Grace Against the Clock (A Manor House Mystery)

by Julie Hyzy

  He didn’t break eye contact and I couldn’t get around the counter without pushing past him. “You told me your wife died of an aneurysm.”

  “She did,” he said. “Now back up. Please. I don’t want to hurt you. But I will.”

  I backed up, banging my behind on the desk. He pointed to the drawers that held my house plans, far along the wall. “Take a couple steps that way.”

  As I inched sideways I toyed with leaping over the counter. It was too high to make it in a smooth vault and there wasn’t enough room for a running start. I couldn’t fight him in hand-to-hand combat. Wes had the advantage of height and weight. He’d take me down in a second.

  Never shifting his attention from me, he slowly reached into the nearest desk drawer, dug beneath a sheaf of papers, and pulled out a gun.

  “I had a feeling,” he said.

  All the blood in my body rushed to my feet. This man, someone I’d considered a friend, had killed Dr. Keay and now was about to kill me. “I’m telling you, Wes, we can talk this out—”

  “No talking,” he said quietly. “There are things I want you to know, but first I need to take a few precautions.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Keeping the gun trained on me, he made his way to the front door, where he flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED and slammed the dead bolt home. He then dimmed the lights. “One thing at a time. I need you in the back room. Hurry up.”

  This was a very quiet part of town. Any faint hope of a passerby seeing me in here faded as I made my way through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. The windows were high and I didn’t remember an exit door from the last time I’d been in. I wished I’d paid better attention.

  I walked slowly, constantly checking over my shoulder, hoping to buy time. I needed to think of a way out of this. Nothing came to mind. “Stop,” he said when we reached a study table.

  I stopped.

  He pulled out one of the table’s heavy wooden chairs. “Right here.”

  I turned. “You want me to sit?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Grace, I don’t want to hurt you. You’re an innocent and you should stay safe. I’ll make you sit if I have to, but I’d rather not.”

  Stay safe? With the gun pointed to my chest, I couldn’t come up with any way around it. I sat.

  “Here’s what will happen,” he said. His words were soft, but his voice trembled. “I’m going to tie you up. Tape you up is more like it.” He reached over and grabbed a wide roll of duct tape he had sitting on top of a box nearby. “I planned for this contingency. I worried that you might figure everything out before I was done. When you brought that newspaper back tonight, I knew you had.”

  “But I didn’t. That is, not until just now.”

  “Either way, you’re an impediment. I have to keep you securely out of the way until the job is finished.”

  “Finished? What else do you have left to do?”

  “You really haven’t figured it all out yet, have you?”

  Using his teeth to help rip long stretches of tape from the roll, he maintained a vigilant hold on the gun. Every ounce of my being urged me to bolt. To run. But I knew I wouldn’t get four steps away before he’d take me down.

  “Hands behind your back, please,” he said.

  I complied, dropping them onto the seat behind me.

  “It would be better if you brought them together around the back of the chair,” he said, as casually as anything. “Your reputation for overpowering your captors makes me skittish. I don’t want to take any chances tonight.”

  I placed my hands around the back of the chair. It was wide enough to make the positioning uncomfortable, but narrow enough for my wrists to cross. He wound a long piece of tape around them.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve never done this before.”

  Hoping his ineptitude would work in my favor, I tried to keep my wrists far enough apart to buy me wiggle room later, but he must have sensed that. He snugged them tighter. Once taped, they didn’t budge.

  “I’m not going to put any of this over your mouth. There’s no chance anyone will hear you, even if you scream bloody murder.”

  That didn’t mean I wouldn’t try.

  He must have read my mind because he said, “No, really. When I first moved here, I originally planned to lure Dr. Keay into this back room. I did sound testing first, to make sure I’d be able to deal with him in private. The stuffed bookshelves work as an effective acoustic barrier.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him here?”

  “The more I thought about it, the more I realized that, as delicious as the prospect was, there was no way to accomplish that and still get away with it,” he said. “The location would make me suspect number one. But it all worked out for the best. My patience paid off. Killing him during the clock fund-raiser turned out to be poetic justice.”

  “Would your wife be proud of what you’re doing?”

  “She’s not here to answer that, is she?” he said with a flash of anger. Softening his tone, he continued, “You need to understand: I’m not a murderer at heart. I hope you can appreciate that.”

  I said nothing.

  “I know you’re disappointed in me and I suppose I can’t blame you. But don’t you agree that the world is better without slime like Keay and his pretentious ex-wife in it?”

  “You’re going to kill Joyce, too?”

  “One more day,” he said. “Couldn’t you have given me one more day?”

  He ripped off a strip as long as his arm, and reached for my right ankle with his gun hand. I tried kicking the weapon away, but he simply dropped the gun and grabbed my ankle tight. I couldn’t get up because my hands were back behind the chair.

  “Grace.” This time his voice was a warning.

  I stopped fighting, concentrating instead on figuring a way out.

  He didn’t say much more as he taped one ankle, then the other to the legs of the chair. “There you go,” he said when the job was complete. “Comfy?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Standing, he picked up the gun and placed it on the table next to me. Far away, though. I couldn’t have reached it without a stretch, even if my hands hadn’t been bound.

