She laughed and nodded to Loretta. "Yep. To somebody I could trust. I don't own a bit. That power of attorney is useless. She owns a hundred percent of DuMont Products Inc."
But Ralston's shock vanished. He began to smile.
The explanation for his good mood came not from him but from Loretta. She said, "Now you listen here. You'll never guess. Bill and I own a hundred percent of the company. Sorry, honey." And she walked forward and put her arm around Ralston. "I don't think we mentioned it but Bill's my brother."
* * *
"You were in it together!" Sandra May whispered. "The two of you."
"Jim died and didn't leave me a penny!" Loretta snapped. "You owe me that money."
"Why would Jim leave you anything?" Sandra May asked uncertainly. "Why would…" But her voice faded as she looked at the knowing smile on the thin woman's face.
"You and my husband?" Sandra May gasped. "You were seeing each other?"
"For the last three years, honey. You never noticed that we were out of town at the same time? That we'd both work late the same nights? Jim was putting money away for me!" Loretta spat out. "He just never had a chance to give it to me before he died."
Sandra May stumbled backward, collapsed onto the couch. "The stock… Why, I trusted you," she muttered. "The lawyer asked who could I trust and you were the first person I thought of!"
"Just like I trusted Jim," Loretta snapped back. "He kept saying he'd give it to me, he'd open an account for me, I could travel, he'd get me a nice house… But then he died and didn't leave me a penny. I waited a few months then called Bill up in New York. I told him all about you and the company. I knew you were going to Pine Creek Club on Sunday. We figured he should come on down and introduce himself to the poor widow."
"But your last name, it's different," she said to Ralston, picking up one of his business cards and glancing at Loretta.
"Hey, not that hard to figure out," he said, lifting his palms. "It's fake." He laughed. As if this were too obvious to even mention.
"When we sell the company, honey, you'll get something," Loretta said. "Don't you fret 'bout that. In recognition of your last six months as president. Now, why don't you just head on home? Oh, hey, you don't mind if I don't call you Mrs. DuMont anymore, do you, Sandy? I really hated —"
The office door swung open
"Sandra May… you all right?" A large man stood in the doorway. Beau Ogden, the county sheriff. His hand was on his pistol.
"I'm fine," she told him.
He eyed Ralston and Loretta, who stared at him uneasily. "These them?"
"That's right."
"I come as soon as I got your call."
Ralston was frowning. "What call?"
Ogden warned, "Just keep your hands where I can see them."
"What the hell're you talking about?" Ralston asked.
"I'd ask you to keep a respectful voice, sir. You don't want to go making your problems any worse than they already are."
"Officer," Loretta said, sounding completely calm, "we've been doing some business dealings here and that's all. Everything's on the up-and-up. We got contracts and papers and everything. Mrs. DuMont sold me the company for ten dollars 'cause it's in debt and she thought me and my brother here could turn it around. Me knowing the company as good as I do since I worked for her husband for so many years. Her own lawyer did the deal. We're going to pay her a settlement as a former employee."
"Yeah, whatever," Ogden said absently; his attention was on a young, crew-cut deputy entering the office. "It matches," he told the sheriff.
Ogden nodded toward Loretta and Ralston. "Cuff 'em both."
"You bet, Beau."
"Cuff us! We haven't done anything!"
Ogden sat on the chair beside Sandra May. He said solemnly, "We found it. Wasn't in the woods, though. Was under Loretta's back porch."
Sandra May shook her head sadly. Snagged a Kleenex and wiped her eyes.
"Found what?" Ralston snapped.
"May as well 'fess up, both of you. We know the whole story."
"What story?" Loretta barked at Sandra May.
She took a deep breath. Finally she struggled to answer, "I knew something wasn't right. I figured out you two were trying to cheat me —"
"And her a poor widow," Ogden muttered. "Shameful."
"So I called Beau before I got to work this morning. Told him what I suspected."
"Sheriff," Loretta continued patiently, "you're making a big mistake. She voluntarily transferred the stock to me. There was no fraud, there was no —"
The sheriff held up an impatient hand. "Loretta, you're being arrested for what you did to Jim, not for fraud or some such."
