Engaged in Death (A Wedding Planner Mystery) (5 page)

I frowned, remembering what Garrett had said about Sylvia’s wishes regarding fracking and drilling on her property.

“I don’t think so.” My good manners bubbled to the top. “I mean, no thank you, that won’t be necessary.”

Shane Hartley looked as if I’d knocked the wind out of him. He rocked back and forth in his boots and rubbed his hands together, ready to dig in for the hard sell. The rotten porch swayed softly with each of his movements. “Now, ma’am—”

Ooh, big mistake. I might be turning thirty this fall, but I hated being called ma’am. I needed to get this guy off Sylvia’s porch immediately.

“No, thanks. I don’t think it would be appropriate to drill on this land. Nothing you can say will change my mind.” I crossed my arms and tried to stand firm, but I felt myself wavering.

Shane Hartley began to laugh. “Now see here, little lady. Why do you think you know whether it’s appropriate to drill here or not? You have plenty of land and you’d barely notice we were here. It’d be very lucrative. I’m not sure you have the funds to tend to this house, but we can make that possible. Why don’t you come on down and hear what we have to offer—”

“She said she isn’t interested.” Rachel leaned over Mr. Hartley.

“Yeah. Sylvia Pierce left me this house and property, and it’s my understanding she didn’t want any fracking at her childhood home. I’m going to respect her wishes. And”—I took a step toward him, emboldened—“I don’t believe it’s any of your business how I finance the renovation of this house or what my plans are.”

Shane Hartley threw up his hands. He gave us some space and moved from the porch to the walkway. “Fine. But between you and me, I’m not sure how long this piece of land will be yours, ma’am, if you catch my drift.”

“Excuse me?” I whispered, struggling to keep my voice under control. It didn’t escape my notice he’d placed extra emphasis on the “ma’am” part.
Perfect. This guy can already figure out how to get my goat.

“Word through the grapevine,” he drawled, “is there were some discrepancies about how Miss Sylvia bequeathed you this place. Rumor is, this house is supposed to belong to Helene and Keith Pierce. They’re smart people, ma’am, especially that Keith. He’s an attorney. There are valuable things in this house that belong to the Pierce family, not some interloper, and I have a feeling when this is all straightened out, it won’t be your decision about what to do with this parcel.”

Rachel told me later I let out a shrill little shriek before I lunged down the stairs, but I don’t remember since it happened so fast. When it was over, I’d pushed little Shane Hartley so hard he’d landed in the high grass. He tumbled over in an exaggerated pratfall as if he were an NBA player falling to draw a foul.

As the wrath left my body in waves, it was replaced by a sense of alarm. Hartley was lying on the ground shaking and made no move to get up. Could I be prosecuted for assault? I was about to go help him when my anger percolated again as I realized he was trembling with laughter.

“Shoot, girl, you are something else!” He stood in one fluid, cat-like movement, rubbing his tailbone.

The men in the truck were cackling too. The lace curtains of the nearest neighbor snapped shut.

Awesome.
I had an audience.

Rachel left the porch and stood imperiously over Shane Hartley. She had more than a few inches on him, especially in her four-inch heels. “Get out of here right now, before we call the police for trespassing. You’re not wanted.”

Mr. Hartley smirked, picked up his hat, and placed it on his head. He was still chuckling as he got into the black pickup, blew us a kiss, and drove away.

“Thanks, Rach.” I was still shaking when Shane Hartley drove off.

Rachel slung her arm around my shoulders. “Anytime, Mall.”

“What a warm welcome,” I joked in an unsteady voice. “I hope everyone in this place is as friendly.”

We tried to salvage what was left of the day. I checked out of the motel by the airport, and we barely jammed all of our stuff into the Mini Cooper, making two trips to accommodate Rachel’s stuff. We unloaded our luggage and made a trip to Target to buy sheets, snacks, litter boxes, and a few other provisions. When we returned, the house didn’t seem as creepy, just stinky and dusty and sad. We feasted on Port Quincy’s finest pizza and Oreo cookies for dessert. I wasn’t anywhere close to feeling normal, but it was a start.

“At least you have your appetite back.” Rachel gestured to the bag of cookies we’d just kicked.

“Baby steps.” I gave her a small smile.

I was happy to be out of the motel and bade my sister good night as I closed the door to the bedroom I’d chosen. I put the new sheets on the florid but tarnished brass bed and fell asleep thirty seconds later.

The day’s events must have lodged in my subconscious because my dreams were disturbing and shockingly vivid. A fire in this house and a woman screaming. I tried to find her but couldn’t pick the right key to open the door. None of them fit. I was choking on the fumes. A hand reached out to save me. It was Sylvia.

