NAILED (28 page)

“I’m only going to say it one more time. Both of you go sit on the sofa.”

I could tell Gary was about to say something which more than likely would not endear him to Elizabeth Applegate. I stood up quickly and gave him a stern look.

“Let’s just do what she says.”

Gary must have seen the fear in my eyes and heard it in my tone, because he came around the desk and took my arm and we moved over to a small blue sofa and sat down very close together.

“Okay, look,” Gary said. “I have no idea who you are or what you want, but it obviously has something to do with me, so why don’t we just let Ms. Harris leave and you and I can sort this all out.”

What was it Gail Hachmeister had said? She told me that at his heart, Gary was a good man, and here he was trying to save my life while risking his own. She was right and if I made it out of all this, I was going to let her know that perhaps she shouldn’t be too hasty in her decision to divorce the man.

“No one’s going anywhere. Sorry, Alex, but I can’t let you go. You shouldn’t have put your nose into it.”

“Elizabeth, the police have been called. You won’t get away with this. I told them everything about your parents and why you killed Victor.”

“No, it’s him who won’t get away with what he did to my parents. And please. The police? Right, that’s what they all say. You watch too many cop shows.”

“She’s right. You can check my cell phone. There’s a text. The police know everything. She called her husband right before she showed up.”

Elizabeth pushed her hair out of her eyes. She really rocked that pixie cut.

“Well, then, I guess we better get this over with quickly,” Elizabeth said to Gary and then turned her cool gaze on me. “So how did you figure it out? What gave me away?”

Right this moment I was again seriously contemplating divorcing my husband. Where the heck hell was he? I needed to stall Elizabeth and maybe this was my chance. She wanted to know how I figured it all out and I intended to tell her my story. The long version. Except that I didn’t have a long version. I kind of put everything together today. All the little clues just came together in one rush.

I could feel Gary squeeze my hand and I turned to look at him. He had an anxious look in his eyes like he was trying to tell me to get on with it and make it good and make it long.

I took a deep breath and tried to steady my nerves. Believe me, when a gun is pointing at you, your nerves don’t want to be steady.

“The truth is I didn’t suspect you at first. Not at all. I’ll admit I entertained the thought that you may have wanted Victor killed because he was cheating on you with Mary M—” I stopped myself. Did I really want to give Elizabeth the name of someone she might want to go after when she was done with Gary and me?

“You’re making that up. Victor was besotted with me. Don’t you love that word? So veddy veddy British,” Elizabeth said in a mocking British accent. “And there was no one else. I had the man wrapped around my little finger. I told him I was a virgin and we were going to have to wait until the right moment. I had him panting like the dirty dog he was. So what else? What else gave me away?”

“And then there was the drinking. You said you met Victor when you were waitressing at a cocktail party he attended, and he took a drink off your tray. Several, in fact.”

“So?”

“So, Victor didn’t drink. A couple of people mentioned that to me, and the truth is I never thought of it until today.”

“She’s right. Victor didn’t drink. Never. Hated the stuff. Tried to get me to give it up all the time,” Gary tossed in. Good. Anything to drag this out long enough for the police to show up. That is, if they were planning on coming at all. Maybe John thought a text warning was good enough.

“That’s not a lot. Something else must have given me away. What was it?” Elizabeth turned the gun on me.

“Once I saw the blanket and started to put it all together I remembered about the drinking. I don’t think you met him like you said. I think you found him and created a situation where the two of you would meet. Then you maybe flirted with him, lured him in. Is that how it happened?”

Elizabeth pursed her lips together in an angry line. She wasn’t as clever as she thought.

“I waited for him to come out of his office and then told him my car battery was dead. He gave me a jump and I offered to buy him a coffee to thank him. It was that easy.” She jutted her chin out at me in a
so there
look.

“And I’ll bet there were no nude pictures to find. You were in his house to make sure there was nothing there that could connect you to him. And once I figured out about the blanket I started to think about the attack on Gary and how the first blow landed pretty low on his body. The killer didn’t miss his mark in the dark. The killer was short. Very short.”

