Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

“Probably.”

  “I’ll send Waldron into town for one. No reason to call for a tow truck.”

  A visiting wrecker would be embarrassing enough at Hillbriar. A wrecker dragging my cheap American sedan through those limestone gates? Unthinkable.

  I nodded toward the envelope in Mrs. Donovan’s hand. “My business?”

  Her cheeks flushed. The color only made her more alluring. “It will be. Let me send Waldron on his way, then we’ll talk.”

  Waldron had been at Hillbriar as long as the trees. He was lanky, tanned and polite. He had no understanding of the entertainment industry, minimal knowledge of horses and few traditional business skills. Yet without him Hillbriar would descend into chaos. He was the Donovan’s chief errand-runner and handyman. I never asked whether Waldron went in front of something or came after, and really it didn’t matter. He was a one-name kind of guy.

  He leaned over the Charger’s engine compartment with a deeply thoughtful attitude, his eyebrows wrestling white caterpillars. The wrinkles in the corners of his eyes went both up and down, making it impossible to tell whether he’d spent more of his lifetime smiling or frowning.

  “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm,” he replied to his instructions, then straightened and stalked to the garage. One of the bay doors swept open and Waldron drove off in an enormous black BMW.

  I followed Sandra toward the stables. The building was cleaner than my kitchen. A broad central corridor with a red rubber floor separated office and storerooms, on the right, from the stalls on the left. Double barn doors at the far end stood ajar to admit the last of the sunshine. Big whiskered noses snuffled as we passed. Mrs. Donovan absently patted them but continued through the barn doors and outside. I caught up with her at the fence.

  “Nobody can see us from the house here,” she explained, “and Whiskey won’t tolerate anyone snooping around the stables.”

  “Whiskey?” Just asking the question made me feel like a barkeeper in a western.

  Sandra pursed her lips and gave a low quick whistle. Horses bumped restlessly in stalls behind us, but her green eyes turned toward the paddock. The chestnut I’d already met bounded across the field and approached at a gallop. He seemed larger in motion, with muscles that moved fluidly beneath his skin and a mane and tail that chased after him like smoke. Just when I was sure we’d both be trampled along with the fence, the gelding brought himself to a thudding halt and steamed inches from Sandra Donovan’s face. He allowed her to caress his neck. A warning gleam in his eye, however, informed me that our earlier pleasantries could be disregarded whenever he chose. While under the gelding’s spell, Sandra’s eyes lost their guarded look. She had to be close to my age. For a moment, though, she was no more than fifteen.

  “Here’s the one soul at Hillbriar who knows nothing and everything about me and has never judged. He’s Jonathon’s first and best horse, and not even Jonathon gets near him if he can help it. The groomsmen and grounds keepers are terrified of him.”

  “What? Of this big softie?”

  Whiskey’s snort quivered somewhere between laughter and a snarl. He and Lieutenant Rafferty would get along splendidly.

  Sandra dismissed the horse with a final pat. Whiskey spun, slapped my face with his tail and pranced back out into the paddock. The hardness returned to Sandra’s eyes.

  “They’ve got reason to mistrust him. He’s why Jonathon needed a second wife.”

  I’d been introduced to the prize jumper who’d thrown the previous Mrs. Donovan to her death twelve years ago. JD wasn’t the sort to get rid of a horse for something like that. Whiskey had to be a nickname.

  “Son of the Northern Wind is his real title,” Sandra confirmed. “Jonathon keeps him as a reminder of sorts. He….does things like that. The only persons who could ever ride that horse were his first wife and his daughter. When she bothered to be around.”

  Her bitterness was tangible. I let it pass without reacting. The Donovans had their problems; I was only being paid to deal with one.

  “That’s your demand letter?”

  “Do you see a lot of these in your line of work?” Nothing in her tone sounded disingenuous. She’d merely asked a question.

  “Not really,” I said. “Blackmail that’s actually mailed is a dying art.”

  She hesitated before passing me the envelope. The address matched the previous missive which had prompted my involvement, heavy printing with curiously rounded capitals. It might have been scrawled by a fifth-grader with a felt-tip marker. The stamp was on crooked and, like the first letter’s, hadn’t been postmarked.

