Lemon Tart

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “I wonder if I can remember how to get there,” Sadie said, making the instant decision to check it out. “I think it’s off the Grass Canyon exit.”

  A reflecting sliver of red and then blue played across Sadie’s dashboard and she was confused until she looked in her rearview mirror.

  Detective Madsen sat in his blue unmarked car directly behind her. Just below where his rearview mirror was attached to the windshield were alternating red and blue lights. His face was pinched and he pointed to the right and mouthed, “Pull over.”

  “Breanna,” she said quickly as she realized she couldn’t outrun Madsen and she didn’t have much time. “This is very important. You must call Detective Cunningham at the Garrison Police Department. Tell him everything I’ve told you and everything you just told me about Trina.” She felt silly for making this request since Cunningham’s partner was pulling her over, but she didn’t trust Madsen and she wanted Cunningham to know she’d tried to give the information to him. She pulled to the curb and watched Detective Madsen jump from his car as soon as they were stopped.

  “Call him right now, Bre, right now!” She clicked off the phone and quickly put it in her pocket as Madsen banged on her window. She looked up into Madsen’s irate, and yet somewhat pleased, expression.

  “Get out of the car!” he yelled.

  With a resigned sigh, Sadie opened the car door. He grabbed her arm and pulled her the rest of the way out.

  “Hey,” she said as she stumbled to the side of the car. He grabbed her left arm and twisted it behind her. “I have a bad shoulder,” she said, cringing against the pain. It was a lie, but she didn’t feel guilty for it because he shouldn’t be treating her this way.

  He loosened his grip and she managed to pull out of his grasp while turning to face him. She took in the handcuffs he was holding in one hand.

  “You’re arresting me?” she asked, her cheeks flushing with embarrassment.

  “For interfering with a police investigation,” he said, reaching for her arm again. She hit at his hand and then, realizing his intent, decided not to make a scene in hopes of keeping some control in the situation. She put her hands forward, wrists together.

  “Behind your back,” Madsen said, grabbing her arm and attempting to turn her around. No way was she going to have her face mashed into the top of her car with all these people driving by.

  “And ignite my bursitis?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”

  She held her wrists up even higher. “Surely you can make an exception for a fifty-six-year-old woman, or do you think I can take you down?”

  His eyes narrowed, but he finally snapped the first cuff on her right wrist.

  “For heaven’s sake,” she muttered as he finished binding her wrists. “I want to talk to Detective Cunningham,” she said, trying not to look too closely at the cars whizzing past. Surely she knew some of these people. How embarrassing.

  Madsen laughed. “He’s done about all he can do for you,” he said as he pulled her up and pushed her toward his car. “In the meantime, you have the right to shut up.”

  Chapter 34

  Madsen shoved her, none too gently, into the same back seat he’d held her prisoner in yesterday afternoon at the library. Then he moved her car to the parking lot of the post office. When he returned, he was stone-faced and offered little by way of explanation for having arrested her; something she was sure was illegal. To say nothing of his telling her to shut up. She added it to the list of things she planned to report to Cunningham. Maybe she’d file a great big lawsuit against the entire police department for mistreatment or something like that. Yet, even as she thought about it she knew she wouldn’t. She was not a supporter of frivolous lawsuits, but then again she’d never been treated so . . . well, frivolously.

  “I thought the investigation was over now that you have a confession,” she said.

  “There are still loose ends to tie up—like you.”

  She let out a breath and would have rolled her eyes but for the anger she felt at his wasting any time at all with her. “Every minute you spend with me is a minute taken away from the real investigation.”

  “The investigation is over,” Madsen said. “Just like you said. We’ve got our man.”

  “But you don’t have Trevor. And if it’s over then why were you at Carrie’s? Why were you asking her questions? And why am I being arrested for interfering with an investigation that isn’t really happening?”

  His eyes met hers in the mirror. “Stop talking,” he said blandly before his eyes returned to the road. “You’re giving me a headache.”

