The First Wife

by Diana Diamond

  Leavitt then ran to the front door and stepped out into the swirling snowstorm that the helicopter was kicking up. He waited until the skids touched down, then ducked low to get under the rotors. The door opened and William Andrews stepped out, looking grim and determined. He wore a windbreaker over his business shirt and tie. The men hurried to the house and paused while the machine lifted, hovered, and peeled away to the south. Then they stepped into the house.

  Jane had listened to the helicopter’s rumbling idle and recognized the turbine scream when it took off. It was too loud for her to hear footsteps or conversation, but she was sure that Bill was already in the house. His first question would be “Where is she?” She wondered what Leavitt would answer. She didn’t believe that he could stand up to her husband. He wouldn’t admit to letting her go. Most likely, he would say that she had escaped and fabricate a story of how she had slipped out and disappeared into the forest. Probably he would try to coax Bill into following her, which would get him out of the way and give her time to escape in the car. That was it! Leavitt had started it and left it running. He wanted her to take the car.

  She looked down at the heavy weapon she was holding in both hands. She knew exactly how to use it. Aim at the widest part of her attacker and squeeze the trigger. But she knew she never would. Maybe she could wave it as a threat and hope it frightened her assailant as much as it frightened her. But fire it at another person—at a man she knew and maybe even loved?

  She heard footsteps overhead, one person walking from the front of the house toward the kitchen. Then the door latch at the top of the stairs clicked. Jane knew she should do exactly what Robert Leavitt had told her to. Focus on the stairs. Wait for Andrews to appear. Fire to protect her life. Instead, she turned away from the stairs, opened the back door, and slipped out into the snow.

  She ran at an angle, away from the house and out of the sight line of the back door. Despite the sunlight, the cold hit her instantly, carried on a stiff northerly breeze. She tugged her jacket around her and kept her head down to protect her face. In just a few seconds she crossed the clearing and plunged into the woods surrounding the house.

  The evergreens closed behind her, giving her a momentary feeling of safety. But she knew she couldn’t stop. She had left a fresh track from the back door to where she entered the forest. She had to keep moving, hoping that she would be harder to follow in the darkened woods.

  “Jane!” It was Bill calling after her. “Jane, where are you going?”

  His voice was getting louder. He was already out of the house and coming after her. “What’s going on? What are you running from?”

  She trudged ahead, farther into the woods, now aware of the snow coming in over the tops of her shoes. Her feet were cold and wet. In another few minutes they would be freezing. She had to step carefully over the uneven roots and avoid branches that could snap in her face.

  “Jane, for God’s sake, you’ll freeze!” He didn’t sound as if he had gotten any closer. He was having trouble following. All she had to do was keep going. She tried to pick up her pace.

  Her ankle turned and her knee buckled. Before she knew what was happening, she was falling face-first into the snow. She got a hand up just in time to break her fall but still landed hard across a tree root. The gun skittered a few yards away from her.

  43

  Jane? Answer me, please!”

  Now he sounded closer. He had come into the woods and was doing his best to track her. Jane got up slowly, stretched out, and picked up the gun. She started to walk but felt herself toppling again. Her right shoe had broken, the heel snapping away cleanly. Each step she took threw her off balance, but she had to keep going.

  “It’s getting dark in here,” Bill’s voice called from a distance. “You’ll get lost.”

  He hadn’t gained any ground. Maybe he was afraid to go too deep into the forest. Or maybe he had lost her trail and was simply wandering.

  She fell again, this time against the trunk of a tree. The damn shoe. She should take them both off and get back her balance. But the ground under the snow was hard and rocky. Her feet would be cut to pieces. Besides, they were already cold and wet. How far could she go barefoot?

  Jane hobbled ahead, holding the pistol in one hand and using the other to ease branches aside. The snow from the branches was dropping down on top of her. Her hair was wet and she could feel ice under the collar of her jacket. In another minute, the cold would overcome her. Then it wouldn’t take long for her to freeze to death. She had to change her direction and get back to the house, where the car was waiting.

