Fit to Die (19 page)

•  •  •

“Miss Hartley. I'm here.” Jean Mayhew called from outside the kitchen door.

Alice let her in. “Miss Mayhew. You will join me for a little supper first, won't you?” She watched Jean's eyes glance first at the scrubbed wooden table set for two, then alight eagerly on the Tarot cards waiting on the pine dresser.

“I hadn't really—”

“Please,” Alice interrupted. “I missed lunch and I can't concentrate when I'm hungry.” She pulled a chair out for Jean and went over to the stove. “I hope you like beef casserole.” Lifting the dish from the oven she carried it to the table. “There. Fresh bread and butter, and a glass of wine.”

Jean Mayhew didn't argue, but then Alice hadn't expected
her to. Clients never wittingly upset Alice in case it affected her ability to see their future.

Obviously eager to start the session, Jean ate quickly, pausing only to praise the meal. Alice deliberately slowed herself. She needed Jean to drink more wine.

By the time Alice laid down her fork, Jean had finished her second glass and looked ready for more. Three would be too many. “I'm done,” Alice said quickly. “Another spoonful for you?”

“No, no. Quite delicious. Let me help.” Jean stood up and carried the plates and glasses to the sink. She stopped and leaned against the counter. “I…I feel a little funny, Miss Hartley.”

Alice rose and limped over to her. “Perhaps you drank the wine too quickly. Take my arm.” She led Jean back to the table. “Sit down. I'll fetch the cards.”

“Perhaps I shouldn't.” Jean shook her head. “It was a mistake coming here. Reverend Stevenson would be so disappointed in me.” She started to rise.

Alice put a hand on her shoulder. “I don't really need to use the cards, Miss Mayhew.” She put them down on the table. “I can see both your past and your future without them.”

Jean sank back into the chair, staring up at Alice. “What do you mean?” Her eyes held a look of uncertainty.

“I'll tell you a story, and you'll see what I mean.” Alice returned to her chair and looked across the table. “There once lived a little girl and her widowed mother. Elizabeth was spoiled and liked to show off, but she wasn't a bad child. When she was eleven, her mother married a divorced man with a fourteen-year-old daughter. This girl, Leslie, hadn't had such a soft life. Rejected by her mother, she had come to live with her father in Westing not long before he remarried.”

Jean's hands clutched the edge of the table.

“I see you recognize the story, Miss Mayhew. Everyone in Westing knew about it. Some thought Ruth Sullivan foolish to marry Eric Mills. She with all that money and he a salesman with a troublesome teenager. Others thought it would be good for Elizabeth to have a father. No one consulted Elizabeth Sullivan or Leslie Mills.

“Elizabeth learned a lot from Leslie. How to shoplift. How to lie convincingly. She experimented with marijuana and she got to know the local criminals. She didn't become addicted to drugs, but she did become a moody, difficult teenager.”

“Terrible girl. Thought she was so clever.” Jean's words slurred.

“Yes. You didn't like her, I know. What did she used to call you? Miss Make Spew.” Alice laughed. “You weren't alone in your opinion. Most adults found her a pain then, while Leslie…Leslie settled down, grew out of her difficult ways. She became soft-spoken and polite. People thought well of her—except those whom she had blackmailed. No, Jean. May I call you Jean? Don't try to stand. Your legs won't hold you.” Alice reached across the table and patted Jean's hand.

Jean jerked away. “The wine! You put something in it.” She tried again to push herself up from the table. “Let me go.”

Alice watched her struggle. “I'm sorry, but I've been wanting to tell you this story for a long time. Sit still and listen.” She leaned forward. “What secret did Leslie discover about you, Westing's respected librarian?” She waited for an answer. “Not going to tell me? You were lucky Elizabeth and Leslie had that fight the day you went to confront Leslie, weren't you? All the world heard Elizabeth yelling ‘I'll fix you for good' when she slammed out of Leslie's place.” Alice got up and filled a glass with water. “I'm not used to so much talking.”

Jean didn't move. Blue veins stood out against the pallor of her skin.

