Slowly, Liss turned to confront the man who had killed both Jane and Nola. “Why, Doug?” she asked. “Why did you do it?”
Yvonne’s willowy body was stiff and her wide, dark brown eyes narrowed once more as she took in the man and the gun in his hand. Then her gaze slid sideways to Liss. “Why is he pointing a gun at us?” she asked.
Liss had to hand it to the actress. She didn’t scare easily. Even as a double murderer advanced on them, armed and dangerous, Yvonne used both hands to smooth back her short cap of blue-black hair with its purple highlights and then slid easily into the role she’d played for so many years on television—the haughty, self-confident, immortal Caroline Sweet of Vamped.
“This is Nola’s ex-husband,” Liss said. “His name is Doug.”
“Know him well, do you?”
“I thought I did.” Boy, had she been wrong! “I guess you didn’t just drop Nola off at the hotel on Thursday night, did you, Doug?”
His thin-lipped smile was devoid of humor. “In fact, I did. But she called me on my cell phone less than fifteen minutes later, begging me to come back.”
Yvonne edged slowly closer to the fence. Liss thought that was the wrong direction to go, but she said nothing. The more distance between targets, the less likely it would be that Doug could shoot both of them. She hoped he wouldn’t fire his gun at all, but she wouldn’t bet her life on it. His desperation showed clearly in his eyes and she could smell the acrid scent of his sweat. He was no longer the polished, overly formal gentleman who ran the funeral home and served as a town selectman. He’d already killed two women and was terrified enough of being found out that he was prepared to kill two more to keep his earlier crimes secret.
“There’s no need for violence,” Liss said in the most soothing voice she could manage. It didn’t sound all that calm, especially when it broke on the last word.
“Don’t you mean more violence?”
His grim expression and the tight grip he had on the gun made Liss’s palms sweat. Her knees felt wobbly, but she held her ground and kept talking. If she could only buy enough time, maybe she could figure out a way to escape. Or she’d be missed, and Dan would come looking for her.
That possibility sent a new wave of panic through her. Bad enough that she and Yvonne were in danger. She would not have the man she loved putting his life at risk. She’d nearly lost him once. She wasn’t going to go through that agony again.
“Yvonne and I won’t say anything,” she promised. “Right, Yvonne? There’s nothing to tell, anyway. We weren’t here. We don’t have proof of anything. And Gordon Tandy thinks Nola killed Jane and then took her own life out of remorse. No one suspects you of anything.”
Doug’s gaze darted back and forth between Liss and Yvonne, but his gun hand remained steady.
“I never thought of you as the type to own a gun,” Liss blurted out. Let alone use one, she silently added. But he carried the weapon with the ease of someone accustomed to being armed. “Do you need protection from all the dead bodies you deal with?” Now she was babbling, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
“Maybe he secretly believes vampires are real.” Yvonne hissed the words, giving them an eerie sound that went well with the maniacal look on her face.
Taken aback, Doug stared at her.
Liss had to tamp down a hysterical bubble of laughter. Obviously, he’d never watched Vamped.
And, in that moment of distraction, she saw her chance.
Liss’s years as a professional dancer had left her with strength and agility. Once she’d recovered from a career-ending knee injury, she’d taken pains to get back in shape and stay that way. Two running steps brought her close enough to Doug to take a flying kick at his gun arm.
Her foot struck his wrist, hard, and the hand jerked upward. His finger squeezed the trigger and the gun fired, but the bullet went wild.
Yvonne rushed at him from the other side. When she threw herself bodily into the air, she kicked him in the chest with both feet. Apparently, her training as a stuntwoman hadn’t been so very far in the past, after all.
Doug fell backward. Yvonne went with him, but the gun flew toward Liss. She scrambled to pick it up. She had no idea how to fire it, or even how to keep it from going off in her hands by accident. She’d be as likely to shoot Yvonne as Doug if she tried to use it. Slipping around them, she tossed it over the edge of the cliff.
