Death Takes No Bribes: An Endurance Mystery (Endurance Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books Available by Susan Van Kirk

  About the Author

  Death Takes No Bribes

  AN ENDURANCE MYSTERY

  SUSAN VAN KIRK

  Prairie Lights Publishing

  Copyright © 2017 by Susan Van Kirk for Prairie Lights Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons living or dead, or events is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN (paperback): 978-0-692-85028-2

  ISBN (e-book): 978-0-692-85029-9

  Cover image by Phillips Covers

  Author Photo by Lori A. Seals Photography & Boutique

  Formatting by Cypress Editing

  Editing by Comma Sense Editing, LLC

  DEATH TAKES NO BRIBES

  Susan Van Kirk—1st ed.

  This novel is for all the loyal readers who have made The Endurance Mysteries possible.

  Prologue

  Del Novak chuckled to himself as he listened to “Dancin’ Away with My Heart,” a country song playing softly on his radio while he dusted the outer office suite at Endurance High School. Humming along with the tune, he thought of his lady friend, Lettie Kimball. She had danced away with his heart all right ever since he met her on a kitchen renovation job at the home of her sister-in-law, Grace. He ambled into the small supply room and emptied the wastebaskets and recycling bin, all the while smiling to himself as he remembered Lettie winning all his money, as well as their friends’ stakes, at their poker game last week. And man, could she cook! When he moved to Endurance and met this firebrand of a woman, he struck a pot of gold. Neither of them were spring chickens, but they seemed to scrape along just fine.

  Walking back into the outer office, he wiped the wooden counter with antiseptic spray. He liked working by himself on the weekends with nothing but his country tunes for company. Sunday afternoon and everyone was gone, even Marilyn Atkins, the social studies teacher. She had been grading papers in her room down on the lower level when he first got here, but she’d left at least two hours ago, trudging down the snowy walk to the school parking lot, bundled up against the cold wind, carrying home still more papers. He had watched her through one of the first-floor windows, shaking his head. She sure was a worker.

  By the time he reached the end of the oak counter, he found a note with his name on it. The secretary, Ann Cummings, wrote that she had left a piece of birthday cake with buttercream frosting for him in the teacher’s lounge refrigerator. My, my. He would eat it on his break, along with the thick turkey sandwich Lettie had packed for him. Picking up the wastebasket from behind the main desk, he shuffled over to dump it into the cart he moved from room to room.

  People here in Endurance are kind to me, he thought. Everybody smiles and speaks to me, whether they know me or not. Even now, in the winter, the snowy Endurance streets are plowed, and people check on their neighbors.

  His girlfriend, Lettie, wasn’t real pleased about his decision to take this moonlighting job at the high school. But it brought in a little more money so he could stash some away in case they needed it down the road. Listen to me, he thought. Making assumptions. He put his arthritic fingers on the secretary’s chair and leaned over to replace some pencils in a holder on her desk. The music switched to another song, one he didn’t know, so he sat down to look at the Endurance Register, which lay on the desk next to Ann’s attendance pads.

  Ten minutes went by and he rose again, carefully pushed in the chair, dusted the other end of the countertop, and straightened the stack of papers into a neat pile. Glancing at the top of the paper pile, he realized the forms were blank copies of teacher evaluations. Now why were those still lying around? Mr. Hardy, the principal, had fussed about the issue all fall with the teachers, and even now this dispute wasn’t settled. Del shook his head. Sure was a lot for teachers to do these days. He looked up as a strong gust of wind blew snow against the office windows. Hmm. Must be another storm coming tonight. The weeks in January had been brutal; now it was the start of February, and he sensed no sign of nature slowing down with the white stuff.

  Next, he went into the assistant principal’s office, where he wiped down the cold, metal windowsills and the desktop. Glancing out a front window, he saw a dark sedan in the parking lot, its engine running. It was there earlier, too, when he came into work. How long had that car been sitting there? He didn’t recognize the car or its owner, and he could barely make out the first three letters in the license plate. He wrote them down on a piece of scratch paper on Alex Reid’s desk. It seemed odd to see an unfamiliar car sitting in the front parking lot.

  Another gust of wind slapped against the windows, causing the old man to look up and feel the uneasiness a huge winter storm brings to a small town. Sometimes it was a little creepy being alone in the whole building. He swore he could feel eyes watching him; after all, the high school had multiple doors, and it would be easy for someone to enter with a key or pick a lock. At times, he swore he heard footsteps but didn’t see anyone coming down the hallway.

