Murder Makes it Mine

by Christina Strong

  Laura stiffened. Her eyes got as big as saucers. McLain watched her carefully. Her nerve held.

  The sound of a powerful engine approaching the house interrupted them. It circled the drive and returned across the front of the house to stop at the point in the drive nearest the side door.

  “Get your coat.” McLain gulped the rest of his coffee, jumped up and put his mug in the sink.

  “My coat?” Laura stood.

  Rags was dumped unceremoniously when she stood. Unruffled, he ran to where Laura’s raincoat was hanging to dry and waited for her.

  She shrugged into it, scooped him up and followed the Colonel out to the driveway. He helped her into the passenger side of the huge vehicle that brooded there, engine throbbing, and asked the man inside, “All gassed up?”

  “All ready to go,” Frank Takamoto answered from where he’d moved to the middle seat of the big SUV.

  “Good.” McLain put it into gear and exited Laura’s property carefully. A nearly four-ton vehicle could do a lot of damage to a dry gravel drive, let alone a wet one. Once he hit the asphalt that ran along in front of Samantha’s house, he shoved his foot through the fire wall.

  “Yap! Yap! Yap!” Rags vibrated with approval.

  For such a behemoth of a vehicle, it took the corner on two wheels very nicely.

  “You had to bring the mutt.”

  “Yes,” Laura was staring straight ahead, rigid, but she could still speak. McLain decided that was good. He took the next corner a little more slowly, and Laura added, “I hadn’t the heart to leave him all by himself.”

  Nobody was coming either way when he got to the stop sign after the Yacht Club, so McLain ran it and screeched left toward the naval base.

  Laura clutched the grab bar with one hand and Rags with the other.

  The terrier had most of the breath squeezed out of him, but decided to be generous and refrain from complaining.

  “That mutt’d probably die of apoplexy if you’d left him.” McLain grinned, striving to make her relax. “Or tear up all your furniture.”

  Laura did relax a little at that. “Believe me, if I’d been thinking clearly, my furniture would have been a very valid consideration. I just couldn’t bear to leave him all alone. Where are we going?”

  “To Greater Tidewater Realty. They’re the ones who should know where their receptionist is.”

  “Of course. Janet. Samantha’s with her.”

  “Yes.”

  ***

  Samantha gazed around her at the tiny, windowless room. There was nothing in it but a trunk in one corner. It was a small affair with bright brass hinges and colorful designs painted on it. It was strangely out of place, somehow, in this otherwise empty room.

  Samantha turned back to face Janet, frowning slightly. Were the albums in this brightly painted trunk?

  “That’s my trunk. My daddy made it for me. It used to hold my dolls and their clothes. My mother made them lots of clothes.”

  The size of the room gave Janet’s voice a strange, childlike quality.

  Samantha didn’t know if she was lulled by the steady rhythm of the rain or by the eerie twilight, but she felt almost as if she were talking to a child. “It’s very pretty. It looks as if your father took a great deal of time making it.”

  “Oh, yes, he did. I’ve always loved it. It was the only thing he ever made me. I was careful to get it out of the house before the fire.”

  Samantha’s whole mind was focused on the chest. She answered automatically, “How fortunate that you could. So few things are ever saved when there’s a fire.” She moved toward the trunk with the care of someone almost afraid to find themselves finally standing on the brink of discovery.

  Suppose there were no photos of young Benny Stoddard after all? Or suppose the photos proved that the young man at Brenda Talley’s was indeed the long lost son of Mimi and Ben Stoddard, and indeed their legal heir? Then what would they do? They’d be no closer to the identity of the murderer.

  She shook off the myriad doubts and questions plaguing her. Smiling a tight little smile over her shoulder at its owner, Samantha opened the trunk. There, in the carefully crafted tray at the top of its interior, were several photo albums.

  Samantha breathed, “Oh, Janet. Here they are! The albums we were searching for.”

  Janet came to stand close behind her. “Yes.” Her voice was as calm as Samantha felt excited. “Those on the top are Olivia’s old ones. Then there are a few more recent ones under them.”

