Poison Flower

by Thomas Perry

  "I believe you weren't motivated in any of this by money. The victim often isn't. The thief is. Otherwise she wouldn't steal. How much was in the account she emptied"

  "About two hundred thousand. What I'm saying is that she didn't decide to leave me to get my part of the money."

  "Why do you think she left"

  "Embarrassment. Humiliation. I had evidence that she'd been having an affair, and evidence that her mother had known and helped her. They had both lied to me. As soon as her mother told her I'd found her reservation and the credit card number, she knew what our next conversation would be about, so she decided there wouldn't be one."

  "Was she afraid you would do her physical harm"

  "She couldn't have been. She'd known me since college. I've never done anything violent. I just wanted to talk, so I could either close the door on the whole marriage, or know what to do to save it."

  "But you decided to start with her mother"

  "Yes. If I was polite and respectful, I thought she might give me an idea of what to expect from Sue. I even thought that if it went well, she would tell Sue I was being reasonable and deserved an explanation."

  "How did it go"

  "I went to her house at seven, and she opened the door. When I stepped inside, I saw she wasn't alone."

  "Who was there"

  "Her brother-Sue's uncle Dave-and his two sons, one they called Little Dave after his father, and Cody. When I walked in, they were all sitting in the living room scowling at me."

  "How did you react"

  "It didn't look good, but I thought I had to try. So I said, `All right, then. We can all talk. Here's the situation I'm in. The wife I've loved since freshman year has taken off and left me without saying a word. She took with her our savings, about three quarters of which came from my paychecks, and a new car that belonged to both of us. I had been planning to ask her about her last business trip, when she left home two days early and came home a day late. She charged the trip to a credit card that I didn't know she had, and it is billed to this address instead of ours. I'd like to hear her explanation of all of this. Since she's gone, I thought you might be able to help me understand what she was thinking.'"

  "What did she say"

  "Her mother said, `I can't believe you've come into my home and in front of my family accuse my daughter of adultery and theft.'

  "I said, `I didn't come here to call her names.'

  "`Why did you come, then'

  "`I'd like to know if she has plans to come back to me. I'd like to know if she's found somebody else, and if she plans to file for divorce. If so, we'll have to get some legal help and make an agreement about how to proceed.'

  "The one to answer was Uncle Dave. He said, `You came in here with an attitude. You accused the lady of conspiring with her daughter to steal your money and then helping her daughter to whore herself out to other men. Now, it's time for you to get yourself out of here.'

  "I said, `I'll leave in a moment, but first I'd like to say something to Mrs. Owens.' And I turned to her. That was a mistake. The two boys were on me from behind. The pair of them were grappling with me and throwing punches at once. As soon as I was fully engaged in fighting them off, the father got up and started throwing hard punches from the outside. A few of them landed. Pretty soon I was worn out from struggling with the boys and bleeding from the punches. The only satisfaction I got was watching them wreck the house doing it. They threw me out on the lawn and locked the door."

  "Did you just go home"

  "I went home the long way. They called the police, who got there in a minute. There were two of them, an older one and a young one. The older one explained the situation. When they're called out on a domestic disturbance, they have to arrest somebody. There were four witnesses on one side, and one on the other. Guess who got arrested."

  "Couldn't the cops see who got the worst of it"

  "Of course. What the older cop said was that I had obviously been hit in the head a lot, and since this was about my absent wife, I was obviously living alone at that time. It was better not to leave me alone, since there might be a concussion or something. So I was going to spend the night at the station."

  "I suppose that makes sense."

  "The problem was that it gave me a record. I had been arrested for domestic violence."

  "They released you. What happened next"

  "I flew to California, to the place where the skip tracer had found Sue. I drove straight from the airport to her apartment building in Santa Monica. I had no idea how long it would take to wrap this up, so I'd taken a week off work and bought a one-way ticket."

  "What did you do first Did you sit in the car and watch the building to see if she was alone"

  "It never occurred to me. It was a first-floor apartment in a big stucco building that was one of about seven buildings on the block, mostly condos. I just figured I'd go talk to her."

  "Was she there"

  "It was around midday, between twelve and one, and I figured she couldn't have found a new job to go to this quickly. And she didn't need to, because she had all our savings. But when I rang the bell, nobody answered the door. I knocked, stood around, looked in the underground garage to see if our car was there. The spaces were just about full, but ours wasn't one of the cars. At this point I was wondering if I had the wrong address. I went to the side windows to peer in. But when I got to the side window, I saw a plant in a pot on the ledge outside. Susan was one of those women who didn't have much self-discipline, so she found ways to make up for it. She set her alarm clock fifteen minutes ahead to fool herself into getting up. She bought candy, but froze it so she couldn't eat it on impulse. And she always hid a spare key outside so she wouldn't lock herself out. The pot looked to me like the sort of place where she'd hide a key, and I didn't see any others, so I poked my finger into the dirt and found the key. I unlocked the door and went inside."

