“So you’re claiming that you knew nothing of the fact that your cousin was murdered in your home back in nineteen seventy-one and left in your sister’s playroom, which was then covered over with drywall and hidden from the rest of the world?” I said. I wanted to get Porter’s lie on the record.
“On the contrary. My cousin Everett walked off into the woods one afternoon and never returned. My family and I searched tirelessly for him for weeks and months, but no trace of him was ever found. Furthermore, I am not now, nor was I ever, aware of this ‘playroom’ you keep mentioning. My sisters didn’t have playrooms. They had closets.”
“Okay, so maybe one of the closets was converted over into a playroom and you just didn’t realize it,” Heath said.
Porter rolled his eyes. “I wouldn’t know about that either. My mother was very strict about our placement in that house. The boys were assigned bedrooms on the third floor and my sisters were assigned rooms on the first. We were not allowed in each other’s rooms. My mother thought that inappropriate.”
“And yet the room in question had a door that was covered over with drywall,” I said. “Assuming Everett met an unfortunate demise in your sister’s converted closet—who covered over the door with drywall?”
Porter eyed me dully. “I’ve no idea, Miss . . .”
“Holliday,” I said when he refused to go on without knowing my name.
But instead of elaborating on how he’d happened to miss the reconfiguration of his sister’s room, Porter focused intently on me. “Did you say Holliday?”
“Yes.”
“As in Montgomery Holliday’s daughter?”
I nodded and was about to direct the conversation back to the topic at hand when Porter said, “So you’re DeeDee’s daughter.” I felt a chill ignite my spine and the room suddenly got very quiet. “I knew your mother quite well, you know,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine. “She was such a beauty, even back then. Mother was always thrusting the two of us together, you know, hoping that sparks would catch fire even at an early age.”
I felt my skin crawl. The thought of this man having such inappropriate thoughts about my mother, who was only eight at the time to his twelve, disgusted me. “What happened in that playroom, Glenn?” I asked, refusing to look away.
Porter smiled. “Why don’t you ask your mother, Mary Jane?” he said. “Oh, but that’s right. DeeDee passed away some time ago, didn’t she? But, from what I gather, you two still chat from time to time, don’t you? And you don’t even seem to need a planchette.”
Heath took a threatening step toward Porter’s desk, his hands balled up into fists, and I grabbed for his arm to stop him.
Porter laughed like he thought it was hilarious that we were so offended. Then he set his hands on his desk and stood up. “Now, don’t let me keep the three of you. I’m sure you have much to do to see about finding that lost body. Can’t very well proceed without that, now, can you?”
I let go of Heath’s arm and took the short steps to his desk myself. Porter stood and leaned forward over the desk to meet my unspoken challenge. Unperturbed, I stuck my face right into his and said, “Somehow, someway, we’re going to prove that you killed your cousin, Glenn.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Oh, but I didn’t, Mary Jane Holliday. And your mother knows it.”
A flood of angry heat seared my cheeks and for several seconds I had a hell of a time holding back the punch to the face I desperately wanted to inflict on Glenn Porter. I felt Heath’s hand on my shoulder just as I was really close to losing my cool, and he said, “Come on, Em. He’s not worth it.”
I let myself be tugged backward, but I continued to snarl at Porter. Just before we made it through the door, however, something in Glenn’s eyes sparked and in an instant all the planchettes in the room began to vibrate and rattle. Alerted by the odd noise, Heath and Breslow paused and turned back to look, while I stood rooted to the spot. We watched as the wall behind Porter came alive with movement. The planchettes rattled on their nails and began tapping out a rhythm against the wall.
With dread I noticed that they began keeping four-four time. Porter smiled his most wicked smile, then sat back down, leaned back in his chair, and waved lazily at the planchettes. And then he snapped his fingers and all the planchettes were once again still and silent.
“Neat party trick,” he said to us, “isn’t it?”
That’s when I turned away from him and grabbed Heath and Beau by the arms, pulling them out of the room. “See you around, Mary Jane,” Porter called after me.
It took everything I had not to run from the building.
Chapter 13
We bypassed Chloe without even stopping to say good-bye. I made a beeline for the car and took my frustration out on the door, which I slammed after I got in.
Heath got quietly into the backseat, and Breslow slid in as well. We sat there for a few beats in silence, and I did my best to rein in my temper, but I still had the urge to go back into Porter’s office and sock him in the nose.
Breslow started the car and pulled out from the curb and still no one spoke. At the first red light we came to, however, he turned to me and said, “Wanna fill me in on what Porter meant by your mama knowing what happened in that playroom?”
I froze. “I have no idea.”
“Well, you seemed to know,” he insisted.
“Beau, will you drop it, please?”
“No, I won’t drop it, Mary Jane!” he yelled, and behind us a car tapped its horn ever so lightly. The light had turned green and we were holding up traffic.
Breslow punched the gas and I turned away from him, so angry and troubled, and confused. “We need to go see Sarah,” I said after several more minutes of silence.
