by E M Kaplan
Bunny Rogers had left the cold comfort of her cushy limo and approached them with the deliberate steps of a queen entertaining filthy foreigners on her lawn. Officer Handsome had her chauffeur back the limo out of the drive to make room for first responder vehicles that would no doubt arrive shortly. On cue, just down the street, a siren wailed.
“Young woman, just what are you implying?” Bunny asked. Her face was pulled down so tightly with condescension and disgust, one fatal pull and she probably could have rolled her face up like a window shade.
“I don’t know. What are you inferring?” Josie couldn’t help but snap back.
Another squeeze on her shoulder made her take a deep breath and start over.
#
“Look,” Josie addressed Billy in full sight of the others, “I know why you were reluctant to file a missing person’s report on your wife. And probably only did so under pressure from the local authorities…and her.” She tipped her chin toward Bunny. “It’s because your wife wasn’t missing.”
Next to her, only Skip and Drew looked surprised, which was very telling of the rest of them, including DJ. He just looked angry, like an avenging angel about to take out his sword and …
“Ridiculous,” Bunny announced, crossing her plaid-covered arms, splaying out her fingers and displaying a deep red manicure. “You just accused him of hiding her body in the garage. Now you’re saying she’s alive?”
“You’re purposefully misunderstanding me. So if you’d like to keep interfering with my theory, by all means, go ahead. Just don’t be alarmed if I haul off and punch you in the throat,” Josie told her. She could feel her shoulders tightening as if she were spoiling for a fight. Anger flooded through her system and it felt…good. Really frickin’ good.
“Josie,” Drew said in a tone she couldn’t quite identify. Not exactly calm, but kind of. Maybe studiously stern and collected.
Huh. She didn’t really like his tone. She brushed him off and proceeded with her magnificent tirade, her Hercule Poirot parlor-room, big-reveal moment. She was in charge now and she hadn’t felt this good in months.
“The fact is, she was alive, at least for the next few years. Tell me, Mrs. Rogers. Why did she choose to live in that strange little room upstairs? The one with all the children’s books and old clothes? Did you keep her prisoner up there with your rudimentary nursing knowledge? Did you live down the hallway from her in that terrible pink room so you could act as her caretaker while you kept her heavily sedated, heavily medicated day in and day out? Why did you keep your daughter like that? People don’t lobotomize their rebellious daughters anymore. Like Rosemarie Kennedy. Like your aunt. There’s not the same stigma against mental illness as there used to be.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bunny Rogers told her through a jaw so tightly clenched only her lips moved as she spoke.
“Well, enlighten me, then,” Josie said, not entirely in control of her mouth, taunting the woman into action. “Why did you keep your daughter in that room upstairs?”
While she and Bunny exchanged words, she failed to notice DJ approaching from the side. He had left Billy’s side and stalked across the drive to them. By the time she realized he was still headed her direction, it was too late.
His fist hauled back and slammed into the side of her head.
Chapter 40
The world spun. As Josie’s cheek hit the pavement, she thought again about TBI. Traumatic brain injury. If she eventually lost her mind due to all the times she’d been whacked on the head, she’d have to rent the room next to her mother in the dementia care home. Or maybe they could be roommates.
Please don’t let me have a concussion. I meant it when I said I don’t have the brain cells to spare.
All around her were shouted voices of outrage on her behalf—thank goodness for that. It proved she hadn’t been a complete a-hole through the events leading up to the punch. Through her wooziness, she saw Officer Handsome sprint up the drive toward them. Now that her adrenaline had faded, she realized how much she had screwed up. Not about Mary Clare—she was right about her—but in allowing her panic to turn into anger, letting it feed on itself until she’d felt nothing but aggression and rage.
So yeah, she needed to talk to someone about her problems before this got any worse. She knew it without a doubt now. And she would get on it, just as soon as she scraped herself off the ground.
“Don’t move yet,” Drew said from somewhere above her. “Give yourself a minute. Easy does it.”
