by Alice Sharpe
“I used the key you gave me to get in,” she said, her voice an odd monotone. “I waited and waited for you.”
Shutting the door with her knee, Liz said, “I’m sorry, Em. I didn’t know you were coming. Give me a second to put the ice cream in the freezer.”
Emily nodded.
Liz deposited the groceries in the kitchen. Sinbad sat up in his enclosure, square in the middle of his sandbox, eyes huge but oddly silent as though he, too, was aware of the tension emanating from the distraught woman in the living room. She dug out the ice cream and slipped it into the freezer, but the kitchen was so cold she knew the meat and milk would be fine for a few minutes. Emily, on the other hand, didn’t look as though she had a few more minutes in her.
ALEX FOUND himself thinking Montgomery could do quiet like no other man on earth. A rock had nothing on this guy.
He’d listened, he’d asked two or three questions, and now he was thinking. At last, he took a deep breath. “So let me get this straight. Sheriff Kapp is convinced you’re guilty, you can’t get him to look anywhere else unless you compromise Liz, Liz is in danger from some unknown person, you suspect Hiller was blackmailed by Kapp.”
“You got it.”
“And now you want me to tell you why I used the word blackmail with Kapp.”
“Yes.”
Montgomery thought some more. “I assume Mike told you about this.”
Alex shook his head once.
“You’re trying to keep Mike out of it.”
Alex didn’t reply.
With a heavy sigh, Montgomery said, “Kapp is a pompous, arrogant jerk.”
Hearing Montgomery label Kapp as arrogant less than twelve hours after Kapp had used that word on him, made Alex feel vindicated in a way. The fact that the chief was talking to him spurred a flame of hope. Alex said, “I’m up against a wall. Kapp is determined to hang me out to dry. I can’t prove he’s a blackmailer. If you can’t tell me what he said to you, will you just confirm that the man approached you? Maybe that would be enough.”
Montgomery got up from his desk. “And maybe it wouldn’t. Let me tell you what I know.” The chief perched himself on the broad windowsill and looked thoughtful. “You’re not a dad yet, but you’re pretty darn close. Someday that baby of yours will be all but grownup. You won’t still think of him or her as a baby, say, when you take them to college, but you will still feel protective. It comes with the territory.
“Well, my last baby is seventeen years old and we took him off to school down in L.A. a few months ago. The boy is smart as a whip, graduating a year early from high school but maybe that wasn’t a good idea. He’s immature. He started drinking to fit in and then he drove a friend’s car into an old lady’s front window. The friend ended up with a broken leg. The old lady had a stroke. Now my kid’s got a DUI and trouble with the law.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No one up here did, but Kapp found out. He even got hold of a picture of my kid taken at the scene, obviously three sheets to the wind and obviously belligerant. Now pay attention, because this is the way Kapp’s mind works. Kapp knows I’m looking to become fire chief when Purvis retires. He offered to keep my son’s trouble off the front pages of the paper if I agreed to enlighten him about a rumored affair Purvis had with an underage girl. He wants the power to threaten Purvis’s marriage so Purvis will endorse him come re-election time. Purvis is an out and out critic of the sheriff’s, so there’s no way that endorsement will come without coercion. Kapp figures I want to protect my son. He even hinted that I won’t stand much of a chance for promotion if Kevin’s debacle is front page news and maybe he’s right.”
“So Kapp tried to blackmail you to blackmail Purvis.”
“Yep.”
“And you then accused him of trying to blackmail you.”
“I did indeed. He balked at that, told me it was ‘business,’ not blackmail. He said I should just scratch his back the way old man Hiller had.”
Alex sat up straight. “He mentioned Hiller and blackmail in the same sentence?”
“He mentioned Hiller and business in the same sentence, but with him, it’s all the same.”
“I can’t figure out what he had on Hiller.”
“I gather he had a lot on Hiller. I have no proof. I have a feeling this is business as usual for Kapp and that he’ll pretty much do anything he wants in this county for as long as he wants. It galls me, and frankly I have to admit that I don’t see how any of this will get you closer to Hiller’s murderer.”
