“If there’s anything I can give you, it’ll be in those tapes. We could watch them together. If Mrs. Coburn is willing to let me back into her house.”
“I’ll persuade her,” Winters says.
They take separate cars and agree to meet at Bracknell Lodge.
Tessa watches Fallbrook grow smaller in her rearview mirror, an aging sentinel of a tragic past.
But the past isn’t where her focus needs to be right now. It’s time for Tessa to fight through her fear and face the monsters of the present.
38
KITTY
Kitty stands on the path to Fallbrook, the forest at her back, and watches Tessa’s car pull away. She carries a bundle of sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper and a thermos of lemonade.
Deirdre stops beside her.
“She’s leaving,” Kitty says to her sister. “Imogene’s daughter is leaving, Dee. What if she never comes back?”
The brake lights of the car wink as it disappears around the turn.
“That’s not our choice to make, Kitty,” Deirdre says.
Kitty turns to glare at her. “How can you be so calm? Tessa was our chance!”
Deirdre carefully avoids her sister’s eyes. She turns instead to look back at the cottage.
“I should get those roses pruned,” she says. “I’ve been putting it off, but it needs to be done.”
“Forget the roses!” Kitty shouts. “This was our chance to tell the world what happened here. Don’t you understand?”
Deirdre whips her head around and glares. “What I understand and what you understand are two very different things, Kitty,” she says coldly.
Kitty laughs, a harsh sound that rarely passes her lips. “That, at least, is one true thing you’ve said today.”
Deirdre crosses her arms and stares. Her face is nothing but stony planes and harsh, unforgiving lines. “What exactly does that mean?”
“You know what it means,” Kitty says softly. “You’re lying. You lied to Tessa, and you’re lying to me. Who took those candlesticks, Dee?”
Deirdre backs up a step, as if Kitty has struck her. “What?” she whispers.
“You heard me. I know it wasn’t Aiden, and so do you. Who are you protecting?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Deirdre murmurs. “You’re getting things mixed up.”
“I’m not. The silver candlesticks. The ones that belonged to the first Mrs. Cooke. How did they end up with Aiden, Deirdre? Someone had to put them there.”
“Where is this coming from?” Deirdre’s breath is shallow and ragged. “Why are you dragging this up? This is exactly why I don’t want anyone digging around to film some ridiculous movie. Talk like this only upsets things. Let it lie, Kitty.”
“Why? Because it’s easier for you if no one knows the truth? Pynchon planted those candlesticks on Aiden, didn’t he?” Kitty whispers. “Did Helena pay him to do it? Or was it his idea?”
Deirdre doesn’t answer. She looks heartsick and pale. Miserable.
“Lawrence Pynchon didn’t love you, Dee. He never loved you.”
Deirdre’s face goes still. Kitty regrets the hurtful nature of the words, but they’re the truth. After all this time, her sister needs to face the truth.
“He treated you the same way he treated all the women in that house, young or old. All except Ruby. He paid special attention to Ruby. Even I could see that. Those candlesticks . . . they were an easy way to get Aiden out of the picture, weren’t they?”
Deirdre has backed up even farther from Kitty. Her face is turned away, and there are tears forming in the bottom of her eyes. Her shoulders are shaking. She’s gripping her arms around her bony frame, bracing herself as if against a storm.
Deirdre was never a beauty, not in the way Ruby was. But her heart was no less tender. Her love no less worthy.
“How long have you known who really stole them?” Kitty asks. “From the beginning?”
Deirdre swallows hard, still desperately holding on to words she’s not willing to let free.
She shakes her head instead. “No,” she whispers. “No. Not for certain. But I suspected.”
Kitty has the urge to hug her sister, to hold her tightly until the pain goes away, but Deirdre wouldn’t welcome it. Not right now.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Kitty asks quietly.
Deirdre’s eyes are dark and bottomless when they meet hers. Her voice trembles when she speaks. “Because the hardest thing in the world is to see the worst parts of the people you love, Kitty. So don’t lecture me about what I understand and what I don’t. Don’t you dare.”
