If You Ever Tell

by Carlene Thompson

  “I have one that’s perfect for him.” Teresa pictured the pony she’d chosen for the little boy who was becoming skittish because of Sharon’s constant hovering.

  “I want your most gentle one,” Sharon ordered.

  Carmen frowned in barely concealed annoyance. “Sharon, you act like Teri’s going to put Daniel on a raging stallion.”

  Sharon’s cheeks grew scarlet under her freckles. “Horses can be dangerous, Carmen, or didn’t you know that?”

  “Hey, girls, let’s not have a chick fight here in front of everyone,” Teresa said with artificial ease, trying to cut the sudden flashing hostility between the two women. “Sharon, I have students even younger than Daniel. I know how to train children and so do my employees, Gus and Josh.” She patted Sharon’s hand. “We’ll be extra careful with him. After all, he’s my nephew!”

  Sharon gave Teri a weak smile, said nothing else, took two sips of her drink, and after ten minutes glanced at her watch. “It’s almost eleven,” she announced. “Time for me to go home.”

  “But the party’s just beginning,” Carmen protested.

  “I’ve been gone for hours. I need to check on Daniel. Teri, you and Carmen stay. Don’t let me interrupt your evening.”

  “I think I should be leaving, too,” Teresa said in support of her sister-in-law, whose tension she saw growing. Sharon really just wanted to escape Carmen’s company. “I have to get up early in the morning.”

  “Me, too.” Carmen was suddenly taking a last sip of her drink and reaching for her purse. “None of us need to be driving after more than two drinks anyway.”

  Out in the parking lot, Sharon rushed for her car, but Carmen lingered near Teri’s. “I hope I didn’t offend you tonight, teasing you about Mac.”

  Carmen’s tendency to tease about sensitive matters often irritated Teresa, but she always reminded herself what a good friend the woman had been to her mother. Carmen had befriended the lonely Marielle when Teri was thirteen and she’d been able to lift Marielle’s spirits like no one else could. After the murders, Carmen had taken in Teri and offered her reassurance and safe haven during that nightmare time, fending off reporters like a pit bull. Carmen had comforted her and never said, “I told you so,” after Teri’s breakup with Mac. Carmen still offered Teri emotional support and friendship without trying to act like a mother.

  Suddenly, Teresa hugged Carmen. “You didn’t offend me with your teasing about Mac. I’m used to you.”

  “Well there’s a compliment for you.” Carmen laughed. “I really did want you to see the club, Teri. It turned out beautifully. But I wasn’t trying to make history repeat itself. I can’t forget how you came crying to me when you caught him with that other woman.”

  “I never told anyone except you why I ended our engagement,” Teri said.

  “And I kept the secret, too. So, Mac aside, did you have a good time?”

  “Mac aside, I had a great time except for you digging at Sharon.”

  “Sharon needs a stern talking-to about her absurd overprotectiveness.”

  “She’s the same way about Kent and about her father now that he’s a widower. I think the protectiveness is really a mask for possessiveness.”

  “Goodness, my Teri is a psychologist now!” Carmen laughed. “Well, whatever it is, I chose the wrong time to call her on it, although there’s no good time to criticize Sharon. She doesn’t like criticism.”

  “Who does?”

  “You’re right. Anyway, I’m sorry. I’ll apologize to Sharon if it’ll make you happy.”

  “It will.” Teri smiled in relief. “I’m glad you suggested we come to the club.”

  “I thought a visit was due because you’ve never been here and you did the lion’s share of designing it. I wanted you to see the finished product. Sure you’re all right to drive?”

  “My drinks were mostly cherries, so I think there’s very little alcohol in my system.”

  Carmen laughed. “You and sweets. I’ll never know how you can eat so many of them and stay so thin. You have your mother’s slender frame. And her beauty. Except for your dark eyes, you look so much like Marielle, it’s almost uncanny.” Sadness shone in Carmen’s gaze for a moment. Then she smiled and began walking away, throwing a cheerful, “Happy birthday, kiddo,” over her shoulder.

