House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) (23 page)

“She won’t be back until tomorrow morning. Thank God it was her afternoon off. By the time she gets here the place will be spotless and the girl will be gone.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. If we put her into the trunk of my car and dump her out in the woods, some hunter could come across her. They can identify people’s remains these days even from skeletons. I suppose we’ll just have to bury her.”

“Bury her? Maribelle Norwood Delaney, do you have any idea how hard the ground is in August? You may be strong, but Hercules couldn’t drive a spade into that dirt.”

“He could into the flower beds.”

“And have the gardener unearth her? I don’t think so.”

“How about the basement?”

“That’s harder than concrete.”

“Then it’s going to have to be the garden, Addy. Back behind the old summerhouse. Those rosebushes haven’t been dug up in years, and I can keep Vern from turning them again. If we dig a deep enough hole, he can plant rosebushes over her until he’s blue in the face without finding her.”

“It’s got to be deep enough so the coyotes and raccoons
don’t get at her, either. Do we have to sit here and look at her like that? She makes me nervous.”

“Go get some of those big plastic leaf bags out of the pantry. Four or five, anyway. We’ll roll her up and put her in the window seat until it gets dark and the café closes.”

“What about fingerprints?”

“What about ’em? Oh, very well, put on your dishwashing gloves and bring me my gardening gloves, though how they’re going to find fingerprints if they don’t find
her
is more than I can see.”

“What about the pitcher?”

“We’ll put the pieces in the garbage and tell Esther I broke it.”

“What about her purse? Her clothes? She can’t have come with nothing but that dress.”

“She said she didn’t have a hotel. Let’s hope she put everything in a locker somewhere. When she doesn’t pay the fee, they’ll open the locker, toss her suitcase into the lost luggage, and after a while they’ll throw it away.”

“You hope.”

“Open her purse.”

“You open her purse, Maribelle. You killed her.”

Together they removed the contents of Michelle’s small purse. They found fifty dollars and some change, the stub of a bus ticket from Memphis to Rossiter, a powder compact, a lipstick and a lace-edged handkerchief.

“We’d better strip her,” Maribelle said.

“What? That’s obscene.”

“Get a grip, Addy. We don’t want them to be able to identify her by the labels in her clothes, do we?”

“There aren’t any. She made her dress.”

“She’s wearing undergarments, isn’t she? Before we bury her, we’ll strip her and burn her clothes.”

“In August?”

“We’ve got the charcoal grill outside. No reason we couldn’t do a little late-night barbecue, is there?”

“You have an answer for everything.”

“I have to, since you have all these silly questions. Get the damn trash bags.”

“Esther will notice if we use that many bags at one time. She watches those things like a hawk.”

“Damnation, Addy, sometimes you drive me to distraction.” Maribelle stood up. “All right. I’ll drive into town and buy a shower curtain liner. That’s plenty big enough to wrap her in. In the meantime, you clean up the mess. Be sure you pick up every piece of that pitcher. One or two of them might have blood on them.”

Addy knew it would take Maribelle at least an hour to drive to Collierville, buy the shower-curtain liner and drive back. More than enough time to pick up the pieces of the pitcher and clean up the lemonade.

She realized with a start that she’d become an accessory to murder.

She’d also become a real threat to Maribelle. Maribelle had learned to ignore Addy’s long affair with her husband, but now Conrad was dead and unable to protect her.

She’d best protect herself.

She sat down at the desk in the library, took out a sheaf of stationery and some carbon paper, and began to write. She’d make certain Maribelle knew that if anything happened to her, Addy, before Maribelle died, the story of Michelle Delaney’s death would be revealed.

She’d assure Maribelle that if her sister predeceased her, she’d destroy all three copies. She wasn’t any more interested in being brought up on charges than Maribelle was. The secret must die with the two sisters.

In the meantime Maribelle would finally have to change
her will so that Addy could live in the house for the rest of her life and have enough money to travel.

Maribelle would be furious, but if the confession was finished and in the mail before Maribelle got back, there was little she could do about it.

