by Ann Self
“Cecily!” she gasped, wrenching away and looking wildly around the observation room into every shadow. “She has an axe..!”
“She’s dead,” Brian told her. “She made a wild swing at you and missed—and struck herself instead. She pitched out the window and fell off the roof.”
“She’s dead? But...who was f-f-following me across the roof?”
“Me! I went out after you after I wrestled with Cecily’s dogs—they were trying to follow Cecily out the window. I lowered myself onto the peak and scrambled after you. I missed grabbing you by a split second...before you were swept down the roof.”
“Oh, n-no!”
“I died a thousand deaths, listening to that scream fading into the night.”
Jane wiped her bangs back from her forehead trying to stop the water from running into her eyes. “It was you!!”
“Yes—we could’ve saved a lot of time if only I could’ve gotten my hands on you before you rolled down the roof. I was slowed down by the ridge vent, and I didn’t expect you to dive off like that—I should’ve just grabbed you, to Hell with being polite.” He sighed and looked guilty, “You might have been terrified and fought like a tiger, but at least I would’ve had you in my hands and not let you fall. I nearly blew it, and I don’t often make tactical errors.”
She watched him speechless as he continued: “I rushed back across the peak and climbed back in the window and then I heard you screaming again...it sounded like you were still on the roof! I grabbed the flashlight that I’d dropped on the floor with my coat, and there you were—far out on the roof curled around a stack pipe. I tried to yell and signal you with the flash, but you didn’t respond—you were too far away. I could barely see you.”
“Flashlight! I...thought it was...lightning!”
“No—that was me, searching for you and trying desperately to make up for my first mistake. I remembered Sam mentioning the rescue ladder Westy put in your room, so I ran down there, grabbed the rolled up ladder, and came back up to the roof. The damned ridge vent made a good anchor.”
She looked at him amazed for a moment. “If it helps, you weren’t at all polite when you finally caught me.”
He smiled back with a big grin. “Sorry, I know I was grabbing at you like a wildman. I knew I wouldn’t get another chance.”
“I’m astounded you could get to me and pull me back up—I thought I was done f-f-or. I thought no one could hear my screaming but Cecily.”
“She wasn’t hearing anything by that time.”
Jane ran her eyes over Brian’s shadowy face. “Guess that Special Forces training came in handy.” A shiver of fright ran through her as she momentarily revisited the roof experience. He studied her for a few seconds, saying nothing. Jane was now uncomfortable that she’d mentioned his military career.
“How did you know I was in Special Ops?”
“I heard Elliot talking about it—I was pretty embarrassed, considering how I thought myself quite the s-spy following you around.”
“Elliot!” he snorted. Then he made a crooked smile. “You were the prettiest, weirdest and most visible spy I’d ever seen. Could see you for three miles at least.”
Jane blushed invisibly and shook her head. “S-so clever I was, wasn’t I?” She raked strands of her wet hair self-consciously from her face, acutely aware of her muddy, filthy appearance. He picked up the flashlight and closely examined the abrasions on her forehead and hands, then began carefully peeling snarled hair that wound around her neck, removing twigs, pine needles and bits of leaves that were pasted to her head.
“So,” she said, “I suppose you r-remember who I am..?”
He smiled as he pried foliage from her hair. “It’s a wonder, with all this hair, that I ever could recall that skinny kid in study hall with the short black hair chopped up to her ears. The kid who always seemed to be nearby, but wouldn’t say a word to me. Or even look at me. Never looked in my eyes.”
Jane cringed. “Oh no.”
“You worked hard at throwing me off track. Telling me you were from New Hampshire!”
Jane groaned. “I just didn’t want you to remember the ragamuffin—Plain Jane.”
“Plain who?”
“That’s what they called me.”
He pulled her close again and hugged her, alarmed at the acute shivering, and she relished the warmth that flowed from his skin. He smoothed more hair and debris from her smudged, scratched face and then said: “I love the ragamuffin...and the new, classy you. Fancy Jane.”
She smiled up at him. Muddy water dripped off her nose. She wiped it away with a grimy hand and plucked a pine needle from her lip. “Yes—I’m quite fancy.”
