A Death in Duck: Lindsay Harding Cozy Mystery Series (Reverend Lindsay Harding Mystery Book 2) (25 page)

“I turned to walk out, but she shouted at me to turn back around. She pointed a gun right up at my chest, saying that it was Peter’s gun that he’d given to her. I couldn’t say anything—not because I was afraid of dying, but because after being so close to getting everything out in the open, now you and Sarabelle would never learn the truth. We’d carried these secrets for so long, and now Patty was trying to make me carry them into the grave. I was so angry that I rushed at her like a banshee and pushed the gun away. It dropped out of her hand and fired when it hit the ground. When I saw her fall, I stood there for a minute. But then I just turned around and walked away. Maybe you think that was terrible, that I didn’t try to help her. But in my mind, the Patty I knew had already died. I didn’t see where the shot hit her, but from what the police told me, there was nothing anybody could’ve done anyway. Peter’s gun shot her right through that twisted old heart of hers.”

Chapter 24

Lindsay had lost all sense of how much time had passed since Swoopes pitched her into the back of his truck. At some point during Simmy’s recitation, they’d passed from the paved road onto the sand road of the 4x4 beaches. Simmy had finished her tale, and now the two women lay silently side by side, each lost in her own thoughts.

Although Lindsay understood why Simmy had taken the chance to unburden herself of the tangled story of Lindsay’s ancestry and Aunt Harding’s death, she couldn’t help but wish that she could have spent her last few minutes of life in blissful ignorance of this tragic history. For one thing, the new knowledge only deepened the painful irony of Sarabelle’s betrayal. Simmy had been poised to offer Sarabelle everything that she had, but rather than receiving Simmy’s offer of money, a home, and security, Sarabelle had partnered with Swoopes to try to take those things by force. The revelations also increased Lindsay’s confusion over her aunt’s life and death. It was tragic beyond measure that her aunt’s ability to love was so warped that she’d lived and died as a prisoner of her own pettiness and jealousy. What might their lives have been like if only her aunt had been open to the possibility of happiness?

The truck moved more slowly now, wheels shushed by the sand—Aunt Harding’s house must be only minutes away. The shock of Kipper’s death and of being beaten and kidnapped had temporarily lulled Lindsay into a mute acceptance of her imminent death. But now she tried to focus on finding a way out of her situation. This is how she imagined that Simmy must have felt when Aunt Harding turned the gun on her in the shed.
No!
, she wanted to scream. She didn’t want the story to end like this, with her powerless and shivering in the back of a psychopath’s truck. She tried to get her brain to snap to attention, but it stubbornly slouched there, refusing to come up with an idea. She knew that physically she was no match for Swoopes. The throbbing in her jaw and abdomen testified to that. Her only hope was to outwit him.

The truck was stopping, and still no clever plan of escape revealed itself. Footsteps crunched on the sand, the tailgate opened, and Swoopes flipped back the tonneau cover. Although the clouds blocked out the light from the moon and stars, the night seemed almost supernaturally bright compared to the womb-like darkness of the closed truck bed. When she saw Swoopes, Simmy let out a terrified scream—the raw screech carried on the wind like the cry of a seagull. Lindsay twisted her body so she could see what was happening. When Swoopes realized that Simmy’s gag had come off, he dragged her toward him by the tape on her ankles. He took hold of her throat and pressed her against the bed of the truck. Simmy turned her face sideways, still screaming for all she was worth. Without a moment’s hesitation, Swoopes grabbed Simmy by the shoulders and slammed her backwards. Her head hit the side of the truck with a sickening thud. Simmy’s eyes rolled in her head and then closed. Swoopes pulled a piece of tape off the roll and fixed it over her motionless lips. Her wig had come off in the struggle and, through the wispy white hair that veiled Simmy’s scalp, Lindsay could see a sickening purple bruise forming.

With Simmy unconscious, Swoopes turned his attention to Lindsay. He grabbed her legs, pulling her violently from the truck and hoisting her over his shoulder like a sack of fertilizer. Although his shoulder dug painfully into her injured ribs, she still struggled against him with all her might until she heard him say, “You just keep on wiggling, little girl.” He stroked her rear end with one hand to emphasize the meaning behind his words. After that, she lay very still.

