Dying for Murder

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  “How did you know your sister and Stacey were victims of the same man?”

  “The vet conference. I broke down and cried because my sister had only been dead a year and Wyatt had just been acquitted, the fucking bastard. Stacey lent me her shoulder to cry on.” If Rosemary could have spit in anger she would have, her raw hatred exposed to the light. “So we hatched our plan and I took a job with him. He never knew who I was. I didn’t attend the trial. Couldn’t. It was too painful.”

  “You took a job with him. I’d hazard a guess that that would have been pretty painful too.”

  She stared at me. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, being at his beck and call, always smiling, always helpful. But I knew where it was going so I was able to live with it.”

  “And Stacey?”

  “Stacey saw me as a comrade in arms and Mel here as an innocent bystander, as were we all.”

  “Does Wyatt know who you really are?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? He’d kill me.”

  But I wasn’t so sure. I remembered Wyatt asking for Rosemary’s file. He must have had his suspicions.

  “How did Wyatt know about Stacey and Mel?” I looked at Mel, whose eyes were as big and round as the harvest moon.

  “He overheard a telephone conversation I had with Stacey months ago. I wasn’t sure how much he had heard so I didn’t tell Stacey. In hindsight it might have been a good idea to tell her.”

  “Stacey was afraid she’d lose her nerve and not be able to do it,” said Mel. I glanced at Rosemary and saw a look of fear skitter across her face. Melanie continued. “She was a devout Catholic and it was against all she ever believed but this despicable excuse for a man made her turn her back on her faith.”

  “That and Lou Gehrig’s disease,” said Rosemary dryly. “And can you imagine having to carry to term a baby born of rape? What kind of agony, what kind of horrible sentence is that? She had a damn good reason to despise the man.”

  I glanced over at Melanie. She was crying and I wondered what kind of hell it would be to know you were born of rape. Which sentence was worse — the mother’s or the daughter’s?

  “But Stacey changed her mind, didn’t she?” I said and stared at Rosemary.

  “Oh, no. She didn’t,” said Melanie, her words slightly garbled through the tears. “She was determined to nail Wyatt.”

  I looked at Rosemary. The fear was there again.

  “You know too much, Cordi.”

  I looked down at the ground, so far, but just a five-second fall away, and shuddered.

  And then I remembered. “The slip knots,” I said.

  “Exactly. You and Darcy and I are the only three who knew about them and Darcy destroyed the evidence. But I blew it. I referred to the slip knots when I was talking to you. I hoped you hadn’t noticed. But it doesn’t matter now. It’s gone too far. You have become a liability.”

  Her eyes were so cold.

  “You don’t seem to be very good at killing me,” I said, taking a stab at my own mortality.

  She didn’t move a muscle and her eyes didn’t blink.

  “Surely you didn’t think I believed that Darcy would do more than just scare me? The flipped bike and a chase into the sea were beyond his abilities.”

  “So Darcy lit the fire.” She laughed. “Too bad it didn’t work.”

  “What are you saying, Rosemary?” said Mel, her voice ending on a very high note.

  “Stay out of it, Mel.”

  “Stacey changed her mind, didn’t she?” I repeated.

  Rosemary tried to stare me down but then she smiled. “Yes.” And in her decision to utter that one little word lay my death sentence.

  “Nooooo!” wailed Mel.

  “How did you know?” Rosemary ignored Mel and kept staring at me.

  “A lucky guess, and the fact that her wrists were rubbed raw. She must have put up a big fight. A suicide would never have such marks unless they had a sudden change of heart.”

  “No, Rosemary. Tell her it’s not true,” Mel wailed.

  Rosemary continued to ignore her. “I was the one who had to be with her in the end,” said Rosemary. “I watched as she put the tape over her nose and mouth. We’d managed to get Wyatt’s prints on the tape. It was my job to collect the gloves she wore.”

  “And to remove the roll of duct tape from the scene.”

  “No, that was sheer panic.”

  “You were running away from a woman begging for her life.”

  “Her eyes. They were awful. But we’d come so far. We finally had Wyatt. I couldn’t let her change her mind.”

  “You goddamn bitch.” Melanie screamed out the words and lunged at Rosemary.

  I heard the boards splinter and watched helplessly as Rosemary and Mel fell over the edge. Frantically I reached out and grabbed Mel’s hand, grabbing the railing with my other. The weight was agony. I tried to pull up but it was impossible.

  “Help us,” screamed Mel who had one hand on the edge of the parapet trying to support her weight and Rosemary’s. “Rosemary’s pulling my leg off. I can’t hold on.”

  It seemed as though I was carrying them both and their dead weight was numbing. I was unable to do anything but hang on, and I knew I couldn’t do that for very long.

  “Her fingers are slipping. Get us up,” cried Mel, but I couldn’t budge and I could feel my grip slipping.

  “She’s got my shoe! It’s slipping. It’s slipping!”

