by Loretta Ross
“You had to ask that now,” Wren sighed.
_____
“So, we know he got the horse from the veterans’ camp,” Death reasoned. “The chief said they found it spooked outside the fence the next morning.” He pointed to the left. “That’s off that way. He must have ridden between the fence and the tree line. I can’t see a drunk on a strange horse managing to jump that gate.”
“How does a drunk even stay on a horse?”
“Beats me. How does anybody stay on a horse?”
They had made a quick search of the mansion without finding any corpses, embalmed or otherwise. Thick dust lay everywhere, undisturbed for decades, and Wren had decided that, while the old house did feel haunted, it didn’t feel sinister. Leaving her happily ensconced among the antiques, the Bogart brothers had returned to the head of the trail to explore the mystery of the dead stranger more thoroughly.
“You realize the police must have been over this ground already?” Randy asked.
“You’d rather go help my girlfriend catalogue knickknacks and dishware?”
“I was just making conversation.”
They pushed along between the fence and the foliage, noting broken branches and finding the occasional hoof mark in the softer earth along the tree line. There was a path, overgrown but hard-beaten, along the outside of the fence. The brothers circled the house, waded through hip-deep weeds on the long slope behind it, and found themselves in an overgrown apple orchard. Many of the trees were dead—tall, black skeletons dropping branches into the mould to decay. A scattering of young trees grew among them, volunteers sprung up from windfall apples. Several were large enough to have produced fruit of their own and Death and Randy went from tree to tree, tasting what they found.
“What the hell kind of apples were they growing in this orchard anyway?” Randy demanded after half a dozen trees yielded nothing but small, hard, bitter fruit.
“Doesn’t matter,” Death said. “Apples don’t grow true from seed. Don’t even ask me how I know that. But these are kind of the apple equivalent of mutts. You plant an apple and it’s anybody’s guess what kind of tree it’s going to produce. Here, try this one. It’s not too bad.” He tossed his little brother a small, dusky-pink apple and pocketed a couple more for later, and they wandered on through the orchard and out the other side.
Through a stand of pines and over a ridge they came to another fence. This one was chest-high, shiny, and new. A small herd of horses grazed on the other side. A big, light gray stallion watched them warily.
“Oh, look! A pale horse! We found your ride.”
“Funny,” Death said. “Hey, you remember that time we saw the Clydesdales?”
City boys, the Bogart brothers had little experience with horses. About the only time they’d ever been in the presence of the big animals had been at a parade once, when they’d been close enough to touch the famous team as it pulled the beer wagon past.
“See if he’ll let you pet him,” Randy urged.
“Why don’t you see if he’ll let you pet him?”
“You’re the one with a pocket full of apples.”
“Oh, right.”
Death took one of the apples from his pocket and held it out, trying to look friendly and non-threatening.
Watching him, eyes wide and nostrils flared, the horse edged closer. He got within reach and stretched his neck out, obviously trying to reach the fruit without getting too close. He took the apple from Death’s palm, but shied away when Death tried to rub a hand down his nose.
“I was just trying to pet you,” Death said.
“Something I can help you fellas with?”
At the sound of a new voice, the brothers turned. A strange man had come out of the trees to their right and he stood now, watching them suspiciously. His feet were firmly planted and his muscular arms crossed over his chest. He wore jeans and a tank top and his exposed arms and upper chest were covered with tattoos.
“We were just trying to pet your horse,” Randy said.
The man scowled at them. “That horse has been messed with enough by strangers.”
“Is he the one that was stolen by the dead guy?”
The stranger’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a matter for the police. This is no place to come snooping around trying to satisfy your curiosity.”
Death stepped between the two men, holding up his hands placatingly. As he did so, his T-shirt sleeve slipped up, revealing his own tattoo. The other man’s eyes fell on it and his face and body language softened.
“Jarhead?”
“Big dumb Jarhead,” Randy clarified helpfully.
“Ex-Marine, yeah,” Death said. “Don’t mind my brother.”
“Kurt Robinson. Army artillery, retired. This, well, the pasture and what’s beyond is a camp for wounded vets. Warriors’ Rest. I’m the caretaker.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Death acknowledged, moving forward to shake Robinson’s hand. “I’m Death Bogart and this is my little brother, Randy.”
“The private eye. I’ve heard of you. Were you looking for us?”
“No, we weren’t looking,” Death said.
“But since you found us,” Randy cut in, ignoring the dirty look his brother was giving him, “I’d just like to say that I’m a paramedic. I’ll give you my cell phone number. If you guys ever need my kind of help, just let me know. No charge.”
Robinson’s demeanor warmed even more. “Thank you. I appreciate it. Any kind of help we can get, we’re glad to have. Listen, I’m sorry if I snarled at you about the horse. It’s just that the big guy’s been pretty freaked ever since that jerk stole him and got himself killed. He won’t even go back in his stall. We’ve had to fix him a makeshift stable in an old tool shed.”
“Yeah, I’m not surprised,” Death said. “I don’t know a lot about horses, but isn’t it kind of surprising that the dead guy was even able to get on him? From what I’ve heard, horses have a pretty keen sense of smell, and that guy must have stunk to high heaven.”
