Sealed with a Kill (4 page)

“It’s nice to meet you all,” Brenna said. She slung a canvas messenger bag over her shoulder. “As Preston said, my name is Brenna. We’re going to take a hike around the lake today. Later in the week, I’ll be teaching a decoupage class at Vintage Papers in town. The leaves you gather today, we’ll use for a project then, so please keep an eye out for colorful ones that you might want to use.”

The sweaters nodded enthusiastically; the teen looked sullen, the mother resigned, the single girl nonresponsive, and the young lovers oblivious. Fabulous, Brenna thought; this should be fun.

She began walking the path that led along the edge of the lake. As she passed by, the door to Siobhan’s cabin banged open and out stepped the young woman. She took in the group before her and frowned.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Hello to you, too,” Brenna said and kept walking. She did not feel the need to explain herself to someone who lacked the basic good manners of a proper greeting.

Siobhan quickly shut her door and hurried down the steps.

“Sorry,” she said as she fell into step beside Brenna. “I was just surprised to see such a large group right outside my door.”

“Hmm.” Brenna supposed she had a point. “Nate lets Preston, from the inn in town, offer walking tours around the lake. Preston couldn’t make it today, and he asked me to fill in for him.”

“How far are you going?”

“Not far.”

“Into the woods?”

“Yes, but staying on the path.”

“Oh.” Siobhan said nothing more but continued walking beside Brenna.

It occurred to Brenna, after several minutes, that Siobhan had apparently decided to join the tour. Brenna wasn’t sure how she felt about this development, but as they rounded the corner and the sweater set, Jan and Dan, began to pepper her with questions about the wildlife of the area, Brenna didn’t have much of a chance to think about it.

As they gathered fallen leaves, which Brenna tucked into her bag, she entertained them with the story about the family of skunks that had moved in under her porch last summer. Hank, Nate’s golden retriever, was the unfortunate one to discover them when he went sticking his nose where it clearly did not belong and got sprayed. Nate had gotten the local wildlife management office to help relocate the family of skunks. All went well, but it did take several days for the smell to leave the area.

Most of the group laughed; only Suede the surly teen and Siobhan looked disgusted. The teen, Brenna figured, was disgusted by everything; he was, after all, a teen. Siobhan, however, was clearly lacking anything resembling a sense of humor.

The group was taking a leaf-gathering break and had fanned out along the path. Brenna had found a clutch of oval-shaped golden beech leaves. She was sifting through them, picking out the ones that were not already turning brown.

“I’m sorry about Tommy . . . er . . . Suede,” Julie said. She crouched down beside Brenna and began to sort through the leaves with her. “He’s become so surly since his father and I split up. I don’t know who he is anymore. And yet when I look at him, I see the cheerful little redheaded butterball who used to waddle around the house in just a diaper and a cowboy hat, who was fascinated with his toes and used to giggle at butterflies.”

Brenna glanced up to see Suede, knit hat low on his brow, ripped jeans, iPod plugged into his ears, leaning up against a nearby tree with a faraway expression on his face.

“Will it help if I tell you it’s just a phase?” she asked.

“Yes,” Julie said. “It would. Of course, I’d be really grateful if you could tell me the exact date and time he will start to behave like a human being again.”

Brenna laughed. She liked Julie. She didn’t seem much older than Brenna herself, and with her heartshaped face and big green eyes, she had an air of fragility that made Brenna feel protective of her. At the same time, when she gazed at her son, there was a strength in her that ran bone deep, and Brenna knew Julie would never let any harm come to Suede. And her patience with him showed her to be a woman with a great capacity to love.

“No such luck,” Brenna said. “However, I have a friend who has five boys. And the last time I saw her, she was looking for a new housecleaning service because her current cleaner quit when the boys decided to make a Mentosand-Sprite volcano in the living room. It worked—too well.”

Julie laughed and said, “Hey, I’m feeling better already.”

“I thought you might.” Brenna glanced up. The rest of the group was getting ahead of them, so she and Julie left their pile and hurried to catch up.

“Is that a bridled sparrow?” Jan asked, nudging Dan with her elbow.

“Can’t be,” he said. “They never fly this far north.”

He pulled a pair of folded binoculars out of his pocket and stopped walking to train them on the tiny little songbird fluttering from branch to branch.

“You know, I think it might be,” he said. He stepped off the path in pursuit of the small bird.

“Dan,” Brenna whispered. “You need to stay on the path. Nate is very specific about not letting the wildlife be disturbed.”

“Just a couple more steps,” Dan said. “I’ve almost got a solid visual. This would be a real coup to tell our birder club.”

Everyone was silent, waiting for Dan’s proclamation. Brenna figured she could give him a second before she yanked him back onto the path.

“Oh, my,” Dan said. “It’s . . .”

Everyone leaned forward, even Suede and Siobhan, who had been the two complaining the loudest during the short hike, to hear if it was indeed the rarely spotted bridled sparrow.

“It’s a . . .”

“A what, Dan? A what?” Jan asked. Her voice held an excited trill of anticipation.

Dan lowered the binoculars and turned to look at the group. His face had gone stark white and his eyes were huge. He looked shocked and shaky.

“It’s a hand, sticking out of the leaves over there. My God, I think we’ve found a body.”

Lily screamed and clung to Zach. Suede looked like he was torn between hiding behind his mother and going to check out the grisly scene. When it looked like morbid curiosity was going to win, Julie stayed him with a hand on his arm. Brenna saw a fleeting look of relief pass over his face before he covered it with his usual scowl.

