by Penny Plume
“That was a compliment to you!”
“I know, and I appreciate it, but he was right—it’s nonsense. If he could have seen your face when you showed up at the Welcome Shoppe, he wouldn’t need any further proof. I saw it.”
“Maybe I’m just a really good actor.”
“If that’s the case, you’re a grade-A psychopath and we’re all screwed. But listen—if you kill me, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Fair enough. Same goes for you.”
“Deal. No murdering each other.”
They shook on it, his massive hand swallowing hers, but he was very careful to not squeeze too hard. Then they both stared out the windshield, not sure what else to say.
Cabo cleared his throat. “So we’re not rushing into town?”
“Not yet. We need to be sure about a few things first.”
Jenna cranked the wheel to the left, heading into the farmlands east of town.
“Where are we going?” Cabo said.
“I’m taking you to fake church.”
It was almost 11:20 when Jenna pulled the Jeep into Nelson Farms. The bright headlights were no match for the vapor bulbs that bathed the parking area and scattered outbuildings in enough light to simulate a UFO abduction.
A square, white, two-story farmhouse stood to the left of the driveway. Tidy hedges and flowerbeds ran along the base of the house, and stone walkways led through mature trees and a weedless lawn. Beneath one of the trees, a wide bench swing with it’s own support structure wandered lazily in a slight breeze.
On the right side of the parking area, the largest barn had a sign painted on the side facing the road: “Buried Sanctuary! Come see the church where the final prayers were spoken before the town was buried for all time. Donations Welcome. $5 Minimum.”
The parking area was empty. Jenna pulled into a spot near the barn and let the headlights add more illumination to what appeared to be the peak of a wooden roof poking out of a sand dune. The dune and roof were surrounded by a ten-foot chain link fence with barbed wire coiled along the top.
“That’s the Church of Sanctuary?” Cabo said.
Jenna smiled. “Not according to our map. But don’t tell Nelson that yet. He’ll just get depressed.”
They got out of the Jeep and watched a porch light pop on above the farmhouse’s side door. A tall, lanky man stepped out carrying a small package in one hand and what appeared to be a shotgun in the other. He walked toward them, taking his time, the walk of a man used to working hard all day, knowing the work would still be there no matter how long it took him to arrive.
Cabo whispered, “Uh, is that a shotgun?”
“He’s harmless,” Jenna said. “Hey Morrie!”
Morrie’s heavy boots crunched onto the stone parking lot. “That you Jenna?”
“Yep. Sorry it’s so late.”
“Oh, we get ‘em out here all hours of the night. They think the holy ghost might show up at midnight, that sort of thing.” He lifted the package, which turned out to be a six-pack of beer bottles, missing two. “Beer?”
“No thanks, but don’t let that stop you.”
Morrie stopped in front of them and examined Cabo, his face slowly compressing into lines of dire concern.
“Now son, if you want a beer, you’ll have to wait until I go to the store and steal the whole cooler. I don’t have enough to fill you up to the ankles.”
“I’m good,” Cabo said. “What’s with the scattergun?”
“Eh?” Morrie looked down, noticed the shotgun, and seemed surprised by it. “Oh, this. Sometimes the kids come out and try to climb the fence, sneak into the church there. You know, young love and all that. They call it ‘finding religion.’”
“So you shoot them?” Cabo said.
“Ha! I wish. Nah, I just sneak around the side and rack the slide a few times, start hollerin’. They come outta there like bees from a kicked nest. I don’t even know if this thing still works.”
“Morrie,” Jenna said, “I’m sure you heard about Ingrid.”
“Ah, yeah. Rest in peace, she’ll be missed. My wife loved those coffee things she made, the cappa-cheetos. Hard to believe something like that could happen here.”
Jenna nodded. “Well, it happened again. Harrison Kavanaugh was murdered tonight, not too long ago.”
“What!”
“I know. It’s crazy.”
Morrie looked off toward the barn. “I always thought that fella was too ornery to die. Who killed him?”
