A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “I want you to wait for me outside.”

  “No.”

  He could see that she was not going to leave his side. “Suit yourself.”

  When Tad opened the door the sweet putrid scent hit them in the face. Jan gasped and covered her mouth when she felt her stomach lurch. “What is that?”

  He had switched on the light with the wall switch and was removing the pillow that covered the head of the figure on the bed. His examination of Gail’s body triggered the release of gases forming in the decomposing figure.

  “Death.” Tad coughed and covered his nose and mouth with his hand. “That is the smell of death.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Who called you?” Seth challenged Joshua when he saw him climb out of his Corvette. He had to park at the corner of Gail Reynolds’s yard. The police and emergency vehicles filled the driveway.

  “The medical examiner.” Joshua did not slow his pace to go inside to escape the drizzle that had started. “Gail was a friend.”

  “How good of a friend?”

  Joshua found the living room packed with the forensics team scouring the scene for evidence. He halted. Seth stepped in behind him.

  Jan dashed away from the kitchen where Deputy Pete Hockenberry was questioning her and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Josh, I’m so glad you’re here! It’s awful.”

  “Where is she?”

  She gestured toward the bedroom at the end of the hallway.

  Seth blocked his path. “First, I need for you to answer a couple of questions, Counselor.”

  “What questions?”

  “How close were you and the victim?”

  “I told you. We were friends.”

  “Are you sure that’s all you were?” The detective chuckled at him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Seth stepped aside and laid his hand on the photograph on the table. He grinned when he saw confusion cross Joshua’s face when he saw the image of the pregnant Gail with his arms around her.

  Jan blurted out, “She was stalking Josh.”

  “Yeah. Right,” Seth replied.

  When Joshua turned to go down the hall, Seth grabbed his arm to stop him. He slapped the detective’s hand away before shoving him back against the wall.

  “Back off, Cavanaugh!”

  His on-scene examination complete, Tad was packing up his instruments into his medical case when his cousin came into the room.

  “What happened to her?” Joshua looked down at the body.

  In the weekend since he had last seen her, death had transformed Gail’s body so that she bore only a slight resemblance to the woman he had known. She was wearing the same black trench coat she had worn when she had stepped out of the shadows in his backyard a few days before. The hat was still on the floor where he had discarded it.

  “I’ll know for certain after I open her up,” Tad replied to his question, “but bruising on the inside of her lips and fibers in her nostrils suggests that someone smothered her with the pillow.”

  Joshua gazed at the pillow that Tad had suggested was the murder weapon. In the room that was brightly lit in order to reveal any clues, he could make out a faint brown outline on the case that resembled a hand. Reluctant to touch the coarse material for fear of disturbing evidence, he bent to look at the shape. “Her killer had dirty hands.”

  “I’d say so. The lab should be able to come up with a chemical breakdown of that dirt to trace it back to our guy.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “She’s been dead for at least three days, based on decomposition and the stages of larvae in the corpse.”

  Joshua repeated the words, “Three days.” He subtracted the days of the week. “Friday.”

  “Friday night, Saturday morning, early hours.” Tad proceeded to fold her hands, encased in paper bags sealed with rubber bands, across her chest as if to make her comfortable for the trip to the morgue.

  “I saw her Friday night,” Joshua muttered a single octave above a whisper.

  Pete Hockenberry, who had followed him into the room, started upon hearing the announcement.

  Tad turned away from the bed to face his cousin. “You saw her Friday night?”

  Three days seemed to be eons in the past. Joshua searched his memory for clues to her death in his last meeting with her in the darkness of the night. “She came by the house. It was after midnight and she was drunk, so I drove her home.”

  “You were here?” Tad asked. “In this room?”

  “Yes. I helped her inside, I put her on the bed, and then I left.”

  “You put her to bed,” Seth chuckled from behind his back.

  “She was drunk,” Joshua said.

  “Won’t be the first time an old friend decided to take advantage of a drunken woman,” the investigator said before asking Tad, “Any sign of hanky-panky?”

  The medical examiner glared. “None.”

  “Of course, you’d say that.”

  “If you want Johnstone to do the autopsy, fine,” Tad said. “I’d rather go home and go to bed anyway.”

  “Why would I want to kill Gail?” Joshua challenged the detective’s suggestion.

  “You tell me. You were the last one to see her alive.”

  “But you have yet to ask me one question about that meeting. Instead you have been making obscene insinuations since I walked in the door.”

  Seth asked Tad, “Why did you call Thornton here tonight?”

  “Because he knows what he’s doing and you don’t.”

  Impressed by his cutting remark, the deputies in the room and hallway, who had gathered with the promise of an interesting scene to witness, let out a whoop.

  Seth’s face reddened. “Where did you get that scratch, Thornton?”

  Joshua’s hand flew up to the mark on his neck. In an instant, he recalled Gail groping for him while he pushed her down onto the bed. Now, his skin was under her fingernails to be found during the autopsy.

