One Deadly Sin

by Annie Solomon

  The thought shattered whatever calm she had left.

  Only one thing to do. Get out. Now. Before anyone else died. Including her.

  She staggered out of the bathroom, pulled the duffel down from the shelf and tossed it on the bed. Threw in her clothes, not bothering to fold anything. Piled on shoes and bras and jeans. She didn’t even bother checking for what she might have left behind. Toothbrush, socks—whatever she missed, she’d replace when she got to wherever she was going.

  She jerked the zipper, couldn’t get it to close, jiggled the lumpy contents and when she still couldn’t get the zipper up, yanked out whatever was on top.

  She reached for the zipper pull, and into the crazed silence, a knock sounded on her door.

  She froze.

  “Edie!”

  She couldn’t see Holt. Not now. Not ever.

  “Edie! Open up!”

  She didn’t move.

  “Goddammit, Edie, I need to talk to you. Open the fucking door!”

  She tried to squeeze herself small, so small he wouldn’t know she was there, would go away and stay away. But he pounded the door again.

  She looked around frantically. No place to hide. Could she jump out the window? If she broke a leg, she’d never get out of Redbud.

  But the window was the only way out. She ran to open it. Raced back to the bed for the duffel.

  The hell with her stuff. She could always buy more stuff.

  Bolted back to the window. Opened it wider.

  The door exploded inward.

  She tried to dive through the open pane, but Holt was there in two strides, pulling her back by the neck of her shirt.

  “Going somewhere, Eden?” He threw her on the bed and, with a heavy swipe, slammed the window shut. Then he grabbed the duffel and hurled it across the room. Shoes clattered out of the open top, a bra banged into the wall. T-shirts and jeans hurtled every which way, on a shelf, over the hotplate, curled around a chair leg.

  And across the floor like a skater gone wild skittered the tiny packet of black angels, spewing its contents over the room.

  Edie looked at them with horror. Her dread was mirrored in Holt’s face. He looked at her with disbelief. With hurt. With accusation. And finally, with cold knowledge.

  “Turn around.” The frigidity in his voice chilled her to the bone. She couldn’t move.

  “I said”—in one deft move, he flipped her so she was lying face down on the bed—“turn over.” He yanked her arms behind her. Cold metal kissed her wrists. The snick of the locks closing around her hands sounded deafening in the silence. Roughly, he turned her over so she could face him.

  “Eden Swanford, you are under arrest for the murders of Fred Lyle, Dennis Runkle, and Kenneth Parsley.”

  He yanked her to her feet. “You have the right to remain silent.” Shoved her out the door. “Anything you say will be used against you.” Down the metal steps. “You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you.” A group of men were clumped outside the bar, smoking and laughing. The minute she stumbled into view, they shut up.

  “Hey, Chief,” one of them called, “what’d she do now? Hit you again?” They snickered, and Holt shoved her forward.

  “Do you understand?”

  She jerked away, whipped around to face him. “I understand everything.”

  “Good.” He opened the door, put a hand on her head, and pushed her into the backseat of the car. The men outside Red’s watched as he hauled her away.

  28

  Holt kept Edie up most of the night. Too angry to sleep himself, he paced the office, shooting wads of paper into a wastebasket for ten minutes before returning to the single cell where Edie looked out between the bars, staring coolly at him. Midnight. Two. Four in the morning. There she was, where he’d put her, like a wraith that needed neither sleep nor justification.

  She freely admitted sending the black angels, but the rest she adamantly denied. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Leaning against the wall across from the cell, he watched her closely. “But you knew about Fred Lyle’s will.”

  She stretched out on the cot, hands behind her head, as if she couldn’t be bothered with his persistence. “I still don’t know about Fred Lyle’s will. Why don’t you fill me in?”

  He took another tack. “Why change your name?” Over the course of the night, he’d asked her that a dozen times, and this time, as she had each time before, she told a variation of the same story. Eden Swanford was a sad, pathetic little girl and she didn’t want to be her anymore.

