two

Wren loved classic rock music. She had probably eight hundred songs stored on her phone—everything from the Everly Brothers and Chubby Checker to ’80s hair bands and U2. But there was no electricity to the Hadleigh House at the moment and thus no way to recharge her phone. She needed to keep from running the battery down in case the boys needed to call her for something.

That was why she’d turned it off in the middle of the first song and tucked it back inside her pocket. She was being practical. Thinking ahead. It wasn’t at all because the bright notes echoed oddly in the silence, or because it felt like the music might disturb something that was best not wakened.

She’d reassured Death that she didn’t think the house was creepy, and it wasn’t. But it did have a feel to it. She looked out the etched glass window in the front door and could picture what the lawn must have looked like in its heyday. In the side yard, to the south, there was a sagging summer house overgrown with vines and a grape arbor. In the back, a single clothesline still stretched between two uprights that had been designed to hold four or six lines.

Beyond the back fence, and visible from the second-floor rear windows, were a row of slave quarters crumbling into rubble, a reminder that the house had seen dark days as well as sunny ones.

Hadleigh House was filled with the possessions of its former owners, everything from rare antiques to rubbish. It was a small miracle that it had never been burgled, but its remote location and the ruined bridge across the driveway had protected it. As far as Wren knew, no one had lived there during her lifetime.

The place seemed like it was caught in a bubble, existing outside the normal, twenty-first century world. Wren felt as if the people who’d lived there were there still, just out of sight around a corner or in another room. As if she might walk through the wrong door, not paying attention, and step into the 1920s or the 1800s even.

She was on the second floor at the north end, in a room she’d found filled with a jumble of furniture, decaying cardboard boxes, and old trunks. It was stuffy in the room, so she slid the locking lever on one of the windows over and pushed it up. The wood frame was swollen with humidity and squealed going up, and it stayed open without anything to brace it. Wren brushed her hands against her jeans to knock the dust off, donned a pair of vinyl gloves to protect anything valuable she might find, and turned her attention to the nearest container.

It was an old metal footlocker, painted dark brown and latched but not locked. The hinges were stiff with rust, but she put her back into it and the lid came up in her hands.

The first thing she saw, right on top, was a gas mask. At a guess, she’d say it was from World War One, but it could be from the second World War too. She took a couple of pictures of it from different angles, to help with her research, and set it aside. Below the mask was an assortment of old clothes, men’s clothes, in styles ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s. At the very bottom of the trunk was a drawing pad, filled with pen-and-ink sketches.

The pages were brittle, the ink beginning to fade, but the artwork was exquisite. Leafing through it, turning the pages ever so gently, Wren realized the drawings were of the same scene, with the same group of people, over and over and over again.

She moved closer to the light from the open window and studied one of the drawings. There was a well in a courtyard, with a ruined house in the background. A group of exhausted, bedraggled soldiers gathered around it. From the uniforms, the way their shirts bloused out above their belts and the puttees wrapped around their lower legs, Wren placed them in World War One. One man sat leaning against a bombed-out vehicle. Another lay on the ground with a bandage over his eyes.

In the center of the group stood a young woman, as ragged and as bedraggled as they were. Her dress was ripped, her hair in tangles around her shoulders. She had dark shadows under her eyes, and a dirty bandage was wrapped around her left hand and wrist. A bucket sat a her feet, and she was offering the soldiers water from a ladle.

Wren turned the pages. Although every picture was the same scene, some were from different angles, and some had the composition slightly different. Many of them were only portions of the larger picture, this bit or that rendered in careful detail.

“It’s … ” Without thinking, Wren spoke aloud. “It’s a study for a larger work, I think. And the artwork is amazing. I wonder who drew it, and if they ever finished the main painting or whatever it was.” She looked through the pad, front-to-back and then back-to-front, but there was no writing in it at all.

Setting it carefully to one side, she dove back into the chest in hopes of finding something to identify the artist. “Who were you?” she whispered.

From a great distance, someone answered.

Wren sat up, shocked, and listened. After a moment, the voice came again, and then a second time. It was a conversation, clear enough to be definitely there but too soft for her to understand the words.

She rose and went to the window and had to laugh at herself.

