A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  “We got a confession, but my gut isn’t buying it.” He opened the medical examiner’s folder for Tricia Wheeler and flipped through the pages.

  “Your gut is a perfectionist.”

  “But it is usually right.”

  “Who confessed?”

  “Phyllis Barlow, the girl next door.”

  “The sister of the guy Tricia had ditched for a dance?”

  “Yeah.” He picked up the crime-scene picture of Tricia laid out on the sofa.

  Phyllis said she did not remember if she laid her out on the sofa or not. The position suggested whoever did it was someone who cared about her. That contradicted his assessment of the relationship between the two girls. He would describe their relationship as one of bitterness.

  The next picture was a close-up of the gun on the floor at the end of the sofa.

  Phyllis said the gun was her father’s old army pistol.

  “What is bothering you about her confession?” Hank was asking.

  “So far I have come up with nothing but questions.”

  The next picture was a full-length picture of Tricia on the medical examiner’s table, before the examiner had cut through her flesh with his scalpel. She was naked in order to capture any injuries or evidence on film.

  Joshua tried not to stare at how beautiful she was—even in death.

  “I think we should talk about us,” Hank said.

  There was a thin gold strand around Tricia’s neck. It looked like a necklace. There was a design at the well of her throat.

  Knowing that there would be a close-up of her face, he flipped to the next picture. He was right.

  “Josh?”

  He gazed at the image of Tricia’s face. It was a head and shoulder shot. His eyes fell to the gold band around her neck.

  “Josh? Are you still there?”

  What is that at the end of her necklace?

  He held the picture under his desk lamp to make sure he saw what he thought he saw.

  She begged, “Josh, please say something.”

  It was a chain from which hung two gold hearts held together by a diamond in the center. He stared at the necklace like a subject trying to hypnotize himself.

  Where—what—who was it that said something about someone giving Tricia a necklace with two hearts?

  “Excuse me, Hank,” Joshua said. “But I have to make a phone call. Can I call you back?”

  While he worked out in his mind the only scenario that fit, he sank back into his chair to study the hearts in the picture.

  He dug through his notebook until he found Cindy’s number and punched it into the phone while praying she’d be home. When she answered, he took a minimal amount of time for pleasantries before he asked her, “Is there any chance that Tricia took back Doug’s necklace?”

  “. . . and so then the Sunday school teacher told Grandmamma Frieda to take Josh home and never to bring him back to church again.”

  Doug laughed.

  In spite of the circumstances, the evening had turned out to be comfortable. Jan prepared dinner out of what she found in the fridge: burgers and a salad, milk, and a block of cheddar cheese while Doug showed off his rock collection to Tad. The genius was fascinated with geology and the acre and a half that they lived on along a hillside had quite an assortment of interesting rocks.

  Jan concluded that he would make a good feature for the paper: the life of a certified genius suffering from mental illness.

  After their meal, they sat back in their chairs at the table in the great room and sliced off bites of the cheese with a butcher knife Jan had found in the kitchen drawer.

  “Did they ever let Josh go back to Sunday school?” Doug wondered.

  “Oh, yes, but the Cunninghams never let him play with any of their kids again.” Jan added with a giggle, “Nowadays, they could have sued Josh for punching out their son over that slingshot.”

  Doug failed to see her humor. He looked at the doctor with wide eyes. “Is he a good lawyer?”

  Tad said, “One of the best.”

  “Is he going to send Phyllis to jail?”

  Jan took their empty plates to the sink. She felt sorry for him.

  Like an adult explaining a grown-up situation to a child, Tad told him, “That’s up to a jury to decide. All Josh will do is present the people’s case against her.” Tad wondered if he knew that Phyllis had confessed.

  “I was going to be a scientist.”

  Referring to his rock collection, Tad said, “And I’m sure you could have been a good one.”

  “But I got sick.” Doug stated it like a scientific fact.

  Tad and Jan exchanged sympathetic expressions when she came back to the table for an armload of condiments to return to the refrigerator.

  “Well, you know, Doug,” she said, “you don’t have to let your illness prevent you from achieving any dreams you might have.”

  “I can’t have my dream until after I die.”

  Frightened by his reference to death, she stepped back behind Tad’s chair.

  The doctor squinted at him. “Why is that?”

  “Trish and I couldn’t be together here in life because they wouldn’t let us. So, we’re going to have to get together on the other side.”

  Fear formed a lump in Jan’s throat that made it difficult for her to swallow. She grasped Tad’s shoulder for courage. Doug cut off another slice of cheese with the butcher knife and nibbled at it like a rat savoring a tasty find while the cat was away at the vet’s office.

  Tad’s voice was steady. “Don’t you have any dreams for here in your lifetime?”

  “No.” Doug continued to gnaw at the cheese and gazed at him with eyes that looked as innocent as a child talking about Santa Claus. “That’s why I keep trying to kill myself, so that I can go be with her. But they keep stopping me because they don’t want us to be together.”

  “Who are they, Doug?” Jan choked out.

