And if it wasn’t Marnie in the guise of Alison who’d killed LaDonna Jeffries, then who the hell was it?
By nightfall a thick, dank fog had settled over the coastline, and the woman who picked her way through it was disheveled and exhausted. Her hair was matted and stuck to her head like yellow brambles. Her face was a grid of white scar tissue. She looked like a vagrant, but she knew exactly where she was going and what had to be done.
Tonight an old score would be settled. There would be no more betrayals, no more bloodshed. She would be avenged. Everyone who had been hurt would be avenged.
Through the mists, the house on the cliff glowed like a medieval fortress. Her legs burned with fatigue, but she climbed relentlessly, guided by the lights. The small, sharp-edged object she held cut into the skin of her palm. It was a key to the house, and when she entered, she would announce herself, and the lady of the manor would gape at her in shock. That lady was her mother.
Bret Fairmont was entertaining himself with his online porn collection when he heard the door to his room open behind him. “Who’s there?” he said, without bothering to close the screen.
“Surprise.” The answer was soft and raspy. “Look what the tide washed up.”
The familiar voice caused the skin on the back of Bret’s neck to prickle. He swung around and sprang out of his chair. The woman standing not ten feet from him looked like a skid-row vagrant. Her gallows grin revealed cracked lips and rotten teeth. Her skin was pimply and pitted. Still, he recognized her immediately—or who she was supposed to be.
It was the same woman he had up on his computer screen, but this one looked as if she actually had drowned and floated back up to the surface.
He began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. “Let me guess…Alison? What is this? Some kind of sick joke?”
“No, my brilliant brother.” Her grin stretched into a grimace. “It’s no joke. Your master plan failed. But then you were up against me. You never stood a chance.”
His plan? This was sick. Bret couldn’t decide whether to throw the imposter out himself or call the police. “Who the hell are you? No, fuck, I don’t care who you are. Who put you up to this?”
She reached into her grimy clothing, as if to scratch herself, and the stench she gave off made Bret’s stomach turn over. He broke out in a sweat, fearing he was going to be sick as she pulled out an automatic weapon.
“You’re supposed to ask where I’ve been all this time,” she said. “Isn’t that what a brother would ask a sister who’d been missing for six months?”
“My sister is fucking dead. Now get out of here—”
Laugher ripped out of her. Sharp and savage, it nearly pierced his eardrums. Jesus, who was this bitch?
“Ask me where I’ve been, you asshole!” she shrieked. “Ask me!”
He covered his ears, protecting them. “Where have you been?”
She sucked in a breath, as if to calm herself, but her knuckles were white against the trigger of the gun.
“I was waiting for the right time,” she said, “and this is just about perfect, wouldn’t you say? I got rid of Andrew and his weird little girlfriend, and now there’s just you left.”
Bret still didn’t believe she was actually Alison, but he was going to play along, anyway. The psycho bitch had a gun. Besides, he wanted to know who was screwing with him now. Andrew and Marnie Hazelton were behind bars, but someone was messing with Bret Fairmont’s head. Was this another one of his mother’s crazy ploys? Why would she do it?
“Where’s Julia?” he demanded. “Our mother—where is she?”
“She’s downstairs, pouring herself a drink, a big one. She knows all about our plan, Bret.”
“Our plan? Which plan was that? There are so many.”
Her dark eyes glittered. “The plan to fake my death and split the trust-fund money.”
Sweat drenched him. No one had known about that but Alison. The Alison who was actually dead. He hadn’t told another living soul about their scheme to get around that fucking morals clause.
“How could our mother know about that?” he asked her.
“I told her, you idiot.”
“No way. This plan you’re talking about,” he said, speaking as casually as he could, “our plan—it wouldn’t work. The trust-fund money goes to the next surviving female. That’s the way our grandmother set up the trust. It wouldn’t come to me under any circumstances.”
“Bret, for Christ’s sake. You’re talking to me, Alison. You know as well as I do there’s a provision in the trust that says the money goes to you if I should die without female issue. I guess Mom never intended to tell you about that, even after she thought I was dead and the money should have come to you. She really doesn’t give a shit about you, does she, baby brother?”
Bret knew about the trust’s actual line of succession only because Alison had told him about it six months ago, when they came up with their plan. But how the hell did this woman know? “Who told you about the succession? Julia?”
“No, I told you that—six months ago. I broke Mother’s silly code, opened her safe and found the papers. That’s when I came up the plan, which would have worked if you hadn’t gotten greedy and fucked it up.”
She repeated the nine-digit combination to his mother’s safe, and Bret’s stomach heaved. He really was sick then, all over himself. Wretching and coughing, spewing up the remains of his dinner. He wished she would shoot him.
“You are fucking not Alison,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. The stink was unbearable, worse than hers. “I watched her drown. I saw the current sweep her away. She’s dead.”
That laughter again, slicing at him like razors. She wouldn’t stop! The bitch was trying to blame him for the screwup, but the goddamn plan had been Alison’s idea, and no one could stop Alison once she got a hair up her ass. She actually thought she could jump off Andrew’s yacht in a storm and make it look like he’d pushed her.
