Read Online To Darkness and to Death by Julia Spencer-Fleming - Free Book Online Page B

out here for a barbecue?”
    “Right now, I’m more interested in checking out the bathroom,” she said, heading around the corner toward the thrum of voices at the front of the house. She and Duane strode past the brown stalks and seed pods marking the graves of perennial borders. They crunched across part of the gravel drive, mounted the steps, and came to a halt, stymied by a logjam of searchers, all trying to squeeze through the front door at the same time. She turned for a look at the long mountain view and saw Russ Van Alstyne’s pickup parked at the edge of the drive.
    Her heart made a ridiculous, giddy ger-thump. She breathed in deeply. Okay, there was a missing person. Eugene van der Hoeven must have called the police. Although, come to think of it, Russ had told her he wasn’t going to be on duty Saturday. Maybe the department was overwhelmed and had to call him in? Logical thoughts, none of which wiped the foolish smile off her face.
    Walking into a home where there’s been a tragedy grinning your head off is just plain tacky
, her grandmother Fergusson chided. Everyone would think she knew something, had seen something. She swallowed her smile and pressed forward behind Duane with as much sobriety as she could muster.
    A petite, dark-haired woman, clad in jeans and a sweatshirt, held the door wide. She looked at the trail of leaf rot and dirt accumulating on the floor with dismay.
    Eugene van der Hoeven stood apart from the search team clustered around the table, conversing with two men in leaf-print camouflage and hunter-orange vests. The taller of the hunters was half-turned toward her. Russ’s eyes widened a fraction, then eased. The corners of his mouth crooked up in what might have been a smile.
Happy Birthday
, Clare mouthed. She ambled toward the men.
    “Chief Van Alstyne.”
    He nodded his head. “Reverend Fergusson. I didn’t expect to see you here.”
    “I volunteered for the search and rescue team last year. John Huggins finally got down to the bottom of the list and called me in.” She glanced at the older man next to him: gray-haired, what was left of it, and close to her height, but broad, with powerful shoulders and a chest like a tree stump.
    “This is Ed Castle. Ed, Reverend Clare Fergusson.”
    Clare’s hand was enveloped in a calloused grip. “Pleased to meet you,” Castle said. “Sorry it had to be under such circumstances.”
    “Are you”—she looked back and forth between them—“here to help the search?”
    “We’ve just found out about the missing girl.” Russ glanced at Eugene. “Ed and I were hunting on van der Hoeven land. We stopped in to pay our respects.”
    “Mr. van der Hoeven,” Huggins called from the dining room table. “If I can have a minute of your time?”
    Van der Hoeven ducked his head toward Clare, paused, as if he were about to make a remark, then slipped away.
    “Poor guy,” Ed Castle said. “This must be real hard on him.”
    “His sister missing?”
    “Yep. But I was thinking more along the lines of him having to put up with all these people. He’s a real private guy. Likes to keep to himself.”
    “How do you know him?” Clare said.
    “I’ve had the license to harvest timber offa Haudenosaunee for twenty, thirty years now. Had it from old Jan van der Hoeven, and now from his kids. ’Course, it’ll all be smoked once the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation gets their hands on the property.”
    “How’s that?”
    Ed Castle told Clare the details of the impending land sale. She glanced back at Eugene van der Hoeven, bent over a topo map. “He’s going to stay in this house, right? I mean, he didn’t talk like a man whose home is being sold out from underneath him.”
    “Dunno,” Castle said. “Alls I know is, no timbering licenses from the new owners. Buncha tree huggers. Don’t realize how important harvesting is to the health of the forest. Think it all happens naturally.”
    “Fergusson!” Huggins’s head popped up