Death Notice

TODD RITTER

Death Notice

Copyright

Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This paperback edition 2011

First published by Minotaur Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., New York, 2010

Copyright © Todd Ritter 2010.

Todd Ritter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9781847562951

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9781847562968

Version: 2014–12–16

Dedication

To Mike, for everything

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

March

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

July

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

October

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The pain snapped him into consciousness. A sharp, steady throbbing, it began at his mouth and pulsed down his jaw and neck. He tried to moan—it was the kind of pain that made men moan—but couldn’t. The pain flared so badly after each attempt that he stopped trying.

He stayed quiet, listening to the ragged streams of air rushing through his nostrils. When he opened his eyes, he saw only darkness as something brushed against his lashes.

Cloth. Heavy and rough.

He was blindfolded.

His face felt damp. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it was blood, smeared across his chin. A thin line slipped down his cheek. The liquid was inside his mouth, too. On his tongue. Pooling in the crevices between his teeth.

Blood. He was certain now. He could taste it.

He lay flat on his back, his body stretched taut, arms at his sides. When he tried to move them, they wouldn’t budge. Rope was wrapped across his arms, legs, torso, and head, binding him tight. The pressure flattened him, ironing out the stooped shoulders that fifty years on the farm had given him.

He began to panic, breathing faster through his nostrils, a locomotive picking up speed. He tried to yell for help, parting his lips to scream. But his mouth wouldn’t open. His lips refused to separate, the pain there growing more extreme. He tried two more times, the hurt so bad it formed deep grunts in the back of his throat. Since the grunts had no way of escaping, he was forced to choke them back.

On his last attempt to scream, he realized what had happened. The pain brought clarity, sharpening his mind so that he understood the situation fully.

Someone had sealed his mouth shut.

He tried to scream once more, hoping the sheer strength of the sound would blast through the barrier his lips now created. The noise that emerged was familiar to him. He heard it all the time on the farm—the high-pitched squeal made just before the slaughter. Only this time the sound was coming from him.

He heard another noise, audible beneath his own desperate attempts to cry out.

Footsteps.

Someone else was there.

“It won’t be as bad if you hold still,” a voice in the darkness said.

The owner of the voice stood just behind his head. He felt warm breath on his ear. Fingers crawled along his chin and held his head in place.

Something pressed against his neck. Cold. Sharp. There was a moment of pressure, an unsettling suspense. Then the cold, sharp something pushed through his skin, entering his body, dividing flesh from flesh.

Blood poured out of him, spilling onto his shoulders, dampening his hair. He lay there helpless, feeling like a freshly gutted animal. Each beat of his heart sent another wave of blood coursing out of his body.

This time, the pain was unbearable. It wasn’t just at his mouth anymore.

It was inside him.

It was everywhere.

He began to scream. Not out loud, but in his head, the desperate sirens of noise ricocheting off the inside of his skull. The cold, sharp something remained in his neck, wriggling. The pain was so overwhelming it erased his thoughts, his silent screams. It kept erasing until there was nothing left in his head but pain.

And fear.

And, finally, darkness.

MARCH

ONE

“Chief Campbell!”

Kat’s name rattled up Main Street as soon as she set foot on the sidewalk. She had just stepped out of Big Joe’s, a Starbucks wannabe, carrying an extra-large coffee, for which she had paid Starbucks’ prices. Normally, the concept of four-dollar java would have annoyed her. But it was a gray and frigid morning, and she needed the heat and clarity that coffee provided. Unfortunately, the sound of her name, now being shouted a second time, prevented her from taking that first, precious sip.

“Hey, Chief!”

The source of the yell was Jasper Fox, owner of a flower shop burdened with the name Awesome Blossoms. Despite the cold, perspiration glistened on his face as he barreled up the sidewalk. Huffing and puffing, he waited until he reached Kat to finish his sentence.

“I’ve been robbed.”

Kat, coffee cup suspended in front of her mouth, blinked with disbelief. In Perry Hollow, robberies happened about as often as solar eclipses. Its pine-dotted streets and exhaustingly quaint storefronts were mostly trouble-free.

“Robbed? Are you sure?”

Jasper had an absurd mustache that dripped from his face like two dirty icicles. Whenever Kat saw him, she thought of a walrus. That morning, the mustache drooped even lower than normal.

“I think I’d know,” Jasper said.

His hangdog expression told her he had been expecting a different response. Something action-packed and decisive. Maybe Kat could have lived up to his expectations had she been given a chance to take a sip of her coffee. Instead, she could only lower the cup and watch Jasper as he watched her.

