Poisoned Ground (22 page)

Chapter Thirty-eight

Tom pulled onto the shoulder of the road a hundred yards beyond Joanna’s gate, flattening the brown stalks of Queen Anne’s Lace and wild aster left over from summer. “I want to get a better look at those pictures before we talk to the Jones sisters.”

“I’ll get them.” Brandon opened his door. “Pop the lid for me.”

They had stowed the box of photos, inside a plastic evidence bag, in the trunk along with the anonymous letters they’d collected from Ronan and Joanna.

When Brandon returned, Tom slit the seal on the clear, oversized bag with his pocket knife and slid out the box that held the pictures. He scooped out half the photos. “Grab the rest,” he told Brandon. “Look for any with Marie Kelly in them, or—hell, I don’t know what we’re looking for. Let’s hope we’ll know it when we see it.”

For a couple of minutes they worked in silence. The only sounds were the hum of the cruiser’s engine and the whisper of photos sliding off stacks and dropping back into the box balanced on the console atop Summer’s soft pink scarf. Tom’s glimpse of the pictures at the Kelly house had left him with the impression that Lincoln Kelly photographed Jake with dozens of women, but now that he examined them closely he saw only five. Each appeared in numerous pictures, in different clothes, in different locations. Passionate embraces on a blanket in the summer woods. Kisses in a parked car on a narrow dirt trail. Half-clothed groping in a secluded riverside spot. Twilight made some photos fuzzy and dimmed the colors, but most had been snapped in daylight.

Tom recognized all the women. Two had died in recent years of heart disease and cancer. The other three still lived in the county, their hair graying and their faces etched with wrinkles as old age overtook them. He recalled seeing a couple of the women in church with their husbands and children every Sunday when he was growing up.

“Whoa.” Brandon held out a picture for Tom to see. “This is the first one I’ve come across that’s X-rated.”

The picture showed Jake and a woman having sex on a blanket, surrounded by woods. The woman’s face was hidden below Jake’s shoulder, but her blond hair was visible. Tom couldn’t identify her, but he knew she wasn’t the raven-haired young Marie. “I guess Lincoln developed these himself. I seem to remember him having a darkroom a long time ago, but I didn’t see any sign of it when we went through the house.”

“I’m starting to wonder if he got off on this stuff,” Brandon said, “sneaking around and taking pictures of Hollinger and his women.”

Tom glanced at the back of one picture. “No date stamp. But he spied on Jake for a lot of years. Look at the hair.” He held up two pictures. In one Jake appeared to be in his thirties, with dark hair, in the other he was older, with silver streaks at his temples.

“The whole thing’s pretty sad,” Brandon said.

Tom tried to summon a cool indifference to what he was seeing, but didn’t succeed. Although none of these people meant anything to him personally, and he didn’t think he had a right to judge, he felt disappointed in them because they’d taken stupid risks that could have cost them their families. Lincoln Kelly was the biggest disappointment. He’d been a kind and generous man, quick to smile and easy to like. And apparently he’d been a stalker and a voyeur.

“Hey, look.” Brandon passed a picture to Tom. “Autumn Jones?”

Tom studied the pretty young woman in the photo. She wore a blue dress and her glossy brown hair hung loose to her shoulders. She faced the camera, and Jake’s arms circled her waist from behind, holding her close. The expression on her face as he nuzzled her neck was one of pure bliss. As if she were in the arms of the most beloved person in her life. Dappled sunlight fell in streaks of brilliance on the tree trunks and foliage around them, and a gap in the undergrowth revealed the river’s glittering surface.

“Yeah, that’s her.” She was the only one of Jake’s women who had never grown older.

“There’s more.” Brandon handed the pictures to Tom one by one.

Jake and Autumn in different settings, different seasons.

“It wasn’t short term. It went on for months. I wonder if her sisters knew.” Tom dropped all the pictures into the box. “No pictures of Marie Kelly.”

“She must have found them and got rid of them.”

Tom shifted the car into drive. “Well, we’ve established that Jake’s a real dog, but we’re no closer to finding our shooter.”

As they drove off, Brandon slid the box of photos back into the evidence bag. He gestured at Summer’s pink scarf on the console. “That’s kind of pathetic, isn’t it? Her hanging around Hollinger. You think she’s trying to get something started with him?”

