Bodies & Buried Secrets: A Rosewood Place Mystery (Rosewood Place Mysteries Book 1) (11 page)

Emmett Barnes looked nothing like Annie had pictured him in her mind. On the phone, he’d sounded like a cross between Andy Griffith and Wilford Brimley, back in his pre-oatmeal days. The man standing in front of her, smiling politely at her mother and chatting a little too easily, was tall, wiry, and had a bushy white mustache that wiggled when he spoke. Instead of a whittled old man, Emmett, who was still in his prime at sixty-eight years of age, was quite the specimen of health, and he seemed to have a rather healthy interest in Bessie Purdy.

“Why, Miss Purdy,” he purred, charming her with his use of the youthful ‘miss’ and sending a blush straight to her cheeks. “I do believe that this is the best sweet tea I’ve had in ages! My doctor won’t let me partake of the sugar too often, you see, so I’ve been sticking with water, mostly, but I dare say, this would wash down a plate of fried chicken much better than H2O anyday.”

Bessie fanned his arm playfully, and Annie had to restrain herself from laughing. “Oh, Mr. Barnes, you do flatter me! And it just so happens that I am planning on cooking up some fried chicken this evening. If you’d care to stay for dinner, that is, if you don’t have plans this evening--”

Or a wife
, Annie added in her head, still stifling a giggle. “Mother, do leave the poor man alone. He’s not here on a social visit, are you, Chief Barnes?”

Emmett’s smile faltered briefly, and he shook his head. “Not entirely, I’m afraid, Ms. Richards, though I have been meaning to come out here for a while now and take a look around the property. It sure has changed a lot since I was a boy.” He rubbed the back of his head as though he was trying to stir up the memories.

“I don’t recall that barn being there, for a start,” he continued. “Of course, that was more than fifty years ago. I was about fourteen the last time I set foot on this property, and I tell you, I just about scared myself silly that day.”

Annie’s curiosity was piqued. “Did you know the former owners?”

Emmett nodded. “Sort of. It was empty most of the time, but occasionally the owners rented it out to different folks. I don’t know why they didn’t just fix it up themselves and do something with it, but I guess it seemed like too much trouble. One summer a family that had seven kids rented the place, though they moved after about a year. One of the boys was my age, and we used to go fishing in the pond back behind the house.”

Annie nodded. “It’s kind of weedy and overgrown now, but I plan on cleaning it up and offering fishing to guests,” she replied. “Did you see something in the pond that scared you?” Visions of dead, slimy things floating beneath the surface of the brackish water made her squirm.

“No, nothing like that,” Emmett replied. “It was the graveyard that darn near scared me to death.”

Annie was sure that the blood drained right out of her face. “Graveyard? What, do you mean here, on the farm?”

“Oh, yes ma’am,” he responded, glancing from Annie to Bessie as he spoke. “It’s up on the hill past the barn. You can’t see it from here, but if you walk up there a little ways, and move some of that brush and briar patch that’s taken over, there’s a whole little family cemetery, complete with headstones. There used to be some sort of statue up there, but I don’t doubt that it’s crumbled right down since then.”

Just then Rory and Devon appeared behind Annie. She took the time to introduce them to Emmett, who nodded knowingly at Rory. “I believe I’ve seen Mr. Jenkins around town,” Emmett said in way of a greeting. “Anyways, I saw something up in the cemetery, probably just a figment of my youthful imagination, but I hightailed it out of there real quick, and I never went back.” He grinned. “I didn’t avoid the place on purpose, but the family that was living here moved out soon after that, and I didn’t have any business snooping around the property on my own.”

Annie and Rory exchanged glances, neither wanting to disclose their own discovery until Emmett had shown them what he’d found in Suzy’s purse. “Sir, you said Suzy had some sort of a map of my property, and you thought she was looking for something. Could we see what you found?”

Emmett pulled an envelope from his back pocket and approached Annie. He was surprised when Devon and Rory leaned in for a look. Annie explained their interest in the documents, and Emmett grinned. “Got us a couple of treasure hunters, eh? Well, you’re in good company. I like to partake of a little metal detecting in my spare time,” he confided in Devon.

“Have you ever found anything valuable?” the teen asked, cocking one eyebrow.

