Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  “We met ten months ago, almost to this very day,” she said.

  His face brightened. “I know.”

  “You were ripping up my advertising poster in Buckhorn’s.”

  He laughed softly. “I remember.”

  “And you hardly had time to put the new one up before I was on your case, asking where it was.”

  “Demanding where it was.”

  Anna cringed, recalling every word of their first two encounters. She’d been quick-tempered, brusque, wanting immediate action in response to her request to display her new poster.

  “But we put it up in the window,” he said. “Together.”

  From the corner of her eye Anna saw a waitress approach. “You’re a patient man, Gene Westfall.”

  “I keep telling you there are things in life worth being patient for.”

  The waitress got down to business with a simple “Good evening,” free from any personal introduction—this wasn’t Denver, after all—and took Anna’s order. When Gene inquired about the elk, Anna let her eyes stray over the tables to her right, to the booths along the far wall, and then to the couple sitting in the corner booth.

  Studying with rapt attention the painting above their table, Maddy Gilmartin lifted a hand to smooth her mane of hair. As a child, Anna would have done anything for hair like that. Red, thick, wild. A curious thing for a young child to want. Instead, God had given her brown hair. Not dark brown, not light brown, just brown. It had a nice waviness to it, but that was as special as it got.

  Paul Gilmartin peered over his shoulder for a waiter. Finding none, he poked idly at his water glass. The two sat, not speaking, for the minute Anna watched them. Odd, she thought. Though as Russell had discovered, Maddy and Paul had been married for eighteen years. So was this a comfortable, married silence? Not exactly. Maddy seemed determined not to meet her husband’s eyes.

  Gene followed Anna’s gaze.

  “Maddy and Paul Gilmartin,” she whispered, looking back to him. “From the historical society. Two of the Gang of Four.”

  “Have you decided to take the job?”

  “I’m not sure I can help, but I don’t like the idea of Esther Vance losing her house.”

  “Neither do I. Just be careful. You don’t know any of these people.”

  That was all the stamp of approval Anna needed. The hunt could begin in earnest. “I’d also like to know why Russell Thurman couldn’t find family histories on two society members.” There were any number of reasons Thurman the history professor couldn’t dig up Zoey’s and Paul’s histories. And one of them was that they had been deliberately hidden. First thing in the morning, right after church, she would have another look at the contents of Russell’s envelope.

  “I know that look,” Gene said.

  “I just remembered that Russell gave me copies of three old newspaper articles. I wonder why.”

  4

  In her home office, Anna switched on her computer, removed the papers from Russell’s envelope, and laid them on the keyboard in front of her. She set the genealogies aside and focused on the newspaper articles. As she stared in disbelief at the first article’s headline, a tingle crept down her spine. “Brutal Murder on the Sadler Bee Farm,” it read.

  The article, from the afternoon edition of the Elk Park Herald, was dated November 1, 1983. Anna looked over her shoulder to the office door, thinking for a fraction of a second that she would call for Gene and show him the article. But after church he’d driven off to his father’s house, Jackson and Riley with him, for an afternoon of clearing brush and chopping wood. He knew she’d be diving into the past all day long. She turned back and began to read.

  Sometime between 10:00 p.m. on October 31 and 2:00 a.m. on November 1, 1983, the article stated, a thirty-one-year-old woman name Jennifer Toller was murdered on the grounds of Emerson Sadler’s home in Elk Park, her body found the next morning among the hives of Sadler’s honeybee colony. She had been stabbed eleven times. “Cripes,” Anna said.

  She read the other two articles, skimming them at first for mention of a suspect or arrest, and finding neither. Jennifer’s husband, Peter, Sadler’s head honey maker, was questioned by the police but never charged, though Jennifer’s parents believed he committed the murder. Jennifer’s thirteen-year-old son, Raymond, had found his mother’s body and was briefly hospitalized due to the trauma, and Emerson Sadler was ruled out as a suspect when it was discovered he had spent the night in Denver. The second article ended with a plea from the Elk Park Police for information from the public.

