Grave Doubts (A Paranormal Mystery Novel) Read online

  “I wanted to thank you for taking care of things the other night,” she began. “This has been a difficult few days, and I haven’t had a chance to call you.”

  She stopped as if the strain would overcome her. Lee was about to say something, when Carey reached into her purse and pulled out a small, carved onyx bird, not much larger than a golf ball.

  “I’ve started going through Diane’s things and thought you’d like this. I know you were with her when she bought it. Think of it as my way of saying thank you.” She placed the small bird into the palm of Lee’s hand.

  Lee recognized the bird as one of Diane’s favorite possessions. As her fingers closed around the familiar dark figurine, a faint rush of energy seemed to flow through the palm of her hand and up her forearm. The tingling sensation warmed her muscles, bringing them back to life. Lee stared with wonder at the bird, forgetting for a moment that Carey was still there.

  “You know, if you’d like to stop by next weekend, we’ll be going through the condo. There are several things I think you’d like. In fact, I thought about bringing her old camera, too,” Carey chattered nervously. “Diane said you have a collection of old clocks and cameras. Vern will just get rid of it. She said you always tried to get her to upgrade to a digital camera,” Carey attempted a short laugh. “But not my sister.” She dropped her head and quickly wiped away a tear. “Anyway, I thought maybe you’d like to have it, you know, as a way to remember how you guys used to argue good-naturedly.”

  The reference to arguments made Lee inwardly flinch. She didn’t think she was ready to go back to the spot where she’d found Diane dead, but then heard a distant voice say, “Thanks, Carey. I’d like to stop by. I need to return her key anyway.”

  “Great, and thank you again, Lee. You were a good friend to Diane. She didn’t have many, and…” Carey’s mouth opened and then snapped shut as her eyes darted toward her husband. “Anyway, I’ll see you next weekend.”

  Carey turned and helped her mother descend the steps. Her husband remained poised at the head of the stairs, turning his attention on Lee. He was a hard-looking man with close-cropped blonde hair, a square face, and firm jaw. His scrutiny made Lee nervous, and she gave an awkward smile in response. He merely turned and followed the two women down the stairs.

  Lee kept the bird in the palm of her hand and turned her attention to the grave. She was alone now, except for two men in dark suits who stood off to one side, presumably waiting for the workmen to lower the coffin to its final resting place. The tent flapped gently in the breeze.

  Lee moved up to the casket and stared with sadness at the sleek lines of the sculpted box. She imagined Diane lying in repose within and wondered if Carey had chosen Diane’s favorite lavender linen dress. Linen wouldn’t be heavy enough for winter. Then, again, Diane wouldn’t be feeling the cold anymore.

  A plaintive cry made Lee look up to where the majestic form of a bird hung in the sky, caught by an air current like a perfectly weighted kite. It was the hawk. Lee watched the bird drift aimlessly in circles until it suddenly tipped one wing and dived for the ground. With a whoosh, it skimmed directly over the coffin before it lifted up and over the treetops. Lee watched it disappear, her heart pounding.

  She didn’t believe in omens, but the bird’s bizarre behavior heightened the desolate feeling in her soul, and she huddled more deeply into her coat. When a cool breeze burrowed under her collar, she turned to face the wind, allowing the cool air to run its fingers across her cheeks and eyes, giving her the feeling that she was flying, too. She closed her eyes and tried to relax. She was so lost in the moment that she barely heard the familiar, throaty voice that whispered past her ear.

  “Leeeee…”

  Her eyes popped open and she whipped around, half expecting to find Diane standing behind her. Her entire body shivered with a chilly frost. With trembling fingers, she pulled up the collar of her coat. In the distance, she saw the hawk and wondered if what she’d heard had been only the call of the bird. As she watched the hawk sail across the tree tops, she allowed her eyes to scan the vista before her. When her gaze fell on the eerie silhouette of a woman standing motionless between two trees just above the gravesite, Lee paused. The woman was dressed all in black. Although afternoon shadows had captured the hillside, she wore sunglasses and a large hat. Storm clouds had gathered behind her, and the crisp breeze entwined the woman’s dark hair with a long black scarf she wore around her neck, drawing invisible patterns in the air. She looked absolutely ethereal, as if she might float right off the ground. Lee couldn’t help but stare, transfixed, wondering who she was.

