“But why me?” I asked as she strung me up until I twisted like a balloon animal.
“So I can be the next Mrs. Frank Finance.” She smiled her brilliant smile. “Of course.”
My arms and legs, already growing numb, went cold. “What?”
“You heard me,” she said.
“You and Frank?”
She nodded.
“You’re having the affair with my husband?
“You were on the right track when you suspected Anastasia,” she said wistfully. “You just had the wrong woman.”
Wrong woman seemed to echo through the room. Awful as it was to picture Frank with Anastasia, the thought of him and Chelsea was that much worse. She was my trainer, my confidante … “I thought you were my friend.”
“And I thought for sure he wouldn’t hesitate to trade you up like he did the first Mrs. Frank Michaels.” She glanced over my shoulder at her reflection in the mirror. “I mean, he put her right out to pasture when he found something greener.”
“I didn’t take him away from his first wife,” I said, the anger and indignity already boiling. I never felt entirely comfortable about meeting Frank mere days after he’d separated from his first wife, or his claim—that he’d been kicked out after having a brief affair in the wake of an already passionless marriage. But, after the initial trepidation he’d convinced me to ignore, and after his ex gave me her blessing of he’s all yours, fifteen seemingly happy years had passed without incident.
Until this nuclear incident, that was.
“He was separated when I met him.”
“Tomato, tomahto. In any case, he wasn’t in enough of a hurry to turn you out, not with this TV deal where he wanted to look like a wholesome family man.” She shook her head. “Isn’t he the most image-conscious person you’ve ever met?”
Somehow being tied up with my minutes numbered made the shocking truth of my husband’s infidelity and the collateral damage it was certain to cause seem that much more horrific. “That’s what this was about the whole time? Getting rid of me so you can be with my husband?”
“Should have been so simple.” Chelsea stepped over to one of the mirrored walls to once again admire her now-nauseating physical perfection. “You dropped your name into my fishbowl and I thought up what should have been the easiest, most simple to implement of ideas.”
“Death by killer workout?”
“So tragic,” she said. “You, chunky and trying to regain your rapidly fleeting youth, accidentally OD’ing on a combo of hard exercise and—”
“Pure, black-market Ephedra?”
Her smile was pure black to match.
“But how?”
“Bye Bye Fat.”
“Bye Bye Fat is Ephedra-free.”
“Yours wasn’t,” she said. “I went into your locker with the master key card, took your BBF out of the stash I had you keeping in your purse, and added a special little capsule. If only you had taken it like you were supposed to while Frank and I were in Florida, you’d have dropped dead and so much of this could have been avoided.”
“You gave me poisoned pills?” The ache in my heart made the growing pain in my arms and legs feel like nothing. “And then went to Florida with my husband?”
“It sucked pretending I didn’t know him poolside, but he made up for it with the extra night we spent together celebrating the deal.”
“The night his flight was cancelled?”
“Rebooked so we could extend the fun.” She winked, and I almost puked. “You can imagine my disappointment when I got home the next morning to find you still very much alive. Of course, if you’d just taken the Bye Bye Fat as directed instead of bashing trays with Tara Hu, I wouldn’t have come up with the even better idea of framing you for Laila DeSimone’s murder and getting you tossed in jail instead.”
I watched helplessly as she pulled one of the narrower resistance bands from the bin, wrapped it around her neck, and pulled from behind until she had a faint red mark I presumed she’d point to as a sign of our imaginary struggle.
“Laila’s death may have been an accident, but when the circumstantial evidence all started pointing to you, it certainly seemed fated.” She held the band by the handles and gave herself a quick snap to the leg. Without so much as a wince, she added, “And, really, it would have been so much easier for me to tag in as step/surrogate mom to the emotionally needy children of a felon rather than have to live in the shadow of a canonized super-mom who died trying too hard to be perfect. Don’t you think, Maddie?”
With her mention of my children, the tears already dripping down my face began to soak my shirt. “I think I can’t believe how incredibly stupid I’ve been.”
“Hardly.” Chelsea stepped back over, sat on the edge of the bench, and gave me a friendly pat. “I’ve had to be on my toes with you always a half-step behind me the whole time.”
Yay for me, I didn’t say, given I was trapped in a web I’d flown into headlong like a big, slow, unsuspecting fly. Why had I so easily attributed the sudden uptick in Frank’s workouts to his damaged ego and not considered the repair a stunning, impossible-to-miss, homicidal trainer at the gym might be willing and able to provide?
“Really, you’ve made this anything but easy.” Chelsea shook her head. “I tried to tell you to stay out of it, tried to get you to stay out of the mall and lay off the relentless investigating, but you wouldn’t listen. You were so intent on playing Miss Marple, even with the police on your trail. What choice did I have but take further action?”
“Starting with listening in on me while I was talking to Griff at the taping?”
“I agree, something doesn’t add up,” she said in exactly the chilling, deep, faux Griff voice I’d heard on the phone after the massage. “The last thing I needed was for the two of you to team up and figure out what that was.”
“So you ran down Tara and Andy instead?”
