Death in the Cards (29 page)

I gasped and jolted to a stop at the next intersection. I sat there, thinking. After all, there was no traffic to hold up.

Start at the end and go to the beginning . . .

Of course. Ginny had been killed at the back corner of the maze, near the end. But what if she'd left a clue at the beginning of the maze. Maybe the small accessories case.

I could go straight, be at Sally's in five minutes.

Or turn left and be at the Crowleys' in about the same time.

I turned left.

I pulled my van alongside the road that ran by the Crowleys' farm, where woods met corn maze and field. I got out my high-powered flashlight, opened up the back of my van for something to dig around with. I settled on a tire jack, then set off down the ditch toward the maze.

The night was quiet and still, except for my steps and a few late autumn insects singing a farewell song. I could make out the Crowleys' farmhouse across the field. It was dark, of course. No lights except for the one large light that shone over the gravel driveway at the side of the house.

I was trespassing, which made me uncomfortable. And if my suspicions were true, that Ginny's note meant to look at the beginning of the maze, that she'd buried the accessories case there and that the case held evidence that would help solve her murder, then I'd have to call the sheriff's department again. The Crowleys would be rousted from their sleep. I didn't think they'd press charges for my trespassing, though.

I walked up the slope of the ditch to the field and around to the beginning of the maze, where I trained my flashlight over the rustling cornstalks. I shivered. Out there, with the fields abandoned and all the kids and Hugh and Rebecca in the barn, Ginny could have pled for mercy at her murderer's hands and never been heard over the cornstalks' husky whispers. And from the road, a passerby would not have seen what was going on in the maze. The stalks were a good two feet taller than me. From the road, the maze just looked like a stand of corn, the dried husks overlapping to create a wall.

I moved my light to the ground. Could Ginny have buried the accessories case and whatever evidence it contained before meeting her killer? I walked along, looking for signs of digging that could easily have been missed as people worked their way through the maze, focusing on maps and the kids in costume and the ribbons that marked off each section.

I realized that I'd strayed from the beginning to somewhere in the middle of the maze. And I hadn't seen any upturned earth, any signs that something had been buried along the stalks. Dammit. The ribbon near me was a blue and yellow check. If I remembered correctly, that put me in section five, right behind section two (the middle section at the front of the maze), marked with hot pink ribbon, where I'd entered. I turned around and started following the blue and yellow ribbon, turning right at each intersection, and exhaled in relief when I got back to the hot pink ribbon.

Another fifteen minutes, and I worked my way back out.

I checked my watch. It was 3:30
A.M
. I'd been wandering in the front section of the corn maze for nearly forty minutes and hadn't seen a sign at all of digging.

Dammit, I thought again.

Then what else could start at the end to get to the beginning mean?

It was a riddle as frustrating as my Aunt Clara's devil riddle, but surely Ginny's riddle had an answer. She'd given it to me, expecting me to figure it out easily enough, I was sure, so that if anything happened to her, I could get to the truth.

I'd started at the end of her life and worked back to the beginning.

I'd gone to the beginning of the maze, in which she'd been murdered near the end.

What else could she mean? Where else had she been, or what else had she done, that had a specific beginning and end?

I sat down on a stump outside the corn maze and doused my flashlight and tried to think. Never mind end to beginning. Where had she been since the beginning of her visit to Paradise that might fit her riddle?

My laundromat. No specific beginning and end there.

The Red Horse Motel. That was built as four units that made up a square. No specific beginning and end there, either.

The Serpent Mound . . .

Of course. The mound was a snake effigy. It had a tail—that was the end. And a beginning—the head.

What if she'd buried the accessory case somewhere near the snake's head? She'd met Dru there. What if she'd also taken some evidence there with her that could help her blackmail him? Something to do with the coveralls and the blood on them?

I stood up and started back to my van. It was nearly four in the morning. Most assuredly, the Serpent Mound would be
closed until 10:00
A.M
. Trespassing on a friend's farm is one thing. Trespassing on a state memorial and national historic landmark is quite another. I would go to Sally's, get a few hours sleep, borrow some clothes from her, and go to Serpent Mound as soon as it opened.