  The club had been busy and the parking lot was still almost full. Teresa glanced at all the cars, thinking that most of them wouldn’t be leaving for another hour, then opened the door of her white Buick Lucerne. As soon as the interior lights came on, she saw papers lying on the driver’s seat. She wondered if Mac had left a note in her car until she saw that the top sheet was a newspaper clipping dating from eight years ago. The headline seemed to scream at her:

  OWNER OF FARR COAL COMPANY AND WIFE MURDERED

  “Oh no,” Teresa murmured, a chill running over her in spite of the warmth of the June night. She picked up the papers and glanced at the article, a few phrases jumping out at her about Hugh’s and Wendy’s deaths by stabbing and the injury of little Celeste, who according to the newspaper was in stable condition in spite of a knife wound to her abdomen. The paper also emphasized that Teresa had sustained only “a superficial wound to the left arm,” a fact that had fueled some people’s belief that Teresa had wielded the knife the night of the murders.

  Feeling slightly dizzy, Teri let the newspaper clipping flutter to the asphalt. Then she read the computer-printed note:

  Dear Teresa,

  Roscoe Lee Byrnes meets his maker this week. Will you finally feel safe? I don’t think so now that Celeste Warner is talking again. Or have you been too busy celebrating your birthday to hear the latest breaking news? It seems she remembers the night you murdered her mother and tried to kill her too. She’s scared now—not telling everything—but she will soon and then your nightmare will really begin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  TERESA AWAKENED HEAVY EYED and sluggish. She wondered what was wrong. She’d only had two drinks at Club Rendezvous last night and been in bed before midnight. Then the memory of the parking lot flooded back to her. Finding the newspaper clipping and the note. No wonder she hadn’t slept well, Teresa thought.

  She groaned and rolled onto her side. At the bottom of the bed slept her dog, Sierra, a fifty-pound mixed breed with short, gleaming chocolate brown hair, white hind paws, and pointed ears a bit too large for her delicate face. Teri smiled as she looked at the dog deep in sleep, untroubled by old tragedies and frightening new threats.

  Teresa’s gaze slowly drifted away from the peaceful dog to the rest of her bedroom. Sunlight poured through the window facing east, highlighting her pale buttercup walls and shining on the simple engraved pine furniture she’d placed throughout the large bedroom. Some people told her the room looked almost Spartan—she needed more than a dresser, a nightstand, a cedar chest, and an overstuffed chair covered in ivory linen striped with moss green.

  Teresa loved the room, though. The unfussy furnishings did not detract from the fireplace across from her bed with its creamy tiles hand-painted with green ferns and a few small butterflies and hummingbirds. She especially liked the décor so radically different from the garish pink and cerise room in which her father and Wendy had been murdered, a room that still appeared in Teri’s recurring nightmare.

  She’d had it last night—the same nightmare she’d had a hundred times of walking into her father’s darkened room, of slowly approaching Wendy’s side of the bed and stepping on soaking-wet carpet, of turning on the light and seeing her father’s and Wendy’s dead bodies, their many stab wounds oozing blood. Her screams. That’s where the nightmare mercifully ended. For years she’d become accustomed to having the nightmare at least once a week. Then, when she was twenty-two, it had abruptly stopped. She was disheartened by its return.

  Teresa realized the note had prompted the dream. Almost against her will, she rolled over, opened the drawer of her bedside table, and withdrew the half page of typing paper le
ft in her car last night. The words seemed to jump out at her in the bright morning light:

  Dear Teresa,

  Roscoe Lee Byrnes meets his maker this week. Will you finally feel safe?…

  Teri laid down the paper and stared across the room into the fireplace. Roscoe Lee Byrnes. The serial killer the police had apprehended attempting to escape a grisly crime scene in Pennsylvania just two weeks after the Farr murders. The man scheduled for lethal injection in a few days who had confessed to killing Hugh and Wendy Farr and twenty other people. Teresa thought of how easily Byrnes could have added two more victims to his list if he’d murdered her and Celeste.

