Eighteen
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.
I found myself again in a dark wood.
The Inferno, Dante
 
 
 
 
“Tiffany Burkhold works at a bar on Whitaker,” Petru said. “The Spur It On.”
Bree tucked the cell phone against her ear while she scrabbled in her purse for her notepad. “What’s the nearest cross street?”
“West Broughton.”
“Near the market, then. It’s eleven thirty. Do you think she’ll be there?”
“They are open for lunch,” Petru said. “It is possible, yes. And your interview with Mr. Lindquist? Successful, perhaps?”
Bree sighed and stared out the car window. Traffic was heavy. It threatened rain. She was suddenly discouraged. “He’s a jerk. But he’s got zero motive to do Probert Chandler in. And he doesn’t know Shirley Chavez from a hole in the ground.” Bree tapped the steering wheel thoughtfully.
“By the way, Mr. Payton McAllister made the noon news. I have taped it for you.”
Bree grinned. “Things are looking up, Petru. Things are definitely looking up. Any word on where we can find Stephen Hansen?”
“Not yet. But I anticipate success.”
Bree said good-bye and drove up Whitaker to the Spur It On.
The bar was tucked into the first floor of an old extension of the Cotton Exchange. A narrow neon sign ran the length of the storefront. Silver spurs cupped the lettering like spiky hands. At some point in the past, some hopeful owner had installed large windows. An Open sign glowed red in the one nearest the solid steel door. A Dos Equis sign blipped on and off underneath it.
Bree parked on the street. The dogs poked their noses out the passenger windows and looked hopefully outside. “An hour, no more,” Bree promised them. “And then we’ll go for a walk near the river.”
The front door opened outward. The rush of air was filled with familiar scents: beer, the undercurrent of disinfectant, fried foods, and a moldy, woody odor that was characteristic of old bars everywhere. The inside was dimly lit. Bree made out a line of booths against the wall opposite the long wooden bar top. A mass of old pine tables stood jumbled together in the center. The place was almost empty: a few retirees, mostly, older men in golf shirts and shorts despite the coolness of the day and their placid wives in pantsuits and bright costume jewelry. Behind the bar, a woman in a white shirt and black pants slapped at the countertop. She looked up when Bree walked in.
Bree figured she’d stick out like a sore thumb in her city suit. She took a seat in the booth closest to the door. The plastic-sheeted menu was sticky. Bree read down the printed page. Hamburger, quesadillas, French fries, and onion rings. Hunter would love this place, if he hadn’t found it already.
“Help you?” The bartender stood with one hip out-thrust, an order pad in one hand. She didn’t have a name tag. The bio Ron had provided for Tiffany Burkhold said she was in her early forties, divorced, with one son, who was grown and out working on his own. This woman could fit the profile.
“BLT on wheat, please.”
“Coke-cola?”
“Iced tea. Unsweetened.” The waitress nodded and sauntered off. A couple at one of the center tables got up and headed toward the cash register at the front corner of the bar. Bree’s waitress looked over her shoulder, stuck her head in the open doorway that let to the kitchen, and yelled, “Front!”
A woman in her forties bustled out of the back and up to the register. She was thin, with nervous, birdlike movements. Her hair was dyed a stark dark brown. A slash of red lipstick cut across her face like a warning sign. “Is that your bill?” she chattered at the couple. “I see you had the hamburg. Wasn’t it good? They make the best hamburg here. No. Sorry. We don’t take American Express. Visa or MasterCard only.”
“Pay her in cash, Harold,” the female customer said. She addressed the cashier. “I swear, I’m going to ditch that AmEx card. Nobody takes it.”
Harold muttered, and plunged his hand into his shorts pocket. He withdrew a money clip and began to count the money out.
“You’ve got cash today? Good. Good. Makes it easy, doesn’t it?” The cashier took the bills Harold offered. “Thirty? On a twenty-five forty bill? You want to leave a little something for Trudy?”
“Just give me two back,” Harold said.
“Got it right here.” The cashier dug her hand into her skirt pocket and handed the two dollars over. “ ’Bye, now!” She watched the couple leave. She busied herself at the register. She refilled the bowl of mints, neatened the pile of matchbooks, and, so quickly that Bree almost missed it, put the thirty dollars into her pocket.
