by Sara Rosett
Chapter Twenty-three
“Hello, Ellie,” Marie said. “I let myself in.” She jingled a pair of keys, the clatter of metal sounding loud, even against the constant hum of the window cooler. But it wasn’t the keys that caught my attention—it was the gun she held loosely in her other hand. “It was so thoughtful of Klea to leave a second set of keys for me so that I didn’t have to climb in that window over the sink again.”
Her fluffy blond hair haloed her face as it always did, but she wasn’t wearing one of her pastel shirts and matching skirt. She had on a loose, flowing black top and pants with a bright, primary-colored pattern. A choker necklace with small rocks spaced along stiff wires encircled her throat, and huge hoop earrings of the same design dangled from her ears.
She waved the barrel of the gun up and down her figure. “I can see you’re surprised by my new look. What do you think? This is the real me.” She widened her eyes. “You have no idea how sick I am of baby blue, pale pink, and yellow. And twin sets and those bell skirts and sensible pumps. Ugh. I wanted to burn them all—it would have been such fun— but I simply don’t have time. Of course, the clothes served their purpose. Stereotypes are so useful, you know? Harmless, middle-aged woman . . . who would ever think that I would do that?” She jabbed the gun at the envelope on the floor by my knee. I’d put it down when I picked up the items I’d kicked out of the box.
“Marie, I’m not sure what is wrong,” I said. “Why don’t you put the gun down, and we’ll sort this out?” I said, wondering how far away “in the area” was for Detective Waraday. Did that mean he was close, like a few miles, or merely on this side of North Dawkins? If it was the latter, then it could be ten or fifteen minutes before he arrived. I licked my lips and took a steadying breath. A lot could happen in ten minutes, I thought, glancing at the gun, but at least Detective Waraday was on his way. If I could just keep her here, once Detective Waraday was on the scene . . . well, it would probably be chaos, but at least he’d have a gun, too, which would go a long way to even the odds.
“Really, Ellie. I expected more of you,” Marie said, her tone heavy with disappointment. “I know you’re aware of what’s going on.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I hedged, listening for the sound of a car pulling up outside, mentally running through what would happen when Detective Waraday arrived. He would come to the front door, but what would he do when I didn’t open it? I knew he had a set of keys because he’d opened the door with them that first time he asked me to look around. How long would he wait before he decided to use the keys? Would he even have the keys with him? I could shout at him that Marie was inside and had a gun, but he might not be able to understand me through the closed door, and I couldn’t imagine Marie not firing at the door if she thought a sheriff’s detective was on the other side.
My stomach plunged at the thought of Marie firing the gun. School would be out soon . . . all those kids and parents swarming around the school. No, I had to keep her in the house and somehow keep her from firing the gun. Maybe I could distract her somehow or trip her or . . . something. My insides twisted again at the thought of getting any closer to her when she had a gun in her hand.
Marie sighed, then said rapidly, “Don’t pretend, Ellie. You know Klea was a snoop. She found those papers and my ledger. She was going to expose me, so I killed her. There. Now you don’t have to pretend you don’t know.” She made two little movements with the gun barrel and my heartbeat kicked. “Move away from that box, please,” she said.
I was still kneeling on the floor and made a move to stand up, but she said, “No. Stay there. Just scoot backward.” I moved back a few inches. I still held one of the wooden cubes from the calendar in my hand. I curled my fingers around it and held it behind my leg.
“That’s right,” Marie said. “Sit crisscross applesauce, like a good girl.”
While I was so scared I was jittery and my palms were sweaty, her stance was relaxed and her grip on the gun was casual and familiar. I heard a car engine and tensed, but it didn’t slow down. “Okay,” I said, “if we aren’t pretending any more, what about Peg?”
