Death in the Cards (30 page)

“Yeah, when they met here,” said Sally. “And maybe Dru set up a meeting at the corn maze for Friday night, knowing he could kill her and stash the body just like he'd done with this other fellow years ago—”

“Wait! Something doesn't make sense, though,” Cherry said. “Ginny saw something in her crystal ball just before she must have left to meet Dru. And she was really upset about it, and by the Death card in the tarot reading. Why would she come meet him if she knew he was capable of killing her, and why would she bring her crystal ball to the corn maze?”

“Dru can explain that in his confession,” Sally said. “You're worrying about details instead of the big picture—”

“Ladies, are you lost?”

We all jumped, turned around, and saw the grim-faced park ranger peering down at us.

It took about an hour, but we finally got everything sorted out with the park rangers and the sheriff's department.

We wouldn't be fined for our trespassing, given our reasons and what we found, but we were sternly warned to talk to officials first, if we ever ran into a similar situation.

After we gave our statements, the sheriff's deputy—not Deputy Rankle, but a very married, middle-aged, thick waisted Deputy Clarke, much to Cherry's disappointment—assured us that Dru would be questioned as soon as possible.

And that was it. I took Sally and Cherry back to Sally's, where they were planning to nap until Sally's boys returned from their fishing trip, and then they were all going to go to the Country Buffet up in Masonville for lunch.

I was invited to join them for the nap and the lunch, but I just asked for a cup of coffee to go. If life was back to normal, I still had my tutoring appointment with Hugh Crowley to keep. And then I'd go visit Guy.

Yep, I told myself, sipping on coffee as I headed up Sweet Potato Ridge back to the Crowley farm, that was it. Just a simple case of blackmail gone awry. A hypocritical preacher and his wife trying to protect their little heavenly empire here on earth. Very simple.

So why couldn't I shake a sense of wrongness? Why did my aunt's old devil saying keep playing in my head?

Just tired, I told myself. I just needed to get back to my laundromat and apartment, make sure Guy was okay, work things out with Owen, and then everything would be all right.

23

At first, I thought no one was home at the Crowley place. I stood on the front porch, holding the screen door open and knocking on the front door. No answer. Jeb, the Crowley's old blue tick beagle who sprawled beneath the porch swing, looked up at me lazily, and then settled back into a snorting, twitching nap. Jeb had howled at me—his tail wagging the whole time—when I came up on the porch. I petted him and he quieted down. Then he saw that I didn't have any treats, so he went back to his regular spot. If I didn't have treats or a rifle and we weren't going critter hunting, Jeb was not interested in me.

I knocked again, a little harder, and the front door came open. That surprised me. People always think folks in the country leave their doors unlocked. Not these days, unless someone is home.

I poked my head in. “Hello?”

No answer.

“Hello?” I tried again.

“I'm in here.” I heard Rebecca's voice. She sounded weak and weary.

“Rebecca? It's Josie. You okay?”

“I've got me a sick headache and I'm laying down in the living room. Come on in. Hugh'll be back shortly. He doesn't want to miss his tutoring.”

I stepped in, taking care not to let the screen door bang. I've never been burdened with headaches myself, but Aunt Clara used to get migraines—or sick headaches, as she also called them—and I knew any loud sound would increase the pain. I shut the door quietly behind me.

Then I turned from the small front hall to the right through the arched entry to the living room and stopped cold.

Rebecca wasn't lying on the couch. She was standing up across the room in the other archway that opened to the kitchen, where Hugh and I would do, I'd thought, our tutoring session.

But I didn't reckon I'd get to tutor Hugh. Because Rebecca had a rifle pointed right at me.

“I've already heard. Cherry called one of her hairdressers, who called Ella, who called me. It looks like Dru did the killing,” Rebecca said, “and I know folks will believe that for a while, but I also know it won't sit right with you and you'll figure it out sooner or later.” She shook her head. “I'm sorry, Josie. But I can't go to jail or heap trouble on Maureen. She needs me. She and Ricky.”

Although my body had turned numb and my mind cold with fear, I was able to believe that Rebecca was terrified and thought she was protecting her family. She wouldn't hesitate to use that rifle.

