by Sam Cheever
As it turned out, there were no worries on that score. George Shulz seemed disinclined to come any closer. Instead, he stood there glaring at us like one of his cats. “What?” he finally asked.
Hal’s beautiful lips twitched with humor. “Mr. Shulz, do you remember me?”
I thought that was a strange question but realized Hal had cause to wonder when the man turned a blank expression to him. “Thomas Beauregard. Murder one. Guilty as charged but a darn good liar.” He shook his head, the greasy mop of hair glued around his face not even moving at the action. “Worst client I ever had. You deserved that prison sentence.”
I gasped, turning to Hal with a shocked gaze.
He lifted one midnight eyebrow. “Nope. Try again.”
Shulz cocked a bony hip and narrowed his gaze on Hal. “Peter Grenache. Forty counts of robbery. Unhygienic in the extreme. Most unpleasant fellow. I didn’t appreciate being threatened with that knife. Scoundrel.”
If George Shulz thought Peter Grenache was unhygienic, I hoped I never came within ten miles of the guy.
Hal sighed. “Not even close. Give it another go.”
Impatience made me twitch. I opened my mouth to try to shorten the process, but Hal lifted a hand to stop me. “Trust me,” he murmured. “This is the way it has to be.”
I snapped my lips closed and gave a weary sigh.
Shulz took two steps closer and looked down his stubby, round nose at Hal, his shaggy brows lifting as he gave him a thorough once over. “Ah. Hal Amity. Arrogant and impatient. Purchased a home he had no right owning. Usurper.”
I gave Hal a look. He chuckled. “Got it in three. You’re improving.”
Shulz’s thin lips twisted with disgust. “Your condescension is not appreciated.” He looked at me. “Why are you here?”
Good manners had my hand twitching out of my pocket in an unconscious movement to offer a handshake before I remembered I’d rather be murdered with a thousand pickle forks. I decided to give him my stats in a language he’d understand. “Joey Fulle. Unrepentant busybody. Never met you before and probably never will again. Looks great in tee-shirts and fringed jean shorts.”
Shulz stared at me a long moment, his mouth working as if he were trying to chew up my words. Finally, he frowned. “Incorrect. Joey Fulle. Daughter of Brent and Joline Fulle, deceased. Unindicted smugglers. Horrible people. Deserved their fate.”
Hal was right. I did want to pinch off his head. Except that would mean I’d have to touch him. My hands flew out of my pockets and transformed into fists. I’d never punched anybody in my life, but I was about to do it. The horrible man standing across the room deserved to have his face dented, and I was just the woman to do it.
Fortunately for Shulz—and probably everybody involved—Hal reached over and wrapped a big, warm hand around one of my fists and gave it a squeeze. I took a deep breath, striving for calm, and then settled for a verbal punch, which was less likely to get me thrown into the Deer Hollow jail. “You’re a jerk. My parents were wonderful people. No wonder all your clients threaten to kill you.”
Shulz shrugged, his blank expression unchanged. “Not all of them. Approximately sixty-three percent threaten violence. Five percent cower in my presence. One percent call the police and fifteen percent try to get me committed.”
I did a quick mental calculation. “What about the other sixteen percent?”
He shrugged. “They leave as soon as they see the office.”
“Understandable,” I replied, giving the room another quick look.
“I’m afraid you’re wasting your time insulting me, Miss Joey Fulle. I’m a sociopath. I don’t care what you or anyone else thinks.”
“I need to ask you about Devon Little,” Hal said as I chewed on the lawyer’s astounding admission. How was it possible for a sociopath to work as a lawyer? Then I realized that made as much sense as him being a serial killer, the usual profession of sociopaths.
Shulz stared at Hal for a moment. “There’s no reason for me to tell you anything about Devon Little. He no longer owns your house.”
“Ah, but there is a reason. I have questions about…ah…the heating system. I need to find out what the warranty is.”
Shulz lifted his hands. “Not my problem. Don’t care. Go away.”
