Now she understood the problem and exactly where this was going. “Where’s Melinda?” She looked past her friends, but there was no one else in the entry hall.
“She’s upstairs resting,” Cassidy explained. “She spoke to her son today and she was so upset afterward that she had to take a sedative.”
“Oh, God.” Damn those Ashlands. “I’m going to see her.”
Cassidy held up a hand for her to wait. “You need to tell us what’s going down between you and Chief Summers, Lace. We’re all becoming troubled by the way this looks.”
Fury detonated inside Lacy. She’d had more than enough today. “Nothing is going down, Cassidy. You know what he’s doing. He’s putting the pressure on me, trying to get me to talk. I won’t.”
Kira blinked, clearly uncertain of her stand now that she’d heard Lacy’s side of things. “Why is he singling you out?” she asked.
The answer to that was none of their business, had no relevance on Charles’s death whatsoever. But she knew how it would look, especially since she’d kept it a secret for so long. “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe he thinks he can intimidate me. I don’t know. But it’s not going to work.”
“A man like Summers doesn’t act without fore-thought and reason, Lacy,” Cassidy stated pointedly. “He has a reason for leaning on you. You need to think long and hard and see if you come up with anything that he might consider a weakness.”
Lacy had to bite her tongue to keep from yelling
It’s sex, okay?
But she kept quiet. In this situation the truth wouldn’t help. She understood that with complete clarity.
“I’ll go check on Melinda.” Kira rushed off as if she feared the worst was yet to come.
“Something’s going on with you, Lacy, and I don’t understand why you’re keeping it from the rest of us.”
Maybe Cassidy was right. Maybe keeping them in the dark was wrong.
“I need to know what really happened, Cass. I can’t live with this another ten years, especially now. The whole world knows he’s dead. I can’t pretend it was just a nightmare anymore.”
Cassidy searched her face for a long while before she spoke. “You know what happened, Lacy. You were there. Don’t pretend innocence. We’re all in this together. Equally guilty. The moment one starts believing they’re less liable than the others, that’s when things start falling apart. We took a vow. Are you going to renege on that solemn promise?”
Lacy ran her fingers through her hair. God, she was so tired. She didn’t want to think anymore. “No, Cassidy, of course not. I just need to know for my own peace of mind.”
Cassidy leaned closer, as if what she had to say next was top secret. “Then I suggest you look deep inside yourself. That’s where you’ll find the answers you seek.”
Cassidy assured Lacy that she would talk to her tomorrow and then she left. Lacy watched her drive away, confusion leaving her too stunned to utter more than goodbye and the occasional acknowledging grunt.
She’d been right.
Cassidy did believe she was the one who had killed Charles.
How was that possible?
“Did Cassidy leave?”
Lacy jumped at the sound of Kira’s voice. She’d been so focused on watching the street, even after Cassidy drove away, that she hadn’t realized anyone had come into the entry hall.
“Yeah. She said she’d call tomorrow.”
Kira shrugged. “I know she’s being hard on you, Lace, but she’s just worried. Anything we say could work against us. We have to be very careful right now and getting all tangled up with Rick is risky.”
“It isn’t what you think, Kira. He followed me, I didn’t invite him or encourage him in any way.” Lacy left out the part about visiting Mr. Carter. She couldn’t be sure how relevant Pamela Carter’s disappearance was to Charles’s murder just yet. Considering the way Kira and Cassidy had looked at her with utter suspicion, the less she said the better…for all their sakes.
“We’re all nervous as hell, especially Melinda. You should have seen her after she talked to Chuckie. It was heartbreaking. He refuses to come home or even talk about what’s happened.”
“Do you think the Ashlands are behind this?” Lacy wanted to shake both of them until they came to their senses and saw how lucky they were to have a daughter-in-law like Melinda.
Kira sighed. “I don’t know. Melinda didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t push. I was a little upset myself after having seen you with Summers right on your tail.”
Lacy shoved a handful of hair behind her ear and let her irritation override her other emotions briefly. “You know if we’re all equally guilty, then why am I feeling like the guilty one here? You and Cassidy are acting like you’ve already decided I’m the one and I have to be honest, I don’t like that feeling.”
Kira grabbed Lacy’s hands and held them tightly, her eyes shiny with emotion. “We’re not judging you, Lace. We’re just worried about you, that’s all. Your vulnerability has been showing since we got here. We just don’t want you to make a mistake.”
