The Double Cross (30 page)

“So you were going to cheat me out of money?” Bernie looked as if she were trying to keep up with a story she could hardly believe. “Nell thought, when we first arrived, that you believed I’d inherited some money from my first husband and that you needed it.”

Rita waved her hand to dismiss the idea. “We have money. We have more money than we’ll ever need. More money than Joi will ever need, and she’ll do good things with it.” She smiled at her daughter, who was softly crying. “I didn’t want to cheat you out of money, Bernie. I already cheated you out of George.”

We’d heard the others walking up the stairs but were all too riveted by Rita’s story to pay attention. When I finally looked toward Bernie’s open door, I saw my grandmother and Susanne crammed into the room’s entrance, trying to be inconspicuous, without any success.

“It was a long time ago, Rita.”

Bernie had come all this way and been through so much to find out what really happened forty-five years ago. And yet, as she was about to find out, it seemed clear that she didn’t really want to know.

Rita must have sensed her hesitation, but having come this far she was going to tell the whole story. She looked toward Eleanor and Susanne at the door and motioned them to come in. They crowded around us, looking for someone to fill them in on all they had missed, but that would have to wait.

“How did you cheat her out of George?” I asked.

Rita collected herself and went back to her story. “When we were young we were best friends, Bernie and I. But I always envied the courage she had. She left the area to go to college. She wanted something bigger for herself. I used to think she had a gift for seeing the future. She seemed so certain of it.”

I glanced over at Bernie, who was blushing.

“I wasn’t so sure of myself back then,” Rita continued. “I guess that came later. All I knew was that I wanted a good man to take care of me, someone as unlike my father as I could find. Someone with ambition and dreams. To me that someone was George.”

“But he was Bernie’s boyfriend,” Joi said. “I never knew that until last night. He always said you were the only woman he’d ever dated.”

“I made him say that. I was so jealous of Bernie that I wanted to erase her from our memories.”

“But if he chose to be with you over Bernie,” I cut in, “what’s to be jealous about?”

“He didn’t. At least not at first. Bernie was away at college. He was lonely. I missed her, too. We used to steal whiskey from his parents’ liquor cabinet, cheap stuff, and drink together and talk. One night when we both had too much . . .” She stopped and took another breath. She buried her head in her hands and we all waited. For a moment I wondered if she was too ill to go on, but then she lifted her head and started again. “That’s a lie. That’s the lie I told him so many times that I began to believe it. One night when he had too much to drink, I pushed myself on him. He was eighteen. He didn’t need a lot of persuading, but, still, it was my idea.”

“And you got pregnant,” Bernie said.

Joi let out a gasp. “You had another baby?”

“No.”

“But, Mom,” Joi said, “that was ten years before I was born.”

“I wasn’t pregnant.” Rita looked at her daughter and then at the rest of us, “I just told Bernie that I was. I went to visit her at school and I made up this whole elaborate lie. I told her I hadn’t said anything to George and I didn’t know if I should. I told her my father would beat me if he found out I was going to have a baby out of wedlock.”

Bernie nodded. “He would have,” she said quietly.

“Probably. But there was no baby.”

I looked at Bernie, who had let go of Rita’s hand and was shaking her head in disbelief. “What did George say when you talked to him?” I asked her.

“I didn’t,” Bernie said. “I mean, I asked him if anything had gone on with Rita and he admitted it. I didn’t ask about the baby because, well, what Rita just said. She told me he didn’t know.” She sighed. “I don’t think it really matters. He’d betrayed me, baby or no baby. That was enough. I went back to school and met Johnny, and then we got married. I heard things about Rita and George from my mother from time to time, things she’d heard in the neighborhood, but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to hear about their growing family or their great life, so I shut out as much as I could. I just assumed there was a baby until I met Joi and realized she was so young.”

Joi stood up. She looked as if she was about to storm out but couldn’t quite leave. “You trapped Dad into marrying you?”

Rita shook her head slowly. “The one decent thing I did in my whole life was to tell George the truth. After Bernie confronted him, he came to me and we talked. I told him about the lie, and I fully expected he would leave, but he didn’t. I’m not sure why. I knew he loved Bernie and I guess he figured it would be too late to win her back, so he stayed.”

Bernie gasped, as if she were out of breath. Then, slowly, she leaned toward Rita and took both her hands, holding them in her own. “If he loved me,” she said, enunciating each word, “he would have called your night together a mistake. He would have come after me, fought for me, done something to win me back. But he just let me go. Because he wanted to be with you.” The way she spoke, it felt to me that Bernie wasn’t just saying it to Rita; she was finally realizing the truth herself.

Bernie stood up, pulling Rita up with her. The two old friends stared at each other for a moment, then fell into a long hug. When they let go, Rita turned to her daughter.

“Can you get my sleeping aid?”

Joi nodded and left the room. A few minutes later she returned with a glass filled with a pale yellow liquid.

“Is that lemonade?” I asked.

Joi nodded. “My mother puts a liquid sedative in it. She has trouble sleeping. And she has trouble swallowing pills.”

“Did George know that?” I asked Rita.

