Jo could imagine the turmoil Randy had gone through. Still a kid, with no one to advise him but Parker Holt who had his own reasons for keeping Randy quiet.
“You sure you don’t have any beer?” Randy suddenly asked. Not waiting for an answer, he went into the kitchen and threw open Jo’s small pantry door. Seeing nothing besides cans of food, he turned to her cupboards, flipping open doors until he saw the wine bottle. He grabbed it, saw it had a cork, and pulled open a drawer, rustling noisily through it.
“Where’s a damn corkscrew!” he shouted.
Jo told him.
Randy shuffled through Jo’s kitchen tools, then finally found what he wanted. He brought it over to Jo, thrusting the bottle and corkscrew toward her, still holding his knife. “Open it.”
Jo peeled away the foil wrapped around the top of the bottle and worked at the cork with the screw until she was able to ease it out. She held the bottle up to Randy, and he grabbed it and gulped, tipping the bottle upward with his free hand.
Jo watched from her broken-springed sofa as Randy paced about the room, taking swigs of her wine. Was the alcohol needed to handle the pain of the memories he had dredged up? What else, though, would it do to him? Finally, he stopped drinking and held the bottle down at his side.
“What did Parker do during this time?” Jo asked, wanting to get him back to his story.
Randy’s lip curled contemptuously. “Parker went back to college. I thought – I hoped- I wouldn’t see him again. But he showed up near the end of summer, wanting money.”
“He asked you for money?”
“Not asked. He wanted it. He said I owed it to him for keeping quiet about the hit and run. I gave him what I had. I thought that would be the end of it.”
“But it wasn’t, was it?”
“He kept coming back, every time he was back in town from college. I owned the farm by then and I guess he thought I was raking it in, but I wasn’t. I was barely holding things together with the mortgage, the taxes, the help I had to hire.” Randy exhaled loudly. “There were piles of loans on the farm equipment, and then there was my mom’s medical bills. But Parker didn’t care. He kept coming back. Finally I told him I was bled dry. I just didn’t have anything to give him anymore. That’s when he said yes I did.” Randy sank into the chair and stared at Jo.
“He wanted your farm, didn’t he?”
Randy nodded, his eyes sunken.
“I didn’t have much choice. Parker, he made it sound like he was offering me a good deal, like he was taking something off my hands that was going to go under anyway. He was paying for the farm, not taking it outright from me, so it was supposed to be great that I’d have money in hand to do whatever I wanted. Trouble was, all I really wanted to do was run the farm. But I signed the papers and took the check, and left.”
Jo didn’t ask how much Parker paid Randy. She was sure it was much below market price.
Randy picked up the wine bottle and guzzled more of its contents. “I took off for Atlantic City. I had the crazy idea I could triple my money and maybe come home and buy the farm back and make a go of it.”
“I guess that didn’t work, huh?”
“Stupid idea.”
“But you came back?”
“Yeah, I came back, eventually,” Randy said, pain showing in his face. “I go to look at the old place and what do I see? Houses going up, and roads going in, and a big sign calling the whole thing ‘Holt Meadows’. Holt Meadows! He didn’t even have the decency to keep the Truitt name on it.”
“That must have been tough to take.”
“And suddenly Parker’s a big shot in town, married to the mayor’s niece, and moving into a big house of his own.”
“And hiring you to do odd jobs for him,” Jo said, adding, “which you did,” she pointed out. “So what tipped you over the edge, Randy? What was the final straw?”
Randy stared at the floor a while, seeing what, Jo couldn’t imagine, then downed more wine, coming near the end of it. Jo waited, wanting to know, but wanting, mostly, to keep Randy talking. Talking, not thinking. She asked again. “What tipped the scales?”
