by R. J. Lee
She caught Wendy’s gaze particularly. “And you’re right, Wendy. I did drown my husband despite my lies. It wasn’t very hard to do. He was mostly out of it when I checked on him. He was practically snoring because he’d had so much to drink. So, I saw my chance, and I took it. I pushed his head down into the water and held him there until there was no more resistance. It didn’t take long for him to stop struggling. Then I pulled his head back up and rested it on the edge of the hot tub. I wanted to be sure he was dead, that he wasn’t breathing. Then I started walking back to the locker room and froze in place when I realized I’d actually killed him. It was surreal and—”
Hollis interrupted, sounding confused. “And that’s when I ran over you? So you didn’t hit him over the head with the pestle? ”
“No, someone else did that. I guess it could have been anyone.”
“It wasn’t me,” Hollis said. “I found your husband that way.”
An awkward silence fell over the group until Wendy said, “So you drowned Brent right after you left me in the locker room, then. When you came back, you looked like you were in shock. But was it real, or were you faking it?”
Carly did not answer right away. Then, she managed a little smirk. “A little of both, I think. I wanted to kill him, and I did, but then I couldn’t believe I’d actually done it. Does that make any sense?”
“In a morbid sort of way, yes,” Wendy said.
“Of course, I was truly in shock when I returned to the hot tub with you, and you told me Brent had that huge gash on his head,” Carly added. “Just know that I got there first with the drowning, but I wasn’t expecting this mysterious extra damage. Who had done that? That was what really threw me.”
Wendy was nodding. “Yes, I remember that you kept repeating the word ‘gash’ over and over again. That makes sense now. You knew you hadn’t put it there.”
Hollis was still trying to piece everything together and offered one of his flare-ups, dramatically clutching at his throat. “This thing is making me dizzy. You mean to say that you drowned your husband, Carly, and then somebody else clubbed him right after, and then I discovered the body right after that, and then I ran over you on your way back to the locker room? Is that the insane sequence? That’s more complicated than a dark ops military operation.”
“I don’t think you could actually pull all that off if you planned it that way. Something probably would have gone wrong. But that appears to be what happened with everyone acting on their own. Let’s just say the stars were aligned, and they were not in Brent’s favor,” Carly told him. “I have to say that I don’t think I would’ve done my part if we hadn’t had the power outage, though. I think it emboldened me. Everything came together to push me toward what I did—the darkness, Brent’s oblivious, drunken stupor before and after he got into the tub, the memories of the years spent putting up with his ego and his cruelty to everybody, including his own son. I was playing the Devil on his own ugly terms, and it didn’t make me feel good to succeed once it was over and done with.”
“So when you asked me out here that first time to confess your guilty feelings, was it because the knowledge of what you’d done was finally getting to you, or were you just trying to fool me and buy yourself some time?” Wendy said. “Because you had me fooled, you know.”
“My brain was totally out of sync, but, yes, I knew I couldn’t handle it. I thought maybe I could deal with it by pretending it never happened. That it was only something I had contemplated but never followed through with. That I could fool you and fool myself at the same time. I found I couldn’t sleep at night, but your lesson in preempting came to me again—that I could get rid of the guilt that way. But it didn’t work. I can’t live with what I’ve done. If I could take it back, I would, even though Brent had become a monster of his own making. But I can’t take it back. And so, when I told you and Hollis I was putting the house on the market so I could leave, I was telling you both only a small part of the truth.”
Wendy and Hollis exchanged puzzled glances, and he said, “What’s the large part of it, then?”
Carly’s stoic façade began to crumble, even as she continued to hold on to the gun firmly. But she could not stop the tears that were forming in her eyes. “The rest of it is that I do want both of you to help David sort through everything when he comes down to deal with the house. I’m not putting Brentwood on the market. I’m just leaving it to him to do with it as he pleases. I’m sure he’ll want to sell it and walk away from his life here.”
“Why is the gun necessary, though?” Wendy said. “You could have told us all this without it.”
