Skeletons in the Mist (The McCall Twins) (23 page)

“She loved Hank Tavish.”

“Yes. She loved him so much that she cheated on him and got pregnant. She loved him so much that she lied to him. And then she wrote about everything in that journal and left it for him to read after she was dead. That’s true love for you.” Dewitt gave a sinister laugh. “He found it you know. The journal I mean. He came to me one night and confronted me about the whole thing. He held a gun to my head.”

Roxy shook her head. There was no way she could picture Hank Tavish holding a gun to anyone’s head unless they were breaking the law.

“You don’t know the real Hank Tavish. He was a controlling bastard. Why do you think your mother cheated on him?”

While Roxy knew that Hank had been somewhat controlling, she refused to believe that any of this was his fault.

“He played Russian Roulette with his revolver and my head. Fortunately I won that night.” Dewitt smiled halfway. “The next night, I went to his house and did the same thing to him. He
lost
.”

Roxy felt her heart stop inside of her chest. “He
didn’t kill himself. You killed him.”

“He was going to tell everyone the truth.”

Sadness ate at her as she realized Hank Tavish’s fate. He’d been the only father she’d ever known and he’d died because of her existence. She felt the tears swarm her eyes and blinked them back. “You are the devil.”

“I had to protect my family—my
real
family. My wife, my kids. I have a legacy to uphold.”

“We were your children too,” she pointed out, though the very thought of this man’s blood running through her veins made her sick.

“Yes, well, had your mother kept her mouth shut, none of this would have happened. She would still be here today and so would your sister.” He pointed the gun at her. “Now get over there with your
brother
. I’m done playing games with you both. I want that journal and I want it now. Once you’re gone and that journal’s gone, there will be nobody left alive to threaten me.”

“Is that what Aunt Myra did? And what about Maddie Croft, did you kill her too?” Roxy refused to move. She just glared at Donovan Dewitt, hate
coursing through her again.

“Maddie Croft got in the way,” he said simply. “I needed to see those police files and the only way I could get at them, was to kill her. As for that old bat of an aunt of yours, she bit off way more than she could chew when she tangled with me. She should have burned that journal when she found it. Instead, she figured out everything and threatened to go to the police. She asked for her own death.”

Roxy winced when he yanked her arm and dragged her over to stand next to Dylan.

“You know it was perfect the way Hank’s older boy came home and picked up that gun. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome to that night. The only thing that went wrong was that I couldn’t find that fucking diary. I looked everywhere. I even came back the other night and looked again.” He glared from Roxy to Dylan. “One of you took it. I want to know where it is.”

Neither Roxy nor Dylan spoke.

Dewitt grabbed a hold of Dylan and yanked him roughly. He put the gun to Dylan’s head and glowered at Roxy. “I don’t have time for this!
Where the hell is it? I know you have it somewhere!”

“I don’t have any journal. I’ve never even seen it. I only found out about its existence two days ago.”

“You’re lying! You have to be. Or
you
are.” He shook Dylan roughly. “Damn you both!”

Roxy knew she had to do something or Dewitt was going to shoot them both. She didn’t even give herself time to think, she just charged him. He was so surprised that he lost his balance, and his hold on Dylan. He fell backward, his gun going off with a bang.

“Run, Dylan!” Roxy felt the instant pain in her side. It was intense and familiar. She’d been shot. She tried to run anyway—saw Dylan in front of her heading for the door. He hesitated, looking back at her. Just as their eyes locked, another bang went off and she felt the same searing pain in her shoulder.

“Run!” was all she managed to get out a second time, before she hit the floor. She saw only his sneakers as he ran out of the room. Once he was gone, she prepared herself to die. She knew Dewitt was behind her and she knew this time he’d go for
her heart, just as he had her mother and sister so many years before.

“Police! Freeze!”

She heard the words but she couldn’t lift her head. And then she heard the explosion of another gunshot and prepared to meet her maker…only that didn’t happen. Something thudded behind her. She somehow found the strength to lift her eyes and she saw Chas in the doorway, his gun still poised in the air. When their eyes locked, he swore and raced toward her. He was at her side, his jacket off in seconds. He did his best to put pressure on her wounds.

