“Hey, ladies, where is Mary Elizabeth?” he asked, interrupting the conversation.
“She said she needed some space,” Daisy told him. “Which probably means she headed down to the river, just the way she always used to.”
Tucker stared at his sister with dismay. “And you let her go off by herself? How long ago?”
Immediately Daisy regarded him with the kind of concern that came from years of reading his moods. “Of course alone. She went out about twenty minutes ago. Why? Is there a problem?”
“There’s a damned killer on the loose,” he retorted. “Yeah, you could say there’s a problem.”
“I’ll find Walker,” Daisy said at once.
Tucker was already running, cursing Mary Elizabeth’s stubborn determination to go on as if nothing were amiss. What had she been thinking?—especially after that fire during the night. She had to recognize the danger.
Praying that he was being unnecessarily cautious, he stayed in the shadow of the trees, finally slowing his steps so that he wouldn’t sound like a herd of elephants crashing through the woods and give himself away if a killer was with Mary Elizabeth. He was halfway to the river when he heard Mary Elizabeth’s quiet, reasonable voice counterpointed against Arlene Willis’s desperate, shrill tones.
“Hang in there, darlin’,” he murmured to himself. “You’re handling her exactly right.”
He reached behind him and took his gun from the waistband of his jeans, even as he moved closer to the sound of their voices. When he finally caught a glimpse of the two women, his heart leapt into his throat. The heavy gun Arlene was pointing at Mary Elizabeth was beginning to waver in her increasingly unsteady grip. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes filled with the primal desperation of a trapped animal.
Worse, Mary Elizabeth was smack in his line of fire, and he had absolutely no maneuvering room. From this point on, any move he made was likely to be spotted by Arlene, who was facing directly toward him.
If only he could somehow signal his presence to Mary Elizabeth alone, he thought without much hope. He wasn’t a great believer in the power of ESP.
“I really have no choice, you see,” Arlene said to Mary Elizabeth, as if reasoning with a recalcitrant child and trying to explain why a spanking would hurt her more than the kid. “I have to end this here and now. You have to understand what you did to me, to my marriage. You were the one who drove me into Larry’s arms. When Ken found out, he threatened to divorce me. That would have been the perfect solution, if only I could have talked Larry into marrying me, but he said he wouldn’t, that he only loved you.”
“But I was divorcing him,” Liz said. “You would have had your chance, Arlene.”
Arlene shook her head. “Don’t you see, it didn’t matter. He still loved you. He told me so that last night. He said he’d come back to Swan Ridge to convince you to try again. Even after he made love to me right there in your house, he still wanted you.”
For one desperate second, Tucker wondered if there was time to get Willis in here to try to reason with his wife, but Arlene’s obviously precarious mental state suggested there was no time to be lost.
“I can make it right,” Mary Elizabeth was saying. “I can help you now. I can campaign for Ken, tell people that he’s the man Larry would want to replace him.”
“You’re lying,” Arlene scoffed. “You would never do that.”
“Of course I would,” Mary Elizabeth said quietly. “I’ve known both of you practically my whole life. Why wouldn’t I help you? Put the gun down, Arlene, and let’s talk about this, see what we can work out. Maybe we can be a team.”
If anything, Arlene tightened her grip on the gun. “No way,” she said. “It’s a trick. Why would you do that when you know I came back that night and killed Larry? I’m not stupid, you know.”
“I know that,” Liz said. “Weren’t you the kid with the four-point average all through school? I know how smart you are, Arlene.”
For an instant Tucker thought he detected a hint of uncertainty in Arlene’s eyes, but then she shook her head. “No. I have to do this my way. It’s too late now. Everyone’s going to know I shot Larry. I’ll go to jail. It’s over for me, but at least I can make sure that you’ll never get what you want again.”
“It’s never too late,” Mary Elizabeth insisted, as if Arlene hadn’t just revealed herself as a murderer. “I ought to know. I’m getting a second chance with Tucker, a chance I didn’t deserve. You and Ken can have a second chance, too.”
