Tar Heart (A New Hampshire Mystery Book 3)

by Mira Gibson

  Mary knew the story and hoped a man would never latch onto her so badly that he’d dedicate his life to capturing her.

  “I’m telling you, he’s dangerous,” she said, as the Audi rolled to a stop in front of the vacant Colonial house, the shed hidden in shadows beyond the tree line. “I brought you here because I trust you.”

  Her tone had shifted so Mary said, “Okay,” though she didn’t understand Roberta’s sudden gravity.

  “I did this for a reason,” she said as though she had no clue how vague she was being.

  Again, Mary reassured her with, “Okay.”

  “You have to trust me,” she pressed. “You have to keep this secret.”

  Mary was getting a bad feeling. Her gaze locked on the dark lake in the distance, too unnerved to look at her friend. When she popped the passenger’s side door ajar, Roberta grabbed her arm tightly.

  “Promise me,” she insisted.

  “You’re hurting me-”

  “Because I love you. Promise.”

  Her eyes held such intensity that for a split second Mary didn’t recognize her. Intimidated, she whispered, “I promise,” and eventually Roberta loosened her grip.

  They walked to the shed in silence, crusty snow crunching under their boots, wind howling in off the water and stinging Mary’s cheeks, the tip of her nose losing feeling, her hands stiff and cold, holding the beers.

  As they neared the orange door, its paint peeling, its wooden surface warped from the harsh winter, Mary heard the distinct whir of the space heater inside.

  Roberta paused with her hand on the door handle, looking at Mary over her shoulder. She shot her a fleeting smile and when Mary tried to reciprocate it felt like a grimace.

  For the second time her friend told her that she loved her, but it sounded like a bribe. Roberta pushed the door open and into the darkness they stepped.

  She heard a young boy ask, “Mom?”

  Roberta yanked a string dangling from the ceiling and a naked bulb flickered on, starkly illuminating the shed.

  On the floor sat Tucker, his knees pulled up to his chin, the space heater whirling beside him. He looked frightened and gutted with sadness, his blue eyes round and studying the females that had entered, perhaps desperate to recognize his mother. Littering the floor around him were several empty pizza boxes and crumpled bags of Doritos, Chex Mix, and other junk food.

  Rushing to him, she wanted to cry. She dropped to her knees, set the beers down, and wrapped her arms around him, exclaiming, “Tucker.” He felt cool and limp in her arms and his heavy head fell against her chest. “Oh, sweetie, remember me? I’m your babysitter. You’re going to be okay.”

  When she glanced at Roberta, she could see the stone-heart of her friend gleaming through those dark, angled eyes.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” she hissed, holding herself back from yelling. Considering Tucker was trembling, she refused to blow-up at Roberta, which would only terrify him.

  As though she had anticipated Mary’s reaction, Roberta pulled a milk crate up and sat confidently, planting her elbows on her knees so she could probe her calculating eyes down at them.

  “No, I’m not crazy,” she said coolly.

  She had more to say, but Mary cut in with, “There are consequences, God damn it, serious consequences. You didn’t think, Christ! Roberta, they think the killers took him, don’t you get that? Fuck.” She tempered her emotions, drawing in a deep breath and stroking Tucker’s wispy hair. Cooing down in his ear, she promised, “You’re going to be okay,” and then tried to drill some reason into her friend. “Look at Candice. Look at Quinton. Everyone thought they were too young for prison, but they weren’t.”

  Roberta seemed unmoved, unaffected, determined.

  Mary hadn’t struck a nerve with her, though her voice had trembled saying her younger sister’s name. She had loved the angelic girl whose demonic mind had orchestrated their mother’s abduction and tortured Kendra nearly to death. Quinton Avery was no better. Though he had been Roberta’s closest friend, he had harbored the worst kind of secret, that he had killed her younger sister in a twisted up attempt to spare Roberta from emotional pain.

