A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery) (10 page)

I’m getting old,
Tad concluded, as he plopped down into the chair behind his desk, closed his eyes, and laid his head back against the headrest to enjoy the sound of silence.

His last patient of the day was an obese woman who wanted him to prescribe diet pills for her to lose weight. She was unhappy when he suggested that she try exercising and dieting first. When she left his office, he suspected that she was on her way to see a doctor he had heard a rumor was selling amphetamines.

“Tad, I need you! Quick!” Jan threw open his door and ran in. She was so excited that she was out of breath.

He started out of his nap. “What?”

She tried to pull him up out of his chair. “Gail’s stalking Josh.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, it’s true.” She tugged on his arm. “She’s been stalking him for years.”

He pulled away from her. “Come on, Jan! Gail is a respected journalist!”

“Then what’s she doing here?”

“Investigating the death of an old friend.”

She stomped a foot. “I wish people would stop believing that crap Gail dished out on television.”

“So she came back to write a book for fame and fortune.”

“No, she came here to stalk Josh! She has a photo album filled with clippings and pictures of him.”

“So? She’s a fan of his investigative talents.”

“She also has a picture, in a frame, of Josh and her and she’s pregnant!” Jan interjected.

Tad hesitated to comprehend what she was saying. “What? Gail was pregnant? I didn’t know that she had a kid.”

“Neither did I,” she told him. “But there they were. Josh was hugging her and they looked like they loved each other.”

He smiled. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe she did have a baby? Josh is her friend. They ran into each other while she was pregnant and had their picture taken together.”

“And she put it in a frame and has it displayed in her living room?” she finished in a suspicious tone.

“You yourself said that Gail has no friends. Maybe Josh is the closest thing to a friend that she has.”

She was shaking her head. “You have to see this for yourself.”

“Are you asking me to break into her house and go through her things?”

Jan almost said yes, but then realized the foolishness of breaking into Gail’s house to pry into her private business. “Can’t you go talk to her and see for yourself? You know about this stuff.”

Tad paused. He didn’t want to admit that she had his interest. After all, Joshua had confessed that Gail did seduce him. “I can’t just drop in on her. I only knew her casually when Josh was in school and I haven’t seen her since then. She probably doesn’t even remember me.”

She agreed. “I did go over to apologize, but I didn’t see her. How about if I go back and you go with me? Then you can see what you think . . . and then you’ll agree that she is stalking Josh and he’s the reason she came back here.”

Nighttime was one of the worst times for widower Joshua Thornton.

The house in which he grew up with his grandmother, even with five children, was too quiet when he went to bed. Fourteen months after her death, he still longed for Valerie and would spend his evenings reading books that forced him to concentrate on something other than the emptiness on the other side of his bed.

Tonight, he was reading The Case for the Creator by Lee Strobel. Tad had lent Joshua the book written by a former atheist, who was saved when he went on a fact-finding mission to prove that God did not exist, only to find conclusive evidence that He did.

When the phone rang at ten o’clock, Joshua assumed it was someone calling for one of his kids. Since he was the only family member with a phone in his room, he answered it in a sharp tone to deter the caller from dialing their number so late in the future.

“I love a man with a forceful voice,” Tori Brody purred from across the phone lines.

“I’m sorry,” he explained. “When you have teenagers in your house you have to do what you can to maintain control. Otherwise, the phone will be ringing at all hours.”

“I feel sorry for you.” It was not pity he heard in her tone.

“I’m not asking for sympathy.” Joshua asked, “Why are you calling me?”

“You owe me. I got you Walt Manners. I should get something for that.”

“I’m letting your client walk away from a burglary and murder charge. What more do you want?”

“Okay, I owe you. I have an unopened bottle of cognac here. Why don’t you come over and get it?”

“I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”

“You certainly know how to hold a grudge, don’t you, Josh?”

“It’s not a grudge. I’m just wise enough to avoid trouble when at all possible.”

“I’m not involved with anyone, and I had nothing to do with Max trying to slice up your face with that blade.”

“You told me that twenty years ago.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t.” Joshua hung up the phone and returned to his book.

