With one arm, I swept dozens of small seedlings onto the ground and then climbed onto the table in the middle of the room. The rubber on the outside of the large balloon had started to blister. Under the balloon was a large metal funnel connected to a series of black soaker hoses that were draped, like a string of Chinese lanterns, to the far corners of the room.
Droplets of orange liquid oozed out of a tear in the balloon, followed by a trickle, and then a stream. Once the rubber tore, the liquid gushed out into the metal funnel. It bubbled and hissed. Soon the black soaker hoses jumped with the contact of whatever it was that was filling them.
Beads of orange liquid pulsed out of the hoses and dripped onto the plants. The first to come into contact with the liquid wilted immediately. The green plastic of the pot melted.
Acid, I guessed. I glanced up at the other hoses and realized if we waited any longer, we’d be unable to escape the shower. The plants would die. The future of Halliwell Industries would be demolished.
Poetic.
I put my hands under Nolene’s arms and hoisted her to her feet. “We have to get out of here now,” I said.
“We can’t. She locked us in,” she said.
I ran to the doors and shook them again. The spray of acid hit my hands and burned like bee stings. I pulled a thick black plastic tarp from under a table of seedlings and held it over Nolene’s and my head. Why had I used my phone to create a diversion?
I searched for a way out. The acid fell from two hoses, killing the plants below them on contact. To my left was a large oxidized tin watering can. I grabbed the handle and swung it against the wall of the greenhouse. The glass cracked.
I pulled back and swung again, this time with both hands. The glass cracked more, and then it broke. I kicked at the broken panes until the opening was big enough for us to fit through. I pushed Nolene first, then bent down and crawled through.
“Go to the main building and call for help,” I said to Nolene. “Hurry.” I gave her a push.
Nolene took off across the greens. I swiped at the skin that had been exposed to the hot acid, brushing away imaginary irritants. Too late, I saw Beth alongside the greenhouse, weaving in and out of the pageant seating.
“You have no connection to Halliwell Industries. But still, you had to play the hero.” She held a lit torch. The dancing flames illuminated her twisted expression. “Do you know what the funny thing is about heroes?”
“What?” I said. I looked back and forth between her face and the torch. The weather had been dry—scarily so. I didn’t know what the open flame would do to the acid-soaked trees inside the greenhouse, but I knew the Tangorli fields would go up like a match set to a scarecrow if she got close.
She stepped away from the greenhouse and thrust the torch at me like the Wicked Witch of the West in a face-off against Dorothy. “Heroes make excellent victims. People try to rescue you. And if you die, they’ll celebrate you all the same.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“There’s a million dollars in a bank account with my name on it.” She staggered a moment and put her hand to her chest. “I paid my dues with this company. I’m not going to live forever and it’s time to make my move.”
“Your medical condition—it’s your heart, isn’t it?”
She dropped her hand from her chest and pointed at me. “You should have minded your own business. Nobody would have known if you didn’t go snooping around.”
“Harvey knew,” I said. “He figured out that the fifty-thousand-dollar deposits were to you,” I said.
“You know about them? That’s too bad. Too bad for you,” she said. She put both hands on the torch and waved it in my face. I stepped back but didn’t say a word. “Congenital heart defect. That’s what I have. Harvey wanted people to think this juice could make people live a long life. Not me. No amount of Tangorli juice is going to change the condition I was born with. When I started working for him, it was my job to audit the financial records. You know what I found, don’t you? A fifty-thousand-dollar deposit sent to a nobody from Encino. The payment happened right in the middle of the pageant planning and nobody ever questioned it. That’s when I first got the idea.”
“You’ve been stealing from Halliwell Industries ever since.”
“I opened an account and wrote threatening letters to Harvey every year, demanding payment.”
“Harvey wouldn’t have paid them off. He wasn’t trying to bury a secret.”
“Harvey never saw the letters. I wrote them, filed them, and sent the money to the account. If anybody looked into it, there was a paper trail in place to point to a mechanic in Encino who was extorting money all these years. And the beauty of the plan was that I never got greedy. Fifty thousand every year for twenty years. A million dollars, with interest. And nobody questioned it.”
“So why kill Harvey now?”
“I saw the application for that Lucy girl. The address was the same as the one where Harvey sent the original money. I didn’t know the relationship between that family and Harvey, but I couldn’t chance it. I sent a letter—a real one—saying that I knew about the girl in Encino. I didn’t know why he’d paid them off all those years ago, but there had to be a reason.”
“There was. He was doing a favor for a friend. And you killed him because of it.”
“I killed him because he found out about the rest of the deposits. He found the letters. He sent a reply to the address on file saying that there would be no more payments.”
“So you confronted him at the garden party.”
“He needed to be scared. I slipped a nitroglycerine tablet into his Tangorli juice so he’d pass out. I didn’t plan to kill him, not at first. I wanted to scare him into thinking that I had some kind of power over him.”
“But Sheila found the pills and thought they were his. And when Harvey saw the vial, he knew who was behind everything. He knew it was you.”
