Her Dr. Wright

by Meredith Webber

  ‘Barry can’t find her,’ Nick told him when the younger policeman came across to let them know the air ambulance was on time and would be landing in fifteen minutes. ‘He’s had to go out to the airport to meet the homicide chaps. You’ll see him out there.’

  ‘I’ll go out in the ambulance. Will you take Sarah out to meet her husband off the second flight?’ David asked him. ‘She shouldn’t go but you can’t stop a woman when she’s made up her mind, so I’d like someone to keep an eye on her.’

  Nick agreed, but when they all met up at the airport later, after the ambulance flight had departed and the small charter plane was approaching the runway, David realised Sarah had two minders. Rowena was also there. He ushered them inside and insisted they sit down.

  The Range Rover arrived last, pulling up as the plane taxied first away from the small terminal building then turned to come back. Ignoring the parking area behind the small terminal building, the woman at the wheel of the earthbound vehicle drove around to the front, closer to where the plane would eventually stop.

  Barry approached the vehicle with caution, but Mary-Ellen—or Sue-Ellen—seemed unperturbed. David followed the policeman, aware that Nick was behind him, providing back-up for his boss.

  ‘I’ve some questions to ask you about what happened yesterday,’ Barry said to her.

  ‘Yesterday?’ the woman said. ‘You mean the fire at the school? Nothing to do with me at all.’

  ‘I mean taking Dr Kemp at gunpoint out to the National Park. I’m talking about charges of deprivation of liberty and attempted murder.’

  Barry, who must have been exhausted after two sleepless nights, was making no effort to hide his anger or lower his voice.

  Even from a distance, David saw the woman’s face blanch.

  ‘You can’t know that. She’s…’

  Was she going to say ‘dead’?

  If so, she stopped herself in time.

  ‘She’s lying to try to save her precious lover. Setting me up to take the blame. My sister’s body is found on his property, the gun that shot Paul Page is found in his pocket—what more proof do you want?’

  Barry stepped a little closer.

  ‘And as for this ridiculous accusation about taking her anywhere,’ the raging woman continued. ‘You can’t prove a thing! It would be my word against hers.’

  She was so unperturbed that even David began to wonder if Sarah had been mistaken.

  ‘I can prove you’re not who you say you are!’ Barry told her. ‘You’re not Mary-Ellen whatever-it-is, although you’ve been living under her name—under false pretences—since your sister disappeared.’

  Sue-Ellen—David accepted now that it was his wife—paused in the act of pulling a canvas carryall out of the vehicle. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at Barry.

  ‘What would you have done if your husband had murdered your sister by mistake?’ she hissed. ‘Of course I pretended to be Mary-Ellen. As long as he thought he’d killed me I was safe.’

  ‘Safe to spend your sister’s money!’ Barry retorted. ‘There will be fraud charges laid against you as well. Paul Page was investigating you, not your sister’s death, and he emailed reports to his office on a daily basis. Some of the information his office has is very interesting.’

  Something in Barry’s voice suggested to David that this might not be entirely true, but Sue-Ellen obviously didn’t catch the nuance. A hand gun, small but deadly-looking, appeared in her hand.

  But Barry appeared unflustered by it—perhaps because the plane had now stopped and a group of men had disembarked and were approaching Sue-Ellen from behind.

  ‘As for Dr Kemp’s story, I’m sure a fingerprint check of the vehicle you’ve been driving will prove who’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Yes, I made sure I put my hands on as many unlikely surfaces as possible.’

  Sarah had come up behind them and now stood beside Barry, facing her tormentor.

  Sue-Ellen gave a cry of rage and aimed the gun directly at her.

  ‘You’re out of bullets, remember?’ Sarah said. ‘You fired the last of them at me as I tumbled down the cliff. Again and again until all I could hear was the click of an empty chamber.’

  A bullet zinged past David’s ear.

  ‘Get down!’ he yelled, and as Barry dragged Sarah to the ground he flung himself at Rowena, hurling her to the tarmac.

  But Sue-Ellen had stopped shooting. She was racing towards the plane, the gun now levelled at the incoming policemen who’d dropped down behind a refuelling tanker.

