by Steve Richer
The combination of his weight and hers smashed him into the paved pathway with far more force than he could have anticipated.
She’d grabbed his arms on impact, not enough to leave marks but enough to pin them at his sides and stop him from reaching out to break the fall.
When he hit the ground it was with his face first, the side of his head.
She felt the slump of his body beneath her as the air was knocked from it.
Saw blood, pooling on the slab already.
Such a vivid color in the golden fall sunlight.
There was beauty in this. Very few people ever got to appreciate that.
The few seconds after he hit the ground, breaking her own fall, was like a divine pause. A moment to soak up the splendor of the moment, the emotional rush of a perfectly executed maneuver.
He was still breathing.
That would not do.
Without a further thought, Libbie took hold of his head, raised it, and smashed it down on the stone.
The crunch of fracturing skull and the soft, meaty thud that accompanied it were another thing few people ever got to appreciate.
This time he’d stopped breathing.
She took a few seconds more, taking in the details. The spreading pool of blood. The yielding mass of another’s body beneath her. The sounds of wind in the trees, of birds in the distance. All the almost imperceptible things that added up to convey the sense of lifelessness where once there had been life.
He was dead.
She’d killed him.
She was smiling.
Careful, she straightened, checking the body beneath her.
She spotted a long chestnut hair on the back of his coat. Removing it carefully, she tucked it into a pocket. She couldn’t see anymore.
She’d been careful with every contact—the hand in the back, the grip on his arms—making sure she would do nothing that would leave obvious signs of struggle.
She stood, still studying the scene closely.
He looked as if he’d tripped. That would look even more the case when she got Tom’s lawn rake from the tool shed and arranged it carefully across the path. Let Tom take the blame, or at least feel the guilt.
Should she feel some kind of guilt? Remorse?
Walter wasn’t part of this, after all.
She felt nothing, though, other than the satisfaction of a job well done and the after-effects of the adrenaline rush.
As she surveyed the scene one last time, the first flies started to crawl across the blood. It really had been an exceptionally mild fall. She wondered if it would last.
Chapter 29
Alice had thought she had Franco Vialli’s measure. Thought he was doing a new variation on the whole If you want it done better you have to pay more routine.
Take the roof off just before winter, threaten to walk.
Blackmail.
It was plain and simple blackmail.
But she’d been mistaken.
She’d asked him his price and he’d still hesitated.
He really wanted off the job.
He didn’t believe she and Tom had the funds to see the project through, and if funds ran out it was inevitable the contractor would end up out of pocket for time and materials.
When Alice had been arguing with him, she’d been convinced it must be Libbie who had tipped him off. Now though, driving away from the site, she felt less certain. It really was hard to believe that of her.
She knew Libbie was not what she seemed, but it was still difficult to accept there might not be an innocent explanation.
Was she running from some kind of trauma? That might explain the fake personal history, the evasion. Everything else was circumstantial. Maybe she really did simply attract bad luck.
Her mind was rushing from one thing to another.
She’d planned to go on to the office after Whitetail Lane. Put a brave face on things. Act as if everything was normal.
But after the encounter with Franco, she couldn’t take any more, so she’d decided to head for home. Work on the pitch there. Try to focus.
She thought she’d left things okay with Franco. She’d assured him that the recent late payment had been a glitch, not a shortage of funds. She’d blamed Tom and felt instantly guilty for doing so, even though it had been his fault. Franco had laughed, as if it was easy to believe, which made her feel even guiltier.
He said he’d at least get the roof covered and secured while they waited for her and Tom to make some decisions about what to prioritize. The unspoken assumption behind that was that in order to fix the roof they’d have to put other elements on hold. From today, though, the site was going to be on hiatus.
The project was not going to be finished with the funds they had available. And if Alice lost her job as well as the Mapleview account, then she didn’t know how they would ever pick the project up again.
Maybe Tom would get his way and they’d sell the Whitetail Lane property—not how he’d envisaged, but as an incomplete project, at a knockdown price.
They’d be lucky to recoup their investment if they did that.
She wondered if Franco himself might even buy the place from them. Maybe that was what he’d been angling for all along, taking the project to a critical juncture and then bringing it to a halt.
She felt exhausted. Drained by the whole thing.
She’d need to check her blood when she got home. Make sure that wasn’t at least part of the reason she was feeling so bad. Sometimes a hypo gave her a real sense of dread. If so, then maybe things weren’t so bad after all.
She actually laughed at that as she drove.
To any onlooker she must’ve appeared insane.
As she swung into the driveway, she noticed a little silver Hyundai parked at the curb. The car looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Didn’t make the connection with who must be here already.
She parked, pausing to take a deep, steadying breath. She really did feel rough. Maybe it was all starting to catch up with her.
Up on the porch she hesitated again.
Something didn’t seem quite right, but she couldn’t work out what.
