Hollyhock Ridge (15 page)

“What in the hell just happened?”

Melissa’s face was pale and she was driving very fast.

“Slow down,” Claire said. “The county keeps a car on this
road and you don’t want to get pulled over while you’re on parole.”

Melissa slowed down to the speed limit.

“You think that woman could identify me in a line up?”

“I think she’s already forgotten me,” Claire said. “What’s
going on?”

“They’re making meth in that storage unit,” Melissa said.
“Long as I live I’ll never forget that smell. That’s what they was making when
they blowed up the house after I got Tommy out.”

“We need to call the police.”

“You can do whatever you want long as you leave my name out
of it.”

“I will, don’t worry.”

“They’re evil, them meth-heads,” Melissa said. “All they
want is more meth; they don’t care who they have to steal from, or hurt to get
more. They’re like walking dead people with no souls; like zombies.”

“You drop me off in town and I’ll call from a payphone,”
Claire said. “Are there still payphones?”

“Them meth-heads are the one’s you wanna avoid when you’re
locked up,” Melissa said. “Them and the crack-heads are the worst. They’ll
snort drain cleaner if they can get hold of it; they’d sooner gut you as look
at you.”

Claire couldn’t think of any response that wouldn’t sound
feeble or patronizing. She was just sorry Melissa had come to know such things.
They were quiet until Melissa dropped her off in front of the office. Claire
started to say something but Melissa pulled away from the curb before she
could.

When Claire reached the door to the office, she found a note
from Pip.

“Call me” was all it said.

Claire unlocked the door and went inside. She dialed the
number to the Rose Hill Police Station and it went to voicemail.

“Lovely,” she said, and ended the call rather than leave a
message.

“Are you working?” she texted Laurie.

She waited five minutes but there was no response.

She called Pip, using his mother’s house phone number. Pip
could never keep a cell phone, either because he lost them or the service was
disconnected for non-payment. His mother, Frieda, answered.

“Haylo,” she said.           

“Frieda, this is Claire, is Pip around?”

“You just missed him,” Frieda said. “He’s gone up to Knox’s
house to have it out with him.”

“Well, that’s stupid.”

“I told him he was gonna get himself in trouble with the law
again, but he’s got this fool idea that Knox owes him money for killing
Courtenay.”

“Is he planning to blackmail Knox?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“Well, crap,” Claire said. “How long ago did he leave?”

“Five minutes, maybe,” Frieda said. “If you’d give that boy
some of that money you owe him, he wouldn’t have to go begging Knox for it.”

Claire ended the call rather than argue.

‘I’m not going to get involved,’ she told herself. ‘This is
not my problem.’

She tried to turn her mind to something else. She needed to
call some law authority and report the meth lab at the storage unit. She didn’t
want to call 911 from Sean’s office phone; she would have to look around town
for a payphone.

But her mind kept wandering up to Morning Glory Avenue. She
thought about the dark sedan. What if Knox was paranoid enough to shoot
whomever knocked on his front door? Or what if Knox’s house was currently
infested with armed thugs?

She was up and moving before she could talk herself out of
it. She locked the office door behind her and called Laurie as she walked.

Where was he?

By the time she reached Morning Glory Avenue, hiking up the
steep driveway to Knox’s house, she was out of breath. She desperately needed to
start running again. Knox’s big Lincoln was parked in the driveway with Pip’s
rickety old pickup behind it. There was no dark sedan in sight.

Claire rang the doorbell and waited. She rang it again, and
then knocked on the door. She waited a moment, pounded on the door, and then
was surprised when it swung open.

Claire’s pulse quickened. Despite the alarm bells sounding
in her head, she pushed the door open and stepped inside.

“Knox?” she called out. “Pip? Are you in there?”

Her ex-husband was standing in the foyer, looking up at Knox,
who was lying on his side facing the wall in the middle of the lower portion of
the wide staircase. There was a huge gash across the back of his head, and the
back of his shirt was soaked with blood. He was so still, and there was such an
absence of Knoxness in the atmosphere, that Claire had no doubt that he was
dead.

