Murder Makes it Mine (Masters & McLain Mystery Book 1)

by Christina Strong

  “No I didn’t.” Tactfully, Samantha didn’t ask anything about the girl’s parents. She remembered that Olivia had mentioned at Bridge that they had died in a house fire when Janet was only twelve and that Janet had been raised as Olivia’s own little sister from then on. Now Janet was alone, and the least they could do was to find the person responsible for making her so.

  Samantha pushed her hood off the back of her head and wondered why Janet didn’t do the same. The damp on it was going to ruin her hairdo.

  Janet led the way upstairs as someone opened and peered briefly out of one of the doors on either side of the huge foyer from which the stairway rose. On the second floor, Janet used a key to unlock a paneled door. Inside, there was a spacious room with windows all along the wall that overlooked Chesapeake Bay. Looking around, Janet finally threw back the hood of Brenda’s raincoat.

  The room they were in was obviously the living room. There was a sofa sitting on a lovely Oriental rug with an expensive floor lamp beside it. The sofa was situated so that anyone sitting there could enjoy the view of the bay. A small bookcase stood nearby, the books arranged neatly by size. Olivia’s reading glasses were on the forward edge of its top shelf. There were no other furnishings.

  “Olivia was just beginning to move in when . . .” Janet left her sentence unfinished.

  Samantha was all quick sympathy. “Oh, my dear. I know how difficult this is for you, and I’m so sorry to have to ask it of you.”

  Janet didn’t answer. Instead she walked across the room to a hall that must lead to the bedrooms. In the dull gray of the stormy afternoon the hall was dark. Samantha, who had never been particularly afraid of the dark, suddenly felt somehow threatened.

  Suppose whoever had brought the false Benny Stoddard to Norfolk was here, waiting to make sure nobody found proof of their perfidy? Suppose the impersonator himself had heard that she was looking for Olivia’s pictures of the real Benny? Suppose . . . Her dreadful musings were cut short.

  “I’ve stored all of Olivia’s belongings here,” Janet told her. “It seemed the easiest thing to do.”

  “Yes,” Samantha shook off her bothersome fancies and answered the bereaved girl. “Of course. Renting a storage shed would have been foolish when you have all this space.”

  “Yes.” Janet’s answer was almost inaudible. “I guess it is my space now.”

  The lump in Samantha’s throat kept her from saying anything to comfort the girl.

  Janet led the way to a door, pushed it open and felt for the light switch. “This is Olivia’s bedroom.” After the dark of the hall, the bedroom leaped into light.

  And Samantha gasped.

  ***

  Laura had had all she could stand of Rags’s howling. Pretty soon now, Agnes Chamberlain would be calling the police or the animal control people! Under that abrasive facade she showed the world, Agnes might be only faintly tolerant of people but she had no patience at all with the idea that an animal might be suffering or in trouble while she stood around doing nothing.

  Laura pulled her khaki raincoat off its hanger, and kicked off her loafers to slip into her rainproof Duck shoes. Glaring out the window, she wondered if she preferred the gentler rain she saw there to the pelting downpour of only a few minutes ago.

  At least she hadn’t been able to hear Samantha’s Rags when the heavier rain had been stomping the starch out of her flower beds. Now she could. The dog was attempting to wake the dead! She grabbed her copy of Samantha’s door key off the key rack. “At least I won’t drown in this,” she muttered as she went to Rags’s rescue.

  The phone rang the minute she was gone. “Hey, Laura. McLain here. Good thing you got this damn answering machine, after all. Just got back from Florida and need to talk to you and Sam. Couldn’t get her. What’s up? Call me.”

  At Samantha’s, Laura let herself in and went straight to the indoor kennel Samantha always put her terrier in when she intended to be out for any length of time. “All right, Rags. It’s all right. I’m here.”

  Rags had made a wreck of his kennel. His pad was scrunched untidily in one corner, and his food bowl was tipped up on edge and leaning against a side of the cage. The newspapers Samantha always left for him in case of necessity were shredded and soaked because the little dog had turned his water bowl upside down too.

