The Dead Season Read online

  Praise for Death in the Family

  “Death in the Family is a terrific suspense novel in the classic Agatha Christie tradition. With a masterful hand, Tessa Wegert combines slices of serial-killer thriller with a locked-room mystery . . . simultaneously claustrophobic and hauntingly beautiful. Wegert offers an intense read that will grab your attention and not let go, even after the last page is turned.”

  —Christine Carbo, bestselling author of A Sharp Solitude

  “Intricate plotting and a razor-sharp narration keep the pages turning in this up-all-night murder mystery. Menacing and atmospheric, Death in the Family will have you on the edge of your seat rooting for Detective Shana Merchant to uncover the truth and triumph over the scars of her own dark past.”

  —Wendy Walker, USA Today bestselling author of Don’t Look for Me

  “A deliciously complicated locked-room mystery that would make Agatha Christie proud. Add a savvy sleuth battling her own demons and the result is an up-to-date and thrilling ride. Death in the Family definitely deserves a place on your must-read list.”

  —Margaret Coel, New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Child

  “Tessa Wegert’s Death in the Family assembles delicious ingredients—isolation, a ticking clock, family secrets—and creates a mystery at once familiar and distinctly her own. Bloody good comfort food.”

  —Andrew Pyper, bestselling author of The Residence and The Demonologist

  “Tessa Wegert expertly ratchets up the tension, turning an idyllic island claustrophobic as the characters’ tangled pasts unravel and the killer closes in. Compulsively readable and utterly satisfying, with an ending that will leave you desperate for Shana’s next case.”

  —Erica O’Rourke, author of Dissonance and Time of Death as Lucy Kerr

  “This locked-room thriller has all of the requisite tangled motives and deductive crime-solving, along with a riveting introduction to edgy survivor, Shana, and Tim, her steady, easygoing foil.”

  —Booklist

  “Death in the Family marks a bold beginning to an addictive new series.”

  —BookPage

  “Death in the Family has it all: an immersive atmosphere, a cinematic setting, and a deliciously dubious cast. But what elevates this book above the pack is its thoughtfully crafted protagonist.”

  —Crime by the Book

  Books by Tessa Wegert

  THE SHANA MERCHANT NOVELS

  Death in the Family

  The Dead Season

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Tessa Wegert

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wegert, Tessa, author.

  Title: The dead season / Tessa Wegert.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2020. |

  Series: A Shana Merchant novel

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020022052 (print) | LCCN 2020022053 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593097915 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593097922 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.E422656 D42 2020 (print) | LCC PS3623.E422656

  (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022052

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022053

  First Edition: December 2020

  Cover image © Carmen Spitzmagel/Trevillion images

  Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons

  Title page photograph: Shutterstock/Sarah Mika

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

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Death in the Family

  Books by Tessa Wegert

  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

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Karl, Leila, and Karel with boundless love

  Swanton, Vermont

  August 1995

  The forest circled John R. Raleigh Memorial Field like a scythe, its tree line cutting an arc into the park’s sun-scorched grass. The grass was where I played Little League, back before I decided there were better ways to spend my time in Swanton.

  There was no game being played on the day we walked those woods, but there had been. Just two hours earlier, dozens of children and their parents had swarmed the field, mothers chasing toddlers through the silver dust blowing in from the limestone quarry at the end of the road. Nodding absently when their older children, fed up with watching baseball, begged to explore the woods. That’s why what we found there was so alarming. Whoever left it intended for kids to see it. Kids like us.

  “Check it out.”

  I stopped. He was a few steps ahead of me, and his body blocked my view, but I was conscious of a new sound linking up to the chatter of crickets at our feet and warblers in the leafy, wind-jostled canopy of trees overhead. The flies, mechanical in their buzzing, hovered just beyond where he stood. I closed the distance between us and looked down, first at the toes of my size-three Keds, filthy now—Mom would be pissed—and then at the box. Large. Plastic. Containing something that made my insides squirm.

  “Ew,” I said, pressing my chin against his shoulder. He smelled sweaty, which was new; at nine and a half, six months younger than me but tall for his age, he was well on his way to puberty. “What is it?”

  “A cat, I think,” he said, still sta
ring.

  “Weird.” It was more than that. The animal was wrapped in a makeshift bag, clear plastic bunched at the top and bound with the green paper twist ties I liked to swipe from the grocery store. One furry white leg stuck straight up, and the animal’s pink toe pads were pressed against the inside of the sack. In my mouth, my saliva had turned to glue. “Is it . . .”