  The woman seemed to watch Lee as well. It wasn’t until the sound of laughter erupted on the road below, that Lee’s attention was drawn away. A straggling group of mourners stood chatting by their cars. Someone had made a joke. But their laughter had died as suddenly as it was born, leaving a hollow sound in its wake.

  The mourners dispersed and Lee turned back. The woman in black was gone, and the onyx bird in her hand had begun to glow an eerie, luminescent red.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time Lee left the cemetery, a light rain had begun to fall. In Oregon, rain was like a neighbor you saw too often on the street. You recognized it, accepted it, but tried to ignore it. Most people didn’t even carry umbrellas.

  She stopped at the store to get cereal for her morning’s breakfast and then entered the west side of Eugene and the University of Oregon campus where the pizza parlors, bookstores, and shops formed a small city within a city. Despite the drizzle, students filled the sidewalks and lingered at the corner Laundromat chatting and smoking, book bags thrown over their shoulders, with various dogs in tow.

  Lee lived just south of campus in the University District. It was an old, affluent part of the city. Here the pace was slow, and the architecture was an eclectic mix of Craftsman and Victorian styles. Most homes enjoyed wide front porches and sloping front lawns, while trees stretched their branches across the streets in leafy canopies. One could almost picture a time when horse and carriage was the main form of transportation, and the favorite form of entertainment was a stroll after dinner. When Lee had selected a home here, it had been as much a strategic move as one of taste. Lee had hoped her daughter, Amy, would enroll in the School of Education at the university. But the strategy hadn’t worked; Amy had enrolled at Oregon State University in Corvallis instead, some thirty miles to the north.

  Lee approached her white, two-story bungalow, noticing her brother’s blue Mazda parked out in front. As she prepared to turn onto the side street and into her driveway, a car swerved away from the curb in front of her. She slammed on her brakes and everything on the front seat flew onto the floor. Lee directed a string of expletives at the retreating sedan before pulling into the narrow dirt drive at the side of her own property. She retrieved her few groceries, dumped them back into the bag, and hurried up the walkway towards the front door. As she rounded the corner of the porch and up the front steps, she almost collided with her brother. He was coming down the steps with her antique typewriter tucked under one arm.

  “Whoa, where do you think you’re going with that?” she snapped, ducking under the eaves of the porch to stay dry.

  Patrick gave the machine a quizzical look and then looked back at Lee. “I’m off to rehearsal.” With a brisk nod, he continued past Lee and down the steps.

  “Patrick, stop!”

  Patrick stopped. Lee moved down the steps behind him, careful not to leave the protection of the overhang. Patrick stood just beyond it, sheltering the typewriter with his jacket. The light rain glistened off the auburn curls on his head.

  “I repeat, where do you think you’re going with my typewriter?”

  He turned around slowly, his boyish grin revealing a slightly crooked set of polished white teeth.

  “I need to borrow it for a play I’m doing. Six weeks, tops.”

  “Did you ever hear of asking?”

  The reddish brows that fr
amed his deep green eyes creased for a moment as he considered the question. “Nope,” he glimmered. He skipped up onto the step with Lee. “Do you mind, really? I mean, it’s not as if you ever use it.”

  “Okay, but only if I get an acknowledgement in the program.”

  “Deal. I’ll even include your middle name,” he offered.

  “Lee is my middle name.”

  “Then I’ll include your first name.”

  “I’d have to kill you first,” she threatened.

  “Whooo,” he mocked. “Scary.”

  Lee frowned at her reference to murder.

  “Hey, it was a joke,” he defended himself. “Don’t go all serious on me.”

  “Never mind,” she deflected the comment. “I’m just tired.”

