Secrets Rising Read online

  The picture inside was faded, but the faces were visible. The sides were black, making him think of those photo booths at carnivals where you paid five bucks and got a series of pictures in strips. The faces were smiling at the camera, heads together. Teenagers. A girl and a boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen. A sense of giddiness pervaded the photo. The girl was dark-haired, doe-eyed, her eyes turned toward the boy at her side. The boy gazed straight-on at the camera, through glasses, and despite the years that had to have passed between then and now, Jake recognized him. He’d met him last night.

  “That’s Tom,” Keely breathed.

  Tom Tanner, town manager of Haven, husband of one of Keely’s closest friends…

  “Tom and who?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know.” He could see her swallow hard, see her confusion. “Tom dated Lise all through high school, then all through college. Except for a few weeks when they broke up and Lise went out with Jud Peterson. That was their senior year, I think. I was a few years behind them. They ran around together and I wasn’t so much a part of their crowd then. I knew Lise more from church. Her family was friends with my family. I used to get her hand-me-downs….” She put shaking fingers to her mouth. “What does this mean? Tom dated whoever this girl is, and this is the girl who was killed, the girl whose skull I found in my garden?”

  “Maybe.” Jake worked to process what they knew so far. “Assuming this is the girl who owned the necklace—and I think that’s pretty safe—then we guess that’s her body that was buried in your garden. If your visions are real, then she was killed, run down on the road. Maybe it was even an accident. Maybe Ray helped him take care of it, hide the body. Then they moved it last fall….”

  Jake dropped the necklace on the bed, got up to grab fresh jeans and a shirt from the bag he hadn’t even unpacked yet.

  “I did some checking on the Internet last night, while you were sleeping,” he went on, zipping his pants as he continued. He was speculating, maybe still wildly, but they were getting closer to something, maybe the truth. “Tom Tanner pushed the town hard to buy some land last fall. The town lost out to a developer.”

  “The new Maple Creek subdivision,” Keely said. Her eyes followed him as he paced the room. She didn’t touch the necklace, as if she still feared it and the secrets it held, secrets it seemed to want to convey.

  “Maybe they’d buried the body out there. Maybe that’s why they moved it. Maybe Ray took care of the job.”

  “Why would Ray do it if Tom was the one who—” Suggesting Tom was a killer seemed no less easy for Keely than that it could have been her late husband.

  Tom was still alive and Tom was married to her friend. An old friend. A friend whose somewhat perfect life might be about to shatter.

  “Ray must have known about it. Somehow. Maybe he was in the car with Tom that night, or maybe Tom went to him for help. Was he part of the crowd that Tom ran around with?”

  “Yes. Tom and Ray, sometimes Jud, till Tom and Lise broke up and Lise went out with Jud for awhile. She and Tom got back together around the time I started seeing Ray. That’s when I started getting closer with Lise.”

  Jake remembered how upset Lise had been last night with Tom for giving money to Jud. He used to do a drunken half-ass job for money, but now Jud wanted nothing but handouts.

  “Jud found out about the murder. Maybe he was blackmailing Tom,” he suggested. “Maybe Ray was, too. You said he had money to buy things at estate sales to stock at the store but you had no idea where the money came from. And Jud and Ray had been friends. Maybe he clued Jud in about the body. Maybe he even helped Ray move it.”

  Blood money. Maybe Ray had had blood money.

  Keely paled. “But if Tom knew about the locket—”

  “He knew Ray had given you a gift. Everyone at the party last night knew Ray had given you a gift. Then someone broke in to your apartment.”

  “Tom and Lise were still at the party when we left,” Keely pointed out.

  “Tom talked to Jud on the phone.”

  “That was before the gift from Ray was brought up.”

  “Lise brought it up. She could have mentioned it to Tom earlier.”

  “You just said maybe Jud was blackmailing him,” Keely argued. “Now you think he asked Jud to break into my apartment?”

  “He was already paying him. Maybe he wanted more for his money.”