“God, I hope not. I can’t see that ending well.”

Although the Jones farm was adjacent to Jake Hollinger’s, Tom had detoured to see Joanna first and now doubled back to visit the sisters. Rolling along the rising and dipping road, he didn’t see the two young men at the end of the Jones driveway until he was barely a hundred feet away.

“What the hell are they up to?” He hit the gas pedal hard to speed up.

Brandon leaned forward, peering ahead. “Looks like they put something in the mailbox.”

As the cruiser approached the two spun around, and Tom saw they weren’t grown men but teenage boys. He thought he recognized one of them.

The boys sprinted for an SUV parked on the shoulder of the road nearby. Tom floored the gas. By the time the boys were in their vehicle he was pulling up so close to it that the driver had no room to maneuver the bulky SUV onto the pavement. He parked the cruiser at an angle, its nose pressed against the rear door of the larger vehicle.

Tom killed his engine and jumped out. The young driver tried pulling the SUV ahead, but it was pinned in place. Tom positioned himself in front of it.

The boy’s head swiveled as he sought an escape route, and his companion in the passenger seat gestured wildly, urging the driver to back up. Brandon was already standing behind the SUV when the boy began inching it backward and to the left. The vehicle jolted to a stop when one rear tire slid into the drainage ditch.

Tom heard the engine die. The driver lowered his head and banged it against the steering wheel.

The passenger door opened and the other boy tumbled out into the ditch. He took off past the rear of the SUV and leapt onto the pavement. Brandon was waiting for him. The boy stopped short of a collision with the deputy, stumbled backward, and fell flat on his back in the ditch.

Tom stepped into the ditch and hauled the boy to his feet. The surly-faced kid, his brown hair spilling over his forehead, didn’t stop struggling until Tom slammed him against the side of the cruiser.

“You’re Robert McClure’s kid, aren’t you?” Tom kept a hand on the boy’s back as he checked his pockets for weapons. He found none. “Answer me.”

The boy’s face was pressed against the roof of the car and his voice came out muffled. “Go to hell.”

“What did you say?” Tom grabbed his jacket collar and shook him. “You want to say that to me again? See where it gets you?”

The boy didn’t speak.

“Get the other one out,” Tom told Brandon.

A couple minutes later both boys stood against the cruiser, heads down. Now that Tom had a good look at the driver, he recognized him as the grandson of the county’s Board of Supervisors chairman. His last name was O’Toole, but Tom couldn’t recall his first, if he’d ever known it. He and the McClure kid were high school students, juniors or seniors. “Why aren’t you guys in school?” Tom asked.

O’Toole looked so terrified that Tom almost expected him to wet his pants right there on the road. He gulped and mumbled, “Teachers’ conference.”

Tom folded his arms and examined them head to toe. Well-dressed, in shoes, jeans and jackets that had an expensive look to them. That late-model SUV wasn’t a standard teen ride. Both had rock singer hair, combed down over their foreheads to their eyebrows. “So you decided to spend your time off hanging around the home of three elderly women? What are you doing here? What did you leave in their mailbox?”

No answer.

“Don’t let them move an inch,” Tom told Brandon. He walked back to the post-mounted mailbox, a fanciful little replica of a Swiss chalet. As he was about to flip open its door, both the boys shouted at once. “No! Don’t open it!”

Tom jerked his hand away. “What’s in here?” When they didn’t answer, he strode back to them. “Look at me. Stop looking at your damned feet.”

Both raised their heads just enough to show him their eyes.

“What did you do? Did you rig a pipe bomb in there?”

“It’s not a big one,” the driver said, his voice high-pitched and shaking. “It’s just like, you know, a few BB pellets mixed in some red paint. It wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

Tom swore under his breath, imagining one of the Jones sisters opening the mailbox and getting a spray of paint and lead pellets in her face, in her eyes. “You’re both under arrest.”

Their heads jerked up. “You can’t do that,” the McClure boy protested. “My dad—”

“Don’t say it.” Tom pointed a finger in the boy’s face. “You don’t want to tell the sheriff that your dad won’t allow me to arrest you.”

The boy responded with a self-confident glare. He still expected to come out the winner.

