“Do you want me to come with you? Two heads are usually better than one.”
“No, thanks, Ginnie. I need to be alone.”
By the front door, I thrust my feet into my boots while Greta tried to keep me from leaving. “It's so early. We still have the scavenger hunt to do, and Santa will be arriving by sleigh in about an hour.”
“Something's come up,” I told her. “I really have to go.”
She hugged me. “Drive carefully,” she said, opening the front door.
As if I had a choice. “Thanks for inviting me.” The windblown snow hid the fields around the farmhouse from my vision. I stood at the top of the porch steps for a moment and pulled the hood of my quilted jacket over my hair. Behind me, I heard Greta call out, “Okay, kids, it's pinata time!”
The door clicked shut, and I wanted to go back in, to the place where everybody was happy and warm and having fun, but I knew I couldn't. There were pieces of the puzzle to be put together, and I needed to be alone to do it.
In some places, the snow had drifted up to my knees.
It slid inside my ankle-high boots and turned my toes into ice cubes. The wind gusted so strongly I had to cling to the trucks parked along the driveway to keep from blowing over until I finally reached Garnet's truck. Although I was worried about the battery, it started up right away and I moved out onto the main road, saying a little prayer of thanks to the inventor of the four-wheel drive.
The roads were not as bad as I'd expected. Judging from the drifts of snow on the shoulders, the snowplows had been through at least once. But driving was still difficult, and sensible people were sitting out the storm in their homes.
When, at long last, I drove through the gateway of the Moon Lake development, I was struck by the total darkness around me. Black clouds above obscured the moon, and there was no light at all coming from any of the mansions’ windows.
Power failure! Thankfully, I'd prepared for the worst.
I lit several candles and greeted the cats, who showed me they were very glad I was home by leaning up against me and meowing pitifully.
“I thought you guys could see in the dark,” I said as I stroked them. “A power failure shouldn't bother you at all.”
When they'd been soothed by a handful of Tasty Tabby Treats I went upstairs and stripped off my green velvet skirt. It had seen me through many a winter party in New York, but one Pennsylvania farm Christmas had done it in. Oh, well, I thought, dropping the soggy thing in the trash, it was time for a new Christmas outfit. Comfortably dressed in a warm sweatsuit, I joined the cats downstairs.
Although the house was heated by oil, the thermostat was electrically controlled, so the temperature was dropping rapidly. The cats helped me prepare a fire by batting crumpled newspapers around the front parlor while I tossed match after match into the fireplace. Once it finally caught, I felt as proud as if I were Daniel Boone. My first fire!
The ringing of the telephone startled me. I'd assumed if the power was off, the phone would be out of commission, too. Cassie's voice cut through the static. “Tori, I've been trying to reach you all evening. I finally got through to the sheriff's office in Jasper, Texas.”
“What did you find out?”
“Not a whole lot. The sheriff said he remembered the Douglas murder-suicide very well because it was his first case as a deputy. He said the saddest part of it all for him was seeing what happened to Eugenia after her parents died.”
“What happened?”
“There were no relatives to take her in. So she was placed with a foster family. The worst happened there. She was physically and sexually abused for at least six months before anybody found out.”
“That's awful.”
“It was. He said she was so traumatized that she had to be institutionalized.”
“Forever?”
“No. After about six months, she was adopted by an out-of-state family. He never heard any more about her.”
“Can the family be traced?”
“He says it can't. I guess we'll never be able to let her know about her brother's body being found.”
“Might be just as well,” I said. “After all the horrible things that happened to her, she's probably better off putting it all out of her mind.”
“I agree. Goodnight, Tori, and Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you—and thanks, for everything.”
I went back into the kitchen and put on water for tea. Thank goodness the stove was gas. While I waited for the kettle to whistle, something tickled my memory like a barely remembered tune, then faded away before I could grab hold. Something about adoption. Reverend Flack saying his wife's problems came from her having been adopted after her parents were killed in an accident.
