by Paula Graves
In the end, she remembered, she’d thought about her father. Her father would know what to do.
But they hadn’t made it that far, had they?
Sara tightened her grip on the bag of candy, lifting it to the light, as if she could see through the pale opaqueness of the hard lumps of sugar to the poison at their centers. Were these the same candies?
“You can’t eat that!” Gracie Allen’s voice was tight with alarm. Sara turned to see the little girl standing in kitchen doorway, her eyes wide as she stared at the bag of candy in Sara’s hand. “That’s only for the bad people!”
Sara blinked. “For the bad people?”
“The people who want to hurt us,” Gracie explained, her gaze never leaving the candies. “You have to put it up. Mama says we can never, ever touch it because it’s only for bad people.”
The knot in Sara’s gut tightened. “Your mother made these?”
Gracie nodded. “She says sometimes there are bad people who want to hurt us, and so we have to have a magic potion to stop them.”
“And where does she make the magic potion?”
“In the darkroom.”
“The darkroom?” Another memory flitted through Sara’s reeling mind. Jim Allen’s voice, amused.
“We call it her secret dungeon laboratory,” he’d told them with a smile when one of the kids had mentioned the photographic darkroom he’d built for Becky in the basement. “She says she’s developing photographs for her night-school class, but we all think she’s really building Frankenstein’s monster in her spare time.”
“Can I see the darkroom?” she asked Gracie.
The little girl’s face blanched. “No, only Mommy can go to the darkroom! There’s bad chemicals down there.”
“Oh. Okay.” Sara flashed the child what she hoped was a reassuring smile, even though her own stomach was aching so much she wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to keep down the big cup of fast-food coffee she’d downed on the drive to Knoxville.
Bad chemicals, she thought, thinking of the crystal meth Cain had found in his grandmother’s woodbin. Meth was volatile and dangerous, but easy to cook.
Had Becky put the drugs there as a warning for Cain to stop nosing around Renee Lindsey’s murder?
Sara tried to clear her mind, not wanting her darkening thoughts to scare Gracie. “You’d better go make sure Jonah’s okay, don’t you think? I’ll put the lemon drops back where I found them.”
Gracie looked relieved as she turned and went back to the den. Sara looked at the bag of candy, her eyes narrowing as she thought about what had happened to Donnie not long after he’d eaten one of the lemon drops.
To put it mildly, he’d started tripping out.
So, a hallucinogen? Something that could be cooked in a home lab?
Sara’s head was starting to hurt from the effort of piecing together the sudden overflow of memory fragments into something that made sense. Why had Becky drugged Donnie and tried to drug her as well? Why not just poison them?
Was it possible that Jim Allen had no idea what his wife was up to?
Most poisons that would act fast enough to kill would show up in tests. At least, the toxins that could be easily created in a home lab. What about hallucinogens, though?
LSD was a possibility, though what she could remember of Donnie’s agitation seemed a lot more violent than she’d ever seen in someone tripping on acid. DMT—dimethyltryptamine—could be cooked in a home lab if you knew what you were doing, though it was usually smoked, not ingested, because the body metabolized DMT too easily, eliminating the high.
She rubbed her aching forehead, starting to lose focus. She’d let the lab guys worry about what was in the lemon drops. Right now, she had to figure out whether or not it was even possible that Becky Allen had killed Renee Lindsey and Ariel Burke.
They’d assumed a male assailant in both of those deaths because manual strangulation wasn’t an easy way to kill an adult. Sara could picture Jim Allen being able to overpower both girls without much trouble; he was a tall, muscular man. But was Becky large enough and strong enough to overpower those two girls?
Probably. Though she was as slender as she’d been back in her own cheerleading days, Becky was nearly as tall as her husband, and staying in shape had kept her fit and strong. Being a tall woman herself, Sara supposed she could hold her own with Becky Allen, but Renee Lindsey had been petite, and based on the photos of Ariel Burke that Sara had seen since her murder, she hadn’t been a big girl, either.
If Becky had surprised them in some way and overpowered them quickly, then yes. She could have strangled both girls to death.
Sara crossed to the living-room doorway to check on the children. Both of them were engrossed in the movie, though Jonah was hugging a ragged-looking blanket to his chest and looking a little more worried than the Scooby-Doo gang’s shenanigans would require.
Poor babies, she thought with a sinking heart. If I’m right about your mother, your whole life is about to be turned upside down.
She returned to the kitchen and took a look around, trying to remember more about the night she and Donnie had come to dinner with the Allens. She’d had no idea he was planning to confront Jim Allen. It had come as a shock to her as well as to the coach and his wife. Donnie had been keeping a lot of his investigation into his sister’s death secret from her by then, putting a strain on their marriage.
Before the inquisition began, however, they’d been having a normal sort of conversation with the Allens, hadn’t they? She had a vague memory of talking about what had been happening at the high school since their graduation, what teachers had left and what students had grown up to become teachers. Of course, Jim had also mentioned that Becky had been taking photography classes at the junior college up in Barrowville and how he’d built her the darkroom in the basement so she could develop her own photographs.
