BLOOD AND BACK STITCHES

  BLOOD AND BACK STITCHES

  STITCHES IN CRIME - BOOK 7

  ACF BOOKENS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Become An Organ Donor

  A FREE cozy set in San Francisco

  About the Author

  Also by ACF Bookens

  1

  The ranunculus had been pushing up through the last vestiges of snow and ice for about two weeks now, and as these early spring days warmed I was thrilled to see their purple and pink buds starting to swell. They were some of the first flowers of spring, if you didn’t count the tulip bulbs that were still sitting in my laundry room unplanted, and I was ready for them.

  Winter had been long here in Octonia, with more snow than usual and a lot of rain. Snow was fun for both Sawyer, my almost four-year-old son, and me for about fifteen minutes, and then we were both over it. We did differ, however, in our affection for mud – he was a huge fan, and I didn’t love using my mop that much.

  But it wasn’t just the fact that I could comfortably hose my child off now that the temperatures were beginning to warm that made me grateful to see the flowers. I was also very glad to be able to get back to salvaging buildings. We’d taken a couple of months off for the holidays and the worst of the cold weather because I didn’t want to put my friend Saul or his crew through the intensity of working in the frigid air. But now with temperatures in the fifties and some sun to dry up at least a little of the mud, we had our first salvage job of the season.

  When adding the fact that Sawyer was beginning preschool for the first time this week, I was practically jumping out of bed on a Monday morning. I would have made it upright much more quickly if there hadn’t been a young child clinging to my neck and trying to tickle me, but I couldn’t resist a little tickle fight with my big guy.

  “Stop it, Mama,” he shouted through his giggles when I tickled him back, and I did what he asked.

  “Had enough, Love Bug?” I said as I put my feet on the floor and stretched. Someday this little guy was going to want to sleep in his own bed next door, but until that day came, I was content to let him sleep with me even though it meant I had his feet in my lower back all night.

  “Let’s go,” he shouted as he wiggled over to my side of the bed and dropped to the floor. “I’m ready to get dressed.”

  For a moment, I just stared at him as he headed to his room to – presumably – find some clothes. Saw never wanted to get dressed, but apparently, the tide of nervousness about school had swelled into a wave of excitement instead. I was on board with that, and as I slipped a sweatshirt over my own head, I heard the drawers of his dresser opening and closing. There was no telling what he was going to be wearing, but as long as it was clothes, I didn’t care. Better he announce his strong personality from day one than to have me temper it.

  A few moments later, he returned to my room and did a spin, a la Jonathan Van Ness, and said, “How do I look?”

  I smiled. “You look amazing, Wild Child. Lots of our favorite color. I love it.” I grinned as I studied his blue jeans, his blue t-shirt, and his blue Captain America cape and mask. “Great choice for your first day.”

  “I’m Captain America,” he said as he put his arms up and over his head and “flew” down the stairs.

  On a whim, I grabbed his Wolverine mask and cape, donned them, and charged down the stairs after him. “I’m going to win,” I said. “Beat you to the kitchen.”

  It was just growing light outside, but the sky was a brilliant gold as Saw and I tore through the living room into the kitchen. He won, as always, and not because I let him, and when he dropped right into his chair at the table and said, “Oatmeal, please,” I could only star. In addition to never wanting to get dressed, he also never wanted to eat. Clearly preschool was a game changer in a lot of ways.

  Fortunately, it did not change my little guy’s desire to help me cook, so he quickly went from sitting in his chair to dragging it over to the stove, where we boiled water, added the oats, and watched carefully as it thickened up. A few raisins, a little milk, and a teaspoon of honey finished off our breakfast, and we sat down to eat and talk about school.

  A few minutes later, I was dressed, Saw was in his car seat, and Beauregard, our Maine Coon Cat, was seated on the front seat next to me after refusing to be left behind. He appeared to be as excited as I was to see how Sawyer took to school. On the short drive there, Sawyer grew more quiet, and I watched him carefully in the rearview mirror.

  My son was like me, and new things were both a source of excitement and nervousness for him, but I’d learned that the way he wanted to handle those feelings was to sit with them, unlike his mother who had spent most of her life avoiding her negative emotions. So I stayed quiet as he dealt with how he felt, and by the time we got to the small preschool near where his father worked, he was all smiles again.

  As I took Saw out of his car seat, I saw his father walking across the parking lot. Neither of us wanted to miss Saw’s first day of school. The three of us opened the front door and walked in together, and Sawyer clung to my leg for a minute until a woman with pigtails and a huge smile asked him if he wanted to play in the sand table with the little girl who was already there.

  He looked up at me, smiled, and then took off, cape flying, toward the table. We watched for a couple of minutes as he played, and then I called, “Have a good morning, Love Bug! I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  As he grinned and waved to his dad and me, I felt the tears prick my eyes and quickly turned to go. He was going to be fine, and so was I. I needed to let myself feel my feelings, too, but not in front of my ex. He didn’t get that privilege anymore. I gave him a quick wave goodbye and walked to my car where I turned on the engine, drove out of the parking lot, then promptly pulled into a church lot a bit down the road so I could cry.

