In the Event of My Death

by Carlene Thompson

  Audra cringed but Laurel held tightly to her hand. She was afraid if the child’s terror overwhelmed her and she ran, Crystal would shoot her.

  Laurel glanced at Monica. She was shuddering violently. She must have been out here for hours, and Laurel was certain if she stepped on that frozen cornstalk now, she wouldn’t feel it. She didn’t dare look at her feet because they would probably be blue.

  “Why, Crystal?” she asked, trying to keep her increasingly raw voice firm. “Why did you kill Angie and Denise? Why do you want to kill Monica and me?”

  “Because the Six of Hearts mined my life!” Crystal screamed. “Everything was wonderful for me. Then you lured me into that club. You forced me to take part in all those Satanic rituals. You made me dabble in evil. Evil! And who suffered? Any of you? No. Me. Only me!”

  In spite of her fear and dropping body temperature, Laurel glared at Crystal. “What in the name of God are you talking about?”

  “Everything has gone wrong for me. My parents died. The money was gone. Chuck flunked out of college. He couldn’t hold a job. I lost four babies. Four. And after all that, Chuck left me like some old dog he’d drop off at the pound.” She drew a long, shaking breath. “I was trying to hold on to my pride, my sanity. Then Angie called and begged me to come to New York for a visit. And I did.”

  “You went to New York?” Laurel asked in surprise.

  “Yeah. No one knew. Why would they? I didn’t have any friends around here who kept up with me, even after everything I’ve been through.”

  Laurel felt a little rush of shame. Maybe none of this would be happening if she’d reached out to Crystal sooner. Then her shame vanished. Crystal had killed Faith thirteen years ago. It wasn’t neglect that motivated that murder. The instinct to get whatever she wanted, even if she had to kill for it, had been present in Crystal even then.

  “So you went to New York.”

  “Yes. Angie looked gorgeous. She was the star of a hit play. She’d divorced a rich man who made her a wealthy woman. She was engaged to another rich man, this one as handsome as Chuck. Judson Green. I never met him, but I saw his picture, I heard her on the phone with him. She only lived in part of her house, but it was beautiful. She took me to fancy restaurants, introduced me to her high-class friends. You should have seen how they fawned over her! But the way they looked at me…like I was a bag lady. One night at a cocktail party I wore my good black dress and pulled up my hair. I thought I looked sophisticated. Then a guy asked me to get him a fresh drink. They thought I was the maid! Angie laughed when I told her. Damn her, she laughed! When we got home and I was crying, she turned all sympathetic and said it was a shame everything had turned out so rotten for me. She just kept hammering away. ‘Why do I have so much when you’ve lost it all?’ she said about five times. ‘It’s tragic, Crystal. Of course I never believed Chuck would stay with you so long after your parents’ money was gone. But you’re better off without him, honey. He didn’t really love you. Everyone knew that.’”

  Crystal’s voice had begun to shake with rage and grief. “When I saw all she had, all she was in spite of what she’d done with the Six of Hearts, I felt sick. I felt…murderous.” She paused, her voice drifting away. “I couldn’t let her live. I just couldn’t.”

  “But if Judson knew you were visiting her when she was killed…”

  “He was on a business trip when I stayed with her. I asked her not to mention my name. She just said ‘an old friend from Wheeling’ was visiting. She hinted it was a man. She got a big kick out of him being jealous. You know how she was—always playing games. I sat and watched her flirting with him on the phone, wearing her exquisite negligees just to get my goat, flashing that huge diamond engagement ring around. I watched and I planned. While I was there, I had copies of her keys made. Two weeks later, when I knew Judson was going to be gone on another trip, I went back. It only takes four hours to get from here to Manhattan, you know.”

  “So you killed her and you mailed the Polaroids of Angie and the photos of Faith from New York.”

  “Yes. I even sent a set to myself. My mailman is so damned nosy. He goes through all my mail. He could swear I got an envelope of photos from New York if it was necessary.”

  Laurel hesitated. Should she bring up this next subject in front of Audra? She had to. She needed to buy time. “And Denise?”

