Stamped Out

by Tonya Kappes

  Since I was gone all day long, I really did try to spend as much time as possible playing with Rowena on the weekends. She loved the little feather-on-a-stick toy the ladies at the nursing home had made during one of their crafting classes.

  I took the food out of the mailbag first, because the last thing I needed was a stinky mailbag tomorrow.

  “What is that?” I reached the bottom of the bag and noticed a letter. “Mac,” I groaned when I realized it was the letter from Tasha I was supposed to deliver when I decided to break and enter instead. “Well, he won’t realize the date.” I put it back in the mailbag to deliver with tomorrow’s mail.

  The letter kept coming back into my brain as my eyes focused on the bag lying on my kitchen table.

  “No. We can’t look,” I told Rowena as if she was going to agree with me. “It’s not our mail.”

  She jumped up on the table and lay on my bag as if she was telling me to open it.

  “No. It’s illegal, and I could get fired.” I looked at her eyes. “I know. No one would know. Tasha would think it got lost in the mail.” I flung the sausage back and forth as I reasoned it out, finally putting it in the refrigerator.

  Rowena let out a little meow as if she agreed.

  “And it’s not like the other letters she sent had anything in them.” I didn’t really recall any important information other than that she loved him and couldn’t wait to be together. “Is it?”

  Rowena stretched out. I stood there, gnawing the inside of my cheek, before I shooed her off the table. Before I even knew what I was doing, it was like the devil dove inside me, and I ripped that letter open.

  “Mac, I won’t be ignored,” I read out loud to Rowena. “Did you hear that? She won’t be ignored.” I read it so dramatically Rowena took special interest and sat up. “If you don’t come through with the money, I’ll be forced to tell everyone your big dark secret and then what will you do? Poor, poor you. Ellie will hate you. Can you live with that? If you don’t come by my house on Sunday, you can kiss everything about your secret little life goodbye.”

  I blinked.

  “She’s sending death threats through the postal service, Rowena. This is illegal.” I shook the letter. “This is my new address. Be there. I’m not kidding.”

  I eased down into the kitchen chair and put the letter on the table.

  “Seriously.” I ran my hand down Rowena’s back. “Do you think Mac killed Chuck? How much money are we talking here?”

  My mind reeled for about five minutes as I noodled what to do.

  “I think I’m going to go talk to her. Woman to woman.” I nodded at Rowena and grabbed my keys to the truck. “I’ll be back in time to fix supper.”

  I didn’t tell her Mac might not be there, depending on what I found out from Tasha. It would crush Rowena’s furry little heart.

  If I timed it just right by my phone GPS, I could get to Tasha’s house across the Tennessee line in about an hour, visit with her for an hour, and then be back on the road in plenty of time.

  The only thing I didn’t factor in was all those Tennessee mountains and how my GPS didn’t like them.

  “Hi.” I stopped at the next gas station and took the letter with the address of Tasha Linder with me to show to the attendant. “Do you know this address?” I asked the girl behind the counter.

  “Ms. Linder.” She nodded and smiled. “Why?”

  “Oh good, you do know her.” I put my hand up to my heart and pretended I was glad, though I really wanted to know what her big secret with Mac was. “I’m a long-time friend of hers from college.” I made sure I threw that in there because it was how Mac said he’d met her. “And we recently connected on Facebook, of all places, after all these years,” I lied. “And she gave me her address.” I flipped the letter over and showed her the address. “My GPS on my phone is having the hardest time finding her house in these mountains.”

  The girl took a long look at the scribbled address. She hesitated.

  “Can you point me in the right direction?” I put my hands together in a “pretty please” way.

  “I…” She hesitated again. “Sure. You’re gonna go out of the gas station right. Then the second left you’re gonna drive down this windy road until you come to a fork. There’s an old, run-down barn on the right. It’s got a red door. You ain’t gonna miss it. Go the opposite direction. Then you’re gonna come to a real old church with a big white steeple. Keep going past that until you see a bunch of donkeys on the left. Turn there.” My head was spinning with her directions. I grabbed the pen next to the cash register and tried to write down and remember the landmarks.

