Paula K. Perrin - Small Town Deadly

by Paula K. Perrin

  “Help you?” he asked.

  “Gene Cudworthy. Is he here?”

  “None of ‘em are, they just responded to a call.”

  “Was Gene with them?”

  “Nope. Haven’t seen him. Want to leave a message?”

  My fists clenched in exasperation. There was no time to explain. I turned and ran.

  I slammed the car door, cursing myself. Gene must have gone straight to the old scout hut near the lake to wait for me to return his things.

  I headed north, flashing past trees, houses, stop signs and Sunday drivers.

  I slowed as I neared the lake. It’d been years since I’d visited the scout hut. I took a wrong turn and ended up in someone’s building site, got back on the road.

  I almost missed the overgrown driveway, but at the last second realized the two piles of stones were the remains of the gateposts. I hit a deep pothole and sucked in my breath. The last thing I needed was a broken axle.

  I crept along the rutted driveway, berries and branches scraping the car. I could hardly see through the windshield and rubbed at my eyes before I realized it was rain coating the window. I flipped on the wipers.

  I didn’t remember the road to the hut being so long. Just as I was about to give up and start backing toward the highway, I spotted Gene’s old green truck. What used to be a large clearing in front of the hut was now mostly overgrown by blackberry vines, young alders, and ferns.

  Except for its boarded windows and the overgrowth outside, the scout hut looked much as it always had; a well-built log cabin with a steep roof and a deep covered porch with stone steps leading up to it.

  I blew my car’s horn, rolled down the window and yelled, “Gene!” He didn’t appear. I pressed the horn again, and it blared through the woods. “Damn you,” I said. He was mad at me so he was going to make me come to him.

  “Gene!” I yelled again. The door of the hut remained closed. Was there anyone more stubborn than Gene Cudworthy?

  I ran through the rain, up the stone steps and across the yielding, slippery floor of the porch to the door. I turned the knob. The door opened, and cold, musty air washed over me as I poked my head inside. The cabin, with its boarded-up windows, was nearly dark. I felt for the light switch. Even as I flicked it up, I realized that the electricity had been cut off long ago.

  “Gene?” I called again, but softly this time, the hair prickling on the back of my neck. Too impatient to wait for my eyes to adjust, I took a cautious step forward, avoiding an old kitchen chair which lay on its back right inside the door. “Gene, I need your help,” I said.

  He was getting his own back by playing a sadistic game of hide-and-seek.

  “Gene, please, I need you.”

  I stopped. The gloomy room appeared empty except for the relics left by the scouts. I made out the hunched shape of a couch against the side wall and the outline of the fieldstone fireplace opposite the door. In the middle of the floor lay a rucked-up rug or sleeping bag, and beside it a small, discarded log.

  I stopped, hugging myself in the mouse-scented air.

  Was he off in the woods exploring? Surely he’d have heard my car’s horn? I couldn’t afford to play his games, I had to get help. I’d drive back to the first house along the highway and use the phone to call 9-1-1. Then I’d go out to Stevenson myself.

  But in the moments I’d stood there thinking, my eyes had studied the shape lying in the middle of the floor, and my hands had begun to tremble as I realized it was neither an abandoned rug nor a sleeping bag. I wanted to run from the nightmare of finding yet another body.

  I forced myself forward in baby steps and knelt beside those broad shoulders. “Gene?” I touched his neck where it wasn’t bloody. His skin was cool and damp. “Oh, dear God.” My hand came to rest on his back as I squeezed my eyes tightly to hold back tears.

  My knees hurt.

  He’d used bad language in church. Please forgive him.

  He’d been so mad at me!

  Now I’d never have a chance to say—

  I heard a scrape on the steps at the same moment I realized I was feeling a slight up-and-down movement under my hand.

  As my rescuer crossed the porch, I felt the vibration through my knees. I turned, trying to force words past my constricted throat.