“Did I kill her?” Marie asked. “Yes, of course,” she said matter-of-factly. “She was the perfect opportunity to distract everyone. I couldn’t pass it up. I knew all about her little blackmail thing,” she said, her tone dismissive. “Nothing like what I had going, of course, but she was trying, I give her that. I knew that if Peg appeared to commit suicide, it would wrap everything up so neatly. Because Peg was blackmailing people, the police would assume Klea had discovered her secret. They would think Peg had killed Klea to keep her blackmail quiet. You know how the rest of it played out. With the police closing in, Peg killed herself. Did you like the suicide note?”
“Marie—”
“I went to her house on my lunch hour,” Marie said, speaking over me. “It is a relief to talk about this,” she said in an aside. “You see, it’s rather ingenious, and it’s a shame that no one knows. I took a bowl of chicken soup—doctored with the pain pills from my medicine cabinet, you understand—and told Peg we needed her signature for a file at work. Poor dear, she was still feeling awful from that ipecac—from the nurse’s office, you know. I put it in her coffee that morning, and she signed the paper without looking at it closely. I had another sheet of paper over the top so she wouldn’t see, but she didn’t even give it a second glance. Then she tried the soup and”—Marie lifted both shoulders in a shrug and smiled—“that was that. So easy. All I had to do after that was remove a few pills from Peg’s medicine cabinet and leave the prescription bottle beside the note, and it was done.” Marie gave me a disappointed look. “And you didn’t even appreciate the setup I gave you. I made that appointment on Peg’s computer so that you’d be the first one on the scene. I know how you fancy yourself a sort of sleuth, but you didn’t seem to enjoy it at all.”
Marie looked rational, and her tone of voice was completely normal, but the words coming out of her mouth . . . I was stunned. I had been totally fooled. She wasn’t who I’d thought she was at all. She was talking about killing a woman—no, two women—without a trace of remorse. “I don’t know what to say,” I finally said. “You sound as if you think I should say how clever you are.”
“I am clever,” she snapped. “Clever enough to put my life back together after Heath’s company went belly-up. Years and years, Heath invested in that company, trusting them when they said their pension plan was terrific, and then suddenly—the money is gone because of some financial accounting scandal? He couldn’t take it. I don’t care what the doctors said about his heart. He couldn’t handle the pressure of the job hunt. He should have been looking forward to his retirement, not filling out job applications. And once he was gone, I should have had the spouse pension, but no, I had to rely on the little job at the school that we’d been using as side income. Instead of a little bonus, suddenly my check had to provide for everything.”
She pressed her lips together for a second, then said, “Do you know what a level-one admin makes in this school district? Of course you don’t. You’re just like all the other stay-at-home moms with their comfy income from their husbands. The money rolls in, and you spend it.”
As she spoke, her easy stance disappeared, and her face contorted. I’d always thought that Marie was pretty in a faded sort of way, but now she looked ugly.
“You don’t have to work for anything in your cushy world,” she said. “It only took me a couple of years to realize I didn’t have to work quite so hard to get what I deserved.” She gave a sharp nod. “I was cheated out of what was rightfully mine, so got it back.”
She was quite worked up, speaking more passionately than I had ever seen her. She shifted her shoulders and took a deep breath, then seemed to calm down a bit. She pointed the gun at the envelope. “Where was it?”
“Taped to the bottom of the china cabinet.”
She snorted. “And to think I spent hours in this house, night after night
, looking for my ledger. I knew Klea had found it.”
Faintly, I heard the school bell ring. It was the last bell of the day, the final bell of the school year, in fact. Outside, the street and the school parking lot, only half a block away, would be flooded with parents, which was hard to believe in the dim cocoon of the living room with its closed blinds and the hum of the window unit.
“Did Klea tell you?” I asked, straining to listen for any movement outside, but I only heard more cars drive by and then the louder rev of a bus engine as it cruised by.
