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  Chapter 7

  The following morning Abigail awoke and finished straightening the house, then she covered herself in old clothes and gloves, for protection, grabbed a broom and trash bags and descended into the basement. Aside from looking for more messages or the diary, the dungeon had to be cleaned because it was time.

  Her lowest floor was a partial basement, low in height and stacked to the ceiling with unwanted furniture and dusty boxes. The smoky glass block windows didn’t let in much sun so the whole area was bathed in shadows. One thick metal pole stood in the middle of the room for support and rusted beams in a grill design laced the upper ceiling. One bare hanging light bulb was the only source of illumination. The basement’s gray concrete floors were as smooth as eggshells and its walls were a dirty lumpy white.

  The kitten had descended a few steps and was watching her as it cleaned its paws. “Don’t come down here, Snowball,” she chided. “Or I’ve have to change your name to dirtball.” She chuckled softly.

  With the first object she picked up to move, an army of tiny eight legged critters scampered away into the dark. She must have disturbed their spider home. “Yeck!” It was nearly enough to make her run back upstairs, but she didn’t. She began cleaning in one corner and kept going; throwing away everything, after she’d poked through it, which Edna Summers had left behind. Mostly boxes of old crinkled papers and bills. The woman had been a hoarder. Martha had apologized for leaving all the junk, but Abigail hadn’t grasped how much there really was until she began filling trash bags. It took twenty of the extra big ones.

  At the end of the day she was rewarded with a clean basement and the discovery of a grimy locked box she’d found by accident stuffed deep underneath a wad of old newspapers in a tall metal cabinet. Someone had hidden it so well even the burglar hadn’t found it. Abigail hadn’t been able to open the box, though. It’d resisted everything she’d tried. She’d used a hammer, but even that wouldn’t break the strong lock.

  But she hadn’t found any more scribbled notes from the kids and hadn’t found a diary either.

  Upstairs, she took a shower, put on clothes and a little make-up and made a call to Frank asking for his help to open the metal box. He said he’d do it if she’d come and stay for supper. He had some things he wanted to discuss with her anyway and would take an extra steak out of the fridge and put it on the grill. He said it’d give her a chance to see the log cabin he’d built with his own hands and was proud of and that he showed to everybody every time he got the chance. “No strings, Abby. We’d be just two friends having dinner together.” She couldn’t resist and said yes. She’d found it a strange coincidence Joel and she had planned to also build a log cabin, so she’d been curious about Frank’s since Martha had mentioned he lived in one.

  Frank gave her directions to his house and she grabbed her purse and the box and headed to the door, Snowball bouncing along behind her. She scooped the kitten up, nuzzled her furry face, and gently placed her back inside. “Sorry, you can’t come with me. There be dogs there. Big dogs with big teeth.”

  All her windows and doors were shut and locked and before she stepped out of the house she’d scanned the yard. No one lurking about that she could see. Jumpy since the break in, she was afraid the intruder would return for whatever he or she hadn’t found the first time–if he or she hadn’t found it. For all she knew the intruder had taken something she wasn’t aware of from her house.

  It was beautiful, Frank’s home. It was much larger than Abigail had imagined. It was a true log cabin with a wraparound porch and a multitude of windows. Wooden rocking chairs with plush cushions waited for people to sit in and he’d hung plants from the roofline of the porch. She lugged the metal box to the front door, a door framed in oak with an oval of stained glass in the center. Frank opened it before she had a chance to ring the bell. He must have been listening for her car.

  Somewhere she could hear dogs barking.

  “Come on in.” His eyes went to her face first, he seemed glad to see her, and then to the box in her arms. “Looks heavy.” Dressed in faded jeans, a blue shirt and barefooted, he took it from her. “Can I get you something to drink…coffee, soda or wine?”

  “Maybe later. I’m okay for now.” She trailed behind him, gawking at the inside of his home. It was done in southwestern themes with Indian blankets and feathered mandalas, Indian rugs on the floors and a huge stuffed brown couch with a coffee table in front of it. There was an impressive collection of weapons displayed in a glass case along one wall adjacent to a massive fireplace. “I love your front door, Frank. I love your house.”

  “Thank you. My friends and I did most of it ourselves. I learned carpentry as I went; learned to do stained glass so I could make the door’s windows myself. It wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be, but I cut my hands up something awful on the glass before I got the knack of it.” He set the box down on the rug by the sofa as she ran her hands over the fireplace’s cool stones.

  “I collected the stones from the creek in the woods behind us,” he told her. “And built the fireplace piece by piece and carved out the mantle by hand.”

  “Oh my, you are a man of many talents. Your home is lovely. Did your son help build it?”

  “Kyle helped as often as he could. Chicago’s four hours away. He spent a month here end of last summer when the walls went up. But he’s pre-med, second year, and on scholarship. He has to keep his grades up. I imagine it’ll come in handy someday for me when I’m old and sick, having my own doctor in the family.”

  “You must be proud. Do you get to see him often?”

