by J. L. Wilson
“Would you mind leaving me alone for a minute?” I asked Bell.
“Are you kidding, Wendy Darling?” a taunting voice said from somewhere to my left. “This is perfect.” Peter moved out of the shadows behind the husband’s mausoleum, a gun in his hand.
I jumped, almost knocking over the tent. Bell moved closer to me but stopped when Peter gestured with the gun. I looked around nervously. Now would be a good time for any cops to leap out and arrest someone. It appeared we were alone, though.
“I finally have you where I want you, Tom.” Peter’s gun was aimed directly at Bell’s heart. Even though he was yards away, I was sure he would kill Bell if he shot. “I can finally kill you, you blackmailing son of a bitch.”
“You shouldn’t toss around insults, Peter. They might come back to land on you.” Bell looked and sounded perfectly relaxed, as though we were all just chatting about old times instead of having a gun aimed at us.
“Blackmail?” I tried to step back but the ground was uneven and I wobbled.
“Stay put,” Peter snapped. “Yes, blackmail. Your father told Tom he saw me that night. Tom went to my mother and she paid him off and she paid off your father. Then later, when he needed more money, Tom tried to get more out of us. We didn’t pay, though. We were at a stalemate. If he revealed what he knew, he’d be arrested for obstruction of justice.”
“And if you revealed what you did, you’d be arrested for murder.” Bell shrugged. “Nice story, Peter. Too bad it isn’t real.” He looked at me, his eyes boring into mine. “Play along,” he said softly while Peter moved down the small hill toward us. “Play your part.”
I swallowed hard. What part was I supposed to play? I didn’t know anymore. “You knew?” I turned on Bell with supposed anger. “You knew Peter was alive all this time?”
“I didn’t know for sure. Your father implied he knew something, but he didn’t tell me what. That’s why I wanted the notebooks.”
“Notebooks?” Peter’s brow furrowed with puzzlement. “What notebooks?”
“You didn’t get them when you robbed the house. I had them.” Bell glanced from me to Peter, turning so his right side—the one with the electronic wire—was facing more toward Peter. “I had the notebooks. That’s the proof about what happened that night.” Bell hesitated and now he looked puzzled. “There was one thing in the code I didn’t understand. George said he saw you and another man.”
“Another man?” I blinked in startled surprise. “Jamie Lim?”
Peter laughed harshly. “No, not Lim. Not that night, at least.” He moved closer to us, now just a few yards separating us. “You mean there was other stuff in that safety deposit box? We searched the whole fucking house and didn’t find anything.”
Bell nodded. “George’s notebooks.”
“You blackmailed him?” I asked Bell. “You knew?”
Bell shifted, turning slightly to face me directly. “Sylvia Barry paid your father twenty-five thousand to keep quiet about seeing Peter that night. Your father used the money for your college and for his medical expenses, but the cancer advanced so quickly, they—your parents—decided not to continue treatment. Your mother saved any money that was left and invested it. Later, when I was just starting out, your mother offered to loan it to me. I didn’t realize where it came from but I suspected.”
I looked from Bell to Peter in mute shock.
“About five years ago, she told me,” Bell said. “I volunteered to find Peter and pay it all back, with interest. It took me a while, but I did it. I handled it.”
That’s what Bell did, I thought. He handled things. “You paid him off?” I spoke over my shoulder because Bell was now slightly behind me, moving around me on my left. “Then it was true? They gave my parents money to keep quiet?”
“Your father was sick. Insurance wouldn’t cover his expenses. They had no choice.” Bell’s voice was flat, non-accusatory.
“Your mother developed a conscience. She wanted to tell the authorities I was still alive. It wasn’t enough that Tom paid back the money. She wanted me to pay it back, too.” Peter’s low, sharp voice told me how angry he was. When Peter got mad, his voice seemed to drop an octave and became soft, like a snake rustling through grass.
“I argued with her,” Bell said. “I told her to leave well enough alone. What was past was past and couldn’t be changed. But she felt so terrible about it. And then she got sick.” His gaze flickered to Peter. “Supposedly.”