  "Did you learn anything"

  "It was the right address. The first thing I saw was the vase that used to be on our mantel-blue and yellow glass melted together in swirls. It was on a coffee table next to an issue of Maxim."

  "The men's magazine"

  "Yeah. There were things of hers-or ours-around the place. I would say exactly one carload of them. And there were other things that belonged to a man. The place had leather furniture, a big-screen TV. I noticed that on the kitchen counter there were two coffeemakers, and one of them looked exactly like the one from our house in Texas. The bedroom had a king bed, two dressers, and two nightstands, and on one of them the alarm clock was set fifteen minutes ahead. I sniffed the pillow on that side, and it smelled like her hair. I went to the closet. About half of it was taken up by a man's clothes-sport coats, shirts, jackets, baseball caps, a panama hat, lots of sneakers and shoes. The other side was full of clothes I'd seen Susan wear. There was also a really short, sheer red nightie that she had tossed toward the laundry basket, but the basket was full, so it was draped over the rest. For years she had been wearing T-shirts and sweat pants to sleep in."

  "What did you do"

  "I went back to the living room. I sat by the coffee table and looked at the mailing label on the corner of the magazine to see what his name was. The label said `Megapharm,' which was the name of her company, but the address was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. I started looking in drawers and things to find something-bills or other mail that would at least give me the name of the guy she was living with. But after a while it occurred to me that I was being stupid. I was in a place I had no legal right to enter. The marriage was over. So I took a sheet of paper from a notepad by the phone and wrote her a note. I said, `When you're ready for the divorce, get in touch. You know the address and phone number. Jim.'"

  "After all that, you just wrote a note and left"

  "I turned in my rental car at the airport, then waited about three hours for my flight. I remember wondering if I should go back to try again, but I couldn't think of anything that would accomplish. I
had my cell phone on all that time, but she hadn't called. I even checked the voice mail at home in case she left a message for when I got home. When I boarded my plane I turned off the phone and that was that."

  "That was that"

  "As far as I was concerned, she was out of my life. I went home and went to work for a month or so. I did my best to stop thinking about her. I started to date a woman I knew from work. I suppose it was nothing serious. We had known each other for years and both kind of wondered what it would be like. She'd been divorced for a year and a half, and now I was separated from my wife, so we found out, and it was pleasant. Then, about three weeks later, Sue was killed. The day after they found her body there was a knock on my door. The California police had asked the Texas police to find out just where her husband was."

  "Standard procedure."

  "Well, they woke me up, and with me was the woman I'd been dating. That went into the record-that I wasn't a grieving husband, but a guy who had already replaced his wife. Then there was the domestic violence arrest at her mother's. At that point I learned that both of them-Sue and her mother-had gotten restraining orders against me in both states, saying I represented a danger to them. Sue's death was settling on me just about the time the police started telling me why I was a great suspect and trying to get a reaction on tape."

  "Did they tell you the details of the murder"

  "She was found in the apartment by the building manager, who wanted to talk to her about why her rent check had bounced. He couldn't get her to answer the door, so he opened it, and there she was. She had been hit with a heavy metal object several times, and then stabbed. They didn't have a time of death, and it was impossible for me to provide an alibi to account for every possible time."

  "Did the cops give you any useful information"

  "I learned pretty quick that I was the only suspect. What I didn't know yet was that the man who shared the apartment in Los Angeles with her was gone. He had moved every single thing of his out of there. Then he had given the place a careful cleaning. My prints were on a few things, but his weren't. The apartment lease was in her name. The note I'd left proved I'd been there. I hadn't put a date on it, and so the guy who framed me left it on the counter as though I'd been there in the past few days."

  "Tell me about the trial. At least some of the men who have been after us were there. Did you see them"

  "I was in Los Angeles County Jail for ten months before my case came up on the docket. My sister told me there were men going around in Austin scaring off people who might testify for me, but I never saw them. Once the trial got going, I got the rest of my education. I was a man with a history of domestic violence, a person who broke a restraining order to get to his ex-wife. Everything the prosecutor could say I'd done was against me. But he also brought out everything bad Sue had ever done to me, and that was against me, too. The fact that she'd cheated on me and stolen our savings didn't make anybody sorry for me, but it was a convincing motive for murder. They brought her mother, uncle, and cousins to testify I was crazy with anger. Sue had supposedly even said something to some woman at work about how, if she was murdered, it would be me. I'm sure the woman was paid to say that."

  "How long did it take the jury to convict you"

  "They had a verdict in three and a half hours. They put the cuffs back on me as soon as the verdict was read, and took me back to the county jail. A week or so later they got me out to hear my life sentence."

  The voice from the back seat startled him. "You poor thing."

  He turned his head to look at Iris. "I thought you were asleep."

  "I woke up. I hope you don't mind that I heard." She put her hand on his shoulder.

  He shook his head. "There aren't any secrets. It was all in the papers and on TV at the time. It probably is again right now, so everybody knows what kind of man escaped."

  "Nobody escaped," Jane said. She glanced at Iris in the rearview mirror. "Neither of you escaped. Those people don't exist anymore."

  11.

