“Will do. She’s Gabby Von Wolfseck now, you know. She and Keith are expecting their third in July. Their oldest is coming up on fifteen. Already got college scouts watching him pitch. And the middle girl, Tracy, plays a violin that could make the angels weep.”
Joseph Ulm wore a proud grandpa expression and Iris said goodbye and left before he could whip out photos.
The trek to the alpaca barn on the far side of the meadow took Iris almost fifteen minutes. By the time she arrived, the sun had broken through the clouds and she was sweating lightly. Taking off the hoodie, she tied it around her waist and followed the sound of a murmuring voice into the barn. It wasn’t a big structure designed to hold tractors and large livestock. Rather, it seemed to have been purpose-built for the alpacas, a rough lean-to with small pens on either side of a central aisle, most of them occupied by alpacas, and a ceiling that only cleared Iris’s head by a foot and a half. Gaps where the boards didn’t fit together evenly let in jewels of sunlight and air. It felt like a cross between a barn and a chicken coop, and smelled of hay and fresh water.
Iris walked softly down the aisle, an object of curiosity to the alpacas. She stopped when she came to the open door of what looked to be a storage room, filled with sacks of feed. Dust motes twirled in the sun’s spotlight beaming through a small window. Esther, massive in overalls and work boots, crouched beside a brown alpaca, preparing to give it an injection. The animal didn’t even seem to notice the needle go in and butted Esther’s arm when she patted it.
Iris must have made some sound because Esther looked up. “She’s diabetic,” she said, nodding toward the alpaca. “Has to have insulin twice a day.” She stood with effort and disposed of the syringe in a gallon milk jug half full of syringes. Then, she turned and met Iris’s eyes, “I told the police about you, you know. About you trying to kill my father and your father taking the blame for it. You’ll have to pay for what you did.” Her face shone with malice.
Ignoring Esther’s words, she said, “My mother and I talked last night.”
“You’ve caused her a lot of grief.”
Brushing aside Esther’s comment, Iris continued, “She told me about visiting Pastor Matt at your house the night he was attacked. She went there to confront him about molesting me. She knew, you see, what he was capable of since he’d seduced her years earlier. I never knew that. Your mother overheard them talking.”
Iris paused, trying to gauge Esther’s reaction. The older woman’s face remained deadpan, her blue stare un-nerving Iris. Iris shifted, her feet rustling wisps of hay underfoot. “You were there.”
When Esther still said nothing, remained motionless, Iris plunged on. “You know what happened that night, Esther. Have you kept quiet all these years to protect your mother? Here’s what I think happened. I think Glynnis lost it. She heard her husband admitting to raping not only me, but also my mother. She snapped. After my mother left, I think Glynnis picked up the poker, followed Pastor Matt to the cottage, and beat him. No one would blame her, Esther. I’m sure you don’t want to see her name blackened at this late date, but think about my father’s freedom. It’s not right that he should die in prison. Can’t you come forward and tell what really happened, clear my father?” Iris’s voice and eyes pled with the other woman.
Esther blinked slowly. “My mother never lifted a hand against my father. She was a mouse. A pathetic, sniveling little mouse. Gray, blah. What he saw in her, I’ll never know.”
The venom in her voice startled Iris and she found herself looking around surreptitiously. There was a metal bucket, and a wheelbarrow with a small shovel in it, probably for mucking out the stalls. Nothing that looked like a weapon. Iris relaxed a bit, chiding herself for letting Ulm’s joke get to her.
“My mother didn’t go for the poker, she went for the phone.” Anger mottled Esther’s face. “She told him she was going to call the police and turn him in. He laughed at her and left, not bothering to say where he was going, but I knew. I came downstairs to stop her, and found her on the floor in the kitchen, gripping her left shoulder. She was obviously having a heart attack. All I had to do was kick the phone out of the way—she had dropped it—and wait for nature to take its course.”
A chill like the cold metal tine of a pitchfork ripped up Iris’s spine and she jerked. Had she misunderstood Esther? “You—?”