Jan’s eyes followed Tad’s while he took in the woods surrounding Gail’s home.

“I always wanted to live in a secluded place like this,” she said wistfully.

“You’ll get yours, Jan.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Good things come to those who wait.” He knocked on the door since they received no response to the doorbell.

“Her car isn’t here,” Jan observed. “It wasn’t here earlier, either.”

Tad turned to leave. “Looks like she’s not here.”

She grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t you want to see? Gail is stalking Josh.”

He shook his head with a smile. “Jan, I’ve been stalked. I know what stalking is. She may be infatuated with him. She may even love him, but she’s not stalking him.”

“Maybe she’s not stalking him,” she relented, “but her elevator clearly isn’t going all the way to the top.” After making certain that no one was around to see them, Jan yanked open the door and pulled Tad into the house behind her.

It was dark. She turned on the light in the front foyer with the wall switch.

“We are now breaking and entering,” he told her.

“We didn’t break anything. The door was open already.”

“But we weren’t invited to enter.”

She dared him, “Call Josh and turn yourself in.” She led the way to the photograph on the end table. “See.”

He took the picture and studied the image. “I’ve seen this before.”

“When?”

He turned on the table light and held the photograph under the bulb. “At Josh’s house in Washington. It was a long time ago.” He squinted at it. “Only Gail was not the woman he was holding. It was Valerie. This picture was taken the first Christmas they were married when she was pregnant with the twins.”

Jan felt vindicated. “I told you she was sick.”

“We need to get out of here.” As Tad replaced the picture on the end table, he smelled a familiar odor. He sniffed in order to confirm the scent and shuddered. When he saw the door open as they had found it, he asked, “Was the front door open when you came here earlier?”

“That’s how I got in.” She was flipping through the pages of the scrapbook. “Look at this album. She has to have cut out everything she has ever seen in print that has Josh’s name in it.”

“It’s kind of late in the year to leave the front door open at night.” He covered his nose with his hand and he headed toward the bedrooms.

“Where are you going?” Jan grabbed his hand.

“I want to see what is down this hallway.”

“It’s the bedroom.” She clutched his forearm.

He reached for the knob to the door between them and the bedroom. The scent was stronger. He hesitated.

“Jan,” he extracted his arm from her grasp, “wait for me in the car.”

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“I want you to wait for me outside.”

“No.”

He could see that she was not going to leave his side. “Suit yourself.”

When Tad opened the door the sweet putrid scent hit them in the face. Jan gasped and covered her mouth when she felt her stomach lurch. “What is that?”

He had switched on the light with the wall switch and was removing the pillow that covered the head of the figure on the bed. His examination of Gail’s body triggered the release of gases forming in the decomposing figure.

“Death.” Tad coughed and covered his nose and mouth with his hand. “That is the smell of death.”

Chapter Eight

“Who called you?” Seth challenged Joshua when he saw him climb out of his Corvette. He had to park at the corner of Gail Reynolds’s yard. The police and emergency vehicles filled the driveway.

“The medical examiner.” Joshua did not slow his pace to go inside to escape the drizzle that had started. “Gail was a friend.”

“How good of a friend?”

Joshua found the living room packed with the forensics team scouring the scene for evidence. He halted. Seth stepped in behind him.

Jan dashed away from the kitchen where Deputy Pete Hockenberry was questioning her and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Josh, I’m so glad you’re here! It’s awful.”

“Where is she?”

She gestured toward the bedroom at the end of the hallway.

Seth blocked his path. “First, I need for you to answer a couple of questions, Counselor.”

“What questions?”

“How close were you and the victim?”

“I told you. We were friends.”

“Are you sure that’s all you were?” The detective chuckled at him.

“What are you talking about?”

Seth stepped aside and laid his hand on the photograph on the table. He grinned when he saw confusion cross Joshua’s face when he saw the image of the pregnant Gail with his arms around her.

Jan blurted out, “She was stalking Josh.”

“Yeah. Right,” Seth replied.

When Joshua turned to go down the hall, Seth grabbed his arm to stop him. He slapped the detective’s hand away before shoving him back against the wall.

