Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet (7 page)

An arrogant male voice crackled out of the speaker. “Yes?”

I must’ve been in the midst of old money. The massive expanse of mansion that loomed
before me was a testament to two things: The Lowells were rich, and the Lowells liked
people to know it.

When I glanced back at the speaker box, I said, “Yes, I’d like a taco with extra salsa.”
When he didn’t ask if I’d like something to drink with that, I tried again. “I’m here
to see Mr. and Mrs. Lowell.” I smiled into the video camera mounted above the box,
then took out my PI license and held it up. “I’ve been hired by their daughter, Harper.”

When I received no answer, I decided to change my tack. “I just need to ask them a
few questions.”

After a long moment in which I kept smiling at the dead kid in my backseat, trying
not to contemplate how awkward the moment was becoming, the arrogant guy came back
on.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lowell are not receiving.”

What the hell did that mean? “I’m not throwing a forty-yard pass. I just have a few
questions. I think their daughter is in danger.”

“They are not accepting visitors.”

What a caring bunch. “In that case, I’ll have the police over in a few. I apologize
beforehand if they come with lights flashing and sirens blaring.”

Rich people hated nothing more than scandal. I loved scandals. Especially the kinky
kind with illicit affairs and CEOs photographed in heels and feather boas. But I did
live in my own little world.

“You will have five minutes,” he said. He did the clenched-teeth thing much better
than Ubie. I’d have to mention that next time I saw my surly uncle. Maybe he could
take lessons.

After rolling up a long driveway that turned into a cobblestone entrance, I lifted
Misery’s emergency brake and glanced in my rearview. “Don’t even think about going
for a joy ride, buddy.”

His blank gaze didn’t flinch. He was fun.

A self-assured man who was dressed much more casually than I’d expected met me at
the massive white door. The house looked more East Coast than most houses in New Mexico.
Without saying a word, the man led me to what I could only assume was a drawing room,
though there were no art supplies anywhere. Since I couldn’t draw, I decided to snoop.
Pictures lined the walls and shelves, but there was not a single candid shot among
them. Every photograph was a professional portrait, and each one had a color theme.
Black. Brown. Navy blue. Four in the family: the parents, one boy, and one girl—Harper.
They all had dark hair except the boy, and he didn’t particularly look like the others.
I wondered if the rooster had gotten out of the henhouse. A blond rooster. The parade
of portraits mapped out the development of the Lowell children, from around four or
five until the kids were in their early twenties. Clearly the parents had a firm grip
on their children. In one portrait, they got almost crazy and wore white.

These people were scary.

“How may I help you?”

I turned to a woman, the matriarch of this here hoity-toity club, if the pictures
were any indication. By the upturn of her nose, she held herself in high regard. Either
that, or she found my fascination with her drawing room distasteful.

I didn’t offer my hand. “My name is Charlotte Davidson, Mrs. Lowell. I’m here about
Harper.”

“I’ve been told you are a private investigator?”

“Yes. Your daughter hired me. She believes someone is trying to kill her.”

A lengthy exhalation told me she probably didn’t care. “Stepdaughter,” she clarified,
and my hackles rose instantly.

I wondered if my stepmother did the same with me. Corrected people when they called
me her daughter. Cringed at the usage. The very thought.

“Has Harper mentioned the fact that she’s being stalked?”

“Fact?” she said, her expression full of a peevish kind of doubt. “Yes, Ms. Davidson.
We’ve been through this with her ad nauseam. I can’t imagine you could bring anything
new to the table.”

The woman’s indifference floored me. It was one thing not to believe Harper, but another
altogether to be so blatantly unaffected by her stepdaughter’s distress. Then I got
a clue that might shed some light.

“May I ask, is Harper’s brother your stepson as well?”

Pride swelled her chest. “Arthur is mine. I married Harper’s father when Art was seven.
Harper was five. She didn’t approve, and these antics of hers began soon after.”

“Antics?” I asked.

“Yes.” She waved a dismissive hand. “The drama. The theatrics. Someone is always after
her, trying to scare her or hurt her or kill her. You can imagine how hard it is to
take this seriously when it has been happening for over twenty-five years.”

