That Last Weekend

by Laura Disilverio

  “I can’t! I have no idea—I hadn’t talked to Evangeline in a year and a half,” Ellie said.

  “We’ll be checking your phone records.”

  “Go ahead.” Anger and fear thinned Ellie’s voice. “I have no earthly idea why she would have left me money, any money, never mind all her money.” She raked her left hand through her hair several times.

  “Twenty thou will make a nice dent in college tuition bills,” Boone suggested. “Quite an unexpected windfall for you, if it’s indeed unexpected.” His tone said he suspected otherwise. “That kind of money, a nice round figure like that—well, it looks to me like a payoff of some kind.”

  “A payoff?” Ellie gaped.

  “What are you suggesting, Sheriff?” Geneva asked.

  “He’s suggesting Ellie was blackmailing Evangeline over something,” Dawn said in a tight voice.

  His interested gaze swiveled to her. “Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of Ms. Paul paying Ms. Ordahl for undertaking a task of some kind, potentially something illegal, or repaying a debt. But if you have a reason for thinking Ms. Ordahl was blackmailing the vic … ?” His voice invited her to continue.

  “No, of course not.” Dawn leaned over to grasp Ellie’s hand. “I wasn’t saying that at all. You know I wasn’t.”

  “I know.” Ellie held on to Dawn’s hand, but her gaze tracked Boone.

  Laurel judged it time to intervene. “Ellie and Dawn visited Evangeline’s former workplace this morning. Tell them what you learned.”

  Ellie and Dawn exchanged looks, and then Ellie spoke. “We talked to the office manager, who was Evangeline’s boss. She made it clear that Evangeline’s work wasn’t up to par and that she was let go right about the time her mother died.”

  “Also,” Dawn cut in, “she more or less said it was impossible for Evangeline to walk again, ever.”

  “So?” Boone seemed unimpressed.

  “So,” Laurel said impatiently, “she lied to us. She said she was going to show us how she could walk with a cane. Did you find a cane in her room here?”

  Boone shook his head. “No, but I don’t see that it matters.”

  “It matters because if she lied about being able to walk, maybe it was all a lie.” Laurel felt the others’ eyes on her but focused on Boone. He was the one she needed to convince of the outlandish theory that had come to her, born from the cane’s absence, her visit to Evangeline’s excessively neat apartment, and the news of her bequest to Ellie. “Her neighbor told me Evangeline didn’t go to Mexico. Maybe Ray is a lie, too.”

  “We met him,” Ellie objected.

  “I know. I mean, what if the engagement was a sham? There wasn’t a single photo of him at her place, no men’s clothes, nothing to hint he spent any time there. If the engagement was real, where’s Ray? Why hasn’t he come back or gotten in touch with the police? By now he either knows she’s dead, in which case he should be here grieving and organizing a funeral, or he should be so worried that she hasn’t been in touch with him that he calls the police for a welfare check. He’s done neither. That’s not just weird, it’s suspicious.”

  “Okay … so?” Boone looked more alert now, and Laurel got the feeling he knew where she was headed.

  “So, the engagement was bogus. The paralysis cure was bogus. Thus, Evangeline’s happiness, her ‘my life is coming up roses’ routine, was an act. Without the engagement or being able to walk again, she had no reason to be so happy. Her mother—who was her caretaker, by the way—had died, she’d had to leave their house and get a rental place, she was unemployed, almost broke, and had no prospects for anything better. Additionally, her house was so clean she might have been expecting guests, and there was nothing to speak of in her fridge, as if she had deliberately emptied it.”

  Geneva sucked her breath in sharply. “You’re saying—”

  Laurel steeled herself. “I’m saying I think Evangeline killed herself.”

  Twenty-Three

  No damn way. That was the first thought that lit up Geneva’s brain. Evangeline wouldn’t do that to herself. She wouldn’t kill herself, and in such a way.

  Ellie echoed her thoughts. “I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about Ray or about her walking again, but she died of strychnine poisoning. Even if she was suicidal, she wouldn’t choose a death like that. No sane person would.”

  “Do you have an answer for that, Your Honor?”

  “Actually, I do,” Laurel said coolly. “I think she purposefully picked a method that would all but rule out suicide. I think she wanted her death labeled a homicide.”

