Body in the Woods (A Reverend Annabelle Dixon Cozy Mystery Book 3)

by Alison Golden

  “Did you have feelings for Daniel Green?” the Inspector asked.

  Louisa raised her eyebrows and smiled wryly.

  “Is this what your investigation is predicated upon, Detective? Teenage hormones?”

  “Answer the question, Miss Montgomery.”

  “I may have had some brief feelings, at some point in time, yes.”

  “Were you jealous then, of your sister Lucy’s relationship with him?”

  “Are you implying that I—”

  “Stick to the question, please.”

  Louisa raised her chin once more.

  “No. I was not.”

  “But you were constantly pestering her about the fact that she was seeing him, were you not?” Annabelle added.

  “‘Pestering’? No. I was her older sister. It was my duty to ensure that she remained safe and on the right track. Gallivanting about town with cocky boys such as… him… was not suitable for a girl her age.”

  “So you fought with Lucy a lot?” Annabelle asked.

  Louisa’s eyes narrowed in on the Reverend, once again spearing her with their sharp beam.

  “Sibling disagreements are an unfortunate inevitability, Reverend. I take it you are an only child?”

  “Did these fights ever get physical?” asked the Inspector, distracting Louisa from Annabelle.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Your sister’s body showed signs of multiple healed fractures. The pathologist said she’d experienced some pretty bad beatings growing up. You don’t know anything about that?”

  Louisa paused uncharacteristically before answering this question.

  “I…” she shook her head. “No. I don’t know anything about that.”

  The Inspector looked toward Annabelle with another shrug of defeat. They had pretty much gone through everything they had, and Louisa had still retained her tough shell, deflecting everything.

  “That’s a lot of side-stepping that you’re doing, Miss Montgomery,” the Inspector sighed.

  “Are you implying something, Detective?”

  The question hung in the air for a few seconds, fermenting the tension that had reached almost boiling point between the three of them. Suddenly, Annabelle got to her feet, her face flustered and red.

  “You know jolly well what we’re implying, Louisa!” she shouted, all her good grace and gentleness eroded in the face of the teacher’s evasiveness. “You killed your sister!”

  Louisa gasped. “This is preposterous!” she exclaimed, her voice full of indignation and surprise.

  “Reverend,” warned the Inspector.

  “No!” cried Annabelle, shrugging the Inspector off as he tried to pull her back to her seat. “This has gone on long enough!” She turned to the seated teacher, who gazed up at her, quietly fuming behind her stony expression. “You fought with Lucy constantly. You were jealous of her popularity, just as she was jealous of your looks. The fights got so bad that they frequently became physical.”

  “Ridiculous!” Louisa spurted adamantly, but the quiver in her voice was unmistakable.

  “But you also became jealous of her relationship with Daniel. You bullied and berated her, hoping that you could force them apart.”

  Louisa shook her head madly, wincing at the words that Annabelle spoke as if they were weapons tearing her apart.

  “You were so madly in love with him, so intent upon a future with him, that you even prepared for the moment that you would have him to yourself. You bought a wedding dress, and packed a suitcase.”

  “Stop it. Stop…”

  “But you just waited and waited. The chance you were looking for never came, and with each day you grew increasingly despairing, tortured not just by your unfulfilled love, but by the fact that your despised sister was the one enjoying the company of Daniel and not you. Until one day, you snapped.”

  “Enough… Please…”

  “What was it? Did she find the wedding dress? Did you simply run out of patience? Did you realize how easy it would be to just—?”

  “She knew I loved him!” Louisa screamed suddenly, interrupting Annabelle so harshly that the Reverend fell back onto her seat upon the couch while the Inspector’s jaw dropped almost entirely to the floor.

  Louisa trembled in the heavy silence which followed her outburst. She pressed her fingers daintily to the bridge of her nose and pinched it as she struggled to suppress the sobs of her emotions.

  “She knew… That’s why she was with him… To spite me…” Louisa’s sobs grew, her body almost convulsing as she struggled to keep down the twenty-year-old secret, the decades of lies, and repressed feelings.