“No. I discovered what the little sneak was doing,” Marie said. “She thought I was on vacation, so I’m sure she thought she was in the clear. But I’d forgotten my sunglasses at the school. It’s a long drive to Jekyll Island. Directly into the sun. Good thing, too, that I had to go back, or she would have told Mrs. Kirk and ruined everything. Odd, when you think about it, that a pair of sunglasses did her in. I left them on my desk, so I walked over to the school that morning. It’s so much easier to walk over during morning drop-off, isn’t it? You know how congested the street and parking lot get. Anyway, they were right where I’d left them, but one of my desk drawers was open.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I knew it was Klea. I’d caught her snooping around the desks in the office before. So I waited in Mrs. Kirk’s office, behind the door, watching out the crack between the hinges. It was Klea all right. She came in, bold as you please. She must have been making copies of my files because she returned some papers to my drawer, but kept some others. Then she came in Mrs. Kirk’s office, and left the pages she’d copied on Mrs. Kirk’s desk with a note.”
Marie was getting agitated again, her face flushing pink as she said, “Klea left Mrs. Kirk’s office—walked right by me without knowing I was on the other side of the door. As soon as she left the main office, I slipped over to Mrs. Kirk’s desk to read her note. Klea wanted to meet with Mrs. Kirk later that day. She said she had more papers like the ones she’d left, and she had my ledger in a safe place, that she could bring it later.”
The flush deepened on Marie’s face, and I could see the muscles in her hand flex as she squeezed the handle of the gun. “Klea must have slipped the ledger out of my purse a day or two before. I’d looked for it earlier in the week, but it wasn’t there. I’d assumed I’d left it at home, but as soon as I saw her note, I knew what had happened. She’d stolen it,” she said, her tone incensed.
The irony of Marie being angry over something being stolen from her was lost on her, and I wasn’t about to point it out to her. She was worked up enough.
Marie raised her eyebrows and said emphatically, “There was only one thing to do. It was so simple, really. Klea came back in the office, and was so surprised to see me that she stood stock-still for a moment. That was all I needed. The phone cord was right there. It only took a second to get it around her neck.” She rotated her shoulders again as if she were working a kink out of her neck. “And the rest was incredibly simple. I suppose you’ve worked it out?”
“I think so. You hid her in the storage closet, then moved her after you set off the fire alarm.”
“Very good. The only bad bit was when I had to wait in the janitor’s office until the last bell of the morning. I knew if I pulled the fire alarm during drop-off, it would be a madhouse. I needed the school to be cleared in an orderly fashion so that I could get out of there without being seen.” She eyed me, considering. “Of course, you will be more of a challenge. It’s too bad I can’t leave you here, but my car is parked out front. With the craziness of the last day of school, no one will probably remember seeing it, but I can’t take that chance, if I leave your body here. No, I suppose you’ll have to come with me and have a little accident. Nearby, of course—” She cocked her head. “What was that?”
Chapter Twenty-four
I had heard it, too. The sound of a car engine idling close by, then the engine shutting off.
“Probably just someone picking up their kids from school,” I said quickly, but Marie was already moving across the room to the window, her gun still trained on me.
Before she could twitch the curtain back, I flung the block at her and dived for the dining room. The block must have connected with at least some part of her because I heard a gasp as I sprinted through the dining room to the kitchen. I fumbled with the levers on the dead bolts, my fingers slipping. The floor in the dining room creaked as she came after me. I was glad she’d come after me, away from the window and the kids and the school—but glad in a terrified way.
The locks unfastened. I yanked the door open and sprinted down the two steps to the carport. Klea’s street didn’t have an alley, so I couldn’t leave the back way. I ran past Klea’s hatchback in the carport. Parked behind the hatchback in the single drive was a gray four-door sedan, Marie’s car, I assumed.
I slowed my pace as I came to the front yard, expecting to see Detective Waraday’s unmarked sedan parked on the street and him on the porch, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight. A large SUV was in front of the house, and the person who I assumed was the driver, a woman dressed in shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops, was several paces away, moving rapidly toward the school.
