Elementary, My Dear Watkins

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Then the telephone rang.

  Danny was so relieved to hear Jo’s voice. He was calling from the road, using a cell phone he’d borrowed from Bradford. By the time Danny left the hospital room, Bradford had been in great pain and exhausted by the effort of their conversation. He was ready for some medication and eager for Danny to go. When Danny asked if he had a phone he could take, the guy had merely pointed to the drawer in the rolling table and told him to feel free to help himself—and to please send a nurse in on the way out.

  “It’s me,” Danny said now, “I’m glad I caught you. I have to tell you something urgent. Listen, Winnie might not be the one who pushed you at the train or messed with the toaster. I won’t take the time to explain it all now, but I think that was done by Alexa’s mother’s boyfriend. His name is Rick.”

  Jo was quiet for a long moment, and then she spoke in a strained yet singsongy manner.

  “Yes, she just got home a few minutes ago. Would you like to speak with her? I can go get her. She’s right upstairs.”

  “Jo? Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yes, hold on just a sec,” Jo said, and then there was a clunk as she set down the phone. “Can you excuse me a minute, Rick? I’ve got to tell Alexa about this phone call.”

  “Sure,” a man’s voice replied.

  Heart pounding, Danny didn’t know what to do. Jo was in the same room as the man who wanted her dead.

  Jo didn’t know how she managed to get out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and down the hall without running. As she forced herself to act natural, Chewie trotting along happily at her side, she could only pray that Danny had understood what was going on here—and that he had heard her address Rick by name. Surely, Danny would summon the police right away and come immediately himself as well.

  When Jo reached Alexa’s room, she didn’t even bother to knock on the door. She simply swung it open and stepped inside, surprising Alexa and her mother, who were sitting on the bed and looking at the silk flowers from last night. Once she and Chewie were inside, Jo shut the door behind her, locked it, and then announced that they were all in danger.

  “I don’t know how to say this,” Jo told them frantically, racing over to the dresser and trying to push it toward the door, “and I know you won’t believe me, but Rick tried to kill me on Wednesday and again yesterday. We’re not safe, at least not until the police get here.”

  Danny’s mind was racing. He was still far away, just over the bridge out of New York City. Traffic was light in the direction he was going, but even as he pressed the accelerator to the floor, he knew it would take a good half hour to get there.

  He was so torn, needing to call the police but not wanting to hang up on the only connection he had to Jo. After listening to dead silence for a full minute, however, Danny finally made his decision. Gritting his teeth, he disconnected the call and dialed 911.

  It took a few transfers to get his call to the right police department, but he finally got there. Knowing that what he had to say sounded crazy, Danny explained the situation as quickly as possible.

  “We’ll send a car right over,” the cop said in response. “What’s the address?”

  Danny rattled the street name off from memory, but he wasn’t sure about the house number. He gave the Bosworth name and said for them to look it up—but to do it fast.

  “A couple of your men were just out at the house this afternoon,” he added. “I’m sure they’ll remember it.”

  “Do you want to hold on until someone is there?”

  “No. I’m going to keep calling back until she answers the phone again.”

  “Help me,” Jo said, trying to slide the large dresser against the door all by herself.

  Alexa just stood there, loudly and angrily refuting everything Jo had said about Rick. But Misty seemed to believe her. She complied, and together the two women were able to move the dresser into place just as Chewie started barking and there was a loud pounding on the door.

  “Jo, are you in there?” Rick’s voice demanded. “Come out! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  Jo looked at Alexa, who burst into tears.

  “Tell me it isn’t true, Uncle Rick!” she yelled, and almost instantly, her mother was at her side, clamping a hand over her mouth.

  “Be quiet, Alexa,” she hissed, “or you’ll get us all killed. Quick, show me how you sneak out at night. Get us out of here!”

  “No, don’t leave this room,” Jo said, “we’re safer in here. Where’s the phone?”

  “There is no phone,” Alexa sobbed. “I don’t have one.”

