by D'Ann Lindun
Collapsing on the couch, she wrapped up in the blanket hoping it would cocoon her from Jace, from her humiliation. How could she have blurted out she loved him like that? She knew sex didn’t mean everlasting love and marriage. She had been taken by the moment and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. Swiping at her nose with the edge of the blanket, she let her thoughts run rampant.
So stupid, stupid. A man like Jace wasn’t going to fall in love just because he’d had sex. She’d reassured him she could handle it. Hah. She’d be lucky if he’d sit in the same room with her ever again, much less touch her. He probably thought she was planning the wedding right now. As if. The sooner they figured out who had set him up and he could go on about his business, and she hers, the better.
Wiping her tears, she sat up and wrapped her arms around her middle. She had turned her back on her family to be with him. There weren’t a lot of options. She couldn’t just walk in the front door of LeFleur and say, ‘Hi, I’m home.’ There was only one thing to do.
Put on a who-gives-a-shit face and stick it out until the truth was found.
Throwing off the blanket like a snake shedding its skin, she got up and strode bare as the day she was born into the bathroom and climbed into the bathtub. She lathered her hair then laid back to soak her sore body. Her muscles trembled, her woman’s parts ached, but it was the pain in her heart that felt like it would never heal. It would, it had too, she vowed.
No one could live feeling this rotten.
Chapter Eighteen
As Trey entered the driveway at LeFleur, he spotted an ambulance and two patrol cars in the driveway. A lump of dread filled his stomach. Jumping out, he sprinted for the door. Had they found Lindy? Or had his mother taken a turn for the worse? Heart pounding, he skidded through the front door.
A flurry of activity at the door of his mother’s room drew his attention. Two EMTs, guiding a sheet-draped gurney between them came out of the room, followed by a white-faced Chief.
Trey’s gaze shot between the chief and the figure under the sheet. “Mother? No … ” Trey took a step, and then faltered. “Chief?”
“Your mother, she … ” The strong policeman stumbled a little, looked confused. He seemed incapable of speaking and fell onto the sofa with his hands hanging between his knees. His face had no color and his eyes seemed to have sunk into his head. He appeared to have aged ten years in one afternoon.
“What happened?” Trey didn’t wait for an answer and moved toward his mother. His throat closed. He couldn’t swallow the lump lodged there.
The EMTs were busy maneuvering the gurney out the sliding glass doors.
“Wait.” Slowly, dreading what he would see, Trey approached the shrouded figure. As the EMTs stepped respectfully away, he reached to pull back the sheet. His finger closed around the cool material, his nerves seemed to be outside his skin. He couldn’t think straight. When had his mother gotten so tiny?
“Don’t.” The Chief’s voice cracked through the room. “Do not look at her like that.”
Trey didn’t lift the sheet, but he continued to stare at the shrouded figure, trying to remember his mother’s face before she got sick. His heart clenched in a tight knot he didn’t think would ever come undone. He had known her death was imminent, but he’d hoped to have more time with her. To be able to come to terms with all the things that would now forever be left unsaid.
He forced himself to nod at the attendants. He dropped the material. As he watched, they rolled the gurney out of the house and placed it in the waiting ambulance. After they closed the doors and drove away without lights, he turned toward the Chief. “Did you find her?”
The Chief’s eyes were glazed over. Finally, he nodded.
“Where’s Etta?” Trey walked to the bar and poured a bourbon — neat, the way the Chief liked it — and brought it to him.
Holding the drink with a shaking hand, but not raising it to his lips, the Chief said, “There’s a note in the kitchen. She got called away. There was an emergency at her niece’s house. Your mother was sleeping. Etta thought it would be okay to leave her alone for an hour or so.”
“Mother passed while Etta was gone?” Trey sat next to the Chief, wanting to put his arm around his shoulders to comfort both of them somehow. But he knew his father wouldn’t welcome it. “She died alone?”
He raised bleary eyes. “Your mother was murdered. Hill came in this house and smothered your mother with her own pillow.”