"Did to Jim?" Ralston looked at his sister, who shook her head and asked, "What's going on here?"
"You're under arrest for the murder of Jim DuMont."
"I didn't murder anybody!" Ralston spat out.
"No, but she did." Ogden nodded at Loretta. "And that makes you an accomplice and probably guilty of conspiracy too."
"No!" Loretta screamed. "I didn't."
"A fella owns a cabin on Lake Billings come forward a couple weeks ago and says he saw a woman with Mr. DuMont on that fishing trip of his back around Halloween. He couldn't see too clear but he said it looked like she was holding this club or branch. This fella didn't think nothing of it and left town for a spell. Soon's he comes back — last month — he hears about Jim dying and gives me a call. I checked with the coroner and he said that Mr. DuMont might not've hit his head when he fell. Maybe he was hit by somebody and shoved in the water. So I reopened the case as a murder investigation. We've been checking witnesses and forensics for the past month and decided it definitely looks like murder but we can't find the weapon. Then Mrs. DuMont calls me this morning about you two and this scam and everything. Seemed like a good motive to murder somebody. I got the magistrate to issue a search warrant. That's what we found under your porch, Loretta: the billy club Mr. DuMont used to kill fish with. It had his blood and hairs on it. Oh, and I found the gloves you worn when you hit him. Ladies' gloves. Right stylish too."
"No! I didn't do it! I swear."
"Read 'em their rights, Mike. Do a good job of it too. Don't want no loopholes. And get 'em outa here."
Ralston shouted, "I didn't do it!"
As the deputy did as instructed and, one by one, led them out, Sheriff Ogden said to Sandra May, "Funny how they all say that. Broken record. 'Didn't do it, didn't do it.' Now I'm truly sorry about all this, Sandra May. Tough enough being newly widowed but to have to go through all this nonsense too."
"That's okay, Beau," Sandra May said, demurely wiping her eyes with a Kleenex.
"We'll be wanting to take a statement but there's no hurry on that."
"Anytime you say, Sheriff," she said firmly. "I want those people to go away for a long, long time."
"We'll make sure that happens. Good day to you now."
When the sheriff had left, Sandra May stood by herself for a long moment, looking at the photo of her husband taken a few years earlier. He was holding up a large bass he'd caught — probably in Billings Lake. Then she walked into the outer office, opened the mini refrigerator and poured herself a glass of sweet tea.
Returning to Jim's, no, her office, she sat down in the leather chair and spun slowly, listening to the now-familiar squeak of the mechanism.
Thinking: Well, Sheriff, you were almost right.
There was only one little variation in the story.
Which was that Sandra May had known all along about Jim's affair with Loretta. She'd gotten used to the smell of turpentine on her husbands skin but never used to the stink of the woman's trailer-trash perfume, which hung like a cloud of bug spray around him as he climbed into bed too tired even to kiss her. ("A man doesn't want you three times a week, Sandra, you better start wondering why." Thanks, Mama.)
And so when Jim DuMont drove off to Billings Lake last October, Sandra May followed and confronted him about Lor
etta. And when he admitted it she said, "Thank you for not lying," took the billy club and crushed his skull with a single blow then kicked him into the frigid water.
She'd thought that would be the end of it. The death was ruled accidental and everybody forgot about the case — until that man at Billings Lake had come forward and reported seeing a woman with Jim just before he'd died. Sandra May knew it was only a matter of time until they tracked her down for the murder.
The threat of a life sentence — not the condition of the company — was the terrible predicament she'd found herself in, the predicament for which she was praying for help "from the sky." (As for the company? Who cared? The "bit of insurance money" totaled nearly a million dollars. To get away with that, she would've gladly watched DuMont Products Inc. go bankrupt and given up the money Jim had socked away for his scrawny slut.) How could she save herself from prison? But then Ralston gave her the answer when he'd picked her up. He was too slick. She'd sensed a scam and it didn't take much digging to find the connection to Loretta. She figured they were planning to get the company away from her.
