by Lee Hollis
“Hurry up!” Boyd yelled.
Hayley handed him the phone, which he stuck in his shirt pocket, and then he backed away, shotgun still trained on them, until he reached the wooden steps.
He turned around and headed back up and outside where he shut the cellar door and slid the crowbar back between the handles to lock them inside.
Liddy hugged Hayley, sobbing. “I can’t believe all of this is happening! What are we going to do? That boy is clearly out of his mind!”
“We need to remain calm, okay? Tell me how you got here!”
“It all happened so fast! One minute I had parked my car and was walking down the street toward Oliver Hammersmith’s office for our meeting, and then the next thing I knew, someone was throwing a potato sack over my head and dragging me away. I tried to fight back, but he was too big and too strong and he must have punched me in the head or something because everything suddenly went dark, and when I came to, I was down here!”
Hayley looked around for some means of escape like a small window or another set of stairs that led up to the main house.
“I’ve already searched everywhere for a way out, Hayley, there is none,” Liddy said, resigned.
“I just hope I was able to get a call through to Mona before he took my phone.”
“He took mine, too! When I woke up down here, I was on the floor and he was on his knees next to me, his hands in my pants! I expected the worst, if you know what I mean, but he just wanted my phone! He said he wanted to make sure I didn’t take any more pictures!”
“Why would he care about that?”
“He thought I was photographing locals here in Salmon Cove and sending the images up to the mother ship so they could identify them and then abduct them to use for our probing and harvesting experiments! I’m telling you, that guy could win a gold medal for being a grade-A screwball!”
“When did he see you taking pictures?”
“At the bar, the night that drunken fisherman got too rowdy and Sue called the police, and we were all herded out on the street, and there was a ticket on my car, remember?”
“Yes, you wanted to record photographic evidence that your tires were close enough to the curb to prove the ticket had no merit!”
“Boyd was definitely at the scene, saw me snapping pictures, and let his imagination run wild. I definitely got a lot of the patrons who were milling around outside the bar in the background of some of my shots.”
“Rufus was also there that night,” Hayley said, her mind racing.
“The town drunk? Yes, I think he was. So?”
“So we’ve discovered a lot more about him since I last saw you,” Hayley said. “His name isn’t even Rufus, it’s Enos O’Shannon, a crime boss from Boston who has been on the run for ten years, wanted for racketeering and murder.”
“Murder?” Liddy gasped. “Wait, do you think he may have had something to do with Jackson’s violent death on the beach?”
“Possibly, because Jackson was lying about his true identity, too. His real name was Conner Higgins, and he was an investigative journalist trying to locate O’Shannon.”
“Investigative journalist? So he was actually here on a top-secret, high-stakes reporting assignment and that’s why he had to break our date? Oh, I can’t tell you how relieved I am!”
“Liddy, your love life is not really an urgent priority at this moment, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine, okay, I get it. It all makes sense now. This O’Shannon guy strangled Jackson, or whatever his name is, because he was onto him.”
“But O’Shannon is eighty-something years old and Higgins was a robust young man fully capable of taking care of himself. So maybe he talked someone else into doing it for him.”
“Somebody like Nutcase McCrazy up there!” Liddy gasped. “Of course! The old man saw him reading his comic books in the bar every night! He must have known he was a simpleton who could be easily manipulated, so not only did he convince him Jackson was part of the alien plot, but us as well.”
“Rufus was clearly seen in the photos you took that night, and he couldn’t let those get out, especially in a courtroom where you were defending a traffic ticket! He couldn’t risk anyone recognizing him!”
“So he had Boyd break into our cabin and try to find my phone, and when that failed, he snatched me off the street because he knew I must have had it on me!”
“Someone’s done a real number on Boyd’s head convincing him that you are an alien queen, but now his paranoid mind has run amok and he thinks we’re all aliens! Including me, which is why he drove me here at gunpoint!”
“O’Shannon probably didn’t plan that part! That’s what you get when you collude with an insane person!”
“There’s just one problem!”
“What?”
“O’Shannon is dead.”
“Dead? He died? Just how long have I been down here?”
“His body was found in his home.”
“How?”
“We’re not sure yet. The sheriff believes he died from natural causes, but I’m not willing to rule anything out yet, and I believe someone else is still pulling the strings from behind the scenes, and it certainly isn’t O’Shannon.”
“Then who?”
Suddenly they heard the crowbar scrape across the metal as someone removed it, and then the cellar doors flew open, bathing the musty, dark basement in light as footsteps descended the creaky steps. Liddy clutched Hayley’s arm as Boyd marched forward, scowling. Behind him was Rufus’s sweet, innocent, waiflike granddaughter Ellie.
Only now she didn’t look so innocent.
She had a sick, twisted smile on her face.
And she held a gun in her hand.
Chapter 32
“I figured Boyd wasn’t smart enough to do all this by himself so there had to be some kind of mastermind behind the scenes,” Hayley said, eyeing Ellie warily as she slipped out from behind Boyd to take center stage.
Boyd smiled at her dumbly, a big grin on his simple face, still madly and hopelessly head-over-heels in love.
