Authors: Lorena McCourtney
I eased backward a step.
It took me only a few seconds to recognize the short, slightly dumpy figure and scuffed boots on one of the ski-masked people. Grandma Braxton. Grandma Braxton with a
gun.
Another gun in the hand of the larger male figure standing behind her.
My nerves skittered frantically, and my supper turned into a toasted cheese tornado in my stomach.
I wasn’t free of the Braxtons after all. Knock one, or even a half dozen of them down, and two more popped up. Eager to finish Drake’s vow of turning me into roadkill. I’d procrastinated too long. Now two guns stood between me and Mac in Montana.
I clutched the mannequin head tighter and took a steadying breath. No need to go all doomsday yet. Montana and Mac were still a possibility. Just back away and call 911.
A great idea, except at that moment I could see my cell phone, right there on the end table where I’d plunked it down after thinking about calling Mac. As far out of reach as if I’d drop-kicked it to Montana.
Now what?
I pep-talked myself again.
No need to panic. Just sneak out the back door, run over to Magnolia’s, and call from there. Grandma Braxton was looking for me, so surely she
’d ask questions rather than blasting an unknown woman just sitting there on the sofa with one shoe off.
But before I could even start edging toward the door, Grandma stalked over and planted herself in front of Tasha like some short but menacing tower of doom. Her eyes glared through the slits in the ski mask.
“So. You’re the woman who killed my son.”
My feet froze to the floor. Grandma wasn’t demanding to know my whereabouts. She thought Tasha in her old-lady disguise was
me
.
I expected Tasha to protest that the woman had made a big mistake, that she had no idea who either Grandma or her son were, but instead Tasha mumbled a generic, “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Oh yes you did. You framed him! If it weren’t for you doing that, Bo wouldn’t have been in prison. If he weren’t in prison he wouldn’t have been killed in a fight.” With implacable Grandma
logic, she raised the gun to target Tasha dead center and repeated her indictment. “It’s your fault he’s dead. You killed him.”
She might be a horse-loving, cookie-baking grandma, but she had murder in her heart.
“He wasn’t framed,” Tasha protested. “There were lots of other witnesses besides me who testified at the trial.”
Witnesses besides her? With a wave of panic, I realized what Tasha was doing. She was going along with Grandma’s error. Pulling off her biggest acting job ever, pretending she was
me.
Protecting me.
I couldn’t let her do that. I couldn’t let herself
get killed for me! This left no time for dashing over to Magnolia’s to call 911. Grandma might pull the trigger on Tasha before I could get out the back door. I charged into the room. Koop prudently
skedaddled the other direction.
I ignored the ski masks. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know we had company.”
Grandma took a step backwards.
“Who are you?” the big man behind her demanded.
“I’m Ivy Malone. Who are you?”
“No, she isn’t.
I’m
Ivy Malone,” Tasha declared. She gave me a perfectly acted glare. “Sis, you’re all mixed up. Are you off your medication again?” Then, her head turned away from Grandma and accomplice, she gave me an exaggerated wink.
I caught her message. If you can’t beat ‘em—and we couldn’t beat ‘em because
they
had the guns—confuse ‘em.
“You’re the one who needs medication, sister dear,” I chided. “Who are these nice people?” To the ski-masked pair, I added, “Won’t you take off your, umm, things, and stay a while? I’ll fix a nice cup of tea.”
I had no idea where we could go with this, and I doubted Tasha did either. Maybe we were only delaying the inevitable outcome. But at least we
were
delaying it. Maybe if we could delay long enough, Eric would come home.
“There’s jasmine or chamomile,” I said. “Or plain old green tea, of course.”
“Why are you carrying that head?” Grandma demanded. She sounded suspicious, as if she thought it might be loaded with dynamite. I wished it were. A bomb would be a handy asset right now.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I should introduce you.” I held up the head I still had clutched under my arm. “This is Imogene.”
“My sister gets things so mixed up these days. She talks to that stupid mannequin’s head as if it were a real person,” Tasha complained.
“Imogene isn’t stupid,” I objected. “She may have a, umm, speech problem, but she still has
feelings
.” I glared at Tasha and hugged both arms around “Imogene.”
“I told you her name is Rosemary not Imogene,” Tasha snapped.
