Hanging by a Thread

by Margaret Evans

  Hanging By a Thread

  Volume Three of the Second Treasures Mysteries

  Print Edition, © October 2017 Margaret Evans

  Moonlight Mystery Press

  ISBN-10: 0-9789076-4-7

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9789076-4-8

  Cover artwork copyright ©2017 Duncan Reid

  Production by Dennis Tuttle, 5editorial, Silver Spring, Md

  Composition by Jenine Zimmers.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  For more information about this book, contact:

  Moonlight Mystery Press

  www.moonlightmysterypress.com

  Contents

  acknowledgments

  prologue

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  forty

  forty-one

  forty-two

  forty-three

  forty-four

  acknowledgments

  My older sister taught me how to do my hair and put on mascara, something I was very excited about at the mature age of thirteen. She showed me in so many ways what not to do as I bumbled along in my own way over the years that I eventually ended up doing many things much better. This book is for Ronnie.

  Other Works by Margaret Evans

  Fiction

  Second Treasures Mysteries

  Twice Sold Murder, Vol. 1

  Priced to Kill, Vol. 2

  A Dress to Die For, Vol. 4 (Fall 2018)

  The Lethal Limit

  Maya Earth Trilogy

  The Sixth World

  Trial in Jade: The Mayan Return

  Kingdom Come: The Mayan Answer

  Hostages to Murder

  The Mandreill Dagger

  Canvas of Deceit

  The Tao of Murder

  The Secret of Kenning Hall

  Code of Treachery

  Non-Fiction

  Prairie Attack

  Lingerie Ward

  The Alphabet

  Saying Goodbye to Matt

  Lucky Day, Lucky Life

  Making the Next Green Light

  Poetry

  Christmas Poems for My Grown-Up Children

  (including “The Forgotten Snow Girl” and “Golden Snowflakes”)

  To Ronnie…

  prologue

  There was no moon tonight. In the darkness, the woman hugged the bundle against her body, pulled her coat shut over it. It was late enough that the shops on Taylor Street had closed for the night. Street lights were not as bright as they used to be, so that helped, too. No one should be out and about at this hour. Many vendors lived above their shops and she waited near the alley for all of the lights to go out before creeping around the corner toward the thrift shop and the bag of clothes someone had left near the doorway. She never saw the figure hunched down in the car parked down the block.

  She stooped, pulled out the man’s sports jacket from under her coat and stuffed it deep into the bag, wondering how she’d ever gotten involved with the jacket’s owner. And not only that, but how had his jacket gotten into the back of her coat closet? She didn’t remember his leaving it. But it didn’t matter, for soon all evidence of any connection between them would be gone, sold to someone else.

  Also unseen by her, a large gray cat sat in the front window of the shop, lolling its tail back and forth, and watched her with great interest. As the woman checked the street in all directions and slipped off into the darkness, the cat waited, its eyes wide, reflecting the street lights, and tail flicking back and forth rapidly as if anticipating more activity.

  The person slouching in the darkened car stretched to look at the retreating woman and back toward the bag of clothes, nodded, smiled. The plan had worked. After waiting a few minutes more, the person got out of the car, carefully shutting the door so no noises would awaken any resident above their shop and went straight for the bag outside the thrift shop door. Pulling a small envelope of loose golden threads from their own coat pocket, the person rummaged through the bag for the sports coat, and emptied the golden threads inside the sports jacket—a couple here, a few there, in pockets, sleeves, under the collar. Then the person returned to the car and drove away, satisfied the rest of the plan would work.

  As the car left, so did the cat into the darkness of the shop.

  one

  It took three trips in the morning for Laura Keene to pull in the bags and boxes left at the front and rear doors of her thrift shop, Second Treasures, and put them all into the work room to look at later. She was used to folks leaving donations from time to time, some things brand-new-looking with the tags still attached. Some items she could clean up and sell, while others went straight into a giveaway bag or trash bin. While she appreciated the contributions from the townspeople, she preferred to go to estate sales and pick up bargains on real treasures. But every now and then, such treasures showed up on her doorstep at no cost to her, so no complaints were made.

  As she turned on the lights and the register, checked the shop to make sure all was ready for her to open for the day, she reminisced about the recent Valentine’s Day dinner with Connor Fitzpatrick, head of the local police department. After an eleven-year separation, she was thrilled they had discovered they still enjoyed each other’s company. They had grown up together, and the sudden split had been painful in more ways than one.

