Deadly Gamble

by Linda Lael Miller

  I hadn’t remembered the address. I’d simply driven to it on autopilot.

  We’d lived across the street, Mom, Dad, Geoff and I. Just to look in that direction was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.

  I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t a vacant lot with a weathered For Sale sign sticking up from the dry, yellow weeds.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw a double-wide mobile home.

  I saw blood-spattered walls.

  I saw the little vent holes inside the dryer.

  I shuddered violently, and for a moment, I actually thought I’d have to shove open the car door and throw up in the gutter.

  I drew deep breaths until the images receded, then popped the Volvo into gear and sped away.

  I’d barely covered a block when my cell phone started its merry little song.

  Tucker.

  I scrabbled for it. Peered at the screen.

  Tucker Darroch.

  I jabbed at the talk button. “Hello?”

  “Who is this?” demanded Allison. “You called earlier and, damn it, I want to know who you are.”

  “J-Just a friend of Tucker’s,” I said lamely.

  “A friend,” she echoed, plainly suspicious.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Were you sleeping with him?”

  I nearly took out a row of rural mailboxes, pulling off onto the side of the road, and I guess I took too long to answer, because Allison picked up the verbal ball and sprinted for the goal posts.

  “Tucker’s children and I are in mourning,” she said. “Kindly have the decency to leave us alone.”

  It wasn’t the best time to point out that she’d been the one to initiate this call, not me. Or to ask how she’d gotten hold of Tucker’s personal cell phone.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You weren’t what? Sleeping with my husband?”

  I pressed the end button.

  Then I laid my head on the steering wheel and did some more deep breathing. Just when I was starting to think I wouldn’t faint, my cell made another noise.

  Hope dies hard.

  I checked it.

  Text message.

  I frowned, pressed the appropriate buttons to access it.

  U-WLL-DY.

  I squinted. “You—will—die,” I translated out loud.

  Then I flung the phone down.

  Allison Darroch, overreacting?

  Or someone else?

  I jumped out of the car, walked around it three times in my own personal version of a Chinese fire drill, and got back behind the wheel again. I’d had a purpose in mind—to release the sudden and terrible energy that surged through me—but it hadn’t worked.

  I picked up the phone again. Hit the button for Tucker’s number.

  “Hello?” Allison rasped.

  “I know you’ve had a bad shock,” I told her evenly, “but sending me a threatening text message was over the line.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The hell of it was, I believed her.

  She clicked off before I could speak again.

  I thumbed my way back to the text message. No name, no number.

  Joseph?

  Geoff?

  Heather?

  The list of people who wanted to harass me, if not kill me outright, was getting longer every day.

  I shut the phone off, in desperate need of a technology break, and sat there at the side of the road until I thought I could drive without risking life and limb. Then I drove aimlessly for at least forty-five minutes, up and down the streets of Cactus Bend, trying to remember.

  Trying not to remember.

  Imagine my surprise when I pulled through the gate of the town cemetery.

  I wondered if cars could be haunted, as well as apartments.

  Mine seemed to need an exorcist.

  I got out of it, the map Boomer had given me the day before clenched in one sweaty hand. I consulted the map, and started off on foot for my parents’ graves.

  My subconscious didn’t kick in, as it had with Lillian’s old house and the vacant lot across the street. I took at least three wrong turns before I finally found the plots I was looking for, on a little grassy knoll in the shade of a tall cottonwood tree.

  The monuments were impressive, made of smooth granite and polished to a shine. Clive and Barbara must have sprung for those, I thought. As little as I remembered about Mom and Dad, I knew their budget hadn’t extended to things like cemetery plots and expensive headstones.

  I stood there, a soft breeze drying my perspiration-glazed flesh, and tried to recall the funeral.

  Nothing.

  I took a step closer, read the chiseled letters on the first marker.

  Evelyn Larimer Mayhugh

  died, August 18, 1983

  My throat constricted.

  I closed my eyes.

