by K. J. Emrick
After all, he’d already admitted to attacking Maria Martin in his horse form by kicking her in the head.
But when he attacked Evelyn, he’d used a handheld rock.
Her eyebrows scrunched down further. That didn’t make sense, either. The whole idea of Cavallo using a rock for one attack, and his magical animal form for the other had bothered her this whole time and now she was even more sure that it made no sense at all. Cavallo was the sort of guy to use his own brute strength whenever he needed to hurt someone. He could have just turned into a horse and attacked Evelyn if she’d seen him setting the explosive, couldn’t he? Like he’d done with Maria.
So, did that imply that the person who murdered Evelyn wasn’t Cavallo?
Were the two attacks done by two different people?
Her thoughts went round and round, until they settled on the answer. It was the only one that made sense.
She had made a mistake in not letting Domovyk talk. He’d been there with Cavallo, right where they’d found Evelyn’s dead body. There was a strong chance he’d seen something, and she’d silenced him before they’d even asked.
Ahead of her, in the backpack over Kiera’s shoulder, the black tomcat’s head bobbed with the motion of the backpack on Kiera’s shoulder. He met her gaze. She knew that he could tell what she was thinking.
Then his bright green eyes flicked over to two of their guests.
Addie had the feeling, in that moment, that maybe he wasn’t as much of an agent for Belladonna as she’d assumed him to be. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on her part but no, she could read his furry face well enough to see he was trying to give her an answer to her questions. He knew something. He was trying to tell her something.
If Cavallo wasn’t the murderer, that meant one of their guests was a killer, walking right here beside them.
Domovyk was trying to warn them. That was what he’d been trying to do since she sealed his mouth shut. Now he was trying to tell her with his eyes.
She followed his gaze. She saw what he wanted her to see.
Yes. That was the one thing that answered all of the questions.
Chapter 9
Knowing the truth was one thing. Being able to prove it was another thing entirely.
“Kiera,” Addie called up to her. “I need a break.”
There was more truth in that statement than she cared to admit, but she had an ulterior reason for what she was doing. They only had part of this mystery solved. It was time to solve the rest of it, before they got back above ground and let a murderer go free.
Kiera saw with a glance what she was up to. “Very well. We’ll break into groups.”
“I’ll stay here with Chase and Purity,” Addie quickly offered, as if this had always been the plan. “You and Willow can go ahead with Maria and Godfrey.”
“Oh, thank God,” Purity sighed. “My feet are killing me. I’m not sure I can go another step.”
Her husband Chase rolled his eyes, and actually looked at his watch. “Honey, we’re trying to get out of here, remember?”
“We’ll catch up to them, Mister Abbott,” Addie told Chase. “Just a few minutes, and then we’ll be on our way.”
“There, see?” Purity crowed. “If you’d listen to your wife a little bit more, things would go much smoother.”
“Oh? Like when you said coming on this trip would be a great idea?”
Purity shot him a glare. “Like when I said to let me take care of our finances. We’d be worth as much as that guy who came up with Facebook if you’d listened to me.”
Kiera gave Addie a nod, trusting that her younger sister had this under control, and then she turned and led everyone else the other away. Willow gave her a look, too, but one of a different sort.
Domovyk squirmed in his makeshift cat carrier on Kiera’s back. He was still trying to tell her something with just his eyes. Addie didn’t have time to find out what it was. He was either on their side, or he was not, and most of the evidence pointed toward ‘not.’
She was on her own for this, but it wouldn’t be the first time. It would be just her, and Purity, and Chase.
One of these two was the real killer. She’d accepted the facts. Cavallo had attacked Maria and set off the explosion that nearly killed her and Kiera—by accident—but not even Belladonna’s spell could make him kill someone. If it wasn’t him, then they had brought the killer into Shadow Lake Caverns with them.
In fact, based on what she knew of the relationship between Evelyn Collins and the Abbotts, coupled with what she had just heard from the two of them, she was certain she knew which one.
