Polished Off (29 page)

“Can’t see,” she croaked.

I flicked a glance at her and caught a glimpse of her face, reddened as if she’d spent a day in the sun, her eyebrows and the hair around her face singed. Was it possible she’d been blinded? The thought horrified me. She was moving better now, so I dropped my arm from around her waist and grabbed her hand, pulling her after me as I plowed ahead. Sweat dripped down my sides and into my eyes.

A shaft of light pierced the gloomy tunnel of smoke. An open doorway beckoned with natural light promising a window. I ducked into the room, Daphne stumbling behind me and slammed the door shut. A desk. A phone. I rushed to the phone and punched in 911.

“Fire,” I gasped to the operator. “Oglethorpe Theater.” I eyed the fingers of smoke curling under the door, the fire trying to pry its way in. I ignored whatever the operator was telling me and dropped the receiver on the desk.

Daphne was at the window, straining to open it. She must be able to see
something
. “We’re trapped,” she said in the same sort of voice someone would say “we’re having broccoli for dinner” or “I think I’ll take Algebra next semester.”

“Move,” I said. I picked up the desk chair, an old wood and fabric contraption with casters at the end of the five spokes that spread out from its pedestal base, and ran full tilt at the window. The wheels smashed the glass and my momentum thrust the whole chair out. Its weight ripped it from my hands and it fell, clunking against the side of the building. I leaned out, gulping in great breaths of fresh air. The drop was no more than ten or twelve feet—less than the high board at the swimming pool, I told myself. A thin strip of grass close to the building was bordered by the sidewalk that led around back to the parking lot. Ripping my tee shirt off, I broke the stalagmites of glass out of the window frame so we could hold on and drop down.

Something in the door popped and a tongue of flame licked through the dry wood. “Take your shirt off,” I commanded Daphne. “Wrap your hands.” I yanked upward on the hem of her tee shirt and helped her pull it over her head. She swaddled her hands as I demonstrated, moving with more urgency now as the door disappeared in a wall of flame.

Sirens sounded in the distance but I knew the firefighters with their ladders would be too late to save us. The fire was eating across the floor.

“Go, go, go!” I shouted to Daphne as the roar of the fire drowned out my voice. She grabbed hold of the sill, swung her legs over, hung for a long moment and then let go. I barely watched her hit the ground before I was slinging my leg over the sill, trying not to slice it open on the jagged glass, and gingerly gripping the window frame with my shirt-covered hands. I hardly felt the glass jabbing into my palms as I cast a fleeting glance over my shoulder at the ground. Heat singed my fingers and I let go.

I landed awkwardly. A searing pain crumpled my leg and I fell back, banging my head on the cement sidewalk. I don’t think I was out for long—maybe thirty seconds or so—but when I came to, firefighters were pounding toward me, hauling a hose, and the air shimmered with heat. I pushed up on one elbow, wincing at the ax chops of pain gouging my head, and looked around. Daphne was gone.

 

 

THE FIREFIGHTERS HAULED ME BACK OUT OF HARM’S way and attacked the fire. Flames gouted from some of the windows and the streams of water playing over the building seemed to have little effect, other than to create great clouds of steam and add the odor of wet, burned wood to the air. It smelled familiar. It took me only a second to relate it to the smell of my mom’s veranda after firefighters soaked it to put out the small fire caused by a Molotov cocktail tossed by Constance DuBois’s murderer. I shivered.

The EMT looking at my hands barked an order to his partner, who wrapped a silvery blanket around my shoulders. I tried to tell him I wasn’t really cold, but all that came out were hacking coughs that brought tears to my eyes. “Daphne?” I managed to croak.

“Is someone else in there?” the EMT asked, dread pulling at his features.

“No, no. She jumped before me.”

“There was no one else here, miss,” the man said, forcing me to lie back on the stretcher. A small silver hoop glinted on his ear as he fitted an oxygen mask over my face. I lay quietly for a few minutes, enjoying the play of the cool, clean air against my ragged throat. The EMT gave me an injection “for the pain,” he said and I hovered on the brink of unconsciousness as they racked the stretcher up and wheeled me to the ambulance.

