Auld Lang Syne (20 page)

“That figures. I can’t even make a confession without screwing it up. I guess I’ve made a big enough mess already. No point making a bigger one for the cleaning staff to deal with.” She laid the little pistol on the manicure table and let her hands fall into her lap. “I’m exhausted.”

“I don’t believe you wanted to kill yourself anyway, Ariel. You could have done that anytime over the past week, but you didn’t. What you really want is for someone to hear you, and we do. I only wish you had asked for help thirty-five years ago.”

She looked me full in the face. “I was seventeen years old. My mother hated me, and my father barely knew I was alive. I didn’t know how to ask for help, and anyway, would you have heard me then?”

I struggled to answer her honestly, but the truth was, I didn’t know.
“Maybe.
I think I would have. I hope so.”

At that moment John
Harkness
stepped into the room, followed closely by Margo. His right hand was in his overcoat pocket. I suspected it was clamped firmly around his police issue .38, but after taking in the details of the scene before him, he pulled out his cell phone.

“The West Hartford police are standing by outside. What should I tell them?” He looked at my hands and Joanie’s, still taped to our chairs, at Ariel sagging drunkenly in her chair and her pistol lying on the manicure table. His eyes met mine.

I looked over at Joanie, and she nodded slightly.

“Tell them it was a false alarm,” I told John. “Everything is okay here.”

Nineteen

Surprising the forecasters, who are often forced to revise their predictions in New England, the storm had blown through quickly and was already moving out to sea. John brushed the snow from Joanie’s Honda and helped her get Ariel buckled into the passenger seat after confiscating her gun. He followed them to Joan’s place in his car, and Margo rode home with me.

“How did you know where I was?” I finally found a moment to ask her. It never even occurred to me that she had not engineered this rescue scenario. She snorted in amusement.

“You might think more kindly about your cell phone after this, Sugar. Everything turned out all right this time, but the way your life goes, you might really have been in trouble.” She waved her own phone at me.

I glanced at her briefly, not understanding, before returning my attention to the still treacherous pavement. “I thought of using it, but I couldn’t reach it in my pocket with my hands taped to the chair, so what possible good did it do me?”

This time she laughed out loud.
“You butt-dialed me, silly woman.
You must have been
squirmin
’ around in that chair, and somehow you pressed my speed dial. I’d been
frettin
’ about you all day, especially after Joanie and Harold both called Mack Realty
lookin
’ for you because you weren’t
answerin
’ your home phone, so I just snatched up my cell phone when I saw your number displayed. I left poor Mr.
Eberhart
at the bank
hangin
’ on the Mack line in the middle of a sentence. And what did I hear? Some drunk fool
yappin
’ on and on about her terrible adolescence, as if anyone has a good one. Then I heard you yelp.”

“That must have been when Ariel ripped the duct tape off my mouth.”

“Ouch! Well, anyway, I naturally called John, and he traced the location of your phone …”

“They can do that?” I asked, amazed.

“They can do that,” she assured me. “So he put the West Hartford PD on alert, and we high-tailed it over here to see what was what. We saw your car in the lot, and luckily, the back door to the salon was unlocked. We didn’t want to bust into what sounded like a delicate situation, so we stood in the back room
listenin
’ until it looked like things had settled down some. It’s a good thing Ariel put that pistol down when she did, though. John was
gettin
’ that twitchy look he gets when he’s had about enough, you know?”

“I do know that look. Armando has one just like it,” I assured her.

We were quiet for a minute. Then, “Why was Harold King in town anyway?” Margo remembered to ask.

Harold! We had promised each other to be in touch by five o’clock, no matter what. It was well past that, and my cell phone had obviously been busy for a very long time. I startled Margo by screeching into the parking lot of a CVS and fumbled for my phone.

“Finally,” Harold growled after answering my call on the first ring. “I was getting really concerned, but since you were obviously talking on your phone for the last hour, I figured you had to be okay.”

I slid my eyes to Margo. “I wasn’t exactly talking, and getting to okay
took
some doing.” I gave him a condensed version of the afternoon’s events, which he digested in silence. Midway through, Margo climbed out of the car and walked around to my side, where she motioned me to do the same.

“I’ll drive,” she mouthed.

“Hold on for a second, Harold. I’m going to switch seats with Margo so she can drive while I talk.” This necessitated more explanations of why Margo was in the car with me. By the time I got to the part about, um, inadvertently dialing Margo on my cell, Harold was howling.

“I don’t believe it. You butt-dialed her, and she moved heaven and earth to get you out of whatever jam you were in. What a great friend.”

I looked at Margo, wearing the eyeglasses she detested as she steered the
Jetta
across the Wethersfield town line at a cautious twenty-five miles per hour with a death grip on the steering wheel.

“I do have great friends, and now I’m happy to count you among them. It’s your turn. How was your meeting with Dan-Dave? Was he home with the flu like he told the people at Shady Hill?”

“There was no meeting,” Harold announced with disgust. “I drove all the way down there in the snow and rang his doorbell for about five minutes, but no one answered. I got a funny feeling while I was standing there, like the place was empty and had been for quite a while … cold and sort of blank, you know? So I went down to the communal mailboxes and looked into the one for Emerson. They don’t lock, and there was so much junk mail crammed into this one that the door would hardly close. Nobody’s picked up his mail in several days, Kate.”

We were silent as we considered what that might mean.

