Gravel scrunched beneath my feet as I walked to the steps and knocked on the front door. It must have been six inches thick. Though I used my fist until my knuckles were sore, I wasn't certain anyone could hear me.
After ten minutes, I grew tired of waiting. Pushing at the door, I found it was unlocked, so I opened it and stepped into the cool, dark foyer.
"Krystal! Mike!" The house was eerily silent.
"Krystal!" I stepped past the staircase and continued down a dark hallway. Opening another door, I stepped onto a screened porch that was tucked around a fireplace in an arc like a capital C. Glass-topped tables with white chairs were set up with tablecloths, china, crystal, and matching napkins. It looked as if a party had been scheduled and then canceled—several months before. The plates had a thin film of dirt.
"Mike!" I felt the finger of dread tickle my gut. "Krystal!" I called, this time with a lot less force. I wasn't really certain at this point that I wanted Krystal to actually come out and talk to me. The house had that eerie quality of a really haunted place. I was afraid that whoever walked out in Krystal's body wouldn't be the same person who'd formerly been Simpson Fielding. The sense that something was very wrong in the house grew stronger with each second I was there.
From the porch, I had two routes. To the left was a door that led to what was probably some type of game room or private dining area. To the right was the kitchen. I chose right, and found myself tiptoeing along the painted boards of the porch.
My skin prickled and goosed as I eased forward. Even though I kept checking over my shoulder and seeing nothing, I had the sense that I was being watched.
Cece had talked to Mike only an hour or so before. What could have happened to him?
At the door, I pushed easy, then hard. "Mike!" The door was jammed, or possibly locked from the inside. A lacy curtain was thick enough to effectively prevent peeking inside.
There was a screened door to the outside, so I exited and walked around to steps that led up to the back door and another entry to the kitchen.
This door, too, was locked. I made a circuit of the house and reentered the front door, stopping in the foyer. I could go upstairs from here, or left or right. Again I went right, hoping for an interior route to the kitchen.
The minute I left the foyer, I felt as if something cold had begun to breathe on my neck. Whirling, I found only emptiness behind me. I turned back and almost cried out at the stuffed bobcat perched on a limb sticking directly out of the wall. The room was dim, but I picked out a buffalo head, several deer, an elk, a red fox, also on a limb, and a big, coiled rattler. This room was devoid of all furniture, except for the stuffed creature collection.
I kept a wary eye on the dead animals as I walked through the room. I didn't want any of them to spring to life without enough warning for me to get a good, running start.
"Krystal." I said her name. Well, whispered it. Where in the world could she be? Two cars, including the gold Lexus, were in the drive. Zinnia was a good ten miles away, and there wasn't even a U-Tote-Em closer than six miles.
I made my way across another room, this one for formal dining. The furniture was heavy, old, and beautiful, no doubt part of the original Putnam Hall. The built-in glass china cabinets even held some of the highly collectible red-leaded crystal. It was odd what people left behind when they moved from a place.
I came to a swinging door, and I knew that I had at last gained access to the kitchen. Easing it open a crack, I stopped. There was the strangest sound, an angry, droning noise that sounded like hornets.
It took a few seconds for the smell to register. Gas. Without thinking, I pushed the door open and rushed into the room.
Krystal's legs extended from one of the big, commercial ovens. She was sprawled across the door, most of her upper body inside the maw of the oven. The angry hissing came from the gas jets.
"Krystal!" Fear gave me the strength to pull her out of the oven and drag her, none too gently, onto the floor. I turned the gas off, but the room was saturated with it. Grabbing both of her feet, I dragged her across the kitchen and through the swinging door. I had built up quite a head of steam, so I just kept going until I was out on the front steps and in the pale yellow of a late spring afternoon.
In the sunlight, Krystal looked like she was dead. I knelt beside her, feeling her throat for a pulse that was so weak it took me a while to find it. Against the paleness of her skin, her red hair was garish and her lips a translucent blue.
