Steeped in Suspicion

by Eryn Scott

  The back of my head screamed with pain from where they’d hit me, but I pushed past it, standing as I kicked my feet free from the loosened ropes. Althea stirred with a groan as I ran out of the barn, turning left to run down the driveway and toward my car. I patted my pockets, searching for my keys and my phone. I needed to call the police.

  My feet came to a sudden stop as I froze in the middle of the long driveway.

  They’d taken both my phone and my keys.

  The back of my neck went cold then hot, and another sob peeled out of me. I grimaced back at the barn then the farmhouse. Warm light spilled out of the windows in an oxymoronic lie. But there were people inside, and some of them had to have phones.

  She couldn’t kill all of us. Right? The thought was too terrifying to answer with any certainty, so I turned toward the farmhouse and scrambled up the steps. The front door was unlocked. I pushed through and slammed it behind me, throwing the lock.

  Every bone in my body hoped Althea didn’t have her house keys on the same ring as her car keys. I ran toward the back of the house and flipped that lock too. Then I raced into the dining room.

  “Help,” I panted as I pushed through the door and found a half-dozen people sitting around the table.

  They blinked up at me. Some of their faces wrinkled in concern; some smiled lazily at me. Right. She’d drugged them.

  “What can we do for you, young lady?” an older woman asked, rising slowly.

  “Do any of you have phones?” I asked, racing forward.

  They looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “It’s part of the relaxation. No digital distractions,” a man said.

  The same older woman held up a finger. “She took them when we checked in.”

  My thoughts raced in panicked roads toward a solution.

  “Is there a phone here in the farmhouse?” I asked.

  They glanced around, confused. “I don’t think so,” someone said.

  “I need to call the police. We’re all in danger.” My attention flashed around the room, trying to see out the windows.

  Were all the windows locked? What if there was another entrance I didn’t know about? Althea was bound to get inside. She knew this house like the back of her hand, and I’d been here twice.

  There was only one solution. “Where’d she put your phones?” I asked, focusing on the woman who seemed the most lucid.

  She studied the ceiling for a moment. “I think they’re in the cabinet in the kitchen. The blue one.”

  The same one I’d seen the cook grab her purse out of earlier. I raced into the kitchen and located the cabinet she was talking about. I pulled out each drawer and opened each door until I found a basket full of phones. Sticky notes taped to the front told which person each belonged to, but I didn’t care. I ripped the notes off as I jammed at any button I could find, hoping to turn one on. After pressing all the buttons, I threw each phone on the counter and moved onto the next.

  From where I stood, I had a clear view of the barn. The door swung on its hinges as if someone had just left. Terror raced through my veins, and I pawed at the buttons on the last few phones. But their screens remained black. They were all dead.

  I swallowed. The word dead was all too real to me right now.

  Fear spiked through my body as a digital sound trilled out. I jumped when one screen flashed to life. I almost cried. Pressing the buttons, realized it needed a code. I didn’t have that. Nor did I know whose phone it was since I’d pulled off all the sticky notes.

  About to run back into the dining room to see if anyone recognized the phone, the emergency bypass option flickered on the screen.

  Yes! I thought as I pressed it and dialed 911.

  But as I was telling the operator I was at The Pines, that Althea Pine was trying to kill me, and there were seven of us here in mortal danger, the front doorknob jiggled. Fear rolled into the room like a storm onto the coastline.

  “Miss Woodmere?” the operator asked when I cut off in the middle of a sentence, fear freezing my throat.

  “She’s here,” I whispered, tensed and ready to run. But the sound of the door opening didn’t follow. Momentary relief flooded through me. She didn’t have her key. “I’ve locked her out of the house, but I’m not sure if there’s another way for her to get inside.”

  “I’m sending the police. Is there a basement?” the operator asked.

  A chill washed over me. When I’d been sneaking around outside, I’d noticed small windows above the groundline. In an old house like this, it was possible there was a separate entrance to the basement.

