Tea-Totally Dead (31 page)

“… I killed my very own sister,” Trent was saying. His voice was deep and steady, even calm. Only his face betrayed his feelings. His eyes were round, the whites gleaming around the brown irises as he scanned the water. His face didn’t look like a college dean’s anymore. It looked like a madman’s.

“I carried the dried oleander leaves with me,” he said softly. “Organically grown in my own garden.” He giggled for a moment, then went on in an even, measured tone. “She was planning to blackmail me again. She wasn’t just after money this time, she wanted to torture me. My sister was riddled with envy, of course. She hated my success. Initially, I thought I’d kill myself with the oleander, make her sorry. But why should I? She was the criminal. And when she drank her herbal tea the evening we arrived, I realized how easy it would be to slip the dried oleander into the mixture of herbs. No one else would drink that tea. Only she would die.”

“Oh, Trent,” Ingrid sobbed. “It
was
you.”

He didn’t seem to hear her as he went on.

“It took me until Friday to work up my resolve. When she said she was going to tell, it was as if she were asking me to kill her. She was going to tear down the very structure of my life. A man in my position has enemies, of course. Enemies who would destroy my success.” He turned away and strode in the other direction, his delivery still clear but distracted. The absent-minded professor. “I’ve worked hard for my position. And of course, I couldn’t allow her to tell Wayne.”

I wanted to ask what it was he couldn’t allow Vesta to tell Wayne, but I didn’t have a chance. Trent picked up another statue and lifted it above his head. I dove once more as he threw it. I reversed course underwater, aiming for the far end of the pool where the ladder was. But I ran out of air before I could get that far.

“… she was trying to drag me back down,” Trent was saying as I surfaced again.

I stroked as hard as I could toward the other side of the pool. But my sodden clothes made the strokes a struggle. It was like swimming in quicksand. With audio.

“I pulled myself out of hell the hard way,” Trent’s voice continued behind me. “Years of working and smiling. A million smiles.” He paused. Was he smiling there in the lamplight? “God, I hate to smile. And Vesta wanted to drag me back down into hell. No, I couldn’t allow that.”

The muscles in my arms and legs were burning with the effort when I finally made it to the other side of the pool. I clutched the concrete edge triumphantly and let myself breathe for a few moments. I could hear my gasps echo around the pool. But I was still a few yards away from the metal ladder. And Trent’s voice was still pouring out behind me.

“I simply couldn’t allow her to drag me back into hell,” he said. “Surely, you must see that.”

I wondered if he was talking to Ingrid or me as I pulled myself along the side of the pool, hand over hand. Or was he talking to himself?

“But why, Trent?” Ingrid cried, her voice filled with the emotion that was absent in his. “Why?”

“Wayne is my son,” he answered quietly.

I lost my grip and sank beneath the surface. I struggled back up frantically, coughing up chlorinated water as I surfaced. I grabbed the concrete edge once more. Was Wayne Trent’s son? I looked over my shoulder. Trent had turned to Ingrid. He was tall and muscular in the lamplight. He would be as muscular as Ace if he worked out. As muscular as Wayne. Was it true, then?

Ingrid stared at her husband, wide-eyed. Did she believe him? I turned away and began pulling myself toward the ladder again, keeping my mind on the present.

“I was the eldest of the family,” Trent explained. “My father beat me daily. My mother knit and read
Mein Kampf.
A charming woman.” A bark of laughter punctuated his words. “There was no love, only cold hard discipline. They wouldn’t even allow me to grow flowers in the garden. Their concept of gardening was to cut everything down to the ground and then poison it if it had the effrontery to grow again.”

“But Vesta…” Ingrid faltered. “Wayne?”

“I didn’t grow up!” Trent hissed. I was almost relieved to hear the momentary spurt of feeling in that hiss. But his voice was even again as he went on. “I survived my childhood. My love for Vesta was the only bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape. I was seventeen. She was feminine then, almost beautiful. And she was sweet. Our love was a refuge for us both.”

I touched the metal rail of the ladder gratefully.

“How old was Vesta?” Ingrid asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Fifteen, but she was a woman, I can assure you, she
chose
to be with me.”

Poor Vesta. Only fifteen years old, and her innocence abused by the brother she must have loved and trusted. No wonder she had been so bitter. I felt a simultaneous surge of pity and forgiveness for Wayne’s mother as I gripped the first rung on the ladder. Then I strained to haul myself up to the next rung. My water-logged clothes felt like a two-hundred-pound anchor, dragging me back down.

“I know there are those who would see our love as tawdry, who would label it ‘incest,’ but they would miss the beauty and sweetness.” Trent paused. “My enemies would use it against me.”

The wind hit me, chilling me to the bone as my shoulders came out of the water. Suddenly, I couldn’t hear Trent speaking anymore. I swiveled my head around and saw him watching me from across the pool.

“I have to kill her,” he said quietly.

