Mock Apple Alibi, page 25
Naomi and Mr. Foster left with Sheriff Wilmot. They would tell him their stories and return to their own families. The helpful townspeople were sent on their way, Terry telling them that Vic needed space and that they would be able to talk and give their condolences later.
Erin caught a glimpse of Campbell Cox’s face in one group of onlookers, etched with pain and worry. She wanted to talk to him but had nothing to tell him. No idea of what had happened to Mary Lou, why she wasn’t with the others, and whether he would ever get her back. It made no sense. She should have been there with the others.
The house went quiet. It was just Vic’s muffled sobs and Erin’s sniffles as she held Vic and tried to control her own emotions and be strong for her best friend.
There was a knock on the door. Not the front, but the back. Erin expected a steady stream of visitors to the front door, even though they had sent everyone away. In the morning and throughout the day, they would bring their casseroles and condolences.
Terry stood up and went quietly to the back door to see who it was.
“Erin,” he said, calling her attention to him. “Erin.”
Erin pulled her attention away from Vic with great effort, getting up and walking to where she had a view of the back door. There, she saw a woman in camo pants and a bulky green jacket, hair in a ponytail, and strong jaws constantly chewing gum.
“Beaver!” Erin was surprised to see the federal agent there. And yet, not surprised, because Beaver did show up at the most unexpected times and places and often knew details of a case the Bald Eagle Falls police were working on before the police did.
Beaver stepped into the kitchen, and behind her was a shorter, older woman. Erin’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the gray bob and neat pantsuit. Mary Lou smoothed her suit nervously, venturing an uncertain smile.
“Mary Lou! Where did you come from? Oh, I’m so glad you’re safe!”
Despite the fact that Mary Lou was reserved and not very demonstrative, Erin flew to her and gave her a warm, welcoming hug. She was solid and real. In the face of the loss of Willie, Mary Lou’s safety was even more poignant.
“Oh! Do the boys know you’re safe? I saw Cam earlier, and he was really upset that we didn’t find you with Vic and the others.”
Erin let go of Mary Lou, shaking her head in amazement. “Where were you? Here we thought everyone had been taken by the same person, but Charley wasn’t, and you…” She looked at Mary Lou and Beaver, trying to discern what had happened.
What was the story?
“You were closest,” Beaver told Erin. “Geographically speaking. So we thought we would stop here first.”
“What happened? How did you find her?” Erin looked at Mary Lou, trying to take in every clue. “Are you okay? You look better than the others.” Erin glanced back toward Vic, still sitting in the living room out of sight. She hadn’t yet showered, changed, or eaten any food the volunteers had handed out after the rescue.
“I’m just fine,” Mary Lou confirmed, looking uncomfortable with all the attention.
“I didn’t need to find her,” Beaver said, chewing her gum. “I knew where she was all along.”
“You knew? How could you know and not tell her family? They’ve been going crazy trying to find out what happened to her!”
Mary Lou hung her head, looking down at the floor. Erin couldn’t understand her attitude. She should have been relieved and excited to return to her family, but she seemed guilty and ashamed. Not like Mary Lou at all. Mary Lou always did the right thing and held her head high. Even when she was beaten down by life’s circumstances, she still had her pride. She did the right thing, and she knew it.
“I knew where she was because I was the one who took her,” Beaver told Erin with amusement in her eyes.
“What?”
“It sounds like this may be a long story,” Terry suggested. “Why don’t you come set for a spell. Erin, do you want me to put the kettle on?”
Erin nodded. “Yes, would you? This is unbelievable.”
She led Beaver and Mary Lou into the living room. Vic, eyes swollen and face red and blotchy, looked at the two of them in surprise. She wiped her nose. “Mary Lou? You’re okay?”
Like Erin, she had nearly given up on Mary Lou being found alive.
They all sat down while Terry started preparing tea in the kitchen. Nilla was cuddled on Vic’s lap, and K9 lay on the floor. Because of the presence of the dogs, Orange Blossom was not in sight, probably pouting on the bed in Erin’s bedroom.
“You had Mary Lou?” Erin asked Beaver. “Why? I don’t understand.”
“It was clear to me that with Willie Andrews in the position he was, the people closest to him needed to be protected. I had a couple of agents watching Vic because I assumed that was where Willie’s enemies would go first.”
That had clearly not worked. What had happened to those agents? Erin hadn’t even realized any agents had been watching the house. They must have been hiding in the woods, hoping to cut off any approaches.
But she couldn’t wrap her mind around why Beaver would think that Mary Lou was a potential victim to those who, like Stayner, were intent on forcing Willie to do what they wanted. She had rarely known Mary Lou to say a kind word toward Willie. She had thanked him politely when he had been instrumental in helping to find Roger when he had wandered off. But she had told her sons to stay away from him, and Erin thought it was clear that she subscribed to the opinion of most of the church ladies that Willie was lazy and shiftless, was taking advantage of Vic’s youth, and many of the other things that had been said about him, including the assumption that he had been working with the Dysons when he had not.
Mary Lou could see the confusion in Erin’s face and sighed, looking at Beaver and then back at Erin and Vic.
