by B. J Daniels
Her lipstick was smeared, her linen dress was wrinkled from where she’d been perched on the arm of one of the leather chairs and there was a run in her stockings.
“We eat at seven sharp,” she snapped, and pointed to the clock on the wall, which read several minutes after.
Josey started to apologize, since it was her fault for staying in the tub so long, but the other woman in the room cut her off.
“You remember Virginia,” Pepper Winchester said drily.
“Of course, Virginia,” Jack said, extending his hand.
His aunt gave him the weakest of handshakes. “Mother says you’re Angus’s son?” Like his grandmother, Virginia had also missed her brother’s funeral. Nothing like a close-knit family, Jack thought.
Virginia was studying him as if under a microscope. Her sour expression said she saw no Winchester resemblance. “The nanny’s child.” She crinkled her nose in distaste. “Dear Angus,” she said, as if that explained it.
Jack tried not to take offense, but it was hard given the reception he and his pretend wife were getting here. He reminded himself that this wasn’t a social visit. Once he got what he’d come for, he would never see any of them again.
“This is my wife, Josey,” he said, glad as hell he hadn’t come here alone. All his misgivings earlier about bringing her were forgotten as he slipped his arm around her slim waist and pulled her close.
JOSEY FELT JACK’S ARM tighten around her as Virginia gave her a barely perceptible handshake.
It was hard not to see the resemblance between mother and daughter, Josey thought. Both women were tall, dark-haired and wore their bitterness on their faces. Virginia was broader, more matronly and perhaps more embittered as she narrowed her gaze at Josey, measuring her for a moment before dismissing her entirely.
“Can we please eat now?” Virginia demanded. “I’m famished. Little more than crumbs were served for lunch. I hope dinner will prove more filling.” She turned on her heel and headed down the hall.
Josey turned to Pepper, who was reaching for her cane. “I do apologize. I’m afraid I enjoyed your wonderful tub longer than I’d meant to. That is such a beautiful bathroom. I especially like the black-and-white tiles.”
Pepper seemed startled. “Enid put you in the room at the end of the south wing?” She quickly waved the question away. “Of course she would. Never mind.”
Grabbing her cane, she followed her daughter down the hallway. Josey noted that Pepper Winchester was more feeble than she let on. Maybe she really was dying. Or maybe just upset.
“I knew it,” Josey whispered to Jack, as they followed Pepper at a distance toward the dining room. “That room must have been your grandmother’s and grandfather’s. Wouldn’t Enid know that putting us in there would upset your grandmother?”
“I would bet on it,” he said.
Josey followed his gaze to where Enid stood in the kitchen doorway, looking like the cat who ate the canary. “She must have shared that room with your grandfather. I wonder why she moved out of it?”
Jack chuckled and slowed, lowering his voice as they neared the dining room. “I doubt it was for sentimental reasons. My mother told me that according to Winchester lore, Pepper didn’t shed a tear when my grandfather rode off and was never seen again. She just went on running the ranch as if Call Winchester had never existed—until her youngest son Trace vanished.”
DINNER WAS A TORTUROUS AFFAIR. Jack had known it wouldn’t be easy returning to the ranch, but he hadn’t anticipated the wellspring of emotions it brought to the surface. As he sat at the dining room table, he half expected to see his mother through the open kitchen doorway.
It was at that scarred kitchen table that he and his mother had eaten with the Winchester grandchildren and the staff. In the old days, he’d been told, Pepper and Call had eaten alone in the dining room while their young children had eaten in the kitchen.
But Call had been gone when his mother came to work here, and Pepper had eaten with her then-grown children in the dining room. When Trace was home, his mother had heard Pepper laughing. After Trace eloped with that woman in town and moved in with her, the laughter stopped. Jack’s mother said she often didn’t hear a peep out of the dining room the entire meal with Pepper and her other children.
“The animosity was so thick in the air you could choke on it,” his mother had told him. “Mrs. Winchester took to having her meals in her room.”