  My sadness tended a few minutes later, I pulled back out on the road and headed toward the job site up in the mountains near the edge of the Shenandoah National Park. As I drove up the winding road, my excitement started to build. This was going to be my first antique log cabin job, and I was so eager to see what we could salvage from the two-hundred- year-old building.

  A bit of online research had given me a little history of the building. It had been built by Irish immigrants, the O’Malleys, who had come over to the at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They had been subsistence farmers for the first few decades, living off what food they could grow and what animals they could raise, but then the railroad had come through, and most of the men in the community went south to help build the tunnels that ran through the Blue Ridge.

  It was a hard time, but the men who survived returned home with a bit more money and a lot more skills to support their families. The O’Malley family bought more acres of land, a bit down the mountain where the soil was more fertile and the terrain flatter, and they soon had a thriving business of growing feed corn and harvesting bark for the tanyards just over the closest ridge. Life was good for the O’Malleys.

  But then, President Roosevelt built a hunting cabin nearby and fell in love with the Blue Ridge. Soon, he had plans for a national park, plans that included moving all the families off their land by declaring eminent domain. It was a bitter piece of Virginia history, one that had forced the O’Malleys off the mountain.

  Technically, their land hadn’t been part of the park proper, but the only roadway that now acces
sed their farm ran through what had been declared park land. Since the park service had closed all the smaller roads up the mountains to control access to the park, the O’Malleys now had to drive to the top of the ridge, come in through the park, and make their way down a logging road to their farm. It was a laborious process, I imagined, with only horse and wagon, and I could understand why the family soon abandoned their farmstead and moved closer to Octonia town.

  When Frank O’Malley had contacted me about salvaging his family’s cabin, I had immediately been interested, because of both the story and the wood. I had offered him more than a fair price for the logs, and when his only counter was that he wanted the hearthstone from the main room in the cabin if it was possible, we had quickly come to terms and drawn up a contract. Today was the day we were going to take the cabin down, and I at least hoped it would be as easy as coming to the terms.

  Over the weekend, Saul and his crew had opened up an old logging road so that it was passable for “most vehicles except those tiny, silly ones,” Saul said. As I turned onto the road, I thought that in Saul’s case the words silly and tiny applied to most vehicles since my Subaru Outback was barely making it up the road. Thank goodness for all-wheel drive, I thought.

  The last few feet of driving were treacherous, with a hairpin turn and a sheer dropoff on one side, but when I parked by the old cabin and looked back at where I came, I gasped. The view was spectacular, and I let myself both appreciate it and feel what must have been the profound sadness the O’Malleys must have felt when they had to abandon this place.

  I could see almost to Richmond, it felt like, and as the Blue Ridge Mountains ended, I could see the Southwestern Mountains and then the flats of Louisa County that led all the way to the shore. It was breathtaking, and on a clear day like that one, it felt like the whole world lay at my feet. For a brief minute, I let myself dream of living up here, imagining evenings on the porch with the sun behind me and a warm drink in my hand.

  Then I thought of the road, of the distance to Sawyer’s school, and of my own wonderful farmhouse just down the mountain, and I let myself be grateful for the chance to be in this place and for the space I called home. It wasn’t either/or. It was both. And more.

  Saul let me gawk for a couple of minutes, but as usual, he was eager to get started and I didn’t blame him. His forklift sat at the edge of the flat space around the cabin, and if he made a mistake in judging the space, he and that machine were going to take a long tumble down the hillside. I could see why he wanted to be done with this particular job. “You ready, Paisley girl?” he said as I walked over to where he stood by his machine.

  “As I’ll ever be.” I glanced back over my shoulder at the view one more time. “Any chance I can get you to take me up on those forks to see from up there?”

  Saul grinned. “You know I’m always game for a daredevil mission, but let’s save that as a treat for the end of the job, okay?” He eyed the building. “You been in yet?”

  “Nope. You?”

  He shook his head. “I wanted to give you the honors.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. Join me?” I held out my arm for him to take, and he slid his hand into the crook of my elbow.

  “Lead the way.”

  As I walked through the door of the house, my breath caught for the second time that morning. I let Saul through the threshold, and then I turned back and pointed. The walls were at least twelve inches thick and made up of a single log on each tier. “These trees were massive,” I said.

  Saul ran a hand along the interior face of the square-cut log. “Virgin timber, I expect. Hewn from around here by the look of it.” He leaned in and took a close look at the grain. “Oak. It was hard work to build this.” He wrinkled his nose a little as he stood.

  I nodded. Oak was heavy and dense, and as the marks in the logs attested, the work had been done by hand with axes and saws. The O’Malleys had been serious about staying put when they built this cabin. It was a work of art.

