Consider the Crows (8 page)

“Anybody killed?”

“Nope, salt pellets. Left a few kids with sore behinds. Everybody knew he was crazy, but he was one of ours, so we made room for him, like happens in small towns. His folks were farmers and when they died, he got the farm, which turned out to have oil under it, and he already had a going tractor business.”

“You saying he was rich? Then why did he live in that shacky house?”

“I'm getting there, just be patient. The man was a genius with machinery, invented some kind of carburetor for tractors. He married and had one son late in life who was supposed to be big and strong and carry on the business. Except the son—Lowell, his name was, after his mother's father—wasn't much good with machinery. He wanted to play the violin.”

“You're making this up.”

“God's truth. Old Howard was blustery and gruff, and didn't see eye to eye with Lowell about most things. Lowell's mother left him some money when she died—some kind of female troubles—and Lowell was the one who bought that house so he could get away from Howie. Besides the trouble with his father, he was having a love affair with his music teacher and folks were beginning to talk.”

Susan snorted. “Was she the church organist or something?”

“Close.” George hooked a finger over his glasses, slid them down and looked at her over the top. “Mr. Spenski was the choir director.”

“Oh.”

“You can imagine the kind of scandal that caused. Lowell's life was made miserable. One Halloween night he up and hanged himself in that little house.”

“That's a ghastly story, George. I assume the ghost is going to turn up here soon.”

“After his son's suicide, Howie started getting peculiar. He sold out everything and moved himself into that house. Rumor was he hid all the money out there somewhere. When he died, nothing was found. That's when the ghost stories started, eerie noises and strange lights flickering. The idea was that old Howie's spirit was guarding the money.”

George leaned forward with another squeal of the chair and rested his forearms on the edge of the desk. “The reality of it was treasure hunters, creeping around trying to find buried gold. Nobody ever did and after a time it all faded away, including Howie's ghost.”

“Does any of this have anything to do with Lynnelle's death?”

“Well maybe not, unless she stumbled across the gold and somebody killed her for it, which does sound like a heap of nonsense, doesn't it?”

“Did Creighton have any relatives?”

“Well now, there's something a mite interesting maybe. One nephew, his wife's sister's son, who lived in Boston at that time.”

“What's his name?”

George smiled. “I wondered if you'd get around to that.” He leaned back and crossed his arms. “Attorney by the name of David McKinnon.”

*   *   *

At ten past seven she set off for home, thinking about David McKinnon. She couldn't believe in buried treasure and strongly doubted, even if it existed, that it had anything to do with Lynnelle's death. David had found the body, and he had moved it; that always roused suspicion and, as an attorney, he knew better, but his reason was tenable. He'd inherited the land and hadn't bothered to mention it, but he may have thought she already knew about Uncle Howard.

As she waited at a red light, she rubbed her eyes and told herself it was too early to speculate. She'd only just begun. She didn't even know anything about the victim yet. What past did this child have? Where did she come from? What happened in her short life that led to murder?

The light turned green and after a moment of unawareness, Susan drove on. Much of her fatigue came from a sticky feeling of negligence.

Let's not get carried away. That instant bond she'd felt with Lynnelle, sensing they shared feelings of abandonment and loneliness and isolation were all in her own mind. Maybe it had been nothing but projection.

Halfway home, she remembered the cat and with an irritated sigh backtracked to Erle's market for kitty munchies and flat cans of liver and fish.

Twenty minutes later, she pulled the pickup into the garage, grabbed the grocery bag and hurried to the house, hoping the damn kitten was all right; she'd been gone a long time. Snapping on the kitchen light, she plunked the bag on the table. “Cat? Where are you?”

In the doorway to the living room, she looked around with appalled disbelief. Ashes had been excavated from the fireplace and spread across the silver-blue carpet. Smudged paw prints covered the blue flowered couch and oak tables. The kitten, black as a coal miner, high-stepped toward her with its tail erect, nattering delight at her arrival.

