Pushed to the Limit

by Patricia Rosemoor

  “You recognize him?” she asked. That had to be why his expression was a combination of horror and sorrow.

  “This is it, Brick. You can’t ignore what’s in front of your eyes. This was no accident. Kenneth was murdered. Now you have to arrest her.” Abruptly Martha flew at Sydney, fingers with nails like claws leading. “Murderess.”

  Sydney jumped away as Brickman grabbed Martha’s arm, stopping her from following.

  “What? I didn’t–”

  ”Don’t deny it. You killed my brother.”

  Confused, filled with a growing feeling of horror, Sydney looked to Benno, who was strangely silent, his features twisted into an expression of sheer grief. Her heart beat wildly in her chest and she squeezed the flashlight so tightly her fingers went numb.

  Brickman said, “Don’t tell us you didn’t know the dead man. This is your supposed, beloved husband.”

  “No, my husband was Ken–”

  ”Kenneth Lord,” Benno finished for her.

  He was looking at her as if she’d lost her mind. The truth hit her then... too much for her to take in. The air squeezed out of her lungs and her vision went fuzzy as Sydney’s knees buckled under her.

  BENNO FLEW to catch Sydney before she could hit the ground. She was a light weight in his arms and he balanced her easily.

  Worry for her competed with the shock of seeing his friend’s body. What in hell was going on? he wondered wildly. Sydney had claimed Kenneth had gone off a cliff, but here he was, shot to death... as had been the man in her dream. Or had it been a dream? he fleetingly wondered before realizing she’d seemed as shocked as he. She couldn’t be playacting, could she?

  He pulled her unconscious body tightly to his chest, his free hand stroking her face. “Sydney, tell me you’re all right.”

  “Aren’t you going to do anything?” Martha demanded of Brickman.

  “That depends on what you mean. I’m going to hand the deceased over to the state police. They’ll take the corpse to Portland to do the lab work.”

  “Kenneth has been shot dead. Any fool can see that.”

  Still cradling Sydney, Benno watched Martha carefully kneel next to the corpse as though she didn’t want to get her clothes dirty. He thought she might touch her brother – but at the last second, she recoiled, no doubt because of the dried blood.

  “I’m talking about procedure, Martha.”

  Two perfect tears rolled down her cheeks as she glared up at the policeman. “And I’m talking about justice.”

  Brickman stooped and slipped what could be thought of as a steadying arm around her. Benno recognized the gesture as one more intimate and was surprised that Martha didn’t move away, that she actually allowed the lawman to hold her fast after pulling her to her feet.

  “I’ll take care of getting justice, too.” Brickman sucked in his gut, stood taller, made his voice reassuring. “Be patient for a little while longer. The lab men are trained experts. They’ll find the evidence we need to catch the murderer.”

  “I don’t need any evidence to know who did this.”

  Benno’s attention came back to Sydney who stirred in his arms. Her eyes fluttered open. First they were filled with confusion, then horror.

  She grabbed at his shirt front with desperate fingers. “That isn’t Kenneth.”

  “But it is. Was,” Benno corrected, studying her intensely.

  She shook her head wildly and struggled to get her feet under her. Then she pushed herself out of his arms. “That’s not the same Kenneth Lord I married.”

  Benno heard the conviction in her words. If she hadn’t married Kenneth Lord, then who?

  “Finally, we get something called truth here.” Pulling herself free from Brickman, Martha attacked. “I knew Kenneth would never have committed himself to some stranger without telling me. Now all we need is justice. What was your scheme, anyway? An elaborate plan to kill my brother and then plead a nervous breakdown? Why? Did you really think I’d let you have his money?”

  “Benno?” Sydney choked. “There must be some kind of explanation.”

  Benno couldn’t help his tight-lipped response. He wanted to believe her... but Kenneth had been his friend. He truly didn’t know what to think.

