Authors: Anne McAneny
Chapter
50
Allison… present
“Hi, Ray,” I said into the phone as I passed the carload of women who molded Smitty into something other than a lifeless, shapeless blob. I’d left him sitting in Mommy’s dining room, trying to remove the indentations my fingers had left on his face.
“Allison, you don’t sound very happy
,” Ray said.
“Sorry. Just had a disappointing conversation and I’m beginning to wonder why I
accepted the invitation into this cesspool in the first place.”
“
Maybe this will cheer you up,” Ray said. “I sent you the picture of the mysterious Shawn Smart. Not great quality, but based on my TV-watching experience, it’s definitely enhanceable.”
Perhaps Ray imagined that with all the detective work I’d been doing, I had access to a sophisticated lab full of chiseled CSI men and high-heeled forensic women. He’d be so disappointed by the messy interior of my car and the two lame stoners at VideoMagic.
“Thanks, Ray. Hey, did Jasper go outside on the morning before I arrived?”
“
As a matter of fact, yes, he must have, because he rushed in through the front door at some point. That’s when he mentioned your name. Said to be sure to look out for Allison Fennimore and to send her up as soon as she arrived.”
“
How did he seem when he came in from outside?”
“Um, he looked… confused.
But that wasn’t too unusual.”
Confused
? Great. By his own version of events? Or by the version Smitty had tried to convince him of?
“
Ray, this is important. Did he seem disoriented or… poisoned?”
“
What? No. He actually seemed energized. Practically ran towards the elevators.”
“Ran? Was that unusual?”
“A little. He wasn’t really a hop-to-it type. More of a mellow, I’ll-get-to-it-when-I-get-to-it dude.”
Mellow was right. As in
I grow pot in my tomato garden and what are you gonna do about it
mellow. What was so important that Jasper needed to run back to his room before my visit? Is that when he wrote the code in the yearbooks? After his conversation with Smitty, did he fear he might not live to see my arrival?
As Ray and I
talked, I opened my laptop and checked my e-mail. The inbox showed a new message from Ray’s personal account. I clicked on its attachment and saw before me the mysterious Shawn Smart. Ray was right. It needed serious improvement. The driver didn’t appear to be much more than a white dot, probably the reflection of the camera flash. Some of the profile was visible but when I enlarged it, the face turned into thousands of tiny squares blurring into nothingness. A perfect description of Smitty, actually.
“I’ve got the picture, Ray. Thanks. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
“Roger Wilco,” Ray said. “Over and out.”
I disconnected and started my car
. Mrs. Smith stood on the sidewalk a few feet in front of me. I shoved the car into drive and moseyed past her, slow and steady to match my defiant stare. Fifteen minutes later, I pulled into VideoMagic.
I
was arrested almost immediately.
Chapter
51
Allison… present
Officer Ervin Johnston still had a bump on his head from where Charlie had bopped him with the flashlight. He made a point of touching it tenderly every time we made eye contact, conveying the promise of revenge if he ever got me alone in the woods again. For now, he remained a silent, hunched figure in the background as Detective Blake Barkley made like his name and barked at me.
“So after you retrieved this long-hidden evidence, you decided to investigate it yourself rather than turn it over to the police
?” He seemed genuinely pissed.
“Somehow,
” I said, “I didn’t think the Lavitte police would respond well to a Fennimore showing up with evidence contrary to local legend.”
“To tell you the truth, it ain’t evidence of much. Except
for that last picture.”
“What is this last picture you keep referring to?” I asked.
“I have no obligation to tell you,” he said.
Man,
the cartoon dog was downright bitchy. Where was the smirk?
“As soon as I lawyer up,
” I said, “life becomes tougher for you. Now I’ve agreed to sit here and tell you everything without representation because I’ve done nothing wrong. But if you’re not going to share with me, then I’ll hire the meanest, most expensive lawyer in North Carolina and he’ll comb through every detail of this investigation. He’s sure to find more than a few procedural errors on your part.”
I glanced pointedly at Ervin’s bruised head
, then reloaded. “Awful lot of bad publicity coming the department’s way if the media finds out you’ve bungled another Fennimore case.”
Detective Barkley waved Ervin out of the room, taking out his frustration
s with me on the skinny officer. Ervin slinked out, his eyes shifting from me to the door several times until he finally left us alone. The detective pulled out a photo packet similar to the one I’d opened earlier.
“All right,” Barkley said, “the VideoMagic guys called us when they found this picture stuck in their machine.
The last part of your order, apparently.”
