Mary Ellen Hughes - Maggie Olenski 01 - Resort to Murder

by Mary Ellen Hughes

  The low-lying Visitor’s Center came into view, and Maggie saw the phone, its gentle light illuminating the numbered buttons that would connect her to the rest of the world. She thought she had never seen anything more beautiful. She picked up her pace, stumbling and staggering by now and finally reached it, pulled the receiver up to her ear and punched in three numbers: 9-1-1.

  “Sheriff’s office, please,” she said quietly, her voice husky with exhaustion. When the crisp voice came on the line, Maggie told her story, condensing it at much as possible but all the time thinking how wild and fantastic it must sound. The reaction she got was not disbelief, however, but a promise of immediate action. Of rescue. She sighed with relief. “Thank you.”

  Maggie sagged against the sides of the telephone enclosure. She closed her eyes, and permitted herself a moment of rest. It was over. Then she corrected herself.

  It was almost over.

  ***

  CHAPTER 21

  Tree frogs chirped noisily to each other in the otherwise silent woods, and the moon cast long, eerie shadows of the trees around the old barn. Maggie and the sheriff waited inside the barn, with deputies scattered behind trees and shrubs beyond, cars hidden and flashlights off. From her description, they had been able, after a false start or two, to locate the barn, and if there had been any doubts that they had found the right one, the presence of the ropes that had so recently bound Maggie erased them.

  Now they hoped to catch her would-be murderers as they returned to the scene, expecting Maggie to be docilely waiting, unconscious and tied up. The sheriff had called his contact at the hotel, and found out that Eric had recently been seen driving away in a pick-up. A second person was also missing from the hotel area, as was Maggie’s Dodge Shadow. Since Maggie had not actually seen her second attacker, it was important to let them both incriminate themselves in front of witnesses.

  “Good work, Chuck, Thanks,” the sheriff had said into the phone, and Maggie’s eyes had widened.

  “Is that Chuck, the waiter? The one who knew Lori in high school?”

  “That’s right.” The sheriff set his car phone down and climbed out of the car with a soft groan. “He’s also my nephew. Studying law enforcement over at the university. I asked him to help us out by working at the hotel this summer, keeping his eyes open. We’ve had our suspicions about things going on at that place for a while now, but didn’t have any hard evidence.”

  Maggie nodded, hiding her surprise. So the sheriff had not been as inactive as she thought. And Chuck, who had been one of her suspects, was the sheriff’s nephew! She wondered if Chuck had been watching her in turn, perhaps suspecting her as she suspected him?

  The sound of a motor came faintly through the woods, and the tree frogs fell silent. Tension in Maggie and the other watchers rose as faculties were strained to their limit, listening, waiting, poised for action. The sheriff had first insisted that Maggie stay behind, safely in one of the cars, but she refused.

  “I’ll stay out of your way,” she had insisted. “But I’ve come this far, and I must see the finish, to see if I’m right.”

  “I have to say, what you told us surprised me. I was pretty sure about the kid, but had no idea about the other.” He directed Maggie to the front corner of the barn, farthest from the door. Someone had slipped a warm jacket over her shoulders, and Maggie peered through the loose boards, watching and listening.

  Was she right? She had to be. All the pieces fit, even though she didn’t have hard proof yet. But she was sure the proof would be there, in the newspaper files that she had sent Joe to look up, in the DNA tests that would be done, but most of all in the imminent reappearance of her abductors. Lori must have realized at least some of it, but in her trusting innocence had laid her head on the block. Maggie shivered and pulled the jacket more closely around her. Now it would be over, the killings would stop, the madness would end.

  The sound of the motor grew louder, and gradually a ghostly grey pick-up materialized through the trees as it bounced toward them on squeaky springs over the rough dirt and gravel road. It stopped in the small clearing before the barn, and the motor sputtered to silence. Seconds later Maggie’s own dark red Shadow came up the road and stopped immediately behind the truck.

  The truck’s door opened, and Eric Semple stepped out and stood beside it, looking toward the barn. Maggie did not breathe. A single frog started to chirp again.

