“Why now, Eric? What made you decide to kill Pete now?”
“That’s all Claudia’s fault,” Eric answered bitterly. “She’s determined to seize power over the family pursestrings. And believe me, Mitch, the day Claudia gets Mom declared crazy is the day she puts Four Chimneys Farm out of business. She hates us. That’s why the twisted bitch wants control—so she can plow us under. That’s why we came up with this plan. She has her plan, we had ours.”
“Small difference,” Mitch argued, hearing the whirring of a helicopter in the distance. “Hers doesn’t involve killing anyone.”
“Doesn’t it? She wants to take away Mother’s control over her own life. Isn’t that as bad as having her killed? So what if the old girl likes her brandy? So what if she hoards candy bars? You’re supposed to make allowances for the people you love, not destroy them. Besides, this has never been about Mother. It’s about how Claudia wants to ruin us. We had to fight her.”
Many more vehicles pulled up outside now. Doors slammed. Voices shouted. Boots pounded on the pavement. The hostage unit from Meriden. They sounded like an invading army. As Mitch lay there on the church floor in terrified silence, blood pounding in his ears, he wondered if they would try to negotiate with Eric. Or would they just blow him away? So far, Mitch’s cell phone had remained silent. No one had called yet to establish contact.
Danielle started toward the windows for a look, the floorboards creaking under her feet.
“Stay away from those windows!” Eric cried out, his knife blade nearly pricking Mitch’s skin. “Are you nuts?”
She halted in her tracks. “I-I’m sorry. Just wanted to see.…”
“Sit back down, you idiot!”
Danielle returned to her pew, cowering.
Ordinarily, Mitch might have felt pity for her. But he was well past the point of extending any human kindness to Danielle Vick-ers. “Your farm matters that much to you?” he asked Eric.
Eric blinked at him in surprise. “Well, yeah. Small farming’s our mission. We bring something vital into people’s lives. We connect them to the land. If we lose the farm that connection will be gone forever. And we’ll go under by next winter without help. We need more land, more sheep, more money. Lots more. Mother won’t loan it to us. She’s into the whole Yankee self-reliance thing.”
“And the banks won’t extend us another penny,” Danielle added woefully, her eyes searching Mitch’s for understanding. “We’ve devoted our adult lives to Four Chimneys Farm, Mitch. We can’t go under. We just can’t.”
“By taking the Gullwing we squared away our cash flow problems until green market season,” Eric explained. “By eliminating Pete we’ve added nearly twenty million dollars to the family piggy bank.”
“You make it all sound like sensible financial planning,” Mitch said in disbelief.
“We were responding to Claudia’s provocation,” Danielle insisted. “If she hadn’t been so greedy, none of this would have happened. It’s all her fault.”
“Guy Tolliver’s death was her fault, too?”
“Tolly was nothing more than a sleazy opportunist,” Eric said disgustedly. “He didn’t deserve to inherit the family’s art collection. “That’s ours.”
Mitch considered their words for a moment as the helicopter drew nearer and the edge of that knife remained poised to sever his jugular vein. How long would he last if Eric used it? How many minutes before his life would bleed right out of him—five, ten? “Did it ever occur to you two that Claudia might be genuinely concerned about Poochie’s health? She refuses to see a doctor. If Social Services launches a mental competency investigation then she’ll be forced to see one. What if that’s why Claudia is doing this?”
“Not possible,” Eric responded. “You don’t know my sister like I do.”
“Here’s what I know,” Mitch said. “I know that you’ve never been the happy, smiling people who you appeared to be. You’ve fooled pretty much everyone in Dorset. You sure fooled me. Danielle, that way you cozied up to Mark was really smooth. Plus you are truly gifted at dishing up vicious, untrue family gossip. First you convinced me that Claudia drove Mark away by being such a greedy bitch. Then you told Des he might have stolen the Gullwing to get back at her. None of which was real. Mark is just a middle-aged guy going through a rough patch. It’s you who planted the idea that he left her over her so-called power grab. Which I’m still not convinced was ever any such thing. I think Claudia loves Poochie and is trying to do right by her. You convinced people otherwise. But let me ask you something stupid—if you guys were so desperate for money why not just kill Poochie from the get-go?”
