don’t.” His eyes hardened. “I won’t have it. She’ll use that as an excuse to ruin me. Cast doubt on my judgment for hiring you in the first place. She’ll go after you too.”

Heartsick, I knew he was right. If I left, it might be taken as a sign of ineptitude or wrongdoing on the part of the Carlton County Sheriff Department. Since Sam was the one who had hired me, Fiona would bring him down in a heartbeat. She wouldn’t care that he was the finest sheriff this county had ever had or that she would be taking away his livelihood.

“All right, but I’ll spend a lot more time at the historical society. I’ll work on this by remote. Out of uniform. I won’t attract as much attention that way. If you don’t mind my mixing the jobs up a little.” I tried to sound innocent. Dig free. Our recent flame-out over the letters couldn’t have been further from my mind.

His lips twitched, his guile detector quivering at my one-upmanship. There’s an advantage to working with old folks who know good and well how the world works.

“Makes sense. We’ll do it your way, Lottie.”

“First time for my way, huh?”

He nodded. I watched the old man walk off and shivered.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I didn’t get home until after nine. Keith was waiting. I’d tried to call him around mid-afternoon. When he didn’t answer his cell, I left bare bones voicemail that Judy was dead and I would be late.

“You’ve heard? All the details?”

“It’s all over town. I’ve been worried sick.” Wordlessly, I just walked over and let him enfold me as I burst into tears, crying over the loss of a woman I’d grown to love like a daughter.

I slumped onto a counter stool at the island. Keith slapped baloney and cheese between two slices of bread. Grim-faced, he handed it to me.

“I can’t,” I said.

“You can.”

Too weary to argue, I reached for it and took a bite. Then I got up reached for Keith again, needing his warmth more than food.

“And to top it off, Sam and I had a fight, honey.” I told him about the anonymous letters mailed to the historical society. His breath stopped, his arms tightened.

“That’s damn sure not my idea of joke.”

“Not mine either.”

Then hearing a car coming up our lane, I closed my eyes. The day simply would not end. I would be frozen in this terrible day throughout eternity.

Keith swore, switched on the porch light and peered outside.

“It’s Brian Hadley,” he said.

“I’m not up to another Hadley.”

“I’ll talk to him, Lottie. You go on upstairs.”

“You will
not.
I kill my own snakes. You should know that by now.”

We went to the front door together and opened it. Keith stood behind me, and laid his hands on my shoulders. My soul shriveled as Brian slammed the car door shut. His mouth a razor-thin line, he looked at us hard for a second before he came up the walk.

“Come in, Brian,” I said. “I can’t tell…”

“You’re not going to tell me nothing, lady,” he said. “I’m here to tell you. You involved Judy in a kind of work she wasn’t equipped to handle. Mom has told me all about the prying she was doing. Now she’s dead. By her own hand. We all tried to tell you. But you wouldn’t leave well enough alone, would you? Poke and prod, poke and prod.”

“Brian, that’s not true.” I bit my tongue to keep from blurting that it was murder, not suicide. Guilderhaus had asked law enforcement personnel to keep their mouths’ shut until the coroner officially announced the cause of death. Not that half the county didn’t know already. But after Sam’s lecture I intended to behave like a pro. Even if I was dead on my feet.

“Judy was like a sister to me.”

“Brian, I know that. She told me how much you meant to her. All the things you did for her when she was young.”

“You’re off the campaign, Lottie. I should have listened to my mother earlier.”

My laughter was harsh, incredulous. Fiona was suddenly an oracle of wisdom? What had happened to the early Alzheimer’s?

“As a matter of fact, Brian, you’ve just beat me to the punch.” Keith stood behind me. Ominous, wolf alert. Ready to pounce. “I wrote a letter of resignation just this morning. I didn’t have time to mail it before Judy’s death.”

“Gonna tell me why, Lottie, or are you keeping that a deep, dark secret?”

“Come closer to the light, Brian, I want to be able to look you in the eye when I say what I have to say.”

He walked toward us, stopped when he was about six feet away. His complexion was sallow. Yellow. The whites of his eyes were muddy. I glanced at his trembling hands.

“You’re the one who’s been keeping secrets and now I know what your secret is.”

His face paled. The skin around his lips tightened. If it’s possible for a human to will his heart to stop beating, the world to stop turning, he did it just then. He was completely motionless. It was as though I had hit him with a two-by-four.