  “You’re gonna go up a big hill like a mountain, and there’s going to be a big steel gatehouse on the right. That’s not hers. Hers is the little cabin directly across from it. There’s an old blue Chevy Nova on cement blocks. That’s how you’ll know it’s her house.”

  “Thank you so much.” I smiled at the girl. “I truly appreciate it.” I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  “Ma’am.” The girl stopped me when I turned around.

  “Yes.” I answered without looking back at her.

  “My pen.”

  A sigh of relief waved through my body when I realized it was only the pen she wanted back and not to question me any more about Tasha.

  “Yes.” I held it up and slapped it onto the counter. “Thank you.”

  I hurried out the store and jumped into the truck.

  I drove the truck in and out of those curves, making sure to keep repeating the landmarks as I came to them.

  “Opposite direction,” I read out loud when I’d gotten to the fork in the road with the red-doored barn.

  The closer up the mountain to Tasha’s house I got, the faster my heart raced. There was a big secret between her and Mac that I needed to know, and maybe she’d be able to provide some sort of information to help me prove Mac didn’t kill Chuck. If Mac said he was with Tasha, I needed to get her to prove it even if Angela wasn’t making a great effort to do so.

  When I pulled in, Tasha was just getting out of her car.

  “Well, you aren’t Mac.” Tasha stood at the door. In one hand, she had a rolled-up McDonald’s sack, and with the other, she was gripping a little girl’s hand. “Let me introduce you to my and Richard’s daughter, Ellie.”

  Richard’s daughter. My mouth dried. My heart raced. Then a little bit of panic set in.

  “Ellie, this is Mac’s friend.” Tasha didn’t refer to me as Richard’s wife. She opened the front door, and they walked in. “Are you coming?”

  I gulped and, against my intuition, went in.

  “She and I have a little bit of business to discuss. Can you run over to the Basses’ and see if they have some sugar we can borrow for those brownies we are going to make for school tomorrow? You can eat along the way.” Tasha handed the food sack to the little girl.

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  The little girl looked at me, and instantly I tried to find Richard in her but didn’t. My heart sank to my feet.

  “I might be a minute.” Ellie bounced up on her toes and kissed her mom. “I want to pet their new puppies.”

  “That’s fine. Just be home by ten.”

  When Tasha said that, I knew she wasn’t planning on baking any sort of brownies for school tomorrow. I looked at the clock on the wall next to the door. It made me nervous, because ten p.m. was a long ways away.

  The door closed behind the little girl. Tasha put her hand up for me not to move. She peeled back the curtain from the window and peered out. I could see the little girl skipping across the street to the large steel gate.

  “Now, we have some business to take care of.” She reached over and dropped her keys in the basket on the table beside the door. She slid open the drawer.

  “I was just coming by to ask if you’d please help me with Mac’s release for being accused of...” My jaw clenched, and my eyes focused on the gun in her hand. “Listen, I had no id
ea Richard…”

  “Are you stupid or something?” She waved the gun in front of her. “You think Richard had been coming to Tennessee every week on business? No.” She shook her head. “I met him years ago when a group of my friends and I went to a bar. Oh, he was on business. Then he made me his business.”

  “Are you telling me Richard had a relationship with you?” My head was so jumbled I couldn’t figure out if he’d had a one-night stand or a relationship, because she sure did sound like they’d had a relationship.

  Was I to believe her?

  “Please, put that gun away. You’re scaring me.” I started to realize there was more to this story than I knew.

  “Chuck Shilling overheard me and Mac arguing about money and Richard.” She waved the gun around all willy-nilly.

  “Money?”

  “Ellie deserves a life. Her daddy died.” She tapped the gun to her chest. “My Richard died, leaving us with nothing. I’ve worked hard over the past ten years to become the manager of Food City. It’s taken every bit of Richard’s inheritance and what I make to make ends meet.”

