If You Ever Tell

by Carlene Thompson

  Kent looked up at Teresa from his position in the armchair, his tired gaze full of sympathy and trust. “I know you didn’t go to Celeste’s room to stab her. It had to be Byrnes, but he didn’t find her and then there was all that ruckus and he thought he’d better get out of there in a hurry, just like the FBI said. God, Teri, do you think I believe you would have stabbed that little girl? Or Dad and Wendy, for that matter.”

  Teresa took a deep breath. “You didn’t believe it, but the police did.”

  “Well, I’m not the police.” Kent leaned forward and gently took her hand. “Now who’s acting like an enraged little kid?”

  Teresa forced her lips into a weak smile. “You’re right. I’ll try to act like a calm and rational adult.” She took a deep breath. “Okay, what about this chant you said Celeste was repeating? A chant that mentioned me.”

  “Nobody could remember it exactly.” Kent sounded reluctant, as if he’d rather be talking about anything else in the world. “There was something about a clock striking three.”

  The grandfather clock, Teri thought immediately. She remembered the grandfather clock chiming three times when she was going into Hugh and Wendy’s bedroom. “Go on.”

  “Well, also something about death coming for her and something about you. She said it over and over.”

  “It was a rhyme,” Teresa said with certainty. “Even when she was a child, she loved making up rhymes. She did it constantly.”

  “Okay, well that’s all I know, Teri. Honestly. The crowd at Bennigan’s said after she’d begun shouting this chant, or rhyme, or whatever you want to call it, her father rushed her out of the restaurant.”

  “I see.” Teresa was amazed at how composed her voice sounded. She didn’t feel at all composed—she felt shaken and slightly sick. “So Celeste starts talking after eight years, she mentions death and me, and then Roscoe Lee Byrnes decides to tell the world he didn’t kill Hugh and Wendy Farr. What fabulous timing.”

  Kent attempted a nonchalant shrug. “It’s just a coincidence. We have to stop thinking about it.”

  “Stop thinking about it? Is that your answer?” Her brother looked away as Teresa went on relentlessly. “We can’t stop thinking about it! Look, Kent, I don’t want to dredge up all of this any more than you do, but who were the main suspects in the murder of Dad and Wendy? Me and Mom.”

  “Well, Mom’s dead,” Kent said dully.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We just haven’t seen or heard from her for eight years.”

  “No, we haven’t, but that doesn’t mean she’s dead. But because we haven’t seen her for eight years—and, as far as I know, no one around here has—that leaves two other people with a very strong motive for murdering Dad and Wendy. I know you had an alibi for that night, but not everyone was convinced it was true. Have you forgotten you and your friends being questioned, over and over, because a lot of people didn’t believe you were really in Virginia at a party that night?”

  Kent looked up at her, his dark eyes filled with misery. “Dear God, do you think I don’t realize that, Teri? We’re the ones whose mother was dumped like a bag of garbage by our father, and we’re the ones who inherited his estate. Who wouldn’t look at us as prime suspects?”

  “Yes,” Teresa said softly. “But I’m the only one of us who had absolutely no alibi, not even a shaky one. I was the one who’d let everyone know how much I hated Wendy, how much I resented Dad for what he did to Mom, how I hated being forced to live in that house with them. God, I had a big mouth!”

  “You were seventeen and mad as hell.”

  “Yes. I was also the one in the house that night who wasn’t seriously injured. If the police had found one scrap of evidence—the murder weapon, traces of blood in the shower, or blood-soaked clothes—I would have been locked up.” Teresa, deciding to be completely honest, took a deep breath. “And I didn’t tell you earlier, but based on a note I found in my car last night and a fax I received this morning, in spite of Byrnes’s confession eight years ago, I’m also the one somebody has always believed is guilty.”

  2

  J. A. MacKenzie wiped the bar of his empty club, leaned down, looked sideways at the black teak length gleaming with a coat of polyurethane, and smiled when he saw no smears, not even a fingerprint. His waiters and waitresses always cleaned up after the bar closed at night—a service for which they were well recompensed—but Mac was never happy until he’d cleaned Club Rendezvous himself on Sundays. Maybe it was because daylight exposed more spots, crumpled cocktail napkins, and peanut halves embedded in the carpet around the bar. Or maybe it was because his mother had always kept her own house and that of the Farrs immaculate. The “compulsive housecleaner” gene had been passed on to him, he mused ruefully. His twin sisters were satisfied if their apartment looked passable and thrilled if someone actually called it neat.

