A Grave End

by Wendy Roberts

  Tracey pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store where I’d parked my car. I told her I was going shopping for a few things so I could make Garrett a nice dinner.

  “Thanks for coming with me and for, well, just for being a friend.”

  “Oh hey.” She squeezed me tight. “Just remember that whether you were drinking that night or not doesn’t change who you are as a person, and it sure as hell doesn’t change us.”

  We released the hug and she folded her arms across her chest.

  “But if I could get my hands on that bastard, I’d...” Her face grew dark, and lost for words, she only growled.

  “Yeah. I know.” I sighed. “Me too.”

  But my anger toward some random stranger who tried to take advantage of me was strengthened by the real knowledge that I hadn’t drunk myself into a stupor that night and hopped in bed with a stranger. I couldn’t wait to share that information with Garrett.

  Tracey drove away, and in the grocery store I chose the thickest T-bone I could find. As I thought about the prospect of letting Garrett know the truth of my night at Wayland, my heart felt lighter than it had in weeks. Even though Garrett would lose his mind and be furious that I was almost abducted by some crazed hipster, once he got over that, I was sure there’d be a level of relief to know I hadn’t screwed up.

  I bought a cheesecake to finish off our meal tonight, then loaded the groceries into the trunk of the rental car and climbed behind the wheel. I was humming a happy tune as I put the key in the ignition and then glanced in my rearview mirror. My mirror was tilted up at the ceiling for some reason, and I frowned as I reached to adjust it. Suddenly, I sensed movement in my back seat.

  “Pull into a parking spot around back next to the dumpster, and don’t make any sudden moves.”

  I felt the cold metal of a gun at my neck, but it was nothing compared to the ice in my veins. The man in my back seat was Ray Hughes.

  “Oh God, Ray...” I moaned. “Look, you don’t have to do this. We can—”

  “Shut up and do what I told you.”

  He pushed the muzzle of the gun deeper into the back of my neck. I backed out of my spot and slowly drove around to the back of the grocery store, and as he directed, I pulled up next to the dumpster right next to a van that I recognized as belonging to Barb because of the Jesus fish decals on the back. I thought about running, but even as the thought entered my mind, he had one hand on my shoulder and the other pressed the gun to my temple.

  “Leave your purse and cell phone behind,” he instructed. “I don’t want anyone tracking where you are by your phone.” He motioned for me to climb out of the car and into the back of the van. “Move. Now.”

  The normally busy parking lot had not a single person where we were parked.

  “If you try to run or scream, not only will I shoot you, I will go see Tracey, and I’ll shoot her too. Then I’ll use your keys, break into your house and wait for your boyfriend to come home, and when he does, I’ll put a hole in his head.”

  The calm in his voice sent chills up my spine.

  I slowly climbed out of the car, hoping someone would notice but there was absolutely nobody around at this part of the back lot. Once I was seated in the back of the van Ray took out some zip ties and bound my hands and feet, then locked the seat belt around me. He slammed the door and jogged around to the driver’s side.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked as he drove out of the parking lot and a few blocks until he was on the northbound ramp to I-5. “Was it you? Did you kill Alice?”

  He turned on the radio and at first a preacher came on the air, which was probably Barb’s usual station, but Ray switched it to some heavy metal station and blasted it so loud my seat vibrated. At one point a state trooper vehicle passed us, but there was no way the officer could see me through the dark tinted windows. Ray’s driving was flawless so as not to attract attention.

  My mind reeled. How could I have missed that he was the killer? Not only had I put myself in danger, he was now connected to Tracey.

  Oh God, what am I going to do?

  I sobbed quietly while racking my brain about how to escape. We were obviously heading back to Blaine. A realization caught up with me as a faint wisp of his cologne reached my nostrils. I pinched my eyes shut and visualized Ray with longer hair not spiked or blond up top. Then I imagined him with a full beard and colored contact lenses instead of glasses. The complete picture hit me like a slap across the face. It was him! He’d been the one to poison my drink in Wayland. He’d missed his opportunity then and had been toying with me ever since.

  Sensing my stare, Ray met my gaze in the rearview mirror and a smirk played on his lips.

  “Remember me now?”

  My throat was sandpaper dry and I could only nod.

  Within an hour he was pulling the van inside Barb’s garage. The houses on either side were boarded up and awaiting demolition so he didn’t even have to be discreet. Still, Ray waited until the garage door slid completely shut before taking me inside.

  “It was you at Wayland. You had long hair, a beard, and I’m guessing colored contacts.”

  “I kept waiting for you to make that connection.” He laughed and shook his head as he pushed me to move faster. My ankles were still bound together with zip ties so I could only shuffle. Impatient with my slow progress, he hooked his hands under my armpits and half dragged me inside the house, then pushed me on an overstuffed sofa.

  “What have you done with Barb?” I demanded. “Did you kill her?”

  Was her body somewhere in this house? Would he kill me and then bury me and Barb in the same place he left Alice?

  “Mom was just in the way and—”

  “Barb is your mother?” I couldn’t keep the incredulous sound out of my voice, and Ray laughed.

