CHAPTER SIX
“Lance, just let me talk to Dad,” Gwen requested irritably, paper rustling in the background of their phone connection. What was she doing working this late on a Thursday evening? “I was hoping he’d stop by the new storefront and measure my office.”
“He’s, uh…” Lance could have kicked himself. What had possessed him to let Gwen think he was at the family homestead? He hadn’t wanted her to know he was at his new place, that’s why. He had no choice but to make up a story. Besides, he was the youngest, so his father should have known he wasn’t good at keeping secrets. “With Noah.”
“Yeah, isn’t that crazy that he found a body in the wall of his house?” Gwen must be really distracted if she hadn’t caught the hesitation in Lance’s tone. “It’s horrible when you think about it.”
“Yeah, you didn’t know Sophia Morton like I did. She attended summer camp together the year Emma went missing.”
“And the authorities think there’s a connection? What the heck is going on back there?”
“I would be surprised if there wasn’t a correlation,” Lance admitted, quietly closing the self-winding metal measuring tape so that Gwen didn’t hear the sound. “It’s too much of a coincidence not to be connected in some way.”
“I still can’t get over the fact that Noah would buy up the old Yoder farmhouse the minute he got home. It must have been the fastest closing in county history.” Gwen was hitting a little too close to home, and Lance needed to figure out a way to change the subject. “Noah doesn’t even know what he wants to do with his future, so how can he be so sure he can afford the payments on that kind of mortgage? The property associated with that farm has got to be at least twenty acres. It was a dairy farm, once upon a time.”
Leave it to Gwen to be the practical one.
“Noah mentioned to me this morning that he’s thinking of approaching Miles Schaeffer for an electrician job, maybe talking to them about a partnership and taking on the management responsibilities while they handle the trucks, doing repair calls and such.”
Lance had spent the last hour taking measurements of each room in his new home, saving the basement for last. He hadn’t been ready to call it a night when he and his dad had left Noah’s place. The renovations his brother had done over the course of the last couple of months had been simply astounding. It spurred Lance’s desire to get started on his own repairs. He wanted to make something of what he’d been given, as well.
“Really? That would work. Have you seen what electricians are making these days? Trade jobs are going unfulfilled, so the demand is relatively high for skilled labor.”
“Hey, sis, I have another call coming through,” Lance said with a wince. He’d be mincemeat if Gwen caught on to him making up excuses and the secret got out. “I’ll have Dad give you a call tomorrow.”
Three seconds later, Lance disconnected the call and shoved his phone inside the front pocket of his jeans. It would make his life a hell of a lot easier if the rest of his siblings followed suit and came back home already. Jace was supposed to be here in a few weeks, while Gwen wasn’t due home until sometime in September. Maybe he would just avoid her calls for a while to make things easier for himself.
Leave it to Mitch to come home twelve years to the month from the time Emma Irwin disappeared. Hell, if the town thought the Kendall siblings had anything to do with murder or kidnapping before, the timing of their homecoming certainly wasn’t helping things. All that the local townsfolk needed to start wagging their tongues was a coincidence or two to encourage the gristmill to churn out a few tall tales.
Lance reached for the dangling string that had once been white with every intention of turning off the bulb so that he could return upstairs until something caught his eye. The metal access door to the HVAC squirrel cage was slightly skewed. Whoever had changed the filter last must not have secured the quarter-turn twist latches properly. It would only take a second to make sure the filter was good to go and slip the panel back in place.
Lance sighed in resignation, knowing it would drive him crazy if he didn’t take care of it now. Thankfully, his father had the utilities turned on the day before Lance arrived into town. Lance had fired up the pilot lights on the gas appliances that still required them, and he also checked the meter for an initial usage reading. What little light there was from the lone bulb gave off enough brightness for him to see what he was doing.
He hooked the tape measure to his belt before turning the latch thumbscrews to disengage them and removing the thin sheet of metal. He might as well make sure there wasn’t something in the track of the access door while he was down here, and he needed to determine the filter size so that he could get replacements.
People never changed these damn things as often as they should. A monthly change on an older house like this one wasn’t beyond reason, especially since he was going to be kicking up dust with all his repairs. He was even thinking it might be a good idea to get all the vents swept out professionally to get things started on the right track and to see if they had any mold or excessive dust in them. Furnace filters would be one of the many things he could add to his list for tomorrow’s run to the hardware store.
“What the hell…”
There was a small tin box lying on its side with one of those magnets attached to it, almost as if it had fallen from somewhere inside the unit. Lance leaned the metal panel against the wall before kneeling to get a better look at what had come loose from inside the ductwork. It was larger than an Altoids container. It kind of looked like an old Velvet Pipe and Cigarette Tobacco tin.
