A Reunion to Die For (A Joshua Thornton Mystery)

A Reunion to Die For

A Joshua Thornton Mystery

By

Lauren Carr

Copyright Information

A Reunion to Die For

All Rights Reserved © 2007 by Lauren Carr

Published by Acorn Book Services

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author.

For information call: 304-995-1295

or Email: [email protected]

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Designed by Acorn Book Services

Publication Managed by Acorn Book Services

www.acornbookservices.com

[email protected]

304-995-1295

Published in the United States of America 

Dedication

To Mom, with love.

You believed in my talent the most, even when I didn’t.

Prologue

October 8, 1984

Dorothy Wheeler turned her Toyota into her dirt driveway and saw her rented cottage nestled between the twin maples in her front yard.

“Finally!”

It had been a long day.

First, Dorothy was late for work because the previous day she had forgotten to get gas on her way home from church. When she walked in three minutes late for her job as a bank clerk, she didn’t overlook boss Susan Sweeney’s evil eye.

Then, after being on her feet all day, Dorothy had to go to the store to buy groceries. Judging by the line at the checkout, everyone else in Chester, West Virginia, had the same idea.

She hoped her daughter, Tricia, had already started dinner. As Dorothy, the widow of a Vietnam soldier, drove across the creek to pull the car behind her house, she smiled and waved her fingers to greet her neighbors across the split-rail fence dividing their two properties.

Teenaged siblings Phyllis and Doug Barlow watched with little expression while her Toyota made its way up the driveway to rest under the first maple tree. Tricia and Doug were seniors in high school. Phyllis was a couple of years younger. The Barlows didn’t return the greeting. They ran into their house and closed the door.

“I swear.” Dorothy frowned. “Those kids are getting stranger every day.”

She turned off the engine. With a groan, she lifted two of the three paper bags full of groceries out of the front passenger seat of the car.

She hoped things would be quiet that night.

“Tricia!” she called into the house when she dropped one of the bags in the driveway. “Can you come help me carry in the groceries?”

She didn’t notice the eerie silence in response to her call. While clutching the bags and her purse, which dropped from her shoulder to hang by the strap at her elbow, she scurried to the back door to deposit the groceries inside the house before she dropped the rest of them.

“Trish, open the door,” Dorothy yelled through the screen door. She waited.

Her daughter didn’t answer.

Dorothy sighed and pried open the door with an index finger. “Help me unload the car!” Frustration crept into her voice. She forced her hand, then her shoulder, through the crack between the door and the door frame. “Get off the phone with Beth and help me!”

She dropped everything onto the table and went in search of her daughter, who, she assumed, was on the phone.

“Tricia, didn’t you hear—?” Her tirade ended with a scream. She found her daughter laid out on the sofa as if practicing for her funeral viewing.

Tricia was dressed in the blue-and-gold cheerleading uniform she had worn that day for yearbook pictures. Blood oozing through the hole created by the bullet through her heart formed a red pool in the middle of the blue O trimmed in gold that stood for Oak Glen High School.

Thus ended Tricia Wheeler’s young life.

Chapter One

Twenty-One Years Later

“Dr. MacMillan, we have a shooting victim and a potential heart attack coming in. ETA three minutes,” the nurse informed the emergency room doctor on duty that evening.

East Liverpool City Hospital was small compared to other hospitals, but it was as big as it needed to be. This Saturday night, the emergency room had only a doctor and resident on duty. Until now, the evening had been quiet. It was the first cold weekend of autumn, and most of the residents of the town nestled along the Ohio River, and its neighbor on the opposite end of the Chester Bridge, had stayed in their homes to keep warm.

As a matter of protocol, the nurse waited for her orders from the doctor in the green lab coat. She had known Dr. Tad MacMillan for so many years that she hadn’t noticed the touch of gray that had crept into his brown hair and the smile lines that now framed his deep green eyes.

“How bad is the shooting victim?” he inquired.

“Conscious. In a lot of pain. Losing blood fast. BP is dropping.”

“See if you can get Dr. Longstreet down here for the heart attack.” He could hear the ambulance sirens in the parking lot.

“No go. He’s in surgery.”

The doors flew open and two attendants ran into the emergency room. The gurney between them was filled with the bulk of a man dressed in soiled work clothes. Reeking of booze and sweat, he thrashed around so much that the attendants had to fight to keep him from falling off the gurney. His lower body was covered in blood.

