by Quinn, Lucy
“Then why would Claire tell her husband she was going to get money?” I asked, turning around just enough so that Scarlet was at my back.
He sighed and I could feel the tension fading. Grabbing the letter from Scarlet’s hands, he folded it as he walked over to the couch. He rolled it up in one hand and stuck it in his back pocket. “She had a tendency to lie when she wanted to do something she thought I would be angry about.”
“Crap on a cracker.” I threw my hands up. “How are we ever supposed to get to the bottom of this?”
“I know an easy way.” Scarlet crossed her arms. “Show me the kid.”
“I don’t have the kid,” Derek said. “Claire used to go see him in California, but she said in this letter he’s here in Saint Agnes.”
“He was never in California,” Scarlet shot back. “She told Henry he was with her in Minnesota.”
“Then what was she always doing in California?”
“She was stalking Henry!” There was a healthy dose of anger behind the words, and I was worried she’d resort to some sort of physical violence.
I put my hands on her arms, trying to back her out of the living room. The last thing we needed was a noise complaint that brought the police. We had to stay off their radar until we had a better handle on this situation.
“She wasn’t stalking anyone.” Derek came off the couch again, and I felt like I was in the middle of a very dangerous game of keep-away.
“Oh yeah?” Scarlet said. “Then why did she always used to show up on Henry’s sets when his show was shooting? Henry would call me up whenever he saw her, and I’d come down to the set with a couple of security guys. She’d only back off when it became obvious she wasn’t going to get near him alone.”
“Okay, everybody,” I said, putting my arms out between them. “Let’s all just take a deep breath and settle down.” My heart was racing and I was worried that adrenaline would turn us all into half-crazed fight-or-flight idiots if we didn’t cool off all the emotions in the room.
“We’re finally getting to the bottom of this, Vangie.” Derek held his hands out, like he was showing me he hadn’t been hiding his brussel sprouts. “I don’t have the money, and if Claire had it, she was hiding it from me and not spending it. As far as I know, she went to find Henry on Tuesday so she could finally get some money out of him. But Scarlet says he’s been sending money somewhere for years. What was really going on?”
The information swirled in my head, and I kept trying to remember everything Henry had said to me in the interrogation room and the jail cell. Had he said anything that could shed light on the situation? But why would he lie to me about it? Or Scarlet? That didn’t make any sense.
The one person who seemed to have been lying to everyone was Claire Barnett. Couldn’t get around that.
“What I really want to know is, where is this kid?” Scarlet said. “He’s not in Minnesota, or in Saint Agnes with Claire and Derek. Where is he, and who has him?”
“Do you have access to Henry’s accounts?” Derek asked, his tone almost helpful.
“Well, his accountant would. I have access to his accountant.”
“Can you find out where the money was going?” I said. “Maybe that would lead us to the kid. If the kid even exists.”
Both of them took a step back with their mouths open, like they hadn’t considered that possibility. Derek spoke first.
“You think she made the kid up?”
“Well, do you remember her being pregnant?” I asked.
He had to think about that for a long minute, then he shrugged. “There were several times, when she was on a bender, that we were broken up long enough for her to have gotten pregnant and given birth. But I have no idea what she would have done with the kid. I always figured she’d left him with his father.”
“Henry definitely did not have a kid in LA.” Scarlet shook her head. “We were together so often, I would have known.”
I backed away from the whole conversation, trying to gather my thoughts. Everything was swirling in my mind, memories of conversations and glances and information, and I couldn’t make any of it fit.
There was a knock on the door, and I automatically reached for the handle, pulling it open. A look of recognition passed over Jenna Van Andel’s face, followed quickly by a frustrated pull of her brows.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, a bite in her words. She carried a big black duffel bag, holding it up against her body.
Derek ran up behind me, pushing the door closed and standing in front of it. “Just give me a second.” He slipped on a pair of shoes and slid through the door, closing it solidly behind him.
