Whispering Winds Widows, page 15
“Her car is in the garage,” Ben said from the doorway.
She’d been so engrossed in the photos and what this thing plaguing Fuller might’ve meant that she hadn’t heard Ben come into the room.
Reyna stood. “Did you check upstairs?”
Their gazes locked and held for a long moment.
He shook his head. “I’ll do that now.”
If his mother had fallen ill...
“Not going there,” Reyna muttered. She reached for the album, and it slid onto the floor. “Dang it.” She crouched down to pick it up, but something beneath the sofa snagged her attention. She leaned down to get a better look. The sofa was one of the higher-legged ones, so it wasn’t difficult to see beneath it.
A cell phone lay face down on the floor.
Oh, no.
Reyna reached for it, turned it over and touched the screen to awaken it.
Dozens of missed calls from Ben.
This was his mother’s cell phone.
“Ben!” The phone gripped in her hand, she hurried to the hall. He was already coming down the stairs. Reyna held up the phone. “This was under the sofa.”
Ben took the phone and checked the screen. He nodded. “It’s hers. I don’t know her passcode, so I can’t get past the lock screen.”
The notifications had allowed Reyna to see there were missed calls from Ben, but now that those had cleared, they couldn’t see anything else without the passcode.
But what was glaringly obvious was that Lucinda Kane had left her house without her car or her phone.
Cold slinking through her, Reyna dared to ask, “Did you find her handbag?”
“I didn’t notice one sitting around in her room.”
“Where does she enter the house most frequently? The front or the back?”
“The back.”
Reyna led the way through the front hall and into the kitchen. The rack over the bench by the back door held a sweater, a raincoat and a taupe-colored handbag. Reyna’s gut clenched.
“Do you want to check for her wallet? See if that’s the handbag she’s been carrying most recently?” Most women changed handbags fairly often. The essentials would be in the one she was currently using.
Ben opened the bag and withdrew her wallet. He looked to Reyna. “This can’t be right. Whatever Sheriff Norwood believes, something is going on, and it involves my grandfather and my mother.”
“You’re right.” Reyna glanced around the kitchen to give herself a moment to think before she spoke. “We should check the other widows’ houses before we call the sheriff. If they’re all three missing, that means something different from just your mom and your grandfather being MIA.”
He tucked the wallet back into his mother’s bag. “I’m locking up. I don’t want to leave the house open like this.”
“You have a key in case you need to get back in?”
He nodded. “Let’s go.”
Evans Residence
Blackberry Trail
11:00 a.m.
BEN PARKED NEXT to Harlowe Evans’s car. It had been sitting in that same spot the last time he and Reyna had come over.
“We should try the door if she doesn’t answer,” Reyna suggested.
“Yeah.”
They got out together and headed for the porch. It was too quiet. He already had this gut feeling that no one was home.
He knocked. “I hate to even say this out loud.” Since no one answered the door and it remained quiet inside, he knocked again. “But if she’s not here and then we go to Ms. Fuller’s house and find the same situation...”
“That will be eerie, and let’s not even go there until we have to. One step at a time.”
After a third knock with no answer, Ben tried the door. It opened.
“You want me to go inside? I’m not from around here,” Reyna offered. “The sheriff might cut me some slack for trespassing.”
“We go together.”
Again, inside there were no scents that suggested any sort of food or beverage prep had taken place that morning. The house was neat. And it was a clear shot from the front to the back considering the renovations that had been done. The wide-open first floor showed no sign of the owner’s presence.
The drop zone for coats and shoes was next to the front door, and Ms. Evans’s handbag hung next to a lightweight jacket. This time Ben preferred that Reyna did the honors. She unzipped the bag and spotted the woman’s wallet.
“Try her cell number,” Reyna suggested.
Ben withdrew his phone, scrolled his contacts until he found her name and tapped. Seconds later the muffled sound of the phone ringing came from the other side of the room. He followed the sound, found the phone on the island partially concealed by a tea towel.
The top notification visible was a missed called from a number not in the woman’s contacts.
“You recognize this number?” Reyna asked, showing him the screen.
He entered the number into his screen, and Sheriff Norwood’s name appeared. He ended the call.
Norwood had tried to reach all three of the Widows. The only reason her number hadn’t been the top notification on Ben’s mom’s phone was because of his calls.
There was a passcode, so that was all they were getting from the phone. He placed it back on the counter.
“I’ll take a walk-through upstairs,” he said, heading for the staircase.
“I’ll look around down here.”
Being in his mother’s house hadn’t felt so strange because she was family. But this was different. If Ms. Evans walked in right now and caught them snooping around, she would likely not be happy. Not that Ben could blame her. And their only excuse would probably not make her feel any better.
