“Did Curt or Rose scare Maxwell? Did scaring him have anything to do with a severed finger?”
Planting an exaggerated expression of confusion on his face, Tanner said, “Again, I’ve been a club member for only a year, and I told you, Maxwell did the scaring.”
“Maxwell is dead, Tanner. That makes him the victim.” Tanner’s delight in taunting her, in leading her to believe, whether or not it was true, that he had severed Hetrick’s finger and used it to threaten Maxwell, frightened Anna. God, help me. I’m not up to this.
Liz stepped forward, crossed her arms, and stood, à la Mussolini, two feet from Tanner. “What about your wife? Why are you cheating on her with Soda Ashbrook?”
Liz knew how to poke hornet nests.
“My wife? You know nothing about her. She’s impossible to live with, an empty shell. She’s not even there. Vacant. The only time she’s ever happy is when I bring her a trinket.”
“Trinkets you stole from Maxwell and the club,” Liz said. “Stuffed in a canvas bag.”
“I already admitted to that.” Tanner waved his hand in disgust. “Like any of this is your business.”
Anna could see that Liz’s bluntness was beginning to throw Tanner off his game. It was time to push him a little harder. “Has Curt ever talked to you about Adrian Armstrong?” she asked.
Tanner’s mouth twitched, a fleeting movement that betrayed his surprise at hearing Armstrong’s name. “He’s talked about not getting that job at the paper,” he said, gamely recovering. “Curt’s a whiner, you may have noticed.”
“Has he ever talked about the pine woods off Saddleback Road?”
Tanner cocked his head to the side and covered any further twitches by rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth. Anna had seen such tics before. Both were clumsy tells. Tanner was about to lie. “What pine woods?”
“You work at the Herald and those woods don’t ring an immediate bell?”
In her peripheral vision Anna saw Rose exit Lily’s and approach the Galleria’s front doors. Tanner too had seen her leave Lily’s, and he abruptly ended his conversation with Liz, turning sharply about and trudging up Summit Avenue without another word.
Standing inside the front doors to the Galleria, Rose glanced warily at her store behind her then waved Anna and Liz inside. “Don’t stand in the cold,” she said as they opened the doors. “No need to get sick. It’s a brand new year, a time for new beginnings, and no one should start the new year that way.” Her voice was raw and tired, and the sorrow in it was palpable. Gone was her bubbling, over-the-top enthusiasm. If Anna was ever going to get the truth from her, it was now.
“Why did someone deface your store sign?” she asked.
Rose spread her hands in a show of bewilderment. Anna didn’t buy it.
“Tanner and Curt seem to think you know why.”
“Do they?”
“What part did Dean have in whatever is going on?”
Rose was silent.
“You know what I think? I think he felt guilty about selling Henry Maxwell’s belongings, among other things, and he wanted to talk to me instead of the police. He’d already talked to Melinda.”
“What?”
“Is that why he was on his way to see me when someone killed him? I’ll bet he didn’t know how badly he’d been hurt and just kept driving until it was too late.”
“I don’t talk about my family with strangers,” Rose answered sharply.
“Rose, people are dying, and this vandalism looks specific, targeted.”
“Why would anyone put red paint on my dear Lily?” Distraught, Rose let out a sob. When Anna put an arm on her shoulder, she wrenched it free. “I’m being punished. Are you satisfied?”
“Punished for what?” Liz asked.
Rose blinked and tears spilled onto her cheeks. “Did you know the punishment becomes worse the longer you refuse to take it?”
“You know why everyone’s dying, don’t you?” Anna said.
“I can’t.”
“If you have any information, you have to speak up. Someone’s killing the club members, and you, Curt, or Tanner could be next.”
Rose shook her head and gave Anna a weary smile. “Do you think you can stop Johannes Sorg? If you tell secrets, it only makes him angrier.”
“Who made you believe that nonsense? Johannes Sorg isn’t the murderer, he’s a painting. And a wig on Curt MacKenzie’s head.”
