Scraps of Paper (13 page)

“Beneath their graves in the woods behind her house. Read all about it and about the notes and stuff Abby’s discovered hidden in her house in the next episode of the Weekly Journal’s Emily Summers saga on Wednesday.”

Mason looked at Abigail, his face unreadable. Some people didn’t appreciate digging up anything that might make their town look bad. Mason was one of those. Something unpleasant flickered behind the man’s eyes and Abigail wondered what he was thinking. He brusquely excused himself with an ingratiating smile, pleading he had to find a good seat and practically sprinted into the darkened stadium.

“Well that was rude.” Frank handed her a soda and a small carton of popcorn.

“Frank, how well do you know Mason?” she probed.

“I’ve known him most of my life, but I don’t know him at all. He’s that kind of an odd fellow. More so since his divorce, which was way messy. No surprise, his marriage was even messier; his divorce left him bitter. He’s alienated from his kids. I think he has two of them. They moved far away; probably just to get away from him. The store is and has always been his life. Profit is his god. He smiled at you, Abigail. Mason smiling. That’s unusual.”

She would have asked more questions but the movie started and they could talk afterwards. So they went in search of seats.

***

“That was a good movie, wasn’t it?” Frank made conversation later in a restaurant as they shared a pizza and soda. They’d almost run into Mason again on the way out of the theater. Abigail saw his blue cap bobbing out ahead of them in the crowd and purposely made Frank slow down until she was sure the man was gone. She didn’t want to run into him again. Not that night.

“Very good. That scene on the ocean with the whale was amazing. Wilson was a cute touch. Yuck, but that tooth pulling part was gross,” she summed up.

“How do you know? You hid your eyes. I tried to imagine what I’d have done if I’d been him stranded on that island. Alone. About the same. Just thinking about it gives me the willies. It makes you appreciate the life you have, a movie like that, and how important your family and friends are.”

They finished raving about the film and Abigail confessed to finding Jenny’s diary and revealed some of what she’d read. “Pages had been torn out and the entries ended in mid-August of the summer of 1970.”

“And you’ve known about this diary since this morning and are just telling me now?”

Abigail nodded.

“I knew Sheriff Cal had a thing for her. I worked for the guy. It was easy to see. But a lot of men had designs on Emily. She was a beautiful available woman,” Frank said softly, but she had the impression he was holding something back. “I just didn’t know someone was abusing her. I never saw that black eye or the broken tooth. But I was gone a lot that last part of the summer trying to get the job in Chicago and then making arrangements for the move. Busy.” She could almost feel his guilt. “I never had a clue someone was intentionally hurting her and the kids or I would have stopped it. What kind of cop was I?”

“You were a young one, just learning human nature and your job,” Abigail said, pushing away from the table. The pizza had been delicious, the movie diverting and her company for the evening stimulating. It was hard to dwell on sadder things. Maybe, as Martha had said that morning, she was too involved in this Summers mystery. It had nothing to do with her or her life. Really none of her business. So why was she so involved with something that’d happened so long ago? She wished she knew.

Frank checked his watch. “You ready to go? Early start tomorrow if we’re going to catch Brown. And I can’t wait to have a look at that diary.”

“I’m ready.” She watched Frank leave a generous tip on the table and afterwards he ushered her out the door.

***

The truck’s headlights shone on the front porch as they pulled into her driveway. The front door of her house was ajar. The lights she’d left on in the house spilled through the opening and out into the yard.

“Oh, no, not again. I know I shut and locked that door before we left.” Abigail sighed. She’d put regular locks on her doors after the first break-in. “I guess I’m going to have to put super sturdy dead bolts on or get a whole house alarm system.” She knew the drill and let Frank enter the house first.

“It’s safe,” he yelled from inside. “There’s no one in here. Again.” But unlike the previous time nothing appeared touched or out of place. The house was as she’d left it. Snowball was sleeping on the couch. A puddle of white.

“False alarm,” Frank announced, openly relieved. “You
must
have forgotten to lock the door and it just slipped open. Old doors do that sometimes. I’ll have a look at it before I head home.”

“Not exactly a false alarm.” Abigail was standing in front of the coffee table. “The diary’s gone. I left it right here on the table. It’s not here now.”

