Altered to Death Read online

  Gussie had been heartbroken. Cheryl figured Donald had come across a big money making scheme he needed a partner for, and Ollie was game. Ollie was always on the lookout for a way to strike it rich without having to work hard. After he left, Gussie spent a lot of time and money searching for Ollie with no success.

  I went upstairs to my office, which doubled as a guest room. I sat in the office chair, twirling in it to take in the whole room and contemplated the arrangement. A twin bed was set up like a couch, a rearrangement of pillows turned it into a bed. I used it more as a couch than a bed since I never had overnight guests. My grandmothers and all my friends lived in town, so I had no real need for a guest bed. If I moved out my large desk with an attached side table, there was plenty of space for two dressers, the twin bed, and a crib. Later, we could exchange the twin for a bunk bed, plenty of space for two children.

  Was I thinking too far ahead? Ted and I wanted a child or two but hadn’t talked about when. There was no reason we couldn’t live in my, or his, house until I was pregnant. It might be a few years before we were ready for a baby, or even a few years before I was expecting. I placed my hand on my stomach. There was a little fear and excitement in me at that thought. I had envisioned many things in my life but never a child. It wasn’t until about three years ago I even considered being in a relationship again, and here I was with thoughts of love, marriage, and baby carriages in my head.

  In a head that should be focusing on Ollie Harbaugh. I rotated my neck and stretched, sat up straight, and centered my attention on the task at hand.

  After the computer booted, I went into the database and typed in Ollie’s name. My screen filled with hits. One by one, I started going through them. Ollie Harbaugh had an attachment to trouble. From the age of fourteen, the guy didn’t go more than a month without having his name appear in either the newspaper or on a police report.

  He concentrated his criminal activities in Eden rather than his own town of Burlington, a town fifteen minutes from Eden and three times smaller. Ollie either centered his wrongdoings here because his crew lived in Eden, or there wasn’t enough trouble to get into in his home city.

  There were a ton of links with cross information. I wasn’t concerned with what he did as a kid, so I scrolled down to the bottom. The last item was a police report regarding a fight. I pulled it up. Ollie Harbaugh and Donald Lucas got into a brawl at a bar in Eden. It was broken up by the police, and both men were charged with drunk and disorderly. I jotted the date down. After that fight, Ollie Harbaugh disappeared. Bob knew his way around the databases better than I did, so he might have more details than me.

  I typed in Donald Lucas’s name into Google, checking to see if there were any scams linked to his name. There were a lot of hits on his name. I groaned. It would take me forever to go through each Facebook profile and obituary listing. I needed more information about the guy to narrow down the search to a manageable level. Or search for Ollie and Donald together and see what popped onto the screen.

  A big fat nothing except for the one fight. I had quite a bit of results for Harbaugh, but not the man I was hoping to track down.

  I placed my hand on the mouse, tapping my fingers on the buttons. I knew just the resource that could speed up this task: the databases Bob installed on my computer to do research for his cases.

  Do I dare? This was important. A murderer was likely on the prowl...or at least hiding. I would be doing a community service.

  You’d be breaking your word. I’d lose Bob’s trust and likely the part-time job I loved. It was a way for me to sleuth and get paid for it. And, I loved my future brother-in-law. I’d break his trust. Nope. I had to ask Bob first. I promised him the databases would only be used for his cases. I didn’t want to ruin our personal or professional relationship.

  Bob was on a stakeout tonight, so I’d text him in the morning. I turned off my computer and headed downstairs. Back to the boxes.

  Donning a pair of gloves, I shuffled the items around in the box from the storage unit. There were a few more pictures, and I took them out. A couple of them were stuck together. I placed them on the table and went upstairs to retrieve dental floss from the bathroom. Carefully, I slipped the dental floss between the two pictures and slid it down, separating the two pictures.

  In the woods near a creek, Ollie and Edward were leaning against a Mustang. They were older than in the first picture I found. How in the world did they get the car back there? There was a thin path on the ground, grass pressed down and browned. There had been some ATV trails in the wood. I wouldn’t have wanted to take a nice car down it and risk getting it scratched—unless it was important. Something drew the men there that day, and whatever it was didn’t leave them happy.

  Their postures spoke of a forced casualness. Wary. The expression on their faces was odd. Their eyes said there was an unspoken challenge between them. Their smiles looked forced, as if they were trying to please someone. Arms were stretched out behind them on the hood of the bright blue Mustang, propping them up. Ollie’s hands were bunched into fists, while Edward’s were splayed out. Relaxed. There was some tension in the air.

  Who was taking the picture? Grandma’s story played in my mind. Georgia? I held the photo closer to my face, studying the ground for a shadow. Nothing.

  A fight that almost killed one of them. The bones! What if it the rumor was true? What if one of the men had killed the other? The only two potential victims were Donald and Ollie, and the murderer was either Donald and Ollie—depending whose bones were dug up—and Edward. If Edward was scared, like Georgia believed, was it because once a secret became unburied, he’d be the only person who knew the truth? As the saying goes the only way to keep a secret a secret was if only one party to it was still alive.

  And now Edward was dead.

