Your Killin' Heart

by Peggy O'Neal Peden

  I swung as hard as I could. I missed the soft targets, but I connected with his head. I heard an unpleasant noise as the branch made contact, a sickening sound. He slumped to the ground.

  I crawled back up the hill, climb two, slip one, to where my car was wedged headfirst into a tree. The door hung open. I reached in, feeling around for my phone. I was afraid to get into the car, afraid my weight would dislodge it and send it sliding down the hill. My fingers touched the phone, and I pulled it to me.

  Nine-one-one.

  I lay back in the freezing leaves. My head pounded, but I was grateful to be alive to feel the pain in my head and the sleet on my face.

  Sirens. I heard sirens. Beautiful, lovely sirens. And getting closer this time.

  “Police!” I could hear the sound of men scrambling in the underbrush above.

  “Give it up, Elliott! It’s over!”

  It was Sam. Sam! I tried to call his name, but all I could do was wheeze.

  Lights were flashing in the trees. Then one flashed off the car, and I lifted a hand, trying to wave.

  “Over here. She’s down. Over here.”

  Flashlights converged on me, alone in a spotlight.

  “He’s down there,” I croaked.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you hurt?”

  “I hit him. I didn’t want to kill him, but I had to stop him.”

  He turned to yell to another dark shape. “Down there. A man. May be injured.”

  The dark shape moved down the hill until his light found Kenneth. I saw a glint of metal. I realized it was a police officer, and he was snapping handcuffs on Kenneth. He must not be dead, I thought. Surely they wouldn’t put handcuffs on a dead man.

  In seconds there were police and flashing lights—red, blue, yellow, white—all around me, and someone was helping me climb up the rest of the slope toward the road. Sam took my arm, which I realized also hurt, and looked in my eyes. “Are you all right?”

  I blinked and tried to speak, but I started crying.

  “Get her some help,” he said roughly, and moved on.

  At the road, I realized that at least one of the sirens must have been from an ambulance. Paramedics were asking me questions faster than I could think and wrapping me in a blanket. I heard a voice say, “Concussion, I think, maybe shock.”

  Lights were flashing, and radios were crackling. I was trying to focus on the red-haired paramedic’s fingers in front of my eyes when I heard Doug’s voice. “Campbell, are you okay? What happened?” I frowned, opened my mouth, and he said, “No. Don’t tell me now.” Good. I really didn’t want to tell him I might have killed his brother.

  Then police were crashing through the brush, shoving Kenneth Elliott in front of them. Sam Davis followed. Kenneth looked dazed and grim, and there was blood on the side of his head. But he was walking. Kenneth started to speak to Doug, but Doug said, “Don’t say anything,” and I realized that the lawyer had taken over.

  “We’re on our way downtown, Mr. Elliott,” Sam said to Doug, “and we’re going to want to ask you some questions, too. You want to ride with us, or will you come in your own car?”

  “I’ll be right behind you.” He turned to his brother. “Don’t say a word. I’ll be right there.”

  Sam turned to me, and I started crying again. “My car, my little Spider.” I fell toward him, and he put his arms around me.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was rough. “We’ll take a look at the car. We’ll see. You need to get to a hospital now. I’ll see you there later.” He handed me off to a paramedic.

  I couldn’t seem to stop crying. As the paramedics led me to the ambulance, I could see the wrecker pulling up to take my Spider away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  But now that I’m older, just a little bit wiser,

  I know what’s important to do.

  Don’t need to prove nothin’; I know why I came here;

  I just want to be here with you.

  —Jake Miller, “I Just Want to Be Here with You”

  Don’t go to an emergency room if you can help it, especially on an icy night, but if you do, go with a police escort. Even so, it seemed I waited hours in a cold, stark examining room before an adolescent doctor announced that I had a concussion and they would admit me for observation. I didn’t want to be observed; I wanted to go home and go to bed.

  Nurses came in regularly, shining tiny flashlights into my eyes. Once, when they woke me, I saw Sam across the room, slumped in a chair with his head in his hands. MaryNell was in another chair. It must have been nearing morning, because there was a faint light from the windows.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  I went back out.

  I woke up later with a splitting headache. I managed to eat without throwing up. I had discovered that sounds and light made my head hurt worse. So did trying to think.