She gathered up all the shards of crystal, put them into a paper grocery bag, bundled them with the original copy of her confession, taped the entire thing together and hid it in the dumbwaiter. She’d hidden her journal there for years successfully, but it had become too much trouble to climb in and out of the thing now that she was getting so arthritic. Maribelle had only discovered the diary after Addy moved it to the top of her chifferobe.

She had no intention of writing a single word about this incident in her journal, so she didn’t care that Maribelle stole it periodically to read what she’d written. She wouldn’t have to take the package out of the dumbwaiter again unless she wanted to destroy it after Maribelle’s death.

When Maribelle returned with the liner, Addy was innocently scrubbing blood and lemonade out of the rug. She’d wrapped the poor girl’s head in a tea towel so she wouldn’t have to look at her face.

Burying her took most of the night and all of both women’s strength.

They stripped Michelle’s body and wrapped it in the liner before they lowered it into the grave.

Filling in the grave was easier than digging it, but still took a couple of hours. Both women had to rest frequently and were bedeviled by mosquitoes.

By the time they finished covering their tracks and cleaning up after themselves, they were much too tired to deal with Michelle’s clothes, so Addy took them to
her room and hid them in the back of her closet in a shoe box.

Later the next day after Esther had gone home, she cut all those marvelous buttons off Michelle’s dress. They were too beautiful to burn. Perhaps one day she’d feel safe enough to use them on one of her own dresses.

They burned the clothes that evening.

All they could do now was wait to see if they’d gotten away with it. It was hell, especially for Addy.

“No one will ever know,” Maribelle said to Addy after a lovely welcome-home dinner with David, Karen and Paul Edward, already known as Trey. “No one’s looking for her. It’s obvious David has forgotten all about her. We’re home free.”

Not quite, although Maribelle didn’t know that yet.

When Addy finally told her about the three confessions, she thought Maribelle would kill her at once. After she calmed down, she agreed to Addy’s terms. Addy didn’t tell her about the pieces of the pitcher she’d saved with the confession.

Both women tried to get on with their lives, but their relationship—always rocky—was soured for good. Maribelle worried that Addy would get an attack of conscience and confess. Addy worried that they’d get caught.

When her son David broke his neck in the hunt field, Maribelle grew old overnight. She padlocked his studio in the back garden after covering the two canvases he was working on with white sizing paint. She didn’t want anyone ever to see the girl’s shadowy face painted behind her son’s.

She and Karen kept Delaney Farms healthy so that Trey would inherit even more than David had from Conrad, but Maribelle was functioning like a robot. Addy didn’t think she ever felt any remorse over Michelle’s death.

After Maribelle died, Addy planned to travel.

But when it actually happened, when she was finally free with a little money of her own, she didn’t dare leave her house and the rose garden. She burned the two carbons of her confession, but her mind had begun to fail. She couldn’t remember what she’d done with the original. She worried about it until the day she died.

“H
ERE’S THAT PICTURE
you wanted, Chief,” the patrolman said. He handed the silver frame to Buddy.

He stared down at it for a long time. “A man never forgets a woman this good-looking.”

“What?” Ann asked.

“Don’t get me wrong, I was already in love with your mother. I hadn’t been on the Rossiter police force long. Didn’t know everybody in town the way I do now. I just figured she was visiting somebody on Main Street.”

“You saw her?” Paul asked. “You remember her after more than thirty years?”

“It was hotter than the hinges of hell. I do remember that. She was tottering down Main Street on those high heels, wearing some kind of black-and-white dress. I remember because she looked so miserable and hot. I think it was this one in the picture. Never saw her again.”

“My God,” Paul fell back in his chair.

“We never got a missing persons report or anything about her. I haven’t thought about that girl from that day to this.” He shook his head.

“You couldn’t know, Daddy,” Ann said.

“Doesn’t stop me feeling guilty.” He pulled himself to his feet and called to the patrolman, “Ray, get some tape, some shovels and some floodlights. I think we got us a crime scene.”

