Deadly Harvest

by Heather Graham

  Jeremy thought it was the appropriate time to bring out Mary Johnstone’s picture. He watched Richardson’s face as he thrust the photo in front of him.

  If anything, the man looked perplexed. He frowned, looking up at the two of them. “That isn’t her,” he said. If he’d recognized Mary in any way, he hadn’t betrayed it with so much as a blink.

  “No, that’s the woman we’re looking for right now,” Joe said.

  “I’ve never seen her ’cept on the news,” Richardson claimed vehemently.

  “She disappeared on Halloween,” Jeremy said.

  Richardson groaned. “I was with a hooker on Halloween.”

  “And her name was?”

  Richardson stared at them, shaking his head.

  “Sugar,” he said at last.

  “Did Sugar have a last name?” Joe asked him.

  Richardson groaned again. “Plum.”

  “Being a smart-ass isn’t going to help you,” Joe informed him.

  Richardson laughed dryly. “I’m not being a smart-ass. That’s the name she gave me when she got in the car. Sugar Plum. She even asked me to go in and buy her a bottle of plum brandy. While we were waiting for the guy to run my card, she said she was just like the sugarplum fairy, she’d be in my dreams forever.”

  “Any reason you picked up a working girl on Halloween?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah. I was horny,” Richardson said.

  The man was wearing down, Jeremy thought. He’d been through all this with the Boston police. It was amazing he hadn’t demanded a lawyer yet.

  “Wait a minute,” Jeremy said. “Did you just say you used your credit card in a liquor store?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you tell anyone this before?” Jeremy asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Joe demanded.

  “Because I just remembered it now,” Richardson said irritably.

  How dumb was this guy? Jeremy wondered. He didn’t seem to realize he’d finally given himself an alibi that would hold water.

  Joe rose and banged on the door for the guard. “I’ll get them right on it,” he said.

  The cell door closed in Joe’s wake. Richardson looked at Joe. “Good cop, bad cop?” he asked.

  “I’m not a cop at all. I’m just a private investigator trying to help my friend. He’s married to the woman in the picture. I would really appreciate any help you can give me.”

  Richardson sat there, chewing his lip. “I wish I could give you something. Believe me—I wish I could get myself out of this place. I never met your friend’s wife. I did meet Dinah. We went to some haunted houses, a couple of shops, and we stopped by a museum, but we left when she saw I was bored with all that history stuff. Then we had dinner at the bar. Did I think I was going to get laid? Yes. Did I kill her when it didn’t work out? Hell no. That’s why they make working girls, you know?”

  “What happened when you left?” Jeremy asked him.

  “After dinner, she said she wanted to talk to someone she’d met during the day. I said I could wait and walk her to her car. She said not to bother, that it was just over by the cemetery, a couple of blocks away, and she could get there by herself.”

  The cemetery, Jeremy thought. Everything kept going back to the cemetery.

  He needed to get a list of everyone who had been in that bar the night Dinah Green had last been seen. He was certain now that someone in that room—maybe the person she had spoken to, maybe someone else—had followed as she walked to her car.

  And then…

  Jeremy handed him his business card. “If you think of anything else, anything at all, call me.”

  “Sure. If they let me,” Richardson said.

  Jeremy glanced around…just in case. “Ask for an attorney,” he said.

  Richardson frowned. “They said I could have one. But I’m not guilty.”

  “Innocent men need attorneys, too,” Jeremy assured him.

  Just then Joe returned to the cell. Jeremy looked at him. “Your Halloween story checks out.” Joe turned to Jeremy. “The guy at the liquor store actually remembers little miss Sugar Plum. Imagine that.”

  Jeremy shrugged. He extended a hand to Richardson, who stared at it for a few seconds, then accepted it. “If I could help you, I would. You know that, right?”

  “You never know what might come to mind,” Jeremy said.

  As he and Joe left and headed for Joe’s car, Joe was scowling.

