House of Secrets

by Ramona Richards

  At Ray’s cocked eyebrow, June gave him a crooked grin. “Mr. Osborne’s words. From one of his letters.”

  Like the second floor, the third-floor landing opened onto a large sitting area, complete with a fireplace and a selection of Queen Anne furnishings. A closed door opposite the staircase provided entrance into a hall lined with bedrooms. A narrow window on the far wall allowed in a smattering of light through a lace curtain, and June crossed to a table and snapped on a lamp.

  Nothing happened. “Right. No power in the house.”

  “You did that like it was a habit.”

  June nodded. “I would come up here to read sometimes, especially if JR was gone or busy with folks downstairs. Sometimes I’d just stare out the windows at the countryside.” She let out a long wistful sigh. “I did this, this arrangement. David kept most of the furnishings the way they were.”

  Ray remembered the controversy that had erupted in the church following JR’s death. The house had been renovated and redecorated with church funds, even though JR and June had handled everything, including the purchase of all furnishings. The church board had wanted everything to remain for the next pastor, while a small faction thought June should not be turned out alone and homeless. The decision to allow her to take a few things to put into the small cottage she’d purchased with JR’s life insurance had created a lot of dissent, but it had been the main reason June had stayed with the church.

  Ray watched as she ran a finger along the back of a love seat, realizing for the first time that June had lost her home and family twice. He felt the stab of an ancient pain as he remembered his wife’s death after her long struggle with cancer. He’d barely survived, yet June had gone through it twice. Too much for one lifetime.

  June suddenly stiffened, as if indulging in memories disturbed her. She pointed toward the door. “The bathroom is down the hall, third door on the right.”

  She strode in that direction, a renewed determination in her step. “The servants’ rooms were small. Up here, they all shared one bathroom. Apparently they had to schedule time in there to reduce conflicts. Mr. Osborne required them all to bathe at least three times a week. He required a level of cleanliness none of them had ever known before.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why Rosalie wanted to run away.”

  June laughed as she reached the hall door and tugged on it. The door’s snug fit in the frame kept it secure. “Rosalie was the youngest granddaughter. Siegfried was already gone when she came along. I doubt she knew much about him.”

  June tugged on the door again, and it popped open. “But she may have known about— Whoa!”

  June stared down the hall. The smell of decay, which had permeated the house, suddenly strengthened.

  Ray’s instincts snapped to attention. He put his hand on her shoulder and held her back. “Stay here.”

  “But I—”

  “Stay here.” His firm tone froze her words, and Ray edged down the hall, his hand slowly moving to rest on the grip of his gun. He opened and checked the two small bedrooms that came first, then approached the bathroom warily, his senses still on alert.

  He pushed open the door, and the stench flooded around him. The bathroom, almost as large as one of the bedrooms, looked spotlessly clean. With dread in his heart, Ray opened the closet.

  He saw her legs first, waxen and gray, then the rest of her form, folded and tucked neatly into the corner of the closet. A leather belt still cut tightly into her throat, and above it, the horror of her last moments remained frozen in Kitty Parker’s sightless eyes.

  EIGHT

  June watched from the hall as the coroner finished her rough exam of Kitty’s body, then stood to report her findings to Ray, who lingered in the door frame with a furious expression on his face. Behind them, Jeff Gage dusted every surface in the bathroom for prints, glancing occasionally at Ray, worry clouding his face.

  “She’s been dead maybe twenty-four to thirty hours.” The coroner straightened and rubbed her lower back.

  June’s stomach tightened at the thought of Kitty’s gentle, sweet-spirited husband—they hadn’t been married long, and both had waited a long time to find the perfect mate.

  She knew how he felt.

  “And this isn’t your primary crime scene.” The coroner glanced at Jeff’s work.

  “No doubt.” His face tensed and his lips thinned to a bare line as he tried to contain his rage. June understood. After all, the house was thoroughly searched after the murder and had been under guard ever since. How had Kitty’s body gotten into the house? The tunnel? And her poor husband, not knowing where she was all this time.

  “Has anyone told her husband?” June’s voice rasped in her throat, like a raw whisper.

  Ray nodded. “I contacted the Franklin police chief. Her husband filed a missing persons report this morning, since she never made it home last night.”

  He looked back at the coroner. “Any defensive wounds?”

  She pointed at Kitty’s hands. “There’s some skin under her nails, some bruising. No signs of a sexual assault.”

  “Small comfort.”

  She nodded, and they moved out into the hall as she motioned for her aides to load the body into a bag and onto a gurney. “I’ll know more when I can do a thorough exam.”

  “Thanks. Let me know.”

  Ray stepped toward June and opened his mouth to speak when Daniel interrupted from down the hall. “Boss?” Ray turned, scowling, as Daniel’s eager steps brought him closer. “They found the SUV.” He stopped in front of Ray.

  “Where?”

  “The quarry. Someone drove it off the south end, not realizing the water was low this time of year. Landed nose-first on the edge of the water.”

  “Did you talk to Fred about searching the property?”

  “He called us. Heard the crash about an hour ago, after the attack here.”

