by Lynn Bulock
Please, God, let him still be at the computer, I prayed fervently as I read his message. “Hi, Mom. U there? I have way cool news.”
His news, whatever it was, would have to wait. I could hear Becca coming back up the hall, and as quickly as possible, clicked the mouse again to hide the message.
The motion of turning away from the computer again made me even more dizzy and nauseated, but I did it. “Got two while I was at it.” Becca brandished her grandmother’s prize embroidered pillowcases. “And once I fill them up, we have to get this show on the road, Gracie. See, these burglars are not only really good at what they do, using gloves and all so they don’t leave fingerprints,” she said, waving her plastic-encased fingers at me, “but they are also really mean. They don’t want to leave any witnesses, which is why they’re going to shoot both of us. Fortunately they’re just going to wing me and I’m going to play dead until they leave. But you’re going to be past hope.”
This time I understood what she was saying and it made me tremble. “Why bother? You are already in so much trouble, Becca. Why kill me, too?”
“Oh, that one’s easy. For the insurance money. There’s a cool quarter million dollars waiting for me when you die. See, I’m Grams’s only heir, and she was in line to get money from the policy.” She looked around the room as she leaned against the kitchen doorway. “Guess I’ll get the house, too. Man, I’m redoing the kitchen before we move in, even if it means living in that crummy apartment another six months.”
I had to get her out of the living room and keep her busy, even if it was just for a few minutes. “If it’s money you need, I can tell you where there is some. I’ll bet you didn’t know that your grandma kept cash in the pantry.”
“I’d forgotten about that. She used to have cash in that fake flour tin years ago, and more in a baking powder one. You mean Dad never cleaned those out?”
This felt like it was buying me precious minutes. “If he did, she loaded them back up. Last time I saw her with one of the tins, it had at least a hundred dollars in it.”
Becca laughed her ugly laugh again. “And you’ve been here over a week without her and you didn’t touch it. You are so much dumber than I thought.”
She went into the kitchen and I heard the pantry open. I knew that Edna’s money tins were back in the far reaches of the pantry, and prayed that the hunt would keep Becca busy long enough. The moment I heard the pantry open I turned back around and clicked the mouse again. Ben had sent me another message. “Mom? U there?”
I typed as fast as I could with the fingers on my right hand that would reach the keyboard by stretching as far as I could. I hit the Caps Lock key for speed and emphasis and typed: “HERE. NEED HLP. CALL RAY NOW. SEND HERE ASAP. I LV U, BEN.” Then I pushed Send. Realizing that I wasn’t hearing much noise in the kitchen, I closed the instant message window, then hid the screen again and turned around so that when Becca came into the room all she saw was me fiddling with my bonds.
“I told you, they aren’t going to give,” she said, sounding tired. “And that was smart, you telling me about the money in the kitchen. Good burglars would have found that. It adds another creative touch to this whole thing. Besides, it almost covers the cab fare I had to pay to get back to Sherman Oaks last night. Too bad I have to shoot you anyway.”
It was hard to take in everything she said. She looked so glassy-eyed and hyped up that it made me wonder if Becca was high on something, or if she just really enjoyed the adrenaline rush that this kind of danger gave her. Either way, I couldn’t think of any way to reason with her at this point. I was still so foggy from being hit on the head. Maybe if I had a little more time I would come up with a plan. At least she didn’t have a gun in her hand yet. Maybe she didn’t really have one.
As if she read my mind, Becca put down the pillowcase and reached around to the back of the waistband of her pants. The gun she pulled out looked small, but efficient. “And you thought I was kidding,” she said with an evil grin. “I’m not. See, it was right here waiting for me to use in a couple minutes, once I make sure that all the good stuff is packed up and ready to go.”
She made one more sweep of the living room and wandered down the hall, talking as she went. “You’re not saying anything more, Gracie. Why not? Usually you’re so talkative. Daddy always said he thought you were going to talk his ear off.” I could hear something go into the pillowcase she’d picked up again. “Hey, what do you think of one last gabfest? After the burglars shoot us both, and you know you’re dying and all, I think you’re going to talk to me. See, you knew about Heather after all, which is why you ran your own car off the road that night with Daddy driving it. And when that didn’t do the trick and Daddy started waking up, you couldn’t have that because he’d tattle on you. So you slipped him a little something you thought would slow down the process, but it killed him instead. What a relief for you that Grams fed him the tea and did your dirty work for you.”
“That’s terrible. Nobody will believe that.”
“Hey, they’ve believed me up until now,” she said as if she were talking about a parking ticket she’d weaseled out of, not two murders and two attempts at more.
She put all the loaded pillowcases in a pile and looked out the window nearest the front door. “Coast is clear. I’ll go put these in the trunk. You say your prayers while I’m gone, because this is it. I’m so glad the burglars are going to take that lousy beater with them. I need a new car almost as bad as I need this house.”