“I’m sure you’ve already figured it out.” Carly affixed a strange little smile to her face. There was also a sadness to it that could not be ignored, as one of her tears finally fell.
“I asked you before if you were going to shoot us. I think the three of us are still terrified that you may still do just that. No one considers being held at gunpoint a soothing experience.”
“Amen to that,” Hollis said, sounding somewhat breathless while bringing his hands together prayerfully.
“You misunderstand me, then,” Carly said, pointing to the gun.
In reality, Wendy had not misunderstood. Her instincts had whispered the truth to her, but she wanted to prolong the confrontation in hopes of defusing it somehow. Maybe she could manage to turn it around. Maybe she could find a way for all of them to walk out alive. “How did we misunderstand you, Carly?”
“The part about me saying that it was time for me to leave.”
“Then explain it, please.”
“I didn’t mean that it was time for me to leave Rosalie. I will not be going up to Wisconsin to join my son. But I will ask that you explain everything to him when he comes down. I’m counting on you.”
Wendy continued to think on her feet. Anything to distract Carly from her task. “But where are you going in the meantime? Whether you believe it or not, there are options available to you.”
Carly’s voice was now completely infused with sadness, as if she were already in a faraway place of her own making. “I don’t know where I’ll end up exactly. I wish I could tell you I knew. Don’t we all want to know? But I wanted the two of you, Wendy and Hollis, to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. I wanted you to know the whole story. You are my witnesses to it all. You are my Bridge Brunch friends. We bonded over that. I trust you.” Then she focused briefly on Lyndell. “And you will be a witness, too, as it turns out, Miz Slover. You’re a member of the Third Estate, and that puts an official stamp on it all.”
Lyndell could barely manage a nod, sitting frozen in place.
Suddenly, the wailing of sirens could be heard in the distance, and Carly glared at Wendy immediately. “You had the police follow you here? Why on earth would you do something like that?”
“I texted my father that I was coming out here. I told him that I was concerned about a few things, and I see now that I was right to be. Daddy is a very instinctual person, like I am.”
“None of that really matters now. I will not be stopped,” Carly said, sounding very sure of herself. “No one will stop me from leaving. Not you, not Hollis, not your editor.”
Wendy began pleading as a reflex action, hoping she still might be able to stumble upon the right words to defuse the situation. “Please don’t do this, Carly. Maybe we can get you some sort of help. You just weren’t in your right mind that night. There is such a thing as diminished capacity in legal terms. Let it play out, please . . . please. You do have your son to live for, if nothing else. Perhaps he’ll get married and give you grandchildren. Think about him and the effect what you’re doing will have on him.”
The sound of the police sirens grew louder as the cars were getting closer by the second, and Carly said, “David is strong enough to take care of himself. He had to be to survive a father like Brent. He’s everything his father was not.”
“Don’t let Brent do this to you, though,” Wendy s
aid, still hoping to get through. “Don’t let it end this way.”
“I have to pay for what I’ve done. I just can’t live with myself. It’s time for me to leave,” Carly said, swallowing hard.
Then she smiled at the three people paralyzed on the sofa and put the gun to her temple.
* * *
Bax bounded out of his police car, drew his gun, and then stationed himself behind the door, using it as a shield as he focused on the nearby front entrance of Brentwood. His heart sank to his shoes as the report of the gunshot coming from inside reached his ears. During the next few seconds, he was tortured by the worst-case scenario a devoted father could possibly imagine. He had already lost his beloved Valerie twelve years ago to the unforeseen circumstance of fatal pneumonia. He thought he would never recover, but somehow he had managed. To lose his Wendy now would be the nightmare that would make him want to give up breathing. He was positive he could not go on living if the shot he’d heard had taken her out.
At the moment, the words were trapped inside his head. Uttering them out loud was too strenuous and devastating a task even to consider, so they remained unspoken but desperately felt:
Please, please, God, don’t let anything happen to that daughter a’ mine.
