Scent of Roses (35 page)

F
letcher Harcourt sat at the desk in his study. He was still using his wheelchair to get around, but during therapy he was able to walk on of those aluminum walkers. His body was taking its own sweet time to heal, but his brain seemed to be working. He still couldn't remember everything that had happened in the years since the accident. But oddly, his strongest memory was of the night he'd been pushed down the stairs.

Fletcher pulled his mind away from thoughts of his son and the ugly moment that would be forever burned into his brain. He leaned back in his old oak swivel chair, pulled out of storage in the barn. Damn, it felt good to be home, to be sitting at the rolltop desk he had worked at for more than forty years.

The house was different now. Carson had redecorated the whole damned place, but Fletcher had to admit he'd done a good job, and though it was more formal than he liked, the rooms were comfortable and he was getting used to the changes.

There were going to be a whole lot more of them.

Since his return to the house, he'd had time to do some thinking. He went over the life he'd led, how selfish he had been through the years, never really thinking of his sons or his wife, always doing exactly what he wanted, no matter who he hurt.

Constance had been dead for more than a decade. There was nothing he could do for her. Teresa was happily married, and she had Zach to look out for her. And Carson would be spending the next few years in jail, though not as long as he undoubtedly deserved.

His son had pled guilty to manslaughter, said that he and Jake Benson had gotten into a fight the night Jake was killed, said Jake had pulled a gun and Carson had turned it against him and shot him in self-defense.

Afterward, he'd been scared, he said, so he buried the body inside the foundation of the overseer's cottage that was under construction on the farm.

Both Zach and Fletcher had refused to testify against him, or mention anything about the wreck that Zach had spent time for in prison. Blood was blood, and both of them would probably have perjured themselves if they'd been subpoenaed. But Carson had always been a smooth talker.

Fletcher had hired his son one of those fancy, overpriced criminal lawyers from L.A., and together they'd negotiated a reduction of the charges. With good behavior, Carson would probably be out in a couple of years.

It didn't seem quite right, yet Fletcher wouldn't have it any other way. The man was, after all, still his son.

“Hey, Dad.”

He looked up to see his younger son standing in the doorway, an arm around the little gal he was marrying next Sunday afternoon. She was a pretty thing, he thought, with her heavy auburn hair and blue eyes. Fletcher believed his son had finally found a woman who would make him happy. And the girl was getting a damned fine man in the bargain.

“You said you wanted to see us,” Zach said, looking a little concerned.

“That's right, come on in.”

Zach ushered Liz through the door then fell in behind her. He dragged over a chair and she sat down, then Zach sat down in the chair next to Fletcher's desk.

“I asked you to come because there's something I want to show you. You got that medal I asked you to bring? The one you said you found under the house?”

“I brought it.” Zach pulled the old rusted piece of medal out of his pocket and laid it down on Fletcher's desk.

Fletcher picked it up and examined it. “See this writing on the front?”

“We tried to read it the night we found it but we couldn't make out what it said.”

“That's because the letters are in German.”

“German?” Liz picked up the medal, studied the printed letters. “Ben Donahue said it looked like something that came from the military. We thought maybe someone brought it back from the war.”

“Well, in a way, that's what happened.” Reaching down, he pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk. He'd had Isabel, the housekeeper, dig around in his old room upstairs until she found the box he was looking for. He was living in a bedroom downstairs now and she'd helped him collect his things.

Nice girl, Isabel. He'd asked her to stay on and she'd agreed. It was good to have someone else in the house.

Fletcher lifted the metal box, set it on the table, and lifted the lid. Inside was a stack of old, dog-eared, time-yellowed newspaper clippings.

He lifted them out of the box and set them down on top of his desk. “I been doing some thinking. Mostly about that house over there and this one, too. You see, I did a little research on that couple who killed those little girls. Sheriff Morgan says before they kidnapped that child, they were model citizens. Not so much as a parking ticket. Then they moved into the old gray house.”

“What are you getting at, Dad?” Zach asked.

“You told me about Miguel Santiago, how the house seemed to change him.”

“That's right,” Liz said. “He was different before things started happening in the house. He's different now. Thank you for giving them another place to live.”

He waved away the thanks. The couple was afraid to live in the house, and after finding two dead bodies underneath, he didn't blame them.

“I started thinking about Carson…about how a boy I raised could kill a man the way he did. I still have trouble imagining it. Which got me to thinking even more.” He shoved the stack of clippings toward Zach, motioned for Liz to come round where she could read them.

Zach picked up a page of yellowed newsprint. “These came out of the San Pico
Newspress.
Looks like they were printed during World War II. They're all dated in the 1940s.”

“That's right. I don't know if you remember me ever mentioning it. It was so far back…I was just a kid at the time. I don't remember much about the war, but my dad would sometimes talk about it.”

