She shook her head again. “No,” she whispered, “I wasn’t there that night.”
“And Sean? Did Bettina kill Sean?”
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She hesitated.
“Martha?” I whispered, trying to keep a check on the frantic urgency I could feel mounting inside me.
But she shook her head again. “No, Bettina didn’t do it.”
“So who did? Do you know?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Martha?”
“Yes.Yes, I know.”
“So who was it?”
“I killed him.” She mouthed the words at me.
“It was an accident,” she said, raising her voice to an alarm-ingly high level when she saw the expression of shock on my face.
She clutched me and thrust her face in front of mine to make me pay attention to her words. She manipulated me like a puppet because I was still tied up. “And that’s why I’m here,” she hissed at me. “She called me and said she’d tell the police I killed Sean unless I came to London to be with her. She said she needed me.”
“You’d better tell me everything, Martha,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”
She was silent for a few seconds then she began to whisper urgently, “Here’s what happened.When Bettina suddenly appeared in the Hamptons in August and started going around asking questions about Shotgun, I contacted Angie and she went ballistic! For the first time since she’d asked me to keep an eye out for Sean, she said she wanted to get in touch with him herself.”
“So you set it up?”
“I gave her his e-mail address and she took it from there.Then she called me and said she was coming over. She said Sean had mentioned Shotgun had given him one of his grandfather’s Purdeys and I had to get hold of it.”
“Did Sean know you knew his mother?”
“Of course not. I had to engineer a conversation with him
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about shooting the next time I met him on the beach and he said he’d bring the Purdey to show me. I think he was a little frightened of it, to be honest, but he was proud enough of it to want me to see it and admire it. He came looking for me with it before he went to New York the night before he died.”
M saw Sean w/shotgun in woods. I remembered Bettina’s notes.
Dumpster must have seen him.
“I had arranged to meet him in the woods. We often used Dumpster’s hunting blind as a meeting place. But I didn’t see him and I found the gun in the blind. I caught a glimpse of Dumpster’s truck in the woods and I was worried that he’d seen me take the gun,” said Martha. “Of course it was covered with Shotgun’s prints.Then Angie flew to New York and came out to hide in my trailers.”
“Before Sean was killed?”
Martha nodded. “The day before. Sean told me he was going to the city and that he would be back the following night. He said he had arranged for Bettina to meet with Shotgun at the house at seven thirty and then come and meet him, Sean, off the jitney at around eight forty.
“I was in Sag Harbor and Shelter Island that Friday, just as I told you, and Angie drove over there in a rented car and picked me up about six thirty.We were back in the Mallaby woods about seven fifteen. It was just getting dark.We left the car quite a long way away and found a place to wait in the woods. Angie had learned to shoot when she lived on the Yorkshire moors. She had Sean’s Purdey that I had passed on to her and she made us both wear gloves. She wanted me to help her carry Bettina’s body.
Once she’d shot her, she planned to take her out into the middle of the bay in my boat and dump her in the water.”
I wondered if Martha realized she was revealing herself to be an accomplice in Bettina’s murder. She was on her knees beside
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me with a wide-eyed look on her face that belied the horrific details coming out of her mouth.
“But seven thirty came and Bettina never arrived,” said Martha. “I wanted to leave but Angie said that even though the meeting with Shotgun clearly wasn’t happening, there was still a chance that Bettina would pick up Sean from the bus and drop him at the house—and we could get her on the way out.
“It was pitch-black, just starting to rain, and nearly nine o’clock when we glimpsed a figure coming through the woods—
on foot. It was very sudden and we weren’t prepared. I had assumed we’d have the headlights of the car to give us warning and that then there’d be a few minutes while she dropped Sean off. I suppose we never stopped to wonder why Bettina was on foot.
Angie had stood the Purdey up against a tree and I reached for it, intending to hand it to her. I had never shot anything in my life.
The shadow was upon us so fast and I panicked. The gun was loaded. Somehow I lifted it up and it went off.”
She looked at me expectantly. “See? That’s how it happened that Friday.”
“It was Sean?”
“The figure fell instantly and we waited to see if it would stir.
When it didn’t we rushed over and discovered what I’d done.”
She was terrifyingly calm, I noticed, as if she had already divorced herself from the proceedings in her mind.
“It was my idea to use one of my wedding dresses as a shroud,”
she whispered proudly. “We carried him down to the beach and I made Angie help me drag him into the shallows and I opened his shirt and washed the blood from the hole in his chest where he’d been blasted by the shotgun. I stuffed an old cloth into the wound to stop the blood seeping out.Then I rowed out into the bay and we tossed his body into the water. Angie wanted to say a prayer but there wasn’t time.” Martha was quite matter-of-fact now. “I
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insisted she drive me all the way back to Shelter Island so I could establish an alibi. My story of having been on Shelter Island would have to stick. Angie dropped me off and I went around asking for a ride home from Shelter Island so the guy who drove me all the way back would remember me. I didn’t get back to the trailers till almost midnight.”
