The Keeper Returns (The Wallis Jones Series Book 3)

by Martha Carr

  At least protecting this secret, even if it wasn’t hers by birth, gave some meaning to her days. The Circle has its Keeper, she thought, smiling in the darkness. She was yet another Keeper, responsible for protecting the balance, whether many knew it or not.

  Outside in the darkness, Rodney Parrish watched Harriet Jones pull something large enough to catch the moonlight and put it into the door of the vault. He marveled at such a small woman being so determined against such a large stone door. That wouldn’t matter in the end. He was here to do a job and he had a reputation to maintain if he wanted to keep getting paid to do it.

  The mausoleum was in a tight area and would make it difficult to kill Harriet Jones neatly, which was after all Parrish’ calling card. He could wait until she finished her business and easily catch her up on the road back toward her car. There was time and he was a patient man.

  Inside the vault, Harriet finally gathered her sensibilities and took the key back out of her purse. It was time.

  She found the ledge underneath the name plates on the far western side of the wall and felt along underneath with a gloved hand until she could feel the slot. She knew she’d have to wash the gloves later and just hoped the grime would come out of her good cotton gloves, once again.

  She oriented the key until it fit, long-ways into the carved-out hold and she could gently push up until it fit neatly into the slot and caused small tumblers to fall into place, dropping yet another key that was almost identical, into her hands. The other half of the Episcopal mark of the saltire had dropped out of its resting place and into Harriet Jones hands. The keys were well over 200 years old and were hammered out of iron by an early member of the Circle as symbols of the group in their earliest days. One key symbolized excommunication, the other that was now in her hands, for absolution.

  How ironic, she thought, that this key was the symbol of absolution but could lead to so much hell if it was ever used by the wrong hands. Even better, that they had become useful to someone who was thought to be part of Management, thought Harriet, letting out a laugh that in the quiet enclosed tomb sounded louder than it was. Given enough time, ownership of just about everything changes, thought Harriet and memories can be rewritten.

  Isn’t that what Walter was always going on about? History is written by the winners but winners eventually die and are replaced by others who may see things differently. Family is everything, thought Harriet and I won’t let anything happen to them.

  Thank goodness Walter trusted her so much that he had let her in on his duties, just as the Circle had predicted. That’s when a better resting place for the second key was created and suddenly, for the first time, the Circle held both parts of Management’s history.

  Quickly, she inserted the first key of excommunication to leave in place of the one she was taking with her. She pushed gently till the stone lever rolled forward again and everything would look undisturbed.

  She put the key she had come to retrieve in her purse and got ready to leave the final resting place of the Randolph family, long supporters of the Circle movement who had no idea what interesting secrets their family burial grounds held and never visited except to inter another member. They held a similar key to the mausoleum but were unaware that it was the only spare key of excommunication left in the world and they should treat it with reverence. Usually, it sat on their mantel in plain view as a piece of Southern tchotchke gathering dust till someone else died and they’d bring it out again.

  Harriet knew there was only one space left and eventually they would all stop coming and the key would lose all meaning for them.

  That would be just fine with her, she thought, as she slid out the way she came and then leaned against the door with her shoulder till it slid back into place. Then, maybe someone who knew a little more about its origins could buy the key at a garage sale and Harriet could stop worrying so much about watching over keys. After all, she was getting on in years and was starting to feel it.

  A few select others knew she had the key, they had to because they held the second part of all of this that led to the proof of the real origin of Management. The diary. But they were all getting old too and no one had been able to agree about who to pass the burden onto in the next generation. Harriet had quickly vetoed the idea of Wallis or Norman. She wanted something better for her family.

  The war came along at a convenient time and only reinforced what Harriet had decided. It was time to bring out the diary and reveal the truth. No more keys.

  Parrish saw Harriet come out and push the door close. He stood still, not moving at all as he watched her straighten her coat and start to walk across the wet grass, back the way she came. He waited until she got just far enough ahead of him that he could still see her in the bright moonlight but not hear him tracking behind her.

  He wasn’t worried.

  He followed Harriet Jones, closing in on her and biding his time till she passed New Avenue inside of the cemetery and only another mile or so to go till she was outside of the grounds. She was easy to track. He could hear the rhythmic click-click of her solid heels on the pavement.

  It was time. He put his briefcase quickly on the ground and snapped it open, making the birds nearby flutter for a moment at the sound. He pulled out a small trowel, along with some rags to clean himself off afterward, just in case, and the knife he was planning to use. It was one of his favorites. He slipped the hilt into his hands, feeling the comfortable balance of the hand-tooled knife and congratulated himself once again about being so accountable to his work. Good tools mattered to achieve a positive outcome. He left the briefcase in the bushes to retrieve in a few minutes.

  None of this would take very long.

