by Sandra Brown
“Reporter?”
“The magazine has no comment other than to say that Dawson was questioned by the police, but it was pro forma, nothing came of it, and he was released. That’s it. Okay?”
“I know all that. I’m not a reporter. Just an ordinary person who wants to know if Mr. Scott is, well, safe to talk to.”
“Safe? Maybe you’d better back up and start at the beginning, Mr. Clarkson.”
“Well, I was walking on the beach, which I do twice a day. The exercise helps my hips.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mr. Scott approached me and struck up a conversation. Seemed to be a nice enough fellow. We chatted about this and that, then he asked if he could interview me.”
“Why would he want to interview you?”
“That’s why I’m calling you, to ask why he would want to interview me.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“He said he was working on a story for the magazine.”
“He’s covering the Willard Strong trial. Are you familiar with it?”
“It’s big news down here.”
“Well, Dawson is writing a story about the double murder of Strong’s wife and her lover.”
“Jeremy Wesson.”
“You knew him?”
“I never met him, but I know his ex-wife very well. Amelia and her children spend summers next door to me on the island.”
“Well, there you go. That’s the connection. The last time I spoke to Dawson, he was hoping to get an interview with her.”
“Why?”
“Because typically an ex-wife is a great source of information on a subject. If you’re well acquainted with the former Mrs. Wesson, it makes sense that Dawson would want to talk to you, possibly as an inroad to her. Okay? Now if there’s nothing—”
“I don’t know that I’d want to be quoted.”
“If you ask Dawson not to quote you, he won’t. Or he’ll refer to you as ‘an unnamed source.’”
“I wouldn’t want to hurt Amelia’s feelings by talking behind her back.”
“That’s very noble of you, but I can vouch for Dawson’s journalistic integrity. He treats his subjects with sensitivity. Sometimes to an irritating degree, if I’m being honest.”
“What made him want to write about this particular crime?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe an inside source tipped him to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or you won’t tell?”
“I don’t know. But if I did, I wouldn’t tell.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to ask him myself.”
“Good luck with that.”
The bitch hung up on him. After patronizing him, she’d rudely hung up. About what you’d expect from a woman put in charge.
Carl had learned what he’d wanted to know, however. Dawson Scott had come to Georgia to cover the Willard Strong murder case and write a story about it.
What Carl still didn’t know was why? Why would a writer based in Washington, DC, recently back from overseas, become intrigued by this particular crime? When compared with writing about war, a double murder in Georgia seemed tame. Why would it have captured Dawson Scott’s interest?
There were several logical explanations, of course. But Carl mistrusted logic. Too often it didn’t apply to a situation. He had never staked his life on what was logical, and he wasn’t about to change that practice now.
“I’m coming in!”
The shout came from outside. He went to the door and opened it for Jeremy, who was tramping through the undergrowth toward the cabin, carrying several grocery sacks.
A road to the dwelling would have certainly made access more convenient, but one had never been included in the plan. Roads led people to places, and Carl hadn’t wanted anyone to accidentally happen upon this hideout after taking a wrong turn or following a road simply to see where it went.
He had bought the property under a name that meant nothing and continued to pay annual taxes to keep nosy bureaucrats from coming to check it out. He liked it okay, and having it had come in handy, but at any given time, he was willing to walk away from it and not look back. He never became attached to a piece of real estate. For that matter, he didn’t form biding attachments to anything. Sentimentality could get you killed.
After murdering Darlene and setting up Willard to take the fall, Jeremy had left the scene on foot, following Carl’s instructions to cover his tracks well. Carl had picked him up on the main road, provided some antiseptic cream and a gauze patch for the self-inflicted wound on his head, and drove him as close as he could get to the cabin. Jeremy had gone the rest of the way through the marsh on foot.
Sandwiched between that brackish marsh on one side and a dense forest on the other, the cabin was so far off the beaten path that Jeremy had been able to hide in it for fifteen months.
During that time, he’d changed his appearance. He’d let his hair grow out long enough to cover the bald spot, which had healed, but was unsightly. He’d also cultivated a beard and gained weight.
Carl had brought him supplies once a week. Occasionally Jeremy had complained about the isolation, the leaky roof, and the lousy TV reception, which could only be obtained with a camouflaged antenna on the side of the roof. But he’d endured these inconveniences, knowing that the sacrifices would eventually be rewarded by getting his sons back.
He and Jeremy had built the cabin themselves while he was stationed at Parris Island. Although it lacked amenities, Flora had loved it because it had allowed them to see Jeremy periodically. She had campaigned for it to become their permanent home. Carl had refused to live permanently anywhere, so she’d had to be content with short visits to the place.
Those times spent here with Jeremy had made her happy. In truth, she was easily made happy by the smallest of things and the most insignificant of gestures. But she also became sad easily and anguished over things that couldn’t be helped and should have been long forgotten. That was a character trait he’d found maddening.
Jeremy clumped inside. “Well?” Carl asked. “What did you learn?”
“The car was still in the lot where ‘Bernie’ left it. I didn’t get too close, but it looked to me like there was a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. Other than that, there was no sign that it had been noticed.”
