“You should be grateful,” he went on. It sounded like he was bustling about. His voice was matter-of-fact, almost cheerful. “I had intended to hang you, as you apparently figured out. But the time is past for such niceties as selecting scenarios from books. And of all the ways I might send you to your Maker, curare is among the quickest and least painful. I almost hated to use it on my wife.”
Annie found her voice. “Why did you kill Maggie?”
“Because she was a self-absorbed bitch who delighted in making my life hell. That’s why.” Gone was the jovial tone. “I knew that if I got rid of her, I’d have the money, I’d have the house, but I’d never again have to face that disdain, that contempt she delighted in doling out.”
“It couldn’t have always been that way.”
“Of course it wasn’t in the beginning. But the higher her star rose, the more insufferable she became.” Annie heard the springs of the mattress creak, as if Charles had sat down to have a chat. “Everyone she came into contact with was subjected to that arrogance of hers, but I was the only one who had to live with it day in and day out.”
“I can’t imagine it helped that you write, too.”
“You phrase that very carefully, Annette.” He laughed. “ ‘I write, too,’ as if I were on a par with Maggie Boswell. That’s a concept she never embraced. As far as she was concerned, hell would freeze over before I succeeded in getting a novel published.”
“She never tried to help you?”
“Are you suggesting I’m even worthy of help?” His tone was thick with irony. “Are you trying to get on my good side now? Instead of insulting me again?”
“I didn’t mean to insult you before.”
“Whether you did or not, you’re certain to tread more carefully now. Not that it will do you any good.”
Annie had no idea what would do her any good at this moment. But as long as Charles was talking to her, he wasn’t killing her. “Your wife may have been horrible to you,” she went on, “but the other people you killed never were. I never was.”
“You don’t understand yet, do you? I don’t care about the other people. They were only to muddy the waters. If Maggie Boswell were murdered, I’d be the number one suspect. The spouse always is. But if a serial killer is on the loose, well …”
“Are you telling me you killed three innocent people just to divert attention from the murder of your wife?” Her voice rose. “You killed Michael as a distraction?”
“Michael Ellsworth had a long and marvelous life, Annette.” Charles’s voice took on a harsh undertone. “He was admired and beloved and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, thanks to that fertile imagination of his. And that skilled pen. I don’t feel sorry for him and neither should you.”
“So you resented him. You were jealous, basically. Of him and Seamus and Elizabeth as well as your wife. Are you jealous of me, too?”
“Hardly. I think you’re overrated, as every new literary sensation is. That was one point on which Maggie and I agreed.” Annie heard the mattress creak again and realized Charles had stood up. “Are you trying to engage me in conversation? To delay the inevitable? Fat lot of good it will do you.” She heard his voice grow fainter, as if he had moved across the room. “I would have thought an admired writer like yourself would make some effort to avoid the clichéd.”
What was he doing? No doubt making the final preparations for injecting her with curare. It was such a vicious poison that very little was required to kill. All Charles had to do was stab her with some sort of syringe and the curare would flow into her bloodstream and begin its deadly work. Within minutes, seconds even, her muscles one by one would paralyze. Yet her consciousness would not fail until her last breath, and, if the horror stories were true, her heart would beat even past her suffocation.
Annie felt desperation claw at her like a drowning man. “You were right about Reid Gardner before, you know. He has been sheltering me. And he knows where I am. He knows I came here.”
“Whether he knows you’re here or not, he’s engaged in pursuits of his own. That much is clear from what you told me earlier.”
“My point is you’ll never get away with killing me. Reid will show up here. And he’ll have the FBI in tow. They’ll find what they need to convict you of murder.”
“They won’t investigate me in any way. They have no cause to suspect me. Why do you think I went to the extra trouble of framing you? Even if they do show up, which I seriously doubt, all evidence of you will be long gone.”
Annie said nothing. She feared her voice would tremble if she spoke and she was determined to betray no weakness.