A CURTAIN. FOOTSTEPS AND CLATTERINGS. DISINFECTANT. I awoke disoriented and had just about figured out that I was lying on a gurney in the ER, a white sheet pulled to my chest, my hands feeling clunky and my head pounding, when someone yanked back the curtain shielding my bed with a rattle of metal rings against the rod. Agent Dillon stood there, an expression on his face somewhere between worry and anger.

“What the hell were you doing in that theater?” he asked in a voice that was almost a groan.

Mom nudged him aside and stopped at the end of the gurney, her hand holding my foot through the sheet. “I’m her mom,” she told Dillon. “I get to talk to her first. What the hell were you doing in that theater?”

I smiled at them both. “Hi.”

Tears slipped down Mom’s face and Agent Dillon handed her a handkerchief. “Oh, honey.”

“I’m okay.”

“Your poor hands.”

I freed my arms from under the sheets and looked at my hands. Swathed in gauze bandages with the fingers peeking out, they looked like weird mitts. Now that I thought about it, they did sort of throb. I guessed the tee shirt hadn’t done the trick.

“The doc says you’ll heal fine,” Dillon put in quickly. “No nerve damage. Just a lot of stitches. You won’t be holding shears for a while. And your ankle’s only sprained.”

Right then I didn’t care. Mom leaned over and kissed my cheek. “As soon as John’s done with you, I’m taking you home. Five minutes.” She gave Dillon a minatory look over the top of her glasses, kissed me again, and walked away, pulling the curtain shut behind her.

Dillon scraped a chair up to the bedside. Gurney-side. “What happened?”

His navy blue eyes never left mine as I told him about seeing the cut lock, the cry for help, Daphne setting the blaze and our escape.

“Sounds to me like that girl owes you her life,” he said when I finished.

I wiggled uncomfortably under the sheet. “I don’t know about that. Have you found her?”

He shook his head.

“She said she couldn’t see.”

He cocked one brow. “Maybe it was a temporary blindness from the glare. She sure took off fast enough, from what you said.”

“Did they save the theater?”

“It didn’t collapse, if that’s what you mean. But no one’s going to be putting on plays in it any time soon. Or pageants.”

I wondered if Marv would be happy or sad. A thought struck me. “My car?”

“What about it?”

I explained about leaving it behind the theater when I went in.

“Not there,” he said with a shake of his head. “Maybe Daphne took it.” He wrote down the license plate number. “I’ll put out an APB. With any luck, she won’t have gone far.”

“With any luck, my car will still be in one piece. I hope she has the courtesy to fill the tank.” Another thought struck me. “My purse was in there! She’s probably at the Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta, buying Prada and Gucci with my Visa.” Not that my limit would stretch to more than a designer scarf. Still, it was going to be a massive pain in the fanny cancelling my cards, replacing my driver’s license . . .

Dillon shook his head slightly and leaned in to lay his hand on my cheek. I could see a patch of stubble on his jaw where he hadn’t shaved evenly that morning. His eyes searched mine. “Grace—”

“Time’s up,” Mom said, popping her head back around the curtain. “There’s an aide with a wheelchair right here.”

Dillon rose slowly to his feet. He tried to pat my hand but got only gauze. A smile crooked his lips. “I’ll stop by later to let you know how things are going,” he promised.

“Come for dinner,” Mom offered.

“I’ve got a date,” I said.

Dead silence.

“You’re not going anywhere this evening,” Mom finally said. “Marty can come for dinner, too. And Althea, if she’s not tied up with Kwasi—or he can come, too—and Stella. And I’m sure Vonda will stop by to see how you’re doing.”

“I’ll bring beer,” Dillon volunteered with a smile so broad it made me want to sock him.

