“Who the hell are you?” cried Marla, all heebie-jeebies gone. “How’d you get in here? What’d you do, climb up the cliff outside?”
“You . . .” I said, my voice meek. “You’re the man who wanted Holly’s notes.” I raised my voice. “Did you kill Kathie Beliar and try to hurt Father Pete?”
The man put his free hand to his lips. Then he shook his head and held out the same hand for the flash drive. I put it in his gloved palm.
Marla cried, “Oh, wait, there’s another flash drive!” She picked up one of the religious statues and sailed it in an arc not far from the man. His eyes followed it, just long enough for my brave friend to run at the man and tackle him. I raced forward, tried to grab the gun out of his hand, but managed only to send it flying under a chair. I yelled for Tom. Marla, who had once assaulted the Jerk right after he’d hit her, held down our would-be attacker. With a loud groan, he struggled on the floor. Marla jumped on his chest, then pulled the mask off Bob Rushwood.
Bob, agile and strong, managed to throw her off him. He then scooted under one of Holly’s love seats, where he nabbed the gun.
I didn’t know if I imagined Tom yelling “Get down!” at me, or if I fell to the floor on my back, just out of instinct. I only knew there was a loud bang, and then I couldn’t hear anything. I also knew something very hot and painful had exploded through my ankle. I was screaming in agony, but couldn’t hear my own voice.
Tom pulled out his gun and fired. He shot Bob Rushwood in the chest. Bob didn’t die, but as he writhed on the floor next to where the collage of Drew had fallen in the melee, I saw something I had not expected—the physical resemblance between young Drew and his biological father, Bob Rushwood.
At the time, I just hurt. Later, I was sad.
Epilogue
When I was in the hospital recovering from the wound I’d received when the bullet went through my ankle, Tom came to visit. He said the flash drive Holly had left for us informed us of many things. I sighed and stared at my cast. I just wished I could have figured out those things earlier.
First, Bob Rushwood was the biological father of Drew. His birthday was September 4. I hadn’t thought that zero-nine-zero-four, Holly’s outdoor security code, could be anything but random numbers. But perhaps I should have deduced that puzzle from the interior security code: zero-four-one-five, Drew’s birthday. The man is outside. The child is inside.
On the flash drive, Holly wrote the notes she’d been talking about: that she’d discovered too late that Bob was a narcissist who always wanted some new woman at his side. But he preferred a woman with money. That was what had attracted him to her, she concluded. She had acquired some wealth through her ex-husband, George. It just wasn’t enough to satisfy Bob. Plus, she had a child. His child, but he didn’t care about that.
I’m in a relationship mess.
Yes, she had been.
On the flash drive, Holly confessed that she had had sex with Bob when he took her hiking in the Flatirons. At the time—during the doctors’ conference eighteen years before—he had been working for Boulder Fitness. He didn’t show up as a staff member at the conference center, because he was working for one of the vendors at the conference—and seducing Holly on the side. When the fitness center fired him, for stealing from the cash drawer—allegedly, Bob’s lawyer added—he went to work for a gym in Denver, from which he was also let go, for stealing athletic equipment to resell elsewhere. Allegedly.
When Tom laid this out for Wendy Williams, whom Holly had introduced to Bob, and who had dyed Bob’s hair and put it into dreads, she said, “You just wouldn’t believe the number of accusations that have been hurled at that man.”
“No,” Tom solemnly replied, “I probably wouldn’t.”
So . . . Bob Rushwood was the biological father of Drew. Holly had not known from the beginning. She hadn’t known about George’s allergy to gelatin, his mumps, or the sterility. But there were no more children, which George desperately wanted. And then . . . Drew had begun to look not like George, but like Bob.
This put Holly into something of a quandary. Edith kept calling Drew her “miracle.” Holly knew Med Wives 101; she remembered when Edith had tossed the molded salad she had made. She looked up allergy to gelatin, just as I had later, and found what she needed to know.
