Weatherby growled, and Clint looked at him. “Rex? What happened?”
“Fainted. Said when she and Hollace bumped up against each other, she read his aura, and it caused her to have a sudden-onset migraine as her aura tried to shield itself from his darkness. I hope to never be near that lunatic again.”
Clint gave a short bark of surprised laughter. Weatherby and Marin—two more polar opposites had never existed. “That’s Marin. She ok?”
“Yeah. Seemed to be. Said I was purple. And to tell you to drink that tea she made for you last week. It will help calm you now. You in to all that plant mystic bull now?”
Clint closed his eyes and pulled in a breath. Then another. He wished he had some of that tea now. “I’m good. And no. She…Maggie asked Marin to come out and help her with the ducks last week. They’re close friends. I’ve known Marin since she was a kid. She’s a bit…different. But she’s not a lunatic. And if the woman tells you to get down, you’d better well hit the ground. I’ve never known her to be wrong like that. Not even once. How did she get involved?”
“Hollace was about to enter the diner when we found him,” Knight said. Calm and cool. Clint had to admit the other man’s manner had his own fury receding enough to figure out what to do next. He needed to get Maggie back where she belonged. He had a lot of making up to do to that woman. “Marin was in front of him. That’s all I could see. Then she collapsed. The end.”
“Hollace confessed. And he was the only one involved in what happened at your place.” Weatherby changed the subject. “You can have Dr. Talley bring your…housekeeper…and baby back.”
Clint already had the phone number to where they were. When he was certain they were safe, he was going to get Maggie back to Masterson County. They were going to have a long talk. He was going to tell her he was sorry for what had happened between them and the way he had handled it and make it clear that they were going to do the right thing by the new baby, and by Violet. And then he’d have Maggie where he wanted her. Where he’d wanted her for two months, but was afraid to let her be there.
He’d be a good husband. He’d make sure of it. He’d love her the way she deserved to be loved. He already did. He’d just been stupid, that was all. In time, maybe she’d grow to love him, too. Maybe he’d be able to make up for her getting stuck with him somehow, someday.
He’d quit his job and go back to school. Finish out his law degree, maybe hire on with Joel Masterson’s cousin, Jack. Jack had a firm in the county that wasn’t doing too badly, and rumor had it his younger brother, Jason, was returning to town to help expand that firm.
Maggie deserved him home every night. He needed to be there for his kids, too. In ways that Clive hadn’t been for him. From the moment Violet was conceived and he’d known about her, Clint had vowed to be a better father than he’d had himself. That resolve had doubled as he’d thought about the baby he and Maggie had made that night. It had been one of the most beautiful nights of his life. He’d ruined it with his stupidity, though. Completely ruined it.
His fists balled up when he imagined how scared she had been, alone, when he wondered where she was right now. How badly she was hurt. When he was going to see her again. He’d just left her at the ranch like it was any other day. And he could have lost them all.
He watched Hollace as he was led down the long hallway toward processing. “I want to kill him.”
Clint said the words flatly, but the emotion burning in his gut—the pure hatred—would be something he never forgot.
Knight shifted right into his way. “You do that, and the woman who matters to you? You’ll never be able to be there for her again. Something to remember. Growing up without a father isn’t exactly a picnic. It screws with you for a long, long time. Don’t do that to your kids. You owe them better than that, more than throwing that away on a piece of dirt like Jim Hollace. Remember that. You owe those kids their father.”
Weatherby took it a full step further. He grabbed Clint’s wrist and had him cuffed to the handrail faster than a man his size should have been able to move.
Clint just stared at the metal cuff. He swore.
Weatherby just shrugged. “We’re not going to let you do something stupid.”
Weatherby always had been a bit of a ass.
Knight just looked at them both, a dark look on his face. “You have a future, man. Don’t blow it now.”
“Clint?” a soft voice said behind him. Clint turned, feeling like a fool handcuffed to a polished handrail. Miranda stood there, a calm, quiet look on her beautiful face. “Want to take a walk? Talk? I know you probably have questions about Maggie right now.”
