Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  “No, not at all.” Bee relaxed her arms and took a chair at the table. “Some people think that, and in fact, in the 1970s the grounds were covered with bird houses, hanging from trees, on posts in the gardens. But no, Sparrow is the name of a person—or a nickname, rather.”

  “Who?” Anna asked.

  “No one knows for sure.” Bee leaned forward, putting her arms on the table, lacing her fingers. She was settling in, enjoying the conversation. It was the most relaxed Anna had seen her since meeting her Monday morning. “Paxton and Nilla don’t know. Neither does Mitch. Word is, it’s the name of our ghost, but why would a man be nicknamed Sparrow?”

  “You mean Kurt Ellison?” Anna said. She blew over the lip of her coffee cup and gingerly took a sip.

  “Yes. Though as someone who’s studied the background of this house so I can give tours of it, I can tell you that Kurt Ellison was never called Sparrow.”

  Anna recalled that Jazmin had told her with certainty that Sparrow was Charlene. “What about Charlene Birch?”

  Bee frowned slightly, her eyes narrowing. “Paxton would know if his mother was nicknamed Sparrow.”

  “Probably,” Liz chimed in. She brushed crumbs from the corner of her mouth. “When did people start calling the mansion Sparrow House?”

  “Right after Kurt Ellison died,” Bee said. “Which is how the rumor got started that Ellison was Sparrow.”

  “So we’re back to 1970,” Anna said. Ellison was unlikely to be Sparrow, especially since Matthew Birch didn’t know him, but what about the other members of the conclave? What about the two women? She leaned sideways toward the chair next to hers, retrieved the conclave photo from her purse, and held it up. “This is the photo I showed Paxton last night.” She tapped the left side of the photo. “I found out this is Catherine Anita Russo. Do you know who the other woman is, the one next to Matthew Birch?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bee said, taking the photo in hand. “The great conclave. I know the names of everyone in this photo. I didn’t want to interrupt Paxton’s recitation with the facts. Have you got a pen?”

  “You bet.” Anna flipped over the purple folder, her pen poised and ready.

  “Catherine you’ve got right,” Bee said. “Next to her is Gary Schwendeman.”

  When Anna frowned, Bee spelled out the name for her.

  “Next to him is Jeffrey J. Allford—no, not the initial, the name Jay. Here, let me.” Bee took Anna’s pen, pulled the folder in front of her, and wrote down the names. Nate Petrick on the far right in the back, then Matthew Birch, Alice Ryder, and Eric Browne.

  Liz perked up when she saw the last name. “Is that the Eric Browne that Nilla talked about last night?”

  “The same.”

  Anna sipped her coffee as she looked from the names on the folder to the photo. The woman sitting between Matthew and Eric was the polar opposite of Catherine Russo. She wore a sunny orange top over her blue jeans, and she was small-boned, with delicate, porcelain features and eyebrows plucked to a high, thin arch. More pretty than beautiful. Her auburn hair was parted down the middle, and her smile was bright, without a hint of the youthful craftiness in Catherine’s smile.

  “Tell me about Alice Ryder,” Anna said.

  “That’s an interesting story,” Bee said, shifting in her seat.

  “Let me write this down.” Anna held out her hand for the pen and smiled back at Bee. It was clear that Bee’s job at the mansion had made her the prickly woman she often seemed to be. She was different, pleasant and fun, when she was doing something she enjoyed.

  “Well, Matthew Birch had a thing for Alice Ryder. And so did Eric Browne.” Bee paused for effect, looking from Anna to Liz.

  “A popular woman,” Anna said, jotting down notes.

  “Only Alice wasn’t interested in either one of them.”

  “You’d think Matthew’s money would have piqued her interest,” Liz said.

  “You would, yes, but not Alice. Word is that Matthew Birch asked her to marry him, but when she left the conclave that October, he never saw her again.”

  “And Matthew married Charlene,” Anna said.

  “Three years later.”

