“Michael thinks it’s the wrong thing to do, but I’m going to tell you what happened with Susan. The whole story with nothing left out. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Her words seemed conciliatory but her face was still the antagonist look of someone who was being forced to do something that she didn’t want.
“That’s not what I want,” a voice said from the doorway. I looked up. Adam Gillespie was standing in the doorway with a gun.
All three of us froze in our places. I assumed that Siever had plenty of experience in high stress situations, but he didn’t appear to be in control here. His hands were shaking, and he’d gone a rather nasty shade of pasty. He made no moves.
I watched Gillespie as he moved into the room. He had the gun firmly in hand. He wasn’t shaking or moving the gun side to side. Mostly the gun was pointed directly at me, which I didn’t particularly like.
“So gee, Mom, why don’t you tell us a story? Where is dear old Susan? I’ve been waiting a long time to find out – too long if you ask me.” His face turned toward my mother, but his hand still pointed the gun at me. Siever was unguarded and unwatched, but wasn’t moving.
I wondered if Siever was involved with Gillespie. He’d pulled the pages from the police report. He’d done his best to stop me from looking into the matter. From most perspectives, he’d done more to hinder the truth than help it. Now Gillespie wasn’t even watching him as he spoke to my mother.
“Well, let’s hear it,” he shouted. The words echoed off the ceiling and through the room. The dogs must not have heard it, because they made no attempt to get inside. The Countess, though, had had enough of the drama and slowly sauntered out of the room. I knew better than to rely on her for help in the future.
“I don’t know. I’ve never known where Susan was or what happened to her. Neither do the police. It’s a mystery.” My mother paused every few words to catch her breath, which was coming in short gasps.
He turned the gun to me. “So what’s it going to be, Fitzpatrick? Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or are you going to back up your mother’s lame story?”
I cleared my throat. “You think she’s told me a thing about anything? Do you see how I live? I’m afraid of the world, scared of being snatched by an unknown terror, keeping my head down and not attracting any attention to myself. Why would I do that if my sister was alive? Why would I have wasted years of my life cowering if I knew that she was still alive?”
He scoffed at me. “You do have a point. How sad it is that you’ve never dated, and when you do you fall for Detective Green. She came by and asked a few questions about the murder too. Did you know that? She seemed to act like you were not aware of her actions. She’s a tricky one. I’d keep an eye on her.”
I mourned that the first time I had some solid advice on my love life, it came from a homicidal maniac who would probably shoot me before I could act on it. I really did need to get out more. I just needed to get out of this situation first.
“So which of you is going to tell me where Susan is?” he shouted again. Now he waved the gun back and forth between the three of us. He did it too fast for me to move on him. He would be bringing the gun back to me before I could jump him.
“She’s gone – for good,” my mother said softly. “She’ll never come back here, and you’ll never see her.”
Gillespie trained the gun on her. “Better think again. If nothing else, I bet she’d come back for her mother’s funeral, don’t you? And when she does, I’m willing to bet that she’ll bring the baby too.”
“Baby?” I said, feeling like suddenly I had stepped into the middle of a play. “Belinda Frias’s baby?”
Gillespie barked out a vicious laugh. “Boy, you didn’t tell him anything, did you? He just went poking his nose into my affairs without a clue as to what was going on. Do you want to tell him, or should I?”
My mother didn’t speak, so he continued. “Susan and I were messing around. She got pregnant. Unfortunately, I seem to be incredibly fertile, because I also knocked up the maid about the same time as well. I only wanted to be involved with one woman, not two. So the maid had to go.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted. My brain had gone into overdrive. Susan had been a pregnant teen. She’d left town because she was pregnant? I had brought all of this mayhem down upon us because no one had told me that I was an uncle. I still couldn’t get a grasp on things. Why wouldn’t she just not marry him? Why run away?
“Poor dumb naïve Griff. Apparently your family didn’t tell you what was happening. You were telling the truth, I guess. It doesn’t change what has to happen, but at least you were telling the truth to me. It’s nice to know that some people are true to their word.” He smirked and pointed the gun at Siever.
“So are you going to tell me where she is, or do I get her back here the hard way?” I could see the gun tremble now as Gillespie grasped it in his right hand.
My mother pressed her lips into a thin line. That look meant that she wasn’t budging. She would be shot dead before she spoke.
Gillespie must have seen the determination in her eyes. “Fine, have it your way.” He fired twice. Siever spun around and hit the floor. I couldn’t see him well from this vantage point, but I could see the slowly pooling blood on my floor.
My mother’s tone was steely. “I won’t tell you even if you shoot all three of us. She won’t come home, and you won’t get your hands on that precious child.”
I did some quick math. The baby that they were referring to would have to be around the same age as Susan when she’d ran away. He or she would hardly be a baby or a child. It would be a surly teenager by this time with acne and attitude. Once again, I’d missed out on a family relationship because of Susan. I felt my face flush and my blood rushing in my ears. I was an outcast in a family of outcasts. Even murderers knew more about my family than I did.
