by Curry, Edna
“But everyone is talking about it already,” Arnold said. “Just glance around the room and you can just see all the gossip going around already.”
I eyed him in surprise. Most men didn’t care about people gossiping. “Small towns are like that, Arnold. Surely you remember that?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he grumbled. “That was one of the main reasons I was glad to get out of here. All that talk after mom divorced Dad, then Kelvin and Jolene’s car accident and then Mom dating Orland so soon after the divorce. People even asked me if she was dating him before the divorce. They didn’t care about the truth, they just like a juicy story to gossip about. It was just too damn much.”
“So do you find there is less gossip in L.A.?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Arnold said. “I don’t even know my next door neighbors in the high-rise where I live. And that’s just fine with me. I mind my own business and they mind theirs.”
“Sounds a bit lonely to me,” Patti said.
“Don’t you find that you don’t know your neighbors in Chicago?” I asked.
“Well, sure. But I make friends at work. And I think you can reach out anywhere if you make the effort,” she said.
The waitress returned to ask if we wanted anything else. As we all said no, she plopped down our bills and left again.
“Well, I’m heading home,” I said, stifling a yawn, then putting down money for my bill. “Patti, let me know if you hear anything new or if Corey wakes up. I’d sure like to know why he was at Agnes’ house and who hit him and set the fire.”
“So would I,” Arnold said. “Luckily, Agnes’ insurance will cover the fire damages. I talked to the agent today and she’s sending an adjuster out tomorrow to assess what repairs are needed. Then I can turn the house over to a real estate agent to put it up for sale and go back to California.”
“Aren’t you going to stay until they decide about your Dad’s death?” Patti asked.
Arnold snorted. “That happened ten years ago. How much new evidence could they possibly find after all this time? Most likely, they’ll open it and talk a while, then close it again without deciding a thing.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s likely,” I said. “There must be something substantive for Sheriff Ben to reopen a case. And I know he will do his best to solve it.”
“Well, I’m not holding my breath,” Arnold said, digging out his billfold and putting money with his bill. “Besides, I have a business to get back to. My assistant keeps calling me with problems or for advice. It’s too hard to try to run an antique store from across the country.”
“Okay,” Patti said. “But keep in touch with me, will you? We don’t have much family left now, you know.”
“Sure,” Arnold agreed, giving her a hug, nodding goodbye to me and then striding out of the restaurant.
***
I drove home on the dark and winding narrow blacktopped road to my house on the lake. The rain had stopped and the air smelled fresh and like the pine trees lining the road.
Halfway there, Paul phoned. “Hi Honey. I’m on my way into town. I’ll stop for a shower and be at your house in thirty minutes.”
“Wonderful,” I said. Yippee. I won’t have to sleep alone tonight. “I’m almost home myself. Did you eat, yet?”
“Yeah, I grabbed a sandwich at a truck stop an hour ago.”
“Great. I had dinner with Patti and her uncle Arnold. I have a lot to tell you.”
Just as I turned into my driveway, a deer crossed the road in front of me. I dropped my cell phone and slammed on the brakes, yelling, “Yikes!” I barely missed him and he bounded into the woods. My heart pounding, I leaned back against the seat, trying to catch my breath.
The driver’s door of my car opened and a man in a dark stocking cap mask poked a gun in my ribs.
“Who are you? What do you want?” I yelled. “Put that gun down.”
“Get out of the car. Don’t make any sudden moves. Take your purse like you normally would.”
When I hesitated, he grabbed my arm and yanked me out of my car, then slammed the door shut.
In the shadows, I saw another car parked off to the side of my driveway. If I hadn’t been so upset about the deer, I might have noticed it there as I pulled in. Too late now.
He shoved me into the driver’s seat of the car. “You drive. And don’t try anything or I’ll shoot.”
“There aren’t any keys,” I said, but he slammed the door without answering.
