Southern Comforts (32 page)

“Well, well. Sleeping Beauty is finally awake,” the dry voice said.

Chelsea turned toward the doorway, her eyes asking Jo,
Why?

“I thought I might have killed you,” the filmmaker said with a casualness that was even more terrifying than anything else that had happened to Chelsea thus far. To be able to speak so easily of murder denoted either a very evil—or very sick—mind. “Which would have been a shame. Since
you're a very important cog in this little wheel we're building.”

She entered the cabin, tossed some bags of fast food onto the cot, then came over to Chelsea and looked down at her.

“I'm going to untie your gag. But I've got to warn you, you'll be very, very sorry if you scream. Not that it would help, because there's no one around for miles. But it gets on my nerves. And believe me, Chelsea, I can be very unpleasant when I get nervous.”

She flashed a smile toward the other bound woman. “Isn't that right, Roxanne?”

Roxanne managed a half nod that made Jo laugh.

When she went over to the cot, picked up her leather purse and pulled out a knife, Chelsea's blood turned to ice.

“Don't worry,” she said, apparently reading the fear in Chelsea's gaze. “I'm not going to hurt you. Not yet, anyway.” She sliced through the thick gag with the shiny blade. “There. Isn't that better?”

“I don't understand,” Chelsea managed to croak. Her mouth was as dry as sawdust. From fear and whatever drugs Jo had slipped into her iced tea. “What do you want from me?”

“What do you think? I want you to write a book, of course. About Roxanne.”

“I thought that was what I was doing.”

“You're right.” Jo sighed. “I suppose it would be more correct to say that I want you to write a tell-all biography of Cora Mae Padgett.” This time the smile she flashed at Roxanne was as lethal as the knife she held in her hand. “My very own mommy dearest.”

 

When Chelsea still hadn't returned by late afternoon, Cash began to worry. He hadn't wanted Chelsea to go to Roxanne's today. He understood ambition, but, as he'd ar
gued with her, someone had killed George Waggoner. And set fire to Belle Terre. Someone who was still running around loose.

She'd scoffed at his fears, assured him that no one would have any reason to kill her, then drove away from Rebel's Ridge. Leaving him to pace and worry.

What if George hadn't been the target? What if the perpetrator had gone to Belle Terre to torch it, was discovered in the act, and killed George to cover up his—or her—crime?

What if this person had a grudge against Roxanne? What if he or she tried again?

Chelsea's independent spirit was one of the reasons he'd fallen in love with her. She was more than capable of making her own decisions. But dammit, this one was wrong. Really, really wrong. And there was no way he was going to let her die in the name of feminine independence.

Grabbing his keys from the hook by the door, he climbed into the pickup and took off, scattering gravel as he tore out of the driveway.

Twenty minutes later he was at Roxanne's Tudor house, arriving just as Dorothy was coming out the front door.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“Who? Chelsea? Or Roxanne?”

“Chelsea.”

“I don't know. I thought I'd stop by after bringing Mama home from the doctor's, to see if Roxanne had any work for me to do, but no one was here.”

A frisson of terror skipped up his spine. “Chelsea's rental car's here.”

“I know. But Roxanne's Mercedes is missing, so I assume they probably took it out to Belle Terre to inspect the damage.”

That was a possibility, Cash decided, desperate to have his fears prove unfounded.

“Although there's something that bothers me,” Dorothy said, on an afterthought.

“What's that?”

“I found a broken glass of iced tea on the floor of the kitchen. Along with Chelsea's duffel bag. Have you ever noticed how many pens and notebooks she keeps in that thing? I can't imagine her leaving it behind.”

Neither could he. Cash cursed.

“I'm going to call the sheriff,” he said.

“Why?”

“To tell him we've got a possible kidnapping.”

Dorothy's eyes grew wide behind the lenses of her black-framed glasses. “A kidnapping?”