By the time she turned back to the pair on the ground, Yvonne was using her fists to beat the crap out of the man who’d threatened to kill her. Doug tried ineffectually to fend off the blows, batting at Yvonne with open hands. A shaky laugh bubbled up and escaped before Liss could quell it. Doug fought like a girl. And Yvonne did not.
Her head jerked around at a shout from the cliff path. Gordon and Dan emerged from the trees at a dead run and skidded to a stop when they got their first good look at the scene in the clearing.
“Well, damn,” Dan said. “You were right.”
He was speaking to Gordon. Liss goggled at them. Gordon had known Doug was involved? It would have been nice if he’d said something! She’d have given him a piece of her mind about that if he hadn’t been fully occupied wading in to separate the combatants. It took considerable strength for him to haul Yvonne off Doug. The moment her blows stopped raining down on him, he curled himself into a ball, sobbing.
Liss didn’t feel a bit sorry for him. In fact, if Gordon hadn’t moved so quickly to get him to his feet and slap handcuffs on him, she’d have gone over there and given him a kick herself, while he was still writhing and whining on the ground.
Yvonne retreated to the fence, leaning against it not because she needed to catch her breath—she wasn’t even breathing hard—but to get control of her temper. Still keeping her eyes on Doug, she reached up to fluff her short hair.
“Try to kill me, will you,” she muttered.
Engulfed in Dan’s tight embrace, Liss rested her head against his chest. She could hear how rapidly his heart was beating.
“You scared the life out of me,” he whispered.
“I didn’t mean to.” She hugged him back, but after a moment, she pulled free and walked over to Yvonne. “That was amazing,” she said.
“You didn’t do so badly yourself. What can I say? Kick-ass women rule.”
They shared a grin and a high five. Right at that moment, Liss didn’t care who had really written the Toni Starling series, not when she owed Yvonne Quinlan her life.
Behind her, she heard Gordon read Doug his rights and ask him if he understood them. A mumble indicated that he did. “Let’s go,” Gordon said, his voice gruff.
“You can’t arrest me,” Doug whined. “I haven’t done anything.”
“You’ve got some nerve claiming to be innocent,” Liss said, marching right up to Doug and getting in his face. “You threatened us with a gun and you killed Jane Nedlinger and Nola Ventress.”
“What were doing with a gun, Doug?” Dan asked. “Most people who use the jogging path don’t need protection from the chipmunks.”
“Back off, Ruskin,” Gordon warned. “This is police business.”
Dan ignored him. “Tandy already had it figured out, you know. All you did today was drive the last nail into your own coffin.”
There was little trace now of the suave, dignified, almost staid gentleman Liss had always imagined Doug to be. “I had no choice,” he whined. “That Nedlinger woman brought it on herself. And then Nola was going to confess. I had to stop her, didn’t I? She ruined my life once. I couldn’t let her do it again.”
“You already told us that you came up here with Nola that night, after she phoned you and asked you for your help,” Liss reminded him. “You said that meeting here was Jane’s idea. But why here?” That still baffled her.
“Can’t you guess? She wanted Nola good and scared and she knew her weakness—her little phobia about the great outdoors, especially at night. It wasn’t hard to discover. Nola never could shut up about herself.”
“She never told anyone about her ghostwriting,” Liss said.
“Her what?” Doug looked blank, which just confirmed Liss’s statement.
“This is not the time or place for an interrogation,” Gordon cut in.
“It is if Doug wants to talk about what happened that night. Isn’t it, Doug? You do want to tell your side of the story, don’t you?”
Doug looked confused. Liss wondered if Yvonne had given him a concussion. She didn’t much care. To her mind, he owed them an explanation for trying to kill them.
“Perhaps you can clarify the situation,” she suggested. “Convince us you’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I need to sit down,” Doug said.
Reluctantly, Gordon allowed his prisoner to collapse atop a convenient boulder. Then he pulled out a miniature audio recorder, turned it on, and recited the date, time, location, and names of all those present. “You’ve been read your rights,” he said. “Do you want a lawyer?”
“No,” Doug said.
Liss repressed a smile. Good. Any confession he made now would be admissible in court.