Even though the doctor was unable to see the man’s face under a nest of tangled hair that reminded him of the serpent locks on the head of a mythical monster he had read about in high school, Tad instantly recognized Rex Rollins. He was a regular visitor to the ER.

The attendants slowed down enough to hear the nurse’s directions. “Examination room two.” They ran off while the second gurney came in behind them.

A rail-thin man was curled up on the gurney with his hands over his ears. His face was covered with an oxygen mask. Tad couldn’t make out the patient’s mumbled words between the hysterical gasps for breath from under the mask.

Figures, he thought. Rex must have been stirring up trouble at his wife’s house again. The second patient was the first’s brother-in-law, Doug Barlow.

Tad directed the attendants to room one. He ordered the nurse, “Get an EKG on Barlow and his vitals. I’ll take the shooting victim first.”

The nurse took off after Doug before the doctor could finish his directions. He rushed after Rex with the rest of the emergency room staff behind him.

The attendants and orderlies already had Rex Rollins on the examination table when Tad got to his patient. The nurse assigned to assist him was setting up an IV to replace the lost blood.

Even though he was losing consciousness, the patient was still able to direct a string of obscenities at his wife. “That bitch tried to shoot my balls off! After all I did for her and she shoots me in the balls! She’s crazy.”

Tad examined the bullet wound in his upper thigh, which the paramedics had exposed by cutting open his pant leg. He guessed from experience that the bullet was a small caliber handgun: little, but effective.

Luckily, Rex’s wife missed her target by at least two inches.

The paramedics had tried to stop the bleeding with pressure above the injury at his hip. Even with the binding, blood spurted like a fountain from where he was shot.

While Tad pried into the leg to get at the bullet, the nurse appeared at his elbow to report on Doug Barlow’s condition. His heart rate was elevated, as was his breathing, but the EKG was normal. She made the same diagnosis the doctor had guessed when he learned the identity of the patient.

Doug was having an anxiety attack.

She rushed off to administer the drugs Tad had ordered to sedate him.

“Son of a bitch! After all I did for that bitch and she hauls off and shoots me in the balls! Son of a bitch!” Rex muttered while slipping off into unconsciousness.

With a shake of his head, the doctor yanked the bullet from his thigh.

“It’s so loud!” Doug complained when Tad stepped into the other examination room to see his next patient. Even though the medication had stopped the hyperventilating, his anxiety had not subsided.

The scene was ironic. The former town drunk was treating the genius, who was now an emotional cripple.

While he took his patient’s pulse, Tad observed the scars on Doug’s wrists, left there from a suicide attempt made a decade earlier. He had put three slashes on both wrists. “How are you doing, Doug?”

The patient took off his dirt-filmed eyeglasses and wiped his eyes. Without the magnification of the thick lenses, his eyes seemed to shrink to half their size. “It was so loud. I didn’t know it would be so loud.”

“What was loud?”

“The gun shot. I didn’t mean to—”

“How is he, Doc?” Phyllis Rollins’ question made Tad jump. He hadn’t given permission for his patient to have any visitors yet.

Doug’s sister had the attitude of a mother bear protecting her cub. The top she wore under her faded coat belonged to pajamas. Without bothering to run a brush through her long, ash-colored hair, she had pulled on a pair of jeans and thrown on her coat to follow the ambulance to the hospital after the police agreed to let her go for shooting her husband.

“We gave him a sedative. His heart rate has already come down. Once it returns to normal, he can go home.” Tad referred to Doug’s record of his previous visits to the emergency room and the list of medications he had been taking. “Is he still on antidepressants?”

“Yes,” she responded briskly.

“Is he still seeing Dr. Dalton?”

“Yes.” She watched her brother with her eyes narrowed to slits.

Tad could see that she was only interested in getting her brother home. “Well, after he goes home, I want you to be sure he sees his psychiatrist within two days.” He signed the release form on his clipboard despite his concern at seeing Doug hugging his knees and rocking on the examination table. “Witnessing a shooting would be traumatic for anyone.”

“He’ll be okay.” Her statement sounded more like an order directed at her brother.

