“Bobby Ray,” Becky begged, trying to get up. “Do something.”
He did something, all right. He walked over to Becky, drew back one foot, and kicked her hard in the side. The thud made my gorge rise again, and I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment.
Then he approached me. Ran the knuckles of his right hand along the length of my face and neck in a way that made me shudder with revulsion. Tension coiled inside me, like the spring in an old-fashioned watch, wound too tightly.
“Where’s the other one?” Danielle asked, batting his hand away from my cheek. “You dealt with her, right?”
“She’s gone for good,” he answered, still staring at me. “Gave her a little baptism in the pond.”
I spat in his face. The spittle glistened on his cheek.
He slapped me so hard my ears rang. If I hadn’t been taped to that pole, my knees would have buckled, and I would have crumpled to the floor. “Wanda, here,” Lombard leered, slowly wiping his face, “she’s got what she figures is a decent reason to kill somebody. Me, I just like to watch people die.”
“You killed Micki, and Judy Holliday.”
The grin didn’t falter, and it was worse than the gleam in Danielle’s flat gray eyes. “Damn right I did.”
I waited out a visceral urge to claw off his face. “You as good as killed Suzie, too,” I breathed, “you bastard.”
“Wanda here, she’s got a thing for kids. We kept the brat alive, but I always figured it was a temporary thing. After all, she was a witness.”
I wanted to spit again, but I knew he’d hit me harder the second time, and I needed to stay conscious. “Why? Why did you do it?”
“Because that bitch Micki filed charges against me. And that lesbo doctor probably figured on sleeping with her—if they weren’t doing it already.”
I glanced in Becky’s direction. She lay very still, maybe unconscious, maybe dead. I wet my lips as I met Lombard’s gaze again, tasted blood.
Danielle’s face hardened, and she glared at me in warning.
“What’s the matter, Wanda? Haven’t you told Brother Bobby the truth?”
She flicked the Bic, used one foot to scrape dry straw up around my feet. I caught sight of the red pickup then, the one that had been used to ram me in the Escalade that night on my way to Loretta’s. The one that had screeched away from the front of St. Swithin’s after dropping Rathburn off, so he could shoot Father Morales.
“You were in on the coyote thing, with Rathburn and your old lover, Oz,” I accused, watching her.
“Shut up,” she snapped, and leaned down to set fire to the straw.
Up until that moment, I guess I was in denial. Or maybe it all just seemed too incredible to be true. This woman actually believed I was a reincarnation of the governess who’d drowned those children and escaped punishment. How do you reason with somebody that crazy?
Wanda Heighton, aka Danielle Bickerhelm, actually intended to burn me at the stake.
“You and Becky—”
“Don’t say it,” she warned.
“What do I have to lose?” I countered.
At that moment, Becky lifted her head and cried, “Wanda loves me!”
Bobby Ray, who had been growing more and more agitated all the while, developed a tic under his right eye. “What the hell is she talking about?”
Danielle bent again, but this time, she touched the lighter to the straw. Flames licked at my pant leg. “Nothing,” she said, rising.
Somehow, I stayed calm. “What about the skeletons in your dining room, Danielle? Are they real?”
It was Bobby Ray who answered, placing the splayed fingers of one hand on his chest. “Dear old Daddy and Mama,” he said. He glanced down at the flames, amused. “Like I said, I like watching folks die. It was especially good with them. Daddy was a mean drunk, and Wanda’s mama turned both of us over to the child welfare folks so she could crawl into the bottle with him. Theirs was a marriage made in hell, I can tell you right now. It was a special pleasure, for sure, killing those two—wasn’t it, Wanda? But you might be even more fun, Mrs. Sonterra.”
“Danielle, tell him about us!” Becky pleaded.
I tried to kick some of the smoldering straw away, but my ankles were taped, and I couldn’t move, except to writhe. I felt my forehead and the skin between my breasts slicken with sweat.
My baby, I thought, in desperation.
The straw consumed itself, and though my pant legs smoked, they didn’t catch fire.
Determinedly, Danielle looked around for something flammable. Not a difficult search, in an abandoned barn.
