Disturbing the Dead

by Sandra Parshall

  “This ain’t none of your business,” he said. “Come on, Holly.”

  Rachel held up a hand to stop Holly in her tracks. She asked Watford, “Why do you want to drag her back home against her will? Why can’t her family be happy she has a job and she’s starting a life for herself?”

  Watford leaned closer and spoke in a low growl. “You leave our family alone, you hear me?”

  The beer and tobacco stink of his breath made her queasy and she had to swallow hard before she could speak. “Get out of my clinic right now, or I’ll have the police throw you out.” She envisioned Lloyd Jarrett, short and skinny and probably incapable of throwing anybody out of any place. She prayed that his gun and uniform would make an impression.

  “Holly,” Watford said, “come on now.”

  “No.”

  The single defiant little word made Rachel want to shout with joy. Stand up to him. You can do it.

  “What did you say to me, girl?” Watford demanded.

  Don’t let him bully you.

  “I said no.” Holly’s voice gathered strength. “I’m stayin’ here.”

  “The hell you are.” Watford bumped Rachel aside, and she stumbled against the reception desk. Holly yelped when his hand closed around her wrist.

  Her blood roaring in her ears, Rachel lunged at him. She grabbed his free arm and wrenched it backward, at the same time planting a foot behind his knee and pushing hard. His legs went out from under him, he let go of Holly and tumbled to the floor.

  The front door opened with a jingle of the bell, and Officer Lloyd Jarrett stepped in. “Well, now.” He looked from Rachel to Watford. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tom kept an eye out for potholes as Brandon maneuvered the cruiser up the long driveway to Pauline McClure’s house. Brandon’s wild driving on the way out had jolted the pain in Tom’s arm up to full strength, and he didn’t need any more shocks. He blew out a breath of relief when they cleared the last crater and Brandon slammed on the brakes.

  The gray stone mansion and a detached four-car garage sat in a clearing circled by five acres of woods.

  As they got out, Tom said, “A full-scale massacre could have happened out here and nobody would’ve seen or heard a thing.”

  Brandon stared open-mouthed at the house. “Oh, man. I think I saw this place in some horror movie.”

  Boarded-up windows and dead vines spider-webbing the walls gave the house an atmosphere of forbidding isolation, emphasized by a gray sky and swirling snow flurries. In the front yard garden, mounds of fallen leaves rotted around blackened coneflower stalks, but Tom could imagine the plot as a spectacular swath of summer color when Pauline had been alive to tend it.

  They took the flagstone walk through the garden to the covered porch. Mounting the steps ahead of Brandon, Tom pulled out the keys Durham had given him. In addition to its original lock, the oak door had two deadbolts, installed after Pauline’s disappearance to keep out vandals and squatters. Tom began the trial and error process of finding the right key for each lock.

  A couple of toots from a car horn made Tom and Brandon turn. A twenty-year-old Plymouth Reliant, painted neon yellow, bounced up the driveway without missing a single pothole and shuddered to a stop behind the cruiser.

  A tall, angular black woman in a red coat unfolded herself from the car. “Good day, gentlemen,” she called. “I trust I’m not tardy.” She slung the strap of a purse onto her shoulder and strode up the walk.

  The housekeeper? Not exactly what Tom had expected.

  When she reached them, Tom realized his first impression of a young, energetic woman had been wrong, at least as far as age went. The braids coiled on her head were as much gray as black, and the skin around her luminous dark eyes formed soft pouches, with wrinkles at the corners.

  “Mrs. Barker?”

  “I am.” She sucked in a breath and released it. “I vowed I would never set foot in this house again. But when I heard your voice on the telephone, I felt as if your father was speaking to me through you. I knew in my heart I had to help you find the monster who murdered that gentle lady.” She added with no change in tone, “I can sense it even now.”

  “Sense what?” Tom asked.

  Her eyes met his. “Evil. Can’t you feel it? The very air we’re breathing is drenched with evil.”

