Chapter
Fifteen
“ Dan, have you seen Liss?”
Margaret Boyd had a worried look on her face.
“She’s off somewhere talking to Gordon
Tandy.” Dan glanced at his watch. It wasn’t the first time he’d
done so in the last half hour. She’d been gone longer than he’d
expected, but he didn’t want to rush her. He wanted her to be done
with Tandy once and for all. Let them hash it
out, he told himself again. Then it will be
over.
“But Gordon’s right there,” Margaret
said, pointing to the doorway.
The state police detective was
obviously looking for someone. When he realized that Dan and
Margaret were staring at him, he made his way across the room to
them.
“Margaret. Dan. I expected Liss to be
here with you.”
“She didn’t find you?” Dan asked,
already halfway out of his chair.
“I didn’t know she was looking for me.
I walked out to the Leap and came back the long way
’round.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t have gone out
there after you,” Margaret said.
Dan wasn’t so certain. If Liss hadn’t
found Tandy, just where had she gotten to? It shouldn’t have taken
her more than five minutes to walk from the hotel library to the
ballroom where the tea was being held, even if she’d
dawdled.
“What did she want, anyway?” Tandy
asked.
“Maybe the better question is why were
you looking for her?”
Tandy shrugged. “I talked to several
people this morning. I thought she might like to know that I
cleared up that little matter of the gum wrappers.”
“Really?” Margaret looked
impressed.
“Some local kids were up at the Leap on
Thursday evening around nine. Teenagers looking for privacy. Trust
me when I say I’ve accounted for both the gum wrappers and at least
one of the discarded condoms.”
“Well, it’s nice to know that our young
people are practicing safe sex,” Margaret said.
Dan and Gordon both stared at
her.
“Well, it is,”
she insisted.
Gordon recovered his aplomb first.
“Anyway,” he said, “I also wanted to assure Liss that I interviewed
Bill Stotz, Eleanor Ogilvie, and Yvonne Quinlan. The Quinlan woman
wasn’t pleased to be questioned about her connection to
Nola.”
“I don’t suppose she admitted Nola was
her ghostwriter?” Margaret asked.
“The very idea that she’d need one
seemed to infuriate her. But, according to her agent, Liss was
right on the money on that one. Nola did write the Toni Starling
series.”
“Are you telling me that Yvonne Quinlan
did have a motive to kill those two women?”
Dan scanned the crowd, looking for the actress who’d claimed to be
a mystery writer. With a growing sense of dread, he realized that
she was no longer in the ballroom. In fact, he couldn’t remember
seeing her since Liss left to hunt for Gordon Tandy.
Liss sidled along the fence, telling
herself over and over again not to look down. Maybe fifty feet
wasn’t that far by some standards, but when seen from this close to
the edge of a cliff, it was more than enough to have her stomach
knotting and her head swimming. She was hoping to put more distance
between herself and Yvonne Quinlan before she turned and made a run
for it, but Yvonne kept pace with her.
“Stop!” Liss shouted.
To her surprise, Yvonne
did.
“This is nuts,” Liss said. “You may
have gotten away with killing those two women, but if a third
victim is found at the bottom of this cliff with a broken neck,
Detective Tandy will figure out what happened.”
Yvonne’s jaw dropped. “I didn’t kill
anyone! And I don’t want to kill you. I just want you to stop
telling lies about me, before the press
picks up the story.”
A wave of relief washed through Liss.
For a minute there, she’d really thought she was doomed. A little
verbal abuse? That she could handle.
“Look, Yvonne, I’ve only told a few
people about Nola writing your books. I didn’t do so with any
intent to hurt your career. It was only because that secret gave
you a motive to kill both Jane and Nola.”
“Who?” Yvonne demanded. “Who did you
tell? How many?”
Liss had to think about it. She’d told
Sherri and Margaret, Dan and Gordon. Had there been anyone else?
She didn’t think so. Angie had overheard her accusations when she
made them in the bookstore, so she didn’t really count. “The state
police detective, a Moosetookalook police officer, my fiancé, and
my aunt,” she said aloud. “That’s it, Yvonne. And none of them are
likely to blab to the tabloids. We want to keep Moosetookalook and
the hotel and ourselves out of the spotlight as much as you want to
go on being known as a best-selling author.”
