Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  “Tess is Nick and Valerie’s child. It’s in her face. I don’t know how I missed it all these months.”

  Dilianna Flores had seen it when Gwen showed her that photograph of Priscilla and Tess. It wasn’t Priscilla who looked familiar; Priscilla had never been to that boardinghouse. Tess looked familiar because Valerie had been there.

  “Tess is Valerie’s daughter,” she said.

  “Her face…” Hawkins said, his eyes losing focus for a moment. He’d noticed, too.

  “Once the child was born,” Gwen continued, “all Nick and Valerie had to do was get rid of Priscilla, now that she’d served her purpose. But they had one problem. Russell Cunningham never trusted Nick, for good reason, as it turned out. He drafted his will so that his son-in-law wouldn’t get a cent in the event of Priscilla’s death. That’s why they resorted to the kidnapping scheme. They might not get the Cunningham inheritance, but they’d keep the five million in ransom money and get rid of Priscilla in the bargain, leaving the three of them to live as one happy, genetically related family. They knew Russell wouldn’t call the police, not after what happened to his son. He’d insist on handling the ransom himself.”

  She glanced at Hawkins, who nodded slowly.

  “All they needed,” Gwen said, “was someone to grab the money at the ravine, and someone to witness the event, to testify that Priscilla had been shot while trying to help her child. And they needed someone to take the blame for the murder. As long as the case was unsolved, Nick couldn’t truly relax. He had to find a plausible suspect, someone to take the fall. That’s where I came in.”

  “This is all speculation, though,” Dwight Hawkins said. “You do realize that.” He sounded more perplexed than accusatory, as if he wanted to believe what she was saying, but couldn’t quite.

  “Nick asked about me at the diner, before I’d ever said a word to him. He even found my old address, the name of my husband. Ask Mike Contaldi at the Mecca. And Valerie hired this Hispanic kid to get in touch with my husband. Later she met with him at his boardinghouse—ask Dilianna Flores, his landlady. She said this really classy redhead had visited Barry…it had to be Valerie. Barry was up here the day of the payoff, but I never told him where Jimmy and I were living. We never had any contact with him after I left him.”

  “But you—”

  “I’ll take a lie detector test, okay?”

  Hawkins sighed. “You wrote that note, giving directions,” he said.

  “Do you have it with you?”

  “It’s at the county.”

  “Was it torn off, as if it was ripped from a larger piece of paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wrote those directions for myself, on the back of a Mecca sales check. Priscilla Lawrence dictated them to me, so I’d find Penaquoit my first day of work. The paper is light green, right?”

  Hawkins nodded very slowly.

  “Nick must have taken it from my house, or maybe I left it at Penaquoit the first day, I don’t remember. He set this whole thing up, he masterminded it from the beginning, over two years ago. He moved the baby monitor into the master bedroom to make sure I’d hear about the payoff, he even chose a spot for the ransom that he knew I’d just been to, a place he told me about, the Devil’s Ravine.”

  “He couldn’t have known for certain that you’d go there.”

  “No, that’s why Tess was left at my house, to make sure the connection between me and the crime was solid even if I didn’t come.”

  “But—”

  “And something else…how did he know I’d run up to the kidnapper, botch up the money transfer, and give the kidnapper an excuse to kill Priscilla? Because of Tess’s crying…he knew I’d have to do something if I heard Tess.”

  “And so the kidnapper what, pinched her until she cried?”

  She shook her head. “Nick…” She waited a beat until the bile subsided. “Nick Lawrence is a monster, but he wouldn’t allow a strange man near his daughter, let alone a drunk like Barry. Tess is the one thing he’s human about. No, Tess wasn’t anywhere near the Devil’s Ravine that morning. My guess is she was with her mother…” Hawkins started to say something. “…With Valerie, who had her the entire time, and probably left her in my house that day.”

  “Then who was crying at the ravine?”

  “Tess! A recording of Tess. Rosa Piacevic told me she saw Nick taping Tess one day, before the kidnapping. He must have taped her crying. And at the ravine, I remember thinking that something sounded odd about Tess’s voice. Last night it hit me: the thinness of it, the way it never varied in loudness. Not to mention the fact that the crying stopped the moment I crossed the stream, and I never did find Tess there. It was a recording.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve found that tape,” Hawkins asked.

