Virtue Falls

by Christina Dodd

  Disappointment sighed through her, then irritation.

  What had she expected? It was a fuse box, not a treasure chest.

  On the inside of the door, affixed with yellowing tape, was a piece of paper with a basic outline of the fuses and what each fuse controlled: kitchen, back porch, living room, bedrooms, bathroom. Pretty basic: most people wanted to know which fuse to flip when the lights blinked out or the hair dryer wouldn’t work.

  But this was no ordinary, cheap piece of paper. It was vellum, thick, made from cotton, used for blueprints and … drawings. Drawings like the ones in her album.

  She loosened the tape, took it and her bag, and stepped into the bedroom, into the sunlight. She turned over the paper—and there it was.

  The watercolor had been first sketched in pencil, then filled in the palest of pastels. The artist had created a masterpiece of waves, sand, a four-year-old girl with a head of hair so white and fine, it looked like a puff of dandelion seeds … and a luminous, curvaceous young woman kneeling beside her, showing her the wonder of a seashell. Above them, a wash of pale blue sky curved down to blend into the horizon.

  Elizabeth’s breath caught.

  This was art. This was inspiration.

  This was love.

  And the scrawled name at the bottom told her everything she needed to know.

  Bradley Hoff.

  Bradley Hoff had loved her mother.

  Bradley Hoff had killed her mother.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

  At the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, Elizabeth lifted her head and called, “Joe?”

  But the man who stepped into the door of the bedroom was not Joe.

  Of course not.

  Bradley Hoff stood there in blue jeans so worn they were faded white, a white T-shirt splattered with pastel shades of oil paints, running shoes … and carrying a long pair of shiny scissors like a blade.

  Her heart began to thump hard in her chest. “Where’s Joe?”

  “He’s outside.” He smiled, a crooked smile of great charm. “He, um, took a blow to the head.”

  Had she managed to get Joe killed?

  “How did you know I would be here?” she asked.

  “I put the note in your bag.”

  “But … Garik’s handwriting.” His distinctive handwriting. She knew it so well.

  “I’m an artist.” Bradley said simply. “I can create lines. I got Jacobsen’s phone number, studied how he made his numbers, then I practiced as I handed it out to the fine, upstanding citizens of Virtue Falls. By the time I wrote the note, I was pretty good. Don’t you agree?”

  She couldn’t believe her own gullibility. “You made me think Garik had written that note. You put it in my bag. You lured me here.” She had to ask. She had to hear him say the words. “Why would you do that?”

  He looked almost young. He looked fit. And his blue eyes sparkled with anticipation. In a voice saturated with confidence, he said, “Elizabeth, you know the answer.”

  She did. She had always known the answer. She had feared this moment all her life. “You killed my mother. And you intend to kill me.”

  “I had to kill your mother. She betrayed me.” Bradley’s mouth quivered; he looked like a man wounded and deceived.

  “Betrayed you.” His arrogance staggered Elizabeth. “How?”

  “I seduced her. I taught her what it was to love. I kept our affair secret. I let her continue on with her sham of a marriage.” As if wiping away a tear, he put his hand to his cheek … his dry cheek. “All I required from her was that she be my muse.”

  “Your muse … why would you kill your muse?”

  “She phoned me. She said to come here. I did. I imagined all kinds of things. I imagined she was going to say she would leave Charles and you, and come away with me, and I would paint her every day of my life.” Bradley sighed with remembered pleasure. Then his smile faded. “Instead, she told me … she told me it was over.” Twenty-three years later, his eyes flashed with remembered rage.

  “So you slit her throat.”

  “Slit her throat? No!” He made a wide, slashing motion. The silver scissors glinted. “I committed a magnificent crime of passion! I ripped her throat open. I tore her guts out. She tried to crawl away. Tried to crawl toward the front door. I stabbed her in the back, in the heart.” He whispered, “She tried to crawl toward the front door. Do you know why?”

  Elizabeth swallowed. She nodded.

