by Paula Graves
He closed the door against the driving rain and turned, looking at the mudroom from a different angle. The room was essentially bare of furnishings save for a low, built-in bench with storage space beneath. There was nothing in any of the storage bins, suggesting the room was rarely used.
He looked at the trapdoor in the mudroom ceiling. It was two floors down from the attic. What lay between the attic trap door and the one in the mudroom?
Only one way to find out.
He caught the latch and pulled the trapdoor open. A wooden ladder unfolded and dropped to the ground.
Tightening his grip on the knife, he stepped onto the ladder and started to climb.
Chapter Eight
Seth had been gone forever, hadn’t he? Rachel checked her watch and saw that only a few minutes had passed.
Time crawls when you’re scared witless.
She had settled on the cedar chest at the foot of her father’s bed, trying not to think about his final moments here, as he breathed his last, labored breaths and finally let go.
Someone had changed the sheets and neatened the room after the coroner’s visit. She and Diane had both been far too shattered to have thought of such a thing, so it must have been Paul. He’d been a rock for them both, a steady hand here at home and at the trucking company, as well.
He hadn’t always been a big fan of his mother’s second marriage—he’d worried that their relationship would make things awkward between him and her father at work, for one thing—but for the past few months, as her father fought the cancer that had ultimately taken him, Paul had put in a lot of long hours at work, helping take up the slack.
She wasn’t sure what she’d have done without him. So why hadn’t she called him to help her this morning instead of depending on strangers? Why did she feel certain, even now, that a man as enigmatic and unpredictable as Seth Hammond was the best person to help her?
A noise coming from the other side of the room froze her midthought. She picked up the gun from where she’d set it on the cedar chest beside her and turned toward the sound.
There. It came again. It sounded like footsteps coming from just inside her father’s closet.
Then came the rattle of the doorknob turning.
Her chest tightening, Rachel lifted the small pistol, trying to remember what she knew about a good shooting stance. She hadn’t done enough shooting to internalize these rules, damn it! Why hadn’t she practiced more? What was the point of learning to shoot if you couldn’t remember the lessons when it counted?
Fighter’s stance, her sluggish brain shouted. Weak foot forward, strong foot back and slightly out, lean into the shot.
The door opened slowly, and Rachel’s heart skipped a beat.
Seth Hammond emerged from the darkened closet, spotted the barrel of the gun aimed squarely at his chest and immediately ducked and rolled.
He hissed a profanity from behind the bed. “I think I just lost ten years of my life!”
She laid the gun on the chest and hurried around to where he crouched, his head down and his chest heaving. “How did you get into that closet?”
“That’s where the trapdoor in the mudroom leads,” he told her, lifting his head to look at her. “There’s a hatch in the top of the closet that leads up to the attic. It has a pin lock hasp—that’s why you couldn’t open it from the attic.”
Of course, she thought. There was a whole level between the attic and the mudroom. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
He pushed to his feet. “I didn’t find any evidence downstairs in the mudroom, but I couldn’t find a light in the closet for a look around.”
“There’s a light switch, but it’s in a weird place.” She opened the closet door and reached inside, feeling for the switch positioned inside one of the built-in shoe hutches. The overhead light came on, revealing the roomy walk-in closet her father and Diane had shared during their marriage.
Diane’s belongings took up most of the room, with her father’s clothes and shoes filling only a quarter of the space. The area was neat and organized, Rachel knew, because while Diane could be flighty about many things, she was dead serious about her clothes and accessories, and she kept her things where she could locate them with a quick glance.
Which made the shoe box jutting at an odd angle from one of the shelves seem all the more out of place.
Rachel crossed to the box and saw that the top was slightly displaced, as well. And on the corner of the bright yellow box, a dark crimson smear was still glistening, not quite dry.
“More blood,” she murmured, feeling ill.
Seth came up behind her, a solid wall of reassuring heat. She squelched the urge to lean back against him, aware that she was already leaning on him more than was probably wise.
He seemed remarkably steady for a man who’d sustained a head injury just a few hours earlier, showing few signs of pain or disorientation since he’d come here with her. On the contrary, he’d been a rock just as she’d had her feet knocked out from beneath her.
What if that’s not a coincidence?
She shook off the thought. Seth had earned a little trust from her, hadn’t he? A little benefit of the doubt.
“There was a lot of blood on that drop cloth,” she said aloud. “Too much.”
“May not be human, though.” Seth’s voice was reassuring. “It wouldn’t have to be. Easy enough to get animal blood to set this up, and you could do it without breaking any laws.”
She turned to look at him. “He’s worried about breaking the law?”
“Never break the law if you don’t have to. First rule of the con game.”
“I thought the first rule of the con game was that you couldn’t con an honest man.” She wasn’t sure where she’d heard that, but she’d always considered it to be a reasonable assumption. Honest men didn’t fall for deals that were too good to be true.
Seth shook his head. “Honest men can be conned. Everyone has a price, even if the price is honorable.” He grimaced. “I guess never breaking the law if you don’t have to isn’t necessarily the first rule of the con game, but it was the first rule Cleve Calhoun taught me.”