“Damn,” Frank said. “I really wanted to read it.” Even though earlier Abigail had summarized everything in it. “How about the ledger, is it missing as well?”

She went out of the room and returned with the ledger. “No. I hid it somewhere safe days ago. They didn’t find it. But it’s all I have left. Besides the diary, the messages from the children are gone as well. I had them on my dresser in a large envelope. Nothing else is missing or disturbed.”

“Damn,” Frank whispered again.

“You’re right. There’s someone who doesn’t want us to learn anything more about the Summers or what happened to them. And unless a ghost floated in here and took those items, it was someone very much alive. What I’d like to know is, how did they know the house was empty?”

“They might have had it staked out. Saw us leave.” Their eyes met and Frank’s misgivings didn’t have to be put into words. He squeezed her hand for a moment as reassurance then released it.

“I really will have to be more careful.” She gave him the ledger. “Here take this with you. It’ll be safer at your place. Hide it well.”

“I will.” Frank produced a faint smile. “You still want to go tomorrow?”

“Of course,” her voice firm. “No one’s going to scare me off that easily. How about you?”

“Me, neither. So I’ll see you tomorrow morning. We’ll get breakfast on the way.”

 “Tomorrow at nine.” Abigail walked Frank to the door, closed and locked it behind him.
Then sat down at the kitchen table and wrote down every word, from memory, she could recall from Jenny’s diary and the crayon notes while they were fresh in her mind. If not the originals at least she’d have something to refer back to.

Chapter 10

“Oh, goodie, been a long time since I’ve been on a road trip.” Frank was cheerful the next morning, lounging behind the wheel of his truck as they moved down the highway. His baseball cap had the words POLICE on the front in small white letters; long hair brushed his collar and he had a diamond stud in his ear. The earring was an unexpected touch, for he looked more like a hippie than an ex-police officer, she’d teased, and he’d laughed saying she was showing her age talking about hippies.

A breeze fanned their faces from the open windows as summer fields and houses sped by. They’d stopped earlier at a pancake house and were two hours into their trip, worrying about the progress of their mystery, as they’d begun to call it. Reviewing what they’d discovered and what had occurred so far.

The graves. They’d been exhumed the afternoon before and hadn’t been empty. Three bodies, a woman and two children, wrapped and buried in blankets had been in them. The remains had been taken to the morgue until the forensic experts could examine them. The medical examiner told Frank on the phone it definitely looked like there’d been foul play; the three hadn’t died of natural causes, that was for sure. It had to have been an accident or murder. The M.E. promised someone would get back to them as soon as they knew more.

They’d also been trying to figure out who might have broken into her house and taken the diary and the kids’ notes.

“Someone who’d read the newspaper article and knew about the messages. They got the diary as a surprise bonus,” Abigail groused.

“How would they have known to take it? That it was Jenny’s?”

“Now that’s a puzzle. It could have been someone who’d known Emily and her children from the past, were aware the diary existed, and lucked out by coming across it on the coffee table.” Frank threw Abigail a sharp look.

Her reflection in the windshield was distorted, muted. She’d been relieved her house hadn’t been trashed a second time, but the fact the diary had been taken bothered her. “How did Brown sound when you phoned and asked if we could speak to him about Emily and the kids?”

“Initially he refused, saying it was ancient history. He sounded cold. I broke the news we found their graves. And he said he didn’t care if they were dead. That they’d been dead for years to him anyway. I told him if he didn’t talk to us he’d be talking to the police. We had evidence he’d been in Spookie the last month of their lives and he’d made a scene at the diner, so he’d lied to officer Kako. It made him change his mind quick enough.”

“Hope he’s there when we arrive.”

“If he runs it’ll tell us something, though fear often triggers the same response. Flight.”

“Fear of being caught?” Abigail placed her fingers against the cool glass.

“Or fear of being innocent but being accused of the crime anyway. Lots of innocent people run for it and lots who didn’t run are now behind bars. The system doesn’t work for everyone and sometimes if you’re innocent or guilty doesn’t make as much difference as how much influence or money you have for competent representation. I’ve seen that first hand. Being a cop gave me some immunity, but I’ve had nightmares of being an innocent arrested and locked up in prison for years for a crime I didn’t commit. I can empathize.