  “I think there is. Hold on.” I raced from the kitchen and found three doors in the main entry hall.

  One led to a small bathroom, another to a coat closet, but the one under the staircase held its own staircase leading down. My fingers scrambled, searching for a lock on the doorknob. Maybe if I locked it from here she wouldn’t be able to come up. But there was none. I could block the door with something. I scanned the hallway, but only found a large wooden grandfather clock I was sure I wouldn’t be able to move. I gulped. I would have to go down there.

  “I’m going downstairs,” I whispered to the woman on the phone.

  She didn’t need to know that, but I felt like if I didn’t say it out loud, I wouldn’t go through with it. A hanging light bulb in front of me lit my way down the stairs when I pulled the chain. I held my breath as I crept down one stair at a time. Each step creaked as my weight moved onto it, and I couldn’t tell if the sounds reminded me more of warnings or threats.

  Cold air swept up to meet me, smelling like roots and damp earth. The dim light was far behind me by the time I reached the bottom step, and I squinted to make out shapes in the basement’s darkness. Boxes were stacked along one wall; there was a bench that held gardening supplies to my right, and straight ahead, there was a door.

  It was an older-fashioned door and about half of it was made from diagonally cut windows. The part of my brain that is in charge of nightmares made me think I saw the outline of Althea’s face in the pale glow of the outside light more than once.

  I reached my shaking hand forward as I kept my eyes glued on the window, just in case that picture wasn’t only in my mind. When my fingers closed over the knob, I turned it right, then left. All the breath left my lungs in a relieved exhale.

  “It’s locked,” I told the operator.

  But she didn’t respond as she had before. I scrutinized the phone and realized it had died.

  I was alone.

  The sound of shattering glass rang out from upstairs. Footsteps creaked across the old wood floors. My instinct was to find somewhere down here in the basement to hide. But there were six innocent people upstairs. I couldn’t leave them to Althea’s mercy. Who knew what she might do at this point. I had to go up there and help them.

  My fingers curled around a garden trowel hanging from a nail to my right. I spun around, pulling in deep breaths as if they might fill me with courage. Being armed, no matter how feebly, gave me the nerve to ascend the stairs. Heartbeat pounding in my chest, in my temples, in my eardrums, I no longer heard the complaints of the old stairs.

  At the landing, I leaned close to the door, trying to pick up sounds of movement in the hallway. Light spilled in from the gap underneath. Footsteps stopped right outside, and before I could scramble back down, the door swung open.

  “Rosemary,” Police Chief Clemenson said in relief as I raised the trowel above my head. He caught my arm. I fell toward into him, sobs wracking my body. The trowel clattered to the floor as he held me tight. “It’s okay. You’re safe. Everyone’s safe.”

  27

  Mom wrapped her hands around the mug of tea in front of her and held on tight. I knew the gesture was more about the chill in the air than a love of tea, but I appreciated her for trying all the same.

  She’d driven down the last night after I’d called her. With the combination of escaping Althea’s wrath and having my mom�
��s warm presence here, I’d fallen asleep the moment my head hit the pillow. Police Chief Clemenson had filled her in on some of what happened to me, but I still had a lot of explaining to do the next morning.

  I was still in my head about having seen Asher and Grandma yesterday, and the questions piled up. Why had Grandma waited until that moment to show up? It sounded like he’d helped find her last night, helped bring her to me. If he could’ve done that, why had he waited? And even though I didn’t expect to see her anytime soon—I’d seen her use a ton of energy saving me last night—why hadn’t Asher come back?

  Mom, not privy to my ghostly worries, was more focused on the facts of the case against Althea.

  “So she killed Frank too?” she asked, staring out the tea shop window at the beach. Tears still hung in the corners of her eyes from when I’d described how Althea had switched Grandma Helen’s normal medicine with a lethal dose of fentanyl.