“Andy and Tara were your main suspects. All I had to do was make you theirs, and voilá: a motive no one would question. Even that big, dumb Griff.”
“He’s not dumb,” I said, feeling suddenly protective and more than a little distressed that I’d suspected him enough to run away from him and into the arms of the real killer.
“If he was smart, he wouldn’t have told me he was headed out of town after the taping. With him gone, I was free to lure you down to the gym for a massage and complementary sprinkling of info about Tara and Andy outing you, which I planted with that gossipy L’Raine. I was also free to run over to the mall, wait until I knew you were done, and then call pretending to be Griff.”
“Ugh.” I shook my head. “Knowing I’d run right over there to meet him.”
“I also knew you’d wait around long enough for me to take your car from where you always park, drive to the other lot, and get up to the employee parking level in time to clip Tara on her way to her car to meet me for a training session.”
“You more than clipped her,” I managed.
“I did feel a little badly about the extent of Tara’s injuries,” she said. “At least until I heard my little stunt landed you in the slammer.”
“You knew I’d been arrested?”
“From Frank,” she said, with the smuggest of smiles. “Didn’t know you’d been released until you came flying in here, though.”
I didn’t think there could be anything more awful than knowing what Chelsea had done to Laila, Andy, and Tara, and what she was about to do, all in the name of getting rid of me so she could take my husband. When she uttered his name though, I knew there was a worse possibility.
Much worse.
Was Frank, the man I thought I knew and loved, not only a cheater, but mixed up in this too?
Was he an accomplice to my murder?
With his loose lips sink ships attitude, I knew Frank at least well enough to know he wouldn’t tell anyone, even his (God forbid) mistress, I was in jail. That was, unless they were in it together. And what about my car key? Could he simpl
y have given it to her? Encouraged her to commit a crime pretending to be me?
Normally the thought would have me feeling like I wanted to die. Given Chelsea was headed across the room toward a rack of weights I assumed she was about to pick from to kill me in earnest; however, I wanted very much to stay alive.
“One question?” I asked, as much dreading the answer as needing to know.
“What’s that?” she asked, trying out various hand weights.
“Frank.”
“What about him?”
“Did he put you up to this?”
My entire marriage fast-forwarded through my head in the second it took for her to sigh.
“I wish,” she said.
“But he told you I’d been arrested.”
“Not in so many words,” she said. “I suspected because of how evasive he was when I asked him where you were last night. You’re the one who confirmed my suspicions.”
Heartbreaking as it was to know my husband was cheating on me with a homicidal maniac and was guilty as sin of being an egotist and a liar, I took the slightest comfort in knowing he wasn’t directly involved in trying to get rid of me. “How did you get my car keys?”
“Borrowed them at the taping and returned them to his couch later.” She giggled. “Isn’t it annoying how Frank’s always losing them?”
“So he wasn’t involved in plotting my murder?”
“Or arrest—although that would have been a touching show of his commitment to our relationship.”
He was committed enough that I was about to die.
As Chelsea settled on a pair of silver twenty-pound weights, all I could think of were my kids saddled with her as a step-monster. “Chelsea, you don’t have to kill me.”
“Of course I do.”
“Please, just let me go. I’ll ask Frank for a divorce.”
“A divorce?”
“He’s all yours. Untie me and I’ll never, ever mention this moment between us ever again. I promise.”
“No can do,” she said.
“Why?”
“I want Frank, but I want your lifestyle just as much.”
“My lifestyle?”
“If you get divorced, he’ll have to give you half of everything.”
Had the circumstances not been so dire, I’d have laughed. “Don’t you mean half of nothing?”
Her eyes narrowed into icy blue slits. “A man who thinks nothing of getting two-hundred-dollar highlights in his hair just because I mentioned how handsome they’d look doesn’t strike me as someone with nothing.”
I’d been scrimping and saving for the sake of my husband, who’d not only lost all of our money, but was busy spending what was little credit we had left on his murderous bimbo? “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Who’s kidding who? I’ve been inside my big, beautiful future house. It’s definitely something.”
“More like the bank’s future house.” I took a deep breath, perhaps one of my last, and said the one thing, that through it all, I hadn’t allowed myself to utter to anyone other than the person who’d caused everything that had and was about to happen. “Frank Finance may have gotten highlights in his hair to show off what was left on our last Visa card, but he, himself, is broke.”
“Broke?” She sidled up beside the bench.
Dead broke, I didn’t say.
“You really expect me to believe that?”
“Don’t you watch the Channel Three news?”
She hesitated. “Religiously, of course.
“Then you’ve heard about Stephen Singer, that local financier who bilked investors out of over ten million dollars in a Ponzi scheme last winter?”
“Of course, but …”
“Frank invested everything we had with him.” I had no reason to hide the truth to protect my no good husband’s reputation any more—certainly not to her, and not to anyone who might eventually hear the recording of our conversation. “The whole reason I put my name in your fishbowl or was at Eternally 21 coupon shopping in the first place is because I’ve had to scrimp and save to keep us afloat.”
“But he’s about to sign a deal for a national show.”
“Not so likely with a dead wife and a maniacal killer love triangle.”
“They can spin things any way they want.”
