Footprints to Murder

by Marcia Talley

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Marcia Talley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Recent Titles by Marcia Talley

  The Hannah Ives Mysteries Series

  SING IT TO HER BONES

  UNBREATHED MEMORIES

  OCCASION OF REVENGE

  IN DEATH’S SHADOW

  THIS ENEMY TOWN

  THROUGH THE DARKNESS

  DEAD MAN DANCING *

  WITHOUT A GRAVE *

  ALL THINGS UNDYING *

  A QUIET DEATH *

  THE LAST REFUGE *

  DARK PASSAGE *

  TOMORROW’S VENGEANCE *

  DAUGHTER OF ASHES *

  FOOTPRINTS TO MURDER *

  * available from Severn House

  FOOTPRINTS TO MURDER

  Marcia Talley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Marcia Talley.

  The right of Marcia Talley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8646-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-756-2 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-822-3 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  This one is for Sherriel Mattingly

  ‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice.

  ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.’

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks, always, to my husband, Barry, who is grateful that he didn’t have to accompany me on any of the peculiar research trips for this one.

  Thanks also to my daughters Laura Geyer and Sarah Glass, who know where all the bodies are buried and love me anyway.

  Kudos to Leah Solat whose winning bid at a benefit auction for the Annapolis Opera Company bought her the right to play a character in this book. I hope that journalism is a refreshing change from presiding over non-profit organizations.

  A special shout-out to my Oberlin College classmate, Cecelia Cloughly, who rose to the challenge and contributed generously to the Martin Luther King Internship Fund established by our class, hoping to be ‘bumped off’ in this novel. I apologize, in advance, for what I did to your French horn.

  A tip of the hat to my friend and colleague, ‘Cop Robin’ Burcell, who graciously agreed to share her talent as a forensic artist with the attendees at my fictitious Sasquatch Sesquicentennial.

  1,000,000 thanks to my colleagues in the Writers’ Circle in Hope Town on Elbow Cay in the Bahamas, and to my partners in crime back in Annapolis, Maryland: Becky Hutchison, Mary Ellen Hughes, Debbi Mack, Shari Randall, Bonnie Settle and especially to Sherriel Mattingly, who will know why. They read it all first.

  I’m grateful to Nan Fulton and Cindy Merrill, the ‘Front Street Boutique Girls,’ who put their stamp of approval on the title.

  Hugs to Kate Charles and Deborah Crombie, dearest friends, confidantes and advisors. What would I do without FaceTime?

  And, of course, to Vicky Bijur.

  ‘How like a hateful ape,

  Detected grinning ’midst his pilfered hoard,

  A cunning man appears, whose secret frauds

  Are opened to the day!’

  Joanna Baillie, Basil, A Tragedy, Act 5, Scene III

  ONE

  November 8, 1721. ‘The first night I lay in this habitation, there was a great alarm at nine at night. I inquired the cause of it and they told me there was in the neighborhood a beast of an unknown species, of a monstrous size, and the cry of which resembled no animal that we knew … It had already carried off some sheep and calves and killed some cows.’

  Pierre-Francois Xavier de Charlevoix, Historical Journal, Historical Collections of Louisiana. Pt. III. NY, D. Appleton, 1851, pp. 157–159

  The French thought a lot about the past. Guillaume Apollinaire hibernated in it, as I recall, while Marcel Proust had a good, 3000-page wallow while writing A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

  Me, I was driving west toward my past along Ohio Route 511, heading for Oberlin College and my fortieth class reunion. Past the Auto & Tire Works, past the IGA Foodliner, past the Lorain Laundramat where – what was his name, the waiter from Dascomb Hall? – took me on a date in the first semester of my freshman year. Perhaps he had found it romantic sharing a dryer – his tightie whities tangled up in my bra straps. I’ll never know. We never progressed to date two.

  After Tappan Square, I turned right on North Professor Street and slowed, looking for a dorm that hadn’t existed during my time at Oberlin: Kahn Hall. I would have had to be blind to miss it – a huge crimson-and-gold banner was draped over the entrance: Welcome Class of 1975. How could it have been that long? I thought as I pulled into a driveway between Kahn and the next building. A student wearing an orange vest popped up from a folding chair, balanced her iPad mini on her forearm and directed me to a parking lot behind the dorm where I slotted my Volvo into a spot in the shade. After fluffing my recently lightened curls and refreshing my lipstick in the visor mirror, I collected my wheelie bag from the trunk and m
ade my way back toward the dorm where I’d be staying. According to the reunion brochure, the modern building was totally dedicated to energy sustainability.