Now came the tricky part.
Addie made a show of kneeling down to loosen the laces on her boots. They had been fine the way they were, but it gave some credence to her needing a rest. Lucian had always made interviewing a suspect seem easy. She was winging it. Lucian made everything seem easy, for that matter. She couldn’t wait to get out of here and get back to him, to tell him all about this latest adventure in the lives of the Kilorian sisters.
To have him hold her in his arms and say ‘I love you.’
In the meantime, she remembered something that he had told her once. Whenever he was about to question someone he had never met before, someone he didn’t know much about, he always let them talk first. Eventually they would say something useful.
So she sat back on her heels, and waited. It didn’t take long.
“I can’t believe I let you drag me into this,” Chase was complaining.
“It was supposed to just be a fun trip,” Purity shrugged. She had one boot off now, and she was massaging her foot as she leaned back against the tunnel wall. “The brochure didn’t say anything about some psychotic person running around and killing people, blowing up the tunnels. Nobody said anything about that. If Evelyn had just stayed away none of this would have happened. You know that, right?”
“Don’t try blaming this on Evelyn. I said we should go to Fiji for our vacation. You’re the one who wanted to come here to this God-forsaken frozen wasteland.”
Purity wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “Well, it certainly isn’t cold down here, now is it?”
“No. It’s not. It’s hot, and it’s confined, and I’m still not—”
Another rumble shook the floor at that exact moment, passing quickly.
“I’m not sure,” Chase finished once the tremor subsided, “if the place is actually going to stay together long enough for us to get out. Can we just go now, please? You women have had your rest. Let’s just go.”
“You’re in such a hurry, Mister Abbott,” Addie said, punctuating her words with a smile. “Why do you want to leave so badly?”
He blinked at her, realizing how selfish his words sounded. “I mean, if you two need more time then I guess we can wait a little longer.”
Addie put a twist on her grin. “You don’t have a very high opinion of women, do you?”
“That’s kind of a rude thing to say,” he barked.
“Not if it’s true.”
He glared at her, stroking the perfectly trimmed beard over his jowls with one hand. When he spoke to her again, it was punctuated with his stubby finger stabbing at the air. “You don’t get to judge me for who I am, Miss Kilorian. Just because we paid you for this little tour doesn’t mean you get to feel superior to us. Not to us. Isn’t that right, Purity?”
His wife looked like she was embarrassed by her husband. She grabbed her opposite arm and glared down at the floor that was barely lit under the light of their flashlights.
“I said,” Chase repeated, “isn’t that right, Purity?”
She finally nodded, and put her foot back into her boot, taking her time lacing it up as an excuse not to look at Chase for a while.
Addie stepped closer to him, close enough to make it uncomfortable. “I thought maybe you were in a rush to leave because of what happened to Evelyn,” she said.
“Well of course I am,” he sputtered.
“Look. A woman dies in these tunnels you’re dragging us through, and now the whole place might come down and we might be next. Not to mention you ladies are dragging the killer around with us in his underwear! Why wouldn’t I want to get out of here? That’s all it is. Knowing a woman died and you can be next does things to a person.”
“But Evelyn wasn’t just any woman, was she?” Addie waited for that to sink in. “You and Purity both knew her before this trip, didn’t you?”
He frowned and shrugged his huge shoulders. “Yes, we did. So what? We weren’t exactly keeping it a secret.”
“You weren’t exactly telling everyone about it, either. I saw the way she talked to you. She didn’t have a single kind word to say to either of you. I’m guessing that you and she had a previous relationship. She was your girlfriend before Purity and you got married? Is that it?”
“His wife,” Purity clarified with a sneer in her voice. “He divorced her for me. That’s what true love does.”
“True love,” Chase insisted to her, “is someone who will do what you say, when you say it.”
Purity looked down at the floor of the cavern again, muttering to herself.
