To the Grave

by Carlene Thompson

  The two exchanged mutinous glances. “Anyway, Renée and I were going to leave town Saturday night,” Ian went on. “No one would miss me until Monday morning, when we’d be long gone.”

  Catherine had heard no noises from the waiting room, and fear suddenly washed over her. She’d assumed Ian had injected Beth and Jeff with something to knock them unconscious, but what if he’d given them something fatal? She shuddered violently at the thought.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Ian flared in annoyance.

  “My leg—”

  “Your leg, your leg—that’s a hell of a leg cramp, missy.” Ian no longer sounded at all like himself. His voice had gotten deeper, rougher … angrier.

  Catherine leaned a bit harder on her desk, pressed her fingers onto the wood until the knuckles stood out, and pretended to be quelling pain as she slid over one more small step. “So you went to meet Renée at the cottage on Saturday and what happened?”

  Ian looked at her, his handsome young face wrecked by anguish. “She wasn’t there. I waited for hours, but my Renée didn’t come home to me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “What did you do then?” Catherine asked softly, compassionately, making certain Ian was looking at her when she winced slightly.

  “What could I do? I went into the cottage. The place was old and crappy, but there weren’t any signs of violence or any of Renée’s things. I called her; I texted. Nothing. I was certain something awful had happened to her. I scanned the news, the Internet. I spent a hell of a week. I avoided Father as much as I could—he would see that something was wrong. But I had hope. Renée said we must always have hope and that we would be together someday. Renée was always right. Most people only saw her beauty, her sexuality—they didn’t see her wisdom.” He paused. “She was the most amazing woman in the world.”

  She played mother to you, Catherine thought. You poor boy whose mother never acted like a mother and, finally, she almost killed you. And all those months, lying in rehab with hardly anyone coming to see you except me, you must have wondered if she would have cared that she almost killed you. And then came along beautiful, vivacious Renée who shared your interests, who took you to bed and at the same time acted like your mother with an unconditional love, both corporeal and spiritual.

  Now Catherine was certain she’d seen someone at one of the windows behind her desk. She wouldn’t give herself time to let her gaze focus on the person. She only knew the center was no longer in total isolation.

  “You didn’t think she was dead,” Catherine said.

  “No. I could not let myself believe that. Renée had said nothing would keep us apart.”

  “When did you find out she was dead?” Catherine almost whispered.

  Ian’s face crumpled. “Oh God. The next Saturday, Father had set me up with the daughter of a business associate. She was all right. She didn’t want to go on the date any more than I did, which made things easier. We didn’t have to pretend with each other. I took her to the Nordine Gallery.”

  “You were friends with the Nordines?”

  “Friends? With Ken? God, Catherine, have you lost your mind? I went to the gallery to see the new art but mostly to see Mary … that poor little neglected girl. She reminded me of myself at her age. I loved her, Catherine. I don’t usually take to children, but I honest-to-God loved that child. And she loved me. One time she told me I was her Prince Charming.”

  “I’m sure she did love you, Ian. You’re handsome and gentle and I’m sure you gave her the attention she didn’t get from her parents.”

  “I tried. Anyway, that Saturday night I introduced the girl to Arcos and everything was going okay, considering, when someone started talking about the body found at the Eastman cottage—the body found by you, Catherine.”

  “Yes. Finding it was horrible, Ian. But finding it is all I did. I did not kill Renée.”

  He gave her a dismissive glance. “My date wanted to go to a party her friends were having. By this time I could hardly even talk, and as soon as we got to her friend’s house I headed straight for the bathroom and vomited. When I came out, she said she’d run into an old boyfriend, neither of us really wanted to be on this date, so why didn’t I just leave and she’d stay with him? He’d take her home, but she’d tell her father I did, we had a wonderful time, et cetera. She wasn’t mad. She really wasn’t paying that much attention to me. The story of my life. So I was able to leave, thank God, without her running to her father with tales of my bad behavior. It was almost too perfect.”