“Back to the story. Naturally, when the body of Leslie was discovered and Miss Mayhew, staunch pillar of the church, claimed to have seen Elizabeth leaving the house at the crucial time, everyone believed her. Especially since you described seeing Elizabeth's prized possession, her black racing bike, leaning against the hedge. No one believed Elizabeth when she said she'd been asleep in bed. Elizabeth Sullivan in bed before eleven! The police laughed.”

Putting her head on one side, Alice studied Jean. “You killed three people that day,” she said softly. “Leslie, Elizabeth and her mother.”

“No.” Jean swallowed, then licked her lips. “No. Only Leslie. Had to kill her.”

“I can understand you killing Leslie. Blackmail's despicable. But why blame Elizabeth? Did you think being rude to you, the librarian, warranted a lifetime in jail? Imagine the different path her life might have taken if you had helped her. You had the chance. Remember that? It was before she became so unmanageable.”

If Alice closed her eyes she could see Elizabeth, bright with enthusiasm, skipping up the steps to the old brick library, dark braids bouncing against her back. See her at the desk. “Hi, Miss Mayhew. I need some books on speed cycling. I want to race.” See that brightness fade at the look of distaste on the librarian's face. “That's not the sort of thing your mother would like, Elizabeth. Nice girls play tennis and go horseback riding. Anyway, bicycle racing is only for men.”

Alice picked up the cards again. “Racing would have given her a goal, and losing would have been good for her.”

Jean raised her head. “She always wanted to win. Show
everyone how clever she was.” Jean spoke like someone whose mouth had been frozen by the dentist. “Anyway, it didn't stop her. She failed Grade Ten because she skipped classes to ride her bike.”

“That's true. She loved the freedom, the speed and the feel of the wind in her hair. Did you ever wonder what it felt like to be nineteen and have that freedom taken away? To be sentenced to twenty-five years? Be deprived of a chance to marry and have a family? Would it surprise you to learn Elizabeth became a model prisoner and holds two degrees? It was hard at first, of course…” Alice's thoughts veered to her turbulent early years in prison and to her saviour, Edie-Rose.

Edie-Rose, staring at her with compassionate brown eyes set in a scarred face.

“Ain't no use fighting the system, little girl,” she'd said. “We're all here for a reason. Maybe you didn't commit no murder, but if'n you'd been a nice p'lite girl no one would've fingered you.” She'd stroked the bruises on Elizabeth's arms. “You make a plan for what you're gonna do when you get out. Me, I'm gonna do murder, and ain't no one gonna guess who done it.”

It had been the goad Elizabeth needed. How to take revenge and get away with it? Under the wing of Edie-Rose, her life in prison had changed. Inmates didn't dare touch her. She was Edie-Rose's protege. Never a lover, although some thought they were. Edie-Rose had become her mentor, teacher and comforter.

Twenty years they had worked together on plans for the perfect murder. Along with courses in French language and literature, Elizabeth had soaked up Edie-Rose's knowledge of the underworld. In the mornings, Elizabeth studied French verbs. In the whispered quiet of the night she learned where to
get false identities and the art of simple disguises. They'd created “Alice” together. No one, Edie-Rose had asserted, really looks at a cripple.

Edie-Rose had favoured a Ford pick-up for a get-away vehicle, but she never got the chance to use it. She had died of a heart attack three weeks before her release. Elizabeth owed it to her to succeed.

But right now she was Alice. She spread the cards face down on the table and looked directly into Jean's dulled eyes. “Ruth Sullivan always believed her daughter innocent. It broke up her marriage, and she spent all those lonely years waiting for Elizabeth's release. But Elizabeth always kept track of you. Elizabeth wanted to know where to find you. Ruth died at sixty-six. The year after Elizabeth came out. It doesn't seem right you should live longer than she did.”

Alice chose a card. “It's time to read your future.” She turned the card over. “A skeleton in black armour astride a white horse, Miss Mayhew. The Death card.” But Jean Mayhew wasn't listening. She sat with her head slumped against her chest.

Alice studied her own feelings. Edie-Rose had thought getting back at those who had destroyed them would exorcise the anger and the hatred boiling within them. Looking at Jean, Alice felt no sense of triumph, only the realization that this was something she had to finish in order to start her own life.

