by that's me
At last it looms ahead, framed by swaying oak branches against a turbulent black sky; its windows darkened and tightly closed against the gale.
Charlotte stops short as she reaches the top of the drive, where a massive oak has fallen beside a car: Nydia's car.
Her heart takes a death plunge as she spots a pair of feet protruding from the mountain of boughs.
Dear God in heaven…
The tree took a human casualty on its way down.
For a moment, Charlotte can only stare. Then she rushes forward, propelled by sheer dread; knowing she is bound to discover that the feet belong to one of a handful of Oakgate residents. Charlotte prays fervently that the victim is still alive-and that it isn't the child she loves more than anything on this earth.
No.
It isn't Lianna.
Numb with shock and revulsion, Charlotte moves closer, whimpering, her feet becoming entangled in the vinelike branches that snake at her ankles.
Charlotte gazes into the eyes of Grandaddy's housekeeper, frozen within a grotesque mask of terror as Nydia stares at the last thing she ever saw on this earth.
She must have seen the tree coming at her.
Her skull is split, a gaping wound bisecting her forehead from the bridge of her nose straight up through her blood and brain and rain matted hair.
"Drop the gun, Jeanne." Aimee's voice is no longer as deadly calm as it was the first time she said it. Frozen on the stairway, her hand still clutching the rail, she doesn't dare to take a step forward, or back.
She's afraid.
She thinks I'm going to kill her.
I think I'm going to as well.
'Jeanne, this is ridiculous. Drop the gun."
Jeanne shakes her head, clutching her mother's pearl-handled revolver in both hands, aiming directly at the woman on the stairs. The woman who murdered poor Nydia and dragged her body out into the storm.
"Where is Melanie?"Jeanne demands again.
"I told you a hundred times. I have no idea. She isn't here."
"What did you do to her?"
"I haven't seen her, Jeanne. She left hours ago. I have no idea where she went"
Jeanne knows where she went: to the liquor store on the island's southern end, to buy Jeanne a botde of bourbon.
"Please, Melanie, my nerves are just shot with this storm and all that's happened with my grandnephew,"
Jeanne had told the nurse, handing her a couple of twenty-dollar bills.
"Where did you get this?"
"I saved it. Keep the change."
"Oh, Jeanne, you don't need liquor to calm your nerves. How about if I sing to you?"
In that moment, Jeanne knew she was doing the right thing.
Nobody in this house, not even Melanie, can possibly understand the depth of Jeanne's misery.
Nobody understands that it will take more than a little song to lift her spirits; that it will take more, too, than bourbon.
The only two souls who would have understood- Mother and Eleanore-departed this earth years ago: one in a suspicious freak accident, the other by her own hand.
Sleeping pills and liquor.
A lethal combination.
Just as effectively lethal as firing a bullet through one's brain. But Eleanore lacked the courage, or perhaps merely the means, to do that.
Jeanne has the means. In the end, what she inherited from her mother is far more valuable than china and crystal.
But she doesn't have the courage. If she did, she'd have done it weeks ago, when she learned that Gilbert had left her nothing.
All these years, she had foolishly held out hope that he would defy their father.
All these years, she had been a fool.
All these years, she had feigned dementia, dunking that if he saw that she was incapable of taking care of herself, he would feel sorry enough for her to take care of her.
And had it worked… to an extent. He didn't put her in a nursing home-she knew he wouldn't. It wouldn't do to have all of Savannah buzzing about Gilbert's batty sister. The family honor had to be protected, at any cost.
So, ever since she "lost her mind," Jeanne has had a familiar dormered roof over her head, a sturdy tabby foundation beneath her.
Oakgate is her home.
Just as it always should have been.
Just as it always should be.
Surely he should have seen that.
But her brother didn't leave her the house.
He didn't leave her anything at all.
It doesn't matter now.
Tucked beneath Jeanne's mattress is the orange plastic bottle of Gilbert's sleeping pills, pilfered from his medicine cabinet weeks ago.
She was dismayed to find that the prescription must have been almost due for a refill.
