House of Secrets

by Ramona Richards

  “You won’t be here that long. We’re just waiting. We had to get you out of town long enough to plan the next move. This place would be too easy for Ray to find. If you know this is about Hunter and Virginia, he does, too.”

  “Mother and son,” June muttered. “You ever see The Manchurian Candidate?”

  Brent laughed and motioned for her to sit on a stool in the middle of the room. “Sit there. So what is it that you have against Hunter, anyway? You think he has some kind of little time bomb in his head? Some programming that’ll go haywire once he’s in the state senate?”

  June perched on the stool, watching Brent closely as she said her next few words in a low, even voice. “Oh, I think we both know he does. A big one. They don’t want people knowing, and they don’t like loose ends. That’s why they killed Rosalie Osborne. Why they killed David. Why they’ll kill me. And you.”

  June could see Brent’s struggle to keep his face impassive. The muscles in his cheeks tightened, and the skin beneath his dark eyes paled. His lips thinned and grew white as he pressed them together, resisting her words.

  June pressed her advantage, calling on every ounce of her imagination. She kept her voice soft, hushed, as she spun the tale she’d dwelled on while in Brent’s trunk. “Virginia must have been a sweet kid back in the day. Beautiful. Innocent. Her husband was older, gone a lot. She was lonely. Then she met Monty. He lured her in. Preyed on her naïveté. Everyone knew what he was like, right?”

  Brent stood still, watching her, listening, his eyelids slightly lowered.

  “She just thought he liked her company. She wasn’t the first. She wasn’t the last. No one knew the baby she delivered belonged to Monty. Until Rosalie fell in love with Hunter. Then Virginia tried to stop them. They resented it. Maybe they decided to elope, went to get the blood test for a license—”

  “No.” Brent’s flat voice covered any emotion in his words. “They gave blood. The Red Cross puts your blood type on the donor cards. Hunter noticed his blood type didn’t match his mother or father. Rosalie noticed it matched hers and her father’s. She put it together.”

  “You’re friends with Hunter?”

  “Cousins. He’s a few years older. Was always the cool kid at family reunions. We followed him around like he was God.” Brent shrugged off the spell of the story and sat on the arm of one of the overstuffed leather chairs.

  “So he knew his mom had cheated on his dad.”

  Brent nodded. “Talked about it as if it made his mom sophisticated. We were teenage boys. We thought it was some big adventure, like having a secret identity, or a spy in the family.”

  “Until Hunter started to get sick and Rosalie threatened to expose what had happened. None of that fit in with Virginia’s plans for the future.”

  Brent shook his head. “Rosalie Osborne was just a cruel woman who thought of no one but herself. She broke Hunter’s heart. She ran away and left everyone who cared about her.”

  “Brent, Rosalie Osborne was the daughter of a paranoid schizophrenic. A disease often passed from father to son. Hunter could be dangerous.”

  Brent stood slowly, wearily. “You don’t think I know that?”

  June stared at him. “You know?”

  He shrugged and tucked the gun in the waistband of his jeans. “Of course I know.”

  June stood up, the realization of how deeply Brent was involved dawning on her. “You get the meds for him.”

  “Every month. His dad got the meds illegally while he was alive. After he died, they came to me. For his career, they said. Cops have access to all sorts of things on the black market. It’s always been pretty simple.”

  “How did David come into the picture?”

  “He grew a conscience.” Brent went to the window and opened the curtains, revealing a beautiful, expansive lake, the centerpiece of the property. “Man, I hate secrets. This family is eaten up by them. Life would be so much easier if people would just tell the truth.”

  “It’s harder for some.”

  Brent sniffed. “You got that right.” He turned to her again. “About a year ago, Pastor Gallagher found something in the parsonage that revealed everything. He went to Hunter, but Hunter persuaded his own pastor to keep quiet. Promised to stay on the meds and gave the church a big donation.”

  “But he didn’t stay on the meds.”

  Brent gave a low laugh of derision. “Hunter has more ego than two or three men. He goes off, goes back on, stops.”

