Death Notice (2 page)

Blood. He was certain now. He could taste it.

He lay flat on his back, his body stretched taut, arms at his sides. When he tried to move them, they wouldn’t budge. Rope was wrapped across his arms, legs, torso, and head, binding him tight. The pressure flattened him, ironing out the stooped shoulders that fifty years on the farm had given him.

He began to panic, breathing faster through his nostrils, a locomotive picking up speed. He tried to yell for help, parting his lips to scream. But his mouth wouldn’t open. His lips refused
to separate, the pain there growing more extreme. He tried two more times, the hurt so bad it formed deep grunts in the back of his throat. Since the grunts had no way of escaping, he was forced to choke them back.

On his last attempt to scream, he realized what had happened. The pain brought clarity, sharpening his mind so that he understood the situation fully.

Someone had sealed his mouth shut.

He tried to scream once more, hoping the sheer strength of the sound would blast through the barrier his lips now created. The noise that emerged was familiar to him. He heard it all the time on the farm—the high-pitched squeal made just before the slaughter. Only this time the sound was coming from him.

He heard another noise, audible beneath his own desperate attempts to cry out.

Footsteps.

Someone else was there.

“It won’t be as bad if you hold still,” a voice in the darkness said.

The owner of the voice stood just behind his head. He felt warm breath on his ear. Fingers crawled along his chin and held his head in place.

Something pressed against his neck. Cold. Sharp. There was a moment of pressure, an unsettling suspense. Then the cold, sharp something pushed
through
his skin, entering his body, dividing flesh from flesh.

Blood poured out of him, spilling onto his shoulders, dampening his hair. He lay there helpless, feeling like a freshly gutted animal. Each beat of his heart sent another wave of blood coursing out of his body.

This time, the pain was unbearable. It wasn’t just at his mouth anymore.

It was inside him.

It was everywhere.

He began to scream. Not out loud, but in his head, the desperate sirens of noise ricocheting off the inside of his skull. The cold, sharp something remained in his neck, wriggling. The pain was so overwhelming it erased his thoughts, his silent screams. It kept erasing until there was nothing left in his head but pain.

And fear.

And, finally, darkness.

“Chief Campbell!”

Kat’s name rattled up Main Street as soon as she set foot on the sidewalk. She had just stepped out of Big Joe’s, a Starbucks wannabe, carrying an extra-large coffee, for which she had paid Starbucks’ prices. Normally, the concept of four-dollar java would have annoyed her. But it was a gray and frigid morning, and she needed the heat and clarity that coffee provided. Unfortunately, the sound of her name, now being shouted a second time, prevented her from taking that first, precious sip.

“Hey, Chief!”

The source of the yell was Jasper Fox, owner of a flower shop burdened with the name Awesome Blossoms. Despite the cold, perspiration glistened on his face as he barreled up the sidewalk. Huffing and puffing, he waited until he reached Kat to finish his sentence.

“I’ve been robbed.”

Kat, coffee cup suspended in front of her mouth, blinked with disbelief. In Perry Hollow, robberies happened about as often as solar eclipses. Its pine-dotted streets and exhaustingly quaint storefronts were mostly trouble-free.

“Robbed? Are you sure?”

Jasper had an absurd mustache that dripped from his face like two dirty icicles. Whenever Kat saw him, she thought of a
walrus. That morning, the mustache drooped even lower than normal.

“I think I’d know,” Jasper said.

His hangdog expression told her he had been expecting a different response. Something action-packed and decisive. Maybe Kat could have lived up to his expectations had she been given a chance to take a sip of her coffee. Instead, she could only lower the cup and watch Jasper as he watched her.

She knew what he was thinking. She read it in his eyes. He saw a woman five feet tall, ten pounds overweight, and six years shy of middle age. A woman who darkened her blond hair in order to be taken seriously. A woman who had bags under her eyes because the furnace was on the fritz and her son was up half the night with a cough. Most of all, he saw a woman—with a badge pinned to her uniform—idling on the sidewalk when she should have been investigating the town’s first theft in more than a year.

Knowing all of this was going through Jasper’s brain, Kat asked, “What was stolen?”

“I’ll show you.”

She followed him down Main Street, which was waking up faster than she was. She spotted Lisa Gunzelman unlocking her antiques store and Adrienne Wellington adjusting a floral-print frock in the window of her dress shop. Similar activity took place on the other side of the street as store owners got ready for another day of commerce in Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania.

Their efforts were in vain. The town had seen few visitors since the Christmas rush, simply because January and February were too cold for shopping. Now it was the middle of March, and although store windows showed off shorts, sunglasses, and tank tops, the scene outside was anything but springlike. Just two days earlier, a nor’easter had dumped six inches of snow on the roads. That was followed by an arctic chill that froze the
plowed snow into miniature icebergs against the sidewalks. Kat stepped around one as she followed Jasper into his own store, two doors down from the dress shop.

Once inside Awesome Blossoms, Jasper made a beeline to the rear of the store and pushed open a door that led back outside. Kat followed him through it, finding herself in the center of a vacant parking lot covered with a thin sheet of ice. Only then did she begin to understand the situation. Jasper’s delivery van—a ubiquitous white Ford with the store’s name painted across its sides—had been taken during the night. The realization gave her an inappropriate kick. At last, something to investigate.

