by A. E. Howe
Cara put her arm around me. A park ranger came in and told us the tour was ready to leave.
A dozen people were on board as the boat glided over the crystal clear waters of the springs. As we turned and headed down river, the guide pointed out the birds and wildlife along the banks.
“This is amazing. I love Florida springs,” Cara said, looking at the sunbathing alligators and the anhingas drying their wings. “My parents used to take me tubing down the Ichetucknee River a couple times a year.”
“Your parents sound very interesting.”
“If you find hippies interesting.” She laughed. “Actually, they’re more serious than that makes them sound. They do a lot of good work. I had to work hard and spent a lot of time helping others when I was growing up. They gave me a great start in life. But that’s not to say we didn’t have issues. Dad can be a bit autocratic. He knows what is right and has little patience for those that take a little longer to see the light. Mom, well, she has a tendency to go off on her own tangents. Sometimes at inconvenient moments. Wherever we lived, we were surrounded with her projects. She finished a lot of them and, when she did, they were amazing. But a lot more never went much beyond an initial manic phase.” She stopped and looked at me. “I hope I’m not making them sound too odd.”
“No. You’re making them sound unique. Like the kind of people that could raise an amazing woman.” I kissed her lightly on the lips. We spent another twenty minutes listening to the tour and spotting the alligators.
Walking back toward the lodge, I asked Cara if she wanted to get lunch in the dining room.
“I’m famished,” she said and started pulling my arm like an excited kid. I was having the best day in years. I tried to tell myself that I was just feeling the first rush of infatuation, but it felt like more than that. I wasn’t someone to get lost in emotion easily, which added to the feeling that this was something very special. I was soon to be reminded that an amazing day can explode in an instant.
We were finishing lunch when Cara saw a small flyer advertising wedding planning services at the lodge.
“This would be a beautiful place for a wedding,” she blurted out. That sentence spooked me. Where is this going? my mind wondered as I signaled our waiter for the check.
She went on, “I’ve got some friends that just got engaged. This would be perfect.” Oh, okay. “One of them works at the vet. He is really funny. Whenever I’m feeling like crap because an animal has taken a turn for the worse or a client has been a real asshole, he knows how to cheer me up. His fiancée is quite a bit older than he is, and when he was first telling me about the guy I wasn’t too sure. But Rick is just as nice as Terry.” She looked at me. “I’m prattling, aren’t I?”
“No. I’m interested in your friends. Actually, I’m interested in learning everything about you.” I tried to make it sound light-hearted, but I was serious.
“He was talking about finding a place yesterday. It would be neat to come here for their wedding.”
“Maybe we could stay here. They have rooms.” Oh, no, you moron, you went too far! my inner voice screamed.
“That might be nice.” And she gave me a smile. “I’ll have to suggest the lodge to Terry. He and Rick are planning everything with the help of Rick’s son. He’s like fifteen and is so excited for his dad.”
“What did you say?” Something she said caused a weird flash in my mind.
“What? I said I’d tell Terry about the lodge.” She looked puzzled by my reaction.
“No, not that. Something else… You said that Rick had a boy, a child?”
“Yes. So?”
“He’s gay.”
“Right, so…?”
“He’s gay and has a child.” A bright light went off in my brain and in an instant I realized that Margret Devries was in grave danger. I jumped out of my seat. “I’ll be right back.”
I stepped outside, trying to find Margret’s number as fast as I could. Adrenaline was pulsing through me as I dialed, muttering the mantra answer, answer, answer. Nothing. I texted her: Stay away from your son. Go immediately to the sheriff’s office. I’ll meet you there.
I started to put my phone back in my pocket when it rang. It was Margret.
“Turn on FaceTime,” came Tim’s voice, dark and low.
“What?”
“You have an iPhone. Turn on FaceTime. Don’t do anything else. Just find the icon and turn it on or my mother dies.”
