Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3

by Karin Kaufman

  “You OK, Liz?” Anna said, peering over her shoulder.

  “Fine. Dogs are too.”

  “Slow down,” Gene said, “and tell me exactly where we’re going and why.”

  The light went green. Anna drove, in awe of Gene’s patience and humor. If he doesn’t drop me tomorrow, she thought, after this insane night, he probably never will. “The Morgan-Sadler House. I think Paul Gilmartin is going to restage his mother’s sacrifice. We’ve called the police, and naturally they can’t do a thing until something actually happens.”

  “So we’re heading to an uninhabited, somewhat isolated house to stop a madman with a knife from sacrificing his wife?”

  Gene sure had a way of putting things. Anna braked, pulled to the curb, and turned to him. “So what do we do? Paul’s going to kill Maddy tonight, I feel it in my bones. I can’t let what happened to Zoey happen to anyone else.”

  Gene looked over his shoulder to the back seat. “First thing we do is take Liz home.”

  “Now wait a minute—” Liz began.

  “I mean it. Dan can decide to come along or not, but you two need to talk about it first.”

  “I’m a newswoman.”

  “You’re Dan’s wife, and without his knowledge we’re about to drive you to a possible murder scene.”

  “He’s right,” Anna said, watching Liz in the rearview mirror. They were behaving like a couple of teenagers, off on an adventure, no accountability. “Let’s pick up your car first.” Anna pulled another U-turn, this time heading home.

  After making a stop at Anna’s house, Liz headed home in her SUV, Anna and Gene right behind her. At the Halvorsens’ house, Anna parked the Jimmy and waited for word from Liz and Dan. The cold front that seemed to have stalled hours ago was on the move again, the wind picking up, the temperature dropping quickly. Clouds obliterated the moon and sleety rain spattered the windshield. It was a good night to be at home, under a blanket on the couch, watching television. Instead, she had dragged everyone outside to hunt for someone Gene had rightly called a madman.

  “It’s the first of November tomorrow,” Gene said. “All Saints’ Day.” He spoke as though the day held significance for him, but her mind was several miles away, on an old honey farm and a field behind Esther’s house—the only two places she could imagine Paul reenacting his mother’s death. But things were closing in on him. To safely carry out his plans, would he choose another place altogether? No, he wanted to repeat the past. The place of killing was as important to him as the killing itself. But he might easily move up the time. Midnight didn’t matter, as long as it was Halloween.

  “Did you bring your gun?” Gene asked.

  “Under my seat.”

  The Halvorsens’ front door opened, and Dan jogged up to the passenger window as Gene rolled it down. “We’ll follow you in our car,” he said. He was far from enthusiastic, Anna could tell, but Liz had somehow talked him into the adventure. The words “website” and “exclusive” had probably been used. “Keep your phone on in case we get separated. Where are we going?”

  Gene looked to Anna.

  “The Morgan-Sadler House first.” It seemed a less frightening prospect—a house as opposed to an empty field where someone had died the day before—and thus a good first choice for a reluctant travel companion.

  “If we see anyone there, anyone at all, we’ll call the police and let them handle it,” Gene added.

  “Sounds good.” Dan sprinted into his garage and pulled himself behind the wheel of his SUV. As he backed up, Liz pivoted to look out the rear window, giving Anna the thumbs up.

  They headed south on Elk River Road, arriving at the Morgan-Sadler front gate five minutes later. Dan pulled up to Anna’s Jimmy and switched off his headlights.

  “Is the gate locked?” Gene asked.

  “Probably,” she said, sliding down from her seat, “but we can get in through the hedges at the side.”

  She reached for the gun under her seat but Gene got there first. “I know you can handle it, Anna, but let me.” One look at his face and she knew no argument would persuade him. He hid the Ruger beneath his jacket, tucking it under his belt behind his back.

  Anna tugged hard at the front gate. When it didn’t open, she motioned for the three to follow her part way around the house, until they came to the hedges lining the south side. The skies spit rain and snow, seesawing between fall and winter. “Find a spot we can squeeze through,” Anna said, raising her jacket’s zipper to her chin.