Sara had wanted to see the darkroom, she recalled. She was something of an amateur photographer herself, but she’d never tried developing her own film, and the idea had intrigued her.
But Becky hadn’t wanted to show her the darkroom, claiming it was a mess.
Or had her reluctance to let Sara take a look around had anything to do with something that could incriminate her?
She needed to find that darkroom. Now.
Jim had said it was in the basement. So where was the door to the basement?
She didn’t think she should ask the children. Based on Gracie’s reaction to seeing Sara holding the lemon drops, Becky had put the fear of God into the children about her secrets. If she had some sort of drug-cooking lab downstairs in her darkroom, she would certainly make sure her kids never went down there to look around.
She wandered past the living-room entrance and into the narrow hallway. A short row of steps led up to the second level, where the bedrooms were, but there was a door in the wall to her left a few feet in front of the steps.
She tried the doorknob. It rattled in her hand, locked.
That was promising.
She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out her key chain. From the leather tool pouch she kept on the chain, she withdrew a simple lock pick she’d bought years ago when she first joined the police force. The ability to pick a lock was a rudimentary skill for police officers, and while the doorknob lock might be effective in keeping the Allen children from going down to the basement, it proved no problem for Sara. The door lock disengaged, and she eased the door open as quietly as she could.
The basement was inky dark, and if there was a light switch on either side of the stairway, Sara didn’t find it as she crept her way into the dark basement below.
At the bottom, she fumbled with her key ring until she found the small pen light attached. She snapped the light on, and the weak beam illuminated a narrow path in front of her. She swept the light around until she spotted a red bulb with a chain attached. Crossing to the light, she tugged the chain and red light spread in a circle around the c
enter of the basement.
The setup was, at first glance, like almost every darkroom Sara had ever seen. A long table filled the center of the room, stocked with bottles of developer, pickling vinegar that Sara supposed acted as a stop bath, and fixer. Four flat plastic trays lay lined up in a row on the table, currently dry, with tongs lying next to them, and near the end of the table was a stack of black-and-white photographic paper.
But it was the large cabinet behind the table that drew Sara’s attention, due to the shiny silver padlock that held its doors shut. What on earth would Becky be hiding in that cabinet that would require a padlock?
She needed to talk to Cain and let him know what she’d stumbled on. If she was making too much out of her suspicions, he’d talk her down. But if she was right...
Pulling her cell phone from her pocket, she turned it on and found, to her dismay, that her battery was critically low. She should have charged it in the car on her way to the hospital, she thought with a grimace, pocketing it as she turned to head back up the stairs to the Allens’ landline.
But before she reached the bottom of the stairs, the door opened, daylight pouring into the basement in a blinding flash. A tall, slim silhouette stood at the top of the stairs, the unmistakable shape of a gun clutched firmly in her right hand.
Sara’s heart skittered into high gear.
“I really, really wish you hadn’t done this,” Becky Allen said.
Chapter Seventeen
Sara still wasn’t answering her phone. Cain didn’t know whether or not he should worry—for all he knew, she was one of those people who put her phone on vibrate and never felt it when it buzzed.
There was a lot he didn’t know about her, if he was honest with himself. But he wanted to know everything.
Like what she did to relax. What kind of music she liked. What foods were her favorites. What she was really thinking when she turned those dark eyes on him and seemed to stare right into his soul.
He knew she was a smart woman. He knew she was tough and capable. But she didn’t know that Becky Allen was on her way home. And she didn’t know, as Cain did, that it was possible Jim Allen hadn’t been the one holding the gun that had come perilously close to killing him.
The drive from Knoxville to Purgatory took a little over thirty minutes, driving as fast as he dared. At most, Becky Allen had a ten-to-fifteen-minute head start on him.
Would it be enough to put Sara’s life in danger?
In desperation, he tried her cell phone one more time. Once again, the call went straight to voice mail. The fast shunt to voice mail suggested she was either on the phone or had shut off the phone altogether.
Pulling to a stop at the intersection where Sequoyah Highway crossed Old Quarry Road, Cain called The Gates, bypassing Quinn’s direct number in favor of the agents’ office. Ava Trent answered on the second ring. “The Gates.”
“Ava, it’s Cain Dennison. I need an address.”
* * *
SARA TOOK A slow step backward as Becky Allen descended the stairs, the small black pistol gripped in her right hand leveled at Sara’s head. “What on earth are you doing?”
Becky reached the ground level. “You’re remembering, aren’t you?”
“Remembering?” Sara played dumb.
“I’m not stupid.” She nodded at the bag of lemon drops Sara still held. “You remembered those, didn’t you?”
Sara gave up any pretense. Becky clearly wouldn’t buy the ignorant act. Besides, she wanted answers, even if they were the last answers she ever got. “Donnie ate one of these lemon drops. And then he started acting strangely.”
Becky almost smiled. “I wasn’t sure they’d work. That’s why I paid one of the addicts I know to bleed your brakes while we were at dinner. Just in case.”
Sara’s gut tightened painfully. “You bled the brakes?”
