“You can trust me, Fee, and Antoinette, too. What’s going on? Did Rachel’s body turn up or something?”
“No,” Fiona says curtly.
But it looks like Rachel did.
“Cassie, I’m checking to see how you are this morning. Please call me as soon as you get this message.”
“Press 1 to hear this message again. Press 2 to delete this message.”
Cassie presses 2.
“Cassie, it’s Alec. I hope today is a better day. How about if I bring dinner over later? I need to talk to—”
Cassie presses 2.
That’s it. No more new messages in the last hour since she took the phone off the hook. She disconnects from her voice mail and debates leaving it off the hook again, but decides against it.
She can’t avoid human contact forever.
It’s been five days since the world as she knew it came to an end.
When she left Brynn’s house last Friday afternoon, she came straight home.
She didn’t know what else to do. At that point, she was utterly numb with shock, grief…fear.
The first two have worn off in the days since; the last has only escalated with every passing hour.
She hasn’t been back to work yet. Yesterday and today were regularly scheduled days off, but she was supposed to be there this morning. She called in sick first thing.
“Will you be in tomorrow?” asked the desk attendant who took the call.
“I’m not sure.”
Well, she can’t keep doing this: spending every day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, reflecting on the past…and terrified about what the future might hold for her.
The Boston homicide team has reportedly detained an unnamed suspect for questioning; he’s a coworker of Tildy’s.
That news should probably be comforting to Cassie, but she isn’t taking any chances. They could be way off the mark. They don’t know about Rachel.
So Cassie’s been holed up here for days, and the only saving grace is that her mother had to go back to New York on Sunday.
“I’m just glad that your name hasn’t been dragged into the papers,” she told Cassie before she left. “The last thing we need is for you to be in the media, associated with something like this.”
How ironic, considering that just days ago, her mother would have killed to have Cassie’s name linked to Matilda Harrington’s in the press.
Both Alec and her mother assume she knew about Tildy’s death before she took off. In fact, they think that’s why she couldn’t face going to the shower.
If they ever realize that Tildy was still alive and well when Cassie fled…
Well, it’s really a miracle they haven’t figured it out yet. The coverage has been nonstop, all over the papers and the regional television news.
It even made the network news the first night, in a story that compared the latest Harrington tragedy to the tragic losses suffered by the Kennedys. They showed footage of Jason Harrington’s Beacon Hill mansion, where reportedly he was in seclusion. The cameras caught his closest friends showing up to console him, looking elegantly somber: Former Governor Allerson and his striking wife, Lisa, along with assorted Kennedy family members who have been there, done that too many times in the past.
The front page of the Boston Herald asked:
IS THERE A HARRINGTON CURSE?
The article inside gave a blow-by-blow timeline account of Tildy’s movements on the night in question, speculating that she was killed in the wee hours.
But then, Regina Ashford doesn’t read the Boston Herald. If she had occasion to read a Boston paper, it would be the Globe.
Mainly, she reads the New York Times. And the Times carried only an obituary, free of the gory details—or even details that might incriminate Cassie, such as the exact time of death.
So, for all her mother knows—along with Alec, and everyone else who had waited in vain for the guest of honor that night—Cassie was blindsided by news of her friend’s death en route to the shower.
She was vague when they later asked where she went when she disappeared; they didn’t press her. Nor did they press the issue that she hadn’t thought to call, or check her messages.
A temporary lapse in consideration is understandable when you’re in shock over your friend’s murder.
Temporary.
But she’s running out of excuses. Sooner or later, she’s going to have to face them all. And then what will she say?
What about her birthday, just a few days away?
You aren’t just running out of excuses, Cassie reminds herself as dread, now coldly familiar, ushers a death march of goose bumps over her skin.
You’re running out of time.
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”
There’s the neighbor again, calling for her lost cat, same as she’s been doing for days now.
“Here, kitty. Mama has some nice cream waiting for you here. Come on, Agatha. Where are you?”
I’m in a Dumpster behind the supermarket, Mama, with my throat slit.
Ha, ha. That’s rich.
Imagining what that stupid cat would say is almost as amusing as thinking about what Matilda Harrington would have said if she’d had the chance.
If there was ever any doubt that this plan could actually come to fruition—and, all right, there was doubt, serious doubt—it’s been all but erased.
That the Boston police already have a suspect is yet another fortuitous turn of events.
The gods certainly are smiling on this ambitious venture of mine.
Of course, the investigation is ongoing. Matilda Harrington’s hapless coworker will eventually be cleared…
Eventually?
Sooner than anyone can know.
This weekend, actually.
If they’ve got Ray Wilmington under surveillance when another Zeta Delta Kappa sister is murdered, he’ll have to be cleared.
Then again, the way things are going in my favor…
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the police continue to suspect Ray in Tildy’s case, and merely attribute Cassandra Ashford’s imminent death to a copycat killer?
Ironic, and highly unlikely.
