“I know.” Elijah’s admission was low and dragged from him against his will. When their eyes met, instead of his distant disdain, Libby saw the reflection of the boy she’d once known.
“I am willing to take the obituary to the police.”
“No. No, I should.” Elijah folded it and returned it to his pocket. “It’s my father.”
Maybe the police would believe him over the daughter of the newspaperman.
“You will report it?” Libby pressed. Logic exposed the fact a killer with a frightening ability to premeditate was still free in Gossamer Grove. Yet, she could still see the all-too-familiar flecks of a question in Elijah’s eyes. What would be unearthed about his father?
Yes. What?
If Elijah held those doubts, then his earlier outburst that his father held no secrets was merely a shroud to cover the horrid reality that Elijah believed it possible, after all. Possible that Deacon Greenwood hid some horrible sin. Sin that required recompense. Death. The grave.
“I want to help.” Her voice came out strained. She reached out her hand, silently pleading that Elijah hand the obituary back to her. Without it, she was nothing but the rambling daughter of the local gossipmonger. With it, she at least had something tangible to argue that the newspaper hadn’t made it up for sensational reasons.
“I know you do.” Elijah rubbed his hand over his mouth, agitated. “But, it isn’t safe. I don’t want to be responsible for anything happening to you.”
A coldness settled in Libby’s stomach. Being responsible for another’s fate was understandably a large burden. It was one she bore every day. “You must show the police the obituary,” she urged one more time, “or we may be responsible for the fate of one not yet dead.” It was horrible to think the killer might be determined to bring another sinner to task and fill yet another grave.
“I’ve got to go.” Elijah patted his pocket. “Be safe.”
As was his custom on the rare occasion they were alone and it all came rushing back to them, Elijah’s expression softened, and he lifted his hand to palm her face.
“Be safe,” he whispered again, then spun on his heel and disappeared into the fast-approaching blackness of the evening.
Libby stood in the doorway of the newspaper building, the door held open in her hand. She stared into the alley where Elijah had vanished. Vanished with the obituary. It should have relieved her to reach a tentative agreement that it must be taken to the police, but instead she was unsettled.
“What are you doing?”
Libby startled, letting the door slam shut behind her. The hallway was illuminated by electric lamps, but its dim glow haloed Paul’s form. He glared at her, a wisp of hair flipped opposite the balding on the top of his head and standing upright like a devil’s horn.
“N-nothing.” Libby hated herself for stuttering.
Paul studied her, then stepped aside as Libby hurried past. She could feel his eyes boring into her back and then heard the door shut behind him as he exited the building. She’d done nothing wrong. Nothing. But Gossamer Grove—home—had become such a dark place. Everyone seemed suspicious of something now.
An envelope was perched on the front desk beside her Bible and reticule. Libby pushed it away as she gathered her things. It was another evening she would need to walk home alone. Mitch never bothered to pay attention to where his daughter was or whether she made it home safely for dinner. The paper was going to press, and she could hear the nighttime workers in the printing room. She was the last to leave the office, and by the time she returned home, night would have settled with a cemetery-like stillness.
Libby slipped the strings of her purse over her wrist. Her gaze fell on the envelope, and this time she took more notice of it. A thousand fears flooded her as she reached for it. Nothing boded well when another anonymous missive was left at the paper.
She ripped it open and tugged out a square note card. The typed print burned into her vision with the ominous familiarity of Deacon Greenwood’s obituary.
Paul G. Darrow. Born November 2, 1861. Died May 14, 1907.
His secrets held, his secrets lost, shall rise again on tempests tossed.
His spirit while it laid to rest cried for mercy, then for death.
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again.
Paul. Libby clutched the premature obituary. She held his obituary, and yet, just moments before he left the paper, he had glared at her. Tonight he was very much alive. Libby cast her eyes back toward the page. But tomorrow? Tomorrow he would be dead.
Chapter 15
Annalise
He was following her. Annalise glanced in her rearview mirror as she shut off her car’s engine. The rusty, dented pickup truck pulled onto the gravel drive behind her. Its headlights illuminated the inside of her vehicle and cast a glow over Eugene Hayes’s abandoned trailer.
Annalise yanked on the handle and swung open the door. It was irritating as heck that Garrett Greenwood chased after her, pretending to care. Within moments of discovering the missing photograph, Annalise had sprinted from the house. Nighttime held no terror over her, for the most precious belonging she had was taken. The only thing Annalise could blame was this trailer. This pit of rotting mysteries that had somehow started a series of events that sent her on a downward spiral that would never stop.
The woods around the trailer were silent. All animals and insects had been frightened into stillness with the arrival of the two vehicles. Annalise slammed her car door shut. Now that she was here, some of the angry compulsion had drained away, leaving her very aware of her rashness in jumping in her car and making a mad dash to find—what?
She’d locked up impulse years before, when that first pink-positive appeared on the pregnancy test. But now? The world—her world—had tipped on its axis.
Annalise climbed the slanting wood stairs to the rickety deck attached to the trailer. Garrett left his truck running with its headlights on. She could hear him approaching from behind her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” His half shout ricocheted off the tin roof of the trailer home.