Meanwhile, Lombard stomped over to Becky, grabbed her by the hair, and wrenched her head back so he could look into her earnest, terrified face. “Talk,” he said.
“Don’t do it, Becky,” I heard myself say.
Danielle seemed to have disassociated from the whole nasty business by then. She broke an old fruit crate into pieces and piled them around the base of the stake. Moving mechanically, single-mindedly, she proceeded to gather other things—ancient scraps of newspaper, old pieces of rope. All of them went onto my funeral pyre.
“I’m going to kill you anyway,” Lombard told Becky, fingers entwined in her hair in a brutal grip. “So you might as well die with a clear conscience.” What had Micki and Judy Holliday suffered at those hands of his? I stopped short of imagining what he might have done to Suzie. Bottom line, I couldn’t bear to know.
“Danielle won’t let you kill me!” Becky proclaimed. “She loves me! We were going to take Suzie somewhere safe, where nobody knew us, and raise her as our own—”
Lombard slammed Becky’s face into the dirt and rotten straw covering the barn floor. She went limp.
“Wanda!” he roared, storming over to her, turning her by the shoulders from the old sawhorse she’d been trying to demolish with bare, frantic hands. “You’d better tell me that bitch was lying! Bad enough you slept with half the men in Pima County—but I draw the goddamned line at doing it with women!”
She stared up at him, blinked. He might have been a troublesome stranger, asking directions in a parking lot, instead of a semi-incestuous lover, half-wild with jealousy.
“Help me get the fire started,” she said almost plaintively. “She drowned my babies. I figured it out last year, when I saw her picture in the paper—”
Lombard stood with his profile to me, and his right temple leaped with the promise of a rupture. “Tell me you weren’t sleeping with no freakin’ woman!” he bellowed, and shook her so hard that I thought her neck would snap.
A flicker in the doorway distracted me from the drama, as well as my own impending barbecue. Sweet Jesus, it was Loretta, eyes blazing with determination and abject terror, her clothes wet through and clinging to her body. She had a cell phone pressed to one ear.
I prayed Lombard wouldn’t notice her, tried to will her away, out of sight. I knew she’d called Sonterra. I also knew he couldn’t possibly get to the chicken ranch before I went up like a dead tree in a forest fire.
I kept my gaze fixed on the scene unfolding between Lombard and Danielle.
“Tell me!” he bellowed, and backhanded her so hard she stumbled backward, only to be grabbed by the front of her blouse and dragged back.
“It didn’t mean anything, Bobby Ray,” she said, smiling oddly. “You know it’s only been you, ever since your daddy married my mama.”
He put his hands to her throat, started to strangle her. “You bitch!” he bellowed.
She gazed up at him in adoring bewilderment.
Far, far in the distance, I heard sirens.
Unfortunately, Lombard heard them, too. He let go of Danielle and spun toward the door, spotted Loretta. She’d dropped the cell phone in favor of a pitchfork, but I wouldn’t have given two cents for her chances. Lombard rushed her with a nerve-freezing roar of rage.
The sirens drew nearer, but they weren’t close enough.
Loretta hesitated for a fraction of a second, then t
hrust the tines of the pitchfork into Lombard’s midsection, putting all her strength behind it. He screamed in pain and furious surprise, and fell forward, driving the metal rods in so hard and so deep that they came through the back of his shirt.
Danielle shrieked, scrambled for the lighter she had dropped in the fracas with her stepbrother, and crawled, sobbing, to put it to the newspaper at my feet. This time, the flames wouldn’t fizzle out. I heard them crackling, looked down to see them traveling in little orange lines from stick to stick.
I’m sorry, Baby, I thought, I’m so sorry.
Loretta, forgetting Lombard, rushed toward me.
Danielle met her in the middle of the barn floor, and they fell, rolled, kicking and flailing and screeching.
I felt the heat, and my pants began to smolder again. I struggled, but the tape only tightened.
Danielle got Loretta by the hair and slammed her head down hard. Loretta shrieked and threw a wild punch, connecting with Danielle’s jaw.