  ‘If I hit that the whole place will go up,’ she yelled. ‘You’ll all die!’

  She made it to the plane and scrambled aboard, firing wildly towards the pilot, who’d been the last to leave so was still closest to it.

  ‘Can she fly?’ Barry asked.

  David nodded, but he doubted whether she had any intention of flying anywhere. The twin engines roared to life and the plane raced up the runway then, without lifting more than a foot off the ground, continued straight out over the cliff and into the sea.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘WELL, for a holiday that started out with disaster, it didn’t turn out too badly,’ Tony Kemp announced.

  He was standing with his arm around his wife’s shoulders on the wide stone patio in front of the Witherses’ house. Ted had invited them all to a lunchtime feast to celebrate the news that he and Kelly were, years after they’d given up all hope of having a family, expecting a baby. It had been a joyous explanation for Kelly’s distraction, confirmed when Ted had persuaded her to see Sarah professionally.

  Barry and Margo were there, demonstrating what life was like after an addition to the family. James was inside, sleeping off a morning playing with new lambs. Lucy was flirting light-heartedly with Nick, and Rowena and David were sitting quietly on the wide stone balustrade, holding hands and saying very little.

  Sarah looked around the people who’d become her friends, then focussed on the one who’d always been close to her.

  ‘I guess our next visit will be for a wedding,’ she said. ‘Have you finally got around to asking Rowena to marry you? Or are you still dithering about what people will think? Or whether you’re finally cleared of all suspicion? Or whatever other dread you’re nurturing? Honestly, David, for someone who was once so positive about life, you sure had the stuffing knocked out of you by that woman!’

  David grinned at her, then kissed Rowena.

  ‘We’ll do things in our own way, thank you, Dr Bossy! You concentrate on your own problems, like persuading Bessie Jenkins to give up her job at the tuckshop until she’s cleared of hepatitis.’

  Sarah smiled smugly. ‘It’s done and, no, I won’t tell you how I did it. A woman needs some secrets.’

  ‘Speaking of secrets, I’ve had copies of the lab report and also a final summing-up of things from the homicide people.’ Barry addressed the gathering at large, but David knew the words were directed at him.

  ‘You know, of course, that the fingerprints on the underside of the seat in the Range Rover proved that Sarah had indeed been in it, and bullets gathered on the cliff where Sarah fell proved someone had been shooting out there. But the lab report’s even more interesting. By sheer chance, some of the dust I vacuumed up under the chest in your shed had oats in it.’

  ‘Oats?’ Rowena echoed faintly. ‘What do oats have to do with anything?’

  ‘Horses eat oats,’ Barry explained. ‘Generally, after such a long time, it would be hard to positively tell one kind of grass-eating animal’s manure from another, unless the animal had been on a specific diet. The oats suggested the animal had been hand-fed, and the Merlyn twins’ horses on the mainland were stabled and fed oats.’

  ‘I don’t see where all this is leading,’ Ted Withers complained. ‘Does anyone else understand?’

  Sarah smiled at him.

  ‘I think I do,’ she said. ‘One of the problems all along has been where the body was when the police searched David’s prop
erty and, presumably, his place in Melbourne. The twins brought two horses over, and Sue-Ellen—though everyone thought it was Mary-Ellen—took the float back. The trunk, with the body in it, must have been in the float, collecting a bit of horse manure on the bottom of it. I bet later, after the island property had been searched, she said she couldn’t leave the horses there unattended, and brought the float back for them.’

  ‘Yes, she did,’ David remembered, ‘but I can’t see her lugging the trunk around on her own. It’s impossible.’

  ‘When we went back to the shed we found a lightweight trolley—a wheeled thing the old man probably used to shift his heavy collectibles around the shed.’ Barry took up the explanations again. ‘The original interview with the chaps on the boat the day she went back to the mainland mentioned a trolley in the float. They assumed it was used to shift bales of hay because there was hay in there as well.’

  ‘Or a trunk cleverly disguised as a bale of hay!’ Rowena suggested.