“Brown did sound stunned when I said we’d found their remains. But then murderers are good at fooling people. I’ve dealt with enough of them to know how well they can lie. He was surprised, but not upset. As if they’d been strangers to him and not family.”

“Well, it has been thirty years. But for Brown not to have heard from or been contacted by the kids in all this time–and we know they used to call him–and not wonder what happened to them, does seem strange. Unless he was part of their deaths. Then the discovery of their graves would be an unpleasant shock,” Abigail put her opinion in. “He’d be running scared.”

“Got a good point there.”

She was content to admire the passing scenery and listen to Frank rattle on about what the M.E. might be able to determine from thirty year old bones. Murder, missing evidence and dead bodies aside she was in a good mood. Martha and Mrs. Vogt had paid generous amounts for their watercolors and tomorrow she would begin Frank’s. She’d collected her old paintings to put in the general store and had ideas for new ones. Now she had hope she’d make it as an artist, if she worked hard and lived simply. Yet she didn’t like the idea of dealing with Mason and his constant fawning. Oh, the things she did for her art. For money.

At three o’clock they pulled up before a modest subdivision home with the name Brown on the mailbox. The grass needed cutting and one of the front windows was cracked. In the driveway was a twelve-year-old Buick in need of a paint job and new tires. Todd Brown hadn’t gotten very far in life.

A man, bent with age and life, answered the door when Frank knocked. He could have been tall, it was hard to tell the way he was hunched over, but his puffy face and red-rimmed eyes gave away that he was ill. His thin hair didn’t look as if it’d been washed recently and the same for his clothes. There was the stink of cheap booze around him. She couldn’t tell how old he was but guessed he had to be over sixty. He looked eighty.

“Hello, I’m Frank Lester and this is my associate Abigail Sutton.” Frank put out a hand and the other man avoided taking it, retreating into the house so they could come inside. Frank had left his police cap on. Brown didn’t know Frank was retired, and unless he asked, no need to tell him.

Brown hobbled past them and dropped his body into a worn chair. There was a television with a blurry picture and he turned down the volume with a remote. “Sit where you want.” The sofa was stained and swayed-backed in the middle but it was the only place to sit. So they sat.

Abigail couldn’t help but feel sorry for the man in the chair across from her. He didn’t look like a wife-beater or a murderer, only a man who’d come to the end of his life and was living hand to mouth like many old people did. The inside of the house, drab and lightless, was as dismal as the outside. It needed a healthy cleaning. It looked as if the person living there no longer cared.

“Live here alone?” Frank inquired once they were settled on the lumpy sofa.

“I do. Janet, my third wife, died two years ago of cancer. I’ve lived by myself since. I like it that way. Less hassle. If Janet wouldn’t have died we’d most likely be divorced. All women are nags.” He smiled and showed rotten teeth. “I have some charity broad who comes in a couple times a week, does shopping for me, picks up prescriptions and dusts the house some. She’s not much to look at, dumb as a cow, but she can drive and fetch. And I don’t have to put up with any nagging. I have, er, ailments which make it hard for me to get out.”

“Sorry to hear about your health, Mr. Brown.” Frank was surveying the room, taking in everything and trying to be as cordial as he could stand to be. Brown wasn’t very likable.

“Thanks. But that’s life. Not much good, mostly bad.” Brown’s shoulders slumped. Might have been handsome once, but ravages of time and booze had changed him into a face sagging, speech slurred man with time running out. He didn’t seem particularly happy they were there and Abigail began to feel uncomfortable. The house smelled. Brown smelled. She wanted to get their questions answered and get out. The sooner the better.

Brown didn’t offer them anything to drink or any pleasant conversation either. Sitting there glaring at them, he repositioned his legs, as if they ached, and Abigail noticed an empty whiskey bottle on the floor besides the chair.

“You still drink the hard stuff?” Frank casually asked as if he didn’t already know the answer.

Brown’s rheumy eyes mirrored a flash of animosity. “I was forced to be sober for a long time cause one day, drunk, I plowed into a family in another car and killed four of them.” He didn’t seem remorseful, just stated what he’d done. “To get and stay out of jail, hold that lousy job the state helped me find, I had to do what the court told me to and go to AA. Stop drinking. For a while. But now, since I don’t drive, don’t have a job–I’m on disability–and don’t got any harpy woman telling me not to drink…sure,” he grinned. “I take a sip now and again.”

