Dead Creek (24 page)

“A little, only a few special items. Why do you ask?”

“Oh …” Julie sighed. “Mrs. Bowers had those lovely silver pitchers from her family, pre-Civil War. Are those gone?”

“Melted down, dear. Sorry,” said Brad. “I have ingots up the wazoo. That’s the only thing I liked about you, by the way. You do have taste.”

“Thank you,” said Julie sweetly. “But you’re leaving behind the other six hundred million dollars that belonged to Robert. What’s so brilliant about that?”

“Ha, ha, ha—” Brad made an attempt to laugh. “What are you talking about? Are you calling me a fool?”

“Why not?” said Julie. Her agreeable tone vanished. “My percentage on getting out of here isn’t exactly great. Why not exit leaving you a little unhappy, too?” She paused and took a deep breath. Brad watched her, his eyes shifting ever so slightly as though he was worried about what he might hear.

“For the record, Brad, Robert was planning to give you the goddam money.”

Julie’s voice cracked like she was close to tears. “He didn’t want it. All he wanted was this house for the two of us and the children. That’s all. His plan was to give me this house with this little lake for a wedding gift, set up a small trust for us to live on … and give you the rest. He told me he loved you … like a brother.”

Julie’s words seemed to stun Brad, who was staring at her.

“I told him I thought he was crazy. I told him I thought you were a real weasel, but he wouldn’t hear any criticism of you. He genuinely cared for you.”

Brad stood speechless. Julie, pleased with the impact she was having, continued. “He didn’t know you were natural siblings. Don’t misunderstand. But he told me he felt you were kindred spirits—if you know what I mean. He told me that he knew what you’d been through, and he would forgive you anything because no human being should have to fight through life the way the two of you had had to in your own separate situations.

“He wasn’t rational, Brad, but maybe that’s a family trait. What I do know is this: he was planning to give all the Bowers money away—after he let you have as much as you wanted.”

Suddenly a deep, almost musical voice rang out from behind Brad. It was a voice with a low timbre and a belllike edge.

“Brad baby? Did I hear we’ve had a six-hundred-million-dollar oversight?” Judith Benjamin came around the corner and stopped in surprise at the sight of Ray’s deer rifle. Brad jumped at the sound of her voice.

“I’ve been listening,” said Judith, answering the question on his face. “Thought I heard a pop a few minutes ago and came up to see if you dropped something.”

“What
the hell is this?” Her eyes took in the room full of people, widening just slightly on spotting Julie.

Osborne was shocked at the sight of her. Gone was the trench coat and the French twist. Instead, stopped short behind Brad and dressed in a tailored charcoal-gray suit stood an individual whose appearance—tall, broad-shouldered, and dignified—suddenly made sense. What had been a too-tall, too-stout, too-burly female had metamorphosed into a stalwart, muscular male.

The head was bald with a light fringe of white-blond hair at the temples and ears and around the back of the head. The lower face sported a neat grayish blond beard and mustache, probably attached with theatrical adhesive. But it was unmistakably Judith. Osborne recognized the signature horn-rimmed glasses.

“Brad! Hey—we don’t have time for any foolishness. I want us in the air in fifteen minutes.” There was an imperious edge to her voice, and Brad’s hand wobbled with the gun in it as if he was apologizing for bad behavior.

Judith’s eyes, flat and wide as her brother’s, seemed even larger in the thin, strong-boned face. No makeup lightened their effect now. She let them play over the sight of Osborne, Ray still standing with his back to the room, and Julie. The ice in her eyes seem to drop the temperature in the freezer another ten or twenty degrees.

“Brad, give me that gun.” Judith reached for the pistol, and her hand grasped it expertly. She pulled the lapels of her jacket close around her neck. “Brrr—what the hell do you have this set at?”

“As low as it can go—the flash-freeze temp.”

“Good. We’re out of here.” She started to leave, then she stopped and turned, her eyes on Osborne. “I am sorry that Brad insisted on including you, Dr. Osborne. But it does make good business sense. Now that we have you and Ray, the good chief here, little orphan Annie, and Erin, this makes for a more efficient exit. Who’s left to know any details? No one in Loon Lake. Right? If it took six weeks to find the other bodies, how long will it take until they find their way to a house that’s not even on a map?”

“Judith?” Ray spoke up, his voice slightly muffled against the wall.

“I made him turn around,” said Brad. “I hate his idiot face.”

“Oh, Brad, stop it,” Judith said mockingly. “You hate him because he’s my buddy. You hate him because sometimes I think he’s kinda cute.”

It was becoming clear that Judith was running the show. “Ray, I do hate to leave you like this—I’ve always thought you’d make a great bartender. If I could leave you alive, I’d give you Thunder Bay. I really would. I know you’d clean it up, which is too bad, but you could do good things with that place.”