Swoopes had parked a few dozen yards away from the house, behind a clump of trees. He stomped up the back steps, entering Aunt Harding’s house through the kitchen. When they reached the dining room, he set Lindsay down with a thump on the floor next to the gun safe. “You stay right there,” he purred. “I need to go and collect your old lady friend.” He took a few steps back toward the kitchen, but then turned and gave Lindsay a running kick to her left hip. Tears sprang to her eyes and despite the gag over her mouth, she made a loud cry. “That’s just to make sure you do what Daddy says like a good little girl.”

Lindsay slumped over onto her right side, struggling to breathe. As the initial intensity of the pain subsided, the details of the room came into focus. Only a single lamp was lit, and it cast its sickly yellow light over the scene. The room bore no resemblance to the homey scene that had greeted her only a week before. On top of the dining table lay an oversized duffle bag, the type athletes used to transport their equipment. Lindsay presumed that this was to hold the supposed loot contained in the safe. Two of the dining room chairs had been overturned, and next to them, under the table, lay Sarabelle Harding’s battered body. Her right leg stuck out at an odd angle, and her back was facing Lindsay. Lindsay dug her heels into the ground and used her feet to inch herself toward her mother’s body. She came around the table to a vantage point that allowed her to see Sarabelle’s face. Her mother’s closed eyes were swollen grotesquely. Her bottom lip was split wide open and almost purple with bruising. Only the gentle rise and fall of her chest let Lindsay know that she was still breathing. Sarabelle’s right hand lay open on the floor in front of her. In her palm was Lindsay’s silver angel pin, the one she thought she’d lost at the hospital. She must have been clutching it when she fell.

Lindsay struggled to make sense of the scene. Did this mean that Sarabelle had tried to double cross Swoopes? Had she done something to anger him? Or had he simply decided that she had outlived her utility? And why was she holding Lindsay’s pin?

Lindsay heard footsteps on the back porch and quickly scooted back into her original position near the safe. The next thing she knew, Simmy was next to her, moaning softly, her eyelids fluttering. Leander Swoopes stood before them, blocking out the lamplight like the specter of the Grim Reaper. He leaned down and ripped the tape off their mouths. “All right now. Which one’a you is gonna tell me how to open this safe? Oh, and don’t bother screaming. Sarabelle tried that, but as you can see,” he said, kicking Sarabelle’s immobile foot with the toe of his boot, “didn’t nobody come to her rescue.”

He stalked back towards them and squatted in front of them. He held Simmy’s face in his hands. Her eyes lolled around in their sockets insensibly. He smacked her hard across the face, leaving a red imprint of his fingers. “Looks like I cleaned her clock a little too well. Earth to Old Lady!” he shouted, shaking her head from side to side. “What’s the combination to your friend’s safe?”

              “What makes you think there’s anything in there?” Lindsay said, as much to distract him from further harming Simmy as to test how much he knew. “Maybe the gun you got was the only valuable thing there was.”

“Do you think I’m stupid?” Swoopes roared, lifting Lindsay’s chin with his clenched fist. “Sarabelle walked away with nine thousand dollars. Where else would she have put it? Besides, Patricia Harding was loaded. Why else would she have a safe like this and a gun like the one Sarabelle brought me? Sarabelle just picked that one out at random. She said there were at least a dozen more like it.”

“Why are you so sure that one of us can open the safe?” Lindsay asked.

“Somebody has to know the combination, and it wasn’t Sarabelle. I know she’s a damn good liar, but she also knows my temper. I warned her that if she didn’t tell me, I’d have to involve you and the old lady. She never liked it when things had to involve you, so if she knew the combination, she would’ve said.” He glanced at Sarabelle’s still form and chuckled to himself. “She thought that she’d seen the last of me when she came out here, but she underestimated my…affection for her.”

“But you couldn’t always make her do what you wanted, right?” Lindsay said, trying to buy time to think. It seemed that maybe there had been some truth to Sarabelle’s story after all. She really had tried to get away from Swoopes and hide out. Rather than escaping from police custody as Swoopes’s accomplice, she’d been kidnapped by him as a victim. Lindsay calculated her options, and decided to take a risky path. “After all, she came out here. Slipped your net for a good few months.”

His eyes narrowed angrily. “She was stupid to think she could hide. Anyway, she did what I said in the end. At first, she only wanted to give me enough to pay me back what she owed. I never say no to an offer of money. But then she showed up with that gun as payment instead of my cash. I could see that it wasn’t any ordinary piece, so I asked her where she got it. She wouldn’t say right away, but I
persuaded
her. That’s how I knew about the other guns.”