  A dark silhouette appeared, blocking the dim light that filtered in through the open doorway. I cleared my throat, but the person at the door spoke first, whispering, “How does it feel?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Standing between me and the light, the killer’s bow-legged form made the cabin even darker. All the better to hide any clues that Gene was still alive.

  I started to rise, but she said, “No. Stay there. I like you there.”

  “How could you do it, Alisz?” My voice sounded flat and loud. “Why?”

  “Even now you don’t understand?”

  “No. How could I?”

  “Always so interested in yourself,” she said, shaking her head, “you never see.”

  “What am I supposed to see?” My tone was exasperated, and I reminded myself I must not provoke her. If I hadn’t made her angry this morning, this wouldn’t have happened. “Why don’t you tell me,” I added, thinking that if she kept talking, if I edged away from Gene so her attention was on me, if I could somehow get past her—

  She clicked her tongue and her hand lifted from her side. Her fingers flickered in the diffused light.

  Was it my imagination, or had Gene’s body shifted ever so slightly? He couldn’t gain consciousness now, his safety depended on her thinking he was dead. At the thought, my eyes went to the piece of wood lying nearby. It was about two inches in diameter and over two feet long.

  “He has a hard head, Gene,” Alisz said, “I had to hit him twice.”

  “Why’d you bother with him at all?”

  “I promised I would get your loved ones, and I will get them. Every one.”

  My heart stuttered. “Is Jared going to hurt—”

  “No! He would never—he has a soft heart. He will make a fine doctor.” Her fingers flickered again, making a faint, strange squeaking sound. Surgical gloves? “But when he and Meg return, I will be waiting. Not you. You gave him so much pain when you thought he was not good enough for your niece.”

  “That wasn’t it! They were too young. Surely—”

  “He will never guess who has set him free when I deal with her. He will mourn Meg, but he will recover and go on with his life, not stay in one rut, not—” Her hands made fists as she searched for the word.

  “Stagnate?”

  “Yes. Stagnate as his father did.”

  “You did all this because Jared’s in love with Meg? Alisz, he’ll get over it—”

  “Hah!” she barked, her head thrusting forward. “Like Hugh, that stupid, foolish man? He never stopped wanting, not one day in his life—”

  Gene groaned.

  She stiffened. “Such a hard head,” she said. She bent and stretched her hand toward the small log.

  I threw myself past Gene and grabbed the wood in both hands. My momentum sent me sliding toward the wall. I scrabbled to my feet, the branch clutched tightly and cocked like a bat, but now she was closest to Gene.

  I took a step toward her, saying, “Get away from him,” but she didn’t back up. She drew back her foot and kicked Gene’s shoulder. He moaned.

  I rushed at her. I swung the wood at her head, my stomach knotting, expecting a horrible crunching noise, but the next thing I knew, she had grabbed my arm and sent me cartwheeling through the air till I crashed to the floor, the wood flying from my hand.

  I tried to get up but I couldn’t even breathe and I saw her leg go back. I wriggled away, twisting, so that her foot connected with the outside of my arm. Oh, God, it hurt. She pulled her foot back again. I rolled away. She laughed.

  I used the wall to pull myself up. I turned to face her.

  She’d gotten the branch and was standing over Gene, a big grin on her fa
ce. “So, you see, all the time Hugh left me alone I put to excellent use to learn self-defense.”

  If only I hadn’t left my purse in my car. How could I get it before she hit Gene again?

  “You certainly surprised me,” I said.

  She laughed. “You have always been funny, Liz.”

  “Is that why you hate me?”

  She frowned. “Perhaps. A little bit.” She shrugged and started to raise the wood.

  “You said Hugh left you alone, but it wasn’t because of me, Alisz, he never—”

  “It did not matter who he was with, he was always thinking of you. From the day we married. For twenty years, every minute.”

  “No, Alisz, we never saw each other—”

  “Last summer we came out of Safeway. You drove by in the parking lot. His eyes followed you, hungry.” She sighed. “I could never be you, and so he could never love me.”

  “He married you, not me.”