Bree’s waitress came out of the kitchen balancing a sandwich plate and a glass of iced tea. She set both in front of Bree, and then went to clear the dishes from the table where Harold and his AmEx-hating companion had been sitting.
“Damn,” she said. “The cheap bastard didn’t leave a dime.”
The cashier made a sympathetic sound.
“I swear to God, Tiff, I’m going to get me a job over to the Pancake Hut.”
“Too close to the old folks’ home,” Tiff whispered brightly. She darted into the dining area and began to straighten up the little piles of salt, pepper, and ketchup on each table. “The old buggers tip worse than the folks here.” She twinkled at an elderly couple in the far corner.
“Keep your voice down,” Bree’s waitress said in mild reproof.
“Deaf as a post, the two of them,” Tiff said scornfully.
She ain’t.” Bree’s waitress nodded in her direction. Bree smiled, waved, and then beckoned at Tiffany.
Tiffany bit her lip, and then picked her way across the room to Bree’s booth. “Help you?” she said.
“I’m sure you can,” Bree said pleasantly. “Although I have to tell you in advance all I’ve got with me is an AmEx card.”
“Oh, we take . . .” She stopped and flushed. “Look, I don’t know who you are or what you’re up to, but we don’t take kindly to your sort here.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Art!” she shouted. “Artie!”
Bree heard a clang of pots from the kitchen. Artie’s belly preceded him through the doorway to the kitchen. Artie himself was moonfaced, with a beard problem.
“She made a pass at me!” Tiffany said indignantly. “She scared me to death! I want her out of here!”
Bree put her head down and laughed. Then she pulled out her wallet and flipped it open to her Bar Association card and held it up. “I’m an officer of the Chatham County court system, Artie. And I need to talk with her. And I promise I’m not about to give her a big fat kiss. Although,” she added, as Artie disappeared back into the kitchen, “I might just give you a slap up the side of the head. Sit down, Tiffany.”
Tiffany perched on the edge of the seat opposite her, her hands clenched.
“You’re quick,” Bree said, with no small degree of admiration. “You must have driven the folks at Marlowe’s absolutely crazy.”
“Is that what this is about! I didn’t have a thing to do with those robberies. Not a thing!” Her voice quivered with outrage.
“The warehouse robberies?”
Tiffany looked at her suspiciously. “You know who’s behind them, don’t you? I told them. It’s that geeky kid who sits in front of the computers all day. He’s got a record, you know. His daddy’s a big-deal lawyer in town. So do they go after him? No. They go after me. Just because of some little trouble I got in years ago. I was barely a kid myself.”
“You’re talking about Chad Martinelli? Is there any proof that you know of, Tiffany?”
Tiffany leaped to her feet. “Everybody’s always on about proof. Proof! I told you! I didn’t have a thing to do with it! There’s no way you can take me to jail.”
“I believe you.” She wasn’t going to get anywhere with this lunatic if she didn’t get her past the fear of arrest. “But you know all about what happened, don’t you? I have to say, you seem pretty smart to me. I’ll bet not much gets past you.”
“Not much does,” she said with a trace of smugness.
“Was it Mr. Jensen, the store manager, who first looked into the robberies?”
Tiffany worried her bottom lip with her teeth. “I guess. I don’t know.”
“You worked the night shift?” Bree guessed. “And at the bank during the day?”
“That’s right.” Tiffany glanced nervously around the room, then sank back into her side of the booth. “I was cashiering. We were open twenty-four/seven, and Mel, that’s Mr. Jensen, was pretty understanding about my not being able to work the late late shift from eleven to three. Because I had to get up for the bank in the morning.”
“Right.”
“But once in a while, I’d get stuck. We had to rotate, see, and no matter how much coffee I drank, I’d get sleepy.” She jiggled her foot rapidly up and down. “See, caffeine has absolutely no effect on me.”
Something sure did. Either Tiffany had ADD or a severe adrenaline imbalance.
“So once in a while, I’d just need to take twenty minutes, or I was just going to drop where I stood. And that’s when the first robbery happened.”
“What was taken, exactly?”
“Drugs. A lot of drugs, from the warehouse. Mr. Jensen figured somebody had a duplicate set of keys.” Her eyes shifted away from Bree’s. “And the pharmacy. Some bitch worker planted the ones from the pharmacy in my purse, so I got nailed for that one. It was a total crock, that was. Total setup.” She smirked. “She got hers a little later on, that bitch. It was nothing to do with me.”