  A rapid thunk-thunk-thunk from a nail gun overhead punctuated her words.

  “What would be the point?” Boone asked impatiently. “A little notoriety? An article about her death in the newspaper? That dog won’t hunt.”

  Understanding came to Geneva in a swoop of clarity and sadness. Oh, Evangeline. Regret drained through her like water through sand, rearranging her beliefs about truth and friendship and making her doubt her qualifications as a psychologist. She should have spotted the depths of Evangeline’s distress and anger; her own agenda for the weekend had kept her from reading Evangeline with more sensitivity. She licked her dry lips. “She wanted it to look like murder because she wanted to get back at us.”

  Laurel nodded once, emphatically. “Exactly.”

  Boone started to say something, stopped, and finally announced, “That makes no sense. If I hear you right, you’re saying she summoned you all here—this get-together was at her invitation, right?”

  They nodded.

  “She gets you all together so she can kill herself in the most painful way possible, so—what?”

  “So we can be murder suspects.” Laurel’s voice was calm, but her wounded eyes expressed her disillusion.

  Dawn clearly felt it, too. “This is her revenge for last time,” she said. “She never knew who pushed her, but she knew—thought she knew—that it was one of us. Maybe she thought we were all in on it, or that we all covered up for whoever pushed her.” She rubbed her hands together. “That’s why there’s evidence pointing at each of us.”

  “You mean … ” Geneva still struggled with the idea that Evangeline could have been so calculating. “You mean she deliberately used a glass with my fingerprints on it for the poison?”

  Laurel nodded. “I’d guess she got it from the dining room, and she avoided touching it so her prints wouldn’t be on it—”

  “The napkin,” Boone said unwillingly. “There was a cloth napkin in her room.”

  “And the will?” Ellie asked. “She put me in her will so it’d look like I had a reason to kill her? Fuck her. Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her.” Rage made each syllable as brittle as ice on a puddle.

  Ellie never used the f-bomb, but it seemed appropriate for the occasion. Geneva felt like dropping “fuck” and “bitch” into the conversation herself. Murder and betrayal could upend anyone’s habits and values.

  “And she picked the fight with me,” Laurel said. “That last night. She threatened me. It felt weird at the time—now I know why.”

  “What about me?” Dawn asked. “There’s no evidence pointing to me.”

  “Maybe it just hasn’t turned up yet,” Laurel said. “Job’s comfort, I know. If the police search your phone, maybe they’ll find that you googled ‘strychnine poisoning.’”

  Dawn put her hand over the lump her phone made in her pocket, and Geneva guessed she was trying not to pull it out and check her search history.

  Boone had been sitting quietly, but now he shook his head again. “I don’t buy it. Even if I could believe that the vic was Machiavellian enough to put all this together, I can’t see anyone sacrificing themselves just to screw over someone they were pissed at.”

  Geneva laboriously lifted her legs off the table and planted
her feet on the floor. She leaned in, her top gaping to reveal cleavage deepened by pregnancy. “I suspect that whatever Evangeline felt went well beyond ‘pissed off,’ Sheriff,” she said. “As she saw it, her life was ruined when she was paralyzed. She’s had ten years to steep in that knowledge. We don’t know how long it took for her to accept that she was never going to walk again. Maybe that realization came only recently. I’ll bet she really went to Mexico at some point, hoping for a cure. When she learned there was no chance, when she lost all hope … well, I guess that’s when her sense of loss turned to bitterness and hate. And we were the targets for her disappointment. That’s too mild a word, of course.” Geneva dragged a hand down her cheek, stretching the skin. “As for Evangeline sacrificing herself to control someone’s life … she’s got quite a history of that.”

  “She almost got herself expelled from Grissom for me,” Laurel said. “It put me in her debt, even though neither of us ever acknowledged it in so many words.”

  “She spent money she couldn’t afford buying up all the pieces I had at an exhibition,” Dawn said in a tight voice.

  “How is that a bad thing?” Sheriff Boone asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand.” Dawn barely got the words out. Ellie squeezed her shoulder hard enough to make her wince.

  “She slept with my boyfriend where the chances were good I’d see them,” Ellie said.

