Fact or Fiction - A Sam Prichard Mystery (Sam Prichard, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Private Investigator Book 13)

by David Archer

  Sam shrugged. “I can turn that around on you,” he said. “I know half a dozen cops who had to get special waivers to join a police force because of their own juvenile criminal records, but the experience has made them valuable officers. They seem to have a natural talent for spotting a lie, or maybe they can just sense when someone they pick up is guilty because they recognize the signs from their own criminal days. I suspect Jason would be one of those.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Moore said after a moment, “but I’m not going to make any promises. I have a pretty hard time getting past the fact that he’s outsmarted me in the past.” He reached into a drawer, took out a pair of nitrile gloves, and slipped them on before turning the hat over and looking inside.

  “Hmph,” he said. “Did you look in here?”

  Sam shook his head. “No, I didn’t want to take a chance on contaminating any evidence that might be inside it. You see something?”

  Moore nodded and turned the hat so Sam could look inside, as well. “Those look like hairs to me,” he said. “Don’t you think so?”

  Sure enough, there were two long thin strands of what looked like gray hair stuck to the satiny lining of the hat. “Sure does. And if this is the hat Ross saw, that means we have a DNA sample.”

  Moore nodded and then carefully put the hat into a large Ziploc bag. “I’m sending this to the lab down in Marion. Give me a number and I’ll let you know what I find out, and I’m sure you know I want to hear anything you run across. I’ll call Sheriff McCollum today and let him know I want to reopen this case.”

  Sam passed over his business card and accepted one of Moore’s cards in return. “My cell number is on there,” he said. “And yes, I’ll call you if I learn anything new.”

  He got to his feet and walked out of the office, waved at the receptionist, and made his way back to the Ridgeline. He climbed behind the wheel and started the truck, backed out of the parking space, and then eased out onto the street. The motel was on the other end of town, so he had to make his way around the town square to get there. The old Italianate courthouse that stood in its center caught his eye, and he realized he was looking at the place where Ross had been quickly convicted and sentenced.

  His phone rang as he was just about to turn into the motel parking lot, and he saw that it was Indie calling. “Hey, babe,” he said. “I’m just pulling in at the motel. You guys ready for lunch?”

  “I’m starving,” Indie said, “but lunch may have to wait. Hurry up and get in here. Beauregard needs to speak with you, and he says it’s urgent.”

  “Urgent?” He let out a sigh. “Let me park, I’ll be right in.”

  It only took him a couple of minutes to get the truck parked and ride the elevator up to their floor, and then he was inside his room. Both of the others were there, but Grace was keeping Kenzie occupied with a coloring book at the table. Sam sat down beside his wife on one of the beds and looked at his mother-in-law.

  “Okay,” he said, “what’s so urgent?”

  Kim looked at Sam nervously. “Beauregard says Ross isn’t the only one that’s in trouble. He said there is another of his descendants who is actually going to be in danger.”

  Sam squinted at her. “Is he talking about Debbie? One of her kids? Or maybe Judith herself?”

  Kim was shaking her head. “He doesn’t know who,” she said. “The only thing he knows is that it’s a woman. Something is going to happen pretty soon, like in the next day or so, that is going to put her in serious danger.”

  Sam put his elbows on his knees and held his head in his hands. “If it’s a woman,” he said, “then it must be either Judith or Debbie. Right now I’d bet on Debbie. If there’s going to be any kind of new danger, it’s probably because somebody isn’t going to like the fact I’m digging into this case.”

  “The real killer, you mean,” Indie said. “Right?”

  “I’d assume so.” He brought them all up to date on the things he had learned that morning, and even told them about getting the keys to Millie’s house from what might have been a ghost. “Is it only me, or does anyone else think it’s ironic all this spooky stuff is happening with Halloween only a few days away?”

  “It’s definitely strange,” Indie said. “Sam, let’s turn Herman loose on Lynette and Bill Parkinson. I understand Detective Moore is going to try, but Herman has a tendency to find things the police would overlook.” She got up and grabbed her computer off the dresser, then sat down and opened it up. “I’m giving him Lynette’s name, and Parkinson’s as well. I’m going to instruct him to look for any correlation between the two. With any luck, if they did get together after he left, he’ll be able to track them down.” She finished typing and hit the Enter key with a flourish.

  “That was my mother’s name,” Kim said. “Lynette, I mean, but her maiden name was Smith.”

  Sam looked at her. “You never talk about your parents much,” he said. “I know you have some unhappy memories, there. What was your father’s name?”

  “Bill. William, I mean, but everybody called him Bill.”

  Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow, that’s a weird coincidence.”

  “They both died before I was born,” Indie said. “I never got to meet either of them.”

  Kim smiled at her daughter. “They would have adored you,” she said. “I know that.”

  Herman chimed, and Indie turned the computer so Sam could see a list of links. Most of them were unrelated, but then she stumbled across one that seemed to have promise.

