The Club (Anna Denning Mystery Book 4)

by Karin Kaufman

  “But how did the movers get in?”

  Melinda’s shoulders rose. “I figured my dad’s attorney would take care of it. It was his problem, not mine.”

  “The attorney,” Anna said. “Of course.” She and Liz had missed the most obvious explanation. The will had the force of law behind it, and the attorney, as a representative of the law, had a key, probably given to him by Henry Maxwell. “But how did you know where Elise lived?”

  “Dean Price told me.”

  “What?” Liz’s head whipped around.

  “Dean Price,” Melinda said. “Yesterday. I was at the Buffalo getting coffee and he came in. It was about an hour after we argued in the gallery. I got the weirdest feeling from him, like he was sorry about everything I was losing. He didn’t tell me out loud to hide my things with Elise, but he was telling me, if you know what I mean. He wrote down her address, and then he told me I should leave my house and stay away from everyone in the club.”

  “He said ‘everyone’?” Anna asked.

  “Everyone. Maybe he’s not such an SOB after all.”

  Anna glanced at Liz. Melinda and Elise hadn’t heard. She took a breath and said, “Dean Price is dead.”

  Elise’s hand flew to her mouth and Melinda stared wild-eyed, her gaze shifting from Anna to Elise.

  “He was murdered,” Anna continued. “They found him in his car early this morning. Parked on my driveway.”

  “Oh Lord,” Elise said. She wrapped her arms around her chest, comforting herself, and looked past Anna into the great room.

  “He should have taken his own advice about staying away from everyone in the club,” Liz said ruefully.

  “Was he killed in the same way as the others?” Melinda asked.

  “It looks like it,” Anna said.

  “I knew it wouldn’t end,” Elise said, rocking slightly in her chair.

  A fragile doll on the verge of a breakdown. This woman needed to leave Elk Park and go back home. “Elise, maybe—”

  “And I don’t think it’s going to end with Dean Price,” Elise said. She let her arms fall, and an expression of stony resolution came over her. “When Melinda came to my house and I found out who her father was, I knew we had something important in common.”

  “And we both had family secrets to uncover,” Melinda said. “We’ve been working on that.”

  15

  Elise opened a thin spiral notebook on the kitchen table and paged through it, past blue-ink paragraphs of bad penmanship and more than a few doodles, mostly aimless circles and spirals in the margins. Anna leaned in for a closer look. Blue ink. And the handwriting looked familiar. Without her photocopy of the scrap of paper found in Jordan Hetrick’s shoe, she couldn’t say for sure, but the writing in the notebook looked the same. Had Hetrick suspected he might be killed? Not knowing for certain who the killer might be, had he left the police he best clue he had?

  “I found this taped behind the dresser in our bedroom,” Elise said, laying a hand on one page.

  “We literally searched everywhere last night,” Melinda said.

  “I knew Jordan was hiding things from me,” Elise added, “and if I had to tear the house apart, I was going to find them.”

  Anna realized she should have known better. Appearances were deceiving, and Elise wasn’t nearly as fragile as she appeared. This woman was determined.

  “He never wanted me to find this journal,” Elise continued, “but he wrote carefully, as if I might find it one day. I think it gave him comfort to write down his feelings, but he tried hard to be vague. These pages”—Elise tapped the pages to the left of the notebook’s wire spiral, the ones she’d flipped past—“aren’t very important. They’re about loving our house and land, seeing the mountains again, that kind of thing. But this page. . .” Elise paused and looked from Anna to Liz. “Can I read it to you?”

  “Yes, please,” Anna said.

  Elise pulled the notebook closer. “‘For a long time I didn’t care if I set things right. I didn’t think about it, and that seemed best. Now I care, but I don’t know what to do. What I did was unforgivable I think, but I hope not. Sometimes I’m in bed at night and lying there, and I hope I can be forgiven. It started out bad, but it was a simple bad and could have stayed simple. Then I did something worse, and it became so big I had to run away to save my mind. Then I found Elise. In her I got something I didn’t deserve.’”

