by Sarah Graves
Amusement tinged the gleam in her cornflower blue eyes. She shook her head. Behind me the machinery continued roaring. Ellie turned, got the unhappy drift of the situation.
“Next time I ask you to get in the car . . .” I began to her.
“Shut up,” Lydia Duckworth snapped.
Shutting up wasn’t an option, though, because I was sure she intended to kill us. Our only chance was to get her talking, keep her interested until Bob Arnold could arrive.
Or so I thought until Maggie appeared silently in the barn doorway, unnoticed by Lydia. I had to force myself not to look at the girl again, so Lydia wouldn’t realize something was up. But the urge to glance past Lydia at Maggie, to latch onto her with my eyes as if the mere sight of her could save me, was nearly overpowering. At the same time something shifted in the machinery, quieting it a little.
Or maybe my ears were just getting used to being hammered by the racket. Blurred in my peripheral vision, Maggie pantomimed a snipping motion with her fingers: The phone line had been cut.
Oh, terrific. My cell phone was in the Fiat, but Maggie didn’t seem to remember—phone, car, phone, car, I thought at her—and there was no way to tell her.
“Jake,” Ellie said from behind me. “The saw blade . . .”
Right: still spinning. And I had a bad feeling that we were going to have to deal with it soon.
If we could. But for the moment I kept my eyes on Lydia and the gun. Now that the first unpleasant shock had faded I could see that it was a horrid little item, the kind of thing that in a childless home could get tossed into a drawer and forgotten.
Probably that’s what Lydia’s late husband had done with it, and after he died she’d found it. “So I suppose the story about Bill Imrie’s gambling problem was a lie, too?” I asked her.
She nodded minutely. Oh, what a sap I’d been.
“Back up, please, Jacobia, and don’t make any sudden movements. My husband kept this to use on burglars, but I’m sure it would work just as well on you,” she said.
Yeah, probably it would. Just the way it already had on Bill Imrie. “Both,” she emphasized, “of you.”
Ellie took a step back. I did likewise. The saw’s whine ratcheted up into a metallic snarl as it began cutting something.
“Why, Lydia?” I asked.
She stepped nearer. “Howard,” she began over the din, “was such a straight-arrow. Good service, fair prices . . .”
I only caught every other word. But it was plenty.
And I’d have nodded to keep her going even if I hadn’t been able to hear any of it.
“Not enough. Not in this day and age,” Lydia said.
She was right; those old-fashioned notions didn’t work when you were up against chain stores, mega-competition. That this was a funny place to discuss commerce didn’t seem to occur to her.
Fine by me. “So you decided to do something about it, didn’t you? Without telling Howard.”
She looked satisfied. “Of course. I couldn’t let that happen. So I enlisted that fool Jim to help me.”
Which was when it all began to make terrible sense. Diamond hadn’t had an accomplice; Lydia had.
I glanced back over my shoulder. The saw’s conveyor belt was creeping forward, the blade biting into a block of wood still out of my view. Sawdust sprayed, but I couldn’t see what was on the conveyor belt with the hardwood.
Something, though. Oh, I’d wager anything on that. Lydia’s eyes shone with grim purpose tinctured with a glint of madness.
“But then,” I guessed, “Diamond got caught. Because your husband found out?”
Another nod from Lydia, accompanied by another implacable step nearer. But not near enough for me to do anything about her.
“And maybe,” I improvised hastily, “to save your reputation your husband promised Jim Diamond money if he would take the blame? Go to prison, not mention your involvement?”
Because if you were a good guy like Howard, and you knew you were dying, and you could do one last thing for your wife, wouldn’t you?
Her face said I’d guessed right. But there was more. “Not just my reputation. We had stockholders. Angry stockholders.”
So she hadn’t just stolen from herself. She’d stolen from others with a financial stake in the business, and she would have been prosecuted, probably even jailed.
From the corner of my eye I glimpsed a big red switchplate mounted on a support beam a couple of inches from my right hand. If I could reach it, I might be able to shut down that saw. . . .
Because my suspicions were growing about what was on the conveyor belt, headed for that deadly blade. Or rather, who was.