Tears began to roll down Arlene’s cheeks, but she remained stubbornly defiant, utterly determined to complete the mission she’d set for herself of making Mary Elizabeth pay for some perceived hurt. Tucker hadn’t pieced together all of it, but it was obvious that Arlene saw herself as being in some sort of competition with Mary Elizabeth, a competition in which she had repeatedly come out the loser.
Come on, Mary Elizabeth, he thought. Keep her talking. With luck, this would drag on, Daisy would locate Walker and Tucker would have the backup he desperately needed.
In the meantime, though, the clouds that had been gathering on the horizon for the past hour turned darker. The wind kicked up, churning the river into a white-capped froth. They were in for a doozy of a storm. Tucker couldn’t decide if that would work to his advantage or against him.
A sudden flash of light split the sky, and a rumble of thunder answered him. Already jumpy, Arlene whirled as if there had been a shot fired, her own gun shooting wildly, then falling from her hand. Mary Elizabeth instinctively dropped to the ground and rolled, grabbing the gun almost before Arlene realized she had dropped it. When she saw that Mary Elizabeth was holding the weapon, a resigned look spread across her face.
“Kill me,” she pleaded. “Go ahead and shoot me.”
Tucker stepped out then, handcuffs in hand. “No one’s going to shoot anyone,” he said, snapping them on her wrists, even as he surveyed Mary Elizabeth from head to toe to reassure himself that she was okay. She still hadn’t lowered the gun, and her gaze was locked on Arlene.
“Darlin’, give me the gun,” he said quietly. “It’s over.”
Mary Elizabeth blinked as if coming out of a trance and handed him the gun, visibly trembling.
“Arlene set the fire,” she told him, her voice unsteady. “She killed Larry, too. All because she wanted to get even with me for ruining Ken’s political aspirations by marrying Larry in the first place.”
Clearly shaken, Mary Elizabeth met his gaze. “How could anyone think that a job is more important than a human life?”
“She’s obviously not thinking clearly,” Tucker said. “The courts will make sure she gets some help.” He spotted Walker and another deputy approaching the scene from opposite sides. “You can take over now,” he told his brother-in-law. “Arlene’s confessed to everything.”
“You hear her?” Walker asked.
“I did,” Mary Elizabeth told him. “She wanted me to know before she killed me.”
“And I heard most of it,” Tucker added.
Walker nodded, then glanced at Tucker. “Can you take Liz to the station to make her statement?”
“Will do,” Tucker said.
Through all of this Arlene hadn’t said a word. Tucker looked into her eyes and saw…nothing. It was as if a light inside had gone out. If he hadn’t seen her leveling that gun directly at Mary Elizabeth, he might have felt sorry for her. As it was, he knew he would carry that image and his utter feeling of helplessness with him forever.
Only after Walker and the deputy had led Arlene away did Mary Elizabeth finally face him, her expression drawn.
“That’s that, then,” she said. “That chapter of my life is over. I can finally move on.” Her gaze met his, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears. “I knew you’d find me in time.”
“I don’t like to think about how close I came to being too late,” he said with a shudder, drawing her to him until her head rested against his chest. “I don’t know what I�
�d do if I ever lost you.”
She lifted her gaze to his. “You’re not ever going to have to find out.”
“Come on,” he said, tucking her hand into his. “Let’s go get that statement over with and go out on the town like two normal people.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” she asked wistfully. “Can we ever have a normal life?”
“I’m going to see to it,” he promised. “Stick with me, Mary Elizabeth. Your troubles are over.”
A smile played across her lips. “In that case, it could be that yours are just beginning, Sheriff.”
Tucker laughed. “I can live with that.”