  “Well, you do look as if you haven’t slept in a week.”

  “Shit!” she muttered, going back up the steps. “I’m going inside.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who said you were tired.”

  She turned back. “I just came from Diane’s funeral.”

  Patrick frowned. “Sorry. I forgot.” He came to stand next to her. “You okay? I could stick around awhile.”

  “No,” she replied, reaching for the door. “Amy is still here, and I’m going over to Robin’s for dinner.”

  “Going to see Detective Grady, are you?”

  She turned to him with a narrowed glance. “I said I was going over for dinner.”

  “Yeah, but you really want to talk to Alan.” Patrick’s green eyes sparkled, undeterred. “You don’t think Diane killed herself. How could you? Diane was the toughest broad I ever met. I used to think she was a man with tits.”

  “Patrick!” Lee stared at her brother shocked.

  “I don’t mean she didn’t have feelings, but she always acted with such purpose, such focus. You know what I mean? I picture people who kill themselves as being, I don’t know, kind of lost. Like you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Lee demanded.

  “Lost, you know, cut off from the rest of the world. When was the last time you had a date?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “When was the last time you took a vacation?”

  “Who the hell cares?” she snarled.

  “When was the last time you did anything for yourself?”

  He snapped this last question like a wet towel, and she responded by opening the door and attempting to close it in his face. He pushed it open and followed her around the base of the staircase and down the narrow hallway to the kitchen.

  “You know, Roger what’s-his-name wasn’t such a bad guy,” Patrick prattled on behind her. “He really liked you.”

  “No,” she spat. “He liked you.” She threw her keys onto an old roll-top desk that sat against the wall in the big farm-style kitchen. “He spent more time watching soccer matches with you than he did with me.”

  “So? He liked sports. What’s wrong with that?”

  Lee placed the bag of groceries onto the white-tiled counter and pulled down a glass from the cupboard before going to the refrigerator. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that.” She grabbed a liter bottle of cola, while she talked over her shoulder. “I don’t like sports. That’s what’s wrong with that. ‘Good guy’ Roger, as you put it, didn’t like anything I like. That’s why I stopped seeing him. He was a bore.” She poured herself a drink and took a long gulp.

  “You have to be kidding. You think he was a bore because he didn’t like Cary Grant movies and the junk you buy at yard sales? Give the guy a break!”

  Patrick snorted with self-righteous indignation. That was so like Patrick, Lee thought. He never assumed he might be wrong.

  “You know, it wasn’t yard sale junk that he didn’t like. He thought valuable antiques, like that typewriter, were dusty and smelly.”

  “Okay, I get it. He wasn’t your type. But I don’t think they’re dusty and smelly,” he said, patting the typewriter lovingly.

  “Good thing,” she said with a smile. “Or you’d be looking somewhere else for your stage prop.”

  “Never!” he grinned. “You are my antique dealer-of-choice whenever I need some piece of lost art or treasure.”

  Lee chuckled and returned to her drink in hopes the caffeine would refuel her engine and wipe away the headache.

  “What’s this?” Patrick asked.

  Lee turned to find him holding a card that had arrived in her mailbox the day before without a stamp.

  “A poorly crafted condolence,” she grunted.

  “Pretty strange if you ask me,” he said, reading the inside copy. “What do you think this means…’things aren’t what they seem’? Sounds like either a threat or a clue.”

  Lee walked over and snatched the card from his hands. “No, it’s a poorly crafted condolence, like I said. Now go back to your play.” She waved the card in his face and then went back to the counter. She was reaching up to put away the cereal when Patrick continued.

  “Hey, Lee. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Ask,” she replied without enthusiasm.

  “Do you think Diane all of a sudden hit a wall that night and decided that life just wasn’t worth living? Do you think she found a needle to inject herself with enough insulin to send her to bye-bye land and then dropped dead on her living room floor, knowing that you, or someone else she cared about, would find her that way?”

  Lee stopped with her hand still on the shelf. “That’s more than one question.”