  A classmate I didn’t immediately recognize was in the lobby to greet me, printed nametags spread out in alphabetical order on the long table in front of her. ‘Hannah Alexander!’ she chirped. ‘Gosh, I love your hair!’

  I grinned, taking a split second to steal a glance at the nametag she wore, hoping she wouldn’t notice. ‘Candy,’ I chirped as memories flooded back, ‘so good to see you again.’

  Candace Peters and I had been lab partners in Biology 101. Back then she’d been a fluffy, petite blonde who’d created a sensation by walking into Wilder Hall student union flaunting the first pair of hot pants most of us had ever seen. The woman handing over my nametag now had pink-blonde hair cut in a neatly-layered bob and – judging from the rolls of fat circling her abdomen – had long-ago lost the battle of the bulge. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ she said.

  I laughed out loud. Candy was such a liar! In 1975 I subdued my shoulder-length curls with a hot iron, parted my hair in the middle and flicked it out on the sides like one of Charlie’s Angels. The thumbnail graduation photo printed on my nametag attested to that fact. I was much more wash-and-wear these days.

  On the wall behind Candy’s head, a glass dome-covered porthole had been glowing green. As she handed me my nametag holder and a reunion information packet, the dome turned red. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, gesturing toward the porthole with my free hand. ‘Is the ship going down?’

  ‘Oh, that!’ she sniffed, glancing quickly back over her shoulder. ‘It monitors the energy efficiency of the building. When it turns red …’ She shrugged. ‘Everyone’s flushing toilets at the same time, I’d guess.’

  ‘A lot of folks already here, then?’ I asked as I slipped my nametag into the plastic holder and looped the cord over my head. ‘Sorry to say, I haven’t kept up with many of my classmates since graduation but I’m hoping to catch up with my roommate, Susan Lockley.’ I ran my hand along the tabletop, scanning the nametags, but the space between ‘Lindsay’ and ‘Loring’ was empty.

  Candy squinted at a checklist attached to a clipboard. ‘Susan? Yeah. She checked in early this morning.’

  ‘Can you tell me what room she’s in?’

  ‘Says here she’s staying at the La Quinta in Elyria.’ Candy looked up. ‘I can give you the phone number there if you want.’

  I smiled and waited as she wrote the number down for me on an Oberlin College Post-it note. The La Quinta, I knew, was a good twenty miles away, near the Cleveland Hopkins airport. Not everyone longs for the good old days of dorm living, I supposed.

  After thanking Candy and promising to see her later, I dragged my suitcase up to the second floor, down the hall and through the door of the room that would be my home for the next three days – a student double, simply furnished with utilitarian blond-on-blond furniture. I opened my suitcase on the spare bed, retrieved my toiletry bag, then – thinking about the unisex bathroom I’d be sharing with others halfway down the hall – wished that I’d checked into the La Quinta, too.

  From the semi-comfort of an ergonomically correct desk chair, I sent an ‘arrived safely’ text to my husband, a message he’d get whenever he and the Naval Academy training sloop he was chaperoning came within range of a cell-phone tower. Last I heard, the forty-four foot Resolute was offshore, somewhere between Cape May, New Jersey and Halifax, Nova Scotia, so it could be days before my message popped up in Paul’s inbox.

  Then I called Susan. She wasn’t in her room, so I left my cell-phone number and asked her to call me back.

  I was strolling across Tappan Square toward Gibson’s Bakery where I’d hopefully still be able to connect with a tall cappuccino and a worship-worthy peanut-butter brownie when Susan texted me. ‘Excited! See you at the president’s reception tonight?’

  ‘You bet,’ I texted back. Then added as an afterthought: ‘I’ll be wearing a red rose in my lapel and carrying a rolled-up New York Times.’

  ‘Goofball,’ she texted. ‘FB!’

  I’d looked up Susan on Facebook, too, so I knew that she lived in Issaquah, just east of Seattle, and was owner/manager of Scarborough Fairs, a conference management and event planning service. She had no private Facebook page, so whether there was still a Mister Lockley in the picture or a passel of successful Lockley children and darling grands would have to wait until we reconnected later that evening.

  Marvin Krislov, like Oberlin college presidents before him since 1927, lived in a symmetrical, Flemish bond, two-and-a-half-story Georgian Revival home on Forest Street. As guests wandered in from points all over campus, college staff herded them down the driveway to a party tent in the backyard where wine, beer and hors d’oeuvres would keep the alumni happy until the speeches began later on. I went through the receiving line, perma-grin firmly in place, grabbed a glass of pinot grigio, some shrimp and something wrapped in bacon on a toothpick and merged with the crowd. I was nibbling on a cold shrimp, in deep discussion with John Congdon from the college development office about Oberlin’s recent crowd-funding efforts, when someone boomed, ‘Hannah Alexander!’

