Chapter One
Holly Webber, one month out of real estate school,
balanced papers and maps in her left hand. With her right hand, she inserted her
electronic key into the lock box hanging from the front doorknob of the house
she was showing her clients. She punched in her code and the lock box clicked as
the key safe fell open. Fishing out the house key, she reached to slide it into
the door lock, but was startled when the door angled inward on its own.
It wasn't locked!
Hmmm. Some dumb agent left this open, she thought,
glad it wasn't her listing. What if the builder found this door open? Worse,
what if someone's inside showing the house? Then what would she do? Sit out here
with her people and wait? That would really mess up her showing schedule.
"I’ll just be a minute," she said to the couple
behind her on the sidewalk who were looking over the front of the house.
She stuck her head into the door. "Hello, is anybody
here?" Now, that's a dumb thing to say into an empty house, she thought, but she
had to establish a routine so she wouldn't forget anything.
The entry door was exquisite: mahogany encased a
large oval of beveled cut glass pieces, the intricate design a vase full of
roses in various stages of bloom. It’s richness made her feel sure she was
showing her clients only the best. She ushered them inside.
A pungent smell of newly cut wood, just-laid carpet
and new paint sprang past them and out the open door as if trying to escape into
the front yard.
The crisp air of an early fall accompanied them the
rest of the way inside as they stepped onto the green slate floor of the
entrance foyer. Combined odors in the emptiness were a little stifling, so Holly
left the door standing open as she oriented herself to the brand new home's
floor plan.
"You'll find the smoking room on the right and the
dining room on the left," she instructed as she juggled the things in her hands.
She indicated the rooms with a toss of her chin while she sought a ledge where
she could put down her unwieldy load. "Wow, look at that crown molding. The
kitchen is through that door over there. And look at the walnut paneling of the
smoking room...absolutely beautiful. Only three houses in this subdivision have
that kind of paneling. I especially wanted you to see it."
She turned to her female client, who had been right
behind her, but the woman had already crossed the dining room and disappeared
through the door into the butler’s pantry on her way to the kitchen.
Holly rolled her eyes and made the instinctive
decision to follow the female client like a puppy dog.
What am I anyway, just a key turner? She thought.
These people persist in tearing through the gorgeous houses she shows them like
they have only the next one on their minds.
At least the houses were all new and empty. If the
homes were resales and full of personal items she'd have a real job of
corralling her buyers. Merely two people, they each tore off in opposite
directions, one hurrying up stairs and one running down into the basement. It
seemed like there were five or six of them instead of only two...like a bunch of
little kids running every which way.
However, the woman was buying the house. Since the
man was only paying for it, Holly sprinted after the lady.
Before she was half way up the stairwell, a piercing
scream penetrated the quiet, causing Holly to drop everything in her hands.
Assuming a smoke alarm must have activated, she looked for one on the ceiling
above her head. She saw her lady client appear at the top of the stairs instead,
her face contorted into a grotesque mask of terror while she screamed and
screamed.
Frantic, Holly dashed up the remaining stairs and
into the room where the woman pointed while the decibel level increased. The
husband emerged on the run from the basement with a look of horror on his face
and vaulted the landing between the basement and the lowest of the second floor
stairs with one leap.
Lying face up halfway into the closet, was a woman
dressed in beige slacks and a green cardigan sweater over what was left of a
white blouse. Holly recognized the upside-down gold name tag on the sweater as
being from Garrison Realty, where Holly had interviewed before going to work at
Redstone. The woman's blouse was ripped open, exposing her bra covered breasts,
and "SLUT" was written across her chest in big black letters. The distinctive
smell of a black felt-tip marking pen hung in the air.
Holly froze, and everything after that seemed to fall
into slow motion as she backed away. Frightened, yet full of pity for the woman
on the floor, she ended up pressed against the opposite wall with her head
spinning and her eyelids scrunched tightly together. Panic rising, she knew she
had to take control of this situation. She'd never seen a dead person, but
decided it was a lie that they simply looked asleep. This woman was purple, had
nasty dark bruises and looked very much dead.
Holly made herself feel for life signs in the woman’s
neck like they do on TV, but the hand she reached out seemed to belong to
somebody else. She wasn’t prepared for the cold clammy feel of the woman's skin,
but that helped to determine there was no life in that body. She wished the
woman on the stairs would stop screaming; it was hard to think when adrenaline
was pumping through her and she was touching a dead body.
Despite the temperate air of fall in the house Holly
shivered as she reached for her cell phone.