“Ariel thought she recognized one of the ambulance personnel Saturday night as Dave Engle,” I reminded Harold.

“Yeah, you said.” We were quiet again. “Anyway, it looks as if we’ll be cleared to take off first thing in the morning. I figure you’ll be turning over everything to the Brewster cops tomorrow, so I left my file on Engle inside your front storm door. I’m sure they’ll know what to do with it.”

Margo eased the
Jetta
into my driveway and pushed the automatic garage door opener on my visor with obvious relief.

“Thanks for everything, Harold. You really came through for me, and I’ll never forget it.”

“I won’t let you,” he joked. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t had this much excitement in my life in years. Besides, I might have a dinner date in the area in a couple of weeks. Maybe we could meet up for coffee, and you can tell me the end of the story.”

I didn’t ask him who he was inviting to dinner. I didn’t have to.

“Oh, I’ll be e-mailing you the details long before then, but we can have a cup of coffee anyway. Now that we’re reacquainted, I don’t want you to disappear from my life again.” I thought about Agnes and Mitch,
Maryellyn
and Jean and Joanne, Pam and Gail, Pat and Carrie, and I realized I felt the same way about each and every one of them. Then I remembered Armando and Emma, Joey and Justine,
Strutter
and J.D., and especially Margo and John. What would I do without any of them? I squeezed Margo’s shoulder affectionately.

“A girl can never have too many friends.”

After half an hour with Detective
Hagearty
in the same dingy Brewster PD conference room in which we’d first talked, I felt I finally had the man’s full attention. Having John
Harkness
sitting beside me helped with that, as did the complete file Harold had left me on Dave Engle, a.k.a. Dan Emerson. John had advised me to be truthful about Carrie’s and Ariel’s less-than-praiseworthy activities the night of the reunion but not to linger over them, simply set the stage and move on to the facts about Dave Engle.

At first
Hagearty
wore the same weary, albeit more respectful, expression he’d displayed at our initial meeting, but after he leafed through the pages in Harold’s research folder, he snapped to attention. When I mentioned Ariel’s belief that she’d recognized Dave as one of the paramedics on duty the night of the reunion and Harold’s unsuccessful attempt to rouse the man at his condominium,
Hagearty
excused
himself
for a minute and left the room, carrying the file. When he returned, I related the story of Dave and Mindy and her culpability in his girlfriend Kathy’s death.

By the time I finished my mouth was dry, and
Hagearty’s
eyebrows had climbed halfway up his forehead. He got to his feet and personally brought me a paper cup of water from the cooler against the wall.

“You put all this together in a week?” he asked me, but he was looking at John.

“Told you so,” John grinned. “She’s got a real gift for investigation. I trust her instincts. Besides, my wife would murder me if I didn’t help Kate out from time to time. They’re business partners,” he explained.

“Well, I had a little help from my friends,” I demurred, but I couldn’t help being pleased.

After a perfunctory tap on the door, Officer McCarthy stepped in and spoke quietly in
Hagearty’s
ear. I hadn’t thought it possible, but the detective’s eyebrows climbed even higher as he listened. Then he sighed heavily and looked me full in the face.

“Normally, I wouldn’t reveal this sort of information to a civilian, but since you’ve been instrumental in moving this investigation ahead, and
Harkness
here vouches for you, I’m going to make an exception. A little while ago I dispatched a squad car to Daniel Emerson’s address with instructions for the officers to enter using any means necessary. The two officers did so and radioed a message to me, which McCarthy just delivered. Daniel Emerson committed suicide several days ago, from the look of things. Overdosed
himself
with morphine. There was apparently quite a stash of the stuff in Emerson’s condo, which may explain another suspicious death at Shady Hill a year or so ago.”
Hagearty
sighed.

“He also left a suicide note that pretty much confirms everything you’ve told me this morning, how Mindy
Marchelewski
drove his high school girlfriend to suicide and ruined his life, how his guilt about betraying her plagued him and made it impossible for him to finish medical school as he’d planned. He tried to erase the past by changing his identity and atone for his past mistakes by working as a paramedic and volunteering with the local ambulance corps. It was sheer coincidence that he was on duty the night of the reunion, but being in that place and seeing Mindy brought it all back. He was overcome with rage and injected her with morphine when he was alone with her in the back of the ambulance, knowing the ER staff wouldn’t be able to check the dilation of her pupils until it was too late because of the glued eyelids. A few days later he was sick with remorse and decided to put an end to his suffering once and for all. Wanted to be with Kathy again, he said.”

I had expected to feel relieved, even jubilant, at having the mystery of Mindy’s death solved at last, but I was neither. “Imagine being so hated that three different people would seek revenge in a single evening,” I shivered and choked up.

John put an arm around my shoulders, not quite hugging me. “It wasn’t like the Christie novel,” he observed, “where the perpetrators deliberately planned their actions. I guess this was more like an unintentional conspiracy.”

When I could speak again, I asked
Hagearty
what would happen to Carrie and Ariel.

“They’ll have to come in and give statements. After that it will be up to the D.A. to decide whether to prosecute. Between you and me, I think he’ll take a pass.”

Only then did relief flood through me along with an inexplicable weariness, and I sagged back against John’s comforting arm. Margo was one very lucky lady.

“Let’s get you home,” he said briskly. “That’s the best place for you after the week you’ve had.”
 

As always, I was happy to follow his advice and hope he saw the gratitude in my eyes.