Zach and Liz both started reading the articles, skimming the pages, picking up the next article in the stack.

Zach finished first. “It says that between 1941 and 1945, the government set up prisoner of war camps all along the San Joaquin Valley.” Zach tapped the yellowed page. “It says one of them was right here in San Pico.”

“That's right. In fact, the camp was right here on this property. It was a farm labor camp even back then. The government needed a safe place to keep German prisoners until the war was over.”

“I think my high school history teacher mentioned the camp,” Liz said. “It seemed so long ago I never gave it much thought.”

“Being patriotic, my old man agreed to let the government use the land. Unfortunately, according to what my dad told me years later, he wound up with the worst prisoners of the lot. The captured German soldiers were Gestapo and Nazi S.S. Really bad men. Some of them were responsible for the massacre in Warsaw in 1941.”

Zach shook his head. “I'm afraid my history's not that good.”

“I read up on it. Happened in a little town called Jedwabne. Nazis forced sixteen hundred people into a barn and set it on fire.”

He looked over at Liz, saw the color wash out of her face. “Sorry, but that's what happened. That's the kind of men these were. Evil men, according to my dad. When the war was over, they shipped the soldiers back to Germany. I have no idea what happened to them. My father tore down the temporary buildings and tents that housed them and in their place, built the old gray house.”

Liz leaned toward him. “Are you…are you thinking that maybe that's where all this began?”

“That's about it. I guess you could say I've been thinking a lot about evil. About the nature of the beast, if there is such a thing. Seems to me a lot of bad stuff has gone on around here since the war. Maybe…well, maybe if the evil is strong enough, it stays on after the carrier is gone.”

“That's pretty far-fetched,” Zach said.

“Maybe. But considering what's happened out here—”

“Good point.”

“At any rate, I've decided to close this section of the ranch, move the workers to another part of the property. The overseers' houses are old and in need of repair. I'm gonna tear 'em down and rebuild in a new location.”

Zach just stared.

“I guess you think I'm crazy. Maybe you'll start believing your brother was right about me, all along.”

Liz reached over and caught his hand. “I don't think you're crazy. I was in that house. I felt the evil that lives there. I think it's a good idea.”

“So do I,” Zach said softly.

Fletcher Harcourt just nodded. Perhaps men of strong will weren't affected by the forces of evil, or perhaps they were able to overcome them. Maybe that was the reason he had lost only one son and not both.

Or perhaps it was all just a big pile of bull.

He looked at his younger son and the woman who would soon be his daughter. He thought about the spirit of the little girl who had come to warn Maria Santiago of the evil that still existed in the house years after the child was gone.

Whatever the truth, they were all starting over.

Fletcher figured it was long overdue.

T
hough both the characters and story are purely fiction, this tale is based on an incident that actually happened in the summer of 1995 in a small town in the San Joaquin Valley. During that summer, a Hispanic couple repeatedly saw the ghost of a little girl at the foot of their bed. It was later discovered that, in 1961, a child who had lived in the house had been abducted by a man and his pregnant wife, raped and brutally murdered.

The apparition appearing to the young woman warned that her unborn baby would die if she didn't move out of the house. The couple, unable to relocate, remained in the house and the baby did die, strangled by its own umbilical cord.

During World War II, the spot had been a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

Discover a brilliant new series
by Kat Martin
the
New York Times
bestselling author
of
THE BRIDE'S NECKLACE
trilogy

 

Turn the page for a preview of
HEART OF HONOR
Coming in January 2007
from MIRA Books

England, 1842

L
eif shivered beneath the thin blanket that was all he had to warm his nearly naked body against the chill. It was not yet spring, the country roads muddy or still partly frozen. A weak sun appeared now and then, sifting in and out of the clouds, shining on a knoll here and there for a few brief moments before disappearing again.

A sharp wind whipped the edge of the blanket and Leif pulled it a little closer around him. He had no idea where he was, only that he traveled through a rolling countryside marked by occasional villages and uneven roads lined with low walls made of stone. He had been in this land for more than four moons, though mayhap he had lost track of time. All he knew for certain was that his small ship had been dashed against a rocky shore somewhere north of here, carrying his nine companions to a watery grave and leaving his body broken and battered.

A shepherd had found him lying in the icy surf and taken him in, had nursed him through a burning fever. He had been barely among the living when traders came and took him, paid the shepherd in silver coin and dragged him away.

They wanted him because he looked different, because he
was
different than any of the men in this foreign land. He could not speak their language nor understand a word of what they said, which seemed to amuse them and somehow enhance his worth. He was at least five inches taller than most of the men, his body far more muscular, and though some of the men were blond, as he was, few wore beards and none as long and shaggy as his, and their hair was cut short while his grew past his shoulders.