  “She slept with Scott?” Laurel exclaimed.

  Ellie gave a small nod of confirmation. “Before we were married.”

  “And she got herself arrested on drug charges along with me so I’d lose my job,” Geneva said. “In fact—” She hesitated. No, it was time for the whole truth. She hugged her arms around her belly. “In fact, she set up the whole thing—the arrest, the newspaper coverage.”

  “What?” Laurel slewed to face her.

  Geneva folded her lips in and nodded. “At the time, I thought we were the victims of the world’s worst luck. I mean, how does a woman—me—making her very first drug buy get busted? What are the odds? And then for it all to end up in the newspaper so I lost my job … I felt like it was karma, that I deserved it for being such a fool.” Lila kicked and she winced. “Settle down in there. As you all know”—she looked at each of them—“I dove into a vodka bottle for a while. It wasn’t until I was sober that I began to think about that night with any clarity.”

  Ellie leaned forward. “What did you do?”

  “I was an investigative reporter once,” Geneva said wryly, “before I threw it away. I investigated. I got hold of the reporter for the New Aberdeen paper who was at the courthouse that morning. She was younger than I was—a kid. Nothing wily about her. She admitted right off that she’d gotten an anonymous call from a woman saying she could get a good story if she showed up at the courthouse. I’ve got an affidavit from her in my room.” She tilted her head toward the bedrooms. “Finding out why the cops were there was harder, but the reporter helped me. She got one of the arresting officers to admit that they’d received an anonymous tip, too. Easiest bust he ever made, he told her. Ruined my life, but what the hell.”

  Bitterness had bled into Geneva’s voice. Eyes narrowed, she locked gazes with each of them, stopping with Boone. “If you can think of anyone else besides Vangie who could have tipped off the cops and the reporter, I’m all ears.”

  “When did you find all this out?” Boone asked.

  She nodded at him. It was the right question. “A few weeks before that last weekend. I came down here intending to … I don’t know what I intended. To have it out with Vangie, to end our friendship, or just let her know that I knew? I never got the chance.”

  “Or maybe you did.” Grim lines bracketed Boone’s mouth.

  Ellie interrupted their tense staring contest. “What about this time? Why did you bring the affidavit?”

  Geneva inhaled slowly until her ribs complained. “Somewhere between then and now, I accepted that I had to own what happened that night. Still, I needed to let her know that I knew what she’d done. I needed to tell her that friends don’t fuck friends over like that. Then I was going to rip the papers into confetti and drop them at her feet before walking away. Dramatic, right?” She winced, and this time it wasn’t Lila. “When she turned up dead, I felt so small and ugly and guilty. God, I want a drink. Anyone have some vodka?” She was only half-joking.

  Dawn put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “How about apple juice instead? Lila wouldn’t like vodka.”

  Ellie leaned away and crossed her arms over her chest. “Did you push her?”

  No one called her out on it, and Geneva sadly acknowledged they were all thinking it. “I don’t know why you’d believe me, but no.” She bit her lip hard enough to taste blood. “When we found her, though, my first thought was ‘she deserved it.’” Her voice was barely more than a whisper, and she hoped none of them had heard her clearly.

  Laurel cleared her throat. “Geneva’s investigation is further evidence of how far Evangeline was willing to go to manipulate people’s lives.”

  “All right, all right.” Boone stood and faced them, palms facing out in a “slow down” gesture. “You’ve cobbled this theory together out of speculation, reinterpreted history, and wishful thinking.” Stopping Laurel’s protest, he said, “You don’t have a shred of proof. I’ll grant that the no-show fiancé is suspicious, but to my mind, that points to guilt on his part, not suicide on the vic’s. All this medical mumbo-jumbo … the vic has been in a wheelchair for a decade. It’s hard to believe she suddenly decided she couldn’t stand it anymore. I can see where she’d blame one of you for putting her there. Hell, I blame one of you—I just don’t know which one.” His stern gaze swept them all. “But I don’t see how that translates into framing you all for murder. No, I don’t buy it.”

  “You had to know Evangeline,” Dawn said simply.