Liz couldn’t quite bring herself to celebrate that night, as she and Tucker strolled along the boardwalk with the happy sound of carousel music filling the air. Too many lives had been ruined. She counted herself lucky that hers hadn’t been one of them, though she knew in time she’d have to face the guilt of knowing that in an odd way she had caused Arlene to focus on Larry and ultimately kill him.
But that struggle was down the road. Tonight she could only be grateful to be alive herself.
She glanced at Tucker and tried to gauge his mood. Everything he’d said earlier and over dinner tonight suggested that he was already envisioning the future, but he was holding something back, some doubt he clearly didn’t want to get into. Finally, when she could bear it no longer, she drew him to a stop and looked him in the eye.
“Okay, what’s going on in that head of yours?” she asked. “You’ve been acting weird all night.”
“Nothing that can’t wait.”
“Tucker Spencer, don’t make me drag it out of you,” she retorted. “If we’re going to have a clean slate, we need to erase every bit of this, including whatever lingering doubts are gnawing at you.”
He regarded her intently, then shrugged. “Okay, then, there’s one thing about all of this that I just can’t seem to shake.”
“And it has to do with me?”
He nodded. “Come on over here,” he said, leading the way to a bench at the edge of the sand. “Back at the beginning of all this, when you first came to me, why were you so determined to have my help? Why didn’t you go straight to the police station or call nine-one-one?”
Liz debated trying to convince him that she’d been afraid, that she’d turned to him instinctively because she had believed she would be the primary suspect. But that was only a tiny part of what had taken her to his house that night. Telling him the rest would mean allowing herself to be vulnerable to him. But after he’d opened up and told her how he’d never stopped loving her, didn’t she owe him the same?
“I was afraid,” she began. “Not of being railroaded for Larry’s death. I believe in the system, and I knew I wasn’t guilty and that the truth would come out, no matter how long it took.”
“Then what were you afraid of?”
“What the investigation would do to us.”
He regarded her with confusion. “There was no us.”
“I know, but the whole time I was in Europe thinking about divorcing Larry, I kept seeing your face. I kept remembering what we had, the kind of man you are. I wanted to come back here with a clean slate and see if there was anything left between us.” She touched a hand to his cheek. “You were so much on my mind that when I found Larry that night, the only thing I could think about was coming straight to you, that you would keep me safe, that you would make everything all right.”
Her lips curved. “And you did.”
“I almost let you get yourself killed today,” he said with self-derision.
She shook her head. “That was my fault. I took a stupid chance. I should never have walked away from the house knowing that Arlene wasn’t in custody.”
“I guess we’ve both made our share of mistakes, then.”
She regarded him with surprise. “What was yours?”
“Letting you marry Chandler without a fight. If I’d fought harder, maybe I could have changed your mind and none of this would have happened. But my pride was hurt, and I took your decision as final.” He looked into her eyes. “So, what about it? Do we get that second chance? After this, I think we can weather just about anything, don’t you?”
Hope spread through her. “I want to believe that. I want to believe the past, all of the mistakes, are behind us.”
“And the future’s just beginning,” Tucker said. “If you’re sure it’s what you really want. Do you want to be with me forever?”
“I’m more sure of that than of anything in my entire life,” she told him. “Are you? Will you ever be able to trust me again?”
“I’ve known you were the woman for me since the fifth grade,” he assured her.
“And your family?”
“They’re already coming around. I spoke to Bobby earlier. He dropped off a batch of your favorite cinnamon rolls this afternoon. He told me Daisy’s already planning a dinner to celebrate the way things have turned out.”
“That leaves King.”
“You won him over the other day.” Tucker chuckled. “Besides, Daddy has his own romance to deal with. He’s finally convinced Frances to marry him. I imagine she’ll keep him in line. Besides, he’ll be ecstatic once we tell him we’re talking about having kids.”
Liz felt as if her heart might burst with sheer joy. “Are we talking about that?”
Tucker lowered his head and captured her mouth. “We will be, but first things first,” he whispered against her lips. “I could do this for a very long time.”
