Caught Redhanded (18 page)

“And you.” He glared at her, but I noticed he kept his arm along the back of her chair, his fingers resting lightly on her shoulder, his fingers fiddling with her hair. “You’re pure as the driven snow.” He made it an accusation.

Dawn glowered at him. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You are.” He looked at Curt and me. “Right? Is she not the quintessential good girl?”

Dawn showed a lot more patience with him than I would have. “Any goodness I have is only because of Jesus.”

I nodded agreement, but he wasn’t interested in what I was thinking. He was intent on Dawn once again.

“That’s too easy an answer,” he said. “Too pat. Too simplistic.”

“Tell it to God,” Dawn said. “Not me. He’s the One who sent Jesus to die for our mistakes and wrongs, yours, mine, everyone’s.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve made too many mistakes and wrongs.”

“Never.” She reached up and caught his hand where it rested on her shoulder. “Never, Mac. You can’t out-sin God’s forgiveness.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. I looked at this intense, driven man who for years had used wild living to still his inner demons. “Women and whiskey,” he used to say with a satisfied smile. “Broads and booze.”

Now he saw the folly of such behavior. Now he saw faith and love in action in Dawn and recognized the difference between “fun” and real joy, but for some reason he still considered himself a pariah.

“Mac,” I said, “you’re a newsman. Telling the story and telling the truth are what you do for a living. You gather facts, analyze them, arrange them. Often they’re unpalatable or uncomfortable and you can’t imagine how the politician could have been so foolish or the murderer so cruel. But it’s truth. It’s what really happened. You don’t flinch from printing it. Why do you flinch, maybe even turn away, from the truth of God’s love and forgiveness?”

He stared at me for a moment, his expression the strangest mix of hope and hopelessness. Then he jumped and grabbed for his vibrating phone. He glanced at the readout, then rose. “Excuse me.”

As he walked a few steps away, I smiled at Dawn. She smiled wanly back.

“He can be so ornery and cantankerous,” she said, “but it’s all a cover for that inner sensitivity, that inner vulnerability that tells him that he’s been so bad for so long that God can’t possibly want him.”

Mac as a sensitive man was an interesting if slightly world-tilting-on-its-axis thought. I had to agree with him that he did have much for God to forgive. When I met him, his reputation screamed
wild man
and he made sure his actions confirmed it. Strangely, in the middle of all his riotous living, he was somehow taken with Dawn and what she stood for. When he finally got the courage to ask her for a date, he was floored when she accepted—if he went to church with her.

“Why would she go out with someone like me?” he had asked.

Good question. All I knew was that his lifestyle changed at that time. The more enamored he became with Dawn, the more he tried to please her. Since Dawn wasn’t about to compromise her high standards and Christian commitment, it meant Mac had to conform to her way of life: no more sleepovers; no more nights in smoky bars flirting and drinking, hitting on the pretty girls; no more hangovers or lost weekends.

Not that she demanded the changes of him. She didn’t. She just kept being the woman she’d always been. Her problem was that she had fallen as hard for him as he had for her. Since she believed that a believer should only marry another believer, she too was caught in a quandary of emotion versus conviction.

“Yes!” Mac yelled as he rushed back to the picnic table. “Come on, Kramer! They’re bringing in Ken Mackey!”

TWENTY-ONE

K
en Mackey walked into police headquarters under his own steam, accompanied by his parents, his older brother, Elton, and Tony Compton, his new lawyer. Ken ignored everyone; Elton nodded to Mac; Tony smiled at me.

Then Tony broke from the group and walked over to me. He took my hands in his. “Are you all right?” he asked with flattering concern. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

Slightly embarrassed because everyone was staring at this little side drama, I said, “I’m fine, Tony. Really.”

“If you say so.” Then he glanced down and saw my red hand. His head came up. “You are hurt.”

“No.” I blushed. “It’s raspberry stains.” All around me reporters were watching and writing. A TV crew was taping.

“Are the police taking care of you?” Tony asked.

“I’ve got a twenty-four-hour watch,” I said. “Friends.” I indicated Mac.