“Aren’t you curious what I intend to do with you after the curare has worked its magic?” Charles asked. “I plan to dump your body. Our proximity to the Pacific is extremely convenient for that sort of thing. And it so happens I have a small boat. You passed it on the driveway, hitched to the SUV. I like to go salmon fishing. Have for years. No one will think a thing of it if I go a mile or two offshore. And with your corpse weighted down as it will be, well …” He paused as if to allow fresh dread to wash over her, which indeed it did. “Let’s just say I’m not concerned that your body will come back to haunt me, so to speak.”
Annie felt her last hope slide away from her like a raindrop down a windowpane. She cursed herself for what she had thought was such a clever tactic, appealing to Charles Waring for help. “Why did you tell the reporters that you didn’t believe I committed the murders? It doesn’t make sense both to frame me and to argue for my innocence.”
“Oh, I was having a spot of fun.” Charles’s voice sounded closer now. Annie realized with a fresh surge of panic that he stood right outside the closet. “The reporters are as much drooling idiots as the police. Allow an aging man his moments of pleasure.”
She had a frantic moment of wondering whether Charles was referring to his past sound bite for the TV cameras or the imminent thrill of dispatching yet another victim when the closet doors began to shudder. He was moving away whatever he had used to jam the door. Her only chance to survive was to keep him from stabbing her with his deadly syringe.
A second later Annie knew the door obstruction was gone. She didn’t think; she acted. She hurtled forward and slammed into the door with every ounce of might she possessed. Pain shot through her shoulder as she connected with the wood. The door flew outward then ricocheted off something—Charles? A chair?—and smashed back into her as she barreled head first out of the closet.
She toppled onto the hardwood floor, aware of Charles inches away armed with the needle primed to kill her. She rolled onto her back, aware she had no time to clamber to her feet. Charles was standing so close to her kicking ankles, so close … In the silver moonlight filtering through the bedroom window, she caught a glint of syringe.
The iron she’d found in the closet felt heavy in her hands. On her ass, scrabbling clumsily backward on the hardwood, she drew upon all those years she’d pitched softballs from the mound and hurled the iron upward toward Charles’s head.
Instinctively he raised his hands to protect his face. The iron shot through the air, its electric cord trailing like a whip. Annie saw the iron glance off Charles’s right forearm, inches from the hand that was wielding the syringe. She thought her heart would stop as she saw the iron crash harmlessly onto the floor. But the sound that arrested her attention, that stalled her in place, came from Charles.
His face red, his expression horrified, he whimpered, and stared as if mesmerized at his left forearm. He staggered backward. The syringe fell out of his hand and dropped to the hardwood, where it skittered across the floor. He turned bulging eyes in Annie’s direction, then took a gulping breath. “You made me stab myself in the arm,” he said.
Annie scrambled to her feet. She kicked the syringe far beneath the bed, once again grabbed the iron, and backed several feet away from Charles.
He looked back at his forearm and muttered those words again, every syllable bathed in disbelie
f. “I stabbed myself in the arm.”
Annie kept her distance, her heart pounding a chaotic rhythm. She wasn’t sure this wasn’t some trick. Yet Charles seemed beyond another menacing move. He tottered another foot or two, then his legs gave way and he collapsed onto the hardwood.
The guest house fell strangely silent. Outside the window the moon shed light upon the earth. Annie realized with some amazement that she was still among the living.
Her heartbeat thundering in her ears, Annie clutched the iron and slowly, very slowly, inched forward, ready to bolt at any sudden maneuver Charles might make. That seemed less likely by the moment. Now his body was contorted in a fetal position, and his face reflected a crazy brew of agony, astonishment, and confusion. A thin breathy whine escaped his lips.
There was an antidote to curare, Annie had read. Deep in the recesses of her memory, she recalled stories of how nineteenth-century scientists kept curare-stricken animals alive by artificial respiration. The animals could even survive with no ill effect.