  “Get a warrant for the SUV.”

  “What about relying on probable cause?”

  “With the number of SUVs registered in Bell County? Get the warrant. I don’t want a defense attorney questioning the details. Send a team and tell them to find the bullets I put into it. That’ll confirm it’s the right vehicle and will give validity to the other evidence.”

  “I’ll head over after I get the warrant—”

  “Wait. First tell me how this happened.”

  “What?”

  Ray pointed back toward the crime scene. “How did a body get into this house with both doors under guard? Did either of you leave?”

  Daniel stiffened. “No, sir. We were here all night.” His brow furrowed for a moment. “I mean, Brent was alone for a while before I got here, and he couldn’t cover both doors at once, but I got here before dark.”

  “What about the tunnel? You sealed it. Has it been tampered with?”

  “I’ll check it now.” Daniel did a crisp about-face and left.

  June leaned heavily against the wall during the exchange, watching the two men carefully. She’d slept the night before, but the roller coaster of adrenaline, the nonstop ride of events, made even her bones feel achy. The soreness in her right shoulder and hip was the result of Ray slinging her to the ground, and June would have loved to take a couple of aspirin and go to bed. But Ray needed her, and she knew that alone would keep her on her feet.

  Ray had been on the same ride but showed little of the strain. His back remained military stiff and his uniform still held its starched and formed creases, despite the tumble they’d taken. The arm he’d wrapped around her in the butler’s pantry had been an iron vise like nothing she’d ever felt.

  JR had been a big man, almost six foot six and 250 pounds, a thundering, powerful presence in the pulpit and a man no one crossed in the soup kitchens. But JR’s biggest strength had been his charisma, his personality. His muscles had never held the might that Ray’s lean frame did.

  Clearly, when Ray promised to protect her, he’d meant every syllable.

  As Daniel
turned and left, a resigned expression settled on Ray’s face and some of the anger drained away. Ray checked Jeff’s progress, then came to June’s side, watching as the coroner’s team wheeled Kitty Parker’s body down the hall.

  “You believe him?” June whispered, even though she could see on his face that he trusted his young deputy.

  Ray nodded. “He’s good. They all are. They wouldn’t have missed a body in the search. The only explanation is that it happened during the transition, while Brent was here alone and some of the crowd still mingled out back. Someone came in through the tunnel, maybe the front.”

  “With a body?”

  Ray shrugged one shoulder. “Kitty’s petite. I’ve seen bodies in suitcases, trunks, once even a large duffel bag.” He turned to her, keeping his voice low and confidential. “What’s supposed to be in Rosalie’s diaries?”

  June’s eyes widened. “You think the diaries have something to do with Kitty’s murder?”

  “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that her body was stuffed into the same closet where the diaries were supposedly found. When did David find them?”

  June glanced again at the list, now damp from being clutched in her hand for the past few hours, even though she didn’t have to look. Standing in the hall, June had memorized every line of the document. “Eight months ago.”

  “So this discovery of the diaries coincides with when he started letting everything around the house go downhill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me everything you know about those diaries, whether it’s conjecture, rumor or fact.”

  June closed her eyes. She and JR had arrived in White Hills long after Rosalie Osborne had vanished, and they’d renovated the house more than twenty years after her disappearance. But June had done her own research into the Osbornes and the house after JR had found Siegfried’s letters.

  She took a deep breath, trying to organize it in her head, and began slowly.

  “Siegfried Osborne joined his father in the banking industry when he was only eighteen years old. When the 1893 panic hit, the family lost everything, and his father committed suicide, which left Siegfried, who was already fearful and eccentric, even more paranoid. He brought the family to Nashville, but even as the economy recovered, Siegfried’s mind did not. He moved to White Hills and built this house, becoming almost a recluse.”

  “What does this have to do—”

  June held up a hand. “Bear with me. Siegfried continued to operate an import business out of his home, rebuilding the Osborne wealth. He may have been eccentric, but he also had an incredible head for business. His older son, Eulis, served and died in World War I. The other, Montgomery, wasn’t born until much later, but he became an invalid after a hunting accident. Montgomery’s first wife left him a few years later. Monty remarried in his late forties, a local girl a lot younger than he was, and she had Rosalie in 1965.

  “Beautiful Rosalie enchanted everyone. She inherited her grandfather’s intelligence, business sense and, unfortunately, his paranoia. Her solution was to watch everything closely, record everything in her diaries. Apparently, she didn’t miss a thing.”

  “Now, this is all rumor, right?”

  June squinted up at him. “The stuff about the financial crisis I found in the state archives in Nashville when I researched the property. Here in the house, we found three different maids’ diaries, one from the early part of the twentieth century, just after the house was built, and two from the sixties and seventies. One maid had worked for all three generations.

  “They discussed some of ‘Miss Rosalie’s’ observations as well. They were amazed at her evaluations of folks here in Bell County. In fact, she saved one of her servants from marrying a really horrible man, and they listened to her after that, even though she wasn’t much more than a kid.”

  “So we can take that much as fact.”

  “I think so.”