“Ooh,” she muttered darkly, “your days are numbered.”

7

G
RILLED
, C
ARENA THOUGHT
, closing the door after Lieutenant Parkhurst's retreating back. Roasted over the coals on one side, then flipped and roasted on the other. She'd felt he never would leave; just sit forever on her couch asking question after question, and making it obvious he didn't believe anything she said. And why should he? It was riddled with lies.

Scary man, this Parkhurst. He made her think of Jehovah, the angry God her father knew so well. Thou shalt not tell a lie. Bear false witness, a voice in her head pointed out with pedantic accuracy. How damnable was that one? Probably right up there between Thou shalt not commit adultery and Thou shalt not kill.

Alexa nudged her knee and looked up anxiously. Carena ran a hand over the dog's furry head. And that was a stupid thing to do too, offer to keep Lynnelle's dog until her family was located. She'd known it even as she opened her mouth, but couldn't stop herself. She'd felt guilty, or angry, or resentful. Or something.

The tape in her mind constantly replayed itself; the trees and the creek and the body in the water, like a bundle of old clothes, soaked and moving slightly with the current.

In the bedroom, she punched in a phone number. Phil answered. Damn. She couldn't talk to Caitlin while her husband was there. She asked for Caitlin, thinking she'd tell her to call back when he was away.

“I thought she was with you,” he said.

“What do you mean with me?”

“She said you called.”

“Yes.” She tried not to bristle at the implied accusation. She and Phil had never liked each other but there was no point in antagonizing him.

“She left a note.” Papers rustled in the background and she pictured him at his very organized desk flipping through a file labeled Problems, Domestic. “Don't worry, I'm fine. Something came up. I'll call.”

“Has she called?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, when she does would you tell her to call me?”

“Sure,” he said and hung up.

Carena wasn't so sure he would.

Sleep was a long time coming that night. Her mind was remembering the awful summer twenty-one years ago. The heat—sticky, oppressive heat—the scared feelings of inadequacy, and the worry, lying awake at night with worry. All the lies and agonizing over whether she was doing the right thing. And then time running out, summer coming to an end and the panic increasing as each day went by and the baby still didn't arrive and it was one more day closer to the beginning of school.

Let it go, she told herself, rolled over in bed, bunched the pillow under her head and looked at the clock. Two
A.M
. Get to sleep. She rolled the other way, turning her back to the clock. If she didn't watch the time, maybe her body wouldn't realize how little sleep it would get.

As soon as she closed her eyes, she saw Lynnelle again, face down in the water, blond curls moving lazily with the current.

Oh no, a voice said. Let's not do that again. We've been over it and over it too many times already.

When she finally went to sleep, she dozed fitfully and woke at six on Monday morning with a headache. The picture of Lynnelle in vivid color popped immediately to mind and she tried to erase it with aspirin and a shower. She still had to teach and she'd better start thinking about today's classes. Even before Lynnelle, this school year had been hard-going. In all her years of teaching, she'd never had one so difficult. Of course, she'd never taught after a divorce before. It did powerful things to the concentration, like giving it a tendency to sit in one groove and snivel. Embarrassing too. When your wonderful husband suddenly decided to run away from home to find himself and took along a grad student, presumably to help him do it, you tended to be mightily embarrassed, and wonder what a nice person like you was doing in a cliché like this. And now there was Lynnelle. Why hadn't Caitlin called?

*   *   *

“Have you seen this?” Hazel sat a mug of coffee on Susan's desk and handed her the
Herald,
tapping a finger on the front page article about Lynnelle's murder. No picture. Probably couldn't find one.

Susan nodded. The paper, more accustomed to lost dogs, local sports events and articles on Mrs. Whatsit took first prize in the raspberry strudel competition and Mr. Whoever caught a so-many-pound catfish at Potter's Point, would play it for all it was worth. If she didn't kick into second gear here, the good citizens would be cowering behind locked doors and acquiring Dobermans who would eat the neighbor's children.

