The Club (Anna Denning Mystery Book 4)

by Karin Kaufman

  “How many of those things are important to the case?”

  “The trouble is, I don’t know what is and isn’t important. Melinda is still convinced someone was in her house the night her father died, though she’s finally realizing it wasn’t Johannes Sorg.”

  “But from what you tell me, it’s possible someone was in her house.”

  “Club members have been stealing from the Maxwell house, I’m sure of it. One or more of them must have had a key, and I’m pretty sure Maxwell’s attorney has a key.”

  “So it still starts with Hetrick. He does something he regrets, moves to California, and years later he returns, only to be murdered three months later.”

  “Hetrick is not that common a name.” Anna drew her laptop forward, navigated to a genealogy website, and began typing. “Hetrick told his wife that when he was in high school, both his parents died in a rollover accident in Rocky Mountain National Park. They went down a cliff.”

  Gene scowled.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Anna said. “Not impossible, but improbable. This would have been maybe eighteen to twenty years ago, and big news at the time.” She typed again, watched as results filled the screen, then clicked again and again. “Burlingame,” she mumbled at last.

  “What’s that?”

  “I have to check one more thing.” Anna again dialed Liz. Could she check something with her newspaper contact? Had there been a fatal accident in Rocky Mountain National Park some eighteen to twenty years ago? Liz promised to find out as soon as possible and give her a call.

  “You doubt Hetrick’s parents died,” Gene said.

  Anna turned her laptop so he could see the screen. “As of two years ago, Mildred and Vance Hetrick were very much alive and living in Burlingame, California. In a very ritzy part of town.”

  Pleased with the progress she had made, Anna gathered their plates and wine glasses and took them to the sink. Zeroing in on Jordan Hetrick had been the right move, she thought as she rinsed out the glasses. All those names and dates and facts—they had obscured her path. Pushing them to the side, she was finally able to see at least some of the forest for the trees. But what had brought these people together in the January Club? And what was worth the deaths of four people? She froze in place. “No, five,” she said aloud.

  “Five what?” Gene said.

  “Five dead people.” She looked back to Gene. “I forgot about Adrian Armstrong, the editor in chief at the Herald before Maxwell was hired. He molested two fourteen-year-old girls, his family left him, and he killed himself in Idaho. But what happened to him started in Elk Park seventeen years ago.”

  17

  Anna and Liz tromped through the unplowed snow at the edges of the public parking lot, crossed Palmer Street, and hurried into the municipal building, the wind howling at their backs. Liz took the lead, striding boldly into the town office, and Anna, a step behind, kept an eye out for Soda Ashbrook, or Black Metal Woman, as Anna had come to think of her.

  She wasn’t interested in meeting her. The subject for this morning’s research was Adrian Armstrong, the former editor in chief of the Elk Park Herald and molester of young girls. But Soda, who had no problem stalking people in her car, could well get in the way—or inform someone, probably Tanner, that they were looking into Armstrong. Whether that mattered or would hinder them, Anna didn’t know. Probably not. But this line of research was between her and Liz. No one else, not even Melinda, was to know about it for now.

  Except Liz’s friend Jillian.

  “Have you got a minute?” Liz said, gesturing with her hands for Jillian to follow them back into the hallway.

  “This is very covert,” Jillian said, a gleam in her eye.

  In the hall outside the town office, well away from listening ears, Liz explained what they needed. Seventeen years ago Adrian Armstrong had sexually abused two fourteen year olds and then resigned from his job. He never went to trial, he was never even arrested, but the disgrace of the incident had destroyed his family and caused him to commit suicide a year later.

  “I can’t find any records of the crime,” Liz said. “Past issues of the Herald don’t say anything except that Armstrong quit, and even my contact in the police department can’t find anything.”

  “That’s an odd one,” Jillian said. “But if he wasn’t arrested—”

  “Then there’s no record, period,” Anna said.

