Poisoned Ground (3 page)

Chapter Five

All the way home to the farm where she and Tom lived, Rachel listened to the dog in the backseat whine and paw the window glass. Letting Bonnie stick her head out might distract her, but Rachel didn’t dare lower the window and risk the dog making a break for freedom.

“It’s okay, Bonnie,” Rachel crooned over and over. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

For God’s sake, I’m lying to a dog, she thought.
Bonnie ignored her and scrambled back and forth between the windows, her whines escalating.
Rachel hoped the Kellys’ son or daughter would take all
their parents’
pets, but she doubted either would provide the doting care that Bonnie was used to. An older dog, deeply bonded with her owners, Bonnie was also a victim of today’s monstrous act.

In her rearview mirror Rachel saw Joanna’s Jeep Cherokee keeping a steady pace three car-lengths behind. Now that the Kellys were gone, with their property presumably willed to their absent offspring, how would the situation change? Joanna was probably thinking about the possibilities already and wanted to enlist Rachel’s help in some way.

A fight over the Packard project had been brewing in the county for weeks, and Rachel sensed it was about to erupt into a nasty public battle.
On Saturday afternoon, in a little over twenty-four hours, a Packard representative would speak at an open community meeting, and after that the lines would be clearly drawn between proponents and opponents. Rachel was determined to stay out of it, at least publicly. Privately, she would offer Joanna moral support, but any active opposition to the resort would cause trouble for Tom, who had been elected sheriff less than three weeks before and now had a double murder to worry about.

She wished her friend Ben Hern were here to take up Joanna’s cause. Ben was a well-known artist and cartoonist, a big landowner and taxpayer in Mason County who wasn’t afraid to stand up to local politicians or big companies. But he happened to be in Europe and wouldn’t return for more than a week.

The dog stuck her head between the seats and yelped. Rachel scratched her ears and murmured, “I know, I know. I’m so sorry, sweetie.”

Looking up at the hills flanking the two-lane road, Rachel wondered how Packard Resorts would market Mason County as a vacation spot. True, the mountainside trees formed a breathtaking palette of red, orange, and yellow in early fall, but now all the leaves lay rotting on the ground, packed down by recent rain, their colors faded. The bare branches along the ridges had their own bleak beauty, dark spears aimed at the scudding gray clouds. But this was not a welcoming place in winter. Did Packard Resorts want to create a mountain retreat that would be open only in warm weather months? Or did they have a grand plan for transforming this small rural county in southwestern Virginia into a winter wonderland?

Their plans didn’t matter. The project would probably die if Joanna stood in the way. The only question was what kind of penalty Joanna would pay for killing a lot of people’s hopes for jobs and profit.

Back home at the farm, Rachel pulled into the driveway ahead of Joanna and opened the back door of the Range Rover. Bonnie shot out and slammed into Rachel. Reeling, Rachel grabbed at the leash but it slid through her fingers. The dog bolted across the yard, heading for the sheep meadow. Heading toward home.

“Bonnie, come back here!” Rachel yelled.

Joanna jumped out of her Jeep and the two of them sprinted after the dog. Joanna couldn’t keep up with Rachel and quickly fell behind. When Bonnie charged across the meadow, the two dozen sheep scattered in every direction, uttering a chorus of frantic
baa-aas
. The dog swung to the right, then the left, as confused as the terrified sheep.

Rachel caught up, lunged at the dog and threw both arms around her. Bonnie surrendered, panting, her tongue lolling.

“You silly old girl.” Rachel sank to her knees, gasping for breath. “I’ll bet your arthritis is giving you fits right now.”

The dog laid her head on Rachel’s shoulder and whined.

“I know, sweetie. You’re scared and you don’t understand what’s happening. Come on, let’s go see Billy Bob.” Rachel pushed herself up, the leash firmly in hand, and led the dispirited dog back to the house.

Joanna hauled the carrier holding the two rabbits out of the Range Rover, along with the bag of their food.