One glance at Sarabelle let Lindsay know exactly what form that persuasion took. “Is that what happened to Lydia Sikes? You couldn’t persuade her?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. That dumb junkie was a liability. I caught her fixin’ to trade that Smith and Wesson to her dealer for more pills. Say what you will about Sarabelle, but at least she knew the value of a buck and when to keep her mouth shut. If I hadn’t’a shut her up, Lydia woulda gone blabbing my business all over New Albany.” He removed a packet of cigarettes from his back pocket and lit up a smoke. With a casual ease, he took off his leather jacket and laid it on top of the duffle bag. “Lydia was a fine piece of ass, but you can’t never trust a junkie.” He blew two thin streams of smoke out of his nostrils.

Now that Lindsay had come face to face with Swoopes, she had a better understanding of his ability to control people, especially women like her mother who had few material or emotional reservoirs to tap into. What might she herself do to buy a few more minutes of time? To try to convince him to spare her? Had Lydia Sikes begged for her life? Had she struggled against him while he pressed the gun to her closed lips? Or had she just quietly resigned herself to her fate, robotically following his orders to the very end?

“How did you convince Sarabelle to help you sell the gun?” Lindsay asked. Swoopes seemed to be enjoying the chance to detail his exploits. Although their dialogue was buying her time to come up with a plan, it also sent a shiver up her spine. If he was revealing all of this to her, clearly he didn’t intend for her to be alive long enough to pass on the information that he imparted.

He withdrew the cigarette from his mouth with a snap of his wrist. “How do you know about that?” he asked.

“Everyone knows,” Lindsay answered, looking him square in the eye. “The police know. They’re closing in on you. Did you really think that you’d get away? We’re on an island! The police are everywhere. Just before you grabbed me, I was talking to my boyfriend about it. You remember my boyfriend, the policeman? I told him that I’d seen a light on here.” Lindsay could see instantly that her ploy had backfired. Swoopes conversational mood had passed. And, instead of looking nervous in response to her threats about the police, Swoopes stared at her coldly.

“You didn’t see no light. Ain’t nobody driven past here all evening. But if you have been talking to your boyfriend, you’d better hurry up and give me the combination to that safe,” Swoopes said.

Lindsay pursed her lips and twisted her body away from him.

“You really wanna know how I got your mama to help me sell the gun?” he asked. He knelt down and pulled up the sleeve of Lindsay’s jacket, revealing her bare forearm. He withdrew the cigarette from between his lips and pressed the lit end to her delicate white skin. Lindsay managed not to scream, although she almost blacked out from the pain. Although Lindsay’s arms were bound behind her, if she contorted her body, she could glimpse the angry, red welt that rose on her forearm. In the center of the wound was a ring of white and gray ashes. Ashes. The word swam to the surface of her consciousness. Warren had said that the box containing Nancy Mix’s ashes was all that was left in the safe now, and in a moment Swoopes would know it.

Swoopes looked at Lindsay, and said in a tone of mock consolation. “That’s right. Big girls don’t cry. You just tell Daddy the combination and this will all be over.” His voice switched to a menacing growl. “Or do you want to see how many tries it takes me to make daylight shine through this old lady’s head?” He withdrew his gun from the shoulder holster and held it to Simmy’s temple.

“Okay. I’ll tell you,” Lindsay said weakly. The seed of an idea was beginning to germinate in her brain. Actually, it was more of a Hail Mary pass than an idea, but it was all she had left. She opened her eyes wide, hoping to project an image of a helpless, naïve Southern Belle. “But you have to promise to leave us all alone after that. If you don’t hurt us anymore, no one even needs to know that you were here. You can just take what’s in the safe and leave.” She knew that he had no intention of keeping any of them alive, no matter what he agreed to do.

“Scout’s honor,” he replied, eying her warily. She could see that he was gauging whether she was trying to trick him.

“How do I know I can trust you?” she demanded. She needed him to believe that she thought she was engaged in a real negotiation. She needed him to believe that she was telling the truth.

He seemed amused. He leaned down to remove the angel pin from Sarabelle’s outstretched palm. “How about I give this back to you? You know, as a token of my good intentions.” He bent down and pinned it to the front of Lindsay’s jacket.

“How did you get this?” Lindsay asked. “And why did Sarabelle have it in her hand?”

“Funny thing,” he said. “Sometimes a dog gets so used to gettin’ kicked, that she don’t even feel the kicks no more.” He glanced pointedly at Sarabelle. “You need to think of new ways to train it to do what you want.”