  Although Mac would never have admitted it, he enjoyed being alone in the club during the day when he could simply stand and gaze at the elegant ivory, black, and azure expanse. It reminded him of all he’d accomplished since his father left Mac’s mother with three children and no words of explanation or apology. It reminded him of his early teens when he’d risen at five o’clock on icy mornings to pedal his old bike on a paper route and later when he’d thought he’d die of heat exhaustion from frantically mowing as many lawns as possible, earning money to help his mother and sisters. It reminded him of those two pretty, intelligent sisters he was able to put through college. He sighed. Mostly, it reminded him of Teresa Farr.

  She was sixteen when he’d first seen her. He was mowing her father’s backyard and singing Billy Idol’s “Sweet Sixteen.” Mac had felt as if someone was watching him and looked up to see a girl with long hair like black satin and ebony eyes in an oval face just a shade lighter than tawny. She wore a tank top and looked at him calmly, her arms resting one over the other on the windowsill. He was almost twenty, but he’d blushed like a kid, let out a strangled laugh, and shouted in a voice that cracked, “Sorry. Got carried away.”

  “I liked it. You’ve got a great voice.”

  To his horror, Mac had felt his blush deepening and wondered why he didn’t just give her a dismissive smile and get back to work. But he couldn’t look away from that face or those eyes that twinkled down at him with a mixture of spontaneity, flirtation, and knowledge beyond her years. “I’m Teresa Farr,” she called. “And you must be the Mac MacKenzie all the girls have a crush on.”

  “Yeah, I’m Mac.” Snappy comeback, he’d thought. He tried again to sound cool and confident but failed, stumbling out an almost shy, “I don’t think all the girls have a crush on me, though.”

  “You’ll just have to take my word for it.” Teresa had tilted her head, her hair falling like a silken veil to her right elbow. “It’s funny that you were singing ‘Sweet Sixteen’ when I was sitting right up here in my room with the window open. Did you know I was here and that I’m sixteen?”

  “No.” That was a lie. At least partly a lie. He hadn’t known she was in her room. But his mother, the housekeeper at this house, had told him last month that the Farrs’ “sweet, shy little girl” was just turning sixteen and her mother, Marielle, was throwing a surprise party for her. Sweet and shy? Mac thought, feeling like laughing. Mothers could be easily fooled. “I mean I didn’t know you were in your room. I didn’t know where your room was. I didn’t even think anything about where you were or what you were doing. I was busy—”

  “Singing.”

  “Yeah. I mean no. Mowing grass. I wasn’t slacking off.” He’d wiped sweat off his forehead, decided the motion looked as if he were trying to indicate how hard he’d been working. “Really hot out here today. Humid. I don’t mind heat, but humidity just kills me. Well, it doesn’t make the job impossible, just harder. Not that it’s too hard for me to do well.” He’d paused as she smiled languidly, seeming to enjoy his clumsiness at witty repartee. “Did you know you have a lot of crabgrass in the backyard
?” he’d ended miserably.

  “No, I didn’t. Should we do something about it?”

  “There’s stuff you can sprinkle on the ground that doesn’t kill the regular grass, just the crabgrass. That should be done in early spring before the crabgrass germinates and again in midsummer.” Mac had known he was talking too much. “I’d better get back to work,” he’d said abruptly, wishing he could stop staring at this jailbait vixen leaning out the window, but he couldn’t.

  “Will you sing ‘Sweet Sixteen’ some more? Some of my friends are really into rap, but that’s not for me. I like a lot of the older songs, even some from the sixties! I love it when Billy says he’d ‘do anything’ for his sweet sixteen-year-old girl.” She’d grinned, flipped her hair, winked at him, then called, “Oops, I hear my father coming up the stairs! I have to go now, but I’ll see you again, Mac MacKenzie.”