Two officers burst forth from a second police car that had just driven up with its blue lights flashing, and Bax shouted to them, “Gunshot inside!” as they drew their guns and took defensive positions behind their doors as well.
“Rosalie Police Department!” Bax shouted toward the house. “Come out with your hands up!”
The officers did not have long to wait, as the front door opened immediately. Bax’s entire body was washed by an enormous wave of relief, moving all the way down to his toes. It was Wendy, his beloved daughter, who stepped out onto the portico, waving her hands in the air.
“Don’t shoot. It’s my daughter!” Bax shouted, even though practically every officer on the force knew who she was after she had helped solve the Grand Slam Murders case the year before. But Bax was taking no chances with the most precious and finest accomplishment of his life.
“It’s okay!” Wendy shouted. “Everything’s under control in here. It’s safe to come in!”
Bax ran up the front steps and embraced Wendy as if her picture had been on a milk carton for years and she had finally been found against all odds. When he finally let go, he noticed the large contusion on her right cheek.
“Did somebody get shot? What happened to your face?”
“I haven’t looked in the mirror, but thankfully, no one was shot.” Wendy steadied herself, closing her eyes briefly before continuing. “Carly Ogle tried to commit suicide, but I stopped her. When she put a gun to her head, I just sprang up off the sofa and leapt as far as I could. I knocked her to the floor, but the gun went off anyway. The bullet’s probably in the wall or the ceiling somewhere. Better there than in one of us. Don’t ask me how I did it. My adrenaline levels were off the charts, and I landed hard on the floor, too.” She pointed to her cheek. “Does this look awful? It does hurt a little bit right now.”
Bax exhaled and held her hand. “We’ll get you fixed up, but my expert opinion is that you’ll live.”
That brought a smile to Wendy’s face, and she said, “Anyway, Hollis and Lyndell have Carly completely restrained on the sofa in there now. She confessed to drowning Brent—all three of us are witnesses to that—so someone can go in and read her rights to her and cuff her.”
Bax motioned the other officers to follow him in with Wendy; but after they had all entered the purple and gold parlor to the sight of Carly tightly wedged between Hollis and Lyndell, Bax said, “Let me handle this, guys.”
But before he could say anything further, Carly glared at Wendy and said, “You should have let me go. It was time for me to leave, and you denied me that. Why would you want to force me to spend the rest of my life remembering what I did? There could be no penalty worse than that.”
Somehow, Wendy found an answer. “It’s the high regard for life I learned from my father as a police officer all these years. I don’t know what will happen to you, Carly, but there are always specific legal remedies in cases like yours. Your lawyer may plead diminished capacity for you, and there’ll be psychiatric help available. I’m no expert, of course, but I didn’t want things to end the way you had planned them. I tackled you because I believe in the value of life.”
“Still, you had no right to stop me,” Carly said, but her words lacked conviction. She appeared to be merely going through the motions. In a sense, she had already left mentally.
“There are some who would say you had no right to take your own life that way,” Wendy said. “It doesn’t matter now, though. What’s done is done. Your husband is dead because of you, and you’re still alive. Your lawyer and the courts will take it from here.”
Bax moved to the sofa and stood over Carly and the two people restraining her, speaking as gently as possible. “Miz Carly, I need to confirm that you did confess to drowning your husband at the RCC two Saturdays ago. I need to actually hear it from you.”
“Yes,” she said softly and without hesitation. “I did it. But I didn’t hit him over the head.”
Matching her soft tone, Bax said, “Yes, we know that.” Then he charged her with murder and read her rights to her while one of the officers cuffed her as she got to her feet. The entire process seemed to move in slow motion with an unexpected surreal quality to it.
When Carly was finally escorted out of the room, Wendy took her father by the arm and said, “Well, these are hardly ideal circumstances, but, Daddy, I’d like to introduce you to my esteemed editor, Lyndell Slover.”
