Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  A faint look of surprise washed briefly over Tom’s face before he regained control. “None of that matters. I want it back.”

  “Oh, it matters. Contracts, the law, what’s right and wrong, it all matters.”

  “Don’t lecture me. I sit on the town council. I know about the law.”

  “Which reminds me,” Anna said. “I wanted to ask you about the meeting last night.” She forced a smile, hoping she looked more confident than she felt or sounded. She hated confronting Tom this way, with no time to plan what she would say and her voice quaking with anger. “I could tell most of the council was upset by your choice of Darlene as liaison. Why change your mind and appoint her? I heard you’d promised the job to someone else.”

  Tom let out a strangled laugh. “Right. You can tell your friends I keep my promises.”

  “What friends are you talking about?”

  “It’s over and done with, leave me the hell alone.” He glanced anxiously behind him then across the street, his anger gone in an instant. “And send me my wife’s documents.” He stepped into the street and headed for the other side of Summit.

  “Stay out of my business, Tom,” she called out after him. His gait quickened, and he nearly fell when he scrambled over the berm of snow plowed against the curb. On the sidewalk again, he walked swiftly away without looking back.

  Anna looked down at Jackson, who was waiting patiently, still sitting on the snowy sidewalk. “Good boy,” she said, releasing him. “Let’s find out what’s going on with my poster.”

  She walked back to Buckhorn’s Trading Post and entered the store to the sound of a bell ringing over the door. Jackson wasn’t allowed in the downtown shops, but she didn’t care.

  The man in plaid looked up from a box he’d just opened as Anna strode up to him. Still uneasy from her confrontation with Tom, she acted quickly to hide her nerves, extending her hand in greeting.

  “Hi, I’m Anna Denning, and that was my ad poster you threw away.” It was a harsher opening than she wanted, but it was either that or cast about for the right words as her nerves grew and her throat closed. Sean had always said she worried too much about what others thought, especially when she needed to stand up for herself. He was right.

  “Gene Westfall,” he said, taking her hand. He looked down at Jackson. “And I’ve seen you before, playing with Suka.” He smiled and scratched Jackson under the chin.

  “Sorry,” Anna said, “I didn’t want to leave him outside.” Stop it, she thought. She was already apologizing. To this man who’d ruined her poster, who’d whispered with Tom behind her back.

  “I love dogs,” he said. “Mine’s in the back sleeping.” He gestured toward the back of the store. “A very mellow golden. Even the doorbell doesn’t stir him.”

  “Goldens are nice.” Anna was at a loss for words. She had primed for a fight, and when it appeared a fight wasn’t coming, she felt like she’d been doused with cold water.

  “About your advertisement?” He rubbed a finger and thumb along the dark stubble on his chin.

  “Yes, I’m Anna Denning, as I said, and you took my ad out of the window. But I was given permission—”

  “By my dad?”

  Westfall, of course. She should have made the connection. The store’s owner, the man who had allowed her to put the poster in the window, was Roger Westfall. “Yes, Roger. He agreed to put it in the window last summer. It’s, well, I don’t understand why . . .”

  “I was just told to take it out,” Gene said, a look of bewildered amusement on his face.

  “By Tom Muncy.”

  “Right.” Gene nodded and crossed his arms against his chest.

  “Cripes.”

  “He told me your business license had been pulled. That you’d been involved in something shady and anyone advertising you would find themselves in legal trouble if they didn’t stop.” His expression was one of concern, but his light brown eyes still twinkled in amusement.

  Anna stared at him, swallowing the unkind words rising in her mouth. “This isn’t funny.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The phone by the register rang. Gene turned to look at it but held his place, watching Anna. “Excuse me,” he said when it rang a second time. “Just one second.” He raised a finger and held her gaze until he picked up the receiver. He listened for a moment then said, “We’re hoping to hear something later today.” It didn’t sound like a customer. Anna walked with Jackson to the far wall of the store to give him privacy.

