I squeezed my eyes tight shut and waited for the inevitable.
But the next voice I heard, coming from downstairs, was Martha’s.
“I’m in here. HERE!” I heard her screaming and then the sound of footsteps on the cobbles. I rushed to the window and looking down through the glass-roofed passage I saw Max shaking the steel gate.
“Smash the window!” he yelled to Martha and I heard the sound of shattering glass.
I could hear Angie on the landing and through the door I made out the unmistakable click of the gun being broken open and the shells being loaded into the chamber.
The gun had not been loaded. I need never have been threatened by it and now it was too late.
“Put down the gun. Do not move,” I heard Max’s voice say.
Even though I couldn’t see anything through the door the scene was brutally vivid to me as if I were right there with them. Max was at the bottom of the stairs and Angie was on the landing at the top of the stairs with a loaded shotgun.
There was an eerie calm for about twenty seconds as I pressed my head against the door. Then I recoiled violently at the sound of the gun going off in my ear.
CHAPTER 20
THE FOLLOWING SEPTEMBER, ALMOST A YEAR AFTER Sean Marriott’s body, swathed in its saturated finery, was found washed up at the water’s edge, Franny and Rufus’s wedding took place farther up the beach at Lazy Point.
They were married in fits and starts due to the fact that at the last moment Franny had insisted that Eliza be her flower girl. Eliza was barely eighteen months and she toddled after them, clutching her little posy of daisies, for all of fifteen seconds before veering off in search of distraction and falling over in the sand. At which point the preacher came to an abrupt halt as Franny abandoned the ceremonies and rushed after her.
When the service was interrupted for the third time, my mother stepped forward and intercepted Eliza on her way down to paddle in the water. Eliza’s mouth puckered in automatic reflex but then she looked up at my mother and wisely thought better of it, allowing herself to be carried back up the beach to sit on my mother’s lap. Not that I was remotely surprised. My mother had spent the last three months stage-managing every minute detail of Franny’s big day—from the daisy chain around Eliza’s neck to the gold silk Indian-style wedding dress with its wraparound skirt and cropped top that exposed the diamond in Franny’s navel, a wedding gift from Rufus. She wasn’t about to have it ruined by the antics of a wayward toddler.
The preacher stood with his back to the water, Franny and Rufus before him, and the rest of us perched on spindly gold chairs rooted in the sand. Behind him, parked in the bay, was Rufus’s truck bedecked with flowers, a reminder of the day when Rufus had proposed and another indication of Franny’s newfound romanticism.
It was a gorgeous day with a cloudless royal blue sky above us, and the sound of the water lapping gently only added to the serenity of the moment. Yet I couldn’t relax.
Throughout the ceremony I was miserably aware that we were but a stone’s throw from the site of Martha’s trailers. If I turned my head slightly I could make out their silhouette in my peripheral vision. Martha wasn’t there, of course. She was in jail somewhere awaiting her fate. I had heard she had been promised some kind of deal in exchange for a confession to being responsible for Sean’s death and for testifying about Angie’s orchestration of what had happened those fateful nights a year ago. I wondered what had happened to her wedding dresses. In my head I began to hear them rustling and whispering, taunting poor Franny while she was blissfully united with Rufus at the shoreline. When I found myself wondering if the dresses had inherited Martha’s ability to jinx weddings I rapped myself mentally over the knuckles.
Apparently I did not do it silently, for my father, sitting between my mother and me, glanced quickly at me. He had accompanied me when I had returned to Long Island almost a year ago. He claimed it would be a surprise for my mother but when I witnessed their reunion my mother behaved as if she had been expecting him for some time.
I had been so wrapped up in writing Shotgun’s book for the past few months that I had not really monitored my parents’ tentative reestablishment of their marriage. But I had heard from my father that Vanessa had marched him straight into couples therapy.
“What happened?” I asked him, intrigued.