  Blood, warm and slippery, on my hands, my T-shirt, my shorts, my bare legs. Mama.

  I backed away from the memory mentally, time-warped back to the present moment a dizzying rush that left me swaying on my feet. I forced myself to read the other stone.

  Ronald Charles Mayhugh

  b. June, 1957, d. August, 1983

  Bile scalded the back of my throat.

  “You came back.”

  I almost jumped out of my shoes.

  CHAPTER

  7

  B oomer Harrison, the groundskeeper, stood grinning at me from the path snaking by on my right. Leaning on a shovel handle, he repeated himself.

  “You came back.”

  My right hand had flown, fingers splayed, to my chest, in an unconscious effort to calm my startled heart. I made a fist before lowering said hand to my side. “You scared me,” I told him, and though I spoke calmly, there was a note of accusation in my voice.

  “Sorry,” Boomer retorted, with no trace of regret.

  I took in the shovel and wondered if he’d been digging a fresh grave. Whimsical thinking, I decided. They probably used heavy equipment for that, these days. Boomer was a groundskeeper. He could have been planting flowers or moving a shrub from one place to another or any one of a dozen other things.

  “You’re the daughter, aren’t you?” he inquired companionably. “Ron and Evie’s girl. I should have figured it out in the first place, with you so interested in finding their graves and all. I ain’t never claimed to be the smartest dog hitched to the sled.” Boomer paused. “Yes, sir, you’re the spittin’ image of Evie, with that red hair and those freckles.”

  For an instant, I went inside myself, and the vision I saw was more vividly real than Boomer or the surrounding cemetery, the sky overhead or the earth under my feet. I became two people; one small, kneeling on a cheaply carpeted floor, sick with terror and desperation, one grown, sprawled on my back, strangling on my own blood. There was no physical pain, but I knew I was dying. An image began to form in my mind…

  Someone grabbed my arm. “Miss Sheepshanks? Are you all right?”

  I blinked. Boomer came into sharp focus, and the rest of the environment assembled itself around him in a dizzying, chock-a-block way.

  I was on my knees in the dry, sparse grass, hugging myself hard with both arms, as if I might splinter into fragments if I didn’t hold on tight. Bile seared the back of my throat, and I couldn’t speak for that, and for the knowledge that I’d just been inside my mother’s dying body, with the face of her killer about to do a fade-in on the screen of her mind.

  A mind we’d temporarily shared.

  A horrible thought blindsided me just then, and nearly sent me plunging face down into the rough dirt of that cemetery.

  Was I the killer?

  Was that the real reason Lillian had whisked me away and cobbled together whole new identities, for me and for herself? Because she thought I’d been the one to pull the trigger and wanted to spare me the consequences?

  “Take a swig of this,” Boomer ordered, shoving a water bottle into my hand.
>
  I unscrewed the lid and gulped. Even in that distracted state, it occurred to me to wonder if Boomer and I were swapping germs, but I made a split-second decision to consider the backwash issue later.

  Presently, Boomer helped me to my feet and led me to a nearby bench, in the shade of the same cottonwood overarching my parents’ graves.

  “You stay right here,” Boomer said. “I’m going back to the office to call 911.”

  I caught at his hand, work-roughened and bull-strong, and held on. “No,” I rasped. “I’m—I’m fine. Please…just let me…sit here for a moment….”

  Boomer eyed me with concern, obviously conducting an internal debate, then sat his bulk down beside me on the bench, giving a huffing sigh as he did so. I realized I was still gripping his hand and let go.

  “It must be an awful thing to remember,” he said hoarsely.

  I nodded. Shoved my fingers through my hair. I’d shampooed it that morning, in the guesthouse shower at Casa Larimer, but now it felt sticky and tangled. The malaise seemed to affect me on every level of my being: full-body bedhead, on a universal scale.

  “The problem is,” I croaked, “there’s too much I don’t remember.”

  I fought off a ferocious urge to jump in my car, shoot back up to Phoenix, and slam into Sunset Villa like a one-woman army in invasion mode. The desire to take Lillian by the shoulders and shake the truth out of her was visceral, as well as insane.