She’d done all the prep work earlier that day, gone down to the boat, hidden the life jackets and loosened the lifeline. She was a strong swimmer and she’d researched the currents. Plus, she’d stashed an inflatable device in the lining of her cover up, but she’d totally overlooked the fatal flaw in her plan: her rat-fink little brother, Bret.
He was supposed to wait in a skiff in a protected area on the far side of the reefs where the currents would carry her. He was also supposed to throw her a lifeline and pull her in before she was swept out to sea. Poor stupid Alison. Why would anyone split a trust fund when he could have it all?
“I told mother about the rest of it, too,” she said. “How we tried to frame Andrew for my death, how you were able to get an insurance policy on me, using just the phone and the fax, pretending to be Andrew.”
“That’s insanity,” he whispered. “Why would you tell her any of that?”
“Because I want her to understand why I have to kill you.” She reached into her putrid layers of clothing again and drew out a silencer for the gun, a modern gleaming high-tech silencer.
“Are you totally psychotic?” Bret hissed. “There are witnesses downstairs. She knows you’re up here!”
He covered his ears, terrified she would start shrieking again. This couldn’t be Alison. This was too insane even for her.
“Are you forgetting Mother’s obsession with me?” she pointed out. “She’d never turn me in, no matter what I did, especially if I did it to you. She hates you now, anyway. You left her precious daughter for dead.”
He believed that. His mother would feel that way. “What do you want from me?”
“I’m giving you a choice. Either confess or I’ll shoot you through the heart where you stand. That’s assuming you have a heart.”
Now he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t have the strength. “Nice try, Alisuck, but a coerced confession won’t stand up in court.”
She let out a ghoulish cackle. “You should live that long! You’re not going to make it to court, genius. I j
ust want to hear you confess. I want to hear you grovel.”
She pointed the gun dead at him and fired. The computer screen exploded behind him, and Bret dropped to the floor, covering his head and cowering. She continued firing until she’d pulverized the machine, and then she reloaded.
“You’re next, asshole. You’re next!” Her shriek nearly split his eardrums. “Talk!”
Bret crouched in abject terror. If this was Alison, he had no doubt that she would shoot him—or that their mother would protect her. That’s exactly how it would go down. If it wasn’t Alison, he didn’t have a clue what kind of crazy he was dealing with. But now he did want to know who she was. And he wanted to live.
“What do you want to know?” He’d decided to talk about anything, everything, give her what she wanted. It would buy him some time until he could figure out a way to turn this around and kill her. He would make it look like suicide, or even self-defense. Christ, it was self-defense.
She prodded him with a question. “You double-crossed me because you wanted the fifty million for yourself, right?”
He sighed. “That was the original plan, but you came back from the dead—or someone who looked like you did—and I had to regroup.”
“Regroup?”
Bret was still crouched down, but he’d spotted a pile of photographs. They were of Alison, and they’d fallen to the floor when she was firing. They were almost within reach. He shifted and groaned, as if his legs were aching.
“I sent Andrew a front-page story about your disappearance, marked up with a threatening message, to motivate him to get you back to Mirage Bay,” he told her. “Anonymously, of course. I also left Tony Bogart several anonymous voice-mail messages to make him think you’d killed Marnie Hazelton. It was working until LaDonna told me the imposter was Marnie.”
“What was the point of framing the imposter?”
“To expose her. I wanted to prove she wasn’t you. Getting her out of the way brought me one step closer to the money. Then, all I had to do was finish the job of framing Andrew for your death.”
He swallowed back the urge to laugh, afraid he’d sound as psycho as she was. “It would have been a slam-dunk, sis. What jury wouldn’t convict Andrew of murder after they found out that he had his girlfriend pretend to be you? What more proof would they need that he was after the money?”
“And now Marnie’s in jail and LaDonna’s dead.”
He wasn’t admitting to LaDonna’s death, even if she shot him in the balls. When LaDonna had told him the imposter was Marnie, he’d quickly come up with a plan to deal with both women. LaDonna was out of control anyway. She’d become so jealous and possessive that she actually snuck into Sea Clouds during Alison’s reception to spy on him. Somehow she got herself trapped on the third floor and came up with the bright idea of dropping a pot on Alison to create a distraction so she could escape.
LaDonna had to be sacrificed in order to frame Marnie, who had a motive to kill her because LaDonna had discovered her true identity. He didn’t care whether or not Marnie took the wrap. He just wanted her exposed as an imposter without exposing himself.
When he’d searched the guest room he’d found sleeping pills, as well as the gun Andrew had left in the nightstand drawer. He’d used the pills to drug his mother’s and Marnie’s drinks the night of the Padres game, and he’d TiVo’d the second half of the game while he was out on the cliffs. Bogart had scared the shit out of him, but Bret had been too fast for him. He’d been too fast for everyone until tonight.
Bret massaged his thigh and inched closer to the pictures. As long as he was confessing his sins, he might as well reveal another one to his she-wolf of a sister.
“I had a video camera hidden in your room for years.” He taunted her with the singsong voice he’d used when they were kids. “I created a Web site devoted to porn shots of you. You’re a star, Alison. There are millions of men out there beating off to your pictures.”
