One Fool At Least (The Madeline Mann Mysteries)

by Julia Buckley

  “This cereal is good,” Jack said, watching my lips as I chewed. “I don’t think this is available in Illinois.”

  “We’ll have to take some home with us,” I said, enjoying the way his hair curled behind his ear.

  The phone rang; I think it rang a couple of times before we actually heard it. Jack smiled sheepishly and jogged to the wall-mounted phone. I admired the back of his jeans while he spoke tersely.

  “Hey. Yeah. Really?” he said, staring out the window over the sink. “Do you think—okay, that’s good. Right. Well, I suppose, if I were in her place…. Okay, Bro. Give us a call when you’re finished. Maddy and I will be here till lunchtime, I think.” He looked at me in a way that conveyed his intentions for the morning. I silently concurred. Then he said goodbye and hung up.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Colleen wants to come out and talk to Pat and Libby. She wants to apologize.”

  “Wow. Poor Colleen. And yet—”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, either, but Pat told her that he would want the police there, and she said she understood. She said she felt she owed him an apology on her husband’s behalf.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. This seemed very noble of Colleen, but of course there was always the possibility that she was her husband’s accomplice, and simply wanted to come to Pat’s home so that she could try to kill Slider again.

  Jack was looking out the window again. “Hendricks is already pulling up,” he said. “That guy is getting to know this family quite well.”

  “He’s creepy, Jack.”

  He spun to face me. “Is that why you don’t want to press charges?”

  I stiffened. “We’ve already discussed this.”

  Jack turned away again. “Okay,” he said. His voice suggested that he still disagreed with my decision. I supposed there would be a lot of those moments in our marriage.

  “Hendricks went in,” Jack said. “So at least we know they’re covered.” He seemed tense, though. It pleased me to know how invested Jack was in his family, in their safety and well-being.

  I joined him at the window. “We’re being nosy,” I said, trying to jockey for a better position.

  “Here’s Colleen,” Jack said. “Why does this make me nervous?”

  “Should we go up there?” I asked.

  “No,” my husband said firmly, clamping an arm around me.

  Colleen Kirk’s car, a blue Taurus, pulled slowly up Pat and Libby’s driveway and then came to a stop behind the police car. I could vaguely see her profile behind the wheel. After a moment or two—perhaps she was gathering her courage? She opened her door and stepped out. From our distance she seemed small and frail. Her arms were wrapped around her in a defensive posture. Chief Hendricks came out to meet her, stooping to say something to her before he escorted her inside.

  “Well, good for her,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Jack moved away from the window, restless. He was going for his guitar, I was sure. Sometimes he used it as a way to calm down.

  I was still staring out the window; I’d suddenly realized that my vibes, which often take the form of stomach butterflies, were in full force. I felt almost sick. “Something’s wrong,” I said to myself.

  “What?” Jack asked. “Maddy, come away from the window.”

  I didn’t answer. Something was odd about the scene in front of me; Colleen Kirk’s car seemed to be driving itself—no, but moving, definitely moving—then I realized that the trunk was opening, very slowly. Colleen must have opened it from inside the house, maybe to get something that she had brought for them. But that was unlikely, wasn’t it? First that she would bring something, and second that it would be large enough to store in her trunk.

  And when I reached that realization, I saw a leg sling over the trunk, then an arm. Someone was climbing out, and I feared I knew who it was.

  “Jack!” I yelled as the full form of a man emerged from the trunk and moved furtively behind the car, away from Pat’s house. “David Kirk just got out of the trunk! He’s out there! He just climbed out of Colleen’s trunk!” In my panic I was babbling the same thing over and over, but Jack got the message and peered out the window. His jaw tightened as he reached for the phone. He dialed with rapid fingers—something I would have done if I hadn’t simply frozen.

  Now Jack was upset. “Come on, come on, answer the damn PHONE!” he yelled.

  “Why aren’t they answering?” I asked.

  Jack shook his head, pounding his fist on the counter. “Dammit!”