When they entered the house with the animals in tow, Tom’s brown-and-white bulldog, Billy Bob, emerged from the kitchen at the end of the center hall. He barked with excitement when he saw Bonnie and trotted toward her, his nails clicking on the oak floor. Rachel unhooked Bonnie’s leash and let her go to meet Billy Bob.

Frank, Rachel’s black-and-white cat with one and a half ears, made a brief appearance in the hallway. He took a look at Bonnie, growled and hissed, then shot through an open doorway into the den.

“Okay, where’s Cicero?” Joanna asked. “We might as well get his opinion, too, while we’re at it.”

Right on cue, Rachel’s African gray parrot called “Hello, Rachel, hello” from the den.

“He’s going to stay where he is,” Rachel said. “He’s one animal more than I can deal with right now.”

“I’ll take the dog home with me, if you want me to. She gets along with my dogs, and if she gets loose and runs back home I won’t have far to go after her.”

“Oh, God, yes, thank you,” Rachel said. “Now what the heck am I going to do with these rabbits? They’re used to running around loose in the house, but that’s not going to happen here. Do you think the Kellys’ son or daughter will take them?”

“Lord, I don’t know.” Joanna, holding the bag of supplies, used the fingers of her free hand to comb her reddish blond hair, smoothing the mess her short run had made of it. “I couldn’t predict what those two will do about anything. Ronan and Sheila are both very different from their parents. And that worries me.”

“Come on, I’ll put the rabbits in the office for now.” On their way down the hall, Rachel asked, “You think they’ll sell the land to Packard?”

Joanna nodded and opened the door to the home office to let Rachel carry the rabbits in. “I feel so selfish for even thinking about it at a time like this, with Lincoln and Marie—” She shook her head. “But I can’t help it. If Ronan and Sheila decide to sell, I’ll probably be the only holdout, and I’ll never have another minute’s peace as long as I live.”

While Rachel tried to find words that would calm Joanna’s anxiety, she set down the carrier next to the desk and peered in at the rabbits. The white female had burrowed under the towel in the bottom of the carrier, facing the back, so that only her puff of a tail showed. Her male companion crouched, frozen in terror, next to the lump she created. Rachel took the bag from Joanna and removed two bowls and the rabbit kibble. “But what about the Jones sisters? They don’t want to uproot themselves at this stage of their lives, do they?”

Joanna hugged her waist and bounced on her toes, her whole body thrumming with tension. “Who knows what those flakes might do? I can’t get a straight answer out of them.” Joanna launched into an imitation of Winter’s stern schoolmarm tone. “We prefer to keep our own counsel for the time being. We won’t be rushed into a commitment one way or the other.”

Rachel had to smile at the pitch-perfect rendering, but she didn’t find anything about this situation amusing. Two good people, a couple Tom had known all his life, had been gunned down in their own yard in broad daylight, the person who did it was walking around loose, and their deaths would pit neighbor against neighbor in a nasty fight over the resort development. Rachel crouched to pour kibble into the rabbits’ bowls and place the food inside the carrier. “What about your other neighbors? Won’t anybody stand with you?”

“Oh, Tavia Richardson’s hell-bent on selling to Packard and getting her hands on all that money, and that means Jake Hollinger’s in favor of it too. Tavia’s got him dreaming about the two of them living the good life someplace where it never gets cold.”

Rachel stood, frowning. “Hold on, you’ve lost me. Mrs. Richardson and Jake Hollinger are an item? Since when?”

“Oh, they’ll admit they’ve been seeing each other since Sue Ellen Hollinger died last year. But the truth is, it started months before that. All the time Sue Ellen was going through torture with chemo and radiation, her shit of a husband—” Joanna’s voice choked up. “I can’t even think about it without getting mad enough to strangle him. Sue Ellen was my friend. And so were Lincoln and Marie.”

Joanna didn’t cry easily, and she was fighting the tears now, but her pain escaped in tremors and gulped-back sobs. At a loss for words or actions that could make a difference, Rachel placed an arm around her shoulders. This basket case was not the strong woman Rachel knew. In Joanna’s distress Rachel saw something more than grief for lost friends, something darker than anger over events she couldn’t control.