  Rags himself was in a state. He’d stopped howling and started barking the minute Laura had put the key in the lock. He was barking still, and Laura covered her ears. “Enough! I can’t hear myself think!”

  Rags increased the tempo of his barks.

  “Shut up or I won’t let you out.”

  The instant silence was a shock. “Oh, dear. You really do understand some things, don’t you?” Laura was surprised.

  “Yap!” Rags’s bright shoe button eyes avidly watched her fingers as they worked the latch. The instant she had it undone, he lunged out, flinging the cage door wide. He headed for the back door in the kitchen like a shot.

  “Oh, no. I’m not just letting you out to run around,” Laura told him. “I need to find your leash.”

  The little dog stopped leaping at the door and turned in mid-air. Now he was looking at the door to the pantry.

  Laura felt as helpless as she did around babies. “What do you want? Are you hungry? No, you couldn’t be. There’s food all over your kennel.” She opened the door to the pantry. “What do you want?”

  Rags flew into the pantry and looked up. There on its hook was his leash.

  Laura took it down muttering, “Lord, this dog makes me feel retarded.”

  Rags refrained from comment.

  Laura snapped the leash to his collar, and the two of them left the house.

  She was feeling more than a little disheveled after having been dragged around Samantha’s house, up and down her driveway twice and all over her own yard before the little tyrant at the other end of the leash let her pick him up—getting muddy paw prints all over her new London Fog—and dash into her house carrying him.

  She had the dog toweled half dry when she noticed the red light blinking on her kitchen desk. “Oh!” she told him, “I have a message.”

  Pushing the play button, she heard the Colonel’s gravelly voice. When he said he hadn’t been able to reach Samantha, Rags whined.

  Laura picked up the phone to call McLain’s number. Before she could, the answering machine beeped again and a second message came through.

  The recording lost none of the anger in the speaker’s voice. It was Brenda Talley and she was clearly upset. “Listen to me Laura Fulton! Benny is gone. I can’t find him anywhere. If that friend of yours, Samantha Masters, has taken him to visit her precious Jasmine without so much as even leaving me a note so that I wouldn’t worry, then you’d better tell me! I want you to know that . . .”

  But the machine cut her off before Laura could hear what Brenda wanted her to know. She stood staring at the machine as it beeped the series of beeps that signaled the termination of the recorded calls.

  Outside, lightning flashed. An instant later, thunder shook the panes of the windows around her. Laura picked up the phone with fingers that trembled and pressed in the Colonel’s number.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Samantha stood transfixed with horror. Everything she was looking at had been violated. Olivia’s bed clothes were slashed, baring the mattress, and that was slashed, too. All four creamy beige walls bore blots of crimson paint that seemed to have been hurled at it with great force, splattering then running down in rivulets, the splotches bleeding like wounded hearts.

  Scrawled across the mirror above the triple dresser were the words, “Leave me alone!”

  Madness had run rampant in this room and the chilling residue of its malice reached out even now.

  Samantha shuddered. He’d been here. The murderer had been here and had destroyed Olivia’s lovely room. Her mind refused to analyze or accept the depths of hatred he must have felt for poor Olivia. Or the bounds of his madness.


  She took a backward step, distancing herself from the obscene destruction. With a tremendous effort, she pulled herself together. “Oh, my dear,” she managed at last. “This must be so awful for you.” She turned to Janet. The girl was statue-still. “Let’s go back into the living room.”

  “Don’t worry, Samantha dear. I’ve seen this room before.” Her face was stony.

  Samantha’s heart went out to the poor child. She’d no doubt discovered this dreadful destruction of her beloved cousin’s room when she’d come to make certain that Olivia’s picture albums were here. How brave she was to have opened this particular door now. Obviously she sought comfort from her, but Samantha had none to offer.

  How could she comfort Janet when the girl had lost the mainstay of her life? She could, however, offer her an escape from this brooding house. “Are you certain you want to go on looking for those pictures, Janet? We could come back another day.” She couldn’t help adding, “A sunny day.”

