String of Lies (26 page)
“Well, enjoy your lunch,” Lisa said. “I’d better get my tables cleaned up. My shift’s over soon, and Randy’s coming by to give me a lift to my sister’s.”
“Say ‘hi’ to Randy for me. Tell him the shelves he built for Jo are holding up great.”
Jo was halfway out the door with her bag of food when she stopped and turned back, catching Lisa before she disappeared.
“You called Parker Holt an old friend of Randy’s. You meant, didn’t you, that they knew each other in school, not that they hung out together or anything, right?”
Lisa shook her head, surprised. “No, they were real good buds. All through high school. Funny, isn’t it, how they ended up so different?”
Jo nodded slowly. Alarms had started going off in her head so loudly that she barely heard the crash of crockery coming from a dropped tray somewhere in the back.
Lisa cried, “Oh gosh,” and hurried off, leaving Jo still nodding and saying to no one, “Right.”
Funny.
Chapter 24
Jo sat in her car for several minutes, thinking, then finally turned on her ignition and pulled away from the curb. She had gone halfway back to the craft shop when she abruptly made a left turn to do a backtrack of sorts. Jo passed the turnoff for TJ’s and continued on for a few minutes until she pulled up in front of Hollander’s, the restaurant where Lucy Kunkle said she and Mallory were lunching.
“Good afternoon.” A mustached man in a dark suit greeted Jo as she entered the foyer. “Do you have a reservation?”
“I’m looking for Mallory Holt’s party.”
“Of course.” He turned to a woman who stood nearby clad in dark slacks and a white dress shirt topped with a red bow tie. “Mrs. Holt’s table.”
Jo followed the woman, who had picked up a menu and obviously assumed Jo was a late-arriving guest of Mallory’s. They wound their way through widely spaced tables that were topped with vases of fresh flowers and seated several well-dressed patrons. Soft music floated through the air along with muffled conversations, but most of that barely reached Jo’s consciousness. Her mind focused on the questions she wanted to ask Mallory.
“Ms. McAllister!” Lucy Kunkle looked up in surprise as Jo approached their table. She managed a pleased expression, unlike her niece, who only looked annoyed. The other two women, closer in age to Lucy than to Mallory, glanced up with interest.
The waitress immediately brought a fifth chair to the table, although Jo explained she didn’t intend to stay. “I’m very sorry to interrupt your luncheon, but I have something important to ask.”
“If it’s about your shop building—” Mallory began, but Jo stopped her.
“No, it’s nothing to do with that.” Jo sat, deciding she’d be less conspicuous and could speak more quietly if she did. “Can you just tell me, was your husband a good friend of Randy Truitt’s when they were teenagers?”
Mallory’s eyebrows shot up, and Jo could imagine her thoughts regarding Jo’s mental state.
“I’m not asking this idly, believe me. Was he?”
“Well, yes,” Mallory admitted. “Parker did tell me they had been friends as kids. You know how it is,” she smiled deprecatingly to her other tablemates, “when you’re that age. I’m certain the draw was the fact that Randy had a car to drive. Parker’s parents were terribly strict at the time about allowing him access to theirs.”
“So Parker and Randy did things together, outside of school, I mean?”
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“I’m puzzled because Randy told me he barely knew Parker, and only from having shared a single class together in high school.”
“Well,” Mallory said, laughing, “you can understand why, can’t you? I mean, how could the paths of two former friends have diverged much farther? It must be humiliating. But Parker, despite Randy’s, ah, shortcomings, never forgot his old connection. He gave Randy jobs off and on, that is, when he felt Randy was sober enough to handle them.”
Lucy Kunkle crooned softly, obviously adding the information to her long list of Parker’s saintly qualities.
“Yes,” Jo said. “Randy mentioned having worked on your new landscaping last summer.”
“Did he? I really don’t keep track of that kind of thing.”
“He said he almost toppled the table in your back hallway when he came in to wash up, and nearly broke the glass candleholder you have on it.”
“Not last summer, surely,” Lucy Kunkle spoke up. “He must have been thinking of some time more recently. You only got that piece two weeks ago, Mallory, didn’t you? From the women’s club—in honor of your first year of presidency.”
Jo suddenly remembered Sharon Doyle having come into her shop shortly after Christmas looking for a gift item and buying one of the two glass candleholders Jo had in stock, the second going only recently to Loralee. Sharon hadn’t mentioned at the time who the gift was for. Once again Jo was amazed at what a tangle of connection things in Abbotsville so often turned out to be.
“Yes, you’re right about when I got that gift,” Mallory said to her aunt. “However, I don’t recall having had work done at the house since then. But”—she shook her head impatiently—“who can remember every little thing. Was there anything else, Ms. McAllister?”
Jo stood up. “No, that’s all I need. Thank you.” She vaguely heard Lucy Kunkle imploring her to stay and join them, with faint echoing murmurs added by the other two women at the table. A social lunch, however, was the last thing on her mind as she made her way out of the dining room. The bright sunlight Jo encountered as she stepped outside would have normally been cheering on a midwinter’s day. But all she was aware of was the cold.
Jo slowly pulled away from Hollander’s and headed back to the Craft Corner. Traffic was light, which was fortunate, since she drove on autopilot, her thoughts far beyond traffic lights and stop signs.
