by Mark McNease
“Ah,” Pucky said, seeing the drinks. “You’re enjoying the Monster Mashes. I have no idea what’s in them. Creme de Menthe from the look of it.”
“Please,” Danny said, “have mine.”
Pucky thought about it a moment, then agreed, taking the green drink and sipping. He made a face as if to say the Monster Mash was monstrous, and put the drink back on the table.
The conversation veered away then from emails, murders and criminals. Pucky told them about his life in Key West, and how his only regret is that he didn’t go there more often with Stu. He talked about life on the island and his neighbors, and the near-perfect climate. Kyle could tell by the tone of his voice and the sadness that kept coming into his eyes that life in the Keys, while no doubt as enjoyable as Pucky said it was, was still life without Stu and that hole would never be filled.
“You could always come back here,” Danny said. “Maybe in the summers.”
“No,” Pucky said. “My time has passed here. I’m sure they’d have me, and maybe even put me to work! But we have to let go eventually. Of everything, and everyone.”
“The timing was certainly perfect,” Kyle said. “You wanted to go, and Sid and Dylan were there. I can’t imagine what would have happened to this place if Sid hadn’t had the money.”
Pucky looked at him. “Sid?” he said. “Oh, Sid didn’t have the money. Jeremy did.”
Kyle stared at him. “Jeremy?” he said. “Old Jeremy who sits in the chair for hours and stays up till two in the morning?”
“What other Jeremy is there? He lent them the money, I know that for a fact.”
The significance of this information was lost on Danny and Detective Sikorsky. They both waited for Kyle to speak, not sure where he was going with this.
“Pucky, it’s great to see you again,” Kyle said, as he stood up quickly from the table. “You’ll have to excuse us.”
Kyle turned to Linda. “We’ve been played,” he said. “We need to go upstairs, now. Have you seen Sid or Dylan?”
“Come to think of it, no” she said.
“Now!” Kyle said again, and he lead the way as the three of them hurried out of the bar.
“Where are we going?” Danny asked as they headed up the stairs.
“To stop a murder,” Kyle replied, taking the stairs two at a time now. “I hope.”
Chapter 31
And the Winner Is . . .
Dylan was standing in the doorway to the Suite, his face frozen in shock. He was babbling under his breath as Kyle, Danny and Detective Sikorsky hurried down the hallway toward him.
“She killed him,” he said, holding out his bloody hands. “She killed Sid.”
Sikorsky eased Dylan to the side as the three of them filed into the living room. The scene was horrific. Sid was at his desk, the X-Acto knife from the pumpkin carving sticking grotesquely from his throat. And there, next to his computer keyboard, was the Cinderella pumpkin Bo Sweetzer had carved.
“I tried to save him,” Dylan said, still dazed. “I should have taken the knife out . . . I didn’t know . . . why would she do that?”
Linda Sikorsky had been to her share of murder scenes, more than one might guess for a place like New Hope, but this one ranked among the worst. Sid Stanhope was now a corpse in a chair, with a considerable amount of his blood drained from his neck onto his shirt, his pants, his shoes, the floor. No one, she knew, could lose that much blood and survive. The knife had been buried fully half its length into his neck. She did not immediately reach for her phone; calling the paramedics now was pointless. Sid was as dead as Sam Tatum had been when a mother and daughter came upon his lifeless body.
“What am I going to do?” Dylan sobbed. He buried his face in his hands.
“You can start by telling the truth,” Kyle said. There was no compassion in his voice.
Everyone turned to Kyle, startled by what he’d said.
“My husband’s dead!” Dylan shrieked. “That maniac killed him!”
“I doubt she would make it so obvious after killing two other men quite efficiently,” Kyle said coldly, staring at Dylan. “This is more the work of someone local. Someone very close to Sid. About six feet away, as a matter of fact.”
Dylan suddenly seemed not quite so shocked, not quite so shaken by the death of his partner, as he began to quickly appraise the situation. Kyle could see it in his eyes, the instant calculation.
“The police are already here,” Dylan said, and to Linda, “Arrest her! She can’t be far, you have to find her! Do something!”