  “Them.” He indicated with a nod of his head the unseen enemy that consisted of the populace who had victimized him during the course of his lifetime. “All those people who kept telling Tricia that I wasn’t good enough for her, and that we were hicks, and that she could do better. She only pretended to be stuck-up and not like me. She really did love me, and it hurt that we couldn’t be together. It hurt so much that she finally had to kill herself.”

  Tad swallowed and phrased his next question carefully. “Doug, were you there when Trish died?”

  “That was when we decided that the only way we could be together was to go to the other side where they couldn’t hurt us anymore.”

  “Was that when she told you that she loved you?”

  “Yeah, that was when she gave me this.” Doug reached down inside his shirt and pulled out a gold chain at the end of which hung a woman’s class ring with a sapphire stone in it.

  Jan gasped at the sight of the ring. She recalled Tricia grabbing it from Randy’s neck hours before she was killed. She imagined how Doug had come to possess it.

  Their host leaned across the table to let his guests examine the ring he wore around his neck.

  While he fingered the jewel, Tad read the engraving inside. It read “TRW.” Tricia Rose Wheeler. He glanced up at Jan and silently answered her unspoken query with a nod of his head. Yes, it was the ring Tricia had taken from Randy, the same one that her mother assumed had been stolen from her dead body by a morgue attendant.

  “Trish gave it to me because she loved me,” Doug leaned back in his seat. “And she’s waiting for me on the other side where we will be together forever.”

  In the midst of devising a plan to call Joshua, Jan leapt for the phone when it rang.

  Enthralled with his fantasy about the love he shared with Tricia, Doug continued
to eat his cheese.

  Tad kept a watchful eye on him.

  “Tad—” Joshua blurted out when Jan picked up the phone.

  “Hey, am I glad you called!” Jan said with exaggerated brightness. “We were just talking about you.”

  “You found out that Doug killed Tricia,” Joshua told her.

  “Yep!”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.” Her voice squeaked. She watched Doug slice through the cheese and offer the slice to Tad from off the point of the butcher knife.

  “You stay on the phone with Donny, and I’ll go have Curt run out there to take him into custody.”

  Tad accepted the slice of cheese.

  “Well, I don’t know if I can remember that far back,” she said into the phone. “You know my memory is not as good as it used to be.”

  Laughing, she offered Doug an excuse to stay on the phone. “Josh’s son has to write a paper. They want me to remember when his great-grandmother started a family feud by having the outhouse hauled out to the dump without her mother-in-law’s permission.”

  Doug nodded his consent for her to continue the conversation and stabbed the block of cheese with the knife. His face was emotionless when he got up from the table and went down the hallway to the bathroom.

  Tad followed.

  Doug closed the door in his face.

  At the Thornton house, on his cell phone, Joshua ordered the sheriff to get out to the Barlow house.

  “Why?”

  “Doug killed Tricia and now Tad and Jan are out there alone with him in that holler.”

  “But Phyllis confessed to killing Wheeler.”

  “My gut said there was something wrong with that confession!” Joshua yelled. “I should have listened to it! She confessed to protect her brother. She’s been doing that her whole life!” Furious with his own stupidity, he slammed his fist onto the top of his desk. “Damn it! I knew she confessed too easily!”

  “Did she kill Gail?”

  “No! Doug killed Gail. He was afraid that she was going to defame Tricia in some way in her book—or maybe he was sane enough to think that she was going to find out that he killed Trish! We assumed the grounds on the scene had been on Phyllis’s hands. Damn! I was sitting right there in their house when Doug told me to my face that he ground the coffee.” He pounded his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Now, get a deputy out there, and we’ll sort this all out later. Right now that lunatic is out there alone with Tad and Jan, and there is no telling what he’ll do!”

  “Okay! I’ve got a deputy out in that area now. He should be there in three minutes.”

  Curt observed the name on the roster of who was patrolling Birch Hollow and rubbed his face. It was Andrew Jones, a rookie of two weeks.

  Jan kept an eye on the bathroom door while she talked fast into the phone. “—so then your great-great-grandmother sees the outhouse is missing and goes ballistic!”

  Tad knocked on the bathroom door. “Doug? Are you okay?”

  The doorknob turned and the door opened.

  Tad stepped back.

  Jan held her breath.

  Doug came out of the bathroom. He seemed to be in a dazed state of consciousness.

  Jan rattled on, “You see, Agnes Thornton had this thing about change. She never bought a dress that was made after 1926.” Her mind raced while she tried to think of a smooth way of conveying to Donny the object Doug held down at his side when he strolled into the center of the living room.

  Tad shielded her.

  “Donny,” her voice cracked in her vain effort to sound calm. “I need to speak to your father. Now.”

  Donny tapped Joshua on the arm and handed him the phone while he held the cell phone to his other ear. “Jan needs you.”

  Joshua put the other phone to his ear. “Yeah, Jan?”

  “Doug has a gun,” Jan said.

  “What’s he doing with it?”

  She whispered to Tad, “What’s he going to do with that?”

  Tad shot his host a nervous smile. “Doug, what are you doing with that gun?”