Rose clasped Anna’s arm. “What did you say?”
“You honestly didn’t know? Curt MacKenzie dresses up as Johannes Sorg to scare the—what does Tanner call them, Liz?”
“Prospects,” Liz said.
“He has a white wig and some old clothes. He sneaked into Melinda’s house the night Henry Maxwell was murdered to scare her. And Tanner—”
“Tanner and the finger,” Liz finished.
“What are you two jabbering about? What finger?”
Rose’s reaction to mention of Hetrick’s finger was worlds apart from Tanner’s. So they weren’t all for one and one for all in the January Club. The members were doing more than stealing from one another. They were keeping secrets.
“Listen to me.” Anna shot a glance through the doors into the gallery to see if Curt was lurking about. Not seeing him, she continued. “What do you think you’re being punished for? Does it have to do with Jordan Hetrick?”
Rose flinched. She shut her eyes, as though wiping out the world before her would make it vanish and allow her to speak. “You know I used to be a nurse, don’t you?”
“I remember.”
“There was an incident seventeen years ago.”
Rose was on the edge of incoherence. If Anna didn’t steer the woman down the right track, she’d lose her and any information she might reveal. “Did this incident have to do with Jordan Hetrick?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“He molested two girls who went to Elk Park High.”
Rose opened her eyes and folded her arms over her chest. “You’ve thought about this, Anna.”
“Do you want to go inside your gallery? It’s cold.”
“No, I need to be here.” She directed her attention to the sign over the gallery’s door.
“What happened after Jordan abused those girls?”
“There was only one girl. Always only one girl.”
“You and the club members fabricated a second girl. Why would you do that?”
“It made the accusation more powerful.”
“You ruined Adrian Armstrong’s life, his family’s life. Is that what you’re being punished for?”
A dark wave of grief passed over Rose’s face. “I told you, I used to be a nurse. I need to sit down in my office.”
Liz took Rose by the elbow and gently guided her to the gallery’s doors.
“Oh, Rose,” Anna said.
Liz turned and waited for Anna to say more.
“When did you lose Lily?”
Rose stared ahead into the gallery, refusing to meet Anna’s eyes. “Sixteen years ago. I was forty-one. We never thought I’d get pregnant again.”
It all made sense now. Rose’s insistence that she was being punished, the repetition of one seemingly meaningless fact: she had been a nurse. Rose couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. To say what she had done. There had been consequences to Hetrick’s abuse of a young girl, and she believed Lily’s death was her punishment. “Hetrick got her pregnant. That’s what Tanner meant by your talents.”
Still staring ahead, Rose steadied herself on the gallery’s open front door.
“How much did Hetrick’s parents pay you to get rid of the baby? Was it enough to open Lily’s?”
19
After ten minutes of listening to Rose recount her past, in fear much more than regret—and giving precious little information that could shed light on who was killing the members of the January Club—Anna headed outside to breathe the cold, clean air, leaving Rose with Liz. Yes, there was forgiveness, she had told Rose, i
f she was truly sorry, and there was so much to be sorry for. Lies, theft, abortion, the ruination of Adrian Armstrong and his family. But Rose wasn’t sorry, she was afraid. Well, fear was a start. The beginning of wisdom.
For shielding their son from charges of statutory rape and for “taking care of the problem he made,” Mr. and Mrs. Hetrick had paid Dean and Rose a large sum of money—in installments, it was so large. Two years later, after collecting all the money, the Prices were able to open Lily’s, named after the daughter they lost not long after the Hetrick incident.
In a twisted sense of honor, Rose had refused to implicate the other club members in the plot against Armstrong, but when Anna suggested how it all happened—Beverly Goff saw an opportunity to move Maxwell to Colorado, Armstrong became the designated scapegoat, Curt MacKenzie sacrificed his promotion but gained a share of the Hetricks’ money, and Dean used his position with the state to threaten Armstrong—she hadn’t argued.