“She’s my mother,” Eric said simply. “I could never kill her.”
So he’d been wrong about that part. So had Des. Not that it mattered anymore. Staying alive mattered. Seeing Des again mattered. “But you could savagely kill Pete and Tolly,” he pressed on, fighting the fear in his voice. “And be damned calculating about it, too. You made it seem as if someone not too bright had done both killings. First by planting Pete’s haul at the Kershaw place. Then by making Tolly’s death look like a clumsily staged suicide. Although that didn’t exactly stick. People like Des have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”
“Maybe they do,” Eric admitted. “But they’re under enormous pressure to crack a case like this. If you hadn’t shown up here I guarantee you they would have dragged the Kershaw brothers away today and interrogated them day and night until one of them signed a confession.”
“Des doesn’t do things that way.”
“She’s just the resident trooper. It would be out of her hands.”
Eric wasn’t totally off base, but Mitch wouldn’t admit it to him. “I’ll concede that you successfully drew the law’s attention away from yourselves. You even have a back-up fall guy waiting in the wings.” He turned his attention back to Danielle. “Last night at the Mucky Duck you told me Mark withdrew his last five grand so he could run off with you. Was that for real?”
“I let Mark believe it was,” she answered in a tiny voice. “He thinks that… that we’re involved.”
“He’s not alone. When I saw how you looked I figured you and he had just had a tumble upstairs on his office sofa.”
She shot a nervous glance at Eric. “That’s never happened.”
“Of course not,” Mitch said. “The reason you looked that way was because you’d just dragged Tolly’s body into the woods and poured lye down his throat.”
“It’s true,” she admitted. “We took care of him as soon as we left Claudia’s house. Poochie didn’t make it easy for us, returning to Claudia’s for dinner the way she did. That was why we had to carry him down to the woods.”
“Meanwhile, Mark makes for a great suspect. He’s a family insider, broke, emotionally troubled. I can see why you’d point the law right at him.”
“Not exactly,” Eric said darkly.
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“That wasn’t our intention. We had long-term plans for Mark.”
“I don’t understand, what did you?…” Mitch’s voice caught in his throat. “My God, you weren’t done, were you? You were going to kill her. That’s it, isn’t it? Claudia was next.”
CHAPTER 26
BEYOND THE FREEZERS THERE was a doorway.
As she passed through it, Des left behind those last rays of daylight streaming down through the cellar doors and encountered utter darkness. She had no idea where any light switches were. And she wasn’t about to grope around for one. Those wide-planked floorboards over her head had shrunk and swelled across so many generations of seasons that she could see cracks of daylight between them. If she turned on a light Eric and Danielle might see it between the floorboards. She couldn’t take that chance.
She waved her flashlight beam ahead of her, pointing it downward at the concrete floor. She was in the furnace room. It was a mammoth furnace compared to the one in her own cellar, as was the oil tank next to it. Across th
e furnace room was another, narrower doorway. And one, two, three concrete steps up to the low, vast expanse of the cellar. She scoped it out with her flashlight. Could not see to the other side of it, where the cloakroom stairs were. Only clutter. A narrow path wove through all of the junk that was crowded in down there beneath a honeycomb of electrical conduits and copper water pipes.
Des gathered herself, the damp cellar floor ice cold against her stocking feet, her ears ringing in the heavy silence. It was so quiet she could hear mice skitter along next to the foundation. And it reeked of mold. This was not good. Des happened to be super-allergic to mold. The merest whiff could set her off. But she couldn’t, mustn’t sneeze. Sneezing was out of the question. Don’t even think about it.
She proceeded, moving slowly and carefully. She had to stay in a crouch. If she straightened to her full height her head would smack into one of those pipes. Which would make a serious thud. She could not afford that.
