Natalie lowered the phone and looked at the woman holding Paige. “My father says he’s seen Constance Farley.”
“Two years ago. I weighed seventy pounds more. I had long, dark hair pulled into a bun and I wore glasses. And he saw me for exactly three minutes when he came to tell my husband and me how very sorry he was that my son had not survived the surgery.”
Natalie raised the phone again. “Dad—”
“I heard her,” he said thinly.
“She’s standing here in front of me with a gun to Paige Meredith’s head. Please get here as soon as possible. I repeat, do not call the police.” She paused. “And do not bring a gun—”
“A gun! I don’t own a gun!”
“I know you don’t.” Please pick up the emphasis on you, she implored silently.
“That’s enough,” Constance said. “Hang up.”
“Dad—”
“Hang up!’ Constance shouted. Andrew must have heard her. Natalie clicked off the phone. “Lay it down.” Natalie placed the instrument on the floor. “Now we wait”
Natalie looked at Paige’s chalky face. “Please take the gun away from Paige’s head.” Natalie made her voice gentle and respectful. “You’re frightening her terribly, and I’m sure she’s not going to run away, are you, Paige?”
“I won’t move. I swear.” Paige said fervently.
Constance hesitated. “If I take the gun away, I know you won’t make a run for it,” she said to Natalie. “You’re far too noble.”
“I’d never make it to the door.”
Constance smiled. “That, too. I said you were a bright girl.”
The cool drizzle had turned into a lonely rain spattering against the dirty windows of The Blue Lady. Rose-scented smoke drifted out from the candles on the dais. The flames danced and flickered in the musty darkness. “While we wait for my father to come and watch my execution, why don’t you tell me what this is all about?” Natalie said.
“You know that it’s all about Eugene.”
“Vaguely. But I didn’t even know Eugene. He must have been quite the son to warrant all this wanton slaughter.”
Natalie had meant the statement to be a taunt and it worked. Constance’s eyes narrowed. “My son was worth everything. And what I’ve done isn’t wanton slaughter. It’s justice.”
“Pardon me if I don’t understand what in the name of God Tamara and Alison had to do with your son’s death.”
“They had nothing to do with it directly. But their parents did.”
“Innocent children paying for the sins of the father and all that nonsense?”
“It isn’t nonsense!” Constance flared.
“Then explain. Dad can’t get here for at least ten minutes. We have time for you to describe your brilliant plan. How did you pull all this off, Constance?”
“You’re trying to stall me. It won’t work.”
“Stall you from what? Killing me as soon as my father gets here? I don’t think it would work.” She shrugged nonchalantly although everything inside her quivered. “You can talk or we can stand here staring at each other with me thinking you are an absolute lunatic for trying to avenge your criminal, suicidal son. It’s up to you.”
“My son was not responsible for what happened to him,” Constance said with quiet venom. “His problems started a long time ago. With his father.”
“I thought his problems only started in Port Ariel.”
“They culminated in Port Ariel. They started with Hugh.”
“I thought your husband’s name was Walter and he had a government job in Washington.”
“That was all a lie, the fictitious background of Ruth Meadows.”
“Is Ruth Meadows a complete fantasy?”
“Of course not. None of this would have worked if she’d been a complete fantasy.” Constance sighed and looked slightly beyond Natalie, seeing another world. “My father was a professor of anatomy at Ohio State University,” she said. “If you’re wondering where the skull on your bed came from, it belonged to a skeleton he used in class. I kept it after he died.”
“Only now it’s missing a head.”
“No matter.” Slowly Constance lowered the gun from Paige’s head. Relief flickered in the child’s dark blue eyes, but she didn’t move. For an eleven-year-old, Paige was showing remarkable presence of mind.
“So your father was a professor of anatomy,” Natalie prodded.
“Yes. He was a brilliant man, and everyone thought he was kind and quite refined.” She sneered. “In reality he was brutal. He beat my mother and me. And he made us do horrible things. The worst for me was the pigs.” The pigs? Natalie wondered, keeping her gaze steady as Constance dredged up memories. “We had a farm outside of Columbus. My father knew I loved animals, so he made me slaughter pigs. Wrestle them down and slash their throats. Pigs can be quite vicious, you know. It takes great skill and strength to kill one quickly and cleanly, but he made me do it, over and over, until I became a master at it. All that slaughtering later came in quite handy.”