Death and Randy were returning from the direction of the veterans’ camp, talking quietly between themselves as they approached over the field.

_____

“Death took a new case, pro bono,” Randy said.

“Won’t make any money that way son,” Sam Keystone said.

Half a dozen members of the Keystone family had arrived just after the Bogart brothers returned. They were planning to start building some sort of bridge across the gully, so that people could at least walk up the road to the auction, and then help Wren start sorting out the estate. But at the moment they were all sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee out of thermoses and gossiping about the dead guy.

“I can afford to donate some time to a good cause. And, honestly, I don’t know that I can do anything for them anyway,” Death said.

“Who’s ‘them’ and what do they want you to do?” asked Sam’s brother, Roy. Sam and Roy, the original sons in Keystone and Sons, were sixty-two-year-old twins who dressed and acted so different that someone who didn’t know them would never guess they were identical. Sam wore a dark suit with a hat and a string tie, no matter the weather, whereas Roy always dressed in overalls and a flannel shirt.

“Kurt Robinson and some of the guys over at the vet’s camp,” Death said. “Any of you ever heard anything about a guy named Anthony Dozier?”

The Keystones all had.

“Sure, it’s been all over the news,” Sam’s son Liam said. “Lot of folks think he should get a medal instead of a murder charge.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of him,” Wren said. “Who is he and who did he kill?”

“Army vet,” one of the Keystone grandsons piped up. “Came back from Afghanistan really messed up, they said. Spent time in a psych ward.”

“He was a medic,” Death told them. “He and his unit got pinned down in a village that was caught in the crossfire between us and them. Dozen soldiers, a lot of civilians. He was the only medic and there weren’t very many survivors. They said he held it together until it was all over and then he just lost it. Nightmares, prolonged flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, a couple of suicide attempts. He’s been out of the hospital, living with family, for about eighteen months now.”

“So what happened?”

“Have you ever heard of a group called ‘the Church of the Army of Christ’?”

“CAC for short,” Sam offered.

Wren frowned and thought about it. “It seems to me I might have seen the name somewhere. Posts on Facebook, maybe? If I did, I skimmed over them. Who are they?”

“A hate group masquerading as a church,” Sam said with an uncharacteristic amount of heat in his voice. While most of the Keystones were at least casual churchgoers, none of them took it as seriously as Sam and his wife Doris. “They claim that it’s a Christian’s duty to convert or eradicate everyone who isn’t Christian.”

“Hate thy neighbor?” Wren observed ironically.

“It was founded by a man named Tyler Jones, and most of the members are part of his extended family. They’re against anyone who isn’t Christian, including atheists and agnostics, but their main target at the moment is Muslims. And here just recently they’ve taken a page out of another group’s book and started protesting at funerals.”

Death, sitting beside Wren, slipped his hand into hers and squeezed, as if to reassure himself that she was still there. “Dozier married a Muslim woman,” he said. “One of the other survivors of that firefight in Afghanistan. Ten days ago she was killed in a car accident. The CAC showed up at her funeral and Dozier confronted Jones and threatened to kill him.”

“Oh God,” Wren said. She leaned her head on Death’s shoulder.

“There was a reception after the funeral. Kurt said that Dozier was supposed to come out to the veterans’ camp after it was over, but he never showed up. They searched everywhere for him, reported him as an endangered missing person, nothing. Then, the next morning, a cop stopped Dozier up in the city. Dozier claimed to think he was back in Afghanistan—he told the cop he had a wounded soldier in his car and was trying to find the base hospital.

“He was covered in blood, and Tyler Jones’ twenty-three-year-old son was in the backseat. The guy was wrapped up in makeshift bandages and very dead. He’d been stabbed repeatedly.”

“Naturally,” Randy said, “the defense is claiming temporary insanity. But the prosecuting attorney is going for murder in the first degree. He thinks it was premeditated and that Dozier intended all along to use insanity as a defense. If he succeeds, Dozier is looking at life in prison at best. He could even get the death penalty.”

“Kurt’s terrified for him, grasping at straws,” Death said. “He wants me to help prove in court that Dozier’s insane.”

_____

“What is this and where do I put it?”

