If You Ever Tell

by Carlene Thompson

  And in the dream she’d never heard the killer emitting that soft, soothing, “Shhhh,” right next to her ear, a soft, soothing, “Shhhh,” she suddenly realized she’d heard long before that awful night eight years ago.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MAC MACKENZIE COULDN’T MAKE himself stop clenching the steering wheel of his silver Lexus as he always did when he was angry or distressed, and this afternoon he was both. If only he hadn’t turned on the television when he was cleaning the bar… if only, what? Roscoe Lee Byrnes wouldn’t have claimed he didn’t kill the Farrs? Mac and especially Teresa would no longer be objects of suspicion? Perhaps they wouldn’t be subjects of another grueling police investigation? No, the earlier he’d found out about Byrnes, the better. Mac still had time to talk to his mother today.

  Mac pulled up in front of her first-floor apartment and glanced in the rearview mirror at his face, slightly damp from anxiety and the fact that he’d forgotten to turn on the car air conditioner. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, knowing that he must act calm. His mother’s health was fine, but ever since the Farr murders, she’d been excitable, nervous, overreacting to any unexpected bad event, no matter how minor. Byrnes’s announcement could hardly be considered minor. Mac needed to see if she was all right.

  He tapped lightly on Emma’s door and in a moment, the tall, slender woman wearing an apron appeared, every silver hair in place, a soft shade of pink lipstick brightening her pale face. She had a dab of flour on her cheek and she wiped her hands fervidly on a towel. “Hiya, Mom,” Mac said easily. “How’s it going?”

  “Jedediah Abraham!” his mother cried in loud joy.

  Mac cringed. He loved that his mother was always so glad to see him. He hated that she’d named him after his two grandfathers and all of his life had stubbornly insisted on calling him by both names, not just “Mac” as he’d christened himself. “I wasn’t expecting you today, Son.”

  “So I see.” Mac wiped at the flour on her cheek. “You’re busy baking, aren’t you? What’s on the menu today?”

  “An experiment. And come in out of the heat. My goodness, your cheeks are flushed red as roses and your hair is in ringlets. You look like you ran here.”

  “My hair is wavy, Mom, and my cheeks don’t look anything like red roses. You make me sound like a Renaissance maiden.” Mac stepped into the small apartment, tastefully decorated in shades of burgundy and blue. “I’m almost afraid to ask what kind of experiment you’re conducting. Nothing that can blow a hole in the ozone layer, is it?”

  Emma giggled, her facial skin crinkling like thin tissue paper, her green eyes dancing as she took his arm and pushed him toward the most uncomfortable chair in the room. She was remarkably strong for such a thin woman and she kept pushing him until he’d landed with a thud on a cushion hard as a church pew. “Oh, honey, you and your silliness! A hole in the ozone layer. That doesn’t say much for my cooking, does it?” Emma chirped while Mac tried to absorb the shock to his lower back and attempted to arrange himself in a more comfortable position. “I’m working on a new muffin recipe.”

  “Mom, you’re going to corner the market on baked goods in this town,” Mac said. “You know you don’t have to work this hard. You don’t have to work at all.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do? Sit in my robe and watch soap operas all afternoon like Mrs. Beemer down in Apartment Five? Or gossip on the phone half the day like that crabby old woman in Apartment Eight? She must pay people to talk to her, she’s so disagreeable!”

  “No, Mom, I know you aren’t one for having idle hands. I’m just saying you don’t have to work yourself to a frazzle. You’re a lady of leisure, now.”

  “Lady of leisure, my foot,” Emma pronounced as she set a glass of iced tea beside him. “What happens to us if that club of yours goes kaput?”

  “I don’t expect it to go kaput, but if it does fail, I’ll do something else.” Mac gratefully sipped the cold, sweet tea. “I refuse to ever let us be poor again, Mom.”

  “I’ve been poor most of my life and I’ve gotten used to it.” Emma returned to the small kitchen divided from the living room only by a long Formica-topped counter. She picked up a large mixing bowl and began furiously whipping batter. “I never wanted my children to be poor, though, and you were for so long. And I certainly don’t want my girls having to drop out of college! Wouldn’t that be awful with them just months away from being seniors?” She set down the bowl with a clatter. “Oh my, it would be terrible!”