“In a minute,” she said, her expression suddenly thoughtful. “Maybe you and I should help Frances and your father along, make sure they take that walk down the aisle in the very near future.”
“You want us to meddle in my father’s love life?”
“Why not?”
Tucker’s grin spread. “Why not, indeed? This could be the most exciting entertainment to hit Trinity Harbor in years.”
“Except for one thing,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“This.” She resumed the kiss she’d broken off, deepening it until it was darn close to X-rated.
“Hey, you two, take it off the boardwalk,” Bobby grumbled, nudging the two of them apart. “This is a family venue.”
“Go away,” Tucker told him.
“Do I have to call a cop?” Bobby inquired, sounding amused.
Tucker sighed and looked up at his brother. “I am a cop. I’m officially back on active duty as of this afternoon.”
“All the more reason for you to be setting a good example out here.”
Tucker’s gaze narrowed. “Tell me something, do you patrol out here every night?”
“Only when there’s a rumor that someone in my family is making a spectacle of themselves,” Bobby assured him.
Liz chuckled at Tucker’s horrified expression.
“My God,” he said to his brother. “You’ve turned into King.”
Now it was Bobby’s turn to look shocked. “Bite your tongue.”
“It’s true,” Tucker said. “You’re turning into our father.”
“Did I hear somebody talking about me?” King asked, strolling up, hand in hand with Frances. Each of them was eating a grape snow cone, and the syrup had tinted their lips.
“Not a word,” Bobby ordered Tucker. “Or I’ll tell what I saw.”
Liz couldn’t help it. She burst out laughing. “You guys are too old to be tattling on each other.”
“Especially when they have me around to do it,” Daisy announced as she and Walker joined them.
“What the devil’s going on?” Tucker grumbled. “Are we having a damned family reunion?”
“Somebody heard there might be something to celebrate,” Daisy said. “We all came to find out.”
“Aside from Daddy’s engagement to Frances?” Tucker inquired slyly.
“Old news,” King said. “I spread the word on that earlier. We’re hoping for something a little more recent.”
&nb
sp; Tucker glanced at Liz. “Do we have anything to share?”
Amused at the finding herself almost engaged without ever having been formally asked, she shrugged. “Up to you.”
His gaze narrowed. “You’re not going to make a liar out of me later, are you?”
“For goodness’ sakes, boy, haven’t you gotten around to asking the woman to marry you yet?” King groused. “Want me to do it for you?”
“He’s getting pretty good at it,” Frances chimed in. “I made him practice several times on me.”
“Come on,” Bobby encouraged. “Ask her, Tucker. Here and now. I think it’s fitting that a Spencer get engaged right here on my boardwalk.”
Tucker uttered a resigned sigh and turned to face her. He tried his best to keep his expression somber, but his lips were twitching as he asked solemnly, “Mary Elizabeth, will you do me the honor of marrying into this impossible family?”
Liz gazed up at King and Frances and winked. “I’ll think about it.”
Tucker frowned at her. “Mary Elizabeth.”
She laughed at his evident frustration. “Okay, okay, I’ll marry you.”
Bobby grinned at them. “What-say I commandeer the carousel, and we take a family ride and see if Tucker can catch the brass ring?”
Jenna pointed over her shoulder. “I think Tommy and Darcy are one step ahead of you. They’ve already got the carousel waiting.” She reached for Liz’s hand and led the way. “Bobby and I got the first ride and it brought us luck. I know it will do the same for you and Tucker.”
A whole line of people had to step aside to let them pass. There were a few grumbles, but when they learned the Spencers were celebrating not one, but two, engagements, the crowd began to applaud in time to the organ music as the carousel spun.
Tucker sat astride a white horse with Liz in front of him. She leaned back against his chest.
“Aren’t you even going to try for the brass ring?” she asked when they’d circled past it for the second time.
“Nope,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ve finally got you right where I want you and I’m never letting go.”
Along Came Trouble Page 31