  “Here’s a news article,” she said, “about a girl named Lynette Cameron who was staying at the Virginia Home for Unwed Mothers in Bluefield. She gave birth to a baby girl, but the day after they were released from the hospital she disappeared. The police said it wasn’t uncommon for girls to run away from the home after giving birth, but they usually left the babies behind. Lynette took her child with her, but they never found any trace of her after that.”

  Sam chewed his cheek for a moment. “That could lend credibility to the thought that Parkinson went to be with her. If he made contact with her before the baby was born, he might have been waiting to take them away once they got out of the hospital.”

  “I’ll bet on it,” Indie said. “It just makes sense, a lot more sense than thinking this young girl would try to make it on her own with the baby.”

  “And there’s nothing about her after that?”

  Indie shrugged. “There’s a couple of references that might be her, but there’s no way to verify them. Nothing that could positively identify her, anyway.” She scrolled down the page a bit further and clicked on another link. “There are thousands of links to men named William or Bill Parkinson, but unless you can give me something more to go on, there’s no way I would know if any of these are the right man.”

  Sam thought for a moment. “What about a marriage license? If he and Lynette were together, they probably got married at some point.”

  Indie tapped on the keys for a moment and then hit Enter. A moment later, she shook her head. “Herman says there are no references to Parkinson and Cameron getting married that match the first names.”

  Sam shrugged. “Well, it was a thought,” he said. “Moore says the sheriff at the time told him that Lynette died years ago. Nobody knows whatever happened to Parkinson.”

  Sam felt a tug on his arm and turned to see Kenzie smiling up at him. “Daddy, can we go get lunch now?”

  Sam smiled. “Of course we can, sweetheart,” he said. “What would you like to have for lunch?”

  “Pizza!” Kenzie said, and everyone agreed that pizza sounded pretty good. There was a pizza place only a couple of blocks away, and the weather wasn’t too cool, so they decided to walk.

  “What really bothers me,” Grace said, “is that ghost woman giving you the keys to that house. That’s just really, really weird.”

  Sam made a grimace. “I don’t believe she was a ghost,” he said. “She was as solid and real as you are. I’d stake my repu
tation on it.”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “Then how do you explain it? How did she happen to show up at just the right moment, when there was a private investigator there who needed to look inside the house?”

  “I didn’t say I had an explanation,” Sam said. “I just said she’s not a ghost. The only thing I can figure is that, whoever she was, she probably got the keys from the real Marie and happened to see me pull up there. She might’ve only stopped out of curiosity, and it’s possible she panicked after she realized who I was and decided to just dump the keys on me and split.”

  “Samuel,” Kim said in the now-familiar Southern drawl, “do you still have the keys?”

  Sam stared at his mother-in-law for a moment, then slowly nodded. “I do.”

  “Then, after you have eaten, would you take me to see the place? It’s possible I might see something new, if I go to the place where it actually happened.”

  Sam continued staring for a moment, then nodded again. “Okay. When we finish, I’ll take everybody else back to the motel, and you and I will go take a look. If there’s anybody getting nervous over my poking around over there, I don’t want them getting a good look at Indie or Kenzie.”

  Kim blinked, then smiled at Sam. “Me again,” she said. “Beauregard says he understands.”

  It wasn’t long before they were done eating, and they all walked back to the motel together. Sam kissed Indie in the parking lot, then he and Kim got into the Ridgeline and headed back to Thompsonville.

  “It’s really pretty around here,” Kim said as they drove along. Sam nodded but didn’t reply. The rest of the ride was silent until they pulled up in front of Millie Cameron’s house.

  They got out and walked toward the front door, and Sam was looking around to see if anyone might be watching them. He didn’t see anyone, but hairs on the back of his neck were standing up. He had the very strong feeling that someone was paying attention, but he couldn’t spot anybody.

  He used the key to open the door, then forced himself to step inside. The eerie feeling that someone was watching got even stronger, and he glanced at Kim to see if she was feeling it as well.

  It took him only a second to realize that Beauregard had once again taken control.

  “That’s the chair they found her in,” Sam said, pointing at one of the pair of chairs. He knew which one it was because of the deep brown stains that were still visible.

  “How interesting,” Beauregard said. “Samuel, do you notice anything strange about that chair? Compare it to the one beside it, and I think you’ll see what I mean.”

  Sam looked from one chair to the other and suddenly realized that they were quite different. The chair with the majority of the bloodstains was otherwise pristine; the other chair, the one Ross had been sitting in, had rips and tears that appeared to be the work of mice or rats over the years.

  “The mice have been at that chair,” he said. “But not the one Millie died in. I suppose that could be because of the bloodstains, don’t you think? Maybe there is an odor or something that the mice avoid?”

  Kim shook her head. “I wouldn’t think so. Despite the fact that they normally tend toward the vegetarian, mice and rats will eat meat if they can. They certainly wouldn’t shy away from blood that was so old and dried. There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I find it interesting nonetheless.”

  Kim looked around the room and then started walking. She went through the door that led into the kitchen, and Sam followed. “In which cabinet did you find the hat?” Beauregard asked.

  Sam looked up at the cabinet that had opened when he was there earlier in the day and slowly reached up toward it. He half expected it to open again, but it hadn’t moved by the time his fingers reached the knob. He gave it a tug and realized that it moved far more easily than he expected. The hinges were so free that he suspected they had been recently oiled.

