by Dee Ernst
“There’s a picture,” I said. “Of Mr. Scarecrow. Without any tattoos on his wrist.”
Doug closed his eyes briefly, then turned away.
“What?” Asked Mary Rose. “What are you talking about?”
Kim stood up. “Doug?”
Mary Rose grabbed Kim’s arm and shook it. “Kim, tell me.” She looked at me. “Ellie, what has a tattoo have to do with anything?”
“It proves that whoever was Mr. Scarecrow between five-fifty and six-thirty wasn’t Todd.” Doug’s shoulders slumped.
Kim took a step. “Doug, please.”
“I don’t understand,” Mary Rose said shrilly. “What do you mean, it wasn’t Todd?”
Doug’s shoulders started to shake. “Simple, Mary Rose,” I said. “By five-fifty, Todd was already dead. And Doug took his place.”
Kim reached out her hand. “Son…”
Mary Rose stared at me, then at Doug. “My God, Doug? He killed his own brother?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
Doug turned. Tears streamed down his face.
He shook his head. “No.”
Chapter 9
“Doug,” Kim pleaded. “Don’t.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t anymore.”
Kim went to put her arms around him, but he shook her off.
Wait. What was wrong here? I took my eyes from Doug’s anguished face and looked at Kim. Her jaw was clenched, and her eyes were suddenly hard.
“Kim, was it you?” The idea hit me so hard I couldn’t even breathe.
She ignored me. “Doug, you know what we said.”
Doug began to sob, a harsh, ugly sound.
Mary Rose turned white and dropped down on the sofa.
Kim put her hands in her hair and tugged, hard. She was muttering to herself, and I felt suddenly sick to my stomach.
Boot lifted her head and began to bark. There was a quick knock on the door, and Sam came in, John Monroe right behind him. Sam looked at the scene quickly, and his hand dropped from his hip.
“Ellie, can you tell me what’s going on?” he asked calmly.
“Kim,” I whispered. “Kim did it. She killed her own son.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she said, very loudly. Her head was still down, her hands still pulling at her hair. “I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t. And he just made me so angry…” She dropped her hands. She didn’t look beaten or fragile anymore. Her eyes narrowed in anger. “He went after Doug with that damn hammer. I couldn’t let him hurt Doug. He’d done so much damage already, I couldn’t. So when Todd dropped the hammer, I picked it up. I didn’t mean to hit him that hard.” She spat the words. “Do you really think I set out to kill my own son?”
Sam had been watching her face. He glanced at me, then nodded to John Monroe, who walked over to Kim and reached for her arm.
“You have the right to remain silent,” he said quietly. He fastened the handcuffs around her one wrist. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” He cuffed her other wrist and turned her around. Her shoulders were stiff, and she held her head high, chin out. John walked her out of the house.
Sam looked at Doug “You need to come with us.”
Doug nodded. “I’ll be right behind you,” he choked out.
Sam nodded and left.
Doug lowered himself stiffly into the chair by the fireplace and buried his face in his hands. I sat next to Mary Rose and watched him as he wept.
He finally wiped his face, took a long, shuddering breath, and then slumped back in the chair, his eyes closed.
“What happened, Doug?” I asked.
“Todd couldn’t come to my gig because he had to be somewhere else, paying off a ten thousand dollar debt. He didn’t have ten thousand dollars, of course. Mom was going to give it to him. She called me, said she had the money, and I called Todd. We were going to meet him in back of the house next door. It was going to be so simple. Mom would give him the cash, and he’d go back to being a clown. But when we got there, he said he needed more money.” Doug shifted in his seat. “I went after him. I wanted to kill him, I really did. But he pulled his hammer out of nowhere. I mean, I don’t even know why he had it. I hit him with my fist, and the hammer flew out of his hand, and Mom picked it up.”
Mary Rose made a sniffling sound.
“She was so calm. She looked down at him and didn’t even cry. She took the mask and the gloves off the ground and told me I should go out and be Mr. Scarecrow. No one would know the difference, she said. I was to make sure that people thought he was alive for as long as I could. That way, we would all have an alibi. She said that the police would think somebody killed him over drugs.”
“That almost worked,” I said.
He nodded. He was looking into the fire. “Then I tried to get the police interested in Eve. That didn’t work either. So Mom got desperate and called the police about the hammer.”
“She put it in the garage?” Mary Rose asked, her voice shooting up an octave. “She did that? When she knew they’d go after my brother?”
“She said there wasn’t enough to convict him. That he’d get off. And by the time the trial was over, Todd’s murder would just be another cold case.” He unfolded himself from the chair. “Sorry, Mary Rose, but I couldn’t just let my mom go to prison.” His eyes shifted to me. “Why did you have to go snooping? It almost worked out perfectly.”