Bree wasn’t so sure. But she said, merely, “Did Mr. Jensen ever discover who had the duplicate set of keys?”
“Sure. The boss’s kid. The one who stole that money from the cute little Girl Scout.”
Bree gaped at her. “Lindsey Chandler?”
“That’s the one.” Tiffany giggled, a sharp, high sound like a bird cracking a nut. “Kid claimed somebody framed her. Yeah, right. You think she’d’ve come up with a better story than that.”
014
“Oh, my God,” Antonia said. “The whole thing sucks like a lemon.”
Bree nodded glumly. She’d gone straight to the theater after hearing what Tiffany Burkhold had to say, in the hope of finding someone sane and lovable to talk to. Who better than her sister?
“Jeez.” Antonia propped her knees against the seat in front of her and unwrapped the remaining half of Bree’s BLT. “Poor kid. Isn’t there anyone who gives a rat’s behind about what’s going to happen to her?”
Bree thought of Madison, who was sane, grounded, and focused, and Chad Martinelli, who wasn’t. “Maybe. I hope so. I’m going up to rag on Lindsey this afternoon.” She resisted the temptation to grind her teeth. “That kid! Are she and Chad mixed up in this robbery? And do the families know it? That goes a long way toward explaining why the Chandlers are keeping the lid on. Do you suppose it’s some kind of revenge against their parents? Why, for God’s sake?” She kicked Antonia’s theater seat in frustration. “I can’t, won’t, believe that the two of them committed murder.”
Antonia’s silence was sympathetic. Then she said, “So what’s going to happen now?”
“I’m going back to the office. I’m going to go through the file again. Maybe I’ll make one of those charts on whiteboard. Except I don’t have a whiteboard.” Bree closed her eyes, suddenly sick of the whole investigation. Pseudoephedrine. Meth labs, probably. God help them. “You want to go out for a pizza after tonight’s show?”
“Got a date. Sorry.”
This was nice, normal, kid sister stuff. Bree gazed at Antonia with enormous affection. “No kidding? Sherlock or Watson?”
“Ew! Watson’s got to be, like, forty-five if he’s a day!”
“Sherlock, then,” Bree said with approval. “Good looking, and a heck of an actor. He’s was at the open house a few weeks ago, wasn’t he? I’d forgotten about that. Lucky old you.”
“Lucky old me,” Antonia said with a happy sigh. Then, with obvious reluctance: “You can join us if you want. We’re going dancing at Murphy’s Law, that pub off of Franklin Square. Hunter dances, doesn’t he? Bring him, too.”
“Hunter, dance? Don’t make me laugh.”
“For Pete’s sake, Bree. The guy moves like a boxer. I’ll bet he’s a wizard on the dance floor.”
“I’m not about to find out.” Bree eased herself out of the theater seat.
“Are you off?”
“I’m off.”
“Are you going to tell Hunter about Lindsey and the keys?”
“I don’t know.” Bree stood in the theater aisle, thinking hard. She didn’t want to make the drive back up to Cliff’s Edge Academy, but she didn’t see how she could avoid it. What she wanted to know from Lindsey, Lindsey didn’t want to tell her. If she called, the kid could just hang up. And it was harder to lie when your interrogator was looking you straight in the eye. “What time is it?”
“Just quarter to one.”
“I’m going to the office. Then . . . I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“We’ll probably end up at Huey’s tonight, if you want to drop by late.”
But Bree, halfway up the aisle, didn’t have time to reply.
015
There wasn’t anyone at home at 66 Angelus Street. Bree let herself into a darkened office. Outside, the wind was rising, and a slow roll of storm clouds headed into Savannah from the west. She fed the three dogs, and then, in response to Belli’s imperative scratch at the back door in the kitchen, let them all out into the cemetery. Sasha relieved himself against the magnolia tree, then sniffed busily around the fence surrounding the graves. Miles and Belli went about their business in a more dignified way, then settled themselves down between the Pendergast graves. Tomb guardians, Bree thought.
She settled herself at her desk and began a methodical search through the Chandler file. A neatly lettered note from Ron was first.
I talked to Luis Chavez. To the best of his recollection, there have been three robberies at the warehouse. The first was in early June, the evening before PB’s death. The other two occurred at ten-day intervals after that.