Alex shook his head. “I don’t either. But the whole thing is like a puzzle. Who knows which piece will be the one that makes all the others fit?” He stood up and held out his hand. “Thank you for being so frank,” he said.
Montgomery stared at Alex’s hand, stood and shook it. “Best you stay away from here until this is all resolved,” he said firmly. “When it is, come see me if I’m still around.”
Alex nodded. “Yes, sir. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s Kapp going to do about your kid?”
“Ruin him. Ruin me.”
Alex left the station preoccupied.
Kapp was a class one scoundrel—was he also a murderer? He heard his name called as he walked to his truck and turned to find Dave under the protection of the station overhang. “Tell me what happened,” his friend said, handing him a steaming mug of coffee and taking a sip from his own mug.
As much as Alex longed to return home to Liz and make up for the tensions of the morning, he knew he owed Dave an explanation. Leaning a shoulder against the building, Alex started talking.
LIZ SAT in the rocking chair and looked anxiously at Emily. “Are you okay?”
Emily nodded her head, then shook it. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks, plopping unceremoniously onto her blouse. Not a blouse, Liz realized suddenly. A pajama top, the same blue one from the night before.
“Let me call Ron for you,” Liz begged.
“No.”
“Then how about I drive you home?”
Emily finally stopped staring into space and turned her attention to Liz, who shrank back against the chair under the intensity of her friend’s gaze. She said, “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?”
Furrowing her brow, Liz said, “Leave what alone?”
Emily closed her eyes for a moment and her head swayed. “Me. Us. You,” she said. “Why couldn’t you just leave everything the way it was? Why did you have to meddle, why did you have to bring Alex around again, why couldn’t you love Ron?”
Liz blinked several times. She wasn’t sure what to say.
“I knew I had to have it,” Emily said, her voice now dreamy sounding. “The minute I saw it, I knew. It’s like that sometimes. Oh, most of the time it’s just an urge, like being a little hungry, like wanting a snack. But sometimes, the feeling is overpowering, like being ravenous, like killing the first beast you come across and devouring it whole. Your uncle was a beast, Liz. Ron told me how much you hated him.”
Yikes, Liz thought as the first prickling of fear tingled her spine. Rising, she said, “Em, you aren’t well. I’ll drive you home.”
“Sit down,” Emily demanded. “I’m not done. The least you can do is listen to me.”
Liz sat.
“I knew I had to have it,” she continued. “I could see myself wearing it before I even touched it, I could feel it around my neck…I wanted it and I took it and I saved you. But did you appreciate what I’d done? You only had eyes for Alex, you couldn’t even see Ron. You couldn’t see that I saved you, that I offered you a second chance. You didn’t care—”
“I don’t understand,” Liz said, fear escalating from a prickle to a drumbeat. Searching for the right thing to say, she added, “You can have the necklace, Emily. Like you said, it’s mine now to do with as I choose and I want you to have it. Let me get it for you. It’s in the bedroom.”
As she said all this, she stood.
“Not the little gold horse. The green scarf.�
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Liz felt like shaking her head to clear her ears. “You?” she whispered. “You took my scarf?”
Emily nodded.
Liz looked at her friend beseechingly. “Emily, listen to me. You must have left the scarf where someone else could find it. Think, Em. Who was nearby when you set it down—”
“And those beach stairs,” Emily said.
The stairs! Liz was trying not to react, trying to keep her cool, but the words just shot out of her mouth. “You broke Sinbad’s leg and tied him down there? You sabotaged the stairs and tried to kill me?”
“It had to be done,” Emily said.
Liz stared at Emily and tried to make sense of this information. It was no use, she couldn’t. She needed help. She said, “I’m calling Ron. It’ll be like old times, just the three of us.”
“Sit down.”
“No, Emily, you can trust Ron, you know he’ll help you.”