“That's right.” A fist was twisting his gut in two. “And another possible homicide.”

Dorothy's horrified expression echoed his own bleak mood.

 

He couldn't lose her, Cash told himself fervently as he had no choice but to wait for Sheriff Joe Burke to arrive.

They'd find her. Safe and sound. And he would marry her in some fancy New York church in a three-ring circus of a formal ceremony that he'd hate but would put up with because every bride was entitled to the wedding of her dreams. He suspected he'd be required to wear a morning coat. And drink champagne beneath a striped tent. And smile and make small talk with all her mother's snobby Long Island friends. But he'd do it. For Chelsea. Because he loved her.

And they'd have babies. Lots of babies. With bright copper hair and big green eyes like their mother. And years later, they'd sit together on the green glider on their veranda
overlooking the river and watch their grandchildren chasing fireflies, and they'd both agree that they were the luckiest people on the planet. Because they had each other.

Cash did not believe all this because he was by nature an optimist.

He believed it would come true because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

He loved Chelsea. She loved him.

Everything had to turn out okay. As the sheriff's car pulled up in front of the house, red-and-blue rooftop bubble light flashing, Cash refused to allow himself to think otherwise.

 

Chelsea couldn't believe what she was watching. Jo had set up a generator to run a VCR and television in the fishing cabin, subjecting Chelsea to videos depicting Roxanne having sex with Vern Gibbons and George Waggoner. There was also one distasteful episode where Roxanne threatened to terminate Cash if he didn't sleep with her. Loving Cash, and knowing him as she did, Chelsea was not the least bit surprised when he turned the predatory woman down.

She watched George blackmailing Roxanne about her former life, and, it seemed, her stepfather, a man named Jubal Lott. Although it wasn't clear to Chelsea which of the deadly duo had actually killed the man, she could certainly understand why Roxanne had been willing to pay him to keep quiet. It also answered her question as to why Waggoner had been hired to work at Belle Terre.

She cringed at the gruesome scene of George's death. When the heavy hammer came down, crushing his head, her stomach roiled. Bile rose in her throat. With an effort, she forced it back down.

“I don't understand,” she said to Jo, “why you killed him.”

“Because he was my father, of course,” Jo explained.

“That's not true!” Roxanne cried. Although Jo had removed her gag as well, this was the first thing she'd said.

“The videotape doesn't lie.” Her eerily serene behavior reminded Chelsea of the calm before a very violent storm. “I can see it's time for a little more show-and-tell.” She put in another tape and pushed Play. “You see,” she said after the scene depicting George reminding Roxanne about her pregnancy had played. “You can't lie about this, Mama. You and that alcoholic murderer made a child together.”

“That's true. But I got an abortion.”

“Liar.” Jo reached into her purse and pulled out a paper. “This is my birth certificate. And although it has the names of my adoptive parents on it, please notice the date. And here—” she whipped out another piece of paper “—are hospital records showing that Cora Mae Padgett was a patient at the same time.”

“How did you get those records?” Roxanne asked.

“You'd be surprised what people will hand over when you tell them you're filming a movie,” Jo said. “It was a small hospital, Mama. I was the only baby born that day.”

Roxanne stared at Jo as if seeing her worst nightmare come to life. She hadn't looked this bad watching Belle Terre burn to the ground. For the first time, Chelsea thought she looked every one of her fifty years.

“George wasn't your father,” Roxanne repeated. It did not escape Chelsea's attention that she did not deny the accusation that she was Cora Mae Padgett. Or even that she might be Jo's mother.

“I
was
pregnant when I married him. But I was afraid the baby might be Jubal's. Surely you can understand that under the circumstances, I had no choice but to get an abortion. Three years before you were even born.”

“You're my mother,” Jo insisted.

Roxanne let out a slow, stuttering breath. “You may be right. When I was a sophomore in college, I got pregnant again. It wasn't anyone important, just a professor who promised to give me an A in my art history class if I slept with him.”