  “For being the brilliant Julie Hall who knows and sees all, you really are quite dense.” He gave me a patronizing smile as he lowered himself to a chair across from me. “Yes, Barb’s my mother. I wasn’t hatched!” He giggled at his own joke, and then hissed, “And I didn’t kill her. I’m not a friggin’ monster, you know!”

  The last was said with anger and a look that challenged me to say otherwise. All I did was stare at the gun that lay in his lap.

  “Why am I here? What do you want, Ray? Why did you drug me at Wayland and...” I swallowed my fear and asked anyway, “Why did you kill Alice?”

  “I didn’t kill Alice. Sheesh. I’m making tea.” He abruptly jumped up from the chair. “Would you like some?”

  What kind of crazy social visit did he think this was? I could only stare in answer and he shrugged.

  “Suit yourself.”

  The zip ties binding my wrists painfully dug into my flesh as I tried to wriggle my hands free. There was a bit more room around my ankles, especially for my left foot. If I could get my shoes off, I might be able to pull at least that one foot free.

  Unfortunately, Ray walked back inside the room with his tea before I had a chance to manipulate my feet enough to loosen my shoes. Instead of the overstuffed chair he was in before, he grabbed a straight-backed wooden chair from the kitchen and positioned it across the coffee table from me.

  “All of this could’ve been avoided if you’d taken me seriously last year.”

  “Last year?” I parroted.

  “I emailed you right after I got out of Lakewood.”

  Lakewood was a psychiatric hospital outside of Tacoma.

  “I didn’t know you emailed me,” I said.

  “Bullshit!” he screamed, and then he squeezed his eyes shut and brought his tea to his lips with trembling hands. “I must’ve sent you ten emails and you didn’t respond to any, but when I sent you one single message from an entirely different account complimenting you on finding that child in the well last year, you responded.” He said in a singsong woman’s voice th
at I assumed was supposed to be mine, “Oh thank you for saying so, it was my pleasure to help the family find comfort in their child’s return.”

  That was my standard response when I replied at all to people complimenting me on finding someone’s remains, but the ten emails he insisted he sent me, those began to also tug on my memory.

  “You sent messages saying you knew I was from Blaine and now living in Everett and that I was living with my FBI boyfriend.”

  “Yes!” He put down his tea and slowly applauded me as if I was a dumb child. “I sent you those messages so that you’d know we had a connection. We grew up in the same town...well, I was mostly in Tacoma with my dad or in the hospital when you were growing up here, but I’d come to stay here with my mom too. I wanted you to know I knew all-l-l about you so that you’d realize how good my idea was.”

  The stalker. All those emails from the same account that insisted he had an idea for a great business partnership. They sounded like spam or, worse, a stalker. I’d thanked him and said I worked alone, and he’d sent a flurry of more emails and made it sound like he was watching me. I’d immediately blocked the account.

  I took in a slow deep breath and then exhaled it even slower. I needed to stay calm. “You—you never signed your name at the end of those emails and the email account was just a vague number.” I tried to keep the panic from my voice. “I didn’t know those were from you, Ray.”

  “That was the whole idea!” He waved his hands in exasperation. “I knew you wouldn’t remember me from living here because you kept to yourself and I wasn’t here much and—”

  When he said “here,” he’d pointed to the floor, as if indicating this room and something occurred to me then.

  “So you sent those emails from here. While you were living with your mom.”

  “Yes-s-s-s.”

  “Is she okay, Ray?” I asked, hoping it would give him an excuse to go check on her.

  “Sure. She’s sleeping it off in the back room.” He rolled his eyes and gave me a slow shake of his head. “Wow, Julie Hall who’s so famous around here is not the wonder kid everyone thinks, huh? See, that’s why you need me. As partners we’d be unstoppable.”

  He’d grabbed my hand on the side of the road after I found Rachel Wu’s car and said I was thinking of Wayland, but of course he’d already known about Wayland because he’d drugged me there.

  “Did you...” I swallowed. “Did you kill Rachel Wu just so we could meet?”

  “Of course not!” He spat. “I just arranged for you to find her.”

  “By telling her parents about me?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He sat back and gave me a smug look. “When I visited Roscoe, he kept insisting he didn’t need my help because his dad had hired you. He said any day now you would come visit him. I started visiting his old roommate there and telling him about his future, which was hard on account of I knew nothing about him. Nothing at all. I had to wing it.”

  That’s what he did. He researched people. He had no psychic medium skills. Ray Hughes was just manipulative and insane.

  “So you visited Roscoe’s old cellmate with the hopes of running into me?”

  “Sure and the Rachel Wu thing was easy. She was visiting her old boyfriend at Ozette. I ran into her in the parking lot the day she went missing. She told me her usual dealer wasn’t available so I made a few calls and hooked her up with the black tar. I’m always thinking.” He tapped the side of his head. “My connection said it had a little boost of fenny. So she OD’d. I saw her stick the needle in her arm and then get behind the wheel. When she started up her car, she was really out of it. I yelled at her to step on it, and guess what? She did! I could’ve stopped her, but what did I care?” He shrugged.

