by Lanyon, Josh
Finn was already dialing The Birches as they made their way back to the Land Rover.
He got Martha again, and after reassuring her that he was perfectly all right—and with Con—he asked about Paul and was told he’d never arrived back at the house.
“Something’s wrong,” he told Con as he clicked off.
“He probably got stuck in the mud,” Con reassured, turning the key in the ignition. “The roads are hell right now.”
That was reasonable. Paul wasn’t used to driving rural roads, and the wind and rain made for terrible visibility. All the same, Finn was rigid with anxiety as they bumped and slid down the road from the lighthouse.
“He’ll be okay, Finn,” Con said without taking his eyes from the road.
“I should never have started this.”
“Do you mean that?”
Did he? Despite his bitterness and anger at Fitch’s behavior, despite everything—
Finn shook his head. “No.”
“No.” Con’s voice was quiet. “Murder will out.”
The wind shook the Rover and plastered soggy leaves against the windshield as they made their way beneath the storm-tossed trees. There was no sign of the station wagon along the road.
Finn rubbed his head, which was starting to pound with tension. “Who could plan something like that? If you and Fitch really didn’t intend to meet that morning—”
Con did look briefly from the road at that. “You said once I didn’t lie to you. I’m not lying about this. I didn’t go up there to meet Fitch.”
If he and Con were going to try and make a go of this—and if he was honest, he wanted to try at least—Finn was going to have to stop throwing the past in Con’s face. He was going to have to let it go. So he said neutrally, “Do you think Fitch was at the lighthouse to meet someone that morning?”
“No. Fitch followed you that morning. He wanted you to go over to the mainland with him. There was some art show he wanted you to see.”
Finn closed his eyes and then opened them. “So whoever killed him…it couldn’t have been premeditated.”
“I guess it could have been an accident.” Con sounded unconvinced. “But why didn’t this person come forward?”
“I don’t know. I guess there could have been a reason.”
Con didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to.
They were passing Miss Minton’s when Finn said, “Wait a minute. Stop. Paul might have come here.”
Con was already pulling to the side of the road, searching for a safe place to park in the wet road. “Why would he?”
“I told him to try and get shovels without anyone at The Birches noticing; he might have thought to ask to borrow Miss Minton’s. She’s got every tool known to man.”
Con killed the engine. Finn opened the door, climbing down cautiously before Con could get around to help him. He slammed shut the door against the wind, shrugging into his jacket and glancing down the woody embankment, and froze.
“Con.”
Con came around quickly and followed the direction Finn was pointing down the gully. The brown station wagon was at the bottom of the embankment, hood buried in the overhang of trees.
Con swore. Turned to Finn. “I’ll go down and check.”
“He must have gone off the road.”
“Stay right here. I’ll be right back.”
Con went slipping and sliding down the muddy slope. Gripping his cane, Finn watched tensely as he reached the station wagon, dragging open the driver’s-side door. He turned and waved all clear.
“He’s not here,” he called up.
“Where is he?” Finn demanded, which was about as dumb a question as he’d ever asked.
Con spread his hands and started back up the hillside. Finn looked over the muddy tracks along the side of the road. He found the spot where the station wagon had been parked. Had Paul tried to back out and gone over the side? But the car was nose-first down the gully, so he’d have had to deliberately pull forward over the edge.
It didn’t make sense.
Con reached the top of the embankment. “There’s no blood inside the car,” he reassured. “He can’t have been badly hurt. It’s not that far down the hillside.”
The idea occurred to them at the same time, and they gazed across the road at Miss Minton’s wall of rosebushes and the house beyond.
“He must have gone across to Mitty’s,” Con said.
“But if he had an accident, why wouldn’t he call The Birches?”
“Could he have decided to walk back for some reason?” Con had a supportive hand beneath Finn’s elbow as they started across the muddy road.
“I think the normal thing would be to—” Finn broke off as Miss Minton’s battered pickup came barreling through the gate toward them.
There wasn’t time to think, and there was no way he could have moved fast enough with his injured leg. Con grabbed him and shoved him hard to the side. Finn went sprawling as the pickup swerved, just missing Con and taking out a section of white picket fence before tearing up the muddy road, water flying up behind its tires.
Finn barely had time to register what had happened before Con was kneeling beside him.
“Finn. Jesus. Are you all right? You’re not hurt?” Con’s face was white, his hands shaking as he dragged at Finn. “Finn?”
“I’m okay,” Finn managed, clutching his injured leg and rocking a little with the pain.
Con was swearing, in between ordering Finn to let him see the damage.
“We’ve got to go after her,” Finn said, pushing him off.
“To hell with her.”
“Con. Listen to me. She’s not on her way to the fucking hairdresser. She’s heading for the lighthouse. We have to go after her.” Finn groped for his cane, and Con got up, reaching down and pulling Finn to his feet.
With Con’s help, Finn made it across the road, slamming shut the Rover door as Con ran around to the driver side, then slid behind the wheel and started the engine.
“Call The Birches,” he ordered. “Tell Martha to call the state police.”