"Don't die," I ordered her. "Damn you, Krystal, you cannot die." I didn't wait for her response. I ran inside and picked up the phone to call 911. There was no dial tone. I punched the phone on and off several times, to no avail. The phone was off the hook somewhere in the house, or the line was dead.
Krystal was on her back on the narrow porch, her chest barely rising and falling. I had no way of knowing how seriously she was hurt. I knelt beside her, chafing her hands and rubbing her cheeks and doing everything I'd ever read in a book or seen in a movie to get her to come around. Nothing worked.
"Mike! Mike!" I yelled his name. He'd been at the house only an hour before I arrived, and he was expecting me. Where had he gone?
I needed cold water. The only thing to do was go back into the house and get it. It took every ounce of courage I had to walk back in the front door. The dead animal room was as scary as before, but I ran through it and the formal dining room. Back in the kitchen, I unlocked both outside doors, opened them and all the windows, and got a clean, wet dishcloth and filled it with ice.
When I got back to Krystal, I sat down beside her and pulled her into my lap. Her breathing was shallow and labored. I was terrified she was going to die.
"You are going to live, and you are going to tell me why you did this." I talked to her with righteous fury. I almost wept with relief when she shifted her face away from me.
"Stop," she said, gagging on the fresh air.
"You'd better breathe," I warned her. I listened for the sound of traffic on the road, but there was nothing except the low coo of a dove.
"In the house. Be careful." She groaned out the words.
"What?" I demanded. My sympathies were lagging way behind my fear and anger. "Where's Mike?"
"In the house. Kemper signed them. Avenger." She mumbled the words as her head moved back and forth.
"What? Signed what?"
"He planned all of it." She started crying. "All along." Her eyes opened wide. She searched my features as if she didn't know who I was. Then the flat, dead look gave way to fear. Before I could move, her hands rose and clutched the lapels of my blouse in a grip so tight I felt like she was choking me.
"Krystal." I tried to break her grip. She was looking beyond me into some unknown abyss where terror ruled supreme. "Krystal, it's me, Sarah Booth."
"You're a dead woman," she said, and violently pushed me away from her.
The force knocked her off my lap and down the steps. She rolled toward my car in bone-bruising jolts without making a sound.
"Krystal." I started after her, scrabbling on my hands and knees. It took me a few seconds to realize that something held me in place. I swung around to face Mike Rich. He was staring at Krystal as if she were some awful aberration.
"She tried to kill herself," I said, trying to shake free of the grip he had on my blouse. "We have to help her."
"Do we?" he asked.
Krystal had reached the gravel parking lot, and she crawled on her hands and knees, oblivious to the sharp stones. She fell onto her stomach, splitting her chin. Blood dripped onto the gray stones, while Mike held me like a rag doll.
"Let me go." I twisted with all of my strength.
"Be still," he said, his focus on Krystal as she clawed at the door of my car.
"Turn me loose!" I swung at him, catching him full in the cheek with my fist.
Without a second's thought, he brought his free hand around and slapped me. The pain was instant, a blinding wall of light. Blood spurted from my s
plit lip and inside my mouth, where my teeth had cut my cheek.
"Run, Sarah Booth. Run!" Krystal had gained her feet, and she managed to open my car door and crawl in.
"Get back here." Mike tossed me to the steps with a knee-capping thrust. He was at the car in three strides, but Krystal had managed to slam the door and lock it. Her hands fumbled at the keys while her face registered mindless fear.
The pain in my crushed knees kept me facedown on the steps as I watched them. Mike pulled a knife from his pocket, and with a swift, clean gesture, he sliced open the convertible top of my car. His hand went in, clutching Krystal's throat. I saw her eyes widen as her fingers clutched at the keys.
At last the motor caught. Somehow she managed to slam the car into gear and began to drive up the steps. Mike, his hand still at her throat, ran beside the car.
She came straight at me, the car climbing the steps in an awkward bumping lurch. My legs were not mine to control. My brain screamed at them to move, but they lay flaccid and useless on the cement. It wasn't until the car was only feet away that I threw myself to the left, tripping Mike as he came up the steps, arm still clutching Krystal in the car.