“You make sure he controls himself?” Weatherby demanded. “Better question—can you control him?”
Miranda just stared at him, giving him a small smile identical to her sister’s. Weatherby’s face darkened. “I think I can handle him just fine.”
“Then take him. As long as you don’t try to read his palm or anything like that.”
“Marin reads auras—not palms,” Miranda said. “And thanks. For keeping her from getting hurt today. It was greatly appreciated. Clint? Shall we?”
Weatherby uncuffed him. Clint drove his fist into the man’s stomach. Weatherby just grunted.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Clint said. “I owe you one.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
55
Miranda had taken that ex-boyfriend of hers on a walk through the town’s backstreets. To talk to him. To tell the other man where his family had been taken. Knight felt sick, thinking what Clint had experienced in those two long hours between them discovering the blood in the barn and Miranda whispering that the woman and baby were safe now. That kind of hell was something he never wanted to see again on the face of someone he respected. And he did respect Clint. He seemed like a fine cop, and a decent man.
He hadn’t deserved this. Not by a long shot.
Knight watched Miranda from the window. They’d both agreed that Jac and the sheriff would handle the interrogation of Jim Hollace right now. Technically, what the man had done was not a federal crime, but a local one. That put it fully in the sheriff’s jurisdiction, as Clint’s ranch was just on the edge of Masterson County.
Knight had assigned himself to keep an eye on Clint. With what had happened to his family, Clint was now a wild card. Wild cards had a way of bringing swift and brutal changes, in Knight’s experience. Clint bore watching. Just to be on the safe side.
Cinnamon hair caught his attention as Clint and Miranda rounded the front of the building. Knight shifted back; he didn’t want to look like he’d been watching them. Even though everyone in the room knew that was exactly what he had been doing.
Masterson’s female Deputy Lowell, a pretty woman the same age as Miranda, quietly sat watching everyone. She hadn’t said more than two or three words at a time since being introduced back when the FBI had first arrived in Masterson.
Well, no more than two or three words at a time to Knight or any of the others. She knew Miranda well, though. They’d hugged that first day and spoken as if they knew each other well.
Of course, they did. In Mayberry, everyone was related to or knew everyone else. It was almost a given.
The door opened and Miranda stepped in.
There were tears on her pale cheeks. Knight almost said something. But didn’t. He was a professional; he shouldn’t care if a colleague he barely knew was upset over something involving her ex-boyfriend. That was foolish. It was the man in him—the man who was attracted to her—that was making him think like an idiot.
Instead, he just crossed his arms and looked at her. Waited.
Miranda had something to say.
Then again, the woman pretty much always did.
“Listen up, everyone. I’m going to give an update while we wait for Jac to finish with her interview of Jim Hollace.”
“Have we learned anything yet?” Max Jones asked.
She shook
her head. “At this point, Jac is in discussions with Jim while they wait for the Masterson County District Attorney to arrive. Jim does say he has information. He’s willing to share.”
“Let me guess—in exchange for leniency for what happened today?” Knight asked.
Miranda nodded. “Of course. And for sharing what he knows about how Helen died. We haven’t told him she was alive when she was buried yet. We need him to give us more information first. I don’t think he is the one who struck her. We have more than one person involved.” Her mouth twisted slightly, showing how she really felt about the situation. “Agent Lorcan and I have arranged for the relocation of Clint’s daughter, Violet, and her nanny, Maggie Tyler. Maggie has definitively identified Jim as the man responsible for today’s attacks. Agent Lorcan and I also saw him in the vicinity today. Today was the result of a drunken grudge against Clint. That’s all. It just so happens to tie into the man who buried Helen. So, we’ll need to set today’s events aside and get refocused on what happened fourteen years ago.”
“We need that information from Jim Hollace to proceed,” Max said. “We’re pretty much stalled until Jac reports in.”
