In Between (2 page)

“He's spooked,” Lori said.

“Ya think?” Sam said. “He's probably trying to convince himself that he left it up and he knows he didn't. Maybe he's afraid his would-be killer is back. And you still haven't answered my question: why are you here?”

She gave him a long searching look, then said, “Revenge. He killed my father.”

Sam blinked. “Let's get out of here,” he said. “We have to talk. Unless you want to watch him suck air like a beached fish.”

Ben was drawing in long breaths, his gaze riveted on the safe, both hands on the desk top shaking. He was pale and sweating heavily.

“Out,” Lori said after a glance at Ben. She led the way through the door to the corridor, hesitated, then began to walk at a brisk pace. “Kitchen,” she said. “No one's likely to interrupt us there.”

She led him to the kitchen, large enough for a restaurant. There, she went straight to a freezer, opened it and picked up a gallon tub of ice cream. After opening a drawer or two she found spoons and offered one to Sam. He shook his head. “How can you be hungry at a time like this?”

“You don't eat ice cream because you're hungry,” she said, hoisting herself onto a counter. “You eat ice cream because you want ice cream. Chocolate with pecans and caramel ripples. Good stuff.”

“Look, get serious, will you? Why aren't we freaking out, dead, talking, moving around. We should be freaking out.”

“That one's easy,” Lori said, digging for a second scoop of ice cream. “According to Ben it's been more than a week since we got the ticket and we were somewhere being indoctrinated, imprinted, or something. I can't remember a thing about that, but when we have a question, an answer pops into our heads. I guess we were instructed about our place here, enough to prevent our going apeshit, anyway. My question is for how long, and I don't get an answer. Do you?”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No. What did you mean when you said Ben killed your father?”

“He killed him. Twenty years ago, when I was eight, Dad was a stuntman at the studio, lead stuntman. There was an accident and later he died. That's all I knew most of my life. Mom married again. A good guy, a dot com guy with more money than anyone maybe. He adopted me and I took his name. Mom and I both love him, but it's not the same kind of love. Before, the three of us, Mom, Dad and I, we laughed a lot, had fun together, some kind of make-believe existence, magic. It's not like that with Howard. Howard Earle is his name. I'm Lori Earle, but my dad was Jacob Leiber. He was the best stuntman of all times.”

She became silent and appeared to be concentrating on getting another spoonful of ice cream. Sam waited a moment, then said, “What about the accident? What did Ben have to do with it?”

“He changed something at the last minute and didn't tell my father. It threw the timing off, and those stunts require absolute time control, to the second in some cases. The stunt involved jumping from a helicopter, landing in water and to all appearances going over a waterfall. The pick-up crew was supposed to fish Dad out of the water, and let a dummy take the falls, and the star would drag himself out of the lake. But the timing was off and Dad went over instead. Head injury, broken bones, internal injuries. It was bad, really bad.”

She looked at the spoonful of ice cream, shook her head, and jumped down from the counter to put the spoon in the sink. She replaced the cover on the tub and took it to the freezer. Only then did she speak again. “I didn't know any details for years. No one tells a little kid much. School, college. One day I looked it up and found out a few things, and I made my mother tell me what happened. Ben had changed something that changed the time of the helicopter incident by two minutes. Just two minutes, but it meant that the pick-up crew wasn't ready. And then Mom and Dad learned about an insurance clause that said if alcohol was involved in any accident, the policy was voided. The studio insured the stuntmen. No private insurance would cover them for anything related to the work. Dad had a beer with lunch that day at twelve thirty. The stunt was scheduled for four thirty and actually happened at four twenty-eight. Ben and others swore that Dad spent the afternoon drinking, and that was a lie. Dad had three surgeries and still needed brain surgery, but the money was gone. Bills were mountain high. Bankruptcy. While they were fighting with the insurance company, trying to raise money for brain surgery, he died.”

She gave Sam another long look, then said, “I learned all this three years ago. Two years ago I got this job, secretary to Ben Carnahan, with the sole intent of destroying him.”

