Annabel Lee Read online

  © 2016 by Mike Nappa

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-0175-8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  This book is published in association with Nappaland Literary Agency, an independent agency dedicated to publishing works that are: Authentic. Relevant. Eternal. Visit us on the web at: NappalandLiterary.com.

  “Mike Nappa’s Annabel Lee is a fast-paced thriller, filled with unexpected twists and peopled by unique and memorable characters. From the first chapter on, I found it impossible to put down.”

  —Lois Duncan, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and New York Times bestselling author of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Killing Mr. Griffin

  “Annabel Lee is compelling, fast-paced, and filled with fascinating characters. One hopes that Mike Nappa’s eleven-year-old wunderkind from the title will reappear in future novels of this promising new suspense series!”

  —M.K. Preston, Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning novelist, author of Song of the Bones and Perhaps She’ll Die

  “A relentless surge of suspense and mounting tension coupled with an engaging mix of characters. With Annabel Lee, Mike Nappa skillfully sets the stage for an irresistible series of Coffey & Hill thrillers.”

  —Jack Cavanaugh, award-winning author of twenty-six novels

  For Jan Hummel

  who makes things happen!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Endorsements

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Annabel

  2. Trudi

  3. The Mute

  4. Annabel

  5. The Mute

  6. Annabel

  7. Trudi

  8. Annabel

  9. Trudi

  10. Annabel

  11. The Mute

  12. Trudi

  13. Annabel

  14. Trudi

  15. Trudi

  16. The Mute

  17. Trudi

  18. Annabel

  19. Annabel

  20. The Mute

  21. Annabel

  22. Trudi

  23. The Mute

  24. Trudi

  25. The Mute

  26. Trudi

  27. Annabel

  28. Trudi

  29. Annabel

  30. Trudi

  31. The Mute

  32. Annabel

  33. Trudi

  34. Annabel

  35. Trudi

  36. Annabel

  37. The Mute

  38. Trudi

  39. Trudi

  40. Annabel

  41. Trudi

  42. The Mute

  43. Annabel

  44. Trudi

  45. Trudi

  Epilogue: The Mute

  Excerpt from the Next Novel in the Series

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Back Cover

  For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee . . .

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  1

  Annabel

  Date Unknown

  Uncle Truck keeps a German shepherd on his farm that’ll eat human fingers if you feed ’em to it just right.

  I know this because I have seen that dog. And I have seen them fingers.

  Truck keeps the dog—house and all—in a chain link cage out behind the big red barn on the property, just down from the winding, dirt-road driveway. The cage ain’t very big, but it’s long and narrow like a practice track, and it gives the dog a place to run. Except when the dog gets to the end. Then it has to almost stop and put its paws up on the corner of the fence so’s it can turn around quickly inside that small space.

  Sometimes I think that dog is crazy, runnin’ up and down that grass-patched cage. Runnin’ like no one is looking. Like it’s got to run or else, well, or else it’ll go crazy. It ain’t the barking kind of dog, though.

  I mean, isn’t. Isn’t the barking kind of dog.

  I am an educated girl. I don’t use words like ain’t, not no more. Not anymore.

  I’m not school-educated, no. Uncle Truck says that’s a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. But he also says he won’t have no stupids in his house neither. That’s why I got books all over this place. Any kind of book I want, Truck’ll get for me. He says that’s my education and I better make the most of it. I don’t mind, though. I like books. I like reading. I like that Truck makes time for me to read each and every day of the week, no matter what. I like that at least twice a week—and sometimes more—Truck pulls a language book off the shelf and drills me on German verbs or Arabic phrases or Italian fairy tales or whatever. I like knowing there’s something else out there to discover beyond just the acres of this farm, outside the closed-up community of Peachtree, Alabama. And I like it when Truck says I’m real good at learning and a “supernatural” at picking up different languages.

  What I don’t like is that dog.

  It don’t bark at me, not ever. But it growls. I can almost feel the rumbling in its throat before I hear it with my ears. Whenever the dog sees me, the growling starts. Sometimes Truck’ll tell it to shut-up-mutt and swat it across the nose. But most times Uncle Truck don’t even hear it. Most times it’s just the dog and me, even when Truck or one of his farmhands is there.

  The dog looks me dead in the eye. Never wags its tail. Never moves off its haunches. Just looks at me and growls, low, deep, and regular. It reminds me of some story out of a fairy tale, except the magic here is real, and bad. Like that dog was once an evil warlock vanquished by a handsome prince, and as his punishment, he was transformed forever into a dog that eats fingers and lives in a cage. Something like that.

  I make my hands into fists whenever I have to be near that dog.

  I asked Truck once why he fed fingers to the dog. He looked at first like he was gonna laugh. Then he got a serious layer onto his face.