  “Looking at Angie just got me started. She wasn’t the only one who’d done well for herself in spite of everything. There was Denise married to a successful doctor. Living in that big house. Having her.” Crystal stepped closer and touched Audra’s cheek. The child flinched. “I lost all my babies, all of them, but Plain Jane Denise gave birth to this beautiful little girl, this angel. Audra should have been mine. She will be mine.”

  So that’s why she’d taken Audra, Laurel thought. She intended to keep her. “I’m not yours!” Audra cried.

  “Quiet, baby,” Crystal said gently. “You’ll be happy with me. I’m a born mother.”

  Audra shook her head vehemently. “You killed my mommy! And you’re the one that came in my room dressed like a ghost. I remember your voice. You’re mean!”

  Crystal’s eyes hardened. Laurel didn’t want her angry with the child. She was unstable enough to do anything, even to this little girl she supposedly wanted. “So you blame the Six of Hearts for the troubles you’ve suffered,” she said quickly.

  Crystal’s gaze shifted to her. “My troubles all started that awful night. That’s why I always put the six and the heart and a judgment card near the bodies. So the rest of you would know you hadn’t escaped judgment for what you’d done.”

  “What we’d done!” Laurel cried. “You’re the one who deliberately kicked over the lantern.”

  “But I wouldn’t have done it if all of you hadn’t pulled me into that awful club. Satanic rituals. Calling up spirits and devils.”

  “So that’s your argument?” Laurel asked. “‘The devil made me do it’?”

  “Don’t make fun of me!” Crystal snarled. “There is evil in the world and it overcame me because I wasn’t as strong or as smart as the rest of you. You all knew that. You should have protected me!”

  “You, the person who has killed four women and managed to cover her crimes, isn’t strong and smart?”

  “I wasn’t strong and smart then, not when I kicked over the lantern. It was an impulse, an evil impulse, caused by demons Monica called forth!”

  “Bullshit!”

  Everyone jumped as Monica’s voice rang out. Somehow she’d managed to get the tape loose from her mouth. It dangled from one cheek. “In the first place, I didn’t call forth any demons, you idiot. Didn’t you know I was just making up those chants? I don’t know anything about Satanism, demonology, or witchcraft, white or black.”

  “That’s not true!” Crystal shouted. “The chants were real!”

  “No they weren’t. But even if they were, they have nothing to do with what you’ve done. You’ve never wanted to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Even when we were in school you blamed your low grades on teachers’ dislike, not on the fact that you never studied. When you lost that stupid cheerleading contest, you said it was because a girl on the other team was sleeping with a judge. Now you commit murder and blame it on demons I called forth with a bunch of mumbo jumbo. It was jealousy! You killed Faith, Angie, Denise, and even Joyce out of jealousy!”

  “It’s not that simple!”

  “Isn’t it? You just said you saw all that Angie had and snapped. The same thing happened with Denise. Faith was pregnant with Chuck’s child and you were afraid he’d marry her instead of you. Later Joyce got Chuck. By the way, how did you pull off that one? Call her and ask her to come to your house?”

  Crystal’s mouth twisted slightly. “No. I was baby-sitting. Then I remembered I’d rushed out in such a hurry I hadn’t turned off the coffeemaker. I was on my way back over to the house when I saw her go in. First she takes my husband, then she just uses his k
eys and walks into my house like it’s her own. I was ready for her when she came out dressed in my coat.”

  “Then you called me from the cell phone in her car,” Laurel said.

  “Phone records, again,” Monica said. “She had to make it look like the killer was afraid of going back in Crystal’s house after he realized he’d made a mistake and killed someone else. After all, Crystal might walk in on him.”

  “Why did you call me at all?” Laurel asked.

  Crystal looked at her. “I didn’t want to be the one to find the body. It was so much better to have you find it, then see my shock when I came in the house and didn’t seem to know why you were there or what was going on.”

  “The police searched your place, Crystal. They didn’t find any clothes with blood or a murder weapon,” Laurel said.