Aha, there was his soothing hand on her back. Maybe he didn’t hate her after all, even though she was a complete jerk.
Off to the side, she heard smacking and the sounds of a scuffle in the dirt. Slowly, checking for dizziness and nausea, she let Drew help her into a seated position from which she saw DJ and Billy going at it in a churning, punching heap on the ground.
“Brother, that woman lost her mind and you know it,” DJ said right before he took a hit to the jaw. Apparently he was more used to it than she was because he barely flinched before adding an uppercut to Billy’s ribs.
“They’re brothers?” Skip asked. He’d squatted beside her to see how she was doing.
“I think it’s just a term of affection,” she said, testing out her jaw, which seemed to be fine. Her cheek, on the other hand… “Like ‘bro.’”
“Aha. Got it.”
But what woman were the cousins talking about? Surely not her, but Mary Clare.
“You don’t hurt women,” Billy shouted at him, and tackled DJ back to the dirt. The two of them rolled again, someone landing a punch to the kidneys. She couldn’t tell who.
He was definitely talking about Josie now. Or was he?
“We’re blood. I’ll get anyone who threatens you. I don’t go back on my promises.”
Officer Handsome shouted at them to break it up. Luckily for them, he was a calm kind of fellow and hadn’t drawn his firearm, though he was threatening to do so now. His patience paid off, however, because after three more punches apiece, the cousins fell apart on the ground, panting hard with no collateral damage to the officer. Josie was glad—she’d taken a shine to the man in blue, although if he had to hit DJ once or twice, she wouldn’t really mind because, ow, her head hurt.
“Mr. Ruby, I’m going to have to take you in for assaulting this woman,” he said, and DJ groaned, though it wasn’t clear whether it was from that or the walloping Billy had just given him.
“Damn straight you are,” Drew said, anger turning his voice into a growl.
“Why’d you hit me, you ham-fisted Hulk? I’m, like, half your size,” Josie yelled, still wobbly, from where she sat across the driveway to DJ. Her anger was gone now, though she felt twice as mouthy. Getting punched in the head had pressed her Reset button.
And to think she’d liked chatting with him over the counter at Smiley’s. Man, was she ticked off. She hated being wrong about a person, especially so badly.
DJ sighed, hanging his head between his knees. One of his cheekbones was red and swelling up. She realized she probably looked the same thanks to him.
“Mary Clare was out of her damn mind half the time,” he said, and Billy made a noise somewhere between denial and a whimper. “She had schizophrenia. It didn’t blow up until after they got married. And it was getting worse and worse. Hallucinations. Voices in her head. Everything you hear about. You see it on TV, but I didn’t even know it could be that bad until I saw it happen to her.”
“We were controlling it with medication,” Bunny Rogers said tightly.
“No you were not,” DJ said. “She needed more care than you could provide. I knew it. Billy knew it. We all knew it. She needed to be in a hospital with medical professionals, not in that miserable room upstairs, all because you wanted to save her reputation—and yours.”
“She loved her house. She wanted to stay here with Billy,” Bunny yelled.
DJ’s voice rose, too. “She wouldn’t let him live his life. He
couldn’t live like a normal person. What kind of existence is it, wondering whether she was going to kill herself or you or him at any point?”
Billy groaned, cradling his head in his hands. “She was my wife.”
DJ said, “I know, buddy. I’m sorry.”
#
“When did she die?” Josie asked, talking across the driveway at Billy.
By now she had a pretty good idea, so when no one answered her, she guessed. “Was it 2007 when Smiley’s burned down? Did she live for twelve years in that room upstairs until you killed her? Why did you keep her around so long only to murder her after so much time? After so many wasted hours of investigation and volunteers searching for her and all the pain and anguish of the people who really cared about what happened to her?”
Drew put a hand on hers. She realized she sounded as if she were about to lose her temper again, but this time, she was perfectly in control. She needed a confession from Billy to confirm her suspicions, so she kept goading him, hoping neither he nor his cousin had enough steam left to come across the pavement at her again. Officer Handsome hadn’t pulled out the zip-ties yet, so she was fair game until they were trussed up.
