Aurora 07 - Last Scene Alive (24 page)

The thing I hated most—media attention—he’d sought out as being preeminently desirable.

More valuable than life. And yet, hadn’t I had the same thought hours before? Better a provocative whodunit than a disease of the week?

“What would Celia have thought about that?”

“You can’t tell me she didn’t know,” he said defensively. “I brought her the coffee with the Valium in it, a whopping dose; she must have tasted something funny about it. She just looked at me while she was drinking it. Then she closed her eyes and waited.”

Then she fell unconscious.

“She’d had a good night before with that stepson of yours,” Will Weir said. “He was good-looking enough, and self-serving enough, to show her a good time.”

I wanted to throw up. The Celia Shaw pre-death lay.

“And she was on the set of her very own movie, her very first starring role. Her Emmy was beside her. She had her own trailer.”

“So you put a pillow over her face.”

“She didn’t struggle. She was at peace. No disease, at the top of her form. And then I carried off the coffee cup.”

I put a hand over my mouth. He explained what he’d done so plausibly, but it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Did you ask Celia what she wanted? Did you tell her about her mom’s Huntington’s?”

“Not before she read it in the letter.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know about the letter.”

“Would you have told her?”

“No.” He looked surprised. “No, I would never have told her. We’d have had to go through the whole emotional scene, then, the crying and shit.”

The crying and shit. What an inconvenience.

“Did you get this job with the idea of watching over her?”

He said, “More or less.”

Meaning, no. He’d been hired by chance, observed the beginnings of Celia’s disease by chance, revealed his identity to her only when she’d made a play for him. And then, he thought he’d kill her. After all, he was her dad. He had the right to choose for her.

I don’t think I’ve ever loathed anyone so much in my life.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked, cutting to the chase. I might as well know.

“I guess I’m going to take this letter with me. I guess, if you say anything about it, I’ll just say you lied.”

Hope flickered in me for a minute, to be extinguished when I considered the overwhelming selfishness of this man’s life. He had no intention of leaving me alive with his secret. After all, there were blood tests that could prove whether or not he’d been Celia’s father. And there was the lawyer who could testify he’d had a letter sent to Celia on her birthday, even if he couldn’t say what the contents of that letter had been.

I had no idea what I could do to stop him. I don’t go around armed. You’d be surprised how many Southern belles have a gun in their purse, but I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t have a stun gun, or a blackjack . . . hey. I had a panic button! It was on the keyless entry pad for my car.

I’d gotten my keys out and now they were clutched in my hand. Was my car close enough to the back door to pick up the signal? I hadn’t the slightest idea how the damn thing worked. I probably had to be closer. So, before I could have second thoughts, I made a dash for the back door, managed to get my hand out of it, and pressed the panic button.

Beep! Beep! Beep
! My car responded in a wonderful way, lights flashing and horn blaring.

But I feared it was too little, too late, because now Will had hold of me around the waist and was pulling me back into the library. I held on to the doorknob of the open door as long as I could, but he was a strong man and my grip was weak.

Who would be driving past the library anyway, at nine o’clock on a weeknight? Downtown Lawrenceton was pretty much deserted even on the weekends, much less on a Thursday night.

My heart sank, even as I kicked backwards at him, hoping to land a blow south of the waist.

I got him in the shin instead, not nearly as effective, but enough to raise a “Huh!” of surprise. I shrieked, hoping to add to the din of the horn and addle his brain, but all that did was make him mad. He whopped me upside the head with an open hand. If he’d fisted it, it would have knocked me out or broken my neck, but I guess he wasn’t used to victims who actually fought back. He couldn’t control both my hands, so I went for his face, hoping to scratch him conspicuously, and I dug in. My nails are always short, so I didn’t make as much of a gouge as I’d hoped for, but he was bleeding and cursing up a storm. He hit me again, and this time he did a better job of it.

“Help!” I screamed, and someone actually did.

I had completely forgotten Patricia Bledsoe.

Patricia was dancing behind him with a gun in her hand.

If she shot him, she’d get me.

