Bloody Kin

by Margaret Maron

  “But, Kate—”

  “We’ll have to ask Rob again exactly when he hired Tom,” she interrupted. “I wish I could remember what he said the other day about not going through the college. The first caretaker quit or something and Tom’s supposed to have heard about Gilead from him. That was after school started, though, which means sometime later in September. After your accident.”

  Her brow furrowed as she tried to keep the times straight in her mind. “Everything falls into place, Gordon! He could have been in Costa Verde in time to damage the boat somehow. Yes! And Covington saw him or helped him and then came up this month to blackmail him and was killed, only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “Well,” she said slowly. “Dwight Bryant thinks Covington, not Thompson, shot Jake. He can prove that Covington was up here that weekend in October.”

  “So?”

  “So if Covington killed Jake, how could he blackmail Tom? They’d be equally guilty.”

  “Unless it wasn’t blackmail, just a falling out of thieves,” Gordon suggested. “Maybe a disagreement over the split of the spoils?”

  “But what spoils? What did Jake and James have that they wanted? Think, Gordon!”

  She dumped the contents of the wooden chest on her drawing table. A carved ivory bead rolled off the edge and Gordon bent to pick it up.

  As he stretched down, his shirt collar pulled away from the back of his neck to reveal a flat brown mole surmounted by two tiny reddish birthmarks, each no larger than a pinhead.

  In a flash of déjà vu, Kate was transported back to a dinner party at Patricia and Philip Carmichael’s penthouse. She could almost hear the murmured small talk and the clink of glasses. Her dinner partner had dropped his fork and, as he leaned over beside her to retrieve it, she had noticed an inconspicuous triad of birthmarks and mole ordinarily hidden by the collar of his shirt.

  “James?” she gasped. “You’re James?”

  He jerked upright and all the color drained from his face. “What are you saying?”

  “N-nothing,” she stammered, instantly aware of enormous danger. “I thought for a minute—so stupid of me—in this light, you reminded me so much of James. But that’s silly. Of course you would. You were brothers.”

  “Too late, Kate,” he said heavily. “I was afraid of this.”

  He studied her bleakly and regret shadowed his gaze. “We met so few times that I thought you wouldn’t know me without my mustache, or that you’d be like all the others and assume I only resembled James because no one here had ever seen Gordon without a beard. What made you suddenly recognize me?”

  He doesn’t know about the marks on his neck, she thought, and found herself remembering the night Mary Pat lay with her head on his shoulder and sang about a spotted pony. Mary Pat knew! That’s why she thought things could change overnight. James was in the habit of giving her piggyback rides and she recognized the back of James’s neck even though everyone told her this was Uncle Gordon.

  “You bastard!” she blurted angrily. “You killed Jake!”

  “No!” His hands clenched his ornate walking stick until his knuckles whitened around its heavy carving. “No, that was Bernie, not me. It was all his idea, not mine. You must believe me, Kate. When Rob called me and said Jake was dead—”

  There was no mistaking the anguish in his face, but Kate was beyond caring for his pain. “You may not have pulled the trigger, but Jake’s dead because he was the one person who would keep you from masquerading here as Gordon. I suppose you killed Elaine and Gordon, too?”

  “No, no, NO!” he cried. “That’s not how it happened. Good God, Kate, what kind of monster do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know, James. You tell me.”

  “The boat accident was real,” he said earnestly. “The mast snapped in the storm, she took too much water for the pumps to handle and she sank. That’s the truth. At least, it’s the truth so far as I know. What I said about partial amnesia was true, too. I really don’t remember what happened that afternoon. It was days before I began to regain consciousness. I had a severe concussion, my leg was broken, my jaw was broken, too, and wired shut for good measure. I was in and out of a coma for weeks. The doctors and nurses were all Mexican. They told me that my brother and Señora Tyrrell had drowned and that was all. I didn’t realize there’d been a mix-up, that they had me on their charts as Gordon, until they let me have visitors and Covington was the first one in. He’d come to offer condolences, I suppose. I could talk a little between clenched teeth, so to speak, and I greeted him familiarly when he walked in.”