“Well, Mother, when are you planning to tell us what is really going on?” Virginia demanded now, slicing through the tense silence that had fallen around the table. She sat on her mother’s right, Jack and Josey across from her. Her face was flushed; she’d clearly drunk too much wine. Most of dinner she’d complained under her breath about Enid’s cooking.
Jack had hardly tasted his meal. He’d pushed his food around his plate, lost in the past. Josey had seemed to have no such problem. She’d eaten as if she hadn’t had a meal for sometime. He wondered how long it had been.
Pepper had also seemed starved, cleaning her plate with a gusto that didn’t go unnoticed. For a dying woman, she had a healthy appetite. Almost everyone commented on it, including Enid when she’d cleared away the dishes before bringing in dessert.
“Well, Mother?” Virginia repeated her demand.
Enid had stopped in midmotion and looked at Pepper, as if as anxious as any of them to hear why the family had been invited back to the ranch.
“Isn’t it possible that I wanted my family around me after receiving such horrible news about your brother?” Pepper asked, motioning for Enid to put down the cake and leave the room.
Virginia scoffed at the idea. “After twenty-seven years you suddenly remembered that you had other family?”
“Does it matter what brought us together?” Jack spoke up. “We’re here now. I assume some of the others will be arriving, as well?” he asked his grandmother.
She gave him a small smile. “A few have responded to my invitation. I knew it would be too much to have everyone here at the same time, so the others will be coming later.”
“Well, I know for a fact that my brother Brand isn’t coming,” Virginia said unkindly. “He’s made it perfectly clear he couldn’t care less about you or your money.” She poured herself the last of the red wine, splashing some onto the white tablecloth. “In fact, he said he wouldn’t come back here even if someone held a gun to his head.”
“How nice of you to point that out,” Pepper said.
Enid had left, but returned with a serving knife, and saw the mess Virginia had made. She set the knife beside the cake and began to complain under her breath about how overworked she already was without having to remove wine stains from the linens.
“That will be enough,” Pepper said to the cook-housekeeper. “Please close the kitchen door on your way out.”
Enid gave her a dirty look, but left the room, slamming the door behind her. But Jack saw through the gap under the door that Enid had stopped just on the other side and was now hovering there, listening.
“I only mention Brand to point out that not everyone is so forgiving as I am,” Virginia said. She glanced at her mother, tears welling in her eyes. “You hurt us all, Mother. Some of us are trying our best to forgive and forget.”
“Let’s not get maudlin. You’re too old, Virginia, to keep blaming me for the way your life turned out.”
“Am I? Who do you blame, Mother?”
A gasp came from behind the kitchen door.
Pepper ignored both the gasp and her daughter’s question as she began to dish up the cake. “I’ve always been fond of lemon. What about you, Josey?” she asked, as she passed her a slice.
Josey seemed surprised at the sudden turn in conversation. “I like lemon.”
Pepper graced her with a rare smile that actually reached the older woman’s eyes. “I don’t believe you told me how you and my grandson met.”
“I was hitchhiking and he picked me up,” Josey said.
Jack
laughed, as he saw Josey flush at her own honesty. “It was love at first sight.” He shot her a look that could have melted the icing on her cake.
Her flush deepened.
“She climbed into my car and, as they say, the rest is history,” Jack said.
Pepper was studying Josey with an intensity that worried him. The elderly woman seemed to see more than he had originally given her credit for. Did his grandmother suspect the marriage was a ruse?
“Well, how fortunate,” Pepper said, shifting her gaze to Jack. “You’re a lucky man.” Her smile for him had a little more bite in it. “You have definitely proven that you’re a Winchester.”
Jack chuckled, afraid that was no compliment. It didn’t matter. He could tell that his grandmother liked Josey and he would use that to his advantage. But it wouldn’t change the way he felt about his grandmother.