That was interesting. Harper hadn’t mentioned that part. “So this started when she
was young?”

“Five.”

“I see.” I took out my notepad and pretended to take notes. Partly to look official,
but mostly to give myself a minute to get a well-rounded read off her. From what I
could tell, she wasn’t lying. She didn’t believe Harper’s accusations were real. She
didn’t believe Harper’s life was in danger.

Then again, my stepmother had never believed a word I’d said growing up either. Mrs.
Lowell’s indifference meant nothing in the grand scheme of things besides the fact
that she was petty and vain.

“According to her therapists,” she continued, her tone waspish to the extreme, “seven
therapists, to be exact—it’s not unusual for a daughter to feel neglected and crave
attention when her father remarries. Her biological mother died when she was an infant.
Jason was all she had.”

“Is your husband home? May I talk to him?”

She chafed under my forwardness. “No, you may not. Mr. Lowell is very ill. He can
hardly entertain Harper’s delusions of doom, much less those of a hired private investigator.”

Mrs. Lowell’s expression would suggest she thought I was nothing more than a charlatan,
out to take Harper’s—aka her—money. Since I was quite used to people believing me
a charlatan, the snub didn’t irritate. But the slight to Harper did. She clearly harbored
no genuine affection for her stepdaughter. She saw her as a nuisance. A burden. Much
like my own stepmother thought of me.

“And,” Mrs. Lowell continued, a thought having occurred to her, “she disappeared for
three years. Three! Off the face of the Earth, as far as we knew. Did she tell you
that?”

While I wanted to say,
I would have, too, with a stepmother like you,
what I said was, “No, ma’am, she didn’t.”

“See. She is completely unstable. When she finally deigned us with her presence, she
said she had been on the run for her life. Of all the ludicrous…” Mrs. Lowell shifted
in irritation. “And now she hires a private investigator? She has gone over the edge.”

I wrote the word
psycho
in my notebook, then scribbled it out before she saw. I was letting my own biases
guide me on this case, and that would get me nowhere. Taking a mental step back, I
took a deep breath and tried to see this from Mrs. Lowell’s perspective, as difficult
as that might be. I didn’t often identify with rich bitches, but they were people,
too. Weren’t they?

So Mrs. Lowell marries a man, a rich man, only to find out the man’s daughter hates
her with a passion and despises the relationship her new mother has with her father,
so much so that she makes up wild stories about someone trying to kill her. To get
back at her new mother? Her father for abandoning her?

Nope. I didn’t buy it. Mrs. Lowell was a cold bitch. She most likely married for the
money, not that I could blame her entirely for that—a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s
gotta do—but to dismiss Harper’s fears outright and so callously bordered on neglect,
in my opinion. Jason Lowell was her meal ticket, and his daughter was part of the
deal. I couldn’t help but feel a little ambivalent toward Harper’s father. Where was
he in all this? Why was he not here supporting his daughter? Taking up for her?

I cleared my throat and said, “You mentioned drama. Can you give me an example?”

“Oh, goodness, you name it. One minute someone is leaving dead rabbits on her bed,
and the next minute a party popper made her throw up all over her cousin’s birthday
cake. A party popper. Then there were the nightmares. We used to wake up to her screams
in the middle of the night, or we would find her standing beside our bed at three
in the morning.”

“She sleepwalked?”

“No, she was wide awake. She would say someone was in her room. The first few times,
Jason would jump out of bed and go investigate, but the therapist told us that was
exactly what she wanted. So, we stopped. We started to ignore her and told her to
go back to bed.”

“And would she?”

“Of course not. We’d find her the next morning asleep under the stairs or behind the
sofa. And searching for her would always make us late to this or that. Her antics
were absolutely exhausting.”

“I can only imagine.”

“So, we stopped searching for her altogether. If she wanted to sleep in the broom
closet, so be it. We let her and went about our usual routine. But the doctor insisted
there was nothing wrong with her. She said the more attention we gave Harper, the
more she would act out. So we stopped paying attention.”