  “But if Tom knew this girl, whoever she was, had this locket on her when she died, a locket with a picture of him with her, why would he have buried her with the locket in the first place?”

  “Maybe he didn’t realize she had it on her. It was nighttime, dark, in your dream, right?”

  Keely nodded.

  “Maybe he had no idea at the time. He was in a hurry—and in a panic. Maybe he called on Ray to help him cover it up, help him get rid of the body. That would be manslaughter and a boy like Tom with college plans ahead of him would see those dreams being ruined if he didn’t cover it up. But he knew where the body was and he didn’t want it going to a developer—and when it did, he arranged to have the body moved, called on his old friend again.

  “And this time maybe,” he went on, “it wasn’t dark and maybe Ray found the locket and decided the body hadn’t been safe once and if it ever wasn’t safe again, he was going to make sure he had some evidence linking it back to Tom, evidence he could use for his own purposes, blackmail. He wrapped it up, hid it in the house like a birthday present, probably planned to do something else with it later but then he died….”

  Keely drew a shaky breath. “You have a lot of maybe’s there.”

  “Yeah,” he said grimly. A lot of maybe’s. “But the biggest maybe is that maybe it’s all true.”

  Keely rubbed her palm over the steamy mirror in the apartment bathroom. She’d opened the store and called Tammy to come in early. Picking up her comb, she drew it through the tangles in her hair. Depression weighed her down and she was annoyed with herself.

  She’d gone into that bedroom with Jake last night with her eyes wide open. He wasn’t looking for a relationship, and truth was, neither was she. That she was falling in more than lust with Jake was a side issue she’d deal with on her own. He cared about her, obviously, but that wasn’t enough. She’d had a relationship that was less than enough before. He’d made her want a relationship again. Shocking. But she wasn’t settling. She couldn’t settle. She couldn’t put herself through that kind of hell again.

  She wanted his love and he’d made it plain he didn’t even believe in the concept.

  He was waiting for her outside the bathroom when she finished dressing. He lifted those dark, smoldering eyes to her that made her feel hot inside even when she was still cold. She’d dressed warmly despite the spring day. A pervasive chill carried clear to her bones.

  “You can’t be my bodyguard,” she said. “I don’t want one and I don’t need one.”

  The apartment phone, the same line that connected with the store office downstairs, rang. Keely picked it up.

  “This is Trooper Nielson. Keely Schiffer?”

  Keely’s pulse thudded automatically. Trooper Nielson was the officer who’d handled the break-in call the night before. “Yes?”

  “The prints came up quickly,” he said. “We had them right here in our office, didn’t even have to put them through the state’s. They belonged to Jud Peterson.”

  Keely’s stomach dipped. “Jud Peterson? He’s the one who broke into my apartment last night?”

  If it had been Jud last night, then that was one maybe of Jake’s that was true and what did that mean about the rest of his maybe’s?

  “We went out to his home this morning,” the trooper continued. “We found Jud Peterson dead. Gunshot wound to the head. He also had a white pickup truck, with front side dents. We’re checking tire patterns to see if that was the vehicle that Jake Malloy reported trying to run him down out at your farm.”

  Keely gasped. “Oh, my God.” She lifted a shaking hand to
her lips, moved the phone to whisper to Jake, “Jud’s dead. Someone shot him. He had a white truck!” And where would Jud get the money for a truck? He certainly didn’t earn it….

  “Let me talk to the officer.”

  Keely stood by while Jake asked a few more questions, experiencing a mix of comfort and anxiety as he morphed into grim cop mode.

  “We have reason to believe the victim out at the farm could have had the initials I.L.K. and that Tom Tanner was involved,” Jake was saying. He told them about the possible connection to the property sold to the developer last fall. “Bring in Tom Tanner for questioning.”

  They’d had nothing but an unbelievable paranormal experience and conjecture before. Now the police had a new murder. Now they’d pay attention.

  “What’d they say?” she asked when he hung up.

  “They found some bones out at your farm this morning,” he told her.

  “What do we do? Do they believe us? Are they going to talk to Tom?”

