Stolen Secrets: A Collection Of Riveting Mysteries Read online

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  CONTENTS

  The Painting Murders: The Beginning

  The Painting Murders: Book 1

  The Painting Murders: Book 2

  The Secret Letter: The Beginning

  Secret Letter: Darkness Past

  Secret Letter: Book 2

  THE PAINTING MURDERS: THE BEGINNING

  1

  BROKEN BIRD

  Having already crusted her forearms, clay splattered thirty-eight-year-old Kimberly Jannis’s apron and cheap sweats. Her bare foot pumped the pedal under the turntable. The potter’s wheel whirled to life. Kimberly pressed, squeezed, and pulled the soft clay upward and outward into a hollow shape—the beginnings of a new vase. As she pumped, Kimberly blew at an agitating strand of black hair glued to her chiseled face that was both fiercely beautiful and hardened by years of silence. She was the type of woman that could cut a man down with a sidelong glance. Perhaps that would save her tonight.

  Nearby, Harold Gatts, a graying man turned heavyset in his later years, locked the final glass door cabinet lining the walls of Gatts Jannis Pottery and Antiquities. He had been watching Kim closely these past few weeks with a question on the tip of his tongue. Ask away, Kimberly taunted her mentor/business partner as she worked the wheel.

  “I’m leaving for a few days,” Harold finally broke the heavy silence. With his bushy gray mustache, saggy cheeks peppered with white stubble, and tiny eyes behind glasses shaped like flipped orange slices, he had the look of a walrus. He fixed the suspenders wrapping over his sky-blue button-up. “Make sure you lock up after you’re finished.”

  “Drive safe,” Kimberly replied coldly.

  Harold leaned on his cane and waddled to the door. He grabbed the handle with his meaty hand and turned back to give Kimberly a final look. Instead of asking his question, he limped onto the Northampton sidewalk and vanished into the night.

  Kimberly pumped the pedal harder. The turntable whirled faster as she shaped the clay. Her heart rate quickened. It was never her intent to push Harold away. He’d been like a second father to her, but Kimberly’s eyes were on grander things. Prospects that would catapult her out of his little failing shop on Riverside and into the heart of Northampton’s downtown: a place where the world would see her art.

  Suddenly, the power cut out.

  Light from the street lamps streamed through the quaint shop’s bamboo blinds, making jail bars across the floor.

  Kimberly stopped pedaling and let the turntable slow down. The wet clay sculpture fell into a volcano-shaped blob. Her breathing quickened.

  Smash!

  Kimberly craned her head back and studied the ceiling.

  Something shattered. Something else broke.

  Kimberly recognized the origin of the noise.

  Her private collection.

  She jolted out of her bench, sending it to its side, and grabbed a crusty rag to wipe the hardening clay from her palms and fingers. She pulled open the door behind the counter and bolted up the flight of stairs sandwiched between two tight walls.

  Not now. Not like this, Kimberly begged. Her stained hands fumbled through her keyring, finding the small key that opened the red door. Holding her breath, she twisted the key in the lock and let the door fall open into the black room. She stopped in the threshold. The towel slipped from her fingers and clumped beside her bare foot with a faded scorpion tattoo running along her heel. Her prized 19th century Satsuma pottery vase and a dozen other porcelain artifacts were shattered on the floor. Moonlight spilled through a singular sealed circular window at the back of the room and cast a spotlight on the bleeding crow lying amidst the jagged fragments.

  On its side, the black bird spread and flapped one of its damaged wings. Purple innards leaked from the red gash across its belly. Crimson pooled under its black feathers and filled the lines of hardwood floor. With cautious steps, Kimberly approached the dying bird. At the end of the potter’s trek, the crow’s wing sank to the floor and stayed spread out, like a black fan dipped in blood.

  Kimberly’s mouth went dry and her muscles tensed. She’d seen this before, many years ago. Just like then, instinct only told her one thing.

  Run.

  Click.

