Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  “Leave tonight.”

  “Gene, I can’t.”

  “Talk to this woman at the Buffalo, give anything you’ve gathered to the Birches, and leave tonight.”

  “It’s tempting, but—”

  “I can bring you and Liz dinner at Sparrow House, help you with your research, then help you pack up.”

  She touched the palm of her hand to his chest. “Maybe if Liz and I eat a late lunch in town, skip dinner, and work hard, we can get out of there by nine or ten. We have a few more things to wrap up. Neither one of us wants to spend another night in that house.”

  21

  Walking past the Jimmy on her way to the Buffalo Café, Anna glanced at the passenger-side window. Liz was fast asleep, her seat tilted halfway back, and instead of playing with Suka, Jackson was sleeping, stretched across his blanket in the back seat, his right ear twitching.

  At the sight of them, Anna realized how tired she was. For three days she’d been running on fear, excitement, and coffee, and every one of those tanks was near empty.

  She grabbed a rain-filled Styrofoam cup someone had left between Cody the buffalo’s shoulders, dumped the rain outside the door, and tossed the cup into the trash receptacle on the sidewalk across from the café. Her hand on the café’s door, she looked west to the mountain peaks. Storm clouds were gathering over Rocky Mountain National Park, becoming a darker gray beyond, over Grand Lake and the Continental Divide. Unbelievably, more rain was coming.

  She opened the door and scanned the small café as she stepped inside, her eyes quickly settling on a small woman at the table nearest the back door. One sleeve of the woman’s yellow jacket, slung carelessly across her chair back, protruded into the aisle like a half-inflated windsock. Anna stood near the door, watching her, and a moment later Alice Ryder looked up.

  Anna smiled as she walked to the table, fighting her nerves and hoping that battle wasn’t playing out on her face. “Alice?” she said. She pulled out the opposite chair, hooked her purse strap over the back, and sat, waiting for Alice to speak.

  It was undoubtedly Alice. She had the same small features—broadened by time and gravity, but still delicate—and the same highly arched eyebrows. Her hair was gray and gathered loosely by something at the back, and coarse gray strands, short and damaged by years of colorings or perms, fringed her face. Her hands were on the table, her fingers laced.

  “You’re Anna,” she said at last. Though her voice must have deepened with time, it was still high-pitched and small, like the rest of her.

  “Yes. Thanks for meeting me.”

  Grace appeared at the table and bestowed Anna with a cup of steaming black coffee.

  “How did you know?” Anna said, smiling. She reached around the chair for her purse but Grace stopped her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s gratis. I’m handing out cups to my best customers today in honor of our fifth day of rain. Can I get you something now?” she asked, turning to Alice.

  “Do you have English breakfast tea?” Alice asked meekly.

  “I think I can scare up a bag.”

  Grace headed back to her counter and Anna wrapped her hands around her cup, enjoying the warmth and the scent of the coffee. “I recognized you from a photo I found at the house, of the conclave in 1970.”

  “Did you?” Alice relaxed her shoulders and let her hands drop to her lap.

  Grace returned with a cup of hot water and a foil-wrapped tea bag in a saucer. “I’m afraid we’re more equipped for coffee. We only have Earl Grey.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Questions crowding her mind, Anna took a sip of coffee and waited for Grace to return to the counter before she spoke. Even with the cup to her nose, she could smell the odor of cloves on Alice. A perfume, or maybe a scented oil. “So you wrote the letters on yellow stationery?”

  Alice chewed nervously on her lip as she tore open the foil wrapper and dropped her tea bag into her cup. “Yes, that was me,” she said. “I sent two.”

  “One to my post-office box and the other to my friend Liz’s website. Why not both to me?”

  “I read your friend’s website and I knew Paxton Birch wanted to hire someone local to work on his family tree.” Alice lifted and lowered her tea bag several times into the hot water, turning the water dark as the tea leaves bled.

  “How did you know he wanted to hire me?”

  “I think Paxton is interested in his family tree. Matthew never was.”

