Lacy shook her head slowly from side to side. “We forgot to put it in the Mercedes. So I buried it.”
The same anticipation Lacy felt lit Melinda’s eyes. “Where? Can you still find it?”
“I know exactly where it’s at.”
Digging it up would be the only difficult part.
“We have to get it.”
“No.” Lacy held her back when she would have rushed from the room. “This killer wants both of us dead. You have two children to worry about, Mel. You can’t take this kind of risk.”
“There’s no way I’m letting you do this alone.”
For the first time in ten years, Lacy felt she had her friend back.
But she couldn’t risk losing her again.
Nigel slammed down the phone. Where the hell was she? He sends her off to Europe to enjoy herself and she won’t even answer the phone when he calls. This was her fault anyway. If she hadn’t crawled into bed with that cutthroat bastard, he wouldn’t be in this position.
He’d taken care of everything once, had taken care of her even when she didn’t deserve it. And this was the thanks he got for it.
Nigel supposed if he hadn’t been so preoccupied being angry with his wife he might have heard the door open to his home office.
But he didn’t.
He wasn’t even aware anyone had come into the room until it was too late.
Chapter 18
“P
lease, Lacy, don’t try to do this alone. Call Rick. Let him help.”
Lacy held her ground. “I can’t do that until I know for sure. For one thing, we can’t be sure who actually killed Charles—Nigel or his wife. Or did he hire Bent Thompson to do it? We can’t do anything that will tip our hand. No one knows we’ve figured out this much. We have to keep it that way until we have the evidence in our hands. Hell, I can’t even remember if the wedding band was a woman’s. I thought it was Charles’s. What if it wasn’t a woman’s?”
“It had to be a woman’s,” Melinda argued. “Charles’s ring was in the Mercedes with him. I told you that.”
Lacy nodded distractedly.
Melinda wrung her hands. “I don’t like this. You know we can trust Rick. We can’t do this alone.”
She was right, Lacy did trust Rick. But this had nothing to do with trust. This was about making sure she didn’t screw this up. All she had to do was go to her grandmother’s old place and dig up the suitcase. Any additional steps between here and there could somehow ruin everything. His men would have to know and she didn’t want to trust anyone else until she had that bag in her hand. And what if she was wrong? She knew the gold band was in there, she just couldn’t be sure it really meant anything.
Maybe she wasn’t making sense, but she’d lived with this burden for ten years. All four of them had let plain old fear keep them from learning the truth. She wasn’t about to let anything get in her way this time. Once they had the bag, then they could call Rick.
“I need to go straight to where the suitcase is,” Lacy insisted. “I don’t want to take any chances. And I need you to act as a decoy.”
“I don’t like this, Lacy. I don’t like it at all.”
“No one will know I’m even gone,” she urged. “Anyone who’s watching us will follow you.”
It took several more minutes to persuade Melinda, but that was okay because there was another hour before dark and Lacy needed the cover of darkness.
When she’d finally gotten Melinda to agree to her plan, they set into making preparations.
First they stuffed a sweatshirt with towels. Melinda dug up a long dark wig her daughter had used one Halloween. A half-gallon milk jug would have to serve as the head. In the garage they put the makeshift mannequin together in the front passenger seat of Melinda’s car using a king-size pillow to prop it up.
“That looks like a stuffed sweatshirt and a wig on a milk jug,” Melinda commented drily.
Lacy laughed for the first time in days. “Yeah, well, in the dark maybe it’ll pass.”
“Maybe.”
Lacy rounded up the shovel she’d found in the garage storeroom and a heavy-duty flashlight. She patted the pocket of her sweatshirt. “I’ve got my cell phone. Got the flashlight and shovel. I’m ready.” She wore a sweatshirt, in spite of the heat, to ward off mosquitoes, plus it was the only dark long-sleeved garment Melinda owned. She’d always been the one to wear bright colors. Jeans and sneakers completed her getup.
“I’m still not feeling so good about this, Lace.”
Lacy held up a hand. “Shush, Mel. We’ve agreed. Let’s not go backward.” An ache echoed through her. “Remember, we’re doing this for Cassidy and Kira.”
Melinda nodded.
“You back out of the garage and drive to the Jacksons’. If you pull up next to Kira’s rental, the passenger side of your car will be camouflaged from the street.” She remembered that from the other night. She wasn’t sure why the rental hadn’t been turned in yet. Maybe the family was still too distraught. “Get out and go in at the side entrance, and before your tail can get a good view you’ll be inside. He’ll assume he simply didn’t see me get out because of the bushes.”
