Her Final Prayer: A totally gripping and heart-stopping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 2)

by Kathryn Casey

  “And Laurel?”

  Hannah’s eyes teared up, her emotions heavy. “Laurel I watched grow up. She was a responsible kid, one who seemed more worried about others than herself. Thoughtful in lots of ways. As a teenager, she used to shop off and on for some of the shut-ins in town, just to help out. I don’t know of anyone who didn’t like her.”

  We were nearly to the stairway, and I was about to leave Hannah to head to my room when I asked, “What about Myles Thompkins?”

  Hannah stopped and turned to me. “Who told you about Myles and Laurel? I mean, people knew, sure, but folks didn’t talk about it. Not after she married Jacob. Did someone bring up Myles?”

  “Didn’t talk about what?” I asked.

  “That they were in love,” Hannah said. “That they’d always been in love.”

  We stood huddled together, whispering so the women and children filtering past us wouldn’t hear. Hannah told me how everyone in town had always assumed that one day Laurel and Myles would be together. A little more than a year ago, Myles had asked the prophet for Laurel’s hand, but a week later Jacob’s father sent a message to the prophet, saying Jacob wanted her as his second wife. “The Johanssons have more money and influence, so it’s not surprising that Laurel was given to Jacob. She took it hard. I heard that the wedding had to be delayed because she refused to eat and locked herself in her room.”

  Listening to Hannah, I realized that Laurel’s story reminded me of my own past.

  I was sixteen when Max was run out of town. I grieved for him, waited for him to return. When he didn’t, I came up with a plan. One more year, and I’d finish high school. Going away to college was unheard of for an Alber girl, but I had a shot at a scholarship. If I convinced Mother and Father, I would be able to be on my own, without anyone watching over me. Once that happened, I decided that I would look for Max, find him and marry him. By the time Mother and Father knew, it would be too late.

  Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, halfway through my senior year, Father and Mother ordered me into his study for what they said would be “a little talk.” When I walked out of that room, my world had changed forever.

  Mullins and his wife had done the same to Laurel, and now she was dead. I wondered if my lead detective felt at all responsible for his daughter’s demise. I wondered if my own father had any doubts after I fled Alber in fear for my life. I’d never know, since he’d died before I returned. Did Mother have any regrets?

  “What did Myles do after Laurel married?” I asked Hannah.

  Her brow furrowed, and Hannah appeared troubled by what had happened to the two young lovers. “In the year since Laurel and Jacob married, Myles has become a shadow of the young man he once was. He lives near the mountain, alone, and he comes into town every few months for an hour or two, just long enough to buy a few supplies. I’ve heard that he has a small spread where he raises hunting dogs and sells just enough to pay for supplies. They’re well-bred, well-trained, and I understand much in demand.”

  “Myles hasn’t married?” I asked.

  “No. He hasn’t. I’m sure he still mourns for Laurel.” Hannah’s expression changed and she suddenly looked alarmed. “You don’t think he’s involved in this, do you? Myles would never… he’s not the kind of man to do something violent. And why would Myles—”

  “I’ve gotta go change,” I said, dodging the question. “If you hear anything that might help me—”

  Hannah gave me a strained smile. “I will, of course, call.”

  The dirt clung to my ankles and feet. The washcloth foaming, I scrubbed my arms, looking at my lone tattoo, the eagle on my arm. Such proud birds, so beautiful. But like vultures, eagles foraged for carrion. I thought again of the grisly scene at the ranch and the heavy-shouldered scavengers in the tree intent on their feast. I shuddered.

  Once dry, I grabbed a uniform and boots from the closet. Dressed, I threw my soiled clothes in the bulging bag holding my laundry. I’d never been good with housework, not when I was married, not when I was a Dallas cop, and that hadn’t changed when I moved back to Alber. I do little until I have no other choice.

  Max was waiting for me in the downstairs parlor in the center of a clutch of women. Single men were rare in this town where girls are raised to be wives and mothers, so I understood why a guy like Max would get a lot of attention. The women asked about his health, and a couple offered to cook him dinners. I chuckled when one asked him if he wanted to have more children. He shot me a panicky look and didn’t answer.