  “Mom, don’t get upset over something that isn’t going to happen.” Mac spoke soothingly. “We’re not poor. The girls are going to finish college, I’m going to keep my club open, you’re going to bake until you wear out that new oven, and we’ll all live happily ever after.” His mother still looked alarmed, lost in her sudden vision of the family abruptly falling into dire poverty. Now certainly wasn’t the time to bring up Byrnes. Mac searched his mind for a topic of possible interest to her and said, “I see you got your hair done yesterday.”

  “My hair?” Emma’s hands lifted from the bowl to her silver curls. “Yes, I did get my hair done. It’s an extravagance—”

  “No, it isn’t. What’s the latest gossip at the beauty shop?”

  “Oh, nothing that would interest you. Anyway, the girl who did my hair was jabbering away about her boyfriend and not paying attention to what she was doing. She fixed my hair completely wrong this time!”

  Mac stifled a smile. His mother’s hair, which had turned pure silver over a course of six months after the disappearance of Marielle Farr, looked exactly as it always did. “I think it looks fine,” Mac said heartily. “So many older women have wispy hair, but yours is as thick as it was in photos I’ve seen of you when you were twenty!”

  Emma blushed and smiled, picking up the bowl and assaulting the batter again. “Do you think so? Your father always loved my hair.” Her smile faded. “He just didn’t love it enough.”

  “You mean he loved drinking and gambling more,” Mac said bitterly. “He didn’t have the brains to know a good woman is worth more than all the alcohol and gambling money in the world.”

  Emma stopped thrashing the muffin batter and looked into his eyes. “Just like Hugh Farr and all of his other women when he had Marielle.” Her voice turned brittle. “I know why you’re here. First Celeste started talking about the murders and saying something about Teresa; then that awful Byrnes person went on TV and said he didn’t kill Hugh and that slut Wendy. Why can’t this horror ever end? Will someone give me an answer?” Emma suddenly began to tremble. “Will you give me an answer?”

  Mac rose and strode to his mother, taking her shaking body into his arms. “That’s why I’m here, Mom. I was afraid you’d heard about Byrnes and you’d be upset.”

  “Well, I did and I am!” Emma’s throat worked as she swallowed sobs. She jerked herself away from Mac, set down her mixing bowl on the kitchen counter again, then turned back to him. “That’s why I started baking. Baking usually calms me down, but not today.” She looked up at him, tears standing in her eyes. “Did you hear what Celeste said? She accused Teresa of the murders. How could she? Teresa loved that child so much!”

  “Last night a few of my customers told me about the scene with Celeste in Bennigan’s. I don’t think Celeste accused Teri of anything. She just mentioned Teri.”

  “She chanted!” Emma sounded as if the girl had thrown fireballs from her bare hands. “She chanted like some kind of demon! I never thought she was any better than her mother, even if she was just a little girl when I knew her. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, you know. Wendy was evil and maybe Celeste has turned out just like her!”

  Mac always worried when his mother started using language that seemed more suited to Puritans than a modern woman. She’d always been highly religious, but her faith had begun leaning toward the extreme ever since Hugh Farr had divorced Marielle, and the Farr home had become a maelstrom of tension and unhappiness.
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  Even then Mac worried about it, although he’d been barely out of his teens and more concerned with plans for his future—plans he hoped would make him a success and better able to care for his family financially—than by the alteration he’d noticed in his mother’s spirituality. She’d no longer talked of her belief in the goodness and gentleness of God. Instead, she’d begun to believe in a God of vengeance, and she no longer urged her children to “turn the other cheek” as she’d done throughout their lives.

  “Mom, Celeste isn’t evil,” Mac said gently. “She endured a horrible ordeal when she was a kid, and as for what she said in Bennigan’s… well, we don’t really know exactly what she said, now do we? Can’t we give her the benefit of the doubt?”

  Emma still trembled in his arms. “I guess so, although like I said—”

  “‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’ Does that mean I’m like my father?”