  In the basement were dark nooks and crannies left over from the original structure in the early 1900s. When he was working on the basement floor, he was always looking over his shoulder, and occasionally he either broke into a sweat at some unusual sound or felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  The elevator was another story. Talk about spooky! On any of the three floors, Del would be cleaning the hallway and suddenly he’d hear a whirring sound. No one else was in the building, but the elevator was stealthily moving between floors. Then the sound would stop, as if ghostly fingers were dancing across the control buttons. Sometimes it paused on the floor he was cleaning, and the whirring sound would cause Del to hold his breath. A bell would ring, signaling a stop on his floor. A pause would follow and Del would stare at the door, waiting to see what happened. The elevator doors quietly slid open, but no one was there. The first time this occurred, Del almost fainted. Even now, the sound of those doors in the silent hallway gave him go
ose bumps and an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. Then the doors closed, taking the invisible riders to another stop.

  He walked back into the outer office, shaking some dust into the cart. His radio shifted to Hunter Hayes’ “Storm Warning.” Golly, that seems appropriate, he thought. Again, he heard the wind gusts sweep around the corner of the old building. It was still light outside, but the gray February sky and lack of sunshine gave it a feel of dusk instead of four o’clock. He walked over to the windows and noticed the dark car was gone. Del grabbed a clean dustcloth and some antiseptic spray, all the while looking over at John Hardy’s office where the door was slightly open. That was strange. He turned, pushing his cart out of his way, and shuffled softly to Hardy’s door. Knocking in case the guy was in, Del heard nothing, so he pushed the door open. The first thing he saw was a broken coffee cup on the floor next to Hardy’s wooden desk sign with the engraved brass plate saying, “John A. Hardy, Principal.” For some reason, both were on the floor under the desk. A pen and pencil holder plus a few papers were also scattered on the floor near the legs of a chair.

  “What the heck?” he said out loud.

  Looking up, he noticed Hardy’s tall leather desk chair was turned around toward the window, a sweat-shirted arm hanging over the side.

  “I can come back later, Mr. Hardy, sir,” Del said. “Do you want I should come back later?”

  Nothing. No answer. Del felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He moved backward a few steps. Then he swallowed hard and said, “Mr. Hardy?” He paused. “Sir?”

  Silence.

  Del took several deep breaths. What should he do? It was shadowy in the room, so he flipped on the light switch by the door. Taking a step back, he pressed his hand to his heart. The room was in shambles. He moved slowly toward the side of the desk, glancing out the window where it appeared Mr. Hardy was staring. Only snow, wind, gray skies. Nothing special. Coming slowly around the corner of the desk, he held his breath and sensed a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  In the chair sat John Hardy—well, maybe it was John Hardy. It was impossible to see his face because a silly, polka-dotted orange lampshade covered his head with orange tassels hanging down from the bottom edge.

  “Mr. Hardy, sir?” Del said again. No answer.

  He reached over, gingerly touching the bottom of the lampshade, his body ready to move back, every nerve on edge. Holding his breath, he slowly lifted the lampshade up from the person’s head. What he saw made him jump, drop the lampshade, and take several steps backward, feeling queasy and light-headed. It was John Hardy, but his eyes were open in a rigid stare, and his mouth was stretched into a terrible, twisted, unnatural grin.

  “Well, I never—”

  He swallowed several times, backed away from the principal, the chair, the desk, the bookshelves, almost stumbling over scattered ceramic pieces from the broken cup, his shoe smashing several bits into powder. Backing out of the office, he dropped the dustcloth and spray, put his hands behind him to feel for the corner of the counter, and labored to get his breath back.

  Sweaty and ashen-faced, Del tried to reach for his phone, but his hands shook so hard he struggled to pull it out of his pocket. His fingers wouldn’t hit the right spots on the screen. He stopped and took several deep breaths. Then he wobbled over to the secretary’s desk, found her phone with punch keys on it, and grimaced. Suddenly, he was dizzy and had to sit down, his head shaking from side to side as if dismissing what he had just seen in that office. Then he remembered the small refrigerator under Ann’s desk. He opened it and grabbed a bottle of water. Twisting off the cap, he took several swallows and dumped some on his shaking hands, using them to splash still more water on his face and neck.

  Staring down at the telephone, he remembered what he was doing, picked up the phone receiver, and punched 9-1-1 with careful deliberation.

  Chapter One

  “Gin!” shouted Grace Kimball, laying her cards on the coffee table and laughing with glee.

  “What? Again? You must be the luckiest person on the face of the planet. Either that or somehow you have these cards marked,” said TJ Sweeney. She picked up the cards, examining them for bent edges. “All right. Again. Double or nothing.” She pushed six toothpicks into the middle of the table and began shuffling the cards, a disgusted look on her face.

  “Me? Cheat? On a Sunday, even? Seriously, TJ?”

  “Grace, even schoolteachers cheat.”

  “Never on Sunday.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Besides, I’m retired, remember?”

  “Even more reason to cheat. You have nothing to lose through a moral turpitude clause.”

  “Spoken like a police detective.”