Lacy couldn’t bear it any longer. She wrapped her arms around Kira and hugged her. She needed to feel the closeness, the unity. But what she felt was doubt, tension, and worse…restraint.
“I’m okay, I promise,” Lacy said as she drew back. “You guys don’t have to worry about me.”
But they were worried. Kira and Cassidy were convinced that Lacy had killed Charles.
Did that mean that the two of them were innocent? Or was it simply a ploy by one or both to shift doubt, as she’d considered earlier?
When Kira had gone, her cell phone ringing before she could even get out the door, Lacy tried to occupy herself for a while then went upstairs and checked on Melinda. She still slept soundly. Lacy suddenly felt damned tired herself. It wouldn’t hurt her to go to bed early tonight. Sitting around in Melinda’s house, allowing the memories to assault her was definitely not something she looked forward to. And nothing she’d found on the hundred or so television channels had distracted her.
She would just lock up and make herself a bed on the chaise longue in Melinda’s room. That way if Melinda woke up she’d be there for her.
With the security system activated, Lacy headed for the stairs once more. It was barely nine, but she was beat.
When she lifted her foot to the first tread the telephone rang.
For all of two seconds she considered letting the machine get it, but it could be one of Melinda’s children and besides, the continued ringing might wake her.
Lacy trudged back to the living room and grabbed the receiver before it could ring the third time. “Hello.”
“I’m the only one who knows the truth, Lacy.”
The voice. Her heart stilled in her chest. The voice from the caller the other night.
“Who is this?”
“I know your secret, Lacy, and you’re all going to regret what you did.”
Chapter 8
B
ent Thompson’s luck had always run bad. Whether it was his mean-as-hell daddy or his mealymouthed mama, or some other relative he’d never heard of who had passed that unfortunate trait on to him he couldn’t say. He’d read a lot about DNA in the past few years. Seemed everything about a person, from the color of his eyes to the hair on his ass, could be traced back to his DNA. That being the case, he was fucked from the day he was born.
Not one damned member of his family had ever amounted to anything. Plain old white trash. That’s what he’d been called for as far back as he could remember. Same went for his folks.
He’d lived in dumps in various cities around the south. Memphis had been his favorite, but he couldn’t go back there. He’d crossed the wrong people.
Some folks liked holding grudges.
Personally, he didn’t believe in wasting the energy to hang on to anything unless he had something to gain from it. That’s why he’d come back to Ashland as soon as he heard the news.
He’d been hanging on to something that might one day provide him with everything he would ever need.
It wasn’t a big deal, nothing complicated. Just a small handgun, a .38 Smith & Wesson. Wasn’t even a top-of-the-line model. But it was worth its weight in gold a thousand times over.
This was the weapon used to put a bullet right through Charles Ashland’s black heart. At least that’s what he’d heard about the way the poor bastard died.
“I don’t know why you kept that,” his host remarked blandly, snapping Bent from his reflections.
Bent smiled. Some people thought they were immune, never expected anything bad to happen to them, even when they deserved it. Then when their naughty deed came back to bite them in the ass they whined about it. That was the problem with being born anything other than plain white trash. Folks who had something always expected things to work out, expected more. Maybe it was in their DNA. Who knew?
“I kept it,” Bent said as he studied the weapon in the nifty Ziploc bag he’d slipped it into ten years ago, “because I wanted some insurance for the future. You know, an investment, sort of like a 401k.”
“What do you want from me?”
Now they were getting somewhere. A lot of people had benefited from young Charles’s untimely death, the way Bent saw it. His wife had shed a cheating, abusive husband. His business partner was finally rid of the star who always outshone him. His own father no longer had to worry about his son’s deviant activities tarnishing his spotless political reputation. Sweet little Pamela no longer had to obsess about someone else having the man she wanted so badly. Then there were the others like Lacy Jane Oliver and her friends and countless husbands around town, all of whom had reason to want Charles Ashland, Junior, dead.
But only one person had killed him. And Bent held the single item that could connect the killer to the victim.
The weapon.
“Let me get back to you,” Bent said smugly. “I need some time to decide what the rest of your life is worth. That’s what hangs in the balance, wouldn’t you say?”
Bent didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed out of the chair and walked away. No need to hang around. Time could be a formidable ally. It made folks squirm…made ’em sweat. But Bent had learned patience the hard way—two stints in prison. And even though they were fairly short compared to what he could have gotten, he knew he didn’t ever want to go back. Now was his chance to set himself up for life. No more running cons…no more dodging the law.