“Thank goodness.” I hugged her, engulfed in thick black smoke. “What do you want me to do with your house?” Her embrace grew stronger, and I tried to pull away. I realized I wasn’t hugging Sylvia, but Helene. She wouldn’t let me go and squeezed ever tighter, like a boa constrictor. I tried to scream, but my throat filled with ash. Keith stood to the side, just beyond the curtain of smoke. He shook his head with disapproval and refused to intervene. It was too late. Helene had almost crushed the last breath from my lungs.

“Mallory, wake up.” Rachel was shaking my shoulders.

I must have been having a nightmare. I struggled to sit up, but the mattress had sunk in overnight.

I rolled back into the deep divot in the bed, pulling the sheet over my head to staunch the weak light coming through the window. I checked my watch with one open eye. “It’s only six a.m. I can sleep a whole extra hour and still make it to work on time. Leave me alone.”

“There’s something you need to see. Right now.”

I detected a slight edge of panic in Rachel’s voice and flung off the sheet covering my head.

“What is it? What’s so important this early?” I was groggy and grumpy. I’m not a morning person, and today would be my first day back at work since my life blew up. I wanted to hide under the covers as long as possible. I wasn’t eager to test-drive Thistle Park’s plumbing this morning either, as there was no way to shower, only a claw-foot tub encrusted in grime.

“Mallory.” Rachel knelt beside the bed and grabbed both of my hands in hers. They were ice cold. “There’s a dead dude in the front yard.”

“Tell me again.”

The Port Quincy chief of police was staring me down, trying to break me. I searched my sleepy brain for any nuggets of wisdom from my criminal procedure class in law school. I wanted to go all Fifth Amendment on his ass and end this interview but ultimately decided it’d be better to play nice. So, I rubbed my eyes with the cuff of my penguin pajamas and recounted the events of last night and this morning for the umpteenth time. It was strange. The more I repeated myself, the less certain I was.

“We came back from the motel, bought some sheets and snacks, unpacked and ordered a pizza. We went to bed around ten. We didn’t leave any lights on. I swear there were no dead people on the lawn when we fell asleep. My sister woke me around six this morning and told me about . . . him.” I delivered this monologue in a monotone, because it was hard to impart enthusiasm when you’d been saying the same thing for hours.

“Him” being one Shane Hartley, the man I’d argued with and pushed. A man my sister had threatened a mere twelve hours before he’d turned up dead in front of Sylvia’s house, now my house, the back of his head bludgeoned.

The interview had started soon after the sun rose. We sat in what we’d been calling the breakfast room, and the morning rays bathed us in buttery, diffuse sunlight. Three hours later, the room was no longer pleasant but sour and stuffy. I was also dying in my flannel sleepwear, which I hadn’t been permitted to change out of. I hoped the cops liked me sweaty.

“Maybe he was killed somewhere else and brought here?” Rachel looked marginally more comfortable in her shorts and silk robe.

“No way. Your grass is soaked with blood,” Chief Truman shot her down. “Someone definitely bashed his head in right here, and he bled out in your petunias—”

My stomach plunged.

“—and expired in your front yard. You okay, Miss Shepard?”

I stood and covered my mouth with my hand.

“My sister’s a little squeamish.”

“Just today.” I was still ruing the loss of that extra hour of sleep, even though I now had worse things to worry about. I swallowed and sunk back into my seat.

“Maybe you need to eat something,” Truman’s sidekick, Officer Faith Hendricks, gently said.

They were an odd pair. Truman was tall and imposing, with a stern, disapproving expression. He had a big gut and salt-and-pepper hair that was thinning at the crown. He was handsome in a craggy, avuncular kind of way. Although I’d never met him before this morning, he looked vaguely familiar. Faith was gorgeous, with creamy milkmaid good looks and a sunny smile. Her caramel ponytail bounced behind her as she nodded, eagerly encouraging me and my sister to spill our guts and further incriminate ourselves. Faith couldn’t have been a day over twenty-five, but her enthusiasm made up for lack of experience. Both Truman and Faith peered at me with genuine concern, which was the nicest they’d been so far this morning.

“I made us Pop-Tarts for breakfast, but I dropped them when I saw him,” Rachel chimed in.

“I figured so,” Truman said drily.

I would never eat another Pop-Tart so long as I lived. I shut my eyes and replayed the morning’s events in the dreadful reel running on repeat in my head.

