Nowhere to Hide

by Carlene Thompson

  Infuriated, Jean swung at her, but Marissa dodged. Attacked by two women in the same day, she thought, a breath away from bursting into hysteria. Bea and Jean—women everyone thought were kind and harmless. But they weren’t. There was a difference, though—this one was cunning.

  Terror rushed through Marissa. This woman was going to kill her. Then she looked at Eric. Even in the dim light, she could see his alarmingly pale face, the fluttering eyelids, the circle of blood under his leg—the circle growing larger and larger. He can’t lose much more blood and live, she thought, feeling as if an icy rapier were piercing her heart. He’s going to lie on this floor and die because I didn’t do enough to help him, because I wasn’t the fearless, ingenious Marissa Gray I’ve always believed I was.

  No, knew I was, she thought suddenly, fiercely. Know I am. The real Marissa didn’t die when Eric broke our engagement or when Mom died. The real Marissa has just been drifting, letting life take her where it will. I used to control where I went and I will again. Jean is cunning, but I can be cunning, too. It’s time for that chest-pounding Eric mentioned just hours ago. I can be clever and I can be mean and I can be a surprise. If I just let go, Jean won’t see me coming and I can throw her so far off balance that maybe I can save both Eric and me. But especially Eric.

  Marissa tried to calm her breathing, soften her voice. “So you knew nothing about all of this until Mitch got so bad you had to put him on morphine, and when he’d had a certain amount of morphine, he’d start babbling.”

  “I told you that,” Jean said disdainfully.

  “Babbling, Jean. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time. But you were determined to believe anything bad he said about himself, to find out as much as you could about Mitch Farrell. That’s why you didn’t take him to the hospital. You wanted to keep him here all to yourself and torture him by withholding morphine, giving him half doses, asking him a hundred questions. Maybe you are right about Dillon being his son—he committed adultery. But what have you been doing? You’ve been killing people!”

  “The people Dillon managed to get in his power, just like Satan does.”

  “You don’t believe in God, but you believe in Satan?”

  “Don’t try to confuse me. I killed those people because they were as evil as Dillon. They did what he told them to do to protect themselves. If they hadn’t been like him, they would have stood up to him. They wouldn’t have injured and killed and let Dillon kill for them and kept their mouths shut. They would have told the police about what they’d done and about Dillon. Instead, there they all were, Dillon’s minions, basking in their fine lives like they’d never done a wrong thing. It was up to me to punish them for their evil!”

  “Let’s talk about evil, Jean.” Marissa made her eyes flash and turned her voice to acid. “Do you know what I think? You were shocked when Mitch married you. Then you gave him nothing except your fawning love and your plain face and your bony body—no daughter, no son. He started working late all the time. You had to suspect there might be another woman. Almost any woman would suspect her husband in those circumstances.

  “I also think you’ve suspected for a long time that Dillon was Mitch’s son. You’re too smart, too observant, not to notice how Mitch acted around the boy when Dillon was here. I think you hated Mitch for having an affair and you hated him even more for not being here when Betsy died! He was with another woman when you were peeling potatoes instead of watching your child as closely as you should. You let her die!”

  Jean screeched at her, launched, and missed again. She held up the gun and tried to cock it, but her hands trembled while Marissa went on relentlessly: “You killed people you’d decided were evil. You decided. Is that your job?”

  Jean looked at her with flaring nostrils and eyes more bloodshot than usual. “I don’t have to explain myself to you!”

  “Then why have you been doing it all evening, Jean? Why have you been spinning out your sad tale about your horrible husband and your dead child? You want sympathy, and when you don’t get it you get mad, and that’s when you get dangerous.”

  “I was never dangerous before Mitch started telling me all the awful things he’d done!”