As she crept her way along, Des suddenly heard the floorboards creak directly over her head. She froze, her stomach muscles fluttering involuntarily. Eric and Danielle were right there, inches away from her. Mitch was right there. She could even hear their muffled voices. Couldn’t make out what they were saying.
She moved forward, her head down, silent as a cat now. Even the slightest noise might alert them to the fact that she was down there. And there was no telling what Eric might do. She couldn’t, mustn’t make a sound. And yet already she was starting to sniffle. And now, God, she could feel it coming on. She was going to sneeze. And couldn’t stop it. But she absolutely had to. She squeezed her nose between her thumb and forefinger, squeezed it so hard her eyes watered. A strangled, volcanic sob erupted deep down in her throat. Briefly, she felt as if she might choke. But then the sneeze passed. Wiping her eyes, she kept on going, using her flashlight sparingly.
She encountered stacks of aluminum folding tables. These were used for special events like the big white elephant sale that the church held every July, when its front lawn became a veritable bazaar of used toasters and television sets. Now the path snaked among piles of cardboard boxes that were marked XMAS. These held those electric candles that were positioned so charmingly in every one of the church’s windows during the holiday season—those exceedingly delicate electric candles with their fragile little glass bulbs. Des edged her way even more carefully now. Because she did not want to nudge one of these boxes. If she broke a bulb it would sound like a grenade going off. She inched her way slowly between them, flashing her light from pile to pile, careful, careful…
So careful she let out a gasp when she ran smack dab into Mary and Joseph. And the infant Jesus. All of them life-sized. All of them right there before her.
She was so startled her elbow jostled one of those very boxes of electric candles. A box that was perched on top of a pile. And was now teetering from that pile and about to fall four feet to the concrete floor. She lunged for it and caught it just before it fell, its contents rattling faintly. But it did not crash.
Sighing hugely, she returned the box securely to the top of the pile and had herself another look at what she was looking at: It was the wooden figures from the beautiful creche that the church erected on its front lawn every Christmas. Sure, there were the three kings ahead of her in the flashlight’s beam. And the shepherds. And the three-sided manger. She took it all in as she crouched there, listening to the hammering of her heart.
Now she heard something else. Rustling behind her. And footsteps approaching softly. She whirled, her SIG drawn. Two sets of eyes gleamed at her in the flashlight’s beam. Soave and Yolie were coming up behind her, crouched low.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered, holstering her weapon.
“We couldn’t let you go in alone,” Soave whispered in response.
“If we go for the shot,” Yolie explained, her mouth to Des’s ear, “we can bring it from three different angles.”
“Plus Yolie’s way better than you,” Soave added, mouth to her other ear.
This much was true. Des was no slouch, but Yolie was one of the top three gunners in the whole state. If it did come to throwing shots from up in the balcony, she’d be mighty valuable. Firing downward was just about the most difficult shot you could attempt. No matter how much you compensated, you still had a natural tendency to come in high.
“Both of you should go back right now,” Des whispered insistently.
“And you should shut up,” Yolie whispered back.
“But what about proper procedure?”
“Girl, we could care less about procedure.”
“We care about you,” Soave agreed.
Des mouthed the words, “Thank you.” And warned them to watch out for Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
They didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about but they both nodded their heads. Then the three of them pressed on.
CHAPTER 27
“MY SWEET BITCH OF a sister was planning to hang herself tonight,” Eric revealed, his lip curling at Mitch unpleasantly. “Who wouldn’t buy that? Just think of the mess she’s made of her life. Mark inherits what’s hers, and Danielle has him comfortably under her thumb. With proper handling, Mark would have kept us afloat for several years.”
“By which time Poochie would die of natural causes and all of your money worries would be over,” Mitch said, glancing up at Danielle. She looked pale and frightened in the front pew.
“Exactly.” Eric merely looked determined as he knelt over Mitch, that knife held to his throat. It trembled slightly in his hand.