Rita shook her head. “He thought if I took a sedative I wouldn’t wake up, so I put it in lemonade. He hated lemonade, so I knew he’d never catch on. I didn’t want to worry him. We never fought, so there was no reason to start over something so small.”

I shifted uncomfortably, unsure if this was the time to point out that that wasn’t exactly true. After a moment I decided it was. “I saw you and George through the window,” I said. “It seemed like you were fighting.”

“I was upset and scared. I thought I would die before I’d made things right. George was trying to calm me down, but I think it scared him too.”

I thought of that day in the kitchen and how George told me things were harder than he thought they would be. I realized now, he wasn’t talking about running an inn. He was talking about the possibility of losing Rita.

Rita turned back to Bernie, and the two women sat on the bed telling us stories of their childhood antics. The tears of a few minutes before were replaced with loud laughter.

“She got what she came for,” Eleanor whispered to me. “Now we can all go home.”

“No,” I whispered back. “Not with George’s killer still out there.”

CHAPTER 47

Rita was exhausted from finally having told her story, so Joi took her up to bed. Bernie, too, was tired, and after a few minutes of talking, it was clear that the others also needed sleep.

But not me. I went downstairs to the sitting room. The scene in Bernie’s room kept playing in my head, as did everything that had happened in the last few days. It hadn’t even been a week since we’d left Archers Rest, and yet I felt like I’d been gone from there for a lifetime. I wanted to go home. Even though most of my closest friends were asleep upstairs, I felt far away from much of what mattered to me—Someday Quilts, my grandmother’s house by the Hudson River, Jitters coffee shop, and the feeling that everything makes sense. Here, in this rambling old house with sad people who lived sad lives, nothing seemed to.

But as much as I wanted to go home, I knew that if we didn’t find the killer, if a cloud still hung over Bernie’s head, I would never feel at ease. It annoyed me that I couldn’t be more like Rita—a thought I’d never imagined I would have. She could make her peace without having the answers. I doubted I ever could.

I sat in the darkened room, looking at the freshly painted walls, and the empty spot above the fireplace where the gun had been.

I went over the clues in my mind. There was the gun, the dead dog shot with the same kind of bullets that had killed George, the seam ripper with the red mark that I’d found by the murder scene, and the witness McIntyre wouldn’t share with us. And there was still so much that Rita hadn’t explained. Maybe all of it pointed to the killer. Maybe none of it did.

If Rita was telling the truth, and in my heart I knew she was, she had no reason to kill George. But neither did anyone else. Except Bernie. Finding out the truth tonight did nothing to eliminate her motive. My mind kept going back to what McIntyre was probably thinking, and it didn’t reassure me.

There were still a lot of unanswered questions, but for tonight, anyway, I knew I had to stop reaching for them. As Oliver had said before I’d left Archers Rest, I had to look beyond the obvious. And to do that I needed to stop trying so hard. Instead I just sat and stared and thought about all that was wasted in being afraid of the truth. George had loved Rita for all these years, but she was so certain she had been second choice that she’d never really trusted it. And Bernie had walked away from her chance to find out the truth and spent more than forty years wondering what might have been. It was a lesson I knew I was learning; not to be afraid of the truth. In fact, I found myself obsessed with it, though somehow it was just outside my grasp.

I stretched out on the couch and stared up at the ceiling. Not really wanting to sleep, but without the energy to go upstairs to bed, I closed my eyes and drifted off.

There was the sound of a door opening slowly, or maybe a window. Or maybe it was closing. I couldn’t be sure. I lay still and listened, but there was no more noise. I closed my eyes and was waiting to fall asleep again when I heard a creak—the creak a floorboard makes when someone walks across it. Someone was up and, by the look of the sky outside the window, it was just before dawn, the part of the night that seems the darkest and most menacing. I decided I’d dreamt the noise and lay back down, turning sideways, with my head facing the back of the couch, to block out the light. But as much as I tried to ignore it, I was cold. And not just cold. there was a breeze against my legs.

I forced myself off the couch. My stupor reminded me of the day I had been drugged, though I knew that wasn’t the case this time. I walked to the inn’s front door. It was locked. I looked around the entryway and the living room. Everything looked just as it had a few hours before.

I made a sweep of the living room. I thought I saw something move outside the window but I couldn’t be sure. My heart racing, I went to the front door, opened it, and looked out. There was nothing, but just as I was about to close the door, I saw it. A flash of light from the woods. I could either do the sensible thing, bolt the door and go upstairs, or I could be stupid and walk toward the woods and find out what it was. I chose stupid.

I grabbed my shoes and headed out the door. The light was still there, just at the edge of the woods, but I couldn’t see its source.

“This is how people die in horror movies,” I whispered to myself as I walked.

But just as I got close to the light, it went away. I stood in the darkness unsure of whether to go forward or go back. I took ten steps forward but it was pointless. Even with stars in the sky, I couldn’t see much once I was in the woods. Afraid of getting lost, I retreated.

I went back to the B-and-B, more than grateful that I hadn’t encountered something I couldn’t handle. Once safely inside, I closed the door, locked it securely, and just for good measure checked the hall closet, under the couch, and inside an ugly armoire.

I was about to go back to the couch when I noticed, in the corner of the room, where it led to the dining area, an open window.