  “I see. You were a paragon until less than two weeks ago when you decided to start messing with your dying husband’s morphine dosages and got him talking. Then you became a killer, murdering people because they’d been involved with Dillon.” Marissa made herself laugh softly. “It’s ridiculous. People don’t change that quickly, Jean. Maybe you did have a psychotic break—my sister would know more about that than I do—but it didn’t come out of the blue. And if you’d had one, you wouldn’t have been so…organized about your killings. You never left one trace. You perfectly executed your little scare tactics—my christening dress and the picture of Dillon and me in the grave, the postcard to me signed with ‘D.A.’ the picture of Tonya and Andrew decorating their Christmas tree, also signed ‘D.A.’ Laying a few things around the Archer house, including my picture, to make it seem like Dillon was staying there. And maybe worst of all, putting the ring I’d given Gretchen, the ring Mitch had been keeping since her death, on her grave, all wrapped up like a present.

  “Those were extremely clever acts. Sly. Not the work of a woman who’d just learned something horrible and went to pieces. I’m sure you started the rumor that Dillon had come home before you went on the vengeance spree you claim wasn’t wrong. If it wasn’t wrong, why did you intend to keep it a secret forever? You were never going to confess to your murders. You were never going to confess about calling poor Bea Pruitt, a woman who’s never hurt anyone and telling her a lie about me threatening to kill Buddy, a lie that will probably result in her spending years in a mental institution.

  “You have mental problems, Jean, much worse than Bea, and I don’t mean problems caused solely by the loss of Betsy. You’ve probably had them since you were a girl working like a man on that farm of your father’s and you’ve ended up destroying more lives than Dillon has.”

  Marissa went on, frantically reaching for anything she could say to enrage Jean. “I don’t think Dillon started believing I was his sister because we have the same color eyes. I think you dropped hints and he decided that was the truth. You took verbal shots at Mitch and at my mother. You envied her beauty and her charm and the love she had from her husband—that’s why you set fire to her rose garden. You’d helped plant it, but everyone thought of it as Annemarie’s rose garden. Now you’re trying to ruin her reputation and turn me into the result of an affair.”

  “You are!”

  “You thought Mitch had replaced Betsy with me and that’s why you tried to send me into the Orenda River in that wreck—because Betsy died in the Orenda River.”

  “Yes. If my daughter died in the river, Mitch’s daughter would, too.”

  “So you thought I’d die because I’m Mitch’s daughter, but it didn’t work, Jean. I’ve loved Mitch all my life, but I will never believe I’m his daughter, because I’m not!”

  “You are Mitch’s daughter!”

  “Then that would make me Betsy’s sister and Dillon her brother!”

  “No!” Jean shrieked. “No!”

  “You can’t have it all ways, Jean. You can’t have Dillon and me as Mitch’s children and not have us related to Betsy. It just isn’t possible.”

  “You and Dillon are no relation to Betsy,” Jean’s guttural voice rolled.

  “Jean, my morph…please.” Mitch’s voice was so low and scratchy, Marissa could barely hear it. “Such pain. Please.”

  Jean didn’t even look at him, but Marissa did and saw that his gaze was fixed on her as his left hand barely tapped the bed. Was it uncontrollable movement? Marissa wondered.

  “Aren’t you going to give him something for pain now, Jean? Haven’t you made him watch enough?”

  Jean’s eyes narrowed. “No. Not quite.”

  Marissa’s gaze flashed back to Mitch, whose left hand tapped harder on the bed. He
was signaling her, she realized. But what did he want?

  Jean stood on the right side of the bed, close to Eric, who wasn’t moving, whose eyes had closed. She still held the gun, but her hands shook and her eyes looked wild and unfocused.

  “What do you think is going to happen to you after all of this, Jean?” Slowly Marissa took a small sideways step from the foot of the bed, hoping to inch her way up to Mitch’s tapping hand. “Do you think you’re going to just run away?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you have all of your papers in order? Birth certificate, driver’s license, credit card? Oh, wait, you couldn’t use any of those because they all have your name on them. Even your credit card. Have you been stockpiling cash?”

  “Yes!” Jean answered triumphantly. “I have cash.”

  “You must have been saving it for quite some time.” Marissa took another small step. “More than two weeks.”