  No phone in here, and Jo’s cell was in her own bedroom across the hall. Rick’s pounding grew louder, as did Chewie’s barking.

  “You can do what you want,” Misty hissed at Jo, “but my daughter and I are out of here. Rick keeps a gun in the car. Any minute now he might start shooting through the door.”

  Clearly terrified now, Alexa did as her mother said, quietly sliding open the far window and climbing out onto the veranda.

  Silently, Misty went through the window next, and then, reluctantly, Jo lifted the very heavy Chewie to push him out as well. He fought her, though, for some reason afraid to go through the opening out into the dark. Quickly, Jo handed out his big bone to Misty and told her to wave it at him so he would come. Sure enough, that did the trick. Focused on getting to his treat, he scrambled through the window as Jo helped, lifting his heavy rear end off of the floor. Once he was out, the bone clenched happily in his mouth, Jo followed.

  Crouching, the three women and the dog all ran across the veranda and down the back stairs, and then across the lawn toward the pasture. Jo did the best she could in her removeable cast, though she was slower than the others.

  “Alexa!” Jo whispered, trying to catch up with them. “Why are you going this way? We’ve got to escape, not just hide. We should be going toward the front. There’s a guard in the hut.”

  “There’s too much light out front,” Alexa whispered. “If he’s got a gun, we’d be easy targets. Besides, this is an escape. There’s an old gate behind the stable.”

  Jo remembered the old gate. Though it probably hadn’t been used in a while, that was how they used to bring in the horses when she was a child.

  “Don’t fall in the well!” Jo warned as they veered close to the stone structure in the dark. By then they were nearly to the gate.

  Once there, Alexa announced that they’d have to climb over the top. Jo instantly realized that she’d never make it. With her sore ankle, she was barely even standing at this point.

  Besides, even if she could make it over, she had one problem: Chewie. There was no way they could get him over that gate without breaking his neck.

  Jo told Alexa to go first, and then Misty.

  “Now you, Jo,” Alexa whispered as her feet touched the ground on the other side.

  “I can’t leave Chewie here alone,” Jo said. “I just can’t. I’ll hide back here in the shadows and wait for the two of you to get help. If I know Danny, the police will be here soon too.”

  Jo looked up at Misty, who had paused at the very top of the gate.

  “You’re not coming with us?” she said.

  “I can’t make it over,” Jo replied. “Even if I could, I can’t leave my dog.”

  Misty hesitated, looking at her daughter.

  “You know where to go from here, to get help?”

  “Yeah,” Alexa said. “There’s a couple houses along the road.”

  Strangely, Misty swung her leg back over and started down the inside.

  “I can’t leave Jo here alone,” Misty said. “You go ahead and go, Alexa. Jo and I will both hide and wait until you return with help.”

  26

  Danny couldn’t stand it any longer.

  Calling the Bosworth house merely resulted in a busy signal. Calling Jo’s cell simply rang and rang and then went to voice mail.

  What’s happening there?

  As the needle on t
he speedometer entered the red zone at the very top of the dial, Danny tried again to reach the police. Once he was connected to them, they told him to be patient, that the policemen had reached the property but had not yet entered the house.

  “There’s always a chance that we have ourselves a hostage situation here,” the dispatcher said. “They have to enter with caution.”

  Someone was coming toward them.

  Jo and Misty crouched in tall weeds near the gate, half hidden behind a massive tree trunk. Chewie was growling low in his throat, the bone still clenched in his mouth, but Jo had her arms around him, and she was whispering calming sounds in his ear. Much to her shock, Misty slowly withdrew from her pocket a small knife, which she opened up and held poised and ready, just in case.

  The way they were positioned, the knife was close to Jo’s face, and even in the dark she could see that it was dirty, flecked with little black spots. Absurdly, Jo wondered if there was a household hint for that, for cleaning a filthy pocket knife.