Nobody answered me, so I turned to Breslow. “Beau. We have to go interview Sarah. She was there that day. I know she was.”
“That’s where I’m heading right now,” he said through clenched teeth.
I didn’t fault him for being angry with me. I would’ve been ticked off too, but I couldn’t offer him anything other than the fact that my mother used to spend time at the Porters’ and she had on her vanity a small porcelain sugar bowl that looked very similar to the tea set in the playroom. That was it. That was really all I knew.
Except that wasn’t really all I knew.
Linda’s reaction to my question about the Sandman, the spook who’d been torturing my mother as a child, witnessed by me in my out-of-body experience; the way DeeDee had told me that Everett and Glenn had called up the Sandman; and the fact that Glenn Porter had craftily implied that my mother was there, in that playroom, the day Everett Sellers supposedly went missing. All of it suggested that Mama was involved, but to what extent I couldn’t say.
And how involved could she have been anyway? She was only a child herself! Just eight years old at the time.
True, she probably could’ve swung that mallet, but murder was an act that I found my mother completely incapable of. There was no way, just no way, she could’ve been the one to kill Everett.
That’s what I told myself over and over at least all the way across town. “There,” Breslow said. “She lives there.”
The house was hard to see, hidden behind so much overgrown foliage, but I caught sight of a two-story redbrick colonial with black shutters.
We got out and approached the house, and as we headed up the walkway, Heath took up my hand. “You okay?” he mouthed.
“Yeah. Thanks,” I whispered back. Heath gave another good squeeze to my hand. He knew I was fibbing.
We got to the front steps and Breslow’s phone rang. He took it from his holster and eyed the screen. It must’ve been important because he answered it. “Breslow. Yeah. Yeah. When? Where? What hospital?”
Heath and I had paused beside Breslow to wait for him to finish t
he call, but alarm bells were going off in my head and I had a terrible feeling about that call.
“What happened?” Heath and I both asked the second he hung up the phone.
“Linda Chadwick was attacked. She lost consciousness right after Matt arrived on scene, but she managed to say your name and told him to warn you. Then she blacked out.”
My knees buckled. Heath caught me before I sank to the ground, and Beau reached down to help steady me. “I know you two are tight, Mary Jane. She’s been taken to South Georgia,” he said, referring to Valdosta’s main hospital. “I can take us there right now if you want.”
“Yes, yes, please!”
Heath wrapped his arm around my waist and we hustled back to the squad car. Breslow drove like a madman, zooming down side streets, switching on his siren and the lights.
We made it to the hospital in no time, but I still didn’t wait for the car to stop before I was out of it and running for the emergency room. A panic so fierce it wrecked my ability to think clearly took hold and refused to let go. Linda and Mrs. G. were my surrogate mothers. If anything happened to either one of them, I’d be undone. I just couldn’t imagine losing one of them, not now. Not yet.
“Linda Chadwick!” I shouted at the nurse behind the check-in desk.
She pulled her head back. I’d startled her. “Is that you or someone who’s come through here?” she said calmly.
“Someone who came through here. Deputy Wells might’ve come with her.” I was fishing for information to give the nurse so that she could cut through the identification process and just tell me how Linda was.
“Are you a relative?”
Before I could answer, Heath and Breslow stepped up next to me. “She’s her niece,” Heath said.
The nurse didn’t even question the statement. Instead she began to type on her keyboard before pausing to tap the screen. “She’s in surgery.”
My eyes flooded with tears. “What happened to her?” I asked.
The nurse adopted a sympathetic expression. “I don’t know, ma’am. That’s all this screen will tell me. If you’d like to take a seat in the lobby, though, I promise to come out and update you just as soon as there’s more information.”
My breathing was coming in short, quick pants and I was having trouble keeping my knees from buckling. Heath took hold of my waist again and guided me over to the waiting area. “Ohmigod!” I cried. “Ohmigod!”
“Shhhh,” he said, cradling me close to him. “Em, she’ll pull through. She will. You heard what Beau said. She was conscious right up until Wells got there. That’s a good sign.”
I wept into Heath’s chest and prayed as hard as I’d ever prayed for Linda to be okay. At some point I realized Beau wasn’t next to us, but I could hardly focus on that. All I could think about was how much Linda meant to me, and how I didn’t know if I could ever forgive myself for bolting out of her home the day before and not chasing after her that morning.
Finally I had cried myself out and I sat up a little, wiping my eyes and sniffling loudly. A tissue box was put in front of me, and I looked up to see Beau holding it. “I talked to Matt,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked, taking the tissue box and blowing my nose loudly.
Beau sat down and leaned his elbows on his knees. “She was found on the lawn of an elderly couple who claim that when they opened their front door to get the paper, she was just lying there. At first they thought she might be drunk, but then they noticed all the blood.”
“Thank God they were home to help her,” I said, so grateful to that couple.