Scarlet shot me an angry look. “Who was that?”
My jaw flapped for a few seconds before I found any words. Seeing Jenna here was like seeing your father at a Green Day concert. Incongruous.
“Jenna Van Andel,” I said, pressing my ear to the door. It wasn’t very thick, so there was a chance I could hear through it.
Nothing but mumbles.
“Who’s Jenna Van Andel?”
“They all went to high school together.” I waved Scarlet off. “Quiet. Let me listen.” I pressed my ear to the seam of the door, where I could feel just a touch of cold air leaking through. The sound wasn’t any better. Either they’d stepped away, or they were talking in such hushed voices it was impossible to hear anything.
“With Henry?” she asked.
“Shhhh.” I kept listening, but when the doorknob turned, I stepped back.
Derek slid back inside, carrying the bag low in his hands. “Sorry about that. I didn’t realize Jenna was coming by.”
“What’s in the bag?” Scarlet asked, a tight look on her face.
“Just some of Claire’s stuff. I ran into Mike Van Andel yesterday and he said that Claire’s family had packed up a bag of her stuff from the Barnett house. They wanted me to have it. I told him I’d try to make it over to Frances and Nikki’s before I left town, but—”
“You’re leaving?” she spat out, zero to angry in half a second. “Your wife got killed and you’re just gonna skip town?” Scarlet advanced on him, her finger held out. “How do I know you didn’t kill Henry? Huh? And her?”
Derek dropped the bag, stunned. “I did not kill my wife. I loved her.”
While the two of them argued, I knelt beside the duffel, too curious to stop myself. Mike Van Andel had made a comment, back at Nikki’s place, about Derek coming around for money. A bag like this could hold a lot of cash.
Expecting to be stopped at any moment, I worked fast, pulling the zipper open and the flaps apart. Glinting up at me, from on top of a folded, ratty Saint Agnes sweatshirt, was a familiar-looking knife. Derek’s hand came from out of nowhere, reaching for the bag.
“Don’t!” I grabbed his arm, hauling him down and away.
He stumbled under my weight and caught himself, pulling me up with him. “What’s wrong, Vangie?”
“Don’t touch that,” I said, making desperate eye contact, trying to convince him through sheer willpower. “Don’t touch any of it.”
“Why not?” Scarlet asked, backing away like we’d just opened a can of Ebola.
“You don’t want the cops to find your prints on that.” I swallowed hard. “I’m pretty sure Jenna Van Andel just dropped off the knife that killed your wife.”
Chapter 20
Derek stared at the knife for a long time, his eyes turning glassy. I didn’t dare try to comfort him. I never should have said what I said, but I needed him to back off the bag. We all stood there in silence for a long time, staring at that weapon like it was a ticking bomb.
Maybe it was.
The shrill ring of my phone cut the air and I pulled it from my pocket, only to find Peter Mayhew’s picture staring up at me. Crap on a holy cracker. This was not turning out to be a good day.
With a shaky hand, I answered the call.
“Where are you, Vangie? I’ve just been by the bakery.” I could hear a car buzzing in th
e background of Peter’s voice.
Holy cracker for the win. He hadn’t even waited to get where he was going before calling me. Totally safe, dude.
I closed my eyes. Peter was mad. I could hear it. There was no getting around the fact that my window had been destroyed.
“It was an accident,” I said, finally, waving at Derek as I walked outside. I covered the phone with my hand and told them not to touch anything until I got back, then went back to Peter. “No big deal. I’ll get the glass company to come and replace it this afternoon.”
Peter snorted. “There’s no glass company in Saint Agnes. You’re going to have to talk to someone at one of the window places in Madison Falls, and good luck with that. They won’t be able to schedule you for a week.”
The door opened behind me and Scarlet came outside, also on the phone. I covered my speaker, just in case Peter could hear any of her words. As soon as she was out of hearing distance, I went back to the call.
“Vangie?” Peter was asking. “Vangie, did you hear me?”