“Okay. What do I tell anyone who asks about you?”
“Tell them I have a migraine.” Lacy hadn’t suffered from a migraine in years, but most people didn’t know that. They would only remember that as a young teen she’d had a number of debilitating headaches.
“When I have the suitcase I’ll call you and then you can meet me at City Hall or Rick’s house, wherever he is.”
Melinda exhaled a heavy breath. “Well, let’s do it then.”
Lacy hugged her. “I love you, Mel.” She wished she had said those words to Cassidy and Kira since coming back to Ashland, but she hadn’t. She knew they had known how she felt, but she realized now more than ever how fleeting life could be. A person should say what they feel…often.
“I love you, Lace.” Melinda drew back, her eyes watery. “Please, please be careful.”
Lacy smiled and struggled to hold back her own tears. “Time to go.”
Melinda loaded into her car while Lacy quickly loosened the lightbulbs in the garage-door opener—the less light the better. Lacy stepped back into the deepest shadows of the garage as her friend sent the overhead door into the up position and prepared to back down her driveway.
When the garage door closed once more, Lacy rushed inside the house and watched the street from between the slats of the blinds in the entry hall. Sure enough, no sooner had Melinda glided off down the street than a police cruiser lit out after her.
“Worked like a charm.”
Just in case, Lacy used the back door and stole her way around to her SUV. She tossed her shovel and flashlight into the back seat and headed for her grandmother’s farm just outside town. She stayed on the back streets in hopes of avoiding any police cruisers.
Twenty minutes later she’d parked next to the old Oliver home place. The place where her father had grown up. Where he and her mother had lived the first few years of their marriage. And finally, where Lacy had enjoyed listening to stories told by her seemingly ancient grandmother as she rocked back and forth in her cane-back rocker on the shady front porch.
No one had lived here in fifteen years, since her grandmother had passed away, but her parents kept the place up. Couldn’t bear to part with it. Lacy sometimes wondered if they expected her to come back and produce them a gaggle of grandkids. Both her mother and father were only children, and so was Lacy. But they had spoken fondly many times of having a little herd of grandkids.
Rick popped smack into the middle of that thought.
She shook her head to clear it. She had to be out of her mind. Maybe she was still in shock after losing her dear friends or maybe she was just slipping over the edge and didn’t know it yet.
The moon, full and round and hanging almost to the ground, lit her path as she walked past the house and across the massive backyard. They didn’t make backyards like this anymore. These days, most were scarcely big enough to hold a small patio.
But this—she surveyed the moonlit landscape—was what one referred to as sweeping. An ocean of grass bordered by trees as old as time and as tall as giants.
She’d walked this path a million times with her grandmother and always ended up in the same place, through the woods, across the cornfield and to the stream. Lacy had loved the stream in the woods on the other side of the field her grandmother had leased to a local farmer after her husband had passed away.
Lacy made her way through the underbrush, weaving between the big old trees, until she reached the place where she and her grandmother had buried Trax, her older-than-dirt hound dog. That dog had taken up space on the front porch for as long as she could remember. And when Lacy was sixteen the old fellow had finally died. Two years later her grandmother had joined her beloved husband and hound dog in the hereafter.
The family cemetery was at the far end of the property near a duck pond. Olivers for several generations were buried there.
As much as she loved her grandmother, Lacy didn’t want to join them anytime soon.
She stopped at the spot where she’d buried Charles’s suitcase ten years ago and stared down at the dead leaves and lush plants that had grown over the spot.
Dropping to her knees, she said a little prayer for Cassidy and Kira. She wished again that they’d realized the truth years ago so they wouldn’t have had to live with this horrendous burden. But they’d stuck by their vow to never speak of it again. They’d stuck by one another.
There was something to be said for that kind of loyalty. The sad thing was that in doing so they had protected a murderer. That murderer had almost succeeded in getting away with not one but at least three murders.
Time to stop her once and for all.
But what if the ring told them nothing? Pushing aside that doubt, Lacy jammed the shovel into the ground. It was harder than she’d expected. But it had been ten years. And she hadn’t forgotten how hard the digging had been that chilly night.
She shuddered at the memory of the snow falling down around her. It almost never snowed in Ashland, but that night it had.
Getting back to her feet, Lacy put her full weight behind the digging and that helped considerably. Another memory assaulted her. The blisters she’d had on her hands the next day.
“Damn.”
She should have thought to bring gloves, too.
