Buried (Twisted Cedars Mysteries Book 1) (25 page)

Jamie loaded up her car with provisions for a long drive—take-out coffee, bottle of water, and snacks. She turned off her cell phone—which she’d neglected to power up the previous night—and slipped a Prairie Oyster CD into the player.

The song was about ancient history and Jamie sang along, wishing it was true, that history didn’t matter. But whether it was the events of a day ago, a week, or even years, history did matter. Very much.

And that was why she was driving out to a remote campground to talk to Olivia in person today. She needed to look into Olivia’s eyes when she gave her answers. She had to know for sure that she was getting the truth.

Because if just one more of Kyle’s stories didn’t hold up, then despite her wedding vows, she was finished.

Leaving would not be easy. It would be heart-breaking. She’d banked everything on this marriage and she wanted so badly to be proven wrong, yet she didn’t hold out high hopes.

The sick feeling in her gut only got worse as she neared the campground. She couldn’t drink her coffee, let alone eat the snacks she’d brought along. When she finally arrived at Little Redwood Campground, she checked with the front office for directions to the Argent’s site. The setting was so beautiful and peaceful, yet her stomach churned worse than ever as she followed the directions to where the Argent’s truck and camper were tucked into a grove of ancient redwoods.

She got out of her car. “Hello?”

All was silent and still. The wooden picnic table next to the camper had a lantern on top and nothing else. She knocked on the trailer door but there was no response. She tested the door. Locked.

Jamie sat down to wait. After half an hour, she settled on the grass, in the sun, and soon her late night caught up to her.

* * *

Jamie awakened to the sound of voices, approaching footsteps. Instantly alert, she rose and brushed off bits of grass and needles. Olivia and her husband were dressed in shorts and T-shirts and both wore caps. They had fishing rods and tackle, and a bucket that looked like it had some weight to it.

“Hi, Olivia, Bert.”

“Jamie? What are you doing here?” Olivia set down her rod, her expression unwelcoming.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Some problem with the accounts?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Then...?”

The woman’s hostility was obvious. Jamie felt her suspicions grow stronger and her stomach knotted tighter.

“Olivia, Kyle told me that you took early retirement from the business because you wanted to spend more time with Bert. Is that true?”

Olivia’s eyes narrowed. “He really told you that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s a load of crap. I was let go. He told me I was redundant.”

Jamie’s heart sank. Another lie. Oh, God. And if she called Kyle on it, he would, no doubt, manufacture an explanation. And it might even make sense. But she didn’t want to hear it this time.

jamie couldn’t face the
prospect of going home to Kyle’s empty house. She felt like her head was exploding and her heart was breaking, all at the same time. Worst of all she couldn’t stop thinking about Cory’s question:
Will you still be here when we get home?
Poor thing. Cory had been abandoned by two key people in her life—her mother and her grandmother.

Now it seemed as if Jamie might have no choice but to leave her as well.

What she needed, Jamie decided, was a drink. People. Noise. Distractions.

* * *

The Linger Longer was quiet, but then again it was only Wednesday. Just two tables were occupied, and as luck would have it, one was with her brother and Charlotte Hammond.

“Hey there.” Maybe it was a sign, running into her brother this way.

They welcomed her to their table and Dougal ordered her a beer. “Where’s Kyle?”

“Away on business. The kids are at summer camp for two weeks.”

“So, for one night, you’re a single woman again, huh?” Charlotte said, her tone friendly.

There was an interesting vibe between her brother and Charlotte. Jamie wondered if her bachelor brother was finally falling in love. She had a hard time picturing quiet, studious Charlotte with her brother. But they both loved books, so they had that much in common.

“When Dougal was a kid he used to spend a lot of time at the library.”

“Part of my mispent youth,” Dougal joked.

“I know,” Charlotte said. “I used to see him there. Not that he would have noticed me.”

“Well, maybe he did,” Jamie said.

Charlotte shook her head, smiling. “A plain-looking, skinny girl, four years younger? No way.”

