Authors: Traci Andrighetti,Elizabeth Ashby
She took the envelope from my hand. "What is it?"
"A list of all the evidence I've collected."
Her eyes narrowed to slits. "Why can't you give it to him?" she asked, and then her eyes popped. "You're not leaving town, are you?"
I shook my head. "I'm not going to cut and run this time. I ran out on school, my ex, Texas, and even Zac the other day. If I want to save the salon and my future, I have to stand my ground for once and fight."
"I'm proud of you, Cass," she said, raising her fist and bumping it against mine. "But how do you plan to do that if you're ratting yourself out to Detective Ohlsen?"
"I'm going to the Pirate's Hook Marine Services to talk to Zac about Clyde."
Her head snapped back. "What? You just said that we were in over our heads with this investigation. Why don't you just let the police handle Clyde from here?"
"I am, which is why I wrote that note to Detective Ohlsen. But remember," I began, pointing at my chest, "I'm the one who lost the evidence."
"So?"
"So, I have to do this. For Lucy, for us." I paused and stared out the window. "And for twenty-nine of those babies in that Bible."
* * *
I peered around the bow of the sailboat and stared at the service entrance to the Pirate's Hook Marine Services. I'd been camped out in the dry dock area since twelve thirty waiting for a chance to talk to Zac without Clyde seeing me. A half an hour had now passed, and Zac still hadn't replied to my voice message or text asking him to come outside. I was starting to think that he was ignoring me.
My "Cut Your Hair" ringtone blasted from the pocket of my DKNY yellow trench coat. I pulled out my phone in a panic and pressed mute. The caller was none other than Detective Ohlsen. By now he'd probably read the contents of my note and sent a squad car after me. Or maybe he was coming to arrest me himself. Either way, his call was my cue to make a move while I still had the freedom to do so.
I shoved the phone back into my pocket, put on my hood, and headed for the Marine. When I walked around to the front of the building, I almost fainted. The company truck was parked near the main door, and the lumber that Clyde had purchased from the hardware store was still in the back. Fortunately for me, he wasn't behind the wheel.
Lowering my head, I opened the door and entered the showroom.
The sixty-something man behind the counter arranged his comb-over with thick fingers. "May I help you, miss?"
"Yes," I replied in a soft voice. "Is Zac Taylor available?"
He pointed toward the cove. "He's out on the dock prepping a boat for a potential buyer."
"Thanks." I turned and hurried outside. The wind was picking up, so I pulled my hood tight.
I scanned the Marine's private dock and spotted Zac unfurling a sail. As I walked toward the boat, I kept one eye out for Clyde and the other fixed on Zac. He looked so sure of himself as he stood on the stern and hauled the line to raise the mainsail. And so strong. My eyes—okay, both of them—drifted to his biceps. Then I shook my head. I'd been hanging out with Gia and Amy for too long.
When I arrived at the boat, I wondered whether Zac had heard me approaching over the sound of the flags flapping and the metal cables clinking against the sailboat masts. If he had, he gave no indication of it. "Hi, Zac."
He looked over at me and then began cleating off the rope. "Hey."
I was definitely getting the cold shoulder. "Gia said that you came by the house this morning to check on us. Thank you for doing that."
"You're welcome." He walked to the jib and began hauling the line.
I glanced at the cabin. "Is Clyde with you?"
He stopped hoisting for a moment and then resumed. "I haven't seen him for an hour or so. He's probably at lunch." He fell silent. "Is this about the investigation?"
There was no point in lying to Zac any longer. He already knew about Clyde, and right now I needed him on my side. "Yes. Do you mind if I come aboard?"
"Be my guest," he replied, his eyes still focused on the sail.
I leapt onto the bow and stepped into the cockpit.
Zac secured the rope and wiped his brow. "After everything that's happened, why wouldn't you just leave it to the police?"
I took a deep breath. "Because I feel responsible for the Bible that he stole from my house. It contains information that affects countless individuals, so, if possible, I'd like to find it before he destroys it or uses it to hurt anyone."
"And how are you planning to do that, exactly?" he exclaimed. "By searching his house?"