  “What happened to Alice?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know. I only know what happened to Gary Schwendeman and Eric Browne.” She reclined in her chair and drew a deep breath. “Schwendeman moved back to Wisconsin and died about fifteen years later in a bar fight. He was shot.” Her lips puckered. Something unpleasant was about to come out of them. “First in the nose. Witnesses said his nose was blown off. Just his nose, and he stood there in shock, poking his finger in the hole.”

  “Good Lord,” Anna said, reflexively reaching for her own nose.

  “He could have lived after that, probably, but someone else shot him in the back.”

  “How old was he?” Liz asked.

  Bee contemplated the question. “About forty, I’d say.”

  “That’s a little old to be in a bar fight,” Anna said.

  “None of those people ever grew up.” Bee scowled at the thought. “None of the men had ever been drafted for the Vietnam War—or ever would be. They received college deferment after deferment. You know that back then you wouldn’t be drafted if you were in college?”

  “Right,” Liz said.

  “Then after student deferments ended, they hit it lucky in the draft lottery. They got high numbers, so they knew they’d never be drafted. They were in their mid-twenties but still boys. They went from undergraduate to graduate studies, and I don’t think any of them held even a part-time job. Matthew was in his late twenties, too old to be drafted in 1970, but he somehow avoided being drafted in the 1960s.”

  “The Birch influence?” Liz said.

  “And Birch money. Nate Petrick was in his late twenties, too, but he had a medical deferment of some kind.”

  “Slacker,” Liz said, pouring more coffee.

  “I’ve been working full time for nine years, since my early twenties.”

  Bee wasn’t used to taking digs at the Birch family, it seemed to Anna, but now, with the house sale looming and her job in jeopardy, she was losing her natural reluctance to gossip about the family’s past. “Could Catherine Russo or Alice Ryder be Sparrow?” she asked.

  Bee was thoughtful. “It’s possible. I don’t know who Sparrow was, but I would think it was a woman.” She stood and smoothed the creases from the arms of her blazer. “Would you tell Lawrence to come find me if you see him? He seems to be off the grounds.”

  “That means he won’t be in the library,” Anna said.

  “You’re entitled to shoo him out,” Bee said. “Which is what I mean to do if I catch him in the attic bedrooms again.”

  Anna stuck out her hand. “Wait a minute. When was he up there?”

  “I found him first thing this morning, when I went to tell him breakfast was ready. He was pawing around in one of the bedrooms.”

  “We heard something up there last night,” Liz said, casting a sideways look at Anna.

  “Now I really need to talk to him,” Bee said, her annoyance growing. “Sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “I imagine he’s living a history professor’s dream,” Anna said. “Working in an old house like this. He can’t help himself.”

  “He’d better learn,” Bee said.

  “Thanks again for the coffee,” Anna said as Bee turned to leave. She stared after her, rapping her fingers on the folder, then looked to the window. Rain drizzled down the panes, giving them a rippled look. She reminded herself to check for puddles on the sill.

  “I wonder if we’re friends now,” Liz said, tossing her head in Bee’s direction.

  “I hope so, though she’s still not sure about Jackson.” Anna looked over at her dog, who had relaxed immediately after Bee’s exit, tucking his paws beneath him and curling into an even tighter ball. “I forgot his blanket again,” she exclaimed. “What is wrong with me?”

  “Sleep deprivation.”r />
  “I’ve got to get it. He can’t sleep on the bare floor like that.” She scooted her chair from the table and rose. “We’re never going to finish this job. Stay, Jackson.”

  As she headed for the sitting room and the entryway, Anna heard Liz say, “Relax, boy.” She mounted the steps quickly and headed down the hall for her room. Her hand on the bedroom doorknob, she peeked at the drawing of the fat man, his hands behind him and tied with some sort of cord, his back bent, his head between his knees. She let out a puff of air. Disgusting. There was no other word for it.

  She lifted Jackson’s blanket from her bed, and as she swung back to the door, her eyes caught a flutter of movement in the garden outside the window. She sidestepped her way to the window and peered around the side of the window frame. There, pacing up and down the peony garden, his eyes scouring the ground, was Mitch DeBoer. Thunder sounded and he halted, hands on his hips, and looked to the skies, rain dripping off the brim of his hat.

