by Lisa Jackson
“Let’s go.” Bellisario had heard enough.
“No, wait!” Sarah insisted, holding her brother’s gaze. “How did she die?”
“By ending it,” he said simply, his Adam’s apple working. “She took her own life. To end the torment. By him. She hung herself in the guesthouse.”
Sarah felt as if she’d lived her life on quicksand, the truth and lies always shifting, never really knowing from one moment to the next what was the solid truth and what was a dark, guarded secret.
“I found her and cut her down.” His expression was tortured, filled with the regret of a lifetime. “I, um, I cleaned up the mess. It was all I could do and then . . . and then I brought her here, so she could rest in peace.”
There was a frightening thread of truth here running through the fabric of lies that had been her life, or what she’d thought was her life. “And you didn’t tell Mother?”
“I didn’t have to. She knew.” He said it with conviction, and Sarah remembered the anguished wails that had risen up the stairs as Roger had carried her down from the attic. All too vividly she recalled their white-faced, stricken mother and how she had crumpled in the hallway. “Bastard! No, no, no!” she’d cried, her fingers laced over the small statue of the Madonna as she’d pounded the floor. The little serene statue hadn’t shattered, had remained intact as even Arlene had cracked, weeping and swearing, tears raining from her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said to Sarah, but hadn’t offered to hold her, had clutched the figurine, Theresa’s little statue, as if the last bits of her sanity had depended upon it. Roger said, “Mother took care of the problem.”
Sarah’s chest squeezed tight. Memories flooded through her. The pieces of her life tumbling together rapidly as a cold, Canadian wind blew fast and hard to the west, chasing away the fog, Sarah Stewart McAdams saw the pictures of her past come into focus. “The baby . . . it was the problem?” she asked, but knew the answer before it passed his lips.
“No, Sarah, the baby was you.”
She stumbled back, wanting to deny it, but she remembered her mother’s reaction at the retirement home when Mrs. Malone had introduced Sarah to her mother, reminding the older woman of a simple truth, but Arlene wasn’t about to be fooled. “My daughter is Theresa,” Arlene had sworn, mistaking Sarah for the woman Sarah had believed was her older half sister. Now, if what Roger was saying were true, that simple fact too was a lie, a secret Arlene had hidden for more than thirty years.
“Theresa was my mother.” Sarah said the words, hardly believing them, but realizing how many questions they answered.
Roger didn’t have to respond.
“And my father . . . ?” she whispered, but in a heart-stopping instant, she understood that sickening truth as well. It was all so clear now: Sarah was the child of the man she had always known to be her father, Franklin Stewart, but her mother was Theresa. Arlene had raised Sarah as her own child, somehow making the family and friends believe she’d been pregnant, perhaps becoming a recluse, who knew? Then, years later, when the same perverted man who had sired her had been sick enough to try it again, to intimately touch and sexually caress his own flesh and blood, Roger had intervened. Her breathing was shallow, her pulse uneven, her stomach filled with acid and hate.
“Sarah,” Clint said, his voice a rough whisper as he wrapped his arms around her again. “Sweetheart, it’s okay . . .”
“No!” she cried. “It is not okay.”
To Roger, she said, “How did Mother think she fixed things? By adopting me? But there’s more, isn’t there? You said ‘she took care of the problem’,” Sarah repeated, taking a step closer to her criminal of a half brother to stare him in the eyes. “What did you mean?”
“That she killed him, Sarah.”
For a second no one said a word.
“Explain that.” This time it was Clint.
“My mother killed her husbands.” Roger’s words were without inflection. “Both of them. First my father, so she could marry Franklin, and when she couldn’t take any more of Franklin’s incest, when she saw that he would never change, she began poisoning him, as she had my father, watching him die, inch by inch, day by day.”
“And you know this how?” Bellisario demanded.
“I bought the rat poison for her. Not for my father, of course, I didn’t really understand at the time what she’d done. But when she asked me to pick it up at the feed store, I did, then I knew that it was for Franklin, and I just let her.” He looked off into the distance, his expression blank. “It was justice. For Theresa.”
