Meg Langslow 17 - The Good, the Bad, and the Emus

by Donna Andrews

  “Instead of trying to administer first aid or at least save her body from the fire?” she asked. “Yes, probably. And that makes more sense. Because I’m pretty sure it was Weaver.”

  “Pretty sure,” I echoed. “Not positive. Still, even with pretty sure, do you think maybe Chief Heedles might have taken your identification more seriously if she’d known that you were within five or ten feet of the fleeing figure, rather than forty or fifty feet?”

  “I realized a few days later,” she said. “But by that time it was too late. I couldn’t very well go down and give a different statement. I couldn’t go down at all.”

  “And Heedles wasn’t going to buy another washcloth-draped interview,” Dr. Ffollett put in.

  “But if I confessed why I lied, maybe she’d believe me,” Cordelia said.

  I nodded.

  “And if she doesn’t believe me and thinks I killed Weaver because he tried to kill me and got Annabel instead, then I could probably get off on self defense,” she said. “Might be interesting.”

  “Good grief,” I said. “You sound just like Dad. He always finds it fascinating to be a murder suspect. I’m so glad I don’t seem to have inherited that peculiar trait.”

  “It’s too late to talk to Chief Heedles tonight,” Cordelia said. “I’ll sleep on it.”

  “In the meantime,” I said, “is it okay if I tell one other person about your real identity?”

  “You mean your father?” She sounded a little wistful.

  “Actually, I was taking it for granted that you’d tell him. I meant one person in addition to Dad. We should definitely tell him right away.”

  “Are you sure this is the right time?” she asked. “With all this going on?”

  “I think it’s long past time,” I said. “How about I break it to him gently tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And before you tell Chief Heedles, if that’s who else you have in mind. James deserves to be the first. Well, after you. But you guessed it. Who else were you thinking of telling?”

  “Michael,” I said. “My husband. And in fact, make that two other people. Stanley Denton. He’s been working very hard to solve your murder. For all I know, this might be just the bit of information he needs to crack the case.”

  “Somehow I doubt that,” she said. “But yes, do tell them. But first, let’s tell your father. First thing in the morning.”

  “Even if he may not be able to keep your secret?” I said. “Not because he won’t try, but because he won’t be able to hide his exuberance.”

  “You think he’ll be exuberant?” She smiled slightly. “Yes, even then.”

  “First thing in the morning, then.” Dr. Ffollett stood up, evidently feeling this was a good note on which to depart. “You’ll probably want to keep that a family affair.”

  “Come over beforehand and help me keep from going crazy,” Cordelia suggested, moving toward the front door.

  Dr. Ffollett nodded and went out. I figured she was tired, so I prepared to take my leave. Probably a good thing I had an excuse to leave. So far I’d managed to avoid expressing the anger I’d been feeling. And it would be a lot easier to get past that by myself.

  But more questions were still nagging me. Maybe one more wouldn’t hurt. One that didn’t go too much farther.

  “Before I go,” I said. “One more why?”

  She cocked her head in interrogation.

  “You never had any children,” I said. “Other than Dad, I mean. Was that a choice?”

  “Of sorts,” she said. “Robert—my late husband—didn’t know about your father. When we were courting, I didn’t know how he’d take it. By the time I figured out my past wouldn’t have been an issue, there was a bigger reason to keep the secret.”

  “Bigger reason?”

  “When we hit our fifth anniversary with me still not pregnant, Robert suggested we ask our doctor if he could do tests. And I’d already figured he’d get around to that sooner or later. So by the time he brought the subject up, I’d already briefed the family doctor, in confidence, about my history, and got him to agree that if Robert insisted on testing, he do the tests—or pretend to. And if there wasn’t much hope, then he should say I was the problem.”

  “You knew he’d take it hard.”

  “It would have killed him,” she said. “Made him feel as if he failed me. I know it sounds silly now, but those were different times. I don’t think it would have bothered me nearly as much. Then again, how do I know? By the time Robert and I met, I’d already had your dad. I knew I could have kids. It all became part and parcel of the big secret I was keeping.”

