by Sharon Short
Then I felt someone tap my shoulder again. I turned around. This time it was Lenny.
“Josie, I am so glad to see you,” he said, sounding relieved.
“Lenny! Well, it’s nice to see you. I wanted to congratulate your daddy—”
Lenny grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me closer to him. “Listen, I need your help! Rich and Mama went back to the kitchen to pour special glasses of champagne to bring out to toast each other in a few minutes,” he whispered. “But Mama spilled the champagne on her dress! I told her not to worry about it, but she’s frantic. She says she won’t come out with her big obvious splotch, and rubbing at it to try to dry it has flattened the velvet and made it worse, and Rich is getting annoyed, as usual. I thought maybe you could help.”
I looked around. I didn’t see Rich or Effie anywhere, although I did catch a glimpse of Rachel, who waved. I waved back. I looked at Lenny. He looked really concerned, as usual, about his mama.
Well, this was a way to get to Rich and get him over to Caleb. I swallowed hard. Was I really prepared to kidnap one of Paradise’s most prominent citizens?
You bet I was.
And my stain expertise was going to help me do it!
I was nearly preening as I followed Lenny back to the kitchen.
I stopped preening the minute I stepped into the kitchen and Lenny grabbed my arm, and pulled a gun on me.
Rich and Effie weren’t back there. Just me, Lenny, and a gun in my back.
I glanced around . . . where were the caterers? Some knives I could grab? An iron skillet to whop Lenny upside his crazy head?
Lenny said into my ear, “I paid the caterers to leave early. Told them to come back in the morning to clean up.”
“I feel a scream coming on.” I widened my mouth.
Lenny shoved the gun harder into my back. “Ah, but then you’ll never get to save your mama.”
I shut my mouth. Then I opened it again, and said, “well, you won’t shoot me here. Everyone would hear.”
“You sure about that?” Lenny said. “Try me. Of course, that way, you still won’t get to save your mama. Or your daddy.”
“Who says I want to save them? I don’t care. They took off when I was a kid. My real parents are Aunt Clara and Uncle Horace.”
“Oh, but Josie, I think you can’t help but try to help your parents, because you’d do the same for anyone.”
I sighed. He had me there.
“Now, let’s go get your daddy and take him and you to see your mama . . . and my daddy.”
My stomach convulsed. “What . . . what do you mean . . .”
“You’ll see,” Lenny said. “Out to my car.”
“But . . . my coat . . . I checked it out front . . .” I started lamely.
Lenny shoved me forward. “Oh, please. Do you think I care if you freeze to death? That’s the idea, after all.”
“I d-d-don’t k-k-know why you think you’re going to g-g-g-et away with this,” I said. For the record, my teeth were chattering because it was cold in Lenny’s car. And I didn’t have my coat.
Lenny, who sat in the passenger’s seat, had his coat and seemed perfectly cozy, sitting there pointing the gun at me as I drove.
“Very simple,” he said cheerfully. “No one will miss me at the party. I’m not Rich and Effie’s kid, after all. Rachel has always been the belle of the Burkette ball. It’s not like anyone’s going to say, where’s Lenny? Meanwhile, your daddy is knocked out cold. It was so easy. I saw you and that reporter—what’s his name?”
“Caleb,” I said.
“You and Caleb came in, and I thought, why wait? I knew I would have to take care of you and Henry sooner or later. I went outside to unlock my car—no fumbling for keys while forcing you inside—and saw your daddy sitting in your van. I went over, said, Mr. Toadfern, can I have a word with you, and he eagerly hopped out, started to say something about wanting a word with Rich, and I whacked him with the handle of my gun. Dragged him to my car, gagged him with an old rag, and tied his hands and legs with more old rags. Have a lot of those, to keep this old car running. Not that I think he’s going to come around for a while.”
That was true. I’d caught a glimpse of Daddy, knocked out, bound and gagged in the backseat. Exactly what, more or less, Caleb and I had planned for Rich.
“I’m taking you and Henry to the cistern,” Lenny went on, “where you’ll join my daddy and your mama. Daddy’s been dead for years, of course. Not much left of his remains. And your mama may well already be dead, of course, since she’s been in there since this morning. Your daddy and you may freeze to death tonight. Not sure.”
