by Gail Lukasik
“I’ll see what I can do, ma’am.” She was professional enough not to comment on my involvement in yet another murder case.
I closed the phone and shoved it in my bag, grabbed the branch and stood up shakily, nearing falling backward onto the bench. I waited a moment, then started down the trail.
“I knew you’d solve it,” Rich said, walking slowly beside me. “How’d you figure out it was Julian? Why don’t you lean on me?”
I could feel the adrenaline fading, a profound exhaustion overtaking me as the pain ratcheted up. Reluctantly, I let him put his arm around my waist and threw the branch away. I had no fight left in me.
“I didn’t suspect him, not really. My focus was on Harper and Nina. Julian panicked. And if he’d killed me, he would have gotten away with it.”
“And me,” Rich added, stopping a moment.
“And you what?” Then I realized what he was saying. “Well, you were acting strangely.”
His arm tightened around my waist, pulling me in too close.
“Listen, Romeo, don’t push your luck,” I said sharply.
He eased up on his grip. “I didn’t want you to fall, that’s all.”
“Too late for that,” I said, suddenly laughing hysterically in spite of myself.
“You okay?” he asked as I continued laughing.
“My ankle’s messed up, I jumped off a one-story house, my windpipe was almost crushed and I was almost burned alive. Oh, I almost forgot the best part. My rescuer tries to cop a feel.”
He started to say something, then stopped. I could feel his body stiffen. Then he began to shake with laughter. “Guilty as charged.”
After that, the only sounds were the sirens growing louder, punctuated by the waves pounding the rocks as if they were beating them into submission.
When we reached the grounds, the fairy lights were out and the patio area was empty.
“You want me to drive you to the hospital to have someone look at your ankle?” he asked. “I promise, no monkey business.” He put his hands up in mock surrender.
“That’s what interns are for,” I joked. “Bob can take me.”
I started toward the apartment quad and stopped. “Did you tie Salinger up to the road sign?”
He nodded.
“And sneaking around my cabin at night, was that you too?”
“Someone had to look out for you,” he said, crossing his arms defensively. “In my gut I knew Nate was murdered. And that it had something to do with Danielle Moyer.”
“Because of the mannequin and the playbill,” I said.
“Yeah, and what Bob told me about Nina accusing Nate of killing someone. That someone being Danielle. By then you were involved, and I felt responsible.”
“You should have said something instead of sneaking around scaring me half to death,” I chided him.
He chuckled. “C’mon. No way you would have let me keep an eye on you.”
He was right. “Thanks anyway.”
“Sure thing,” he answered.
Getting up the apartment stairs drained the last of my energy.
As I opened the apartment door, I was surprised to see Bob slouched on the sofa, his feet on the coffee table, engrossed in a TV program. Hadn’t he heard the sirens? I thought for sure he would have left to see what was going on.
“Didn’t you hear the sirens?” I asked him, hopping to the sofa, then plopping down ungracefully.
He dragged his eyes away from the TV. “Yeah, I heard them. Watch this crazy dude on this reality show about exterminators. He’s going into the barn. Biggest wasp nest I ever saw. And all he has is bug spray. Cool.” He continued watching. Then suddenly he took a few quick sniffs. “Hey, you smell like smoke. Were you in a fire or something?”
“You could say that. How come you didn’t go see what was going on outside?”
“Wow, there’s no pleasing you. You said stay put, no matter what. So I stayed put.”
I took the remote from the coffee table, turned off the TV and said, “We’re going for a ride. Make sure you bring your driver’s license.”
“Where we going?”
“The hospital.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: MONDAY, JULY 24
From behind the blue and pink striped curtain I heard raised voices and running feet.
“Possible overdose,” a nurse said as she ran past my bay, where I was sequestered on a hospital bed in the ER. I was waiting for transport to radiology for an MRI to see if the tendon in my ankle was torn. The x-ray they’d taken showed no broken bones.
It was past one a.m. and after a cursory exam I’d been given a sedative, easing the chronic pain and allowing me to doze in a fitful sleep. Every so often, I jolted awake, flinging my arms around at imaginary bats, gasping for air. Relief flooded through me as I opened my eyes to the bright overhead fluorescents. I wasn’t inside the darkness, dying. Smoke wasn’t rising around me, filling my lungs. And bats weren’t flying at me. I was in Bay Hospital. Safe.
I heard wheels traveling fast toward me. “I’ve got a pulse,” someone said, “but it’s weak.” Then the commotion moved away and, down the hall, a door opened and shut, then the flickering quiet of the ER returned.
