The Dead Past Read online

  THE DEAD PAST

  A Felicity Grove Mystery

  By Tom Piccirilli

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Tom Piccirilli

  Copy-Edited by Kurt Criscione – Cover Design by David Dodd

  Cover Images courtesy of:

  http://effing-stock.deviantart.com/ & http://hellensstock.deviantart.com/

  LICENSE NOTES:

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY TOM PICCIRILLI:

  NOVELS:

  Short Ride to Nowhere

  Nightjack

  NOVELLAS:

  All You Despise

  Fuckin' Lie Down Already

  Loss

  The Fever Kill

  The Nobody

  The Last Deep Breath

  Frayed

  You'd Better Watch Out

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  Nightjack – Narrated by Chet Williamson

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  Let the dead Past bury its dead.

  —Longfellow, A Psalm of Life

  ~ * ~

  For Ed Let the dead Past bury its dead.

  Gorman and Buddy Howe,

  both of whom know the past is only taking a siesta.

  ONE

  When my eyes focused, I saw that the clock read 4:10.

  A phone call at four in the morning can only mean one of two things: either my ex-wife is on a crying jag about her latest biker boyfriend, or else my grandmother is caught up in something which will probably get me killed.

  With great conviction I promised God a fifty percent tithe of my annual net if only I'd hear Michelle's usual complaints about the harsher realities of living with men who wear leather underwear and have BORN TO KILL WIMPS tattooed across their chests.

  But the familiar sense of trepidation was already wedged into the pit of my stomach. I cleared my throat, reached over and snatched the receiver before it rang again. "Hello?"

  "Jonathan," my grandmother said. "I realize it's quite late and I hate to disturb you at this hour, but there's been trouble here in Felicity Grove."

  I did some quick math and figured I should've offered God my gross worth and two certificates of deposit instead. "Anna, there's trouble everywhere if you go looking for it."

  "I do not," she emphasized, "go looking for it."

  That might be the truth, I thought, knowing how she kept to herself and her books most of the time. Still, I wondered how anybody not affiliated with the bomb squad, Mafia, or the CIA could get involved with so much calamity. Especially in a town where the population is less than ten thousand. "Well, whatever. Let the police take care of it. Haven't you learned not to rush into murder cases that have nothing to do with you? After the last time?"

  There was a long pause while she turned that one over. "I didn't say anything about murder."

  "No, but you wouldn't have phoned me at four in the morning otherwise."

  She sighed, and I could hear the soft squeak of tires as she wheeled herself around the kitchen, running the tap and putting tea on. "You need to return home immediately," she stated flatly. "It was presumptuous of me but I've already taken the liberty of calling the airport. The first flight back leaves Kennedy at seven fifty-five this morning. I'll have a cab meet you."

  It always sounded so easy to put my entire life on hold when she ordered it in that voice. "I can't close up the store on a moment's notice just because you've gotten your nose stuck in somebody else's business again."

  "This is not…"

  "Last week I bought several rare volumes of Nicht Wahr? from two German antiquarian collectors. The books are expected tomorrow and I have to be on hand to sign for them."

  "Couldn't one of your employees simply forge your name?" she said. "What possible difference would it make to the German sellers?"

  None, but I was still half asleep and it was the best excuse I could come up with to keep from doing what I knew I was going to do anyway.

  There are times you must go home to a place that is no longer home—and if that's not swinging in full circle, then at least it's moving backwards. Wolfe was wrong: you can never get away from home. I stood and brushed the curtains aside from the window, staring at the snow on Amsterdam Avenue glowing with the last strands of moonlight; in an hour it would be a convulsive churning of grime. In New York, February is a month bearing no resemblance to the winters of my childhood. "There's another foot of snow on the ground. That means the drifts are at least four feet high in Felicity Grove."

  "Approximately," she said with some bite now. She mistook my moment of sentiment for more arguing on my part. Unlike most of the emotions she kept a tight rein on, disappointment often bled through.

  "Please don't try to make me feel guilty because I don't want to come rushing back on a whim, Anna."

  The tea pot whistled, and her Rottweiler, Anubis, made slow, stalking sounds across the kitchen tiles. He sounded nervous, and that bothered me. "I wouldn't dream of calling you on simple caprice, Jonathan. I need your help, and not merely for legwork. Besides, nobody can make you feel guilty except yourself."

  "That's a self-serving cliché I don't accept. Of course you can do it to me."

  My grandmother has a smile that can be heard from across a room. "Really? I hadn't noticed."

  "Okay," I said, fully awake. My curiosity was piqued, and if there's one nasty character trait I've inherited from her it's that I'm nosy, too. "Maybe I can take a few days off. Give me an overview, Anna. What's it all about?"

  She took a breath and called Anubis to her. "Evidence has been introduced into the death of Margaret Gallagher. The police now believe it may have been a homicide."