“We’ll book you for trespassing and vandalism, and the U.S. Attorney will probably be bringing charges too. In case you didn’t know, putting a bomb in a mailbox is a federal crime.”

O’Toole went pale and slumped as if he’d been socked in the gut. The McClure kid’s face flushed scarlet.

Tom called the dispatcher and ordered a car to pick up the boys, then called the State Police and requested a tech to disarm the explosive in the mailbox.

Almost an hour passed before the boys were gone, accompanied by Brandon, and the State Police tech arrived. In all that time, Tom had seen no sign of the Jones sisters. That seemed more than odd, considering how nosey they were and how promptly Winter had shown up at Joanna’s place when the stable was on fire.

He left the tech to his work and pulled into the driveway, parking behind the ancient station wagon the sisters used to get around. Halfway up the walk to the front door, he remembered Summer’s scarf and had to go back for it. He rolled it tightly and stuck it in his jacket pocket. For more reasons than one, he wanted to see Summer’s reaction when he returned it to her.

Chapter Thirty-nine

All the draperies in the front of the house were closed, as if the sisters hadn’t awakened yet. Tom knocked on the door anyway, and the sharp rap of the brass knocker startled sparrows from an evergreen foundation shrub. The edge of the living room drapery flicked aside. Winter Jones peered out between curtain and window frame.

Tom raised a hand in greeting, and the drapery dropped back into place.

Winter opened the door. “Oh, Thomas, hello.”

Instead of swinging it wide to invite him in, she cracked it about six inches, just enough to look out at him. Enough for Tom to see that her white hair, usually wound into a neat knot at the back of her head, hung in untidy wisps around her face, and the hem of her green blouse had come untucked from the waistband of her black skirt on one side.

Tom had never seen her when she appeared less than immaculately groomed and self-possessed. “Are you ladies okay?”

“Oh, yes, yes, we’re fine, thank you.” Winter’s gaze slid sideways, as if drawn to something or someone in the living room. “Of course, we are concerned about the goings-on down there in the road.”

Yet they hadn’t come out to investigate. “There hasn’t been any damage, but some kids put a pipe bomb in your mailbox. You’ll probably be getting a visit from a federal agent at some point.”

“Oh, dear lord.” Winter pressed a hand over her heart, and her eyes shifted to look beyond him, down the gentle hill to the road.

“Like I said, they didn’t do any damage, and an explosives expert from the State Police is down there right now, disarming it. The boys are in custody, so you don’t have to worry about them coming back.”

“Who are they? Do we know them?”

He told her.

Winter shook her head. “That’s terrible. Simply terrible.”

Why was she keeping him at the door? “May I come in? I wanted to talk to you about the phone calls you’ve been getting.”

Winter hesitated, her reluctance obvious. After a moment, though, she opened the door wider and moved aside. “Of course. You’ll have to forgive my rudeness. We’re all very much on edge.”

Tom stepped inside. “That’s understandable. I think everybody’s a little—” He broke off, stunned by the sight of the living room.

The sofa and chairs sat undisturbed, their plump throw cushions perfectly placed, but they were islands of order in a wash of destruction. Two ceramic end table lamps lay in pieces on the floor, their shades bent. Shards of china and glass littered the coffee table and the rug around it. A long streak of what looked and smelled like coffee trailed down one wall and pooled around a framed painting on the floor. Heavy splatter on the country landscape and a tear in the canvas told Tom the painting had been the point of impact. A mop leaned against the wall. Evidently Tom had interrupted Winter’s cleanup effort.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. “Did somebody break in? Why didn’t you report it?”

“It wasn’t a break-in,” Spring said. “I did it.”

She had appeared in the doorway between the living room and dining room, looking as disheveled as her older sister, her bright gold hair a mess, her purple blouse wrinkled. Most startling was Spring’s total lack of makeup. Tom wasn’t sure he would have recognized her without the garishly dyed hair.

“You did it?” Tom said. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, dear, this is so embarrassing.” Spring fluttered a hand before her face. “We’ve all been under so much stress, the constant tension and worry. Winter has been a rock, but I simply reached my breaking point. I snapped, as they say.”

“And you…” Tom looked around. “You started throwing things?”

“Yes, I suppose that’s it in a nutshell.” She pressed her hands to her flaming cheeks. “I’m so ashamed of myself. I can’t imagine what you must think of me.”

