by Lauren Carr
“Lying also puts him under the spotlight.”
“I need to go question Ned Carter again,” she said. “Now we know who gave Cheryl his phone number. Brianne says Cheryl never showed up, but her car did. I wonder if something odd like that happened to Ned. If I can recreate the chain of events leading up to and after Cheryl’s murder, I might have luck in finding real evidence against Doris.”
He rolled over onto his side and smiled at her. “So you think it’s Doris?”
“Of course, I do. It was her freezer. I’ll go to the hospital and question her today.” Conscious of covering herself, she sat up. “What time is it?” She looked up at the anniversary clock on the mantle. It was six o’clock in the morning.
Remembering Joshua’s son, who was only two floors above them in the house, she sprang for her clothes while clutching the comforter around her. “I have to go before Donny gets up and comes down here and finds us.”
Her reminder woke Joshua up all the way. He dove for his clothes. “He’s going to be up early. He and his friends are going to Pittsburgh for a concert. They’re going out for brunch—”
“Dugan says you and Donny need to go into the police barracks to give them your—”
“Admiral!” Donny’s voice called from upstairs. “Come on, boy! Do you want to go out?”
Clutching their clothes against their naked bodies, Joshua and Cameron froze. They held their breath. They could sense, rather than see, Donny at the top of the steps waiting for Admiral.
The huge dog took his time climbing down off the sofa to the floor and making his way up the stairs.
“There you are,” Donny greeted him.
They watched the ceiling while listening to Donny’s footsteps cross the floor to the back door to let the dog out. Then they followed the sound of his footsteps to the kitchen cupboard where he took out Admiral’s canned dog food. The whirl of the can opener signaled the opening of the can.
With a loud meow, Irving flew off the top of the back of the sofa and up the steps.
“No!” Cameron gasped.
Joshua covered her mouth with his hand. “Shhh!”
“Irving, what are you doing here?” Donny asked.
A moment later, Irving trotted down the stairs with Donny behind him.
“Traitor,” Joshua hissed at the cat.
A wide smile crossed his face at the sight of his father and Cameron wrapped in a comforter after having spent the night together. “Well, well, well.” Chuckling, he folded his arms across his chest. “Dad, I guess now would be a good time to talk to you about my curfew.”
“I don’t understand the purposes of curfews anyway,” Cameron argued with Joshua while he maneuvered the country roads in his SUV. “Like, what can Donny do after midnight that he can’t do before?”
“It’s called boundaries,” Joshua grumbled. “Children need boundaries. I don’t want my kids running around at all hours of the night getting into trouble.”
“Oh, I can see Donny running around at all hours of the night getting into trouble,” she said with sarcasm. “He’s a good kid, Josh.”
“And I want him to stay that way.” He pointed a finger at her. “Your skunk cat is a snitch.”
“You’re only put out because he won’t let you call him Irv.” She wanted to further argue for Irving’s innocence, but got distracted by a sharp turn that Joshua made to take his SUV down a worn country road leading back along a steep ridge in Johnsonville, a community on the outskirts of Chester. The back road was home to a row of mobile homes lots, one set up next to another. In an effort to make their trailers homier, their owners had erected wooden porches and decks with various degrees of success. Others had cheaply made additions that didn’t match the original structure.
“Ralph’s ex-mistress. Name, Peggy Lawson,” she read the name in her report. “Lives at 15 Hickory Lane, located off Johnsonville Road.”
Joshua pulled the SUV off the road. “There it is.” He pointed to a yellow trailer with black shutters. A muddy, red sedan was parked in the gravel driveway next to a gardening shed. “Do you want me to come in with you?”
“Why do you think I brought you?” she asked.
“I came voluntarily because I need the mental exercise from arguing with you.”
She smiled. “I’ll do the questioning, and you’ll be my back up.”
Groaning, he shifted his car into drive. “Oh, I hope I don’t have to shoot another suspect.” He parked next to the sedan.