Becky stirred, tried to get up, fell again. I saw her gaze dart, with horror, from Lombard’s skewered body, spouting blood, to me. Then, dazed, she took in the catfight between Loretta and Danielle.
Her eyes widened. She grabbed for something—a rusty horseshoe, it turned out—and headed for the fray.
My ankles began to blister. “Loretta!” I screamed. “Look out!”
But it wasn’t Loretta Becky was after. She raised her hand, high over her head, and brought the horseshoe down between Danielle’s shoulder blades with the force of a sledgehammer. “You said we didn’t mean anything!” Becky screamed. “You said it’s always been just you and him!”
Danielle stiffened and fell facedown in the moldy straw. Becky hit her again, and a third time.
Loretta rushed to me, kicked away the burning paper and wood, and tore at the duct tape with both hands. Over her shoulder, I saw Becky kneeling over Danielle, calmer now that she’d spent her fury, resting her forehead on the very places where she’d struck her with the horseshoe.
The duct tape began to give way, but it was a slow process, and the flames Loretta had scattered began to catch here and there, cheerfully greedy. I watched in partial stupor as they licked at the other support beams, found their way to Bobby Ray Lombard’s bloody shirtsleeves, nibbled at his pant legs, explored the soles of his boots.
And the sirens reached a deafening pitch.
Loretta’s hands were bleeding where she’d tried to free me. Thwarted, she looked around frantically, found Danielle’s lighter, and used it to burn through the webbed tape. It was quality stuff—flame-resistant.
Smoke rolled up from the floor, and the fire raced toward flash point, dancing in a merry circle around Danielle and Becky. Becky noticed the flames, at last, though she seemed oblivious to the sirens, and began to beat at the flames with her bare hands.
Loretta and I both started to cough, and my eyes burned as if they were already ablaze.
Sonterra burst through the barn doorway, closely followed by Special Agent Timmons and Eddie.
The fire started up the tinder-dry walls, sneaked under the red pickup, searching with supple red fingers for the gas tank.
It all seemed surreal by that point, an incident in a dream.
Sonterra tossed Loretta to Eddie, who rushed her toward the exit. Timmons looked down at Lombard, shook his head, and ran for Becky, grabbing her around the waist and dragging her, kicking and struggling, to safety.
I was finally free, but my legs were bloodless. I folded, and Sonterra caught me on the way down, lifted me in both arms.
“Get the hell out!” he roared at Eddie, who had come back for Danielle.
Eddie sidestepped him and barreled past, and the whole place went up with a whoosh.
I screamed.
Outside, Sonterra hurled me bodily into Special Agent Timmons’s arms, turned on his heel, and dashed back into the fire for his friend.
The roof caught.
There were more sirens, but I barely registered them over my own raw-throated cries. I fought Timmons with all my strength, but he held me against his chest, as stiff and unyielding as a bronze statue.
“Sonterra!” I shrieked.
The barn roof collapsed, sending up a spire of sparks.
At the same moment, Sonterra and Eddie catapulted from the inferno, dragging Danielle’s motionless body between them. Their clothes were on fire, and both of them dropped and rolled.
Timmons finally let me go. I ran, stumbling, toward Sonterra.
He was lying facedown in the grass, his jacket scorched and melted.
I knelt, wrestled him over onto his back, sobbing his name.
He opened his eyes and grinned. “Are you ever in a shitload of trouble,” he said.
I fell to him, kissing his face, his hair, his chest.
He caught my cheeks in his hands, held me just far enough away to sit up. Then he dragged me close and held me.
Eddie, too, was okay, if a little singed around the edges. He sat up, shook himself, and put his fingers to the pulse at the base of Danielle’s throat. I knew even before he looked at us that she was dead. Two fire trucks careened into the yard and spilled volunteers. There were no hydrants on the chicken ranch, so it was hand-to-hand combat. The paramedics showed up next, tending to each of us in turn.
Loretta’s hands were bandaged.
I was treated for minor burns to my lower legs, but I didn’t feel the pain. That would come later, along with a few scars to remember the occasion by. As if I could ever forget it.
