Three Sisters (41 page)

He was too proud of that accomplishment to be coy about it. “I hacked into her computer. Found copies of Moxon’s encoded e-mails—and passwords.”

“Ah—I should have guessed.”

Turner continued in a repentant tone: “I don’t know why I did such an absurd thing, Bea. I must have been out of my mind. Crazy.”

She arched both eyebrows. “The accused chooses to plead insanity?”

“Yes. Yes I do.” He added quickly, “Not for April’s death—I had nothing whatever to do with that. But sending your sister the e-mail while she was on TV—it was a lunatic thing to do.”

“I quite agree. And it was also very mean-spirited. But considering Cassie’s alleged communion with April Valentine’s spirit, I suppose you had a right to retaliate.” She patted him on the cheek. “So don’t give it another thought. Consider yourself forgiven.”

Relief flooding over him, he said, “Thank you, Bea. Thank you for being so understand—”

“There is, however, the matter of Astrid’s death.”

“But—”

“But me no buts, Andrew. You have used up your allowable quota of lies. I simply cannot tolerate another one.” The judge, jury, and executioner cocked her pretty head. “But if you come clean—and I mean
squeaky clean,
I might find it in my heart to forgive all. And even, as time passes, to forget.” She pointed a finger at his nose. “But do not cut any corners. I assure you—aside from a few minor details, I know precisely what you have done. I merely want to hear it from your own mouth. Clear the air between us, so that perhaps…we can go on from here.”

Turner was grateful for this one last chance. “Very well.”

“Defendant shall have three minutes.” She consulted an exquisite diamond-studded wristwatch. “You may begin.”

He cleared his throat for the recitation. “There were things about your younger sister that you didn’t know. Astrid was making my life miserable. She was insanely jealous. Listened in on my telephone calls, checked to verify where I’d been. And I’m sure you never had a hint of this—Astrid even thought she was hiding it from me. She had become an alcoholic. Poor thing was sipping martinis before breakfast.”

“Really?”

A glum nod. “She kept a half pint of Jack Daniels concealed in the drawer of her antique sewing machine. Finally, it became more than I could stand. I tried to reason with your sister, convince her to submit herself to therapy, but it was no use. Once, in desperation—and I’m ashamed to admit this—I even brought up the subject of divorce. Astrid went wild with rage, and threw a wine bottle at me!” He paused, as if to rid himself of the bitter memory. “I felt hopeless, trapped in a failed marriage. In an attempt to regain some level of sanity, I started going on long walks into the forest.” Turner frowned. “I suppose the seed must’ve been planted on one of my strolls. I found a deer carcass—a cougar kill, I imagine. But there was evidence that a bear had been feeding on it. I remember thinking…‘If that unfortunate deer had been my alcoholic wife, we would both be better off.’ From that moment on, I began to bait the forest nearer and nearer to our home with fruit.” A wistful sigh. “At first, it was merely a game—therapy for my troubled mind. But day by day, as the bears got closer to the house…I began to think of the exercise as something real. Something I could actually accomplish…”

“And on the day of her death, before you left for Denver, you left strawberries in her bedroom.”

“Yes,” he said. “On a paper napkin, under her bed.”
But if you’re thinking of telling the DA about this forced confession, it won’t do you a bit of good.

“And you jammed her bedroom window, so it wouldn’t shut.”

He gazed at Beatrice’s face for some sign of pity. “I was under unimaginable stress. I’m so terribly sorry—please believe me.”

“Oh, I do.”

This was too good to be true. “You do?”

“I believe you’re a terribly sorry
liar,
concocting all that nonsense about Astrid. My little sister and I had a telephone conversation almost every day. There were no secrets between us.” Her look could have frozen bubbling lava. “You fed your first wife to the pigs to acquire her five-hundred-acre farm, and used the proceeds to set yourself up in business in Granite Creek.” She shushed his protest with a wag of the finger. “You arranged my sister’s death with the expectation that you would inherit Yellow Pines. Poor Andrew—that must’ve been quite a bitter disappointment for you.”

It shall be mentioned that this small drama had an audience of several dozen creatures. Including some who qualified as
Homo sapiens
. For example, those ardent anglers who—at Daisy Perika’s prodding—had denied themselves a few cherished hours of night fishing to do their duty. Which compelled them to shadow Beatrice Spencer and her husband.