“Back off, Cavanaugh!”

His on-scene examination complete, Tad was packing up his instruments into his medical case when his cousin came into the room.

“What happened to her?” Joshua looked down at the body.

In the weekend since he had last seen her, death had transformed Gail’s body so that she bore only a slight resemblance to the woman he had known. She was wearing the same black trench coat she had worn when she had stepped out of the shadows in his backyard a few days before. The hat was still on the floor where he had discarded it.

“I’ll know for certain after I open her up,” Tad replied to his question, “but bruising on the inside of her lips and fibers in her nostrils suggests that someone smothered her with the pillow.”

Joshua gazed at the pillow that Tad had suggested was the murder weapon. In the room that was brightly lit in order to reveal any clues, he could make out a faint brown outline on the case that resembled a hand. Reluctant to touch the coarse material for fear of disturbing evidence, he bent to look at the shape. “Her killer had dirty hands.”

“I’d say so. The lab should be able to come up with a chemical breakdown of that dirt to trace it back to our guy.”

“When did this happen?”

“She’s been dead for at least three days, based on decomposition and the stages of larvae in the corpse.”

Joshua repeated the words, “Three days.” He subtracted the days of the week. “Friday.”

“Friday night, Saturday morning, early hours.” Tad proceeded to fold her hands, encased in paper bags sealed with rubber bands, across her chest as if to make her comfortable for the trip to the morgue.

“I saw her Friday night,” Joshua muttered a single octave above a whisper.

Pete Hockenberry, who had followed him into the room, started upon hearing the announcement.

Tad turned away from the bed to face his cousin. “You saw her Friday night?”

Three days seemed to be eons in the past. Joshua searched his memory for clues to her death in his last meeting with her in the darkness of the night. “She came by the house. It was after midnight and she was drunk, so I drove her home.”

“You were here?” Tad asked. “In this room?”

“Yes. I helped her inside, I put her on the bed, and then I left.”

“You put her to bed,” Seth chuckled from behind his back.

“She was drunk,” Joshua said.

“Won’t be the first time an old friend decided to take advantage of a drunken woman,” the investigator said before asking Tad, “Any sign of hanky-panky?”

The medical examiner glared. “None.”

“Of course, you’d say that.”

“If you want Johnstone to do the autopsy, fine,” Tad said. “I’d rather go home and go to bed anyway.”

“Why would I want to kill Gail?” Joshua challenged the detective’s suggestion.

“You tell me. You were the last one to see her alive.”

“But you have yet to ask me one question about that meeting. Instead you have been making obscene insinuations since I walked in the door.”

Seth asked Tad, “Why did you call Thornton here tonight?”

“Because he knows what he’s doing and you don’t.”

Impressed by his cutting remark, the deputies in the room and hallway, who had gathered with the promise of an interesting scene to witness, let out a whoop.

Seth’s face reddened. “Where did you get that scratch, Thornton?”

Joshua’s hand flew up to the mark on his neck. In an instant, he recalled Gail groping for him while he pushed her down onto the bed. Now, his skin was under her fingernails to be found during the autopsy.

Seth smiled broadly at his hesitation. “I’ll be seeing you, Counselor.”

Deputy Medical Examiner Gary Johnstone was called to meet Gail’s body at the morgue.

Tad went home with Joshua to find out what had happened the night of her death.

While the children, in various stages of preparation for school, ate their breakfasts, Joshua sat at the head of the table and stared into his coffee mug. They could see that he had been awake the whole night.

The kitchen was filled with the scent of an egg scramble that contained a mixture of ground beef, onions, and cheese. The meal was accompanied by home fries topped with country gravy and thick slices of toast. Tad had prepared the feast more for himself and Joshua than the kids after he realized at four o’clock that he had not eaten since lunch the day before.

Admiral, who usually waited next to his master during meals in hopes of getting a morsel of food, chose to move to the other end of the table where Tad, easy pickings for handouts, distracted the children from their father’s distress by recounting stories from their youth.

After they had left for school and Admiral had wolfed down a bowl filled to the rim with the leftovers for his breakfast, Joshua let down his guard to pace the kitchen.