“And the next day, Saturday, Angie killed Bettina.”
“When I left my trailers on that Saturday, she told me she was only going to go out to get rid of the Purdey. She said she was going to bury it in the sand just along the beach near Shotgun’s property.When she’d done so, she said, she saw movement in the woods. So she started back the way she’d come, but using the woods as cover, and she came across a truck. She found this bow and arrow in it and then this figure appeared out of nowhere. It was almost a repetition of the night before. It was a woman and she came toward Angie and started waving at her as if she knew her. It was Bettina and she’d recognized Angie but then as she grew closer she saw Angie had a bow and arrow pointed right at her so she turned and ran. And Angie shot her in the back.”
“So where were you, Martha?”
“You know where I was,” said Martha, looking at me with reproach. “You saw me, remember? Earlier, at your mother’s ceremony on the beach. And then I had a date with Louis.”
She sounded like a lovesick teenager whenever she mentioned his name and suddenly I saw a way to get through to her.
“Martha, you have to get out of here and go back to Louis. I told you, he came to find you.”
There was an element of truth in what I said. He had gone looking for her but before she could ever be reunited with him, she’d have to talk her way out of her role in two gruesome murders. But I had to bank on her apparent failure to realize this.
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“But how can I get out of here?” she said. “Angie would never let me leave.”
“That’s right,” I said patiently, “that’s absolutely right. Martha, you know Angie won’t let you out of here alive.”
“But she asked me to come here.”
“To kill you,” I said brutally. “I’m sure of it.Which is why you have to call for help—you have to find someone to get you out of here, away from Angie.”
“But I don’t know anyone in London anymore.”
“Call the police,” I said simply. “Call them and tell them where you are and ask them to tell Det. Supt. Max Austin of New Scotland Yard that you’re here with me and he needs to come get us.
Okay? Can you repeat that back to me?”
I made her say it several times, repeating his name over and over again. I persuaded her to at least untie my feet and when she let herself out of the room and I heard her tiptoeing down the stairs, I could only pray. Pray that she would make the call and that they would hear the urgency in her voice and pass the message on to Max.
As it began to get light I heard sounds coming from Angie’s room, footsteps crossing the landing, and then the door was unlocked.
“How did you get the scarf off?” she said immediately. “And who untied your feet?”
She locked me in again and I rolled over to press my ear to the floorboards. I heard the sound of her voice raised in anger downstairs and Martha wailing in response. Then there were footsteps thundering up the stairs and Angie was crying out: “I’m going to get the gun.”
I squeezed my eyes tight shut and waited for the inevitable.
But the next voice I heard, coming from downstairs, was Martha’s.
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“I’m in here. HERE!” I heard her screaming and then the sound of footsteps on the cobbles. I rushed to the window and looking down through the glass-roofed passage I saw Max shaking the steel gate.
“Smash the window!” he yelled to Martha and I heard the sound of shattering glass.
I could hear Angie on the landing and through the door I made out the unmistakable click of the gun being broken open and the shells being loaded into the chamber.
The gun had not been loaded. I need never have been threatened by it and now it was too late.
“Put down the gun. Do not move,” I heard Max’s voice say.
Even though I couldn’t see anything through the door the scene was brutally vivid to me as if I were right there with them.
Max was at the bottom of the stairs and Angie was on the landing at the top of the stairs with a loaded shotgun.
There was an eerie calm for about twenty seconds as I pressed my head against the door. Then I recoiled violently at the sound of the gun going off in my ear.
C
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T HE FOLLOWING SEPTEMBER, ALMOST A YEAR AFTER
Sean Marriott’s body, swathed in its saturated finery, was found washed up at the water’s edge, Franny and Rufus’s wedding took place farther up the beach at Lazy Point.
They were married in fits and starts due to the fact that at the last moment Franny had insisted that Eliza be her flower girl.
Eliza was barely eighteen months and she toddled after them, clutching her little posy of daisies, for all of fifteen seconds before veering off in search of distraction and falling over in the sand. At which point the preacher came to an abrupt halt as Franny abandoned the ceremonies and rushed after her.
When the service was interrupted for the third time, my mother stepped forward and intercepted Eliza on her way down to paddle in the water. Eliza’s mouth puckered in automatic reflex but then she looked up at my mother and wisely thought better of it, allowing herself to be carried back up the beach to sit on my mother’s lap. Not that I was remotely surprised. My mother had spent the last three months stage-managing every minute detail of Franny’s big day—from the daisy chain around Eliza’s neck to the gold silk Indian-style wedding dress with its wraparound skirt and cropped top that exposed the diamond in Franny’s navel, a wedding gift from Rufus. She wasn’t about to have it ruined by the antics of a wayward toddler.
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The preacher stood with his back to the water, Franny and Rufus before him, and the rest of us perched on spindly gold chairs rooted in the sand. Behind him, parked in the bay, was Rufus’s truck bedecked with flowers, a reminder of the day when Rufus had proposed and another indication of Franny’s newfound romanticism.