He continued to stare at the floor. “That day, I was working on the Schilling’s front lawn, cutting up a tree for them that had fallen halfway down. Their place is right next to Parker’s big house. I was there a coupla days, actually, cutting up the wood, stacking it up, hauling away the brush, and the whole time I’m seeing Parker coming and going in his flashy, expensive car. And I’m seeing the home improvement guys bringing in stuff to make his big, expensive house even better, seeing his wife go out in her fur coats and diamonds. And I’m thinking the whole time how Parker got his run on making all that money because of my farm. My farm.” Randy raised his eyes to Jo.
“And he couldn’t even call it Truitt Meadows. He had to name it Holt Meadows, like his family had owned it all those years.”
Jo understood how in Randy’s eyes that may have been Parker’s worst crime – erasing Randy’s family name from all connection to their land.
“So,” Randy went on, “that second afternoon, I saw the two guys who were working there take off early. Parker’s wife was gone, and I figured he’d be showing up in an hour or two like before. I had heard one of the workers that first day, call out the alarm code to the other as they were getting ready to leave – dumb of them, but they didn’t know I was listening – and as soon as they took off this time I went over and got in the house, and wired up the trap.
“I’m good at things like that,” Randy added with a certain pride. “Parker, he liked to look down at me, but he wouldn’t have known how to do what I did. I knew when he’d reach down to pick up that crow bar, even if he saw the wire running from it, he wouldn’t figure out what was going on.”
“So that was why you killed Parker,” Jo said, hiding as best she could the chill she felt at Randy’s eerily calm recitation of his steps toward the murder. “But what about Alexis Wigsley, Randy? Why did you kill her?”
“Wigsley?” Randy looked reluctant to turn his thoughts in a second direction, as though he preferred to linger on his satisfying removal of a long-hated enemy. Then he scowled, possibly remembering his feelings against the town gossip.
“She always watched me like a hawk,” he said. “She knew it was me run her cousin off the road.”
“Her cousin?”
“Yeah, the kid coming home from his Burger King job was her cousin. Every time I ran into her after that, she was always giving me the evil eye, like she’s trying to trip me up, find some way of getting the goods on me.”
Jo doubted Alexis suspected anything of the sort of Randy, but was merely watching him as she did everyone in town. It was Randy’s guilty conscience that had seen things otherwise.
“Always watching me,” he continued, “even after all these years. And she saw me working in the Shilling’s yard that day, and came to your shop just to let me know that.”
Jo remembered Alexis barging in the day the Craft Shop was closed, as Randy was rebuilding Jo’s shelves. Alexis had mentioned seeing Randy at the Shilling’s, but was it in any kind of threatening way? It hadn’t sounded that way to Jo, but had only come across as Alexis’s usual babble tumbling out as she liked to demonstrate how aware she was of everyone’s comings and goings. Except she probably wasn’t the least bit aware of what she had actually seen – a man planning murder. All Alexis likely saw was a handyman cutting up a tree, and had probably cared only about how much the Shillings were paying him.
“You killed Alexis because you thought she would turn you in?” Jo asked, thinking how incredibly easily one murder led to another to cover one’s tracks. Randy was right in that one could hang for the first murder alone, so what was there to stop him from more? What would stop him from killing Jo?
Randy stared at Jo, his face darkening, his fingers flexing in their grip on the knife. “She told Lisa,” he said, “that she should break up with me.”
“Oh! Yes, I knew about that
. Alexis shouldn’t have done that.”
“Lisa’s the one good thing’s happened to me in twenty years, and she wanted to take that away from me.”
“Lisa wouldn’t have left you Randy, just because of what Alexis said to her.”
Randy slapped his knife hard against the wooden arm of his chair. “How do you know that? Tell me! How do you know that?”
Jo jumped at Randy’s outburst. “I – I –” she stuttered, not knowing what to say that could calm him down. He glared hard at her, waiting. Then the phone rang.
CHAPTER 26
Jo turned to stare at the phone, sitting on the end table beside her. She looked back at Randy.
“Don’t touch it,” he warned.
It rang, two, three, four times, then her answering machine clicked on. They both listened to Jo’s recorded voice inviting the caller to leave a message. The phone beeped, then Carrie’s voice came through.