Lydia Duckworth took a final step toward me. Maggie still hesitated behind her, unable to help; if she made a sound Lydia might fire that damned weapon, and Maggie realized it.
“Howard promised Jim Diamond a payoff when he got out of prison. But I . . . I never promised anything,” the old woman finished.
With the result that Jim became incredibly inconvenient when he did get out . . . My fingers nearly brushed the switch, the whirling blade connected to it eating slowly but remorselessly forward.
I fought down a pang of nausea at the thought of what would happen next. Then all at once with a fresh surge of fear I realized that I couldn’t see Maggie, and I didn’t know where she’d gone.
“So when Jim demanded his payment, and threatened to expose you if you didn’t pay . . .”
“I dealt with him,” Lydia agreed flatly. “Exactly as I will deal with you.” Her hand tightened on the gun.
Ellie spoke for the first time. “I don’t understand.”
“Why kill Bill Imrie?” I asked, even though I knew. “And Kris, why would you . . .”
Lydia’s eyes narrowed. “Because he’d figured it out. I saw him on the street here in Eastport. I saw his face when he looked at me. He tried to hide it by turning away. But I knew.”
She hadn’t, actually. She couldn’t have, because Bill hadn’t figured anything out. It was only guilt that made her think he had.
Her fresh guilt, because she’d just finished murdering Jim Diamond. And later our visit to her had confirmed her notion that Imrie was onto her, that he must have told us something.
How she would have dealt with us if we hadn’t shown up here tonight I didn’t know. But I had no doubt that something would’ve come to her.
“So you came here, wrote that fake confession, and . . .”
“To make him look guilty, yes. And it can still work. My car is down the road. I can dispose of all of you . . .”
It would be a big job, but the sad part was she was probably right. There’d clearly been a struggle in the house, and Bill was bigger and younger, but she’d had the gun so she’d won.
She could win again. Maybe she’d get away with it and maybe not. But it wouldn’t matter as far as we were concerned. . . .
My fingers brushed the switch. Maggie was still nowhere in sight. But I couldn’t worry about Maggie now. Time was running out for us.
In the instant when the saw’s snarl stopped, Lydia would be startled. Distracted for a moment . . . and whatever else happened at least I would halt the progress of that blade.
I pulled the switch.
But the saw didn’t stop. Instead I got a glimpse of a frown on Lydia’s face, then of Maggie appearing suddenly again, raising something in both desperate hands . . .
. . . before all those long white fluorescent overhead lights went out at once, throwing us into pitch darkness.
The darn switch didn’t run the saw. It ran the lights.
With a harsh grunt of pain Lydia fell on top of me. Something heavily metallic—the gun, I thought, my hand scrabbling for it—clattered to the floor near my head but I couldn’t find it. And over it all the howl of that awful blade went on, cutting in the dark.
Ellie scrambled behind me, fumbled for the switch I’d hit. Bright light blazed down onto Lydia Duckworth’s crumpled body. Whatever Maggi
e had hit her with had knocked her out cold.
“Maggie, keep looking for the gun,” I said desperately. “She could—”
But Ellie cut in urgently. “Never mind her, both of you come here and help me! Hurry!”
She was running toward the saw mechanism and we ran, too, but once I got there I almost wished I hadn’t. I’d known what I might see but the ghastly reality nearly dropped me to the floor again, filling me with fright.
Kris Diamond lay atop the moving conveyor belt, strapped to a thick board with what looked like adhesive tape. Her mouth was taped but her eyes rolled in fear.
Inexorably, inch by slow inch, the conveyor moved her headfirst toward the massive whirling blade. “Can we cut her off?” Maggie shouted.
“No. Way too much tape.” Impossible to get enough of it off in time. “Where’s the freaking switch?” I yelled over the din.
All around us stood a variety of tools, crates, shelves full of lubricants and boxes of spare parts, in an order that probably had made perfect sense to Bill Imrie.
But it didn’t to me. And I saw no other power switch. Still, it had to be here somewhere. . . .