This man on the floor had butchered Michael, slashed him to death in a burst of malevolence she could hardly fathom. Maggie, Seamus, Elizabeth, too, he had killed. He had hunted Annie for weeks, made her life hell, would have slain her as well if she hadn’t managed to fight back. Now he lay dying, a fate he richly deserved.
Annie knew she might have the power to save him. If she acted before the paralysis spread to his lungs.
Her decision wasn’t instant, or automatic, but she chose the path she believed she would not regret. She flattened Charles out on the floor, tilted back his head, pinched his nostrils, and forced herself to put her mouth against his. She breathed into him, time and again, keeping him alive, pulling away when his chest was full of air, returning with another deep breath when he needed it. Once she ran to the phone on the bedside table to call 911, warning the dispatcher of a second case of curare poisoning at the Waring estate. She was fully aware this would summon the police to her side. Now she was ready to face them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In the early afternoon of a Tuesday in May, hours after Charles Waring had been revealed as a serial murderer, Sheila was out of custody and in Reid’s home. She stared at the man she loved across the suburban expanse of his living room and understood that she had finally, irretrievably, lost him. Not that she had ever had him. Not really.
As of that morning, Annette Rowell had metamorphosed from serial-killer suspect to hero. Charles Waring had transformed from grieving widower to madman killer. Now Reid Gardner leaned forward on his sofa with his forearms resting on his thighs, restored to his persona of righteous crime fighter. He had been right all along about the pretty brunette writer and now everybody knew it. His golden gut had been burnished to an even higher sheen. To a less practiced eye, nothing about Reid appeared different. But Sheila, who knew him well, grasped that something about him had changed, and profoundly so.
She watched him shake his head as if dumbfounded. “I just can’t get over what she did.”
He was speaking about Annette Rowell. Still. As he had been for the last hour.
“Most people would have let Waring die. After what he did?” Reid raised his head to meet Sheila’s gaze. She had the idea he wanted her to dispute him just so he could continue arguing the point. Yet she nodded in agreement. What he said was undeniably true. “But Annie? No. She gave him effing artificial respiration to keep him alive. I can’t get over it. It’s unbelievable.”
Annette Rowell had been vilified, and now she was glorified. That was how it went sometimes. Sheila had seen it before. And, she had to admit, the praise was warranted. It was simply that it pained her to witness such admiration on Reid’s face, in his voice, when he spoke of a woman who wasn’t her.
Then again, she told herself, maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Her heart was very stubborn when it came to Reid. Maybe, to persuade it once and for all that he would never return her love, what her heart needed was incontrovertible evidence, evidence so overwhelming her head couldn’t argue it away. That dazed expression he now wore while speaking of Annette Rowell might just do the trick.
“When do you expect her to be free to go?” Sheila asked.
Reid glanced at his watch. “Lionel told me they should done with her interview by three.”
Sheila knew what would happen then. The lovers would be reunited, the path before them free and clear. Sheila would make sure to be gone from Reid’s house when that happened.
She rose to her feet. “I could do with some coffee.” She pointed toward the kitchen. “How about you? Shall I go make some?”
He nodded and she escaped to the kitchen. It was a whole new sensation, this wanting to be separated from Reid. Maybe it, too, was a good thing.
Sheila busied her hands with the grinder, the coffeepot, the beans, the filtered water. Reid had already filled her in on the evidence the police had begun to compile against Charles Waring. It sounded like there was plenty to indict him on multiple murder charges. In the fullness of time, he might well find himself on death row facing a lethal injection whose course no savior would interrupt.
Annette Rowell, of course, would be the star witness at his trial. All of her books would vault to the top of the bestsellers charts, if they weren’t there already. Sheila had no doubt that Rowell’s personal life would prove phenomenally blessed as well.
Sheila heard Reid move about in the living room, then tap the keys on his computer keyboard. She remained in the kitchen to watch a thin line of coffee stream into the glass pot.
