I Scream, You Scream

by Watson, Wendy Lyn

  So much for the direct approach.

  JoAnne eyed me shrewdly. “Are you recording our conversation?”

  I shook my head, all wide-eyed innocence.

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Come on, I wasn’t born yesterday. Hand it over.” She held out her hand, palm up, and waited.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I bluffed.

  She sighed. “Look, I’m not saying another word until you put a tape recorder in my hand.”

  I hesitated a moment longer, but she stared at me, unblinking, so I dug out the digital recorder and gave it to her.

  She eyed it curiously. “Cute. They make these things smaller and smaller every year.” She turned the recorder this way and that until she found the OFF button and clicked it.

  “Now, what specifically can I help you with?”

  “Well, for starters, at the gym the other day, you said you knew Wayne wasn’t at the house when Brittanie died but that he definitely wasn’t with me.”

  She grimaced. “Oh, that. Just a slip of the tongue. Don’t worry, Trish and Jackie don’t have more than a half dozen gray cells between them. They won’t remember what I said, and I assure you that I won’t blow your alibi again.”

  “My alibi? I don’t need an alibi!”

  “Are you sure about that?” JoAnne asked slyly.

  I pressed my lips together in consternation. In fact, it was looking more and more like I did need an alibi. “Regardless,” I said, “I already told the police that Wayne wasn’t with me that night.”

  JoAnne laughed, a soft, liquid sound like water at the bottom of a deep stone well. “That explains why Wayne has been pestering me about coming forward. Poor Wayne. First he wanted you to lie about being with him that night, and now he wants me to tell the truth about being with him that night . . . and neither of us is willing to oblige him.”

  Now I was totally confused. “So you were sleeping with Wayne? I was led to believe you’d, uh, been romantic with Brittanie.”

  An enigmatic smile touched JoAnne’s face. “Actually, I’ve slept with them both. Not at the same time, though.”

  “What?” I felt as though the whole world had tilted on its axis. Crazily, it occurred to me that this must have been what it felt like for the people on the Titanic, when the ship suddenly tipped on end.

  “Aw, poor, sweet, naive Tally Jones,” JoAnne tutted. “You don’t have a clue what goes on in this little town, do you? Why, we could put Peyton Place to shame.”

  “I don’t understand,” I insisted. “If you were sleeping with both Wayne and Brittanie, why did you call Brittanie a whore? I mean, how was she—” I stumbled to a halt, mortified by what I was about to say.

  JoAnne didn’t seem offended, though. “How was she any worse than me? She wasn’t. But my affairs with both of them were long over. No, I’ve mended my ways. Celebrated two years of sobriety the first of this month.”

  “Sobriety?”

  “From sex,” she said matter-of-factly. “I joined Sex Addicts Anonymous. In fact, I joined just after things ended with Brittanie. Sleeping with a self-destructive college kid?” She pulled a face. “Not my finest moment.”

  “So you don’t have sex anymore?”

  She laughed that sultry laugh. “Heavens, no. I’m not abstinent. But I’m in a loving, monogamous relationship with a dear woman, who shall—for obvious reasons—remain nameless. It’s about love for me now, not compulsion.”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s nice.”

  I wondered fleetingly if they made greeting cards to congratulate people on such things.

  Just then, a gentle chime sounded, indicating someone had come through the front door, and JoAnne excused herself.

  For a moment, I sat perfectly still, digesting what I’d just learned. The notion of JoAnne Simms, with her pearls and her cashmere sweaters and her perfect small-town pedigree, being an addict of any sort was troubling. But a sex addict? It was too much to process.

  And JoAnne had basically admitted that she and Wayne were together the night Brittanie died. Yet, even though she claimed she wasn’t having an illicit affair with Wayne any longer, she apparently wouldn’t go on the record with his alibi—which wasn’t really an alibi at all, now that the police had determined that Brittanie was poisoned at the luau.

  It made my head hurt.

