The Consequence of Murder Read online

Mackenzie rose and padded barefoot to the hall. On the little ebony side table with the malachite top, a bijoux French antique and a thrift store find, were her wallet and keys, apparently undisturbed. Yet she clearly remembered leaving her cell phone here, too.

  Am I going crazy? The skin on the back of her neck prickled. Goose bumps swept over her arms. Mackenzie inhaled. For a second, she could have sworn she detected the faintest hint of a dry, dusty scent that reminded her of the dead mouse smell in her office. She exhaled and returned to the living room, deciding she had better adjust the thermostat before she froze into a popsicle.

  In the living room, her gaze zeroed in on the remote sitting on the side table next to the sofa, exactly where she recalled putting it last night.

  “I must be losing my marbles,” she muttered, thinking about a few weeks ago when she’d misplaced her car keys in the refrigerator of all places. She carefully put the phone on the coffee table in plain view, sat on the sofa and used the remote to turn on the television.

  The screen flared to life, but she was only able to press the button for the next channel before the television clicked off. She turned it back on. As soon as the picture appeared on the screen, she tried to change the channel. Again, the television cut off.

  Mashing the ON button did nothing. The remote was dead.

  “What the hell?” Must be something wrong with the batteries.

  Growing annoyed, Mackenzie heaved herself off the sofa and stomped to the kitchen for fresh batteries. When she returned and replaced the remote’s batteries, the television remained stubbornly off when she pressed the remote’s ON button several more times. She turned on a lamp, confirming the electricity in the apartment was working. The problem must be with the television itself.

  She knelt on the floor to check behind a bookcase for the electrical outlet, making the baffling discovery that the television wasn’t plugged in. But it had turned on twice, hadn’t it? Stretching her arm as far as possible, she grabbed the cord, plugged in the television and sat back on her heels to use the remote.

  Nothing happened. She scowled.

  Her cell phone rang.

  She retrieved her phone and answered, “Cross speaking.”

  “You ever hear of Annabel Coffin?” Maynard asked without preamble.

  “Who?” she replied.

  “She was buried behind your office wall.”

  Mackenzie crossed to the sofa and sat down. “Don’t know her.”

  “Doc Hightower found a charm bracelet on the body when it was being moved,” Maynard said, the line crackling slightly with static. “One of the charms was inscribed with that name. I’m trying to find out if anyone knew her.”

  “And you called because you miss hearing me talk? I told you before, Jimmy, I moved into the office three years ago. The body must’ve already been there. Why would you think I’d know anything about this dead woman?”

  “I called because I want you to ask your mother about her.”

  Mackenzie’s stomach lurched in alarm. “What does Mama have to do with any of this?”

  “According to another inscription on a different charm, the victim attended high school in the same year as your mother. It’s possible she’ll recognize the name.”

  Put that way, how could she refuse? “Fine, I’ll go over there tonight,” she said. “Although I don’t know why you can’t just talk to Mama yourself.”

  “Let me know what you find out.” He terminated the call.

  She stared at the phone in her hand and snorted. Putting down the cell phone on the coffee table, she went to grab the remote, only to find it gone.

  After a brief, internal debate, she walked to the hall. Sure enough, the remote sat on the ebony and malachite table.

  Unbidden, memories of campfire stories and family legends sprang to mind. Her great-uncle Stapleton swore he’d seen a ghost in an abandoned funeral parlor when his friends had dared him to peer inside the window. And great-grandmother Beryl Rose had maintained to her dying day that the spirit of a child haunted a well on her property.

  Like many small Southern towns, the city of Antioch had its share of strange happenings. As a child, she’d heard about the ghostly motorcycle rider on Conklin “Haint” Hill, the crying stone angel in the old Oak Grove Cemetery, the ghost of a headless woman who groped along the railroad tracks near the Weatherholtz Bridge on full moon nights and other restless spirits. She hadn’t believed a grain of truth existed in the stories until now, when she was forced to reconsider her skepticism.