He’d spent most of dinner secretly studying his beautiful “wife.” Josey continued to surprise him. Her manners and the way she carried herself made him realize she must have come from money—probably attended a boarding school, then some Ivy League college. She seemed to fit in here in a way that made her seem more like a Winchester than he ever could. So how did she end up on the side of the road with nothing more than a backpack? And more importantly, why would a woman with her obvious pedigree be sitting here now, pretending to be his wife?
“You’ve hardly touched your food.”
Jack dragged his gaze away from Josey as he realized his grandmother was talking to him. “I guess I’m not really hungry.”
Pepper nodded. “You probably have other things on your mind.”
“Yes. I should apologize for making this trip into a honeymoon. It wasn’t my intention when I answered your letter.”
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t,” his grandmother said with a wry smile. “But what better place than the family ranch? I assume you remember growing up here. You loved to ride horses. Surely you’ll want to ride while you’re here and show Josey the ranch. You were old enough to remember your uncle Trace, weren’t you?”
Virginia didn’t bother to stifle a groan.
Her mother ignored her. “You must have been—”
“Six,” Jack said, and felt all eyes at the table on him. Beside him, he sensed that even Josey had tensed.
“Then you remember the birthday party I threw for him?”
Jack nodded slowly. It wasn’t likely he would forget that day. His mother told him years later that Pepper had been making plans for weeks. Everything had to be perfect.
“I think she really thought that if she threw him an amazing birthday party, Trace would come back to the ranch,” his mother had told him. “Of course the only way he was welcome back was without the woman he’d eloped with, the woman who was carrying his child. Or at least he thought was carrying his child. Pepper didn’t believe it for a moment. Or didn’t want to.”
“I had a cake flown in,” Pepper said, her eyes bright with memory. “I wanted it to be a birthday he would never forget.” Her voice trailed off, now thick with emotion.
Instead it had been a birthday that none of the rest of them had ever forgotten. His grandmother, hysterical with grief and disappointment when Trace hadn’t shown for the party, had thrown everyone off the ranch, except for Enid and Alfred Hoagland.
“I bought all the children little party hats,” she was saying. “Do you remember?”
From the moment he’d received the letter from his grandmother’s attorney, Jack had known she wanted something from him. He just hadn’t been sure what. But he had an inkling he was about to find out.
“I recall sending all of you upstairs so you wouldn’t be underfoot,” Pepper said. “I believe you were playing with my other grandchildren at the time.” Her gaze locked with his, and he felt an icy chill climb up his spine and settle around his neck. “Whose idea was it to go up to the room on the third floor? The one you were all forbidden to enter?”
THIS FAR NORTH it was still light out, but it would be getting dark soon. Deputy Sheriff McCall Winchester listened to the whine of the tow truck cable, her focus on the dark green water of the Missouri River.
Déjà vu. Just last month, she’d watched another vehicle being pulled from deep water. Like now she’d feared they’d find a body inside it.
A car bumper broke the surface. The moment the windshield came into view, McCall felt a wave of relief not to see a face behind the glass. Which didn’t mean there still wasn’t someone in the car, but she was hoping that bizarre as this case was so far, it wouldn’t get any worse.
The tow truck pulled the newer-model luxury car from the water to the riverbank, then shut off the cable motor and truck engine. Silence swept in. Fortunately they were far enough upriver on a stretch of private ranch land away from the highway, so they hadn’t attracted any attention.
McCall stepped over to the car as water continued to run out from the cracks around the doors. She peered in, again thankful to find the car empty of bodies. Snapping on latex gloves, she opened the driver side door and let the rest of the water rush out.
Along with river water, there were numerous fast food containers, pop cans, empty potato chip bags.
“Looks like they were living in the car,” a deputy said.
McCall noticed something lodged under the brake pedal.
“Get me an evidence bag,” she ordered, and reached in to pull out a brand-new, expensive-looking loafer size 10½.
“The driver got out but left behind his shoe?” a deputy said as he opened the passenger-side door. “But did he make it out of the water?”
