Authors: Nancy Pickard
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General
Ring of Truth
Special thanks to David E. Rovella, criminal justice reporter for
The National Law Journal
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2001 by Nancy Pickard
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-10: 0-7434-1805-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-1805-8
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Contents
Ring
of
Truth
Books by Nancy Pickard
The Jenny Cain Series
Generous Death
Say No to Murder
No Body
Marriage Is Murder
Dead Crazy
Bum Steer
I.O.U.
But I Wouldn't Want to Die There
Confession
Twilight
The Marie Lightfoot Series
The Whole Truth
Ring of Truth
Published by Pocket Books
Ring
of
Truth
Susanna
1
I'm Marie Lightfoot, or at least that's the name my publisher puts on the covers of the books I write about true crime. In classic “true crime” fashion, my latest one is titled
Anything to Be Together.
It's the tale of a murderous minister, the Reverend Robert F. Wing, who with his lover, Artemis McGregor, killed his wife, Susanna. Here's how it begins. This is the raw story that I am supposed to make you believe:
They were a matched pair: evil for evil, no holds barred. If the devil had split himself into male and female he could hardly have done a better job of creating two strands of a DNA for malevolence.
They felt their attraction instantaneously when they met. It was easy to see, perfectly apparent to the only witness to their meeting.
As irresistibly as hydrogen bonds with oxygen, “like” attracted “like” that day in the church. But what did it really feel like, inside their bodies, the first time they saw each other? Did it pierce them like a knife? Did it jolt like electricity, shooting at light speed from their eyes to their breath, hearts, minds, groins? Or was it more subtle and delicate than that, more like a rare taste of something savory on their tongues? Was it love— or lust—at first sight? It looked that way to the church secretary who saw them meet. But what, precisely, did they see in each other at that moment that nobody else had ever seen?
Well, it is said that the devil knows his own. And her own. At a dark, submerged depth below the light of consciousness, they must have recognized each other. Lovers, twins, soul mates. Surely there was something ancient, wicked, and intimately familiar for each in the other's eyes. Before long, they knew they would do anything to be together, even murder—especially, and most deliciously, murder.
Too bad he already had a wife.
Too bad for the wife, that is.
That's what I wrote, so portentously that I have almost convinced myself that I believe it. It's overheated, isn't it? Sexy, steamy, as their lust is judged to be. It sounds as if the Reverend and the “other woman” were fated to meet, mate, murder. A jury believed part of it. They convicted him, freed her. Do you believe some of it, all of it? Ah, but you don't know the facts of the case yet, do you? I'm not sure that I do, either, and I wrote the book about it.
My book, if not their crimes, begins with innocence. There isn't even a hint of sex to begin with, except for the body of a naked woman abandoned to the subtropical vines, the snakes, the insects, and the putrefying heat. There is only the pure curiosity of childhood, betrayed in a decaying “Garden of Eden,” on a stifling summer day in Florida.
Anything to Be Together
By Marie Lightfoot
CHAPTER 1
The suburbs look as if they're taking over Florida, but don't be fooled by appearances. Natives will tell you this state isn't what it seems. What it looks like is recent and skin deep; what it
really
is goes deep to porous limestone. Way down there, shellfish without eyes swim in water that Florida's famous sunshine has not warmed in centuries.
Live here long enough, and pay enough attention to its startling secrets, and you'll get the feeling it could revert to primordial ooze in the blink of a heron's eye. The Everglades could rise again and swamp the land, flooding new developments and turning them into ghost marshes. Hurricanes could topple every condominium on the beach and consume the last morsel of sand on reclaimed land. The gators could take over backyard pools, the panthers could prowl school grounds, and the bears that are confined to Ocala National Park could slip the fences and appear in town to ransack abandoned garbage pails.
It could happen, with only a subtle twist of the dial of fate: a bit to the left to get a monster hurricane season, or a bit to the right for global warming, and the whole state
will disappear under water, just fall back into the sea. It wouldn't take that great a change in temperature or in the barometer to run the human beings off and turn Florida back to nature.
There are pockets of it, right now, where it looks as if it's happening.
Most people have no idea they're here, these pockets.
They're hidden in plain view, often behind
KEEP OUT
signs in dense, dark woody spots along a highway. You could drive by one so fast you'd think that momentary darkness out of the corner of your eye was a light pole flashing past. You could pass one every day on your way to take the kids to school and you'd never even wonder what was behind that dilapidated-looking fence.
