Seven Sisters (35 page)

He stopped, stared at her gorgeous, uncompromising smile, then did as she said without a peep of protest.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “Everything I told you is pure speculation. Ruining the reputation of someone like Rose Brown over something you have no substantial proof for would, as I said before, not only garner you a libel suit, but also might hinder you finding the real perpetrator.”

He frowned, knowing she was right.

“So, what should we do?” I asked. “We should do
something
.”

“My advice? Go light a candle or say a prayer for those sad, pathetic people and get on with your life, because it’s way beyond your control.”

I stood up, hitching my purse over my shoulder. “Thanks, Amanda. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.”

“No problem,” she said, coming around the desk and wrapping me in a Ralph Lauren-scented hug. “You do manage to get yourself into some interesting situations.” She held out a hand to Detective Hudson. “Good luck, Detective. Hope you find your killer.”

“Count on it,” he said grimly.

She grinned at me. “God bless the eternal cockiness of the native Texan male.”

“YOU CAN DROP me off at the folk art museum,” I said, as we walked out to his truck.

“Fine,” he said.

I glanced over at him. “You okay?”

The only reply I received was an almost imperceptible shrug. He was quiet the whole drive over to the museum.

“Got a john in there?” he asked when we pulled into the driveway.

“Sure, back in the workrooms.”

I was listening to the message on the answering machine for the third time when he walked past my office. “Detective, come listen to this.”

He stood next to me, listening to Cappy’s gruff voice.

“We need to talk,” she said. “Call me.” The time of the call was three-forty-five p.m. The exact time we were sitting in Amanda’s office. It was now almost five.

He picked up the phone and handed it to me. “Call her and see what she wants.”

“I bet she knows we went out to see Eva Knoll,” I said, staring at the phone he held out. “She probably had us followed or she has a contact out there.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Call her.”

After finding it in my Rolodex, I punched her number with a shaking finger.

“We need to talk,” she said again. “Can you come out now?”

“Right now?” I asked, looking at the detective. He nodded yes.

“Yes,” she said. “But alone. I will only talk to you alone. I mean it.”

I hesitated, then said, “I’ll be there in about a half hour.”

“Fine.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

“I’ll drive,” Detective Hudson said, starting for the door.

“She said she’d only talk to me,” I called after him.

He stopped at the doorway and slowly turned around. “I will not let you go out there alone.”

“But what if this is our only chance to get a confession out of her? Can’t you put a wire on me or something? Park around the corner and come if I need help.”

His face tightened. “This isn’t television, Benni. If you got hurt, I’d never forgive myself. Not to mention your husband would kill me. Probably
after
he cut off my balls.”

I grabbed up my purse and snapped. “Fine, come along. It’ll probably screw up any chance of her telling us anything, but far be it from me to endanger your masculine appendages.” Deep inside, I knew he was right. But I also knew that Cappy most likely wouldn’t admit to a thing with him standing next to me.

When we drove the long, twisting entry road to the ranch, we didn’t see one solitary sign of life; the ranch was eerily empty. Even the wine-tasting room had only one car parked in front. Though Wednesday was not a busy day, tourist-wise, I expected to see some activity, a vineyard worker, a groom, or somebody walking around or working. We passed the stables where the hot walkers stood still, the chains swinging gently in the breeze, the training track and corrals clean and empty. I rolled down my window, catching a strong whiff of horse, but not a single nicker came over the breeze to shatter the immense silence.

We pulled up to the house and walked up the front steps. Detective Hudson rang the doorbell once, and ten seconds later Cappy answered the door. She was dressed in slightly dirt-stained blue jeans and a pale blue, snap-button Western shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her brown, muscled forearms looked as dangerous as a man’s.

“I said I’d only talk to Benni,” she said, her gray eyes flat as steel.

“Don’t blame her,” he said. “I wouldn’t let her come alone.”

“Sit in the foyer, then,” she said, pointing at a parson’s bench. “Come into my study,” she said over her shoulder as she strode across the glossy floor toward her office.

Detective Hudson hesitated.

“I’ll be fine,” I said in a low voice. “You’ll be right out here.”

“I don’t like this,” he answered.