  But he couldn’t possibly have been trying to kill me, Teresa admitted reluctantly to herself as she had hundreds of times. That awful night, amid all the carnage he’d wrought, why had he been content just to cut her arm? Teresa glanced down at the narrow nine-inch scar stretching from her bicep almost to her wrist. The wound had been so shallow the scar now was barely visible. Her attacker’s action didn’t make sense, and for eight years Teresa had obsessed over why her life had been spared when the other people in the household had been so viciously torn and gashed.

  After Byrnes’s confession, local police and the FBI decided Teresa’s screaming had saved her life that night. The neighbors said that through their open bedroom windows facing the Farr home, they had heard her wild shrieks. The husband had immediately turned on a bright bedside light and called 911. Meanwhile their Great Dane, spending the night on the porch, had begun howling and set off every other dog near the Farr house.

  From the Farr bedroom, the police reasoned, Byrnes must have seen the neighbor’s glaring bedside light and guessed someone was reaching for a phone. He had also heard the strident howls of at least five dogs and he’d been frantic to escape the house. He’d probably thought police would answer alarm calls quicker or that maybe they even made routine passes around the homes of the affluent. That was the answer, most of them decided. Byrnes had been too intent on flight to waste time killing Teresa. He’d merely slashed at this unexpected impediment between him and escape.

  Still, the Farr house security alarm hadn’t gone off and none of the locks had been picked. That fact the police couldn’t understand until Teresa told them that her father had been “upset” with her when she’d come in late. He’d lectured her, sent her to bed, and almost immediately she’d heard his heavy footsteps climbing the stairs. He often forgot to turn on the alarm when he was distracted, she’d told them, and had no qualms about giving the police this expurgated version of the scene that night because her conscience was clear when it came to Hugh’s death. Actually, she’d been terrified that if the police knew about the violence between her and Hugh that day, both before and after her night excursion, she’d be an even more likely murder suspect.

  After his apprehension in a small Pennsylvania town, police had presented a scenario of the Farr murders to Byrnes, one in which he’d perhaps seen a pretty girl, followed her home, waited a couple of hours, decided to go in after her and whomever else he could find, and luckily discovered the front door unlocked. They went on to add that because of all the noise and the lights next door, he’d been in such a hurry to escape, he hadn’t taken time to kill a teenage girl who might put up a struggle.

  Later the cops had allowed Teresa to see a video of them presenting Byrnes with their theory of the crime, then waiting anxiously for his reaction. Byrnes had stared expressionlessly at them for almost a full minute with his pale, yellow-tinged blue eyes, then nodded his unusually big head with its sparse hair, fat red cheeks, and receding chin. Finally, he’d said, “Yeah, that’s what happened,” in the rumbling monotone that was his voice. The police had been satisfied. Teresa hadn’t. They had not seen the killer calmly descend the stairs, open the front door, and close it behind him. To her, that escape didn’t seem to be one of a man frantic with fear, frenziedly trying to flee.

  She had never described the killer’s unhurried “getaway” to anyone, though, because too many people already believed her unstable mother had killed her callous ex-husband and his new, pregnant wife. Nor had Teresa mentioned the whiff of sandalwood she’d caught that night when the killer bumped against her. She’d read that sandalwood was used in both women’s and men’s colognes, but she was certain someone would mention that Marielle Farr always wore the scent of sandalwood, pointing toward her as the possible murderer.

  Teresa sighed and muttered in frustration, “It was eight years and two months ago. Enough of the tragic replay.”

  She climbed out of bed, managing not to disturb a snoring Sierra. Teresa went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her complexion was paler than usual and she had dark shadows beneath her eyes. “You have one birthday and you look ten years older,” she told her reflection, but she knew she didn’t look tired because she was officially a year older than the day before yesterday. She’d had a bad night because of the chilling note left on her car, a night torn with nightmares of the murders, and a heartbreaking dream about her lost mother.

  Teresa turned on the radio she kept in the bathroom. Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again” came on, an upbeat song that for once did nothing for Teri’s downbeat mood. She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, Marielle. After a breakdown and stint in a psychiatric clinic precipitated by the divorce, Marielle had gone to stay with her Aunt Beulah who lived just north of town. Doctors had pronounced Marielle unfit to care for a teenage girl, causing her to lose not only Hugh but also custody of Teresa.