Even Skip had been rendered speechless at this point. He’d gone so far as to take a step back from her as if to avoid any fallout damage, but he still held his phone up, capturing the video of her meltdown.
Billy had made another anguished sound of protest during her last verbal attack, so she thought she might be getting closer to cracking him. The sirens were getting closer, so she knew her time was running out. As soon as more cops arrived, they’d all be carted off for questioning or shooed away, if they were lucky.
“What did you do to her at the restaurant that got her teeth—her tooth bridge—knocked out? We found it in the fire pit. A person doesn’t just walk around like nothing happened after something like that. Were you going to burn her body in the restaurant fire? The wife you’d imprisoned after more than a decade of her life?”
She was purposely making false accusations at this point. She didn’t think Billy had kept Mary Clare imprisoned—Josie had seen the room herself. And she did think that he had sincerely loved his wife, at least truly had loved her.
“Are you going to allow this to happen to Billy, DJ? The less he talks, the harder it’s going to be for him. I have enough evidence to nail him to the wall now. The restaurant will go down the tubes. It’ll have to be shut down. Everything he’s worked for his whole life—and you, too, right alongside him—it’ll all be for nothing. Bankruptcy. Ruin. And forgotten forever. Are you going to let this happen to him? You’ve been protecting him your whole life. Are you just going to let him fall now?”
“Don’t say a darned word, DJ,” Billy said. “I’ll take my chances with a lawyer. And she’s going down with me.” He cocked his chin toward his mother-in-law. “This is all her fault from the way she dealt with it from day one.”
Josie smacked her hands together with a loud crack to get DJ’s attention back. “You listen to me, DJ. This has gone far enough. Tell me how Mary Clare got hurt. Did she hit her head? You tell me now.”
Officer Handsome had gotten behind the two men where they sat on the ground and had trussed their hands up with zip ties behind their backs. As soon as DJ’s wrists were tightened behind him, the last of the fight seemed to drain right out of him.
“Tell me,” Josie said again.
And then he began to talk.
Chapter 41
“She hit her head on the fire pit,” DJ said, without meeting her eyes. “She fell and hit it. That’s how she lost her tooth bridge. She hit her mouth on the edge.”
Billy made that strangled animal noise again, but DJ didn't seem to hear him this time. He was locked in his own memories.
“Was it a fight?” Josie asked. “Did you hit her?”
“No. I was stopping her. She’d set the kitchen on fire. Smiley’s was burning. She had a can of gas.” His voice became calm and fell to a quiet monotone.
“Why didn’t the gas show up in the two fire investigations? If there was an accelerant, it would have shown up during the investigations.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s something you need to ask her.” He tipped his chin toward Bunny Roger’s car, where she sat with the door open exactly where Officer Handsome had asked her to wait.
Interesting. Had Bunny Rogers paid off both investigators to cover up the arson? That meant not only did she know her daughter was alive in 2007, but she very well may have been the reason Smiley’s had burned down.
“So you’re saying not only was Mary Clare alive in 2007, but she was at Smiley’s. How did she get there?”
“She drove herself in her car. She didn’t go out anymore, but she knew where the keys were, so she just took herself over there. We had to drive it back to the house.”
“What do you mean? You drove it back to the house when? After she was dead?”
He stared dully at the pavement between them. “Yeah, afterward, because she was dead.”
“And who hit her—sorry, I mean, who shoved her when she was lighting the restaurant on fire? Was it Billy?”
“No, I did it,” DJ said. “I shoved her.”
“And she hit her face on the pit?”
“Yeah.”
“And this was 2007 when the restaurant burned down?”
“Yeah,” he said again.
“So Mary Clare wasn’t missing the whole time?” She realized she was repeating herself, but she wanted to see what other details she could coax out of him while he was in this weird almost-fugue state.
