The Curse of Hollister House

Wednesday

When I woke the next morning to hear that another girl had been found in a shallow grave similar to the one in which Tracy had been buried, everyone assumed the same killer was responsible for both deaths. I wasn’t so sure. Yes, I got the fact that it was unlikely there were two killers running around in one small town isolated way up in the mountains, but while there were things that tied the girls together, there were also things that distinguished the most recent killing as being different from the previous three already identified.

For one thing, Patricia Long was a high school student while Stella, Hillary, and Tracy had been in middle school. For another, while Patricia did have scratches on her face, according to Cass, who’d texted me a brief message first thing that morning, they were shallow, as if they’d been made by fingernails, while the tears in the skin of the other three were deep, as if inflicted by a wild animal or some sort of clawlike tool. Both Tracy and Patricia had been found in a shallow grave in the same part of the woods, but the location of the former’s gravesite, and the fact that Tracy had suffered from claw marks, were well known by everyone in town, so the possibility that Patricia had been killed by a copycat was a very good possibility in my mind.

The one positive thing to come from this second murder was that it forced the mayor and the sheriff to take a step back from their assurance that Buck Darwin was to blame for Tracy’s death. As far as I knew, he hadn’t yet been released from jail, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if that didn’t happen at some point in the day.

“I guess you heard?” Gracie said when I wandered out into the yard where she was helping Tom hang the white lights from the eaves of the house that I remembered her putting up every fall when I was growing up. She’d leave them there through the winter until the longer days of late spring returned.

“I heard. Did you know this girl?” I asked.

“Not really. I think her family moved to town at the beginning of the school year last year. I spoke to Ida, who told me that Patricia was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, and she’d actually been missing since Saturday.”

“Saturday? Why didn’t Cass know about that before now?” I asked.

“According to Ida, who lives across the street from the family, so she knows them quite well, Patricia was last seen going out on a date on Saturday evening. It seems her parents didn’t care for the boy she was dating, and they argued before she left. When their daughter didn’t come home that night, they assumed she was off on one of her snits.”

“Snits?”

“I guess Patricia was prone to episodes when she would get angry and disappear for a few days and then show up after she’d worked through the drama of the moment,” Gracie said. “Or at least that’s the way Ida put it. It wasn’t the first time she’d taken off, so when she didn’t come home on Sunday, as she was supposed to, her parents didn’t think much of it. When she didn’t show up for school on Monday or Tuesday, they began calling around to her friends, but no one said they had seen her. It wasn’t until late last night that they finally called Cass. Patricia’s mother had a bad dream she described as prophetic. On a hunch, Cass and Milo searched the same area where Tracy’s body was discovered and found Patricia buried there as well.”

“I didn’t talk to Cass this morning; he texted me, and his message was brief, but he did say that it looked as if the victim had been dead for a few days.”

“Ida indicated that she’d heard something similar,” Gracie confirmed.

Tom climbed down the ladder because Gracie had stopped feeding him lights. He pulled off his gloves and slapped them together. “I heard on the scanner that the sheriff is linking Tracy and Patricia’s deaths as being carried out by the same individual.”

“I heard that as well,” I confirmed. “While there are similarities, I’m not so sure, though. I think it’s possible that someone else could have killed this poor girl, and then made it look as if she’d been killed by the same person to divert suspicion.” I went on to compare the two murders, pointing out the differences as well as the similarities.

“If the killer is a copycat, I think I’d want to have a long chat with the boyfriend,” Tom said.

I looked out toward the lake. Other than a slight breeze rippling the surface, the weather was fairly calm today. I missed the geese that made Foxtail Lake their home in the summer, but I didn’t blame them for flying south before the first real freeze set in. “The boyfriend seems like an obvious choice as the killer. The two had been out on a date. I supposed there are all sorts of things teenagers do when they go out on a weekend evening. Many drink and some even do drugs. It does seem like a recipe for disaster. Still, the boyfriend as the killer seems too obvious.”

“This isn’t a movie,” Gracie pointed out. “It is a real-life situation, and the obvious choice is usually the correct one. Unlike in a novel, where a twist might be assumed.”

I shrugged. “I suppose you’re right. Still, my intuition tells me that the boyfriend won’t turn out to be the killer.”

“Cass might have some insight into what happened on Saturday after Patricia left her home,” Gracie said. “If you are still going out this evening, I suppose you can ask him.”

“Oh, I will. In the meantime, I’m going to help you hang the lights and then I’m going to give Paisley her piano lesson. Are you still going to bingo tonight?”

“I am. I won’t be late. If your plans with Cass fall through, there is plenty of food in the refrigerator.”

I picked up a string of lights and began draping one of the large shrubs that grew along the front of the house. I’d once asked Gracie why she left the lights up from October through April, and she’d told me that winters in the Rockies could be long, dark, and bitterly cold; a little bit of sparkle was just the thing to lift your spirits at a time when you needed it.