  A bit more study, though, revealed that the cabin was succumbing to the elements. A couple of the top log tiers showed some rot, and I suspected that there was termite damage up near the roof, too. By and large, though, the logs were in great shape, and I was going to come out financially way ahead if we didn’t find any major problems with the building as we began to disassemble it.

  The structure was very simple in layout. A large front room included the huge stone fireplace, which was used for cooking and for heat, a kitchen full of knotty pine cabinets next to the chimney, and a cozy sitting area. At the back of the room, directly across from the front door, was the single bedroom where all the members of the family would have slept.

  Frank O’Malley had told me they slept head to toe in the two beds, everyone together. I didn’t mind sleeping with Sawyer, and once or twice now Santiago had stayed over when Saw was there, and the three of us could make it work in a queen with a toddler sandwiched between two adult bodies. But more than two adults in a bed was too many limbs for me to think about navigating in my sleep.

  As I headed toward the door to the bedroom, I heard Saul behind me giving directions to the crew, who had been climbing on the roof and securing straps to begin the work. They were as eager as their boss to get moving, so I knew I was running short on time to scope out the interior.

  The back room was as empty as the front one. All the furniture had long been removed, and since this was a log cabin, there wasn’t much on the interior anyway. Frank had been fastidious about taking everything out of the building for us since he felt it important that we not have to deal with any “junk” as he called it. I had actually been a little sad about that. Sometimes what people thought of as junk was really the great stuff.

  When I saw the small pile of something in the back corner of the room, I thought of junk and great stuff and felt my heart pick up its pace a little. Treasure, I thought as I made my way over to the corner. As I got closer though, my steps slowed. Whatever was in that corner was long and thin and covered with what looked like a very modern black comforter. Given that no one had lived in this cabin for almost one hundred years, I didn’t think it was likely that a polyester blanket was some forgotten family heirloom.

  Behind me, I heard Saul walk in and as he stepped toward me, the smell hit. It was sweet, like rotting fruit, but also musty. On instinct, I leaned back, bumping into Saul in the process. I began to shake my head. “No. No. No,” I whispered.

  Saul put his hands on my shoulders. “Stay put,” he said as he stepped around me. Very slowly, he lifted the corner of the blanket closest to us and the back wall of the cabin.

  As the fabric rose, the smell bloomed and I gagged. I couldn’t even take a deep breath to steady myself, but I forced resolve into my throat. There beneath the blanket was a man, a young man. A young white man. A dead young white man.

  The fabric dropped from Saul’s hand, and he said, “Crap.” He folded his arms behind his head and walked a circle around the room. “I’ll tell the guys to stop work.”

  I sighed. We’d unfortunately been in this situation way too many times, and we both knew the protocol. I also knew, given my undesired experience with finding human remains, that this man had not been dead long – a couple of days, maybe. My cabin project was now an active crime scene.

  As soon as Santiago Shifflett, the sheriff, picked up the phone, he said, “I so hope you’re calling to tell me, as your boyfriend, that you hit the mother lode with this cabin and we’re going to take Sawyer on a safari. Please tell me this is a casual call, Paisley.”

  I felt terrible. My salvaging work had made his workload so much higher, but he had to know. “I’m afraid not,” I said. “How soon can you get here?”

  “See you in thirty,” he said as the phone moved away from his ear. But then his voice got louder again. “You okay?”

  “As okay as I can be. See you soon.” I hung up and followed Saul back out of the building. Then, I climbed into my car and cried for the second time that
day. This was becoming an unwelcome pattern. A very unwelcome one.

  2

  As I waited in my car for Santiago, I pondered the guilt I felt about finding all these murdered people. It wasn’t my fault their bodies kept winding up in the buildings I was salvaging from; my rational mind knew that. But that poor man in the bedroom made six dead human beings that I had found, and it was beginning to feel personal.

  I’d said as much to Mika and Santiago both, and both of them assured me that none of these terrible deaths were about me. “In fact,” Mika said the last time I brought up the topic, “maybe you should think about it like this: You are actually giving people peace and helping their families find some closure.”

  I had to admit she did have a point. I did find the experience of finding out the stories of these people to be really valuable to me, and not just for my business. I’d always understood people and the world through stories, and each time I delved into the lives of the people’s whose bodies I’d found, it was an honor.

  Still, with that man’s corpse resting inside my latest salvage project, I didn’t feel so much honor as I did sadness and not a small amount of fear. Either the man had laid himself under that blanket and died quietly, or someone had put his body there. Neither scenario was pleasant to consider, and I didn’t want to be the one who had to tell Frank O’Malley that there was a dead body in his family’s antique cabin.

  Fortunately, that job didn’t fall to me, and as soon as Santiago’s cruiser pulled up next to my car, I felt a little of the weight of the moment pass from my shoulders. I hated that it passed to him, this man I loved, but I knew he accepted the burden of his police work gladly. He was a true civil servant, and when it came to solving mysteries, he was relentless, especially when the mystery involved a dead body.