“He’s my father,” she heard herself mumble. “He killed my mother and my sister and Aunt Myra. He killed Maddie too. And Tabitha—” She started to choke on the words and coughed weakly. “God, Chas, he killed Daddy. It wasn’t…” Her voice broke off and she struggled for strength. “He didn’t kill himself. No suicide.”

“I know, baby. I know. Just stay still. We’re getting you help. You’re going to be okay.” He held her against him, pressing on her wounds tightly.
“Damn it! Hurry up with that ambulance!”

“It’s coming.” She heard Trace’s voice but she couldn’t see him. Her head was growing fuzzy and she felt herself drifting off.

“You stay with me, you hear me? We have unfinished business, Roxy Tavish. Look at me, damn it!”

Her eyes flickered and she looked up at him. She loved to look into his eyes and figured if she was going to die, this was the way to go.

“No.” He said the word firmly, his eyes filling with moisture. “Stay with me.”

She tried her hardest, but in the end the blackness took over and his face drifted away.

TWENTY-FOUR

Chas listened to the steady beep of the medical machinery in Roxy’s room. With every beat of her heart, he silently thanked God. She was alive.

She’d been shot twice, once in the abdomen, amazingly enough, not far from the spot she’d been shot as a child. The other bullet had gone into her shoulder. She’d been rushed to the hospital and into emergency surgery. For several hours, he’d sat in the waiting room and prayed, unsure what his feelings for her were, beyond the fact that he couldn’t stand the thought of not having her in his life.

When the doctors had come out and told him she’d come through everything as good as could be expected, and that she was likely to make a full recovery, he’d felt the most overwhelming sense of relief that he’d ever felt in his life.

Now he was waiting for her to wake up. She’d
been asleep for over twenty-four hours, only waking up for seconds at a time.

He heard the door to the room open and turned his head. Trace walked in, quietly shutting the door behind him.

“She’s still out?”

Chas nodded, turning back to Roxy. “She’s been awake for little bits at a time but she goes back out again.”

“Tabitha’s going to be okay. He hit her in the chest but it missed hitting anything crucial. She’s in recovery.”

Chas felt more relief. When he’d turned and seen Tabitha Kennings standing in his living room in the dark, he hadn’t noticed she was bleeding at first. It turned out that Donovan Dewitt had shot her when she’d attempted to escape from him. She’d fallen to the ground and played dead. He’d left her there and taken off and she’d managed make her way to find help.

If Tabitha hadn’t found Chas and Trace in their house, they never would have figured out that Donovan Dewitt was behind all of the murders and
that he had taken Roxy to an old garage near his property, where he’d been holding Tabitha and Dylan hostage for the past couple of days. Tabitha had saved Roxy’s life. If the police had gotten to that garage seconds later…

“Hey. She’s going to be okay.” Trace set a hand on Chas’s shoulder and he realized his emotions were showing in his expression again. He wasn’t usually an emotional guy.

“Chas?”

Hearing her voice, he whipped his head around and leaned forward, reaching for her hand. Her eyes were open and she was staring from him to Trace and then back again. “Am I seeing double, or are you both here?”

Trace chuckled at that and Chas found himself smiling.

“We’re both here. Double the trouble. How are you feeling?”

She grimaced, obviously in pain. “Everything hurts.” Her voice crackled. “Water.”

He grabbed a cup and filled it with water, holding it for her so she could suck some through a
straw.

“Dylan?” She spoke the word softly, her eyes looking worried.

“He’s fine. For now he’s staying with Aggie Colyar. Devon’s on his way there too. ”

She visibly relaxed. “Thank God.” Suddenly she tensed again. “Is Dewitt…”

“He’s dead. I didn’t have a choice. He was going to shoot you again.” He squeezed her fingers. “He was a bad guy, Roxy. I’m sorry.”

“I know.” She whispered the word. “He hurt so many people…” Her voice broke off again and she turned away from him. “I’m sorry for all this. It was all my fault.”

“Hey.” He stood and reached for her chin so that she was forced to look at him. “You can’t choose your family. None of this was your fault.”

“Yeah,” Trace chimed in. “If you could choose your relatives, do you think I’d have chosen this knucklehead to be my twin?”