  “Now that they have two bodies on their hands, a new one and an old one, they’re taking what we have to say more seriously. They’re going to pick up Tom and I’m going to take the necklace to the station. They want it to take in to evidence now. They’re going to show it to Tom, see what they can shake out of him.”

  “He might not talk. Or we might even be wrong.”

  “Either way, whoever did it will find out you don’t have the necklace anymore. You’ll be safe, out of it. If Tom was responsible for the death of I.L.K., it’s going to be difficult to prove after all this time. But if he was responsible for Jud Peterson’s death, that’s a different story and the necklace, coming from Ray and the bones being found in your garden, could tie the two crimes together.”

  “He took a big chance, if he killed Jud.”

  “If he’s the one who killed I.L.K., then he’s got a lot to lose,” Jake pointed out. “Then and now. What’s one more murder? In for a penny, in for a pound. He knows there’s still a chance he’ll get away with it. He has no choice but to take the chance if he knows this locket could connect him to those bones. Now we know the necklace was what they were after from you. I’ll give it to the police, and you make sure everyone in this town knows you don’t have it anymore. Ray didn’t leave you anything else, did he?”

  Keely laughed harshly. “Debts.”

  The silence in the room felt heavy.

  The phone rang.

  Keely picked it up.

  “Hey. Do you need me to come into the store today?”

  She put her hand over the phone. “It’s Lise,” she whispered. Hurt waved through her. If Tom had done everything they thought he had, Lise’s life was going to be shattered terribly.

  “Tell her to come in,” Jake said. “In case Tom goes nuts, it’ll get her out of harm’s way.”

  Keely asked Lise to come in at ten then hung up. “I hope she’s okay. Oh, God, what I hope is that it wasn’t Tom, after all.”

  Jake nodded. “I hope so, too.”

  He left for the station with the necklace, still in the box, and Keely was unbelievably relieved to see it go. Whatever had happened with that necklace last night, she wanted it to be over. She wanted that necklace out of her life.

  The store remained busy, though not quite as bad as the day before. She made a big point of telling people she’d turned a necklace Ray left her over to the police. She plowed her way through the morning, feeling warmer as the day progressed. Thank God. The necklace was gone and so was its strange power over her. The more hours passed, the less she could even believe what had happened, with the necklace and with Jake.

  When they needed extra hands at the short-order counter, she went to the kitchen, happy to be busy.

  She took a full bag of trash out back to the Dumpster. It was nearly noon and the birds were singing and the air felt good. She was still alive, and as long as she was alive, she had hope. Jake had at least shown her that she could live again, even love again.

  Back inside, she found Mary waiting outside her office.

  “Hey, brat,” Mary said. “What’s up?”

  Keely had a hard time suddenly controlling the tears. The happiness fell away as reality hit her. It’d been hard keeping things to herself all day with Lise at the store, knowing how her life could be about to shatter. She needed to confide in someone.

  “Let’s go in my office,” she said.

  Mary came in, shutting the door behind her. “What’s wrong?”

  Keely refrained from teasing her friend that she should already know, seeing as how she was psychic. Then Mary surprised her.

  “I know something’s wrong,” she said gravely. “There’s something about that skull back at your farm.”

  “They found more bones today. It’s real.” Keely shivered.

  “That necklace…It was a locket, wasn’t it? I keep seeing a man and a woman, and there’s some kind of danger, Keely. Danger to you!”

  Keely swallowed hard. “I’m scared,” she admitted. “The police have the necklace now.” She told Mary about waking with the locket around her neck, about the vision. If there was anyone who would believe her in this town, it was Mary. She was afraid to say anything about Tom Tanner. There was always Danny…. He’d run around with that crowd, too. She didn’t want to scare Mary.

  Mary already looked scared. “I think there’s more. What aren’t you telling me?”

  Maybe she really was psychic now. Anything was believable.

  “I’m seeing something,” Mary said suddenly. Her eyes widened. “There’s something, papers, that’s it. Papers. Papers from Ray. Do you have any papers from Ray?”