  “I am proud. And I see him about once a month when he drives down for the weekend or I drive up. I miss him, but he’s doing what he wants and that’s why we have kids…to send them off into the world to live their own lives. He loves this place. Like me, at heart, he’s a country boy. One day all this will be his. My secret hope is that someday after he becomes a doctor, he’ll be a small town country doctor. Here. Old Doc Andy isn’t getting any younger.”

  “Does Kyle know you have designs for his future?”

  “We’ve never talked about it, no. I wouldn’t put that on him. But I can dream, can’t I?”

  Getting up, she went to the gun case. “How many guns do you have?”

  “A lot. I collect them. Some of the weapons in that case are antiques, very valuable. When I get old and need money I can sell them off. I figure they’re better than stocks and municipal bonds. Their value only keeps going up, never down.”

  “If you say so.”

  “For now. I’ll get the tools and we’ll open this box. My curiosity is killing me. Then we’ll have supper.” He left the room and returned with a hammer. In a few whacks he had the box open.

  They looked at what was inside. The box was stuffed with papers. Frank lifted the contents out and laid them on the coffee table. At the bottom was a smaller cardboard container marked personal.

  Frank, sitting down beside her, skimmed through the loose papers. “Mainly receipts for everything from china to blankets. Edna loved to spend money. But from what I’d heard she was only on Social Security, so I wonder where she got it all?”

  “And she wasn’t always. Social Security doesn’t kick in to you’re sixty-two. How was she living before that?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t living here in town during most of that time, remember?”

  Abigail checked out the cardboard container. Inside was a red record book of some kind. There was nothing written on the front. She opened the first page and the next and the next, her face baffled. “Appears to be a record of payments for something. Look.” She handed the book to Frank and looked over his shoulder as he flipped the pages.

  “Numbers,” he said. “Looks like money amounts with dates behind them. Earliest figures a hundred a month in September 1970–around the time Emily and the kids left town–and steadily larger every month. It doesn’t mention who the payments are from or what they’re for.
No names, nothing. Just amounts and dates. Add it all up, that’s a great deal of money.” He turned the pages. “Over years and years. Last payment being the month before Edna died.”

  Abigail stared at the entries. “I’m pretty sure that’s Edna’s handwriting. Anyway, it’s got the same distinctive y’s and c’s as the writing I found on the back of the house deed. But was she paying out or receiving it?”

  Frank shook his head. “One or the other. My cop instincts say it looks like blackmail. Old Edna was either blackmailing someone or she was being blackmailed. That’s my guess.”

  “My money’s on Edna being the blackmailer. It’d explain where she got her money all those years. From what I’ve heard she was spending a lot…and if all she had was Social Security, she had to be getting it from somewhere or someone else.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I wonder if this–” she took the book from Frank and held it up “–was what my intruder was looking for?”

  “It could have been. How did you find it anyway?”

  “As I said, I was cleaning the basement, looking for more notes from the children or the diary Myrtle claimed Jenny might have had or might have hidden in the house somewhere. But, if it exists, I haven’t found it.”

  “It exists. Jenny did have a diary. It was a little pink thing with flowers on it. I remember because one night I was there and she and Christopher were fighting over it. He’d been reading it, or so she’d thought.”

  “Then I’ll keep looking for it.”

  They put the papers and book away and ate supper out on a deck shaded by lush trees. The day had been hot, but there was a breeze as Abigail looked out across the rolling hills and valleys. The sun was setting and the air was golden and filled with the sounds of summer insects. Far in the distance she could see woods and tiny houses. The steaks were delicious, the company was pleasant, and the scenery was captivating.

  “That view was the reason I bought this piece of property and built here.” Frank noticed where her attention was. “I’d spent too many years staring at concrete and steel, alleyways and people in their cardboard boxes. Jolene really loved the city. But when she was gone I wanted my final years spent enjoying trees and sky.”

  She could understand that, she felt the same way and told him so as they lounged on the deck and watched the sun set and night creep into its place. In the soft glow of Tiki lamps they ate ice cream for dessert, talked and played with Frank’s German Shepherds, which he’d finally let out, as they romped around on the deck with them.

  “You really miss your wife, don’t you?” She couldn’t help but ask.

  “Every second of every day, but it’s better than it was. I don’t bawl as often. Coming back home and building this house was my way of healing. Like the writing.”

  She was unable to imagine this man besides her crying. Not many men would admit to such a weakness. “By the way, how’s the book coming and what made you want to write one?”

  “It’s nearly finished and, believe it or not, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But being a cop paid better and had retirement benefits. I’d been writing on this book for years, a little at a time, long before I retired. Being a detective I’ve seen so many crimes go unsolved that solving one of them in a book gives me great satisfaction. Even if I don’t get it perfectly right, it makes a good story.”

  “And me,” Abigail murmured, “I’ve spent so many years clocking in for a paycheck, now I just want to do my art because it makes me happy.”