“Yep,” Beau agreed. “Anyway, they said that when they went out to see if she was all right, they could see that she was really hurt, and they coaxed her to lie down and the husband went in to call nine-one-one while the wife stayed with Linda. During the time it took the ambulance to arrive, Linda was talking but she wasn’t makin’ much sense. The one thing the wife said she managed to understand was that Linda was anxious about someone named Mary Jane, and that she really wanted to have someone warn her about something.”
“What?”
“Linda never said. The elderly woman tried to get Linda to give her more information, because she was worried that maybe Linda wasn’t the only one who’d been attacked and hit over the head. She was thinking maybe this Mary Jane might be off in the woods somewhere, hurt too.”
“Why off in the woods?” I asked. That was a curious thing to say.
“Well, the old lady said Linda kept pointing to the woods behind her house.”
My brow furrowed. A small hint of recognition sprang to my mind. “Beau, where exactly does this couple live?”
“Oh, this all happened on Loamloch. You know how there’s that stretch of road that butts up right next to those woods?”
I sat forward. “Did you say Loamloch?”
“Yeah. Why, you recognize it?”
“My grandparents used to live on Loamloch,” I said. That couldn’t have been a coincidence. “What was Linda doing over by my grandparents’ house? They haven’t been alive for years.”
“I don’t know, Mary Jane,” Breslow said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait for Linda to get out of surgery and tell us.”
We waited hours for news of Linda’s condition and at last, right around three o’clock a doctor showed up to give us a report. “Mrs. Chadwick came through the surgery very well,” he said. “She had a severe skull fracture and we’ve put a temporary stent in to relieve the pressure, but she is doing very nicely, given her condition.”
“Can she talk?” Breslow asked.
The doctor shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. We’ve induced a medical coma at this point to give her brain a chance to heal. We’ll be concerned with swelling and any sign of infection for the next several days, but I’m quite optimistic about her chances.”
I sagged against Heath, so relieved I started crying again. And then I launched myself at the doctor who’d saved her and hugged him fiercely. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I told him.
He chuckled good-naturedly and patted me on the back. “It’s okay, miss. Just doing my job. By the way, do you know how we can get ahold of Mr. Chadwick? We don’t have a record of insurance.”
“They’re divorced,” I told him. “But you can call her attorney, Montgomery Holliday. He handled her divorce, and I’m positive he made sure Linda’s insurance was taken care of.”
Linda’s husband had left her two years earlier for a younger, much dumber model. Grant Chadwick had been a fairly wealthy man, and through e-mails and phone calls, Linda had given me the blow-by-blow throughout their divorce. Daddy had made sure she had received a very good settlement, which included a provision for her health insurance. In fact, I could remember a chat with Linda about it and she let me know she was so pleased that Daddy had even thought to include that, because she couldn’t have afforded it on her own.
Since we weren’t allowed to see Linda, Breslow, Heath, and I headed out of the hospital to grab a bite to eat. I wasn’t hungry, but Heath insisted that I get something, so I humored him by ordering soup and a veggie sandwich. Over the meal we discussed what’d happened to Linda, and I confessed to Beau that I thought she knew something about the Sandman that she wasn’t telling us.
“How would she know anything about the Sandman?” he asked.
“She went to school with Sarah Porter,” I said, trying to hide the fact that Linda was Mama’s best friend.
“So did your mama, right, Mary Jane?” Beau wasn’t stupid. He knew I was hiding something.
Heath had been oddly quiet from the time we’d left the hospital, but he chose then to chime in. “You know what I think?”
“What’s that?” I asked, jumping on the chance to change the subject.
“I keep going back to Scoffland’s murder.
And I can’t understand why he was killed.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?” I suggested.
But Heath frowned. “Which brings up another question. Why was he there alone in the first place? The coroner said he’d been dead a few hours before the crew arrived, right?”
Beau and I nodded.
“Okay, so why? What was he doing there?”
“Checking out the place before the crew showed up? You know, getting a scope for the work involved,” I suggested.
Heath frowned. “Several hours before the crew arrives, though? I’ve worked construction, and that’d be a weird thing to do.”
“So you think he might’ve been the target?” I asked. That hadn’t occurred to me, as I’d just assumed that Scoffland had been in the house at the wrong time, and maybe he’d seen something he shouldn’t have.
“Worth checking out, don’t you think?”
I pulled out my cell and called Gilley. “Yo! Yo! Yo!” he said. “Whaz up?”
“Can I speak to Gilley, please?” I said.
He laughed. “Sorry. What can I do for you, sugar?”
“You’re in a good mood.”
“Michel’s job ended early and he’s flying down here on Saturday for your daddy’s wedding. He’s going to be my plus one.”
I rubbed my temple. My father’s wedding was in three days. How the hell was I supposed to attend the wedding with a crazy spook and a killer on the loose? “Gil, that’s great, but I need you to do some more research.”
“Okay, and speaking of that, I have stuff to report.”
“What?”
“No, no, you first.”
“Okay,” I said. “I want you to look into Mike Scoffland. See if you can find a connection to him and the Porters.”
“The construction dude who was killed by one of his workers?” Gil said.
“Yes.”
“What kind of a connection might I find?”