While Ben had a look upstairs, Reyna explored downstairs. There were no photos or albums lying around. The entire downstairs was neat, everything in its place. Reyna thought about the note she’d gotten the other night, the one stuck on Ben’s truck windshield. She checked through the cabinets in the island and near the sink until she found the one where the trash bin was tucked. Like the rest of the place, even the trash smelled clean. There was very little in the bin.
At the bottom, beneath a discarded potato chip bag and an empty cookie bag, were newspaper clippings. Reyna clawed them up from the bottom of the bin and spread them across the counter.
These weren’t new clippings—these were from decades ago. Most were about the search for the missing men. But one was about the fundraiser being held at Our Lady of the Mountain Church. Reyna smoothed the crumpled article. A photo of the football team, the Three included, was front and center. Father Cullen was huddled close to one of the players, so close you could hardly see his face.
The difference between the article about the fundraiser at the church and the others was that Harlowe Evans had crumpled this one. Reyna read the article and found nothing that set off alarm bells. It was fairly cut-and-dried—the team had made the playoffs and extra funds were needed for travel, thus the fundraiser.
“You find anything?” Ben came up beside her.
“Just these clippings in the trash.”
He surveyed the articles, then shook his head. “Whatever is going on, it doesn’t feel like these women left voluntarily.”
“We should check the Fuller home and call Sheriff Norwood.”
If the women had been missing since yesterday...they could be running out of time.
Chapter Thirteen
Fuller Residence
Hawk’s Way
11:45 a.m.
There was no answer at the Fuller house either, but the door was locked. A walk around the property showed the owner’s car was not home. The detached garage had windows, so they could see inside. Ben had checked the one other larger building just in case the car was in there. It was not.
“So maybe we’ve overreacted,” Reyna offered. “The three of them could have taken a trip somewhere. A shopping spree or a spa getaway.” She shrugged. “Girl trip.”
“Except,” he countered, “why would my mom and Ms. Evans leave their phones at home? Leave their houses unlocked?”
Reyna put her hands up. “You got me there.”
Ben thought for a moment about what he wanted to do. It might not have been the smartest step, but his curiosity was getting the better of him. He really needed to see if Ms. Fuller was inside the house—car or no car. And whether her phone was in there.
“I think I’ll check a few windows. If there’s one unlocked I’m going inside to check things out. You let me know if company arrives.”
“I’m sure there are things I should say to you right now,” Reyna pointed out. “Like the fact that breaking and entering is a crime.”
“I promise I won’t break anything.” He shot her a grin, and she just shook her head. “Keeping watch.”
She sat down in the glider on the porch and gestured for him to carry on.
Ben started with the windows on the porch. The home’s windows were double hung with sliding screens that made the task far easier. All four front windows on the first level were locked. He moved all the way around the house until, next to the back door, he found the one he needed. The screen slid up out of the way, and the window sash followed. Not a very big window, but he felt confident he could work his way through.
He pulled his upper body into the opening and reached for the floor. Once he’d braced his hands there, he pulled his lower torso and legs through. He closed the window and locked it just to make sure no one else did the same.
The laundry room, where he’d entered, led into the kitchen. He checked around the room, remembered to look in the garbage can before moving on. Reyna had found newspaper clippings in Ms. Evans’s trash.
The entire first floor was in order, and there was no sign of the owner, her cell phone or a handbag. He called her cell to ensure it was not in the house. If it was, it had either been silenced or the battery had died and it no longer rang. He moved on to the upstairs, where he found the same. No Deidre Fuller.
As he approached the front door to join Reyna on the porch, it occurred to him that none of the security systems in the houses had been armed. He stared at the keypad next to the front door.
He was surprised this one hadn’t been.
He couldn’t exit via the front door since the dead bolt was the kind that needed a key to engage or disengage. The back door, on the other hand, had no dead bolt. When he had exited via that back door, locking it behind him, and reached the front of the house, Reyna looked to him for an update.
He sat down next to her. “No handbag. No cell phone. No sign of the owner.”
“Time to call the sheriff,” she suggested.
Ben nodded and reached for his phone. He put through the call and relayed all the details they’d discovered—except for the part about him going into Ms. Fuller’s locked house. He left it at no answer and no car.
When he’d hung up, he passed along the sheriff’s response. “She’s sending deputies to check the Kane and Evans homes for any signs of forced entry or a struggle—which we know she won’t find. That’s about all she can do at this point.”
“What do you think we should do now?” Reyna asked. “We can’t just sit around and wait to see who disappears next.”
She was right about that. They had to do something.
“We can go back to see the priest.” Ben shrugged. “Maybe he’s home now. If so, we tell him what’s going on. Maybe if he knows anything at all he’ll toss us a bone. Anything to give us a direction to go.”
“Unless he’s the one hiding the most secrets.”
Ben considered the probability that many priests knew plenty of secrets about their parishioners. Secrets they could never share with anyone.
“Then I guess we’ve kind of hit a brick wall.” Where on earth were his mother and his grandfather? This was all kinds of crazy.
