“Are either of you two expecting any visitors tonight—or during the day tomorrow?” Vic asked, pocketing their phones.
Both she and Liam timidly shook their heads.
“Expecting any calls?” He winked at her. “I mean, besides lucky Matt?”
Sophie frowned. She and Liam both shook their heads at him again.
Vic finally stopped smirking at her and turned to her mother. “So—what’s for dinner?”
“I have no idea,” she said, holding James closer.
“Well, get in the kitchen and start thinking about it,” he said. Then he turned to his friend beside him. “You watch her and the little brat—and keep the chitchat to a minimum. Princess and Junior are going to give me a tour of the rest of the house, starting upstairs with their bedrooms . . .”
Sophie automatically recoiled. She grabbed hold of her mother’s arm. She figured their bedrooms would be where he’d tie each of them up.
Her mother shook her head at Vic. “I’m not leaving you alone with my kids.”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “Shut up and get dinner started. Joe, tell her not to get her panties in a bunch.”
“Vic just needs to make sure there aren’t any other phones or laptops in the house,” Joe explained. “I promise, no one will be hurt.”
Her mother didn’t budge from the sofa. She gave him a wary look.
“I swear to you,” Joe said. “I mean, how could I expect you to help us tomorrow if we harmed any of your kids?”
Sophie wondered how her mother was supposed to help the two men.
Vic lumbered over to the bottom of the stairs. With a hand on the newel post, he turned to them. “C’mon, you two, move it. Off your butts . . .”
“You don’t have to be rude, Vic,” Joe murmured.
Sophie let out a dazed little laugh. Yes, if you’re going to kill us, at least be polite about it, she thought. Obviously, this Joe person was a little off. His manner was so gentle and passive. He didn’t seem to want to harm anyone, and yet the police were after him for slaying an entire family.
Liam stood up first—followed by her mother and James.
With uncertainty, Sophie got to her feet and moved to the stairway. She was shaking, and her stomach was in knots. She hesitated a moment at the bottom of the steps, while her mom carried James toward the kitchen. Joe was behind them. Sophie couldn’t help feeling this was the last time she’d ever see her mother.
Vic sighed impatiently. “C’mon, get going . . .”
He made her and Liam lead the way upstairs. In the hallway, she passed her parents’ bedroom. The door was open. The place was in a shambles. Sophie wondered if her bedroom was in the same condition.
“Do your folks keep a gun in the house?” Vic asked, trailing behind them.
“No,” Liam answered.
Vic swatted him on the back of his head. “Lying little shit—”
Sophie spun around and pulled her brother to one side. “He’s not lying. He just doesn’t know about it . . .”
This, of course, was a total lie. They both knew about the gun in their parents’ bedroom closet. After seeing the mess in the master bedroom, she figured Vic or Joe must have already found it. Vic was probably just testing them. “My dad has a gun on the shelf in their bedroom closet, behind his sweaters,” she said. “You’ll find a box of bullets there, too.”
“Really? Dad has a gun?” Liam asked, rubbing the back of his head. He was quite the little actor.
Vic seemed satisfied.
Vic’s friend, Joe, wasn’t lying. Vic wanted a tour of the bedrooms—along with their dad’s study on the third floor. Unlike their parents’ bedroom, the other rooms hadn’t been touched. So, starting with Liam’s bedroom, she and her brother were forced to empty the desk and dresser drawers, clear off the shelves, and go through the closet—just to show the son of a bitch there were no extra phones, hidden weapons, or sharp objects. It was exhausting, and they created an absolute mess. Liam’s bed and the floor were covered with piles of clothes, shoes, hangers, and all sorts of junk from his desk and his shelves.
Vic emptied Liam’s wastebasket and dumped in it an eclectic assortment of things he deemed contraband: Liam’s iPad, a souvenir mini baseball bat her brother had bought at a Mariners game, an old letter opener, a sturdy but completely fake replica of Thor’s hammer, a flashlight, a pair of scissors, and a drawing compass.