“No pain, no gain,” she mumbled as she thrust the shovel deep into the ground.
The one other thing besides the icy temperature she recalled vividly from that night was the idea that she should bury the suitcase as deep as possible. She felt reasonably certain she would regret that decision before she was finished here tonight.
But then, if she hadn’t, critters might have dug it up and dragged it off. She damn sure hadn’t wanted to take a risk like that.
Grunting with each pound into the well-packed earth, she comforted herself with the knowledge that she might soon be able to nail the scum who had killed her friends. She couldn’t actually say whether this same person would have been the one to kill Pamela Carter, but there was a good possibility that whoever left that ring had killed Charles and murdered two of her best friends. Lacy wanted that person to pay for killing her friends. Neither Cassidy or Kira had had any idea that they were concealing the one piece of evidence that might lead the authorities to the real killer. So their deaths had been for nothing.
Fury flamed deep in Lacy’s gut. She was the one who’d packed the suitcase. She would see that justice was done.
The crack of a breaking branch jerked her attention to the right. She froze. Had someone followed her here? She didn’t remember seeing any lights in her rearview mirror.
She grasped the shovel’s handle more tightly and drew it up to her shoulder in preparation of swinging it like a bat.
“Lacy?”
Lacy wilted with the withdrawal of adrenaline. “Mel, what the hell are you doing here?”
Melinda cut through the trees into the small clearing where Lacy worked. “I couldn’t let you do this alone.” She clicked on her flashlight and shone it on the ground. “Why don’t you let me dig awhile?”
Lacy released a lungful of tension. “You’re here. I guess you might as well.” She passed the shovel to Melinda. “I won’t even ask how you managed to get away without being followed.”
Melinda plunged the shovel into the ground. “I borrowed a car from one of the guests.”
Lacy shook her head. “What’s a grand-larceny charge after you’re sent up the river for concealing evidence in a homicide?”
Melinda hesitated in her work. “I hope that’s a rhetorical question, because I have no idea.”
“Just dig.”
A clunk accompanied the shovel’s next lunge into the earth.
“I think maybe I hit something.”
Lacy got back on her knees and slowly moved the flashlight’s beam over the area. A black nylon corner jerked her attention back to the spot when she passed it.
“That’s it.”
They both started to dig then, using their hands, anticipation driving their movements.
When they had unearthed the black overnight bag, they sat back on their haunches and caught their breath.
“You poke around inside,” Mel said. “If we turn it upside down we might lose the ring in the darkness.”
Lacy nodded. “Good idea.”
The zipper resisted at first but finally surrendered to her tugs. The sound buzzed in the night like a cluster of dry flies fighting to escape their shells.
She reached inside and dug through the damp, musty articles of clothing. She’d found the ring after packing the other stuff. It should be close to the top…unless it had filtered down to the bottom.
Finally her fingers encountered the cold, smooth circle of gold.
Her heart jolted. “Got it.”
She pulled her hand out of the bag and opened it to display the ring lying on her palm.
“It looks like a man’s ring,” Mel said.
Holding her breath, Lacy took it between her thumb and forefinger. “Hold the light steady, Mel.”
Lacy tilted the ring, peered at the inside of the band that represented love and commitment.
“Can you see anything?” Mel wondered aloud.
“I see what might be an—”
“Give me the ring.”
Lacy’s head came up at the fierce order.
She blinked, unable to reconcile what her eyes saw with what her mind knew.
Melinda spoke first. “Renae?”
Renae Rossman. She stood over them, a gun in her hand.
Lacy squeezed her eyes shut just for a second to make sure she wasn’t seeing things.
“Give me the ring,” Renae commanded.
Lacy felt her hand moving toward the other woman’s.
“This can’t be your ring, it’s—”
And then she knew. Renae had married the older man for his money, but she’d needed more. A younger lover…one who gave her what her much older husband could or would not.
“Now stand up.”
Lacy jerked at the harshly uttered words.
“You and Charles were lovers.” Melinda’s words weren’t a question. Like Lacy, she had just come to terms with what Renae’s appearance meant.
Renae laughed hatefully. “We were more than lovers, sweet little Mel. I was his first. We’d been in love for years before he screwed up and got you pregnant.”
Lacy slowly got to her feet, the fingers of one hand curled around the shovel’s handle. Melinda was already standing and, judging by her stance, was madder than hell. Lacy looked at the gun, then at Renae. Somehow this just didn’t fit, but fear kept her from being able to analyze what it all meant.