  Still holding the toothpick, I turned.

  The same abundant hair, now unnaturally blond. Same boyish face. Same straight, impossibly white teeth. I didn’t have to check the guy’s nametag to remember the jerk who was leering at me: Duane Edward Becker. We’d gone out a couple of times during our sophomore year. After a movie at the Apollo one evening I’d made the mistake of allowing him to kiss me goodnight. The next thing I knew, his hand had been snaking under my sweater, crawling up my back and skillfully unhooking my bra. One well-aimed knee had cut him off in mid-grope and we hadn’t seen each other, except in passing, since.

  ‘Duane,’ I chirped. ‘Have you met John Congdon?’ I sent a wide-eyed, semi-desperate look to John, who picked up my SOS immediately.

  ‘Duane,’ he oozed, extending his hand and drawing the guy aside. ‘Can’t tell you how much the college appreciates your support.’ He turned to me, a co-conspirator’s grin lighting his face. ‘Thanks to Duane, the Columbus Greater Medical Center is now matching charitable contributions.’

  ‘So, what do you do at the Columbus Greater Medical Center?’ I asked, genuinely curious. With his thousand-dollar suit and boyish, Botoxed good looks, I figured he had to be somebody important.

  ‘I’m Chief of Obstetrics and Gynecology,’ Duane said.

  That figured.

  ‘There’s somebody I’d like you to meet,’ Congdon said then turned to me, his eyes twinkling behind his wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Please excuse us, Hannah.’ He seized Duane gently by the arm and steered him off into the crowd.

  I snagged another shrimp from a passing server and made a mental note to up my annual donation to Oberlin College by at least a hundred dollars.

  Over the course of my chat with John Congdon, my wine glass had grown mysteriously empty. I wandered over to the bar for a top up, then stationed myself near the receiving line, slowly sipping, waiting for Susan to show.

  I didn’t wait long. A white-haired woman dressed in navy slacks topped off by a festive, multicolored embroidered jacket was being efficiently passed from hand to hand along the receiving line. My college roommate still showed her love of all things Southwest in the turquoise and silver barrette that secured her shoulder-length hair to one side.

  ‘Hey, you,’ I said as she finished running the gauntlet.

  ‘Hannah! You look wonderful!’ Susan hugged me so hard that wine sloshed out of my glass and ran down my hand. ‘Sorry,’ she said as she released me.

  ‘No damage done,’ I told her, shaking my hand dry. ‘That’s why I drink white. Grab a glass for yourself and let’s find a place to sit down.’ While Susan waited in line for her wine I piled a plate high with cheese, crackers and cut-up vegetables then joined her at a table not far from the exit.

  I brought her up to date on my family
. Paul was still teaching math at the US Naval Academy and our daughter Emily’s spa, Paradiso, was an unqualified success. There had been a Mister Lockley, I learned – Harold – but he passed away of a heart attack in 2010, leaving Susan and two grown sons, one in banking and the other in real estate. Between Susan and me there were eight grandchildren, and we’d both come prepared – quelle surprise – with iPhones loaded with pictures.

  Susan was faster on the draw. I nibbled on cheese cubes while she paged through her photo album, then I did the same. As one impossibly cute grandchild after another scrolled past my thumb, I was vaguely aware that the tables around us were filling up, but it wasn’t until someone thumped on the microphone that I realized the speeches were about to begin.

  I glanced up. Duane Becker had escaped from John Congdon’s clutches and was gliding my way, heading, I was certain, for the empty chair to my right. Damn! I leaned so close to Susan that our heads almost touched. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Susan expertly pocketed her iPhone. ‘Good idea. My engine only runs for so long on cheese cubes.’ With a farewell glance at the podium where a line of speakers appeared to be gathering, she added: ‘If we sneak out now, nobody but Duane will notice.’

  We skedaddled.

  Chatting amiably about our student days, we ambled up South Professor Street toward the Conservatory of Music. We skipped across the crosswalk painted like a piano keyboard, ducked around behind the Co-op Bookstore and made our way to Lorenzo’s Pizzeria Restaurant, the best pizza joint in town – possibly in all of Ohio. ‘The Beautiful Flame,’ Lorenzo’s wood-fired pizza oven, was parked in the lot nearby. Hauled on the back of a specially equipped flatbed truck, the oven made regular appearances at fairs and private events all around the state. The evening was balmy and it was tempting to sit outside under one of the umbrellas, but yellow jackets were buzzing around the patio tables so we opted instead for a table inside.