Most of the time Vic half-sat on Liam’s desk with the gun in his hand, barking orders at them, making wisecracks about Liam’s things, and occasionally leering at her.
Sophie quietly became angrier and angrier. At least she was a little less frightened. What Vic was making them do didn’t mesh at all with the news accounts of the Singleton murders. She hadn’t seen anything on TV or read anything online about the rooms in the Lopez Island house being torn apart. It didn’t seem like the same situation at all.
From what they’d said earlier, it was obvious the two fugitives had made some kind of deal with her mother. They were forcing her to do something for them tomorrow, some errand. And in the meantime, they planned to stay here the night.
Was there a chance she and her family would survive this? Or would this deal her mother had made with the two murderers merely delay the inevitable?
Every now and then, she heard James downstairs letting out a shriek. That wasn’t unusual. He got wound up and loud sometimes in the late afternoon. Sophie was relieved to hear most of his screams followed by giggles. Her mother must have been distracting him.
But if her mom had seen the look on Vic’s face after each shriek, she certainly would have tried harder to keep James quiet.
Sophie shuddered. She couldn’t help thinking that if Vic started shooting, her baby brother would be the first to die.
* * *
James let out a screech and then laughed. “You moved first, Joe!”
He and Joe sat on the family room floor, playing “chicken” with a couple of James’s toy trucks. It was obvious Joe was losing on purpose, pulling his truck to one side long before it might have collided with James’s truck. “Oh, rats!” Joe said. “You won again. I want a rematch . . .”
From the kitchen, Laura kept an eye on them as she tried to get dinner started and the utensils put away. But it was hard to keep her mind on food when her two older children were upstairs alone with Vic. Any minute now, she expected to hear a scream or a thud or maybe even a gunshot. Her nerves felt as if they were scraped raw.
She kept thinking about Dane’s corpse lying out in the vineyard right now. She wasn’t sure whether or not she should tell Sophie and Liam what had happened. They needed to know just how dangerous Vic was. But they’d already figured out these two men were the fugitive suspects in the Singleton murders. They were already terrified. She didn’t want to panic them even more.
She found a package of ground Italian chicken sausage in the freezer, and pulled a jar of Newman’s Own spaghetti sauce from the cupboard. She’d make penne. She started cooking the sausage, while from another cupboard she took out a recently opened bottle of red wine to add to the sauce later.
It suddenly occurred to her that her kitchen and pantry were overstocked with an assortment of wines. Starting with dinner, all she had to do was keep refilling Vic’s glass, and by ten o’clock, he’d be passed out or, at the very least, “slow on the draw.” She might be able to wrestle the gun from him.
Then again, Vic was probably a violent, abusive drunk. If he started drinking, how long would she and her kids be at risk until he finally lost consciousness?
She glanced over at Joe sitting on the floor with her son. She was pretty sure he’d surrender once Vic was put out of commission.
She heard a thump from above. It made her flinch. Laura had to tell herself that someone had merely dropped something on the floor, nothing more.
She took a deep breath and moved into the family room. Grabbing the remote control, she switched on the TV to an episode of Sid the Science Kid
she’d DVR’d earlier. “Jamie, look what’s on now,” she said. “It’s your favorite show. Why don’t you sit and watch Sid while I talk to Joe?”
James’s shoulders slumped and his face bunched up. “I want Joe to watch Sid with me!”
“Well, I really need to talk with Joe—just for a little while. He’ll come watch TV with you in a few minutes, okay?”
Her son didn’t answer. He was already mesmerized by the show.
She moved over to the counter-bar, and Joe joined her. “Vic said we shouldn’t be talking,” he murmured. Still, he sat down on one of the bar stools.
“I just wanted to say, James likes you,” she whispered. “You’re really good with him.”
He half-smiled and shrugged. “Well, I like kids.”
“I’m not sure Vic does,” Laura said. “I don’t trust him around my children, Joe. In fact, I have to admit, I’m terrified that he’s alone upstairs with Sophie and Liam right now. I saw what he did to that man this afternoon. I can’t help thinking . . .” She shook her head. “Tomorrow, you want me to drive to Lopez Island to talk to this waitress, Martha, about this Zared person . . .”
