Bones Behind the Wheel

by E. J. Copperman

  But Maxie wasn’t helping by being more conspicuous than I wanted her to be, which was pretty much par for the course with Maxie. “You’re not shooting anybody,” she said to the man who couldn’t hear her.

  Harriet did take note, however, and flew over toward Maxie. “Yeah he is, and I’ll make sure of it.”

  There were so many questions unanswered, like why Herman had been in a competitor’s car and why it had been necessary for Darlene to blackmail Bill into his role in this bizarre business when she knew how to run excavation equipment herself. But there wasn’t going to be time to ask them and not get answers from Darlene. Maxie had called the question somehow just as the light was fading in the backyard.

  Maxie was, in fact, raising her fists to take on the advancing Harriet when they became too difficult for me to see. I thought I saw Everett head toward the shed, presumably to find something he could use as a weapon. Bill was apparently having the same difficulty, although without the added problem of trying to get a fix on transparent people. He started flailing around with the gun in his right hand, variously aiming at Josh, Katrina and me and causing each of us to back off when it seemed he was going to fire.

  “There’s no time to get them into the shed!” Darlene yelled at him. “Shoot now!”

  Something hit me hard from the left side and I felt myself falling to the ground, where I landed ungracefully but unharmed. I heard the report of the gun and then Josh’s voice in my ear, whispering, “Stay down. Roll around so there’s never a stationary target.”

  “What about Katrina?” I asked as quietly as I could.

  “I’ll see.” And then his arms weren’t around me anymore. Which wasn’t as good.

  I did as he said and rolled back and forth on the grass, not giving a moment’s thought to how I was going to get those stains out of relatively new denim and a cotton blouse, which hopefully was being somewhat protected by my fake leather jacket. All the time my mind was focusing on Josh and where he might be. Aside from the small area around the back door the yard was pretty much pitch black now. Seeing anything more than a couple of feet away was a useless exercise.

  But I could hear things: Mostly the sound of struggle. Maxie and Harriet must have been going at it pretty seriously. Josh said something to Katrina, who it seemed was trying to advance toward Bill, about hitting the deck. Paul said something about the rope and Everett answered with an, “Affirmative” that really didn’t help me understand any better. Darlene kept telling Bill to shoot but the one round was the only bullet I’d heard go by. Bill cursed once and then I heard something hit the ground in his direction. I squinted and could barely make out the gun.

  That was enough; I had to crawl toward the weapon and secure it and then I could take control of the situation. I had made it about three feet on my knees when the gun was raised from the turf by a woman’s hand I took to be Darlene’s, and that wasn’t good. I froze, not wanting to give Darlene an audible clue about my whereabouts. Then much of the sound—except for Maxie grunting a lot in her struggle with Harriet—died down.

  And I heard the sound of wood breaking and saw flashlights gathering from somewhere. Maybe fifteen feet away came the desperate cry, “Mom!”

  I wanted to leap up then and scream at Melissa to get out of here, to stop being in danger. She was my only priority and I was petrified that she might somehow find herself in front of the gun in Darlene’s hand. But something kept me on the ground and stopped me from screaming out at her, and it wasn’t just that I was upset with my daughter for disobeying me and staying here when she should be on her way home.

  The voice wasn’t Melissa’s.

  “Mom!” she shouted again. “Put down the gun. Now!”

  Sgt. Theresa Menendez, holding her four-battery flashlight straight at her left shoulder and her police-issued weapon in her right, marched into the backyard with five other flashlight beams to her sides and behind her. I was focused on finding Melissa, but she did not seem to be present, which was a huge relief. Meanwhile Menendez was doing her best to contain her mother, Darlene.

  “Drop the weapon and put your hands behind your head, Mom. Do it right now.” Menendez’s voice was firm but she was trying to sound soothing. “Let’s not make this worse than it has to be.”

  “You don’t understand,” Darlene told her. I could see her in profile because of the angle of the flashlights. “They’re trying to say you murdered your father.”