A half-formed fear had been niggling at the back of Rachel’s mind for the last hour, and now she couldn’t stop it from pushing forward, full-blown. Joanna seemed positive the Kellys would not have sold their land to Packard
,
that they would have stood firm with her to block the company’s plan for a luxurious mountain resort in Mason County. Now the Kellys were dead.

Although she feared the answer, Rachel voiced the question. “Do you think the Kellys were murdered because they refused to sell their land?”

“You bet I do. Nothing else makes sense.” Joanna’s shoulders felt rigid in Rachel’s embrace, and her expression was hardening, the sorrow and agitation giving way to a grim determination. “Well, nobody’s going to get me. The next time I point my shotgun, you can bet it’ll be loaded.”

Chapter Six

“This is kind of a Hatfields and McCoys thing, huh?” Brandon asked when they were in Tom’s cruiser, headed over to Jake Hollinger’s farm. Tom had left Dennis Murray in charge of the murder scene.

“That’s an exaggeration. I wouldn’t call it a feud, just a running disagreement.”

“We need to take precautions? I mean, what’re the chances Hollinger’s the shooter? What state of mind is he going to be in when he sees us coming?”

“I can’t even guess,” Tom admitted. “Just stay alert.” A sick little knot had formed in his gut. He hoped this would be a routine visit, to give Hollinger a chance to provide a solid alibi for the time the Kellys were shot. He didn’t want to discover that Marie and Linc had died because of a petty dispute over a property line. But if Linc had torn the fence down in the last day or two, that might have pushed Hollinger to the breaking point. And Tom and Brandon could be walking into a confrontation with a man who had already killed two people today.

Barely ten feet ahead of the car, three chocolate-brown sheep hopped over the narrow drainage ditch and landed in the road. Tom slammed on his brakes. When he tapped his horn, the ewes turned to regard the car with mild curiosity.

“Are sheep as stupid as they look?” Brandon frowned in disgust at the animals blocking their way. “I never could figure out why anybody wants to bother with them. And what kind of sheep is brown, anyway?”

“They’re Merinos. They must be from Jake Hollinger’s flock. He’s the only one around here who keeps Merinos. And yeah, sheep are a little dense. Dogs intimidate them, but they’re not afraid of people. Or cars, obviously.”

“Why are they running around loose? They don’t have the good sense to look out for themselves. And they could cause an accident.”

“Jake’s fence must be down,” Tom said.

“You think Kelly and Hollinger might have had a fight about it this morning?”

Tom didn’t answer as he inched the cruiser forward, encouraging the ewes to get out of the way. How long had they been loose? Why hadn’t Hollinger rounded them up yet?

The three sheep, bunched together, seemed to have no plans to move. Tom shifted the car into park and got out to shoo them away. After balking long enough to make the point that they couldn’t be hurried, they turned in a leisurely fashion and ambled back to the side of the road, their hooves clacking on the pavement. One by one they jumped the ditch into the field.

The Hollinger gate was another half-mile on. Both the Hollinger and Kelly farms, side by side, bordered the McKendrick horse farm. Joanna’s property dwarfed all of its neighbors. If this was the prime location for the proposed resort, Joanna’s land was the critical piece and would bring the biggest offer, but if the contract Tom had seen in the Kelly house was typical, the owners of adjacent properties could also sell for more money than they’d ever dreamed of having.

Tom pulled into Hollinger’s driveway and parked behind his red pickup truck. The small brown-shingled house, with a screened porch on one side and an extra room tacked onto the other, looked neglected. Weeds choked the flowerbeds along the foundation, moss colored a patch of the roof dark green, and dead leaves had piled up in the gutters. Hollinger had apparently lost interest in keeping the place up after his wife died of cancer.

“Back me up,” Tom said as he got out of the cruiser.

