Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet - Darynda Jones Page 0,109

something, so I came over here.”

“You really need to leave. She may not look like much, but that woman has a wicked left hook.” I glared at her over my shoulder. “Freaking cheater. How the f**k did she wield a cast-iron skillet? She’s the size of a tennis ball.” But I’d lost Harper. She was staring at Mrs. Beecher’s back, a combination of astonishment and anguish in her eyes. I had anguish in my eyes, too, but for a completely different reason.

“Harper,” I whispered, trying to coax her back to me. Thankfully, Mrs. Beecher seemed to be unable to hear anything under a dull roar. “Sweetheart, what do you remember?”

Harper’s huge brown eyes glanced down at me but didn’t quite focus. “Her grandson,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “Dewey was a little older than me. He lived with us. With Mrs. Beecher in her apartment.”

The pain ebbed slightly, the throbbing becoming almost tolerable. “What happened, hon? She stayed with you at your grandparents’ house while your parents went on their honeymoon. Did her grandson hurt you?”

Her expression was so distant, I was afraid she wouldn’t answer. But after a minute, she said, “No. Not me.” She put her hands over her mouth. “A little boy. I think he killed a little boy.”

My eyes slammed shut in a feeble attempt to block the mental image her words had conjured.

“Mrs. Beecher found Dewey. He was trying to wake the little boy up, but he couldn’t. That’s when she saw me.”

I looked back at her. “Mrs. Beecher? She saw you nearby?”

“Yes. We were playing hide-and-seek in the barn, but Dewey got mad when the little boy found him. I’m not really sure what happened, but they started wrestling. Dewey got him down and sat on him until he stopped struggling. Stopped breathing.” Harper shut her own eyes, and tears spilled out from them. Then she jumped, remembering more. “I came here. I came to ask Mrs. Beecher why she did it. Why she covered it up.”

Mrs. Beecher had apparently found what she’d been looking for. She was headed back our way. I had to hurry. “Harper, what did she do? What did Mrs. Beecher do that day when you were in that barn?”

“She grabbed me.” Harper refocused on her arms. “She had sharp nails and she shook me. Said that Dewey had accidently killed a rabbit. A white rabbit. And that if I ever told anyone, he would do the same to me. Then she put the rabbit in a suitcase and brought him back to the city with us.”

My shock must have shown.

Harper nodded as sadness welled in her eyes. “But it wasn’t a rabbit. I remember now. That little boy is buried somewhere on our property. In a red suitcase.”

My lungs seized. Cookie told me there’d been a missing child from Peralta around that time, and Peralta and Bosque Farms sat back to back. It was hard to tell where one stopped and the other began. The case had never been solved.

Well, it was certainly about to be.

Still pretending to be unconscious, I lowered my lashes to slits as Mrs. Beecher ambled near. I could see just enough to make out her image as she shuffled into view. Carrying an ice pick. An ice pick. What the hell? This woman was cold. Harper gasped and huddled over me protectively. It was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever done for me.

The door above us opened, and heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. Sadly, it couldn’t have been Uncle Bob. Not enough time. And Uncle Bob almost always yelled things like, APD! Get your hands up! This guy didn’t yell anything.

I cringed as the guy from the pictures stepped beside me. Partly because he was ginormous, almost twice the height of Mrs. Beecher, but mostly because shit just got real. Now I’d have to outrun both of them with Barbara oozing out of Fred.

“Who are you?” he asked me. He apparently talked to spaghetti, as I was doing my best impression of a wet noodle.

“This woman wants to take you away from me. We’re going to have to plant her in the ground so she can grow.”

He lowered his head. “I don’t think I want to do that anymore.”

“I don’t want to either, but I need you here with me, honeybun. Who else is going to do the yard work?”

The yard work?

“I know, Grandma, but—”

The f**king yard work?

“No buts. Now, you take care of her like you did Miss