  The four of them poked and prodded, at last coming to a dying section of hedge that looked like it had been breached before, probably by kids in the years prior to restoration work. They pushed their way through and crept toward the hives, keeping close to the hedge.

  “That’s the path to the hives,” Liz whispered, coming to a halt and pointing at the flagstones leading to the trees and the hive farm. “I don’t hear anything, do you?”

  “Not a thing,” Dan said.

  They talked in hushed tones, debating whether to go forward. The path leading to the trees was one thing, the darkness beyond the trees was another. What if Paul had brought more than his wife to this place?

  “Could they be in Alex’s field?” Liz asked Anna. “It would make sense to kill her there to get back at Alex too. This is where Paul’s mother betrayed his father.”

  Anna shook her head. “I think he sees them as the same woman. Both queen bees. Besides, he killed Zoey in the field. He doesn’t want to sacrifice Maddy in the same place, I’m sure of it.”

  “I hear something,” Gene said.

  They froze, straining to hear anything above the wind and the leaves.

  “Someone’s groaning,” Gene said.

  “I can’t hear—”

  Gene quieted her with a hand to her arm. She watched his face, hearing nothing but hedge grinding on hedge in the wind.

  At the sound of moaning, her head snapped around. “By the hives,” she breathed.

  “I hear it too,” Liz said.

  “Stay behind me.” Gene circled around Anna and waved Liz back. “Dial 911.”

  Liz pulled her phone from her jacket and hit a quick-dial button.

  “We can’t stop here,” Anna said. “What if he’s about to kill her?” She heard Liz talking quietly to the emergency dispatcher.

  “You two—” Gene began, eyeing Anna and Liz.

  Anna cut him off. “It’s no safer for us to stay here alone. Someone could be near the front of the house.”

  Dan moved alongside Gene. “You and Anna stay behind us,” he said to Liz. Gene pulled the gun from his belt and cut a path for the grove of trees, Anna and Liz bringing up the rear. They crouched low, listening, edging their way through the black branches.

  Another moan cut through the night. A voice waking from a deep sleep, comprehending, more with each second, a looming horror. A man’s voice.

  They broke through the trees and into the clearing, racing for the hives. A moment later Paul and Maddy came into view and Anna froze in disbelief.

  A knife in her hands, Maddy stood over Paul. He groaned again, pushing his legs against a hive, trying to break free from his stupor.

  In a shooter’s stance, Gene raised the Ruger with both hands. “Put it down!”

  Shocked at the sight, Maddy recoiled. She dropped the knife and raised her hands. “I had to,” she said. “He was going to kill me. I pretended to take the pills he gave me then hit him on the head. With that.” She aimed a finger at a shovel on the ground. “I hid it near a hive in case I ever needed it.”

  It was a well-rehearsed speech. Thought out, way too detailed for someone who had just stared down her own death.

  “God, help me,” she cried suddenly, falling to her knees. “He was going to kill me like he killed Russell and Zoey. He told me how he killed them.”

  Paul groaned again, louder this time, raising a hand to his bloody head. “Get her away,” he said, his speech slurred by the blow he had taken.

 
“He even brought paint!” she cried, finger to her forehead. “He was going to put it right here.”

  “Stay on your knees,” Gene instructed Maddy.

  “Of course,” she said. She began to cry softly, her gaze traveling slowly, from Gene to Anna to Dan and Liz, making sure they all saw her, the wife who had only done what she had to do to survive.

  My God, what an actress, Anna thought. Ham-fisted and manipulative, but she never turned it off. Even earlier tonight, when she had pleaded for help, knowing that Anna would refuse—but what cover that pleading provided her. If called to testify, Anna would have to admit that Maddy had told her Alex was afraid of Paul. And yes, Mr. Defense Attorney, Maddy seemed afraid of Paul too.

  The police responded speedily to Liz’s phone call, reaching the hives minutes after Maddy bowed in surrender. On seeing them, she cried louder and more pitifully, her long red nails trembling on her red lips.

  An officer hoisted her from the ground and led her to a waiting police car.

  “Thank you,” she said, clutching at Gene as she passed by. “Thank you for saving me.” She stumbled in the wet grass and steadied herself on the officer’s strong arm. “But officer, my husband. Could you . . . ?”

