Twice Sold Murder, page 20
part #1 of Second Treasures Mystery Series
“Everybody, this is Kayla Boyer. Kayla, this is everybody. Don’t embarrass me, guys; I want to keep her as my friend. She saved my life when Rose was sick.”
The two ladies stood inside the front door of the Fitzpatrick house, peeling off hats, gloves, coats and boots. It was Christmas Day, just past noon, and the entire Fitzpatrick family was present, from the chief down to Shannon and Bob and their six-month-old baby whose name was Ruth Ann but who, for some reason, everybody called Twinkles. Beth and Harry were there. Charlie was there. William Kovacs and his dog Peeks were there. Ian and Maddy were there. The tree was lit, and Ian and Maddy’s two boys were running through the house with their laser tag guns, trying desperately to shoot each other’s body targets.
In a chorus, they all said, “Hello, Kayla. Hello, Laura. Merry Christmas.”
“You guys are great!” Kayla laughed.
Laura suspected they had rehearsed it.
Later, Kayla was in the kitchen with Mrs. Fitzpatrick, helping her bring in the mugs of mulled cider to pass around. She caught the end of Laura’s comment about the newspaper article Charlie wrote. And she noticed upon her entry into the living room that Connor was standing in the far corner, arms folded across his chest, watching Laura. She heard her friend talking.
“That was so embarrassing, Charlie. I mean, was the 500-point font really necessary?”
“You were news, kiddo. Big news. Not much else happens around here. My sales are up and my website hits and views are going beyond Minnesota. It went viral. You should see how many follows I got on the paper’s Twitter account. Global.”
“And did you notice he got three stories out of it, too?” Ian asked.
“I think everyone saw that. I still wish the headline had been a little different,” Laura defended herself.
“How different would you have wanted it?” William asked.
“I know. Maybe a quote, like, what you said when your stiletto heel broke,” Ian offered.
“I can see that,” Charlie said. “Okay, here goes. Five hundred point font. ‘Laura Keene Says the F Word.’ ”
After the laughter died down, Laura spoke up.
“Yeah, I was really surprised to find a brick wall at the end of that tunnel.”
“Well, you know we cleaned out the tunnel last summer because we couldn’t keep the children from trying to get in—you remember what that was like—and we made it part of the Heritage Week activities. A couple of our history teachers took everyone who wanted to make the journey crawling through the tunnel and learning what happened all those years ago. We put a new padlock on it and sort of bricked it up at the river’s end to keep animals out until next summer.”
“Seriously, Laura, that whole thing must have been awful for you,” Shannon said.
Laura nodded.
“Not to mention the dead body I had to crawl over. Ew!”
“Speaking of the dead body, Laura,” Connor called from across the room, “can we talk for a minute?”
He caught a warning look from his mother about bringing work to her Christmas Day celebration. He winked at her. It wouldn’t take long.
The deputy chief joined them at the table, set for a glorious dinner still simmering and baking in the kitchen and whose yummy aromas tempted them. He settled next to Laura, and Connor sat at the end, at her left elbow.
“What?” she asked, her head bobbing between them, when neither man spoke at first. “Did you find out who it is?”
“He’s actually a relative of yours, a young man from the 1960s who was thought to have run away to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War.”
Her eyes widened.
“Uncle George? Mom’s oldest brother?”
Connor nodded and let his father continue.
“We matched the dental records. He’s obviously been dead for some time and only recently placed in the Freedom Tunnel where you found him.”
“And put there by someone who knows how to open the access panel, which is most of the people in this town,” Connor interjected.
“It’s an open investigation. A cold case now, but open.”
“Why is it a cold case if he’s been dead and somebody just moved him?” she asked, her skin beginning to crawl. She looked from one man to the other again, feeling as if she were watching a tennis game but with a macabre purpose.
“There was a bullet hole through his skull, entry and exit wounds, and they were not close enough to have been self-inflicted,” Connor said.
Her face changed.
“Murder,” she stated and gave Connor a look, opened her mouth to speak further.
He held up his hand.
“He doesn’t know. Let me tell him.”
“Tell me what?” Deputy Chief Fitzpatrick asked.
“When Laura’s store was broken into and the coded warning was left about the Rage family, we didn’t know at the time who had done it. Claypoole now tells us he did it as a joke to throw suspicion off him when he had heard someone mention it at the café. By the way, he still won’t tell anyone who helped him get the chest of drawers out of the shop; maintains it was someone who didn’t really understand what they were doing—completely innocent and paid in cash. Doesn’t even know his name or how to find the guy again. Thinks he was passing through. But Laura did some research on threats to the Rage family and found some interesting things. Okay, now you can tell him what you found.”
