He watched Lucy out of the corner of his eye as he removed two bottles of water from the refrigerator. She probably needed something stronger than water, but she had declined another glass of wine. He could not tell how she was handling the shock of the discovery. She appeared surprisingly calm—maybe somber was a better word. Then again, it was possible she was simply exhausted. It had been a very long night, and it wasn’t over yet.
They were back in the kitchen of the old house. Lucy was slumped in a chair at the table. It was after midnight. Chief Whitaker and the two officers who had accompanied him had finally departed after taking a lot of pictures and bagging up some samples of the debris in the fireplace. The unpleasantly droopy body bag had been loaded into an ambulance and driven off into the night.
A yellow crime scene tape had been strung across the wide doorway into the living room. Whitaker had warned Lucy against building a fire in the newly opened fireplace. She had assured him in a sharp tone that she had no plans to do so. In any event, the chimney would need to be thoroughly cleaned and inspected first.
“Dear heaven.” Lucy shook her head slowly, awed. “My dear, sweet little aunt who practiced yoga, meditated every day and ate a strict organic vegan diet murdered the son and heir of one of the richest men in Northern California and stuffed his body inside her fireplace. It’s unbelievable.”
“There’s still some question about the identity of the body,” Mason reminded her. “The decomp process has been going on for thirteen years.”
“Who else could it be? The date on the newspaper, the timing of Brinker’s disappearance all those years ago, the driver’s license—it all fits.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Mason said.
Chief Whitaker’s last words had been exactly what Mason had expected. “I want you both to come to the station in the morning. I’ll need statements.”
Mason sat down at the table. He opened the bottles of Summer Springs water and placed one in front of Lucy.
Lucy contemplated the bottle as if she had never seen one before. Then she picked it up and drank some of the water.
“It looks like we accidentally closed the only known cold case in the history of Summer River,” she said.
“You never know what you’re going to find when you start down the DIY remodeling road.”
She blinked, brows crinkling in a frown. “That is probably a very inappropriate remark.”
“Probably.”
“So why do I want to laugh?”
“Don’t worry, it’s a nervous reaction.”
“Oh, I see.” She paused. “Aunt Sara would have laughed.”
“If it had been anyone other than Brinker, I wouldn’t have made an inappropriate remark,” he said. “But it was Brinker, and to tell you the truth, it’s a relief to find out that he’s been sealed up in that fireplace all this time. The bastard was one of the monsters. Assuming your aunt was trying to tell us something by leaving that newspaper with the body, Brinker may have been the Scorecard Rapist. Regardless, it’s good to know he hasn’t been out in the world doing bad things to good people for the past thirteen years.”
“There is that.” Lucy hoisted her bottle of water in a small salute. “Here’s to Aunt Sara.”
“To Aunt Sara.” Mason raised his own bottle of water.
“Just think, if I had sold the house in as-is condition, the buyer would have gotten a heck of a shock when he took out that tilework,” Lucy mused. “Because sooner or later someone would have opened up the fireplace.”
“Yes.”
Lucy shuddered. “No wonder I couldn’t get to sleep last night.”
Mason leaned back in the chair. “Are you going to tell me that you think this house is haunted by Brinker’s ghost?”
“No, of course not, but this place felt very weird to me last night. I got that icy vibe people get when they walk across graveyards and battlefields.”
“People get that vibe only when they happen to know that they are walking across a cemetery or a battlefield,” Mason said. “The imagination is a powerful thing.”
She shot him a quick glare and then wrinkled her nose. “Never mind the reasons for my insomnia last night. The real question is how could Aunt Sara sleep here in this house knowing that there was a dead body in the fireplace, one she had put there herself?”
Mason shrugged. “Maybe it was all that meditation and yoga she practiced. Could be it endowed her with some Zen-like ability to ignore the body in the fireplace.” He paused for a beat. “Or it could be that she was okay with it because she felt justified in killing Brinker—which she was, in my book, by the way.”
“I wonder if she told Mary?”
“I doubt if we’ll ever know. But in situations like the one your aunt was facing, the smart thing to do is to follow the Three-S Rule. Got a hunch Sara would have figured that out for herself.”
Lucy frowned. “What’s the Three-S rule?”
“Shoot, shovel and shut up.”
Lucy turned the water bottle between her palms. “Yes. I see what you mean.” She hesitated. “But I doubt if Aunt Sara actually shot Brinker. She didn’t approve of guns, and she didn’t own one. She must have used some other method.”
“I think the ME will conclude that Brinker was killed with one or more blows to the skull.”
“The poker?”
“Uh-huh.” Mason drank some of his water. “There was some stuff sticking to the end of it.”
“Stuff?”
“Hair, I think.”
Lucy sighed. “Well, finding the body in the fireplace tonight certainly explains why Sara and Mary started doing a lot more traveling after that summer. It also explains why she didn’t want me coming back to Summer River to visit her. To her way of thinking, inviting me to stay here in the house with a dead guy would have been very bad karma.”
“I apologize, again, for jumping to the conclusion that you had ignored her for the past thirteen years.”
Lucy gave him a faint smile. “Apology accepted. You’re right, though, there are a lot of questions. The first one that comes to mind is, why hide the body here in the house?”
“Can you think of a better way to make sure it wasn’t found and subjected to a forensic autopsy? Take it from me, it’s hard to hide a body. Over time they have a way of showing up. They wash ashore. They get uncovered by a heavy rain. Developers stumble onto them when they start building houses on previously unused land.”