“It’s closed on Sunday,” Dennis said, “but I’ll see what they’ll tell me in the morning about who rents the box. I might have to ask the local cops to talk to them.”
Tom opened one of the cards. The message was written in an open, loopy script. Happy birthday, Princess! Fifteen already! I’m thinking of you. Lots of love always, Amy. A tiny heart dotted each i.
Amy Watford and Jean Turner had both left within days of Pauline’s disappearance. Jean, for certain, hadn’t been seen since, although her mother claimed she sent money for Holly’s expenses. Jack and Bonnie Watford had given the impression they were in frequent contact with their daughter Amy. All those details about her family, her husband’s accident. Maybe Amy was lying about her married name so certain people—Shackleford, for example—wouldn’t be able to find her.
Or maybe the person who sent these cards and letters wasn’t Amy Watford.
Chapter Thirty
At nine o’clock Rachel collapsed into bed, desperate for a few hours of oblivion. She’d feel better with Tom in the house, but at least Brandon was there, and Tom had promised to be back by eleven.
Please, God, if there is a God, let Holly get through the night without waking the whole house.
Frank hopped onto the bed and curled up next to her. In his cage in a corner, Cicero made soft muttering sounds as he tucked his head under a wing. Rachel switched off the lamp and relaxed into sleep.
Her cell phone rang.
Struggling back to consciousness, she groped on the tabletop and knocked the phone to the floor. “Oh, crap!” She got an answering croak from Frank. At last she had the lamp on and the phone to her ear. “Hello!”
“Rachel?” Tom sounded unsure who he’d reached.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“I’ve got bad news, I’m afraid.”
Rachel pushed herself upright. “What’s happened now?”
“The animal hospital’s on fire.”
“Oh my God!” Rachel fought her way free of the covers and leapt out of bed. “How? When? What— Oh, God.”
“Rachel, listen. Right now we need to know if you’ve got any animals in the building.”
“No, no. There aren’t any. But we’ve got tanks—oxygen, anesthetic—in the storage room downstairs, they’ll explode if—”
“Oh, Christ. Hold on.” He shouted the information to someone. “Okay,” he said to Rachel, “they know what they’re dealing with now.”
“How did the fire start?”
“I don’t know yet. Your alarm went off about twenty minutes ago and the manager of the Mountaineer saw flames and called it in. I was about to head out to Joanna’s place when the dispatcher alerted me.”
Rachel sank onto the bed. Her clinic, her business, her new life, in flames. Her mind turned to the dead bird on her cottage porch, the threat written on her door, the shots fired at her and Holly yesterday. “Was it arson?”
“I don’t know yet,” Tom repeated, but the edge in his voice told her he suspected the same thing. “I can’t talk to the chief till the fire’s out.”
Rachel forced herself to ask, “How bad is it? The whole building?”
“No. The fire’s in the back. The front looks okay— Well, except for your big window. The firefighters broke it to get in. They were on the scene in less than two minutes. They’ll get it under control soon.”
She pictured men in heavy coats climbing through the hole where the big plate glass window had been, grinding glass shards under their boots as they dragged a hose through the reception area. What was happening to the patient records, the drug supply, the expensive equipment in the back rooms? She stood again. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“No, Rachel,” Tom said. “It’s snowing. The roads are too bad. I don’t want you having an accident and getting hurt.”
“This is my business we’re talking about. I’m coming.”
“Rachel, you’re not—”
She pressed the button to cut him off.
Dressed in jeans, a heavy sweater, and boots, Rachel ran downstairs and grabbed her coat from the hall closet. She pulled it on as she hurried toward voices in the kitchen. Joanna and Brandon sat at the table eating chocolate chip cookies and milk.
“The animal hospital’s on fire,” Rachel announced from the doorway.
“What?” they exclaimed in unison.
“I don’t have time to talk. Joanna, can I borrow your Cherokee?”