He had been weak, unable to defend himself, when he had been lifted into the back of a wagon and driven from the shepherd's hut. As his strength began to return, the people who had taken him began to fear him and his legs and arms were shackled with bands of heavy iron. He was shoved into a cage not nearly big enough for a man of his size, forced to crouch in the straw on the floor like an animal.

He was a prisoner in this hostile land, an oddity to be displayed to the people of the countryside, a cruel form of entertainment. They paid to see him, he knew. The fat man with a scar on his face who brought him food collected coins from the people who gathered around his cage. The man,
Snive-ly
, he was called, beat and prodded him, goaded him into a violent temper, which seemed to please the crowd who had paid their money to see him.

Leif hated the man. He hated all of them.

Where he had lived, he was a free man, a man of rank among his people. His father had begged him not to leave the safety of his home, but Leif had been driven to see the world outside his island. Since then, he had seen little outside his cage, and the hate and anger inside him gnawed like a hungry beast. Daily he prayed to the gods to help him escape, to give him the strength to remain strong until that time came. He promised himself it would happen, vowed he would make it so, and it was all that kept him sane.

But day after day, no chance came and the despair inside him deepened. He felt as if he were becoming the animal they drove him to be and only in death would he ever find peace.

Leif fought the dark despair and clung to the faint hope that someday he would again be free.

 

The three-story brick building that housed the offices of
Heart to Heart Weekly Ladies' Gazette
sat on a narrow street just off Piccadilly. The soul of the magazine, the heavy Stanhope printing press, one of the most modern presses of the day, sat on the ground floor next to a box that housed metal type, the letters, numbers and characters used to print the weekly paper.

Krista walked over to the wooden box. She had finished the article she had been writing for this week's edition and except for one minor change, the gazette would be ready to go to press in the morning.

Along with Krista, her father, and her best friend Corrie, the staff included Bessie Briggs, who did most of the typesetting; a printer named Gerald Bonner; his young apprentice, Freddie Wilkes; and a part-time helper who did whatever jobs were needed to get the paper out to its subscribers.

The crew was working late, as always on the night the gazette went to press. It was dark outside, the streets mostly empty, a brisk April wind blowing in off the Thames. Standing next to the press, Krista adjusted a section of metal type, then turned at the sound of footsteps on the cobbles outside the paned window at the front of the office. Glass shattered and one of the women screamed as a heavy brick sailed into the room, missing Krista's head by only inches.

“Good heavens!” Corrie gasped.

The brick landed with a clatter and rolled several times across the wooden floor and Krista raced to the window.

“Can you see him?” Corrie rushed up beside her. “Can you tell who did it?”

Down the block, the glow of a street lamp revealed a lad in course brown breeches running madly toward the corner. An instant later, he disappeared out of sight.

“It was only a boy,” Krista said, turning away from the window, wiping ink from her hands on a rag near the press. “He is already gone.”

“Look! There's a note!” Kneeling on the floor, Corrie retrieved a piece of paper from around the brick, fastened by a tightly tied bit of string.

“What does it say?” Krista walked up beside her.

Corrie smoothed the crumpled bit of paper. “'
Stay out of men's business. If you don't, you will pay.'”

Krista sighed. “Someone must have paid the boy to do it.” And it wasn't the first warning
Heart to Heart
had received since Krista had initiated a change of format that included editorials and articles on education and social issues.

Last week, along with the usual fashion and domestic topics, there had been an article lauding Mr. Edwin Chadwick's Sanitary Conditions Report, which called for changes in the London sewer system and clean, piped water—necessary, he believed, for the prevention of disease.

The expensive proposal was highly unpopular with the water companies, local authorities and rate payers, who argued they could not afford to foot the bill.

“There will always be someone who disagrees with our position,” Krista told Corrie as she plucked the scrap of paper from her friend's small hand.

“You're going to show that note to your father, aren't you?” Corrie cast her a look of warning, knowing how independent Krista was and how she hated to bother the professor with problems that related to the gazette.

“Krista…?”

“All right, I'll show him.” She glanced at the hole in the window, letting in the chilly April air. “Have someone board up that hole.” She headed for the stairs, the note clutched in her hand. “I'll be back in a minute.”

On the nights Krista worked late, her father insisted on accompanying her home. He had arrived several hours ago and gone to work in his makeshift study upstairs. There was also a room for business meetings and one with a narrow chaise for napping if the hour grew late.

She knocked on his door—waited, knocked again, finally gave up and simply opened the door and walked into the high-ceilinged, book-lined room.