  “Because you would not. Nothing was ever good enough. Oh, he didn’t say it, did not say he would not love Jared because he wasn’t your son instead of mine, did not say he hated our house because it was ours not yours, but he was always restless, wanting to be somewhere else, relieved when a patient called and he could go.” Her jaw clenched. Her head shook. “In this day, to take patient calls himself!”

  I had to get to the gun. Clearly I couldn’t out-fight her. I slid the tiniest bit toward the door.

  “No!” She raised the club. “You think I am stupid, Liz.”

  “No, I’ve never thought that.”

  “Yes. You did not laugh with the other children, you did not call me those names, but I knew. How sly you were. Always knowing the correct word. Always the pretty clothes to hand-me-down. Always the best friends, the most handsome boys. The best of everything.” She smiled, her lips tight over her teeth, her eyes so full of hatred they shone. “Not any more, Liz. No more. How does it feel?”

  I said nothing.

  She laughed softly. “You make me so happy to be here like this.” She tapped the log against the toe of her hiking boot. “So many times I watched you walk down the sidewalk to your house on the street that bears your name. I saw you laugh with your friends and knew you would go drink Coke and listen to records and do your homework together like the girls on TV, while I went home to care for Vencel, Jozsua, and Rezi.

  “I cleaned the house and dressed my mother and sat her in a chair so Papa would not yell when he came home from his janitor work in his brown clothes, shout of how it was before he left his country, our country, where my mother laughed and played cards with her friends. And every day it hurt.

  “I went to work and planned how to escape this terrible town, but I could not leave my parents. Then Hugh came, and I was in love, but he wanted you. When you threw him away and I thought, now, now is my chance, we will marry and move away and forget all the past. But he would not move, he would not forget, and it was Vencel, Jozsua, and Rezi who left and I who stayed and watched my husband watch you.”

  “I’m sorry, Alisz,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry. Do not ever be sorry for me. It is I who am sorry for you, for your pain when you are alone and you look at a ruined life.”

  My mind caught on her words. How could she expect to leave me alive to suffer my losses? She wasn’t making any sense. A bubble of hysteria rose in me—I expected her to make sense? What could I say? What should I do? My hand pressed so hard against my mouth that my lips ground against my teeth.

  She raised the club.

  I forced a laugh, a brittle, ugly sound, but it stopped her. “You’re right, I do think you’re stupid. You threaten to kill my loved ones and then you go after Gene. How dumb can you get?”

  She came at me so quickly I barely had time to whirl away, and I was so startled, I turned in the wrong direction, away from the door. The club crashed into the wall. I leaped across Gene, but the club caught my left shoulder and drove me to the floor. I lay there, gasping with pain, tears blurring my vision, hunched, expecting another blow, but none came.

  “You are too obvious,” she said, “you try to make me forget my plan, but you cannot.”

  I pushed myself up with my right arm. I steadied myself, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a sound, pushed myself to my knees.

  “No,” she said, “stay there.”

  “What’re you going to do, hit me?” I forced myself to my feet, staggered, caught my balance and turned to face her. I was a little closer to the door, but she was next to Gene.

  “Alisz, what about Jared? You can’t get away with this. What will become of him?”

  “I am getting away with this.” She wriggled her gloved hands. “No evidence. Once you and your family are gone and Jared has finished medical school, he will settle back here in his father’s practice. I will have grandchildren. I will buy your house and live there, and they will come visit their dear Grandmama.”

  “I thought you wanted to get away from Warfield.”

  “Yes, until I realized it was you who spoiled everything.”

  I sighed. I couldn’t help it. “You must realize you’re running out of time. No matter how careful you are, you’re bound to make a mistake.”

  She frowned.

  “Anybody would. There must be an awful lot for you to remember, little details where anyone might slip up. So for Jared’s sake, so he’ll never know, why don’t you just take me away and get it over with? Let it end there.”

  She looked down at Gene.

  “You don’t have to finish him off. He never saw you, did he?”

  “I hid on the chair behind the door. He never suspected. He walked in whistling.”

