False Cast: a small town murder mystery (Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series Book 5)

by S. W. Hubbard

  “A few families have called me about babysitting their kids. After Ronnie’s body washed up, I guess they figured they had nothing to fear.”

  Once the weather had warmed up, Ronnie’s bloated body had risen to the surface of Veazey Pond. His legend had finally died. Frank was relieved although without Ronnie’s testimony, Gage Shelby might beat the conspiracy charge in Cottlemeir’s murder.

  “How’s RJ?” he asked.

  Pam exhaled a deep breath. “A little better. Still depressed, but Denny and his dad are a good influence.” She dropped a box of Sugar Pops into her shopping basket and Frank thought their conversation had ended. But she reached for Frank’s hand, and her eyes searched his. “Tell me—did Ronnie jump, or did RJ startle him into falling?”

  Frank didn’t know the truth, but he knew the right answer. “He jumped. He knew we’d have to cross that stream. He didn’t want to end his life in jail.”

  After Pam left, Frank moved on scrutinize The Store’s meager selection of spices: cinnamon, chili powder, garlic salt. None of the tarragon he’d been sent to find.

  “Hey, you busy?”

  No one could construe him as that.

  “I need to talk to you.” Anita Veech had materialized beside him, holding a liter of Diet Dr. Pepper and a loaf of whole-wheat Wonder bread.

  Frank turned to face her. “I’m listening.”

  “Not here.” She looked around for eavesdroppers although The Store was completely empty except for the girl at the register. “Meet me at my place. It won’t take long.” Anita retreated down the aisle then hesitated. “Please.”

  Anita opened the door just as he raised his fist to knock. She ushered him over to the dinette table and waved him into a chair with no pretense of hospitality. With Gage in jail, Anita had no need to rush the move to Glens Falls. Trudy insisted that they wait until the school year ended, so the little apartment was no longer being packed up.

  Anita sat down across from Frank. “I want you to work something out for me.”

  “Oh?” That one word expressed all his ambivalence about Anita: sympathy for her miserable upbringing and grudging admiration for the way she’d managed to start over, mixed with suspicion of her motives, and the conviction that she couldn’t be the kind of parent Olivia needed.

  Anita looked down at her folded hands on the table. “I figured you’re the only person I can tell about this.”

  What was this meek bashfulness? It seemed most un-Anita-like. But Frank played along. “Of course you can tell me. You’ve got a problem?”

  Anita didn’t raise her eyes. “I’ve had lots of problems. It starts way back.”

  Frank stretched out his legs and dropped his plastic shopping bag. He’d played a lot of roles recently: medic, forest ranger, housebreaker. Why not add shrink to the list? “Start wherever you need to start.”

  “Remember I told you that when I first got arrested, I was kinda relieved to be away from Pap. But there was one thing about prison that I couldn’t adjust to. I was never alone. Not one minute of the day. Not even in the bathroom. People talking all day, all the time. I thought I’d go crazy. Then I started taking the computer class, and they discovered I was good at it. They changed my job from working in the laundry to working in the warden’s office. I put together spreadsheets and reports for her all day. They gave me a little desk in the corner and no one talked to me ever, six hours a day.” Anita looked up and smiled. “I loved it.”

  Of course, the enforced intimacy of prison would be hard for anyone, but especially for Anita, who had spent her life living under the thumb of the paranoid, reclusive Pap Veech, rarely interacting with anyone outside her extended family. But where was she going with this? Frank couldn’t help suspecting this story about the trauma of prison life was simply an attempt to soften him up for some big favor.

  “Yes, I can see how that job in the warden’s office would improve your circumstances. So once you got settled….” He nodded for her to continue.

  “Then the days weren’t so bad. But at mealtimes, and after work, I still had to deal with the stories.”

  “Stories?”

  “That the other girls told. Some of them, they said their kids got taken by the social workers and put in foster care. Some of them had been in foster care themselves when they were young. They wouldn’t shut up about it.” Anita shook her head. “They said it was bad. It was always bad.”

  Frank glanced around the unadorned little kitchen, so different from the cheerful clutter of the kitchen at the Iron Eagle Inn. What horror was coming?

  Anita slid to the edge of her chair. “At the custody hearing I said I never got any of those first letters Olivia wrote me. That wasn’t exactly true.”

  So that made it exactly a lie. He’d always suspected Anita’s tale of prison neglect was just a fabricated excuse. “So you did abandon your daughter,” Frank said.

  “I didn’t! Maybe this doesn’t make sense to you, but when you’re inside, you’re totally powerless. What if Olivia told me she was getting hurt? What could I do? I wouldn’t be able to help her, and that would be worse than not hearing from her at all. So when I was in there, I didn’t want to think about Olivia too much. I just shut that part of my brain down.”

  Frank recalled his college psych courses. There was a word for this…compartmentalization. You shut the bad thing up in a corner of your mind so you could manage to go on living. He’d done it himself with Estelle’s death, kept the door locked on his grief so he could manage to drive a car or buy a quart of milk.