  “That was before my time in Elk Park,” Jillian said, “but I can do a little poking around. In fact . . .” She held up a finger, instructing them to stay, walked back to her desk in the town office, and returned with her cell phone. “Let me call someone. And don’t look so surprised, Liz Halvorsen, we all have our contacts.” Grinning, she walked off to the building’s front entrance, dialed a number, and stepped outside the doors.

  A hand to one ear and phone to the other, her shoulders hunched against the cold, Jillian talked to her contact. After a minute, she pulled a tiny notebook from the pockets of her cardigan. Anna leaned sideways toward Liz, keeping her voice low. “Two days after Armstrong quit, Maxwell was officially the editor in chief. No way things happen that quickly. Maxwell had a heads-up that Armstrong was on the way out.”

  “Do you think someone at the Herald contacted Maxwell in Wyoming as soon as the scandal broke?”

  “I’m thinking Maxwell heard about what happened before it actually happened.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Armstrong was railroaded.”

  Liz stared in disbelief. “But he admitted to abusing the girls, didn’t he? He quit, he left the state.”

  Jillian yanked on one of the building’s glass front doors, a gust of wind whipping her hair about her face. As she marched toward Anna and Liz, she had the look of a woman who had just heard a startling piece of news and couldn’t wait to share it. “I talked to someone who was at the Herald when this all went down,” she said. “At first Armstrong fought like crazy to keep his job. He screamed bloody murder to anyone who would listen to him. Said he had never heard of these girls, never met them, would never do such a thing. He was going to fight the accusation, and then wham! nothing. Without admitting guilt, he handed in his resignation and never said another word. The few employees who knew what had happened were told to keep mum or lose their jobs. Two days later, Henry Maxwell is at the helm and Armstrong is never heard from again.”

  Anna looked over to Liz, who was staring open-mouthed at Jillian. “He was railroaded,” she breathed.

  “It sure sounds hinky, I’ll give you that,” Jillian said. “Here’s another funny thing. Supposedly he took both girls on a walk through the woods, then molested both of them right there.” She paused, letting her words sink in. “In the woods. Both of them, one after the other. And somehow neither one of them ran away.”

  “Where did this happen? Could it have been the woods off Saddleback Road?” Anna said.

  “All I know is it was an isolated wooded area.”

  “I see.” Saddleback Road was at the far north end of town, where houses were few and far between. “Can you find out?”

  “I can try. Aren’t the woods off Saddleback where the murder victims were found?”

  “Yes, a couple hundred feet from the road.”

  Jillian tore a page from her little notebook and handed it to Liz. “Listen, I have to go. I made note of a few more facts. Let me know if you need more info. Good luck, guys.” She hurried off in the direction of the town office and disappeared from view a moment later.

  “Wow,” Liz said, her eyes fixed on the notepaper. “How come no one’s looked into this before? The girls were never named. They were fourteen years old, both of them, and students at Elk Park High. They said they weren’t raped, but molested. Whatever that means. Both families left the state not long after.”

  “Did the girls lie?” It was hard for Anna to believe that even impressionable young teenagers would lie about such a thing, and by lying ruin a man’s life. And what about later? Seven
teen years had passed since the incident. Might they have had a change of heart in all that time?

  “Anna, this is looking more and more like Armstrong was set up.”

  “And I don’t think we can consider it a coincidence any longer that Beverly Goff was principal at the time it happened.”

  “Where did the girls move to? Can you find them?”

  “I can try.”

  After leaving Hetrick’s writing sample for Schaeffer at the PD’s front desk, Anna and Liz started for the parking lot. “Dean isn’t the last victim,” Anna said. “These murders are revenge, and they’re not going to stop. Someone has waited a long time for payback.”

  Back in Liz’s SUV, Anna pulled her purse from under the passenger seat and fumbled around for a notebook and pen. “The two girls would be thirty-one years old today, give or take.”

  “If we know the truth about how old they were then. Everyone’s lying.”

  Anna latched onto her pen, clicking the end button repeatedly, her mind racing. “Club members know a whole lot more than they’re saying. Even knowing they might be the next victim, everyone’s lying.”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  A more chilling thought entered Anna’s mind, and if it was true, they were on the wrong track again, far from solving the puzzle. “Liz, what if the girls never existed?”