“It’s my pleasure to meet you,” Bax said, as Lyndell rose from the sofa to shake his hand. “Though I have to admit my daughter is correct. I never thought it’d be while I was arresting someone for murder after you’d also been held at gunpoint the way you were.”
“No, I imagine you didn’t,” she said, unable to suppress a grin. “Let me just say that it wasn’t even close to my normal experience behind the editor’s desk. But all that aside, it’s also a pleasure to meet you.”
“I’m sure things will be much less frantic and stressful when we get together at that dinner party my daughter is planning. No gunshots, no handcuffing and wild antics like this,” Bax said. That was followed immediately by a frown. “But how in the world did you get mixed up in all of this?”
“It’s my fault, Daddy,” Wendy said, jumping in quickly. “I was coming out to help Carly with some business she’d made up about putting Brentwood on the market. She invited Hollis out for the same phony reason. I’m afraid I let Lyndell tag along at her request.”
“But that’s hardly your fault,” Lyndell said. “I came with you of my own free will, and since I’m your boss, you properly deferred to me. What were you going to say to me, ‘No, you can’t come’?”
Wendy needed the genuine laugh that followed. Her entire body relaxed, even though her pulse was only now starting to slow down after racing at a breakneck pace for so long. She could still feel it pounding in her ears.
Then Hollis chimed in. “I never would’ve figured Miz Carly for the murderer, though. Frankly, I thought one of Mr. Ogle’s golfing buddies did it. I mean, they almost got into that nasty fight by the bar, and they were all roarin’, screamin’ drunk. Either one of them did it or Carlos, I thought.” Suddenly, Hollis was frowning, too. “So, if Miz Carly did the drowning, who did the clubbing with the pestle?”
“We’ve solved that, too,” Bax told them all. “Ross and I got a confession at the RCC from Mitzy Stone before we came out here. Seems the drowning and the clubbing followed one after the other very quickly, and it was incredible, unplanned timing that prevented both acts from converging. The result was that it was clearly Brent Ogle’s time to go. I imagine not many people on this earth have survived back-to-back attempts on their lives within a few minutes of each other.”
It was Wendy who see
med the most surprised. “Mitzy confessed? I was convinced she was on the up-and-up with me about everything—the success she’d made of her job here, how she didn’t want to let her family down, how she could take Brent Ogle’s guff, no matter what. So tell me you’re kidding.”
“Nope, I’m not.”
“I guess I’m two for two in taking people at their word,” Wendy added. “It took me way too long to figure out Carly was preempting me with her own little sob story. I’m not exactly proud of that, and what’s worse, I didn’t even tell you and Ross what she told me. Maybe if I’d done that, you could have figured things out a lot sooner.”
“Don’t beat yourself up too much,” Bax said. “We have your sleuthing skills to thank for uncovering Mitzy’s relationship to Coach Doughty in the first place. That led to our testing her and most all the other suspects when we revealed the results of Brent Ogle’s autopsy out at the RCC. You helped us bring that to a close quickly. That was on you. Apparently, Mitzy was tired of bluffing her way through it all, and she broke down and finally confessed when the drowning twist was revealed.”
“I’m thankful for that much, at least. But . . . I sure fell for the front she put up, didn’t I?”
Bax snapped his fingers. “You did important work in the case on your own, but I forgot to mention that there’s a catch where Mitzy is concerned, though. Since Brent Ogle was already dead when she struck him with the pestle, she cannot be charged with actual murder. Her blow was postmortem. Still, she’s been arrested on attempted murder charges and mutilating a dead body. Ross is taking care of all that now down at the station.”
“Wait . . . you can mutilate a dead body?” Hollis said, nearly hyperventilating at the thought.
“Yes,” Bax told him. “Believe it or not, corpses have rights, too. They are entitled to be treated with dignity and respect at all times. Funeral homes will be the first to tell you that. But that’s the least of Mitzy Stone’s worries. It’s the attempted murder charge that’s gonna do her in.”