“Dan, come away from there,” Jan said. “I’ve watched enough
Law and Order
to know that we shouldn’t disturb anything.”

Dan looked unconvinced. “Shouldn’t we check to see if he’s dead?”

Jan fished into her nylon backpack and pulled out her cell phone. “I’m calling nine-one-one.”

Brenna felt light-headed. Hadn’t she had enough bodies in the past year? Surely there could not be another one. Not here in her own backyard. It had to be a prank. Halloween was coming. Some of the local kids must have planted a fake hand out here as a prank.

“I’ll go check it out,” she said.

“I’ll come with you,” Siobhan said.

“Me, too,” Paula said.

Brenna was surprised by the show of support. She would have refused them, but honestly, on the off chance it really was a body, she didn’t want to do this alone.

The leaves crunched under their feet as they approached the pile Dan indicated. A large fluffy cloud drifted over the sun, blocking its warmth, and Brenna shivered in her hooded sweatshirt.

As they were folded into the crowd of towering maple, oak, and birch trees, Brenna felt her heart thump in her chest. There were several piles of leaves, swept together by the wind and the uneven terrain. She kept her eyes trained on the largest. At ten feet away, it became obvious there was indeed a human hand poking out of the leaves.

Brenna sucked in a breath. This morning’s breakfast put up a mutiny in her stomach, but she forced it back down. She was responsible for this tour. She wasn’t going to let them down by losing her cool or her breakfast.

She knelt beside the pile and brushed away some of the debris. She could feel the two women at her back but noticed that neither of them made a move to come closer to the body. Fine.

She pushed aside some of the leaves where she assumed the head would be. A tuft of white hair showed first. That was as far as she got. Now that she was closer, she could see the dark brown stains in the leaves that could only be blood, and could smell the unmistakable stench of death.

She rose to her feet and backed up quickly. She held out her arms and pushed the two women back until all three of them were in full retreat.

“The police are on their way,” Jan said.

“Good,” Brenna said. “We’re going to need them.”

“Did you recognize him?” Siobhan asked. Her look was intense as she scrutinized Brenna’s face.

“No,” Brenna answered. “There really wasn’t enough left of his face to identify.”

A gasp rippled through the group.

“Let’s move back down the path so Chief Barker can see us,” Brenna said. She did not add that she wanted to put some space between her and the dead guy. Judging by the speed with which the rest of the group moved, they felt the same way.

No one spoke as they trudged away from the grisly scene. Brenna felt a buzz in her head as if her ears were ringing, and she wondered if she was going into a minor state of shock.

“Not exactly your average bridled sparrow sighting, now was it?” Paula asked as she fell in step beside Brenna.

Brenna glanced at the young woman. It was just the sort of thing Tenley would have said to distract her from the ghastly discovery, and she appreciated the girl’s attempt to break the tension.

“No, not exactly,” she said.

“I’m from New York City,” Paula said. “I live in Brooklyn, actually. I wanted to get away for a while, away from the hustle and bustle, the noise and the crime, and spend some time in the quiet serenity of nature. Pretty ironic, don’t you think?”

Brenna didn’t know what to say. How to handle a dead body in the middle of a nature hike was just not covered in any of the etiquette manuals her mother had forced her to read as a kid. She was pretty sure even Martha Stewart would be stumped by this one.

“This sort of thing doesn’t happen here very often,” she said.

She wasn’t sure if she was trying to comfort Paula or herself. Either way it was a big fat lie because this was the third body she’d stumbled upon in the past year.

Paula shrugged and retreated into the warmth of her puffy jacket. Brenna couldn’t tell what she was thinking behind her thick glasses, but frankly, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. This was the stuff of nightmares.

In what felt like hours but was really just minutes, they heard the crunch of heavy boots headed toward them. Chief Barker, the head of Morse Point’s police department, was coming through the woods flanked by his two officers, DeFalco and Meyers.

“Brenna, the call we got, it can’t be right,” Chief Barker said. “Right?”

“What call did you get?” she asked.

“A body in the woods,” he said.

“Sorry, Chief,” she said. “It’s under that large leaf pile over there.”

He rubbed his index finger across his gray mustache; then he nodded. Brenna noticed his shoulders lowered as if in resignation. It had not been an easy year for the Morse Point police.

“You folks wait here and give Officer Meyers your names and where you can be reached,” he said. “We’ll go check it out.”

He pulled some blue crime scene gloves out of his back pocket, as did DeFalco. The two of them made their way over to the leaves, and Brenna noticed they were careful where they stepped so as not to disturb the area.

The tour group watched silently as the men worked. Officer Meyers, a tall black man with very broad shoulders, was new to the force, having been hired just a few months ago. He made his way from person to person, getting their pertinent information and their accounts of what transpired.

He stopped in front of Brenna last. She had seen him around town and knew that given the size of the town and the trajectory of gossip within it, he probably knew that she had already been on the scene for the discovery of two other bodies.

“Ms. Miller, can I ask you a few questions?”

“Of course,” she answered. She kept her gaze on Chief Barker, her own curiosity getting the best of her. Did she know the person in the woods? Had he lived in Morse Point? And why was it always her?

“You’re in charge of this tour group, correct?”

Brenna forced herself to glance away from the body and focus on Officer Meyers.

“Yes,” she said. “Preston Kelly, the owner of the Morse Point Inn, asked me yesterday if I would take the group for him, as he had a schedule conflict.”

“Is everyone here accounted for?” he asked.

Brenna glanced around the group. This was everyone she had started out with, so she nodded. “Yes.”

“Can you tell me exactly what happened?” he asked.