Fatal Trust

by Diana Miller

  “There’s a path there, too,” Cecilia said, pointing at a rough path just beyond the SUV, one that appeared to go up. “Maybe they took it instead.”

  “Why? The Ferrari went into the ravine. Come on.” Jeremy started toward the first path.

  Cecilia grabbed his arm, stopping him. “Wait.” She dialed her cell phone with her free hand.

  “Did you find her?” Ben asked when he answered the phone.

  “Not yet,” Cecilia said. “We found Trey’s SUV, parked off the road in the trees. Where we all thought Grandfather crashed.”

  “Is Lexie with him?” Ben asked.

  “We haven’t found Trey, just his SUV. You know this area since you helped Grandfather stage his death here. If Trey plans to hurt Lexie, would they more likely go down the ravine or take the other path? It looks like it goes up.”

  “Damn.”

  “Which one, Ben?”

  “The path does go up. It leads to a cliff that overlooks Forest Lake. If Trey wants to kill Lexie, he could push her off and into the lake.”

  “Aunt Muriel saw Lexie shot and in water,” Cecilia said.

  “I know.” Ben’s words sounded strangled.

  Cecilia shut off her phone. “We’re going up,” she told Jeremy. “Hurry.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Her brain admittedly wasn’t at its sharpest, but Trey’s words made no sense. “Agreeing to marry Max caused Aunt Jessica’s stroke?” Lexie asked.

  “Of course not,” Trey said. “Her supposed stroke was caused by an injection of a certain paralytic poison that she gave herself, thinking it was her insulin. It took longer to work since she injected it subcutaneously, but it eventually did the trick.”

  The blood left Lexie’s head and the world seemed to recede, as if she were looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. “You killed Aunt Jessica because she was going to marry Max? For God’s sake, why?”

  “Walk,” he said, gesturing with the gun.

  Lexie slowly turned back around. She still felt dizzy, but managed to resume walking.

  “Jessica insisted on having a prenup. Faster.” Trey poked Lexie’s back with the gun. “Jessica was successful, but nowhere near Max’s league, and she didn’t want anyone thinking she’d married him for his money or his family hating her for it. She insisted on an agreement that she wouldn’t get a cent from him if they divorced or he died. Max had given her attorney some accountings I’d prepared, but the attorney wanted copies of Max’s income tax returns and financial statements as part of that damn full-disclosure requirement before he’d let Jessica sign anything. By then I’d been stealing from Max for a few years, so the accountings her attorney already had wouldn’t jibe with the financial statements or tax returns. I realized I had to get rid of Jessica so there’d be no need for a prenup.”

  Lexie was having trouble breathing. “No one suspected? Even though it happened right after Max asked you for the documents?” Her voice sounded strained and an octave too high.

  “Why would they?” Trey asked. “Max trusted me, and no one knew what I was doing. Jessica had also suffered a small stroke a month earlier. I think that’s why she finally agreed to marry Max. And Max was so broken up by Jessica’s death that he convinced your mother to refuse to allow an autopsy. He didn’t want anyone cutting up Jessica’s body, which is ironic considering all the bodies Max has eviscerated in his books. Not that they could have detected the poison I used anyway.”

  Trey’s words and self-satisfied tone flicked a switch inside Lexie. She was no longer scared, she was angry. Angry for Jessica’s sake, that she’d been murdered when she still had so much to live for. Angry for Max’s sake, that he’d never achieved his dream of marrying Jessica and had lost so many years with her.

  And Lexie was angry for herself, not only because she’d loved and missed her aunt, but because her aunt had encouraged her to stand up to her mother and live her own life. Who knows how different things would have been if her aunt had lived—for one thing, Lexie probably wouldn’t have given in to her mother’s pressure to marry Neil.

  She whirled around. “You bastard! How could you kill my aunt?”

  # # #

  “Did you hear that?” Cecilia asked, quickening her pace. “It sounded like a woman.”