“I showed her the mercy God wants us to show all who suffer or are in need. I put a damp cloth on her brow and I sat on the floor with her, holding her hand and praying for her soul until her spirit left her. She couldn’t talk, so I prayed for her, asking God to forgive her for thinking to betray the husband he had joined her with, asking him to make her passing painless and quick. He was merciful and just, as is his nature. It was less than twenty minutes before she died. But even that was too long.”
Iris stared dumbfounded at Esther, who was eerily calm. Only her last words betrayed emotion. “Too long?” Esther hadn’t admitted to murder, or even lifting a hand against her mother, but surely not summoning help for someone in distress was a crime? It was certainly a moral crime, even if the legal system couldn’t prosecute. And it made Esther one very cold, calculating eighteen-year-old. Iris edged toward the storage room door, uneasily aware that the two of them were alone and isolated.
“I went after my father, of course. I had to tell him about Mother, to assure him that he was safe. I was too late. If only Mom hadn’t taken so long to die, I’d have been there. I could have saved him.” Sorrow contracted Esther’s face. “Your father had already attacked him when I got to the cottage, struck him down and hit him again and again. There was blood everywhere.”
Iris didn’t think this was the time to protest her father’s innocence, so she kept her mouth shut. She touched the door jamb, the unfinished wood rough beneath her hand. A thought struck her. “You must have been very mad at him,” she suggested gently. “At your father. For what he did. No wonder you struck out at him.”
Esther stared at Iris for a second before catching on. She laughed. The sound rang inappropriately through the barn. An alpaca bleated. “You think I hit my father? I would never, ever have hurt him.” Earnestness settled on her doughy face and she took a step toward Iris. “Never. I loved him. He was the love of my life. Even when he left me for Penelope, I didn’t stop loving him. It wasn’t his fault, it was hers. He didn’t want to be the way he was. He fought it, you know, fought against his nature, the way God made him. He used to cry sometimes when he came into my room at night and I’d tell him, ‘It’s okay, Daddy.’ Girls like Penelope and you tempted him, led him into sin. You were Bathshebas to his David, displaying yourselves, luring him away from God and me.”
Something in Esther’s voice prickled the hairs on Iris’s arms. She remembered the sensations of water and terror she’d felt when holding Penelope’s bracelet. “Penelope didn’t die in the landslide, did she?” Iris blurted.
“It was an accident.”
Iris didn’t ask what Esther meant. It was too much to process at once. Esther had been Pastor Matt’s first victim. Or maybe not. There was her own mother, after all. At any rate, he had molested his own daughter and when she’d grown too old for his sick tastes, he’d moved on to other girls in the Community. Esther had felt rejected and taken steps to secure her father’s attentions again. Iris breathed quickly, almost hyperventilating at the implications. She sucked in a bit of hay or husk of feed and began to cough hard.
While she was bent forward, Esther grabbed her arm. Her hands were large and the pudgy fingers had a core of steel. Iris tried to wrench away, but Esther pulled her in until their faces nearly touched.
“And you,” she breathed into Iris’s face. “You tried to take him away, too. What none of you ever understood is that he’s mine, that we share a sacred bond, a connection that is eternal. You were a wisp of fog in his life, a moment. Meaningless. I’m the one he loves.” Esther’s fingers tightened.
She leaned into Iris and bore her back against the storage room wall, her bulk pinning her to the splintery slats, breast to breast, thigh to thigh. The intimacy of it was unnerving.
Iris fought down panic. Esther’s flesh enveloped her, made her feel as if she couldn’t breathe. It felt like all of Esther’s three hundred fifty pounds was compressing her rib cage, making it hard to draw in air. Esther was still talking, but Iris had quit listening, intent on getting away. She didn’t have enough leverage to get a knee up into the woman’s crotch. Esther’s hand still gripped Iris’s left arm and she fought to wiggle her right hand free. The boards protested and Iris thought she felt them shift.
“… they’ll all be glad you’re gone,” Esther was saying. “No one will look for you or wonder why you didn’t come back. Not even your own mother.” She maneuvered her hand up and began to wedge it toward Iris’s neck. Her eyes were hard, soul-less sapphires and she pressed her lips together so tightly they disappeared into the flesh surrounding them, making her look eerily like the sock puppet dolls Iris and her mother had made together when she was a child. Esther’s fingers groped for Iris’s neck as her torso mashed Iris to the wall. A rank scent rose from her, adrenaline and sweat and malice oozing from her pores.
