He removed his hand, shoving Susan’s head back as he did, and then he turned to Annie. “And you, Annie, you don’t seem to know when to mind your own business. Now it’s a little too late for turning back.”
Annie straightened her shoulders, forcing herself to look him coolly in the eyes. “People know I was coming here. They know you were coming here. If anything happens to us, if you do anything at all, they’ll know. You won’t be able to just walk away.” She paused, letting him think. “But it’s not too late to do it now.”
He laughed to himself, the same warm chuckle she had heard over the phone before, only now it made her blood run cold. “Sure they know. They’ll know I came out here to talk to the lady who owns Susan’s old house, the lady
you
told me about. They’ll know you came out to talk to us both. And once I’m gone, they’ll know you two were just fine when I left you. They’ll even know that friendly Mrs. Dawson decided to accept ‘Sandy’s’ invitation to stay to dinner so you two could get better acquainted. Now what could be nicer than that?”
“Her husband was on his way here when I left town,” Annie bluffed. “He’ll be at the door any minute now. If you go now, nobody has to even know you were here. I promise we won’t say anything.”
“No,” Prescott agreed. “You won’t say anything. And neither will her husband. I’ve already made sure of that.”
Annie glanced at Susan. “Tom’s here?”
“In the kitchen.” Again tears sprang to Susan’s eyes. “He came in the back door. Archer was already here with that bat—”
“You know what they say about weaving tangled webs, don’t you, Susan? You shouldn’t have tried to deceive me. You knew I’d find out. No matter how long it took.”
“Please. Tom’s hurt. Let me—”
“He’s all right. And he won’t have to last much longer anyway.”
“What are you going to do?” Annie demanded.
“Once you mentioned ‘Cousin Sandy’ was living here in this house, I started thinking about what I should do. I couldn’t leave my darling Susan out here with just good old Tom to keep her company. She might get bored and start talking too much.”
Susan screwed her eyes shut and shook her head. “No. No, I won’t. I promise. I swear!”
“Shh.” Annie squeezed her arm around the other woman, trying to calm her. Then she glared at Prescott. “What are you going to do?”
“I remember this house very well from when I used to visit Susan here.” Prescott looked thoughtful for a moment. “Houses like this, the really old ones, you’ve got to be careful with them. This one is heated with propane, and that can be deadly if you don’t store the containers the right way.”
Annie glanced at Susan, but she only looked bewildered.
“The tanks are out back where they should be. Tom’s always careful—”
“You put a propane tank in a closed space, like that basement down there,” Prescott continued, “and if it leaks, there’s no place for the gas to disperse. The propane itself isn’t actually toxic, but you get down in a place where it’s concentrated and there’s not enough oxygen. You drown, just as if you were in twenty feet of water.” He winked at Susan. “Or in the ocean a couple of miles off the Carolina coast.”
“I couldn’t stand it, Archer. You scared me, and I knew you’d never let me get away. That’s all I wanted. I wasn’t going to tell. You don’t have to do this.”
“It’s too late now, my darling. Your friend here has a big mouth, and I’m sure, a righteous sense of civic duty. Even if you didn’t say anything, she would. Better to settle this now and for good.”
“How are you going to explain it?” Annie forced herself to be calm and logical. “Why would we all be down in the basement?”
“Good question, and I made sure I had an answer for it when I was figuring out what to do. Something I could be sure the police would think of all on their own. Something that would let them close the books on another unfortunate accident.” Again he ran his hand along the side of the bat. “Everyone knows that if Mr. Homeowner suspects he has a propane leak, he’ll naturally want to go down to the basement and check it out. When he doesn’t come back upstairs after a while, of course Mrs. Homeowner is going to go check on him. That was going to be the end of it until you showed up, Annie. Now, of course, when
Sandy
sees her husband lying on the floor unconscious, knowing she can’t get him back up by herself, she’ll call her new friend to help her out. Sadly, the two ladies will also be overcome.”
Annie looked him straight in the eye. “Do you think we’re just going to go down there and wait to die?”
“That’s where my little buddy here comes in.” Prescott held the bat in both hands over his shoulder as if he were waiting for a pitch. “Tap somebody just right, not hard enough for a postmortem to find any skull fractures, and he becomes really cooperative. Like good old Tom out there in the kitchen.”