“Find something to cut off as much tape as you can,” I yelled to Ellie. “If we can’t get the saw stopped, maybe we can—”
Ellie grabbed a pair of shears from a shelf and attacked the tape. But that didn’t work, either. It was wire-reinforced tape, the shears struggling fruitlessly against it.
Meanwhile the conveyor belt just kept chugging steadily along. Beneath the table its gears rolled together, meshing like metal teeth.
“I’m going outside,” Maggie said into my ear. “There’s a power wire to the barn. I think I can throw a wooden ladder I saw out there against it, to break it.”
“Okay,” I hollered back. It was a glimmer of hope; we didn’t have time now to hunt for circuit breakers or a fuse box. Hell, we couldn’t even find the switch. “Go for it,” I added.
But then I stopped, because there behind Maggie loomed Lydia Duckworth again, her eyes dazed and her gait staggering, a trickle of blood running down her forehead.
And that dratted little gun in her hand. Damn, I’d known we should’ve stopped to look for it. . . .
Lydia grinned hideously. One of her front teeth had gotten chipped when she fell, and her lip was bloody and swollen, but she didn’t seem to be having any problem aiming the weapon.
At me. And for a long terrible moment that I firmly believed was my last one, I couldn’t speak.
But then Ellie did, from behind me. “Oh, screw this,” she pronounced distinctly, then hurled the shears she was holding at Lydia Duckworth and rushed headlong at her.
“Ellie!” I cried, but it was too late. The gun discharged, a bullet caroming with a metallic ker-whang! off the spinning saw.
Ellie drove both clenched fists hard into Lydia’s solar plexus and I heard the breath go out of the older woman with a pained-sounding oof! Both of them fell backward, Lydia’s head smacking the floor as Ellie got a knee in her midsection and finally—finally!—snatched away the gun, prying it from Lydia’s still resisting fingers.
“Tie her with something,” Ellie gasped as I searched Lydia roughly, alert for another weapon. But she had none unless you count trying to spit in my face. I jerked my head aside just in time; in the next moment my fingers found something in her sweater pocket.
It was a roll of reinforced tape, probably the same stuff she’d used to tie Kris. But there was plenty left.
“We should wrap it around your neck,” I told Lydia, tossing the roll to Ellie. Instants later Lydia Duckworth was hog-tied.
“Oh, God,” Ellie breathed, hauling herself up. “Jake . . .”
“Yeah. Maggie, get that ladder and get out there—”
But Maggie wasn’t going anywhere. “No,” she said. She held a crowbar, a big one. “There’s no time.”
Before her lay her enemy, at the mercy of the blade. Twenty seconds remained, at most; only a sliver of light showed between the teeth of that relentlessly advancing monster and the top of Kris’s head.
Kris squeezed her eyes shut, her body straining uselessly at the tape. I wanted to shut my eyes, too. Then . . .
Maggie hefted the crowbar. “I have no idea how to do this,” she said. “Or if it will work. But back off, because I think it could be bad.”
Then, lunging forward decisively, she thrust the flat end of the crowbar into the space between the meshing gears under the conveyor belt. And the result was like . . .
Well, it was like the end of the world. Metal chunks flew, sparks spewed wildly from the machinery’s innards, the wooden supports shuddered as if they might bring the barn down around us, and a hideous grinding protest of steel on steel tore out of the mechanism’s viciously clashing guts.
And then, with a series of booming thuds, the conveyor jerked backward as the motor howled, groaned in dying anguish, and failed with a sudden hot stench of burning electrical components.
Finally . . . the conveyor belt stalled and halted.
The shriek rising up in my throat dissipated, too, as Lydia Duckworth moaned. A chunk of something had hit her in the cheek, opening a horseshoe-shaped wound leaking bright red blood drops.
But no one else had been struck. In the near-silence that followed, Ellie pulled a fire extinguisher from its mount and activated it toward the smoking scrap wood the sparks had ignited.
Meanwhile I spotted another switch, this one underneath the saw. Oh, sure, now that I didn’t need it . . .
I pulled it. The humming of the motor under the saw table ceased. The blade slowed with a descending whine, its blurred teeth resolving into sharply nasty, distinct hooks.