  “The tape recorder isn’t in its usual place. I checked today. But you never found the voice-altering machine, did you? And that didn’t prevent you from charging me with murder.”

  “We never found the five million, either,” Hawkins almost whispered.

  “Nick planned to have Priscilla killed at the Devil’s Ravine, he intended for it to go just the way it did. But he couldn’t count on his wife running across the stream; he couldn’t count on me doing that, either. He had to ensure that things went wrong, so he gave my husband that tape recording and told him to activate it before taking the money.”

  “Quite a story,” Hawkins said. “But not much proof.”

  “How about this for proof? Nick Lawrence has run away. He’s taken Tess.”

  “What?”

  “I was at Penaquoit this morning. He left last night, with most of his clothes and a lot of Tess’s things, too. Valerie must have called him after I told her that I knew she’d been in touch with my husband.”

  Hawkins’s head sagged as he emitted a long, defeated sigh.

  “Why would an innocent man run away? Tell me that?” Gwen leaned across the table, forcing Hawkins to meet her gaze. “Why would Nick Lawrence leave, unless he was afraid of something?”

  A knock at the door saved him from replying. Gwen found she was out of breath, and only when she stopped talking did a sense of rage bubble up. A uniformed police officer stuck his head in.

  “Boss, Russell Cunningham’s on the horn. Wants to speak to you right away. Guy’s having a fit. I think you better see what he wants.”

  “What I want is that charges against my client are dropped,” Gargano said as Hawkins stood up. “Immediately. No jury on this planet will convict Ms. Amiel with the chief witness flown the coop.”

  Hawkins looked from Gargano to Gwen and then shook his head.

  “I gotta take his call. Don’t go anywhere, either of you.”

  Later that afternoon, after peppering Gwen Amiel with additional questions, Dwight Hawkins told her to go home and wait for his call. He sat in his office for a while, absorbing the scenario she’d outlined. His gut told him she was right. Yet every time his hand reached for the phone to dial Don Reeves in Albany, one raw thought would immobilize him: How had he missed it, what lead had he overlooked that would have taken him to where he was now?

  The answer never came. He’d screwed up, and badly. There was no getting around it. When he finally called Don Reeves he spent a half hour repeating what Gwen Amiel had told him earlier that morning. Reeves asked a few questions in a flat, defeated voice.

  “I’ll try to find Valerie Goodwin, notify customs to watch for Nick Lawrence and his child,” Reeves said when Hawkins was through. “Meantime, I’ll check with our lab. We ran DNA analyses on the hair and trace from the kid’s nursery. Some of the hairs matched Nick Lawrence, some Priscilla. Maybe we can use the results to prove whose daughter Tess Lawrence really is.” He sounded thoroughly unenthusiastic.

  “What about Gwen Amiel?” Dwight asked. “Do we drop the charges?”

  Reeves answered after a long silence. “Let’s wait for the DNA results.”

  Gwen felt the glass crunch under her shoes moments
before she noticed the empty windowpane in the kitchen door. She froze and considered getting back in her car, then took a tentative step toward the door and turned the knob. Someone had smashed the glass, broken in.

  She pulled open the door and entered the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed; otherwise the house was silent.

  “Hello?” she shouted. Better to make her presence known than surprise someone who might be armed. “Hello?”

  She walked slowly to the front hall, reassured by the fact that the driveway was empty.

  “Hel—”

  The antique pitcher and bowl were smashed to pieces on the floor. And in the middle of the disarray was a single purple thistle, garishly perfect, its long, silver-leaved stem gently arching across jagged shards of pottery.

  She glanced into the living room, found it undisturbed, looked into the dining room, also untouched, then returned to the shattered wash set. Whoever had done that knew how to get to her. Nothing else in the house mattered.

  Upstairs, she checked Jimmy’s room, then her own. Nothing disturbed. She dialed 911 and told the dispatcher what had happened. A car would be sent over right away, the woman said. She hung up and began pacing the room. After a minute or so she ran downstairs and found the plant book on the living-room shelves.

