Dying in the Dark

by Valerie Wilson Wesley

  But there was still a chance that somebody was with her, a surprise visitor sitting on the couch, sipping the fresh coffee she'd made, finding out what she knew before he did what he'd come to do. A black Mercedes-Benz with Jersey plates was parked in the driveway. It could be hers, but if she'd had enough foresight to buy rock salt, she would have had enough to park her car in the garage. I placed my gun near the top of my bag, strewing some stray Kleenex over it so I could get to it quickly, then trudged up the snowy driveway.

  The porch was small, but large enough for an old-fashioned swing, which made eerie squeaks as it swung in the cold wind. The curtains in the window nearest the door were open, and I glanced inside. A fire blazing in the fireplace radiated a warm coziness. But the room was empty, and I felt that intuitive sense of dread, which has warned me of danger more times than I care to remember. I thought again about leaving while I could, maybe contacting the local police department. But recent run-ins with city departments had left me wary of sharing my theories until I had hard evidence to back them up.

  But then Rebecca came into the room, and gave the fire a poke. She settled into a large comfortable-looking rocking chair, which looked like it might have been the favored chair of her late husband. She was dressed in an elegant black robe that clung to her body like silk, and seemed strangely incongruous with the setting. I watched her for a moment then pressed the doorbell. Startled, she glanced toward the porch, and I waved from the window.

  “Mrs. Donovan, I'm sorry to bother you, I hope I didn't startle you,” I said when she opened the door. She stared at me blankly, not speaking.

  “I'm Tamara Hayle,” I said quickly, fearing she didn't recognize me. “We spoke several days ago?”

  “Why are you here?” There was no expression in her eyes.

  “I'm afraid I have some very sad news. I tried to call you, but your answering service wouldn't give me your number, you don't have an answering machine, and I felt it was very, very important that you know.”

  Truth was, I was beginning to wonder how important it really was. Had I made a mistake?

  “Come in,” she said as if it had suddenly occurred to her that I was standing outside in the snow. She took my coat and hung it in the closet. I set my Kenya bag on the coffee table in front of the couch and moved closer to warm myself by the fire. Her manner surprised me.

  The blazing fire, chintz curtains, and matching upholstery gave the place an ambience of homey comfort. There was a stairway on the side of the room that led to what I assumed were the upstairs bedrooms, and a door that was ajar probably led to a kitchen. Yet there was something unsettling about the room. For one thing, the photographs that had been in the Newark house were here as well. I wondered if she kept duplicates, one for each home. There was one thing, however, that was clearly not a duplicate. The black porcelain urn with the golden lid that I had admired before sat on a pedestal close to the rocking chair.

  So she carried it around with her, this urn with her husband's ashes. Did she set it beside her bed at night? Or across from her in the dining room or kitchen?

  “What brings you here, Ms. Hayle?” The cold distance that had been in her voice before was back.

  But what did I expect, showing up on this woman's doorstep in the middle of a snowstorm. I was probably lucky she let me in at all. I got right to the point.

  “Something terrible has happened, that I thought you should know about, and I wanted to tell you as soon as I could. First of all, is there anyone else here?”

  She paused a moment. “No.” She glanced at the urn, and I wondered if that was the presence that had put the hesitation into her voice.

  “I saw the black car—”

  “That's my car. It's a one-car garage. I park Clayton's Porsche in the garage.”

  Did she put his ashes in his car and drive around? Talk to him as “he” rode beside her?

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “Well, I have some very sad news for you. You may want to sit down,” I started slow, took a deep breath. “I thought you should know as soon as possible that your friend, Annette Sampson, has passed away. Actually, I had an appointment to see her on Friday, and when I visited her home the police were there. They think that her death occurred sometime Thursday, but her body was found by her husband on Friday morning. I'm so sorry to be the one to have to tell you this. Actually, I was—”

  I stopped midsentence because there was no reaction from her, nothing at all. Could this be a form of grief? I wondered.

  ‘And you came all this way in this weather, all the way up here just to tell me that? Or is there something else?”

  I thought then about Aaron Dawson's reaction, the hands over his face, the way his body shook.

  “Yes. I thought you should know.”

  “What was your appointment with her about?” There was warmth in her voice, but there was also cunning as if she wanted to pry something from me that I didn't want to tell.

  ‘A personal matter.”

  She glanced at the urn, and then, as if she realized how odd her reaction had been, she tried again, covering her face with her hands as if weeping. “Oh, poor Annette. I'm so sorry to hear that!”

  Perhaps I was judging her too harshly. Maybe it had taken that long for it to get to her, for her to understand my words.

  “Yes. I was sorry, too.”

  We sat there in silence, the gaze of both of us drawn to the crackling fire. I risked a glance at her. “You don't get lonely here?”

  “I like it here by myself. People take me from my thoughts.”

  And your memories, I thought. I could see through the window that the snow was falling harder. A sheet of white covered the picture window in the dining room. It was painfully clear that any hope I had of her offering me shelter from the storm was out of the question. Best for me to get on the road as soon as I could. I stole another glance at Rebecca, still puzzled by her response to Annette's death and the odd mood that had overtaken her.