Then, from Petru:
Cell phone calls, day of client’s demise:
 
Mr. Mel Jensen 6:00 a.m.
Dr. John Lindquist 6:07 a.m.
John Stubblefield 6:10 a.m.
Jensen, the store manager, must have discovered the robbery when he came on duty at six in the morning and called his boss. Then Chandler marshaled the troops, Lindquist and Stubblefield first. A long list of calls followed those. Bree skimmed through the phone calls—the man must have had the phone permanently implanted in his ear, from the number of them Petru listed. She stopped at the calls that must have occurred at the Miner’s Club in the early evening. An incoming call from Chad Martinelli. An outgoing call to Peter Martinelli, his father. Another call from Probert to Chad, and then to Lindsey.
Bree sat back. So Chad called Probert first. Why? To make threats? She shook her head, puzzled. The kid didn’t make sense to her. Not yet.
She moved on through the file, the witness statements, the accident report, the summary of her talks with the rest of the Chandler family. She read through the autopsy report again, noting, as she did, that Probert Chandler’s blood type was OO.
That stopped her.
Bree was realistic enough to know that as a corporate tax lawyer—the area of law she’d specialized in before she’d been dragged into this loony defense work—the only real talent she had was a memory for minutiae. And something about that blood type bothered her.
She still had the lab report on Carrie-Alice’s blood type crumpled in her pocket. She smoothed it out.
Carrie-Alice was OO, too.
And Lindsey . . .
Bree thumbed through the girl’s medical history. There it was. AB-.
“Whoa,” Bree said aloud. Lindsey wasn’t Probert’s daughter. She couldn’t be. There was no way two double-O parents could have an AB- child. Bree remembered enough Mendel to know that.
Bree lifted her head and stared out the window, thinking hard, wondering why this bit of information seemed so critical. She reached for the phone. Carrie-Alice. Lindsey’s mother was the place to start for answers.
A shout of thunder shook the house. Outside, the wind picked up with a shriek. Miles and Belli sat as if carved in stone. Dead leaves and dust whirled around them. Bree got to her feet—Sasha, at least, shouldn’t be out if it was going to rain.
The swamplike mire that covered Josiah’s grave opened up, slowly, a dread eclipse of movement across the ground. Miles whirled and faced the opening. Belli backed up slightly, head lowered, lips pulled back over those fearsome teeth, eyes glowing red.
A strange, furnace glow sprang to eerie life in the depths of the open grave. And then, with the sly, stealthy movement of a creeping snake, a path of filthy green light crept over the lip of the hole and onto the ground.
Bree discovered she’d backed up against the desk. A figure jerked horribly up the path. The shape was manlike, but distorted, as if she saw it through the shield of a scum-filled pond. It seemed to be made of flesh and bone, but a pallid, dead white flesh that crawled with corpse-mold. The man, Bree saw, or what had once been a man, raised his arms in a dreadful summons.
“Bree!”
Sasha appeared out of nowhere, tail thrashing furiously over his back, barking as if to raise the dead.
Which had been raised already.
Miles and Belli leaped forward. The ground caved under their feet. They fell, soundlessly, and disappeared from sight.
Sasha jumped backwards, avoiding the pit by a hairs-breadth. Josiah—who else could it be but Josiah?—lifted his head and stared directly at Bree. His eyes were a hideous, human blue in the ruins of his face. He grinned, horribly. Then he whirled and kicked. His boot caught Sasha under the chin. The dog screamed and flew backwards and hit the magnolia tree with a shattering thump.
Bree raced to the back door and flung it open. The wind smacked into her like a train. She staggered, got to her feet, and pushed herself against the roiling air like a swimmer coming out of the depths of the sea. Sasha shook himself, rolled to his feet, and raced to Bree’s side.
She had nothing. No weapons. No way to fight him. Josiah shuffled over the dank and rotting grass. The stench of rotting flesh forced itself down her throat. Bree fought the fear that engulfed her, and sent up a wild, wordless prayer for the power that was her Company’s gift to her and her kin.
Josiah’s hands reached out to grab Bree. Sasha leaped full at him. Josiah fell back, flat onto the green miasma of the Bridge from the grave, and tumbled back, back, back to the ashy glow of the depths.
The grave closed in over itself, but not before Belli and Miles jumped out.
Bree was alone in the cemetery with her dogs. A gobbet of decayed flesh clung to her hands and the smell of the dead was in her hair.
