The Cove (34 page)

Epilogue

 

S
ALLY
S
T
. J
OHN
Brainerd and James Railey Quinlan were married on the date Dillon Savich had set for them—October 14. Dillon Savich was Quinlan's best man and Sally's mother was her matron of honor. She attended her daughter's wedding with Senator Matt Montgomery from Iowa, a widower who'd taken one look at Noelle and fallen hard. She had worn a two-piece bathing suit that summer.

There were 150 special agents from the FBI, including two special agents from the Portland field office, one of them the newly appointed SAC, or special agent in charge. Every Railey and Quinlan within striking distance arrived at the Elm Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Sally was simply enfolded into her new family.

Ms. Lilly, Marvin the Bouncer, and Fuzz the Bartender were in attendance, Ms. Lilly wearing white satin and Marvin announcing to everyone that the chicky looked gorgeous in her wedding dress. Fuzz brought a bottle of Chardonnay for a wedding present. It had a cork.

The media mobbed the wedding, which was expected since the trial of Dr. Beadermeyer—aka Norman Lipsy—had ended just the previous week and Sally had been one of the major prosecution witnesses. He'd been found guilty of conspiracy, murder, kidnapping, extortion, and income tax evasion, which, a TV news anchorwoman
said, was the most serious of all the charges and would keep him in jail until the twenty-second century.

Scott Brainerd had plea-bargained to a charge of kidnapping and conspiracy, which the government finally agreed to, since the Feds could find no solid proof of his activity in arms dealing. He was sentenced to ten years in jail. But Sally knew, she told Quinlan, that Scott would have the best behavior in the entire prison system. She'd just bet the little worm would be out in three years, curse him. Quinlan rubbed his hands together and said he couldn't wait.

In the previous June, Sally had become the senior aide to Senator Bob McCain. She had begun showing Quinlan a glitzy Washington, D.C., that was sleazy in a very different way from what he was used to. He said he wasn't certain which Washington was more fascinating. Sally was running every day, usually with James, and in July she began to sing in the shower again.

Amabel Perdy, it had been agreed to in late July, was going to be treated differently from the other fifty members of The Cove. Besides committing eight murders—four by stabbing—she'd also shot a special agent, kidnapped her niece, and aided and abetted the escape of a murder suspect, thus becoming an accessory. Her trial would be held at the end of the year. Neither Quinlan nor Sally was looking forward to it.

All the murders were detailed in Thelma Nettro's diary—how they had been done, when, and by whom. Thelma Nettro wrote that there was little or no remorse among the townspeople after the twentieth victim had been dispatched. Poison was the favored method, she wrote, because Ralph Keaton didn't like mess when he laid the people out for burial.

She herself had murdered two people, an old couple from Arkansas, she wrote, who'd died quickly, smiling, because they'd eaten slices of Martha's New Jersey cheesecake and hadn't tasted the poison.

It came out that the last two murders of old people who'd had the misfortune to want to try the World's Greatest Ice Cream had occurred just two months before Sally Quinlan had arrived for the first time in The Cove to hide at her aunt Amabel's cottage. Reverend Hal Vorhees had drawn the highest number. He'd persuaded an affluent old couple to remain for a special evening spiritual revival service that had just been organized that very afternoon.

Thelma had written in her diary that it had been a very pleasant service, with many people rising to give thanks to God for what He'd done for them. There were punch and cookies after the service. Revered Hal hadn't put enough arsenic in the cookies, and the old couple had had to be poisoned again, which distressed everyone, particularly Doc Spiver.

Three books were being written on The Cove, all with a different slant, the biggest best-seller presenting Reverend Hal Vorhees as a crazed messiah who had murdered children in Arizona, then come to The Cove and converted all the townspeople to a form of Satanism.

Since it was obvious that the murders would have continued until either all the townspeople died off or were caught, as was the case, the Justice Department and the lawyers agreed that the old people would be separated, each one sent to a different mental institution in a different state. The attorney general said simply in an interview after the formal sentencing, “We can't trust any two of them together. Look what happened before.”

The ACLU objected, but not very strenuously, contending that the ingredients in the World's Greatest Ice Cream (the recipe remained a secret) had induced an irresponsible hysteria in the old people that led them to lose their sense of moral value and judgment. Thus they shouldn't be held answerable for their deeds. When the ACLU lawyer was asked if she would go to The Cove to buy ice cream, she allowed that she would only if she was
wearing tattered blue jeans and driving a very old Volkswagen Beetle. Perhaps, one newspaper editorial said, it was a collective sugar high that drove them all to do it.

