One Deadly Sin (43 page)

“Pink cake?”

“Pink, blue, whatever color you want.”

“I want pink. With white flowers.”

“You got it. Go with Nannie now, and I’ll be home for cake.” He tried to transfer her over but she clutched at him.

“Promise? I don’t like Auntie Ellen.”

Grimly, he tensed his jaw. “Me neither. You won’t have to see her anymore. I promise. Go on now.” He kissed her. “There’s a brave girl.”

He put her in the back of Mimsy’s car. “I love you, baby girl.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

He waved as they drove off, tears welling in his eyes. Thank you, Edie, for keeping her safe. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And now he allowed his fury to come. Hands fisted, he raced for his car. Pounded the wheel. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could he not have seen it? Old people get confused and can be easily manipulated. But still…

Ellen had fed them cake? Poisoned cake? Bizarre as it sounded, that was the only sense he could make of his daughter’s words. And where was Terry? Miranda hadn’t mentioned him at all.

He sped off toward town, punching in phone numbers and barking at whoever answered until he’d tracked down Miranda’s counselor. She was Darcy’s youngest, so she wasn’t hard to find.

“She had your card,” the young woman said over the phone. “And a note on the back giving her permission to pick up Miranda. She works at the church; I was sure it was all right. I hope I didn’t do anything wrong.”

His hand tightened on the phone, and he felt like screaming. But he managed not to. “Just double-checking.” It wasn’t her fault for trusting someone she’d always known. Hadn’t everyone?

He phoned Sam, told her what had happened, and had her meet him at the Garvey house. He wasn’t sure what they’d find, but if Terry had somehow pressured his aunt to pick up Miranda, who knows what he’d be up to now that his plans had been thwarted.

Holt met Sam at the curb. He took out his weapon, signaled Sam to do the same.

“Expecting a fight?” she asked.

“Don’t know what I’m expecting,” he said grimly. “Terry could be holding his aunt hostage, or worse. He must be completely out of control. I want to be prepared. I’ll take the front, you take the back,” Holt said. “Don’t want anyone running off on us.”

“How’s Edie?”

Holt looked at her, surprised she even cared. She reddened, then said, “I didn’t ask anyone to kill her, Holt. Just wanted justice done.”

“I don’t know how she is.” He took a breath. “Can’t think about it now. Gotta concentrate on this.”

She nodded and switched on her radio. “Look, been something I’ve wanted to say for a while.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“Probably. But we’re going in armed and all, and, well, better get if off my chest now.” She squared her shoulders. “Want to thank you for not firing me.”

“I should have.”

“I know.”

“You’re lucky you’re a damn good deputy.” He turned on his radio, too, then raised his weapon. “You go behind my back again, though…”

“No, sir. Won’t happen again.”

He eyed her. “Don’t think you’re through groveling.”

Her mouth twitched, but she repressed the smile. “No, sir.”

“Okay, enough said. Let’s do this.” He nodded for her to take off. She walked up the drive and around back while Holt took the steps. Through the arched and overgrown shrubs and up to the front door.

He knocked.

No answer.

Knocked again. “Open up, Miss Ellen. It’s Chief Drennen.”

Still no answer.

“I’m going in,” he radioed to Sam. “He could have her tied up in there. Meet you inside. Count of three.” He counted down, kicked open the door, and crashed inside.

Except for the echo of his footsteps it was quiet as a tomb.

“Sam,” he whispered into the radio. “Anything?”

“Negative,” she said.

He made his way cautiously, room by room, leading with his weapon and clearing each one before moving on to the next. He made it past the dreary entryway, with its narrow set of stairs leading into a darkened second floor, then a front parlor whose French doors had been shut tight the last time he’d been there. When he got through he saw the room had been converted into a bedroom. A large, unmade hospital bed took up most of the space. Backing out, he headed deeper into the house.

He found the remains of a meal in the room he’d sat in with Ellen the other evening. Fancy teacups and cakes were scattered over a table in the middle. He poked at one with a pen. Pink, just as Miranda had said. An image of his frightened daughter rose up along with one of pale, lifeless Edie. Fury surged through him, and he gripped the pen so tightly it snapped in two.

Grimly, he surveyed the rest of the room. There were clear signs of a struggle. A chair pushed back, another overturned. A teacup spilled. What in holy hell had happened here?

“Got something,” Sam said into his radio. “Upstairs.”

He tramped back to the front of the house and up the staircase. Sam was waiting in the hall outside an open door. She nodded with her head to the room, and he went in. Terry was on the floor.

“Dead,” Sam said.

That threw Holt. If Terry was dead, he couldn’t be the one pulling the strings. Which left… God, that was crazy. Pure unadulterated lunacy. “The aunt?”

“Don’t know,” Sam said. “Waited for you to check the rest of the rooms.”

There were two more bedrooms up there. They found Ellen Garvey in the second one.

She lay on the bed dressed in a yellowed bridal gown. The flouncy skirt was spread wide, and a gauzy veil covered her head. Beneath it, her face was petrified in a grimace of agony. A dried-up bouquet lay at her side, her fingers frozen into monsterish, clutching claws.

Sam holstered her weapon. Let out a whistling breath. “Not my idea of a wedding night.”

54

A
t ten, Holt left the endless paperwork at his desk and drove to the cemetery. By the look of the cloudless sky and the bright sun, it was going to be a scorcher. Not the day he’d pick to be standing around in the open, but everything had been arranged, so he couldn’t do much about it now. And Edie would appreciate the irony. It had been hot the day her father was buried, too.