  “Alice, how did you know I was the one Paxton hired? Did Mitch tell you?”

  “Mitch?” Alice said, looking up in alarm. “Why Mitch?”

  Not who is Mitch but why Mitch. So Mitch DeBoer was indeed Alice’s nephew. That raised even more questions, but they would have to wait. Alice was clearly troubled that Anna had mentioned Mitch, and if Alice, who was again chewing her lip, left now, Anna couldn’t ask her far more important questions. She took a long and deliberately casual sip of coffee, then asked, “How did you know I’d take the Birch job?”

  Alice gave a tiny smile. “No genealogist would pass up the chance to work in that library. I started work on Matthew’s family tree once. In that very library.”

  “You didn’t finish it?”

  “Matthew hated genealogy, history, anything like that. He always said, ‘It’s the past, Alice. We’re all about now.’” She grimaced. “He was a child in a man’s body. He had no idea how soon now becomes the past. And now he’s part of the past himself.” Using the string and tag, she pinched water from the tea bag and placed it on her saucer.

  “So you worked in the Birch library.”

  Her eyes on Anna, Alice gave a barely perceptible nod of her head. She knew what she was about to be asked.

  “You’re the one who wrote the coded words on the family papers?”

  “In October 1970. You’re the first person to decipher them.”

  “Using your rotation key.” Anna leaned forward. “Do you really believe Matthew Birch murdered Kurt Ellison?”

  “I know it.” Her tone was firm, certain.

  “How?”

  “Because I’m the one who brought Kurt to the house.” Alice latched onto her cup, cradling it. “It’s my fault.”

  “How did you get him inside the house? Did anyone else know him?”

  “No one. I vouched for him, but in the end that wasn’t good enough. Back then, everyone was sure everyone else was an informant. In Kurt’s case, they were right.”

  “Who was he working for?”

  “The FBI.” Alice paused before continuing, searching Anna’s eyes for a trace of condemnation. “Matthew’s friends weren’t playing around, they were going to take action. People were going to die, and that was never my thing. I didn’t want it to be Matthew’s either. I wasn’t trying to turn him in, I was trying to save him.”

  “You didn’t want him to hurt innocent people.”

  “I contacted the FBI about the conclave, then I told Matthew that he needed to organize the library. I was always telling him that, so he didn’t think it was out of the ordinary.” She sighed mournfully, her face clouded with regret, as she relived those days in October 1970. “Kurt wasn’t a professional, he was a librarian in Boulder.”

  “He wasn’t an agent?”

  “The FBI wanted to hire an amateur so he wouldn’t stand out. They didn’t realize how dangerous Matthew was. Neither did I at first. Kurt had a degree in library science, so when the FBI asked me if I knew anyone I could get into the house, I suggested him. They told me to start harping on Matthew about what a mess the library was. A week later I told him about Kurt. I said he could keep a record of the conclave too.”

  “That didn’t make Matthew suspicious?”

  Alice put her hand to her cheek and shook her head. “Matthew was so vain. He thought keeping a record of the conclave was a good idea. Conclave.” She snickered. “Do you know about the Colorado Declaration?”

  “Paxton mentioned it.”

  “Matthew
wrote it. When it was finished, the group couldn’t decide whether to call it a declaration or a communiqué. They were so pompous. They finally decided it was a declaration because the word ‘communiqué’ sounded insignificant.”

  Alice was opening up, and in doing so she was revealing her disdain for Matthew and the other members of the conclave. Why then hadn’t she taken her concerns about Kurt’s death to the police? “Did Matthew place a trip wire on the attic stairs?”

  Alice repressed a flinch.

  “Did he intend to kill Kurt?”

  “At first I thought Matthew knew I was fond of Kurt. I thought he was jealous when he saw us talking and wanted to show Kurt that I was his. It was almost flattering.” She unzipped the purse on the chair next to hers and gently removed a plastic sandwich bag containing a piece of blue paper. Folded once in the middle, it was the size of an index card. She unfolded it, taking care not to tear it where the fold had worn it thin, and passed it to Anna. “Please be careful with it,” she instructed.