  He started moving faster toward his target. It wasn’t difficult to close the distance between them and he kept to the mossy grounds closer to the older trees to ensure that she wouldn’t hear his approach. He could feel the familiar rush of adrenaline as he got close enough to see the color of her purse, a deep red and thought he could smell a hint of magnolias, trailing behind her.

  Parrish could feel the muscles in his arm tensing as he gripped the handle of the knife just so; tight enough to make a firm incision in one sweeping gesture, but not so tight it could catch and cause a jagged line. He knew what he was doing.

  He took larger strides, closing in as he came up the hill. There was only a few yards left between them and if he didn’t hurry she would soon sense he was there and might turn to see him. That would complicate things. He hated complications.

  For a moment he thought about his hardest assignment, Alice Watkins who had given him a run for his money. She had fought back and left him with bruises. The beating he took at the hands of those cops the same day didn’t help things at all.

  He put it out of his mind. This was not the time to get distracted by anything. If he could just let the energy flow, the assignment would go smoothly and he would be back at the combinating room before anyone missed him. There would be payoffs to deliver and collections to get to by sun-up. Mac would not care about his reasons for being late.

  “Stop,” someone hissed, just off to his side. “Parrish, stop.” It was Richard Bach, breathing hard, coming up through the bushes around a family grouping of headstones, making a racket. Parrish saw Harriet turn around and grow frightened as she picked up her pace and practically took on a run toward the exit.

  He swore quietly under his breath and let his arm relax. Parrish might have considered killing Richard Bach instead and then seeing if it was still possible to complete his assignment and find Harriet. That is, if it hadn’t been Bach who had hired him in the first place.

  “You’re a little late to be trying to give new orders,” Parrish whispered loudly, angry. The adrenaline still had his heart beating faster.

  Richard Bach was sweating profusely, particularly given the cold air but he had hurried to the cemetery wondering if he was too late. Someone he feared more than his deceased boss, Robin Spingler, had warned him
to leave Harriet Jones alone.

  Richard had been thrilled when Robin had died right in front of him, thinking that his troubles in Management had ended and he’d be able to finally move up in the ranks. He had no way of knowing that there was someone worse, George Clemente who would soon be invading his space.

  Richard felt a shudder go through him when he realized how close he had come to planting a bulls eye on himself that he was sure would have Clemente aiming at his demise. There had been a board meeting earlier in the night of the local Management’s top seeds and Clemente had railed over the group how they were failing him. Their task was so simple, he shouted as he beat on the conference table with both fists.

  Another angerholic, thought Richard trying to look sufficiently attentive and frightened to not catch Clemente’s attention. He was really sitting there thinking about what had to be happening just across town, right about now and was finding it difficult not to look smug. Another loophole finally closed.

  Surely, when others found out they would eventually thank him.

  It wasn’t until after the meeting that Clemente had cornered him, pressing the tip of his finger into the soft spot in Richard’s shoulder where the pain was almost unbearable and leaning in so close Richard couldn’t escape the stale, hot breath as Clemente spit out the words.

  “If anything happens to anyone in Wallis Jones family without my direct order I will hold you personally responsible,” he said, “and you will end up begging me to finally finish you off.”

  Richard had felt the blood drain from his face and he had hoped that Clemente had taken his look of shock as just fear at being so close to the man’s angry face. He wouldn’t have been completely wrong.

  “I have my own plans for that damn woman,” Clemente had spit out. “And no one is getting in the way of them. I’ve gone to great lengths to make sure it’s done right this time and you,” he said, stabbing each word into Richard’s shoulder, “will not take this away from me.”

  It was all Richard could do to back calmly out of his parking spot and leave with the other cars in an orderly line. Richmonders never even honked at traffic lights. If someone didn’t move, after a while someone got out of their car to make sure the driver was okay. Honking would have just started a round of gossip.

  It wasn’t until he was at the next light that he could turn the corner and push his foot against the gas pedal to get all the way across town as fast as his car would carry him. It was just luck that it was late at night in a town where everyone went to bed after the news except for a few revelers down in Shockoe Bottom who didn’t have sense or family or were transplants from the North.

  He could barrel down the streets, wondering if he could say a prayer that a murder he had ordered and paid for out of his own pocket wasn’t over with yet.

  He took it as some kind of odd sign when he saw Parrish creeping up on Harriet Jones who was still very much alive. Thank God, he had insisted Parrish call him when he located the woman and tell him where it was going to happen. Otherwise, he would have been trying to take his family to where Clemente couldn’t find them and he wasn’t sure such a spot even existed.

  “What the hell?” stammered Parrish, who rarely lost his cool but no one had ever interrupted a job so close to its completion before and risked his exposure. He thought about still killing Bach and keeping the down payment. No one would know.

  “It’s been called off,” Richard said, still out of breath.

  “By who? I thought you were the one paying for this event.”

  “It’s been called off. That’s all you need to know. Keep the money,” he said, waving at Parrish as he leaned over, trying not to throw up.