  Annabelle pulled out a packet of tissues from her pocket and handed one to Louisa.

  “You will never know…never know what it’s like…to bear such a secret…for so long….” Louisa uttered, in between the gasping sobs of her crying. She raised her eyes to meet Annabelle’s, but this time the small intense beads of dark light were soft and wet with tears and pain. Her pursed lips trembled maniacally, and the tightly controlled expression on her face softened into the round openness of a broken woman.

  “Lucy was popular, but that didn’t stop her from detesting me. She always wanted to get the better of me. She’d never had a boyfriend for more than a month before Daniel, but when she realized how much I loved him, she decided to torture me, to keep him for herself, have him hanging around, doting on her every whim. All so that she could rub in my face that the man I loved was hers, and there was nothing I could do about it. Yes. We fought, of course we did. If they’d found my body in the ground, I’m sure they’d discover just as many bruised and broken bones.”

  Annabelle cast a sorrowful look at the Inspector, but his eyes were intense and focused, waiting for the crucial moment that Louisa would say what he needed to hear.

  “The dress, the wedding bands, the jewelry,” Louisa continued, as she swayed from side to side, sobbing and dabbing at her red, wet cheeks, “I gathered them myself in readiness. The suitcase of clothes I packed myself. It’s stupid, but I’ve always been one for preparation. I always thought that if I had a plan, had some money, had everything ready, then the final piece would just fall into place. The way I saw it, the way Daniel looked at me, the way he spoke to me back then, I was sure that one day, he would turn up on my doorstep and declare his undying love for me, the kind of love I had for him. In my dreams, Daniel and I would live blissfully and happily ever after.“

  Annabelle shook her head sorrowfully. “But why, in all this time, did you never simply tell Daniel about your feelings toward him? Particularly if they were so strong?”

  “I may be passionate, Reverend. I may be proud. But I have always lacked confidence. My mother always told me that I was born out of time. I have never felt it was ladylike for a woman to announce her intentions. It is enough for her merely to entice. Besides,” she said, blinking away tears, “rejection would have crushed me overwhelmingly. I daren’t risk it. No, he had to come to me.”

  “What happened, Louisa?” asked Annabelle gently, as she offered another tissue.

  Louisa breathed deeply, her face twisted into a look of sadness so deep that Annabelle felt pained just to observe it. With the greatest of struggles, Louisa sat up, tightened her throat, swallowed her sobs, and began talking, her voice taking on a cold, detached monotone.

  “We argued, as was typical for us. I told her I didn’t want her out too long, she told me she would do as she pleased. It escalated, again, as was usual, and she told me precisely what she intended.”

  “Which was?”

  “To keep Daniel and to stop us from ever getting together.”

  “That must have made you angry.”

  Louisa glared at the Inspector through her tears and hurt.

  “It wasn’t the only thing she said. She called me pathetic for pining after her boyfriend. She ridiculed me. She told me that even were she to leave Daniel, he would never be with a wretch like me for more than a week. And then she l
eft.”

  The Inspector leaned forward.

  “And then?”

  “I was so mad. I could barely think. The gall of that girl! To keep us apart simply for her petulant enjoyment! The anger… All the pain… It possessed me. I lost my sense of composure, of rationality. All I could think about was how much I hated her, and how much happiness awaited me if she would only... disappear.”

  “You followed her?”

  Louisa nodded, absently staring at the floor with eyes that were wide and wild.