“Willie and I… have a history,” she admitted.
“Oh, is that so?” Erin questioned with a laugh that came out unexpectedly. She hadn’t intended to laugh when they were talking about the man they were mourning. She quickly composed her expression. But she couldn’t help being excited to learn of a secret relationship between Mary Lou and Willie. “Exactly what history do you have?”
Mary Lou looked at Vic, blushing.
“We were both young and foolish,” she explained. “Things could never have worked out between us, and I left any thoughts of Willie Andrews behind many years ago.”
Vic blew her nose. “It isn’t like it matters. It wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway. That was before I was even born.”
“You already knew?” Erin demanded.
“No. But Cam is about my age, and assuming he is Roger’s, Mary Lou ‘left any thoughts of Willie behind’ before they got married, so…”
“Oh.” Erin followed the logic and nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. You guys were an item…” Erin prompted Mary Lou, “back before he did his time with the Dyson clan?”
Mary Lou took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. “At the beginning of his time with them. He said he just needed the money. I was foolish enough to believe he could serve those five years without getting into anything too serious. But then I started to see how it was changing him. And I knew I couldn’t stay with him. He couldn’t be that close to the Dysons without it changing him… and neither could I. And I wasn’t okay with letting that influence into my life.”
It was no wonder she believed that having once been in the clan, he could never truly leave its influence behind. And why she would not want her boys to have anything to do with him.
Vic wiped at her tears. They were still flowing freely.
Erin’s heart ached for Vic. She remembered Willie’s words.
You don’t think that I would do anything for Vic?
How would Vic go on without him? Erin knew that it happened. People, even those who had been deeply in love, lost their spouses and remarried and went on to have happy lives. Vic could fall in love again, could find someone else who would accept her for who she was. It had been hard for her and Willie to work things out between them—their roles, their pasts, all the things that could make or break a relationship.
“And how did you know about this?” Vic asked Beaver. “How could you know something that happened twenty years ago that neither told anyone about?”
Beaver looked at Mary Lou. “There were signs. I’m pretty good at reading people. I’d talked to both of them privately a time or two. Things are revealed.” She shrugged. “When I saw the writing on the wall with the clan and all of the dissension and talk of insurrection, I knew Vic and Mary Lou needed to be protected.”
“But you didn’t protect Vic,” Erin pointed out resentfully, “You just let her be taken.”
“Well… in my defense, I had a couple of agents on her house, and I did not expect law enforcement to swoop in and scoop her up. I was expecting action from the Dysons or Jacksons, not Stayner.”
Terry brought in a tea tray and put it down. Erin did not feel like tea, but Vic probably needed it, and it was something to keep her hands busy until they stopped shaking. She busied herself with pouring hot water over leaves until everyone had been served. She sipped her tea without tasting it. Usually, she enjoyed detecting all the ingredients in the herbal tea mixtures, but today, she took no pleasure in it.
“What happened to the agents?” she asked Beaver. “They told you that a cop had taken Vic away, and you sent them home?”
Beaver shook her head. Despite her usual casual, carefree demeanor, Erin thought she could see the anger bubbling. “I haven’t found them. Since they were not in that mine with the others… I can only assume he disposed of them some other way. And that he will never talk because that would get him the death penalty.”
Erin swallowed, sorry she had accused Beaver so quickly. “Maybe he stashed them in another mine.”
“You can rest assured that we will be checking every one we can. But there are a lot of mines and tunnels around here, as you know, and if we don’t find them quickly and Stayner doesn’t talk…” She clenched her jaw tightly before she started chewing her gum again. “That’ll be a black mark against my name forever.”
Erin envisioned Stayner checking on her, then scouting out the backyard and the woods, and spotting the federal agents watching Vic’s apartment. How would they know that the uniformed cop who approached them with an outstretched hand would not blanch at killing a couple of federal agents to kidnap the girlfriend of a crime boss they were guarding?
Maybe he hadn’t known at the time that they were federal agents and had thought them members of one of the clans, not discovering his mistake until it was too late. He wouldn’t have had a lot of time to kidnap Vic and to take care of a couple of bodies before being called in the morning and pretending he knew nothing about it. He hadn’t managed to dispose of Potter’s body. But it would have been more vital to dispose of the agents.
“I can’t believe it was Stayner,” Erin said, shaking her head. “I never liked the guy, but I thought he was a true-blue cop and would enforce the law to his dying breath. He always acted so… righteous.”
Beaver nodded, her gaze hooded. “People are not always what they appear to be.”
Chapter 52
Erin’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She ignored it at first, but it kept vibrating, and eventually, she pulled it out of her pocket, irritated.
She realized belatedly that the cell tower must be back up again. Maybe the buzzing was all the messages left while the network was down being delivered to her phone.
There was a number on the screen. A phone call from a number she did not know.
But it was not a good time. People needed to exercise some common sense about when to call.
She sent it to voicemail.
In a moment, it vibrated again. She looked down at it as a text message appeared briefly on a banner at the top of the screen.
Erin answer your phone
She mentally cursed the person who continued to harass her even after he should clearly have understood she was not taking any calls.