He parked outside the gates and walked to the gravesite. Passed the countless markers that represented the lifeblood of the town. Some of the names were familiar, families still pumping oxygen into Redbud. But there were also those long forgotten, the faded names dating back to 1842. Children dead before they could walk, mothers dead bearing them. Murderers and thieves as well as upright citizens. How many secrets lay buried in those graves?

Well, at least one was out in the open now. The blood evidence from the abandoned truck led to a thug who used to do yardwork for the Butenes. He didn’t lose much time naming Hally Butene. Holt still remembered his disbelief, but when he went back to question Hally, he found Amy Lyle tied up and stuffed inside a closet.

“I thought Hally might remember something,” Amy told Holt when she’d recovered from her ordeal. “Together we could figure out what happened.”

“But she didn’t want you poking around any more than she wanted Edie digging up the past.”

Amy had shuddered. “Edie must have called me three or four times that day.” Tears welled in her eyes. “She wanted to cook dinner for me.”

Holt had squeezed her thin shoulders, still not understanding why Hally Butene had done what she did. But later, between her testimony and Arlen Mayborne’s analysis of the file he’d taken off Terry, the whole story became clear.

The reports in the file reflected real production data, real profit-and-loss statements. Not the golden numbers Alan Butene, in his capacity as comptroller, showed IAT, the corporate parent. The reports in the file showed the factory losing money—a lot of money—its profits way down. In effect, the file was a second set of books. The real books.

Together with plant manager Fred Lyle, Alan had cooked up the scheme to doctor the reports in order to ensure the plant’s survival during the period of corporate consolidation in the late 1980s.

But Edie’s father found out, and threatened to tell the truth. Not only would that have put the plant in danger of closure, but discovery of the fraud would have meant the end of Butene’s and Lyle’s careers.

So they framed Charles Swanford. Holt discovered that Edie’s father had been treated for depression at that time, and speculated that, faced with the power of his adversaries, his conviction that they could make good on their threats, the shame he must have felt as the town shunned him, and the impending loss of his own livelihood and freedom, Charles jumped into the quarry.

“Implicating Charles was supposed to be temporary,” Hally Butene had explained in her gravelly voice while a tape recorder ran in the interview room. “A quick fix while they figured out what to do. But Charles jumped off that cliff.”

“And attacking Edie?”

She’d looked away, ashamed. Her voice was more wobbly, her tremors worse—a sure sign of the stress she was under. But she refused to give in to them. She squared her shoulders as best she could and looked him in the eye, facing her confessor as well as her actions, he’d supposed. “I’m very sorry about that. It was stupid. Desperate and utterly stupid. But I panicked. I was terrified they’d take away Alan’s pension if what he’d done came out. I’m afraid my husband wasn’t as crafty with his own investments as he was with Hammerbilt’s. The house and the pension are almost all I have left.” She sighed. “I never meant to hurt anyone. I just wanted to scare Edie off. No excuse, of course.” She gave a tiny, bitter laugh. “Things never do seem to go the way one planned, do they?”

But, as he pointed out, they’d gone that way for twenty years. Charles Swanford’s suicide played right into the conspirators’ hands. Between the mayor and the rest of the council they persuaded James to cover up the fraud. For the good of the town.

“I did it, son,” James told Holt in that same room at the police department. “I made the best decision I could. This town would have dried up and blown away if Hammerbilt had left.”

“So you let Edie’s family bear that burden.”

“I wasn’t proud of what I’d done, but I weighed the cost of the whole town against one family.”

Hannah Garvey was part of it, too, the only one Alan trusted to keep track of the discussions at the council meetings. When Holt took a closer look, her name was there as secretary on every copy of the minutes.

Of course she wasn’t as trustworthy as she must have appeared if she was blackmailing Butene. “I think she’d already started to get sick,” James said, “and was frightened of not having the money to pay for medical care.”

No wonder Alan Butene hadn’t stewarded his holdings well. They were being systematically drained.

But how Ellen got the twisted idea that Alan was her father, Holt could only speculate. Probably couldn’t imagine any other possibility. An analysis of Ellen’s bank account revealed a huge dent in her income after her mother died. Alan must have figured the bleeding could stop, but Ellen had gotten used to the extra cash. She needed some reason to get the payments reinstated, so maybe she invented one. It wasn’t so far-fetched. Hadn’t Amy Lyle also thought the same thing about Edie?

And the arsenic could have fried her brain anyway. She’d been breathing and ingesting it for years as it flaked away from the paint on the walls. It’s what she had used in the tea and cakes she prepared for the lethal tea party. Ground it up fine as dust.

On a hunch, he’d had Hannah’s body exhumed. Sure enough, an autopsy revealed she’d died of arsenic poisoning, not the cancer everyone assumed. Her mother had been Ellen’s first victim.

Closing in on the gravesite he’d come to see, he braced himself. Refused to get emotional. Plenty of time for that later. Instead, he busied himself with the details of the inspection. Walked around, examined everything. Was satisfied with what he found. The angel looked, well, like it was supposed to. And the newly turned earth of the Garvey graves was well away on the other side of the cemetery.

One last look, then he started back. He hoped he’d done the right thing. Hoped wherever they were the Swanfords would be pleased.

55