Brandon stood in the yard while Tom mounted the front steps and knocked on the door. He got no response, and after three tries he gave up and rejoined Brandon.

“He has to be here somewhere. Let’s walk.”

They rounded the house into the backyard, where unraked leaves from a massive oak tree covered a scruffy patch of lawn. At the edge of the yard sat a large chicken coop with a fenced space for a flock of brown hens. A big vegetable garden, surrounded by high wire fencing to keep deer out, took up a broad clearing, and beyond the garden the land turned to rolling meadows.

Tom and Brandon found Hollinger on his fence line, lifting rails and shoving them back into slots in the posts. The contested fence between the Hollinger and Kelly properties was a simple post-and-rail that was easy to take apart and just as easy to put back together, but either chore would be time-consuming. Each section had three thick rails made of pine branches, six feet long between posts. About a hundred yards of rails, stretching down a slope, lay in the grass. A mixed flock of about forty brown and white sheep grazed nearby, ignoring the call of the wild that had led a few of their sisters to wander when the fence went down.

Hollinger looked up as Tom and Brandon approached. Pausing in his work, he wiped sweat from his face with a handkerchief. Despite the chilly November day, he had hung his denim barn jacket on a fence post and rolled up his shirt sleeves. A tall man in his sixties with thick white hair, he looked fit and strong. And not the least bit rattled by the appearance of two cops on his property.

Tom relaxed a little. “Hey, Jake.”

“Hey, Tom. And you’re Brandon, right? The Connollys’ boy?”

“Yes, sir,” Brandon said.

“Haven’t seen you since the election, Sheriff.” Hollinger stuffed the handkerchief into the back pocket of his jeans and offered a hand. “Congratulations. The best man won.”

“Thanks.” Tom shook his hand, feeling the strength of the older man’s grip and the calluses on his palms. “By the way, we saw some of your ewes in the road on our way over. I ran them back into a field.”

Hollinger blew out a sigh. “Those girls never pass up a chance to go exploring. Usually they come back on their own. If they don’t show up soon I’ll go find them and give them a ride home in the truck.”

“They’re over on the Kelly property.” Tom glanced to his left, but the stand of evergreens hid the Kelly house from view. “How long have you been working out here?”

“Just came out. I’ve been at the mill, and when I got home and started making my rounds, I found this.” Hands on hips, Hollinger scowled at the dismantled fence. “Fourth time this month. He even managed to get one of the posts out of the ground. I thought I was securing them when I sunk them in concrete.”

“He?”

“You know who I mean.” Hollinger flung a hand toward the Kelly land. “You here to take my complaint?”

“No, I came by to find out if you heard any gunshots in the last hour or two.”

Hollinger displayed no surprise or interest. He turned away from Tom and hefted one of the pine rails off the ground. “Nope. Like I said, I was at the mill. Somebody going over their limit for turkeys?”

“I’m afraid not,” Tom said. “Somebody shot Lincoln and Marie Kelly in their backyard.”

The rail dropped from Hollinger’s hands and landed on the ground with a thud that Tom felt as a vibration under his feet. “God damn,” Hollinger said. “Are they all right?”

“No.” Tom watched the man’s face for his reaction. “They’re both dead.”

Hollinger stared slack-jawed at Tom for a moment. He raised a hand, scratched his head. “God damn,” he repeated. “Who did it?”

His shock appeared genuine, but if he was the shooter he’d had time to prepare for Tom’s inevitable visit. “We don’t know yet. Have you seen or heard anything out of the ordinary today? Any voices, shouts? Any strange vehicles passing by?”

“No. My God. This is unbelievable.” Hollinger pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and swiped his face again. “Was it a burglary or what?”

Tom ignored the question and asked another. “Why were you at the lumber mill today? I thought you retired and turned it over to your son.”

“Yeah, I thought so too.” Hollinger seemed distracted, his gaze fixed on the trees in the distance that shielded the Kelly house. “But every time he screws up an order I have to go straighten it out for him.”