  Seth smiled broadly at his hesitation. “I’ll be seeing you, Counselor.”

  Deputy Medical Examiner Gary Johnstone was called to meet Gail’s body at the morgue.

  Tad went home with Joshua to find out what had happened the night of her death.

  While the children, in various stages of preparation for school, ate their breakfasts, Joshua sat at the head of the table and stared into his coffee mug. They could see that he had been awake the whole night.

  The kitchen was filled with the scent of an egg scramble that contained a mixture of ground beef, onions, and cheese. The meal was accompanied by home fries topped with country gravy and thick slices of toast. Tad had prepared the feast more for himself and Joshua than the kids after he realized at four o’clock that he had not eaten since lunch the day before.

  Admiral, who usually waited next to his master during meals in hopes of getting a morsel of food, chose to move to the other end of the table where Tad, easy pickings for handouts, distracted the children from their father’s distress by recounting stories from their youth.

  After they had left for school and Admiral had wolfed down a bowl filled to the rim with the leftovers for his breakfast, Joshua let down his guard to pace the kitchen.

  “How is it that you never had any idea that her feelings for you were other than friendship?” Tad asked while wiping down the stovetop. “You were the one who told me that she came over and seduced you right under this roof.”

  “This roof was replaced fifteen years ago,” Joshua reminded him. “It was under the old, leaky roof that she seduced me.”

  Tad grinned at his cousin’s attempt at humor and dumped the coffee into the sink to make a fresh pot.

  Jos
hua rinsed out the sponge that Tad had put away to clean up a gravy spill he had missed on the kitchen table. “We were hormonal teenagers back then. She came across like the sophisticated feminist who considered love and family beneath her. I bought it. I honestly thought that whole seduction thing back then was a one-night stand and nothing more.”

  “Clearly it was on your part.”

  “She seduced me,” he reiterated.

  “You did sleep with her.”

  “Not Friday night!” He threw the sponge into the sink. It bounced off the rim and landed on the floor.

  “Hey!” Tad picked it up. “I’m on your side. What about all that stuff she had of yours—and that picture?”

  “That was Valerie in that picture. I was looking for it when we were packing up to move back here and couldn’t find it.”

  “Gail must have taken it and morphed her head onto the body.”

  “Why would someone do that?” Joshua asked in a steady tone. “What else did she have of mine?”

  “I don’t know. All I saw was the picture and the scrapbook.”

  “Cavanaugh is going to try to hang this on me. He’s too stupid to look anywhere else.”

  “Am I correct in assuming that your skin will be found under her fingernails?”

  “She was drunk,” Joshua fingered his wound. “She scratched me while I was helping her into bed.”

  “Or she scratched you while fighting you off when you tried to take advantage of her drunken state. What we need to find is another suspect. What time did you take her home?”

  “One o’clock Saturday morning.”

  Tad sat up on the kitchen counter. “That’s about when Rex Rollins was killed. He was killed around midnight and the fire in the boardinghouse was set around one.”

  Joshua leaned against the edge of the counter next to where Tad sat. “And Rex wrote a book about a wicked witch who got away with murder and Gail was writing a book about Trish’s death. We have two victims writing books about murder here in Chester and both of them are now dead.”

  “Maybe Rex wasn’t as stupid as everyone thought.”

  “If he was so smart, why is he dead?”

  The e-mails were flying.

  At this point in Jan’s career, if anyone had asked her, she would have said that she didn’t have much in the way of sources.

  She was wrong. After spending her whole adult life running the pharmacy, she knew almost everyone in town.

  Jan went home and sent out a mass e-mail to every addressee in her address book to announce the murder of Gail Reynolds and to ask about her life before her return to Chester, West Virginia.

  It did not take long for her phone to ring. The call came from Liz Yates, a young woman who had recently moved to Chester from Charleston and went to Jan’s church. Her new husband was a teacher at the elementary school. A realtor, Liz began working for Margo Connor.

  “Is it true that Gail Reynolds is dead?”

  Jan confirmed that the news was true.

  “When did it happen?”

  “Tad says that it had to have happened Friday night sometime.”

  Liz gasped. “I may have been one of the last ones to see her before she was killed!”

  “Where?”

  “At Antonelli’s. I went to dinner with Margo Connor to talk about my job with Connor Realty and Gail Reynolds showed up. I recognized her from television.” Liz laughed nervously. “They got into such an awful fight that I thought it was a joke.”

  “Of course!” Jan responded to the news. “Gail was writing a book about Tricia Wheeler’s murder. Margo and Trish had an awful fight right before she was killed. She had to be one of Gail’s prime suspects.”

  “That’s what the two of them were fighting about,” Liz confirmed. “I was never so embarrassed in my life!”

  “What time was this?”

  “I met Margo at five o’clock. She was eating her spaghetti when Gail showed up and launched right into asking her about this dead girl.”

  “I’ll bet Margo was furious.” Jan envisioned her former classmate’s reaction to the journalist tracking her down and interrogating her about Tricia Wheeler’s murder in public.