  “Rosie Layne sent you flowers.” MaryNell pointed to an arrangement of lilies on the window ledge. Rosie Layne, I reflected, was truly a lady. “Do you know what happened?”

  I shook my head.

  MaryNell was speaking quietly. “Doug Elliott confronted his brother about the painting in the Smith Logan museum brochure. Kenneth knew you’d recognized it as the original of the forged painting in Hazel Miller’s house. Especially, I gather, after he caught you coming out of his back room,” she explained. “What were you thinking?” I didn’t answer. I was trying to remember. Smith Logan museum. Note cards. And Kenneth Elliott’s back room. Forged!

  “I think Franklin Polk had helped him forge some of the documentation on the paintings,” MaryNell continued. “They’d been doing this for years. It’s how Hazel was getting by. And Polk and Kenneth weren’t doing too badly themselves. Stick dropped by this morning and brought you this.” She handed me a CD. The Greatest Hits of Jake Miller, Volume Two. I wished I could laugh without feeling like my head was the inside of one of Stick’s drums.

  All those calls, when I had persisted in trying to get Kenneth’s evaluation of the museum, had sounded like extortion to him. Then, of course, he’d seen me sneaking out of his workroom. Then I’d had to go and talk to Doug, had to be fair.

  MaryNell had been with me from the time Sam had called her, so she didn’t know anything about my car. And cars were wrecked and off in ditches all over town. The first ice storm of the winter.

  Sam had come by after questioning Kenneth for hours, but he had gone again. He asked MaryNell to tell me he’d be in touch. I would have to give a more complete statement. My head hurt.

  “Was Franklin Polk trying to kill me, too? Did he know what Kenneth was doing?” And Doug. Did Doug know?

  “Polk’s still out of town, but he told Sam he has no idea what any of this is about. That he’d said you could come to his house, but you never showed. He didn’t know what happened to you. Sam expects phone records will show he called Kenneth after he talked to you.”

  But Kenneth was already following me, I realized. The car I’d seen pulling out behind me. And the next night he waited for me on my way home.

  “I don’t think anybody knows for sure right now. But Polk was probably part of it. He said he was going to call the next day and see why you didn’t show up, but he had an early flight.”

  When she was sure that I was conscious and going to be okay, MaryNell left to change clothes and go to work. I closed my eyes. My vision was better, but it was still blurry, and trying to see made my head hurt worse. I tried to think if I had any final payment or ticketing deadlines at work.

  Randy called. It seemed a year since I’d left him outside Jimmy Kelly’s. “I probably should pick you up next time.” I started to laugh, but it made my head hurt too much.

  Around lunchtime, Doug called. “Look, I can’t talk to you about this. I shouldn’t be calling at all. I won’t be representing Kenneth in court; I’ve found him somebody who’s good in criminal law. But it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to talk to you about it. I just wanted to say that I’m
sorry.”

  Yeah, well, sorry and $1.65 will buy you a cup of coffee.

  By midafternoon, the doctors had decided to dismiss me. MaryNell picked me up on her way home and tucked me in on my couch with hot tea and chicken-noodle soup, the universal cure.

  It was seven when Sam knocked at my door. He was carrying a pizza; a six-pack of Cokes; a cellophane-wrapped, grocery-store bunch of flowers; and a sack. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  “I thought you might be ready for some solid food. Pizza’s the perfect food, you know. All four major food groups. You’ve got your bread, your meat. You’ve got cheese for your dairy. And vegetables: you’ve got tomatoes, tomato sauce, onions, peppers, and olives. It’s all here.” He held up the sack. “And Julie made you some chocolate-chip cookies, prescription-strength chocolate.” He insisted I go back to the couch while he put the flowers in a tall glass of water and rummaged in my kitchen for plates, glasses and ice, forks, and paper towels in lieu of napkins.

  “Why is it there’s never a policeman around when you need one?” I asked as he settled on the floor in front of the couch.

  “Must be because you seem to need one so often. We were onto him, you know. I told you we had a tire print. We compared it with everyone involved in the Miller case, and it matched his tires. Problem was, it didn’t prove anything. A lot of people in Nashville have those tires. There was some suspicion of the forgery scheme, but what little information that division of the department had was pretty vague. It wasn’t until Hazel’s will was released, leaving all her paintings to Elliott, that the guy in that division made the connection.”