  Kirk had slithered out of sight, toward the woods to the west of the house. “What the hell is he doing? Where the fuck is Hendricks?” Jack yelled. My husband became profane in times of stress, which was something we had in common.

  Jack slammed the phone down and marched to the door.

  “Jack, no!” I yelled. “He has a gun!”

  “No, Hendricks has his gun, remember?”

  “He could have another one! You have nothing!”

  “You want him to get to Slider with his gun? To Molly?”

  I said nothing; the situation was unbearable to me.

  “He won’t even see me. I saw where he went. I’ll go east and run around. I’ll be fine, Maddy.”

  He was already at the door. “Jack,” I said.

  He understood everything I was feeling, and he sent me a brief look of compassion. “I’m sorry, Babe. I’ll be right back.” With one foot over the doorway, he turned back and said, “And under no circumstances are you to leave this house. Not if you love me, Madeline.”

  I didn’t even have a chance to reply. He shut the door with a firm click, then moved fast, at a crouching run, toward the eastern treeline, as he’d promised.

  I glued myself to the window, trying to get a glimpse of Kirk, of Jack, of someone. “No, no, this isn’t happening,” I said. I was remembering all of those sad movies, love stories with unhappy endings. What if Jack was hurt? What if he was shot? My husband was going to face a madman in order to protect his family, and David Kirk would not think twice about killing him. He simply had nothing to lose.

  Then I thought of Jack’s last words. “Not if you love me, Madeline.” What sort of comment was that? If I loved him I would protect my own hide? The way I saw it, if I loved him I would be out there protecting him. If I loved him I would face Kirk with him, if that was what it came down to. And Jack hadn’t even made me promise, because he’d been in too much of a hurry.

  Nervously I tried dialing Pat’s house again; this time it didn’t even ring; I merely got Pat’s voice on an answering machine. “Oh, God,” I said, and I hung up.

  I turned around. The cottage was no longer sweet and cozy. It felt cold without Jack. I was finding it hard to breathe. I hopped to the wall where my crutches were and opened the door. “I do love you,” I said to no one, to the gray and somber Cat’s Teeth blotting out much of the horizon. “But I want to love you for my whole life.”

  Pat’s house sat on a higher elevation, a lovely bluff with a view of Montana for miles around. A path wound from Jack’s and my cottage into the woods, eastward and up toward Pat’s place. Jack had headed here, probably for ease of movement and cover provided by the trees. I moved east, too, much more slowly than Jack had moved, scanning constantly for a person, any person. I saw nothing. I crutched along, quickly as I could, and my mind assaulted me with images of Jack. Jack at Christmastime, starting a snowball fight with me and looking about ten years old as he launched snowballs with amazing precision; Jack playing his guitar, his face focused and sweet, almost as intent as it was when he made love; Jack brushing his teeth; Jack packing his briefcase for work in the morning; Jack kissing me goodbye, his lips warm and coffee-flavored.

  My teeth were chattering by the time I reached the summit of the hill on which the Shea’s house stood. It wasn’t cold, but I was terrified. I hesitated, and that was when I heard the voices. Low, but just audible. Men’s voices.

  My stomach cramped horribly and I m
oved with care, trying to make no sound with my clumsy crutches. Finally I bent to set them down and tried to move, gingerly, without them. It wasn’t too bad, I found, if I put most of my weight on my good foot. I limped this way, unimpeded, trying to stay in shadow as I pursued the voices; they’d grown slightly louder.

  I limped to a large tree and peered around it; what I saw made me want to scream, or vomit, or die in the leaves at my feet. David Kirk did have a gun, and he was aiming it at my husband, and the look in his eyes said that he would find pleasure, even relief, in pulling the trigger.

  “There’s no point in this,” Jack said, his voice eerily calm. How could he be that calm, knowing he might never see me again? “Let’s go in together and talk to your wife.”

  “I’m doing this for my wife,” said David Kirk. “And I don’t really care who I have to knock down to get to my goal. Have you ever been poor?” he asked. His voice was so petulant, so ridiculous in light of what he’d done that I realized we were not dealing with a rational man.

