Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  “Doesn’t this seem a little too convenient?”

  Liz stopped typing. “Go on.”

  “It’s what you just said. It’s perfect. All this.” She gestured at the ceiling. “It’s too perfect.” She began to pace again, tracing a path from the southern window to the end of the bed. “Let’s say you wanted to sell your house to a developer, and that developer wouldn’t buy it unless it had a reputation as a haunted house.”

  “And you hired someone to help you prove that reputation?”

  “And then you asked that person to stay overnight. And that person asked a friend to come with her. A friend who owns a news website and just a few days ago wrote an article about Sparrow House on that very website.”

  A look of disgust formed on Liz’s face. “Would the Birches sink that low?”

  “I don’t know. They’re desperate to sell.” Immediately it occurred to Anna that such an undertaking would be enormous, requiring the cooperation of not only Paxton and Nilla, but everyone in the house and on the grounds. It was unlikely at best. “Everything would have to be an act, and everyone would have to be in on it.”

  “Devin? Was that an act?”

  Anna dropped to the armchair and dragged the pink throw over her shoulders. “No, can’t be. Schaeffer is coming here tomorrow to talk to me. The Birches could never wiggle their way out of a lie like that. Besides, Bee and Mitch were genuinely upset about Devin. Especially Bee.”

  “Wait a sec. I have to post this.” Liz typed a few more words, hit Enter, then closed her laptop. “So Devin was real. But what about the noises?”

  “And then there’s the woman I saw in the garden a while ago.”

  Liz’s eyes became saucers. “What woman?”

  “I don’t know who it was. She was in the peony garden behind the house. I think she saw me watching her because as soon as she looked up at my window, she left.”

  “Could it have been Bee? She does everything for the Birches. What if she’s helping Paxton and Nilla by haunting the grounds? She knew you’d tell me and then I’d write about it.”

  “I don’t think Bee would want to help Paxton sell the house. She’d be helping herself out of a job.”

  “But the Birches are going to sell the house sooner or later.”

  True, Anna thought. Paxton was desperate to sell, and he’d sell at a loss if he had to. Then another thought occurred to her. “Paxton could have paid Bee—or anyone—to make those noises and walk around in the garden. And if he hired someone outside the house, Nilla might not know anything about it.”

  She didn’t know what to think. On the one hand it was too convenient—a couple of strangers with nothing to gain stay overnight and verify the Birches’ ghost story. But on the other hand, Nilla seemed genuinely frightened by the house and surprised that Paxton had hired Anna to find proof of a haunting. The woman wasn’t that good of an actor.

  So were Nilla, Bee, and Mitch off the hook? Were the noises Paxton’s idea?

  “Maybe Nilla hired someone from Elk Park and Paxton knows nothing about it,” Liz said. “Or Nilla hired Bee or Mitch. Or Lawrence. I mean, really, what is he doing here?”

  “I hadn’t thought of Lawrence. Is he even a professor?”

  “He is. I looked him up.”

  “That doesn’t mean he isn’t doing double duty—gathering the family papers and scaring the guests.”

  An unpleasant possibility occurred to Anna, but before she could speak, a scraping sound, like a fingernail racing along a wall, silenced her. This sound was closer, and it seemed to be coming not from above, but from an inside wall, maybe in the bathroom. She rose from the armchair, marched to the bathroom door, and flung it open, her eyes shooting from the shower stall to the linen closet. Listening, she ran her eyes over the baseboards from one side of the room to the other, then opened the closet. Nothing.

  “Or maybe,” Liz said as Anna backed out of the bathroom, “Paxton, Nilla, and the rest have nothing to do with this and there really is something weird going on in this house.”

  “I’m thinking it could be mice,” Anna said, shutting the bathroom door. “This place is full of holes, and I read somewhere that mice could squeeze through holes no larger than a nickel.” She hated the thought, and she hadn’t seen rodent droppings anywhere, but at that moment mice were preferable to the host of alarming alternatives.

  “I’d rather deal with ghosts. What on earth is that?”

