by Sharon Dunn
Beth finally let go of Ginger’s hand. “Now we talk about purchases and agree on what we’ll buy. We’re a team.”
“It’s all just stuff anyway.” Frank held up his hands for emphasis. “My wife is more important.”
“We decluttered our lives like we’ve been trying to do for years.” Beth smiled.
Frank grinned and nodded, looking a great deal like the bobbleheads he’d recently parted with.
That was what was different. Her memory of them that day was of two people with tight fists and tight faces. None of that tension was in their expressions or body language.
“Matter of fact.” Frank leaned into the truck bed and grabbed something from underneath a tarp. “We got a load ready to take to the dump. I don’t need this fishing pole anymore. It hasn’t worked right since I took it back anyway. The line keeps jamming, never used to do that.” Frank placed the pole into Ginger’s hand. “Beth said your friend bought it for her grandson. I hope he gets some use out of it.”
Ginger’s lips parted, but she couldn’t think of anything to say.
Beth and Frank got into his truck. Frank rolled down the window as they drove past Ginger. “Thanks for everything.”
After a long moment of still trying to fathom how anyone could pay three hundred dollars for a pair of shoes, Ginger closed her mouth and shook her head.
She pressed in Keaton’s phone number on her cell. Please let Renata answer, please. The phone rang three times.
“Allo.”
Ginger’s heart jumped. “Is this Renata?”
Long silence. “Yes.”
“Don’t hang up. This is Ginger. You were at my house yesterday.”
“Keaton would not want me to talk to you.”
Ginger bit her lip. She needed to choose her words carefully. “But you want to talk to me. You’re not happy with Keaton.”
“I am object to him. Like his Lexus or his vacation condo. Now he want me to go back to France so he can get a new object.”
“Did you…did you see my friend Mary Margret?”
Renata took in a deep breath. “Keaton said I break the law. He said I would get in trouble and be sent back to France. So I am silent. I am not dumb. I see that he is thinking of sending me back to France anyway. So I make him do the same. We are even. I break and enter. He break and enter.”
“My friend, what happened with my friend?” She had tried to purge her voice of any impatience.
Again, there was a long pause. “You want to know. I tell you. I want Keaton to hurt, like he hurt me. I have Mary Margret’s card, right?”
Ginger tapped her fist on the trunk. “Right.”
“I go to Mary Margret’s house to get the box. She race out in her blue car with a man. Keaton put much pressure on me to get the box back so I follow, thinking I will ask her. They drive long time. At first, they get out of the car, he push her around, I see she is in danger so I follow to help. They go to his fancy house in the forest. I break and enter to help her. I hide. They did not see me. She escape in her car. He follow in his. I call Keaton. He say, ‘Get out, get out, you break the law.’ He is worried not about me, but his reputation.”
Ginger couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Renata, could you identify the man if you saw him?”
“Maybe. I see him only short time. He big. Big belt buckle. Big cowboy hat.”
That was half the men in Three Horses. “How about the house—could you identify the house?”
“Will this hurt Keaton? You know, he has been giving friend at DMV money for silence about the motorbikes.”
Ginger rolled her eyes. Keaton thought everyone could be bought. Unfortunately, most people could be. “We will find a way to make all of this hurt him.”
“The house was up winding roads and dark, but I think I could find it.”
Ginger picked up the fishing pole Frank had given her and fiddled with it. “I’m at the mall right now, Renata. Can you get here and take me to the house?”
“Bon, my sister come with me.”
The reel on the fishing pole rattled. “I will be waiting in the corner by the car wash, sitting on my car trunk. It’s an older Pontiac.”
“I be there.”
Ginger hung up. She sat on the trunk of her car while the sky grew darker and the last few cars pulled out of the front lot. She had to tell somebody the news.
She leaned the pole against the bumper of her car and checked her cell phone. Still no message from Suzanne. She tried Kindra’s cell. Nothing. No one was answering at Arleta’s either. Hmmm. The law of averages dictated she should be able to reach at least one of them. She hopped off the trunk.
