Say No Moor

by Maddy Hunter

  “Are youse gonna let her talk about us like that, Ma?” huffed Vinnie.

  “Quiet!”

  “I thought about contacting the police, but what were they supposed to do? Slap a restraining order on you people? I could be dead before the ink dried. Give me my own security detail? Like that was going to happen.” Caroline sucked in a breath, on the verge of hyperventilating. “As awful as the accident was, I felt like I’d just been handed a Get Out of Jail Free card. Could I disappear in all the confusion? Could I escape with my nest egg that very minute, before your goons tracked me down again? My car was parked in the commuter lot. If I left it there, the authorities might think I’d been on the train that derailed. I always took the early train. My officemates knew that. If I didn’t show up at work, they’d think I’d been involved in the wreck. That’d give me time to get out of Dodge.”

  “Shame on you,” scolded Maria. “You’d do that to your mother? Let her think you’d been in a train wreck and not let her know you were still alive?”

  Tsking from the assembled guests.

  “Look, my mom and dad died a few years ago. Cancer. Both of them. So there was no one to wring their hands over my death. I left my car where it was parked, hoofed it home on side streets, crammed my money into a backpack, and boarded the next regional bus leaving town. I didn’t even stop long enough to pack a toothbrush.”

  More tsking from the crowd, who, at their age, understood the ramifications of poor dental hygiene.

  “And ended up where?” asked Maria.

  “A little Podunk town in South Carolina, and that’s where I’ve been ever since.”

  “Back up,” ordered Maria. “You just left out a whole slew of chapters.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Vinnie. “Youse can’t just become someone else unless youse go into that witness protection program.”

  “Yes, you can. Especially if you know the ropes. That was my job in New York. I worked for an organization called the Woman’s Domestic Care Network, so I knew the ropes. I checked into a woman’s shelter once I got into town, told them I feared for my life—which was the absolute truth, by the way—and they helped with everything else. They found me a job as a live-in companion to an elderly woman, and they gave me all the information I needed to establish a new identity. And once I settled in, I learned that New Jersey was just too far away for anyone in rural South Carolina to notice what happened there, including train derailments where bodies had been too mangled to be identified. So I became Caroline Goodfriend, home companion and budding genealogist, which is something I’d always wanted to pursue. And here I am.”

  Maria nodded. “Here you are in Cornwall at my boy’s inn. How’d you know he was my Anthony?”

  “The photo, Ma!” Vinnie ran into the dining room and ripped the photo off the wall, delivering it to his mother. “It was hangin’ right there in the open. She must of recognized me and Elmo.” He smiled at the image. “See? Youse can tell in this picture that I’m way taller than the rest of the family.”

  Maria blessed herself with a quick sign of the cross. “I remember the day this was taken. Your Uncle Carmine had just poured concrete for the new stadium and told us that Fat Joey Bananas wouldn’t be skimming any more money from our accounts. Such a happy day.” She glared at Caroline, steely-eyed. “And you take my happy day and use it against me. You use it to kill my son!”

  Oh my God. Caroline killed Lance?

  “I—” Caroline stirred the air with her hands in what looked like a futile attempt to provide an explanation. “This wasn’t an easy choice, okay?” she said, voice trembling as she gave in to the inevitable. “His family—you guys—wanted to kill me. What if he recognized me?”

  “Ma never showed him the video,” taunted Vinnie.

  “Well, I didn’t know that, did I? What if he told you I was here? Are you going to tell me you wouldn’t have told him to take me out?”

  Elmo frowned. “Youse mean like a date?”

  “No! I mean like knocking me off.”

  “Oh, okay, because in case youse missed it the first time, Anthony batted for the other team.”

  “I’m not a crazed killer,” defended Caroline, “but I’m not a victim either. What was I supposed to do? Wait around until he ambushed me with a carving knife in my back? I was petrified. Can you understand that?”

  “How did you kill my son?” Maria asked in a near sob.

  “I pushed him down the basement stairs.”

  “No one heard you? No one saw you?”