“Pip,” she gasped. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “He was like this when I got here.
Claire, what’ll we do?”

Pip’s eyes were open so wide the whites were showing all
around the irises. His face was pale. He was breathing so hard he was almost
hyperventilating.

“We call the police,” Claire said, taking out her cell
phone.

“They’ll arrest me,” Pip said. “I can’t go back to jail.”

“Wait a minute,” Claire said. “Don’t panic or you’ll do
something stupid. Well, more stupid, anyway.”

Pip pushed Claire out of the way and ran out of the house.
He jumped in his truck and then backed it down the driveway, turning so sharply
at the end that the truck tires screeched. He gunned it and was gone.

Claire called the police station again, left a frantic
message, and then she called the County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher. Once that
was done, she turned back to look at Knox.

The polished wooden stairs were carpeted with a plush, golden-colored
Oriental runner, held down with brass rods fastened at the back of every step.
The carpet stopped halfway up the stairs at a marble landing, before continuing
on the other side up to the second floor. Knox’s head was resting on the third
step down from the marble landing; below it, down to around mid-chest level,
the carpet behind the body was stained a deep dark red. His left arm was
beneath him and the other hung limp from the shoulder that was rolled toward
the wall. His jacket was missing, exposing his big belly straining the buttons
of his blue oxford shirt. The legs of his khakis rode up a little where he must
have slid down a step or two after he fell, revealing argyle socks and brown penny
loafers.

A piece of paper was stuck to the bottom of one of his
shoes. Claire took a closer look; it was a hundred-dollar bill. From the open
front door a stiff wind whipped up the staircase; the bill detached and flipped
in the breeze, coming to rest near the bottom step. Claire left it where it
landed.

Claire had been on enough movie sets where violence and gore
were so cleverly faked that, when faced with actual blood and a dead body, it
didn’t seem quite real to her. It also seemed impossible that someone she knew,
albeit someone she disliked intensely, could be gone, just like that.

A scant few weeks previously, she had socked Knox in the
face for trying to swindle her parents out of their home, and then had watched,
horrified, as his wife, Meredith, tried to bludgeon him to death with a
collector’s coin box. There was no doubt Knox Rodefeffer had been a
power-hungry, underhanded, low-down bastard, so there were plenty of people who
might want him dead. Claire wondered which one he had finally pushed over the
edge.

Knox’s first wife, now a famous psychic, had allegedly
conspired with him to frame and then get rid of his last mistress, Pip’s
ex-girlfriend, Courtenay. His brother Trick suspected him of embezzling from
and killing their aunt. His business partner, former Mayor Stuart Machalvie,
was the focus of a federal investigation due to the schemes he and Knox had
cooked up to line their pockets and get Knox elected senator. There were also a
couple of high-level politicians who would be relieved if Knox Rodefeffer could
no longer testify against them in order to save his own hide.

Claire thought it was obvious someone hit him from behind,
but if so, wouldn’t he have fallen forward? How could he have died from a wound
on the back of the head, yet be lying on his side on the stairs, facing the
wall? Maybe he was dazed at first, and attempted to flee up the stairs, only to
pass out and fall. But his position didn’t jibe with that scenario. It was
certainly a puzzle.

She had the thought that maybe she would just look around a
little before someone from the sheriff’s office arrived. She probably had at
least ten minutes.

She went back through the hallway next to the stairway,
which led to the kitchen. Everything was spotless and neat in there. The door
from the kitchen to the mudroom was open, and in the mudroom there were muddy
footprints on the floor. Claire could see that the deadbolt was drawn back on
the door to the outside.

There was a set of stairs on the other side of the kitchen that
led to the second floor. Claire listened, but it didn’t seem like there was
anyone else in the house. She didn’t imagine whoever killed Knox would want to
hang out to see what happened.

Claire went up the back stairs, which led to a long hallway.
All of the doors were closed except one to what looked like Knox’s office. Inside,
it looked as if Knox had just stepped away from his desk. His cell phone lay on
the desk next to the documents he’d been looking at. There was a stack of
bills, and the amount due on each made Claire whistle. There were also several overdue
notices, and a checkbook register that displayed a negative number as the
balance.