  “And David saw the cycle.”

  Brent nodded. “Finally. Realized Hunter had manipulated him into silence like he did everyone. David told Hunter he’d broken a trust.”

  “And Hunter had him killed.”

  “Virginia. She knew about Webster from some of her dealings on a case in Florida. She made that call.”

  “What about Kitty?”

  “Webster. He did it when she wouldn’t tell where David hid the evidence. He and I put the body in the house before Daniel got there.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Brent shrugged again, and a deep veil of sadness fell over his face. “This is my last task for Hunter. He called in a marker I had to repay, even though it will take everything from me.” His face grew even darker. “Everything, June. This time helping him meant giving up everything.”

  June shook her head, a touch of desperation for this sad man tightening her stomach. “Brent, no. Ray will work with you on any charges against you. Hunter and Virginia are responsible. The proof is still in that house somewhere.”

  “And that,” came a dark baritone voice from behind June, “is the only reason why you are still alive.”

  “This is killing me.” Daniel crossed his arms over his chest and planted his feet wide. “We should be chasing them down. Doing something.”

  The corner of Ray’s mouth twitched, but otherwise he remained still, staring at the back wall of Virginia Bridges’s summer home. He knew exactly how his chief deputy felt. Inside, he felt as if he were being clawed apart by the raw power of his emotions, but he didn’t dare release a single ounce of it.

  Daniel shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “At least this removes any doubt about the Bridgeses’ involvement.”

  “Plausible deniability. This is Virginia’s vacation home. Not a residence. They have a caretaker and a maid who come in regularly. The family is only here irregularly. They can claim someone broke in, raise reasonable doubt.”

  They stood, waiting on a warrant to be delivered by the local Kentucky sheriff. The garage door stood wide open, revealing empty space, and the windows showed no signs of activity. The GPS signal from June’s laptop had vanished less than ten minutes before they arrived, removing any last bit of probable cause they had for entering the house.

  Ray flipped open his cell phone again and called Gage, who monitored the computer tracking system from the station. “Any change?”

  “Not yet.” Gage’s voice held the same stress they all felt. “Anything there?”

  “Still waiting on the warrant. Call me if you get anything.”

  “Will do.”

  Ray flipped the phone shut, frustration building to a boiling point. Abruptly, he started toward the house.

  “Ray?”

  “I’m not waiting. The warrant will be here.”

  “You said—”

  “I’m not waiting.” Ray’s boots echoed loudly in the empty garage, and he drew his gun, holding it down to one side as he peered through the rectangular windows of the kitchen door. Testing the knob, he found it unlocked and pushed the door open, swiveling around the frame, gun at the ready. Daniel came in behind him, following protocol. They cleared each room, finding only an abandoned house that looked more like a museum than a home.

  Until they came to the den. June’s laptop lay in the center of the floor, smashed almost beyond recognition. “This explains why we lost the signal. They took the hard drive.”

  “Sir?”

  Ray turned to
find Daniel staring down at one of the burgundy leather chairs. “What did you find?”

  Daniel looked up at him. “Blood. This chair is covered in blood.”

  “Ray Taylor was and always will be a Marine. That makes him deadly and efficient but also predictable. He’ll follow the rules. He’ll wait for a warrant and the outcome of evidence. Unless he has a body, he won’t step outside the boundaries. It’s just who he is.”

  Hunter’s rambling and sometimes nonsensical monologue had continued for thirty minutes, and June found her rage returning in full force. Only the duct tape on her mouth kept her silent—she’d learned quickly that struggling against it hurt like crazy. Hunter’s useless and self-serving prattle made her nuts. If she could have freed her wrists and ankles from the plastic ties that bound them, she would have launched up off the back-seat and gladly throttled him.

  “That’s the difference between someone who makes laws and someone who enforces them. Politicians, we have more freedom, and since we know how the laws are made, we know how to best use them to our own advantage. It makes everything run a lot smoother.”

