All Fall Down (2 page)

“I think we’d better head home now,” she said.

“So soon?” Cait asked. “Don’t you want to walk to the end of the path as usual?”

“No. I’d like to get dinner started.”

“I hope we’re not having anything fancy,” Robin said, dashing Blaine’s visions of chicken in lemon sauce. “I’m really in the mood for a pizza.”

“I
knew
it! Actually, that sounds pretty good to me, too. We’ll go to Village Pizza Inn. Do you and Kirk want to join us, Cait?”

“No, thanks. I have a roast in the oven, which is probably burning to a crisp, since Kirk will never remember to check it.”

Blaine laughed. “So you might be joining us after all.” She paused, then called, “Ashley!” The woods were silent. “Ashley, come on, girl!” Again there was no sound.

Blaine whistled and was glad finally to hear an answering bark. Only it wasn’t just a bark of recognition. It was a volley of barks. Had Ashley cornered a ground hog? The three of them stood still, listening. No, there was something different about the barking. It held a note of alarm Blaine had learned to recognize after owning the dog for years. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

Robin whistled for the dog she loved almost as much as Blaine did. No response except the distant, frantic barking. She and Blaine exchanged a look, then began to run along the path with Caitlin trailing behind. “Ashley, come here!” Robin shouted.

The barking continued, but the dog did not come. She was up ahead and off to the right, Blaine decided, stopping to listen again. “She’s at the creek. Maybe she tried to swim and can’t make it back up the bank. We’ve had so much rain, it could be crumbling.”

Blaine plunged into the undergrowth, feeling her running shoes sink slightly into the dark, loamy earth still spongy from Saturday’s downpour. Usually she didn’t veer from the path, frightened she might step on a snake. Even now she imagined a sleek head rising to bury its fangs in her leg. Could a copperhead bite through jeans? she wondered, stopping once more to listen.

This time she heard Ashley tearing back and forth through the vines along the creek, barking hysterically. At least the dog wasn’t drowning, but something was terribly wrong. Blaine started off again and in her alarm screamed as a chipmunk raced across her path. She slipped on the mossy ground, colliding with a holly, and felt one of the points on its leathery leaves scratch her face. Caitlin caught her arm to keep her from falling. Then they skirted the tree and immediately spotted the dog.

Ashley had stopped running and stood at the creek’s edge beside a weeping willow whose spiny, naked yellow limbs drooped desolately into the water.

“Has she found a dead animal?” Caitlin asked barely above a whisper.

“Maybe,” Blaine said doubtfully. “Ash, come here.”

The dog looked at her but refused to come. Instead she sat down solidly on the creek bank, staring determinedly into the water. Although she had never been trained as a hunting dog, the retrieval instinct was strong in her. A dead animal was a source of curiosity for the dog, one which she usually picked up and delivered at Blaine’s feet like a gift. But she wasn’t merely curious now, and she was making no attempt to retrieve whatever it was, as she would a piece of game. A sickening sense of déjà vu filled Blaine when she remembered another time Ashley had acted this way.

Cautiously the three of them approached through the dying undergrowth dank from yesterday’s rain. A vaguely ripe, nauseating odor rose from the creek, and Blaine suddenly thought of the carrion crows they’d seen flying away from this direction. Her stomach tightened as perspiration popped out on her forehead. She wanted to turn and run away from this lonely, darkening spot. But she
had
to see. No matter what it was, she had to see it.

Robin reached the dog’s side first. She knelt and touched Ashley’s head, murmuring, “What is it, girl?” Then, slowly, she looked into the water. Her back went rigid as her hands dropped limply to her sides. “Blaine,” she said in a voice gone childish with fear. “There’s…there’s something in the water.”

Blaine’s breath turned shallow as she and Cait picked their way hesitantly to the creek bank and looked down. Something floating. Something…no,
someone
.

Blaine bent down, peering into the water. Caught in the jutting roots of the old willow was a body. “My God,” Cait murmured.

Blaine stared. Abruptly, the world seemed to grow unnaturally quiet, just like the figure dressed in blue jeans and what once must have been a white sweater, now muddy brown from the dirty water.

“Blaine?” Cait quavered.

But Blaine couldn’t take her eyes off the floating figure. A bluish right hand, wearing a large, familiar diamond-and-opal ring, was entwined by two willow limbs and stuck up in the air, as if waving to someone on the opposite shore. Extremely long black hair floated gracefully on the dark, rippling water, surrounding a startling white face torn by fish and bird bites.

“It’s a woman,” Blaine said quietly as Cait leaned over her shoulder, peering at the figure.

