by Sharon Sala
He and his secretary stood in the doorway, curbside onlookers to the scene being enacted across the street. Even as Carter watched, he began to sweat. He couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but that voice coming from the trunk of the car was all too familiar. When he saw the chief take a rifle out of the backseat, he started to shake. It was the same kind of gun that Bo Marker had carried in the gun rack in the cab of his truck, right down to that telescopic sight.
Oh, no.
“Look, Mr. Foster. There’s a man in the trunk, and he’s all tangled up in some kind of wire. What on earth do you suppose happened?”
That stupid Bo Marker got himself caught is what happened, he thought, but it wasn’t what he said.
“I have no idea,” he said, and made himself smile. “You know what, Bernice? It’s nearly noon. Since we’ve been interrupted, why don’t we just go ahead and break for lunch? I’ll be in court all afternoon, so why don’t you take the rest of the day off?”
And then the ambulance pulled up and the show was all but over. His secretary was pleased with his offer, and anxious to share the gossip of what she’d seen with the dentist’s receptionist down the street. She didn’t give him time to reconsider, unaware that her work schedule was the last thing Carter Foster was worried about.
As she went to get her purse, he slipped out the door and into the alley, leaving Bernice to lock up. But he wasn’t going to eat. Food was the last thing on his mind. It would only be a matter of time before that idiot, Marker, started blabbing. Carter knew that if he was to have a chance of escaping, he had to be miles away when it happened.
His hands shook as he slid behind the wheel of his car, and although he wanted to race through the streets at full speed, he made himself take the trip home with his usual, poky ease.
Upon arrival, he began digging through closets, trying without success to find his big suitcase. It would hold all that he needed in the way of clothes. But the longer he looked, the more frantic he became. It was nowhere to be found.
He was at the point of hysterics when he remembered the last time he’d used it. It was the night Betty Jo had died. He’d packed a portion of her clothes into it to back up the story of her having left him, then tossed it in the dump when he’d tossed her body.
“Okay…okay. I’ll improvise,” he muttered, and headed for the kitchen.
Moments later, he was back in the bedroom, stuffing shirts and underwear into a garbage bag and yanking clothes, still on their hangers from the closet. He had to get going.
Bo Marker came to in a frightening manner. One minute he’d been staring up at the bright lights of the operating room, and then everything went black. Now, light was reappearing at the periphery of his vision. A woman’s voice was calling his name and urging him to wake. It was the nurse who’d put a needle in his hand earlier.
Struggling against the desire to stay where he was, he finally opened his eyes, and then wished he’d followed his own instinct. People were hovering around his bed, staring intently at his face as he awoke. In a drug-induced state, he imagined them vultures, hovering over a carcass, readying to take a first bite.
“No. Go ’way,” he muttered, and tried to wave them away when he realized that one of his arms was in bandages, and the other was connected to an IV line.
“Bo, this is Chief Conway. I understand you promised Mr. Hatfield here a name.”
Bo groaned. “Can’t you let a man rest in peace?”
Wyatt shifted his position, leaning over the bed so that Marker could see him clearly. “If I’d known that’s what you wanted, I could have aimed a little to the left and saved the county the cost of cutting on you.”
Bo looked up into eyes dark with anger and then closed his eyes, partly in pain, mostly in fear.
Amos Steading stood to one side, judging his patient’s capability to communicate against the need these people had to find out the truth. After learning what Glory Dixon had endured at this man’s hands, he had to remind himself of the oath he’d taken to preserve life, not end it.
Wyatt leaned closer until he was directly over Marker’s face. “Give me the name now…or face murder charges on your own!”
It could have been the tone of Wyatt’s voice, or the fact that Bo was in too much misery to put up a fight, but when the demand was uttered, words spilled.
“I didn’t murder no one,” he cried. “The only thing that I put away was a dog.”
Wyatt’s voice was almost at a shout. “Glory Dixon’s father and brother are dead because of what you did. And you tried your damnedest to send her with them today. You might also like to know that they found a partial print on that stolen car that someone used in an attempted hit and run. What do you want to bet that it’s yours?”
Bo groaned.
“Just don’t give me any more of your crap, Marker. I’m already wishing I’d left you in that stinking dump.”
The machine monitoring Marker’s heart rate began to beep in a wild and erratic pattern.
Amos Steading frowned. “That’s about enough for now. You’ll have to come back later for further interrogation.”
“I didn’t kill no one!” Bo said. “Them people was already dead before Carter Foster hired me. I didn’t have anything to do with their deaths…I swear!”
The chief frowned. “Now, damn it, Bo, I don’t think you’re telling me the truth. Why would Carter Foster want to kill the Dixon family?”
“Who’s Carter Foster?” Wyatt asked.
“He’s the town lawyer,” Conway said. “And as far as I know, he doesn’t have a vicious bone in his body.”
But as soon as he said it, he remembered the investigation he’d asked his deputy to initiate, and wondered if anything valid had turned up on the whereabouts of Betty Jo.
Wyatt spun, staring back at the doorway where Glory waited.