And so she'd come up with a plan of her own.
Sandra May now opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out a bottle of small-batch Kentucky bourbon and poured a good three fingers' worth into the iced tea. She sat back in her husband's former chair, now hers exclusively, and gazed out the window at a stand of tall, dark pine trees bending in the wind as a spring storm moved in.
Thinking to Ralston and Loretta: Never did tell you the rest of Mama's expression, did I?
"Honey," the old woman had told her daughter, "a Southern woman has to be a notch stronger than her man. And she's got to be a notch more resourceful too. And, just between you and me, a notch more conniving. Whatever you do, don't forget that part."
Sandra May DuMont took a long drink of iced tea and picked up the phone to call a travel agent.
The Kneeling Soldier
He's out there? Again?"
A dish fell to the tile kitchen floor and shattered.
"Gwen, go down to the rec room. Now."
"But, Daddy," she whispered, "how can he be? They said six months. They promised six months. At least!"
He peered through the curtains, squinting, and his heart sank. "It's him." He sighed. "It's him. Gwen, do what I told you. The rec room. Now." Then he shouted into the dining room, "Doris!"
His wife hurried into the kitchen. "What is it?"
"He's back. Call the police."
"He's back?" the woman muttered in a grim voice.
"Just do it. And Gwen, I don't want him to see you. Go downstairs. I'm not going to tell you again."
Doris lifted the phone and called the sheriff's office. She only had to hit one button; they'd put the number on the speed dialer ages ago.
Ron stepped to the back porch and looked outside.
The hours after dinner, on a cool springtime evening like this, were the most peaceful moments of the year in Locust Grove. The suburb was a comforting thirty-two miles from New York City, on the North Shore of Long Island. Some truly wealthy folk lived here — new money as well as some Rockefeller and Morgan hand-me-downs. Then there were the aspiring rich and a few popular artists, some ad agency CEOs. Mostly, though, the village was made up of people like the Ashberrys. Living comfortably in their six-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, commuting on the LIRR or driving to their management jobs at publishing or computer companies on Long Island.
This April evening found the dogwoods in bloom and the fragrance of mulch and the first-cut grass of the year filling the misty air. And it found the brooding form of young Harle Ebbers crouching in the bushes across the street from Ron Ashberry's house, staring into the bedroom window of sixteen-year-old Gwen.
Oh, dear Lord, Ron thought hopelessly. Not again. It's not starting again…
Doris handed the cordless phone to her husband and he asked for Sheriff Hanlon. As he waited to be connected, he inhaled the stale, metallic scent of the porch screen he rested his head against. He looked across his yard, forty yards, to the bush that had become a fixture in his daydreams and the focus of his nightmares.
It was a juniper, about six feet long and three high, gracing a small municipal park. It was beside this languorous bush that twenty-year-old Harle Ebbers had spent much of the last eight months, in his peculiar crouch, stalking Gwen.
"How d'he get out?" Doris wondered.
"I don't see what good it'll do," Gwen said from the kitchen, panic in her voice, "to call the police. He'll be gone before they get here. He always is."
"Go downstairs!" Ron called. "Don't let him see you."
The thin blonde girl, her face as beautiful as Lladro porcelain, backed away. "I'm scared."
Doris, a tall, muscular woman exuding the confidence of the competitive athlete she'd been in her twenties, put her arm around her daughter. "Don't worry, honey. Your father and I are here. He's not going to hurt you. You hear me?"
The girl nodded uncertainly and vanished down the stairs.
Ron Ashberry kept his gaze coldly fixed on the figure next to the bush.
It was a cruel irony that this tragedy had happened to Gwen.
Conservative by nature, Ron had always been horrified by the neglect he saw on the part of families in the city to which he commuted every day. Absent fathers, crack-addict mothers, guns and gangs, little girls turning to prostitution. He vowed that nothing bad would ever happen to his daughter. His plan was simple: he'd protect Gwen, raise her the right way, teach her good moral values, family values — which, thank God, people had started talking about again. He'd keep her close to home, insist that she get good grades, learn sports, music and social skills.