He tumbled down beside me as Krystal managed to throw the Mercedes into reverse and back onto the driveway. Spinning gravel, she was gone.
Gasping for breath, I lay on the cement. Before I could attempt an escape, Mike began to stir. I knew I would surely die.
"Get up," he ordered as he climbed to his feet.
I tried rolling to my hands and knees, but he grabbed my arm and tugged me up to stand beside him. "You'll pay for this," he warned me.
I looked down the driveway in time to see my Mercedes turn right onto the highway. Krystal had escaped.
28
In my earlier examination of the dead animal room, I'd missed the one piece of furniture that I now found myself sitting on, a straight-backed chair. Mike had tied me to it with enough knots to keep a seaman busy for an Atlantic voyage. I clearly did not have that long to live.
"I'm going to ask you one more time. Where're the insurance papers on that horse?" The barrel of his gun was cold against my cheek.
"Was he insured?" I wasn't certain if Mike knew that Avenger was still alive. The best I could do was hedge my answers, hoping he would give me a clue to what he knew.
"Answer me now," he demanded. His clean-cut looks were still intact, but he'd dropped all pretense of good manners. He leaned so close that I could feel his breath on my neck. "You're going to tell me, one way or the other."
"I don't know," I said for the tenth time. "I never saw any papers. I've been looking for them, too."
He spun away from me and paced the room. He checked his watch. "Simpson's been gone about ten minutes. It'll take her another ten to get into town. I don't have time for games."
I clearly saw the sand in the hourglass slipping away. And I did want to go home.
"The night Kemper died, he was trying to kill Avenger, wasn't he?" I asked, hoping to divert Mike.
"Kemper, that idiot, couldn't even kill a horse properly. He couldn't execute a simple plan without botching it. He was all big talk."
"Quit whining," I snapped, surprised that in the midst of my agony I would revert to the behavior of a Daddy's Girl. It was one of the first lessons Aunt LouLane had taught me: When outnumbered, assume authority and give an order. I'd seen it work in more than one ugly situation. Unfortunately, Mike didn't know the rules.
"You're just like Simpson, aren't you?" He glared at me. "She's got her country-girl act down to a T, but scratch the surface and there's Delta-bred bitch. She's not as smart as she thinks, though. She got careless and made it clear that she intended to dump me as soon as she made it to the big time. Right about then, she became more valuable dead than alive. All you Delta girls think the world can't exist without you. But you're wrong. Dead wrong."
My brain had finally started to work, and I added up the details of what he said. Krystal and Avenger shared one thing in common—to Mike, they were worth more dead than alive. "Insurance doesn't always pay on suicide," I pointed out to him.
"That's where you're wrong. You just have to know how to write the policy, and I'm an expert at it."
I understood it all, then. "You wrote the policy on Avenger, and you filed it in ..." I had to think. To avoid suspicion that as owner of the horse he would benefit from Avenger's death, he couldn't use his own name, so it had to be—"Krystal's name."
"Aren't you the teacher's pet? Except you're wrong. I wrote the policy under my real name. Mitchell Raybon. It was easy to change my name when Simpson changed hers. It was one of those togetherness things that women are so fond of."
I recognized the name only because I'd just spoken it to Cece. "You and Kemper were going to split the insurance money. You'd done it before, with LaCoco, when you torched a resort."
"You got the right answers, but I'd say your timing's a little off."
"I managed to get here in time to save Krystal, and she will get help. If you're going to escape, you'd better get moving right now." I could only hope he'd be content to leave me tied in a chair.
"You don't understand. I owe Tony a lot of money. He's been the primary backer of Krystal's career. Tony isn't what I'd call a sentimental man. He wants to be paid, and he wants it yesterday. He would have killed Kemper if someone hadn't gotten there first. If I don't come up with his money, he's going to kill me." The cold barrel of the gun pressed into the back of my neck just at the point that would leave me a quadriplegic. "Where's the policy on that horse?" He grinned wickedly. "And where's the horse and the kid?"
