She knows too much, p.1
She Knows Too Much, page 1
part #2 of If Only She Knew Mystery Series Series
SHE
KNOWS
TOO
MUCH
SHE
KNOWS
TOO
MUCH
IF ONLY SHE KNEW
MYSTERY SERIES
Book 2
PAMELA CRANE
Tabella House
Raleigh, North Carolina
Copyright © 2023 by Pamela Crane
Tabella House
Raleigh, NC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without written permission.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
www.pamelacrane.com
ISBN: 978-1-940662-329 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-940662-299 (eBook)
Thank you for supporting authors and literacy by purchasing this book. Want to add more gripping reads to your library? As the author of more than a dozen award-winning and bestselling books, you can find all of Pamela Crane’s works on her website at www.pamelacrane.com.
Note to the Reader
Part 1
Tara Christie
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Tape 1
Alice in Chains
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Tape 2
Little Red Corvette
Part 2
Ginger Mallowan
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Tape 3
Mad About You
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Tape 4
Creep
Part 3
Sloane Apara
Chapter 25
Tape 5
One Sweet Day
Chapter 26
Tape 6
Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part 4
Tara
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Tape 7
Jagged Little Pill
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Tape 8
Exposé
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Tape 9
Oh Tara
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Epilogue
Ginger
About the Author
Enjoy what you read?
To Jamie.
I’ll always cherish our early days when you wouldn’t give up on the slow learner in me. Even when it took handwritten notes back and forth until you had taught me enough sign language to get by. You gave me a most precious gift—sisterhood, connection, friendship—as you patiently revealed to me the beauty of American Sign Language. And I’m still learning!
Note to the Reader
This series features characters you may not be used to reading about, but who I chose for a specific reason:
Sloane: a Deaf woman who runs a popular event planning company that she built from the ground up. Inspired by my brother, sister-in-law, along with a Nigerian friend of mine, I sprinkled bits of Deaf and Nigerian culture and history into Sloane that will develop throughout the series.
Ginger: an older woman beleaguered by chronic pain due to poverty and a tough life that took a toll on her body. We often take for granted our ease of access to decent healthcare, mold-free homes, or fresh produce. But not everyone grows up with the same means, especially in rural areas. Those who are forced to battle daily illness or pain are some of the toughest people I know. Luckily Ginger’s got a sense of humor and spunk that help her thrive.
And last but not least Tara: that co-dependent friend we all know and love who can drive us nuts but whose heart is made of gold. She’s the kind of friend who makes you family—with all the good, the bad, and the crazy.
Why did I build a world around these characters? Representation matters. Growing up familiar with closed caption and TTYs (an early version of a phone for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people) and admiring Marlee Matlin, I always wanted to see more Deaf people in entertainment. So I decided to write what I wanted to read.
I also grew up on Golden Girls, but it showed a Glamour Shots version of what aging can be like. Not every hero can leap mountains. Not every heroine can scale tall buildings. Some have arthritis. Others are clumsy. And Ginger’s here for those types of heroes.
I hope you enjoy my quirky cast as they draw you into a murder mystery that will fire up those brain cells! Their adventures—or should I say misadventures—are only just beginning…
Part 1
Tara Christie
Chapter 1
A breeze brushed over me, scattering dry dirt, revealing the pale gray of a recently buried hand. The waist-high dog fennel bent around my boots, and my hair whipped across my face, as if trying to cover my eyes from the grisly sight. But there it was, as undeniable as the dying April sun: a dead body hidden in my field.
Unfortunately, I knew who that hand belonged to. Let’s just say we hadn’t been on the best of terms. Some might even call us archenemies if we were characters in a Marvel comic. Which we weren’t. So that, I guessed, made me a prime murder suspect.
After getting all the screams and gagging out of the way, I turned to my husband, wondering what we were supposed to do. Chris hadn’t pulled his eyes away from the body since we found it. Only the hand was visible at first. Chris theorized an animal—a coyote, probably—had tried to dig up the body and gotten spooked.
“I’ll call the police,” he said, whipping his cell phone from his pocket. “Just…try not to say anything…incriminating when they get here, okay?”
Chris knew just as much as I did how bad this looked…for me in particular. As he wandered across the meadow, he held his phone out, trying to find a signal.
