Elizabeth C. Main - Jane Serrano 01 - Murder of the Month (28 page)

He gestured toward the back door. “Shall we continue this discussion in the car? It’s out back.”

I didn’t really want to do that, so I just stood there, waiting for inspiration to strike. Nothing came to me, but I could hardly tell him to go ahead by himself. I kept talking.

The yearbook on the counter was still open to the prom page. Now that it was too late, everything was clicking into place. I looked at the picture again and made a guess. “You didn’t go to the prom, did you? And Kurt wasn’t the one that Vanessa kept on a string. It was you.”

The slight smile he attempted didn’t quite work. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“After all these years—”

“Let’s go!” he ordered. He didn’t like this subject.

“I’m not going anywhere.” I raised my chin and tried to look resolute. “You’ll have to shoot me right here.” That always sounded good in the movies, but I was really hoping he wouldn’t take me up on the offer.

“Oh, Jane, I’m not going to shoot you,” he said. His voice suddenly dropped back to its usual agreeable tone and he smiled broadly. What a chameleon. “I merely need to keep you briefly out of circulation, just long enough for me to leave town.”

I nodded, hoping he’d think I was stupid enough to believe that. I wouldn’t have thought twice about getting into a car with him last week, but that was before he started littering the county with the bodies of his friends.

The telephone beside me began to ring.

“Don’t answer that!” His command voice was back.

“I have to. Laurence knows I’m here.”

“He’ll think you’ve stepped outside.”

“No, he won’t. I told him I’d wait for his call.” After four rings, the answering machine took over, but no one left a message. A minute later the ringing started again. “He’ll know something’s wrong if I don’t answer soon.”

“Do not pick up that phone unless you want something bad to happen to this dog.”

Good threat. I didn’t answer the phone.

The ringing stopped and Harley smiled. “There. That’s better.”

“He’ll just call back.”

“Then he’ll be disappointed again.”

“Will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I didn’t think he’d go for this stall, but it was worth a try.

“No. Get moving.”

Maintaining eye contact with him as though considering his order, I thought about the box of tacks spilled on the floor between us. They ought to slow him down, but they wouldn’t be of any use against a gun. Besides, what was I going to do about Wendell? I couldn’t leave him with Harley.

I pictured the contents of the shelf next to me under the counter. Pens, Scotch tape, rubber bands … none of them very useful in a fight. Cleaning cloth, telephone book, stapler. Could I throw the stapler at him? It might be heavy enough to do some damage. I slid my hand along the shelf and encountered the smooth plastic side of the Windex bottle. A dose of Windex in the eye ought to sting plenty, possibly giving me enough time to run if I could squirt it before Harley could pull the trigger. He wouldn’t risk the sound of a shot if he could avoid it. I gripped the handle of the Windex bottle, still trying to figure out what to do about Wendell.

As if on cue, the ringing of the telephone pierced the air once more. Harley glanced at it just long enough for me to bring up the spray bottle and blast him full in the face. From the depths of my subconscious, inspiration surfaced at last.

“Wendell, dinnertime!” I shouted. Wendell leaped to his feet and raced out the front door of the store, just as he had after book club. Harley was between me and the door, so I dashed the other way, toward the back of the store. Though I didn’t wait around to check the results, Harley’s roar of pain gave me a pretty good idea that the Windex was doing its job.

It would take too long to get the bolt unlocked and the security bar off the outside back door, so I sprinted up the back stairs three at a time instead. Just around the corner at the top, I whirled and crouched out of sight. Now what? Though I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do next, I did know that getting into a car with Harley would have been a spectacularly bad idea.

“Jane? Come on now.” Harley’s disembodied voice floated eerily up the back stairwell. “You’re over-reacting.” He sounded genuinely regretful, the kindly banker disappointed that his client had failed to take his investment advice. Funny how having that gun pointed at me had made me wary of his suggestions.