  “Dead?” I could feel his heart thumping through his back. “There’s blood.”

  I swallowed hard and stepped out from behind him for a better look. Through the plastic I could see the white fur around the cat’s left ear was dark and matted with blood.

  “If it’s dead,” he said, “that means it got murdered.”

  “Fuck.” Using the illicit word gave me a thrill, and tweaked his mouth into a smile. He studied my face.

  “I heard a story. This old guy in town, lives over by the river? Crissy told me. He tortures animals and stuff.”

  “But Crissy’s a liar.” That was fact: she made shit up all the time, mostly so she could sneak out with her friends.

  “She’s not lying about this.”

  “My neighbor has a cat,” I said, contemplative. “It digs in our flowers and drops dead mice on the porch. Mom hates it. One time she was so mad she said she could kill it. I bet a lot of cats make people mad like that.” I waved my arm at the box to support my argument. Flies lifted like a cloud of black confetti.

  “This isn’t like that.”

  “Well, somebody did this. We’ve gotta figure out who.” It was the first thought that came to mind, not We have to tell my parents or Let’s get the cops. I loved a good mystery, even then.

  “We’ll look for clues.” There was an undercurrent of excitement in his voice. Try as he might to be solemn, I could see he was delighted. “Footprints and stuff. And we can ask around to see if anyone saw him.”

  Wanna play? This was our new favorite pastime. The games our fellow fourth-graders liked—four square, cops and robbers—held no joy for us. We yearned for more. Usually we had to concoct mysteries for ourselves, but here was a real one, right at our feet, and we aimed to solve it. We were natural-born detectives, he and I. That’s what I told myself, and I believed it.

  “I’ll look here. You take the field.” He flashed me a grin as he crouched on the dirt path and swatted a fly from his shin. He was so tan his legs were three shades darker than the skin visible where his sock, the elastic stretched out from wear, had slipped down.

  “Okay,” I said, keeping my head real still. Trying not to let him know I’d spotted the bracelet on his ankle, a neat braid of green paper twist ties lying flat against that band of pale, secret skin.

  ONE

  Bullshit.”

  “Nope.” I turned over the cards on the table between us, and there it was: three aces take the game.

  McIntyre groaned. “I hate playing with you. You’re so damn lucky.”

  “Me and my charmed life,” I said, deadpan, as I gathered the cards in a stack and tapped their rounded corners into place. Across the table, McIntyre tried and failed to catch my eye. “This has got to stop, Shay.”

  She was talking about my mood. It had been black lately; she wasn’t wrong about that. Four months since my rebirth in the Thousand Islands. Three weeks since it all went to hell. Tim once told me things were simple around here, but that was before the murders and the drowning, before the fiancé I kicked to the curb. If that was what passed for simple in Upstate New York, I didn’t want to see things get complicated.

  I reached behind me, pulled a blanket from the back of my chair onto my lap, and smoothed the fabric over my knees. There was a quilt for every patron on the covered patio at Nelly’s Bistro, thoughtfully placed for Clayton’s chilly mornings. I was only a little cold, didn’t need the throw any more than I needed a third cup of coffee, but the card game was over and I found I couldn’t quiet my hands. “I know,” I told Mac. “It’s not that easy.”

  “Who cares about easy? You’re Shana Merchant, the badass who solved the bloodiest case these parts have seen in years.”

  Baptism by fire, as they say—or in my case, water. “Cue the ticker tape parade.”

  “Great idea,” she said. “Only instead of ticker tape we’ll shred those damned corruption case files from my desk and blanket Church Street in confetti. Bear claw?”

  I looked askance at the pastry in her hand. “Isn’t it taboo to chase breakfast with dessert?”

  “It’s my birthday.”

  “Not yet it’s not.”

  Extricating a slice of almond from the frosted dough, she swiped at me, catlike. “Close enough—and when you’re fifty, you get to do whatever you want. I’m thinking about chasing this dessert with that hunky Canadian border guard.”

  I laughed, had to, because I knew which guard she was talking about, and he was more scrumptious than any pastry Nelly’s could produce. Where would I be without Maureen McIntyre and her uncompromising humor? It still came as a shock to me that we were friends, especially when I thought of her in the context of her work. If someone manufactured Sheriff McIntyre posters for fangirls, I’d have taped one to my bedroom wall—if I had a wall to call my own, that is. Mac was my professional idol, but she was also the person without whom I’d be homeless. Most of my things were in storage, but thanks to the sheriff of Jefferson County I had a La-Z-Boy couch and the best company a person in my situation could hope for.