“We don’t know yet. The state police are investigating, so hopefully we’ll know more soon.” Jenna took a deep breath. Her stomach tightened. She was possibly about to find out that one of her dear fellow shop owners was lying at best, a killer at worst. “But for now, I’m trying to make sure my friends won’t be framed for any of this—Ingrid, now Kavanaugh. And whatever comes next.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
Jenna said, “Did anyone from the Main Street shops come by yesterday?”
Morrie frowned. “Yesterday? Let’s see. I can check the receipts in case Eunice or one of the girls did the sale, but I sold some butter and eggs to Belma.”
The weight on Jenna’s stomach lifted, just a bit. “Do you remember what time?”
“Oh, it was after dark. She accused me of trying to sell her store-bought eggs, like she always does, and she used the flashlight on her phone to inspect the shells. Then she got her fifty pounds of butter—”
“Fifty?” Cabo said.
“Oh, yeah. Folks can’t get enough of our butter, especially in desserts and the like.” Morrie leaned closer, sharing a secret. “I mix seaweed from the lake in with the cows’ feed. Gives the milk and butter that little something you can’t quite identify.”
“Nice,” Cabo said, though he seemed unsure if it actually was.
Jenna said, “And you have receipts for what Belma bought, and what time?”
“Of course. This is a legitimate business operation.”
All three of them turned as a Honda Civic with its headlights turned off coasted along the road toward the entrance. Two teenage faces peered out from the windshield, their wide eyes lit by the halogens.
Morrie set the beer down and pumped the shotgun. “Get outta here you horn dogs! This is a sacred place of worship!”
The Civic’s tires squawked as the car leaped out of sight, the headlights popping on a hundred yards down the road.
Cabo shook his head. “Such a shame. So disrespectful.”
“I know, right?” Morrie said. “They weren’t gonna leave a donation, I guarantee you.”
Jenna’s stomach felt light, free, soaring as she and Cabo drove back toward downtown. She had a photo on her phone of Belma’s Nelson Farms receipt, showing her purchase for eggs and butter at 9:27 PM Thursday night.
Cabo looked at it. “So there’s no way?”
“No way. Olson said the medical examiner puts Ingrid’s death around 9:30. Belma was the first one to the meeting last night. There would be no time for her to drive back into town, store all the eggs and butter, kill Ingrid, and show up at my shop like nothing was wrong. No way.”
“What about Kavanaugh?”
Jenna chewed her lip. “I saw her around 8:15, right after I closed. She was ringing up what I figured was her last sale of the day, and she was still talking to them when I came back down Main Street. That had to be 8:30, maybe even 8:40.”
“I left the library to get dinner at 8:47,” Cabo said.
“Not enough time for her to get to Horizon House, sneak in, and kill Kavanaugh.”
“Belma’s in the clear?” Cabo asked.
“She’s in the clear,” Jenna said, smiling so big it almost hurt.
Cabo’s phone was in the passenger-side cup holder, and the screen lit up with an incoming call: Detective Olson.
“You put him in your phone?” Jenna asked.
“Yeah. Didn’t you?”
“I just kept his card…”
Cabo
kept any judgements about that to himself and took the call. “This is Cabo. Yeah. Uh…okay. Maybe ten minutes. Is that fast enough? Okay, yeah.”
He ended the call and stared down at the phone.
“Good news?” Jenna said.
“I don’t think so. We have to go back to Horizon House. Now.”
“Did Olson find something?”
“It’s more like what he can’t find—Bart’s gone missing.”
Jenna pushed the Jeep along the dark country road, her headlights the only illumination other than the stars. The Jeep urged her to stomp it, really chew some asphalt, but she kept it reigned in.
She asked Cabo, “Olson has no idea where Bart is?”
“I don’t know how hard he’s looked. He just said I need to come back and make my statement, and if we see Bart wandering around, pick him up and bring him home.”
“Oh, no. As drunk as he is, he could have fallen down the hill to the lake. Or tried to drive and gone right off the road.”
“Or bumped into the killer,” Cabo said. “If he isn’t the killer, that is.”
