Greedy Bones (32 page)

I dressed and combed out my wet hair. Makeup
couldn't begin to cover the damage, so I didn't try. I grabbed my purse and met Harold at the front door.

Sweetie and Chablis danced and barked, hoping for a sign they could go. Not a chance. While the weevils were dead, the potential of contaminants in the cotton was too dangerous. Chablis had a varied wardrobe of glitter bows, cashmere sweaters, and booties, but not a single canine hazmat suit.

"I'll be back," I told them. "Soon." When I looked outside, I realized there wasn't much daylight left. If I intended to investigate, I had to shake the lead out.

I lived with a ghost at Dahlia House, but the sense of being haunted didn't bother me at home. Not true of the Carlisle plantation. Foreboding hung over that place like a funeral shroud. Color me uneasy.

Harold idled down the driveway, and in the fading late spring light, the devastation in the fields was heartbreaking. Not a single sign of life was in evidence in the long vista of cotton fields--not plant or insect--as far as the eye could see.

In the distance, the grand old house looked shabby and abandoned--by living entities. If the theme from
The Exorcist
started playing and dead leaves began to blow along the drive, I wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.

"I wonder what the disposition of the land will be," Harold said.

"I don't know." If Erin was dead and Luther found guilty as an accomplice to murder, or worse, the land might be sold. "It's a terrible shame."

"I wonder why Janks settled on developing this particular plot of ground."

"Because Luther convinced him he could get it. The
development plan was enormous. It's hard to find a piece of property large enough for such an ambitious project."

"Maybe." Harold stopped in front of the house. The divided steps curved gracefully up to the front door, which was at the second-story level. "My question is this--in today's economy, what kind of sense does it make to think of developing a huge subdivision and shopping complex? Most folks are worried about surviving, not consuming."

"Good point, Harold." Which begged the question of why Janks had been so hot to develop the Carlisle land. What was his real role in the whole scheme?

Harold pointed to the house. "You had your picture made here in high school in the drama club."

"You weren't in my class. How did you know that?"

"Millie had an old high school annual at the cafe showing folks your school pictures. All of you thespians were lined up on the steps."

"This place was so beautiful then." My words seemed to invoke the spirits of the past. A wind whipped out of the south and one of the shutters banged.

Harold opened his car door and came around to assist me out. "Let's get this done," he said. "I want to satisfy your curiosity and then tuck you into bed. Graf and I aren't best buds, but I don't want him pissed at me because I helped your trot all over the county after being beaten."

"Maybe you should just chain me in the yard like some prize-hunting dog that you men control," I grumbled as I got out of the car. But I was happy for his supportive hand under my elbow.

"Now that's an amusing image." Harold was still chuckling as he assisted me up the steps.

The front door was locked, but we had a clear view though the sidelights flanking the stout mahogany. I paused for a moment before I saw the dead potted plant.
Without a second's hesitation I picked it up and hurled it through the glass. After the shards finished falling, I reached in and unlocked the door.

"Very subtle," Harold said, but he followed me inside.

The furnishings were dark shadows in the corners of the room, but the elegance still lingered. Had I not come home to Dahlia House, she would have had the same feel of loneliness and neglect. It was probably silly to personify a house, but I couldn't help myself. This had once been a home, a place of both laughter and tears. And perhaps murder.

Did the ghost of Lana Carlisle still walk the hallways, hoping that someone would eventually avenge her murder?

Wind whistled through the open front door and it slammed with a bang. I almost jumped into Harold's arms.

"A little edgy, aren't you, Sarah Booth?" he teased.

"It's been a hard couple of weeks." I managed a dry tone. "Let's check the kitchen."

Power had been shut off to the house for quite a while, so I was unprepared for the smell of decay that slammed into my nostrils when I pushed open the kitchen door.

"Some animal must have died in here," Harold said, walking briskly to the back door and opening it. A little more light illuminated the room, but the day was slipping away from us.

The foul odor came from the sink, and I went there and opened a cabinet. Instead of a dead creature, there was rotted food in a garbage can. "No one lives here. Why is there food?" The packaging was relatively new.

The thud that came made us both jump.

Without debating the issue, we ran to the staircase. To my surprise, Harold drew a small pistol from the waistband of his pants. It was sleek and sophisticated, just like him.

"When did you start carrying a gun?" I asked him.

"When you started calling me to haul you around," he said. "You forget, Sarah Booth, I've been in the hospital emergency room more than once to visit you and Tinkie. If bullets are going to fly, I want to be launching my share of them."

No point arguing that theory, because I agreed with it. I only wished that I'd brought a gun, too.

At the next floor, we moved cautiously. We had no way of knowing if someone was hiding in the house or trying to lure us into a trap.

"We should separate," I told Harold at the top of the stairs. "I'll go right."

"Not on your life." He snatched my arm and held it firmly. "You stay behind me." He didn't give me a chance to argue but moved down the hallway in the lead, the gun extended and me behind him like a shadow.

The house was deathly still. I'd begun to wonder if we'd imagined the thud when I heard something again. It sounded like furniture bumping against a wall. Or someone thumping down stairs.

Lana Carlisle had fallen to her death--the stairs were ten feet from where Harold and I stood. I couldn't resist glancing backward to see if some vestige of the past had presented itself. I had that kind of sick and twisted mind.

The staircase was empty, and the thud came from down the hallway.

"I couldn't convince you to stay here, could I?" Harold asked.

"Nope." I was on him like white on rice.

"Then stay behind me."