  “The man is innocent,” Jeremy said quietly. “They’ll have to let him go in the end.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Joe said. “That poor sucker is too damn dumb to have done it,” he added in disgust. “Wasted time.”

  “No,” Jeremy disagreed. “He said that she stayed in the bar after he had left because she wanted to talk to someone she’d met that day.”

  “So? That may not even be true.”

  “I think it is.”

  “We’re still looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “I think the haystack just got smaller. I asked Hugh to pull his receipts for the day, and I’ll pick them up later. We can start looking at every local who was in that bar that night.”

  Joe eyed him dolefully. “We can start looking, and we may still be wrong.”

  “And we may be right,” Jeremy said. “Richardson said she told him she was parked by the cemetery.”

  “I told you—there are no tunnels in that cemetery. No tombs doubling as a secret hideaway.”

  “That’s not the point,” Jeremy said. “The cemetery figures into this somehow. This guy has decided that he likes the whole Harvest Man idea. Being worshipped. He’s taking these women and entertaining himself with them. Making them adore him, beg for their lives, maybe. And then, when he tires of them, or they try to escape, or maybe because it’s Wednesday or it rains, he decides it’s time to kill them and find another. And I’m telling you, Joe, whoever he is, he was at that bar that night.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said.

  “We narrow it down. We find someone who was there, and who has land, so no one will hear what goes on. Or a soundproof room. Somewhere where he kept Dinah Green before he killed her. Somewhere where he’s got Mary Johnstone right now.”

  “Let’s just hope he paid with a credit card,” Joe muttered.

  “Let’s just hope he doesn’t get tired of Mary,” Jeremy replied.

  “Amen,” Joe said solemnly.

  16

  Rowenna had no idea what to say to Eve.

  She couldn’t believe her friend was accusing her own husband of being a murderous monster.

  And looking into Eve’s tormented eyes, she knew that Eve didn’t want to believe it, either, but things had built up inside her until she was ready to self-combust, and she’d desperately needed to speak with someone. Someone she trusted.

  “Well?” Eve whispered.

  “Well, the fact that he wasn’t in the store doesn’t make him a murderer. And even if he flirted with her…well, we all flirt sometimes. It’s a way of feeling…appreciated, I guess,” Rowenna said.

  “What should I do?” Eve asked quietly.

  “Have you confronted him with any of this?” Rowenna asked.

  “I’ve argued with him about the books. And we had a big fight after he followed Dinah Green out of the store…. It didn’t help when we saw her again later. At the bar,” Eve said.

  Rowenna sucked in a breath, watching her friend closely as she asked, “Did he leave you at all that night?”

  Eve frowned. “Yes. He got up from the table and went to the bar to get our drinks. Then, when he didn’t come back, I went to ask Hugh what the hell was going on that it took so long to get a drink, but I couldn’t find him, either. I was angry, so I said screw the check and left.”

  “And then—did Adam come home?”

  “Of course he came home. Do you think he’d leave a house he feels he paid for?” Eve asked bitterly.

  “Eve, I meant when did he come home?”

  �
�I don’t know!” Eve exclaimed miserably. “I’d had a few drinks, and I was so angry—I shouldn’t have, but I took a sleeping pill. And I was out like a light.”

  “What happened in the morning? Was he there when you woke up?”

  “Yes. He was there. I got up, ignored him and went into the store without him.”

  “Did he come into the store later?”

  “Yes. He got there a few minutes after me.”

  Rowenna studied Eve, at a loss for reassuring words.

  Adam?

  Could her friend be right? Was her husband a killer?

  “What should I do?” Eve begged. “What should I do?”

  If Adam was the killer, Rowenna thought, was Eve safe with him? No, what was she thinking? It couldn’t be Adam. It couldn’t.

  Why not?

  Because it just had to be someone else.

  But should Eve be staying with him if there was any possibility, any possibility at all?

  “Oh, Eve…”

  “I know. If I’m wrong, I’ve destroyed my marriage. But if I’m right, I might wind up dead in a cornfield,” Eve said miserably.

  “I have to tell Jeremy,” Rowenna said.

