Over the next few minutes, Clovis explained how Ruby, councilwoman for Anna’s district, was related by an intricate network of divorces and second marriages to Esther Vance—something Zoey, Alex, Paul, and Maddy could never discover—and she would not be pleased with Esther being the first target of an IHD. Ruby’s influence, Clovis hoped, would help remove the designation from Esther’s house.
“Do you think you can help?” Clovis asked. “I don’t want to leave this to chance. I want torpedoes in all my tubes.”
“I’m not sure what you think I can do.”
“To be honest, I don’t know, but Russell was sure you could help, and after Esther quit the group, he resolved to hire you.” She leaned forward, pleading with Anna. “What do you say?”
Anna thought for a moment before answering, ignoring the questions jostling for attention in her mind—about Russell being watched, if he had been right about that, and about Maddy, who taught demonology—focusing instead on Ether Vance and the possible political chicanery that was about to take her house from her. “All right. I’ll try my best, Clovis.”
3
Liz Halvorsen had already heard about the murder of Russell Thurman, but when Anna called her friend to say she might have a different angle on Thurman’s death, or at least a strange sidebar involving town politics, Liz insisted they meet downtown at the Buffalo Café, the Summit Avenue coffee shop with the stuffed buffalo named Cody outside its front door.
As Anna entered the long, narrow café, Grace Bell poked her head around an enormous biscotti jar, smiled, and acknowledged her with a quick wave. “The first lady of news and her laptop just got here,” she said, tossing her head at Liz, who was seated at a table opposite the counter. “Where’s Jackson? I was hoping he could play with Suka. I had no idea when I got her how much Siberian huskies need to run, the poor thing.”
“Sorry,” Anna said, sliding into a seat opposite Liz at her table. “He’s with Gene. They’re inseparable these days.”
“Like Liz and her laptop,” Grace said, glaring at the offensive machine as she made her way to the table. “Pumpkin spice coffee?”
“Decaf?”
“You’ve got it. Liz?”
Liz bit back a grin. “The first lady of news would like a decaf pumpkin spice latte.”
Grace gave Liz’s laptop a final, scornful stare and headed back to the counter. Though she often badgered Liz to shut the lid on her infernal machine and enjoy both life and coffee, the ongoing battle between the two wasn’t a battle at all. Liz adored Grace and had made the Buffalo her office away from home, and Grace, for her part, loved having Liz, laptop and all, in her café, especially in the off-season months, when customers were scarce and Liz and her news website made for good conversation. Grace had even installed wireless in her café, and Anna suspected it wasn’t as much for her other customers as for Liz.
Liz pushed her computer to the side and propped her elbows on the table. “So what’s going on?”
“Dirty politics, possibly.” Anna unzipped her fleece jacket and draped it over the back of her chair. “And murder. This is confidential unless and until you find proof of wrongdoing, OK?”
“Of course.”
Liz responded immediately, almost offhandedly, but Anna knew her friend to be thoroughly honest when it came to her job and its responsibilities. If Liz had any doubts about a story, she would hold it, even at the risk of missing breaking news. But it was her honesty that made her trustworthy and brought contacts and information her way. Her unwillingness to run with unverified breaking news paradoxically made her website the place to go for breaking news.
“Russell Thurman—”
“The murdered man,” Liz said.
“Yes. He was a member of the Elk Valley Historical Society, the group I told you about.”
“He was found with a pumpkin on his head.”
“You know about that?”
“Shall I bring them to your table, my ladies?” Grace called out, pointing at two steaming cups on her counter.
“No, no.” Grinning, Anna stood and strode to the counter. Grace didn’t “deliver,” as she put it. You picked up your coffee at the counter or you didn’t get it. A cup in each hand, she headed back to the table, breathing deeply as the scent of pumpkin spice rose with the coffee’s steam.
“Speaking of pumpkins,” Liz said, making a face as she took her cup.
“No jokes about this allowed.”
“No.” Liz shook her head. “Of course not.”