He laughed. “I’ve seen you cleaned up.”
Loud footsteps clomping up the tower stairs made them move apart. Brian grabbed the flashlight. Westerlund, Russell, Sam, and Madeline rushed through the door with their own flashlights. They all froze for a moment, looking at each other in the crossing beams of light.
“Sam!” Jane yelled, struggling to her feet. “I’m s-so glad you’re not dead! Where’s Reggie?”
“He’s gladly not dead either. Just has a lump to match mine.” Sam touched his scalp gingerly. “I think the four-miles of duct tape hurt worse than the pry bar she used on us, though.”
Westy used the keys he had taken off Cecily’s body to open the skybox. All electricity was out for real now, so they restored power to the observation room by firing up a generator under a lean-to outside the arena. The electric heat baseboards crackled into life, taking off the damp chill, and brass lamps and wall sconces flickered dimly on the uneven power.
There was a shortage of big trees near the roof over the skybox, so they considered it a fairly safe place to ride out the storm. The generator hummed one floor below, as coffee laced with brandy was distributed and everyone congregated in leather club chairs arranged around the bar area. The lamps continued flickering weakly like candles as the storm raged and howled outside, starting to peak at its full intensity.
Jane was very thankful she was no longer out on the roof as she went into the ladies restroom and stripped down to her underwear, throwing her clothes on the tile in a muddy heap. She gingerly rinsed the gash on her forehead, and her scraped, bloodied hands as mud and debris flowed into sink in a heavy stream. Madeline helped her wash the dirt out of her hair, drying it as best she could with a handful of paper towels and then twisting it into a slick knot on the back of her head. She brought Jane a gray sweatsuit retrieved from the trunk of her car, after Brian dashed out to drive her Jag into the indoor ring. Jane gratefully pulled on the warm, dry clothes and finally stopped shivering.
Walking out of the restroom, she stared down past the tiers of empty tables, through the window-wall, at the muddy Mercedes sitting in the darkened cave of the indoor arena. Madeline’s Jaguar and the cruiser used by Westy and Kenny Russell were parked nearby, also covered in leaves and mud. Four emergency lights in the arena threw a feeble illumination over the shiny metal cars and trailers. The arena was rattling under the assault of wind and rain, and Jane felt a whisper of fear as she thought about Cecily hiding right where she now stood, watching her as she explored the indoor ring down there with her spotlight. She squinted closely at Brian’s SUV and noticed the grille-guard was covered in white paint and chunks of fencing, as well as twigs and branches. She caught Brian studying her as he poured coffee into several mugs. His ruined shirt and slacks were gone; clothes he had dressed in for a business meeting, and he had retrieved casual clothes from his own vehicle. Jane spied Reggie lying down on a couch against the wall with a cold-compress on his head and rushed over to kneel beside him.
“Are you okay, Reggie?”
“I’m fine. Even know my name and the date. Takes more than a lump on the head to stop this guy.” Reggie moved the compress aside to stare up at her. “I’m thankful Cecily didn’t harm you—I thought we really let you down! What happened to your face—and your hands!?”
&nbs
p; “Oh...just scraped them on the roof, but I’m fine too.”
“Mother of God, climbing on the roof!” he exclaimed, readjusting the compress. “I can’t believe that woman! I can’t believe that dingbat could drag me like a sack of grain and wrap me up in silver tape like some crazed spider!”
Jane patted his arm in sympathy, and Brian came over to help her to her feet and hand her hot coffee. “They tell me,” he said, “that you like two gallons of milk and sugar in it, but I’m afraid you’ll have to settle for brandy.”
“Brandy is fine.” She seemed to be drinking a lot of it these days.
Brian guided her to a club chair next to his and sat down with his arm draped protectively around the back. Jane stared into her coffee mug and inhaled the bracing fumes. Then she gasped: “Madeline! Cecily tried to poison you and Westy! She put arsenic in your coffee!”
“What?!” Westy bellowed, taking a second look at the mug he was now holding. Madeline looked stunned. Detective Russell set his coffee down on a little round table and sat back to stare at it as if it was a snake.
