The Winter Widow (27 page)

Something dark and small and furry suddenly ran over her arm. She jerked back, catching her breath with a thin bleat. Rat! Oh Lord,
rat.
She shuddered, clamped her teeth and removed the top sack, then another and another, with the awful feeling she wasn't going to like what she found underneath. Eight bags had covered the old tarp wrapped loosely around a bulky object.

She folded back an edge of the tarp and shined the flashlight on the blond hair of Brenner Niemen. Injury to the back of the head. Hair disheveled. Face—swollen and blue with the bulging eyes and protruding tongue of a strangling victim—twisted toward the wall.

Fury raged through her. Brenner couldn't be dead. Goddammit, he was the killer.

Wind slammed the damaged door against the shed with a crash that brought her up on her toes, heart banging against her ribs. She didn't unwrap the body any further or touch anything else; the Sheriff's Department needed to be notified and Sheriff Holmes would take it from here.

She drew in a breath. Call off the search for Brenner; at least a lot of time hadn't been wasted on that. If she hadn't found his body, she'd have devoted all her attention there. The body might not have been found for some time, maybe not until the weather got warm and maybe not even then, unless somebody got close enough to notice the smell.

Oh shit. She'd been so sure. Everything pointed to Brenner. Obviously, faulty thinking on her part. Now what? She was back where she started, with no idea who had killed Daniel, and in three days the mayor would give her the boot. After a last glance around the shed, she set off on the half-mile hike to the pickup.

*   *   *

SHERIFF Holmes had rigged up lights in the shed, and the harsh glare spilled through the doorway to make a bright rectangle on the gravel. Inside the shed, sheriff's deputies took photographs and crawled on the floor picking up bits of possible evidence. Parkhurst, the collar of his black leather jacket turned up, stood outside and watched, chin on his chest, arms crossed with his hands trapped in his armpits as though to prevent himself from touching anything.

Susan, leaning against the fender of the pickup, knew how he felt. She wanted to be in there doing the work and keeping a beady eye on the collection of evidence, making sure nothing was overlooked or contaminated. The residual anger at finding Brenner dead had drained away and now she was simply cold and tired and nowhere.

A dark-colored Dodge drove around the house and pulled in behind the pickup. Helen, wearing trousers and a heavy wool jacket, a brown muffler wrapped around her throat, got out and marched with her brisk stride toward the shed. Susan intercepted her.

“What's going on?” Helen demanded.

“What are you doing here?”

“I have a right to be here. I own this place.”

And it's going to be yours a while longer, Susan thought, before I agree to sell. Now that Brenner's dead, you're back on the list. “How did you know anything was going on?”

In the darkness, she couldn't see Helen's eyes behind the large round glasses, but the glasses flashed her way and Helen's eyebrows twitched with amusement. “Haven't you learned yet that news travels fast? Bob Donato saw the sheriff's cars go by. What happened? Did you find Brenner?”

Susan shoved her gloved hands deep into the pockets of her jacket and hunched her shoulders against the wind; it was less fierce now, its violence diminishing with malcontented wails. “Brenner was killed.”

“Here?” Helen sounded indignant.

“Maybe. Maybe killed somewhere else and the body left here.”

“Why was he killed?”

Good question, Susan thought.

“Who killed him?”

Susan didn't know; she didn't know anything except that her feet were numb.

“He didn't kill Dan, then,” Helen said.

That's certainly a possibility.

Helen turned her head to watch two young men maneuver a stretcher into the shed; then she looked back at Susan. “Well, missy, bit off more than you can chew?”

Susan went rigid, clamped her teeth against some brilliant response like “Up yours,” and carefully arranged poised confidence on her face. Helen, paying no attention, which made Susan even angrier, had her glasses aimed at the bagged body on the stretcher being angled through the doorway. Wheels crunched on the gravel as the two men rolled it to the waiting ambulance, hoisted it inside and drove away.

Helen muttered, “Poor Sophie. She knew what kind he was, but this is still going to be hard on her.”

She may never know, Susan thought. She may never regain consciousness.

Helen started for the shed and Susan put a hand on her arm. “Don't go any closer. You can't go in until they're through.”