  “Are you sure these weren’t put in your mailbox by someone on the road?”

  “Positive. The gate and mailbox are on the security camera.”

  I turned the envelope over. At some point it had been pressed with other items, as in a deliverer’s sack: creases showed something thicker than a single sheet of stationery had been inside. I tipped the note onto my palm. Checking for prints was pointless. Even an amateur was unlikely to be that careless and I didn’t have access to fingerprint databases. The note had been run off on a laser printer that was low on toner. The verbiage was typical demand note fare:

  Whites Creek Post Office, Box # —

  $85,000 cash in unmarked $100 bills. Put in this envelope. Put in box Thursday, 8:30 AM. Drop key in

  out-of-town mail slot. Don’t be late. Leave immediately.

  Don’t watch or more than the butterfly will be seen.

  Butterfly had been mentioned in the earlier letter. It was the only specific word common to both messages and nothing else could have troubled a client enough to call me.

  “The box key was with this?”

  “Yes.” Sandra’s face remained turned toward the paddock where her equine sentry browsed. The breeze played with her hair but the rest of her was tense.

  “You’re going to have to tell me why a butterfly is important.”

  “Mr. Bedlam, have you any idea how dreadful this is for me? For Jonathon?”

  “If I’m going to be any use at all….”

  She sagged against the fence. Tears glinted beneath her lowered lashes. I found myself intensely wanting to gather her in both arms and coo that everything would be all right. Common sense narrowly won out. I didn’t know if everything would be all right. I was more certain old Whiskey would come back and stomp my ass into the turf if I grabbed his girl.

  Viridescence flared through the tears. Sandra’s hands darted to the buttons at her throat. Whatever tendency I had to watch a beautiful woman open her shirt was overridden by her startling ferocity; I was dimly aware of red lace, nothing more. When she deposited the print in my hand it was warm and curved to the shape of the breast against which it had been hidden.

  Shifting my gaze from Sandra’s face to the snapshot without impropriety wasn’t easy but I damned well managed it. The print had been scissored from a larger piece, which had in turn been enlarged to the limits of the film used. The butterfly was a tattoo. An expensive tattoo. Not the kind you wake up with in Tijuana after a wild night with college buddies. The woman whose hip it adorned mustn’t have been very ticklish; neither a tattooist’s needle nor the female fingers touching the art in the photo seemed to have generated that kind of reflexive movement.

  When I looked up I already knew what I’d see. Sandra had the hem of her skirt gathered in one hand, raised past her waist on the left side. The curve of her upper thigh was interrupted by a slender arc of crimson lace and a rendering of a Monarch butterfly, identical to that in the photograph. The tattoo’s location—and the woman’s hand in the photograph, angled such that it plainly wasn’t Sandra’s—couldn’t be misconstrued as innocent.

  She let the skirt’s hem fall like the curtain at the close of a tragedy’s first act. Whiskey sniggered applause out in the field.

  “You’re thinking ‘why now?’“ she said.

  I didn’t answer either way. She knew the rumors better than I did. She lived with them.

  “I’m an
outsider here, Mr. Bedlam. My daddy wouldn’t ever have been let past the front doors of JD’s country club. I’m surrounded by contemptuous people and every one of them is always watching. If I don’t make my own mistakes, they’ll imagine worse ones to amuse themselves. Does it really matter what I’ve done?”

  “It might,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

  She didn’t react angrily. Sandra Donovan needed someone in her corner, even if her husband had to pay for it. Her voice faltered to a trembling whisper.

  “There’s….there’s never been proof. Only a few have seen my tattoo. But if the wrong ones recognize it….I’ve had some cruel lovers….”

  Whiteness threw Whiskey’s long shadow across the paddock. The BMW’s headlamps led it through the gates. Waldron had returned in time for supper.

  “Mrs. Donovan—”

  “Sandra. Waldron calls me ‘Mrs. Donovan,’ not you.” A bit of authority had crept back into her voice.