Finn spent the remainder of the short, rough drive on the phone with Martha trying to explain what was happening—which wasn’t easy given that he wasn’t exactly clear himself what was happening.
He clicked off the phone and asked Con, “Could Paul have stolen Miss Minton’s truck?”
“Paul wasn’t driving.”
There went that theory—that Paul had arranged to meet his ex-lover and ended up killing him. It hadn’t been much of a theory to start with, but the other possibility seemed even crazier.
“You saw her? Miss Minton was driving?”
“I saw her. She deliberately swerved in order to miss me.”
They were tearing back up the slippery road to the lighthouse. As they topped the crest, Finn could see lightning flashing out over the ocean. Miss Minton’s pickup was parked near the cliff’s edge. The tailgate was down, and she was dragging something across the grass to the verge.
Con sped forward across the green, braking sharply. He was out of the Rover and running toward Miss Minton. Miss Minton, who was dragging an unconscious Paul by his legs across the short space to the ledge, dropped him and turned.
Finn, moving more slowly than Con, dropped down beside Paul, who was unconscious and gray-faced, his blond hair soaked in blood. But Finn was only dimly aware of this, his focus on Con as he struggled with Miss Minton. For one truly horrific moment, he thought Con and Miss Minton were both going over the side, but Con dragged her back.
Miss Minton was shrieking. It was difficult to make out the words through the wind and rain, but Finn thought he heard her scream, “They should have drowned him at birth!”
* * * * *
“I’ve been thinking…I’d like to paint you.”
Con’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t open his eyes. He murmured, “Oh yes? I think I’d look good in a nice robin’s egg blue.”
“Funny.” Head propped on
hand, Finn studied him. Sunlight gilded Con’s hair and turned his skin honey brown against the peach-colored sheets. It was late Monday morning, and they were still in bed—they had barely been out of bed since arriving Saturday night at the little bed-and-breakfast they had stayed at in Union three years earlier.
Con reached over, lacing their fingers and bringing Finn’s hand to his mouth. He kissed it lightly and opened his eyes.
He smiled, but there was a certain melancholy in those black-cherry eyes that Finn understood only too well.
It had been four days since Miss Minton had confessed to the attempted murder of Paul Ryder and the murder of Fitch Barret three years earlier. With true New England reticence, she had declined to discuss her reasons for either crime with the state police, but she had talked to Con on the drive back to The Birches. In fact, she and Con might have been alone in the Rover for the attention she paid to Finn anxiously cradling an unconscious Paul in the backseat.
“He was bad. He was a bad seed, that one. Selfish and cruel from the day he was born. Everything he put his hand to, he spoiled.”
Finn couldn’t see Miss Minton’s face, her hair and clothes were soaked and her voice was a hoarse croak he had to struggle to hear over Paul’s stentorian breathing.
“I saw him that day. I saw him laughing as he spoiled your life the way he spoiled mine. Spoiled every chance I had for love and happiness. First with Barnaby Purdon and then with Thomas Barret. He did it deliberately. Nothing made him happier than when he was hurting people, seeing them cry.”
Her eyes raised, unexpectedly catching Finn’s gaze in the rearview mirror. She said harshly, “You don’t know. He was laughing that day. You ran off and Con knocked him down, and he was still laughing. And then he went up in the tower to see where you’d got to. And I followed him up and pushed him off. It was the easiest thing in the world.”
Finn had put his head down at that point and stopped listening.
When they had reached The Birches, everything had grown surreal. Martha had fixed tea and provided dry clothes for everyone, and they had waited together in the kitchen while Con phoned the mainland requesting emergency services and the state police. Miss Minton had stopped talking by then. She was silent and eerily docile.
A LifeFlight helicopter made it to the island to transport Paul to the mainland, where he was currently in critical but stable condition. Miss Minton had declined to say why she’d attacked Paul, but from what she’d said during the drive from the lighthouse, Con believed that she had mistakenly thought Paul had showed up at her cottage to accuse her or blackmail her—that her own guilty conscience had fooled her into thinking Paul had somehow figured out the truth.
That evening, after the state police had taken Miss Minton away, Barnaby Purdon came to the house and there was more muted, shocked discussion. The house had the feel of death after long illness…and after all, that was close to the truth of it.
Barnaby Purdon was the one who remembered that Miss Minton had been gathering gravel at the lighthouse all that long-ago week, transporting it by pickup truck to her cottage, traveling sedately back and forth along the road.
She was a strong, vigorous woman used to hauling rocks and bags of fertilizer and mulch, used to taking care of her own property. It wasn’t so hard to picture her dumping Fitch into her wheelbarrow, shoving him into her pickup, and driving him away…to bury him beneath the bloodred roses in her garden—the roses she’d been planting that August afternoon when Con had traveled the road to The Birches.
As their nearest neighbor, Miss Minton had a key to The Birches, and she’d been in the habit of going up to the house for art lessons. She knew her way around, knew that the house was deserted that day, and she had packed Fitch’s things in his suitcases, dumped them at the lighthouse and driven the station wagon down to the wharf, and then walked home.