“Beats studying,” Chelsea couldn't resist muttering. Her comment earned a hot look from Roxanne and a conspiratory smile from Jo.

“So this professor was my father?”

“Yes.”

“Not George.”

“No. Not George.”

“Oops.” Jo giggled. “Looks as if I made a little mistake. She shrugged philosophically and flashed a grin toward Chelsea. “Oh well, the guy was a creep anyway. No one will miss him.”

Unfortunately, Chelsea found she couldn't disagree with that statement. Jo turned back to Roxanne. “You were saying?”

Although it was hot and steamy in the cabin, Roxanne was trembling as if she'd been set adrift, buck naked, on an arctic iceberg. “Do we have to do this?”

“If you want to stay alive.”

“All right.” Roxanne shuddered, took another deep breath and continued. “I'd planned to get another abortion, but I was upset and distracted on the way to the motel where the procedure was supposed to take place and crossed the street against the light. I was hit by a car and ended up with a broken back that forced me to spend six months in the hospital in traction. Since abortion was still illegal at the time, I had no choice but to carry the baby to term.”

“So, unwilling to sidetrack your lofty career goals by becoming a mother, you gave me up for adoption and never looked back.”

“It was the best thing to do,” Roxanne insisted. “For both of us.”

“For you, maybe. But not for me.”

“That's not true! You've told me all about your parents. Your father was in the military. An officer, I believe. You traveled around the world. Your parents adored you.”

“Beneath his fancy dress uniform, my adoptive father was a brutal, autocratic redneck who terrorized the men under his command and beat up his wimp of a wife for kicks. When I got old enough, he beat me up, too. He used to play games. One of his favorite pastimes was playing Russian roulette during dinner. He'd point his revolver at me or my mother and pull the trigger.

“When the cylinder came up empty, he'd laugh. And sometimes he'd put the gun down. Other times he'd try again. Every so often, just to remind us that he
could
kill us, he'd shoot into the wall over our heads. It was a fun life, Mama. Thanks for making it happen.”

“How could I have known?” Roxanne argued plaintively. “The woman at the agency—”

“Don't talk to me about that agency!” Jo yelled, displaying her first sign of temper so far. “It was a fucking baby mill. They bought babies, then sold them to the highest bidder. Like you sold me, Mother. For ten thousand dollars.”

“I was assured they were good people.”

“Don't give me that shit. I know you. I've been living with you for weeks. I've been watching every little secret aspect of your life. You're a scheming, heartless, opportunist bitch. And we both know you would have sold me to Genghis Khan for ten thousand dollars.”

She reached into the purse again and pulled out a revolver. “This was my adoptive father's gun. I inherited it when he died when our house burned up. It seems he trag
ically fell asleep with a cigarette.” She laughed. “Which, of course, proves that it's true what the Surgeon General says about smoking being hazardous to your health.”

Chelsea had never seen so much hatred in one person. It was both terrifying and horribly sad at the same time.

Jo put the barrel of the gun against Roxanne's temple. The older woman closed her eyes and cringed. Jo pulled the trigger.

“Well,” she said cheerfully, when the click seemed deafening in the heavy silence, “I guess you lucked out this time. We'll try again. Later.”

She handed Chelsea a pen and a yellow legal pad. “Start writing. I tell you, Chelsea, this revised version of the Roxanne Scarbrough story is going to shoot you to the top of the bestseller list.”

Chelsea had no doubt she was right. She hoped she'd be alive to see it published.

“I
gotta tell you, son,” Joe Burke said. “Having your lady friend disappear when you're already a suspect in a murder ain't the best thing that could happen to you.”

“I didn't kill Waggoner,” Cash insisted yet again.

“You weren't home all night with Miz Cassidy, either.” When Cash didn't answer that, the sheriff nodded. “That's kind of what I thought. She seemed like a real loyal little gal. But someone ought to warn her that lyin' to a law enforcement officer during a criminal investigation could get her in big trouble.”