Annalise ignored him, inserted her key, and twisted the doorknob, opening the front door. Her breath caught as the rancid smell of a hoarder’s home assaulted her sinuses.
“Q!” Garrett’s fingers closed around her arm. Annalise tugged from his grip and leveled a glare on him that she was sure would sink a lesser man right through the trailer’s carpeted floor.
“I owe you zero explanation.” She hoped he felt the pain of her scowl. Annalise pushed her way past him into the black hole of the trailer. She pulled her phone from her jacket pocket and tapped on its flashlight app.
“You owe me a massive explanation.” Garrett was practically on top of her. Annalise spun around, her nose almost hitting his chest. She lifted the phone so that the beam of light hit the bottom of his unshaved chin.
“Listen.” Oh, she’d had it. Completely and entirely had had it. “You left. End of story.”
He pushed the phone away so he wasn’t blinded. “Everyone said to get on with my life, and I did.”
Wow.
“Must have been nice.” Annalise shook her head and turned away. There was a place for memories like that. Locked up and stored away. A sideways glance at Garrett told her he wasn’t going to allow her that luxury.
“They told me you said I should go.”
Annalise didn’t answer. Never. She’d never said that. But if she was thinking at all rationally, she could wager a guess it was her parents who’d communicated that on her behalf. Separate the two before worse things happened. Like they actually got married or something!
“Did you?” Garrett said over her shoulder as she made pretense of sweeping the trailer with her phone’s light.
“Did I what?” Annalise snapped.
“Say I should leave?”
Annalise blinked away those annoying type of tears that weren’t from sadness or sensitivity but from anger. Sheer, unadulterated anger.
“Why would you ever think I’d be okay with you leaving for Switzerland while I had to cope with your parents thinking I was a pariah and my parents weeping over their lost dreams of a perfect child? While I had to wobble around on swollen feet and sit on a blow-up seat cushion like I was an eighty-year-old with hemorrhoids?”
Silence.
Yes. Answer that, Garrett Greenwood.
But he didn’t. For whatever reason, Garrett was silent. Annalise stood in front of the dark wall, silhouettes of photographs taped to it. Photocopies of old newsprint. A revival flyer copy.
“What did she look like?” His question stilled Annalise’s sweeping of the room with the flashlight. The beam settled on a lamp in the corner, its shade cockeyed and stained from cigarette smoke.
What did their baby girl look like? If the picture hadn’t been stolen, she might have shown him. Might have.
Annalise’s eyes burned with unshed tears, and the wash of emotion at the idea that her one link to their child was gone threatened to release the floodgates. She blinked furiously.
“She was beautiful,” Annalise whispered. Without any more explanation, she shone the light in the direction of the desk still littered with papers and photographs. “I want her picture back. It’s all I have.”
She should have made one zillion copies of it and filed them in safe places. She could have done it all online and no one local would have had to print the photograph of the Greenwood baby no one knew existed. But it was a calculated move Annalise had always been reticent to take. There was control in one photograph, one memory. Comfort in knowing it was solely hers.
“You think you’re going to find the picture here? In the middle of the night?”
“No.” Annalise lifted some photocopied pictures off the desk. Vintage photographs like the ones in an antique photo album displayed as décor in her house. She turned to Garrett and waved the papers at him. “But, I’m going to find out what is going on. It cannot be coincidence that her picture was stolen the same day I inherit Eugene Hayes’s trailer complete with a museum of pictures of me and”—she shook the papers again—“some dead guy you’re related to.”
Garrett took the photocopies from her hand and bent to look at them. “Shine the light over here.” His tone was clipped, almost landing somewhere between irritated and hurt. But she could never tell with Garrett. He wasn’t expressive unless he wanted to be.
Annalise did so, and the photograph lit up on the page. The black-and-white man stared back at them, his eyes bright as if he were somehow still alive. His arms were crossed over his chest as if challenging their inquisition into who he was. Well-trimmed beard and mustache emphasized the now-dead man’s cheeks, and his top hat was perched on his head as if to hide secrets he kept stored away in his mind. His presence in the picture portrayed him in an almost ubiquitous fashion. As if at any moment he would appear in real life here while his image remained stationary and frozen in time.
“He looks familiar.” Garrett squinted and motioned for Annalise to lift the light higher.
“It’s Harrison Greenwood. Your great-great-grandfather.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Eugene wrote his name on the top of the page.” She stabbed at it with her fingertip.
“Yeah, well, I climb. I don’t study genealogy.” Garrett handed the page back to her.
“Or read, apparently,” Annalise mumbled.
“Who was Eugene Hayes?” Garrett ignored her insult.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, willing the crossness from her. Garrett didn’t deserve all her bitterness. In some way, he was as much a victim as she’d been. Their parents had been forces to deal with—big hurricane-like forces.
Annalise tried to muster an element of commonality. “That’s what bothers me. Who was Eugene Hayes to all of this? To me?” To our daughter were the words Annalise couldn’t voice.
She swung the flashlight around the room. A blown-up photograph of Harrison Greenwood surrounded by smaller copies of other Edwardian-era people hung on the wall opposite the one wallpapered with her own images.
