by Audrey Keown
I was looking for a moment to somehow take the pistol from her. Maybe after we got in the car. At least I still had my phone.
Outside, the air felt heavy and still, but it couldn’t be more than seventy degrees out here.
“Toss me the keys,” she said when we reached the staff lot. “And your cell phone.”
Damn.
I did as she said, all the while thinking someone from upstairs would catch up to us, but they’d gone to the garage and didn’t know where George’s car would be parked or even that we would be in George’s car.
She opened the door to the back seat, then took an extra moment to be sure I wouldn’t be a hazard. “Facedown on the floorboard.”
I hadn’t thought I could feel more vulnerable than when she was aiming the gun at me, but after I laid myself down like she’d said to, I couldn’t even see what she was doing. Would she hit me again?
“Reach forward.” Her voice came from the side of the car near my head now.
I stretched my arms blindly overhead. “You drew the pictures and hung them on the walls.”
She put a length of seat belt into my hands. “Tie yourself up.”
I didn’t do a very good job. I couldn’t see what I was doing, and anyway, why would I do it well?
But she used her own hands to tie another knot in the belt and jerked it hard.
My arms yelped at the joints.
She couldn’t have done that with one hand, I realized. She must have had to lay down the gun.
Now was my moment.
I reached out for her hands, found them, and pulled up so I could see the seat beside me.
The gun was right there.
But she cinched both my hands in the strap, snatched up the gun, and slammed it into the back of my head.
My scalp stung, and tears pooled in my eyes.
Velvet got into the driver’s side, started the car, and peeled out onto the road. “So which way to the interstate, Miss Marple?”
The torque of the seat belt wrenched my arms over my head. My head still stung. My skin puckered and burned where the seat belt cut into me. I couldn’t answer her.
“Never mind—I don’t trust you. Hey, Siri,” she yelled. “Route me to Atlanta.”
“Okay, routing to Atlanta,” said the disembodied voice of her iPhone.
I wondered where the gun was now. I turned onto my side so I could breathe better. If I had to be here on the floor of a car, I was thankful that it was George’s so the mats weren’t full of dried grass or mud or gravel. “Where are you headed?”
“I’ll let you go as soon as I can,” she said. “I’m not a monster.”
“I find that hard to believe, coming from a murderer. And from someone trying”—a hard bump in the road took my words—“to torture Mr. Fig.” Was it too coincidental to think she hadn’t been just a maid at the house but the maid who had been fired for the painting theft?
“Torture? I simply want him to pay for his crimes, just like Clyde.”
“And Renee. Renee paid for them.”
“That had to be done.”
“But why? Wouldn’t killing Clyde’s daughter hurt him more?” I asked.
“Clyde wouldn’t be as obvious a suspect in his daughter’s death. And the point wasn’t just to hurt him but to disgrace him. I couldn’t prove he’d stolen my work, but I could change the way posterity would remember him and make him serve out a sentence that would punish him.”
“No matter that it was for the wrong crime?” I struggled with the strap, but between Velvet’s knot and the seat belt’s own pull, I couldn’t loosen it at all. I tried not to think about what was going to happen to me at the end of this ride.
“Anyway, Renee was an easy target,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I knew she’d have one of her passive-aggressive headaches at some point during the weekend. And I was determined to be ready for it.”
I remembered the headache and the magic pill Clyde had gotten from Velvet for Renee. “You drugged her, didn’t you?”
“I had to make sure she wouldn’t hear me coming into the room, or if she did that she wouldn’t put up much of a fight,” she said. “You know, you’re really a lot smarter than I gave you credit for before I found you hiding like a mouse in that armoire.”
“It was you who came back. To seal up the hole?”
“You got it, babe,” she said.
“And then you left that book of poetry for me at the desk?”
“Yes sirree.”
“But how’d you get away from the tour group to commit the murder?”
“That’s the thing about being an old woman. You become nearly invisible. It’s like a superpower.” A dark laugh seeped out of her. “Deena was the only one who would’ve noticed, and she slipped off to the bathroom.”
Speaking of old women, I wondered where Deena’s crew had ended up. I’d bet they had taken that fast Porsche of hers.
They’d had time to leave the hotel before us. They could be anywhere now. My best shot was to distract Velvet from the road. If Deena caught up with us, it would be better if Velvet didn’t notice right away.
“You really thought this out,” I said. “Especially the bit with the paintings.”
She was silent.
“I guess you won’t get any money out of Mr. Fig now, though.”
“I didn’t want his money,” she said. “I wanted him to admit to what he’d done.”
“He didn’t steal the paintings.”
“I saw him being all friendly with the thief. He was in on it!” she shouted.
“No. I know him. He wouldn’t have done that.”
“Whatever.” She sighed. “Either way, my friend suffered because he didn’t admit the truth. I should’ve outed Ralph Fig when the Morrows fired her, but I’d just found out that Clyde had gotten approval for his thesis idea—my thesis idea. I was too devastated to put up a fight.”
So she was a friend of the maid they’d let go. “Did you know Clyde well before all that?”