I opened my van door and paused. I'd heard the squeak of my van door's hinges, but had I heard something else? A rustling that came from the woods and not the cornhusks?

I shook my head. I was tired and jumpy. I'd heard a raccoon or other night animal moving about. That was all.

“I still don't see why you can't just call the sheriff with your theory. That nice Deputy Rankle you told us about,” Cherry said. “Serpent Mound is in his jurisdiction, right?”

“Right,” I said patiently, turning onto the road that led to Serpent Mound. “But he's probably off duty now. And after what happened at the Red Horse, with the bomb scare and evacuation, I don't want to be rousting up any more trouble. For all I know, my theory is cockamamie.”

“Maybe. But tell us again about how Mrs. Oglevee gave you this idea in the first place,” Sally said from behind me. She didn't even try to hide the amusement in her voice. “I like that part. Mrs. Oglevee dressed up as a cornhusk doll.”

She and Cherry giggled. We were in my van at 9:45
A.M
. heading toward Serpent Mound.

When I'd arrived at Sally's trailer home much earlier, she and Cherry were up and waiting for me. I told them everything. And I mean everything, even about Mrs. Oglevee. So for the first time, someone besides me did know about my Mrs. Oglevee dreams. Two someones—Cherry and Sally. Maybe that hadn't been so smart. I was sure to hear about it again. And again. And again. They'd found my nightmarish visits from our old, feared junior high teacher supremely amusing.

But I'd had to tell them about the hint I'd gotten in the dream about another way of looking at Ginny's clue—start at the end and work to the beginning—in order for our visit to Serpent Mound to make sense.

And they'd been very sympathetic and outraged about the threat to Guy.

We'd dozed for maybe two hours, and then Sally had made us a strong pot of coffee. We were fueled by caffeine, adrenaline, and lack of sleep giddiness. Plus a sense of adventure, I'll admit. In a way, we were looking for buried treasure.

We pulled into the Serpent Mound's parking lot, which held just one car and one van.

“Not too many visitors this morning,” Sally said.

“Yet,” I pointed out. “We want to see if we can find what we're looking for before too many people get here. After all, we're going to go off the paths into restricted areas. And maybe even dig.”

I shuddered. Besides being state owned, this was, more importantly, the hallowed ground of an ancient people. If I was haunted by Mrs. Oglevee just because of, say, the mean things I'd written about her on the junior high girls' room walls, what kind of haunting would I get if I dug up part of Serpent Mound in search of an accessories case?

“Do you think it's okay I'm wearing heels?” Cherry asked. “I'd hate to twist an ankle.”

I grinned. Cherry was always great for pulling me back to the here and now.

Twenty minutes later, we stood at what was the head of the serpent, according to the map we'd been given when we'd bought our tickets. We were the only people in sight.

“What now?” Cherry asked impatiently. “This dumb accessories case could be buried anywhere.”

She was right. I looked around, my heart falling. We were
standing on the path, looking around at fields that spread out for miles, dotted here and there with small patches of trees.

“No, not really,” said Sally. “Think about it. Ginny would have wanted to put the accessories case somewhere she could re-find easily. And she wouldn't have had much time to bury it, because she was meeting Dru and because she wouldn't have wanted to get caught. So she couldn't have walked far from here. It has to be close, somewhere she could easily remember.”

“One of the patches of trees,” I said, excited again.

“But which one? There are at least seven,” Cherry said.

We fell silent, pondering that question. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms. The wind was cold, brisk . . . and somehow urging us on, but to what? I shook my head. It wasn't like me to think that way. My weariness and the crazy events of the weekend were getting to me. And yet, the sense of being urged, nudged, somehow, by the cold wind, seemed real. . .

“I've got it!” Cherry exclaimed.

Sally and I looked at her, then at each other, reading surprise in each other's faces. Cherry never was the one who came up with answers to puzzles.