  “Is your daughter’s condition improving?” a woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties or so inquired. She bounced a small one on her hip. Hannah had introduced the young mother to me when they’d moved in and explained that she’d been the fifth wife of an abusive husband. “Do the doctors think Brooke will ever be able to walk again?”

  “Well, she’s…” Max stammered, and I knew he felt uncomfortable talking about his daughter’s condition. I could have interrupted and rescued him, but I waited. These were questions I’d wanted to ask but hadn’t, and I hoped he’d answer. “She’s… Brooke is… doing as well as can be expected with the extent of her injuries. We really don’t know what the future holds.”

  The women effused sympathy, and I stepped forward.

  “Ladies, the chief and I need to be on our way,” Max said, looking relieved as we turned and rushed out the door. I glanced back and saw a few of the women frowning at me.

  We drove through Alber in his squad, out to the highway, took a right outside town and set a course toward the mountains. “Thanks for getting me out of that,” Max said.

  I played dumb. “What are you talking about?”

  “The women surrounding me, asking me…” He glanced over, saw me smile and realized that I’d known exactly what he’d meant. Turning his attention back to the road, he chuckled and then asked, “You are coming for dinner tonight, right? I told Brooke you’ll be there. She’s been excited all week. She spent yesterday evening helping me make the chili.”

  I took a deep breath, and Max frowned, as if he knew what I was about to say. “I don’t know, Max,” I said. “I mean, I know I said I’d come, but…”

  I noticed his jaw set. He wasn’t happy. “Clara, why not?”

  “Because…” I started, but then couldn’t really find a way to continue.

  “Brooke would love it,” Max said, his voice weary. “I’d love it. You know that, right?”

  “I do, but…”

  He glanced at me again, his brow furrowed. “There’s no ‘but’ here. No one stands in our way. Nothing prevents us from being together anymore. Not your father. Not your mother. Not old man Barstow rotting in a prison cell. Clara, there’s only one thing in our way: your fears.”

  I didn’t answer. He was right, but I still felt conflicted. Yet I had no good response.

  Max glanced over at me and pleaded, “Clara, don’t do this to us. I know there’s something special between us. There always has been. The other night…” For a moment, silence, then he said, “I know, deep down, you want this as much as I do.”

  I said nothing, inside my chest a tug of war raging. A tear formed in my eye, and I quickly brushed it away, hoping he wouldn’t see.

  We drove on, the scenery flowing past, and I changed the subject to a safer one. Max knew what I was doing, gave me a regretful glance but didn’t stop me. “This isn’t the time to talk about other things. We need to focus on the case,” I said. With that, I explained everything I’d heard from Mother Naomi and from Hannah. “It appears that Laurel and Myles were kind of a thing, and they expected to marry. Until the prophet issued other orders.”

  As it had for me, Myles and Laurel’s story apparently brought back memories for Max. Again, he glanced over at me, and I felt the conversation take another turn, from my perspective a dangerous one. “Rather like what happened with us,” he said, as he turned onto a road that veered farther west. “Clara, we both know that if the prophet and your parents
hadn’t interfered, we would have—”

  I didn’t let him finish. “Alber’s past is undoubtedly littered with stories like ours,” I said.

  “Yes, well…” he muttered.

  “Again, let’s go back to Laurel and Myles,” I suggested. “We have four murders to solve, remember.”

  Max bristled, but didn’t argue. “Okay, but I’m not sure how what you’ve learned ties into what we saw at the ranch. How it’s germane, considering what the killer did to Laurel.”

  “I don’t know that it is,” I admitted. “Although the murders did seem to all be about her, so it’s reasonable to think that she has some kind of a tie to the killer.”

  Down a long, winding driveway, a small log cabin came into view, with a barn beside it. “Clara, if Myles loved—maybe still loves—Laurel, how does it make sense that he’d want to first kill her and secondly shame her like that?” Max asked. “If he loved her, why didn’t he kill the others and take her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But love doesn’t always mean happiness or safety, after all. We’ve both, I’m sure, worked many cases where love turned to hate, the ardent suitor who murdered the woman who turned him down. A husband who promised love but delivered violence. The wife who murders rather than allow a man to leave. Even parents who murder their own children.”