  “At first, Margo told her to talk to her lawyer.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then Gail Reynolds told her that she and this other girl got into a lot of fights. Margo said that it was because they didn’t like each other.”

  “They didn’t,” Jan said. “Margo hated Tricia. Did she threaten Gail?”

  “Yes,” Liz answered quickly. “I was trying to get out of there as fast as possible. They were screaming at each other and everyone was looking at us. I couldn’t believe it was really happening and here I was in the midst of all of it. I tell you, Jan, I don’t care if Connor Realty is the biggest realtor in the valley, I don’t need that type of grief.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Jan steered her back to the details of the fight. “What did Margo threaten to do to her? Do you remember Margo’s exact words?”

  Liz paused to remember the details of the fight as it happened.

  On the other end of the phone line, Jan waited.

  “First,” she said slowly, “Margo said that this Tricia committed suicide. Then Gail said that she had seen the fight they had the day she died and that Tricia had no reason to kill herself. Then Margo said that she killed herself because she had stolen some guy—I don’t remember his name—”

  “Randy.”

  “Yeah, Randy. That was it. Margo stole him from this dead girl.” Liz paused before she continued, “The next thing that Gail said did not make any sense. It sounded like she was then saying that Margo didn’t kill her, but that this boyfriend did because something happened between him and the dead girl and he needed to keep her quiet.”

  “What?” Jan gasped. This was not what she was expecting. “What did Margo say to that?”

  “She then told Gail that if she wrote her book, it was going to be over her own dead body.”

  Liz wasn’t able to give Jan any more details about the fight. She had run out of the restaurant without looking back after the threats of murder started flying between the two women.

  After encouraging Liz to call the police to tell them what she had witnessed, Jan hung up the phone and proceeded to do a Google search under the name Gail Reynolds. Her search produced thousands of results, some of whom were the Gail Reynolds she knew, but most were not. Jan cursed the dead woman for having such a common name. Several pages into the list, she discovered an article dated four months earlier from a small newspaper in Connecticut:

  “Journalist Gail Reynolds did not appear in New London County Municipal Court today to answer charges of stalking . . .”

  Stalking!

  “. . . Adam O’Neal (19) attended the hearing with his parents, Glen and Sylvia O’Neal. The O’Neal family’s request for a restraining order was approved . . .”

  Adam O’Neal was nineteen years old. Jan smiled. Gail liked them young.

  She sent the article to PRINT. While she waited for the hard copy, she scrolled to find any proof that the Gail Reynolds mentioned in the article was the same one whose body she and Tad had found the night before.

  The defendant in the stalking case sent letters and gifts, made phone calls, and followed Adam O’Neal from high school to college. He was afraid to move away from home to campus because of her. The stalking climaxed when Gail appeared in his bedroom with a knife one night and threatened to kill him and then herself. He managed to disarm her. She was arrested and taken away to a psychiatric ward where she spent three days before she was released.

  Jan’s computer dinged to signal an instant message. It was from Angie, a source Jan had acquired years before when she was writing for the lifestyle section of The Rev
iew, The Vindicator’s chief competitor. Angie had moved to Philadelphia where she worked as an administrative assistant for a television station that happened to be an affiliate for Gail’s network.

  “I didn’t know Gail came from Chester,” Angie replied to the news. “What a small world. Were you friends?”

  “Acquaintances,” was Jan’s answer. She was tempted to put the word in bold type, but chose not to. “Did Gail ever live in Connecticut?”

  “No, Gail was not the Connecticut type. She was a cosmopolitan girl through and through.”

  “Why didn’t the network renew her contract?”

  Angie responded, “I heard rumors of a nervous breakdown.”

  Tad was writing as fast as his hand could move on the yellow notepad he had found in the center of Joshua’s desk in the study. Dr. Johnstone was a friend as well as a colleague. He couldn’t send him a copy of the report that he had yet to write out for Seth Cavanaugh, but he could gossip about his findings.

  While Tad scribbled out cryptic notes in single misspelled words, Joshua strained to put together conclusions based on his “ah-hah’s” and “uh-huh’s.”

  “Well?” Joshua whirled the tablet around to read his notes as soon as his cousin had hung up the phone.

  “Gail died of asphyxiation,” Tad announced. “No big surprise there. Her blood alcohol level was .16.” Hearing the sound of a truck in the quiet town, he parted the blinds of the window behind him and peered outside.

  “I told you she was drunk when she showed up here.” Joshua tried to decipher one of the words His cousin had scribbled out. It started with an “e.”

  “Johnstone found cotton fibers caught up in the hairs of her nostrils. While she was possibly passed out, someone held a pillow over her face until she suffocated.” Tad peered through the shrubs that bordered the backyard and the alley behind the home. He could make out the tilted-flatbed of a tow truck. “Someone is being towed.”

  Joshua handed him the notepad and took a turn to look out the window at the truck on the other side of the hedges. “What’s that word?” He pointed to the word beginning with an “e.”