  “No,” Janet said, her voice tense, “It’s best to get this over with now.”

  ***

  Laura let go a sigh of relief when John McLain answered his phone. “I’m so glad you’re back, John. How did you make the trip so quickly?”

  “I left at two in the morning, so I was in position to investigate by the time offices opened down there in Florida.” He sounded disgusted. “A fat lot of good it did. Everyone was courteous and curious, but nobody’d gimme the time of day when it came to where I might find the Stoddards’s belongings, much less a chance to look through them for photo albums. Seems they’re all locked away until the heir to the estate is found.” The sound he made Laura could only interpret as a snort. “When I couldn’t even bribe ‘em, I gave up and flew out of there.”

  “Oh, John. How disappointing.” Then, “Hush, Rags. I can’t hear.”

  “Is that racket Sam’s mutt?”

  “Yes, it’s Rags. Nothing I do seems to reassure him. He’s been carrying on for hours now. Samantha’s not back from going to look for Olivia’s photo albums, and he’s pitching a fit. That’s why I have him here. If I’d left him at Samantha’s he’d have raised the dead by now.”

  “Where’d Sam go to look?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. Just that Janet Wilson was picking her up.”

  McLain was silent for a long minute. “Look, Laura, I’m coming over. I have something to tell you, and I think I’d better do it there.”

  ***

  In Ocean View, the rain renewed its attack on the tall windows of the beach house. Sheet after sheet of it dashed, wind-driven, against the glass, setting the panes to vibrating in their frames.

  Janet reached into the vandalized room and switched off the lights. Dark mercifully covered the pitiful wreckage of what had been Olivia’s elegant bedroom. The abrupt darkness caused the two tall windows opposite the doorway where the women stood to glow with the deepening gray-blue of the rain-washed twilight outside.

  Samantha turned away to Janet. The eerie light emphasized the strain on the girl’s face, and quick pity rose in Samantha. She wanted to get Janet away from here as soon as possible. “It’s getting late. Do you know exactly where the pictures are?” Try as she would to sound less grim than she felt, her voice was still flat with the depression she felt.

  Questions flooded her mind. Why would anyone do this to Olivia’s lovely things? Wasn’t it enough that they’d taken her life? And what did the scrawl on the mirror mean? “Leave me alone!” The red-painted words were forever emblazoned on her mind. Leave who alone? The answer was obvious. The young man at Brenda Talley’s, of course. Certainly he wanted Olivia to leave him alone. It was his plans Olivia might have interfered with.

  Certainly neither Herb nor Brenda would have had any reason to write those words. Nor, she was certain, would they have been guilty of the wanton destruction of the room she’d just seen. Not even if they were driven to the brink of desperation. She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking on that.

  Somehow the assertion made her feel better. Relief flooded her. No, her neighbors were most certainly not capable of that.

  Thanking God for small favors, she wondered if the perpetrator of the destruction could still be here, hiding somewhere. There had been that third car parked around the corner of the house as if it were trying not to be seen, she remembered.

  She shoved aside the thought that a murderer might lurk here, and grasped at the memory of the utter stillness she’d felt when Janet had opened the door to the apartment. That feeling that a house was empty or occupied had never failed her. Whenever she’d opened a neighbor’s kitchen door for a visit she’d always sensed whether or not anyone was home. She wasn’t going to ignore that feeling now. She’d known this apartment was empty before she stepped into it. She wasn’t going to deny that just because she’d had an awful shock. If Olivia’s poor young cousin could be brave, so could she!

  But, oh, how she wished she could shake off this feeling of dread that had come over her when Janet opened that door!

  Squaring her shoulders she said, “Janet, we must find the pictures that we know Olivia would have taken of Benny. We must. After the room you’ve just showed me, I can only conclude that he has to have been the one who did it. Clearly, only a deranged mind could have perpetrated such a horror.” Firmly she announced, “I guess that clears Brenda. Say what you will about Brenda’s moodiness, she is most certainly not deranged.”