Detective Linda Sikorsky thought she’d seen it all, but this was rattling her. The only clear victim in the room was dead in a chair. But who was the killer? Who should she be arresting?
Kyle glanced out the window then and saw a pair of taillights disappearing down the road. “I think she’s gone by now,” he said, turning back to them. “Probably hours ago.”
“But Sid stole the money,” Dylan cried, desperate to cast the blame on anyone but himself. “And he did something terrible, years ago, it was in that email. Someone wanted him dead.”
“They did indeed,” Kyle said. “There was no embezzlement. Sid was a criminal, there’s no doubt about that, but he didn’t steal a dime from the bank. The money came from old Jeremy. Dylan only wanted us to think Sid was a thief.”
“Why in hell would I want that?” Dylan demanded, now a very different man from the one who’d been standing in the doorway when they came up the stairs.
“Because it’s all yours now,” Kyle replied. “Or it would have been, had Pucky not shown up. Not a bad plan, Dylan. Not a flawless one, but you could have gotten away with it. Sid gone, the Lodge and inheritance, whatever there was, yours free and clear with just a sizable loan to repay. Bo Sweetzer—or should I say Emily Lapinsky—blamed for the murders. Who would believe her if she denied it? And Jeremy bankrolling the whole thing, unaware of what you’ve done. He is unaware, isn’t he? I just can’t see him as a partner in crime.”
“You’re out of your mind. She killed him. I have no idea why she was careless. For the same reason she brought the pumpkin, so everyone would know it was her!”
“You mean so everyone would think it was her.”
Linda Sikosrky stepped toward Dylan. “You’re under arrest, Mr. Tremblay.”
“Arrest? Me?! For what?!” Dylan shouted.
“For finishing the job Bo Sweetzer started,” Kyle said. “For Teddy, for poor Happy, just a kid who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Is that what happened, he told you what Teddy told him, what Teddy found out, and the wheels were set in motion? You’re a monster, Dylan. And as bad a man as Sid was, I wish he’d lived to know it.”
Dylan thought about running, dashing out of the room and through the Lodge front door, but he knew there was nowhere to go. How far could he get? Everything he owned was here. Better to try and talk his way out of this later. What proof was there? He’d been careful every step of the way. He would find a way out of this, he believed that, he had to believe it. In the meanwhile it was time to be silent, to give them nothing that could and would be used against him, and to think.
Detective Sikorsky finally pulled out her phone and started making calls. The coroner’s office for a dead man, back up to help her get Dylan Tremblay to the station house. It was going to be a very long night.
Chapter 32
In the Rearview Mirror
She’d had the chance to do it, then and there, and yet she had refrained. Hesitated. Was it the influence of her evening with the woman she would never see again, the beguiling detective from New Hope? Or had vengeance run long enough through her veins?
She’d left her room and headed downstairs when she was suddenly, strangely, compelled to see this man face-to-face again. She had thought her reasoning was to tell him the end was near. So near, in fact, it was here, right then and there, and she would shoot him in his doorway. But when he had answered her knock—her hand sliding to her waist where the gun could be slip
ped out quickly—she had stopped hating, just for an instant, just long enough for the two of them to stare silently at one another.
Finally, she said to the man she had been waiting thirty years to kill, “Why did you do that to me?”
Sid thought a long moment, even as he expected to die any second, and said, “You weren’t supposed to be there.”
“Well,” Bo said to him, “I was. And now, I’m here. I’ll be downstairs, waiting. I know you’ll come. There’s no way around this. You know that as well as I do. “
Sid nodded. She was right. He could run, but she would find him. She was that determined. He had closed the door then and gone back to his desk to sit and think. Maybe the best thing to do was call the police, to give himself up, to be done with it once and for all. He was trying to decide his course of action when the door opened and Dylan came in, carrying a pumpkin.
Bo knew they would probably catch up with her eventually. When she saw the three of them rush out of the bar—Kyle, Danny and the detective—she knew it was time to go. At first she’d thought Sid might have killed himself, but whatever had happened, an alarm had been sounded and her plans had changed in the instant. She had been at this long enough to know something big had happened, and the time for an escape was now or never.
