Erin Solomon Mysteries, Books 1 - 5

by Jen Blood

  She lowered her eyes. So, she hadn’t known that part, at least.

  “Where I get lost is after all that went down,” I said. Frustration was starting to bleed into my voice. I tamped it down; losing control would never get Kat to see things my way. “Because after the shooting, Dad got a call from Joe telling him they weren’t going after Rebecca. That he should just forget it. So, Dad called Reverend Diggins, and then…?”

  I looked at her. She stared at her hands for a long time before she finally met my eye.

  “He came to see me,” she said.

  Things got quiet. “You said you didn’t see him that morning. That if you’d known he wasn’t coming back for me, you would have gotten me yourself.”

  “I lied,” she said simply, and I knew that for once she was telling the truth. “He came to me to ask what he should do. He was in trouble—he knew that. Rebecca saw to it. So, I told him to leave.”

  “Leave where?”

  “Payson Isle. Littlehope. Maine. The U.S., if he could. I was on my way to get you when Diggins called to tell me Joe was there, drunker than a skunk and talking crazy. And he was: beaten to hell, crying, covered in blood, babbling about something I didn’t understand.” I could imagine Ashmont seeking refuge at the bottom of a bottle after his son had been killed, maybe getting the snot kicked out of himself somewhere along the way. “He said Matt was still out on the island,” Kat continued, “and he needed to get back out there. I dosed him with sleeping pills and he passed out.”

  “And when he woke up, you found out the island was burning,” I guessed.

  “Your father came back—I don’t know how he heard. He went and got you.” She rolled her eyes. “Took you out to that fucking island where dozens of people were already dead, because he was afraid to leave you alone once he knew what happened.”

  I held my breath. “And what happened, Kat?” I finally managed.

  She wet her lips. Looked me square in the eye. “There was a fire,” she said. “People died. That’s all you need to know.”

  “The hooded man—the one you always said was a figment of my imagination? I saw him again. He was the one who attacked you out on the island, wasn’t he? You and Joe and Matt—what the hell were you up to? Did he come for you, or did you go looking for him?”

  “There was a fire,” she repeated. Her eyes had gone cold, but there was still a tell-tale spark of fear lingering there. “I’m telling you: that’s all you need to know, Erin. Stop looking.”

  Maya came in before I could get the water boarding under way.

  “You two are still playing nice, I see,” she said. She wore jeans and a pretty green sweater and she looked more chipper than my mother on her best day. Kat smiled at her—actually smiled. I’d forgotten she could even do that.

  “Just catching up, but Erin has to be going.”

  “Did you tell her our news?” Maya asked. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hand resting absently on my mother’s knee.

  “What news?” I asked. If there was suspicion in my voice, I felt it was entirely justified.

  I sat with my hands folded in my lap while Maya gave me the skinny on my mother’s future plans. They would stay in Littlehope—just for a while, Kat assured me. Take over the clinic while she recuperated. Take things slow. I tried to read my mother in all of this; the woman who had despised Littlehope almost more than I had when I was growing up. She might have been bruised and swollen and just back from the brink of death days before, but she looked surprisingly pleased with the decision.

  Maya gave me a hug before I left, while Kat just told me to put ointment on my scratches and get a damned haircut already. I got back in the car and drove Einstein to the local dog shop, where I sat and watched him wrestle with a shepherd named Chuck while I checked out premium dog foods and thought about the bizarre bastardizations of love that manifest between parents and children, and all the ways they’ll bite you in the ass in the end.

  Then, I bought six tins of Loyal Biscuit premium dog biscuits, packed my mutt back in the car, and buckled him into his brand new doggie seatbelt.

  I went to find Diggs.

  Einstein trotted happily beside me once more when we returned to the Trib. The sun was out, the sky was clear. Diggs smiled when I came into the newsroom, nodding toward his office before any of the roving reporters could question me about the alarming number of people who seemed to meet a terrible end shortly after they crossed my path. Diggs sat in his chair; I sat on the corner of his desk.

  “You got some sleep,” he said.

  “Lots of sleep.”

  “Come up with any answers to the mysteries of Payson Isle?”

  “Other than the basics? Not really. I need to know who the Angel of Death is, though.”

  Diggs looked uncomfortable at that. The day before, I’d finally given him an abbreviated version of my story about the hooded man who had chased me the day of the Payson fire, and the role I suspected he’d played that day and over the past week. I hadn’t been able to tell at the time whether Diggs was skeptical of my tale or just plain terrified.

  “What? You think I’m still making him up?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I think three people were murdered out on Payson Isle yesterday, and you and Kat almost joined that list. I think your father’s hiding out for a reason you might not be ready to know, and this nut job in the hood isn’t just gonna drop everything. Not if you keep pushing.”

  I had actually considered all of that. Someone saner might have just let the whole thing go, but I knew I couldn’t. Diggs read that without me having to come out and say it and moved on to the next topic.

  “And you still don’t have a clue where your father might be.”

  “Washington, I guess—I mean, that’s where the phone rang, anyway. I’m booked on a flight tomorrow.”

  He didn’t look happy about that, but he didn’t look that surprised, either.