“Found my car keys once. I’d say that’s pretty darned valuable,” Emmett chuckled, then cleared his throat. “Now, this here’s a map of the current property lines, and this other one was the old property lines. See how this one is much smaller?” Annie knew that the plantation had once included over a hundred acres, but seeing the difference between the two maps really made her spacious ten acres look like nothing.

“I can’t tell, but it looks like these areas here,” he pointed to a spot near the edge of Annie’s property line, “and here,” he continued, pointing to a spot in the middle, across from where the house now stood, “have been highlighted. There're a few scribbles along the edge of the map that I can’t make hide nor tail of, and some numbers.”

“Could it be a phone number?” Annie didn’t understand the odd sequence of numbers on the paper.

“Looks like coordinates,” Rory suggested. “Here, hang on a minute.” He pulled out his cell phone and tried plugging them into his GPS. “Nevermind. There aren’t enough numbers, was this page torn in half?” The paper in the plastic evidence bag was smooth and white, an obvious copy of something else.

“I reckon that Suzy copied her uncle’s map, or maybe she only had a copy of it, and he had a similar one, but they both have these same numbers.” Emmett folded the bag up again carefully and put it back in his pocket. “I reckon those treasure hunters were working with only half the information that they needed,” he said, twisting one corner of his bulbous mustache between two fingers.

“So they only had half of a treasure map?” Devon queried, his eyes glistening with excitement. “Then we just have to find the other half, and we can go get the treasure!”

Emmett let out a friendly laugh. “Well, now, that’s the spirit, son! But first, we’ve got another matter to take care of. There’s still a murderer to be found, and so far, my suspect list is fairly short. Miss Purdy, if you don’t mind, I’d like to step outside with your daughter and Mr. Jenkins for a minute. We need to discuss some things young Devon here ought not to hear.”

Devon opened his mouth to protest, but Annie shot him a look that could shatter glass, so he closed it again, and sat down in the nearest chair. Annie and Rory followed Emmett wordlessly out into the fresh air.

“Well, Annie, I appreciate you having me out here to discuss the things we found in Suzy’s purse, but I think you and I both know that’s not really why I’m here.” Emmett’s friendly demeanor melted away, and his expression became as serious as death. “I’m here because we have two unexplained deaths, one of which happened the very night you moved into this house. In fact,” he continued, stopping beside Rory’s truck, “one of these deaths happened right under your very nose.”

Annie’s insides squirmed, but she tried to keep a calm face. “Chief, I hope you are not accusing me of having anything to do with Suzy’s death. I had no idea that woman would come back here, and my own mother can vouch for my whereabouts the whole night, seeing as we slept in the same bed.” She didn’t clarify that it had actually been an air mattress. He probably wouldn’t give a hoot if she’d been sleeping in a pile of hay.

“I didn’t say that I thought you killed Suzy,” Emmett replied coolly. “But I believe you know who did. In fact,” he glanced at Rory, who remained stone-faced and silent, “I think the pair of you know more than you are letting on about this whole business.”

Annie’s mind went to the notebook they’d found in the attic, but she wasn’t sure if telling Emmett about it would help her or make her look even guiltier. She couldn’t read Rory’s expression; his face was clouded, no doubt by fear. Of course, the ex-con would be singled out in a murder investigation. He had a sketchy past, and the police needed a suspect. It was all too easy, Annie realized with horror, for the Chief to pinpoint Rory as the killer, even if he was completely innocent.

Emmett ran his hand along the side of Rory’s truck, picking at the tarp he used to keep his tools dry in case it rained. “Rory, were you here the entire night that Suzy was killed?”

Rory’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Like I told your officers, sir, I was asleep in my camper. For the whole night,” he added sarcastically.

“You mind if I take a look inside your truck?” Emmett didn’t offer an explanation as to why he wanted to look in the bed of Rory’s vehicle, but Annie knew what he was looking for.

“Don’t you need a warrant for that?” Her voice raised unexpectedly. Rory put his hand on her arm to calm her.