  “What about Trevor? Aren’t we still trying to find him?”

  “We?” he repeated, meeting her eyes again. “We are doing nothing. You are going where you can’t cause any more problems.”

  His eyes went back to the road and Sadie adjusted her position—handcuffs were blasted uncomfortable but she offered up a quick prayer of thanks that her hands were bound in front. How would she sit at all if they were wadded up behind her?

  Madsen made a right-hand turn and Sadie searched for Jack’s truck on the roads around them. The steely afternoon sky spoke of more snow to come. Carrie was long gone by now, however. It made Sadie’s stomach ache to think what could be happening right now. While she was stuck here, falsely accused, was Carrie headed for the cabin? What were her intentions with Trevor? “I’d like to talk to Detective Cunningham. Will he be at the station when we arrive?”

  Madsen muttered something under his breath.

  “It’s terrible manners to mumble,” she reminded him sternly, fed up with his arrogant rudeness. She reflected on most of her day, realizing she’d been short and snippy with several people—quite out of character for her. Then again, she didn’t usually live under so much pressure. Surely she could be excused for being a little tense.

  Madsen sighed. “I said, ‘I’ll just bet you would.’ You seem to think you’ve got Cunningham in your pocket.”

  Sadie snorted. “Hardly,” she said, thinking of the very un-pocket-occupying treatment he’d been giving her, though she was curious as to his unofficially telling her to continue with what she was doing. Almost as if he was prevented from doing what she could still pursue. She found herself rubbing her mother’s ring again, searching for calmness, and tried to come up with something she could say. She stared at the back of Madsen’s head, reviewing all their experience with one another, looking for something to make sense of his ongoing poor treatment of her. Something came to mind that didn’t add up just right.

  “So what happened to your hearing yesterday?” Sadie asked. He seemed to be taking the long way to the police station.

  Detective Madsen stared straight ahead and said nothing—a reaction she hadn’t anticipated. It sharpened her awareness of him, the tightness of his shoulders, the deep breathing. He was taking her into the station, getting her out of his hair. Why was he so tense?

  “What are you talking about?” he asked after several seconds. “I went to the hearing.”

  “No,” Sadie said, “you didn’t.” Feeling cocky for catching him in a lie, her eyes narrowed and she forgot about the police station for the moment. “You said you were going to one, but then you showed up at . . .” Her sentence trailed off as she realized he might not know she’d been at Susan Gimes’s office. Detective Cunningham knew, but it seemed as if they were working separately now. That was something else that grabbed her attention. Why was Madsen alone? Why wouldn’t he know she’d been there if Cunningham knew? What kind of partners withheld information from one another? Distrustful ones, she answered her own question.

  The plot thickened.

  He stopped at a red light and turned to look at her over his shoulder. “How do you know where I was?” he asked incredulously.

  Sadie gave him a cocky smile; he looked nervous as he turned to face the front again. A shiver of recognition ran through her at the expression on his face. It was so similar to the look Ron had yesterday m
orning. Madsen was hiding something and whatever it was had caused a breach between him and Cunningham, had necessitated Madsen’s lie about the hearing. She took a breath. Everyone’s secrets were wearing her out, but she was determined to figure out what his secret was. To do so, though, she needed to keep him talking.

  “So what brought you here from Denver?” she asked with feigned casualness; she already knew the answer thanks to Susan Gimes and her family history lesson.

  His jaw stiffened and the tension rolled off of him in waves. Like a shark in bloody water, her senses heightened even more. He said nothing.

  Her phone!

  She’d forgotten she had it and maneuvered her hands to the side so she could dig it out of her pocket. But she needed him to keep talking so he wouldn’t notice what she was doing.

  “You came from Denver, right?” she pressed as they passed Harmony Street, the route that would take them to the police station. Her heart began thudding in her chest as they headed further toward the outskirts of town and she paused in the retrieval of her phone. He wasn’t taking her to the station after all. Even more alarming, the tension seemed to be leaving him and his arrogance returning. Her movements quickened and she finally had her phone in her hands. She was attempting to flip it open when it slid out of her hands, bounced on her knee, and landed on the floor. She stared at it in horror.