“What did you learn from Jenny Beise?” Knight asked. In the excitement from this afternoon, they hadn’t been able to discuss the interview Max and Dr. Appell had conducted with the young woman, who now went by Kayla. She was twenty-one and living apart from her family while finishing up a nursing degree.
Max shook his head. “All Kayla could give us was what we already knew or suspected. She and her sisters Honey and Marcie—Olivia and Marnie, now—were both ill with a flu virus. As was their brother Luther Junior, who now goes by Luke. She did give us contact information on Luke, as well as the youngest Beise child, Marcie, who now goes by Marnie. Marnie was not quite seven that day, so doesn’t remember anything credible. Their grandmother was responsible for their care that day. All Kayla remembers was sleeping a lot, and being wakened in time to pack her belongings. Her mother was yelling at her oldest sister, and her grandmother was nowhere around. That was the last time she ever saw her grandmother. Before she lay down for a nap. But she was only eight at the time; we can’t fully depend on her account. But I believed her.”
“She gave us an actual timeline, though,” Dr. Appell added. “She remembers her mother coming home for lunch that day. Pauline’s supervisor said that she always went to lunch at 12:15 p.m. Kayla remembers watching four of her favorite cartoons before she took a nap, and right after her mother left at twelve thirty. They were half-an-hour each, so that’s two hours. Two thirty. She said her grandmother fed her some cookies and orange juice and fever medication right before the final program ended, and she took a nap while her brother Junior then took over his turn on the TV.”
“Lesley stated that he got home at five forty-five. His mother was already home,” Miranda said. “He said he thought things had been going on for a while before he got there. So let’s just ballpark an hour or so. No one said Pauline left early, that day. Her shift ended at four thirty, and they lived about fifteen minutes away. Colleen, her supervisor, confirmed she left shortly after four thirty—with her lover. We’ve identified that lover as Jim Hollace.”
“Did any of the Beise children mention going into the barn?” Knight asked.
Miranda shook her head. He’d not once seen the woman refer to notes or her phone for anything. The information was all stored in that brain of hers. “The only one who mentioned anything about being outside at all was Lesley when he arrived home. Junior was throwing up on the lawn.”
Dr. Appell’s phone beeped. She looked down. “It’s Agent Jaclyn Jones.”
“And? Did she learn anything we can use?”
Miranda’s phone beeped next. She read the text quickly.
“Yes. Jim Hollace confessed to burying Helen’s body.” She looked back at the room’s occupants. “But he swears up and down he had nothing to do with her death. She was already dead when he stopped by to talk to Pauline. Pauline persuaded him to bury her mother in the barn.”
“But she was buried alive,” Dr. Appell said. “What does he say happened?”
Miranda texted her friend quickly. A few moments later, the answers came. “He doesn’t know she wasn’t dead when he buried her. Told Jac that Pauline said it had finally been too much that day. And that Helen deserved what happened to her.”
Knight snorted. “Sure, he doesn’t. And now we still don’t know what happened to Helen.”
“We’ll find out.” A look of determination went over Miranda’s face. “I say we round up all the players. It’s time to get to the truth.”
56
Pauline had a lawyer with her. Knight figured the guy for exactly what he was the instant they walked into the small interview room off the second-floor entrance. He hoped Miranda knew what she was doing.
Knight was just there to observe, after all.
Pauline looked at her as she sat at the table. “Well. What do you want?”
The lawyer hushed her quickly. “We’re here to help as much as we can. I will, of course, object to any questioning I feel is out of bounds.”
“Of course,” Miranda said warmly. She smiled at the attorney briefly. “We just have questions. We have Jim Hollace, Pauline’s former lover, in custody. He admits he buried Helen. And since she was buried alive, he’s technically our killer, isn’t he?”
The attorney paused for a moment. Knight got it—the guy hadn’t expected the sunny smile, or her words. He almost snorted. He had a feeling Miranda liked shocking people at times. He’d learned one thing though—Miranda Talley was good at reading people. She used that skill to her advantage. “Then what do you need from Pauline?”