I’d run down the stairs, Rachel on my heels, as soon as I’d processed what she said. Sure enough, there had been a dead man in the front yard. A whole ten feet from the front door. He had been on his back, staring up at the pale morning sky. His face had leered in death, a thin trickle of blood running out of the corner of his mouth, which was rigored into a skeleton smile. His right hand had been awash in rusty stuff, as if he’d touched his head before he expired. It was Shane Hartley. And right in front of him had lain two fresh cherry Pop-Tarts, broken into pieces.

I’d stared at him in silence for a full fifteen seconds.

“Why are those there?” I’d finally asked, pointing to the breakfast pastries and not the dead man. It had seemed like a fair question, though, looking back, a better one might have been, “Did you hear anything last night?”

“I was going to wake you with breakfast in bed since it’s your first day back. I wondered if we got the paper, which is dumb, because no one’s lived here for years, but it was early and I was out of it. I opened the door and saw him, and it was still pretty dark, so I walked over to figure out who was lying there and if they needed help. When I realized who it was, I panicked and dropped the Pop-Tarts,” Rachel had prattled on in a rush before she’d begun to cry.

I’d gently steered my sister around so we couldn’t see Mr. Hartley’s body. “It’s okay, Rach. Not really okay, but we have to do something.”

“I can make more Pop-Tarts.”

“We could do that.” I’d pulled her up the porch steps. “But I was thinking maybe we should call the police.”

“Oh, right, of course.” Once we had gotten back inside, the door shut firmly behind us, we’d snapped out of it and done a pretty good job of dealing with the body on the lawn. The police had arrived about five minutes after we’d called 911. We’d been here ever since, hunkered down around the old oak table in this octagonal room, drinking cold coffee with Port Quincy’s finest man and woman in blue.

“Tell me again.”

“Just like she said,” Rachel began. “We—”

“Nope, we’ve told you enough,” I interrupted. “We’re not going to change our story.”

“Your story?” Chief Truman perked up.

“Our truthful accounting of what happened. Do we need a lawyer?”

The chief smirked. “I thought you are a lawyer.”

I flinched. “I am, but I don’t practice criminal defense, and I don’t know anything about murder investigations. Are we suspects?”

Rachel tensed up next to me. I grabbed her hand under the table and gave it a reassuring squeeze. No matter what, I wasn’t going to let them incriminate my little sister or me.

“Neither of you appear to have been in a struggle,” Faith said slowly.

Rachel relaxed.

“Now hold on.” Truman shot Faith a dirty look and leaned closer to us across the table. “Ma’am, a man was murdered right here at Thistle Park while you and your sister were admittedly on the premises. What I can’t wrap my head around is your claim neither of you heard a peep last night.”

Geez, what was with the ma’ams flying around this town? I obviously needed better wrinkle cream. I didn’t know what pissed me off more, the fact I was a possible murder suspect or that I’d just been called ma’am again.

“I did have a nightmare sometime before Rachel woke me. Someone was screaming in my dream. Or at least I thought it was a dream at the time.”

Duh.
Why hadn’t I made that connection until now?

“What time was that?” Faith sat up straighter, her pen poised over her little notebook, the picture of an eager student.

“I don’t know,” I stammered, sounding defensive.

Chief Truman and Faith exchanged knowing glances.

I rushed in to fill their disappointed silence. “I feel awful about what happened. I really do. That poor man. But we didn’t have anything to do with it.” I couldn’t wait for Shane Hartley to leave yesterday, but that didn’t mean I had been hoping for his demise.

“Oh, come on,” Rachel said wearily. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but the guy was a class-A jerk. I’m sure he had lots of enemies.”

Faith gave her a disapproving glare.

“And no matter who killed him, it’s awfully convenient he ended up dead on my—Sylvia’s—front lawn.” I took a swig of water and tried to set the glass neatly on the table. My hands shook so badly I splashed most of the water out of the glass. This earned another portentous look between Truman and Faith.

“True, but we have several witnesses who saw you get into a physical altercation with the victim yesterday.” Chief Truman was barely able to contain his glee, as if he’d just laid down a royal flush.

“Why would you try to hide that from me?” He cracked his first smile of the day, a real Cheshire special.

Crap.
A trickle of sweat ran down my back.
Stupid, stupid. You always shut up, and you always get a criminal defense attorney when you talk to the police
. Though I didn’t practice criminal law, I’d had a few occasions to advise my clients to clam up in the event authorities questioned them. And I
had
watched
The Wire.
And here I was, digging myself a bigger hole, thanks to my teeny-tiny lie of omission. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them I’d shoved Shane Hartley hours before he was murdered. It was time to shut up for real, even though Rachel and I hadn’t done anything.

