What she needed, in fact, was to return to the Morgan-Sadler House. She’d hardly glanced at Emerson Sadler’s crated books in the library, and it was conceivable that they held the answers to some of her questions. Anyway, filling in the missing leaves of a family tree meant methodically gathering and recording facts, no matter how small or insignificant they seemed, and her scattershot approach had yielded little in the way of valuable information. She decided to call Clovis in the morning and ask to visit the house again.
“One more thing,” Liz said. “And this information has to stay here. If it gets out, it will come back to my contact.”
“Of course,” Dan said.
Liz looked troubled, Anna thought. Gone was the calm detachment with which she’d discussed even Ruby Padilla’s autopsy. Whatever her contact had told her, she needed to share the burden of its discovery.
“It’s not in any of the newspaper accounts of Jennifer Toller’s murder,” Liz went on, “but the police report states her death appeared to be a ritual sacrifice of some kind. The case was never closed, so that fact has been kept secret all these years.”
The room fell silent. Liz took a breath and continued.
“There were circles of red paint on Jennifer’s forehead and upper back.” She paused and looked pointedly at Anna. “And a red circle on the hive closest to her body.”
Anna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was it possible the red circle she’d seen on the hive yesterday afternoon was paint, not blood? That would explain its too-perfect shape and why the rain hadn’t washed it away. It seemed that Russell Thurman’s killer had mimicked the Toller murder in ways only Jennifer Toller’s killer could know.
“Other than the paint, what made the police think her death was part of a ritual?” Gene asked.
“As she was dying, her arms and legs were tied to the ground with tent spikes,” Liz said. “Her arms were cut, about here.” She ran her index finger in a diagonal from her shoulder to the inside of her elbow. “Not deeply, but both arms were cut exactly the same. And a jack-o’-lantern was placed next to her head.”
“The police never solved this?” Dan said.
“The killer’s probably long gone from Elk Park,” Liz said. “Or dead. This was 1983, after all.”
Anna didn’t share Liz’s confidence—if Liz even believed what she was saying. More likely she was trying to reassure Dan, letting him know that it was safe for her to be involved in the case, since there was no way she was going to drop it.
“This is the weirdest part,” Liz went on. “Jennifer had bee pollen in her hair, and her mouth was smeared with royal jelly, a secretion from the glands of worker bees. An ordinary bee becomes a queen when she feeds on large amounts of it.”
“I’ve seen bottles of that in health-food stores,” Gene said.
Liz dug into her jeans and produced a small slip of paper. “There’s a color-coding system beekeepers use to mark their queens so they can find them and keep track of how old they are. The color used depends on the year,” she said, reading from the paper. “Blue for years ending in zero, white for years ending in 1, yellow for years ending in 2, and so on. In 1983, the color for new queens was red.”
Anna listened with dawning horror. Jennifer Toller had been marked as a queen bee then slaughtered. Some sick soul had gone to great lengths to devise a ritual around her murder. Bees and Halloween? She had never read of such a pairing in any ritual—pagan, demonic, satanic. This was the personal creation of a madman, or woman. “The color coding—that’s from the police report?” she asked.
“Right,” Liz said. “The police interviewed her husband, Peter, and he told them about the code.” She turned to Dan. “He was head of Sadler’s honey facility,” she explained. “They even interviewed Walter Root, the previous head. Both used dabs of color to mark their queens, and Walter said he sometimes clipped their wings to keep them in the hives.”
Anna reflexively touched her upper arm. “The cuts.”
Liz only nodded.
“Does the police report say what the purpose of the ritual was?” Gene asked. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
“The bee colony was in decline that year,” Liz replied. “A sociologist hired by the department speculated that Jennifer’s death was supposed to return the colony to health and increase honey production, and it was performed about midnight on Halloween because the killer was also involved in the occult.”
“Insanity.” Gene wearily rubbed his jaw.