She listened, but heard nothing out of place. Just the wind in the trees, the calls of birds, the sound of distant traffic.
Was Libbie in? She hoped not. Last night she and Tom had agreed to avoid their tenant as much as possible. However, in the light of day, she realized that was far easier in theory than in practice.
She went to the corner of the house and peered round toward the basement apartment’s entrance.
At first, she didn’t register what she saw.
The clumps of tall asters in need of dead-heading. The border of shrubs leading up to the surrounding trees. The flat, paved path.
The body, lying sprawled in the path, just past the step down toward the back garden and the apartment.
She knew it was Walter immediately and realized then that it had been his silver Hyundai parked in the street.
His legs lay at an odd angle, one bent and crossed under the other. It was a position that could not have been comfortable.
His arms lay at his sides, which even then struck her as odd because if he’d fallen, wouldn’t he have put his hands out first to catch himself?
A pool of blood lay around his crumpled head like a macabre halo.
Oh my God!
She rushed to him.
She paused for an instant, standing over him. Scared to go any closer and confirm what she saw.
He wasn’t moving.
Not even the rise and fall of his chest.
She dropped to her knees. Reached out to his neck to check for a pulse.
He was still warm. What had she expected?
The blood pooled on the paving came from a nasty-looking gash in the side of his head, and when she looked closely, she saw that the wound was actually concave, as if the skull itself had been dented inward.
That couldn’t be right.
“No… No…”
She couldn’t find a carotid pulse.
How many years was it since she’d done that first aid course at the office? Too many.
She struggled to think what to do now, even as she fumbled in her purse for her cellphone.
She shouldn’t move him, in case she did further damage. But how do you do anything for someone lying face-down?
She heaved at his body one-handed, half-raising him before losing her hold. He slumped to the ground again, and as he did so he gave a gruesome sigh.
Was he alive?
She knew he wasn’t.
She knew that sound was just the air being forced from his lungs on impact with the ground.
“9-1-1? Yes. Listen… I…” Her head was spinning.
“What’s your emergency? Please answer calmly.”
“I found someone. A man. Walter. I think… he’s dead. I think he hit his head.”
“Is the patient breathing?”
“No. No, he’s not. I can’t find a pulse, either. Not at his neck. Not at his wrist.”
“Is the patient bleeding?”
“He is. He was. His head. He’s fallen and hit his head. Please send someone.”
“Please give us your location.”
She gave the address before going on. “Please. What can I do? He can’t be dead… Walter can’t be dead!”
Alice heard the voice, but not the words. She was aware of something strange going on with her senses, but couldn’t work out what.
She felt dizzy again, so bad it felt as if her whole body was swaying as she kneeled over Walter’s motionless form.
Walter!
She balanced herself with one hand against the ground.
She recognized the feeling. She’d been concerned even before she’d gotten home. Her blood sugar.
If she’d been on the brink even then, she knew this might easily have tipped her over. The fight or flight response as the body tries to flood your blood with extra fuel to deal with emergency. Extra sugar.
She was aware of the voice again. Of her own voice trying to answer. But everything sounded slurred. The bass tones booming, the higher tones whining like flies.
She rummaged in her purse.
She normally kept candy there, but there was nothing. She’d been so forgetful recently, even though forgetting about something as fundamental as candy and insulin was something she could never afford to do.
She turned away from the thing on the ground. From Walter.
Tried to stand, but only succeeded in stumbling forward onto her knees again.
If she had to crawl back to the house, she would do so.
She heaved her body forward. Felt the painful scrape of her knees on stone.
There was a lawn rake here, by the low step. Was that how Walter had fallen? Was it Tom’s fault, like everything else?
She knew she shouldn’t be thinking like that, but didn’t care. All she could focus on was that last stretch of graveled ground before the double step up onto the porch.
The small stones on her shredded knees were agony, but a good agony, one that sent a rush of adrenaline that jolted her back to a vague semblance of alertness.
She pushed herself to her feet again.
She’d dropped her phone somewhere, but didn’t care. She knew this was bad.
She wobbled forward, catching herself on the wooden post to the side of the steps up onto the porch.
Her purse! Thank goodness. She hadn’t dropped that.
She fumbled inside it, tipping the contents out. Found her keys, and stabbed them third time lucky into the lock.
Alice pushed on the door and almost collapsed into the house, only catching herself on the table by the door.
The table had a drawer and she pulled at it, scraping at the contents. They always kept candy in there. Last-minute candy they called it. Put there so she could take a handful to put in her purse as she went out.
Why hadn’t they topped it up?
She went to the kitchen drawer where they always kept a couple of tablets of glucose, and more candy. There was no candy, though, and the blister-packs were empty of pills, as if she’d used them all and then put them back here just to taunt her. Why would she do that?
The refrigerator!