He slapped a remarkably clear photo
down on the table. Shelby’s dead yet vibrant eyes stared up at me. I didn’t realize how green her eyes had been, so pretty against her red hair. They protruded perhaps more than they had in real life, as if forced outward from the pressure of the noose that broke her neck. Her splayed, left arm lay at an awkward, and just plain wrong, angle, like a bad Picasso painting. The rope around her neck seemed to be trying to crawl away from her, as if ashamed of what it had done. In contrast, her pained body rested on a soft layer of hay. She could almost have been floating. Just as Jasper had described.
“Want
to tell us why you were in possession of a picture of the dead body that your father might have killed?”
Jasper must have snapped one last photo after the body hit the ground,
maybe when Smitty had run out to find Bobby. It would have all occurred during that hazy phase, when Jasper was clearly in shock. I reached into my purse and pulled out Jasper’s letter, unable to shift my eyes away from the photo. “It’s all in here. You have to go get Smitty, uh, John Smith. He’s headed out of town.”
“Why
do I have to get him?”
“He
…”—I pointed to the photo—“…he did this.”
Within
five minutes, Detective Barkley had dispatched a car to go after Smitty’s Jeep Grand Cherokee which would be heading north towards D.C. right about now. Somehow, I didn’t think Smitty’s security clearance at the Pentagon would be upgraded after this.
“Detective,” I said when he returned to the room, “there’s something else.”
“What else could you possibly have, Allison?”
“
I have a picture of Smitty pulling into Ravine Psychiatric Clinic the same morning Jasper Shifflett went into a coma.”
Admirably, it only took Detective Barkley about a millisecond to understand the implication.
A hint of excitement glinted from his eyes. “Were you following him? How’d you get that?”
I told him the story of the broken door at Ravine
, along with its exciting sequel,
The Warranty Claim
.
“Where
is this picture?” he asked.
I gestured to m
y laptop at the far end of the table. They had removed it from my car, along with the photos under my seat and the extra copy of Jasper’s letter. I regretted not having made an extra copy of the photos, too. If Mayor Kettrick somehow got to them, I’d have nothing but Jasper’s letter, and I’d already seen how Smitty could shred that with his perfectly woven lies.
“
It’s in my e-mail. But it needs enhancement. Do you guys have that kind of technology?”
He frowned. “
Show me what you’ve got.”
I accessed my
account and opened the photo attachment. “There. That’s the person who signed in as a fake pharmaceutical sales rep the morning Jasper was killed. Smitty admitted to me that he was there. I think it’s him.”
Detective Barkley squinted and craned his neck but couldn’t make much of the photo. “Looks like we should have stayed at VideoMagic,” he said
“That’s why I was headed back there,” I said.
The smirk returned, and his mood lightened, but he kept glancing
up at the conference room window, uncharacteristically anxious. Maybe worried the whole case would fall apart if anyone knew how close we were to changing the legend.
He tucked my laptop under his arm.
“What do you say we go and see if those two potheads can’t help us out?”
He stood and held the door open for me. W
e emerged from the interrogation room, the hopeful mood dampened considerably by the surprise appearance of Mrs. Georgia Kettrick. I glanced in a panic at the laptop. She couldn’t be allowed near it.
A
somewhat flabbergasted Detective Barkley subordinated himself to Mrs. Kettrick like a common lackey. “Mrs. Kettrick, we weren’t expecting you today. Did Delorma offer you some coffee? Do you need to see the chief?”
Really? Her husband served as mayor a lifetime ago and they still treated her like she could wipe out their
careers in the blink of an eye?
“Thank you, Blake,” she said
, the familiar moniker causing an unexpected flare of jealousy to shoot through me. “I’m actually here to speak with Ms. Fennimore, if I may.”
“Of course,” he said.
“I’m sure Ms. Fennimore would be delighted.”
I didn’t appreciate him answering for me and
told him so with a cutting glare. Then I returned my attention to the blond intruder.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kettrick,” I said. “We’re in the middle of something here.”
“Your arrest, apparently,” she said.
“Well aren’t you the best-informed person in all of Lavitte
?” I said. “And that’s saying something.”
Detective Barkley nearly injured himself trying to brush away my
cheekiness. “No. What? We’re good. We can spare a minute or two for the mayor’s wife, Allison. No problem. Why don’t you two use the conference room?”
What was wrong with him?
Overdue for a promotion, most likely. I tuned out his sputtering and locked eyes with Georgia Kettrick. While her face held itself together with its usual, poised grace, a storm brewed inside.
“Perhaps we can speak in private,
Allison. Please? As a personal favor?” Her voice resonated at just the right volume to convey both power and serenity.
“Fine,” I said.
I was surprised Detective Barkley didn’t scurry in before us to mop the floor and wipe down the table. Hell, I wouldn’t have blinked if he put tennis balls on the chair legs to keep them from scraping. But he restricted himself to opening the door and gesturing like a bellhop at a five-star hotel.