Cameron unclipped her police shield to show Ralph’s ex-mistress when she answered the door. When she opened the passenger side door to climb out of the car, she saw two large gasoline cans filling the back seat of the sedan. The car reeked of the smell from the gasoline. “Josh?”
When she saw she had his attention, she pointed to the back seat of the car. He nodded his head. Together, they made their way up the steps to the front door. Standing aside from the doorway, Cameron knocked loudly on the door. “Peggy! It’s the police. Will you please open the door?”
The response was silence.
Cameron knocked on the door again. “Peggy Lawson, open the door. We need to speak to you.”
Joshua had his ear pressed to the side of the trailer. “I don’t hear any movement.” He turned the door knob, and it swung open.
Their guns drawn, Cameron entered first with Joshua directly behind her. With each turn they made, they aimed and searched the cluttered living room and kitchen area.
“I think someone was on a binge.” With the muzzle of his gun, Joshua indicated a row of empty vodka bottles along the kitchen counter. There was only one glass next to the bottles. Spotting an empty cat food and water dish, he said, “She has a cat.”
“She’s not all bad.”
“I wonder if her cat’s a snitch.”
“Peggy, it’s the police,” she announced again while peering down the hallway in case Peggy was asleep and didn’t hear them entering. “We have some questions for you about Ralph Hildebrand and Doris Sullivan.”
The hallway was too narrow to allow any place for her to hide. Cameron rushed down and threw open the door at the end of it.
The bedroom occupied the back portion of the home. The unmade king-sized bed filled the room, leaving barely enough space to navigate to the closet on the other side. Peggy Lawson was sprawled out on the bed with the sheets twisted around her naked body. An empty vodka bottle rested next to her body like a lover. Her hand still clutched the glass from which she had sipped.
Cameron holstered her gun.
“Is she alive?” Joshua asked in a low voice as if he feared waking her up. He was forced to wait in the hallway because there wasn’t enough space for him to enter the room.
Cameron reached across the bed to feel Peggy’s neck for a pulse. While searching, she watched her chest for any sign of breathing. She noticed her chest rise slightly. The pulse was very faint. “She’s alive—barely!”
Joshua unclipped his phone from his belt and pressed the button to call emergency.
Cameron yelled loudly into her ear. “Peggy! Stay with me, Peggy! Help is on the way!”
Spying an empty bottle on the floor next to the bed, she knelt to read the label.
“What did she take?” Joshua asked.
“Benzodiazepines.” She showed him the date on the label. “This bottle was filled yesterday morning.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Is it us?” Cameron asked Joshua while they watched Hancock County’s sheriff, Curt Sawyer talking to Peggy Lawson’s neighbor. “Everywhere we go lately, mayhem breaks out.”
Short and muscular, Curt Sawyer had never let go of his Marine training. One look from him intimidated anyone into saying and doing whatever he wanted. That was what made him a good sheriff.
Their ears were still ringing from the ambulance sirens that had whisked Peggy Lawson off to the hospital. It did not look good. She had slipped into a coma.
Looking distraught by the happenings next door
only a few yards from her home, the woman was holding her young daughter with both hands on her shouldesr, while the girl clutched a long-haired black cat in her arms. The residents of the quiet neighborhood had suddenly woken up to emergency vehicles filling one of their yards.
“In the last twenty-four hours,” she noted, “we’ve had a hostage situation and shooting, arson and attempted murder, got nailed by your son for premarital sex, and now an attempted suicide.”
“Just your average day in a small town,” Joshua replied as Curt Sawyer crossed the driveway to join them.
“Well, so far, everything seems to be on the up and up for an attempted suicide.” The sheriff pointed his pen in the direction of the mother leading her daughter into their home. “Mrs. Clausson says Peggy Lawson gave her cat, Toby, to her daughter yesterday morning, without asking permission from her. Mrs. Clausson didn’t like that. So she kept coming over here to try to talk to Peggy about it. She says she was here knocking on the door about five times throughout the day and getting no answer. But she knew Peggy was home because her car was in the driveway. Then, last night, around ten o’clock, when she was getting ready to go to bed, she heard the car start up. She says she came running out in her bathrobe to try to catch her, but the car was speeding down the road and wouldn’t stop. She heard the car come back in a little after eleven. By then, Mrs. Clausson gave up and decided to let her daughter keep the cat.”
