Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3 Read online

  Contents

  Title

  The Witch Tree: Book 1

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Copyright

  Sparrow House: Book 2

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  Copyright

  The Sacrifice: Book 3

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Copyright

  Other Books

  Anna Denning Mysteries:

  The Witch Tree,

  Sparrow House, and

  The Sacrifice

  Karin Kaufman

  Copyright 2015 Karin Kaufman. All rights reserved.

  KarinKaufman.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Witch Tree

  Anna Denning Mysteries Book 1

  1

  Anna Denning gagged and dug her fingers into the envelope in her hand. She glanced back at the bedroom doorway then down again at the woman on the floor.

  The woman lay on her right side, her left eye staring half-lidded at the ruffled bedskirt inches from her face. Her mouth was parted, her lips stained brown. The bedskirt and the woman’s white bathrobe were spotted the same dark brown, and a brown puddle mushroomed across the carpet from her mouth to the bed.

  Sixty seconds ago a woman had called out, telling Anna to come inside the house, come down the hall to the bedroom on the left. But the woman at her feet hadn’t been alive sixty seconds ago, Anna thought. Was it Susan Muncy? Anna had never met her before, but this was the right address and who else would be here, in a bedroom of the Muncy house, lying on the floor in her own vomit?

  The sour odor filled Anna’s nostrils. Neither had this woman died that long ago, she thought. The carpet was still wet, the stench still strong. She had to get out before she was sick.

  She turned and saw shards of glass peppering the carpet on the far side of the bedroom near a pair of French doors. A few of the longer shards stood erect in the fibers, and leaning against one of the doors was a round, silver frame, splinters of glass jutting from its inside rim like teeth in the splayed jaws of a shark.

  The other door was ajar—just half an inch, but each time the wind blew, it sent a sliver of cold air into the room. Anna carefully made her way around the shards and looked through the door’s glass panels to the deck outside, squinting in the bright Colorado sun.

  Snow had been swept aside in the shape of a fan by the outward-swinging door. There were footsteps in the snow from the door to the garage side of the house, and where the deck ended, two feet above the ground, someone had knocked snow from the railing.

  The police. She had to call them now. Her cell phone was in her purse, in the glove compartment of her Jimmy, parked outside the house. She glanced quickly about the room and saw a cordless phone on the nightstand nearest the door. But this wasn’t an accident scene—not with the glass, the footsteps in the snow, the woman calling out—and she didn’t dare touch that phone or anything else in the room.

  A high-pitched scraping sound came from somewhere down the hall. Anna froze, straining to identify it. At first she thought the noise was coming from outside the house. A branch scraping a window, something metal loose in the wind. But the sound grew louder and lost the random rhythm of the wind. Was someone inside the house? The person who’d left by the deck could have circled around and come in through the front door.

  She sidestepped the broken glass and hurried to the bedroom door, stopping just inside the door frame, listening. When she heard the noise again, she knew what it was. Fingernails on glass. She wheeled around and looked behind her, searching the deck outside the French doors. Police evidence or not, she had to grab the phone on the nightstand.

  In two steps she was there. She dialed 911 then pressed the receiver to her black fleece jacket, muffling the sound of the operator. Could she risk speaking? What if someone was inside the house? The police could identify the location of any emergency call made—all she had to do was keep the line open.

  Rooted in place, the phone to her jacket, she heard another noise, this one louder. Then the sound of the front door slamming shut.

  “Susan? For crying out loud, the door was open. We talked about this.”

  A man’s voice. Susan’s husband? A neighbor?

  “Answer me. Where are you?”

  Whoever it was, he knew Susan, and he was heading down the hall. And she was standing in Susan’s bedroom near her body, holding her phone. There was no telling how the man would react if he saw her without any warning. She had to say something before he came to the door.

  “Mr. Muncy, is that you? I’m Anna Denning, back here.” She set the phone on the nightstand but didn’t hang up.

  Anna felt the man’s footfalls hard on the floor as he made for the bedroom.

  “Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” As his eyes fell from Anna to the black glass, a look of alarm spread across his face. “What happened? Susan?”

  Anna lifted her arm to point at the body hidden from view by the large bed, but Muncy turned and headed down the hall, toward the kitchen and great room, calling out for his wife.

  “Mr. Muncy,” Anna said, following him. “Stop. There’s been an accident.” An accident. Whatever had happened in that room, it wasn’t an accident. But she didn’t know what else to say.

  He spun around. “What accident?”

  “Your wife.” Anna gestured toward the bedroom. “I’m so sorry,” she said as he rushed past her.

  Muncy cried out. Anna walked to the far end of the hall. He howled his grief and Anna turned her head toward the great room. The house was chilly, but she was sweating, and her glasses began to fog from the bottom up. She unzipped her jacket then took off her glasses and blew on the lenses.