“I knew he had that meeting with Violet Garden. It was on his calendar for two months. I confronted him in the gardens on Sunday. He said he was going to turn me in to the authorities. I had to kill him to get away. And then I came back here and replaced his calendar with a new one. No appointment with Violet Gardens meant she’d look like she was lying.
“But now I’m free. I can finally have a life that doesn’t belong to Halliwell Industries. And after tonight, there’s going to be nothing left of Halliwell Industries.”
She reached out with the hand not holding the torch and pushed me. I stumbled backward several steps and tripped over a chair. Behind me, the Tangorli fields loomed. Beth touched her flame to a branch. The fire spread quickly. Weeks of dry temperature without the break of rain had left the field in poor condition. And what an easy way to get me out of the picture.
In the distance, sirens called out their approach. The scent of burned oranges filled the air as tree after tree went up in flames. If I didn’t get out of the field soon, I’d be a human tiki torch. Adrenaline, anger, and courage came together and I charged her.
I knocked her to the ground. The torch fell from her hand. Flames licked my pant leg. I grabbed onto Beth and rolled us away from the fire, over and over each other, until we were up against the back of the greenhouse. I climbed off her and grabbed at a metal spigot, spinning it so hard it came off in my hand. Water spit out of a green hose that had been coiled on the ground. Beth got up and ran away. I aimed the hose in her direction and pulled the nozzle, shooting a stream of cool water in an arc that caught her between her shoulder blades.
She fell forward. I ran with the hose and showered her with water, pinning her to the ground with the spray. When I caught up, her short, spiky gray hair was plastered to her face and water dripped from the plastic fruit cluster earrings that hung from her ears. She gave up the fight.
Thirty-four
The rain that we’d so sorely needed in San Ladrón
came that night, helping to put out the fire. I was ushered from Halliwell Industries to the hospital, where I was checked for everything from smoke inhalation to bruised ribs. Sheriff Clark showed up and I told him what happened. After getting a clean bill of health, I went home. I used half a bottle of moisturizing shower gel on the parts of my skin that had been exposed to the acid, fell into bed sometime after midnight, and slept straight through to Sunday afternoon.
• • •
When I woke, both cats were nestled on my pillow, leaving me only a corner for my own head. I ran my hand over Pins first, and then Needles. “Hey, you two,” I said. “You almost lost me last night.”
Needles stood up and walked straight at my face. He bumped his cold pink nose against my own and then turned his head and ran the top of it over my cheek. Pins stretched his gray paws out in front of him, the left paw landing on top of my fingers. They had come to depend on me over the past several months, and I wasn’t ready to let them down.
I took another shower, this time mostly to tame the hair that I’d slept on while wet, and dressed in a long black jersey dress that ended just above my ankles. I slipped on a pair of gold sandals and added a long gold chain around my neck. A little mascara and lipstick and I started to feel human. Having lost my phone at Halliwell Industries last night, I didn’t know if anybody had tried to reach me. What I did know was that secrets—the secrets everyone was trying to keep from everybody else—had made me suspect people who should have been above suspicion.
The Miss Tangorli pageant had made everyone crazy, only not in the way I’d been warned. Maybe I’d bought into the warning too much and had let the buzz about the pageant go to my head. But now, after my showdown with Beth, bits and pieces of information had come together in an entirely unexpected way. There were answers to questions I hadn’t wanted to see, and questions that I didn’t deserve to know the answers to. It was time everybody put aside their own concerns and learned to work together.
I went downstairs to the shop and made a couple of phone calls from the fabric store phone, then headed out to Charlie’s Auto.
Charlie stood over the workbench where her tools were scattered. Her thick dark hair was pulled into two loose ponytails on either side of her head. A red bandana was tied around her forehead, catching stray hairs that had come loose. Her normally dark lips were uncolored, showing their natural red shade. The dark circles under her eyes had only grown deeper.
“Lucy’s still not back. I don’t know how to reach her.”
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“What?” she asked, her head snapping up to focus on me.
“Knowing you want to say something to someone in your family but not knowing where she is or whether she’ll listen.”
“Don’t make this about me, Polyester. Lucy’s life was nothing like mine.”
“Charlie, you think you know everything, but can you stop talking for five seconds?” Her eyes went wide. “Ned found out who your father was when you lived with him. He contacted Vic before your eighteenth birthday.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Yes, he did. Ned told Vic about you—your life in Encino, your skills as a mechanic. Vic McMichael wanted to set up a trust for you but he didn’t know if you would be receptive to him reaching out. He asked Harvey Halliwell to set it up. He didn’t want it to be traced back to him. It was supposed to be a onetime thing so you wouldn’t have to worry about money.”
“There was no trust.”
“Yes, there was,” said Mr. McMichael from the doorway.
We both turned to face him. He stood outside the shop. Today he wore a tan suit and tie and looked as if he was prepared to take a meeting, even though it was Sunday. He held a brown leather briefcase in one hand. I stepped back and held my arms open in a gesture that welcomed him into the conversation.
“Mr. McMichael, I think the money’s still sitting in a bank account somewhere.” I turned to Charlie. “It was in confidence. You have to accept that.”