And I'd already started wondering about the question Cherry had asked back at Serpent Mound. Why would Ginny run out to meet Dru if she'd seen her own death predicted?

And the woman Max had seen at the Red Horse . . . his description fit Missy. But it also fit Rebecca.

“I have someone who needs me, too, Rebecca,” I said. “Guy needs me. Let's talk this out. If you kill me, eventually that will be figured out, too, and that will just make things worse for you and your family.”

Rebecca shook her head, licked her thin pale lips. The rifle trembled in her hands. “No. Everyone will believe Dru killed Ginny to hide their marriage and his work in the dark arts. We were the only ones here in Paradise that knew about all of that.

“Ed and I were stationed out there, you know. Edwards Air Force Base. Dru and Ed joined up together, but then Dru didn't re-enlist. Ed came home for two weeks, married me, and off we went. I followed him from base to base—but that was okay. I had Little Ed.

“By the time Ed was back at Edwards Air Force Base again, Little Ed was eight,” Rebecca went on. Her voice was sad and lost and, as I'd thought with Maureen talking about her Ricky, Rebecca wasn't, in a way, talking to me. She just needed to get the story—the justification for why she was going to kill me—clear in her own mind. After all, she had time. Hugh and Maureen obviously weren't there. The only creature who would hear the shot was probably Jeb the blue tick beagle, and he'd just wonder why he hadn't been invited to go critter hunting and then he'd go back to sleep.

“Ed wanted to look up Dru, and I agreed. We became pretty good friends with Dru and Ginny. Back then, we thought what they were doing with psychic healing and seeing was phenomenal stuff.

“Then Little Ed got sick. Kidney disease.” Rebecca's voice wavered. “The doctors didn't have answers. We turned to Dru and Ginny, asked for their help. And I . . . I was so angry with the doctors—with God—that I took Little Ed out of
the hospital, away from medication, up to Dru and Ginny's place. They prayed and meditated for two days while I held him . . . but he died. In my arms, he died.”

Tears were coursing down Rebecca's face now. My heart clenched in reaction to what I'd just heard. I hadn't even known the Crowleys had once had a child, before Maureen.

Lots of things fell into place. Dru and Ginny's marriage breaking up. Dru turning his back completely on the psychic world, seeking redemption—after this terrible loss of Little Ed as well as his murder of Harold several years before that—in what he saw as the exact opposite of the psychic world, his own brand of fundamental Christianity.

That there is a devil, there is no doubt . . . but is he trying to get in or trying to get out . . .

Ginny had stayed with the psychic arts, embracing them as fundamentally as Dru had rejected them. That had been her way of coping with the horror of what had happened to Little Ed. Then she returned to Paradise during the psychic fair, hoping to blackmail Dru for money to pay for the alternate treatments she wanted.

Her appearance must have been a shock to Rebecca. It had to have been bad enough, seeing Dru in town all those years, knowing his secret, knowing he knew hers. But why would Rebecca suddenly kill Ginny now? Had her appearance in Paradise jolted a long-buried anger in Rebecca?

“Ed always told me Little Ed would have passed on anyway,” Rebecca was saying. “A doctor who was part of the investigation after Little Ed's death told me that, too. But I still feel like by trusting Dru and Ginny . . . we killed our own son. After Ed finished his tour of duty, we came back here. We'd fallen out of touch with most everyone in Paradise. When we were young, we foolishly thought that we no longer needed any connection to people in Paradise, while we were
off exploring the world outside of our hometown. So no one, except Ed's and my immediate families, knew about Little Ed. And after we came back, no one ever spoke of him. And then we were blessed with Maureen. When Dru came back to town, Ed and Dru were never friends again, of course, but Ed told me it was only right to forgive.

“Then Ed, God rest his soul, passed on. He didn't live to see Ricky get ill, too.

“But Maureen had the good sense to follow every bit of medical advice she could. Ricky's getting the best care possible in Cincinnati. But then Ginny came here Friday night.” Rebecca's voice turned bitter and hard and cold. A chill crept up my spine, warning me. She wasn't going to talk to me much longer. And when she stopped talking, she'd want to walk me out to the woods and shoot me. I glanced nervously around the room for something, anything to use to distract her. There was a display case of Hummel figurines against the wall. Maybe if I knocked it over . . .