  “I grabbed the first thing I saw – a rolling pin from the kitchen – and then I just ran. Out into the woods. I wasn’t even looking for her. I just needed to run. To rid myself of all the anger and passion that flowed through my veins. I ran in the knowledge that there was almost no chance we would bump into each other in those vast woods because, you see, I didn’t really want to hurt her. But after a few minutes, I saw her. Walking, so pleased with herself. Smiling, even though nobody was there to see it. She caught sight of me and laughed. She told me once again about how pathetic I was, sprinting through the forest with a stupid rolling pin. She said I was too meek and afraid to do anything. That I was a ‘talker’ not a ‘doer.’ Just seeing the smugness in her face, hearing the mockery in her laughter, the ease with which she demeaned me, I lost control. Anger took over once again and.…”

  Louisa slumped over as she broke down into sobs. This time Annabelle stepped out of her chair and knelt beside the woman, a fresh tissue in her hand. She rubbed her back gently, as more pain was released from the deep well of sorrow that had been residing inside of Louisa Montgomery.

  “I hit her. The rolling pin was heavy, and it didn’t take much to knock her out, but again and again I hit her until the mockery and the shame was no more. Until the derision in her eyes was gone. Then, I buried her. It was as if I exited my body and watched myself from somewhere above the treetops, clawing and scratching at the dirt until I’d made a hole big enough to bury her inside.

  “I didn’t do a good job; it was a shallow grave. I lived in perpetual fear that somebody would stumble upon it. Over the years, I would sometimes make my way there in the darkness of the night, to see if she had been discovered. I would talk to her, sometimes. Full of rage, full of regret, full of despair.

  “Last month, it was her birthday. I went to ‘visit’ her, and for the first time I saw that the soil had dried up to the point that her skull was visible. I hurriedly covered it but dropped the apple I had brought. I knew then my secret would be discovered soon. Somebody would find her eventually. I often felt that the fact that nobody had, for all these years, had been the worst punishment of all. To be confined with a secret for so long…”

  “Tell us what happened after you buried her, Louisa,” Annabelle gently prompted her as Louisa’s words trailed off and she stared out the window, lost in thoughts as deep as the forest in which she had killed her sister.

  “I don’t even remember anymore. What I can remember feels like something I witnessed, not something I did. I ran back to the house, and when Daniel called to ask where Lucy was, I told him I had no idea. However strange it sounds, I actually believed it. It was the truth. It took me weeks, months even, to realize that what I had done was real and not simply something I had dreamed.” Louisa looked up at the Inspector, then at Annabelle. “Has that never happened to you?”

  Annabelle looked back at the Inspector, whose face was neutral, but whose eyes seemed wet with compassion.

  “Strangely enough, Miss Montgomery, it has. Though the consequences were nowhere near as severe as yours.”

  Louisa gazed at the Inspector for a few moments, as if finding some respite in her engulfing misery through his words, before the shudders and the sobs overwhelmed her body once again and she began to cry uncontrollably.

  “After the original investigation turned up nothing, we all returned to our lives. I got married and went to university. But Gary noticed that something had changed and we divorced,” she muttered, in between sobs. “I told people that he had left for America because of his work. In truth, it was because I was unbearable to him. I kept him at a distance even after the marriage. Oh, I was my regular self on the outside, but inside I was dying. I had committed fratricide! I killed my own sister! I was deplorable, deviant. I’ve hurt almost everybody that was close to me…”

  The Inspector stood up and watched Annabelle gently console the teacher as she released years of pain and anguish. He stepped into the hallway and pulled out his radio.

  “Raven?” he said quietly into the receiver. “Louisa Montgomery’s house… Opposite Flynn’s tea shop… We’re to arrest her… Yes, turns out she is.”

  He clicked off the receiver and cast one more look at the despairing woman. Annabelle stood up and joined him.

  “Is she going to be alright?” he asked.

  Annabelle shrugged pityingly.

  “I don’t suppose one can ever be alright after committing an act like that.”

  The Inspector’s face settled into a forlorn sadness.

  “It’s strange. A case like this, a pretty young girl murdered in the woods, it usually gives a sense of satisfaction when you solve it. A clear sense of right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. This though, this is a mess.”

  They watched Louisa silently for a few minutes. Raven arrived and entered the house eagerly.

  “She’s in there, Constable,” the Inspector ordered, some formality and direction returning to his manner. As Raven stepped past him, however, he put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Take it easy. Be gentle with her.”