  She was trying to scoot it back to her with her foot when instead she sent it under the seat at the very moment Madsen’s voice broke the silence. “Boston, actually.”

  If not for the cars and the road still moving outside her window, Sadie would have thought the world had frozen in place.

  Boston?

  Anne was from Boston, it was where she met Jack, where she had worked for Riggs and Barker, where Trevor was born. In an instant all her moments with Madsen and his incredible arrogance and determination to find her guilty flashed through her mind. Like a kaleidoscope, all the colors shifted and a whole new pattern appeared before her. It wasn’t often that Sadie Hoffmiller found herself at a loss for words, but she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Madsen seemed to count her silence as a victory and continued without prompting. “I’d had some trouble in Denver, so I went to Boston to stay with a friend of mine. Horrible city, if you ask me,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “Not only is it full of boring history lessons I already had to sleep through in high school, but it’s big and smelly and under continual construction. But it’s got a nice night life if you’re into that kind of thing.” He met her eyes in the rearview mirror and smirked. “I don’t imagine you are though.”

  Sadie felt her mouth moving but she couldn’t make any words come out. Her head was buzzing again as all the pieces of the puzzle she’d been working on seemed suspended in the air: filing cabinet, dirty diapers, Trina’s appointment, Jack’s wedding ring, Anne’s book, pink shoes. None of them had anything to do with Madsen. She felt cheated for having given so many things so much attention for no reason.

  Madsen continued, the more he talked the more relaxed he became. Sadie had read about that. Serial killers seemed to make a habit of it in suspense novels—wanting to boast of their exploits. Is Madsen a serial killer? she wondered.

  “There was this one club, The Barracks, on the north end. Nice place; catered to military and police. I met a girl there, hot little number. We danced, and had a few drinks every weekend for a couple months. She had a kid at home, but hired a babysitter for Friday nights. After awhile she starts telling me about the kid’s dad, some old guy, married, living in my home state of Colorado. He totally ditched her, but was coming around sometimes, still wanting the best of both worlds, ya know.”

  “You?” Sadie finally said as everything else she’d already learned funneled through her brain. Carrie . . . well, probably Trina had confronted Anne in the parking lot just hours before Ron had caused her to fall down the stairs. More details rushed through her mind: the lemon tart, a child’s shoe box in the garbage can, Carrie telling Mindy she was taking a trip. Nothing made sense, as if she had taken pieces from eighteen different puzzles and was trying to make something out of them anyway. “You . . . but . . . Anne . . .”

  Madsen laughed. They were outside of Garrison now, heading east on the highway which just happened to be the same direction as Jack’s cabin. “It was my idea to have her move out here, ya know. I got hired onto the Garrison force, which wasn’t hard to do with idiots like Cunningham taking up space, and then we waited for a house to come up for rent in Jack’s . . . well, I guess it’s your neighborhood too. Can you imagine the stroke of luck when it was two houses away from Jack?” He shook his head and Sadie had to fight back tears as she absorbed what he was telling her. He was so cold, so uncaring about the whole sordid story. “Almost seems like it was meant to be, doesn’t it?”

  “How could you do that?” she said quietly, almost in a whisper. “How could you ruin the lives of all these people?”

  He glared at her. “Guilty people, Mrs. Hoffmiller, adulterous, lying, deceitful people who thought they could get away with it.”

  “Like you plan to?” Sadie replied, leaning forward. “Have you no shame in the fact that Anne is dead because of your plan?” Sadie spat out. He met her eyes again, narrowed in the rearview mirror.