  It had been a month since she’d been in Buckhorn’s. Roger had been kind enough to put her poster in the store’s window last year, so she bought the store’s handmade greeting cards from time to time, but she wished should could afford to do more. Though Roger once told her that the mass of tourists from May to September, and the few who braved Rocky Mountain winter weather for Elk Park’s Christmas parade, paid his way for a whole year. He created his own Christmas ornaments, and they sold out every year.

  Anna wandered to the Christmas aisle. There were only two of Roger’s ornaments left, a cross and a star, both carved from cottonwood. The cross was five inches long but the crosspiece was only an inch wide, a design imposed by the limitations of a cottonwood branch. The letters INRI were carved with precision on the crosspiece, and a wide red ribbon, the ornament’s hanger, was fastened to the top. She picked it up and walked slowly back to the register, listening to see if Gene was still on the phone.

  “That’s a nice one,” he said, tossing his chin at the cross and jotting a note on a pad by the phone. “My dad made that.”

  “I know. I have other ornaments of his at home. He’s a very good carver. Is he off for Christmas?”

  Gene dropped the pen into a holder on the counter. “No, he’s in the hospital. That’s why I’m here. He had a heart attack yesterday. Afterward, the second thing he said to me was ‘Open the store, it’s Christmas.’” He shook his head. “That’s my dad.”

  “I’m so sorry. Do you know how serious it is?”

  “Not yet. We think he’ll be fine, but they’re doing some tests today and we should know soon. My sister’s with him. I think he may be looking at surgery.”

  Gene puffed out his cheeks and exhaled through rounded lips, like a man trying to stay in command of his emotions. He was in his late thirties, Anna thought, but talking about his father, he looked younger, lost and wondering what to do next.

  “I’ll pray for him,” she said.

  “Thank you. There’s real healing in prayer.”

  “Let me pay for this and I’ll be going,” she said, holding up the ornament.

  “Hang on, not so fast.” Gene slipped around to the back of the register. “I’ll ring that up for you, but there’s still the matter of Councilman Muncy and your poster.”

  Anna laid the ornament on the counter and absentmindedly grabbed at her shoulder for her purse strap. “Shoot,” she said. “I left my purse in my car.”

  “Pay me later.”

  “No, I can get it.”

  Gene held up a hand. “I mean it. Pay me later. Tell me what’s going on with Muncy. You seemed surprised when I told you what he said about your business license. Is he full of it?”

  Gene was cutting right to the chase. She liked that. “He sure is. I can’t believe he said that to you. My business license has not been pulled. You can check with the town clerk.” How could she explain what was happening? Tom’s out to ruin my business because he thinks I broke into his home and killed his wife. It sounded crazy. “I don’t know how to explain it,” she began.

  Gene waited for Anna to go on, but she was silent. “So he lied about your business license,” he said.

  “That’s the short story, yes.”

  “And he’s a member of the town council.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s dirty. It’s slander too. What’s he thinking?” There was genuine indignation in his eyes. He believed her. Maybe he’d had dealings with Tom before. The councilman was
n’t the sort to leave a trail of loyal friends in his wake. Or maybe he had the same instinctive dislike of Tom that she had. He folded his arms and looked directly into Anna’s eyes. “Is your ad in any other stores?”

  “Just the Buffalo Café, and Grace Bell would never believe Tom. She’d throw him out on his ear.”

  “Good. That Grace is one tough cookie, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is.” Anna smiled. Tough cookie. It reminded her of Sean’s tough old bird.

  “Hang on.” Gene walked to the back of the store and disappeared behind the greeting card racks. Jackson tried to follow, pulling on the leash until Anna told him to sit. She heard the sound of heavy paper crumpling. Or uncrumpling. Her poster.

  “No, didn’t work,” he said, reappearing with her poster in his hands. “I’ve tried to rub out the creases, but it’s too damaged.” He laid it on the counter and tried to work out the creases with both hands. “Nope. Can you bring me another one? I’ll put it in the window right next to the door. You won’t be able to miss it.”