“Sarah, I’ve heard a lot of bullshit stories from cons,” Bellisario began.
“No.” Sarah cut her off. She was remembering her mother’s satisfaction when she’d nearly drunk the fly in her milk, so many years ago, and then recently, she’d been accused of lacing a diabetic man’s drink with sugar at the retirement home. “I believe him.” Sarah’s mother was really her grandmother, a murderess, her father a sexual predator who’d raped her older sister and nearly done the same to her.
“This is some tale you’re telling,” Bellisario said, unconvinced, as she motioned for the deputy to start hauling Roger away. “Why the hell were you here with the kid?”
“I told you,” Roger said, “I was saving her.”
“From what? Or whom?” Sarah demanded, then scanned the stern faces of everyone who had collected in the old graveyard near the open door of Angelique Le Duc’s tomb. A new fear struck her. Why were they all here? How did they all know to come and save her when they should be out searching for the madman who was stealing girls from the streets of Stewart’s Crossing?
No!
“Where is she?” she demanded, turning to Cliff, her worst fears congealing when she read the pain in his eyes. “Oh . . . God! Where’s Jade?”
Bellisario glared across the interrogation table at Roger Anderson. Pale, with light eyes, unkempt beard, and a high forehead, he sat in clothes that hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine in a month. His legs were shackled, and his cuffed hands were clasped atop the table as if he were about to pray. Overhead, the fluorescents were harsh, giving him a sickly, beleaguered appearance.
“Let’s start over,” she suggested, as they’d been at the interrogation for nearly an hour and she wasn’t buying his story. “Where’s Jade McAdams?”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know. Ask Hardy Jones.”
“We have. He says he doesn’t know anything.”
“He’s lying.”
“That’s what he says about you,” Bellisario said, knowing that the interview was being watched through the “mirror” on the wall, as well as every word and nuance videotaped.
“I was there to save them.”
“Sarah and her daughters? The way you saved Rosalie Jamison?”
“I don’t know her.”
“What about Candice Fowler?”
“I told you—no.”
He was calm. Too calm. “I failed with Sarah,” he said for the fourth time, “but I wanted to help her girls. Make certain they were safe.”
“But Franklin Stewart is long dead. Your mother took care of that, according to you.”
“True.”
“Why did you think the McAdams girls were in danger?”
“They always are,” he said simply, and Bellisario fought back a desire to throttle the man with his cryptic answers. It had all been so bizarre, almost surreal. Finding Anderson at the tomb had been the first surprise; the second was Sarah McAdams and the dead bodies inside. Anderson swore he didn’t know who the skeleton of the man was, though Sarah McAdams was certain the corpse was Maxim Stewart, the first of the line and the man who’d built Blue Peacock Manor for his wife Angelique Le Duc, a woman who had apparently cheated on him with his son, her stepson. Anderson had admitted to locking Sarah in the vault, to “keep her safe,” that he was planning to find a way to put her and her daughters somewhere outside the kidnapper’s range, but Sarah had found the key to the vault and
he’d seen her leave the house—he’d been watching it ever since they’d returned—and he’d followed her to the cemetery. In his deluded mind, he thought that the vault had become a safe house of opportunity. Which was all a little too convenient, another part of the Stewart family mess, in Bellisario’s opinion.
The kicker was that the other corpse, that of a woman, was supposedly Theresa Anderson, Roger’s full sister, who was pushed over the edge of sanity when she was raped by her father. All of that was conjecture at this point, but time would tell. Anderson also swore he’d stayed under the radar and away from his parole officer because he’d sensed, from Hardy Jones, that something was up as Jones, after drinking too much at The Cavern after his shift, had bragged to Roger that he was in for a major score. Though Hardy had played coy and hadn’t said exactly what the scam was that he was running, he had mentioned how valuable “girls” were, how men would pay big money for them, use them as slaves or whores or even wives, if the situation were right. Anderson had gone on alert, knowing that Sarah and her girls were moving to Stewart’s Crossing. He vowed to himself to protect them because of his broken promise to Theresa to keep Sarah, her baby, safe all those years ago. He included Sarah’s children, Theresa’s grandchildren, as well. He’d been living in the woods since their return to Stewart’s Crossing, moving his camp every few nights, staying close
Bellisario had trouble believing the story Anderson was peddling, but there was a ring of truth in there somewhere, she just wasn’t sure what was fact and what was fiction. The trouble was, if Roger Anderson wasn’t in cahoots with Hardy Jones, then who the hell was?