I could see that he was angry, and I didn't blame him. After all, I'd deliberately misled him about my interest in Clyde. I took a seat and replied, "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."
"No way, Cassidi," he said, wagging his index finger. "Even if I knew his address, I wouldn't give it to you." He tugged at the collar of his windbreaker as though letting off steam. "If Clyde is guilty of the murders, which is doubtful, then the last thing you need to do is go and break into his house."
Now it was my turn to get a little hot under my hood. Who was Zac Taylor to doubt me and tell me what I did or didn't need to do? "Why are you so sure he's innocent?"
He put his hands on his hips and hovered over the seating area. "Because, unlike you, I believe that everyone is innocent until proven guilty." He released his arms and turned to face the ocean. "And besides, Clyde's been in Danger Cove for only six months or so. What motive could he possibly have had to murder two people?"
So Clyde
was
new to town. I wasn't going to say anything, but my temper got the best of me. "What if I told you that he was either the stepfather or the uncle of a baby that Margaret stole and then sold on the black market in the early '80s?"
Zac blinked, shocked by this news, but he quickly regained his composure. "Then I'd tell you that you were dead wrong about the guy. Because I happen to know that he was born on the same day as one of my sisters in 1981."
I was so surprised that I leapt to my feet. "How is that even possible? He looks like he's in his fifties."
"That's what diabetes and hard living will do to you."
"Why didn't you tell me all of this when I asked you about him at The Apple Tree?"
He pointed a finger at me. "Because you said that you wanted to hire him, and I didn't think that his health and his age were relevant."
He had me there.
"Little did I know that you were using me to spy on Clyde," he continued as he stepped into the cockpit to face me.
He was standing so close that I could feel the heat from his body through my trench coat, which was making it impossible for me to focus on staying mad. "Zac, it's not that I wanted to use you. I just didn't want to involve you in this whole mess and cause problems between you and your workmate."
"Well, you could've fooled me." He lifted the seat perpendicular to mine and removed a bucket. "Oh, and guess what? You did." He slammed the seat shut. "Now if you don't mind, I have to sponge off the deck before a client comes."
I didn't need to be asked to leave twice. I exited the boat and then turned to look at him. "For what it's worth, I'm on my way to the police station to tell Detective Ohlsen everything I know."
He began filling the bucket with water.
Clearly, this conversation was over.
I walked up the dock with a heavy heart. Zac was no longer speaking to me, and I was on my way to jail to serve time. On top of that, I was 99.9 percent sure that Clyde was one of the thirty babies that Margaret, a.k.a. Leona, had sold on the black market. And to be honest, I felt sorry for him in a way because I suspected that the trauma of the being taken from his birth mother had a lasting impact that might have even contributed to his criminal activity.
A wave hit the dock, bringing me crashing back to reality. I glanced at the sky and saw ominous-looking clouds gathering like vultures moving in for the kill. Judging from the size of the waves coming in, the storm was going to be a memorable one.
I tightened the belt of my trench and turned right toward Main Street. As I passed by the public dock, I looked at the slip where Prudence had docked her boat and was surprised to see that it was still there. In dire need of a friendly face, I decided to pay her a farewell visit.
As I neared the boat, Prudence emerged from the cabin clutching her left wrist. Then with one hand she began removing the canvas cover from the mainsail.
"Do you need any help with that?" I called.
She looked up and gave an embarrassed grin. "I've got it. Can you believe that I sprained my wrist opening a jar of mayonnaise?"
"Those lids can be murder," I replied as I reached the bow. "So, today's the big day, huh?"
She nodded as she unfastened the twist-locks holding the cover in place. "I've done everything I wanted to do here, so it's time to move on."
I eyed the darkening sky. "What about the storm?"
"According to the weather reports, I have just enough time to make it out of the area before the rain hits." The corners of her mouth turned up into a smirk-smile. "Besides, it's more fun to sail in choppy water."
"Well, you'll never know how much I envy you." For a split second, I thought about begging her to take me with her. I mean, who wouldn't be tempted to give up an old whorehouse and a sinking salon in exchange for her freedom? But then I remembered my earlier vow to Gia to stand my ground and fight for my future.