  Trying to turn off the running list of ghostly questions in my mind, I nodded. “Apparently, Frank checked into The Pines the night he was supposed to. Althea lied when she said he never showed. He came in late, however, and the other guests had already gone to bed for the evening. She heated him up some of what they’d had for dinner, inviting him to eat in the kitchen after she’d added a dose of the drug she was using in her guests’ meals.”

  “And it was too much?” Mom asked, leaning forward.

  I bit at my lip for a moment to steady my breath. “She fed him before having him fill out his medical survey. She’d researched him online and knew he didn’t have any close family members. That was one of her checks to make sure no one would come looking for the person when they stayed with her for much longer than they originally planned. But because she didn’t know he had a heart condition, the drugs gave him a heart attack, and he collapsed right there in her kitchen.”

  “Which is how his blue button ended up under the stove.” Mom snapped her fingers as she connected that to something Police Chief Clemenson must’ve told her last night.

  “Yup.” I sipped at my tea, reveling in the cinnamon and cardamom flavors of Grandma’s Home blend.

  I thought—for the seventh time that morning—about telling my mom about seeing Grandma’s ghost yesterday, about how she saved me. But just like every other time the thought came to me, I shut it down. Mom had a hard enough time accepting everything else that had happened. I didn’t want to give her one more thing to worry about.

  Instead, I said, “Frank was only supposed to stay for four days, so she knew if she wanted to get him hooked enough to stay, she needed to start fast. But that recklessness led to her arrest.”

  Mom wrinkled her forehead. “And she killed Frank after Helen died—sorry, after she killed Helen? I’m still coming to terms with that.” Mom exhaled.

  “Almost two weeks after. Grandma Helen had suspected Althea of sketchy behavior ever since she started selling teas to her. But once Lance Howe came by the shop a few weeks ago telling her his godmother seemed odd, she made the connection that Althea could be drugging her customers. Grandma also knew she needed more evidence. Althea knew Grandma was getting close, so she silenced her before she could tell anyone.” Sadness sank over the room, suffocating and heavy, as if all the sand from the beach had been transported inside.

  “But she did tell someone,” Mom said, checking with me that she’d gotten that detail correct.

  “Yes. Well, sort of. She tried to talk to Doc Gallagher, but he … wouldn’t hear her out.” It wasn’t as if I wanted to keep secrets from my mom, but Doc Gallagher’s past with drugs didn’t seem like mine to share.

  Mom’s fingers traced the handle of the mug in front of her as she thought. “I still don’t understand why she drugged those people in the first place.”

  I’d wondered the same thing. Apparently, the cook woman who’d been willing to help Althea fake my suicide and assisted in the killing and drugging of others had developed a conscience. She’d spilled everything to Chief Clemenson when he’d taken her in for questioning, swearing she only looked the other way, that she hadn’t drugged or killed anyone. The fact that she’d also been the one who’d tried to run me over that night by my mailbox—and had flashed the headlights at me last night that allowed Althea to hit me over the head—made me inclined not to believe her about the conscience part.

  Chief Clemenson had answered almost all my questions last night after I’d given him my statement, seeing as how I’d almost died for the information.

  I sat back, exhaling. “Well, I heard Chief Clemenson telling you about Althea’s medical history, so you know about how it all started.”

  Mom nodded. “She misdiagnosed a young girl who wrote a book about the lasting negative effects of Dr. Pine’s shortsightedness.”

  “Yes. And because she knew she’d never be respected in the medical field, she left it altogether. She bought the farmhouse property and started The Pines, still interested in helping people heal, just from a more holistic way this time.” I sipped the last of my tea. “But business wasn’t good. Pebble Cove isn’t a tourist town, and people didn’t want to come all the way out here. So she got desperate. She still had a contact in a hospital who could get her medications. The chief is launching a big investigation into that person’s identity, since Althea won’t give up the name. Anyway, she started drugging her guests with a small amount so they would feel euphoric while they were here. When they left, they felt like garbage. They went through withdrawals, but they didn’t know that. They thought The Pines was the cure, and they needed to go back. People sold their houses, drained their retirement accounts, whatever they needed to do in order to stay.”

