Page 64 of Night Falls on Predicament Avenue
He looked in her direction then, and his fingers lifted in greeting. “Hello, Effie,” he called.
Effie scrambled to her feet.
Before she could do anything, the air was cut off in her throat as hands from behind gripped her neck. Fingers dug into the hollow of her throat, squeezing. Effie clawed at the fingers. A woman’s hands. It was a woman’s form she fell back against, and a woman’s laugh she heard as she faded into oblivion. Her eyes tried to focus, growing blurry. She stared toward the attic window of 322 Predicament Avenue. As she lost consciousness, she thought she saw a woman’s face in the attic window, hand pounding against the glass, silent in its aggression. Ghostly. As she slipped into the darkness of her mind, Effie knew she was the only one who saw the face of dead Isabelle Addington, screaming from the grave.
And now Effie would join her.
22
NORAH
Present Day
Shepherd, Iowa
“I’MAMESS,” Norah said and sank onto Otto’s porch step.
The elderly man lumbered out of his house and eased himself onto the step beside her. She never came to Otto’s place, nor Ralph’s one-level house across the street. The boys had always come to her at Aunt Eleanor’s place. But today she needed to get away from 322 Predicament Avenue. From the case files spread across her dining room table. From Sebastian’s intense study of the crime and the rumbling of his voice as he made verbal notes into his phone for his podcast. She even needed to get away from Harper—poor girl—who she’d heard throwing up in the bathroom. Harper’s pregnancy was going to come out soon, and Sebastian was going to have to deal with the reality that life was more than unsolved historical murders. Sometimes it was in-your-face trauma.
She’d faced her share, and she wished it on no one.
“What brings you over?” Otto’s breathing was a bit raspy, and Norah looked sideways at him to make sure he was all right. He noticed and added, “Oh, I’m fine. I was just working in my toolshed out back. Getting too old to be moving around heavy stuff.”
Otto and his toolshed. It was where he’d kept all his tools to garden with and tend to the bed-and-breakfast’s lawn for decades. The man was a bit of a tool hoarder, Aunt Eleanor had always stated with fondness. Otto claimed to have three different riding lawn mowers in the metal shed that he never used. Said he preferred to walk behind his self-propelled mower. He also wouldn’t let his brother Ralph or even Norah convince him to let them help him get rid of stuff that might be in his way—like the three unused riding mowers. He refused, saying he might need them someday.
“I saw him today, Otto.” Norah picked at the hole in the knee of her jeans. Frayed edges were better to pick at with her anxious energy than her cuticles, which were sore from her bad habit. “LeRoy Anderson.”
“Awww, kid, why’d you go an’ do that?” Otto’s sigh was bigger than any Norah had managed to expel. He stared across the street at Ralph’s place. “You spent all these years trying to avoid that man.”
“I don’t know.” Norah shook her head. “Sebastian didn’t want me home alone—Harper had gone shopping—and so I went with him. I ruined it too. I laid into LeRoy like it was yesterday that he killed Naomi.”
Otto nodded vehemently. “As you should. I woulda sucker punched the man. Passed LeRoy once in the department store, and it took every ounce of me not to kick over his cart and pummel him for what he did to our girl.”
Norah smiled sadly at the image. “Otto, you’d get arrested if you did that.”
“I know. It’s why I didn’t do it,” Otto groused. “Theonlyreason why I didn’t.”
“It just makes me sick,” Norah admitted. “All these years I’ve known—you’veknown, Mom and Dad have known—that it was LeRoy. Heck, even the cops have known.’
“Just not enough evidence,” Otto said. “I know, kiddo.” He patted Norah’s knee. “Unfair, isn’t it?”
“Horribly. And now? I don’t know how to process Naomi’s things just turning up out of the blue. And who was in the graveyard, Otto?”
His brows drew together, and he tapped his stubby fingers on his knees. “Don’t know. Sure is bothersome, though.”
Norah brushed away an errant tear. “I called the police, and they said they’d ‘pass it on’ and to ‘keep them posted.’Keep them posted?What does that even mean?”
“Means they don’t know what to do with it either,” Otto supplied. “Can’t really do much with old things you find in your house and out back in the yard. Cops will say it just took you thirteen years to notice Naomi never had them on her to begin with.”
“And I just happened not to see her library card on my dresser forthirteen years?” Norah spat.
Otto shrugged. “Didn’t say the police would make a lick of sense. Just said they don’t know what to do with stuff like that. Not like the case can get reopened just ’cause you ran across your sister’s wallet in the graveyard.”
“Well, it didn’t just land there all by itself!” Norah’s sarcasm overwhelmed her, her nerves spiking so high that she could see black shutters at the corners of her eyes. She needed to calm herself. Needed to think rationally. Needed to draw strength from someone other than herself because she sure as heck didn’t have any. “Otto?”
“What is it, kiddo?” He turned his head to give her a grandfatherly understanding scrunch of his face.
“Do you think if I called Dover again, he’d do something?”