“Don’t, Annie. Let him look. There’s nothing to find because I didn’t do anything.” Rory’s words calmed her, and for a moment, she thought that perhaps everything would be just fine. Emmett would look, then leave them alone, content to flirt with her mother from afar. They’d laugh about it once the real killer was found, and Annie would have this shared experience with Rory that they’d laugh about later on, each recalling how nervous they’d been that the Chief was going to find a murder weapon that simply didn’t exist.

Except, that’s not what happened.

“Well, now, what do we have here?” Emmett had barely begun looking in the jumble of tools when he stopped abruptly and pulled a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket. Using the piece of cloth, he reached into the truck and pulled out a long-handled mallet. It looked like a smaller version of a croquet mallet, but with one grisly difference. Annie could see splatters of a deep claret
something
on the blunt end of the wooden head. Several strands of very blonde hair stuck to the wood, and Annie had no doubt that they would match those found on Suzy’s head.

“Mr. Jenkins, I do believe I have just located the murder weapon in the back of your truck,” Emmett announced. Rory’s eyes were panic-struck.

“I didn’t put that there,” he said dumbly, shaking his head.

“Is this not your mallet? I mean, it looks like a carpenter’s mallet to me.” Emmett was calm, and he made no moves to approach Rory, let alone handcuff him.

“It is my mallet,” Rory began, “but I’ve never even used it, and I certainly didn’t use it to kill anyone.”

“Couldn’t someone have used it and put it in Rory’s truck?” Annie knew that she was grasping at straws, but Emmett had so far seemed like a reasonable man. Maybe he would see that Rory just wasn’t the type of person to murder someone in cold blood and quietly tuck the murder weapon back into his truck.

“Well, Annie, anything’s possible,” Emmett replied, scratching the edge of his lip where his mustache ended. “But I’m not gonna lie, it looks bad, for both of you.”

Rory shook his head in disbelief. “Why both of us?”

Now Emmett pulled out his handcuffs and gestured towards Rory’s hands. The younger man hesitated, then lifted his arms with a frustrated sigh.

“Well,” Emmett finally replied, after snapping the cuffs in place. “I have a murder weapon, I have a suspect, and I have a dead body, but it seems Annie here had a pretty good motive, and you two certainly have quite a history together.”

Annie couldn’t believe what was happening. “Rory, I can have my lawyer here in half an hour.” She cursed as she realized that she wasn’t in New York anymore, and her attorney back in the Big Apple wouldn’t do her a blind bit of good. “I can get someone here, soon,” she corrected herself.

“Well, that’s probably a good thing, Annie,” Emmett interjected, taking Rory by the elbow and steering him towards his police cruiser. “You’re going to need a lawyer if I find out that you had anything to do with this.” He opened the door to the police car and guided Rory in gently, then turned back towards the now-trembling Annie. “This is serious business, Mrs. Richards. Harboring a criminal at best, conspiring to murder at worst--it all comes down to one thing.”

Annie forced herself to take a breath. “What’s that?” She jutted her chin out, trying to look brave, though she felt anything but.

“You could be heading to prison,” he replied gravely, “and you’re probably going to lose this house.”

Annie held herself together until his car pulled out of the driveway, then she stumbled to the front porch steps and collapsed on them, trying to catch her breath and fight the sobs that threatened to burst from her chest.

“You turn my carpenter loose this instant, Emmett Barnes, do you hear me?” Bessie’s voice carried throughout the empty downstairs of the old farmhouse, threatening to shake the very glass in the window panes. “That man wouldn’t hurt a fly--he is
reformed
,” she added, shaking her head as though the man could see her through the telephone. After a few more heated demands and comments, Bessie handed the telephone to her daughter. “I don’t know how to hang this thing up,” she wailed, before taking a deep breath and straightening her shoulders.

“I am telling you, somebody framed Rory. It may have even been that two-faced Emmett Barnes himself, carrying on like he’s our best friend, then turning right around and stabbing us in the backs.”

Annie wasn’t sure when Rory and her mother had become an ‘us,’ but she understood her anger. After crying for a few minutes on the porch, Annie had gone inside to break the news to her mother and son. She waited until Devon had gone to his temporary room to check on his kitten to tell her mother what Emmett had said about the possibility of them losing the plantation.