 

 

IN THE END, IT WAS ONLY MARTY AND MOM AND ME FOR dinner. Agent Dillon called to say he was tied up at the office and Althea and Kwasi already had plans. I wondered briefly if he’d heard about Daphne setting the theater on fire and regretted not giving me her number. Vonda stopped by earlier, hugged me convulsively, and read me the riot act. I lay passively in my bed upstairs at Mom’s, surrounded by the detritus of Alice Rose’s and my childhood. I plucked at the tufts on the chenille bedspread as Vonda vented.

“No more investigating,” she said, wagging a finger in my face. “You found the real murderer so now you can leave it alone. Let the police and the courts do their thing. I heard Simone is pressing the DA to drop all charges against Stella’s hubby in light of the evidence against Daphne.”

“I’m not so sure Daphne murdered Audrey and Barnes,” I said.

“Of course she did,” Vonda said incredulously, widening her eyes under the fringe of platinum bangs. “And she almost killed you, too.”

“I’m pretty sure that was an accident,” I said, conscious of pain in my palms and head.

“Accident, shmaccident. She lured you into the theater so she could kill you.”

“If she wanted to kill me, she had her chance after I jumped from the building.”

“She probably thought you were dead,” Vonda said. “Or she didn’t have time with the firemen almost there. You need to lay low until the police apprehend her.”

“She’s a kid, not a criminal mastermind . . . How long can it take for the police to catch up with her?”

 

 

DAPHNE WAS STILL MISSING AT DINNERTIME. MARTY filled us in on the chase after Mom dished him a huge serving of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and collard greens. I got substantially less because I didn’t have much appetite. Mom gave me a sharp look but didn’t say anything.

“She withdrew the maximum from her account at a bank ATM outside Brunswick half an hour after you called 911 and there’s been no trace of her, or your car, since,” Marty said.

“Great.” If I had to buy a new car, it would be that much longer before I could save up a down payment for a house. I struggled to spear a bit of collard greens with my bandaged hand but gave it up in frustration, dropping my fork on the table. Ignoring Mom who was preparing to feed me a bite off a fork she got from the utensil drawer, I unwrapped the bandages around my right hand and peeked under the dressing taped to my palm. It didn’t look as bad as I’d expected: a little red around the stitches—six in one spot and four in another—but not inflamed. I flexed my hand gently. It stung, but I could manage. I removed the bandage from the other hand, letting it spool to the floor.

“Grace Ann—” Mom began warningly.

I gave her the “I’m thirty years old and can be stupid if I want to” look and forked up a bite of meatloaf. I was hungrier than I realized. I inhaled half the meal while Marty talked.

“Michaelson’s lawyer is lobbying to have all charges against him dropped. The DA is waffling. The case against Daphne is purely circumstantial, but then so’s the one against Michaelson.”

“Except for the cape,” I reminded him.

He waved his fork dismissively. “Anyone could have dumped it in Michaelson’s pickup. The DA knows that’s not enough to convict. And Daphne Oliver’s motive is stronger: she wanted revenge on the pageant she saw as killing her sister. No one’s quite sure why Michaelson would want to kill his girlfriend.”

I guessed word of the pregnancy hadn’t leaked.

“What about the pageant?” Mom asked. “I hope that’s finally been cancelled.”

Marty shook his head and swallowed quickly so he could answer. “Nope. Jodi cancelled tonight’s evening gown competition, but she’s going to combine it with the finale tomorrow night. They’ll do the evening gown bit, take a short intermission to tabulate the scores, announce the finalists, and crown Miss Magnolia Blossom.”

“Does the woman have no sense?” Mom asked.

“I guess the contestants will have to manage their own hair,” I said, holding up my hands.

Marty took one gently in his and kissed my fingertips. “They’ll get by,” he said. “You just rest.”

“I second that,” Mom said, rising to stack the dishes in the sink.

“I’m feeling a lot better,” I said. “My headache’s almost gone. A good night’s sleep and I’ll be good as new.”

Mom peered at me skeptically.