The Mountain's Shadow tlf-1

by Cecilia Dominic

  “That’s a little suspicious, Joanie.”

  I also thought so, especially since it seemed Leonard Bowman had some grounds to challenge the will.

  Another glance up the staircase and the shadowed second-story hallway was enough to convince me I really needed to get my leftovers out of the cooler and into the fridge.

  “Let’s leave the suitcases here and go up later,” I suggested. We walked through the sitting room and into the breakfast nook. I stopped, dumbstruck.

  “What?” asked Lonna.

  “He completely redid this.” I gestured to the kitchen. It was not the old-fashioned kitchen I remembered from my childhood. Now all the appliances were new and stainless steel, there was a black marble island with a pot-and-pan rack hanging above it, and all the cabinets had been updated. I couldn’t remember my grandfather cooking a day in his life, and I really couldn’t imagine him giving his kitchen a makeover for some woman he paid from the village.

  “Since you’re a gourmet cook, this should be a welcome surprise,” Lonna said. “Wow, look at this. A full set of Le Creuset and All-Clad cookware.”

  I just shook my head and put the leftovers in the fridge, one of the super-modern types with the freezer in a drawer at the bottom. I turned to the island and saw an envelope with my name on it.

  “Looks like somebody left you something.”

  “It’s from Galbraith.” His long, slanted writing gave it away. I opened it with a knife—Wusthof, of all things—and found a brief note with cash, lots of it, and a spare key. The money was for spending and housekeeping expenses until the rest could be transferred to my accounts.

  “I can’t even begin to believe this.”

  “I can’t, either,” murmured Lonna as she walked around and opened cabinets and drawers. “This is moving a lot faster than most estate settlements.”

  “Really?”

  “Isn’t your mother a co-beneficiary?”

  “Of a small amount, yes.”

  “And you don’t think she’ll challenge it?”

  “She probably will.”

  Lonna opened and closed cabinet doors. “And would you blame her? I wonder why Galbraith is so eager to have you take possession of the money and property.”

  “I don’t know. I wonder if it has something to do with that Leonard Bowman guy.”

  She looked up at the name. “Why Leonard Bowman?”

  I told her about the encounter at Galbraith’s office. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention it to anyone,” I said and remembered the blond man at the diner who’d winked at my friend. “Especially Peter.”

  “Not a word,” she promised.

  “So what’s your game plan?”

  “For what?”

  “The investigation.” I gestured to the window over the sink, which showed a wide expanse of lawn sloping toward the woods. “Finding the missing children.”

  “I don’t know. I guess the first step is to call work. Do you think the phones are on?”

  After some searching, we found a cordless telephone on its charger in the sitting room. It sounded a dial tone when we clicked it on, so I left Lonna to make her call while I put on some coffee. I had just switched it on when the doorbell rang.

  I opened the front door to see a middle-aged man whose tan uniform strained over a belly that had probably been fed at the town diner too often. He stood with feet planted shoulder-width apart and thumbs hooked into his black belt. His sheriff badge said he must hold some respect in the community.

  “May I help you?” I asked. I had no reason to be nervous, but there’s something about a cop appearing at your door that prompts a quick examination of conscience. Had I gone too fast through the community? Did I roll through a stop? Was I supposed to have a parking permit?

  “Miz Fisher?”

  “Yes, and you are?”

  “Bud Knowles, sheriff.” He held out his hand, and I took it. His handshake was firm, if a little moist. “I just wanted to make sure you’re rightly welcomed to the community.”

  “Thanks. Would you like to come in?”

  His face lit with a grin. “I’d love to, ma’am.”

  I suspected the true reason for his visit was to check out the place, but I didn’t mind. I had nothing to hide.

  “I just made some coffee. Would you like some?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Call me Joanie, please. How do you take it?”

  “Black.”

  This guy was not going to be easy to talk to. I led him through the sitting room, where Lonna sat at the card table to the right of the fireplace with an open file. As most men do, Bud Knowles took a second look.

