Priced to Kill Read online

  Priced to Kill

  Volume Two of the Second Treasures Mysteries

  Print Edition, ©2016 Margaret Evans

  Moonlight Mystery Press

  ISBN-10: 0-9789076-2-0

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9789076-2-4

  Cover artwork copyright ©2016 Duncan Reid

  Production and composition by Dennis Tuttle, 5editorial, Silver Spring, Md.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  This book was printed in the United States of America.

  To order additional copies of this book, contact:

  Moonlight Mystery Press

  www.moonlightmysterypress.com

  acknowledgments

  I always look to my family for inspiration, and they provide a wealth of it, including a massive dose of encouragement and support for all the projects I take on, whether realistic or a dream. The past two years have been a challenge for me, but I’ve made it through, due mostly to the strength and love of my family. For them, I am eternally grateful.

  Other Works by Margaret Evans

  Fiction

  Second Treasures Mysteries

  Twice Sold Murder, Vol. 1

  Maya Earth Trilogy

  The Sixth World

  Trial in Jade: The Mayan Return

  Kingdom Come: The Mayan Answer

  Hostages to Murder

  The Mandreill Dagger

  Canvas of Deceit

  The Tao of Murder

  The Secret of Kenning Hall

  Code of Treachery

  The Lethal Limit (coming soon!)

  Non-Fiction

  Prairie Attack

  Lingerie Ward

  The Alphabet

  Saying Goodbye to Matt

  Lucky Day, Lucky Life

  Making the Next Green Light

  Poetry

  Christmas Poems for My Grown-Up Children

  (including “The Forgotten Snow Girl” and “Golden Snowflakes”)

  To Jen, Julie, Chris, Geoff and Dan – The 5 Wonders of my world.

  prologue

  The self-confidence of his perfect crime dissolved into vapors of panic as the man desperately searched through every box and bag in his storage unit. He rummaged through dishes, lampshades, pots and pans, tossing things from his former life left and right. The more he explored without success, the louder the banging and clattering of discarded items grew, creating an alien sea of scattered debris around his feet.

  Where could it be?!

  He raked fingers through his hair, regarded the decimated heaps of a past he had hoped to escape long before now. He dug into the mess again, this time wrapping his fingers around a small alarm clock he extracted and pitched against a wall. It cracked hard and became a heap of fractured plastic and useless electronic components adding to the flotsam and jetsam on the floor of the storage unit.

  He stomped through the chaos, kicking things as his feet slipped here and there on his way out, yanked on the light cord, pulled the door shut and jammed the combination lock closed. He must find it. Wherever it was, he must find it.

  one

  In a coffee shop off a county road not too far from the small town of Raging Ford, Minnesota, a woman looked nervously out the window at the heavy snow-laden clouds. They’d just had one snowfall; good gracious, it looked like another was on its way already. How could people live like this? She over-stirred her mocha latte, dissolving the whipped cream, but she couldn’t stop stirring.

  This snow thing was not something she thought she could get used to easily. Nothing like this kind of winter ever happened in South Carolina. She was beginning to wonder how she had ever gotten herself into this mess with this man. It had all looked so simple.

  She stopped stirring and started tapping the floor with her toe.

  “I told you, I just grabbed all the clothing, bedding, and towels, and put everything in bags for Goodwill or Purple Heart—one of those charity folks. If it looked good, I put it in boxes for an estate sale, to get some money out of it.”

  At the time, she had been proud of all the work she had done.

  “But you were supposed to actually dispose of it!” the man hissed. “We won’t know for sure if it’s gone unless you remember exactly what you did with it and we can track it to its end. And we don’t need to make any extra money; we have plenty now. We have to clean up this loose end so we can get out of here for good.”

  The man glanced around at the other tables and booths. Too many people or he would have throttled the girl, much as he liked her. The whole thing had been her idea; he’d carried it out, taken the risks and done his part, and now they had to make one hundred percent sure that nobody would find out what they’d done. All of that rested on the girl remembering what she’d done with the quilt and their finding and destroying it.

  “Where’s the list of giveaways we were using for tax deductions?”

  She brightened.

  “Oh, I’ll pull that out for you. Everything is listed individually on it.” She had gone to great pains to document everything for the taxes, leaving no ends that would draw an IRS audit.

  “It better be. And if the quilt isn’t on the list? What does that mean?”

  Her face dropped.

  “It means it probably went in a box with the other quilts to one of the group of estate sales that the agent put together to draw a bigger crowd. That’s harder to trace.”

  “You should have burned it and put the ashes into the trash, like I told you. Or even in the lake where nobody could find it.”

  Two quiet sips of coffee later, she spoke.

  “The estate trustee hung around while I went through things. I couldn’t throw it out; I had to slip it in with the giveaways or sale stuff, and I had to pretend I was a social worker sent from the hospital to help you out or he wouldn’t have let me touch anything. I created a designation from you and faked your signature.”