  As the man drew closer, Jo squinted to see who it might be. With the glint of the moon shining off his metal belt and the orange glow of a cigarette tip, she realized that it was Rick. Holding her breath, she prayed Chewie would remain quiet until he had passed.

  At least he didn’t come very close. He just poked around the empty stable for a moment and then continued making a broad sweep along the perimeter, around back. As he went, he kept saying things like, “Come on, Misty, it’s okay. I’ll help you. It’ll be all right.”

  Finally, when he was well past them, Jo decided they ought to make a move toward the front of the property. Maybe Danny had misunderstood and hadn’t called the police. If they could make it all the way to the guard hut, they could get some help themselves. As quietly as possible, Jo whispered her intentions to Misty. Chewie set his bone on the ground right in front of him, resting his chin nearby. To him, this was all just an interesting nighttime adventure.

  “We’ll have to go a little at a time,” Misty whispered back, pointing toward the well. “Let’s run to there first.”

  Without waiting for Jo to reply, Misty grabbed Chewie’s bone, darted out from hiding, and ran across open lawn to the old well. Once there, she crouched down behind it and waved frantically for Jo to join her, holding out the bone so Chewie would come as well.

  Jo wouldn’t have chosen that particular way to go, but it was too late now.

  “Come on, boy,” Jo whispered to Chewie, and then they took off toward Misty.

  Alexa was almost to the main road when she looked down and realized that her socks were glowing in the dark. Thank goodness Uncle Rick hadn’t spotted her running across the lawn!

  After so much walking at the amusement park today, her bad leg was really weak, and she tripped a few times as she went. Once she reached the dark and deserted road, she stood and looked both directions, trying to figure out which house was closest. Since it was the more familiar route, she turned right and headed toward the bus stop, knowing she would pass two places on the way.

  Unfortunately, at the first big house, not a light was on and no one responded to her doorbell ringing or her pounding. Summoning even more energy, she continued down the road to the next place. But it was protected by a tall iron gate, and when she pressed the buzzer at the entrance, no one responded. She stood there and rattled the gate and yelled, but no one ever came.

  What could she do?

  By this time she had almost looped around to the front of the old lady’s place. Suddenly she remembered the guard in the little hut at the front of the driveway. He could help her.

  Clenching her teeth and dragging her right leg, Alexa kept going, making her way there as quickly as she could. As she went, she could hear sirens in the distance, and her prayer was that the cops were coming to rescue them all.

  By the time Danny reached the estate and screeched to a stop in the driveway, there were four police cars there, lots of activity, and one very agitated Rick, whom they had just apprehended around the side of the house. Danny didn’t see Jo anywhere, and when he asked a cop what was going on, he said that the house was empty and they were now checking the other structures and the perimeter for the three women, who seemed to have escaped from the house and disappeared into the expansive grounds of the estate.

  “According to this guy,” the cop said, gesturing toward Rick, “he’s not the one we should be worried about. It’s the woman he calls Misty. He says he can prove she’s the killer.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Danny said, suddenly infuriated.

  The cops didn’t even try to stop him. They just stood and listened to the exchange between the two men, one of whom was in handcuffs, his arm gripped tightly by a cop.

  Rick defended himself against Bradford’s charges, saying that the reason he had been asking around about Jo Tulip—and ruminating about murders that looked like accidents—was because he knew what Misty was planning, and he was trying to gather enough information to circumvent her efforts.

  “If you knew about this,” Danny challenged him, “then why didn’t you do something about it sooner?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure at first,” Rick replied. “After Bradford opened his big mouth and told us all that stuff about Jo Tulip, Misty talked about wanting her dead. But I thought that’s all it was, just talk. We’ve been planning for a while to get back together, but it wasn’t until I was moving some of my stuff into her place that I found a piece of paper with information on it about Jo Tulip—her home address, the type of car she drove, her basic schedule. Seeing that paper, I realized that Misty might’ve been serious.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police?” Danny demanded, but he knew the answer to that question: because the police would learn about the Trephedine supply and the meth lab—and that would send both him and Misty to prison.

