Gabriel's Revenge (The Adventures of Gabriel Celtic Book 2) (15 page)

Chapter 41

August 27, 1998

My eyes were burning slightly as I drove; they had been off and on since I had arrived back in Indiana. I had assured myself that it was probably just some allergen I was no longer used to. Thinking about it on the long ride to Lawrenceville though, I realized that it had only been about a week since I had gotten the telegram at the dig. Since learning of my friend’s death, I had been on a plane for two days, delved into Frank’s case files, and investigated a fresh murder.

Mixed into the fray, there was Abby, who had somehow wormed her way into my life in less than a week. I really wasn’t complaining mind you; I liked the kid, but I was at a loss to explain her motivation for being around me.

It was no wonder then that my body was rebelling; I would be 50 in a couple of years, and I had put a lot of mileage on this body in 48 years.

“What are you thinking about over there?” the voice surprised me out of my revere.

“Nothing really,” I said when I got over my shock, having momentarily forgotten she was there. “Just how old I am feeling these days.”

“You’ve been through a lot in the last week; give yourself a break,” she said sternly, but smiling.

“Humph,” I grumped, “well, I don’t have anymore time for it anyway; the driveway is right up here.”

I slowed down and pulled into the gravel lane, the house and outbuildings about a quarter of a mile down the corn lined drive. As we approached the house, I saw chickens in the front yard, along with ducks and geese in another group farther off. A flash of red out of the corner of my eye that caught my attention was just a cardinal flying off of his perch on a grotto containing the Virgin Mary next to a flower bed.

Pulling off the gravel into the grass, I killed the engine and we got out. The house before us was immaculate, the fresh paint bright, the flower beds weed-less. Walking up to the screen door, we were met by a lyrical “come on in” from another part of the house.

The thick smell of baking apple pie filled the inner space of the house. The sound of steps preceded a nice looking middle aged woman with dark hair, who I assumed was Mrs. Gracen.

Walking confidently up to me with her hand outstretched, she introduced herself with a smile, “Mr. Celtic…I’m Roberta Gracen, pleased to make your acquaintance.” Looking over to Abby, “And you must be?”

“Gabriella Tran, Mrs. Gracen, nice to meet you,” she stated professionally but with a smile as Abby handed her a business card.

That was the first time she had ever used her given name; I guess I just assumed Abby
was
her first name.

“Please, sit you two. Can I get you anything to drink? I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”

We both agreed to the coffee and Mrs. Gracen…Roberta, went off to retrieve it. I sat down on the couch behind me, while Abby milled around the room, looking at family pictures, an occasional “hmmm” escaping her lips. Stopping in front of one of the group photos, she stared at it for a long time.

“That’s my husband Loren with us in that photo,” Mrs. Gracen said when she entered the room. “There are only two up there with him in them. It seems we take a lot more photos lately now that I think on it; most of the rest have been taken since he passed. Hard to believe it’s been a year already.”

She carried a tray full of coffee cups, sugar, cream and some delicious looking homemade cookies. “The pie ain’t done yet, or I’d have offered you some of that.”

Abby sat down on the other side of the couch, while Mrs. Gracen moved to a wingback beside me.

“So what can I do for you Mr. Celtic? You said you had some questions?”

I stuck to my cover story I had been using as of late. “We are just trying to clean up some old files, doing some follow-up interviews on some of the accidental deaths in the county. Frank Luther was working on this project, and as you probably know, he died suddenly a few months ago.”

“Oh I know, that was so sad; I knew Frank from school. He was in my older sister’s class at St Linda’s.”

“Did he happen to come out and interview you at sometime after the accident?”

“Oh yes, he was here; it was only a couple of weeks before he died actually. That’s what made it so sad; I hadn’t seen him in ages before that, and then he died so soon after. I went to his funeral, there weren’t enough people there I’ll tell you that, for such a nice man as he was. Always a loner though, that one; were you close to him Mr. Celtic?”

A pang of remorse assaulted me briefly. Shaking it off, I told her that Frank and I had been good friends.

“Mrs. Gracen, Frank’s notes were lost when he died. Do you mind if I ask you what he talked with you about?”

“Oh dear, now let me think. He seemed to be a little mysterious about it really. Basically he wanted to hear my side of the story I guess. And he wanted to see the barn, and the old drill Loren had been using.”

