Liar, Liar

by Lisa Jackson

  CHAPTER 32

  “Didi’s dead? For certain?” Vera Gibbs whispered, her hand over her mouth as she stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the interior lights, a screen separating her from the detectives.

  She’d answered when Settler had rung the bell. She and Martinez had introduced themselves, shown their badges.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Settler said.

  “Dead? You found her? After all this time. I can’t believe . . .” Turning her head, she called, “Jensen. It’s the police. They found your aunt.”

  Behind her, a tall man in his twenties appeared. “They say Didi’s dead,” Vera whispered, and though she seemed a bit shaken, she didn’t fall apart.

  “You’d better come inside.” Jensen pushed the screen open farther, and they entered. “I’m Jensen, Vera’s son,” he said. “Have a seat.” He motioned to the living room, and as Vera took refuge in a rocker, Jensen stood in the open space between the living room and dining room, his arms crossed over his chest. “What happened?” he asked.

  Settler and Martinez took turns explaining about finding the body in the car in the desert, that it was obvious that Didi had been dead for two decades and that she’d been murdered.

  “Murdered?” Vera repeated. “I guess I’m not surprised. But who would . . . ?” She let the question fade, and Settler noted that though she appeared surprised and was obviously processing the news, she certainly wasn’t sad about her sister’s violent death.

  Jensen ran a hand over his short-cropped, blond hair. He swung a dining room chair around and sat on it, while Settler and Martinez, at his urging, took seats on opposite ends of a couch that had seen better days. A recliner angled toward a flat-screen TV remained unoccupied. Milo’s chair, Settler thought.

  “Is your husband here?” Martinez asked.

  Vera shook her head. “Working.”

  Jensen said, “It’s just Mom and me, and my son, who’s sleeping.” He brightened a bit at the mention of his boy, but then added, “Dad’s on the road. Sales. Farm equipment. And Uncle Bill, who lives out in an apartment in the garage, he’s gone, too, for a couple of days. Vacation from work.” He paused, then looked at his mother. “You know, Mom and I, we’d talked about coming to see you. You aren’t the first people to show up today.” He explained about Remmi Storm and Noah Scott showing up unexpectedly, and as he did, Vera seemed to shrink farther into the rocker.

  Though irritated that Remmi and Noah Scott had been here already and hadn’t bothered to mention it, Settler managed to keep an outwardly calm facade. Why couldn’t people just leave police investigations to the investigators?

  “. . . they left a few hours ago,” Jensen finished, staring at his mother as she seemed to shrink into the well-worn cushions of the gently swaying rocker. “Mom?” he said, encouraging her.

  “Oh, no . . . this isn’t a good time.” She was shaking her head.

  “There’s never a ‘good time,’ Mom, and you know it. So, if you don’t tell them, I will. At least I’ll tell them what I know.” He turned his attention to the officers. “Look, I was a screw-up as a kid. Did a lot of things I’m not proud of.”

  His mother made a little snort of disdain.

  “I even stole from my cousin.”

  “Which you didn’t tell her,” Vera popped out with. “You had the chance today.”

  “I will. And I’ll pay her back.” Jensen appeared sincere. “I’m a father now, and I’ve got to set a good example for my son. But this doesn’t have anything to do with me.” Once more his gaze landed on his mother. “Mom?”

  She sent her son a furious glare.

  He pushed. “We talked about this. You said you needed to do the right thing. The Christian thing.”

  Silence stretched between them, and for a second, Settler thought Vera would stand firm, but she finally exhaled on a long, weary sigh. “Fine.” Gathering herself, she faced the officers, her pointed chin lifting in a bit of a challenge. “I think . . . I mean I’m not sure, but it could be that my husband is into something very bad.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Settler asked.

  “I don’t really know,” Vera said as she rocked slowly and fingered the cross at her neck. The room was tired-looking, the lamps dim.

  “Mom,” Jensen said, urging her. “You know it’s a sin to lie, and worse yet—”

  “Don’t lecture me!” She held up a hand to him, her lips moving silently as if she were giving herself a mental pep talk or maybe praying. With all the pictures of Jesus decorating the room, and the huge Bible lying open on the dining room table, that seemed the most likely.