39
TESSA
Tessa doesn’t dare let her mind wander to all that could go wrong. She stays focused on the tangible goal in front of her and pulls her car to a stop next to Chief Winters’s battered old truck.
She steps out and the pair of them walk toward the door of Bracknell Lodge together.
“Let me do the talking,” Winters says. “She’s no fan of yours.”
No thanks to you, Tessa thinks, but she holds her tongue.
Mrs. Coburn’s face brightens at the sight of Winters but immediately grows cold when she spots Tessa behind him.
She stands silent while Chief Winters explains the situation.
“Mrs. Russell isn’t here,” Mrs. Coburn informs them. “She left a little while ago.”
Winters glances back at Tessa.
“When she returns, we’d like to use the television in her guest room to screen some video footage. Official police business. And Ms. Shepherd is vital to that process.”
Mrs. Coburn’s nose wrinkles as if she’s suddenly smelled something that’s gone bad. Tessa fights an urge to roll her eyes.
“Whatever you need, Chief Winters,” Mrs. Coburn says finally, making it clear that he’s the only reason Tessa would ever be allowed in her establishment again. “But I can’t let you into Mrs. Russell’s room without her permission. You understand.”
Now she gets a conscience.
“Of course,” Winters says as Tessa fishes her phone from her pocket. The bars indicate that, for once, she has reception, and she opens the screen to place a call to Margot.
“I had no idea Mrs. Russell was your sister,” Mrs. Coburn says, addressing Tessa directly for the first time since they’ve arrived. She sniffs. “She seemed so respectable.”
Tessa bites her tongue and smiles. “I understand,” she says sweetly.
Mrs. Coburn raises her nose and turns back toward Winters. Apparently, Tessa’s been dismissed. “I really have no idea when Mrs. Russell will return, Chief.”
The cloying way the woman keeps saying the word Chief is grating on her. She glances down at her phone to call her sister.
“She and her husband only left about twenty minutes ago.”
Tessa’s head comes up.
“Ben was here?” she asks.
Mrs. Coburn nods. “Such a polite man.”
If Ben is here, Margot must have called him, asked him to come. Her heart leaps. They’ll patch things up.
Tessa scrolls through her contacts, presses “Call,” and holds her phone against her ear as Winters and Mrs. Coburn continue their conversation without her.
It rings, but no one answers. If Margot has gone back to Fallbrook, she’ll have no reception. Tessa waits, listening for the recorded message before she can leave a voice mail.
The message starts, and the sound of Margot’s voice fills her ear, but Tessa pulls the phone away. Her stomach drops. Something is wrong.
Quickly she hangs up the phone without speaking and dials the number again.
She listens.
“Shh,” she says to Mrs. Coburn, interrupting whatever flattery the woman is shoveling up to Winters.
Offended, Mrs. Coburn glares at her. “That’s incredibly rude, Ms.—”
“Shh!” Tessa says again, this time more forcefully. “Listen.”
The phone is ringing in Tessa’s ear. Margo
t still doesn’t answer, but there’s an echo of a ringtone coming from somewhere else in the house.
“Do you hear that?”
Winters stares at Tessa, putting the pieces together faster than she’d have given him credit for. “Mrs. Coburn, I need you to open Margot Russell’s room,” he says, his voice suddenly official and insistent.
The landlady pulls back a bit. “Chief, I’ve already told you, I can’t—”
Tessa doesn’t hear what he says next. She’s running down the hallway toward the guest rooms. The call ends and she quickly redials.
First door, second door . . . there. The third door on the right.
Margot’s phone is ringing inside that room.
Tessa pounds on the door with as much force as she used earlier when she’d been locked in at Fallbrook.
“Margot! Are you in there? Margot!”
Winters and Mrs. Coburn are hurrying up the hall behind her. The landlady has a set of keys dangling from her hands.