  “I’m afraid things look bad for you,” Brickman said, earning a grateful look from Martha. “You told us your husband went over the cliff. You should have stuck to your story and buried the body.”

  “My husband did go over a cliff. I never saw this man before in my life. Not until the dream.”

  Her brow furrowed and her head tilted to one side as she seemed to be looking deep within herself. Then she held out her right hand whose fingers were curled into a fist. Benno looked from her to the dead man. He couldn’t stop himself. Picking up the flashlight she’d dropped, he stooped and, with difficulty, pried open Kenneth’s right hand. He flashed a light over the palm and from it, freed a small piece of metal that had stuck to the skin.

  “Don’t touch that,” Brickman ordered too late.

  The triangular shaped piece of metal was already in Benno’s hand. “Looks like a stud.”

  “Shouldn’t have done that.” Brickman produced a handkerchief. “Now your fingerprints are on it.”

  Benno dropped the object into the handkerchief which Brickman stuffed back into a pocket.

  “Trying to cover for the lady here?” the lawman asked.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Sydney protested, her voice rising with each word.

  Brickman grunted. “Let’s get back to the house so I can make the necessary calls. In the meantime, we’ll be investigating you more closely, Miss Raferty. Don’t even consider doing a disappearing act.”

  Benno saw how stricken Sydney appeared. Emotions rushed to the fore and he set a protective arm around her, not because she was the widow of his friend – she’d just denied that connection – but because she had a pull on him he couldn’t deny. His head was whirling as they picked their way back over the grounds.

  “Can’t you just arrest her and lock her up in one of your jail cells?” Martha pleaded with Brickman. “I refuse to have a murderer under my roof.”

  “No one has proved Sydney is a murder,” Benno stated.

  When Martha flashed him a look of pity, he frowned. Maybe he was losing his mind. What if he were getting himself tangled up with a woman capable of committing murder?

  SYDNEY FELT as if she were trapped in a nightmare. This couldn’t be happening to her.

  Her husband not her husband.

  Dead but not dead.

  Even Benno didn’t seem to believe her this time.

  She sat frozen on the sofa for hours, while police came and went and the bagged body of the real Kenneth Lord was taken away. The murder site was cordoned off until it could be properly searched and photographed by evidence technicians in daylight.

  Sydney was questioned; copious notes were taken. Over and over, she reiterated everything that had happened from the first time she’d met the man she now knew to be an imposter through the moment when she’d stumbled over the corpse. When she tried to explain the dream, she was looked at with a combination of pity and disbelief. Even though the authorities didn’t immediately arrest her, she got the feeling they had already had her tried and convicted.

  Again, she was warned not to leave town. They left just before midnight.

  Martha flounced off to the police station with Officer Brickman, saying she would be back, but if she had to share her house even for one night, she would be sure to lock her door and “protect” herself if necessary. Then Sydney was left alone except for Benno. She waited for him to abandon her, too. And how could she blame him?

  Instead, he stood in the shadows, leaning on a widow sill, staring out into the dark.

  “You don’t believe me anymore,” she said quietly.

  “You have to admit it would take a real stretch of the imagination to give your story credibility.”

  “It’s much easier to believe I made u
p a marriage and a husband, then killed Kenneth Lord and called the police only to claim I never saw the dead man before.” She could hardly keep her voice from shaking. “Right?”

  He turned to her, his face deep in shadow. “That doesn’t make sense, either.”

  “Not even if I thought I could make big money on some grand scheme Martha thinks I concocted?”

  “Not even then.”

  “Maybe I have gone around the bend,” Sydney said as much to herself as to him. “Maybe I’m crazy and had no motive. Maybe I can’t tell fantasy from reality any more.”

  Even as she made the charges against herself, Sydney wasn’t convinced. Before finding the body, she had gone over every detail of her romance with “Kenneth Lord.” Everything had to have happened just as she’d said.

  Her mind was filled with memories, not delusions.

  Benno was silent for a moment before asking, “Do you have any enemies?”

