Chapter Seventy-One Piper
Chapter Seventy-One
Piper
The doorbell rang, and Piper looked up from the diary, fighting the sense of disorientation that came from being abruptly ejected from Dottie’s mind.
“Poison?” Kiersten whispered.
“She must be wrong . . .” Rosamund said, shaking her head. “I know he’s awful . . . but would he really try to kill her?”
“People magazine and Dateline always have stories about people trying to kill their spouses instead of just divorcing them,” Kiersten said, clutching the meat thermometer. “And that’s now.”
Piper gripped the diary so hard her knuckles turned white.
“And back in 1965, Dickie had even more motivation to kill his wife. Plus he had means and opportunity. His father-in-law’s money, business, and political connections, the fact that his wife was infertile, his political ambitions, and the social stigma of divorce.
It would all make murder a far more palatable option than divorce. ”
“If you happened to be a monstrous person with no conscience,” Rosamund added. “Which Dickie obviously was.”
“Or is currently,” Kiersten added.
The doorbell rang a second time.
“Rosamund, can you get the door?” Kiersten asked. “I’ve got to make the rolls.”
“It must be Miles and Valentina and Reggie,” Piper said.
“Wait.” Rosamund wiped her hands on her apron. “Do we tell people about this? Or not?”
They all looked at each other.
“No.” Piper shook her head. “We don’t.”
“Why not?” Kiersten asked.
“Because we don’t know the whole story,” Piper said.
“And we don’t want to impugn the character of a living person with diaries written sixty years ago.
Maybe Dottie was trying to tarnish his reputation.
Maybe she was crazy. First, we get all the facts.
Then if it looks like something . . . bad .
. . happened on Beaverbrook Lane back in 1965, we go to the police. ”
“Do we confront Richard and Margaret Davis with what we know?” Kiersten asked.
“Definitely not. We tell no one else. For now,” Piper said firmly.
“Okay.” Rosamund raised a breadcrumb-caked hand. “Blood mother’s oath of silence.”
The doorbell rang again, and Piper opened the door for Miles, Reggie, and Valentina.
Simultaneously, a thundering sound reverberated through the house as Kiersten’s family returned home from the Air and Space Museum and came in through the mudroom.
Matthew, Luke, James, and Johnny flung their shoes, coats, and hats into the air, disrobing as they moved through the house, only to find the neighbor girls in the backyard with a new puppy, causing them to stampede out the back door into the frigid dusk in their stocking feet.
“In case you’re wondering,” Kiersten called out to Piper as she gestured toward the shoes and coats strewn across the floor. “This is how I end up with socks in my trees.”
They called the kids inside, and everyone gathered in Kiersten’s kitchen to serve themselves, buffet-style, from the food laid out on the kitchen counter. The kids took plates of mashed potatoes and chicken nuggets onto the screened-in porch, where they ate with the dog, despite the autumn chill.
The adults crammed into the classroom / dining room and gathered around the table, where they discussed childhood pets, Las Vegas, the six new homes going up on Haskel Avenue, and recent news stories about unidentified flying objects in the night sky over New Jersey.
“And speaking of anomalies, I noticed something else odd the other day,” Miles said, plucking a dinner roll from the basket on the table.
“What’s that?” Garrett shifted his chair, making room for Piper to sit down after getting a second helping of mashed potatoes.
“Someone’s been tampering with my wildlife cameras.”
Kiersten and Piper exchanged a look.
“Tampering in what way?” Piper asked.
“The cameras aren’t complicated,” Miles explained. “They’re solar powered with a simple on/off switch on the side. Someone keeps flipping it to off.”
Reggie looked up sharply. “I could have sworn someone was poking around my backyard yesterday morning. It was about 4:30 a.m. I lift weights out in the garage before I come over and get you for our run.” He gestured at Kiersten with a forkful of pork loin.
“Something bumped into the trash cans behind my garage. I thought it was a raccoon. I went out back to check, and whatever it was ran away, but it sounded big. Bigger than a raccoon.”
“I also found a strange thing,” Valentina said, leaning a little closer to Reggie. “This morning, I go out to get my newspaper, and there is a notebook paper, nailed to the tree in front of my house.”
Piper swallowed. “This paper . . . was it blank?”
Valentina shook her head, curly dark hair undulating as she moved. “No. It had nasty things on it.” She made a motion with her fingers. “Like someone painted on it . . . with blood.”
Kiersten swallowed. “At the Harvest Festival, Chip told me the neighborhood wasn’t as safe as it used to be. He told me to keep my wits about me, or something like that.”
Piper narrowed her eyes as her mind churned through the possibilities, searching for a link, a connection.
Hawkeye Slaughter, the sick bastard actively making threats against her on X.
Alex Orlov, the fourteen-year-old kid who continued to stalk her daughter.
And Richard, the eighty-something-year-old man next door who tried to kill his wife sixty years ago.
And what about Chip and Trey Davis, with their own career and political ambitions? Did they know what had happened sixty years ago? How far would they go to protect family secrets?
She looked at her neighbors. Good, decent people, all of them. They deserved to know about the threats she could identify . . . with the exception of Richard, for the time being.
She took a deep breath and told them about the traffic jam she’d created and the threats from Hawkeye Slaughter, about the worms and the cockroaches and the man who’d shown up at her house with a bag of sex toys.
About the strange papers nailed to the tree in front of her house and the Cleaver house.
It felt cathartic, to say it all out loud. Now they knew. Now they could protect themselves . . . but from who?