  “Yeah, but…” he started, and then stopped.

  I stayed quiet for a moment, considering my own past, the violence that spurred me to run from Alber. But then again, that was completely different. In the case of my marriage, love had never been part of the equation.

  “But what?” I asked, and I heard the edge to my voice, the anger at memories I tried to keep hidden. “We don’t know what they were talking about on Saturday, out there alone on that road. Maybe Laurel and Myles argued. Maybe Myles blamed Laurel for deserting him and with this morning’s killings, he took revenge.”

  Max sighed, and then said, “I guess it really is an old story, isn’t it?”

  “Unfortunately, it’s also a frequent one,” I said.

  Max looked uncertain. “To me, Carl’s still the more likely suspect. Those photos he took of Laurel suggest an obsession.”

  “Absolutely. Carl’s still on the list,” I said. “What we need is something to pop up in the lab reports that points to someone, that clears up the confusion, or for Jacob to wake up and tell us what he knows.”

  “Yeah,” Max said. “But somehow I’m wondering if either of those possibilities will come together. When I think of Jacob breathing like he was, all the blood he lost. What are the odds he’ll live?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely.” We pulled up to the house and parked the car. “I’ll take the front. You cover the back door.”

  Looking at the lonely setting, Max mused, “Maybe we should have brought backup?”

  “We’re just here to talk,” I said.

  Moments later, my hand on my holstered gun, I stood outside Myles Thompkins’ front door. From the barn off to the side, a cacophony of barking dogs should have alerted their owner to our arrival, but I waited a few moments for Max to get in place, and then I knocked. No answer. I knocked again. Still no answer. “Mr. Thompkins, Chief of Police Clara Jefferies and Chief Deputy Max Anderson here. We’d like to talk to you. Please open up.”

  The dogs yapped ever louder. No answer from inside the house. Max walked back around to the front. “I peeked in the windows. I don’t think he’s home,” he said.

  “Let’s take a look around the outside,” I suggested.

  Off to the side sat an aging fire-engine-red Ford pickup, no one inside. I put my hand on the hood. It was cold. The cabin wasn’t large, but it looked well-built; the timbers had been notched and joined using hand tools. I walked around and peered in the windows. The interior appeared warm, comforting, rustic and inviting. Myles had an old desk in front of an entire wall of shelves crowded with books. A heavy, vibrantly colored wool shawl with fringe covered a table, resembling one I’d bought at a Navajo pawn shop years ago. Myles had mounted a steer’s skull over his fireplace.

  As Max and I walked toward the barn, the barking got louder. Inside, there were two empty horse stalls on the right, and on the left a large fenced pen filled with all sizes of bloodhounds, the hunting dogs Hannah had mentioned. The pack trailed over to greet Max. He put his hand up to the metal link cage, and they sniffed it. With that, tails began wagging and the barking abated.

  “You’re right. Myles isn’t here.” I glanced inside the stalls and noticed evidence that a horse lived inside one of them: a full water trough, an oat bucket, and a pile of drying dung in the corner. “He must be off somewhere on his horse.”

  “I guess so,” Max agreed. “What do you want to do?”

  “Nothing for us to do here. Head back to town,” I said. “Let’s have someone watch the place, to let us know when he returns.”

  “Sure. I’ll put a deputy on it.” Max looked at his watch. It was going on five thirty, and the sun dipped ever lower in the sky. Late November, the days grew short.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get Bill Conroy out here for the evening, have them put one of the night officers on later to relieve him. This is an Alber case, after all.”

  “If you’d rather, that’s fine,” Max said. “You know, you still haven’t told me what you’ve decided about dinner.”

  “Well, we have work to do. I don’t—” I started.