  The gun still at his side, Doug looked at Tad with a face filled with anticipation. “It’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “I’m going to go be with Trish.”

  Jan hissed into the phone, “I think he intends to kill himself.”

  Tad asked him, “Why now?”

  “Because you’re going to try to stop me. You don’t want us to be together, either.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because you’re one of them. Phyllis said so, but I didn’t believe her. But I saw she was right when I showed you this.” Doug held up the ring to show him. “I should have known. You’re going to steal this and say that Trish didn’t give it to me, and that she didn’t love me, and that I killed her, and that I stole this.”

  “Is that what happened?” Tad took a step towards him.

  In a flash, the gun was no longer at Doug’s side. He aimed it at Tad. In the other hand, he clutched the ring like a lifeline.

  Jan dropped down to crouch on the floor. “Josh! Hurry! Please! I think he’s going to shoot Tad!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Holding up his hands, Tad stepped back from Doug and the gun. “Take it easy, man! I came here to help you.”

  Jan had crawled back behind the china closet.

  All was still. No one moved.

  Joshua held his breath and prayed.

  “Doug,” Tad spoke in a calm tone. “Give me the gun.”

  The man with the gun wavered.

  “I’m your friend. Have I ever hurt you?” Tad asked.

  “Phyllis says that I’m not a good judge of people. I’m smart when it comes to things in books, but not when it comes to people.”

  “I think you are a good judge of people, Doug. You were right about Trish, weren’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She gave you that ring. A girl doesn’t give a guy her class ring if she doesn’t love him, does she?”

  Doug wavered more. He gazed at the ring he clutched in his hand. “Yeah, Phyllis said she didn’t love me, but she gave me this ring.”

  While Doug gazed at the ring in his hand, Tad inched towards him. “You were right there, Doug, and you’re right about me being your friend. You don’t want to hurt me. Give me the gun.” Tad’s hand was on the gun.

  The doorbell rang. “Dr. MacMillan! Deputy Jones with the Hancock County Sheriff Department. Are you okay in there?”

  Jones’s question was answered with a gunshot.

  When he heard the shot come across the phone line, Joshua yelled and dropped into his chair.

  Donny took in a sharp breath and tried to think of what to do to help the situation. He decided to call for help from his sisters and brothers.

  Miles away in Birch Hollow, Deputy Jones kicked in the door and ran inside the house with his gun drawn.

  The scene that greeted him was that of one man on his knees clutching a bloody hand while the other man stood over him with a gun.

  A screaming woman was crawling towards the man with the bleeding hand.

  “Drop the gun now!” Deputy Jones took aim on Doug, who looked at him.

  “He said drop it!” Deputy Pete Hockenberry appeared in the doorway behind Deputy Jones with his gun drawn. He made it just in time to back up the rookie.

  Seeing both guns pointed in his direction, Tad threw himself across the room to tackle Jan. Together they rolled across the floor until they landed with his body on top of her under the dining-room table. It was too late now for him to do anything to help Doug.

  Doug smiled broadly.

  Tad observed that it was the happiest he
had ever seen his patient in all the years that he had known him.

  “I’m coming, my love!” Then, Doug Barlow took aim on the deputies and fired a shot that missed them both by a mile.

  The law officers did not have time to check out his aim. They only had and took the time to experience the jolting fear of having a shot fired at them. They had no choice but to fire their weapons in self-defense.

  Hancock County Medical Examiner Dr. Tad MacMillan ruled Doug Barlow’s death as suicide by cop.

  The woman known in the valley as an ice queen dissolved into tears. She was rousted out of bed in her cell and brought back down to the conference room to be told that her brother was dead after confessing to Dr. Tad MacMillan and Jan Martin that he killed Tricia Wheeler.

  Phyllis broke down at the news.

  Jan had driven Tad to the emergency room to get his hand bandaged up. It had been grazed by the bullet when the gun went off while he was attempting to take it from Doug.

  Joshua and Curt sat across from Phyllis while Ruth comforted her client the best she could. Even the seasoned professional hadn’t realized that her confession to Tricia’s murder was a lie. If she had, she would never have let her do it.

  While Phyllis sobbed, Joshua did his best to piece together what had happened for the sheriff and the public defender.

  “When you got home on the bus after school that day, you could not find Doug. While you were looking for him, Cindy brought Tricia home and she went inside her house, which was just across the yard from yours.”

  Joshua waited for her to confirm he was right with a nod before he proceeded. “That was when Doug shot Trish.”

  Phyllis broke into loud sobs and dropped her head onto the table. Ruth patted her shoulder. Having anticipated the emotional scene, Joshua handed her a handkerchief he had brought along. He waited for her to wipe her face and regain enough control to choke out, “It was an accident!”

  “I have no doubt that it was.”

  Phyllis gave a hint of a smile of relief.

  Joshua continued, “Doug had decided to kill himself because he came to realize that he could never have the woman he loved, but he could not do it without telling Tricia good-bye. So, he went home to get your father’s pistol. He had a key to the Wheeler house because it was rented from your family. Tricia found him waiting for her when she got home.”