  On the paper, a single sentence was written in faded ink: “Come to me tonight.”

  Still holding the paper before her, Anna looked up. “The story you wrote on the first letter you sent me—that was you and Matthew. He told you to write this note.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought this was about calling the ghost. ‘Come to me tonight’ is what kids write on Halloween to call the Sparrow House ghost.”

  “Yes, I know.” Alice stuck out both hands and held them out until she received the paper. She folded it again, cautiously placed it in the sandwich bag, and returned the bag to her purse. It struck Anna as a ritual—removing the note, reading it, replacing it—performed many times, judging by the fragility of the paper where it folded. Alice had kept that note for more than forty years.

  “Why would you write this? If you knew—”

  “I didn’t know.” Anger flashed in Alice’s eyes, the first emotion other than sadness and longing that Anna had seen in them. “I thought Matthew wanted Kurt to see us together in my bedroom.”

  “The Forsythia Room.”

  Alice tilted her head in wonder. “How did you know?”

  “It’s yellow. I’m staying in it.” She took a quick sip of coffee. “And it’s still yellow.”

  “My color,” Alice said. “Matthew did that for me.”

  “It hasn’t been repainted since that time.”

  “They don’t keep up with the house.”

  Anna drank more coffee to keep from speaking. They don’t keep up with the house. That was a kind way of putting the Birches’ nearly psychotic need to keep everything in the house, even the ugliest of things, frozen in time. They didn’t have a lot of money, but a can of paint cost next to nothing, and a garbage bag for the half-bear and wooden mallets cost even less. “So you didn’t know Matthew had placed a trip wire.”

  “Never. Kurt was a good guy. He and Eric Browne were the only decent ones.”

  “Did you care for Kurt?”

  “Not in that way. He was married, and he made it clear he loved his wife. But Matthew saw us talking a few times, so at first I thought Matthew was jealous.”

  “You thought Matthew was calling Kurt to your room to humiliate him.”

  “And I let him do it.”

  “When did you find out about the trip wire?”

  “I saw Matthew take it down before the police came. He strung it from a screw in the wall to the first railing at the top of the stairs.” She briefly closed her eyes, remembering.

  Stunned, Anna flopped back in her chair. “Alice, why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “It was then I knew he wasn’t jealous at all. He’d figured out Kurt was an informant.”

  “Why are you messing around with coded messages and letters to me?”

  “The police didn’t want to investigate. I told the FBI what I saw and they told me to forget it.” Alice spoke intensely, her voice rising in register until it sounded like the raspy plea of a captured mouse. “I’m sure they told the police to drop it. The FBI couldn’t let it be known they were running an operation against Matthew in his own house—not if they wanted to continue it.”

  “Forget the FBI. Why didn’t you talk to the police?”

  “When I told the FBI what Matthew and his friends were planning, they made me sign a paper. I promised to never reveal that they sent Kurt to the house.”

  Anna was dumbfounded. How was it that Alice still felt bound by this agreement, especially when it meant a man’s murder had gone unpunished all these years? “That was decades ago. They can’t enforce that—not if it means covering up a murder.”

  “Do you think there’s an expiration date when it comes to the FBI?”

  “I’m sure the agents you talked to aren’t even with the FBI today. They might not even be alive.”

  “Others will come after me.”

  Anna didn’t know how to reach Alice, to slice through the cocoon of her hippie paranoia. Like the color yellow, it had clung to her all these years and she would not readily part with it. “So why tell me about it? And why use these cryptic methods?”

  “You were my best chance for this to come out before Kurt’s widow died—without anyone figuring out that it came from me. Her name is Nancy, she lives in Fort Collins, and she’s seventy-one now. The FBI promised they’d pay her every month for as long as she lived, but they said if I ever talked about Kurt, they’d stop the payments.”

  “Didn’t Nancy ask where the money came from?”

