She paused and took a deep breath. “Oh, but Stan, my creative boy. He could make a great bookshelf in woodworking. And he could detail a car or fix a dent better than his father, which was also good, since a few days later he hurt his knee at football practice and his scholarship was lost.” She smiled the first genuine, although small, smile since coming in. “That was like a knife to my heart even though Stan didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he embraced working in the shop after school, helped put food on the table while I got my teaching degree, and has told me many times he has no regrets about taking over his father’s shop.”
Lizzy’s insides felt like an earthquake was happening in her soul. After everything she’d just heard, it registered at least a nine point five on the Richter scale. She forced in an even breath, mentally patting herself on the back with the idea she was keeping the terror swirling through her well-hidden.
The sense that Kathleen was approaching the end of her story heightened her fight or flight mode. She was going to have to do something. She knew full well Kathleen was not about to smile and thank her for the coffee, pie, donuts, and nice chat and then mosey on out the door. Not after that story.
In fact, if she didn’t think she was about to have to fight for her life, she’d compliment Kathleen. It was a truly amazing story in itself. The fact that the woman had managed to keep it a secret all this time made it even more astonishing. She wasn’t given much time to dwell on it, though, because like a snake striking, Kathleen grabbed the pie knife before Lizzy could.
In almost the same instant, Lizzy tossed the hot mug of coffee in her face.
Kathleen screamed but managed to keep the knife in her hand as she slid off the stool, her face dripping and coffee staining her shirt.
Heart racing, Lizzy wasted no time. She sprinted around the counter to the front door. It was her best option. The front of the building was all glass. She hoped someone would see her struggle and come to help. Also, not that she liked the idea any more than before, but she was prepared to jump through one of the front windows to escape. It was the one on her left where there was one fake wedding cake that became her target. But she didn’t make it.
She was shorter, her stride smaller than that of Kathleen, who stood taller and had longer legs. Which was why Lizzy had mistaken her for a man in the dark at the entrance to Marston’s Tunnel. Kathleen tackled her, obviously taking lessons from her son’s high school football days.
Her back to the floor, Lizzy fought, keeping her hands and feet kicking, striking, holding wherever possible. She also fought to stay focused. There was a flash as the knife sliced through the air and then a burst of white hot pain as Kathleen managed to cut her arm with the pie knife.
Lizzy didn’t exert the energy to scream, just breathed and worked to focus on the fight, grabbing Kathleen’s wrist that wielded the blade. She was at a disadvantage having Kathleen’s weight on top of her.
“Target points,” Lizzy said out loud, trying to remember. It was another amazing moment. Everything was happening fast but felt like slow motion. Everything was clear. She heard her own breaths, felt her heart racing in her chest, and knew she could not stop fighting or it would mean her life as Kathleen held the knife raised above her.
She was not going to die by her own father’s pie knife.
She was not.
With the sound of her own words, she remembered the target points. Keeping her elbow locked, holding the knife at bay with her grip on Kathleen’s wrist, she attacked with her other hand with three quick sequenced blows. One to Kathleen’s left breast, one to her solar plexus, and the third to the throat.
Bam, bam, bam.
None of the three were enough to cause lasting damage, but they—especially the one to the throat—gave Lizzy what she needed.
Time and distraction as Kathleen gasped and struggled for a breath.
This, in turn, gave Lizzy control of the hand that held the knife. She let it arc down in the direction it was pointed. Only she took it farther, holding tight and directing it until the blade sank right into Kathleen’s midsection. The shock on her face was time-stopping.
And for what felt like a lifetime, the two of them hung there, suspended, Kathleen straddling Lizzy, who still grasped Kathleen’s wrist.
Lizzy was terrified to let go. Her breaths were loud in the silence. Her opponent, however, appeared to have stopped breathing as she stared down at the knife handle protruding from her belly.
It wasn’t a lifetime. It wasn’t even a few seconds. Blood began to pour from Kathleen’s wound. She opened her mouth as if she tried to speak but uttered no words. Maybe it was from the punch to her throat, maybe it was from the shock of having a knife in her gut.