“See if you can find any tracks downstream,” McCall said. “The current is strong enough here that he would have been washed downriver a ways.”
“Should be easy to track him since he is wearing only one shoe,” the deputy said.
“Let’s try to find out before it gets dark,” McCall said. Otherwise they would be dragging the river come morning for a third body.
On the other side of the car, a deputy pulled on a pair of latex gloves and opened the passenger-side door to get into the glove box. McCall watched him carefully check the soaking wet registration.
“The car is registered to a Ray Allan Evans Jr., age thirty-five, of Palm City, California. Looks like he just purchased the car three days ago.”
Chapter Five
Josey felt the air in the dining room tremble with expectation as she waited for Jack to answer his grandmother. What was this about a room that he’d been forbidden to enter?
“What would make you think I’ve been in that room?” Jack said, meeting his grandmother’s gaze with his cold blue one.
His grandmother’s look was sharp as an ice pick. She knew, just as Josey sensed, that he was evading the question. But why would he care about something that happened when he was six?
And why would his grandmother care after all these years?
“Those cute little party hats you were all wearing when you went upstairs,” his grandmother said. “I found them in the room.”
“Really?” Jack said, forking the piece of the cake Pepper had passed him. “I’m afraid I don’t remember anything about some party hats.”
“Is that right?” His grandmother’s tone called him a liar. “Are you going to also tell me you don’t remember that day?”
“Oh, I remember that day. I remember my mother losing her job and us having to leave the ranch, the only home I’d ever known,” Jack said in a voice Josey barely recognized. “I remember my mother being terrified that she wouldn’t be able to support us since Angus had been cut off without a cent and didn’t have the skills or the desire to find a job. I remember looking at the Winchester Ranch in the rearview mirror and you standing there, making sure we all left and didn’t come back.”
“Oh, my,” Virginia said, clearly enjoying Jack’s rancor at her mother.
“I remember Angus losing himself in the bottle and my mother struggling to take care of us while she tried to make us
a family,” Jack said, his voice flat and cold. “I remember the toll it took on her. But nothing like the toll being exiled from here took on Angus.”
“Your mother. Is she…?” Virginia asked.
“She died a year before Angus drank himself to death.”
Pepper looked down at her untouched cake. “I didn’t know.”
“Really? Then you didn’t know he left a note?” Jack reached into his pocket and took out a piece of folded, yellowed paper. Josey saw that it was splattered with something dark and felt her stomach roil.
Jack tossed the note to his grandmother. “It’s made out to you.” With that he got to his feet, throwing down his cloth napkin. “If you’ll excuse me.”
MCCALL SAT in her patrol car, studying the screen. The moment she’d typed in Ray Allan Evans Jr.’s name, it had come up. Ray Jr. was a person of interest in a homicide in Palm City, California. The murder victim was his father, Ray Allan Evans Sr. He’d been killed two days ago—just a day after his son had purchased a very expensive luxury automobile.
She put through a call to the detective in charge of the case in the Palm City homicide department, Detective Carlos Diaz. She told him that she’d found Ray Jr.’s car and that he was wanted in Montana for questioning in another homicide case.
She asked what they had on the Evans murder so far.
“A neighbor can place Ray Jr. at the house at the time of the murder. But he wasn’t alone. His stepsister was also there. Her car was found on the property. No staff on the premises, apparently, which in itself is unusual. This place is a mansion with a full staff, at least a couple of them live-in.”
“I’m sorry, did you say his stepsister?” McCall asked, thinking of the young Jane Doe the fisherman had hooked into.
“Josephine Vanderliner, twenty-eight, daughter of Harry Vanderliner, the founder of Vanderliner Oil. The father is deceased. The mother married Evans two years ago, was in a car accident shortly afterward, suffered brain damage and is now in a nursing home. The stepdaughter had been in a legal battle over money with Evans Sr. Her fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. Neither Vanderliner or Evans Jr. has been seen since the night of the murder.”