Maria Sebastian drove through thickly overhung red
and yellow and gold maple, oak, and poplar trees up to the row of mailboxes at
the end of a dirt road off Warhill Park Road. It looked like fantasy land under
the arched branches where ferns, huge rhododendrons and mountain laurels spread
their leaves out like a tablecloth at a picnic. She pulled to the left and was
forced to stop at a gate. From up the hill at the other end of the driveway a
shirtless young man stepped out of a mobile home. Muscles rippled down his
stomach, and his chest muscles were so defined he looked pumped up from a recent
workout. He must be the son of Houston Brace, the man who had called her about
pricing his land. One of his relatives had been a previous client of Maria’s.
The young man was barefoot, wore cutoff jeans and his
right arm was missing from below the elbow. His small body had no tan lines.
Light brown curly hair softened the chiseled cut of his jaw. Incongruously dark
long eyelashes outlined cobalt blue eyes that held a smile. He opened the gate
and held out his left arm to shake hands. "Ms. Sebastian? I’m Houston Brace." He
was her contact after all.
She thought his name sounded like a college handbook
publisher.
"I can show you the land, but it ain't really mine
yet," he explained. "My parents died when I was a baby and Mrs. Lacy, Sheila,
took me to raise because there wasn’t nobody else.
"Her son, Billy--do you know him? Billy Lacy? He
builds houses around here, I thought you might know him."
Maria nodded. Everybody knew Billy Lacy. He was a
colorful builder who drew his own plans on the back of cardboard boxes. There
had been no building restrictions in Dawson County when he’d started building
years earlier, and he’d survived due to the good ol’ boy system of sliding
things under the table. Sometimes it was money; usually it was permits.
Houston went on. "Ms. Lacy's going to transfer title
to me on this land 'cause she don’t trust Billy to keep it in one piece. She
thinks he’ll cut it all up to build houses and it won’t stay together. This is
between you and me." He looked knowingly, questioningly at her as he nodded his
head up and down persuading her compliance.
"Of course," she replied.
As he talked, he entered the woods, gesturing to her
to follow.
She felt a kind of ageless wisdom emanating from the
spread of giant red oak limbs covered with crimson leaves at the height of their
swan song. The undergrowth branches were so dense she had to unstick each
clinging briar individually or risk holey jeans. Brushing them off was an
ineffective struggle, yet Houston Brace slipped through them, unharmed, clothed
mostly in skin.
He struck a dog trot path, which he referred to as a
"pig trail," and followed it down into a ravine, all the while considering out
loud the property's value as compared to other properties belonging to friends
and relatives.
At the bottom of the ravine a little creek trickled
over rocks, along mossy banks and through fern laden sand beds that could have
been miniature fairy parks. Coming upon a pool deeper than the shallow creek
bed, where Houston submerged his left arm up to his shoulder and, with a grin,
pulled up a six pack of coke cans, offering one to his companion. "This here
spring bubbles up and keeps my cokes cooler than my refrigerator."
She laughed, accepted the coke, taking time to
examine the mouth of the spring more closely. A fascinating gift of the earth,
precious pure water initiated its emergence into daylight through an arch no
less impressive than a niche in a cathedral wall.
Maria had to remind herself this was a job and not a
picnic with a youngster with nothing but sweet simplicity on his mind. She could
have stayed in the woods for a week.
The fifty-two acre parcel was covered all too quickly
and she had a pretty good idea of how it lay. Soon she would verify the lines
with Dawson County's overlay maps.
She hated to part with the man-child but, as she was
leaving, her pager sounded off relentlessly. Waving, she pulled out of the
driveway. The rolling hills of northern Georgia prevented cell phone
transmission, so she headed south, alerted to some urgency she could not
imagine. Her pager persisted.
"What in the world?" Maria said out loud as she tried
over and over to call her office.
Finally, she heard, "Maria, where are you?" from the
secretary as she entered transmittal range.
"I’m up here wandering around Dawson with Mr. Nature
Person. What a character. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. I’m headed
for the office because my pager loaded up with calls I can’t make from this far
north."
"Get back here as soon as you can. All hell has
broken loose and Giles has called in all of the agents."
"Oh God, what’s happened," she said flippantly. "Has
someone figured out how to get more money out of us?"
"No, Penny’s been killed."
"Whaaat?"
"Get here quick. I’ve got all my lines ringing at
once."
Maria pulled onto the berm of the freeway while she
tried to adjust to the news. They’ve obviously made a mistake, she thought, with
her head buzzing. I saw that woman this morning. A million
questions zinged through her head but every phone number she tried rang busy.
Frustrated, she pulled out into the slow lane and dialed into her voice mail
where she listened to Donna Delaney, Eileen Davis, and Tommy Larken call her in
various stages of panic, alarm and grief. They were realtors, friends, and a
homicide detective from the sheriff’s office.