“You figured right,” Ellie said, not a trace of the wide-eyed purity left in her now hardened, stern demeanor. “It’s a pity. You should have left Salmon Cove when you had the chance.”
“How long did you know the truth about your grandfather?” Hayley asked.
“Since I was about fifteen or sixteen. I was up one night watching one of those late-night true crime shows on Discovery Channel or something, and there he was, my grandfather, on TV in old news footage, a mafia crime boss! Can you imagine the shock?”
“You must have been devastated,” Liddy whispered, trying desperately to stay calm.
“Devastated? Hardly! Actually, I thought it was pretty cool. I was invisible at school, didn’t have many friends, nobody really cared to hang out with me or get to know me. I was just the awkward, lost little girl who lived with her soused grandfather. But now I had this huge, amazing secret that made me special. I’ll never forget Granddaddy’s face when I confronted him about knowing everything! Even that he lied about my father having died in a plane crash when he was in reality wasting away in prison for the rest of his life! I thought Granddaddy was going to keel over right then and there. He thought I was just this sweet, innocent young thing who was far too fragile to handle the truth, but he was wrong . . .”
“It turns out you take after him in more ways than one,” Hayley said pointedly, eliciting a small pout from Ellie.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said haughtily. “I told him his secret was safe with me, and I never breathed a word to anyone.”
“And everything was hunky-dory until Jackson Young showed up in town,” Hayley said.
Ellie nodded. “Granddaddy spent most days at the Starfish Lounge downing his whiskeys, without a care in the world, but I was obsessed with getting caught. He was getting sloppy and careless, and so I spent every day constantly online reading up on the FBI’s search for him and all the fame-whore journalists
trying to beat them to it for a scoop, so Conner Higgins was on my radar long before he brazenly arrived in town pretending to be a travel writer. I pegged him right away!”
“You knew Boyd was in love with you and would do anything for you, and was easily susceptible to manipulation. So you convinced him that the alien invasions he was so obsessed reading about in his comic books were real, and that was how you got him to do your bidding.”
Boyd, only half listening, just gazed happily at Ellie. “She loves me.”
“Yes, I do, Boyd, very much,” she said, gently stroking the side of his face. “Now do me a favor and go find a shovel. I think I saw one in the garage propped up against the tractor.”
“What do you want me to do with it?”
“I want you to dig two holes out back near the edge of the woods, okay? Can you do that for me, sweetheart?”
“Anything for you,” Boyd said as she leaned in and lightly kissed him on the cheek.
Liddy was near tears, her whole body shaking, while Hayley fought hard to keep her cool and try to figure a way out of this. Her best option at the moment was to just keep Ellie talking.
Boyd lumbered up the steps and outside, leaving Ellie playfully tapping the barrel of her pistol against the side of her leg.
“I couldn’t stomach the thought of that obnoxious reporter writing some tell-all, splashy article in Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone, using my beloved granddaddy to get his Pulitzer . . .”
“So you told Boyd he was part of the alien invasion, and you had him strangle Higgins to death on the beach at the clambake when no one was around. You thought that was the end of it, but then when you came to the bar to pick up Rufus a couple of nights ago you saw Liddy snapping photos of her car tires and a few of them happened to catch your grandfather in the background so you had him try to steal her camera at our cabin, and when that didn’t work, he just snatched her off the street. Did Rufus have any idea what was going on?”
“I kept him informed every step of the way. It was his idea to keep your friend down here for a while, at least until all the brouhaha over Jackson Young’s death died down, when we could take care of her properly so she would never be found.”
“That’s why he lied to me at the bar about seeing Liddy drive out of town,” Hayley said. “He was aware of what you were up to and was doing whatever he could to help you cover your tracks and make it look like Liddy left on her own accord.”
Liddy, panicked, threw herself at Ellie, who stepped back, raising her gun to keep her at bay. “Please, Ellie, Rufus is gone now! There is no reason to be afraid of him getting arrested or going to trial! The whole nightmare of hiding is over! So just let us go. I swear we won’t say anything to anyone!”
“I wish I could believe you, I really do, but I’m much smarter than you give me credit for. There is no way you won’t tell someone about all this. I was going to eventually pin everything on Boyd, let him go down for the Conner Higgins murder, I even planned on attending his trial, and testifying as a character witness, but he would obviously lose in court and be put away forever, and I would give him a tearful good-bye, make my lips quiver just so, and lie and tell him I would wait for him. I would send him off believing I was still behind him one hundred percent and then just be done with the big dumb goon!”
“You’re a regular Meryl Streep,” Hayley said, disgusted.
“You have to be a good actress when you’re hiding from the feds,” Ellie said with a crooked half smile.
“Please, I’m begging you, Ellie, don’t kill us!” Liddy wailed.
“Stop whining! You’re really starting to irritate me,” Ellie shouted.
“Think about it, Ellie. Sue already knows the truth about Rufus, as well as the entire FBI, and it’s only a matter of time before they round you up for questioning, it makes no sense to harm us at this point.”
“You said it yourself, Hayley. I’m a regular Meryl Streep. I think I can still deliver one more good performance as the adoring, well-mannered, but hopelessly naïve granddaughter, who was totally in the dark about her family history, and will need the support of her loyal townsfolk to help her get over the shock and trauma. Yeah, I can totally pull that off!”