Darn it.
Prudence turned the last twist-lock, and a gust of wind blew the cover from the mast. It landed draped over the bow, hanging partially in the water.
I crouched and pulled the cover onto the dock, revealing the boat registration information on the side of the bow. I'd gone sailing with friends in Texas often enough to know that the state abbreviation came before the actual registration number. But instead of seeing the
CA
abbreviation for Prudence's home state of California, I saw
MS
. And even though I had a mental block when it came to the abbreviations for Missouri and Mississippi, this time I had no doubt about what that
MS
stood for.
I looked up at Prudence in a state of shock, and her face hardened.
Our eyes locked.
With her good hand, she drew a gun from the back of her waistband and cocked the hammer. "As we say down South," she drawled, "'keep your saddle oiled and your gun greased.'"
I started to inform her that the saying was specifically Texan, but then I concluded that under the circumstances it might be best to keep my mouth shut.
She leveled the gun between my eyes, and as I stared down the barrel, jail started looking pretty good.
"Stand up, and step onto the boat," she said in an even tone.
Fear began washing over me like the waves on the dock, but somehow my body obeyed her order.
"Now get into the cabin."
As I opened the hatch and descended the stairs, it struck me that I was going to be sailing away with Prudence after all.
At least, I hoped that was the plan.
When I reached the bottom of the cabin steps, I came to an abrupt stop.
Clyde was on a couch to my right, staring at me with the intensity of a lion preparing to pounce on its prey.
"I don't have all damn day," Prudence said through clenched teeth. "Move it." She pushed me between my shoulder blades.
I hit the kitchen cabinet directly in front of me so hard that my upper body slammed onto the countertop. I planted my feet on the ground and raised my head to find out whether Clyde was coming for me next.
"Stay down," she ordered. "And put your hands behind your back."
I complied.
As she began to bind my wrists with thick plastic cords, I saw that Clyde's arms were in an unnatural position behind his back and that his feet were tied together with what appeared to be plastic airline handcuffs.
Now I knew how Prudence had really hurt her wrist, but nothing else about the situation made sense. A million questions were running through my mind, but I limited myself to the most pressing one. "What are you going to do to us?"
She finished tying my hands and knelt to bind my ankles. "To put it in the language of our people, you and Clyde are going to sleep with the fishes."
I wasn't sure what she meant by that "our people" comment, but if she was implying that I was a wannabe
mafiosa
, then she had me all wrong. "I think you're confusing me with Gia."
The boat lurched, and I hit the counter once again. It served me right for that cousin crack.
Prudence opened the curtain on the window above the kitchen sink. "The storm's picking up. I've got to get this boat into open water."
"Maybe we shouldn't go," I gushed. "I know you don't care about us, but you could be swept off the boat in weather like this."
She closed the curtain. "I'll take that over staying here and getting arrested. Now, Chatty
Cathy
," she began with a telltale stare, "you sit across from Clyde." Her fingers sunk into the flesh of my arm as she yanked me upright and threw me onto the other couch. "I'm sure you two have a lot to talk about since he says you're friends with his mother, and all."
I squirmed to a sitting position as Prudence rushed from the cabin. So, Hazel had called Clyde, and he'd put two and two together and reported it to Prudence. But what reason did Prudence have to want to kill him? And who was she in all of this anyway?
The outboard engine roared to life, and the sailboat jerked as it pulled away from the dock.
While Prudence motored us out to sea, I pondered an escape plan. My phone was still in the pocket of my coat, but there was no hope of reaching it with my hands tied. I leaned my head against the wall as I realized with a sinking feeling—the
I'm about to plunge to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean
variety—that the only way I had a shot at freedom was to convince Prudence to cut me loose. Then I started my breathing exercises.
Clyde started hacking like a two-pack-per-day smoker.
I studied his leather skin and wispy hair, amazed that he was only in his thirties. And then I remembered something—Prudence had said that she was a decade older than I was, which would make her around the same age as Clyde. My mind flashed to that page in Margaret's Bible, and suddenly I knew who she was. "Prudence is one of the other babies that Margaret and the crooked obstetrician she worked with, Jonas Thorpe, sold on the black market. Just like you."