  “Who is this? Who called you?”

  She slipped her glasses back on and stared down the hall. Muncy was talking into the phone. The operator was still on the line.

  She heard a bang, plastic on plastic. He’d slammed the phone into its cradle. He shot out of the bedroom and raced toward Anna. “You.” He flung out a forefinger, directing it at her. “Don’t move.”

  Anna tensed. “That was 911,” she said, pressing her back to the wall and staring up at him. “On the bedroom phone. I heard a noise and I dialed.” He was thin but tall. Anna was five f
eet ten and he towered over her. If he lashed out she was trapped.

  His eyes were brimming with tears, his chin thrust forward. “Don’t move an inch. I’m calling the police.”

  He marched into the kitchen and reached for the wall phone near the refrigerator, keeping an eye on Anna as he dialed. “My God,” he whispered as he waited for an answer. He ran his hand across his head, palming back a forest of short dark hair. “Yes, I need the police, now. This is Tom Muncy, 2198 Snow Mesa Drive. My wife’s dead.”

  He motioned for Anna to move from the end of the hall toward the kitchen. She crept forward, toward the granite-topped kitchen island, wondering if she should run for the front door. Wondering if he was even talking to the police. What if he was responsible for Susan Muncy’s death? When she was ten feet from the island he made a motion with his palm, a “stay” signal like the one she used on her German shepherd mix, Jackson. She stopped.

  “No, I didn’t call before, someone else did. There’s an intruder in my house, a woman.” The skin under his fingernails went white as he gripped the phone. “She’s right in front of me. Brown hair, about thirty-five. I’ve never seen her before.” He took the phone away from his mouth. “What’s your name?”

  “Anna Denning. I was hired by your daughter to research your wife’s family tree as a Christmas present. I came to deliver it, the front door was open and—”

  “What?” Muncy fixed his eyes on her and lowered his head slightly, a bull ready to charge.

  “I heard someone tell me to come in.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “Someone else was in your house, Mr. Muncy.”

  Muncy raised the phone to his lips, keeping his eyes on Anna. “She says our daughter hired her to research some family tree. We don’t have a daughter. I think you’d better get here now.”

  2

  “Mrs. Denning, this was in the hall. It has your name on it.” Detective Lonnie Schaeffer of the Elk Park Police held up a large envelope in his latex-gloved hand.

  “I must have dropped it,” Anna said. “That envelope is why I was here this morning. I was hired to research Susan Muncy’s family tree and deliver the results this morning.” She couldn’t believe it was Lonnie Schaeffer standing six feet away from her in this stranger’s house. She hadn’t talked to him in two years.

  Schaeffer crimped the brad at the back of the envelope and pried open the flap. He extracted a folder and began flipping through its pages. The dark tuft of hair front and center on his head, surrounded by pale, bare scalp, was even smaller than when Anna had last seen him. And he’d gained some weight. His barrel chest pulled at the single closed button on his black suit jacket, pinching the fabric into a butterfly. He didn’t seem to recognize her.

  “Who hired you?” he asked.

  “Jazmin Morningstar.” Anna exchanged looks with an officer taking notes. “Jazmin with a z. She works at a store downtown called What Ye Will. I only met her once, the day she hired me. She paid me extra to deliver my research.”

  “To Mrs. Muncy,” Schaeffer said, continuing to flip through the pages.

  “Her mother, yes.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two weeks ago. Can I sit down?”

  Schaeffer glanced up at Anna then toward the great room. “Is Mr. Muncy still in the bedroom?” he asked the officer with the notepad.

  The officer pointed down the hall. “First bedroom on the right, with Armstrong.”

  “This way,” Schaeffer said to Anna, nodding toward the great room. Schaeffer wanted privacy, Anna realized, and it was hard to find it in this part of the house. It was one large room, from the front door to the open kitchen to the oak-floored great room. At the far end of the great room were floor-to-ceiling windows and yet another deck, this one overlooking the glen below and Rocky Mountain National Park a few miles in the distance. A million-dollar house. Maybe two million.

  Schaeffer took a dozen long strides to an armchair then turned, watching Anna closely as she followed and took a seat on the couch nearest the chair. She sank into it, wilting, feeling as though her bones had suddenly lost their ability to hold her up.

  Schaeffer sat, placed the open folder on the coffee table in front of him, and peeled off his gloves. He leaned forward and turned two more pages, a scowl beginning to form on his face. “Have you been paid for this job yet?” he asked.

  “I was paid half up front, by check. I’m supposed to get the other half today.”

  “Does this Jazmin Morningstar get a copy of your work?”

  “She asked me to e-mail her the results, so I did, yesterday. A little after five o’clock.”

  He looked up. “Can you give us a copy of the canceled check later today?”

  Anna nodded. “I bank online. I’ll print out a copy.”