  She stopped and listened. There was nothing. The woods seemed deathly still, with just an occasional rustle of wind in the treetops. But she knew he was there, and not very far away. She turned to her right, at a sharp angle from the direction she had been moving. She planned to make a wide turn, away from her pursuer and around to the front of the chalet. Then she would rush out of the woods to the car. Once again, if she could get inside with the keys, and now with the gun, her chances of escape were better than even. There would still be the road with its snow-covered surface and its sheer drop down to the lake below. She would have to move carefully. But Bill would be on foot, unarmed, and without his helicopter to come to his rescue.

  “Jaynnee!” he called at the top of his voice, stretching her name into a long cry. He had lost her, she guessed. He was calling desperately, not knowing which direction she had traveled or how far she had gotten. And even with his scream, he sounded farther away. She was going to make it! If she could just fight the cold for another few minutes, she would be safe in the car.

  She saw the house through the trees, sitting up in front of her on cleared ground. How far? It was hard to tell through the branches. Maybe a hundred yards. Maybe less.

  Something snapped somewhere behind her. Bill’s voice cursed, probably at the whiplike sting of a branch. He was close. In turning back toward the house, she had moved closer to him. Jane stood still and held her breath, knowing that any noise she made would give her away.

  “Dammit, Jane, why are you doing this?” he shouted nearby. “There’s no place to go. You can’t keep running.”

  She pressed flat against a tree, hoping to make herself invisible. She heard his footsteps crunching in the snow, and then the sound of his heavy breathing. Snow fell nearby. Bill swore. Then he appeared, a shadow moving in the spaces between the branches no more than fifty feet away. She was caught. She knew she couldn’t make it to the car.

  She remembered the pistol, completely forgotten even though it was clutched in her hand. “Don’t let him close,” she remembered Leavitt telling her. She put the other hand on the gun, raised it in front of her chest, and aimed in the direction of the approaching figure. She caught a glimpse of his face. A branch pushed aside. He stopped abruptly when he saw her.

  “Don’t come near me,” Jane said, her tone more hopeful than determined. “I have a gun.”

  “Jane, what in hell…” He took one more step toward her.

  She turned her eyes away and pulled the trigger. The sharp crack of the gunshot rang in her ears and echoed in sequence off the distant peaks. She smelled the gunpowder, almost like holiday fireworks. Slowly she turned her eyes back to her husband, afraid of what she might have done.

  He was on his knees, looking up at her, his eyes wide with surprise. His lips contorted as he tried to say something through his pain. He glanced down at the red droplets that were already staining the snow. Then he toppled forward onto his face.

  Jane watched for a second, the gun still pointed as if she expected him to get up and attack her. She heard him groan. “Bill?” she said, asking him if he was still there. He didn’t answer. She let the pistol drop from her fingers, then turned and ran.

  She stumbled coming out of the woods and sprawled out on her chest. Snow clung to her hands and face. The damaged shoe had come off and was buried somewhere behind her. But she didn’t stop to look or to brush at the
snow that was in her mouth and eyes. She pushed up to her knees, crawled a few yards as she scampered to her feet, and raced for the car. Halfway there, she threw a glance back over her shoulder. No one was following.

  She tore open the car door and threw herself into the seat. As she was closing the door, she realized the engine wasn’t running. She reached down to the ignition. There was no key. Where was it? She did a panicky search of the seat next to her, felt under the seats, and lifted the floor mat. Where had he left it? It was only then that Jane realized he hadn’t left it. Sometime after he had pushed her into hiding, Robert Leavitt had gone out, turned off the engine, and taken the key.

  She stepped back into the snow and nearly fell. Her feet had no feeling, and she couldn’t find her balance. She staggered the short distance to the house and fell against the front door. “Bob,” she screamed in desperation, then turned the handle and stepped inside. “I killed him,” she said. “He was reaching for me. I shot him.”

  “Of course you did,” a voice answered. It was a woman’s voice.