My sister-in-law’s Great Pyrenees, Puffin, had been trying to dig up the rectangular patch of freshly turned soil ever since my scream summoned Chris and Peace to the scene. She was a beautiful animal, loyal and loving toward her human family, but the bane of foxes and coyotes stupid enough to menace the horses on Peace’s property—the Christie family homestead that Peace had inherited after her parents’ death. Although Peace’s horse farm—the Rockin’ C Ranch—was a solid five minutes away by car, Puffin preferred taking the scenic route through the fields where the edges of our properties met.
Puffin’s usually immaculate white coat was stained sandy brown up to her chest. The harder Peace yanked on her leash, the harder the huge dog resisted.
“Peace, would you please take your wooly mammoth away from here? She is really determined to dig up that…whatever it is.”
Puffin had managed to unearth another body part that looked to be an elbow in a torn chambray shirt, or was it a denim-clad knee, maybe? I wasn’t sure which, and I didn’t want to find out. My stomach was already in knots, on the verge of spewing lunch.
“I’m trying, I’m trying!” Peace finally managed to drag Puffin to where the edge of the hayfield met the wood line, then tied her up to a pine sapling along with the horses, cropping contentedly at the tall fescue.
The afternoon had begun innocuously enough.
It had been ages since I last walked the perimeter of the property line. The plan was to see where I could fence in more pasture, since our horse rescue was preparing to bring in a new herd of horses we saved from the kill pen. I figured I’d invite my best friend Ginger Mallowan and her widowed daughter-in-law Sloane Apara out for a leisurely trail ride. As it turned out, there was nothing leisurely about this.
Skipping like kids over ant hills and broken tree limbs, the mood light and breezy, I was pretty sure even Sloane, who was Deaf, heard my scream when I nearly tripped over the rotting hand, protruding from the shallow grave, like a cinematic jump scare. As the three of us stood shoulder to shoulder, I was the first to break the stunned silence.
“I…I know who it is.”
“Get out of town,” said Ginger. “How on earth could you know that?” She interpreted her question in American Sign Language for Sloane.
“You can recognize a man by his hand?” Sloane signed to me, though it took me a moment to catch the sign for recognize. “I look at hands all day and even I wouldn’t be able to identify a person that way.”
For several weeks, Sloane had been teaching me ASL in exchange for free horseback riding lessons. I wouldn’t say I was fluent yet, but I could hold my own in a conversation.
It was a shock when Sloane mentioned wanting to ride, because somebody with
“Look at the ring.” I signed the word for ring, then pointed at where a thick, putty-colored finger poked up from the ground.
I had instantly recognized the gold band with a ruby gem. It belonged to the one person who had the means to hurt me from beyond the grave. And his father just so happened to be the judge, whose money, power, and connections had enabled him to hold our little town of Bloodson Bay under his fat thumb for decades.
“That ring belongs to Victor Valance.” The name slid off my tongue in a dreadful whisper.
“Judge Ewan Valance’s son?” Sloane signed, eyes wide.
“The one and only.”
“Oh, darlin’, you’re in deep do-do,” Ginger said, patting me on the shoulder. She was old enough to claim her verbal filter was broken. “That’s the one family you don’t wanna mess with.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Chris approached the other side of the grave. “The police are on their way. As long as we stick to the facts, everything will be fine.”
All three sets of eyes shifted to me—Ginger’s full of terror, Sloane’s full of confusion, and Chris’s full of worry. I could already feel that rotting hand wrapping its ring-bejeweled fingers around my neck, choking the life out of me.
Chapter 2
The sky darkened. The stars flickered. And Victor Valance’s broken face looked up at me. I had never seen a skull blown to bits before, but now I would never forget it.
“We really should stop meeting like this, Tara.” Detective Martina Carillo-Hughes shook her head at me with a stern look, as if we had bumped into each other at Debbie’s Diner, a popular local greasy spoon, instead of on my farm gazing down at a corpse.
“Do you think I like all this drama?” It was a rhetorical question, but Detective Hughes seemed to mull it over.
Drama was a bit of an understatement, but I didn’t dare say the word murder. I didn’t want to directly associate myself with that word in front of her.
“I’m starting to think you might. You seem to attract a lot of trouble, Tara. The deadly kind, if you catch my drift.”
Detective Hughes, or Marti as I sometimes called her if I was feeling sassy, had a point. After Ginger’s son Benson was stabbed to death last year, and my husband was arrested for it—and later released, mind you—trouble latched on to me like a foal to its mama. Last year my husband was the suspect, this year it was me. God forbid our daughter Nora should make the list next year.