  Max jumped in, not letting me finish. “Clara, we can’t do anything until we get lab results and the autopsy in tomorrow. Myles isn’t here, and our only other lead is Carl, who isn’t talking except through a lawyer, right?”

  “All that’s true, but I still don’t think—”

  “Why not? Why wouldn’t you come? By now Brooke is waiting for us,” Max said, looking not angry but hurt. “If for no other reason than to not disappoint her, why not drop in and have a quick dinner with her, with us? Your father isn’t in control now. Remember: it’s only us in charge. Why can’t we?”

  Max gave me a hopeful look.

  He was right. Everything he’d said was true. This was my problem, not his; the reluctance, the fear of being pulled in too quickly and too far. “Okay, as long as I leave right after dinner,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as conflicted as I felt. “I want to stop back at the hospital to check on Jacob.”

  “Didn’t the doctor say the hospital would notify us if he comes out of it? If Jacob can talk to us?” Max asked, although we both knew the answer.

  “Yes, but you know how it is, doctors get busy and they forget.” I knew that Max assumed I was simply making an excuse, and I couldn’t deny that having a reason to cut dinner short appealed to me. Getting to know eight-year-old Brooke better felt like a big step forward in a relationship I wasn’t sure I was ready for. I didn’t want to admit it, but part of me worried that I’d never be ready. I had an uneasy relationship with all men, going back to my father. As certain as I felt that I could trust Max, the prospect of attaching myself to another human being, especially a male one, frightened me.

  But that wasn’t all. There was another reason.

  Max was right, and I was probably wasting my time. But while we’d followed all the day’s leads, I couldn’t get the crime scene out of my head. I kept seeing the bodies of Anna and her sweet children under the bloody sheet, and Laurel on the bed, her face stained with the blood-red lipstick. I had no choice: I had to figure out the puzzle. I’d made Jeremy a promise.

  Seventeen

  Max dropped me at Heaven’s Mercy, and I followed him in the Suburban to his house in Pine City, not far from the sheriff’s department offices. The setting sun sent streaks of rose through the sky, and the mountains had a pewter cast that made them shimmer in the diminishing light. The mountain air smelled fresh, and I could feel the increasing chill of the coming frost.

  A two-story, white-frame bungalow on a quiet street, Max’s house had an oak in the front yard so big I knew without trying that I w
ouldn’t be able to stretch my arms halfway around the trunk. The roof extended over a wide front porch, and the curtains were pinned back. Lamps lit, the inside glowed. A wooden ramp covered one side of the front steps and a short one formed a low bump over the front door’s threshold to accommodate Brooke’s wheelchair.

  “Clara!” she shouted, from her perch on the edge of the porch. “You came!”

  I immediately felt guilty for not having wanted to. My reluctance had nothing to do with Brooke, who I’d spent only fleeting moments with but who struck me as a remarkable young girl. I took in a deep breath and smiled. “Hmm. I smell garlic and tomatoes. Chili, I hear!”

  “Dad’s a super-good cook.” Her strawberry blond hair cascading over her shoulders, Brook giggled, and Max bent down and wrapped his arms around her, lingering ever so slightly. When he let go, he turned Brooke’s wheelchair and pushed her inside.

  “And what did you do today?” he asked her.

  Brooke screwed up her nose and grinned at him. “Well, it was a pretty cool day.”

  “What was so cool about it?” I asked. The girl had the most inquisitive hazel eyes, fringed in thick lashes.

  “After school, Aunt Alice took me to the park and put me on a swing,” she said. “The physical therapist suggested it. I couldn’t pump with my legs, but I swung my body weight and pulled with my arms, and Aunt Alice helped, and I got high. Really high. So high that Aunt Alice got scared.” Brooke’s grin grew wider, and she mimicked her aunt. “‘Brooke, you’ll give me a heart attack,’ she shouted. And I think I almost did. Her face was nearly purple.”

  Teasing, Max put his hands on his hips and pretended to be upset. “You laugh about nearly sending your aunt into cardiac arrest?”

  “It was super-fun,” Brooke said. “She said we can do it again tomorrow. And maybe the day after, too. I’m gonna try to convince her.”