  Jesus Christ, Tom thought, one of those. Next she’d be claiming she had “the sight” and wasn’t bound by the natural world. Brandon gaped at her as if she’d brought the horror movie set to life.

  “Thanks for coming out,” Tom said. “Let me get the door open and we’ll go in.” So far he’d managed to open only the top lock.

  Mrs. Barker’s icy hand on his stopped him. “Allow me.” She rotated her open palm above the keys, then touched two with a fingertip. “This silver one is for the middle lock. This blue one fits the bottom.”

  Tom tried them. The bolts slid back. He turned the knob and pushed the door open. He answered Brandon’s astonished expression with a shrug. Maybe Mrs. Barker was an amateur locksmith.

  Tom gestured for the woman to enter the house, but she stood with her eyes shut and her head thrown back. “The moment I turned into the driveway that morning, a terrible foreboding swept through me. It grew stronger and stronger as I approached the house. I wanted to flee, but something told me I had to go inside. I rang the bell, but there was no answer. I knocked, and there was no answer. Something made me try the door, and I discovered it was unlocked.”

  “Was that unusual?” Tom asked.

  Her eyes opened. “It was unprecedented. Mrs. McClure believed a woman living alone in the country must take precautions.”

  Tom studied Mrs. Barker, wondering what this articulate, intelligent woman’s personal story was. He vaguely recalled hearing about her popularity as a fortune teller for rich and poor alike. Why had she been cleaning Pauline’s house for a living? He pulled his mind back on track. “What did you do when you found the door unlocked?”

  “I entered the house.” Spine stiff and chin up, Mrs. Barker marched past Tom and Brandon into the foyer.

  Tom flipped a switch next to the door and the brass chandelier lit up. The foyer was larger than the living rooms of more modest houses. Peacocks fanned gaudy tails across the wallpaper. The silence seemed a physical sensation, a heaviness in the air. Motes swirled in the light, and dust invaded Tom’s nostrils.

  “I stood here,” Mrs. Barker said. “I called Mrs. McClure’s name, but she didn’t answer. Two of the cats ran down the stairs and rubbed against my legs.”

  When she glanced down, Tom did too, half-expecting to see the cats.

  “I looked in the living room.” Mrs. Barker stepped through the doorway to the right.

  The living room had no ceiling light, and in the gloom Tom saw only a large empty space, wall color indiscernible, the outlines of boarded-up Palladian windows faintly visible. His imagination supplied fine furniture and carpet, elaborate draperies, gold-framed paintings.

  “The lamps were on,” Mrs. Barker said. “One of the dogs was sleeping on the rug. One of the cats was in the front window. Mrs. McClure wasn’t here. I went to the dining room next.”

  She turned, the folds of her red coat swishing around her body, and crossed the foyer. Tom and Brandon followed. With both hands, Mrs. Barker slid open oak doors to reveal another empty room. Tom felt for a light switch and brought a crystal chandelier to life. Thirty people could have been seated comfortably in the dining room. A sad picture came to mind of the widowed Pauline, alone after sending her daughter to boarding school, sitting at an enormous table to eat her meals.

  “I began to fear she was ill or injured,” Mrs. Barker said. “I rushed through the rest of the house, searching for her.”

  She led Tom and Brandon across the foyer and down a hallway past a library, a den, a powder room. At the end of the hall, Mrs. Barker stopped short of the last closed door. Her eye
s clouded with an emotion Tom would have called fear if he’d seen any reason for her to be afraid.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She licked her lips, her gaze fixed on the door. “I would prefer not to go into the kitchen.”

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t.”

  More bad vibes, probably. Tom felt them, too, crawling like millipede legs up his spine, but he told himself his reaction was normal in a house where a murder—maybe two—had been committed. “Did you see something out of the ordinary in the kitchen?”

  “It’s not only what I saw or didn’t see. It’s what I felt. I feel it now. A terrible anger. And hatred. Evil, consuming hatred.”

  Brandon backed against the wall and gaped at the kitchen door. Jesus Christ, Tom thought, am I the only sane one here? “What did you see in the kitchen?”