  The more she tried to find an explanation for the television becoming unplugged and the remote and her cell phone shifting places without human intervention, the more she came to the reluctant conclusion that the cause might—just maybe—be supernatural.

  Cold dread settled heavy in her guts. Feeling foolish as well as apprehensive, she returned to the living room and cleared her throat. “Uh…is anybody there?” she asked aloud, praying she wouldn’t receive a reply.

  After several minutes of waiting, no answer seemed forthcoming.

  Sighing in disappointment mingled with relief, she turned away, only to violently start when the television came on with a blast of sound that left her deaf to her own scream.

  Chapter Five

  Her nerves shattered, Mackenzie fumbled with the remote and finally turned off the television. She found the sudden lack of sound more unsettling than the noise, but feared putting on the stereo or her computer. Who knew what else might happen next?

  She threw the remote on the coffee table and fixed her gaze on it. If the device moved so much as an inch, she’d see it. She stared until her eyes watered, but the remote remained in place, sitting close to a stack of magazines she hadn’t had time to read.

  Blinking to clear her blurry vision, she thought she caught movement close to her face. She shied away from a long, luminous, silver-gray blob that vanished when she looked directly at it. Lowering her eyelids, she glanced at the spot obliquely. The blob reappeared, resolving into a woman’s gray-skinned hand reaching for the magazines.

  Mackenzie made the mistake of trying to focus on the outstretched hand. Exactly as before, the second she put the apparition in the center of her vision, it disappeared.

  The stack of magazines toppled over and fanned out across the table’s surface, exactly as if someone had pushed it. Mackenzie’s heart knocked against her ribs. She didn’t know what to do. Screaming and running away seemed like a good idea, but to where?

  One of the magazines lifted into the air, the pages flapping like a bird trying to take flight, and in the next second, hurtled across the space to slap the wall next to her head.

  Abruptly, Mackenzie lost her temper. The situation reminded her of school, when her petite, perpetually thin, flat-chested physique made her a target for bullies. Being called names like “Olive Oyl,” “Skinny Minnie,” and “Ironing Board” had hurt. She’d learned to ignore such taunts as the rantings of unintelligent ass clowns who ate boogers for fun. Physical threats and violence against her, however, were met with instant retaliation.

  She stood. “All right, that’s enough!”

  In the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a woman standing beside the coffee table, the same pearly gray, black- haired and black-eyed woman she’d seen in Jo-Jo’s coffee shop. By this time, she’d figured out not to scrutinize the strange figure too closely.

  The woman sneered, her dark gray lips lifting to show shiny white teeth.

  “I’m serious,” Mackenzie warned. “I’m sick of this shit. If you wanted my attention, goddamn it, you’ve got it.”

  The dry, musky smell she associated with the body grew stronger. She shivered. Without warning, something hit her on the head, bounced off and clattered to the floor. Cursing, she glanced down to find her cell phone at her feet.

  “Lady, you keep doing that, I swear I’ll get an exorcist in here,” she snapped. “Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Catholic…whatever your flavor, I reckon I’ve
got you covered. If that don’t do it, there’s a Buddhist temple and monastery on Copper Ridge and the Wiccan coven meets on the second Tuesday of the month at Myrtle Johnson’s house.”

  The cell phone’s display lit up, showing a picture she’d taken of the body in the wall. She heard a soft hissing that seemed very close to her ear, and at the same time very far away, like the muffled sound of a radio playing in another room.

  The hiss resolved into whispers, at first unintelligible, but definitely an attempt at deliberate communication. Mackenzie concentrated. The whispers became clearer.

  Know me? the ghost asked slowly at last.

  To Mackenzie, the “voice” wavered in and out. She fixed her gaze on a spot about two inches above the apparition’s head, which seemed to work as long as she didn’t focus closely. “I think you’re Annabel Coffin, or at least that’s what the police believe.” She paused. “You don’t know who you are?”

  Why?

  “Why what?”

  The cell phone rattled on the floor. Who?

  “I don’t understand what you’re asking. I also don’t understand why you’re haunting me,” Mackenzie said. “I didn’t do anything to you and you certainly didn’t die here.”