Holding the gun extended, Harold advanced with me at his back. The thud came from a room to the left. The
door was closed, and I could see that a hasp and lock had been added. A serious lock.

"What the hell." Harold brought the butt of the gun down on the lock, but it held solid.

Another bumping noise came from inside the room.

"Someone's in there," I whispered.

"I could shoot the lock off," he offered.

Instead, I lifted my foot and smashed it into the door as hard as I could. The wood held, but the screws used to bolt the lock into the wood loosened. Harold kicked it this time, and the screws loosened more.

"One, two, three . . ." We both kicked at the same time and the screws gave with a tired screech.

The door flew open, and in the dim light I saw a figure tied on the floor, honey-gold hair catching the dying rays of light.

"Erin!" I rushed over and snatched a piece of duct tape from her mouth.

"Help me." Her voice was dangerously weak.

I tore at the knotted ropes that tied her hands and feet. Harold had his cell phone in hand. "Send an ambulance to the Carlisle plantation," he said. "Immediately. And get in touch with the sheriff. We need him here."

By the time Doc concluded his examination of Erin, Coleman still hadn't arrived from the dumpsite of Jimmy Janks's body. As ER nurses rushed to carry out Doc's bidding, I gently questioned Erin.

She was sure of only one thing--that her abductors were a male-female team. They'd worn ski masks and taken care to protect their identities. With help from Cece, who called in a few favors at the newspaper, I was able to get my hands on photos of Jimmy Janks and Bonnie Louise McRae to show to Erin.

She couldn't identify either. Nor could she implicate her brother, Luther, in the sequence of events that led to her abduction.

"I'd agreed to meet that newspaper reporter, Cece Dee Falcon, at the studio." She put a hand over her face. "It was stupid so late at night, but she had details on what
Janks and Luther intended to do with my family land. I was furious they'd gone so far. I got to the studio before Ms. Falcon and went inside to wait. I'd barely cleared the front door when I was struck on the head. When I came to, I was trussed up and the man and woman pushed me into the back of the vehicle."

"Did you ever see Cece?"

"Yes." She sipped the water I held for her. "We drove through the parking lot and I saw her lying there, bloody and beaten. I was afraid she was dead."

"You can't identify either of them?"

"They concealed their faces. They gave me some kind of injection in the vehicle, but before I passed out, I heard their voices. I don't know them."

In the hours of her incarceration, she'd been kept blindfolded and restrained. Her captors had fed her and allowed her to use the bathroom, but they hadn't spoken to her.

"Did they ever say why you'd been abducted?" I asked.

She shook her head. "They never spoke in my presence. Not a single word. That was one of the hardest things about it. There were times when I thought I'd disappeared into a place where I'd never talk with anyone again. And when I finally got the blindfold off I realized that I was back in my family home." She shuddered. "It was hellish."

For Erin, the Carlisle plantation held more bad memories than good. It must have been awful to awaken there and realize she was a captive in the place where she believed her parents had been murdered--and to realize that she'd been abandoned in a locked room on a derelict plantation.

"When was the last time your captor showed up?"

She thought about it, the toll of her ordeal showing clearly in her pale complexion. "Maybe midmorning."

"Today?" That was impossible.

"That's right."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. Why?"

I looked at Harold, who was leaning against the back wall of the emergency room. "It couldn't be Jimmy Janks, then," I said. "He was dead this morning."

She pushed her thick hair out of her eye. "I'm not sorry he's dead."

"You're certain Luther wasn't your abductor?" Harold asked.

"No. It wasn't Luther, though I don't doubt he was involved in it. But I know the sound of his footsteps, the way he moves around that old house. I grew up listening to him sneaking in and out of his room. I can say one hundred percent that it wasn't Luther."

Then who the hell was it? I didn't have to ask the question aloud, because Harold was thinking exactly the same thing. His eyebrows had risen almost to his hairline.

"Let's check on Oscar," I told Harold. We were only a few corridors away from the private room where he'd been taken, and I wanted to speak with him alone.

We left Erin to the tender mercies of the lab techs and nurses as they began the process of collecting bloods and fluids for the battery of tests Doc had ordered.

"There's another accomplice in this," Harold said once we were alone in the hallway.

"It could still be Luther. A lot of time has passed since Erin shared space with her brother. If he was involved in hurting her, she might have subconsciously blocked it out." I was an authority on the power of subconscious blocking.

We stopped talking when we paused at Oscar's door. All of the patients had been moved to private rooms, and I'd heard Luann and Regina would be discharged in a matter of hours.

Remembering my sage advice to Tinkie, I tapped lightly and waited for an invitation to enter. Lord knows, I'd been scarred and battered enough for one case--I didn't need to see a personal encounter between Oscar and Tinkie.

"Come in," Tinkie called, and there was such life and pleasure in her voice that I wanted to clap and dance.

"Sarah Booth! Harold!" Tinkie came around the bed and hurled herself at us. She stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. "You're amazing. You're the most generous person alive. I thank you and Oscar thanks you."

Glancing over the top of her head, I saw the reason for her effusive thanks. Oscar gave me a weak smile. "Sarah Booth," he said in a thin, hollow voice, "I hear we're finally blood relatives."

I went to the bed, dragging Tinkie with me. She'd latched on with surprising strength. "Damn it, Oscar, you scared us half to death."

"I kept being drawn to this bright light," he said. "There was a beautiful tunnel, and people kept calling my name. I wanted to go--there was this really sexy redhead--"

"He's lying like a rug," Tinkie cut in. "More likely it was a straight drop down a black hole to a fiery lake."