She was out the door and I made one last effort to get out of the cords that held me. It didn’t work, but I wasn’t going to just sit here and let this deranged young woman shoot me, because I knew she would. I couldn’t budge the cords around my arms, but with a lot of effort, I got one foot down to the floor. By throwing my weight from one side of the chair to the other and pushing with that foot, I could move the chair.
I’d gotten a good ten feet by the time I heard the car trunk slam and Becca come up the front walk. She’d left the front door locked behind her again, and it gave me a few more wonderful seconds to wriggle even farther toward the front door, moving to the side of the front hallway away from the side of the door that opened.
“Okay, showtime,” she crooned when she got the door open. She stood one step past the doorway, looking at where she left me. “Hey, where’d you go…?”
In that one moment of surprise, I gave it all I had. Screaming as loudly as I could, I launched the whole chair at her, praying she was a lousy shot. We tumbled into a heap on the floor and the gun went off just as I heard sirens outside the open door. My ears were ringing so loudly from the noise and the motion that I couldn’t do anything but retch and pray that it would take just enough time for Becca to crawl out from under me that the police could make it to the door. At least the movement had knocked the gun out of her hand. I could see it on the tile floor of the hallway, where Becca was groping for it.
Ray Fernandez was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen, even with a gun drawn and a look of panic on his face. Becca must have seen him about the same time that I did, because she gave a mighty effort and heaved the chair—and me with it—off of her body. The motion hit my head against the wall next to the front door, and the pain put me down for the count.
15
They told me later that once Ray and his backup uniformed officers from the sheriff’s department arrested Becca they called the paramedics again. I took my second ambulance ride in two days back to Los Robles Hospital, even though I didn’t ever remember that part of the commotion. I do remember having a conversation with one of the doctors later in the day, who said that retrograde amnesia was a tricky thing.
Apparently getting hit on the head often means that you lose little chunks of memory around the event. Getting whomped twice in the course of an hour, I was probably extremely lucky that the only thing I “lost” was an ambulance ride with my friend Steve and company and a bit of time in the emergency room at Los Robles.
&nb
sp; I would have liked to have lost some of the time I spent with Becca there at the house. Although I guess it was good that I could tell Ray Fernandez all about what she’d said once he talked to me that evening in my hospital room. The doctors insisted on keeping me overnight due to the concussion I’d received. At that point I was sore and felt awful and couldn’t really argue with their decision.
“Now why didn’t you just wait for me to show up at the church instead of going off after Becca?” Ray did not look at all happy. “It would have made life so much easier for everybody.”
“You were coming to the church? Could have fooled me,” I countered. “I waited around at least half an hour hoping to talk to you.”
“I was busy talking to Adela Rodriguez after she stopped me in the parking lot at Dodd and Sons. She was almost certain she’d made a positive ID on the person she’d seen leaving Dennis’s room during the funeral, but she felt so bad about what she had to tell me that she waited until the family was gone.”
“Because the person she identified was Becca? I thought the same thing, and it’s what I wanted to tell you at the church. When Carol told me that Becca was at the house going through her grandmother’s things, I thought I’d confront her there.”
Ray folded his arms and stood at the side of my bed, scowling. “Do you realize how silly that sounds? Gracie Lee, she could have killed you. She almost did.”
“I know that now. At the time I really thought that her involvement might have only stretched to hustling her grandmother out of there, and putting the GHB in my tea.”
“Wouldn’t that be enough to stop you?”
I shrugged. “It should have been, I guess. At least things turned out okay. Remind me to never give my son any grief again about how much time he spends on the computer.” Ben had been the first person I’d talked to once I could use a phone in the hospital. Our conversation had been somewhat stilted, and along the same lines of the one I was having with Ray, with my son pointing out to me how much danger I’d been in and how foolish I’d been to go to the house alone. “I’m also thankful to you that you called him the moment you could, to tell him everything was okay.”
“Hey, he was worried about you. That was one panicked young man I talked to while I was on my way to that house.”
“You were already on your way?”
“I told you, I showed up at the church,” Ray said, speaking slowly and distinctly as if to a small child. I couldn’t fault him for that, because I was pretty sure that folks had been repeating themselves around me all day. “Once I found out that Becca was at the house and you’d gone after her, do you think I would have gone anywhere else?”
“I guess not. Especially if you’d talked to Señora Rodriguez.” It seemed odd that in the end everything had turned on a case of mistaken identity, corrected during Dennis’s funeral. This whole series of events that led to Dennis’s death and to Edna’s seemed to hinge on such small things.
That reminded me of something else I needed to tell Ray. “I think Becca was the one who ran her father off the road back in August. Of course then she thought it was me. She said something at the house that made me think she’d done it, anyway.”
He nodded. “I read the young lady her rights the moment I arrested her, because she was so mad at you that she wanted to talk. According to her everything that happened was your fault. You were supposed to be driving your own car that day, so that the scheme she’d worked out with her father to get your insurance money went off as planned.”
“So you were right about thinking that most of this was aimed at me in the first place.”