  Samantha sat down on the clean-swept floor and pulled the first of the books out of the trunk and into her lap. The light from the unshaded bulb hanging from the center of the tiny room’s ceiling was more than bright enough for them to see the pictures Olivia had taken. There were pictures of a large home in a lovely garden.

  “That’s Olivia’s home in Charleston.” Janet reached over Samantha’s shoulder and turned the next page. “Those are her parents.”

  The picture was of a kind-faced couple past their prime, smiling into the camera and squinting a little in the sun. Olivia stood between them, a teenager in bobby socks. “They look very nice. It’s easy to see why Olivia was so gentle. Growing up with them as your parents must have been a happy experience.”

  “Yes. They were very nice. Very kind.” Janet turned several pages at once, and they were looking at an older Olivia. Other pictures on the same page showed groups of children with whom she must have worked. Another bunch of pages flipped past, and Samantha was looking at a picture of Mimi and Ben Stoddard. This time the child between the parents was Ben Stoddard Jr, and Jasmine, a younger edition of her very own Jasmine, stood close by. “Ah. Good. Here’s Benny.”

  Abruptly, Janet dropped a second album in Samantha’s lap. She crushed it down on the first, covering the page to which Samantha had opened it. A quick sensation of danger shot through her. Samantha tried to dismiss it as overburdened nerves, but alarm bells were beginning to go off in the back of her mind.

  Janet commanded, “Look here.”

  There were two people in the picture to which she pointed. One was a young man who bore a startling resemblance to the youth in the picture with Mimi and Ben Stoddard, the other was a girl.

  Behind the two people in the picture, Samantha could see a wall with words on it. Words carved in granite. The first was hidden by the boy’s head, but over his shoulder she could read part of them. It said —hiatric Insti—. Then the remainder of the last word was cut off by the photographed face of a pretty, smiling girl. And the girl was Janet Wilson.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  McLain gunned the SUV into the neatly landscaped parking lot of the Greater Tidewater Realty building, slammed it to a rocking halt and stepped out into the downpour. Opening the passenger door, he grabbed Rags from Laura and tossed him to Frank Takamoto. “Here, keep the mutt happy, Frank. We’ll be right back.”

  Laura and he ran for the building. Inside they shook off the raindrops and Laura told McLain, “I thought that was Janet’s little red car I saw parked on the side street, but we were past it before I could be certain. Did you see it?”

  “I . . .”

  Brenda Talley burst into the room from one of the private offices. “So that’s who took my car! I thought it was Benny. She took my raincoat, too. The little bitch! I’ll kill her!” Fury radiated from her.

  “Hey! Take it easy. What’s going on?”

  Brenda turned on him like an angry cat. “My Lexus is gone! Benny left me a stupid goodbye note that I almost didn’t find and has run away, so I thought he’d taken it. I wondered what in hell he wanted with my raincoat, the stupid bas . . .”

  “Hey! Watch it. There’s a lady present.”

  Brenda ignored him, her eyes on Laura. “But you say you saw her—Janet’s—car parked down on the side street, so it must be Janet. Damn that girl! I wondered why she watched me like a hawk when I put the spare keys in my desk. Now, I know! How dare she? If she puts one scratch on that Lexus I’ll . . .
”

  “Yeah, yeah. We know. You’ll kill her. Later. Right now we have something more important to worry about than your blasted over-priced wheels.”

  Brenda sputtered through the first part of his explanation, but by the end of it McLain had her complete attention.

  “So,” he concluded, “where are Olivia’s things—that’s where they’re headed.”

  Brenda was immediately all efficiency. Samantha was more important to her even than her Lexus. If anything happened to dear, stuffy Samantha she wouldn’t have a single true friend left in Tidewater.

  Wimps always found Brenda Talley of Greater Tidewater Realty too hard to take, and she knew it. And she considered so many of her well-bred ‘Vah-gin-Yah’ friends, thanks to their soooo good manners, wimps. Her habit of getting right to the point and saying exactly what she thought had disconcerted more than a few lovely Southern Belles, but Samantha Masters could take it. Or at least understand it, and Brenda cherished her for that.