  “And their families didn’t see any red flags?” Mom asked.

  “They did. In the beginning, there were a few families who got suspicious and came digging around, so she began only taking guests who had no family, no one to check up on them. With Ruth, Lance was a godson, so Althea wouldn’t have found him on any of her records.”

  “So then the mayor’s crimes weren’t related to any of this?” Mom asked, having heard the buzz in the station that Sam’s court date was today.

  I couldn’t help the way my jaw clenched as I told her she’d heard correctly. “I mean, he was using an illegal drug, but his was heroine, not the medical grade opioids Althea used,” I added. “And he had financial ties to the development company, landing him in a thick ethics violation. He invited Frank down here but panicked when the man showed up dead, wanting to make sure his name wasn’t tied to him at all.”

  “Which is why he came to you asking around because he heard you might’ve talked to him.” Mom put her head in her hands. “Instead, it was me.”

  I chuckled. “It’s okay, Mom. You couldn’t have known. You were trying to help me sell the house.”

  Mom looked up. “So …? Are you … going to sell it?”

  I trailed a fingertip around the lip of my mug, wincing as I looked outside instead of at her.

  A figure walking out on the beach stole my attention for a moment. My heartbeat kicked up a notch when I caught a glimmer of the ocean through the person. They were transparent, a ghost. But through my excitement, I recognized it was neither Asher nor my grandmother.

  It was Lois.

  Her hair was down, hanging in loose waves that bounced around her shoulders instead of plastered to her head in that tight bun like when I’d seen her last. Then I realized she wasn’t alone. Max walked by her side.

  My heart felt light, and a smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. As happy as seeing Lois and Max made me, it also highlighted the ghosts I missed. I checked over my shoulder, scanning the room as I’d been in the habit of doing since Asher went missing, and last night when I’d seen both him and my grandma. But there had been no sign of either of them.

  “You’re staying, aren’t you?” Mom asked quietly.

  I nodded, keeping my gaze fixed on the beach.

  She exhaled. “Well, other than you almost being killed
out here, I have to admit that it seems like this place has been good for you.”

  My eyes flashed over to hers. “Really?”

  She tucked a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “Really. You seem happy, more yourself than you have since”—her eyes crinkled at the edges, showing the pain it caused her to finish—“since we lost your dad.”

  A happiness surrounded me, almost as palpable as the relief I’d felt last night at seeing Chief Clemenson on the other side of the basement door. I hadn’t realized how keeping my true feelings from my mother had been weighing down on me. I might not be telling her the whole truth—I couldn’t see anything good coming from sharing my ghost-seeing abilities with her, at least not right now—but being honest with her about staying in Pebble Cove felt like a good start.

  Telling the truth had its benefits, for sure. I thought about how I’d lied to Asher about doing research about him, the hurt written across his face as clearly as that article I’d read online. I hoped I got the chance to say I was sorry. But it was feeling like I would never see him again.

  Mom told me she would stay for longer than just the weekend, but I insisted she get back to work. I would be up to the city soon anyway to move out of my apartment.

  Watching her car pull away early that Monday morning, however, was much harder than I wanted to admit.

  I puttered around the house, reading, cleaning, and thinking about how I might rearrange the furniture. I even left the front door unlocked in case Daphne wandered in to keep me company. And even though I hoped to see Asher, the sight of another man at my back porch brightened my smile around midday.

  Carl stood facing the sea, hands shoved into his pockets, acting as if he hadn’t just knocked on the door.

  “Hi,” I said, doing my best to disguise my happiness at seeing him, knowing it might chase the ornery man back to his hideaway.

  He tipped his fisherman’s cap forward and gestured inside. “Can I come in for a minute?”