“How is it that you never had any idea that her feelings for you were other than friendship?” Tad asked while wiping down the stovetop. “You were the one who told me that she came over and seduced you right under this roof.”

“This roof was replaced fifteen years ago,” Joshua reminded him. “It was under the old, leaky roof that she seduced me.”

Tad grinned at his cousin’s attempt at humor and dumped the coffee into the sink to make a fresh pot.

Joshua rinsed out the sponge that Tad had put away to clean up a gravy spill he had missed on the kitchen table. “We were hormonal teenagers back then. She came across like the sophisticated feminist who considered love and family beneath her. I bought it. I honestly thought that whole seduction thing back then was a one-night stand and nothing more.”

“Clearly it was on your part.”

“She seduced me,” he reiterated.

“You did sleep with her.”

“Not Friday night!” He threw the sponge into the sink. It bounced off the rim and landed on the floor.

“Hey!” Tad picked it up. “I’m on your side. What about all that stuff she had of yours—and that picture?”

“That was Valerie in that picture. I was looking for it when we were packing up to move back here and couldn’t find it.”

“Gail must have taken it and morphed her head onto the body.”

“Why would someone do that?” Joshua asked in a steady tone. “What else did she have of mine?”

“I don’t know. All I saw was the picture and the scrapbook.”

“Cavanaugh is going to try to hang this on me. He’s too stupid to look anywhere else.”

“Am I correct in assuming that your skin will be found under her fingernails?”

“She was drunk,” Joshua fingered his wound. “She scratched me while I was helping her into bed.”

“Or she scratched you while fighting you off when you tried to take advantage of her drunken state. What we need to find is another suspect. What time did you take her home?”

“One o’clock Saturday morning.”

Tad sat up on the kitchen counter. “That’s about when Rex Rollins was killed. He was killed around midnight and the fire in the boardinghouse was set around one.”

Joshua leaned against the edge of the counter next to where Tad sat. “And Rex wrote a book about a wicked witch who got away with murder and Gail was writing a book about Trish’s death. We have two victims writing books about murder here in Chester and both of them are now dead.”

“Maybe Rex wasn’t as stupid as everyone thought.”

“If he was so smart, why is he dead?”

The e-mails were flying.

At this point in Jan’s career, if anyone had asked her, she would have said that she didn’t have much in the way of sources.

She was wrong. After spending her whole adult life running the pharmacy, she knew almost everyone in town.

Jan went home and sent out a mass e-mail to every addressee in her address book to announce the murder of Gail Reynolds and to ask about her life before her return to Chester, West Virginia.

It did not take long for her phone to ring. The call came from Liz Yates, a young woman who had recently moved to Chester from Charleston and went to Jan’s church. Her new husband was a teacher at the elementary school. A realtor, Liz began working for Margo Connor.

“Is it true that Gail Reynolds is dead?”

Jan confirmed that the news was true.

“When did it happen?”

“Tad says that it had to have happened Friday night sometime.”

Liz gasped. “I may have been one of the last ones to see her before she was killed!”

“Where?”

“At Antonelli’s. I went to dinner with Margo Connor to talk about my job with Connor Realty and Gail Reynolds showed up. I recognized her from television.” Liz laughed nervously. “They got into such an awful fight that I thought it was a joke.”

“Of course!” Jan responded to the news. “Gail was writing a book about Tricia Wheeler’s murder. Margo and Trish had an awful fight right before she was killed. She had to be one of Gail’s prime suspects.”

“That’s what the two of them were fighting about,” Liz confirmed. “I was never so embarrassed in my life!”

“What time was this?”

“I met Margo at five o’clock. She was eating her spaghetti when Gail showed up and launched right into asking her about this dead girl.”

“I’ll bet Margo was furious.” Jan envisioned her former classmate’s reaction to the journalist tracking her down and interrogating her about Tricia Wheeler’s murder in public.

“At first, Margo told her to talk to her lawyer.”

“Then what?”

“Then Gail Reynolds told her that she and this other girl got into a lot of fights. Margo said that it was because they didn’t like each other.”

