The clock on the wall ticked as polished gold-and-silver gears rotated behind the glass face. Gideon watched the clock, thinking of when he’d given it to his father and Felicia a few Christmases ago. They’d loved it.
When Felicia stayed silent, Gideon said, “Do you think Chapman owns the police? Is that why you won’t go to them?”
“I won’t discuss this.” She finally released his wrist. “I’m doing what’s best.”
Gideon watched the minute hand move forward. “I don’t think he owns the police. Chapman may be rich, but I haven’t gotten the sense that he runs the town or that people are afraid of him. I’m willing to chance going to the police.”
“Don’t be silly. You won’t do that. You know I wouldn’t warn you away from them unless there was genuine danger.”
“I usually trust your word,” Gideon said. “But this time, I’m worried grief is damaging your good judgment. If you have evidence, give it to me now. Otherwise, I’m calling the police.”
She watched the clock as Gideon had—the mesmerizing rotation of the gears, the motion of the hands. He watched the clock with her and waited.
The second hand rotated around the clock face once. Twice.
Gideon drew his phone out of his pocket. “This isn’t a bluff,” he said. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
“Put that away,” she snapped.
“Evidence, Felicia. Give me evidence.”
The second hand made another rotation.
“Let me think about it,” she said. “Call me tomorrow.”
“You don’t need to think about it. You either have evidence or you don’t.”
She looked at him. Her face was ghostlike. Inscrutable.
Gideon battled his instinct to ditch his demands and focus on her health. If he got diverted now, he’d have to start over. More wheel-spinning, no answers.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Okay, the cops it is.” A slack sensation in Gideon’s fingers made it tricky to hold his phone steady and look up the number for the police department. He hadn’t thought he’d end up doing this. Gold medal to Felicia for stubbornness.
“I’m calling the main number,” he said. “I figure this isn’t a 911—”
Felicia ripped the phone out of his hand.
Dumbfounded, Gideon reached to snatch it back but pulled his hand away. He’d never seen Felicia get physically aggressive, and he didn’t want to flail his way into an altercation where she might get hurt.
“You foolish boy.” She tossed his phone onto the lamp table. “I can’t go to the police because Robert Chapman has something on me.”
The words hit as though he’d whacked himself in the face with the hammer he’d thought he could use to nail evidence together. “Are we talking about blackmail?”
“If I turn him in, he turns me in. I’ve dealt with your father’s murder privately because it’s the only way I can deal with it if I don’t want to go to prison. Do you understand?”
“No.” He couldn’t fathom Felicia doing anything anyone could blackmail her for. “He’s . . . blackmailing you into keeping your mouth shut about Dad?”
“It’s a standoff. We’ve never talked about it. But he knows what I did, and I know what he did, and I know what will happen if I go to the police.”
Blackmail? This had to be grief-fired madness. “What did you do?”
Felicia’s lips remained still.
“So help me, I will call the police.” Gideon didn’t want to raise his voice, but it happened anyway. “If I want that phone, I’ll take it back. If you want to arm wrestle for it, fine, but you won’t win.”
She spoke in a whisper. “Don’t do this, Gideon.”
Gideon wiped the anger from his voice. “I owe it to Dad to help you. That doesn’t include letting you bury yourself in secrets or fears. If there’s blackmail or implied blackmail going on—let alone murder—this all needs to come out. If you’re unable to give me solid information, maybe what we need is a doctor, not the police.”
“I haven’t lost my mind.” Felicia drew a long, deep breath that deteriorated into a wheeze. “I murdered Sheryl,” she said. “Robert Chapman’s first wife.”
Chapter 15
A shock wave nearly decimated Gideon’s self-possession. “What . . . I thought his wife died in some kind of accident. What happened?”
She glared at him. “I told you enough. I told you what Chapman has against me. And his daughter, his and Sheryl’s—they had a falling out after her death, and they’re still estranged. He lost his wife and his daughter. Do you see why he’d take revenge by killing my husband and possibly by targeting you, my stepson? He’ll take from me what I took from him.”