It also traumatized you, Natalie thought in horror. How awful—a young girl who loved animals forced to struggle with pigs emitting high-pitched, terrified squeals as they fought for their lives. Had it been so different for a young Constance than killing humans so many years later?
“I married Hugh when I was twenty,” she went on. “He was an accountant, ten years older than I, very conservative, especially where money was concerned. Believed in living on a shoestring. We did have a lovely honeymoon, though. We spent it here, at The Blue Lady. It was before the fire. I thought the hotel was fabulous—my father had never taken us anywhere. I didn’t see how shabby The Blue Lady had become by the late sixties. I didn’t realize Hugh had chosen it because it was cheap.” She glanced around the musty, cavernous room. “We danced in this pavilion. There was a perfect red rosebud on our table. The mirrored ball sparked so beautifully.”
“You’ve been coming in here and polishing that ball,” Natalie said.
“Oh, yes. Such hard work. At first I thought it was ruined, but I was determined to restore it as best as I could.”
“Why was it so important?”
Constance looked directly at her and smiled beatifically. “I told you we danced here. I wore pink silk. Blue lanterns hung around the outside, making the place look like a fairyland. The light from the lanterns and the flames from the candles on the tables reflected over and over in those hundreds of tiny mirrors. It was magical. And after we danced beneath that glittering ball, Hugh and I went back to our room and made love.” She sighed. “That was the night I conceived Eugene.”
Oh, God, Natalie thought. No wonder The Blue Lady held such significance for Constance. How many nights had she spent in here, polishing that damned ball, recalling, no doubt romanticizing, the night she thought her precious Eugene had been created?
“You did tell me you’d been here before,” Natalie said. “That part was true.”
“Yes. Unfortunately I told Eugene so much about The Blue Lady and Port Ariel, he decided he might like it here, so he applied to Bishop Corporation. He was hired and he met that bitch”
“Viveca Cosgrove.”
“Yes. You should have read his letters about her. I knew from the start she was trouble. Older than he was. An executive. Prosperous. He kept saying she’d been all over the world, she was used to the best. I encouraged him to find someone younger, certainly someone without an adult, disturbed daughter. I was worried. Hugh made fun of him. The boy was so much brighter than his father, so much betterlooking, and Hugh was jealous. He always downgraded Eugene. He told him a woman like Viveca was only toying with him, that she’d only truly be interested in a man with money. Hugh had great influence over Eugene.” She looked meaningfully at Natalie. “He planted the seed.”
“What seed?”
“Why, to embezzle the money, of course.”
“You don’t mean he encouraged Eugene to steal from Bishop Corporation!” Natalie exclaimed.
; “No, his influence was much more insidious than that. He just kept mentioning how he’d heard rumors about what a slipshod operation Bishop was, how loosely it was run, especially the accounting department. And then he’d talk about Viveca and how interested she is in money.”
Natalie stared at her blankly. “That’s it? You think those comments were encouragement for Eugene to embezzle?”
“Hugh planted the seed,” Constance said stubbornly. “He knew how impressionable Eugene was.”
No normal, adult man could be that impressionable, Natalie thought. Viveca made plenty of money as an executive at Bishop, and no one but she knew why she’d broken off with Eugene. He had stolen, plain and simple, but Constance didn’t want to blame him. “Did you kill your husband?” she asked quietly.
Constance’s gaze grew distant again. “I didn’t cut his throat. I didn’t poison him. I just reminded him, day after day, that his son was dead. That his son had blown off his head with a .38 revolver. That his son had still been alive after losing half his brain, and on some level had been aware of what was happening to him on that operating table where your father butchered him.”
Tears had been welling in Paige’s eyes. The child was frightened of Constance and horrified by what she was hearing. Natalie didn’t know how much longer the remarkable control she’d shown so far could hold. Enough of grisly details. “What did you do after your husband died?” Natalie asked quickly.