“She was living at the house. Her mother was giving her medication. It was supposed to keep her from…losing control of herself. She had hallucinations. Right, Billy?”
Billy didn’t answer. He sat on the edge of the pavement, dumbly, face pale and blank.
“She had a lot of problems,” DJ continued. “That’s how she lost her teeth in the first place a bunch of years before. Blacked out on medication. Pills and drink together.”
Josie shuddered thinking about the kind of life the woman had lived. The hand she’d been dealt. Was any of it her fault? She’d been sick. And she’d suffered twice over for it.
“Where is Mary Clare right now?”
His gaze briefly flicked toward the house. “Over there in the floor of the garage, just like you said.”
“And did Billy do this?” She looked at Billy, but he remained face downcast, no longer responsive, as if he’d just given up.
“Yeah. He wanted to keep her at the house. Close to him.”
“And that’s why he doesn’t want to sell the house?”
DJ nodded.
“And where does Bunny think Mary Clare is?”
“We told her she swam out into the lake one day and didn’t come back in.”
“And did she believe you?”
DJ shrugged. “I guess she believed what she wanted to.”
Josie glanced over at the woman, sitting in her car staring straight forward at nothing. Icy, perhaps, or maybe just unable to face the hand that life had dealt her.
#
Officer Handsome helped DJ haul himself up to his feet just as two more squad cars rounded the bend and pulled into the driveway.
“Doggone, Josie. You’re every bit as impressive as Greta Williams says you are,” Skip told her, to her surprise. He gave her a hand up.
For one thing, she felt as if she’d been holding on to her sanity by a hair’s breadth. None of her interrogation techniques had been skill. For another…that Greta. Although by now, Josie shouldn’t have been surprised that Skip had tracked her down and quizzed her about Josie. The woman seemed to be behind everything everywhere Josie turned. At this point, she’d be expecting Greta to be the tooth fairy. Although the tooth fairy probably didn't scare little kids as much as Greta.
As the squad cars parked, Josie could see that in the backseat of the nearest car sat Ryan the bartender, looking worse for t
he wear. His face was black and blue and blood streamed from both nostrils.
She moved closer so she could overhear the newly arrived officers tell Officer Handsome, “Found this guy trespassing on a lady’s property about a mile down the street. She was beating the crap out of him with a Swiffer, shouting at the top of her lungs about Bunco and Marilyn Monroe, I think. No idea what that’s about, but I figured he had something to do with y’all’s mess over here.”
One of Marion’s Bunco girls, Josie realized. She wondered if she could get in a few minutes alone with Ryan, too. In fact, she was currently exercising all of her self-control—what little she had left—in restraining herself from beating on his window and flipping him the bird.
“Right now, he’s our primary bombing and arson suspect. You can see burns on his hands. And his knuckles are all torn up. Nice job on the collar,” Officer Handsome told him. “We gotta take him in and swab his hands. Maybe Mrs. Rogers over there would like to come with us and perhaps throw him under the bus.”
“Let’s hope so,” the other guy said.
Chapter 42
Josie and Drew stood outside the perimeter of the police tape at the house with the third remaining cop, waiting for what would most likely be a parade of crime scene processors. They’d have to come and check for remaining explosives. Then they’d have to dig Mary Clare up, process her, and eventually release her to the family for a proper burial. Whatever family was left.
Josie tried to say goodbye to Skip because she thought she might not see him again. He planned to follow the parade of cop cars and livery downtown to the police station to watch them all get processed and, presumably, to lawyer up. Plus, he had the video recording on his phone that he wanted to transfer to a flash drive as soon as possible. When she approached him, he refused to accept her goodbyes.
“I’m sure I’ll see you around,” he said, and she left it at that. Would she meet up with him again? Maybe in Boston, if he ever got up that way. She and Drew were leaving Austin for San Antonio in the morning, so she wouldn’t be running into Skip again this trip. However in her experience, people had a habit of turning up at the weirdest times.