The Devil Died at Midnight

by Cheryl Bradshaw

  “All night. The love I had for Alexandra was the kind of love a brother has for his sister, not a man for a woman. It wasn’t sexual, and it wasn’t wrong.”

  Aside from his odd behavior, which I assumed may have just been the way he’d always been, I believed him. “Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time.”

  “You came all this way to talk to me and you’re not even going to ask me about the book?”

  “What book?”

  “The one Alexandra was writing when she died.”

  “How do you know about it?”

  “I told you, we were friends. She knew she could talk to me about anything and I’d keep quiet.”

  “Who was the subject of the book?”

  “She was.”

  “Alexandra?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t follow. She writes about criminals, just like I do. Why would she be the subject of her own book?”

  He raised a brow. “You’re assuming the book was the same kind she’d written before. It wasn’t. It was the story of her life. Her memoir.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Elias Pratt

  December 27, 1989

  Over the last several years, Elias had grown accustomed to the eye candy Alexandra provided during each visit, her titillating style of dress, her sassy I pretend to care but I really don’t attitude. On the outside, she was bold and brazen; yet a softer more vulnerable side lingered, a side concealed from everyone except him.

  Piece by piece, Alexandra’s hardened shell had chipped away the more they saw each other. Small clues at first, like the way she sheepishly looked down when he said something that made her blush, or when she tucked a few strands of her hair behind her ear when his eyes lingered on hers for too long. The formalities of the past were gone. He was no longer referred to as Mr. Pratt. He was Elias. She was Alexa. And he’d achieved exactly what he wanted.

  Today when he saw her, everything about her was off, different, like she was a changed person. She wore black from head to toe, her supple flesh covered with a turtleneck beneath a frumpy cardigan sweater.

  It wasn’t like her.

  It wasn’t like her at all.

  She made no eye contact before sitting across from him, spoke no pleasantries, offered no greeting.

  “What’s wrong, Alexa?” he asked.

  She cleared her throat, furrowed her brow. “Nothing. I don’t have a lot of time today, Elias.”

  “What’s eating you? Tell me.”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing. Everything’s fine.”

  Except it wasn’t.

  “Are those tears in your eyes?”

  They were tears.

  She breathed heavily, struggling to keep her composure in front of him. Aware he understood what was happening, she bit her lower lip like the gesture would prevent an onslaught of water from dripping down her face.

  But a tear did drop.

  Then another.

  Then the floodgates opened.

  She was in full-blown, meltdown mode—a magnificent sight to see.

  Everything he’d wanted, everything he’d hoped for was finally coming true.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me what’s wrong. Are you upset because we’ve reached the end? We both knew the time would come when my last stay of execution would be denied.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that.”

  He didn’t believe her.

  What else could it be?

  “I’ve made my peace, prayed to whatever god will listen,” he said.

  Using the sleeve of her sweater, she wiped the tears from her face. “Dammit! I can’t do this today, Elias. I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  She stood halfway up, then sat back down again. Pressing a hand to her stomach, she closed her eyes, slowed her breathing.

  “What the hell’s going on with you today?” he asked.

  Without opening her eyes, she said, “I’m not feeling well.”

  “Go home. Get some rest.”

  “No! This may be the last time I’ll see you again before they ... before you ...”

  She couldn’t say it.

  Before he died.

  Fourteen days.

  Fourteen days and it would be all over.

  “It’s going to be okay, you know,” he said.

  “It’s not going to be okay.”

  “Sure it is. You’ll finally publish your book, and I’ll be ... well, in hell if you believe in such things.”

  She thrust a hand over her mouth, but it was too late. Pieces of semi-processed food erupted, spraying the room. Elias threw his hands up, pushed his chair backward. An armed guard rushed to Alexandra’s side. She tried pushing him away, but he took her by the arm anyway. “Miss, let me help you.”

  Alexandra pressed a hand to her stomach, glanced down, then locked eyes with Elias. Reality came into focus, and he saw what he was meant to see.

  “Wait a minute. Are you ...?”

  A slight nod from Alexandra provided the answer.

  Alexandra wrenched her arm free, said to the guard, “Call someone to clean this up please.”

  The guard didn’t move.

  “Don’t think about it,” Alexandra pressed. “Do it.”

  Unsure of how to handle the predicament, the guard kept an eye on Alexandra while backing toward the door. He opened it partway, yelled for help.

  “Congratulations,” Elias said. “I’m happy for you.”

  “If that’s true, you should be happy for yourself as well,” she whispered. “I haven’t had sex with my husband in weeks. It isn’t his baby, Elias. It’s yours.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Alexandra Weston

  Ten Minutes Later

  Alexandra sat inside her car in a parking lot next to the prison. She rarely cried, but today was a rare day. After confirming her pregnancy a couple weeks earlier, she’d had several outbursts like this one. First the denial, then the decision on whether to keep the baby or get rid of it, followed by a plan on how to keep the baby’s father a secret, and whether or not she’d tell Elias the truth. One day earlier she’d decided against telling him. Now, having done it minutes before, she drove both fists into the center of her steering wheel and screamed.