“Oh yes, that was the thing. We were good friends for a year or two before. I think he justified it to himself that way. Like deep down he thinks every woman on whom he bestows his very valuable time and attention owes him something.”
That was grim, but I could see how she could be right. I didn’t know Clyde like she did. “Did you meet at the mansion?”
“He came to one of their fancy dinners, and I was working, of course. He flirted with me, and we got to talking, realized we were both going after the same degree. But it was always a little unbalanced between us, like he thought he was mentoring me or something because he was going to a nicer school than I was and was a year ahead of me.”
“I’m still grappling with how you tricked all those people into believing that you were, what, twenty years older than you really are?”
She laughed again. “Well, even without the stage makeup, I’m not sure I look as young as I am.”
“Why not?”
A song began playing softly over George’s car speaker—a song from the playlist on my phone. I was sure of it. My phone was paired with the car, which meant she hadn’t turned it off.
“For starters, let’s say I’ve a had a heck of a lot harder life than Mr. Golden Opportunity.”
“Haven’t we all?” I still couldn’t see a lot, but Siri directed us to Fourth Street. We weren’t that far from the interstate on-ramp. If Deena’s crew didn’t catch us before that, they might never.
“And you betcha I’ve made a few alterations, stopped dyeing my hair, for example, but it didn’t take that much. Don’t get me started on how society’s made us believe women under seventy don’t have gray hair.”
Then again, on the open road, the Porsche could outrun this Toyota. If they knew which way we were headed.
I wished I could text someone in the group.
“Befriending Deena made your whole charade more believable.” I couldn’t take this position anymore. It hurt, and I couldn’t see a
thing. “You used her.”
“It wasn’t entirely an act, dear. I enjoyed getting to know her. She’s a snazzy lady.”
We stopped at a light. I used the seat belt tension to pull up to sitting.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve—no—no, I’m not sorry. Excuse me. I’m not sorry.” Velvet waved her hands around while she spoke as if casting curses through time at all the people who had hurt her. “I’ve suffered too much for far too long to let anybody ruin this, even some pretty young thing like you.”
Even sitting up, I couldn’t take a full breath.
Then another sensation became clear to me. Although the bumps of the road had disguised it for a while, my heart was now thumping too hard to be ignored.
Fear swallowed me. No. No. No. I clenched my eyes shut.
“I’ve had a hard life.” She was really going now. “Born in poverty, raised myself up to go to college, and then some arrogant misogynist comes along and takes it all from me.”
“You’re blaming him for all of it?” I said with the little breath I could muster.
She went on like I hadn’t spoken. “Anyway, I guess I never recovered from all that. Can you blame me?”
I tried to focus on the pressure of my body against the car seat behind me, the texture of the rubber floor mat below me.
But her voice was so straining, so overpowering.
“ ’Cause that son of a gun went on to win awards! And fellowships! And published work in illustrious journals, and you know what I did? You know what? I taught high school in a rinky-dink, hole-in-the-wall—”
“No matter where or who you teach, teaching is a noble, undervalued …” My voice died as I ran out of air. My head felt disconnected from my body.
“Whom you teach.”
“Okay.” I tried to make my brain work. Maybe this wasn’t the panic. Maybe this was really a heart attack. Was I dying this time?
I pushed down through the feelings, not past them. I let myself fall toward the fear, lean into the lack of control.
“You didn’t have to take my phone, by the way,” I said on the first good breath I caught.
“Oh, you Millennials and your precious phones. Like babies with pacifiers.”
I had been both praised and criticized over the last few days for being my particular age. Now I would employ it for my own ends. “But what was I gonna do with it? Hey Siri-ously, send George a text that I’m being held hostage and taken in his car toward Atlanta?”
I held my breath. If Siri had heard me, she’d respond over the car speaker. It was turned down low, but would Velvet hear too?
But the woman started talking again, too loud for me to hear the speaker at all. “I’m sure teaching at that level is fine for some people, but I was supposed to be somebody special.” She revved the engine. “And he robbed me of all that.”
She took a sharp turn, and my shoulder slammed into the car door. From my floorboard viewpoint, I saw the top of a familiar steeple of a church at the end of Fourth Street. Were we climbing the on-ramp to Highway 27?
“But why take your revenge now?” I said. “After almost forty years?”
“You know what, Ivy, that is an appropriate question. It really is.” She bobbed her head up and down.
She reminded me of Clyde’s classic “great question.”
“See after Clyde betrayed me, after his dissertation was published, I showed my professors my notes—I was a year behind him and just getting started writing, but I had my notes in order. Those blowholes refused to believe me, of course. Clyde had his good name and his good connections …”
While she talked, I focused simply on breathing. Just inhaling for as long as I could and exhaling for as long as I could.
Velvet went on. “I pushed it down, tried to forgive and go on like he hadn’t destroyed all my prospects. I finally went back and got my master’s and got married, and then—” She screamed with frustration. “Then six months ago my husband left me, left me for some no-good, trailer-trash home wrecker.”
