Flowering Judas

 

This book is for Robert Piepenbrink because it contains, within it, everything he hates in murder mysteries.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would be nice if, when I finished a book, I went directly to the next page and wrote my acknowledgments, but I've got to admit—what I do is wander into the living room, collapse on the love seat, and channel surf until I realized I've just spent fifteen minutes watching large, mostly fat men with too many tattoos shouting into the faces of people whose cars they want to repossess.

Or something.

And, right now, the spell check on this computer is telling me I've spelled “something” wrong. This gets harder all the time.

Let me just thank my editor, Keith Kahla, who's kept Gregor afloat these many years, and his assistant Kathleen Conn, who puts up with me with more grace than I have the right to expect. Let me thank my agent, Don Maass, as well, and Carol Stone and Richard Siddall, two of the best friends I—or anybody else—have ever had.

And then let me thank the large group of enthusiastic readers—including Linda Dumas, Mike Fisher, Mary Featherston, Sue Daniels, Lynda Standley, Lymaree, Joan Kreuser, and I don't remember who else—who spent an entire afternoon on Facebook with me, working out the intricacies of amateur tattoos.

If I've forgotten anyone, I apologize. I tried writing it all down, and then lost it.

And finally, let me send a note to Robert: having heard for years now about the list of requirements for your owning and keeping a book in hardcover, I just had to see if I could get you to do it when the book broke all your rules.…

—Litchfield County, CT
        Thanksgiving, 2010

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part II

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part III

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Epilogue

The Gregor Demarkian Books by Jane Haddam

Copyright

 

PROLOGUE

We all believe in fairy-tales, and live in them.

—G. K. Chesterton

 

1

The first person to see the body hanging from the billboard on Mattatuck Avenue was Haydee Michaelman, and she wasn't paying attention.

“It only stands to reason,” Haydee was saying to her friend Desiree, as the two of them stood by the side of the road, waiting to cross.

It was a hot night at the end of August, and the traffic on Mattatuck was insane. Later, Haydee would wonder why everybody had managed to miss that thing up there. She wouldn't wonder for long. It was “The Billboard,” after all. It was that big sign asking if you'd seen Chester Ray Morton. It had been up there for twelve years. Nobody looked at it twice anymore.

Haydee's backpack was heavy with books, and she had been walking. She and Desiree walked out here three times a week to save the bus fare. Then they took the bus back home, because Desiree didn't like to walk in the dark. Haydee thought she was an idiot.

You were not supposed to cross Mattatuck Avenue right here. There was a crosswalk about three hundred feet down the road. The problem was that the crosswalk was nowhere near the entrance to Mattatuck–Harvey Community College, and it was another five hundred feet from the entrance to any of the actual buildings. Haydee wanted a car of her own. Lots of the other students had cars. Some of them had really impressive cars. Some of them even had trucks.

“The yard was dug up all around the place this morning,” Haydee said, “and then it was dug up over near the garbage shed. With a shovel. I know what digging with a shovel looks like.”

“I'm not saying you don't,” Desiree said. “I'm saying it doesn't necessarily have to be. Have to be Mike, I mean. I mean, I know you don't like him, but—”

“It's not that I don't like him,” Haydee said. “It's that he's a prick, that's what it is. Don't ask me what my mother thinks she's doing. Don't ever ask me that. But he knows I've got it stashed someplace. He knows.”

“I'm sure he knows,” Desiree said.

“At least he doesn't grab at me,” Haydee said. “That was the last one. Asshole. But Mike knows I've got it stashed, and he's not going to pretend he doesn't want to steal it. He stole it the last time.”

“I know he did,” Desiree said. She sounded a little desperate. “I know he did, but—”

“There aren't any buts,” Haydee said. “Twelve hundred dollars I had that time. I was supposed to buy a car with it. Now what are we doing? We're standing here waiting for the frigging traffic to thin out, and we're probably going to be late for English class, and you know what that's going to do. She's going to give us that look when we walk in that says, well … whatever it says.”

“I don't think she's so bad,” Desiree said. “I just wish she'd be, you know. Stricter. Like high school. I get work done faster when they're stricter.”

“It isn't high school,” Haydee said.

Just then, a car went by with three boys in it. It was one of those fancy-ass small Jeeps, and Haydee knew all three of the boys in it. They were in the same English class she was going to. They were probably on their way there. Or maybe not. People with cars like that didn't always come to class.

Of course, people without cars, people from the place Haydee was from herself—they didn't always come to class, either. Haydee looked over at Desiree. Desiree was wearing cropped Lycra pants that hugged her big thighs and and a flowing, sparkly T-shirt that looked wrinkled all along the back. She was also wearing high heels. Haydee had given up wearing high heels the second week of the semester. They hurt her feet when she walked here.