Some forty yards away, Charlie Moon and Scott Parris were belly-down on the ground, concealed in a thicket of chokecherry, bitterbrush, and fairy-comb ferns. The chief of police shook his head. “Charlie—can you
believe
this?”

The Ute nodded. Appreciatively.
What a woman!

Beatrice hooked the picnic basket handle onto her arm, looked beyond the clearing, deep into the inky shadows. “It is beginning to get dark, and that’s when the hungry bears come out, so I really must say goodbye.” She raised a hand, wriggled fingers to simulate a wave.

“But—you said if I would confess that you’d reconsider…you promised.”

“Au contraire; I said that I
might
reconsider.”

His shrill shriek was filled to the brim with unabated hatred: “You filthy, lying bitch!”

“Ah, now the real Andrew Turner appears.” She turned away. “Give the famished bruins my bon appétit. Ta-ta.”

“Wait…I’m sorry, Bea.” He banged his fists on the wheelchair armrests. “Please don’t leave me here all alone!”

Like his life, Turner’s words were wasted.

His wife had departed, leaving a cold, cruel emptiness in her wake. The response to his pleading was a chill twilight breeze—a melancholy sigh in the spruce, a sorrowful whine in the pines.

Scott Parris whispered to his Ute friend, “Well what do you make of that?”

“Pard, ask anybody who knows yours truly, and they’ll tell you Charlie Moon may be a lot of things—but he’s not a fella who leaps to conclusions.” A thoughtful pause. “But it looks to me like the honeymoon is over.”

Scott Parris made this observation: “Bea figures she’s pulled off what them hack mystery writers call a ‘perfect crime.’”

The Ute nodded. “Way the lady tells it, she took her invalid husband on a stroll in the forest, intending to treat him to a nice little picnic. Only when they got there, she remembered that she forgot something essential. Like maybe—”

“Pickles,” Parris said.

“Okay. Let’s say sweet baby gherkins. So she says, ‘Tarry here a few minutes, sweetie-pie, whilst I return to our cozy twenty-room bungalow and glom onto a fresh jar of Mrs. Vlasic’s finest.’ And he says—”

“Wait a minute.”

“What?”

The chief of police pointed out a flaw in Moon’s plot: “That won’t explain how he got the honey poured all over his head.”

“Yes it will, if you won’t interrupt me for about sixteen microseconds.”

“Sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” Moon gathered his thoughts, commenced to splice the broken storyline. “So she says: ‘Tarry here a few minutes, sweetie-pie, whilst I return to our cozy twenty-room bungalow and get a fresh jar of Mrs. Vlasic’s finest.’ And he says, ‘But I’m a poor, sickly cripple in a wheelchair—if you leave me here all alone, I might get et by a bear.’ And she says, ‘Don’t be such a scaredy-cat, Andrew—there ain’t been no scumball-eatin’ bears in these woods for years and years.’ And off she goes, skippin’ back home like the darlin’ little wife she is, to get the cucumber condiments. But her husband gets despondiment and decides to prove her wrong even if it kills him. So, to up his chances of being a bear’s supper, he twists the lid off the honey jar, pours it right on his head and—”

“Charlie, that’s downright silly.”

“Yes it is. And so’s your objection to the lady’s devious plot. See, after the bears get finished with Turner, there won’t be enough left of the fella to find any hide or hair on, much less honey.”

Parris recalled the grisly remains of Astrid Spencer. “Good point.”

“And even if his corpse was found soaked in honey, nobody could prove it was his wife that put it on him.”

“But, Charlie—both of us watched her do it!”

“That’s a fact. But beside the point.”

“Please tell me why.”

“Because you and me won’t be telling a solitary soul what we saw or heard here.”

“Please tell me why again.”

“Because if we did, the lady would very likely be charged with a serious crime.”

“Excuse me, Charlie—but I kinda figured that was the whole idea.”

“Scott, you got to look deeper into the matter. If all we had here was a ticked-off woman setting up her innocent husband to be a carnivore’s supper, a murder charge would be just the thing that was called for.” The Ute paused to listen to a noise in the forest. “But this particular husband fed his first wife to the pigs and his second one to the bears—just so he could get title to some real estate. And if Beatrice doesn’t see that justice is done, Turner’ll get away with
both
of those killings—clean as a whistle.”

