Lethal Little Lies (Jubilant Falls Series Book 3) (21 page)

Chapter 35 Kay

            
 
I was sitting up in a chair, wearing a pair of black yoga pants and a loose white sweater when Marcus came in. Whatever collection of personal belongings I’d amassed during my stay—celebrity magazines, a toothbrush, hairbrush and a vinyl travel bag filled with makeup—was stashed in a brown paper shopping bag at my feet. A small pharmacy of medication and stack of replacement bandages lined up on the bedside table, atop several pages of instructions. My best winter coat lay across the rumpled sheets of my former hospital bed.

              “I can’t believe it! I’m going home!” I reached out to hug him. His hug was strong and warm, but his smile was stiff.

              “I know, baby, I know,” he whispered into my hair. “I can’t believe it either.”

              “Did something happen at court today? The policemen left a little after ten this morning and a lady from the hospital’s public information office called to ask if I wanted to talk to a reporter.”

              Stepping back, Marcus sat down in the wheelchair that would roll me to the front door and back into my own home, my own bed. His eyes were hard and I could see his jaw grind with tension. “Really? Who?”

              “That Mike Flagg from the TV station. I told her the only reporter I wanted to talk to was my husband.”

              This time the smile matched the light in his eyes.

              “Good for you,” he said.

              An orderly appeared in the doorway. In a few minutes I was rolling out of the elevator in a wheelchair, through the front lobby and into the cold November sunshine. Marcus held my arm as I walked the three tentative steps into the Lexus. He kissed me again as he fastened my seat belt and, in a moment Plummer County Community Hospital was in the rearview mirror.

              But we weren’t headed home.

              “Where are we going?” I asked.

              “You’ll see,” he said, without smiling.

              In a moment, we pulled into one of the parking lots of the hotels south of downtown, near the highway. He pulled a key card from his jacket.

              “Marcus, what are you thinking? I’m not entirely sure my doctor…”

              “Trust me. Just trust me.”

              He jumped out of the Lexus, grabbed my two small bags from the back seat and helped me from the front seat. Our room was on the fifth floor. He opened the door with the key card and, in one motion, picked me up and carried me across the threshold.

              Gently, Marcus sat me on the bed. Wordlessly, he helped me shed my winter coat, lifted my legs onto the bed and plumped the pillows behind my head. Marcus lay down next to me, drawing me into his strong arms, making me feel—for the first time in a long time—we were complete again.

              This was the man I belonged with, the only man I could—or would—ever love. We had been through so much, had such a past and such a future, I couldn’t ever let him go. Ours was not the torrid embrace of new adoration, but the deep, abiding love built day by day, month by month and year by year.

              I knew now that he had never been and never would be unfaithful. He wasn’t Paul. He was Marcus.

              He lifted my chin with his finger, brushed a strand of red hair from my face and kissed me, long and deep and passionately. His lips moved down my neck and I felt one of his hands slide up inside my sweater, up between my shoulder blades. I wanted to feel his weight against me, and more. I cried out as I tried to wrap my leg around his, feeling the pull of my stitches.

              We fell apart, breathing heavily.

              “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t even ask my surgeon when we could—”

              “Don’t worry about it. It’s OK.” He smiled tenderly as he swung his legs over the other side of the bed. With his back toward me, he spoke, his words tense and clipped. “Just do me one favor.”

              “Of course.”

              “Don’t leave this room. Don’t answer the phone and don’t open the door.”

              “What?” I raised myself up on my elbows.

              He stood and slipped on his coat. Searching through his pockets, he pulled out my Blackberry and handed it to me.

              “Marcus, what is going on?”

              “I’ll call you on this. It’s been charged up, so you don’t need to worry about the battery dying,” he said. “Remember, you have to trust me.”

              “Marcus, what happened today in court? Where’s Charlie? What is going on?”

              “Trust me, Kay. Just trust me.”
              In two steps he was gone.

Chapter 36 Marcus

            
 
On my way back into town, I called the newsroom and got Dennis.

              “Hey, is PJ still there?”

              “Yeah. You want to talk to him?”

              “No. I need you to keep him there.”

              “Jesus, Marcus. What are we, babysitters?” A voice echoed in the background. I heard a rustling on the phone, more muffled voices and then Dennis was back. “That was Graham. He’s got a couple things this evening—a township meeting Elizabeth asked him to cover. He said he could take PJ with him. What’s up?”

              “I’ll tell you later. Just don’t let him come home until he hears from me.” I touched the phone’s screen and ended the call.

              Within a few more minutes, I was pulling down our street. The gray Ohio skies made the empty street seem gloomier. I looked around to see if any unmarked police cars remained, but didn’t see any.

              As the garage door opened, a few lonely, fat snowflakes fell from the sky. An engine rumbled low in the distance, the sound growing louder as it came down the block. I held my breath and gripped the steering wheel, only to watch in the rearview mirror as a FedEx truck passed the house. I exhaled, relaxing as I let go of the steering wheel.

