Death Casts a Shadow, page 22
“Thirty years and three statues,” Cubiak said.
“That’s how it played out. Zack kept the girl, and I got the satisfaction of pulling a fast one on him.” Overly shook his head. “Pretty pathetic when you think about it.”
“But lucrative. You got a substantial amount of money from each one you sold.”
The birdman crinkled his eyes. “I admit that there was a bit of satisfaction in that as well. Zack was a man’s man. He hunted grizzly and moose and belittled my interest in ornithology, but it was his money that bought the bird seed and the Audubon prints.”
Cubiak drained his coffee. “You left The Bronco Buster for last. Why?”
The accountant shrugged. “I don’t know. There seemed a certain vengeance in making the first last. But after Zack died, there didn’t seem to be any reason to continue. Then I’d be stealing from Lydia, and I’d never do that.”
“What about her?” Cubiak said.
Overly gave a sad, sweet smile. “I was biding my time, hoping that eventually I would have a chance with her. With Zack gone, I wanted to fall at her feet and tell her how I felt, but she was newly widowed and that seemed inappropriate. I told myself that I had to be a gentleman and forced myself to wait a decent interval. I didn’t want to appear too hasty, as if I was dancing on his grave. And then James Dura waltzed into her life.” He grimaced. “So much for propriety. Lydia was ready, and I was left out again.”
“What do you know about Dura?
The accountant snorted. “There is no James Dura. Well, there was, but he’s dead. I tried to tell Lydia, but she refused to believe me. I even showed her a copy of Dura’s obituary, but she insisted I was wrong. It wasn’t him, not her James, it was some other man with the same name.”
“When I spoke to Dura’s ex-wife, she said someone else had called asking about him. Was that you?” Cubiak asked.
Overly nodded.
“And you told Lydia?”
“I tried to, but she wouldn’t listen. She was so innocent that she couldn’t bear the thought of such deception. She couldn’t fathom that the person she was in contact with wasn’t Dura, that someone was pretending to be him. Then, that Tuesday, she called around seven and asked me to come over for a drink. She said she had something important to tell me. ‘Just let yourself in,’ she said.”
“That was the evening she died,” Cubiak said.
“Yes.”
“You have a key?”
“I’ve had one for decades. I galloped over, thinking she’d seen the light about Dura. When I got there, she was in the living room with The Bronco Buster. Seeing it there on the coffee table, I had this crazy idea that she knew what I’d done. ‘Come in, John,’ she said when she saw me. I was in the doorway, still with my coat on. She poured a glass of sherry and held it out to me. I didn’t know what else to do so I went in and took the glass from her. Then she patted the sofa and told me to sit down. ‘Right here, next to me,’ she said. She sounded giddy, maybe even a little tipsy. Lydia wasn’t a big drinker, so it didn’t take much to get her high. I put the sherry on the table, slipped off my coat, and sat down, like she’d told me to. I was so close I could see the yellow specks in her irises. We clinked glasses and drank, and then I asked her what was going on, why she’d taken the bronze from Zack’s office. She said she wanted me to have it. Such a simple explanation. I nearly wept with relief.”
The birdman hesitated. “I almost told her the truth then. And I would have, too, but she started talking about Dura again, and it really pissed me off. James was coming, she said, and after I’d met him I’d see that all my suspicions were for naught. I nearly spit up my drink. What do you mean? I asked her. She said that he’d sent a message that morning saying that he’d arranged for a long weekend off later this winter. He’d send her his itinerary as soon as he had the information. I told her it was a trick. James Dura wasn’t real, and whoever was pretending to be him would make an excuse and cancel. We went back and forth about it. All those years Lydia and I had known knew each other, and that was the first time we’d argued about anything.”
The sheriff took the plastic bag with the ring from his pocket and put it on the table.
“Did you give this to Lydia that evening?” he asked.
Overly braced his hands against the table edge and stared at the gold band. “In a way, I guess you could say I did.” The wall clock ticked through several seconds. Then he stumbled to his feet and crossed to the rear window and stared out at his bird sanctuary.
“I went over there confident that she’d wised up about Dura. I went there intending to ask her to marry me. We were still arguing when I went down on one knee. Maybe it was the sherry that got to me or maybe I went a little crazy, but after all this time I was determined to tell her how I felt. She knew what was coming, she had to, because before I could say anything she put her hand on her heart and smiled. Not in the way you would smile if you were going to say yes to a proposal, but in the way you would if you were humoring a child who’d told a silly joke.” The birdman turned from the darkness and looked at the sheriff again. “She was mocking me, just like Zack did.”
“Is that why you pushed her down the stairs? You were angry because she humiliated you?”
“No!” Overly staggered back to the table. “I didn’t push her. We were in the living room. She was still sitting on the sofa. I seized her by the arms and pulled her to her feet. ‘Don’t you understand,’ I said. ‘Dura isn’t real. I’m real!’” He held up his hands and shook them, to pantomime his actions. “I told her I was in love with her, that I’d always loved her. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I had to say it to her face. I had to know that she heard me.”
“What happened then?”