It was a gorgeous day with a cloudless royal blue sky above us, and the sound of the water lapping gently only added to the serenity of the moment.Yet I couldn’t relax.
Throughout the ceremony I was miserably aware that we were but a stone’s throw from the site of Martha’s trailers. If I turned my head slightly I could make out their silhouette in my peripheral vision. Martha wasn’t there, of course. She was in jail somewhere awaiting her fate. I had heard she had been promised some kind of deal in exchange for a confession to being responsible for Sean’s death and for testifying about Angie’s orchestra-tion of what had happened those fateful nights a year ago. I wondered what had happened to her wedding dresses. In my head I began to hear them rustling and whispering, taunting poor Franny while she was blissfully united with Rufus at the shoreline.When I found myself wondering if the dresses had inherited Martha’s ability to jinx weddings I rapped myself mentally over the knuckles.
Apparently I did not do it silently, for my father, sitting between my mother and me, glanced quickly at me. He had accompanied me when I had returned to Long Island almost a year ago. He claimed it would be a surprise for my mother but when I witnessed their reunion my mother behaved as if she had been expecting him for some time.
I had been so wrapped up in writing Shotgun’s book for the past few months that I had not really monitored my parents’ tentative reestablishment of their marriage. But I had heard from
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my father that Vanessa had marched him straight into couples therapy.
“What happened?” I asked him, intrigued.
“What do you think?” He smiled. “She talked nonstop and neither I nor the counselor could get a word in edgeways. But it worked, because after I don’t know how many sessions of listening to herself, she decided that we should give it another go.”
I was pleased, of course, but I would never stop mourning the loss of the Phillionaire, and thinking that he might have been the one person who could have penetrated my mother’s emotional defenses once and for all. Still, as my father pointed out rather wistfully, “What is marriage if not a friendship? And that’s the thing about your mother and me, Lee. We’ve been friends for a long time.Whatever else happens, it makes sense for us to renew that friendship.”
Scott stood up for Rufus, as they say. I figured Rufus had to ask him. I watched as he lurched forward with the ring, body rigid, shoulders hunched, his demeanor more fitting for a funeral than a wedding. There would always be a certain amount of tension between the two brothers in regard to Franny and Eliza but there were two things that had gone a long way to smoothing the relationship. Scott had moved his practice into Manhattan and himself into the Fifth Avenue apartment. And no one could be impervious to Rufus’s good-natured charm forever. Scott was still Eliza’s father but once he moved away, it became clear that he had no real interest in adopting that role in her life. He seemed happy to pass that responsibility on to Rufus, who was only too glad to step up to the plate. Franny was aware that the problem of Scott hadn’t gone away entirely—how could it? He was Rufus’s brother—but for the time being they had arrived at an acceptable compromise. Until, I imagined, Eliza started asking who her father was.
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As for Dumpster, who had just given Franny away, leading her along the beach to the tip of Lazy Point to hand her to Rufus, I just didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t just a case of M saw something. As it turned out, M had seen everything.
What had come to light in the wake of the investigation was that on the night Sean was
killed, Dumpster had been driving through the woods around seven o’clock on his way to put up Shotgun’s shelves at Mallaby, and had seen Angie and Martha go past in the car. He had caught only a glimpse of Angie but it had been enough to start him wondering where he’d seen the face before.When his memory was sufficiently jogged to send him up to Sean’s room to take another look at the picture he’d seen on the inside of the closet, he realized it was Angie. And then he called Bettina and suggested a meeting at the beach. As he’d told me at the cabin when he’d come looking for Franny just before the Phillionaire’s funeral on the beach, he had lured her to the beach with the tantalizing bit of information that he had just seen something he knew would interest her. He planned to tell her about Angie’s arrival and offer future snippets in return for her silence about his mother.
But he never got to speak to her. Instead he witnessed her murder.
He had intended to go hunting that night but the weather was so bad he had abandoned the idea pretty early on in the evening.
He had tried to call Bettina to postpone the meeting at the beach but had not been able to reach her because her cell was turned off. So he had parked his truck—with his bow and arrow inside—
and set off through the woods to meet her as planned.
Instead he saw her shot with an arrow in the back by Angie. It did not occur to him until he returned to his truck, after racing through the squelch of the rain-soaked leaves, that his bow and
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arrow were missing and they had been used as the murder weapon.
I learned all this from Shotgun while we were working on his book and the first question I asked Shotgun was why Dumpster did not report what he saw.
And this was when I received the biggest shock.
“He did,” said Shotgun. “He came to the house in the middle of the night and he told me.”
I gasped. “He told you what?”
“That he had seen Angie kill Bettina and throw the bow and arrow in the pit. Then he followed her back to Martha Farrell’s trailers and saw her bury the quiver and let herself into one of the trailers.”
“What did you do?”
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