              Leaving Kay at the hotel room wasn’t what she wanted, but something told me earlier that afternoon, as Charlie and I left the courthouse and went our separate ways, this wasn’t over. I’d seen too many sides of her to trust the one I saw in court today.

              Her agreement was to tell police where Rowan was, then to immediately leave town, without making contact with him. I wasn’t in the room when she passed that information on. I know Steve Adolphus handed her a bus ticket after she’d finished her long, sad tale and she promised to give them Rowan’s location. Birger was driving her to the bus station himself.

              After Charlie got on that bus, my part of the agreement was to drop the protection order.

              Inside the house, I made a beeline for the walk-in closet in our bedroom, searching the back shelves. I dug behind the boxes of old, failed novels, my old IBM Selectric typewriter, the zipped storage bags filled with our summer clothes and a collection of baseball hats until I found it: My 9mm Glock, inside a locked case. I’d bought it ten years ago in a fit of testosterone poisoning, when the kids were still at home and our upscale neighborhood was enduring a series of break-ins. No one, including Kay, knew it was there.

              A quick check of the magazine showed it was loaded, a full seventeen rounds. The pistol felt heavy and strange in my hand. Suddenly I wished I’d spent more time at the firing range after I’d bought the damned thing.

              This is
not
what my fictional hero, Rhys Chapman would do, I told myself.
Grow a pair.

              Clutching the gun, I walked through the house, checking each room to make certain I was alone. Satisfied that I was, I returned to the kitchen and, laying the Glock on the counter, made myself a sandwich.

              In the next couple hours, the pistol became my security blanket and I kept it next to me, as any toddler would. Like some oddly armed housekeeper, I changed the sheets on all of the beds, wiped down the sink in the hall bathroom that the kids had shared, rinsed the few plates and mugs in the sink and put them in the dishwasher, the Glock always within reach.

              As I stood at the sink, I stared out the back window, watching as the snow began to fall heavily. The snowflakes were fat, fluffy and coming fast, filling the world outside with winter’s silence.

              I glanced at the calendar hanging on the side of the stainless steel fridge. Two weeks ago, what seemed a lifetime ago, Kay had circled Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, on the calendar.

              Three days away.

              We were getting used to juggling everyone’s schedule for holidays, now that the kids all had their own lives. The original plans had been to meet Lillian, Bronson and Bronson’s family in New York City. PJ was going to come down by train from Cambridge. Andrew couldn’t get leave until Christmas. We didn’t know yet if we’d be able to connect with him by phone or Skype.

              How different would the holiday be now?

I pulled a can of diet soda from the fridge, and stuffing the Glock into the back pocket of my jeans, wandered into the study.

              I sat down at the old partner’s desk and pulled the laptop out of the center drawer.

              This desk belonged to Kay’s father, Dr. Montgomery James, one of Jubilant Falls’ long-ago family physicians. He and his partner shared an office when they’d first begun to practice medicine. Ten years later, the partner wanted to be out on his own, and he’d left the desk behind. Dr. James brought the antique desk home to this room. He died when Kay was sixteen and her mother, Marian, had gradually whittled away at the masculine furnishings, filling the room with her own awful, overblown, frilly tastes. Only the partner’s desk remained.

              Over the years, it became the place where Kay could work at night on Aurora Development business while I sat across from her, finishing a story for the paper or exercising my need to be a novelist. As the years passed, we’d gone from big clunky desktops to more up-to-date technology. Kay had graduated to a tablet computer, but most days I still missed the sound of my IBM Selectric keys striking paper. My laptop was a concession to the relentless march of time and technology, not to mention the fact I couldn’t find typewriter ribbon anywhere.

              I pulled the Glock from my back pocket and set it down beside the computer. The laptop sprung to life with the push of a button.

              The novel I’d been working on opened quickly. The flickering blue screen mesmerized me, drawing me in. Suddenly, the words I’d choked on for so long promised to flow if only I would touch the keyboard. I reached out with both hands, spreading my fingers to fit them to their individual key: A, S, D, F with my left hand and J, K, L, and the semicolon with my right.

              My hands stopped mid-reach as the front door opened and I heard the
thunk
of something—a body? —hitting the foyer wall. A male voice screamed over a woman’s raspy sobs.

              “So is this where your man lives, huh? This is where he lives?”

              I grabbed the Glock, released the safety with my thumb, and jumped to the door to listen. The man—it had to be Rowan Starrett—shoved Charlie out of the entryway and down the hall. I heard the crystal decanters fall onto the floor from the Queen Anne sideboard as he shoved her through the living room toward the kitchen, searching for me.

              I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and dialed 911.

              “Police and fire, what is your emergency?” The dispatcher voice echoed throughout the study. The clamor in the kitchen stopped. The dispatcher repeated herself. “Police and fire, what is your emergency?”

              Before I could answer, the study door burst open, knocking me to the floor. I watched helplessly as both the phone and the Glock slid in separate directions across the hardwood floor. Rowan pushed Charlie, her face badly bruised, to the floor beside me. Blood from her broken nose stained the pink sweater, the same one she’d been wearing when she was arrested in the newsroom. Her wrists were bound together with duct tape and her jeans were marked with dirt.