  Emma looked appalled. “You are nothing like that man!”

  “Then maybe Celeste isn’t anything like Wendy. She’s probably more like her father, Jason, and I’ve heard he’s a pretty nice guy.” Mac forced a smile although his mother’s agitation upset him. “Why don’t you try to calm down for now, Mom? We’ll find out what Celeste really said. And I can’t think anyone would believe Roscoe Byrnes.”

  “They might. They just might, Son.” She whirled away from him and picked up her bowl of muffin batter. “Eight years ago, so many people were determined to believe that Teresa killed her father and his paramour they didn’t want to even consider some stranger did it!” With a shaking hand, Emma grabbed up a dipper, filled it with batter, and dumped too much into a muffin cup, making it overflow onto the spotless counter. “Now look what I’ve done!”

  “I’ll clean it up.”

  “No!” Emma attacked the spilled batter with paper towels. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just can’t stand that all of this has come up again just when Teresa has been making such a good life for herself. She calls me sometimes, you know,” Emma went on. “She even came to see me twice. She told me not to tell you.”

  And she’d acted so innocently surprised at the club last night when he’d told her his mother was well and living in an apartment. So she hadn’t lost interest in the MacKenzie family after all, Mac thought, pleased in spite of Teresa’s secrecy. “So Teri’s been to see you. That’s nice,” he said indifferently.

  Emma tossed away the paper towels and took a deep breath. Relieved, he could almost feel the rush of fear and anger beginning to settle within her. She ran cold water over her hands, dried them endlessly on a dishcloth, then turned and looked at Mac cannily. “You have been smitten with Teresa since she was just a little girl.”

  “God, Mom, you make me sound like a pedophile. She was sixteen when I first met her.”

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Jedediah Abraham! Teresa was too young for you even if she was sixteen.”

  “I know it. I knew it then. I didn’t start seeing her until she was seventeen and then we just went for walks and talked. She seemed older than seventeen.”

  “And you fell in love with her. I knew it and Hugh Farr knew it, too.”

  “Yes, he knew and tried to keep us apart, but Teri would always sneak out to see me. Hugh thought we were… well, doing things we shouldn’t—but as I said, we mostly just talked. We’d get Cokes or ice-cream cones and go sit in that little park about a block away from her house. After her mother was sent to the mental institution, then to her aunt Beulah’s, and Hugh got the restraining order to keep Marielle away from Teri, she said I was the only one she could talk to who really understood her.

  “She cried a lot about her mother and said as soon as she was eighteen she was leaving the Farr house and ‘rescuing’ her mother. Teri didn’t like Marielle’s aunt Beulah any more than she liked her father.” A wave of sadness crossed over Mac’s face. “But Teri never got the chance to rescue her mother. She didn’t even get a chance to see her mother alone before Marielle disappeared.”

  Emma immediately began slopping batter into the muffin cups. Mac knew her nervousness was returning. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, dear,” she said with sweet vagueness.

  “I know you. Something I just said upset you.” Emma slopped more batter in the direction of the pan. “You know you can’t keep a secret from me.”

  Emma’s head whipped around. “Oh, all right! You never could mind your own business. Ever since you were a child, you had to know everything that was going on. You can be quite annoying.”

  “I enjoy being annoying,” Mac said evenly, hoping to calm his agitated mother. “Now tell me why you’re so upset.”

  Emma sighed gustily, gave up on the muffins, and led him back to the living room. She pushed him back onto the chair and seated herself primly on her chintz-covered couch. “Teresa did see her mother one last time before Marielle… went away.”

  Mac sat up straight on the rock-hard chair. “Teri saw her mother! She never told me!”

  “It was a secret. Teresa knows how to keep a secret!”

  “Yeah, I know. And so do you, apparently.” Mac leaned forward and gently took his mother’s heavily veined hand in his. “Now tell me how and when Teri saw her mother.”