Laura nervously drummed her fingers on the countertop. She wasn’t sure if either one of those people even existed.
“That’s at least six or seven hours I’d be gone. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t leave my children alone with Vic that long. Hell, I’d be a wreck leaving them alone with him for seven minutes.”
“But your kids won’t be alone with him. I’ll be here.”
“No offense, Joe, but you were here this afternoon when he slit that man’s throat. You didn’t want that man to die, and you wanted to stop it, but you couldn’t.”
“I swear, I won’t let him hurt any of your kids, Mrs. Gretchell.”
There was something about the way he said her name that sounded eerily familiar.
“You can trust me to make sure nothing bad happens,” he said.
“That’s the other thing, Joe,” she said, wincing a bit. “As much as I want to believe you’re innocent, the fact is you’re wanted by the police for murdering seven people, some of them just kids. There’s no mother in her right mind who would feel safe leaving her children with either of you. I’m sorry.”
He gave her a wounded look. “But you just said I was good with James . . .”
“Yes, while I’m here, watching you. But I’m not about to drive off and leave you alone with him—or any of my kids. I’m sorry.” She put her hand on his arm. “Joe, I want to help you, but not this way. I can’t. Don’t ask me to leave my kids here with you and Vic. If you’re really innocent, you’d—”
“I am innocent!” He jerked his arm away. “I thought you of all people would believe me.”
“What do you mean me of all people?”
“I told you, I was asleep when they were killed!” he went on. “I don’t know how it happened! I don’t know how anybody got through that front gate. Maybe someone snuck in when the two older kids got back from dinner. They were all fine when I fell asleep. I didn’t kill anybody. I couldn’t have. Earlier on Friday night, I was in my room—”
“You mean the apartment above the garage?” she asked.
Joe sighed and gave a nod. He seemed to calm down a bit. “I was watching TV when Mr. Singleton called and asked me to come to his study . . .” Joe stopped and took a deep breath.
Laura recalled the news accounts. Scott Singleton’s body was discovered in his study. He’d been beaten savagely—tortured, according to some news accounts. And his throat had been slashed. “What time did he call you?” she asked.
“Around ten-thirty,” Joe answered. “I remember, because Mr. Singleton said to come to the side door. His study had its own entrance. He said he didn’t want me to wake up anybody. Everyone was home by then except the college girl, Jae. A couple of the kids were in bed. I was really nervous because this was my first time meeting Mr. Singleton and I wasn’t sure exactly why he was calling me to his study at that hour. I thought maybe I was in trouble.”
“Wait a minute.” Laura frowned at him. “You hadn’t met him?”
He shook his head. “No, it was Mrs. Singleton who had hired me. Earlier in the summer, I had this job with a landscaping crew. We were working in the yard of this superrich family, and Mrs. Singleton came over to their house to play tennis. I was one of four guys there that morning, and I was trimming the hedges around the tennis court. I won a coin toss. It was light work. But mostly, the other guys wanted the job because, well, for older ladies, Mrs. Singleton and her friend—the lady who owned the house—they weren’t bad to look at in their tennis outfits and all. I think Mrs. Singleton stopped and talked to me for like maybe two minutes—mostly about gardening. And based on that, my boss, Mr. Neff, told me the next day that somebody wanted to interview me for this groundskeeper job . . .”
Above them on the second floor, Laura could hear movement, but nothing sudden or loud.
The savory smell of the sausage cooking started to fill the kitchen. She excused herself and went to stir the meat and reset the burner to low. All the while, she wondered if these people hiring Joe knew he’d spent time in an institution. She wanted to ask if it had come up in the interview, but thought better of it. They must have known. They had to have conducted a background check on him. Maybe Sherry Singleton was a true Christian in the sense that she wanted to give this unfortunate young man a second chance. Maybe she hoped to convert him or something.