“I’d like to see how they handle this one.”
Chelsea, her beauty masked by pure anger and evil, hoisted one of the weights above her head. “I’m sure viewers will be plenty curious about the story behind how Frank found comfort in the arms of his dear sweet trainer, the almost third victim of his crazy wife’s psychotic break.”
I prayed the thump to the head would be fast, hard, and fatal. “I love you FJ, Trent, and Eloise,” I cried aloud and squeezed my eyes shut.
The door to the room squealed open.
“Maddie!” A voice I’d now recognize anywhere reverberated through the room.
“Griff!” I shouted. “Thank—”
“God you found us!” Chelsea burst into huge crocodile tears. “I was forced to defend myself against this—”
“She killed Laila,” I interjected. “She tried to kill Andy and Tara, and she was about to kill me!”
“That’s utterly crazy!” Chelsea raised both weights above her heard. “She’s the lunatic!”
There was a bright spark and a simultaneous cracking sound that I assumed was the result of forty combined pounds of iron meeting my skull.
Somehow, I felt nothing.
Chelsea, however, made a strange gurgling noise. Her arms went slack, and she dropped the weights onto the floor. “Just a mall cop,” she mumbled, still standing.
There was another zap and a crack.
Chelsea twitched, her legs buckled, and she finally dropped to the ground.
“Wow,” Griff said. “Once should have done the trick on a woman her size.”
“Is she dead?” I asked as he ran over to check on her.
“Just tazered,” Griff said, checking her vitals and pulling a pair of handcuffs from his utility belt, snapping one around her wrist, and quickly attaching her to a Cybex machine. “She’ll be fine, but I’m sure she’s going to be out of it until the police get here.”
“Thank you,” I said, tearing up once again as he hurried over to me. “I can’t tell you how thankful I am you followed me.”
“I was afraid you’d be here,” he said tugging at the resistance band holding my arms behind my back. “Are you okay?”
Before I could process, much less answer the question, Detective McClarkey came bounding through the door followed by a gang of uniformed officers.
“Griff saved my life,” I said instead and pulled the Eavesdropper from my waistband. “And I have Chelsea Charles’s entire confession. On tape.”
THIRTY
I FELT AS NUMB as my newly freed limbs watching the police wrap things up in true-life crime-show style. I wasn’t Maddie Michaels, but an extra pulled onto a movie set for the police to ask the requisite questions and the EMTs to look over and throw a blanket around my shoulders.
I felt a whole lot of nothing as Detective McClarkey escorted a still dazed but ambulatory Chelsea out of the gym toward the police cruiser.
“How did you know to follow me here?” I heard myself ask Griff as he led me away from the encroaching news vans and toward the mall security Jeep for a ride back to my car. “How did you figure out that Chelsea—”
“I knew you’d been training with her.” He readjusted the blanket around my shoulders. “And I saw her looking too cozy with Frank at the taping the other day.”
“Oh,” was all I managed to say, or think.
“I tried to tell myself there was nothing to it, but the thought of Chelsea and Frank kept eating at me even after I heard about the timing on the Piggledy’s lease and called to let you know.”
“But you never returned my messages.”
“Not after I clocked in back at work, heard what had happened to Andy and Tar
a, and knew from your texts and voicemails you’d been down at the mall.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think you could really be behind any of this, but honestly it was looking pretty bad.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“I think I owe you a huge apology,” he said pulling his keys from his pocket.
“Me?”
“For testing to see how you’d handle the information about the Piggledys.”
“You tested me?”
“I knew there was no way you’d go to the mall to confront them if you were guilty, but the minute I heard you were at Circus Circus, I rushed up there to share what I thought could be the real missing pieces of the puzzle.”
“Why didn’t you just call me?”
“Given the sensitive subject matter, I wanted to talk in person, not leave a message or shout my suspicions down a service hallway.”
“While I was trying to get away from you as fast as I could?” I almost laughed.
He shook his head. “Thanks to that darn monkey.”
“I believe I owe you an apology as well,” I said. “I didn’t even give you the benefit of the doubt. Not until it was too late.”
“That was my fault, too,” he said. “You should have heard about my history with Laila from me, not the Piggledys.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right off the bat?” I asked as we approached the passenger side of the Jeep.
“Mainly because—”
“Griff! Maddie!”
We both looked up as L’Raine, who appeared out of nowhere, bolted through two rows of parked cars, stopped beside Griff, and had me in an embrace that while nowhere near the strength of Chelsea’s, was every bit as suffocating. “I just got done with a client. I can’t believe what’s going on. Are you okay? It’s so shocking that Chelsea—”
“Yeah. Surreal,” Griff said for both of us.
She let go of me and, seizing what she had to figure was her big opportunity, embraced him. “You totally saved her life!”
He smiled.
L’Raine let the hug linger, finally let go, and looked deeply into his eyes. As she fired off the first how did you in what was sure to be a series of concerned, flirtatious questions that would likely end with her phone number, I was suddenly too overwhelmed by it all to listen to what I’d just lived through.
Eternally 21: A Mrs. Frugalicious Shopping Mystery Page 26