“Now wait a minute.” Brandon rose and assumed a policeman’s stern demeanor, but the smear of chocolate on his lower lip spoiled the image. “I’m not letting you go anywhere by yourself.”
“You can’t come with me.” Rachel yanked her gloves from the coat pockets. “You have to stay with Holly.”
“I don’t want you driving in this much snow when you’re upset,” Joanna told Rachel. She blotted her lips with a paper napkin and stood. “I’ll take you.”
“No,” Brandon protested. “It’s too dangerous. What if somebody—”
“Oh, hush,” Joanna said. “We’ll be fine. I’ll take my Glock.” When Brandon’s face registered alarm, she added, “Honey, I was an expert shot before you were born.”
Minutes later, they were on the road, the Jeep Cherokee plowing through the snow at a speed that took Rachel’s breath away. More than once she shut her eyes and braced for disaster, but Joanna negotiated every twist and turn with aplomb.
The scene on Main Street was exactly what she’d imagined. Both of Mountainview’s fire trucks sat in the snow outside the animal hospital. One hose snaked through the broken window and another disappeared around the side of the building. She saw only a couple of firemen, which meant the rest were inside or out back. From the rear of the hospital rose a pillar of black smoke, illuminated by leaping flames.
City police and sheriff’s cars sat sideways in the street to stop traffic. Joanna pulled to the curb a block from the hospital. Rachel flung open her door and jumped out. She ran up the sidewalk through the snow.
Tom seemed to appear out of nowhere and intercepted her with both hands raised. “Stay back, Rachel. You can’t do anything to help.”
She tried to push past him, but he grabbed her. “Let me go!” she cried. “I have to get things out of there before—”
“No,” Tom said.
Catching up with Rachel, Joanna said, “Be sensible, honey. You can’t go into a burning building.”
Rachel wanted to kick and scream, but she knew Tom and Joanna were right. Reluctantly she crossed the street with them to the Mountaineer, where they could wait in warmth.
The firefighters labored for another hour before they extinguished the blaze. After they marked off the burned areas with crime scene tape, Rachel thanked them all, shaking each man’s sweaty hand. One of them gave her a heavy flashlight, told her to be careful where she stepped, and led her inside, with Tom and Joanna trailing. Water pooled on the floor in the reception area and chairs lay on their sides. Glass fragments crackled underfoot. Smoke clogged Rachel’s nostrils with the stench of charred wood and melted plastic.
She reached over the high counter of the reception desk and grabbed the appointment book. Dry and clean, by some miracle. With so many worries beating at her mind, she latched onto the one clear action she could take: call everybody tomorrow morning, reschedule all the appointments. She tucked the book under her arm and followed the firefighter through the door leading to the heart of the hospital.
She looked into each of the four exam rooms, ran the flashlight beam over the soot-streaked walls, the dripping wet cabinets and tables. Filthy, but intact.
She continued down the hallway to the surgery and boarding rooms, and walked into a scene of ruin. The entire rear of the hospital was gone. Nothing remained of the surgery room except the plumbing and the steel tables, now almost buried under chunks of burned roof. Falling snow melted on the smoking debris.
“Oh, honey.” Joanna slipped an
arm around Rachel’s waist.
Rachel was too stunned to speak.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said, his hand on her shoulder.
Rachel choked out, “I want to know if this was deliberate.”
“I’ll go find the fire chief and bring him back to talk to you.”
Rachel and Joanna returned to the reception area. Joanna pulled a couple of chairs upright and urged Rachel to sit. Rachel waved her off and remained huddled by the broken window, keeping vigil for Tom’s return. Snow drifted in and collected on her boots.
On the darkened street only the Mountaineer blazed with light. One by one the firefighters drifted away from their trucks and into the restaurant. The sight of them sipping coffee, talking, laughing while her business lay in ruins made Rachel feel unbearably lonely and bereft. She couldn’t think about the future now. If she started thinking about the work ahead, her weary mind would buckle under the burden.