“Still, he should see Dr. Dalton,” Tad repeated on his way out of the room. He got to the door before he remembered Rex Rollins. “Oh, about Rex—”

“What?” She started at the reminder.

“Your husband is going to be okay.”

“Thanks a lot.” Phyllis’s appreciation was sarcastic.

“Sorry,” Tad responded.

Joshua Thornton’s Monday was going badly.

The morning began with his ten-year-old son Donny remembering that he needed a science project for school—that day. The widowed father was able to recall how to make a cyclone out of two plastic liter bottles and tape, and spent his breakfast giving his son a science lesson.

After that fiasco, his two teenaged daughters, Tracy and Sarah, got into a fight over something that had to do with cosmetics. He stepped in before it turned violent. The girls did not speak to each other during breakfast. Sarah slammed the back door so hard when she left for school with Donny that the force knocked a flowerpot off the porch railing. Joshua was grateful that it was not him, but his twin sons, Joshua Junior (J.J.) and Murphy, who had to endure the drive to the high school with Tracy, who would surely present her side of the case.

The final straw came when he ran out of coffee before he got a full dosage of caffeine. The headache from the withdrawal had already settled behind his eyeballs when he left the house for his office down the river in New Cumberland.

Joshua pulled his black 1958 Corvette convertible into the space reserved for Hancock County’s prosecuting attorney, got out, and had just slammed the door when the clouds split open and dumped all of their contents on the Ohio Valley. He was torn between digging out his keys to unlock the car door so that he could get back inside to escape the downpour or running twenty feet across the parking lot into the school building where his office took up one corner of the basement. He decided to run for it and got soaked.

He didn’t even have time to take off his trench coat before Mary, his administrative assistant, announced that he had a visitor.

With rain dripping from his auburn hair and down his face, the tall, athletically slender lawyer stood in the center of the reception area. The pitter-patter of the rain in the parking lot above them drowned out the classic rock music he played in his office.

The visitor rose from the chair next to Mary’s desk and extended her hand. “Hello,” she greeted Joshua in a voice meant to warm up the rain soaking his clothes. “I’m Tori Brody. I just joined the public defender’s office.” Her brown eyes smiled at him.

The recognition was instant. “Tori,” he mouthed.

One corner of her lips curled. She painted them a red that was a shade darker than was appropriate for a woman in what was still a man’s business. Her honey-colored hair fell in one wave to her shoulders. She had darkened it since high school. It used to be the color of platinum and worn in permed curls down to the middle of her back. The darker shade was more becoming on her.

Aware that he was still holding her hand, Joshua released it and backed up. “Step into my office.” He slipped his coat off and hung it up on the rack next to the door. When she passed him, he picked up the scent of her perfume.

“I guess you two know each other,” Mary said. It was more an observation than a question.

“We went to school together.”

“She doesn’t look like your average public defender.”

After he closed his office door, Joshua asked Tori, “Did I hear you say that you are with the public defender’s office now?” He paused in front of the wall mirror by his door to wipe the rain off his forehead and smooth his hair back with his hands. When he saw his reflection, he observed that her style wasn’t the only one that had changed in the past twenty years. His hair used to fall to his collar and curl. Now, it was cut short and combed back off his forehead.

“Part time. I’m setting up my own legal practice here in town.” Tori took the seat across from his desk. She crossed one leg over the other. The skirt of her gray suit was shorter than what would be appropriate in court.

While he made conversation, Joshua sat behind his desk and took out his notepad and pen. “Let me warn you, Ruth Majors is like a dog with a bone. She likes to keep all the good stuff for herself. You’ll get a couple of cases—”

The warning didn’t bother her. “As long as I get enough to be able to get a reputation.”

He paused.

Tori Brody already had a reputation. Her looks made him doubt if time would ever erase the invisible scarlet A branded onto her chest from her youth.

“What case are you here to see me about?” he asked in a tone not unlike that of a school principal to a student.

“Saturday night Phyllis Rollins shot her husband. His name is Rex.”

“I know the Rollinses. Rex is a regular visitor at the county jail. He has a tendency to get nasty when he drinks too much, which is all the time. Did Phyllis kill him?”

“No, she got him in the leg.”

“Lucky guy.”

“You’re right there. She was aiming for his balls.”