  The man’s hard stare unnerved her.

  “When exactly were you planning on telling me this? There’s evidence on it that could link to me!”

  “Look, you weren’t even here to help during all that time when I went through everything. You were in Las Vegas. I’m the one who had to pack everything from the house in both of your storage units and bag the rest of it for giveaway or trash. Everything had to be finessed with that trustee hanging over my shoulder. This was the best I could do.”

  He remembered that he stayed in his wife’s home for less than three months before heading out west to get away from all the drama. It took almost a year and a half after her death for his friend to go through things and dispose of them little by little on weekends, but he wondered how anyone could be that stupid. Good thing he didn’t have to worry about the trustee. The guy asked no questions, just wanted his cut of the estate.

  “At least you remembered to wash it, didn’t you?”

  Her head bobbed up and down.

  “That’s why I wasn’t worried. I washed it three times, and I wore gloves and threw out the gloves in a trash dumpster behind a gas station on the highway. I think you’r
e worrying too much about this…” She’d almost added “Sugar” but knew he hated being called that.

  The man contemplated his hands, folded on the café table in front of him.

  “There still could be evidence. I don’t want any loose ends here. Just find out where it went. And try to do that without making a lot of noise. And don’t do anything when you find it. Tell me exactly where it is. I’ll take care of it.”

  The whole plan had seemed so simple at the beginning. Get rid of the wife, get the wife’s money, which they had converted to bearer bonds, and then they’d go abroad and never come back. Now he was angry with her, almost as angry as he had so often been with his wife. It scared her. And she realized she’d better do what he wanted and not mess up again. Or something might happen to her as it had to his wife, and she figured he’d get rid of the evidence for that, too. Only he wouldn’t make any mistakes doing it. And he might even find someone else to help him, as she had. Maybe she should write somebody a letter, telling all, to be opened in case she had an accident or…disappeared.

  two

  Laura Keene wondered how hard it was to be an empress.

  She watched a display of indifference to the rest of the world as her cat Isabella perched on the deep front window sill of Laura’s apartment, licking its paws and waving its tail in intense self-absorption, looking at neither Laura nor the busy folks shoveling show from the sidewalk across the street, one floor down.

  In this case, she decided no effort was needed at all. The cat’s arrogance came naturally. The mystery of its needing neither the saucers of milk Laura put out nor the litter box, and apparently being only visible to Laura would one day be solved, she was sure. Since the feline always helped her or warned her of danger, Laura had decided to overlook these minor issues and worry about it in the future.

  Laura shifted her thoughts to the box that had once belonged to her father and been entrusted to his best friend Michael Fitzpatrick’s care. The instruction had been to keep it and tell no one, but the presumption was that if anything happened to either Frank or his wife Fran, as it had, the contents should go to their daughter, Laura. Michael had stashed it high on a shelf in the garage where it had been forgotten among all his other “garage stuff” until Laura returned to Raging Ford last fall. He gave it to her last Christmas when she came over for dinner.

  Laura had put off going through the box with the busy weeks following the holidays and getting her store’s inventory and company taxes in order. Now it was early February and she made time today to explore what her father, likely with her mother’s help, had put together.

  As she sat on the floor and unfolded the flapped corners, anticipation rose at what she might find inside, what mysteries and secrets and, hopefully, answers awaited her concerning her family’s history in Raging Ford, and perhaps even clues as to who had murdered her parents eleven years ago based on the evidence police were able to collect at the time. She also hoped for her parents’ ideas about the family. She unclasped and opened the first of a stack of large envelopes and felt a tug as she saw her father’s familiar handwriting with notes on the so-called accidental deaths and disappearances of members of the entire Rage family over the years. This was just what she needed to find!

  Her ancestor, Samuel Rage, had invested in a small but lucrative iron ore mine with two partners, Aldous Munley and Cuinn Dowell over a century earlier when iron ore was first discovered in the Mesabi Range in eastern Minnesota. Together, the trio had built the foundation of a solid town, contributing almost all mine profits to its infrastructure. While rumors came out decades later that Munley and Dowell had resented much of the investment, wanting more money in their own pockets from the mine and less for the town, and a bigger and better lifestyle than they had, it was a known fact that Samuel owned the majority of the mine’s share of stock and made all the major decisions. This included frequently outvoting and overruling his partners. The inevitable ill will followed, but no one expected what Laura’s family suspected: That a long term deadly plan of revenge had begun in the past and was still taking place with the sole purpose of wiping out the entire Rage clan.

  After her mother and Great-aunt Rose died, Laura became the last one.

  She dug further into the box and found a bulky, lumpy envelope, presumably holding something other than just papers. As she unclasped it, she was more puzzled than enlightened by its contents: a root beer lollipop, a toy car, a small furry toy animal, and a piece of wood that looked like a miniature baseball bat.