“We need a timeline. You see, someone helped Jim. We’re trying to figure out who that would be. Pauline was at work that day until around four thirty, I believe?”
Pauline nodded. “I don’t know why you think any of my kids know what happened. Jim says he did it. Isn’t that enough for you people?”
“The full truth is all we’re after, Pauline. Don’t you want to know what happened to your mother?”
“Of course, I do. I thought…I thought she just left because she didn’t want to see me again…She hated my children, her own grandchildren. Well, I’ve had two more she never met. And have seven grandchildren, too. I’m doing so much better than she ever did.”
It took all he had to bite back a response. Hollace had been adamant in his interview that Pauline had known her mother was dead that day. That she’d handed him the shovel. If they let her ramble, she just might get around to confessing.
“Then tell us everything you remember of that day. You went to work…you came home for lunch…what happened then?” Miranda asked, completely calmly.
“What do you think happened? I had a bunch of sick kids at home and wasn’t feeling so great myself. Pregnancy didn’t agree with me then.”
“So you…”
“Gave my youngest some acetaminophen. Held her for a bit. She went back to sleep, and I dealt with the other three and their whining. I was only home for fifteen minutes to check on the kids, see if any of them needed to go see Dr. Masterson at the ER. I grabbed a sandwich; ate it on the way back to the factory.”
“Where was your mother?” Miranda asked.
“In the kitchen, making potato soup. She always made that potato soup. I hated it. The kids hated it.”
“Then why did she make it?”
“Because she controlled everything at all times,” Pauline snapped. “Why else do you think? You knew her. Knew exactly what she was like. Or have you forgotten where you come from, Doctor?”
The look she shot at Miranda told its own story. Pauline eyed the younger woman with distaste and, if Knight wasn’t mistaken, jealousy. Resentment.
“I know exactly where I come from. And I remember that potato soup. Monica brought it for lunch quite often. However, we really need to get a timeline figured out. Make certain it was Jim. You unde
rstand that? We really want to know what happened to your mom.” Her voice had softened. Turned understanding. Compassionate. “I remember how difficult Helen could be. All the rules she had for Monica and Lesley and the rest of the kids. I know Monica was a bit afraid of her. Was Helen the one that hurt the kids all the time? I remember the bruises I’d see on Monica. At the time, I didn’t know what they were. I do now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. No one hurt my kids. No one! I wouldn’t let her.” Pauline’s hands clenched on the tabletop. She shivered. “I wouldn’t let her.”
“So what happened that day?”
“I don’t know! I went to work. I came home for lunch, and she told me she was kicking us out. We’d lived in that house for nine years. Even paid her rent money and the property taxes. On the whole ranch. We’d been buying the acreage up around it for the ten years before we left. Just had three acres and the house itself to buy. She promised we could when the time was right. But she said no, we couldn’t live there no longer. She wanted the house for her new boyfriend. She moved in with us years earlier. We didn’t want her there. But her name was on the deed to the house. We didn’t have much choice.”
“What reason did she give you?”
“She couldn’t handle the kids anymore. Didn’t want them around getting in her way. Didn’t want me having more. Only ones she ever cared about were Monica and Lesley, anyway. Told me I should have stopped after them. She always did want them; preferred them over the others. Wanted me to give them to her when they were born. She never forgave me for saying no. Badgered us for years.”
“So you came home at twelve thirty or so, and she kicked your family out. Then what happened?”
“What do you think happened? I went back to work. We needed every penny. We had two hundred dollars in savings. That was it. Luther had a paycheck coming two days later. We stayed with my cousin after that. Paid him half the rent my mother demanded for that shack. But I didn’t have a job after that. Neither did Luther, for that matter. It was tight, and it was all her fault.”
Buried Secrets: PAVAD: FBI Case File #0005 (PAVAD: FBI Case Files) Page 20