“I am sorry to bother you, Father, but—”

“Thought I heard someone.” He removed the wire-rimmed spectacles he used for reading and looked up from the stack of books sitting open on his desk. He was bone-thin and extremely tall. Krista had got her taller-than-average height from both her parents, but her blond hair, green eyes and more rounded, full-bosomed figure were a legacy of her fair-haired mother.

“Got involved in this translation,” the professor explained. “Are we finished? Is it time for us to go home?”

“We aren't quite done, but we will be very soon.” She crossed the room and handed him the note. “I thought I had better show you this. Someone tied this message to a brick and tossed it through the window. I guess they didn't much like my article on Mr. Chadwick's report.”

“Apparently not.” He looked up at her. “Are you certain you know what you are doing, dearest? Your mother had a number of strong opinions, but she rarely put them in print.”

“True, but she wanted to. And times have changed in the past few years. Our readership has been growing steadily ever since we went to the new format.”

“I suppose fighting for a good cause is worth a bit of risk. Just be careful you don't push things too far.”

“I won't. One more article on the need for city-wide water and disposal improvements and I am returning to our campaign for better working conditions in the mines and factories.”

He chuckled. “As I recall, those articles stirred up a hornet's nest, as well.”

Krista bit back a smile, knowing it was true. “Even so, I think our efforts are helping.” She rounded the desk to look over his shoulder. “What are you working on?”

“I'm going over some tenth-century Icelandic tables that calculate the sun's midday height for each week of the year. They're remarkably accurate. Earlier I was reviewing a translation of the
Heimskringla
text.”

The text was written in Old Norse, Krista saw, the language spoken in the Scandinavian settlements from the years around 800 until the last known Viking settlers disappeared from Greenland in early 1500. Her father even spoke the long-dead language.

She thought of the hours she had spent as a child in his study, listening to tales of the Vikings and even learning some of their language. They had practiced together, and because she wanted to please him, she worked hard to perfect her speaking skills. She was educated far beyond most women and along with her ideas of social reform, had, like her father, developed a certain fascination with Norse life and culture.

“You've a good deal of Viking blood in your veins,” he would say when she bemoaned her height and the fact that most of the men of her acquaintance were shorter than she was. “Your mother could trace her family lineage back to the Danes. You should be proud of your heritage.”

Mostly, she just wished her appearance weren't quite so different from other women.

Her father shuffled some of the papers on his desk, closed the book he had been reading and looked up at her. “I hear you and Coralee are going to the circus on Sunday.”

She thought of the article Corrie planned to write on the Circus Leopold that had just arrived in town.

“Would you like to come with us?” she asked, surprised by his interest.

Her father chuckled. “Actually, I gave it some serious thought. I imagine you've heard about the main attraction. The man they call the Last Barbarian.”

Krista laughed. “Yes, I gather he is part of the sideshow.” Now she understood. “He is supposed to be a Viking.” Anything Viking drew her father's interest. “They say he stands over seven feet tall and is covered head to foot with thick blond hair.”

He smiled and shook his head. “It is all nonsense, of course, spouted to increase the size of the crowd. Still, it might be interesting. They say he is a terrifying brute, worth the price of admission just to get a glimpse of him in one of his towering rages. Undoubtedly some poor creature escaped from Bedlam. Mad as a hatter, I'll wager.”

“Probably. But since you seem so interested, I promise I shall pay him a visit. He might make a good addition to Corrie's article.”

Her father nodded. “In the meantime, try not to light a fire under the rest of London's male population.”

Krista smiled. “I imagine my articles have just as many supporters as naysayers, Father. Perhaps even more.”

“Perhaps. But most of them are in far less powerful positions.”

That was true enough. It was men and women of the poor working classes who wanted improved conditions, not the wealthy manufacturers who would have to pay for them.

Krista left her father's office feeling a little uneasy at the notion. How far would men in power go to silence a voice that stood up for city sanitation and improving the awful conditions suffered by the working classes?

It didn't matter. Her course was set, and besides, the articles had increased the magazines' circulation by more than twenty percent. Though most men frowned on the notion that women wanted to be kept informed, it was becoming more and more clear that the female population wanted exactly that.

Heart to Heart
would continue to move in that direction while also giving its readers the serialized fiction and society news they also enjoyed, which was Coralee's domain.

Which reminded Krista that on Sunday, she had agreed to accompany Corrie to the circus.

As she headed back downstairs to put the finishing touches on this week's edition, she found herself looking forward to the day she would spend with her friend.

 

Leif leaned back against the bars of his cage. In the distance, he could hear the odd, lyrical sounds of the machine that played music whenever the traveling company rolled into a village. The sun was out, warming him a little, but his cage was parked in a shady spot and an icy wind raised goose bumps over his bare skin. The only garment he wore was a spotted animal skin just large enough to cover his rod and the rest of his man parts, and did nothing to warm him.