  Did I do it? I would scream at her. Did I get hold of a gun somehow, and shoot my parents? Did I?

  I gulped. “Do you think I could have killed them, Boomer?” I couldn’t bring myself to look at him—my gaze was fixed on the pair of headstones marking the final resting places of two people who hadn’t deserved to die—but I felt him stiffen beside me, on the bench.

  “It was Geoff that done it,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Do they?” I mused. I remembered the blood, warm and already congealing. So much blood. I didn’t remember Geoff, or any sense of his presence in that room, on that night.

  “Your brother was found wanderin’ the streets, with blood all over him,” Boomer reasoned quietly. “And he confessed.”

  “Immediately?” I asked.

  Boomer paused, probably to recollect the general shape of the incident and its aftermath. A double murder. It must have been the biggest thing that ever happened in otherwise unremarkable Cactus Bend, Arizona. “As I recall, the police took him in for questioning right away. I reckon a day or two went by before he said anything at all. My brother-in-law was a dispatcher, back then, with the sheriff’s office, so I might have heard it from him. Could have read it in the papers, too. It was all over the news.”

  “Nobody questioned me?”

  Boomer made an executive decision and reached out to pat my hand tentatively. “They tried, but you was in shock. And you was real little, too, don’t forget. What do they call it when somebody just stares into space and won’t say nothin’?”

  “Catatonic,” I supplied dismally. My first conscious memory, after curling up inside the dryer after the murders, was finding myself in that motel room, with Lillian. I remembered the cool, soothing feel of that washcloth on my face, and the worried tenderness in her eyes. I’d been confused, and frightened.

  “You’re safe now, baby,” Lillian had said, though I’d still thought of her as Doris then. Doris, my trusted babysitter. Doris, the woman across the street. My mother’s friend, and mine. “I won’t let anybody hurt you, ever.”

  She’d kept that promise, too. Until Nick came along, anyway—he’d been a different kind of threat. Even then, she’d tried to warn me.

  And now the memories were beginning to force their way to the surface. I didn’t have Lillian to protect me. I didn’t really have anyone but myself.

  I drew a deep breath.

  I would have to do.

  I gathered myself to stand.

  Boomer stopped me. “Your brother,” he said miserably. “He’d done stuff before he killed your mama and daddy. Bad stuff. Don’t you go thinkin’ it was really you that done it. You was just a little kid, no bigger’n a minute.”

  I thought of Chester, lying dead in the deep grass behind the storage shed in back of our double-wide. “What kind of bad stuff?” I asked quietly, dreading the answer.

  “Tearin’ things up, mostly,” Boomer said. “Bullying, too. There was a rumor goin’ around that Evie was fixin’ to put him in some kind of institution for a while. That she thought he was dangerous.” His sigh was telling, and for the first time, I linked up with the obvious. Both my parents would have been around Boomer’s age, if they’d lived. Cactus Bend was a very small town, where everyone knew everyone else. Most likely, Boomer, Evie and Ron had grown up together. “I liked Evie,” he went on sadly. “Never thought she got a fair shake, between your no-account daddy—if you’ll excuse me for sayin’ it—and the way things turned out for her in general. She was the prettiest girl in school. Prom queen. Had a scholarship to ASU, too. But she never got to use it. She just seemed to meet with bad luck wherever she turned.”

  Bad luck, I wondered, or bad choices?

  “Tell me about my dad. I don’t remember much.”

  Boomer sighed again, gazing at the headstones as if he could see Ron and Evie’s ghosts standing in their places. “He wasn’t one for hard work, your daddy. Always lookin’ to make an easy buck. Get on the dole someway. I always said, if Ron Mayhugh had put half as much effort into a job as he did into tryin’ to catch himself a free ride, he’d have been a millionaire five times over.”