Lizzy scrambled to escape the seeping blood. Her action sent the taller woman tumbling away. She used her feet to slide backward across the polished wood floor to put some distance between them. The moment was horrific. All she could do was stare as more of Kathleen’s blood soaked her bakery floor. A strange, absurd thought of Kelly dying in the same manner and what goes around comes around whirled through her mind.
Then the door crashed in, sounding like an explosion in the silence. There was Chief Daniels, Mac’s dad, two men in suits whom Lizzy didn’t recognize. And Mac.
She’d never been so glad to see him.
Mac hauled her to her feet. His mouth was moving, too, but she couldn’t hear any words over the rushing of blood and the roaring sound in her ears. There was blood on her shirt. Then she remembered Kathleen had cut her arm with the knife. Strange how it didn’t hurt anymore.
She felt so dizzy. Her knees were so weak that all she wanted to do was lean against Mac’s chest. She breathed in his enticing, inviting scent to get the coppery burning smell of blood out of her nose. Oh, his embrace, there was no safer place. She just needed to rest for a few minutes, and then she’d tell him everything Kathleen had said. She closed her eyes and listened to the strong beat of his heart.
Chapter Twenty-One
Mac worked to ignore the pain that coiled like a snake in his leg while he waited for the guard to buzz him into the interior of the county jail. The barred door automatically closed behind him with a loud sound of mechanism and lock and finality. Three locked entrances later, he found himself seated in a small glass partitioned booth. Sitting didn’t ease the pain in his leg. Stan Gresden sat on the other side.
Stan stared at him for a long moment, an unnerving grin on his face. When he picked up the corded handset of the nearby telephone, Mac did the same.
“You shouldn’t have bothered coming down here, Mac. My lawyer’s going to get me out of here within the hour. You could have just talked to me back in Mossy Point. Hell, you could have come to my shop or met me at the Streetside, and we could have downed a few together.”
Mac shrugged. “Okay, but in case you haven’t heard, your mother tried to kill Lizzy earlier this afternoon. Before that, she confessed to killing Kelly Mattis and to killing the girl you liked to visit at Mizzou named Sara Gibson.”
Mac let that information get digested, and it didn’t settle well. In fact, Stan bit his bottom lip. Defeat was etched in his expression for the first time. “Sara?” Stan stared at the table in front of him, unable to meet Mac’s gaze.
“That’s right. And your mom got stabbed. She’s still in surgery.”
“Is she going to be all right?”
“She’s expected to be. Of course, she’ll wake up handcuffed to the bed.”
“I need to get out of here.” Now he sounded like a desperate man. “I need to take care of Elliot.”
It tore at Mac to see him. Stan was his friend, his expert receiver who had surely been dealt a horribly bad hand. He let out a long, heavy breath. “Elliot’s fine. Tell me about your father.”
Puzzled confusion crossed Stan’s expression but was quickly gone. “I haven’t heard from him. I always figured he was in Florida like his note said.”
“He’s been frozen in a freezer in your mom�
��s storage unit for a long time, perfectly preserved, still has a little frozen blood in his mullet and a knot on his head. And your mom spilled a lot a few hours ago. A hell of a lot. Despite all her confession, she didn’t know anything about your dad. As a matter of fact, she was in the hospital the night he supposedly skipped town and made his way into the tundra. Would you like to tell me about it…while you have the opportunity?”
“I don’t think I want to tell you anything.”
“It’s only reasonable to tell you Chief Daniels is preparing to arrest Elliot. After all, if you didn’t kill him and put him in the freezer, and your mom couldn’t because she was in a hospital bed, Elliot’s the only logical suspect. I imagine, given his simple way of thinking, he’ll probably tell us what he knows. I doubt he’ll fare very well in prison. He’s too nice, too trusting.”