“He wouldn’t leave.” Rachel pushed back from the table. “Honest. He was threatening
us,
not the other way around.”

I nodded, my lips pursed. I’d Krazy Glue my mouth shut if I had to.

Then I quickly abandoned my internal promise to stay quiet in less than a nanosecond. “He said something was wrong with the way Sylvia left me the house and that it would be Helene and Keith Pierce’s property soon enough.”

That revelation raised two sets of eyebrows. Ultimately, Truman and Faith said nothing. They stuck to their previously successful tactic of waiting for me to stick my foot firmly into my yapping mouth. I chewed on my lower lip to keep from talking. Rachel stirred her spoon around in her cup, the metal making a grating noise against the bone china, her coffee long gone.

“We also heard about an altercation you had with the Pierces after Sylvia’s funeral.” Faith smirked. “Do you have a problem controlling your temper, Mallory?”

I managed a sip of water, trying to play it cool. It took every ounce of control to keep my hand from shaking. I used the time my drink bought me to wonder how they’d found out so quickly. Did gossip really spread this fast in a small town?

“So what?” I finally ventured. The truth should be good enough. “Helene Pierce is crazy.”

“We know,” Faith said, surprising me. “I’d just like to hear your side.”

It was possible they’d heard about these incidents before Hartley’s death had even been called in to the police. I was impressed and worried, but I was no murderer. Then it dawned on me. Faith and Truman had popped up from the table several times during our interrogation to field phone calls. Their colleagues must have been gathering intel and relaying the information to them.

“He had no business being back here while it was dark. I told him to buzz off, and I meant it. I admit I pushed him, but he deserved it. He threatened me. It wasn’t like he came back here in the middle of the night to strike a business deal.”

Faith glanced at Chief Truman, wordlessly asking for permission. “Actually, that’s precisely why he came back here.”

“How do you know that? It’s not like you can ask him now.” The words left my lips before I realized how insensitive I sounded.

“Because he drew up an offer letter for this property. Not to lease it, but to buy it outright. A pretty big offer based on the number of zeros. He was probably going to slip it in the mail slot since you’d rebuffed him. Let the money talk for him.”

“How much?” Rachel’s eyes were shining. She’d been quiet for a while, a much savvier suspect than I was. But at the mention of money, she perked right up and leaned toward the cops, abandoning her nervous ritual with the spoon and cup.

“We can’t tell exactly. The note was soaked with blood. Some of the ink smeared, but we’re talking high six figures.”

I gulped. Good thing I hadn’t had a Pop-Tart after all.

“The surveyors who were with Shane Hartley told our colleagues at the station the same version of events as you did, and that’s what matters for now,” Chief Truman said. “That is, I don’t have enough information to take you for a little ride downtown. We’re done here. Thank you for the coffee.”

Truman and Faith stood to go.

I faded back into my chair with relief.

“Oh, ladies?” Truman barked.

“Yes?” My voice was a squeak.

He wasn’t finished with me just yet.

“You two be careful. You might think about installing an alarm system. We’ll be in touch.”

“That’s it?” I’d wanted them gone all morning, and now I didn’t want them to leave.

“What about the body?” Rachel’s eyes darted in the direction of the front yard.

“Gone.” The chief glanced at his watch. He was done with us. “Impounded his truck too. You’ll need to cut down the crime tape and you might want to hose off the grass, but that’s it.”

Faith touched my arm lightly. “You hear anything, give us a call.”

They handed us their cards and waltzed out of the breakfast room.

“What’s that smell?” Faith asked the chief.

“Cat piss,” he whispered back, but not quiet enough for me to miss.

Rachel flopped back with relief as soon as the front door shut. We hadn’t even bothered to show Truman and Faith out. We were safe, for now.

“I thought they might arrest us.” Rachel flashed me a shaky smile.

“Me too. But for what? I certainly wasn’t marauding around last night, confronting trespassers. And I was so exhausted, I wouldn’t have noticed a murder going on right under my window. Which is apparently what happened.” A shiver trilled up my back. Someone had been killed just below me. Had the murderer even realized Rachel and I were inside? We’d parked the Mini around the back of the house and turned off all the lights, so it wouldn’t have been obvious.

“Who wanted Shane Hartley dead?” I wondered.

“Like I said, he was a jerk, so I bet there are a lot of people in this town who wanted to off him.” Rachel’s hand flew to her mouth.

“No worries, Rach. I’m sorry he’s dead too. No one deserves to be murdered, especially that way. But that doesn’t change the fact he was a complete Neanderthal for the whole five minutes we talked to him.”