Bessie had waited as long as she thought it would take for Emmett to make it back to the police station, then she began calling him, trying four times before she finally reached the man in his office. Annie didn’t hear Emmett’s side of the conversation, but she was sure his ears were bleeding. Bessie didn’t waste time or niceties when she was angry about something, and right now, she was spitting nails over the arrest of Rory Jenkins.

“Oh, that no-good, son-of-a-biscuit!” Bessie hadn’t held back on her insults, though she drew the line at actually swearing. She had her limits, and her priorities, and right now, clearing Rory’s name was at the top of her list.

“Annie, we have to find out who could have taken that mallet and brained that Suzy woman with it. I just know that Rory is innocent, but I don’t know how we can prove it,” she continued, putting the kettle on the stove and switching on the heat. As she pulled two teacups from a cabinet, she continued her tirade. “And to think I almost cooked fried chicken for that man!”

Annie pulled the box of tea bags from another cabinet and handed two to her mother. “Mama, maybe he’s just doing his job. I mean, I don’t want to think that Rory did this, either, but who else would have had access to his tools? The only other people here when Suzy was killed was you, me, and Devon, and I know my son could never do something like that.” Annie looked her mother straight in the eyes, and leaned in to add, “and we know you didn’t do it, right?”

Bessie cocked one eyebrow. “Annie Louise Purdy Richards, I know I raised you better than to ask your mother such a question!” She added sugar to both cups and jostled the not-yet boiling kettle impatiently. “There was one other person here, you know.”

Annie flopped in a chair by the kitchen table. “Who?”

“Well, Suzy, of course. And since we didn’t find her car out there, I’m guessing someone had to bring her here. She sure didn’t walk, not in those heels she was wearing.”

Annie realized that her mother was right. How had Suzy made her way to the farmhouse? The police never mentioned finding a car anywhere nearby, and Suzy’s heels had been immaculate, so she hadn’t been traipsing through the briars and brush to sneak into the house. If she had driven herself, there would be a car nearby somewhere, but there wasn’t.

“Do you think somebody came with Suzy and killed her, then tried to make it look like Rory did it?”

Bessie slapped the counter, making the teacups jiggle. “Bingo! Someone had to drive Suzy here, then whoever it was took the chance to whack her, right there in our kitchen.”

Annie shook her head at her mother’s lingo. Obviously, she’d been watching too many crime dramas on television. “But who would want to do that?”

“Maybe somebody wanted to frame Rory,” she replied. “What about that fella he beat up? The one he went to prison for?”

Annie had her doubts. “I don’t know, it seems like it would be awfully hard to plan something as big as framing a guy for murder when you don’t even know he’ll be at the place where the murder happens. Nobody knew Rory would be here, remember? He only came because you called him and he felt like he owed us a favor.”

“Well, what about that ex-wife of his?”

Annie was surprised by how much her mother seemed to know about Rory’s checkered past. “I don’t know, but I doubt she would have waited until now to try and get revenge for something that happened all those years ago.” Try as she might, Annie just couldn’t come up with a likely scenario that involved someone deliberately framing Rory for Suzy’s murder. She didn’t want to think that he was capable of killing Suzy, but all the signs seemed to point to Rory as the most likely suspect.

“Has that fiancée of Suzy’s called you again?” Bessie picked the whistling kettle up and tipped it over, filling the two teacups with boiling water. “You know, I just didn’t like the way he turned up like that. I mean, sure, Suzy was his fiancée, but he had no business just turning up unannounced like that. He should just let the police do their job.”

Annie wrinkled her nose. “Yeah, he kind of gave me the creeps. I mean, he seemed sort of desperate to find out if we knew why Suzy was here. It was almost as though he was more concerned with how much we knew about her death rather than the fact that she’d been murdered.” Daniel definitely seemed off to Annie, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was that bothered her about him. His charm had seemed insincere, but his sadness had seemed real enough. She supposed that grief affected everyone differently. She had hardly cried when her own husband had died, but then again, meeting his girlfriend at his funeral had slapped the sadness right out of her, at least temporarily.

Bessie sipped her tea and seemed lost in her thoughts, calmed for the first time since Emmett had driven away with her favorite carpenter in the back seat of his patrol car. “I guess you’d better go check on Devon. I think he took this hard, you know. He really likes Rory. We all do, don’t get me wrong, but I think Devon really took a shine to him.”