Abigail wondered if a whole bottle was his idea of a sip.

“Anyway, you came here to tell me you found Emily and the kids bodies, right? I won’t lie to you. I’m past caring. Emily left me a long time ago, a lifetime ago–her idea, not mine…I wasn’t good enough for her. In the end she wanted nothing to do with me. Those kids?” And here for the first time Brown seemed to soften a little. “They weren’t bad kids but I never helped raise them and never saw them much after the divorce. I’m sorry they’re dead but what’s it got to do with me? I didn’t kill them. I even tried searching for them after that summer. I did.” His face fell into a stubborn defensive look and a sarcastic smile twisted his mouth. “But I never found ‘em.”

He shrugged. “And life went on. I went on. I thought they didn’t want me to find them. You know Emily hated me. But then she always was an uppity sort of woman.” A past resentment in his eyes he stared around the room as if he were seeing things they couldn’t. Ghosts, perhaps.

“I didn’t kill them,” he blurted the words out in a gruff voice. “If that’s what you’re thinking. I. Did. Not.”

Frank pacified him. “We’re not accusing you of killing them.” Yet. “We’re just asking questions, just trying to unravel what happened to them, if we can.”

Brown looked at Abigail, “Why is it so important to you?” He’d guessed she wasn’t a cop. So he wasn’t as dull and sick as he acted.

The truth seemed to be her best route. So she explained about buying the house, finding the scraps of paper, the diary and the photos, instigating the newspaper story and its repercussions, including the break-ins and finding the graves.

Brown sat there and listened, and Abigail thought she saw his hands shake, thought she saw a glimmer of humanity in his hard eyes. For a brief moment. “Wouldn’t have minded having one or two of those pictures you found.  Pictures of kids make women feel sorry for ya. Got a couple of churchwomen that stop by once and a while and bring me things. Take me places I can’t go to anymore on my own. And I don’t have any pictures of the brats. Lost them along the way. I’ve moved a lot.” He repositioned his body in the chair; released a painful sigh. “Ah, I guess it doesn’t matter no how. They’re all dead anyway. They’re no good to me. I could have used some help in my old age. A kid or two might have been nice. To take care of me, you know?”

Abigail stared. She’d rarely met someone as unsympathetic and she didn’t need to know what Frank, sitting stiffly besides her, was thinking at that moment. He was probably ready to deck the guy.

“But you visited them in August, 1970, didn’t you?” Frank asked, not showing any emotion.

“Okay, I did. Sorry I lied to your cop partner,” Brown confessed. “I was afraid I’d be accused of something. Old reflex. And yeah, I had a fight with Emily in the diner. I’ve been drinking. Drank a lot in those days. I wanted her to get out of that town and come back to me. She was going to get that house. Money. I wanted my share. She wouldn’t think of it.” A snort. “She always was a selfish woman.

“What I could never understand is…she had this new boyfriend and, from what I heard, he was worse to her than I’d ever been. He was a drinker, too. Never met him but I hated him.

“There he was getting what was mine. He was mean to my kids. I didn’t go for that. He’d get drunk and push Emily and them around. Now Emily probably deserved it, with that mouth of hers, but he had no right to yell at my kids. I went down there to put him in his place. But Emily wouldn’t tell me who he was or where he lived; wouldn’t leave and wouldn’t let me take the kids with me. I guess I got a little angry. I guess I made a scene. Bad me.

“But I didn’t hurt her. The whole thing was blown way out of proportion. That nosy waitress and those nosy townspeople. Ha, Emily was probably dating half of those men who jumped up to get me off her.” His hand plucked at his pant leg in a repetitive gesture. “Emily was wild as they come. Nah, I was never good enough for her. Never.”

Abigail suspected Frank was boiling by then and wanted to hit Brown smack in the face, but he was behaving himself. She didn’t think Brown remembered he was one of those men who’d known the real Emily. Probably didn’t remember him at all. Good thing.

 “Any idea who might have meant them harm then, Mr. Brown?” Frank pressed. “Did Emily have any enemies? She ever say anything to you about being stalked or threatened?”