“He’s kind of overbearing, isn’t he?” Addie observed. She kept her eyes on his face, studying him like he was a complex puzzle. It would be so easy to believe Chase could have killed Evelyn. His ex-wife, suddenly here on the same trip as he was. Needling him and pecking away at his supposedly perfect second marriage. Throwing insults at both him and Purity. He had the size to easily overpower someone like Evelyn. He had the previous connection to her. He believed women were possessions, and love meant obedience.
Addie gave him a knowing smile.
And then she turned her attention to Purity.
“Then again,” she said, “let’s be honest. Just between us women, you didn’t marry Chase for his good looks and charm, did you?”
Purity gasped. “What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that one of you killed Evelyn. It was the one who knew Evelyn was going to be here. It was the one who booked this trip in the first place despite her husband’s objections.” Addie stepped away from Chase, and over to Purity. “That was you. Chase wanted to go to Fiji. You’re the one who insisted on coming here. Here, where you knew Evelyn Collins was going to be. How about it? Am I getting warmer?”
Purity stepped back from Addie and very quickly found her back up against the rock wall. “But… no. That man killed Evelyn. The crazy man in his underwear. He killed Evelyn. Isn’t that what you said? He killed her, and he attacked that reporter woman, and he tried to kill the rest of us with that bomb. It was him!”
Addie shook her head. “That’s what we all thought at first, but too many things didn’t add up. Now that I’ve had a moment to think about it all, I can see it. You wanted your husband’s ex-wife dead. I think I know why, too, but we’ll get to that. The thing of it is, Cavallo Raithmore threw a wrench into your plans when he set off that explosion. I’m willing to bet you wanted this to look like an accident. That rock that killed Evelyn could have been just a chunk from the ceiling that broke loose, right? It would have looked like an accident, if not for everything else. Once we knew Cavallo set off that explosion, we thought he killed Evelyn too, and that made it a case of murder.”
“Right, exactly,” she agreed. “He murdered her. It was him!”
“Only, no it wasn’t. He didn’t do it. He had no reason to. He could have set the explosion to kill her. All of us, for that matter. But honestly, without getting into it, Cavallo had other ways of killing Evelyn.”
All of that sank in slowly for Purity. Of course, she had no way of knowing that Addie and her sisters could have used magic to determine how Evelyn really died. Her plan wouldn’t have worked in any case. Although, Addie had to admire its simplicity. Get your victim in a cave, hit her with a rock, and claim it was an accident. If this had been any other cave tour in the world, it might have worked.
Now, Evelyn’s face flushed red. Her eyes went past Addie, to her husband.
“It was Chase!” she blurted out, pointing with one accusing finger. “He did it. He killed her! I knew as soon as I heard she was dead that he did it. You saw what he thinks about women. He hated his ex-wife. That’s why he left her for me! He’s a killer and he’ll do the same to me. Please, you have to protect me from him. Please, you have to protect me!”
That was quite possibly the fastest Addie had ever seen anyone turn on someone they were supposed to love, honor, and cherish. Although, somehow, she doubted that Purity’s wedding vows meant anything to her at all.
Because now, she knew why Purity had orchestrated this whole thing.
“Chase didn’t do this,” she pointed out to Purity. “Neither did Cavallo. Both of those men are big enough that they could have overpowered Evelyn without using a rock to hit her over the head. Your husband is three times Evelyn’s size. Cavallo… well. Like I said before, he has ways of killing that don’t include crude weapons like rocks.”
“I should think so,” Chase said. He was looking at his wife as though he’d never seen her before. Like she was some species of insect that had crawled out from under a rock, ugly and slimy and potentially poisonous. “As if I’d use a rock to kill someone. As if I’d kill Evelyn Collins in the first place! She was my ex-wife, and she was hard to take at times, certainly, but that didn’t mean I wanted to… wait a minute. Wait a minute! Purity, is she saying that you killed Evelyn?”