  “I can’t lose you, Roberta,” Mary declared, gripping the boy tightly in her arms, cradling him as though she might conjure her own sister’s warmth. “After everything you’ve been through, everything I’ve been through, you really want to spend the rest of your life behind bars?”

  Roberta didn’t look convinced. She straightened her back, glancing down her nose at Mary, and said offhandedly, “I sold the coke so he could have food, warm clothes, and diapers since apparently he needs them.”

  Witnessing her friend’s subdued attitude had Mary’s blood boiling in her veins, but she tricked some calm into her brain, helping Tucker off of her. It wasn’t until she got to her feet, advancing and angling over Roberta that she let her emotions fly.

  “You stupid, fucking bitch!”

  Roberta leapt to her feet, but it didn’t stop Mary from barreling forth.

  “You’ve been keeping him here? In a fucking freezing shed? No supervision?”

  They were standing nose-to-nose and breathing hard. Mary balled her fists.

  Roberta looked like a wild animal readying to attack.

  But Mary cut her off at the knees, spitting through her teeth, “And you thought your mother was bad.”

  Eyes flaring, her mouth stiffening, white-hot rage rolling off her skin, she seethed, “What did you fucking say to me?”

  “You heard me-”

  “I did. I was giving you a chance to correct yourself.”

  Overwhelmed, she demanded, “You came into the house when I was babysitting? They’re going to think we acted together.”

  “No, I would never risk you,” she stated with conviction, which seemed so fucking off to Mary that it made her itch to plant a second bruise on the girl’s face. “Cody would never suspect you, and even if he did, he would never arrest you.”

  Mary had to pace away before she did something she would regret. Turning on her heel, she caught sight of Tucker. The boy’s mouth was a tight O, his eyes wide, watching the argument. She hoped he wouldn’t ask for his mother again, knowing it would rip her heart open if he did.

  “You promised,” Roberta reminded her, pointing firmly.

  “You’re going to trust the promise of a fuck up like me?”

  “Can we be real for a second?” she challenged, her eyes suddenly so big that they caught the light—catlike and muddy and screaming self-destruction. “Lucas is psychotic. That’s what he is, psychotic. In addition to being mentally unstable, he’s Tucker’s father. Yeah, that’s right,” she added when Mary’s shock blossomed. “The second I found out, I took him, because sooner or later Lucas is going to realize he has a legal right to guardianship.” She swallowed hard. “Lucas had… and I’m repulsed to say this, but he had an even worse childhood than I did, than you did. And he’s a man,” she stated so deeply that Mary’s heart skipped a rocky beat. Roberta’s ferocious eyes misted over, glassy with tears, as she spat out her point. “I know what he’s capable of. I know what he’ll do if he’s awarded custody. You might think it’s only an assumption, that just because terrible things happened to Lucas growing up doesn’t mean he’ll do terrible things to his son, but I know better. And I refuse to let that happen to this kid. I am not going to let it happen, Mary.” Her tone had arched up, flighty as though she were coming undone. “After Maude...”

  Mary quavered. She knew what was coming but wasn’t sure she could stomach it.

  “There’s only one thing I did right in my life,” Roberta went on, choking back the tremble in her voice. “I never let them get to Maude. And I know you never let Dale get to Candice. I’m not about to give Lucas the benefit of the doubt on this. I’m saving Tucker. That’s the fucking end of it.”

  Roberta’s conviction, the raw emotion in her frayed tone, the pain and misery and gut wrenching hope in her expression told Mary that he
r friend might have done far worse than kidnap a little boy.

  Digging deep, terrified of the answer even before she'd asked the question, she locked eyes with Roberta and demanded, “Did you kill them?”

  Roberta’s eyes shifted.

  Voice cracking, she insisted, “Was it you all along?” Her hands were trembling. Why wasn’t Roberta answering her? “Did you kill them so you could take Tucker?” Her vision blurred with tears. “I loved Rose. I thought you loved Benji.”

  “I don’t love anyone,” she said finally, but her tone was melodic and easy as though this was some other conversation. “My heart isn’t real. There’s no soul in this body. I thought you knew that.”