  “I…everyone was distracted. A pipe burst in one of the rooms, so most of the guests were gathered down there trying to record the chaos. My roommate and I went back to our room to work on our blogs, but she said my keyboard was too noisy so she decided to work in the bathroom with the fan on—kinda like creating her own white noise. So while she was in there, I sneaked out the back door and ran around the side of the inn to the kitchen. Lance lived in the kitchen, except when he made time to come out and terrorize the guests, so I figured he’d be in there.”

  “His father’s temperament, the no-good SOB,” sniped Maria.

  “I didn’t have a plan. I had no idea what I was going to say or do. I was operating on fear and adrenaline, but when I saw him on the stairs, I didn’t stop to think. I just…pushed.”

  I thought about my frantic sprint through the kitchen and frowned with the memory. Something didn’t square. I shot my hand into the air.

  Maria fired an irritated look at me. “Another question?”

  “Just a teensie one.”

  “Make it fast.”

  “Caroline, your shoes had to have been wet. The lawn was soaked from all the rain that day. Why didn’t I see your footprints on the kitchen floor? Because if they were there, I would have to’ve been blind to miss them.”

  “I wasn’t brought up in a barn,” she defended. “I wiped my feet on the mudroom floor mat.”

  “A girl who’s built like a beanpole now has the strength to push my big strapping boy down a flight of stairs?” Maria flung her arm toward Caroline’s torso. “What? With arms like sticks?”

  “I used my foot.”

  Elmo redirected the barrel of his gun. “Youse want me to shoot her foot off, Ma?”

  “Look at her shoe,” jeered Vinnie. “What size is it—5? 6? How’d a foot that small take out someone the size of Anthony?”

  “Soccer,” said Caroline. “Compliments of the Federal Government and Title IX.”

  Seemingly satisfied, Maria leaned back in her chair and nodded to Elmo. “All right. You can kill her now.”

  Spencer leaped out of his chair with his hands up. “Please don’t shoot but—”

  bang! Vinnie squeezed off a shot that lodged somewhere in Spencer’s vicinity.

  Screams. Shouts. Shrieks.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” wailed Nana as she leaned forward to eye a gaping hole in the upholstery. “He killed my armrest.”

  “Something’s happening!” yelled Spencer, ducking behind a chair. “Listen! It’s happening right now!”

  “Is he talking about the gunshot?” asked Margi. “Because I’m pretty sure we all heard that.”

  And that’s when we began to hear faint rumbling sounds, like an approaching thunderstorm. Only the sounds weren’t coming from above.

  They were coming from below.

  “Omigod!” cried Margi. “It’s the dragon!”

  The rumbling grew louder, as if the earth had suffered a deadly wound and was rupturing like a breached levee. The floor vibrated. Dishware rattled. A vase wobbled off the mantel and crashed to the floor.

  “We’re all going to die!” howled Helen.

  Vinnie charged toward the bank of windows in the dining room. “I can’t see nothin’! The glass is all crudded up on the outside.”

  “Then open a damned window!” ord
ered Maria.

  He looked left and right, shrugging helplessly before driving the butt of his gun through a pane of glass. Peeking through the hole, he let out a terrified yelp. “It’s crumblin’, Ma! The whole cliff’s giving way!”

  I launched myself out of my seat. “run!”

  They popped up en masse and started to stampede toward the front door, dragging their spinners with them.

  “Leave your suitcases,” I cried. “Save yourselves!”

  “What am I supposed to do, Ma?” Elmo waved his gun toward the stampeding crowd. “They’re getting away. I don’t got enough bullets to shoot ’em all!”

  Dick Teig rammed his spinner full force into Elmo’s legs, sending him flat on his rump.

  “You won’t need that anymore, young man,” said Tilly, raising her walking stick and arcing it downward in a mighty wallop across Elmo’s wrist. The gun flew from his hand, skidding along the floor where Wally snatched it up.

  Gee. That worked out well. “Change of plan!” I yelled in a major flipflop. “Take your suitcases and run like hell!”