I hoped that if I was behind the wheel, I could cause an accident or something to catch someone’s attention. Or speed. For once I was glad I loved to drive too fast. Though the cops wouldn’t recognize this car. But I did, I realized. It was familiar. Whose was it? Damn it, I was too upset to think straight. Calm down and think.
Then he got into the passenger side and put the key in the ignition.
“Drive,” he repeated.
“I don’t know how to drive a stick shift,” I lied, hedging with the first excuse I could think of to slow things down. Damn it, why hadn’t I rescued my cell phone from the floor of my car? Had Paul heard any of the exchange with this man? Would he realize I needed help? Or did he just think I’d hung up on him? I never did that.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he said. “Okay, get over here then and I’ll drive. Don’t think you can pull anything though.” He reached into the back and came up with a scarf. “Turn around and put your hands behind you.” I didn’t dare argue with his gun still pointed at me. I obeyed and felt him tie my hands together, then he reached across me and fastened the seat belt, effectively tying me in place. He slammed the door and ran around and got into the driver’s seat.
He laid the gun on his lap and started the car, backing out of my yard and heading back toward town.
For once I hated the fact that my house is so isolated and that the only road to these houses along the lake had almost no traffic. I needed someone to see me and realize I needed help.
Most of the summer residents hadn’t started coming for their summer weekends at the lake yet because it was only the end of April and the lake was still very cold. Fishing didn’t open until May either, so I was on my own. I closed my eyes and prayed.
He sped down the road, his headlights making a yellow beam between the evergreen trees beside the road.
“Where are we going? What do you want with me?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“You’re my ticket out of the country,” he snorted, shifting gears.
“You’ll never get away with this. Kidnapping is a felony,” I said.
He laughed and suddenly I knew who my kidnapper was. I recognized that bray. “Geoffrey?”
“Yeah,” he said, and pulled off the ski mask. “Damn thing is too hot anyway. And itchy. How did you know it was me?”
“Your laugh,” I told him. “It’s easily recognized. You won’t get away with this, you know.”
“Sure I will.”
“Why are you picking on me?” I asked. “What did I do to you?”
“You should have stopped investigating Agnes’ death when I told you to.”
“You sent those messages?” I gaped at him. I’d expected it to be Corey or Arnold. Even Rolly. But Geoffrey? How was Harold’s nurse involved in all of this?
He nodded.
“Why do you want me off this case?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t already know. I know you found stuff in Agnes’ files. Rolly said you and Patti had been digging through stuff at her house. And when I searched her file cabinet, the stuff Agnes said she had on me was gone, so you two had to have taken it.”
“So you were the one at Agnes’ house during her funeral?”
“Yeah. I thought sure the house would be empty then. But Corey showed up.”
“What was he doing there?” My mind was whirling, trying to make sense of all this.
Geoffrey shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to look for money or something he could sell for cash. Anyway, I had to take
care of him.”
“But setting that fire didn’t work. He’s still alive.”
“Don’t remind me.” Geoffrey made a face. “I went to try to finish him off at the hospital, but there was a cop at his door.”
“Was Rolly in on this with you?”
“Naw, he doesn’t even know I’m his half-brother. He thinks I’m just the dumb nurse he hired for his dad.” Geoffrey brayed that laugh again.
His half-brother? How could that be?
“But Rolly thinks that Harold cheated Roscoe years ago. That’s why he closed the firm instead of selling it.”
“I don’t get it. Why not sell it and make a lot more money?”
“Rolly thought he was protecting Harold’s reputation. Then you guys had to start snooping into everything.”
“So that’s why Rolly was dating Patti? To find out what we knew?”
“Sure. She had no idea he wanted anything besides getting her into bed.”
I chewed my bottom lip, trying to make sense of this. And to keep him talking while I tried to figure out a way to escape. “So you knew Agnes found out something you did?”
“Yeah. She told me she figured out what we’d done. So I had to shut her up. And now I have to shut you up, too. You should have listened to my warnings,” Geoffrey sneered.