  She’d darted away from the window and left him standing, mower running, mouth slightly open, sweat pouring, heart beating fast. Then Hugh Farr’s wide face appeared at the window, glowering, and Mac managed a cheerful wave, then had begun mowing with a vengeance as he tried to wipe the song “Sweet Sixteen” out of his mind.

  Later that evening he’d laughed at himself. He must have been suffering some kind of heatstroke to have such a powerful reaction to a silly flirty little sixteen-year-old girl, he’d mused. If he saw her again, he probably wouldn’t even give her a second look.

  But over the next few years, he had seen her repeatedly and she always had the same effect on him—intense attraction and discomfort because she was too young for him. Still, Mac had never gotten tired of looking at her. Or talking to her. And later of kissing her and planning a life with her.

  “And you are a sentimental dope wasting time thinking about the past, because she made it perfectly clear she doesn’t want to have anything to do with you anymore,” Mac told himself aloud in the empty club. “And who could blame her? I was young and stupid and I have no one except myself to blame for blowing my chance with Teri Farr a long time ago.”

  Half to take his mind off Teresa, half to fight off an impending wave of sadness for “the good old days,” Mac snapped on the twenty-seven-inch-screen television on a shelf at the end of the bar. A lot of people told him he should get one of those sixty-two-inch high-definition televisions, but Mac always told them he didn’t want to turn Club Rendezvous into a sports bar. At night, he wouldn’t even allow his employees to turn on what they considered the pitifully dilapidated small television set on the shelf. Now a perky blond announcer whose smile looked strained repeated the news for what was probably the tenth time that morning.

  Mac was on his way to retrieve a pale blue matchbook lying under a table on the ivory carpet when the name “Roscoe Lee Byrnes” pierced his preoccupation like a needle popping a balloon. He jerked upward, banging his head on the underside of the table, and swore loudly. Then, rubbing at the spot on his head that was already beginning to throb, he moved away from the table and stood to listen to the newscaster talking about Byrnes’s execution this week. Her glossy red-lipped smile of a few moments ago had vanished and her dark blue eyes hardened with the somberness of her current news subject:

  “Roscoe Lee Byrnes, the man convicted of killing twenty-two people over a three-year period, announced last night that in his confession eight years ago when he was apprehended in Pennsylvania, he claimed two victims whom he now says he did not kill—Hubert and Wendy Farr of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Hubert Farr, owner of Farr Coal Company, and his twenty-nine-year-old wife were stabbed to death in their bed. Mrs. Farr’s eight-year-old daughter received a serious knife wound to the abdomen but survived. Mr. Farr’s teenage daughter received only a shallow cut on the arm. Byrnes now says that although he had been in the Point Pleasant area near the time of the murders, he not only had never heard of the Farrs, he did not kill them.”

  Mac’s mouth opened slightly in shock and he moved closer to the television although he could hear perfectly from where he stood. Nevertheless, he turned up the volume, then stood back and stared unflinchingly as the broad face of Roscoe Lee Byrnes appeared in a video clip. His head looked huge, as if it were going to overflow the television screen, and Mac had the feeling that behind those big pale blue eyes lay nothing—no conscience, no soul, nothing.

  Byrnes twisted his beefy hands together as the tape picked up the sound of dry skin rubbing against dry skin. “I know it don’t make no difference whether I kilt twenty-two people or twenty—I’m still gonna die—but I wanna set the record straight.…”

  The man’s rumbling, toneless voice set Mac’s teeth on edge, and although he wouldn’t like to admit it, Byrnes’s hauntingly pale eyes made him feel cold. It was hard to believe this blundering, doughlike creature had killed again and again. It wasn’t hard to believe he didn’t seem to feel a shred of remorse.

  “Them police seemed all excited over those Farrs gettin’ offed, so since I’d been to that town and all, I got a notion to say I did it and impress ever’one. But I was lyin’. I want people to know that before I die. You hear that, God? I’m tellin’ people I lied and I’m sorry. I don’t want credit for killin’ nobody I didn’t kill. But I also wanna say I know one day the person that really did kill them people and stabbed that li’l girl will get what’s comin’ to ’em.”

  The video ended and the blond newscaster reappeared. “Roscoe Lee Byrnes will die by lethal injection in State Correctional Institution–Greene in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, on Friday.” Her broad smile reappeared with startling immediacy. “And in other news…”

  But Mac didn’t hear her. His face grim, he clicked off the television and headed for the door of the club.