  Jane blinked to clear her eyes. Leavitt was standing next to the sofa, showing a thin smile in answer to her obvious confusion. Seated next to him was a face she had seen before. On the street, in a bank, and then faintly in the dim light of her Paris hospital room. “Selina?”

  The woman laughed and flashed a smile. Jane recognized her from the pictures. The grainy newspaper photos where the face was formed by a pattern of black dots. The fuzzy reproduction of old magazine photos she had pulled up on the Internet. She knew her. But something didn’t fit. This wasn’t the woman she had glimpsed only once in a picture of an eight-year-old awards banquet. This face had been in ball gowns at opening nights at the symphony. It had peered out of a tent, flanked by two lovely children. It had been on the dresser of the flowered boudoir that Bill had never redecorated. It wasn’t Selina Royce.

  “Kay Parker,” Jane said. She blinked hard and tried to sharpen her focus. The woman turned her face slightly and glanced upward in a classic pose. “Jesus,” Jane said, “you can’t be. You’re—”

  “Alive,” Kay said.

  44

  Jane felt her knees buckling, but she braced herself with a hand against the open door.

  “Come in,” Robert said. Then he offered, “Stand by the fire and get warm.”

  Jane had forgotten she was wet and cold. Forgotten, at least for an instant, that she had just shot her husband. She stood where she was, blinking incongruously, trying to make sense of the people she was facing—Bill’s dead wife and the business partner who had covered up her murder.

  It wasn’t Selina Royce she had seen in Paris. It was Kay. William Andrews had gone to see the wife he had buried eight years ago. And maybe Leavitt hadn’t been lying when he said he had never heard of Selina.

  “But then who …” Jane tried to ask. “Who …”

  “Who was murdered here?” Kay asked, putting into words the question Jane couldn’t manage to ask.

  “Selina Royce,” Jane mumbled, beginning to work her way through the puzzle. Then she found another answer. “You killed her.”

  Kay smiled as if she had been complimented. “She was stealing my husband,” she explained. “I couldn’t allow that.”

  Jane still wasn’t able to make complete sense of the images that were flashing through her mind. “Then all these years, you were in hiding. Using her name …”

  “Where’s the gun?” Robert Leavitt interrupted.

  Jane heard the question, but it didn’t register.

  “You buried Selina in your place …” Jane went on.

  “And I took her place,” Kay Parker said. “It wasn’t much, but it was better than going to prison.”

  Leavitt was agitated by the small talk. “Where’s the gun?” he repeated. “What did you do with the pistol?”

  Jane tried to remember, but the question seemed unimportant. “I dropped it,” she said. “Outside in the snow.”

  “Dammit!” Leavitt hissed. He reminded Kay, “We need that gun. It has to be the same gun.” He pushed past Jane and rushed outside, where he followed her footprints back toward the forest.

  “Your whole life … in hiding …” Jane shook her head sadly.

  “Oh, not my whole life,” Kay corrected. “Not anymore. Those days are over. Now I’m the wife of the new chairman of the board. Everyone knows that Robert is the heir apparent.”

  “But you can’t…just… come back to life.” It still wasn’t making any sense to Jane.

  “No,” Kay told her. “But Selina Royce can come out of hiding. A touch of plastic surgery. Colored contacts. After all these years, no one would recognize me anyway. Then the only person who will know is Bob. And he’s in love with me.”

  “Then Bill wasn’t lying to me,” Jane said with a sense of relief. “He wasn’t going to get rid of me.”

  “No,” Kay answered from her comfortable seat on the sofa. “No, that’s something we’ll have to do right now.”

  She was Robert’s lover. So then, it was Bob Leavitt who wanted to get rid of Jane. But why? He was Bill’s friend. Why would she be a threat to him? The answer was there in a flash, so obviously simple that she should have seen it from the beginning. Leavitt’s whole career was as William Andrews’s alter ego. His authority derived from his closeness to the seat of power. His wealth was Bill’s gift. But then Andrews had turned to her. Jane became the center of his world, and Bill was hoping to move her to a throne next to his own. Her presence was a threat to everything Leavitt had and wanted.

  “Why did you want me to kill him?” Jane asked.