  “Who is that, Miz Joanie?”

  “My friend Lonna. She’s a social worker with the state. Her friend Matt called her up here to help with the missing kid problem.” Gads, I sounded flippant. The truth was this laconic sheriff made me nervous. I felt like the kid whose teacher has suddenly appeared at the door to talk to her parents.

  Bud’s only response to my statement was a heavy sigh. I brought him into the kitchen, and after some searching, found a few cobalt blue mugs and poured the coffee—black for him, with cream and sugar for me, and with cream for Lonna. Apparently Galbraith had done a little grocery shopping when he left the note, and there was at least some creamer in the fridge and sugar in a stainless-steel tin on the counter.

  “This seems like a nice community. Crystal Pines, I mean.”

  The sheriff looked at his coffee so hard I wondered if a bug had landed in it. “It was nice until the kids started disappearing.”

  “That must be awfully hard on the people here.”

  “Some of them.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure Lonna will want to talk to you.”

  “I’d rather deal with her than the Feds.” He winked.

  I took a deep breath and prepared to change the subject, but Lonna walked in.

  “Coffee’s ready,” I told her.

  “Thanks.” She held out her hand to Knowles, who stood up so quickly he bumped the table, and his coffee sloshed. She ignored it and smiled. “Lonna Marconi, it’s nice to meet you.”

  “Bud Knowles, sheriff,” mumbled the red-faced man. I hid a smile as I wiped his coffee with a dish towel and poured him a little more.

  “It’s so nice of you to stop by,” Lonna said as she sat and crossed her long, slender legs in full view. “Is this a social visit?”

  “More or less. Just wanted Miss Fisher to know she could call on us if she needs anything.”

  “How kind of you.” Lonna smiled at me. “Joanie, isn’t that kind?”

  “Very.”

  “Now, Mr. Knowles, you came at a good time. I was just thinking about how to get in touch with you.”

  She was turning on the deep charm now. I hoped she remembered our earlier conversation and would ask the questions I wanted too. I took a deep breath and attempted to calm the resentment building in my chest at her usurping the situation. Not that I had been doing spectacularly, but there were some things I wanted to know.

  “Yes, ma’am?” asked the sheriff.

  “I’m with DFCS”—as I had, she avoided mentioning she was also a licensed P.I.—“and I was wondering what you could tell me about the children who have vanished.”

  Bud had no more information than Matt had given us. When asked about the full-moon connection, he only said, “I don’t believe in that voodoo witch stuff.”

  “Now, Mr. Knowles, I have one more question.” She studied her coffee as though attempting to divine an answer to a long-standing riddle, then hit him with the full force of her gaze. “Do you know what happened to Joanie’s grandfather?”

  Bud looked over at me, and I tried not to betray how eager I was for the answer. He leaned back and laced his fingers over his ample gut. “Well now, we don’t rightly know.”

  “There must have been something,” pressed Lonna. “Fortunes like this aren’t handed over at the mere suspicion of
death.”

  “All I know is we found his canoe, life jacket and shoes a little ways down the river. The jacket and shoes had been chewed, and there was some blood, but no body.”

  My breath left me as though someone had punched me in the stomach. Lonna put a hand on my arm.

  “What did the coroner say?”

  “Likely the old man’d had a heart attack and drifted down stream ’til he ran aground, and then wild animals got ’im. I’m sorry ma’am,” he said to me. “I thought that city lawyer would’ve told you.”

  “He didn’t.” I tried to still the welling tears. I hadn’t been close to my grandfather for years, but I had been fond of the eccentric old man. He had been the one steady source of support in my family after my brother died and my parents divorced. Some days I would take comfort in knowing I had a safe haven if I needed it. Now that security had been shattered.

  “If it’s okay with Joanie, I’ll see you out, Sheriff.”

  Lonna and the sheriff both got up and walked out of the room. I held tight to the coffee mug, heedless of the heat scalding my palms, so my hands wouldn’t shake. The image of a black wolf flashed into my mind.