Knox was in deep debt, no doubt about it.

Claire plucked a tissue from a box on the desk and covered
the end of her finger with it. Pressing his cell phone buttons through the
tissue, she went to the call history for the day and photographed the screen
with her own phone.

Claire looked around the room, and noticed a painting on the
floor, leaned against the wall. Above it the door to Knox’s safe was wide open.
Claire peered in; it was empty.

In the distance she heard a siren as the first county car entered
the city limits. She shoved the tissue and her phone in her pocket, ran back
down the hall, and down the back stairs. She ran through the kitchen, the
hallway next to the stairs, and out the front door. Out of breath, her heart
pounding, she sat down on the front steps, and tried Laurie again.

It went to voicemail.

She watched as a county car careened up Peony Street and slid
around the corner of Morning Glory Avenue. After it pulled up the driveway and
parked, Sarah got out of the driver’s side door. She was frowning as she walked
up the path to where Claire was sitting.

“Where’s Purcell?” Sarah asked.

“He must be off today,” Claire said. “He’s not answering my
calls.”

“Passed out drunk’s more like it,” Sarah said, shaking her
head.

“Even a police chief gets a day off,” Claire insisted, but
Sarah rolled her eyes.

Another county car arrived, and Sarah turned to greet her
team. Claire watched as they dressed in crime scene suits and paper booties.

“Don’t leave,” she told Claire before they went inside.

“Don’t worry,” Claire said.

She figured Sarah would be preoccupied for a while, so she
took out her phone and opened a browser. She did a search for each phone number
she had found in Knox’s phone, and added the numbers and names to her contact
list.

At 8:00 a.m., Knox called the bank in Rose Hill

At 8:19 a.m., Knox called a bank in Pittsburgh.

At 8:32 a.m., Knox called his first wife, Anne Marie, when
it would have been 5:30 a.m. in California.

At 9:14 a.m., Knox called an attorney’s office in
Morgantown.

At 10:12 a.m., Marigold Lawson called Knox.

At 10:28 a.m., Knox called Stuart Machalvie.

At 12:20 p.m., Knox called Rodefeffer Realty.

At 12:52 p.m., Pip called Knox from Frieda’s house.

Claire wanted to write it all out and analyze the data, but
she didn’t dare do that while Sarah was so close by.

By calling his mother, she was able to find Skip, Scott’s
youngest deputy, and a few minutes later he drove up in the town’s only
cruiser, but seemed reluctant to come up the stairs.

“Frank’s in Pendleton at the courthouse,” he said.

“Sarah’s inside,” Claire said.

He started to enter the house but Claire stopped him.

“I wouldn’t go in there without a crime scene suit on if I
were you.”

“Oh, yeah, right,” he said.

He looked toward the cruiser as if he longed to jump in it
and drive away.

“What do you think I ought to do?” he asked her.

“Just wait for Sarah,” Claire said. “Keep an eye on me.”

Skip’s eyes widened.

“Are you a witness to the crime?” he asked her.

“I don’t know what happened to Knox,” Claire said. “Pip
found him.”

Skip cleared his throat and his voice jumped an octave as he
spoke.

“A blow to the back of the head,” he said. “They were
talking about it on the radio as I came up the hill.”

“Pip didn’t do it,” Claire said. “You know Pip; he’s too
much of a coward to kill anybody. He’s more of a pot-head than a hot-head.”

Skip shrugged.

“I guess I’m just crowd control,” he said.

“I guess I’m the crowd,” Claire said. “What would you like
me to do?”

“You’re a person of interest,” Skip said. “So don’t go
anywhere.”

“Don’t worry,” Claire said. “Have you seen Laurie today?”

Skip couldn’t look her in the eye. He cleared his throat.

“He’s off today,” he said.

“I know he’s got a drinking problem.”

“He’s never come to work drunk,” Skip said. “My dad’s an
alcoholic, so I’d know. They think vodka doesn’t smell but it does; I know that
smell. He might be drinking, but not when he’s working. Laurie’s a good guy; we
all like him.”