  “You can’t!” Eve gasped. “You can’t. He’ll make them bring Adam in for questioning, and then Adam will hate me. He’ll kill me!” She realized what she had just said and started to laugh, but it was a sad and bitter laugh.

  “Eve, I can tell Jeremy to talk to Adam himself and to be careful. He isn’t Joe, Eve. He’s not a cop anymore. But…you have to be careful. I mean, honestly? I don’t believe it. I’m sure Adam can be a pain—he’s a man, for God’s sake,” she said, trying to lighten the tension. “But I have to say something to Jeremy about this.”

  Eve shook her head vehemently. “Couldn’t you…couldn’t you do your thing?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your thing—where you commune with the earth, or your mind, or whatever it is you do for Joe when you let the spirits talk to you.”

  Rowenna groaned inwardly. “Eve, I’m not a psychic. I’m not sure I even believe in psychics.” Though given what she’d been through recently, she was getting closer to believing all the time.

  “You keep saying that!” Eve snapped. “But you’re lying to yourself. I don’t care what you call it, but you…know things. And if you let yourself, you could see what happened that night. And you could find Mary, too,” she added stubbornly.

  “Eve, if there was any possible way for me to find Mary Johnstone, don’t you think I would have done it by now?” Rowenna demanded, exasperated.

  “Adam said he found you in the cemetery last night,” Eve said accusingly.

  “Yeah, well, I thought I was being followed.”

  “And you thought the cemetery would be a good place to hide?” Eve asked, nakedly skeptical.

  “It was…a series of circumstances,” Rowenna told her. “And stupid.”

  “But it’s daylight now,” Eve told her.

  “So?”

  “Please, let’s go there. It’s day, people are out. You can try to figure out what happened. You can pretend it’s Halloween and see what happens.”

  “Nothing will happen,” Rowenna said tensely, lowering her head and shivering.

  She had to admit, she’d been thinking that she needed to go there. Not by night, not when she thought that she was being chased and no one else was around. In daylight. And with or without Joe, who still wanted to get her out there, too.

  Even if this was a day cursed with a gloomy pewter sky.

  “Please. Before we say anything to Jeremy about Adam. You said you’d do anything possible to find Mary Johnstone.”

  Rowenna let out a sigh. “All right.”

  “Thank you,” Eve breathed in genuine relief. “Let’s go now.”

  As Eve spoke, Rowenna’s phone rang. She answered it by rote.

  “Hey, where are you?” Brad asked. “I actually came back to the museum early, thought I’d poke around, and Dan told me you’d headed over to Eve’s.”

  Rowenna hesitated, thinking it might not be a bad thing if he went with them.

  “Who is it?” Eve whispered.

  “Brad,” Rowenna mouthed in return. “Should I…?”

  “Bring him? Yes. Tell him to meet us outside Red’s.”

  “Brad, meet me outside Red’s. I mean, meet us. Eve’s with me.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Just come,” Rowenna told him.

  “Now,” Eve begged.

  “Now,” Rowenna said.

  “All right, I’m on my way,” Brad told her, and hung up.

  “Let’s go!” Eve insisted.

  Determined, Eve headed back out to the front of the store. She paused, collecting one of the little bags of herbal spells near the door. “It’s for long life,” she told Rowenna.

  “Let’s hope,” Rowenna muttered.

  Just as they reached the door, Adam entered. He was frowning. “Why is the Closed sign on the door?” he asked irritatedly. Then he noticed Rowenna and smiled.

  Great, Rowenna thought. He thinks I’m telling his wife she’s lucky to be married to such a great guy who loves her so much, and really I’m planning to go to the cemetery to try to figure out if he’s a murderer or not.

  “Ro and I were going to hop out for coffee, and I didn’t know when you’d be getting back,” Eve lied easily.

  “Oh.” Adam seemed to accept that happily enough. “Well, have fun. Bring me back a cup.”

  “Sure,” Eve said curtly, and swept past him.