  The fire crackled as logs shifted in the fireplace and sparks went up the chimney. Grace glanced out the window while TJ shuffled the cards. She pondered the snow falling, coating the branches of the trees, sticking to the window, and cascading down to heavily snow-burdened sticker bushes. Early February in Illinois—this isn’t going away soon, she thought. Then she looked at TJ.

  “So how did work go this week at the Endurance Police Department? Any cats to rescue from trees?”

  “I’ll have you know it was an exceptional week of service to the fair city of Endurance as we protected its citizenry. In fact, the EPD was right here on Sweetbriar Court yesterday morning.”

  “You were? Where was I? Oh, I was slaving away at the Register office.”

  “You missed a fire engine, ambulance, and Officer Zach Gray, all racing down Sweetbriar Court with hardly room to park one vehicle, let alone a fire engine.”

  “Really? I didn’t hear anything about this.”

  “And you’re working at a local newspaper? You need to get your sister-in-law, Lettie, over to the Register. Her jungle telegraph can sniff out any scuttlebutt in town.”

  “Fine, fine,” said Grace, irritably. “What happened?”

  “Ardis Brantley happened.”

  “Down at the end of the court?”

  “The very person. She has one of those things she wears around her neck that alerts a security company if she has an emergency or she falls or something.”

  “Oh, yes. Deb O’Hara got her mom one of those last Christmas. Did she fall? Ardis?”

  “Not exactly.” TJ spread out her cards in her hand, a smug look on her face. “She was in her kitchen trying to pry a lid off a large pickle jar. Although she finally managed to loosen it, she had to turn it so hard that she put it up against her chest, hitting the doohickey she wears around her neck. The alarm went off, and the security company called both her and her daughter who lives across town.”

  “Doohickey?”

  “Oh, you know what I mean…one of those thing-ies people wear for alarms.”

  “To think I taught you English. I must have failed you miserably with vocabulary.”

  TJ gave her a pained expression.

  “So, it wasn’t an emergency, right?”

  “Started out that way. While Ardis was on the phone to the security people, her smoke alarm went off, and the operator asked her if something was burning. She couldn’t remember cooking anything and seemed a bit vague, which prompted the operator to alert everyone. Meanwhile, the smoke alarm continued to screech—geez, those suckers are loud—and when Zach got there, Ardis was wandering around on the front porch, shivering in the cold. He said she offered him a pickle.”

  “A pickle?” Grace laughed, rocking back and forth. “What about the fire?”

  “Wasn’t one. The alarm was defective. By the time the firetruck, ambulance, squad car, and Ardis’s daughter’s car were all parked hood-to-trunk on the cul-de-sac, no one could get out or in.” She threw a card down on the discard pile. “Good thing they didn’t have a real alarm somewhere else.”

  Grace paused, considering the implications. “This is a good town in which to be a detective.”

  “Oh, you mean because of the various dead bodies which have turne
d up over the last year or so?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that. No. I mean very little ever happens here…outside of a murder or two no one expected. Those were unusual. Exceptions. Beyond that we have some petty crime and an occasional false alarm, but otherwise, all in all, Endurance is quiet, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?”

  “I entrust all the flowery descriptions to you, Former Teacher. You’ve already impugned my vocabulary, obviously, the product of an inferior high school English education.”

  “Gin!” Grace stood up and ran a little victory lap in a circle.

  “Seriously?” TJ threw her cards down. “I give up. Take all the toothpicks.” She moved everything to Grace’s side of the table.

  Grace smiled broadly and began picking up cards and toothpicks. “How about one lovely glass of wine?”

  TJ looked at her watch. “Well, I’m off call in about fifteen minutes so I could do that. Speaking of wine, I know you’ve saved a bottle you got at Christmas for Jeff Maitlin’s return. Any news on that front?”

  Grace shook her head, pushing the deck of cards into a box. “He promised he’d be back this week, but it’s now Sunday, the start of a new week. So much for that thought. I could call him—I have—but his phone simply goes to voice mail.” She ended this pronouncement with a heavy sigh.

  “What’s he doing? Where is he?”

  “I have no idea. When he left, he said he had to deal with some incident having something to do with his past.”

  TJ shook her head slowly. “Well, vague enough, isn’t it?”

  “Lettie’s right.” Grace put her hand over her mouth in mock horror and said, “You didn’t hear me say that. Don’t repeat it to her.” She hated to admit her sister-in-law was right. Ever.

  “Right about what?”

  “He is a mystery man. I don’t know much at all about his past, but he worked for quite a few newspapers all over the country, ending up at a big one in New York. At least he told me that. Oh, and he isn’t married and never has been. Why he moved from New York to this particular small town beats me. He said he heard about the part-time job at the Register from some friend who was also a journalist. Thinks this might be a great place to retire. Period.” She looked up at her friend. “That’s all he said.”