Lethal Little Lies (Jubilant Falls Series Book 3) (9 page)

              “Great. Nothing like a little security.”

“Oh, and Watterson has been up here twice looking for you.”

Chapter 13 Kay

            
 
The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the strong jaw, the broad manly shoulders shrouded in a leather Air Force issue pilot’s jacket… He’d been gone for nearly 20 years; now he’d come back to see me. Major Paul Armstrong at my bedside was proof that I was dying.

              “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, and for once I understood.

              His infidelity gave my children and me so much pain. His philandering even gave me PJ, whose Korean mother placed him in my care years ago, when she, like me, realized that the price of loving Paul came at too high a cost. I was already in Marcus’s arms when I realized that painful cost, but not yet divorced when Paul’s jet crashed and made me a widow.

              “We have quite the history, don’t we?” I reached up to stroke his cheek.

              “Yes we do,” Paul said. “You know I always loved you, don’t you?”

              “You had a funny way of showing it,” I smiled and felt an incredible peace wash over me.

The kids would be OK. Marcus—my stability, my forever love, would grieve—but he would go on. I would be with them always, like Paul was with the children, watching over them. The need I’d felt earlier to be at Lillian’s wedding, to be in Marcus’s arms again was gone. As a bright light enveloped me, I suddenly didn’t want to be anywhere else except inside that light. I felt myself moving toward it, wrapped in a peace and happiness I’d never known.

              Was this what it felt like to die?

Then the voice I thought was Paul’s spoke again.

              “Mom? Mom? It’s me, Andy. I’m here.”

              My eyes began to focus. Andrew and a nurse were standing on either side of the bed. The nurse—young, pretty and brunette—was adjusting the IV tubing, and smiling at my son. He radiated that same magnetism his father had.

              Marcus, the antithesis of Paul with his thinning brown hair, his short stature and bandy legs, who loved me enough to raise another man’s children, was here, standing at the foot of the bed. He looked like he hadn’t slept.

              “Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Glad to have you back.”

              “Glad to be back.” I whispered hoarsely.

              Marcus’s mouth began to move, but his words were slurred. I could see his mouth move, and clouds of bright colors floated around his face.

“What?” I asked. “What? I can’t understand you.”

“Don’t worry about it, honey. You’re still pretty dopey—we’ll talk later.”

Talk to me about what? Before I could ask him, I slid back into darkness.

Chapter 14 Marcus

            
 
Kay was going to live. She was going to
live
. As Wednesday dawned, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. Could we fix our marriage back to where it was before? I only hoped so.

              Andrew gripped his mother’s hand and grinned at me.

              “She can talk!” he said.

              “Yes. Yes, she can,” I said softly.

              The nurse finished her duties and adjusted Kay’s blankets. “Her surgeon will be through here probably around ten this morning,” she said. “If you two want to go get some breakfast, you’ve got plenty of time.”

              “I ate on my way over here,” Andrew said. “You go get something, Dad. I’ll stay here with Mom. I’ll call PJ and Lil and let them know what’s going on.”

              I nodded, kissed Kay’s forehead. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I whispered.

              Heavily drugged, Kay mumbled something in response.

              I stepped into the elevator, riding down to the basement cafeteria. As I walked silently through the line, surrounded by hospital staff and patients’ families, I couldn’t keep the memories of that disastrous weekend in Seattle from filling my head.

*****

              After lying blatantly to my wife, I ended the phone call and gathered my few belongings. Hopefully Charlie would be gone from my original hotel room—as the featured author, she was part of Saturday’s early morning panels on research and character development, then she would speak at tonight’s dinner.

              Hopefully she would also be sober—or I could avoid her completely. We weren’t on any panels together today, thank God. I had one with other first-time authors and another book signing; there was lunch then a panel on Swedish mysteries, and another on Sherlock Holmes by a local academic, then the keynote remarks at dinner, where Charlie would speak again. Sunday’s schedule included Seattle homicide detectives talking about their jobs and the basics of police investigations.