  “So leave him. He’s a cop. If you kill him, they’ll look harder—you know how they always emphasize that on TV.”

  “But you were naked with him last night.”

  “I bet Jill Ferguson told you that, didn’t she? You know how she exaggerates, how she tries to get attention. Why would you believe her?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “But he has always been in love with you.”

  “Give me a break! The guy’s been married three times!”

  “And divorced, also.” She looked at me, her eyes roving up and down. She shook her head. “I don’t see what is so special about you, how you can make these men want you, never be happy without you.” She stared at me intently. “You will not have them, but you will not let them go.”

  I felt my face flush. “That is ridiculous.”

  “I saw you Thursday night. You traced Gene’s shoulders with your eyes, you watched him walk, you wanted him.”

  “I did not!”

  “I don’t sit high in a castle and ignore the world,” she said. “I am not like you. I pay attention. I listen, I look, I plan. I’m like a general, Annamaria always says—” Alisz stopped, drew in breath, her cheeks growing round with air before she allowed it to escape through her teeth with a hiss. “Ah, Annamaria. Of all the things you have done to me, that was the worst.”

  I shook my head. “What are you talking about?”

  “If not for you, she would not be dead.”

  “Don’t tell me you killed her too? Your best friend? How could you?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Alisz shrieked. “It was you.” She rubbed her free hand across the back of the one that gripped the club. “She was only supposed to have a stomachache, just enough to keep her home one night so you would see your niece taken away for murdering your lover.”

  “You poisoned her?”

  “No! The chicken—I left the package out in the sun, then cooked it spicy. She had not told me about her heart.” Tears glittered in her eyes. “And then at her house I saw you and Fran laughing. You laughed!”

  “We didn’t mean any disrespect,” I said, then wondered why, under the circumstances, I was apologizing. Mother’s training paying off, I suppose.

  “See, you smile now! You are heartless,” Alisz said.

  “Heartless! You think I’m heartless?” A l
ittle voice of caution said I’d better be quiet, better concentrate on a way out of here, but the words poured out. “You hit Andre so hard his brains came out of his head! You killed him only because he was part of your plan. And what about this so-called plan? It didn’t work, did it?”

  “It was a good plan, but the police were stupid. How could the sequins be under his body if not from a struggle with Meg? What about her lipstick? How could they let Meg go?” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “But it was for the best. I realized to make you suffer they all must die one by one.”

  “Did you poison Fran?”

  “Of course. Remember what you said to me? That you could only imagine how bad I must feel that my best friend is dead? I had to bite my lip, knowing you would find out soon. That Fran. Always searching for cosmetics to make her beautiful, to stop aging. And so I filled capsules with penicillin and put in the mint to cover the odor and put them in little bottles, one red and one green, and gave her such specific instructions. I told her to take them at bedtime, unhook the phone, make sure she could not be disturbed or they would not work. I called it—”

  “Beauty sleep,” I whispered.

  She smiled. “Yes, and she was so happy to pay for them. She hugged me and laughed—”

  I screamed and sprang at her, arms outstretched, fingers clawing for her face. I flew across the soundless room in slow motion, seeing her club come up, not feeling scared, only caring that I get my hands on her flesh. Then her mouth stretched in astonishment, and her arms flailed for balance. As I crashed into her falling body, Gene’s voice yelled, “Run, Liz.”

  I leaped to my feet, turning, seeing Gene grabbing Alisz, rolling onto her like a sea lion. She screamed and struggled, her fingers hooking the club that she’d dropped. I lunged for it too, but Gene’s weak voice said, “Godammit, Liz, run.”

  Sobbing, I ran for the door, my ears straining for the sound of the log connecting with Gene’s head. I splashed through the puddles to my car, wrenched open the door and dove in, grabbing my purse, running back, hearing Alisz shrieking. I struggled with the purse’s zipper, skidded on the slick boards of the porch, caromed off the door frame, and suddenly stood inside the room again, gun outstretched in shaking hands, in the dim light seeing a figure once more on her feet raising a club.