“All yours, Mrs. Mayor,” he said. “I’ll have Delorma bring in that coffee.”
I looked up at him from under cynical brows. “I’ll take mine with cream,” I said.
No sooner had he closed the door than Mrs. Kettrick shed her mask of civility.
She knew I knew. Mrs. Smith must have gotten to her. “When I think about how Bobby could have fallen when he climbed the rafter to build that swing.” She shook her head in that little way she liked to do. “I get nervous just thinking about it. He would have made a fine engineer, don’t you think? Maybe a bridge designer. Probably would have been the host of his own show by now, teaching kids how to build things. They tend to hire the best-looking people to host those shows, have you noticed?”
The room suddenly seemed rather small and Mrs. Kettrick’s purse quite large. Delorma had surely turned off the metal detector in order to spare the mayor’s wife
any inconvenience. I glanced at the door, but Mrs. Kettrick stood firmly between me and a safe exit as she fantasized about Bobby’s TV bookings.
She
glanced up suddenly and I saw Bobby’s face. Not the good-looking one from the yearbook, or the chiseled one they’d flashed at the reunion. No, this face transported me back to third grade when I’d watched fifth-grade Bobby beat the daylights out of Jesse Morrison because he hadn’t let Bobby cheat off him on a test. It had taken the teachers a full minute to fight through the crowd and reach the scene. By that time, there was so much blood, they didn’t know whether to press the grimy towel to Jesse’s nose, eyes, or lips. They’d settled for his lips in order to stifle his moans.
“Bobby was a good boy,” Mrs. Kettrick said. “Not his fault he was born with an explosive temper.” She reached behind her and lowered the
shutter blind on the window of the door. For the first time, I noticed an ugly, black and brown valance above the door that matched nothing else in the room. No doubt Delorma’s decorating skills at work.
Once
the blind was lowered, Mrs. Kettrick snapped it shut. The air in the room stilled itself, each molecule making itself noticeably less available. “The mayor wanted to take him to see a psychiatrist, maybe put him on medication, but can you imagine how people would have talked?”
Odd. According to salon gossip, it was she who wanted to medicate Bobby, and Mr. Mayor who would have been mortified by a psychiatric history popping up on Bobby’s future ESPN profile
.
“And then your father… your father, Allison, had to go and gun my poor Bobby down. For what?
A few cheap tools? He was just a boy. Innocent in every way aside from some teenage pranks.”
Had to remind myself to update Wikipedia that
teenage pranks
now included beating people to bloody pulps and stringing girls up for sex.
“
Bobby had nothing to do with Shelby dying,” she said. “I know the whole story. Smitty, of course, ran home like the spineless sourpuss he was and told Elise everything. And you know Elise. Can’t keep her mouth shut for a second. Why, it was only a few hours after I’d found out about Bobby’s death and there she was at my door, telling me how Bobby built that swing and how that poor girl got stuck and how Bobby was only trying to break in to the garage to get rope so he could save her. Then Elise had the audacity to lay her cover story on me, probably the same one Smitty told you.”
“What story is that, Mrs. Kettrick?”
“That Smitty and Jasper saved the girl and sent her on her merry way. But I knew the truth. I knew how she died.”
“How
? How could you possibly know?”
“The evidence was all over the barn. I’m not stupid.
I knew where Bobby was all day. I always knew where he was, every day. Despite my grieving, I dragged Elise over there and showed her that her boy was a fat-out liar. To be completely honest, I hadn’t pieced everything together until I spoke to little Jasper at five that morning, when I realized Bobby still wasn’t home. My goodness, that Jasper was thin. Never ate very well at that disgusting trailer. Amazing what a little offer of food and caring will get a child to admit to.”
“You’ve known the truth about Shelby Anderson all these years
and you still let it hang over my family? Over my mother? What kind of—”
“Oh, please, Allison, spare me the theatrics. That’s so unlike you. Did you really expect
that I would come out and support the killer of my son? That I would clean the slate for him, even a little? My goodness, when that extra bit came out about the matching ropes, well, that was just icing on the cake. The punishment could never be severe enough for the murderer of my Bobby.”
She had a point, but it didn’t lessen the heaviness
that came with the truth of her revelation. And suddenly, I felt crushed. It wasn’t just this claustrophobic room with her sucking all the sanity out of it. It was the entire town of Lavitte pressing in on me from all sides—above, below, from the inside out—until I disappeared. Seemed to be what they all wanted… for the little Fennimore girl to slip away so they could pretend she never existed. After all, the Fennimore mother was fading and the brother was locked away. Why did that pesky Allison Fennimore have to blow back into town?