  When the officer looked back to Paul, Maddy set her sights on Anna, her voice at a whisper. “I told you it wasn’t enough to divorce him.”

  22

  Anna woke early to the sound of autumn leaves blowing against the window. Dirt and twigs, too, by the sound of it, and whatever else the first of November was hurling at her house. Bone dry. The wind had whipped up again, evaporating the few drops of rain and sleet that had fallen last night.

  She clutched a pillow to her chest. Jackson, thinking she was about to get up, raised his head, ready to begin the day. “No boy, not yet.”

  Gene had told her about his idea the night before, as she drove him from the police station to his car behind Buckhorn’s. Exhausted, her spirits low, she had agreed. Having sat with him and the Halvorsens at the station until one o’clock in the morning, she hadn’t had the energy to tell him no.

  It would cheer her up, he’d promised. Before the snow came, before Esther left Clovis’s house and returned home, they would clean up Esther’s yard. Pick up the glass, mow the lawn. Anna had told him how Esther couldn’t keep up with it all, so what could feel better after such a night? Besides, he reminded her, there was no one to help Clovis now that Zoey was gone. Anna’s eyes squeezed shut. And he’d promised that after they finished, they would head to the Buffalo for hot coffee.

  She buried her face in the pillow. She didn’t want to rise from her warm bed and face the day, much less clean and mow someone’s yard. But Gene was probably right, and when they had finished their work and were sitting with hot pumpkin lattes in the café, she’d be glad.

  She flung back the comforter and swung her feet to the floor. The only way to deal with a day like this was to move forward, not think too much about it. The events of last night were heavy on her heart. She could still hear Maddy’s taunt. I told you.

  Maddy knew Paul had killed Russell and Zoey—had he told her that or had she been with him when he’d murdered them? She’d almost murdered Paul, and if she’d succeeded in killing him, she would have claimed self-defense and gotten away with it. Just as she was doing now. With her testimony, if you could call it that, Paul was going to prison for the rest of his life. Alex, who had kept his hands clean, would be freed after a short investigation. And with Ruby dead, it would never be discovered that he, or Maddy, blackmailed her.

  Anna slipped on a pair of Wranglers, a black mock turtleneck, and a thick pair of socks before heading into the cold kitchen to make coffee for herself and breakfast for Jackson. She let her dog out the sliding glass door and he sniffed cautiously at the plastic pumpkin head still caught in the shrub.

  The doorbell rang as she was scooping coffee into a filter. Gene was on time, she was running late. “Hey,” she said as she opened the door.

  He took her in his arms and kissed her on the forehead, the sort of kiss you gave a small, injured child, and Riley bounded past him and up to Jackson. “Don’t make me cry,” she said. “Want some coffee?”

  “To go. I want to get there before Esther does.”

  “Leave the dogs?” she said, grabbing a Thermos.

  “I think so.”

  Minutes later they headed out to his SUV, Anna catching sight of a lawnmower handle protruding from his rear window. “Hard to believe it, but it fit,” he said.

  As he drove for Bonner Street, she watched as houses, fields, and shops passed by her window. The past two cold nights had killed off the town’s sturdier autumn flowers. Everything was in collapse—dry and drying, hugging the ground, preparing for winter snows.

  She had thought that Alex had conspired with Paul to trap Maddy and make her his sacrifice, but probably, almost certainly, it had been the other way around. Now Alex and Maddy would be free of Paul and at last get their candy. Together they’d celebrate in the field and in the Morgan-Sadler House, Alex’s hive. It wasn’t that she felt pity for Paul—he was a madman and a killer—but Maddy and Alex would skate, and they must have known from the beginning that Paul had killed Russell. But they said nothing, did nothing.

  Then Zoey died. And they knew Paul had killed her too, probably because Alex told him who she really was. Paul, the psychotic lunatic. He had confessed, Schaeffer told her. And then he’d screamed that Russell and Zoey, busybodies who stuck their noses where they didn’t belong, had deserved to die. Zoey received the mark of the bee, Russell the crown of Halloween, fit for a fool.

