by Lauren Carr
The sound of the women speaking drifted down the stairs. The determined look hardened and Mildred charged out of the room.
“Mom,” Gail called after her, “I thought you wanted me to take you home.”
“I can’t leave my group.” She was up the stairs as fast as her plump legs could carry her.
Gail raised an eyebrow in Cameron’s direction and smiled. “We can’t risk Doris Sullivan taking control of the Bible study group.”
“I guess you’ve been on the sidelines to witness this feud between your mother and Doris from almost the beginning.”
“Oh, yeah.” Gail rolled her eyes. “It makes you grow up a lot. You learn how you don’t want to be when you grow up. And what to marry . . . and divorce.”
“The stand by your man crack,” Cameron noted.
“My husband had to stray once, and I kicked him to the curb. Mom never forgave me for that. She claims my love was conditional, and that I’m an unforgiving woman. Hey, I forgave him . . . but I still kicked him to the curb.”
Cameron recalled seeing her and Ned Carter’s furtive glances while they were talking at the casino, and him hiding her in his office while she questioned him.
“You can forgive someone without being a fool,” Gail claimed. “There was no way I was going to put up with what Mom has had to put up with from my father. She honestly believes no one knows about it.”
“How about you playing the other woman cheating with the married man?”
Gail’s eyes narrowed. She caught her breath. “I have no idea what you mean.” Her voice had gone up a full octave.
“If your friendship with Ned Carter is so innocent, why did you feel the need to hide when I went to interview him?”
Gail’s cheeks turned pink. After a few attempts to explain, in which she sputtered out indistinguishable noises, she finally said, “We didn’t mean to fall in love.”
“Does Brianne know?”
Her face went from pink to white. “No!” As if her knees had grown too weak to hold her, she lowered herself into one of two chairs placed in the restroom for nursing mothers. “You have no idea what a temper Brianne has.”
“I thought Cheryl Smith was the one with a temper.”
Gail chuckled. “Cheryl Smith’s temper was public. Brianne unleashes her temper behind closed doors. Only those close to her have seen it.”
Finding this revelation enlightening, Camera sat down in the other chair. “Have you seen it?”
“Thankfully, no, but I know others who have. Ned has seen it many times. When something happens to upset her, she’s all smiles and graciousness in public. Then, as soon as the door closes, lamps are flying and people are running for cover.”
“Wow.” The detective urged her to continue.
“That’s if you’re lucky,” Gail said. “If you’re not lucky, Brianne will go behind your back and connive and manipulate something far worse.”
“Like what?”
Gail’s eyes met hers.
The two women stared at each other. Cameron felt as if she were reading what she wanted to tell her telepathically. “What did she do to Angie Sullivan?”
“Angie?”
“Doris Sullivan’s sister,” Cameron explained.
“How good of a detective are you?”
Cameron noticed that Gail’s hair was also strawberry-blond and her eyes blue. I wonder . . .
“How good do you think I am?”
Gail lowered her voice to a stage whisper, “Good enough to know that Angie was my half-sister.” As Cameron sat up in her chair, she added, “That’s something else Mom is in denial about.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“Angie was my friend.” She swallowed a catch in her throat. “I loved her like a sister.” She lowered her eyes to her hands. “She died not knowing we were sisters.”
Cameron’s low voice matched hers. “But you knew.”
“It was my twelfth birthday party at our house. Angie was fourteen. I had invited her to it because she was my friend from here at church. We had all gone outside to cut the cake, and I came into the kitchen to get something. I overheard Dad and Doris talking in the dining room. Doris said that Angie was wanting to know who her father was, and she wanted to tell her. Dad was furious because he said Mom would be devastated if she found out the truth about Angie.”
“Does your mother buy the story about Angie being Doris’s sister?”
Gail smirked. “She has to. Dad was dating both of them until Mom rammed him into marrying her. If she admitted to herself that Angie was Doris’s daughter, she’d have to face that her husband was the father. Mom would rather kill herself than face the fact that her husband has been with anyone besides her.”
The detective said, “Wasn’t this family secret the topic of the fight that night that Angie disappeared?”
“So you know about that,” she said, “but I bet you don’t know the whole story behind it.”
“Enlighten me.”
“In their senior year, someone beat out Brianne for prom queen.”
“And that was—”
“Angie,” Gail said. “Now I went to Oak Glen High School. They all went to South Side High School. But I went to the rink and all of us mixed together there. Back then, Ned hardly noticed me. I was chubby—”
“Get to Brianne’s conniving and manipulation involving Angie.”
“Brianne and Angie were best friends,” she explained. “Angie had done what best friends do. She confided to Brianne about Doris being her mother. So, Brianne was armed with this weapon. Plus, she had two other things going for her; looks and money. She knew how truly nasty Cheryl Smith was. So Brianne proceeded to seduce Cheryl’s boyfriend away from her. Ned was sneaking around with Brianne, who he couldn’t resist. Cheryl knew he was sneaking around. So Brianne told her that it was Angie. Then, she gave Cheryl the ammunition to truly wound her.”
“The family secret to reveal to all,” Cameron finished.
“Everyone knew about it.”