  Why? Annabel repeated, her gray hands clenching into fists, her black eyes filled with icy animosity.

  “Why did you die? I don’t know. You were murdered, though, unless you managed to commit suicide after burying yourself behind a wall.”

  Annabel let out a wail that climbed the scale to a soprano shriek making Mackenzie’s eardrums pop, and then the ghost abruptly winked out of existence.

  Mackenzie turned on her heel to survey the entire room including the ceiling. Nothing. The troublesome and apparently confused Annabel was nowhere to be seen.

  “Was it something I said?” she asked into the silence.

  All at once, her bravado crumbled. She hurried to her bedroom, put on a pair of jeans and sandals and grabbed her keys on the way out of the apartment. Screw the cell phone. If anyone needed to speak to her, they’d leave a message on her voice mail.

  When she exited at the bottom of the steps to stand on the pavement outside, she discovered Dr. Hightower’s station wagon was gone. So was the patrol car. Scowling, she noticed someone—probably Maynard, that pain in the ass—had fastened more bright yellow crime scene tape across her office’s front door.

  She decided to leave the tape for now. Crossing the street, she shoved the events with the ghost to the back of her mind. Some things didn’t bear close examination, not until the shine wore off, as her father used to say. She got into her car and hightailed it east toward her mother’s neighborhood.

  A South Carolina native who’d moved with her family to Antioch as a young woman, Sarah Grace Cross née Maynard still lived in the same white, two-story, wooden clapboard house where she’d married and made a home with her husband and only daughter.

  In Mackenzie’s early childhood, her father had extended the front porch to stretch across the entire width of the house, but otherwise the structure remained much the same as what her grandfather had purchased after returning home from World War II.

  Mackenzie parked her car under the shade of a pecan tree. The moment she turned off the engine, and with it the air-conditioning, she began to sweat.

  “Hey Mama,” she called when she exited the car and walked up to the porch.

  “Hey baby,” Sarah Grace replied in her low, slow, gliding Charleston drawl that drew out the vowels to a maddening degree. She reached up to tip her watering can over a hanging basket filled with drooping pansies, the gesture so graceful, she didn’t spill a drop of water on her light denim shirtwaist dress. A stray breeze ruffled through the mop of cropped, coarse gray curls covering her head. “You want a glass of iced tea?”

  “Sounds good. I swear, it’s hotter than two rabbits making babies in a wool sock. I feel about to melt.” Mackenzie pressed a kiss to her mother’s wrinkled cheek. The powdered and lightly rouged skin felt impossibly soft against her lips.

  Sarah Grace set down the watering can and turned toward the screen door. She moved on her house slippers in a perpetual cloud of Chantilly, her favorite perfume. “I guess you’d better come in and tell me what you want.”

  “Mama, can’t I just want to see you?” Mackenzie asked, following Sarah Grace’s finely boned figure inside the dim, still house. The screen door swung shut behind her.

  “Baby, I know you ’cause I made you myself.” Sarah Grace’s sharp blue gaze arrowed straight through Mackenzie, daring her to protest. “You never visit unless I call and ask, or unless you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about something. Out with it.” She led the way into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and removed a pitcher of tea.

  “All right, all right, if you must know, Cousin James asked me to talk to you.”

  “James Austin, my brother Dillard’s boy.”

  “No, Mama. He’s Uncle Anse’s son with Aunt Ida Love.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s right. He’s a police detective, I recall. James Austin, I mean, not my oldest brother Anderson. A good boy, that nephew of mine. I like him. He doesn’t need an excuse to visit his favorite aunt.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sarah Grace filled two glasses with ice cubes from the freezer, added lemon slices and poured tea to the brims. She placed a glass in front of Mackenzie. “And what does James Austin want from me that he couldn’t ask his own self?” She sat at the kitchen table, her spine straight despite the years evident in her liver-spotted hands.