016
“What I want to know,” she said furiously into the phone, “is where was everybody?
Professor Cianquino let a moment of silence pass before he responded. “The rules are fairly clear,” he said, finally.
“Not to me, they aren’t.” Bree’s hands were clenched tight on the steering wheel. She made a conscious effort to relax them. She was headed up to Cliff’s Edge to confront Lindsey. Belli and Miles sat behind her in the back. Sasha sprawled in the passenger seat next to her.
“Like meets like.”
“Like meets like?” Bree wasn’t scared anymore. But as often happened when she’d been frightened out of a year’s growth, she was angry. And that interfered with the ability to think clearly. So she said, as calmly as she could, “Does this mean I’m the temporal equivalent of a corpse?”
“Very good,” Professor Cianquino said. His approval was a rare thing.
“No extras, then,” she said. “I get it. The Pendergasts don’t have any extra help, and neither do I.”
“Precisely.”
“So it’s mano a mano?” She scrabbled around for her long-forgotten Latin and said, “Or corpus a corpus?”
“You would not,” her professor said, “want it any other way. If you were able to call on the Company, they, in turn, would be able to call on . . .” He paused. “You would not like that. Not at all.”
Bree rolled her eyes. Says you, she thought, but aloud she said, “Thank you. I guess.”
“How is the case progressing?”
“Slowly. I don’t have any real leads. And it’s insane to try to solve this murder without any real communication from my client.”
“But he has communicated with you,” he said. “The paperweight, the keys, the blood test, and the photograph.
“The blood test has already led you to an essential key to the case, dear Bree. Listen to what else your client has to say.”
017
She made it to Cliff’s Edge Academy in under two hours. The big wrought-iron gates to the school were closed. The fence surrounding the property was as firmly planted in the ground as ever. Bree drove past the grounds at a leisurely pace, as if looking for an address or admiring the Spanish moss that dropped from the live oak trees that dotted the landscape like so many sentinels.
“The thing is,” she said aloud, to the attentive dogs, “I want to avoid Miss Violet Henry like the plague. The only hope I’ve got of getting Lindsey to Tell All is if I convince her no one knows for sure about the robberies but me—and as her attorney, I’m bound to keep my mouth shut about stuff that can put her in jail.”
Sasha put his paw on her knee and yawned.
“As for you two”—Bree glanced in the rearview mirror, where Belli and Miles sat as immobile as a pair of temple dogs guarding a Chinese emperor’s palace—“I just hope you’ll come runnin’ if I end up needing some help with nosy security guards. Ah. There we are.”
There was a gap in the fence. More properly, there was a stile in the fence, which horses with the local hunt could jump over. There was a security camera perched on one of the fence posts. The camera would capture anything over five feet tall. Bree pulled up on the grass and parked the car. She got out, then released Miles and Belli. “Heel,” she said to Belli, and pointed to her right. Belli stood at her right shoulder. If Bree bent over, she was concealed behind the big dog’s shoulder. “Miles,” she ordered, “heel!” She pointed to her left, and Miles took his position on her other side. She hitched her purse over her shoulder and took a deep breath.
“Up and over!” Bree commanded. She took off for the stile at a dead run, the two dogs running silently on either side. They scrambled over the stile in unison. Bree fell to the grass, rolled over, and lay there for a moment, to catch her breath. She got to her feet and ordered the two dogs back over the stile. They jumped back onto the grass verge by the road with ease, and stood looking at her doubtfully. From the safety of the front seat, Sasha cocked his head and looked on with interest.
“Stay,” Bree said. All three of the dogs dropped to a stay position, and Bree took off across the lawn, toward the sprawling mass of the school building. With luck, she’d have twenty minutes or so before the guards who went out to check on the dogs thought to check on the owner of the car.
She found Lindsey in the dining hall. Cliff’s Edge treated its students well. The room was large, sunny, and carpeted. The round tables, each seating eight, were draped in white cloth. Lindsey was slouched at a table in the corner. She was alone, picking listlessly at a hamburger. Bree threaded her way through the tables, nodding with confidence at the several teachers seated with the students. She reached Lindsey unchallenged, and paused and looked her over. Lindsey’s color was good. Her skin was more pink and less gray. Her hair was washed. The circles under her eyes were less pronounced. The girl looked up at Bree in mild surprise, quickly replaced by her usual sullen, hostile sneer.