“The poor man. He was a retired history professor.” Anna wrapped her hands around her cup, indulging in its warmth before taking a sip.
“Really?” Liz gazed out over the café, her eyes settling on the plastic jack-o’-lantern on Grace’s counter. “It must have been a large pumpkin. I mean, to fit over a man’s head.”
Anna groaned her objection.
“I’m not making jokes—or I’m trying not to.” Liz fixed a neutral expression on her face and pressed on. “Seriously, let’s think this through. It had to have been a large pumpkin.”
Anna nodded in agreement. “All right, then. And it had to have been cleaned out ahead of time and brought to the Morgan-Sadler House. There’s no vegetable garden on the grounds.”
“That’s a lot of trouble to go to.”
“Agreed.” One ghastly horror-movie image after another paraded through Anna’s mind. Had the killer wanted to evoke just those kinds of images? Or was the pumpkin on Russell Thurman’s head a private message? “Have you learned anything about his death?” she asked.
Liz pulled a piece of paper from under her laptop, glanced about to make certain no one was within earshot, and began to read. “He died between 10:00 p.m. Friday night and 1:00 a.m. Saturday morning, approximately where he was found. He was stabbed eleven times with a five-inch blade, small enough to be concealed under a jacket or in a purse.”
“Eleven times?” Anna was horrified. “That’s a vicious, personal attack.”
“The first two wounds were to his back,” Liz continued, “so he was taken by surprise. There were no defensive wounds. He was arranged postmortem in a seated position, his back against a beehive. Also postmortem, a pumpkin, Cucurbita pepo, was placed on his head.”
“The killer knew him. I’d bet on it.”
“The positioning of the body is very personal too.” Liz folded the paper, hid it under her laptop, and latched onto her coffee cup. “This isn’t like poisoning him or hitting him over the head, Anna—not that those things aren’t terrible. But this is pure evil.”
“I agree.”
Liz took a long gulp of coffee, scowling as though she were washing down the disturbing facts of Russell Thurman’s death, then set her cup on the table. “You haven’t said how politics enters into this.”
“Have you heard of an involuntary historical designation?”
Liz hadn’t.
As Anna recounted the events at the society’s meeting and relayed what she had learned through Clovis Fleming, Liz took notes. When she mentioned Alex Root, Liz, frowning in recognition, grabbed her laptop and typed his name into a search engine.
“It’s a hard name to forget,” she said, angling her laptop so Anna could see the screen. “Is that him? He just declared himself a candidate for county commissioner.”
“That’s him.” The brand-new president of the Elk Valley Historical Society wore glasses in his candidate photo, but otherwise the photo seemed to be recent, his white sideburns giving him the same toupeed look Anna had seen earlier in the day. His short bio even mentioned his current position as president of the EVHS. The man hadn’t wasted any time in letting voters know of his coup. Alex, it seemed, was bursting with ambition.
“Let’s see what else we can find.” Liz pulled the laptop her way, typed, ran her finger over the keypad, and once again turned the screen to face Anna. “He teaches astral projection at the Boulder Institute for Metaphysical Education. I don’t recall seeing that in his candidate bio.�
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“Cripes.” Anna pulled the laptop closer. “He charges money for this?”
“I wonder if the students have lab sessions, like they do with biology classes.”
“I wonder if Clovis knows about this. She didn’t say anything.”
“And I wonder if you can take his class astrally. Or would that be cheating on tuition?”
Anna had a feeling this was about to descend into a string of one-liners. On the surface there was a funny side to it—the ridiculousness of a grown man teaching others, probably teenagers and twenty-somethings, astral projection—but there was also a deadly serious side, as Anna knew full well. It was something she had never told Liz about, or even Gene, though both knew she had dabbled in wicca when she was younger.
“Far away?” Liz asked.
“Just ruminating.”
“So this Clovis Fleming woman came to your house and asked you to finish the genealogy job Russell Thurman wanted to hire you for, right?” Liz contemplated the coffee left in her cup and polished it off in long gulps.