My hands found their way into fists again.
“What if I can make it your problem?” Hal said quickly, giving me a quelling look.
“I’m listening.”
“Mr. Little is a person of interest in a murder. If I tell Deputy Willager you’ve been in contact with your client, he’ll be all over you like a cheap suit.
Shulz thought about that for a moment. “Why would you do that?”
Hal shrugged. “Why wouldn’t we?”
As a self-professed sociopath, I figured Shulz should understand that simple concept. Apparently, I figured right.
“I don’t know his present location.”
“Then give us the last location you know. It’s important that we find him,” I said.
Shulz stared at me a long moment, gaze speculative, and then nodded. He moved to the paper-laden desk in the center of the overcrowded room and jotted something onto a sticky, shoving it toward Hal. “Now leave.”
“Happily,” I told him. But I didn’t quite make it out of the room unscathed. Shulz’s cold, unfeeling voice stopped me as Hal pulled the door open. “She could be with you now,” he said.
I frowned. “Who?”
“Your mother. She chooses not to be. She never wanted you.”
Though I knew he was lying—my mother was dead and couldn’t choose to be with me at all—his words stabbed into me like a blade, slicing my heart in half. They cut way too close to home…to my deepest fears.
There was actual, physical pain from his hateful statement. I found it hard to breathe. “Shut up,” I wheezed out, wishing my voice didn’t sound so strangled.
Hal touched my arm, turning to give Shulz one last glare, which, if it had been directed at me, would have made my blood run cold. “Let’s go, Joey. He’s just being an ass.”
He didn’t have to ask me twice.
I huddled in my seat, too unhappy to talk as Hal drove us out of Deer Hollow. He let me brood for a while and then reached over and squeezed my hand. “He was lying, Joey.”
I shrugged, trying to pretend I didn’t care and that Shulz’s words hadn’t cut me to the bone. But I doubted my pretense was very convincing since I was pretty sure I had massive internal bleeding from his taunt.
“He likes to hurt people. He thrives on it.”
I frowned. “There’s one thing I don’t get.”
“What’s that?” he asked me, still holding my hand.
“He has cats.”
After a beat, Hal glanced my way, confusion on his handsome face. “He does.”
“What I mean is, aren’t sociopaths generally cruel to animals? Don’t they torture them and stuff? Why would he have them at all, and so many of them at that?”
“One, I don’t think he’s a true sociopath. Not in the clinical sense of the word. He’s just a really mean person and he uses that as an excuse to get away with his cruelty. And, secondly, I’m pretty sure he has all those cats just to annoy people. I don’t care how much you like cats. When you squash that many of them into a small space, the result isn’t pleasant.”
My nose wrinkled in scent memory. “You aren’t kidding. It smelled like a meth lab in there.”
He grinned. Giving my hand a squeeze, he finally released it. I felt the loss of his heat and his touch like a physical thing. “Are you up for a visit to this location?”
I glanced at the sticky he held out, taking it from him to look at the address. “This is off Highway 37. There’s nothing but trees and farmland out there.”
“I’m not expecting much,” Hal told me. “Devon’s probably long gone by now. But we need to follow it up.”
I agreed. We needed to follow up. Just in case my dad’s best friend was feeling cocky and didn
’t bother relocating after dealing with his sleazy lawyer. But, like Hal, I didn’t have very high hopes for the outcome.
Boy was I wrong.
Chapter Fourteen
The ramshackle barn huddling in the distance appeared to be the only structure on the property. Hal pulled the Escalade off Highway 37 and stopped it when the short gravel drive ended. We sat, staring at the barn, seeing the half-collapsed roof and hole-riddled walls of weathered gray wood.
There was no fencing around the calf-tall grass, and I didn’t see any livestock. Nothing moved in the shadowed doorway, which was half-open and sagging like the rest of the structure. “I doubt anybody’s living in that,” I told Hal.
He frowned. “That’s probably a good bet.” He glanced at me. “You want to wait here while I give it a quick look?”