  Osmond raced toward the exit, face-planting on the floor when his pants dropped to his shoes. Alice paused to help him up, falling backward over George, who was struggling on his back like an upended turtle, entangled in his own pant legs.

  Oh, God. I peeled them off the floor and shooed them toward the door.

  Jackie grabbed my shoulders in an all-out panic. “What about my cake?”

  “Forget your cake!”

  “But the timer’s about to—”

  The floor began vibrating with earthquake ferocity.

  “I’ll leave it.”

  “Grab Maria!”

  “With pleasure.”

  As the gang practically climbed over each others’ backs in their rush toward the front door, Jackie hoisted Maria out of her chair. “Hi there. My name’s Jackie. I’m a six-foot transsexual who believes that people who abuse their second amendment rights should have a brain-eating amoeba shoved up their nostrils. So I’m warning you, don’t give me any lip.”

  I glanced toward the dining room. No Vinnie. Where was Vinnie?

  Heart thundering, pulse racing, I rushed toward the foyer, wheeling around at the last minute to retrieve Osmond’s suitcase with its cache of cell phones from the dining table. I ran out the front door and into the parking lot to the deafening roar of two hundred feet of cliff collapsing into the sea, devouring the bluff to within spitting distance of the inn. We stood with mouths hanging open as a plume of debris shot into the air, creating a smothering brown cloud that muddied the sun and the sky—but not the sight of Vinnie pressing his gun to Helen’s head.

  Five feet away, Wally had his weapon pressed against Elmo’s earlobe. “Let Mrs. Teig go,” he ordered Vinnie.

  “Let Elmo go first.”

  “You go first.”

  “No, you go first.”

  “Be strong, Helen,” encouraged her husband. “Someone’ll save you.” He looked around desperately. “Anyone seen Marion?”

  “Mexican stand-off!” whooped Dick Stolee.

  Better a Mexican stand-off than circular firing squad.

  “It’s over, Vinnie,” warned Wally. “Drop your weapon.”

  “Youse drop yours.”

  “You first.”

  “No, youse first.”

  One thing was becoming crystal clear about this stand-off: they could both use a good dialogue coach.

  “I swear I’ll waste her,” threatened Vinnie.

  “Then I’ll waste him,” lied Wally.

  “Ma!” whimpered Elmo. “Youse gotta do somethin’, Ma.”

  “Don’t whine to me about someone wanting to blow your stupid head off. The loony I’m with wants to shove a worm up my nose!”

  The debris cloud drifted overhead and began to settle over us like coal-blackened smog. I swept my arms through the grit, trying to clear a path, but it enveloped us like a fog bank, masking sound and movement and breath.

  I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. Voices grew muffled. Coughing. Spitting. More coughing. “Don’t anyone move,” I called into the darkness. “Stay right where you are until the dust settles. And hold your pants up!”

  I heard a sudden oooffff, followed by a scream and a muted whomp.

  “What’s going on?” I cried. “What’s happening? Geez, somebody say something.”

  The debris cloud dissipated as quickly as it had appeared. Wally still held a dirt-covered Elmo captive, but Vinnie was spread-eagled on the ground with his face pressed to the parking lot pavement. Nana stood over him, saturated in dirt, looking like a half-smoked cigar as she leveled his gun at his left foot.

  “I never shot no firearm before, but you so much as wiggle them ears of yours, I might have to give it a try.”

  “Aim for his brain,” shouted Dick Teig, showing no mercy as he wrapped his arm around a sobbing Helen.

  Nana frowned. “I thought I was.”

  As we crowded around our captives, Alice assessed the situation with a charitable heart. “Do you think you should be magnanimous and give him at least one chance before you shoot him, Marion? You could follow the example he set when he fired that warning shot into Dick’s suitcase. Considering the circumstances, it was quite a thoughtful gesture.”

  “I wasn’t aiming for the suitcase,” snarled Vinnie. “I was aimin’ for his head!”

  twenty

  “You should have pursued a career in law enforcement, Mrs. Miceli.” Constable Tredinnick nodded toward the three members of the Cacciatore family who were squirming on the lawn by the spa, trussed up in blue-and-white crime scene tape like horror film mummies. “Very creative way to shackle the blighters.”