“What do you think?” He smiled. “She talked nonstop and neither I nor the counselor could get a word in edgeways. But it worked, because after I don’t know how many sessions of listening to herself, she decided that we should give it another go.”
I was pleased, of course, but I would never stop mourning the loss of the Phillionaire, and thinking that he might have been the one person who could have penetrated my mother’s emotional defenses once and for all. Still, as my father pointed out rather wistfully, “What is marriage if not a friendship? And that’s the thing about your mother and me, Lee. We’ve been friends for a long time. Whatever else happens, it makes sense for us to renew that friendship.”
Scott stood up for Rufus, as they say. I figured Rufus had to ask him. I watched as he lurched forward with the ring, body rigid, shoulders hunched, his demeanor more fitting for a funeral than a wedding. There would always be a certain amount of tension between the two brothers in regard to Franny and Eliza but there were two things that had gone a long way to smoothing the relationship. Scott had moved his practice into Manhattan and himself into the Fifth Avenue apartment. And no one could be impervious to Rufus’s good-natured charm forever. Scott was still Eliza’s father but once he moved away, it became clear that he had no real interest in adopting that role in her life. He seemed happy to pass that responsibility on to Rufus, who was only too glad to step up to the plate. Franny was aware that the problem of Scott hadn’t gone away entirely—how could it? He was Rufus’s brother—but for the time being they had arrived at an acceptable compromise. Until, I imagined, Eliza started asking who her father was.
As for Dumpster, who had just given Franny away, leading her along the beach to the tip of Lazy Point to hand her to Rufus, I just didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t just a case of M saw something. As it turned out, M had seen everything.
What had come to light in the wake of the investigation was that on the night Sean was killed, Dumpster had been driving through the woods around seven o’clock on his way to put up Shotgun’s shelves at Mallaby, and had seen Angie and Martha go past in the car. He had caught only a glimpse of Angie but it had been enough to start him wondering where he’d seen the face before. When his memory was sufficiently jogged to send him up to Sean’s room to take another look at the picture he’d seen on the inside of the closet, he realized it was Angie. And then he called Bettina and suggested a meeting at the beach. As he’d told me at the cabin when he’d come looking for Franny just before the Phillionaire’s funeral on the beach, he had lured her to the beach with the tantalizing bit of information that he had just seen something he knew would interest her. He planned to tell her about Angie’s arrival and offer future snippets in return for her silence about his mother.
But he never got to speak to her. Instead he witnessed her murder.
He had intended to go hunting that night but the weather was so bad he had abandoned the idea pretty early on in the evening. He had tried to call Bettina to postpone the meeting at the beach but had not been able to reach her because her cell was turned off. So he had parked his truck—with his bow and arrow inside—and set off through the woods to meet her as planned.
Instead he saw her shot with an arrow in the back by Angie. It did not occur to him until he returned to his truck, after racing through the squelch of the rain-soaked leaves, that his bow and arrow were missing and they had been used as the murder weapon.
I learned all this from Shotgun while we were working on his book and the first question I asked Shotgun was why Dumpster did not report what he saw.
And this was when I received the biggest shock.
; “He did,” said Shotgun. “He came to the house in the middle of the night and he told me.”
I gasped. “He told you what?”
“That he had seen Angie kill Bettina and throw the bow and arrow in the pit. Then he followed her back to Martha Farrell’s trailers and saw her bury the quiver and let herself into one of the trailers.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him to get right back out there and get his truck off the property as quickly as he could before anyone saw it. It wasn’t a problem if they found tire tracks because he had a legitimate reason to be driving to and from my house, but it wouldn’t have helped if anyone had seen him there that particular night.”
“But why didn’t Dumpster report what he’d seen to the police?”