“I'll tell her,” Cash said, his impatience escalating with each minute they wasted. “As soon as we find her.”

“That could be a mite difficult. Seeing as how we don't know where to start looking.”

“Jo McGovern's got her,” Cash said.

“You got any proof of that, son?”

“Yeah.” Not worrying whether his actions had been legal, Cash had entered the house and gone straight to the kitchen where he'd heard the faint whirring sound of a cam
era in the eerie stillness. Opening the pantry door he located the hidden camera.

Jo had documented her crime well. The sheriff, Cash and Dorothy watched the videotape as the young woman stirred the drug into the iced tea. Watched an unsuspecting Chelsea drink it. Then watched as she slid off the chair onto the floor and was dragged, feet first from the room.

The sheriff turned to Dorothy. “You've spent a lot of time with Ms. McGovern. Do you have any idea where she might have taken off to?”

Dorothy shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“Dammit,” Cash exploded. “She must have said something.”

“Mostly she just talked about her film.”

“You went sightseeing with her the first day Roxanne brought Chelsea out to Belle Terre,” he remembered.

“The day Roxanne got that call from LaDonna?”

“That's it. While you were driving around, filming the local color, was there any one place that she seemed attracted to?”

Cash watched the light of recognition brighten Dorothy's eyes. “Her daddy had a fishing cabin on the Tallatch River.”

The river was only a few miles from Raintree, part of the Lower Coastal Plain. It wasn't much, Cash thought. But it was a start. He exchanged a look with the sheriff which told him they were thinking the same thing.

“Do you remember her saying where it was?”

“I may be able to do better than that,” Dorothy said. “I believe I can show you.”

“You've been there?”

“She wanted to see it. I was irritated because I'd probably be late getting home to fix Mama's dinner. But Jo was so insistent, and Roxanne had instructed me to do whatever it
took to make Jo's and Chelsea's stay with us more enjoyable. So I drove her there to look at it. We didn't stay long.”

She shivered. “There was an old alligator sunning himself next to the rickety old front porch. We couldn't get out of the car. Which didn't disturb me in the least, since it wasn't a very nice-looking place.”

Cash picked Dorothy up off her feet and planted a big kiss right on her mouth. “Dorothy, darlin',” he said, when he'd put her back on the ground, “I love you.”

Even knowing that he didn't mean it, not in the way she would have liked, Dorothy still blushed.

“I'll call and have them get a chopper ready for us,” the sheriff said. “It'll be faster. Do you think you can spot the cabin from the air, Miz Palmer?”

“I think so. So long as you follow the road so I can get my bearings.”

Ten minutes later, the trio, accompanied by two members of the Sheriff's Department SWAT team were taking off from the county airport.

They were going to get to Chelsea in time, Cash assured himself. They had to. Because the alternative was unthinkable.

 

It seemed she'd been writing for hours. Chelsea's hand was getting cramped. But every time she stopped to massage her aching fingers, Jo would stop dictating long enough to scream at her to keep writing.

Chelsea was reluctantly impressed at how much information the filmmaker had been able to compile. She knew an amazing amount about Roxanne's—Cora Mae's—life. It was only too bad she hadn't known about the earlier abortion. Then George Waggoner might still be alive. Although if she were to be perfectly honest, Chelsea certainly wasn't going to mourn the man.

All the time she was dictating, Jo paced. And filmed the process for her documentary. The dark circles beneath her eyes looked like bruises, making Chelsea wonder how long she'd been in this manic state, and how long she could keep going. She seemed to be operating on adrenaline. And madness.

Every so often, she'd get to a gap in what she knew. That was when she'd turn to Roxanne and hurl the questions at the stricken woman hard and fast. Whenever Roxanne didn't immediately sob out an answer, Jo would hit her. Hard. Then begin to pace again.

