“Look, I promise not to say anything to him, OK?” Then I remembered stopping by the station earlier to report the threats I’d received. Even if I didn’t go back and tell him it had been Heather all along, I had a feeling he would figure it out soon enough on his own. He might work for a small-town police department, but I still gave him credit for being able to figure it out.
“Why couldn’t you have stayed where you were?” Heather said, tears now streaming down her face. She’d shed the crazed, obsessive act. “Now you’ve ruined everything.” It was like witnessing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Aunt Lula would say Heather was two sandwiches short of a picnic.
There was no point in reasoning with her. I knew she and Justin hadn’t been in a relationship for a while, but in her mind, she thought she still had a chance with him.
“That’s between you and Justin. Like I said, I haven’t done or said anything to indicate I want to get back together with him.”
“You lie,” she accused. “You expect me to believe there’s nothing going on between you two? I saw y’all at lunch. Several times, in fact. That doesn’t sound like nothing to me.”
Shivers ran down my spine. She’d been spying on us the whole time. I wondered what else she’d seen.
“It wasn’t like that. We’re just friends.”
Heather inched her way closer to me. “Now why don’t I believe that?”
“It’s the truth. I’m only in town for a few more weeks. Why would I start something with Justin?” That was a question I’d been struggling with myself. “If you think I’ve crossed the line, it’s all in your head.” Probably a bad choice of words on my part.
Each time she took a step closer to me, I took a step back. Pretty soon, I’d be up against the wall. I had to figure out a way to get out of here, and fast.
“It should have been you who died that night,” she cried.
What? What the hell was she talking about?
“Heather—”
We heard loud footsteps coming from the hallway.
“Jules, get out of here, now,” Justin ordered.
This time, I didn’t argue with him. I hightailed it out of there as fast as my size eights would take me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
For once, I wasn’t at the police station waiting to get reprimanded for getting involved in Harvey’s murder. After the incident at Heather’s, Justin called to ask me to come down and give my statement. I still hadn’t come to terms with what actually happened, but I was grateful Justin had figured it out and was able to get me out of her house in time. I wasn’t sure what she had in store for me, but I was indebted to him just the same.
We sat in his office as I gave him the rundown on how I had ended up at Heather’s house and what she had admitted to me. Justin didn’t say a word as he wrote down everything I said. When I was done retelling my tale, I realized just how crazy Heather was and how close I had been to getting seriously hurt. If Justin hadn’t shown up when he did, who knew what might have happened?
When I finished my statement, I asked, “How did you know I was at Heather’s? More importantly, how’d you know I was in trouble?”
He shrugged. “I saw your car parked at Heather’s. I knew you two weren’t exactly friends, so I put two and two together. And to be honest, I’ve known for a while there was something not right about Heather,” he said. “Seeing you there drew up a big red flag.”
If anyone had an inkling toward Heather’s mental state, it was Justin. He was being modest, but as far as cops went, he wasn’t half bad. In fact, he was pretty damn good, even if he did work for a small-town police department. I felt guilty for doubting him. There was no telling what Heather would have done to me if I had stayed in her house much longer.
“What’s going to happen to her?” There was still a small part of me that felt sorry for her. I only wished someone had caught on to her mental state well before she’d trapped me in her house.
“Oh, I imagine she’ll be looking at life. Unless she finds herself a good defense attorney and pleads insanity.”
“For stalking?” Stalking didn’t warrant a life sentence. Depending on the state, it could take a second conviction for it to be considered a felony charge. Even then, it wouldn’t be anything close to a life sentence.
Justin stared at me in disbelief. “You mean you don’t know? I thought for sure Lula and her geriatric armed militia would have already spread the word by now.”
“I’ve been sitting here at the station, waiting to make my statement, all morning,” I reminded him. “What else is there to know? The woman was obsessed with the both of us.”
“Jules,” he said slowly, making sure he had my attention. “She confessed to killing Harvey.”
I was momentarily stunned. “What?”
“The aconite was meant for you.”
I was having problems thinking straight. “What? How?”
“According to Heather, she crashed your welcome-home party with the sole purpose of poisoning you. She said she knew you coming back would . . .” He paused as if he didn’t want to continue. “. . . she said you being here would hurt her chances of being with me. She left the party thinking she had poisoned your food, only to find out later that Harvey accidentally ate it.”
So that was what she’d meant when she said I should have been the one to die. Poor Harvey!
“He must have taken my plate by mistake,” I said, instantly feeling horrible that his death was all my fault. “That’s why she showed up at my parents’ house uninvited. But none of this makes sense. That was only my first night back in town. There’s no way she could’ve acted so quickly.” But deep down I knew, just as I had known when I was stuck in that room, that she had been planning this for a long time, just waiting for the right moment to strike.