“I could do that,” said Ray. “I guess for the moment, it doesn’t sound like a viable option.”

“It isn’t. Sorry, sonny.”

“She’s leading you on,” said Brad, “payback for your lousy jokes.”

“Mind your own business, Brad,” said Judith sharply. “We’ll talk payback all right—for your six-hundred-million-dollar mistake.”

“Like what? What do you mean?” Brad whirled around to face his partner. Osborne heard fear in his voice.

“That isn’t my fault—”

“It’s never your fault. Forget it. Get down to the plane and check—” “But—”

“But nothing, Brad. Just do it. Okay? Just follow my directions this one time.”

“Judith?” Ray turned to face her. “I’d like to raise a nonhumorous subject if I may?”

Judith checked her watch. Brad still stood before her. He had planted his feet like a stubborn child. “I’m not going. I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Brad …” Judith raised her hand and leveled the pistol at her brother. “Move. Get down to that plane. Count the boxes in the back, and make sure that fool Marie packed every one. We should have seven, not including the suitcases. We got about thirteen minutes to takeoff and I want no delays. My customs connections work tonight and tomorrow only. If we miss them, we can’t get out of Canada. Do I make myself clear?”

Brad gave Judith a sullen look, then shrugged and walked slowly out of the room.

“Why did you kill all those men? Why not just Robert Bowers?” Ray asked.

“Oh, that’s a good question,” said Judith, shaking her finger. She chuckled.

“That was another one of Bradford’s little schemes that went askew. He thought he could take over Robert’s identity. Have you noticed how he lost weight? He had a special beard designed, he practiced speech patterns. He was going to impersonate Robert and return to Kansas City with the YPO guys, then transfer all the assets of the Bowers estate abroad, but he forgot one thing: those YPO assholes have these ridiculous secret handshakes and signs—a small detail that Brad overlooked.

“So we have them out here for an artsy-fartsy party, give them an artistic excuse to watch one of my girls dance and plenty of booze, then Brad gets in the car to drive back with them, and the asshole from Des Moines asks him some dumb question in code, some philosophical bullshit question. He blows it, of course.

“I was standing there watching it happen. I saw this look pass between the three of them. I knew right away they were suspicious. That was it. I couldn’t risk blowing this deal that way. We had to kill ‘em all. Too bad, too. Can you imagine if Brad had made it back to KC undetected and got—what did you say, Julie—another six hundred million bucks? That’s real money. But we got a hundred ‘n’ thirty mil out of the art, and that’s not to sneeze at. Of course …” She winked at them. “It counts for even more when you don’t have to share.”

“What about me?” asked Julie. “I would have known he wasn’t Robert. You could never fool me!”

“You were the least of our worries,” said Judith. “He could just say he broke off the relationship, and you were a spurned lover making up stories.”

“I don’t think so. I’m respected in Kansas City.”

“Respect isn’t worth shit when someone’s looking at making a few million bucks off a deal, honey.” Judith’s eyes through her horn-rimmed glasses looked amused. She started to back out of the room.

“Remember Billy Spencer?” Ray interrupted as if anxious to keep her talking. Osborne felt a flash of anger and tried to get Ray’s attention with an angry look.

What on earth was Ray thinking? What’s with this inane topic of conversation? Who the hell cares about Billy Spencer, for God’s sake! Time was running out for them.

The baby was looking bad. Where earlier the little guy had appeared to have fallen asleep, now it looked like he’d lost consciousness in the cold. Erin’s eyes above her gag caught and held Osborne’s in panic. She thought so, too.

Tears filled Osborne’s eyes. He felt his heart breaking. He felt everything he’d done in life worth absolutely nothing in this moment: He was helpless to help his children. Helpless to help the woman who was in his thoughts almost every hour of every day, a woman who might have been the finest fishing pal he could ever wish for.

But he might have time to tell Erin how he loved her—if they could get Brad and Judith out of the freezer. He wanted time to put an arm around Lew and tell her that she had changed his life—and he hoped he had made some small difference in hers. It wasn’t the worst way to go, he decided, with your arms around the ones you love most. But he needed time to do that. Time alone together. Thirty minutes from now, and he knew he’d be close to unconscious himself. If Ray would just shut up, they could have a few precious moments together before death.

Osborne tuned back into the words that were passing like an endless slow dance between Ray and Judith.

Judith had stopped and turned. “Yes. I knew Billy. He lived next door to Ruth Minor when I was living there. Why?”

“I was in Billy’s backyard that Sunday morning.” Ray’s voice had taken on a slow, deliberate cadence, and Judith stood frozen, her flat, wide eyes fixed on Ray’s. “I was watching through a hole in the fence, and I saw old Ruth working on her roses, and I saw you come up behind her….”

“Shut up,” said Judith. “Just shut up.”