  I felt the weight lift and in that instant I let go of the rail, blocked out the sound of Rosemary screaming, and grabbed Mel’s other hand. Before I could even think that I was nowhere near strong enough I reared back and hauled her over the edge. We landed in a pile on the splintered walkway and sat there in silence, gorging on air, our lungs hungry for it. Neither of us trusted the strength in our legs and it was some time before we went down to help Rosemary. But nothing could help Rosemary. She was gone.

  We were in Mel’s vehicle, heading back to the station, when I said to her, “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You led me to believe you hated your mother’s guts.”

  “I did. For most of my life.” She fell silent.

  “And?”

  “And then I found out about Wyatt and what he had done to her.” Her knuckles were white where she gripped the steering wheel.

  “So why did you lie to me?”

  “Because I couldn’t tell you the truth.”

  “She must have loved you.”

  “How would you know?” she glanced at me.

  “Because of the lock of hair in her locket.”

  “That was mine?” her voice went high and ended on a wail.

  “Who else’s could it have been?”

  “I’m the child of a rapist,” she said. “How could she love me?”

  “Because she’s your mother and there’s nothing as strong as a mother’s love.” It sounded so trite, but it was true.

  We drove along in silence for a while.

  “Did your mother ask you to help frame Wyatt?” I asked.

  “At first she didn’t know that I knew Wyatt was my father, if that is what you mean. Rosemary said it was best that way and I agreed. It would have broken her heart.”

  “So Rosemary told you?”

  “Yes. She thought I should know who my father was.”

  What would possess someone to tell someone else their father was a rapist? It was an unbelievably cruel thing to do and I marvelled at how blinded Rosemary had been to anything but her own situation.

  “And she told Stacey that you knew.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “She thought you should both know in the hopes that you would join her and your mother as an accomplice in the plot to frame Wyatt,” I said.

  “Why would she do that?” asked Melanie.

  It was a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway. “Because she knew your mother might have second thoughts, but I’m guessing sh
e also knew how much Stacey loved you and that your influence could make the difference between going through with it or not.”

  “That’s a pretty jaded view of things. My mother desperately wanted Wyatt put away forever. He’d ruined her life. More than anything she wanted to ruin his.”

  We were almost at the station when she blurted out, “Did you know that my mother once weighed a hundred and twenty pounds and was five feet nine inches tall? What he did to her made her hate herself and she ate and ate until she weighed more than three times what she had before. He dominated her life and she needed her revenge.”

  “And so did you. He tried to talk to you, didn’t he?”

  Her knuckles were white as she said, “Who told you?”

  “I overheard him trying to get you to agree you were his daughter.”

  “The bastard. He couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to rub my face in his mess.”

  “Why did you do it? Why did you help your mother?”

  “You have to ask?” she said and paused. “To see my mother get her revenge and escape a terrible death by ending her own life, with her daughter and her friend by her side.”

  “But you weren’t by her side, were you?”

  “No, I wasn’t, I couldn’t and I’ll live with that for the rest of my life.”

  She started to cry as we came to a stop in the clearing. She got off the ATV and turned abruptly to leave, garbling about going to find Darcy to tell him about Rosemary. I offered to go with her but she was putting a brave face on things and wanted to go herself. I went back to my cabin, hoping Martha was there. She wasn’t so I flopped on the bed and tried to relax but couldn’t. I went up to the mess for a snack and to see who was about, but there was no one and I figured they must be out collecting Rosemary’s body. When I went back out on the balcony Wyatt was there, gazing out over the clearing. He turned when he heard my footfall.

  “Have you got your murderer?” he asked.

  “You could say that,” I said, not wanting to get into a conversation with him. But he wanted to talk and he was the type of guy who got what he wanted and I was too polite to ignore him.

  “Three conniving little bitches, two down and one to go.”

  “I think the courts will look lightly on Mel,” I said, between gritted teeth.

  “She can’t be allowed to get away with murder, can she? Even if she is my dear little daughter?”

  “You did,” I said. We stared at each other and I felt impotent, which made me angry.

  “You killed Rosemary’s sister.”

  “Case was thrown out,” he said with a supercilious smile on his face.

  “Through lack of evidence, not through lack of guilt,” I retorted.

  He smiled again and I had this overwhelming urge to wipe it off his face.

  “You don’t really give a damn about your daughter, do you?”

  “Oh goody goody, here comes the rap-me-on-the-knuckles speech.”

  “You should be in jail. You raped Stacey and murdered Rosemary’s sister.”

  “Did I hear you say, ‘among others’?” He smiled then and I shuddered. There’d been others?

  “I am completely innocent in Stacey’s death.”

  “How can you say that? You raped her and left a daughter to be raised in foster homes. You destroyed their lives.”

  “You mean had consensual sex with, don’t you?” he said with a leer. “Anyway, that’s Stacey’s fault. She should have looked after our daughter better.”