“I need to talk to you,” Bree said without preamble. “And I don’t want to do it here.”
“There’s grass stains on your skirt,” Lindsey said.
“Yeah, well.” Bree grinned. “My entry was a little unorthodox. Nobody knows I’m here.”
“My brother didn’t send you?”
“No. I came to talk to you. Come outside with me, will you?” She held her hand out, and added gently, “Please. It’s about your father.”
Lindsey shrugged. Then she shoved the hamburger aside and got to her feet. She followed Bree through the French doors to the terrace fronting the lawn outside.
“Let’s sit here, shall we?” Bree pointed to a stone bench set under one of the ubiquitous live oaks. Lindsey perched on the very end, then drew her knees up to her chin and stared at Bree.
“Do you have a dollar?”
Lindsey blinked at her.
“I’ve quit my job as your brother’s lawyer. I’m signing on with you. But I can’t represent you unless you give me an official retainer.”
Bree knew she desperately needed to gain the girl’s confidence.
“I think you got a raw deal, Lindsey. I want to help you.”
A peculiar smile flickered across her face. She shrugged—that shrug!—dug into the pocket of her jeans, and handed Bree a dollar.
“Good.” Bree folded the dollar and tucked it away in her suit coat. Then she plunged her hand into her purse and brought out her set of car keys. She held them loosely in her hand, so that Lindsey couldn’t see anything but the keys to the front and back doors of the town house. “Keys to the pharmacy and the warehouse at Marlowe’s,” she said gravely.
Lindsey sat up, her eyes wide.
“Your dad found out about the robberies.”
“My dad?”
“Easy as pie, I suppose. Coming into the store, late at night, with a set of these.” She jiggled the keys and they chimed faintly in the thick air.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She hunched over and rubbed her arms, as if she were cold.
“I’m on your side,” Bree said. “I’m not turning any of this over to the police. I just need to know who else was in on it with you.”
Lindsey looked frantically from side to side. “Nobody,” she said. “Just fuck off, will you? Just fuck off.”
Bree grasped Lindsey’s hands and held them, hard. “Don’t lie to me, Lindsey. If you lie to me, I can’t help you at all.”
“Leave me alone!” Lindsey screamed suddenly.
“This boyfriend of yours, Chad Martinelli . . .”
Lindsey sucked her teeth.
“I’m looking at him for some bad stuff, Lindsey. If he helped you with this, it’s possible he was responsible for your dad’s death. Possible that he killed poor Mrs. Chavez, too.”
“Killed my dad?” Lindsey said. “Somebody killed my dad?”
“Miss Winston-Beaufort. Stop right there!”
Bree sighed. Less than twenty minutes. The security team was sharper than she’d thought. She stood up and waited for Miss Henry and the two burly guards trundling after her. “I’m going to see what I can do to fix this, Lindsey. I’m going to have to talk to Chad. You have any idea where he might be today?”
Violet Henry plowed to a heaving dusty halt in front of them, reminding Bree of the Road Runner in the cartoons. She stifled the impulse to say “beep beep.”
“How did you get in here?” the headmistress demanded. She was furious. A very Southern Lady sort of furious. Her voice was low. Her smile was fixed. There wasn’t a hair out of place. But she’d buttoned her suit jacket up starting with the wrong button, and a smear of gravy was on her chin. Clearly, she’d been interrupted while eating. Behind her, the two guards put their hands on their gun belts and looked menacing.
“She’s my lawyer,” Lindsey piped up. “She’s my lawyer and I asked her here.” She folded her arms defiantly. “So just fuck off, okay?”
Bree bit her lip. “I’m sure Lindsey’s sorry for the language, Miss Henry. But I can’t help but agree with the sentiment.”
Lindsey rolled her eyes. “Talk to Madison, Bree. Okay? She’ll tell you Chad didn’t have a thing to do with it.” She swallowed hard. “She’s my best friend. She knows I didn’t have anything to do with it, either. I know you won’t believe me. But everybody believes her.”
“Get out, Miss Beaufort,” Miss Henry said between her teeth. “Right now.”
So Bree got.
018
“She’s not here,” Andrea Bellamy said, when Bree got her on the cell phone twenty minutes later. “She didn’t come straight home. She volunteers at the hospital on Wednesdays. She’s a candy striper.”