  “Stop a second,” Anna said. “Read that last sentence again.”

  Elise frowned. “‘In her I got something I didn’t deserve’?”

  “That’s it.” She looked to Liz. “Remember what Tanner said? He said, ‘Getting something you don’t deserve is always the exchange.’ He said it about your dad getting the editor job at the Herald, Melinda.”

  “It’s true, he didn’t deserve it,” Melinda replied, “but what does Tanner mean by ‘exchange’?”

  “Your dad got the job in exchange for giving the January Club everything he owned.” As soon as she said the words, Anna saw the difficulty in them. How had the club, brand new and by then consisting only of Dean, Rose, and Curt, guaranteed Henry Maxwell his job? And if they had the power to perform such employment miracles, why hadn’t they made sure that Curt got the job? He deserved it far more than Maxwell.

  But the explanation seemed to satisfy Melinda. “I thought he must have pulled strings. He wasn’t ready for that job. I remember him working all the time, at night and on weekends. And he was so miserable. He must have been drowning the whole time, trying to figure out how to be editor in chief.”

  Elise, seeing something different in the words, was near tears. “I never realized. Jordan thought he didn’t deserve me.”

  Liz reached over and put a hand on Elise’s arm. “A lot of husbands think that.” With a twinkle in her eye, she added, “It’s completely normal and in my opinion totally reasonable.”

  To Anna’s surprise, Melinda laughed. “My ex-fiancé didn’t deserve me, that’s for sure. And may he forever and ever remember that.” She rose and marched to the coffee maker on the counter opposite the table. “You go ahead, Elise. Keep reading.”

  There was a new lightheartedness in Melinda, Anna thought. She had found a kindred soul in Elise, and it was doing her good.

  Elise ran her finger down the page until she found her place. “‘Why did I find her after what I did? I don’t know. I’ve wondered for a long time. But now I’m here again, and I need to make things right, even if I don’t think I can. Today I met someone who made me see it all differently. You can do things that make amends, at least a little, and even if they take a whole lifetime.’”

  Elise stopped reading. When she started again, there was a catch in her voice. “‘I’ve been thinking for a long time I don’t deserve a family, even though Elise wants one. How does not having kids make anything better? It doesn’t fix anything, it just hurts someone I love and keeps babies from being born in the world.’”

  When Elise paused again, Anna asked her if the journal entry was dated.

  “No, but I know it was written three weeks ago. Listen to this. ‘I asked Elise today about the hunting trip.’” Elise looked up. “That was three weeks ago today.”

  “Do you know who he met that day?” Anna asked. “This person who made him look at things differently?”

  “I wish I did. I think it was the person who picked him up for the hunting trip, don’t you?”

  “Possibly.” Or someone he was having an affair with, Anna finished silently. Or at least that’s what she had suspected two days ago. Now she wasn’t sure. In the journal entry Jordan didn’t sound like a man ready to have an affair, to further hurt his wife.

  “There are a few more sentences,” Elise said. “‘Not having kids hurts me too, but I deserve to be hurt. Only this isn’t the right way to do it. I don’t think being unhappy all the time is the right way either. I just hope I don’t make more mistakes.’” She closed the notebook and slid it across the table to Anna. “You can t
ake it with you if you want. Just make sure I get it back.”

  “Here we go, ladies,” Melinda said, carrying four empty mugs, each a different size and color, by their handles to the table. She stepped back to the kitchen, returned with a coffee carafe and potholder, and set the carafe atop the potholder in the middle of the table.

  While Liz poured Elise and herself a cup, Anna gently probed the question of children in Elise’s marriage. Jordan hadn’t wanted them, she remembered Elise saying. But did she have any idea why?

  “For the first few years of our marriage, I thought he disliked them,” Elise said. “Some people do. We should have talked about having a family before we got married.” She cupped her hands around the mug, lifted it, and breathed in the steam before taking a drink. “Later he acted as if he didn’t want to bring them into this world. He was always talking about what a bad place the world was and how it wasn’t fair for innocent children to be born into it. To be honest, that always seemed like a load of baloney.”