  Crystal smiled slightly. “The Grants had a dog that died a couple of years ago. It had a nice big doghouse at the back of their yard. I stashed my clothes and the tire iron there. The rest of the time I kept my robe and wig and tire iron at the Pritchard farm. It seemed only fitting since this is where all the trouble started.” A look of regret crossed her face. “I had no idea Chuck would turn up at our house that night, or that Joyce’s children weren’t home all evening to give him a perfect alibi. I never wanted him to be a suspect. I don’t want to hurt him, you see. I just want him back.”

  “But you weren’t afraid of becoming a suspect?”

  “I thought I’d be cleared immediately. But Monica said the police are still suspicious of me. They think because I was just next door, I had plenty of time to kill Joyce and be back at the Grants’ to get their call at seven-thirty.” She shrugged. “The police are right. That’s why I had to act quickly. I don’t have time to be arrested.”

  “How did you know she was with me?” Laurel asked.

  “Wayne told me at the visitation. I did go, you know, just like I did to Angie’s. It was the proper thing to do.”

  “You mean it looked like the proper thing to do.”

  “Not just that. It was sort of fun to know they were lying in those closed caskets, never able to enjoy their wonderful lives again, while I was moving around talking, full of life, full of hope.”

  “You make me sick,” Laurel spat.

  “You should be nicer to me. I had planned to spare you.”

  “To what do I owe that honor?”

  “Because your life wasn’t a whole lot better than mine. Thirty. One big, broken romance. Finally another, obviously going nowhere. No children. Living in your parents’ house running their crummy little flower shop. You’re not even beautiful. Just a plain woman living alone with her two mongrel dogs. Pathetic, really.” Crystal paused. “But you were always nice to me.”

  “Apparently not nice enough.”

  “You were until you started messing around with Neil Kamrath. Even I can see his attraction to you. He’s famous, probably wealthy. And then you began asking too many questions, taking your job as amateur detective a little too seriously. You’re shrewder than I thought. You would have figured out things eventually.”

  “But you tried to scare me earlier.”

  “I had to. I couldn’t make you seem like the only Six of Hearts who wasn’t being terrorized so I started out by driving an old Chrysler New Yorker Chuck left in the garage out to Wilson Lodge and ramming your car on the way home. It’s what I brought you here in.” Crystal sighed and rubbed a hand across her forehead, as if she were clearing her thoughts. “I’m getting really tired of all this explaining. I’m cold, the child’s cold. I think it’s time to get on with things.”

  2

  Neil rolled over, punched his flabby feather pillow, and looked out the window at the snow. Or what he could see of it. His father had been too cheap to buy storm windows. Cobwebs of frost grew, blocking his view. He’d offered a hundred times to refurbish the old house, but his father refused to take money from the “trash” Neil wrote. His mother had sat here with him in this damp, cold place with her arthritis getting worse every year until she’d become a cripple. Then she died quickly in her sleep, no doubt in a bed as uncomfortable as this one. When his father went, Neil didn’t intend to sell the place. He would take the few mementos in it that mattered to him, then have the house demolished.

  But it wasn’t thoughts of his parents, his dreary childhood, or his plans for the house that kept Neil awake. Something was wrong, something he couldn’t put his finger on. It wasn’t that Laurel hadn’t attended Denise’s visitation. Wayne explained she was taking care of Audra, which Neil thought was a good idea. Not seeing Kurt had seemed a bit odd because Kurt knew the Prices. But it wasn’t that, either. It was something someone had said, something strange, something “off,” something that didn’t add up. What the hell was it?

  He tossed to the other side, beating on the pillow again. Good God, how long ago had geese lost these feathers? The turn of the century? He liked thick, fluffy pillows. He liked the sound of the ocean over the cliffs beside his house in Carmel. Dammit, he liked his house with all its windows and bright spaciousness. Minimalist, the decorator had called it. A perfect place for a woman and two frisky dogs.

  Wait a minute, Kamrath, he thought. Just because he’d always liked Laurel and now found her the warmest, most interesting woman he’d ever known didn’t mean anything. She was attached to Kurt Rider. Besides, his wife and son had been dead less than a year. Still, the only times in those ten months when he’d felt really alive were his meetings with Laurel. He grinned. Two scandalous meetings in a fast-food restaurant. There was their talk at her shop, and another at the little cafe down the street. Then there was their rip-roaring evening at the Lewis sisters’ house when they had met Genevra Howard. That had been shocking and disturbing. It had also been exciting.