  “Sure. I can bring it by later today, along with the money for the ornament.”

  “I’m going to take a break later and go to the hospital. If I’m not here, leave the poster with Grace and I’ll get it from her. And forget about the ornament. It’s the least I can do.”

  He gave the poster another look. “So you’re a genealogist? I’ve always wanted to research the Westfall side of the family. I have an aunt who worked on my mother’s family tree, but no one’s done Westfall further back than my great-grandfather in Wisconsin. We think my great-great grandfather came from Germany, but we can’t find any record of him there.”

  “I’ll bet he changed the spelling of his name. Or a census taker changed it for him when he arrived. That happened a lot.”

  “It’s Westfall as in autumn, fall,” Gene said. “It’s not very German, is it?”

  “Fall was probably spelled phal or maybe fahl, or Westfall might not be the family name at all. It could be a place name, or your great-great grandmother’s surname. In Germany a man sometimes took his wife’s last name.”

  “Really?”

  Anna could see curiosity in Gene’s eyes and it spurred her on. She loved talking about genealogy but rarely encountered anyone who lasted more than sixty seconds before their boredom overtook politeness and the conversation faded into yawns and wandering eyes. “My great-great grandmother was born in Norway, where her name was Inger Severinsdatter Bjolset. In Norway, children’s surnames were based on their father’s first name, so Inger’s father’s first name was Severin. She was Severin’s datter.”

  “What’s the other name? Beeyol—”

  “Bjolset. That’s the name of the farm in Norway where she was born.” She was pleased he was asking questions. She hadn’t bored him yet. “It distinguished her from all the other Inger Severinsdatters in the area. In America she was known as Inger Bjolset or Inger Severinsen because census takers didn’t understand the concept of datter and couldn’t spell it anyway. And of course Bjolset was butchered a dozen different ways in the records.”

  “Like Westfall might have been.”

  “Exactly. And then Inger married Hans Sormrude, whose name in Norway was Hans Tollefsen Sormrude.”

  “Huh.”

  The one-word reply. Worse, the huh. It set off Anna’s internal alarm, the one that told her she’d said enough and a yawn was about to make an appearance. But more than that, Gene’s father had suffered a heart attack only hours ago and here she was yammering at him. He was too polite to finesse his way out of the conversation. “I get carried away when I talk about names and genealogy,” she said, apologizing.

  “No, it’s interesting,” Gene said. “Complicated, but interesting.”

  “Well, I’d better get going.”

  Gene pointed a finger at the poster. “You should report Tom. There was a customer here when he came in, and I’m sure she heard what he said. He probably wanted her to hear. Gossip gets around in a small town, and when it gets out, it’s hard to stop it. You need to protect your business before he can do more damage.”

  It seemed to Anna that Gene had something else he wanted to say but was weighing the wisdom of saying it. He shifted his weight then said, “He told me you were going to be prosecuted.”

  “I’m going to murder that man.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Anna considered that Tom was probably reacting irrationally to Susan’s death. She wanted to cut him some slack. But Gene was right. She had to put an end to Tom’s lying, and fast. There was no telling what damage he could do—or might already have done. “I’d better get going,” she said, picking up the cross ornament. “I hope your dad’s okay.”

  Anna was about to push through the door when Gene called out to her. “Wait a minute,” he said.

  She turned, waiting.

  “Anna Denning. You’re Sean Denning’s wife.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The mando player.”

  “Right,” she said again. She knew only someone familiar with mandolins said “mando.”

  “I loved the way he played—the bluegrass and the Celtic stuff. He was very talented. I saw him play in Fort Collins a couple years ago. I was sorry to hear he died.”

  “Thank you.” Anna didn’t know what else to say. “He loved the mandolin.” She pushed her way out the door, Jackson leading the way.