  “You think something she observed caused her disappearance?”

  June shrugged again. “I just don’t know. Without the diaries, I can’t do much more than speculate.”

  “So speculate a bit.”

  June nodded. “We started renovating the house, and folks who’d known the Osbornes came out of the woodwork. There were times it felt like every female over fifty wanted me to sit down over sweet tea and gingersnaps so we could talk about Rosalie. She graduated early from high school in 1983 and finished a business degree at Yale in only three years. By 1986, at the age of twenty-one, she had taken over the family import business, continuing to run it out of this house. She was beautiful, rich, smart and powerful. The business put her in contact with equally rich and powerful men, and she began a series of affairs best called unfortunate.”

  “So she was smart and rich but still only twenty-one.”

  “Exactly. A kid who should have been hanging out with her friends and having fun instead found herself in the company of Nashville’s elite ‘old boy network.’ Plus she’d just lost her dad, who seemed to have been a good influence on her. Not a good mix.”

  “And?”

  “And…in 1986, she called the sheriff’s office, then disappeared.”

  “You think she named names in the diaries?”

  June shrugged one more time. “But here’s one for your argument that Rosalie ran away. According to one of my tea-and-snaps ladies, Rosalie dismissed all her live-in help a few months before she vanished. In fact, she dismissed them not long after Monty died. Kept only one girl who came in twice a week.”

  “That sounds like money problems.”

  “Could be. Or a desire for more privacy.”

  Jeff Gage signaled Ray from inside the bathroom, and the sheriff joined his deputy inside the tiled room. They spoke a few moments, then Gage began packing up his kit.

  Ray motioned for June to join him, and she pushed away from the wall, nodding at Jeff as he left.

  “Ready to check that niche David claims to have found?” Ray stood aside and pushed the closet door open wide. “You’re the hidden niche expert.”

  As June stepped into the closet, she thought back to the day that JR had found that tin box he’d refused to let her examine. When she’d given a playful pout about it, JR had turned sour and critical, cautioning her that the papers concerned current members of the congregation, information that needed to remain confidential. He’d declared his intent to destroy them.

  “You have to trust me, June.” That’s what he said. And I did.

  But…do I still?

  Unlike modern homes, with rooms made with dry-wall and metal or wooden studs, the Victorian had been walled with plaster or wood paneling. All the closets were lined with cedar planks inset in beveled frames. Siegfried had put a lot of money into the home, intending it to last for generations.

  June felt along the edge of the cedar planks, tapping lightly with her fingernails, then up the edge of the beveled frames.

  Almost at eye level, one of the taps turned hollow. June pushed on a cedar plank and felt it give slightly. Taking a deep breath, she slid her thumbnail into the crack between the frame and the edge of the board and pried outward. It resisted at first, but with her second attempt, the board creaked and swung outward on hidden hinges. Ray passed her his flashlight, but the deep pocket revealed only a dark, empty space.

  “Nothing.” June didn’t try to hide her disappointment as she returned the flashlight and started to shut the niche.

  “Wait.” Ray took the light from her but turned it back toward the plank door. He stepped forward and ran the beam around the edge of the door, pausing it on a small, oval-shaped brown stain on the narrowest side. “I don’t think that’s a natural part of the wood grain.”

  An odd lurch of excitement tightened June’s stomach as Ray looked down at her. “We need to catch Jeff before he leaves with that kit. I think that’s blood.”

  “Definitely blood.” Jeff Gage examined the end of a swab, watching it change colors. “And human. I’ll get it to the lab, ask
them to rush a comparison with Pastor David.”

  “Thanks, Jeff.” Ray turned to June, who rocked back and forth on her heels, chewing her lower lip.

  “This is all about the diaries!” June said suddenly.

  “How do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, if that’s David’s blood, then it got up here after he died. And so did Kitty. Daniel was right. They didn’t miss her.”

  “How so?”

  “Kitty must have known that David found the diaries. If she told the wrong person that he’d found them, it may have set this all in motion. They had to make sure David never revealed anything in the diaries. He was killed to keep him silent. She might have been killed either after she told where they were or because she wouldn’t tell at all. The killer used Kitty to get to David.” June brightened visibly. “Which could mean that David wasn’t into anything sordid after all! He could have been trying to sort stuff out and protect the diaries and the information inside! He was just in the way.”

  Ray crossed his arms. “Or Kitty could have been using the information to blackmail someone, which got her killed.”

  June’s enthusiasm waned a bit. “Or David was blackmailing someone.”

  “Or maybe this involved no blackmail at all. Kitty and David both tried to keep the information silent, to protect the diaries, and both were killed as a result. The blood is right where the diaries were supposedly hidden. What if David moved them and the killer found the same empty hole that we did?”

  June grew still, then pointed at Ray. “I like that idea best.”

  “Because you don’t want to think about Kitty or David involved in blackmail.”

  “True, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, just because I want to believe the best of them.”

  “Also true.”

  “So what now?”

  Ray reached for her arm and turned her toward the end of the hall. “I need to go over to Fred’s quarry and check on the progress with the SUV.”