When the kettle came to a boil, I prepared tea in one of Ethelind's Staffordshire teapots and covered it with a flowered tea cozy. I loaded up a silver tray with the teapot, a mug, artificial sweetener, a bowl of potato chips, and an unopened package of chocolate chip cookies. I always think better with food on hand, and I had a lot of thinking to do tonight.
Back in the parlor, wrapped up in a crocheted afghan, with the fire going, several candles lit, a cup of hot tea in one hand, a cookie in the other, and the cats on my lap, I settled down to do some serious brainstorming.
Something had come to me in a flash right after dinner at Greta's, and I was pretty sure I knew who could have committed the murders, but even though I was now sure that the intended victim had been Oretta, the “why” was still beyond my grasp.
I reached for another cookie when suddenly a rumbling noise seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth. The cats sat up, startled, as it built to a crescendo that ended with a crack and a burst of lightning that momentarily turned the room as bright as day. My mug flew into the air, and the cats shot off my lap and sought refuge under a marble-topped table in the corner.
After my heart stopped pounding, and I'd wiped up the tea I'd spilled, I laughed at them. “ 'Fraidy cats—scared of a little lightning.”
Another clap of thunder shook the house. “Maybe you guys know what you're doing,” I said. I'd never heard of thunder and lightning accompanying a snowstorm. I longed for a battery-operated radio to tell me what was going on, but that was the one thing I hadn't thought of earlier in the day.
Covered with another afghan, I tried to recapture my train of thought. During the past week, I'd spent a lot of time in the company of some very strange people: a TV psychic, a goddess-worshiping witch, a cat artist, a recovering alcoholic-drug addict restaurateur, an amorous arms collector, a bingo buff, a hymn-playing seamstress, a cavorting chiropractor, and a child serial-killer-in-training. But I hadn't come up with any evidence that pointed to any one of them as a murderer.
“Damn,” I muttered after a few minutes. “Nothing makes any sense.”
Noel, still under the table, consoled me with a comforting chirp.
How could I find Oretta's killer when I knew so little about the woman? If only I'd had the opportunity to get to know her better. What did she do in her spare time besides write bad plays and save animals?
That thought made me pause. Animals. Someone, presumably the murderer, had rescued all the animals in Oretta's house before setting fire to it. Had Oretta done something at the shelter to incense a fanatical animal lover?
Something else occurred to me. Oretta's passion had been writing. What if she hadn't limited her plagiarism to Shakespeare and the Bible? Perhaps the answer lay in Oretta's own, or stolen, words. What if someone had written a wonderful play and shown it to Oretta, only to discover later that Oretta had incorporated it into one of her own works?
Nothing in the Christmas pageant had struck me as unusual, except for the terrible writing, but there was the copy of the play she'd artfully left behind when she'd brought the lizard in. It was the only thing of Oretta's that had survived her death.
She'd claimed it was her “masterpiece,” a play even better than The Bad Seed. I'd pu
rposely avoided reading it, dreading the woman's pretentious prose. But … everything else had been destroyed in the fire, and now I knew I had to look at the play. Maybe, just maybe, the answer I was looking for was there.
The manuscript was in the kitchen, half-buried under the Christmas catalogs. After refilling the potato chip bowl, I carried chips and script back to the living room.
I glanced at the title page and smiled at the title, Oretta Clopper's last attempt at plagiarism, Death in the Afternoon. With a sigh of resignation, I turned to Act I.
It was the worst writing I'd ever had the misfortune to read, but I couldn't put it down. Like the play Oretta had mentioned, it was about children. If I hadn't been directly involved so recently with Peter Poffenberger, the young wannabe serial killer, I would have thrown it down in disgust, but because I now knew without a doubt that children are capable of evil I kept reading, for Oretta's play was a thinly veiled account of Eddie Douglas's death.