“Something wrong?” Terry asked.
Erin tried to compose her face. Obviously, she was showing everyone in the room her feelings about the irritating caller.
“Sorry. I just don’t know why someone would be so persistent at a time like this.”
“Maybe they don’t know,” Vic pointed out, rubbing tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands. Already, her nose and the skin around her eyes looked completely raw. Erin wanted to gently put cream on them and give Vic a reassuring hug. And tell her what? That she could find someone else? That the pain would pass?
Erin sighed. She thumbed a message back to the caller.
not a good time
send Vicky to loft
Erin blinked at this message and tried to make sense of it. Who would want Vic to go back to her apartment? Someone who knew she had been rescued from Stayner and hoped to get his hands on her himself? But anyone who had heard of the rescue must also have heard the news of Willie’s death.
“What is it?” Vic asked, looking at Erin’s grimace.
Frowning, Erin turned the phone so that Vic could see the message. Her brain tried to analyze the words in the message. No one referred to Vic as Vicky but a few intimate friends, and even then, only at the closest moments.
Vic looked at the screen and then back at Erin’s face.
“Could it be…?” she started, then shook her head, looking away with a scowl. “No. But…”
She pushed herself to her feet.
“No,” Erin warned. “Be careful! It could be—”
Vic was running to the back door. Beaver was on her feet in a flash, hot on her heels. Terry was a bit slower, a few feet behind, his hand grasping his gun and pulling it from the holster before he was out the back door.
Erin felt like an old woman trailing behind them, her brain still trying to make sense of it all. Only Mary Lou was behind her, and she didn’t seem inclined to leave the house to find out what was going on. Maybe Erin was too eager to run toward trouble. But she just wanted to help Vic. If it was a trap…
Vic was up the stairs to the loft and wrenching open the door. Beaver, right behind her, had produced a gun from somewhere. Terry was still half the long flight of stairs behind them. Erin pounded up after everyone was gone, already in the apartment. At least if it was dangerous, the people with weapons had beaten her there.
Erin ran in, puffing embarrassingly hard. Terry and Beaver were standing back, their weapons held down at their sides rather than at a suspect, and they parted slightly so Erin could see past them.
Vic, sobbing, clasped in the arms of… Willie. Erin gasped.
“What?”
Willie looked across the room at her, patting Vic on the back, and raised his brows.
“What?” he asked innocently, “You believe everything you hear? I told you, ‘Whatever it takes.’”
The rest of his words came back to her. “Just trust me. No matter what you see or hear about me… trust that I will find a way.”
“You’re okay? You’re not hurt? You’re not…”
“Not dead,” Willie agreed. “But don’t spread that around. You haven’t seen me. This has to stay under wraps until I tell you. You breathe a word of it, and you could wreck everything.”
Erin looked at Terry. “You said he was dead.”
“Melissa said he was dead,” he corrected.
“Melissa said Jack Ward said he was dead,” Erin remembered.
“It wasn’t Jack Ward,” Willie said. “It was… somebody who sounded reasonably like Jack Ward. Who happens to be away from the office right now, unreachable.”
“And how did you engineer the communications outage?” Erin demanded.
“That wasn’t me. That was just… serendipitous.”
“It was Stayner,” Terry said. “He sabotaged the systems. Not to help Willie.” He shook his head. “To give himself cover. So that no one could say where he was—or wasn’t—during the blackout.”
“And he came after me,” Erin stated.
“You were one of his targets, anyway. I can’t say if he had any others. But he definitely wanted to put a stop to your investigation.” Terry considered this for a moment. “He’s never been thrilled about how you stick your nose into some of our investigations.”
“I don’t stick my nose in,” Erin protested. “In fact, I try to stay as far away from your investigations as possible.”
“Yeah,” Terry agreed. “That’s the scary part,” he said with a chuckle.
Erin looked back at Willie.
Not dead.
Willie was not dead.
“I can’t believe you’re okay. And that everyone was convinced that you were dead.”
“They have to stay convinced,” Willie said firmly, as if Erin might not have understood the first time. “You can’t say anything to make people think it is a lie.”
“So that’s how you decided to get out of leading the clan? By faking your own death? What are you going to do, go into hiding for the rest of your life?” A terrible thought struck Erin. “You can’t leave here! You can’t!”
She couldn’t stand to lose Vic. Vic was the one person who had fully accepted her when she had come to Bald Eagle Falls, who had been there for her the whole time and never been judgmental or negative toward her. Of course, there were other people who had been carefully supportive. And Terry. But she’d never had a best friend like Vic and couldn’t stand the idea of losing her.
“We’re not going to go into hiding permanently,” Willie reassured her. “We’re going to allow the clan to operate without me for a little while. Let them figure out how they are going to manage the leadership of the clan if I’m not there. Then, when they find out that I’m not really dead, they won’t care. They’ll have the stable leadership they need and won’t want an heir to the throne hanging around.”
Chapter 53
“How did you do it?” Vic asked, pulling back from Willie after wiping her damp face and nose on his shirt. Willie wrinkled his nose. “How did you convince them you had been killed?”