  As I sat there, though, listening to the faint sounds of JoAnne conversing with someone in the front of the store, it occurred to me that I was in a prime position to answer at least one nagging question. What had Wayne purchased from Sinclair’s other than Brittanie’s engagement ring?

  With a quick glance at the office door, I scooted around behind the desk. I had seen JoAnne write up her sale in a carbon-copy receipt book, so I started looking for similar books and in no time found a bunch of them stacked neatly on a shelf. I pulled one out and found that it bore a label on the front: August 09—2. If Brittanie had seen the jewelry store charge on Wayne’s credit card statement near the first of October, then he’d probably made the purchase in September.

  I found the three books for September and began thumbing through them.

  From out front, I heard JoAnne laugh. I didn’t have much time.

  Near the middle of the second September receipt book, I found one with “W. Jones” listed as the customer. My heart beat faster. It might not get me closer to solving the murder, but at least I might get an answer to something.

  Sure enough, the receipt listed two purchases. But it didn’t describe what he bought, only provided catalogue item numbers.

  The first item, to be engraved “Always My Sugar,” cost almost six grand. I couldn’t help it. It cut me to the quick. I had been Wayne’s “sugar.” Me. It hadn’t been carved in precious metal or celebrated with a diamond; it had simply been the name he gave me in the dark quiet of the night. And here he had spent a small fortune to erase all that and give the title to Brittanie.

  I blinked away unexpected tears and looked at the other entry on the receipt. Again, the catalogue number didn’t tell me much, but the price was more than eight hundred dollars and a note said the piece should be engraved “Step Twelve.”

  Step Twelve?

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

  I nearly jumped out of my skin. I’d been so absorbed in what I was doing that I hadn’t heard the chime of the front door opening or JoAnne returning to the office.

  “You’re like a terrier, aren’t you?” she said. “Well, did you find what you were looking for?”

  I didn’t see any point in beating around the bush. “Not really. What’s this?” I pointed at the second item on the receipt.

  JoAnne smiled. “Well, that’s this,” she said. She tugged on a delicate gold chain around her neck, one I hadn’t noticed before, and pulled a pendant from beneath her sweater. It was gold, inlayed with diamond chips, and it was shaped like a poker chip.

  “Step twelve,” she said. “Carry the message of forgiveness to other sex addicts and live a life of healing. Wayne gave this to me to celebrate my second anniversary.”

  I must have looked as confused as I felt.

  “Wayne is an addict, too. I’m his sponsor.”

  Suddenly, I remembered the handful of poker chips in Wayne’s desk drawer. They must have been tokens, symbols of his milestones on the path to recovery.

  “That’s why I was so angry at Brittanie,” JoAnne continued. “Because she knew he had a problem and took advantage of it to worm her way into his life. And because she was not supporting him in focusing on getting right with God and breaking his bad habits. She was pushing him to be more aggressive, more competitive, more materialistic. The exact opposite of what he needed to be doing.”

  She took the receipt book from my hands, closed it, and returned it to its shelf. Then she tucked the gold and diamond poker chip back under her sweater.

  “And that’s what Wayne and I were doing together the night Brittanie died. The stress of the proposal, seeing y
ou at the luau, his fight with Brittanie . . . He was in real danger of relapsing. So he called me. We went to an all-night meeting in Dallas. Wayne was miles away when Brittanie lay dying, and I was right there holding his hand.”

  Her face grew hard then, her expression fierce. “But those meetings are private. Sacred. And if you tell a soul what I just said to you, I’ll deny every word.”

  As I put the van in gear, my phone rang. I sighed as I answered, half expecting to hear Cal McCormack telling me that they’d found still more red plastic sundae cups tainted with antifreeze. But, instead, Finn Harper greeted me.

  A little hiccough of pleasure rippled through me. “Hey, Finn.”

  “Tally.” He pitched his voice low, as if he were afraid of being overheard, and his words were hard and tight with urgency. “Listen, Mike Carberry has been acting like the cat with the canary all damn week, and he finally let it slip what’s going on.”