  They stayed on the road as long as they could, and stopped only to change drivers and buy necessities. They paid in cash for everything they bought. The long, straight highways in the middle of the country gave Jane time to begin teaching the others how to stay difficult to find. "Every time you deal with anybody, there is information to protect, and misinformation to plant. Even here on the road."

  "On the road" said Iris. "You mean we lie just for the sake of lying"

  "We hide the truth, or anything that could lead anybody to the truth. The fewer people who see Jim, the smaller the chance he'll be recognized. I was photographed at the courthouse, so I'm a potential problem, too. So we have you do most of our talking, and if only one person needs to show her face, it will always be your job. We want to protect the car, and have as few people as possible associate it with us. That's why I try to park it where it's not easy to see, and there are no cameras to leave a record of the license number. If we talk to anyone in a station or restaurant, always lie. If we're going north, say south. Any misdirection might save your life."

  When it was Jane's turn she drove hard, staying at or slightly above the speed limit for each three-hour shift, pushing it when the rest of the traffic was fast, and then keeping the needle glued to the speed limit when the rest slowed down. She didn't accelerate or touch the brakes for long stretches of road, because keeping a car moving at the same speed used the least gas and put the least strain on the car's parts.

  They drove for almost three days, over nineteen hundred miles from Salt Lake City to Delaware Avenue at Gates Circle in Buffalo, and they arrived at one forty-five p.m. When Shelby began the arc that would take them halfway around the circle, Jane said, "Keep going north for a few blocks, then pull over wherever you can do it safely and we'll change places."

  He pulled over a few blocks farther on, and Jane took the wheel. She went around the first block, then came back south on Delaware and into the center of the city.

  Shelby said, "Where are we going"

  "To a place where you'll be safe while I pick up your sister and bring her back."

  "She's my sister. I should be with you."

  "She and I have met, remember" Jane said. "This is the best way."

  Iris said, "But what's the point in splitting up"

  "Anybody who knows where Sarah is will be waiting near her, trying to get Jim. When I was in Los Angeles, one of the men who held me there told me they knew about her and that she'd be the next one if I didn't tell where Jim was. She'll be a priority for the police, too. They always expect fugitives to turn to a relative, and most of them do. The reason we've been tearing across the country is to get to her before anyone can figure out where she is."

  "But we could all do that together."

  "If you stay here with Jim, he doesn't have to go out and be seen. You don't fit the description of the woman who helped him escape, so you make him safer. There's only one person looking for you, and he's in a hospital or a prison cell for now."

  "But you're still hurt."

  "I'm not planning to do anything strenuous."

  "But-"

  "Don't bother," Jane said. "This is something I'll do better alone."

  Jane called from a pay phone on the way to reserve a room, then drove them to the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Buffalo as though she were a friend who had picked them up at the airport. She paused at the entrance and watched them go inside with their suitcases. As Jane had instructed her to, Iris went to the desk with a credit card of Jane's to register while Shelby disappeared into a men's room in a corner of the lobby. Jane had seen enough. She drove off.

  The drive to Ithaca was exactly as she remembered it from the years when she was a student at Cornell. There was a very long stretch of the New York State Thruway, and then the exit at Waterloo, and the long drive beside Cayuga Lake to the southern tip. She stopped in a gas station in Tompkins County near Ithaca to fill the tank, then went into the ladies' room to change the bandage on her le
g again. For the whole trip she had been careful to keep the dressing fresh and clean, and she had used her left foot on the pedal when she drove, so her injured right leg was improving rapidly. Jane found her way to Dryden Road just after seven in the evening.

  This was farm country, but most of the property this close to the university was no longer planted, and the only domesticated animals seemed to be dogs and a few horses. She had to read the house numbers stenciled on the sides of galvanized-steel rural mailboxes at the side of the road, but the long gravel driveways led to suburban houses, a lot of them probably owned by professors at Cornell or Ithaca College.

  When Jane found the address she was looking for, she got only a second or two to glance down the driveway at the house. She saw a flash of lighted windows, and that was all. She drove on for a few hundred yards before she found a place to pull over. She looked in every direction, then saw that the nearest farmhouse was old, and apparently whoever owned the land didn't live there. She backed her car into the orchard and parked it.

  Jane sat in the car for a few minutes and watched the traffic while she thought. There was something that bothered her about what she had seen at the house where Sarah was staying. At the end of the driveway was the house, and beside it a two-car garage. That looked fine. The garage door was shut, and there was no telling whether Sarah's car was there or not. But there had been a lot of lights on in the house, and no blinds or curtains shut. There was something inviting about all the lights, but it didn't feel like a house where someone was trying to wait quietly. Maybe Sarah was one of those people who felt safe only if every bulb in a house was blazing, but she had not struck Jane that way.

  Jane reached under the seat and picked up the pistol she had brought with her across the country. She released the magazine and made sure the fourteen rounds she remembered were still there. She clicked the magazine back in, pulled the slide to cycle the first round in, and flicked on the safety. But the gun didn't make her feel better. Something was wrong.