“Are you positive this is where you parked it last night?”

“Of course.”

“I know you think I’m asking the obvious,” Kat said. “But these are the things I need to know if you want me to find your van.”

Jasper pointed to an empty patch of gravel. “I parked it right there.”

“Are you the only person with a set of keys?”

“I keep a spare set in the glove compartment in case someone else needs to make a delivery.”

“Let me guess. You leave the van’s door unlocked, too.”

Jasper didn’t need to speak. His mustache did the talking for him. And when it sagged sadly, Kat knew the answer was yes.

As stupid as his actions sounded, Kat couldn’t hold it against him. Perry Hollow
was
the kind of town where you could leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and know it would be safe. Until now, apparently.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll find the van. Everyone in town knows what it looks like. Some kids probably took it for a joyride and left it behind the Shop and Save.”

Kat assumed this theory would relieve Jasper in some small way. Instead, the florist’s face scrunched with worry.

“There was something else in that glove compartment, Chief.”

“What?”

Jasper hesitated, just for a moment. “A pistol.”

Kat groaned. It wasn’t the best thing to do in front of Jasper, but it was better than her first instinct, which was to throttle him. How could he be so stupid as to leave his van unlocked with a gun in the glove compartment? And why did he have a gun in there to begin with?

“I had it for safety reasons,” Jasper said, sensing the unspoken question that hung like a clothesline between them. “I had a permit for it and everything. I just kept it there in case I got carjacked.”

Unless he made regular deliveries to West Philadelphia, Jasper had no reason to worry about a carjacking.

“Was it loaded?” Kat said.

A sad nod from the florist told her this was a bigger problem than she had first suspected. She needed to find that van. Pronto. And when she did, hopefully the gun would still be there.

Quickly, she made her way back through the store and onto Main Street. When she reached her black-and-white Crown Vic—still parked in front of Big Joe’s, thank God—Kat heard Deputy Carl Bauersox trying to reach her on the radio.

“Chief?” his voice squawked as Kat slid behind the wheel. “You there?”

Carl, her sole deputy, worked the night shift. Kat was usually in the station by that hour to relieve him of duty. But she had been sidetracked by Jasper’s van troubles, and now Carl was probably wondering when he could go home.

Kat grabbed the radio. “I’m on my way, Carl.”

“We have a big problem, Chief.”

Kat doubted that. Two crimes taking place on the same day would be some sort of record for Perry Hollow. It was
probably more like a cat in a tree, which in Carl’s world did amount to a big deal.

“What kind of problem?”

“A truck driver called. Said there’s a wooden box sitting on the side of Old Mill Road.”

As Carl spoke, Kat realized she was still carrying her neglected Big Joe’s house blend. She raised the cup to her lips and, just before getting to that long-delayed first sip, said, “Why didn’t you go out there and move it?”

“Because it’s more than a box.”

Kat stopped herself mid-sip. Again. “More than a box how?”

“Well, Chief, the trucker swears up and down that it’s a coffin.”

A coffin. On the side of the road. The idea was so preposterous Kat knew it couldn’t be true. The truck driver was mistaken. It was simply a box. And now her job was to move it before some distracted driver smashed into it, possibly necessitating the use of a real coffin.

“I’ll check it out,” she said. “In the meantime, do me a favor and put out a countywide APB on Jasper Fox’s delivery van. It was stolen last night.”

She didn’t mention the gun. It would have been a good idea with anyone but Carl, who flapped his gums faster than a hummingbird worked its wings. If he knew about the gun, the news would be all over Perry Hollow within an hour.

Carl signed off with a chipper “Righto, Chief,” leaving Kat to reluctantly lower her coffee, start the Crown Vic, and head out to whatever awaited her on Old Mill Road.

When Kat found the box, it was indeed sitting on the side of the road, resting on a patch of frozen snow. Although the truck driver who spotted it called it a coffin, Kat, in true police chief
fashion, refused to speculate on the matter. Squinting against the sun’s reflection on the snow, she peered through the windshield at the box sitting a few yards away. Rectangular in shape, it looked to be made of untreated wood. Probably pine, if Kat cared to guess. Which she didn’t.

She climbed out of the car, her breath forming a brief ghost of vapor that floated away in the frigid breeze. It was too damn cold for March, which Kat thought was bad news in several ways. For one, the prolonged winter depressed her. Second, the cold had kept the tourists away for too long. And most folks in Perry Hollow depended on them for their livelihoods.

Finally, the cold seemed to Kat a shivery warning of impending danger. It was too sharp, too unnatural.

When she finally got around to taking that first sip of coffee, it was in a vain attempt to steel herself against the chill. But the java itself had already succumbed to the cold, not helping her one bit. Kat instead had to rely on her parka, which she zipped up to her chin.

When she reached the box, Kat understood why someone passing by could think it was a coffin. It certainly looked casketlike. More than six feet long, three feet wide, and about two feet deep, it was definitely big enough to hold a body.

Kneeling next to it, she inspected the box for signs of where it had come from and, hopefully, where it was supposed to go. She looked for an invoice stapled to the side or a company’s logo branded into the wood. She found neither. As she ran a hand across the box’s top and along its sides, the rough wood scraped her palm. Whatever its intended use, the box was definitely homemade, most likely by an amateur. Any craftsman worth his salt would have subjected the wood to at least some form of sanding.