  “So he never knew about Dad.”

  “Heavens, no!” She shook her head vigorously. “After a while, I wished I could tell him, but I couldn’t do that to him. I don’t think your father’s existence would have bothered him so much as the fact that we hadn’t had any children together. He went to the grave thinking it was my fault, and he never blamed me. Not once.”

  Her answer to this why raised at least as many questions as it settled. Like why not adopt? And why not find some reason for keeping in touch with Dad—like pretending to be his adoptive parents’ oldest and dearest friend, a friend who, not having children of her own, became like a second mother to him.

  Time enough to talk about all this, instead of trying to do it standing in a doorway with both of us nearly falling asleep on our feet. So I nodded and was turning away when Cordelia gently took my arm and stopped me.

  “I never stopped thinking about your father,” she said. “About all of you. I realized pretty quickly that having me around really bothered your father’s adopted parents. Made them worry that I’d take him back. So I watched from afar, because that was all I thought I could do. Wait—let me show you.”

  She pushed the front door closed and strode back to the living room. I followed her to the small desk. She opened a drawer and took out a key.

  “Annabel never approved of this,” she said. “She always said that if you spend too much time craning to see the road not taken, you’re sure to trip and break your neck. So she pretended this didn’t exist.”

  She unlocked a nearby armoire—I’d assumed it held a television. But instead, I saw a shrine to my family. The large space where I’d expected to see a television contained a pair of wrought-iron candlesticks I’d made, and pinned to the inside of the cabinet were pictures of Mother and Dad, of my sister Pam and her family, of Rob, and of me with Michael and the boys. Most of the pictures were obviously taken from publications. Rob on the Businessweek cover the year his first computer game, Lawyers from Hell, was a runaway success. A photo of me at my anvil from a craft magazine. Mother and Dad’s wedding picture from the Yorktown Crier. Michael in his costume from the cult TV show he’d appeared on for several years.

  “I suppose some people might call me a stalker,” Cordelia said. “But I think I had reason.” She was pulling open one of the armoire’s drawers to show that it contained scrapbooks. Copies of some of Rob’s games. Several more bits of my blacksmithing work, including one of the simple little hooks I often made as a demonstration and gave out to members of the audience.

  “And this is a prized possession.” She bent over to open the bottom drawer.

  I was leaning over to see the contents when something hit my head, hard, and everything went black.

  Chapter 28

  “You can’t leave her lying that way.” Cordelia’s voice hit my head like a sledgehammer, pounding away with every syllable. No, wait. My head was doing the pounding. Her voice only made it worse.

  “She could suffocate,” Cordelia went on.

  I flinched, and wondered if there was a polite way to tell your own grandmother to shut up.

  “I said—” Cordelia began.

  “Shut up, you bossy old cow!” said another voice. Irrationally, the words made me mad. Okay, I wanted peace and quiet, but where did she get off, telling my grandmother to shut up? That was my prerogative. And I
wouldn’t have been so rude.

  And who was she, this rude person? The voice was tantalizingly familiar. I could figure out who it was if my head would just stop pounding.

  Or maybe it would work just as well if I took a look at her.

  I opened my eyes. Didn’t help. I was looking at a small stretch of white wall and white-painted baseboard. And they wobbled slightly in a way I didn’t think walls and baseboards were supposed to be capable of.

  “You can’t—”

  “Shut up! I’m trying to think!”

  I recognized the voice now. Sherry. Valkyrie Sherry. Clipboard Sherry. What was she doing in Cordelia’s house?

  “I could make it look like arson,” Sherry said, “so Chief Heedles will think it’s the same killer as last time.”

  “What do you mean, ‘think it’s the same killer?’” Cordelia asked. “Don’t pretend you didn’t kill both Annabel and Theo Weaver.”