  I felt uncomfortable. I wasn’t afraid of hard work, but there was no denying that I had a certain aversion to the 9-to-5 life myself, as Greer so often pointed out. Was I like my dad?

  And, come to think of it, where the hell did Greer come off saying stuff like that, anyway? Since when did selling a business she’d slaved to build and then throwing herself into the role of trophy wife qualify her to criticize my career choices?

  “Go on,” I said on a breath, reconnecting with the present moment, in which Boomer figured prominently.

  “Clive Larimer had a truckin’ company back then. Built it up himself, pretty much from nothin’. He was doing real well. Barbara’s family owned a chain of tire stores, so when he married her, his bank account fattened up even bigger. I always thought he could have helped Evie out a little more than he did, but there was bad blood between her and Barbara right from the first. Evie was proud, too, so that was part of it I guess. Anyways, your daddy worked some for Larimer Trucking, and some at the tire store on Center Street, but he was usually in between. He managed to get sick or hurt, often as he could.”

  I closed my eyes, opened them again. “Mom supported us, then?”

  “Mostly,” Boomer said. “She sure deserved better than she got.” He hoisted himself to his feet. “Best I get back to work,” he told me. “The city ain’t payin’ me to yammer on about the old days. You just sit there, now, till you feel right.”

  If I’d sat there that long, I’d have become part of the landscape.

  Besides, after what I’d seen in my personal flashback, what I’d sensed, and all that Boomer had told me, I wasn’t sure I’d ever “feel right” again.

  I thanked him.

  He’d left his shovel leaning against the trunk of the cottonwood tree. He retrieved it and headed back down the path.

  I stayed put on the bench for fifteen minutes or so, then made my way slowly to my car.

  It was still early, and I knew Jolie would be in her lab, up to her eyeballs in the detritus of death. I wasn’t about to go back to the Larimers’ place and hang out, or do a hairpin turn for Phoenix and upset Lillian with a bunch of questions she couldn’t answer.

  My options were getting narrower by the second.

  As soon as I was behind the wheel of the Volvo, with the doors locked and the motor running, I put a call through to the nursing home. A nurse reported that Lillian was resting comfortabl
y; other than that, there had been no change.

  Next, I drove around Cactus Bend aimlessly, for perhaps half an hour, getting the lay of the land. I cruised past the high school, the tiny library, the office of the weekly newspaper, the tire franchise where my dad had worked, when he couldn’t get out of it.

  The text message I’d received the day before niggled at the back of my mind, but the truth is, I was on overload. There were so many things to think about, I couldn’t really settle on anything too specific. My mind kept swooping from one subject to another, like a bird far from shore, circling a shipwreck, trying to find something to light on that wasn’t about to sink.

  In time, I realized the Volvo and I were both low on fuel.

  It probably means something that I hit the gas pump first, before forcing myself inside the Happy Trails Truck Stop. One of these days, I’ll check out the Damn Fool’s Guide to Freudian Psychology, if there is one.

  I had no memory whatsoever of the diner. Nothing stirred as I walked in, took one of the stools at the counter, reached for a plastic-covered menu. Just the same, I knew my mother had run her feet off waiting tables there, doing her best to make ends meet and always falling just a few dollars short.

  My stomach closed like a fist, but I was light-headed and shaky, which meant I needed to eat, whether I wanted to or not. The Volvo wouldn’t run on empty, and neither would my brain.

  I consulted the listed offerings.

  A waitress in blue jeans and a tank top appeared across the narrow expanse of Formica, with its metal napkin holders, plastic ketchup bottles and salt and pepper shakers. “Help ya?” she asked.

  I looked at her over the top of the menu. She could have been any age between nineteen and thirty. Her skin bore the traces of an old case of acne, and I counted seven piercings in her right ear. Her brown hair was thin, the kind that falls into roller shapes no matter how much you tease and spray. I wondered what her life was like—if there were kids at home, if she worked to support some loser boyfriend or undermotivated husband, the way my mother had.

  I ordered coffee, orange juice and poached eggs on toast.

  Was I like my mother?