Iris knew she only had one shot. As Esther’s fingers dug into her throat, she smashed her head forward into the other woman’s nose and threw herself back against the wall as hard as she could, using all the power of her legs to strain backward. Blood splattered from Esther’s broken nose. The woman bellowed with anger and pain, heaving herself forward to grind Iris against the wall. Esther’s hand tightened around her neck, and Iris’s vision began to dim at the edges, blood pounding in her head.
The wall shuddered. Just a little more … Iris sank down as much as she could, allowing her thighs to push harder. Crr-rack! The boards bent, then splintered under their combined weight. Iris felt a slight gap open between herself and Esther as she fell backward. She flung herself sideways, not wanting to cushion Esther’s fall or be trapped under her. A broken board gouged her thigh. She ignored the pain, wrapping her suddenly free arms around her head and ducking her chin toward her chest.
Iris hit the ground with a hard thud and lay winded for a moment. Dust and debris created a disorienting fog, but she could see the litter of torn and broken boards that had been the storage room wall and part of a pen. Hoofed feet sounded like far-off thunder as the alpacas surged inside their pens, panicked. The ones freed by the wall knocking over their enclosure trotted down the aisle and out the open door. Her left shoulder shrieked with the pain of torn muscles and blood dripped down her leg from where the board had gouged it. Her legs were trapped beneath Esther’s still form.
With her left arm all but useless, Iris scrabbled backward. An anchor. Need something to hold onto. Her fingers brushed cold metal. With a gasp of relief, she hooked her elbow around the water trough’s supports. The metal cutting into her arm, she hauled her body toward it. Bucking and pushing with her legs, she managed to drag them out from beneath Esther’s heavy body. She identified a strange, ragged sound as her own labored breathing, on the cusp of sobbing. Uncoiling her arm from the trough, she pushed to a kneeling position. Grabbing the trough’s edge, she began to pull herself up. A hand clamped around her ankle.
Esther yanked. Iris, still unsteady, fell forward, clipping her forehead on the metal trough. Lights sparkled behind her eyes and everything went gray. She fought for consciousness. If I black out, I’m dead. She kicked out with her free foot, connecting with Esther’s shoulder. Esther’s grip didn’t loosen. Her hands climbed up Iris’s calf to her knee and pulled steadily. Raising her head, Iris glimpsed the other woman’s bloodied, implacable face, and her bright hair, now wild and gooped with something from the alpaca pen. Esther’s breath came in little grunts and her face was frozen into a grimace.
Iris’s good arm swept the ground around her and her fingers scraped a piece of wood. Can’t quite reach … got it! She gripped it, ignoring the slivers that bit into her palm, lifted it high, and swung hard. It glanced off Esther’s head and the woman yelped. Desperate, Iris swung it again, simultaneously kicking as hard as she could. The board snagged on something and came out of Iris’s hand. Esther’s hold loosened and Iris crab-walked backward on her feet and one hand. She struggled up, breathing raggedly, and eyed the prone woman. Her bulk was unmoving, arms flopped forward over her head. A thin rivulet of blood crept from beneath her chin and soaked into the hay. Iris took a cautious step toward her.
“Esther?” She dropped to her knees and saw a bloody nail rising up from the board that lay beside Esther. Iris tore her hoodie from around her waist to stanch the thin trickle of blood seeping from Esther’s neck and dialed 911 with trembling fingers. The small brown alpaca sidled over nervously and nosed Esther’s arm.
“It’s okay,” Iris told the animal, more to comfort herself than to soothe the alpaca. She reached out to pat it, needing its warmth and softness, but it sidled away, leaving a trail of bloody hoof prints. Iris continued to apply pressure to Esther’s wound, unsure if the woman was still breathing. Waves of relief and sadness and confusion rolled through her as she replayed events and Esther’s story in her mind. She thought about treating Esther for shock but didn’t think she should stop stanching the blood to do it, worried briefly about the loose alpacas and whether someone would round them up, and wondered how Jane’s surgery was going. She desperately wanted to talk to Jane. Realizing dimly that her lack of ability to focus and the nausea-inducing headache probably meant she had a concussion, she touched the bump; it felt like a golf ball had embedded itself in her forehead.