“They didn’t,” Jan said. “Margo hated Tricia. Did she threaten Gail?”

“Yes,” Liz answered quickly. “I was trying to get out of there as fast as possible. They were screaming at each other and everyone was looking at us. I couldn’t believe it was really happening and here I was in the midst of all of it. I tell you, Jan, I don’t care if Connor Realty is the biggest realtor in the valley, I don’t need that type of grief.”

“I don’t blame you.” Jan steered her back to the details of the fight. “What did Margo threaten to do to her? Do you remember Margo’s exact words?”

Liz paused to remember the details of the fight as it happened.

On the other end of the phone line, Jan waited.

“First,” she said slowly, “Margo said that this Tricia committed suicide. Then Gail said that she had seen the fight they had the day she died and that Tricia had no reason to kill herself. Then Margo said that she killed herself because she had stolen some guy—I don’t remember his name—”

“Randy.”

“Yeah, Randy. That was it. Margo stole him from this dead girl.” Liz paused before she continued, “The next thing that Gail said did not make any sense. It sounded like she was then saying that Margo didn’t kill her, but that this boyfriend did because something happened between him and the dead girl and he needed to keep her quiet.”

“What?” Jan gasped. This was not what she was expecting. “What did Margo say to that?”

“She then told Gail that if she wrote her book, it was going to be over her own dead body.”

Liz wasn’t able to give Jan any more details about the fight. She had run out of the restaurant without looking back after the threats of murder started flying between the two women.

After encouraging Liz to call the police to tell them what she had witnessed, Jan hung up the phone and proceeded to do a Google search under the name Gail Reynolds. Her search produced thousands of results, some of whom were the Gail Reynolds she knew, but most were not. Jan cursed the dead woman for having such a common name. Several pages into the list, she discovered an article dated four months earlier from a small newspaper in Connecticut:

“Journalist Gail Reynolds did not appear in New London County Municipal Court today to answer charges of stalking . . .”

Stalking!

“. . . Adam O’Neal (19) attended the hearing with his parents, Glen and Sylvia O’Neal. The O’Neal family’s request for a restraining order was approved . . .”

Adam O’Neal was nineteen years old. Jan smiled. Gail liked them young.

She sent the article to PRINT. While she waited for the hard copy, she scrolled to find any proof that the Gail Reynolds mentioned in the article was the same one whose body she and Tad had found the night before.

The defendant in the stalking case sent letters and gifts, made phone calls, and followed Adam O’Neal from high school to college. He was afraid to move away from home to campus because of her. The stalking climaxed when Gail appeared in his bedroom with a knife one night and threatened to kill him and then herself. He managed to disarm her. She was arrested and taken away to a psychiatric ward where she spent three days before she was released.

Jan’s computer dinged to signal an instant message. It was from Angie, a source Jan had acquired years before when she was writing for the lifestyle section of The Review, The Vindicator’s chief competitor. Angie had moved to Philadelphia where she worked as an administrative assistant for a television station that happened to be an affiliate for Gail’s network.

“I didn’t know Gail came from Chester,” Angie replied to the news. “What a small world. Were you friends?”

“Acquaintances,” was Jan’s answer. She was tempted to put the word in bold type, but chose not to. “Did Gail ever live in Connecticut?”

“No, Gail was not the Connecticut type. She was a cosmopolitan girl through and through.”

“Why didn’t the network renew her contract?”

Angie responded, “I heard rumors of a nervous breakdown.”

Tad was writing as fast as his hand could move on the yellow notepad he had found in the center of Joshua’s desk in the study. Dr. Johnstone was a friend as well as a colleague. He couldn’t send him a copy of the report that he had yet to write out for Seth Cavanaugh, but he could gossip about his findings.

While Tad scribbled out cryptic notes in single misspelled words, Joshua strained to put together conclusions based on his “ah-hah’s” and “uh-huh’s.”

“Well?” Joshua whirled the tablet around to read his notes as soon as his cousin had hung up the phone.

“Gail died of asphyxiation,” Tad announced. “No big surprise there. Her blood alcohol level was .16.” Hearing the sound of a truck in the quiet town, he parted the blinds of the window behind him and peered outside.