“I saw you push her,” continued Ray. “I watched you swing at her with the shovel. She was crawling into the house and you …” He paused. Judith said nothing.

“She was a grown woman, Judith, and you were … what … nine or ten years old?”

“Hate makes it easy,” said Judith. “You’d be surprised. It makes many acts easy. Remember,” she snorted, “I was big for my age. So you saw it all, and you never told anyone? Well, Ray, that perturbs me,” said Judith, sarcasm in her voice. “Now, why would you keep your mouth shut all these years? Waiting to blackmail?”

“Before that terrible day, I had been spending the night at Billy’s a lot that summer,” said Ray. “One night we snuck out to catch nightcrawlers, and we saw a man going into Mrs. Minor’s store real late. We snuck up to the window….” Ray paused. “Do you want me to continue?”

Judith nodded, but her eyes looked glassy. As Ray’s low voice went on, Osborne remembered the small Minor house with its one-room little grocery store, its shelves of gums and candies by the cash register, and the short aisles with boxes of saltines and cereals and cans of soup. And old Ruth, heavy, ponderous, and mean. When little kids tried to swipe a piece of bubble gum, she didn’t call a parent, she just grabbed the kid by the shirt, pulled him back to the cash register, made him put his hands on the counter, and whomped his fingers with an old wooden ruler as hard as she could.

“We watched Mrs. Minor take money from him and then we saw her pull you into the room….”

“Go on.” Judith’s voice was steely.

“We started to watch, but Billy got scared and ran off. I watched everything. I shouldn’t have. I lost my innocence that night. I knew why you killed her. I knew that I would have, too. When I was in high school, I learned that the statute of limitations never runs out on murder, so … I’ve never told anyone.”

Judith took a deep breath. She gave a slight smile and shook her head, “You know, Ray, if you’re trying to soften me up, it’s too late.”

“I wanted you to know because I want just one favor in return, Judith. I want you to let Erin and her baby out of here. Doc and Lew and I—hey, we know the world is oversupplied with muskie hunters. But these two, please. Whatever Brad’s feelings are toward the rest of us—they have not hurt anyone. Please?”

Judith looked over at Osborne. “Dr. Osborne?”

“Yes?”

“You have daughters….” “Yes.”

“Do you remember a certain October night after a football game in the early sixties?”

Osborne did not think he could possibly feel any colder, but he did at this moment. He felt the ice deep in his gut.

“Do you mean the night that you were beat up?”

Judith looked at him and gave a wide, deliberate grin. “I mean the night that I made the mistake of thinking that a boy really liked me and was taking me to a beer party with all the rest of the kids. The one night that I let my guard down and began to think that I might have a life with some happiness like everyone else. The night when I went in to the woods to pee, they followed me. They all followed me … the boys and … the girls. You know the rest, don’t you, Doc?”

Osborne did indeed. He first heard the story from Mary Lee who had heard the news from a close friend whose daughter was at the party. It started with about seven of the high school boys watching one pull Judith into a clearing and tear off her clothes. They’d crowded around to poke and look at her. Then one of the boys raped her. Two others followed. The rest said they found her body too disgusting. Then one swung a fist, and others followed. Toward the end, the girls had crowded around watching, too. They left her there, naked and bleeding.

Weeks later, Judith was brought to Osborne by her foster family for a final round of reconstructive work on her face. The injury to the jaw had been so severe than a portion of bone had been removed, necessitating dental surgery. That’s why her face appeared so much thinner than her siblings: as a result of the beating, she lost an inch on each side of her jaw.

But she lost much, much more. That was the night the town learned exactly how she was different from other women. Hair grew down from her navel in a pattern familiar to boys her age. It grew between her breasts, across her back, and along the insides of her upper thighs, just enough to make her different.

But that wasn’t all. Puberty had been cruel, arriving earlier than normal and causing her to have overdeveloped in every way. She grew too tall and too big, filling in with muscle when the other girls were turning soft and curvy. She had the shoulders of a linebacker but breasts that stopped traffic. She was more than a woman and armored like a man. No one understood. From that time on, she was the object of ridicule and an absurd, humiliating sympathy. If Judith had been excluded before, now she was shunned. Jokes were cracked that if she hadn’t inherited her old man’s looks, she wouldn’t have had a problem.

“No one helped me, Doc. No one has ever said they were sorry. No parent ever stepped forward to say to me or anyone that a terrible thing had happened. Did they, Doc? Did
you,
Doc?”

She paused and looked hard at Osborne. “Do you know I lay in that field until dark
the next day?
I was unconscious, my right arm was broken. I went to the police station. They never did a thing. No one cared.

“So guess what—I sure as hell don’t care either.” Backing up as she spoke, Judith grabbed Ray’s rifle, then turned abruptly around the corner and slammed shut the door to the freezer. Osborne heard the lock catch, then seconds later, the door to the wine cellar slammed shut.