  “So you had been seeing him in Costa Verde before the accident?”

  “Oh, yes. We’d kept in touch. In fact, you might even say we were business associates. Bernie was my supplier and we’d done a little dealing.”

  “Drugs?” Kate was surprised. She’d never associated him with drugs.

  “Don’t look so shocked. I’m not talking hard-core addicts, just people getting a happy buzz on after dinner. You must have friends who are into recreational drugs. A little coke, a little speed. That’s all this was. I didn’t let Gordon know because Elaine was straitlaced about drugs, even though this was nothing worse than Lacy and his moonshine that everybody thinks is so cute—just enough to keep my friends happy and give me some extra pocket money.”

  Kate looked scornful and James shrugged.

  “Anyhow, Bernie realized I was James and tumbled to the possibilities immediately. I’d told him about Patricia’s will at the time Elaine and Gordon became Mary Pat’s guardians, and he was the one who saw that with Gordon dead, I was back out in the cold; but with the authorities thinking it was brother James who had drowned, I could have it all. I told him it was crazy, but he made me promise to think about it.”

  “And it only took you five minutes to decide,” Kate said bitterly.

  “As a matter of fact, it was closer to three weeks,” he answered quietly. “Bernie trotted out every argument he could think of. You know what finally tipped the balance?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Mary Pat. That poor child had seen everybody who ever loved her stripped away, one by one. I had no legal right to her, but I was the only one left who could provide continuity. And by then—” He hesitated and his eyes dropped.

  “By then, Jake was dead?” she whispered.

  “I had nothing to do with that,” he repeated again. “I admit I wanted to pass as Gordon. Hell! Why not? Gordon was dead. Nothing could bring him back, so why should I have thrown away everything without at least considering it? It wasn’t as if I were taking anything from Mary Pat. If Gordon had lived, the money would have been his, so what difference did it make if I took his place?

  “I honestly didn’t think I could pull it off, though. When the bandages came off, I saw they’d shaved my mustache. Covington said that I could blame the accident for any apparent changes and that no one would think twice about Gordon looking like James. They’d put it down to seeing his face without a beard for the first time in twenty years. And it’s true that none of Gordon’s friends there in Costa Verde was the least suspicious. Jake was the only one I had to worry about.”

  James’s voice slowed as if he was picking his words with care and judging their effect on Kate.

  “There was a letter from Jake on my bed when Covington came that Thursday morning. He’d wired condolences earlier, but this was a letter offering to come down to Costa Verde if there was anything he could do to help me. It was a wonderful letter, Kate. He talked about Vietnam and the things we’d done together after we got back to the States. The more I thought about it, the more I knew I couldn’t avoid seeing him and he’d know as soon as we met that I wasn’t Gordon.”

  He took a deep breath and looked away from her steady gaze. “I showed Covington the letter. I swear to you, Kate, that I only let him read it to prove how well Jake knew me.”

  “And Jake had mentioned in the letter that he was coming down to the far
m that weekend,” she guessed.

  “Yes.”

  In the silence that fell, Kate was wrenched with fresh grief, recalling how stricken Jake had been when he learned that his cousin Elaine and his old friend James had both drowned. He was only waiting to hear that Gordon was out of the hospital and on the mend before he flew down to Costa Verde to offer his sympathy face-to-face.

  “If I’d known what Covington was planning, I’d have sent for the doctors right away and told them the truth about who I was. He must have realized I would because he went away before visiting hours were over and he didn’t come back all weekend. When Rob called Monday to tell me about Jake, I just lay there stunned. You don’t know what a shock it was after losing Gordon and Elaine. Later, I realized that now I could be Gordon. I guess I’m not too bright, because it was at least two hours after that before it dawned on me that Jake’s hunting accident was just a little too coincidental. When Covington walked into my room Monday night, I took one look at his face and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. I was so damn angry that he’d killed Jake I wanted to call the policía and have him lynched.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. Again, what was the point? Much as I loved Jake—and I did love him, Kate—telling wouldn’t bring him back, would it?”

