Liss all but flew between the rows of trees. She had no idea how she managed to avoid the hazards underfoot. She didn’t trip over any roots or step in any chuckholes, but the snap of twigs and the rustle of branches thrust aside sounded inordinately loud in the still, cold night.
Juliette turned. For a moment her flashlight illuminated her own face. Liss recognized disbelief in her expression, before it gave way to rage.
“Why aren’t you dead?” Juliette shrieked and threw her flashlight at Liss’s head.
Liss ducked and kept running.
Juliette slid into the driver’s seat of her car and turned the key she’d left in the ignition, but Liss caught hold of the top of the car door before her adversary could get it closed. With a strength born of fury, Liss jerked it all the way open, reached inside, and hauled an astonished Juliette out onto the icy ground.
They landed hard, both staggering to keep upright. Liss lost her grip on the other woman’s arm. Juliette, enraged, swung around and charged, intent on using her fingernails to claw Liss’s face.
Quick reflexes saved her skin, but the sudden jerky movement caused her weak knee to spasm. It buckled under her when she tried to shift out of Juliette’s way a second time, and she felt herself falling.
Instinct and years of dance training took over. She landed hard. A rock bit painfully into her hip. But she avoided hitting her head, and she did no serious damage to her limbs. Her bum knee protested even more emphatically when she pushed herself to her feet, but it didn’t give out on her again. She gritted her teeth and braced herself for the next attack.
Juliette came at her like a freight train and the force of the impact took them both to the ground. They rolled together down the incline at the side of the logging road and narrowly missed slamming into a tree. The breath knocked out of her, Liss did all she could to protect herself as Juliette struck out, kicking, squirming, punching, and cursing. Her blows landed haphazardly but with bruising force.
Juliette threw another wild punch and overbalanced herself, giving Liss an opening. In an instant, she was on top, pinning her opponent. Juliette bucked, trying to dislodge her. When that failed, she broke Liss’s hold on her wrists and grabbed for Liss’s hair. Liss evaded the grasping fingers and tightened her knees. For strength, for determination, they were evenly matched. Juliette might be mad, but Liss was angry. This woman had tried to burn down a house with them in it. She’d meant to kill Dan and Sherri and Liss herself.
But furious as she was, Liss was rapidly tiring. Being bundled up in warm winter clothing cost Juliette a little mobility, but it also protected her from most of the blows Liss had managed to land. At the same time, what Liss was wearing put her at a disadvantage. She had lost one of her boots, and her flannel nightgown had hiked up. Her bare legs were so numb with cold that she could barely feel them. One more shift in position and Juliette would win.
Liss drew back her arm, made a fist, and put all the force she could muster behind the blow she aimed at Juliette’s jaw. They both yelped in pain. An instant later the back of Juliette’s head connected with the ground, and she went still.
Liss was still sitting on top of the unconscious Juliette and cradling her injured hand against her chest when Sherri found her.
“Are you okay?”
Liss nodded. “I hurt my thumb.”
“You hurt . . . Oh, don’t tell me! You had it on the inside of your fingers when you hit her. You made a girl fist.”
Choking back a laugh, Sherri helped Liss to her feet, then rolled Juliette over and slapped handcuffs on her while she was still too dazed to resist. She jerked her prisoner upright and told her to stay put. She needn’t have worried. All the fight had gone out of her.
Liss wondered if Juliette had a concussion, but she didn’t much care. She managed to find her other boot with the help of Sherri’s flashlight and get it back on her foot, but after that she was shivering so hard that she could barely stay upright. Her thumb was now too cold to throb. Ditto for her knee.
“Sorry it took me so long to follow you,” Sherri said. “I had to make sure fire and police were on their way.”
“I need a blanket.” Liss’s teeth were chattering so badly that it was a miracle Sherri understood her.
“With any luck, there’s one coming now.”
Two bobbing lights moved toward them—men with flashlights. They were no more than shapes at first but soon resolved themselves into Mike Jennings and Wyatt Purvey.
