“There are cameras watching the parking lot in front of the dorms,” Brody said as he pulled into a lot near a huge glass building. “But this is the science building. There are some gardens behind it. We’ll walk through those and it will take us to the back doors at Brittany’s dorm.”
I followed Brody through the parking lot, around the building and past a fenced-in garden area, and finally we arrived at another large parking lot. The building on the other side of that was our destination.
It was one building in a line of residential housing, but it was by far the fanciest. The exterior was brick as opposed to the vinyl siding of the other dorms. Opulent landscaping surrounded the building even in what was considered the back. The front side of Brittany’s dorm must have been stunning, but I wouldn’t get the chance to see it.
We walked quickly up to the back door and Brody waved a white plastic card over a sensor next to the door. A little green light lit up and the lock popped.
“It worked,” Brody said as he pulled the door open for me.
The building was quiet. Most of the girls who lived there must have either been at class or out doing whatever rich college-age girls did in the late afternoon and early evening. I had no idea what that was as I hadn’t gone to college. A couple of years of community college taken while working a variety of full-time jobs was all I had under my belt. Brody was the academic of the family.
What residents there were didn’t question our presence. It occurred to me that was because I was finally old enough that I just looked like an adult. No one questioned it. To a bunch of college girls, I was a potential authority figure, but that played to our advantage as no one bothered us on the way to Brittany’s room.
The hallway outside of her dorm was empty. Brody swiped the key card over the sensor outside of her room, and again we got the green light when the door opened.
We both walked in and closed the door quickly behind us. I looked around at the luxurious furnishings. Brittany’s room was not what I thought of when I thought of a dorm room.
There was a huge four-poster bed in the center or the room. When I thought about a dorm room, I picture two twin beds wedged into the corners of a narrow room, but Brittany’s room was at least twice as large as I’d expected. She had a separate seating area with a huge flat-screen television hung on the wall, and another area with a small refrigerator, microwave, and table with chairs.
A small desk sat by the window, and I decided to look there first. The space where her laptop probably sat was empty. I tried to remember if Brittany had a bag with her when I found her, but even if she didn’t, it might have been in her car. Either way, if she had it with her, the FBI had taken it with them.
“What are we looking for?” Brody asked.
“I’m not sure. But we’ll know it if we find it. Meri, look under the bed and the furniture,” I instructed.
“Oh, sure. Because I’m short I have to…”
“Meri,” I scolded. “Come on. Please?”
“Fine,” he said and disappeared under the bed.
I checked her desk drawers and found nothing, but then a thought occurred to me. We might not have access to any of her texts or emails, but what if she’d written a letter? The desk had revealed nothing, but then I remembered where I hid notes and letters when I was younger.
Brittany’s dresser sat against the wall next to the bathroom door. I pulled each drawer open until I found her sock drawer. Sure enough, there was an envelope addressed to James in it.
“Bingo,” I said and pulled the letter out.
“Let me see that,” Brody said and reached for the letter.
“No, wait. It’s to James. Let me read it first and make sure it’s something you want to see,” I said.
“Fine, but don’t hide things from me, Brighton. I don’t need you to protect me.”
I read the letter, and it was most likely something Brody didn’t want to see. It was intended to break things off with James officially, but Brittany said that she loved James. The only reason she was going to marry Brody was because her father would never let her marry a man who managed a small-town tavern.
Then it went on to say that she might not even marry Brody because he was going into research and had no more ambitions to be a professor at a prestigious university. But that either way, she could never marry James. Brittany did promise that they could still have a physical relationship if he wanted to continue because she would never really want to be with another man besides him. There was a lipstick print kiss at the bottom.
“What does it say?” Meri asked impatiently.
I was about to tell Brody that the letter made it more likely that people would think he was guilty when someone pounded on the dorm room door. “Campus police,” the man outside announced. “Open the door or I will force entry.”
“It’s not exactly force if he uses a keycard,” Brody whispered and rolled his eyes.
“Shh,” I hushed him and pointed to the bathroom.
Brody looked at me like I was nuts and threw his hands up as if to ask what the heck I was thinking. I just glared at him and pointed more emphatically at the bathroom. He let out a quiet sigh and walked in with Meri hot on his heels.
I followed him in and retrieved the container of salt I always had with me from my purse. After pouring a line of it across the threshold, I pulled out a small black candle and a my lighter.
“What are you doing? Summoning a demon?” Brody asked.
“She’s setting up a protection spell,” Meri countered. “With my magic augmenting it, hopefully, the human will completely ignore the bathroom.”
“So shh,” I said just as the campus police officer opened the door.
He came in and looked around like he couldn’t believe there was no one there. The officer even went to the window to look out like maybe someone had escaped that way, but the spell worked. It was as if he had no awareness that there was even a bathroom in the dorm. He didn’t even look in our direction.
A minute later, the cop left. I blew the candle out, ran the wick under the water to make sure it was really out, and stuck it back in my purse. I stashed the letter in there too.
