Authors: Pamela Grandstaff
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“You okay?” she asked.
He shook his head and then nodded toward the upstairs.
“Go on up,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”
Scott went upstairs to the apartment and washed his face and hands. He hadn’t touched the body, but just seeing it was enough. Someone as young and vibrant as Courtenay shouldn’t be found that way, with her head turned at an unnatural angle, and her legs and arms splayed in the brush.
Scott would never forget Pip’s emotional breakdown after the phone call.
“Who would do this?” Pip had cried. “It wasn’t an accident, I know it. Courtenay hates nature; she hates bugs and grass and sticky things. She doesn’t even like to hike.”
“Think hard,” Scott said. “Can you think of anything else she said about the man who was going to meet her?”
“I was talking to Lloyd at the gas station,” he said. “She didn’t even get out of her car. She stopped to tell me where she was going, and she said it was about a job. She said it was somebody she met in Rose Hill this week. She said it would pay really well. She was excited about it. That’s all I remember.”
“Be careful what you say to the State Police,” Scott said. “They’re going to wonder if you did this. After Courtenay left, were you with Lloyd until I got there?”
“Yeah,” Pip said. “I should have gone with her.”
“I’ll call Lloyd just to make sure he knows how important it is to tell the State Police you were with him after you both saw Courtenay alive, clear up until I arrived.”
“Why would I kill her?” Pip sobbed. “I loved her.”
“Pip,” Scott said. “We’re going to meet the State Police at the park, but they may be sending someone out here to search this place. It will take about fifteen minutes for them to get here. Is there any pot you’d like to flush before they arrive?”
“Oh shit, yeah,” Pip said, sniffing and wiping his face. “You don’t mind?”
“I’m going to go sit outside,” Scott said. “You come out when you’re ready to go.”
Scott watched as Pip took a canister marked “flour” off the counter, took it to the bathroom, and then heard him repeatedly flush the commode.
“You might want to put the bongs somewhere,” Scott called out to him. “And those rolling papers.”
“Hey, yeah, good idea,” Pip called back.
Outside, sitting in the warm sunshine, Scott reflected that what he had just done could get him fired, arrested, and jailed, but it hadn’t felt wrong to him. This kind of thing was what Ian had always referred to as the “art” of police work rather than the “science.” Once outside, however, he had called Lloyd to corroborate Pip’s story.
When Maggie arrived upstairs, Scott was still in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub. As he told her what had happened, she leaned against the doorway and listened. After he was through
, she walked over, he leaned his head into her torso, and he cried. She didn’t say anything, just held him until he was finished. Then she ran him a hot bath, undressed him, and helped him into it. She went to the kitchen and made him a hot, sweet cup of tea. When she handed it to him he looked at it and smiled in a wry way.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said.
Maggie sat down on the floor next to the tub.
“Are you ready for what’s coming tomorrow?” he asked her.
“My only regret is that I won’t get to see Sammy baptized,” Maggie said.
“Patrick and Curtis are going to keep an eye on your dad at the service station,” Scott said. “Ian will probably be over there as well.”
“Dad will need some booze just to get through it,” Maggie said. “I don’t want him shaking with the DTs.”
“Patrick will know what an appropriate amount is,” Scott said. “After all, he’s a professional.”
“Sean’s going to walk me up the aisle,” Maggie said.
“I think your dad might be relieved about that,” Scott said. “Less pressure on him.”
“Claire’s really outdone herself,” Maggie said. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay her.”
“Is she still stuck on that Scottish guy?” Scott asked.
“I think she’s just lost right now,” Maggie said. “She hasn’t found her bearings yet.”
“Ed’s spending a lot of time with her,” Scott said. “I think he’s serious.”
“She could do worse,” Maggie said.
“That’s my best friend we’re talking about,” Scott said. “He’s a man among men. He’s my best man.”
“And she’s my maid of honor,” Maggie said. “That’s a start.”
“Did Hannah mind?”
“No,” Maggie said. “She wants to walk with Sam anyway.”
“Will she behave?”
“Of course not,” Maggie said. “It wouldn’t be our wedding if Hannah didn’t somehow leave her stamp on it. I fully expect Van Morrison himself to sing ‘Into the Mystic’ from the balcony.”
“Will your mother ever forgive you?”
“Are you kidding me? This is the day she’s been waiting for since the day I was born. And she’s crazy about you.”
“So no pinching?”
“Oh, there
will be pinching,” Maggie said, “but not until it’s all over and we’re well and truly hitched.”
“I love you, you know,” he said.
“I know,” Maggie said. “And I love you.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”
“I don’t think you washed very thoroughly,” she said.
“I didn’t,” he said. “On purpose.”
“Well then,” she said. “Let’s take care of that right away.”
When Sarah called later with the toxicology report, salicylic acid was on the list of what was found in Mamie’s bloodstream. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell if it was from the tea, or from aspirin in a bottle. Mamie had aspirin in her medicine cabinet, and there was no proof she was given, or drank, willow bark tea. Everything that was in her system she had a prescription for, and the levels were consistent with the amounts she was prescribed.
“So if it was a crime, it was very well executed,” Sarah said. “And I seriously doubt we’ll be able to trace Courtenay’s death back to Knox. He’s bound to have hired that out through several layers of contacts.”
Scott hung up feeling disappointed and frustrated. Maggie had heard
only his side of the conversation, but did not ask any questions.
“I’m sorry,” was all she said.
Scott put on his boots and tied them.
“Where
are you going now?”
“To tell Claire,” he said. “I don’t want her to hear it from someone else.”