Parris was beginning to get the gist of it. “Because even though we heard him admit to Bea how he lured the bears to her sister’s bedroom, that so-called confession was what the DA will define as ‘under duress.’”

“Which it dang well was.”

“But you and me, we know Andrew Turner’s guilty as a fat man with his hand in the cookie jar and—”

“Sure we do. Which leaves us with only two options. Neither of ’em much fun to think about.”

Parris blinked. “You suggesting we walk away, leave Turner for the bears?”

“Nasty as it is, that plan gets
my
vote.”

“Well I say we get him out of here before the—”

“Shhh.” Moon touched his companion on the shoulder. “Listen.”

Scott Parris strained both ears. “I don’t hear nothing.” And then he did. Something coming through the woods. Something that did not bother to keep quiet. Something big and bad and unafraid. This was top of the food chain. He muttered under his breath. “Jeepers—it must be a bear come for the honey.”

The Ute was listening carefully to the creature’s approach.
That’s a bear, all right.

The chief of police reached for his shoulder holster. “I don’t care what Turner’s done—I’ll have to shoot it.”

Moon caught his first glimpse of the hairy, four-legged forager, shook his head. “You take a pop at it with that little .38, you’ll just make it mad.”

“But we can’t just do
nothing
.”

“Pard, have you ever tangled with a hungry bear?”

“No, I haven’t, but—”

From the man in the wheelchair came a pitiful, lost-soul wail that made the lawmen’s skin crawl and prickle.

“Charlie, we have to do something—beat it off with a stick—anything!”

“We are doing something.”
Letting nature take its course
.

The bear, trotting along on all fours, was a big-shouldered black with a cinnamon stripe running the length of its bristled back.

His thin arms raised in a futile attempt at defense, Turner was whimpering.

Parris remembered his friend’s big horse-pistol. “Charlie, you can stop it with your .357.”

Within a few yards of the source of the sweet scent, the beast saw the creature in the wheeled chair. Puzzled by such a novel spectacle, the animal raised its long snout, sniffed.

Charlie Moon had a hard decision to make. He reached for the Ruger revolver, cocked it, closed his left eye, laid a bead dead-center on the animal’s chest, all his thoughts coming during the intake of a breath.
If I fire a shot over the bear’s head, maybe that’d scare it off.
Or a sudden, loud noise might make it charge. He tightened his finger on the trigger.
God, I wish I didn’t have to do this
—

Prayer answered.

The Ute’s one-eyed field of view was blocked by the backside of another hairy something. Big one. Twice the size of its opponent. And the slugger in the near corner meant business. Legs firmly planted on the moss, it crouched slightly forward as if ready to pounce. The newcomer had taken a stand—between the bear and the defenseless man.

The black bear was surprised at this development. Perhaps even startled. But not greatly impressed.

Scott Parris was impressed. Greatly. His jaw had dropped to his collar. He managed to get it back in the hinge, and in a croaky whisper urged, “Shoot, Charlie—kill ’em both!”

But his friend, who recognized the new player, had lowered the pistol. The game was out of his hands.

On his hind legs, standing straight as a lodgepole pine, the bear eyed this aggravating barrier betwixt him and supper, rumbled a guttural growl.

The response was immediate and unequivocal: “Hhhnnngh!”

Mr. Bear displayed a magnificently clawed paw, made a warning swipe.

Bobbie Sue raised a ham-size fist, in which was clenched a club large enough to stun a three-ton mammoth.

The preliminary gestures were over. The main event was about to begin.

Mr. Bear made a lunge, the huge woman in the grizzly skin made a swing.

What followed was something the likes of which this forest had never seen. Howls, yowls, claws a-slashing, bludgeon a-bashing, bodies a-rolling, teeth a-snapping, bones and saplings fracturing, blood and spittle spraying, then—the opponents parted.

Armistice.

The formidable warriors circled the small battlefield, clockwise. Eyed each other. Mumbled. Muttered. Grumbled. Gurgled. Reverse circled.

