“Maggie?” Keating asked in a stronger voice. “It’s one o’clock in the morning.”
“I want to see you.”
“Yeah?” His eagerness was palpable. “Where?”
“The gazebo at Grove Spirit House. Can you meet me there in an hour?” I was counting on Shively having the same destination. If not, I’d call Keating with a change of venue.
“Why there?” he asked.
“It’s secluded…and romantic. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Sure,” he agreed too readily.
“But don’t let anyone see you. Stay hidden and I’ll find you.” I gave a throaty chuckle. “We’ll make this our little game.”
“In an hour, sweet cakes.”
Sweet cakes? Eeewwww. Trying not to gag, I ended the call.
Bill was grinning at me.
“What?”
“God will get you for raising the poor man’s hopes, along with…other things. How come you seldom use that sexy voice on me?”
“I couldn’t tell Keating the real reason I want to see him. He’s so convinced Alicia’s guilty, he wouldn’t have met me merely to pursue the Ashton case.”
“Guess he’s in for a surprise,” Bill said with a laugh. His expression sobered suddenly. “You don’t find Keating attractive, do you?”
“Jealous?”
“Should I be?”
“Quit talking like a cop.” I leaned across the console and kissed his cheek. “It’s sweet that you’re jealous, but you have no cause for concern. I have no interest in Keating. Garcia, on the other hand…” I smacked my lips.
“Don’t make me stop this car,” Bill warned with fake seriousness.
“I love it when you talk tough.”
“And I love you, Margaret.” He reached over and squeezed my hand. “You seem so much happier now that you’ve laid down the law with your mother.”
“No more wedding bell blues,” I agreed.
Bill pulled his attention back to the road and the truck far ahead of us. “He’s taking the exit on to 54. So far so good.”
An hour later, Bill killed his headlights and pulled onto the shoulder of Hidden Lake Road, out of the range of the gate’s surveillance camera. Shively’s truck was parked in front of the closed gate, but Shively was nowhere to be seen.
A large dark sedan pulled up behind us. I hopped from the passenger seat and met Keating as he climbed from his car. Bill followed.
“What the hell is going on?” Keating asked in a loud, angry voice.
“Ssshhhh,” I warned him. “We want your help.”
I couldn’t see Keating’s face in the darkness, but I could hear the shock in his voice. “I don’t do threesomes.”
“Get your mind out of your jock strap,” Bill said. “We’re tracking Ashton’s killer, and we need you to make the arrest.”
“I’ve already made the arrest.”
“And I’m betting you’re wrong,” I said. “Come with us and prove you’re right.”
Keating sighed. “What the hell. I’m awake, I’m dressed, and I’m here. What else am I going to do at two in the morning?”
“The gate’s closed, so we’ll have to go over the fence,” Bill said.
“Me first.” I grasped the chain link with Bill behind me. If anyone had to boost my butt, I wanted it to be him, not Keating.
I climbed the fence, swung one leg over the top, then the other, and dropped into the weeds below. Bill landed beside me, followed by Keating.
“Let’s work our way back over to the drive,” I whispered. “There’s grass alongside and easier going.”
In the moonless night, we didn’t have to worry about being spotted. I could barely make out the silhouettes of my two companions.
After a short tramp through the weeds in the grove, we reached the grassy strip that paralleled the drive and broke into a run. Behind me, Keating slipped on the dew-wet grass and went down with a muffled curse. Bill gave him a hand, and we continued in pursuit of Shively. We skidded to a halt at the flash of his light-colored shirt on the path heading toward the main pavilion. Its walls had been stacked back, open to the night, and dim light streamed from several groupings of lit candles. Celeste sat inside in a yoga position, open palms resting on her knees, eyes closed.
At Shively’s approach, she opened them in alarm and leaped to her feet when he stomped up the stairs.
“What are you doing here?”
“Why’d you do it, Celeste?” he demanded.
CHAPTER 21
“He gave me no choice.” With a heartrending cry, Celeste plunged into Shively’s arms like an actress in a perfume commercial, minus the slow motion. He clasped her close, as if never wanting to let go.
Concealed in the bushes, Keating, Bill and I listened. I waited for Celeste to confess to killing her husband and to explain to her lover why. And once Keating heard her, he’d have to release Alicia, and my job would be finished, hopefully before I contracted West Nile virus from mosquitoes the size of vampire bats that were feeding on my arms and neck. I resisted the urge to swat and focused my attention on the sweaty clench a few feet in front of me.
Finally, Celeste broke away and gazed up at Shively with tear-filled eyes. “The ring. Your letters. I gave them back because you demanded them. Don’t you love me?”
I stifled a gag. Lovers’ encounters, like the making of sausages, were something I preferred not to witness. Unfortunately, for them and for me, in this case, I had no choice.
He cradled her face in his hands. “I hoped by forcing you to return them, you’d come to your senses. And come to me. But you didn’t even call. Not even now that you’re free. I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t dare contact you.” He released her and she wiped tears from her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “The police already suspect that I killed Ryan. If they find out about my affair with you, they’ll have good reason to arrest me and let their other suspect go.”