  Barry nodded at her.

  ‘Where she kept the trailer while the mainland search went on is anyone’s guess, but if it was near stables, the smell could have gone unnoticed.’

  ‘Or been contained by the trunk to a certain degree,’ Tony put in. ‘There are documented cases of bodies left for years in left-luggage facilities at railway stations. Obviously the smell didn’t attract too much attention.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Barry continued, ‘once she had it back on the island, she was safe. It was a year before David decided to come and live in the house, and by then she was off spending her sister’s money and, no doubt, felt she’d got away with murder.’

  ‘So why come back at all?’ Rowena asked. ‘Why open up the investigation? Why take the risk?’

  ‘I wasn’t lying when I said Paul Page had been investigating her,’ Barry responded. ‘Though I only had the fax telling me that the morning the planes came in. Apparently she’d gone through all Mary-Ellen’s money, so when one of Mary-Ellen’s ex-husbands died she sued his estate for a share. His family didn’t think Mary-Ellen would have behaved that way—they’d always liked her and hadn’t blamed her for leaving the old man who’d been a bit of a tartar. Anyway, they hired a firm of private detectives to check her out and Paul Page’s firm got the Australian end of the investigation.’

  ‘But had he any proof she wasn’t who she said she was?’ Rowena asked. ‘And why was he with her, pretending to be her detective?’

  ‘They were both too clever by half,’ Barry replied. ‘As soon as she realised he was snooping around, she turned the tables by going to his firm and asking specifically for him to help her find her sister’s murderer. Once David mentioned he was going to clear out the shed, chances were the body would come to light. What better idea than for her to discover it? No doubt she thought it would throw Paul off the scent. Of course, he saw it as an opportunity to get close to her and find out more.’

  ‘So when she suggested they look in my car for something, he’d have fallen in with her plan?’ David tightened his arm around Rowena as he made the suggestion. They’d come so close to losing this magical love before they’d properly explored it, and he felt his heart juddering at the memory.

  ‘Actually, she told me about it as we drove out to the National Park,’ Sarah said. ‘I think she wanted me to know how clever she was. Paul Page had already shown her he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight, so she told him she’d arranged to meet David in his car, knowing Paul would come, too. She let Paul sit in the front passenger seat, saying there was more room there for his legs, and being behind him made it easier to produce the gun without him suspecting. Later, she got into the driver’s seat and turned on the engine and the heater, then, by pure chance, as she was driving the Range Rover back to the motel, she saw David dash across the street from the hospital. She waited until he’d gone inside, then went across and slipped the gun into the pocket of his raincoat.’

  ‘I guess, having visited since childhood, she knew everyone left their rain gear in the outer porch,’ Ted put in.

  ‘But once you found that gun, where did the other gun come from?’ Margo asked her husband. ‘Why was she wandering around with two guns?’

  ‘They were a pair. Mary-Ellen had lived abroad and, according to information Paul Page had collected, one of her husbands had given her a gun and shown her how to shoot. Prior to her return to Australia, she’d bought a second gun for her sister. No doubt, she suggested the island would be an ideal place for Sue-Ellen to learn to shoot, so they brought the guns over with them.’

  ‘Then she was killed with one of them!’ David murmured, the enormity of the crime still weighing him down.

  ‘Exactly,’ Barry agreed. ‘In fact, she told Sarah a lot of that as well, though the information remained hearsay until we proved what we could of it. She wasn’t experienced with firearms so she couldn’t shoot anyone from a distance, but she boasted to Sarah about daring her sister to try to fit into the trunk. Apparently the story of their mother having a trunk of old clothes was true, and in their childhood they’d hidden in it. Mary-Ellen had gone along with the dare, making it easy for Sue-Ellen to shoot her and hide the body at the same time. The bullet hole in the bottom was filled with debris, and wasn’t found until the trunk went to the lab.’

  ‘But she brought the guns back to the island this time, five years later,’ Rowena said. ‘Did she intend to kill someone all along?’