  Liz chortled. “It usually is.”

  Melinda placed a half pint of cream next to the carafe and took her seat. “Like the world wasn’t a bad place when all of us were born,” she said. “It was strawberries and cream back then, am I right?”

  “That’s exactly what I used to say to Jordan. It’s always been bad, it will always be bad.”

  “So why did he think he didn’t deserve to have children?” Liz said.

  “I’ve been racking my brain over that. I just don’t know.”

  Anna leaned back in her chair, enjoying the warmth of the coffee mug in her hands and the company of the three other women at the table. Had the reason for their gathering been different, she would have remained quiet and simply listened to them talk, enjoying their time together, but she sensed that Elise was right about the Elk Park murder spree and Dean Price: he would not be the last victim. “Tell me what you know about Jordan’s life in Elk Park before you met. Anything at all. His family, where he went to school, what jobs he had during the summer.”

  “He went to Lincoln Elementary and Elk Park High.”

  Liz sat forward. “Could that be a connection to Beverly Goff? She was the principal of Elk Park High. How long ago did Jordan graduate?”

  “He’s thirty-six, so . . .”

  “About eighteen years ago,” Liz finished, without remarking on Elise’s use of the present tense. “A year before your dad moved your family here, Melinda.”

  “It’s not much of a connection anyway,” Melinda said. “Everyone who went to high school in Elk Park went there, and probably 10 percent of the town worked there back then.”

  “Do you know where Jordan worked?” Anna asked. “Or did he leave Colorado right after high school?”

  “He stayed about a year after high school. He worked at a gas station, that’s all I know. He said out-of-state travelers used to stop there, so maybe it was on Highway 34. Californians, a lot of them. He told me they reminded him of his favorite aunt and uncle in Burlingame, and that’s how he got the idea to move out there.”

  “So when did Jordan leave Elk Park? How many years ago, exactly?”

  Her head cocked at an angle as though she were listening to a faraway sound, Elise considered the question. “It would have been seventeen years ago.”

  Melinda’s eyes widened. “Seventeen,” she echoed. “My family left Wyoming seventeen years ago.”

  “What does that mean?” Elise said.

  Desperate for answers, both women were grasping for significance in the number, but what did a gas-station-working teenager in Elk Park have to do with a junior college instructor in Wyoming? Still, Anna didn’t believe in coincidences, and seventeen years was one heck of a coincidence. “I don’t know what it means. Maybe nothing. Earlier you told me that his parents are dead.”

  “Yes, Mildred and Vance Hetrick. I don’t know much about them, except that they died in a car accident in Rocky Mountain National Park when Jordan was still in high school. It was a terrible time for him.” Elise pushed herself to her feet and began to rummage through a cardboard box on the kitchen counter. “He never said so, but I think his personality changed after that accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “A rollover. They skidded on ice and went over the side, down a cliff.”

  Anna shot a look at Liz. Down a cliff? Not many people had accidents like that in Rocky Mountain National Park, even during the winter.

  “And you and Jordan moved here just three months ago?”

  “A little less than three months, yes.”

  Hetrick had been back in Colorado for less than three months when he was killed. Was that long enough to create an animosity so great it ended in murder—and in Maxwell keeping Hetrick’s severed finger in his bedroom? Or had something happened seventeen years ago? What linked these two men?

  “Here’s something else he hid,” Elise said, holding up a faded gray pamphlet with black lettering on the cover. “And it’s a good thing he did, because if I’d found it, I would have tossed the thing . . .” She let her words trail off and handed the pamphlet to Liz.

  “Of Charms, Divination, Calling Up of the Spirits, and the Magic Places of Scotland,” Liz read. She flipped to the pamphlet’s first page. “It says, ‘A reprint of a work by A.E. Johnstone, originally published in 1915, Edinburgh.’”

  “Was Jordan interested in the occult?” Anna asked.

  Elise braced her arms on the box’s edges and shook her head. “No, I’m positive he wasn’t.”