  Emma looked resigned. “Marielle came to the Farr house the day after Wendy’s big party announcing she was pregnant. Marielle thought Hugh and Wendy were gone. Hugh was gone and not supposed to be back until evening. Wendy was home, but her car was at a garage being fixed. Anyway, I heard this little tapping on the front door, and when I opened it, there was Marielle. I was so surprised I just stared at her.”

  “Marielle’s aunt Beulah’s house is three miles from the Farr house. Did someone drive her?”

  “No. She’d walked all that way. She was so tired, poor thing. Her health was poor.”

  “Her mental health?”

  “Her physical health. That Beulah!” Emma jerked her hand out of Mac’s and waved it angrily. “She didn’t care anything about Marielle even if they were blood kin. She just took in Marielle because Hugh paid her. She never really looked after Marielle. I know because Beulah let me visit two or three times. Marielle was too thin—not being fed properly—and Beulah never even offered us a cup of coffee. One time I marched right into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee myself. I fixed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Marielle, too. Just about all Beulah had was junk food. At least peanuts have protein, and poor little Marielle certainly needed some healthy food.”

  “Good God!” Mac was genuinely surprised. “Did Teri know her mother wasn’t getting enough food?”

  “I’m sure she didn’t. Marielle probably made some excuse for her weight loss or wore bulky clothes when Teresa visited. If that girl had known her mother wasn’t getting enough to eat, she would have done something.”

  “She certainly would have, even if she was just seventeen.” Mac couldn’t keep the admiration out of his voice.

  “Marielle told me Beulah spent most of her time reading or watching television up in her bedroom,” Emma went on. “Beulah never kept an eye on her. She took a nap every afternoon as if she’d done something to make her tired. Couldn’t have been housecleaning. That cramped little cottage looked like no one had dusted for weeks, and the kitchen—sticky floor, dirty counters. I saw a cockroach once walking around like he owned the place!”

  Mac stared at his mother. “Mom, you never said anything to me about visiting Marielle.”

  “I promised Marielle I wouldn’t tell anyone about my visits. She was so scared of Hugh, she thought if he found out, he’d fire me. She was also afraid he’d find out Teresa visited her more often than the judge had said she could. We didn’t worry about Beulah telling—Hugh would have taken away Marielle and Beulah would have lost the money he gave her for Marielle’s care.”

  “Hugh probably knew how Marielle was being treated, but he didn’t do anything. He was a mean old bastard.” Mac’s mother gave him a
steely, reproving glance and suddenly he felt like he was fourteen. “Sorry. I meant he was a mean old… man. Now tell me more about when Marielle came alone to the Farr house.”

  Emma immediately looked away again. “I shouldn’t have let it happen, I guess, but for a mother not to be allowed to see her child… well, it was cruel! When Marielle turned up at the house, I told her she shouldn’t have come—there would be trouble. But she begged to see Teresa. She had tears running down her face and she looked so pale and thin and miserable, I just couldn’t stand it. I told her Wendy was home and she should stay outside, go to the side of the house where all the bushes were so she could hide, and I’d get Teresa.

  “It was lucky that the girl was home and Wendy was watching television. Teresa sneaked outside. I was happy for those two, but I was a nervous wreck, scared Wendy would ask me where Teresa was—Hugh made her do that so he could keep tabs on Teresa—but she didn’t ask me, thank the Lord. At least I thanked him at the time.

  “Then something worse happened. Hugh Farr came home about ten minutes later! He dragged Marielle into the house and threw such a fit I thought my heart would stop. Teresa came in screaming at him and he slapped that poor girl on the face so hard she nearly fell down. Wendy laughed! While he was busy slapping his child around, poor Marielle ran out of the house and vanished.

  “Then Hugh turned on me. Wendy had seen me talking at the door to Marielle, and instead of saying anything, she just let our plan play out while she called Hugh. She was a sneaky little twit, not fit to be a mother to that little girl she was going to send off to some boarding school so she wouldn’t be bothered with her. Anyway, Hugh stood in front of me and nearly yelled the house down. I was so scared I dropped the glass bowl I was holding and he yelled even louder.” Emma paused, looking puzzled. “Son, I thought I told you part of this—at least that Hugh had slapped Teresa and that he’d shouted at me.”