“He can’t be, remember? I saw him and Sherri driving through town around the time Kavanaugh was killed.” The thought of aloof Sherri and her stupid mourning hat still irked her, but she shoved that aside.
“What about Ingrid?” Cabo said.
“Wasn’t Bart with you at the Horizon House meeting?”
Cabo looked out the open window for a moment. “Yeah, he was. The whole time, too. He and Lawrence tried to get a drinking game going with the lawyers. It didn’t work.”
The mention of Lawrence brought another knot to Jenna’s stomach. “Oh, please tell me Lawrence was there the entire time too.”
Cabo closed his eyes, remembering. “He was.”
Jenna let her breath out.
“No, wait. He left before the meeting was over. Kavanaugh was talking to the engineers about building the resort on a huge slab of concrete. Something crazy, instead of digging out the foundation. They thought it was hilarious. Lawrence said it was…what did he say… ‘More boring than an empty bathtub.’”
“That sounds like him.”
“Kavanaugh told him if he was bored, he can leave, so Lawrence did.”
Jenna winced. “What time was that?”
“I can’t say for sure, sorry. Maybe McTavish will know.”
“Maybe,” Jenna said, willing the time to be too late for Lawrence to stop by the Sanctuary Café and kill Ingrid before he came to the Main Street meeting.
But…something Cabo just said was jumping up and down in her brain, raising its hand.
What was it?
She started mumbling: “Drinking game. Lawyers. Engineers. Kavanaugh.”
Cabo raised an eyebrow. “You okay?”
“Hold on. Engineers. Slab. Slab?”
“Are you having a stroke? Nod if you can!”
“Slab!”
Jenna hit the brakes and slid to a halt on the shoulder. Dust swept past the Jeep as she punched on the interior lights and grabbed the stack of map photos.
“Kavanaugh was asking about building the resort on a giant slab?”
Cabo blinked in the wake of the interrogation. “I think so, yeah. I tried to pay attention but man, Lawrence was right. It was a snore fest.”
“He knew,” Jenna said. “Kavanaugh knew about the graveyard.”
She flipped through the sheets until she found the shot of the full desktop, map, and smooth stones anchoring the corners.
“The graves must still be there, that’s why he was asking about the slab. He was hoping to build his resort without digging into Lost Haven’s past, literally, and unearthing the bodies. Cabo, if Kavanaugh had gotten his way, the Lost Haven Resort was going to be a tomb on top of the cemetery.”
“Creepy. So, why was he murdered? We figure Ingrid was killed because she was going to stop the resort, right?”
“That’s the assumption, yeah,” Jenna said.
“If Kavanaugh was going to build it, why would the same killer go after him? And now, with Bart missing, maybe him too?”
It was Jenna’s turn to blink. “Do you think there’s more than one killer?”
“Man, I hope not. It’s hard enough just finding one.”
Jenna stared at the map, trying to fathom Belma and Lawrence working together as an assassin squad.
Bart and Wilford.
Belma and…Cabo?
As she worked through the timelines and crossed off possibilities, her eyes were drawn to the scrap of stark white paper peeking out in the upper right corner of the map, beneath the stone. The Kavanaugh letterhead mocked her. Below that, she could see the top of the first line of the letter, presumably the greeting to the recipient.
Or, recipients.
“Hold on a sec,” she said.
She shuffled through the photos, finding a closer shot of the upper-right corner of the map. The white paper was there, much larger. Jenna’s book brain recognized the font—Garamond Premier—and the peaks of the capital letters gave hints to what the line said:
Greetings Lost Haven Historical Society
She let the letters cascade down in her mind, forming their curves, corners, and barbs.
“Oh, no. Oh, how did I miss this? It’s right there!”
“What?” Cabo said. “The stone? Don’t tell me there’s blood on it.”
“No, the letter!”
Cabo frowned. “What letter?”
Jenna pointed. “This one. The one from the desk of Mr. Harrison Kavanaugh, Esquire.”