The high color in Yvonne’s face began
to dim and the look in her eyes became more bemused than ferocious.
“You thought I was a cold-blooded murderer?” she
asked.
“It made sense.”
Yvonne went up to the rail, leaned over
to look at the drop, and gave a theatrical shudder. “And just how
am I supposed to have managed to throw two women off this
cliff?”
“You said you were a stuntwoman.” Liss
was starting to feel foolish.
“That was years ago. What am
I—superwoman? I didn’t even do my own stunts for Vamped.”
“Well, someone killed both of them.”
Liss still resisted accepting Gordon’s murder/suicide solution.
There had to be another explanation. “Jane may have arranged for
someone to meet her out here in the middle of the
night.”
Yvonne’s eyes widened. “Here?
Why?”
“Maybe she just liked to jerk people
around, make them jump through hoops. What did she want you to do,
Yvonne? Did she ask for a payoff to keep the ugly rumor that you
weren’t the real creator of Toni Starling and her friend Simon out
of her blog?”
“I did create those characters,” Yvonne
said through clenched teeth. “They were my idea.”
And that wasn’t quite the same, Liss
thought, as writing novels that featured them. “Did Jane make such
a threat or not?”
Yvonne affected indifference. “She may
have been hinting around about something I
wouldn’t want my fans to know, but I ignored her
insinuations.”
“I thought you said your conversation
with her at the opening reception was all about her review of the
new Toni Starling novel. Or was that just the story you made up
rather than admit that she’d just tried to blackmail
you?”
“You just don’t quit, do you? Do I have
to pay you off, too?”
Stunned, Liss stared at her. “Too? You
mean I’m right? You paid her?”
Yvonne drummed her fingers on the top
rail of the fence and stared out at the view. It was another clear,
balmy, sunny day. The vista should have inspired a sense of calm.
Instead, Liss tensed and tried to readjust her thinking yet again.
Was Yvonne a threat to her or not? She couldn’t decide, but she
thought it might be wise to stop baiting her.
“I don’t want anything from you,” Liss
said after a moment, “except the truth.”
“Fine,” Yvonne snapped. “Nola Ventress
assisted me in writing the books in the Toni
Starling series. I’m a terrible speller.”
And I have a bridge in
Brooklyn I’d like to sell you, Liss thought. She waited for
Yvonne to continue. The silence stretched between them for a long
moment before she did so.
“Jane Nedlinger was a nasty piece of
work. She was intimidating, both physically and in the power she
wielded in her blog, and she knew it. She liked making people dance
to her tune. You’re probably right that she arranged for someone to
meet her out here. But it wasn’t me. I had Bill write her a check.
What’s the point of having a manager if he can’t handle petty
annoyances for me?”
“Maybe Bill did more than write a
check. Or maybe he decided to take steps to avoid writing
one.”
Yvonne’s lips quirked into a smile.
Then she laughed out loud. “Bill?”
“Nice way to talk about your
lover.”
Yvonne shrugged. “Haven’t you ever
heard of a business associate with benefits? The point is, I know
him very well. He’s a dynamo in bed and a barracuda in contract
negotiations, but turns into a wimp when he’s up against a force of
nature like Jane Nedlinger.”
“Well, someone
killed her,” Liss said.
“Not me.” Yvonne leaned against the
railing, apparently relaxed.
“Not you,” Liss agreed, finally
believing it. “And probably not Bill. Or the two of you together.
But not Nola, either. Nola just wouldn’t have had the strength to
toss a woman of Jane’s size off this cliff.”
“Maybe she had help,” Yvonne said.
“That’s the logical scenario, isn’t it? Nola didn’t do it alone,
and then her partner in crime turned on her and killed her to hide
his part in Jane’s death.”
“Oh, no,” Liss murmured. “That couldn’t
be.”
But even as she voiced the denial, she
knew Yvonne was right.
Liss had overlooked the most obvious
explanation of all, the one that answered every question, but
produced one new one—who else had been out here at Lover’s Leap
that night with Nola and Jane?
There were only two possibilities that
Liss could see. One was Stu, but she’d already ruled him out
because of his drunken confession. She didn’t believe he’d faked
his grief or his misplaced guilt.
That left one other.
“Doug,” she said aloud. “It had to have
been Nola’s ex-husband who helped her kill Jane
Nedlinger.”