She knew what he was thinking. She read it in his eyes. He saw a woman five feet tall, ten pounds overweight, and six years shy of middle age. A woman who darkened her blond hair in order to be taken seriously. A woman who had bags under her eyes because the boiler was on the fritz and her son was up half the night with a cough. Most of all, he saw a woman—with a badge pinned to her uniform—idling on the sidewalk when she should have been investigating the town’s first theft in more than a year.

Knowing all of this was going through Jasper’s brain, Kat asked, “What was stolen?”

“I’ll show you.”

She followed him down Main Street, which was waking up faster than she was. She spotted Lisa Gunzelman unlocking her antiques store and Adrienne Wellington adjusting a floral-print frock in the window of her dress shop. Similar activity took place on the other side of the street as store owners got ready for another day of commerce in Perry Hollow, Pennsylvania.

Their efforts were in vain. The town had seen few visitors since the Christmas rush, simply because January and February were too cold for shopping. Now it was the middle of March, and although store windows showed off shorts, sunglasses, and tank tops, the scene outside was anything but springlike. Just two days earlier, a nor’easter had dumped six inches of snow on the roads. That was followed by an arctic chill that froze the plowed snow into miniature icebergs against the sidewalks. Kat stepped around one as she followed Jasper into his own store, two doors down from the dress shop.

Once inside Awesome Blossoms, Jasper made a beeline to the rear of the store and pushed open a door that led back outside. Kat followed him through it, finding herself in the center of a vacant parking lot covered with a thin sheet of ice. Only then did she begin to understand the situation. Jasper’s delivery van—a ubiquitous white Ford with the store’s name painted across its sides—had been taken during the night. The realization gave her an inappropriate kick. At last, something to investigate.

“Are you positive this is where you parked it last night?”

“Of course.”

“I know you think I’m asking the obvious,” Kat said. “But these are the things I need to know if you want me to find your van.”

Jasper pointed to an empty patch of gravel. “I parked it right there.”

“Are you the only person with a set of keys?”

“I keep a spare set in the glove compartment in case someone else needs to make a delivery.”

“Let me guess. You leave the van’s door unlocked, too.”

Jasper didn’t need to speak. His mustache did the talking for him. And when it sagged sadly, Kat knew the answer was yes.

As stupid as his actions sounded, Kat couldn’t hold it against him. Perry Hollow was the kind of town where you could leave your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition and know it would be safe. Until now, apparently.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll find the van. Everyone in town knows what it looks like. Some kids probably took it for a joyride and left it behind the Shop and Save.”

Kat assumed this theory would relieve Jasper in some small way. Instead, the florist’s face scrunched with worry.

“There was something else in that glove compartment, Chief.”

“What?”

Jasper hesitated, just for a moment. “A pistol.”

Kat groaned. It wasn’t the best thing to do in front of Jasper, but it was better than her first instinct, which was to throttle him. How could he be so stupid as to leave his van unlocked with a gun in the glove compartment? And why did he have a gun in there to begin with?

“I had it for safety reasons,” Jasper said, sensing the unspoken question that hung like a clothesline between them. “I had a permit for it and everything. I just kept it there in case I got carjacked.”

Unless he made regular deliveries to West Philadelphia, Jasper had no reason to worry about a carjacking.

“Was it loaded?” Kat said.

A sad nod from the florist told her this was a bigger problem than she had first suspected. She needed to find that van. Pronto. And when she did, hopefully the gun would still be there.

Quickly, she made her way back through the store and onto Main Street. When she reached her black-and-white Crown Vic—still parked in front of Big Joe’s, thank God—Kat heard Deputy Carl Bauersox trying to reach her on the radio.

“Chief?” his voice squawked as Kat slid behind the wheel. “You there?”

Carl, her sole deputy, worked the night shift. Kat was usually in the station by that hour to relieve him of duty. But she had been sidetracked by Jasper’s van troubles, and now Carl was probably wondering when he could go home.

Kat grabbed the radio. “I’m on my way, Carl.”

“We have a big problem, Chief.”

Kat doubted that. Two crimes taking place on the same day would be some sort of record for Perry Hollow. It was probably more like a cat in a tree, which in Carl’s world did amount to a big deal.

“What kind of problem?”

“A truck driver called. Said there’s a wooden box sitting on the side of Old Mill Road.”

As Carl spoke, Kat realized she was still carrying her neglected Big Joe’s house blend. She raised the cup to her lips and, just before getting to that long-delayed first sip, said, “Why didn’t you go out there and move it?”