Cabo scanned the letterhead, the blank white area below that got cut off by the map and stone. Then he did it again, growing more and more confused.
“Is it a confession?”
“No,” Jenna said, barely containing herself. “The first line, right here. The salutation. It says ‘Greetings Lost Haven Historical Society.’”
“I just see a bunch of specks.”
“Trust me, that’s what it says.”
“Okay,” Cabo said. “I trust you. But what does it mean?”
Jenna beamed. “Kavanaugh wasn’t going to build the resort.”
11
The gate to Horizon House was still open, and the front of the house still blazed with security lights. Every window was lit, as if someone inside needed to drive out every inch of darkness. The crime scene van sat abandoned near the stairs. Garrett’s cruiser was gone.
It was an eerie setting, given the bloody murder scene inside the mansion.
Jenna didn’t bother with any of that. She bolted from the Jeep, ran past the van and started climbing, the photos clutched to her chest. She called over her shoulder, “Come on!”
“I’m literally two steps behind you,” Cabo said, from two steps behind.
“Well…hurry.”
Cabo shook his head. “I’m still not exactly sure what we’re doing.”
“Just saving the town,” Jenna said with a grin. “You know. No big deal.”
Jenna pushed one of the massive doors open and headed for the stairs to the second floor. Then her manners took over and she skidded to a stop, went back to the entrance and leaned out to press the doorbell embedded in the stonework.
A deep tone sounded from somewhere within the house.
Cabo watched this with a raised eyebrow. “Really? I don’t think the crime scene crew needs us to follow formalities.”
“This is still someone’s home,” Jenna said.
“Not if Bart’s dead.”
“Shush!”
McTavish emerged from the first floor hallway. His posture was still flawless but he looked tired, his face dry and gray.
“Miss Hooper. Mr. Cabo. They’re waiting for you upstairs.”
“Thanks McTavish,” Jenna said. She ran up four steps and stopped, unaware that Cabo had to grab the thick bannister to keep from bowling her over.
“McTavish, do you happen to know what time Lawrence left the meeting last night? When Mr. Kavanaugh told him
if he was bored, he could leave?”
“Of course, miss. It was 9:40 PM. I can show you the log, if you like.”
“No need, thank you.” She turned to Cabo. “Lawrence couldn’t have killed Ingrid. He’s in the clear.”
“Good,” Cabo said. “He’s funny. It would be too bad if he also killed people.”
Jenna started up the stairs again.
“I beg your pardon,” McTavish said, “but have either of you seen Master Bart?”
Jenna stopped again, crushed by how insensitive she was being. Poor McTavish—Harrison Kavanaugh murdered, Bart missing, people tromping through the estate and constantly in need of him—no wonder he was exhausted.
And, now that Jenna really looked at him, miserable.
She hurried back down the stairs and wrapped him in a fierce hug. Startled, he kept his posture ramrod straight for a moment before relaxing and resting his cheek on top of her head, just for a moment.
“We haven’t seen Bart,” she mumbled into his shoulder.
“Very good,” McTavish said, straightening up. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea?”
“No,” Jenna said. “Please, don’t worry about us. Go take care of yourself.”
He patted her back and broke free from the embrace.
“I’ll be in the kitchen should anyone need anything.”
Then he was gone, turning the corner and disappearing down the hallway.
Cabo blew air through puffed cheeks. “Rough. Poor guy.”
“Please don’t let Bart be dead,” Jenna said to the enormous chandelier.
Detective Olson stuck his head around the corner at the second-floor.
“Hey, you’re here, good. What are you two doing, some weird version of Romeo and Juliet?”
Jenna frowned. Cabo was on the stairs, looking down at her with his arms spread on the bannister.
“Huh?” she said.
Cabo said, “O Jenna, Jenna! Wherefore art thou Jenna?”
“He’s got it,” Olson said.
Jenna blinked. “Guys. We’re trying to solve some murders here. I mean…seriously.”
She hurried up the stairway with Cabo close behind. At the top, she flapped the stack of photos in front of Olson.
“Tell me no one has touched anything in the secret library.”