  Funny, he thought. In some ways he felt like he knew Laurel better than he’d ever known Ellen. Ellen was like a spun-sugar figure—all pretty and dainty on the outside, hollow on the inside. But she had produced a miraculous child, a child Neil would miss until he died.

  Who was it at the visitation who sympathized with him over the loss of Robbie? he wondered suddenly. He squinted, trying to see her face. “Always so tragic,” she’d said. “Sometimes I think it’s worse on the father than on the mother. Why, I remember…”

  Neil sat bolt upright in bed. That’s what he had been trying so desperately to recall! He reached for the phone and dialed Laurel’s number. No answer. He glanced at his watch. Eleven-thirty. Laurel wouldn’t be running around with Audra at eleven-thirty. Something was wrong. He hated doing it, but he rang Monica’s room at the Wilson Lodge. Once again he got no answer. In dread, he looked up Crystal’s number and called. The phone rang in an empty house.

  “That does it,” Neil said, climbing out of bed. “I can’t just lie here all night worrying. I have to do something, but I’m not sure what.”

  3

  Crystal walked over to Monica, withdrew a knife from her coat, and began sawing at the rope around her wrists. “Don’t think because you’re bigger than I am, you can overpower me,” she warned Monica. “I’ve got a gun.”

  “You would never have gotten me in that car trunk without it,” Monica said bitterly.

  Crystal severed the rope. Monica rubbed her wrists. Crystal gave her the knife. “You cut the rope on your ankles.” She pointed the gun at Monica’s head. “And don’t try any heroics. Two shots and you and Laurel will both be dead.”

  “You’d actually kill us in front of Audra?” Laurel asked, noticing how weak her voice was growing. She wouldn’t be able to talk much longer.

  “She’d forget in time. Children are very resilient.”

  “Maybe it’s better you never had a child,” Monica snapped. “You don’t have a clue about how children’s minds work.”

  “Shut up!” Crystal hissed. “As if you with your fancy career and your men and your life in New York would know anything about kids.”

  “This might come as a surprise to you,
Crystal, but career people in New York City actually have children and do a good job of raising them.”

  Laurel didn’t know if Crystal heard the apprehension in Monica’s voice, but she did. Monica’s doing the same thing I’ve been doing, she thought. She’s trying to get Crystal unfocused, flustered, so we can overpower her. The problem was she didn’t believe either of them had the strength to overcome Crystal. Laurel was beginning to feel terribly sleepy, even fuzzy, and she knew by the way Monica sawed clumsily at the rope around her ankles that she too was losing her battle with the cold.

  “Hurry up!” Crystal prodded.

  Monica looked up at her. “Why don’t you just shoot me and get it over with?”

  “Because that’s too easy. You forced me to take part in your Satanic rituals. Now I’m going to force you.”

  Monica sighed. “Crystal, how many times do I have to tell you the rituals weren’t real. And no one forced you to do anything.”

  “You did. I was scared not to do what you said.”

  “Oh? Tell me, what did you think would happen to you?”

  “I…I didn’t know. You seemed so powerful, so capable of anything.”

  “I seemed capable of anything?” Monica managed a ragged laugh. “God, Crys, you really have gone around the bend.”

  “The rope is cut. Quit stalling.” Crystal put the gun against Monica’s’ temple. “Get over there, step up on the bale of straw, and put your head in the noose. Just like Faith did.”

  Twenty-six

  1

  After he got in his car, Neil’s first impulse was to drive to police headquarters. But what would he say? “No one I call is home?” That should electrify the cops, he thought wryly. Most of them probably held the same view of him that Kurt Rider did, anyway. He was just some nut who wrote ghost stories and was probably trying to stir up some publicity for himself. No, he had to have a little more to tell them if he expected any action.

  So, where should he start? With Laurel, of course. It was her failure to answer the phone that disturbed him the most. He drove to her house, cursing the snow, the slick roads, the rental car that didn’t handle like the Porsche he’d left in California. It didn’t even handle as well as his father’s old boat of a vehicle, but he’d brought it because it had a cellular phone.