  I could hear the conflict in Menendez’s voice as Josh crawled over to me and placed himself between me and the gun. He held me closely. I felt my neck relax a little. Maybe we weren’t going to get shot. But maybe Darlene was. “I did, Mom,” Menendez said. “I was a little girl and it was an accident but I shot him. I don’t remember it really, but that’s what happened. And we’re going to have to deal with that, but there are a lot of officers here now and if you don’t drop your gun we’re not going to get the chance. So please. Mom. Put down the gun.”

  Darlene twisted quickly, like a spasm, and when she did I saw that Bill was already in handcuffs and putting up no fight at all. I couldn’t see any of the ghosts because flashlights just go right through them but I heard Maxie grunting a little less. Then she said, “Now be a good girl and go back to being dead.”

  Harriet, doing the ghost equivalent of breathing heavily, said nothing. But I could hear her straining in some way and I’ll admit that gave me some satisfaction. It was one thing to try and kill me, but to lie to Paul on the Ghosternet? Unforgiveable.

  “You don’t understand,” Darlene protested as Bill was led out of the backyard. “They would have taken you away from me!”

  Her daughter clearly knew that letting Darlene slide into a breakdown would not end well for anybody. It was up to Menendez to talk her mother down and she had to do it quickly. The other cops didn’t have the same kind of attachment to the woman holding the gun.

  “Maybe, but they can’t do that now,” she said. “But you need to focus on now, Mom. You need to put that gun down—very carefully—on the ground and we’ll take a ride to the station to work this all out, okay? Put the gun down. Right now.”

  Darlene looked at her daughter. “Terry. It’s you.” She started to turn toward Menendez.

  “Don’t move, Mom.” The voice was firm but insistent. “Don’t turn with the gun in your hand. These officers don’t want you to do that. They want you to put it down on the grass.”

  “I have a shot,” I heard one of the officers say.

  “Don’t take it,” Menendez said with authority, although I was certain she had no jurisdiction at all outside of Harbor Haven. “She’s going to put the gun down.”

  “What?” Darlene asked. I couldn’t see her face very well at this angle but in profile her left eye looked profoundly confused.

  “Mom. Do you see the gun in your hand?” I thought it clear Menendez had gone through some negotiation training.

  Darlene looked at her hand. “This one?”

  “Yes. Don’t move it. Don’t do anything except put it right down on the grass, slowly. Okay? Then it’ll be all right, I promise.”

  Darlene looked at her daughter and there was no way to know if she comprehended even where she was standing at that moment. She didn’t move or speak for a long pause. But then she said, “All right,” and bent over to place the gun softly on the ground in front of her. “Was that okay?” she asked Menendez.

  Theresa Menendez exhaled as she holstered her weapon and carefully picked up the one on the grass using a ballpoint pen. She immediately put the pistol into an evidence bag from her pocket.

  “Yes, Mom,” she said. “You did just fine.”

  Chapter 35

  “Did I or did I not tell you to keep your nose out of this investigation?” Lt. Anita McElone shook her head at my sheer idiocy and sat down uncomfortably on an easy chair in my den. I hasten to point out that it wasn’t the chair or my den that was uncomfortable; McElone just won’t ever be at ease in the guesthouse. I’ve com
e to accept that and even, if I’m being honest, to find some amusement in it.

  “You always tell me that,” I countered. “How am I supposed to know when I should listen to you?”

  The detective let out a deep theatrical sigh and broke eye contact as if just looking at me was too aggravating to consider. She looked instead at my mother and asked, “Was she always like this?”

  “Oh yes,” Mom said with a pride in her voice I don’t think McElone had been trying to elicit. “She’s so smart.”

  You didn’t think Mom was going to get that call from Melissa and not come back to the house with my father, did you?

  I had instructed the ghosts to leave the lieutenant alone and so far they were acting accordingly. But Maxie had that look in her eye indicating she was more interested in finalizing the kitchen design than having to deal with all this cop stuff. Still, McElone had shown up to get statements from Josh and me, it was late at night and Maxie understood that unnerving the lieutenant was only going to prolong the process. She was, in a Maxie kind of way, being reasonable.