“Ginny was a psychic, right?” Cherry sounded excited. “And another word for psychic is seer, right? And we're at the head of the snake and if this earthwork snake really had eyes it would be looking straight ahead—” she pointed to a copse of trees before us, “to there.”

We contemplated the patch of trees.

“Wow. That was amazing, Cherry,” Sally said.

Cherry shook her head, looking befuddled. “I have no idea where that came from.”

“Never mind that,” I said, climbing over the railing that was supposed to keep us away from exactly where we wanted to go. “Let's go look.”

It didn't take us long to find where Ginny had buried the accessories case. Just a few feet into the copse, we saw the fresh signs of digging. After all, she'd only dug this hole two days before. It had not rained since then.

We all got down on our hands and knees—even Cherry, though she was wearing a tan suede skirt and tights, despite the fact that Sally and I had told her she should wear jeans like us—and started pulling back dirt with our hands.

A few minutes later, we uncovered the top of the accessories case. I grabbed the handle and pulled.

“My grandma had a case like that,” Cherry whispered.

“So did ours,” Sally said.

“And my Aunt Clara,” I said.

That there is a devil, there is no doubt. But is he trying to get in . . . or trying to get out?

The saying flitted through my mind, and at the same time seemed to whisper in the breeze. I shuddered. Then, slowly, I opened the accessories case.

Like the larger matching suitcase, it only held a few items: old newspaper articles. Just three.

We read them quickly, swapping, until we'd read everything, and then we stared at each other in stunned amazement at the truth we'd just learned.

Winnie, for all her good work in tracing Ginny's past, hadn't dug quite far enough into Dru's. These articles were old enough they must not have made it into the online archives.

The earliest dated article was about a man who'd gone missing from a bar in Bakersfield. There'd been a fight between a young man named Harold Thiesman and another young man named Dru Purcell, who'd just left the military, married a psychic who ran a business in Randsburg, and started life over as a fine artist specializing in landscapes.
They'd been fighting over Dru's wife, Ginny, because Ginny and Harold had once dated and Dru had caught them flirting. Police had broken up the fight.

The second article was about how two days later Harold Thiesman disappeared. The police suspected foul play because a bloody knife was found by his apartment's back door. But there were no fingerprints. No evidence that could lead to an arrest warrant, although Dru Purcell had been questioned and released.

The third article was simply about how Harold Thiesman's body was still missing and the police had no leads.

“Oh Lord,” Cherry said. “The bloody overalls in the suitcase . . .”

“Dru Purcell's,” Sally said. “Dru must have murdered Harold and Ginny knew it, and all these years kept the overalls. How could she let Dru walk free? Especially since they divorced later? It's not like she was protecting him out of love.”

“Maybe she knew enough about the circumstances of the murder to know Dru hadn't meant for it to happen—maybe it was a fight gone too far, or Dru killed in self-defense,” I said, thinking of Owen's situation.

“Then why keep the overalls?” Sally asked.

“Blackmail. Maybe she thought the pants would come in handy for blackmailing Dru someday. We've already heard how nasty she was to the animal psychic,” Cherry said. “And she just dropped Max, giving him no reason. She definitely had a dark side.”

That there is a devil, there is no doubt . . . I shook my head to clear it.

“She was sick. She probably dropped Max because she knew he couldn't handle being supportive and she just didn't want to deal with being left,” I said. “And she needed money. So she finally decided to cash in on the knowledge she'd had
all those years about Dru, coming here, threatening him, hoping for money so she could go for her radical treatments.”

“But Dru—and maybe Missy—were having none of that. They didn't want to take money from the church to give her and they couldn't have her tell the truth and ruin Dru's empire, so they killed her,” Sally said.

“And Missy could have noticed the suitcase in the laundromat before I did—I was so busy that morning—then taken it after I'd left to see Guy,” I said. “Ginny could have told Dru about the overalls and the suitcase when she threatened him with blackmail—”