  Margaret had owned a flower stand at the corner of Monroe and Fairlawn in Felicity Grove for as long as I could remember. I had known her to be a woman with a boisterous laugh, and she had let me skimp a couple bucks on my prom date's corsage. She'd died a few months ago of natural causes. "What evidence? You told me she had a heart attack."

  "And so she did, but three days ago a young man named Richie Harraday tried to dispense with several pieces of jewelry at a local pawn shop. Unfortunately for him, the owner of the shop had originally sold the pieces to Margaret some months earlier—a silver oval locket, and a smaller, distinctive clover-shaped one. He remembered them quite well because she'd asked him to engrave each with a specific flower pattern. The sheriff was called in, and a subsequent check of her belongings showed the jewelry to be missing. The police suspect that Richie Harraday burglarized Margaret's home, and during the robbery she was either attacked or frightened badly enough to have suffered cardiac arrest. If such is the case, then under the Felony Murder Doctrine Harraday is responsible for her death and the charge will be murder."

  "What does Harraday say?"

  "He told the pawnbroker he discovered the lockets in the park, but when the police performed a more thorough search of Margaret's home, they found that the back screen window had been partially cut through. Harraday's prints were all over the inside pane of glass."

  "Even so, how
could the cops possibly prove he had anything to do with her death?"

  "I doubt they could have."

  Something in her tone hooked me. "Could have?"

  "Yes. Richie Harraday fled before he could be arrested. He was already known to the police as a juvenile delinquent. Petty crimes for the most part. Disturbing the peace, car theft and the like."

  "I don't get it, Anna. Exactly what do you expect me to do? Hunt this guy down?"

  "No, Jonathan," she said, sipping more tea, "that won't be necessary." The dog was whining, something I'd never heard him do before. "Richie Harraday's body was found in my garbage can nearly four hours ago."

  TWO

  When I got out of luggage claims I saw Lowell Tully sitting in the airport coffee shop, reading the Felicity Grove Gazette and eating a stack of waffles reinforced by a bulwark of sausages. His muscles rippled beneath his brown Deputy's uniform like tectonic plates shifting, the veins in his corded neck bulging. I suddenly wished I'd taken more of an interest in those Soloflex commercials.

  It didn't seem as though he waited for anyone in particular, laid back and enjoying his meal, but I knew he was there for me. He didn't read the paper unless he was killing time: the front page of the gazette read MERLIN'S TURKEY TAKES COUNTY PRIZE. Nobody read the paper unless they were killing time. I stepped over and put my suitcase down, sat beside him and waved the waitress over.

  "You know what I said to myself not more than twenty minutes ago?" he asked.

  "What was that?”

  “I said, 'It's been a long while since I've seen Johnny Kendrick, I wonder how he's doing?' And then I stop in here for breakfast and up you come walking right under my nose."

  He still looked the same as when we'd played varsity football together almost ten years ago. Most of his face was eclipsed by a large, boyish smile that used to turn cheerleaders into lemmings that would follow him off any cliff. He had slightly suspicious eyes too bright to be considered beady, yet he occasionally dropped into an Eastwood squint that would set any wisemouth back a few paces. His first year on the force, I'd seen him break up a pool room brawl by dislocating every third guy's arm. He earned his respect the old-fashioned way. If Lowell and I weren't exactly best friends, I was certainly glad we weren't enemies.

  "It happens like that sometimes," I said.

  He redoubled his attack on his breakfast and was finished before the waitress came with my coffee. "Come on," he said. "I'll drive you into town."

  We walked to his squad car parked directly out front, and I noticed the cab that Anna had sent for me. I paid the driver for his time and let him go, then got in beside Lowell, overly aware of the shotgun locked vertically between the seats. "Is this standard issue now?"

  "The Grove's changed some." He frowned. "You'll never believe it, but I've started repeating things my father used to tell me. I'm not sure how I feel about that."

  "For example?"

  "Well, get this, I caught myself the other day saying ‘when I was a boy we always slept with our windows open.' " He grimaced, and it surprised me at just how much of his father I did see in him at that moment. "In exactly the same disgusted tone my old man always used."

  I frowned too because, like him, I couldn't remember if we'd actually done that or if it was just something our parents had told us too often. "I think I know what you mean."

  "I've also been quoting prices a lot whenever I go shopping. It all makes me sound cheap and bitter, and I'm neither."

  "If there's one person I don't consider a cynic, Lowell, it's you."

  We crept down the highway through the snowy lanes; traffic was negligible, but even taking the weather into account he drove especially slow. It was as if he was giving a stranger a grand tour of the township, a proud papa showing off his baby. Canadian winds blew off Lake Ontario across northern New York, freezing everything; when he turned off the highway we entered a new world carved out by the blizzard. Canopy trees cocooned in frost, utility wires and poles heavy with rime, and six-foot-high waves of white unfurled across the drainage ditches as we continued down into Felicity Grove. Cars were cluttered into driveways, making room for the plows. The evergreens and pines added an emerald hue to the frost on the windshields.