With the phone still in her hand and her purse strap resting in the crook of her elbow, she lifted the fishing pole to put it in the trunk. The reel was really loose. She shook it. Maybe that was why it hadn’t worked for Frank. She set her purse and phone on the trunk. It probably just screwed back on. She twisted it. The reel fell into two parts in her hand. Earl would be on her case for that one. She couldn’t even remember the lefty loosy, righty tighty rule.
When she stared inside the reel, a piece of paper slightly larger than a postage stamp was wedged around the spool of fishing line. She maneuvered it out. New creases in the older brittle paper made it fragile. Once she’d unfolded it, her eyes went to the signature at the bottom: Joe Smith. That had to be a made-up name. The date at the top read June 15, 1991.
To whom it may concern:
I am writing this letter because I am not in good health and desire to be free of the guilt that has weighed me down for five years. I sought out Professor David McQuire because he sensed five years ago that the city commission’s decision not to allow him to investigate the possibility of the archaeological significance at the mall property site was not right.
The developer and owner of the property, Mr. Jackson, offered me, Keith Wheeler, and Jeffrey Stenengarter a substantial amount of money to push the mall development through without delay. I always saw myself as an honest man, but even I had a price tag on my soul. Because death is just around the corner for me, I don’t want this on my conscience. I can only hope that justice will result from this confession. If the site did have historical significance, that has been lost forever.
Joe Smith
Ginger looked up from the letter. Renata should have gotten here by now. Was this confession what her friend had been killed for? It seemed like there would be some kind of statute of limitations on bribery. Mary Margret had put the fishing pole on top of the basket to call attention to it. Ginger hadn’t figured out that part of her friend’s “note.” But who thinks to take a fishing pole apart?
She could only guess at the sequence of events, the order in which Mary Margret had connected the dots. Had she found the handwritten MLS number and recognized it as the one on Jackson’s license plate? She probably knew it was the MLS number for the mall property. Maybe she had mentioned that to Jackson, not realizing the significance of what she was saying until she found the confession. The confession had probably been stuffed in one of the pockets of the photo album, or it could have been in one of the vest pockets. Mary Margret wouldn’t have been foolish enough to ask Mr. Jackson directly if the confession was true. Something she said or did must have clued him in.
A slight breeze ruffled the paper in her hand. She gripped it tighter. The police. She needed to call the police. She stared at the phone. Tammy had said that this somehow connected back to the police department. She didn’t know Tammy’s home number or how she would reach her directly if she was working.
The sky darkened. Renata better hurry up and get here.
If Wheeler wanted to cover up the bribery and save his business reputation, he had motive, too. Certainly the law couldn’t go after them after twenty years. She shook her head. It still didn’t seem like reason enough to kill Mary Margret.
Ginger slipped the confession into the secret compartment of her travel purse. She needed to call Earl first, to hear h
is voice. She dialed and waited. The phone rang two, three, four times. Of course he was in the shop. The message clicked on. After listening to her own voice she said, “Earl, I found something. I think it connects to Mary Margret’s murder. I am waiting here in the mall parking lot. The French woman knows the house where Mary Margret was taken. I’m—”
A hand squeezed Ginger’s shoulder, and her phone was yanked out of her hand. “Why don’t you show me what you found?” Ginger turned around slowly. Keith Wheeler, dressed in his usual cowboy boots, Levi’s, and Western shirt, grinned. He was minus a hat, but Wheeler had to be the big man Renata had made reference to. Wheeler turned the phone off.
“Nothing. I didn’t find anything.” She could barely croak out the words. “It’s just a…game my husband and I play.”
“Ah, Mrs. Salinski, you are not a good liar. I heard what you just said. Is it in the purse? I saw you put something in there.” His eyes rested on the fishing pole. “Is that where she hid it? Your friend glanced back at the basket right before we left. I started to get a feeling, so I sent.… Then you had to go and take the stuff. Mary Margret told me she had hidden it on her garage sale route.” His face muscles tensed. “She spent half the day leading me on a wild-goose chase.”