Purvey’s face looked ghastly in the uneven lighting. He stared at Juliette as if he’d never seen her before, then turned, briefly, to look back over his shoulder at the fire.
It lit up the sky in that direction. The house was fully engulfed. The parking area was a beehive of activity, full of fire trucks and people rushing about. There was an ambulance, too. Liss hoped someone was looking after Dan.
Jennings draped a heavy gray wool blanket around her shaking shoulders. Purvey had brought its twin for Sherri.
“Can you make it back under your own steam?” Jennings asked. “The EMTs can bring a stretcher if you need it.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look it,” he said bluntly.
Liss wrapped the blanket more tightly around herself. “I’m not going anywhere until you place Juliette Cressy under arrest. She set the fire, and she murdered those men. All three of them.”
Wyatt Purvey had moved closer to Juliette, but he didn’t touch her or try to speak to her. She ignored him completely.
“And don’t you dare leave Juliette in his custody,” Liss added. “He’ll let her escape.”
A sound suspiciously like a sob came from Purvey’s direction. “I didn’t think she meant it,” he whispered. “I couldn’t believe—” Unable to go on, he just stood there. His mouth worked, but no sound emerged.
Jennings stepped forward and took charge of the prisoner, helping her to her feet and keeping hold of her arm. He recited the Miranda warning and was met with sullen silence on her part. She wouldn’t even nod when he asked her if she understood her rights.
They moved as a unit to return to the parking area, where Dan anxiously waited. The ambulance included crutches in the emergency medical supplies it carried, so he was once again on his feet and mobile, if somewhat hampered by having to huddle in a blanket identical to the ones Liss and Sherri had been given.
“Get back inside the car and keep warm,” Liss said after they embraced. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t sound it.”
“Your teeth and hers will be performing a castanet duet if you keep standing around out in the cold,” Jennings said. “Get back in the car, Ruskin. Your wife will join you as soon as the paramedics check her over.”
Reluctantly, Dan obeyed.
Sherri steered Liss toward the ambulance while Jennings escorted Juliette to his police cruiser and locked her in the back, still handcuffed. Although the delay seemed interminable, it didn’t take long for Liss and Sherri to be cleared. Aside from a few scrapes and bruises, skinned knuckles, and a throbbing thumb, Liss had escaped with relatively little damage.
All the while she was being fussed over, Liss kept one eye on Wyatt Purvey. He made no further attempt to approach Juliette, nor did he try to leave. He seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Another fire truck, this one from a neighboring town, pulled into the parking area, quickly followed by more volunteer firefighters. The house was gone, but they had to make sure the blaze was completely extinguished. A state police cruiser arrived next. The trooper spoke to Mike Jennings, then to Wyatt Purvey. Mike got into his cruiser, with Juliette still in the back, and drove away.
In the midst of all the confusion, Andy Dutton showed up on her motorcycle. She surveyed the situation without speaking to anyone, although she stared at Liss for a long time. Then she took off again. Fifteen minutes later, she returned, this time carrying dry, warm clothing in a backpack.
A pair of Mrs. Dutton’s wool slacks fit
Sherri well enough for decency. The flannel-lined jeans she offered Liss were her own. They were too big, but Liss slipped into them gratefully, rolling up the legs so she wouldn’t trip over the hems. When she’d added one of the two knit sweaters Andy had brought, she felt almost human again.
While she was dressing, Andy opened up the Quonset hut and turned on a space heater, which Liss hadn’t even realized was there. Everyone who wasn’t involved in containing the fire trooped gratefully inside. Liss had barely gotten Dan settled on the seat of the John Deere when the state trooper walked up to them.
“Ms. Ruskin?”
She nodded.
“Chief Purvey there . . .” He gestured to the far end of the Quonset hut, where Purvey had been left to stand all alone, shoulders slumped and a resigned look on his face. “He says he’s got a statement to make, but he won’t make it unless you’re a witness to what he has to say.”