“This is most irregular, Chief,” she says, her eyes wide with confusion. “Just because a guest forgets their phone in their room is no reason—”
“Open the door,” Winters says, his words one step below a shout.
Taken aback, Mrs. Coburn turns quickly to do as he asks. Her good opinion of him has clearly dropped a notch or two, while Tessa’s has come up.
The woman fumbles with the key in the lock and finally turns the handle to the door, opening it upon a tidy room with an open suitcase sitting on the bed.
Nothing appears out of place.
Nothing except that Margot is gone, her car is gone, and there, in the center of the bed, is her phone.
It’s not right.
Tessa rushes in and opens the door to the bathroom. It’s empty. She walks quickly around and checks the closet. Nothing more than a few wooden hangers.
Winters moves to the bed and picks up her sister’s cell phone.
A terrible thought has taken hold of Tessa. It grips her by the throat and she’s struggling to draw a breath.
“What did he look like, Mrs. Coburn?” Tessa forces out. “The man with my sister.”
Mrs. Coburn shakes her head and stumbles over an answer. “Oh, uh . . . I don’t know.”
“What did he look like?” she shouts.
“He . . . he was tall. Tall and thin. Hair a little on the long side . . .”
She trails off as a voice begins to speak from the phone Winters is holding in his hands.
A voice Tessa would recognize anywhere. She flies across the room and rips the phone from his hand. The video continues to play.
The face on the screen of her sister’s phone belongs to Oliver Barlow.
40
“Your sister didn’t want to tell me where you were, Tessa. I don’t think she believed me when I told her what good pals we are, but I finally persuaded her. I had to promise not to hurt you, though. I hope you can help me keep that promise. Because I don’t want to hurt you.”
Her own safety is the least of Tessa’s concerns as she watches the video Oliver has left on her sister’s phone.
“I’m recording this to set the record straight. Just in case your sister tries something on our way to you. You wouldn’t do that, now, would you?” The camera pans to Margot’s strained face standing next to Oliver as he films the pair of them. She shakes her head, her expression set in tense lines. Tessa is certain Margot isn’t standing there willingly. Oliver must have a weapon, must have made threats to keep her with him.
“I’ve promised I won’t hurt you, and I’ll keep my word . . . if your sister behaves. We’ll see you soon, Tessa. We’ll have a nice chat. Catch up, like old friends. And if your sister and I don’t make it there, you’ll know who’s to blame. Right, Margot?”
Tessa sits in the passenger seat of Winters’s truck as it speeds back toward Fallbrook and replays the images in her mind. Oliver was following Margot. And now he has her. The thought of losing Margot, really losing her, is so big, so utterly foreign, that Tessa can’t look at it straight on. It’s like trying to stare into the sun.
So she averts her eyes and looks in every direction but that one. If not, she’ll go blind.
Tessa holds her phone in her hand, watching the bars that indicate her signal disappearing one by one.
“No,” Winters says. “Don’t call the police.”
“You are the police.”
“He wants me too,” Winters says. “That’s what this is all about. Me. And you.”
“But why now? Why like this?” Tessa asks. She just needs somewhere else to focus her thoughts.
Winters’s jaw is tight, and for a moment she thinks he’s not going to answer.
“I don’t know what he wants from you, but he wanted me to admit, publicly, what I’d done.”
“What you’d done? What are you talking about? Is this about the evidence?”
The tainted evidence. It was the turning point in the case. While researching the documentary, Tessa had tracked down the teenagers who’d discovered Gwen Morley’s car hidden in the woods, miles from where her body was discovered. They weren’t teenagers anymore, but young men who’d once been tangentially involved in the most infamous murder in Bonham’s history.
The boys drank for years on that story. In a town like Bonham, the tales were rehashed and retold, distorted and exaggerated, until they had only the vaguest resemblance to what actually happened.
But it didn’t matter that their stories had been stretched beyond recognition. The revelation was in the pictures.
One of the boys had been carrying a camera during the search. He claimed he’d taken it with him that day because he worked on the school newspaper and he took it everywhere, but Tessa suspected the teenagers were hoping for a more gruesome subject.