“Jo, are you there? I tried your cell and it wasn’t on. Where are you?”
Jo pictured her cell phone tucked into the purse that had been left behind in her car. The sound of her friend’s voice wrenched at her, contact with her only inches from Jo’s hand but totally out of reach.
“A couple customers have asked things I can’t answer,” Carrie continued. “Are you coming back soon? Call me.”
The phone clicked off. The silence in Jo’s living room hung heavily. Jo feared Randy might be thinking, as she was, of her car, sitting in the parking lot beside her shop. How long before someone recognized it and mentioned that to Carrie? How long before Carrie found it herself?
Randy could be thinking they had to get out of there. But to where? If he had known where to take Jo from the first, he wouldn’t have brought her here to begin with. This had been the only place he could think of in his rush to get hold of her. A stopping point. Possibly he had thought to stay there until dark, when it would be safer to be on the road again.
Randy had been drinking, Jo reminded herself. He might be struggling to keep his focus. Perhaps she could help keep it muddled.
“I just remembered,” she said. “I might have a small bottle of Kahlua around. It was part of a gift basket someone gave me for my grand opening.”
“Kahlua? What’s that?”
“A liqueur. It’s coffee-flavored, and kind of sweet, but it’s alcohol. Shall I try to find it?”
“Alcohol? Yeah, sure.” Randy got up to stand next to Jo. “Go get it.”
Jo stood up, unzipping her jacket which had become overly warm, but kept it on. “I’m trying to think where I put it. It might be mixed in with everything in the pantry.”
She moved toward the kitchen with Randy following closely. Jo opened her small pantry and peered into it, hoping she really did have a bottle of Kahlua, since the memory of exactly what had happened to it had grown dim. She could feel Randy’s breath on her neck as she moved aside cans of green beans, and jars of mayonnaise and pickles, then looked behind boxes of pasta, packages of soup mix, and cartons of microwave popcorn. Finally, a dark bottle with a foil label came into view.
“Here it is.”
Randy grabbed for it, and stared at the bottle. He seemed to be having difficulty reading the label. He shoved it back at Jo and said, “Open it up.”
Jo removed the foil wrapper from the top, then twisted off the bottle’s cap. She handed it back to Randy, not bothering to offer a glass.
Randy tasted the Kahlua, and grunted. “It’s like syrup,” he complained, but he downed a sizeable amount of the contents.
Jo watched, also keeping an eye on the hand holding the knife. Had it relaxed at all? Not any that she could tell. What else could she do?
Suddenly Randy banged the Kahlua bottle on her kitchen counter, hard. “I have to get out of here! They’re going to come looking for you soon.”
Jo jumped at the noise, aware that he had said “I have to get out of here, not “we”. Was that his plan, then? To kill her there?
“No one will come here, Randy. I never come home in the middle of the day. Carrie knows that. She’ll keep checking around town.”
Randy began to pace the small kitchen. “They’ll come. They’ll come. I gotta do it. I gotta get out of here.” He stopped at her kitchen door and peered through the glass at the edge of Jo’s curtain. Then he turned around and stared back at Jo, his knife blade twisting in the air.
“Randy, you can’t kill me.”
Randy stared silently at her.
“I have to.”
“I know you think you have to, but it won’t help you at all, Randy. I’m not the only one who will figure out you killed Parker. Killing me won’t mean you’re home free. It will only be one more death on your conscience.”
Randy snorted. “Conscience? What’s that? You think I have a conscience anymore?”
“Yes, I do, Randy.”
“Well, you’re wrong, lady. I left it back on Route Thirty.”
“I don’t think you did, Randy. I think you still feel very bad about killing that boy, even though it was an accident. It’s too bad that Parker Holt was with you that night, egging you on and twisting your thoughts. He pushed you into that first bad decision to keep going, but I think you’ve suffered over that night ever since.”
Randy was silent.
“One bad decision led to another,” Jo said, “didn’t it? It’s what got you here. It’s time to stop, Randy. Too many people have been hurt. You can’t undo what you’ve already done, but you can stop adding to it.”