  Melissa had called my mother from the truck while she was waiting for Josh and me to emerge with Katrina from Bill Harrelson’s backyard. She had not obeyed my text and gotten a ride home but instead had conferred with Mom, who agreed to come with my father to Melissa’s side, and then called McElone after texting me back and getting no answer. She had not left the truck despite desperately wanting to see what was going on but she was orchestrating help from the Hazlet police even as McElone had been on her way, leaving her husband and children yet again for an evening of rescuing the likes of me.

  “Have you been able to sort all this stuff out?” I asked McElone. “I can’t make head or tail of it.”

  The lieutenant reestablished eye contact with a look that made me wish she hadn’t. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I’m a trained police officer and you own a little hotel. We’ve managed to work out most of the story, and it’s a weird one, which I should expect by now whenever I get a call to this address.”

  I ignored all the wiseacre stuff she’d just said because there just wasn’t any point. “So Darlene found out Herman was cheating on her and was going to scare him with his gun, but his daughter shot him by accident. Right? How’d she find out? Did one of the women Herm was harassing dime him out?”

  Melissa, sitting on the sofa with Josh and me, looked over. “Dime him out?” she asked.

  “Public phone calls used to cost a dime,” Josh explained. “So when someone dropped a dime on you they were calling the authorities to say you’d done something wrong.”

  “What’s a public phone?” Liss asked, but she was kidding, I’m pretty sure.

  “No,” McElone said as if this hilarious banter had not been performed strictly for her benefit. “Actually Darlene just happened to see Herman in a Dairy Queen parking lot with someone she was pretty sure wasn’t her.”

  “So she immediately went home and got Herman’s gun to take her revenge?” My mother looked positively appalled.

  McElone shook her head. “Yes, but it was not without planning. She didn’t intend to shoot her husband, but when her daughter did that, she saw an opportunity and called her pal Nathaniel Adamson, telling him Herman needed a car to leave town and she wouldn’t let him use his own.”

  “And Mr. Adamson bought that?” Melissa asked. “Mr. Fitzsimmons was a car dealer. He didn’t need a borrowed car if he really wanted to leave.”

  “No, that’s true,” McElone said. “But Nat probably knew Darlene didn’t intend to let her husband drive off. He knew she was angry and vindictive. I’m sure he didn’t figure Herman was dead and she would bury him in the car, but when her husband suddenly vanished into thin air and the car went with him, Nat knew not to ask questions.”

  “Yeah, that’s about how Harriet tells it,” Maxie said from her corner of the ceiling. “She’s really a nice person once you get to know her.” Maxie had gotten to talk to Harriet Adamson by beating her mercilessly and then containing her so she couldn’t hurt Josh or me. It seemed they had now formed something of a friendship, which was lucky since it would have been really difficult to send Harriet to jail.

  “Do you think that’s why he killed himself?” Melissa asks questions that most thirteen-year-olds might not ask and it has a way of unnerving some adults.

  Not McElone. “Medical records indicate Mr. Adamson was suffering from depression and it was unrelated to the Fitzsimmons thing,” she told Liss. “But the question I most wanted to ask Darlene was why she decided to bury her husband in a Lincoln Continental, and not just in the ground.”

  “What did she say?” Mom asked. I saw my father conferring with Maxie in the upper corner and he pointed toward the kitchen. Maxie nodded.

  “She looked surprised,” McElone answered. “As if it seemed the most obvious thing in the world. Apparently one of the reasons Herman had taken up with Harriet Adamson was that he envied her husband’s Lincoln/Mercury dealership. He’d applied for a franchise and been turned down because Nat was local and he objected. Herman figured he’d get his revenge in, you know, another way. So Darlene thought putting him in the Lincoln, even after he was dead, would annoy him no end.”