  Most species of thistle made unsuitable garden plants, she read, trying hard to concentrate. Exceptions included the Scotch or Cotton thistle, a biennial growing up to five feet with striking, sculptured leaves, covered with white cobwebby hairs and…

  Where the hell are the police?

  She read on. The rich purple flowers were the badge of the Stuarts and were still the national emblem of Scotland. They were cultivated in—

  The phone rang. She tossed the book onto the couch and hurried to the kitchen.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Clare Pearson. I know this hasn’t been the easiest time for you, but I think I deserve to know in advance when Jimmy has other plans. Henry and I got to the camp right on time, same as always, only to be told that Jimmy had already been picked up.”

  “Jimmy didn’t have a play date today.”

  “I don’t know that you’d call going over to his aunt’s house a play date exactly.”

  “But…” Jimmy had no aunts, of course. And he would never leave the camp with a stranger, not without putting up a fight that would alert the counselors.

  “Did…did anyone tell you the name of the person who took him?”

  “No, they did not. But in the future I would appreciate—”

  Gwen hung up and tried like hell to think clearly. She paced the kitchen, the hallway. Jimmy’s…his situation was related to the broken pitcher and bowl. It had to be. But how? He wouldn’t leave camp with a stranger…yet they knew so few people in Sohegan. She reviewed a mental list of their acquaintances as she gazed at the shattered wash set. The Pearsons, of course, Mike Contaldi, Sheila and Betsy, the Piacevics…

  Her eyes came to rest on the purple thistle, bizarrely lovely, somehow, atop the wreckage, so deliberately placed, as if to make a statement.

  And she knew.

  Chapter 46

  Gwen pounded on the front door of Sheila’s house, then ran around back and tried the kitchen door. It wasn’t locked.

  “Sheila?” She stepped inside. “Are you home?”

  She checked the entire downstairs, then the rooms above. Sheila and Betsy’s king-size bed was unmade, rumpled clothes were piled all over the floor. The shades were lowered against the hot August sun, casting the room in sickly amber shadow.

  She left through the back door. Halfway to her car, something caught her eye. Sheila and Betsy never paid much attention to their yard, and it showed. But at the far end of the small property, nearly obscured by a badly overgrown shrub, was a clump of unexpected color, the brightness a jarring contrast to the prevailing browns and greens.

  Purple thistles. A cluster of rangy, robust purple thistles.

  Gwen parked at the all-too-familiar spot and charged down the embankment to the ravine, calling Jimmy’s name into the dusky woods. Her third shout was answered.

  “Mom?”

  She tripped over a small rock and only half noticed the hole in her jeans as she stood up.

  “Jimmy!”

  She charged into the clearing by the river, squinting at the sudden brightness.

  “Mom!”

  She turned. Jimmy was waist deep in the water.

  “Mom, come in! It’s freezing but it’s great!”

  She ran toward him.

  “Stop!” Sheila stepped from behind a tree. Gwen saw the pistol and stopped about ten yards from the stream.

  “Back up,” Sheila said. “Jimmy doesn’t have to see this.”

  Gwen started backing up the embankment.

  “Mom, come on!” Jimmy called from the water.

  “There, right there,” Sheila said with unsettling composure. “You’re in position.”

  Gwen looked down, then around, and it hit her. She was standing in the precise spot where Priscilla had died.

  “Sheila, I had nothing—”

  “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d figure it out even without my calling.” With her free hand she pulled a cell phone from her pocket and let it drop to the ground.

  “The thistle,” Gwen said. “Badge of the Stuarts.”

  Sheila—Sheila Stewart—nodded as a single tear glinted on her cheek. “We discovered that in junior high. We did a book report on the Stuarts.”

  “You and Priscilla,” Gwen said quietly. Sheila closed her eyes as more tears squeezed out.

  “Mom?” Jimmy was out of the water, walking toward them, shivering.

  “Get back in the water, Jimmy,” Gwen said.

  “But I’m cold.”