Carl gnawed on that. “Strikes me as odd that they haven’t impounded it. How long do they usually wait to haul in cars with parking violations?”
Jeremy shrugged as he took a carton of orange juice from one of the shopping bags and gulped directly from it.
“You didn’t spot any cops staked out to watch it?”
“No, but there are industrial buildings surrounding that parking lot, each of them several stories tall. They could be surveilling it from any one of a thousand windows, but I don’t think so, Daddy. Who would be lying in wait for Bernie to return? Bernie is a nobody, a nonfactor in any of this.”
Carl eyed his son shrewdly. “Then why don’t you look happier?”
“They’re all over the boat.”
Carl muttered a stream of obscenities.
Defensively, Jeremy said, “They were bound to follow up on any boats that had put into Saint Nelda’s dock on Sunday. I guess the gas pump attendant remembered the name of it.”
“Stupid name. No wonder he remembered it.”
Flora had suggested the boat be named CandyCane because they had acquired it on a Christmas Eve. They’d used it to escape following the burglary of a church after its midnight mass when the coffers were full.
The owner of the boat, an embittered veteran of the Vietnam War, and a devotee of Carl’s, was also an atheist. He’d been so delighted over the theft of a church, he had graciously offered his boat to convey them far away from Maryland. He’d taken them all the way down to the Florida Keys.
When the need arose for a boat, the embittered vet, now suffering several forms of cancer, had been willing to oblige h
is hero again. He taught Jeremy basic boating and navigational skills, enough so that he could get himself to Saint Nelda’s from other islands and marinas along the coasts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Marina slips were rented under assumed names.
“That guy on Saint Nelda’s might be able to describe me,” he said now, “but he can’t identify me as Jeremy Wesson. Besides, I told you, the boat has been wiped clean. They won’t find any trace of me onboard.”
“One hair is all it would take.”
“That’s a worry, but a minor one. They’re still looking at Dawson Scott.”
“He was released.”
“Yeah, but the investigators are ‘reconstructing the time line,’ making me think he hasn’t been altogether cleared.” He gestured to the plastic bags he’d dropped on the table. “I bought a newspaper. The murder has been demoted to page five.”
Carl found the newspaper in one of the bags, opened it to that page, and scanned the text. Jeremy turned on his tablet PC. “If you’d ever learn to navigate the Internet, you wouldn’t need a newspaper anymore.”
“I don’t like computers.”
“By the time you read a newspaper, it’s old news. You get continual updates on the Internet.”
They’d had this conversation many times before. With the exception of firearms, Carl loathed gadgetry. He was leery of anything he saw or read on the Net.
According to the newspaper story, the sheriff’s office was being tight-lipped about the progress of its investigation. Deputy Tucker was quoted. He used the same hackneyed phrases that every law enforcement officer in the country uses whenever what he is saying, basically, is that they don’t have jack shit.
Dawson Scott had cooperated with the investigation. They hadn’t made an arrest, but were analyzing evidence. They were following a new lead. Blah, blah. Carl knew that whenever a lead petered out and cops were stuck, they always lied and said they had a new one to follow.
Jeremy had been reading aloud off the newspaper’s website, and the write-up on it more or less matched what Carl had just read. “So much for constant updates,” he said snidely.
“But here we get a color photo, too. The newspaper didn’t even have a black-and-white.”
Carl glanced at the tablet from over Jeremy’s shoulder. “Tucker is a tub o’ guts,” he remarked, pointing to the potbellied deputy pictured standing in the foreground of a group of uniformed officers.
Then, in the motion of turning away, he said, “Wait! Give me that.” Roughly he snatched the tablet out of Jeremy’s hands. “How do I enlarge the picture?”
“Tap…”
The photograph filled the screen. Carl looked hard at a man standing in the background. Although a deputy in a cowboy hat was blocking one half of his face from the camera, instant recognition suffused Carl with feverish heat. He clenched his teeth and sailed the tablet across the room like a Frisbee.
“Hey! What’s the matter?”
“I knew it! I sensed it! Didn’t I tell you something was out of joint?”
“What? What do you see?”
With unmitigated hatred, Carl said, “FBI Special Agent Gary Headly.”
Diary of Flora Stimel—Christmas Day, 1993
I’m so blue, I can barely stand it. We stole from a church last night, which I’m pretty sure means I’ll go to hell. Of course I already knew I would, because I’ve killed people. Well, helped kill people. I’ve been there when Carl killed, and I think that’s the same as doing it myself.
Carl had me go into the church before the midnight service started. I watched people as they came in. Mommies and daddies and grandfolks. Some of the children were sleepy, being as the service started at 11:15, way past their bedtime. Others were excited and couldn’t sit still. I guess they were anxious to get home and into bed so Santa Claus could come.
It just made my heart ache, because I never got to spend a Christmas Eve with Jeremy and play Santa for him, and now he’s too old. He’s a senior in high school! I wish that just once I could have watched his face on Christmas morning when he found his presents under the tree.