She watched the snow come down. White flakes swirled under the streetlamps before spiraling to the ground, like crazed butterflies caught out of season, dying in the cold.
She was shivering by the time Tom reappeared with the fire chief.
Looking like an outsized cartoon hero in his bulky coat and hard hat, the chief pulled off one glove and wiped soot from his lips before he spoke to Rachel. “Real sorry about this, Dr. Goddard. I hope we can find out who did it.”
A flush of heat shot through Rachel’s half-frozen body. “It was arson? You’re positive?”
“Oh, yes ma’am. No doubt about it. Soon as I saw the flames, I knew it was started with an accelerant. Hell— Heck, I could smell gas. Somebody splashed it against the back of the building and lit a match.”
“Why?” She looked at Tom. “Do you think it has something to do with Holly?”
“I’d be amazed if it didn’t.”
“Her father. The son of a bitch. If he thinks he can scare me into—You’ve got to put him away, before he kills somebody else. Before he kills Holly to keep her quiet.”
Tom met her gaze, and in his eyes she saw an anger and determination matching her own. “I will, Rachel. I’m going to get him out of her life and out of yours.”
“When? And how?”
His face looked set in stone. “As soon as I can. Any way I have to.”
Chapter Thirty-one
At eight a.m., the fax in the squad room spat out two reports from the state’s regional crime lab in Roanoke. Tom snatched them from the machine, praying for something useful.
No such luck with the report on O’Dell. The pathologist confirmed Tom’s guess that O’Dell had died at least three days before his body was discovered. No bullet fragments were found in the corpse, so they’d never be able to prove any particular gun had killed him.
“Hey, Tommy.” Dennis Murray walked in and dropped his hat on his desk. “I heard about the animal hospital getting torched last night. What a shame.”
“The real shame is we don’t have a thing to go on. Not even footprints outside the building, because of the firefighters tramping around and all the water—” Tom shook his head, let go of the pointless complaint, and skimmed the lab report on the unidentified bones they’d found on the mountain. “Look at this. The second victim was a young woman, probably Caucasian.”
Dennis leaned in to read the report. “Did they give us a cause of death?”
“Possible blunt trauma to the head,” Tom said. “But the skull’s so broken up they can’t be sure how much damage was done by a blow and how much by bears. That’s a lot less important than identifying her. We need to make sure Amy Watford’s alive.”
“I’ll get back to it right now.”
“See if you can find Amy’s dental records,” Tom told him. “I’ll work on the parents.”
He had somebody else to see first, though. He headed out on foot for Reed Durham’s law office two blocks away.
Main Street was lively for such an early hour, with the snow plow making a final pass to reach pavement, and shovel-wielding merchants yelling their usual good-natured complaints about the driver piling snow on the sidewalks they’d just cleared. The sun peeked over the mountains and cast dazzling light on snow-covered roofs. Tom would have enjoyed the scene if he hadn’t been able to see the boarded-up front of Rachel’s animal hospital at the far end of the street.
The door to the law offices was unlocked, but the outer office was empty. Tom knew Durham always came in by eight because he liked to get a quiet hour of work done before the staff arrived. Passing the reception desk, Tom entered Durham’s inner office without knocking.
Startled, Durham looked up and pulled off his reading glasses. “Hey. What’s up?”
“I need some answers, and I think you can give them to me.”
Durham frowned. “I’ll help you if I can. Take a seat, have some coffee.”
“No, thanks.” Tom stood in front of the desk and looked down at Durham. “First of all, I want to know why you didn’t call the sheriff and report her disappearance. Why weren’t you alarmed when her housekeeper called and said she was missing?”
“Who says I wasn’t alarmed? I was scared to death. I knew Willingham wouldn’t do anything about it, so I let Mrs. Barker call him and I called your dad.”
Durham’s explanation, so simple and sensible, left Tom feeling foolish for a moment. But he’d come here for answers to all of his questions, and he pushed on. “All right, tell me this. Who is Mary Lee’s real father?”