Before I could give my opinion, she seemed to realize that, too, and turned the gun around in her hand. Holding it by the barrel, she poised herself, and swung the butt with all her might.

She connected solidly with his head, right above his right ear. There was an awful little noise, like stepping on wet peanut shells, and then he collapsed in a heap.

We stood there and breathed heavily for a minute, Patricia’s chest heaving just as hard as mine.

“Oh, thank you,” I babbled. “Oh, Patricia, thank you thank you.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said precisely, clipping off her words like they were the end of a cigar.

“Yes, sure.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“I’ll make up something, you get gone. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I believe you,” she said, sounding a little surprised.

“He could’ve hit the corner of that table,” I said. “It’s wood.” I wasn’t sure if that would make a difference or not, but it sounded good.

“Better put some blood on the corner, then,” Patricia advised. She had her envelope still clutched in her hand, and now she tucked it into her skirt pocket.

“Good luck to you and Jerome,” I said, and then Patricia Bledsoe—Anita Defarge—was out of the Lawrenceton Library for the very last time, and over the sound of my car honking, I never heard her pull away.

I had a couple of things to do before I called 911. Feeling my whole face pucker with distaste, I touched my fingers to Will Weir’s depressed wound, and I rubbed the blood and hair on the corner of the table nearest him. I thought briefly of trying to move him closer to the table, but I was afraid of screwing up things even more. Better leave it simple.

I didn’t think I’d ever concealed a crime before in my life. It was kind of exhilarating. I rinsed my hands off in the employee sink, and then poured some cold coffee that had been sitting in the pot down the drain after the tinged water. I left the pot in the sink.

I dialed 911 on the phone in Patricia’s office. While I was there, I checked to make sure everything had been left in order. I wondered what had been in the envelope she’d needed so badly—money? Documents? Whatever it was, she had saved my life by coming back to get it.

As I waited for the police to come, I wondered what would have happened if Patricia hadn’t believed I would keep silent. After all, she’d had a gun in her purse, and she’d showed she wasn’t afraid to use it. Then I decided there were paths I didn’t need to walk, and that was one of them.

It was actually lucky for me that Will had hit me. By the time the room was swarming with police and emergency and library people, the whole left side of my face was swollen and blackening. The bruising had hardly healed from my mishap in the parking lot. I was going to forget what I really looked like. Blood and saliva had made a track down my chin where a tooth had cut the inside of my cheek. In the face of such graphic evidence, and the letter (which I never got to read all the way through) and Mark Chesney’s testimony that Will had tried more than once to get Mark to give him the books to bring to the library, I was home free.

Airlifted to an Atlanta hospital, Will Weir lingered in a coma for four days. Then he died.

I had to endure a lot of silent sympathy from people who were sure a gentle woman like me would be harboring lots of guilt at having indirectly caused a death, even the death of someone who was trying to kill me.

I guess they just didn’t know me very well.

If it ever crossed my mind to tell anyone about Patricia/ Anita, I sat on the thought as heavily as I could. I imagined her building a new life somewhere else, but I hoped in this new life she would cut Jerome some slack and let him wear Nikes.

Sam waited three more days, griping loudly about Patricia’s inexplicable absence, before he called the police, who weren’t too swift about telling the FBI. The FBI hopped right on it, fingerprinted the rental house (which had been cleaned, in the interim, by professional cleaners who’d been hired and paid in cash through the mail), fingerprinted the whole office (though by then the library janitor had done a jim-dandy job of cleaning the desk, under Sam’s direction) and questioned the whole staff. In the end, they still weren’t a hundred percent sure we’d encountered Anita Defarge.

How did Robin handle all this? After all, he’d been with me when I saw the picture.

Somehow Robin realized that identifying Patricia Bledsoe was no high priority of mine. I may have whispered something to him to that effect in the dark of the night, the night I moved into my new house. And since he had his plate full testifying against Tracy, moving his stuff from California to the small house on Oak my mother found for him, and doing some rewrites on the script of
Whimsical Death
, Robin didn’t ask any questions.

I like that in a man.