“This is my choice, Tinkie. Give me about half an hour, then call Coleman and tell him where I went. If I can’t handle Bonnie by then, I’m going to need the cavalry.”
“I’ve got you covered.”
I hurried down the hallway. Harold would be pissed when he discovered that I’d taken his car. And his gun. And driven off into danger without him. But Peyton’s instructions had been clear—I was to come alone. And in the darkest, ugliest corner of my mind, I realized that I wanted a tête-à-tête with Bonnie Louise—without witnesses.
She’d done the unthinkable to me. And before Coleman or anyone else could stop me, I intended to hurt her. At least a little.
28
Mega-gins, huge complexes that separate the cotton fibers from the seedpods and press them into bales with speed and efficiency, now dominate the industry. The old, smaller community cotton engines are relics. Once, the local gin had been the heart of an area, the place where farmers gathered as the machine removed the sticky seeds and readied the cotton for shipment. Ruins of rusted tin and silent machinery, the dilapidated gins still dot the rural landscape, a reminder of a way of life that’s slipped behind the curtain of time.
The old Henderson gin was about twenty miles out of town on County Road Eight, a lonely two-lane bereft of a center line because two cars seldom passed.
Even as far back as high school, the Henderson gin had been unused, at least for cotton. The building and grounds had become a favorite parking place for teens. I’d spent my share of crisp autumn nights there, intoxicated by the forbidden acts of sipping whiskey and kissing handsome boys. And giggling. My goodness, we’d giggled a lot in those days of fumbling kisses and dreams of a future we’d only seen in magazines or movies.
Someone would turn on a car radio, and we’d dance in the shadow of the old building under a clear night sky where the black velvet darkness wasn’t interrupted by a single incandescent light. Couple by couple, kids would drift away, seeking solitude and those delicious private whispers and kisses.
Thinking of those nights, I keenly felt the loss of such innocence. Those had been the days when a kiss—or lack thereof—had meant jubilation or crushing defeat.
My aunt Loulane had been a straitlaced mentor in such situations. Proper young ladies didn’t kiss passionately at abandoned cotton gins. Such things could lead to over-stimulation of the Delaney womb, which would only yield a lifetime of woe and irrational conduct—or worse, a Fallopian malfunction or the uncorrectable horrors of the tilted womb.
Delaney foremothers prone to uncontrolled necking had suffered tragic consequences in the past.
To make her point, Aunt Loulane would whisper the name of Aunt Cilla, whose proclivities for sexual conquests made her the scandal of the family. But she wasn’t alone. There were other antecedents with lustful ways and what Aunt Loulane considered “insatiable and inappropriate appetites.” She counted them off like a strange rosary to warn me of falling off the straight and narrow. Aunt Loulane’s admonitions—and scare tactics—had stood me in good stead through my teen years. I owed her a lot. But not even following the rules had kept pain and loss from my door.
By the time I pulled Harold’s sporty red car into the parking area of the old gin, I’d let go of the past, at least a little. What pained me now was the loss of my future. My child. Given my druthers, I would be in Dahlia House with Graf. We would be together, so we could begin the process of grieving and healing.
Graf had been told about the baby. As I sat in the car, I dialed his cell phone. It went straight to voice mail, which was exactly what I’d hoped.
“Graf, I’m wrapping up this case. Please don’t worry. I’m fine. Physically, I’m fine. I’ll meet you at Dahlia House as soon as you can get here. I . . . need you.”
I hung up before I was tempted to erase it. Admitting that I needed anyone was worse than torture. But I did need Graf. I couldn’t wait to deck Bonnie Louise and deliver her to the Sunflower County jail so that I could return to my life and my fiancé. We had to help each other through our loss.
Harold’s gun was tucked beneath the front seat of the car, and I got it. It was small and sleek, the kind with a clip instead of a cylinder for bullets. A spy gun. The feel of it in my hand gave me a jolt of confidence.
Because it belonged to Harold, I trusted that it was clean, loaded, and in peak operating condition. That was Harold’s M.O. He was always prepared, which accounted for the fully charged high-beam flashlight in the glove box.
Gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, I crossed the gravel-pocked ground to the slightly open door of the gin. Drinking and necking no longer seemed to be teenage occupations. At least not here. The place had an air of eerie abandonment, as if no living human had visited in years.
As I stepped inside the building, a roost of mourning doves blew out of the rafters, the cackling noise and fan of frantic feathers almost stopping my heart. Old Leatherface couldn’t have given as near fatal a start.
Once my heart rate calmed, I moved forward. My footsteps sounded loud in the quiet, and I tried to conjure up memories of close dancing with a high school beau, but those carefree days were out of my reach. I was alert for a killer, a woman warped by a desire for revenge. My body was tensed for Bonnie Louise to pop out of a dark corner like some demented—and deadly—jack-in-the-box.
Yet the gin seemed strangely empty.
Even as I’d driven there, I’d had the sense that I was being played. How or why, I didn’t know. Why had Peyton called me? Or a better way of phrasing it was why had Bonnie Louise allowed him to call anyone, and most especially me? It was possible that her ultimate goal was to abduct me and hold me hostage in an effort to work out some kind of deal with Coleman. Had she known him at all, she would have deduced he wasn’t the bargaining type.
But where was Bonnie? The gin was empty, as far as I could tell. I shone the flashlight beam around the interior. Shadows stretched and jumped causing adrenaline to flood my body to the point I thought I might be able to lift a car.
The place was empty.
A loud, tearing sound made me whirl, gun at the ready, until I realized a gust of wind had caught one of the old tin panels. Rusted nails screamed a complaint. Nothing else.
“Peyton!” My voice reverberated. I didn’t anticipate an answer, so I wasn’t surprised when there was only silence.
Why had Peyton—or Bonnie—brought me to this place? What had been accomplished?
That Oscar had been left alone? Was Bonnie Louise so far gone that she thought she’d attack Oscar in the hospital and finish the job she’d started?
That prompted me to pat my cell phone in my pocket. I could call Dewayne Dattilo and get him to provide some kind of security for Oscar’s room. If Bonnie was so nuts she meant to kill Oscar no matter what, it might be best to have someone watch over him.
Reception in the tin building was nonexistent. I’d place the call when I returned to the car.
Which would be in about three minutes.
I’d made it to the end of the gin and found only dust, rust, and shadows. My time had been wasted.
As I eased toward the front door, something wet struck me in the top of the head. I sighed. Just my luck to walk under a dove with gastrointestinal issues. Lovely conclusion to a horrible day.
The bird poo oozed down my temple, and I wiped it away. Harold surely had a towel or hanky or cloth in his car. He was always prepared.
Another drop plopped on my hand. I swung the light to look. Dark, sticky, red. Not bird poop. Blood.
I swung the light instinctively, the dread of what I would see already building. Instead of Peyton, though, it was the petite figure of Bonnie Louise that hung from the rafter, swinging gently as if a faint breeze moved her.
Blood coated both hands, and as I moved the light along her arms, I saw the long, open slices on each wrist that indicated she’d wanted to die. Just to make sure, she’d stepped off the second-floor landing with a rope around her neck. She
was nothing if not determined. And she was definitely dead.
I didn’t scream or run. I was frozen by the sight as my brain processed the scene. And the implications. If Bonnie had killed herself, where was Peyton?
Not even Bonnie Louise could be a kidnapper and dead.
I had to get out of that gin and fast. My sense that I was being played had been all too true—but not in the way I’d imagined. Several images leaped forward in my head—Bonnie’s clothes and shoes in a drawer in her desk, Peyton’s sly manipulation of information to put Bonnie in the worst light. Bonnie had never abducted Peyton. The exact opposite was true, which was why neither Cece nor Erin could identify Janks or Bonnie as their abductors. It had been Peyton all along.
“Hello, Sarah Booth.”
Peyton’s voice came from the doorway and I turned to face him, the flashlight and gun trained at the exit. There was no one there. I shifted the light left and right until the beam caught him emerging from the shadows near the right side of the door. It was possible he’d been there all along, watching me explore the old gin. Or he could have just stepped inside.