  “I was saving it for a rainy day. Some time when Mitch and I might need money in a hurry. I was thinking of me and Mitch.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you were,” Marissa said sarcastically. “And what about your father’s land? Rather, your land. Everybody always wondered why you didn’t sell it. Even a chunk of it would have given you and Mitch the money to lead a more comfortable life, take some trips, buy a bigger house and a boat like my dad’s. Mitch loved going out on that boat.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “No. And you weren’t going to sell the land so you could buy some nice things because you were punishing him.” Another step. “You’ve been punishing Mitch for years. Long before Betsy died. Was it because you thought he only married you for the land? You wanted to see if he’d stay with you if you didn’t sell it? Or was it because you suspected he was with other women?”

  “I was saving for our old age! I wanted us to be comfortable! To be able to live a nice life!”

  One more step. “Comfortable doing what? Leaving Mitch to his woodworking while you tended your flower gardens? Oh, he’d probably be too old for the woodworking and you’d have arthritis in your knees and couldn’t stoop down to dig in the dirt.” She glanced down and saw the edge of something dark beneath a fold in the sheet. Mitch tapped at it once, then moved his hand. “I guess you two could have just stayed closed up in this house together. He wouldn’t be the handsome sheriff anymore. You’d finally have him all to yourself, completely under your control.”

  “I never wanted to control him! I just wanted him to love me!”

  “He did, Jean. Maybe not in that wild, passionate way we see in the movies, but he loved you, he cared about you, he stayed with you, he protected you. It’s just that he couldn’t make you his whole life. No man could.”

  “Yes! A real man of character could have loved me the way I should have been loved!”

  In a panic, Marissa thought she’d run out of things to say. She was reaching the end of her endurance. Then she thought of the person who was the crux of the situation.

  “Have you thought about what Dillon will do if you kill me?” Marissa asked, smirking. “He thinks I’m his sister and he loves me. He’s probably convinced himself I love him, too, so if you murder me, he’ll hunt you down. You know he will. You’ll have nowhere to hide from him. He’s smart and relentless and totally without a conscience. He’s more clever than even you and he’s younger than you. He’ll run you to the ground and make you pay for killing me, Jean.”

  “He won’t find me.”

  “Yes, he will,” Marissa said with slow, quiet certainty as she touched the dark, hard corner under the sheet. She even moved it slightly. A gun. God, Mitch had a gun tucked under the sheets. For a moment, Marissa thought she might faint from surprise and relief; then she saw Jean looking intensely at her eyes. “He won’t have any pity for you, no matter how many sad stories you tell him,” Marissa said coldly. “He’ll look at you and see only the ugly, possessive, conniving murderer of his sister!”

  “No!” Jean screamed. “I’m not those things, you little bitch.” She raised the gun and pointed it toward Marissa. “I’m a good woman with an evil husband who I’ve kept alive so he could see me kill the man he wishes was his son and the spawn of his and that whore who was your mother. He’ll live to see it—”

  Mitch rose in his bed and let out a bloodcurdling scream Marissa knew she’d remember until she died. She raised the gun, cocked it just like Mitch had shown her many years ago, and pointed it at Jean just as Jean pointed her gun at Marissa. They fired at the same time, the noise sounding as if the whole world were shattering. No one in the room moved. Then slowly, Jean toppled onto Eric, blood from her head spilling over his chest. Marissa stood still for a moment, then slowly looked around at the small hole in the wall a good foot to her left.

  As soon as she realized she was still alive, she ran to Eric. She pushed Jean off him and took his face in her hands. It was white—even his lips. “Eric,” she cried. “Eric!” But he didn’t open his eyes; he didn’t make a sound.

  Then she heard the thin wails of police cars and ambulances as they turned into the slanting driveway of the Farrell house.

  Epilogue

  Marissa and Eric sat in the Grays’ family room, watching the New Year’s Eve festivities on television. Catherine and James had gone to a small New Year’s Eve party at James’s parents’ home. “My sister is turning into a party girl,” Marissa said. “I’m beginning to think I should worry.”

  Eric, his leg swathed in a cast that almost reached the trunk of his body, grinned at her. “I think your sister has finally gotten her mind off her studies long enough to have some fun.”

