Desert Shadows (9781615952250)

by Webb, Betty

  Or a stack of really dull experimental manuscripts for Patriot’s Blood Press.

  ***

  The drive to Pinnacle Peak took longer than I’d planned, due to a nasty wreck south of the Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard exit. As the EMTs scraped bleeding suburbanites out of a Lexus and a Beemer, I sat in the Neon, wondering why people wanted to live so far away from their jobs. My own situation was perfect; business below, apartment above. No dangerous commute to work, only a walk downstairs. Thinking about the stairs set my feet a-tingling, so I turned the engine off and flexed them. Still sore, but better than yesterday. There was a good chance I would be back to normal in another week. Well, normal for me, anyway.

  By the time the police redirected traffic around the carnage, I’d been massaging my feet for almost half an hour. I hoped that by the time I reached Gloriana’s acreage, everyone would still be there. The fact that a real estate agent had been thrown into the mix complicated things, but I could work around that. I’d ask Zach a couple of pointed questions, then tell him I needed to have a private meeting with him and his attorney this afternoon at my office. There was no reason to involve Megan.

  Following Rosa’s instructions, I left the blacktop and its surrounding subdivisions behind and drove east along a primitive dirt road for almost a mile. Then I cut north again at an almost invisible fork and headed toward the McDowell Mountains. After bumping along the road for ten minutes, I finally saw a familiar pickup truck parked along the shoulder. But I did not see a realtor’s car. He was probably long gone.

  Megan would be there, though, enough protection. Besides, I was packing. I put a reassuring hand on my carry-all and felt the comforting weight of my .38 and the rattle of handcuffs.

  I pulled the Neon alongside the pickup and got out.

  “Zach? Megan?” I called.

  To my consternation, I could not see anyone, merely miles and miles of sand and cactus. Overhead, two hawks circled, their shrill cries competing with the sighing wind.

  “Zach?”

  “Over here, Lena!” Megan’s voice.

  I finally found her walking along a shallow gully that had probably been a raging torrent the day before, carrying the runoff from the rains in the McDowells.

  “Better get out of there,” I called down to her. “It might start raining again up north.” Getting caught in a flash flood was a leading cause of accidental death in the Southwest.

  She smiled up at me, the shadows gone from under her eyes. “You’re right. I’m being stupid.”

  I would have helped her all the way up, but my feet were still so sore that I didn’t trust them. When she neared me, I put down my carry-all and held out my hand. With some difficulty—Lord, she was so pregnant—I hauled her up the rest of the way.

  When she was up on safer ground, I asked, “Where’s Zach?” I looked around, expecting to see him emerge from behind one of the many saguaros behind me.

  “He stayed at the hospital. I’ve been dealing with the real estate broker myself.” Her eyes were not only lighter, but they positively gleamed. She looked rested, too, as if she had finally managed a full night’s sleep.

  “So where’s the broker?”

  Her smile grew. “Gone. He already has a buyer, a developer from Tucson. Poor Gloriana, she loved this place and had even talked about turning it over to the Nature Conservancy. But Zach and I will put it to better use.”

  Money for manuscripts? Money for the Hacienda? Why should that have made Megan look so happy?

  Perhaps seeing the puzzlement on my face, she answered my unasked question. “Zach changed his mind. I told you he would.”

  “Changed his mind?”

  She nodded in satisfaction. “Yes. When he got back from Iowa last night, we had a long talk. The manuscripts hadn’t been as good as he’d been led to believe, just pages and pages of self-involved angst. You know. ‘Life is cruel but I’m the only one who’s sensitive enough to care.’ Just the usual Creative Writing 101 drivel.”

  Since I knew life would soon turn cruel for Megan, I didn’t smile. “So you’re getting your mystery imprint after all?”

  “Oh, yes! Not only that, since I know more about that kind of thing than he does, he’s going to let me help choose the manuscripts. I know I can make it work. The imprint will more than pay for itself; it’ll make enough money to let Zach buy all the experimental stuff he wants.”

