Chapter 28
Two days later Annie was feeling a bit stronger and Beatrice had taken up residence on her couch. Beatrice finished the boys’ costumes, made an overflowing pot of chicken soup, baked bread and pies.
“That coconut pie is simply the best I’ve ever had,” Mike said before he left the house that morning.
“Thanks. It’s an old recipe of my mom’s,” Beatrice told him. Funny, when she was a younger woman, she didn’t care to bake. Now she loved it and always had a freezer full of her baked goods.
Annie, always a thin woman, looked devastatingly thin to Beatrice. She moved like a ghost through her little house, checking e-mails, looking over books full of ancient symbols and runes, reading romance novels that DeeAnn and Sheila brought her.
Beatrice thought she’d be okay. She just needed to rest and eat to get her strength back—and Beatrice was going to see that she did so. Annie’s mother could not make it to help take care of the situation.
Annie had lost a lot of blood—so much that the doctors had considered a transfusion, but she was otherwise so healthy that they thought she could manage without one. Transfusions could be risky.
She plopped herself down on the other end of the couch. “I’ve been thinking, Bea,” she said. “I should have seen this coming. I knew I wasn’t feeling like myself. Why didn’t I pay attention?”
Beatrice smiled. “Stupidity, I guess.”
Annie laughed. “Okay. Hey, thanks for finishing the boys’ costumes. I was worried about that.”
“No problem,” Beatrice said.
Halloween was two days away. Beatrice looked out the window at the graying, cloudy sky. The wind was picking up, and leaves and branches were blowing around. Another storm?
Annie picked up a tablet. “Hannah Bowman.”
“What?”
“Hannah Bowman,” Annie said. “She is the young woman I met at the funeral. Same age as Sarah and Rebecca. She’s so hard to reach.”
“The Bowmans that live up in Jenkins Hollow are Old Order. She may not have a phone. They’re good people. I’ve known them a long time,” Beatrice said.
The doorbell rang. That would be Paige, bringing pizza for lunch.
“Well, hello,” she said, walking in the door and hugging Annie.
“Now, this will help fatten you up. I also brought some treats from the bakery. Vegan chocolate cupcakes.”
“Mmm,” Annie said.
“Vegan? Since when does DeeAnn make vegan anything?” Beatrice asked.
Paige shrugged. “She’s just experimenting.”
Annie plunged a cupcake into her mouth. “Mmm.”
“Let me try,” Beatrice said and took a dainty bite of one of the cupcakes—but, damn, she needed another bite, a bigger one. She nodded. “Good.”
“It’s getting a bit cold out,” Paige said, digging in a plastic sack and pulling out paper plates. “The temperature must have dropped ten degrees since this morning.”
“Glad the boys went to school dressed warmly,” Annie said.
“Have you heard anything about the case?” Paige asked.
Annie shook her head.
“You’d think they’d have caught him by now,” Beatrice said. “Land sakes, we just about handed Bryant the murderer on a silver platter. I’m sure it was the guy who helped us change our tire. Or at least he knows about it. “
“You’re sure it’s him?” Paige said, passing around the plates.
“He’s a bit strange, Bea, but it doesn’t mean he killed those women,” Annie said.
“One thing is for sure. That man was bizarre, very different, not local, and he also was some kind of weirdo, with that damned rune in his ear.”
“Doesn’t mean he killed those girls, though,” Paige said, opening the box of pizza. “I heard they brought him in for questioning and let him go. Not enough evidence.”
“What? Why did they bring him in? Just because of what we said? That doesn’t make sense. Damn, I need to call Bryant. Maybe he’ll tell me why they brought him in,” Annie said, placing her pizza slice on a plate, licking her finger where some of the sauce had spilled.
From everything that Beatrice could gather while pretending to watch television, Paige was correct. The young man was questioned and had rock-solid alibis. Rumors were sometimes true. But there was something else. Beatrice strained her ears to hear. FBI? Halloween? Runes? Cults? What the hell was happening?
Annie hung up the phone. “They couldn’t hold him. His name is Luther Vandergrift. We knew that. He is new to the area. We knew that. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t have a regular job. He lives on some farm up around the hollow.” She took another bite of pizza.
“Now, let me think,” Beatrice said. “There aren’t too many working farms up there. It never was a good place to farm. It’s very rocky.”
“It’s a new farm,” Annie said.
“What are they growing?”
Annie shrugged.
No, Annie wasn’t herself. The old Annie was sharper than a tack and would have asked what they were growing—even if it didn’t matter. She was always curious. But maybe the pain medicine was muddling her mind.
“The police are on high alert, and a few undercover FBI members will be hanging around Cumberland Creek. Isn’t that strange?” she said.
“Why the alert? The FBI?” Beatrice said.
“Halloween,” Annie said after she swallowed her pizza. “They are expecting trouble. You know, copycats, pranksters, and stuff. Halloween is the night all the troublemakers come out.”
“I’ve heard that a lot of parents are keeping their kids home this year because of the killings,” Paige said.
“I can understand that,” Annie said. “But the rest of it? I don’t know.”
Beatrice didn’t know how to feel, either. “It seems like a bunch of superstitious mumbo jumbo to me. Halloween, indeed.”