I had used FaceTime exactly twice when I first got the phone. But I figured it out. I could see Tim and behind him, taped to a chair, was his mother. I couldn’t tell where they were.
“Where are you?” Tim asked as though he was echoing my thoughts.
“Wakulla Springs.”
This seemed to take him a minute to process. “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Keep the phone on FaceTime. Keep the camera on your face at all times. If you hang up, she dies. If you lose your signal, she dies. If you try in any way to alert someone, she dies. You are going to come to me.”
“I can’t guarantee that I won’t lose my signal. I’m down in Wakulla County.”
“I’d suggest you stick to the main roads.” He was hard and cold. I’d never seen or heard him like this.
“I have a date. She’s in the restaurant. I have to let her know I’m leaving.” I turned the phone so he could see her through the dining room’s large French windows. “If I don’t, she may call my father or someone else.”
“Get her attention, wave, smile and leave. Don’t go back in the restaurant.”
“But…”
“Or she dies.”
I had a totally selfish moment when I thought, Let the horrible woman die. I’m going back and finishing my date. But that wasn’t possible. It was easy to get Cara’s attention as she’d been watching me while I talked on the phone.
“Keep the phone on your face. Wave and smile and then walk around the building to the parking lot.”
I waved and Cara smiled and waved back. It broke my heart. I walked away as fast as I could.
“You don’t have to do this. I know…”
“Shut up.” He cut me off. “I’m not going to talk about it. Just get in your car and drive. Keep your phone on your face.”
“Listen, that’s going to be very difficult.”
“Do I give a damn? Figure it out.”
Chapter Twenty-One
It took me a minute to get the phone set up on the dash mount so that it kept my face in frame while I drove. My mind was working, trying to figure out the most populated route home with the hopes that I could keep the signal. I looked at the battery icon and saw that the charge was 94%… Should be more than enough for the hour-plus drive home.
“Where am I going?”
“I’ll direct you once you’re back in Adams County.”
My muscles were aching from gripping the steering wheel when I finally crossed into Adams County. I’d tried to come up with a way out of this, but everything ended with Margret Devries dead. And probably with Tim dead too. I’d tried getting him to talk to me several times, but each time he just cut me off. His voice was flat and emotionless. I tried to ignore my phone as it rang off and on.
Tim finally started giving me directions, heading me toward Calhoun. After a few more miles and several more turns, I realized I was coming in on the south side heading for the area around the warehouse where Mark Kemper had been shot. When I was close, Tim gave me two more turns that led me to a spot several blocks over from the warehouse and railroad tracks, but still within the industrial area.
“Get out of your car and come into the building you see to your right,” he told me. It was an old tobacco warehouse. “Use the office door.”
The rusty door with its faded sign reading “office” was at the top of five concrete steps. I opened it and stepped into a moldy, dusty room filled with old metal desks and ratty leather chairs. It was obvious that the place hadn’t been used for years.
“Take your gun ou
t of your holster and place it in the desk. Show it to me on the phone and then close the drawer.”
“I was on a date. I don’t have a gun.” I pulled my shirt out of my pants and showed him that I wasn’t wearing a gun inside my waistband.
“Bullshit. Let me see your ankles.” Busted. I took the PPK/S off of my ankle, showing him as I put it in a drawer. After he’d made sure that I wasn’t hiding anything else, he told me to leave the room. I was in a hallway and was instructed to go up a metal staircase. The rusty iron stairs squeaked and groaned as I climbed them. At the top was a small hallway with two doors. One of them opened. I could now hear Tim without the phone.
“Drop the phone and stomp on it.” He stuck his head out the door and watched me smash the phone to pieces.
“But I don’t have insurance for my phone,” I said, a lame joke. Anything to try and jog him out of his single-minded focus. Focus on what? was the question running around inside my head.
“Just do it! Then come in here.”
The room was large, probably an old storage room. There were still a few boxes stacked around the edges. Taped to a chair in the middle of the room was Margret Devries. She had a gag over her mouth and her eyes were hot and hostile.