All these years he’d hung on to this damned little .38 when he wasn’t even sure why. He hadn’t had any real proof that it had been used in a crime. Hell, he’d been in the same boat with everybody else. He’d figured Charles had run off with Pamela after all. Stranger things happened. But on a farfetched hunch, in light of the circumstances surrounding how he’d come into possession of the weapon, he’d decided to take very good care of it. Funny, he’d left town ten years ago for his own reasons, with no idea what a gold mine he’d taken with him in that handy little Ziploc bag.
Imagine his surprise when he learned that Charles had been murdered, that his body had been found and that no one had a clue what had really happened.
Then he’d known exactly what his little keepsake was worth.
The world.
Lacy left Melinda’s the next morning and dropped by her parents’ house to shower. She didn’t bother with breakfast. She went straight to the library as soon as it opened.
That call last night had shaken her far worse than the first one.
…you’re all going to regret what you did.
No matter how she looked at it, she and her friends had been threatened. The others could believe that Rick was somehow behind the calls in order to scare Lacy into talking, but she knew better. The caller was real, and his or her threats were real.
Someone knew what they’d done.
She didn’t understand how it could be so. As Cassidy said, Mr. Ashland had offered a sizable reward for any information related to his missing son and no one had come forward. So, clearly money wasn’t this person’s motivation. She shivered as she considered that this was no doubt about revenge.
But who could have seen them?
One of the neighbors as they left in Charles’s Mercedes? Someone at the lake? It was dark. She couldn’t fathom how anyone saw anything that happened that night. Then again the moon had been big and bright, glinting off the glassy water of the too-still lake.
But why not come forward ten years ago, especially in light of the reward?
Some kind of twisted revenge was the only possibility that made sense.
Rick thought she was hiding something and he wasn’t about to give up trying to learn what it was. Some wacko caller appeared to know something. The way Lacy saw it she had only one choice: piece together herself what had happened. The only way to protect her and her friends was to be armed with the facts.
What they had done was wrong, no matter how much Charles had deserved exactly what happened to him…it was wrong.
The question of who had been the one to do what they’d all wanted to do crossed her mind again. Surely Melinda hadn’t left the hospital. That had to be another of Rick’s ploys to get information. But what about Cassidy or Kira? Cassidy had been awfully quick to pull together a plan when the rest of them had fallen apart at the sight of Charles’s body.
Lacy shook off the thoughts. The bottom line was it didn’t matter which of them had done the deed—it was done. But for her own peace of mind, Lacy needed to know what really happened. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, but it did. For reasons she didn’t even fully understand. She had to know. And she had to find out who could have seen their desperate act.
She pushed through the double doors leading into the library and walked directly to the information desk. “Where do you keep the old copies of the
Ashland Announcer
filed?” Since it was the only paper the town had, the library surely had all the back copies on microfiche somewhere.
The clerk smiled and pointed to the stairs in the middle of the library’s main level. “Take the stairs to the second level and you’ll find the electronic files on the right at the rear of the reference section.”
Lacy hurried up the stairs, focusing straight ahead. She didn’t want to talk to anyone, so avoiding eye contact was necessary.
She found a free desk and sat down before the computer screen. She moved the mouse to shut down the screen saver. The desktop appeared with a table of contents. She was impressed. Everything she would need was right here, only a mouse click away. That was pretty uptown for Ashland.
Going back to around Thanksgiving ten years ago, she slowly surveyed the biweekly newspaper’s headlines for anything related to the Ashlands or Charles’s investment company.
Several articles appeared regarding the election of Charles, Senior, to the senate. No one had been surprised when that happened. The elder Ashland had been working toward that goal for as long as Lacy could remember.
His granddaddy had been the governor, and his own father had served as Ashland’s mayor multiple terms. Politics ran in the man’s veins, but Charles, Junior, never once displayed any penchant for that world. He was too busy being a lady’s man to bother with anything that might get in the way.
Lacy gritted her teeth and tried her level best not to think badly of the dead, but she couldn’t help herself. He’d been a miserable bastard in life and he wasn’t proving any kinder in death.
Ashland Heir Missing…
Lacy rolled her eyes. This was small-town Alabama for Pete’s sake. Did they have to make him an heir? Then again she supposed that this was the closest thing to a royal family that Ashland had. The town was even named after the founding family, some of Charles’s forefathers.