  “You coming?” Eric called to the driver of the car, and for an answer the car’s door opened. A large figure climbed out and stood on the ground next to the small car. Maggie sucked in her breath as the figure stepped from the shadows and into the moonlight.

  Burnelle Semple had returned with her son to commit murder. And her intended victim this time was Maggie.

  “Where’re we gonna push her off?” Eric asked his mother. He stood by his truck and seemed in no hurry to move from it.

  “Olson’s Ridge. There’s been plenty of accidents there before. One more won’t arouse suspicion. And everyone knows she’s not used to these mountain roads.”

  Burnelle’s voice carried clearly in the still night air, and, obviously unaware that other ears beside her son’s were picking it up, she spoke confidently. “She almost crashed through the guard rails just the other day, you know, and even conveniently filled out a report on it.” An eerie laugh followed, and Maggie felt goose bumps rise on her skin. The exhaustion from her ordeal had long been overrun by adrenalin, and her breath came quickly as she listened and watched.

  “You haul her into her car now,” Burnelle directed her son, “and I’ll drive it over to the ridge. You follow behind.” Eric did not move.

  “Can’t we just do it here and leave her?” Eric’s voice had taken on a reluctant, whiny tone. “Why take a chance going to the ridge? Why not….”

  “No!” His mother cut him off sharply. “It has to look like an accident. Lori was a mistake. I acted rashly, afraid she would start talking to others. And it brought people poking their noses around. Including her.” She jerked her head toward the barn. “This time I’ve planned it right like I did the first two times, both of us having clear alibis back at the hotel when people started to notice she was missing.

  “I got her car keys from her room as soon as we got back and moved her car out of sight. They’ll think she went off on her own, got lost and tired, and drove off the ridge in the dark all by herself. With luck the car will catch fire and burn, otherwise the crack on her head will look like just one more injury from the accident.”

  “I don’t know why you couldn’t of just let Lori alone in the first place,” Eric continued complaining. “She was okay. She wasn’t hurting nothing.”

  “She was nosy, asking questions, noticing too much. She was close to figuring things out that would have destroyed us. She would have talked to the wrong people, and they would have taken you from me! All these years, you’ve been my life. I couldn’t let her do that. I couldn’t!”

  Maggie could see Burnelle’s face, and it had changed, frighteningly, from the polite, hotel housekeeper she had known to a wild-eyed fanatic. The pictures of John Brown she and Holly had recently seen flashed in her mind, his face filled with righteous fury, eager to do evil for the good he believed would come from it. The Burnelle Maggie now saw, in her own righteous fury, would do anything for her perceived good of keeping her son close to her. The son who she had convinced herself was hers.

  “Ma, what’re you talking about? So she knew I was picking up a few things at the hotel. So what? I could have got her to keep her mouth shut. You didn’t have to kill her.”

  “She knew! From that blood drive. She hadn’t figured it all out, but she would have, with those college books of hers. And then I would have lost you! After all I went through to get you, to keep you.” Burnelle’s face had become grotesque, her eyes blazing wildly. “You are mine. We belong together. You know that. You must know it. Together. Always. Come Eric. Come help me now, as I have been helping you.”


  She reached toward Eric with outstretched arms, but he backed away, his face now filled with confusion, revulsion. His eyes darted around desperately, as if looking for a way to escape.

  “You can hold it right there!” Sheriff Burger stepped from the barn, and deputies materialized from the surrounding woods, guns drawn. At first there was stunned silence, mother and son frozen in surprise. Then Maggie appeared, coming out of the barn and moving behind the sheriff into the moonlight.

  “No!” The scream, almost a wail, came from Burnelle, and she rushed at Maggie, hands stretched forward claw-like. The sheriff reacted instantly, knocking her to the ground and holding her there, where she writhed and shrieked, spewing forth hatred and venom. “You meddler! You serpent! Evil Serpent! Whore of Babylon!”

  Maggie jumped back, reacting as if she had been physically struck, as though the words spouting from this fearsome, pitiful woman were pointed nails flying at her. She covered her face, then her ears as it continued, then turned and took refuge in the barn.