  “Milo’s a good man,” she whispered.

  “What did he do?” Martinez asked.

  “I don’t know that he did anything. I’m not really certain. I mean . . . I don’t know for sure, but there’s a chance he was involved somehow in that poor woman’s death.” She blinked and looked at the floor.

  “Whose death?” Settler asked.

  “Karen Upgarde’s. The woman he—we—hired to dress up like Didi.”

  “You hired her?” Dani asked. “Why?”

  She was wringing her hands now, her voice shaky. “For publicity. For the book.”

  “I’m Not Me, the story about Didi?” Martinez jumped in before Settler could ask.

  She nodded. “It was my idea. I thought it might add a little interest in the book if there were ‘Didi sightings’ like there are Elvis sightings, and it was a good idea.” She glanced at Settler. “She wasn’t supposed to die!”

  “What went wrong?” Martinez asked at the same time Dani queried, “Did you run this by Trudie Crenshaw?”

  “Trudie knew. She even had some of Edie’s . . . Didi’s old things. She was close to her, when they both were in Las Vegas, and sometimes Didi would crash at Trudie’s, you know, if she was too drunk or too stoned to go home, or if she had a fight with her current boyfriend.” Her face pulled into an expression of disgust.

  “Did Ned Crenshaw know, too?” Dani asked.

  “Yes, he was a part of the book, of course. Edie’s first husband.”

  “And Trudie, his second wife, was the author,” Martinez clarified.

  “Whose idea was the book itself?” Dani asked, but she suspected she already knew.

  “Mine,” Vera said with a bit of remembered pride, but then her face fell. “But Trudie was a better writer, and I didn’t want anyone to know that I was connected. I’m a respected member of my church and . . .” She shook her head and sniffed. “If anyone found out who Maryanne Osgoode was, it was better if it wasn’t me. I’d tried to sell the idea years before, but nothing had happened, and Trudie knew this agent who was connected to an editor at Stumptown, who bought the book. The advance was small. They thought that, other than a few true-crime buffs, who would buy it? So, we decided to stir up some interest. Since no one knew if Didi was alive or dead, why not create a publicity buzz?” She looked at Settler as if she expected the detective to understand. “The only way to make a lot of money was if the book’s sales really got going.”

  “How did you find Karen Upgarde?” Dani asked.

  “Milo had seen her in some bar in the Seattle area. He’d gone in for a beer, and she was up on stage, and he thought she looked a lot like Edie. He was right. With the right makeup and wigs, and dresses, she could pull it off. It turned out she could use the money—well, who couldn’t? So they struck a deal.”

  Vera’s lips started to tremble, and she swallowed hard. “She was just supposed to walk through a crowd, hope someone would see her, catch someone’s eye. Even though Didi Storm wasn’t exactly a household name, Marilyn Monroe still was.”

  “How did you expect someone to make the connection? That she was really trying to act like Didi, not Marilyn?” Martinez asked.

  “The book was just out. We thought if we called some reporters . . . you know, nudged them in that direction, someone would get interested in what had happened to Didi. But Karen wasn’t supposed
to commit suicide. No, no, no! It was supposed to be kind of a guessing game. She’d show up at a mall. Or a bar. Or walking through a hotel, y’know. It’s the holidays, and TV cameras are filming events everywhere. Karen was supposed to show up; then one of us would call the television stations anonymously and say we thought we saw Didi Storm, and the reason we thought she was Didi was because of her hands, the fingernail thing that Edie always thought was so cute, one nail different from all the others.” Vera pressed a finger to her trembling lips. “We thought we might be able to make some real money from it.”

  “From your sister’s disappearance.”

  “I didn’t know if she was really dead. I expected it, of course, but . . . well, I figured Edwina, she owed me.”

  She glared at Dani, her deep-down jealousy, rage, and moral superiority on full display.

  There it is, Dani thought. The true motive.