“People will notice that we’re missing,” I said, stuttering half the words.
“Of course they will,” Lenny said. “Well, they’ll notice you’re missing. Why would Josie run off and leave her business? Her dear cousin?”
I clenched the steering wheel and told myself staying calm was my best bet.
“But as for your mama and daddy—well, they’ve run off before. No one will think much about that. For you, there will be a search. But your disappearance will remain an unsolved mystery. Who knows? Maybe people will think you ran off with your parents. Anyway, no one found my daddy for years, of course, except your damned Uncle Fenwick. And for years, he blackmailed Rich . . . in Henry’s name.”
“What?!” I exclaimed, so shocked that for just a microsecond I forgot the danger Daddy and I were in.
“Oh, you want to hear the whole story, Nosey Josie?” There was a grin in Lenny’s voice. I clenched my teeth and didn’t say anything. Of course I wanted to know. “Well, it’s pretty simple. Let me start at the beginning. Let’s see . . . oh yes. Daddy’s routine beatings of me and Mama. She never stood up to him, of course. And neither did I.
“Until somewhere in my junior year in high school. See, I was dating your mama then. And she kept telling me, Lenny, you don’t need to take that. Lenny, stand up for yourself! And one night, not long after Grandpa died, and Mama was in town working in one of the antique shops, Daddy came by.
“By then, he and Mama were divorced. But he’d heard that Rich and Mama had had an affair. Had been, for a long time. He decided to take it out on me, for not telling him, he said. He pulled me outside, started to take off his belt to beat me again, and I heard your mama’s voice in my head. Lenny, you don’t have to take this. So I grabbed a rock, threw it at him. It shocked him so much, the bastard dropped his belt. So I jumped him. Hit him hard. Knocked him out.
“And then I had an idea. It was a great idea, too. Whoever looks in old cisterns? And with the lid on, I wouldn’t have to worry about smell. So I drug his body to the cistern. It was a long trek, but he was skinny and I was young and strong and angry, and we were far enough from view of the road that I didn’t worry about being seen. He stayed out of it. I pulled back the lid, shoved him in.
“Don’t even know if he was dead or alive when he hit the bottom. And didn’t care.”
I swallowed hard at the image. The car skidded a little.
“Oh no, you don’t,” said Lenny, poking the gun in my ribs. “Don’t think you can get us into a wreck and somehow get out of this.”
“Okay,” I said, forcing myself to focus despite the fact my eyes were watering. “But you never let me get my coat and it’s kinda hard to drive steadily when I’m shivering.”
Lenny turned up the heat.
“Thanks,” I said. Maybe if I kept him talking, like I was a friend, I could think of something. “So you got rid of your daddy. But the plan went wrong, somehow, when Uncle Fenwick found his body in the cistern.”
“That’s right. I’d moved by then, or I’d have stopped Mama from calling the C. J. Worthy Plumbing Company. A few weeks later, Rich got a blackmail letter—and a photo of what was left in the cistern of Daddy. It was signed Henry Toadfern. And there was a P.O. box to send payment to—somewhere in Michigan. Of course, Rich knew he hadn’t killed Daddy. And it wasn’t hard for him to figure out I had.
“He confronted me. Rich was worried about his career if the truth came out about his stepson. And I didn’t want to go to jail. I’d already lost years of my life to my daddy’s cruelty. I wasn’t about to go to jail for what I’d done. So Rich and I agreed we’d each pay half the blackmail. Of course, it didn’t end there. Every few months, another blackmail note. A different P.O. box, from a different place. Mama had no idea, of course. She would have immediately gone to the police, so we simply didn’t tell her.”
I took in what Lenny was saying. Effie had stayed in touch with my mama, not knowing about the blackmail that allegedly came from Daddy. And Uncle Fenwick, with his fancy RVs . . . why, he could go somewhere, set up a P.O. box, and then have the mail forwarded to another P.O. box. All in his brother’s name. The ultimate revenge for not sharing the initial wealth—the antique coins in the septic tank. I’d never know for sure, but that was my guess.