She didn’t miss the hint of affection in his voice when he spoke of his old mentor. He may have walked away from the life Calhoun had taught him, but clearly he hadn’t stopped caring about the old man.
“Whoever’s behind this isn’t used to skirting the law,” he added.
“How can you say that? He’s already hired someone to kill four women. He’s drugged me and probably killed Davis Rogers—oh God.” Her voice cracked. “Davis. I wonder if the police have found him yet.”
“I think we’d have already heard from them if they had.”
She closed her eyes, fighting off her growing despair. She needed to stay strong. Not let this mess destroy her.
Not again.
“What I meant about this guy not being used to breaking the law is he’s hired other people to do it so far,” Seth added quietly.
“What makes you think he didn’t beat up Davis himself?”
“If he was a practiced killer, he’d have killed those women himself. But he didn’t. He hired someone else to do it. He doesn’t want his hands dirty if he can avoid it.”
Rachel heard something in Seth’s voice that pinged her radar, but he spoke again before she could pin it down.
“What do you want to do now?” he asked.
“I think we need to call the police.”
He nodded, though he clearly found the idea unappealing. “Okay. But call Antoine Parsons directly, not nine-one-one.”
That made sense—Antoine already knew the details of the case. He seemed fair and honest, too. “You don’t have to be here for it,” she offered, aware that he still looked uncomfortable.
He
shot her a sheepish grin. “Yeah, I do. I’m a material witness.”
She started toward the phone but stopped halfway, turning back to look at him. “Seth, do you have any idea who’s doing this?”
“Who’s doing it? No.” He shook his head firmly. “But I have an idea why he’s doing it.”
* * *
TO ANTOINE PARSON’S credit, he didn’t automatically start grilling Seth about why he’d been there with Rachel when the craziness started. First, he caught them up on the search for Davis Rogers. “We’ve searched the woods behind the bed-and-breakfast, but there’s a lot of wilderness to cover in that area, and if the point of knocking out Mr. Hammond was to keep him from calling the paramedics to help Rogers, it’s unlikely they’d hide the body anywhere near those woods.”
Rachel flinched at his use of the word body. Seth’s chest ached in sympathy, and he barely kept himself from giving her a comforting hug.
“We’ve also contacted the police in Virginia to let them know we have a report that Rogers is missing,” Antoine added. “If he contacts his family or any of his friends back home, they’ve been asked to let us know.”
Antoine had brought along a uniformed police officer to help him with the interviews. The two of them separated Seth and Rachel to get their independent statements.
Antoine took Seth’s, naturally. But to Seth’s relief, he approached his questions in a straightforward way and seemed to believe Seth’s answers. “Bold, just walking in here and setting something up that way,” the detective remarked. “Especially with you both right here in the house.”
“I’m not sure whoever did this knew I was here,” Seth said. “My car’s in the shop having the tires fixed. The only car here is Rachel’s. He might have assumed she was alone.”
Antoine gave a slow nod. “And you didn’t see anything of what Ms. Davenport saw in the attic?”
“Just the piece of drop cloth plastic I gave you and a stain on a shoe box in the closet that might be blood. But I think I did hear the music that Rachel heard playing.” He told Antoine about his dream, leaving out the part about Rachel on the bridge girder. “I know it was just a dream, but how did I dream that particular song at that particular time?”
“Would be a hell of a coincidence,” Antoine agreed. “Do you think this is connected to the previous murders?”
“Of course.”
“Of course.” Antoine looked thoughtful. “What’s in this for you, Hammond?”
Ah, Seth thought. Now we get to the grilling part. “I knew the murder victims. I liked them, and I like Rachel Davenport, too. Her father took a chance on me when he hired me at the trucking company when most people around here wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire.”
Antoine smiled a little. “I wish I could feel sorry for you, but...”
“I’m not the bad guy here.”
“No, I don’t think you are,” Antoine agreed.
The other policeman, Gavin McElroy, joined Antoine in a huddle near the doorway of the den, leaving Seth and Rachel alone across the room.
Seth crossed to where she stood near the windows, rubbing her arms as if she was cold. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She managed a smile. “I’m sure I sounded crazy to poor Officer McElroy.”
He heard a faint undertone to her words that was beginning to make a bleak sort of sense to him. She was very concerned about appearing sane, understandably. After all, her mother had committed suicide.
“You’re not crazy,” he told her firmly. The look of gratitude she sent his way made his stomach hurt.
Did she fear her mother’s instability was hereditary? She wasn’t much younger than her mother had been when she’d died. It was probably something she worried about now and then.
Maybe more often than now and then.
Did the person now tormenting her know that she harbored such a fear? The two direct attacks on her so far seemed aimed less at hurting her than convincing her she was losing her mind—first the drugging incident, inducing a state of near psychosis, then the gaslighting attempt in the attic, designed to make her believe she was seeing things that didn’t exist.