“What?” Trey rocketed to his feet. This obsession was getting out of hand. Why wouldn’t the Chief admit there might have been someone else who could have killed Soloman? And why would he think Jace would want to kill his wife? “You don’t mean that. Who would want to murder Mother? She had a terminal illness. All this death has affected the way you’re thinking. Leroy hung himself today. Jimmy Ray Hunt a day ago. That’s it.”
“I have proof.” The Chief waved a trembling hand toward his wife’s room. “See for yourself.”
With disbelief in his heart, Trey trudged into his mother’s sickroom. Normally dim, with low lights and the shades pulled, it now blazed with every light. The unpleasant scent of a stuffy hospital room and the lingering stench of her cancer assaulted his nose and he tried to ignore it. Nothing looked out of place. Her silver brush, comb, and mirror on the dresser looked exactly the same. He didn’t touch the rows of medicine on the tray next to her bed. The closet stood empty, save several silk robes. Mother’s clothes would be in the closet upstairs in the bedroom she’d shared with the Chief for twenty-five years.
What proof did the Chief think was here? Trey glanced at her unmade hospital bed and the pillow lying there. He averted his eyes then moved toward it. Glancing toward the door he saw the officers busy in the bathroom. They hadn’t dusted in here yet. With a flick of his wrist he turned over the pillow.
Leaning close, he saw it.
A strand of dark hair.
He took a pair of clear plastic gloves Etta used off the nightstand and slipped one on. Then he picked up the hair and stuck it inside and empty medicine bottle. Jerking off the glove, he stuffed it and the bottle in his pocket.
The hair wasn’t his mother’s.
It was auburn.
He stuck his head in the bathroom door and froze. Two officers stood with their backs to him. One of them aimed a camera at the mirror and the resulting flash ricocheted off the surface, straight into Trey’s face. Blinded for a moment, he wasn’t sure he saw what his eyes were telling him when he could see again.
Etched across the mirror in bright, blood red lipstick were the words:
Two down
Two to go
Trey looked and looked again, not sure his eyes were seeing things correctly. Two down and two to go? Lindy and now his mother. Were the next two he and the Chief? Who had left the evil message? Had the writer killed his mother in cold blood? Why? One thing was certain — when he found out who had done this Trey would kill him with his bare hands.
The dark-haired policewoman saw him and frowned. “You can’t be in here, sir. This is a crime scene.”
Numbly, he nodded and backed out.
The Chief hadn’t moved. He stared into the amber liquid within the glass held between his hands. Trey walked over and sat beside him, searching for healing words.
“Did you see the message?”
“Yes, sir, I did.” He wanted to deny it, to push the awful image out of his head. But he couldn’t. Someone had been in his mother’s bathroom and left a note of hate scribbled across her mirror. “Why would someone want to hurt Mother and Lindy?”
“I’ll tell you who. Jace Hill, that’s who. He snuck in here and smothered your mother in her bed.” Some of the bourbon in his glass splashed to the floor. “He took my daughter. She’s probably laying dead in a swamp somewhere. He’s out there laughing at u
s right now.”
“How do you know Jace did these things?” Trey tried to remain the voice of reason. His mother’s death had made the Chief’s blind obsession worse.
“Did you see what he said?” the Chief asked. “‘Two down’? That means your sister and your mother. He motioned between them. “‘Two to go.’ That means you and me. Half of our family is gone. If we don’t hunt down Hill and put him back in a cage where he belongs, you’ll be next. He’ll save me for last to punish me.”
“Sir, shouldn’t we let the officers do their job? Maybe they’ll come up with a whole different scenario.” Trey wanted to distract the Chief from his vendetta. “For all we know, there might be a serial killer on the loose. Three people have died this weekend.”
“It was Hill,” the Chief insisted. “If you weren’t packing a hard-on for his sister, you’d see it too. Your poor mother isn’t even cold an hour and you’re jumping to every excuse you can come up with to cover for that girl. Face it; Hill smothered Emily in her own bed.”