  Liz hung a right, cutting through a small mound of snow left in the middle of Summit by the town’s plows. Except for the sound of the SUV’s wipers working to clear the ever-faster falling snow from the windshield, all was quiet until they turned onto Anna’s street. “You mean someone invented two high school girls? I don’t see how you’d do that without being found out. What makes you think so?”

  “First, I don’t know how Armstrong could molest two girls in the woods without one of them getting away. No one’s said anything about him having a weapon or injuring either girl. Second, Armstrong said he’d never heard of the girls, and something made him give up trying to clear himself—fast.”

  Liz pulled into Anna’s driveway, nosing the car up to the garage door. “Gene shoveled,” she said, looking appreciatively at the mere half inch of snow left on the drive.

  “That means he left Riley here with Jackson.”

  “I haven’t seen Riley in a while.”

  Anna felt a twinge of guilt. Dan had been in Casper for days, leaving Liz alone most of the time. Who had been helping her with simple things like shoveling snow from her driveway? She remembered what it felt like—living alone, doing everything, large and small, on her own. She either did it on her own or she worked hard to make enough money to pay someone else to do it. Two weeks after Sean died, her married friends fell back into their routines, leaving her to figure out how to move furniture, clear the gutters of leaves, hire and fire the plumber. Not that they were unkind. But married people’s lives were tiny worlds unto themselves, and single people, single women especially, didn’t fit in those worlds. They were lucky if they were allowed to orbit them. “What about your driveway?”

  “I’ve been shoveling tire tracks. Just two shovel-width lines, garage to street.”

  Anna smiled. “Yeah, that works.”

  As Liz fired up her laptop in Investigation Central, as she was now calling Anna’s kitchen table, Anna let the dogs out and started the coffee maker.

  “First things first,” Liz said, hooking her purse strap on a chair back. “We know from my contact at the paper that there was no fatal accident in Rocky Mountain National Park during Jordan Hetrick’s time in high school. No serious accident, period.”

  “Hetrick lied to Elise about his parents dying in a car accident.”

  Liz made herself comfortable in her chair. She laid out two notebooks, one on either side of her computer, checked her cell phone’s battery, and then set the phone on one of the notebooks.

  “Ready for takeoff?” Anna asked.

  “Not until I get my coffee.”

  Anna rubbed her hands together and popped open her laptop. “It’ll be ready in a minute. Let’s consider why Hetrick would lie. It could be something as innocuous as he and his parents didn’t get along.” She called up her favorite genealogy website and began a search for Hetrick’s siblings, if he had any.

  “When Elise read his journal to us and told us about his parents,” Liz said, “I wondered if he was responsible for their deaths.”

  Anna looked up. “That crossed my mind too. I need a piece of paper.”

  Liz tore a sheet from a notebook, handed it to Anna, then wandered into the kitchen, where the coffee maker was gurgling as it dripped the last ounce of water into the filter. “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Please, and can you let the dogs in?”

  In the time it took Liz to let Jackson and Riley in from the backyard, Anna discovered that Jordan was Mildred and Vance Hetrick’s only child. All the more strange he should pretend his parents were dead. She flopped back in her chair. Which approach, which line of inquiry, should she take next? “Think about how these January Club people met, Liz. Curt said the club started at a New Year’s Eve party sixteen years ago. Tanner corrected him and said seventeen.”

  “There’s that number again.” Liz brought two mugs of coffee to the table, setting one in front of Anna before returning to her seat.

  “Funny Curt said sixteen at first. I got the impression he was at this founding party, so he knew Dean and Rose before he joined the club.”

  “Knew them from where?”

  “That’s the problem. But Elk Park isn’t that small. They met somehow.”

  Liz grabbed a pen and began scribbling. “Dean was a criminal investigator, Rose was a nurse, Curt was a newspaper editor, Beverly was a high school principal.” She stopped writing. “Why would these four people form a club that’s lasted a full seventeen years? For what purpose?”