She dropped the newspaper on the budget, which was still blank. And blank was what they still were on Lynnelle's background. Missing Persons turned up nothing; routine check of police records turned up nothing. Department of Licensing in Oklahoma had come through with a confirmation of driver's license issued to Lynnelle Hames with not so much as a speeding ticket against it. Department of Motor Vehicles had the yellow VW as registered to William Radler in Oklahoma City. No stolen vehicle report. No word yet on this Radler.

“Dr. Fisher's office called,” Hazel said. “He's finished the autopsy and you can stop by the pathology department and pick up the preliminary results if you want.”

“Tell him I'm on the way.”

The pathology department was located in the basement of Brookvale Hospital in the middle of a warren of offices connected by corridors leading to the various nonmedical departments required to keep the place running; generators, laundry, housekeeping, maintenance, engineering.

Upstairs, all was light, and pleasantly decorated; down here was strictly utilitarian, brown vinyl floors and scuffed white walls. She sensed, rather than heard, the hum of huge machinery and caught glimpses through open doorways of electrical ducts large enough to crawl through. Hospital personnel, busy and purposeful, constantly bustled along from place to place.

She passed the lab, brilliantly lit, with technicians working on the specimens of blood, urine and tissue from the patients above. Computerized equipment softly muttered to itself as it churned out the results of the information fed into it. Detective work of a different kind, she thought, tracking down perpetrators of pain and illness; after death, pursuing the killer.

Owen Fisher's office was small, lined with bookshelves, framed anatomical illustrations on the walls. Wearing surgical greens, including booties, he sat at his desk, littered with what looked like exotic insects, deftly twisting string around little bits of fluff. He finished the one he was working on and put it in line with its fellows.

“Fishing lures,” he said, noticing her glance. “I'm donating them to the fair.” He pushed a file across the desk toward her.

She paged through it, scanning rapidly. “Death by drowning.”

“Just like I thought. The blow was enough to cause loss of consciousness, but not severe enough to be fatal. If she hadn't had her face underwater.”

“What kind of weapon are we looking for?”

“A hammer, something like that.”

“Time of death?”

“Ten Saturday night, an hour either way.” He picked up something vaguely green and, almost too quickly to see, his long slender fingers created a dragonfly.

“Identifying marks?”

“Nothing out of the way. Small scar on her knee, superficial cut that should have been stitched. Some dental work. Two small fillings in back molars. Last meal maybe five hours earlier. I'm working on stomach contents. I'll let you know.”

“Drugs?”

He shook his head, frowned at the dragonfly, apparently found it lacking and tossed it in the wastepaper basket. “Healthy young female. Five-foot one, a hundred and three pounds.”

“Trace elements?”

He looked at her. “She was in the creek with water rushing over her in pouring-down rain. What do you think?”

Susan nodded. “Is there anything else?”

“One thing.” He started twisting together another dragonfly. “She had a splinter embedded in her left palm. Half-inch long. Happened shortly before death. I've sent it to the lab.”

“Where'd it come from? The weapon?”

“Maybe. Could have tried to grab at it, protect herself. Not my department. Could have tried to grab at her assailant and he had wood slivers on his clothing. Any fibers, if there were any, got washed away.”

When she got back to her office, she mentioned the splinter to Parkhurst. “Keep an eye out for any place it might have come from.”

“Right,” he said and started to leave.

“Parkhurst, did Egersund tell you anything yesterday evening?”

Parkhurst, in black pants and black turtleneck sweater, turned back and paced across to the window. “No,” he said with a half-admiring shake of his head. “She's worried, and a couple of times I thought I had her, but she just got more tight-lipped and stuck to denials. Her stock answer was, I don't know, occasionally varied with, I have no idea. I asked her about the snap of her and the kid. She said the kid was her son. What was Lynnelle doing with it? She had no idea.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I haven't yet found anybody who ever saw the two of them together.”