  “You said that was Saturday night. James went to the cottage Saturday night and someone tried to blow it up using Molotov cocktails,” Catherine said. “That couldn’t have been you.”

  “Why not? Because of time? I went home around ten o’clock. Do you think a Molotov cocktail is hard to make? That it takes hours? It doesn’t. I’ve become something of an expert. I practice in my apartment.”

  “You were such a strange kid,” Lawrence suddenly rumbled from the couch. “When you were little, I’d take you to the terminal. I wanted to show off my son. But after the car wreck, you turned odd. You didn’t act like other boys your age, like my friends’ boys. You talked about things no eleven- or twelve-year-old would know. The doctors said there was no brain damage, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “So that’s why even our very few trips out stopped,” Ian said, as if experiencing an epiphany. “You thought I was brain damaged. You were ashamed of me.”

  “Lawrence, Ian has a high IQ,” Catherine said quickly, feeling hurt for Ian in spite of the position in which he’d put her. “His intelligence was above that of your friends’ boys. And he’d had a whole year of recovery from the wreck—a year in which he’d read everything he could get his hands on and watched all the adult scientific and discovery shows. If he sounded different from other kids his age, it’s because he was different—he was smarter.”

  “Humph,” Lawrence managed, as if that single word were an effort. It was also a dismissal of everything she’d said.

  Ian’s gun steadied toward his father again, hatred sparking in those incredibly beautiful “Dreamy Eyes.” Catherine was appalled at watching the destruction of a human being she’d loved like a brother for years.

  “So everything that’s happened this week has been an attempt to kill whoever murdered Renée,” she said dully. “You were determined to avenge her.”

  “Of course I would avenge her! Did you expect me to just accept that someone had killed the most extraordinary woman I’d ever known?” His voice tightened. “My Renée.”

  “Ian, if I were in your position, the first person I would have thought of as Renée’s killer was the man who’d used leverage for years to keep her, the man whose ‘prize’ had escaped him: James. Were you trying to kill him at the cottage with the Molotov cocktails?”

  “Kill him with Molotov cocktails thrown from so far away?” Ian let out a small, soft giggle. “Oh, Catherine, you don’t know anything. How clumsy, how inaccurate, that would have been! I just wanted to burn up the place, but I didn’t want anyone to see me there, so I made the cocktails and threw them as hard as I could. I didn’t even see James until after Patrice drove away.

  “Besides, I always knew James didn’t kill Renée,” Ian said. “I was finally about to have her. I wanted to take every precaution. Patrice had told me James was going to a conference in Pittsburgh. I thought he might know Renée was coming back and the whole thing was a ruse, so I hired a private detective. He followed James to the convention and kept an eye on him the whole time. The police said Renée was probably killed on Friday. James left on Thursday and didn’t come home until Sunday.”

  “But you tried to kill him!”

  “With a .22 rifle from such a long distance away? I had three reasons for shooting him. One, to pay him back for all he’d done to Renée. Two, to make people think he was in as much danger as Arcos had been. And three—this is hard for me to believe now—to scare you away from him.�
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  “To scare me?”

  “I loved you, Catherine, like I would have loved a sister. For so long, you were so good to me. I hated hearing you were seeing him after Renée left. You deserved the best. Instead, you settled for him. In my eyes, he was little better than Gaston. I thought his ‘near death’ might scare you away. The phone call I’d made to Marissa the morning of Arcos’s death didn’t. I thought you’d see right away that anyone involved with Renée was in danger. I thought Marissa would convince you of it if she got to see Arcos up close, before the cops arrived and backed off the reporters. But it didn’t work. Neither did Renée’s lingerie I put in James’s town house. I’ve kept that for two years, always sprinkling her perfume on it.”

  “But it didn’t scare me away from him and neither did the mask you put in my car the night of the rehearsal dinner,” Catherine said.

  “I thought by that time you’d realize being with James was making you a walking target. But you’re more stubborn than I ever thought, Catherine. You won’t give up.”