“You should put the letter back, Brighton,” Brody said. “I don’t think the FBI has searched this room yet, and it feels really illegal to take it.”
“But it makes you look guilty,” I said.
“It makes me look more guilty if someone finds out we took it,” Brody countered.
“Fine,” I said. “You’re right.”
I took a picture of the letter with my phone and slid it back into the envelope. As I was pushing some of the socks out of the way so I could hide the letter underneath them, the paper lining the bottom of the drawer came up a little. Underneath was another envelope. That one had Brittany’s name on it.
“What’s that?” Meri asked.
“Another letter hidden in the drawer,” I said.
“Well, open it,” Brody said.
“I’m taking it with me. It was hidden. No one knows about it,” I said.
“Brighton,” Brody warned.
“No, we have to get out of here before someone realizes we really are in here and the cop comes back. Whatever this is, Brittany didn’t want anyone to know about it. I’m taking it,” I said.
Brody gave me a nod and Meri hopped back into his bag. I took their silence as regretful consent and stuffed the envelope into my purse.
The campus police officer was long gone, and we made it out of the building and out to the car without getting caught. As we were leaving, Meri cast a spell to rid everything we’d touched of my fingerprints just in case the FBI tested for them when they finally got around to searching Brittany’s dorm room.
Chapter Nine
While Brody drove back to Coventry, I read the letter. What it contained broke my heart. Everything I’d learned about Brittany pointed toward her being a terrible and manipulative person, but after reading the letter her father had written her, I so
rt of understood why. She was probably always in self-preservation mode.
The letter nearly brought me to tears. I didn’t know how old it was, but her father had written it to her while she was in college. The most heartbreaking part was that she’d kept it. I had no idea why someone would want to hang on to something so depressing.
At some point, Brittany must have wanted to change her major to something her father didn’t approve of. Apparently, she’d even tried to stand up for herself.
“Did Brittany ever mention wanting to change her major to psychology?” I asked.
“Hmm,” Brody said. “She did back when we first met. We’d only been dating for a couple of weeks at that point. She went home for Christmas vacation, but when she came back, Brittany said she’d changed her mind. She said that she thought finance suited her better after all.”
“I don’t think she decided that,” I said and folded the letter back up.
“Why? What is it?” Brody asked.
“It’s a letter from her father. He didn’t want her to change her major to something he thought of as stupid. Gregory told her that if she ever mentioned it again, he’d pull her out of school and disown her. He then went on to tell her that if she ever mouthed off to him again, he’d wring the life out of her.”
“Do you think?” Brody asked.
“What? Do I think her father might have murdered her?” I asked. “He does have a dreadful temper. He showed up at the store right after the murder and started yelling at Bob and me. He was a little scary.”
“She said her father was strict, but Brittany would never really talk about it. I didn’t realize it was because he was so awful that she was afraid to talk about him,” Brody said.
“I’ll talk to Thorn about it,” I said.
“You’re going to tell your sheriff boyfriend that you broke into Brittany’s dorm room and stole a letter?” Brody asked.
“I am,” I said. “But first I want to talk to Brittany’s father about this letter.”
“Brighton, that’s a terrible idea. Especially if you think he might be a killer. Plus, he’s a surgeon at the hospital in the city. He’s probably at his condo and not even in Coventry right now.”
“Then I’ll talk to her mother,” I said.
“She’s not going to talk to you,” Meri said from the back seat. “If he’s as bad as all that, there’s no way the mother is going to talk to you. She’s either just as bad as the father or she’s an enabler.”
“But I think I know someone who will talk to you,” Brody said. “She might not know anything, though.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Brittany has an older sister named Clarissa. She’s only a year and a half older than Brittany.”
“Well, where is she? Where does she go to college? Do we need to turn back around?”
“Clarissa doesn’t go to college. She lives in the trailer park in Coventry and works in the mailroom at the courthouse, as far as I know. She’s the black sheep of the family. Disowned for being a deviant and a criminal, but I now have my doubts that she’s actually what her family accused her of being,” Brody said.
“Then let’s go talk to Clarissa,” I said. “Do you know her address?”
“I’ve been to her trailer once,” Brody said. “Brittany went there to get something from her. I don’t know what. I waited in the car.”
“You’ve been to Coventry before?” I was surprised.
“A few times because of Brittany’s family,” Brody answered.
“Did you ever go by Hangman’s House?” I asked. “It’s so weird that you’ve been here before but the town never affected you.”
“I didn’t go to Hangman’s House. It was your inheritance. I don’t know, Brighton. I suppose I never really thought about it, but it is strange.”
“Since he hadn’t come into his power, he willfully ignored it all. Just like the humans,” Meri said. “My guess is that between short visits and never going to Hangman’s House, Brody never had the chance to feel his powers.”
Brody drove us to Clarissa’s trailer. We passed a small yellow trailer on the way, and I assumed it was Grey’s even though his work van wasn’t parked out in front.