I inched toward the case as Rebecca went on. “Ginny'd just seen in her crystal ball that Ricky would die if he didn't get psychic healing treatments from her. She'd been talking to Maureen anyway at the fair. Maureen had gone against my will, knowing how I hate psychics or tarot cards or anything like that, wanting advice, a healer, something to help Ricky no matter how wild it might seem. I'd gone to the Red Horse and warned Ginny away from us.

“But Ginny came up to the house anyway. I was here by myself, while Maureen was down in Cincinnati with Ricky, and Hugh was talking to the kids in the barn. I was in the midst of scrubbing down the bathroom.”

Rebecca would have been wearing rubber gloves, I thought, probably the thin disposable kind. That's why she'd left no fingerprints on Ginny's gun.

“Ginny told me all about how she was Ricky's only hope,” Rebecca was saying. “She wanted to set things right, after what had happened with Little Ed.”

I shivered. To Ginny, attempting to heal Ricky after what happened to Little Ed might be setting things right before she faced her own illness.

“She wanted to do a reading again with Maureen in the crystal ball, to verify what she'd seen. And I could just see it all in a flash,” Rebecca moaned. “Maureen believing her. Desperate to believe her. Taking Ricky from his treatment, him dying just like Little Ed.

“So I told her Maureen was out in the maze and we should go find her. Ginny followed me down to the corn maze and to the far corner—I know that maze like the back of my hand—and when we got to the far corner, I turned suddenly, startling Ginny, so that it was easy to push her down.

“Ginny dropped her crystal ball as she fell. I was going to hit her in the head with the ball, then run back up here for my rifle, and go back and shoot her, but then a new way opened for me. A small gun came out of Ginny's pocket as she fell.

“I don't know why she had it, but I picked it up. I still had on my gloves from my cleaning, so I knew I wouldn't leave fingerprints. It seemed so . . . simple. I shot her through the head. Then I shoved her body back through the corn to the edge of the woods. I left the gun and the crystal ball near her, thinking I'd come back and just drag her and the ball and gun back into the woods later. I had to hurry because I knew Hugh would be coming to the maze with the kids, and I had to get back to the house.

“But then your boyfriend found the body. And you got to poking around. And I saw you at the corn maze last night.”

I remembered the sound I'd thought was from an animal. “You were in the woods when I was out there.”

“I couldn't sleep. I can't, much, these days. I walk in the
woods when I can't sleep. I knew you wouldn't give up until you figured out the truth, so I told Hugh that he needed to go with Maureen today, that she needed him, and I'd apologize to you for him missing his tutoring.

“I'm sorry, Josie,” Rebecca said, and she truly sounded it. “But we're going to have to go to the woods now.”

I glanced at the Hummel display, set myself to run into it.

“No, Rebecca, I can't let you do that.”

Both Rebecca and I jumped at the sound of Hugh's voice. He'd appeared in the archway from the kitchen, right behind Rebecca.

She whirled, turned the rifle on him. “Hugh!” she cried in a strangled voice. “I thought I told you—”

“Maureen is fine.” Hugh took the rifle from Rebecca's hand. She didn't fight him at all. I felt the shuddery warmth of blessed relief rush through me.

But then he looked right at me. “I heard the whole thing. Rebecca wanted you to believe she'd killed Ginny, but of course that's ridiculous. I did it for just the reasons she gave.”

He looked at Rebecca. “Call Chief Worthy. We'll tell him the whole story. How I killed Ginny to protect you and Maureen and Ricky from her wicked ways.”

Rebecca wavered.

“Hugh,” I said softly. “Hugh, you've sacrificed enough for this family. Hiding the truth won't help Rebecca face what she's done. And she needs to face it.”

Hugh pointed the gun at me. “Josie, you have to believe me. Or so help me God.” He swallowed. Tears coursed down his cheeks. “Or so help me, I'll kill you, just like I killed Ginny.”

I looked at Rebecca. A war played out in the expressions on her face. She was horrified at what Hugh offered to do. Yet she was pleased at getting a way out. Yet again she was aghast at her own pleasure . . .