“Anyway,” Haydee said. If anything, the traffic seemed to be getting worse. “I know he's looking for it, and he knows I know he's looking for it. I've got it someplace he won't think of, because he doesn't think. You've got to give it to Mike. Every time he goes to jail, it's for a crime of opportunity.”

“What's a crime of opportunity?”

“When people steal stuff because it's just lying around. You know, when people leave their keys in the car or their purses on the picnic table when they go off to chase their kid, or something like that. Did I tell you he was in jail again last week?”

“I know he was in jail,” Desiree said. “The police came and arrested him in front of everybody. I thought that was a domestic disturbance, though.”

“Nah. He shoplifted enough beer to make a Budweiser river right in front of the cashier at the Quik-Go, and when does that make sense? He's in and out of the place half the week. It's not that they wouldn't know who he was. And there was a tape. I mean, for God's sake, the man is an idiot. And a prick. And he's not going to steal my money this time. I've got a plan.”

“You could stick it in a condom and put it up your, you know, junk,” Desiree said. “I saw that on television.”

“I've got a much better plan. I'm going to do what real people do. But maybe it's not such a bad idea, having him digging up the place. I mean, I didn't bury it. He's not going to find it by getting down in the dirt and knocking the trailer off the blocks. If he causes another plumbing problem, maybe my mother will kick him out.”

“I don't think so,” Desiree said.

“I don't think so, either,” Haydee said. “Do you ever think about it? What it would be like to be, you know, somebody else? Maybe somebody like Dr. London.”

“Nobody is like Dr. London,” Desiree said. “She's weird.”

“Yeah,” Haydee said. “I know.”

“She's even weird for a professor.”

“I know,” Haydee said again.

“And I was just saying, about the digging. It doesn't have to have been Mike looking for your stuff. I mean, you know, the place is haunted, and that kind of thing. Maybe it's the ghost of that guy that got killed there—”

“Ghosts don't dig holes in the ground,” Haydee said, “and besides, nobody knows if he was killed there or anywhere. They don't even know that he's dead. And that was a long time ago. The police have already dug the hell out of everything. You'd have to be an idiot to go digging around our place now.”

“Yeah,” Desiree said.

Haydee saw a break in the traffic just a little way up the road. She turned her head the other way and saw a break there, too. There were no cars coming down the long curving entryway, either. If they got the light, they'd be able to get across. She grabbed Desiree by the arm and said, “Get ready.”

It was just then, at the very last second, that Haydee looked up at the billboard right on the other side of Mattatuck Avenue and thought she saw something, something moving up there, swaying back and forth in the nonexistent wind.

Then the light changed and the traffic stopped and they ran. They ran with their backpacks banging against their backs. They ran as fast as they could.

You had to cross Mattatuck Avenue when you had a chance to, or you didn't cross at all.

2

For Kenny Morton, the idea of spending his time writing English papers at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College was ridiculous, and he would never have agreed to it if he didn't think his mother was about to have a nervous breakdown.

“She just wants us all to be normal,” Kenny's sister, Suzanne, said, when their parents were first pushing Kenny to go to school. “She just wants us all to be the way we would have been if Chester hadn't disappeared.”

“Even if Chester hadn't disappeared,” Kenny said, “I wouldn't be going to Mattatuck–Harvey and studying English. What am I doing this for? Can you tell me that? Why am I bothering? It's not like I'm not making a living.”

“And there's that, too,” Suzanne had said. “Why do you do that? Don't you know how much it hurts them that you're not going to go into the business? And why wouldn't you go into the business?”

The business was Morton Rubbish Removal, and Kenny had nothing against it except the obvious. His father wasn't about to give him any serious responsibility when he was only eighteen, and he wasn't going to give it to him now, when he was twenty-two. That was not how Kenny's father did things.

“She wanted all of us to get an education,” Suzanne had said.

And now, four years later, with the light beginning to fade a little outside the living room windows, Kenny was standing in the hall with a stack of books and a state of mind so foul, he was ready to kick something.

The books were something called
Current Issues and Enduring Questions
and
The Everyday Writer.
Kenny didn't think he needed to be told how to write stuff. He wrote a perfectly good business letter, and he was even better at working out a cost benefit ratio, and nobody had had to teach him either in school. He had a deal set up in Crayfield for Saturday that was going to net him over ten thousand dollars if he handled it right. He had an appointment for Wednesday that meant taking a vintage Model T out on Route 7 just to show some guy it could run. He had work to do, and the work paid him. He did not need to waste his time writing a two-and-a-half-page paper comparing and contrasting high school and college.

Mark was in the kitchen with their father and mother. There had been a lot of low murmuring all day. Kenny thought if he had to do this crap, he might as well get on with it and do it.