As I asked the question I already knew the answer I would get from Shotgun—Because I asked him not to—and suddenly everything fell into place with a sickening lurch. Shotgun had asked Dumpster to keep quiet about what he had seen. Shotgun had known about Angie’s involvement in two murders fourteen years apart, and he had covered up for her for both of them. All that stuff about pretending not to know why Dumpster had lied at the arraignment—Shotgun had lied to me. He had covered up for Angie regarding Bettina’s murder because whatever might have happened between them he still loved her and would shield her no matter what.
“I was telling you the truth when I said I wanted to do the book for Sean,” Shotgun told me. “I made a kind of maudlin New Year’s resolution at the beginning of this year that I would set the record straight for him once and for all. There had been times when he’d asked me what had happened and I just hadn’t had the guts to tell him. How do you tell your son that his mother was a murderer? But I just knew it was going to come out one day and that it was better he hear the truth from me than from anyone else. And of course I would have broken the news to him before the book came out.”
“But you changed your mind?”
“I owe you the biggest apology, Lee. I should never have even started work on the book with you. Once I heard that Angie had killed Bettina, I knew you were in danger. The problem was I didn’t know who had killed my son. I couldn’t believe Angie had had a part in that and I thought you might uncover something there for me. Of course I should have gone to the police as soon as Dumpster told me about Angie in the woods. But I couldn’t be the one to turn her in—and especially not to that bastard Evan Morrison.”
“Do you suppose Dumpster told his mother?” I asked Shotgun.
“No. He told me he didn’t want her involved any more than he could help. He was very shaken when she changed her story at my arraignment but he had to be my alibi. He could have told Evan Morrison what he’d seen Angie do at any time but he had promised me he’d keep quiet. I owe him a lot.”
And in a way this proved to be the saving grace for Dumpster. He was finally out of the woods—an appropriate enough expression—and Shotgun had taken him on full time to be the caretaker at Mallaby. He had given Dumpster Sean’s old apartment above the stables. They would continue to cover for each other about the events of the night of Bettina’s death. To all extents and purposes Shotgun had become the father Dumpster never had and if Franny had a problem with this, she kept it to herself. All she asked of Shotgun was that he keep Dumpster clear of any drug activity.
Despite her new role as the fiancée of a millionaire, Franny still turned up to run the Old Stone Market every day and whenever I went there, I thought of my first meeting with Angie Marriott. Over the past nine months I had spent a lot of time trying to get Angie Marriott out of my head and wondering over and over again if she had planned the final outcome of what happened that night at her house off Portobello.
Following the deafening blast of the shotgun on the other side of the door, I had held my breath for as long as I could before rushing to rattle the door handle in panic.
“Let me out! Please, let me out of here.”
And then I heard Max’s voice. “Lee, don’t move. DO NOT MOVE!” I heard him running up the stairs and then the sound of the key turning in the lock. I rushed to the door but he only opened it a crack. He was leaning in and pushing me away.
“Stand back. Move right away from the door. Go on,” he said as I struggled to get out. “You’re not coming out. You’re staying here.”
What was he doing? He had to let me out. Was he trying to hold me prisoner too? And then I looked down and saw the bloody footprints made by the soles of his shoes and I began to shake. He pushed me firmly away from the door and locked it from the inside.
“You’re staying here, Lee. Do you understand? I do not want you to see what’s out there. We’ll get a ladder up to the window and take you out that way.”
“What happened?” I whispered, almost paralyzed with fear. “Did she shoot Martha?”
“She shot herself,” said Max. “She sat down on the top step, rested the shotgun a few steps down with the barrel pointing up into her mouth and fired. Her brains exploded all over the landing.”
“You just stepped in them,” I said, staring at his bloody shoes.
“I had to tread in them to get to you and you will too if you go out there.” He threw open the window and leaned out to yell down to the courtyard, “Up here, we’ll need a ladder soon as you can. The entrance is round the corner in Westbourne Park Road.”
“So,” he turned back to me, “what happened?”
