Death Dangles a Participle (Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series) (28 page)

“But I came up with another idea,” she said. In a strange way, she seemed to want some modicum of credit for the outrageous scheme.

Blakely’s voice was dripping venom. He gave Brigid a look of pure hatred and chanted, “Oh, right, making a drop, in a tent, on the lake in a converted lunchbox. Wow, how could I forget? Was it your idea or Matt’s to keep the discs and sell them yourself?”

“But we didn’t keep them! He left them in the tent! It was those two kids—they got the lunchbox.”

“What?” He seemed genuinely confused. “What kids?”

“The two boys they arrested,” Brigid said desperately, “they stole the lunchbox! I saw them do it!”

All color seemed to drain from Blakely’s face. “Somebody stole—then Matt—”

Now Brigid’s face registered contempt. “He told you the truth, and you killed him.”

As Blakely and I stood staring mutely at Brigid, my mind was racing. Was this my chance to escape?

I analyzed my options: I would have to step, or leap, over Brigid to go back down the stairs, a risky undertaking at best. And I surmised that there was no real exit at the top of the tower, so running up the stairs wouldn’t do me any good. All I could do was bide my time and pray that J.T. had contacted the police by now. Or would he?

Blakely’s moment of hesitation had passed. “Come on!” he barked. “Get going, you two!” He gestured upward with the gun.

Slowly Brigid regained her footing, her purse still dangling from her crooked elbow as if she was on her way to go grocery shopping. It was a remarkable transformation. She was once again the arrogant Mrs. Shea, future mayor’s wife. Her shoulders straightened and with her free hand, she took hold of the railing and took a step.

We resumed climbing.

I had faced death once before, and when it seemed imminent, I had accepted my fate, secure in my faith and willing to concede that my life had come to an end.

This time was different. It was no longer just me, it was Gil and the little person I carried within me. This time, I was going to fight in whatever way I could.

Years ago, as teenagers, Lily and I had discussed self-defense. She had read an article.

“It’s simple,” she’d said, “You just kick ’em where it hurts the most.” We giggled, a little embarrassed at our ribaldry. Now I considered the possibility.

If Blakely was determined to kill me, I would resist with everything that was in me. In the meantime, however, I decided to try to reason with him.

“Blakely, you can’t possibly get away with, um, harming us. You’ll be caught immediately. Why not just leave us here and make your escape now, while you can?”

He actually chuckled. “Nice try, Amelia, but you forget that nobody has seen me here. I made sure of that. And you got rid of those kids for me, thank you very much.”

We reached the top step and stepped though an open door into a small, hexagonal room, with windows on every side. The windows had no glass in them, only angled wooden slats, through which we could hear the sounds of a crowd cheering.

The parade must have begun,
I thought,
but I don’t hear the music.

The wood of the slats was rotten with age. Some sagged; some were gone altogether. Cold gusts blew between them, refrigerating the room. As I had expected, there was no bell in the tower, just the old wooden yoke where one had hung and a small hole in the floor where the pull rope had reached down to the bottom floor.

“Over there, Amelia.” Blakely gestured with the gun across the room, some ten feet away, while he took tight hold of Brigid’s elbow.

The room was empty; there was no place to hide. I obeyed, praying inwardly,
Give me an opening, a chance, anything.

“Here’s how it’s going down,” Blakely said in a conversational voice. “Everybody in town knows you two women hate each other. You got in an argument up here in the tower, and Brigid shot you. Come over here, Brigid.” He jerked her to his side and tried to force her hand around the gun.

“No!” Brigid yelled, struggling, “No way I’m shooting a pregnant woman. D’you think I want to go to hell? Do it yourself!”

“Pregnant?” Blakely looked utterly dumbfounded.

“How did you know?” I demanded at the same moment.

Brigid backed away from Blakely while she answered me. “Are you kidding? It’s all over school that you barfed on the principal’s desk. You signed up for childbirth classes. One of the Gervais girls saw you. And—”

“Interesting, even tragic,” Blakely interrupted sharply, once again asserting himself, “but not relevant to the matter at hand. Never mind, Brigid, I’ll do it. My plan still holds. Your fingerprints are all over this gun and mine, as you can see, are not.” He indicated his leather-gloved hands.