“We were both kind of invisible to him back then, weren’t we?” Jamie said. “At home Dougal could go an entire week without saying one word to me. Unless it was, ‘get out of my way,’ or some other sweet thing like that.”

“Daisy was the same with me. She’d get angry if I just
looked
through her make-up drawer in the bathroom.” Charlotte glanced at Jamie’s new wedding band, then grimaced. “Sorry. That was tactless.”

“Don’t worry. Daisy’s your sister, so of course you should talk about her. And she and Kyle have been divorced for so long, it’s not an issue for me, at all.”

“Thanks for being so sweet about it. It is nice to talk about Daisy sometimes. Even if it is just to complain that she hated sharing a bathroom with me.” Charlotte laughed.

“Dougal didn’t have much choice about sharing with me and my mom. What we never had much of in our trailer was space.”

Charlotte’s expression turned wistful. “It must have been kind of cozy though, huh?”

Her response was totally unexpected. It confirmed to Jamie, that even though she and Dougal had been poor, they’d been lucky in lots of other ways. “You’re right, it was cozy. And fun most of the time, thanks to my mom.”

“I was close to my mother, too. Not so much my sister. Something I’ve always regretted. Now I just wish I could see Daisy again. That would be enough.”

“She’s never in touch?”

“Not unless you call making regular cash withdrawals from our joint account staying in touch.”

Charlotte’s cheeks suddenly looked hollow, her eyes haunted. Jamie thought of Daisy’s journal. Kyle had said he was saving Daisy’s stuff for the children, but she wondered if he had ever offered to let Charlotte look through it. She would guess not, but as Daisy’s sister, surely Charlotte had the right.

Jamie’s beer went down fast, and she ordered another, along with a plate of wings and another of nachos to share with the others. She asked Dougal how his research into the librarian killings was going, and he told her they’d had some new developments.

As Dougal and Charlotte filled her in, Jamie stared from one to the other. “But this is freaking unbelievable. How is it no one ever caught this killer?”

“You’d be surprised how many homicide investigations went unsolved in the 70’s,” Dougal said. “There were few state crime labs and no DNA testing. Email didn’t exist yet and individual law agencies had no ability to share database information via the Internet.”

“I guess it would be pretty amazing if you could find the killer now, huh? Forty years later?”

“Yeah. It would bring resolution to the survivors, that’s for sure. It’s awful to live without ever knowing the truth about what happened.”

Jamie nodded. She could imagine, all too well. Suddenly, despite the risk of having Dougal say he’d told her so, she had to share her worries about her husband.

“Dougal, I’m afraid you might have been right about Kyle. He’s not the man I thought I married. I just found out today that he manipulated me into quitting my job at Howard and Mason so I would work for his company and spend more time looking after his children.”

“How did he do that?” Charlotte asked.

Jamie explained about Olivia Argent’s so-called “retirement.” “But that’s not even the worst thing. He told me he was going on a business trip to Coos Bay, to finalize some condo deal. But I found out yesterday he was really travelling to California.”

“Does he have business dealings there?” Dougal asked.

“Not that I’m aware of. I’m afraid he might be having an affair.”

Dougal swore. But to his credit, he didn’t rub in the fact that he’d warned her not to marry Kyle.

“Don’t overreact,” Charlotte counseled. “Talk to him first. Give him a chance to explain.”

Dougal shrugged. “Sure, talk to him. But if I were you, I’d be contacting a good attorney sooner, rather than later.”

* * *

Dougal had fought a war with his good intentions where Charlotte was concerned—and lost. That night, after Jamie left, he asked Charlotte to come home with him. For some reason, perhaps because she could tell how worried he was about his sister, she agreed. On the drive home, they compared thoughts on what Jamie should do about Kyle.

“She should leave first, ask questions later. The guy’s a goddamned liar.”

“Makes me wonder if he’s lied about Daisy, too.”

Dougal reached over the gearshift to squeeze her shoulder.

Making love turned out to be the perfect antidote for their troubled emotions. But later, when Charlotte was sleeping peacefully in his bed, Dougal still felt restless. One minute he was wondering what Kyle was up to in California. The next he was puzzling over the connection between the librarian murders. He and Charlotte had managed to find some answers lately—but they still had no idea why the killings had been exactly one year apart? And why in those particular locales?