Laura poured Joe a glass of water, brought it to him, and sat back down next to him. “Go on,” she said. “You were about to interview for the groundskeeper job.”
“Thanks.” He sipped his water. “So—I went in for the interview, and I guess it went well, because I met Mrs. Singleton again, and I got hired to look after their house on Lopez. That was back in late September. Like I told you earlier, it was mostly a summer place for them. So it was just me there most of the time. It was really kind of an easy job. I just had to keep the grounds looking nice and check inside the house every few days. Whenever somebody wanted to stay over, Mrs. Singleton called me in advance. Some cleaning woman would come by, and I’d help pull all the white sheets off the furniture so it would be ready for occupancy. That’s how Mrs. Singleton would put it, ‘Could you help get the house ready for occupancy, Joe?’ It was almost always Mrs. Singleton who spent the night there. She was usually alone. A few times she brought a couple of the kids with her. The older kids sometimes came there unannounced with friends. But Mr. Singleton, he was never there . . .”
Laura squinted at him. “But you told me earlier that you saw him in the driveway, talking to that Zared person. . .”
He nodded—a few more times than necessary. “Oh, yeah, but he—well, he just sort of showed up that afternoon. No one called ahead or anything. I noticed the car come in, and I looked out the window, and I saw him go into the house. I recognized him—from TV and from photographs in the house. I figured I should go down and introduce myself, and I was about to do that when this other guy showed up . . .”
“Zared,” she said.
Joe nodded again. “That’s right. They had the argument in the driveway—like I told you about. Mr. Singleton didn’t stick around very long after the other man drove off. So I never got a chance to introduce myself to him. The first time I actually saw him face-to-face was Thanksgiving night. He had me and the kitchen help come into the dining room, and he said a prayer over Thanksgiving dinner. He kept getting my name wrong. I was worried he didn’t like me very much. So—just as I said, when I knocked on the outside door to his study for this meeting, I was pretty nervous.”
Laura studied him while he talked. She could tell he was omitting something. She wasn’t getting the entire story. From years of teaching, she’d learned how to detect when a kid was lying—or not giving her a completely accurate explanation about something. They never quite looked at her, or they fidgeted, or their speech patterns gave them away. Joe was unconsciously givin
g out all those telltale signs. He might not have been lying per se, but he seemed to be holding back something he didn’t want her to know about.
“Did you tell all this to the police?” she asked.
He nodded nervously.
“Exactly the way you told me?”
Joe nodded again and took another sip of water.
No wonder the police didn’t believe you, she thought.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she sighed. “So—what happened when you talked to Scott Singleton that night?”
Joe shrugged. “Well, he invited me into the study and gave me a dark beer, something imported. I sat down on the sofa and he—he sat across from me with his beer. He told me I was doing a good job on the grounds and that he was glad to finally meet me and all. He was really friendly. After about twenty minutes, his cell phone rang and he said he needed to take the call. He said it wouldn’t be long, and when he was done, he’d walk over to my apartment so we could finish our conversation.”
“For twenty minutes, he talked about the good job you were doing on the grounds?”
Joe nodded.
“And he wanted to finish up that conversation later?” Laura gave him a sidelong glance. “Joe, I can’t imagine a conversation like that taking any more than five minutes—maybe ten at the most.”
“Well, we talked about other stuff, too,” Joe said, restlessly shifting around on the bar stool. “He asked me about my religion, and I asked him about football. Like I say, he was really friendly.” Joe made a face. “I think I smell something burning. Is whatever’s on the stove okay?”
Laura went to check on the sausage. It was fine. She drained the fat from the pan and added the wine and the Newman’s Own. “So—go on, I’m listening,” she said, standing over the stove. “It was about eleven o’clock. Mr. Singleton was supposed to come by your apartment above the garage and talk some more about—stuff.”
Joe let out a sigh. “Well, when we were in his study, before his cell phone rang, Mr. Singleton had started talking about my insurance. He said it was important, and he wanted to talk some more about that.”
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