  “This is the section on calling up the spirits,” Liz said. “Listen. ‘It is sometimes wondered if the Celts of ancient Scotland practiced the calling up of the spirits, what is today called necromancy. The texts are unequivocal in this. They did.’” Her eyes rose to Elise.

  Not to be dissuaded from her opinion, Elise answered Liz’s gaze. “I’m telling you I would have known.” She held up her hand. “I know what you’re thinking. There are a lot of things I didn’t know about him. But that I would have known. Besides, Melinda and I looked through that little book and we have a different theory. Come on, let’s go into the living room.”

  They grabbed their coffees and settled themselves, Elise and Melinda on one couch, Anna and Liz on the facing couch. Before she spoke, Melinda let her eyes travel slowly around the little group, letting them know that she and Elise had come to a firm conclusion on what she was about to say.

  “My dad was the Scottish nut,” she began, choosing not to mince her words. “He traveled all over Scotland, bringing back soil and stones and archaeological finds, which I hope he bought and didn’t steal. But that’s beside the point. He didn’t treat these things like vacation mementos, he treated them like amulets.”

  Juju, Anna thought. Like the finger, the soil.

  “He hated me and my brother touching them,” Melinda continued. “I remember he brought back the bones of some poor little animal once. He said he was going to carve designs on them, but I never once saw him carve. One day when I knew he’d be in Denver, I looked for those bones, and I found them in a box.”

  Anna reminded Melinda about the bone necklace in her father’s bedroom. “I never heard from the police if the bones were animal or human, did you?”

  Melinda grimaced and dropped her head back on the couch. She had forgotten about the necklace, and being reminded of it must have been one more blow to her memories of her father, one more illustration, among a host of illustrations, of his sickness. “The police haven’t told me. Those bones were in his bedroom. I don’t want to know. I can still see the bones of that little animal when I was a girl. My father taught me about evil, more than anyone else I’ve ever known. He taught me how to recognize it.”

  Anna quickly dropped the subject of bones and moved on. Melinda didn’t need even more terrible images crowding her mind. “You were out of the room at the time, but Curt MacKenzie told me your dad brought back soil from the serpent mound at Loch Nell, stones from cairns, even a piece of
Holyrood Abbey. He said they were for Scottish magic.”

  “That sounds right. I know he went to the Isle of Iona. He called it a ‘thin place,’ where earth and the supernatural almost touch.” She looked to Elise, who took the pause as her cue to speak.

  “So here’s what we’re thinking. This booklet belonged to Melinda’s father, and somehow, recently, it came into my husband’s hands.” Elise paged through the pamphlet, planted her finger on a paragraph that bore several underline marks, and held it up for Anna and Liz to see. “This is about the fairy mounds on Iona and their connection to the occult.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask what a fairy mound is,” Liz said as she took hold of the pamphlet.

  “They’re nothing more than hills,” Melinda said with a measure of disdain in her voice. “According to legend, fairies live inside the hills, and they call people inside and trap them there. Unfortunately, hills on Iona, this beautiful, isolated island, have become modern-day druid vacation spots.”

  “I met a modern-day druid once,” Anna said, frowning at the recollection of Rowan Glamorgan, Jazmin’s young druid-wannabe friend. She hadn’t heard from or of him in over a year, and for a moment she speculated on what had happened to him. A stint in jail perhaps? A life of drudgery making ritual smudge sticks? But like Melinda when it came to the bone necklace, she didn’t really want to know. Sometimes praying for people from a distance was the best, and wisest, thing you could do. “Go on, Elise.”

  “Notice the underlining in that paragraph about the largest mound,” Elise said.

  “Sithean Mor,” Melinda added, pronouncing it something like sheen more, a Gaelic place-name she had probably heard her father say more than once.

  Liz held the pamphlet so Anna could see.

  “My dad visited that mound,” Melinda said. “Notice someone wrote ‘October 4’ in the margin? I don’t know the exact date my dad went there, but he always traveled to Scotland in late September or early October.”