The formaldehyde and body liquor were not common knowledge, so Death didn’t elaborate. Even without them, the dead guy had to have smelled like a distillery.
“Well, Sugar was confined in a narrow stall, so he didn’t have anywhere to get away. The guy just had to open the gate, then climb the rails and jump on his back before he could get out.”
“His name’s Sugar?”
The big horse had edged back over, reassured by Robinson’s familiar presence, and was gazing pointedly at the pocket Death still had a couple of apples in.
“Because he’s such a sweetheart,” Robinson said.
“Can I give him another apple?”
“Let me see it.”
Death showed him the apple and Robinson nodded. “Go ahead. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t green. Green apples will give a horse terrible stomach pains.”
Death held it out to the horse.
“Not like that,” Robinson said. “Hold it flat on your palm. Otherwise he might bite you accidentally.”
Death did as he was told and, almost delicately, the big stallion took the apple from his palm.
“So, what kind of things do you do around here?” Randy asked, again ignoring Death’s glare.
“Whatever we can to help whoever needs it.”
Sugar moved close, stretched his long neck over the fence, and rubbed his cheek against Death’s.
“He wants you to pet him.”
Death obliged, and Robinson nodded at the horse as he continued his conversation with Randy.
“Sometimes it helps someone who’s traumatized just to be around someone who understands.” He sighed. “Sometimes, nothing at all is enough.” He looked hard at Death. “I appreciate your brother offering his help, but it seems to me that you’re the one whose help we really need right now. I don’t know how much we’d be able to pay you … ”
Death waved away the concern. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Brothers-in-arms. If you really need
help, I’ll be glad to do what I can. What is it that you need my help for?”
“I need for you to prove that my best friend is insane.”
two
Wren loved classic rock music. She had probably eight hundred songs stored on her phone—everything from the Everly Brothers and Chubby Checker to ’80s hair bands and U2. But there was no electricity to the Hadleigh House at the moment and thus no way to recharge her phone. She needed to keep from running the battery down in case the boys needed to call her for something.
That was why she’d turned it off in the middle of the first song and tucked it back inside her pocket. She was being practical. Thinking ahead. It wasn’t at all because the bright notes echoed oddly in the silence, or because it felt like the music might disturb something that was best not wakened.
She’d reassured Death that she didn’t think the house was creepy, and it wasn’t. But it did have a feel to it. She looked out the etched glass window in the front door and could picture what the lawn must have looked like in its heyday. In the side yard, to the south, there was a sagging summer house overgrown with vines and a grape arbor. In the back, a single clothesline still stretched between two uprights that had been designed to hold four or six lines.
Beyond the back fence, and visible from the second-floor rear windows, were a row of slave quarters crumbling into rubble, a reminder that the house had seen dark days as well as sunny ones.
Hadleigh House was filled with the possessions of its former owners, everything from rare antiques to rubbish. It was a small miracle that it had never been burgled, but its remote location and the ruined bridge across the driveway had protected it. As far as Wren knew, no one had lived there during her lifetime.
The place seemed like it was caught in a bubble, existing outside the normal, twenty-first century world. Wren felt as if the people who’d lived there were there still, just out of sight around a corner or in another room. As if she might walk through the wrong door, not paying attention, and step into the 1920s or the 1800s even.
She was on the second floor at the north end, in a room she’d found filled with a jumble of furniture, decaying cardboard boxes, and old trunks. It was stuffy in the room, so she slid the locking lever on one of the windows over and pushed it up. The wood frame was swollen with humidity and squealed going up, and it stayed open without anything to brace it. Wren brushed her hands against her jeans to knock the dust off, donned a pair of vinyl gloves to protect anything valuable she might find, and turned her attention to the nearest container.
It was an old metal footlocker, painted dark brown and latched but not locked. The hinges were stiff with rust, but she put her back into it and the lid came up in her hands.
The first thing she saw, right on top, was a gas mask. At a guess, she’d say it was from World War One, but it could be from the second World War too. She took a couple of pictures of it from different angles, to help with her research, and set it aside. Below the mask was an assortment of old clothes, men’s clothes, in styles ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the very bottom of the trunk was a drawing pad, filled with pen-and-ink sketches.
The pages were brittle, the ink beginning to fade, but the artwork was exquisite. Leafing through it, turning the pages ever so gently, Wren realized the drawings were of the same scene, with the same group of people, over and over and over again.
She moved closer to the light from the open window and studied one of the drawings. There was a well in a courtyard, with a ruined house in the background. A group of exhausted, bedraggled soldiers gathered around it. From the uniforms, the way their shirts bloused out above their belts and the puttees wrapped around their lower legs, Wren placed them in World War One. One man sat leaning against a bombed-out vehicle. Another lay on the ground with a bandage over his eyes.
In the center of the group stood a young woman, as ragged and as bedraggled as they were. Her dress was ripped, her hair in tangles around her shoulders. She had dark shadows under her eyes, and a dirty bandage was wrapped around her left hand and wrist. A bucket sat a her feet, and she was offering the soldiers water from a ladle.