“I want to look inside. I haven't seen the inside of that shed since I locked in all those Mason jars.”

“Nothing's been damaged, and probably nothing's been stolen.”

“Ha! You think I care about that? It's easy to see you've never spent your summers in a kitchen full of steam. Cleaning fruit and snapping beans, filling those
jars
with tomatoes and pickles and cherries. That evil pressure cooker waiting to explode when I turned my back. The happiest day of my life was the day I put the padlock on that door.” Her mouth tightened thinly against her teeth. “I simply wanted a look at what I'm leaving behind when I sell this place.” Helen tossed the loose end of the muffler over her shoulder. “I assume we can take care of all the legalities before you leave.” Her voice held a hint of steel and the hidden eyes seemed to send out a warning.

“What makes you think I'm leaving?”

“The mayor won't let you stay, not after this.”

“I'm not leaving until I get Daniel's killer.”

Helen made a short sound that might have been amusement, might have been derision. “You don't give up easy, I'll say that for you.” She strode to her car, slid in, and backed furiously out of the driveway.

*   *   *

BEFUDDLED by fatigue, Susan drove slowly into town, making no attempt to engage her mind with anything more taxing than getting herself home and into bed. Brenner's murder would have to wait till morning. Somewhere she'd gone wrong; she'd have to start over, sift through all the bits of data and shuffle and rearrange until they came out right.

She thought of Sophie, so small and still in a hospital bed. And Frannyvan came to mind, small and still in a hospital bed. Susan had gone to see her, had sat holding Frannyvan's lifeless hand, then gone home, gotten in her own bed and gone to sleep. In the morning, Frannyvan was dead. During the night, she'd given up her fight. Tears welled up and rolled down Susan's face. Was Sophie still fighting?

On Railroad Avenue she drove past the park and then, instead of turning left for home, she turned right, continued until she came to Brookvale Hospital and pulled into the parking lot. She had to know if Sophie was still alive.

The hospital corridors were dimly lighted and filled with the hushed quiet of watchful waiting. Loudspeakers periodically broke through the hush calling for Dr. Janis, Dr. Janis. Room 318. Dr. Rosenfield to ER. Code Blue, followed by a rush of white uniforms and scurrying feet.

Turning a corner, she edged past an elderly man swinging a heavy buffing machine in slow arcs across the beige floor. From the doorway, Sophie looked bad; from the bedside she looked even worse, she looked like death, skin gray except for purple bruises and red abrasions. The white bandage on her head, only slightly paler than her face, showed seepage of brownish stains. On the wall, instruments bleeped and monitors displayed jagged green lines. Breath rasped through her nostrils. Colorless liquid dripped from a bottle on a metal stand through a thin tube into a needle taped to her left hand.

Susan's mind flashed again on Frannyvan, diminished by a stroke; like Sophie, surrounded by tubes and drains; like Sophie, still and gray. She swallowed hard, blinking rapidly, then lightly touched Sophie's hand, cool and dry. “Hang on, Sophie.”

Susan slipped quietly away and as she approached the nurses' station, she recognized Jack Guthman leaning on the counter talking with the nurse. When he noticed her, he straightened, came toward her and walked with her to the elevator. He didn't look a whole lot healthier than Sophie, with skin stretched tightly across his face, dark circles under his eyes and deep lines on either side of his moustache.

“Why are you here?” she asked as she pressed a button for the elevator.

He gave her a brief smile. “My mother told me to come.” Then he spoke soberly. “I was having supper at home when we heard about Brenner. She worried the news would be too much for Sophie and called here to ask about her.”

“Sophie's still unconscious.”

The elevator doors slid noiselessly open and they stepped inside. Susan pushed another button and the doors closed just as noiselessly.

“Doctors wouldn't tell her anything, so she sent me to find out how Sophie was. Why my mother thought I'd have more success than she did, I don't know.”

“Mothers are like that.”

When the elevator door opened, they walked through the brightly lit lobby and outside to the parking lot. Jack stuck his hands in his pants pockets and asked diffidently, “Brenner—do you know…?”