He picked up his cell phone from the dashboard and said, “Call Patti.”
He must have had her number programed into it. “How did you get her cell number?”
He laughed again. “From Rolly’s cell phone. They’re dating, remember?”
Of course. I was losing it, forgetting that. He could easily sneak a look at Rolly’s phone when he lived with him.
“Damn,” he said. “No signal. Don’t you have coverage out here?”
I shrugged. “Sure. But you’re in a dead spot. Go back a couple miles and it’ll work.”
He glared at me, but turned around and drove back until his cell dinged to tell him he had a signal. He stopped along the road and called her again.
“Patti?” he said. “It’s me again. I have your lady P.I. Bring me that hundred thousand dollars I called you about earlier to that motel room right now or she’s going to end up dead.”
“How do I know you aren’t lying? Lacey’s too smart to let you catch her.”
“She’s right here. I’ve got this on speaker phone. Say, hello to your client, Lacey.” He poked me.
“Don’t do it, Patti. It’s Geoffrey. Call the sheriff,” I yelled.
Geoffrey laughed. “You’d better not, Patti.”
“I know, Lacey. I recognized his voice. You won’t get away with this, Geoffrey. Corey’s awake and he told us you were the one who hit him and started the fire at Agnes’ house. And I’ve already told the sheriff you demanded that money. He’s looking for you now and he’ll track you down no matter where you go.”
“No, he won’t. I’ll be out of the country before he can catch me. And I’ve made sure the government doesn’t extradite people where I’m going.”
Patti gasped, then whined, “I can’t get the money that fast. It’s all tied up in stocks and takes days to sell and get the money.”
“Don’t give me that line. I know the balances of all those bank accounts. Rolly bitched to me about it after you met with that other lawyer. I’ll take all the cash from those. Get the money from an ATM right now.”
“It won’t give me that much. My ATM has limits.”
“Then skip bringing it to that motel room. You’d just have the sheriff there anyway, wouldn’t you?”
“His deputy is waiting for you,” Patti agreed with a nervous laugh.
“Right. So instead, you’d better just transfer the money to my account immediately. I know you have online banking access. I’ll send you the account number by email right now from my phone.”
“No, Patti, don’t do it,” I yelled. Tension had tied my stomach into sour knots.
“I won’t do it,” Patti said, stubbornly.
“If I don’t see the money in my account within the next hour, you can tell your buddy the sheriff to look for Lacey’s dead body in my car. I’ll shoot her before I leave the country.”
“He’ll shoot me anyway, Patti,” I yelled. “Tell Ben to alert the airports.”
“Shut your mouth, bitch,” Geoffrey said, glaring at me. “You’re dead!” he mouthed at me silently.
“No, wait,” Patti said, panic in her voice now. “Okay, I’ll do it. But you have to promise to let Lacey go. Promise me, Geoffrey.”
“Sure,” Geoffrey said, laughing. He hung up the phone and winked at me.
I knew he had no intention of doing that. I was a dead duck. My stomach heaved and I thought for sure I’d throw up in his car. That would serve him right. I made a choking sound and he looked my way.
“Don’t you throw up in here,” he said.
“I can’t help it,” I said through clenched teeth. ‘Let me go. It’s not my fault that Agnes figured this all out,” I said, pretending not to know what he was talking about.
“Don’t act innocent, you damned bitch! I know you found that file Agnes had on me. She told me she put a copy in a safety deposit box and gave one to her new lawyer. That’s what he wanted to tell the sheriff.”
“Tell him what?” I pressed. If I’m going to be killed, at least I’d like to know why.
“About killing her dad, of course. Roscoe was so dumb, he trusted our accountants firm to tell him the truth. It was so easy to take the money out, cook the books and make him think they were going broke.”
“I still don’t understand how you got involved. I thought Rolly just hired you after you moved out here.”
Geoffrey laughed. “So you didn’t figure out everything after all, did you?”