  Anna swung to face Liz, who for the first time was looking closely at the painting above the headboard. “The painting? I know, tell me about it,” she said.

  The colors, the composition, the single, isolated tree—something about the painting made Anna uneasy. Maybe because it portrayed a red tree but everything else in the painting signaled springtime, not autumn. Maybe because the tree had grown sideways but wasn’t growing on the African savanna or on a windswept coast. Like so many things in the house, it was off, askew.

  “I don’t like the feeling I get when I look at it,” Liz said. “And I can’t really say why.”

  Anna dropped onto the bed. “Have you noticed the artwork on the walls in the hall? They’re all like that—or worse. There’s a painting of a pig man on the wall between our rooms.”

  Liz frowned. “Outside your door?”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “I did, just now. It’s dark in the hall, but it looked like a charcoal drawing of a fat man trying to stick his head between his knees.”

  “What? No, I mean between our bedrooms.” She opened the door wide then stepped across the hall to Liz’s door and opened it, throwing more light on the painting.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Liz said. “It’s black ink, though, not charcoal.”

  Dumbfounded, Anna gaped at the drawing, black ink on white paper, of a muscular yet pudgy man standing with his back bent forward and his head straining for his knees. It was larger than the painting she’d seen and was dressed in a simple wooden frame. She shook her head, unwilling to accept that she’d imagined the painting in the gilded frame.

  “Didn’t you see the painting when Bee brought us to our rooms? It was so awful I was going to show it to you. It was a pig-faced man with an orange bottle for a body, in a gold frame. I’m positive.”

  “I didn’t notice. I didn’t even notice a gold frame.”

  “Someone’s playing games.” Anna began to bristle with anger. “Someone’s playing games with us and I don’t like it.”

  10

  “Show me where you were,” said Detective Lonnie Schaeffer.

  Anna led Schaeffer out the front door, down the gravel drive, and to the greenhouse, where she and Paxton had stood when they first heard someone cry for help. The lawn glistened with dew, and the air, scented with lilacs, was cool and sweet. “We heard something that sounded like yelling so we stepped outside. Then we heard someone shout for help and an ambulance.”

  Schaeffer nodded, stepped around the still-open greenhouse door, and contemplated the brick planter inside. The small tuft of dark hair near his forehead, an island of hair besieged by scalp, was finally graying. He was in his early fifties and overdue for some serious graying, Anna decided. And the tuft was smaller since she’d last seen him. In just four and a half months it had shrunk noticeably. She bit her lip to stop from smiling. That circle of hair was like an hourglass, marking the time since they’d last met.

  “Show me where you went next.”

  Anna took Schaeffer to the drive and showed him where Paxton had run toward the cries and motioned for her to stay.

  “And you never saw Devin Sherwood?”

  “No.”

  “You left before the ambulance arrived?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was in the house when you went back in?”

  Anna thought for a moment before answering. “Bee. I saw her first. Paxton came back into the house. Then I saw Nilla. I think she came from the sitting room next to the library. Then Paxton asked me to move my car.”


  “You didn’t see the groundskeeper?”

  “No, but I think it was him yelling for an ambulance.”

  Schaeffer flipped open a small notebook and thumbed back a few pages. “And Lawrence Karlson, the professor from DU. Did you see him at any point?”

  “No, I think he was in the basement working. Or at least Paxton Birch thought he was.”

  “Why in the basement?”

  “There are some Birch family papers down there. He was working in the library until Liz and I arrived.”

  “All right.” He closed his notebook, slipped it into his suit jacket pocket, and stepped outside the greenhouse, stopping in front of the door to take another look around the grounds. He was quiet when he worked, speaking only when necessary and treating her like he’d never met her, as though they’d never sat in her living room in Elk Park and joked about his middle name—the unfortunate Shirley.

  He was being professional, of course. Investigating the tragic death of a young man. But standing on the driveway with him, the fragrant morning air tickling her senses, she felt the urge to break with professional protocol. It’s good to see you, Lonnie. Come on, Lonford Shirley Schaeffer, I know you, and you’re not this serious.