“You might as well come down. You can’t stay up there forever.” That last part was true enough, but any delay that I could promote sounded good to me and would improve my chances of escape. He knew that, too, so I didn’t expect that he’d stick with his falsely reasonable persona for long. This situation was too much like a chess game for my taste, move and counter-move. Unfortunately, chess was a game at which Harley excelled, whereas I was never able to map out more than one move ahead when Tony used to challenge me to a game. My mind always skittered off to wondering whether the laundry needed to come out of the dryer, or whether we had enough milk for dinner.

“You’re afraid I’m going to hurt you,” Harley said gently. “Is that it?”

The urge to answer was almost unbearable, but I didn’t want to give away my position. The threadbare hallway runner for once did some good instead of just soaking up dust. It deadened my steps as I edged toward the front staircase. His voice had sounded as though it still came from the bottom of the back staircase, but I couldn’t be sure.

“I give you my word that nothing will happen to you. All I want is to get away from Juniper. You can understand that. The sooner I leave here, the sooner Bianca will be set free, so you and I really should be able to work together on this. Imagine how terrified she must be by now. A young girl like that … this must be an awful experience for her!”

And whose fault is that? I thought. His indignant tone merely reinforced my belief that he was truly a chameleon. He must consider me an idiot if he expected me to surrender to him.

“I know you want her released as soon as possible, Jane, but I simply can’t allow you to talk to Arnie yet. I have to lock you up for just a short while. I’ll tell you what. Come down now and I’ll tell you everything that happened. Will that make you happy? Once you’re free, you can contact Arnie and clear Bianca. We can have a win/win situation here, Jane.”

I tiptoed to the door of the original master bedroom of this house, the room that now housed our history and current events volumes. Besides its one dirty window, it also had an outside door. Now I looked at that door longingly, well aware that its decaying outside staircase had been dismantled when Laurence first bought the place. Even if I could get the old door lock to turn—and that was a big “if”—I’d exit into thin air and a straight drop from the second story. Peter Pan might be able to fly to the branches of the never pruned apple tree which flourished a short distance from the side of the building, but I was no Peter Pan. If I could get that door open, maybe I could tie something together and shinny down the outside wall though.

Meanwhile, I turned my cautious steps toward the front staircase. Running down the staircase leading to the front door of Thornton’s seemed more my style than a daredevil circus descent from twenty feet in the air. Just as I edged one foot onto the top step, still undecided, Harley spoke from nearly beneath me.

“I’m very disappointed in you, Jane. You’re no more reasonable than your daughter.” He was starting to sound aggrieved. Waiting for me to come out and play must be getting on his nerves. “Opposing me is not going to do you any more good than it did Gil and Vanessa. They thought they could outsmart me, and look what happened to them. You’re smarter than they are. I knew you didn’t want to go out with me, but that’s fine. Really. I’ve never been one to hold a grudge. I like you, Jane, and I don’t want to hurt you, but you’re smart enough to see that you’re going to force me into it if you don’t cooperate. It’s sad but true. I can’t wait here all night for you to make up your mind. This place could go up in flames very fast, you know.”

I considered and dismissed his threat to set fire to the building. Harley had no intention of attracting outside attention. Too great a chance that I’d be found alive. I remained silent.

“How come you tried so hard to accommodate your daughter and you won’t cooperate with me at all? You listened to her, even when she made no sense. I’m presenting you with a very clear and sensible set of options.”

His voice was rising to a pitch I’d never heard before, almost a singsong. “I’m getting really tired of this. Why are people never reasonable? Take Vanessa. She badly misjudged things. I gave her every opportunity to come to me. You have to believe that. Every opportunity. Even when I carefully explained how much more I had to offer her than Gil, she didn’t get it. Sometimes I thought she was starting to understand. She’d come to me after they’d had a fight or something, and I’d take her back, but it never lasted. Even after she agreed to go to the senior prom with me, she backed out when Gil finally got around to asking her. That wasn’t right, but she couldn’t see it. She always thought she could play me for a fool, but I got the last laugh on both of them.”