If he was with Mary Margret, Wheeler couldn’t have been the one who chased her that Saturday. “And then you killed her.”
Wheeler raised an eyebrow but did not respond.
Anger like she had never known flared through her muscles. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Wheeler were involved in Mary Margret’s death. And maybe the other city commissioner, what was his name? Stenengarter. Where had she heard that name before? Wheeler stood close enough to grab her if she tried to run.
He snatched the broken fishing pole. “This wasn’t with the stuff when we finally found the garage sale things.”
There was that “we” again. Found the garage sale things must have been his euphemism for breaking and entering. They must have broken in a second time. The first time the garage sale stuff had been with her. Ginger straightened her back. A lucky accident or God’s protection?
After he peered inside the broken reel, he tossed the pole. “What did you do with it?” He grabbed the purse from her and rifled through her stuff, dropping her compact and her coupon envelope on the asphalt. His face scrunched when he pulled out the flashlight/pepper spray, but he put it back. “You will tell me what you’ve done with the confession.”
He shoved the purse back toward her. “I’m not going to let that letter slip through my hands again. It opens a Pandora’s box, and I have my business to think about. How about we go up to my office while I have someone search your car? The mall is closed. There won’t be anyone to hear you scream.”
Ginger crossed her arms. “Excuse me, I’m not going.” Her voice trembled. She glanced around the parking lot hopeful that she would see Renata.
He opened the flap of his blazer. The handle of a knife stuck out of an inside pocket. He yanked her arm, twisted it behind her, and pressed upward.
Ginger gasped. “Maybe I will go with you.” She clutched her purse to her chest with her free hand.
The closest person was a man way across the lot. With the wind blowing, he probably wouldn’t even hear her yell for help. Ginger listened to the sound of her own footsteps clicking on concrete and tried to think of what to do next.
Suzanne lay in her hospital bed and counted holes in the ceiling tiles. How much time would pass before Greg processed her request?
“You want what?” His voice floated to her in rippling waves.
“I said I want my cell phone, Greg.”
“Suz, you’re in labor.”
“I have an important call to make. And I need to make it—” Radiating pain, starting in her uterus, spiraled through her body. “Now, Greg!”
He ran over to the pile of stuff that had been brought in with Suzanne. He pulled her cell out of the purse, dropped and picked it up twice, and trotted back to her. “Here, honey, here.”
She held her hand up, indicating that he would have to wait a moment. She breathed through the contraction. Find your happy place. There it is. A store where everything is 90 percent off retail. The pain subsided.
She lay her head back down on the hospital pillow, turning slightly to enjoy the clean smell. “How far apart are the contractions?”
Greg checked his stopwatch. “Ten minutes.” He handed her the cell.
Ten minutes. She had ten minutes to call Ginger and let her know what she had found at the courthouse. Suzanne held the phone above her and pushed buttons. Ginger wasn’t answering her cell. No one picked up at home either. She tried Kindra. No answer. Even Arleta wasn’t picking up.
“Honey, will you find me a phone book? Look up Tammy Welstad for me.”
“Sure. Can I get you anything? Water? Cold cloth for your head? A sandwich?” Greg smoothed the sheets around her and patted her pillow.
Suzanne wasn’t sure why Greg was so nervous. They had been through this three times before. She spoke in a measured fashion, enunciating each word, the same technique she used with her five-year-old. “I don’t want a sandwich. I’m in labor. You know the drill. Before you look up the number, can you look in my purse for a list of names I wrote down on notebook paper? It should be on top.”
After rooting through her purse, he extended the paper toward her. She grabbed his hand and pulled him close to her face. “It’s gonna be okay. Can you relax?”
He grinned a silly half smile. “I’m never gonna get used to this part.”