“How did you figure out it was Uncle Fenwick, not Daddy, who was blackmailing you all along?”
“Simple. Rachel doesn’t know about any of this, of course. When she came to Rich and told him Henry and May Toadfern had contacted her, wanting him to buy into their FleaMart idea, Rich realized that Henry must not have been the blackmailer all along. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have exposed himself to Rich, let him know how to find him so easily. Rich told me about it, and I realized that was right.
“Thanksgiving afternoon, I went out to take a walk on the towpath, to think over what to do. Someone knew about Junior and had been using Henry’s name as blackmailer out of convenience. We thought of everyone—but the obvious choice. And then I saw your uncle, hanging from the telegraph pole.
“He was still alive, Josie. Struggling. Kicking. Looking like he wished he hadn’t made the choice to kill himself, wishing he could undo it. Our eyes met. He couldn’t say anything of course—but I knew. He was the one who’d found Daddy years ago. I ran back, grabbed the clothesline, tied him up to keep him still. I didn’t want to risk him somehow managing to undo what he’d started. And then I stabbed him. Repeatedly.”
I gagged. “I know that,” I said, swallowing to try to keep my stomach and throat under control. “I found him. Actually . . . Rachel and I . . .”
“Ah yes, poor little Rachel,” Lenny said. “She was so traumatized. But it worked out well, didn’t it? Your daddy accused of the murder. The blackmailer out of the way.”
“But why take Mama? And Daddy and me?”
“May knew that Henry and Fenwick had fought on their walk on Thanksgiving. That Fenwick had been horrified to learn Henry was going to work with Rich on FleaMart. She told me about it at the Bar-None because it seemed so strange to her. She was like that, you know. If something didn’t seem right, she’d get curious about it, pursue it.”
Like me, I thought. Or, rather, I was like her.
“It was like old times, when we’d share our thoughts, whatever was on our minds,” Lenny said. His voice got a little dreamy. “Like when I’d tell her about Daddy. Or she’d tell me about her family problems. I don’t think she could talk like that with Henry. He’s too shallow. I never did figure out why she went with him.”
Love bears no explanations, I thought.
“Then that night, she saw the coins you had kept. And she finally figured it out. She called me up this morning, told me to come get her. Of course, I did. She told me about the coins Henry had found in the septic, how seeing them reminded her of him telling her years ago about finding them, not sharing with his brother, who’d been working on the cistern.
“She’d wondered why Fenwick would be so upset about Henry working with Rich, and made the same leap I’m sure you did. That Fenwick had been blackmailing Rich over Dad.
“But, of course, she’d also made the same mistake you did. You should have seen the look on her face when I told her, ‘no, sweetheart. You told me to stand up to my daddy. And I did.’ Then I took her into Rich’s office at the house—Mama and Rachel were already at Run Deer Run taking care of details—and I told him she’d figured it out. He told me to just dump her like I’d dumped my daddy.”
“And you did that. To the woman you love.”
“Loved! In the past! And she dumped me,” Lenny said, sounding agitated, “for a no-good bum. She got what she deserved. I wouldn’t have killed Daddy if it weren’t for her.”
“I saw the way you looked at her at the Bar-None. You still love her. And I’m sure when she said stand up to him, she didn’t mean kill him,” I said angrily, forgetting that part about staying calm being my best bet. “And I’m sure she didn’t think you’d turn into a hit man for Rich.”
Lenny smacked me hard in the face, and the car swerved. Daddy moaned in the backseat.
“Just drive,” Lenny said angrily. “We’re almost to the house. Then I’m dumping you and your daddy, too. You all can suffocate together.”
“You know you can’t get away with this. Killing four people?”
“You think your boyfriend will save you?” Lenny snapped.
“My boyfriend’s in Kansas City,” I said.
“I mean the reporter, with you at the party. You’ve probably told him everything,” he said.
I felt a clenching in my stomach. Caleb was in danger, too. “I didn’t,” I said.
“Uh, huh. I’ll take care of him, later.”
“Look, he’s really not my boyfriend—”
“Right,” Lenny said with a sneering, mimicking tone. “I saw the way you looked at him.”