  3

  The dark hall seemed endless, stretching in front of her like a tunnel deep beneath a giant mountain. Someone was screaming—shrilly, mechanically, deafeningly. The noise came from all around her. She banged into something—a table—then ricocheted into a warm, shadowy being swathed in something slippery. The Being had no face that she could see, but it had a scent—the scent of sandalwood. The Being held up two cautionary fingers to what must have been its mouth, and in spite of the screaming, Teresa heard a soft, comforting, “Shhhh.” She strained her hearing and there it was again. “Shhhh,” right before she felt pain slice her left arm. She froze, the screaming that she now realized had been her own stopping as she watched the Being drift down the stairs and out the front door. Then she felt blood dripping down her arm. She began to run and cry, “Celeste!

  “Celeste! Celeste!”

  Teresa sat bolt upright in bed as Sierra leaped onto her lap, ears even more erect, a low growl rumbling in her throat. Teri squeezed the shining brown dog, her gaze shooting all around her cheerful bedroom, still full of late-afternoon sunlight. It was a dream, she thought in relief.

  The dog sensed the lessening of tension in Teri’s body. After another scan around the room with her own sharp honey brown gaze, Sierra turned and placed a reassuring lick on Teri’s nose. “Thank you,” Teri said. “I feel much better.” Sierra jumped up and whirled around, front legs flat, back end sticking up, ready for a frolic.

  Teresa rubbed the top of the dog’s head. “Sorry, but I’m not up to romping right now.” She glanced at the bedside clock. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and she’d just awakened from a two-hour nap feeling worse than when, upset, depressed, and tired from lack of sleep the night before, she’d crawled into bed after Kent left. “Let’s go downstairs and get a snack,” she said. “Dog biscuits and ice cream are great for chasing away the dregs of bad dreams.”

  Once downstairs, Teresa put three scoops of ice cream in a bowl and dug out a large beef-basted biscuit from the “treat bin.” Sierra looked hopefully at the bowl, but Teri shook her head. “Sorry, girl. This is double chocolate fudge and dogs aren’t supposed to eat chocolate.” She laid the biscuit on the vinyl floor and felt a twinge of guilt as Sierra looked at it with vast indifference. “I promise to get cherry swirl
at the grocery store tomorrow, if you’ll settle for a biscuit now,” Teri cajoled as the dog slowly bent her head and picked up an unappetizing biscuit.

  They ambled back to the living room, Sierra clenching the biscuit between her teeth as if it were a piece of dry wood, Teri holding the cold bowl of ice cream against her burning forehead. She glanced at the television, then, fearing she might see another announcement about Byrnes claiming he didn’t kill Hugh and Wendy Farr, turned on the stereo instead. She flung herself onto the big, soft recliner that always felt as if it were lovingly holding her.

  This was supposed to be a happy day, Teri thought, the day when little Daniel got to meet the guy she hoped would become his best friend, Caesar. Instead, the afternoon had turned into a nightmare with Sharon and Kent falling into an argument, Daniel sobbing, and, worst of all, Roscoe Lee Byrnes proclaiming his innocence of the Farr murders at the expense of Teri’s and Kent’s peace of mind. By evening, the whole town would be rehashing the murders of Hugh and Wendy and speculating on the guilt or innocence of Teresa, the “wild, rebellious” teenager who’d survived the bloodbath with a cut while everyone else in her house had been slashed to death or seriously stabbed. No wonder I had to go to bed for a while after Kent and Sharon left, Teri thought. I haven’t had a headache like that since—

  Since right after the murders, before Byrnes had been caught and had confessed to killing Hugh and Wendy. Then Teri had a constant headache, an unrelenting upset stomach, and nights filled with gruesome dreams of mutilated bodies and massive pools of blood.

  After Byrnes’s confession eight years earlier, her stomach had calmed and her headaches had lessened. She’d still been plagued with nightmares about finding the bodies of Hugh and Wendy, but they’d always ended with her screaming. She’d never had a dream that took her beyond Hugh and Wendy’s bedroom. She’d never felt herself walk down the hall, bump into the killer, and feel him slash her left arm quickly and deftly, almost absently.