My mouth went dry. He knew Kip and Avenger were alive. "You've already tried to kill the horse twice, once with insulin and then by setting the barn fire. Maybe you should give it up and get out of here before Coleman arrives."
He walked around to face me. "I would have had the money from Krystal if you hadn't come along just a few minutes too soon. My plan was that you'd find her dead, and find me 'knocked out' in the bedroom. You would have been my perfect alibi. Since you screwed that, you're going to help me find the insurance policy."
I had a few cards up my sleeve. "You can't risk trying to collect on Avenger, even if you finally manage to kill him. The sheriff has contacted every insurance company in the nation. They'll never pay off. Take your losses and get out of here while you can."
He checked his watch. "True confessions are over, sweetheart. Tell me where the kid took the horse. I promise I can make you talk. It'll be a lot less painful if you just tell me what I want to know."
He came toward me, and I knew he'd do whatever it took to make me talk. Just his eyes made me want to tell him everything.
"Why are you obsessed with an insurance policy you can't collect on?" I had to either make him leave or keep him talking. I was completely unprepared for the slap.
Tied in the chair, I couldn't even attempt to defend myself. I blinked the tears out of my eyes and felt the blood begin to trickle from my nose. He'd gotten the other side of my face this time.
"Where's the damn policy? It's the only physical evidence that ties me to Kemper in any way, shape, or form. That's the only thing that can cause me trouble."
"What about Krystal? She's not going to look kindly on a man who tried to gas her to death and then strangle her."
Mike laughed. "You don't know how desperate Krystal is for her singing career. Any hint of bad publicity could crash all of her dreams. Right now, the worst I'm looking at is a domestic argument with my wife, a temperamental wannabe star." He shrugged. "At worst, I may be charged with attempted murder." He crouched down so his face was level with mine. "You're the flaw in my plan, Sarah Booth. You've been snooping and poking around in everyone's business, and now it's caught up with you. I know you know where that policy is. Carol Beth said you were out at the farm going through all the files. She said you took the policy."
"I don't have the policy. I never saw it." It didn't matter that I was actually
telling the truth. It wasn't what Mike wanted to hear.
The gun barrel swung until it was pointing at my face.
"You won't get away with this." I spoke the television words with as much grit as I could muster.
"Maybe, maybe not, but you're going to start talking or I'm going to start shooting little bits of you off." I could see his finger slowly beginning to squeeze the trigger. The barrel eased to the right slightly until it was pointed at my ear. I'd never be able to wear matching earrings again.
"Okay, I know where the policy is." I had to come up with something. "The sheriff has it. He's had it all along. You're a dead man if you hurt me. When Coleman gets his hands on you, he'll make you suffer in ways you can't even imagine." Lying in the teeth of death is a peculiarly liberating act.
"I don't believe you." But he lowered the gun even as he spoke.
"It's over, Mike. There's no escaping. You'll only make it a lot worse on yourself if you hurt me." I sat up as tall as the ropes would allow. "I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life in prison as the sheriff's boy, and Coleman will see to it that every man in there has a shot at you." Tony LaCoco wasn't the only person who could steal lines from the movies.
He swallowed but held the gun steady.
I saw a chink and pressed harder. "Maybe you can make a case that Kemper's death was an accident. You didn't intend for him to fall under the horse." I wasn't going to bring up the tiny details of the insulin and the nippers. "The barn fire could have been an accident, too. J.B. Washington is recovering from the head wound. There's nothing here you can't put behind you."
He looked at me hard. "I didn't kill Kemper."
I didn't believe him, but I wanted to keep him talking. "If you didn't kill Kemper, who did?"
"Lee killed him. She confessed."
"Right." I couldn't help the skepticism.
"She must have. When I left the barn, Kemper was still alive. He'd stolen the insulin from the veterinarian's truck. We'd originally planned to electrocute Avenger. You know, the old wires in the nostrils. The insulin was a better idea. Kemper said he could handle it, so I left. The difference between me and Kemper is that he wanted to watch the horse die. For some reason, he hated that animal. I just wanted the money. Kemper was very much alive when I left him. Either Lee killed him, or the kid did it."
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