Then they waited.
‘I’m sorry I lied to you,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry about it. At least now I understand why Bella reacted as violently as she did. I’m only surprised she didn’t kill him. I would have.’
She put her hand on his knee, squeezed.
‘I think you would have, too.’ Then she cocked her head, buzzed the window down. ‘There he is now.’
He listened, heard the sound of a helicopter in the distance, coming their way.
‘My father sold our beach house not long after it happened,’ she said. ‘Bella had disappeared and although I never told anybody apart from her what had happened, my father knew something was wrong. I always had an excuse for not coming here. So he sold the house. But Gerald Bloodwell didn’t sell his.’ She pointed at a smaller road on the right fifty yards away. ‘His house is down there on the edge of Oyster Pond.’
‘And he’s there now?’
She pointed at the sky, the sound of the approaching helicopter louder now.
‘He will be soon. My son Merritt has been spoiled all his life. He’s had two rich grandfathers fighting over him, trying to buy his love. That’s his latest toy you can hear. It’s a Robinson R22 Mariner. It’s fitted with floats instead of skids so that he can land it on the pond next to Bloodwell’s private jetty.’
‘What did he do to persuade Bloodwell to come here?’
He knew the answer as he asked the question, gave her a stern look. She did her best to look embarrassed.
‘Showed him some photographs. One of them was of a man lying senseless in a toilet stall with his front teeth missing. And another man was half drowned in his pond last night by a notorious contract killer while he was asleep upstairs.’
‘A notorious contract killer?’
She couldn’t keep the smile off her face any longer.
‘Uh-huh. Apparently, my family hired him to kill Bloodwell before Bloodwell’s men killed Bella.’
‘I hope he’s an anonymous contract killer.’
‘Oh yes. Nobody knows his name.’
‘And Merritt was happy to be involved in this?’
‘He was after I told him the truth.’
Suddenly the time for light-hearted banter was over. They’d been joking about killers but there was nothing funny about the implications of why he’d smuggled her onto the island. If they’d wanted to continue with the joke, they might have added that the killer was rumored to be a middle-aged woman.
She got out of the car, grabbed a large crossbody bag from the back seat, leaned back in through the window.
‘I have to go now. I want to be at the house before they get there.’ She patted the bag. ‘Get a welcome drink ready for them. Bloodwell likes a drop of whiskey. You don’t need to worry about waiting for me. Thank you for everything.’
Then she was gone, running down the road and out of sight. He was reminded of his own words when Leon had asked him whether he’d gone into Bloodwell’s house to get some extra satisfaction from attacking the man himself after dealing with the guard.
Something tells me she wants to keep that for herself.
He waited a little longer for the helicopter to come into sight over the trees, start its descent towards the pond. Blair had given him a very brief description of Merritt’s new favorite toy. Toy was the right word—and not only in terms of a rich man’s plaything. It wasn’t a very big helicopter.
And it only had two seats.
One of the three people in the beach house that day wouldn’t be coming out again.
16
‘We’re honored by your presence,’ Guillory said when Evan joined her up at the bar in the Jerusalem Tavern the following night. ‘Did the chauffeur drop you at the door? How long have you got before you have to head back to the beach house on Martha’s Vineyard?’
The mention of the beach house was a little too close for comfort. Any day now he expected to read about how a rich man who was old enough to know better fell off his private jetty and drowned after drinking too much whiskey.
He put it out of his mind, more concerned by the strange feeling he got sitting in his usual seat. He’d been sitting in it a week and a half ago when Bella sat down beside him and everything kicked off. He wasn’t sure he’d ever feel the same about it again.
‘I won’t be taking you with me when I go,’ he said.
‘No?’
‘No. They like the ladies to look their best at all times. Lipstick is mandatory.’
‘Even when killing somebody?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
They held each other’s eyes for a long moment, let it slide by tacit agreement. She was a serving police officer, after all. And he knew what he was—happy to have been a part of an evil man getting what he’d had coming for thirty years. But you can’t have thoughts like that loose in your head without it showing on your face. Not his face, anyway. She knew him too well, put her hand on his arm.
‘It was bad, wasn’t it?’
He saw himself standing beside Blair on the edge of the ocean, heard the bitterness in her voice before the wind whipped it away, still wondered how a person can carry a load like that for all that time. He bit down and swallowed hard at the memory of the pain in her voice.
‘It was beyond bad. After he raped her, Bloodwell threatened her. Took her back to Dike Bridge, said she’d end up the same way as the girl who died in Senator Kennedy’s car if she ever told anyone. Said he knew people who’d do it for two dollars and a beer. He was rich and powerful and she was a young girl, twenty years old. He said he’d disown his son Vance, her husband-to-be, leave them penniless on the street. She knew he’d do it, too. She was scared and didn’t know what to do. So she didn’t report it.’
‘But she told her sister.’
‘She didn’t even want to do that at first. But they were close, despite Bella being a thousand miles away in South Carolina. You know what it’s like.’
‘Actually, I don’t. I had three brothers.’
He ignored Ms Pedant, carried on.
‘As soon as Bella came home for the wedding, she saw something was wrong. It wasn’t long before it all came out. That’s when she beat the shit out of Bloodwell and arranged it so that he didn’t dare show his face at the wedding.’
He took a long swallow of his beer, didn’t taste it over the bitterness in his mouth. And he’d only just begun.
‘So the wedding went ahead as planned, only without Bloodwell.’
She’d gone very quiet, taking an unnatural interest in the contents of her glass. The un-lipsticked lips were like a knife slash across her face. Just as she knew him, he knew her. She’d seen what was coming.
‘A few weeks later she found out she was pregnant. Her husband assumed it was his. Obviously. She knew better. But what was she going to do? Tell him, no, it’s your father’s? She went ahead with the pregnancy, never said a word to anyone. Not even her sister. She’d have killed him for sure and then it would have all come out. It would’ve destroyed her husband.’
Guillory was shaking her head, eyes on the bar top. He didn’t want her to raise them towards him. He was a man, after all. One of the offenders. Her voice had a sandpaper rasp when she spoke.
‘So Bloodwell is Merritt’s father and not his grandfather.’
It wasn’t the time to correct her, point out that the present tense was no longer appropriate.
‘And of course, when Merritt was growing up, nobody noticed anything unusual. Bloodwell and his son shared the same genes, so the boy is going to look the same whoever the father was.’
Sometimes he wished he only communicated with her by text. Because there was always something she picked up in his face that gave him away. Looked like he’d just done it again. She fixed him with a glare that made him feel as if he’d planned the whole thing for his own amusement.
‘What else?’
He took another swallow of beer. She grabbed his glass.
‘
Stop guzzling beer and tell me.’
‘Bloodwell despised his son . . .’
‘Jesus wept.’ This before he’d even gotten a half dozen words out.
‘He was a huge disappointment to him. Maybe he wasn’t a big enough bastard for the old man’s liking. They were always arguing. It was usually about the business. Then one time it got a lot nastier, more personal. Bloodwell ended up telling him the truth about Merritt.’
‘And that’s what made him commit suicide.’
He nodded, Blair’s face in his mind, her words echoing inside his head where they would live for evermore.
He took my husband from me and left me with a child to remind me of it every day of my life.
Guillory had a question for him.
‘How does a person live with that for thirty years?’
He had no answer for her. But she had something to pass along to Blair if he ever saw her again.
‘Tell her if she ever has to kill a man like him again, she can borrow my lipstick while she does it.’
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