They had not seen her. She had been alone in the crowd, watching and waiting. She had planned to give Sid another hour to show up, then she would go looking for him. He would be waiting, too, she knew that. Waiting to die, or to kill her instead. And now, just like that, everything had changed.
She drove away from Pride Lodge with nothing but her purse and a gun that would soon be rusting at the bottom of the Delaware River. She could not have gone back to her room, and she knew she was leaving everything behind her, including Bo Sweetzer. She’d glanced in the rearview mirror as she drove down the hill, wondering what name she would take next, when she swore she saw Kyle Callahan in an upstairs window. But of course he had no way of knowing it was her car, if he’d seen it at all.
She drove carefully along to the highway, thought of making a left turn, then made a right instead, and disappeared into the night.
Chapter 33
Check Out Time is 11:00 a.m.
Seventeen messages. That’s how many times Imogene had tried to reach Kyle, once he added up voicemail, texts and two tweets. He’d tried to tell her that, while he had a Twitter account for his photoblog feed that would send out new posts with photos when he put them up, he never actually tweeted. Not with his phone, not with his thumbs, not in any way. So trying to reach him @AsKyleSeesIt was like people who tried to communicate with him through Facebook messages. He seldom ever looked to see what was there.
It didn’t matter anyway. He had seen Imogene’s car drive past ten minutes earlier. There weren’t many like it, a vintage, pink 1968 Mustang that only Imogene Landis would be seen driving. He knew she was at the Lodge now, already asking questions, and he regretted having called her in the first place. Danny was right: it was unseemly, and it appeared, however much Kyle told himself the appearance was deceiving, to be taking advantage of a particularly bad situation. Three people were dead, not counting the men in Los Angeles and Detroit. Having a mouthy livewire like Imogene show up with a microphone, reporter’s notebook and handlheld HD camera made it all seem so . . . DeathWatchNewHope.
“You can’t hide forever,” Danny said, putting the last of his clothes in his suitcase. “She’s at the desk now, pestering poor Ricki for details. Ricki and anyone else unlucky enough to show up this early.”
“I never should have called her,” Kyle said. He was packing up his camera, wondering if he’d taken any good pictures at all, then feeling guilty for caring.
“It’s not so much that you called her, Sweetie,” Danny said. “But that you never called her again!”
“We were a little busy,” Kyle reminded him. “We spent what, two hours at the police station giving statements? I didn’t get to sleep until three a.m. this morning, and that was fitful.”
“Murder doesn’t care. Hell, we’re lucky that’s all the time we were there. At least we get to leave! Dylan Tremblay won’t be seeing the outside of a jail cell for a very long time.”
“Nor should he,” Kyle said, with a little too much righteousness.
“Nor should he,” Danny agreed.
The two then fell silent as they continued packing for their exit from Pride Lodge. Finally, Danny said, “Do you think they’ll find her?”
“It would only be right,” Kyle said, not looking at him. He knew it was highly unlikely that the taillights he’d seen from the upstairs window were those of Bo Sweetzer. They hadn’t even known she’d fled until later, when the police who came to support Linda Sikorsky found no trace of her except the clothes and pocket watch she’d left in her room. And even if they had been her taillights, what was he supposed to have done? Cried out for someone to chase her? He knew he was simply feeling guilty for having wanted her to get away.
“She’s a murderer, after all,” Kyle said, closing his suitcase. “It would only be right.”
When they got to the check out desk Kyle glanced around nervously and asked Ricki in a hushed voice, “Where’s Imogene?”
“You mean Genie? The reporter lady?”
Ricki was unusually alert and seemed more than a little excited. Kyle knew it meant he must have already been interviewed, however quickly. An interview with Imogene meant flattery, a wink if the person she was talking to was a straight man, and letting a desk clerk at a countryside gay resort call her “Genie.” That really was the giveaway. No one called Imogene Landis “Genie” and lived to tell about it. Except Ricki. Kyle could see it now, the not-too-sophisticated man who’d never lived in a place with more than a few thousand people in it calling the diminutive newswoman “Genie,” the way a waitress in a roadside diner calls everyone “Sweetheart,” and Imogene saying, “You can call me Genie, everyone does.” Anything for the story.