  Has my grandfather been hunted down too? What have I gotten myself into?

  Chapter Three

  After the sheriff’s departure, Lonna and I sat in silence and sipped our coffee.

  “Somebody wants you to have this place, Joanie.”

  I resisted the urge to look over my shoulder. “Either that or somebody doesn’t want someone else to have it.” Like Leonard Bowman. As much as he’d been described as a loafer living off his brother’s generosity, he looked like he worked toward some sinister purpose.

  “Regardless, you're the designated heir. I have a mystery to solve, so I need to ponder my strategy,” mused Lonna. Her eyes focused on a spot on the wall, and I knew she was drawing up a list in her mind. It was the same look she’d gotten on numerous previous occasions—some innocent planning, some diabolical plotting.

  “You can stay here as long as you like,” I told her again. “Goodness knows I don’t need all this room.”

  “And you probably need the company. I don’t know that you’re safe here.”

  “Thanks.” But I felt the same way.

  “The locals probably wouldn’t be very forthcoming with me,” she continued, “so how about you talk to them? If nothing else, they may remember the ‘old man’s little granddaughter’. You’re sort of a local.”

  “If spending six weeks for five summers makes you a local.”

  “It’s more credibility than I’ve got.”

  “True. Who will you talk to?”

  The corners of her lips turned up in a cat’s smile. “I’ll keep in touch with the charming Sheriff Bud Knowles, of course. And the new families who’ve moved in.”

  “Including the Bowmans.”

  “Right.” Her grin widened. “Including the Bowmans.”

  The after-work rush at the diner was more of a small swelling of the crowd that had been there earlier, but this time they all looked like locals. Judging from the hard hats and dirty, tanned shoulders huddled at the booths, many of the men were construction workers. I cringed internally when I realized their likely employment was building the houses that had displaced their families. When I came through the door, I thought I heard a lull in the conversation, but it picked up again quickly. Maybe Lonna was right—being half a local was better than being an outsider.

  “Have you been here all day?” I asked Louise as I slid onto a stool at the counter.

  She poured me a cup of coffee without my asking for it. “I took off for the lunch shift and came back to help Terry with dinner. Laurel, the evening girl, is sick. Difficult pregnancy.”

  I nodded, not sure what to say.

  “You all settled in?” she asked, as though inheriting my grandfather’s mansion and fortune was the most natural thing in the world.

  “No, Lonna and I weren’t brave enough to go upstairs yet. The place looks like no one’s been in it for months. Except for the kitchen.”

  “Now that’s a fact. Gorgeous, isn’t it? That city lawyer of your granddad’s had me bring some stuff up there. Oh, that reminds me.” She pulled a key out of her pocket and set it down. “I should’a given this to you earlier. I held on to it for your granddad when I’d do some cleaning for him.”

  “Thanks. I was wondering who had been helping him keep the house.”

  She grinned and showed the gap between her front teeth. “You know men. They need all the help they can get.”

  “That’s the truth.” I slid the spare key into my jeans pocket.

  “So did he tell you about why he redid the kitchen?”

  “No, I haven’t talked to him. In years, actually.” This wasn’t exactly Lonna’s investigation, but it would help mine. “I was really pleasantly surprised.”

  “Well, about six months ago…” She broke off as a customer waved her over. “One minute, sweetie.”

  I watched her as she walked down the length of the counter to where Peter Bowman had just settled in. He glanced at me, so I looked down into my coffee cup for a second. When I looked back up, Louise was nodding at him as if he’d just asked her a question.

  “You’ll notice the local guys are a bit more polite than those city types,” she told me when she returned. “They’re all about to faint from curiosity about you, but it’s Peter Bowman who had the cheek to ask.” She wiped at an invisible spot on the counter with a red checkered rag.

  “So you were saying something about my grandfather’s kitchen,” I reminded her.

  “Your kitchen, if I recall, young lady.” The tenor voice at my shoulder startled me, and I turned to gaze right into the icy blue eyes of Peter Bowman.