  “You remind me of Emily when you talk like that. The memories of her are coming back more often now. She had to make a living but she dreamed of taking college art classes, going to art school someday and of being a real artist. She was good. I saw some of her drawings.”

  “You think of Emily often, huh?”

  “Only lately. You started it with all your questions.” Frank cleared his throat. “I didn’t say anything earlier because I didn’t want to spoil our dinner, but I’ve been doing a little investigating on my own. I have a police buddy back in Chicago, my old partner, Sam Kako, and I had him do a computer search on Emily and her kids. See if they were ever spotted or heard from again after 1970. If there were any paper trails at all.”

  “And?”

  “Not a trace. Sam also contacted the DMV and there’s been no license renewal for Emily Summers since 1968–in any state. She could have remarried, I know, changed her name, but Sam did a credit search, too…no credit card receipts, not even a credit application is on the record. And here’s the clincher. There are no school records for the kids, nothing. Ever. Not under Summers or Brown, which is their biological father’s last name. Sam did a worldwide missing person’s search and there’s no paper trail for any of them.”

  Abigail wondered what that meant.

  “Unless they went underground and changed their names,” Frank went on, “it seems more likely now that something happened to them. They didn’t run away, Abby, they really disappeared.

  “After Sam did the computer search and came up cold, he did one on Todd Brown, the kids’ father, and located him. Sam made a telephone call and discovered that Brown never saw Emily or his kids alive again after that summer either. Brown didn’t make a police report, though, which is strange and he didn’t come back here and beat the bushes for them. He talked to Edna, Brown told Sam, who told him the three of them drove away in Emily’s car, wanting to start a new life, and he had no reason to not believe her.

  “But the truth is, the Summers’ official existence ended here in that summer of 1970. Yet Emily wasn’t the sort of woman to keep her kids from their father, as much as she disliked him. She wasn’t like that.”

  A dark suspicion was growing in Abigail’s mind. Before it’d only been a normal curiosity about the former occupants of her house…now it was becoming an enigma that cried out to be solved. What had happened to Emily and her two children?

  Frank leaned forward in his chair and brought his glass of wine slowly to his lips, his eyes on Abigail’s face, but she knew his thoughts were probably in the past. In the night woods katydids croaked and the wind was a sigh through the leaves. The heat had left the earth and on the deck Abigail was chilly. She should have brought a sweater.

  “And,” Frank added, “I walked our friend Sheriff Mearl to his car last night and he let it slip, I believe by accident, that there was some question about old Edna’s death after all. That it wasn’t completely natural. The coroner found a trace too much of prescription drugs in her system. He thought, as most would, her being feeble minded at the end she’d forgotten and taken too many pills. According to many people, Edna had been frail most of her life. She’d been sickly since her early thirties, which kept her from working. People wondered, as we did earlier, how she made it, alone in that house, no job, and no income that could be accounted for.”

  “So she took too much of her medication and died from it?”

  “If it was only that. The coroner found medication in Edna’s stomach which wasn’t hers. It could have killed her. But because she was elderly, chronically ill and unloved, there was no inquest and she was simply buried. No one cared.”

  “It’s funny how a person’s death is only as important as that person was in life,” Abigail made the observation cynically.

  Frank groaned, stretching out his long legs. “Oh, and there’s something else you’ll find interesting. The sheriff confided that after Edna died last year her house, your house now, was rummaged through during the funeral service. He thought it was one of those obit burglars. You know, a thief reading in the newspaper someone has died and breaking in because the house is empty, so the sheriff didn’t think much of it. As far as he knew, the old woman hadn’t anything to steal.”

  “What a coincidence. Well, either the house I live in is a burglar magnet or Edna must have had something somebody wanted badly enough to break in for. Twice.”

  “Could be it’s that record book you found in the metal box, Abby. I
f Edna had been blackmailing someone for something, there’d be someone out there who’d want the evidence disposed of. I’d put it in a safe place, if I were you.”

  “I intend to.”

  They talked a bit longer of unrelated things and then Abigail said goodnight. “The supper was fantastic and the company was too. I should get home. I worry about Snowball. And all that cleaning I did today and a full belly has made me want to sleep.”

  Frank escorted her to the door. “We have to do this again, Abby. It was nice cooking for someone else besides myself. Nice having someone to talk to.”

  “My turn next time. I make a tasty pot roast and the best apple turnovers you’ve ever had.”

  “I’ll take you up on that one night. Give me a time and a day and I’ll be there.”

  Abigail picked up the box and her purse and left. Driving into the lightless woods and navigating through the night fog, her mind was churning over what Frank had told her.

  It was possible someone had murdered Edna. Now why would anyone want to do that? An old lady? Abigail thought of the metal box on the seat beside her and the record book with the figures in it. There had to be a connection there somewhere to Edna’s death if she could find it. She had to find Jenny’s diary, if there was one. She bet that would answer some questions. Kids put secrets in diaries.

  So…where else could Jenny have hidden her diary? That question filled her mind the rest of the way home.