  “What?”

  “Someone who would want to set you up?”

  Blinking, startled by the thought, she tried to make out his expression which she thought serious enough. “No. I don’t think so. Set me up for what? Murder?”

  He shrugged. “If you really did marry someone claiming to be Kenneth Lord–”

  “I did!” she said vehemently, not realizing until that moment how very certain she was.

  Sounding more sure of her, he offered, “Then you may have been the victim of a con.”

  “Conned?” Her mind began spinning again. The Kenneth Lord she’d met and married had been an imposter. That was undeniable fact. So what else did that make her erstwhile husband but a con man? “For what purpose?”

  “To provide a patsy to take the fall when the real Kenneth Lord was killed?”

  “If you’re correct...” Her hand went to her throat and she took a deep, shaky breath. “I can’t for the life of me think of who would hate me so much.”

  “Or hate Kenneth.” Benno seemed to be deep in thought. “Perhaps you were merely... available. You were burned out, feeling fragile, and our murderer recognized your susceptibility when he met you.”

  With each word Benno uttered, Sydney’s anger grew. Yes, she had been experiencing burn out because of her job. And the dreams had disturbed her even more. She hadn’t been ready to accept these psychic warnings back into her life and so had multiplied the pressure on herself.

  “But why? Who would want to take such advantage of me?” And another thought crystalized. “He’s still alive. The man who married me is alive. He must be, right? He had to have been part of some elaborate scheme. He might be the murderer.”

  “Sounds like a safe bet to me,” Benno said, his brow furrowed. “A man pretending to be Kenneth falls off a cliff. And then the real Kenneth Lord turns up dead.”

  “Sounds crazy. How will I ever convince the authorities?” Her situation seemed hopeless. “Without proof, they’ll continue to think I’m crazy or a murderer or both.”

  From the depths of her soul, Sydney drew on the very fiber of her true nature. Her innate resilience had been bruised and battered and had done a good job of eluding her lately, but she hadn’t lost it yet. Anger, hot and sharp, jolted her into a frame of mind that gave her an odd and opposing feeling of inner strength, a state of certainty, a sense of purpose that she hadn’t felt in months.

  Remembering the premonition that had turned into frightening reality – that of her erstwhile husband calling her to join him in death - she calmly said, “I’m going to find him if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

  Benno drew closer. “How do you propose to accomplish that when you don’t even know who he is?”

  At least he wasn’t questioning whether the man existed. “I don’t, but someone must.”

  “If these speculations are correct.”

  Listening to her instincts, Sydney felt they were on the right track. “I don’t know whether the intended victim was Kenneth or me. Maybe I just got caught in the crossfire.” She stared at Benno who now loomed over her. “But one way or another, I’m going to find out. And I’m going to prove my innocence and sanity to all of you.”

  His expression was unreadable when he said, “Sounds like you’ve lumped me with the others.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “It would be a first.”

  For all the time she’d spent with this man during the past few days, for as well as she’d grown to know and care for him, Sydney couldn’t believe she was just now realizing how far he was from fitting in the big picture around Stone Beach. She’d been too self-absorbed, too immersed in her own troubles to realize the ramifications of his being at odds not only with Martha, but Mick Brickman or Parnell Anderson, as well.

  But the real Kenneth Lord had been his friend.

  “As cockeyed as your story sounds,” Benno was saying, “I want to believe you.”

  “That’s something, then.”

  Probably more than she should have hoped for given the circumstances. Even she had thought she was losing her mind.

  “But what I think doesn’t count for much around here,” he went on, confirming her suspicions. “My being on your side might hurt you in the long run.”

  For the life of her, Sydney couldn’t figure out why and she didn’t feel as if she had the right to ask. She sensed his reasons were very private, and that his hurt ran very deep. If Benno wanted her to know the source of his trouble with the town, no doubt he would tell her in due time.