  “Not when I believe in someone.”

  “And you believe in him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you’re right. He lacks the courage.”

  “You didn’t think Arcos did, though?”

  “Arcos is crazy, even when he’s not on drugs. Mary told me she saw a woman who looked like the girl in Mardi Gras Lady. She told me she’d told Arcos, too. I didn’t blame her—she’s just a child. She thought Arcos would be pleased that there really was a woman who looked like ‘my lady,’ as he always called her.” Ian drew a deep breath. “Arcos is big; he’s volatile; he nearly went crazy when Renée left here. I knew he was just crazy enough to kill her for leaving him. So I waited and I planned. He stayed locked up in his warehouse for a couple of days after you found Renée’s body.

  “Then I heard about him coming after you. The police were after him. I drove for hours, even though I had a feeling he’d go to the morgue where her body was stored. It was like him to do something perverted like that. I waited and waited, and at last he showed up, high on something, trying to break into the morgue—God knows what he planned to do with her body if he found it. But he didn’t get to her. I didn’t let him. I don’t think he even knew what hit him.”

  “You shot him in the right eye, just like Renée had been shot. How did you know she’d been shot there?”

  “People talk.”

  “Robbie?”

  “Robbie?” He looked bewildered. “Robbie wouldn’t tell crime-scene details. At least I found that out. I guess it can’t hurt to tell now. There was a paramedic. I’d run into him before when he came to an accident at the airlines. His hair was so red you couldn’t forget him. He was a smarmy smart aleck and I knew he had no scruples. I also knew he wasn’t going to be on the rescue team for long. I paid him for the information. It doesn’t matter now. They fired him the next week. I have no idea where he is.”

  But Emergency Services might, Catherine thought, and if he’s found, he’ll be the one paying for what he did. “You put Mardi Gras beads on Arcos.”

  Ian smiled eerily. “Arcos liked jewelry. He never would have put on cheap stuff like those beads bought by the dozen. I picked purple—at Mardi Gras, purple symbolized justice. Justice is what I gave Arcos.”

  “You also put purple beads beside James’s car.”

  “He didn’t kill her, but he wasn’t good to her.”

  “And Ken Nordine?”

  “At least Arcos was passionate about Renée. When he heard about her death, he acted like a lunatic, but that was better than Nordine, going on with life as normal, still thinking first of himself.” Ian’s face turned hard. “And he’d already found a replacement for Renée. Not so intelligent, sensitive, beautiful, cultured, but a replacement.”

  “Bridget Fenmore.” Ian nodded. “Ian, did you kill her, too?”

  Silence spun out in the room as Ian looked downward, his eyes hooded. Just as Catherine thought she heard a slight, metallic noise in the other room, Ian said firmly, “No. But I took her away from Ken. I wanted him to spend a few days knowing what it felt like to have the woman you love missing. Not that I think he really loved her. I don’t think he could love anyone. But he couldn’t stand the thought of not being in control. He couldn’t control Renée’s disappearance, and he couldn’t control Bridget’s.”

  “What did you do with her, Ian?” Catherine asked softly, moving just a bit to the right. “Is she all right?”

  “She would probably tell you she’s not all right. She’s weak, a whiner, disgustingly easy to frighten. She is all right, though. Police released Arcos’s building on Thursday. I took her there after I’d finished with James. I’ve kept her warm, well fed, and in return, she placed a call for me to Ken. I made her tell him to come and get her in the fields of Arcos’s warehouse. She told him she’d be killed if he brought the police, but I didn’t trust him. I wanted to have room to get away if I saw anything suspicious. But Ken did as he was told. And Ken got what he deserved.”

  “And then you took him back to the gallery?”

  “Yes. Dragging him around wasn’t easy, even though I’d rolled him into a heavy blanket. I had Bridget’s keys and she’d told me the security system code.”

  “So after you killed Ken, you were able to put him under the painting of Mardi Gras Lady.”