  “Something interesting out there?”

  Anna gasped as she wheeled toward the door. “Lawrence. Cripes.”

  He held his palms toward her, apologizing. “I should have made a concert of noises coming down the hall. I saw you walk in here, and I was wondering if I could get into the library during lunch.”

  Anna’s shoulders sagged. What was it with this man? “We’re running behind today. We’ll be eating lunch in the library.”

  He looked horrorstruck. “You’re not going to touch anything while you eat?”

  “No.” She said nothing more to reassure him.

  As he walked away, she remembered that Bee was looking for him and almost called him back. But Bee would find Lawrence eventually, and in the meantime, Anna wanted nothing more to do with him.

  11

  “I’m taking Jackson with me wherever I go from now on,” Anna said, folding her dog’s blanket. She put it on the floor next to the armchair and called Jackson to it. “I’ll take you outside later,” she said as he happily pawed at the blanket.

  In answer to Liz’s questioning look, Anna told her about Mitch and Lawrence, and that when she’d looked back to the window, Mitch had gone.

  “It’s this house,” Liz said. “It’s coloring how we look at everything. They were probably both doing something perfectly normal.”

  “That reminds me.” Anna found the flashlight where she’d left it the night before and put it on top of her purse, pressing down on it as if to glue it in place. She looked over at Liz, who was sifting through a bundle of documents, her face knit in concentration. “I’m sorry, Liz, you seem to be doing all the work.”

  “You can make up for it tonight. You work while I write my second on-the-scene report from Sparrow House.” She glanced up, a wry smile on her face.

  “It’s a deal. Down to business.” Anna carried a stack of books, folders, and stray papers from the shelf behind her to the table, took her seat, and drank the rest of her coffee in one gulp. It was cold, but it was caffeine.

  “Primary document,” Liz said, giving the paper in her hand a flourish. “Birth certificate of Matthew Birch from my folder of goodies.” She gave it a push, sending it skimming across the table to Anna.

  “Matthew Warren Birch, born June 4, 1942, in Boulder, Colorado,” Anna said. His father was Charles Warren Birch, his mother, Jean Joyce Birch, maiden name Schultz.

  “What’s on the back?” Liz said, pointing at the certificate.

  Anna flipped it over and laid it on the table. “Numbers.”

  “Dates?” Liz emptied the last of the coffeepot into her cup.

  “I don’t think so.” In blue ink someone had written two rows of numbers, each number in the top row neatly aligned with a number in the bottom row. Five over 11, 6 over 12, and so on until the last numbers, 8 over 14. She stared at them, a wave of recognition sweeping over her. She’d seen numbers like this before. “I think it’s a code,” she breathed, looking up at Liz.

  Her cup halfway to her lips, Liz froze.

  “It’s a shift code,” Anna said. “It has to be.”

  “I love codes!” Liz pushed out of her seat, rounded the table, and stood next to Anna, her palms flat on the table as she examined the back of the birth certificate. “What’s a shift code?”

  “A very simple code, but it usually uses an alphabet.” Anna looked over at Liz and nearly giggled. Their mutual love of anything mysterious, a puzzle in need of a solution, was one of the ties that bound their friendship. “Remember in elementary school when you’d write a secret note, D means A, E means B? The code shifts the order of the alphabet.”

  “Sure. Like a decoder ring.”

  “And the person you sent the note to was the only one who was supposed to know that D stood for A. No one else would have the key.” She swatted the certificate with the back of her hand. “This is a key.”

  “But it’s numbers.”

  “Numbers standing for letters?” Anna said, looking back at the certificate. She grabbed the purple folder and began to write. “The fifth letter of the alphabet is E, right? Only in this shift code, 11, not 5, equals E.” She quickly jotted down the rest of the alphabet and wrote the corresponding numbers beneath the letters. “See? A equals 7, E equals 11, and T equals 26. Then you start at number 1 again, so Z equals 6.”