  “C’mon, Lee. Even Diane wasn’t that callous.”

  Lee turned and leaned against the counter, feeling fear welling in her chest. She crossed her arms hoping Patrick wouldn’t notice that her composure was all but fractured.

  “What do you think?” her voice cracked.

  He paused before responding. “I think someone might have helped her.”

  Tears plopped over the rims of Lee’s eyes before she could get a hand up to catch them. “Dammit, Patrick! You don’t know anything. You’ve spent too many hours on stage cooking up make-believe characters in make-believe lives. This isn’t make-believe. This isn’t the theater. People kill themselves. People you think would never kill themselves, kill themselves. It happens. Shit happens!”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders and backed towards the door. “You keep working on that, Lee. Give it a few weeks, and you might even believe it. Meanwhile, thanks for the typewriter. I really need it.”

  A moment later, the front door closed and she used her sleeve to wipe away the tears. She moved over to the table and picked up the strange card Patrick had held. Lee glanced at the illustration of an angel floating above the clouds, harp tucked neatly under her elbow. The card had arrived on Saturday without a postmark, addressed with slanted, curvy handwriting she didn’t recognize. Although the card gave her a weird, ominous feeling, she opened it to read the handwritten verse again.

  Little do we know

  When once we chance to dream

  Death may be the final blow

  But things aren’t always what they seem.

  The roar of an engine brought her to the kitchen window just as Patrick’s Mazda disappeared up the street. She stood there watching the retreating taillights. Patrick was right. He was always right. She didn’t think Diane had killed herself. In fact, she had openly challenged the police the night she’d found Diane, but they had the bottle of insulin and suicide note, and they hadn’t listened. Patrick was also right about her dinner plans. It wasn’t Robin she wanted to talk to; she hoped that Alan could help her understand why the police had accepted just a few pieces of evidence to support their finding of suicide.

  The sound of thunder rolling down the stairs made her leave the window to finish putting the groceries away. A moment later, her daughter’s voice boomed behind her.

  “Mom, I’m ready to go. Did Uncle Patrick leave?”

  “Yeah, he’s gone.”

  “Are you going to be okay?” Amy seemed concerne
d.

  Lee glanced over her shoulder. “Sure, but it’s raining again. Do you have to go now?”

  “I have a class tomorrow morning.”

  “You could leave first thing tomorrow.” She reached for a top shelf, bumping into a large German Shepherd that had appeared quietly by her side. “God! I’ll be glad to see King Kong leaving.”

  Lee pushed the dog aside and grabbed for a cupboard door. As she put the groceries away, she glanced back at Amy leaning against the kitchen doorway, her long legs crossed at the ankles. At five-foot-eight, Amy shared her father’s height, but had gotten Lee’s dark, curly hair. Lee tried to commit to memory every detail of this child she was beginning to lose. The heart-shaped face and the fact she rarely wore make-up made her look younger than a second-year college student. Yet, even now, dressed only in a baggy T-shirt and jeans, casually leaning against the wall, Amy could have been posing for a magazine, she was that pretty. If it weren’t for the severe asthma she’d inherited from her grandmother, she would be perfect.

  “How was the funeral?” Amy inquired carefully.

  Lee’s muddled brain attempted to form a concrete thought.

  “Um, it was okay.”

  She grabbed a can of soup to put it away in an effort to derail the conversation, but before she could change the subject, she bumped into the dog again.

  “Why don’t you just load this eating machine into the car right now?”

  “Actually, I need to talk to you about Soldier,” Amy replied. She slapped her leg and the dog lumbered over. “I need to leave her here for awhile.”

  Lee turned to her daughter. “You what?!”

  “Maddie called. She tried to get the apartment manager to make an exception and allow us to keep a pet, but no such luck. They won’t even allow birds. Can you believe that?”

  Amy whined in hopeful exasperation, but Lee’s expression wasn’t meant to be encouraging. She merely tilted her head to one side and arched her brows as if to say, “So?”