One (Count to Ten Book 1)

by Jane Blythe

  “Xavier?” Rob was narrowing his gray eyes, impatiently waiting for an answer. “Did she have blood on her feet?”

  “Yeah, she did,” he nodded confidently.

  “Great,” Rob gave a grim smile, “so no break in and blood on Annabelle Englewood’s feet; now if we can just get a confession, we can move on.”

  It sounded as though Rob was being harsh and cold; however, Xavier understood that his boss was not dismissing the trauma and horror of the Englewood murders. But they had dozens of other open cases, ones where the perpetrator was still out there somewhere; and as awful as her crimes had been, Annabelle was safely tucked away at the hospital under police guard. The quicker they got this wrapped up, the quicker they could concentrate their energies on the rest of their cases.

  “At least we can be thankful for small favors,” medical examiner, Billy Newton, announced as he entered the room, plonking down into a seat and looking every bit as exhausted as you’d expect an overworked, underpaid, father of seven to look.

  “What’s that then?” Rob asked, trying not to look annoyed as Billy propped his feet up on the table.

  “The Englewoods were all dead when their bodies were mutilated,” Billy explained. “That girl was lucky to survive; you think whoever it was got spooked when you two showed up?” When no one responded, Billy’s dark eyes grew wide, “You think she’s the killer? Murder/suicide? Or at least murder, attempted suicide. Why? What possible reason could this young woman have for killing her family? And the way she did it,” Billy shuddered. “She must be one angry girl.”

  Xavier couldn’t disagree with that. Or maybe instead of anger, it was insanity that filled Annabelle Englewood’s mind.

  Billy’s wrinkled brow wrinkled further in confusion, “So she killed her family, calls nine-one-one, then tries to kill herself?”

  “Actually, the nine-one-one call came from the house next door,” Kate explained. “Apparently the neighbor couldn’t sleep and was sitting reading outside in his yard when he thought he saw someone with a knife in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He went back inside, found his telescope and looked through into the parents’ bedroom, saw the blood, and called nine-one-one.”

  “The one time it’s helpful to have a nosy neighbor,” Billy mused.

  “It would have been more helpful if he’d noticed earlier,” Xavier grumbled, still thinking the neighbor sounded more creepy than helpful. Who kept a telescope in their house? And what did he usually look at through it? They were yet to talk with the Englewoods’ neighbor, a Ricky Preston, because he’d been out at a doctor’s appointment all day; he’d apparently been injured at work recently.

  “We’re still waiting on toxicology results,” Billy informed them. “I heard you guys were thinking that maybe the family had been drugged before they were killed.”

  “When will you have them?” Kate asked.

  “Soon, I hope,” Billy assured them.

  The phone on Rob’s desk chirped, and while their boss answered it, Billy shot them all another perplexed frown. “I still can’t understand what kind of person would do something like this.”

  “You never really know what’s going on inside someone’s head,” Kate commented. “All the neighbors Xavier and I talked to had nothing but nice things to say about the entire Englewood family.”

  “Maybe they argued over a guy she liked but the family didn’t approve of,” Billy suggested.

  “She was twenty-three,” Xavier reminded him. “I don’t see why she would have had to do what her parents wanted.”

  “Maybe she had some sort of psychotic breakdown,” Billy tried again, obviously desperate to gain some sort of understanding as to why he should have to perform autopsies on five people killed and mutilated by a family member.

  “Well, hopefully, you're about to get your answers.” Rob hung up his phone and included all of them in his grim smile. “Annabelle Englewood is conscious.”

  * * * * *

  7:12 P.M.

  Annabelle was getting frustrated.

  No, that wasn’t quite true; she was way past frustrated. She was now bordering on full-blown panic. Her stomach was churning with that all-too-familiar sense of dread and foreboding. Instead of carrying oxygen around her body, her blood felt like it was carrying little tiny drops of stress.

  She was in the hospital, her left shoulder ached so she surmised that was the reason she was there, but she couldn’t remember a thing that had happened after she and her family had eaten dinner last night. At least she was assuming it was last night, but who knows how long she had been lying here in the hospital?

  No one would tell her anything. They wouldn’t tell her what had happened to her. They wouldn’t tell her where her family was. And they kept giving her strange looks.

  What Annabelle really wanted to know, though, was why her wrist was handcuffed to the side of the hospital bed. Did the police think she had done something bad? Was that why no one would talk to her? But what had she done? She couldn’t remember doing anything, but then again she couldn’t remember much of anything since dinner.

  Closing her eyes, she forced herself to focus her swirling mind, trying to push it into recalling the events that had landed her in the hospital. Annabelle was just starting to get her brain to reach back tentacles to the last thing she remembered when she heard the door to her hospital room open and footsteps march across the floor, stopping beside her bed.

  Not in the mood to face another doctor or nurse whose face was painted with the same mix of pity and revulsion, she kept her eyes firmly closed.

  After a long wait, an impatient voice spoke, “Miss Englewood?”

  Steadfastly, Annabelle ignored it. She was good at ignoring things, had spent most of her life doing it.