  Anita took a deep breath. “But I couldn’t get her totally out of my mind. Because the other girls were always talking about how wrong it was that their kids got taken away. Some of them were inside ‘cause their boyfriends or husbands had been selling drugs or whatever and gotten the girls involved. They felt like they got screwed over twice: once by their men, and once by the courts. Just like I got in trouble because of Pap and my brother. And they said when they got out, they were going to take back what was rightfully theirs. So hearing them say that I thought, yeah, me too.”

  Great. Was Olivia just a pawn in a game of tit for tat? He didn’t like the turn this conversation was taking. Anita sounded too much like Ronnie Gatrell—blaming everyone but himself for what he had lost.

  “Then I got out.” Anita stood up. “You’ve sent a lotta people to jail. You ever been with one of them on the day they got out?” She answered her own question before he had a chance to. “Probably not. Being a cop is like working at the beginning of an assembly line. You don’t get to see the final product.”

  She went over to the fridge and poured herself a glass of soda without offering him one. “Lemme tell you—it’s weird. The whole world looked different, smelled different. The colors of the leaves in the sunshine were so bright it hurt my eyes. I kept thinking people were trying to start something with me when they looked me in the eye and smiled. I was only inside for five years. People who are in for twenty, thirty years and get out? Geez, no wonder they commit another crime so they can go back.”

  Anita returned to the table with the soda, oblivious to her rudeness.

  “The prison counselor asked me where I was going to go when I got out. I didn’t have to come back here to Trout Run—Pap and my brother and our old house were all gone. But where else would I go? There was nothing for me anywhere else. There was nothing for me here, either—except Olivia.

  “Coming back to Trout Run, all I could think about was Olivia. How I had to have her back. Because she was mine. The only thing that was mine. And they had no right to keep her. I got the job with Gage and he said I should fight for Olivia. I never fought and won anything before. It was a good feeling.”

  Anita’s dentally enhanced smile expressed something other than joy. “But once I had her back…”

  Suddenly Frank could see where this was headed. The story of every guy who married the beautiful model. Who landed the prime job. Who took the trip of a lifetime. Who moved into the
McMansion. The long-sought dream crumbled. The chase was better than the capture.

  Anita rattled the ice cubes in her empty glass. “We were together every day. Every single day in this little apartment. The weekends were the worst...her looking at me like ‘now what?’. And then she ran away.”

  Anita stared at the blank beige wall. The only sound was the wheezing of the old refrigerator’s compressor.

  “I was worried something bad might’ve happened to her, but at the same time—”

  Anita was relieved to be alone. He could see it in her face. She didn’t have to say it.

  “But when Gage threatened her, you were genuinely worried, terrified,” Frank said. “You love Olivia.”

  “In my own way. But there’s something wrong with me inside,” Anita whispered. “I can’t relate to other people.”

  Frank’s suspicion wavered. Clearly, it was costing Anita a lot to ask for help. He tried to meet her halfway. “I understand. You need some counseling, but you’re afraid if you talk to Trudy about it, she’ll take Olivia away. I’m willing to talk to her for you.”

  Anita tipped the last ice cube in the glass into her mouth and crushed it. “No, you don’t get it. I want to give Olivia back to those Bates people.”

  Chapter 51

  Frank put a hand out to steady himself. The apartment pitched like a boat in high seas. “Give her back? After the way you fought to keep her? After the way you risked your life to protect her?”

  Anita’s face flushed a mottled red. She started to stand.

  Frank felt like kicking himself. This was the moment they’d all longed for. He shouldn’t be making Anita feel bad for her decision. He’d been so shocked, the remark just slipped out. He wasn’t sure why Anita trusted him in her hour of need, but she did. He’d better step up and deliver some compassion.

  “Sit, sit. I’m sorry—I didn’t see that coming. You said you wanted me to help you work this out?”

  Anita sank back into her chair. “I know it’s me. I’m not trying to push off the blame. But Olivia is feeling the strain too. I talked it over with her. We both decided it’s for the best that she go back. But I want to be able to visit her sometimes. She wants that, too.”

  This was the moment when he should reach out to Anita—squeeze her hand, pat her arm. But Anita exuded a force field that repelled any gesture of intimacy. “It takes a lot of courage to do what you’re doing, Anita. I admire that.” That much was true.

  “I’ll make this work out,” Frank continued. “I know I can.”

  That part was bull.

  Chapter 52

  Frank stood outside the back door of the Iron Eagle Inn. How many times had he walked right in, not even bothering to knock? Sometimes he found Lucy in her nightgown drinking tea, or Edwin cursing at a sauce on the stove that refused to thicken.

  They hadn’t minded.

  They never turned him away.

  Now he took a deep breath and knocked. No answer, but he could hear them moving around, hear the radio playing.

  He tapped louder.

  “What’s that sound?” Edwin asked. “Is that damn woodpecker pecking on the shutters again?”

  Frank pushed open the ever-unlocked door. “Hey. It’s me,” he called from the back hall.

  Lucy and Edwin held hands and crept closer. They looked at him as if he were a wolverine, ready to pounce.

  “Can I come in?” Frank asked.

  Edwin pulled Lucy closer. “Why?”