              I knocked at the door before sliding my key card through the lock. There was no answer. I opened the door: Charlie was gone, but on the night table was a short note, written on hotel stationary.

Marcus—

              We make a beautiful pair of bookends, don’t we? Missed you this morning, my darling, but am looking forward to seeing you again tonight. Sit with me at dinner.

Charlie

              The hell with the rest of the conference—I had to leave and leave now. I threw my clothes into the suitcase, grabbed my sport jacket, my briefcase containing my laptop computer and left.

              I paid my bill and grabbed the first taxi to the airport, practically running out the door of the cab through the airport lobby to the airline counter.

              “I need to change my flight back home,” I said. “If I could get on the next plane back to Collitstown, please?”

              “Certainly, sir.” The haggard middle-aged airline employee wore a cheap polyester uniform and glared at me over her white plastic reading glasses as she feigned sounding pleasant. “I’ll need to see your driver’s license or any other identification.” A lock of her gray-brown hair swung across her face. She continued to glare.

              I reached into my breast pocket to get my tickets and felt something stringy and slick jammed into the pocket next to my wallet. Without thinking, I pulled out the wallet—the agent smirked, and then guffawed.

              It was Charlie’s red satin thong, wrapped around my wallet.

*****

              The elevator stopped its gentle downward drift and the doors hissed softly as they separated. A sign pointed to the hospital cafeteria, down the hall to the left. As I stepped from the elevator, a painful realization struck me.

              My lies, however casual, however designed to protect my darling, darling Kay had come home to roost.

              The insistent phone calls we got at home, forcing us to change our telephone number, weren’t from readers as I told Kay they were: a legion of goofy fans. While a few of the calls were truly fans, nice earnest folks who truly admired my writing and hoped for a few words that inspired their own writing—it was largely one voice.

              One frightening voice.

              The man who left the repeated voice messages in the newsroom was no man.

              The police wanted to listen to those voicemails, thinking they might have something to do with Kay’s kidnapping and gunshot wounds. If I hadn’t overslept and Elizabeth Day had never taken those original calls and forwarded them to my newsroom phone, I would have heard that voice—Charlie’s gravelly voice.

              I never saw her after that weekend in Seattle. I made certain we never traveled together again, although our book tour continued through another six cities. I arrived a day earlier and made certain that my schedule never ran anywhere close to hers. If she spoke in the morning, I never came out of my room to speak until the afternoon. I signed books early in the morning, when she was sleeping off her late night binge. I left well before she did—or well after.

              I changed my home phone number. I changed my cell number. I couldn’t change the newspaper’s phone number, so she still haunted me.

              The fact was that the mystery world’s best selling author was a stalker.

             
My
stalker.

              If I’d been honest when this whole mess began, if I’d arrived at work on time, if I’d talked to her, I could have saved my wife from being shot.

              I might have even kept her from leaving me.

I stopped outside the hospital cafeteria door and sighed.

              The police wanted to talk to me and now, I would tell them the entire story.

Chapter 15 Addison

              “The publisher wants to see you.” Dennis Herrick punctuated his sentence by pushing his thick-lensed glasses up his nose.

              I looked at my assistant editor and knew it was serious.

              “Yeah—you’re the second one to tell me. Do you know what it’s about? I just got back in the office.” I sighed and tossed my notebook on my desk.

              Dennis shrugged and pushed his glasses up his nose again. “Jane down in advertising was telling me there’s rumors of more furloughs the first quarter of next year. Maybe it’s about that.”

              Jane was the advertising department’s secretary. If I couldn’t find Dennis, he was usually hanging around at her desk. One of these days I was going to ask him if they were dating, but not now.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said and headed downstairs, past the advertising department and the front office staff to the hallway that led to J. Watterson Whitelaw’s mahogany-lined office.

              As I walked down the hall, I passed framed
Journal-Gazette
editions of local importance: the end of World War I, V-E Day and V-J Day, Nixon’s 1974 resignation and the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing with the Pulitzer Prize winning photo of an Oklahoma City firefighter carrying the bloodied body of a gravely injured baby.