“And Bement? How did he figure into this?”
“He doesn’t,” Eric replied. “The kid could care less about money. All he thinks about is the Kershaw girl.”
“Eric, you sure were right about one thing,” Mitch concluded, pinned there on the floor with his hands lashed beneath him, his shoulders throbbing. “Madness runs in the family. You’re insane. You both are. And now you’re totally screwed. You should give yourselves up. Because they’ll never agree to your demands. You have no chance of getting away. None.”
“You’re wrong, Mitch. Everything’s going to be okay. But what’s taking them so long?”
“The snipers have to get in position,” Mitch explained, fighting off the overwhelming impulse to panic. He had to keep talking. As long as he was talking he could hang on. But how much longer? “Those guys, they’re amazing. They can zone-in on a freckle from a half-mile away. I imagine they’ll set up on the neighboring rooftops.”
Eric glanced around at the windows, his eyes bulging with alarm. There were so many windows. So many different vantage points. He scrambled back behind Mitch, hugging him to his chest as a human shield. “They wouldn’t shoot up a church,” he argued.
“Won’t have to. You asked for a car to take us to the airport. As soon as we walk out the front door they’ll shoot you dead in your tracks. You won’t even know what hit you.”
“Don’t try to rile me, Mitch. They’ll agree to our terms. We’ll be fine.”
“You two will never be fine,” Mitch said stubbornly. “You don’t trust each other.”
“Of course we do,” Danielle objected. “You’re wrong, Mitch.”
“Really? Then why did Eric tell me he thinks you’re fed up with him? I think he’s terrified that you really are having an affair with Mark.”
“I love my husband. I’d never do any such thing.”
“Eric doesn’t believe that, Danielle. He was afraid you’d try to pin this all on him and run off with Mark. It’s the classic double-cross. Think Out of the Past. Think The Killing, which it might interest you to know was directed by a young unknown named Stanley Kubrick.”
Danielle shook her head at him. “I don’t know what any of this means.”
“It means your boy has been fitting you for a pair of hot pink Jimmy Choos.”
“Now I really don’t know what you mean. But you’re wrong about us, Mitch. We’re together. We’v
e always been together.”
“I’m not buying that, Danielle. You see, I’ve just spent quality time with someone who knows the real Eric. And she told me his so-called mission in life is all one big, pesticide-free scam. That he’s strictly about himself.”
“What are you talking about now?” Eric demanded angrily. “Who are you talking about?”
“A girl who deserved to be treated a whole lot better than you treated her,” Mitch answered, feeling the man’s entire body tense up. “You talked a lot about yourself in bed, Eric. You talked too much.”
Danielle peered at her husband warily. “Eric, what is he?…”
“N-Nothing, hon.” Eric’s voice suddenly cracked like an adolescent schoolboy’s. “A perfectly innocent situation. Just this girl who was hung up on me years and years ago.”
“Which girl?”
“Allison Mapes,” Mitch informed her.
“She’s the little teenager who used to go to the green markets with you.”
“Right, I-I was mentoring her.”
Mitch let out a hoot. “He was putting it to her for months and months, Danielle. She told me he couldn’t get enough of her.”
Danielle gaped at Eric in horror. “You were cheating on me with that child?”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Mitch continued, “I was plenty surprised myself. Eric’s such a do-gooder. Up at dawn every morning. He works hard. He cares about the land and the—”
“Oh, shut up!” Danielle screamed. “Just… shut… up!” She’d begun rocking back and forth in the pew, hugging herself tightly as tears streamed down her cheeks. “She was a child, you pervert. She was… my God, how old was she?”
“Fourteen,” Mitch answered as he lay there in Eric’s vise-like grip. “That does constitute statutory rape. And he could still go to jail for it if Allison wanted to press charges. Mind you, that’s the least of your legal worries right now.”
“Bastard!” Danielle spat, rocking back and forth like a distraught mourner.
The Sweet Golden Parachute Page 28