Hetrick, the ne’er-do-well who had graduated high school but stayed a childish drifter, had set his eyes on a young girl. And the girl, being fourteen and foolish, had let whatever slippery charm he possessed sway her. In his beat-up car he drove her north on Saddleback Road, parked, and talked her into walking with him through the pines. Was the girl’s part in the incident completely voluntary? Anna doubted it, but Rose had never wanted to know. She still didn’t.
So Hetrick had supplied the fuel, and Goff, Anna suggested—again Rose didn’t argue—had hatched the plan. Like any good principal, she knew all the gossip at her high school. Unlike most, she made personal use of it. And for seventeen years the evil Beverly, Rose, Dean, and Curt had instigated took its natural course: it metastasized.
Anna stepped back inside the Galleria’s doors, dialed Schaeffer, and left a message for him at the front desk. Curt, Tanner, and Rose were the only club members left. One of them was a murderer, and the other two needed to be protected.
It was odd that she felt no joy in cracking at least part of the case. Maybe she didn’t have the constitution for work like this, she thought. Maybe she was a “desk jockey,” a term she had heard Elk Park PD street cops use about their desk-bound fellow officers.
Liz exited the gallery and joined Anna at the doors. “I need a drink,” she said, heaving a sigh.
“You don’t drink like that.”
“I know, it just seemed the thing to say.”
“I left a message for Schaeffer.”
“Good. I got a call from Melinda a minute ago. She found a letter from her father addressed to her and dated two weeks ago. He never mailed it. He stuck it in between all the letters he saved.”
“Lucky she took them. I wonder if he planned to hand her the letter before she left for Iowa. What did it say?”
“He was sorry for what he’d done to his family, something about his own parents hating him for what he’d become.”
“They must have known he was involved in the occult. They didn’t cut themselves off from him just because he sleazed his way into a new job.”
“Unless they heard about Adrian Armstrong and put two and two together.”
“Could be. Either way, I don’t understand them abandoning Melinda and her brother. They could have been a good influence on their lives.”
“Maybe they couldn’t handle it.” Liz tilted her head back and massaged her neck with her hands. “Maxwell also wrote something about being trapped and not knowing a way out. Then he warned Melinda to stay away from the January Club. She’s going through everything else she took with her to see if he left her or her brother another letter.”
Of course. All this time Anna had wondered why, after eleven years of separation, Henry Maxwell had asked his daughter to come home. “He was having regrets, Liz.”
“Sure sounds like it.”
“He was going to tell Melinda everything. He just hadn’t worked up the courage yet.”
“If that’s true, that would make him as much of a threat to the club as Jordan Hetrick. He might have been opening up about his regrets at club meetings.”
“Then Melinda comes home for the first time in years—and someone guessed why.”
“Maxwell planned to tell her everything.”
Anna absentmindedly reached for her cell phone in her jacket pocket, as if touching it would cause the final pieces of the puzzle to snap into place. It made her hands itch—the feeling that there was someone she should call, someone to warn. “Beverly Goff claimed she didn’t even know Henry Maxwell had a daughter. I saw her that night. She was surprised to meet Melinda.”
“If we believe Tanner, Curt knew Melinda was here. He was in the Maxwell house trying to scare her the night Henry was murdered.”
“And Curt might have told one or two of the others.”
“Except for Beverly Goff?”
“He didn’t like her. She was the club’s medium, taking the job that belonged to him, just like Maxwell stole his job at the paper.”
“So at the very least Curt knew about Melinda.”
“Maybe everyone but Goff did, which could be why the club wanted everything Maxwell owned, even his personal things. They were afraid he left a confession for his daughter. It’s even possible he hinted at leaving one. From what I know of him, he was a taunter like the rest of the members.”
“Do you think the other club members are still in danger?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder Hetrick didn’t think he deserved kids.”
