Countdown (28 page)

‘Where is Drusilla?’ Constance asked.

Jean shrugged. ‘Off to tell the world about you, I hope.’

Constance laughed. ‘You’re giving her far too much credit, Doctor. Dru bitches and moans a lot, but when she can’t pay her rent or buy booze she’ll come back.’

‘So you’re making another alcoholic, are you?’ Jean said.

Constance sat down on the love seat opposite the two other women. ‘Now you’re going to blame me for Paula’s drinking problems?’

‘Dru told me about what you did to Paula.’ She shook her head. ‘You truly are a sick woman, Constance.’

Constance laughed. ‘Thanks for the diagnosis. But you won’t be sharing it with anyone else.’

‘You’re just going to shoot us? Right here? That sounds complicated.’

‘No, I’ll think of something less complicated and more apt. Maybe an accident – or rather, two.’ She turned to Megan. ‘What kind of accident can two people have, dear?’

‘A car accident,’ Megan said, smiling at her stepmother.

‘Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?’ She patted Megan on the arm. ‘You always come through for me, darling!’

Constance and Megan both were sitting on the love seat, their backs to the door from the hall. They didn’t see or hear Vivian come through the doors in her silent automatic wheelchair, but Jean did.

‘So you gave your little sister to your pedophile boyfriend, and then later his own daughters … You’ve been pimping them out for how long?’

‘Don’t give me that holier than thou bullshit! Paula enjoyed it! Just like my girls did, and don’t let Dru make you think she didn’t! Because she’d be lying! And what else was I supposed to do after their father left me with nothing?’

‘Get a job?’ Jewel suggested.

Constance was about to respond but never got the chance. Her mother took that opportunity to hit her only surviving daughter over the head with a very expensive vase.

The next day I met my wife and sister at the airport in Tulsa, both me and Harmon loaded down with flowers to greet our women and Johnny Mac loaded down with Godiva chocolates for both his mom and his aunt. We don’t do things half-assed in Oklahoma, folks.

It was all over. When I called Emmett and told him to tell the judge and Harry Joyner – oh, and Drew Gleeson, too, I suppose – that Drew was no longer a suspect, I asked if he could see whether Harry would like to sit in on an interview with the new suspect. Harry said sure. Since I doubted Ronnie Jacobs made much more than the minimum wage at the pizza joint, I figured I’d hit up the judge to pay Joyner as a court-appointed attorney.

Joyner advised Ronnie to tell the truth, and when he started to do so, his girlfriend, Lucinda Blanton, tried an easy stroll out of the building. Holly, bless her, saw her going for the door and she and Chandra Blanton managed to grab both the girl’s arms and bring her back in. Holly knocked on the door to the interrogation room where me and Joyner and Ronnie Jacobs were sitting, and said, ‘This one was taking a hike, Milt. I think you might want her in here?’

I nodded. ‘Swell idea,’ I told Holly, and grinned like an idiot. She pushed the girl in and I stood and offered her a seat. ‘So good of you to join us, Ms Blanton,’ I said.

She looked at Ronnie, whose head was down, hands clasped in front of him. ‘Baby?’ she said.

Slowly, Ronnie’s head came up. ‘I gotta tell it all, honey-bunch.’

Lucinda jumped up and ran to the door, but my wise clerk had locked it. I encouraged the girl to sit back down.

So it went like this: Ronnie and Lucinda fell in love, which was a no-no for a Blanton girl. When Darrell and his cousins found out about it, they accosted Ronnie, beating the ever-loving crap out of him. And Darrell told him that if he saw Ronnie with Lucinda again he’d kill him. So after enough time for Ronnie to heal up, he and Lucinda decided the only way they could get out of Prophesy County with both of ’em alive and kicking was to do something about Darrell, the ring leader.

Ronnie was on his way home from the pizza joint that Saturday night, having stayed late to clean up, and carrying a nice hot pepperoni with him, when he saw my Jeep going by with Darrell Blanton all snug in the back seat. He ran back to his apartment where Lucinda was waiting for him and the pizza, and told her what he’d seen. And then the girl took over.