“Hugh had a heart attack. I could have called the emergency squad and probably saved him, but I didn’t. I watched him writhe and moan until he was gone.” She shook her head. “Then I had a nervous breakdown. I spent nearly a year in a psychiatric ward. At first my sister and her son Jeff came to see me, but only out of curiosity. They thought it was just a temporary little ‘spell.’ That’s what my sister called it. When she realized it was much more serious, the visits stopped. Insanity in the family was embarrassing.
“When I was released, my family would have nothing to do with me. I had to hire a woman to stay with me because I wasn’t up to being on my own. That woman was Ruth Meadows. She’d been an aide at the hospital. Her husband had died and left her with a pile of debts. My stingy Hugh, however, had made us live like poor people while he tucked money away. So much money that could have made life so much happier for Eugene and me. And there was a large life insurance policy.” She gave a brittle laugh. “There I was, all alone, crazy, and wealthy. At least wealthy by my standards. And Ruth’s. She was desperate and not burdened with any high moral sense. So I made a deal with her.”
“To trade identities.”
“Yes. When I first dreamed up the plan I thought it could never work. But the more time I spent thinking about it, working out every detail, planning for every contingency, the more convinced I was that it would work.” She frowned. “Where is your father, Natalie? You don’t suppose he’s gone to the police, do you?”
“No. He knows you’re serious about killing us if any police show up. He’s probably just rattled, running around looking for his car keys or something, but he’ll be here soon. Tell me how you pulled off the identity switch, how you became Ruth Meadows.”
Constance smiled. “It didn’t take a genius to come up with the plan. I didn’t have a driver’s license, but Ruth did. It was the only picture I.D. we had between us. I’d already lost seventy pounds during my illness. I had my hair cut short, had it colored silver, and got aqua contacts so I’d look as much as possible like Ruth. You know how bad those license photos are, anyway. It was a pretty good match.”
Yes, Natalie had always been struck by “Ruth’s” eyes. They were aqua, a shade she’d never seen in nature but one she’d seen in ads for colored contact lenses.
“The houses in Port Ariel and Knoxville are rented,” Constance went on. “That way we avoided any in-depth checking involved with getting mortgage loans. We didn’t use credit cards. We stayed in constant contact so that all correspondence dealing with my husband’s estate, as well as any other important correspondence, could be forwarded to me, then returned bearing an authentic signature, not a forgery.
“I wrote letters to the few relatives with whom I remained in touch and sent them to Ruth, who forwarded them so they would have a Knoxville postmark. Ruth also made certain to be seen every day by her neighbors. She walked her dog. I never appeared in Knoxville. Ruth is the only woman neighbors and business people in Knoxville have ever seen.” She shrugged. “There are recorded cases of this kind of scheme being pulled off for years, but I wouldn’t have risked it. I only needed a few months, long enough to move here and establish myself before I began my work.”
“Your work being the murders,” Natalie said flatly.
“Yes, of course. I made a few friends, including little Paige’s sitter, Mrs. Collins. We attended the same church, were on the same committee. I was just dropping by some leaflets to her tonight when unfortunately Paige recognized me from that night at the Saunders house. She tried to hide it, but those expressive eyes gave her away.”
“You didn’t go to the house to get her so you could use her to lure me here?”
Constance gave her a genuinely innocent look. “No. I’d been led to believe she couldn’t possibly identify who was at the Saunders house that night. Besides, I thought she’d be in bed, and I only planned to hand the leaflets to Mrs. Collins and leave. I wasn’t going in the house.”
“But you had a gun.”
“I always carry a gun these days,” Constance said offhandedly. “Really, this wasn’t how I planned things, Natalie. I didn’t intend to shoot you. I intended to slash your throat, like I did to the others. But when I saw that Paige recognized me, I didn’t have any choice but to make my move.”
“Then let Paige go,” Natalie begged.
“I can’t. Not now. You don’t seem to understand, Natalie, that I’m forced to do things I don’t always want to do.”