  Vera went on. “We knew my sister as Edie, short for Edwina. She and I never got along. She was always so . . . outgoing. She always got the attention. Edie thought the world revolved around her, even as a child. She was beautiful,” she added grudgingly. “And, of course, she caught the eye of every boy in school, but she did terrible things. Smoked, drank, and did drugs, I’m pretty sure. Anything for a good time. And she had the loosest morals of any girl I knew! We were brought up by good Christian parents, but it just didn’t take with Edie.” She glanced at her son, who had listened silently to his mother’s take on her sister. “She even went out with your father, did you know that? Milo and I were nearly engaged, and she and he . . .” She shuddered. “Well, anyway, it was a short period, and he begged me to come back to him, begged. So I forgave him, and we got married not long after. Moved away from Anderstown.”

  Dani silently questioned whether the philandering Milo had ever been truly forgiven but kept her own counsel.

  “You think your husband might have done something bad?” Martinez reminded her.

  “Well, yes . . . I mean, I really don’t know. But . . .” She glanced back at her son for encouragement, and Jensen, sober, nodded. Vera’s eyebrows drew together, the lines on her forehead deepening, the turn of her lips downward. “A friend of mine was in San Francisco the day Karen jumped, and . . . Milo was supposed to be in eastern Oregon, selling hay balers, or tractors, or whatever. I just wanted to make certain he was where he was supposed to be, so I checked with a couple of equipment dealers in Bend and Prineville and Baker City, stores on Milo’s sales route.” She began to wring her hands, unconscious of her actions, Dani was pretty sure. “And no one had seen him. So I checked a little farther east into Idaho, but no . . . and he wasn’t in Washington, either. Everywhere I called, they said he wasn’t scheduled for another month or two weeks or whatever. It was obvious he’d lied to me. And then . . .” She blinked rapidly, her expression even more pained. “I checked his cell phone. He was definitely in San Francisco.”

  “You think he was with Karen Upgarde?” Settler asked.

  A whimper escaped her throat. “I don’t know! But he did say once that she was unstable, had tried to commit suicide or something like that, and, you know, with the right urging . . . Oh, sweet Lord.” Tucking a lock of hair around her ear, she added, “I thought he was joking, you know, just kidding around.”

  “And now?” she pressed.

  “I don’t know. We’re kind of in a bad way. A lot of bills, and we paid Karen a lot of money to impersonate Didi, so . . . I don’t know what to think. And now . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I just know that he lied. Again. Just like before. When I was in college and he cheated on me.”

  Martinez asked, “Do you know where he was when Ned and Trudie Crenshaw were killed?”

  “No . . . ,” she said weakly. “But when I called and we talked about it . . . he pointed out that, with them gone, all of the royalties for the book would fall to me.”

  “Does he own a rifle?” Martinez asked.

  She didn’t answer immediately, seemed somewhere else, so Martinez repeated the question. She snapped to, and said, “Oh . . . oh, yes. Several,” she admitted. “He . . . he hunts.”

  Settler felt that little sizzle again. This was it. “Does he have the guns here?”

  Vera shook her head. “He always has them with him.”

  “Dad’s a dead-eye with a rifle,” Jensen put in. “Got the shooting trophies to prove it. Sometimes he even refers to himself as ‘the Marksman.’”

  * * *

  “Go to bed.” Half sprawled over Remmi’s couch, Noah had his computer on the coffee table. Once they’d gone upstairs, they’d turned on the spy camera and checked its memory, but watching it had proved futile because, after swinging the baby off his feet and dancing, Vera had cleaned off the dining room table, which meant she’d placed the sunglasses in a drawer. All that showed on the screen was darkness.

  Already connected to the Internet on his laptop, Noah was also linked wirelessly on Remmi’s iPad to Emma, his assistant, who, it seemed, never slept.

  Remmi was next to Noah, her legs over his. “I’m not going to bed yet. Too keyed up.” They were too close to finding out the answers to questions that had haunted her all her life. As tired and emotionally wrung out as she was, she couldn’t just fall into bed and shut it all down, not with her mind spinning as it was.

  Noah was FaceTime-ing with Emma, who was pretty and intense. In her early twenties, with brown hair that fell in loose, unkempt layers to her shoulders, Emma Yardley was chewing on her lower lip as she concentrated. Hazel-eyed and sharp-featured, with a smattering of freckles that she didn’t cover with any kind of makeup, she stared into the screen when she wasn’t checking other computers. According to Noah, she surrounded herself with electronics.