Things were unraveling fast.
Sweating, he parked in an empty lot near the center of town. He knew he had to keep calm, force a smooth exterior, not alert anyone around him about his secret life.
He’d heard that Dodds was in lockup and Hardy Jones was already at the station house, being interrogated. Both men knew the drill, if they stuck to the plan. Dodds was solid, Hardy Jones a bit of a wild card. He rued bringing Jones to his first serious meeting with the “mountain men,” as they called themselves, a handful of rogues who lived in Idaho, lived by their own rules, and defied the government. Their homes were fortresses, complete with underground shelters, stashes of food, water, and weapons, and booby traps if a trespasser, the “enemy,” should ever dare step onto their properties.
They liked their women strong, beautiful, maybe a little sassy, but in the end, obedient to their “husbands.”
Fortunately, they were willing to pay. Munitions sales were lucrative, and they weren’t afraid to pay a high price for the right “wives,” as they called them, married by their own ministers, in their own small fundamentalist sect.
The deal was dangerous, but oh so lucrative.
So he had to play it cool for a few more hours.
He made one quick call, heard it ring, then a distinctive click as the phone on the other end was connected. Before the mountain man could utter a word, he said, “We’re moving the operation up. Twenty-four hours. Midnight tonight. There won’t be seven girls, only five, but we have to move them. Now.”
There was hesitation on the other end, and he wanted to scream at the man, It’s now or never, cocksucker, but apparently the guy understood. “All right, then. We’ll be there,” he said with finality.
“With the cash,” he reminded his client.
“Of course,” the man responded, then hung up.
He let out his breath, lit a cigarette, rolled down his window, and drove through town to a house on a high point above the city where Dr. Bigelow and his wife lived. As if thumbing its nose at the little town below with its rustic, Western decor, this home was sleek and modern, with walls of glass and an “open-concept interior,” which seemed to be all the rage these days. Built on one level, it boasted commanding views of the river and the Washington shore, as upscale a Stewart’s Crossing address as one could pay for. Dr. Bigelow and his gossip of a wife and all their damned money, a lot of it inherited . . . such a fucking travesty.
From the number of vehicles lining the winding driveway and parked on the street, the party looked to be in full swing.
Good. He hadn’t worn a costume, wanted everyone at the party to see that he was there, in attendance, though it wouldn’t matter in twenty-four hours. But for now, he needed a little breathing room, a bit of an alibi that would at least pass at a cursory level. Also, he wanted to be certain that the dirt from his operation was sloughed onto someone the police would more likely suspect; then he’d be on his way.
Tossing his half-smoked filter tip through the window, he grabbed a bottle of Merlot from the front seat and walked up a slate walkway to the huge glass door. He rapped lightly on the panels, and Dee Linn, herself, dressed as Marie Antoinette, a white wig piled high, answered. “Oh, dear,” she said, deflated. “Another one in street clothes. I suppose you didn’t get the memo that this was to be a costume party.”
“Sorry,” he said and handed her the bottle of wine. “Been busy.”
“Hmmm.” She eyed the label, one eyebrow rising. “Nice. Thank you.” Walter Bigelow, DDS, deigned to join his wife at the door. Despite “the memo,” he was dressed in the uniform he wore at the office: scrubs, lab coat, and superior expression. “Glad you could come. Your mother and sister are already here. You know how Marge is. Always punctual.”
“That she is,” he agreed, holding up his hand, spying Joseph, in jeans and an open-collared shirt, drink in hand, surveying a table laden with appetizers and decorated with pumpkins, black cats, and a witch’s hat. The caterers were in the kitchen, all dressed in white shirts, black slacks, and long, orange aprons. He mingled with those dressed in street clothes, along with three women who were supposed to be kittens, a witch or two, a husband and wife who were ancient Egyptians, Rambo, and Indiana Jones.