  I told him about the phone call from Polk and the St. Louis museum and the brochure I had sent to Kenneth. I told him what Kenneth had said when he was chasing me, although that was already in my statement. I told him about the painting in the workroom. He kept shaking his head.

  “You don’t think you should have told me about that?” His jaw hardened.

  “Maybe.”

  “That still doesn’t explain what you were doing going to meet a murder conspirator so late at night in the middle of nowhere.” Sam was angry.

  I tried to be reasonable. “I didn’t have any reason to believe Franklin Polk was mixed up in murder. And I wasn’t going to meet him in some deserted place. He asked me to come to his home. I was beginning to realize there was something fishy with the paintings, but I couldn’t believe that Doug’s brother could be a murderer. Please don’t tell me Doug was part of this.”

  He shrugged. “Kenneth Elliott didn’t know exactly how much you knew, but he thought you had figured out that he had sold paintings to Hazel back when she had more money, copied them and sold the originals for her, splitting the money with her. Eventually he had sold most of the forgeries, too, to buyers who had more money than sense, forging the provenances with Hazel’s cooperation and, we think, Franklin Polk’s. People didn’t ask a lot of questions when they could tell their friends they’d bought art from Jake Miller’s widow. It was a pretty good racket.”

  “So that’s how Hazel had kept going all those years when the income from the trust wasn’t enough to support Jake Miller’s widow’s lifestyle,” I mused.

  “Yep. Kenneth had counted on the originals not being seen publicly, and he purposely chose minor painters. He told us a little before your lawyer friend convinced him to be quiet.”

  My lawyer friend? Did I have a lawyer friend anymore?

  “Hazel wanted more money, but Kenneth thought the operation was getting too risky. More people are traveling and going to museums in other places far from home. Museums trade exhibits. A trip like the one you were planning is the perfect example. Internet exposure, too, was increasing the likelihood that someone would recognize a painting that wasn’t where it was expected to be. Everything had changed since they started this soon after Jake’s death. But Hazel was threatening to expose him if he didn’t continue, and, in fact, raise the stakes.”

  “And the will, Hazel’s will?”

  “With the paintings going to Elliott and Franklin Polk as the executor, I suppose they all figured no one else would be likely to be examining the paintings.”

  “So how did he do it?”

  “He knew Hazel regularly took sedatives. Who didn’t? He was counting on the fact that everyone knew that, that most people would assume that she wouldn’t be too picky about which ones she took. He came in from the back alley, counting on you and your lawyer friend to keep the house staff occupied as you reclaimed the paintings. He knew Hazel generally took naps in the afternoon, maybe chemically assisted. He got several extra pills down her dissolved in whiskey, apparently, then got impatient, we think. He held a pillow over her face until she was gone. Then he slipped out the French doors, not even knowing Jay Miller was out front providing an extra distraction. He must have thought he was incredibly lucky.”

  “How could he do that to his own brother?”

  He shrugged. “He probably expected that Doug wouldn’t be alone in the house.”

  “Was she dead when I saw her?”

  “Probably.”

  Kenneth hadn’t admitted all this; Doug had seen to that. But Sam was confident they’d get a conviction. There was some supporting physical evidence. “We found some prints in Hazel’s bedroom we think are a match for Kenneth’s, although it’ll take a while for the lab to confirm that. A bottle of the same medication that was found in Hazel’s bloodstream—with the same prints—was in a bank safe-deposit box registered to George Lewis.”

  “You’ve had all that all this time?”

  “What did you think we were doing, sitting back waiting for you to figure this out for us? I kept telling you to stay out of it, leave it to us. But not the prescription bottle. We didn’t have that until after Lewis was killed. When we started investigating Lewis’s murder and opened his safe-deposit box, we found the medicine bottle in an envelope with a note. The note just had Kenneth Elliott’s name on it. And there was also the art scheme. We hadn’t put that together, but we were beginning to.”

  “Why didn’t you say something, do something?”

  He stopped and looked at me for a long minute, then laughed and shook his head.