“What's back in there?” one of your kids might ask.
“I don't know, but don't go there,” you might say, without even thinking.
Of course, that would naturally get a kid to wondering.
Right in the middle of the most populous areas, there are hidden acres of snakes and Spanish moss, of gigantic looping ropes of vine. Poisonous frogs feast on insects that don't even have names. Tropical lizards disappear into the cracks of trees whose branches spread out as wide as their trunks climb high. This is the real Florida, as it was before people, and probably will be after us, too.
More kids know about those places than adults do.
When the grown-ups aren't paying attention, the children sneak in, on foot or bicycle, to roam the dangerous acres, and scare themselves silly trying to peek into deserted houses they call haunted.
On a steamy Tuesday in August of 1999, Jenny Carmichael egged Nikki Modesto into climbing over the padlocked gate of just such an abandoned property. Signs on the chain link fence warned
NO TRESPASSING
and
KEEP OUT,
but children don't seem to think such signs apply to them.
At least Jenny didn't. Nikki thought they did, or ought to.
“We shouldn't go in there,” she protested.
They were ten years old, fifth-graders together at North Bahia Beach Elementary School, in Ms. Fran Baker's class. Jenny excels at soccer, specializing in a complex move called a “Maradona,” which involves both feet going seemingly in four different directions at once. Nikki loves to read, but no horror stories, please. On sleep-overs, she always plugs her ears with her fingers and sings real loud if her friends start telling ghost stories. She was really really scared of this idea of Jenny's, but she didn't want to say that, so she tried to rely on legalisms.
“It's private property.” Nikki pointed at a sign.“We'll get in trouble. There might be some man in there with a gun, and he'd shoot us.”
“You're such a wimp,” her best friend taunted.
Jenny, the daring one, is the fourth of five children. She is a red-haired, freckle-faced girl, always flaring into adventure and mischief, a bottle rocket of a child. But Nikki is an only child, quiet, and obedient. They're a natural pair of best friends, a perfect balance for their qualities of fire and ice, earth and air. The problem from reckless Jenny's point of view is that Nikki is a scaredy-cat. The problem from timid Nikki's point of view is that Jenny always wins their arguments, unless Nikki bursts into frustrated tears and runs away. Then Jenny comes back, shamefaced, to say she's sorry, and would Nikki like to bike around the block?
Nikki always would, if they don't ride too fast.
Jenny always rides too fast, and takes the hills—when she can find them, in flat Florida—like a racer.
They had propped their bikes against the chain-link fence around the property with the
NO TRESPASSING
and
KEEP OUT
signs. Federal Highway, one of the most heavily traveled
thoroughfares in the state, buzzed right behind them. It's just “the big street” to them, which they aren't ever supposed to cross without a parent, but which they do cross, because their parents can't be with them every second of the day.
Nikki is the image of her Italian mom, with beautiful olive skin and big brown eyes and a shy smile that looks like an advertisement for innocence. She has a great giggle, and when it gets started, everybody around her starts laughing, too. Nikki has been known to set entire movie audiences into paroxysms of laughter.
It makes Jenny's day to get Nikki to laugh, but that wasn't what she was attempting to get Nikki to do at this particular moment. Usually, it takes Jenny a long time to persuade Nikki to do something the first time; but the second time it's easier, and by the third, Nikki is trailing right along.
Jenny dared Nikki: “Don't you want to know what's in there?”
“No.”
“There could be a cool old house, or a beach.”
Behind the property was the Intracoastal Waterway, where they also were not supposed to go.
“I don't care what's in there.”
“I do! I want to see. I'll go without you!”
“Go ahead.”
Nikki didn't really mean that. Being left alone on the edge of the big street sounded almost as scary as going into the dark woods behind the fence.
“Okay, I will.”
Jenny didn't really want to be alone, either, so she tried a new tack. “It'll be our secret hideout—wouldn't that be cool?”
That was an attractive prospect, all right, but to Nikki the patch of land looked as ominous as the darkness under
her bed at night. Who knew what kind of scary creatures were lurking in there? Nikki is afraid of spiders, and snakes, and the dark, and almost anything that surprises her in any way. This makes it very challenging to be Jenny Carmichael's best friend, but there is nobody Nikki has ever known who can be so much fun as Jenny.
“Let's just go in a little, little ways,” smart Jenny urged.
“How far?”