  And his filthy mother had deserved to die, Paul said. He told all, “vomited” his confession, as Liz’s contact put it. Every detail, every new and decades-old perversion of his mind—and Liz wrote it all down before they left the station. Jennifer Toller hadn’t had an affair with Emerson Sadler, Paul had said with glee. She’d been raped by him. No wonder Sadler never went to the police with his suspicions about Peter. An innocent girl. Raped by a middle-aged occultist who then told a teenaged devotee, another occultist drawn to bees, that he’d had an affair with the girl and he’d give him money, lots of it, to marry her and keep his mouth shut about whose baby she was carrying. Jennifer wanted to keep her baby, and to do that, she needed money, so she’d agreed.

  Only Peter Toller didn’t keep his mouth shut. He told Walter Root, the man whose place he took on the honey farm, and Walter wanted his cut. After all, he was fired so Peter could be hired. In the end, in his own strange way, Sadler got back at Peter by having a glassmaker tell the story of Jennifer’s murder. He didn’t care about Jennifer. All he wanted to do was punish Peter for talking.

  Thirteen years after their marriage, Peter found out that his wife’s supposed affair was in truth ugly rape. She told him what Sadler had done to her, expecting only sympathy in return. But her rape meant nothing to Peter. That she had mated with another was all that mattered. Peter told his son Raymond who and what he was—the product of a straying queen bee—then had him watch as he ritually slaughtered Jennifer. What could he do? She’d swarmed, taking the honey with her. The hives were dying.

  “If you’d rather not go, that’s OK,” Gene said, putting a hand on her arm.

  “No, no,” Anna said, forcing a smile. “It’s a great idea. I’m glad we’re doing it. It’ll brighten Esther’s day.”

  Given the chance, Paul would have killed Maddy, just as he had killed Russell and Zoey. He wanted a new, loyal queen bee. But before he could act, Alex and Maddy set a trap of their own. Anna realized she had been wrong all along, about most things. But then, she’d been lied to, even by Zoey.

  “It’s just hard to be in a cheery mood,” she said. She straightened in her seat. “Poor Zoey. Twenty-nine years old. She was trying to right a wrong and ended up being killed, all because someone she knew nothing about was killed decades ago. Does that make sense to you?”

  “None at all.”

  She watched
Gene drive. He often was a man of few words, especially when mere words wouldn’t do and trying to explain the inexplicable was futile.

  As they neared Esther’s house, Anna saw Clovis’s car parked in the driveway. She and Gene were too late. The ladies were back. And there was another car, a black Explorer, at the curb.

  Gene pulled up to the Explorer and shut off the engine. “Let’s do this anyway. We’ll get started before she can object.” He stopped her before she could pop open the door. “We can never see the whole picture, Anna. You have to trust God.”

  “I know,” she said. Though knowing that was true and feeling the truth of it in her heart were sometimes two very different things.

  Grunting with the effort, Gene hauled the lawnmower from his SUV, set it on the street, and dragged it to the curb. Anna pulled a roll of trash bags from the back seat, stopping to look back at the house, hoping Esther would ignore any noise she heard until Gene had the mower going and could pretend not to hear her protests. Too late again. Esther was on her porch, waving them in, and soon she was joined by Clovis.

  Leaving the bags on the SUV’s seat, Anna trudged with Gene to the front door. He’d stop for just a moment, he told her under his breath, but then it was mowing time.

  “We’re so glad you’re here,” Clovis said, her thin arms fluttering with excitement.

  “Come in, come in,” Esther said. “And you, are you Anna’s young man?”

  Gene grinned. “I’m not sure about the young part.”

  “But he’s my man, yes,” Anna said, glancing over her shoulder at him as she crossed the threshold into Esther’s living room.

  “Here we go,” Esther said, walking sprightly, if stiffly, to a man sitting in an armchair by her fireplace. “Please, can you begin again? That way I won’t have to remember everything.”

  The man rose and extended a hand toward Gene, introducing himself as Gavin Adams. He took Anna’s hand too, then gestured for everyone to sit. Anna took the last of the four chairs, and Gene stood next to her, reassuring Gavin when he scanned the living room for another seat. “No problem, I’m fine here.”