  There was silence in the car except for the occasional crackle of static and indecipherable murmurs over the police radio. Since the official investigation into Richie Harraday's murder was still under way, anything Lowell told me would be off the record. If Merlin's turkey could make the headline then word of murder was going to have them cleaning their rifles. Rather than push for information, I let Lowell broach the subject first. It wasn't a long wait.

  "This one confuses the hell out of me," he said. "And the more I mull it over the more scattered the implications become."

  "How so?"

  "I can't see why anyone would want to kill Richie Harraday. He was strictly a nickel and dime operator. He had no money or drugs to steal."

  Living in the city had taught me many things, and one of them was that nobody needed a reason to kill you. Out here it was still different, I hoped. "Maybe it was something personal. Was he chasing the wrong guy's wife?"

  Lowell's lips flattened, and his shoulders rose like hilltops as he shrugged. "Not that we know of. I kept a pretty close eye on him since his last arrest, and he seemed to have kept to the narrow. Frankly, I never thought he'd have the guts to burgle a house." His squint returned. "And then he goes and gets himself killed off a couple days later. Over what? Where's the connection?" He grunted, harsh and low, the way Anubis did. "And the possibility exists that there is no connection. That we're just dealing with some sicko and a random killing."

  "Do you believe that?"

  "No, but it's something I've got to think about."

  My next question was the rough one. "Do you think Anna was deliberately involved?"

  "I don't know about that either, and I'd hate to hazard a guess. It doesn't make much sense one way or the other."

  I agreed with him. My grandmother's house did not lie at the end of Little Red Riding Hood's path through the woods, but it was a corner home set almost directly across the back woods of a park, where the brush overgrew into thickets. Neighbors on either side were more than fifty yards away down the ends of the block. I'd never thought about how secluded a place it actually was. Conceivably, Harraday's corpse was simply dumped there because it was a conveniently remote area. But why leave him in the trash can where he was sure to be found? Why not hide the body in the woods where it might not be discovered for days, maybe weeks?

  I didn't want to think that somebody had chosen Anna for a particular reason.

  "How did he die?" I asked.

  Lowell checked his watch. "Haven't gotten the coroner's report yet, but Wallace should be done in a little while, around noon. Harraday's neck was broken though, that much is certain, but it might have occurred when the killer or killers were jamming him head first into your granny's pail."

  "What a lovely thought. No other signs of struggle? Footprints in the snow?"

  "The way it was coming down last night anything would have been covered in a matter of minutes."

  Icicles gleamed from low hanging branches and dropped onto the hood of the car as we passed. "Where was he for the past three days between the time he brought the jewelry to the pawnshop until they found his body?"

  "Nobody's saying for certain, but he was probably right at home. We watched the house as best we could, but he lived out in a trailer by the edge of town, and there are plenty of logging paths back there."

  "He live alone?"

  "No, with his brother Maurice."

  "Get out of here," I said.

  Lowell chuckled. "I heard his mother named him after Chevalier, which probably explains why he's got such a nasty disposition. Everybody calls him Tons. He's about thirty-five, a troublemaker but not clever enough to be a real problem. Sold a little cocaine and stole some farm equipment for a few years, but then he got married last spring a
nd had a baby girl. That seemed to get him turned around and settled down. You can never be completely sure, though."

  "Did he ever change his name?"

  "No."

  We crossed in front of the county courts where a large gazebo and cast-iron fountain embellish the town square. "You know why I picked you up, don't you?" he asked. "And why I'm not going to go into my usual lecture about how you should hold your granny back and let the cops handle the investigation?"

  "Yes." He was nervous, too. "Was there a note?”

  “If there was, it wouldn't be made public knowledge."

  I needed to ascertain if a note had been left behind for my grandmother, and now I knew there hadn't been or else Lowell would've found a way to tell me. We pulled up in front of Anna's house, and I got my first look at the place where Richie Harraday's body had been disposed of. The snow was trampled by the police and a hole with a ten foot circumference had been dug in the search for physical evidence.

  "Anything at all?"

  "No. Tell Anna I'll be stopping in on her from time to time. If you need me, just holler."

  "You really say that, don't you, Lowell? You say, ‘holler' not ‘give me a call.' You say holler."

  "I say holler. So did my father. So did you.”

  “I don't think so. Thanks for the lift."

  My grandmother's house wasn't at the end of a path through the woods, but there was still a bad wolf or two around. Lowell and I might not have slept with our windows open as children, and those homespun tales our fathers told us about childhoods free from fear could have been merely gingerbread spicing. Maybe there had never been any real safety in Felicity Grove.

  I was glad he had the shotgun. If I had to, I'd holler like a banshee owl.