“You know Samuel Rage married Violet Amsterdam whose father was a wealthy banker in upstate New York. Violet’s father trusted Samuel’s business sense and gave a big dowry to Samuel at the time of their marriage. So when he and Munley and Dowell decided they wanted to buy one of the iron ore mines in the range and build a town, Samuel made sure he bought fifty-one percent of the rights to the mine. He called all the shots, handled the money, drove the other two crazy probably. But the thing was that he didn’t want to spend it on himself or his family; he wanted to spend it on the town. We’ve all gone to the high school and seen his investment. The life-sized murals of the history of the mine wrapped around the high school library, the marble floors and walls in the bathrooms, a huge auditorium with tiered, velvet-covered seats and crystal chandeliers—we even have an indoor swimming pool in that high school. He put the mine money into the town.”
“Yeah,” the chief agreed. “Even that crazy-ass library out on the country road.”
“Even that crazy-ass library,” Laura repeated. “And that gives me ideas—but another time. So the old stories mention a feud between the families, as you can guess might happen when lots of money is involved. Jenna Buckley made a comment that I was the last living Rage in the whole wide world, and it got me thinking when I saw that warning in the shop and looked up the history.”
Kayla, lured by the story of lots of money, family feuds, and a dead body in a tunnel, joined them at the table.
“First I went to the old clinic off Route 35 and talked to that nice Dr. Anderson,” Laura said, giving Connor a sidelong glance. She pretended she didn’t hear him pretend to cough.
“Did you share with Dr. Anderson what you were looking for?” the chief inquired.
“Oh, no. I just told him I was wondering if there were any old medical records from my childhood still there. I was doing a family history of illnesses, vaccinations, and so on. He answered that nicely. Everything is somewhere, if it still exists, offsite at some storage facility. He admitted he didn’t know. So I thanked him and went to Plan B.”
“Which was…” Kayla prompted. “Don’t worry—I’m used to being her straight man.”
Connor stifled a smile. Kayla would fit in nicely.
“I went to the M.E.’s office at the new hospital and asked them how far back their official records went because I was doing a piece for Charlie’s newspaper on trends in violent crime in recent years, and they told me what’s not in the computer from the last ten years or so is somewhere offsite in a building somewhere. So I went to Plan C.”
The chief cleared his throat.
“I’m getting there. I went to Smedley and Smedley.”
“That’s the funeral parlor that’s been here for over a hundred years,” Connor explained to Kayla.
“I was expecting to hear that all their records were ‘somewhere offsite,’ but that’s not what Mr. Andrew Smedley told me. He said they have all their records carefully boxed up in the attic and they’re also scanned and in the computer. He explained the record-keeping was something his great-great-grandfather, Amos Smedley, always insisted on. So here’s the good part.”
Connor was aloof, letting her talk, and she had the chief’s attention. Kayla, her chin on her elbows and jaw open, was staring at her friend. Nobody ever got bored around Laura.
“Every death they’ve handled in the town for the past one hundred fifteen years has—are you ready—a signed death certificate attached to it. All of this is scanned. When I told Mr. Andrew Smedley I was working on a town history project, he was very amenable to my making a copy of all of the town’s death records that passed through Smedley and Smedley Funeral Home since forever, so I did. And guess what I found.”
“Go on,” the chief encouraged.
“I love when she does this,” Kayla said.
“I charted everyone, literally everyone, from the beginning days of Raging Ford down to the present, and I found a very odd thing. It’s understandable that people marry, their names change, they move away, new people move in, and all that stuff, but the Rages have all stayed here, right down to me, except for Rose and Rose taking me to Maryland. And we’re the only family that has an unusually large number of accidental deaths—no other family does. Just the Rage family. And two key disappearances listed without death certificates but for which memorial services were held, and one of which you just cleared up. So that makes me a little more than suspicious. Because I don’t believe in coincidences, especially ones that big.”
The chief was silent a moment, then turned to his son.
“You knew about this?”
“Sam and I copied it on a thumb drive and brought it to work a couple of days ago. We’ve looked at every bit of it. It bears a second look.”
“Have you involved anyone else in this?”
“No, just Sam. His family has only been in this country about 70 years.”
“You know you’re opening a nasty door with this type of investigation, little girl,” the chief said, turning back to Laura. “And you’re talking about—”
“A pact,” she finished for him. “A pact in one or more families down through several generations to punish or eradicate the Rage family entirely. And it makes sense when you look at the facts. There’s a pattern of accidents affecting adults and children in every generation.”
“You realize you’re giving Connor one helluva cold case, don’t you?”
She looked Connor in the eye.
“I’m giving Connor a whole bunch of cold cases. But you have two recent ones in the group that might merit a glance from this different perspective.”
Mrs. Fitzpatrick had set down her hot pad holders to stand by the doorway and listen. The Kovacs families and the rest of the Fitzpatricks had gathered to listen to the story, as well.