“I didn’t know she’d ever been
married.”
Yvonne had been admiring the view and
now turned her head to look at Liss as she spoke. A moment later,
her gaze shifted and an annoyed expression crossed her
face.
“If that’s a reporter,” she hissed, her
narrow-eyed gaze on something behind Liss, “we need to give him the
slip.”
Liss glanced over her shoulder toward
the cliff path. A shadow moved among the trees. Someone was there.
Someone who’d been watching them; listening to them. She squinted,
trying to get a better look at the dark, sinister-looking figure.
There was something familiar about that silhouette.
“That’s not a reporter.” She knew him
now—both his identity and the reason he was skulking about in the
woods, spying on them. She grabbed Yvonne’s arm. “We need to get
out of here. Now.”
Before they’d taken two steps toward
the section of the trail that would bring them out on Spruce
Avenue, a cold, hard voice stopped them in their tracks. “Stay
right where you are,” it ordered, “or I’ll shoot.”
Slowly, Liss turned to confront the man
who had killed both Jane and Nola. “Why, Doug?” she asked. “Why did
you do it?”
Yvonne’s willowy body was stiff and her
wide, dark brown eyes narrowed once more as she took in the man and
the gun in his hand. Then her gaze slid sideways to Liss. “Why is
he pointing a gun at us?” she asked.
Liss had to hand it to the actress. She
didn’t scare easily. Even as a double murderer advanced on them,
armed and dangerous, Yvonne used both hands to smooth back her
short cap of blue-black hair with its purple highlights and then
slid easily into the role she’d played for so many years on
television—the haughty, self-confident, immortal Caroline Sweet of Vamped.
“This is Nola’s ex-husband,” Liss said.
“His name is Doug.”
“Know him well, do you?”
“I thought I did.” Boy, had she been
wrong! “I guess you didn’t just drop Nola off at the hotel on
Thursday night, did you, Doug?”
His thin-lipped smile was devoid of
humor. “In fact, I did. But she called me on my cell phone less
than fifteen minutes later, begging me to come back.”
Yvonne edged slowly closer to the
fence. Liss thought that was the wrong direction to go, but she
said nothing. The more distance between targets, the less likely it
would be that Doug could shoot both of them. She hoped he wouldn’t
fire his gun at all, but she wouldn’t bet her life on it. His
desperation showed clearly in his eyes and she could smell the
acrid scent of his sweat. He was no longer the polished, overly
formal gentleman who ran the funeral home and served as a town
selectman. He’d already killed two women and was terrified enough
of being found out that he was prepared to kill two more to keep
his earlier crimes secret.
“There’s no need for violence,” Liss
said in the most soothing voice she could manage. It didn’t sound
all that calm, especially when it broke on the last
word.
“Don’t you mean more violence?”
His grim expression and the tight grip
he had on the gun made Liss’s palms sweat. Her knees felt wobbly,
but she held her ground and kept talking. If she could only buy
enough time, maybe she could figure out a way to escape. Or she’d
be missed, and Dan would come looking for her.
That possibility sent a new wave of
panic through her. Bad enough that she and Yvonne were in danger.
She would not have the man she loved putting his life at risk.
She’d nearly lost him once. She wasn’t going to go through that
agony again.
“Yvonne and I won’t say anything,” she
promised. “Right, Yvonne? There’s nothing to tell, anyway. We
weren’t here. We don’t have proof of anything. And Gordon Tandy
thinks Nola killed Jane and then took her own life out of remorse.
No one suspects you of anything.”
Doug’s gaze darted back and forth
between Liss and Yvonne, but his gun hand remained
steady.
“I never thought of you as the type to
own a gun,” Liss blurted out. Let alone use
one, she silently added. But he carried the weapon with the
ease of someone accustomed to being armed. “Do you need protection
from all the dead bodies you deal with?” Now she was babbling, but
she couldn’t seem to stop.
“Maybe he secretly believes vampires
are real.” Yvonne hissed the words, giving them an eerie sound that
went well with the maniacal look on her face.
Taken aback, Doug stared at
her.
Liss had to tamp down a hysterical
bubble of laughter. Obviously, he’d never watched Vamped.
And, in that moment of distraction, she
saw her chance.