  With the unexpected deaths of Laura’s parents when she was only 15, her great-aunt had scooped her up and brought her south to live in Maryland. There she was home-schooled and taught a variety of different arts and skills, including self-defense, so much so that she barely had a moment to think about the murders of her father, a police lieutenant, and her mother, a psychologist who often assisted the police with their profiling. When Laura did think and talk about that terrible time, it was with a skilled psychologist, one who helped her learn to cope with it all. She never left her parents behind, always missed and still loved them, just learned to keep going. When her aunt died recently from cancer, one of the first things Laura did
was pack up and drive back to her home town in Minnesota. Going back for her was going forward.

  Encountering Harry’s Rules, opening her thrift shop, and beginning a fledgling tax accounting business as a C.P.A., Laura was also assaulted by a variety of different mysteries, some of which were directly related to second-hand goods in her shop. Harry Kovacs was the owner of the “Rules” which allowed Laura to gently ease back into the small town of Raging Ford lying at the southernmost tip of St. Louis County, and renew her ties with old friends and neighbors. Harry also owned the building in which Laura ran her shop and the apartment above in which she lived. He ran the barber shop next door, where he lived in the upstairs apartment with his wife Beth, so Harry and Laura saw each other frequently, often more than once every day.

  Laura looked up as a dark SUV passed by but was disappointed that it wasn’t Sergeant Fitzpatrick on his first pass down Taylor Street for the day. Maybe he would stop by, if he had time, for a quick kiss in the back room. She smiled at the thought.

  She was grateful, too, that he might actually have that moment to spend with her, given the recent decisions by someone in the county to cut the police staffing in Raging Ford to a point where not all shifts were being covered. It had been a terrifying time with a handful of police officers stretched too thinly, but thankfully a solution had been found and most of the staff had been reinstated with business pretty much as usual. She had asked Harry Kovacs about his thoughts on the matter, but he just shrugged his shoulders in such a way that she suspected he and his two brothers knew more than they were telling. She wouldn’t put it past the Kovacs triplets to have been behind the rescue. After all, the brothers did make up the Town Council.

  As she walked about the shop and straightened everything before turning the Open sign outward, she returned to the main mystery in her life—that of her parents’ murders which had never been solved in spite of the huge task force of local and state officers and federal agents. She was making her own progress on the front where a supposed conspiracy from deep in the past was reaching out to the future and had caused a large number of her mother’s family members to fall to unexplained accidental deaths and mysterious disappearances, but every time she tried to focus her day on those details, something else blew up in the store. Figuratively. Thankfully, she had a cat to help her.

  A cat.

  A nice cat, really, but nobody else could see the Empress Isabella, except for Laura. To cover her shock and disbelief in this type of supernatural occurrence, Laura continued to put out a fresh saucer of milk every day next to a litter box in the storage room behind the shop—a litter box that was never disturbed. The big gray feline had pointed things out to her recently and indicated its disapproval of certain individuals who frequented Laura’s shop, but there was no way she could explain that to anyone or share it even with Connor, for he couldn’t see the cat, even when he was drinking coffee with Laura in the kitchenette off the back room and it was sitting on her lap.

  She glanced about the store, nodded in approval and headed for the kitchenette for a cup of the coffee that Connor liked so much and she thought was pretty good, and a piece of toast loaded with homemade marmalade before opening.

  Her mind wandered to the box of paperwork and “toys” that her father had left with Connor’s father, also a policeman, in the years before his death. It contained a lot of writing and information about his theories of the history of Raging Ford and its three founders: Samuel Rage who was Laura’s ancestor, as well as Aldous Munley and Cuinn Dowell.

  Samuel had saved up his pennies and bought the lion’s share of a small iron ore mine on the southern end of the Mesabi Range near the town he named Raging Ford in Minnesota. His two partners owned lesser shares, and there was the inevitable resentment of partners who were often overruled in making decisions. Rage had taken the mine’s proceeds and equipped the town with well-built city buildings, schools with marble floors, an enormous Victorian library filled with murals of the town’s history, and more. Later, indoor plumbing was added to the high school, including an indoor swimming pool. Munley and Dowell wanted a bigger income for themselves, but Rage continued to pour the funds into the town’s infrastructure and live a frugal lifestyle.

  Several generations later, someone happened to notice an odd thing happening.