Suddenly, the curtain was pulled back and I let out a yelp.
“Sorry.” Chet clutched his police hat in his hands, looking decidedly uncomfortable. “That was Finch they’re working on. Overdose.” He cocked his head toward the ER station. “How you doing there?”
“Nothing’s broken, but the tendon in my ankle might be torn. Finch overdosed?”
“Yeah. I should have seen that comin’, when he started talking all crazy. Saying stuff like ‘Don’t let me be mad.’ Then he runs off to the bathroom and locks the door.”
“O, let me not be mad,” I said.
“Something like that.” He stared at me in confusion.
“It’s from King Lear. You know. Shakespeare.” I giggled. The sedative was making me wacky. “Is he gonna make it?” I asked, trying to control the hysteria bubbling up inside me.
He shook his head. “Don’t know. He downed that there oxycontin before I could bust open the bathroom door. Dumb bastard.”
“Where did this happen?” Maybe it was the sedative, but I was having trouble following Chet’s story.
“Arrogant scumbag was at that cast party at that what-chamacallit house. I asked him to push up his shirtsleeve and just like you said, his arm was scratched up pretty good. That’s when he hightails it to the bathroom, locks himself in and swallows them pills. He must have had them on him.”
A sick thought came to me. With me out of the way, was he going to finish avenging Danielle’s death by killing Nina?
“I showed the ER doc here the bottle. There were about twenty-one pills left. I counted them before I handed the bottle over. Now, here’s the thing. Finch had a scrip for them pills all right. But it was for twenty pills. Considering he’d taken enough to cause him to black out, it’s pretty clear-cut he was stockpiling them oxycontins. Soon as the final tox results on Ryan come in, we got our murderer. These killers always make a mistake.”
Through my drugged haze, I realized what Chet was saying. “You knew all along Ryan died from an overdose of oxycontin, didn’t you?”
Chet shrugged his massive shoulders. “Not for sure. And it might have been an accidental overdose. Not murder. We weren’t sticking our necks out on this one. And I didn’t need you”—he pointed his finger at my face—“mucking everything up. What with Ryan being this celebrity and all.”
“Did Lydia know? Is that why she was so stressed out and wouldn’t tell me anything? She told that PopQ guy Ryan died of a heart attack. She was so guilt-ridden.”
“She suspected drugs were involved. I told her she couldn’t say anything until we had the tox results. She understood.”
“Finch must have thought she knew something, though. Why else would he try to kill her?”
Chet looked away.
“What aren’t
you telling me?” I pressed.
“No clue why that scumbag attacked Lydia. Now what’s this about Finch and Brownie Lawrence?”
After I told him that Finch had confessed to killing Brownie, Chet scratched his head, perplexed. “You’re gonna have to testify to that unless we can get a confession out of Finch. That is, if he lives.”
“No problem. Now are you going to tell me what you’re holding back? C’mon, Chet. I was almost killed. Don’t you think I deserve to know the whole story? Lydia is my friend too.”
He leaned down by my ear. “You didn’t hear this from me.” I felt the warmth of his breath oddly comforting. “Lydia admitted she and Ryan smoked a joint before that there class.”
He stood up and arched his back. Now Lydia’s guilt made sense. When Ryan collapsed, she was probably too out of it to react as she’d been trained. She blamed herself for his death.
“He would have died anyway. She couldn’t have saved him,” I said.
The ER doc came up behind Chet. “Can I see you a minute, Officer?”
Chet and the doctor stepped away. All I could hear was mumbling.
When Chet returned he said, “Looks like you’re testifying.”
“Finch died?”
“Yup. Doc couldn’t resuscitate him. At least he saved the state the cost of a trial.” Chet squeezed my shoulder reassuringly. “Need a ride home?”
“Thanks, no. My ride’s out in the waiting room. What about Ken?”
“Soon as you’re up to it, come by the station and give a formal statement. That’ll get the ball rolling.”
“I’ll be by tomorrow.”
“Now why did I know you’d say that?”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: THREE MONTHS LATER
It was a windless sunny day, the October air crisp and clean. Bundled in sweaters, Lydia and I sat on the cabin’s wood deck and listened to the crows cawing to each other. With every caw, Salinger growled but didn’t run off. Attentive and loyal, she sat between us, giving what comfort she could. I was doing the same thing. I’d invited Lydia to stay with me until she was strong enough to resume her old life. When that would be was hard to tell.
“It’s so . . . so . . . so . . . What’s the word I want?” She stared off into the woods, her voice wistful.