“That would suggest Emerson Sadler was involved,” Anna said. “He had the most to lose from a drop in honey production.”
“Peter Toller had his job to lose,” Liz said.
Insanity is right, Anna thought. Being so obsessed with bees that you murdered for them. What nagged at her now, more than Jennifer’s murder, was its similarity to Russell Thurman’s murder. Was Russell’s killer equally obsessed with bees? And had she met the four leading suspects in his murder last Saturday, during her talk at Alex Root’s house? Zoey claimed to be bored with bees, but on Tuesday she and Liz had caught her walking to the hives in the company of Alex. Liz was right. It was all a jumble. How she hated unsolved puzzles.
Anna was silent, looking out the window as Gene drove down Black Bear Road. Tired and stuffed pleasantly to the brim with Liz’s dinner, neither of them had spoken since saying goodnight to Liz and Dan. They’d come to a comfortable stage in their relationship where they could pass several hours together and say no more than “Want some coffee?” Anna knew couples who dreaded that stage. She cherished it, feeling no need to fill the contented silences with noise. Though part of her was itching to fill this silence and ask Gene if he had understood the significance of her agreeing with him the other night. Yes, she had said, they needed only one house.
“I agree.” What to her had been a monumental statement of transformation, long fought for and a long time in coming, was just two words, after all. Easy to miss. And so what if he had heard and understood her? Why should he jump like a happy puppy over her belated acknowledgment? There were two options as she saw it. Either he hadn’t understood and she would have to make herself clearer, or he had understood but he felt no need to respond, at least for now.
On Black Bear they had passed half a dozen houses decorated full bore for Halloween—strings of orange lights and bodies made from old clothes stuffed with leaves, most of them hanging from nooses and lit by front porch lights. The holiday used to mark the change in seasons, the harvest, but now it celebrated death. What was it Maddy had said? Asmodeus harvests. What in the world had she meant by that? Paul had shushed her. Quiet now. Had that all been for show? A verbal form of Maddy’s tattoo, meant to shock the uninitiated? How serious was Maddy’s love of demons? The woman was deluded, that was clear, but was she devoted to Asmodeus? And how far would she take that devotion?
“I’m going to call Clovis tomorrow morning, see if I can get another tour of the Morgan-Sadler House,” Anna said.
Gene swung right onto Bighorn Street. “Not by yourself, I hope.”
“I’ll ask Clovis to stay with me. She won’t mind.”
“You promised not to be alone with any of them.”
“I didn’t mean Clovis. If she wanted to hurt me, she would have by now. She’s had ample opportunity. Besides, the woman’s so frail I could take her with one hand tied behind my back.”
Gene wasn’t buying her breezy attitude.
“Gene, Clovis is the one who hired me. She’s paying me to do what I’m doing, and she can’t stand the other group members.” Anna didn’t dilute the strength of her argument by mentioning that Clovis carried a gun in her purse. If Gene asked her to stay away from Clovis, she’d have to give his request serious consideration—and she didn’t want to do that. She had reached a point in her research, a familiar point, where curiosity overcame caution and solving the puzzle became paramount.
“We just heard about a woman who was killed in a ritual sacrifice at that house,�
�� Gene said.
“In 1983.”
“You really want to argue with me on this?”
“So come with me tomorrow.”
“You know I can’t. Why don’t you ask Liz?”
“I can’t keep asking her to follow me around. Anyway, I’ve got a job to do too. You may not like it, but it’s important to me.”
“Haven’t you found what you needed to find?”
“But I haven’t helped Esther, and now her house belongs to Zoey.”
“Damn!” Gene slammed on the brakes and flung his right arm outward. It did no good. Anna lurched forward and struck the dashboard arms first, crying out in her surprise.
“Anna!” Gene threw the SUV into park, took hold of her shoulders, and gently leaned her against the seat back. “Did you hit your head? Let me see.”
“Just my arms. So stupid, I forgot my seat belt. What happened?”