  “Sandra. I can’t guarantee this will disappear. Nobody can. It’s sure to find its way onto the Internet whether you pay this character off or not. Even if I find him—or her—and retrieve every negative, your husband will know. He wrote the check.”

  “At the very least, he suspects already. How could he not? You aren’t the first investigator he’s hired on my account.”

  No emotion flavored her last sentence. None at all. There apparently wasn’t enough trust in the Donovan’s marriage for an extortionist to threaten. If this was about safeguarding reputations, fine. I worked the dark side of public relations all the time.

  “Do you know who those other investigators are?” I asked. In addition to handling PR, most gumshoes are into photography. You know, butterflies and such.

  “No. There was just one that I know of, years ago. Waldron pointed him out but I never got a good look or caught the name. Jonathon wrote it in the accounts as ‘investigations’.”

  “There were opportunities for this type of snapshot then?”

  “Mr. Bedlam—!”

  “You can skip the details. But I need something to work with.”

  It had gotten too dark to read her expressions. All I had to go by was the extended silence before her curt “yes.”

  The stable’s main lights came on. Glare spilled past us through the barn doors in a rectangular pattern. The sun was nearly gone and it was time for the horses to return to their stalls. A groomsman whistled for Whiskey without venturing into the paddock to fetch him. Maybe he’d just found me charming but I had a hard time seeing the big chestnut as all that scary. He trotted inside docilely enough.

  Mrs. Donovan returned briefly to the stable herself, then out a man-door on the house side. Our discussion wasn’t finished. The setting had just gotten too busy. One of the stable hands walked into a door jamb trying not to look our way.

  “Do you want to see if you can get that investigator’s name from your husband?” I asked. “Or would you prefer I spoke with him myself?”

  Across the drive rose the mansion, wood-toned brightness pouring from under its front canopy; nearby stood a second building, smaller, utterly dark. Referred to now as Hillbriar’s “guest house,” this was the estate’s original structure. The foundations had been laid before the Civil War by JD’s great great grandfather. JD’s mother had been murdered there. If rumors bore truth, JD had simply pulled down the shades after the investigation concluded, padlocked the doors and left it that way. Nobody’d even washed Muriel Donovan’s blood from the walls.

  I was tired and ready for some meal or other. Otherwise the guest house wouldn’t have distracted me so easily. A scent of honeysuckle brought me back around. Sandra Donovan’s perfume wasn’t strong but she was close.

  “Jonathon will never tell me. If you must know, Mr. Bedlam—”

  “You’re insisting on first names, right? Mine’s Tyler.”

  “Of course. Tyler.” My moniker had a nice ring the way she said it, like a song lyric. I wished we could have handled this over the phone. Sandra Donovan in the flesh was ruinous to a man’s concentration. “I’m asking—pleading—that you be discrete. There’s so much to lose—”

  “Is there? I’m not sensing that.”

  She reeled back into the drive. Her silhouette was utterly feminine against the brilliance spilling from the main house, with only her hair showing color like golden flames.

  “Don’t be an idiot!” she snapped. “There are things besides love and dignity to lose! Jonathon won’t cast me aside. He keeps everything! That damned house of death—he never even disconnected the power—it stays like it’s always been! But I won’t—I can’t—risk….”

  Rage disintegrated as suddenly as it appeared. For several seconds she didn’t make a sound. When she continued, her voice was taut, controlled.

  “My younger years were terrible. Being pretty may have shielded me, or maybe my looks earned me the trouble, I don’t know. I survived. The men I chose were wrong. They were wrong for me, wrong for everyone. They lived and died in ugliness and thought they could keep me around to hide it. Lies, drugs, betrayal, death—always death! When Jonathon found me I was nearly dead myself. He took me away from that. And even if there’s been ugliness and death at Hillbriar since, I have a home here. Instead of love, I have Hillbriar. Instead of destruction, I got Hillbriar. I’d give anything to stay here and love has nothing to do with it.” She flung her arms wide. “This is my next last chance! There can’t be any others.”