I told him, speaking very fast because it was the only way I could stop myself from breaking down in tears. When I’d finished, a smile began to spread across his face. All the brooding tension that was part and parcel of his normal expression seemed to dissolve as his features relaxed. For one memorable instant he looked genuinely happy and I barely recognized him.
I yearned to be able to capture this softer side of Max and bottle it so I could produce it to offset the grouchiness he normally presented to me. Was this the only thing that put him at ease? The solving of a murder?
“Wait till Frank Shaw hears about this!” He punched the air with an uncharacteristic show of excitement. Then before I knew what was happening he had gathered me up in a spontaneous hug that was so forceful I felt the tip of my nose being abraded by the scratchy tweed of his jacket and I pulled away.
“Oh, sorry,” he said and the scowl was back.
“No,” I said and pointed to my nose. “Your jacket’s like a Brillo pad.”
He took it off and flung it on the floor. Then before I could say another word, he brought me back into his arms and lifted my chin so that my lips met his.
His lips were unbelievably soft and his tongue explored my mouth slowly and carefully as if he were investigating it for evidence. I reached up with my arms above my head and stretched myself against him. He ran his hands down the sides of my body to the bottom of my thighs and up again and then he lifted me up and held me high above him as if I were a feather. He brought me down slowly to reengage his mouth with mine.
It was all over in seconds—suddenly there was a tap on the window and I saw a hand reaching up. Richie’s head appeared at the top of the ladder. I felt Max freeze in my arms before he sprang away from me.
“I’m sorry,” he said curtly, “I don’t know what came over me. I’m truly sorry.”
Richie was standing there on the other side of the glass, trying in vain to open the window from the outside. Max signaled to him to go back down again.
“I’m not remotely sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m very pleased and happy and excited about what just happened and I’d like it to happen again. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He didn’t give me an answer, just opened the window and beckoned me to climb out onto the ladder.
We had several meetings after that, about the investigation and nothing else, and he made sure that each one took place in an interview room down at the station. It was sheer agony for me to sit there, separated from him by a metal table with Richie parked beside him like a chaperone. At one point our knees
touched and I became electrified. I contemplated reaching out with my foot although where exactly I intended to aim it, I wasn’t too sure. In any case there was a chance I’d start stroking Richie by mistake and make things even worse.
Max’s eagle eyes bored into mine during the interviews but the minute they were over, he stood up and barely looked at me again. And then he disappeared off my radar altogether. Cath told me he and Richie were caught up in a horrendous case investigating the murder of a four-year-old girl and that Richie was so strung out he was coming home and not speaking to her all night. She didn’t say anything about Max and me and I began to think that maybe Richie hadn’t seen us kissing, or if he had, he hadn’t said anything to Cath.
Or maybe he had. Because Cath didn’t stop going on about Tommy and when was I going to go back to America? And then Genevieve got in on the act and reported that Shotgun had been asking about me. In the light of what had happened, he wanted to return to the book.
“Oh, I don’t know, Genevieve,” I said. “I’m wondering maybe if I’m not too close to this whole thing.”
“Well, that’s why you have to see it through,” said Genevieve, matter-of-fact as ever. “Or shall I look for someone else to take over?”
I was like a rat out of a trap. “Absolutely not! If Shotgun’s asked for me, I have to go back, don’t I?”
If Genevieve was surprised by my abrupt change of mind, she didn’t show it. At some point in the last few months it seemed I had learned—at this late stage in my life and career—to be competitive.
Even though it was some time before Shotgun came through with his startling revelation that he had known all along that Angie was the killer, the minute I walked back into Mallaby, I knew there was an unbreakable bond between us. As a ghostwriter I am often party to confidences pertaining to my subjects’ lives that are not mentioned in the book. As Shotgun and I went back to work, I sensed a tacit understanding between us that he was going to have to tread very carefully as to what he put in and what he left out. He didn’t know how much I knew. He didn’t know exactly what Angie had told me about the night the groupie had died and gradually I enlightened him.
How to Marry a Ghost Page 33