Liss’s years as a professional dancer
had left her with strength and agility. Once she’d recovered from a
career-ending knee injury, she’d taken pains to get back in shape
and stay that way. Two running steps brought her close enough to
Doug to take a flying kick at his gun arm.
Her foot struck his wrist, hard, and
the hand jerked upward. His finger squeezed the trigger and the gun
fired, but the bullet went wild.
Yvonne rushed at him from the other
side. When she threw herself bodily into the air, she kicked him in
the chest with both feet. Apparently, her training as a stuntwoman
hadn’t been so very far in the past, after all.
Doug fell backward. Yvonne went with
him, but the gun flew toward Liss. She scrambled to pick it up. She
had no idea how to fire it, or even how to keep it from going off
in her hands by accident. She’d be as likely to shoot Yvonne as
Doug if she tried to use it. Slipping around them, she tossed it
over the edge of the cliff.
By the time she turned back to the pair
on the ground, Yvonne was using her fists to beat the crap out of
the man who’d threatened to kill her. Doug tried ineffectually to
fend off the blows, batting at Yvonne with open hands. A shaky
laugh bubbled up and escaped before Liss could quell it. Doug
fought like a girl. And Yvonne did not.
Her head jerked around at a shout from
the cliff path. Gordon and Dan emerged from the trees at a dead run
and skidded to a stop when they got their first good look at the
scene in the clearing.
“Well, damn,” Dan said. “You were
right.”
He was speaking to Gordon. Liss goggled
at them. Gordon had known Doug was involved?
It would have been nice if he’d said something! She’d have given
him a piece of her mind about that if he hadn’t been fully occupied
wading in to separate the combatants. It took considerable strength
for him to haul Yvonne off Doug. The moment her blows stopped
raining down on him, he curled himself into a ball,
sobbing.
Liss didn’t feel a bit sorry for him.
In fact, if Gordon hadn’t moved so quickly to get him to his feet
and slap handcuffs on him, she’d have gone over there and given him
a kick herself, while he was still writhing and whining on the
ground.
Yvonne retreated to the fence, leaning
against it not because she needed to catch her breath—she wasn’t
even breathing hard—but to get control of her temper. Still keeping
her eyes on Doug, she reached up to fluff her short
hair.
“Try to kill me, will you,” she
muttered.
Engulfed in Dan’s tight embrace, Liss
rested her head against his chest. She could hear how rapidly his
heart was beating.
“You scared the life out of me,” he
whispered.
“I didn’t mean to.” She hugged him
back, but after a moment, she pulled free and walked over to
Yvonne. “That was amazing,” she said.
“You didn’t do so badly yourself. What
can I say? Kick-ass women rule.”
They shared a grin and a high five.
Right at that moment, Liss didn’t care who had really written the
Toni Starling series, not when she owed Yvonne Quinlan her
life.
Behind her, she heard Gordon read Doug
his rights and ask him if he understood them. A mumble indicated
that he did. “Let’s go,” Gordon said, his voice gruff.
“You can’t arrest me,” Doug whined. “I
haven’t done anything.”
“You’ve got some nerve claiming to be
innocent,” Liss said, marching right up to Doug and getting in his
face. “You threatened us with a gun and you killed Jane Nedlinger
and Nola Ventress.”
“What were doing with a gun, Doug?” Dan
asked. “Most people who use the jogging path don’t need protection
from the chipmunks.”
“Back off, Ruskin,” Gordon warned.
“This is police business.”
Dan ignored him. “Tandy already had it
figured out, you know. All you did today was drive the last nail
into your own coffin.”
There was little trace now of the
suave, dignified, almost staid gentleman Liss had always imagined
Doug to be. “I had no choice,” he whined. “That Nedlinger woman
brought it on herself. And then Nola was going to confess. I had to
stop her, didn’t I? She ruined my life once. I couldn’t let her do
it again.”
“You already told us that you came up
here with Nola that night, after she phoned you and asked you for
your help,” Liss reminded him. “You said that meeting here was
Jane’s idea. But why here?” That still baffled her.
“Can’t you guess? She wanted Nola good
and scared and she knew her weakness—her little phobia about the
great outdoors, especially at night. It wasn’t hard to discover.
Nola never could shut up about herself.”
“She never told anyone about her
ghostwriting,” Liss said.