  “She said ‘you bastard,’ but I couldn’t make out the rest,” Jeremy said.

  “Neither could I, but it must have been Lexie. Who else would be out here? She’s in trouble.” Cecelia started walking as fast as she could over the rough path. The voice had sounded too far away for comfort.

  Jeremy pushed by her. He’d been holding the gun loosely at his side but now had it raised. “Let me go first.”

  # # #

  Trey grabbed Lexie’s arm and squeezed it painfully. “Shut up!”

  Anger gave her the strength to disregard the pain and jerk away from him. Ignoring the gun, she took off running.

  Lexie immediately regretted her impulsiveness since she was guaranteed to end up dead. But it was too late to back down. Not that the adrenaline surging through her veins would have let her stop. She kept running, bracing herself for a shot in the back.

  It never came.

  Suddenly she was out of the trees—and standing less than twenty feet from the edge of a cliff overlooking Forest Lake. With nowhere to run.

  “I apologize for the fog,” Trey said, stepping out of the trees. “It must have drifted in from Superior. I guess you won’t be able to enjoy your final view after all.”

  Lexie’s heart was hammering from adrenaline, exertion, and fear as she analyzed her options. Even from here she could tell that the cliff went straight down probably two hundred feet to the lake. Jumping was a definite last resort.

  She needed to get Trey talking again. Talking would hopefully distract him enough that she could rush him and grab the gun, now that they were in the open. She should certainly be able to take down a sixty-something man who’d just gotten out of the hospital. If she tried now, he’d shoot her before she reached him. If she waited, let him get closer—

  “You know how this is going to end,” Trey said as he approached her. “Why don’t you make it easy on yourself and jump?”

  “Easy on you, you mean.”

  “I’m actually thinking of you.” Trey gestured with the gun. “Why incur a painful gunshot wound if you don’t have to?”

  “You don’t need to kill me,” Lexie said. “You can take me somewhere and make sure it will be hours, if not days, before someone rescues me. I’m sure you’ve planned to make a quick getaway.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because you’re too smart not to have, especially once you killed Max. You’ve got a plan to leave the country, and I’m sure your money isn’t in U.S. accounts.”

  “You’re right on both counts. My money’s in a country that couldn’t care less how I got it. I’ve also had an escape plan in place for years.”

  “You claim you don’t want to disappear, but I’ll bet you never planned to stick around Minnesota once you retired anyway,” Lexie said. “The winters are almost six months long. Six cold and snowy months.”

  “True. But if I kill you, I can leave on my own schedule. What’s one more death on my conscience?”

  Trey stopped a couple of feet in front of her. He hadn’t lost a bit of his focus, his grip on the gun still sure.

  “You’ve gotten away with the earlier murders, but you can’t be sure you’ll get away with killing me,” Lexie said. “Someone might have seen us leave Nevermore together. You were worried about Max pursuing you if he discovered your embezzling. My father’s really rich, too, and he’ll spend whatever it takes to find my killer. Don’t think that you’ll be safe even if you’re in a country that won’t extradite you back here. My dad’s friends aren’t all law-abiding.”

  “You’re right that someone could have seen us together in the house,” Trey said, although he didn’t sound concerned. “I’ll have to tell the police that I
saw you in my office. You seemed upset, although you wouldn’t tell me why, just that you had some thinking to do and were going for a walk. You walked with me as far as my car, and then I left. No one will suspect I’d ever kill you, not the police, not your father. I don’t have a motive for doing that or for killing Max. And Max’s murderer supposedly tried to kill me.”

  She didn’t even see him lunge toward her. She dug in her heels, fought him as hard as she could, struggled to keep her footing on the cliff. She’d be damned if she’d let this monster who’d killed both Aunt Jessica and Max kill her.

  For someone who’d just gotten out of the hospital, he was surprisingly strong. He muscled her over grass made slippery by the fog until Lexie was at the edge of the cliff.

  She pushed him with as much strength as she could muster. Trey lost his footing and fell to the ground. The gun slipped from his hand onto the grass.