“I get rid of you and it’s over,” he said.
“But it won’t be, Randy. There’ll always be one more, and one more. Is that the way you want to go on? You killed Alexis thinking she would be the end of it, didn’t you?”
Randy didn’t answer.
“And it wasn’t. There’ll be someone after me, then someone after them. Is that what you want?”
“I can leave town tonight, take Lisa with me. It’ll be over then.”
“Is that fair to Lisa – life with someone always looking over his shoulder? And what about the man you’d be leaving behind? The man who could be charged with Parker’s murder? Can you leave him to be sent to prison for what you did?”
Jo thought she saw something flash in Randy’s eyes. Was it the smallest touch of regret?
“He’s an innocent man,” she said, “with a young wife whose baby will be born any day now. Can you do that to him? To his young family?”
“What do I care about that?”
“But you do, Randy. You do. You’re not such a monster as you think you are.”
Randy reached for the Kahlua bottle and gulped at it. He raised his knife and waved it at her, signaling to Jo that she should walk back to the living room. She hesitated, then moved forward, preceding him and half-expecting to feel steel against her neck at any moment. Had she reached him at all? Or had she been talking to an already dead soul?
Randy didn’t strike, and Jo made it back to her sofa, with quivering knees but alive. She sat down.
“You can end this now, Randy” Jo said, quietly.
Randy stood over her. He raised the hand holding the Kahlua and put the bottle to his lips, drinking up the remaining contents.
“I’ve had one hell of a shitty life, haven’t I?” he said, wiping his mouth, his face twisted with disgust.
“It’s been pretty tough,” Jo agreed.
“All I wanted was to farm,” he said. “Grow things, hold onto the land. And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hold it together.”
“You might have, if you’d been allowed to.”
“I should have killed Parker right off. Got him off my back right away.”
“That wouldn’t have been the answer.”
“No? Would I be where I am right now if I got rid of him right off? A bum, without two nickels and ready to kill one of the few people who treated me with any decency?”
“You might have your farm, but if you’d killed Parker back then your life wouldn’t be
much better. You’d be as haunted as you are right now, always running from your conscience, thinking everyone who looked at you could see inside to what you had done.”
Randy flopped into the chair he had occupied before. He sat, staring dully and silently at Jo. She could only guess what was going through his mind. After what seemed like several minutes he spoke.
“I made a footstool for my mom, once. I was only twelve. It was the first thing I ever made like that. I fitted the legs to it, sanded it, stained it. She told me it was the best footstool she’d ever seen.”
Jo nodded, not knowing what Randy was leading to.
After another period of silence, he said, “My pop and me, we were talking about buying a few more acres to expand the farm. He asked me what I thought we should plant on it. He asked me.” Randy’s eyelids flicked briefly. “I told him I thought we shouldn’t go with corn but that soy beans were looking good that year. So that’s what we were going to do. Plant soy beans on the extra acres.”
Jo waited. Why was he telling her this? The silence grew heavy, and Jo could hear herself breathing. Short, rapid breaths. Then Randy spoke again.
“Just before my mom died,” he said, his voice having gone hollow, “she said she wanted me to find a nice girl to marry, and have kids. She wanted me to name one of them after my pop. Bill. His name was Bill.”
Jo nodded, venturing a small smile. She waited again, but Randy had stopped. He didn’t seem to be looking at her anymore, but looking through her. Finally, he stood up. Jo held her breath as Randy moved toward her, but then he continued on. He wandered about the room, touching things absently.
He moved over to one of the windows again, pulling aside its curtain an inch and peering outside. But Jo didn’t sense the same urgency, the same anxiety he had had before, pushing him. There seemed to be a strange calm settled on him, and Jo didn’t know what that meant. She began thinking of what she could do to defend herself should he suddenly come at her with that knife. But, as it had been in the truck, everything she thought of seemed hopeless. She might be able to fight Randy off for a time, but ultimately she knew he had all the power.
String of Lies Page 20