  “Why lie to me about it?”

  “Eden Swann is my legal name. Everyone calls me Edie. I didn’t lie.”

  “You knew who sent the black angels.”

  “That was none of your business.”

  “You made it my business when you killed those men.”

  “I told you—”

  “Yeah, I know. A demon did it. A mysterious being working on your behalf.”

  “No, not on my behalf.”

  “You didn’t want those men dead?”

  “I wanted them to sweat, that’s for sure. But dead? They’re useless to me dead.”

  “Not if you wanted to use them for revenge.”

  She snapped to a sitting position, swiveled to face him. “Look, don’t you get it yet? I wanted to shake them up. Get them ready to talk.”

  “To talk or to die?”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “I’ll stop when you start telling the truth.”

  She glared at him, and he scrubbed a hand over his face. He was tired of the runaround, but more pissed off than anything. He didn’t have to lock her up. He shouldn’t even have arrested her. But he wanted her on edge, and if she felt even the smallest bit of the betrayal he felt when he saw those black creatures tumble onto her floor, he’d cry hallelujah to the devil himself.

  “Dammit, Holt. I am telling the truth and you know it. Let me out of here. Go home. Look in on Miranda and get some sleep. Then we can go over all this tomorrow.”

  “And let you hightail it out of town? I don’t think so.”

  “You took my keys.”

  He stabbed a finger at her. “And impounded your bike.”

  “See? It’s not as if I can go anywhere.”

  He leaned against the wall across from the cell. Crossed his arms. He had no intention of letting her out. Not until her throat bled from begging. And maybe not even then.

  “Okay, let’s go back to the church. What were you doing there?”

  “I told you. I was looking for the black angel. I was trying to take it back.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I think maybe you were planting something there, not taking it away.”

  “Like what?”

  “You tell me. Something to implicate someone else.”

  “Like who, Holt? If I could have implicated someone else, wouldn’t I have done it already? I love the enforced closeness, darlin’, but I’d rather do it without bars.”

  He grunted, allowing her the point though he didn’t want to. “If you didn’t know something was going to happen, why did you warn Terry to watch out for Reverend Parsley?”

  “I didn’t know, I suspected. I told you, I was worried. Wouldn’t you be? Wouldn’t anyone?”

  “Anyone with murder on their mind, yeah.”

  She glared at him.

  “So why these three men?”

  She groaned. “How many times do you have to hear it? Before she died my aunt Penny gave me a list of names. Men who visited my father during the last few weeks of his life. She didn’t know why they came or what they said. If I could find that out—”

  “What?”

  “Maybe it would explain—”

  “Why he killed himself?”

  She nodded.

  “No, I think you blame them for your father’s death and killed them for it.”

  She grabbed her head. �
��I didn’t kill them. How the hell could I find out what happened if they’re all dead? Don’t you see? It isn’t me who wanted them dead. Someone didn’t want me to find out what really happened.”

  “What really happened?” He lunged at the bars, grabbing them. “Your daddy embezzled money from Hammerbilt. He got caught. Couldn’t face the consequences and offed himself. That’s what really happened.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know that your precious father jumped into oblivion and left you and your mother alone to face the whole town. I know that he was a weak coward.”

  “Shut up. Shut up!” She grabbed the bars from the other end and only the steel kept them apart. Her face was wild with denial and fury, the dark hair and brows a keen contrast to the high blush of her cheeks, the white of her neck. As alive in her passion to defend her father as she was in his arms.

  He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to strangle her.

  In either case he’d be able to touch her, which was what he wanted above all.

  He cursed. Her stubbornness, his infatuation. The deep, deep endless pain inside his chest, as if someone had taken a machete, hacked through his ribs straight to his heart.

  He stalked off. Back to his office. Back to the chair behind the desk. Breathe, man. Shake it off and breathe.