“That’s right.” If the time came to tell Gene or Liz that she had strayed beyond the boundaries of wicca, Anna thought, it would come. And until then, Alex wasn’t her focus. She had two family histories to uncover. “The ancestors of Zoey Eberhardt and Paul Gilmartin. Apparently they don’t have any.”
“You’ll find them,” Liz said. “You’re a wiz.”
“I wonder about this Boulder Institute for Metaphysical Education.” Alex taught astral projection there—might this institute be where Maddy taught demonology? “Can you search for Maddy Gilmartin among the faculty?”
A minute later, Liz, staring dumfounded at the screen, murmured in the affirmative. “She teaches a seminar on demonology six times a year. Who teaches something like that?”
Anna flopped back in her chair, thoughts swirling in her head. “So they both teach at the institute.”
“Institute,” Liz said with disdain.
“Makes it sound almost legitimate, doesn’t it?”
“It says here that a new seminar starts on Monday and lasts through Halloween.” Liz shot forward with mock excitement. “Only a thousand dollars, and there’s still time to sign up on line.”
Anna ignored the jest and asked if Paul, Zoey, or Clovis taught at the institute. “And check Russell,” she added. “He taught history at Colorado State, but maybe he taught in Boulder too.” She heard the urgency in her own voice. She had the niggling sense that something was very wrong with the Elk Valley Historical Society, and that Clovis, dwelling on her lost presidency and the influx of new members, was missing the bigger picture. Or maybe Clovis was part of the bigger picture.
“There’s a faculty tab on the home page. Hang on.” Liz traced a finger over the keypad, maneuvering and scrolling.
Anna looked over at Grace, who was wiping down the café’s long, L-shaped counter with a dish towel. She wished Grace would hire more help, get off her feet more during the day. She was in her mid-sixties now, and it was time for her to ease up on the accelerator a little. She had run the Buffalo for more than twenty years—more than seventeen of them without the help of her husband, Bert.
It struck Anna that her world was full of widows. She was one herself, going on three years now, and she’d only just turned thirty-seven. Grace had been a widow for nearly eighteen years. Then there was her elderly neighbor Helen. And now Esther Vance, Clovis’s friend. What a club they made. Was Clovis a widow too? She hadn’t asked.
“Nope, nope,” Liz said. She checked one last page and exited the website. “Russell didn’t teach there either.” She looked up at Anna. “Only Alex and Maddy do.”
Liz belonged to another club altogether, Anna thought. She had been happily married to her husband, Dan, for almost half of her thirty-nine years. Like Gene, Dan was one of the good guys.
“You are far away today,” Liz said.
“Just trying to figure all this out.” Anna shrugged her shoulders, striving to appear focused and unperturbed all at once. Truth was, she had a lot on her mind, or a lot of someone on her mind, and she didn’t want to mention him to Liz. Last spring a conversation about Gene—about whether Anna would move on or cling to memories of Sean, about whether she would choose the old, as Liz had put it—had caused a rift between the two, short-lived but painful.
Anna had met Gene ten months ago, and they’d started dating soon after. Dating. The word made her cringe. Thirty-seven was too old to be dating, wasn’t it? For ten months Gene had moved slowly, never pressuring her with talk of the future, partly because that was his way and partly because he knew Sean’s death had torn her world apart. But they were coming up on one year together, and all that would change. It had to. And when it did . . .
Anna roused herself, straightening her back, drinking the rest of her coffee. “Can you research the town council’s vote on the involuntary historical designation for me? Clovis says Ruby Padilla voted for it, which surprises me. Maybe there were some backdoor deals made to pass it.”
“There are always backdoor deals,” Liz said. “I’ll find out everything I can about it.”
“Anything you can find out about the Morgan-Sadler House, too.”
“Such as?”
Anna thought a moment. “Alex Root’s grandfather worked there. Can you find out when that was? And who owned the house before the Corporation for Historical Preservation bought it?”