  “Did you know Kat and Maya are moving back here?” I asked.

  Based on his reaction—or lack of one—I was guessing he did. “What about you? Are you sticking around the old hometown for a while?” he asked. “After the Washington trip, I mean?”

  “Maya asked if I wanted to take care of their place in Portland. I think I’ll do that, actually.”

  There was a flicker of what might have been disappointment before he nodded. “Good—it’ll give you a chance to establish yourself, get back on your feet. Maybe go a few months without a life-or-death struggle for truth and justice.”

  “Just truth,” I said. “Justice is beyond my scope.”

  He smiled at that. “What about Juarez?” he asked. “Any word from the Cuban commando?”

  I thought of Jack’s words, and focused on drawing intricate patterns in my jeans so Diggs couldn’t read me. ...been in love with you since you were sixteen. Yeah.

  “I’m sorry about that whole thing,” I said. I managed to divert my attention from my denim etchings back to his face. “I know you and I aren’t…whatever, and you obviously don’t think of me that way anymore, which is totally understandable given, you know, everything. But it still wasn’t fair putting you in that position.”

  He didn’t say anything for at least twelve Mississippis, but his smile was one I remembered from another life. He put his hand on my knee and stood up. Situated himself between my legs and got a lot closer than two BFFs typically get. The look he gave me was anything but brotherly.

  “I didn’t say that,” he said.

  “Didn’t say what?” It was suddenly much, much warmer in his office.

  “I didn’t say I don’t think of you that way anymore.”

  I blinked at him stupidly. “What do you mean? Yeah you did.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t think of you that way—I said we shouldn’t go down that road. Then I got married. And I got divorced. And you got married. The timing was always a little off.”

  He tangled his right hand in my hair and gave me a bemused half-smi
le.

  “I never said I don’t think of you that way anymore, Solomon,” he repeated softly.

  “But the other night… This whole visit—”

  He rolled his eyes, but he still didn’t let me go. “Your marriage just fell apart. You just lost a baby, for Christ’s sake. You’ve been working twenty-eight hours a day trying to solve a mystery that’s been dogging you since you were a kid. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but it didn’t seem like the best time to make a move.”

  I tried to remember the basic mechanics of breathing in and out. “And now?” I asked.

  His lips hovered just a milli-second from mine. “I guess we’ll see,” he said.

  The conversation was clearly headed in a direction I hadn’t expected. Before we could get there, my cell phone rang. Diggs looked mildly amused.

  I let it ring once more.

  “You should probably get that.” He took a step back so I could dig through my purse. My knees were shaking and a lot of parts that had been solid before I walked into the office had liquefied in the past five minutes.

  It was Juarez. Now, Diggs looked really amused. He grinned, eyes sparkling when I answered.

  “Are you at a computer?” Juarez asked without preamble.

  I was still stuck at the part where Diggs had me pressed against the desk, so it took a second to switch gears. Once I had, I pushed Diggs out of the way none-too-gently and turned his laptop toward me.

  “I just sent you something,” Juarez said.

  I checked my e-mail and clicked on a link he’d forwarded. It led to a breaking news story in Olympia, Washington.

  Former Senator Jane Bellows Found Murdered In Her Home.

  I froze. Diggs scanned the headline over my shoulder.

  “That’s the woman, right?” Juarez asked. “That was the phone number Noel had written down with your father’s name next to it?”

  “Yeah. That was her.”

  A former senator.

  “I’m booking a flight,” Juarez said. “Are you coming?”

  I looked at Diggs. He nodded like he knew exactly what was happening.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  I hung up the phone.

  Diggs glanced at his watch. “When do we leave?”

  SINS OF THE FATHER

  The Erin Solomon Mystery Series

  Book 2

  Jen Blood

  Part I: Littlehope

  Chapter One

  I first met Hank Gendreau at the Maine State Prison in Warren, twenty-five years into a life sentence. It was hotter than hell in Midcoast Maine, and I was damp from the humidity and cranky from spending an hour and a half in summer traffic, crawling along a bottle-necked stretch of Route 1 that ran the full thirty miles from Bath to Waldoboro.

  When I finally hit Warren, I parked Einstein—my faithful canine compadre—with a sympathetic neighbor I knew from back in the day, thus saving him from baking in the hot car while I went about my business. Then, I drove another half mile up Route 97 and turned right at a section of brick wall taken from the original state prison in Thomaston, before it was replaced by the fifty thousand-square-foot “Supermax” I was about to enter.

  According to the official prison visitor’s rules of conduct, shorts and a tank top are too much for the average lifer to handle, so I opted for khakis and a button-up blouse. The ensemble was cooler than jeans, but still too warm for the dog days of summer. Once inside the building, it took forty-five minutes to get through the metal detector, a lengthy list of questions, and a frisking more intimate than any date I’d been on in recent memory, before I was allowed into the belly of the beast. The sun was blazing outside, but that light didn’t make its way into the stark visiting chamber where Gendreau waited for me.