“Enough to make them soft. You know these mountain roads. One wrong move...”
My God, Sara thought, sickened. “Why? Because Donnie suspected that Jim had killed Renee?”
“Because he knew that I was the only way that Jim could have known she was pregnant.”
“You found out from Dr. Clayton. You told Jim.”
“I didn’t tell Jim.” Becky’s whisper of a smile hit Sara like a punch in the gut. “He was as surprised as everyone else when he learned about the baby.”
“He wasn’t the one who killed her, was he?”
Becky laughed. “He doesn’t have the backbone for it. He would have wanted to do right by the girl. Claim the kid as his own. Humiliate me in front of the whole town.”
“You couldn’t let that happen.”
Becky’s chin rose like a dagger. “No, I couldn’t.”
“And Ariel Burke?”
Becky’s lip curled in disgust. “He never learned. Not from Renee, not from the others—”
“The others?”
“You think he never messed around with any other homecoming queens between Renee and Ariel?” Her expression darkened. “Every girl in Ridge County goes to Dr. Clayton. Only gynecologist in the county—you know how that works. Do you know how many times one of those cute little things came through the doors, looking for birth control or a pregnancy test, and every damned time I had to wonder, was Jim doing her, too?”
“Why didn’t you just leave him?”
Becky looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “You know this town. You know how fast the rumors would have flown. It would have turned into one big joke—the jock stud hero who still has what it takes get into the pants of cute little coeds versus the aging shrew of a wife who can’t even keep him faithful for more than a month at a time.”
“What did you give us?” Sara shook the bag of candy.
A flicker of pride gleamed in Becky’s eyes, sending a shudder rippling down Sara’s spine. “I just gave you lemon drops.”
“Donnie started tripping almost as soon as we got out to the truck.” The fragmented images that her brain had been piecing together for the past few hours had started to form a coherent memory of the night of the accident. “He hit me in the mouth, hard enough to stun me as we reached the hairpin curve. Donnie never raised a hand to me in his life.” She gave the bag of lemon drops an angry shake. “What did you dose him with?”
“DMT,” Becky answered finally, her tone almost bored. “Ayahuasca, to be specific. Mixed into lemon sugar syrup and allowed to harden. It’s a big favorite with hard-core users.”
“Not as volatile to cook as meth,” Sara murmured, her gaze wandering around the basement, taking in the boxes stored on shelves at the back of the basement. Not hard to turn a darkroom into a drug lab, she knew, with the right equipment and ingredients.
Becky smiled. “I have kids. You think I’m going to cook meth?”
“You did, though. Didn’t you? Enough to try to blackmail Cain Dennison into backing off his investigation.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Sara gave a wave toward the lab equipment. “What else do you deal in? Magic mushrooms, maybe? GHB?”
“I dabble in this and that. Girl’s got to make a decent living, and God knows Jim’s never going to make anything coaching high-school baseball.” She laughed without a hint of humor. “He promised he was going to make it in the majors. If I just hung in there with him, he said, we’d be set for life. Yeah, that really worked out.”
“Jim never asked where the extra money was coming from?”
“Jim doesn’t want to know.”
“Is this why he shot himself?” Sara waved her hand toward the boxes in the back of the basement. “Or did he find out you were the one who killed Renee and Ariel?”
“He was careful, after Renee.” Becky shook her head. “It put a scare into him, finding out she was pregnant after her death. He’d assumed she was on contraceptives. Idiot.”
“What happened with Ariel?” Sara asked, stalling for time. Right now, Becky held all the leverage in the palm of her righ
t hand. Sara had left her own weapon in the lockbox in the bed of her truck, safely away from the Allen children.
“She told him she was on birth-control pills. No condom required.”
“She lied?”
“She had a prescription. I checked. But she wanted more than a few tumbles in the back of his truck out on some dirt road in the middle of nowhere. She thought a baby would make him leave me for her.” Becky flicked the pistol toward Sara, motioning for her to move deeper into the basement.
Sara stayed put. “Would it have? Made him leave you, I mean.”
“Doesn’t matter, does it?”
“Were you the one who broke into my cabin last night?”
Becky just looked at her.
“You heard I was helping out Brad Ellis with the investigation, right? You must have wondered if I had remembered anything about that night. So you broke in and took my notes.”
“I broke in to scare you,” Becky said bluntly. “Make you think you were in danger. Make you go away again. But you just dug in your heels, didn’t you?”
“I’m not a foolish little teenager in love,” Sara answered. “I don’t scare easily.”
“That’s too bad for you.” Becky gestured more emphatically with the barrel of her gun. “Go to the back of the basement. There’s a drop cloth back there. I want you to spread it out and stand in the middle of it.”
Sara’s heart skipped a beat. “Easier to clean up the mess?”
Becky just looked at her without answering.
“The kids will hear the gunshots.”
“I told them I’ll be doing some hammering down here. Making a nice surprise for their daddy when he wakes up.” Becky shook her head. “He’s not going to wake up, but they don’t have to know that. Not for a while.”