  I looked off across the desert, at the gently rolling land leading up to the spectacular mountains. Forty acres. Forty very expensive acres. “So now the money from the land sale goes for…?”

  Her smile was blinding. “For my no-kill shelter, of course! Zach told me to go ahead and find some land and have an architect start drawing up plans. Oh, Lena! It’s what I intended all along.”

  What I intended all along.

  Her face changed. “I meant, what I wanted all along.”

  With a sick feeling, I realized her first statement had been the most accurate. What she’d intended all along. What she’d intended when she put the water hemlock in Gloriana’s salad.

  “Uh, that’s wonderful news, Megan,” I told her, inching toward my carry-all, which was now closer to her than me. “But, well, I drove up here to talk to Zach, and since he’s back at the hospital, I’d better.…”

  With astonishing agility for someone in her condition, Megan bent down and plucked my .38 out of the carry-all. She’d obviously used a gun before, because when she aimed the barrel at my chest, her hand didn’t waver.

  “I screwed up, didn’t I, Lena? I talked too much, like I always do.” She didn’t look so beautiful any more, just deadly.

  Maybe there was a way out of this. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Megan, but you’d better give me that gun. It could go off.”

  Her laughter held little of its former joy. “Well, I hope to God it can go off. Now that you know what I did, I’m going to have to kill you, too.”

  She stood with her back to the edge of the gully. With rising optimism, I realized I might be able to rush her and tip her backward into it. I shifted my weight forward.

  But she saw the plan in my eyes and drew the hammer back on the .38 with a practiced movement. “You’ll be dead before you’re halfway here. You’re still limping pretty bad.”

  I raised my hands. “Megan, you don’t want to kill me.”

  The laugh again, the half-crazy laugh of the obsessed. “You’re right, I don’t want to. But it’s you or.…” Tears welled in her eyes, but her jaw remained firm. “It’s you or me. Why couldn’t you leave things the way they were? Owen would never have gone to prison, not with that expensive attorney I made Zach hire for him. If you hadn’t become involved, Gloriana’s death would only have been another unsolved Arizona mystery.”

  “Not death, Megan. Murder. You murdered her.”

  “Gloriana was a terrible person. Those books, those games, they were pure evil.”

  I did not think this was the right time to discuss the pros and cons of the First Amendment, so I kept quiet.

  She tossed her head, and in that moment, I saw an echo of Gloriana’s blind self-righteousness. “What kind of person would publish books that ruin lives, that only add to the world’s misery? Just so she could save a house? Gloriana had no love in her, none at all. Maybe what I did was wrong, but what I did, I did for love. Gloriana never cared anything for anyone, just the Hacienda and her stupid pedigree. She didn’t even care for Zach after she got the DNA results back. Oh, you don’t know what she was like, Lena! That day she came screeching up to the house, kicking those poor animals out of the way, yelling that Zach…that our baby…that they’d never get a dime, that she’d rather leave his share to the Nature Conservancy! Thank God he wasn’t there to hear it.”

  She jabbed the gun toward me for emphasis. “She…she called him a bastard. And she called our baby a bastard’s bastard!”

  “Where was Zach when all this happened?”

  “Up at WestWorld, helping set up the
SOBOP display. It would…it would have killed him if he’d heard the way the old bitch talked about him!”

  As Megan howled with grief and outrage, I saw her finger tighten on the .38’s trigger. I had to keep her talking.

  “Tell me how you did it.” Murderers liked to share, especially those who killed for love. They wanted you to understand.

  She calmed, and a note of pride entered her voice. “It was easy. Everybody thinks pregnant women can’t do anything but sit around and knit, but we can hike as well as anyone else. When Zach came back that morning and told me about everyone picking that water hemlock, I realized he’d given me the solution to our problems. So I got on the Internet and found out what it looked like. Then I drove up to Oak Creek Canyon and hiked in. Zach was so busy at WestWorld that he didn’t even notice I’d disappeared for half the day.