Still, one can hope, right up until the end.
And the end will come soon enough.
For now, might as well just enjoy this little game, which has been a long time in coming.
Ten years, to be exact.
“Tell me you’re not getting sick of my face,” Quincy says as he leans forward on his elbows and eyes Ray Wilmington across the interrogation room table. “I know I’m getting sick of yours.”
Wilmington shrugs.
But there’s something different about him today.
He’s wearing down, Quincy realizes. Endless hours in the claustrophobic interrogation room with the dauntless, in-your-face Quincy Hiles have a way of doing that to a person.
Maybe today, Wilmington will talk.
Confess, even.
Then again…
Quincy is starting to have his doubts about that.
Ray Wilmington is hiding something, but Quincy isn’t sure that guilt as a murderer is it.
No, but there’s something.
Deb and Mike, seated on either side of him, aren’t even so sure of that anymore.
“Maybe he’s totally innocent,” Deb had said last night as they were making yet another pit stop at the ubiquitous Dunkin’ Donuts: black coffee for Deb, chamomile tea for Quincy.
“Yeah, maybe he’s totally innocent,” Quincy had shot back, “and maybe I’m thinking of calling off my retirement and working another ten years. Without pay.”
“I don’t know…Do you think he’d have confessed by now if he were guilty?”
“Do you think he’d have made up that mythical bouquet of roses if he were innocent?”
Deb shrugged and sighed. She’s been doing a lot of that these past few days.
So has Quincy. And it isn’t his style.
His IBS has been acting
up lately, though he’s been eating all the right things and taking his medication. It’s stress. Cumulative, probably. Retirement is so close he can taste it, and this case will drag on without him, but it would be pretty damned satisfying to nail Matilda Harrington’s killer as his swan song.
Now—his stomach clenching painfully as he faces Ray Wilmington—Quincy says, “We’re running more DNA tests from the crime scene. If you were in there, you’re toast. You know that, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t in there.”
“You said you were,” Mike points out.
“Outside, not in.”
Quincy shakes his head. “We have evidence to the contrary.”
They don’t. Yet. It’s a classic interrogation ploy.
They aren’t necessarily banking on DNA to connect him to the scene, but Wilmington doesn’t have to know that.
There was no evidence of semen or sexual assault; no blood droplets that were likely to have belonged to anyone other than the victim. The lettering on the cake was done in blood, but it was determined to have come from a cat. The crime lab is testing a stray gray hair found near the body; Quincy figures it will turn out to be the housekeeper’s. There were no foreign skin cells under the victim’s fingernails the way there would be if she had clawed at her killer to fight off the brutal attack.
The forensics evidence so far has backed up Quincy’s initial hypothesis that Matilda Harrington was killed almost instantly by a single blow to the head, and her face was disfigured afterward in a violent rage.
The weapon that ravaged her beautiful features has yet to turn up, but Quincy was right about the cast iron doorstop. Lab tests revealed minuscule particles of blood, skin, hair, bone, and brain…but no fingerprints.
There were none at the scene.
Meaning the killer had the presence of mind to wear gloves, and clean up after himself—or herself.
He—or she—did leave behind a single, strange calling card, but it raised more questions than it answered.
Quincy still doesn’t know what to make of that small piece of knitted gray wool…ragged and raveling at the edges where it had been cut from a larger piece. Microscopic crimson fibers were found on it, suggesting that the original garment might also have contained red yarn. It apparently had spent some time in the great outdoors as well. The lab is running further tests to see if they can pinpoint a geographic region for the soil and pine needles.
For now, it’s the only real link to the killer.
“What’s your mother going to do, Ray, if you spend the rest of your life in prison?” Deb is asking sadly. “You’re her only child. Your father’s dead. She’s on Social Security. She needs you, Ray. You’re all she’s got.”
“And we know she was about to lose the house,” Quincy puts in. Again. They’ve used this information repeatedly. Futilely. “We know she had the place mortgaged up to the hilt and all her credit cards were maxed out. Yours, too.”
Mike takes it up. “You must have been upset that the bank was going to foreclose on the house where you grew up, where your mother and father were so happy together for all those years. We know she couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments, even with you helping her. You both must have been feeling pretty out of sorts lately.”
“Angry, even,” Quincy agrees. “Furious. Keeping it all bottled up, though. Right?”
They’ve also gone this route before, repeatedly, to no avail.
But this time, Quincy senses a subtle change in Ray’s stoic demeanor.
“How will your mother survive without the house, and without you if you go to prison, Ray? Where will she even live?”
“She won’t have to worry about surviving without me because I didn’t kill Matilda and I’m not going to prison for the rest of my life,” Ray says heavily, shoulders slumped.
Yes, he’s wearing down.
“Then what did you do, Ray?” The question comes from Mike, almost gently. “Look, we know you were up to something outside Tildy’s house that night. What was it?”