Caitlin screamed before slapping a hand over her mouth. Blaine glanced back at her. Cait’s face had turned so white that the freckles stood out like dots of brown ink, unnatural and garish. Strangely, her scream did not set birds squawking in the trees. All was silent, as if in reverence of death.

Robin licked dry lips. “That ring. That hair.” Blaine’s breath stopped, and sourness filled her mouth. Robin leaned forward, nearer the floating body. “Her eyes are gone,” she said in an eerie, vacant voice. She turned her head slowly, gazing at Blaine. “It’s Rosie, and her beautiful eyes are gone.” Then Robin turned her head and threw up into the dense, creeping vines along the creek bank.

1

Blaine choked back her own nausea and rushed to Robin, holding her shoulders until the retching stopped. Keeping her eyes averted from the body, she pulled the girl to her feet. “We have to go back to the house and call the police.”

Robin looked at her wildly. “I can’t just
leave
her here!”

“You have to,” Blaine said, surprised by how controlled she sounded. “I’m not leaving
you
out here. It’s getting dark.”

“But Rosie…”

Robin shuddered violently, and Blaine shut her mind to the horror. “Cait, help me,” she said to her sister, who still stood with wide, terrified eyes and her hand over her mouth as if she were stifling back more screams. “We have to get back to the house.”

Caitlin had always responded to the sound of authority in Blaine’s voice, and now she snapped out of her shock and rushed to Robin, supporting her left side while Blaine wrapped an arm around the girl’s waist and propelled her away from the creek. With Ashley trotting ahead, they stumbled through the vines to the path. It’s so quiet, Blaine thought. It is so frighteningly, unnaturally quiet in these woods. And it’s such a long way to the house.

As Robin cried, Blaine and Caitlin half led, half carried her toward home. Long shadows now fell across the path, and the trees seemed to lean menacingly close, like sentient creatures in a child’s nightmare. Blaine’s heart thudded painfully, and her eyes darted left and right, probing the dimness of the woods. She felt as if a presence were everywhere, watching them, playing with them, waiting until they’d almost made it home before striking. Even Ashley seemed to feel it, staying close, her ears perked for any threatening sounds as she occasionally growled softly. When they finally reached the open expanse of the lawn, Blaine almost wept with relief.

By the time they staggered through the French doors, Blaine felt as if knives were slashing her chest. Too much strain after just recovering from pneumonia, she thought, fighting to keep both Robin and Cait from noticing her pain. The girl’s sobbing had subsided to intermittent whimpering, and she wasn’t leaning so heavily on Blaine as before.

When they entered the living room, Robin headed for the couch, but Blaine steered her down the long hall, through her bedroom to the bathroom. While Robin stood by limply, Blaine got a towel and a washcloth from the linen closet and turned on the cold water. “I want you to wash your face, then go lie down for a few minutes. You look like you’re going to faint.” She was relieved when without argument Robin bent over the sink. As she splashed water on her face, Blaine walked back to the living room and sank down on the couch, forcing herself to take slow, spaced breaths until the pain in her chest began to dull.

“Are you all right?” Cait asked, stopping her pacing through the living room long enough to hover over Blaine.

“I’m okay. Just breathless.”

“I’ll get you some water.”

“Yes, please.” Blaine reached for the telephone. “I have to call the police.”

“Do you want me to do it?”

“No,” Blaine said, recalling how Cait had a tendency to garble information when she was nervous. “Just get the water. I’ll take care of it.”

A deputy in the county sheriff’s office answered.

“This is Mrs. Avery. There’s a body in my creek. You have to send someone,” she blurted, thinking she sounded ludicrously abrupt. Maybe Cait should have made the call after all.

There was a pause before a young man said, “Just slow down, ma’am. Now, this is
who?
”

“It’s Blaine Avery. Martin Avery’s wife, out on Prescott Road.”

“Oh. Mrs. Avery.” Blaine recognized the voice of a young deputy named Clarke whom she’d met during the investigation of Martin’s death. He sounded excited. “Would you repeat that information, please?”

Blaine forced herself to speak more slowly. “There is a body on my property. In the creek. I believe it’s Rosalind Van Zandt.”

“Just a minute, ma’am.” Abruptly the receiver made a thunking sound in her ear, and she heard him say loudly, “It’s Blaine Avery on the phone. Says she found a body! Claims it’s Rosalind Van Zandt!”

In a moment a deep, calm male voice came on the line. “This is Quint.” Blaine stiffened. Logan Quint, the sheriff. They’d met in grade school, dated as teenagers, and she had thought of him as her friend until that awful day in late May when he’d come to the house after she arrived home to find Martin dead. “What’s this about a body?”