A siren, thin at first but then stronger, warned of the ambulance’s approach and Iris yelled, “Hurry, hurry!” before the EMTs were out of the vehicle. Relinquishing her place at Esther’s side to a competent-looking woman, she let another technician help her to her feet, yelping when he tugged on her injured arm. Tears came to her eyes and she knew they were a reaction to the stress and horror of the last half hour, more than to the pain.
“I’m okay,” she told the EMT. “Esther—”
“My partner’s looking after your friend, ma’am. Let me take care of you.”
“She’s not my—” Iris broke off. She stayed silent while the efficient but taciturn EMT hooked her up to an IV that took the edge off the pain, and helped her onto a gurney that slid into the ambulance as easily as a tray of cookies into the oven. I don’t bake, she thought, woozy from the pain medication and the concussion. All the way to the hospital she wondered what kind of cookies Greg Lansing preferred and whether she’d killed Esther Brozek.
forty-six
iris
The doctors swabbed out Iris’s thigh wound and stitched it, put her arm in a sling, stabbed her with antibiotics and a tetanus booster, and admitted her overnight to keep a watch on her concussion. When they let her leave Sunday afternoon, she carried with her the burden of Esther’s death. A doctor who was more Marcus Welby than McDreamy sought to cushion the blow by telling Iris that Esther had died not of blood loss from the neck wound, but from a heart attack. She’d regained consciousness at the hospital and asked for her brother, the doctor said, and Zach had stayed with her until she died.
“She was a walking coronary,” he said gruffly. “Bad family history. Two hundred pounds overweight. It was bound to happen sooner rather than later. Don’t blame yourself.” With a hearty but friendly pat that made her good shoulder ache, he signed Iris out.
Four days later, Iris figured she had told the story of her confrontation with Esther what felt like a hundred times. To many species of law enforcement officials from cops to investigators to ADAs, to her mother and Jolene, to Jane and Lassie and Greg via phone, to Cade, and to assorted other Community members who trickled sheepishly to her motel room door, bearing flowers and good wishes for her recovery. Her mother had offered to let her stay at the cottage to recuperate, but Iris
didn’t think their fragile, newly hatched détente could survive so much togetherness so she had declined and laughed to herself at Marian’s relieved look. Her concussion headache and nausea had finally faded and her shoulder, though painful, was functional. She had little trouble changing the dressing on her thigh and was due to have her stitches removed on Monday. Her injuries went a long way toward convincing the police she’d acted in self-defense and the DA declined to file charges, especially after Zach Brozek filled them in on the conversation he’d had with Esther on her deathbed, where she apparently told him everything she’d told Iris, and more.
On Thursday afternoon, Cade and Iris met Marian at the cottage. Marian and Cade leaped on the story as a means of exonerating Neil. “Of course she killed him,” Marian said of Esther. “She admitted to letting her mother die, practically confessed to killing poor Penelope Welsh, and to being livid about Matthew’s other relationships. Victims. That poor girl,” she said, pausing for a moment. “Who knows how she would have turned out if he hadn’t—? Anyway, she obviously followed him here”—she gestured to the cottage where the three of them sat in the living room—“and hit out at him in fury and hurt, not meaning to put him into a coma.”
“I know a reporter,” Cade said leaning toward Iris with his forearms on his knees. His skin looked clearer than when Iris had last seen him and his eyes seemed less puffy. He hadn’t brought the odor of cigarettes in with him and Iris wondered if he’d given them up. A chased gold band circled his left ring finger and he gave it a self-conscious twist when he noticed her noticing. Iris raised her brows slightly, earning a rueful smile in return. She hoped he and Lila would make it work, and wondered which of them had made the first overture, and how you brought a relationship back from the brink. She’d always shoved hers over the cliff before they’d lasted long enough to merit the term “relationship.” Things would be different with Greg, hopefully. Definitely. She recalled her wandering thoughts as Cade continued.
The Reckoning Stones: A Novel of Suspense Page 27