Reaching for the door handle, I shook my head. “Not a chance.”
He smiled. “I should have known.” But he glanced at my low-cut pull-on sneaks. “You’re going to get your shoes dirty.”
“They’ll wash.” I climbed out, slamming the car door before he could talk me out of coming. I couldn’t explain why, but I felt an almost overwhelming urge to check out the dilapidated barn. It could have been just my fascination with old barns. I’d always loved them, to the point where I’d been mad at my dad for two weeks when he’d torn down the one on our property that had once stood where his hangar now was.
But it was more than that.
As I stared at the building, my heart started to beat really fast. The sun rose up just behind the ancient structure, painting its old walls in gold and creating a halo-like effect. I found myself walking in that direction without conscious knowledge of having moved.
I was dimly aware of Hal calling my name.
A moment later he came up beside me, wrapping a hand around my elbow. “You know there are probably snakes in this grass.”
I twitched, my feet jolting to a stop. “Ugh!”
He grinned. “Just watch where you step.”
I picked my way carefully through the rest of the tall grass and Hal pulled the sagging barn door open. It groaned and caught in several places before he managed to wrench it open enough for us to pass easily through. We stopped just inside the door, our eyes adjusting to the dimmer light inside. The sun filtering through the broken walls and roof painted golden lines across the dirt floor, gilding random strands of straw and highlighting things better left unnoticed.
I frowned at the dried-up husk of a dead rat and fought the urge to step back through the door.
Hal moved into the barn, his tall frame dwarfed by the high, peaked roofline. On one end, a fractured wooden ladder climbed to a loft with moldy hay spilling over its edge like ugly lace. On the wall beneath the loft, a plain wooden door stood slightly ajar. I headed for that.
As I grew closer, I found that my chest had tightened. I wondered if I was having an asthma attack. I’d had asthma as a kid but had largely outgrown it. I rarely suffered from its effects anymore, and when I did, it was just a small sense of pressure that quickly dissipated.
But the feeling making it hard to breathe wasn’t going away. I stopped in front of the door, my hand outstretched to grab the ancient brass knob, and thought I could hear the quickening of someone’s breath on the other side of the door.
I considered calling Hal over, just in case, but decided against it. I was letting my imagination run away with me. There was nothing behind that door but dust and dead spiders. Squaring my shoulders, I reached out and pulled it open.
My heartbeat stuttered. I gasped, one hand reaching out to grab the door frame.
My knees buckled.
If it hadn’t been for the sudden arrival of Hal behind me, his strong arms encircling my waist, I might have hit the ground.
My head started to shake and my lips parted, the denial I wanted to scream dying before the words could emerge.
Shock turned the edges of my world gray as I stared at the woman standing in the middle of the tiny, disheveled tack room.
She stood tall and lean, hair swept back from her still pretty face in a ponytail that made her look ten years younger than her fifty years. She looked slightly ruffled around the edges. As if she’d spent too much time in filthy, decaying barns. But the gentle smile I remembered all too well transformed the roughness into a regal kind of beauty.
“Hello, sweetie.”
I swallowed, my lips slamming closed as shock made stars burst before my eyes. I shook my head. “It can’t be.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” Joline Fulle said softly. “I can explain everything.”
I sincerely doubted that. But, since I’d thought she was dead for over two years, I was definitely interested in where she’d been. Why she hadn’t told me, her only child, that she was alive. And why she hadn’t cared enough to consider the pain I was suffering because of her loss.
She could be with you now... She chooses not to be. She never wanted you.
I shook my head to dispel Schulz’s cruel taunts from my mind as she began.
“I was only trying to keep you safe.”
I must have whimpered because Hal’s arms tightened around me. “I think we should do this somewhere else.”