“And who are these people?” Annalise bent and studied them. A woman, a younger man with eyes suspiciously like Harrison Greenwood’s, and a photograph of twin gentlemen astride a tandem bicycle, of all things. Garrett’s shoulder brushed hers as he bent in the darkness to peer at the wall. The shadows illuminating the pictures brought them to life somehow. Their spirits seemed to beckon both Annalise and Garrett until their own pasts became moot compared to the mystery these individuals represented.
“I think that’s my great-grandfather, Elijah Greenwood.” Garrett’s finger landed on the younger man’s photograph. “I remember my mom showing me a picture of him when I was a kid.”
“Do you know who she is?” Annalise traced the face of a pretty young woman whose dark curls framed her features and whose expression seemed timid, almost nervous.
Garrett shook his head. “No clue.”
Annalise focused on the revival meeting poster taped crookedly next to the picture collage. Where had Eugene dragged up all these artifacts? That old obituary? It was as if he’d raided a Greenwood family museum.
She straightened, drawing in an intentional breath. “Tomorrow I’m going to come back here and take down every single photograph, newspaper print, and photocopy, and put them in chronological order as best I can. Then I’m going to find out who Eugene Hayes was and why he felt connected to me. I need to know what I have to do with all this historic mumbo jumbo. Most of all, I’m going to find out who took my baby’s picture, and why.”
Her determined proclamation echoed through the trailer, followed by an uncomfortable silence that either insinuated she was teetering on the edge of sanity or remarkably in charge of the situation. More likely the former.
Garrett sniffed, then jammed his hands in his pockets and stood so close that Annalise almost put her hand out to push him away. Her heartbeat sped up, and she could make out the lines of his face in the dim light. Her flashlight beam bounced off the floor as her hand lowered.
Garrett tipped his head, and his words were soft against her tempestuous emotions. “I’ll help you find her.”
Find her. The words clipped her breath, and Annalise bit the inside of her upper lip. No, he meant the picture. The picture. They would never find her. Their baby was gone forever. Closed case, sealed files, compliments of parents and her eighteen-year-old insecure self.
“I will help you uncover what all this is about.”
Annalise hated the way she leaned toward him. The old magnetism, the way her body remembered everything about Garrett Greenwood, and the forgotten sense of how his sensitive side—not often seen—made her feel. As if only Garrett would ever be able to know her. Really, truly know her. That was perhaps the worst part of it all. Only he could understand her pain, if he chose to meet her there.
The long folding table was littered with papers and photographs. Annalise’s laptop was propped open on her desk to the login page of a popular genealogy site, and the smells from the coffee shop drifted into her office. She took off her glasses and squeezed the bridge of her nose as Christen floated through the doorway, bringing with her two mugs topped in cappuccino foam and the persistent temperament of a woman who wanted answers.
“Okay.” Christen set a mug in front of Annalise and sank into a chair opposite Annalise’s desk. She sipped her cappuccino as her gaze swept the room. “You slept here, didn’t you?”
She fixated on the quilt bunched in the corner with a pillow on top.
Annalise busied herself with logging in to the website.
“I don’t blame you,” Christen nodded, her eyes wide and earnest. “’Cause after yesterday? That was freaky. Inheriting Eugene Hayes’s shrine to everything you and then having your house broken into? Brent wouldn’t tell me what was
taken. He said it was police business.”
The roll of Christen’s eyes told Annalise that she was not going to get off so easily.
“So?” Christen leaned forward in the chair and rested her mug on the desk. “Was it bad? Did they take a lot? Are you installing a security system?”
Annalise had forgotten her password to the site with all Christen’s prattling. She closed the lid on the laptop. “Yes, it was bad. It was an invasion of privacy. No. They didn’t take much.” Just her sanity, her most treasured possession, and maybe worst of all, the distance between her and Garrett.
“And the security system?” Christen pressed.
Annalise nodded. “I’m looking into it.”
“Did you put a stop on your credit cards?”
“My what?” Annalise blinked. “Oh no. No, they didn’t get anything financial.”
“What’d they take, then?”
Annalise looked away and sighed. Garrett was going to be here in a few minutes. His text indicated she had little choice in the matter. The baby’s picture had been stolen, so this affected him too. His own ancestors lined the walls of her newly acquired squatter’s trailer. And, they both had dibs on the property his sister, Nicole, had major influence over. So, they needed to talk.
“Well?” Christen said.
Did it matter anymore? Annalise was sure it would all come out sooner rather than later. Garrett and his sister certainly wouldn’t say anything, but now that the baby’s picture had been stolen? Someone knew. Someone—something—bigger was going on that threatened not only Annalise’s peace but also her future.
“They took a picture from my dresser.” Annalise probably should have told Christen ages ago.
“A picture.” Christen’s eyebrow rose.
“Yes.”
“Oooooookay. That’s weird. A picture of who?” The concern in Christen’s voice was almost Annalise’s undoing. She would be better off if Christen’s peppy personality was paired with snark. Instead, her perky determined nature was compassionate and protective. It was hard to build a wall against it.
The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond Page 10