  “Joyce didn’t call you to meet her tonight, did she?” I asked.

  His shoulders came up. “A lie. One of many.”

  “Like your wife dying of an aneurysm?”

  “That,” he said, pointing a shaking finger at my face, “was true. If she’d had the surgery she’d been scheduled for, he would have found it before it stopped her heart. He could have saved her.”

  Wes’s eyes grew red. He worked his lips. “Lynn had had heart problems for years. When we flew out here for our consultation, Dr. Keay told us he could fix her.” Blinking, he fought to speak over his choking voice. “He told us—no, he assured us—that Lynn would have a normal life. That she’d be transformed, forever. That we’d have all the time in the world. He lied.”

  “Aneurysms are tricky things,” I said. “I’m no medical expert but—”

  “If she had had the surgery, she would have lived,” he said through clenched teeth. “But she didn’t get her chance because the old lush had to go out and get drunk. Had to get in an accident. Because he was in jail, he couldn’t perform the scheduled surgery.”

  “You wouldn’t have wanted him performing surgery in that condition,” I said.

  “Don’t you get it?” he asked. “If he’d gone home and sobered up, he would have been fine two days later. Everybody said that’s how it went with him. But no. This time he overdid it. And his stupid wife decided to teach him a lesson so she made him stay in jail for those days.” His voice was trembling and he was shaking. “Two days. They canceled Lynn’s surgery. They said that we could reschedule. But she died that ni
ght.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. And I was.

  Wes took his time tidying up. While he worked, he made noises that led me to believe he was holding a conversation with himself. He kept a close eye on me, and whenever his attention turned my way, I stopped trying to stretch against the duct tape holding my hands together. The minute he returned to his tasks, I resumed mine.

  He reclaimed the newspapers and the storage box from the other room and brought them to the table next to me to work. “Those poison bottles we found in your secret passage really are valuable, by the way. That wasn’t a lie. I did quite a bit of research on them.”

  “You did quite a bit of research on the passage in my house, too, didn’t you?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  He met my eyes but didn’t reply.

  “There is a way to unlock from the inside, isn’t there? You planted that evidence at Todd Pedota’s. The bottle and syringes didn’t belong to David Cherk, did they? You took those photographs that the reporter gave to Flynn.”

  He shrugged.

  “Sneaking into the fund-raiser via that wood elevator was a huge risk,” I said. “Someone could have seen you.”

  “An unavoidable risk, and yes, I was fortunate no one saw me, but I did what I had to do.” Raising his voice as he put the newspapers back in the box and covered it, he said, “Your poison bottles are in one of my desk drawers. You’ll find them there later, I’m sure. I hope you get a good price for them.”

  With a grunt, he hoisted the storage box onto its proper shelf.

  “My guess is that you’ll be found here tomorrow or Saturday,” he said. “Someone will notice that the offices aren’t open, and I’m sure the police will break in, looking for me. They’ll find you instead.”

  “And where will you be?”

  He disappeared into the other room again. When he returned this time, he had my purse with him, his hand deep inside. He stopped pawing through it long enough to answer my question. “Gone,” he said. “I’ve had five years to plan this. As soon as I’m finished with Joyce, it will be like Wes McIntyre never existed.”

  “Why not leave now? What good will killing Joyce do?”

  From deep inside his beard, a chilly smile emerged. “Patience these five years has brought me many rewards. Keay at the clock fund-raiser was only part of it.” He pointed to his chest. “Whose idea do you think it really was to have the event in the Marshfield basement? Mine. Joyce is so self-absorbed, however, that she never noticed how I guided her to that decision. Little by little while she was here studying plans, I set up the pieces so that they would fall into place.”

  “I should have realized,” I said. “You had all the answers. You pointed to everyone else. That should have tipped me off.”

  “It did. Unfortunately for me, a little too soon.”

  “Wes, please. Consider disappearing. No one needs to know. By the time they find me, you’ll be long gone. You don’t need to harm Joyce.”

  He actually laughed at that. “Don’t you see? Joyce is basking in the glow of wealth. She’s inherited everything from her ex-husband and thinks her life has taken a spectacular turn for the better. Right now, when she believes everything has gotten as good as it can get—I’m ending it for her. The same way she and her disgusting, drunk husband did for us.” He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and grinned more widely. “I’m telling you, it’s beautiful. Poetic.”

  Convinced grief had driven the man insane, I stopped trying to reason with him. I wondered if, once he was gone, I could hop in the chair and move it forward into the front area, where I would have a better chance of being seen and heard. That was assuming, of course, he left the door open between the rooms. That was another big if.

  He returned to my purse and pulled out my cell phone. “I’ll take this with me to Joyce’s office, and toss it in a garbage can there. That will give the police an interesting trail to follow. At least until you’re found.” His expression grew thoughtful. “I don’t envy you the next couple of days. I know they won’t be pleasant. You’ll be hungry, you’ll be thirsty.” He frowned. “I would have let you use the facilities before I tied you up, but that would have been too much of a risk.”