              At the end of the hall were two final framed editions—one was the Sept. 12, 2001, edition with the World Trade Towers crumbling and a simple headline: UNDER ATTACK. I’d put that page together myself as tears rolled down my face.

Beside that edition hung the front page with Rowan Starrett holding the Stanley Cup aloft, following the Detroit Red Wings’ 1997 win over the Philadelphia Flyers.

              His black curly hair, so much like his brother’s, was wet from sweat and plastered to his forehead. His grin—missing his front four teeth like most hockey players—was wide and triumphant and victorious.

              That was no Associated Press photo. We’d sent a sports writer to cover the game. I still had the originals and the negatives in my desk.

              The following year, he would be traded to the Black Hawks and it would be revealed that Rowan had bet extensively—and lost—against his own Red Wings.

              The year after that would be the first of many convictions for fraud, theft, drugs and gambling. When he began missing the opposing team’s shots at the goal more than usual, Chicago sports writers began calling him “The Sieve.”

              When it was revealed that he intentionally missed those pucks to fix his bets, he was suspended for a season. When he couldn’t pay his bookie, he was beat up and hospitalized. When investigators learned the extent of his gambling debts, and when prominent Chicagoans, came forward to tell how they’d been conned so Rowan could pay those debts, he was banned from the National Hockey League for life.

              Shortly thereafter, a video surfaced of Rowan taking money for throwing a game. Banishment seemed to be fitting punishment; you couldn’t turn on ESPN or open a newspaper without images from the grainy film filling the screen or the page. Sports pundits everywhere (even in our own J-G) decried Rowan Starrett’s sins and proclaimed his sentence just.

              The gambling—and the arrests—continued: drugs, thefts, more gambling, multiple domestic violence convictions and a short-term marriage, along with more arrests. After a while, it seemed cruel to continue to cover Rowan’s disastrous fall from grace, but we did it, long after many other news outlets stopped.

              He finally went to Elkton Federal Prison for bilking folks who believed he needed money for rehab and then made the world think he’d committed suicide after his release.

              I stopped and touched the frame.

              How could we have been so stupid? Of course, out of all the deaths I’d covered over the years, how often did I demand a death certificate or to see and touch the body? Not too damned often.

              I’d bought into the myth both Starrett boys fed me, wrote the story and moved on to the next edition.

              And now Rick tells me it was all a lie.

              I sighed, straightened my shoulders, and opened Watterson Whitelaw’s door.

              “You wanted to see me?”

              Prosecutor Steve Adolphus stood as I entered the room, turning a silver laptop away from Watterson and toward me.

              “Hello Penny. Have a seat.” Watt indicated a chair in front of his desk. “Steve has something to show you.”

              Adolphus sighed. “You and I have worked together for a long time, Penny. I can’t believe what the sheriff brought me just now.” He turned, pushed a button on the laptop’s keyboard and, looking harshly at me, folded his hands. “I’ve always thought you were a good journalist, but this takes the cake.”

              The screen came to life and as the video came into focus, I saw Anna Henrickssen, a shackled Rick Starrett entering the jailhouse conference room, as I followed behind. I watched myself circle the table and point to the ceiling camera, my index finger coming into close focus near the lens.

              As Adolphus and Whitelaw watched, Rick Starrett laid out his claims of innocence because of a brother who really wasn’t dead. I winced as I watched Anna Henrickssen hand me the envelope.

              Adolphus sighed as the video clip came to an end.

              “Well?” he asked.

              “Well, what? What’s pissing you off? The fact that I’m looking at both sides of a story?” I hoped I sounded a lot braver than I felt. “I’m assuming you’re going to look into what you heard Rick say?”

              Steve smirked. “I don’t have to. I’ve got a victim identifying her shooter on her deathbed. And while identical twins may have the same DNA, they don’t have the same fingerprints. Although I haven’t seen it, I’m sure the police have the weapon that killed Mrs. Ferguson with Rick Starrett’s prints on it.”

              Gary hadn’t told me whether they had a weapon or not. He’d just said she’d been shot and they’d found .38-caliber bullets at the scene.