  “The FBI told her Kurt had done research for them. Something important.” Alice looked away, toward the windows by the front door. Flakes of mascara dotted her left cheek near her hairline. “I had to make sure the real story came out long after I left the house, so they couldn’t connect it with me,” she added.

  “So you want Nancy to know, but you want me to tell her?”

  Alice looked stricken as her eyes shifted back to Anna’s. Laid out so plainly, it sounded craven. But Alice had good intentions. That was clear. She wanted to right an old wrong, but her fear was holding her back.

  “Why not just come out and tell me?” Anna continued. “It took me forever just to figure out what ‘worked like a genealogist works’ meant.”

  “Genealogists like stories and puzzles. I knew I had to intrigue you.”

  “The question remains. Why not just tell me?”

  “I was willing to tell anyone who was hired to work in that library after I left.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “A few days after Kurt died. I wanted to leave right away, but I couldn’t risk making Matthew suspicious. So I stayed a few days and planted clues. I knew someone would find them eventually.”

  “After you found out the Birches hired me, you could have told me, instead of writing me letters.”

  “And when you talked to the police, how would you explain to them how you know all this? By talking to me, that’s how. This way you can say you found clues, but the clues don’t have to be from me. Don’t you see?” She leaned closer. The scent of cloves was strong. “If I had told you about Matthew, would you have believed me? You don’t believe me now, even after all the time you’ve spent in that house and all you know about the Birches.”

  “Matthew Birch is dead. So is his wife.”

  “That man’s claws stretched a mile. Nothing stopped him.”

  The woman was being illogical and Anna had no patience for it. “You can still make this right by going to the police right now. If you want, I’ll go with you.”

  “Don’t even say that,” she pleaded. Her voice was a hoarse, tiny whisper. “I was scared back then and I still am. The Birches scare me, Anna. I could never talk while Matthew Birch was alive, and I can’t talk now. Paxton is a Birch, isn’t he? He’s his father’s son.”

  “You have to let this go. It isn’t 1970 anymore.”

  “I want nothing to do with them.” Her nostrils flared as she spoke.

  Getting nowhere with
simple logic, Anna decided to try a different tack. “Do you know the gardener they hired was murdered?”

  Alice looked away again, first to the counter where Grace was dropping biscotti into a jar, then behind Anna, toward the door as thunder announced the arrival of another storm.

  “And do you know the professor they hired is missing?”

  Alice said nothing, confirming in Anna’s mind that she had heard about both Devin and Lawrence. “Did you read about them on ElkNews.com or did Mitch tell you?”

  Alice’s head snapped around. “How do you know about Mitch?”

  “I’m a genealogist. It wasn’t hard.”

  “He’s my nephew.”

  “I know.”

  “He didn’t believe Devin took drugs, and he was right. Now he thinks Lawrence is dead.”

  Shocked to hear it said aloud, Anna nevertheless had suspected, from the moment she heard he hadn’t returned from breakfast in town, that something terrible had happened to Lawrence. The Birch documents, or something in them, were too important to him. He’d never abandon them. “Does Mitch think someone in the house—”

  “Killed him?” Alice finished. “Don’t you?”

  “Why would they? They hired him.”

  “They hired Kurt.”

  “Matthew hired Kurt.” Anna refused to consider the possibility. Lawrence could very well be alive, and if he was dead, it was entirely conceivable that someone outside of Sparrow House killed him. She had one more night of work, and she was going to finish the job she was hired to do, take Paxton’s check, and get out of that house.

  “Mitch knows the Birches better than anyone,” Alice continued, “and if he’s concerned, you should be.”

  Anna suddenly knew where the Elk Park Herald had found its mole. “Mitch told the newspaper about Lawrence being missing—even before he was missing. Didn’t he?”

  “He was hoping the police would notice.”

  “How did Mitch know about Lawrence?”

  “Bee told him.”

  “Why don’t you and Mitch just speak up?” She wanted to reach across the table and shake Alice by the shoulders. “The Herald used that bit of information to ruin my friend’s reputation. Are you aware of that?”