Ray nodded. “That was the most twisted part of her logic, that none of the acts she committed were really murders because the intended victim didn’t die right away, or by her hand. Even poisoning her father was a mistake, because you never drank the tea that was supposed to make you ill on the way home from the care center, and it was her grandmother that gave it to Dennis. So of course his darling daughter had nothing to do with it.”
There were still things that bothered me. “What about Edna? Do you think she committed suicide with an assist from her granddaughter?”
“Not a chance. That was definitely another murder, whether Becca sees it that way or not. The medical examiner’s office called me while I was on the way from the mortuary to the church with some important lab results from the autopsy. That was the other reason I was late. Did you know that your motherin-law was a diabetic?”
“No. But it explains why she was so strict about not letting sweets in the house. I would have been a lot more tolerant of her wishes if I’d known there was a medical reason. But what does that have to do with how she died?”
“Mrs. Peete was the kind of diabetic that didn’t need insulin, but controlled her diabetes with oral medication and diet. Apparently Becca found some way to tamper with her grandmother’s food and medication. She kept Edna more and more confused for a week, until the old lady was so ill she couldn’t fight back. Then I’m guessing that Becca drove the car to Rancho Conejo and staged the whole suicide, and almost managed two more convenient murders to go with it.”
“Can you prove any of that yet?” Even as I asked, there was something nagging the sore reaches of my brain, telling me I knew something that could help.
“Not totally. Becca and her grandmother were alone at the apartment most of the time, because the husband, Brandon, was off working at some kind of extreme sports tournament.”
“He skateboards. That’s why the baby’s named Ollie,” I added.
Ray gave me another look that said he thought my head injury was coming into play again. “Okay. I just thought somebody was an old movie fan. You know, Laurel and Hardy? Anyways, I can theorize how all of this happened, but have precious little evidence to back it up. Becca was pretty meticulous in not leaving much behind.”
I rested my aching head back on the pillow again, trying to remember what was nagging me. It was something Becca had said while she was ransacking the house, talking freely to me because she didn’t expect me to be able to tell anybody what she’d said. Then it came to me and I sat up. “She took a cab back to Sherman Oaks. I don’t know where she caught it, probably somewhere not too near the house but within walking distance.”
“How do you know this?” Ray sounded very hopeful.
“She told me. While she was ransacking the house to make it look like a burglary had taken place she found cash in Edna’s pantry. She said that it almost covered the cab ride back to Sherman Oaks.” I lay back again, feeling drained.
“This could be the one break I need. There can’t be that many overnight cab drivers in Rancho Conejo. And there will be even less who took a fare all the way to the Valley.” He grasped my hands and looked straight into my eyes. “I still wish you hadn’t gone in there and gotten yourself in trouble, Gracie Lee, but since you did I’m glad you could pass on that one piece of information. Now try and get some rest, okay? I’ll be back in a day or two to take a full formal statement.”
“That’s fine. I don’t expect to be here then.”
“No, I guess not. I hope you’re not going back to that house, either.”
I shook my head. It still didn’t feel great when I did that, but at least it didn’t feel like my head was ready to explode, which was a start. “Only to pack up my own things and move them over to the apartment on the Morgans’ property. That’s going to be home for a while.”
We said goodbye and I must have dozed for a while. I couldn’t go into a real deep sleep, because no one would let me. Every time I came close, it seemed someone from the nursing staff was there to jog me awake again. More than once in the course of the evening and on into daylight the next morning I reminded myself that I never wanted another concussion. They were absolutely no fun.
In those long hours, I spent a lot of time wondering what might have happened if I hadn’t run into Linnette in the bookstore, or she hadn’t pointed me in the direction of the Christian Friend
s group. Without all that, Dennis might still be alive. I could still be squabbling with Edna, and wondering where my money would turn up, if it ever did.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I knew that even if I hadn’t found the Christian Friends, Becca would probably have found a way to cause most of the trouble she’d started by running my car off the embankment last August. She’d made such a series of incredibly bad choices that nothing I could have done, or not done, would have changed the outcome of what she’d done.
I had to believe that God had a purpose in my life, and part of that purpose led me to the Christian Friends. The God I believed in didn’t cause the deaths of innocent people, but He didn’t protect any of us from the worst of our choices, either. And sometimes those bad choices destroyed other lives, as well as our own. In this case I felt like Dennis’s own bad choices in bilking so many of the people around him just led to his daughter’s behavior, as well. If all she’d seen from him for over twenty years was that lying, cheating and stealing was okay, then making money off killing me for my insurance wasn’t that far a stretch.
It gave me chills all over again to remember that she wasn’t the one who’d taken out the policies. Dennis had arranged all that. If things had worked out in his favor, I’d be dead now and he could easily have gotten the money from his mother, making him a quarter million dollars richer, with Becca no doubt getting a share of that money, as well.
Before I had time to dwell on that any longer I got company. Linnette walked into my room, looking flushed and in a hurry. “I really intended to get here before this to come and sit with you, but something came up. Several things came up, actually.” She sat down in the bedside chair.
“I didn’t expect anybody to visit besides Ray. The police I expected. But I figured the rest of you had plenty to do at church on Sunday morning.”