“Honey, what do you know about Carter Foster?”
Surprise reshaped her expression. “Who?”
“The local lawyer.”
“Oh! Why, not much. I don’t think Daddy ever used him. When we had to commit Granny to the nursing home in Hazard, Daddy hired a lawyer there. That’s the one who’s handling the probate on Daddy’s will, remember?”
Wyatt nodded, then turned. He could tell by the look on the doctor’s face that they were about to be ejected.
“Please,” he urged. “Just one more question.”
Finally, Steading nodded.
“All right, Marker, let’s say you’re telling the truth. Did Foster say why he wanted Glory dead?”
Consciousness was beginning to fade. Bo’s attention was drifting and his tongue felt twice its normal size. He licked his lips over and over, and it took everything he had just to get the words said.
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “All he ever said was that the crazy witch could ruin him.”
“That’s enough,” Steading ordered, and finally ushered the trio from the room.
Once they were in the outer hallway, Conway paused, and scratched his head. “I don’t get it. This doesn’t really make sense.”
Wyatt grabbed the lawman by the arm, desperate to make him believe.
“Look, Chief, there’s something we haven’t told you. Glory thinks that there’s a connection between what happened to her family and the vision she had of that body being tossed in the dump.”
The argument he expected didn’t come. Instead, a strange expression crossed the chief’s face as he turned and stared at Glory, as if seeing her for the very first time.
“Is this true, girl?”
She nodded. “That’s why we went back there today. I wanted to see if the vision I had the first time would recur. I hoped that if it did, I might see something that I missed seeing before, like a face, or a tag number on the car.”
“Well, did you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then who did you see?” Conway asked, and then couldn’t believe he was considering the word of a psychic as an actual fact.
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“I didn’t see a face, but I saw the man’s back,” Glory said. “He was stooped and starting to go bald on the crown of his head. He also drove a dark gray sedan. And…I saw something else I hadn’t seen the first time. The dead woman has red hair. And I think her name is Elizabeth.”
Conway visibly staggered, then swiped a shaky hand across his face. “Good Lord, girl! Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir. Definitely sure about the red hair. Pretty sure about the name. It came to me out of nowhere, and I have no reason to believe that it is unconnected to what I was seeing.”
Wyatt could tell by the look on his face that something Glory said had struck a chord. “Why? What is it you know that we don’t?”
“It could be completely unrelated to what you saw. And it doesn’t prove that what Bo Marker said is true. But…”
“Damn it, Glory has the right to know,” Wyatt said. “Hasn’t she endured enough?”
Conway looked at her where she stood, silhouetted against the bright backdrop of a wall of windows. Small in stature and fragile in appearance though she was, there was still something strangely enduring about her poise and the waiting expression on her face.
Finally, he nodded. “Yes, I suspect that she has.” He made a quick decision and started talking. “A little more than a week ago, Carter Foster’s wife ran off with some man. It wasn’t her first indiscretion, and no one expected it to be her last. She’s what you might call a loose woman.”
Wyatt wasn’t following this. If Foster’s wife was gone, then why would he blame Glory?
“The deal is…to my knowledge, no one saw her leave. All we know of what happened is from Foster’s version of the story. What gives me pause to wonder is what Glory just said. His wife was a redhead who went by the name of Betty Jo. But I’ve ticketed her myself on several occasions for speeding, and I distinctly remember that the name Elizabeth was on her driver’s license.”
Glory gasped, and then turned away. Wyatt came up behind her. His touch was comforting, but there was nothing he could do to ease the ugliness of what surrounded her.
“Why, Wyatt? Why did I get caught up in this?” she cried.
“Remember when you said the two incidents were connected?”
She nodded, then leaned against his chest, as always, using his strength when her own threatened to give. Wyatt’s voice was low against her ear, but the truth of what he said was too vivid to deny.
“What if his wife didn’t really leave him? What if he killed her, dumped the body and then feared you would see it and give him away? Bo Marker said that Carter claimed you could ruin him. Marker also claimed he had nothing to do with the explosion that killed your family. If he’s to be believed, then that could mean Carter caused the explosion, and when he found out you escaped, he hired Bo Marker to finish what he couldn’t.”
She moaned and covered her face with her hands.
“Don’t, honey,” he said softly. “It’s just about over.”
“Look, I don’t know quite know what to make of all this,” Conway said. “But I need to get back to the office. I want to bring Foster in for questioning.”
“I’ve got a cellular phone at the cabin,” Wyatt said. “Here’s the number. I’d appreciate it if you’d keep us abreast of what goes on, but right now, I think Glory needs to go home. She’s had just about all she can take.”
The trio parted company in the parking lot of the hospital, and when Wyatt seated Glory in the car, she looked like a lost child. Heartsick at what she’d endured, he was about to get in when he glanced across the street and noticed the drugstore on the corner.
Just for a moment, he had a flashback of another time when he’d been in this lot, sitting in a wheelchair and waiting for Lane to pick him up. In his mind, he could almost see the peace that had been on Glory’s face that day as she’d stood between her father and brother, safe in the knowledge that she was right where she belonged. But that was then and this was now. Now they were gone, and God willing, she would soon belong to him.