“Not yet.” She felt beaten down, run into the ground, and it was taking all she had to stay on her feet long enough to get to the pickup and then home. She hadn't anything left to parry questions with or to ask any of her own.

“It's all so strange,” he murmured. “Not even real. Dan walks across an empty pasture and gets shot. Lucille has an argument with Dad and gets strangled. Sophie bakes a cherry pie and gets hit on the head. Brenner talks with a reporter and ends up dead on Dan's farm. I just can't—”

A thought battered at the edges of her fatigue and then was gone. “Reporter,” she said sharply. “Who?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “Doug McClay.”

“When?”

“Yesterday evening.” Jack took his hand from his pocket and rolled plastic pellets across his palm.

“How do you know?”

“Brenner called to ask about Lucille, if there was anything new, and mentioned McClay was coming to see him.”

“At Sophie's?”

“I don't think he said. I assumed so.”

Doug McClay, she repeated to herself to make an impression on her tired mind. When they reached the pickup, Jack said good night and angled across the parking lot to his own car.

It took her two tries before she got the key in the ignition; then she backed from the parking slot, turned onto Railroad Avenue and drove through the quiet, deserted streets; most houses dark, but here and there a light burned inside. Watches of the night, she thought, whatever that might be. Actually, it was only a little after midnight, probably not late enough for watches.

Tell Sheriff Holmes McClay had an appointment with Brenner the evening he was killed. McClay. Involved with the murders? Couldn't be. No motive. Had she looked carefully enough? Maybe the motive was there and she missed it. Her mind, too tired and lumpish to care, refused to examine the possibility; it simply kept insisting Brenner was the killer. He killed Daniel, he killed Lucille.

Taking one hand from the wheel, she rubbed her forehead; she felt dense, stupid. Something was nagging at the edge of her mind, something important, something Helen had said, and she couldn't remember what it was.

At Elm Street she made a right, went four blocks, pulled into the driveway and thumbed the opener. The garage door rattled up and the interior light came on. As she rolled inside, a flicker in the rearview mirror caught her eye and she twisted to look through the back window. Driveway empty, no movement on the dark street; probably a tree limb swaying in the wind.

The overhead light went off and after cutting headlights and motor, she sat in the dark hearing the little ticks and clicks of cooling metal and waiting for enough energy to get out of the truck. Taking a breath, she opened the door and slid out, then turned to disentangle the shoulder-bag strap from the gear shift.

A split second too late, she was aware of movement, a presence behind her. She pivoted, tried to turn toward the attack. White pain exploded through her mind, shot through with iridescent lights.

Not alert—too tired—if hadn't been—should have—

Colored lights dazzled across the growing darkness; then the lights faded and the darkness closed in.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

RATS. Large gray rats. Red eyes. Swarmed from the black tunnels behind her. They were gaining. Would trample her, get Doug McClay before she could reach him. Run. Faster.

Her heart pounded. Loud. Bang. Bang. Her head—the pounding hurt her head. She stirred, heard a moan, struggled up through the dream. Hazy thoughts floated on the pain in her mind. She had stopped at the hospital to see Sophie, she'd driven home, into the garage. Why does the garage smell like a horse barn?

She moved her head, felt scratchy matting under her cheek and groped at it with her fingers. Straw. Ah, straw. She was quite pleased with herself for working that out, then wondered uneasily why the garage was covered with straw.

Something happened—something—

She remembered turning to reach for her shoulder bag and then … and then.… Someone had come up behind her.

Her eyelids flew open on total blackness. Panic gripped her.
Blind. I can't see. I'm blind.
Pushing hard with her hands, she managed a half-sitting position and dizziness rolled over her. She heard a snort, then puffing and blowing and a bang against wood.

In a stall. With a horse. That I can't see. No, calm down. Not totally dark. Not quite. She could just make out the large bulk of the animal, slightly paler in the darkness, the sway-backed shape and bony head.

Buttermilk. Sophie's barn. The old mare snorted and huffed and shifted her rump, banging her head against the doors. Both doors were closed, and Buttermilk didn't like it. Latches would be on the outside. Strong, sturdy latches: no way to open the doors, no way to get out.