Thelma Nettro died peacefully in her sleep before the final disposition of her friends. Martha hanged herself in her cell when she was told by a matron in mid-July that young Ed had died of prostate cancer.

As for The Cove and the World's Greatest Ice Cream, both ceased to exist. The sign at the junction of Highways 101 and 101A fell down some two years later and lay there until a memorabilia buff hauled it away to treasure it in his basement.

Hikers still visit The Cove now and again. Not much there now, but the view from the cliffs at sunset—with or without a martini—is spectacular.

Keep reading for an exciting preview of Catherine Coulter's FBI Thriller

BOMBSHELL

Maestro, Virginia

Very early Saturday morning

She'd drunk way too much. She was an idiot. Why had she, Delsey Freestone, a reasonably intelligent twenty-five-year-old supposed adult, swan-dived into those last two margaritas?
Because the big cheese director of Stanislaus was treating you like his favorite student, making you his special margarita recipe, that's why, and you were afraid to turn him down. To be honest, you were flattered, too. And what was in those margaritas that tasted so good?

She was very sure at that moment she didn't want to know.

She didn't understand why Dr. Elliot Hayman, the new director of the Stanislaus School of Music—
Call me Elliot, my dear
—had appeared to want to cut her out of the graduate student female herd at the party and bestow his margaritas and attention on her. Not only was Dr. Hayman in charge of the prestigious music school, he was also an internationally celebrated concert pianist, with a libido, she'd read in a critic's review, to rival his glissandos. When it came to renown, he was in a different universe than hers. She and Anna Castle, a violinist from Louisiana and her best friend in Maestro, had decided Dr. Hayman enjoyed the role of director because it appealed to his vanity, but they also both acknowledged it was only the older graduate students, like herself, who believed that he was, at the core, faintly contemptuous of the students. On the other hand, he was a sharp dresser, dropping in conversations that he shopped twice a year in Milan for his suits, always fashioned for him by Bruno Giraldi himself. Whoever Bruno was, Anna observed, Dr. Hayman certainly dressed to impress.

So why had Dr. Hayman dogged her all evening, giving her entirely too much attention until she was certain every student within hearing distance now hated her guts?
Thank you, Dr. Hayman—Elliot—
that was just what she needed. And what would Anna say about him when she told her about his behavior tonight? She'd laugh and say something like, “Smile, Dels, and suck it up,” stretching it out in her lazy Louisiana drawl until Delsey would want to yank the words right out of her mouth. She'd wished all evening that Anna had come, but no, Delsey had had to fly solo.

Delsey supposed the sudden waves of gut-wrenching nausea combined with her flatlining brain had been heaven-sent, since it had gotten her out the door of Professor Rafael Salazar's sprawling ranch-style home on Golden Meadow Terrace in under a minute, with no one the wiser, only one arm in her coat when she'd quietly closed the back door behind her. She'd sucked in the cold winter air, grateful to be out of Professor Salazar's whooping hoedown, away from both him and his twin brother, Dr. Hayman, and wasn't that a hoot? Twins! Separated as boys and ending up with different last names. The only thing they had in common, as far as she could see, was their incredible talent.

She drove very carefully until her head was pounding so hard and she was feeling so woozy she was swerving like a drunk, which, she supposed, she was
. No cops, please—too much humiliation.
She eased her ancient Spyder to the curb of Tinsel Tree Lane and shifted into neutral. She pressed her forehead against the steering wheel, willing the world to stitch itself back together for her, swearing to any power listening that she'd go back to her one-drink limit. She'd made that promise when she was only sixteen, after sharing a bottle of hooch with her boyfriend Davie Forman, and wanted to die, certainly not have sex with him in his daddy's Mustang. Tonight was the first time she'd broken that promise in nine years.
What an idiot you are; you deserve freezing your butt off and having your head explode, and the misery of hugging the toilet in the morning.

She finally cracked an eye open to see the half-moon crystal clear overhead. It looked as cold and hard as the solid mountains of snow that blanketed everything around her—trees, street signs, cars, mailboxes. Big snow, the locals called it—unusual, the locals also said—yet here it was, a big honking snowstorm. At least it had stopped pelting down for a while, but they said it would begin again hard near dawn. She'd come to realize after the first heavy snow in December that if she hit a snowdrift, she and her Spyder wouldn't be found until spring.

