Murder on the Horizon Read online

  * * *

  GRACIE TURNED THE Ranger into a gravel driveway leading back through a forest of rolling hills and tall pines, and stopped in front of a green metal gate blocking the entrance with a sign announcing, NO TRESPASSING.

  “Thanks for the ride,” Baxter said, pushing the door open. “I’d ask you to come in, but we’re not supposed to have visitors.”

  “Oh, that’s okay. I—”

  “The ground is booby-trapped. Trip wires and stuff like that.”

  “Good to know!” Gracie said and peered ahead out of the windshield.

  “Thanks again for the books. I’ll take good care of them.”

  Gracie smiled back at Baxter. “You’re welcome again. I’m leaving early tomorrow for a couple of days. Maybe I’ll see you when I get back, okay?”

  “Okay.” Baxter reached back to where Minnie lay on the mound of gear behind the seat and petted the dog’s head. “Who’s going to watch Minnie?”

  “Acacia. I’m bringing her down to their house later on tonight.”

  “She’s lucky,” Baxter said. “I’d like to help watch her for you. But, Gracie?”

  “Yup.”

  “I like you.”

  “Well, thanks, Baxter. I like you, too.”

  “You don’t treat me like I’m stupid.”

  “Who treats you like you’re stupid?”

  “My dad. My grandpop.”

  “And Jordan?”

  “Yeah. And Jordan.” He picked at a frayed patch on the knee of his pants. “They tell me I’m stupid. All the time. Call me a mama’s girl and a sissy.” He looked over at her. “You don’t think I’m stupid, do you?”

  “Not a bit. In fact, I think you’re pretty doggoned smart.”

  The brown eyes sparkled back at her. “I gotta go.” He reached back and patted Minnie’s head again. “Bye, Minnie. You’re a nice dog.” Then he climbed out of the truck. “Bye, Gracie. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Bye, Baxter.”

  The door closed with a click.

  Gracie watched the boy circumvent the gate and disappear down into a ravine. Seconds later he reappeared on the other side, turned, and waved.

  Gracie waved back. “Wow,” she whispered to herself. “I could grow to love you, Baxter Edwards.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  “I’M lost?” Gracie growled, staring out the tiny side window of her rented Chevy Spark. “I’m friggin’ lost?”

  On her way to the hospital in downtown Detroit from the airport, she somehow, somewhere had taken a wrong exit from the interstate and, for the last fifteen minutes, had been wandering aimlessly through a maze of sagging houses, abandoned buildings, and overgrown vacant lots. Driving a car the size and consistency of a sardine can instead of her truck had only contributed to her general crankiness at having to spend the next twenty-four hours in a city. Not just Detroit. A city. Any city.

  “I hate cities,” Gracie said aloud as if in confirmation, then swerved at the last second to avoid dropping a tire into a ten-inch-deep pothole in the middle of the road. She swooped back into her own lane and grabbed up the Detroit street map provided by the rental car company, glancing at it between takes of the mélange of cars and trucks and pedestrians up ahead.

  Finally, after almost taking out a stray dog, she swept the car around the corner onto a side street, pulled to the curb, and stopped. She frowned down at the map. “Where the hell am I?” She squinted at the minuscule lettering. Blinked. Held it closer to her face until she realized it was the map that was slightly blurred and not her vision.

  Driving along I-94 toward downtown, Gracie had felt as if she were on the Paramount Pictures studio tour and had walked from one movie set onto another. In less than four hours, she had been transported from Southern California’s Inland Empire—hot and arid with palm trees, orange bougainvillea, and pink oleander set against a backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains, capped by a cloudless blue sky—to southeastern Michigan, where the air was pleasantly warm and humid, the land a flat cross-hatching of asphalt and cement, punctuated by lush green hardwoods and angular office buildings, opaque windows reflecting the slate-colored sky.

  “What street is this?” Gracie said as she glanced back over her shoulder at the sign on the corner. “Benson.”

  She studied the map, finally pinpointing exactly where she was—miles from where she should be. She tossed the map on the passenger’s seat, sighed, and looked around.