  Mary shook her head, terrified of where they might go from here.

  “Lucas once told me...” she trailed off, her gaze resting on Tucker who was huddled in a ball of uncertainty on the floor, “how his heart works, or how it doesn’t. What it is, what it’s made of... He described it as tar. Thick and black and sticky liquid, not yet hardened into asphalt. The heart of a killer.” She angled her eyes at Mary. “When he explained it, it sounded so much like me...”

  “It’s not you,” she pleaded, desperate to hear that her friend hadn’t killed them. “Please tell me, please, Roberta. Tell me it wasn’t you.”

  “I have Tucker now,” she said definitively as though that could possibly be the end of it.

  It wasn’t.

  Mary saw herself screaming, Tell me! and though she was a breath away from acting out her impulse, she was derailed when the faint sound of a cell phone vibrating hit her ears.

  Roberta fished her cell out of her coat pocket and when she eyed the screen, she mentioned, “Gisele,” and answered the call, “Yeah?”

  Mary heard nothing but murmuring through the receiver, much too soft to make out, as Roberta listened stoically for a long moment.

  When she finally lowered the phone, a look of stunned confusion came over her face. “There was a fire at the club... some kind of explosion set it off,” she said in a stupefied, vacuous tone. “Ron Conover is dead.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “It’s beautiful.” Gertrude was eyeing the heart-shaped pendant, its opal bezel, the flecks of periwinkle and tangerine and lavender within the milky-white gemstone. She lifted the silver, cable link chain, asking, “This is the one she wanted?”

  “Just like her friend’s,” Holly assured her, smirking from across the counter.

  “It’s thicker than I imagined,” she said, passing the necklace.

  “It’s a sturdy chain. She can accidentally yank it and the links won’t weaken. It also won’t tangle easily,” Holly explained, as she coiled the chain into a jewelry box, fit a sheet of card stock inside, and set the pendant atop so that it was resting on the Shackles logo.

  Before Holly could close the box, Gertrude asked, “How does it open?”

  Demonstrating, she angled her thumbnail under the edge of the bezel and popped the pillbox open. “It snaps shut just as easily,” she said, showing her, then handed Gerty the open box.

  The woman tried it herself a few times, eyeing the small compartment beneath. “What in the world she thinks she can fit in there....”

  Holly was tempted to guess cocaine, but it wouldn’t be the best way to get Gertrude to open up about her daughter. Not that Holly had dared yet. She was still working up the nerve to ask the woman about what Roberta had really been up to.

  “Would you like it gift wrapped?”

  “Yes, please,” she said, fishing her wallet out of her purse. “Do you take debit cards?”

  “Sure do,” said Holly, taking the card, which she swiped in the machine, then set on the counter. Next, she wrapped the necklace box with silver paper. By the time the receipt slip was jutting out of the credit card terminal, Holly had stuck a pointy red bow on the box and was placing it inside a Shackles bag. “Well I hope she likes the necklace,” she said, dropping the receipt in the bag and handing it to Gerty, who thanked her again for having the necklace ready so soon.

  As the woman started for the entrance door, Holly felt a lump form in her throat. She should ask the woman about Roberta. There was still time. She should stop her. She should run to the entrance door, block Gertrude from leaving, and demand to know where Roberta was, where her secret hiding places were; if she had Tucker...

  But she couldn’t.

  After watching Gertrude shuffle down the sidewalk where cars were parked against dirty snow banks under a cloudless sky, Holly went into the studio and began straightening up, returning spools of chain to their proper home on the shelf, collecting scattered gemstones from the table, setting the Crock Pot in the sink basin at the back of the room.

  Lucas was weighing heavily on her mind.

  Their encounter disturbed her.

  I don’t know who I am.

  She had aimed her revolver at him, kept her elbows locked, her tone firm, demanding that he tell her where Tucker was. She had threatened to shoot, to kill him if he refused to explain where he was keeping her nephew.