  A ruckus in the hall, a shout and thudding footsteps followed by a clatter and raised voices, broke the tension in the sunroom. A workman appeared at the door, his face pale with dust or shock. His yellow helmet was askew. Every muscle in Geneva’s body tensed. She wished she could put her fingers in her ears to block what he was going to say.

  “A body. There’s a body. A woman. Dead. At the bottom of the elevator shaft.” Having spit out the words, he turned away and vomited into the hall.

  Twenty-Four

  So much for that theory. The thought slipped through Ellie’s mind before she could stop it. Laurel had almost convinced them that Evangeline had committed suicide, but Mindy’s body in the elevator shaft deep-sixed that. Two bodies in the space of two days was no coincidence; Boone wasn’t going to buy Laurel’s theory now. Too bad. They had all frozen for a split second, but then Geneva said, “Do you think it’s Mindy?” and they rose as one to investigate. Ellie wanted to say, Of course it’s Mindy—who else could it be? but she kept silent. Geneva’s question was reflex, or denial.

  Despite Sheriff Boone’s order to “stay here,” they followed him into the hall. The stench of vomit stung Ellie’s nostrils and she breathed shallowly through her mouth. What looked like every construction worker in the state of North Carolina was clustered around the plywood box housing the elevator shaft. It was probably only eight or ten men, but Ellie could see nothing over the sea of yellow hard hats.

  “Police. Let me through.” Boone plowed a path with an efficiency Ellie admired.

  She trailed him, eeling through the spaces he opened before they could close up again. The odors of sweat and dirt and something with a sickly sweet edge made her stomach lurch. Someone had slid away the heavy sheet of plywood that had blocked the shaft opening, and a hard-hatted man knelt inside the roughly four-foot-by-six-foot space inside. At first, Ellie thought he was trying to aid Mindy—could she still be alive? She caught her breath. But then she realized he was praying, his lips moving silently. He stood in response to Boone’s hand o
n his shoulder and backed away, revealing a sight that would haunt Ellie forever.

  Mindy lay sprawled on her back on a two-foot-high stack of lumber. Her torso hung over the boards, head tilted awkwardly on the floor with her hips and legs twisted above her, resting on the rough planks. Her arms were flung out over her head like she was making a referee’s “goal” symbol and her hair splayed out, matted with blood. A gleam of white bone stuck out of her thigh, and a depression in her temple made one staring eye bulge. Ellie couldn’t tear her gaze away from Mindy’s open eyes, filmed and flat, clearly lifeless and yet accusing. Blood was splattered everywhere. Suddenly, it was too much. She backed away hurriedly and bumped into Laurel.

  Laurel was paler than usual, but she steadied Ellie and helped push through the workmen to open space. Ellie bent and put her hands on her knees, letting her hair flop over to hide her face. She fought down the urge to throw up. “Sorry,” she managed.

  Laurel rubbed her back. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

  Ellie straightened, and they headed for the front door and sunshine. Outside, she blinked back tears. The brightness, she told herself. She’d hardly known Mindy, after all. “Sorry for falling apart on you,” she said to Laurel, slightly embarrassed. She was the mom who stanched bloody noses and calmly took her sons to the ER when they broke arms falling out of trees or got concussed on the lacrosse field. She hadn’t turned a hair when Shane came home with a bleeding gash in his shin from skateboarding that needed thirty-eight stitches; she wrapped it tightly in a clean dish towel and got him to the ER in record time. Why was she all shaky?

  “It got to me too,” Laurel said. “We should have been smart, like Geneva, and not looked. There are things you can never unsee.”

  Ellie hadn’t realized that Geneva had hung back. A thought struck her as they moved into the shade of the huge live oak thirty feet from the door. “Braden. Oh, that poor boy. His mother’s dead. Who will tell him? What will happen to him?” Braden’s tragedy suddenly loomed larger than Mindy’s. Mindy was dead, and no matter how that had happened, she was beyond pain. Braden was about to be blindsided with the worst news of his life, much worse than his father leaving. Tears stung behind her eyes again and she pinched the bridge of her nose to dam them up. Her biggest fear from the time the boys were born was of dying before they didn’t need her anymore. She wondered if Mindy’s last moments had been tortured by thoughts of her bereft son. She hoped, for Mindy’s sake, that she’d died instantly, without time to worry about Braden.