As the hours wore on, what had begun as a remarkably detailed accounting of one woman's life became the disjointed paranoid ramblings of a mind that was rapidly unraveling. As Jo grew more and more delusional, Chelsea realized she was also more and more dangerous. One could not reason with madness.

On the other hand, she considered, there was the chance that the crazed young woman might wear down completely. And that was what Chelsea decided to count on.

She began asking Jo to repeat things, which only confused the matter more. Sometimes Jo looked as if she were about to burst into tears. At other times, she appeared to be infuriated by her confusion. It was then Chelsea switched gears, soothing, calming, assuring her that they were in this together. Relieved to have found an ally, Jo would resume pacing. And talking.

Chelsea was not surprised to discover that Jo had burned Belle Terre. But there was one piece of the puzzle she couldn't make fit.

“May I ask a question?”

“Depends on what it is,” Jo snapped, looking irritated at being interrupted.

“Did you have anything to do with me falling off the staircase at Belle Terre?”

“Why would I want to do that?” Jo countered. “When I needed you to write this book. Think about it a minute, Chelsea. Who do you think could have felt threatened by you finding out the truth?”

Chelsea immediately turned toward Roxanne, who didn't respond to her probing gaze. But the guilty look in her eyes spoke volumes.

“I didn't mean to hurt you,” Roxanne said finally, as the silence hovered over the room. “Really,” she insisted when Jo laughed. “But I overheard you asking Jo about my background.”

“Fictional background,” Jo put in.

“I had my reasons for that,” Roxanne snapped, showing a bit of her own spunk. “I kept telling myself that you weren't an investigative reporter like your father, that you'd let it drop. But then you went to the courthouse to look up the old records, and well, I just wanted you to go back to New York. After all, you had enough to finish the book. And if you'd only gone,” she said pointing out what Chelsea had already thought of, “you wouldn't be in this predicament now.”

“That's enough chitchat,” Jo decided. “It's time to get back to work.”

Having lost her watch somewhere after being drugged, Chelsea had no idea what time it was. The cabin door was shut and barred, the hurricane shutters closed. The only light was from that single forty-watt bulb hanging overhead.

“I'm so tired,” she complained. “And my head is aching. Can't I take a break? I need some sleep. And some aspirin.”

“It's not night, yet,” Jo snarled. “You don't need to go to sleep.”

“What about the aspirin?” Chelsea put on her most con
ciliatory expression. “You're an artist, surely you understand how difficult it is to be creative when you're in pain. I truly want this to be a wonderful book, Jo.” She rubbed her forehead. “But with this splitting headache, I'm having trouble thinking straight.”

“There are some aspirin in the glove compartment of the car,” Roxanne offered carefully. “If that will help.”

Jo spun around. “Why are you trying to help me? What are you up to?”

“Nothing! I'm your mother. As you pointed out, I inadvertently did a terrible thing to you. The least I can do is help Chelsea write you a wonderful book.”

Jo looked hesitantly from Roxanne to Jo and back again. She reminded Chelsea of a wounded, trapped animal. “I'm not going to leave you alone in here.”

“Where could we go?” Chelsea asked. “We don't even know where we are. Speaking of which,” she said, “if I'm not back at Rebel's Ridge soon, Cash will worry. If he comes looking for me and I'm not at the house, he may call the sheriff.”

“Let him. By the time they find you, you'll both be dead anyway.”

That was exactly what Chelsea had feared. The stakes had just been raised considerably. “I don't think you'd kill me, Jo,” she said. “Because I'm on your side. And what good is a dead writer?”

“You don't think Truman Capote still sells?” Jo countered. “Hell, I'll bet his numbers are higher than when he was alive.”

Good point. Chelsea tried again. “But if I'm dead, I won't be able to promote the book. Do you have any idea how many people watched my interview with Charles Gibson on “Good Morning America”? All those people are potential readers, Jo.