“She said she put arsenic in your coffee the day of the show. Must have been when she came down all dressed up to supposedly “check” on us. She was so angry that you two didn’t finish your coffee. Thank heavens you didn’t!”
“Wow!” Madeline exclaimed. “I set my coffee down when I was braiding your horse. Then when I went back to retrieve it, some of the horse hair fell off my arm into the cup, so I dumped it.”
“And I left mine on a ledge and forgot it,” recalled Westy. “We were so busy looking at Charmante that we didn’t notice what she was doing.”
“And, she poisoned Dylan and Lars too,” Jane exclaimed, “said she had to get them out of her hair.”
Reggie half sat up. “Oh, that poor kid. No wonder he looked so bad. How could she poison Lars? He was all right when he showed up at our party.”
“But he was carrying a bottle of wine from the skybox party when he came in,” Sam said. “Cecily may have added a little something to it, before he left.”
“She did exactly that—and no one’s seen him since,” Jane stated.
“Poor Lars. I hope he’s okay,” Sam said. “Well at least I didn’t bring Dylan a bad sandwich. How did she get him?”
“Had to be his soda can,” Madeline guessed. “He set it on a stall ledge over his head—right next to where Cecily was “checking” the wardrobe bag. Didn’t think much of it at the time, but now of course it’s very significant.”
Jane nodded, “You’re right, she poisoned his soda. I hope he’s okay...I hope Lars is all right, Do you think we should try to look for him?”
“Not in this wind,” Westy answered her. “We can’t risk it now, the storm has worsened in just the last ten minutes. It’s going to escalate for at least the next couple of hours, and then it may stall on top of us.”
“Lars,” Sam speculated, “most likely got very sick after he left our party—remember he departed early. Cecily dropped a little present into the bottle of wine he left with, and by the time he got to his gatelodge he would have been quite ill. He undoubtedly went to bed to sleep it off. He was there, I bet, when I knocked at the door, but either in bed unconscious, or too sick to answer.”
“Well, at least his home is made of rocks and won’t blow down,” Westy stated. “We’ll get him to a Doctor as soon as we possibly can.”
Reggie responded from under his cold compress: “I’m sure he’ll be fine. Cecily didn’t want to kill him—didn’t want too many bodies dropping all over the place.”
“One way to get out of his contract,” Sam joked.
“Cecily wanted most everyone around you who could be helpful or protective to be out of commission,” Westy assessed. “But she needed to leave a couple of people around like Reggie and Sam, or you wouldn’t have been lured back to the barn at all.”
“Oh! So we were bait!” Reggie complained.
Westy smiled. “That’s about the size of it. She also didn’t want to dose anyone with enough arsenic so we would start trying to trace it. Poison is fairly easy to trace back to the poisoner. But if no one dies...they just get a little sick, then recover, usually no one suspects poison. Put it down to tainted meat or bad mayonnaise.”
The detective took a careful sip of coffee and then continued: “I guess she’d come completely unhinged and gone way past wanting your death to look like an accident. In the beginning, of course, she was being quite crafty. Pretty hard to point a finger at anyone for you falling through a trapdoor; especially when Cecily didn’t have to be on the scene. I think she planned this little surprise much earlier...the night of Lucinda’s party. That’s why the lights were off and the trap door had been monkeyed with.”
“You’re right,” Jane agreed. “She ranted to me about that. She was so mad that Dylan was in her way that afternoon and late doing the stalls. It kept her from arranging things down in the cellar. All she got done was loosening the nails and throwing the breaker on the south-wing lights.”
“No wonder she decided to poison him!” Madeline exclaimed, “and everyone else who could possibly get in her way.”
“How in the world,” Sam asked, “did Cecily manage to pry the nails out of that trapdoor? It’s fifteen feet off the cellar floor.”
“Pickup truck with a ladder in the bed,” Jane informed him.
“Ahhh...” Sam said, nodding. “Gotta give her points for that.”
Westy swirled his coffee around and examined it closely. “Yes, she was a clever little devil. Trap doors and roosters and all.”
“And killer horses,” Jane added.
“Shut up!” Sam exclaimed. “That was Cecily’s work too??”