  “You still owe me the balance,” said Parrish, lifting the knife to where it could be seen in the moonlight. Richard saw the glint of metal.

  “Sure, sure,” he said, wondering how often his life would be threatened this week. “I’ll get it to you tomorrow, just like we planned. But this job is called off. You don’t go anywhere near that woman. We understand each other?”

  “We do,” said Parrish, nodding his head. “You pay me as we planned, you call the shots. Mind telling me, though what’s changed?”

  “There’s new Management in town and he has a different idea about things.”

  Detective Arnold Biggs took small sips of air, trying not to make a noise as he listened to Bach and Parrish only a few feet away from where he was hidden behind an oversized marble statue of an angel with a small child sitting by its feet.

  Buster was waiting in their car back near the entrance. His only comment when the detective got out to follow Richard Bach was, “this reminds me of a certain children’s story about the dog following the cat who was following the mouse.”

  Detective Biggs ignored him and quietly shut the car door. They had been following Parrish for days since he was let out of lockup without being formally charged with anything. Buster wanted it on the record that it was possibly futile but Biggs had insisted and in the end, they were partners.

  “Why do you think Parrish is at a cemetery in the middle of the night? All of his potential victims are already dead,” said Buster. They were planning to wait till he came back out the other side but when Richard Bach had walked close enough by them to see in their car if he had only looked, Detective Biggs decided to follow him.

  “That’s too weird,” said Buster.

  “You stay here. It’ll be hard enough to get close to them without them noticing as it is,” said Biggs.

  “Suit yourself.”

  The detective had caught up to Bach in time to see an older woman walking on the road above them and he realized that Parrish had a target all along. A surge of anger came over him as he realized that if they had sat there waiting for Parrish to exit the cemetery he would have left a deposit for the gravediggers.

  He found a hiding place behind the oversized marble angel and crouched down, his gun drawn, ready to shoot anyone who looked like they were about to kill someone. The woman quickly disappeared out of sight as the two men in front of him argued over calling off the hit and new management being in charge.

  Detective Biggs wondered if a new crime syndicate had moved into town and did Mac know anything about it. Mac was a lot of things but he wasn’t a killer by nature and just tolerated Parrish as a necessary evil. He was sure that Mac would know who they were talking about and would be willing to give up information to stop Richmond from being taken over by a rough crowd.

  After all, that would at some point lead to someone trying to cut into Mac’s business. That’s how certain parts of the city kept itself in check.

  Mac took in too much cash for others not to eventually try to take some of it and that’s where Mac drew a very deadly line.

  Harriet had heard the two men in the bushes and the fear of God had gone through her very soul. This late at night in a cemetery, even one as nice as Hollywood could not mean anything good.

  She had broken into as fast a run as she could manage, realizing this was not the time to worry about what anyone else thought about what she was doing and ran for the exit as fast as she could manage in wet leather shoes.

  She thought she heard them still following behind her and in a panic got off of the road, thinking that she’d have a better chance of hiding for a while, maybe till the sun rose when a groundskeeper would arrive for the first shift.

  The side of the road was crumbling at the edges and Harriet almost turned an ankle taking a small leap across a dip in the hillside and pushing through bushes that scratched at her arms and face till she was well out of sight of the road.

  It wasn’t until she was on the other side of the shrubbery that she realized what part of the cemetery she was in and then it seemed only natural that she would go find solace in one of the few places she was able to for so many years. Walter was buried nearby. She could sit with him and chat till the sun came up and the daylight would make everything seem safe again.

  This assignment did
n’t used to scare her so easily, she thought. I am getting too old for this nonsense.

  She knew this part of the cemetery as well as she knew the road where her house stood. She had been here so many times to sit with Walter and tell him how things were going in what she still saw as their lives and not just hers, alone. That thought, the solitary nature, was too much for her.

  She had placed a stone bench right by his headstone so she could sit and talk to him without having to stand for so long and now it seemed like divine order that it was there for her to rest after such an ordeal.

  The night had been too much for her in the cold air and the damp grass and then the excitement of thugs chasing her down the road. Just retrieving the key was enough drama, she thought, as she settled herself on the bench, still holding her purse close to her chest.

  “Walter,” she started to say, but the word came out in a slur. That surprised her. She tried again. “You won’t believe.”

  That’s what she could hear in her head but the words didn’t sound anything like that when they came out. They made no sense. Her purse started to slip from her grasp and she felt the panic return again. The key was in her purse. She tried to hold on tighter but that only seemed to make her arm grow more heavy and useless until it slumped in her lap and the purse rolled to the ground.

  Harriet looked at the purse on the ground at her feet, marveling that she had all the will in the world but couldn’t make her body move an inch. Slowly, the stars above faded for her till there was complete darkness and she slumped over on the bench, her mouth hanging open in a way that would have embarrassed her, if Harriet Jones had only known where she was anymore.