  What was so damn attractive about Edie Swann anyway? Rat’s nest she called hair, inked up and down her arms. She was a freak, a circus freak.

  Yeah, and that freak was shaking up his life like nothing had since Cindy died.

  Which was exactly the point, wasn’t it? That itchy restlessness he shoved aside, the memories he buried—of dark alleys and the hyped-up rush of adrenaline from putting everything on the line. Wasn’t he just a little tired of playing it safe?

  And Edie was so far from safe she might as well be the grenade about to explode in front of him.

  Maybe that was it. Not her at all, but the danger she represented. He grabbed on to that as if it was his last crumb of bread. Thought about all the other ways he could soothe his dormant thrill seeker. Bungie jumping off the nearest bridge. Hang gliding. Speedboat racing. Anything that didn’t involve Eden Swann, black angels, or three dead men.

  He closed his eyes, suddenly way beyond tired.

  Holt didn’t remember falling asleep, but he woke when someone shook him. And there he was, bones aching from being squashed in his desk chair, his father looking down at him.

  “Jesus, Dad.” He ran a hand over his face. Saw the time on the wall clock. 7:00 A.M.

  “Morning,” James said cheerfully. “Your mother sent over some coffee. Didn’t want you poisoning yourself with the stuff here.” He held up a thermos and a plastic container. “And some ham biscuits.”

  Holt grumbled, but his dad didn’t seem to mind the crankiness. He set the thermos and container on the corner of the desk. Took a seat across from Holt. “Long night.”

  Holt unscrewed the thermos. The hot liquid steamed as he poured it into the top, and the aroma began to wake him up. He slid the coffee over to his dad, then poured some into a Styrofoam cup for himself. The liquid was hot and strong. It cleared his head but didn’t take the ache away. “I arrested Edie.”

  James paused in the action of bringing the cup to his mouth. He hadn’t slept much either, desperate to know what Holt would do with the information he’d been given, what Edie would tell him, if she knew anything to tell. He’d figured Holt would go straight to her, would question her. Hadn’t expected him to arrest her.

  “She’s the source of the black angels.”

  James set down the cup altogether. Could he have lucked out at last? If Edie had sent all those black angels, she was Holt’s prime suspect. “I’m sorry, son.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “You got enough for an indictment?”

  Holt shook his head. “Says she didn’t do it, no surprise there. But her story was consistent all night long. And I can’t place her at the scene of any of the deaths. And even if I could place her I don’t know how she could’ve arranged any of them.”

  James nodded sympathetically, his mind racing. How to convict her without seeming to? “Look, Holt, I don’t like to stick my nose in. This is your job now.”

  “But?”

  “But are you sure you’re talking murder? A heart attack, an allergic reaction, and a drowning could all have perfectly plausible explanations. The black angels could have nothing to do with any of it.”

  “A coincidence? Edie has a list of men connected to her father and three of them just happen to pop off while she’s in town? Come on, Dad, you know better than that.”

  In a rush, the blood left James’s body and pooled at his feet. “A list? She has a list of names? What names?”

  Holt waved away the question. “Doesn’t matter. They’re all dead now.”

  “All of them?”

  “Alan Butene—remember him? Fell off a ladder last year. Broke his neck. And then our three.”

  Anticipation beat a faint rhythm in his chest. “That’s all?”

  Holt peered at James closely. “Dad, you got something? Some connection between the names?”

  James shook his head, buried his face in his coffee. “No, no. Just wondering. Thinking out loud. You said Butene was on the list and he fell off a ladder?”

  “He was changing a light bulb at the top of the stairs. Tumbled right to the bottom. Neck broke. Died instantly.”

  “Another accident.”

  Holt shot his Dad a sharp look. “Had to be,” Holt said. “The ladder must have been eighty years old.”

  “And Edie wasn’t in town then.”

  “Okay, so I’ll give her one. But the others?” Holt shook his head.

  “You sound like you want her to be guilty.” James picked his words carefully, trying not to let the hope shine through.