It was not clear to her why Reid had not been with Rowell the prior night, why the woman had set off on her own to Waring’s estate. He had skirted that point and Sheila didn’t press it. He did explain how he’d gotten back to their motel room to find Rowell gone, then discovered a coded message from her on the Crimewatch message boards that sent him to the estate just in time to see a squadron of black-and-whites descend. The rest was the day’s top story, detailed in every news outlet across the country. And of course that week’s Crimewatch would be devoted entirely to the tale and its aftermath, and would feature an exclusive interview with Annette Rowell.
That episode would air in three days. Sheila straightened. She had a lot of work to do.
As she strode to the living room, two mugs of coffee in hand, she wondered if it might be wise to pursue a new job. It would be incredibly difficult to leave the show, not to mention Reid. Though she knew, as she handed him a mug, that from now on it would be just as challenging to stay.
Reid looked away from the computer screen and met her gaze. “I wish I could think of a way to thank you for all you’ve done for Annie and me over the past week, Sheila. You kept our secret when nobody else would have. Saying how grateful we both are just isn’t enough.”
Annie and me. Our. We. Sheila swallowed hard. Those were phrasings it would take time to get used to. “You’ve already thanked me a dozen times. Please, no more.”
He was about to go on when her Bollywood ring tone rent the air. She let her mobile go to voicemail, then walked to her handbag to retrieve the message.
“Anyone important?” Reid was back to looking at his computer screen.
Sheila found that simple question surprisingly difficult to answer. “It’s Sam Trotter.”
“Who?”
She explained.
“It’s all over. What could he possibly want now?” Reid asked.
What Sam Trotter wanted was to know if Sheila was all right, if he could help her with anything, anything at all. He also wanted to ask her to dinner. On Friday after the show, or Saturday if Sheila would find that easier. This weekend, he hoped. And maybe a glass of wine or a cup of coffee sooner, if she could swing it.
Sheila saved the voicemail. “Nothing,” she told Reid, then smiled.
*
It had been years since Reid had gone to a florist. He used to know a little corner place not far from his house that could be counted on for gorgeous blooms, but it
was gone, replaced by a taqueria. Finally he found a shop that passed muster, and splurged on an enormous spring bouquet that was a riot of color. He asked the clerk to replenish the water in the vase, then carefully belted his floral treasure in the passenger seat of his truck and proceeded to his destination.
Between imposing stone columns, tall iron gates stood open. Reid slowed to a properly reverential pace and drove through.
All around him were rolling grass-covered hills dotted with gravestones. Some rose in the shape of a cross, or an angel, or a Madonna. Others were simple and rectangular, reduced in dimension by the passage of time. Colorful bouquets much like his own struggled to remain upright in front of many a marker, a good number of which were also ornamented with small American flags.
Once Reid had to stop to ask directions, since it had been some time since he had come here. Mausoleums proved to be good signposts. A few other vehicles also wound their way along the narrow, curving roads. At one point he passed a burial in progress, where people with bowed heads huddled around a flower-covered bier. A minute later he encountered what was to him an even more solemn sight: a burial not long ago concluded. Now, however, no mourners remained. All that was left for the dearly departed was an uneven mound of dirt topped with decaying blooms, timeworn mementoes of a final earthly rite.
Reid had changed, but the gravestone he sought remained the same, and ever would.
Donna Jane Partridge
1978 – 2006
He settled the vase against the gray stone, taking great care that it was stable. Then he stilled, crouching on the grass, and waited for his eyes to clear of tears.
He asked forgiveness, as he did every time he visited. He told Donna he loved her, and always would. Whatever happened in his life, that was one constant.
Then he told her about Annie, and how he’d turned the truck around the night before even though he was sure he had a chance to nab Bigelow. He told her how foolish he had been, how cocksure, for a second time, and that it had almost cost Annie her life. He couldn’t believe he had done that again, but this time he and she both had been incredibly lucky. He was an unbelievably flawed man, Reid told Donna, but somehow an amazing woman found it within herself to love him anyway, and he loved her back.
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