  She realized how permanent that sounded, as if they would be allies forever, when she, in fact, was eager to leave Stone Beach as soon as possible -- as soon as she cleared her name. The thought of being without Benno left her with a sense of loss she couldn’t quite comprehend.

  Edgy, she rose and paced the length of the living room. “If I could pick anyone in the world to be on my side,” she assured him honestly, “that person would be you.”

  A hint of a smile mellowed Benno’s granite features. “That’s quite an endorsement.”

  “A sincere one.”

  “So where do we start?” When she stopped her pacing and raised her brows in question, he said, “Kenneth was my friend, you know. An accident is one thing, murder another.”

  Suddenly she became aware of the grief that Benno was feeling... the grief that she had claimed as her own for the past several days. All that was changed now. She was freed of one cause for suffering, filled with another. She had a different reason to mourn.

  Hers had become a loss of innocence.

  “I wasn’t even thinking of him,” she admitted softly.

  Discovering the identity of the dead man must have come as quite a shock to Benno, much more so than when she’d told him about the supposed accident. Bodies lost at sea were so much less tangible than ones riddled with bullets and covered with blood. She herself was still shaken albeit for a variety of different reasons.

  “Benno, I’m so sorry.”

  Their eyes met as they shared a quiet moment in which words weren’t necessary.

  Then he broke the silence. “So where do we start?” he asked again, his tone more positive this time.

  “There’s the justice of the peace who married us...” Her voice faltered. “My God, I’m married to a man whose name I don’t even know.”

  “If the marriage is considered legal considering the circumstances. You think the J.P. will be able to tell you something?”

  “I won’t know until I ask him.”

  “Until we ask him. I’m going with you.” He cut off any objection by adding, “You’re not supposed to leave town, remember? We’ll sneak you out in my car and get you back before anyone misses you.”

  Though Sydney could tell Benno still had some reservations, he was giving her the benefit of the doubt. She couldn’t ask for more.

  “All right, we’ll do this together. I appreciate the offer. The excursion will have to wait until morning.” She looked around. “But we don’t have to. Maybe we can find some of the answers rig
ht here.”

  “You mean search the house. I don’t have the faintest idea of what to look for. Do you?”

  She shrugged. “Anything out of the ordinary. At least it’ll keep us busy. I certainly am in no mood to sleep.” Realizing he’d left his business to come when she called, Sydney said, “Sorry, I’m not thinking. You should get back.”

  ”Poppy can take care of things,” he said. “I’ll call and explain.”

  Happy that she wouldn’t be abandoned, she said, “I’m really going to owe you one... Lord, I owe you now.”

  “No. Kenneth was my friend. And now you are.” His expression was grim, intensely personal. “I want to know what’s going on just as much as you do.”

  Once again Sydney was struck by whatever Benno wasn’t saying. “Why don’t you go through Kenneth’s study while I check Martha’s room before she returns.”

  “You’d better be careful. If she even suspects you’ve gone through her things, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Sydney laughed. “I’ve been to hell and back in less than a week. I’m not afraid of Martha.”

  “Perhaps you should be...”

  If Martha were the murderer? Sydney silently finished. The smile died on her lips.

  “Benno, too much has happened to me, too much is at stake for me to sit by and idly watch what’s left of my life be destroyed. I’m ready to take on anyone to learn the truth. Even a murderer.”

  With that, she headed for the stairs.

  “So we’re looking for anything out of the ordinary,” Benno muttered. “Now if only we can figure out what that is.”

  He disappeared inside Kenneth’s office as she made the landing.

  Sydney tried to keep her mind off Benno and on her purpose as she entered Martha’s room and snapped on the light. He was helping her for Kenneth’s sake, she told herself, and simply because he was a good man, a caring human being. She was his friend – he’d told her as much – and she needed to be content with that. She might want more from Benno, but she had too many doubts about her own judgment.

  Besides which, there was no second-guessing the future until she’d settled her present.