It’s been a long time since he believed in Santa Claus, of course. What he believes in now, mostly, is his daddy. He thinks Carl hung the moon. Randy and Patricia have seen to it that he knows Carl’s ideas about things. They tell him about how men like Carl are smart enough to see everything that’s wrong in this country, and that’s why the government and the law hate and fear them and want to shut them up. Jeremy has caught on. Grabbed on, really. I’m glad of it. But it worries me.
I got off the track, which I do a lot whenever I write in this diary. I start thinking back and then…See? There I go again.
After the congregation sang “Silent Night” at midnight to candlelight (I had a candle, too. Everybody did. The people on either side of me had no idea that they were sitting next to a noted outlaw! Bet they would have croaked!)…Anyhow, everyone started filing out of the church. Except me. I went into the ladies’ room, which I’d made sure to locate before I took my seat in the sanctuary.
Only one other woman came in. She did her business quick and left. Her family was probably waiting on her. I stood on the toilet seat in case a janitor or somebody came in to check the stalls and see if everybody was gone, but the lights went out with me still balancing up there.
I waited another ten minutes like Carl had told me to, then turned on my flashlight and left the restroom. What had looked so pretty in the candlelight looked kinda spooky in the dark. The statues and all. But I tried not to look at anything except the circle of light I directed to the floor.
I let Carl and Henry in through a side door. No alarm sounded, but Carl said it was probably a silent one. Henry joked and said, “Only God can hear it, I guess.” I didn’t think it was funny. Carl sorta laughed, but he was focused on picking the lock on the church office door.
We grabbed the bags the ushers had emptied the offering plates into and got the heck out of there. But there must have been a silent alarm, because when we ran out of the church, there was a policeman just stepping out of his patrol car. He pulled his pistol and hollered for us to halt. Carl shot him in the chest. Henry got him in the head, I think.
As we were running to the car, Henry fired at the figures in the Nativity on the church lawn. He claims he doesn’t believe in God or Jesus or Allah or anything, but he sure bears them a grudge.
We made a safe getaway and came away with good cash. But I felt awful about it and didn’t get high like the men did after we boarded the boat and started south. I hope the sailor, or whatever it is you call the guy who drives the boat, can drive it when he’s stoned. They all got stoned good. Carl included, which is why I felt it was okay to get out my diary and write.
I hope Jeremy likes his presents. I haven’t seen him since we went to Vancouver this past summer. I can’t get over how grown he is! A man, really. I was shocked when we hugged and I felt whiskers on his chin! I don’t know when I’ll get to see him again. I’ve started mentioning his high school graduation which will be in the spring. I say over and over again how much I wish I could be there. Carl acts like he doesn’t hear me. But maybe he’ll take the hint.
The sun’s coming up and I’m seasick from writing, so I’d better put this way. But not before saying, Merry Christmas, Jeremy. I love you.
* * *
Dec. 25th, later. We get TV even out here on the ocean, and on the news they were talking about the burglary at the church. The policeman died. He was only twenty-seven. He had a two-month-old baby girl. Hearing that kinda made me sick to my stomach, so I used that as an excuse to come below and get away from Carl, who’s in a mean mood.
I think because the news people quoted that FBI agent Gary Headly, who’s been after us for years. Carl hates him with a passion. I think on account of he’s a little afraid that one of these days Agent Headly is going to capture us like he’s pledged to do.
Also Carl hates him because he was at Golden Branch, and he never fails
to mention that whenever he’s interviewed about us. Carl hates being reminded of that day. So do I. Even if Carl doesn’t admit it, I think deep down he was awfully scared that day, too. Scared of being killed or of getting caught. I also think he feels guilty over doing what he did and leaving like that when everybody else was dead or dying.
Anyhow, he blames everything that happened that day on the feds and, in his mind, Headly sorta represents all of them. Carl won’t be happy till Agent Headly is dead.
Chapter 21
Headly’s bad news had to wait.
Just as he was about to impart it, Hunter and Grant came into the kitchen asking for a snack. Since breakfast had amounted to an overdose of sugar, Amelia offered them milk or nothing. They took the milk, but dawdled over it as though aware of the adults’ impatience for them to finish. When they were finally done, she wrangled them back into the living area to continue their movie.
The moment she reentered the kitchen, Headly picked up where he’d left off. “For all the reasons we’ve discussed, Tucker isn’t convinced that Stephanie DeMarco’s murder is related to Amelia beyond the fact that Amelia was her employer.”
“Stubborn jerk,” Dawson said. “Wills?”
“Leaning toward Knutz and me. But, you know, we’re the big, bad, buttinsky FBI, and he’s loyal. Sheriff is backing his man, too. Tucker shared the Jeremy-is-alive theory with him. No fool, he recognizes that it will be hard to live down if we’re wrong. He’s asked for further analysis on the fingerprint. Now, about Bernie. The sheriff was quick to point out that he hasn’t been charged with a crime.”
“Not as Bernie, no.”
“Well, he thinks the Carl-Bernie connection is thin and is demanding more concrete evidence of that before launching a full-scale manhunt for a fugitive that nobody’s heard from in seventeen years.”