“Just a sec.” Liz opened her purse on the seat next to hers and retrieved a pen and small notepad. “Go ahead.”
“If you can, find out about the family who owned it.” Anna paused. She had veered off track. She was supposed to be researching a couple of family trees in hopes of helping Esther Vance keep her house. “No, there’s something more important,” she said. “Find out if there are any city records on Zoey and Paul that prove they exist.”
Anna pushed back her sweater sleeve to check her watch. She had promised to meet Gene for dinner at the Backcountry, a new restaurant on Summit Avenue, half a mile east of the Buffalo.
“It’s getting dark,” Liz said with a glance at the café’s windows.
“Yeah, and I’ve got a dinner date with Gene. Better run.” She slipped her arms into her jacket and raised the zipper. “Call me when you find something?”
“Right away. Watch out for goblins.”
Liz had already returned to newshound mode, Anna noticed with a smile. Head down, laptop open, fingers flying over the keyboard. She’d have her contacts on the phone before the night was over.
Anna exited the Buffalo and paused on the sidewalk, breathing deeply the chill evening air. She loved the sights and smells of autumn. Rain-blackened shrubs with withered berries, slate-blue skies, burning leaves, spice-scented cakes and pies. If only she could bottle it, she used to say to Sean. Then she could pop the cork on that bottle in August, when she was weary of the heat, or January, when autumn was a memory and spring was inconceivable.
She walked two blocks west on Summit, found her Jimmy, and hoisted herself onto the seat. After reaching down to check the floor under the passenger seat for her purse, she pulled from the curb and headed east. She caught sight of Buckhorn’s store window as she drove by, noticing with a twinge of pride that it was one of only a handful of Summit Avenue shop windows not dressed for Halloween. Gene wouldn’t hear of it. No latex bats, no bedsheet ghosts floating on hooks. Anna herself was more flexible. She had loved Halloween as a child and it hadn’t done her any harm, she told him. But she liked his steadfast stance on the subject. It wasn’t surly or born of habit, it sprang from well-considered, good-natured conviction.
She swung left into Backcountry’s parking lot, eased the Jimmy into a spot a row back from the restaurant’s front door, and headed inside. Gene was waiting just inside the front door, sitting on a bench beneath a wreath of autumn leaves and dried gourds, wearing a clean flannel shirt and jeans. Anna smiled. Her man was Colorado through and through.
“We’ve already been s
eated,” he said, putting a hand to the small of her back and leading her to their table in a quiet corner near the windows. He held out a chair for her. She sat, and he helped her off with her jacket, slinging it over the back of her chair before taking his seat.
“I left Jackson and Riley sleeping in front of your wood stove,” he said. “With a few embers left burning.”
“They’re in heaven.”
“They do enjoy each other’s company.”
“Naturally.”
“Why naturally?”
“Because they see us enjoying each other’s company.”
“We do, don’t we?” Gene said, toasting her with his water glass.
“It helps that they’re both easygoing dogs,” Anna said, reaching for her menu. “Not puppies anymore, but not old either. They have the same energy level. They don’t irritate each other. They like playing at the same time, sleeping at the same time.” Anna focused on her menu, holding it close, examining intently every word on its two pages. If she said anything more about Jackson and Riley, Gene could quite rightly say she was babbling. Why was she suddenly so nervous in his presence? Did he sense her nerves? That she was using the menu as a shield? He wasn’t a fool—how could he not? Cripes.
She looked up. He’d been watching her. He gave her a smile—a defeated smile—and opened his menu. “The bison’s supposed to be good,” he said. “Elk too.”
She was pushing him away again. What was wrong with her? Idiot. Anna felt her lips soundlessly form the word and froze.
“What did you say?” Gene said.
“Nothing. It’s been a long day.” She closed her menu and laid it at the end of the table for the waitress. “I’m going to try the bison.”
He nodded and returned to his menu. One of these days, she thought, he’s not going to be so understanding. He will have had enough of her love affair with her past and he will move on. He won’t have any choice but to move on.
Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3 Page 54