Seems Blanton women know a lot about herbs and flowers and stuff, and Lucinda knew that the oleander bush in Ronnie’s side yard was poisonous. So she blended the petals up with some oregano and garlic and olive oil, poured her concoction over the pizza, added extra cheese, stuffed it in the oven long enough to melt the new cheese, and they were ready to do the deed. The girl had no idea that the oleander mimicked digitalis, she just knew it was poisonous. It wasn’t the first time Ronnie had delivered a pizza to the sheriff’s office, to the deputies or to prisoners, and he didn’t think anyone would think anything about it.

At that point in his recitation, Ronnie looked up at me with big watery blue eyes and said, ‘And it worked like a charm!’

‘Just shut up, Ronnie, for God’s sake!’ Lucinda said.

‘But, honey, I have to tell the truth!’

‘Why?’ she demanded.

Obviously she had him there, because Ronnie failed to reply.

I stood up, knocked on the door and Holly unlocked it. ‘I need the keys to the lock-up,’ I told her. She handed me her ring of keys and I took the lovebirds back to the cells – one for each.

When I came back out, I told Harry Joyner, ‘You might want to find another attorney for the girl. I don’t think you’re gonna want to defend them together.’

‘She pissed?’ he asked.

I shrugged. Looking over at Holly, I said, ‘You might wanna get the first aid kit and go back to Ronnie’s cell. He needs to get cleaned up.’

Holly didn’t say anything, just grabbed the first aid kit and headed back. Joyner raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Fingernails,’ I said. ‘Before I could get them locked up, she went for his face.’

‘Separate attorneys for sure,’ Joyner said.

That Monday night I got a phone call from Jean telling me she’d finished up her business. ‘You know who it was?’ I asked her.

‘Long story, babe, but I’ll give you all the gory details tomorrow night. Can we go to La Margarita when Jewel and I get in? We’ll be starving,’ she said.

‘La Margarita? You sure? I thought you said it was too greasy for your taste.’

There was a silence on the other end of the phone for about thirty seconds, then she said, ‘I could use a little grease right now.’

And it wasn’t until the ladies deplaned, we ate dinner, sampled some Godiva chocolates, drove all the way back to Prophesy County and got Johnny Mac to bed that the four of us sat down and discussed the situation in Kansas City.

And I gotta say I was shocked. A child doing that to her own sister, not to mention the crazy father of those two girls. It was sickening and personally I wanted to exhume the old man’s body and shoot it a couple of times.

‘And the old lady cold-cocked Paula’s sister?’ I asked.

‘Knocked her right out!’ my sister Jewel said with a big grin.

‘But then we had to talk Vivian into calling the police,’ Jean said. ‘“That is not something we do!” she told us. I just looked at her for I don’t know how long, then I told her she had to. That’s when Megan jumped up—’

‘She tried running to the door to the hall,’ Jewel said, still grinning, ‘but I tackled her!’

Jean looked at Jewel and grinned herself. ‘It was beautiful!’ she said. ‘Jewel was like the best linebacker I’ve ever seen! Made a dive right for Megan’s knees and took her down in about two seconds!’

Jewel shrugged and tried to look modest. ‘I think it might have been more like ten or fifteen seconds, but,’ again she shrugged, ‘it was cool!’

My wife and my sister high-fived each other.

‘So what did you do after that?’ Harmon asked.

‘I dragged her ass back to the love seat!’ Jewel said.

‘And I used my cell phone to call the Kansas City cops, while Vivian used hers to call the family attorney,’ Jean said.

‘And I sat on Megan so she wouldn’t try to leave again,’ Jewel cut in.

‘What about Dru?’ I asked.

‘She called Vivian about an hour later and Vivian told her the police were there and were arresting Constance, but that she and Megan were in the clear and she could come home.’

‘But Megan dragged you into the solarium!’ Harmon said to his wife. ‘She should go to jail for that!’

Jean looked at Jewel, who took a deep breath and said, ‘I decided not to press charges. Earlier today Jean got the name of a colleague in Kansas City who works with adult victims of child abuse. Vivian said she would make sure the girls went twice a week as scheduled.’

‘But—’ Harmon started.