Wren looked up from her notes to find Robin Keystone, one of the grandsons, standing in the doorway. The contraption he was cradling consisted of two rollers set in a frame, with a crank that caused them to turn toward each other.

“It’s a manual wringer, for doing laundry by hand,” she said. “Where did you find it?”

“On a corner of the back porch. I knew it was a wringer, but where’s the rest of the washing machine?”

“That wasn’t part of a washing machine,” she told him. “People used to wash clothes by hand, with a washboard. They’d have the wash water and the rinse water in big metal tubs. This thing clamped on the edge of the tubs. You’d wring the soap out before you put them in the rinse, then wring that water out before you hung them up to dry.”

“Sounds like a pain in the butt. Where do you want it?”

“We’re putting the non-furniture antiques in the parlor for now,” she said, pointing. “Gadgets on the right, clothes on the left.”

Robin lugged it into the other room, his voice drifting out behind him. “This is gonna be a huge sale.”

“Yeah. It’ll probably take two days to sell it all.”

“Did you see the car?”

“No, there’s a car?”

“Yeah, in one of the outbuildings, under a tarp. An Impala, from the sixties. I’m not sure what year. Needs a bit of work, but it looks like it’s in really good shape.” He came back out of the parlor and leaned on the doorframe. “You know, I’m gonna be sixteen in a couple of months.”

Wren shot him an amused look from under her lashes. “You don’t say?”

Heavy footsteps crossing the porch interrupted their conversation and Wren glanced toward the open door, hoping to see Death. He and Randy were helping Roy and a couple of the sons with the bridge, and Wren was worried that he’d overdo it.

Instead of her boyfriend, she found a deputy sheriff in the doorway.

“Hey, Orly! What brings you out this way?”

Orly Jackson had been a couple of years ahead of Wren in school. He was a short, balding man with a round face and a generally cheerful demeanor. At the moment he was scowling slightly, but she couldn’t tell if he was genuinely annoyed or putting on a show.

“Just the woman I was looking for,” he said.

“Me?”

“No, him. Yes, you.”

“What did you need me for?”

He came inside and helped himself to a seat on a dust-cloth-covered settle. “I’m still trying to identify that dead horse thief.” He paused and cast Wren a slanted look. “You heard about the dead horse thief ?”

Wren just looked at him. “This is East Bledsoe Ferry. I heard that Buddy Zimmer fell off his porch and I heard that Melanie Vansant was late to Sunday school. You really think I’m not gonna hear about a dead horse thief ?”

“Whatever.” He took a 3x5 photograph and an evidence bag with a square of paper inside from his breast pocket and looked at them for a moment. Then he held out the picture. “Recognize him?”

Wren shied away. “You want me to look at a picture of a dead guy? Really?”

“Yeah. It’s not gory. He just looks like he’s sleeping, I promise. C’mon. Look at it!”

Reluctantly, Wren took the picture he handed her and peeked at it. It was an old man, from the neck up. He lay on his back with his eyes closed. His face had an unnatural pallor. The wrinkles around his mouth and eyes looked like they had been molded in clay. His eyes were dark and sunken and his lips were blue.

She shuddered. “He doesn’t look like he’s sleeping. He looks like he’s dead.”

“Well, he is.”

She gave Orly a withering look, but he just raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“Can I see?” Robin asked, coming over to look. “Oh, wow. He does look dead. Cool!”

“I suppose we can be thankful there’re no brains showing.” Wren sighed.

“He didn’t hit his head that hard,” Orly said. “It wasn’t the head trauma that killed him.”

“No?”

“No. The branch just knocked him out and made him fall off the horse. He actually died from alcohol intoxication. He drank himself to death.”

Wren tried to hand the picture back. “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.” Orly held up a hand, refusing to take the photo. “But who is he? Or who was he? Look at it and tell me if you know him.”

Wren looked at the picture again. “No, he doesn’t look familiar.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah. I mean, he looks a little familiar. Like someone you’ve seen in the grocery store, maybe? Or maybe he just looks like someone on TV. I don’t know. But I know I don’t know him. You act like you think I should.”

“Well, yeah.”

“But why?”

“Because,” Orly said, holding up the evidence bag, “he had a note in his pocket. It has your name on it, and I’m pretty sure that this is your handwriting.”