“Let’s get this over with,” the guy growled. “They’re both nuttier’n fruit cakes.”
Tasha ignored him. “Usually she thinks she’s me, but sometimes she gets even more mixed up. Like when she thinks she’s Elizabeth Taylor and gets teary-eyed about all those husbands.” Tasha rolled her eyes. She did an excellent eye-roll, very expressive.
I dragged up names from that place in the brain that stores useless information. Along with the words to Mairzy Doats, the list of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands was in there. I went a little dreamy. “Yes. Nicky Hilton, he was my first. Then Michael, of course, father of my children.
And Mike Todd. Such very different Michaels.” Big sigh. “Then, my great love, Richard—”
“Shut up,” Grandma yelled. She waved the gun as if she wanted to shoot someone but she wasn’t sure who. “Just shut up, both of you.”
“Who did you say you were again, dearie?” I inquired.
“You know who I am! At least one of you knows me!” She yanked off the ski mask, and there she was, the same rosy-cheeked Grandma I’d seen that day at the farm. But a much more frustrated and angry one. Her glance whipped back and forth between Tasha and me.
I expected recognition to kick in when she got a better look at me. I’d managed to be invisible in the floppy sunhat and sunglasses that day at the farm, but surely she’d recognize me now. She’d seen me at the trial. Unpleasant thought: maybe I’d aged so much I was no longer recognizable.
“Surely you’ve seen a photo of the real Ivy Malone. Which is me.” I stuck a thumb, the one that wasn’t holding “Imogene,” against my collarbone for emphasis.
“Sis, cut it out. How many times do I have to tell you? You’re not Ivy.
I’m
Ivy.” Tasha stood up, a little lopsided with one shoe on, one off. “I’m going to go find your pills.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” the guy snapped. “Get back on the sofa.
Now
.”
Tasha dropped back to the sofa. It was old and squishy, and her weight bounced me upward. A rather frivolous bounce, considering the life-and-death situation we were in. Some other time I might have said
whee!
But not now.
Grandma kept her eyes flicking between Tasha and me, but she turned her head slightly to speak to the man behind her. “Have you ever seen a photo?”
“No. What difference does it make? We’ll just get rid of both of them.”
I still didn’t know who he was, but he was definitely Braxton to the core. One more murder? No problem.
Although now Grandma’s gun dipped slightly and she said, “I don’t want to do that. I’m not an . . . indiscriminate killer.”
“Of course you’re not,” I encouraged. “And your devotion to your son’s memory is quite admirable.”
The gun came back up. “I just want Ivy Malone dead. Whichever one of you is her.” She glared at us again.
“She’d have been dead a long time ago if Drake hadn’t kept messing up,” the guy muttered.
I ignored . . . at least pretended to ignore . . . this conversation about my hoped-for demise. “Imogene, we really need to get you some hair, don’t we?” I smoothed the mannequin’s bald head.
“You, get over on the sofa,” Grandma commanded suddenly. She motioned to me with the gun. “I want to see the two of you together. I saw the real Ivy at the trial.”
“We don’t have time to sort out who’s who,” the guy said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We have to get rid of both of them. The one who isn’t Ivy knows too much now. We can’t leave her alive.”
Grandma hesitated only momentarily before nodding agreement.
“You shoot the one on the right. I’ll take the one on the left.” The one on the left was me. His gun took deadly aim on my midsection. The grilled cheese sandwich went into tornado mode again. “Then we get out of here.”
What Tasha and I had discussed one time flashed into my head. Death and what came after. Was I afraid? Not of what came after. But, looking down the barrel of the gun, I was definitely jittery about the unpleasant preliminaries facing me.
“No, we stick with the original plan,” Grandma said. I felt a faint relief that she was still in charge. “If we shoot them here someone may hear and call the police before we can get away. We just walk them out to the car and take them to the farm. No one will ever find the bodies there.”
Well, personally I didn’t think much of either plan, but no one was asking my opinion. I had the impression the guy didn’t want to do it that way, although it’s difficult to read expression through a ski-mask.
All I could think of was delay.
“Where’s Beth?” I asked. “Surely you didn’t leave her home all alone tonight, did you?”
“No. She’s with her mother for a few—”
“Grandma, don’t
talk
to them,” the guy said.