  “Inheritance?” I questioned then realized that all those letters Mac had been getting from the Tennessee address were actually to Richard. I bet Mac was giving them to Richard, and Richard was storing them at Mac’s. Mac’s financial problem was Tasha and Ellie, Richard’s problem.

  “First Federal every month puts in a lump sum of money in Ellie’s name. Only it stopped about three months ago. I started writing Mac since I didn’t have his phone number, and he refused to answer me. I even sent him a photo of Ellie, begging him to help us out and find out where the money had gone.” Tasha’s black eyes narrowed.

  It was then that I noticed her hair was cut exactly like Ashley Williams’s. The bartender had had it right. We’d had it wrong.

  “Come to find out, Mac had been putting money into an account so you and your little boy wouldn’t find out about us after Richard died,” her sordid tale continued.

  Then it hit me.

  “Richard paid for two families?” I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This would kill Grady.

  “You want to know how angry I was that night? I had to find a babysitter for Ellie so I could drive to Sugar Creek Gap to find Mac. Then Chuck Shilling showed up.”

  She’d already told me this, which made me think she was getting nervous and jumbling her thoughts.

  “I didn’t know about you so why are you going to hurt me?” Not that she’d hurt me yet, but judging by the situation, she looked as if she was going to.

  “Because you know!” she screamed. “And don’t play dumb with me!”

  “Okay, so I know.” I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

  “You think I can just let you leave here and go back to that nosy sheriff of yours and tell her Richard had a love child? She’d for sure connect the dots that I was the one who killed that old man.”

  My mouth went dry.

  “You killed Chuck?” I choked out. My eyes shifted back and forth as I tried to add this little nugget to all the other jumbled-up pieces in my head. “Why?”

  “You are an idiot. I just told you he overheard me and Mac arguing about the money.” She held up her free hand and rubbed the pads of her fingers and thumb together. “He was at Mac’s house discussing this big business venture. I busted in and started going off about the money from Richard stopping.”

  “Let me guess.” I frowned, and tears welled in my eyes. “Chuck figured out Richard had a child by you, Mac had been paying you to make it look like Richard had been, and he told Mac that if Mac didn’t drop buying the property, then he was going to expose Richard. All because he didn’t want Mac to turn around and sell the condos, giving you the money for Ellie to live on.” I blinked, and the tears fell. “Mac didn’t want Richard to look bad in the community, so they had a fight. He kicked Chuck out…”

  “He kicked Chuck out and then me. He said he had to think about it and that I should give him until the morning. But it wasn’t Richard he was trying to protect.” The disgust was written all over her face. “It was you.”

  “Me?”

  “Come on,” she snarled. “Richard even told me how Mac had a thing for this lady who had a kid and lived on a farm. Richard described you to a T, but the catch was that she was married. I had no idea he was talking about his own wife.” She was saying things I didn’t want to hear. “So I followed Chuck to a local bar. Got him all good and drunk, because I told Mac before I left his house that he was going to build those condos and give me a couple for income.

  “Mac was good and liquored up. I put him in an Uber, figuring I could talk Chuck into selling the country club, and when he wasn’t budging, I worked my magic on him. I knew exactly where Mac kept his gun, and it was easy to hit on old Chuck, making him think he was going to get a little.” She was enjoying every second of this.

  I was having a hard time catching my breath. I bent over and placed my hands on my knees.

  “Lord, you’re gonna keel over, and I’m not going to have to kill you myself.” Her tone told me she was pretty pleased with the reaction I was having.

  Only…

  I knew this feeling all too well. The first time I’d had it was when Richard and I took Grady on his first vacation to Florida. We drove over a long bridge across the bay to get to our hotel. I could hardly breathe driving over the bridge in fear we were going to plunge to our deaths. It was my first panic attack. There were a few more here and there, but nothing like the one I’d had when I was told Richard was dead.

  “Please just give me some water before you let me die here.” I gasped and eased myself down onto a chair before I truly did pass out.