“Because it’s more than a box.”

Kat stopped herself mid-sip. Again. “More than a box how?”

“Well, Chief, the trucker swears up and down that it’s a coffin.”

A coffin. On the side of the road. The idea was so preposterous Kat knew it couldn’t be true. The truck driver was mistaken. It was simply a box. And now her job was to move it before some distracted driver smashed into it, possibly necessitating the use of a real coffin.

“I’ll check it out,” she said. “In the meantime, do me a favor and put out a countywide APB on Jasper Fox’s delivery van. It was stolen last night.”

She didn’t mention the gun. It would have been a good idea with anyone but Carl, who flapped his gums faster than a hummingbird worked its wings. If he knew about the gun, the news would be all over Perry Hollow within an hour.

Carl signed off with a chipper “Righto, Chief,” leaving Kat to reluctantly lower her coffee, start the Crown Vic, and head out to whatever awaited her on Old Mill Road.

When Kat found the box, it was indeed sitting on the side of the road, resting on a patch of frozen snow. Although the truck driver who spotted it called it a coffin, Kat, in true police chief fashion, refused to speculate on the matter. Squinting against the sun’s reflection on the snow, she peered through the windshield at the box sitting a few yards away. Rectangular in shape, it looked to be made of untreated wood. Probably pine, if Kat cared to guess. Which she didn’t.

She climbed out of the car, her breath forming a brief ghost of vapor that floated away in the frigid breeze. It was too damn cold for March, which Kat thought was bad news in several ways. For one, the prolonged winter depressed her. Second, the cold had kept the tourists away for too long. And most folks in Perry Hollow depended on them for their livelihoods.

Finally, the cold seemed to Kat a shivery warning of impending danger. It was too sharp, too unnatural.

When she finally got around to taking that first sip of coffee, it was in a vain attempt to steel herself against the chill. But the java itself had already succumbed to the cold, not helping her one bit. Kat instead had to rely on her parka, which she zipped up to her chin.

When she reached the box, Kat understood why someone passing by could think it was a coffin. It certainly looked casketlike. More than six feet long, three feet wide, and about two feet deep, it was definitely big enough to hold a body.

Kneeling next to it, she inspected the box for signs of where it had come from and, hopefully, where it was supposed to go. She looked for an invoice stapled to the side or a company’s logo branded into the wood. She found neither. As she ran a hand across the box’s top and along its sides, the rough wood scraped her palm. Whatever its intended use, the box was definitely homemade, most likely by an amateur. Any craftsman worth his salt would have subjected the wood to at least some form of sanding.

Leaning in close, Kat sniffed deeply, detecting a faint trace of pitch. Pine. Just as she had suspected.

She wanted to believe the box had simply landed there after falling off a truck, but instinct told her otherwise. It was in perfect condition. No scratches or scuff marks. No signs of impact with the road. The way it sat—on its back, stretched tidily across the ditch—also raised suspicion. No box tumbling from a truck could have landed so perfectly without some assistance.

Its location was no accident. Someone had placed it there. Someone had wanted it to be found.

Finished with her examination, Kat saw no point in delaying the inevitable. Coffin or not, the box needed to be opened. Tugging on the lid, she noticed it was nailed shut at the corners and at two points along each side. She marched back to her patrol car and grabbed a crowbar from the trunk before returning to the box. With the crowbar’s help, the nails barely resisted when she pried the lid open and yanked it away.

The first thing she saw was a pair of wheat-colored work boots. Next was a pair of mud-streaked overalls that continued over a red flannel shirt. Finally, framed by the shirt’s collar, was the face of a man in his late sixties.

The full picture sent Kat scrambling backward. Standing halfway between the box and her car, she turned away and clamped one hand over her mouth to calm her gasping. She pressed the other hand against her right side, where a sudden fear jabbed at her ribs.

When a minute passed, Kat willed herself to look at the coffin again. The second glance was accompanied by the sad, stomach-sinking realization that she knew who the corpse was.

His name was George Winnick, and until this morning he had been a farmer who tended fifty acres on the outskirts of Perry Hollow. Kat didn’t know him well. Other than exchanging greetings at the Shop and Save or in passing on the street, they had barely spoken. But he was enough of a fixture in town for her to know he had been a decent man—hardworking and dependable. She also knew there was no reason he should be lying dead in a pine box on Old Mill Road.

“George,” she whispered as she unsteadily approached the body again. “What happened to you?”