“I did. I’ll call the window place right now. Thanks, Peter.”
“Oh, no you don’t.” He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “I warned you, Vangie. I told you if anything else like this happened, I was going to have to put in a call to the bishop.”
“Someone destroyed my window…” I made a quick glance at Scarlet, who was still at the end of the sidewalk, “…on accident…and you’re going to report me?”
“The stipulations of our agreement with the denomination are very clear. If anything scandalous happens, you’re to be stripped of your ordination and fired.”
Those words landed hard, right in the middle of my chest, and made me suck in a deep breath. My bishop had said to me, more than once, that I’d been trying to get myself stripped of my ordination ever since I got ordained. He thought I didn’t want to be in the ministry. But that wasn’t true at all. I knew I was built to do this.
I just didn’t like to be told what to do.
“Please, Peter,” I said, dropping my voice. “It was just an accident. There isn’t going to be a scandal.”
“That’s not what I hear from Travis at the local paper. He said they’re doing a whole story on your involvement in this mess with the actor and Claire Hobson, and they don’t even know about your little incident in North Carolina.”
I heard the phone ring inside Derek’s house, and I wanted to pull my hair out. I could only babysit so many things at one time.
“Please, Peter. I’ll talk to Travis. Just give me a day to fix this before you call anyone in Raleigh.” I tried to sound appropriately contrite, given that he probably just wanted to scare me. But at this point, I couldn’t take any chances. He’d been holding his knowledge of my misdeeds over my head ever since I came. I couldn’t let this be the thing that ended my career as a pastor.
He agreed, reluctantly, and I hung up the phone with a long sigh. This was a super crap day.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Scarlet said, walking toward me, staring at the screen of her phone. “Henry’s accountant just told me that he was making regular payments to Claire Hobson, like I said, starting about fifteen years ago, but the checks weren’t going to Minnesota.”
“They were going here, weren’t they?” I asked, stuffing my phone in my pocket. “I just know it.”
“Yeah. The checks were sent to Claire Hobson, but the mailing address was on Mockingbird Lane.”
“I’ll bet it was Frances Barnett’s house.” I swallowed hard, reluctant to bring this up, but…I couldn’t hold out any longer. I had to know. “What did Henry tell you about Claire?” I asked.
Her silence was pretty telling, but I kept waiting, hoping she would answer. If we could somehow poke a hole in Henry’s motive, we might be able to convince Malcolm to keep investigating.
“Not a lot.” When she finally spoke, her voice had turned from whiny beauty queen to concerned friend. “I know it happened a long time ago. I think it was when he was in high school, maybe right after. I don’t know. He got drunk once last year and started talking about it. After he graduated high school, ‘an ex’ got so crazy, he had to leave Saint Agnes. I mean, it turned out that coming to LA earlier than planned was a great move for him. He happened to run into a casting director at his gym and they had him read for a big soap opera part the next day. It was definitely serendipity.”
I bit my lip, trying not to point out that she’d just intimated the assault had helped his career. That was not going to help loosen her tongue. And it made me hate her just a little bit.
“So, you didn’t know who it was?”
She looked down at her hands. “He never told me outright, but I figured it was Claire after she started showing up on set when he got cast as Tom Bronson.”
“Then why did you tell the sheriff about the assault?” I asked, stuffing both my hands in my coat pockets. This was the part that didn’t make sense to me.
“What?” She was genuinely angered by the suggestion. The lines on her face went an inch deeper. “I didn’t tell him anything. He already knew about it. He asked me a thousand questions about it, and I couldn’t lie to him.”
I paused with my hand on Derek’s door, trying to think of a reason for Malcolm Dean to know about an assault that clearly no one talked about. Unless he had been at the party the night it had happened—which I couldn’t rule out completely—I couldn’t imagine how he’d known.
“Let me just see if he’s off the phone yet,” I said, slipping the door open just a crack. Derek was standing over the duffel bag, the knife glistening in his hand. My throat went thick with fear as he pointed the knife at us, his hand shaking, and I slowly edged into the room with my hands up.