Emily’s hands shifted as she withdrew a black handgun from the folds of her skirt and rested it on her lap.
Liz swallowed a lump the size of a basketball. “Where did you get that?”
Emily lifted the gun until Liz was all but staring down the barrel. “I don’t remember where I got it,” she said. “Maybe I borrowed it from somebody. I must have borrowed it….”
“I’m calling Ron.”
“Sit down. You aren’t calling anyone.”
“But—”
“Don’t make me kill you, too.”
Chapter Twelve
“Who else did you kill?” Liz mumbled.
Emily shook her head.
Uncle Devon? But Emily had never known him, she’d never met him until the night of the party. Even Uncle Devon couldn’t provoke a killing frenzy that quickly. Who then? Had Emily drugged Harry? Did she think he’d died? Or had she shot Ron or Alex—
Liz battled panic as she said, “Who, Emily? Who else did you kill?”
Emily kept shaking her head. Liz glanced at the phone. If only she could call Alex and tell him to come home! When could she expect him? Ordinarily, he’d come directly from the fire station, but he’d been perturbed with her when he left so who knew what he might do to blow off steam. Run on the beach, go to the gym, drive up to the national park and hike along a wintry trail—anything was a possibility.
Come home, she cried in her heart. Please, come home to argue with me, come home to be angry, just come home!
Liz’s mind was so focused on trying to figure out a way to get the gun, cursing her present ungainly state, calculating trajectories without having the slightest idea what it all meant, that it took her a while to figure out that Emily had asked a question. But what question?
Emily waved the gun at Liz and said, “Tell me why.”
Why what?
“Tell me!”
Liz jerked. “I…please, ask me again.”
“I said, why can’t you love Ron?”
Liz inched closer to the edge of the rocker. “Um, well, I didn’t meet Ron until I was already married,” she said, a sudden plan popping into her head. She grabbed her leg and groaned, struggling into an upright position. “I have a horrible cramp, Em! I need to walk. Don’t make me sit.”
“Over there,” Emily said, gesturing with the gun to the area by the Christmas tree. “You can walk around over there. Just don’t get too close to me.”
“I won’t.”
“If you’d met him first—”
Ron. She was still talking about Ron. Liz said, “Your brother is a fine man. You and he are valuable friends.”
“He loves you,” Emily said.
She wanted to argue this point but the gun made honesty a difficult policy, at best. She said, “I love him, too. Like you love him. Like a brother.”
“My mother was so happy when he was born. She and Daddy used to sing to him. They loved him. But me…” Her voice trailed off.
Liz heard a noise outside and held her breath. Tires crunched, the sound muted by the rain that had started up again as Emily’s talk drifted from one thing to another and back again. Liz prayed that Emily, unaccustomed to the particular sounds that heralded visitors at this house, might not recognize the fact that someone was coming.
Please, please, be Alex…
Emily said, “Your uncle had to die.”
“Why, Em?” Keep her talking…
“Ron said you hated him.”
“I—”
“So I killed him.”
Liz stopped pacing. “But Emily, you didn’t even know him. Did he catch you stealing the necklace, is that what happened?”
“Ron said you hated him.”
“We had our troubles—”
“He fell on his letter opener, but if he hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered because there was your pretty green scarf. He had to die. He wouldn’t cooperate. So old, so feeble, so stubborn.” She paused for a second, looking confused. “It’s like a dream, like a story,” she said, her voice almost sing-song. “But now he’s dead. Did you hate him, Liz?”
“I don’t know.”
“You try to like everyone. It doesn’t matter, Ron still wants you so Alex has to go.”
Liz’s heart had been beating like a marathon racer, but as Emily’s intent finally sank in, it stopped cold. Emily was going to shoot Alex the second he opened that door.
With a lurch, her heart leaped back into the race. No. It’s not going to happen. I won’t let it.
Liz made a decision, born of fear, strengthened by the knowledge that she had to do something right now. Coddling hadn’t worked, perhaps authority would. She held out a hand and moved with all the bluster she could manage. “Enough is enough, Em. Stop this right now and give me that gun.”