“So long, Amelia,” he said suddenly, and fired straight at me from across the room. I hadn’t time to react at all. I barely had time to close my eyes as the report echoed against the stone walls.

I flinched, but felt no pain. Another shot rang out. I flinched again, but again, nothing.

Blakely’s expression registered utter astonishment. “What’s wrong with this gun—Arghhhh!” There was a crashing sound, and splinters of wood flew through the air. A hand and sturdy arm, coming from outside the tower, had punched through the rotten slats and had a grip on Blakely’s hand.

As Brigid and I watched, Blakely and the anonymous hand struggled for possession of the gun.

A split second later, exchanging significant glances, we two women realized that our chance had come, and Brigid hastened forward to enthusiastically administer Lily Burns’s version of self-defense.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this. Hold still, iss-May—but you’re married now, aren’t you? It’s not iss-May any more, is it?” My former student Toby House wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm and began pumping it up. “Be quiet, please.”

He looked at his watch. Even when using the playful pig Latin I had introduced to my classes, Toby, a paramedic, was all business with regard to matters medical.

We were in an ambulance parked in front of the Old Episcopal Church, Brigid Shea and I. The groaning and incapacitated Blakely Knight had been whisked away—under guard—to the hospital in another one.

Brigid winced as another paramedic treated her swollen split lip and bruised cheek. “Ouch!” she said as he dabbed on antiseptic with a gauze pad. “What Blakely said up there was all bull, you know.”

“Really?” I didn’t believe her.

Toby gave me a stern look. I was sitting on one of the two ambulance cots, and he was holding my wrist, taking my pulse.

“Totally. He’s nuts—you can see that. The way he treated us? You know, you weren’t in very much danger, but I was.” She sat still as the paramedic finished with a butterfly bandage at the end of her mouth, pressed a cold pack to her cheek, and moved away.

“What do you mean?” I asked and was again shushed by Toby.

“He used my starter’s pistol, the idiot. It’s usually really dangerous only up close. Like that guy—the one on TV? He was just fooling around, holding it to his head, and it killed him. Stuff comes out of the gun, even if it’s not loaded with bullets, and it can get you if you’re close enough. But you were all the way across the room. Blakely must not know much about guns.”

I remembered that night at the Lion’s Roar and Blakely’s casual answer to Gil’s question:
I’m afraid I’m not much for the great outdoors; hunting, fishing, none of that.

Toby took off the cuff. “You’re okay. You didn’t sustain any trauma, but you need to see Dr. Stout to check out the little guy, just to be on the safe side, okay?”

I’d told him of the pregnancy. It was apparently a matter of public knowledge, anyway.

He patted my shoulder. “‘Appy-Hay ’aby-Bay.”

Toby was one of my all-time favorite students, but don’t tell anyone.

“Thank you, ’oby-Tay.”

He turned to Brigid. “Mrs. Shea, you sit here and keep that cold pack on your face while we let the painkiller kick in, okay?”

She nodded. He climbed out of the ambulance and began to consult with the other paramedic.

I had another question for her. “Why didn’t you tell him I was there, back in the restroom?”

“I figured you’d go for help.”

“Oh.”

Abruptly, Brigid put down the ice pack, retrieved her purse, and announced to me, “I’m feeling much better now. I need to get going.”

As she climbed down out of the ambulance, Police Sergeant Dennis O’Brien met her. “Mrs. Shea, we have some questions for you,” he said firmly. “Please come along.” He turned a stern look at me and raised his voice slightly. “And I’ll want to talk to you, too, Mrs. Dickensen.”

“All right, Sergeant,” I said meekly. Poor Dennis, despite all my efforts we’d ruined his day off.

I sat there, amid the hubbub of the crowd, thinking about what had happened.

You answered my prayer, didn’t you? You really did.

I couldn’t think of strong enough words to express my gratitude. I closed my eyes.

“That was pretty cool, signaling me with the French like that,” J.T. Rousseau said softly as he and Crystal Gervais crept into the ambulance, glancing over their shoulders. “You were right about it coming in handy!”

“Thanks, J.T.,” I said. “And thank you for what you did. But you took a terrible risk, climbing the church tower. Why didn’t you just go to the police?”