Gideon struggled to stabilize his thoughts. Natalie had said it was an accident at an event Felicia was catering. “Tell me exactly how she died. We’re done with secrets.”
Felicia was shaking—or was it shivering? Gideon stood and grabbed the chenille throw blanket folded in a basket next to the couch. He draped it over her, covering her from her shoulders to her feet.
“Tell me what happened.” He remained standing in front of her. “No point in holding out. I’ll hound you until you talk, and if that doesn’t happen soon, I’m taking that phone back.”
She pushed the chenille blanket off her shoulders and sat folding and smoothing the edge of the blanket now crumpled on her lap.
“Felicia.”
She yanked the blanket back up to her shoulders. “Swear you won’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t promise that. I swear I’ll do whatever I can to help you. I swear I’ll try to do what my father would want.”
“He wouldn’t want everyone to know what I . . .” Her gaze returned to the clock. Gideon wanted to unhook it from the wall and stuff it behind the couch if that would help keep Felicia’s attention on him.
“Okay.” Gideon lifted his phone off the lamp table. “You sit there and hoard your secrets.”
“Sit down,” Felicia said. “Please.”
He retook his seat on her left, keeping his phone in his left hand so if she wanted to steal it, she’d have to reach across him—an attempt he’d easily thwart.
“My café . . . The Chicken Noodle . . . Chapman was a fan,” Felicia said haltingly. “He decided he wanted our soup and sandwiches and cookies for the opening of Maison du Canard.”
“Great compliment for you.”
“It was. But my food wasn’t the . . . type of cuisine usually served at an event like that. Sheryl was the one organizing the program, and she . . . she was unhappy with his choice of food. Soup and sandwiches for the opening of a magical glass house on the pond.”
Cautiously, Gideon set his phone on the arm of the couch opposite from where Felicia sat. “Did she try to convince him to change his mind?”
“I’m sure she tried, but he wanted what he wanted. So Sheryl was . . .” Felicia’s expression transformed from haunted to ice hard. “She made it clear to me—and to everyone working on the event—that I wasn’t up to her standards. I was a low-class hash-slinger and wasn’t it cute how Bob got these peculiar ideas and you had to roll with them, and if he’d sink this low, next time he’d be serving people frozen fish sticks and canned spaghetti.”
“Ouch.”
Felicia adjusted the blanket so it reached her chin. “The day we were setting up, Sheryl mocked my food so often I worried I wouldn’t get any positive word of mouth from the event. Nobody would want to look like a hick by praising food Mrs. Chapman despised.”
Her words no longer came grudgingly. They flooded out of her, and blood began to return to her ashen cheeks. Telling this story must be a relief. Had she ever confided it in anyone—even his father?
“This wasn’t the first time I’d met Sheryl,” Felicia continued. “She’d come into my café with her husband and had called it an ‘aspiring truck stop’ in a loud voice to make sure all my customers heard her. I was fed up with her. She kept making a big deal abo
ut how elegant and tasteful the event was supposed to be and how they’d have to do their best to compensate for the ‘college-student food’ by making everything else extra marvelous.”
Gideon was starting to wish uncharitably that this “elegant event” had involved someone splashing lobster bisque all over Sheryl’s designer clothes.
“At the beginning of the celebration, she was planning to paddle across the pond in a rowboat. There was a painting she loved . . . I can’t remember the artist . . . called Lady in a Rowboat. It was on loan to the museum at the time. Sheryl was a dead ringer for the woman in the painting—a dead ringer plus twenty-five years, mind you. She wanted to re-create the painting.”
“Re-create it?”
“Yes. ‘Bring it to life,’ she said. She had the flowing white dress, the pink-flowered hat, the white parasol, an exact reproduction of the rowboat. She planned to paddle gracefully across the pond while all the guests watched her from the deck of Maison du Canard and a string quartet played and a narrator talked about the painting. Oh—Edward Cucuel. That was the artist’s name. American Impressionist.”