“Lydia shook her head and said, ‘I know, John, I’ve always known, but I’m sorry. I can’t.’” Overly choked and looked past the sheriff. “I laid the ring on the palm of her hand and pressed her fingers over it. ‘Keep it,’ I said. ‘It’s yours.’ Then I turned around and walked away.”
“You left her in the living room?”
He nodded. “Only she followed me to the foyer. ‘John, please, try to understand,’ she said. She kept pleading with me to turn around, but I refused to look at her. I couldn’t. All I wanted to do was leave. I grabbed my coat and opened the door. I was halfway out when I broke down and glanced back and saw Lydia at the top of the stairs. That’s when she fell. Oh my God, the sound of her scream and the soft thump over and over as she tumbled. Then nothing but silence. I don’t even know how I got down there. All I remember is kneeling over her and calling her name, begging her to say something.”
“You didn’t phone for help?”
“Help?” Overly closed his eyes and cupped a hand over his mouth. Then he took a deep breath. “I was a volunteer EMT for ten years, Sheriff. I was the help. Lydia was dead.”
The birdman rubbed his collarbone. “I stayed with her. I don’t know for how long. An hour, maybe more. I couldn’t think straight. Finally I got up and went upstairs.”
“You washed and dried your glass and put it away?”
“Yeah, I guess. I must have.”
“Which made it look like Lydia had been drinking alone.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So I wouldn’t be blamed? I don’t know why, not really. It was like I was living a nightmare and was waiting to wake up and find out that everything was okay.”
“And then?”
“Then I left.”
“The same way you came in?”
“Yes, through the front door. I pulled it shut behind me like I always did.”
“She fell on the statue,” Cubiak said.
“I know. She must have been carrying it when she came into the foyer.” Tears welled in Overly’s eyes. “My compensation prize.”
“What about the ring?”
“I didn’t think of it until the next morning. I got up late and went back to look for it. I was downstairs when I thought I heard a noise out front, probably Bobby coming to clear the snow. I couldn’t leave that way, so I went out the downstairs door and circled around to the road where I’d left my car.”
Overly shook his head as if trying to get rid of a taunting memory. “What a fucking fool I’ve been.”
From where he sat, the sheriff could see past him to the yard. The birds had flown off and the sun had disappeared behind a bank of gray clouds. Snow drifted from the sky. Against the backdrop of the tumbling flakes, the birdman’s reflection shimmered like a misty veil in the panes of glass.
“But it’s worse than that, isn’t it?” Cubiak said. “A lot worse.”
27
THE WRONG MAN
Cubiak waited for Overly to react, but the accountant remained mute. The uneasy silence in the kitchen was broken only by the persistent tick-tock of the wall clock. Oblivious to the drama playing out in the room, the second hand stuttered from one black dot to the next, measuring the passage of time. Ten seconds and then twenty elapsed, but Overly said nothing, did nothing.
Another minute passed before he moved. The hearty ruddiness that marked his cheeks when they came in from the yard had slowly drained, leaving his complexion pasty white. Splaying his hands on the table as he sat down, he glanced in the general direction of the sheriff. “What do you mean?” he said.
“Two weeks ago, you attended the birders meeting at the Old Gray Mare, didn’t you?”
Overly brushed an invisible crumb from the table. “Probably. I’d have to check my calendar. I try to get to as many meetings as I can.”
“The flyer was on your bulletin board.” Cubiak pointed toward the hall. “I saw the notice the first time I was here.”
Overly shrugged. “Okay, sure. I was there. I’m the president. What does that have to do with anything?”
“The place was crowded that evening, wasn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know, Sheriff. We were in one of the private meeting rooms.”
“The one closest to the bar?”
The accountant braided his fingers into a fist. “If you say so.”
“According to the bartender, the three people—one woman and two men—sitting at the end were making quite a racket. The woman was Tracey Fells and the guy talking the loudest was her brother, Bobby Fells. You know Bobby, don’t you?”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“Oh, I think it goes further than that. Bobby worked for Lydia. He raked her leaves last fall and cleared the snow for her in the winter. As her bookkeeper, you wrote checks to him almost every month. In fact, a number of your clients who live in that area employed Bobby for the same kind of work, so it’s reasonable to say you’d have heard him mentioned and might even have seen him working at one homestead or another.”
Overly wet his lips and shifted in the chair.
“There’s no question that you’d also seen Tracey. She cleaned and ran errands for Lydia and others as well.”
“So what?” the birdman said.
“Some people get really quiet when they drink, but not Bobby. Liquor makes him loud and obnoxious, and he’d had plenty to drink that evening, which made him particularly odious. The bartender was busy, but he picked up bits of the conversation. Bobby was bragging about getting rich off a couple of old women. They thought they were so smart, but he was showing them. It was ‘like taking candy from a baby,’ he said.”
Overly squirmed. “You seem to know an awful lot about what Bobby Fells said that night. How do I know you’re not making this up?”
“I’m just telling you what the bartender told me. If he could hear what Bobby was saying, there’s a chance that people in the private room could as well, especially someone who got up to close the door.”
The sheriff continued. “The way I understand it, Bobby had to talk loud, so the other two could hear him over the noise from the televisions and the crowd watching the game. What I’d like to know is how much of this you heard.”