She focused on the numerous articles related to Charles’s disappearance. Several articles from larger papers were cross-referenced. She made it a point to read every single one. Being thorough was absolutely essential.
Her life, as well her friends’, could very well depend on it.
She moved back a screen to read an article she’d almost missed on Pamela Carter’s disappearance. There was only one and it was very small. No one had really cared that a mere waitress from Long Hollow Road had gone missing.
Lacy shivered when she thought of the baby Pamela had been carrying. Melinda would be so hurt by that revelation. Maybe she would never have to know. It was bad enough that Charles screwed around, the least he could have done was to take the necessary precautions. Poor Melinda. It was a miracle she hadn’t caught some horrific disease from the careless bastard.
None of the articles mentioned the money Charles had withdrawn. Lacy couldn’t help wondering what had happened to it. Had he given it to Pamela to shut her up? Had Pamela disappeared and never come back? Lacy had to agree with Rick on that one. The chances of a small-town country girl disappearing and never once looking back, especially if she came into money, were highly unlikely.
Once she’d read the articles directly related to Charles, she moved slowly through the weeks and months that followed. She had nothing but time this morning.
She had reached the September first issue from three years ago before she discovered anything else related to Charles. An article announcing the ruling that Charles Ashland, Junior, was in fact dead, droned on about the details surrounding his disappearance, what few there were. Followed by an explanation of what occurred when one was officially pronounced dead.
Articles about Charles, Senior, and his new run for the senate were splashed across most issues. A last-minute, six-figure anonymous campaign donation had been chalked up to closet Democrats who called themselves Republicans by day. Of course the opposing party had insisted the donation was most likely nothing more than an illegal, hidden payoff for future services to be rendered. Wes Rossman had staunchly denied such charges. Lacy wasn’t exactly pro Charles, Senior, but she imagined it would take more than the speculated one hundred thousand or so dollars to buy off an Ashland.
More enthusiastic pieces relayed the tight race between Senator Ashland and his Republican opponent as election day neared. And then, the many hurrahs for his successful reelection to a new term.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Nothing useful to her investigation.
Basically nothing she didn’t already know.
Lacy rubbed her eyes and tried her best not to admit defeat too quickly. There were other places she could look, people she could talk to.
A man hanging around the periodicals sections snagged her attention. He looked away as soon as she noticed him. He looked remotely familiar, but she couldn’t be sure. Tall, broad shouldered and heavily built. He looked…mean, tough, definitely not like anyone who would hang around in the reference section of a library.
Her pulse reacted to a burst of adrenaline. Was he watching her?
Okay, paranoia had set in again. She had to get a grip on her reactions. Everyone wasn’t out to get her. For all she knew, the guy could be there researching how to decorate his living room or nurture orchids.
Determined not to play mind games with herself, she skimmed a couple more issues beyond Christmas three years ago and then decided she’d learned all she was going to.
Nothing.
She exited out of the archives file, grabbed her purse and pushed out of the chair. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she’d skipped breakfast. Maybe she’d go hang out at the diner and see if she overheard any gossip. That was one thing you could count on in Ashland. Whatever was going on in town would be hashed out at Betty Mama’s.
It wasn’t until she’d gotten outside and settled into her Explorer that her nerves jangled once more. Mr. Tough Guy had come out, as well. She stilled, held her breath, as she watched him make his way to a blue Camaro that, if she were feeling charitable, she would call vintage. Definitely not anything from the past decade and a half.
Since he didn’t look her way, there was the possibility that she was, once again, overreacting. Not certain she could take the chance, she rummaged through her purse to buy some time. She poked around a while, fiddled with the CD player until she found a selection she liked. And still he just sat there. Okay, now for the big test.
She put her car into reverse and backed from the slot. Easing out onto the street, she noticed in her rearview mirror that he’d executed a ninety-degree turn and pulled out just moments after her.
A new shot of adrenaline roared through her veins and she ordered herself to stay calm. She would drive around a while, head back toward her house and if he still followed her she would…what? Go to the police? No. She couldn’t do that. Not without ending up being questioned herself and appearing even more suspicions.
If he stayed on her tail she’d just have to go to Melinda’s. At least there she wouldn’t be walking into an empty house with a stranger shadowing her.
She made several unnecessary turns as she took the longest route she knew and each time he followed her as if they were connected by some invisible tether.