“Officer Alonzo, make sure they bag him and tag him,” Detective Hughes yelled over her shoulder to one of the policemen milling about.
“Yes, ma’am,” the tallest and bulkiest one in uniform replied.
The forensics team had finished unearthing the entire body by now. The stench of decomposition was thick enough to cut with a knife. The macabre scene was lit by the headlights of the crime scene van, idling nearby. Two attendants manhandled the corpse by the shoulders from the grave, then rested a moment before finagling it, with some difficulty, into a body bag.
That was when I saw what I wish I hadn’t.
The fragmented skull was a skull only in the academic sense, with chunks of brain tissue oozing out of the fissures. Where Victor’s face should have been there was a red, pulpy mass, looking like a half-eaten wedge of watermelon with strands of flesh and hair clinging to it, and deep black craters in place of facial orifices. I thought I even saw seeds, but then the seeds moved. They were carrion beetles, flat and alien and creepy, burrowing through the layers of mutilated flesh. One of the men casually flicked the bugs off with his gloved hand, then zipped up the bag before he and his partner hoisted the body onto the gurney. As they wheeled it past me, I heard a singsong voice chanting beside me:
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…”
Peace was grinning puckishly when I turned to look at her.
That’s when I lost it.
Holding onto my churning gut, I ran into the brush and fell to my knees and barfed up my lunch. I sat back on my haunches, wiping the tears off my burning cheeks. I felt a hand on my back, rubbing small circles, and looked up.
“You okay there?” It was Ginger. And ironically I could go for a ginger ale right about now.
“The smell…the face…the bugs…it’s…too much,” I said as a drip of spittle fell to the grass. I rose unsteadily to my feet and watched them push the gurney across the pasture, barreling recklessly over fire ant mounds and chickweed patches in the advancing dark.
“Too much for your stomach to handle?” Marti said as she approached me. “I get it. It’s not every day you see a man’s head blown off. At least for most people.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“You ever see something like this before?” Marti probed.
“Goodness no, Detective!” Ginger interjected for me. “Why would she have seen something like this before?”
“Oh, I dunno. If she’s the one who did it.”
“What?” My body stiffened. “Why would you think that I’m capable of killing a person?”
“Maybe if that person were someone you hated.” Her long pause let it sink in. “I think you’ve got a good idea who this is.”
I glanced sidelong at Ginger; her wide eyes said don’t say a word. Then I remembered what Chris had said: try not to say anything incriminating.
“It could be any farmer from around here,” I answered. “The boots, the snap-front work shirt, jeans. Your standard Tractor Supply wardrobe.”
“An astute observation. But what about the ring, Tara? That didn’t come from Tractor Supply, now did it?”
Marti was going to bulldog me until I cracked. Might as well get it over with. “I happen to know Victor Valance wore a ring like that. I’m not saying it’s him, but it could be. I hope you appreciate my honesty, Detective.”
“I do, Tara. Very much. But the fact of the matter is, the body’s buried on your property. Everyone knows you and Victor had bad blood over the kill pen horses. I bet I don’t need to dig deep to find motive. All we need now is the weapon, and I’m pretty sure you have a shotgun loaded with buckshot in your house somewhere.”
“Around here, every farmer with livestock owns a shotgun loaded with buckshot,” I pointed out. “Look, I know Vic and I weren’t exactly on friendly terms, but I didn’t kill him. And even if I did—which I didn’t—what sense would it have made for me to call you and basically deliver the body to you?”
“To give the perception of innocence.” Marti cocked her head as if she had just scored the winning point.
“That would have been pretty dumb of me,” I retorted. “I wouldn’t want to draw attention to a body when there’s no way anyone would have found him way back here.”
“Seems like you put an awful lot of thought into that logic.”
I swore this woman was gunning for me and I still couldn’t figure out why. My family was cleared of the murder charges when Ginger’s son died. If Ginger could forgive me and move on, why couldn’t Detective Hughes?
“You also wouldn’t need to dig deep to find a whole lineup of people with motive to kill Victor Valance. We all know what kind of people he did business with.”
The killing kind.
“We’ll let the evidence speak for itself,” Marti said. She started walking toward the forensics guys as they loaded the body, then turned to add: “In the meantime, don’t go running off anywhere. I’ll have my eye on you, Tara Christie. And I suggest you stay out of trouble going forward.”