  “Wes, please. You don’t want to do this. You really don’t.”

  He leaned on one of the bookcases and regarded me. “I’ll tell you what I don’t want to do,” he said. “I don’t want to kill your boss.”

  “Bennett? What does he have to do with any of this?”

  “Didn’t he tell you he was meeting Joyce tonight?”

  My entire body sagged.

  “I guess he didn’t,” Wes said. “Joyce is sweet on him. Sweet on his money, is more like it. She invited him out to dinner tonight.”

  “But he—”

  “No, I don’t think it’s going anywhere either.” He made a face that was supposed to be comical, but came across eerie and cruel. “Especially after tonight. If it hadn’t been for you, they might have had an enjoyable evening and retired to their own beds afterward. But plans changed. My timetable for taking Joyce out was thrown off. That’s your fault.”

  He pointed. “You did that. As soon as you pulled out that newspaper for the day before the scandal, I knew I had to scramble. Just in case you made the connection. Because of you, I had to reconfigure everything and pick a new killing date. Turns out, that’s tonight. It’s Bennett’s bad luck that he’ll be there.”

  “No, no.” My voice came from some primal center of my being. “Can’t you simply tie him up?”

  Wes shook his head. “Won’t work this time,” he said. “Sorry.” He crouched to my level. “I really am. But there’s no way around it.”

  “But,” I tried again, “you’ve avenged your wife’s death by killing Keay. There’s no reason to do this. You’ve gotten what you wanted.”

  He stood up again. “Revenge,” he said, almost to himself, “is one of the purest motivations for killing.” He gave me a condescending smile. “Tonight, for the first time in five years, Joyce is going to get what she truly deserves. Bennett, if he’s still with her, will be unfortunate collateral damage.”

  He picked up a weighty leather bag and threw it over his shoulder. “Can’t be helped. Sorry.”

  He left me then. In the dark. Alone.

  Chapter 32

  Screaming and hopping did little more than render me hot, sweaty, and frustrated. Forcing my body upward with as much power as I could muster while balancing on my toes—the only parts of my feet that maintained contact with the floor—I’d managed to move no more than two inches forward from where I’d begun. All the while, I’d worked my wrists against their duct tape bindings. The tape was made of fabric, wasn’t it? It ought to rip, shouldn’t it?

  I wiggled my hands and twisted my legs, doing my best to loosen the duct tape’s grip. No luck. I expelled a long breath of despair.

  Clenching my eyes, I visualized making headway, and tried hopping and scooching again.

  And again.

  Another two inches. Maybe.

  I’d seen this maneuver in movies: the heroine, taped to a chair, hops across the room to safety. Or at least to a place where she can call for help.

  There’s a reason they call it fiction.

  My chair still firmly attached to my backside, I leaned as far forward as I could, doing my best to peer around the five-foot-tall shelf next to me.

  There were obstacles in the path to the door. Lots of them. Large boxes, piles of books, and other pieces of furniture lined the aisle. Clearly, Wes had anticipated my attempt to bounce my way to the front room. Forget the obstacles: There was no way I’d make it to the door. Not to mention the fact that he’d been sure to close it completely. Even if I could make it that far, I’d have a devil of a time trying to get it open.

  “You gave me way too much credit,” I said a
loud.

  Jerking my wrists up and down, then twisting them as far as they’d go, one way and then the other, I fought the duct tape’s clutches. Wasn’t this stuff designed to be flexible?

  I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth. Summoning every bit of concentration I could marshal, I tensed my wrists and twisted. Tensed and twisted back.

  My eyes popped open when I felt a little bit of give. Not a lot. But some. Enough, I hoped.

  “Come on,” I urged the tape as I struggled against it. “Give it up. You can do it.”

  Sweat beaded up at my hairline, above my lip, and under my arms. Strings of perspiration wended their way down my sides.

  More give, a little looser. The tape fought back, but slowly began to stretch. “Come on,” I said again. “I swear if you let me free, I’ll never make another disparaging comment against you.”

  Talking to duct tape. What was wrong with me?

  I was getting more give with each and every twist of my wrists.

  Twist, tense. Pull. Twist, tense . . .

  One shocking instant later, I was free.

  Bringing my hands up, I quickly wrenched the last remaining pieces of tape from them, wincing as the pale blond hair on the back of my wrists was yanked out, leaving welts on my skin.

  I bent over and fought the tape around my ankles. He’d had more time to get these tight and solid and it took far longer to unwind when the tape kept catching on itself, sticking whenever an end came free.

  My brain began a countdown. Wes had been gone about ten minutes, maybe a little longer. I raced to the front office, gauging where the closest telephone might be. I picked up the landline phone. It was dead. He’d thought of everything.

  At the front door, I threw open the dead bolt and ran out. On this cool evening, with most of the businesses on the street closed for the night, there were zero tourists strolling. I had exactly one second to decide: Should I run up the street who-knows-how-far to find a phone at the first open establishment? Or should I run down the street, three blocks to Joyce’s place of business?

  With Bennett’s life in the balance, I took off for Joyce’s law office.