A Penny for Your Thoughts (33 page)

I took off a shoe and stepped down onto the first step, grabbing for the closest piece of paper I could reach. I knew what it was almost before I got a good look at it. It was onionskin paper, the kind of stationery Derek used to write to Sidra years ago when he was in seminary.

This was more of Judith’s handiwork, I felt sure, another act of vandalism against Sidra.
I told him to go ahead and take the test,
I read, noticing the numeral 2 scribbled in the upper right hand corner.
I think he probably made about a C, but I have a feeling I aced it. Say a prayer that I did!

I skimmed the entire page. The letter wasn’t full of romantic platitudes by any means, but at the end, it was signed,
Counting the days, hours, weeks, minutes until I see you again, I remain faithfully and forever yours, Derek
. A love letter.

I exhaled slowly, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I would have to confess to Sidra that I had taken these letters and that they had then been stolen from me and ultimately dumped out here. As a sort of penance, I put down my stuff, removed the
net from its hook beside the cabana, and dipped it in the pool until I had scooped every last letter out. Then I gathered up the entire soggy pile and knocked on Sidra’s door. It was 7:20
A.M.

To my surprise, Derek answered. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans with no shoes, and his hair was wet. He smelled pleasantly of soap and shampoo.

“Derek?” I said, unable to hide my surprise.

“Hey, Callie,” he replied. “You looking for Sidra?”

“Who is it?” I heard in a soft voice, and then Sidra appeared next to Derek, her hair wrapped in a towel, wearing a peach-colored terry cloth robe. I felt my face flush in spite of the fact that they were married, in spite of the fact that this was a wonderful new development to their previously estranged relationship.

“We need to talk,” I said to them both. “I just found these in the pool.”

They both looked confused when they saw the dripping mess I clutched in my hands so I explained further.

“Letters,” I said. “Old love letters. From you to you. It’s a long story.”

Sidra gasped, but Derek put a calming hand on her arm.

“Don’t let it get to you,” he said to her. “We know who’s doing it now. The whole ball game has changed.”

Sidra pulled the towel off of her head and held it out for me so I could drop the glob of letters onto it. I then grabbed my own things and came inside.

“We need to keep our voices down a bit,” said Sidra as she motioned me toward a chair. “Carlos is still asleep. He doesn’t get up for school until 7:30.”

“I was just getting ready to head back over to the house,” Derek said. “We don’t want to…confuse him.”

Derek’s eyes met mine, and I knew he was telling me, in his own way, that he had taken my little lecture to heart. This
was
a
marriage worth saving; it looked as though they had taken some first, important steps toward healing.

“Derek told me everything,” Sidra said, coming to sit on a chair across from me, wet tendrils of hair sticking to her cheeks. “We know now that Judith is the one who has been doing these things. What we don’t know yet is why.”

“Have you had a chance to think about that? Both of you? Why she would want your marriage to break up?”

Sidra and Derek both shook their heads.

“Judith and I have always gotten along fine,” Sidra said. “There was never any animosity between us.”

“How about you, Derek?”

“My sister and I have a complicated relationship,” he said. “Sort of competitive, I guess. Like a lot of siblings. But no, nothing in our history would’ve prepared me for this.”

“Well, I’m afraid this latest incident was partly my fault,” I said, looking toward the letters. I went on to explain how I had taken them from here a few nights before and that they had subsequently been stolen from my room.

“At the time, it was just a part of my investigation. But I’m sorry for taking them. Especially now that they’re ruined.”

Sidra was about to reply when we heard Carlos’ alarm go off in the other room. She looked at Derek, who quickly slipped on his shoes.

“What’s done is done,” she said softly before rising. We all stood, and Derek and I headed for the door.

“Come back once Carlos has left for school,” Sidra whispered to Derek, a sexy hint of promise shining in her eyes. He held her gaze, finally bending over for one more, slightly longer kiss.

“Till then.”

“Hey, Mom!” Carlos yelled from his room. “Do you know if Angelina washed my new jeans?”