“Maybe we should wait for the detective handling the Snowe case to get here,” Liss suggested.
“Purvey says it has to be now, or he won’t talk at all.”
Sherri’s face wore a worried look. “I get that you want to hear what he has to say, but this is unorthodox.”
“Will you be able to use what he says against him?” Liss asked.
“He’s been read his rights. I’ll record his statement.”
Sherri took the trooper aside. After a brief conversation and two quick phone calls, none of which Liss could overhear, they returned.
“We have the go-ahead from the powers that be,” Sherri said. “It’s okay for you to be the one he talks to.”
In the end, Wyatt Purvey had an audience of four—Liss, Dan, Sherri, and the state trooper. He didn’t seem to notice. Or, if he did, he didn’t mind. All his attention was fixed on Liss.
“All right, Chief Purvey,” she said when a digital recorder had been activated. “What do you have to say to me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For trying to burn down the Christmas tree farm.”
For a moment, Liss was at a loss for words. That was not what she’d expected him to say.
“I thought Juliette did that,” Dan said. “It seems pretty obvious she was the one who set fire to the house.”
“Yes, she did.” Purvey hung his head. “That’s what she wanted me to do the first time, but I thought burning the house down was going too far. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Why that particular field?” Liss asked.
He sighed, looking even more pathetic. “The trees seemed to be closer together there. I thought they’d burn better. Faster.”
Good grief, Liss thought. Talk about conspirators working at cross-purposes! By picking that particular field and calling attention to it, he’d accomplished the opposite of what Juliette wanted.
The state trooper interrupted. “Let me get this straight. Ms. Cressy wanted to get rid of the Ruskins? She told you to set fire to the house?”
Purvey nodded. “I thought burning the field would accomplish the same thing—get them gone.”
“If you wanted to get rid of us,” Dan asked, “why come by the next day and order us not to leave town?”
“Reverse psychology,” Sherri murmured. “He knew he couldn’t make that order stick.”
“I don’t understand,” Liss said. “Why would you even consider doing something so terrible just because Juliette wanted you to? Was she blackmailing you?”
Purvey gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. “She didn’t need to. I was in love with her. All she had to do was say, ‘Jump,’ and I’d ask, ‘How high?’ ”
“You loved her? Even though she was selling herself to anyone who could meet her price?” Sherri couldn’t conceal her incredulity.
Purvey winced. “She didn’t. . . . She promised.” He drew in a deep breath. “Yes, I knew about her past. That’s how we met. I meant to put a stop to what she was doing. I never intended to arrest her, you understand. Hell, no one’s getting hurt, right? Not worth making a fuss over. But the next thing I knew, she’d charmed the socks off me.”
Along with the rest of his clothes, Liss thought.
“I . . . I thought if I gave her enough money, she’d give up whoring.” He stared down at his hands, and Liss saw that they were trembling. “But it was never enough. She said she could make more by keeping her business going. We compromised. She agreed to bring in a couple of girls and to stop seeing customers herself.”
“Kitty and Josie,” Sherri said.
Purvey nodded. “Those two now. Others before. Some of them were college girls earning tuition money.” He made a choked sound. “She used to say she was doing a public service by hiring them.”
“So you looked the other way?” Liss asked.
“I thought . . . I thought I’d get to keep her all to myself if I did. She convinced me that she wasn’t actually working in the business herself anymore, only supervising. She swore she slept only with me. Probably wrong about that,” he muttered. “Seems like I was wrong about everything.”
A small sound behind Liss made her turn. The detective she’d talked to after finding the body in the freezer chest had come into the Quonset hut unnoticed. He motioned for the trooper to continue recording and positioned himself out of Wyatt Purvey’s line of sight.
“She had me so twisted up that I couldn’t tell right from wrong anymore. I lied. I stole. But not murder. Never murder.”
“Stole what?” Liss asked.
He didn’t look at any of them but rather stared into space. After all the years of keeping his sins secret, Liss had to wonder if he might be finding some kind of relief in confessing.