  “That wasn’t my fault!” he roared, making her flinch and pull back into the upholstery of the seat. “We just wanted money. I was sick of playing the politics of law enforcement. I found this place in Costa Rica where, with a couple hundred thousand dollars, we could have a good life together. We were moving toward that goal and then Anne had enough. When I called her on Monday she was acting weird and she didn’t want to talk to me. I knew something was wrong and she finally admitted Jack was coming over that night and that she would get the money. He’d been so generous in his attempts to keep her quiet, we had little doubt he’d do it again.”

  It wasn’t making sense. Ron hadn’t said anything about Anne making those kinds of demands. She hadn’t said anything about money that night, just that she was going public and wanted Jack. In fact she specifically said she didn’t want money. And then a few of those hovering puzzle pieces snapped into place.

  “Oh,” Sadie breathed as she saw things a bit more clearly than she had—than Madsen had too. “Oh,” she said again, managing a low chuckle. “Did she play you or what?”

  His brows furrowed in the mirror and she laughed, thinking about the book she’d read; the way the woman kept trying to be a part of the man’s life. It wasn’t about the money for the woman in the book and it wasn’t about the money for Anne either. Anne was a far better player of this game than anyone had ever expected her to be.

  “Carrie already knew about Trevor when you called Anne on Monday,” Sadie told him, watching his eyes closely as they hardened. “The blackmail angle was gone and Anne knew it before she demanded Jack meet her that night. You wanted the money, but even after everything that happened, all Anne ever wanted was Jack.” She paused, aligning her understanding; the clicks of everything coming together was almost audible in her head. “And the lemon tart,” she mused. “My mother used to make that recipe for Jack and me when we were little. It’s been a favorite of his all his life and Anne had asked me how to make it right after she moved in.” There was silence for the space of two seconds as the implication of it all settled, reminding her that everything had been so calculated and yet she’d had no idea. “Jack was coming to see her, or so she thought, and she expected him to stay. She even set the tart to finish cooking so it would be ready when they started a new day—a new life together. Only Jack didn’t come Monday night like she planned, Ron did.” She wasn’t sure yet, however, what part Madsen played in that. But it was coming, she could feel the details lining up in her mind.

  Madsen’s knuckles turned white against the steering wheel but he said nothing. Sadie felt her panic rising again as even more questions entered her mind about where they were going, but she tried to keep them at ba
y. She needed to keep the dialogue going.

  “Your boyfriend pushed her down the stairs before she had a chance to tell him,” Madsen said. “That’s all. He ruined everything. That stupid tart isn’t the lynchpin.”

  “But it is,” Sadie said quickly. “It was the symbol of the woman she was becoming for him, the proof that she could take care of him better than Carrie, better than any other woman in his life.” She paused. “Wait, how did you know about the stairs?”

  Ron had only told her half an hour ago. If only Ron and Anne had been in that house Monday night and Anne was found dead in the field and Ron had only told Sadie . . . “Unless, you were there!” She leaned forward as more and more pieces of the gruesome puzzle fit themselves together. “That’s it, isn’t it? You were there, in the house, and Anne didn’t know because if she had known you were there she’d have had to follow your plan and demand the money. But you figured it out, didn’t you? From where you were hiding in the closet, or maybe downstairs, you heard the whole thing and you—” Ron’s words came back to her, “She was alive when I left her.”

  “You killed her for betraying you,” Sadie summarized, shocked at her own words, at the picture they created. “You strangled her with the tieback.”

  Madsen was looking ahead now, though she could feel his anger. His whole attitude made sense now, the reason why he’d targeted her from the beginning, why he’d followed her to the library, and why he had confronted Susan Gimes. All along he’d been protecting himself, hiding his own sins while inflating everyone else’s. And now she was his only secret keeper; she was the only one who knew the part he played. In one sense it was absolutely terrifying, and yet in another way, a whoosh of relief washed through her. It wasn’t Jack or Ron or Carrie or Trina. No one she loved had killed Anne. The relief of that realization was overwhelming enough that it tempted her to relax and accept that it was over and she could stop thinking such dark thoughts. Then Madsen took the Grass Valley exit off the freeway—the exit that led to Jack’s cabin. Everything shifted again.