Beside me in the undergrowth, Keating uttered a soft grunt. I took his visceral reaction as an indication that he’d opened his mind to the possibility that he’d arrested the wrong woman. Or maybe his legs were cramping from crouching in the bushes.
“But I didn’t kill Ryan,” Celeste insisted. “I swear on my mother’s grave.”
Shively turned away, walked to the edge of the steps and sat on the top tread with his head in his hands.
“He’d found out about us,” Celeste continued. “The night before you sent Garcia to pick up the things you’d given me. We had a terrible quarrel. I thought he was going to kill me, he was so angry. Probably the only reason he didn’t was my promise that it was over and I was returning your gifts and would never see you again. He was so out of control, I was afraid he might come after you, too, if I didn’t convince him that I meant what I said. But you have to believe me. I didn’t kill him. The Langston woman must have done it.”
Celeste’s plaintive voice echoed on the night air, and I was getting nervous. If Celeste maintained her innocence, Alicia was out of options. Her only hope would be for Terry Pender to use Celeste’s affair with Shively to raise reasonable doubt among the jury.
“It wasn’t her,” Shively mumbled through his fingers that still hid his face, and I couldn’t tell if his words were a statement or a question.
Celeste folded herself onto the step beside him. “Was it Garcia? He’s hated Ryan since their prison days. Did Garcia leave the poison in the kitchen after I returned your ring and letters to him?”
Shively’s moan of anguish split the stillness. “It wasn’t Garcia.”
Beside him, Celeste tensed. “Then who?”
Shively dropped his hands and looked at her. “You still love Ryan, don’t you?”
“How can you say that? The man was a monster.”
“You could have left him any of those weekends you spent with me. All you had to do was stay in Fort White and never return. He wouldn’t have known where to find you.”
Cel
este shook her head. “I needed time.”
“You still loved him.”
“No, I needed time to prepare. I’d been moving money from our joint account into an account under my real name for the last two years, but I had to do it in small enough increments that Ryan wouldn’t be suspicious.”
“I would have taken care of you.”
She shook her head. “I swore that I would never be dependent on any man ever again. Not even one I love as much as you.”
He groaned, shoved to his feet and paced the floor behind her. “God, I’ve botched everything.”
Her gaze followed him back and forth across the room. “What are you saying?”
“I didn’t mean to kill him.”
She uttered a strangled cry. “Oh, God, Gerald, tell me it wasn’t you. Please!”
Keating’s swift intake of breath was loud enough to give us away, but the couple was too wrapped up in their own emotions to notice.
Shively returned to sit next to Celeste and buried his face again, as if unable to look at her. “I didn’t mean to kill him. You have to believe me.”
“You were here that night?”
He sat for several minutes without saying anything. When he finally spoke, his voice was dead, without inflection, eerily similar to Celeste’s tone when I’d talked with her the day after her husband had died.
“I put the deadly nightshade in the food in the refrigerator and freezer,” he admitted, “while you were meeting Garcia at the gazebo.”
“You could have killed me, too.” Horror edged her words. “Did you even think of that?”
He lifted his head, smiled and shook his head. “Not you. You eat like a bird, you hate peas and anything green, so I knew you’d never consume enough of the berries or leaves to harm you.” His smile vanished. “But I hadn’t expected Ryan to die. I’d hoped the poison would send him to the hospital, long enough for you to make your escape and come to me.”
“Ryan was a glutton,” Celeste said. “He ate enough of that pasta dish for six people, and it killed him. God, you killed him.”
“I only wanted to make him sick enough to give you an opportunity to get away,” Shively insisted. “Even though you were returning the gifts I’d given you, I suspected you were doing so under duress. I wanted to give you…us a chance.”
Celeste began to cry again.
“You believe me, don’t you?” Shively said. “I kept waiting for you to arrive at my place, or at least to call to say you were on the way. I didn’t even know Ryan had died until some private eye showed up asking questions.”
Celeste’s tears stopped. “What?”
Shively nodded. “Some woman named Skerritt. But she was looking for Garcia. She didn’t suspect anything.”
“Did she find Garcia?”
Shively squirmed beneath her gaze. “Yes, but—”
“You idiot! Did he tell her about us?”
“Some guy from her agency came to see Garcia. Garcia told him you and I were finished and that he’d come here to pick up the gifts I’d given you.”
Celeste shook her head. “They know about us now. It’s only a matter of time before they piece it all together.”
“More quickly than you’d think.” Keating stood and stepped from the bushes. Bill and I followed.
Celeste and Shively looked up with a mixture of surprise and alarm.
“I heard everything,” Keating said. “Gerald Shively, you’re under arrest for the murder of Willard Ashton.”
I had to give Keating credit. He’d taken the lazy way out by arresting Alicia in the first place, but when you beat him over the head with incontrovertible evidence, he sprang into action like a whirlwind.
Keating cuffed Shively and read him his rights. As the detective led Shively down the drive toward his car, Celeste watched, dry-eyed and hostile.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. “Will you be all right? Is there someone I can call to be with you?”
Her anger spilled over on me. “This is all your fault, bitch. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?”