              “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she sobbed.

              I scrambled along the floor toward the Glock and was met with a workman’s boot in my stomach. I cried out, curling painfully into a fetal position. Rowan picked up the pistol and held it to my head, his foot on my neck.

              “You want my woman? You want my woman?” he screamed. A stream of spittle hung from his gap-toothed mouth. The hand that held my pistol was covered with the twisted scars of a burn victim, his efforts to hide his fingerprints when he’d wanted to leave his past behind and become Deke Howe. The sleeves of the worn flannel shirt only partially covered more scar tissue that traveled up both arms like twisted tree roots.

              “Rowan, he didn’t do anything wrong!” Charlie cried out. “It was me! I was drinking! I did it all! He told me to go away and I wouldn’t leave him alone!”

              “Shut up, bitch!” He leveled the firearm above Charlie’s head and squeezed the trigger. The bullet buried itself into the chair rail above her head as she tried to duck beneath the partner’s desk, screaming and sobbing.

              His boot shifted and I tried to sit up, but Rowan jammed me back down to the floor.

              “Leave her alone!” I said. “What do you want?”

              “I’m sick of being the bad son! Anytime I try to build myself back up, I’m in the way of somebody else! I can’t come home to see my dying mother? I can’t go to her funeral? For once, I’m going to tell the world I’m running things! I’m not at the mercy of my lying brother or my slut wife!”

              “Baby, I tried to help you, you know I did!” Charlie implored, coming out from beneath the desk.

              “Shut up!” He fired another bullet into the wall and Charlie screamed again.

“              Why did you kidnap my wife? Why’d you shoot her?” I demanded.

              “I wanted you to know how it
felt,
you bastard.” His foot pushed harder against my neck and I gasped for breath. The room began to spin.

              “We were both in that motel room,” Charlie cried. “We were fighting over the gun—he was going to kill Kay first and then me, but I got the gun away from him.”

              “I’m still going to kill you, bitch!” He pointed the gun at Charlie.

              “Stop it, Rowan! Stop it! We struggled over the gun—both of our hands were on it—when it went off.” She began to sob again. “I didn’t want this to happen—I was trying to keep her safe, Marcus. I’m the one who called you that day. I was trying to tell you where she was. I was trying to save—”

              The words were barely out of her mouth when Rowan squeezed the trigger again. Charlie’s body jerked back against the wall as a round, red hole appeared in her forehead. Blood and brain matter darkened the wall behind her head. A second shot exploded in her chest, sending blood, bits of sweater and tissue against the wall and across the floor.

              I squeezed my eyes shut and swallowed the vomit building in my throat.

              “Why did you fake your suicide? Why didn’t you just come back to Jubilant Falls and start again?” I demanded. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of my phone beneath an overstuffed Queen Anne chair, just out of my reach. Hopefully, dispatchers were sending a cruiser to investigate my 911 call. Maybe if I could keep Rowan talking the police could get here in time to save my life, even if they couldn’t save Charlie.

              And Rowan wanted to talk.

              “That was my brother Rick’s idea. By the time he’d gotten his big time political job in Columbus, he couldn’t be bothered with a twin brother who had a past. I was too
inconvenient
, he said, too much of an
embarrassment.
He couldn’t let it be known that he’d bet on anything that moved, same as me.”

              I heard him pull back the trigger.

              “You know that video that everybody saw? The one where I supposedly was taking money for betting on my own game?” he asked. “ That wasn’t me. That was my fucking brother, Mr. Perfect. But who was going to believe me?
I’m
the one who went to prison;
I’m
the one who had the gambling problem, not him, not the good son! Nobody’s going to believe we’re twins, for God sake, not without a DNA test! Not now!”

              I gasped as he jabbed the gun’s cold barrel against the back of my head.

              “But what about the commercials Virginia Ferguson was running? The ones that showed you walking into jail?” I asked, hoping to postpone my own death, hoping the phone connection was still open.

              “I’m the one who told Virginia Ferguson the truth, a piece at a time. She was stupid enough to not recognize me. I told her I was Deke Howe, that I knew Rowan Starrett and that he was still alive. I met her and her campaign manager several times in Columbus at a restaurant. I’d feed them just enough to send them off to look for details. Then I’d call Rick and tell him I’d heard she was digging into my suicide, that she was getting close to finding the truth. He thought it was all going to come out and his precious career was over, like mine was. All the time he’s sending me money, thinking it will keep me quiet.”

              He jabbed the barrel harder against my skull and I winced. Rowan continued his story as Charlie’s dead eyes stared back at us, her jaw hanging.

              “So he gets stupid enough and mad enough that after she wins, he’s gotta go over to her house. He can’t let it alone, he’s got to find out what she knows. And that dumb bitch? She’s all cocky and mouthy and she tells him the whole fucking story’s going to be turned over to the Ohio attorney general and the FBI as soon as she takes the oath of office. That his career is more than over, he’s headed to prison.”