  Anna was eager to ask Liz about the murder. If anyone could find out more, she could. They had talked only briefly at church, Liz saying that she’d uncovered information about Alex and would stop by later in the day to tell her about it.

  Anna pushed aside the papers and typed “Jennifer Toller,” “Elk Park,” and “murder” into a search engine. Only two results came back—both of them one-paragraph case summations on websites listing unsolved Colorado crimes. When removing the quotation marks and changing the search terms didn’t yield additional results, Anna navigated to a genealogy website and searched for a Peter Toller married to a Jennifer, starting with Colorado marriages. A minute later she found what she was looking for.

  Peter Dayton Toller, age eighteen, married Jennifer Bauman, age eighteen, in Elk Park in March 1970. They were practically children, Anna thought. Why marry so young?

  A quick search found the probable reason. Their son, Raymond Dayton Toller, had been born on October 27, seven and a half months after Jennifer and Peter’s marriage. “Shotgun,” Anna said aloud. Someone—Jennifer’s parents or Jennifer herself—had imposed the marriage. Or Peter, acting responsibly, had asked Jennifer to marry him. Though the latter was unlikely, Anna thought. Few eighteen-year-old boys were eager to rope themselves into marriage, even when their actions made marriage a possibility.

  She leaned back in her chair, drumming her knuckles on her desk, considering the articles and the sprinkling of facts she had uncovered. Evidently Russell Thurman thought the murder of Jennifer Toller was connected in some way to the Elk Valley Historical Society, or to the taking of Esther Vance’s house, but Anna couldn’t imagine what that connection might be. Zoey hadn’t been alive at the time of the murder, and Paul and Maddy had probably been too young to commit such a violent crime. It seemed to her that only Alex and Clovis had been old enough to commit murder in 1983, and it was possible neither of them had lived in Elk Park at the time.

  Anna chuckled to herself. Clovis commit murder? But she would have been in her mid-thirties in 1983, Anna guessed, and not the brittle-thin woman she was today. How much strength did it take to drive a knife into human flesh? She shuddered at the thought. But one fact argued against Clovis being the murderer—she knew about the articles and had left them in Russell’s envelope for Anna to read.

  She went back to the genealogy website. It took her fifteen minutes to find the full names and birthdates of Clovis, Alex, and Maddy—all of them born outside Colorado—and to double-check that Russell had been right about Maddy’s maiden name and the date she had married Paul. But a two-hour search through several websites and in numerous databases revealed no record of Paul before his marriage, no Zoey Eberhardt in her twenties or thirties—not anywhere—and no record of a woman with the first name of Zoey who had married a man with the last name of Eberhardt. Anna was stumped. Clovis was right—they didn’t exist.

  Zoey’s absence from birth and marriage records could be explained, Anna thought. She was using her middle name as her first, she was an army brat who had been born overseas, she had recently married and the marriage certificate wasn’t yet in the website’s system—any number of possibilities presented themselves. What was harder to explain was the lack of more recent records. Zoey wasn’t in any Colorado phone book of the past decade, she didn’t pay property taxes, and she wasn’t a registered voter in the county. Anna wondered if she even had a driver’s license.

  Pau
l Gilmartin’s more distant past, prior to his marriage to Maddy, was a similar mystery, but his recent past was an open book. Russell had gotten it right. Before moving to Elk Park, Paul and Maddy had lived on a twelve-thousand-acre ranch in North Cliff, Colorado, near the Wyoming border, and four years ago they’d leased their land to Aim Renewable Energy, a wind-farm company. They weren’t even ranchers, one newspaper article said. After a year of studies, wind-speed measurements, permit wrangling, and legal challenges, and over the vehement opposition of their rancher neighbors, sixty-two wind turbines had been built on a third of their acreage. Another article estimated that the wind farm made the Gilmartins $450,000 a year.

  “No wonder they sold out their neighbors,” Anna mumbled. She cringed inwardly. It was one thing to talk to Jackson, but this talking to herself had to stop. Is this what happened when you lived alone for too long?

  The doorbell rang, shaking Anna from her thoughts. “Enough talking to yourself,” she said as she headed for the door. “Like this. Stop it.” Looking through the peephole, she saw Liz Halvorsen on the doorstep, laptop under one arm, a look of breathless excitement on her face.