  From the corner of her eye, Remmi saw Romeo saunter into the room, stretch, then hop onto the arm of the couch. She motioned for the cat to come closer, patting the vacant cushion next to her. Instead, he pounced onto the back of the couch just out of reach.

  “So here’s the interesting thing,” Emma said as Remmi leaned in for a better view of the screen. “Oliver Hedges Senior, the old guy? He had a bad skiing accident that really messed him up. Lost part of his spleen, broke ribs and his legs, had a punctured lung, and a bruised spinal cord. From what I can see, he kind of gave up for a while, ended up in a facility called Fair Haven Retirement Center, one of those communities that has a graduated living scale, depending upon a person’s needs. Everything from independent living to full-time nursing care, you know what I mean?”

  Noah nodded. “Yep.”

  “Well, Hedges, he was in the upper limits of care requirement. Couldn’t walk and barely talked. He wasn’t that old, either. Sixty-one. So he goes to the hospital and then to the care center, and everything heals but his spine. The long-term diagnosis was that he would probably never walk again. So, his young, second wife—trophy wife—puts him into the home, as, apparently, she’s now having second thoughts about being married to an invalid. Within six months, she divorces the old man and then . . . ends up marrying his son, Hedges the second.”

  “OH2,” Noah said.

  “Okay, whatever. But it goes a little deeper than that. I guess Marilee and OH2 had been college sweethearts, which is how she met his father in the first place. OH1 was single at the time, having already divorced his kids’ mother. So Marilee and OH1 click and she dumps the son for his rich daddy. But after the accident and the awful diagnosis, wifey bails right into the arms of her former boyfriend. So much for ‘until death do us part.’” Emma held up a finger. “But wait, there’s more. The story isn’t over because the old man in the care center. The original Oliver Hedges, OH1? He finds love again.”

  “What?” Noah said.

  “At the nursing facility? In his condition? What were the chances, huh? But it’s true. He recovered enough to take back the reins of the company and marry again.”

  Remmi just stared at the screen “Who?”

  “Well, this is where your Shawna Whit
man comes in,” Emma drawled.

  “Seneca?” Remmi whispered, feeling her pulse jump. “How?”

  “Shawna Whitman, aka Seneca Williams, was one of the nurses at the care facility, and she worked directly with Hedges Senior. I guess you could say she gave him back the will to live again, and he started to improve.”

  Remmi couldn’t believe it. After all this time? “Why an alias?”

  “Turns out Shawna didn’t have a license to be a midwife. Never registered with the state; she just did it on the side. She was really just a nurse’s aide.”

  While Emma was talking, Noah was typing on his laptop and, from the looks of it, checking out information on OH Industries. He’d clicked on the board of directors and pictures of the officers of the company, and front and center was Oliver Hedges.

  Emma went on, “Remember I told you there were two sons? OH2, who died at thirty-seven, and his younger brother, Brett. Well, OH1 also has a twenty-year-old daughter. A girl named Kayla.”

  “Ariel,” Remmi said and turned her attention from the screen to Noah. “It’s Ariel. Not his daughter. Though he might claim she is. Ariel’s his granddaughter!”

  He typed quickly, Googling Kayla Hedges. Pictures appeared, shots of her growing up, from a toddler with her father to a gangly adolescent and eventually to a young woman who was a thinner, younger version of Didi, right down to her secret smile.

  Remmi let out a little cry, and tears filled her eyes. “She’s alive,” she whispered. On the very night she’d found out for certain that her mother had been murdered, she’d learned that her sister had survived! “Is there mention of a son the same age?” she asked, dashing away the tears.

  “Let’s see.” Noah’s fingers flew over the keyboard, as Emma said, “Yep. Kyle. Google him.”

  Noah did, and several pictures appeared on his screen.

  Staring at the lanky teenager with straw-blond hair and a surly expression, Remmi gasped, “He . . . he looks like Jensen when he was about that age.”

  “They would be cousins,” Noah said.

  “Looks like both Kayla and Kyle are in school at UNLV,” Emma said. “The Hedges family home is still in Las Vegas, too.”