“Can we ask you what you remember of that night?” Abby asked with a look of interest on her face.

“Well, let’s see. We had supper at six as usual; then Loren said he had to work on a tractor, so he went out to the barn. I fiddled around in the house doing laundry and such, and then I noticed that it was dark out, and Loren wasn’t back yet. That was nearly 9:00; I remember that because Loren really liked watching NYPD Blue, and it started at 9:00.”

“I looked out the window and saw that there were no lights on in the barn; so I sent my son Bobby out with a flashlight to check on him. I shoulda never done that. He was only 13 at the time, finding your father dead, well; I just shoulda done it myself is all.”

“Anyways, he comes running back to the house white as a ghost, told me what he had found, and we called 911. They said he had been dead a couple of hours by then, so there wasn’t anything they could do.”

I made some notes, and then asked if we could go see the barn and the drill. As she led us out of the house, Abby mentioned how nice everything looked.

“Why thank you Gabriella! This place is my pride and joy now, ceptin my son of course. We sold off all of the farm equipment and lease the land now to a farmer down the road. Between that and the life insurance, we are doing fine I’m happy to say!”

Abby had a funny look on her face, not funny exactly, more like she was working something out, solving a puzzle. She looked at me then; a slight smile crossed her face before she looked back at Mrs. Gracen.

“It’s nice that he had the life insurance set up; many people never take the time to do that.”

“You know,” Mrs. Gracen said with a look of wonderment, “that was the biggest surprise of all in all of this. I thought when he died that we would be digging change out of the cookie jar for his burial. Loren wasn’t one to be worried about what came tomorrow; he mostly struggled with the day to day around here. So I was really surprised when we found the life insurance policy, $100,000 it was, I about fainted.”

We walked into the very clean barn, space that had once been filled I presume with the farm equipment that had been sold off.

“It happened over here,” Mrs. Gracen pointed to a spot in front of a work bench, “and the drill is under the work bench.”

“Look around all you want...I need to go back and check on my pies.”

I walked over to the bench, pulling out the drill. Looking it over, it was indeed old, but had been very well maintained, even having a new cord on it. 

Pulling open some drawers, I located a screwdriver, and started disassembling the drill.

“What are you doing Gabe?” Abby questioned.

“Just checking something inside the housing of the drill,” I replied, removing one of the screws. “Unless there was a direct short on this drill, there should be no way that he would have gotten enough of a jolt to kill him.”

“Wow, you know a lot of stuff!”

Looking over my shoulder, I expected the mischievous grin telling me she was having fun at my expense. What I found instead was a look of…admiration? Giving her a little smile, I went back to removing the screws. As I removed the last one from the handle, Abby sidled in beside me to see what I would find.

It only took a few seconds to confirm what I feared I would find. Abby was intently eyeing the wires, trying to decipher what they meant, when she happened to look up at my face.

“What’s wrong Gabe; what do you see?”

I snapped out of my thoughts after a few seconds, looking at my young partner’s questioning gaze.

Reaching down, I pulled out a wire with the end stripped, the bare copper bent into a hook.

“Someone has cut the hot wire on this,” I started, “then wrapped the wire around one of the screws holding the drill together.”

Abby was thoughtful, until the realization hit her and she gasped at the thought.

“Someone did this on purpose?”

I started putting the drill back together; we would need to take it for evidence.

“Yes,” I finally answered my friend, “Loren Gracen was murdered!”

Chapter 42

August 27, 1998

“Wow,” Abby said while deep in thought. “This thing is getting huge!”

I finished putting the drill back together while I thought about Abby’s observation. Yes, it was bigger than anyone had thought, except maybe Frank. Knowing that the power tool had not been tampered with since the murder, I was still at a loss as to what Frank had found that had convinced him to look into Loren Gracen’s death in the first place.

Picking up the drill, I motioned Abby to follow me back to the house.

“There is still one more piece of information I need from Mrs. Gracen,” I told her. “Where had the water come from that was on the floor that night?”

Getting back to the house, Mrs. Gracen seemed confused. “I don’t really know. It had rained that week, so I had someone check the roof, but they said that it was ok. Then I thought that Loren might have washed the tractor when he was working on it, but it was still caked in mud from the fields. There is a water spigot right there, but I have no idea why he would run water out on the floor like that; we never did really figure it out.”