“But what about us?” Liddy cried.
“What a shame about you two, everybody thought you left town to avoid having to go to trial for all that breaking and entering and tampering with evidence business! What an awful mess you were in! I would run away too! But when all of your family and friends report you missing, the sad truth emerges that you were just the poor, unsuspecting victims of a deluded nutcase who actually thought aliens were running around Salmon Cove! I can hear people buzzing about it at the Starfish Lounge now. ‘Can you believe that crazy boy killed three people? I heard they found those poor women buried in his backyard! Such a tragedy!’”
“Ellie, you can’t be serious—!” Hayley said.
Ellie turned her head and called up the cellar stairs. “How are you doing up there, Boyd?”
They could hear him yelling back faintly from a distance. “Just about done! Two big holes!”
Liddy fell against Hayley, about to faint dead away, as Hayley grabbed her by the shoulders to keep her from collapsing to the ground.
Chapter 33
“After you, ladies,” Ellie said, gesturing for them to head up the stairs with the gun in her hand.
“No! You’re going to shoot us and bury us in those holes!” Liddy cried, hugging Hayley.
“I can just as easily shoot you down here, it honestly doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m just trying to save Boyd the trouble of having to lug your bodies up those flimsy old stairs and I don’t want him straining his back!”
“You’re so cold, Ellie,” Hayley whispered, shaking her head.
“You said it yourself, Hayley. I take after my grandfather. Now move,” she seethed, losing her patience.
“Come on, Liddy,” Hayley said soberly, leading her by the arm past Ellie, who kept her gun trained on them, and up the stairs to the outside of the cellar.
When they reached ground level, both Hayley and Liddy squinted from the blazing sun and covered their eyes, after being trapped in a dark basement.
Ellie looked around for Boyd, but there was no sign of him.
“Boyd?” she hollered. “Boyd, honey, where are you?”
They noticed the two holes that had been freshly dug on the far side of the property near a thicket of trees but the shovel had been left lying on the ground.
“Boyd!” Ellie yelled, slightly nervous.
A couple of small birds rustled some tree branches as they flapped their wings and flew away, and then there was stillness again.
Hayley saw Ellie gripping her gun tighter as her eyes darted around, suddenly suspicious.
And then they heard a low, even voice directly behind Ellie.
“Put the gun down.”
It was Sheriff Daphne Wilkes, and she held her own standard-issue police pistol, pointing it right between Ellie’s shoulder blades.
Ellie hesitated, her mind racing.
“I’m not going to tell you again, Ellie. Do it now,” Sheriff Daphne said.
She wasn’t kidding.
She was fully prepared to shoot.
And Ellie knew it.
She slowly bent down, set the gun on the ground, and then raised her hands in the air.
Within seconds Daphne had her weapon holstered and Ellie’s hands cuffed behind her back.
Sheriff Daphne’s squad car was parked in front of the main house. Hayley could see Boyd locked in the backseat, his own hands cuffed behind him, a subdued, sad look on his face. Mona and Corey were positioned behind the car, out of harm’s way, undoubtedly at the behest of the Salmon Cove sheriff, who clearly didn’t want to endanger them until both suspects were safely in custody.
Ellie appeared to be in a trancelike state, emotionally shut down, as Sheriff Daphne escorted her over to the squad car. After all her herculean efforts to keep
a lid on her family’s secret, she just couldn’t believe her single-minded mission had failed so miserably and spectacularly.
Once Ellie was placed in the back of the squad car with Boyd, Sheriff Daphne gave Mona and Corey the all clear, and they raced over to Hayley and Liddy, who was still a little light-headed and wobbly from the entire ordeal so Hayley kept her hands clasped firmly onto her shoulders to keep her steady.
“So my call to you got through! Thank you, Jesus!” Hayley cried.
“At first we thought you had just accidentally butt dialed me, but then we heard Boyd and Ellie talking and put two and two together, and that’s when we called the sheriff, jumped in Corey’s truck, and raced right over here to meet her,” Mona said.
“If you had gotten here just a few minutes later, it might have been too late,” Hayley said, glancing at Liddy, whose eyes were heavy, like she was in a state of shock.
“Well, I got to say, I know we’ve had a few run-ins with that sheriff, but she arrived on the scene before we did, and let me tell you, that woman is fearless. I bet she can kick some serious ass!” Mona said, impressed.
“Are you okay, Liddy?” Hayley asked, still holding her up.
Liddy nodded, forcing a smile on her face. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“Really? Because you look a little pale,” Hayley said.
“No, seriously, I’m good,” Liddy said.
“I’m going to let go of you now, okay?”
Liddy nodded again, and Hayley slowly removed her hands from Liddy’s shoulders. Her eyes rolled up in the back of her head and she promptly fainted and dropped to the ground in a heap.
Corey rushed in and scooped her up in his arms. “I’ll take her over to my truck. Sadie’s waiting in the back and that dog is real good at waking people up with a lot of sloppy wet licks to the face.”
Corey carried her off like some romantic hero from a Nicholas Sparks novel.