  “No,” she said tonelessly.

  “You don’t believe me,” he sighed. “I can’t blame you. But I swore to myself then and there that Bernie Covington was going to pay for Jake’s death.”

  “How very noble. So you brought Mary Pat back to Gilead to play lord of the manor. Why steal those pictures?”

  “The wicked flee when no man pursueth, I suppose,” he said, with one of his engaging lopsided smiles.

  Kate was past being charmed. “You thought someone would recognize you from those old snapshots?”

  “I should have left well enough alone,” he admitted. “I just don’t understand how my chest got here, though. I hid it in an old suitcase up in the attic and the next time I checked, it was gone. I found it in the Whitley bedroom, but the chest wasn’t there.”

  “You were that thief, too? You took Sally’s earrings?”

  “I had to make it look like a real burglary,” he said sheepishly.

  “Then someone else knows!”

  “Not necessarily. By the time the police came, the suitcase was back in the attic. I’d say it was Sally, only she’s as timid as a field mouse.”

  “She hasn’t been here, so it must have been Tom.”

  “Who cares?” James said impatiently. “Anything he says or does from now on is going to look suspicious.”

  “You’re wrong,” she said and pushed away from the drawing table in a rush for the door, but he reached out with his cane and tripped her so that she fell heavily to the floor.

  She tried to get up, but James brandished the heavy stick. “Be sensible, Kate,” he coaxed.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, sinking back to the floor.

  “I don’t know yet. I’ve got to think.” His voice broke. “Oh, God, let me think!”

  “It’s all coming apart. There’s no way you can kill me and make it look like an accident. Too many people know you’re here right now. Lacy knows we were going to take a walk and you must have told someone at Gilead where you would be.”

  He didn’t answer, but she could almost see his brain at work, furiously trying to conjure a scenario that would fit all the details.

  “Okay,” he said at last, and Kate was chilled by the cold resolution in his tone. “There’s no way to keep up the charade, so listen very carefully. I’ve got to hide you somewhere for a few hours, long enough for me to get to Raleigh and put together some cash and then disappear. I don’t want to hurt you, Kate, but I will if you make me.”

  He searched for a threat that would keep her cooperative. “If you want that baby, you’d better do exactly as I say, because I promise you that if you make me hit you with this stick, I’ll aim for the baby first. Do you understand?”

  Kate was appalled to realize that he meant it, and she crossed her arms over her abdomen protectively. “I understand,” she said shakily.

  James scanned the studio until he spotted some electrical flex that Tom had left on a nearby countertop. “Okay, stand up and put your hands behind you,” he ordered.

  He bound her wrists together tightly and left a length of the plastic-covered wire to act as a leash. From the box of soft rags Kate kept to wipe pens and brushes with, he took strips to act as an eventual gag.

  “You’re not going to put me in the pit, are you?” she asked fearfully.

  “No, they’d find you too fast here.”

  “Like Bernie Covington?”

  “I would have moved him that night, but my leg gave out on me.”

  “Why did you really kill him? It couldn’t have been for Jake’s sake. That was five months ago.”

  “He was getting greedy,” James admitted. “He wanted a bigger percentage of Gordon’s trust fund than I could spare. I told him to meet me here and we’d discuss it. We’d met here before, so he didn’t suspect a thing. I should have loaded his body in his car and left it a hundred miles from here, but I couldn’t manage with my leg.”

  He opened the studio door and took a good look around, but the lane was deserted in both directions and there was no sign of anyone, not even the dogs.

  Holding tightly to the electrical cord that bound Kate’s wrists, James helped her down the packhouse steps and pointed her toward the row of abandoned tobacco barns. “Down there,” he said. “They won’t think to look there immediately.”