Charlie looked back and forth between our faces.
“I sneaked into Halliwell Industries Friday night and looked at the financial records. There was a fifty-thousand-dollar withdrawal every year for the past eighteen years.”
“That’s almost a million dollars,” Mr. McMichael said.
“Plus interest. I thought Nolene was guilty of skimming money at first, but it didn’t make sense that she’d kill her golden ticket. But Beth Fields audited the books when she first started working at Halliwell Industries. She saw the original fifty-thousand-dollar payment to Charlie’s account and traced it back to the letter from Ned. That’s when she got the idea. She faked letters demanding more money and filed them. If anybody discovered the payments, they’d assume someone in Encino was extorting money from Harvey. She set the whole thing up to look like Harvey was paying someone off.”
“Harvey discovered the missing money,” Mr. McMichael said. “He knew someone was stealing from him. That’s when he confided in me. He told Nolene she had to take her unused vacation time. He wanted her out of the way so he could see if it was her.”
“That’s why she bought all that luggage,” I said. “But she returned it after he was murdered. She’s really one of those people who loves her job so much she doesn’t want to take time off.” I turned my attention back to Mr. McMichael. “Sorry to interrupt. That luggage was bothering me.”
He smiled, and then continued. “Harvey sent a letter to the address on file saying he wouldn’t make any further payments and that he was opening an investigation leading to blackmail charges. If he’d found out Beth’s identity, she would have lost everything.”
Charlie spoke up. “Why didn’t she just leave then? If your math is right, she had a million dollars in a bank account. She could have disappeared.”
“Not without Harvey finding her. She would have had to clean out the bank account, close it, and hide all evidence that she was the one who opened it. But if Harvey died, then nobody would go looking into old financial records. Beth had a heart condition. She slipped one of her nitro tablets into Harvey’s drink at the garden party. She knew what it would do to him. Only she must have dropped the vial. Sheila found it and thought it belonged to Harvey. She gave it to Ned, who put it in Harvey’s jacket after he passed out.”
I thought back to that night. Vaughn and I standing under the privacy of the weeping willow tree branches. Until Harvey collapsed, he and Ned hadn’t known we were there. By chasing Ned away, I gave up our secret presence. If Beth had been watching, she would have seen me ask Vaughn to go get help. That might have changed her plans.
“When Harvey saw the pills, he knew they weren’t his. He knew about Beth’s health. He told her the Tangorli juice was what kept him healthy. She was bitter about it. She managed her condition with medication. It must have been curious enough—the pills, him passing out, the demands for money. When she confronted him on Sunday, he figured out exactly what she was up to. So she killed him.”
“She had so many opportunities to disappear. I still don’t know why she stuck around.”
“The pageant was right around the corner, and that gave her a unique opportunity to make it look like that’s why he was killed. Think about it. This whole time we thought his death had to do with the pageant. From her post at Halliwell Industries, she was able to keep an eye on everybody. She needed the pageant to continue to create enough of a distraction for her to plan to leave. If the pageant had taken place, I bet that’s exactly when she would have left.”
“When Harvey first suspected something, he asked my firm to look over his accounts. We would have found her.”
“But how long would it have taken?” I asked. “She made one withdrawal every year. Even if you started with the current books, you would have had eleven months to go through before you found it, and there are so many expenses attached to the pageant that you might have assum
ed it was related to that.”
“But you discovered it in a week,” Mr. McMichael said.
I looked away. Yes, I’d discovered the truth, but I’d broken the law in doing so. It wasn’t a proud moment.
“I’m glad you found all these answers, but we still don’t know where Lucy is,” Charlie said.
I interrupted her before she could continue. “Charlie, when Lucy ran away, she went to Mr. McMichael. She knew he was your father. She overheard your concerns about Ned and she didn’t know where else to go. Everybody she’s met since she got here is connected to you. Except for him,” I said, indicating the businessman with my thumb. “But since he’s your father, he’s the one person she could go to without jeopardizing her standing in the pageant.”
“Lucy went to you?” she asked Mr. McMichael, visibly stunned.
“Yes. She’s been staying in my guest room. She is well, though she is shaken up. In light of what happened last night, I imagine all of the young women who expected to participate in the pageant are shaken up.”
“Can I talk to her?” Charlie asked.
Mr. McMichael rested his briefcase on a chair, popped open the brass locks, and extracted a business card. “This is my address. You’re welcome anytime.”
“Not so fast,” I said to him. “I don’t think it would be fair for Lucy to stay with you, all things considered.”
“Ms. Monroe, I can’t say that I follow.”
“You told me that Harvey Halliwell left explicit instructions for you to take over the Miss Tangorli pageant if anything should happen to him. Well, something happened. Lucy is a contestant in the pageant, and I don’t care how big your estate is, she can’t stay with you while you’re picking up the pieces.”
“I hardly think the city expects the pageant to continue.”
“You said yourself, Harvey considered you a friend when a lot of people considered you a monster. This would go a long way toward showing this city who you really are.”
Silk Stalkings Page 24