B
UDDY REFUSED
to allow Paul to work beside the men as they dug up the rose garden. Paul stood as close to the dig as he could.

Ann huddled on the back steps of the mansion and watched him.

She was glad Paul would have his mother’s remains after all this time. He’d be able to give her the burial she deserved. He would probably bury her close to her sister. He might even take her remains back to France.

He’d be relieved that his search was finally over, but he’d also be grieving. No matter how long he had known in his heart she was dead, the final confirmation must be terribly painful.

Ann longed to be with him, support him through his grief. But his body language said he needed to go through this alone. She had to respect that. Not once had he looked around to find her.

Of course he was focused on what was happening in the back garden.

But he seemed to have forgotten she existed.

He’d accomplished everything he’d come to Rossiter to do. No matter how hard the Delaneys tried to hush things up, the story would be all over the county within twenty-four hours. They might never officially acknowledge Paul, but everyone would know he was David Delaney’s son.

He had his revenge.

There was nothing—and nobody—to keep him in Rossiter.

If Ann ever intended to hold her head up in this town again, she had to act as though none of it mattered to her. They’d had a fling. Period.

She could sob to Dante in private.

Paul would no doubt protest that he truly loved her. Maybe he even believed it. He’d swear that they’d stay in touch, that he’d come back for her. But once he was
back in that other world, he’d forget Ann, forget Rossiter. Neither of them was of any use to him any longer.

She would allow herself anger. She had every right to be angry. He’d used her.

The only way to avoid throwing herself into his arms and begging him to stay was to remind herself of how he’d conned her. She had to stay angry. She had to avoid him.

She stood up. She might be able to manage that. She’d have to run home before she started crying.

“C
HIEF
, I
THINK
we got it.” Ray said from the hole in the rose garden.

“Stop right there. I’ll go call the ME.” He touched Paul’s shoulder on his way by. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I can’t take it in. To find her body after all this time. I never truly believed it would happen. What now?”

“Everybody connected with this crime is long dead. Nobody to charge. The ME will have to identify the remains officially. We’ll need a sample of your DNA.”

Paul laughed bitterly. “Ask Karen Lowrance. She has a brand-new report.”

“Yeah. Okay. After she’s identified, I guess we release the…remains to you for burial.”

“Thanks, Buddy.” Paul’s arm and shoulder ached. He felt drained. For the first time since his mother disappeared, he didn’t have his quest to drive him. He felt numb.

“Go home, Ann,” Buddy said. “You look like hell.”

P
AUL STARTED TOWARD HER
, but she glanced quickly at him, shook her head and walked away.

“Look, Buddy,” Paul said, “this place is going to be crazy. Is it all right if I pack up and go to a motel?”

“Sure. Leave word with the office where you’ll be. I’ll call you later.”

“Thanks. Could I…see her?”

“Don’t advise it. Nothing but bones.”

“Sure. Right.” He walked upstairs. He longed to call Ann, bang on her door, break through this barrier she’d erected, but he didn’t know how. He wasn’t thinking clearly, anyway. He shoved his few belongings into his suitcase and carried it downstairs to his car. Beyond the floodlights that surrounded Buddy’s crime scene he could see the first lightening that signaled dawn.

The dawn was red. “Sailor, take warning,” the old saw said. A red sky usually meant a storm before nightfall. At least it did in the north. Down here it frequently only signaled a dry day with dust swirling in front of the sun.

He closed his trunk and started toward the driver’s door. Buddy came up behind him and said softly, “Paul, you given any thought to how all this is going to affect your…well, your position in Rossiter?”

Paul leaned on the side of his car. “I’ve thought of little else.”

“I know you revealed a crime that should have been solved thirty years ago, and I know you and your mother are actually the injured parties here, but folks around here may not see it that way.”

“I’m a stranger. The Delaneys are not.”

“That’s what I mean. Some folks may not take kindly to your coming down here under false pretenses, picking everybody’s brain, causing a bunch of scandal to one of Rossiter’s oldest families…”

“Seducing one of its prettiest girls.”

Buddy looked away. “That, too.”