A dark figure moved outside the windshield.
“That happened.”
Gene went for the door handle, but Anna pulled him back. “Don’t,” she said.
Standing a foot from the hood of Gene’s SUV was a man clad in black, a plastic jack-o’-lantern over his head. He laughed and joggled his head from side to side, the pumpkin bobbling. “Sorry, man,” he shouted. “Can’t see too good.”
“Unbelievable.” Gene opened the door, sending the man racing across the street. At the curb the man spun back and waved before disappearing down an alleyway between houses.
14
“The house is so quiet, I’m glad to have the company today,” Clovis said as she opened the door to the library at the Morgan-Sadler House. Gesturing with her arms, she presented the room once more, this time for Liz’s benefit. “Jacob Morgan’s library,” she announced.
“It’s lovely,” Liz said appreciatively. “Oh look, there’s more stained glass.”
After the incident the night before with the pumpkin-headed man, Gene had insisted on staying with Anna an hour, checking her arms for any nascent bruises before driving home. She didn’t have the heart to worry a man like that. And so, without him saying another word on the subject, she had agreed to ask Liz to tag along with her once more. Fortunately, Liz was more than happy to, since she’d seen little of the inside of the old house.
Anna explained her friend’s presence by telling Clovis she needed help cataloguing the books, and she was grateful Clovis didn’t ask what Sadler’s books had to do with her genealogical research into Zoey’s and Paul’s family trees. Russell had spent time with the books, researching Alex and the others, and that seemed enough for Clovis.
Anna opened her purse on the library table, pulled out a cold can of Diet Coke, and handed it to Clovis. “In case you get thirsty,” she said.
Clovis’s eyes lit up. “That’s just the ticket, thank you.”
It occurred to Anna that even store-brand colas were expensive these days and that to Clovis, who clearly loved her pop, a can of Coke was like a flute of champagne. She didn’t seem to have much more money than Esther—her frayed and make-do clothes were testament to that.
“I need to check on the refinishing and wallpaper removal upstairs, so I’ll leave you to it,” Clovis said. With a backward glance she paused at the door, laying her hand on the jamb. “I wouldn’t put it past some of the other members to show up. So if you hear anything . . .” She smiled unconvincingly and let her words trail off.
“Can I ask you something, Clovis?” Anna said, lifting a short stack of books from a crate and carrying it to the library table.
“Of course.”
“What do you know about the Jennifer Toller murder in 1983?”
Clovis threw her head back. “Oh, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” She swung back into the room, took a chair at the library table, and popped the tab on her Coke. “I thought about it last night.”
“Why?” Anna asked.
“For one thing, it was important to Russell for some reason. Remember the articles? For another, it’s Halloween tomorrow.”
“Halloween has me worried,” Anna said.
“You too? I thought Esther had rubbed off on me and I was overreacting.”
As Liz continued to lift books from the crates and pile them on the table, Anna pulled out a chair and sat opposite from Clovis. “Is Esther at your house?”
“She agreed to stay with me through the first of November.” Clovis took a long, slow gulp from the can.
“Good, I’m glad.”
“Except for Halloween night, between six and nine.”
Great. “Trick-or-treaters?”
“I couldn’t talk her out of it. She’s always given out candy on Halloween. But I’ll pick her up at nine and she’ll spend the night at my house.”
That’s not good enough, Anna wanted to say. She wanted to shake Clovis and warn her about this thing. It was lying in wait, gaining strength. Didn’t she feel it? Her friend was in danger. Esther was a widow, after all. Not like Anna—not a young, self-sufficient widow who could make her own money and handle a chain saw—but one twice her age. Vulnerable.
Maybe she’d talk to Esther on her own, Anna thought, coax her into foregoing Halloween this year. Clovis and her skepticism offset Esther’s natural fear, and vice versa. Each withdrew from her own end of the teeter-totter and moved to the middle, and in this instance, the middle was not the best place to be. Esther needed to listen to her fear.