“You were telling us about Jane Nedlinger, and how she wanted Nola to be frightened when they met up here,” she prompted him.
Doug nodded, then winced and rubbed the back of his head. “Nola told me that the Nedlinger woman had been waiting for her in the lobby when I dropped her off at the hotel. She insisted Nola meet her at the Leap, precisely because it would scare Nola half to death to walk all the way up here alone through the woods in the dark. She was a cruel woman. She wanted Nola to suffer.”
“So you came to her rescue,” Liss prompted him.
“Yes and no.” A sly expression came into Doug’s eyes. “A part of me wanted her to suffer, too. She had a lot of nerve asking me to bring her up here when she knew that just the mention of this place would bring it all back—what she did to me.”
It took a moment for Liss to realize what he was talking about. Then she remembered. It was here that Nola and Stu had been caught—how had Aunt Margaret put it?—“buck naked and going at it like rabbits.” The discovery of Nola’s extramarital affair had led directly to Doug and Nola’s divorce, and to Doug’s public humiliation. No wonder he’d jumped at the chance for a little payback.
“So, you agreed to accompany Nola,” she said aloud. “Did she tell you why she’d agreed to Jane’s demands?”
“She just kept saying she didn’t have a choice, that she had to save her career. She told me to pull into the employee parking lot, so no one would see her leaving the hotel, and she slipped out the back door and into my car. Then we drove down to the Spruce Avenue end of the path and came up that way.”
Doug was calm now, and telling his story in such a matter-of-fact tone of voice that he might have been relating an everyday anecdote to a group of friends. Liss wondered if he’d lost his grip on reality. He didn’t seem aware of Gordon’s audio recorder, and he had a faraway look in his eyes.
“The Nedlinger woman was some startled when I showed up with Nola, but she already knew who I was. She knew all about Nola’s past. That story was going to go into her blog, too, she said, unless Nola was willing to pay what she called a ‘kill fee.’ She said she was building up her retirement fund and she laughed—a real nasty laugh. Nola was ready to pay her off, even if it took all of her savings to do it. I told her not to be a fool. A woman like that doesn’t stop with one payment. And I figured she’d be after me next, demanding money not to repeat all the old scandal. Maybe even suggesting that as a town selectman I could dip into the municipal coffers to keep the good name of the town of Moosetookalook from being smeared in her damned blog.”
Liss found the possibility that Doug might claim to have killed Jane as an act of public service a little hard to take.
“I was so disgusted by her tactless and offensive demands that I started to leave, taking my flashlight with me. There were no lights along the path. All we had to see by were the Nedlinger woman’s flashlight and mine, and it was a miserable, overcast, drizzly night. When Nola realized I was going, she went into a panic.”
His humorless smile combined with his thin face and general boniness put Liss in mind of a grinning skull, an image that made her shudder even before he told the rest of his story.
“The Nedlinger woman grabbed hold of Nola to stop her from leaving and gave her a shake for good measure. I may have wanted to make my ex-wife suffer for her sins, but that doesn’t mean I’d let someone else hurt her. I shoved the bitch. Hard. And she fell. She cracked her head on a rock. She was dead as a doornail. No pulse. Nola really freaked out then, saying I’d murdered the Nedlinger woman. Well, obviously, I hadn’t. It was an accident. But Nola was unreasonable about it, going on and on about how all her secrets were going to come out if we told anyone what happened. To shut her up, I helped her toss the body over the cliff.”
So that it would look more like an accident, Liss presumed. Clearly neither Nola nor Doug had been entirely rational at the time.
“What happened to the rock Jane Nedlinger hit her head on?” Gordon asked in a quiet, nonthreatening voice.
“Oh, I tossed that over, too.”
“Weren’t you concerned about fingerprints?” Liss asked.
“Of course not. You know I always wear driving gloves when I go out at night. I feel the cold in my hands something terrible.”
“So, you’d have gotten away with it,” Liss said softly. “I don’t understand why Nola had to die.”