Joshua said, “Getting her affairs in order. Giving away her cat to make sure it was well taken care of.”
“But one last thing,” Cameron said, “before she went, take out the man who she blamed for ruining her life.”
Joshua opened the sedan’s driver side door. A puzzled expression crossed his face.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him. “Why are you giving me the face?”
“Did you see all the booze stacked up on that kitchen counter?” Joshua asked them.
“She was inebriated,” Curt said. “Liquid courage.”
“As much booze as she had in her, she drove over to Hookstown and set fire to a house with gasoline and matches, but she didn’t set herself on fire.” Joshua turned to Cameron. “Did you smell gasoline while trying to revive her?”
“No.” Startled, Cameron shook her head. “But I did smell vomit and body odor, which means she didn’t shower.”
“As drunk as she was, she would have smelled like gasoline.” Joshua studied the driver’s seat in the car. “How tall would you say Peggy Lawson is?”
“Five feet-eight inches easy.” She looked over his shoulder at the front seat of the sedan. It was pushed up all the way to the steering wheel.
“Whoever last drove this car was short.”
Cameron knelt next to the car to examine the tires.
Joshua shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you about the car and the arson. But I can tell you this, my gut is telling me that Peggy didn’t drive this car last. I think she spent the whole day locked up inside drinking up courage to take a bottle of pills.”
“Josh, come take a look, and tell me what you find in the treads of this tire.”
After kneeling next to her, Joshua studied the front tire. He sniffed at what appeared to be mud embedded in the tread. Not satisfied, he rubbed his gloved finger over it and held it up to his nose to smell. “Horse manure.”
“Horse manure. How do you know it’s not cow manure?” Curt asked.
“Cow manure has a distinctive smell and consistency,” Joshua replied. “This is horse manure.”
Cameron turned to the sheriff. “And Doris Sullivan breeds and trains Thoroughbred horses.”
Joshua slowly rose to his feet. “Forensics can extract the DNA from this manure and, if they can get samples from the horses on Doris’s farm, trace it back to the horse that left it, which would place this car at her farm if there’s a match.” He told Curt, “We need to impound this car, and have forensics go over it with a fine tooth comb. Whoever set that fire tried to frame Peggy for doing it.”
“I never said I didn’t have a second freezer,” Doris insisted from her hospital bed.
“But you did deliberately mislead us by not mentioning that you owned a second freezer,” Joshua said.
“Which is now in the barn.” With a pained expression, she sat up to look down the length of the bed at where Cameron stood on the other side of Joshua. “I take it that it’s still there in the feed room.”
“Yes, it is,” Cameron said. “We’re talking about the other freezer—the one that was there before this one.”
“The one you tried to blow up in Albert’s house to keep from being discovered,” Joshua explained.
“You know,” Cameron said, “the one that had Cheryl Smith’s body in it.”
Doris pursed her lips together so tight that her mouth resembled a beak. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Now, leave. In case you didn’t notice someone tried to kill me last night.” She sat up. “I’m the victim here, and you’re accusing me of murder.”
Joshua placed a hand on Cameron’s and softened his tone. “I’m sorry, Doris. We’re simply trying to figure all this out. Someone did try to kill you last night, and someone also killed your daughter. We need to know the truth if we’re to determine if the two things are connected.”
“Angie was not—” Tears came to Doris’s eyes. She sniffed.
Never comfortable with sobbing victims, witnesses, or suspects, Cameron stepped away from the bed. It was additionally disconcerting for her since Doris had come across as so tough. Tears in her eyes did not appear right. They didn’t look like they belonged there.
Joshua took a box of tissue from the bedside table and handed a tissue to the elderly woman. “Who knew about you and Ralph?”