  The Motor City, once healthy, industrious, and thriving, had been decimated by years of recession, the decline of the auto industry, the resulting mass exodus of half its population, its former glory obscured by the creeping scourge of poverty, blight, drugs, violence, and virtual anarchy.

  The street on which Gracie was parked was lined with dilapidated houses staring out through broken or missing windows. Mournful. Depressed. And depressing.

  Several times over the last decade, Gracie had been back to southern Michigan. But she had never engaged, emotionally or mentally, behaving and talking like an automaton at family holiday gatherings, existing in suspended animation until the minute she could reboard the plane and fly west again.

  I should never have come, she thought and sagged in her seat.

  On the road ahead, a gray squirrel ran across the pavement, some tasty morsel in its mouth.

  Gracie rolled down her window. The rush of air was moist, laden with the heady smells of fields and trees and grass. The street ahead was lined on both sides with massive, stately elm trees. Across the street from where Gracie sat, side-by-side vacant lots were bursting with milkweed, goldenrod, and purple asters. The hum of traffic had faded to a murmur behind the twittering of birds in the branches overhead and a dog barking from several blocks over.

  Somewhere above Gracie’s head, a cardinal called, startlingly loud and sweet, instantly recognizable, transporting her back years to her childhood. She leaned her head out the window, searching the leaves above for the flash of brilliant red, never realizing before this how much she missed the sound.

  Gracie pulled her head back inside the car with a sigh. She reached her hand over to shift into Drive, then stopped. Halfway up the block, another animal trotted across the street. She leaned forward and stared out the windshield. Gray fur. Long tail. Easy lope. “That’s a coyote!” she said and laughed with pure delight.

  Suddenly conscious of the eerie beauty within the ruin, she lifted her foot from the brake and let the car roll forward. Meandering through the neighborhood, she looked around with increasing interest and the realization that what she was witnessing was a transformation in progress. The natural world was reclaiming what once had been a city, replacing brick with oak, redbud, and maple, cement with grass, and glass with roses, daisies, rabbits, and even coyotes.

  Gracie turned from one deserted street onto the next and whispered to herself, “This is just awesome.”

  * * *

  GRACIE STOOD IN the middle of the brightly lit hallway of the intensive care unit. Her face felt flushed and hot. Clammy fists clenched and unclenched. Looking in through the wide doorway of the hospital room, past a blue-patterned curtain pulled partially closed, she could see the end of a bed and two swollen bare feet encased in what looked like black casts.

  Her arrival at the hospital had peeled back the scab of a deep-burning rage. Feelings she had worked so hard to tamp down and suppress had roared to the surface. Her heart was pounding so loudly in her ears, it took her a moment to comprehend that a young Asian nurse standing next to her had asked her a question.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Can I help you?”

  Gracie squeezed out a tight smile. “No. Thanks.” She took in a breath and gestured to the room. “This is . . . where . . . the room . . .”

  Almond-shaped brown eyes smiled up at her. “We’re here if you need anything,” th
e woman said, and walked away down the corridor.

  The nameplate to the right of the doorway identified the patient in the room. RODGERS, M.

  At the request of her mother, hoping for a deathbed reconciliation between her husband and her estranged daughter, Gracie had flown two thousand miles, rented a tin can for a car, driven a circuitous route to the hospital, and now could go no farther.

  She turned away from the doorway.

  “Grace Louise?” A tremulous voice stopped her.

  She hesitated for a moment, then turned back and stepped inside the room, dark except for a single light bar at the head of the bed and the glow of the late afternoon sun through the large casement window.

  Morris was sleeping, mouth open, head sagging off to one side, looking mildly ridiculous in a green hospital gown short enough to reveal swollen knees. An oxygen tube from his flat nose and multiple IVs from both hefty arms ran to no less than a half-dozen blue-screened monitors crowding both sides of the bed.

  Perched on the edge of a chair on the other side of the bed, barely visible amid the stands and equipment, was Gracie’s mother.

  When Gracie walked in, Evelyn rose unsteadily to her feet.

  Gracie hesitated, shocked at how old her mother looked, as if she had aged twenty years in the last year.