Dark, red fury filled Stan’s features. Mac wondered if this was how he looked when he was strangling Lizzy. “You leave Elliot out of this!” His words were spoken through gritted teeth. “And you get me the hell out of here so I can take care of him.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. If you talk to me, maybe I can keep him from being arrested. Right now, he’s in the tender care of the Mansford Home. You know, the place for those with mental challenges. It’s a nice place, and I think he’ll like it…a lot better than prison.”
Again, it tore at Mac. He didn’t want to threaten Elliot, and it left a bitter taste in his mouth and seemed to set a fire in his leg wound. He had no intention of allowing Elliot to go to prison. He needed answers. He was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to get back to Lizzy. He figured it was his turn to get a massage. Still he was very certain she was going to need something to help her sleep after the day she’d had.
Stan met his gaze evenly but sounded more defeated than ever. “Off the record?”
“Off the record,” Mac agreed. Right then, he was ready to take it however he could get it.
“My father was a prick. There was never any secret in that. He broke my mom’s ribs just because she made baked potatoes instead of mashed. He hit her and knocked her down, then kicked her until she couldn’t breathe. Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch that? Because I watched it my whole life.”
Mac had no idea how that must have felt. He pursed his lips and took a deep breath, blinking back tears that filled his eyes. His best friend didn’t deserve this. No one deserved this. He always felt he did everything he could for Stan. Now he was left wondering what more he should have done. Or could have done. He swallowed down a huge lump in his throat and let his friend go on.
“Life with my old man was this vicious cycle of getting drunk, getting mad, needing to lash out and hurt someone, feeling sorry, feeling guilty, needing a drink to wash down the guilt, then getting drunk again. Sometimes, if we were lucky enough, he’d get drunk and pass out before he got mad enough to hurt someone. I guess after he put my mom in the hospital, he was feeling exceptionally guilty because when Elliot and I got home from school, I saw he’d been drinking the hard shit.”
For a moment, Mac wasn’t even sure he could sit still to hear the rest of the story. He stared at Stan through the glass partition, wondering just how different his friend’s life would have been had he had a different parent. But then kids never got to choose their parents.
Stan continued. “And he was pretty drunk by the time Elliot and I walked in the door. I was tired. I had had Elliot sit on the bleachers while we had football practice. I never let him go home alone anyway. I sure didn’t let him be alone with Dad when I knew Mom wouldn’t be there. Anyway, we found him drunk and mean and demanding supper as if he forgot my mom was in the hospital because he put her there. He broke dishes and yelled and cussed and drooled spit like some rabid animal. Before I could stop him, he knocked me right off my feet. Then stomped on my leg. He ended my football career. He took my scholarship from me. I made it like it happened at practice the next night. And I shuffled around in agony all the next day before that practice so no one knew. Getting back to my dad—when he was going to stomp on my leg again, Elliot rammed into him. I remember Elliot was crying.”
He paused and gave a small, sad smile. “You know how he is. He’s either happy or sad. I yelled for him to stop. I was afraid Dad would hurt him. I have to say, my dad was a prick in every way. He’d hit me. He’d hit my mom. He was pretty careful when it came to Elliot. And at that moment, given Dad was worse than I’d ever seen him, I was certain he would hurt my brother. So I screamed for Elliot to stop and go to his room, away from me and our old man. Told him to lock himself in and hide under his bed.”
Stan paused in his explanation and chuckled bitterly. “He didn’t. He tackled Dad better than anyone on the team could have. He took him right off his feet and sent him tumbling down the basement steps.”
Stan took a deep breath that sounded a little like relief at finally getting the horror of that moment off his shoulders. “I was just glad to see Elliot didn’t go with him. The sounds of him going down the stairs and landing on the floor—thump, thump, thump, plop—still haunt my nights. There was no rail, as you well know, and he didn’t go all the way down via the steps. He fell over the side and hit the concrete floor.”