  “I’ll be as diplomatic and vague as I can,” I promised. Being vague ought to be simple, provided Sandra’s husband didn’t open her mail. “You’re making the drop payment?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not as I see it.”

  “Then we have an appointment to keep on Thursday. Do you think meeting here at six that morning will suffice?”

  “That’s fine.”

  She was near enough that I smelled honeysuckle again. Her hands were warm on mine. The offending snippet of a photograph in my fist crumpled slightly under the added pressure.

  “Thank you, Tyler,” Sandra Donovan said with emotion. Then she turned toward the mansion and disappeared into the brightness that owned her.

  I swore softly to myself and strode back to the garage to see if Waldron was done fiddling with my car. A final ray reached from the dying sun through the trees and touched the abandoned guest house’s upper windows. Not all of the blinds had been closed, or the sunlight couldn’t have done that trick. It looked like an upstairs light had been on, then switched off.

  Four

  All Wednesday had to offer was more rain. I’d have preferred to spend the afternoon recuperating on the sofa with a good novel. But tomorrow would be spent trying to sniff out a blackmailer, I had preparations to make, and Officer Smally was still on guard duty. I didn’t dare steer his attention toward my personal library more than could be helped.

  I reacquainted myself with the gym downstairs, then called a friend with connections to look up who’d last turned in a Form 1093 for the post office box number in Sandra’s demand letter. This was a formality. The postal service isn’t all that hard to fool. The box key might have been stolen. The owner might be a legitimate law-abiding citizen duped into letting someone else borrow his or her mailing address. A proper search could take a week or more.

  My next errand was to drive my injured car to the dealership for repairs. While service technicians orbited the Dodge shaking their heads and doing arithmetic, I helped myself to burnt coffee in the showroom and sought out the manager. I needed a loaner. I doubted my trash-bag-and-duct-tape interim repairs would make a favorable first impression at JD’s office.

  Delbert Ray had sold me the Charger a week before he stepped up to management. He was a small, trim man with a mustache and a penchant for bowties. My appearance in his office door caused him to hurriedly wrap up a phone call and wave me to one of the waiting chairs.

  “Mr. Bedlam! How’ve you been?” We shook hands. I wo
ndered if car guys got sick of shaking hands. Did Delbert purposely keep his mitts pocketed when acquaintances spotted him on the street?

  “I’m fine,” I said without taking the offered chair, “but somebody threw a rock through my car window.”

  Delbert’s expression showed just the right amount of sympathy and outrage. “A rock! Really? Was anything taken?”

  I lied and told him no. Delbert had little need for details about what I did for a living. “They’re looking it over in the shop.”

  “Good time for an upgrade?” Delbert winked slyly.

  “I should at least wait till the first oil change, don’t you think?”

  Delbert shrugged. I couldn’t blame him for trying. I was his favorite type of customer, one with money who kept coming back.

  “I would like to see what’s available for a service loaner, though.”

  He fiddled with his bowtie. “We ordinarily need a week or so’s notice. But I’m sure we can dig something up.”

  “I’d appreciate it. If you try to stick me with a minivan I’ll switch to Chevy.”

  He almost laughed, considered I might be serious, limited his reaction to a mild smile. “We wouldn’t want that! Let’s just see what’s in the back lot.” He rose and led the way through the showroom, which was laid out in an L-shape with floor-to-ceiling windows. We sidestepped option-laden representatives of my current car, the dreaded minivan, a ponderous new pickup truck. More direct routes to the rear lot existed, but the preferred path always wound among the latest floor models. A tilted dais at the L’s corner displayed the manufacturer’s crème de la crème, menacing and low, polished so excessively the black and silver paint looked wet.

  My reflection grinned back at me from a fender. Worry tugged the corners of Delbert’s eyes. He fussed again with the tie. “That’s definitely not a loaner. It isn’t technically even for sale till next year. It’s a fluke we have the thing here at all.”

  No, I didn’t suppose a 640-horsepower, carbon fiber swaddled Viper GTS with track suspension was a sane choice for any dealership to use as a demonstration model. Not many salesmen have the cojones to sit in the passenger seat for that kind of test drive.