“Why didn't you bring in a gun and just shoot him?”

“I didn't want to go to prison for the rest of my life,” she said with a shrug. “I knew that as soon as an investigation started, I'd be a prime suspect. Or, as they say, a person of interest. I wasn't sure how to get him at first, then I began to believe that he was blackmailing people. It wouldn't have been fair to any of them to have his safe opened and their past exposed. I just didn't want to do it that way. I want to bring him down in front of the world, to let the whole world see what kind of a monster he is. That will kill him and I won't have to do it myself. To be honest, I wasn't sure I could do it myself.” She looked thoughtful, nodded, and said, “I believe that now I could. When I think about the grief he's brought to my mother again, first Dad and now me, I'm sure I wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger. Except the Voice won't let me. I'll have to settle on exposing him.”

“How?” Sam asked after a moment.

“I don't know yet. I planned to send the blackmail stuff to the owners. After that, his turn. I have pictures, film, tape recordings. I've been gathering my own files for over a year. When the time was right, I intended to send copies to news outlets, online blogs, television, print newspapers, magazines, Anonymous, people like that.”

“Jesus!” Sam looked at her with awe. “One more question, how did you manage to land a job here in the lion's den?”

“I bribed the manager of the employment agency he uses to send me when his previous secretary quit, and I paid her off to quit. As I said, Howard Earle has more money than just about anyone, and he's been very generous. I have more money,
had
more money, than I needed.”

“And he simply hired you? Why?”

“I showed him that I know my way around computers. Howard taught me a thing or two about computers over the years and I was able to demonstrate to Ben that his system had been hacked, that I knew how to fix it and keep it safe.”

“Had it been? Hacked?”

“Sure. I made certain of that.”

Sam swallowed hard. “Remind me to keep on the good side of you.”

“What more could I do to you than what's been done?” she said. “Come on. I want to go to bed. There are half a dozen guest rooms upstairs. I'm going to make like a guest.”

“You want to sleep? I'm not tired, not hungry, not sleepy. Not anything.”

“Me neither. But I can stretch out and try to come up with another way to get Ben. I keep thinking about my mother and Howard, how grieved they must be, Mom especially. God, I hate Ben Carnahan.” She became silent for a moment, then said, “Sam, have you given any thought about what we're supposed to do now? How we can get out of this mess we're in? I mean, were we dumped here just to relax indefinitely until the Voice comes to collect us? It seems like we have to wait our turn, and if Ben has to die first, that could be years.”

How to get out of this mess? He shook his head. He suspected they had nothing to say about it.

They left the kitchen and ascended the sweeping staircase to the second floor. “Ben's suite,” Lori said, motioning toward the end of another wide corridor. “Darla's room is next to his, with a connecting door, which is probably locked tonight. Come on, down the other way, empty guest rooms.” They chose a large room with twin double beds and she threw herself down on one of them with a deep sigh.

Sam regarded her for a moment, then said, “I'm going to roam about, see if anything's been changed during the past week.”

Lori jerked up to a sitting position. “You'll come back, won't you? It's crazy, but I don't want to be alone. I mean, what more can happen? But it scares me to think of being here alone.”

“I'll be back,” he said. “I don't want to be alone either. Just a quick look around, then back. Try to rest.” He laughed, an unhappy sound that turned into a near sob. Did dead people need rest? “I'll be back,” he said and hurried out.

At first he thought little or nothing had changed, but then he saw a security company truck parked in the rear of the grounds. He entered, only to be bewildered by an assortment of cables, multi-colored wires, tools he could not comprehend, computers, and a counter with rolled blueprints. He unrolled one and realized that the security company was wiring the eight-foot-high-stone wall that encircled the estate. Ben was turning his mountaintop retreat into a fortress.

Outside again, Sam wandered down the driveway to the big iron gate. There was a new guard house there, with a man inside watching television. Before, a caller had pressed a button at the entrance, and from inside the mansion Arthur Beasley had identified the visitor and opened the gate. Now a real live guard had been installed. Probably other security features had been added inside and out. Security cameras? Had a camera recorded the action inside Ben's office? Would it have recorded the picture being raised at the safe? With or without people, or shadows?