Gary let go of my hand, and turned to look at me. “What blanket? What the hell are you talking about some blanket for, and who the hell is this person? Will one of you tell me what the hell is going on?”

Poor Gary. He still hadn’t put two and two together.

“Elizabeth is the daughter of the couple who was killed when that building collapsed in Rhode Island.”

Gary put his head in his hands and shook it back and forth. He looked up and turned to Elizabeth. “That’s what this is all about? That happened so long ago. It was an accident.”

“It doesn’t seem so long ago to me, you bastard! I got up and went to school like any other day, and the next thing I know my aunt is coming to pick me up because my parents are dead.”

“Aw, gee,” Gary got up and cautiously approached Elizabeth. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know there was a kid. The company went through a lawsuit, they went bankrupt. I didn’t know any of this.”

“Nothing happened to you and Victor. Nothing! My parents died and nothing happened except that my aunt got some money to take care of me. My parents worked so hard to save up money to start their own business. My mom was so proud. We were in the paper. Did you know that? They did an article on her, how she came from nothing and she and my dad were making a go of it. There was a picture of us in the paper together. I was sitting on her lap and I was so happy, and you took that all away from me. You did that and then went on with your life like nothing ever happened.”

Elizabeth was sobbing now. She dropped to her knees and covered her face with her hands. I jumped up and kicked the gun away from her. Gary got down on the floor and gently put his hand on her back. He looked up at me and his eyes were wet.

Through Gary’s open office door, I saw a shadow and a moment later my husband and Jim Maroni walked in. They handcuffed Elizabeth, and Jim escorted her through the office as another team of police from the Fairfield police department came across the room to take statements from Gary and me.

“Are you okay?” John asked as he wrapped his arms around me.

“We’re fine. I wasn’t sure whether you were going to get here in time or not.” I was still shaking.

John conferred with the local police and then he left to take Elizabeth back to Indian Cove.

Gary and I left the tech guys to do their thing and went out in the reception area. I waited for a couple of officers to pass through and then I touched Gary’s arm and looked up at him with a warm smile. “Thanks for trying to save my life. I appreciate it.”

He shook his head and then winced from the pain. “No, thank you. If you hadn’t shown up to warn me, I’d be dead now. I never knew about Elizabeth. That company was a mess. Victor and I talked to our boss on more than one occasion about the crap they were using to build that building. I know, I’m making excuses. I should have reported them or just walked away, but we were idiots and just did our jobs and this kid lost her parents. What’s going to happen to her?”

“She killed Victor. She’s probably going to prison for a very long time.”

“That doesn’t seem right somehow. What we did, or didn’t do, put all of this into motion,” Gary said.

I picked up my purse and headed for the door. “She’s a grown up. She made her choice. She could have just talked to you, maybe sued you. I don’t know. But not murder.”

“Hey, what was all that about a blanket? Were you just making it up to stall her?”

“No. Elizabeth’s car is a mess. She keeps a lot of junk in there and when I was talking to her, I saw a blue blanket. It was hand-crocheted. I crochet a lot myself and could tell it was good quality. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. My husband told me that they found blue alpaca fibers on the floor of the site where Victor was killed.”

“Alpaca? Like the animal?”

“Exactly. They make high-end yarn from alpaca and Elizabeth teaches a craft class and does a lot of needle work. I never put two and two together until I was at Maddi Wickersham’s house this afternoon and her husband was carrying out some blue blankets to take with them to Block Island. Then everything else fell into place. I’ll bet Elizabeth lured Victor to the site with the prospect of a romantic evening under the stars. She must have used the blanket for something for them to sit on.”

“Poor Victor.”

“Yeah, well don’t feel too sorry for him. I’m pretty sure he killed his wife.”

“I guess. Well, thanks again. You really did save my life,” Gary said to my breasts.

“Hey, Gary! Eyes up here!”

The last couple of days had been pretty hectic. Everyone wanted to hear about how Gary and I almost bought the farm. It seemed like I told the story a hundred times. As it turned out, I was right on the mark when I thought Elizabeth had lured Victor to the house site. She promised him a picnic and a night of passion under the moon and the stars. She had brought along the blanket I saw on the back seat of her car and then she nailed him but good.