“Back when I was writing fiction,” she said, “I developed a number of sources in areas where I might need to do research. One of them was a retired FBI agent. I emailed him about Father Cullen. I know it might seem a reach, but the fact that when I did some digging on the net I couldn’t find anything about him feels off. Scrubbing your history from cyberspace is not an easy feat. I didn’t mention this before because maybe it’s nothing, but I don’t want to ignore even the most unlikely possibility. In any event, I hope to hear back from him later today.”
Ben shook his head and laughed out loud. “This is just a small town in Tennessee—how can we have all these unsolved mysteries?”
And missing people?
“Let’s go see the priest.” Reyna stood, grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to his feet. “Who knows—maybe we’ll hear from the sheriff or my FBI contact by the time we’ve interviewed the priest again, assuming he’s home.”
He had a feeling that was wishful thinking.
Our Lady of the Mountain
Kings Lane
1:00 p.m.
LIKE EVERY DOOR they’d knocked on so far today, there was no answer at the rectory.
Reyna wasn’t one to easily admit defeat, but this was getting ridiculous. Where the hell was everyone?
“Maybe he’s in the church,” she suggested. “If not, the current priest might know where he is.”
“Could be out for a walk,” Ben said as they took the cobblestone path that led back to the parking area. “It’s a nice day. I’ve seen him out walking before.”
“Or maybe at lunch.” Reyna’s stomach had already reminded her that they hadn’t stopped long enough to grab a bite.
Ben grinned. “We should do that before our next stop.”
“You won’t get any argument from me.”
Father Garrett Jordan had just exited the church and was coming down the steps when they reached the front of the building. He sucked on a cigarette and released a puff of smoke.
“Afternoon, Father,” Ben said, announcing their presence since the man hadn’t spotted them.
“Good afternoon to you.” The priest smiled and waved the smoke in his hand. “A bad habit I’ve never been able to kick.”
Reyna returned his smile. “We all have one kind or the other.” She offered her hand as he reached the bottom step. “Reyna Hart. Father Cullen may have told you I’m here researching the Three.”
He gave a nod. “Several dedicated parishioners have reported your activities, Ms. Hart—Father Cullen included.”
She laughed. “It’s a small town,” she agreed. “The news of a stranger picking through the past travels quickly.”
“Indeed.” He looked from Reyna to Ben and back. “How can I help you today?”
“We don’t want to hold you up,” Ben said, “if you were on your way out.”
“Off to lunch at the diner. Nothing that can’t wait.”
Garrett Jordan wasn’t much older than Ben, Reyna decided. Fortyish, maybe.
“We hoped to speak with Father Cullen again,” she said. “But he’s out. Do you know when he might return?”
Jordan’s brows drew together. “I haven’t seen him today. Yesterday either, for that matter. When last we spoke he seemed distressed over the stir about the past.” He smiled at Reyna. “He’s never talked about it very much. My impression is that he feels he failed those three young men. As we get older we tend to reflect on the mistakes—or those things we perceive as mistakes—we’ve made. Father Cullen is looking back a great deal lately.”
“When you see him, Father,” Ben said, “can you let him know we’d like to speak with him again? It’s very important.”
Jordan gave a slow nod and appeared to struggle a bit with himself before responding. “I feel I should share something with you that will perhaps give you some insight into Father Cullen’s current situation. He’s not been himself for a bit. You see, he has a brain tumor. Sadly, it’s inoperable, and it’s only a matter of time before he will be leaving us. It’s not common knowledge, but I hope you might be able to make your judgments a bit more accurately knowing this.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.” Reyna looked to Ben, uncertain what else to say. Good grief, they’d found the prescription in his grandfather’s room, and now this. It was true that all those who might’ve known details about the Three and their disappearance were going fast.
“Thanks for letting us know, Father,” Ben said. “It’s a shame. He’s an institution in this town.”
“A hard act to follow, for sure,” Jordan said. “As for catching him, generally if he’s out for a walk or lunch, he comes back fairly quickly. Feel free to wait for him. He never locks his door.”
“We’ll do that,” Ben said. “Enjoy your lunch. We’ll be heading that way next.”
Father Jordan gave another nod and hurried to his car. He tucked his half-smoked cigarette into his mouth and climbed in and drove away.
“Wow.” Reyna turned to Ben. “Eudora and your grandfather are right. We’re running out of time.”
“That’s what worries me,” he admitted. He hitched his head toward the cobblestone path that led to the rectory. “The father said we could wait.”
“He did,” she agreed.
As Father Jordan had said, the door to the rectory was unlocked.
“Father Cullen?” Reyna called out as they entered.
No answer, of course.
Rather than have a seat and wait, they wandered around the space. Looking but not touching. Ben checked the bedroom to ensure Cullen wasn’t napping.