  “What I want’s irrelevant,” Holt said flatly. “It’s what’s staring me in the face that counts.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “The only thing I can do with the evidence I have. Let her go.”

  29

  When someone finally came to unlock the cell, it wasn’t Holt who set Edie free, but the deputy, Sam Fish. She was crisp and pressed in her starched uniform, her hair pulled back, her face bright-eyed and refreshed. The sight of her made Edie even more grumpy than she already was.

  She stumbled out of the cell and into the sweeter-smelling air outside the jail room. “What happened to Holt?”

  “Gone home.”

  No need for long explanations from Deputy Fish.

  Edie grumbled. She couldn’t help a flash of disappointment. Even in her dreams she’d been explaining herself to him, and the opposite urges to slap his face and throw herself on her knees and beg forgiveness were making her crazy.

  “What about me?”

  “What about you?” Sam countered. She led the way to the small office overburdened with its two desks, its steel filing cabinets, bulletin boards, chairs, and a long wooden bench against one wall.

  “You just letting me go?”

  “Why—you want to spend another night here?” Sam opened a desk drawer, took out an envelope, and dumped the contents on the desk. Edie’s wallet, credit cards, keys.

  Edie pocketed the first two, examined the last. It was lighter than it should be. “My bike key’s not here.”

  Sam frowned, but there was something manufactured about it. “It’s not? You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  The deputy shrugged. Sat in the big desk chair and leaned way back. “Maybe you didn’t have them with you when the chief brought you in.”

  “I didn’t have them with me, because Holt took them.”

  “Everything he confiscated was in that envelope.”

  “Everything except my bike key.”

  “Well…” She rocked back in the chair, clearly unperturbed. “They’ll turn up.” She grinned. “Eventually.”

  Ev
entually, my ass. “Tell Holt he can kiss my butt.” She shoved the rest of her keys in her pocket and stalked off.

  “Don’t think he’d want to get that close anymore,” Sam shouted after her.

  Without her bike, Edie had to walk back to Red’s. She would have called a cab, if there even was such a thing in this deadbeat of a town, but her cell phone was back in the room above the bar. And she’d be damned if she asked Deputy Dawg for anything, let alone use of the phone.

  So she set her chin and started the tramp back. After her mostly sleepless night, she was so tired she could have slept a month. When she finally got to the alley behind Red’s she clomped up the metal steps, opened the door, and crawled into bed.

  And lay there, wide awake.

  The night-long interrogation replayed in her head. The hurt and anger on Holt’s face. The accusation. She tried to whip up some righteous indignation, but couldn’t. Truth was, she deserved his condemnation. She’d lied. Betrayed his trust. It was her own goddamn fault if he thought her guilty.

  Sure, there was a tiny pinprick of disappointment that he didn’t believe in her despite appearances. But that wasn’t the way the world worked. Not Edie Swann’s world.

  She sighed and rolled over. Thought about spending the rest of her life locked inside a jail cell. Couldn’t believe it would come to that.

  But if Holt didn’t believe in her, who else in Redbud would?

  A chill rolled over her. No one had believed in her father’s innocence either. Was this what the black angel was all about? Standing over another Swanford sacrificed at the Redbud altar? Was she part of some great cosmic joke? A sick, twisted gag on the part of the fates?

  Edie opened her eyes. Screw that. She sat up. Threw off the covers. She’d be damned if she would play the part of punch line for anyone, angel or devil. She would not throw herself over a cliff, would not go gently into a psych ward, and would not let Holt Drennen railroad her.

  James nursed a cup of coffee at Claire’s, trying to decide whether to be relieved or anxious that Edie hadn’t named him. Was he even on her list? He hadn’t received a black angel. Had she not gotten around to him? Or didn’t she know about him? Was she, like him, loath to hurt Holt? Worse, would she use his name to get leverage over his son? And what would Holt do? Would his upright son bend the rules for his father?