  I moved my head ever so slightly so I could see them. Cordelia was sitting in a chair a few feet away from me. Her hands were tied behind her back. Sherry was standing nearby. She had a gun in her right hand. I liked the fact that it was pointed at the ceiling rather than at me or Cordelia, but not the fact that Sherry was tapping it rather absentmindedly against her other hand.

  “But she’s already arrested someone for that,” Sherry went on.

  “You should have thought of that before you attacked us,” Cordelia said. If the tendency to mouth off when it would be smarter to keep silent was a genetic trait, I now knew where I’d gotten it.

  “I’ll need to find someone else to pin the blame on,” Sherry mused. “Preferably someone who can be blamed for the other murders as well. And a better way of starting the fire this time. If Weaver’s house had burned down the way it was supposed to—well, it can’t be helped. But I’ll have to find something that works better this time.”

  “Are you asking me for advice?” Cordelia said.

  “No, I’m telling you to shut up.” Sherry pointed the gun at Cordelia. “If you shut up and let me think, I’ll knock you out before I start the fire. If you keep yakking, I’ll make sure you’re awake for it.”

  I already knew I disliked Sherry. And I liked her even less now, since evidently she was the reason I was lying here with my head pounding and my arms tied behind me, listening to her threaten my grandmother and brainstorm on how to get away with adding us to her death toll.

  “I think you’re the best candidate.” Sherry was studying Cordelia. “She’ll have a knot on her head—I’ll set it up so it looks as if you knocked her out and were planning to burn down the house with her in it and fell down while running away.”

  “You really think they’ll buy that I tried to burn down my own house?” Cordelia asked.

  “Not your house.” Sherry sounded exasperated. “Weaver’s house next door. That way we’ll also be rid of any inconvenient evidence that might be there. And Chief Heedles will assume you were the culprit all along and with nosy Meg out of the way, too, everything will be fine.”

  Clearly her definition of fine was radically different from mine.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” Cordelia said. “There’s not a shred of evidence against you in either of the two cases. Why not quit while you’re ahead?”

  “And let you turn me in? No thanks.”

  “You could claim you ran in and found me hitting Meg over the head,” Cordelia said. “It would be your word against mine, and everyone in town thinks I’m crazy.”

  “But that won’t solve the real problem, will it?” Sherry said. “That horrible Dr. Blake will still be running around trying to ruin my family. He wants to keep us from mining the kyanite, and if we can’t get another project going soon, we’ll go bankrupt.”

  “Dr. Blake is here to rescue the emus,” Cordelia said. “He isn’t here to stop your mine.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t know about it,” Sherry said. “As soon as he finds out, he’ll attack us again. So I have to get him before he finds out. And that means I have to get rid of you so you won’t warn him.”

  Her matter-of-fact tone chilled me as much as the fact that she was talking about killing three people—one of them me, and the other two the grandparents who’d only recently entered my life.

  “I don’t think Dr. Blake—” Cordelia began.

  “It’s Blake who’s ruined everything,” Sherry snapped. “Him and people like him. First the unions come in and force us to coddle our workers. The way they carry on you’d think we kept slaves instead of paying people to work in our mines. Then it was the tree huggers trying to tell us what we can do on our own land. And then just when we find a natural gas deposit good enough to keep us from going under, along comes Blake and stops us—and for what? A stupid toad! A toad so ugly we’d be doing the world a favor if we did make it extinct. You know what I think I’ll do when I’ve gotten rid of Blake? I’ll round up my brothers and we’ll go out in the woods and have us a toad hunt. We’ll use the slimy little things for target practice, and when we run out of bullets we’ll go after them with clubs. You want to talk about extinct? I’ll show you extinct.”

  She was practically shrieking now, and her face was beet red and contorted with fury. I was relieved to see that Cordelia, though obviously tempted to reply, had clenched her jaw tightly shut.

  “Yes, once I’ve gotten rid of Blake, I can finally stop pretending to be a stupid tree hugger.” Sherry smiled with satisfaction and hurried out of the room.