  June felt the huge SUV swerve to the left, and a tall shadow passed over the right side of the vehicle. June looked up. A truck?

  A second shadow passed, as June tuned out Hunter’s meandering speech.

  A convoy, maybe? She knew they couldn’t see into the SUV through the tinted windows, but maybe Hunter had overlooked something…like the locks on the back doors.

  June dropped her feet over the edge of the seat, catching her heel at the front and pulling back. The shoe on her right foot slid off, and she scooted closer to the passenger side of the SUV. Raising her legs, she curled her toes around the door handle.

  Behind her back, June searched with her fingers for the seat belt latch as she waited for the next truck. She wanted to send a signal, not slide out into the road, so she grasped the seat belt with both fists, holding on tightly as another shadow started over the SUV.

  June curled her toes and pulled. The door popped open, almost slamming shut again from the wind. She kicked out hard once, then twice as the door flew open and tried to slam shut. Each time the door whipped back and forth, she slid closer to the opening. Her grip on the seat belt slipped, and she felt a fingernail rip as she tried desperately to hang on.

  Hunter let out a barrage of curses and slammed on the brakes, skidding out into the median. The force flung June to the floor with a thud that sent rockets of pain into her left hip. The back door slashed open so hard she heard the hinges pop. She twisted onto her back, trying to get her legs out the door, and curled around the bottom of the car. That could give her enough leverage to pull herself out and to the ground. She couldn’t run, but he’d have to pick her up to get her back in the vehicle. Maybe someone would see. The longer she struggled with the door open, the better the chance that someone would see, would call 911.

  Please, God.

  Twisting over the front seat, Hunter reached down, grabbing her by the shoulder and belt, trying to yank her legs back into the car. June kicked out in an attempt to fling herself out the door. They struggled furiously, June slipping ever so close to the edge.

  Suddenly, Hunter released her shoulder, and June realized too late why. She barely registered that his hand had closed into a fist before it slammed into the side of her face, and her world sank into an unrelenting darkness.

  SIXTEEN

  They found Brent Carter in his car, submerged eight feet below the surface of the grand lake that came almost up to the front door of the Bridgeses’ vacation home. When the local sheriff had arrived with a warrant and a crime scene unit, one of the officers had gotten suspicious about an odd set of tire tracks in the yard and had dived in to take a look.

  Ray, arms crossed over his chest, stared out over the surface of the placid lake. Daniel satisfied his need to do something by acting as liaison with the local team, relaying messages as the crime-scene officers went over the house with a fine-tooth comb. Ray had ordered that Virginia Bridges be brought into the station for questioning and had sent Gage to a judge for a warrant for the arrest of Hunter Bridges. Plausible deniability was one thing; blood spatter and a dead officer was something else entirely.

  To Ray’s left, a coroner’s van backed slowly toward the lake, and a tow truck arrived to begin the retrieval of Brent’s car. They both waited, engines idling, as the Kentucky officers continued processing the scene. Ray tried to push away memories of working with Brent Carter, of how close they’d been as colleagues and friends. It was hard to believe Brent had betrayed him, but harder still to believe he was gone.

  Daniel came up on his right and both watched for a moment as a diver went into the water with a cable. “Why do you think Hunter did it?”

  “You ever been around a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds?”

  “No.”

  “This is an illness that most people don’t understand and has been badly portrayed in the media. If it’s well managed, you might never know someone had it. Just like no one realized that Hunter Bridges had it. He’s almost fifty. Finished law school and practiced. Successful man. Elected to various offices. Probably because Rosalie did, in fact, confront Virginia to tell her. Virginia took charge, got Hunter help. But she couldn’t leave Rosalie out there knowing that secret. The Bridges ambition cost Rosalie her life.”

  “So you do think she’s dead.”

  Ray nodded once. “I think June called that one. And if Rosalie loved Hunter enough to step out on that limb, I suspect Hunter loved her as well. He’s never married. And I know he liked David Gallagher and relied on his counsel.”

  “So you don’t think he had anything to do with their deaths?” Daniel asked.