There was glucagon, at least. One injection and catastrophe would be avoided. She was going to be okay.
How had she ever let herself get this bad?
She steadied herself, put a new needle in the glucagon vial and sprayed a two-unit air shot of the clear liquid to test it. Then she set up the dose, pressed the needle into a fold of belly and pressed the plunger.
The surge of relief was, in itself, exhausting.
That had been a bad one, she knew. A combination of her stupid complacency, her forgetfulness, and the fight or flight response to…
She remembered the sight of Walter outside, his body twisted, the pool of blood.
She wanted to cry but, strangely, was unable.
Her breathing was still ragged, her heart pounding.
She felt that blackness looming all around the edges of her vision. Felt the gathering heat in her head, the precursor to fainting.
The shot should have kicked in by now. She should be feeling better not worse. What was happening? Why wasn’t she recovering?
Alice sat perfectly motionless and felt her whole body swaying.
She was going to black out. She knew it and there was nothing more she could do about it.
She didn’t even have her phone to make another call to 911. She didn’t have the energy to reach into the refrigerator again. If she could only get a mouthful of something sweet. That disgusting barbecue sauce that Tom loved could save her life…
Only the fridge seemed a thousand miles away, so out of reach. She tried to stand, at least to get out to the porch so the medics would find her when they arrived.
The blackness stole in, rushing across her vision, and she fell sideways out of the chair.
~ ~ ~ ~
This couldn’t have gone better if Libbie had written the script herself. Which she kind of had.
She stood in the shade of the trees and watched Alice arrive. Saw the car pull up, saw the moment of hesitation as she found the body and still didn’t believe what she was seeing.
The look of absolute horror on her face!
Not only that, but she’d pulled at Walter’s body, let if fall again. Everyone who’s watched enough CSI shows on TV knew that you don’t disturb a crime scene. But Alice was too stupid. She didn’t even know it was a crime scene, after all.
And when you think there’s even the slightest chance the victim might still be alive, you do what you can. You grab at him. You pummel him. You try to turn him over and then let his body fall back onto the ground with that comical dead-meat-falling sound, don’t you?
Alice had put herself all over that crime scene.
They wouldn’t think she was responsible, of course, but she’d have destroyed a lot of the evidence that might have told the cops someone else was!
She followed as Alice half-crawled, half-stumbled her way back around the corner of the house to the porch and into the house.
Watched through windows that frantic search for anything that might save her, because by now it was clear even to Libbie’s untrained eye that she was going into hypoglycemic shock.
Watched, finally, as Alice injected water into her belly in the belief it was glucagon.
So perfect.
So funny.
So just.
Chapter 30
For the first time in what seemed like forever, Tom felt as if he was taking control again.
As if they were taking control.
And that was the key thing. He and Alice were a team. When they pulled apart and isolated themselves, things started to go wrong. But when they pulled together, they were a unit. While they didn’t think alike, they complemented each other. Their communication was fluid and often unspoken. As people often joked,
they were the classic couple who finished each other’s sentences.
They should never have lost sight of that. Of what they were.
He’d been out this morning. A trip to the mall for a new shirt and some of that Jean Paul Gaultier perfume Alice loved. A stop off for some groceries.
And a five-minute pre-consultation with Jason Grande, the real estate lawyer they’d used for the purchase of the Whitetail Lane property. Tom had called Jason’s office first thing, and although his schedule was full the lawyer had offered a between-meetings chat to establish the procedure for evicting Libbie Burchett.
“So why the urgency? Why are you looking for the fastest possible route when your tenancy agreement has an established three-month notice procedure?” Jason had stood there with raised eyebrows and what Tom took to be a man-to-man grin, before adding, “You haven’t been a naughty boy, have you, Tom?”
Tom couldn’t even object. Every time he closed his eyes he remembered that brief kiss. Remembered just how close he’d come to making the biggest mistake of his life.
He hadn’t though. He kept telling himself that. He’d faced temptation and resisted.
“She’s… erratic. She’s creeping Alice out.” It was hard to explain. “And then when we checked a bit closer and we found out about the fake identity—”
“Hang on, Tom. Fake identity? Are you telling me she lied in the lease? If you can confirm that, then the agreement is invalidated and you can just tell her to pack her crap and leave. What’s her real identity?”
Tom had shrugged. “We don’t know. Just that the identity she’s using now is almost certainly a fabrication.”
Jason had put a big hand on Tom’s shoulder then. “Find her real name and prove she lied on that lease and your problem’s solved,” he said. “That’s all you have to do.”
Now, driving back across town, Tom’s spirits were higher than they’d been in a long time.
He had no idea who Libbie really was, or what she was up to. It might easily be that she was escaping some past trauma of her own, as Alice had suggested. But it felt good that there might at least be a way out if they needed it.
It was time to move on with his life, he realized. To stop hiding.