  Lights flashed into my front window. I went over and drew back the curtains. The Buford brothers’ plumbing truck was parked in my driveway. At least it was a reasonable excuse for Wyatt Buford stopping by my house for a late-night visit. My grandmother knew about the “animal carcasses” so no concerns about her popping over to check on the plumbing issue I was having. Though, I’m sure Mrs. Barlow was on the phone telling Ted all about it. She’d want my man to come rushing over to save me from whatever calamity had befallen me.

  My heart hurt for Wyatt. The sins of the father. If Ollie had murdered someone, how would it change the town’s outlook on the brothers? It was a fear that had made me remain silent when I first returned home from the Army. I was terrified residents would turn on me, and even worse treat my grandmothers badly, because of what my ex-husband had done. Some believed that a spouse had to have known the evil the other one did. I hadn’t. I had no clue my then husband had murdered someone until I was arrested for it.

  Wyatt knocked on the door and shouted, “Buford Emergency Plumbing Services.”

  I opened the door and stepped back.

  “I brought drop cloths to help protect your stuff,” Wyatt spoke loud enough to draw Mrs. Barlow’s attention. The show he was putting on was so much of one, he wouldn’t fool anyone. Great. If Mrs. Barlow hadn’t called Ted yet, she would now so he could run over to protect his “property.” Mrs. Barlow loved a good man brawl over a girl. Especially when it was two good-looking, buff guys tussling around.

  Wyatt walked in with two large garbage bags heaved over his shoulders like Santa’s gift bag.

  I shut the door. “Did you stop to go through everything or get lost?”

  “Nope. I just had to wait Mitchell out.” He lowered the bags to the floor, rotating his shoulders. “He was parked near Graves’ cabin. I had to pretend like I was doing plumbing. Graves wanted to throw me out and threatened to go tell the officer what I was up to if I didn’t hightail it out of his space. He’s not one to put up with company for a long time.”

  “Why did you stay so long then?” My stomach tightened. The last pe
rson I wanted to know what we were up to was Officer Mitchell. The man didn’t like me, and nothing would please him more than tossing me into a jail cell. Even more so since Ted and I were engaged. I knew he was looking at Ted’s job with starry eyes. There was only one detective slot on Eden’s police force, and Mitchell wanted it.

  “Because Graves hates cops more than he does my company. If he said anything to Mitchell, he’d have poked around and might’ve found Graves’s moonshine still. No way he’d risk that. I’m not allowed to store anything there anymore.”

  “Did you talk to Ted? He would’ve found a way to get Mitchell out of there.”

  Wyatt glanced at the floor. “I was thinking maybe we’re jumping the gun a little. We don’t know anything...”

  “We know there wasn’t a family burial plot in that area. Someone was murdered.”

  “But—”

  Time to share some bad news with him. “I have some pictures of your dad to show you.”

  “Cool. The only picture I’ve seen of him is the one you showed me today. It’s been hard for me to picture him.”

  The sick feeling in my stomach increased. Was Ollie such a horrible person Gussie hid all his photos? I hated thinking Gussie knew the father of her children killed a man and remained silent. I forced my mind off its current path. Everything was a wild guess about people I didn’t know, or situations I wasn’t around to witness. My mind was taking a rumor and turning it into a truth. “You don’t have any pictures of him?”

  “Ma put them somewhere. It hurt her to look at them all the time, and Wayne and I don’t ask because we don’t want her hurting anymore. People said a lot of mean things when he left. She just didn’t want those words in her house, and the pictures always started them talking in her head.”

  “What did people say?” I asked, immediately feeling guilty. Why did I want Wyatt to speak those words aloud? “Never mind, it’s rude of me to ask.”

  “It’s okay, Faith. We’re trying to find the answer of what happened to my father. To know that, we have to talk about the ugly. There’s nothing uglier than thinking your dad might’ve killed someone.”

  Wyatt was taking this well. He had a calmer personality than I remembered him having back in school. He’d always been more the kind to react and speak, losing his temper rather easily if someone poked fun at him. And it happened a lot. He was teased for the way he spoke, dressed, and the fact he didn’t have a father around. I was never the teasing kind. I’d liked to have said it was because I was such a nice kid, but the truth was I knew I had something in common with the Bufords. No father. Or mother. I stayed quiet so I didn’t pop up on the bullies’ radar.

  While my circumstances were different than theirs, those small nuances didn’t matter to kids who wanted to taunt others. I had endured my share of teasing. Growing up, I hated Mother’s and Father’s Day as there was either a breakfast or dance dedicated to children and their parents. My grandparents happily took me, but in my heart, it wasn’t the same.

  All the teasing of the Buford brothers stopped when their height and girth expanded. Kids didn’t like picking on boys who topped six feet and were two hundred pounds of muscle. Plus, it helped when they became the best defensive players Eden High School had ever seen.

  “You could be wrong,” I said, even though I was starting to believe it.

  “I don’t know what to want,” Wyatt said. “My dad being alive. Or my dad being dead. Cause if he’s alive, it means he probably has something to do with someone else being dead.”

  I had no answer for Wyatt. I handed him the two photos. “The other guys in the picture are Edward, Walter, and Donald.”