  “No, you don’t.” He was indignant. “It took me years before I realized what she tried to do.”

  “The logic is irrefutable.” Elizabeth was proud of her calm manner. “I was in the bedroom, and she was trying to lead you away from me.”

  That intense gaze flashed up to hers. “Yes. You’re right. She loved you more than me.”

  “No kidding.” Elizabeth held her bag in her left hand. She held the small watercolor clasped between two fingers of her right hand.

  “She was going to return to your father, to that milksop marriage with a man who was good to her. She didn’t understand. She was my muse.” In an extravagantly romantic motion, he pushed the casual droop of hair off his forehead. “Do you know the kind of work I did while she loved me?”

  “I think so.” Elizabeth showed him the watercolor, and in a voice imbued with scorn, she said, “This is not some feeble Nature’s Artist crap. This is good.”

  “I don’t ever paint crap!” He flip-flopped from one emotion to another, from brokenhearted agony to violent rage, from self-righteous smugness to simmering resentment.

  No matter what she did, she was in trouble.

  Garik didn’t know she was here.

  Joe was hurt, or worse.

  She had to save herself.

  Elizabeth had him off-balance. She had to keep him off-balance. “Really?” she said. “What you paint now isn’t crap? Really?” Her words dripped scorn, and she kept the watercolor turned toward him. “Because when I study this as opposed to that commercial stuff you now do, I can see the difference. You had feelings for the scene, for the subjects. You were obsessed.”

  He stared at the watercolor, breathing hard.

  “You’re still obsessed. With this subject. But not the pretty watercolors. Not the paintings of Virtue Falls and the beach and the sunsets. You know the difference,” she said softly. “You do. You see the difference between the passion that permeates this watercolor … and that crap you paint now.”

  “Don’t call it crap!” he shouted in an explosion of resentment and anger. “People love that crap!”

  “Crap! Crap! Crap! Your new paintings are very pretty. Pretty.” She paced toward him. “Pretty! And crap!”

  When she was almost in reach, he grabbed for her.

  She jumped back. “If my mother saw what you were painting now, what would she say?”

  His lips compressed. His head lowered as if he was a bull ready to attack.

  “She would be ashamed of you.” Elizabeth pounded at his most vulnerable spot—his ego. “After the earthquake, you wanted to kill my father. You came to Virtue Falls to kill him.”

  “The online article said you were visiting him, that you were connecting with him. Sooner or later, the two of you would get together and somehow you were going to figure it out. Who I was. What I’d done.”

  “Why did you care?”

  “I’m the smart one. I’m in charge.”

  Surprise! He was a control freak. “For the keys to the facility, you attacked Yvonne in the parking lot. But you did it the night before you arrived. How?”

  “You are so astute, Elizabeth.” Bradley seemed almost to admire her.

  She thought he probably did. If he defeated an intelligent opponent, in his own mind, he was even grander and more important.

  This man lived to be important.

  He said, “I met a man in Portland at one of my art shows. He bragged about the small, unlicensed helicopter he had built for himself. He bragged that he could fly it low, under the rad
ar, and never got caught. He told me that for one of my paintings, I could rent it. So I did. I rented it, and him, and flew here. The stupid thing leaked fuel all the way here, and all the way back.” Bradley wrinkled his nose as he remembered the stench.

  “Yes. Yvonne said her attacker smelled like fuel.”

  “Did she? Good thing I killed her, then.”

  “God, yes … but the pilot knows about you?” Which would be too much to hope for …

  And was, for Bradley said, “Don’t be ridiculous. He knew too much, and I had to kill him.”

  He made murder sound so simple, so logical.

  Keep him talking. Keep him talking. “What does your wife say?”

  “My wife? Who? Oh … Vivian?” He fingered the tip of his scissors. “Vivian says nothing.”