  “There’s a towel over there.” Sheila pointed behind her with her free hand. Jimmy looked puzzled, but from where he stood he couldn’t see the gun. He walked over to the towel and wrapped it around his shoulders.

  “It was our badge. Priscilla…” Sheila breathed hard for a few moments. “They sent Cilly to boarding school, then to New York. They married her off…and I found Betsy. But they could never separate us. Never.”

  All those unexplained disappearances, Priscilla dressed so fastidiously, including—

  “The morning of her murder…”

  “Cilly came to my house, frantic. She knew about you and Nick. She was sure you planned it, alone or with him. She was sick with worry, but Nick wouldn’t let her interfere with the arrangements, and her father wouldn’t call the police.” She reached into her pocket and took out a thistle. “We picked this together that last morning, from my yard, so I could be with her, here, at the ravine. I never saw her again.”

  “Sheila, I didn’t kill Priscilla, and as for Nick, he and I…”

  “He and you what?” Her voice had dropped to a snarl.

  “Nick set the whole thing up, he and Valerie Goodwin. They did it for the money. They’ve disappeared, Sheila, and they’ve taken Tess.”

  Her eyes flashed surprise and Gwen felt a tremor of hope. “Well, Tess is his girl,” Sheila said. “All his, now.”

  “His and Valerie’s.”

  The gun began to waver. “What do you mean, his and—”

  “They arranged everything, back when they first met Priscilla. They did it for the money.”

  “But you—”

  “They set me up, Sheila. They lured me to the ravine.” Jimmy was headed toward her. “Go up to the car, Jimmy.”

  “But, Mom, I don’t want—”

  He saw the gun and ran to her side, wrapping his arms around her legs.

  “It’s okay, Jimmy. Sheila won’t hurt you. Will you, Sheila?”

  Sheila slowly shook her head. “Not you, Jimmy.”

  Gwen took a deep breath. “I didn’t kill Priscilla. Even the police know that now. I found evidence, down in New York. The egg Priscilla received? It was Valerie’s.”

  “Oh, oh, no.” Sheila’s voice cra
cked and she wiped tears from her face with the back of her free hand. “Poor Cilly. My poor Priscilla.”

  “Put the gun down, Sheila.”

  “I was sure it was you,” Sheila said, “the way you mooned after Nick. And you would never tell me why you moved up here from New York. I figured you came up here as part of the plan, the plan to take Tess. I wanted to…I wanted to kill you after what you’d done to Priscilla, after what I thought you’d done. I didn’t have the nerve. I wanted to so badly but I couldn’t.”

  “Jimmy’s panda, and that…that effigy here.”

  “But it wasn’t enough,” Sheila said. “Cilly couldn’t have a child, and then you took her life. I thought…”

  “You thought you could take my child, my life. As if that would even the score, somehow.”

  Sheila stepped toward Gwen and sank to her knees. “Here, where it ended.” She cleared a layer of leaves and twigs from a patch of ground near where Priscilla had died. Sacred ground, consecrated in blood. “Nobody loved her except me. Not even her father.”

  “Put the gun down, Sheila.” Gwen stepped back, angling Jimmy behind her, as Sheila placed the thistle on the cleared dirt. An offering.

  “Run up the hill!” Gwen whispered to Jimmy.

  “But I—”

  “Run, Jimmy, now!”

  She gave him a shove and he tore up the embankment.

  Sheila heard his footsteps and turned toward him, raising the gun.

  “No, Sheila!” Gwen charged her. Sheila swiveled the pistol at Gwen, who stopped short. Jimmy disappeared in the dark woods above them.

  “You know I wouldn’t hurt him,” Sheila said softly.

  It was true. “Give me the gun. It’s not too late. I won’t press charges for breaking into my house, I swear to you. Just drop the—”

  “Get away from here!”

  “But, Sheil—”

  “Go!” Her voice was hoarse, almost unrecognizable. “Go away. You never belonged here, never! Leave…leave us alone!”

  Gwen began to back away. “I don’t want to leave you here, Sheila. Please, put down the gun and come with me.”

  Sheila slowly shook her head as tears fell onto the bare earth where the thistle lay.