  Wyatt lightly rubbed his fingertip over the image of his father. “Walter told me he had hung around with my dad when they were teens. That all stopped after they hassled Mrs. Barlow one day. Walter’s mom found out and laid into him good and long. Said he’d never been so scared of his mama, or anyone, before or after. She was barely five feet but that day turned into a giant. Said if fire could be shot from a person’s eyes, they did so that day. He got real scared when his dad, brother, and brother-in-law hightailed it out of the house. His brother-in-law was a boxer and almost qualified for the Olympics and wanted nothing to do with tangling with Walter’s mom.”

  “I’m sure his mom wasn’t happy he was so disrespectful to a woman.”

  “Walter’s mom was never fond of Mrs. Barlow. What bugged the tar out of her was the fact he put a baby girl in danger. You don’t mess with babies.” Wyatt grew quiet, head dipping low.

  “You okay?” I placed my hand on his shoulder. He looked so sad.

  “My ma told me that Walter’s momma had lost a baby girl. She was two and ran out into traffic and died. That’s why she was so angry about Walter’s behavior.”

  Tears filled my eyes.

  “It was after that Walter stopped hanging around my dad. All the fun of being a punk whooshed right out of him.”

  “What about Donald? Did your mom ever talk about him?”

  “One time she said there were some friends my dad had that weren’t worth talking about. I guess Donald and Edward were two of them.”

  I tucked the piece of information into the back of my mind. Why hadn’t Gussie mentioned Edward? Was she trying to steer her sons away from Edward’s sons? Gussie might’ve feared mentioning the men’s friendship would encourage her boys to hang out with the Brodart brothers, a town disaster in the making.

  “Maybe she didn’t like talking about Edward because he didn’t like us much.” Wyatt continued to stare at the photo. “We never bothered him or his kids but whenever he looked at us, he kind of sneered. Mrs. Brodart was even worse. She couldn’t even bear to look at us for a second.”

  “You guys were always loud and boisterous.”

  “Not any more than her own dang kids.”

  True. Her boys caused almost as much angst as Wayne and Wyatt. “People can usually handle their own kids’ misbehavior better than someone else’s.”

  “I know she didn’t like my ma. My ma didn’t like her. Said Mrs. Brodart was uppity to her. Thought she was better because she had a husband and my mom didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t your mom get married?”

  Wyatt shrugged. “I figure my dad never asked her and no one else wanted the package deal of me and Wayne. It’s not really something you want to ask your ma. Seemed hurtful.”

  I blushed. Wyatt was right. There was no polite way to ask a woman why she didn’t marry the man who fathered her children. I didn’t want to hurt Gussie so that question was off my list. It didn’t matter. I knew tongues wagged about it, being in a small town and all, and I had heard snatches of conversation here and there while I was growing up.

  Grown-ups had said, when they forgot little ears were around, that Gussie wasn’t the type a man married but one he took up with. If I had been Gussie, I’d have left town to get away from the gossip. The shame would’ve run me out. Gussie was made of stronger stuff. She stayed where she was born and raised, giving her boys a better life in the very place that looked down on hers.

  “I tried getting information about Donald Lucas thinking I might be able to track your dad down that way,” I said. “What I’ve found out so far is there are a lot of men named Donald Lucas. I’m going to try again tomorrow once I see if I can have access to a couple of databases.”

  “Can you look for my dad also?” Wyatt put the photo down and opened one of the bags he carried in.

  “Yes.”

  “Ma was surprised he went away and never came back. Ollie was known to take off on his motorcycle for months at a time, but he always came back to Eden.” Wyatt took some items from a bag, stacking them on my coffee table. Photos. Embroidered linens. A map. Blueprint.

  “What’s this for?” I spread the blueprint out on my floor. “I think this is the original plan for the Everton hous
e.”

  Wyatt squatted down beside me. “If that’s true, it’ll be great for the historical society and us. Maybe it can help prove that the house does belong to the Eden Historical Society. Once a certain percentage of improvements are made, then by default it’s ours since the owner didn’t show up until after.”

  Maybe that would be the saving grace for Scrap This. We had made a lot of improvements to the building, especially after the fire. We had to gut half of the customer area of the store. The only part of our store that hadn’t been damaged was the storage area. Of course, it might be all null and void if the town had no right to claim the land the shopping center was built on.

  Wyatt patted my hand. “I told you not to worry about it, Faith. No one can take your grandmothers store away from you guys. It’s not that easy. It’s just the Everton mansion has been abandoned for over seventy-five years.”

  I held little comfort in that fact. I stretched out on my stomach by Wyatt, my neck and shoulders over the blueprint. I tapped the section of the document in front of me. “What’s this?”

  Wyatt frowned. “The living room and ballroom area. I could see better if you weren’t blocking the light.” He shooed at me.

  I clambered to my feet and scanned the opened boxes he had brought in. On the top of one of them was an old leather book. It looked similar to the one I found in the box Sierra brought. I picked up the book and flipped to the first page.

  The Diary of—

  Nothing was written after the word “of.” I turned to the next page. There were six words written on the page in cursive.

  Life is now gone from me.