Harley’s rambling commentary was punctuated by the sounds of things hitting the floor. “I’m making it look like burglars vandalized the place,” he explained, now returning to a conversational tone, “but you can explain the truth later. Maybe Kurt or his stupid son will get blamed for this, too, but you can clear them. Take care of things however you want. Just not for a few hours. Okay?” He paused and then announced the time, as though it had any relevance to this bizarre situation. “It’s almost nine o’clock now. We’ll go soon, unless you want me to start a fire down here instead.”

He didn’t really want to march me out of here until it got darker, so I had a few more minutes before he’d get serious about flushing me out. I planned to spend whatever time I had left making a rope ladder and getting that locked door open.

Suddenly a tremendous crash sounded from downstairs, in the back. Silence, followed by a low moaning that set my hair on end. Had Harley fallen? I raced silently down the dim hallway toward the front stairs. Maybe I could be down them and out the door before he recovered. I paused at the top, clutching the sturdy banister and listening. Nothing.

I descended one step, and then another. Was this a trick? If Harley caught me part-way down the stairs, he might get close enough to grab me. Also, if he were willing to risk a shot, I’d be a sitting duck, but I didn’t think he wanted the noise. The grounds surrounding the refurbished old house were large, but not that large. Every instinct I possessed was telling me not to go down those stairs. Harley urged rational thinking, so that was a good enough reason in itself for me to stick with instinct. I whirled and retreated upstairs again.

“Changed your mind, eh?” Harley’s voice came from under the front staircase, where he’d been hiding. Score one for instinct. “We are going to walk out of this place together, either now or later, so you might as well accept the situation and save us some time. Jane, are you listening?”

Oh, I was listening all right, but only to determine his location. The icy reasoning that had led Harley to kill his two childhood friends as easily as he might knock pieces off a chess board was still controlling his behavior. His place in the world was built around this town, and I knew he had no intention of leaving alive someone who would make it necessary for him to flee. Given his recent treatment of Vanessa and Gil, his assertion that he wasn’t one to hold a grudge didn’t ring quite true.

If he could get rid of me, he’d be safe. He wouldn’t be able to blame my disappearance on Bianca for a change, since she was still in jail, but I had faith in his powers of invention. Maybe he’d make my death look like a suicide, or else he would concoct some yarn that would implicate Kurt or Jenna, and enjoy the challenge in doing so. He seemed to have been three moves ahead of everyone so far, but I wasn’t ready to concede the game.

Now that he was in the front part of the store, I would break for the back door. I ran to the top of the back stairs, but skidded to a halt before I could start down them. Across the bottom lay a barricade of books and splintered wood, the remains of the massive bookshelf in the office which had contained all the books we were holding for specific customers. That must have been the crash I’d heard. Harley was making sure that I couldn’t easily get down those stairs, and he had added the moaning to trick me. Good moves. He really was thinking ahead, so I needed to match his concentration. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get my mind off the thought that someone was going to have quite a time straightening out the mess below. I sincerely hoped I would be around to help with the project.

From the front of the store came the thunder of another shelf toppling and I realized the bookcase that displayed newly released hardback selections had now become another barricade. The immediate question was whether Harley was now above it on the front stairs or below, biding his time. Straining to hear footsteps, I held myself ready to run in the opposite direction from whichever way Harley might come. I even held my breath in an attempt to gain just a little bit more stillness. Was he coming or not? Sweat sprung out all over my body as I braced for a rush. No sound. No movement.

It was getting harder to see now. Was that an advantage to him or me? Maybe someone would notice the lights shining at night in the supposedly empty store. As though Harley had read my thoughts, all the lights suddenly went out. The good news was that the light switches were downstairs, on the other side of his barricades, so I was safe for the moment. He had decided to wait for full darkness. Once my heartbeat slowed again, I was encouraged to realize that maybe I was matching him move for move. Now all I had to do was get one move ahead. He was sure he had me trapped up here, so, obviously, I had to leave.