In and of themselves, there weren't enough capsules in the bottle to do the job.
But Eleanore's lethal recipe called for one other ingredient, and unwittingly Melanie agreed to provide it "Your hands are shaking pretty badly, Jeanne," Aimee observes. "How are you going to shoot me? It takes steady hands to shoot a gun. Believe me, I'm aware of that. Do you know why?"
Jeanne doesn't reply, just struggles to keep the gun trained on her target.
"I'll tell you why. Because I spent the last two years-two years, Jeanne-in marksmanship training. I can hit a terrorist on a predesignated freckle on his arm from a block away." She emits a short laugh. "Or I can hit a regular Joe in the leg from just across the street, and, thanks to my medical background, be sure to take him down… without permanent damage."
Jeanne's jaw drops. "Are you talking about Royce?"
"Royce?" she echoes. "Sure, we'll call him Royce for a little while longer if you like. But we don't have much time."
"For what?"
"It's almost over, Jeanne. You've lived a long life. Is there anything you want to tell me?"
"What… What do you mean?" 'You know… anything you'd like to share, before you die. People like to do that, Jeanne. And I like to listen. It was part of my job, and I kind of miss it, you know?"
Aimee moves to take a step forward, believing that Jeanne might be so engrossed in her story that she won't notice.
"Stay there!"
Aimee obeys Jeanne's sharp command. But she keeps talking.
"I'm a nurse. Did you know that? Just like your friend Melanie. So I know all about people like you."
"And I know all about people like you. "Jeanne glares at her.
Ignoring that, Aimee goes on, "I used to take care of lonely old people. Some of them didn't have anybody else in the whole world who would take care of them, or anybody to leave their money to. A few of them actually left it to me, not that they had much. Still, it was nice of them, don't you think? And you'd be surprised how many of them had lots of cash hidden right there in their houses."
Jeanne thinks of the wad of twenty-dollar bills, now sea
led in an envelope with Melanie's name on it Just yesterday, Melanie finally revealed that her benefactor was a married congressman. He died a few years ago, leaving her with only the condo he bought for her.
So Melanie can use Jeanne's birthday money-meager a sum as it is. Along with the cash, she's leaving Melanie a note: a suicide note, as it were, to thank Melanie for all she did, and apologize for what Jeanne has to do.
"A lot of old people don't believe in banks. Do you, Jeanne? Oh, wait, I guess it doesn't matter. I guess you don't have any money to start with."
Jeanne's finger tightens over the trigger.
"But my favorite part of the job was just listening. Some of those deathbed confessions can be really interesting. Take Silas Neville's, for instance."
Silas Neville?
The vaguely familiar name seems to hover before Jeanne in a fog.
Then Jeanne plucks the recollection from the chasm of lost memory. He was a friend of Gilbert's, she now recalls. Ever since he was a boy.
"Remember him, Jeanne?" Aimee smiles. "His was the most interesting confession of all. And I was the only one who heard it. Just like I'll be the only one to hear yours. So, Jeanne, do you have any final requests? Any profound last words?"
Jeanne swallows hard, staring into green eyes-unnaturally green-that are ablaze with madness.
"No?" Aimee asks, after a short pause. "Then I'd say it's time to call it quits."
In one abrupt movement, she reaches for her pocket.
She's going for a gun, Jeanne realizes.
Then a deafening blast swoops her to a place where there can be no more pain.
"Lianna!"
Her stepfather's voice is faint, drifting to her ears from someplace above her, up in the house.
Cowering on the stairway in the damp, dark tunnel concealed behind the wall of her room, she wonders if she should go down and try to escape through the basement after all.
She decided against it earlier, afraid that somebody would see her through one of the windows as she tries to flee the house-or, even more frightening, that she might be lying in wait in the cellar.
Royce's daughter.
Aimee.
Thinking again of what she saw upstairs in the master bedroom, Lianna closes her eyes to shut out the disgusting vision of father and daughter-in each other's arms.