“Robin, Cait, and I were walking my dog in the woods behind the house when we discovered a body in the creek. Or rather, the dog did.” Her control was breaking. She caught her breath and added weakly, “I think it’s been there a while.”

She expected a barrage of questions, but mercifully Logan said, “I’ll be right out.”

Blaine felt a sob rising. “Please hurry.”

“I will. In the meantime, Blaine, I want you to stay in your house. Don’t go back in those woods.”

2

The sun had disappeared and only a faint rose blush hung above the trees as Logan Quint and Chief Deputy Abel Stroud sped along Prescott Road toward the Avery house five miles out of town.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Stroud commented. “First Martin Avery, now the Van Zandt girl, if it really is her.”

“She was reported missing two hours ago, and Robin Avery was one of her closest friends,” Logan said. “Blaine said Robin was with her when she found the body, so if Robin says it’s Rosalind, I think we can be pretty sure it is.”

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t call me when she was reported missin’.”

“Like I said, I’ve only known about it a couple of hours. Her aunt said she was supposed to be in Charleston for the weekend visiting a cousin. When she didn’t return by midafternoon, Miss Peyton got worried and called the cousin. Rosalind hadn’t been there at all. That’s when she called me, and Clarke and I have been trying to contact Rosalind’s friends to see what they can tell us, although we haven’t had much luck. None of them seem to be home.”

“Sunday matinee,” Abel said. “My girl, Arletta, goes every week. Most of the kids do. Not much else for them to do around here on a long Sunday afternoon.”

“I guess not. In my day we went to the Dairy Queen.”

“That’s the difference between your day and mine. We
worked
on Sunday afternoons. Always somethin’ to do on a farm.”

Logan groaned inwardly. He’d heard about Abel’s childhood on the farm until he could hardly keep from thrashing the man every time he launched into another interminable story of hardship and responsibility. If Abel were to be believed, by the time he was ten years old he’d been running a twenty-acre dairy farm single-handedly.

“Sure is a coincidence, though,” Abel went on, luckily too diverted by the present drama to dwell on his youth. “Of course, if it turns out the Van Zandt girl was murdered, too, Blaine Avery’s gonna be in one hell of a fix.”

She certainly would be, Logan thought. Just six months ago she’d called him in hysterics to report that her husband had killed himself. And that’s exactly what it looked like at first. Logan had found Martin Avery slumped in his wheelchair on the terrace. A small, slightly stellate hole appeared in his right temple, indicating a contact wound. Later, the M.E. reported traces of gunpowder on Avery’s right hand.

But Logan was bothered by the fact that Avery’s Smith & Wesson Combat Masterpiece had been lying near him, not clutched in his hand, as was the case in most suicides by gunshot. Then the next day he’d discovered a slug from the Smith & Wesson lodged in a young maple tree about thirty feet away from the terrace. The slug had not been there long, which the condition of the wood surrounding it indicated, yet Blaine and Robin both claimed they’d never fired the gun and that when Avery had slipped into depression after being paralyzed from the waist down when his Ferrari was crushed by a hit-and-run driver, the weapon had been kept in a locked gun cabinet whose key Blaine had hidden in the lining of her jewelry box. The key, however, was found in Avery’s desk drawer. Although it was possible Avery had found the key earlier, the only time he had been left alone was the Saturday afternoon of his death. Therefore, he would have had no earlier opportunity to fire the gun without the shot being heard by someone else in the house, leading Logan to conclude that the gun had probably been fired twice on Saturday. Perhaps Avery had taken a wild shot before he put the gun to his temple, Logan thought. The only problem was that five unspent cartridges remained in the gun’s six-cartridge cylinder, and it was unlikely that the man would have replaced the missing cartridge before killing himself.

The prosecuting attorney was certain Avery had been shot, the gun placed in his hand and fired to leave gunpowder residue, then another cartridge inserted in the cylinder to make it appear the gun had been fired only once. Unfortunately, Avery’s beautiful wife—eighteen years his junior, rumored to be involved with Avery’s good-looking young doctor, Richard Bennett, and slated to inherit half of Avery’s ten-million-dollar estate, including his controlling shares in Avery Manufacturing, one of the biggest boatbuilding companies in the eastern United States—had no alibi. She claimed she had left home around twelve-thirty for a shopping trip to a nearby mall. Since Avery’s private-duty nurse, Bernice Litchfield, was to arrive at one o’clock, Blaine said she had not worried about leaving her husband alone for less than half an hour.