“Because I don’t believe in allowing an innocent woman to pay for someone else’s mistakes.” My sympathy had evaporated, especially when I thought of all the people Celeste and Ashton had scammed. “Think of it as my way of achieving oneness with the Universal Spirit. Or you can call it cosmic justice, if you like.”
Bill and I followed Keating and Shively up the drive toward our cars. Watching the suspect, his hands bound behind him, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of a man Shively had been before encountering Ashton and Celeste. Had he been basically good until his association with them had tainted his soul, their fraudulent retreat the tipping point in calling forth the evil that lurks in each of us? Or had something dark and malevolent in his spirit responded to the same characteristics in theirs?
Or maybe the whole fiasco was as Bill had suggested, merely a man in love being bitten by the stupid bug.
“You okay?” Bill asked when he opened the door of the SUV for me.
Before climbing in, I kissed him. “I’m fine.”
I thanked my lucky stars. I never had to wonder about Bill. His intrinsic goodness was a given.
CHAPTER 22
The next morning, I was at my desk when Darcy and Roger arrived a few minutes before eight. She took one look at me and frowned. “What truck hit you, girl?”
“Didn’t get any sleep,” I said. “I’ve just come from the sheriff’s substation. Bill and I caught Ashton’s killer, and we had to give statements.”
“Was it the wife?”
I shook my head. “The man she was having an affair with.”
Darcy put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Does love always make people stupid?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder.”
“You want coffee or are you intending to get some sleep?”
“Coffee, please, if you’re going to the bookstore.”
“Bill, too?”
“He’s gone back to the boat to get some rest.”
“Good to know at least one of my employers has some sense.”
She flounced out of the office and I reached for the phone. Terry Pender answered her cell phone immediately.
“You can arrange for your client’s release,” I told her. “Keating has the murderer and a confession.”
“Not Garth Swinburn?”
“Nope, Gerald Shively, Celeste’s secret squeeze.”
“Thank God. Any more trauma, and Alicia would lose it for sure.”
“Now all she has to worry about is her wedding,” I said. Better her than me.
“You’re good, Maggie, you and Malcolm. But that’s why I hired you.”
“Glad to be of service. Give my best to Alicia.”
“I’m sure she’ll be contacting you to thank you herself.”
Terry hung up, and I scooped Roger into my arms. I’d missed the pooch. He licked my face briefly before squirming to be released. Hopping onto his bookcase, he assumed his surveillance of Main Street, on guard against vicious sanitation and UPS trucks.
I called Adler to let him know our case was closed and to thank him for his help.
“Already heard the news,” Adler said. “Keating is taking full credit for the collar. Claims he knew all along Alicia wasn’t guilty, but he wanted to throw the real killer off guard until he could nail him.”
“No problem, as long as the true culprit’s in jail and our client is free. Any luck on your drive-by case?”
“Some promising leads. Gotta go. See you at the Burns-Baker bash.”
I hung up, exhausted but serene. Alicia Langston was free; my mother and sister were off my back; and Bill and I had made life a bit easier for the Lassiter sisters. Life was good. I removed the box of Benadryl from my purse and shoved it into the back of my top desk drawer.
I should have known the calm wouldn’t last.
Two weeks later, I stood with Antonio in the rear of the upstairs banquet hall at
Sophia’s, waiting for the other shoe to drop. So far, the Burns-Baker reception had progressed in typical fashion. The newly married couple had been piped into the roomful of guests upon their arrival by bagpipes played by the Dunedin City Pipe Band. Then the deejay had taken over. To the strains of Shania Twain’s “From this Moment,” Linda and Kevin danced their first dance as man and wife.
Kevin Baker looked strained, his smile tight, his body language tense, but I credited his discomfort to the hoopla of the event. Girls, present company excluded, dreamed of a fancy wedding, expensive bridal gowns, mountains of flowers and being queen for a day. Guys probably wished for a magic wand to make the whole ordeal go away so they could have a beer, kick back in their recliners and watch the latest sportscast.
Kevin’s bride, on the other hand, looked radiant. Triumphant, even, since her smile had a touch of smirk. After dancing with her father to “Sunrise, Sunset,” from Fiddler on the Roof, she retreated to the head table to watch Kevin and his mother circle the dance floor to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.”
The song ended and Kevin took his seat beside his new bride. The best man and maid of honor, then the newlyweds’ respective parents flanked the couple.
Bill and Adler blended unobtrusively with the waitstaff behind the head table, and Ralph Porter and Abe Mackley did the same on opposite sides of the large hall.
Disguised as events coordinator in my floral dress and Torquemada high heels, I shifted from one foot to the other as the familiar ritual unfolded without incident. After the bridal dinner had been devoured, the newlyweds cut the cake and fed each other a slice, resisting the fashionable but tacky trend of smearing each other’s face with the dessert.
Beside me, Antonio breathed a sigh of relief. “Everything is going well, no?”
I nodded. “Everyone’s having a great time. The parents and siblings have buried the hatchet, for tonight at least. Looks like your fears were unfounded.”
“Ah, but better to be prepared than surprised.”
Wedding Bell Blues Page 16