Grandma ignored him. “What do you know about Beth?” she demanded.
“I know all about you and your family.” Tasha nodded knowingly. “I make it a point to know all I can about people who are trying to kill me.”
“Oh, nobody wants to kill you. You’re not Ivy Malone,” I grumbled to Tasha. To Grandma I said, “How’d you know that I, the real Ivy Malone, was here in this house, not in the one where you burned up my motorhome?”
“Sis, if you can’t remember who you are, I’m going to have to put a name tag on you,” Tasha grumbled.
I thought Grandma was going to answer my question about knowing how I was here in this house instead of my own, but the guy interrupted before she could say anything.
“Grandma, don’t
talk
to them.” This time he sounded almost pleading. “Just—”
“I don’t understand why you two are even here,” I complained before he could demand a speeded-up shooting schedule. “It’s Drake who’s been after me all this time.”
“After
me,
” Tasha corrected.
“Oh yes. Drake was all for tracking you down after Bo went to prison,” Grandma said. The scorn in her voice sounded as if I’d hit a hot button. “The whole family was at first. But he’d have quit a long time ago if it weren’t for Sam and me.”
Sam. I ran the name through my mental file of the Braxton clan. Sam Zollinger, Bo’s son, which would make him Grandma’s grandson from her first marriage. His twin brother Tyler had joined the condo scheme and was in custody along with Drake now, but Sam was still in the computer store business, free to carry on with exterminate-Ivy schemes.
“But after he killed the wrong woman, we finally figured out Drake couldn’t find his own foot in the shower,” Sam said sourly.
“His big condo deal is more important to him than family,” Grandma said.
A noxious sin, obviously. Family loyalty was everything to Grandma. Admirable in her protective attitude toward granddaughter Beth. Admirable in her generosity to both Beth and other family members. Not so admirable, at least from my admittedly prejudiced point of view, was her determination to avenge her son’s death by killing me.
“Drake burned down my motorhome too?” I asked.
“
My
motorhome,” Tasha said.
“No, that would be me,” Sam said, apparently proud enough of that accomplishment to claim it.
“Very clever,” I said. “How’d you get inside to turn the stove on? The door was locked.”
“I could’ve picked that lock in my sleep.”
“But not too smart doing it when I wasn’t even inside,” Tasha observed.
“Drake was supposed to do it,” Sam muttered. “But he was off running one of his stupid seminars.”
“And he still thought I was going to pay his bail,” Grandma added scornfully.
“Nothing is more important than family,” Tasha declared righteously. “Family comes first.”
“A family sticks together,” I chimed in.
“But I finally figured it out.” Grandma sounded grimly victorious. “Family or not, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
Another opinion I could often share, although in this instance it did bring us to this rather unfortunate moment.
I suddenly realized that in my new position on the sofa, I was within inches of my cell phone sitting on the end table. If I could edge over and get hold of it, maybe I could—
I shifted a fraction of an inch toward the end table. Grandma noticed. Her gun swung a fraction of an inch in response.
Sam was getting impatient. “C’mon. We’re wasting time. Let’s get going. Stand up, both of you.” Another motion with a gun.
I stood up, but I knew if they ever got us in their car, we’d be two dead Ivy’s. I got a firm grip on the mannequin’s neck.
I aimed for Sam. I didn’t know which of them was the more dangerous, but he was a bigger target. Throwing a mannequin head isn’t like throwing a horseshoe at a stake. My skill is also unpredictable even in the best of situations. And this was not the best of situations.
But I gave it
my
best, along with a prayer. I threw. Hard.
It sailed across the room, but a mannequin head hurled by a nervous LOL does not travel at the speed or accuracy of a guided missile
. Sam took a wild shot at it. He missed but the bullet
thunked
the ceiling and plaster rained down. The head sailed on in what seemed like agonizingly slow motion. But if anyone ever wants to know if Sam’s skull is harder than a mannequin’s head, it is.
The mannequin head exploded when it collided with Sam’s nose. Mannequin shrapnel and blood flew everywhere. I ducked. Sam howled, threw up an arm to protect his injured nose, and his next shot went wild. He probably couldn’t have hit the narrow chain holding the chandelier if he’d aimed for it, but without aim, it was a direct hit.