Sidra winked at us as we stepped outside, and she quietly shut the door. Derek and I walked a few paces together as I struggled for something fitting to say.

“You were right,” he said finally. “There’s no excuse for letting this marriage go. I want to thank you for banging me over the head with that fact before it was too late.”

I grinned, picturing my fury of the morning before, slamming my money down on the table and marching out of the restaurant. At least my point had been made.

“Hey, Derek,” I said, changing the subject, thinking of Harriet’s e-mail, of the man who followed me around town and later pushed me into a grave. “Let me ask you something. Does the name Mitchell Ralston mean anything to you?”

“Rings a bell,” he replied. “Let me think.”

We reached the end of the pool and the point where the sidewalk made a T. We stopped walking because Derek was headed back to the house, but I was going to my car.

“Mitchell Ralston,” he repeated. “If I’m not mistaken, that was the name of one of my father’s night nurses.”

“He had night nurses?”

“This was a while back. Dad was trying a different kind of dialysis where the cycler runs all night while you’re sleeping, instead of during the day. Sidra didn’t want him doing it unobserved; she thought it was too dangerous. So we tried hiring some night nurses, mostly for observation. But in the end, my father found he couldn’t sleep well enough all hooked up to the machine anyway, so he went back to daytime dialysis.”

“What happened to the nurses?”

“We let them go. But Ralston was fired before that anyway. He was bad news, almost from the day he started.”

“Bad news, how?”

Derek pressed a finger against his chin absently as he thought.

“From what I recall, we made the mistake of hiring him without checking his references first. He had sticky fingers. Stole some cash from Dad’s dresser, some jewelry from Mom. We let him go fairly quickly.”

“How long ago was that?”

Derek shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe six months ago. Why do you ask?”

I shook my head.

“Too complicated to explain,” I said. “Why didn’t you check his references before hiring him?”

“He came here on a recommendation. From Alan. Ralston had worked for Alan’s aunt or something.”

“What did Alan say when he found out the man was a thief?”

“He was mortified and furious, of course,” Derek replied. “But what can you do? Sometimes things like that happen.”

“I guess so.”

I asked Derek to describe the man.

“Big muscles. Brown hair. Not too bad-looking. Funny haircut, though. Kind of spiked up in the front.”

I thanked Derek for his help, then headed on to my car. As I drove, I thought about what I had just learned. A former nurse! By limiting my search to people whom Wendell would freely allow to inject him with insulin, I hadn’t even considered
former
employees. Still, if this man had been let go under difficult circumstances, what would Wendell’s reaction have been to the man now appearing in his office, slipping in through the back way? Somehow, I doubted that Wendell would’ve allowed this guy to inject him—unless, perhaps, it was done at gunpoint.

I pulled onto the Schuylkill expressway, knowing I needed to give this information to Duane Perskie because he was running the man’s prints for me. I called him after putting on my earpiece, expecting to leave a message on his voice mail. Much to my surprise, however, he answered on the second ring. I continued to drive as we talked.

“Callie!” he said when he realized it was me. “I was just trying to reach you at the Smythes’. What a mess I’m in here.”

“What’s going on?”

“Those prints you asked me to run? I was doing it on the QT just as a favor. But one of the names set off some red flags with
Keegan and Sollie, not to mention the FBI. Now they wanna see you
and
me ASAP.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “The red flag was for Mitchell Ralston.”

“Ralston, Rathbone…the guy went by several names. Real name is Monty Redburn. He’s got a rap sheet long as my arm.”

“Why was he flagged?”

“He’s being sought in connection with Smythe’s murder. Don’t know how he fits in, exactly, but now I’ve got to explain why I was running his prints and where I got them. You’ve got to come in.”

I glanced at the clock, thinking about Harriet. She would be at the train station in less than 20 minutes. So far, traffic was very light, but I knew I couldn’t depend on that. Once I picked her up, we had lots to do, important work that might clear up the questions hovering over this entire investigation. I knew that if I went to the police station instead, I would be stuck there for hours, answering their questions, telling them everything I had done and been through since my investigation began.