  “She has another semester of work to do before she gets her license.”

  “You know something? You sound like she’s twelve and you’re her mother. Relax, Marissa. Catherine knows what she’s doing. I think she proved that last week.”

  Marissa frowned. “I’m glad I didn’t leave her a note saying we were going to the Farrell house. She and James would have walked into that nightmare.”

  “And they wouldn’t have been able to save us. Not to be selfish or anything.”

  “Oh, of course not, sweetie.” Marissa went back to frowning. “But we were gone; there was no note; they couldn’t reach me; no one could reach you. The cops couldn’t even raise you on your walkie-talkie. Robbie knew where we were going and, bless her, harangued about there being trouble at Mitch’s until everyone gave up and came on what they thought was probably a wild-goose chase.”

  “I was the hero last week. This week is Robbie’s turn.”

  “Her father will be so proud of her, not that he isn’t already.”

  Lindsay pranced into the living room wearing a party hat and holding a stuffed animal in her mouth. “I can’t believe she’s not fighting to remove that hat you brought her,” Marissa said.

  “She knows it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re having our own, private party. Besides, you and I are wearing them.”

  “And looking like complete fools. Anyway, thank you for her Christmas present, too. I think the one animal she didn’t have was a stuffed panda. She loves it.”

  “Let’s make certain she doesn’t love it too much. I’d hate for you to take her for a walk and have her go in hot pursuit of what she thinks is her panda only to find out it’s a skunk.”

  Marissa started laughing. “Given the luck we’ve had lately, it’s bound to happen.”

  Eric tightened the arm he’d draped across her shoulders. “I don’t think our luck has been so bad. We’re…seeing each other again.” Marissa noticed he was careful not to say they were “back together.” “We’ve discovered what was wrong with Gretchen. We have her ring. Mom was so grateful to get it.”

  Marissa sighed. “Even though your parents have the ring again, I still feel guilty because we didn’t tell them about Gretchen’s essential tremor.”

  “We will soon, when they’ve gotten over the shock of everything that’s happened.”

  “Such as you being alive. Eri
c, you were so close to death from blood loss.”

  “But you, my darling one, saved me. You stood up and talked so loud and so fast and said such awful things, you knocked Jean for a loop. Then you came up with a gun.”

  “Mitch always loved to put those little secret hiding places in the things he made, like that little table by his bed. I guess Jean didn’t know he had a gun hidden in there, but he got it when she left the room to call and tell us he was dying. It must have been a tremendous effort for him.”

  “Jean must have forgotten both to search the table and that you’re a good shot thanks to Mitch’s lessons. You saved the day.”

  “I didn’t save him.”

  “Nobody could save Mitch, Marissa. But he lived two more days, enough to know that you and I were all right. Enough to tell you a few things you still didn’t know.”

  Marissa nodded, then made a decision. “He lived long enough to tell me that after Dillon killed Gretchen, he knew what he had to do. He told Dillon he’d get him out of the city, told him to go fishing with Buddy, hit him on the head, and Mitch would be waiting in a car in the woods on the other side of the Orenda. And he was. Then deep in the woods where they were far away from everyone, he killed Dillon.” Eric looked at her in astonishment. “He killed his own son before Dillon could do any more harm. That was one secret Jean wasn’t able to pry out of Mitch.”

  “My God, Marissa. All this time people thought Dillon was alive!”

  Marissa shook her head. “Well, he wasn’t. And although I know how horrible Dillon was, I still almost cry when I think of what Mitch had to do,” Marissa said.

  “That’s because you know you were the only person in the world Dillon loved—his sister, or so he thought.” Eric shook his head slowly. “I don’t suppose Mitch told you where he buried Dillon.”

  “No.” Marissa gave Eric a slanting look. Mitch hadn’t told her where he’d buried Dillon, but she knew, maybe by instinct, maybe because of the beautiful photograph of the Gray’s Island church on the old desk in Mitch’s room. She was certain Mitch had waited until night and taken his son’s body to Gray’s Island. Dillon lay buried there, probably near the church, and in less than a hundred years the entire island would be underwater.