“Ah.” Gideon tried not to look clueless. He didn’t know much about art.
“Sheryl loved the spotlight,” Felicia said. “Loved showing off.” She went silent. Gideon waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.
“What happened the day she . . . the day of the event?” he prompted.
“I was sick of her rudeness,” Felicia said quietly. “So sick of it.”
“I’ll bet. I would have been.”
Her gaze locked onto the clock again. “I knew she was scared of cats. Phobic of them.”
“Of cats? Plain house cats?”
“Yes. You should have seen her when a stray wandered past when we were on the grounds talking about setup. Sheryl screamed like the cat was a rabid lion, ran inside the museum, and wouldn’t come out until a security guard caught the cat and took it to the shelter.”
“Huh.”
“I decided to strike back—a practical joke, I suppose it was. I had a toy cat—not a toy, really. A decoration. Realistic looking. Do you remember it?”
“Yeah. You had it in a basket by the fireplace. A faux pet that wouldn’t bother your allergies.”
“Yes.”
“So you used the cat as part of a practical joke?”
“When I arrived early on the day of the celebration, I hid it in the rowboat she was using. I figured she’d notice it when she climbed in and she’d panic and make a fool of herself in front of her audience, maybe fall in the water in her pristine, vintage dress. She would be the star at a party where everyone was privately snickering over how she’d been spooked by a fake kitty. It was childish of me, yes, but I was so tired of her, and . . . I suppose I thought immaturity was justified. I . . . didn’t think she’d get hurt. I didn’t want her to get hurt.”
“I know that,” Gideon said. “What went wrong?”
“She climbed into the rowboat with no problem. I thought someone must have noticed the cat earlier and removed it. I was disappointed but also relieved—by then, I was a little embarrassed for being so petty.” She looked at Gideon. “I’m not usually that way.”
“I know.”
“But the cat was there. She was too preoccupied playing the oil-painted beauty to notice it at first. About halfway across the pond, she screamed and started whacking at the interior of the rowboat with her paddle. Then she stood up, and . . . the boat tipped over.”
After another extended pause, Gideon prodded. “Did she not know how to swim?”
“Of course she did, and I hadn’t been worried about that anyway because with so many people around, I knew if she did fall in, she’d get rescued immediately. But I didn’t know she had a heart condition or that her panic combined with the shock of falling into cold water . . . The water wasn’t that cold; it was early October, but apparently, you don’t need freezing water to cause problems in a vulnerable person. They rushed her to the hospital, but she died before she got there. Cardiac arrest.”
Gideon rested his hand on Felicia’s blanket-covered shoulder. “You couldn’t have known about her heart condition. You couldn’t have known that would happen.”
“Does that change anything? I pulled a prank that killed her.”
“Robert Chapman knew you put the cat there?”
“Nobody found the cat or knew why she’d panicked. The cat must have sunk. It was fairly heavy, weighted at the bottom to sit nicely on a hearth or pillow.”
“You never told anyone what happened?”
“I couldn’t. I’d go to prison for murder.”
“Not murder. You didn’t mean to hurt her. But you said Chapman knows what you did.”
“He must have figured it out eventually. Maybe he dredged the pond and found the cat and was able to link it to me. That’s why he ordered Wade’s death. An eye for an eye.”
Gideon gave himself several ticks of the clock to evaluate what she’d told him. Up until this point, she’d been reporting what had sounded like a factual story, but now she was leaping off facts and landing in assumptions. “Felicia . . . if he knew what you did, why didn’t he go to the police?”
“Because he’s Robert Chapman. He does what he wants. Soup instead of caviar. Murder instead of taking his chances that the legal system would get revenge for him.”
“If he did want to take revenge by killing Dad, wouldn’t he have done something less chancy than tampering with a ladder? Dad might not have gotten seriously hurt, let alone died.”