“Such as killing Tamara. You said you liked her.”
“And so I did. But Oliver Peyton had bungled my son’s case. Any fool could see that a first-year lawyer could have put on a better defense. So he had to pay by losing one of his children, just like I lost mine. I knew Tamara from the suicide hotline. She even told me about her evening walks. Choosing her instead of Lily was simply a matter of convenience.”
Rage, hot and bitter, rushed through Natalie. Gentle, loving Tamara had been killed because she was a convenient target for this lunatic. Natalie wanted to rush at the woman, screaming and clawing, but that would only result in the death of Paige. Instead she clenched her fists and tried to force down her fury and disgust. “And then there was Charlotte and Warren.”
“Oh, I had no qualms about killing them. Awful people. The children of awful people. Max Bishop hounded my poor boy over a couple of hundred thousand dollars, as if he’d ever miss it! And that lout Richard Hunt. My husband knew him! But he still pointed the finger at Eugene. He could have covered up the embezzlement so easily! But no, he had to show off.”
To Constance, everything was personal. Her son had not been brought to justice—he had been persecuted. “I understand why you attacked Alison,” Natalie said. “She’s the child of Viveca. But what about Jeff? He was your nephew.”
Constance smiled. “Exactly. My no-good nephew. He was fired from his job at the newspaper, you know, so he decided to hit up good old Aunt Constance for a loan. He went to Knoxville and found not me, but Ruth.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid Ruth didn’t handle matters well. She should have stopped him, but she has no stomach for killing. At least she did warn me about him.
“Apparendy during my early days in the hospital I’d raved about getting back at the people who’d hurt Eugene by hurting their children,” Constance continued. “And of course the murder of Tamara was in all the Ohio papers. Jeff was bright. He figured it out and decided to find me by tracking the people in Port Ariel that he thought I’d be tracking.”
Her eyes narrowed and her voice turned vicious. “He found
me through you, Natalie. He watched outside your house the night of Tamara’s viewing and followed when your father took me home. He did nothing then. I didn’t even see him until the day of the funeral. That’s when I dropped my purse in the church. Andrew rushed me home. He waited until your father left, then he came to my door, brazen as sin. He planned to blackmail me.” She laughed harshly. “He got a nasty surprise. I dragged him to the basement and kept him a prisoner until the perfect time to kill him.”
“A time when you could safely leave him in front of my house so I could find the body. Why?”
“Why you?” The gun shook slightly in her hand. Even her voice trembled. “Of everyone who hurt my Eugene, I hold your father most responsible. My son could have pulled through that operation. That nurse Dee Fisher said so. But Andrew botched it because he hated Eugene for stealing that tramp, Viveca. And after he’d murdered my son, he came into the waiting room with his matter-of-fact expression and said Eugene hadn’t made it. That’s it. ‘Sorry. We did all we could.’ So blasé.” Her voice rose shrilly. “There wasn’t an ounce of feeling, of compassion, in his eyes.”
Natalie knew this wasn’t true. Her father felt for all his patients, but Eugene Farley’s death had especially bothered Andrew. “If he had lived, he would have been brain-dead,” Andrew had told Natalie sadly. “At least he could have been an organ donor—he wanted to be—but his mother forbade it. Now nothing of that tragic young man lives on except the memory of a stupid mistake and a horrible death.”
Natalie heard a crunch of gravel outside. Paige blinked and Natalie knew she’d heard it, too, but Constance didn’t seem to notice. It had taken Andrew a long time to get here. Why? Were the police with him after all? Suddenly she knew she had to keep Constance distracted.
“You say you held my father most responsible for your son’s death,” she said. “You must have hated him, so why did you date him?”
“Date!” Constance burst out. “I was researching! You didn’t live here. You didn’t even have your own place. I couldn’t ask Tamara a lot of questions about someone I’d never met. But your father supplied the answers, and I would have come after you, but you came home first!” She laughed. “Actually, your arrival in Port Ariel is what set everything in motion. It was a sign, you see. All the children were here, ripe for the picking.”
Don’t Close Your Eyes Page 35