“Yes,” Jane answered. “Saved Mike from the killers and had him drugged and delivered to the barn.”
“Yeah, by me,” Sam groused. “I can’t believe how she was using me, and trying to throw suspicion on me.”
“She finally got so desperate she was going to poison me at the party.”
“Good God, the woman was a monster,” Brian said angrily, aghast at the prospect of Jane being attacked with an axe or poisoned. He shook his head and moved his arm closer around her shoulders.
“Homicidal psychopaths usually have a short fuse,” Madeline stated.
Brian nodded, looking closely at Madeline, still surprised that the chubby, bespectacled kid with short dishwater hair could be the stunning blonde before him.
Then he noticed Detective Russell staring warily at his coffee cup, as it sat on a table beside him. “I can personally vouch for this coffee, by the way.” Brian announced. “I opened a new jug of spring water and a fresh bag of coffee. Pot came straight out of the bar dishwasher and I even broke the plastic on a new bag of filters, so I think we’re safe with this.” Brian smiled and held up his cup. “Besides, she did switch to axes and pry bars today.”
Russell smiled benignly, but did not touch his cup.
Jane’s eyes fell on Sam and she noticed the lump on the back his head, peeking through thin blond hair. “Poor Sam and Reggie,” she mumbled as she sipped her coffee.
Sam looked back at her. “I just feel so stupid,” he complained. “Fell right into her trap. I couldn’t resist looking for a phone, and of course I don’t find one—but the door to the office is conveniently open.” Sam took a big gulp of coffee after checking it closely, and then continued: “Elliot’s phone for some reason is on the floor beside his desk. Wouldn’t you think that might have given me a clue? But no, I run right over, drop my baseball bat and bend down to get the phone. Wham! Lights out! I never even saw it, or her, coming. Woman can really wield a pry bar—I’ll have to thank the carpenters for leaving that thing behind.” Sam looked over at the couch where Madeline was checking on Reggie. “How’s he doing?”
“I think he’ll be fine, but he’ll need to take it easy.”
“He’s a little old for a lump like this,” Sam said as he rubbed his head.
“Who’s old
!?” Reggie demanded from the couch.
Sam looked at Jane. “That crazy old woman wrapped us up in enough duct tape to choke an elephant. You don’t know how frustrated I was, when I heard you trying to open Elliot’s office door and I couldn’t move or speak! Just lying there on the carpet, tape over my mouth and trussed up like a Christmas goose, with the two dogs sitting by me like statues.”
“How did she get Reggie?” Jane asked Sam.
“I was dumb! Jes plain dumb!” Reggie yelled from under his compress.
“No dumber than me,” Sam sighed. He leaned back in the club chair, stretching his cramped legs out in front of him. The wind howled, rain droned on the metal roof panels, thunder rattled the building, and the lights danced with shadows as Sam explained what happened to Reggie.
“Reggie said he started getting worried when he woke up and the power was off in the office, and I didn’t return like I said I would. He heard a noise and opened the office door and walked into the corridor to yell for me...and pow! He got clobbered. I can’t believe the strength of that woman. She actually dragged Reggie into his room and taped him all up. He didn’t come to for a long time, though.”
“Where is...where is Cecily?” Jane asked, as another squall of wind attacked the roof.
“Right where she fell,” Westy answered. “Russell and I had to force her dogs in out of the rain; they wouldn’t move, they were like statues sitting over her body. They’re still pressed against a door near her. It’s weird.”
Jane felt another tickle of fear along her back.
The wind became a howling banshee whistle, and everyone prayed the large building would hold together. A broken branch smacked the outer roof and scraped across it—the angry trees still raging at their loss. Jane stared at the planked ceiling, just a few yards below the arena roof, glad now that the picky Elliot had insisted the skybox roof be fully built out with heavy beams, plywood sheathing and roofing shingles to protect the fancy interior.
“I always thought those two dogs were far too obedient,” Sam commented, “as if they had no will of their own. When I was struggling on the floor it really gave me the creeps—they stared down at me exactly like the stone dogs at the mansion driveway. Might as well have been made of stone—no doggy personalities...as if...”