  “Papers? No, just, well, his manuscripts. But that was fiction.”

  “Are you sure? Where are they?”

  “He kept them in a bank deposit box.” She’d always thought that was strange. Fear raced straight to her bones. What if it was more than strange? He’d never seemed to do anything with his writing. What if it hadn’t all been fiction? What if he’d written down what happened in case anything ever happened to him? She’d completely forgotten about them.

  Ray didn’t leave you anything else, did he?

  Chapter 15

  “Oh, my God,” Keely breathed. “I have to go get those papers.”

  “I’m going with you,” Mary said.

  The bank was within walking distance. She told Tammy where they were going and once inside the bank, she explained that she didn’t have the key. She had no idea what Ray had done with it, but she didn’t have it and if it was in the house, she’d never find it now. Thank God for small towns and people who’d known her since birth and broke the rules.

  The box contained one slim legal-size envelope, not the piles of manuscripts she might have expected.

  Mary was waiting for her when she came out of the vault. “Let’s go back and get your car,” Keely said. “I want to take this to the police station. I’ll open it there.”

  Mary nodded. “Okay. Good idea.”

  They got back to the store parking lot and found Lise by her car. She turned and Keely saw the tears in her eyes.

  “Tom’s at the police station,” Lise choked out. “I have to get there.” She started sobbing.

  Oh, God she was in no shape to drive. And she knew. She knew about Tom. The news wasn’t going to get any better, either. Keely put her arms around her friend, looking at Mary over Lise’s shoulder. “Come on. Come with us.”

  Lise got in the back. It was only a mile up the road to the police station. Keely looked back at Lise after they pulled out of the parking lot. “Are you o—”

  She wasn’t crying anymore. “Just drive,” Lise said, the small pistol she’d pulled out of somewhere suddenly jammed against the back of Mary’s head. “And keep driving.”

  It took four hours for Tom Tanner to crack under police examination while Jake, by professional courtesy, was allowed to watch and listen behind a concealed observation window, and when he finally did crack Jake knew he’d made the b
iggest mistake of his life. And once again, someone was going to die.

  Someone he felt more than protectiveness toward, and the fear he’d felt about that was completely gone in the face of danger. He was going to lose her.

  “I really hate to do this to you guys.”

  She had a gun. Lise had a gun. Her friend Lise had a gun and she was pointing it at the back of Mary’s head while she continued to drive. The car swung wide, nearly running into a guardrail as they wildly rounded a sharp curve.

  Keely’s heart pounded. “Then maybe you shouldn’t do this,” she said. What was Lise going to do?

  “No, I’m going to do it. I just feel bad about it, I want you to know that.”

  Lise sounded shockingly calm. Like this was no big deal. And she didn’t really sound like she felt bad about it.

  “Why?” Her mouth felt thick. Fear. Fear was taking over her. She was almost afraid she’d pass out from it, but she had to keep her wits about her. She had to do something. What? They were careening down the highway out of Haven at fifty miles an hour down a winding, sharply curving road through mountain hollows. They whipped by a two-story farmhouse. A horse munched grass behind a wooden post fence in a field beside it. A trembling Mary just barely missed hitting the mailbox by the road. The serene country scenery contrasted sickly with the nightmare playing out inside the car.

  “You know why, you idiot,” Lise said. “You found that damn locket. If we hadn’t been in such a drunken mess that night, we’d have realized she was wearing it.”

  “We? Who’s we?” Who all was involved? Keely’s head reeled.

  “Me and Tom and Ray and Jud. We were drunk, driving around, too many of us piled in a car with too much alcohol. Stupid! And then Tom tells us that moron Ilene Klasko was pregnant—he was going to leave me even though we’d just gotten back together.”

  Ilene Klasko. I.L.K. Keely didn’t know an Ilene Klasko, but she had to have been a couple classes ahead of her in school, like Danny and Tom and Ray and Jud. Mary had been in Keely’s class, but Mary had started dating Danny long before Keely’d hooked up with Ray—