I did not know if George Ingleby had truly loved Holly. He’d been captivated by her beauty, that was certain. But Holly had been deeply hurt by George’s penny-pinching, and by the fact that he paid so little attention to her. She unburdened herself on the flash drive, writing, I thought I needed to be married to George, that he would help me care for this child. And she had needed it. That was why she’d been lying to George and Drew all those years, as she’d half confessed to me in Amour Anonymous.
Like me, Holly had said, I’d thought we could make it work.
But George had not loved Holly the way she needed to be loved. To be fair, Holly had married George for his money, and hadn’t given him what he needed, either. Worse for Holly, after they broke up, she thought she could get the affection she wanted from Bob Rushwood.
And of course, Holly’s chart had told her she would be a successful artist. I could hear her laughing through her words on the flash drive: I thought I’d become rich and famous and ride into the sunset with the man I really loved.
Yes, she went back to art school, studied with Yurbin, and figured out a way to make money commissioning portrait-collages from him. But the main reason she’d moved with Drew down to Denver was that she wanted to be with Bob.
Despite Holly’s protestations of love, despite the gifts she’d showered on him, Bob had responded first with indifference, then with disdain. Worse, she was dependent on George for money. She did not have access to the Ingleby oil fortune. And she had an encumbrance: Bob’s son, Drew.
Bob didn’t care. He rejected her.
In the midst of the police processing what they’d learned from the contents of the flash drive, Father Pete woke up. We all praised and thanked the Almighty. Father Pete said Holly had told him, and not under the seal of confession, as we’d thought, about her conflict with George, and Bob being Drew’s biological father, but not about the blackmail she had going. She had tried to put Bob behind her after the disaster in Denver, Father Pete told the police, but when Bob moved to Aspen Meadow and then took up with Ophelia, Holly suspected that he was running a scam. Moreover, Bob was the one who attacked him and killed Kathie Beliar.
Father Pete provided some more of the missing pieces. He said that when Drew began to look like Bob—sandy-colored hair, tall, athletic build—Bob had no doubt noticed, probably at the country club. Holly suspected that Wendy Williams had begun dying Bob’s hair, and that she had put in the dreads. Holly knew this for certain, though, after she set up cell-phone video surveillance outside the Mane Event in Boulder. It hadn’t taken long for Bob to show up, needing his roots done.
And Bob did all this, Holly had concluded, because he wanted a bigger payoff: a very wealthy woman without encumbrances.
Enter Ophelia Unger, stage right. She was young. She was pretty. But best of all was the trust that her father, Neil—who confessed as much to Tom later—dangled in front of Bob. Neil said Bob’s one job was to marry Ophelia and make sure she had a baby as soon as possible, and never got a college degree. Bob was handsome; he was charming. At thirty-eight, he was older than Ophelia, and could provide a steady hand, Neil felt. Neil was sure Bob could keep Ophelia close.
As the photos Holly had taken, and preserved on her flash drive, confirmed, Bob was two-timing Ophelia. Holly had told Father Pete that he had been two-timing Ophelia with Wendy. And Wendy, like so many other women, had fallen in love with Bob herself.
But there was that money thing, and the inconvenient kid thing. If sanctimonious Neil Unger, the head of The Guild, had discovered that Bob Rushwood had fathered a child by another woman out of wedlock, it would have meant bye-bye to Bob’s gaining control of Ophelia’s trust through m
arriage. Bob promised Wendy that soon they could be together, and that he would set her up in her own salon.
Holly and Bob had been exchanging e-mails; these were on the flash drive. She knew about Wendy and Ophelia; she knew about Neil’s wealth. Now she needed money, and Bob needed a secret kept. He’d paid her, for a while.
And then he’d balked. They’d had the loud phone conversation: I’ve got you, you bastard! There’s a record!
She had been convinced that Bob was the one who had broken into her rental to see if he could find some record of his biological connection to Drew. He’d found none. She’d put out all the clues for us to figure out what was going on, just in case . . .
And that deadly case had come.
Tom was convinced that Bob knew about Holly’s heart issue from their pillow talk. Bob had taken Loquin for a sinus infection, and been stupid enough to keep the bottle. So Tom was pretty sure Bob had not taken the Loquin, but had kept it to make Holly’s murder possible.