And then it really was quiet, except for the faint tinkling sounds of hot metal cooling.
“Maggie,” I said breathlessly, but she wasn’t listening. She was staring down at Kris. I started toward her; Ellie put a hand out to stop me.
“Let her do it,” she told me.
So I just stood there as Maggie stepped toward the conveyor belt. She’d found a pair of tin snips and, as Ellie and I watched, she used them to cut the strips of wire-reinforced tape from Kris’s body.
Shakily, the other girl sat up, her eyes dull and only half alert, as if she’d begun shutting down all the important systems in advance of the killing blade.
“This is going to hurt,” Maggie said ominously, then ripped the tape from Kris’s mouth.
Kris didn’t scream. She just sat there a moment as if stunned by a hammer blow before her body sagged sideways.
Maggie caught her, looping an arm firmly around her. Then, frowning as if this part took concentration, she put the locket with the curl of Kris’s hair in it around Kris’s neck.
“Here,” she said, “it’s yours. You should have it back.”
Once we got Kris down off the saw table I muscled Lydia to her feet. “So, Lydia,” I asked her, “how soon after your husband caught onto you did he die? And if they dig him up will they find something in his body that shouldn’t be there?”
She stumbled; I hoisted her. Not gently. “Painkillers, maybe?” I went on, hearing the coldly furious edge in my own voice and not bothering to soften it. “The potent kind he might’ve overdosed on, accidentally-on-purpose?”
Her answering look was venomous.
“Or,” I continued, “that you might have given him? And since he was already terminally ill, the doctors assumed that it was suicide? Hushed it up for the family’s sake?”
Because promising money to Jim when she would’ve preferred a more permanent solution was bad enough. But God forbid her sick, meddlesome husband should add insult to injury by, for instance, becoming even more ill, maybe even lapsing into a semiconscious state.
A talkative semiconscious state. And in her gaze I found a look of such virulent rage, I knew my theory was correct.
She’d killed her husband, too.
“Okay, Lydia,” I said, suddenly dead tired. We reached the front lawn of
the farmhouse where the reek of burnt wires overlay the sweet smell of fresh-turned earth. In the distance sirens whooped, coming from town. Cherry beacons whirled on Route 190, speeding toward us.
Bereft, the tame goats muttered sadly from inside their wire enclosure. “It’s over now,” I told Lydia.
But it wasn’t.
Not quite.
Much later—
—after Bob Arnold had arrived and had summoned an ambulance and the state police, and after Wade and George had been phoned and reassured that we were quite fine and didn’t need reinforcements, and after a great number of questions had been asked and answered, many of them several times over—
—we drove home again to my beloved old house in Eastport.
I’d put the top down, the salt air scouring the burnt taste of fear mingled with fury from my mouth. A full moon was rising, the night sky a milky bowl over our heads and the bay a sheet of silver.
“I don’t understand,” Maggie said. “If it wasn’t Jim Diamond or Bill Imrie or Lydia, and it wasn’t Kris, then who wrote those dreadful notes?”
I glanced in the rearview. Hollow-eyed, Kris met my gaze, then looked away. She’d refused medical attention, and the police had their hands full with the murder scene and Imrie’s body.
So after consultation with Bob Arnold, they’d let her come with us. “Think about it,” I said. “Lydia stole the skillet the day she came to my house.”
The sheer audacity of it still amazed me. “She saw Bella working there, recognized her from having seen her at Jim’s trial, and realized that Bella’s own house might be empty.”
I stopped a moment, imagining the plan springing almost full-blown into Lydia’s mind. A truly ruthless solution to the Jim Diamond problem . . .
“As it happened,” I told them, “Bella’s house was empty; Kris was out with Sam. Lydia knew just by looking at it that there would be a key under that statue on the porch, the same way I had. And she needed a weapon that belonged to Bella.”
What she must’ve been feeling when we showed up at her door, I couldn’t imagine. But she’d carried it off beautifully.
“So she went in,” I continued, “found one, and took it. She knew that combined with those notes, if the police could track the weapon back to Bella, they’d figure she was guilty.”