  Evelyn’s hair, dyed to a dark auburn the same as Gracie’s, was pulled into a short, neat ponytail at the back of her neck. As always, she was dressed exquisitely in a tony, bright red bolero jacket, gold braiding at the neck and cuffs, black slacks, bowed flats. But her face was pale, haggard. Worry lines dug into the corners of her mouth, the meticulously applied makeup insufficient to fully hide the sunken cheeks, the bleak, despairing eyes.

  “Hello, Mother,” Gracie said.

  In short, fast steps, Evelyn hurried around the end of the bed and up to Gracie, putting her arms around her waist and clinging to her as if she were a life preserver.

  Gracie was amazed that the top of her mother’s head only came up to her chin. She hadn’t remembered her being so short. It had been a long time . . . years . . . forever . . . since they had embraced.

  “I’m so, so glad you’re here,” Evelyn mumbled into Gracie’s shoulder. Then she stepped back and, taking her daughter’s hands, gave them a little shake and nodded toward her husband.

  With feet that felt like lead, Gracie stepped over to the bed and looked down on the sleeping man.

  In spite of their tumultuous history, in spite of his horrible, abusive behavior, and in spite of the despicable things he had done, Gracie felt a pang of something, perhaps even sympathy. The man was a human being. And he was dying. “Morris?” she said in a quiet voice.

  Morris opened his blue, rheumy eyes and turned his head toward Gracie. “What the hell do you want?” he asked, voice deep, harsh. He turned his head toward his wife. “Goddammit, Evelyn! What the hell is she doing here? I don’t want her here! Get her out of here!”

  Evelyn fluttered nervously over to the bed, smoothing Morris’s hair back from his wide forehead, straightening his hospital gown. “She’s here to see you, MoMo. All the way from California. She wanted to see you. She cares about you.”

  “Bullshit!” Morris glared back at Gracie. “She’s nothing but a greedy little witch, sucking up at the last minute, trying to weasel her way into some of my money.”

  Gracie felt her heart petrify to stone. She put both hands flat on the bed and leaned forward until her face was inches away from Morris’s. “You’re a sonofabitch,” she said in a raspy voice unrecognizable as her own. “You’re mean and you’re hateful. You made my childhood a living hell, you worthless piece of shit.”

  Morris glared back at her, chest rising and falling, nostrils flaring with every inhalation.

  “And,” Gracie said, her entire body trembling, “I don’t want a single penny of your goddam money!”

  “Get the hell out of here.” Morris’s voice rose to a hoarse croak. “Evelyn! Get her out of here!” He struggled to lift his head from the pillow, but couldn’t.

  Gracie spun around on her heel, her head whirling. She put a hand on the doorframe to keep herself from falling, then stumbled out of the room.

  Her mother’s footsteps came up behind her. “Grace Louise. Please stop.”

  Gracie stopped and turned around.

  “He’s in pain,” Evelyn pleaded, placing a hand on Gracie’s arm.” He doesn’t mean it.”

  “Of course he means it,” Gracie said. “Pain doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it. He’s always been this way, Mother. And you’ve always covered up for him. Always defended him. I’m leaving.”

  “But where . . . where are you going?”

  Gracie stopped again, anger blowing out through her lips like steam from a valve. “I don’t know.”

  “Stay at the house. I stay in a little room here in the hospital. But you stay at the house. I’ll see you tomorrow?” A question, not a statement.

  Gracie looked over at Evelyn, a frightened little bird, frail, soon to be alone. “Okay, Mother,” she said. “I’ll stay at the house.” She blew another long breath. Suddenly exhausted, she said, “And I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  GRACIE PUSHED THE door open and looked around what had once been her bedroom.

  Gone were the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and Defenders of Wildlife posters, an entire wall of pasted-on wolf and mountain lion and wildflower pictures cut from magazines, the little oval rag rug she had woven at camp, the glass-top case holding carefully hoarded treasures: a tiny bird skull, a sloughed-off blue racer snakeskin, red and orange and yellow leaves—maple and beech and oak—meticulously gathered and pressed between dictionary pages. Gone were the pictures of her real father she had purposely left behind. Every scrap, every trace, every remnant of the angry, passionate, rebellious teenager who had lived there had been removed.