  “Once I got back to Desert Shadows, everything went just like clockwork. The publishers were in the last seminar, so all I had to do was slip into the banquet hall and put the hemlock into her salad.”

  “What if someone had seen you?”

  She shrugged, and the nose of the gun went up. “All they would have seen was a pregnant woman leaning over a table. And anyway, if that had happened, I would have removed the hemlock and tried something else. But nobody did see. I just…I just.…” The pride drained from her face, leaving it forlorn.

  “What, Megan?”

  “I just wish it hadn’t hurt her so much. If I’d known, I’d have found another way.”

  Of course. This was a woman who couldn’t bear to see an animal hurt. And a human being was a kind of animal, even cold old Gloriana. Given Megan’s druthers, she would probably have preferred disposing of Gloriana via a nice clean shot of potassium cyanide. Or a decompression chamber, the kind they used at the dog pound.

  “Now I have to kill you, too.” Tears threatened her eyes again, but the nose of the .38 came back down, pointing toward my heart.

  I held my hands higher. “Megan, did you ever see a person get shot?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “Of course not.”

  “Well, I have. It’s not like you see on television. Not at all. Gunshot victims usually don’t die right away. They linger for a while. They gasp. They convulse. Oh, Megan, if you think Gloriana died hard, wait until you see what a .38 does to the human body.”

  The gun wavered. This tender-hearted murderer didn’t really want to hurt me.

  Just kill me.

  “Megan, you haven’t told me everything yet. What about the office? Once Gloriana was dead, why did you need to bomb Patriot’s Blood? You knew that Zach had already canceled production of those awful books and games, so there wasn’t really any need to destroy the place. And how did you know how to build a bomb, in the first place?”

  Never had I seen a face so miserable. “Oh, God! That was wrong of me, so wrong. I…I didn’t know that Sandra would be there. Zach had already brought Casey home, so I took it for granted that Sandra was home with her kids. But I guess Rosa was still taking care of them. I certainly never thought for a minute that anyone else would drop by the office, either. When I heard…when I heard that I’d almost killed two people, I wanted to kill myself.”

  I remembered her visit to me in the hospital, her haunted face. How could I not have realized, then, that I was looking at guilt?

  I shifted my weight on my sore feet, making sure she saw me. No matter how she’d hardened herself in the past weeks, she remained acutely attuned to suffering.

  I was right. Her face crumpled even further, and tears began trickling down her flushed cheeks. “Oh, Lena, I’m so, so sorry for what I did to you and Sandra.”

  Not sorry enough to put the gun down, though. I had to keep her talking.

  “You still didn’t explain why you bombed the office. Or how.”

  “Because I’d been wrong about Zach. Instead of selling the land out here and using it for the no-kill shelter like we’d talked about, he decided to put everything back into Patriot’s Blood. So I thought…I thought that if I bombed the damned place, he’d give up in disgust and go back to our original plan. But I was wrong. He was almost like Gloriana, hell-bent on getting his way no matter how it affected anyone. As for knowing how to make a bomb, well, Gloriana had published this horrible book called Recreational Explosives and How to Build Them. All I had to do was follow the diagrams.”

  Poetic justice, then. Patriot’s Blood had been reduced to rubble by one of its own products.

  “Lena, I’m sorry.” The voice firmed, the finger tightened. The time for talk was over.

  I threw myself to the side a split second before the gun went off. Rolled. Toward Megan.

  The noise of gunshot. A thud of impact as the bullet hit a saguaro behind me. Before Megan could adjust her aim, I grabbed her around the knees. Brought her down.

  But even as she fell, she maintained a death grip on the .38.

  I lunged at her again, and we fought for the gun. Ordinarily, I am very strong, but since my injuries, I’d allowed myself to go to seed. No visits to the gym, no jogs in the park, no weight-lifting. All I had done was sit around nursing my sore feet, and now a pregnant woman proved stronger than me. I couldn’t bring myself to do the one thing that would probably have worked—kick her in the stomach. When I tried pinning her to the ground with my knees on her shoulders, she easily rolled me off. I scrambled to regain my footing, but she sat up, straightened the .38, and pointed it at me again.