  A few other inmates were already scattered throughout the room, visiting with friends and family. Gendreau sat behind a wood-veneer table with his hands folded and his eyes on the clock. Unlike movies or TV, there was no protective glass between us. He wore a blue denim shirt with faded jeans. No shackles. His hair was graying at the temples, and his brown eyes were clear and soulful. At first glance, they didn’t look at all like the eyes of a man who’d tortured and killed his seventeen-year-old daughter in a hallucinogenic frenzy.

  I sat down in a plastic chair on the opposite side of the table. He smiled, his teeth even and surprisingly white. In another life, he would have been an attractively innocuous sixty-year-old man living out an attractively innocuous life. Someone you might remember for his good manners, but not much else.

  I introduced myself and managed a good two minutes of small talk—a personal record—before I got down to business. The guards had confiscated my bag before I was allowed inside, but they let me carry a letter in with me once they’d assured themselves I wouldn’t pull some kind of Ninja death-through-origami stunt.

  “I know your final appeal was just denied. I’m not sure what you expect me to do about that,” I said. I tapped the letter with my index finger. “What did you honestly think you’d get by writing me?”

  He didn’t seem ruffled by my tone. “You came. That’s something.”

  I opened the envelope and took out the blurry photo I’d received with it two days earlier. Someone had scrawled the words Jeff, Will & Hank, Summer 1968 in sloping penmanship on the back. In the photo, three boys mugged for the camera. Two were dark-haired, the other a redhead, probably between fourteen and sixteen years old. The picture was too out of focus to tell much beyond that, however.

  “I’ve had that for a long time,” he said. “But it didn’t click for me till last week, when I was reading a story about the Payson fire in the Globe. They had a picture of you and your father in there, when you were younger.”

  I’d seen the article; it was one among many these days. Three months earlier, I’d bungled my way through an investigation that had ultimately proven the alleged cult suicide by fire of the Payson Church of Tomorrow—the religious community where I spent the first nine years of my life—hadn’t been suicide at all. In the process, I’d learned that my father had been harboring a secret that, for reasons I still didn’t understand, had inspired him to fake his own death ten years later. For the past three months, I’d been searching for some hint as to what that secret might have been… And where, exactly, my father was now. Gendreau’s letter was the first lead I’d gotten with any real potential in months.

  “And you recognized him after all those years?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been in the picture with him. But you looked just like him when he was younger.” I didn’t care for the way he was looking at me: like I was some ghost of Christmas past, come calling in the dead heat of summer.

  “I don’t know how you think this picture would convince me of anything—I can barely tell these kids are kids, much less that one of them might have been my father forty-five years ago. Besides which, my father’s name was Adam, not Jeff.”

  I waited to see if he took the bait. I knew full well my father wasn’t born Adam Solomon. I just needed to know if Gendreau did.

  “Maybe he was when he had you—after he joined that church,” he said evenly. “But when we were kids together, it was Jeff. He had a birthmark behind his knee shaped like South America, and a scar on his left forearm. You remember?”

  I nodded, but said nothing.

  “He got that scar when we were out fishing one day—we were about fifteen,” Gendreau continued. “There was this pond with some of the best trout in the County, but we had to climb over a fence to get to it. Somebody saw us. While we were trying to get away, Jeff got his arm snagged on the barbed wire. I’m telling you the God’s honest truth: the boy in that picture is your father.”

  I’m not above taking the word of a crazed psychopath, but I try not to make a habit of it. Facts don’t lie, though: my father did have a scar on his left forearm, and he’d told me almost exactly the same story about how he’d gotten it. And while as a kid I’d always thought th
e birthmark behind his knee looked more like a dancing hippo than South America, I could see where someone might get confused.

  “In your letter, you said you could give me answers.” I hesitated. There were a couple of prisoners at a neighboring table seemingly lost in their own conversations, but I’d learned the hard way that there was a very determined, as-yet-unidentified faction out there who’d go to great lengths to keep me from finding the truth about my father. I leaned in closer and lowered my voice, comforting myself with the knowledge that it’s only paranoia if there’s no one out to get you.

  “How did you know him? Where did you two grow up?”

  He pushed the letter and photo back toward me and wet his lips. Like that, his eyes changed. Either thirty years in prison had made that pleasantly innocuous sixty-year-old a hell of a lot harder than he would have been otherwise, or I was getting a rare glimpse into the true Hank Gendreau. He never took his eyes from mine.

  “I’ll make a trade,” he said.

  “What kind of trade?”

  “I don’t have any money left to hire anyone. My last appeal’s been denied. But I read about what you did with the Payson fire—how hard you worked to find the truth.” He looked like he expected me to argue the point. I kept quiet. “If you’ll look into my daughter’s murder, I’ll tell you about your father. Whatever you want to know.”

  “What was his last name?”

  “Not until you bring me something. Will you look into that day?”

  I’m not an idiot—I knew he could be lying. Maybe he and my father had known each other when they were kids, and that was the end of the story. Maybe he’d never known my father at all.

  “What if all I uncover about your daughter’s murder is that you did it?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. His eyes hardened, but he didn’t flinch and he didn’t look particularly offended by my words. He looked around for the guards, then waited a second or two, until he’d assured himself they weren’t listening. “There’s something else,” he said. “Something I didn’t mention in the letter.”