Once he knew the why of it, Finn had stopped listening. He didn’t care about the details of how and where and when. He was grieving for Fitch. Maybe Fitch was all that Miss Minton said and believed, but he had been more than that to Finn, the best loved companion of his childhood—his other half. He had grieved for him three years ago, and he continued to grieve for him now. It was a strange comfort to think that Fitch had climbed up the light tower. He wanted to believe that Fitch had regretted what he’d done, that he’d wanted to find Finn and had gone to look for him. Con had listened to him and kissed him and said nothing, letting him talk late into the night.
The police had questioned them all; then the reporters had descended on the island, and Con had taken Finn away to Union. For two days Finn and Con had been getting to know each other again.
Now Finn admitted, “I’ve been afraid to try anything since the accident.”
“But you’ve only been out of the hospital a week or so.”
“I know but… From the time I left college—not a day went by that I didn’t work. Even if it was just to sketch something. Until the day I woke up in the hospital and couldn’t see.”
Con didn’t say anything at first, his brows drawing together as he surveyed Finn’s face. “But you’re okay, Finn. There’s no reason you can’t start working again.”
Finn nodded.
Con said, “You can paint me.” His eyes were bright beneath the soft fall of blond hair. “You can do whatever you like to me.”
Finn looked interested. “Is that right? Because I’ve been thinking I might like to experiment with different mediums…”
Con bit his fingers lightly. “This sounds promising. Tell me more.”
Finn lowered himself to Con’s arms. “I think I’d prefer to show you.”
Cards on the Table
Chapter One
The card was wedged under the brass 17 on my apartment door when I got back from my morning swim. For what felt like a long time I stood dripping on the welcome mat, staring at the slightly crooked number and the colored rectangle beneath.
A tarot card.
Finally, I removed the card, examined it. A castle in flames, a man and woman plummeting to the cliffs below, and the words The Tower.
Not good. Even if I turned it upside down so that the man and woman seemed to be doing handsprings through the clouds and lightning, it still looked pretty ominous.
I told myself that someone was playing a joke on me.
Funny stuff.
Only a handful of people even knew I was writing a book about the Aldrich case. For that matter, who would care if they did know? It was dead news in every sense.
I stuck my key into the latch and stepped into my apartment, eyes adjusting to the gloom. Dusty sunshine poured through the arched living room window. Everything looked just the way I’d left it an hour ago. In the kitchen alcove the old dishwasher was steaming, stereo lights flashed from the entertainment center, and the screen of my laptop, which sat on the coffee table, offered a gently rolling view of star-lined outer space.
I walked through to the bedroom. The bed was stripped, sheets piled for laundry in the doorway. The mirrored closet doors were shut. I got a look at my face as I moved to open them, and was irritated to see that I looked worried—hazel eyes narrowed, tanned face grim, body tense.
Jesus. The last year had turned me into an old woman.
I slid open the closet doors, jumping back as a box of photos tumbled from their precarious perch on the shelf above and dumped snapshots across the carpet.
A photo of me—in a gold-sequined sombrero, no less—and Jack celebrating my thirtieth birthday at Don Cuco’s landed by my bare toes.
I stepped over the pictorial retrospective of my life and moved on to the bathroom, poking my head inside. Another glimpse of my frowning face in the cabinet mirror—and, by the way, I really did need a haircut, I reflected, momentarily distracted by the wet spikes of my chlorine-bleached hair. The shower dripped noisily. I yanked back the curtain with a plastic rustle.
Nothing.
Okay, bathtub ring, but otherwise nothing sinister.
But why would someone leave a tarot card on my front door?
I went back to the kitchen, poured a glass of OJ, and drank it slowly, studying the tarot card.
Was someone trying to tell me something? Was it some kind of clue?
More likely it was just some kind of weird coincidence. Right?
And even if it wasn’t a weird coincidence…what was I supposed to do about it? It wasn’t exactly a lead that I could follow up. And I couldn’t picture myself going to the police over something so…vague. There was no defined threat, and I had absolutely no suspect in mind.
I could always talk to Jack.
I stared out the window over the sink at the row of second-story apartments, red doors and turquoise railings glimpsed through the tangle of ivy and bougainvillea.
Jack Brady was a homicide detective with the Glendale PD. We’d gone out a couple of times. Slept together once. We were still on friendly, if distant, terms.
The blinds to Jack’s apartment were up so it looked like he might be home.
I stripped off the swim trunks, tossed them over the shower rod, pulled on a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt, stuck the tarot card in my pocket, and headed upstairs to Jack’s apartment.
I could hear Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps playing behind the scarlet door. The smell of something spicy drifted out the open kitchen window. My stomach tightened, but it had nothing to do with hunger—not for chili, anyway. I’d liked Jack a lot.
I knocked and the door opened. Jack stood framed in the doorway. He was about thirty-five, just over medium height and build, gray eyes and dark hair. He had a small white scar over his left eyebrow and a dimple in his right cheek when he smiled. He was not smiling now. Music and the aroma of garlic and onions wafted around him.
“Hey, Tim,” he said briefly, neutrally, after a pause.
“Hi, Jack,” I said. “Could I talk to you for a minute? I could use some advice. Professional advice.”