So engrossed were they that they never even realized they had been seen.
Not that Lianna lingered in the doorway for more than a nauseating split second.
That was all it took for her to realize that her stepfather isn't the man she and her mother believed him to be…
And that her stepsister is precisely what Lianna instinctively perceived her to be: a lying, conniving fraud.
Hearing an explosion overhead, Lianna believes for I a moment that another tree has fallen-this time on the house.
Then she realizes that it wasn't a tree.
That time, it really was a gunshot.
Charlotte hears a loud bang, and this time, she instantly realizes what it is: a crack of gunfire.
And that it came from inside the house.
She never even considers running down the driveway toward the gate and the old stone wall; running for help.
That isn't an option.
Her only thought is that she has to get to her daughter.
Please, God, let her be all right.
Her oozing sneakers pound up the steps and across the wet flagstone of the portico.
Please let her be alive.
Too late, she realizes that the door is locked, and that she doesn't have a key.
Lianna's instinct is to hurl herself down the stairway in the dark, anything to get away from whoever has the gun.
But she's outnumbered already; there are two of them.
Royce is somewhere above, but there's no telling where Aimee is.
Well, Lianna will have to take her chances.
She has to try to get away.
This is her own fault. She should have been braver. She should have gone shopping with her mother this morning, instead of sulking, and then cowering, in her room.
Now she has nobody to blame but herself.
Nobody is going to come and save her, just like nobody could save Adam.
But that wasn't his fault.
It was mine.
And now I'm being punished for what I did… just like I always knew I would be.
* * *
Royce has just encountered what feels like a loose panel beside the fireplace when he hears a gun go off upstairs.
"Aimee?" With a curse, he rushes to the hallway, dragging his bad leg. "Are you all right?"
Odette appears, holding her pistol. "She was armed up there, Joe."
"Shhh!" He gestures wildly to alert her that she's slipped up and called him by the wrong name: his real name. Not that anyone else gets away with the shortened version of it.
Aside from his mother back home in Chicago, who calls him Joey, he's been Joseph his entire life, Joseph Borger… well, that is when he's not busy being Royce Maitland or whatever dearly departed soul he's had the pleasure of impersonating for the purpose of a well-planned con.
"Oh, give it up already, Joe. Who's going to hear?" Gone is the honey-sweetened N'Awlins drawl, replaced by the twang of the Tennessee mountains, where Odette Krupp-AKA Aimee Maitland-was born and bred.
"The old lady's dead, and so is the housekeeper," Odette informs him. "All we have to do is grab the kid and Charlotte, and we're home free."
Incredulous at her laid-back attitude, he snaps, "All we have to do? It's not that simple."
"Sure it is. Remember, Daddy} You came up with the plan yourself. We just use this"-she waves the gun- to convince your lovely wife and stepdaughter to get into the car and drive. Then I grab the wheel and make sure that they overshoot the foot of the causeway-so easy to do in this nasty weather-and land in the water. Oh, but first I have to remember to jump out."
She flashes the dazzling row of white teeth Joseph paid a fortune to have capped. That was almost as expensive as the liposuction, but not as much as what he spent on the colored contacts, the frequent hair salon visits, the gym, and the personal trainer.
But it was worth all the money and well worth the wait. Odette Krupp was transformed into a tawny Southern beauty. She looked at least ten-or twelve, to be exact-years younger. She could easily pass for a nubile twenty-five, virtually unrecognizable as the mousy nurse who had once worked for the hospice clinic-and stumbled across a multimillion-dollar secret.
At first, when she told Joseph, he thought they might just blackmail the old man with what they knew.
Then Joseph looked a little more closely at the illustrious family tree, and realized that there might just be an old-fashioned, legitimate way to inherit the entire Remington for
tune: by marrying into it Maybe he should have left it at that. As Charlotte's husband, even with Charlotte inheriting just one-third of the fortune, he would be set for life. Nobody would ever have to know who and what he really was.
But his own greed, and Odette, got to him.
He wanted it all.
So he took a gamble-and he won.