“It seems she’s been waiting for an opportunity like this for years. News of your arrival spread pretty quickly, so she acted on it. Carried around enough poison on her to cause serious damage, hoping for just the right opportunity. When she found out she’d poisoned the wrong food, she waited to see if she’d be linked to Harvey’s death before she tried again.”
I shuddered, thinking about all the times I’d had run-ins with Heather since I arrived in Trouble. She certainly had plenty of opportunities. I wondered why she’d taken her time after the first attempt. There was really no evidence that would have linked her with Harvey’s murder. The reality sunk in.
“She was going to try to kill me back at her place.”
He nodded. “Heather had a casserole baking in the oven. I suspect she was going to try it again. When we asked her about it, she said she was going to claim you’d had too much wine and possibly food poisoning, hoping the paramedics would say it was alcohol poisoning.”
“Oh my God, did she really think she’d get away with it? Surely she must have known the autopsy wouldn’t have corroborated that.”
“Heather was ill. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to consider anything beyond her plan.”
As off-the-wall as he made it sound, what he said wasn’t improbable. I had studied the typology of stalkers back in grad school, and there really were no boundaries when it came to the objects of their obsessions. There was a disconnect between reality and fantasy. Stalkers could fixate on their victims for years, even decades, and prepare themselves to take action when the opportunity presented itself. There was no rhyme or reason when it came to people like Heather.
“I feel so bad about Harvey. If I hadn’t come home—”
“Jules, stop. If she hadn’t tried to poison you then, she would have done something later on. And if it wasn’t you, it would have been somebody else.”
“There was someone else. Harvey . . . he died because of me.”
Justin got out of his office chair and came over to where I sat opposite him. He placed his hand on my shoulder in an
attempt to comfort me. “No, he died because of Heather.”
Intellectually, I understood what Justin was saying, but I was having a hard time coming to terms with it. I sighed. “She was sick, I know.”
“If anyone should feel sorry, it’s me. I swear, I had no idea she had it out for you like that, but I should have seen the signs. I knew there was something wrong, but I just chalked it up to jealousy and possessiveness. Now that I look back, there were dozens of red flags I missed. It didn’t register until I saw you were over at her house.”
I shook my head in his defense. “You couldn’t have known. I mean, no one knew I was coming back to Trouble. Who knew she was harboring those kinds of feelings toward me?”
“I should’ve, though. It’s the reason we broke up.”
I looked up at him.
He continued. “The thing about me and Heather was, we were never as serious as she made it out in her head. Sure, we went out on a few dates, but in her mind, we were in a committed relationship. I wasn’t ready for it, and she wouldn’t let up. That alone should have been the biggest indicator that something was off with her.”
“Didn’t you ever have a talk with her? Let her down easy?”
Not that it would have mattered. People like Heather were so far removed from what they heard and what they actually believed.
“I know how it looks . . . that I should have caught on sooner, but you want the truth?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to know.
“In the beginning, she made living here much more bearable.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you loved living here in Trouble. It’s all you ever talked about when we were teens—moving back to the island and starting a family.”
“And I still want those things, but it gets lonely around here. For a while, before Heather got too intense, it was nice getting all the attention. She’d come to work at the station with cookies, bring me dinner when I was too tired to cook after a long day. You of all people should know how it is around here. All the other women around our age are already married or spoken for. The options are limited.”
That was no surprise. Of course the dating pool was limited; this was a small island. I didn’t know how I felt hearing him say that, but I didn’t feel bad about my decision to move away when I did. I could feel guilty about Harvey being killed because of me, but not Justin’s lack of a love life.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea,” I said.
“He wants to throw the book at her, you know,” he said casually, changing the subject.
“He who?”
“The assistant DA. When he found out that the source of Heather’s obsession was you, he seemed bound and determined to prosecute her to the hilt. He can’t charge her with first-degree murder because Harvey wasn’t the intended victim, but he’s going for second-degree murder, felony stalking, and intent to commit,” he explained. “You must have made quite an impression on him.”
“Oh.” Hearing that gave me the warm fuzzies. I instantly felt guilty about feeling good about Hartley when Justin was clearly going through his own relationship issues.
Like Justin, I quickly changed the subject. “Does this mean Abby Lee is in the clear?”
“Pending a confirmation on everything Heather said, yeah, she’s cleared as a suspect.”
At least there was a silver lining.
One thing still bothered me. There was still a piece missing from the big picture. That night at Heather’s house she had said that she hadn’t locked me in the stockroom at Palmetto Pink. If it wasn’t Heather, then it was someone else. But who? And for that matter, why?
Abby Lee and I were seated on my aunt’s porch swing, drinking ice-cold sweet tea as I told my story again for the second time that day. I had called her with the news that she was no longer a suspect as soon as I left the station.
“That is sooo creepy!” Abby Lee said. “I can’t believe she was that obsessed with both y’all.”
