He came close enough to rub his cheek against my hand, then turned and bounded toward the slope that went down the hill on the opposite side of the road from where the apprentices’ house sat.
“Meow,” he said, turning back and calling to me. “Meow!”
He obviously wanted me to follow him, so I did. Nary a qualm. I would do anything for Sami, now that he was back. And—bottom line—I was going to take him home with me and hand him to Bebe and there would be some smiles in our house again. Guaranteed.
I was getting excited about that and I forgot to pay attention to what was going on around me. When Sami meowed again and dashed out into the brushy area, I followed him. A little further, and I saw a little shed very much like the one on the other side of the road where I’d found the letters. Hidden by the bushes, I hadn’t seen it until I was almost on top of it.
There was no padlock on this one. Sami had stopped right in front of it and it seemed he wanted me to look inside. I reached out and pulled the wooden door open. Inside there was a pile of parts to a smashed wooden chair, a big blue rain tarp, and a stack of bungee cords.
I stared at it. Sami meowed. I reached down to scratch behind his ears. “Well, Sami, what do you suppose we have here?” I said to him.
I was surprised when he darted away, but I still jumped when a male voice responded, saying, “An example of why someone like you should just mind her own business, that’s what I’d say we have.”
I whirled. There was Jason Moon and he had a gun pointed right at me. I gasped.
“Will you please not aim that gun at me?” I said in a moment of pure terror.
He grimaced, coming a little closer. “I’d like to accommodate you, sweetheart, but I’m afraid you’ve made that darn near impossible.” Now he was just a few feet away. “You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you? You had to stick your nose in and try to put pieces of the puzzle together. I just can’t let you do that.”
My heart was beating so hard, I could hardly hear what he was saying. I’d never been so frightened. He’d come out of nowhere—with a gun. This was so not good.
“Hey, listen,” I said, stumbling over my words. “I don’t know what your problem is. I just came to….”
“I know what you came for. The question is, do you know what I came for?”
I shook my head. “No. I have no idea. So if you’ll just let me go, I’ll go back up to the parking area and get into my car and drive away. I won’t come back. Honest.”
“Fat chance.” He waved the gun and gestured toward a stand of small, brushy trees further down the slope. “Let’s go down there, shall we? Find a place where we can have some privacy.”
He was planning to kill me. I knew it. I could tell by the slight crazed look in his eyes.
“Come on, move,” he said more harshly, and I started to move in the direction he’d indicated. But I had to do something. Once I got out of the view from the road, even if someone came looking for me, they wouldn’t see me. I knew I couldn’t let him herd me down to where the trees would hide everything from view.
“Faster. Let’s go. With your hands up.”
He was closer now and I was afraid he was going to hit me with that gun if I didn’t follow orders. I had a quick idea. If I could just get to my smart phone in the front pocket of my hoodie, it was set up to record. All I had to do was touch a button. At least then, someone might be able to find out what had happened to me—once they found my body.
Ugh. That was not a cheery thought. But it was a plan. I started down the slope, hands held high and wondering how I was going to get anywhere near that cell phone.
“See, I knew you were trouble from the first night I came back when I followed you on Bay Watch Drive,” he said from behind me. “There was just something perky about you that caught my eye.”
Well, that was something, anyway. Now I knew I had been right about being followed that night. Too bad I wasn’t going to be able to tell anyone about it.
“Look, I don’t know what you think I’m doing here, but….”
“I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to find out what actually happened to Star. That would be okay if you just wanted it for academic speculation. Trouble is, I know very well you’re friends with that cop. And I can’t let you spill the beans to that guy. That would ruin me.”
I turned to look at him. “What if I promised….?”
His mouth twisted derisively. “Save your breath. I’m not that easy to fool.”
Okay, the thing was, I wasn’t even sure what he’d done or what he thought I thought he’d done. It seemed like we ought to get that clear. Maybe he would change his mind once he knew I didn’t really know anything.