  “Where’d she get the Lincoln?” I asked. “That was just mean.”

  “From Adamson,” McElone said. “He wanted to punish the man who was cheating with his wife and once he found out Herman was dead, he furnished a used car.”

  I looked over at Paul, who was hovering in front of the lieutenant, intent as always on seeing how she operated. He knew why I was training my attention on him and reminded me, “I couldn’t raise Herman Fitzsimmons. Maybe he really was irritated through all eternity.”

  “I’m confused,” Josh said to McElone. “If Darlene Fitzsimmons …”

  “Darlene Menendez,” the lieutenant corrected.

  “Of course. If she could operate all the earth moving equipment herself, why did she need to get William Harrelson, Sr. involved, and why did she need Bill to move the car after it had been exhumed?”

  “She needed senior because even if she could run the machines she didn’t own any,” McElone told him. “Harrelson rented them out, but Darlene had to be sure there was no record, no paper trail that would implicate her in digging the hole and putting a car in it, which would be illegal even if there wasn’t a dead body in the car that she just happened to kill. The stuff with Bill, who filled in as many blanks for me as he could, was only to keep him quiet. Once that car came out of the ground he knew what his father had been talking about all those years ago and when the body was found he got in touch immediately with Darlene. He wasn’t blackmailing her so much as alerting her and begging not to mention his father’s name.”

  “That should have been enough,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you have to keep in mind that Darlene is crazy and paranoid,” McElone answered. “She wanted to be sure Bill would keep quiet about what he knew, even though he didn’t know that much. Once she heard it was his crew that unearthed the car—and Bill admits he was trying to confirm the story his dad told him—she saw him as a potential threat. She was desperate to keep her daughter’s name out of this. So she came here that one night and took the car away to put his blood in it. I’m not sure how she got the blood because she is telling one nutty story.” Maxie stifled a laugh. I don’t know why since McElone couldn’t have heard it. “But however she did it she convinced Bill she could implicate his dad in the whole mess, maybe even say he had shot Herman, and essentially forced him to keep quiet after she brought the car back the next night.”

  “And so the construction man was romancing Alison’s guest to create an alibi?” My mother looked scandalized and I thought about Katrina, up in her room probably thinking this was the worst vacation she’d ever had. Is it saying something awful about me that I spent a moment wondering how this would affect her evaluation form?

  “No, not really, according to Bill.” McElone didn’t sit back on
the sofa; it was something of a small victory that she was sitting down at all. Usually she looks like she had her spine replaced with a steel pole simply to make her stance perfectly straight. “He says he really liked Ms. Breslin and only thought this morning that maybe he could use her to get out of the situation. It would have been easier if he’d just told me what had happened, but that appears never to have occurred to him. The county prosecutor will decide what he’ll be charged with, although surely abduction and maybe kidnapping will be included. He threatened both of you with a gun, too.” That was in case Josh and I had forgotten and somehow decided to be sympathetic toward Bill. I didn’t know about Josh, but that certainly wasn’t my inclination at the moment.

  “What about Sgt. Menendez?” I asked. “The poor kid was only three.”

  “She’s not going to be in trouble about that; it was an accident and it was over thirty years ago,” McElone said. “She should have told us what she knew as soon as her dad’s body was identified, but she was conflicted. She’ll be on leave for a couple of weeks but I’m sure her work in securing the situation without any injuries will work to her advantage.”

  “Was that why you were holding the emerald, Lieutenant? You didn’t suspect Officer Lassen at all, did you?” Josh has the ability to cut to the chase much more smoothly than I do.

  “No. I knew there was something up with Menendez,” McElone admitted. “I wanted to see if she would report that emerald missing or if she wanted to cover up as much of the case as she could to protect her mother. She reported the emerald, which was what I wanted her to do, but I had turned it in personally to the chief of police as soon as I left here. But I didn’t need you knowing all that. It was a department matter.” She gave me a significant look. “I’m not stupid.”

  “Nobody ever thought you were,” Melissa said.