  The Rage family had numerous members who either had fatal accidents or disappeared without a trace. The once fulsome and flourishing clan had dwindled over the decades to one person: Laura Louise Rage Keene. Her own parents weren’t the first ones to dig into the past and suspect the Dowells and Munleys had had a hand in this, but now it was up to Laura to finish the job and find out once and for all what had happened to her family before anything could happen to her and the Rages were gone forever.

  Her father’s box of information yielded a few clues from his own—and she presumed, her mother’s—research. It also included several objects that had to be clues, but whose meaning had thus far eluded her. She was still thinking about those random objects when her phone dinged and she read the text from Connor.

  I’m at your back door. Coffee?

  She responded with a smiley face and hurried to punch in the key code to greet him.

  With the door closed behind him, he took off his Minnesota peace officer cowboy hat and pulled her close.

  “That was better than coffee,” he commented, following her to the kitchenette some minutes later. He stood, arms crossed, just inside the little room and ran his eyes over her while her back was turned. He watched while she reached for the second mug, her long, honey hair rippling with her movements. Gave her a smile when she turned to hand him the mug.

  As they sipped coffee at the little table, they shared the same corner, knees bumping. Connor tried but failed to keep his hands to himself, touched the shimmering honey draping over her shoulder.

  “You get to touch my hair, and I get to touch yours,” Laura said, reaching a hand out to his short, dark hair.

  “Not much there to touch,” he commented, returning to his coffee.

  “I like your hair. You’ve never changed your hairstyle, have you? Part’s in the same place, too.”

  “Some girl once told me she liked my hair that way.”

  Laura almost blushed then recalled how old she’d been at the time.

  “Do you do everything twelve-year-olds tell you to do?”

  “Just that one.”

  Laura made more toast overloaded with jam and set it on the table.

  They sat eating and sipping coffee in companionable silence for several minutes before Connor spoke again.

  “Have you figured out anything more about those pieces of ‘stuff’ from your father’s box?”

  She stopped to think.

  The root beer lollipop, the furry toy animal, the miniature car, the small wooden stick. They were definitely clues to something, perhaps who was behind her parents’ deaths and what had happened to the other Rage family members.

  “Not much progress there. You identified the car as a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow which doesn’t help me much. We both know the doctors gave out those root beer lollipops at the old medical center when we were little kids. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I can’t figure out what they all mean.”

  Fitzpatrick’s eyes turned inward.

  “I could swear that somebody around here once owned a Silver Shadow, but I can’t remember who. I’ll ask around.”

  “No! Don’t do that. We have to be very quiet about this whole thing. I think that’s why they were left in the box without an explanation. Daddy didn’t want it to be obvious what they meant. It might have shown his hand before he was ready. I’ll do some more research on the families and where they all ended up. Some women certainly married and have different names and families by now with multiple name changes, so I have a lot more to check. But right now I have to focus on my tax customers and the upcoming St.
Patrick’s Day Parade.”

  “Why the parade?”

  “I’ve been asked to sit on the committee.”

  “They recognize your creativity and high energy level?”

  “No, I think they just want another grunt they can shove the work at. I’d rather focus on my shop window and setting everything up for the holiday. That’s more fun. And I have five more new tax customers. It should be a good year, but anything’s better than last year.”

  Connor knew she was referring to the days after the death of her Great-aunt Rose, her last living relative.

  Laura got up and reached for something in a drawer next to the sink.

  When she turned, she grinned at Connor through green teeth.

  He stared at her a moment before responding.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you to brush your teeth every day?”

  She laughed as she took off the green wax teeth.

  “Do you think the kids will like these?”

  “Yeah. Kids.”

  As Connor rose to head to the station, Laura stayed by his arm.

  “I got an invitation to Sabina Morello’s bridal shower. It was for both her and Jack. Are you going?”

  “I’m going to the groomal shower, which is what my invitation called it. If I can get the time off.”

  “I didn’t know Sabina that well, but I remember seeing her at school from time to time. She seemed nice. She was in your class, wasn’t she?”

  He nodded. Connor was ahead of Laura by a year, as was Jack.

  “She is nice, and Jack is happy.”

  Jack Flynn was a civilian employee with the Raging Ford police department. He managed the Francis Xavier and Frances Rage Keene Communications Center, or “Comm Center” as the officers called it, named after Laura’s parents and built in recent years from an anonymous endowment. Connor suspected Laura had something to do with the donation, but she refused to confirm or deny it and consistently avoided the subject, which to Connor was confirmation. Where she might have gotten the money was another matter. Life insurance proceeds, maybe? For the present, he let it go but knew he’d get to the truth one day.