  “We had the prints from Hazel’s room,” he said, “but we didn’t have any of Elliott’s for a comparison. Even the prints wouldn’t prove he had killed her, only that he had been in her room at some point in time. We didn’t have enough to go on to bring him in. Nobody had placed him at the scene. And I had no idea you were going to be wearing a bull’s-eye. Kenneth Elliott started out saying he lost control while driving, that he had no idea it was you, but I think we have too much for that to convince anyone. You’ll have to testify, though.”

  “And he killed George Lewis?”

  “That one’s going to be harder to prove. No physical evidence so far. That bottle in the safe-deposit box goes a long way to proving motive, though. It seems Lewis tried to blackmail Kenneth Elliott and got himself murdered. Probably explains Lewis’s sudden prosperity. Sudden and temporary. I doubt if we’ll tie Polk to either Hazel’s or Lewis’s murder, but we may connect him to the extortion and your attempted murder. Remember the maid was supposed to go work for him.”

  “Doug wasn’t part of this, was he?”

  “We don’t know for sure yet,” Sam answered grudgingly. Please, no. “But we don’t think so.”

  I could imagine how Doug was feeling about this—guilty, embarrassed, angry. If Doug hadn’t allowed me to go with him to Hazel’s that afternoon, I wouldn’t have been involved at all. Kenneth was, after all, his brother, and I was much too involved in all that was being exposed about him. It might not help to shoot the messenger, but Doug wouldn’t want to be too friendly with me anytime soon.

  Sam turned to look me in the eye. “How much does that matter to you?”

  I reached for a chocolate-chip cookie and realized that my answer to Sam’s question could be very important. I thought about it for a minute, surpris
ed to realize that it didn’t matter the same way it might have a few weeks ago.

  I spoke carefully. “He’s a friend. I’d be very disappointed in him—and, in a weird way, in myself—if he had known about this.”

  Sam nodded slowly.

  “And Jake,” I said. “What happened to Jake?”

  “I don’t imagine we’ll ever know for sure. He could have stopped at some tavern. It was a long road. If what Rosie said is true, he had a lot on his mind. Maybe he was going to leave Hazel after all. If Hazel was with him on the drive back from Louisville after he’d talked with Rosie, maybe he told her the truth about Jacqueline, that he wanted a divorce to marry Rosie. Maybe Hazel didn’t want to let that happen. What was she if she wasn’t Jake Miller’s wife? He was in trouble. And the way the stories go, when there was trouble, he went to a bottle.” Sam shrugged.

  “If Hazel did have anything to do with Jake’s death, no wonder she was so mad when the will was read. Still, it’s sad, somehow, not to know what definitely happened.”

  Sam nodded.

  “What about my car?”

  His face fell. “I’ll be honest with you. It doesn’t look good. MaryNell told me where you have it serviced, and we had it towed there. I thought the guy was going to cry. He said to tell you he’ll do his best.”

  I closed my eyes and tried not to cry. It was just a car.

  “Hey, none of that,” he said. “You’re okay. You only got hit in the head, and I’ve never seen a head any harder than yours. Have some pizza before it gets cold. You like anchovies?”

  My head was hurting again, but I did like anchovies. And I could get to like a man who brought me anchovy pizza and chocolate-chip cookies.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the wonderfully patient and helpful folks at Thomas Dunne Books, especially editors Hannah Braaten, Melanie Fried, and Jennifer Letwack, and copy editor MaryAnn Johanson. Thanks, too, to my invaluable resource and agent, Jill Marr. Thank you to my family and friends who have read early drafts and encouraged me for years, to David, Mom, who took me downtown on her lunch hour to buy Nancy Drew books, and Dad, who first taught me to love country music, Mike, Mark and Wendy, Colin, Nathan, and Evan, to Shawn and Brandon, Pat and Paul, to Dr. Constance Fulmer, to Barbara, Pam, Melinda, and Betty, to Frances, Judy, Suzanne, Karol, Julie, Debbie, Gale, Margaret, Leah, Paula, Mark, Greg, and so many more. Thanks to the Pokeno group, to the Bodacious Books critique group: Mary Saums, Rai-lyn Wood, Mary Richards, J. T. Ellison, Del Tinsley, Jill Thompson, Cecilia Tichi, Janet McKeown, and Dee Lambert, who first invited me. Thank you to the students from whom I’ve learned so much, and thank you to Mrs. Barrett, Mrs. Tyler, and all my other inspiring teachers. I hope they knew how important they were to the little girl who talked too much in class.