In the end, their motivation made no difference. The shots they took of Gwen’s car before the police arrived were never shared with authorities, for fear they’d get themselves in trouble. Instead, they sat forgotten on a shelf in a childhood bedroom while the boy who’d taken them moved on with his life.
While everyone moved on with their lives.
Everyone except Oliver Barlow, who spent his days in a cell inside the walls of Merrivale Correctional Facility.
Those pictures, mentioned offhand during Tessa’s interview with the boy turned man, clearly showed the back floorboard of Gwen Morley’s Pontiac hatchback.
And there was no sign of the T-shirt that belonged to Oliver, which would miraculously appear in the official police photographs. That article of clothing, along with eyewitness accounts that claimed Oliver had made a drunken pass at Gwen earlier that night at a local bar wearing that same T-shirt, had swayed the jury to convict. The shirt was ripped and sweat-stained and had trace amounts of Gwen Morley’s blood on it. Oliver claimed he had no idea how it got there, but the jury took one look at that shirt and imagined Gwen Morley struggling for her life.
Gwen’s body had already been found when the Bonham Police Department conducted a voluntary search of Barlow’s house the day before the discovery of Gwen’s car. With his brothers alibied, Oliver was the first and the only suspect they focused on. It didn’t matter that no other evidence was found or that there was no sign of Oliver’s DNA on Gwen’s body. Someone was determined that at least one of the Barlows was going to pay, one way or another.
The photographs proved that someone placed that evidence there. The only question was who, exactly, had made that choice.
The officers maintained throughout Oliver’s new trial that neither of them placed the evidence. That it was there when they arrived, and they bagged it and tagged it in good faith.
But the photographs put everything in doubt. Enough doubt that Oliver was granted a new trial. With the T-shirt evidence excluded, he walked out of prison a free man.
It was never determined exactly how the shirt came to be in Gwen’s car, nor how it came to have traces of Gwen’s blood on it. Tessa couldn’t prove who’d placed it ther
e, if anyone. Perhaps the boys had moved it for some reason prior to taking the photographs? Anyone could have discovered Gwen’s car prior to the police, just as the boys with the camera had, including the killer. Winters and his men had plausible deniability.
“Was it you?” Tessa asks now.
Winters keeps his eyes on the road, and there’s only a slight pause before he shakes his head sharply. “No. I never found out who put it there, but it wasn’t done on my instructions.”
“But Oliver wanted you to say it was?”
He shakes his head again. “No. He wasn’t interested in the shirt. He was talking about Billy Tyson.”
Tessa stares. “Who the hell is Billy Tyson?”
She can see the tension in every line of his profile, the stiff way he holds his spine and his shoulders. But he finally answers the question.
“Billy Tyson was a serial rapist. He was arrested in 2005 after he was linked to the murder of a high school girl in Albany. He was going away for a long time. Once they had him, he offered up confessions to other crimes in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
Tessa’s stomach drops.
“Gwen Morley?” she asks, knowing already what the answer is going to be.
Winters nods. “Among others.”
“That was two years after Oliver was sentenced,” Tessa says, unable to keep the shocked condemnation out of her words.
Winters glances in Tessa’s direction, but quickly pulls his eyes back on the road.
“Some of the stuff he confessed to was credible, but most of it was fantasy. Crimes he couldn’t have committed because he wasn’t even in the state at the time. High-profile cases. Some unsolved. Some not.”
“When did you find out?” Tessa asks. She’s not interested in his personal justifications.
Winters sighs. “I got a call while Tyson was in custody. I made the decision not to pursue it.”
The only DNA found on Gwen’s body never matched Oliver. The prosecution got around that by claiming Oliver’s motive was jealousy. He stalked her, followed her as she left the bar with an unidentified male. Watched them while they were together. All he wanted was a chance with her but seeing Gwen with another man pushed him over the edge.
The Caretakers Page 19