Trey flinched at the image of his former best friend holding pillow over his frail, cancer-ridden mother’s face as she fought for her life. If Jace had done this thing, Trey would pull the switch himself. Even Summer couldn’t defend him. “Don’t you find it odd that two other people have died this week, sir? Jimmy Ray Hunt and Leroy Eaton.”
The Chief shifted his weight. “What are you suggesting? That your mother had some connection with a lowlife like Jimmy Ray Hunt? Emily didn’t even realize white trash like that existed. And Leroy? He hung himself for one reason. He was a manic-depressive. I’ve known it for years.”
“He seemed okay at the picnic yesterday, sir,” Trey said mildly. Leroy had been a little odd, but he hadn’t seemed so depressed that he would go home and hang himself in his barn within an hour.
“Leroy was a master of deception.” The Chief sipped his drink and stared at the opposite wall. “Always pretending, always hiding from things that hurt him.”
“Like what, sir?” Focusing on something but his mother kept Trey’s grief at bay. If he stopped for a moment and let it knock him down he didn’t know if he could get back up.
“He’s been in love with my wife forever. I knew it all along, but he never acted disrespectful, so I left it alone. They died on the same day. Leroy would like that, if he knew.”
Trey felt his mouth drop open. The quiet little barber had carried a torch for Emily? He’d hidden it well. “Leroy Eaton was in love with my mother?”
“Sure. We all were. Me, him, Tom down at the grocery store. Even old Buford Krebbs carried a torch for Miss Emily Devereaux.” He snorted. “Course if I’d married old dog-faced Viola I’d be eyein’ other women, too. Buford looked past Viola’s shortcomings toward her daddy’s money. But I was the lucky one, the man Emily picked. I won the prize. A fine lady, indeed. I didn’t care a lick about her daddy’s fortune. Never did understand why a sweet woman like her would pick a poor old goat like me, but she did.”
“She loved you, sir.” Trey’s throat grew tight again. He’d never doubted their love for one another. They hadn’t been great parents, but they had been good to one another. His father had always worshiped Emily, treated her like a china doll in a case. As if she were too good to be touched.
“Most men aren’t so lucky.” The Chief looked at him with hate-glazed eyes. “I’ll hunt down the man who did this to her and see him fry. You better make a choice, boy, whose side you’re standing on. If it’s mine, or it’s with the Hills. There isn’t room for any ifs, ands, or maybes.”
“Sir, Summer or MiLann can’t be held responsible for something Jace may have done. We don’t even know for sure he’s the killer.” Trey knew he was wasting his breath. The Chief had made up his mind and nothing Trey could say was going to change it. If he pursued a relationship with Summer, he could forget about his father. He reached out to touch the Chief then dropped his hand midway. “Mother wouldn’t want us to blame them.”
With unexpected violence, the Chief hurled his glass at the wall. “I don’t want to think about anyone or anything except your mother right now.”
Before Trey could answer, the front door swung open and Etta rushed in, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks. “Is it true? Oh, God in Heaven, tell me it isn’t so. Say my Miss Emily isn’t gone. Oh, Lordy. I just stepped out for a minute.”
Trey rose and hugged her. “I’m sorry.”
“Why’d you leave her at all?” The Chief’s voice was freezer cold.
“It was Lilah,” Etta explained through her tears. “I got a call from her house saying she was hurt and needed a ride to the hospital. I rushed over there fast as my ole bones could carry me. But when I got there, she was sittin’ on the couch pretty as you please. Eatin’ supper and watchin’ her program. I was a little put out. I sure was.”
“Who did you actually talk to?” Trey asked.
Etta moved out of his arms and blew her nose into a crumpled hankie. “I don’t know for sure. I was in the kitchen, cookin’ a nice roast … well, that don’t matter does it? The phone rang and I took the call. Someone told me to rush right over to Lilah’s place, that she was in trouble. I didn’t do more than turn down my stove and drove straight over there.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice?” Trey asked.
Etta shook her head. “No, sir, I didn’t. I was so afraid, I just took off. Miss Emily was sleepin’. I figured she’d be okay for a bit.”
“You thought wrong.” The Chief held not one ounce of compassion in his voice for the woman who’d been part of his family for three decades. “Dead wrong.”