A dull ache ricocheted through the cavern of my chest. To know what Harper went through
with no one to support her. No one to believe her. “So you did nothing?”

“As per her doctor’s instructions,” Mrs. Lowell said with a sniff. “But her outbursts
escalated. We went through the nightmares and the panic attacks night after night,
and did nothing but order her back to bed. So, she stopped eating to get back at us.”

“To get back at you?” I asked, my throat constricting.

“Yes. And then she stopped bathing, stopped combing her hair. Do you have any idea
how humiliating that is? To have a child who looks more like a street rat than a proper
young lady?”

“That must’ve been awful,” I said, my tone flat and unattractive.

My sarcasm was not lost on the foul woman, and I regretted it instantly. She shut
down. Any information I might have gained was now lost to the frivolity of my mouth.

“I think your time is up, Ms. Davidson.”

I chastised myself inwardly and asked, “Is Harper’s brother around? Can I talk to
him?”

“Stepbrother,” she corrected, seeming to sense my chagrin. “And he has a place of
his own.” The statement wrenched an interesting rush of indignation out of her. I
sensed no small amount of displeasure from Mrs. Lowell that her son had moved out.
But he had to be in his thirties, for heaven’s sake. What did she expect?

She had her housekeeper show me out before I could ask anything else. Like who trimmed
her lawn, because day-um, I had no idea bushes could be clipped into the shape of
a Kokopelli.

“Have you worked here long?” I asked the young woman as she escorted me to the door,
knowing she couldn’t have. She looked around twenty.

She glanced nervously over her shoulder, then shook her head.

“Can I ask how long you’ve known the Lowells?”

After opening the door, she scanned the area again before saying, “No. I just started
here a couple of weeks ago. Their long-term housekeeper retired.”

“Really?”

She seemed to want me out of the house. Bad. And I didn’t want to get her in trouble.
I knew how these people worked, and their employees were not to speak of anything
that happened at their house or they would lose their jobs immediately, but we were
talking about the well-being of one of their own. “How long had the last housekeeper
worked here?”

“Almost thirty years,” she said, seeming as baffled by the idea as I was. How someone
could last thirty years under the reign of that woman was beyond me. But if anyone
knew what happened in a house like this, it was the hired help.

“Thank you,” I said, offering her a wink. She grinned shyly.

I left the Lowell mansion with way more questions than I’d had when I went in, but
at least I had a clearer picture of what Harper had endured growing up. Still, she
didn’t tell me how long this had been going on. While I could guess why—nobody believed
her, why should I—I would need to confront her as soon as possible. I was missing
pertinent information that could help us solve this entire case.

But one thing stuck out in my head. Everything Harper had done, all the nightmares
and delusions and lashing out, pointed to one thing: posttraumatic stress disorder.
The tip-off was the party poppers. I had taken enough psych in college to recognize
the most basic symptom of PTSD: extreme response, like shaking and nausea, to loud
noises.

Being stalked could cause posttraumatic stress to a degree, especially if the situation
was life-threatening, but Harper’s symptoms would indicate a more severe form. Surely
a licensed psychotherapist would know that. Maybe I needed to visit these seven therapists
Mrs. Lowell was telling me about.

I called Cookie to have her find out exactly who Harper was seeing and when. “Also,
I want to talk to their housekeeper who recently retired, and then I need more info
on the Lowell family.”

“Housekeeper. Got it. But info?” she asked, typing away at her keyboard.

“Dirt, Cook. I need you to scrounge up all the dirt you can get on them. Any family
with that much hot air has something to hide, and I want to know what it is.”

“That kind of dirt rarely makes the headlines, but I’ll see what I can dig up.”

“And I want to actually talk to the therapists the Lowells were sending Harper to.
She’s been seeing them since around the age of five.”

“That could be difficult.”

“Are you saying you can’t do it?”

“No,” she said, a smile in her voice. “I’m saying it’s about time you gave me a challenge.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

The second I hung up, I called David Taft. Officer Taft worked the same precinct as
Uncle Bob and had a departed little sister who liked to visit me at the worst times
possible. Namely any. We weren’t exactly friends, Taft and I. Which might explain
the cold reception.