He showed no reaction. "Nosy till the end, ain't ya?"
"I'm trying to find out the truth."
He cough-laughed. "What for?" He glanced around the cabin for emphasis. "Whaddaya think you're gonna do with that information here?"
The motor shut off, and the boat started swaying.
I broke into a cold sweat. We'd reached the bay, and we were about to set sail to our final resting places.
Despite this grim realization, I knew that I had to do two things if I wanted to survive—stay positive and win Clyde over. He wasn't in the best health, but he was still stronger than I was. And I might need his strength to get out of this nightmare alive. "We could make it off this boat, you know."
He snorted and shook his head.
"And if we do," I continued, undaunted by his doubt, "I would think that you would feel some responsibility toward the other people who were stolen from their parents."
He shifted his hips. "Some of 'em probably figured it out when they grew up, like Prudence did."
There was the confirmation—Prudence was one of Margaret's victims. "But what about the ones who didn't?"
Clyde stared at me, expressionless.
I tried an emotional approach. "I'm sure that you suffered serious trauma after being taken from your mother, maybe enough to make you kill for revenge. So, don't you want to make things right for the other victims?"
The deep lines on his forehead relaxed. "I didn't kill nobody."
I should've been skeptical, but I was too surprised. It had never occurred to me that Prudence might have committed the murders, even after she'd pointed that gun in my face. "But I saw you in Margaret's house."
He gave me a hard stare. "I seen you there too, and you didn't kill nobody neither."
I paused, unsure what to think. Even if Clyde wasn't a killer, he was still a thief and a snake. "If you didn't kill anyone, then what were you doing searching through Margaret's things?"
"Workin'," he replied as though breaking and entering constituted an honest day's labor. "Prudence hired me to help her find evidence of the adoptions. She never said she was gonna murder no one."
"Why didn't you turn her in after Margaret was found dead? Or at least quit your, uh, job?"
"I figured I could get more money outta Prudence. And frankly, I didn't give a damn that the old broad got killed. She had it comin'."
So that was why Prudence wanted to kill off Clyde. He was blackmailing her. "You also broke into my house to get the Bible and the syringe wrapper."
He nodded. "When I told Prudence I seen you at Leona's, she figured you'd found sumpthin' that connected Leona to the adoptions in that ottoman with the fake bottom. I thought she'd hidden a document or some type o' information in a book or a drawer, but neither of us knew what we was lookin' for till I found the Bible at your place. And you mentioning the syringe wrapper to Prudence was a lucky break. She didn't know where that thing had got off to, but she knew it had her fingerprints on it."
I mentally kicked myself for being such a
stunad
. "That explains why you didn't take the wrapper when you planted that prescription pad in my trash." I looked him in the eyes. "What I don't understand is why Dr. Windom had to die."
He met my gaze. "Because he's her ma's brother, and she found out that he was the one who helped her ma adopt her from Leona and Thorpe. So she offed him."
The stern of the boat rose and fell, causing both of us to slide down the couches. But that didn't shake me nearly as much as the shocking news about Dr. Windom.
I wiggled my way back to the corner of the couch and pressed my feet to the floor. "If Dr. Windom facilitated Prudence's adoption, he must have known Margaret."
"Nah." Clyde used his legs to push himself up. "He was friends with Doc Thorpe. Prudence said they went to med school together back in Jackson."
So Mississippi had been at the heart of this whole mess. "Then how did Margaret end up in the same town as Dr. Windom?"
A bitter smile flickered across his lips. "Because they was lovers. I guess at some point they split up."
Something cold touched my foot, and I looked down and saw an inch of water on the floor—a sure sign that we had a hole in the hull. I licked my lips and pressed on. "What happened to Jonas Thorpe?"
"Prudence tracked him down in New Mexico, livin' under an assumed name. She said he died of a stroke back in 2007."
The boat bounced as it struck wave after wave, and something inside one of the kitchen cabinets started knocking into the door.
"Did Prudence find out about this recently? Is that why she killed them now?"