Tony looked startled. Because he thought Mac was still a suspect? “Well, tell them they can count me in to help,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Thanks. I will.” Maybe.

With a nod, he hurried back to his client and family waiting at the door.

Tony laid a hand on Ken and muttered something to him. Ken nodded. The entire party turned and faced the news media present. Not only were we there, but the
Daily Local News
from West Chester, the
Main Line Times
from Devon, the local stringer for
The Philadelphia Inquirer
and a couple of TV crews circled the steps.

Tony pulled out a piece of paper and read, “Ken Mackey has come to speak with the police of his own volition. He has been out of town for several weeks competing. As you all know, he is a nationally ranked motocross rider. He extends his deepest condolences to the family of Martha Colby, feels grief himself at the loss of a good friend and looks forward to this conversation with the authorities to help them in any way he can to find the person responsible for this heinous act. Thank you.”

Tony then reached into the briefcase he had left on the steps when he came to speak with me and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Here are copies of our statement for all of you.” He handed the papers to the nearest person, who in turn passed them on. Mac and I each took a copy as the papers made their way to us. We passed them to the
Daily Local
woman.

With a nod to all of us, Tony turned, as did the Mackeys, and went inside the station.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” I said as Mac and I climbed back in the car.

“But important.” He frowned. “If Ken was out of town at competitions, he’ll be cleared easily.”

I glanced at him. “Mrs. Wilson saw two people at Martha’s. She named Ken and the new boyfriend.”

“So she did, but she is eighty-three years old.”

I gave a humorless laugh. “Don’t let her age throw you. She’s sharp as a tack.”

“Maybe mentally. What about her eyesight?”

I had to admit that was a good question and one I hadn’t considered. “Well, if it wasn’t Ken, assuming the dates of his competitions check out, which I’m sure they will, who was it? And who in the world is the new boyfriend? After all, he’s been around since April and here it is, the end of July. Someone must have seen him.”

Mac looked at me. “How do you know he’s been around since April?”

I experienced a brain freeze, pain and all, just like I did when I ate something cold too quickly. “Uh,” I said, totally lacking Mrs. Wilson’s mental acuity. How did I explain knowledge I only had because I’d read Martha’s diary, something I wasn’t allowed to mention to anyone?

We were turning into the street where Doug and Maddie lived. “Almost home,” I said brightly.

“What is it about you, Merry?” Mac looked at me like I had just flown in from some outer galaxy. “I can’t get William to tell me stuff like that.”

Relief surged through me. “It must be my feminine wiles.”

“You? Wiles?” Mac started to laugh, the first genuine laugh I’d heard from him since Martha’s death. It was so good to hear him laugh I didn’t even mind that it was at my expense.

We were almost at the Reeders’ when I grabbed Mac’s arm, making him swerve. “Did you see that?”

“Watch it, Merry!” He just missed swiping the fender of a car parked on the street.

“Did you see?” I repeated, pointing to Maddie and Doug’s.

“What?” He still sounded miffed.

“A dark shadow.”

He glanced all around. “It’s pushing eleven at night. There are dark shadows all over the place.”

“Not running through Doug and Maddie’s yard.”

He hit the brake, actually stopping right in the middle of the street. “You saw someone running across the Reeders’ yard?”

I nodded, wrapping my arms about myself. “I’m sure of it.” For the first time in my life I wished I suffered from paranoia. Then I could blame the vision on an unruly imagination.

“Tall? Short? Man? Woman?” Mac demanded.

I shook my head. “Just a dark shadow wearing black.” I rubbed the goose bumps on my arms as I had a terrible thought. “Do you think someone put a bomb in Curt’s car? Or attached something to the foundation of Maddie and Doug’s house?”

Once again I felt the heat from the explosions I’d experienced, the force of the blast as I was blown off my feet. I always came back to the same question. What had I done to make someone try multiple times to kill me?

Mac looked grim. “We’ll check the car, believe me, though I’m not too worried about the house. Too many innocent people there.”

I hoped he was right. “Don’t you guys check the car.” The thought of Curt or Mac getting blown up made me shudder. “Call the police and get the bomb squad.”

