Into the Frying Pan

by Sarah Osborne

  “That’s quaint,” Harper said. “I’m sorry to bother you, Mabel, on your time off. I’m just really worried about a few things.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “I’m frightened of Phil!”

  “Phil? So this conversation has nothing to do with adoption?”

  “No, I was afraid if I told you the truth, you’d tell me to go to the police again.”

  “You’re right about that. The last time you were here, you said everything was fine. What’s different now?”

  “Phil won’t take no for an answer. He scares me. He took our relationship too seriously.”

  “So you were involved with him before Ryan died,” I said.

  She stared at me. “I never expected you to be so judgmental, Mabel. You’ve always been fair-minded. I like to feel men are attracted to me. There’s no harm in that.”

  “No harm in that, Harper?” I said. “You kissed half the men at my party.”

  “I’ll admit I had too much to drink, but it never went beyond kissing.”

  I shook my head.

  “Mabel, you haven’t lived the life I have. You always relied on your brains, not your looks. Maybe you could have been a beautiful woman—you do have a lovely face—but you never seemed to care about your body. I’ve had to rely on my body. I’m smart enough. Plenty smart as a matter of fact, but that isn’t what men want. They want a beautiful woman and beyond that a woman who will be a good mother to their children.”

  Here she stopped for a moment. I thought I saw a flicker of what might be genuine emotion. She gulped down the glass of wine.

  “Could I have another glass?” she asked.

  I poured her more Chardonnay and left the bottle beside her.

  “I was a person who was meant to have it all. I don’t mean that in a grandiose way. I was gifted with brains and beauty. My father always made sure I knew that, and he was very clear about his expectations. He wanted the finest line of offspring I could produce. He could never accept less, even with the domestic animals we had.”

  She paused to finish off a second glass of wine.

  What would my psychiatrist friend have advised me to do? Keep her talking. And drinking, I suspected.

  I topped off her glass.

  “I had a favorite dog,” she continued, “a walker coonhound. We were inseparable. Daddy bred her and sold her pups, but somehow she got pregnant with what my father called rotten mutts. When they were born my father made me drown them one by one.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said and meant it.

  “That wasn’t the worst. He said if it ever happened again, he’d kill the dog.”

  Harper stopped talking, drank wine, and poured herself more. She drank as if I’d given her a pitcher of ice water on a hot day.

  Her speech was slightly slurred when she continued. “It did happen again, and my father said it was my fault. He made me shoot my own dog—one bullet to the head.”

  Harper took a single breath and let it out in one anguished cry. “After that, I swear that dog haunted me. Every dog seemed to know what I’d done, and every dog was waiting to rip me apart.” She caught herself. “So when my father said he wanted pure offspring, I knew exactly what he meant. And then my future got taken away from me.”

  She lost me there.

  “Your future got taken away? How?”

  “You know how! I was sterile. Sterile at twenty-five. Can you imagine that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No one can. Who wants a woman who can’t get pregnant? I’ll tell you who—no one. Not Phil that’s for sure. Not even Carl. Men and their dynasties. Disgusting! They made me feel like half a woman. A good woman to screw. In fact, a perfect woman to screw, since I couldn’t get pregnant. But not wife material. Never that.”

  “Ryan didn’t feel that way,” I said.

  “No, he didn’t. He loved me desperately, and when I couldn’t get pregnant he said it didn’t matter.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t settle for Ryan. I thought everything would be all right when Frank asked me to marry him. Daddy wasn’t excited because Frank wasn’t Southern. But he knew Frank was smart. He thought we’d produce good offspring.”

  “Your father didn’t know you couldn’t have children?”

  “I couldn’t tell him that. All he ever talked about was the good lineage that would carry on the ranch. When Frank broke off our engagement, Ryan was there. He was Southern, and he could keep a secret. We stalled Daddy for three years. I even thought we might adopt a baby that looked enough like me, so he’d never have to know. Then my father up and died. It was horrible. And it was a relief.”

  “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, Harper, I really am.”

  “I didn’t mean to tell you any of that,” she said. “It just came out. I’m here to warn you about Phil. I’m scared of him, and you should be too.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he planned the whole thing, the two murders. You know how meticulous he is about everything. He made it look as if he were being framed.”

  “But why would Phil kill Carl? To settle an old score? Because his father brought Carl into the practice?”

  “Yes and yes. Phil could be very vindictive when he felt threatened. You know what he did to Sally. He sold her out and had no regret about doing it.”

  “Phil isn’t the man I thought he was, but why would I be in danger?”

  “Phil thinks you’re too close to the truth.”

  “He told you that? He admitted to killing two people?”

  “Not in so many words. He said, ‘everyone should let this go.’ He was sure the police bought his idea that someone was framing him.”

  “I see.”

  “I hope you do see, Mabel. I hope you’ll back off the way Phil wants you to.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “I have my children to think about.”

  Perhaps I said it too quickly.

  Harper gave me a hard look. “Don’t ever think of acting as a second career,” she said. “You’re not good at it.”