  “No. But I think he recently found out his mother did. It’s pushed him toward the edge.” Ray nodded toward the lake. “People who manage an illness this serious build walls to protect themselves. They have to. They keep loved ones close and anyone untrustworthy out of range. Virginia Bridges has been Hunter’s fortress his whole life. If he’s found out his mother killed the only woman he ever loved, all those walls could crumble. He’s off his meds and spiraling. We have to find June. And soon.”

  Daniel hesitated. “How do you know—?”

  “Anne. It’s the real reason we never had kids.”

  Both men fell silent a few moments, then Ray’s cell rang. He snapped it open.

  “Boss, we may have something.” Ray’s face hardened as he listened to Martha Williams describe the 911 call she’d received only moments before. “A trucker, headed south on I-65. Said he saw a man and a woman struggling in a big SUV. He thought it looked like she was tied up, but she was putting up too much of a fight for him to be sure. Got so bad they ran off the road, but he’s pretty sure the SUV passed him later, moving lickety-split. Maybe ninety or more. Exited off 117.”

  “Hunter Bridges own a black SUV?”

  “A big one. A Navigator.” She rattled off the license plate number.

  Ray hung up and looked at Daniel. “They’re headed back to White Hills.”

  Daniel’s eyes brightened. “Now we chase him down?”

  Ray turned and headed for his cruiser. “Now we chase him down.”

  June awoke to the repeated snapping of metal against metal. The heavy odors of gun oil, old wood and dust filled her nose, and she fought back a sneeze as she opened her eyes. Only a few feet away, Hunter Bridges sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, staring out one of the small windows that lined the attic of the Victorian parsonage. Silhouetted by the golden light of late afternoon and haloed by dust drifting in the sun’s rays, Hunter sat with his shoulders hunched. In his right hand, he clutched Brent Carter’s 9 mm automatic, repeatedly releasing the magazine from its grip, catching it and snapping it back into place. The gun he’d used to kill Brent.

  June moved slightly, stretching out her legs, only to be hit by soreness that seemed to hold every muscle in check. She groaned, realizing that the tape on her mouth
had been removed, as had the plastic ties around her ankles and wrists.

  Hunter stilled, clutching the gun in both hands. “My mother killed Rosalie Osborne.”

  June licked her lips, then cleared her throat. “I know.”

  Hunter nodded several times, then the right side of his face twitched with a sharp tic. He blinked, rubbing his face vigorously. “You knew about the documents.”

  June pushed herself into a sitting position, trying not to moan from the pain. “Not until this morning.”

  His voice turned sharp. “Don’t lie!”

  June inhaled deeply, startled at how much her ribs hurt. “I didn’t. I think JR knew. And David. But they never told me. JR said he’d destroyed the documents.”

  Again, the rapid head nods. “JR.” He sniffed and rubbed the side of his head again, this time digging his fingers into his hair for a few moments. “Right. He knew.” He glanced her way for a second, then back out the window. “He wasn’t the man you think he was. You never knew some of the things he did.”

  A flush of anger flared in June’s chest, but she willed it back. Now was not the time to get defensive. “Hunter—”

  “He protected you. A lot.” He glanced at her again, then away. “He thought you were fragile. I never saw that. Mother, she had you investigated when y’all first got here. I knew what you’d gone through. What you’d survived.”

  “Everyone has problems in their past.”

  He grinned, then ran his hand along the barrel of the gun, back and forth. “You and I have a lot in common, June. We survive. Whatever it takes, we survive.”

  June swallowed hard, her throat still dry and tight. “Is that a bad thing?”

  He shook his head. “No. Just makes us different. Not like the others. JR. My mother. They were users. David, too, somewhat, though not so much.” He sat straighter and rolled his shoulders. “When David found those papers, he offered to help, just like Brent did—” He stopped, staring down at the gun. “Why did I do that? Why did I shoot—” His voice broke again, and he shook his head vigorously, as if to rid himself of a horrendous thought.