  “The authorities assume that Annette killed herself because she killed Celia Jones,” I said, hoping to get some kind of a rise out of her, anything besides the silence, and I got one: a smile that was barely perceptible, but her eyes were still glued to the fire.

  “Could I trouble you for some coffee or tea? It's a long drive back to Jersey, and I want to get on the road before it gets too much later,” I asked. She glanced from the fire at me.

  “Yes, that's a good idea. I'll make some for you, right away.”

  “On second thought, don't bother.” That feeling of dread was back.

  “It's no bother.”

  “Thank you,” I said, grateful for a few more moments before the fire, but something wasn't right about this woman, and I wanted to be out of there as soon as possible. Now more than ever, I felt that I'd been on a fool's errand. I'd wasted my Saturday, put more mileage on my car than I needed to, risked my life in this damn storm, because I was worried about her safety, and she was treating me like crap. This would be one to share with Wyvetta and her customers in the Biscuit.

  Always the lady, Rebecca brought in the coffee in a carafe with a mug and some cream and placed it on the coffee table.

  “Thank you so much,” I said, reaching for the carafe, not waiting for her to bother to pour it. In my haste, I knocked it over, spilling coffee over the table. A photograph of her husband was in harm's way, and she screamed as she grabbed it, knocking my Kenya bag out of the way; the gun inside it made a thud as it hit the floor. She examined the photograph in her hand. Coffee had seeped inside. When she looked up at me, I was surprised by the rage in her eyes.

  “I'm so sorry,” I stuttered, as I swooped another picture off the table before the coffee could reach that one, too.

  “It's ruined now, and there will never be another one taken. Never.”

  “I'm really sorry,” I stammered again. She seemed stunned, unable to move. “Let me get something to wipe up this mess,” I said as I grabbed the tray and coffee and fled to the kitche
n in search of paper towels. I'd get myself some coffee on the road, I decided. Maybe stop at that 7-Eleven on the way back to the highway. The counter guy would be better company.

  With a nasty attitude, I poured the coffee out of the carafe, rinsed it out, and left that and the mug in the sink. Let her wash the damn thing whenever she got around to it. I looked around the counter for some paper towels, couldn't find them, then, out of habit, looked in the cabinet under the sink where I keep my own. I spotted a roll of Bounty behind a can of Comet and a bottle of Fantastic. But as I reached for it, I tipped over a wooden box shaped like a coffin that was pushed to the back of the cabinet.

  It took me a minute to get it, to fully understand what lay on the kitchen floor before me: fountain pens, blood-red ink, Seconals. And, neatly tied with a purple ribbon, those hateful letters she'd written to Celia Jones. My body tightened with fear, as if what I'd found could reach out and strike me dead, too. I stood up slowly, then made my way back to the living room and my Kenya bag where I'd tucked that .38.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  She rocked back and forth in her dead husband's chair, and the creak of that chair and the howling wind outside seemed like the only sounds in the world. I looked for my bag, but it wasn't on the floor where it had fallen. It was beside her chair, as if it belonged to her. I knew then that my gun was in her hand. She must have remembered that the paper towels were under the sink, that I was bound to find her wooden box when I searched for them. I'd found out her secret, and now she would have to do something about it.

  “You know, don't you?” Her voice was tired and heavy, as if she were talking in her sleep.

  “Know what?” I made my voice light and innocent.

  She made a sound that could have been a laugh but it came from too deep inside her throat. “You know because you found the letters. You found the pills.”

  “Why did you do it?” I asked, even though I knew she wasn't going to tell me. “I can guess why you killed Annette. When Celia gave her your letters, she must have recognized your handwriting, the paper, the ink. An old friend like her would know something like that. Annette told me she always heard from you on holidays, that you two never failed to get together. But you didn't call her on New Year's Day, did you? So it probably didn't take much for her to figure out that you might have killed Celia Jones. But why did you kill her?”

  There was no light in her eyes when she looked at me.

  “I will say that I thought you were a burglar,” she said. “That I heard a sound, came downstairs and you were in my living room, going through my things, and I shot you. That's what I will tell them.”

  There was no logic to what she said, and I told her so. “Right, Rebecca. You're going to tell them that I broke into your house and you shot me with my own gun. That doesn't make any sense, does it? Give it to me. Before it's too late. Just give me my gun, and we can work this out together.”

  But we both knew there was no working anything out together. That the truth can be twisted half a dozen ways, and that it always belongs to the person left to tell it. Only one of us would be left to tell it.

  She rose to face me, moving slowly like a tired, old woman, like my grandmother had the day my young uncle was killed, as if all the light had gone from her life. The light was gone from Rebecca's life, too. She was as dead as her husband and baby, and I felt sorry for her. But not sorry enough to end up like Celia and Annette.