“Why?” My question needed no explanation. Peyton would understand.
“Have you ever had someone take something from you, Sarah Booth? Something more valuable than gold?”
That was the wrong question to ask me. The growl came out of my gut, clawing up my chest. He’d taken something from me. Something that dissolved my fear and made me think only of lashing out.
The flashlight beam showed me that he held a gun. As much as I ached to rip his throat out, I controlled myself.
“What was stolen from you, Peyton?” As far as I knew, Peyton had no history with Oscar. Fidellas was not a Sunflower County name. Peyton had no connection to the Carlisle land, or at least none that I had unearthed.
“Have you ever heard of D-79?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Broad spectrum insecticide now used in almost all commercial agricultural endeavors. I created it. And Austin Janks stole my formula and took it to DeFoe, got paid a hefty sum for it, and then stole it from them and resold it again. He earned a fortune off my genius.”
“Austin Janks is dead.” Peyton was crazier than I thought. “He was killed in a break-in at DeFoe’s South American plant years ago. Besides, that has nothing to do with the people of Sunflower County.”
Peyton’s laughter rang out, bouncing off the tin walls. “You miss the point of my whole scheme. Austin Janks is very much alive. Who do you think backed Jimmy’s development ventures? It was his father, and he did it off the money he earned from the formula he stole from me. Such a clever man. But now he’ll have to live with the fact that his son died because of his greed. He stole from me so I took from him.”
“You hurt a lot of people to get back at one man.”
“But ultimately, it’ll be worth it. I’ll be a wealthy man, thanks to Bonnie’s research. Or I should say the research that Bonnie conducted along with Austin Janks.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She was brilliant. She’s worked years on a type of cotton that would yield two harvests. She had it, too. She was all ready to give the seed to local farmers. Give it away! To benefit the farmers. The only way I kept her mouth shut was to contaminate the weevils’ feed with mold and make her believe that her cotton was responsible for a potential epidemic.”
Not even I had gauged the depth of madness at work in Sunflower County, and I’d greatly underestimated Bonnie Louise’s real character. “You’ve known all along that Oscar and the others had been exposed to mold?” I’d wanted to beat Bonnie Louise when I thought she was responsible for the loss of my child. I wanted to kill Peyton. My finger felt the trigger of Harold’s gun. One good shot and I’d take him out.
“Not even I understood the genetic changes the mold would produce in the weevils—or that they’d carry the deadly mold on their backs,” Peyton said. “I was just lucky there. Seems like luck is on my side these days. Too bad for you.”
“Your luck has run out.” He was in my sights, and I would kill him if I had to.
The first shot whizzed by my cheek, missing by only a fraction of an inch. As I darted for cover, I fired at him blindly, twice, aiming at his body because Coleman had once told me that torso mass was easier to hit than a head.
Crouched behind an old piece of machinery, I tried to pinpoint his position with the light. He was nowhere to be found. Peyton obviously knew the gin far better than I did.
“At last, someone who fights back,” Peyton said. In the darkness, his tone was amused. “You’re a real bonus, Sarah Booth. When I conceived of my plan to settle an old score, I never figured on you, but you’re the perfect ending to a well-plotted crime. Beaucoup will kill you and then take her own life. It’s a little out of order, but I don’t think the local law will deduce that. Especially not when I’m alive to tell them exactly how it happened.”
I’d been so eager to finger Bonnie Louise as the culprit that I’d made a terrible miscalculation. So had Coleman. We’d all followed behind Peyton Fidellas like lemmings.
Exposing myself as little as possible, I swung the flashlight beam across the building until I found him again tucked behind a conveyor belt. There was a slight stain of red on his left arm. I’d winged him with one of my shots but done no real damage—unless I could keep him talking until he bled to death. Not likely.
“Why do you hate Oscar so much?” I asked.