  Elizabeth didn’t like his tone, his little smile. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember the legend of Blackbeard’s wives? He married many, and one by one they disappeared. Finally he married a smart woman. He gave her the household keys, and told her she could go into any room in his mansion, except one. She couldn’t resist. She unlocked that door, and found the heads of all his other wives hanging there, their faces frozen forever in the death grimace.”

  The story made Elizabeth’s skin crawl. “Vivian discovered your stash of … heads?”

  “Not quite. She broke into the back room of my studio, and saw my souvenirs and my paintings.” He laughed a little. “It was so interesting to catch her in there, to coax her into confessing. All these years, I thought she was nothing but a fool, a tool, someone for me to use. But she knew what I was. She knew what I was doing.”

  “So you killed your wife? Because she knew that you’d killed my mother?”

  With deceptive simplicity, he said, “Vivian knew that I killed them all.”

  Elizabeth froze, held her breath until she was faint, felt the fear spread from her gut to her cool, numb fingertips.

  “The women. The blondes. The mothers.” Those weird blue eyes blazed with evil delight.

  He was admitting to everything. Everything Garik had told her. Everything she had feared.

  Elizabeth took a deep breath. She had to remain conscious. She had to be smart. She had to survive. She pretended not to know. “You’ve been killing blond mothers?”

  “And their children.”

  “You’ve been killing me.” Garik had told her. She knew the truth. But she hadn’t understood. Not until now, when she could see Bradley’s pleasure, and his determination.

  With chilling precision, he said, “That day, twenty-three years ago, I left you alive. I have never made the same mistake again.”

  “The children. You’re killing … little children?” Tears leaked from the corners of Elizabeth’s eyes. Tears of grief. Tears of fear. “Because … because you didn’t kill me?”

  “You saw me. You saw me when I was talking to your mother, kissing her, seducing her.” His lips curled back from his teeth. “Wretched little girl, always there at the worst times. Misty finally, finally took you to play group twice a week so we could make love, and so I could paint her. Then, that day, when she was telling me it was over, I saw you peeking around the corner. You wretched, nosy kid…”

  “I did see you kill my mother.” The knowledge made her stagger. She had actually seen him kill her mother. Yet still … she didn’t remember.

  She looked at the watercolor. This fragment of memory was all she had.

  “Yes. But in the heat of action, I forgot about you. Because I had to kill her, because I grieved at what I had to do.” As if a tear would make his viciousness acceptable, Bradley cried a single, real tear. Then in a prosaic tone, he added, “Because I had to get rid of her body first.”

  Elizabeth could see the moment in her mind. “When you came back to get me, it was too late. Daddy had already found me. The police were already here. It was too late.”

  “It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She was dead. Misty was dead. My muse … was dead.” Now real grief twisted Bradley’s face.

  “You’re missing the point. You murdered her.”

  “I did what I had to do!”

  “You killed my mother … and your paintings were never the same.” Elizabeth allowed the watercolor to drop.

  As if he couldn’t take his gaze away, he watched it flutter to the floor.

  She slid her hand into her bag and brought out her knife.

  In a mournful tone, he said, “After all this is over, never again will I perform work worthy of my genius.”

  “Oh, how you mourn your genius.” She allowed her sarcasm to overflow.

  He yanked his gaze up to hers.

  “You killed my mother for your paintings. You killed blond women because they remind you of my mother. You killed children because”—in a burst of fury, Elizabeth yelled—“you’re a fucking coward who destroys people who are smaller and weaker than you.”

  Bradley shook as if an earthquake rattled him from the inside out. Those blue eyes grew blindly manic. Lifting the scissors, he rushed at her fast and hard.

  She swung aside, slammed her bag into his throat, and thrust her knife into his belly.

  “Bitch!” Bradley shouted.

  She dropped her bag, left her knife in his gut, and ran.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

  Moving fast, Elizabeth rounded the corner into the living room—and Bradley tackled her from behind. She screamed as she went down, then hit flat and hard on the bare chipboard floor.

  Her lips split. Her breath slammed out of her lungs.

  He landed on top of her.