“So what do you know?” he asked in voice that was way too calm.
“I think I have most of it figured out.”
“Sit down in that chair.” He pointed to a chair at a ninety-degree angle from Margret’s and about ten feet away.
“You’re Mark Kemper’s son,” I said, sitting down in the chair.
He tossed me a roll of duct tape. “Tape your feet to the legs of the chair and then tape your left hand to the arm.”
I started taping my feet. “I find it hard to understand why you had to kill him. I’m sure it was a shock, but…”
“He killed my real father!” he screamed. “First he tells him that ridiculous story that he had sex with her.” He pointed to his mother. “He was gay! I know she’s a whore, but how could he? How could she?” His fury was palpable. “An hour after Kemper left us, Dad collapsed. That queer killed my father and tried to convince me that I was his son.”
I’d managed to tape up my feet and hand. He came over to me, his face flushed from the fury surging through him. When he went to grab the tape from my hand I hit him as hard as I could with my free hand. The angle and the leverage was all off. I made solid contact, but not the knockout blow that I needed.
Fuming, he kicked my chair, causing me to fall over backward. I hit my head hard enough to leave me seeing stars. Before I had a chance to recover, he’d jerked my free hand over to the arm of the chair and was wrapping it with duct tape. He didn’t bother to right my chair. The pain and blood rushing to my head caused me to blackout.
“Wake up, you moron!” I heard through the dense fog swirling between my ears. Where am I? And why do I feel so odd? I asked myself. “Wake up, wake up!” I couldn’t think with all that racket.
“Shut the hell up!” I screamed. The yelling stopped and I managed to open my eyes.
Everything came back at once. I tried to look around, but it was hard to turn my head since part of my body weight was resting on it. I rolled the chair so that I was lying on my back. My neck was unsupported, but at least I could look around. Tim was nowhere to be seen. Margret was glaring at me.
“Are you finally awake?” she sneered. “You’re lucky I got my gag off, otherwise who knows when you would have woken up?”
“We’ll see if that was good or bad luck,” I said, tired of her annoying voice already.
“Go ahead, Mister Bruce Willis, make jokes. He’s going to come back here and kill both of us.”
I had to roll over on my side to give my neck some rest. Looking around the room, I couldn’t see anything that would help me get the tape off my hands or feet. Both of us had tape wrapped around our hands as well as our wrists. Nothing dumb about Tim. Trying to scoot or roll myself and the chair was next to impossible. Finally, I lay still, exhausted and sore from my efforts.
“Do something!” she yelled at me.
“I don’t see what I can do!” I yelled back, exasperated. “If you had told me that he was Mark Kemper’s son right from the beginning, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“Screw you. I didn’t know he’d killed Mark. And I can’t believe he killed Dell.” She sounded genuinely baffled.
“I doubt that he knew he was going to do it when he went to meet with her. But the revelation about his parentage and the shock of Jim Devries, the man he thought was his father, being struck down by a stroke. You add on the fact that he wasn’t going to inherit a farm and a business that he’d dedicated his life to if the truth got out, his reaction is not that shocking.” I paused. “Dell must have realized what had happened. I take it she knew that Mark was Tim’s father?”
“I told her the truth when I learned I was pregnant. The two of us figured out that I could marry Jim and he’d never know any different. We’d had sex a couple of times, and he wasn’t too smart about stuff like that.”
“You took advantage of him.”
“I gave him a hell of a lot. He loved marrying me. I was the catch of the county. You don’t know how many men were panting after me.”
“You had all those guys after you, then why the hell did you sleep with Mark?” My neck was killing me. I had to change position again.
“Ha! That was the first and only time I took pity on someone. See where it got me? Mark told me he thought he was gay. Queer, was the word he used. He was so young and pathetic. He was the first guy that I liked. Weird, right? It wasn’t a sex thing. I’d just gone out with him ’cause he had the hot car, and he talked about something other than football. I was going to ditch him as soon as I got tired of riding around with him. But then he told me he might be gay and got all teary-eyed and sad. I looked over at him, curled up against the door of the car, and I told him there was one way to find out.”