  “I’m betting she’d rather have you than any amount of money,” Jack said. “When all is said and done the money won’t bring her happiness.” He had his hands in the air, like the good cowboys who get cornered by the bad guys in the movies. But the good cowboys always had something up their sleeves, or they were really fast on the draw. They usually got away, didn’t they? My hands started shaking. My body knew that I had made a decision before my mind did; it was trembling all over, and then I felt myself stepping from behind the tree.

  David Kirk didn’t see me at first, but Jack did, and his face fell. I knew I had disappointed him, but it didn’t matter; if one of us died, at least we had the other one right there. I wouldn’t want to die without seeing Jack one more time, and I was sure he felt the same about me. “Get away from my husband,” I said. My voice sounded odd, too—brittle and harsh, like something that would easily shatter.

  Kirk swung around, his gun waving wildly; I flinched, my hands flying up protectively.

  No bullet sound tore through the air, and I lowered my hands to see Kirk aiming his weapon at both of us alternately. “Get next to him,” he ordered. “You want to die together, it’s fine with me.”

  “It’s not up to you when we die,” I said. I felt an unexpected rage filling me. Who was this man, this crazy man, who had ruined my honeymoon, who was trying to ruin my life? To take my life, even. I felt the anger burning upward, into my head, and I craved action. I heard Jack say “Maddy, no!” and then I started marching toward David Kirk, with the vague intention of killing him with my bare hands.

  “Stop it. Get away,” he said. “I’ll shoot.” His gun teetered in my direction and stayed there, pointed at me. I was still relatively far from him; Jack was perhaps thirty feet away from Kirk on the other side.

  “Madeline!” Jack yelled, anguished. He started moving, a peripheral figure among the trees, a dreamlike figure, and then an explosion ripped through the air. My trembling hands flew to my ears, pointlessly, since the sound had stopped; at the same time both David Kirk and Jack fell to the ground.

  “Jack!” I screamed. I wondered hazily if there had been some sort of bomb. Kirk’s gun had flown out of his hand; I barely glanced at it or him as I made my way to the prone Jack. When I got there Jack’s hand snaked out and yanked me down, not gently.

  “Jack,” I said gratefully, feeling him for bullet wounds.

  “Would you get DOWN, you crazy woman,” he said, but I could hear the relief in his voice. “We don’t know who’s shooting!”

  This made sense, and I lay down next to Jack, feeling with a certain gratitude the cool ground under my skin, the pine needles that pressed into my cheek. At the same time I was trying to get a sense of what our enemies were doing. Kirk still lay prone; he was moaning and clutching his arm. I became aware, too, of approaching footsteps crunching and snapping across the forest floor.

  “Everyone okay?” asked a voice that I thought I knew.

  “NO, I’m not okay!” yelled Kirk through clenched teeth. Ardmore walked up to him, holding a shotgun loosely in his right hand; he prodded Kirk’s wounded arm with a booted foot. I grabbed Jack’s neck, as though somehow this would stabilize us both, perhaps make things seem sensible.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, asshole,” he said. He turned toward Jack and me and seemed to be assessing our condition.

  “We’re fine,” Jack said. “You have impeccable timing.”

  “Yeah,” Ardmore said, sounding a bit surprised himself. He scratched at the bandage on his arm, the remnant of his own bullet wound.

  “Maddy, let go of my throat,” Jack said gently.

  I did it. I stared at Jack and then Ardmore without really seeing them well. I wondered when my heart would stop hammering in my chest, when the blood would stop rushing in my ears like a mighty river.

  Suddenly we heard another gunshot. I stared at Jack in disbelief. “Who?—”

  I asked, and then we heard a voice.

  “That was a warning shot!” boomed another familiar voice. “This is Chief Roy Hendricks. Identify yourself, shooter.”

  Ardmore grinned, then turned toward the sound of Hendricks’ voice. “I’m Ardmore Wilde, and I have David Kirk lying on the ground here. He’s been disarmed. I’d be obliged if you’d come and get him, Chief.”