“I don’t follow.” It was odd how she felt a need to prove herself to me. Then again, it wasn’t for me, really. She was justifying herself to herself. Some part of her felt guilty. Because she wasn’t a sociopath. Bipolar, maybe, but not sociopathic.
She was still talking. “And that’s when I thought—you know what? I never woulda married that cad if it weren’t for going back to school when I did, and whose fault was it that I went back to school when I did?”
“Clyde’s, I guess?”
“Ding-ding-ding. So, star pupil, if you’ve grasped history, we can move on to economics. After my husband left, the powers that be decided they’d had enough of teacher raises for a while and voted down a budget increase that would’ve raised my salary just enough probably to cover all the supplies I buy out of pocket every year. To heck with that, I said, and I took my toys and went home.”
We were gaining speed, coming up to the place where we’d merge onto the interstate, I thought.
Was that a squeal in the distance? Maybe a police siren, or was that wishful thinking?
My heart wasn’t slowing down, but the pain in my chest no longer sucked up most of my attention.
“And suddenly I had a whole lot of time to surf the internet,” Velvet went on. “And whose face popped up on the Facebook? Good ole Clyde Borough’s! And the little devil on my shoulder said, ‘Now’s your chance.’ But I didn’t rush in. I stopped to consider—would punishing Clyde, taking everything he loves away from him, really make you feel better? And there was no way to answer that hypothesis without running the whole experiment.”
“And you began by vandalizing his house.”
“Exactly. But that wasn’t nearly satisfying enough, although it did cost him quite a bit in insurance deductibles—shoot!” She screamed the last word.
I started. What had she seen that made her say that?
“I can’t believe it!” she shouted.
I had to see. I struggled against the seat belt and pulled myself up into the seat.
It was Deena’s bright-orange Porsche coming up on our left. The windows were down and Deena was yelling something from the driver’s side. Tom stuck his head out the passenger side, waving an arm like an air-traffic controller. It looked like Clyde, Autumn, and—Doyle?—were in the back.
Velvet released a stream of expletives.
There was a split coming up. If she couldn’t get over, she’d have to take the exit.
Deena nudged into our lane. Go, Deena. Go, Deena.
But Velvet didn’t let up.
The split was coming for us. We were aimed straight at the guardrail.
At the last second, Velvet braked and swerved behind Deena.
My shoulder knocked into the car door again.
“Ha-ha!” Velvet screamed.
Darn it.
Deena changed tactics. She’d started to brake. Traffic had picked up here, and Velvet had to slow down to keep from hitting the Porsche.
The police siren I’d heard earlier was louder now. I turned around.
Blue lights flashed on the roadway behind us. At least three patrol cars were heading this way, but Velvet was flying now.
“Suffering savages!” She saw the lights too.
The I-75 split was coming up ahead. Velvet would go right at the fork for Atlanta. If Deena chose the wrong direction, there was no way she could catch us.
She craned her neck around. “What are you doing? Get back in the floorboard.”
She held the gun in one hand and steered with the other, but she couldn’t shoot me while I was behind her.
The police were gaining on us. Would they see which way Velvet went in all the traffic?
I couldn’t take the chance. All I had to do was knock Velvet off the road. There was a concrete barrier on one side, a guardrail on the other.
It was dangerous for us both, but I couldn’t let her get away.
“I told you. Get down!” she screamed.
I was st
ill breathless and weak coming out of the panic, but I finagled the middle seat belt across my body and into its buckle. I shoved my foot between the front seats and kicked the gearshift into neutral.
The engine groaned.
“What did you do?” Velvet shouted.
Before she could recover, I thrust my foot up past the seat.
And jammed it into the side of her head.
Velvet’s skull bounced off the driver’s side window. Her hands jerked the steering wheel.
The car swerved.
We slammed into the guard rail, and the world started spinning.
All I could think of was George.
XX
The Road Back Home
I was tired, on the whole, of ending up in ambulances.
Cords and pumps and such surrounded me, but thankfully, none of them were hooked up to me. The first responder’s assessment was that I was fine except for some bruising. Funny the amount of pain that could be included in the word minor.
As if she hadn’t just taken a bad fall herself, Deena had waited at the open end of the ambulance while I was evaluated.
I was going to miss her.
Autumn, Tom, and Clyde stood in a tense exchange a few feet behind the white-haired woman.
Doyle, who I guessed had come along on the promise of something interesting to do, chatted up one of the first responders, his hair burning orange as a Tic Tac in the afternoon light and his thumbs in his suit pockets. Somehow he reminded me of the mayor of Emerald City.
Traffic was down to one lane on this side of the interstate. Emergency vehicles were scattered all over the place.
I had given a short statement to the police, and now Velvet was being questioned.
Deena followed my gaze, frowned, and then decided, evidently, to think happy thoughts. “We didn’t know what we were gonna do, but it was gonna be something.”
“You did do something.” I reached out and squeezed her hand. “Thank you for coming after me.”
“Furnell and Parker wanted to come too.” She adjusted her peacock bag on her shoulder. “But Furnell thought a high-speed chase would be too stimulating for the boy.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t get to tell them good-bye.”