I waited for her to remember. I’d been waiting a lot since she moved in here two weeks ago. “Don’t rush her, don’t finish her sentences,” the physical therapist had advised me. “Let her find her own words in her own time.”
“Peaceful, that’s it. Peaceful.”
Despite myself, I let out a sigh. “More wine?” I offered, raising the bottle. She was finally off the steroids and narcotics, and we were celebrating.
“Why not?”
I refreshed her glass and then mine.
“Is this the Reserve you bought from the winery?”
“Pretty good, huh?”
She tilted the glass back and forth several times, watching the wine coat the glass before she took a sip. “Yummy.”
Yummy was something the old Lydia would have said. But I knew the old Lydia was all but gone. I had only to look at the slight indentation in her skull, hear the hesitation in her speech.
“Chet told me Ken Albright’s been cleared of all charges.”
“Yeah, and he’s decided to stay on at Marshalls Point after all.”
“And Brownie’s family? I can’t remember. Did you find them?”
Over the months of her recovery, we’d avoided talking about the murders and her assault. I was waiting for her to bring it up when she was ready.
“Not his mother. She died about ten years ago. But I located Brownie’s sister and told her everything. I wanted her to know that before he was murdered, he’d turned his life around.”
The bitter irony of Brownie’s death still haunted me. He’d survived Vietnam, a lifetime of substance abuse, had finally gotten his life back on track, and was murdered because he saw something he shouldn’t have. Brownie had been collateral damage, and he didn’t deserve that fate.
A blue jay let out a loud squawk as it landed in a nearby birch tree. We watched it hop from limb to limb, complaining, then finally settle on a high branch that shuddered under the jay’s weight.
“And you didn’t forget,” I assured Lydia.
“You’re a good friend,” she said.
“Hardly,” I scoffed.
“No, don’t say that. That madman almost killed you too. I should have told you everything.”
I waited.
“I did a bad thing,” she continued. “No one knows about it. But I have to tell someone. It’s been weighing on me.”
“I can keep a secret,” I assured her.
“I know you can. Well, here it is. After Nate and I had that joint—it’s like yesterday. I can see him so clearly that morning. Anyway, I thought the joint would calm him down. But it didn’t. He asked me for a piece of paper and a pen. Then he made me witness what he wrote. I didn’t want to. But I was high and not thinking straight. So I signed it.”
“What did you sign?” She seemed to have lost her train of thought.
She turned toward me. Her eyes looked beseechingly into mine. “Nate revoked the donation to the Bayside Theater. I didn’t want to sign it. But he was so insistent.” Again, she trailed off.
“What happened to that paper?” I asked, thinking probably that’s what Julian had been looking for in her studio the night he hit me over the head.
“I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet.”
“When did you do that?”
“At Sarah’s place. After I called 9-1-1, I took the paper and stuffed it in my yoga top. I knew Nate was already dead. And the BT needed a new theater. What difference did it make?”
Had Nate confided in Julian that he was going to withdraw the money? Was that why Julian had to kill him that morning? I’d never know. Just as I’d never know whether Julian’s revenge included murdering Nina. Had Julian suspected Nate had written his wishes down and possibly told Lydia? Another unanswered question.
Lydia’s hand was shaking so badly, she put her wine glass on the table. “Then later, I thought I might have done the wrong thing. But then it was too late to fix it.”
“You did what you thought was right. Julian was bent on revenge. You were an innocent bystander.”
“As were you,” she said, touching the side of her head briefly.
“Ken Albright’s been freed. You’re getting stronger every day. There’s no point in telling Chet about this.”
Lydia smiled and touched my hand. “You’re a good friend, Leigh.”
“I’m working on it.”
“So what did you decide? Are you buying the cabin?”
My settlement from the divorce was safely tucked away in my bank account, so I could afford to buy the cabin. But I was aching for something new, something that was mine alone, something I could build from the ground up.
“Still weighing my options.”
Just then the blue jay darted low over our heads. I watched its brilliant blue body disappear like the last note of music echoing into silence.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gail Lukasik was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and was a ballerina with the Cleveland Civic Ballet Company. Lisel Mueller described her book of poems, Landscape Toward a Proper Silence, as a “splendid collection.” In 2002 she was awarded an Illinois Arts Council award for her work. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught writing and literature. She writes the Leigh Girard mystery series. Kirkus Reviews described her second Leigh Girard mystery, Death’s Door, as “fast-paced and literate, with a strong protagonist and a puzzle that keeps you guessing.” Kirkus Reviews called The Lost Artist, her first stand-alone mystery, “a highly intriguing tale loaded with suspense and historical interest.”
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