  My heart began to pound. Was I sweating?

  “You look so frightened. We won’t be alone much longer,” Harper said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I spoke to Phil on the phone, and he’s coming over.”

  She watched me like a hawk.

  “And you think he means to harm me?” I asked.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then we’d better leave.”

  I tried to usher her out of the kitchen, but she wouldn’t move.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said. “It’s written all over your face.”

  My giveaway face! I tried hard to recompose it. “Harper, let’s talk somewhere else. We need to get out of here before he comes!”

  “You’ve already figured it out, haven’t you?” Harper said. Her words were garbled, but she spoke with a deadly calm. “I’d hoped I might not have to kill you. Now, it can’t be helped. You know I killed Carl and Ryan.”

  “I don’t know any of that,” I said.

  “Come on, Mabel, don’t play me for a fool. The great pleasure of the cannon exploding was that I didn’t care who got killed. I would have been happy if the whole lot of them were dead. Every one of them betrayed me in some way, and I always get even. I did that with the men who gave me all their nasty diseases and left me infertile. Some are still alive, but every one of them will never be able to do anything sexual to a woman again. I saw to that.”

  “And Ryan?”

  “Ryan was smothering me. It was easy enough to fill Phil’s cartridge with a live bullet and urge him to fire at Ryan—just for fun. I told him Ryan would be aiming at him. I didn’t know enough about ballistics to realize a smaller bullet couldn’t be traced to the original gun. That was the
only thing my father didn’t teach me.”

  “Did you send the photo to Kathy?”

  “Yes. Carl was ready to leave Kathy and marry me. He was going places unlike Ryan. And then Kathy got pregnant again, and all our plans fell through. Carl wanted to work out his relationship with her. Both of them deserved to suffer.”

  “You were the one who pushed me in the tunnel,” I said.

  “I hoped I could scare you off, but I didn’t know if you’d recognize the hat I was wearing, so I gave it to Sally. I didn’t want to kill you. I don’t want to kill you now. You’ve never done anything to me, but now it’s too late.”

  She reached into her giant handbag and pulled out an antique derringer. She pointed it at my head.

  I backed away from her. “Phil’s?”

  “Of course.”

  “You can’t possibly imagine the police will believe Phil came to my house to kill me with an antique gun.”

  “You overestimate the police.” She looked at her watch. “Phil should be arriving in a few minutes. I told him that you had important information for him that you couldn’t share over the phone. This is the pistol he brought for the reenactment. It’s probably the only handgun he owns. The police will believe he killed you because he feared you knew too much.”

  I did what I could to keep her talking.

  “How did you get the gun?” I asked.

  “I have the key to his lockbox,” she said. “I made a copy during one particularly passionate night, when Phil fell asleep after too much alcohol and carrying on. The sedative I put in his drink didn’t hurt either.”

  My cell rang. I tried to pick it up, but Harper waved me away.

  “No rescue for you, Mabel.” She waved the gun erratically in my direction. “We have to get a move on, so Phil will find you dead, and I’ll be gone.”

  I stood with my back to the stove and reached behind me for the skillet.

  “What, Mabel, you’re going to hit me over the head with a skillet?” Her speech was almost unintelligible. “Only you would think of such a lame defense. Put it down.”

  She waved the gun again in my direction and almost fell off the stool. She tried to steady herself with an elbow on the island.

  Harper was drunk, and I had only one option.

  I made a motion as if I were lowering the skillet to the ground.

  I heard the click as Harper fully cocked her gun.

  She aimed it unsteadily in my direction, and that was when I ducked and charged her with the skillet in front of my face.

  The sharp crack of a gunshot stopped me.

  Was I hit? My ears were ringing. I thought I’d heard the bullet ping off the skillet. Nothing hurt.

  Thank God for cast-iron, and thank God Harper was drunk.

  I stayed crouched and peered around the skillet. Harper looked as dazed as I felt. She struggled to reload, but she fumbled and dropped the bullet. Hermione roared into the kitchen barking ferociously, teeth bared.

  I ran toward Harper, skillet in one hand, but Hermione reached her first and pounced on her. That seemed to completely unnerve Harper. The gun thudded to the wooden floor, as she fell to the ground and covered her face with her hands. Hermione was on her, yapping and jumping.

  That’s all the time I needed. Hermione stayed on top of her, front paws on her chest, growling, as I called 911 on my cell. I kept my iron skillet at my side to use as a weapon if I needed it.

  “Get her off me!” Harper screamed. “She’ll kill me!”

  The police arrived in two minutes.

  Mason was right behind them. “I tried to call you, and when you didn’t answer I got worried.”

  Fortunately, Lurleen and the kids weren’t due home for another hour.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Everything seemed to unfold at once. Harper was led away in handcuffs. Mason took me to the living room to allow a forensics team to work in the kitchen. He made sure I was okay, and then we waited in silence for the investigator to do the actual interview.

  Two officers took me into the family room, closed the door, and listened to my account of what had happened. There would be more questioning at headquarters later.