“Maybe you were thinking you could get a handout from your rich girlfriend…only you realized then that she didn’t want to be your girlfriend.”
Ray glares at Quincy. “She wasn’t my girlfriend.”
“You seemed to think she was. ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ you called her.” That information came courtesy of Tildy’s coworker Katie.
“And we know,” Mike adds, “that last Thursday wasn’t the first night you were hanging around on Commonwealth Avenue.”
A few of the neighbors had noticed him there before on occasion. Just sitting in his parked car at night, keeping an eye on Matilda Harrington’s house.
Was he plotting her murder? Waiting for the right opportunity?
“Did you see something, Ray, that night? Something that made you angry with Matilda?”
“No, not that night.”
Quincy freezes.
It was a classic slip…
Only, judging by the look on Ray Wilmington’s drawn, pockmarked face, it wasn’t a slip at all.
He’s ready to talk at last.
Having borne two children—forget that, having lived in a sorority house filled with sexually active college girls—Brynn is familiar enough with pregnancy tests to be aware that you can get a false negative…but not a false positive.
Sequestered in the bathroom while Caleb is at school and Jeremy is napping, she wraps the plastic stick, with its unmistakable plus sign in the little window, in a tissue.
Several tissues.
Then she encases it in toilet paper, winding it around and around until it’s securely mummified. She deposits it in the wicker wastebasket, which she carries with her to the kitchen, to add to the already-full black trash bag there.
As she ties the handles securely and spirits it out to add it to the garbage can on the deck, she’s ludicrously grateful that the weekly trash pickup is tomorrow morning. They’ll cart away the evidence and no one will be the wiser.
No one…as in Garth.
So you’re not going to tell him?
No, she decides, closing the back door again and turning the knob lock and the dead bolt, and sliding the chain. She isn’t going to tell him…yet.
Not until she has to.
Standing in the kitchen, she presses her palms against the slight swell of her stomach, beneath her belly button. She isn’t showing yet; her once-taut abs long ago gave way to a permanent little rise after she carried Caleb.
But she will be showing, soon. She did almost immediately with Jeremy.
How in the world did this happen?
Because it was meant to be.
An utter twist of fate.
An accident.
But Garth might not believe her. He might think she did this deliberately.
Did you?
No! Of course not.
She’s taken her birth control pills religiously every morning, even though it’s been against her will for these last few months.
At least, she thinks she has.
What if she subconsciously missed a few…?
No, she would have noticed. The packet is numbered by the days. On the rare occasions that she’s forgotten a pill, she’s figured it out promptly, the next day, and taken two.
That hasn’t happened in ages, though.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter.
Regardless of how or why it happened, she’s pregnant.
She and Garth are going to have a third child, whether he wants it or not.
Of course he’ll want it.
He might balk at first—
Might? she thinks ruefully.
Okay, he will balk at the news. Definitely. He’ll probably be angry, accusatory toward her, even.
But once he gets used to the idea, he’ll embrace it…
Just as Brynn already has.
Really. He will.
He has to.
“Dr. Saddler?”
Gathering his notes at the front of the rapidly emptying lecture h
all, Garth looks up. All the way up, past the three open buttons on the coed’s blouse. He forces himself to focus only on her face—a pretty face.
“What’s up, Danielle?”
She looks pleased that he remembers her name. She should be. It’s six weeks into the semester, but this is a popular course, held twice weekly in a packed lecture hall. And at this point, Garth recognizes most of his students on sight, but knows only a handful by name, mostly the intense intellectual types who sit down in front and engage themselves in active discussion.
Danielle isn’t one of those, but the lithe brunette is memorable for a different reason. Two reasons really, and they’re currently threatening to spill out of her too-tight, silky blouse.
Garth encounters one or two Danielles almost every semester: femme fatale types who engage in a subtle seduction with the professor. This professor, anyway.
Some of Garth’s department colleagues claim that it doesn’t happen to them. Some, he’s inclined to believe. Others, he suspects, are carrying on clandestine flirtations or even full-blown affairs.
“I’m not sure I understand what you were saying about the Grounded Theory Methodology,” Danielle tells Garth.
“Ah, Glaser and Strauss. We’ll be going over the four dying-awareness contexts in more detail at the next lecture.”
“We will?”
“We will.” He smiles at her. “Okay?”
“Okay.” She hesitates. “This is an interesting course.”
Her voice echoes a little; the lecture hall is empty now. She adjusts her backpack, slung over her shoulder, giving him an ample view of her large breasts.
“I’m glad you think so.” He taps the sheaf of notes on the podium, aligning the edges. “I’ll see you next week, then.”
“Right.” She looks disappointed.
But she goes.
He doesn’t let himself watch her walk away, though he knows the view from behind is as spectacular as the full frontal.
There are things a married man just shouldn’t do. Or even think about. But he’d have to be dead not to notice someone like Danielle—and not to be flattered by the way she watches him, every lecture.
Don't Scream Page 23