“That reminds me,” Clovis said. “Zoey asked me to tell you that she’s called off her Halloween party. She’d invited Esther and me. Of course, Esther has the trick-or-treaters, so she wasn’t planning to go.”
“Why did Zoey call it off?”
“She said she had something to do. I didn’t ask.”
“That’s odd. Why wouldn’t she call me? She couldn’t have known I’d run into you.”
Clovis waved a hand. “That’s Zoey for you. Scatterbrained.”
Liz quietly set stack after stack of books on the table, keeping her eyes low, creating a soothing rhythm in the room while remaining inconspicuous.
“I was interested in what Esther said about Emerson Sadler having his eye on Jennifer Toller,” Anna said. She sat back, waiting for Clovis’s reaction.
Clovis crossed one thin leg over another. “I remember hearing talk about that after Jennifer was killed. It was never more than a rumor as far as I know, but rumors have a way of being true.”
“You lived in Elk Park at the time?”
“I have since my marriage in 1978.”
“Your husband—”
“Died almost five years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Luckily, our house was paid off, and as long as I’m careful, I get by. Esther has six years left on her mortgage and very little income.”
“I can understand why she wanted to sell her house.”
“Zoey didn’t even ask for an inspection before signing the papers.”
“That’s strange.” A dicey move, Anna thought. Zoey would have no way of knowing the condition of the house’s bones—the wiring, plumbing, foundation, roof. She remembered how Esther had explained a thudding sound inside the walls as “the pipes” and realized that rather than make a killing on the house, Zoey might lose money.
“It saved Esther a lot of time and worry,” Clovis said before taking another gulp from her can.
Anna made a mental note to bring two cans with her the next time she saw Clovis. “About Jennifer Toller’s murder.”
Clovis arched her eyebrows, waiting.
“It seems like most people at the time thought her husband did it.”
“Jennifer’s parents thought so.”
“Did anyone suspect her son Raymond?”
“No,” Clovis said with a frown. “Raymond was the one who found Jennifer—it was a terrible thing.”
“And Emerson Sadler was in Denver when the murder happened?”
“At a fancy Halloween ball, if I remember right.” She made a face, not
ing the irony.
“I’ve got another question,” Anna said, her eyes moving from Clovis to Liz. If she was wrong and Clovis was as crazy as the Gang of Four, her question could open a dangerous can of worms. But time was running short, and it was a risk she’d have to take. “I wouldn’t ask, but this might have a bearing on what Russell was looking into.”
“How are you doing on that?” Clovis asked. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward across the table, as though she’d suddenly become aware that the family trees she had paid for were nowhere to be seen.
“I’m almost done,” Anna said. She exhaled and plunged ahead, deciding to tell as much as she could without explicitly revealing Paul’s and Zoey’s identities. “The thing is,” Anna went on, “I found Zoey and Paul—I mean, who they really are.”
Clovis snapped to attention. “I had no idea. Who are they, then?”
“I can’t tell you that right now.”
“But I paid to find out.”
“Yes, you did, but there are confidences I can’t break. At least not yet.” She had researched Zoey’s and Paul’s real family trees last night, going back just one generation. Russell had been curious about their seeming nonexistence, not about their ancestors. Both Zoey and Paul had led tragic lives. Zoey’s parents had died young—her mother when Zoey was only eleven—and she had no siblings. Paul’s father had disappeared not long after his mother had been murdered, and Paul too had no siblings Anna could find. Or uncles. He did have one elderly aunt who, like him, had grown up in Colorado, but sometime in the 1980s or early 1990s Nancy Carlson had moved to Maine, putting about as much space as possible between herself and her Colorado memories.
“Well, honestly . . .” Clovis looked down at her sweater sleeve and began picking at the pills, her lips pursing and unpursing. “I do think I’m owed.”
Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3 Page 66