“He wanted to send a message but didn’t want a vigorous police investigation. I imagine that was his first try, and if it hadn’t worked, he would have tried again.”
Imagine was the right word to use. Imagine. Fantasize. Fabricate. “It’s way too much of a stretch to think Dad’s accident—”
“I didn’t realize it at first either until I found out that the day your father died was . . . would have been . . . Robert and Sheryl’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. That’s not a coincidence.”
This fact unsettled Gideon, but he said, “It absolutely could be coincidence. How many years ago did Sheryl die?”
“Seven.”
“If he wanted revenge, why would he wait that long? That’s six anniversaries he bypassed, if he wanted to take his revenge on that date.”
“I don’t know why he waited. Maybe he only found the cat and figured it out recently. Maybe he wanted to wait until a significant anniversary.”
“Did he contact you in any way? Send you a message to indicate that he knew?”
“Your father’s death was the message.”
“But you never heard from him or any of his people? Never any blackmail or threats or hints that they knew what had led to Sheryl’s death?”
“Your father’s death made it clear.”
But where’s your proof? Felicia’s grieving, guilty assumptions, plus the date of death . . . none of that was solid evidence.
“When you said you ‘took care’ of the issue, what did that mean?” Gideon asked.
“It means I took care of it.” Her voice tightened, the loose eagerness of confession gone.
“Be more specific. What did you do?”
“I got the message to Mr. Chapman that I knew what he’d done and I had proof, and if he harmed you—or me—I had prepared things so my evidence would automatically go to the police. But if he leaves us alone, I’ll leave him alone. He got the only revenge he was entitled to. He can’t blame me for his problems with his daughter.”
Entitled to revenge? Gideon decided not to dissect that statement. “You have proof Chapman killed Dad? Courtroom-grade evidence?”
“No. I was bluffing. But I learned enough to make it appear I know more than I do. That will scare him.”
“What did you—”
“I’m done talking.”
“No, you’re not. You need to—”
“You wanted proof of why Chapman would go after your father. I ga
ve it to you.”
“You didn’t give any proof. You gave assumptions.”
“They’re correct. And I have . . .” Her lips closed.
“You have what?”
The color that had enlivened her face drained away again. Her pallor provoked an abrupt memory of how his mother had looked when he’d visited her in the hospital before her death.
“I have indications that Chapman got my message,” she said. “You’ll be safe.”
“What indications? How did you send the message?”
“I’m done answering questions. If you can’t stop asking them, get out.”
“What about Camille Moretti? She was one of Chapman’s people, and she’s dead too.”
“I have no idea what happened to Camille. Go home. I need to rest.”
“I’m not walking out while you’re still—”
The doorbell rang. Felicia jumped.
“Should we ignore that?” Gideon asked.
Felicia pulled her hand out from under the blanket and massaged her forehead. She started to stand.
“No, stay here.” Gideon sprang to his feet. “I’ll answer it.” And get rid of whoever it is. He walked to the door and checked the peephole. At the sight of Natalie, fresh stress and deep relief skirmished inside him. He unlocked the door and opened it. “Hey.”
“Oh, hello.” Natalie’s eyelids were swollen, but her eyes weren’t bloodshot. “I’m sorry about the—” Apparently remembering he hadn’t wanted Felicia to know they were meeting, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “How is she?”
He had no idea how Felicia was. Better? Worse? Healing? Having a breakdown?
Behind him, he heard soft footsteps. “Natalie, it’s so sweet of you to stop by,” Felicia said. “Come in.”
Come in? She wanted Natalie’s company? Yes, because she thought it would shut Gideon up. He wouldn’t ask painful questions in front of Natalie.
Would he? It might be better to bring her in . . . But he still didn’t know . . . Should he dig more details out of Felicia before daring to . . . What would his father . . . He flat-out didn’t know what to do. Never in his life had he felt so far out of his depth that he couldn’t find the surface no matter which direction he swam.
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