  “What?”

  “I guess Cal turned over the forensic evidence from the state crime lab to the district attorney’s office, and he took it to the grand jury.”

  I sat there with the van in gear, my foot on the brake, halfway out of my parking space. Behind me, an irate driver laid on his horn. But I couldn’t move.

  “Tally, honey,” Finn said, “they indicted you for Brittanie’s murder about twenty minutes ago.”

  chapter 25

  A warm breeze, sharp with the scents of cedar mulch, rosemary, and chlorine, drifted through the screen door to the deck. The soft hum of the pool filter was almost hypnotic.

  “I miss having a pool,” I murmured. “Living close to downtown is great, and I don’t really need a yard, but I wish we had room for a pool.”

  Finn’s voice came from just over my shoulder, so close his breath stirred the fine hairs at my temple. “Do you want to go for a dip? Probably the last chance for a moonlight swim before next summer.”

  A hysterical giggle bubbled up inside me. It would probably be my last chance for a moonlight swim before I stood trial for killing Brittanie Brinkman.

  The underwater lights glowed through the rippling water like the heart of a brilliant gemstone, beckoning, but I shook my head. “No, thanks. I don’t have a suit.”

  “It’s just the two of us.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Haven’t you ever been skinny-dipping?” His voice vibrated with silent laughter.

  My face burned. “You know perfectly well I’ve been skinny-dipping in this very pool, Finn Harper.”

  “So?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s undignified.”

  He laughed. “Tally, baby, you’re on the lam. Comparatively speaking, skinny-dipping is no big deal.”

  I shook my head.

  “Coward.”

  “I’m not a coward.” But I was.

  I kept my gaze fixed firmly on the blue fire of the pool as I heard him moving away, then back.

  “Come on,” he said, draping a towel over my shoulder.

  “Oh, I don’t—”

  “I dare you.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “Doped to the gills on her pain meds and sound asleep upstairs. No one will see you.”

  “Except you.”

  “Except me.” He let the words hang in the air, something between a challenge and an offer. I didn’t respond, and he sighed. “It’s a moonless night, Tally. I’ll turn off the pool lights, and your modesty will be safe.”

  Still, I hesitated.

  “Promise,” he whispered, as he tugged gently on a lock of my hair. “I’ll meet you out there.”

  He slipped open the screen and padded across the deck to a breaker box on the side of the house. The backyard went dark. After a moment of rustling, I heard a splash and a loud whoop.

  “Come on, Tally,” Finn called from the inky night. “The water feels great.”

  I took a fortifying breath before shimmying out of my skirt and pulling my top over my head. I paused for an instant with my hands on my bra clasp.

  Coward, Finn’s voice echoed in my head.

  In for a penny, in for a pound.

  I slipped out of my skivvies, rolling them up inside my shirt and making a tidy stack of my clothes on the closest family room chair. I wrapped myself in the towel and crept across the deck, testing the ground with my toes until I found the concrete lip of the pool and the aluminum railing for the steps.

  The soft lapping of the water gave away Finn’s location. I waited until he drifted to the far side of the pool before dropping the towel to the ground and slinking into the water.

  I gasped at the shock of the cold, then again as a hand closed around my ankle.

  “Finn!”

  He chuckled softly. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist.” He drifted away again, and I allowed myself to relax into the embrace of the water, floating on my back, my ears filled with the sound of my own hollow breath.

  We stayed like that for a while, alone together, gliding separately through the water. Occasionally floating close enough to brush a hand against a knee or a foot against a shoulder before ricocheting off in slow motion.

  Eventually, Finn spoke. “You know, I always sorta figured we’d end up in this situation, but I thought I’d be the fugitive and you the one giving shelter.”

  The laughter welled up from deep inside me, unnaturally loud in the chill quiet. “If our roles were reversed, I’da called the cops on you by now,” I teased.

  “No, you wouldn’t have,” he replied, suddenly serious.