Bernice Litchfield, however, swore she’d received a call from Martin Avery at a quarter to one, telling her his wife was taking him out for a drive and they would not be needing her services that day. Robin Avery had been with Rosalind Van Zandt from ten until four, helping decorate the school gym for the prom to be held that night, so she could not verify at what time her stepmother had left, or if she had left at all. Nor could anyone at the mall remember waiting on Blaine Avery. The investigation had been grueling, one that would have crushed a weaker woman, Logan thought. But in the end, to the prosecuting attorney’s great chagrin and Logan’s relief, there had been too many questions about when the shot was fired into the tree, and no hard evidence against Blaine. There had been nothing but suspicion.

“Her family never did have a good name,” Stroud was saying dolefully. “Her daddy wasn’t worth salt.”

Logan tried to keep his voice neutral. “Jim O’Connor was okay.”

“Oh, I know he had an agreeable way about him. You couldn’t help likin’ him just to talk to. But he was a lazy welfare bum. I can’t tell you how many times I found him lollin’ down in the park drunk as a lord. No wonder his wife took off and left him. Kind of a shame about those girls, though. She shoulda taken them with her. It had to do somethin’ to them, being deserted by their own mama and raised by a do-nothin’ like O’Connor.”

“I think they turned out all right.”

“I guess Cait’s a good girl. Married a good, steady guy—Kirk Philips. He and his daddy got that wood-workin’ business.”

“I know that, Abel.”

“They do good work, too. Then Cait started that daycare center.” Logan felt his hands tightening on the wheel at Abel’s habitual insistence on telling him the history of people he’d known most of his life. “She seems to be doin’ okay with that place. I hear there’s a waitin’ list to get kids in there. Most folks seem to think a lot of Cait. And Blaine…well, she’s a looker, I’ll give you that,” Stroud continued as they pulled into the Avery driveway. “But she’s trouble. I’m tellin’ you, Sheriff, the woman is pure trouble.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Logan muttered, wondering if Stroud was right.

3

After Blaine hung up the phone, Caitlin called Kirk. Blaine heard her trying to soothe him, telling him she was fine and that she wanted him to stay at home with their four-year-old daughter. “Don’t come out here,” she ordered. “The excitement and the policemen will upset Sarah. I’ll be home as soon as I can get away.” Then she went to check on Robin while Blaine remained immobilized on the couch. She drew up her knees, hugging them to her chest as she stared at the French-style masonry fireplace, its mantel decorated with polished brass and copper ornaments gleaming in what was left of the sun. She swallowed a few times, controlling the sobs, and in a few minutes she was aware of her breathing calming, but she was very cold. Against her will she closed her eyes, and the body’s white, bloated face floated before her.

Something touched her leg and she jumped, her eyes snapping open to see Ashley sitting in front of her. Twigs had caught in the long hair on the dog’s ears, making it stand out. She looked as frightened and frazzled as Blaine.

“Come with me, girl,” Blaine said. The dog trotted behind her into the kitchen and waited patiently while Blaine fixed Ashley a bowl of water and considered pouring herself a shot of Scotch, then decided it wouldn’t be wise to have alcohol on her breath when the police arrived. Instead she poured a glass of orange juice and sat down at the kitchen table, worrying.

What if the body came loose from the tree roots and floated away before Logan got here? But it couldn’t float far in half an hour. This was just a little creek swollen by Saturday afternoon’s rain, not a river with a swift current, although two miles away the creek did flow into the Ohio River. If the body hadn’t gotten trapped in the tree roots, it would probably be well on its way to the river.

Ashley had flopped down in exhaustion under the kitchen table, but she perked her ears a few minutes later at the sound of a car in the driveway. Then she scrambled up and barked her way to the front door. The bell chimed. Blaine opened one of the double doors to see two men standing on the porch.

“Evening, Mrs. Avery,” the taller one in uniform said.

She and Logan had become very formal in the past few months. “Please come in.” Ashley reluctantly stood aside, although she looked with suspicion at the two men, almost as if she knew their presence spelled trouble. “You made it out here in record time.”

“That’s what the red light on the car’s for,” Abel Stroud piped up. He’d been a deputy for as long as Blaine could remember, and she’d never liked his self-important aggression. Even his looks offended her. Right now the thin, graying hair he carefully combed over a bald crown with hair tonic was drying out to stand in dirty-looking wisps, and he’d gained at least ten pounds since she’d seen him in July. Zipped into a too-small jacket, he resembled a sausage stuffed into casing. His cheeks were flushed with excitement, his pale blue eyes darting everywhere. But there was something Blaine had learned during the investigation into Martin’s death—Stroud was not the fool he often pretended to be. And that made him dangerous, because for reasons she didn’t understand, he didn’t like her. She felt he’d been disappointed when she hadn’t been arrested for Martin’s murder.