“Yes, her,” Danny interjected.
“Oh, she’s out by the pool talking to the twins. They’re on set-up today.”
“She’ll love that,” Kyle said. “What murder in the woods is complete without a set of identical twins? But it gives us a chance to get out of here. I’ll just say I didn’t see her, didn’t know she’d come. Give me ten minutes down the road and I’ll call.”
“As long as you tell her we’re just about into the Lincoln Tunnel. No turning around! You know she’ll ask.”
It was then Kyle realized that the Lodge had gone on, even with Sid dead and Dylan in jail. He and Danny had missed the coroner’s van coming to take Sid’s body away. They’d missed the other cops helping to handcuff and incarcerate Dylan. They’d wanted to be away from it as quickly as possible and had headed to the police station in their own car as soon as backup for Detective Sikorsky arrived.
“What happened?” Kyle asked quietly.
“Oh, she asked a few questions, took some footage,” Ricki said.
Footage, Kyle thought. Of course Ricki would consider a few minutes on a digital video camera footage, as if he were going to see his name in the final credits at an Imax.
“No,” he said. “I mean last night, after . . . you know.”
“If you mean, did the band play on? Yes, it did. They put yellow tape up outside the Master Suite, but most of the people downstairs never knew what went on. The cops weren’t interested in them, and the staff wasn’t about to empty the place. It’s our best weekend!”
That thought struck Kyle and Danny both. Dancers danced on, drinkers drank on. Halloween weekend at Pride Lodge celebrated and partied unfazed as the lives of the very people who provided it were destroyed.
“I told them to stay the course,” a voice said from behind them. “They weren’t being greedy, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Kyle and Danny turned to see Jeremy standing just a few feet away, leaning slightly on a cane in his left hand. He was doing just fine without the walker
today. He seemed much sturdier this way, not like the frail old man everyone imagined him to be. Kyle wondered if that had been what he wanted them all to think. He was a cagey sort, an observer and listener, for whatever his purposes.
“Pucky told me you were the silent partner here,” Kyle said. “That’s how I knew, how the pieces fell together. Dylan wanted me, Sikorsky, everyone, to think Sid had stolen all that money.”
“They weren’t a happy couple,” Jeremy said. “At least not Dylan. Sid, probably, he was older, his options more limited, by time if nothing else. But Dylan wanted his freedom, as long as it came with the property.”
“If you knew all this, why didn’t you say anything?” Danny asked.
“Say anything about what? I never imagined Dylan Tremblay would kill people to get what he wanted. I thought he’d stick it out, maybe try for something in a divorce. Honestly, I thought he would even just wait it out. Sid was in poor health, he’d probably die at least twenty years before Dylan. The whole thing is conjecture anyway.”
“Correction, Jeremy,” Kyle said. “Teddy dead at the bottom of the pool is not conjecture. Happy dead in a creek is not conjecture. And Sid dead upstairs with a knife sticking out of his neck is not conjecture.”
Jeremy had defended himself as much as he intended to. “ I can’t help it that my imagination is not as vivid as yours, Kyle,” he said with a shrug. “We’re going to need new innkeepers here. I don’t suppose I could get the two of you . . . “
“Not on your life,” Danny said. “Pride Lodge is a great place to visit, and I’m sure we’ll be back, but running a resort is the last thing I would ever want.”
“True, true,” the old man said. “I expect you’ll be running Margaret’s Passion soon enough. No one lives forever, it’s just the way life goes. But have it your way. For now I’ve got Ricki, the twins, Cowboy Dave, everyone really, except the owners! Oh wait, that’s me.”
“So the place is yours?” Kyle asked.
“It is now,” Jeremy said. “Sid and Dylan made monthly payments to me, with Pride Lodge itself as collateral. If for any reason the loan was not paid off, which I imagine it won’t be now, the Lodge becomes mine. Had I died first that wouldn’t be the case. Apparently Dylan didn’t think of everything or I’d be the one dead at the bottom of a pool. I’m not the old fool people take me for, you know.”