We said our goodbyes, letting her know we were taking the drill.

“Good riddance I say,” she uttered as she retreated once again into the house.

We were quiet as we got back into the Jeep and headed off down the lane.

“Gabe, did you happen to look at any of the pictures in the living room while you were in there?”

“Not really, I’ve not had a good experience with pictures lately.”

This confused Abby greatly, and she was at a loss as to how to reply.

“Never mind…you were saying?”

She was still looking at me, probably wondering about my sanity.

“Well…ok, here’s the thing. There were several pictures of the family since the accident, all smiles and toothy grins. Even the grandparents were in a few and happy. I think they were Mr. Gracen’s parents by their looks. Anyway, there were a couple of older family picture with all of them in them, Mr. Gracen included.
Nobody
looked happy looking in those pictures!”

Ok… I was thinking about what she was saying, but I was not grasping a point.

“What’s your point?”

“Hear me out. You saw how nice the house looked, right? It had bright paint, clean windows, plenty of flowers, a real homey place.

Again I was drawing a blank.

“There was a picture, of Mrs. Gracen and her son, standing in front of their house, from 1996. Neither of them showed any emotion, and the house was dismal, peeling paint, no flowers, and the windows looked dingy. There was also one of those aerial photos of the house and barns. The barns were nice and new looking, well kept, while the house was still dingy and dirty looking, and not a flower bed in sight.”

“Ok,” I said, trying not to dismiss her story as it rambled on.

“The date on the aerial photo was July 1997; that was only a month before Loren Gracen was killed.”

“So, you’re thinking that she used some of her insurance money to fix up the place? There’s no crime there Abby.”

“It’s not that she fixed it up, it’s that she
happily
fixed it up. The Gracen family is now a much happier family; 100% happier I’d say. The grandpa in one picture had a twinkle in his eye Gabe, a
twinkle!
In the older ones, his eyes looked dead. I bet if we looked into hospital and police records, we would find evidence of abuse in this family.”

Although a very keen observation by my new partner, I was still struggling with the point of the story. Apparently, Loren Gracen was a negative in the family’s life, but how did that figure into murder?

“What do you think all of this means Abby?”

“I think that Mr. Gracen was an abusive person, if I were to hazard a guess. I take a lot of pictures, and I can read people’s faces pretty well. I think at the very least, he abused his wife, and was probably abusive to his son, as well as his parents.”

“So you think what? That Roberta Gracen killed her husband because of the abuse, or maybe another family member?”

“You’ve met her; I don’t think she could have hated enough to do something like that. The grandparents look too frail, and the son’s probably too young, and probably would have never known anything different from the life he had.”

She was quiet for a few minutes, seeming to let something gel in her mind before speaking again.

“But maybe, and this is a big but, but maybe it could still be the
reason
he was killed.”

It was a well thought out theory I guess, but a long shot at best. Who would kill someone because they were not nice people?

“So your theory is that there is a do-gooder out there that kills people, because they don’t live up to his standards?”

As I said it out loud, the sound of it coming out of my mouth seemed to strike a sour note, enough to cause Abby to look depressed.

“Pretty stupid when you actually say it,” she mumbled.

Although it seemed far fetched, it still had a certain reasoning to it that trumped any other logic that we had up to this point. An ‘Out There’ theory was better than no theory at all.

“Ok, when we get back, we’ll look up the records; see if we can uncover anything.”

Abby face brightened immediately.

“Really?”

“Sure, it’s a long shot, but let’s see if it leads anywhere. If this pans out, then we need to see if the pattern fits with anyone else on our list.”

“Thanks Gabe.”

“Don’t thank me; it’s your theory, and it could be a break. Just don’t get your hopes up too far yet.”

Grinning, “I meant thanks for listening to my whacky theory; a lot of people wouldn’t.”

Why did I listen to my young friend’s theory? I’d like to think it was because I’m so smart that I could work through any theory to the end and immediately tell if it was sound.

I was not that smart.

But I
was
getting more confident in Abby; she had her head on straight, and seemed to have some innate abilities that made her suited to this work. Whether this theory panned out or not would take time to determine. Our partnership however, while only just beginning, seemed to be on the right track.

Thinking back, maybe that wasn’t such a good thing after all….for her.