Then, when she turned eighteen, he'd give her freedom. She'd be old enough then to make the correct decisions — about boys, about careers, about money. She'd go to an Ivy League college and then return to the North Shore for marriage or a career. This was serious work, hard work, this child rearing. But Ron was seeing the results of his efforts. Gwen had scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the PSATs. She never talked back to adults; her coaches reported she was one of the best athletes they'd ever worked with; she never snuck cigarettes or liquor, never whined when Ron told her no driver's license until she was eighteen. She understood how much he loved her and why he wouldn't let her go into Manhattan with her girlfriends or spend the weekend on Fire Island unchaperoned.
And so he felt it was utterly unfair that Harle Ebbers picked his daughter to stalk.
It had begun last fall. One evening Gwen had been particularly quiet throughout the evening meal. When Ron had asked her to go pick a book out of his library so he could read it aloud, Gwen just stood at the kitchen window, staring outside.
"Gwen, are you listening to me? I asked you to get me a book."
She'd turned and to his shock he saw she was crying.
"Honey, I'm sorry," Ron'd said automatically and stepped forward to put his arm around her. He knew the problem. Several days ago she'd asked if she could take a trip to Washington, D.C., with two teachers and six of the girls and boys from her social studies class. Ron had considered letting her go. But then he'd checked out the group and found that two of the girls had discipline problems — they'd been found drinking in a park near the school last summer. He'd told Gwen she couldn't go and she'd seemed disappointed. He'd assumed this was what troubled her today. "I wish I could let you go, Gwen —" he'd said.
"Oh, no. Daddy, it's not that stupid trip. I don't care about that. It's something else…"
She'd fallen into his arms, sobbing. He was filled with overwhelming parental love. And an unbearable agony for her pain. "What is it, honey? Tell me. You can tell me anything."
She'd glanced out the window.
Following her gaze, he'd seen, in the park across the street, a figure crouching in the bushes.
"Oh, Daddy, he's following me."
Horrified, Ron had led her to the living room, calling out, "Doris, we're havi
ng a family conference! Come in here! Now!" He'd gestured his wife into the room then sat next to Gwen. "What is it, baby? Tell us."
Ron preferred that Doris pick up Gwen at school. But occasionally, if his wife was busy, he let Gwen walk home. There were no bad neighborhoods in Locust Grove, certainly not along the trim, manicured route to the high school — the greatest threats were usually aesthetic: a cheap bungalow or a flock of plastic flamingos, herds of plaster Bambis.
Or so Ron had believed.
That autumn night Gwen had sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the floor, and explained in a meek voice, "I was walking home today, okay? And there was this guy."
Ron's heart had gone cold, hands shaking, anger growing within him.
"Tell us," Doris had said. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened. Not like that. He just like started to talk to me. He's going, 'You're so pretty. I'll bet you're smart. Where do you live?'"
"Did he know you?"
"I don't think so. He acted all funny. Like he was sort of retarded, you know. Kind of saying things that didn't make sense. I told him you didn't want me to talk to strangers and I ran home."
"Oh, you poor thing." Her mother embraced her.
"I didn't think he followed me. But…" She bit her lip. "But that's him."
Ron had jogged toward the bush where he'd seen the young man. He was in a curious pose. It reminded Ron of one of those green plastic soldiers he'd buy when he was a kid. The kneeling soldier, aiming his rifle.
The boy saw Ron coming and fled.
The sheriff's office knew all about the boy. Harle's parents had moved to Locust Grove a few months before, virtually driven out of Ridgef ord, Connecticut, because their son had targeted a young blonde, about Gwens age, and had begun following her. The boy was of average intelligence but had suffered psychotic episodes when younger. The police hadn't been able to stop him because he'd only hurt one person in all his months of stalking — the girl's brother had attacked him. Harle had nearly beaten the boy to death but all charges were dropped on the grounds of self-defense.
The Ebbers family had at last fled the state, hoping to start over fresh.
Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver Page 32