  In that moment, staring at him, breathing heavily, enraged, his eyes had suddenly distracted her. She had never seen it before, never noticed it, but in that moment she’d realized Lucas’s eyes were the same as Tucker’s—round and blue, tumultuous, maybe even stormy, his pupils pinprick black.

  He was Tucker’s father.

  He’d had an affair with her sister.

  And she had every reason to believe he had her nephew.

  She shouldn’t have been standing so close to him, the barrel just shy of his chest. Her hands had been trembling badly and within a split second she had understood she was making the exact same mistake.

  It was Benjamin all over again.

  In the blink of an eye, Lucas had swiped the revolver from her grasp and pointed it at her head.

  Her heart had pounded violently, her breath quickening, her gaze locking on the barrel—Will he go through with it?

  Did he kill Rose?

  Staring at him—her life in his hands—she’d seen honesty in his eyes. He’d looked like a man who had reached his breaking point, who was in desperate need of being believed, and Holly had wanted to believe him.

  She wanted to believe that he wasn’t behind the murders, the abduction, and the explosion, which had destroyed the house and nearly taken her life.

  But she couldn’t believe him. She didn’t know how.

  I don’t know who I am.

  What if Lucas was responsible for it all, but didn’t remember any of it? What if he was so confused that he’d done it all and forgotten?

  I thought she was you.

  As Holly wiped down her worktable, spraying Lysol and rubbing off the dust and grease with a rag, she tried to fathom the incredible secret Lucas had been keeping from himself.

  Was it possible for a person to be involved in an affair and have no recollection of it whatsoever? She didn't think so. Lucas wasn't a zombie; he wasn't functioning in a drug haze. How could he hold down a job, one that required keen investigative skills, if he was plagued with some drastic version of dissociation? What was it called? She had heard the term years ago while watching a PBS special—multiple personality disorder. She didn't even think it was real, but a fabrication, pseudoscience used when floundering psychologists wanted to appear remarkable within their communities, or at least that had been what the special focused on—the fiction of desperate psychoanalysts, how they’d groom their patients, frame the disorder though it wasn't truly present.

  Did he even know, did that other side of him that functioned in the black hole of his psyche understand that the woman he had fallen in love with, the real woman, Rose was dead?

  After stealing her revolver, training the sight on her forehead between her eyes, Lucas had screamed, spit flying from his mouth and tears spilling down his cheeks, I don’t know how to remember, but she knows, she has to know!

  Who? She had begged, terrified he might squeeze the trigger whether he
meant to or not.

  Roberta, he’d growled. She has to know. She has to.

  Without warning, he’d thrown the revolver as if the weapon was suddenly a thousand degrees. Holly hadn’t even understood where it had landed until it fired, bullet zinging through the air after the gun had struck the wall. The bullet had left a blackened circular hole in the windowpane, glass splintering out like a spider’s web all around it.

  Thoughts hadn’t entered her mind. Before she knew what was happening, she was sprinting for the door, throwing it open, barreling down the stairs, taking the treads two at a time. He hadn’t come after her. There was no yelling or screaming from the apartment, as she ripped the Volvo door open, desperate to get the hell out of there.

  Faintly, the doorbell chimed from the store so Holly padded to the black curtain and peered out to see who had walked in off the street. Her chest tightened.

  It was Cody McAlister. He stalked confidently through the store and though he eyed the displays, he obviously had no interest in jewelry.

  She feared to imagine why he was here and, breathing out the dread in her chest, she stepped into the store, cleared her throat, and offered a brittle, “Detective, how are you?”

  “Been better,” he frowned, shooting her a commiserating glance, as he neared one of the velvet pillars. “Help me out here, Holly.”

  “Okay...”

  “I swung by Speare Memorial,” he began.

  It knocked the wind right out of her.

  “I was curious. Let’s just say the affair between Rose and Lucas was much deeper than I originally assumed, but I’m sure you know that.” He let that hang for a beat, studying her. “Imagine my surprise when the receptionist told me that your sister had in fact stopped in the other day.”