“Except your mother,” the detective said in a low voice.
“She knows,” Gail said. “She only pretends she doesn’t.”
“She’s not the only one.” Cameron looked at Gail. Here’s a woman not cut out to be the other woman. Ned was too good looking to expect him to cheat on a looker like Brianne with someone so down to earth. “What do you think Brianne would do if she were to find out about Ned cheating on her with you?”
Gail’s face turned red.
“What does Brianne have on him? Did Ned see Cheryl Smith when she came back?”
“No,” Gail blurted out.
“Do you know that for certain?”
“Yes, Ned wouldn’t lie to me.” When Cameron grinned at her patronizingly, Gail said, “Ned was the one who requested the audit . . . the audit that everyone is talking about. Someone has been skimming money out of the Mountaineer’s accounts. The deeper we dug, the more it looked like Ned. He requested the audit to find out who has been trying to frame him. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Brianne because she knows about us.”
“That’s what Ned tells you.”
“That’s what I know,” Gail said. “We can prove it. Someone is hacking into the accounting programs, using Ned’s login and manipulating the numbers to skim money from the resort. He changed his login. Less than a day later, they had hacked in under his new login.”
“Have you had a computer forensics team in to trace the hacker?”
Gail nodded. “The state prosecutor’s office sent a team up.” She lowered her voice. “We’re keeping it hush-hush because we don’t want to clue in whoever it is that’s doing it.”
Cameron found it difficult to believe Ned was as innocent as Gail was claiming. She didn’t know if it was because of his good looks and past, or because of Gail’s starry-eyed gaze when she talked about him.
“One of those weekends that the hacker broke into the account was last Valentine’s Day weekend.” The pink i
n Gail’s cheeks deepened. “Brianne had told Ned that she had to go away to a conference and would be working all weekend. Ned and I used the opportunity to go to the Clay-Byrn Castle Lodge in Ohio for a romantic getaway. While we were gone, someone transferred twenty-five thousand dollars from the resort under Ned’s account.”
“If it was an online transfer, Ned could have done it from his phone.”
Gail was shaking her head. “There’s no internet at the Clay-Byrn Castle. They have none on purpose. No television. No cell phone service. No phones in the rooms. It’s an escape. Ned and I were there the whole weekend. He couldn’t have sent an e-mail if his life depended on it.” She concluded her case with, “I think Brianne knows about us, and she’s framing him. And of course, if they do decide Ned did it, once our affair comes out, I’ll be going down along with him.”
“Seriously?” Doris reacted to Joshua’s question about the freezer with a laugh that reminded him of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. “It was my freezer that Cheryl Smith was found in?” She squinted at him. “Everyone said when you took up with that lady cop that you had lost your mind.”
Her surprise turned to insult. “Look, I gave them permission to dig up Angie’s body so that they could look for proof that Cheryl killed her. Now, you’re accusing me of killing that slut that killed my baby!” She laughed again. “If I did kill Cheryl, don’t you think I’d admit to it? I challenge any jury to convict me for doing the world a favor.”
Joshua looked around the sanctuary where he had taken her to discuss the matter away from the other women in the study group. His effort to not embarrass her was in vain. While he lowered his voice, she raised hers. “Tell me about when you went down into the basement at Albert Gordon’s house.”
“Are we really going to go over that again?” Doris looked past him to the altar.
“Maybe now that you’ve had more time to think about it, you can remember what you saw.”
Doris shook her head. “I saw a lot. Albert’s cellar was a mess. There was stuff everywhere. I could have found a bomb making kit right in front of me, and I would never have noticed it because of all the junk.”
Joshua folded his arms and leaned over toward where the old woman was sitting at the other side of the pew. “How did you feel about him representing Cheryl Smith in that hearing where the judge decided the police couldn’t keep her from going to Hollywood?”
“I was extremely hurt,” she said. “But he apologized and explained why he did it.”
“Which was?”
“Innocent until proven guilty.” She shrugged her thin shoulders. “I eventually forgave him.”
“Did you know before Albert’s death that he was a hoarder?”
“No,” she replied. “After his wife died, Albert shut me out along with everyone else.”
“You two were neighbors and friends,” the lawyer noted. “You have both grown up on the same road. Your farms are next to each other. He let you use his fields after he let go of his livestock. You had to notice that something was happening.”
“Yes,” Doris snapped. “I noticed that his wife died, and he wanted to be left alone. I felt the same way when Angie disappeared. I understood. So I left him alone . . . I left him alone to wallow in his own junk. Is there anything wrong with that?”
“Unless you decided to take advantage of it and slip a dead body into his basement to hide.” He asked, “Do you by any chance have a key to his farmhouse?”
She jumped up to her feet. “I think it’s time for me to go.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he replied.
“I’m an old farm girl,” Doris said in a gruff voice.
Joshua waited in silence.
“Why on God’s green earth would I want to kill some Hollywood porn star and stuff her body in an old, broken down freezer?”
“Because you blamed her for killing Angie,” he said in a whisper. “Fingerprints don’t lie.”
“Maybe I put them there years ago,” she suggested.