“What exactly are you trying to hide?” I asked him. “I know who you are, but for the rest, I don’t know why you’re angry with me or what you want me to do…”
“Quit playing dumb. I know you think I caused Star’s death.”
Okay, that was true--now. But it hadn’t been before. What exactly had he done?
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re talking about? Maybe we could figure out a way….”
“No. There’s no way to fix this.”
“But if you actually have good reasons for what you did, why don’t we discuss them?”
“Good reasons?” He grinned at me coldly. “Oh, I had my reasons alright. But you won’t like them. And anyway, I didn’t really cause her death. She mostly did it to herself.”
“What do you mean?” I said, but I wasn’t really paying attention to him anymore. I had my plan to execute. I glanced around, realizing I hadn’t seen Sami since Jason had scared him off. That was okay. I didn’t have to worry about Jason taking a pot shot at him at any rate.
The slope was really steep here. We weren’t going very fast, but once you started to slide on these things, it was hard to stop. I saw a pile of loose stones ahead and I stepped deliberately into them. My feet began to slip beneath me and I began to fall.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Keep those hands up!”
But there was obviously no way I could do that when I was catapulting down the side of a very steep slope.
“Watch your head!” he yelled, racing after me. “You could kill yourself!”
As I rolled I reached into the kangaroo pocket of my hoodie and clicked on my cell phone’s recorder. I had my hand back out in a flash and I looked to see if he’d caught the move. Luckily, his mind was on keeping me alive. Imagine that.
“Careful!” he yelled, racing after me.
I straightened my legs and brought my slide to a stop, and he was right there when I looked around, a bit dazed, still sitting on the ground.
“You okay? Nothing broken?”
I nodded, pretending to be too stunned to answer. In truth, I had a few bumps and bruises. I could tell I was going to pay for that move. But I didn’t have time to deal with that now.
He shook his head, more worried than angry. “For a minute I thought…. Lady, you’ve got to be more careful.”
“Yes,” I managed to grate out. “I’ll be more careful from now on.”
He stood a few feet away, holding the gun on me. I was scared, but I was also ice cold. If he was going to kill me, there was nothing I could do to stop him. Was there?
I didn’t want to get up. We were still visible from the road. What I wanted to do was to keep him talking and hope someone else would show up. Kind of a thin reed to base my survival on, but I didn’t have a lot of choice.
“Get up,” he ordered.
“I will.” I pretended to be in pain. “Give me just a minute, okay?”
He hesitated and I went on.
“Listen, I just don’t get it. What were you doing here, anyway? I mean, did Star know you were coming?”
“Nah.” He liked to talk and he got caught up in it right away. “I ran into some financial trouble in Alaska. I kinda wanted to get out of town, if you know what I mean. So I called some people I know down here and asked how
things looked for my prospects in the area. I wanted to know what Star was up to. And I heard she was going around town saying she was making plans to go to the Caribbean and live on a yacht. I thought—what the hell! Then I heard about the apprentices.”
He shook his head. “That was a new one on me. That she was saying she was going to give them the farm. Well, that was just plain crazy talk. I wasn’t about to stand around with my thumb in my mouth while that sort of thing was going on. So I took a plane down here on Tuesday, thought I’d spend some time getting the lay of the land before I made my presence known. I finally headed up to Star’s place late Wednesday afternoon. She was getting ready for a party at the country club, but I wanted to have it out with her, tell her I wasn’t going to let her hand the farm over to some stupid apprentices. I mean, after all, I helped build this business back in the day. I deserved a piece of any action she had in mind.”
“Sounds reasonable,” I encouraged. I was still sitting on the ground.
“Yeah.” He sighed. “Sadly, our reunion was not a joyful one. I was pretty upset by what I’d been hearing and when she couldn’t refute it, when she just laughed in my face and told me there was nothing I could do about it, I got pretty mad. Did some yelling. You know how it can be.”