She touched his cheek. “I think this should be the last one. I love my babies, but I’m tired.”
“You say that every time, Suz.”
“This time I mean it.”
Greg grabbed the phone book on the nightstand and flipped through it. He rattled off the numbers while Suzanne pressed them in. Tammy picked up right away. Suzanne explained why she was calling her and not Ginger and then read off a list of names and explained the mall connection.
“Stenengarter.” Tammy repeated. “He used to be a city commissioner? Twenty years ago he would have been barely out of his teens. What is the first name?”
“Jeffrey.”
“Oh, his dad. Business owner. Former state senator, thinking about running again.”
“I’d love to chat, Tammy.” She lifted her head slightly from the hospital bed. An intense twisting heat whirled in her abdomen, threatening to become a full-blown tornado. “But I have to have a baby right now.”
She hung up just as the pain folded into a tight knot and exploded through her.
“Please, you’re hurting me.” Searing white stabs penetrated Ginger’s arm.
Wheeler pushed up even harder on her elbow. He had directed her to the back of the mall, where there were fewer streetlights. Without turning her head, she surveyed the parking lot. Nobody, not a single person, moved through the lot. But there were still a few cars. If she walked slowly, maybe a clerk or a store manager who had stayed late would come out of one of the back doors. And maybe they wouldn’t think she was nuts if she screamed for help.
“So do you manage the mall? Is that why you have an office?”
“I own the mall.” He pulled the knife, still in its sheath, out of his inside pocket. An action she ironically welcomed because it meant that he let up on her arm. Her triceps and shoulder burned.
Wheeler was probably Mary Margret’s killer. If time had run out on the bribery, maybe the discovery of the confession made them fear that something else would surface. Wheeler had said it opened a Pandora’s box. But what? From Earl’s episodes of The Rockford Files, she remembered that the only crime that time didn’t run out on was murder.
Ginger assessed the possibilities for cover if she made a run for it. The only option was a Dumpster about forty yards away. Not close enough. Wheeler was probably not only stronger than her but faster. “I thought Mr. Jackson owned the mall.”
“Did you learn all that by reading the c
onfession you say you don’t have?” His hot breath stained her cheek.
Even in the dim light, his eyes held a flash of intensity that suggested the level of violence he might be capable of. How had Mr. Wheeler ended up with the mall if it had been Mr. Jackson’s investment? “I think I read it in a newspaper. The same one Mary Margret was looking at.”
“Your friend was quite the little Miss Marple.” He released her from his grip and pushed her toward a door that said Employees Only.
His cell phone rang. Before answering the phone, he unsheathed the knife, backed her up against the door, and held the knife an inch from her stomach. “’Lo.” He kept his eyes on her, twirling the knife. “You what?” He spat the words out. His cheeks and nose crimsoned. “You were just supposed to follow them and watch. I’ve got the one who has it.”
The voice on the other end of the line was frantic enough for Ginger to hear but not discern words.
“You messed up again. We can’t let them go. The trail has to be wiped out.” Wheeler pressed his lips together. “You tell me. All of this would have died if it hadn’t been for your big mistake fifteen years ago.” He pressed the end button and shook his head.
“Who can’t you let go?” Judging from the vein popping out on Wheeler’s forehead, something had gone wrong.
“Change of plans. We are not going to my office until I can put this fire out.” His snarled as he punched in another number. “Are you in the shop? I have someone who needs to be babysat.” He hung up.
He shoved a key card into her hand. Its sharp edge sliced across her palm. “Open the door and step inside; then go two doors down.” Wheeler raised the knife a little higher.
Ginger swiped the key. He wasn’t going to put that knife down anytime soon. “I thought arrows were your weapon of choice.”
“You talk too much.” He grabbed the key card out of her hand. “Now open the door and go inside.”
Ginger pushed down on the cold steel handle, eased open the door, and stared into blackness. She bent across the threshold but couldn’t see a thing.