  Marielle’s aunt told police that on the day of the Farr deaths Marielle had seemed calm, even somewhat cheerful, and said she was going for an afternoon walk on her favorite path in the woods. Encouraged by her improved mood and unusual energy, Beulah claimed that for the first time since Marielle’s release from the hospital, she had let the younger woman go out of the house alone.

  Teresa’s eyes filled with tears. Her beautiful, gentle mother had never returned to Beulah’s house. There had been a massive police search for Marielle, especially because of the murders, but the investigation had revealed absolutely nothing. As far as Teresa knew, no one had seen or heard from her mother for eight years. Marielle Farr simply seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth the beautiful day in April that had ended so grotesquely for Hugh, Wendy, and Celeste.

  Teri impatiently wiped at her tears, then splashed cold water on her face, hoping she could whisk herself away from the ghastly trip down memory lane, but it didn’t work. As she briskly tried to rub some color into her wet skin with a towel, she remembered the day after the murders when her bewilderment over her mother’s disappearance, along with her horror over the brutal killings, was suddenly magnified when she realized the police thought that if Marielle hadn’t stabbed Hugh and Wendy to death, then Teresa had. Her father and stepmother, both of whom everyone knew Teresa hated, had been murdered. Celeste, whom people mistakenly assumed Teresa also hated, had been stabbed in the abdomen. Teresa, however, had suffered only a shallow cut on the arm.

  She hadn’t been arrested, but not because local law enforcement believed her innocent. She’d remained free simply because of lack of evidence—the police never found the murder weapon, which according to the medical examiner was a long, razor-sharp serrated knife—and while Teresa’s nightgown bore some blood from the victims, the gown would have been soaked if she’d violently stabbed three people. No other bloody clothes had been found in the house, nor had blood been found in the drains as it would have been if Teresa had stripped naked to stab her victims, showered, then put on a nightgown merely smeared with blood.

  In addition, Teresa had also agreed to take a lie detector test, which she had passed. Some local students of crime remained unconvinced, though, ominously pointing out that “certain kinds” of people were capable of beating the machine. That, they added triumphantly, was why lie detector results were not allowed as evidence in court.

  Most people, though, didn’t car
e to look at evidence appearing to rule out Teresa. They seemed to find the idea of a seventeen-year-old girl going on a killing spree much more entertaining. During the next two weeks, the looks of alarm and disgust Teresa saw in people’s eyes, and the long, intense police interrogations she’d undergone had frightened her nearly senseless. Even eight years later, Teresa remembered back then only four people in the world loudly proclaiming her innocence—her brother, Kent; her mother’s best friend, Carmen; the housekeeper, Emma MacKenzie; and especially Emma’s son, Mac.

  Sunlight poured into the bathroom on this glorious first day of July, but Teresa shivered as if a chilly breeze were washing over her when she remembered that unbelievable, terrifying time—a time when she’d kept hoping she was having a nightmare from which any minute she would awaken. “But I didn’t wake up,” she murmured to herself as she stripped off her nightgown and turned on the shower, making the water hotter than usual. She had spent seemingly endless days and nights in a haze of disbelief, knowing that almost everyone in town thought she’d killed two people and critically wounded a child.

  Teresa was shaking as she stepped into the shower stall, letting the water stream over her hair, her face, and down her body that actually bore chill bumps. Teri hadn’t experienced a bout of the old, recurring panic for a long time, but the note had brought it rushing back. Once again she felt as if she were a seventeen-year-old girl with a murdered father, a lost mother, and a town half-full of people who thought she was a deranged killer, a town half-full of people who felt they had to be sure to lock their doors at night because Teresa Farr was on the loose. It had seemed ludicrous, and at times she’d even laughed at the idea. Then she would realize that people really were afraid of her, and she’d choked on her laughter and burst into tears—tears of grief, disbelief, and overwhelming fear.