  “Yes. The placement of his body was an extra bonus.” Ian sighed as if exhausted. “I thought I was finished. I thought I’d killed everyone who might have killed Renée. And then two things happened.”

  Ian’s voice ran down like the sound of an old Victrola phonograph. Catherine felt as if even the air had stopped moving in the room—all except for Lawrence’s heavy breathing as he looked downward, seemingly unable to stand the sight of his son. Catherine prayed no sound would come from the waiting room. She was certain help of some kind was coming. She just had to stall long enough for it to arrive.

  “What two things happened, Ian?” Catherine asked.

  “What?” he asked vaguely, as if he’d drifted away from the conversation. “Two things? Oh. The first concerned you.”

  “Me?”

  Ian nodded. “I lose cell phones a lot. I lay them down and just forget about them. Then someone takes them.” Catherine waited for him to go on. He looked back at the porcelain temple jar he’d brought her just over two weeks ago when she’d officially moved into her new office. “You remember when I brought you that.”

  “Of course, Ian. We’ve already mentioned the temple jar.”

  “At the reception, you rushed up to me and asked to use my cell phone. You said you’d forgotten yours or left it somewhere. It was like a light went off behind my eyes. When I brought you the jar, I was in close contact with Renée. I brought the jar on a Thursday and I was supposed to meet her Saturday night. I got a call when I was here—not from her, from Father—and when I finished, I laid my phone down on your desk. Later that evening, I wanted to use it to call Renée, but I didn’t have it. I remembered I’d left it here.” He looked at Catherine. “You used it to text Renée and tell her not to meet me on Friday night.”

  Catherine was flabbergasted. She felt her face slacken with surprise before she heard another, almost minuscule noise and burst into speech. “Ian, I didn’t know you even had a relationship with Renée, much less that she was in town.”

  “Other people saw her.”

  “Or thought they saw her, but they didn’t tell me. And what makes you think I had any idea that you were going to meet her at the cottage the next night?”

  “Maybe James, maybe you, had someone watching her or.…”

  “Or?”

  Ian looked at his father. “The second thing happened yesterday at the brunch. You were toasting to a merger that obviously wasn’t finalized. You were loud and obnoxious, talking about Patrice getting a star tattoo and pointing your glass right at her pubic area.” He paused. “Renée had a pentagram tattoo right there. I knew that you’d se
en it because at some time you’d forced yourself on her. She might have used Arcos and Nordine to ease her fear and loneliness, but you? Being with you would be like being with Gaston. You raped her. Then you had to kill her to keep her quiet.”

  “Rape her!” Lawrence exploded. “No one had to rape Renée!” Color flooded back into his face. “But I didn’t rape her. I never touched her,” he said loudly and unconvincingly. “I don’t know anything about a pentagram tattoo. I only mentioned a star and swept my glass upward. Patrice was there and maybe my glass hovered in that area, but it was just a … a…”

  “A what, Father?”

  “An accident. Do you think I’d make a suggestion like that in front of all those people?”

  “I think you’d do a lot of things you would have had better sense than to do a couple of years ago. You’re different. I don’t know if you’re just in a frenzy over this merger or getting married freaked you out, but you are different.”

  “Goddammit, there is nothing wrong with me!” Lawrence shouted. “I’m the way I’ve always been. I’m fine!”

  Another, louder sound came from the waiting room. Oh God, two or three more minutes, Catherine prayed. Just give me a little more time.

  “Ian,” she said sharply to get his attention, “why would I text Renée from your phone and tell her to meet you at the cottage on Friday night instead of Saturday?”

  “You’d use my phone so she’d think it was me. And she’d be there on Friday night, but I wouldn’t be the one meeting her—you would. You knew if James heard she was back, he’d probably be through with you. It was her that he wanted. It was always her, not you. I’d thought of that before, but I didn’t believe you were capable of murder.” Ian bent his head and said weakly, drearily, “But does anybody really know another person? Did I really know what you’d do to hold on to James?”