“What’s even scarier is her fixation with me before I even came back to the island. Apparently she’d been obsessed since before she started dating Justin.” Just saying it out loud gave me a case of the creeps. “Probably since high school,” I said, thinking of the old photos Heather had of us taped to the walls of her room.
“But I don’t understand. You haven’t lived here in like forever. Why was she so focused on you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. That was the million-dollar question. Who knew what motivated people to do things?
“Like I said, I think it started well before that. My guess? Justin never let the idea of me go, and it drove Heather to the extreme.” It was as if I was the sole obstacle in her attempt to get closer to Justin. “Or maybe it really had nothing to do with me at all. She had to blame someone other than herself for Justin never committing to a relationship with her.”
The typology of stalkers alone generated a lot of questions as to her true intent. Some stalkers could go after a person for a real or imagined wrongdoing. Others did it for undying love and attention. At this point, it was anyone’s guess. Even if Justin never mentioned my name the few times they went out, she clearly associated me as part of her failures with Justin. Heather either hated me that much, believing I was in the way, or loved Justin too much and didn’t want competition.
“Damn . . . remind me to screen potential boyfriends,” Abby Lee said.
“You and me both,” I said.
“Speaking of, what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. Trying to track down a killer wasn’t part of my summer vacation plans, but now that it was over, I wasn’t sure how I was going to spend the rest of my time here in Trouble. “I guess work on my tan.”
Abby Lee shook her head. “No, silly. About the boyfriend situation. Who’s it going to be? Justin or that hot prosecutor?”
I stared at my friend, my mouth agape. “What are you talking about? There’s nothing going on between me and either of them,” I insisted.
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I don’t know . . . I feel a summer romance brewing in the horizon.”
“I think what you’re feeling is the humidity.” My shirt was already sticking to my back. This was going to be a three-shower kind of day; I could already tell.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a fling before you head back to Virginia.”
“The last thing I need in my life is a man. Even if it is for a few weeks.” I wasn’t going to admit to Abby Lee that maybe I did need a little dalliance in my life—with either one of them. It’d been a while since I’d been intimate with anyone.
“Are you still sore about that loser back home?”
With working at Aunt Lula’s store, trying to solve a murder, and being pursued by two men—possibly—and a stalker, I had almost forgotten about James and the way we left things.
“Honestly, no. I guess I didn’t love him as much as I loved the idea of being with him.”
“So what’s the problem? You and I both know Justin still has a thing for you. But then again, that prosecutor is easy on the eyes,” Abby Lee said. “I say go for it.”
“With which one?” I asked, laughing. “No, scratch that. I’m leaving soon, remember? I don’t think either one of them would appreciate a fling. Besides, I don’t think Hartley wants to hear from me anytime soon.”
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed about how he and I had left things.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The invitation came in the form of a rose-imprinted note card that arrived via postal service. At first, I thought it was a thank-you card from Abby Lee’s mother for helping her daughter avoid prison (that’s how we rolled in the South), but as I scanned the note, I was surprised to learn it was Sheila Boyette asking me to join her for coffee at her home. She wanted to thank me in person for identif
ying Harvey’s killer.
After the whole incident with Heather, I was a bit hesitant about meeting Sheila for coffee, but I couldn’t very well say no. She might be disliked around town, but how did you decline an invitation from a woman whose husband was murdered because of you? I was lucky she didn’t hold me personally responsible.
On a conscious level, I knew there was nothing to be apprehensive about, seeing that Heather was the one responsible for Harvey’s death, but my gut told me otherwise. From the little interaction I’d had with her, I knew I didn’t like Sheila much. That alone was enough for me to want to say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
But still, the responsibilities (or burdens, depending who you asked) of being born in Texas included proper manners, and Mom would have herself a conniption if she knew I turned down an invitation for coffee—even if the offer did come from Sheila Boyette.
Sheila had tidied up since the last time I was over at her house. Gone were the empty glasses and plastic frozen-dinner containers that had littered her coffee table. Perhaps I’d misjudged her. The entire town thought she was a gold digger with bad fashion sense. Aside from wanting to get her hands on the restaurant, maybe she really had been broken up about losing Harvey in her own way. You could hardly fault someone for neglecting something as trivial as household chores when her husband was found murdered. Even I’d forget to wash a dish or two.
“First, I’d like to apologize for my behavior,” Sheila started off, in an attempt to clear the air. “I know you’re Abby Lee’s friend, and I didn’t mean to get carried away. It’s just, Harvey’s death struck me hard.”
Understandable. But that still didn’t excuse her from assaulting or harassing Abby Lee. I hadn’t forgotten. It was best if I just let Sheila go through her apologies before I said anything I might regret. I was here for a civilized chat over coffee.
Sheila continued. “Could you please tell her that I’ve ceased trying to take ownership of The Poop Deck and that I won’t bother her anymore? Harvey had his reasons, and I suppose the restaurant rightfully belongs to her.” I couldn’t help but notice she said the last part rather reluctantly.
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