  “You could’ve called the police,” I murmured. “Maybe she could’ve been saved if someone found her earlier.”

  “Not my problem. Worked out anyway because we finally got to meet.” He grinned madly at me then, full of pride for helping end Rachel Wu’s life. “Of course, once I saw her mom on TV pleading for help finding her daughter, I reached out to the family. I told them you could find her body and I even gave them a hint that I saw her in the area around Ozette so they’d know where to send you.”

  “You’re happy Rachel died because we got to meet.” I shook my head incredulously.

  “So?” he shouted. “It’s not like I killed her. She was a friggin’ drug addict. I gave her what she asked for and she drove the car off the road. She died because of her own stupid weakness.” He lowered his voice then and gave me another maniacal smile. “You have your own weakness. Booze. Kim and Blossom, they told me all about your problem with the bottle. But take a look at me...” He proudly thumped his chest. “I am completely drug free. All those shitty pills they filled me with at Lakewood are gone. Those meds are completely out of my system. No more drugs for this guy.”

  Unmedicated and psychotic. Oh God, I was beginning to realize that the only way out of this would be to keep him calm and talking until I could come up with a plan.

  “So you emailed me, and I stopped replying,” I said.

  “Yes. When you wouldn’t return my emails and meet to talk about our future business, I just knew if I got you to a bar...”

  “You messaged pretending to be the boyfriend of a lost hiker and asked to meet at Wayland. You looked completely different then. Did you deliberately change your appearance so I wouldn’t recognize you?”

  “I was planning on getting cleaned up anyway. Mom was riding my ass about getting a haircut, and she hated the beard and colored contacts.” He shrugged. “Mom said if I got cleaned up maybe I’d get a job and she was kind of right, because when we met at the side of the road after Ozette, you even let me take your hand.”

  “You drugged me at Wayland.” My eyes met his. “Would you have killed me that night if you’d been able to get me in your car?”

  “I’m not a killer.” He sighed elaborately. “All I wanted was a chance to explain to you in person all about our future business. My plan was to get you here and show you my plan so that Ray Hughes and Julie Hall can partner up and take this state by storm!” He was alive with excitement. “Not just the state either. That would just be a start. We’d be doing road trips and finding lost people all over this damn country. Maybe the world!”

  “That’s why I’m here? To talk about, um, a business deal?”

  “Of course.” He cleared his throat. “Let me show you something...”

  He walked around the coffee table and helped me to my feet. He had his hand on my elbow to help me as my ankles were still bound. For a second I thought he was going to leave the gun on the table, but as we passed by he snatched it up and kept it pointed between my shoulder blades.

  “If you loosened the ties I could walk faster,” I told him.

  “I’m not in any hurry.”

  Great.

  We made our way down the hall of the older three bedroom, my feet taking tiny steps on the worn shag carpet. He stopped me outside the first bedroom and opened the door. There was a single bed, neatly made, and a corner desk with a laptop. One wall was filled with corkboard, and thumbtacks pinned newspaper articles and emails all over the board until it was completely covered.

  My eyes grew wide. “Those are all about me.”

  “Yup. Every time you were in the news, I printed it out. I’ve kept a log of all your cases that you worked and how long it took you. I even followed up with some of your clients. Told them I was researching you for a future documentary.”

  “Holy shit,” I muttered.

  It began to feel hopeless. Raymond Hughes’s mind was held together with a tangle of cobwebs, and I had a feeling there was no way he’d ever let me go. Still, I couldn’t help but ask again.

  “You’ve done all this research so that we can work together.” I looked him in the eye and tried my best to ke
ep my face looking interested and not terrified. “So once we work out this business agreement, you’ll untie me and we’ll just get together for jobs?”

  “Of course. Once we work out all the details of our seventy-thirty agreement...” He winked. “I get the seventy because it’s my idea.”

  “Sure. That sounds fair.” At this point, I would’ve agreed to anything as long as he let me go or, at least, let down his guard long enough for me to escape. “So let’s sit down and talk this out so I know exactly what you want,” I said, feigning enthusiasm.

  He grabbed my elbow and we began the slow, painful walk back to the living room where he lowered me back to the sofa.

  “First things first,” Ray began. “We’ve gotta get this in writing.”

  “That makes sense.” I nodded.

  “And, of course, it would be easier if you just lived here.” He nodded his chin toward the hall. “We’ve got a spare room, and as soon as Mom gets her sewing stuff out of there, it’ll be more than comfortable.”

  “You want me to leave my boyfriend and my home to come live here. With you.” I was trying to make him see the insanity of it, but that only made him scowl.

  He began pacing the room. “You make it seem unreasonable, but Garrett will understand. It’s not like we’re going to get married. This is strictly business.” He walked fast from one end of the living room, spun on his heels and walked back in the other direction. Back and forth for a number of minutes while he mumbled unintelligibly under his breath.

  “Ray, what about Alice?” I said just above a whisper. “Did you...did you arrange her, um, situation so we could meet?”