  Why did you tell him?

  Why? Why? Why?

  She could question it all she wanted. She knew why. Somehow over the years, she’d fallen in love with him. Even now, it was hard for her to believe. She was a logical woman. A woman who never made the slightest misstep when it came to her career. In all her years as a writer, she’d never allowed the flirtations of her subjects to get in the way of her work before.

  Until now.

  Until him.

  He hadn’t just made her feel special, and wanted, and whole. He knew her. He saw a part of her no one else did. Her family, her husband, the few friends she had, all of them accepted what little she revealed about herself, a single layer in a much more complex, multi-layered person.

  Elias was the opposite. He worked his way in, piece by piece, visit after visit, until she felt raw and naked in his presence. She fought her feelings for years until the awareness of knowing their time was coming to an end overshadowed all else. All reason. All logic. Somehow, it no longer mattered.

  CHAPTER 42

  Present Day

  Now in her eighties, Loretta Pratt’s timeworn, wrinkled face exhibited a life marred by heartache and despair, each elongated, deep-set wrinkle like crooked lines on a map, connecting one hardship to the next. As I stood there on her front porch, staring for entirely too long, I couldn’t help but wonder what else in her life had gone awry, or if the overwhelming loss of her son all those years ago was enough to ebb the beauty and light I was sure she once had.

  Loretta barely looked in my direction before waving us into the house. She offered a slight nod then turned, using her cane to lead the way. We followed her into a spotless living room where a single color dominated the sparse décor: white. White piano. White
sofa. Furry white rug covering a real hardwood floor. The room had a museum feel to it. Clean. Unstained. Pure. Stodgy.

  “My name is Joss Jax,” I said. “And this is Finch.”

  He raised a hand. She blinked, her face otherwise remaining steady. Unchanged. She didn’t seem the least bit interested in who we were, or that she’d just welcomed two strangers into her house without inquiring what we were after.

  When she finally did speak, her voice was solid, but lacked fluctuation in tone. “What can I do for you two?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about your son.”

  “Which one, Everett or Ethan?”

  “Elias.”

  Her lips formed the slightest smile, her eyes shifting to a picture of a young Elias inside a silver frame over the fireplace mantle. “Oh. Him. What do you want to know?”

  “When he was alive, did you visit him in prison?”

  “A few times, yes.”

  “Did he tell you anything about his visits with Alexandra Weston?”

  She nodded. “He spoke of her often. Of the book she was writing. Besides me, his lawyer, and our pastor, she was his only other visitor.”

  I moved to a harder question. “Were you aware of Elias’s relationship with Alexandra?”

  “If you’re going to keep firing questions off like this, I need to sit down.” She sat on a chair, crossed one leg over the other, looked at us like it was up for us to decide whether we wanted to remain standing. “When you say relationship, which relationship are you referring to, the professional one or the personal one?”

  “You knew about the personal relationship that existed between them?”

  “I believe we should clarify what personal means. You do mean sex, don’t you?”

  I looked at Finch. He looked like he wanted to disappear into the floor.

  “Elias was on death row in prison,” I said. “I don’t see how they managed anything physical between them.”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like he’d give those details to his mother. Of course, he always was different from the time he was a young boy. So different from the others. But he was my son, and I loved him anyway.”

  Her attitude toward him made me wonder if she’d regarded him the same way she did his brothers. If she had not, I was sure it had affected him. “How would it have been possible for Elias and Alexandra to be intimate together? Didn’t they conduct their visits through a partition?”

  “You didn’t know Alexandra Weston very well, did you? Elias always said she was the only woman he’d ever known who could bend any man to her will. Even though Alexandra and Elias had one-on-one visits with a guard present, there were times they were alone.”

  “How did she manage that?”

  “The men at that prison loved her, both inmates and guards alike.”

  “Do you know if it only happened once, or multiple times?”

  “I don’t have an exact number. Why does it matter now anyway?”

  I wondered what the guard received for giving her what she wanted and looking the other way. I also wondered what made Alexandra want to have sex with Elias in the first place. Were real feelings there? Had she loved him?

  “I suppose Alexandra found a way to convince the guard to look the other way, so to speak, give her a few minutes alone with him. Like I said before, she was a woman who always got her way.”

  And he was the kind of man who slaughtered people.

  “Who told you they were intimate with each other?” I asked.

  “They both did, though Alexandra didn’t mention it to me until recently. I’ll never forget the shocked look on her face when she realized I’d known all these years and kept quiet.”

  “When did you last see Alexandra?” I asked.

  “A few months ago.”

  “And when before that?”

  “It had been years. Decades. She showed up at my door, said she was writing a book and wanted to talk to me before she published it. Her exact words were, ‘I need to tell you the truth about a few things before you read about it in my book.’ Imagine her surprise when she found out I already knew what she’d come to tell me.”