  She twisted back to the silhouetted figure standing in front of the closed door. Kimberly backed over the dead bird.

  The figure took a step with her. Shadow cloaked the person or thing in the darkness of the stuffy room.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” Kimberly bluffed. A bead of sweat made a racetrack down her clay-stained cheek. “You got the wrong person.”

  A piece of glass nicked Kim’s sole as she backed up. It opened her skin and sent her bumping into a bamboo shelf. The antiques rattled, clinking together. Kim grabbed a hand-painted amphora, one of her first creations, something with significant sentimental value, and launched it across the room.

  The figure ducked the projectile and didn’t bother turning back to watch it explode against the door. The person moved closer. The walls of the room closed in on Kimberly. The remaining wet clay on her hands had dried and cracked like dead earth. She set her jaw and glared at the figure. Maybe she could cut them down with her sharp eyes.

  The figure brandished its own blade.

  The moonlight reflected on the ivory-hilted hunting knife. It moved closer, and closer, and closer…

  2

  THE LUMINIST

  Ellie Batter couldn’t stop laughing as her dashing husband, Troy, carried her through the apartment’s door. He flipped on the lights and gave her a sloppy, over-exaggerated kiss.

  “Welcome to your home, Mrs. Batter,” he said, smiling with his sparkling white teeth. Seriously, they were something out a Colgate advertisement.

  Ellie breathed in that familiar homey smell of her eleven-month-old suite. It was the first time she passed through the door with the last name Batter. Though not the most romantic surname, but it sure beat Smith, the monotonous maiden name that had plagued Ellie with a sort of normalcy she’d been trying to escape her entire life. First through the angsty teenage years where she wore black lipstick, black hair dye, and black clothes, and then to her twenties where she tossed away the abysmal attire for bright spontaneous yellows that reflected her uplifting, artistic style. At the age of thirty-two, she’d mellowed out considerably and dressed with a sort of conservative class.

  Her intelligent eyes scanned around the twelfth-floor, modern and elegantly-designed apartment. Its tall windows displayed the fullness of Northampton, Massachusetts that was currently soaked in rain. Breathtaking oil paintings decorated the walls with smoky mountain vistas, wild flower meadows, homesteads on a sunny day, and horses grazing in green pastures. All of them were memories of a naive girl from Pennsylvanian Amish country who struck gold in the big city.

  “I think we need to hire a new interior decorator,” Ellie replied with snark.

  “You’re too hard on yourself, big shot.” Troy put her back on solid ground and helped her with her damp coat.

  “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re trying to get lucky,” Ellie teased her newly-minted husband as he hung the lightweight trench coat on the rack. “I thought the honeymoon would’ve worn you out.”

  “There are certain things that wear me out, that’s not one of them,” Troy replied. “Come on, I’ll get a bubble bath going.”

  The closed double doors to the paint room caught El
lie’s eye. “Maybe in a little while.”

  The comment took Troy off guard. He noticed where her attention had gone and frowned. “You work too much.”

  “I didn’t work at all this past week, now did I?” Ellie gave him a kiss on his stubbled jaw.

  “Your loss,” Troy said, jokingly but serious. “I guess I’ll be enjoying the bubble bath all by myself.”

  “Aww,” Ellie said as if speaking to a dog. “Did I hurt your wittle feelings?”

  She went to pinch his cheek. He caught her wrist midair and held it with an unexpected amount of force. His intense brown eyes locked with Ellie’s sapphire blues. A barrier of heavy silence hung between the married couple.

  Thump, thump, Ellie’s heart quickened as she stood frozen by her husband’s uncharacteristic show of aggression. Then, Troy smiled in the wonderful way that made a girl melt and kissed her passionately. “Have I told you I love you today?”

  “Only a half dozen times,” Ellie replied.

  “Can I say it again?”

  “Only if you mean it.”

  Troy looked deep into her eyes. Ellie waited and waited. With one brow raised, she put her hand on her hip and cleared her throat.