“Duane,” I said, “I’m really sorry and I owe you big on this one, but I’m not coming in. Not just yet.”

“What?”

“You have to put off the meeting. I’ll contact you in a few hours.”

“But Callie, you can’t—”

“Please, Duane. I’m sorry. I’ll be in touch.”

He was quiet for a long moment before exhaling loudly.

“Just a few hours,” he said. “I can’t hold ’em off any longer than that.”

“I promise,” I said.

I hung up and was just slipping the phone into my purse when I heard the odd sound of a motor gunning.

I looked up, shocked to see a red pickup truck filling my rearview mirror; Mitchell Ralston or Monty Redburn or whatever-his-name was at the wheel.

Bang!

He rammed his truck into the back of my car! I felt the force of it thrust me forward, and I gripped the steering wheel tightly as I tried not to lose control.

I looked around frantically, trying to size up my situation, blaming myself for being so wrapped up in my phone conversation that I hadn’t seen Redburn behind me.

Bang!

He hit me again, this time propelling me sideways into the cement median. He had chosen the place for this ambush well; we were driving along a several-mile strip of road construction, an area with no shoulders and absolutely no way to go but forward. On each side of the two lanes were four-foot-high concrete walls with only about a foot’s leeway between them and the road.

I steered back from the median, yelling at the image in my rearview mirror. He kept coming though, so close that I could see the grin on his face. He was enjoying this.

I slammed my foot down on the gas pedal and managed to put a few yards between us. I tried to use that time to grab my phone and hit redial. But before I could press the “send” button, the truck slammed into me again. The phone shot from my hand, clattering to the floorboard on the far side of the car and out of reach.

“Stop it!” I screamed, racing through my options in my mind, desperately trying to figure out what to do. There were no other cars here, no choices but to go fast or faster. Still, my little Saturn was no match for his truck. I knew that if his intention was to kill me, he would more than likely succeed.

I thought about slamming on my brakes, but I felt sure that he would simply crush me from behind, making my car look like an accordion. We were already going about 85 miles per hour. One good impact into that cement wall and my car would be scrap metal.

I decided to take my foot off of the gas completely. As I slowed, he banged into me again, but I was ready for him. I steered against the push of his truck and then gunned myself ahead of him in a
short burst. I tried that again, slowing until he almost hit me, then pressing down on the gas.

Bang!

He rammed into me hard. My head snapped back with such force that I thought I would see stars. Amazingly, my air bag didn’t deploy, but I still lost all control of the wheel. I felt myself spinning, spinning out of control, then the next thing I saw was the cement barrier rushing closer. I would’ve crashed into it if I hadn’t seen at the last moment a gap in the wall. I grabbed hard on the wheel and held on, suddenly steering to make a sharp right when I reached the break.

I didn’t know where I was going as I turned, only that I was getting off of the road, away from the maniac in the truck.
With my luck, I’m driving off a cliff,
I thought as I pounded blindly down an incline, away from the road. When my car finally came to a stop, I was enveloped in a cloud of dust. I held my breath, eyes closed, praying that he was gone for good and that I was safe.

“You alright, lady?”

I opened my eyes to see six or seven men surrounding my car, looking in at me with concern. They were construction workers, all in jeans and hard hats. I nodded, opening my door with trembling hands.

“Somebody ran me off the road,” I said, my voice hoarse.

“We heard the noise,” one of the men said. “He was gunning right for you.”

“Where am I?”

“Road construction,” another one said. “We’re widening the lanes.”

I stood up on unsteady legs and looked around at the packed-dirt lot that surrounded me. There were cars parked in rows in the dirt, and I could see the cranes and other equipment of heavy construction in the distance. Fortunately, I seemed to have landed in the one part of the area that didn’t have any vehicles in it. I realized that had I gone another 20 feet, I would’ve crashed into a group of workmen laying some cement.

I turned to look at my car, fear welling up in my throat when I saw what he had done. The car looked as though it had been through a major crash with paint scraped from the sides and the back crushed in like a cereal box. Only with God’s grace, I knew, had I survived.