  “Thanks, that’s all I need.” He started up the drive toward the house, and she hurried to catch up with him.

  “Do you know how Devin died?” she asked as she came alongside him.

  “No, and I couldn’t tell you if I did,” he said with a glint in his eye.

  “I heard he wasn’t injured in any way. Is that true?”

  Schaeffer said nothing.

  “Does he have family in Colorado?”

  “His family is out of state.”

  “Which state?”

  Schaeffer came to a stop at his Elk Park Police SUV. He looked skyward. “It’s going to start raining again, any minute now. It’s going to rain all day, they say.”

  “Fine, OK, no more questions. I’d better get back to work, anyway. I’m on a tight deadline.”

  “Anna, listen,” he said, reaching for the car door, “if anything else about yesterday comes to mind, if you remember something new, anything at all, let me know.”

  Standing inside the front door, Anna watched Schaeffer drive off. So he was looking beyond a simple, self-inflicted drug overdose as the cause for Devin’s death. He had to be. There was no other reason for him to tell her to review yesterday’s events in her mind—and that was exactly what he’d just told her.

  She closed the door, shutting out the half-clouded morning light, and moved through the darkened entryway to the sitting room. Glancing at the row of mallets on the mantel, she noticed for the first time a black object at the end of the row. As she drew nearer, she saw it was a wooden carving about the size of a bag of coffee. It was half a bear, half a standing bear, she realized as she bent close. The upper half had been sliced off, cleanly, leaving a smooth, polished half-bear body with lower legs but no upper legs. She ran her finger along the faint traces of orange paint on the claws of the creature’s lower legs.

  The hairs at the back of her neck prickled and she stood upright. This was not right. Something was wrong with this house. She wished she could call Schaeffer back and show him this—but what could she say about it? That this chunk of bear was a sign of something off-kilter in this house, something swaying and ready to totter?

  She backed away from the mantel and headed for the library. She had to rein in her emotions. The sooner she finished her tasks, the sooner she and Liz could leave.

  The moment she sat at the table she realized she’d forgotten to phone Gene last night. She groaned and propped her elbows on the table, massaging her temples with her hands. She’d told him she would call. How could she have forgotten? “Gene asked me to phone him last night. With everything going on, it slipped my mind.”

  “I forgot to call Dan. They’ll understand,” Liz said, looking up from her laptop. “What did Schaeffer say?”

  “If he thought anything was suspicious about Devin’s death, he wasn’t letting on.” Anna opened her laptop and navigated back to her Birch file. In spite of her feelings, which gave her gooseflesh when she entertained them, she had to put Devin out of her mind. Devin, the noises, the half-bear—all of it to the back of her mind. She would think about it later, when she was safely out of Sparrow House.

  “Now to post.” Liz ceremoniously hit a key on her laptop. “I wrote an article about Devin while you were talking to Schaeffer.”

  “That was fast.”

  “There wasn’t much to say, but I’m trying to post updates every few hours about the goings-on here.” She pushed back a loose tendril of hair, catching it on the side of her clip.

  “Did you get any responses to your post last night?”

  Liz stuck her fists in the air and let out a quiet cheer. “Forty-six comments from thirty-four different people. The most I’ve ever had on a single post.”

  Anna flopped back in her chair. “That’s great! You’ll have advertisers beating down your virtual door.” Maybe Sparrow House, with its mice, inexplicable noises, and ghostly figures in the garden, was just what Liz’s website needed. Anna hoped so. She knew Liz would be brokenhearted if the site failed financially and she had to close it.

  “People want another report tonight,” Liz said.

  “You’ll just have to give it to them, won’t you?”

  “You have to give the people what they want.” Liz lifted the lid of a cherry red box the size of a ream of paper. “But work first. I found something interesting,” she said, taking a newspaper clipping from the box. “It’s an article about the death of Charlene Birch, Paxton’s mother, in 1981.”