In the first act, a little boy follows the older children to the quarry, where they have a secret clubhouse. The kids regard him as a pest, and when he falls in the water, they taunt him and throw rocks at him until he goes under and never comes up again. In the second act, the children, afraid of being punished, swear a blood oath not to tell anybody what happened.
I went back to read the cast of characters. The leader of that charming group of children was described as “a girl of great beauty and creative ability.” Not surprisingly, her name was Loretta. Loretta's cohort was Richard Shook, “a chubby but artistic child.”
As I read on, I was convinced that I was not reading fiction—Oretta hadn't even changed Eddie's name—that Oretta had written a play about the terrible thing she and Raymond Zook and possibly some other playmates had done. Why had she written it? Had it been an attempt to clear her conscience? In the past, this was the kind of thing I would have talked over with my best friend, Alice-Ann, but that was now out of the question. And I knew Maggie was out of town recreating the Civil War. I thought for a moment, then picked up the phone and called Ginnie Welburn's number. There was no answer, so I assumed she was still at Greta's house.
Before I had a chance to get resettled, a crash, far above, shook the house. What had happened? A tree? The roof? What? When the building stopped shaking, I took a candle and went upstairs to check on the damage. In a third-floor bedroom, a falling tree had smashed through a window. There was nothing I could do to fix it, not now with the storm at the height of its fury, so I moved everything I thought was valuable into the hall and shut the door against the howling wind.
Halfway down the stairs, with the candle flame casting eerie shadows on the wall, I suddenly thought I heard something in the front of the house. I stopped. Listened. Heard nothing but the wind. And yet, there had been a sound—I was sure of it. I wanted to run back to my room, lock the door, pull the covers up over my head. But that wasn't the adult way to face formless fears. Besides, my cats were down there. Near-panic set in. What if the door had blown open? They could be lost in the storm! What if they'd knocked over a candle? What if … ? “Stop acting like an idiot, Tori,” I scolded myself. “Go downstairs and find out what's happened.”
In the front parlor, I found the cats were standing on their hind legs looking out one of the front windows.
I whistled with relief. What I'd heard had probably been them, moving around. “Is it still snowing?” I asked.
My answer was a crack of thunder followed by a bolt of lightning. Both cats screamed and scurried under their table.
I was transfixed by what I thought I'd just seen in the window before the drapes fell back in place. A face. I rushed to the window and looked out, but of course there was nothing there. My imagination, triggered by the storm, had gone into overdrive.
After I threw another log on the fire, I tried to call Greta's house, but apparently the phone lines had finally gone down. I wondered how much longer this storm could go on, and once again, I longed for the comfort of a portable radio.
Noel came out from under the table and gave me one of her looks that called me a “stupid human.”
“What's wrong?” I asked her. She answered by strolling out of the room with her twitching tail straight up. I followed her into the front hall, and from there I heard the sound of someone or something pounding on the front door.
I stood close to the door and yelled, “Is someone there?”
“It's me. Ginnie.” I could barely hear her voice over the roar of the wind.
I unbolted the door, and it blew open, admitting Ginnie Welburn and a lot of snow. The porch creaked ominously as I shut the door as gently as I could. Noel screeched and ran from the hall.
“I tried to call you a little earlier,” I said.
“I came straight from Greta's. I have something I wanted to give you.” I noticed she had a plastic-wrapped bundle tucked under one arm.
“You shouldn't have … I didn't get you a present,” I protested.
“It's not really a present. But don't open it until tomorrow, please.” She placed it on the hall table, hung her parka on the hall tree, and went into the living room.
“What a lovely fire.” She was rubbing her hands together in front of the fireplace.
“You look frozen. I'll get some tea,” I offered. When she didn't say anything, I hurried back to my frozen kitchen. The water in the kettle was still hot, so it took only a minute or two to come to a boil. I refilled the teapot, grabbed another mug, and went back to the living room, where Ginnie was seated on the couch reading Death in the Afternoon.