We pulled into the driveway of a small white trailer surrounded by pots of flowers. Each of them was a different size and color, and even the trailer’s windows had boxes of flowers attached just under the sills.
A small wooden deck stained a cheery blue color led to the front door. Clarissa could only afford a modest abode because her wealthy family had cut her off, but it was obvious she took great pride in her home. It was hers through her own hard work, and she’d made the absolute best of it.
I knocked on the door, and when it opened, my stomach turned. The cheerful face looking back at me looked so much like Brittany’s that it made me flash back to finding her dead. They were a year and a half apart, but they could have been twins.
“Hello,” she said and stepped out onto the deck. “I don’t know you.” But her eyes moved to Brody. “But I do recognize you. You were my sister’s fiancé.” The thought of her sister stole the cheer from her eyes, and I immediately felt awful for bringing the painful reminder to her door.
“I wanted to talk to you about your sister,” I said.
“Are you with the police? The FBI has already talked to me, but I didn’t know anything. Brittany and I weren’t close anymore. I hadn’t seen much of her for years. Even when I did, it was never for long. He can tell you that,” she said and nodded toward Brody. “The times he came here with her, she stayed just long enough to drop off whatever letter or package she’d been tasked with delivering for my parents.”
“That’s what I wanted to speak with you about,” I said. “Your parents. Well, more about your father.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s not a front porch conversation. Please come in,” she said and stepped out of the way. “Your cat can come in too. You don’t have to leave him in the car.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, very much. Please don’t leave the kitty in the car. He’s welcome.”
I retrieved Meri from the car and joined Brody and Clarissa inside. Her living room featured an assortment of eclectic furniture that I guessed she’d purchased second-hand. Still, it was all charmingly coordinated and well cared for from the blue loveseat that nearly matched the color of the front deck to the refinished oak coffee table.
“I was thinking of making some coffee. Would you like some?”
“Sure. Thank you.”
“Me too. Thank you,” Brody said after me.
We sat quietly while Clarissa went into the kitchen to make coffee. There was a gap in the wall between the living room and the kitchen. The half wall came up from the bottom and the kitchen cabinets hung from the top, but through the middle, I could see Clarissa busying herself with the coffee.
She came back into the living room a few minutes later with two mugs of coffee in one hand and the third in the other. I stood up to help her, but Clarissa deftly bowed down and set the coffee cups on the table.
“I got this,” she said. “Before I got the job at the courthouse, I waited tables. I can handle way more than three little coffee mugs. Let me grab my cream and sugar. I’ll be right back.”
She returned moments later and set a small container with packets of creamer, sugar, and sweetener on the coffee table.
“Thank you,” I said and grabbed a couple of packets of creamer and sweetener.
“You’re most welcome. So why don’t you tell me what you want to know about my father. Let’s just get down to it.”
“Okay. I can do that,” I said. “Brody found a letter from your father to Brittany.”
It was a lie, and I felt bad about it, but I couldn’t tell her that we’d found it while searching Brittany’s dorm room. Brody finding the letter seemed like a viable and harmless version of the events.
“That can’t be good, then,” Clarissa said. “His letters were never about an
ything good.”
I handed her the letter and then drank my coffee while she read it. Her eyes moved from the bottom of the page to the top again as she reread the letter more than once. When she was done, she handed it back to me and I tucked it into my purse.
“Brittany had been the golden child in the family for a long time,” Clarissa said.
“And she wasn’t any more when she mentioned changing her major?” I asked.
“No, it wasn’t then. She lost the golden child status shortly before I left the house. Nobody but Brittany knew that I knew why either.”
“You don’t have to tell us,” I said, but I could have kicked myself. I’d gone to Clarissa’s house to get information on Gregory Hargrave, but I felt so terrible about bringing up painful memories.
“It’s okay,” Clarissa said with a soft smile. “I lived in a house where we were required to keep secrets for too long. I’m done with all that now. I probably should have said something to someone sooner, but I’m still afraid of my parents. I got out of the house, but I’m not far enough away.
“I wanted to go to Oregon or Washington and get as far away from them as possible, but I have a younger sister that still lives at home. My brother is the golden child now, but my little sister isn’t like the rest of them. I rarely get to talk to her and I see her even less, but I’ve promised her I’ll stay here for when she turns eighteen in three years. I told her she can move in with me as soon as it’s legal, and I intend to keep that promise.
“So I’ve been too afraid to reveal his secret. But what can they do? Move away? I’d just follow along to wherever Amanda said they were going and wait for her there. I’ve learned to live on very little, so my life is quite mobile.”
“You’re a good big sister,” Brody said, but I noticed that he was looking at me when he said it.
“But you didn’t come here to talk about all that,” Clarissa said. “You want to know if my father could have killed Brittany. Well, I can tell you that he’s killed before.”
Wicked Witches of Coventry- The Collection Page 30