Bob had also tried to kill Drew—only I’d fallen into that trap. He’d attacked me in our backyard, hoping to find out what I knew. Then it seemed he’d left Arch out of an e-mail loop that canceled the trail building. Out by the Wildlife Preserve, we believed Bob had laid down a strip of tacks so the Passat would have a flat tire, and Bob would then have an excuse to come to our house—sit in our kitchen!—to look out back and ask what had happened. Did we know who had done all that damage? We said it was a bear, which Bob knew was a lie since he’d been the one who attacked me. But we hadn’t acted suspicious of him at all. After Bob had given us his sob story about Ophelia, Warren Broome had shown up to handily distract the police, and Bob had made a quick exit out the back.
Holly had left a final puzzle for us, and she’d made it so challenging, and surrounded it with so much religious statuary, that the arrangement of astrological signs had slipped right past Bob—and Tom, and the rest of the sheriff’s department.
And me.
When confronted, Wendy Williams said yes, she’d started sleeping with Bob after Holly introduced them. He’d told her that if anybody from Aspen Meadow showed up asking questions about Holly’s past, she should point them in the direction of Warren Broome and Neil Unger, both of whom were from Aspen Meadow and had ties, however tenuous, to Holly. And Wendy had done just that: tried to point us in the wrong direction. But we’d said we were going over to Holly’s to get her address book to plan for the memorial service. She’d called Bob and warned him: they’re going to Holly’s house to nose around.
We’d arrived at Holly’s house first. But Bob was an athlete. Never mind the broken staircase. He’d climbed the rocks outside the deck he’d sabotaged. We’d found the notes, the record, that he’d been so worried about.
Bob had thought he’d had the whole child-out-of-wedlock thing knocked until George Ingleby found out he was sterile. When Lena insisted that George cut off child support for Drew, George told Tom that he had known that this would only be temporary. He knew the court would eventually force him to pay child support, per the initial agreement. He trusted that Holly and Drew would be okay until that happened. But in the meantime, Holly had to deal with a mountain of credit-card debt, and little income except the paltry amount she earned from the portrait-collages, a greater percentage of which Yurbin was now demanding. She had been forced to use the collage money, plus the funds she obtained from selling Drew’s and her Audis, to hire an attorney to go after George.
Unfortunately for everybody, cases in family court take a long time to be decided. Holly fell behind on her house in the country club, then lost it entirely. She pulled Drew from his expensive prep school and put him into a large parochial one. She went from imported Gruyère to a block of supermarket cheddar.
The e-mails in which she attempted to blackmail Bob had begun in January: Start getting money from Ophelia to help me with my expenses, or I’ll expose your secret. I’ll get a paternity test ordered. I’ll wreck your dreams.
Bob ponied up at first, but by June, he responded with a threatening text of his own. And then he hatched a murder plot he was sure would work, as long as he, like everyone else in the kitchen the day of Arch and Drew’s party, could get to the Mexican food, and pretend to be stirring something in. Well, he was stirring something in—enough antibiotic to kill someone with an elongated S-T interval.
Tom speculated that Bob had been afraid of leaving loose ends. Father Pete had spoken with Bob and made thinly veiled remarks about parenthood and being responsible to your loved ones. Bob knew that Holly had gone to see Father Pete that morning, which had given Bob an opportunity to sabotage the deck at the rental house. He must have worried that Holly had told Father Pete about Drew being his son. Maybe the priest knew where Holly had stashed her evidence on him. So Bob had staked out the church office, hunting knife in hand, come in, stabbed Father Pete, and gone through the church files, looking for evidence that Holly had confessed her secrets to Father Pete. Kathie Beliar, who’d been meeting with our rector, had simply “gotten in the way.” She had seen Bob’s face, and so he couldn’t allow her to escape.