“We don’t have a choice,” I said.

“She’s right,” Cappy called from her office.

He glared in Cappy’s direction and sat down on the parson’s bench.

Inside her office, she was already sitting behind her desk, under her mother’s Churn Dash quilt. “Please shut the office door,” she said.

I did as she asked, then stood there, waiting.
Calm down,
I told my nervous stomach.
Nothing’s going to happen. She’s not a killer and even if she was, she’s not going to pull a gun on you with Detective Hudson sitting right outside the door. Besides, he’s just a yell away and he’s armed and experienced at confrontations like this.

“Please, sit down,” she said, her voice amicable, as if all I was there for was to do a little horse trading or perhaps sell her a good load of timothy hay.

I sat down in one of the green leather chairs that Detective Hudson had used the night of Giles’s murder.

“Would you like a drink? I’ve got some bourbon here in my desk.”

I mutely shook my head.

“Okay, then,” Cappy said. “Let’s get down to business so we can get this wrapped up. I’ve got a trip to the Los Alamitos racetrack with Churn Dash tomorrow. He’ll be running his first race as soon as he qualifies. We’re expecting great things from him. Maybe he’ll end up siring our next Futurity winner.”

I nodded, not answering.

“You’re a very clever girl, Benni Harper,” she said, picking up a smooth wooden letter opener, running it back and forth through her strong fingers. “And persistent. I knew once you got your teeth in this I would have a hard time forcing you to let go. So . . .” She set the letter opener down and blinked her eyes slowly. “Blackmail’s an evil thing, wouldn’t you agree?” she asked, her mouth set in a grim, pale line.

I nodded.

“So anyone who would commit it would also be evil and deserve to be punished.”

I shifted forward in my chair. Was she going to confess to Giles’s murder? Reveal it was someone else? Was she covering for someone? That has always been a possibility. “Who are you talking about?”

She stared at me, her eyes as steady and reflective as a knife blade. She didn’t answer my question, but instead said, “I have a story for you. Do you like stories, Benni Harper?”

Without thinking, I held my breath, mesmerized by her control. Her every deliberate movement, her unblinking eyes, reminded me of an ancient, battle-scarred rattler poised to strike.

She started talking, her voice cold and emotional. She told me a story that had I not already talked to Amanda, I would have never believed. A story about a terrified seven-year-old girl who watched her mother gently place a pillow over her little sister Dahlia’s face, pressing down until her sister kicked and kicked her tiny legs in desperation to breathe. Then picking the baby up and running out in the hall and down the stairs calling for help, calling for someone to call the doctor, the beloved family doctor. How she saw her do it again and again, placing the pillow so lovingly, so gently over her sister’s tiny face. Each time, stopping just in time to call for the doctor. The little girl told no one, but held the secret tight inside her chest, not believing her mother capable of that, not a mother, not her mother.

Then Dahlia died, and at the funeral she heard her mother whisper,
My babies are together again.

Every night the little girl prayed that God would make things all right. That Daisy and Dahlia would not be dead, that the memories in her head of the pillow being held over Dahlia’s face by her mother’s delicate white hands would go away. A year later when another set of twins was born, the little girl was relieved because she believed that God had answered her prayers and that her mother had been given another chance. But she watched her mother, followed her constantly, until her mother said in her soft, gentle voice,
Don’t be always hanging around me, go play like your sisters, get some fresh air, let me be with my babies.
Then the new twins, Bethany and Beulah, died, too, first one and then the other. Her mother both times came running out of the nursery crying for help, calling for the housekeeper to call the doctor. At the funerals, Cappy could not stop staring at her mother’s delicate white hands.

“Then it was over,” Cappy said, her voice emotionless and dry as a desert. “My mother never bore any other children, and she went on to become a great advocate for the welfare of children in this county. Without her, thousands of children would be much worse off, even dead, for lack of medical care. My father used his political influence to help her achieve her goals. I left home at seventeen to follow the rodeo and didn’t come back until after Father died and Mother needed me to run the ranch.”

I sat quietly—horrified. Horrified by the story of a sickness I still couldn’t imagine, by the matter-of-factness with which Cappy told her story, and with the fact that a seven-year-old would have to carry a burden like that, a burden that twisted her own thinking and loyalties to the point of murder.