“Sure.”
“She told me I was out of luck. Things had changed. Then that Bebe—I think she’s your aunt?--she called and Star told me to hush while she talked to her, but I didn’t even like the way she treated the poor woman. It was obvious she was taunting her and trying to manipulate her to come on up here. And it worked. With Star, it usually does.”
“She…uh…was a strong woman,” I commented a bit lamely.
“Oh yeah. But she was setting the lady up. I knew her tricks. She was going to ambush her as she came up the winding road. I’ve seen her do it before.”
“What?” I couldn’t quite get that one.
“Yeah, it was a thing she liked to do. She said, ‘Come on, Jason. I’ve got to get out there. This little sucker is coming and I’m going to throw her for a loop.’”
“Hmm.”
“I followed her out onto hillside. I was trying to explain to her that she couldn’t do anything until we talked to a lawyer and straightened it all out. She laughed at me. She said it was too late. The property was already gone. She had to sell it to pay the bills. I said, ‘How could you do that without me? I’m part owner.’”
“What did she say to that?” I still had my hands up, but they were drooping.
He shrugged. “She said she had friends who helped her and it was a done deal. ‘Your problem,’ she told me, ‘is that you never had any friends. Not the right kind, anyway.’ Can you imagine?”
“No.” I was trying hard to make him think I was sympathetic to his cause and by all I could see, he seemed to be buying it.
“That’s when I grabbed her and she shrieked and began to whale on me and I pushed her, just a little, you know, just to get her away from how she was hittin’ on me, and the next thing I knew, she was rolling down the hill, right into the turnaround, which is lined with these big rocks….well, you’ve seen it. And I guess she hit her head because when I got to her, she was a goner.”
“Oh my gosh.”
“Yeah. I didn’t mean to kill her. And actually, it was her fault. But…you know? I couldn’t just leave things that way. I knew people wouldn’t understand. I had to do something to take the blame away from me and put it somewhere else. And that’s when I got my idea.”
“Uh huh.” I was trying to edge away from him. “So how did she get into the road?”
He grimaced. “I put her there.”
When I gasped, he sighed.
“You see, you don’t know about Star. She had the place set up for her usual game. So I thought, what the hell. Might as well put it to use. If I could move fast enough, I knew I could arrange things. You see, I knew that Bebe was coming. I conceived of a plot, right there on the fly. I grabbed the wooden chair from the apprentices’ front porch and I set Star’s body in the chair, right there around the curve. The blue tarp and bungee cords were waiting there where Star had put them by the side of the road. I grabbed them and covered the mirror.”
“So Bebe couldn’t see around the corner as she came up?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re telling me that Star was ready to do that to Bebe anyway?”
He nodded. “Sure. She loved to scare people driving up that road. She’d hide in the bushes and when they came around the curve, she’d jump out at them and half the time, they’d lose it before they realized what was going on.”
“But that’s so dangerous.”
“Sure it is. That’s what made it fun for her. One guy—Kenny Madred—went right over the side. He got the slide stopped in time. It didn’t kill him. But it could have.”
“Wow. Star was….”
He laughed. “Yeah, whatever word you’re thinking, it’s not bad enough to cover what Star was.” He looked a bit woebegone. “And I still loved her.”
That would take some puzzling over, but I had a feeling it was one of those human things impossible to understand.
“So anyway, your aunt was a little too quick for me. I didn’t get a chance to get away. She came cruising around that bend and ran smack into Star. So I just stuck around and tried cleaning up some of the evidence. I knew she’d be hysterical at what she’d done, so I snuck on down and pulled the parts of the chair up, then took the tarp back off the mirror and hid all that in that little storage unit down the hill that you found today. Then I high tailed it out of there.”
“Didn’t she see you?”