“Great, pity sex killed us. They can put that on our gravestones,” I moaned.
“It wasn’t good. He managed to get it hard and push it in. Boys being boys, his little man took over and finished the job. Afterward he cried.”
“Wait a minute! You all did it by the old juke joint. That’s why Tim picked the warehouse parking lot to kill Mark.”
“I guess so.”
“When did Mark know that Tim was his son?”
“I’ve always been a bitch. I told him I was pregnant. More crying. I couldn’t stand the sight of him at that point and told him to go away and never talk to me again. I honestly thought he might have blocked it out of his memory. I guess he didn’t.” She said the last bit softly, as if she finally felt real regret.
I looked toward the door. “Where do you think Tim went?”
“Where do you think? Look around. Who’s missing from our happy little family?” she asked bitterly.
“Tilly.”
“We have a bingo. The only legitimate heir to the Devries name and property.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about Tim?”
“Jesus, are you that naïve? I thought I could work it to my advantage. Jim had a lot of money. I got a very small piece of the pie when we got divorced.”
“But Tim killed your sister!”
“Guess I was in denial about that. Anyway, she was dead. Nothing was going to bring her back. What did Norman Bates say, ‘we all go a little crazy sometimes’? I hoped he’d gotten it out of his system. Honestly, I thought your lot would find some evidence and arrest him. You didn’t. And then he started asking a lot of questions.”
“Questions?”
“About who else might know. Were there any records? That sort of thing.”
“Let me guess, you told him about the doctor.”
“Dr. Brook knew that it wasn’t Jim’s baby. He and Dell were the only ones. I told Tim that he might have some records that would give it away.”
“So you didn’t tell me that Tim was Mark’s son, which would
have saved lives, but you told Tim about Dr. Brook and got him killed. So why did Tim turn on you?”
She was quiet for a while. “I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I decided to make a run for it.”
“He caught you?”
“I did the second decent thing in my life. I called Tilly to warn her. I got her voicemail and got part of the story out before he grabbed me and brought me here.”
“But, wait, I’m still confused. If you had gotten Tim arrested for the murders, Tilly would have inherited. Wouldn’t that have worked out for you?”
“Have you been living under a rock all your life? Mothers and daughters don’t really get along that well. Every time I thought that might be the way to go, I remembered how many times I’d called her a fat pig. Or told her that a dress would look better on a horse, or any number of not-so-sweet things I said. Even though Tim stayed with his father, he always called me. We had a little of the mother/son bonding thing going on. Right before he abducted me, I thought that I might have done the right thing by breastfeeding him. Guess it didn’t make a difference.”
There were sounds coming from the stairs—steps, struggling, creaky flooring and muffled screaming. The door opened and Tim shoved Tilly, taped up like the rest of us, into the room. She stumbled and fell, landing close to me. Her angry, terrified eyes looked into mine, pleading for help, but I couldn’t give her any hope.
Tim closed the door and stood looking at all of us. No one said a word for a few moments, and then Margret and I spoke at once.
“I’d clap, but you taped my hands to the chair,” Margret said. “You’re getting quite the collection.”
“Tim, you don’t have to go down this road,” I said. He stared at me with dead eyes. “We can resolve this. My father can help get you out of this bind.”
My inner voice wanted to know why the hell I hadn’t taken the hostage negotiation class at Quantico when it was offered. I’d had a choice—I could have gone to Virginia and learned to talk slowly and calmly about pleasant things to homicidal maniacs, or I could have gone to Shot Show in Las Vegas and looked at all the cool new weapons and body armor, plus gone to range day and shoot guns I could never afford to own. So I went to Las Vegas on the county dime with two other guys from our department. I should have at least gotten the notes for the FBI hostage class. A little late now.