Annie nodded, pausing to take a drink. “I’ll go check on him. You try and relax a little, because, without Rory, we’re all going to have to work extra hard to get this place pulled together in time for the summer tourist season.” She rose from her chair and made her way upstairs, pausing to peer out the front door, where Rory’s truck and camper remained. It seemed surreal that he’d been taken to jail so unceremoniously. Annie decided right then that she would go to the police station as soon as she’d made sure that Devon was okay. Rory shouldn’t have to go through this alone, not when Annie was still certain that he couldn’t have committed such a heinous crime.

Devon was in his room, staring at his phone when Annie poked her head into the room. “Dev, you okay?”

The teen had a look of pure concentration on his face, and Annie surmised that he must be playing one of his games, but when she slipped into the room and sat beside him on his mattress (he had refused to assemble the bed frame on principle, since he was determined to move into the attic as soon as possible) she realized that he was staring at an image of the map that Emmett had shown them.

“Where’d you get that?” she asked, moving TigerLily aside so she could lean in for a closer look.

“Snapped it when the old guy wasn’t looking,” Devon replied, tilting the phone so his mom could look more easily. “I didn’t think he’d let us keep a copy, so I took a photo when nobody was looking. I thought we could use it if we find the other half of the map. Rory thought these were GPS coordinates, and he might be right.”

“Honey, I don’t think that GPS coordinates were used in the 1700’s. You know this isn’t likely to be a pirate map, right?” Annie really didn’t want Devon to get his hopes up, and she didn’t want him counting on Rory’s help with locating whatever the map led to. After everything that had happened, she wouldn’t be surprised if Rory walked away from the job of renovating the old plantation farmhouse.

“Mom, they still used coordinates. Longitude, latitude--you remember all that from the prehistoric days when you attended school, right?” He gave her a cheeky grin and tossed his phone on the bed beside him. “I just wonder what it is that people have been dying to find. Do you think it’s like gold and jewels and stuff? Could we be megarich if we found whatever it is, or would we have to turn it in to the police?”

Annie had no idea. “It would be great if we had more information,” she agreed, “but unless there’s anything in that notebook we found in the attic, I’m afraid we’re just searching blindly.” This time she gave into the impulse to ruffle his hair, and he pretended to be annoyed, but she could tell he didn’t really mind. One day soon, he would be too old for that, but for this particular moment in time, he was still her little boy.

“I’m going to go close up the attic for now,” she told him. “Until we can get someone up there to install a light, it’s not safe to poke around.”

“Rory will do it when he gets back.” Devon sounded certain of this, and Annie’s heart hurt a little. She hoped that her son was right, but she had to be practical. There was a very real possibility that Rory wouldn’t be finishing the work on her home, and she didn’t want to give Devon any false hope, but she also didn’t have the heart to tell him that she thought Rory might not come back, so she didn’t say anything at all.

She smiled at Devon, kissed him on the cheek, and rose to her feet, disturbing the fluffy orange feline once again. “Sorry, TigerLily,” she whispered, then headed towards the attic door.

Annie almost pushed the door completely shut, but stopped herself. If the floor was warped, she may have a hard time getting it open again. Sighing, she dropped to her knees and ran her hand across the slightly bulging plank of wood below where the door would hang. It definitely rose in the middle and had scuff marks where the door had rubbed against it.

As she slid her hand across the floor, she noticed that the seam between that plank and its neighbor seemed uneven. She ran her fingertips along the edge of the wood, then slipped a fingernail into the space between them. It barely fit, but she estimated that there was enough space to fit a screwdriver, so she scurried back to her bedroom to retrieve the flathead screwdriver that she’d been using to assemble her bed.

Annie settled back onto her knees and wedged the screwdriver between the two planks of wood. They felt surprisingly firm, so she hoped that the wood wasn’t rotted through from moisture. With a wiggle and a push, she managed to pry the offending board up in one piece. She peered into the hole where it had just been, praying that she wouldn’t find rot or termites, or even, god forbid, a mouse. She found none of these, but she did find something that made her heart skip a beat.

Inside the hole, beneath the floor, Annie found an old-fashioned, leather-bound journal and something far more interesting--a single gold coin.