  “Look,” Rick said defensively, “I’ve been working this thing from the only angle I could think of: I e-mailed Jo and warned her.”

  “Where did you send the warning e-mails from?” Danny asked, as a test.

  “First one from the library in Kreston. Once the police caught on, though, I’ve skipped around. An Internet café. A different library, in Jersey. After I heard about what happened on Wednesday at the train station, and I knew for sure the threat was real, I haven’t left Misty’s side so I could make sure she didn’t try anything else. Alexa and I have been trying to get her into a rehab. It’s just the drugs making her do this, you know? She’s not really a killer.”

  And that was the bottom line for Rick. Not only had he been reluctant to involve the police for his own personal reasons, he had continued to hold on to the hope that he could get the woman he loved some help without ever having to do anything official about the attempted murders.

  Hobbling as quickly as possible toward the old well, all Jo could think about was Alexa’s safety out there in the dark, alone on the road. Jo hated to be judgmental, but she couldn’t help but think what an awful mother Misty was. Who on earth would let their 14-year-old daughter go out into dark streets alone with a killer on the loose? Misty should have left Jo with the dog and continued over that fence with Alexa.

  Of course, Jo realized as she reached the well, according to Alexa this woman had been making bad decisions her whole life. Though living here in this big cold house wasn’t the best situation for such a young teen, it had to be better than what she’d been living at home, with a mother to whom drugs and dollars were more important even than her own child.

  Jo reached the well and crouched down, careful not to press against the old stone in case it might crumble and give their position away. Glancing at Misty, she realized that she still had the knife in one hand, but in the other she was still holding onto Chewie’s bone, despite his eager whimperings.

  “Let him have it or he might bark,” Jo whispered.

  Distracted again by the black flecks on the knife, Jo realized they looked just like the black flecks that had been on the table behind the toa
ster, where the cord had been scraped down to the wire.

  The toaster.

  Jo thought again of Rick’s words in the kitchen just now, and the expression on his face. If he was the killer, was Misty “Toaster Girl”?

  If so, why were there flecks on her knife?

  Suddenly, before Jo could draw the next logical conclusion, Misty raised up the bone, tossed it as far away as she could, and said to Chewie, “Go get it, boy!”

  Before Jo could get a good grip on his collar and stop him, he took off running. In the distance, Jo thought she could see extra lights coming from the front of the house. Were the police here now?

  She sure hoped so, because she was standing beside a killer.

  Jo looked back at Misty, eyes wide, and at the knife she now wielded toward her.

  “It was you,” Jo said, knowing it with certainty, knowing it deep in her bones. “You pushed me into the train. You rigged the toaster.”

  Misty was very small, very thin, but there was something almost animalistic in her gaze, and Jo was frightened.

  “It’s nothing personal,” Misty replied, bringing the knife even closer. “I just need you out of the way. Bradford said unless you’re dead the whole thing’s going to come to an end. And I can’t have that. As long as your death looks like an accident, I’m free and clear.”

  Jo tried to turn and run, but the cast slowed her efforts. In an instant, Misty reached out and gripped Jo’s clothes, pushing her toward the hole in the well. Heart pounding, Jo fought back, trying to knock the knife from her hand, surprised at the strength in the small woman. As they grappled there in the dark, Jo tried to scream and yell for help, but Misty managed to work her way around to Jo’s side, clamp a cold hand against her mouth, and hold the knife to her throat.

  Chewie returned and began barking, and then he went for Misty. Jo managed to break free as Misty screamed, the dog doing what he could to subdue her. Terrified that Chewie might get stabbed by the flailing knife, Jo knew she had to do something. Glancing around, she spotted the bone that Chewie had retrieved. Picking it up, she gripped it in her hands like a baseball bat. Then, praying she’d make her mark and not hit Chewie by mistake, Jo swung as hard as she could.