  We slid past each other in the water, not touching, but I could feel the slip of the water, stirred by his passing, caress my skin.

  “She did a lot of bad things,” he said softly, “but she was too young to be a really bad person.”

  I didn’t have to ask about whom he was talking.

  “Imagine,” he continued, “if all the world would ever know of you was what you did before you turned twenty-four. If you never had a chance to be anything more than a silly, selfish child.”

  I thought about that, fluttering my fingers through the heavy silk of the water. Once upon a time, I’d had a chance at adventure, a chance at life. And I’d sent it away, peeling out of the Tasty-Swirl parking lot in a cloud of road dust. By the time I was twenty-four, my die was cast: I was Mrs. Wayne Jones.

  “I’d been married almost five years when I was her age,” I murmured.

  Finn, not following my train of thought, laughed softly, a devilish chuckle. “I don’t think being married made you more experienced than Brittanie Brinkman. She got plenty of experience without having a ring around her finger.”

  “Finn Harper,” I chided. “That’s not kind.”

  He laughed again. “You always were my conscience, Tally.” His tone sobered. “Lord knows I needed one.”

  After a beat of silence, he continued more casually. “For what it’s worth, your, uh, troubles won’t be the only big story in tomorrow’s News-Letter. We’ll be running a report that Cal had an affair with Brittanie.”

  I levered myself up and let my feet drift back to the bottom of the pool. Water sluiced from my head, and thick hanks of wet hair clung to my cheeks.

  “Cal McCormack? Really?”

  “Really.”

  “So maybe he killed her,” I said.

  “Tally, he wasn’t even at the luau.”

  “No, he wasn’t there. But all we have is Cal’s say-so that Brittanie was poisoned by the luau sundaes.”

  “Cal’s say-so and the say-so of the state crime lab.”

  “But the state crime lab analyzed evidence Cal collected. He could have slipped the antifreeze in Brittanie’s sports drink or whatever, then manufactured evidence to make it look like she was poisoned at the luau. The sundae cups, Wayne . . . maybe they were all just red herrings to hide his crime.”

  Finn paddled closer. “You’ve been watching too much TV. Besides, why would Cal want to kill Brittanie?”

  �
��I don’t know. Maybe he was angry that she dumped him.”

  “That’s a pretty big leap of logic.”

  “Not really,” I said. I knew he was right, but I was grasping at straws. “They had an affair. Sex with a pretty young girl, that’s heady stuff for a guy staring middle age in the face. Look what it did to Wayne.”

  Finn snorted. “If every guy she knocked boots with is a suspect, you’re going to have to round up just about every Y chromosome in Lantana County. She slept with just about everyone.”

  “Not you.”

  His silence was as damning as a gavel.

  “Oh, God. You slept with her?”

  “Tally—”

  “You slept with her?”

  A few labored steps brought me close enough to grasp the stair rail with both hands. I began to pull myself up the steps when Finn shot around to my right and covered my hand with his own.

  “Aw, Tally, don’t be mad,” he coaxed. “It was just one night. Back when my mom had her first stroke. I went to the Bar None to get away from the hospital smells and the constant shadow of death. She came on to me. I was drunk, and she was so damned alive. But it didn’t mean a thing.”

  “I bet it meant something to Brittanie,” I hissed back.

  “I doubt it.” He’d got his back up, and his tone was none too friendly. “She hopped from my bed to Wayne’s pretty darn quick. Much like someone else, who shall remain nameless.”

  I flinched as though he’d struck me.

  “Don’t you dare compare your one-night stand with Brittanie Brinkman to us.” My chest felt tight, as if something deep inside me was about to explode. “I loved you,” I gasped. “I loved you more than my own life.”

  “Apparently not,” he snapped. “You sure as hell weren’t willing to give up much to be with me, and you latched on to Wayne Jones practically before I crossed the county line.”

  His voice was hard and angry, and an ugly possibility began to form in my mind.

  “I . . . I’m cold. I would like to get out of the pool now.” I held my breath for his response.