  But something in her eyes had changed.

  “Back up,” she ordered, her voice flat, devoid of all inflection.

  Trying to read her and failing, I scrambled backward over the sand, feeling behind me for a stick, a rock, any weapon.

  Then I saw. Understood.

  She turned the .38 toward herself.

  Toward her mouth.

  She was done with killing, couldn’t take it anymore.

  Now only one victim remained.

  “No, Megan!” I cried, as I scrambled toward her, reaching for the gun. I could smell her sweat. “No!”

  For a second, I touched cold steel, but then her foot came up and kicked me in the stomach. The air left my lungs in a wheeze, and I fell away from her, coming to rest against a barrel cactus. The spines poked into my skin but I hardly felt it, so desperate was I to catch my breath.

  “I have to end this,” she said, the gun almost at her mouth now, hammer still cocked. Then she closed her eyes tightly, as if she couldn’t bear to see herself die.

  I finally managed to take in some air. In desperation, I blurted out the only thing I could think of.

  “Megan. Remember the baby.”

  Her eyes flew open.

  “You can’t kill the baby, Megan.”

  “The baby.” A mere whisper. But she halted the gun’s progress toward her mouth.

  I rose to my feet.

  Ran toward her.

  Bent down.

  Took the gun away.

  This time, she didn’t resist.

  She didn’t resist when I pulled my cell phone out of my carry-all and called Kryzinski. Didn’t resist when I told him what had happened and where to find us. Didn’t resist when I took the handcuffs out of my carry-all and snapped them around her slender wrists.

  “I’m sorry, Megan,” I told her.

  She still didn’t resist when I sat down next to her and waited for the law to arrive.

  “I’m sorry, Megan,” I said again, as I put my arm around her trembling shoulders.

  She didn’t resist my touch.

  And there we were. Two sad, sorry women, sitting together in the desert.

  Chapter 32

  A week later I drove back to the Hacienda, this time in the Jeep. My feet had healed, if not my soul.

  Rosa let me in, but with no smile this time. “Why you do that to my sweet girl?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I had to.” It did not escape my notice that I sounded like Megan.

  Megan, who remained u
nder suicide watch at Maricopa County Medical Center.

  But I had saved Owen. Exchanged one life for another.

  As I walked into the Hacienda’s spacious hall, cats and dogs swarmed around me. Now that their savior was gone, what would happen to them? Maybe I.…

  No. I couldn’t.

  “Mr. Zach, he in the library waiting for you.” She gave me a not-too-gentle shove in that direction, almost knocking me off my feet. Her sweet girl. Had Gloriana ever been someone’s sweet girl? Probably not. Maybe that had been her problem. A woman can only go so far on strength alone; at some point, she needed tenderness.

  Zach was standing in front of the desk when I entered the library. He motioned to the chair across from the basinet where Marcello Alden-Taylor slept, milky drool covering his chin.

  I had been at the hospital the night he was born, four hours after his mother had been charged with murder.

  “Satisfied, Miss Jones?” Zach asked, his glare as hostile as Rosa’s. “Thanks to you, my son has lost his mother.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry.” It seemed like I couldn’t stop sounding like Megan.

  No surprise there. What Megan didn’t know, what Zach didn’t know, what none of them knew, was how much she and I had in common. They also did not know that as I first stood over Megan in the desert, watching her weep, that I almost—almost—didn’t call Kryzinski. That I almost walked away from the whole thing. Almost pretended that I didn’t know what I knew.

  Almost.

  Until I remembered Owen and the wife and children who needed him.

  “You said you had something to show me, Mr. Alden-Taylor.” I recognized that the time for first names was over.

  He leaned down and opened a drawer in the desk. Took out a sheaf of papers, most of them singed at the edges. “The ATF returned these to me. They belonged to my stepmother.”