“Yes, you did,” he replied. “Like when you stuffed Cheryl Smith’s body in the freezer after killing her.”
She lowered her voice to a growl. “I meant when I used to own that freezer. Maybe it was an old one that I had sold back before Cheryl Smith came running back to town, and whomever I sold it to killed her instead.”
The suggestion that her fingerprints had remained in the freezer long after she had gotten rid of it was a stretch, but Joshua played along. “Do you remember having an old freezer that you sold to a possible suspect?”
After a long pause, her lips curled. “Yes, I do remember one.” The glare came back to her eyes. Her mouth grew tight. “I don’t remember what year it was . . . it was after they found Angie. I know that. I donated an old freezer just like the one you described to the church yard sale.”
“Do you remember who bought—”
“Mildred Hildebrand.”
Joshua sighed.
“How could I forget? That witch then turned around and sued me. Sued me!” A grin came to her face when she recalled, “The judge tossed the case out of court, of course; but still, I had to go down there all because that petty—”
“It was a piece of junk!” Mildred came galloping into the sanctuary from the hallway.
“It was a donation to a yard sale,” Doris said.
“It broke after only five days.”
“You only paid fifty dollars for it. What did you expect?”
When the two women charged at each other, Joshua stood up between them and held out his arms to keep them apart. “What did I say about you two starting trouble?”
His warning was enough to make them back up and fall silent.
“Very good.” He turned to Mildred. “What happened to the freezer you bought at the yard sale?”
She scoffed. “What do you think happened? It wouldn’t work. So I had Ralph haul it out to the landfill.”
He took a chance and asked, “I don’t suppose you remember what year that was?”
Mildred made a noise from deep in her throat. “Of course, I do. I have a memory like an elephant.”
Doris scoffed.
Mildred folded her hands across her midriff. “I remember everything based on what was happening with my family at the time. I bought that freezer at the yard sale—I’ll have you know that I don’t usually buy used items. I also make it a point not to buy wholesale or at discount stores, but the yard sale that year was to raise money for underprivileged families in—”
“Today, Mrs. Hildebrand!” Joshua blurted out.
“May 1985.”
Surprised that she was able to narrow it down to the month, he asked, “How can you be so sure?”
Pleased by his reaction, Mildred stuck out her chest. She smirked when she answered, “It was the same month Trish, my third daughter, graduated from high school. She was with me that day when we bought it.”
Chapter Twelve
Their luncheon date turned into a massage session in Joshua’s study.
That morning, Joshua was quietly reading the Review while sipping his coffee when he heard the garbage truck turn the corner. That was when he discovered Donny had failed to take the garbage cans out to the curb. Wearing only his bathrobe and slippers, Joshua slid down the icy driveway in a race against the garbage collectors to get the cans out to the curb before they drove by.
Joshua won by a nose. He also lost when, on his way inside, he slipped on the ice and landed flat on his back in the driveway.
After listening to him groaning through half of lunch, Cameron ordered him to take off his shirt and lay down on the rug. Intrigued with what she was going to do, he complied. Once he was on his stomach, she straddled his back.
“We have an audience,” he told her.
Her hands on his shoulders, Cameron stopped to see Irving sitting in the doorway. His glaring eyes were aimed at Joshua, who was staring back at him. “Irving,” she said in a sharp tone. “Behave.”
> The black and white cat paused as if to consider her order before standing up, his tail straight up in the air, and stalking across the study to Joshua’s desk. There, he waited.
Suspicious, Joshua twisted around to see what he had in mind.
Once Irving was assured he had Joshua’s attention, he jumped up onto the desk, circled around on top of his papers, and plopped down.
“He did that on purpose,” Joshua said.
“Ignore him.” Cameron urged him back down.
“Easy for you to say. He doesn’t hate you.”
“Put Irving out of your mind, and concentrate on my hands.” She resumed giving his back a deep massage.
Within seconds of pushing her attitude-filled skunk cat out of his mind, Joshua replaced his groans with moans of pleasure. “Where did you learn to do this?”
“My late husband used to come home with horrible backaches from riding in the cruiser all day. One of my massages would snap him right back into shape.”
An awkward silence filled the room.
It was the first time Cameron had ever mentioned her late husband.
Joshua tried to remain cool. Bingo! She knows that I know about him.
Her soft slender hands felt so warm on his back that Joshua feared he was going to fall asleep.
Her voice woke him up. “Harry called me a bitch.”
“Detective Shannon,” Joshua recalled the retired detective who had first worked Angie Sullivan’s disappearance. “What did you do to him?”
“Why do you think I did something to him?”
“He wouldn’t call you that if you didn’t give him a reason.”
“I called to tell him about uncovering the rumor, which proved to be true, about Doris being Angie’s mother,” she said. “Even if Brianne, Ned, and Kyle kept quiet; Harry should have found out about it during his investigation from someone or somewhere. He says he did hear murmurings, but claimed it was nothing more than schoolgirl gossip mongering and irrelevant. I told him that until it was proven to not be part of the case it has to be treated as a lead, and he should have put it in his notes.” She clutched his shoulders with her hands so hard, her fingernails dug into his flesh. “That was when he called me a bitch.”