Tom wasn’t sure what to think.

Winter had regained her composure, and she seemed eager to cut off discussion of Spring’s meltdown. “You wanted to ask about the phone calls. What can we tell you? We want to help in any way we can.”

Neither Winter nor Spring had suggested that they sit down, another oddity for these women. The air in the room seemed to thrum with a disturbing vibration. And where was Summer? At the thought of the youngest living sister, his eyes were drawn to the mantel, to the photograph of Autumn. She smiled, forever fresh and pretty, from a gilded frame. But a crack ran diagonally through the glass over the picture, from upper left to lower right.

Dragging his attention back to Winter, Tom said, “That’s right. We’re getting your phone records. With any luck, we’ll find out who made the calls. Was it always a man?”

“Oh, yes.” Winter began tucking strands of hair behind her ears. “Always the same man, as far as I could tell. His voice was rather muffled, as if he had something covering the mouthpiece. So I’m not at all sure what his natural voice would be like. He was trying very hard to make himself sound menacing.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“It was classic bullying,” Winter said. “If we didn’t sell our land and make way for the resort, we would be sorry, that sort of thing. Once he threatened to burn down our house while we were sleeping, if that was what it took to force us out.”

A strangled cry pulled Tom’s attention back to Spring. She slumped against the door frame. “You never told us that.”

Winter sighed. “I didn’t want to provoke the kind of hysteria you’re demonstrating at the moment.”

“Did you always answer the phone?” Tom asked her.

“Yes, I do tend to be the one who takes calls. What few we receive.”

“Why haven’t I heard about this before?”

“It was weeks ago,” Winter said. “Before Lincoln and Marie died. And the Richardson woman. As I explained, it sounded like typical bullying to me. Remember that I taught high school for many years. I’ve known boys—and a good many girls, I might add—to make far worse threats than those to their unfortunate victims. But the worst that ever materialized was a scuffle or minor hair-pulling. I believed our caller was also engaging in bluster, nothing more.”

“Now that three of your neighbors have been murdered, I hope you’re taking this whole situation more seriously.” Tom doubted that their anonymous caller had anything to do with the shootings, but it ticked him off that they hadn’t reported the threats. How could citizens expect the police to protect them if they withheld potentially vital information?

The color had risen in Winter’s pallid cheeks, but it looked more like a flush of irritation or anger than a blush of embarrassment. “Of course we take it seriously, Thomas,” she said, in that tight, admonishing tone he remembered from high school. Miss Winter Jones never lost her temper, but she could freeze a student into submission with her frosty voice and eyes. She waved a hand at the mess on the floor. “You can see the toll it’s taking.”

“From now on I’ll expect all of you to let me know about anything and everything out of the ordinary that happens around here.”

“We will,” Winter said. “I promise you that.”

A thud overhead drew Tom’s gaze upward. “Is Summer upstairs? I need to see her.”

“Oh, she’s suffering from one of her migraines,” Winter said. “She needs to rest. Those headaches are a plague.”

Tom heard the unmistakable creak of a floorboard directly above him. “Sounds like she’s up. Would you ask her to come down for a minute? I want to talk to all three of you at the same time.” When Winter hesitated, he added, “I won’t keep her long, but I want to see her.”

With a sigh, Winter walked past him to the stairs. As she mounted the steps out of sight, Tom heard a clinking noise that sounded like a ring of keys pulled from a pocket. For a second he wondered if Summer might be locked in her bedroom, but that seemed so crazy and unlikely that he dismissed the thought.

Spring remained in the doorway from the dining room, but when a Siamese cat appeared beside her and seemed about to venture into the living room where broken glass and china posed a hazard, she shooed it away.

Tom turned when he heard footsteps on the stairs. At the sight of Summer, he almost regretted forcing her to leave her room. Her normally rosy complexion had paled to a grayish cast, her uncombed brown hair fell over one eye, her sweater and slacks were wrinkled, disarranged, as if she’d been lying down in them. Winter gripped her arm to steady her.

“You’ll have to excuse my appearance.” Summer pulled her arm from Winter’s grasp and brushed her hair off her face. Her pink sweater, Tom noticed, matched the scarf that created a bulge in his jacket pocket. “I’m not having a good day, to put it mildly.”