“No one,” she replied. “Ralph and I have a complicated relationship. The last time he and I were together was before Peggy came along. That was years ago.” She sucked in a deep breath. When she spoke again, her voice grew stronger. “It used to be just sex between him and me. But then, after Angie died, we became friends . . . who had sex. No strings. It’s nice to have a companion like that. Then he took up with Peggy, and we became friends without sex. This weekend, after he broke it off with her, he came over and . . . Well, you know.”
“Did Mildred know?” Joshua asked.
“If she did, I didn’t tell her.”
“But you did tell her that Ralph had left her,” he reminded her.
“I was messing with her,” Doris said. “I’ve been messing with her for decades. It’s what we do. If Mildred doesn’t know what Ralph is, she’s deaf, dumb, and blind.” She chuckled. “I knew it the second I laid eyes on him.”
“If you know what he is, why do you put up with him?” Cameron asked.
Doris ticked off the points on her fingers. “He doesn’t tell me what to do, he doesn’t ask anything of me, and he’s damn good in bed.” She puffed out her chest and nodded her head. “You can’t ask for a better man than that.”
“There’s someone for everyone,” Joshua told Cameron.
Cameron stepped in. “Tell us about the freezer and you blowing up the house.”
Doris pointed a boney finger at her. “You can’t prove I blew up the house.”
“But you knew the freezer was down there,” Joshua said. “That’s why you blew it up. You didn’t want us to find the body.”
“It had your fingerprints and traces of horse feed in it,” the detective said. “That’s enough for us to take you in.”
“I’m an old woman,” Doris said in a mocking tone.
“Old women get convicted of murder all the time,” Cameron said.
Joshua again put his hand on Cameron’s. With his eyes, he told her that he would handle this questioning. Stepping back, she held her hands up in surrender.
He turned to Doris. “I’m trying to help you. I can’t if you don’t start telling me the truth. It is your freezer. Cheryl Smith’s body was found in it. Cheryl was a prime suspect in the murde
r of your daughter. That gives you a very strong motive for killing her. Cameron’s right. She has enough to arrest you for murder. I don’t want that to happen. I want to help you. So fill in the blanks. Tell us where she’s wrong.”
Doris stuck out her chin. Her nose was up in the air when she said, “Because you’d never believe the truth.”
“Try me.”
“Okay.” She paused to look from Joshua to Cameron and then back to him before saying, “Someone stole it.”
Cameron and Joshua exchanged glances before they both turned back to the old woman in the bed.
“Someone stole . . . your freezer and put a dead body in it and hid it in your neighbor’s basement?” Cameron asked.
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.”
“You mean to tell me that you walked into the barn one morning and—” said Joshua.
“Found it missing,” Doris said. “All the feed was taken out of it and sitting in a pile in the feed room. There were tire tracks leading up to and into the barn.”
“Did you ever report it?” Cameron asked.
“Are you kidding? It was an old, broken-down freezer. I used it to store the horse feed in to keep the mice and raccoons out. It had no monetary value. I just bought an old freezer from a garage sale and used that.”
“Do you recall when this happened?” asked Joshua.
Doris gestured with a wave of her hand. “So long ago that I can’t remember. I had forgotten about it until you gave me a tour of Albert’s house to see what had to be done to get it cleaned out so that I could buy his farm. When you took me down to the basement and I saw my freezer, I about had a stroke. I recognized it because of a dent in the front from where a horse had broken out of his stall and gotten into the feed room and kicked it. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Albert had stolen my freezer. Later, I came back. I remembered I had a key that Albert had given me eons ago. So I went to look inside to see why he had stolen it—” Her eyes grew wide at the memory. “I didn’t even recognize her as Cheryl Smith. Albert was my friend. I meant it when I said I had forgiven him for helping Cheryl get permission to leave town after killing Angie. When I saw that dead body, all I wanted to do was help cover it up so people wouldn’t be saying all sorts of cruel things about him. I figured that if he was a killer or sex fiend, then he would already be getting his judgment and punishment up in heaven. I wasn’t thinking about any of this tracing back to me. I was trying to protect Albert, not me, when I made that bomb.”