He refused to look at his watch, hoped he appeared relaxed, felt the seconds click by in slow motion.
Just a few more hours, he reminded himself as he snagged a beer from a passing waiter, and then, finally, freedom.
Jade’s hands were bleeding and raw. She couldn’t see them, it was much too dark, but she felt them throbbing, knew her fingernails had split, the flesh beneath her fingertips and palms exposed.
She heard the other girls, shuffling in their stalls, lying on a creaking cot, gurgling down water, or occasionally peeing, the sound of urine hitting the bottom of a bucket.
God, this was miserable.
In-fucking-humane!
She’d spent all the daylight hours trying to climb the damned wall of the stall and get over it, to find a way to escape, but she’d failed. Over and over, she’d scaled the rough siding, forcing her toes into knot holes or spots where the boards didn’t quite fit together, but each time she’d neared the top, she’d lost her balance or couldn’t find a foothold and had ended up sliding down to land on the floor again. Her only triumph had been knocking the horseshoe down and catching it deftly.
The other girls hadn’t fared any better. Dana, who claimed to be a gymnast, hadn’t been able to vault over the doors (no big surprise there, the girl was a braggart), and Mary-A, still a pain in the butt, proclaimed that she’d found a tool stuck in the corner of her stall, something she thought was used to clean a horse’s hoof. Jade didn’t trust the girl, not even now. She was probably lying. Candice had no weapon, but Rosalie said she’d found something that might cause damage, part of a nail clipper or something that sounded incredibly small and useless. No, her horseshoe was the only weapon she’d trust.
She only hoped that, with another day before this supposed slave auction or whatever it was, the police or some of the parents or the damned FBI would locate them. Jade had checked; no one had their phones on them, nor had the jerkwads kept them. Nothing electronic, no ID, to help.
She felt her insides shredding at the thought of what her abductors planned to do to her, but she knew she wouldn’t go down without a fight. Rosalie’s plan wasn’t brillia
nt, but it was all they had, if Candice, the whiner, could play her part. Only then, if she could lull the dirtbags into thinking she was ill and letting down their guard, would they have any chance at all.
Jade didn’t like the odds. She paced the stall, where odors of horseflesh and urine still lingered, and wished she had just one nail, something she could step on, to lift her up a little higher, a bit of wood or metal that she could wedge between the boards and that was strong enough to bear her weight long enough that she could push herself up, pull herself over, and drop onto the other side. She’d open all the stalls and they could run, ever westward, to the house and her mother.
Her heart cracked a little at the thought of Sarah and Gracie, so near, but so damned far. Would she ever see them again? And what about the father she’d just met? Would she even get the chance to get to know him?
Not if you let these sickos determine your fate!
She plopped down on the edge of her cot.
Someone would come for them, surely. They weren’t that far off the grid. Weren’t there FBI helicopters or something reserved just for the purpose of saving hostages? On television there were always battalions of ace sharpshooters, all dressed in black, with helmets and assault rifles.
But that was in the city.
No, she reminded herself, that was in Hollywood.
“Hey!” Rosalie shouted. “Listen up! Hear that? Someone’s coming.”
The barn went silent. Jade hardly dared breathe, and sure enough, the sound of a engine whining as it climbed a hill reached her ears. Her muscles tensed. Did he have another girl? More than one? Was he coming just to check on them?
“Just remember the plan,” Rosalie shouted as the engine—a truck, Jade thought—rumbled closer. “If we can get him tonight, before there are others, even if it’s both of them, we need to go for it. Candice? Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” was the dispirited reply, and Jade’s heart sank. Having their whole plan resting on the shoulders of a girl who was obviously the weakest link seemed ridiculous. But at least Candice had quit crying and sobbing and moaning. That was something. Could she pull it off? Jade doubted it. She couldn’t allow her fate to be in Candice Fowler’s hands.