  She walked back into the broad hall from which she’d come and studied the key board. Neatly labeled keys hung there on numbered pegs that were matched to files of their listings with Greater Tidewater Realty. Studying the board for a moment, she put her finger out and touched the blank spot under a peg. “Laura, you know where Olivia’s apartment is, of course.”

  “Yes, over on Stockley Gardens.”

  “Right. But see this. Unless I’m mistaken, this was the peg for her newly acquired beach house. We still had copies for the workmen Olivia commissioned us to send out there. And the keys are missing.”

  “Where is the place, woman?” McLain had to hold himself back from shaking it out of her. “Where!”

  ***

  Samantha woke up with an awful pain in her head. Without opening her eyes, she tried to raise her hand to the knot she felt certain must be at the center of the pain, and found that she couldn’t move. Her eyes flew open!

  She was on the cold, bare floor of the tiny room she last remembered, and she was bound hand and foot. Who could have done this? Where was Janet? Was she all right?

  Her eyes refused to focus. She blinked them into obedience and looked up. The bare bulb hanging from the ceiling fused into a single glare after a moment, and Samantha thanked the Lord that she didn’t have a concussion. “Janet!” she gasped. “Janet, are you all right?”

  Turning her head to look for her young friend, she saw Janet sitting quietly on the glossily painted trunk.

  Janet smiled brightly. “Ah, you’re back. Good. Now I can talk to you.”

  Samantha’s mind rioted. She wanted to demand answers. What had happened? Who’d hit her on the head? What was the matter with Janet? Untie-me! Why aren’t you tied? All of it ricocheted around in her mind, one question colliding with another.

  Then the spinning stopped, and she knew the reason that she was lying on the floor with her wrists and ankles bound and Janet was sitting calmly on the trunk watching her. The trunk Janet had been able to get out before the fire that killed her parents!

  Oh, how could she have been so stupid? How could she have been so focused on finding the photo albums that she hadn’t picked up on what was said? It had been Janet who’d attacked her and trussed her up like a Christmas turkey!

  As the last of the fog dissipated and an infinite sadness filled her heart, she concluded Janet was indeed all right in the sense of being unharmed physically. But Samantha now realized that the lovely young girl sitting there so calmly was far from all right in quite another way.

  Samantha didn’t say any of what was running through her mind. Somehow, she sensed that saying nothing at this point was the wisest choice she could make. So she lay and looked up at Janet, letting the questions she had on the tip of her tongue speak from her eyes.

  “You want to know what’s going on, don’t you Samantha dear?”

  Samantha nodded carefully. Surely that was the safest way. She very desperately wanted to play it safe. She was more than deeply troubled by the odd expression in Janet’s glittering eyes. Much more than that—she was terrified.

  “It’s quite simple. As you’ve probably guessed by the picture of ‘Benny’”—she used the gesture in the air for quotation marks that Samantha had used in the car and giggled. “I like that, that’s cute.”

  She stroked the quotation marks in the air again, then grew serious. “The picture of Benny and me that I showed you just a while ago, I’m the one who brought Freddie—that’s really his name—here to pretend to be Benny Stoddard. I knew the story of the lost Stoddard boy from Olivia, of course. I can’t tell you how often she whined about him. Wherever we went, Olivia tried to fill me in on everything and everybody so that I’d feel at home and part of things.

  “She hated moving around, but since she was my keeper, she had to when I . . . made someone upset, but she always hoped I’d settle in.

  “I hated her for that. For being my keeper, I mean.”

  She shifted a little. “The courts awarded me to her after her sanctimonious parents died. I was still in the mental institute at the time, but meddling old Olivia got me out and promised that she’d keep me with her always and that we would live a happy life together in the real world.”

  Janet laughed scornfully, the sound sharp and brittle in the small room. “The real world. And they thought I was crazy! Olivia really believed I’d settle down into the tiresome grind that she considered ‘a good life.’” Her eyes narrowed, and she spat venom into the two words, “The fool.”