“Your parents and your Uncle George,” the chief said, musing. “You know, I have some paperwork of your father’s from a box he asked me to keep, and it made no sense to me at the time. Wasn’t linked to any cases. But it did mention the Munleys and Dowells and some other names. I thought he was doing research for your mother’s family. Kept it for you. Makes a little more sense now in light of what you’re saying you found.”
Laura looked at him, then Connor, then back to the chief.
“What if—just what if—my dad wasn’t the target after all? What if it was Mom?”
Fitzpatrick looked around the room at everyone, including his wife.
“This conversation doesn’t leave this room, is that clear, Charlie?” he ended pointing a finger at the newspaper man.
Everyone nodded solemnly, and the topic was dropped.
“Why couldn’t Jenna come for dinner today?” Beth asked.
“Oh, she’s spending Christmas with her mother in Connecticut.”
“What happened with that man she was engaged to?”
“I think they split up,” Laura fibbed, exchanging a look with Connor, suspecting he knew she had correctly guessed WitSec was behind all the mystery. Ahlstad had disappeared one day without another word to Jenna. “Oh, look, here comes the turkey!”
They were finishing the plum pudding dessert, when Shannon jumped up.
“I need to run next door and get some more Pampers for Twinkles. I thought you had some here, Mom.”
Laura’s ears pricked up.
“Next door?”
The only next door on the block was her old house. The Fitzpatricks lived near a corner facing the same direction. On the other side of Fitzpatricks’ was a small, forested vacant lot where the town held an annual haunted forest party at Halloween.
“Didn’t you tell her?” Shannon asked her family collectively.
“Connor said a very nice family moved into my old home.”
“Well, they are a very nice family,” he said, defending himself.
Laura jumped from the table to hug Shannon.
“I’m so glad you’re in my old house. I was so happy there.”
“Yes, we know. We used to watch you dance through the house. Mom always said it was because you were happy.”
Laura’s cheeks grew hot.
“You all saw me dancing?” She asked and looked at Connor.
“You danced,” he said, “as if no one was looking. Why would we ever tell you we saw you and spoil that?”
Laura focused on Connor. What a nice thing they’d all done. But, boy, did they have a job ahead of them with the cold cases. Maybe they’d even find who killed her parents.
As she continued to lock eyes with him, she could see lots of things. He was thinking the same thing about finding her parents’ murderer. He was thinking ahead to the other cold cases. He was thinking about their dancing at the station after the Christmas party. He was thinking about their kiss. And she saw more.
Coming Soon From Margaret Evans!
Priced to Kill
Second Treasures Mysteries, Vol. 2
Laura Keene’s adventures in Raging Ford, Minnesota, continue as she struggles to pull her life together and find the truth behind the deaths of her parents. In Vol. 2 of the Second Treasures Mysteries, Priced to Kill, Laura digs into the history of a beautiful hand-made quilt that finds itself for sale among the goods in her thrift shop and soon discovers it may have been an instrument of death in the past. What she discovers puts her own life, and her friend Connor Fitzpatrick’s in danger, and once again, she must enlist the aid of her wits and her mysterious cat to survive the bitter cold and trap the killer.
The Lethal Limit
Ex-Navy SEAL Steven Walker, a WitSec agent, is assigned to relocate witness Angela Morrissey. When a secret buried deep in his past resurfaces, he must face the secrets that twins share, unmask a traitor in his WitSec unit and save the witness. Follow Walker and Morrissey across an autumn Pennsylvania landscape, dodging bullets and hiding in haystacks to stay alive. Morrissey’s hidden talents give them surprise weapons against a powerful enemy, but can they outrun his minions? Watch Walker’s past and future collide on a boat in the stormy North Atlantic….
“Margaret Evans has a real winner in this series.”
--MyShelf.com
Don’t miss the Maya Earth Trilogy—hailed as “flawlessly plotted mystery thrillers” (Ibbetson Street Review) that “draw the reader in from the start and never let go” (Roundtable Reviews).
The Sixth World
Book One of the Maya Earth Trilogy
Experience the thrills and excitement of discovery in the California hills, the secret plots to sabotage the archaeological expedition, and the heart-breaking promises Amy Parrish and Joe Magee have to make to protect the Maya.
Trial In Jade: The Mayan Return
Book Two of the Maya Earth Trilogy
Explore a Mayan past filled with disobedience, banishment and treachery, and watch it collide in the present in a trial in jade to decide the future against a backdrop of the magnetic polar reversal and forbidden love.
Kingdom Come: The Mayan Answer
Book Three of the Maya Earth Trilogy
A boy meets a king. Two women face their destinies. The Maya build their new age. In a world of change and global greed for power, one young Mayan finds the answer.
For more information about these and other works by Margaret Evans, visit www.margaretevans.com.
Margaret Evans, Twice Sold Murder