  With an irritated sigh the voice spoke again, “My name is Detective Montague. I’m here with my partner, Detective Hannah. We need to talk to you about what happened.”

  Grabbing at anger, not an emotion Annabelle was particularly good at, she was much more equipped at being a doormat than at letting others know when they’d hurt her. “I don’t know what happened,” she snapped.

  “What do you mean?” a female voice demanded.

  “I mean, I don’t remember anything after eating dinner,” she shot back, her resolve to stick with fury wavering; she turned to jelly the second anyone raised their voice at her. “Why am I handcuffed to the bed?”

  “Would you please open your eyes?” Detective Montague pleaded tiredly.

  Reluctantly complying, when she opened her eyes, she realized the face that looked down at her was one she’d seen before. Surprised, her brow creased in concentration, “You were there,” she mumbled. The light brown hair, the hazel eyes, the sharp features, this man was somehow linked to whatever had happened to her.

  For a second his hazel eyes softened before growing hard once more. “Yeah, I was.”

  “Well then, you can tell me what happened,” she pounced on that delightedly. “You can tell me how I ended up here.”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.” Detective Hannah pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat, her blue eyes probing.

  “You don’t know?” she demanded. “Where are my parents?” Annabelle couldn’t understand why they weren’t here by her side. Whatever John and Kathy Englewoods’ faults, they would be by their oldest child’s side if she were in the hospital. A thought occurred to her, “Are they hurt, too? Is that why they don’t come? Are they here in the hospital, too?”

  The two detectives exchanged glances above her head. “You really don’t remember anything?” Detective Hannah asked.

  “No,” she shrugged helplessly, ignoring the burning that produced in her shoulder. Annabelle was finding herself dangerously close to tears, and right now tears were not going to get her the answers that she needed.

  “What is the last thing you remember?” Detective Montague asked.

  He spoke calmly, but Annabelle could see something lurking in his eyes
, something she was still a little too groggy to make out. “The last thing I remember was eating dinner last night. At least, I think it was last night, but I'm not sure how long I've been here . . .” She looked to the detectives for confirmation.

  “It was last night,” Detective Hannah confirmed, fiddling with the ends of her blonde ponytail.

  “Who cooked dinner last night?” Detective Montague asked.

  “I did. Why?” She wondered what possible bearing that could have on anything. She was wrong, though, because once again the detectives exchanged glances. “That’s important…why?”

  “Did anyone help you?” Detective Montague pushed.

  She was unsettled by the way he kept staring at her with such deep intensity. “No.” Annabelle was still confused about why this was important. “I cooked dinner on my own, but earlier in the day Katherine and I made cookies.” Another exchange of looks, and this time when they looked at her, their eyes showed nothing but icy coldness and Annabelle felt herself shiver. She needed to know what was going on. “Why am I handcuffed to the bed?” she asked, pleased that her voice came out with more strength than she had anticipated. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “You could say that,” Detective Montague said harshly. “Your family is dead.”

  A black hole seemed to start growing inside her head. Growing quickly, bigger and bigger, swamping every part of her. Her surroundings began to fade until they joined the blackness in her brain. Annabelle started to feel light, like she was floating, flying through the dark night sky.

  “Xavier, maybe we should call the doctor.”

  Detective Hannah’s voice floated by her. Annabelle could actually see each word in the dark, glowing like musical notes.

  “Just give it a second.” Detective Montague lightly tapped at her cheeks. “Miss Englewood. Annabelle.”

  As quickly as the blackness had come, it swept away, leaving her shaking and empty. “They’re really dead?” she asked in a small voice. “All of them? My mom and dad? The boys? Katherine?”

  “All of them,” Detective Montague nodded, holding her in a forceful stare.

  “How?” She wondered if someone had broken into their home and killed her family, trying to kill her, too, only somehow she had survived.

  “You killed them.”

  She expected the blackness to come creeping back, but instead, Annabelle realized that all she felt was anger. How dare this man suggest that she would kill her parents and siblings. Sure, it wasn’t like they got along all the time; they had their problems just like all families did—but she would never in a million years hurt them, let alone murder them. “How dare you!” she spat out, surprised at the venom in her voice. “How dare you say that!”

  If Detective Montague was surprised by her outburst, he didn’t show it. “You had their blood on your feet, your bloody footprints were all over the house, and there was no sign of a break in. You did it. I don’t know why you did it, but you did. I don’t know if you really blocked it out and can’t remember or if you're setting up some sort of insanity defense or if you really had some sort of psychotic breakdown, but it doesn’t change the facts.”

  He was staring at her so coldly that it made her wonder what had happened to him that made him see the world in such a way that he could believe someone like her could kill their family in cold blood.

  And then she realized what was happening.

  This was simply a dream. A horrible nightmare. That was the only explanation. If she could just wake up, then everything would be back to normal. Raising her right hand, she began to smash it into her injured shoulder, a little shocked when it caused arrows of pain to shoot up and down her arm.

  Startled, Detective Montague snapped a hand around her wrist. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to make myself wake up,” she answered simply.

  Pocketing her phone, Detective Hannah stood. “We need to leave, Xavier. Now,” she added when he raised an eyebrow at her. Then she leaned over and whispered something in his ear, something that made his eyes grow wide.