Maybe there was something he’d missed in his notes.

Quietly he slipped out of bed and into his jeans and a sweater. He sat at the dining table, going over her notes for almost an hour, before he found something he’d missed. It was so obvious, now, he felt like an idiot. Gilbert had told him there was a big library convention in town when his grandmother was murdered. Of course, that had to be the big Oregon Library Association Conference. According to Charlotte, the same conference that her aunt and mother always attended.

Dougal went back to the notes he’d taken from the OLA newsletters in 1972 through 1974. And sure enough, the date and place of the conferences coincided with each of the four murders.

He couldn’t just sit on this. He had to wake Charlotte and tell her. He was just getting out of the chair, however, when he heard her voice.

“Dougal? Have you found something?”

Her instincts were impeccable, he marveled. Or maybe he’d been making more noise down here than he’d intended. “The connection between the murders. They happened every year at the OLA’s annual conference.”

“Really?” Charlotte hurried down the stairs, her hair a mess, her body wrapped in the throw blanket he kept on an upstairs chair.

He showed her his notes. She nodded, then her eyes brightened. “Hang on, let me get something.” She went to the curio cabinet and pulled out four snow globes. “From the moment I saw these, they struck me as strange. My aunt had some good quality china in here. Why would she also save these tacky snow globes?”

Dougal took them from her and set them down on the table. Sure enough, she had one for each location where a murder had taken place. “It’s almost like they’re some sort of trophy,” he said.

Charlotte looked appalled. “Are you suggesting my aunt really did kill those women?”

“She would have had opportunity,” Dougal said. “And these trophies are suspicious. But was she strong enough to strangle another woman? And what would be her motive?”

“Maybe someone gave her the snow globes and she didn’t know what they stood for?”

Dougal nodded. “Someone like the child she’d abandoned all those years ago.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “Librarianmomma.”

* * *

They went back to bed an hour later. Dougal had no idea how well Charlotte slept, but he fell into such a deep fog that he didn’t wake up until nine the next morning. He knew right away that Charlotte was gone, probably she’d wanted to shower and change at home before heading in to the library.

His plan was to get out of bed, but somehow he fell back asleep, into a twisted dream about the past. Kyle was there. Wade, Daisy, and his sister, too. Jamie was in some sort of danger, but no one would believe him. They laughed. Told him he was crazy. Then, abruptly, he found himself alone, in the woods behind the cabin. And he could hear crying...

Who was crying?

When he woke the second time, it was almost noon. His head was pounding. That dream. His subconscious was trying to tell him something. But what?

As he was brushing his teeth his thoughts skittered back to the conversation with Jamie last night at the bar. She’d told him Kyle had been in California. An idea occurred to him, then. He spat out the toothpaste and grabbed his phone.

Fortunately she answered right away.

“You said Kyle went to California. Do you know where, specifically?”

“Sacramento. Why?”

He swore. “I’ll tell you later. Just, get out of the house, Jamie. Don’t be there when he comes home.”

Soft hearted Charlotte had kept her joint account with her sister open all these years, because she was certain her sister needed that money to survive. But what if someone else was using her banking card? Someone who was privy to her access code. Someone like her ex-husband? He could have used a disguise to trick the video cameras at the ATMs. Or paid a woman who looked a bit like Daisy to make the withdrawals.

There was only one reason Dougal could think of, for Kyle to make such an effort to create the illusion that Daisy was still alive. But if Kyle had been responsible for her death—what had he done with her body?

Dougal went to the kitchen to put on the coffee. What would he do in Kyle’s shoes? Dumping a body in the ocean would be easy—but there would be a chance it would wash up or be discovered by fishermen.

The other obvious choice was burial.

Coffee spilled to the counter, as Dougal dropped the scoop. Pieces were coming together so fast now, he knew he was onto something.

The crying in the woods from his dream. The patchy area of the old vegetable garden. No one would look for a body if they didn’t think anyone had died.