“Her what?” Doug looked blank, which
just confirmed Liss’s statement.
“This is not the time or place for an
interrogation,” Gordon cut in.
“It is if Doug wants to talk about what
happened that night. Isn’t it, Doug? You do want to tell your side
of the story, don’t you?”
Doug looked confused. Liss wondered if
Yvonne had given him a concussion. She didn’t much care. To her
mind, he owed them an explanation for trying to kill
them.
“Perhaps you can clarify the
situation,” she suggested. “Convince us you’ve done nothing
wrong.”
“I need to sit down,” Doug
said.
Reluctantly, Gordon allowed his
prisoner to collapse atop a convenient boulder. Then he pulled out
a miniature audio recorder, turned it on, and recited the date,
time, location, and names of all those present. “You’ve been read
your rights,” he said. “Do you want a lawyer?”
“No,” Doug said.
Liss repressed a smile. Good. Any
confession he made now would be admissible in court.
“You were telling us about Jane
Nedlinger, and how she wanted Nola to be frightened when they met
up here,” she prompted him.
Doug nodded, then winced and rubbed the
back of his head. “Nola told me that the Nedlinger woman had been
waiting for her in the lobby when I dropped her off at the hotel.
She insisted Nola meet her at the Leap, precisely because it would
scare Nola half to death to walk all the way up here alone through
the woods in the dark. She was a cruel woman. She wanted Nola to
suffer.”
“So you came to her rescue,” Liss
prompted him.
“Yes and no.” A sly expression came
into Doug’s eyes. “A part of me wanted her to suffer, too. She had
a lot of nerve asking me to bring her up here when she knew that
just the mention of this place would bring it all back—what she did
to me.”
It took a moment for Liss to realize
what he was talking about. Then she remembered. It was here that
Nola and Stu had been caught—how had Aunt Margaret put it?—“buck
naked and going at it like rabbits.” The discovery of Nola’s
extramarital affair had led directly to Doug and Nola’s divorce,
and to Doug’s public humiliation. No wonder he’d jumped at the
chance for a little payback.
“So, you agreed to accompany Nola,” she
said aloud. “Did she tell you why she’d agreed to Jane’s
demands?”
“She just kept saying she didn’t have a
choice, that she had to save her career. She told me to pull into
the employee parking lot, so no one would see her leaving the
hotel, and she slipped out the back door and into my car. Then we
drove down to the Spruce Avenue end of the path and came up that
way.”
Doug was calm now, and telling his
story in such a matter-of-fact tone of voice that he might have
been relating an everyday anecdote to a group of friends. Liss
wondered if he’d lost his grip on reality. He didn’t seem aware of
Gordon’s audio recorder, and he had a faraway look in his
eyes.
“The Nedlinger woman was some startled
when I showed up with Nola, but she already knew who I was. She
knew all about Nola’s past. That story was going to go into her
blog, too, she said, unless Nola was willing to pay what she called
a ‘kill fee.’ She said she was building up her retirement fund and
she laughed—a real nasty laugh. Nola was ready to pay her off, even
if it took all of her savings to do it. I told her not to be a
fool. A woman like that doesn’t stop with one payment. And I
figured she’d be after me next, demanding money not to repeat all
the old scandal. Maybe even suggesting that as a town selectman I
could dip into the municipal coffers to keep the good name of the
town of Moosetookalook from being smeared in her damned
blog.”
Liss found the possibility that Doug
might claim to have killed Jane as an act of public service a
little hard to take.
“I was so disgusted by her tactless and
offensive demands that I started to leave, taking my flashlight
with me. There were no lights along the path. All we had to see by
were the Nedlinger woman’s flashlight and mine, and it was a
miserable, overcast, drizzly night. When Nola realized I was going,
she went into a panic.”
His humorless smile combined with his
thin face and general boniness put Liss in mind of a grinning
skull, an image that made her shudder even before he told the rest
of his story.
“The Nedlinger woman grabbed hold of
Nola to stop her from leaving and gave her a shake for good
measure. I may have wanted to make my ex-wife suffer for her sins,
but that doesn’t mean I’d let someone else hurt her. I shoved the
bitch. Hard. And she fell. She cracked her head on a rock. She was
dead as a doornail. No pulse. Nola really freaked out then, saying
I’d murdered the Nedlinger woman. Well,
obviously, I hadn’t. It was an accident. But Nola was unreasonable
about it, going on and on about how all her secrets were going to
come out if we told anyone what happened. To shut her up, I helped
her toss the body over the cliff.”