“I’ll tell you,” I said, turning to face him.
He looked at my mother for a second. He took a step forward and cracked her on the head with the pistol butt. She crumpled to the floor in a heap.
“Don’t worry. She’s not dead. I might need her if you’re lying to me. So she’s safe for now. So talk.”
I started telling him the entire story of how I’d learned that Susan was alive. He waved the gun at me. “Hurry up. I don’t need the entire story, Sherlock. You’re brilliant and we know it. So where does she live?”
“How did you know that she was pregnant? I know that you figured out that I had no clue about that. I knew she had to have a strong reason for staying away, even after all this time, but I hadn’t settled on her having a child.”
Gillespie’s face was growing red, and I could see sweat forming on his forehead. He was definitely rattled at this point, and more likely to make an error. That’s what I was counting on. The more time that passed, the more chance I had of getting him off focus.
“I certainly didn’t deduce it from a set of bloody footsteps. She told me. Then three days later, Belinda Frias told me the same thing. I had to get rid of one of them, and even though your sister was younger than me, I wanted a life with her and not the maid. So Belinda had to go.” His hand trembled, and he spun quickly as my mother groaned from the floor. I hadn’t heard a peep from Siever. I wasn’t sure if he were dead or passed out or just listening to us talk.
“So you killed the maid when you all got back from Cedar Point?”
“Best plan in the world. We came home. The front door was open. She’d apparently left something in the house. I walked in first. She was there. She greeted me, and she patted her stomach as we talked. Like we’d made something. I got so angry that I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and killed her. My parents found me covered in blood, and they concocted a plan to make it seem like she’d been dead before we came home.”
“But there were people – witnesses – who said otherwise.” I kept watching his face, seeing if he was continuing to get more agitated, but he’d seemed
to have not gotten worse. He still sweated and swung the gun wildly, but he seemed more in control than before. This was not a good development.
“Your good buddy, Siever, fixed that. Ditched the reports, put off the witnesses. Hell he even got my parents to move to Mexico. Murderers might be extradited from south of the border, but he hadn’t heard of any cases where material witnesses had been sent back. So I was safe. Susan was safe and the kid was safe. Until you started butting in.”
“What are you going to do when you find Susan?” I asked, fearing that I already knew the answer.
“If she gives me the kid, I might let her live. If not, then I’ll kill her and take the kid. Finally this family will have what it always wanted, a real live kidnapping of its own.”
My entire body ached at his statement. I thought about all the pain and suffering I’d gone through in this family, thinking that someone had been kidnapped. I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to do that again. I was sure that I’d withdraw from the world again, and I was liking my weird little forays into society.
I saw a color out of the corner of my eye. The Countess had come back and was perched above us on the bookshelves. She’d been a stray before I’d adopted her, and she’d never quite relinquished her sense of self-preservation. I would like to think that I talked to her and told her what to do, but I’m sure some people would call it animal instinct to protect their human.
As if we had planned it, The Countess leapt onto Gillespie’s head, and I dove low. With a single swipe, she scratched across his face and eyes. He screamed in pain as I hit him with all my strength at the knees. I heard something pop in his left knee as we went down. He screamed again. I grabbed the gun away from him and left him on the floor as I called the police.
It was some hours later when I saw Sheila in the doorframe of my house. She stepped forward and gave me a smile. “So was it worth it? Was it worth the human cost to know exactly what happened?”
I nodded. One of the paramedics said that I was suffering from an adrenaline overload, and I wanted nothing more than to be left alone at this point. I wanted to go back to my solitary life where I stayed below the radar.
My mother had been taken by ambulance to a local hospital. I hadn’t seen Siever when he’d been wheeled out, but he was alive but in dire shape after losing so much blood. I’d stayed behind and answered questions for the police. The experience reminded me of Susan’s disappearance, and I kept wondering if she would visit now or allow us to visit her. Gillespie had admitted most everything to me, and Siever had heard part of the conversation as well. So he would be put away for a long time.
Sheila patted my arm and checked me over. “You look okay,” she said with a hint of a question in her voice.
I took her in my arms and kissed her. Maybe it was the adrenaline or the thought of someone else walking out of my life, but I kissed her like I meant it.
When we broke, there was a man standing beside us. He was tall with dark hair and eyes that looked like they’d seen everything life had to offer. He had a ridiculous cleft chin, and a body that looked like it visited the gym more than his job. His hands were on his hips, and he looked like he wanted to say something about us.
“Griff, this is Zane. He’s from IA.”
I nodded, remembering what she’d texted early about the police files. They were still hidden, so it was unlikely that Zane would be finding any evidence of wrong-doing on my dining room table.
“Sheila, is that any way to introduce me?” he said smoothly. “Let’s try this again. I’m Zane. I’m Sheila’s husband.”
~ END ~
SLEEPING DOGS (Animal Instincts Book 6) Page 9