“My own mother was a drunk, Brian. I should have noticed the signs in you earlier, but I wanted to believe.” I never took my gaze off him. “It’s a common failing in kids who’ve lived with drunks all their lives. We want so very much to believe, it just breaks our hearts.”

I faltered, confused. Even as I was speaking, the expression in his eyes was changing, from shame to a spark of something I could not identify.

“You think I’m a drunk? A drunk?” He threw back his head and laughed.

“I know all about denial, Brian.” I wanted to sound brave, self-assured. Keith’s hands tightened on my shoulders.

Brian stared at me steadily. I glanced at my feet. Something was happening here I didn’t understand. What I did know was I had been in charge and now he was, through some subtle transference of power.

“I’ve been thinking about a treatment program,” he said calmly. “Do you suppose your sister would recommend one? I don’t intend to deal with this until after the election. I’m sure you know all my reasons.”

I was completely thrown. “Yes, of course, Josie would know who to go to. Brian, I really am sorry. About Judy, about your problem.”

“I apologize for my impulsiveness in coming over here.”

“No apology necessary. I know how close you and Judy were.”

He nodded. “Nevertheless, considering my mother’s feelings, it would still be better if you were off my campaign.”

“Of course. I think it will a big relief to us both, and I won’t have to worry about the press asking questions.”

“I’ll head back home,” he said. “Again, my apologies.”

We watched his taillights disappear. Surprised by my sudden surge of rage at Brian’s unpredictability, I turned to my rock-solid husband. Relishing his protection, I clung to him like a barnacle.

***

The door to my office was already open when I arrived the next morning. Margaret Atchison sat at her desk, sorting the mail. She glanced at me, then looked away.

“I’m surprised to see you here, Margaret. I had planned to close today out of respect for Judy. I came in to round up her personal belongings to take to Max.”

She looked up with a stern, sad expression on her face. “They’ve called a board meeting, Lottie.”

“I’m the director of this society and I haven’t been told about it?”

She lowered her eyes. “No, it’s about you.”

“About me?”

“The Hadley family has asked that we relieve you of your duties.”

I slammed the storage box down on the floor and caught my breath. “But this is
my
organization. I’m the one who started this place.”

“You started it, yes. But it wouldn’t be the first time the person who started an organization ended up not being the right person to run it.”

“That’s ridiculous. We’ve collected a record amount of information. Our methods are second to none.”

“Lottie, I really don’t know what’s going on. If I did, I would tell you. At first, I was worried your new job would cut in too much on your time here, but I changed my mind. And I never thought much of Judy, but she was doing a good job. Things were going okay.”

“I’m going to be in this office more. You can count on that.”

Margaret looked at me sorrowfully, and I was stricken with apprehension.

“Maybe you’ll be here,” she said, “if they let you stay on.”

“Let me stay on?” I laughed. Let me stay on this thankless, miserable job? But I knew the job enabled me to live in Western Kansas. I needed work, needed the satisfaction of active research. I needed the connection with the community. More than that, this job was mine, and they were trying to take it from me.

“Won’t I have a chance to speak?”

“Oh, I’ll see to that. I still have some say-so around this county, but Fiona tells anyone who will listen that you don’t have a clue about dealing with people.”

My mouth literally dropped open. “She thinks
I
don’t know how to deal with people. What pure unmitigated gall.”

“She blames you for Judy’s suicide.”

“I know that, Margaret. How did she manage to crucify me practically overnight? What did she do? Start phoning people from the mortuary?” I ached to tell Margaret that Judy’s death was a homicide, not suicide.

“She says there’s something worse, Lottie. That’s what this meeting is about.”

I saw William walk past the door. Grim-faced, his old straw fedora pulled down over his forehead. My heart sank.

Margaret glanced at her watch, stood and squared her shoulders. “It’s time for me to go up, Lottie. I’ll call down when we’re ready for you.”

My emotions ranging between seething and heart-sick, I started packing Judy’s things while I waited. There were a number of how-to manuals and organizing aids. She’d been determined to do her best.

Sadly, I picked up the one picture Judy had on her makeshift desk: a family portrait of herself, Max, and Zelda. I wrapped it in tissue and carefully placed it on top of her books, where the glass would be protected.

The telephone rang.

“You can come up now,” Margaret said. I didn’t like the sound of her voice.