“If we play our cards right, all of them—millions of viewers—will run out and buy our book and realize how badly you've been mistreated by Roxanne. None of them will ever buy any of her books again. Or her dishes, or her flatware, or her towels. She won't even be a footnote in history. She'll disappear. It'll be as if she never existed. But you need me to help you.”

“I'll get the aspirin,” Jo decided. “And you can come use the phone in the car to call your boyfriend. But you'd better not try anything funny.”

“I wouldn't think of it,” Chelsea promised.

As she left the cabin and walked out to the car parked on a strip of bright white sand, the sun was setting, bathing the landscape in a molten copper glow. The rain had stopped, but rather than cooling things down, the steamy air was pregnant with lingering moisture. They seemed to be somewhere similar to the swamp where she'd gone fishing with Cash and Jamie, but the water, rather than black, was a bright tea color. A pair of alligators dozed on the far bank.

“Where are we?”

“That's none of your business.” Jo opened the car door. “Make your damn phone call. Then we can get back to work.”

Chelsea called, relieved and worried when she got Cash's answering machine. That could mean he had already begun looking for her. Or perhaps he'd been arrested for George's murder.

She left a message, wishing she could have said something clever that would have tipped him off to her whereabouts. Which, of course, would have been impossible, even if she had been able to speak with him, because she had no earthly idea where she was.

She vaguely remembered Cash telling her that the rivers on the Coastal Plain were called backwater rivers. And that
their clear water was stained tea-colored by decaying organic matter in adjacent swamps. The salt dunes, she recalled, were on the eastern side of these streams and thought to be wind deposits from the nearby sea laid down some two million years ago.

Terrific. So now she knew she was somewhere on Georgia's coastal plain. Which was only hundreds of miles square. No problem finding her way home, she thought with a sinking heart.

But then again, if she didn't try to escape, her fate was sealed. Because although she might be able to temporarily confuse Jo, she did not believe for a moment that she'd be allowed to walk away from this alive.

Jo frowned as she watched Chelsea hang up. “You know, I never thought of this, but you could have used the phone to call 911.”

“But I didn't.”

“No. Not this time. Let's make sure you don't.” She lifted the revolver and slammed it down onto the console, shattering the phone's plastic casing. “There. That's better,” she said with overt satisfaction. “Now let's get back to work.”

They were almost to the cabin door when Chelsea stumbled and fell to her knees.

“Dammit,” Jo, clearly shaken by this unexpected event, shouted. “I told you not to try anything.”

“I fell,” Chelsea said on the closest thing to a whine that had ever, in all her twenty-eight years, come out of her mouth. “I told you, Jo, I'm exhausted. I need some sleep.”

“You can sleep when the book is done.” Something struck Jo as funny about that. “In fact, I promise you, Chelsea, you'll be sleeping for a very long time.” She was laughing as they entered the cabin.

“All right.” She went over to where she'd left the video
camera on the cot. As she bent down to pick it up, Chelsea lifted the rock she'd picked up when she pretended to fall and brought it down on her captor's head.

Chelsea quickly bent down and tried to untie Roxanne. But the cords were too tight, forcing her to resort to sawing through them as Jo had with her. Unfortunately, she wasn't left with enough cord to tie up her captor.

“We're going to have to get the hell out of here now. I don't suppose you have an extra car key hidden under the floor mat?”

“Of course not.”

“Terrific.” She dumped Jo's bag onto the cot, rifling through the contents until she found the set of car keys with their gold Mercedes symbol. “Okay, let's get this show on the road.”

“Do you know where you're going?” Roxanne asked as she followed Chelsea out to the car.

“Sure,” Chelsea answered with exaggerated bravado. “Away from here.”

“That's not a very good answer.”

“Sorry. It's the best I can do.” Chelsea claimed the driver's seat without asking permission, stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. The quiet, unmistakable click was almost deafening. She tried again. Nothing.