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Tom said. “I’ll let you go in a minute. I have a couple of questions that I want to ask with all of you here.”

“What questions could you possibly have,” Winter said, “that we haven’t already answered?”

He hesitated, wondering how to phrase it, and decided to get straight to the point. “Did Lincoln Kelly come to see you recently with some pictures he took a long time ago? Pictures of Jake Hollinger and your sister Autumn?”

Outrage flooded Winter’s face. “What on earth does our poor little sister have to do with your work? Why are you prying into our personal business?”

“I’m just trying to make sense of—”

Summer’s hand darted out and grabbed at Tom’s jacket. Startled, he caught her arm and forced it back. The pink scarf slid from his pocket, unfurling from the edge she gripped in her fingers.

They all stared at the length of fluffy knitted wool.

“Why do you have my scarf?” Summer demanded, sounding like a child whose belongings had been pilfered.

“Jake gave it to me. He wanted me to bring it to you, so you won’t have to go back to his house for it.”

“You see?” Winter said. “I told you he didn’t want you over there.”

Summer lunged at her. For a second Tom was too astonished to act, then he got an arm between them and forced Summer to back off. Her face contorted with fury, she spun away. The pink scarf trailed from her hand as she ran from the room and up the stairs.

In the quiet moment that followed, all Tom heard was raspy breathing, in and out, and he couldn’t separate the sound of his own from that of the two women remaining in the room. “You all right?” he asked Winter.

Winter cleared her throat and said, “I’m perfectly all right. We’re all overwrought. We have cooperated with your investigation, Thomas, but we never expected you to open up the terrible wound of our sister’s…indiscretion.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Tom said, “but I need to know whether Lincoln Kelly came over here recently with those pictures.”

“All right, if you must know, if you must have your curiosity satisfied, yes, Lincoln brought his shameful pictures here again, three weeks ago.” Winter shook her head, anger and defeat mixing in her expression. “I have done my very best to protect this family in the way our father would have wished. To preserve our family’s reputation so that we can live here and hold our heads up without shame. I believed that…that incident was behind us. Marie promised us years ago that she would destroy those pictures, but here Lincoln was, throwing them in our faces.”

“Why now? Why bring it up again after all this time?”

“The man was sick. He thought Autumn was still alive. He thought our father was still alive, and he demanded to see him. He’d completely forgotten that he drove our sister to suicide, that our father would not have died the way he did if he hadn’t seen those pictures and gone looking for Jake Hollinger to confront him.”

Tom’s mind was racing, making connections, throwing up more questions. “I thought your father’s death was an accident.”

“It
was
an accident. But Father wouldn’t have been over there at all if he hadn’t found out that Jake Hollinger had seduced our sister.”

“I see,” Tom said. “And I can understand it must have been a shock when Lincoln brought it up again. How did you handle it?”

“We made allowances for his condition because Marie begged us to. But in my opinion, Lincoln was always mentally unbalanced. What kind of man follows another man around with a camera, hoping to take pictures and use them to humiliate others? He took pictures of his own wife with Jake. Can you imagine such a despicable thing?”

“Did he show you the pictures of Marie and Jake when he came over here recently?”

Winter shook her head. “No, we were spared that experience. Marie told us about them, as if it would make us feel better to know we weren’t the only ones he tormented. She said she had confiscated those and destroyed them, and she promised yet again to destroy the pictures of Autumn. Despite her failure in the past, we had no choice but to trust her to do that. But now you’ve seen them, and God only knows who else. Our trust was once again sadly misplaced.”

Listening to her, Tom realized he had waded into a swamp of bad memories and festering grief and inflicted still more pain on this sad trio of aging sisters.

That didn’t stop him from adding Winter Jones to his list of suspects.

“Do you have a gun in the house?” he asked.

Winter drew herself up, shoulders back, and gave him the glare of a disappointed and disapproving teacher. “No, Thomas. Look around, if you don’t believe me. Search high and low, but you will not find a firearm anywhere inside this house. Now I would appreciate it if you would leave and let us try to deal with the damage you’ve done.”

Tom held her gaze for a long moment, and in her eyes he saw no fear, no uncertainty, only the rock-hard defiance of a guard who would never let him breach their walls again.