The dry, lifeless prose, accompanied by the steady patter of rain against the windows, lulled her into a contented sleepiness. She rested her head on her forearms and listened as the storm became more and more violent, whipping the cypresses against the window with a rhythmic scraping. A stray branch hit the window with a loud pop that made her jerk upright in her deep chair.
A bolt of lightening shot through the sky and the lights flickered.
Just the storm, Kate thought, enjoying its power. She closed her book and turned off the lamp to watch the storm blowing in off the Pacific, a sou’wester coming up from Mexico. It moved in rapidly, as if it could extinguish the sun just rising in the east.
Fat drops of rain pecked at the oriel windows, like birds trying to get in out of the storm. Below her, the spine of burned beach stairs was awash in a torrent of mud. With few plant roots to hold it after the fire, the sandy soil mixed with the rain and washed down to the beach in long shafts, like slices from a cake.
The burned stairway, parts of it still connected together, floated on a shifting base of mud, slithering down the face of the bluff. Kate watched the ruins until they were nothing more than a spill of burned lumber heaped on the sand. When they were gone, she felt cut off, as if some vital escape route had disappeared.
On the desk behind her the telephone rang. She yawned and reached for it.
“Hello?”
“Die, bitch.”
“Shit.” She slammed down the receiver, then picked it up again and listened. Someone was there, at least the other end was still off the hook. She could hear something on the line, a familiar hollow background fuzz. The call had been made on the house phone. Someone was inside the house.
Kate ran down the hall, trying to control her fear, trying to keep her steps quiet. She opened her bedroom door.
Tejeda was still tucked under the blanket as she’d left him, his back to the door.
“Roger.” She gently shook his shoulder. “Wake up. Someone’s here.”
When he didn’t respond, she shook him harder. “Wake up, dammit.”
He fell onto his back and she gagged. The right side of his face was a mound of blue and red pulp, his eye lost in swollen pads of oozing flesh.
“Not you,” she sobbed, ripping the blanket back to listen to his chest. Under the smooth skin the faint breath came in irregular gasps. She covered him again to keep him warm, then reached for the telephone.
The line was still open. As long as it was, she couldn’t call out for help. She didn’t want to leave him, but she had to get him help. Fast. She had to find an open telephone. She tried to count. There were six, maybe eight extensions in the house.
As she leaned over Tejeda to check him again before leaving, a hot hand gripped her throat from behind, another pressed something cold and sharp against the corner of her eye.
“Don’t move.” It was the raspy voice from the telephone.
Kate was caught in an awkward stance, half-leaning with nothing to support her. She knew that she couldn’t stay that way for long. Though she didn’t dare move even her eyes, the feet on the floor behind her were within her focus. The feet looked heavy in plastic rain shoes, but the ankles were trim. The ankles in the torn photograph.
“Let me stand up, Mina.”
“Stay where you are. You can die here with your policeman.”
“Why?” Kate tried to seem calm. “At least tell me why I have to die.”
The line of cold metal moved to press the sinews of her throat. “All right. Stand up.” The metal pressed harder. “But slowly. This is Dolph’s straight razor, and it’s very sharp. I stropped it myself.”
“Is Dolph okay?” Kate felt her anguish growing as she thought of all the others who might be Mina’s targets.
“Dolph can’t die until you do. Otherwise, what’s the point of it all?”
“Point of what?” Kate asked. It was so ludicrous to think of Mina as a desperate killer that Kate, out of nervousness and shock, kept waiting for her to say it was a big joke. “You don’t want to kill me, Mina.”
“Don’t patronize me, young lady. You sound like Dolph. Always so superior.” Mina was shorter than Kate, and although her grip was tight, her arms had to get tired sooner or later from reaching up. She shifted slightly and the blade of the razor nicked Kate’s throat, no more than a slip while shaving. “I won’t fail this time.”
Kate felt a trickle of blood run behind the collar of her robe. Shrinking as far from the blade as she could, she tried to find some reason for what was happening. And to think of some way to disarm Mina without getting her throat slashed.
“This isn’t necessary,” Kate said, imagining the blade slicing through her vocal cords if she antagonized Mina. “I won’t let Dolph disown Reece.”
“Reece!” Mina cackled derisively. “You damned fool. Reece can take care of himself. It’s me. I’m being dispossessed in your favor. Dolph is leaving me in your care.”
“I can assign his estate to you.”
“But it’s mine. I earned it. After all those years, putting up with crap from your mother and everybody. No more.” Her thin fingers dug into Kate’s throat. “I’ll be damned before I take any handouts from you or any other Byrd again. For the birds.”
Kate felt Mina draw the razor back, ready to cut deep. She managed to twist in Mina’s grasp, so that the blade missed her throat and glanced off her chin. Kate raised her shoulder to touch the insistent itch where the blade touched her, and felt hot, wet blood. The razor was so sharp she hadn’t felt it cut.
“Mina, please,” she said, hoping to buy time. Mina couldn’t hold her in this insane grip much longer before her muscles gave out. Beside her, Tejeda’s breath became a ragged whistle. Any way she looked at it, she didn’t have much time.
“Your friend sounds bad,” Mina said. Kate understood from the little giggle at the end that she was enjoying the slow torture. It gave her hope, letting Mina draw it out until Kate could find her opportunity.
“My mother’s head looked worse than Tejeda’s,” Kate said. “Did you do it?”
“No. Miles did.”
“But you helped him?”
“I just sort of urged him on. It was pretty easy. He hated Margaret almost as much as I did. I told him she was making you divorce Carl, to cut him out of any hope of inheritance. Then I said Margaret would dump Miles in an institution and tear down his house. That’s all it really took. I faked a phone call from the women’s shelter to lure her out. Then he took her downtown and bashed her head in.”