His laughter grated on me. “Collateral damage, Sarah Booth. That’s where you went off the track. You assumed Oscar was the target. Someone had to get sick from exposure to the mold, but I didn’t care who it was. I’d planned on it being Jimmy Janks. Death by mold would be more satisfying than the gunshot I had to resort to.”
My brain was working hard to process the new facts. Peyton had engineered the weevils, the mold, everything. And he’d set it up so that Bonnie Louise would take the blame. Now Bonnie would also take the blame for my death—assuming Peyton could actually kill me this time.
I had him in my flashlight beam, but he also had a good shot at me, because I held the light. It was a stand-off. “You should have killed me in that cotton field, Peyton. You’d already abducted Bonnie, and you took her shoes out of her desk and wore them to throw Coleman off.”
“Another rash assumption, Sarah Booth. But let me say I had no idea you were pregnant. A misfortune. Then again, you would be dead otherwise.”
The idea that he could be so cavalier about my miscarriage steadied my hand holding the gun. My finger tightened on the trigger. I had it within my power to kill him. He might get a shot off at me—but I might get him first.
The things that I wanted to say—before I pulled the trigger—were lodged in my throat. I couldn’t speak of the loss of a child to this creature. I thought of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. There was a scene where a rabid dog had to be shot. Atticus, a man who abhorred violence, did what had to be done to protect his children.
It was too late to protect my child, but I could prevent a madman from harming others.
“Take the shot,” he said, taunting me, stepping out into the open.
Perhaps I’d never forgive myself for killing a person, but it was a risk I was willing to take.
The blow came from the dark shadows beside me and felt like it snapped the bone in my arm. The gun jerked down, discharging harmlessly into the dirt floor, and fell from my useless fingers.
Peyton’s laughter rang eerily off the metal walls of the building, and I swung the flashlight around to spotlight a blond woman, tall, slender, and composed.
Sonja Kessler lifted the bat she held. “You’re a hard one to kill, Ms. Delaney,” she said. “But this time, I won’t miss.”
She lifted the bat a fraction to give herself more leverage. In a second she’d swing the weapon and I had no doubt she meant to strike me in the head. She was framed in the beam of my light, and I was unable to move. My arm was useless, the hand hanging at an odd angle.
Just as she started the downswing, there was an explosion. Sonja spun as if a giant hand had twisted her. She cried out, a noise that sounded like cloth ripping.
“No!” Peyton’s cry came from the other end of the building. I swung the light to show him rushing toward me, his gun pointed.
I had no idea what had happened. In the darkness, everything was a jumble, and I was totally unprepared for the next assault. Someone—not Peyton—hit me in the midriff, knocking me backward. The weight of a body fell across mine.
I caught a whiff of something exotic and sensual—Tinkie’s perfume. Another shot rang out, and Peyton grunted. Then, in the darkness, there was the sound of someone tumbling into some of the equipment.
It took a moment for me to regain my breath.
“Don’t move,” Tinkie ordered.
My arm was killing me, but I had no intention of moving. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Saving your ass,” she said sweetly. “You can thank me at any time.”
“Thank you, Tinkie.” I let the pain roll over me. “You’re crushing the life out of me, not to mention my arm. I think she snapped the bone.”
“Well, I haven’t slept in a week. What’s your point?”
“I think I’m going to faint.” It was amazing, but the darkness of the building was not nearly as dense as the black that was moving in from the center of my brain.
“Don’t you dare,” Tinkie said. “Not after Coleman and I rushed out here to save you. The least you can do is stay awake and thank him.”
“I’m not feeling all that chipper,” I told her.
“Hang on, Sarah Booth.” Coleman’s voice came from the fringes of the darkness. “We’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
I pondered the fact that to my knowledge there wasn’t a single sheep in Sunflower County. Not that sheep couldn’t live here. No ordinances against sheep existed. Somehow, though, sheep had chosen other locations.
Strong arms slipped under me and in the distance there were sirens. In my mind, the patrol cars were driven by sheep. The place where I’d drifted to was strange and wondrous and I had no desire to leave it. While I wasn’t unconscious, I’d shifted to an alternate reality.
Greedy Bones Page 25