Emily sprang to her feet, grim determination filling her eyes, her mouth a slash of rage. Liz suddenly understood that Emily’s fury had been building for years and had now been fueled and honed by a psychosis no one had even known she had. Her fury was demanding an outlet, consequences be damned. If she couldn’t kill Alex, she’d kill Liz. She’d already admitted she killed Uncle Devon; somewhere in her mind she had to know she’d burned a bridge that could not be reconstructed and that Liz was now an enemy.
All these realizations passed through Liz’s mind in less time than it takes to blink, but they formed the foundation for her next move. Still staring at Emily, she dodged into the kitchen. Sinbad howled as she tore past him, upturned a chair in her path, yanked open the back door, stumbled down the cement steps, fled into the yard, toward the bluff, Emily in hot pursuit. She cradled her belly and kept moving, hoping that Alex would come in time, knowing the only way to give him a chance—him and the baby she so ponderously carried—was to draw Emily away from him.
She heard a shot and a bullet whizzed by, striking a tree to her left. Gasping, she struggled on through the deep, wet grass, rain beating on her head, sliding into her eyes. Another shot. Her arm burned, she tried to crouch. She heard Alex’s voice and ducked behind a tree, driven to look back, afraid Emily would turn the gun on him, unable to bear the thought.
Emily stood thirty feet away, her attention focused toward the house. Alex stood at the back door, completely vulnerable, the gun now pointed at him. He’d started talking to Emily much the same way Liz had, coaxing her to put the gun down, to give it to him. Emily let him approach, down the stairs, across the wet grass, rain flattening his hair, staining the shoulders of his leather jacket.
Liz opened her mouth to warn Alex. She knew this was a trick, a trap, that Emily would only let him get close enough to be sure he couldn’t escape, then she’d shoot him. At close range.
Behind Alex, another man appeared in the open doorway. “Emily!”
Emily’s attention shifted from Alex, up to the house, to her brother.
Ron stared at his sister with frantic eyes. “What are you doing?” he yelled. “For God’s sake, Emily.”
Emily yelled, “I’m taking care of things…for you. Like I did old man Hiller. Like I—”
Liz’s view of Emily was restricted to her back. Long, wet hair, clinging pajama top, skirt drooping, boots dark from moisture. She saw Emily nod as though she understood.
Someone had finally gotten through to her!
Emily lowered the gun from Alex’s head and then, in a flash, she raised it to her own temple and pulled the trigger.
ALEX HAD KNOWN Emily was going to shoot herself the minute she’d changed the aim of her Glock 9mm. He’d seen it in her eyes. He’d tried to move forward to stop her, but it all happened too fast. Even as Emily’s body crumpled to the ground, even as the noise of the shot seemed to ricochet off every tree in the yard, he ran past her, toward Liz whom he’d seen hiding behind a trunk, reaching her as she screamed and sank to her knees, deep sobs consuming her.
He held her trembling wet body in his arms and soothed her with soft words that sprang from the very depths of his soul, words that originated in his devoted love of her, words fine-tuned by the last few minutes when he thought for sure that Emily would shoot him in the heart and then turn the gun and her madness on Liz and their baby.
In the distance, he heard sirens, he heard Ron, he heard the ocean, he even heard Sinbad cry, but it was all lost in the part of the world that didn’t include him and Liz, the far away part, the unimportant part. He kissed her wet head and held her until she grew still and silent and then he held her even longer, trying to absorb her fright and pain.
Eventually, paramedics arrived and he realized that Liz was bleeding, that the bullet had grazed her upper arm. Ron was pale and silent, sitting on the steps in the rain, his eyes vacant as he stared at the covered body of his sister, protected by a canopy, waiting for the medical examiner.
Eventually, Sheriff Kapp asked questions. Liz refused to leave with the paramedics until she’d recited what Emily told her, how Emily confessed to murdering her uncle.