  “We thought about restraining them with belts but the guys were tired of having their pants fall down, so we went with the crime scene tape instead.”

  After freeing Osmond’s suitcase from its web of belts and putting Margi in charge of returning everyone’s cell phone, I’d called 999 to report a trifecta of incidents: the landslide, the end of a hostage crisis, and the capture of three dangerous criminals. Tredinnick had arrived just minutes ahead of a fleet of emergency vehicles whose personnel split their time between administering to the guests and evaluating the situation with the landslide.

  The constable cast a troubled look about the debris-strewn mess in the parking lot. “I’m afraid Enyon’s going to be gutted when he sees what’s occurred in his absence. But at least he’ll know what happened to Lance and why. You’ve done my work for me, Mrs. Miceli. I’m feeling like something of a numpty.”

  “It wasn’t me—it was the Cacciatores. They forced a confession out of Caroline with their threats…and their guns.”

  An official in a hard hat and neon vest motioned to Tredinnick as he emerged from around the corner of the inn. “We’ll be needing to designate this area off-limits,” he announced as he joined us. “The whole bleedin’ bluff could collapse straightaway, taking the inn with it, so I suggest you load up your vehicles and get these blokes out of here.”

  I stared at the official, dumbstruck. “Leave? But…but can we at least run back inside and get the rest of our stuff? The bloggers need their computers. I need my clothes. My tour director needs the guests’ medical history forms and our travel docu—”

  “No one goes back inside.”

  “But—”

  “No one.” He departed with a stern warning. “Step lively before we start accumulating casualties, Constable.”

  Omigodomigodomigod. This was a disaster. Everyone would be furious. No computers. No clothing. No footwear. No lodging. Omigod. No lodging?

  On a brighter note, at least everyone had their cell phone back.

  As Tredinnick escorted me across the parking lot, he slowed his steps, as if giving himself time to collect his thoughts. “You
probably don’t need to hear any more bad news right now, Mrs. Miceli, but I think you should know. The police in Exeter tracked down the woman who matched Ms. Zwerg’s description, and…I’m afraid it wasn’t her.”

  “It wasn’t Bernice? But…but…” A vibrating lump formed in my throat. Tears sprang to my eyes. “We can’t leave without her. I mean…we can’t. Have you considered a search party? Or a silver alert? Do you have those over here? Or bloodhounds? My agency will absolutely foot the bill. Have you checked the villages outside Exeter? Or Lyme Regis? Maybe she’s there already. Not a lot of women fit Bernice’s description. She has to be here someplace. Doesn’t she?” I gave him a pleading look as I dashed a tear from my cheek. “You have to find her, Constable. You just have to.”

  “We’ll keep looking, Mrs. Miceli. I just want you to be prepared should we discover something you might not be expecting.”

  He led me to his squad car, where Caroline sat hunched in the back seat, her clothing and hair hemorrhaging grime like Pig-Pen hemorrhages dirt. He opened the front door for me. “Whatever is said about the situation here today, Mrs. Miceli, I commend your skill in disarming the Cacciatores without causing a single bullet to be spent.”

  “Disarming people is my grandmother’s specialty, not mine,” I sniffled as I slid onto the front seat.

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Tae kwon do. She has a black belt.”

  Caroline leaned forward in her seat. “The police will understand why I did it, won’t they, Emily? They can’t throw me in jail, can they? They have to know how terrified I was. They have to know I had no other choice. It was self-defense. You can see it was self-defense, can’t you?”

  Tredinnick leaned in, his gaze on Caroline. “Would you care to hear the results of the postmortem on Ms. Holloway, Ms. Goodfriend? She died from traumatic brain injury, the likely scenario being she was injured outside the hot tub and her body dumped into the water to make her death look like a drowning. But I suspect you’ll be able to provide more details for me at the nick.” He gave his head a disgusted shake. “How does such a right proper lady involve herself in the murder of two people?”