“Bret, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever done.”
She laughed, and that was the moment he believed her. She was Alison. His sister wouldn’t have given a shit about being the object of men’s masturbation fantasies. She would have dug it. God, what a slut she was. What a nasty, unrepentant slut. He could almost love her for that.
“You never could resist a picture of yourself.” He grabbed the snapshots and flung them at her.
She ducked as the pictures flew into her face. In the confusion, Bret sprang up and rushed her. There was a fight for the gun, and a shot rang out.
Bret felt a fire split his skull. It felt as if his brains were pouring out, but consciousness stayed with him for another second or two. As he slumped to the floor, he stared up at the woman who’d shot him. She was right. He had no chance against her in this life.
Darkness came at him like a hammer. But there was no pain as his eyes drifted shut, and his parting thought was a sweet one. Every man deserved a second chance, and Bret Fairmont would get his. He would be waiting for his sister, Alison, in the lowest level of hell.
A two-man SWAT team burst through the French doors that led to the deck, and at the same time, Tony Bogart came through the bedroom door. Andrew was right behind him.
One of the SWAT team knelt next to Bret’s body and checked his vital signs. “He’s dead,” the officer said. “Our sniper got him.”
His sister, who thought she had shot him, sank to her knees and stared in horror at the blood that was oozing from Bret’s head wound. Andrew lifted her into his arms and turned her away from the gruesome sight.
She was Bret’s sister, but she wasn’t Alison. It was Marnie, posing for one last time as the woman she’d always wanted to be. The sting operation had been Andrew’s idea, and his call to Tony had been to bargain—dropped charges in exchange for his and Marnie’s cooperation in a sting operation to get the real killer, Bret.
Andrew had also found the details of the trust fund’s succession in the safe in Julia’s dressing room. He’d gone to Mexico, thinking it was Bret who would take the bait and come down to identify his sister’s body. But LaDonna’s murder had brought Andrew back to the States before the trap could be sprung—and it had thrown him off Bret’s scent.
Bret had no motive to kill LaDonna, unless it was to frame Alison, and that made no sense. To claim the trust, Bret needed Alison dead, not rotting in jail for the rest of her life. What Andrew didn’t know was that Bret had discovered Marnie’s true identity. LaDonna had told him. The girl who made one mistake after another with men had made her last one.
Marnie was grateful not to have to watch as the emergency techs took Bret away. She honestly didn’t know how she felt about her brother. There was revulsion, of course, considering everything he’d done. But it was more complicated than that. She felt pity, too, and sadness. Maybe in time she would sort it out.
Time was what she needed, she realized as she met Andrew’s concerned gaze. She touched the penny ring, aware that she had never been more grateful not to be Alison Fairmont. Perhaps she’d had to go through the ordeal of the last months to realize how much she’d loved her life and her grandmother and everything that was Marnie Hazelton. She would take that knowledge with her as she faced the future, and if she ever had children of her own, she would do her best to teach it to them.
She had a realization as she looked down at the outline on the floor where Bret’s body had been. He may have thought he could get away with letting his sister drown. He may even have felt justified because of the way she and her mother had treated him over the years. But obviously he’d never heard the old saying that Marnie had learned from her grandmother all those years ago, and had seen for herself in the depths of the ocean as she looked down from Satan’s Teeth.
When you give things to the sea, be it trash, woe, prayers or wealth, the sea remembers.
35
“Just put me in a hospital,” Julia said, worrying the emerald-and-diamond ring on her finger, “and give me drugs, please. Strong drugs
. Knock me out for a month, at least.”
The psychiatrist Julia had found through a friend sat in a high-backed chair next to hers, slowly nodding his head. He was large and bearded, a pleasant-looking man who reminded Julia of Sigmund Freud, and he’d been nodding sympathetically from the moment she entered his office.
“You’ve been through a lot,” he said, his tone soothing. “You just lost your son in a horrific way, your daughter is still missing, and now you’re dealing with this adult child, born out of wedlock.”
Julia’s heart felt heavy enough to crush her. She’d gone to the media room last night to watch a Padres game in honor of Bret. She’d sat in his chair, drank a beer from a plastic cup and wept through the entire game, wondering how she had so totally lost touch with her son.
Julia pulled a handkerchief of fine Irish lace from the breast pocket of her blouse and blew her nose. The doctor waited patiently until she’d composed herself. At least he seemed to understand how badly she hurt, that she could hurt.
“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?” he asked.
She thought a moment, trying to find her way through the fog of pain. “Yes,” she said suddenly, “there’s my former assistant, Rebecca. I just learned she has a six-figure contract with a big publisher to write a tell-all book about the prominent families she’s worked for. The Fairmonts will be featured, of course.”
Julia stuffed the hanky in her pocket, not caring if she wrinkled it. “The double-crossing bitch bugged our house. I’ll see her in court, I swear.”
The anger felt good, she realized. Cleansing energy coursed through her, and she took a deep, calming breath, trying to remember if there was anything she hadn’t covered. She didn’t see the need to tell him that she had inadvertently kept Rebecca from bugging Marnie and Andrew.
The Arrangement Page 35