His corpse had been crammed inside the coffin like a doll stuffed into a shoe box. His arms were folded across his chest, each open hand resting against the opposite shoulder. The ashen shade of his hair matched the pale flesh on his hands, neck, and face.

Two polished pennies sat atop each of his eyes, hugged by bushy, gray-studded eyebrows. Both coins had been placed heads up, Abe Lincoln’s profile glinting in Kat’s direction. The effect was eerie, the pennies looking like eyes themselves—dead and unblinking.

A wound marred the right side of his neck, partially hidden by his shirt collar. Pushing the fabric out of the way, Kat examined the gash. About three inches long, it had been stitched shut with black thread. Beads of blood had frozen to the thread, like raindrops in a spiderweb.

Similar ice crystals could be seen on George’s lips, which were coated with rust-colored flecks of dirt. That’s when Kat realized it wasn’t dirt she saw. It was dried blood. Lots of it, crusted around more black thread that crisscrossed his lips.

George Winnick’s mouth had been sewn shut.

Kat gasped again as the pain in her ribs deepened. It was an overwhelming sensation—part nausea, part horror. Still, she managed to make it back to her patrol car and radio Carl.

“I need you to listen closely,” she said. “Call the EMS squad. Tell them to get here immediately.”

“There’s someone inside the box?”

“Yes. George Winnick.”

Carl reacted the way Kat had expected him to—he prayed. She waited as he murmured a quick prayer for George’s soul. After the amen, he asked, “How did he die?”

Kat told him she didn’t know.

“What I do know is that you need to get on the horn and call the county sheriff. Tell him to bring the medical examiner. We’re going to need some help, because this—”

She stopped speaking when she realized she had no idea what this was. Nor did she have the first clue how to handle it. All she knew was that she had been right about the relentless chill. The cold was a bad omen.

Very bad.

TWO

It’s called a death sentence—that single line in an obituary detailing who died, how, and when. Henry Goll, who wrote them on a daily basis, enjoyed the nickname. He liked its sly wordplay, its mordant wit. Plus, he appreciated how the name hinted at a deeper, darker truth just below its surface: from the moment we are born, we are sentenced to death.

Part of Henry’s job was to make sure every obituary printed in the Perry Hollow Gazette contained a death sentence. For the most part, it was easy. A grieving family gave the information to the county’s only funeral home, which in turn faxed it to Henry. Using that as a guide, he sat in his cupboard-sized office and wrote a respectful overview of the deceased’s life. The death sentence always came first. It was the meat of the obituary, the only thing readers really wanted to know. The rest—family, work histories, achievements—were just side dishes to be consumed later.

Henry knew the obituary for George Winnick was a fake because it wasn’t a complete death sentence. Other than a name and a time of death, it contained barely any information at all.

George Winnick, 67, of Perry Hollow, Pa., died at 10:45 P.M. on March 14.

Five years of being the obituary writer at the Gazette had made Henry an expert at spotting fakes, which arrived with alarming frequency. He had no idea how anyone could see humor in that kind of prank, but many did. The worst offenders were teenagers, who often sent in fake death notices of much-reviled teachers. Others were sent by the alleged corpse’s friends, usually during a milestone birthday. Under Henry’s watch, none had managed to sneak into the paper. Whenever he saw an obituary claiming someone had died on his fiftieth birthday, he automatically threw it away.

He was close to doing the same with George Winnick’s, which had been sitting in the fax machine when he entered his office that morning. But because there was nothing suspicious about the age and date listed, he figured it was best to at least confirm it was a fake before relegating it to the trash.

Henry’s first and only call was to the McNeil Funeral Home. Tucked away on the far end of Oak Street, McNeil was a father and son outfit that had a monopoly on Perry Hollow’s dead. If someone in town passed away, the folks at McNeil knew about it.

Deana Swan, the funeral home’s receptionist, answered the phone after a single ring.

“McNeil Funeral Home,” she said in a bored voice. “This is Deana. How may I help you?”

Henry cleared his throat before speaking. “This is Henry Goll from the Perry Hollow Gazette.”

Deana interrupted him with a pert “Hey, Henry.”

“I have a question about a fax I received.”

“Why don’t you ever say hello to me?”

Taken aback, Henry replied with a confused “Pardon?”

“You call here, like, every day. And you just get straight to the point. No hello. No chitchat. Why is that?”

Henry was at a loss for words. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not that interesting.”

Deana’s response of “That’s not what I heard” surprised him, mainly because she offered no follow-up. Henry didn’t find himself interesting in the least, so he doubted Deana’s mysterious source.