  “I’ve never heard of anyone coming out of a heart attack with a drink of water.” She shrugged.

  With blurry vision, I watched as she went into her kitchen.

  My chest heaved as I tried to take deep breaths and get myself out of this panic attack. It was as if nothing was real around me, but I knew if I could think of something I might get out of this situation.

  That’s a blue couch. That’s a blue couch. That’s a blue rug. I repeated the things I saw that were blue. I’d had enough therapy to learn that when I was having a panic attack, if I focused on something that was real, like a color, I was able to distinguish that the feelings caused by the panic attack weren’t real.

  Just as I heard her turn off the water faucet, I looked behind me to see if there was a weapon or fireplace poker or something. There was a baton. It had to be Ellie’s. It wasn’t one of the full-sized ones but a smaller one.

  Slowly, I dragged it over to me and slid it under my thigh.

  “Please call the ambulance,” I begged Tasha for good measure, though I was feeling much better.

  As she got closer, I noticed the gun wasn’t in her hands. I figured she’d put it down in the kitchen, possibly thinking she didn’t need it because I was dying of what she thought was a heart attack.

  Think again.

  With a shaky hand, I reached up to get the water at the same time I gripped the baton under my leg and swung it up to meet Tasha’s skull.

  I jumped up, dropping the glass, and watched her go down in slow motion.

  She didn’t move. She was knocked out cold.

  I ran over to the door where I’d seen the shoes and jump rope. I knew I had to get her tied up so I could call 9-1-1.

  With her bound by the jump rope, I walked to the kitchen, where I found the gun. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed 9-1-1, picking up the gun with the phone tucked in between my shoulder and ear.

  “Yes. Please, I need help. Someone has tried to kill me.” I rattled off the address.

  Exhausted.

  I slid down the door with the gun pointed at Tasha until I heard sirens barreling up through the mountains.

  “Bernie! Where are you?”

  I jumped up when I heard Mac calling my name. I jerked the door open.

  “
Mac!” I dropped the gun and ran into his open arms. I was mad at him for keeping Richard’s secret, but I was so glad to see him.

  Sheriff Angela Hafley appeared out of nowhere. “Where is she?”

  “Inside.”

  I looked around and noticed Angela’s sheriff car. Confused, I looked back at Mac. “How did you find me?”

  “Mr. Macum of all people.” Mac smiled and dragged me back into his arms, running his hand down my hair. “He saw someone who looked a whole lot like Tasha on the bridge with Chuck. He said both of them looked drunk and as if they were having a lovers’ quarrel. Buster was barking the whole time they were fighting. He said he’d not paid any attention to it until you mentioned it to him when you were delivering his mail. He has one of the Ring Doorbells and looked back at the footage. As soon as Tasha shot him, Buster barked, but Mr. Macum doesn’t hear very well and he’d just taken off his hearing aids.”

  I smiled. Tears of relief rolled down my face.

  Another Sheriff cruiser and an ambulance pulled up. The first responders ran into the house. Angela walked outside and talked to the officer.

  “When you weren’t home for Sunday supper, everyone knew something was wrong. I went to the sheriff’s department to report you missing. Angela is the one who asked me if she thought Tasha might have you, but I had no idea where she moved.” He drew back and looked down at me. Tears clung to his bottom eyelids.

  “Uncle Mac?” Ellie was standing behind us with the neighbor. “What is going on with Mommy?”

  Mac looked at me and then back to Ellie. He dropped his arms from around me and walked over to kneel in front of her.

  “She’s okay, Ellie Belly.” He reached out and tickled her stomach.

  “Why don’t we go back to my house, and you stay the night until your mommy feels better.” The neighbor and Mac looked at each other.

  “Yeah. That’s a great idea.” Mac planted a big grin on his face for the little girl and nodded.

  “A sleepover?” Ellie was innocent in this entire mess and had no idea what was going on.

  “Yeah. A sleepover.” The neighbor grabbed Ellie by the hand.

  “Bye, Uncle Mac.” Ellie waved and went with the neighbor.