  “You won’t believe it,” Liz said the moment the door opened.

  “You found out something about Alex?” Anna asked.

  “Not him.” She strode into the house and wheeled back to face Anna. “Ruby Padilla. She’s dead.”

  “No.” Anna put her back to the door and pushed it shut. “How?”

  “She was murdered, Anna.”

  “What?” Anna followed Liz as she made for the small dining table at the kitchen end of her living room.

  “Her husband found her this morning, in their house.” Liz set her laptop on the table, dropped into a chair, and tossed her purse onto the chair beside her. “I don’t know the details yet—only that she was murdered.” Her friend was charged with energy, her dark brown hair, neatly gathered by a dragonfly hair clip at the back of her head a few hours ago at church, now hanging in unruly tendrils as though she’d just engaged in some strenuous physical activity.

  “What’s happening to Elk Park?” Anna said as she took a seat at the table. “Two murders in two days.”

  “We don’t know when Ruby was killed,” Liz said. “I should find out how and when any moment now, though I’m guessing she was killed sometime before eight o’clock this morning, which is when her husband called her from the Denver airport.” She opened her laptop, sighed wearily, then closed the screen again, slowly lowering it with the palm of her hand. “He was coming back from a business trip. Did you know her at all?”

  “No,” Anna said, her eyes wandering the kitchen as she recalled Ruby—a fiftyish woman with firecracker-red lipstick and nails—at town council meetings. Why had she voted in favor of this involuntary historical designation? It was out of character with her other votes, with her belief that the people of Elk Park were in almost every case best left alone, free to run their own lives. Did her vote have something to do with her death? “She was my councilwoman, but I never saw her outside council meetings.”

  “I didn’t know her either. What a shock it must have been for Mr. Padilla.”

  Anna looked across the table at Liz. “This isn’t a coincidence.”

  “Two murders in the same small town, one right after the other? I doubt it.”

  “It’s not just that. Have you ever heard of Jennifer Toller?” Anna told Liz about the unsolved murder that had taken place on Halloween in 1983, about the eleven stab wounds and how the body was found among the Sadler beehives.

  Liz sat straight in her seat. “And Russell Thurman gave you this information?”

  “Through Clovis, yes. The question is why. What does that murder have to do with the family trees he wanted me to research?” Anna pushed out of her chair, headed into the kitchen, and reached for a bag of hazelnut coffee and a stack of filters in a cabinet above the coffee maker.

  “Great,” Liz said. “I need to stoke the boilers.”

  “We both do.” It was after one o’clock, long past Anna’s self-imposed caffeine cutoff time, but there was research to do. Something was escalating, about to come to a head. Something to do with the past—with murder, buried family histories, and even Halloween. “And why the beehives, Liz?” she said, scooping coffee into a filter. “That’s where Thurman was found too. I don’t understand what Sadler’s beehives have to do with anything.”

  Anna had just switched on the coffee maker when she heard a muffled ring tone. She looked back to see Liz digging into her purse, retrieving first her phone and then her notepad with a pen clipped to it. Liz listened, scribbling away, and after a moment she looked up, found Anna’s eyes, and mouthed the word “stabbed.” A few seconds later Liz held up her right hand, fingers spread wide. Five times. Ruby Padilla had been stabbed five times.

  Anna pulled mugs from a cabinet and a carton of half-and-half from the refrigerator. It was oddly reassuring that Ruby had not suffered eleven stab wounds, though that didn’t mean her murderer was not also Russell’s. A knife was a merciless and personal weapon, and it strained credulity to believe that there were two killers wielding knives in Elk Park. She hoped the first blow of the knife was the only one Ruby had felt, that shock had swiftly robbed her of fear and pain. If not, her death had been an agonizing one.

  Anna heard the clack of Liz’s phone on the table and the sound of her laptop opening. “She was probably murdered late last night or in the very early morning hours,” Liz said. “Won’t know for sure until later.”

  “Clovis,” Anna said, twisting back. “Clovis said she and Esther Vance were going to meet with Ruby yesterday evening.”