She fetched the wheelchair from the hall. Spreading open a plastic bag from the mattress she'd bought, she laid it on the chair. Manhandling Jean's sleeping form into the chair wasn't easy, but she and Edie-Rose had practised this manoeuvre using a prison chair. Getting rid of the body couldn't be planned; it depended on the circumstances. Alice wished she could tell Edie-Rose how cleverly she'd arranged it.

Leaning down, she zipped the bag up as far as Jean's waist
and tucked a blanket around her. If anyone were to see them, Jean would look like a sleeping woman. Alice would close it completely before she slid Jean into the big sewage pipe laid to service the new development.

•  •  •

Leaving the parlour, Alice went to the kitchen. She knew the shoe wasn't there. She'd scrubbed the place after she got back from the construction site. There would be no trace of Jean Mayhew and no fingerprints from Elizabeth Sullivan.

It must have fallen off, gotten caught between the plastic bag and the footrest and dropped somewhere en route. It wasn't on Jean's foot when Alice had pushed her into the pipe. She could picture the body perfectly as it lay face down in the clear plastic bag, could remember thinking Jean would have a peaceful death, suffocating long before the sleeping draught wore off. Why hadn't she registered the missing shoe then?

Alice looked out of the window. Daylight was fading. She could at least check that it hadn't fallen somewhere between the house and the old logging road at the back.

Head down, searching through grass grown long in the wet spring, Alice suddenly heard voices coming from the front of the house. She had time to reach the shed, duck under the cobwebs and scoot behind the door before the voices got closer.

“She may be out doing a reading, Andy.” Alice recognized Constable Blain's voice.

“Reading?” That must be Andy.

“Yes. She tells fortunes. Has done ever since she rented this house. Makes a good place for the church ladies who don't want to be seen.” Constable Blain laughed. “Keeps the place spotless, doesn't she?”

Alice imagined them standing, faces pressed against the window.

“Odd how she went white when she described the body. She hasn't done that before. That's why I want to see her face when I ask her what the shoe looked like.”

Goose bumps rose on Alice's arms. She listened intently.

“Yeah. You often see old sneakers lying about, but a woman's brown leather shoe…how would that suddenly appear on a road construction site?” Andy asked. “Any missing women reported?”

“Not yet.”

“What's the background of this Hartley woman anyway?”

“That is something I'm about to look into.” The voices fading. “I'll run a check before I return.”

God, how stupid she'd been. Why hadn't she listened to Edie-Rose? “Girl, you got a talent for bringing attention to yourself. Keep quiet, and ain't no cop gonna think 'bout you.” And what had she done? Been in and out of the police station all year.

Jean was supposed to have gone on holiday today, so she wouldn't be missed yet. And they were unlikely to come across the body. That section of the road had been covered with six feet of fill before she'd reported the murder. But as soon as they started looking into Alice Hartley's background, they would discover she didn't have one. She waited in the shed until she heard the car turn onto the main road.

In the house, Alice climbed the stairs to her room. Going to the closet she knelt down, moved her winter boots and pulled out a cardboard box. From it she took a black nylon fanny-pack and a pair of black leather running shoes. She didn't need to look into the fanny-pack; it had been ready from the moment she arrived. Now she would stow it with her
get-away vehicle. Then she would clean the house and be ready to leave in the morning. She had no fear that Blain would discover her non-existence before then. Alice Hartley had no police record, and all bureaucrats would have gone home by now.

The phone rang, and Alice paused. Should she answer it? It could be Blain. Better to talk on the phone than have him come round. She went down to the parlour and lifted the receiver.

“Is that Miss Hartley? Jack Lee here.”

“Hello, Mr. Lee.” Why would he be calling? A warden of the Anglican Church wasn't likely to be wanting his cards read. “How can I help you?”

“I'm worried about Jean Mayhew.”

Alice froze. No words would come out of her mouth.

“Hello? Are you there?”

Trying to gather her wits, Alice managed to make a response.

“Did Jean come and see you yesterday?” Mr. Lee asked. “She said she was going to.”

Damn her. She wasn't supposed to tell anyone.

“No, no. She never arrived. I think she's gone on holiday.” Alice knew she sounded flustered.

“There was a problem. She postponed it until this evening. I was supposed to drive her to the station, but she isn't home.”