He paused as if he had to re-digest the memory. “I told Elliot he was just sleeping, passed out like he usually was. I knew, the moment I managed to get down there, he was dead. I was terrified no one would believe me if I told them what happened. I was even more terrified they would believe me, and Elliot would go to jail. Either way, I didn’t trust in telling. I know your father tried to stop my dad at every opportunity, but he always found a way to slither out from under the law—which I might add never seemed to be on our side. So I wrote the note that sounded so much like his guilty side it really could have been like he wrote it. After Elliot went to sleep, I dragged him to his own truck and put him in the back. It was the biggest workout I’ve ever had, especially since it felt like my leg was on fire. I didn’t really know what to do with him, so I took him to the storage unit, plugged in the old freezer that was there, and was glad when I saw it still worked. He used to use it in his hunting days to store pelts and animals before having them processed.” Stan grinned. “I suppose I should always be thankful he gave up his hunting and his guns before he started drinking and punching.”
Mac swallowed down the bile that burned his throat. He had no idea how much Stan had had to carry around.
“I shoved his truck over the ledge up at the strip mine lake. It sank pretty quickly, and we’ve never had a drought dry enough to reveal it because he couldn’t leave if his truck was still here. I really didn’t plan to leave him there in the freezer, and later I thought I should have sent him into the lake with his truck. That way, if it was discovered, everyone would think he drove over the ledge while he was drunk. God knows it was probably eighty proof running through his veins that night. But then I guess I didn’t actually plan any of it, but it seemed to work out. No one found the truck and no one thought about the freezer. Everyone seemed to believe the story written in the note about him moving away to keep his family safe and about being sorry for all the years of pain. And as days melted into weeks and then months, I kind of gave up on ever moving him. My mom only griped once about the price of the storage unit going up, but she didn’t connect it to the fact that the electricity was now being used. If she ever opened the freezer and found him, she didn’t say anything about it.”
“It was an accident,” Mac pointed out. His throat was dry, the words were painful.
Stan chuckled bitterly. “Yeah. My whole life was an accident. And I eased the pain by sniffing some of the chemicals at the shop.” He shrugged as if the idea of that was no big deal.
They were quiet for a long moment. Then Stan’s features softened. “I’m sorry about Lizzy. She’s a nice woman. I never meant to hurt her. No one ever saw me like that before. And I…did a little snorting before that. I don’t even remember most of what ha
ppened after she walked in.”
“I know.”
“Will you tell her for me?”
“Yes.”
“I always wondered if my mother had something to do with Kelly Mattis. I never asked. I guess I was too afraid to know for certain.”
“I’ll bet,” Mac said. He figured Stan as a teenager was probably keeping enough secrets with his dad’s death.
Again, there was silence over the intercom for a long moment. Then Stan asked, “Anything else you want to ask me about?”
Mac shrugged, then shook his head. “I think that pretty well covers everything.” He knew it was going to take a while to digest it all. How Stan finished out his senior year carrying the weight of this and still making the grade, he had no idea. He had, after all, had trouble seeing the year through with the memory of a blood-covered Kelly Mattis haunting his dreams, and considering how things worked out—or didn’t work out—with Lizzy. He didn’t think he could have functioned with something as heavy as a death like that of Randy Gresden on his back, even if it was an accident.
Stan nodded. Mac took the receiver away from his ear. Stan’s, “Mac?” stopped him from hanging up.
“Yeah?” At least his throat was no longer burning.
“Take good care of Lizzy. The two of you deserve some happiness together after all this time.”
Mac nodded and left him there, hanging onto the phone.
He didn’t remember the drive back to Mossy Point. He barely acknowledged Tony, who unlocked and opened the door of the bakery and let him in. His steps across the floor sounded loud and heavy and echoed in the stillness. He was pretty sure someone had branded his leg with a hot iron. Then he was in Lizzy’s arms. Where he belonged.
****
Sweet heavens, the last time Lizzy saw Mac like this, he stood in the middle of the police station and her father had just told him to never speak to her or approach her in any way.
Small Town Secrets Page 17