  Kay nodded to acknowledge the question. “Just before you killed yourself. The dramatic ending of a woman betrayed. You went to Paris, saw him with his mistress, then came home and killed him in a jealous rage. Then, with nothing left to live for …”

  Jane understood the script. She could reason her way through Leavitt’s motivation. But why was Kay involved? What did she expect to get from Bob that William Andrews wasn’t already giving her? Bill was paying for lavish life in Paris. Why would she want him dead?

  Her thoughts were shattered by the sound of a gunshot—a crack that rattled the windowpanes and then carried through the mountains. Kay jumped, her color instantly draining. It took Jane a second to realize what she had just heard. Robert had found the gun and then fired at something. What? Had he found Bill alive? Had that been the coup de grâce? She rushed to the window. She could see her own tracks and then the second set of footprints where Leavitt had walked in his search for the pistol. But he was nowhere in sight. He had gone into the woods.

  Jane heard a metallic click behind her, a sound she didn’t recognize. She wheeled. Kay had gone to the fireplace and taken down the shotgun. She had snapped it open and was in the process of loading shells into the double-barrel. She looked up from her grim work, made eye contact with Jane, and closed the gun. Slowly, she raised the barrel into Jane’s face.

  Jesus, it’s going to happen again. She was going to be the headless wife, killed in a massacre just like the one that had killed Selina Royce.

  45

  Leavitt had followed Jane’s tracks to the edge of the woods, searching the snow for the lost pistol. He cursed quietly under his breath when he couldn’t find it and realized that he would have to follow her footsteps into the trees. The light was failing as the shortening day faded. What visibility was left was broken up by the branches. He pushed a branch aside and peered into the forest. The footprints were blurred and indistinct, but he thought he could follow them, at least for a short distance. And he needed the gun. That was the pistol Jane would have to turn on herself.

  They had never figured that Jane would run out into the mountains rather than shoot the man who had come to kill her. The plan was simple. Kay had flown over from Paris, leaving a well-documented trail of ticket stubs and credit slips in the name of Selina Royce. It would appear that she had come back to be with her lover, ample motivation for Jane to ta
ke action. The wronged woman had killed her husband and then shot herself. It was all to happen in the house, with the same gun. But Jane had run, spreading the crime scene out over the countryside. And then she had lost the gun they needed to kill her with if the murder-suicide charade was to be credible.

  Now Leavitt worried that the pistol might be lost. Jane might have tossed it away as she fled, in which case it wouldn’t be lying in her footsteps. He wouldn’t be able to find it in the dimming light. There would have to be a change in plan. Maybe just take her back into the woods and ram her head into a tree trunk to knock her unconscious. She was half frozen when she came back to the house. She would never survive a few hours lying in the snow.

  He pulled up abruptly. Something was moving just ahead of him, snapping twigs and crunching snow. He backed up a step. Finding the gun was suddenly less important than his fear of confronting a bear or a wildcat. Branches moved and there was William Andrews, staggering toward him, supporting himself against the tree trunks, his shirt red and his jacket stained black. Leavitt backed away, looked about hurriedly, and spotted a broken branch on the ground. He rushed for it, pulled it out of the snow, and wielded it like an axe as he turned back to Andrews. Only then did he see the gun rising in Bill’s hand. He didn’t hear the shot, but noise exploded in his ears as he fell backwards into the snow.

  Kay circled the room, keeping the shotgun pointed at Jane. “Get away from the window,” she ordered.

  Jane moved away slowly and Kay came closer so that she could see who came out of the woods and crossed the clearing to the front door. She was no longer cool and calculating, but plainly rattled by the sudden turn of events. If Robert had to use a second shot to finish off Andrews, they might still be all right. It was plausible that Jane would have used two shots to kill her husband. But if William had lived and found the gun, then everything was wrong. Then her partner would be dead, and what choices would be left to her? Kill the two of them and run for her life? That would leave behind a scene of senseless slaughter. The same trail she had left to suggest a woman returning to claim her lover would now point to a jilted woman bent on revenge.