  Cordelia watched her go. The front door opened and closed again. Then she craned her head again to look down at me.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “My head hurts,” I said. “And when we get out of this, I’m going to have Dad check me out for a possible concussion. But apart from that, I’m okay.”

  “‘When we get out of this,’” Cordelia repeated. “Does that mean you have a plan to rescue us?”

  “No, but I’ll work on it,” I said. “If you have any bright ideas, now’s the time to share them.”

  She pursed her lips and sighed.

  “So she’s doing this because she thinks Grandfather wants to stop her family from mining the kyanite on Biscuit Mountain?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Cordelia said. “She’s a Smedlock. She joined Blake’s Brigade under her married name, but she was born a Smedlock—part of the family that owns that dreadful mining company.”

  “The company whose fracking plans Grandfather foiled.”

  “Precisely,” she said. “And they’re still plenty mad about it and out for revenge. They blame him for the fact that they’re nearly bankrupt. And none of them would think of doing anything responsible like getting an honest job. So the only thing they’ve come up with to keep themselves afloat is strip mining the kyanite on Biscuit Mountain. She killed Annabel—thinking she was me—because she knew I’d fight it all the way. Once I’d seen the report from my own mining engineer and knew what a disaster it would be for the town, I was pretty vocal about my opposition to any mining on Biscuit Mountain.”

  “Was she also behind the attempt to poison Grandfather?”

  “Yes, she’s been plotting that for a long time,” Cordelia said. “Out of revenge for his ruining their fracking plan, even before he showed an interest in Biscuit Mountain. And the lethal candy box was supposed to be punishment for me, for inviting him down here.”

  “But why did she kill Weaver? Assuming she did, of course.”

  “He saw her kill Annabel,” she said. “And he was blackmailing her. Demanding a bigger share of the proceeds from the mine. Pretty stupid, if you ask me. He knew she was a killer.”

  “She certainly told you a lot,” I said.

  “I think she’s been dying to get it all out of her system,” Cordelia said. “The strain of operating within enemy territory. And, of course, she has no intention of letting me live to report any of it. In fact—”

  Just then we heard the sound of the door opening. Cordelia lo
oked away, no doubt to avoid calling Sherry’s attention to the fact that I was awake.

  I decided that was my cue to pretend to be more out of it than I was. I closed my eyes almost all the way, and slumped on the floor again.

  “The coast is clear!” Sherry chirped, in the sort of bright, cheerful tone some people use when they have been put in charge of children and neither like nor understand them.

  Cordelia didn’t say anything. I decided to continue playing dead.

  “You can get up now.” Sherry’s voice had a bit more of an edge to it.

  “I’m still tied to the chair, you know,” Cordelia said. “And for all I know you’ve given her a concussion.”

  I opened one eye wide enough to watch as Sherry carefully went round to the back of Cordelia’s chair and undid something. Then she grabbed Cordelia by the elbow and hauled her up out of the chair, her hands still tied behind her.

  “Ow!” Cordelia protested. “Be careful! Old folks like me have brittle bones.”

  Sherry ignored her words and took something off her wrist—I realized she’d been wearing a roll of silver duct tape like a bracelet. She ripped off a strip of it and stepped behind Cordelia to wrap it over her mouth.

  Cordelia kicked her in the shins.

  “Ow! You’ll pay for that, you old bat.”

  She grabbed Cordelia’s arms roughly and forced her to her knees. Then she taped her mouth and hauled her back to her feet.

  Cordelia didn’t look cowed. A pity looks really didn’t kill, or our only problem would be getting ourselves untied.

  Sherry ignored the glare in Cordelia’s eyes and turned to me.

  “Don’t try anything,” she said.

  She strode over and planted her foot on my back, making sure I didn’t have a chance to try anything. She tore off another strip of duct tape and applied it to my mouth. Then she jumped back as if worried that I’d try something in spite of being bound and gagged.