Going back even further, the murders of people who’d been important to her seemed ominously significant now, too. If he’d wanted to drive Rachel to mental instability, he could think of no better way to prepare the ground than to brutally eliminate all of her emotional underpinnings. Every one of those murders had been a powerful blow to Rachel Davenport. Could that effect have been their entire purpose?
“You said you thought you knew why someone is targeting me,” Rachel murmured, keeping her voice too low for Antoine and Gavin to hear. “Did you tell Detective Parsons?”
“Not yet. I wanted to run it by you first.”
“You could have told me before they got here.” She sounded a little annoyed. He’d kept his thoughts to himself while they’d waited because he needed to think through his suspicions before he committed to them. If he was wrong, he might be pushing the investigation in the wrong direction, putting Rachel in graver danger.
But after talking to Antoine, and realizing the police didn’t have a clue what was driving the attacks surrounding Rachel, he was growing more certain he was right.
Someone wanted Rachel out of the way, and he was pretty sure it had everything to do with Davenport Trucking.
“If you were to resign as CEO of Davenport Trucking tomorrow, who becomes CEO?” he asked quietly.
She shot him a puzzled look. “There’s a trustee board my father set up before he died. If something happened to me, they would make the decision, I think. I don’t know. My father knew I was committed to running his company. I gave him my word.”
“But accidents happen. People get high and fall off bridges, right?”
Her gaze snapped up again. “You think all of this is about getting me out of the way at Davenport?”
“What if you were deemed mentally unstable? Would that get you out of the way?”
She looked horrified. “Probably.”
Antoine and Officer McElroy walked back to where they stood, ending the conversation for the moment. “We’ll get a lab crew here later as soon as we can to process the access points to the attic,” Antoine told them. “Meanwhile, Officer McElroy is going to stay here to preserve the chain of evidence until they arrive.”
“Do we have to stay here?” Rachel asked bluntly.
Antoine looked surprised. “No, I don’t suppose so, but I’m not sure you should be out on the roads in this weather.”
“I don’t plan to go far.” She gave Seth an imperious look that did more to relieve his worries about her mental state than anything he’d seen so far. She looked like a pissed-off warrior princess, one he had a feeling he’d follow to the end of the universe if that’s what she desired.
He was in serious, serious trouble.
* * *
THE CABIN NEAR the base of Copperhead Ridge had been in her father’s family since her great-grandfather had built it with his own hands in the late twenties. Or so the story went. Rachel looked at the slightly shabby facade with a fond smile as she pulled the Honda into the gravel driveway near the front door.
“What is this place?” Seth had been quiet for most of the short drive, but once she killed the engine, his low drawl broke the silence.
“According to family lore, my great-grandfather built this place to cover a family moonshining operation during Prohibition.” She slanted a look his way. “I’m not sure that’s entirely true.”
He met her look with a hint of a smile. “Good stories rarely are.”
“I think it might have been embellished to give the Davenports a little hillbilly cred.” She smiled. “We were damned Yankees, you see. My great-grandfather was the third son of a shipbuilding family in Maryland that had only eno
ugh money to support two sons. So he was left to find his own way in the cold, cruel world.”
“And chose Bitterwood, Tennessee?” Seth gave her a skeptical look.
“There’s beauty here, you know. It’s not all harsh.”
“Guess it depends on what part of Bitterwood you come from.”
She conceded the point. “My grandfather told me his daddy knew from the moment he set eyes on Bitterwood that it was home.”
Seth’s expression softened. “I guess I can’t argue with that. I always end up back here no matter how far I roam.”
“I love this place.” She nodded toward the cabin. “My grandmother was a Bitterwood native. Her roots go back to the first settlers. She and my grandfather would bring me here during summer vacations from school and we’d rough it.” She laughed. “Well, I considered it roughing it.”
In fact, for a primitive log cabin, the place was relatively luxurious. A removable window unit air conditioner cooled the place in the heat of summer, and a woodstove kept it cozy on all but the coldest of winter days. It had been wired with electricity a couple of decades ago, when the town borders extended close enough to the cabin to make it feasible. And with a nearby cell tower, she never had much trouble getting a phone signal.
Seth climbed the porch steps behind her, carrying their bags. She’d packed a few things before leaving her house, and they’d stopped by the bungalow on Smoky Ridge where Seth lived in order to pick up clothes for him, as well.
The shabby old house belonged to Cleve Calhoun, the con man who’d brought Seth into that lifestyle, Seth had told her, his expression defensive. He’d moved in with Cleve again a few years back, after the older man had suffered a debilitating stroke. Now that Cleve was at a rehab center in Knoxville for the next few weeks, Seth was thinking about looking for a place of his own.
Rachel wondered what sort of place a man like Seth would like, watching with curiosity as his sharp green eyes took in the decor of the cabin. She’d decorated it herself several years ago, when her grandfather had left it to her in his will. She’d been twenty-two, fresh out of college and torn between sadness at one part of her life passing and a whole vista of opportunity spreading out before her.