“I told you she was drunk when she showed up here.” Joshua tried to decipher one of the words His cousin had scribbled out. It started with an “e.”

“Johnstone found cotton fibers caught up in the hairs of her nostrils. While she was possibly passed out, someone held a pillow over her face until she suffocated.” Tad peered through the shrubs that bordered the backyard and the alley behind the home. He could make out the tilted-flatbed of a tow truck. “Someone is being towed.”

Joshua handed him the notepad and took a turn to look out the window at the truck on the other side of the hedges. “What’s that word?” He pointed to the word beginning with an “e.”

He recognized the uniform of a Hancock County deputy sheriff. Through the bushes, he could not tell which deputy it was. “They found Gail’s car.”

Tad dropped the tablet and joined him in watching as the sports car was hoisted up onto the flatbed. “What’s her car doing behind your house?”

Joshua hung his head. “She was too drunk to drive back home when she showed up here, so I drove her. I left her a message the next day to tell her where it was and to come get it.”

“But someone killed her before she could do that, and Cavanaugh got the message.”

“Yep.” Joshua turned from the window. “Was there any evidence of sexual assault?”

Tad shook his head with a chuckle. “Nope, she was as clean as a whistle.”

“What do you mean by that?” Joshua had heard the term “clean as a whistle,” but he had never heard it used in connection with a medical exam on a murder victim, except when it meant that she had been sterilized by the killer to remove all evidence.

“Her genital membrane was intact.” The corners of Tad’s mouth curled with amusement.

Once again, Joshua heard himself asking what the doctor was talking about.

“When a woman or girl is penetrated, the genital membrane is broken—”

“Also referred to in slang as breaking a girl’s cherry.” Joshua frowned as he repeated, “Her genital membrane was intact.”

Tad nodded his head.

Joshua shook his. “But Gail was not a virgin. We had sex together right upstairs in what used to be my room—”

“Twenty years ago. With no sexual activity over a long period of time, and I’m talking years, the membrane can grow back. You know,” he said, putting his hands on his hips, “there is a theory that every seven years we end up with a totally different body as a result of cells dying and then replacing each other.”

Joshua interrupted him, “Therefore, Gail didn’t have a lover for a very long time.”

“We also know that she had a baby.” Tad pointed to the word on the yellow pad. “Episiotomy. She had an episiotomy scar.”

“She had a baby.”

Tad shrugged. “An episiotomy scar does not necessarily mean that a woman had a baby. There can be other reasons for the scar. But, yes, Johnstone did also find a distended uterus to indicate childbirth at some point.”

“What point?” Joshua swallowed.

“Not recently.”

Jan was proud of herself. She may not have had the experience of a hard-hitting journalist, but she was developing the mind of one. If she could not get anyone at Gail’s network willing to talk about her and what had occurred in Connecticut, then she would call the O’Neals. Considering that they were driven into getting a restraining order against the journalist, they should be willing to talk about what drove them there.

She found Sylvia O’Neal’s phone number on the Internet. She was not sure if the woman knew or cared who she was talking to. As soon as Jan mentioned Gail Reynolds, the story poured out over the phone line faster than she could type on her laptop.

“They told us that those records were sealed. There should be laws to protect decent people like us. We invested our heart and soul into that boy. He was a part of us, even if he didn’t come from us. And then, nineteen years later, that woman goes digging through the records and turns our world upside down. Poor Adam has had to start seeing a shrink because of her.”

Sylvia was talking so fast that the words were swimming in Jan’s head while she tried to put them together to comprehend the meaning behind them while she wrote her story. “Wait a minute,” she sputtered while typing out that Adam had to see a therapist after his experience with Gail Reynolds. “She found you. Why was she looking for you?”

“Because she suddenly started feeling all maternal,” Sylvia spat out. “He might have come out of her womb—”

“Gail was his birth mother?”

“—but I’m still his mother. You can’t give your child over to another woman to raise and then pop back up in his life with this insane idea that you can take this boy—who’s now in college—home to live with you and his daddy and be some big happy family! That woman is insane!”