  “Just testing the limits,” he said. “Nothing for you to concern yourself with, Annie-girl.”

  “But where’d the fingers come from?” I wanted to know.

  Uncle Truck didn’t answer.

  Kenny, one of Truck’s oldest hands on the farm, told me later that the fingers came from a medical research facility in Tuscaloosa, that they was from cadavers dedicated to science and that one of Truck’s old army buddies got ’em while he was working out there as a lab assistant after the second Iraq war. Kenny said Uncle Truck knows people all over Alabama, all over the world. And because of that, Truck can’t talk about everything he does or everyone he knows to a little girl with a big imagination. But Kenny said he only knew Truck and Peachtree, AL, so he could talk to whoever he wanted whenever he wanted, and that included me.

  I like Kenny. But I worry about him sometimes. Even I know it ain’t—isn’t—good to let your mouth run off too much. Truck says that’s what killed my parents. I think he may be right.

  Peachtree ain’t but a fourteen-mile drive from our acreage on the edges of the Conecuh Na
tional Forest, so that’s where we go to get most of our supplies and to find out the gossip of the world. I saw a man once, down at Kelly Supply store in Peachtree, who had two fingers missing from his left hand. His pinky and his ring finger both was gone down to the nub. Truck was over in the leather section looking at a saddle, so I took a chance.

  “What happened to your fingers, mister?” I asked the man.

  He looked down, grinning. “Well, aren’t you a cutie,” he said.

  I find grown-ups like that annoying.

  I got long brown hair, just enough curl to make it nice, I guess. I got green eyes and a lean, horse-riding frame that older women tell me is gonna turn into a “man-killa” someday, whatever that means. I wear boots most days and a dress on Sundays. But I didn’t ask this man to judge whether or not I was cute. I asked about his messed-up hand. Seems disrespectful not to answer a person’s question when it’s asked straight on at you, so I tried again, pointing at his nubs for emphasis.

  “What happened to your fingers?”

  This time he raised his hand and looked at it like it was the first time he’d seen he was missing something there.

  “Lost ’em when I was about your age,” he said. “Stuck ’em under a lawnmower by accident.”

  “Did you feed ’em to a dog after?”

  He cocked his head like he wanted to tell a secret but wasn’t sure if I knew it already. I decided not to make him spill something private, so I changed the subject.

  “How you gonna get married without having a finger to hold the ring?”

  He laughed at the question. “I guess that’s a problem,” he said, patting his belly, “but first I gotta find me a woman who don’t mind that her man eats too much and exercises too little.”

  I seen Uncle Truck comin’ over then. I figured it was time to wrap up.

  “Bye, mister,” I said. “Good luck finding your woman.”

  “Thanks,” he said. Then he followed my gaze and saw Truck was headed our way. His whole manner changed. His eyes darted all over, looking for exits, and his back stiffened like he wanted to run. He didn’t wait around. He turned and walked the opposite direction, around a display of feed grain and then out the door of Kelly Supply. A minute later Truck was standing next to me, looking after the eight-fingered man.

  “Who was that?” he said to me.

  I shrugged. “Just some man.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. But I was thinking about Truck’s dog.

  “Good,” Uncle Truck said to me. “Come on, I need to get some rope before we go.”

  Unlike that eight-fingered man, most people in Peachtree greet Uncle Truck like he’s their best friend. Wherever he goes, they call out his name, clap him on the back, and tell stories about off-the-wall adventures. But when Truck ain’t looking, I see them sometimes show a little something they don’t want him to see. They get this wary gleam in their eyes and fidget around a bit like they’s in a spotlight and can’t wait to get out of it again.

  Afraid.

  Makes sense to me.

  Truck gets good deals on stuff wherever he goes. The man at Kelly Supply lets him keep a runnin’ tab for things he buys at the store. It’s listed under the name of Leonard Truckson. He runs up credit in the winter and then pays it off in the fall, after harvest. At least that’s what they tell me. I ain’t never seen Truck—or Leonard Truckson—pay for anything at that store.

  Anybody who calls Uncle Truck “Leonard” or “Lenny” or even “Mr. Truckson” is from out of town. Everybody here knows that he’s Truck, period. That’s the way it’s always been, and I guess the way it always will be.

  Funny how he’s so peculiar about his name, but that dog ain’t got no name at all.

  That dog . . .

  Uncle Truck keeps a dog that eats human fingers out behind his barn.

  I’m afraid of that mean old dog.

  But sometimes, if I’m honest, Uncle Truck’s the one who really scares me.

  2

  Trudi

  Friday, August 28

  Trudi Sara Coffey brushed a darkened curl away from her eyes and, as was her custom, looked first in the classifieds section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

  She scanned the personals until the familiar advertisement came into view. It was only one line, easy to miss. In fact, she wondered how long it had been running in the Constitution before she’d even noticed it three years ago, by accident, while on her way to the used car ads. It had been running daily ever since, and Trudi now couldn’t start her morning without checking to see if its invisible author still had the same message to send out to the world.