She leaned across the seat, then looked out at him through the open door.
“Wyatt? Is something wrong?”
Quickly, he slid behind the wheel, then cupped the back of her head and pulled her gently toward him until their mouths were a breath apart.
“Not anymore,” he whispered, “not anymore,” and felt her sigh of relief as their lips connected.
Carter was at the end of the street and turning when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw a patrol car easing up his drive. There were no flashing lights or sirens squalling, but to him, the implications were all the same.
“Oh, my God,” he gasped, and swerved, taking alleys instead of the streets to get out of town.
He cursed as he drove, damning everyone but himself as to blame. Once he barely missed a dog that darted across an alley, and then a few minutes later, slaughtered a pair of matching trash cans as he swerved to miss a pothole. On top of everything else, he now had a sizable dent in his left front fender.
“It’s no big deal. I can handle this,” he muttered, and then accelerated across a side street and into the next adjoining alley. When he realized he was on Ridge Street, he started to relax. He was almost out of town!
As if to celebrate his premature joy, a small dinging began to sound from the dash of the car. Carter looked down in dismay at the warning light near the fuel gauge. It was sitting on empty…and he had less than five dollars in cash to his name.
He slapped the steering wheel in frustration. He had credit cards he could use, but they left a paper trail. If he used them, it would be only a matter of time before they found him.
Frantic, he paused at a crossing and then saw salvation to his right. The First Federal Bank of Larner’s Mill was less than a hundred yards ahead. Money was there for the taking. His money! And while he didn’t dare enter, the automatic money machine in the drive-through beckoned.
Moments later, the decision made, he shot across the street and into the lane for the ATM, right behind a small brown coupé belonging to one Lizzie Dunsford, retired librarian. The moment he stopped, he realized he’d just made a mistake. Lizzie Dunsford was notorious for being unable to remember her own address. It was obvious by the way she kept punching numbers that she also could not remember her own personal identification number for her money card.
“No…oh, no,” he groaned, and started to back out when a big red four-by-four pickup pulled in behind him. Although the windows were up, music could be heard as it reverberated loudly from the interior, marking time for the teenage driver and his young sweetie, who were making time of their own while they waited.
Carter waved at them to back up, but they were too busy locking lips to see him, and honking to get their attention was out of the question. Their music was so loud that they wouldn’t have been able to hear, and honking his horn would only call attention to himself.
In a panic, he jumped out of his car, squeezing between it and the next car, until he was at Lizzie Dunsford’s door.
“Miss Dunsford…it’s me, Carter Foster. I see that you’re having a little trouble. Maybe I could be of service?”
Hard of hearing, the old woman frowned. “I don’t know any Arthur Fosser,” she said, and started to roll up her window, certain that she was about to be the victim of a robbery.
By now, Carter was panicked. He stuck his hand in the gap between door and window, pleading his case with renewed vigor.
“I said, Foster! Carter Foster! You remember me. I’m a lawyer.”
“Oh…why yes, I believe that I do,” she said.
Thank God, Carter groaned inwardly. “Now…how can I be of service?”
“I just can’t get this thing to work,” she said. “I keep punching numbers, but nothing comes out.”
Carter peered at the screen, then frowned. “I don’t know what your identification number is, but this looks like a phone number to me. Are you sure you remember it right?”
She frowned, and
then suddenly cackled in delight. “You know…I believe that you’re right! Now, you run back to your car, boy. I’ll try another. You’re not supposed to watch me, you know.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and jumped back into his car, praying that he hadn’t been seen.
Afraid to kill the engine for fear there wouldn’t be enough fuel to start it back up, he sat in horror as sweat rolled down his face and the gas gauge slid farther into the red. The only good thing about his location was that the patrol car cruising down the street didn’t notice him sandwiched between the two cars.
In his mind, he was already preparing an argument to the court on his behalf when Lizzie’s car suddenly sprang to life and bolted out of the lane and into the street, with Lizzie in less than firm control.
“It’s about time,” he muttered, and drove forward. Inserting his card, he began to withdraw all that he could from his account.
As Wyatt turned onto Main Street and headed out of town, he kept glancing back and forth at Glory. She was leaning against the seat with her eyes closed. More than once, he was certain that he’d seen her lips tremble. He kept watching for tears that never showed.
“Hey, little Morning Glory,” he said, and slipped a hand across the seat toward her. “How about scooting a little closer to me?”
Glory opened her eyes and tried to smile, but there was too much misery inside of her to let it happen.
“What is it, baby?”
“Granny calls this…thing I can do a gift. But how can it be when it caused the deaths of my father and brother?”
“Your gift didn’t cause them to die. Someone murdered them,” he argued.
“Because of me,” she whispered. “Because of me.” Unable to accept his pity, she looked away.
There was nothing he could say to help. Only time, and a better understanding of the frailties of the human race were going to make Glory’s burden easier to bear.
“Just rest,” he said. “We’ll be home in no time. Maybe it will make you feel better.”