  “You said to only say it if I mean it,” Troy defended himself.

  Ellie punched his arm. “Jerk.”

  Troy snickered. Ellie rolled her eyes but couldn’t kept from giggling as well. She thought this marriage would make them less juvenile. She was wrong.

  Troy released her and snatched an apple from the basket on the kitchen counter. With a mouth full of Granny Smith, Troy said, “Don’t stay up too late. My beauty sleep is very precious to me, and thanks to a certain someone, I hadn’t gotten much of that.”

  “Oh, boohoo,” Ellie replied.

  Taking his apple with him, Troy jogged up the spiral stairs to the open loft with a railing made of twisted black metal. At thirty-four years old, Troy was two years Ellie’s senior. He had a sharp, handsome face free of blemishes, intense brown eyes, and a trimmed beard that connected to his silky blond tapered haircut.

  When he had left her sight, Ellie sighed. As much as she enjoyed the beach night resorts, martinis, and the boardwalk, it felt good being back home. The wedding planning had set her back on her daily art commissions, and the honeymoon added to the delay. She’d already mentally prepared herself for days of catch-up. Farm houses, rolling fields, natural springs sparkling in the sunset, and other art pieces influenced by the luminism movement—Ellie’s artistic niche.

  She headed into the art room. Unpainted canvases leaned against a wall. Different paint mixes and brushes stuffed buckets and mugs. Half-finished paintings dangled on walls or rested on the flat wooden table. To an outsider, the place was an unorganized disaster, but Ellie knew the clutter like the back of her hand, and the incomplete paintings that seemed like works of an expert procrastinator were actually Ellie’s passions projects. They were the type of creations that she poured countless hours to make every brush stroke, dot, and contrasting color meld in perfect harmony. In her eight years of professional art -- six of which were spent begging art galleries for work and the latter two being flooded by a wave of success brought on by her mentor and friend Andrew Maneau -- Ellie had only completed one of her masterpieces, and it was so detestably dull that she longed to send into a fiery grave. The projects she thought would bomb exploded with successes, and the pieces she cherished were shrugged off by the masses.

  Ah, the life of an artist, she thought with hints of sarcasm.

  Ellie stood before the blank linen canvas taking up a healthy portion of her 58-inch wide and 92-inch tall easel. Needless to say, this customized oaken structure was far from the Walmart special. She put her hand on her hips and contemplated the best way to paint a mountain vista she’d painted a hundred times and somehow make it unique. As a Luminist, she didn’t depict nature with awe-inspiring grandeur, but created quiets moments on old American frontier that evoked a sense of somber spirituality, usually through intricately detailed natural phenomena and the use of cool, hard light. The result was something orderly where brush strokes were nearly invisible and realism was paramount. She’d spent years adopting the style after her parents took her to a small historical art gallery in Strasburg. Her lower middle-class parents were supportive of her passion and got her what she needed, though deep down, they thought Ellie would be the one living at home at the age of thirty. Her slacker brother Paul took the award for that one.

  Ellie grabbed her painter’s palette and some bright colored paint. She wanted to create something cheerier this evening. Something with bright lights and wonderful yellows. It would break a few tropes of Luminism, but she didn’t get famous following the status quo.

  Lighting struck followed by a peal of thunder

  Ellie felt the plastic-covered floor move beneath her feet.

  She blinked a few times, and the odd sensation subsided.

  Weird, she thought and wheeled over her metal cart boasting cans of paint and brushes of every size imaginable. As she prepped the canvas, something tingled up her spine. Her vision became sharply focused and her goosebumps rose on her pale skin.

  She picked up the brush dipped in paint, trying to ignore the strange feeling.

  As soon as the brush hairs touched on the canvas, Ellie’s arm took over, dragging the brush across the linen surface. The painting began to spin. Ellie’s breath quickened. Her heart rate spiked.

  More lightning. More thunder.