“Who? Oh, your aunt? Sure. But I was wearing a dark hoodie and I used the flashlight I got from the storage unit to light up my face from below to look eerie and evil. You know what I mean? Like kids do on Halloween. I knew she’d never recognize me after I did that.”
I frowned. He wasn’t tall and gaunt. The flashlight probably made him look it, but… And then I realized something else. Bebe was about 5 foot in her stocking feet. Any man over 5’5” looked tall to Bebe. And Jason was a lot taller than that.
Jason Moon was the man who killed Star. It was all his fault. Bebe was just an innocent bystander. That made me furious.
But now that I knew all that, what was he going to do with me?
Chapter Eighteen
“Get up,” Jason was saying now. “We need to get into that little grove of trees and bushes. If I remember right, there’s actually a tool shed in there. That’s what I’m looking for.”
“Why?” I got up and we started toward the place he’d indicated. “What are you going to do?”
He looked at me and I could tell what he was thinking. He was thinking he ought to kill me. But as I watched, his gaze shifted and he ran his tongue over his lower lip. I felt a surge of hope. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer and he was looking for some other way. Relief swept through me. Maybe I wasn’t going to die after all.
And then something occurred to me. I hadn’t tried any magic. Not that I knew any that would help in this case. But I did know a chant. Would that help? I really didn’t know.
We trudged toward the brushy area and he kept talking, telling me he had access to a boat.
“What do you know about sailing?” he asked me. “Hey, if we start right after dark, we could make it to Catalina by morning.”
I turned to look at him and he gestured with the gun, reminding me to keep my arms up. “I don’t want to go to Catalina,” I told him. “And can I please put my arms down for now. This is killing me.”
Oops. Unfortunate choice of words. But he didn’t seem to notice.
“Okay, hold them straight out for awhile.”
“What are you planning to do to me?” I asked, my voice trembling a little. To my surprise, that seemed to get to him.
“Hey, I’m only doing this because I have to,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. You’re too pretty for that, tell you the truth.” He
actually grinned at me. “So I’m trying to think of ways to make this work. You’re from Hawaii, right? Maybe we could sail to Hawaii. Would you like that?”
I stared at him. He was serious. I didn’t know what to say.
“Come on. Let’s go. We’re almost there.”
We walked on. It was now or never. I had to try it. I started the chant I’d learned from Aunty Jane. At first it was so low, he probably thought I was mumbling to myself, but as we walked along, I got louder and louder. And the funny thing was, it was working some kind of magic on me. I felt better, stronger, more confident, the longer I chanted. It was empowering.
“Hey,” he called to me. “What’s that you’re doing?”
“I’m just singing an old Hawaiian song,” I told him. “One my grandmother used to sing to me.” And I went on with the chant.
“Hey, you know? I sort of like that,” he said, his words slightly slurred. He was walking closer behind me now. “Do you know how to dance to it?”
I nodded. “Want to see?”
We’d reached the shed and he’d opened it. We went inside.
“Yeah,” he said. “Show me.”
The shed was full of the kinds of tools workers who fill these fields when they’re planted with flowers—these we’d been walking in weren’t for the time being-need to get things done. Jason sat back on a wooden box against the window. I took a deep breath. I’d taken many, many hula lessons when I was young. I knew it would all come back like second nature. But it still felt odd to be doing it this way. Hula in jeans and a grey hoodie. Lovely.
I did a basic hula, vamp, vamp, vamp, and I didn’t make full moves. I wasn’t trying to entertain, just to engage. But I was really getting into the chant. It began to sound almost as good as those professional singers at ceremonial events in Honolulu.
Somehow, someway, it seemed to come more and more from my heart and soul. And all the while I did the chant, I was staring right at him. I caught his gaze and held it. He looked like a man coming under a spell. My heart began to beat quickly with excitement and I had to calm down in order to keep this thing going. His eyelids were getting heavy. Just a bit more and he would be out.
A Ghost in Time (Destiny Bay Cozy Mysteries Book 3) Page 12