Had she been focusing in the wrong direction all this time? she wondered. Had Parker Holt’s murderer—and Alexis Wigsley’s—been right under her nose? Fixing her shelves? Clearing her walk? Or was she overreacting to the lies she had just caught Randy in? They were certainly nothing that would hold up in a court of law. A lie about how well he knew the victim, plus one concerning when he had last been in the victim’s house? What did they, in actuality, add up to?
The thing was—Jo braked as she realized the traffic light before her had turned red—why would Randy need to lie at all unless he had something to hide? Jo supposed it was possible that, as Mallory claimed, Randy simply hated to invite comparisons between his life and Parker’s, and so had denied their past connection.
But Jo couldn’t buy that. Randy’s general history was well known in the town. He must have been aware that Jo, though new to the area, would have eventually learned at least the basics of his background. So pretending little connection to Parker Holt, Jo felt, must have sprung from guilt.
Randy surely knew that Xavier was strongly suspected by the police, and that Carrie and Dan were suffering severe damage by association. Jo’s concerns, he would have seen, would clearly have been for her friends. Randy may not have been aware of the extent of Jo’s investigations, but he would have realized she was someone to be careful around.
But his lie about when he was last inside the Holt’s house was, for Jo, the most incriminating one. Randy’s comment on the glass candleholder, she figured, must have slipped out before he realized its possible significance. When he did, he clearly tried to cover by changing the time he had nearly broken the piece. Except he unwittingly trapped himself by not knowing how recently Mallory acquired the candleholder.
Jo sighed deeply. She had liked Randy, had felt he had potential for getting his life back on track. She would never have thought him capable of murder. What had derailed him so completely? Neither of the murder victims were sterling characters, but what about them could have drawn such violent actions? She arrived at Main Street and gradually braked as she approached her shop’s parking lot. Jo signaled for her turn, then slowly drove in, feeling as weighted as if she were the one carrying her car instead of it carrying her. Uncovering the dark side of a liked and trusted individual, she was finding, was not a particularly satisfying coup.
Jo parked next to the Craft Corner’s building and she opened her door. Engrossed with her dour thoughts, she stepped out, then remembering her lunches, leaned back for the paper bag. As she did, a voice spoke chillingly close to her ear: “Just stop there.”
Jo felt the pressure of the knife before she saw it. She froze, then turned her head slightly to see Randy inches from her, his breath puffing into her face. He pressed a very large, very lethal-looking knife against her side.
“Be quiet, or I’ll have to use this,” he warned, and reached past her into the car, grabbing her keys from the ignition. He gripped her arm tightly with one hand, the other holding the knife, and jerked her toward the battered pickup that Jo had failed to notice as she pulled in, parked as it was beyond a large van.
“Randy—” she began, but he showed he meant what he said by pushing the knife into her jacket enough that she heard its nylon fabric pop.
“Just move,” he repeated, and Jo did.
Randy pushed her toward the passenger’s side of his pickup, Jo’s eyes searching the lot for someone, anyone, who could help, but without success. He yanked open the door and shoved her forward.
“Get in,” he said. “All the way over.”
Jo climbed up and into the truck, then scrambled awkwardly over the console to get to the driver’s seat as Randy pushed, while at the same time gripping her tightly. Randy took the passenger seat and pulled his door closed.
“Drive out onto Main,” he said, his knife still pressing at her side. “And don’t try to signal anyone or I
will
use this.”
will
use this.”
“Where—” Jo began, the knife instantly stopping her.
Her foot fumbled for the pedals, which were out of reach until she yanked the seat forward. Then she turned the ignition and put the truck into reverse.
When Jo turned her head to look back, she got her first full look at Randy’s face. It wasn’t the face of the man she knew, the man who had come to her shop that first day, nervous and grateful for the promise of a job. This was the face of a total stranger. Though the features hadn’t changed, the person behind them definitely had. The fear Jo had felt from the first, suddenly tripled.
“Turn right,” Randy said as they approached the street.
He held the knife against her with his right hand and gripped the collar of her jacket with his left. Jo checked in each direction but could see no pedestrians who might notice them and help her. The drivers of the few passing cars kept their eyes on the road ahead of them, Jo and her captor apparently catching no attention. She turned the truck onto the street and pulled away from the Craft Corner, feeling her heart sink with every inch of road she put between her and all reasonable hope of aid.
Jo drove up Main, staying, at Randy’s orders, within the speed limit, while at the same time her mind raced, searching for a means of escape. Any scenario she came up with, though, ended with the high probability of her blood fatally spilling over the inside of the truck, so she drove on, hoping against hope that she’d still find a way out of this.
Jo drove straight when Randy told her to and turned when Randy told her to turn, gradually suspecting where he was taking her. This was confirmed when they pulled onto her street. He told her to slow down as they approached her house. Banks of snow lined the curbs, but the laughing children that had so recently played in them, building snow forts and tossing snowballs, had gone off to school, their parents most likely away as well at their jobs. The street was empty of both neighbors and traffic, and Jo turned into her driveway without, she feared, a single eye witnessing it.
Randy switched the knife to his left hand and fumbled in his pocket. Jo glanced over to see him pull out her automatic garage-door opener, which he must have snatched from her car’s visor when he grabbed her keys. He pressed the button to raise the garage door, and when it reached its top, grunted, “Go.” Jo did.
As Randy closed the door behind them, Jo stared forward, hearing the noisy clang behind her as the door hit bottom. It sounded like the clang of a prison door, which was what her once-cozy home had just become—her prison. But what was her sentence to be?
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