‘Honey,’ Jewel said, ‘Megan is a victim, too. So is Constance, for that matter. But she turned her own victimization into a family business and she needs to be punished for that.’ Jewel looked at Jean, as if to confirm her own statement, and I had a pretty good idea where my sister’s psychobabble had come from. Sorry, I’m not supposed to use that word.

‘Megan was doing it for the money,’ Jean explained. ‘She’d tamped down her feelings so deep that she could only see the goal of finishing school without student loans.’

Jewel shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Jean. Megan was pretty loyal to Constance, enough so to think about killing the two of us! And she sure didn’t stick by her twin!’

‘I think Megan had developed tunnel-vision,’ Jean said. ‘All she could see was finishing college, then she could get away from Constance and the life she’d created for her and Dru.’

‘And what about Dru?’ I asked.

Jean shook her head. ‘Dru’s a lot like Paula. More sensitive than her sister, with a higher intellect. Unlike Paula, who masked her pain with alcohol and promiscuity, Dru masked hers with bitchiness – and alcohol.’

‘You think those girls are gonna be OK?’ Harmon asked.

Jean shrugged. ‘They’ll get better with help – their own and Vivian’s and the therapist’s, but I can’t say they’ll ever be OK. They’ve lived through something that will color their lives forever. But with help they’ll be able to see beyond that and hopefully both of them will find a real life for themselves.’

‘From your lips to God’s ear,’ Jewel said softly.

I
t was yet another Saturday, two weeks to the day from that awful Saturday at the Longbranch Inn. But this one was different. Great big chunks of different. We were at the Holy Trinity Church of Christ in Longbranch at the wedding of my deputy, Dalton Pettigrew, and my clerk, Holly Humphries. I was all decked out in a tux and looking good. I had two roles to play at this shindig – one, walking the bride down the aisle and giving her away, and two, standing up as the groom’s best man. Anthony and Emmett were the other groomsmen and Jasmine was the matron of honor. Nita and my wife Jean were the bridesmaids.

The bride was wearing her mother-in-law’s wedding dress, a beautiful whitish (my wife called it eggshell, who knew?) thing from the fifties, satin with little pearls around the top – a bodice, my wife insists I call it. She said if I was describing what women were wearing I should have a woman’s input. Whatever. The bridesmaids were in pink – excuse me,
rose
-colored taffeta. We guys were all wearing tuxes we rented from Big Jim’s Men’s Store on the square. They matched.

The preacher talked too much, as preachers do, but he got the job done. After, we went into the church’s fellowship hall where the reception was to be held. The thing about that, though, is when you have a reception in a church building you can’t have liquor, and, I’m sorry, but weddings are a time of rejoicing and who wants to rejoice without booze? So Jean and I had lined up an after-reception party at our house, after which we transported the soused newlyweds back to the Longbranch Inn for their wedding night.

As the weeks and months wore on, a few things happened: Drew Gleeson moved back to Tulsa and Jasper Thorne was promoted to head EMT; Chandra Blanton and Mike Reynolds got married, with their son and Jean and I in attendance; and my deputy, Anthony Dobbins and his wife, Maryanne, were expecting their first child in just a few months. She’d made it way past the eight-week mark that had ended her earlier pregnancies, and the doctor said that everything looked real good. We put an ad in the local paper about Tornado, the golden retriever/Shetland mix that had been abusing my testicles, but nobody claimed him. He now has his own dog house, one that Evinrude, my cat, occasionally visits, when the two aren’t lying together in front of the fireplace. Go figure.

Eunice Blanton pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years with a possibility of parole; Earl Blanton pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment; and Jean got monthly written reports from the therapist in Kansas City on the progress of the twins. She also got weekly phone calls from Vivian, which was probably a good thing for the old lady, but maybe not so good for my wife. She seemed to be bummed out after every call. During one call Jean found out that one of her earlier prime suspects – a guy named Neil Davenport, who lived next door to the Carmichael estate – had been using Constance’s services: namely sleeping with both Dru and Megan from about the age of twelve onwards. He was being investigated.

But mostly life went on, as it does in Prophesy County. Shit happens, then we clean it up. That’s just the way we roll.