Sam saw car lights appear on the upper driveway and he leaned against the guard house to await this new development. Darla was driving her BMW convertible. She stopped near the guard house and yelled at the guard to open the gate. He spoke into a telephone, did something out of sight, and the gate swung open. She drove through with a roar of acceleration, fishtailed at the curve to the access road, and vanished, hidden by the wall. Sam hoped she would slow down at the killer curve that had done him in.

He began to trudge back up to the house, then paused. This time he didn't ask a question, but simply knew something he had not known a second earlier. He wanted to be on the terrace by the pool, and he was there. It was like knowing he could walk. He never had to think he could walk, or wonder, or ask if he could; he just did it. “Okay,” he said to himself. Rule number something or other. He wished that they had been provided with a list of rules they had learned, a crib sheet, memorandum, something. He put himself in Ben's office, nodded in satisfaction and thought of being in Ben's bedroom. Nothing happened. Datum, he told himself. He had to have been there before, something like that. Then, sitting at Ben's handsome shiny desk, he thought of his little sister Susan. She was twenty-four, a pretty little goldfish swimming in a tank of sharks. She'd be lucky if she got back home with her wisdom teeth intact.

He thought of a lot of things sitting there: Ben's blanched face when he saw his safe revealed; Lori's mother grieving for her only child; his laptop with two short stories and several chapters of a novel that would end up in Ben's hands; the various people Ben appeared to be blackmailing, turning them into malleable slaves; a wannabe killer who might or might not try again to murder Ben….

Lori's question kept intruding and he repeatedly pushed it aside. How could they get out of this mess they were in? No answer came.

At last he gave up thinking and put himself back in the guest room where Lori was still lying on the bed. “Sorry I was gone so long,” he said, sitting on the other bed.

“It's okay. I've been doing a lot of thinking,” she said, pulling herself up to sit cross-legged in the center of the bed. “I can get into that safe as soon as Ben opens it again. I'll watch him do the key pad thing. So that's all right. But what then? If I burn everything, none of the victims will know they're safe from him. Obviously, we can't pick up the phone and call the living. I seem to know that it's impossible to interact, and also impossible to contact anyone.” She drew in a long breath. “But we could burn down the mansion, and then the victims would know that whatever he had on them is gone.”

Sam shuddered. “And be stuck here wading through ashes? I don't think so. Listen, we can't pull any more stunts like that painting over the safe. You saw him, spooked out of his fucking mind. Scare him enough and he might take off, live on his yacht, or in the downtown condo, and we'll still be cooling our heels here in miniparadise. Agreed?”

After a moment she said in a grudging voice, “Okay. Agreed.”

“Good. Next. If the guy who wanted to kill him tries again, we can't let that happen. At least not yet. I can't let that happen.”

“Why not?”

“Ben's going to get his hands on my computer. There isn't a play, but there are a couple of stories, drafts of stories, and the start of a novel. There's enough for him to butcher, to hire a hack to turn into his kind of crap. Did you read my play?”

“No. I saw the movie.”

“Right. My play was called ‘Aftermath.' It's about six people, how they cope with the aftermath of a mass killing. No psychopathic killer, no close-up shots of terrified people trying to shield kids or anyone else, no sprays of blood, no swat team, no hovering helicopters, no standoff and tear gas, no car chases or explosions. Just six people trying to put their lives back together. Ben made some changes.” He could hear the bitterness in his voice and was unable to soften it.

“So you wouldn't even start a new play.”

“You got it,” he said. “Anyway, if we can get to my computer maybe I can delete everything I don't want him to have. Would that be interacting with him? I don't know and won't know until I try. After that, let the murderer do his thing.”

Lori shook her head. “Two problems,” she said. “First, the studio would own the material if Ben dies. Second, deleting stuff doesn't really get rid of it. An expert could recover anything ever put on the hard drive. I could do it.”