“Chief. Sir. It’s not her fault.” Trey understood his father’s rage, but Etta wasn’t to blame. If she had been here, she probably would’ve died, too. Someone had set her up, called her out of the house. He squeezed her upper arms then let her go.
“Sir? Chief?” The young policewoman stood at the door. “Will you come here, please? I need to show you something.”
When Trey would’ve gone with him, the policewoman shook her head. “This is an investigation. You can’t be in here.”
The Chief plodded toward his wife’s bedroom. At the door, he turned. “While I’m gone you best decide what matters to you.
• • •
Trey was up at dawn.
In truth, he hadn’t slept at all. The Chief had refused to tell him anything the police had found. He had left with them and still hadn’t returned. Trey figured he had probably spent the night at his office. He stirred his coffee without really seeing it. He’d been sitting in the kitchen for an hour or more.
A small figure moved at the corner of his vision, and he started. Lindy?
“Didn’t mean to scare you none,” Etta said, slipping out of the shadows. She trudged to the fridge and got out orange juice and a bowl of eggs.
“Why are you up so early?” Trey swallowed his disappointment and straddled one of the barstools, watching Etta pour two glasses of juice.
She handed him one and turned to the stove. “I’m sure the Chief will be needing a meal. He’s got a busy day ahead of him. Soon as word gets out about Miz Emily, peoples will be comin’ in droves. Everyone sure loved her.” Etta’s small shoulders stooped forward.
Trey took two steps and enfolded her from behind. Sobs shook her small frame. He kissed the top of her cotton-white head. “Mother knew how much you cared for her.” She nodded and wiped her eyes with the corner or her apron. “I’m sorry, too, for the way the Chief spoke to you last night.”
It wasn’t his job to apologize, but Trey knew how badly the Chief had wounded Etta. She had taken care of their family since the day Emily Devereaux married Samuel Bouché twenty-six years ago. This was her family. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for any one of them.
“Oh, pshaw. He don’t mean nothin’ when he sounds off like
that. He’s just like an old hound who barks first and feels bad later.” She slipped out of his arms and picked up the eggs. “I just let it be when he snaps. I know he don’t mean it.”
She was a better person than Trey was. The wounds the Chief had inflected on him would last a lifetime. The key was learning how to let go and not hold onto the bitterness. He watched Etta move about the kitchen, busy preparing a meal no one would have an appetite for. His mind was on Lindy. Somehow, he had to find her today. If she didn’t hear about their mother and come home for the funeral, she might never get over it.
Etta set a steaming plate of scrambled eggs, ham, and toast in front of him and refreshed his dark chicory coffee. He had no appetite, but he picked at it to make her happy. He patted the chair next to him. “Sit with me. Please?”
Pouring herself a cup of steaming coffee, she sat across from him. Her small, gnarled fingers curled around her mug. “I can’t linger. Your daddy will be needing me to pick out something for Miz Emily to be wearing. She’ll want to look nice to meet her maker. Yes, sirree, Miz Emily did love her fancy clothes.”
“Yes.” He couldn’t remember a time his mother hadn’t been pulled together and elegant. Even during this last week, she had worn satin nightgowns and robes. No hospital garb for Emily Bouché.
Etta’s dark eyes searched his face. “Your mama was so happy to see you.”
Tears formed in his eyes and he blinked them back. He’d almost been too late. For whatever force had guided him home, he was grateful. He couldn’t wish his mother was still suffering, and he prayed she was at peace, but he couldn’t help but wish he’d had more time with her. Whoever had stolen her life had also taken her family’s last few days with her. A burning fury boiled in his belly. Whoever had done this would pay for their crime.
The Chief’s words rang in his ears. Jace Hill did it. He’s the killer. Trey couldn’t believe it. The friend he had known would no more have murdered a helpless woman than cut off his right hand. A threat of revenge from prison was one thing, but to actually carry out a murder was something else all together. Trey was beginning to think the Chief had lost all rationality when it came to Jace. Why did the policeman hate his former family friend so much? Trey couldn’t figure it out.