  “The cats and dogs hadn’t been fed. I knew for certain something was terribly wrong. Mrs. McClure would never have neglected them.”

  “Did you see any signs of a struggle, anything broken or out of place?”

  She shook her head. “No. But the animals refused to follow me into the kitchen.”

  Tom trusted the animals’ instincts a lot more than Mrs. Barker’s emotional sensors. Pauline might not have been killed in the kitchen, but something sure as hell happened there. “I want to take a look, but you can wait here. Brandon, you coming?”

  Startled, Brandon lurched away from the wall, hitched up his gun belt, squared his shoulders. “Yes, sir.”

  Tom nudged open the swinging door, aware that his father’s hand had probably performed the same motion ten years before, that he was retracing his father’s invisible footsteps.

  Tom circled the kitchen while Brandon hung back at the door. If the windows hadn’t been boarded up, the kitchen might feel cozy and cheerful, with its strawberry vine wallpaper, light oak cabinets, and breakfast nook. Maybe Pauline had eaten her solitary meals here instead of the cavernous dining room.

  After Pauline’s disappearance, the State Police crime scene techs had found no blood in the kitchen—or anywhere else in the house. But something about this room disturbed Tom. His heartbeat quickened.

  Jesus Christ. He shook his head to clear it. He was letting Mrs. Barker spook him.

  “What?” Brandon said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” Tom searched for keys to fit the three locks on the back door. When he finally swung it open, he looked out onto a flagstone patio, a lawn, and another garden. Pauline might have been killed outside. Probably was, if an ax was the weapon. He imagined her struggling with her assailant in the kitchen, breaking free and frantically throwing open the back door, escaping into the night. He saw her killer pursuing her, grabbing an ax that leaned against a stack of firewood outside the door, running after Pauline with the weapon raised and ready to strike. Maybe she had tripped, fallen—

  If she’d bled on the ground, the killer could have shoveled up the evidence and hauled it away. But the crime scene report didn’t mention disturbed soil in the yard.

  A gust of freezing air struck Tom on its way into the house. He saw three possibilities: Pauline was murdered somewhere else; the killer had expertly covered his tracks and concealed the spot where Pauline died; or the investigation was so slipshod that vital evidence on her property was overlooked. Tom didn’t want to think about the third scenario, or what it would say about his father as the cop in charge.

  “Mind if I take a look around outside?” Brandon asked.

  “Go ahead.” Brandon probably wanted to get out of the house because it was giving him the creeps. Tom locked the back door after Brandon and returned to the hallway.

  Mrs. Barker wasn’t there. He found her deep in the shadows of the living room, standing at the fireplace with her dark hands spread on the white marble mantel.

  She spoke without looking around. “I feel her presence so strongly. On a snowy winter’s day like this, she would curl up in her big chair by the fire, with her animals around her, and knit or read. She said she found peace in this room.”

  The shadows near the fireplace seemed to float before Tom’s eyes, shifting into an image of a small woman nestled in a massive wing chair. Get a grip, Bridger. He unhooked his flashlight from his belt and switched it on, and the apparition vanished. He cleared his throat. “What did you do after checking the kitchen that morning?”

  “I looked upstairs. I looked in the garage, and her car was there. Then I called Mr. Durham.”

  Durham wasn’t mentioned in the initial report. “You didn’t call the police first?”

  “Mrs. McClure told me to notify Mr. Durham if anything ever happened to her, if she was in an accident or incapacitated, and he would see to everything.” Mrs. Barker paused, and when she spoke again her voice quavered. “She said he was her rock, the one person she could depend on.”

  “Didn’t he tell you to call the police?”

  “Not right then. He told me to wait for him. I fed the animals while I waited. I had to put their food in the dining room to persuade them to eat. Mr. Durham arrived and we went through the house together. We talked about the possibility that she had been kidnapped for ransom. Then he told me to call your father.”

  Why didn’t Durham call? Tom would rather hear the explanation from Reed Durham than Mrs. Barker.

  He asked, “Had Shackleford and O’Dell been working here the day before?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t here.”