Looking at the unrelenting white made her miss the warm salty air of Santa Monica, scented with the night jasmine trellised on the stone fence surrounding her former apartment building. To top it off, her car heater was struggling to stay alive, her Spyder no more used to this circuit-freezing weather than she was. She sure wasn't helping any, staying out all hours of this frigid night—it couldn't be more than ten degrees, and counting down.
Houston, we have a problem.
She squeezed her eyes shut; what should she do?

She became aware of how very quiet it was, not a single owl hooting in the snow-drenched trees, not a single car or truck engine tunneling through the snow on the interstate only a quarter-mile away. No wonder; it was nearly one o'clock on Saturday morning. Only people she didn't want to know about were up this time of night. She looked around and sent a silent prayer of thanks upward that there weren't any cops, either. She knew she wasn't up for convincing anyone she wasn't drunk. She'd probably shatter the Breathalyzer.

She raised her head after a few minutes, held perfectly still for a moment, noticed she didn't feel as dizzy and, blessed be, her headache was throttling down. She shifted the Spyder into gear and drove slowly, in a perfectly straight line, as only those who are impaired and know it do. After another six blocks, she turned off onto Hitchfield Avenue and then onto Lonely Bear Court. She saw her building up ahead on the right, a duplex with her one-bedroom unit on the bottom and Henry Stoltzen's on top. Built as a solid red brick back in the twenties, it had been split up in the late nineties by the heirs to the old lady who'd lived there all her life.

She looked up to see Henry's light on. Henry and his prized six-inch goatee had helped her move in the day she'd arrived in Maestro, fed her hot dogs and beer, and quickly become a good friend. He liked the popular songs she wrote and sang, even though he sat solidly in the classical corner, a gifted cellist who adored playing Jean-Baptiste Sébastien Bréval's Sonata in C Major.

He seemed oblivious to most other people around him, only his music and his iPod tethering him to planet earth. She turned into her parking spot next to Henry's, drew a deep breath, thanked the Almighty she was still alive, and even better, not in jail. She promised good works she told herself she wouldn't forget by morning, as she slogged through the snow to her front door. She was shaking with cold when she finally fit her old-fashioned key into the lock and the door opened. She stepped into a blissful seventy degrees.

She locked the front door behind her, slipped on the two chains, and shoved the dead bolt home. She flipped on the light inside the door in the small foyer.
Home and warm. No more margaritas, no more one a.m. parties. I'm now a sensible woman, resolute and determined, and the Director of Stanislaus can go compliment someone in the reed section.
She saw Eileen Simons of clarinet fame in her mind's eye, and knew she was interested in Dr. Hayman—
Elliot, my dear
. Why hadn't Director Hayman loaded Eileen up with booze this evening and stayed away from Delsey? Eileen had been at the boozefest, as drunk as everyone else, and giving Delsey the “die, bitch” eye all evening.

Now I'm safe.

Where had that left-field thought come from? Well, from being out alone and drunk in the boondocks of Virginia in the middle of the night, that's where. Delsey bypassed the living room and went straight to the kitchen, swallowed three extra-strong aspirin and drank two full glasses of water. The tap water tasted nastier than usual, but she drank it anyway. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and walked through the hallway to the bathroom, turning on lights as she went. When she flipped on the bathroom light she saw the colorful South Seas shower curtain was pulled closed around the bathtub.

She never left the shower curtain closed because it made the bathroom look too small—well, unless she hadn't cleaned the bathtub. Had she? Her brain was still fogged, and she couldn't remember.

A hot shower, that was all she could think about, jets of hot water pounding her face, clearing out her head, making her want to live again. She stripped off her clothes, paused on the clip of her bra when she heard something, movement, something. Maybe a sharp breath? She didn't move, listened hard. No, there wasn't anything. Her brain was still squirrelly with tequila. She got her bra off, left her clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor, pulled back the shower curtain, and froze.

She'd never believed she was a screamer, but a scream ripped right out of her mouth, and then another, her brain screaming in tandem,
Not possible, not possible.
Her breath caught when she heard the sound again and whirled around, but she didn't have time to be afraid before something hard as a brick smashed her on her head, and she didn't scream anymore.