I spun back around. Marie was already down the steps and coming out of the shade of the carport. She walked with the gun angled slightly up, the barrel pointed at the limbs of the tree overhead, but as soon as she came out of the carport, she leveled the gun at me, her arm straight and steady. “Ellie, stop,” she called, but her words about needing only a few seconds to kill Klea popped into my head, and I kept moving.
I skittered backward around her car, moving away from the school and putting the trunk of the sedan between us. She made an impatient exclamation, and my hyper-aware senses picked up the sound of her sandals slapping on the driveway as she hurried toward the back of her car.
With the car shielding me, I crouched and ran down the side yard that sloped away from Klea’s property to a rainwater drainage grid set in a square of concrete. The grass was wet and my ballet slippers had zero traction. I slid down the little slope, but I got my balance back as I hit the concrete surrounding the drain. Marie was right behind me. Her sandals must have had as little traction as my shoes because she slid down and bumped into me before I could even take a step.
She had the gun in her right hand, and I lunged for that arm, grabbing her wrist and twisting it away from me. She grunted and jerked backward, but the gun fell from her hand, clattering onto the metal drainage grid. I cringed, thinking it might go off. But like a coin pushed into a slot, it fell through the space between the metal squares and landed with a faint, watery plink.
For half a second, we both stared down the drain, our arms interlinked, then I jerked away and scrambled up the little hill toward the school. Marie wasn’t quite so scary without the gun, but I still didn’t want to be too close to her. She had strangled a woman, after all.
I heard her coming up the slope behind me, but I didn’t stop to look back. I managed a quick glance both ways before I sprinted across the street to the grassy verge that ran along the edge of the chain-link fence. I wanted to get to the school, which was still a mass of cars, parents, and kids. Traffic was always bad at the open and close of the school day, but the first and last days of the year were the worst. Parents who usually had their kids ride the bus picked them up instead as a special treat for the last day, and as a result, the car circle pickup line was always extra long.
I ran down the street, feeling every pebble and uneven clump of grass through the thin soles of my flats. I heard the screech of tires and glanced quickly over my shoulder. Marie, in the gray sedan, had backed out of the driveway, into the street. I slowed my pace, expecting her to turn in the opposite direction from the school and accelerate away, but she spun the wheel and turned the car toward me. Her gaze locked with mine, and she gunned the engine, aiming straight for me.
Great, no gun, but she still had a car. The thought flicked through my mind even as I twisted arou
nd and made for the school. The long line of the fence hemmed me in on one side, and the row of stationary cars, waiting for their turn to inch into the car circle line, filled one lane of the street.
I came even with the tail end of the car circle line and felt relieved. I was inside the labyrinth of the pickup zone and would be okay. But then I heard the growl of the engine and looked back. With a shock, I realized Marie was driving on the wrong side of the road, in the lane that was open, the one that cars flowing out of the car circle would take.
The engine roared and the car closed in on me. Mitch was the runner in our family, but I put on a burst of speed that would have made him proud. I sprinted, legs pumping, for the end of the fence. I rounded the metal pole that marked the end of the chain-link and raced into the double car circle lane, palms out, arms waving a warning for the two cars that were waiting while kids climbed into them.
The screech of metal on metal filled the air as Marie careened around the fence post and barreled toward the two minivans that were about to pull away from the school. I darted to the side to the parking area, getting out of the path of the car circle and all the vehicles.
With a squeal of brakes, Marie stopped inches before her bumper made contact with one of the vans.
A cacophony of horns sounded from farther back in the car circle, and both moms in the minivans at the front of the line gestured impatiently at Marie to back up out of their way. I raced over to Mrs. Kirk, who had whirled around, a look of severe displeasure on her face.
“It’s Marie,” I panted as I wove between the cars toward Mrs. Kirk. “She did it.... She killed Klea. And Peg, too,” I added.
Mrs. Kirk stared at me for a second, but the sound of an engine growling snapped all our attention back to Marie’s car. Marie reversed away from the double minivans that barred her way, backed into a parked car with a crunch, then put her car in drive.