              “And if they don’t, you’d let an innocent man get convicted?” I wasn’t certain what Rick told me was gospel, but I didn’t know what direction the prosecutor would take. “After all, the burden of proof is on you. I would think that however bizarre this story is, it still might constitute reasonable doubt in the minds of a jury. And aren’t you obligated to tell Anna Henrickssen about any exculpatory evidence?”

              “Rick Starrett isn’t innocent.”

              “It doesn’t look good, Addison,” Whitelaw said. “The man was found in your barn and now you are getting information from his lawyer?”

              “I want to know who wrote the story of Starrett’s arrest,” Adolphus said. “If it was Penny, then you’ve got a clear conflict of interest.”

              My stomach sank. Whitelaw was right—that didn’t look good. Adolphus had me there. I’d logged into the computer system under my own name. I’d written the story, but taken my byline—automatically placed by the editorial program at the top of the story—off. Somebody might even make the case that I was harboring a fugitive or obstructing justice. I don’t know which one would be worse.

              “I’m not volunteering that without a subpoena,” Whitelaw said.

              I turned away so Adolphus wouldn’t see the look of relief on my face.

              “So you’re willing to cost Plummer County thousands when the jury pool is poisoned by her story?”

              “Excuse me?” I asked.

              “Her story is going to fill the heads of anybody who reads it with this crap about his dead brother pulling the trigger!” Adolphus exploded. “The prosecution will have to move this trial to another county because we can’t get twelve impartial jurors.”

              I started to laugh. “You’re kidding me, right? Maybe Anna Henrickssen will ask for a change of venue, too! You seem to have forgotten who told Gary McGinnis that Rick Starrett made threats against Virginia Ferguson the day she died—
me
! Who called the police when he was found on my farm?
Me!
I’m not hindering a police investigation, for God’s sake, I’m helping it!”

              “Calm down everybody, calm down,” Whitelaw waved his puffy, wrinkled hands. “As the publisher of the
Journal-Gazette
, don’t you think I know our circulation numbers, Steve? If you are only looking for twelve people who neither subscribe nor buy a copy when they buy their coffee every day, you’ll have that many plus another dozen alternates within thirty minutes. Your biggest problem is not any story Addison might write about some cockamamie excuse for a murder.”

              Adolphus sank back in his chair.

              “Steve, you know I wouldn’t compromise any police investigation,” I said. “You know who my father is. I’ve got too much respect for cops and what they do.”

              “And you know that the J-G has editorially supported every police or fire levy that’s ever come on the ballot,” Whitelaw interjected.

              “So what is my biggest problem, then?” Adolphus asked.

              “Your biggest problem isn’t that this crazy story of Rick Starrett’s is true,” Whitelaw said. “Your biggest problem is the next election. This district hasn’t got anyone in the Statehouse right now. It’s up to the central committee to appoint someone now—what if Virginia Ferguson was as good as anybody could do?”

              The tension in the room dissipated.

              Adolphus smiled. “True, true. Whoever they appoint has to serve out Virginia’s term, then win against whoever runs against him—or her.”

              He stood, shook his head, and closed the laptop, sliding it into his briefcase.

              Whitelaw and I stood. I reached out my hand.

              “I’m glad we talked, Steve,” I said. “You know I won’t ever prejudice your investigation, unless you believe my search for the truth prejudices your oath of office.”

              Steve shook my hand and then Whitelaw’s. “I hope not,” he said, turning on his heel, left the office, shutting the door behind him.

              Whitelaw turned to me, once the sound of Adolphus’s footsteps died down.

              “I don’t know what Rick Starrett gave you and I don’t think I want to know. You and your staff tend to go hog wild on some of these stories and they put this newspaper at more than a little legal risk. Frankly, I’m more than a little sick of it. If you or any of those cowboys upstairs do anything to stand in the way of Rick Starrett’s prosecution—that means conceal evidence or obstruct justice or anything that stands in the way of this case—you’re fired. Fired, out the door and gone.”