  “Is the Shea girl with you?”

  “She is, Chief, along with her hubby,” Ardmore said.

  I wondered how long they were going to carry on this conversation; then Hendricks appeared, gun drawn, and he too put a foot on Kirk while he read him his rights. Pat and Slider suddenly loomed up next to us. “Are you hurt?” Pat asked, kneeling next to his brother. “Maddy, we just got your message a minute ago. All you said was ‘Oh, God,’ and then we tried to call you and you were gone. We were mighty nervous.” Pat still sounded nervous; he was talking rapidly and his eyes darted everywhere while he talked. The poor man had been through some major stress this week. “Are you hurt?” he asked again.

  “No,” Jack said. “Just finding I don’t have enough muscle power to get up right now. Never had a gun pointed at me before,” he said. “Not to mention that seeing Maddy pop up behind Kirk took about twenty years off my life.”

  He looked at me, and I saw that there were tears in his eyes. “Maddy, I said stay put.”

  “And I figured that I wouldn’t be much of a wife if I let you face a criminal unarmed, which is what you did. If I did that, you’d be furious.”

  “You have done that,” Jack said, looking away again, staring at the sky.

  Slider and Pat slid away, murmuring something about getting my crutches for me.

  Hendricks and Ardmore hauled David Kirk to his feet and marched him away. He was complaining all the while, saying he intended to sue for maltreatment. Ardmore threatened to kick him. “I’m not on the police force,” he said. “I’m just a guy who wants to kill you. How does that feel?”

  “Watch it, Wilde,” I heard Hendricks say, and then they were gone.

  I touched Jack’s arm. “No one knows what to do under stress. You didn’t, and I didn’t. We both followed our hearts. Yours was with protecting your family—and so was mine.”

  Jack sighed. “Okay. Okay. But Maddy, what in the world were you planning to do? Just walking toward him like that? It was like you were daring him to shoot you.”

  I blushed. “Uh—that’s the part I can’t quite explain. I just got mad.”

  “You’d better hope I don’t tell your brothers about this.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  We stared at each other. “There’s something else bothering you,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Yes. We almost died, which means you must be honest with me.” I sat up and felt slightly dizzy doing so. The trees, and the glimpses of mountain, were still disorienting to me.

  Jack sat up, in yoga position, and rubbed his face. I put my hands on his knees. “Well, he rescued you again, didn’t he?” Jack said. “I me
an, the guy is like this legendary hero, big and manly, and you obviously dig him, and this is the second time he’s come to the rescue.”

  I stared at him for a minute, not even sure at first what he was talking about. Then I realized, with delayed logic, that he meant Ardmore. I started laughing at the thought, and then my laughter became hysterical; my fear of death, never reliable, had finally kicked in, late as usual. I laughed until tears rolled down my face, and Jack looked at me with a concerned expression.

  “Oh, God,” I said, holding my stomach. “Oh, Jack. Don’t you see how ridiculous that is? The man has a giant gun and he shot Kirk from the shelter of the trees. He was never even seen. You, on the other hand, marched out there unarmed, ready to take on anything for the sake of those kids. You are my hero, Jack. You’ve been my hero over and over, this whole trip, my whole life.”

  He was silent for a minute, looking at me and then looking at our joined hands in his lap. “I want to be that,” he said.

  “You are.” We sat in silence until I squeezed Jack’s hand a little harder. “Hey, here’s a thought. What was Ardmore doing in Pat’s woods with a loaded gun?”

  *

  Inside Pat’s place it was a bit chaotic. Kirk had been bundled into the back of Hendricks’ car; backup had arrived, and Hendricks was talking importantly in Pat’s driveway to other guys in uniform. They all strutted around with their hands on the sides of their belts, and their body language grew more pompous when a news crew arrived.

  I turned away from the window to see that Libby hadn’t quite managed to calm Colleen Kirk, who had been horrified anew by her husband’s actions, and had screamed “bloody murder,” according to Libby, when she saw him marched past the door.