  Her eyes rolled into the back of her skull.

  Her hand worked feverishly on the painting. A brush stroke here, splattered there, red paint, black paint, blue paint, gray. The yellows and golds were cast aside and spilled on the plastic sheeting on the floor. Ellie’s eyes rolled farther back into her head until her milky whites revealed themselves to the world. Not stopping production, she grabbed a second brush with her off-hand and swiped on the canvas.

  Ellie only saw blackness. It consumed her mind, body, and soul. The water piping for the upstairs bubble bath rumbled in the ceiling.

  Torrents of heavy rain bombarded the windows.

  The faint wind’s howl seeped into the lightless apartment.

  Ellie awoke face down on the plastic-covered floor, marinating her cheek on a puddle of her own drool.

  Her skull crushed her brain. She grimaced and set her jaw. It was like someone had given her a lobotomy with a railroad spike. After wiping her cheek, she pushed against the ground to rise. Numbness crippled her legs, thwarting her ascent. Invisible needles prodded her flesh when she tried to bend her knees. Her eyes adjusted to the dark apartment. Did the storm kill the power? When did she fall asleep? What the hell was happening? More questions assaulted her mind. She took hold of her paint cart’s metal rim and used it to steady herself. Her ankles rolled and her legs nearly gave way, but she overcame the prickling sensation and it started to fade.

  The massive canvas nearby dwarfed her. It was fully painted and nearly dry, though the darkness of the room masked its contents.

  Lightning flashed through the slightly ajar French doors, illuminating the butchered woman.

  Ellie gasped and stepped back as the darkness made a swift return. Not taking her eyes off of the canvas, she groped at the air in front of her and snatched the beaded string connected to the ceiling light. A sickening fear pitted in her belly. The tiny hairs on her arm rose. Something inside told her not to pull the string, not to bring whatever she had created into the light. Ellie heard the internal voice but didn’t heed its advice. She tugged. A covered bulb cast a spotlight onto the disturbing masterwork.

  The details of the painting were immaculate, somehow both surreal yet realistic. Red contrasted black, gray, and white. It looked more real than a photograph, but held on to a certain artistic style that gave it a larger than life quality. Ellie couldn’t describe its style, though it was far from Luminism.

  It showed a woman with her back propped against a wall with a closed circular window spi
lling moonlight over her head. Shelves of antique pottery flanked her left and right. More shattered shards littered the floor around her bare feet. A black scorpion tattooed the right side of one ankle. Her dry, lifeless eyes were half closed on her fiercely beautiful face. She stared lifelessly into the nothingness. A scarlet tear of blood trickled from the corner of her lip, down her pointed chin, and slithered onto her skinny neck. More scarlet spattered the wall behind her while over a dozen deep gashes ruined her dirty apron. Her palms were turned upward and were coated with a mix of dry clay and glossy blood. In the foreground, and untouched by the pool of blood blooming out from the woman, was a dead crow, its purple sloppy innards slipping out from its slashed belly.

  Heart pounding and head spinning, Ellie focused her attention to her own paint-stained hand. Her fingers were dipped in deep crimson. Her palms were black as twilight.

  A tear snaked down her cheek. She had no recollection creating this painting, yet all the evidence pointed to her. With short, wavering breaths, she backed up out of the room and glanced at the blinking green light on the kitchen stove. It was almost 4 am. Troy had carried her in at 10:30 pm. Six hours of her life were unaccounted for. A painting like that was at least a fifty-hour project.

  “Troy?” Her voice cracked as she cried out.

  No reply.

  She flipped on the light switch with the top of her hand, smudging it with red paint. She started up the spiral staircase, making sure not to touch the railing with her coated hands, and pushed open the cracked bedroom door with her elbow. Troy was on the bed with half of his body hidden by ruffled covers. His mouth was slightly agape and his head was limp on his pillow. It didn’t look like he was breathing.

  Ellie froze. Her face turned stark white. She whispered her husband’s name.