  “Are you aware that the Muncys don’t have a daughter?”

  “Now I am.”

  “I’m curious,” Schaeffer said, tapping the folder. “If this is a family tree, why are there only women’s names in it? Where are the men?”

  “That’s what Jazmin wanted.” Anna shrugged. “I thought she might have started her own research and run into dead ends. Sometimes it’s harder to find information on women. They marry, change names. She only wanted me to research the women in Susan’s direct line. Burial places, their husbands’ names, how many children they had.”

  “But not the boy children?”

  “Right.”

  Anna’s right hand found her wedding ring. She kneaded it with her thumb, as she often did to calm her nerves, sliding it to the knuckle and back. Sean. In the two years since her husband had died only the empty shape, the outline, of her life had gone on. The heart and soul of it were behind her, fading into the ever-receding past.

  “What are these names in parentheses?”

  “Women’s maiden names.”

  “And these?” Schaeffer pulled two sheet-sized black-and-white photos from a pocket at the back of the folder.

  “Jazmin said they were family homes and I should include them in the final package because her mother liked to put together photo albums.”

  Schaeffer laid the photos on the coffee table. “They’re just houses. I don’t see any people.”

  Anna didn’t know what to say. She did the work she was paid for. It was how she earned her living. Was she supposed to question why there were no people in the photos? It wasn’t her business. She rarely saw her clients, in fact. She took on projects through her website and emailed clients the results. Even a city the size of Denver, sixty miles to the southeast, couldn’t offer enough work to pay her bills, much less Elk Park, a mountain town of nine thousand.

  Schaeffer turned the photos face down. “Looks like someone wrote addresses on the backs.”

  At the sound of wheels scratching along the wood floor, Anna turned. Two men were pushing a gurney from the hall to the front door. Atop it was a zippered vinyl bag holding Susan Muncy’s body. Tom followed behind, his arms hanging heavy at his sides. He was watching strangers take his wife’s lifeless body from his house as other strangers sat in his great room and still more roamed his house, poking and prodding. Anna’s heart ached for him.

  She was grateful she’d never seen Sean that way. Her husband had given her a kiss goodbye on a bright autumn day and walked out of the house, mandolin in hand, on his way to a bluegrass jam with friends in Loveland, twenty-five miles east. Several hours later, driving home, he was hit by a truck heading in the opposite direction. The truck’s driver had fallen asleep and crossed the median.

  It was Lonnie Schaeffer who had come to her door that night. She heard herself scream, once. Then she ran into her living room, staring back at him, her mouth wide, unable to speak. Children. After the first shock, that was what she thought. We were going to have children. She’d seen the detective only a handful of times since then, mostly downtown, at a distance, and every time she was reminded of that night. So she avoided him. Like Sean’s friends avoided her.

&n
bsp; Tom stopped behind Schaeffer’s chair as the gurney left the house. “Where are they taking her?” he asked.

  “The county morgue. I’ll leave you a name and telephone number. And my number.”

  “An autopsy?”

  “Yes.”

  A grimace formed on Tom’s thin, rectangular face. “She would’ve hated that.”

  “It’s necessary. I’m sorry.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that.” Tom stuffed his hands into the pockets of his khaki-colored pants. “Except the person who was here when she died.” He glared at Anna.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Muncy. I didn’t know your wife, but—”

  “Yes you did,” Tom said. It was a statement, not an argument. “And you know Jazmin, and Darlene Richelle, and the whole rat’s nest of them.”

  “Mr. Muncy, please.” Schaeffer stood and extended a hand toward the hall. “Wait in the bedroom if you would. Two more minutes.”

  As soon as Muncy left the great room, Schaeffer looked back at Anna then gestured at the folder. “I need to hang onto that for now.”

  “All right.”

  “Mr. Muncy seems to think you know Jazmin Morningstar as more than just a client. Any idea why?”

  “No idea. It makes no sense. I don’t know her, I don’t know him. Or his wife.” Anna felt a queasiness in her stomach. She directed her gaze out the windows of the great room to the mountain peaks in the distance. It was a trick her parents had taught her on family car trips long ago. If you feel sick, look out the window, focus on something far away.

  She wanted to go, to leave this house. Jackson was waiting for her in the car. She hadn’t done anything wrong. At most she’d been foolish, agreeing to make a delivery to people she didn’t know. But she needed the money, and it had seemed like a bargain. Thirty dollars extra, on top of her usual fee, just to deliver the results of her research. She should have said no.

  “And the door was open when you got here?”

  “A few inches. You can see where snow blew into the foyer.” She gestured toward the front door. Melted snow dotted the tile in the foyer, and tiny rivers followed the grout lines into the kitchen, puddling near the kitchen island. The island’s granite shone like a polished Mercedes under the pendant lights above.