“I was presiding over the meeting. All I heard was a lot of noise. I wasn’t paying attention to a couple of drunks.”
“What about when you went over to shut the door?”
It didn’t seem possible that Overly could grow paler, but he did.
“Standing in the doorway, you heard enough to realize that Bobby was talking about Lydia. It must have seemed surreal. The man masquerading as James Dura was this good-for-nothing punk sitting on a bar stool less than three feet from where you stood. Lydia had fallen for him? The woman you loved had been conned by this buffoon? How was this even possible?”
Overly shrank back into the chair.
“By the time you closed the door and sat back down, you’d pretty much worked it all out and realized that Tracey was part of the scam too. That wouldn’t have been so hard to figure out, would it? She had the inside track. She’s the one who helped develop the James Dura charade.
“You were uncharacteristically quiet during the rest of the meeting. You must have been in shock. After the meeting, you drove one of the other members home, but then you came back. What were you going to do? Confront the two of them?”
The birdman opened his mouth and then snapped it shut.
“When the three of them left, you got up to follow them. As drunk as they were, they moved quickly through the crowd, not like you. By the time you got outside, the friend was nowhere in sight, so you assumed he’d already left. You didn’t know he was slumped over on the front seat of Bobby’s pickup. You watched Tracey get into her car and saw Bobby climb into the pickup. Which one should you follow? You didn’t know what you were going to do, but you knew you had to do something, didn’t you?”
Overly slumped over the table.
“In your mind both were guilty, but there’d be time to deal with Tracey later. That night Bobby’s the one who stuck in your craw. It was Bobby you had to get to first. He was the focus of everything that had gone wrong with Lydia. You tailed him toward town, and when you saw him turn off on the trail that led to the bay, you knew exactly where he was going. The only things out there were the fishing shacks. You figured he owned one of the huts and was going there to sleep it off. People did that all the time, didn’t they? They had heaters and stoves, things to keep the shacks warm, things that could blow up and burn. You watched Bobby open his shack and figured he was in for the night. When you left, you didn’t know what you were going to do next but you knew you had to do something. Am I correct so far?”
“Pretty much.”
“I can imagine what it was like for you, driving all that way in the middle of the night, alone and heartsick, humiliated and blaming Bobby for everything that had gone wrong. By pretending to be James Dura, he’d stolen Lydia from you. It was déjà vu all over again, wasn’t it? First Zack, which was hard enough to take, but now this—beat out by a phantom lover. You’d knelt in front of Lydia and offered her your love, only to have her reject you in favor of the shadow man James Dura—a man that Bobby Fells had fabricated out of memory and thin air. That’s enough to enrage anyone. You despised Bobby Fells. He’d scammed Lydia. He’d conned her out of her money and left her with a dream about a fantasy life. Caught up in this phony internet romance, she wouldn’t listen to reason. She even ignored the facts of Dura’s death when you showed them to her. Instead, she talked about downsizing and selling the bronzes, which didn’t portend well for you, did it? It was because of Bobby, the make-believe James Dura, that Lydia wouldn’t marry you and why you argued that fateful evening. All these pieces fell into place. Bobby was the source of the problems and angst that agitated Lydia and caused her to fall down the stairs and die.”
Overly groaned.
“Have I got it wrong? If I do, tell me. Tell me the truth.”
The birdman picked at his sleeve and stared at the floor.
“Did you sleep at all? Or did you pace back and forth, plotting your revenge? You knew that people warmed the fishing huts with woodstoves and propane heaters. Anything could go wrong if someone was drunk enough, and plenty of people had seen Bobby getting skunked that night. Everyone would assume he’d been careless and done something stupid to cause the explosion and fire.”
“I didn’t care what anyone thought.”
“By morning, you were set with everything you needed. You put on your coveralls, so to anyone who noticed, you were just another one of the fishermen out for the day. You took a chance that Bobby would still be there when you arrived and you were correct. There was someone asleep in the shanty but it wasn’t Bobby Fells.”
Cubiak opened the folder and laid a photo of the charred body across the table.
“I want you to take a look at this.”
Overly pinched his eyes shut.
Cubiak slapped the table. “Look at what you did, John.”
The birdman mumbled something, but the words were drowned out by the rush of warm air from the overhead heating vent.
“You’ll have to speak up. I didn’t hear that,” Cubiak said.
Overly squared his shoulders and pulled himself to a full sitting position. Then he opened his eyes and stared at the far wall, careful to hold his gaze clear of the awful image on the table.
“I don’t need to look at anything. I know what I wanted to do, and what I did. I went to the shack to destroy Bobby Fells.” He thumped both fists on the table. “He didn’t deserve to live, not after what he did to Lydia. I wanted to wipe him off the face of the Earth. You understand what I’m saying? I have no regrets about any of that.”
“You killed an innocent man.”
Overly gripped the edge of the table. “I’m sorry for that, Sheriff, sorrier than you can ever know. Nothing I do will make up for that mistake, but I’m even sorrier that I let the bastard live.” Then he crumpled and looked at the picture. “That should be Bobby Fells,” he said.