  Lexie grabbed for it, but he beat her to it. He picked up the gun and got to his feet. “If you’re not going to cooperate, we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

  Lexie looked behind her. She couldn’t make out the water through fog that had thickened in the last few minutes, but she knew it was down there. Her only hope now was to jump. Maybe she’d be able to swim to shore.

  Trey raised the gun, pointed it at her.

  She needed to jump. But she couldn’t make herself step back and off the cliff. She could just as well miss the water and hit the shore. Even if she made it to the water, the impact would probably kill her. She closed her eyes, braced herself. At least if he shot her, he’d have a better chance of getting caught.

  The gun exploded, reverberating in her ears. But no pain. She opened her eyes.

  Trey wasn’t pointing the gun at her; he was pointing it at the sky. “No, Max—”

  Then a hand shoved Trey off the cliff.

  Lexie’s knees gave out, and she collapsed on the damp ground.

  “Lexie. Are you okay?” Jeremy was there, a gun in his hand.

  She was hyperventilating, could barely force out words. “Trey was trying to kill me,” she puffed out. She focused on slowing her breathing.

  “Because he was embezzling from Grandfather.” Lexie recognized Cecilia’s voice before she could see her through the fog. “Ben said you figured it out.”

  “How did he know?” Lexie asked.

  “From what Jeremy told him about your conversation,” Cecilia said. “That’s why Ben sent us after you.”

  “You saved my life, Jeremy,” Lexie said.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You pushed Trey. Thanking you for that seems a little inadequate.”

  “But I didn’t,” Jeremy said. “Trey was falling off the cliff when I got here. I assumed you shoved him, which is why his shot missed and he fell.”

  “I didn’t do anything besides shut my eyes and wait for him to shoot me,” Lexie said. “When he missed, he said something about Max, then somebody shoved him. I saw a hand.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Cecilia said. “I was behind Jeremy.”

  “No one else is here,” Jeremy said. “Trey must have slipped. Although I can certainly understand why you’re confused after what you’ve just gone through. And the fog is damn thick. No wonder you thought you saw someone.”

  “I swear—” Then Lexie broke off. They wouldn’t believe her, not what she was beginning to think had happened. She wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t been there.

  Or maybe she was confused. “You’re right,” she said. “He must have slipped.”

  “Let’s get you back to the car so we can head over to the jail,” Cecilia said. “Ben’s going crazy worrying about you.”

  Jeremy chuckled. “For the first time in his life, I think Ben’s going to be happy to see me.”

  CHAPTER 31

  “Do you really believe that Jeremy was trying to help Olivia get back together with me because he felt guilty?” Ben asked.

  Lexie moved from beneath Ben’s arm and rolled over to face him. She’d spent several hours helping get him released, then they’d come back to his house—a Victorian-era place he was remodeling—and made love with an intensity that made her appreciate that truism about soldiers and danger and lust.

  She lightly slugged his bare shoulder. “You make love to me, and your first thought is getting back with your ex-wife?”

  “You know that’s never happening. I was talking about Jeremy.”

  “I think he meant it when he said he was sorry he broke up your marriage,” Lexie said.

  Ben rose up on his side, resting his head on his bent arm. “You don’t think it’s more likely that he knew about Olivia’s problems with the SEC and wanted to stick me with them?”

  “No, I don’t. Can’t you accept that Jeremy did something nice for you? Even after he risked his life to save me because you asked him to? I think you should make peace with him.”

  Ben rolled his eyes. “Next you’ll be trying to get me to make peace with my father.”

  “You do have two stepbrothers you’ve never met,” Lexie said, treading carefully. “I know it’s none of my business, but I nearly died today. It makes you realize that life’s too short to hold grudges.”

  “So you’re going to make nice with your mother?”