“Now, Derek,” I said, trying to force a calm, collected tone. But my heart was pounding so hard, I could practically hear it beating in my chest. “Why don’t you put the knife down and tell me what’s wrong?”
“Shut up!” His words echoed in the low-ceilinged room. “Just shut up. I need to think.”
My brain was moving a thousand miles a second, much too fast for me to focus on one thought. He hadn’t even thought about fingerprints.
Was he guilty after all?
A loud, groaning noise sounded off to my right, and both Scarlet and I jumped for a moment. It was just the pilot light pushing the heater on. I grabbed Scarlet and pulled her all the way inside, closing the door to keep out the cold air. No need making everyone more jumpy than they already were.
“What happened, Derek?” I asked. “When we left, you were fine. I need you to tell me what happened.”
He pressed the knife-wielding hand to his forehead, like he’d had a thought distracting enough to make him forget he was holding something dangerous. If that knife did end up being the murder weapon, it was completely tainted now.
“Did you know that he assaulted her?” The choking emotion in his voice nearly broke my heart, and I couldn’t lift my eyes. “You did. I knew it.”
“I thought you would be better off not knowing.”
“The sheriff,” he croaked out, dropping the phone completely. “He said the case was closed. Henry murdered her to cover it up. Killed himself because he got caught. You lied to me. You said someone killed him.”
“I didn’t lie.” I held up my hands, glancing at Scarlet for support, but her face was so white, she could have passed for a vampire Buffy was about to stake. “Right, Scarlet?”
“N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-no…” Her stammer was punctuated with little breaths, like she was trying to work up the courage to say the word.
I nodded my head. “You said Henry felt guilty about it for a long time, that he was sorry. He wouldn’t have wanted to kill Claire.”
She returned the gesture, wildly, like a little kid. I was afraid she was going to edge toward me, making us a bigger target. We needed to split his focus. I tried taking another step along the wall, but the knife went up again, and I stopped.
“That must have be
en why she went to get money from Henry. Why she told me he would pay her. It was bigger than her kid.” He nodded, sniffing and slouching back onto his heels.
Scarlet opened her mouth to object, but I snapped my fingers at her. Don’t do it, I tried to advise her telepathically as soon as our eyes met. If only silent conversations really worked.
“It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d talked to the press. We had a file on her, for all her stalking behavior. It would have been easy to prove she was unstable—”
“Stop saying that!” Derek said, despair edging his voice. “She was not stalking him.”
Scarlet didn’t even attempt to look contrite. She just stared straight ahead, like she was trying hard not to show weakness. These two were impossible.
“We found the payments to Claire,” I said to Derek. “They’ve been going to an address here in town.”
That seemed to relax him a little, and he dropped the knife to his side. “So she was getting what she wanted?”
“I’m not sure. The checks were made out to Claire, but mailed to a local place.” I pulled the door shut behind me, stepping to my left, toward Scarlet.
He shook his head, wiping at his nose with his wrist. “I don’t understand any of this,” he bellowed.
Him and me, both.
“Let’s talk it out, Derek. We’re not going to resolve anything otherwise.” I said it in my calmest voice. Then I turned toward Scarlet. “Henry said Claire talked to him while you were inside the convenience store in Rolo,” I said, trying to change the subject back to the task at hand. “Did you happen to see her, at all, when you left the store?”
“No.” She paused, then added, “I was in there for a while because the clerk was playing stupid video games on his phone. It wasn’t until I got the first text from an unknown number about money for Claire—” she shot a look at Derek, “—that I asked Henry about it. He said he’d talked to her briefly while I was in the store.”
“So, how do you know he didn’t kill her?” Derek asked, his brows pulling together, knotty and angry. “You don’t.”
“He wouldn’t have had time. And where would he have gotten that knife?” I said, pointing to Derek’s weapon.