  “Did Alexandra say why she’d decided to write a memoir?”

  “She said after all these years she wanted to come clean about her life. If she didn’t, she feared someone else would, and if it was going to be told, she wanted to be the one to tell it.”

  “Did she mention who she thought would betray her?”

  Loretta shook her head. “She only said there would be a chapter in her upcoming memoir devoted to Elias. Decades ago when Alexandra wrote The Devil Died at Midnight, she left some details out. I never understood why. The last time I visited Elias, he said she was quite smitten with him. He joked about having manipulated her.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know.” She paused then added, “I hate to say this, but I’m going to. It’s been eating at me for days now, ever since Alexandra Weston died. There’s a chance that I’m to blame for her death.”

  “How? Do you know who did it?”

  “Maybe.”

  I hoped the word “maybe” would be followed with an onslaught of other juicy details. But she’d stopped talking.

  “Can you give me a name?” I prompted.

  “I can give you two names. Right before Elias’s death, he sent me a letter. He said Alexandra promised to keep some of the things he’d told her a secret. He also said he didn’t trust her. He thought the day would come when she’d break her promise. Not at first, but one day. He asked me to do him a favor.”

  “What favor?”

  “Inside the letter he sent to me were two additional letters. One addressed to Sandra Hamilton, the other to Paula Page. He said that once he died, I was to deliver the letters to them personally without opening them.”

  “Did you deliver them?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. I kept them.”

  It was like someone had just handed me the keys to a brand-new car.

  “Where are the letters now? Can I see them?”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why not?”

  “After Mrs. Weston left my house, I thought about what Elias had said all those years ago, about what he’d asked me to do. It occurred to me the purpose of her visit may not have been as it seemed. I felt she’d manipulated me, pressed me for details only I would know. Details she planned to include in her memoir to make it as scandalous as possible. I dug the letters out of an old file box the next day and hand-delivered them to Sandra and Paula.”

  “Did they wonder why you waited so long to deliver them?”

  “I told them I’d happened upon the box he’d sent me from prison, and there they were.”

  “Did they accept the letters?”

  “I thought they wouldn’t, but both of them did.”

  “Is there any chance you read them first?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t. Thought about it more than once. It would have been so easy to break the seal on the envelopes, read the letters, then deliver the letters and just say that was how they were sent to me. But those letters weren’t meant for me. So I didn’t read them.”

  “Did you say anything about Alexandra when you delivered the letters to Sandra and Paula?”

  “I told them about her upcoming memoir.”

  “How did they react?”

  “In a word—scared.”

  As the first unexpected shock settled in, Loretta unleashed a second, equally shocking bit of information.

  “Personally I didn’t care what Alexandra wrote in her tell-all book. There’s nothing she can do now to hurt my family that she hasn’t already done. I only asked her to leave the child out of it.”

  Was it possible? Had Loretta known the truth about Chelsea all this time?

  “What child?”

  “Elias’s daughter. My granddaughter.”

  “Wait—you know about Chelsea?”

  Loret
ta nodded.

  It seemed everyone knew about Chelsea except Chelsea.

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “How do you think I learned of his sexual relations with Alexandra Weston? He had to tell me if he was going to tell me about the baby. There was no other way.”

  “What did you do after you found out?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Weren’t you interested in being part of her life?”

  “Part of her life? If Alexandra had wanted me to be part of Chelsea’s life, I would have been. She had her reasons, or her fears, I should say. I respected her need for discretion. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t imagined what it would be like to have a life with my granddaughter. But I thought it was for Chelsea’s own good if I stayed away. I put her needs above my own. I suppose Alexandra did the same.”

  I didn’t agree. “Alexandra should have told you about her. You’re her family. You had every right to know.”

  “Why? Think about it. If the truth of who Chelsea really was got out, how do you think Chelsea would have been treated? Think about how much different her life would have been. I didn’t want it to be ruined because of Elias. He’d already ruined the rest of my family.”

  I still didn’t agree, but I saw her point. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, for your loss.”

  For the first time since I’d arrived, Loretta looked at me. Really looked at me. “What do you know about significant loss, Miss Jax? Has your heart been torn from you and yet you still continue to exist when you have little left to live for? Keep your sorry. I don’t need it.”

  Finch glanced in my direction. I thought he might speak up. He didn’t.

  “I don’t know what your loss feels like to you,” I said. “I can’t imagine. But you shouldn’t assume you’re the only one who has suffered.”

  “Did your son die cruelly in an electric chair? Did your friends shun you? Your family? Your neighbors? Your church? Was your husband forced to sell his company, the one he built from nothing? Did you walk into this very room and find your husband hanging from the beam you’re sitting beneath at this very moment?”

  Like a motorist passing the scene of an accident on the highway, I knew it was wrong to stare, but I did anyway. I couldn’t help it. A minute earlier, I wouldn’t have noticed the beam. Now it was etched into my mind forever. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know about your husband.”