“I’m glad he never had them, but I’m sorry for Elise.” Anna jammed her hands into her jacket pockets and stared at the falling snow. She needed to call Gene and ask him to pick her up after he closed Buckhorn’s for the night. The snow was beautiful to look at, but those powdery high-country flakes made for slick roads. She could pick up her car tomorrow. “Did we ever figure out why Soda Ashbrook followed me? She almost slid right into the Jimmy.”
“I’ve thought about that. I think she heard Melinda and me talking in the town office. I heard Melinda ask someone else about where to find a genealogist, so I butted in and suggested you.”
“I don’t see why Soda would think I was a threat.”
“Because I gave the impression that you were more than a genealogist, that you could find out all kinds of things about her father . . . and you’d even solved crimes before.” Liz smiled apologetically. “But you are more than a genealogist.”
“I’m not so sure.” Anna dialed Gene at Buckhorn’s and asked him to pick up her and Liz outside the Columbine Galleria when he closed up shop. They would wait inside the front doors and watch for his car, she told him. “Now you don’t have to listen to me scream as I try to drive you back to your car,” she said to Liz, dropping her phone back into her pocket. From the corner of her eye, she saw Rose walk past her office door toward the far wall. “Did Curt come back?”
“Not when I was in there.” Liz followed Anna’s line of sight. “She’s checking on her cache of Henry Maxwell’s goods.”
When Rose reached the Dala horse display, she touched one of the horses, turned around with barely a pause, then shot a disdainful glance at Anna. “She’s checking on us.”
“Look how quickly she recovered. She really had me going there.”
“I think she’s scared to death.”
“All this garbage she was talking about Johannes Sorg, and that creepy painting.”
“At first I thought Sorg might be real, a Norwegian necromancer they decided to worship. But I think one of them found a paint-by-numbers portrait in the Salvation Army, slapped it on the wall, and called it Sorg. They invented him as a weapon.”
“Before or after they ruined Armstrong?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Rose walked past her office door once more and then disappeared from sight. “I don’t for one second believe that Rose is worried about Sorg rising from the dead and punishing her.”
“All that Scottish and Scandinavian stuff?”
“Paraphernalia, window dressing for the
prospects. Or maybe they believed in the magic of bottled scents and bags of soil. I think Soda believes in the magic of darkness. But that finger . . .”
“A warning to Maxwell? Keep quiet or you’re next?”
“If it was a warning, why did he keep it?” Anna shook her head. “If it was meant as a warning, it didn’t frighten him. To me it sounds more like an offering than a warning. Despite his regrets, he wanted that finger as an amulet. That’s the only reason he would have kept it.”
Liz leaned back on the Galleria’s doors. “Think of what a tortured man Maxwell must have been. Melinda’s going to find more confessions from him in those letters—the club must know that. She’s lucky no one tried to kill her.”
Just when Anna thought she had erected more of the structural support for her theory, and that the beams and joists she’d just laid had joined with perfection, the structure began to alter. “I think the killer would have loved for Melinda to shine a light on the whole sick episode. Keeping people quiet was never the point of the murders.”
“Rose and Curt might disagree with you.”
Something niggled at the edge of Anna’s mind. “Liz, this isn’t about silencing anyone, this is about revenge for what happened seventeen years ago.” More and more the motive for the killings had reeked of revenge, and that motive had been all but confirmed by Jordan Hetrick’s last journal entry, in which he had confessed to a slip of the tongue—telling his hunting companion his real name. That Hetrick’s slip of the tongue was followed shortly by his murder was no coincidence.
Liz’s phone sounded in the pocket of her coat. “That’s email,” she said, looking to see who had contacted her. “An attachment with photos from the yearbook’s freshman class, about thirty-five girls.”
Anna peered at the screen as Liz scrolled by the photos. “Where are the names?”
“Off to the side.” Liz swiped at the screen until the lists of names appeared on the left, then handed the phone to Anna. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”
“A name. Confirmation.” Anna scrolled slowly downward, scanning the girls’ names. “Trouble is, most of these girls would have a different last name today.”
The Club (Anna Denning Mystery Book 4) Page 19