“They may not find fractures,” said Annie, “but they’ll find bruising on all three of us. No coincidence could explain that. They’ll know it wasn’t an accident.”
“Not by what’s left after a house fire. Another reason it’s not smart and not legal to store propane inside, especially in an old tinderbox like this. I remember that there’s a hot water heater in that basement. When the flame eventually catches the propane gas, that’s all it will take.” Prescott took a moment to admire the bat. “And in the fire, Exhibit A here is reduced to ashes along with everything and everyone else. No weapon, no blood, no DNA, no fingerprints … and no witnesses.”
“They’ll find you, you know. There’s always something criminals don’t account for, and the police figure it out every time.”
“Not every time. Not if you’re smart enough. Not if they’re convinced there was no crime.” His mouth turned up slightly at one side. “Not if there’s nobody left to talk.”
Stall for time. Annie knew that, as long as she could keep him talking, they’d have a chance to figure a way out of this. Maybe Tom would wake up out there in the kitchen and rescue them. Maybe the cavalry would come riding over the hill. Something. Anything. She just had to stall for time and pray. “You said you wanted to ask Susan about some things. Have you forgotten?”
“After twenty years? Not on your life.” The grin reappeared. “No pun intended.”
“You’d better ask her, then. While you have a chance. Before the police come for you.”
“You know, Annie, I can’t decide if you’re a good bluffer or just stupid. Either way, we both know that’s not happening. In a little nowhere like this? What, Deputy Fife is going to come put a headlock on me?”
Annie merely looked at him, hoping her expression was confident enough to make him wonder if she might be telling the truth.
“But she’s right, darling Susan. I have some things I want to know. You know I don’t like being outsmarted. If it happens, I want to know how it was done so I can keep it from happening again. So now you tell me how you managed to disappear like that. I wouldn’t have thought a shrinking violet like you would have the backbone to do it.”
“I just—” Susan took three or four quick breaths and then steadied herself. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Archer. I didn’t want to make you mad. You wanted—you wanted me to be somebody I couldn’t be. I could never live up to everything you demanded in a girlfriend. I knew it would only get worse if I was your wife.”
“Worse?” He shook his head, undisguised disbelief on his face. “I gave you everything. You never stepped outside without being covered in jewels, dressed in the latest fashions from New York and Paris. I gave you a European sports car. Once we were married, you would have had half a dozen mansions to live in, people to wait on you hand and foot, and whatever else you wanted day or night. That would have been worse?”
“I didn’t want those things, Archer. I never wanted those things. You wanted those things for
you
, not for me. I had to wear certain clothes, drive a certain car, know certain people, look a certain way because that’s what Archer Prescott’s girlfriend was supposed to do. But you never listened to what Susan Morris wanted.” A tear trickled out of the corner of Susan’s eye. “What she needed.”
Prescott snorted. “Don’t give me that. You loved all that stuff. Every woman does. But I picked you. I picked you to be my wife, and you threw it all in my face.”
“You didn’t want a wife. You wanted a Barbie doll. You wanted something you could dress up and carry around with you to impress your friends.”
“Why did you agree to marry me in the first place? If I was such a jerk, why did you say yes?”
Susan wiped her face with both hands. “I thought you loved me. I really thought you did. Everybody told me you must, the way you showered me with presents all the time. Every time you screamed at me and told me I was stupid, and it was a good thing I had you to take care of me, I thought somewhere inside, you must love me. I thought we’d work things out in time. I thought maybe you just didn’t realize how I felt, and I was afraid if I told you I’d lose you too.” She glanced at Annie, her eyes pleading for understanding. “But then I realized I couldn’t dress perfect and act perfect and feel perfect all the time. I wasn’t a fashion model, and I didn’t want to always dress like one. I wasn’t a high society girl. I couldn’t play that forever. I wasn’t what you wanted, and no matter how much you pushed me, I couldn’t be what you wanted. And after that night on the boat, that night we were docked at Brockton—” Again she glanced at Annie. “Archer, I knew you’d never let me go. I had to do something.”