While she continued to present her defense, Joshua cringed at the thought of being shot in the testicles. It was a mistake for her to tell the prosecutor that her client was aiming to shoot her victim in the crotch. It showed criminal intent. If Phyllis wanted to claim that she shot her husband in self-defense, then her lawyer blew it.

“The husband is in the hospital and expected to recover,” she finished.

“That’s good for your client.”

“He was violating a restraining order. He had kicked in the door and was in the bedroom. My client was on the phone with the sheriff, and the police were on their way there when she shot him.”

Even though he was familiar with Rex’s history, Joshua had not had a chance to read the police report on the shooting. “Your client and the victim are legally separated, but their divorce isn’t final yet. Who owns the house?”

“My client. She put the house into her name when she took out a mortgage on it a few years ago.”

His job was to decide what charges, if any, to bring against Phyllis Rollins. If he prosecuted a woman trying to defend herself against a husband with a history of violence, the newly elected county prosecuting attorney would be very unpopular. “I have to charge her with something. Otherwise, I’d be sending a message that it’s okay for women to go around shooting off their husbands’ balls.”

“It was self-defense,” she argued. “He has a record, and she had reason to fear for her safety.”

“Was he armed?” He hoped Rex had made it easy for him by making a case of self-defense.

She shook her head. “But Phyllis didn’t know that.”

Joshua needed an out. “Let me read the police report and talk to the investigator to see what he’s found out.”

“Investigator?” she asked. “This is a simple case of self-defense.”

“Unless Phyllis was actually trying to kill Rex,” Joshua pointed out. “I don’t know if Ruth told you. The sheriff’s department has hired a chief of detectives. Actually . . .” He grinned. “He’s the only detective. Seth Cavanaugh. Maybe you heard of him.”

Tori shrugged while shaking her head.

“Maybe not,” he conceded. “Seth Cavanaugh was the cop that solved the Quincy murders in Parkersburg last year.”

“Has he investigated the Rollins shooting yet?”

Joshua thumbed through the reports on his desk and found none from over the weekend. “The best I can tell you is that based on what you tell me, we can charge Rex with breaking and entering, trespassing, and violating a restraining order and maybe make some sort of deal with your client that won’t involve any jail time.”

“Jail time? She was firing a gun in her own home in defense of herself against an abusive husband.”

“Did she give him a warning?”

“Yes, the sheriff has it on the 911 tape.”

“Then I think we can make a deal. Let me talk to Cavanaugh and the sheriff.” Joshua noticed she let out a sigh of relief. “How long ago did you pass the bar?”

“It shows?”

He nodded.

Now that they were no longer talking business, her professional demeanor slipped away like a satin sheet. “I always knew you’d be gentle our first time together.”

It was his turn to be nervous. Joshua sat forward in his seat and concentrated on a doodle on the corner of his notepad.

“I passed last year,” she answered his question. “I went to law school in Morgantown.”

“That’s a good school. If you don’t mind my asking—” He cocked his head and reconsidered asking her the question he had on his mind.

“What?”

“When we were in school,” he reminded her, “I don’t recall ever seeing any sign from you that you were interested in college, let alone going to law school.”

“I don’t recall you ever taking the time to find out what I was interested in.” Tori prepared to leave.

Joshua stood up and leaned with his palms flat on his desk as a reminder of his position of authority. “It’s hard to ask questions when someone is coming at you with a switchblade.”

“That was not my fault,” she fired back. “Let’s not go there.” She dug a business card from her portfolio and placed it in the center of his desk, inches from his fingertips. Bright white with blue print, it was crisp and new.

“Call me after you talk to your detective.” She held out her hand to him to shake.

He took her hand.

She smiled. This one was pleasant and inviting. “It’s good to see you again, Josh.”

“You’ve come a long way, Tori,” he said. “Congratulations.” He extracted his hand from hers.

At the door, she struck a pose that mocked her own sexual reputation. “Call me some time.”

“Jan Martin is on line one.” Mary startled him out of his thoughts by calling from her desk into his office after the public defender had left.

Dreading the reason for his childhood friend’s call, Joshua plopped down into his chair, groaned, and picked up the receiver. “Hey, Jan!” He forced himself to sound happy to hear from her. “How are you doing?”

“Splendid! I just signed the papers! The drugstore has been sold and I’m a free woman!”