“Until what time?”
“Four thirty. Then she heads out to the Y to swim. She picks up Hartley first.”
Bree sat in the driver’s seat of her car. She’d made it back to Savannah around six, having been evicted from the Cliff’s Edge premises in record time. Sasha yawned beside her. Behind her, Belli and Miles sat upright, staring at the street. She’d postponed the promise of the walk to blank looks from all three of them. She said, now, to Andrea, “Hartley Williams? The judge’s daughter?” Cordy’d backed off the whole Sophie Chavez mess with amazing speed, due, Bree had suspected, to a couple of discreet phone calls from that same eminent gentleman.
“Is her father a judge?” Andrea said, impressed. “You’re kidding. I thought he ran a business of some kind. You know what? I’m a liar. It’s her stepfather who runs the business. A judge. What do you know?”
“Does she live with her mother or her father?”
“Oh, her mom. I’ve met her. I can’t believe Dorcas dumped a judge. ’Course, from what I hear, she’s dumping this new husband, too.”
Bree made an effort to control her impatience. “Do you have the address?”
“Sure. Hang on.” Andrea put the handset down with a clatter, and then picked it up again. “It’s a housing development out by the Oglethorpe Mall. Twenty-two Trail View. I’ve been there once. It’s right off the main entrance. There’s this pair of stone monuments with the name carved in them: Valley View. Trail View’s the first right as you come in the front.”
She’d rather talk to Madison in a venue less public than either the hospital or the Y. “May I have Madison’s cell phone number? I’d like to meet her at Hartley’s, if I could.”
Andrea rattled it off. Bree scribbled it down, promised to let Hartley know her father was welcome at the Bellamy residence anytime, and phoned Madison. She went straight to voice mail. “It’s important,” she said. “I need to talk to you about Lindsey and the robberies at the warehouse. If you and Hartley know anything at all about this, Madison, I really need to talk to you. Lindsey needs your help.”
Then she punched Hartley’s address into her GPS. The trip time was less than twenty minutes. “So, you guys, we’ve got time for the walk after all.”
Belli placed her huge head on the backrest and slobbered gratefully in Bree’s ear.
019
By the time she reached the turnoff for Valley View—which had neither a valley nor a view of anything but the back end of the Oglethorpe Mall, Bree was running a little late, and the weather had worsened. It was going to storm again and storm hard.
Madison’s little red Miata was already in the driveway. The housing development was new, and the landscaping was sparse. There seemed to be three different styles of houses. Twenty-two Trail View was at the more modest end of the scale. It was two stories, with a small front porch and an attached garage. A For Sale sign sat on the lawn. Bree parked at the curb, just past the mailbox, and got out of the car. The front door opened and Madison Bellamy waved at her. Bree waved back. Madison wore a bright pink T-shirt. The Savannah Sweethearts Social Club logo was picked out in sequins and the lowering sun struck metallic flashes off her chest. Bree squinted against the fractioned light; there was somebody behind Madison. Some guy, she thought. Hartley’s stepfather, perhaps.
She reached into the rear seat for her briefcase, shoving aside Belli’s huge forepaws to get it. As she backed out of the car, the briefcase awkwardly positioned under one arm, she collided with the mailbox.
“Watch it,” Madison said in her ear.
Bree jumped. She shut the door. The dogs looked out at her. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come up. And it looks like I whacked the mailbox a good one. Sorry.” The cheap wooden stake lurched to one side and the metal door to the mailbox gaped open. Bree gave the stake a firm shove to keep it upright, and palmed the door shut, idly noting the name as she did so.
The name on the mailbox was Hansen.
Bree froze.
Hartley’s stepfather, Stephen, is a real asshole, Lindsey had said.
Marv Kleinmetz. Tiffany Burkhold. Stephen Hansen.
“Nice to meet you at last, Miss Beaufort,” Stephen Hansen said.
“Oh, Madison,” Bree said. She felt sick.
Hansen had a scar on his cheek.
Shirley: He had a scar under one eye.
Hansen was the third man in the old photograph in Probert Chandler’s office.
Lindquist: We were all chem majors . . . Steve Hansen was with us for a time.
Madison stepped away from the car. The man behind her stepped forward. His hair was cropped close to his head. He had to be at least forty-eight, Bree thought, but he looked a lot younger.
Madison: I prefer older guys myself.