When I could finally speak, I asked, “Do your sisters know?”

“Yes, I told them years ago. But we agreed it should stop there. Our children and their children have never known and never will. It needs to end when we die. And it would have. . .” She left the statement open.

“It would have, except Giles somehow found out about the murdered babies.”

A muscle in her cheek flinched at my graphic words.

“Probably, because of her senility, from your mother,” I continued, “and he was blackmailing the family to force you to merge your winery with his father’s. You, or somebody in the Brown family killed him to keep him quiet.”

Speaking slowly, obviously choosing her words with care, she replied, “Giles’s death was a tragic event. I know his family will miss him. I wish it didn’t have to happen.”

“You know I have to tell Detective Hudson. I have to tell Gabe.”

“What is there to tell? I’ll deny anything you claimed I said about my mother and her babies. As for the rest...” She shrugged. “You and I were just lamenting over poor Giles’s tragedy.”

Our eyes met, and in that moment I knew she’d killed Giles and I knew she’d never get caught.

“Now you, too, have a burden to carry,” she said, her voice not unkind, but firm and, it seemed to me, tired.

My heart pumped wildly out of control. It took me a moment to find the voice to ask the question I knew I had to ask. “Why would you protect her all these years when she murdered your sisters?”

An almost astonished expression crossed her old face, as if she couldn’t believe I’d ask such a ridiculous question. “She’s my mother, Benni.”

“But she
murdered
your sisters,” I repeated, my voice a whisper.

For the briefest second, her expression changed. All the years of fear and shame and grief and disappointment seemed to converge, and I thought for a moment she might lay her head in her strong, capable hands and start sobbing. Then her back stiffened, and cool resolve again blanketed her face.

“We’ve talked long enough,” she said. “Please go.”

I stood up, my knees trembling, wanting to say something, but not knowing what. Finally I said, “You won’t get away with this forever.”

“Good-bye, Benni,” she said, then took a deep breath and turned her chair around, dismissing me.

Detective Hudson was pacing the hallway when I came out of Cappy’s office.

“What did she say?” he demanded.

Stumbling over the words, trying to keep my composure, I told him.

He pushed past me and stormed into her office, his face white with anger. “You sick, sorry piece of human garbage,” he said. “You’d protect a woman who murdered her own babies just for some attention. You’d protect a woman who’s lived a lie most of her life, this woman who professes to be a great lover of children. You’d kill another human being in cold blood for a woman who’d do that! Why?”

She turned her chair slowly around, her face as expressionless and cold as a smooth river stone. Had I really seen all those emotions on her face minutes before, or had it just been wishful thinking on my part?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

His breathing sounded loud in the quiet room. “You won’t get away with it. I’ll find a way to see that you or your mother doesn’t get away with this.”

“You don’t have that kind of power, Detective,” she said, unmoved by his anger. “And you never will.”

“Maybe not,” he said, his voice steel-edged, “but I have time. And if it takes me the rest of my life, I’ll expose you and your mother.”

“Excuse me,” she said, picking up the phone, dismissing us. “I have some important phone calls to make.”

He started to say something else, but I laid a hand on his forearm. “Let’s go, Detective Hudson.”

He turned and looked at me, ready to snap a reply. We stared at each other a long moment, and I saw a small muscle flutter in his smooth cheek. Without a word, I took his arm and led him outside without looking back.

Swallowing the salt that coated the back of my throat, I willed myself to stay calm.
Get away
, a voice inside me kept saying.
Just get away
. Away from this house with its ghoulish secrets, away from a woman so tainted by the evil she saw as a child, it destroyed her, too. Having lost my mother so early and yet going on to live a fairly happy life, I once thought foolishly that perhaps a mother’s influence was not as great as all the psychologists claim. That was until my experience last spring with my own mother’s secrets. I realized then that our mothers set the stage so early for who we are, what we think of the world, of ourselves, of the bare facts of what we perceive as good and evil, that even their absence, emotionally or physically, changes the very fabric and landscape of our lives. We didn’t have to be like them, but we never escaped them, no matter how swiftly we tried to run.