  Anna snapped to attention. Newspaper articles were important documents, and this was one about a death in Sparrow House. It could disclose information on the family tree and shed light on the house’s haunted reputation.

  “She was pregnant, like Paxton said,” Liz continued. “She fell down the attic stairs, and the coroner ruled it was an accident because she was eight months pregnant and her balance was off. Plus, she’d had some wine.”

  Anna grunted in disbelief. “Sure. Because pregnant women are always falling down stairs after a little wine.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Here.” Liz held out the clipping.

  Anna skimmed the article, looking for any mention of the police. They’d been called immediately after the accident, but after a short investigation and the coroner’s examination, Charlene’s death was ruled an accident. “I suppose if someone had pushed or tripped her, that would be hard to prove. I wonder who was in the house that day.”

  “It doesn’t say.”

  “How long would these attic stairs be?”

  “Longer than stairs in modern houses. The ceilings in this house must be ten, eleven feet high. Though if she fell head first, the length of the stairs wouldn’t matter.”

  Anna considered that for a moment then said, “We should take a look.” She slipped the article into the purple “Haunted” folder and looked over at Liz, who was grinning wildly. “Later, I mean. When we have the time.”

  Liz was itching to wander the house and poke into things. Her no-holds-barred investigative methods worried Anna sometimes. But she understood the urge to snoop—digging for clues in others’ affairs was what a genealogist did, after all—and an investigative reporter, which Liz had become, snooped for a living.

  “Look what was under the clipping.” Liz gave the red box a quick shake then set it on the table and pushed it Anna’s way. “Rosaries.”

  “Just the clipping and these?”

  “Funny, isn’t it?”

  Orange, purple, pale pink, and mahogany, their beads broken, their cords cut and shredded, half a dozen tangled rosaries were in the box. Some of the beads were amethyst or quartz, and others were made of natural materials—shells, colored beans, or polished wood. Some crucifixes were broken in half, and most of the beads on the wood rosary looked like they’d been smashed
with a hammer. Someone had unleashed a great deal of anger on these inanimate objects.

  “Good morning, ladies,” said Bee, entering the library from the sitting room. A small smile on her lips, she carried on a tray before her a pot of coffee, two white cups, and another plate of cookies. As she rested the tray on the table, she shot a disapproving look at Jackson curled in a corner, but her smile never wavered.

  “Bee, you’re a lifesaver,” Anna said. Bee had made eggs and toast for breakfast, but that had been almost three hours ago, and Anna craved something sweet for midmorning. Cookies were just the ticket. “How do you find the time to bake?”

  Bee smiled again, broadly now, and tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “I have to confess they’re from a ready-to-bake cookie roll. All I do is spoon the dough onto a baking sheet.”

  “Good idea,” Anna said.

  Liz mumbled her assent and reached for a cookie.

  “I have a fascination with names,” Anna said as she poured coffee into her cup. She breathed in the steam, savoring the aroma. “Can I ask you, is Bee short for something?”

  “My full name is Beelitha,” Bee replied. She crossed her arms and started scratching at one elbow, as though trying to pick away a bit of rough skin. “It’s my grandmother’s name. She was from Mississippi, where ugly names grow like moss on trees.”

  Liz snickered and reached for a second cookie.

  “But ‘Bee’ is nice,” Anna said. And infinitely better than Beelitha, she finished silently.

  “It’s adequate. I’m in the same boat as Nilla, saddled with Pernilla for a first name.”

  Bee’s eyes, which had been wandering about the library, came to rest on the box of rosaries. She took a step closer. “Those belonged to Charlene. Paxton has always thought that Matthew tried to destroy her rosaries after she died, but I think he did it before she died. He was a hateful man when it came to her religion.”

  “Charming,” Liz said.

  “Can I ask you something else?” Anna took a cookie and put it on the napkin in front of her. Liz would devour all but the plate if she didn’t act now. “Why is the Birch mansion called Sparrow House? Does it have anything to do with birds?”