He was tall and rangy, with cold gray eyes. He draped one hand familiarly around Madison’s shoulders. In the other, he held a gun. Madison glanced down. Bree didn’t know as much about handguns as she did about shot-guns, but it was a .38. “I thought you got rid of the damn thing,” Madison said. “Damn it, Steve. That’s just plain dumb.”
“You’re all in this,” Bree said. Involuntarily, she glanced at the house. A third figure stood at the open door. Short, chunky, with that irritating giggle that cut through the heavy air like a squalling baby’s. “And Hartley, too.”
Madison snapped her fingers rhythmically and began to sway back and forth. “Sweethearts send a sen-ti-mental sound to the guys to the chicks to the people all around. If you’d like another version that’ll get you off the ground, it’s the singin’ Sweet Savannahs where the happy can be found.” She brought the back of her hand to her nose, sniffed heartily, and grinned.
Bree looked at the gun in Hansen’s hand. She was furious. Coldly furious. “Lindsey said you knew all about it. I guess she was right.”
Madison laughed. It was genuine, gleeful laughter. Bree didn’t think she’d ever heard anything so chilling. “Lindsey, my ass. The only thing that little bitch is good for is the keys to her father’s pharmacy.”
“Hey!” Hansen said. “That’s my kid you’re talking about, here.” He cuffed Madison on the ear, not too gently. Hansen was Lindsey’s father.
The ninth circle. Treachery. Poor, friendless Lindsey.
“Probert discovered all of this that day at the Miner’s Club,” Bree said. “About the robberies, at least. Is that why you killed him?”
“I didn’t have a damn thing to do with that. Bert never could handle his liquor. And he was worth more to us alive than dead. No way was he going to turn in his own kid. Not to mention my little meth lab and the kids here, who help me get the goods to the customer.” He grinned at Madison.
“But if he’d just discovered that Lindsey wasn’t his daughter . . .”
Hansen looked surprised. “He knew that?”
“You mean he didn’t?”
Hansen shrugged. “Why cut off the source of the golden eggs?”
Bree frowned. “You mean you were blackmailing Mrs. Chandler?”
“You know,” Hansen said, “I think this conversation is over.” His eyes narrowed, and he looked meaner than any junkyard dog Bree had ever seen.
“And Shirley? What about Shirley?”
Hansen’s eyes shifted away from hers.
“Got in the way.” Madison shrugged. That all-purpose, in-your-face, so-what shrug. “And that was your fault, Miss Rich Bitch Beaufort. If you hadn’t asked her that question about the store robberies, Shirley wouldn’t have put two and two together. She tracked me down after you left, wanting to know if I thought Lindsey had anything to do with them. ’Cause Lindsey had the keys, see, from her dad.”
Shirley’s call to an unknown number. The keys. Bree wanted to punch something. She looked at Hansen. “So you shot her? Shirley Chavez?”
His face was stone. Flint.
“Maybe it’s a good thing you did hold on to the gun, Stevie,” Madison said. “I think you’re going to have to shoot her, too.”
Hansen cupped Madison’s neck with a proprietary caress. “We’ll ditch it after this,” he said. “I told you it’d be dangerous to be in this kind of work without a weapon. I’m sure you’d agree, Miss Beaufort.” He raised the gun to the level of Bree’s forehead and aimed between her eyes. “Inside the house. Now!”
Sasha growled. Bree’s hand tightened around her briefcase.
“The dogs!” Madison shouted. “Steve! The dogs!”
Bree swung the briefcase and knocked Madison sideways. Hansen leaped back and shot Sasha in the chest.
“Sasha!” Bree flung herself at her dog. She clamped her hands over the blood pumping out of Sasha’s chest. Hansen leaned around Madison, crouched slightly, took aim through the backseat window, and pulled the trigger twice. One bullet for Miles. One bullet for Belli.
Behind the shattered glass, Belli and Miles roared in fury. Striker was a vast, silvery presence behind them.
Sasha’s dying eyes locked onto hers.
Bree’s rage burst its bounds.
She flung her hands wide, the dog’s blood splattering the car, her hair, Madison’s contorted face. The air around her began to spin with the ferocity of a rip tide. She grabbed it, held it between her spread hands and arms like a living animal, and molded it, directed it, spun it . . .
And she was at the top of a mountain, with the winds of Heaven at her command.