Purity stared at him for several long seconds, and then she threw her head back, and she laughed. The sound of it echoed over and over along the tunnel until it became so distorted it was impossible to recognize it as her voice.
“You, dear husband,” she said, “are such a dimwitted sloth it’s a wonder that any woman has ever been able to tolerate you being in the same room with them, let alone in their bed! Did you ever wonder, dear husband, why someone like me married someone like you? I’m an eight on my worst day. You… you’re a four on your best.”
Her entire demeanor had changed. She was defiant now. She’d been caught, and this was her reaction to seeing her perfect scheme go up in smoke.
“Yes, you big buffoon. I killed Evelyn. She was going to take you back to court and up your alimony payments. She called me six months ago and said she wasn’t getting enough money from you. She actually laughed and bragged about paying for this trip with the bundle of cash you pay her every month. You idiot! She was going to soak you for more money, and that would mean less money for me!”
There it was. There was the truth. Addie could recognize it even without feeling it brush against her magical senses. The pure, unvarnished fact was that Purity had never loved Chase Abbott. Not ever. Her wedding vows had been meaningless, empty words to her. She hated everything about him. Everything, that is, except the one thing that had attracted her to him in the first place.
His money.
Addie crossed her arms as she faced down the conniving woman in front of her. “You’re only with Chase for the inheritance he represents. You’re living in the lap of luxury now, with his money, but that wasn’t enough for you, was it? Not when so much of it was going to another woman. You couldn’t let her take even more of it, so you planned on being here with her. Then you waited for your opportunity. When we all split up aback at the Passages, you lured Evelyn back to where you knew the two of you would be alone. You probably told her you wanted to talk about the alimony, but you were actually waiting for her with that rock. When you knew she was dead, you came back to join the rest of us. You were still wearing your gloves at the time. I notice they’re gone now.”
Purity held up her one hand to inspect her manicured nails. “I hated to lose those gloves. They were calfskin. Very soft. Very nice. But, I saw they had a little of Evelyn’s blood on them. I tossed them away when we got bombarded by those bats. I figured no one was looking. Who would not
ice? But I see you aren’t as easily fooled as some.” She turned a look of pure disdain on Chase. “Like my idiot husband, for instance. Do you have any idea how hard it is to wake up next to you every day and not want to shower the stupid off of me?”
Surprisingly, that comment brought tears to Chase’s eyes. “But… I love you, Purity.”
“But I love you,” she mocked. “You’re such an idiot. I should have killed you first.”
“Wait,” he said, his voice rising in pitch as his disgust turned to shock. “You were going to kill me, too?”
“She’d have to,” Addie explained. “If she’s going to get your money all to herself then she would need to kill you, too. Isn’t that right, Purity? You decided to kill Evelyn first because she got in your way. Not to mention she was an ex-wife and if Chase went first, the ex might just have a claim on some of his fortune.”
“Wow, you are smart,” Purity snarked. “Yes, with Evelyn gone then no one else could challenge me in court for Chase’s money when the time came. I was going to have to wait, unfortunately, because if both of them died, close together, someone might get suspicious. And I hate suspicious people.”
That last comment was aimed at Addie, but she didn’t rise to the bait. Purity had confessed. That was all that mattered. “If not for Cavallo messing everything up you were expecting Evelyn’s death to be labelled an unfortunate accident, and then you could just keep on living your sham of a marriage to Chase until the perfect time to kill him arose. Then you’d have his inheritance, and no one else would have any claim on his money. Just you.”
Purity scowled at her, but had nothing more to say to that. She might have gotten away with it, if not for Cavallo. If not for the Kilorian sisters. If not for the crazy sequence of events that had led them to this moment. Purity’s perfect plan wasn’t so perfect after all.
Her first mistake was trying to commit murder in Shadow Lake.
She turned to Chase. He was distraught, and upset, but not because he was about to lose another wife. Addie could see dollar signs in his eyes. All he cared about was that someone had been trying to separate him from his money. Only that, and nothing more.