I was disappointed to find out that I wasn’t the only one who was on to Elizabeth. After I had told John about meeting her, he and Jim interviewed her and followed up on her alibi about the restaurant. She had been there just like she told me, but only much later in the evening after she had already killed Victor. That got the police interested in her and they found out that she was using her aunt and uncle’s last name and her own middle name as her first, which explained why the names I found on the Internet didn’t fit. After her parents died her aunt took her in, albeit reluctantly, and she moved to Europe where her uncle was stationed with the military. John told me that while they were never abusive to her, children had never factored into their plans, and she was made to feel like an intrusion.

I finished up the potato salad I was making for tonight’s barbeque, and covered it and placed it in the refrigerator. The whole family plus Meme’s friends and Shirley and Tom and Mary Beth and Jeff would be arriving at six, which gave me a few hours to run an errand. I called out to John, who was mowing the back lawn, and told him I would be back in a while. Ten minutes later I pulled up in front of Maddi Wickersham’s house.

“Come on in. How are you? I read in the paper what happened. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. I didn’t think I was going to walk out of there, but someone was watching over me.” Meme told me it was probably Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. I wasn’t sure how to take that.

“Well, thank goodness for that. Come on into the kitchen. Hal ran to the store to pick up some steaks for dinner. With the girls gone we’re planning on a quiet evening with just the two of us. I can’t wait! He’s even doing the cooking.”

“I can’t stay. I have plans myself, but I wanted to tell you something.”

“I bet I can guess what it is. You thought I killed Victor, and you want to apologize? That’s it, right?”

I looked down at the counter for a moment and thought about that, then I looked up and met Maddi’s gaze. “Yes, I did think you may have killed Victor. I didn’t think it all the time, but sometimes I felt that your pain was so great that it got the better of you.”

Maddi’s right hand covered her mouth, while tears flowed down her cheeks. “It still hurts. I don’t think it’ll ever stop, and I try to be strong for Moshi, but I loved my sister with all my heart. We were best friends. I’m glad Victor is dead, I won’t deny it, I just wish he had confessed to killing her before he died.”

“That’s why I’m here. My husband got a call from the Maine police yesterday. The place where your sister died has a lot of summer cabins. People go up there when the weather is warm, and the rest of the time the cabins are empty. A man walked into the town’s police station a few days ago. He’s homeless, does odd jobs during the summer for people in the area, that sort of thing.”

Maddi’s smoky eyes were huge as she listened to me. She stood ramrod straight and I could tell she was holding her breath.

“He told the police that he had been staying in one of the cabins last winter. He didn’t think anyone would mind, but he didn’t want to get caught and risk being kicked out. Maddi, he was out walking on the day your sister died. He heard someone coming and he hid, hoping it was just hikers and they would pass. He saw Victor grab Jenna and drag her to the edge where he pushed her over. The homeless man was afraid to tell anyone what he saw. He didn’t know who Victor was and was afraid that he might come back and kill him, too. But he told some of the summer people what he saw and they made him go to the police. He described Victor and your sister as well, including what they were both wearing. Maddi, it’s over. You know the truth.”

Maddi slumped against the counter and I rushed over and helped her onto one of the stools.

“Let me make you a cup of tea.”

Maddi sat there quietly crying while I made her a cup of tea and then sat down next to her. The tears came in a torrent like she had been saving them up for months, and maybe she had. I waited for the storm to subside.

“It’s okay. Let it all out.” I handed her a couple of tissues.

“I must look like a raccoon or something,” Maddi said with a small smile. “You know that saying,
be careful what you wish for
? I wanted to know the truth all these months and now that I do, I think I’ll be haunted for the rest of my life thinking about my sister’s last moments. The image of her being dragged to her death. How will I ever get that out of my head? I should have forced her to leave him and not go on that trip.” Maddi looked at me, the smoky eyes just two black pools with a bright blue dot in the middle. “I’m glad he’s dead. If someone hadn’t killed him, after what you just told me, I would have. A life in prison would have been too good for him.”