  Raven nodded. He carefully led Louisa out of her home into the waiting police car. Annabelle and the Inspector followed. They watched the vehicle make its way back to the police station.

  “You seem rather reflective, Inspector,” Annabelle said, looking up at his furrowed brow.

  “Well, when you hear a story like that, it’s difficult not to be. It makes you think about your own life.”

  Annabelle sighed.

  “It’s a simple matter of letting go, Inspector. Whether it’s a lover, a family member, an idea, or – dare I say it – a dog.”

  Nicholls looked at Annabelle, his eyes as innocent as a child’s.

  “And what if there is nothing to replace what you let go?”

  “That’s just it, Inspector,” Annabelle replied, “you’ll never know what can replace it if you don’t give it a chance.”

  Inspector Nicholls smiled slightly and nodded his head. He shoved his hands into his pockets and took a step toward the car.

  “Would you like me to drop you off home, Reverend?”

  “No, thank you.” Annabelle looked about her at the nighttime street. “I’d like to pay someone a visit. All this talk has reminded me of a promise I made.”

  Nicholls nodded, exchanged one more smile with Annabelle, and walked to his car.

  EPILOGUE

  AUTUMN SWEPT OVER the village of Upton St. Mary in waves of brown. Leaves lay on soil darkened by the increasingly regular rainfall. Where before, the villagers had puttered along the sunny streets slowly, their heads raised in case the opportunity to stop and exchange news presented itself, now they clutched their coats tightly around their bodies and hurried to their destinations.

  The faces of the children were no longer red and sweaty from days of physical activity in the hot sun but were sleepy and pale with the return of the new school year and classroom work. The sound of chatter from mothers outside the school gates and raucous banter between men on their way to the pub had been replaced by the sound of wind through dry tree branches and the rustle of crunchy leaves underfoot. Picnics of sandwiches, cake, and fruit had given way to hearty meals of soup, meat, and roasted vegetables. Yes, autumn and the approaching winter prevailed and ordered the lives of the good people of Upton St. Mary as it had for centuries.

  “Oh, Reverend,” cooed Philippa as she stood beside Annabelle who was leaning over the stove, “I do wish you
’d go easier on the pepper.”

  “A soup with a good kick is just the remedy for this weather.”

  Philippa shook her head and darted to the other side of the kitchen to cut some bread. She squeezed the loaf, testing it.

  “Did you buy this bread today, Reverend? It’s lost much of its freshness.”

  “I did, Phllippa,” sighed Annabelle, before turning to face her, gesturing with the pepper shaker. “And I dare say that I rather preferred it when you were too frightened by outside “events” to offer me your running commentary on my cooking. I am not a total beginner in the kitchen, you know.”

  “Oh, don’t say that, Reverend. You’ll never know how stressful it was. I didn’t sleep for a week!”

  “Well, if you don’t concentrate on your own duties and instead focus on mine, I might just consider hiring Daniel to give you another scare.”

  “Oh, Reverend, I feel such a fool,” Philippa said, as she tossed the bread into a basket and tidied up the crumbs.

  Annabelle chuckled as she brought the soup to the table.

  “Don’t worry, Philippa. You’re right, I can’t imagine what it must have been like. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d seen him at that hour of the night, all bloodied and determined.”

  “You’d probably have run out and bonked him on the head with a saucepan, Reverend,” chuckled Philippa.

  Annabelle laughed and mimicked herself bashing someone over the head clumsily when the doorbell rang.

  “They’re here!” Philippa said.

  “Go let them in, I’ll set the food out.”

  Annabelle hurriedly placed the bowls of boiled peas, roasted carrots, potatoes, and parsnips out on the table. Seconds later, Dr. Brownson, Shona Alexander, and her nephew, little Dougie, entered the room, followed by Philippa.

  “Hello!” Annabelle smiled, happily.

  “Hello, Reverend,” Shona said, embracing Annabelle with a warmth that she had rarely seen in the woman.

  “How are you?” Robert added, smiling his appreciation politely.