“I embezzled money from the town to give to Juliette.”
“Who caused my husband’s accident in the parking lot at the grocery store?” Liss asked.
“Juliette. You stopped by and said you were staying at the farm, and then her mother told her you’d bought a book on mazes. I didn’t understand what it was that worried her. I didn’t know she’d buried Snowe there.”
“What did you know?” Liss persisted. “Did you know she’d killed John Doe?”
“I . . . Yes, she told me about him. But she said killing him was an accident. He threatened her. He was a criminal. He wanted to bring organized crime into my town.”
He said that as if it was okay to kill someone who was connected to the mob. That was how he’d justified Juliette’s crime to himself, Liss supposed. “Why did she bring him out here and net him?”
“She was out of her mind with fear.”
“More likely, she wanted to frame Simeon Snowe for the murder,” Sherri said.
“I believed her when she said she didn’t know what happened to Snowe.”
“Finding him in that field was proof that she did,” Liss said. “That must have been a nasty shock. And then she tried to frame Rowena.”
“She’s afraid.”
“She went off half-cocked, and she doesn’t give a tinker’s dam who gets hurt or killed as a result.” Dan’s disgust was obvious. “What about her stepfather? What reason did she have for killing him?”
“I don’t know.” Purvey seemed to shrink into himself. His voice, never more than a loud whisper, faded away to nothing.
Sherri threw more questions at him. So did the state police detective. Purvey denied that his mother had been involved. He claimed she didn’t even know he’d been intimate with Juliette. Then he stopped talking. A short time later, the trooper took him away.
The detective remained behind long enough to tell them that the search for evidence against Rowena had yielded plenty to incriminate Juliette. There had been evidence in the storage locker that would send Wyatt Purvey to prison, too, even without his recorded confession.
“Rowena will be devastated,” Liss murmured, “but at least she won’t be punished for a crime she didn’t commit.”
“I could almost feel sorry for Wyatt Purvey if he wasn’t such a weakling,”
Sherri said.
“Do you really think he knew nothing about Snowe’s murder?” Dan asked.
“Hard to tell, but I think his disillusionment with Juliette was real. When he belatedly realized that only Juliette could have killed all three men, he had to stop deluding himself. She’d been using him. She never loved him. She probably didn’t even enjoy the sex—”
“Too much information,” Liss interrupted.
“I have to wonder, though, why Juliette killed her stepfather.”
“Maybe he was a customer, too,” Dan suggested.
“Or else he found out she was selling herself and tried to get her to stop,” Sherri suggested. “Threatened to tell Rowena, maybe. Or threatened to turn her in to the cops.”
“So she, what?” Dan asked. “Killed him, shoved him in the freezer, and forgot about him?”
“Hardly. She knew he was there. By the time she was on her third victim, she had no qualms about giving him a temporary freezer mate. From the sound of it, she was willing to dispose of anyone she saw as a threat, including us.”
“So you think Snowe was giving her a hard time, trying to get her to give up her sideline for her mother’s sake?” Dan was shaking his head in disbelief.
“Maybe. Talk about déjà vu!”
Almost all the emergency vehicles had dispersed by the time they left the Quonset hut. There was nothing left in the ruins of the house to salvage, and now that they had answers to most of their questions, Liss wanted nothing more than to go home. Exhaustion was taking its toll, but she had one more obligation to fulfill before she could leave.
She borrowed Sherri’s cell phone and called Gina Snowe.
Once she’d brought the property’s owner up to date on the latest developments, she cut short a barrage of questions with one of her own. “Why did you send us here, Gina?”
“To find out what really happened, of course, but I didn’t expect I’d have to lose the house in order to get answers.”
“You expected me to snoop.”
“Well, it’s what you do.” Gina chuckled. “You keep denying it, but you’re the closest thing to Miss Marple that Moosetookalook has. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of that?”
Ho-Ho-Homicide (A Liss MacCrimmon Mystery Book 8) Page 24