“Was Mark there when you were? Can he vouch for you—what time you got there, when you left?”

Hollinger snapped his head around, anger flaring in his eyes. “Oh now, hold on. You can’t be thinking I shot Linc and Marie.”

“You’ve been fighting with Lincoln Kelly for a while now.”

“About a fence, for God’s sake, a property line. I wouldn’t kill a man over something like that. Much less him
and
his wife.”

“People are murdered every day over a lot less,” Tom said. “How much land were you and Linc fighting about? How many feet?”

Hollinger threw up his arms in exasperation. “Who the hell knows? He kept changing his mind. He’d say six feet one week and twenty the next. Look, I knew the man had Alzheimer’s, and I tried to make allowances. But the survey shows I put this new fence right smack on the property line. The old one was six feet inside the line. I just took back what’s mine.”

“Does it make any difference?” Brandon asked. “A six-foot strip on one boundary?”

“Hell, yes, it makes a difference. I’ve been thinking for a while about selling, even before Packard came looking for land to buy. That’s why I wanted a fence right on the property line, so there wouldn’t be any confusion when I found a buyer.”

“I hear Packard’s already been handing out purchase agreements,” Tom said. “Have they made you a firm offer in writing? One that you like?”

“You bet I like it. They’ll give me top dollar—a lot more than my acreage is worth, to tell you the truth, but they’ve got it to spend and they want the land. That was just one more reason for Linc to raise hell about the property line. He swore he’d do everything he could to stop me from selling.”

“Do you expect things to change now that Lincoln and Marie are dead? Will Ronan and Sheila be easier to deal with than their father was?”

“Aw, God.” Hollinger winced as if he’d forgotten about the killings for a moment and Tom’s question had brought it all back with a jolt. “Who knows what’ll happen? Their kids haven’t lived here since they graduated college. They’re professionals, they’ve got careers. I can’t see either one of them wanting to come back here to live on the land.”

“So you think they’ll go against their dad’s wishes and sell?” Brandon put in.

“Now don’t put words in my mouth, son. I don’t have the least idea what they might do. I’ll just have to wait and see.”

Hollinger lifted a rail and shoved one end into a slot in a post. Tom grabbed the other end and maneuvered it into the opposite post. “Why are you so gung-ho about selling?”

Straightening, Hollinger flexed his back as if loosening stiff muscles. Sweat rolled down his face, and half-moons of perspiration darkened the armpits of his shirt. He scrubbed the handkerchief over his face again before answering. “I don’t want to live here alone anymore. That’s the plain truth. It’s not the same with Sue Ellen gone. Anyway, I’m almost seventy years old. I want some of that retirement leisure everybody talks about. If I sell to Packard, I’ll be comfortable the rest of my life. More than comfortable.”

Tom nodded. “Especially if you and Tavia Richardson combine your assets. The two of you together would have quite a nest egg.”

“I don’t know about that,” Hollinger muttered, avoiding Tom’s eyes.

Tom was surprised to see a deep flush rise in the man’s cheeks. Was he embarrassed by his relationship with Tavia? They didn’t flaunt it, but they hadn’t hidden it either. Plenty of people knew about it.

“I guess you realize,” Tom said, “that Joanna’s not going to sell. Packard’s probably going to scuttle the whole project if they can’t get her land.”

Hollinger waved off Tom’s remark with an impatient gesture. “I’m not going to stand here talking about selling land when Linc and Marie…good God, I still can’t take it in. Shot to death. Who could have—”

“Can you think of anybody who had a grudge against either of them?” Aside from yourself,
Tom added silently.

Hollinger looked at Tom, his eyes widening as if something startling had occurred to him. “The drugs. It could have had something to do with the drugs. I know they had the best intentions, trying to help sick people, but I was always afraid it might turn dangerous.”

“Wait a minute.” Tom held up a hand. “What are you talking about? What drugs?”

“Not the hard stuff, I don’t mean that. Pot. Marijuana. The Kellys have been growing the stuff and selling it for years.”