  The screaming continued, muffled somewhat by the closed barn door. Maggie rushed deeper inside, aware at the same time she fled from it that the barrage wasn’t aimed only at her, but at a world Burnelle must have seen in her own twisted way, that she had felt always threatened her. It was as sad as it was terrible. But at least it was over. No more innocent people would be the victim of her insanity.

  Maggie sank down and laid her head on her knees, finally giving in to her exhaustion. An era of tragic crimes was over, she thought with relief, Lori’s family might be able to move on now, and – yes, Joe, she thought with a weak smile, - Maggie would finally come home.

  ***

  CHAPTER 22

  Maggie sat on her bed at the hotel, propped up against several pillows. It was very early morning, the light just breaking through the grayness of a lingering night. She had refused the suggestion of going to a hospital, asking only to be returned to her room, and Charles had summoned the doctor on call to treat her scrapes and cuts.

  “Nothing serious,” the doctor assured her, “but you’ll probably be sore for a few days.” He had wrapped a few bandages around her and given her pills, recommending that she see her own physician back in Baltimore. “You’ll be going there soon?” he asked before he left.

  Maggie dropped her head back against the pillows. “Yes,” she said with a weary but happy smile. “Soon.”

  Soon! How good it would be to be back in familiar surroundings, with only those who had always cared about her and never wished her harm nearby. It seemed like incredible luxury now, something Maggie had lived with every day before, and taken for granted, assuming it would always be the same. She realized now she had come frighteningly close to losing it all.

  She thought of her parents. Less than twenty-four hours ago she had still felt impatient with their concern, anxious to push it some distance away. Now she knew how important it was to her, how valuable. Maggie saw the irony that their healthy parental love had nourished her life, and another’s twisted version of maternal love had tried to end it.

  Her thoughts, along with her weariness, filled her eyes with tears and she gave in to them, finally, letting them flow unchecked until they came no more and only a feeling of relief remained. She rested a while, then wiped her face and mentally shook herself. Then she smiled. “Just don’t think this means I’m moving back home, Mom,” she said aloud. “Let’s just consider this a kind of pot hole on my road to independence. It may have given me a flat tire, but it’s totally fixable.”

  Maggie sat up with a jerk. My car! My poor car. Where is it, and has it survived?

  Just then there was a knock on the door. Dyna opened it and peered around the edge.

  “Maggie? Maggie, are you awake?” she whispered. At Maggie’s smiling nod Dyna rushed in and sat on the edge of the bed, her face anxious and her blond hair a straggling mess. Maggie saw that one crystal earring was missing.

  “Are you okay?” Dyna asked, not waiting for an answer. “I saw the doctor leaving. I hardly had a chance to talk to you. I was so worried! You can’t imagine what we went through when we couldn’t find you.”

  Maggie laughed and held up a hand to stop the gush of words.

  “I’m fine. What do you mean “we”. Who else was looking for me?”

  “Rob of course!” Dyna seemed surprised that Maggie wasn’t keeping up with her. “The poor guy. I nearly attacked him when I first realized you were missing. I accused him of doing all sorts of terrible things. But then I saw the look on his face when he finally figured out what I was screaming about - I mean, the blood just drained from it! So I knew right away he was innocent.”

  Maggie pulled herself up. “Rob was worried?”

  “Worried! He was out of his mind. It’s a good thing he wasn’t with you all when Burnelle and Eric came back to the barn. He would have, I don’t know, done something awful.”

  “Really?” Maggie hugged her knees and smiled with delight.

  “Uh-huh. Anyway, when we finally got word that you were safe, I asked him about the lesson thing. You know, the tennis lesson with Mr. Anderson that was canceled but that Rob told you he kept, when you were being trounced by the blue van?”

  “Yes?” Maggie urged, her interest intense.

  “He canceled it because he was helping out Holly. He found her crying at the spot where Lori had been killed. When he tried to console her, she just got worse, saying things like how Lori was too good to die, and that it should have been her instead of Lori ‘cause her life was worthless, and she was no use to anyone, and so on. I mean, she was really down.