  Touché. Lexie had called her dad—whose friends were all law-abiding, to the best of her knowledge—and told him what had happened, asking him to relay the information to the rest of her family. She didn’t think her mother deserved to learn about it from the news or, worse yet, Bitsy Davenport, but Lexie hadn’t wanted to talk to her herself. After escaping death, she was feeling so glad to be alive that she loved the world. Talking to her mother might ruin that.

  “I’ll probably call her in a few days.” By then real life was bound to have killed her post–near-death euphoria. “I guarantee she won’t have forgiven, let alone forgotten, the way I told her off the last time we spoke. Holding grudges is her specialty, not mine.”

  Ben reached out and twirled Lexie’s hair around his finger. “Maybe the fact you nearly died will have changed her attitude, too.”

  “Maybe,” Lexie said, then shifted to a topic that wasn’t such a buzz kill. “You know, I never found out who lost that button. I guess it really doesn’t matter, but it still bugs me.”

  Ben released her hair, his forehead furrowing. “What button?”

  “The one I found under Max’s bed when I searched his room. The one I was positive was a clue to who knew he was still alive,” Lexie added when Ben still looked confused. “I thought I mentioned it to you.”

  “You didn’t. Was it a white shirt button?”

  “How did you know?”

  He smiled faintly. “Because I assume it’s mine. One night when I was changing out of my dress clothes after sherry hour and dinner, I noticed I’d lost a button. I didn’t bother looking for it since the shirt had spares. But I’d just done my after-dinner check of Grandfather’s room for messages, so I’ll bet that’s where it fell off. It must have rolled under the bed.”

  Lexie shook her head, feeling like an idiot. “I can’t believe I agonized over that button but forgot to ask you about it. Some Nancy Drew I turned out to be.”

  “You did figure out the important thing, who killed Grandfather,” Ben said. “I can’t believe Trey had us fooled all these years. It’s a good thing Grandfather never found out that he killed Jessica. He’d definitely have killed Trey as painfully as possible. And Grandfather had quite an imagination for brutal deaths.”

  Lexie stared at the stained glass window over Ben’s dresser, thinking. She probably shouldn’t bother mentioning it since Ben wouldn’t believe it anyway. On the other hand, he might help her figure out a logical explanation for what had happened.

  Lexie turned from the window to Ben and plunged. “I think Max got his chance after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll probably think I’m losing it,” she said. “But Trey was aimin
g the gun directly at me. I shut my eyes and prepared to die. Only he ended up shooting into the air. When I opened my eyes, I swear I saw someone’s arm shove him off the cliff. I’ll admit it was foggy, and I’ve never believed in ghosts before, but I think it must have been Max. Trey even said Max’s name before he fell.”

  She expected Ben to agree she was losing it or at least laugh. Instead he looked thoughtful. “So Walt was right,” he said. “Since Grandfather got you into this, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let you die, especially not on his property. Just like when he made sure you weren’t hurt when your brakes went out.”

  Lexie had rejected Walt’s theory before, but now she smiled faintly. “I guess if anyone could figure out how to come back as a ghost, it would be Max.” Then her smile faded, replaced by a hollowness in her chest. Max had saved her, but she’d let him down twice, not only by failing to prevent his murder but also by screwing up the trust. “If it was Max, it’s too bad he didn’t stick around long enough to get rid of the requirement that you spend every night in Nevermore to inherit,” she said. “I’ll do my best to find a way around it.”

  “I wouldn’t work too hard on it.”

  “Why? You’re opposed to inheriting a fortune?”

  “No, but I happen to know Grandfather drafted an amendment that eliminates that requirement completely if and when his murderer is identified,” Ben said.

  Lexie rolled back up onto her side, her eyes wide, her temper flaring. “You didn’t tell me about it? Even though you knew I was worried to death about it?”

  Ben held up one hand. “I didn’t know until this afternoon. He had a lawyer in New York draft it and told him to let me know about it only when the condition had been satisfied.”

  “I can’t believe Max did that,” Lexie said, shaking her head. “Knowing him, I’d have assumed he’d be positive he’d identify his potential murderer and still be around to amend the trust afterward.”