His derisive snort spoke volumes. “Nola promised to say nothing about what happened up here, but when I saw her the next day, she was in a terrible state. She was fussing about how guilty she felt, how she had never meant for me to hurt anyone. I knew then that I had to take steps to protect myself or she’d ruin my life, right along with her own, by confessing to the police. I suggested she salve her conscience by creating a memorial to the Nedlinger woman. I told her to buy some flowers and meet me at Lover’s Leap. She was reluctant, even though it was still daylight, but I convinced her that I had a way for her to make amends.”
“You walked up the other way, as you had the previous night.” It was not a question.
Doug nodded. “Who would believe it was a suicide if I’d been seen?”
“But she didn’t kill herself, did she? You may have suggested it, but Nola had priorities you knew nothing about.”
Doug shrugged again. His voice was devoid of emotion. “She may have had a little help, but it was what she wanted to do. She was the one with the guilty conscience.” He frowned. “That should have been the end of it. I know dead bodies. No one would be able to say exactly when Nola died. I made certain I was seen at the auction less than twenty minutes later. It was an excellent alibi. I even bid on a few items. I won a hand-crocheted pillow with a cat on it.” He made a moue of distaste.
Silence descended on the little group gathered around the boulder. Doug’s seeming indifference made the tale seem even more hideous.
Gordon cleared his throat. “I think that’s enough. Come on, Doug. Let’s get you back to civilization.”
“Hold on a minute,” Liss said. “I have more questions.”
She waited until Doug looked up, wanting him to meet her eyes. She was momentarily disconcerted by the blankness of his gaze. He seemed to look right through her. She had to swallow hard, but she asked her questions anyway.
“Why did you bring a gun to the tea? Why did you follow me out here? Did you think I knew you were guilty of murder?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Liss MacCrimmon. My wife told me you were looking for me after Lenny’s funeral this morning. What else could you have wanted except to ask nosy questions? And if you were asking, then you were getting close to the truth. Everyone in town knows that when you stick your nose in where it doesn’t belong, people end up in jail.”
“I only wanted to talk to you about your son,” Liss whispered.
He didn’t seem to hear her. She didn’t suppose yo
ung Frank’s attitude mattered now. His life would be shattered when he found out that his father was a murderer. She doubted the funeral home would stay in business after the news broke. That was not the way she’d expected to correct the boy’s lack of respect for the dead, but it would certainly solve the problem.
“If you knew,” Doug volunteered, “then I had to eliminate the threat. I had it all worked out in my mind. I meant to force you into my car at gunpoint and drive you somewhere remote, somewhere I could shoot you and no one would hear. Then I’d hide your body.” He chuckled. “That part would have been easy. I have plenty of caskets. No one would think twice about it if I buried one more, and no one would ever know what happened to you.”
Liss shivered convulsively, although the sun was high in the sky and the day was pleasantly warm. Doug’s voice sounded so ordinary, his tone almost conversational.
He’d followed her when she left the hotel looking for Gordon. He’d overheard part of what she said to Yvonne—overheard his own name. How ironic that, until that very moment, she hadn’t had the slightest suspicion that he was involved.
This time, when Gordon hauled Doug to his feet and led him away, she did not object. As soon as they disappeared around a curve in the trail, she turned to Dan, standing patiently beside her, and walked straight into his waiting arms.
Epilogue
A full day later, Liss was still haunted by Doug’s confession. Filling Sherri in on the details helped. Repetition dulled the sharp edges and reinforced the most important facts: She was safe; Yvonne was safe; and Jane and Nola’s killer would get what was coming to him.
After Sherri left, Liss sat in the rocker in her bow window, waiting. She’d left a message on Gordon Tandy’s voice mail, asking him to stop by. She’d not yet had the chance to clear the air between them on a personal level. She could not move on until they talked.
Gordon arrived just before five that afternoon. Liss invited him in, settled him on her sofa with coffee and coffee cake, and resumed her seat in the Canadian rocker with her hands primly folded in her lap. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dan crossing the town square. She knew the moment he spotted the state plates on the unmarked vehicle parked in front of her house. He stopped dead, right in the middle of the street, then turned back the way he’d come.
Scotched Page 23