  While Kim peeked into that one, Sam reached up and opened another. Unlike the first, this one was stiff. He took out his phone and turned on its flashlight, then shined it up on the hinges of the first cabinet door.

  “Sure enough,” he said. “It opened so easily I figured it must’ve been oiled, and I can see signs of fresh oil on the hinges.” He shined the light upward and suddenly let out a gasp. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Somebody was yanking my chain.”

  Kim raised her eyes to follow the light and saw what had caught Sam’s attention. Attached to the cabinet door in the top outer corner was a thin thread, and it ran over to the wall and through a screw eye. From there it ran along the wall and then disappeared between the cabinet and the wall itself.

  Sam turned and walked out the back door, then stepped around the corner so that he was standing outside the wall the cabinet was mounted on. The string hung down from a hole in the wall, a small metal button secured to it as a weight.

  Kim had followed. “Look at that,” Sam said. “It had to be that woman, the one who gave me the keys. Once she saw me leave the living room, she must’ve come around here and waited until I entered the kitchen.” He pointed at a window. “She could have seen me through that window, even though I missed her completely. Once I was there, all she had to do was pull that string and it was almost certain that I would find the hat.”

  Kim was nodding slowly. “Then whoever she was,” Beauregard’s voice intoned, “she somehow knew the importance of the hat. I would surmise that she would be the one who placed it there. She undoubtedly found it sometime after the murder and must have considered it to be a valuable clue. I wonder how long it laid in that cabinet, waiting for someone to discover it.”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said, using his phone to take pictures of the string. He went back inside and got photos of the string attached to the cabinet door, as well. “I want to show these to Detective Moore. Somebody around here knows something, and we need to find out who it is.”

  Kim walked around Sam and went back into the living room, then stood there and stared at the chair. When Sam joined her, she looked up at him.

  “What?” Sam asked, and Beauregard’s reply left him staring with his eyebrows trying to climb over his forehead. A second later Kim wavered, and then she was blinking at Sam.

  “Sam? Oh…”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah, Beauregard just left, and if I could get my hands on him, I’d strangle him.”

  Kim’s eyes went wide. “Why? What did he do?”

  Sam shook his head, muttering under his breath, but then he looked at his mother-in-law again. “He just told me I need to find the witch.”

  11

  Sam locked the house back up and drove straight over to the Garrity place. He left Kim sitting in the truck as he limped up to the door and knocked again. Mrs. Garrity opened a moment later, her face friendly but cautious.

  “Mr. Prichard? Jason’s not here, said he was going to see his girlfriend over at Benton. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “I’m going to ask you a really strange question,” Sam said. “Do you know anything about someone around here who might be considered a witch?”

  Mrs. Garrity’s eyes grew round. “A witch? Oh, there’s only one person you can be speaking of. That would be Daisy Willis—she lives in a trailer off by itself, on the north edge of the woods. There’s a little trailer park there just off the highway, but hers is an old silver trailer that sits way back from all the others.”

  Sam nodded. “By any chance, would Daisy Willis fit the same general description as Marie, the one I asked you about earlier?”

  A sudden smile came across the woman’s face. “Oh, I never would’ve thought about it until now, but yes,” she said. “She’d be about the same size and shape as Marie was when she died. She got the reputation of being a witch because of these ointments and potions she makes out of stuff she finds in the woods. To be honest, some of them work better than the medicines you get from the doctor, but everybody’s just a little bit afraid of her.”

  “I can imagine,” Sam said. “
All right, thank you very much.” He turned and hurried at his best pace back to the Ridgeline and got behind the wheel again.

  It took him only a couple of minutes to drive around onto the main highway that led back toward Benton, and he spotted the trailer park immediately. He pulled in and wound his way through its driveway, then spotted the old Airstream travel trailer sitting just at the edge of the woods. There was no driveway leading to it, but he saw tire tracks in the tall grass and followed them.

  He climbed out of the truck and walked to the door, then knocked. When there was no answer after a few seconds, he knocked again, calling out, “Daisy? Daisy Willis? I need to speak with you.”

  “She ain’t there,” a voice called, and Sam turned to see someone standing on the back porch of another trailer. He turned and walked toward the person and saw that it was another elderly woman.

  “Do you know when she might be back?” Sam asked.

  “No idea,” the old woman said. “I saw some car pull up there a couple hours ago, and some woman went up to the door. Then a few minutes later Daisy came out and got in the car with her. Don’t know who it was, or where they might have been going, but she didn’t look a bit happy about it. Daisy don’t hold with cars—she says they’re all from the devil.”

  Sam had gotten close by this time and squinted at the woman. “Then why do you think she would’ve gotten into it?”

  “Well, there’s them around here think I’m just another crazy old lady,” the woman said, “but it sure looked to me like whoever it was with her had her scared to death. Held on to her arm all the way to the car and opened the door and kinda pushed her inside, then hurried around and got in and took off.”

  “Did it look to you like she was being threatened?”