  “Did they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should tell the police.”

  “I will.” Anna poured the coffee, tucked the pint of half-and-half into the crook of her elbow, and carried it and the mugs to the table. What if they’d met and Ruby had refused to help Esther? she wondered. Then what? Esther Vance, the elderly widow, restrained Ruby while Clovis murdered her? Or watched while Clovis took Ruby by surprise? It was absurd. And if one person murdered both Russell and Ruby, then Clovis also murdered her friend Russell and thrust a pumpkin onto his head.

  “You keep shaking your head,” Liz said. She blew over the top of her coffee and took a quick sip. “Thinking about Clovis?”

  “Did Ruby have any stab wounds to her back?” As the words left her mouth, Anna felt a chill, a sense that the world was a precarious place where such questions should be, but weren’t, unthinkable.

  “Like Russell, you mean.” Liz patted her open notebook. “Two to her back and three to her chest with a smallish knife. My source didn’t have the blade size yet, but my guess is five inches.”

  Anna sat back and drew in her breath. “Then she was taken by surprise, just like Russell. Which means she had no reason to suspect her killer.”

  “Looks like it.” Liz fell silent, her eyes on Anna. She opened her mouth to speak again but instead reached for her coffee.

  “What is it?” Anna asked.

  Liz ran a finger down and up the mug’s handle, reluctant at first to say what was on her mind. “I don’t want to scare you,” she said at last, “but do you think Russell was trying to tell you that one of the members of the Elk Valley Historical Society is a murderer?”

  “Tell me? No,” Anna said, wrapping her hands around her mug. “He’d tell the police. You don’t report murder to a genealogist.”

  “Oh, Anna, it looks to me like he did just that.”

  Anna considered. What reason did Russell have for adding articles about an unsolved murder to an envelope containing two dead-end genealogies? He couldn’t have been pointing his finger at Zoey or Paul. At the time of the 1983 murder, one hadn’t been born and the other had been too young. And he couldn’t have uncovered a suspect in their hidden family histories. You can’t suspect someone you don’t know to exist. Even if someone in Zoey’s or Paul’s family tree had committe
d the Toller murder, Anna couldn’t see how that would have led to Russell’s death. No one with even half a hold on reality would commit murder because some historian found a murderer in his or her family tree.

  Anna leaned against the chair back, massaging her temples with her hands. “Only Alex and Clovis were old enough to have murdered Jennifer Toller, so why would Russell hire me to research Zoey’s and Paul’s family trees?”

  Liz shook her head slowly, the logic of it escaping her as well. “You’ve got me there,” she said. “But what do you really know about the people in this group? Nothing. And what sort of person teaches demonology? Have you thought about that?”

  “Sure I have.” Anna dropped her hands to the table. “I’ve wondered if Maddy’s serious about her seminar or if it’s just a scheme to make money on the side. Same with Alex.”

  “Does it matter that much? Either way—”

  “If Maddy’s serious, she’s playing with fire.”

  “She could be dangerous.”

  “But I’m working for Clovis now, and I’m not looking into Maddy’s family tree.”

  “You’re working on her husband’s tree. Close enough. And didn’t you tell me Russell had researched some of Maddy’s family tree?”

  “He did.”

  “So maybe you’re focusing on the wrong people in the group.”

  “But he wanted me to research Zoey and Paul.” It immediately occurred to Anna that there was a crucial flaw in their examination of the facts. She and Liz were proceeding as if Russell Thurman had the facts. They were banking on the reliability of his research and interpretation. “Remember,” she said, “Russell also thought he was being watched by members of the group. Maybe his judgment was off.”

  “Paranoid?”

  “Possibly.” Anna had never met the man. There was no way for her to make such an assessment. In fact, she felt a sort of loyalty toward him. He had entrusted her with his research, and one of his last acts on earth had been to write her a check in hopes she’d complete it. “Whether or not he was paranoid, if he had suspected someone in the group, he wouldn’t have been taken off guard at the honey farm.” She downed the rest of her coffee and headed for the kitchen with her mug.