  Adam stared at Rowenna in confusion. Her smile felt too wide and plastered on, as if she’d just had a triple dose of collagen injected.

  As she slipped by Adam, she brushed against him, and thought, Adam? A killer?

  He couldn’t be.

  But she couldn’t forget what Brad had said about her friends at the bar the night before.

  “They’re kind of scary-weird.”

  And then, “One of them could be the Devil.”

  Thank God, Rowenna thought, when she saw that there were lots of people thronging the mall. And she was even more relieved, when they took the turn for the cemetery, to see that there were still plenty of people in the area.

  The tourist tram went by, and she could hear the conductor cheerfully passing on information to the riders.

  Outside Red’s, they waited for a few minutes for Brad to arrive. “Why didn’t you just have me meet you at the shop?” he asked.

  “She doesn’t want Adam to know what we’re doing,” Rowenna explained.

  “Oh?” Brad said, frowning. “What are we doing?”

  “Going to the cemetery,” Eve replied, then apparently realized how painful that might be for him and hurried to add, “Ro’s going to do her magic trance thing to try to figure out what happened to Mary.”

  A series of emotions flashed through his eyes. He hated the cemetery, but at the same time, he was eager to revisit it if doing so could provide any shred of hope. Rowenna could tell that he was even worried about her. He probably thought she and Eve were heading over the edge. Crazy. Of course, he hadn’t sounded so sane himself recently, ranting about visions in crystal balls and the Devil out drinking alongside the locals.

  “All right, let’s go,” he agreed. “I’m willing to try anything,” he added under his breath.

  The cemetery looked bleak. The trees there were almost leafless, as if they had shed their brilliant beauty overnight.

  Rowenna realized that she really didn’t want to go in. “Come on,” Eve urged her. “You promised. And Mary might still be alive,” Eve said.

  “She is alive,” Brad said. “You said so,” he insisted to Rowenna.

  “We’ll go back to Halloween,” Eve said. “Brad can talk you through it.”

  As they walked in, Rowenna, forcing herself every step of the way, found herself remembering the night before and where the shadow had stood. Staring unwillingly at the tomb where her name h
ad been written in dark, dripping blood. She felt almost as if she were entering her nightmare again, and she was terrified.

  “Okay, concentrate,” Eve said. “It’s Halloween. Crowds are everywhere.”

  “There are vendors set up out there in the street,” Brad said, taking over. “But it’s getting near dusk. I’m in the cemetery. Alone with Mary. She had a book about what the symbols on the tombstones meant and she was telling me about them, but I was getting tired, so I walked over there—to that aboveground tomb.” He pointed to show her the one he meant. “And then I lay down on it and closed my eyes.”

  Rowenna half closed her own eyes, letting her lashes shield her vision from the present reality. She imagined the crowds, the laughter, the little kids running here and there. Costumes. Everyone in costume…

  And Mary. Exploring, and then…

  Rowenna felt the breeze and had the overwhelming sense that, if she were to open her eyes wide, she would be standing on a hill. Mary had stood above a grave, and somehow Rowenna knew that Mary had seen her own name on it. Etched cleanly, as if the letters had just been chipped into the stone that morning.

  Then he had come, powerful and somehow unseen, and he had kept Mary from crying out, even though she had been terrified. He had taken her from just feet away from where she herself had stood last night, paralyzed in terror. And Mary had known him, had recognized him, from earlier that day, but he was a master not just of effects but of hypnotism, and he had kept her mesmerized so she never cried out. Then he had silenced her with a drug-drenched rag. And with the entire city around them in costume, he had spirited her away. She had been in a cemetery, and then she was on a hill.

  Looking down on the cornfields.

  “Ro!” Eve gripped her arm, shaking her.

  Rowenna opened her eyes. Eve and Brad were both staring at her anxiously.

  Rowenna looked at Brad. “Her book—did you find her book? The one you were just talking about?”

  “No. Only her purse and cell phone were on the grave. That one.” He pointed. “You can just read the initials on the stone. Her initials,” he added emphatically.