“Why did you move the body, Doug?”
He looked surprised at the question. “Todd was my brother. I couldn’t leave him out there, all alone.”
Mary Rose covered her mouth with her hands.
“You’d better get down to the station, Doug.” I said. “They’re going to want to talk to you.”
He nodded and left, shutting the front door gently behind him.
Mary Rose was shaking. I grabbed the throw from where it had bunched up behind the dog and drew it around her shoulders. She looked at me. “What just happened?”
“A very sad story just ended,” I said.
By the time Tessa came home from school, Mary Rose had left to wait for her brother to be released from jail. I was upstairs, trying to work. Tessa came and went, first to have a snack, then off to do homework.
Tessa was not a problem. Cait, on the other hand, was going to be tough.
I heard her bounding up the stairs. She stopped in the doorway of my office.
“Anything new?”
I motioned to the battered chair in the corner next to my desk. “You might want to sit down.”
Her coat slid off her shoulders and landed in a heap on the floor, on top of her purse and tote bag. She sat, watching my face. “What?”
“Kyle was right about Doug. He didn’t kill his brother.”
“Do you know who did? Was it Steve? Oh, no, that’s awful.”
I shook my head. “No, honey. It was Kim.”
She looked away, and I could almost see her brain turning. “His mother?”
“Apparently, Todd was going after Doug, and she hit him to stop the fight.”
“If it was an accident…” She looked back at me. “Doug covered it up?”
“Yes. He put on the scarecrow mask and pretended to be Todd. That moved the time of death. It gave his mother an alibi.”
“Wow,” she whispered. “So all this time I thought he did it?”
“He was protecting his mother.”
She stood. “I need to tell Kyle right away. This is, well, unbelievable.”
“It’s sad. That poor family.”
She bent down and gathered up her things from the floor. “Is Doug going to be in trouble?”
“Probably. He’s an accessory to a murder.”
“Oh.” She stood there, looking miserable, her arms full of coat and purse, and I wanted to gather her into my lap and tell her that everything was going to be just fine.
But it wasn’t going to be just fine. For Kyle’s good friend Doug, the world would never be fine ag
ain.
She turned and left, and I spent the rest of the afternoon staring at my computer, thinking about being a mother, and trying to imagine what the world for Kim Wyzinski was going to be like for the next forty years.
Sam came by late. He looked tired and unhappy, and he sat in front of the fire, nursing a scotch, not talking, while I sat in my reading chair and didn’t say anything. When he finally motioned for me to sit beside him, I curled up in the crook of his arm and sank into him, grateful for his strength and warmth and the feel of his fingers in my hair.
“This one was bad,” he said.
I nodded.
“Thank you for what you did. It…helped.”
“Good.”
“And I have to admit, I was impressed at your self control.”
I smiled against his shoulder. “Well, luckily I have minions.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Minions?”
“Yes. Everyone I knew was asking questions, so I wouldn’t have to.”
He threw back his head and laughed. I loved his laugh. It came from the very center of his chest, and rolled up and out like champagne from a bottle.
“So, I shouldn’t be impressed by your self control as much as I should be impressed by your powers of manipulation?”
“I prefer to think of it as project management.”
“Oh, well then.” He kissed the top of my head. “I confirmed the reservation for New Year’s Eve. Are we still good for that?”
“Yes. It sounds wonderful. You and I, a romantic inn, a body…”
He laughed again. “Yes. And absolutely no chance of you getting into trouble.” He drained his scotch and sank further into the couch.
“What will happen to Doug?”
Sam sighed. “He’ll cut a deal. He’ll have to. If he gets a sympathetic judge, he could walk.”
“And Kim?”
“A mother killing her child? That’s a tough one. Doug backs her story, that Todd went after him, so she’ll be charged with manslaughter. It depends on the jury.”
I pulled away and looked up at him. “How do you do this all the time? Deal with such damaged people?”
“Someone has to speak for the dead. Someone needs to find the truth, and hopefully, dispense justice.”
“It’s late.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “I should probably get going.”
“Why don’t you stay?”
He looked down at me in surprise. He had never spent the night at my house with the girls home. “Are you sure?” he asked.
I nodded. “Cait’s an adult, and Tessa has sleepovers all the time. I even have extra toothbrushes.”
“Thank you. I would love to stay.”
We sat there a bit longer, until the fire had burned down, and Boot had curled up in her bed, then I turned off the light, and we went upstairs, together.
Also by Dee Ernst
Am I Zen Yet?
Better Than Your Dreams
A Slight Change of Plan
A Different Kind of Forever
Better Off Without Him
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