  “How would you describe her relationships with them?”

  Mrs. Barker frowned at a spot Tom couldn’t see on the mantel and rubbed it with her fingertips. “Cordial, from all appearances. But I didn’t care for Shackleford. I had a strong sense of corruption—immorality, criminality. It surrounded him like a black aura.”

  “Why did Pauline have scum like him working for her?”

  Mrs. Barker abandoned her cleaning effort and faced Tom. “It was a way to make certain the child was provided for.”

  “What child?”

  “Her sister Jean’s little girl. Holly. Troy Shackleford is her father, but I’m sure you know that. Mrs. McClure had an arrangement with Shackleford. Most of what she paid him was passed on to Jean for the child’s support.”

  Interesting. Maybe Pauline didn’t have much contact with her family, but she’d cared enough to find an indirect way to help her sister and niece.

  Before Tom could pursue this line of thought, Mrs. Barker went on, “But I was always uneasy about having him around. He’s the one I would have predicted would do something like this—”

  When she reached toward his wounded arm, Tom took an unthinking step backward, out of her range. His flashlight beam bounced with his movement, illuminating her faint, brief smile. She lowered her hand.

  “I have to admit I’m quite surprised that Rudy O’Dell shot you,” she said, “and people don’t surprise me very often. He was so shy and tongue-tied I rarely heard him utter a sensible word. Harmless as a baby rabbit. Something has driven him to this extreme. Something…wicked.”

  Tom’s arm throbbed and his mouth went dry at the memory of the bullet gouging his flesh. Wicked, all right. “Did you ever hear Mrs. McClure argue with either of them? About money, or anything else?”

  “In my hearing, not a single contentious word ever passed among them.”

  Terrific. The person who’d spent the most time with Pauline was turning out to be useless as a witness. “Do you remember any women who visited her around the time she disappeared?”

  “Let’s see.” She pursed her generous lips as she thought. “Both of her sisters came to see her that week—came together, I mean. Her niece, Amy, was here on a couple of occasions.”

  “Really? I thought Pauline didn’t have much to do with her family.”

  “I couldn’t tell you anything about her relationships with her family.” Mrs. Barker drifted around the room, her hands moving as if
she were mentally replacing each missing piece of furniture. “It was a private matter. It didn’t concern me.”

  Tom doubted she was ignorant on the subject, but he was sure she didn’t intend to tell him anything. He’d get back to it. For now, he took another tack. “Aside from Reed Durham, did she have any male friends?”

  Mrs. Barker stepped closer, willing to face him again. “Ed McClure was a friend.”

  “How often was Ed here?”

  “Two or three times a week.”

  That sounded like a hell of a lot more than friendship. Tom would have to ask Natalie McClure how she’d felt about her husband’s attentions to his beautiful sister-in-law. “Did you hear what they talked about?”

  “Plants,” Mrs. Barker said. “You know he’s a botanist? He teaches at the college in Blacksburg and he hybridizes fruit trees.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Mrs. McClure enjoyed working with plants herself.” Now Mrs. Barker seemed relaxed and expansive, maybe because she considered this topic safe. “She had her flower garden in front, and she grew herbs out back. She was a great believer in herbal cures for all manner of conditions. Learned it from her mother.”

  For a second Tom tasted again the bitter brew Mrs. Turner had urged on him after she’d bandaged his arm. “Did Pauline ever try any of these herbal cures on her husband?”

  She tensed like a line jerked taut. “I doubt it. He wouldn’t even drink herbal tea.” Her eyes narrowed. “Mrs. McClure didn’t poison her husband, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  Tom’s knowledge of herbs was limited to the parsley sprigs on restaurant plates. He’d have to learn more before he pursued the idea of Pauline as a poisoner. “Did her friendship with Ed McClure continue up to the time she disappeared?”

  “Almost,” Mrs. Barker said. “He’d fallen out of favor shortly before. She told me never to admit him to this house again. I don’t know why.”

  A scorned lover? “Did you tell my father all this after Pauline disappeared?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think I ever discussed it with him.”