The two young people exchanged glances. “Are you kidding? Think they’d believe me? They were having a cow down on the ground while I was climbing. The cops were waiting at the bottom to arrest me when all of a sudden they heard those shots. Everybody ran upstairs and forgot about me—for now. We don’t want to miss that dance tonight, so we gotta run.
Au revoir!”
The two disappeared around the corner of the ambulance.

“Wait, you’re going to be—” I began, and sighed. There would be repercussions, no doubt, but it would probably all come out in the wash, as Martin Rousseau had said.

I exited the ambulance, feeling quite brave and sane and was re-buttoning my coat when I was suddenly engulfed in an embrace.

“Amelia! Oh, thank God! What happened?” Before I could answer, Gil hugged me tight again. “Oh, never mind, you can tell me later. Oh, if anything had happened to you!”

We looked into each other’s eyes. I crumpled in his arms and began to sob.

Gil knew the routine. He let me go on until I was a hiccoughing, nose-running mess. Then, proffering a handkerchief, he guided me over to Mann’s Drugstore, just down the street. He deposited me in a booth at the snack bar, ordered hot chocolate and a toasted cheese sandwich, took my hand across the table and held it tenderly.

“Got to keep your strength up. After all, you’re eating for two.”

My nose was stopped up. “You doh?” I asked.

He nodded. “Um, hm.”

“But how?”

He sighed. “Honey, I’m a newsman. Don’t you think I know the symptoms? Don’t you think I hear the local gossip?” He beckoned me closer. “I’ll bet I know something you don’t: The rumor is that ours was a shotgun wedding!” He laughed heartily, and I joined him after a fashion, as I dabbed the last of the tears from my cheeks. Gil added, “Seriously, I wanted to let you tell me in your own time.”

I stroked his hand and smiled. I whispered, “Gil, we’re going to have a baby.”

He grinned. “I doh.”

I made quotation marks with my fingers. “What about, ‘Here’s to things staying just the way they are,’ cross your heart and hope to spit?”

He made the same gesture and quoted, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”

“That’s from Philippians. Gil, you’ve been reading the Bible!” He had only recently begun going to church with me.

He shrugged. “Don’t make a big deal out of it. It just seemed appropriate.”

“What about, ‘no fuss, no muss, no crying and messy diapers’?”

“Hey, I knew that was what you needed to hear at the time. But that diaper stuff comes with the territory doesn’t it? In life, you take the stinky with the sweet.” He sighed. “You know, it is kind of miraculous. I feel like one of those old geezers in the Bible, having a kid at my age.”

“You’re hardly a geezer.”

‘That’s not what Vern’s going to say.”

“Will he ever forgive us for turning in the lunchbox?”

Gil reached across the table, grabbed the pickle from my plate and took a bite. “Sure, eventually. Besides, what’s to forgive? We did the right thing.”

“He says it has something to do with respect.”

He signaled for the check. “Yeah, well, that’s a two-way street, you know, but enough about Vern.” He looked at his watch. “Do you feel up to watching a parade?”

~~~

The ice festival parade was delayed only a half-hour and it did our community proud. To my surprise, there was very little to indicate that a crime had taken place in the vicinity, only some yellow police tape at the entrance to the church and a police car parked in front. We could see this from our vantage point, cuddled close together on the roof of the newspaper building, three stories above the ground. Judging by the cheery mood of the crowd, word of the showdown in the church tower hadn’t spread very far yet.

Marching with youthful enthusiasm were three high school bands and one from the college, the aforementioned assortment of costumed team mascots, some ingeniously designed floats and open cars, showcasing female festival royalty waving gloved hands at their subjects. The Flowers by Nathan float featured banks of multicolored mums and the Maple Syrup Queen.

“Look who’s coming.” Gil pointed in the direction of yet another open car festooned with decorations and a sign saying, “Grand Prize Snow Sculpture.” In the car rode Vern and Alec, waving merrily. Alec happened to look up, spotted us above them and reached in his pocket. Vern looked up, too, and gave a vague wave in our direction, before returning his attention to the crowd.

In a matter of seconds, the now-familiar theme of “Bonnie Annie Laurie” played in my coat pocket. I answered it.

“Where’ve ye been?” Alec asked accusingly, “I got your message and tried to call.” I could hear the stereo rattle of drums echoing in the background.