Wren turned the pages. Although every picture was the same scene, some were from different angles, and some had the composition slightly different. Many of them were only portions of the larger picture, this bit or that rendered in careful detail.
“It’s … ” Without thinking, Wren spoke aloud. “It’s a study for a larger work, I think. And the artwork is amazing. I wonder who drew it, and if they ever finished the main painting or whatever it was.” She looked through the pad, front-to-back and then back-to-front, but there was no writing in it at all.
Setting it carefully to one side, she dove back into the chest in hopes of finding something to identify the artist. “Who were you?” she whispered.
From a great distance, someone answered.
Wren sat up, shocked, and listened. After a moment, the voice came again, and then a second time. It was a conversation, clear enough to be definitely there but too soft for her to understand the words.
She rose and went to the window and had to laugh at herself.
Death and Randy were returning from the direction of the veterans’ camp, talking quietly between themselves as they approached over the field.
_____
“Death took a new case, pro bono,” Randy said.
“Won’t make any money that way son,” Sam Keystone said.
Half a dozen members of the Keystone family had arrived just after the Bogart brothers returned. They were planning to start building some sort of bridge across the gully, so that people could at least walk up the road to the auction, and then help Wren start sorting out the estate. But at the moment they were all sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee out of thermoses and gossiping about the dead guy.
“I can afford to donate some time to a good cause. And, honestly, I don’t know that I can do anything for them anyway,” Death said.
“Who’s ‘them’ and what do they want you to do?” asked Sam’s brother, Roy. Sam and Roy, the original sons in Keystone and Sons, were sixty-two-year-old twins who dressed and acted so different that someone who didn’t know them would never guess they were identical. Sam wore a dark suit with a hat and a string tie, no matter the weather, whereas Roy always dressed in overalls and a flannel shirt.
“Kurt Robinson and some of the guys over at the vet’s camp,” Death said. “Any of you ever heard anything about a guy named Anthony Dozier?”
The Keystones all had.
“Sure, it’s been all over the news,” Sam’s son Liam said. “Lot of folks think he should get a medal instead of a murder charge.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of him,” Wren said. “Who is he and who did he kill?”
“Army vet,” one of the Keystone grandsons piped up. “Came back from Afghanistan really messed up, they said. Spent time in a psych ward.”
“He was a medic,” Death told them. “He and his unit got pinned down in a village that was caught in the crossfire between us and them. Dozen soldiers, a lot of civilians. He was the only medic and there weren’t very many survivors. They said he held it together until it was all over and then he just lost it. Nightmares, prolonged flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, a couple of suicide attempts. He’s been out of the hospital, living with family, for about eighteen months now.”
“So what happened?”
“Have you ever heard of a group called ‘the Church of the Army of Christ’?”
“CAC for short,” Sam offered.
Wren frowned and thought about it. “It seems to me I might have seen the name somewhere. Posts on Facebook, maybe? If I did, I skimmed over them. Who are they?”
“A hate group masquerading as a church,” Sam said with an uncharacteristic amount of heat in his voice. While most of the Keystones were at least casual churchgoers, none of them took it as seriously as Sam and his wife Doris. “They claim that it’s a Christian’s duty to convert or eradi
cate everyone who isn’t Christian.”
“Hate thy neighbor?” Wren observed ironically.
“It was founded by a man named Tyler Jones, and most of the members are part of his extended family. They’re against anyone who isn’t Christian, including atheists and agnostics, but their main target at the moment is Muslims. And here just recently they’ve taken a page out of another group’s book and started protesting at funerals.”
Death, sitting beside Wren, slipped his hand into hers and squeezed, as if to reassure himself that she was still there. “Dozier married a Muslim woman,” he said. “One of the other survivors of that firefight in Afghanistan. Ten days ago she was killed in a car accident. The CAC showed up at her funeral and Dozier confronted Jones and threatened to kill him.”
“Oh God,” Wren said. She leaned her head on Death’s shoulder.
“There was a reception after the funeral. Kurt said that Dozier was supposed to come out to the veterans’ camp after it was over, but he never showed up. They searched everywhere for him, reported him as an endangered missing person, nothing. Then, the next morning, a cop stopped Dozier up in the city. Dozier claimed to think he was back in Afghanistan—he told the cop he had a wounded soldier in his car and was trying to find the base hospital.
“He was covered in blood, and Tyler Jones’ twenty-three-year-old son was in the backseat. The guy was wrapped up in makeshift bandages and very dead. He’d been stabbed repeatedly.”
“Naturally,” Randy said, “the defense is claiming temporary insanity. But the prosecuting attorney is going for murder in the first degree. He thinks it was premeditated and that Dozier intended all along to use insanity as a defense. If he succeeds, Dozier is looking at life in prison at best. He could even get the death penalty.”
“Kurt’s terrified for him, grasping at straws,” Death said. “He wants me to help prove in court that Dozier’s insane.”
_____
“What is this and where do I put it?”
Wren looked up from her notes to find Robin Keystone, one of the grandsons, standing in the doorway. The contraption he was cradling consisted of two rollers set in a frame, with a crank that caused them to turn toward each other.