  She picked up the lollipop and turned it over in her hands. She knew this—the doctors at the old medical clinic used to give them out to small children who had come in for vaccinations. It was unusual in that its stick was a loop, beginning and ending in the candy itself. It was also almost sugar free, she recalled, with other natural flavorings and colors, many of which had probably been outlawed by the FDA since then. The kids loved them.

  She noticed the clear plastic seal around the treat was unbroken and wondered how her father had found this treasure. She clearly remembered gobbling up all of hers. And what’s more, she wondered where these items fit in the puzzle of the Rage family history, for surely her father had thought they did, and perhaps left them behind as clues for his daughter to understand their significance one day.

  She wasn’t so sure that he anticipated Laura ever getting to that place where the burden fell on her alone, but she was certain, knowing her father as she did, that he had planned for the contingency. There was a lot of work ahead of her if she were to figure out this whole puzzle, for puzzle it was, and she was determined to solve it regardless of how long it took her.

  She set the box aside and stood to face the Brick Wall, taking another good hard look at what anyone else might call a white board. Her eyes raced over the names and years written carefully a few a day, about the early population and their descendants of the small town of Raging Ford. As yet, it gave her no answers to her question of why her parents had been targeted and killed eleven years ago. Or why she herself, as the last living descendant of founder Samuel Rage, might also be in danger, as she and others thought she was.

  The big question was why so many of her predecessors had succumbed to death by mysterious, accidental circumstances and unexplained disappearances. She had researched the death certificates from Smedley & Smedley’s funeral home where all the death records were meticulously kept, studied the causes of everyone’s deaths since the beginning of time in the town, and had reached no certain conclusions about what had happened. But she had a couple of strong hypotheses. Her eyes were drawn again to her father’s box. Hopefully, he had found some little clue or link that she’d missed or hadn’t discovered yet. Or maybe all the clues were there, just waiting for her to put them together.

  The bounties of the iron ore mine had built and enhanced the town, provided jobs and money for all. The town had boomed for years, drawing folks from other towns and states, until the iron ore waned and the mine later produced only taconite. By then, other industries and businesses had sprung up, always moving forward from its good, solid base, as the town slipped smoothly into the computer age. But while other families seemed to have flourished, the number of Rages dwindled drastically down to Laura.

  It was puzzling. Was revenge alone enough of a reason to keep such a plan going this long?

  There was a pattern here, she knew, and connections she couldn’t yet see. That meant looking at things other than her past family members and just a pile of dates. She twisted a lock of her long, honey-colored hair a few times. Something had to tie this all together somehow.

  At present, there was no one in the town whose last name was either Dowell or Munley, presumably due to marriages. That was another path she need to follow, but she knew for a fact that while Smedley & Smedley had tracked all of the so-called bad luck the Rages had through death records, their fastidious record-keeping also proved that no memb
ers of any other family, including the Dowells and Munleys, had suffered the same fate over the years. That sure made the whole thing look suspicious.

  Laura heaved a deep sigh, capped her pen and pushed the white board and the box behind the folding screen in the sitting room of her apartment where she lived above her shop.

  It was time to check out the new shipment of goods for the store. The problem of her family history wouldn’t go away, but customers for her thrift shop wouldn’t wait and they paid her rent. So she polished off her coffee, slipped into her shop shoes and skipped down the stairs to her store.

  Laura’s thrift shop, Second Treasures, had been a great success. Only a few months before, she’d taken a big step in leaving Maryland where she’d lived with her aunt since her parents’ deaths and returned to her home town of Raging Ford. Old friends and neighbors had welcomed her with open arms. There had been a few snags, with her uncovering and solving an old murder, but mostly everything had worked well.

  It was now beginning the prime tax return season with a growing customer base, and Laura, also a C.P.A., had hung out her shingle below the shop’s name. Between stocking the store, waiting on customers and helping folks with their tax returns, Laura barely had time for herself, let alone a mysterious cat that apparently only she could see.

  Right at this moment, however, her focus had to stay on the shop.

  Laura felt as if she were in the middle of a specialty chocolatier’s store as she gazed at the new shipment of handmade quilts in the storage room behind the shop. She and her long-time friend Kelly Rogers had gone to numerous estate sales and pulled together several batches for the shop. Many had traditional and well-known patterns, but there were a few that looked to be family stories. All were lovingly handcrafted, some with bright colors, other with softer, muted fabrics.

  The Minnesota winter was still in the midst of its bitter sting and handmade quilts were a hot item, especially the older, classic patterns. Visions of being curled up in front of a roaring fire came to mind. And speaking of fires, Laura had already planned the display of quilts against the backdrop of a hand-sketched and -painted fireplace, with brilliant sparking flames licking a bountiful pile of logs, also thanks to Kelly who was an accomplished artist.