Mac took his foot off the brake and we rolled slowly into the drive. Curt had had to move his car for Mac to get out for the news conference and it was parked in front of Maddie and Doug’s garage. We pulled in directly behind it.

“Mac, the front porch light is off and so is the lamppost beside the drive.”

I could see Mac frown in the weak light of the digital readouts on the car’s front panel.

“They were on when we left,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“They were,” he agreed.

“The dark shadow doused them, maybe so no one would see him working on the car.” Now my goose bumps had goose bumps and my heart was pounding.

“What have you done to make someone so determined to get rid of you?” Mac asked as we climbed out of the car.

“I don’t know.” My voice sounded shaky. I took a deep breath. I would not cry from fear or frustration. “I’ve tried to think of something, anything, but I can’t.” Certainly articles about the Coatesville city council or West Chester University’s latest budget issues or Amhearst’s school board woes didn’t engender the type of emotion that led to murder. Verbal defamation perhaps, if the feelings were strong enough, but not the taking of a life.

“It’s got to be related to Martha’s death,” Mac said as we walked up the dark path, trying not to trip on the cracks between the pavers. “You’ve been involved from the get-go.”

“But Jolene has been, too, and no one’s trying to blow her up.”

In the silence that followed this comment we heard a weak meowing sound.

“Cat,” I said, glancing up and down the street, looking for some stray amid the shadows.

“I bet that’s what you saw. A cat, scurrying across the yard.”

Mac liked that idea a lot and I couldn’t blame him. It was much more palatable than a person planting another bomb.

“Not a cat unless he’s clever enough to run on two feet. It was a person, Mac.”

We stepped onto the porch and the meowing noise sounded closer but still weak and wobbly. “Maybe there isn’t a bomb at all. Maybe it was someone dropping off a litter of kittens he didn’t want.” I bent to peek under the azalea bushes that grew against the house.

I heard Mac make a surprised
argh
kind of noise.

“What?” I turned in time to see him go down on one knee.

“Get some light out here! Quick!”

All my fear came rushing back. Booby traps! Bombs. Death. I began beating on the door. “Curt! Help!” I stopped my hand on its way to the door for another slam. “Is it safe for them to open the door? We’re not going to blow up the house and us, are we?”

“Hardly.” He stood with something in his arms. The weak mewing started again.

The inside door flew open and Curt appeared looking frantic, Maddie, Dawn and Doug right behind him.

“Merry! What’s wrong?” He threw open the screen door and grabbed me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Really.” I was thrilled as he pulled me close and wrapped his arms around me.

“You scared me out of another one or two of my nine lives,” he said. “But what’s wrong?”

“Mac,” I said. “Kittens.” I pointed as he stepped into the light spilling from the front hall.

But it was no kitten Mac held in his arms. It was a baby, all red-faced and wizened and bleating weakly.

TWENTY-TWO

W
e stared in disbelief at the bundle in Mac’s arms. A baby!

Dawn recovered first and pushed Curt and me aside to get to Mac. She pulled him inside under the hall light.

“It’s a newborn,” she said. “Only a couple of hours old.”

Since she saw newborns all the time including two just this week, I knew she knew what she was talking about.

Deftly she took the baby from Mac and went into the living room. She sat on the sofa with the rest of us crowding around and Mac collapsing beside her. She opened the soft yellow hand-knit blanket that was loosely wrapped about the child. Skinny arms and legs with skin so translucent that the veins showed moved weakly. A little T-shirt and the smallest diaper I’d ever seen covered the baby’s body.

“Do you have a cotton baby blanket?” Dawn asked Maddie as she checked the baby for the requisite number of fingers and toes and looked in that tiny diaper to determine sex.

“Coming right up.” Maddie hurried upstairs.

As Dawn worked, a note slid out of the folds of the yellow blanket and fell to the floor. Doug picked it up.

In surprise he said, “It’s for you, Merry.”

“Me?”

He held it out and I could see my name printed on the front of the envelope. I took the missive and tore it open. I scanned the note, only a few lines, and gasped.

“Read it,” Curt said. Everyone nodded.

I cleared my throat. “Merry, please take care of Elise for me. I’m trusting her to you because you are a good and kind person.”