  “All right, my kitchen.”

  He wedged his briefcase between me and the guy next to me. “’Scuse me, I have some business with this young lady,” he told the annoyed construction worker, who glared at him but moved over.

  “I’ll tell you later, Miz Fisher. I’ve got to wait on these gentlemen over here.”

  Louise disappeared and left me with my empty coffee mug. And Peter Bowman.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said.

  “Yet each of us knows who the other is.”

  “True enough. So no formal introduction is necessary.”

  “Not unless you stand on such ceremony.”

  “Not usually.” I took a breath. Here I was feeling like I needed to keep the conversation going, yet it was he who had barged into my space and my talk with Louise.

  “I would appreciate an introduction to your lovely friend, the one you were with earlier.”

  “Why?” I had to ask, although I suspected his intentions were less than honorable.

  “Let me pay for your cup of coffee.”

  “I’ve got it, thanks. So, how do you know Lonna?”

  “She worked on a case for a friend of mine in Little Rock. Although we never met personally, he pointed her out to me online.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I’d like to become acquainted. I may have some work for her here.”

  “She’s spoken for.”

  “I’m sure. But I’d like to meet her regardless.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Please do. In the meanwhile, I’ll speak to the sheriff and let him know we have an esteemed P.I. in our neighborhood.”

  “She’s incognito for now.”

  “Then we shall definitely have to talk.” He reached in his pocket, and for a moment I thought he was going to draw a gun on me, but he pulled out an ivory-colored business card.

  “I look forward to seeing her in the morning. My schedule’s clear until lunch.” He disappeared into the crowd.

  “That one’s a snake,” Louise said as she suddenly reappeared in front of me, coffee pot in hand. “What did he want with you?”

  “Not me, my friend.”

  Louise nodded as if Peter Bowman asking about an attra
ctive woman wasn’t at all unusual. “His poor wife. She seems to be such a nice little woman too.”

  “Any kids?”

  “Lance is a cutie pie, but he’s difficult. His mother has her hands full with him and his dad.”

  “How old is Lance?”

  “Terrible two. And he is one hundred percent little boy.”

  Another memory jolted me. My brother had been like that—a challenge for both my parents, although my father had taken pride in Andrew’s rough-and-tumble personality. It was a miracle he’d never broken a bone.

  Louise glanced over her shoulder, where another new face had joined the crowd. “Look honey, I know you must be real curious about everything that’s been going on. Why don’t you come by tomorrow morning when it’s not so busy, and I’ll fill you in on the town gossip about your granddad?”

  “That would be great.” The tension in my chest that had been there since the sheriff’s visit eased a little. “Thanks, Louise.”

  She waved and moved down the line, refilling coffee cups and greeting newcomers. I left enough money for the coffee plus a generous tip and squeezed out of the diner. As I walked out the door, I realized I had no idea what Lonna and I were going to do for dinner, but there was no way I’d turn around and fight my way back to order something to go from the packed diner. A chill had crept into the air with the setting sun, and I shivered.

  “You’ll catch your death of cold out here.” The tone was mocking. I turned to see Leonard Bowman leaning against a lamppost. He wore a black leather jacket over an open green polo shirt and khaki trousers, and although his posture was relaxed, he seemed like a compressed spring ready to uncoil at any moment.

  I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “I just had a conversation with your brother.”

  “Did he try to charm or threaten you?” A smile tugged at his lips, and I noticed he was the antithesis of his pale brother with his wavy dark brown hair and black eyes. More intense too. The image of him in Galbraith’s office came to mind.

  “A little of both, but mostly threaten.”

  “That’s usually how he works.”

  “Leonard, there you are.” Her greeting and the staccato clicks of her black designer heels announced the appearance of a tall woman with emerald eyes. Her milk-white skin glowed in the half-light, and her black hair fell in soft curls to midway down her back. She, too, wore a light leather jacket, but underneath was a ruby red dress that left very little to the imagination. I couldn’t really see her purse, but I guessed it cost more than my car.