The weak reception told him that she was on her cell phone. He guessed that she was on her way across the Ohio River to work at her new job as a journalist at The Glendale Vindicator, a local newspaper.

Jan Martin had spent her adult life running her mother’s drugstore. Then, over the summer, Joan Martin had met a millionaire while on a bus tour. After a whirlwind romance, they married and moved to Branson, Missouri. She turned over the store to her daughter, who went about selling it to pursue a writing career. Jan was starting out as a reporter covering the courthouse.

“Did you get the invitation to the reunion?” She was referring to their twentieth high school reunion that she was coordinating. “Have you RSVP’d yet?”

“I have to check my schedule,” Joshua lied.

She responded with a laugh. She knew he had no intention of going to their reunion. “What are you doing tonight?”

Quick, he told himself, come up with something!

They had grown up together. Joshua always sensed that Jan had a crush on him, but he ignored it. Then, after marrying someone else, having five children, and traveling around the world as a lawyer for the Judge Advocate General, he had returned to his hometown, on the cobblestoned streets of Chester, West Virginia, in the heart of the Ohio Valley.

It was upon his return that her crush turned to love.

Neither of them said anything about it—until the party celebrating his election in a special run-off election for prosecutor.

The Thorntons held an open house in their big stone house on Rock Springs Boulevard with its rolling front and backyards. The adults drank beer or margaritas, and sat on the porch to watch the younger hosts and guests play football.

After one too many margaritas, Jan confessed her love. While the encounter ended chastely, Joshua felt guilty for not handling it better.

That had been one month ago and neither of them had talked about it since. It was as if the encounter had never happened. But it had happened, and thoughts about it lay beneath the surface.

“I want to celebrate my freedom,” she told him. “I’ve got a lasagna put together. All I have to do is pop it in the oven. Tad is coming.”

Relieved to realize that this was not a date, Joshua accepted the invitation and offered to let her bring the lasagna over to his place. His house had more room, and the kids would like to share in the celebration. The tension alleviated, he felt comfortable enough to ask, “Do you remember Tori Brody?”

“Yeah,” she answered without enthusiasm. “What about her?”

“She’s with the public defender’s office now.”

“Okay, now tell me for real. Sawyer found out that she was running a whorehouse and busted her, right?”

“No, really. She’s a lawyer.”

“You can dress a pig up in a tux and teach him how to dance, but that won’t change what he is. He’s still a hog. I’ll see you tonight.” Jan didn’t wait for him to say good-bye before she hung up.

“After everything I’ve done for that bitch!”

In the ward reserved for patients without insurance who couldn’t afford rooms, Tad was examining the hole in Rex Rollins’ hand. The bullet had passed through the palm before it imbedded itself in his thigh. During the examination, Lieutenant Seth Cavanaugh broke the news to the patient that he was under arrest.

“You’re shitting me!” Rex kept saying while the detective reminded him that he had violated the restraining order Phyllis had placed against him by forcing his way into her home.

Dressed in jeans and a sports jacket over his trim build, Lieutenant Seth Cavanaugh, with his blond hair and blue eyes, looked like a television version of a detective. Tad felt as if he was in a scene from a glitzy Hollywood cop show.

“I don’t fucking believe this! Why aren’t you arresting her?”

“She was defending herself. You broke the law. That’s why you’re being charged and she isn’t.” Seth went on to tell him that the deputy standing at his elbow was going to stay there. As soon as Rex was released from the hospital, he would be taken to the magistrate to have bail set, and then, if he could not afford bail, he would be taken to the jail to await his hearing.

“I got that house for her! You wouldn’t believe what I did for her to get her that house!”

Tad was putting the finishing touches to the fresh bandage on his patient’s hand, which resembled a giant white lobster claw.

Seth cut Rex off in his declaration. “The fact is you are under arrest.” He gestured towards the deputy standing next to his bed like a sentry. “Darrel will stay here to make sure you don’t decide to check out early and go elsewhere.” The detective headed for the door.

“Do you believe this?” Rex asked his doctor to verify the irony of the circumstance.

“If I were you, I’d cross Phyllis off my list and move on,” Tad said before instructing the nurse’s aid at his elbow to pack up the bandages and disinfectants. Wanting to proceed with his rounds, he didn’t care to hear any more rantings about how unfair life had been to his patient.

“I’d kill for that woman. Hell, I have!”