Claire had spent the day wrangling seminar attendees. They were divided into four groups, so 25 of them at a time were able to receive spa services while the other three groups attended the seminars. Every spa session was booked for the entire weekend, clear up until the seminars ended at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday.
After a mass refusal and a threat to walk out, the masseuses and Reiki Master had filled out and signed their confidentiality agreements, albeit with fictitious names, as Claire suggested. Because Joy had not hired nor communicated with them previously, she was none the wiser. They were thrilled with the generosity of the tips they were being given. The attendees reported how good the treatments were, and just as Jeremy predicted, Anne Marie was pleased, and Claire was back in her good graces.
Throughout the day Claire evaded Joy, who kept waving her new-hire paperwork at her. As thorough and tenacious as Joy was, there would be no way Claire could sign a fictitious name and get away with it. At one point Claire sneaked into a seminar session to hide from her, and was appalled at how the attendees were being treated.
Each person was called up in front of the group, before whom one was required to bare one’s soul, only to be castigated by Anne Marie for every bad thing that had ever happened to that person. The main tenant of Anne Marie’s religion was that every traumatic experience was caused by the “reactive mind” being “negative,” and drawing “negative experiences” in to that person.
No one escaped unscathed; not the incest victim, the cancer survivor, nor the mother who had lost her baby son to SIDS. Claire watched as, one by one, Anne Marie convinced them that what had happened was a lesson they had planned for themselves before they came to earth in this incarnation, and that they had drawn their misfortune to themselves through a toxic combination of negativity and bad karma.
When someone asked for a break or something to eat or drink, she was denied, even though amenities, beverages, and food were obviously available. If someone complained or disagreed with what was going on, this person was immediately shamed by Anne Marie, with the support of the staff members and the complicit passivity of the rest of the group. It was like watching each person be psychologically tortured, and then punished for having a normal emotional reaction.
“You have to free your mind,” Anne Marie exhorted. “Your tears are only your reactive mind having a negative reaction to what it perceives as a negative experience. Let your negative thoughts go, and replace them with this mantra: ‘Everything that happens is meant to happen, and I am always fine.’”
This was said to a woman sobbing over the recent loss of her job and her husband. Claire wanted to ask this woman, “Why did you spend your money on this seminar instead of some professional counseling?”
Claire could only sit through one session of this before she escaped out a side door temporarily unguarded by the women in white. She confided in one of the massage therapists what she had witnessed and the woman was properly appalled.
“Before we came I looked up Anne Marie’s organization on the Rick A. Ross Institute’s cult awareness site,” the woman whispered. “There are lots of negative comments on there about her ministry. Evidently she charges people for a series of classes, each one more expensive than the next. The knowledge they gain has to be kept a sacred secret, and they only get to know her powerful techniques at the highest, most expensive levels.”
“It sounds like a scam,” Claire said.
“It’s classic cult behavior,” the woman said. “There’s all that secrecy so no one compares notes, and then all the money goes to one powerful person who doesn’t have to pay taxes because it’s a church. Those women on her staff don’t even get paid. They volunteer all of their time and pay for their own travel and lodging. They’re also expected to pay for all the classes and for the privilege of living at the ranch. She must be brainwashing them.”
“Why did you agree to come, then?” Claire asked her.
“The money they’re paying is awesome,” she said. “Plus I knew I wouldn’t have to attend the seminar. I told my partner if I didn’t come back on Sunday she should call the FBI. She lost a sister to Yogaville in Virginia, so she knows you can’t mess around with these kinds of people.”
“I feel like I need to do something,” Claire said.
“But what?” the woman said. “They’re all here by their own free will.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Claire saw Joy enter the basement, and hid behind the sheet wall, saying, “You didn’t see me.”
As soon as Joy left the basement, Claire grabbed her handbag.
“I’ve seen enough. I’m leaving and I probably won’t be back,” she told the massage therapist. “You all have my cell phone number; call me if you need help getting out of here.”
“Don’t worry,” the massage therapist said. “We’ve all agreed that if it gets too weird we will all go together.”
Claire checked that the coast was clear and then left by the back door. She ran down the hill through the park like the women in white were on her heels, and didn’t stop until she got to Ed’s office.
“Hey,” he said when he saw her. “You didn’t come to make me run, did you? I was enjoying my day off.”
“I have a story for your paper,” Claire said. “A whopper.”
Claire and Ed worked on the story until it got dark outside. Claire looked at her phone and saw it was nine o’clock.
“Oh my gosh,” she said. “I have to go to the Thorn right now. I was supposed to meet someone there at seven.”
“I’ll be down in a little bit,” Ed said. “I want to get this down to a more manageable size and then lay it out. I’d like to get some pictures of Anne Marie and Gwyneth together.”
Claire ran all the way to the Thorn, her heart pounding in her chest. She had meant to go home, take a shower, fix herself up, and be there in plenty of time to welcome Carlyle to Rose Hill. Instead she was two hours late, sweaty, and wearing flat shoes, of all things. When she reached The Rose and Thorn, she flung the door open, and searched the dark interior.
He wasn’t there.
“Patrick,” she called out. “Was someone in here looking for me earlier, around seven?”
“I’ve been looking for you all my life, darlin’,” one of the locals said, and his buddies all laughed.
“No,” Patrick said. “Nobody asked for you.”
Claire sat down at the end of the bar, in the seat where her father used to greet and bid farewell to all his customers, and checked her phone. There were no messages for her from Carlyle in either email or texts. She imagined plane crashes, car wrecks, and how many hospital rooms there were between here and California.