  When I moved out of the apartment I’d shared with my ex-fiancé into McIntyre’s place in nearby Watertown, she made a point of telling me she wouldn’t push it. Talk when you’re ready, she’d said, just as she had in July when, brand-new to the job, I’d opted not to tell my closest colleague about my variegated past. She hadn’t forced me to share my secret pain with anyone. This was more of the same.

  The chin-up routine Mac kept rehashing had to do with my ex, and the betrayal I endured by his hand. Despite her intuition, though, Carson Gates was the last thing on my mind. The thin line on my fourth finger, left behind by my engagement ring, was proof I’d once loved him. Soon that would be gone.

  No, Carson wasn’t the reason why—as McIntyre dove into a story about the couple who spent an hour in her office arguing the innocence of the four Watertown officials accused of misconduct—I couldn’t stop sizing up every man in the room. That one with the wife and kids is too short, but his gaze cut to me twice after he sat down, and his voice when he ordered sounded tight for a Saturday morning. The guy who just walked in with his girlfriend is the right height and build, but the features are off. My eyes lingered on the stranger’s face anyway. With a prosthetic nose and some liquid latex, available online for less than twenty bucks, it would be a convincing disguise.

  Beyond the covered deck where we sat, wind raced toward us across the river and assailed the clear plastic flaps that enclosed the outdoor seating area. When the man caught me staring and his mouth crimped at the sight of my scar, I couldn’t help but go rigid. For half my life I’d looked in the mirror at the skinny white mark that ran from the crook of my mouth all the way to my left ear, yet I often forgot it was there until I saw it reflected in someone else’s expression of distaste.

  I turned my attention back to my plate to find I’d finished off my breakfast without realizing it. Stress-eating session complete, I surveyed the St. Lawrence River. Nelly’s shouldn’t have been open this late in the season, but unusually high temps had convinced the owner to push on. Our luck was running out. With a cold front on the way, Nelly’s was about to trade those patio flaps for plywood boards until next summer. There was no more pretending it was fall. The lusterless sun and biting breeze added up to one conclusion. Winter was on its way.

  I swallowed the dregs of my coffee in one bitter gulp and said, “I’ll miss this place.”

  “Ah.” Mac drew the word into a sigh. “I keep forgetting you’re still a newbie. You’re not used to i
t yet, but this is how things are around here.”

  “Temporary?”

  “Cyclical. When the tourists pack up, all that’s left is us townies. Not enough folk to support the local economy, including, sadly, places like this. But come late spring, everything will open up again. New season, fresh start. You’ll see.”

  I nodded. Spring was months away. Where would I be by then? I honestly didn’t know.

  “Don’t look now,” Mac said, “but we’ve got company.”

  Every hair on my freckled forearms lifted, and it took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize Mac was grinning over my shoulder. I turned to see yet another man striding across the restaurant, this one carrying two mugs of coffee from the self-serve counter near the entrance.

  I hadn’t seen much of Tim Wellington in recent weeks, with my suspension and the therapy sessions I was required to complete, plus the fact that I was actively avoiding him. The sight of him trying not to dribble coffee onto the floor made me smile, but the corners of my mouth quickly fell back into place. Tim wasn’t alone.

  “Sheriff.” He shook McIntyre’s hand. Then, “Long time, Shane.”

  The nickname, a reference to an old western movie, was starting to grow on me. I considered grumbling about it anyway, for old times’ sake, but my gaze slid to the woman by his side. I didn’t recognize her. She was in her early thirties like Tim and had a small face and perfectly round eyes, not unlike those of a creepy Victorian doll. She accepted one of the coffees from Tim and their hands brushed for an instant before she curled hers around the mug. Eight a.m. on a Saturday morning’s a strange time for a date, I thought. Tim was keeping a respectable distance, but his cheeks were pinker than usual, and there was stubble on his jaw. Not a date, then. Just breakfast.

  Well, well. Good for Tim.

  As happy as I was to see him, I wasn’t happy to see him now. I’d intended to deal with my demons and arrive back at the station the detective I was before Tim, before Carson, and most importantly, before Blake Bram. I didn’t want any of my investigators asking me how I was doing, especially not this one. Especially not in front of a doll-faced woman and Mac.