  Lucy shook herself free. “Of course you can come in, Frank. Have a seat.”

  But he didn’t sit. Because Edwin kept standing.

  He had rehearsed his speech, even going so far as to role-play with Penny. But when he opened his mouth, no words came from his paralyzed throat.

  “What’s wrong?” Lucy asked. “Has something happened to Olivia?”

  This gave Frank an opening. He spat out his news in one breath. “Anita and Olivia have talked things over, and Olivia wants to come back to live with you. Anita will give you full custody, but she wants visitation rights.”

  Lucy’s face lit with joy.

  “NO!” Edwin screamed. “How dare you? Get out! Get out of my house!” His hand picked up the first object it found, a cast iron pot lid. “Haven’t you caused enough damage?”

  Frank scurried out as the airborne lid took a chunk out of the doorframe.

  Back in his truck, he sat with his head against the steering wheel. Could he have screwed that up any worse?

  The passenger door opened, and Lucy slid in beside him. “Don’t worry, Frank. He’ll come around.”

  “No, Lucy. He shouldn’t have to come around. Edwin feels manipulated. I don’t blame him. I’m no better than Gage Shelby, pulling people’s strings to make them jump. I’m sorry I came here and caused you more pain.”

  Lucy rested her head against his arm. “Oh, Frank—you’ve always wanted what’s best for Olivia. Even right now when he’s so mad, Edwin knows that’s true. He’s mad because he’s worried about me.”

  “I’m worried about you, too. I hurt you once, and now I’m doing it again.”

  Lucy took his face in her hands and turned his head. “Do I look hurt?”

  Frank had to admit, her eyes were twinkling.

  “Frank, this time away from Olivia has actually been good for me. Before, I wanted so much to be her mother. It was a constant tug-of-war between us. Now, I’ve let that go. Anita is Olivia’s mother—always was, always will be. And me, I’m her Lucy. And that’s okay. I’m fine with it. I really am.”

  Lucy took a deep breath. “But Edwin, Edwin’s her daddy. The only one she’s ever had. And I’m okay with that too.”

  Frank looked up and saw Edwin illuminated in the bedroom window, making no pretense of the fact that he was watching them. “Will Edwin ever forgive me for suspecting him of taking Olivia?”

  Lucy snorted. “I told him he has no one but himself to blame. You don’t tell a cop you’re thinking of running off to South America with your foster child, even if that cop is your best friend.”

  Frank rested his head against the seat and closed his eyes. “I miss Edwin.”

  Lucy squeezed his hand. “He misses you.”

  Epilogue

  The gym smelled of old sweat and new perfume.

  “I’m so hot. Let’s get this show on the road,” Penny complained.

  Frank yanked his tie loose. “When I was a kid, we didn’t even have eighth grade graduation.”

  “Me either,” Edwin agreed. “It’s not like going to high school is optional.”

  “I can’t tell which one is Olivia.” Lucy squinted at the dais. “The girls all look alike in those white mortarboards and robes. I think she’s the third one from the left.”

  “No,” Anita corrected. “Olivia’s the fourth from the left. See how one shoulder is higher than the other? She always stands crooked like that.”

  “You’re right,” Edwin said. “I tell her she’s going to grow a hump.”

  Finally, the principal began to read the names of the graduates. There were only forty-two eighth graders in High Peaks Middle School, so it didn’t take long to get near the end of the alphabet.

  “Olivia Veech,” the principal said.

  Frank and Penny and Lucy and Edwin and Anita cheered.

  Later, the graduates mingled with their friends and relatives in front of the bleachers. A smiling Olivia spun from one embrace to another. Frank turned to congratulate Rollie Fister’s grandson. When he rejoined Penny, he saw Olivia holding a small wrapped box and Anita walking across the gym floor.

  “Isn’t Anita coming to the party at the inn?”

  Penny shook her head. “Edwin invited her, but she said it’s a long drive back to Glens Falls.”

  Olivia watched her mother pass through the gym door into the dark night. She slipped her hand into Edwin’s. “Let’s go home.”

  THE END

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  Have you read all the books by S.W. Hubbard?

  Frank Bennett Adirondack Mountain Mystery Series

  Take the Bait

  The Lure

  Blood Knot

  Dead Drift

  Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series

  Another Man’s Treasure

  Treasure of Darkness

  This Bitter Treasure

  About the Author

  S.W. Hubbard is the author of the Palmyrton Estate Sale Mysteries, Another Man’s Treasure, Treasure of Darkness, and This Bitter Treasure. She is also is the author of four Police Chief Frank Bennett mystery novels set in the Adirondack Mountains: Take the Bait, The Lure (originally published as Swallow the Hook), Blood Knot, and False Cast, as well as a short story collection featuring Frank Bennett, Dead Drift. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and the anthologies Crimes by Moonlight, The Mystery Box, and Adirondack Mysteries. She lives in Morristown, NJ, where she teaches creative writing to enthusiastic teens and adults, and expository writing to reluctant college freshmen. To contact her or read the first chapter of any of her books, visit: http://www.swhubbard.net.

  Copyright © 2017 S.W. Hubbard

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.