  “The club is a front,” Anna said, shaking her head. “Ignore the whole bogus encouragement aspect. They formed an organization for some other purpose, and it had to do with Jordan Hetrick, Adrian Armstrong, and Henry Maxwell.”

  Anna was certain that Armstrong was a fall guy. Someone who had to be dispatched so that Henry Maxwell could land a plum job and move to Elk Park. To be with the others. She sat bolt upright. “The occult. They knew each other through some occult network. They’d probably met before. I know enough about practitioners in the western U.S. to know they all flipping know each other.”

  “Necromancy,” Liz said softly.

  “There aren’t that many occultists involved in that. They all knew each other, Liz.” The pieces of the puzzle were coming together. Unable to contain her excitement, Anna sprang to her feet and began pacing the several feet that separated the kitchen counter from the table. “Henry Maxwell was a small-time journalism instructor who wanted a better job, a decent paycheck, and a home in Elk Park, where his occult friends were. He probably also wanted to break free from his and his wife’s families, who didn’t approve of his extracurricular activities. He cut off ties with them. The four club members got together, and—”

  “But how?”

  Anna waved her hand. “I don’t think it matters. What matters is what they did.” She pivoted back to Liz. “And what they did is accuse Adrian Armstrong of molesting girls. They got rid of him, and for some reason he wasn’t able to fight back. They threatened him.” She pressed her palms to the table and leaned in. “And Hetrick helped them. That’s what he felt guilty about. Armstrong was innocent, and he killed himself over the charges.”

  “But . . .” Liz scowled, her hands fluttering as she searched for the right words. “How did Hetrick . . . and what did he get out of it?”

  “Money?”

  “You said his parents own an expensive house in Burlingame.”

  “That doesn’t mean they gave him any money.” But Liz had a point, Anna thought. Hetrick had lived an aimless life since leaving Elk Park. There was no sign of money in his life. On the contrary, he’d gone through bankruptcy and everyth
ing he owned belonged to his wife. If he had made a deal with Curt, Beverly, and the Prices, it had been a bad one. Unhappy, friendless, childless. “Did he think he didn’t deserve children because he robbed Armstrong of his life and destroyed his family?”

  “Why Hetrick? Anna, listen, why did they choose Hetrick? How could some kid just out of high school help them execute their plan?”

  Anna slumped into her seat. “Money?” she said half-heartedly. “That’s all I can think of.”

  “But they didn’t choose Hetrick at random, pick any old kid whose parents had money and then murder him years later.”

  “I think he was killed because he was going to confess, to try to make things right.”

  “Confess to what?”

  They were back at the beginning, it seemed, knowing little more than they had known two or three days ago. What was he going to confess to? What had the club members asked him to do? And in exchange for what? Curt, Beverly, the Prices—they were amoral, they were adrift in the occult, they were opportunists. Another picture began to form. Not one of a lonely high school graduate used by his elders for a sinister purpose, but of a dissolute teenager who had chosen to do wrong, and had done it before he knew a thing about the January Club. “How stupid are eighteen-year-old boys,” she murmured.

  “Is that a rhetorical statement?”

  “Can you get access to an Elk Park High yearbook from seventeen years ago?”

  “They probably have copies at the library. Or better yet, on disk. That’s how they keep yearbooks these days.” Liz snatched up her cell phone and dialed. “What are we looking for?”

  “The names and photos of girls in the freshman class.”

  Anna rose and walked to the sliding door in the living room, and Jackson and Riley, sure they were about to be let outside, were close on her heels. Riley pleaded with her, issuing a high-pitched whine. “Sorry, guys,” she said. “No more wet paw marks for a while.”

  She peered through the snowflakes, falling swiftly now, forming drifts against the fence and caking the north-facing bark on her ponderosa pines. “Armstrong was the editor in chief of the Elk Park Herald. He knew people. Politicians, business owners, high school principals. He would never let two imaginary girls destroy his life. I don’t know why he didn’t fight the charges,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at Liz, “but the girls must have been real.”