  She put her hands down to push herself up.

  His hand slashed down over top of hers.

  Agony.

  A pair of scissors pinned her to the floor. His pair of scissors … through her palm.

  Blood rose from the wound. Blood pooled on the floor.

  She couldn’t believe—this was wrong. Impossible. Her nightmares come to life. She was helpless against the man who had slaughtered her mother.

  She screamed and scrambled to reach for the handles.

  He slammed her to the floor again, his knee against her back. He grabbed her jaw, twisted it around until he wrenched her neck, until she could see him out of the corners of her eyes. Said, “I’ve been waiting for twenty-three years to do this.”

  No. He would not kill her. She wouldn’t allow it.

  He yanked the scissors out of her hand.

  Agony. She screamed again.

  He repeated the words he’d said to her once before, “Let’s cut off your pretty hair. We don’t want to get blood in it.”

  She felt a snip close to her ear. Blond strands drifted to the floor.

  He placed the points of the scissors against her eye.

  And with her bloody hand, she reached behind her, grabbed his hair, and slammed his head forward and her head back.

  She felt it; his face broke against her skull.

  Now he screamed.

  Driven by pain, by desperation, she bucked like a wild horse, throwing him off. She flipped over, and smacked the side of his head, over his ear, with her flat of her palm, driving air into his ear canal.

  For one moment, his face went slack. He fell backward.

  She rolled, got halfway to her feet.

  He kicked her leg out from underneath her.

  She caught a glimpse of his bloody face, of his eyes, insane with fury.

  Insane. Yes. And livid.

  Then, from the side, she heard a roar.

  A male body crashed into Bradley, knocking him away and tumbling him across the room.

  * * *

  Elizabeth caught a glimpse of Garik as he slammed Bradley against the wall. Garik punched him, fast and hard, in the face, the chest, the belly.

  But hurt as he was, Bradley still fought.

  Insane.

  His insanity gave him strength and cunning—and he still held the scissors. He knew Garik’s weakness, the ribs still unh
ealed, and he dodged and slashed, going for Garik’s side again and again.

  Every time he did, Garik fell back, gasping.

  Every time Garik faltered, he returned to fight again.

  Never taking her gaze from the two men, she tried to stand.

  Her knee collapsed.

  She crawled her way to the wall, used it to support herself as she inched to her feet. She was bleeding. From her hand, from her face. Blood slid down the back of her neck.

  She looked around, found a two-by-four torn from a boarded-up window. Picking it up was torment. Lifting it over her head, she turned—in time to see Bradley rush Garik. Like a bullfighter, Garik stepped aside, gave him a push, and slammed him into the wall.

  The scissors clanged to the floor.

  Bradley crumpled, unconscious.

  Elizabeth dropped the two-by-four. She slid to her knees in relief.

  Garik checked Bradley for a pulse. “He’s still alive. Damn it.” He stood over him, fists clenched, jaw clenched, expression tight with wrath and frustration. “I ought to finish the job.”

  “No. You can’t. You really can’t.” Elizabeth started crying—from pain, from relief, from a frantic worry that would not ease as long as Bradley Hoff breathed free. “If you do that, you’d never work for the FBI again.”

  “I don’t care about that. That’s over, anyway. And someone’s got to kill him. He’s evil, and he deserves to die.” With his foot, Garik pushed at Bradley’s limp body. He sighed in disgust, and turned away. Coming to Elizabeth, he knelt in front of her, and took her in his arms. “But you’re right. I can’t do it. No matter what kind of garbage he is, I can’t kill an unconscious man.”

  Elizabeth cried on Garik’s chest.

  He murmured softly to her as he dug out his phone. “I’m calling nine-one-one and telling them to send an ambulance. You’ve got blood all over you.”

  “You’re bleeding, too.”

  “He opened some of the stitches. What did he do to you?” Lifting her chin, he looked at her face. “You must have hit your face, and that looks painful. But where is the blood coming from?”