So that it would look more like an accident, Liss presumed. Clearly
neither Nola nor Doug had been entirely rational at the
time.
“What happened to the rock Jane
Nedlinger hit her head on?” Gordon asked in a quiet, nonthreatening
voice.
“Oh, I tossed that over,
too.”
“Weren’t you concerned about
fingerprints?” Liss asked.
“Of course not. You know I always wear
driving gloves when I go out at night. I feel the cold in my hands
something terrible.”
“So, you’d have gotten away with it,”
Liss said softly. “I don’t understand why Nola had to
die.”
His derisive snort spoke volumes. “Nola
promised to say nothing about what happened
up here, but when I saw her the next day, she was in a terrible
state. She was fussing about how guilty she felt, how she had never
meant for me to hurt anyone. I knew then that I had to take steps
to protect myself or she’d ruin my life, right along with her own,
by confessing to the police. I suggested she salve her conscience
by creating a memorial to the Nedlinger woman. I told her to buy
some flowers and meet me at Lover’s Leap. She was reluctant, even
though it was still daylight, but I convinced her that I had a way
for her to make amends.”
“You walked up the other way, as you
had the previous night.” It was not a question.
Doug nodded. “Who would believe it was
a suicide if I’d been seen?”
“But she didn’t kill herself, did she?
You may have suggested it, but Nola had priorities you knew nothing
about.”
Doug shrugged again. His voice was
devoid of emotion. “She may have had a little help, but it was what
she wanted to do. She was the one with the guilty conscience.” He
frowned. “That should have been the end of it. I know dead bodies.
No one would be able to say exactly when Nola died. I made certain
I was seen at the auction less than twenty minutes later. It was an
excellent alibi. I even bid on a few items. I won a hand-crocheted
pillow with a cat on it.” He made a moue of distaste.
Silence descended on the little group
gathered around the boulder. Doug’s seeming indifference made the
tale seem even more hideous.
Gordon cleared his throat. “I think
that’s enough. Come on, Doug. Let’s get you back to
civilization.”
“Hold on a minute,” Liss said. “I have
more questions.”
She waited until Doug looked up,
wanting him to meet her eyes. She was momentarily disconcerted by
the blankness of his gaze. He seemed to look right through her. She
had to swallow hard, but she asked her questions
anyway.
“Why did you bring a gun to the tea?
Why did you follow me out here? Did you think I knew you were
guilty of murder?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Liss
MacCrimmon. My wife told me you were looking for me after Lenny’s
funeral this morning. What else could you have wanted except to ask
nosy questions? And if you were asking, then you were getting close
to the truth. Everyone in town knows that when you stick your nose
in where it doesn’t belong, people end up in jail.”
“I only wanted to talk to you about
your son,” Liss whispered.
He didn’t seem to hear her. She didn’t
suppose young Frank’s attitude mattered now. His life would be
shattered when he found out that his father was a murderer. She
doubted the funeral home would stay in business after the news
broke. That was not the way she’d expected to correct the boy’s
lack of respect for the dead, but it would certainly solve the
problem.
“If you knew,” Doug volunteered, “then
I had to eliminate the threat. I had it all worked out in my mind.
I meant to force you into my car at gunpoint and drive you
somewhere remote, somewhere I could shoot you and no one would
hear. Then I’d hide your body.” He chuckled. “That part would have
been easy. I have plenty of caskets. No one would think twice about
it if I buried one more, and no one would ever know what happened
to you.”
Liss shivered convulsively, although
the sun was high in the sky and the day was pleasantly warm. Doug’s
voice sounded so ordinary, his tone almost
conversational.
He’d followed her when she left the
hotel looking for Gordon. He’d overheard part of what she said to
Yvonne—overheard his own name. How ironic that, until that very
moment, she hadn’t had the slightest suspicion that he was
involved.
This time, when Gordon hauled Doug to
his feet and led him away, she did not object. As soon as they
disappeared around a curve in the trail, she turned to Dan,
standing patiently beside her, and walked straight into his waiting
arms.