“This was all a lie?” I threw up my hands in despair. “All of this?”
“Of course not. I still care for you.” Bell said it almost in dismissal, just like—yes—just like talking to an idiot child.
I swear to God if he wasn’t standing behind me and if I could have put my hands on my gun at that moment I would have shot him. As it was, I turned to slap him. That’s when he stepped around me and raised a gun, aiming it directly at Peter.
I edged away from Bell, casting furtive glances around the cemetery. There was no one in sight. Where were the police? Why didn’t someone interrupt? The weather and the fading daylight gave the scene the appearance of a movie set with swirls of smoky-looking air drifting on the faint breeze. If this kept up, we’d be hard pressed to see each other in the next half hour or so.
If we lived that long.
Peter didn’t appear worried by Bell’s gun. He shifted his aim, his gun aimed at me. I held up my hands in a whoa, calm down gesture. “Quit moving, Wendy,” Peter said. “Stay put.”
“I don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.”
“You don’t want to stay by the side of the man you love?” Peter took a step closer, his gaze flicking from me to Bell. “I’m surprised at you, Wendy. You always struck me as the kind of woman who would stand by her man.”
“That tells you how much you know about me.” I inched to the right, away from Bell and from Peter, who approached slowly.
“Drop the gun, Peter.” Bell’s aim was steady and his gaze didn’t shift from Peter.
“No, Tom. You drop your gun.”
I whirled when I heard the voice behind me. A tall woman stepped out from behind the wife’s mausoleum, her gun pointed directly at me. She was stylishly dressed in a floral print dress, chunky-heeled shoes, and a perky white hat that showed just a hint of her blonde hair under its white brim. It was hard to guess her age. She might have been thirty or seventy. I glanced at her hands. Mom always said you could tell a woman by her hands. I revised my estimate of her age upward, to sixty or so.
Bell turned slowly to his right so he could easily look at the woman and at Peter. “Hello, Sylvia.”
Chapter 18
The woman smiled. “Hello, Tom. Long time, no see.”
“Sylvia? Sylvia Barry?” I stared at the woman, trying to see the slender girl-mother from decades earlier. All I saw now was a hardened, sophisticated woman with no hint of sympathy or compassion on her well-sculpted face. A face, I suspected, that had seen its share of plastic surgery in the not-too-distant past. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought Peter might need some help.” She walked carefully down the slope toward us, a small gun in her hand.
While she was distracted, I shot furtive glances around us. Where in hell were the police? Peter was looking anxiously at his mother and Bell, who hadn’t lowered his gun one inch. In fact, I realized, I was the only one here who wasn’t overtly armed. Holy crapola. I was in the middle of a damn firefight.
I inched backward, aiming for the carpeted area under the tent. I had a vague idea that if I could drop to the ground there, the wooden folding chairs might provide some measure of protection. A stupid thought, perhaps, but it was the best I could come up.
Bell appeared calm, totally prepared for the fact that two people were pointing guns at us. Peter was still turned so he could aim at me and Sylvia’s gun was unwavering, pointed at Bell. “You thought he needed help or you were afraid he’d screw it up?” Bell asked.
Peter’s mouth
thinned into an angry line and I knew Bell’s little jab hit home. “Who was the mastermind behind it all, Peter?” I inched back more. “Was it you or her?”
Sylvia was ten feet away, her dark brown eyes cold. “I thought of it, of course. We had to do something. All our plans were unraveling.” She glanced at her son, who looked miffed at this dismissal of his involvement. “I didn’t think it would work, but Peter was right. He said you’d all act exactly the way you all did. And it worked. Now give us the proof, and no one gets hurts. That’s all we need.” Her hand with the gun wavered and I swallowed hard, praying she knew how to handle it.
“Unraveling?” Bell frowned. “What was unraveling?”
Sylvia looked at me when she answered. “Your father saw Peter and his father that night.”