  Safe.

  Trudi had read once about a married couple separated by the tragedy of the Holocaust while trying to escape Poland for America. Before their separation, the husband and wife had promised each other that whichever one of them reached freedom first was to go to America and then take out an advertisement in the classified ad section of the New York Times. The ad was to repeat their personal code phrase—something like “love is forever” or “forever is love”—and then add a phone number where the person could be contacted.

  The wife had made it out first, just before the end of the war, but was not able to place her ad until August of 1947. Early on, she ran it only once a week—on Sundays—because that was all she could afford. She built herself a new life in America, made friends, converted to Catholicism, became a nurse, and worked for three decades at a hospital in Long Island. But she never married again. Instead she dedicated her life to her work, her church, and her growing circle of friends.

  By 1953, she was running the ad daily in the Times. Her friends told her it had been long enough, to give up, to move on. Surely her husband had perished as one of the many nameless people in the Nazi concentration camps. She deserved to live her life to the full, to finally be finished with grieving and begin anew with joy. And each time she heard someone say these things, she would smile, say, “You’re right, of course you are,” and then move the conversation to a different topic. And each month she’d mail in a renewal check to the New York Times, making sure her advertisement would continue to appear each day for years to come.

  In 1982, she retired from the hospital, was feted with a lavish party, and was presented a gold watch with diamond accents. She settled into her brownstone apartment and prepared to spend the rest of her days reading good books, taking long walks in the park, and generally being grateful for the life she had lived, albeit alone, in her immigrant home.

  In 1984, a small news item on the back page of an obscure newspaper reported that Soviet authorities had decided to shut down several leftover prison camps, relics from their Eastern European victories during and after WWII.

  In 1985, the woman answered her phone one afternoon to hear an old man’s voice, a tired and nervous accent, speaking on the other end.

  “Love is forever.”

  And the woman knew immediately who it was. Her husband, long thought dead, had come back to life. For her.

  In truth, he’d been surviving in a concentration camp in Poland where he’d eventually been forced to cooperate with the Germans in a clandestine weapons program. When the camp was “liberated” by the Russians, anyone found to have worked on the weapons program—prisoners and guards alike—had been swiftly, and secretly, swept into the Soviet Union, trading a German prison camp for an only slightly better Soviet installation in Siberia. He’d grown into an old man there, until finally it was determined that he and his fellow prisoners—those still alive—could no longer harm Mother Russia. He was seventy years old by this time, but he’d made a promise and he intended to keep it.

  With unsteady eyes and a body ravaged by decades of discomfort, he traveled to the United States, to New York City. He’d waited a few days in a cheap hotel, working up the courage to hope. Then, after a week, he’d finally bought a copy of the New York Times and slowly worked his way through the personal ads until
he saw, faithfully printed, his wife’s advertisement and phone number. And he’d called her. And, as the story goes, they lived happily ever after.

  Trudi thought of that couple whenever she saw the daily ad that read “Safe” in the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The romantic in her hoped it represented a story of undying love. The bitter ex-wife in her hoped it even more. It would be a terrible world, she decided, if all love was only temporary.

  So she looked once again at the four-letter word she’d grown so accustomed to seeing, let a faint grin pass on her lips in gratefulness that it still remained, then contentedly turned back to the front page to begin her day in earnest. Half an hour later, her receptionist (a new hire, but she seemed to be working out okay) buzzed in on the intercom.

  “Ms. Coffey,” the receptionist said with youthful professionalism, “there’s a client here to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment but insists that you’ll see him anyway.”

  Trudi turned to the small video monitor situated under her desk, hidden on the left side. The one-room reception area of Coffey & Hill Investigations was empty except for Eulalie Jefferson (the new receptionist) and an older gentleman dressed with impeccable care in a dark suit, carrying a cane. The older man turned slowly and—although the camera in the outside office was well disguised as a lighting sconce on the wall—appeared to look directly into Trudi’s appraising eyes. He gave a slight nod toward the private investigator and then turned his attention back to Eulalie, who waited patiently for a response from her boss.

  Trudi hesitated. She’d never met this man before . . . had she? The PI studied the gentleman closely for a moment longer, then shrugged. This man was a complete stranger, but something about him tickled Trudi’s curiosity. And besides, though Coffey & Hill had enough ongoing contracts to keep busy for the time being, Trudi had no other cases or clients that were pressing for her time at the moment.

  She reached over and flipped the switch on the intercom. “Thanks Eula,” she said confidently. “Send him in.”

  The older gentleman paused to review Trudi’s tiny office before crossing the threshold into the room.