I shrugged, hoping he’d keep talking. I wriggled my tied hands, trying to loosen the knot in the scarf. How am I going to get out of this?
“Ma finally admitted Harold was my dad before she died,” Geoffrey said, bitterness dripping from his voice. “Here we were, so damned poor all our lives and I had a rich, big shot lawyer for a dad.”
“So you went to see Harold?”
“Hell no. If he wouldn’t admit it all those years, he wouldn’t own up to it now, either. I decided to get even instead. I had my accounting degree by then. So I found out who did their books and got a job there. I worked my way up and got to be the one in charge of his firm’s books. Harold even had me paying all the bills and writing all the payroll checks. So it was easy to siphon off money with fake invoices and changing the amounts on checks.”
“So you diverted some of the money to yourself?”
“Sure. Harold owed it to me. He’d never paid child support all the years I was growing up. Or paid for my college. So I took it and paid off my college loans and Ma’s debts. And bought myself a new car. First decent one I ever had.” He patted the steering wheel, started the car and turned around, then started back toward the main road.
I gulped and stared out the window into the darkness. Perps can always justify their crimes. We were still on the winding road to my house, but I knew we would soon get to the highway. If he made it into the cities, I’d be a goner.
“Then Harold got Alzheimer’s and Rolly decided to come out here ‘cause Harold wanted to come back to his home town. I thought it might help, but the move made him worse.”
“So why didn’t Rolly and Roscoe sell the firm in Minneapolis?”
He tossed me a grin. “You can’t sell a firm without somebody going through the books. I couldn’t allow that, of course. So I hinted to Rolly that they’d find out Harold didn’t treat Roscoe right. So he didn’t want an audit.”
“And he couldn’t convince Roscoe to close it, so you got rid of Roscoe by faking his suicide? Or did Rolly do that?”
He glared at me. “I’m not telling you, bitch. If you’re so smart, figure it out yourself.”
I tried again. “What about Harold? Have you thought about what will happen to him if you lea
ve the country? Who’ll take care of him?”
For a minute I thought he looked regretful. Maybe he did care about Harold after all. Then he said, “Rolly will hire another nurse. Harold’s got plenty of money left and Rolly will inherit whatever’s left after he dies.”
“What if they arrest Harold, too?”
“They won’t do anything to an old man with Alzheimer’s,” Geoffrey assured me.
And maybe he was right. I didn’t know. And right now, I didn’t have time to worry about it.
I was silent a minute, then asked, “Surely they’ll stop you at the airport before you can get on a flight. The sheriff will have called ahead for them to watch for you.”
He smirked, anxious to tell me how smart he was. “I’m not going to fly commercial. I have a friend with a private jet ready to go.”
“Oh.” That might work, I realized with dismay. He just might get away with this, damn it.
I asked, “So the sheriff at the time bought Roscoe’s death as a suicide?”
“Yeah. Roscoe’s ex-wife found him and threw a fit. Henrietta told everyone he did it because of their divorce and money troubles. Everyone believed it. So I didn’t have to do anything, just stay out of the way.”
“Roscoe and Harold had left the firm to each other in a mutual agreement?”
He frowned at me. “How’d you know that?”
“I do my homework.”
He shrugged. “Sure. That’s not unusual. Rolly waited a while, and then just closed it. By then Harold was bad enough that it was easy to convince him it was the only thing he could do.”
“Then Agnes must have found out somehow?”
“Yeah, she said she found papers in her attic Roscoe had left. So she figured it out.”
“And then you shot Agnes to keep her quiet?”
He nodded. “You aren’t going to live to tell anyone this, bitch.”
I swallowed my panic and went on, “How’d you know where to find her?”
“I saw her leave town, so I figured she went to visit her mom at the nursing home in the Twin Cities. So I parked by the lake where people always fish and waited for her pretty red car to show up. It’s easy to spot from a distance, you know.”