Durham assumed an expression of sorely tested patience. “Tom, I told you—”
“You told me a lie. Now I want the truth. I know Adam McClure wasn’t her father.” He raised a hand when Durham started to protest. “Willingham told me. This is one of those rare times when I think I can believe him. But he wouldn’t tell me who her real father is.”
Durham pushed his floppy hair off his forehead. “I don’t know why any of this matters. You’re investigating Pauline’s murder, not her daughter’s paternity.”
“Come off it, Reed. If Pauline was sleeping with another man while she was married to Adam, and she had a baby with him, that could have something to do with her death. Don’t tell me you can’t see that. And I’ve also got a personal reason for asking.”
Durham squinted up at him. “Personal?”
Tom leaned on the desk and fixed the other man with a stare. He had Pauline’s letter to his father in his shirt pocket, and it felt like a cold weight against his chest. “Is Mary Lee my father’s child?”
In the space of seconds, Durham’s expression ran the gamut from shocked to flustered to annoyed. Good thing he didn’t have to argue criminal cases, Tom thought. He’d never put anything over on a jury.
Then Durham laughed. “Where’d you get a crazy idea like that?”
“Let’s cut the crap, okay? I know something was going on between them.” He forced himself to say the words. “They had a relationship.”
Durham swiveled his chair and stared out the window. After a moment, he said without looking at Tom, “You think they had an affair? You really believe your father would do that to your mother?”
Covering up for him, like a good buddy should. “Don’t try to make me feel guilty. Everything points to it.”
Durham swung his chair back around and met Tom’s gaze. “They’d been friends since high school. That was the first time John had been around any other Melungeon kids. He grew up in this part of the county, and he didn’t meet anybody from Rocky Branch District till high school. He was interested in that stuff, the history, even back then. He got to know all the Melungeon kids, even Troy Shackleford.”
Tom paced the room, unable to stand still. “Just how well did he get to know Pauline?”
“I’m telling you they were friends, Tom.” Durham’s voice took on an edge of exasperated anger. “Your dad and your mother were already together, they were planning to get married. Besides, Pauline wasn’t interested in him that way. She had big
plans for herself. She talked about going off to New York or California to have a career of some kind. Nothing ever came of it, but that’s what she wanted back then.”
“She did pretty well for herself, marrying the rich bachelor at the bank.” Tom wasn’t ready to believe Durham’s story, and he wasn’t ready to see Pauline as an innocent dreamer.
“She loved Adam McClure,” Durham said. “Robert doesn’t want to believe that, but I knew Pauline as well as anybody, and I can tell you she loved Adam.”
“Yeah, right. And I guess she carried on her friendship with my father after she got married.”
“No, actually, they didn’t see each other for a long time after high school. He went off to Vietnam, came back and married your mother and took a job as a deputy. Pauline was married to Adam by then. Different worlds, you know, even in a little place like Mason County.”
Tom halted and glared at Durham. “But they started seeing each other again before she disappeared. Several years before.”
Durham nodded. “But don’t go jumping to conclusions. She was lonely after Adam died. With her husband gone, people in the McClures’ social circle wouldn’t have anything to do with her. She reached out to your dad—and your mother. She had them over to her place for dinner with my wife and me—”
“My mother went to Pauline’s house?”
“Yeah, but they never got close. Just too different, I guess. She had more in common with your father.”
Tom slumped into a chair. “You really expect me to believe he was over at her house all the time and they were just pals, talking about Melungeon history?”
Durham sighed. “I never would have expected John’s own son to think the worst of him. Tom, you grew up in the same house with the man. You knew him. But here you are, believing the gossip—”
“People gossiped about them? Everybody knew?”
“People thought they knew something. It doesn’t take much for busybodies to start putting two people in bed together.”
“And my mother had to put up with that? How could he do that to her?”
Disturbing the Dead Page 25