  “We’ll be back later,” Detective Montague turned his attention away from his partner and back to her.

  “This is really happening, isn’t it?” Annabelle whimpered.

  He watched her warily now, as though not sure what to make of her. “It really is.” Seemingly realizing he was still holding her arm, he set it down gently against the stiff mattress, pulled out a key and removed the handcuff, and then he was gone.

  Alone, Annabelle did the only thing she could think of that would help her. She pressed her buzzer to summon a doctor and requested something to make her sleep.

  * * * * *

  9:03 P.M.

  “Annabelle Englewood absolutely, positively, one hundred percent did not kill her family.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” Xavier demanded.

  “Take a seat and I’ll explain everything.” Diane sat at her desk and gestured to the two other chairs in the room.

  In the middle of their interview with Annabelle they’d received a call from Diane telling them to stop what they were doing and get to her office immediately because Annabelle was not the killer. When Kate had first whispered that in his ear, he hadn’t known what to think. He had to admit that Annabelle didn’t look like someone who would slaughter her family in their sleep, but then again, he knew very well that looks could be deceiving. Although at the time he hadn’t wanted to see it, now Xavier had to admit that the shock and grief in her eyes when they’d told her what they thought she’d done was genuine.

  “First of all, the family was drugged and the samples of food contained traces of sleeping pills. He probably crushed some up and added it to the pasta sauce . . .”

  “Annabelle said she was the one who cooked dinner for her family last night,” Kate informed Diane.

  “There was a bottle of pasta sauce in the fridge,” Diane explained. “When I found out they’d been drugged, I sent someone back to collect it. The sauce had the drugs in it too, so it doesn’t matter who cooked the meal. And Annabelle was drugged as well.”

  “That doesn’t discount her,” Kate protested warily. “She could have been the one to add the sleeping pill powder to the jar, and she could have drugged herself to throw suspicion off herself. Or maybe it was the only way she could attempt to kill herself.”

  “What else have you got?” Xavier asked, more prepared than his partner obviously was to give Annabelle the benefit of the doubt.

  “She didn’t have any of her family’s blood on her,” Diane told them. “We tested all over her pajamas; no blood but her own.”

  “Maybe she showered,” Kate suggested, pulling her hair free from its ponytail and shaking it out, his partner hated wearing her hair up. “And washed her clothes before putting on her pajamas.”

  “No blood in any of the showers,” Diane countered. “And no clothes in the washer or dryer. Maybe she waited while the clothes went through both then folded them up and put them away before stabbing herself, but I’m thinking probably not.”

  “Okay,” Xavier nodded, completely agreeing with Diane’s logic. “What about the blood on her feet?”

  “Painted on.”

  “What?” he exclaimed.

  “Someone painted it on her feet, she never walked through her family’s blood. In the footprints, we found a couple of hairs from a paintbrush. There were some in her bed too. And the footprints were all wrong. She wasn't walking on her own; someone was walking her around. I spoke with her doctor and he said the angle of the wound indicated it was someone standing above her. It wasn’t self-inflicted.”

  Xavier drew in a shaky breath as he realized they were no longer dealing with a murder/suicide but an unknown killer who hated the Englewood family so much that they would set all of this up and murder them in such a horrible way. That also meant that there was someone out there who hated Annabelle so much that they would frame her for her parents’ and siblings’ murders. Once again, the
young woman’s white eyes flashed into his head.

  “Plus,” Diane continued, “we never found the knife. Searched the whole house from top to bottom, the yard, too, but we couldn’t find it. So unless Annabelle Englewood painted her own feet with blood, or possesses the ability to make objects vanish, and to clean herself without an ounce of water, then there is no way that she committed those murders.”

  “Okay,” Kate admitted reluctantly, “maybe she didn’t actually commit the murders, but that doesn’t preclude her being involved somehow.”

  “Like how?” Diane demanded.

  “Maybe she was in on the plan to kill her family and hired someone to do it, only that person tried to take her out, too.”

  Diane arched a skeptical brow. “So your theory is that Annabelle Englewood hired a hit man who then tried to kill her, too?” Xavier asked, knowing that Kate was still clinging to the idea that Annabelle was involved, because it made their job so much easier.

  “Or maybe she and a boyfriend were in on it together. He kills the family, then the two of them are supposed to ride off into the sunset together—only he realizes he’s just not that into her and tries to kill her, too,” Kate put forward.

  “I buy that a little more than your first notion,” he acknowledged, still thinking it was more likely that Annabelle was, in fact, an innocent victim in all of this. “Di, was there any evidence of someone else being there?”

  “No fingerprints other than family members on the door handles, but there are hundreds of fingerprints, fibers and hairs in the rooms, which is not unusual. The kids have girlfriends, boyfriends, friends, all of whom I’m sure spend time in their rooms. So far, nothing suspicious. We’ll keep plodding through what we have, but I don’t think it’s going to lead to anything useful. And I for one like the idea that a stranger, or at least someone with a grudge against the family, committed those murders rather than that girl slaughtering her own family in such a vicious way,” Diane stated firmly.