I was shivering so hard that I had a hard time walking. And my hope—that when Lenny was preoccupied with trying to drag Daddy through the dark and cold, I’d have a chance to get the gun from Lenny—was ruined by the fact that Daddy had come back around when we’d jolted to a stop at the end of the long lane that led up to the Burkette house.
Lenny had held the gun on me while I untied Daddy’s ankles and took the gag from his mouth. Daddy had immediately started to curse Lenny, but I’d shaken my head gently and he’d stopped. Then Lenny handed me a flashlight, and barked directions as we walked around the side of the house. He was behind us, the gun trained on us, of course.
And we were so far from the road, nobody would see the flashlight in the woods. If they did, they probably wouldn’t think anything of it. Not only that, but it was unlikely anyone would drive by for hours. After all, only locals used these roads. And most of the locals were either at Rich’s retirement party, or snugly in their homes sipping hot chocolate.
In other words, we were pretty much doomed.
“Don’t talk,” Lenny had told us as we started around the house. “If you do, I’ll shoot. Don’t run. If you do, I’ll shoot. It’s just as easy for me to shoot you now and dump your bodies in the cistern—but I’d rather think of you as dying cold and miserable in each other’s company.”
When we got to the cistern, I thought maybe I could attack him when he was pulling away the cistern lid. But Lenny wasn’t about to let himself get in a vulnerable position.
He ordered Daddy to pull away the lid, which was partially pulled back.
It was heavy and Daddy grunted and pulled, and finally got it off and to the side.
“Not as young as you used to be, huh, Henry,” Lenny said. I could hear the grin in his voice. “Train the flashlight down there. Take a look.”
Daddy and I crept to the edge, and I shone the flashlight down into the cistern.
At the bottom of the plaster-lined well was Mama. Her eyes were shut. She was still, her face tilted up. She had scrunched up in her fur coat, as far away as possible from the other thing in the bottom of the cistern.
A corpse that was mostly—but not completely—rotted away to the skeleton. A few rags were all that was left of the clothing.
I gagged.
Lenny laughed. “Take a look at your future.”
I sat back, hard, on the cistern lid—and immediately felt it crack beneath me.
For the first time in my life, I was thanking th
e good Lord that I needed to lose twenty pounds—because the cracked lid gave me another idea.
I didn’t react, though. My heart started thumping harder. What was a cistern lid, but gravel and mortar? And over time, even that would start to weaken. The old cistern lid had been pulled back and forth a lot lately, weakening it. How big of a piece had cracked off? Small enough to pick up and throw, but big enough to knock Lenny out? I prayed that maybe, yes, this was true.
“May? May?” Daddy was calling Mama’s name anxiously.
I heard a barely audible, weak, “Henry?” Tears pricked my eyes.
“Oh good. Still alive. I was hoping she hadn’t died of exposure just yet. That’s why I left the cistern lid ajar. Leave her some air. Let her see you join her. Let her contemplate the choice she made—the wrong choice, years ago,” Lenny said bitterly. “Get down there, Henry!”
I half expected Daddy to jump up, lunge at Henry, try to knock him off balance, but Lenny had anticipated that.
He released the safety, held the gun pointed down into the cistern. “Try anything Henry, and I’ll pull the trigger and kill her. You won’t even have your last minutes together.”
Daddy stood up slowly, lowered himself down into the cistern using the ladder that was attached to the side.
“I tried to get out,” Mama was saying. I could just hear her soft, dry voice. “But the lid was so heavy. I couldn’t budge it. Henry, where’s Josie . . .”
“Oh, she’s coming, too, May,” Lenny said. “Finally, your little family will be together again.”
Daddy peered at me over the rim of the cistern. Our eyes met in the glow of the flashlight. His eyes said “I’m sorry.” And mine said back, “It will be okay.”
Then Daddy’s head disappeared. Oh, Lord. I’d have to move fast . . . but I was so cold and shivering. How could I possibly aim with the chunk of cistern lid—assuming I could even lift it?
“Hand me that flashlight,” Lenny said.
I held it up to him, not wanting to get up and have him see the cracked lid. He snatched it from me.