Kate felt Mina relaxing. The blade still pressed into the side of her neck hard enough so that Kate felt her jugular pulsing against it. But the left hand was weakening.
“What did you do to Miles?” Kate asked, keeping Mina busy.
“Sooner or later he was going to talk, so I switched his Dilantin for sugarless mints. All the pressure he was under, it wouldn’t take long.
“You know the best part?” Mina sighed, almost trancelike. Her elbow dipped slightly, but she caught herself and pressed the razor harder against Kate’s neck. “That last day, when I was sure he wasn’t ever coming to his senses and I left the hospital. Before you or Dolph came. I was going home, but I couldn’t remember where I parked my car. Then you drove up in your mother’s black heap, and it gave me the idea. I’m sorry I missed, but it was a damned good try.”
“So were the other tries, the stones on the beach stairs, the lye in the sugar.”
“Yes they were. The stones were inspiration. I was in the gazebo that night, trying to figure out how I was going to stop you from looking for the baby, when you came out and stood there. Like you were waiting for me.”
Kate saw her advantage while Mina preened. She grabbed the arm with the blade and backed away from it, butting Mina’s face with the back of her head. As they struggled, the razor sliced down Kate’s cheek like a sliver of ice.
Once she was away from the razor, the advantage was Kate’s. She threw Mina onto the bed,
wedging the right hand with the blade underneath her. She twisted the thin wrist until she heard bones crack, and the right hand fell open.
Kate snatched up the razor and folded it into its handle and threw it across the room. Then she yanked Mina up off the bed, to keep her as far away from Tejeda as possible, and held her pinned against the wall.
“Why?” she demanded. “Was it all for money?”
Mina spat in her face and Kate shook her, letting her head bounce against the flowered wallpaper.
“Tell me why!” She raised a hand to slap Mina but, even in her fury, wasn’t sure she could do it.
“All right.” Mina shielded her face with her free hand. “I did it for my son. So you wouldn’t spoil everything for my son.”
“Your son?” Kate anticipated new tricks while thinking that maybe Mina truly was insane. “You have no son. You went to Mexico and had an abortion.”
“You’re wrong. Helga had an abortion. I had a son.”
“Reece?”
“No, you idiot. Carl.”
“That’s crazy.”
Mina began to shake and Kate was afraid she would faint. Or worse. She moved her to the closest chair and sat her down, holding her shoulders against the seat back. “If Carl is your son, why did Helga claim him?”
“I couldn’t have taken a baby home. Dolph had been gone a year already. He would have divorced me. Alone I had nothing, no way to support a baby. So we made a deal, Helga and I. She would claim that Carl was hers so that Miles would support her.”
“And what did you get?”
“My baby lived.”
“Mina.” Kate knelt down in front of her, feeling terrible about the rough treatment she had given her aunt, no matter how necessary. “How did this start? Miles had taken care of Carl. We wouldn’t let Mother get control of Miles’s estate. Everything was safe.”
“No it wasn’t,” Mina sobbed. “Your damned mother found a snapshot of me and Carl in Mexico when he was confirmed in the church. She knew when I was pregnant and she figured it all out. She was the most devious, ruthless woman on the face of this earth, and I hated her!
“Your mother blackmailed me. If I didn’t help her get Miles put away she was going to tell. Then it would be all over for both Carl and me. Miles would change his will. Dolph would divorce me. And you would have everything Carl should have had.”
Tejeda groaned and, in reflex, Kate glanced toward him. Mina took advantage of the moment and brought her knee up under Kate’s chin, sending her sprawling backward. Like a thing possessed, Mina sprang from the chair and across the room to where Kate had flung the razor.
Kate dashed after her, grabbing for her but missing. As Mina reached the razor, Kate rolled across the corner of the bed and landed on the floor on the far side of Tejeda. She yanked the drawer out of the bedside table and found his service revolver.
She cocked the hammer and aimed the heavy blue gun at Mina’s midsection. “Put down the razor, Mina. Miles taught me how to use one of these things.”
“But you won’t.” Mina opened the razor and took a step toward her. “You sniveled for a week after Miles shot an elk. You won’t shoot me.”
“Just come downstairs with me.” Kate felt better with the big weapon in her hand. “I have to get help.”
“Did you ever notice?” Mina turned her head to one side coquettishly, “that Carl has your father’s eyes?”
Mina and her father? The revolver sagged in Kate’s hands.
Mina leaped toward Tejeda, the point of her blade like the needle of a compass aimed at his neck.
The police special slug caught Mina in midair and flung her on her back before Kate even felt its heavy recoil.
TWENTY-ONE
TEJEDA OPENED HIS UNBANDAGED EYE and looked at Kate. “What time is it?”
“Tuesday.” Kate closed the awful book about Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists and walked over to her bed and sat down beside him. She checked the gauze turban that circled his head before she bent to kiss him.
“Where’s Theresa?”
“At school. Mrs. Murphy will bring her here at three.”
“Does my head hurt?”
“It should. You have a fractured skull and about two dozen stitches.”
He squinted his eye and looked at her again. “What’s that thing on your face?”
“Combat ribbons.” She touched the twin line of tiny sutures that vee’d from the corner of her mouth to her chin and back up along her jawline.
Color was coming back into his one visible cheek. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Lieutenant. But you’re going to have one hell of a shiner.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1987 by Wendy Hornsby
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
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No Harm (The Kate Teague Mysteries Book 1) Page 23