  10

  “Have a seat, Mrs. Denning.” Detective Lonnie Schaeffer picked up several notebooks from a wooden chair at the end of his desk, set them on a bookcase behind him, and motioned for Anna to sit. “Coffee? I was about to pour myself some.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Anna pulled the chair away from the desk, turned it to face Schaeffer, and sat. She usually stopped drinking coffee about eleven o’clock in the morning—if she didn’t, her already restless nights turned to full-blown insomnia—but she needed to hold something to still her nervous fingers.

  Schaeffer reached for two black mugs atop a file cabinet behind his desk and headed out the door of his fourth-floor office in the Municipal Building. Through an interior window in his office Anna saw the detective at the coffee machine. He poured coffee into both mugs then talked to a uniformed officer staring into a computer monitor at a nearby desk.

  Anna supposed they were discussing Susan Muncy’s death. The whole department had to be working on it. A murder in Elk Park was a big deal, and Susan was the wife of a councilman, making it bigger still.

  She glanced about Schaeffer’s office. There was a yellowing philodendron on the top shelf of a bookcase behind his desk and several more stacks of folders, one on his desk and the others on a battered wood table on the other side of the room. The routine ugliness of the space was almost comforting. It was strictly a place of business, not fancy or even pleasant. She wasn’t interrupting anything or imposing on the detective’s time.

  “Here we go,” Schaeffer said, walking back into the office and handing Anna a mug.

  “Thank you.” Anna laced her fingers around the mug to warm her hands. She hadn’t felt warm since leaving her house.

  Schaeffer stood in front of his desk, took a swift gulp of coffee, and let go with an ahh of satisfaction.

  Anna wondered if Schaeffer had any recollection of her at all. His face was burned into her memory, but he didn’t appear to remember her. Maybe he’d been at the scene of so many accidents and knocked on the doors of so many loved ones that their faces had blurred in his memory. And even if he did remember Sean, he probably thought it best not to mention him.

  Anna crossed and uncrossed her legs. She couldn’t continue until she asked him. “I don’t know if you remember me, but—”

  “Of course I do.” He worked his way around his desk and sat down. His chair creaked loudly when he leaned forward to put his mug on the desk. “I remember the accident. On Highway 34. A trucker fell asleep.”

  “Yes, that’s right. It’s been two
years.”

  “I’m surprised you remember me, Mrs. Denning.”

  “I remember everything from that night.” Anna saw that Schaeffer was as uncomfortable talking about it as she now was. But he remembered, and that meant something to her.

  She took a sip of coffee, moving on, clearing the slate. “Well, I won’t take much of your time. First, here’s a copy of the check Jazmin Morningstar gave me a couple weeks ago.” She reached into her purse, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Schaeffer. “I’d also like to ask your professional advice on something.”

  Schaeffer put the paper, still folded, on the stack of folders to his right. He leaned back in this chair. “Shoot.”

  Anna told him about Tom Muncy lying to Gene Westfall at Buckhorn’s Trading Post, putting her business in jeopardy, and she explained that it was Darlene Richelle, not Jazmin, who had hired her to research Susan Muncy’s genealogy.

  “It’s funny you should mention Darlene Richelle,” he said. “I took a report from her first thing this morning.”

  Schaeffer pulled a folder from atop a short stack on his desk and opened it. “She demanded to speak specifically to me.” He looked at Anna, a kind but no-nonsense expression on his face. “She accused you of stealing something from her store.”

  “What?” Anna sat straight in her seat.

  He glanced down at the single sheet of paper in the folder. “Something called an athame. A ceremonial knife.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “She says you took it yesterday, when you were in her store.” He shut the folder.

  “That’s a lie.” Anna put her mug on his desk. “She knows I didn’t take anything. This is deliberate.”

  Schaeffer reached for his coffee. “Deliberate?”

  “Just as deliberate as Tom Muncy lying about me to Gene Westfall. Darlene knows I didn’t take an athame. Though I did find one sticking out of Jazmin Morningstar’s couch about an hour ago.”

  Schaeffer raised both eyebrows.