  She sat, quiet for a few minutes, then spoke again more calmly. “As I said, I hated her for always being there, always looking after me, always caring what I did. Always having her nose in my business. She was my jailer!”

  The girl took a deep breath to steady herself. “When she found out that I’d brought Freddie here to pretend to be Benny Stoddard, she had a fit.” She laughed again, and Samantha could clearly hear madness at the base of it. She tried to squirm away from the slender girl on the trunk.

  Janet was beside her in an instant. “Here, let me help you sit up.” To Samantha’s utter surprise, the girl grasped her under the arms and pulled her over to lean back against the wall. Again Janet smiled brightly, “There. Isn’t that better?”

  “Y-yes,” Samantha’s voice sounded as if she hadn’t used it for a month. Long habit forced the words, “Thank you.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome. I don’t want you to be uncomfortable just because I have to kill you, after all. Now where was I?”

  Samantha didn’t hear the neat repetition of what Janet had already said as she led up to what she wanted to say next. Her own mind was too occupied with trying to grasp that she was going to die! Janet intended to kill her! As difficult as it was, Samantha understood that. She was going to die here in this bare little room, and she didn’t even know why. Before Janet had begun to explain to her, she hadn’t known that the girl was in any way implicated in . . .

  “Are you listening to me?” Janet stamped her foot and spoke sharply. “You’d better be listening to me, Samantha Masters!”

  Samantha didn’t want to listen. Samantha wanted to ask. “Why? Why do you think you have to kill me?”

  “I was getting to that if you would just listen!” Janet looked as if she wanted to slap the older woman.

  Samantha closed her eyes for an instant, then opened them and looked Janet straight in the eye. “I’m listening!” she told her captor testily. After all, what did she have to lose at this point? Nobody even knew where she was.

  “Oh.” The girl looked momentarily taken aback, then the light of purpose returned and burned bright in her eyes. “After Olivia told me I’d have to confess what I’d done, apologize to Brenda and unmask Freddie—Benny to you—I knew I had to act.” She smiled winningly. I’d already acted once, and wouldn’t Olivia have had a fit if she’d known. I’d already killed Dr. Tiggs and cleaned his fingerprints off with emery boards so that nobody could find out who he was. The old fool came to warn Olivia that I’d take
n Freddie and left the institute. Couldn’t have that.

  “At Bridge, Alison said that her aunt had the travel brochures Olivia wanted, remember? Then Olivia said when she’d pick them up, and suddenly I saw the way to stop her meddling. All I had to do was wait by the gate at Laura’s until Olivia got there, stop her car and kill her.”

  Samantha shuddered. Janet’s casual recounting of how she’d killed her own cousin in cold blood horrified her.

  “It was so hard ever to catch Olivia out of the apartment and alone after dark, you know. I knew this might be my only chance. I had the knife ready, and she stopped the car and rolled down the window like a perfect lamb. I think she was surprised to see me.” Janet giggled. “I think she was even more surprised to die.”

  The girl leaned forward earnestly. “Wouldn’t you think she’d have guessed? She’d already seen what I wrote on her mirror. She knew I wanted her to leave me alone!” She sat back. “But, oh, no. Not ‘Miss perfect-everybody-loves-me, I-love-everybody Olivia’! She couldn’t see me living without her. Without her meddling care and guidance—not for one minute. Well, I showed her!”

  Samantha’s eyes misted. Poor Olivia. Poor, dear Olivia.

  “Are you crying?” Janet demanded, obviously annoyed.

  Samantha shook her head vehemently. She wasn’t going to let this woman think she’d made her cry. Though she supposed she was someone to weep for. It didn’t seem that she was going to have time to come around to weeping for Janet, however.

  “You know, Samantha. This is all your own fault. You’d have been all right if you’d just left well enough alone. The only reason I have to kill you is because you vowed to get ‘Benny’ to go to the hospital if you had to drag him. I couldn’t let you do that. Jasmine seeing Freddie would have ruined everything.”