The bear bared his teeth, showed her the extended paw with bloodied claws. Growled.

Bobbie Sue reached inside her hairy garment. Showed him the shiny blade of a Bowie knife. Unbloodied, but thirsty.

Upon a telepathic exchange of signals, the circling stopped.

The black bear, who had somewhat lost his appetite, snarled.

Bobbie Sue, who had never been in such a scrap, coughed up a “Hhhnnngh!”

The animal eyed the woman.
I can take you
.

Her beady black eyes stared back.
C’mon then. Show me whatcha got.

Not a creature-sound in the forest.

Charlie Moon, who had never witnessed such a wonder, was transfixed.

Scott Parris was not entirely there. His consciousness had slipped away elsewhere. All he could see was a self-induced hallucination orchestrated to match his superstitious expectations. But he could hear his wristwatch.
Tick-tick.
And feel his heart pump.
Thump-thump.

The bear glared.

Tickety-tick. Thumpity-thump.

The mountain woman glared back.

Tickety-clickit.

Hairy bear snarled.

Clickety-clickit! Thumbumpity BUMP!

Hairy Woman snarled louder.

Something just
had
to happen to put an end to this….

It did.

Bobbie Sue slowly raised the Bowie knife to her face, drew the razor-edged blade under her nose, licked up the ooze of blood, smacked her lips. “Hhhnnngh!” She spat a crimson stream at the bear’s right eye! Hit it, too. Dead-center.

Enough was enough.

Señor bear blinked. Cocked his head.

Bobbie Sue grinned. Blood dripped off her chin.

Deciding to call it a draw, her worthy opponent dropped to all fours, and—like a chunk of black chocolate pitched into a boiling, bubbling candy pot—melted away into the night.

The bloodied victor turned to gaze upon her prize.

What she saw was Andrew Turner, in the wheelchair—gazing back at her. With bland expression, blind eyes. Bobbie Sue turned, vanished like a shadow into midnight.

Parris’s heart was knocking against his ribs. “Charlie—that was the damnedest thing I ever did see!”

“It was some scrap, all right.” Moon holstered his pistol.

The white man was waving his arms. “At first, I thought the big one was another bear.”

The Ute cocked his head. “And now you don’t?”

He glared at the Ute. “Don’t mess with me, Charlie.”

Moon had put on a puzzled expression.

Parris pointed toward the field of battle. “Tell me this—did you ever see a bear whip out a hunting knife?”

“No.”
Puzzled
was replaced by
concerned.
“Did you?”

The chief of police wagged the pointing finger at his deputy. “You know damn well I did.” The finger froze as he tried to organize his jumbled thoughts. “Uh—what I mean is I
didn’t
. That’s the whole point—
bears don’t use knives.
”

Moon smiled at a fond memory: “Few years ago in Kansas City, I saw a little chimpanzee in a sailor suit eat a peeled banana.”

“So what?”

“He used knife and fork.”

“Dammit, I don’t care if he—”

“After lunch, he rode a blue tricycle and tooted on a brass trumpet.”

“Charlie—read my lips. I don’t want to hear about some silly ape in KC. You’re changing the subject because you know that big one wasn’t no bear!”

“Then what was it?” Moon grinned. “The big Doo-Dah you thought you saw in the snowstorm—totin’ a burrito big enough to choke a buffalo?”

“Make fun of me if you want to.” Parris jutted his chin. “But it
was
that big Doo-Dah that fought the bear!”

“Hey—if that’s your story, stick to it.” Moon brushed a dead leaf off his sleeve. “But don’t mention me being here with you.”

“Charlie, I saw a sure-enough Bigfoot and you’re my best friend and you’ve got to back me up!”

“Even if you’re hallucinating?”

“Damn right!” Parris tapped a finger on his best friend’s chest. “Code of the West.”

“Okay, then. Write it all down in your official report. I’ll say you must’ve gotten a better look at that big bear than I did.” The Ute set his jaw like steel. “And when all those beer-soaked barflies and pool-hall louts start poking fun at you, they’ll have me to answer to.”

Parris blinked.
I’d be laughed out of town
. His eyes narrowed.
I’ll come back with my deer rifle, hunt it down.

Charlie Moon knew what his friend was thinking.