  ‘I’d say so.’ It was Tony who made this assessment. ‘I saw some of Paul Page’s reports and he was getting far too close to the truth. He’d even found a record of a sale of the second anklet so presumably, like the hair-dye thing, Sue-Ellen had insisted on buying an anklet for her sister to complete the double image. When she realised Paul Page knew more than he should, the decision to get rid of him, while irrational to us, no doubt seemed logical to her. And, having killed once on the island, it might have seemed easier to repeat it over here.’

  ‘Well, I like that explanation better than doing it here to deliberately target me as chief suspect,’ David said. ‘Though I think revenge—or perhaps jealousy—ran through all of Sue-Ellen’s behaviour. Things were often “unfair” to her, beginning, I suspect, with Mary-Ellen going first through the birth canal. And there was an instability there as well.’

  He sighed then looked at Tony.

  ‘I owe you a huge apology for putting Sarah in danger. From the moment Sue-Ellen arrived, I sensed a threat but, seeing her as Mary-Ellen, I felt she might object to me replacing her sister with another woman. Naturally, I thought the target would be Rowena, and did my best to deflect danger from her. But Sue-Ellen, though she’d never met Sarah, had always been jealous of my friendship with her. She didn’t know Sarah had remarried so when I contacted who I thought was Mary-Ellen, telling her I had Sarah coming over to the island as a locum to give me time to clear the sheds, she could have leapt to the conclusion I was considering remarriage and assumed I had Sarah as the likely candidate for a bride.’

  Rowena saw Tony’s arm tighten around his wife and knew the security of that kind of protection. She could almost feel the love flowing between the couple—between the other couples here as well—and understood it was her own new and different experience of it heightening her senses.

  Then Sarah shook her head.

  ‘She was definitely irrational. Frighteningly so. I tried to talk to her, to get her to explain. But in all she said—raved, really—I still couldn’t get an answer to why she killed her sister.’

  ‘Money!’ David said. ‘And in the end it’s what brought her down, don’t you see? First she went through her own inheritance from her parents. A lot of the problems in our marriage were money-related. I worked sessions at the Childrens’ Hospital on a voluntary basis and Sue-Ellen felt it was a waste of good earning time. She hated me doing it and nagged incessantly about it. Taunted me about my “charity”!’

  ‘Money!’ Sarah murmured. ‘How often it comes back to that.’

  Dav
id nodded, then, as if he needed to explain, added, ‘Looking back from this different perspective, I can understand her behaviour towards me after she’d killed her sister. She was in such a towering rage but knowing now that it was Sue, I can see she was blaming me for what she’d done. Killing her sister would have been like killing part of herself, and in her mind it was all my fault because I couldn’t provide her with the money she wanted—or perhaps needed.’

  He smiled, but the expression held little mirth. ‘It’s strange, but the wrangling over money, the unhappiness it caused, must have stayed with me. When I gave up paediatrics—came here to the island—it was a relief to get away from the money-oriented side of specialising. I realised later it was an underlying motivation in making that decision.’

  ‘Not to mention getting away from colleagues who viewed you with suspicion,’ Rowena, who’d heard so much of his story in the last few days, reminded him.

  ‘Yes, but getting back to Sue-Ellen,’ David said. ‘It must have seemed unfair to her that Mary-Ellen was not only free of encumbrances in the way of a husband, but was inordinately wealthy to boot. She killed her sister to get her money, went through it all, then greed prompted her to try for more from the ex-husband’s estate. I think Tony’s right in saying she considered herself safe, killing on the island. Then it became a bit of a game. By inveigling Paul to accompany her to my car, she also implicated me, and getting rid of Sarah just added a bit of spice to her delight.’

  Rowena felt the cold presence of evil brush against her skin and shivered in the warm sun. But David’s warmth sustained her, promising safe harbour—eventually.

  ‘But she didn’t get rid of me,’ Sarah reminded them. ‘As soon as we stopped, I got out and ran. OK, so I ran over the edge of a cliff in sheer fright when she fired at me, but that turned out to be my salvation. When I didn’t move, she fired the rest of her bullets in my general direction, then assumed I was dead and eventually went away. But that’s all in the past. Let’s look to the future. When are you two getting married?’