  I called Lurleen and caught her just as they were headed home. I could imagine Lucie trying to listen in, so I made sure I started with the fact that everything was fine. When Lurleen and I had finished I asked to speak to Lucie.

  “You were right about Harper,” I said. “She was behind every bad thing that happened.”

  “Really, Aunt Di?”

  “You gave me the clues, Lucie. When you talked about a magic trick, it made me start to think about Harper’s alibis and that led to everything else.”

  “I helped solve the case?”

  “You did, Lucie.”

  “Wow!.”

  I could hear Lurleen in the background asking Jason if he wanted ice cream with sprinkles.

  She took the phone from Lucie. “Why don’t you come to my house when things are…settled,” she said.

  “Great idea.”

  I hung up and went back to sit beside Mason. “Do we have all the answers now?”

  I asked.

  “I think we’ll have them soon. The police had Brockton picked up for questioning. I suspect he’ll confirm what you suggested—that it was Harper who encouraged him to let Carl participate in the way he did and that she suggested he fire at Ryan.”

  I shifted on the sofa. “What I don’t understand is why Phil never said anything about that. He must have suspected Harper was the murderer.”

  “Maybe the interrogation will get that out of him,” Mason said.

  “And Sally? Did she admit to planting the accounting book in Kathy’s apartment?”

  “She did. Once she realized she was a murder suspect, she was desperate to get the focus onto someone else—like Frank Peterson. She ripped out the other pages because it would show payments from Harper, Phil, and Carl.”

  “There is another remaining mystery,” I told Mason.

  “And that is?”

  “What was the secret meeting Kathy had with Andy? Andy says he can’t tell me.”

  “I assume with your insatiable curiosity, you will call Kathy and find out.”

  “Brilliant, Mason. Of course I will. I need to tell her about what happened anyway.”

  Mason stood up and walked to the kitchen to see what was going on and to give me some privacy.

  Kathy listened as I recounted what I’d just been through with Harper.

  “Thank God you weren’t hurt,” she said. “I never would have forgiven myself for asking you to get involved if something had happened to you. If there is anything I can do to repay you, please tell me.”

  I smiled into the phone. “There is one thing, Kathy. About that secret meeting with Andy. Andy won’t tell me one word about it. He said I’d have to get the information from you. I’d like to call in that favor you offered.”

  Kathy laughed, a full-throated chuckle. “I’m sorry I didn’t come clean the first time you asked. Lucie doesn’t miss a trick apparently, and she was right. It was meant to be a secret meeting.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I didn’t want anyone to know for a while, but Andy and I are getting married at the end of the next school year. We’ve always cared about each other, but I swear we never did anything while Carl and I were married. After Carl died, Andy was so good to me. I think we both realized we could make a happy life together. I wanted to keep our relationship secret for a while because I knew people would think it was happening too fast. I was afraid they’d imagine all sorts of things.”

  “What about the money you gave him?”

  “That money was to reserve the florist. I insisted on going in halfway with Andy on the wedding, so that was my part. The papers were about venues and cate
rers. I haven’t felt this happy in years. I suppose that sounds terrible.”

  “Not to me,” I said.

  “Finally, I feel as if I’m living my own life, not the life Carl or my parents expected me to live.”

  “I couldn’t be happier for you, and your secret is safe with me.”

  “Thanks. We’ll announce our engagement in a few months, and then I hope you’ll come to the wedding in June with the kids. Mason, Lurleen, and Danny are invited as well. You’ve been a godsend to me, not just by helping me find out what happened to Carl. It’s good to know there are happy, healthy families out there.”

  I was about to hang up. “May I tell Mason about your news? He’s the most discreet person I know.”

  “Of course. You can also tell Lurleen and the kids if you want. I’m tired of secrets, so if the word gets out I can live with that.

  “Thanks. You’ll move back to South Carolina?”

  “Yes. Andy and I will buy a new house together and start fresh. He says you might bring the kids out for a visit soon. We’d love that.”

  “Good as done,” I said.

  I hung up and found Mason waiting for me in the breakfast room. The kitchen was cordoned off and we could see three members of the forensics team dusting surfaces and taking photographs.

  “They found the bullet,” Mason said. “Luckily for you it was a derringer that held only one bullet. It bounced off the inner surface of the cast-iron skillet and tore a giant hole in the side. You won’t be using that skillet again.”

  “I may frame it,” I said. “It saved my life.”

  Together we walked out to the porch and sat in the swing. I told Mason about Kathy’s engagement.

  “That’s good,” Mason said. “Really good. You need to be around people who get engaged and married. It’ll get you used to the idea.”

  Mason put his arm around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder. “I’m already getting used to the idea,” I said. “Just a few hundred more questions for you to answer and I’ll be there.”

  Mason chuckled and kissed my unruly curls. “Promise you won’t change one thing about you,” he said.

  “That’s a promise I can’t keep, but if you mean will I ever stop loving you, I can’t imagine that.”