“So how’d you pull it off?” He looked her up and down. “How in the world did you ever have the courage to pull it off?”
Susan swallowed hard and then straightened her shoulders, daring to look him in the eye. “I didn’t sleep at all that night. I just kept thinking about what you said. ‘Once we’re married, nobody can ever make you testify against me.’ I knew after that, you’d never let me go. I knew that, if I tried to leave, you’d just come after me. There was nothing else I could do.”
Annie bit her lip. “But why—?”
“Why didn’t I tell someone? Why didn’t I get help? I had no family anymore. No real friends. Nobody to look after me anymore. You’ve obviously never been around someone with his kind of money, with his connections. Make the wrong man mad, and you end up in a ‘rest home’ for people with mental issues or a ‘treatment center’ for those with a tragic addiction to pain medication. Or maybe you
accidentally
overdose on some designer drug that happens to be popular at the time, something he’d been begging you to get treatment for for months and months. Or maybe you just disappear.” She glanced at Archer. “Wasn’t that how you explained it to me in Brockton?”
He looked her up and down, blatant contempt on his face. “You never were very smart, you know. You probably would have made me do something like that, in time.”
“I guess I decided I’d rather disappear on my terms than yours.”
“I still want to know how you did it. You had no money. No friends.”
“Yes, you made sure of that. But you forgot the jewelry. Those diamond solitaire earrings and the matching bracelet, the ones I was wearing when I left the boat, were fakes. While you were having lunch with that stock trader in Brentwood, I pawned the real ones, bought some cheap replacements, and hid the money. You had told me not to leave the boat, and usually I was scared enough that I didn’t. That day, I was too scared not to. I had just gotten back aboard when you showed up. I remember thinking you could hear my heart pounding and being sure you knew where I had been.”
“So you were a deceitful little thief as well as an ingrate. I don’t know why I ever tried to make something out of a piece of trash like you.”
She licked her trembling lips. “Later on, when I knew a storm was coming up, I decided it was time to do what I had planned. Did you ever wonder why you slept the whole night that night? I put some of my sleeping pills in your coffee. Not so many that you’d really notice, but enough to keep you under until I had gotten away. I was always a good swimmer, remember, Annie?”
Annie nodded, and Susan turned again to Prescott.
“Once I was sure you were asleep, I put the boat in toward the coast a bit. When we were about two miles out, I turned it back toward open water and slipped over the side. I had made myself a little packet of clothes and shoes that I put in a waterproof bag I had also gotten at the pawnshop. When I got to shore, I made sure I came up on some rocks so I wouldn’t leave any footprints in the sand. I hid there and rested for a while. Then I went up into the trees and changed into my dry clothes and cut my hair short. I caught a bus that took me into Charleston, and from there, I got the night bus to Atlanta.
“The next day, I had my hair fixed. The salon was one of those cheap places you would have never even heard of. Cut and color cost 25 dollars. I took a few more bus rides after that. Every time I stopped, I changed something about myself. Just some little something that would make me blend in and keep anyone from tying me to you. I earned a little money here and there waiting tables or washing dishes. I spent a few nights in women’s shelters and in a couple of churches where they didn’t ask questions.
“I told people I was Sandy Childress, and nobody ever questioned it. I didn’t drive or vote or buy on credit, so I never needed proof of my identity. Then, after I married Tom, I was Mrs. Maxwell, and he took care of everything else. Susan Morris really was gone.”
Annie tried to imagine the courage that must have required. “Then Tom knew about you.”
Susan nodded, and her calmness crumbled into tears. “Always. I met him in El Dorado, and he was so down-to-earth, and so easy to talk to. It took me a while to trust him, but I never regretted it. He made me feel like I was worth something just the way I was.”
Prescott sneered. “Well, isn’t that just sweet. And in return, you get him his head knocked in.”
Susan started to sob, and his sneer deepened into a scowl.
“Stop crying. You make me sick.”
“Why can’t you just leave us alone?” she wailed. “He never did anything to you! He never hurt anybody!”
“I told you to stop crying!” His face was transformed into an ugly mask of rage. “It’s not going to help! It never helps! It makes you weak, and it makes you ugly! I don’t need ugly people around me!”