  It was only a few hundred feet to the low, tar-paper-covered door and James guided Kate over the step-down threshold to the dirt floor.

  The old barn was dank and musty, and ancient cobwebs draped down from the wooden tiers overhead. Ordinarily, light would have filtered through beneath the eaves and air vents under the tin roof, but generations of sparrows had blocked all the spaces with thick straw nests until there was no sunlight or moving air except that which came through the open square door.

  James guided Kate to the back of the barn, eased her down onto the damp earth and tied her to one of the wooden tier supports. He was almost gentle as he inserted the gag and left her in the gloomy corner.

  He disappeared for several minutes; then, to Kate’s horror, returned with a long thin piece of lightwood, the resinous “fatty” heart pine which Lacy often split for kindling.

  “Kate, I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I can’t leave Gilead. You can understand that, can’t you? I’m a Tyrrell and a Tyrrell without land is nothing. I’m a good steward, too. How could I give it up?”

  Terrified, Kate watched him light the wood with his cigarette lighter.

  He lifted the bonnet of the gas burner closest to Kate and holding the torch away, turned the knob.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried a second burner. “What the devil? I know there’s gas. When I opened the valve on the tank outside, the gauge still registered three-quarters full.”

  He held the torch closer and saw that the jets were clogged with dirt dauber nests. He banged them sharply and the clay fell away, and a slight hiss of gas could be heard.

  Pleased, he moved on to the third burner and repeated the maneuver, explaining as he worked. “I’ll jam this torch about halfway up the racks and it’ll burn like a candle until enough gas builds up under the rafters. I should have at least three or four hours to establish an alibi. I’ll say I came to walk with you, but you weren’t at the studio and I went on back to Gilead. By the time a fire truck gets here, it’ll be too late and they’ll think it was Willie Thompson again. Willie! I wonder where the kid really is now?”

  Kate tried to protest through the wad of cloth in her mouth, to reason with him. Only distressed murmurs were audible. “I wish you wouldn’t struggle,” he said worriedly. “Please don’t. Try to relax. Maybe the gas will put you to sleep first. I wish I didn’t have to do this. Oh, Go
d, Kate! Why did you have to recognize me?”

  Kate watched helplessly as he approached the fourth and final burner, diagonally opposite from the corner where she was bound. Lying on the dank ground, her view was blocked by the defective burner in front of her. She could only see the top of James’s head, the flickering lightwood torch and the shadows it cast on the planked walls.

  She heard James tilt back the hood and bang on the jets and she heard the hiss of gas, but there was no way for her to see the semi-comatose corn snake as it writhed from hibernation beneath the burner hood, only inches from James’s hand.

  James saw the snake’s lethargic shape, though, and with an involuntary gesture of revulsion and fear, he jabbed at it with the fiery stick.

  The gas ignited in a loud swoosh; then pressure cracked the outdated gas line and the whole burner exploded in a blast that took out the side of the barn behind James.

  The explosion sent Kate into darkness as flames raced up the tarpaper siding, devoured the sparrows’ straw nests and began in earnest on the wooden structure itself.

  CHAPTER 22

  It was well after midnight before Dwight got back to the hospital and took the elevator to the intensive care unit on the sixth floor.

  Even though a hospital is never completely quiet, footsteps are softer along the upper halls late at night, voices are hushed, and the lights are dimmer.

  The intensive care unit’s waiting lounge was nearly empty and the sleepy-eyed volunteer who manned the reception desk looked blank at Dwight’s question. “He might have gone down for coffee,” she whispered.

  At that hour, the only snack bar open in the hospital was a dreary room lined with vending machines on one wall and a row of vinyl upholstered booths on the other.

  Dwight found his brother alone, staring into a foam cup of corrosive-looking black liquid. “I’d advise against the coffee,” Rob said with a weary smile. “It’s probably how they keep the beds filled here.”

  Dwight considered his choices and selected a can of tomato juice.

  “How are they doing?” he asked as he sat down across from Rob.