Lance hadn’t seen one of those around going on ten years or more, so it wouldn’t be much of a surprise to find out the heater needed to be replaced due to its age and infrequent periodic maintenance.
He picked up what he thought would be some discarded tobacco container. It was far from something that belonged inside the furnace’s ductwork.
Lance shifted his weight so that he could shed more light on the object in his hand. It reminded him of his grandfather’s habit of smoking a pipe when he would come over for Sunday dinner. Of course, Mary Kendall never allowed her father to smoke his old Velvet tobacco inside her house.
Lance shook the tin to find that something was still inside, though he doubted it was tobacco from the weight of it. He carefully pried opened the lid, hoping like hell it wasn’t some dead carcass. Old man Fetter was known for making odd contraptions, and it wouldn’t surprise Lance if this was some kind of rigged mousetrap of some sort.
“Huh.”
Polaroid pictures.
Who the hell used Polaroid pictures anymore?
The photographs appeared faded with age, but it was hard to tell what the subject was with the limited lighting. He began to put the top back on the tin when he abruptly stopped mid-motion.
There was absolutely no way in hell was he looking at a picture of Emma Irwin.
A sick feeling set up shop in his stomach. What were the odds of him finding photographs in his new home after his brother had discovered a body in the drywall of his house? This had to be somebody’s idea of a sick joke. Would his brother take a prank this far just to spook him?
Lance tilted the box to show himself that he’d been mistaken, but Emma’s long brunette hair was easy to recognize.
“Son of a bitch.”
Lance replaced the cover and then quickly stood, seating the metal covering in the slats so that the ductwork was secure and the filter was in place. It wasn’t long before he’d cast the basement into darkness, taking the basement stairs to the kitchen two at a time. He’d already taken his cell phone out to make a call to the sheriff’s department when he thought better of it.
Noah and their father had explained how Sheriff Percy was in the process of being removed from office, causing quite a stir among the longtime residents. It would be better to contact Detective Kendrick with what Lance had found, though he couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with Emma Irwin’s disappearance. Those pictures had been there for a very long time from the looks of things. It couldn’t be his brother fooling around with him.
Lance forced himself to stop at the small kitchen counter and set the tin box down on the laminate surface. There had to be a reasonable explanation as to why these photographs were hidden in the old Fetter house.
Arthur Fetter had lived in Blyth Lake since the day he’d been born, so it wasn’t a stretch that he and his family had known the Irwins. Right? Maybe the man’s grandson or granddaughter had stored the pictures in a vent up in one of the bedrooms. They might have stored them away as mementos for when they visited their grandfather in the summers.
It was a plausible explanation, but Lance couldn’t bring himself to believe the rationalization he’d snatched out of midair.
“Open it,” Lance urged himself, his thoughts automatically contradicting that idea due to fingerprints. He could already hear Noah’s response to that excuse, especially considering his reaction to the cemetery idea. Was he overreacting? Honestly, the cemetery idea had some relevance if what he thought was in the box was really inside the tin can. “Shit.”
Lance’s fingerprints were already covering the outside of the evidence, so it wouldn’t matter if he took another look to verify his suspicions. It could very well be souvenirs one of the Fetter family members had kept as a token, but there was only one way to find out. And he certainly didn’t want to call Noah or Detective Kendrick if this turned out to be a harmless keepsake. Hell, it might not even be Emma. It might be another girl with the same style of hair.
The tin cover hit the counter with a shrill ting, revealing Emma Irwin’s smile sure as the day he’d last seen her.
Lance lifted the picture away from the small stack, his chest becoming painful when his gaze landed on the next photograph.
Sophia Morton.
Holy shit.
He stared in disbelief at the girl whose body had been found in his brother’s house.
His conscious mind was telling him that he’d discovered photographs of victims—seven girls were counted after he’d set each Polaroid on the counter—but he was still in denial. Besides, there was one photograph of a teenager who he knew one hundred percent to be alive. There had to be a reasonable explanation as to why these pictures were in this box inside the heating unit of a house that had been sitting empty for the last nine months.
Lance couldn’t come up with one plausible explanation.
He’d set his phone on the counter before taking the lid off the tin can, so he picked it up with an unsteady hand and speed-dialed his brother before he could formulate the words that might come out of his mouth.
He was still staring in horror at the photographs, but in particular Emma and Sophia, when Noah finally answered on the fifth ring.
“Hello?”
“Noah, you need to call Detective Kendrick and get him over to my place as fast as you can.” Lance swallowed the painful lump in his throat as he finally uttered what had been thrashing around in his head. “I think Arthur Fetter murdered Sophia Morton, as well as Emma Irwin and a bunch of other girls. You better get that detective’s ass moving, like, right now.”