  All had been replaced by gold carpeting, a tapestried bedspread with matching drapes. Walls a deep teal with white crown molding and window trim. Brass fixtures and lamps.

  Tastefully done, but as sterile and impersonal and cold as a mausoleum—a window, perhaps, into her mother’s life.

  Gracie tossed her carry-on and purse onto the bed and kicked off her shoes.

  Stocking feet silent on heavy carpet runner, whispering onto hardwood flooring, then back onto carpet, she walked down the hallway and looked into her half brother Harold’s room, now filled with exercise equipment. Next to it, her half sister Lenora’s old bedroom was being used for storage.

  Well, Gracie sighed internally, at least she ranked a little higher than Morris’s own children. Her old room still had a bed, used for something other than housing off-season holiday decorations and a set of old weights.

  She padded down the massive winding staircase, veered off to the right into the den, and flipped on the light.

  The specter of Morris rose from every facet of the room—enormous flat-screen television, plaques and pennants from the University of Michigan and every Detroit sports team, acrid overtones of cigars, glass-topped end and coffee tables, brown leather furniture, including her stepfather’s favorite recliner, dented and worn from years of use. What there wasn’t a sign of was the hole Gracie had blown in the wall with a double-barreled shotgun. That had been patched and painted over at least twice.

  Gracie crossed the room to the built-in bookshelves where two spotless Waterford crystal tumblers sat on a silver tray next to a matching decanter, filled no doubt with Morris’s drug of choice—Johnnie Walker Blue Label.

  Gracie poured two fingers of the deep amber liquid and held it aloft. “To Morris,” she said. “You son of a bitch. I will never forgive you for what you’ve done to me, to my mother, to everyone else. When you’re gone, the world will be a better, brighter, sunnier place.” She swallowed the drink in one gulp and spent the next three minutes hacking and c
oughing.

  CHAPTER

  13

  GRACIE merged the Ranger into the steady stream of traffic in the eastbound lanes of the 10 Freeway. She settled into the number three lane and set the cruise control for five miles an hour over the posted speed limit, ten miles an hour slower than the flow of traffic.

  That morning she had returned to the hospital as promised, refusing to see Morris again, meeting her mother in the cafeteria instead. Evelyn, while dressed as immaculately as ever, looked even more haggard, more exhausted than the evening before. For ninety minutes, over a cinnamon roll and multiple cups of strong Colombian coffee, Gracie had listened to her mother chatter on, regaling her with stories about Morris and reminiscing about his accomplishments, fretting about who might and who might not come to the funeral and whether she should order gladiolas or lilies or roses for the casket and what color. When Evelyn had begged her daughter again to forgive Morris, Gracie had lied, telling her she would think about it.

  Gracie glanced out the driver’s window at Mount Baldy, rising imposingly in the hazy blue sky, and back ahead to the Swift semi-truck she had been following, which blocked her entire view. She flipped on her turn signal, glanced in her rearview mirror, punched down the accelerator, slid passed the rig, then back into her lane in front of it.

  The horizon opened up and Gracie did a double take. Up ahead, above the tops of the office buildings and trees, an enormous column of thick, dark smoke rose high into the late-afternoon sky.

  “Holy shit,” she whispered. Consumed as she had been with family during the past twenty-four hours, she had completely forgotten about the Shady Oak Fire burning at the base of the mountains.

  She leaned over and snapped on the radio, scanning the frequencies until she found a station reporting on the fire. For the next twenty minutes, she listened about how multiple small brushfires, which officials believed had been set by a single arsonist, had spread quickly into surrounding residential neighborhoods and the national forest. Fanned by high winds and aided by high temperatures, low humidity, and heavy vegetation, suppressed for years into thick, sometimes impenetrable feasts for a fire, the small brushfires had grown, converging into two enormous demons of flame. Thousands of residents, schools, and businesses had been evacuated. Roads and neighborhoods had been closed. More than twenty thousand acres and seventeen structures, including seven homes, had been destroyed. One human life had been lost.