I glanced up, my gaze catching on his and seeing the pity there. I bristled. I didn’t need his pity. It made me feel pathetic. A dupe. A pawn. “No. There’s nothing she could say that I’d be interested in hearing.” I pulled away from Hal and shoved past him to the door. I stopped to look back to my mother. “Do you have any idea what you put me through? I almost died from grief. You could have saved me that. But you obviously decided I wasn’t important enough…”
She took a step closer, her hand outstretched and a pleading look on her face. “That’s not true, sweetie. Hear me out, please.”
I jerked my head in the negative. “I don’t know why you’re skulking around here. There’s nothing left for you in Deer Hollow. You should leave.”
I nearly ran from the barn, tears flowing so fast and furiously they nearly blinded me. A bird rose into the air with a surprised squawk as I plunged from the dim light of the decaying structure into the sunlight. A soft breeze pushed at my hair as I ran. A sob tore from my throat. I didn’t get far. Halfway to the car, I dropped to my knees in the grass, panting and sobbing.
Moments later, I’d forced myself to calm down.
The soft swish of footsteps behind me gave warning that I wasn’t alone. I didn’t look up, assuming it was Hal. “I want to go home.”
There was a long moment of silence. Then a soft voice said. “I lost him that night, Joey. The man I’d always loved. I lost him more than once.”
I stiffened, my head coming up. I didn’t want to hear the story she needed to tell me. I wanted to run away from it. From her. From the rejection she represented.
But I couldn’t move. My muscles locked and I sat there, unable to escape.
“I wanted to die too. I probably would have if it wasn’t for you. For Devon.”
I blinked in surprise, finally turning to look at her. “Don’t lie to me.”
She sank slowly into the grass, shaking her head. “It’s true. Devon saved me that night. He dragged me away and hid me in that cabin for weeks.”
I frowned. “Hid you? Why?”
“You’re a smart girl, sweetie. Tell me you didn’t have questions about the crash?”
“I did, but…”
She nodded. “Someone put that rock in the grass that night. Someone made sure your father’s plane would hit it in the dark.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know the answer to that. We thought, at first that it had something to do with the job we were on…”
“The painting?” I asked. “Hal and I solved that mystery.”
“Not the painting. That was a small problem. One which your father was trying to fix in the midst of a much bigger issue.”
“I don’t understand.” I turned around, crossed my legs and leaned my f
orearms on my knees, caught up in her story despite myself. “What bigger issue?”
“A friend of your father’s from Indianapolis asked us to help. To use our network to move someone to safety.”
“Someone?” I asked incredulously. “You moved a person?”
Joline Fulle’s lips tightened. “A woman. The girlfriend of Garland Medford, a criminal who has ties to drugs, sex trafficking, and murder. Medford’s organization is wide and well-connected. Your dad’s friend believed Garland even had an informant in the US Marshals Service.”
“Witness Protection…?”
“Not safe,” my mother responded
I frowned. “So, you delivered this woman that night and then what? The bad guy found out and made the plane crash?”
She looked down at her hands. “I don’t know the details.”
I bit back frustration. “You know you’re alive. And you know my father isn’t. And you know…” My heart skipped a beat. “Is Arno in on this?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because he reported two bodies in that crash. A man and a woman. He reported that you were in that crash.”
My mother shrugged. “The woman was my size and had my coloring.” She frowned, her cheeks pinkening. “I suppose he saw what he expected to see. There would have been no reason for him to look further.”
I felt a stab of pity for her as she spoke. It couldn’t be easy for her to discuss my father’s death and realize that, for whatever reason, she’d escaped his fate.
Why had she? I asked myself. Why hadn’t she been in that plane with him?
My mother’s mouth tightened into a straight line. “Obviously, it wasn’t me.”
“Where were you that night?”
“I was there. Waiting for him to return. I was catching up on some paperwork in the office.”
“So, you saw…”
A tear slid down her cheek. “If Devon hadn’t been there, I’d probably have been blown up when the engine exploded. I was trying to get to your father…” She swallowed hard, her cheeks wet with silvery tears. “He stopped me. He dragged me away, screaming and fighting him with every step. He took me to his cabin and made me promise to stay there while he went to find out what was going on.”