  “So Rob took her into the sports shop, canceled the lesson with Mr. Anderson, and let Holly talk it all out. He didn’t tell you about it because that would be violating her privacy. Of course, he didn’t know at the time what that led you to think.”

  Maggie smiled, remembering Holly’s firm statement yesterday that Maggie was looking at the wrong person, that Rob was an okay guy, and knew now what had prompted that.

  “And your brother Joe left a message last night. Something about him finding the stuff you wanted and that you might be right. What does he mean?”

  Maggie’s face became sober. “I asked him to do a search of old newspapers in the West Virginia and western Maryland area, the area that the gardener, Jack, told me he rode through twenty-some years ago. It was a long shot, but what he said about meeting Burnelle in a diner there made me suspicious. She had Eric then, but she seemed reluctant to talk about him to her old school friend. That was very uncharacteristic of her. I felt she was hiding something about him, and now I’m sure she had actually kidnapped him when he was a baby.”

  “Kidnapped!”

  “Yes. And I think Lori was on the brink of proving Eric wasn’t really hers.”

  “How?”

  “That blood drive, remember? Lori probably noticed Burnelle’s and Eric’s blood types, and, from the biology class she had recently taken, noticed a problem. She wasn’t an expert in genetics, but she had probably learned enough to be puzzled by it, and said something about it to Burnelle.”

  “About the possibility that their blood types were too different to be mother and son?”

  “Yes, or maybe just asking what Eric’s father’s blood type was, to account for Eric’s type. Whatever the question, it must have set Burnelle off. Thinking Lori would expose her, would bring the authorities down on her and part her from her son, Burnelle immediately silenced her.”

  “By killing her.” Dyna’s face was grim.

  Maggie nodded. “You should have heard Burnelle back there at the barn. She is completely obsessed with Eric. We knew she was protective of him, but this went way beyond anything I’ve ever heard of. If she was sick enough to steal a baby from its parents and pretend he was her own, she was too sick to raise him as a normal mother would.”

  “So she killed the girl who died of an overdose of sleeping pills, and the guy who crashed his car driving back from the hotel l
ate at night?”

  “Probably. We may never know for sure unless she confesses. They must have threatened her hold on Eric somehow. She may also have murdered the man Jack was hitching a ride with, after he found out she had Eric. Maybe by slipping some kind of sedative into his food.”

  “And who knows how many others we don’t know about?” Dyna said.

  “That’s right. Who knows.”

  There was a knock on the door and Dyna ran to answer it. Maggie heard Rob’s voice asking about her, sounding worried.

  “Why don’t you go in and see for yourself?” Dyna answered, stepping aside for him to enter.

  He lurched through the door in a blend of hesitancy and eagerness, his eyes lighting up when he saw Maggie smiling at him. “Hi,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  Maggie grinned and nodded. He stood looking down at her, his face a mixture of emotions, until she held out her arms. He sank down into them, pulling her close with a relieved sigh. Maggie saw Dyna over his shoulder, pulling the door behind her as she tip-toed out. Maggie closed her eyes, then, and smiled, and hugged back.

  Maggie held onto Rob, loving the feel of him, the smell of him, then gently pushed him back. “Do you forgive me?” she asked.

  Rob’s eyes opened wide. “For what?”

  “Oh, just a little thing like thinking maybe you were a murderer.”

  “If I had known what you were getting yourself into….”

  “You would have what? Locked me away in an ivory tower?”

  Rob grinned. “Yeah, something like that. Or maybe, you know, actually helped you.”

  Maggie laughed. “Oh, come on. You know you would have tried your best to talk me out of it.”

  “Probably. And then you would have been really convinced I was guilty. Maggie, you could have been killed!”

  Maggie loved the concern she saw in his eyes. She put her hands up to his face to hold it. “I know. But I wasn’t. I’m sorry for scaring everybody, but it all turned out all okay.” She pulled his face close and kissed him, softly at first, then harder. It turned out very okay, she thought as she tightened her arms around him, and felt his tighten around her. Wonderful feelings and thoughts flowed through her as they kissed, and not one of them, she realized, was a math postulate.