“What? Your father came home?” I looked at Peter and he nodded. Then I turned to Bell, expecting to see shock on his face, too. What I saw was satisfaction. “You knew?”
He glanced at me but returned his gaze immediately to Sylvia. “I debugged the program, remember?”
The program. The pseudo-code my father wrote describing that night. I only skimmed it, so I wasn’t sure what was in there. Peter and his father? My eyes widened in disbelief.
Sylvia saw my astonishment. “Honestly, Wendy. For a supposedly intelligent girl, you’re pretty stupid.”
I didn’t take offense at her comment, but I did take offense at the condescending way she said it. I was getting tired of people treating me like a simpleton. “I may be stupid but at least I’m not wanted for murder,” I snapped.
“Neither am I.” Her composure didn’t waver. “No one can prove anything.”
“Unless we exhume the body and run a DNA test,” Bell said.
Choking silence covered us all. “Perhaps,” Sylvia said. “But it won’t come to that, will it, Tom?”
“I don’t understand.” I said it to Bell. “Peter’s father returned home?”
“We were one month away from declaring him legally dead.” Peter had moved and now all my little maneuverings were in vain. He once again had a clear shot at me. “We kept up the life insurance policy for him and for me. Didn’t you wonder why we were so poor, Wendy?”
I shook my head mutely. Both Peter and Bell were poor growing up, but I never gave it much thought. Both were from single-parent households and I just assumed that was why. As with so much, my assumptions were wrong.
“That son of a bitch came back a month before I stood to inherit one million dollars.” Sylvia’s gaze remained fixed on my face but I saw her dart little glances at Bell, as though gauging his reaction. “He came back and that’s when Peter devised his plan to conveniently die and put the blame squarely on you, little Wendy, the darling of Kensington.”
I tried to laugh but it came out more like a choked croak. “Bullshit,” I managed.
“Oh, it was true. You didn’t see it, but everyone else did. You were Princess of this and Queen of that. Head of the Honor Society, President of the student council, head cheerleader, leader of the Glee Club.” Sylvia waved her free hand dramatically. “Whatever contest you entered, you won. Whatever office you ran for, you won. You were so sincere, so sweet, so—”
“Gullible,” Peter finished for her. “I knew you’d blame yourself if I declared my undying love for you.”
“And you knew the police wouldn’t pursue a verdict of suicide if it meant implicating Wendy in his death,” Bell said. “You were banking a lot on her popularity and the police being sympathetic to her.”
“Not just her.” Sylvia’s voice dripped with venom. “Her fucking parents, too. The perfect couple. Handsome, so pretty, so well-matched. Children flocked to their house because they welcomed everyone. It was the place for kids to hang out because her father was cool and her mother was so sweet and patient. He did charity legal work for Viet Nam vets. She served on every volunteer committee in town.” Sylvia’s face twisted into a mask of scorn. “They were so well-loved that no one in town would want to besmirch their names, especially something that could harm their children. After all, they had been through tragedy, losing their oldest son. Everyone felt sorry for them. No, we were safe and we knew it.”
“All we had to do was kill my father, rough up his body so it wouldn’t be recognizable, let him rot for a while, then toss him in the river.” Peter smiled at the memory.
“There wasn’t any DNA testing back then. Besides, I identified the body.” Sylvia gestured with the gun and Bell moved closer to me. “No one questioned it.”
“Mary Davis told me,” Bell said. “They were desperate for money. Then, later, she was afraid to tell the police what she knew. She was afraid she might be implicated and then what would happen to Wendy?”
“We bought them off,” Sylvia said. “They needed money for college expenses and for his health care.”
“Why didn’t they tell me?” I whispered. “They could have told me. Mom didn’t have to keep it a secret all those years.”
“Because no one wanted to hurt you,” Peter sneered. “Little Wendy Darling. Nobody wants to hurt Wendy.”
Days of pent-up confusion, anger, and grief started to boil in my gut. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to hit somebody. I wanted to scream. “Fuck you, Peter,” I spat.
His eyes widened. “Oh. Little Wendy is angry. Tsk.”