  “Do you have any idea what it must have been like for her? To have to have a child born of rape.”

  “She could have had an abortion.”

  “She was Catholic. Her parents were Catholic. She had no choice.”

  “Bullshit. What’s the big deal anyway? You get knocked up. You either abort or have it. She just liked the attention. The way I see it I did her a favour.” He laughed. “I gave her a purpose in life.”

  “You’re going to jail for a very long time.” I said it without thinking, biting my anger back.

  He looked momentarily disconcerted but then the old smirk was back. “And just how do you intend to do that? Are you going to fight my cases the way you did your other murders up in Quebec and in the Arctic? With clumsy good luck?”

  “No,” I said as evenly as I could. Clumsy good luck! I could have killed him. “Nothing as mundane as that. The police have new evidence that has come to light in Rosemary’s sister’s case. They are going to reopen it.”

  I stared him down, knowing that I’m not a very good liar but really believing that I could find that evidence, and needing him to believe it too.

  “That new evidence is irrefutable and will nail you securely to the maximum-security-prison wall. You’re going down for multiple lifetimes.”

  And there it was. The smirk was gone. He went very pale and his eyes darted about as if they’d lost their anchor.

  He moved over toward the railing like an automaton and too late I realized I had never put up the orange tape. I hesitated and in that moment of hesitation he leaned against the railing. It splintered and pulled away from the verandah and Wyatt went with it.

  For the next couple of hours things were pretty chaotic, with two more bodies joining Stacey in the cooler. Darcy insisted on putting Melanie under house arrest until the police came, and everybody was talking about what drove Stacey and Rosemary and Melanie to do what they did. Revenge is an evil thing. It takes hold like a cancer, growing and growing and spreading and spreading until its only outlet is action. Lives ruined at the hand of a sick man who never paid for his crimes. And his influence still stalked its prey, still stalked Mel, still stalked me. The way he died had me second-guessing myself a million times and I could see him laughing at that.

  He died because of me.

  He died because I didn’t like him.

  He died because I hesitated.

  And I find I am glad that I did. And that is what haunts me the most.

  acknowledgements

  Thank you to my good friend Rebecca Bell, who, besides making excellent comments on Dying for Murder, taught me a great deal about barrier islands and sea turtles, and made sure I never ate pork chops ten nights in a row again. Thanks also to Jim Richardson and Nicholas Mrosovsky who introduced me to barrier islands and sea turtles. Thanks to ma soeur, Dorion Kingsmill, and my sons, Tim Kingsmill Wootton and Jesse Kingsmill Wootton, for reading over various drafts and providing excellent comments and suggestions. Thanks for the many lunchtime conversations at Pho Vietnam! Thanks to Age of the Geek, where I finished writing the book, between important lunches and coffee breaks. Thanks also to Sandy Macdonald for my author photo on the Dundurn website and for his voice on my book trailer (www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLXKIF36Su0) and so much more. And thanks to Kirk Howard and the team at Dundurn. You rock!

  From the Same Series

  Forever Dead

  A Cordi O’Callaghan Mystery

  Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  978-1-550027051

  $11.99

  The discovery of a bear-ravaged body abandoned in the wilderness, some killer rapids, a fumigated lab, stolen research disks, and a stalled career all coalesce into the ripening madness that hauls zoology professor Cordi O’Callaghan into some very wild, very dangerous places.

  While the police label the wilderness mauling an accidental death, Cordi realizes that the theft of her disks is somehow related to the body found in the woods. She must unsnarl the mess if she is to salvage her academic career. Cordi’s athletically ingenious and hair-raising solutions to deadly encounters keep her one stumble ahead of a murderer as she follows a path littered with motives. But nothing can prepare her for the final shocking twist that leaves her with a wrenching dilemma — one that no one with a conscience should have to face.

  Innocent Murderer

  A Cordi O’Callaghan Mystery

  Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  978-1-554884261

  $11.99

  When zool
ogy professor Cordi O’Callaghan reluctantly accepts an invitation to be a lecturer aboard the Susanna Moodie, a vessel ferrying tourists through Canada’s Arctic, she figures it will be a breeze. Seasickness aside, Cordi becomes entangled in the deaths of two of her fellow passengers, both members of a close-knit fiction-writing group. The fatalities are ruled accidental, but Cordi suspects they’re anything but. However, she lacks evidence and credibility, according to Martha Bathgate and Duncan Mcpherson, her sometimes reluctant sidekicks who try to keep her grounded.

  After Cordi returns to her home in the Ottawa Valley, she hits the trail and stirs up a hornet’s nest of lies, intrigue, jealousy, and greed as she grills potential murderers, one of whom takes offence and stalks her. Getting marooned on pack ice, a harrowing trip in an airplane and a hot air balloon, and a mysterious fire all add to the menace that threatens Cordi as she attempts to nail down a killer.

  Available at your favourite bookseller

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  Copyright © Suzanne Kingsmill, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.