He glanced at the water on the floor. "She's known she was adopted since she was in high school. She found some letter her uncle had written to her ma about it. But she only tracked me down about eight months ago when Windom stopped makin' payments."
"What kind of payments?"
"Prudence was blackmailing him. She told him that if he didn't pay up, she was gonna turn him in. Since most of his patients was on Medicare, he didn't make big bucks like other docs. So he started a drug ring to come up with the cash. But then his dealer quit, and he stopped payin'."
This was turning out to be one wild ride—the story and the sailboat.
"Then she was never a hospital administrator in LA," I said to myself.
"No, but she was in Jackson. She got a master's in hospital administration so she could work at Presley-Smith Memorial."
I cringed at this last detail. Prudence had been hell bent on revenge for years. Nothing was going to stop her now.
"She went there lookin' to find out who her real parents was, and that's how she found out she'd been declared dead as a baby," he continued. "She also got records of all the other babies who supposedly died in Thorpe's delivery room, which is why she needed that Bible—to figure out which ones died for real and which ones was sold."
I narrowed my eyes. "What did she want to do with that information?"
"She had this plan to track down the adoptive parents and make 'em pay for what they did. We was gonna blackmail 'em and split the money sixty/forty. That forty percent was supposed to be my 401(k)."
Before I could comment on Clyde's choice of retirement plans, the waves began tossing the boat about like it was a child's toy. We struggled along with the boat to stay upright.
The thumping sound in the kitchen had stopped, but now the cabinet door was slamming. Whatever was inside must have come out.
I glanced toward the kitchen and saw the Bible sliding down the walkway between the couches—in the inch of water. Fortunately, only the bottom of the book was submerged. But if the water continued to rise, the names of the other twenty-eight babies would be lost.
The hatch door flew open, and a soaking-wet Prudence appeared in the doorway.
I almost jumped out of my handcuffs at the sight of her. Except for the life jacket, she looked like Medusa incarnate.
She smirked and rubbed her wrist. "You know how to sail, right, Conti?"
I noticed that she'd switched to my last name—it was less personal that way. "I can work the jib pretty well."
"Good, because I need you on deck." She hurried down the steps and tripped over the Bible. "What the hell?"
I watched with relief as she grabbed the book and threw it in the sink. There was now a chance that the Bible would be saved. With any luck, I would be too.
She pulled out a pocketknife and cut my bindings. "Now get out there."
I exited the cabin first and grabbed onto the boat railing for dear life as I stepped into the cockpit.
Prudence took a seat in the rear and took hold of the tiller.
There was no point in asking for a life jacket, but I was determined to ask everything I wanted to know about the crimes, even though the stormy setting wasn't exactly conducive to conversation. Besides, growing up half Italian had taught me nothing if not how to talk loud. "I know why you killed Margaret, but why did you do it in my salon?"
She looked down as though debating whether to confess. "I didn't know she'd be there that day. So after you cut my hair, I came back to the boat and got one of the syringes I keep on hand to fix the fiberglass boat hull. Then I went back to The Clip and Sip and injected Margaret while she was asleep under the dryer."
I grimaced. "Did she put up a fight?"
"She never woke up. She was in a dead sleep."
That was one way to look at it. "Then you had Clyde set up Lucy."
She tightened her grip on the tiller. "You were the original target."
I gasped. "What? Why me?"
The boat hit a swell and dropped with a bang onto the water, but Prudence seemed too caught up in her memories to care.
"Thanks to the intervention of my dear Uncle Seth, Leona, a.k.a. Margaret, and Jonas Thorpe, I grew up the only child of a strict Southern Baptist couple who despised me." She paused. "But I was born to Italian American parents who already had four children."
That explained the Italian connection. "I'm sorry to hear that."
She gave an incredulous laugh. "Not as sorry as I am. I could've been a Francesca or a Bella in a big, happy family. But instead I ended up a Prudence in an abusive home."
The sail luffed, and she jerked the tiller.
I ducked just before the boom from the mainsail swung over my head to the other side of the boat. I scrambled to uncleat the jib and pull it in on the mainsail's side.
Clearly, I wasn't going to get a heads-up.