But there was a second issue, beyond the paternity one, that Holly had fully documented on her flash drive. Bob had furiously told Holly about losing the two jobs where he’d been accused of theft. Long after he dumped her, she resolved to find out if he really was a thief. Bob Rushwood, Holly’s flash drive revealed, was hedging his bets with the engagement to Ophelia. He was making about thirty thou a year as a trainer at the country club, and he couldn’t get caught again stealing from employers. So he supplemented his income with the untraceable cash people dropped into the ubiquitous Pails for Trails buckets. Holly had taken pictures of him picking up the pails, of him putting the cash in a storage facility, of him taking money out of the facility when he needed it. The shovels and other pieces of trail-digging equipment, the sheriff’s department discovered, were donated by half a dozen hardware stores.
In his Aspen Meadow apartment, Bob had posted an elaborate schedule for picking up the pails. According to workers in the establishments where the pails were posted, the pails were often filled to the brim with cash and coins. A rough estimate of the amount of money Bob was making from the hundred-plus pails in Aspen Meadow, Denver, and Boulder, ranged from fifty thousand dollars a year to over a hundred thousand. And of course he didn’t pay taxes on any of that.
Holly, in addition to detailing the whole paternity situation on her flash drive, plus copies of her e-mail communication with Bob, had provided so many pictures of Bob engaging in his scam that his conviction on charges of grand larceny was a slam dunk. Bob might have survived the public revelation of Drew being his son and forced Neil Unger into sticking to their deal, rather than having to reveal the existence of the trust to Ophelia. But once Holly threatened to expose Bob’s criminal doings to the cops, he must have decided that killing her, and anyone she’d confided in, was the safest option. He may have had some charm and cunning, but Bob had also panicked. Keeping the last of his Loquin, so it could be matched with what Holly had in her system, was pretty dumb.
Bob had to have surgery after Tom shot him. The bullet narrowly avoided his lung. Then he demanded to see a lawyer. But given that he was facing two charges of first-degree murder, two of attempted murder—Father Pete and me in my foray onto Holly’s deck—and grand larceny, the district attorney told Tom there was no way she was doing a deal.
News of Bob’s schemes began to be reported in media outlets. Neil Unger puffed himself up and told the papers, “I never trusted that young man.” Of course, that was before one of Brewster’s colleagues filed a civil suit against Neil claiming malfeasance in his handling of his daughter’s trust.
Tom gave me updates as I lay in a hospital bed down in Denver. Tom had insisted I be admitted and checked over, with every possible test administered. He wanted to make sure I didn’t have bits of flak in my system, so my blood was drawn, I peed into a cup, my foot was X-rayed, the whole nine yards, ex
cept I couldn’t even walk an inch. I only hoped I didn’t get the same medical staff that had treated me when I fell through Holly’s deck. They hadn’t seemed to like me.
After the shoot-out at Holly’s house, an obliging sheriff’s department deputy had taken Marla home. There, she picked up her own vehicle and used it to zip back down to the hospital.
So after all the obligatory tests, both Marla and Tom were present when Dr. Quartz—his real name, if you can believe it—whisked through the door to the private room Tom had arranged for me. I didn’t even want to contemplate how much that was costing.
“Well, Mrs. Schulz,” said Quartz, “I have good news and bad news.”
I gave him my best stone face. “I don’t want to hear it.” I immediately imagined that one of the tests had shown I had cancer. Who would take care of Arch, if I was gone? Who would—
“The bad news is that I’m not going to be your doctor anymore. Still, there will be no catering until you’re out of that cast, do you understand?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “What’s the good news?”
Dr. Quartz smiled at me. “You’re pregnant.”
We had the memorial service for Holly Ingleby the following Tuesday, right after the one for Kathie Beliar. Father Pete was a bit unsteady on his feet, but did a wonderful job.
There was one thing that Holly had asked for on the flash drive: Please don’t tell Drew about Bob. Drew and George adore each other.
But Tom said we couldn’t do that. If Bob contacted Drew from the prison where he would surely end up, it would be an even nastier shock than if Tom told Drew that his biological father was, as Tom put it, “deranged.” George Ingleby was and is Drew’s father, Tom said. My dear husband also promised to tell Drew that Holly’s momentary lapse in judgment with Bob should not be held against her. Without Bob, Drew, who was wonderful in every way, would not even be here.
The Whole Enchilada Page 34