I filled two mugs with tea and put one down beside her. She flipped quickly through the pages and didn't seem to notice me.
Fred crawled out from under the table and curled up on my lap. I sipped my tea, which burned all the way down.
“So she did give you a copy,” she said.
“She didn't exactly give it to me. She sort of left it here for me to find.”
“I figured that's why she came down here after leaving my house.” Ginnie tossed my copy of the play onto the coffee table. “The day after we learned Kevin Poffen-berger was lost.”
“The reason she gave me for dropping in was she wanted me to lizard-sit an iguana until she could find a home for it. Now I can see that was just an excuse to leave the play here. But I didn't see it until Sunday night when Praxythea packed up to leave and took the iguana with her.”
“That explains a lot.” Ginnie sipped from her mug of tea. “Have you read it?”
I said quietly, “Yes, Eugenia, I read it tonight.”
Ginnie jumped up and started pacing the length of the room. Back and forth, and back again. Fred, startled, jumped from my lap and ran from the room.
When Ginnie spoke, her words sounded almost childlike. “Eddie and I were twins, you know. Like one spirit with two bodies. Always together. If I hadn't had a summer cold, I would have been with him that day. And he wouldn't have gotten lost. Mummy said it was my fault he got lost.
“I tried to put it out of my mind. For years, I hadn't thought about it. Then Eddie's body turned up in the quarry, and I read Oretta's play, and everything flooded back. Eddie's disappearance. Mummy drinking. And crying all the time. The fighting. The shots. Finding Daddy and Mummy in the bedroom. All covered in blood.
“They took me away to live with another family. There was a terrible man there. He did things to me in the barn—it all came back.
“I called Oretta. Told her it was a great play. When I asked her if it was ‘autobiographical,’ she was stupid enough to tell me it was—that she'd done something as a child she regretted, and writing about it was her way of getting it off her conscience.”
“Why didn't you go to the police with it?” I asked.
“I couldn't have proved she'd really killed my brother, and even if they believed me, she'd never have been punished enough. They'd have figured it all happened a long time ago, when she was only a child. At the most, she'd have been given a lecture and mayb
e a short sentence, suspended of course. She deserved to die.”
“Did Bernice deserve to die?”
She began to cry. “I didn't mean to kill her.” Her pacing was more rapid now. Up and down, back and forth. “As you guessed, it was meant for Oretta. I felt terrible when Bernice drank it and died.”
“Where did you get the cyanide?”
“In the back of a locked closet in the high school lab where I sub. Years ago, cyanide was used for some science experiments involving the synthesis of complex molecules, but schools were supposed to have disposed of it.” She half-smiled as if she'd heard a bad joke. “Most likely the science teacher didn't know how to get rid of it, so he locked it up and forgot about it. Nobody knew it was there. After I read her play and decided to kill her, I remembered the cyanide. I went over to the school and helped myself. A few students saw me, but they had no idea what I was doing.”
“I'm going to have to call the police, you know,” I said.
She stopped pacing and hovered over me, and I became frightened although I tried not to show it.
“You can't call anyone. The phone lines are down.”
I knew I had to keep her talking. As long as she was talking, she wasn't hurting me. “With all the painful memories Lickin Creek holds for you, I'm surprised you came back here to live,” I said. “Why did you?”
The pacing started again. “What I told you about driving through with my husband on our way to Gettysburg was true. There was something about the town that appealed to me. I instantly felt as if I belonged here. I didn't remember that I'd lived here before. After all, I was only five years old when it happened. It wasn't until I read Oretta's play that I realized that this was the town, and the reason I felt so comfortable here was because this was the last place where I'd actually been happy—before Eddie disappeared and my life ended.”
“Why did you threaten me?” I asked, recalling the disemboweled bean-bag kitty that had been left on my doorstep. “What have I ever done to you?”
Death, Snow, and Mistletoe Page 25