Chas was about to glare at his brother, until he saw Roxy smile halfway. The sight was worth the insult.

“Actually,” Trace added. “I would have chosen him anyway. You’ve got yourself a pretty great guy here if you can tolerate the fact that he’s a colossal slob.” He slapped his brother on the back again and then leaned over and gave Roxy a squeeze. “I’m going to leave you two alone and go check on Tabby again.”

When he was gone, Roxy looked up at Chas. “Tabby?”

“She was shot but she made it. Smart kid, that one.”

She looked confused. “I still don’t understand how Tabby ended up with Dewitt.”

“Wrong place, wrong time,” Chas explained. “When she was walking home the night she disappeared, she ran into Abel Flannigan. He apparently decided to drag her back to the old shack in the junkyard and have a little fun with her. He didn’t count on Donovan Dewitt being in the vicinity the next morning. Apparently Donovan didn’t care for pedophiles.”

“He killed Abel?” she asked groggily.

“That’s what Tabby said. It lines up with the
facts. He already had Dylan at that point, locked up in the garage on his property. He wanted Myra’s journal and wasn’t getting anything out of Dylan. He naturally figured you were the only other person besides Devon that might know where the thing was. He attempted to kidnap you that night at the motel. When you fought back so intensely, he took off. Then he called you and asked you to meet him at the yard the next day—convinced you that he was trying to help you find Dylan. What he didn’t count on, was running into Abel and Tabitha—lucky for you. He ended up killing Abel. He hauled the body to the old Cadillac and then took off with Tabitha, knowing he had no choice if he wanted to keep her quiet. You stumbled upon Abel, Woody heard you screaming, and the rest is history.”

He could see that Roxy was struggling to process all of this information. Her eyes were wide with shock. “How could he have possibly gotten away with all of this for as long as he did?”

Chas shrugged solemnly. “Even his own wife had no idea. She knew nothing about anything in his past, or about his affair with your mother.”

She inhaled a deep breath. “I didn’t recognize his voice at all. God, if only I had maybe—”

“Don’t. There’s nothing you can do now to change things. There is no way you could have known that Donavon Dewitt was the person that called you that day. You hadn’t seen him in years.”

“The first day I got here he approached me. I sensed that he wasn’t happy to see me. I just thought it was because Devon had been caught peeping in his windows.”

“I would have thought the same thing.” Chas gave her a sympathetic smile. “You should know, Dylan had the journal this entire time. He took it from Myra’s house the night of the murder. He buried it in the junkyard, near the workshop. We have it now. The whole story about your mother and her affair with Dewitt is in there.”

She was quiet for a minute, obviously digesting everything that was coming back to her now. Moisture filled her eyes as she bit her bottom lip. “I’m glad he’s dead. He was never really my father anyway.”

“Yeah, he was a sick man.” It still bothered Chas
that Dewitt had been sitting in the mayor’s office right upstairs the entire time they’d been working on things. He’d been right under their noses, eavesdropping on everything they were talking about. It had been easy for him to keep a step ahead of them.

“You saved my life.” She said the words quietly and he met her gaze.

“Actually, Tabby did. She and Dylan were both with Dewitt at the house when he broke in and took you. She tried to get away and he shot her and left her for dead. If she hadn’t come to us when she did—”

“He was going to shoot me again. You saved me.”

He shrugged. “I was just doing my job.”

“You’re good at it. When I first met you, I thought you were too unorganized to be a cop. Now I see differently.”

“I like what I do,” he said nonchalantly. Then he looked at her seriously. “I like you too, Roxy. If anything had happened to you…” His voice broke off and he swore. “It would have devastated me.”

She gave him a tired smile. “I like you too. My
life is a mess right now, Chas. I have no place to live. I have no job and no car. I have Devon and Dylan to worry about too. Even though technically we’re not blood related—”

“I know. Things are complicated. We’ll work all that out later. You’re staying around though, right?” He was a little worried about her answer.

“I don’t know about Cavern Creek. I like Spokane though. I’m really more of a city girl these days.”

He thought that over. “The city’s good. Close, and there’s lots to do there. I can deal with that.”

She gave him another weak smile, then her eyes started drooping again. “I’m so tired. Will you stay?”