  Mackenzie took a sip from the glass, almost shuddering in pleasure at the balance between sweet tea and bitter lemon captured on her tongue. The chilled liquid slid down her throat, cooling her from the inside out. “Well, you know my office is having some repairs done,” she began, only to halt when her mother held up a hand.

  “I know about them boys finding that poor woman’s body in your office,” Sarah Grace said, giving Mackenzie a disapproving look.

  “How’d you know about that? The story won’t be in the paper until tomorrow and I’m sure it ain’t on the news yet.”

  “I had to hear about it from my hairdresser, Mrs. Dewey Broom. She called me a few minutes ago. Her eldest son, Charles, is married to Edna Stafford’s daughter, Loretta, who’s a dispatcher at the Antioch police department, but you could have called me yourself, you know,” Sarah Grace scolded, her expression smug.

  The Internet had nothing on the small town telephone tree when it came to information dissemination, Mackenzie thought, shaking her head. “The police think the dead woman may be Annabel Coffin,” she said as her mother continued giving her the stink-eye. “Jimmy wants to know if you or Daddy knew Annabel when y’all were in high school. Do you remember anything about her?”

  She didn’t say a mumbling word about the ghost, mostly to avoid unwanted advice. Despite being a devout Episcopalian and much involved with the church, Mama loved anything to do with spiritualism. Mention the haunting, and she’d veer off on a tangent regarding communicating with spirits according to the latest television psychic.

  For several moments, Sarah Grace sipped her tea, clearly considering the question. “Your daddy and I knew a girl named Ann Coffin in our last year of school,” she finally said. “Good heavens, that was a long time ago. Nineteen fifty-seven, I believe. We were hardly more than children then. Well, me and your daddy were seventeen. Ann was our same age.”

  Mackenzie tried not to fidget, hoping her mother’s reminiscences weren’t about to delve too deeply into “good old days” territory that had nothing to do with her query.

  “Kindly pay attention, since you asked me in the first place,” Sarah Grace said sharply.

  “Sorry Mama.”

  “As I was saying, we were all so young. Ann Coffin was going with a boy on the baseball team…let me see, what was his name? Oh, yes, I do believe it was Franklin Follett. Bless his heart, Frankie died in the Vietnam War, you know. Blown to pieces, so I heard.” />
  “What happened to Annabel?”

  “Ann took up with an unsuitable beau.” Sarah Grace’s frown deepened. “I don’t rightly recall his name. He looked like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Very handsome. All the girls in town were a-flutter, but Ann caught his eye. She couldn’t drop Frankie fast enough, which I think is why he never married before he passed on, bless his heart.”

  “The Marlon Brando look-alike, do you know anything about him?” Mackenzie asked, anxious to prod her mother back on topic.

  Sarah Grace made a face, but went on. “This boy—I suppose I ought to call him a young man since he was our age, I just can’t remember his name—ran a still somewhere in the mountains and sold moonshine out the back of a truck. He didn’t go to school with the rest of us. He quit his schooling young, I heard, and used to run around wild with those no-account Gascoigne brothers, who never did a lick of honest work in their lives.”

  Mackenzie nodded encouragement.

  “Ann was smitten, I tell you, completely smitten with her young man. She wouldn’t hear a word against him. Not from her mama, her daddy, her pastor, her family or her friends. I didn’t know her very well, but I tried talking to her after communion one Sunday. Her family and ours both went to All Saints’ Church.” Sarah Grace sniffed. “I don’t mind telling you, Ann gave me what-for. She called me names that no lady ought to know, let alone speak to another lady. She said I was just jealous ’cause she’d caught the handsomest boy in town. And I was already engaged to your daddy at the time!”

  “That little heifer,” Mackenzie murmured, affecting an appropriate degree of shock.

  Huffing, Sarah Grace sat back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and glared down her patrician nose at Mackenzie. “You can put that attitude away right this minute, my girl. If you’d rather be doing something else than listening to an old woman’s rambling, I have some chores to do before my program comes on.”

  “Sorry Mama.”

  “I mean, if you can’t even show your own mother a little respect—”

  “I really want to hear about Annabel, I promise. I’m sorry.”