“I found out about it later,” Bell said. “Your mother felt so guilty. I offered to find Peter and pay it all back.”
“And that’s when we realized there might be a complication.” Sylvia raised the gun slightly higher. Now it was pointed directly at my heart. “Your mother’s conscience was bothering her. And she involved Tom Bell.”
“She didn’t know about the murder.” Bell glanced at me, his green eyes intent and reassuring. “All your parents knew was that Sylvia and Peter defrauded the insurance company, claiming Peter died.”
I shook my head. “Didn’t Mom and Dad wonder who it was in the river?”
Bell’s mouth tightened into a flat line. “Sylvia explained that perfectly. She told your parents it was a veteran she worked with, someone who was terminally ill and wanted to commit suicide, someone in pain.”
Sylvia shot me a pitying look. “Your parents believed it. They wanted to believe it because they needed the money. I told your father it was assisted suicide. The man overdosed and Peter and I disposed of his body to save his family the grief. Your parents bought it. They even sympathized. I can see where you got your gullibility, Wendy.”
That was third or fourth time someone called me gullible. I held on to my temper, forcing myself to think rationally. “What about Tina?”
Sylvia stiffened. “What do you know about her?”
“I—Totts—Totts said that Tina died. I thought maybe she was with you.” I stuttered out an explanation, realizing my mistake too late.
Peter looked momentarily sad. “I hated to do that to Tina. All I wanted was for her to join me.” He shot a venomous look at his mother.
“We discussed that, Peter,” she said calmly. “Tina couldn’t be trusted. It was better we didn’t have to worry about her.”
“You killed her?” I asked incredulously. “Good Lord, don’t you have a conscience?”
“It’s all about survival,” Sylvia said. “We had almost two million dollars at stake between two insurance policies. I wasn’t going to let anything or anyone jeopardize that.”
“What are you going to do? Kill us both? That might look a little suspicious, don’t you think?” Where were the police? Didn’t they have enough information? What else did they need?
Bell grabbed my arm. “What are you going to do, Sylvia? It’s over.”
“We want the proof.” She gestured with the gun. “Once we get the proof, everybody goes home and nobody gets hurt.”
“That’s crap,” I blurted. “There isn’t any proof.”
Her eyes narrowed, the long and obviously fake lashes fluttering with her action. “What? Why would they—” She looked
at me then at Bell, who still held his gun and had me in a tight grip. “What’s going on?”
“Leave her out of this.” Bell shoved me and I stumbled into one of the folding chairs. “She doesn’t know anything. Let her go and I’ll give you all the proof.”
Sylvia tilted her head slightly to one side. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “Peter, get Wendy. We need to split them up. Maybe if we have a hostage, he’ll cooperate.”
“I told you I’d cooperate.” Bell stepped forward and lowered his gun, crouching to set it on the ground. “I will. Trust me.”
I wanted to laugh. Instead I cowered and let my handbag slip off my shoulder.
“Get up, Wendy,” Sylvia snapped. “You’re going with Peter.”
I knelt to pick up my bag, pretending to overbalance and fall forward. I dug my hand into the center section of the purse, pulled out the gun, flicked off the safety, stood, and aimed. “Bell!”
He turned. His eyes opened wide when he saw me aiming at him.
“Now who’s predictable?”
Peter laughed behind me.
I whirled around and shot. The bullet went wide. I knew it would. I didn’t have time to aim and I’ve never shot at a person before. But it did what I wanted. It surprised them. As soon as I fired, I dropped to the ground, crashing into the chairs, and bringing them down on top of me. I struggled to free myself and peered out from the confining wood.
Bell and Peter were fighting for Peter’s gun, tussling around on the ground. Two men were running toward us, racing over the knoll where the mausoleums sat. Two other men ran toward us from the opposite direction, near the cemetery entrance. Each had a gun drawn and each looked like they knew how to use it.
I flailed amongst the chair legs, finally righting myself enough to get to my hands and knees. Someone grabbed my hair and my head was jerked back. I stared into the barrel of a gun.