  Janet turned abruptly and led the way down the hall to another door. Throwing it wide, she switched on its light, and gestured Samantha into the room.

  Judging by the rows of neatly stacked boxes, this was a storage space. Turning, Samantha asked the girl behind her, “Where are the photo albums?”

  “Through this door. There’s another room off this one.” She led the way to a narrow door, opened it and stood back.

  Samantha took a step into the room, but couldn’t see anything. The light from behind her did nothing to illuminate the space in front of her. She took another step and waited for Janet to switch on the light.

  Samantha hated dark places, and because of the awful room she’d seen down the hall, this one seemed full of menace. She could feel the hairs at the back of her neck rise.

  ***

  Laura was at the door before John even appeared over the tall brick wall that separated their properties. Rags was growling around her ankles, his muzzle pointed unerringly toward the direction from which the Colonel would come.

  Laura threw the door wide the instant she saw McLain drop from the top of the wall. It seemed to her that he was taking an inordinately long time crossing the sweep of lawn, and impatience tore at her. “Oh, do hurry,” she murmured senselessly. The Colonel was already coming at a dead run.

  “Yerapp!” Rags stood on his hind legs and pushed at the screen door. He jumped back out of the way as the Marine tore it open and charged into the house.

  “Have you heard from her yet?” he demanded.

  “No. And it’s getting late. Past time for feeding Rags. This isn’t like Samantha.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Brenda Talley left me a message that Benny is missing. She thinks Samantha took him to visit Jasmine. But Samantha didn’t.”

  “Damn. I wish I knew what the hell’s going on.” He scowled. It was a measure of his degree of distress that he neglected to apologize for his profanity. He always did with her, while letting it stand to irritate Samantha. “This is getting complicated, Laura.”

  “You said you had something you wanted to tell me. Something that you had to come here to tell.” Her brown eyes were solemn, anxiety at the back of them.

  “Yeah.” He was looking at her as if assessing her.

  “Oh, do tell me,” she burst out. “I can handle whatever it is.”

  He wondered if that was true. Somehow he considered Samantha the stalwart and Laura Fulton the dreamer of the group that he’d come to know over the last few weeks. He wondered just how much he could tell he
r without sending her into a fit of hysterics. Laura was no Samantha Masters, and Sam was bad enough.

  Rags leapt against his leg, whining.

  “Okay.” He pushed his hand through the short hair on the top of his head. “Look, I could do with some coffee.”

  “Oh, dear. You’re stalling.” Nevertheless, Laura went to the coffee maker and poured steaming brew into the mug she’d had waiting for him since his call. She turned with the mug in her hand and asked, “Is it so dreadful, then?”

  He threw himself into a chair at the kitchen table and told her, “It’s not good.”

  “But what could you have learned in Florida that would be so upsetting? You said they wouldn’t give you the time of day.” Laura eased into the chair opposite him and clasped her own mug with hands that suddenly needed the warmth it offered.

  “It wasn’t in Florida. It was in South Carolina.”

  Laura frowned, bewildered. “What were you doing in South Carolina?”

  He took a swallow of coffee, regarding her levelly, marshaling his thoughts.

  Laura frowned. “Will you please tell me!”

  Rags jumped into her lap and stared at the man across the table. Laura was so distressed she didn’t even notice the dog.

  “I stopped off in Charleston because I remembered that Olivia Charles had lived there. I had plenty of time, thanks to the guys that wouldn’t give me diddly in Florida. In Charleston, I looked up an old Marine buddy. The guy’s a private investigator now, and I wanted to ask him to dig up any info he could find on Olivia Charles. And boy, did I hit pay dirt. Seems he was actually born and raised in Charleston, and his sister and mother had known Olivia’s family. He knew all about ‘em. Seems you Southerners take an inordinate interest in the lives of your friends and neighbors.”

  Laura didn’t think anyone who cared could take less than an interest in their friends, but she didn’t think this was the time to argue him into understanding. She nodded her head at him, urging him to go on.