The EMTs hustled Becky into an ambulance, and we learned later that night that she’d died on the way to the hospital. The diagnosis was a ruptured spleen, courtesy of Lombard’s steel-toed boot, but I’d put my money on a broken heart.
They were all dead—Lombard, Danielle, and now Becky.
“Thank you,” I told Loretta, as Sonterra rubbed burn cream on my shins and calves, later that night, in the master bedroom of our house on Cemetery Lane. Emma huddled in the doorway, pale with residual fear. Bernice and Waldo tried to lick my wounds, and Sonterra elbowed them gently aside.
“It was nothing any superhero wouldn’t do,” Loretta said, and grinned wanly. She looked a mess, but she was beautiful to me.
I choked on a sob. “I thought he’d killed you—Lombard, I mean—”
She watched as Sonterra continued to doctor me. “He tried to drown me in the pond,” she said. “I played dead, and he bought it. I found your cell phone on the ground and called for help.” She paused, shuddered. “I might take a while to get over the pitchfork thing,” she confessed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If it wasn’t for me—”
Sonterra caught my eye. For a long moment, we just stared at each other.
Here it comes, I thought. I was going to catch hell, and I deserved it. Sure, we’d gotten the bad guys, but it could have turned out so differently.
He grinned. “God,” he said, “I hope our kid has more sense than you do.”
My smoke-reddened eyes burned with tears. “Me, too,” I replied.
Sonterra leaned in to kiss my forehead. “Do me a favor and rest for a while, okay?”
I nodded.
He kissed me again. Switched the bedside lamp to dim.
Emma backed out the doorway, and Loretta and Sonterra left the room. The door clicked shut behind them.
I lay there, blinking away tears. My head was caked with dry blood, and the blow from the butt of Lombard’s pistol pulsed, but it wasn’t a serious wound. I needed a shampoo, but not stitches.
I sighed, settled back into the pillows fluffed behind my back, and closed my burning eyes.
When I opened them, she was standing at the foot of my bed.
The other Clare.
I sat up, stiff with surprise.
There wasn’t a mark on her. She smiled.
I knew she’d vanish if I closed my eyes. “Are you—?”
My voice dried up, like the moisture on my eyeballs.
She was as solid as the walls of that room. She wore jeans and a white blouse and a tweed blazer. Studying her, my heart pounding, I noticed that her hair was a lighter shade of brown than mine, her nose slightly tipped at the end, where mine was straight. She was an inch or two taller than I was, and at least ten pounds lighter.
“Don’t go,” I said, and started to move, intending to touch her. If I touched her, she’d be real.
The pain in my legs stopped me.
She smiled again, waggled her fingers in farewell.
I stared, a thousand questions battering at the back of my throat. I couldn’t utter a one.
Eventually, I had to blink.
When I looked again, she was gone, and I knew it was for good.
Who was she? Maybe she was a hallucination. Maybe she really was the ghost of my dead twin.
I’ll never know for sure.
And maybe I don’t need to know.
Epilogue
Tucson General Hospital
S onterra and I stared in wonder at the two tiny forms on the screen of the sonogram machine. Our babies. Our boys.
“Will you look at that?” Sonterra marveled, clutching my hand. “Twins.”
I merely nodded, too stricken to speak.
“They look and sound healthy,” observed the doctor with a relieved smile. “Any names in mind?”
I chose the first one, for two of my favorite men. “Anthony Alejandro.”
Sonterra nodded in rapt agreement, reached out to trace the small forms with the tips of his fingers. “And Edward James.”
Edward for his former partner and now deputy, of course. And James for Jimmy Ruiz. My throat tightened with emotion.
“It’s a good world,” I said when I could speak.
The doctor nodded, waited a few more moments, then lifted the handheld scanner off my belly, switched off the machine, and left the room.
Sonterra patted my stomach. “It gets better,” he said.
I searched his face. “Tell me.”
“While you were getting set up for this, I looked in on Suzie. She’s not talking yet, but she’s conscious. It’ll be a long road back.” He paused, swallowed, blinked away the moisture in his eyes. “Her dad and stepmother are determined to get her all the help she needs, and they obviously love her very much. She’s going to be okay, Clare.”
One Last Look Page 31