  “He told me what happened between them, and he said it meant nothing, but he must have caught it from her, and so she killed my children, the children I should have had, and she wouldn't let me have the one she carried.” I remembered what Laura Hunter had told me in the Biscuit about the judge's wife and the pelvic infection that might have rendered her sterile. Infections like hers could come from an IUD, but they could also be caused by a venereal disease like gonorrhea, I knew that, too. So she thought her husband had caught a disease from Celia and infected her, “killing her children,” and Annette must have told her what she'd told me, that Celia was pregnant.

  Never argue with a woman holding a gun. The best you can do is piece together what you know about the situation and try to figure out what to do about it. You can agree with her, too. Play back what she told you in your own words, and that's what I did.

  “Yeah, Rebecca. I can certainly understand what you're saying. You were right. She took away your babies. It wasn't his fault though, it was all on her because she wouldn't let you have her child, right?”

  She nodded like a kid, grateful that I understood her point.

  “I went to her that day, to Celia Jones, because it was the first day of the year. Annette had told me she was pregnant, and that it could be anybody's child, and I thought it might be Clayton's. He said he hadn't had anything else to do with her, but I thought maybe he didn't know. Maybe it was something left of him. Maybe she would let me raise it because I didn't have anything else. But she laughed in my face and told me there was no baby. But I know she was lying because Annette told me there was.”

  And was that when you shot her through her womb? I thought.

  “Celia Jones always was a liar,” I said, edging closer to the door, wondering if she would shoot me before I could make a run for it. Then I remembered I didn't have my car keys; they were in my bag. “I can see how hurt you must have been, Becky,” I said, my voice kind and sympathetic. “To go there on that morning to ask her to give you the baby, and she said she wasn't even pregnant. What a liar that woman was.” I shook my head in agreement, then thought maybe I should go in another direction, wondered if there was something I could say that would shock her enough to throw her off, catch her off guard so I could make a lunge for the gun. I was stronger than she was, and I knew how to fight.

  So I changed midstream, making my voice wheedling and nasty.

  “But you did know that your loving husband, the late great Clayton Donovan, knew her before you introduced them, didn't you?”

  She looked at me blankly, wondering what I was up to, not sure how to react.

  I smiled as if caught in some pleasant memory. “I remember them in high school, Clay and Celia. They were lovers then, did you know that? Did you know that your husband, the late great Clayton Donovan, was the first man she ever slept with, she told me so herself. She told me before you killed her that he was going to leave you, and they were going to go off together. Isn't that why you really killed her, Becky?”

  “No!”

  I smiled knowingly and went on. “They say you never forget the first man you have sex with, and Clayton was her first. Did you know that, Rebecca? That's why he was giving her money before he died. How stupid could you be, Rebecca. So they were going to run off together and raise their child together.”

  It was coming off the top of my head, but there was just enough truth to make it sound convincing. I was sure now that Clayton Donovan was the him that Dawson had told me about yesterday. He was a big man with lots of respect who people admired. He hadn't been able to do anything else for her because he had died. I was sure he'd broken it off, like he'd told his wife. Men like him don't leave a prissy, high-class wife for a Celia Jones, but she obviously didn't know that.

  “Your Clayton had been seeing her off and on for years. That was the real reason he'd made sure Brent Liston spent all that time in jail.” I baited her, wondering what impact my words were having, but she just cocked her head to the side like a dog waiting to hear a master's whistle.

  “He told me the truth before he died.”

  “The truth about Celia?”

  “The truth that he had been seeing her. He asked me to forgive him. He begged me to forgive him. But I caught it from her nasty, diseased thing.”

  She was such a lady she couldn't bring herself to say the word she'd written in those letters. She sure could kill the girl, though, empty her gun into her “nasty, diseased thing.”

  “How do you know he caught it from Celia?” I grinned, teasing her. She looked at me strange
ly, cocking her head to the side again.

  “Because she was a whore.”

  “Thou shalt not kill, Rebecca. You're a religious woman. How could you forget that?”

  “She deserved to die for what she did to people who cared for her. Because she should feel God's wrath come down on her, and I could finally have some peace at last.”

  You need to find some kind of final resolution, one that will give you peace at last.

  She had said those words to me before. How could I have missed the meaning behind them?

  “Did killing Annette bring you peace as well?” She gazed at me, as if she didn't know what I was talking about, and I trotted out the theory I had about the way I thought Drew Sampson had done it, spitting it out with utter conviction, as if I'd been sitting in the room. “So you came by on Thursday morning, and she offered you a drink because she liked to drink, and you knew that she would. You sent her back for something, anything that took her out of the room, and then you put the Seconals you'd mixed with some of your husband's liquor into her drink. Enough to send her into a coma, and you two sat talking about old times until she began to get dizzy, and here's what you said to her when it started to take effect. ‘Why don't you lie down, Annette? You might feel better. Let me put this pillow under your head, Annette, to make you comfortable. Try to go to sleep, Annette, and you'll feel better in the morning.’ “I spoke in a high falsetto imitating a phony woman's voice, and she watched me, her gun steady on me as I continued.

  ‘After she was out, you searched for the letters you knew she had because she had asked you about them, and before you left, you took her limp hand and made sure her fingerprints were on the gun, then put the gun and the drawing under her pillow.”