  She leaned back, thoughts whirling around in her head. “If this is the key, where’s the coded message?” Was this code connected to the yellow letters? And she worked like a genealogist works. But she had worked like a genealogist, starting with the known and tracing backward, and she’d gotten nowhere until now—until finding this code, if that’s what it was, on Matthew Birch’s birth certificate.

  “Good question.” Liz retook her seat. “You like puzzles. Let me ask you, why was the key written on Matthew Birch’s birth certificate?”

  Forgetting that she’d already had the last of her coffee, Anna reached for her cup. On seeing its stained bottom, she set it back down.

  “I’ll ask Bee to make us some more,” Liz said. She leaned forward, her elbows propped on the table. “If you had written this key, why would you have put it on this certificate of all places?”

  Anna considered before answering. “First I get the yellow letters, and now we find this code. What if they’re connected?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “And what if this has to do with Matthew Birch’s generation? I assumed that because I was starting with Paxton and Nilla in my research, the person who wrote the second letter, the one telling me to work like a genealogist, was too. But everything keeps pointing back to the 1970s.”

  “True.”

  Anna lifted her eyes to the ceiling, the pieces of the puzzle swimming before her eyes but not yet falling into place. “What if that letter was from a genealogist? It’s a strange thing for someone who doesn’t know anything about genealogy to write.”

  “But the person who wrote it knew you were a genealogist, don’t you think? And it was probably sent to me because I’d written about you working at Sparrow House on the Birch family tree.”

  “The first letter was sent to my post-office box. Why not send the second one there?”

  Liz shrugged. “It was sent to me because the writer knew I’d give it to you. He or she must have known you were starting work here and wouldn’t be able to get to your post-office box.”

  “But . . .” Anna jerked to attention. “How would anyone know I’d be staying up here? Or the exact day I’d be here? I read your article. You didn’t give a date, you said I’d be working on the Birch family tree ‘this month.’ How would the person who wrote the letters know the first one would reach me but the second one wouldn’t?”

  Liz opened her mouth but nothing came out. She fingered the turquoise necklace at her collarbone. “You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Anna rose quickly, shut the library door, and stood, her back against the door, looking at Liz. “Only the people in this house knew I was going to be staying overnight. They kne
w before you or Gene knew.” She snapped up her purse and dug for the two yellow envelopes, looking at both of them before presenting them to Liz. “Check the postmarks. Both letters were mailed the day before yesterday.”

  Liz looked. “Before anyone knew for sure you’d be staying here.”

  A hard rain began beating against the library window. Anna looked to the sill and noticed a long, thin puddle forming on it, slowly but inexorably extending its margins. At the rate it was raining, that puddle would spill over the sill in no time, giving Bee even more work to do. The poor woman had enough on her hands. Selfishly, Anna didn’t want Bee’s now-pleasant demeanor to change—and change it would if she had to mop the library floor. “I’ll be right back with paper towels,” she said to Liz, pulling open the door.

  To her surprise, Paxton was in the sitting room, perched at the edge of an armchair, a magazine on his lap. He wasn’t reading, he was simply flipping pages in an effort to look engaged. It seemed to Anna that he’d seen the closed library door and decided to wait for her. Either that or he’d been listening.

  “Hello,” he said as she entered the room. “I’m glad I caught you.”

  “Good morning. Or is it afternoon already?” She smiled at him, noticing as she did the rumpled t-shirt over his jeans and dark skin beneath his eyes. He looked like he’d slept even less than she had last night.

  “Almost lunchtime.” He tossed the magazine to the opposite armchair and sprang to his feet. “I was wondering how things were going in there.”

  “Well, we’re making—”

  “The thing is, if you could work less on the family tree and more on the haunted aspect, I’d appreciate it. People from Ryant are going to call Thursday morning for an update and I’d like to give them”—he wiggled his fingers, grasping for words—“something, anything to keep them interested.”

  “We’ve found a few things, like the letter from your father to the archdiocese requesting an exorcism.”

  Paxton’s eyebrows rose. “Really? That’s good.” He pushed back a mass of hair on his forehead and slid his hands into his pockets. “I knew that was probably in the family records, but I didn’t know where.”