He turned away from me to look behind him. Was he looking for another weapon? I scrambled up the last rungs of the ladder clumsily. God. It was cold out here. But at least I was across the pool from Trent, safe for the time being. I stepped out onto the concrete and looked around me, dripping and shivering. The pool was surrounded by a tall fence. Could I climb that fence? The only other way out meant passing within yards of Trent.

“You told me
Ace
was Wayne’s father,” Ingrid accused, her voice loud and clear. Trent turned to her, momentarily distracted.

“Ace believed he was the father,” Trent answered dismissively. “Good old Ace. He slept with her when I went away to college, but she dropped him the minute I came back that summer. She had only slept with Ace to make me jealous. She loved me! Me!” He pointed at himself like Tarzan as he raised his voice. Then he lowered it again. “Ace was always so gullible. Look at the eye color. Vesta and Ace both had blue eyes. How could their son have brown? And the timing: Ace didn’t sleep with Vesta again after I got home. And the baby was born a year later. The fool. He never guessed I was the father.”

He turned away from Ingrid, searching for me with his eyes again.

“Ace tells me he was foolish enough to tell Ms. Jasper that he was Wayne’s father,” he said just as his eyes found me.

“Was it you who sent Wayne on the wild-goose chase?” I asked him, keeping my tone as even as his. His eyes widened, showing whites again.

“Once Ace had told you he was Wayne’s father, I knew it was only a matter of time before you thought of me,” he said. “I had to protect myself. Only Wayne got back too soon—”

“Well, I
didn’t
think of you,” I interrupted him, incensed at the arrogance implicit in his paranoia. “Why should I? I only—”

I broke off when I saw he was no longer listening. He had turned and lifted a lounge chair above his head.

“It is far too late now,” he told me and heaved the chair in my direction. It splashed down halfway across the pool.

“But why kill Vesta?” Ingrid asked from beside him.

“She was going to tell. She had threatened before, even while she was pregnant. But my money had kept her quiet. I was a father before I was twenty, going to college and working two part-time jobs to raise a son I could never acknowledge. She never stopped trying to drag me down. Never.” He bent over one of the concrete planters and wrapped his arms around it, then tried to straighten up. But he couldn’t. It was too heavy. He paused to catch his breath, then went on. “When Wayne went away to college, she finally cracked. I arranged for her to go to a mental hospital—”

“You
put her in the hospital?” I demanded. True, I had heard Vesta accuse Trent of putting her away. But at the time I had thought it was just another one of her wild accusations.

“Yes, yes,” he answered impatiently. “I had her committed and made sure she was on plenty of medication….”

I shivered in the cold and thought of Wayne blaming himself for his mother’s commitment and over-medication all these years.

“… the minute she got out, she began with her demands again. We were to come to a family reunion, at her beck and call. I was to dance attendance or she would tell.” He trotted toward the remaining stone statue. Ingrid followed him.

“Did you kill Vesta’s friend too?” she asked.

“Of course,” he replied, bending over the statue. “Harmony had stepped into Vesta’s shoes as blackmailer. All of her talk about ‘family secrets.’ She knew.” He paused as he lifted the statue. There was no way he could throw it far enough to hit me where I was. Didn’t he realize that? Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid of him anymore.

He set it back down again as if he’d heard my thoughts. He stared across the pool at me.

“I’m not a violent man, you know,” he stated for the record.

“Well, you sure coulda fooled me,” I muttered. It was easy to backtalk him while he was safely across the pool.

His brows lowered into a glare. Wayne’s glare. He really was Wayne’s father, I thought. A wave of nausea swept over me along with a spasm of renewed shivering.

“I kept the rest of the oleander. I mixed it with marijuana from Lori’s room and took it to Harmony as a house gift—”

“From Lori’s—” Ingrid cried.

“Yes, Ingrid,” he snapped at her. “Our daughter smokes marijuana. I will have to speak to her about it sometime.”

He turned back to glare at me again. “Unfortunately, Harmony refused to smoke my little gift. But she put down her bat and turned her back to me. I took the opportunity she gave me. I took the bat and swung it.” He closed his eyes and was quiet for a moment.

His voice was deep and trembling as he went on. “She began to turn toward me as I swung, and kept on turning even after the bat hit her head. Maybe she was already dead. I’ve heard that dead people keep on moving. I’m not a man accustomed to violence. I didn’t know what to do. And then, she looked at me with those empty eyes.” His shoulders slumped. “I lost control then. It was inexcusable, but I did. I swung the bat into her face. It hit her nose and blood spurted. She stumbled and I hit her again. Blood went everywhere as she spun around. I just kept swinging and hitting her. I couldn’t seem to stop.”

He opened his eyes again and pulled his shoulders back, clasping his hands behind him, in control once more. “But then she was no great loss, was she?” he added.

My eyes teared up in the cold. Harmony
was
a loss, I screamed inside. But I didn’t scream aloud. I was afraid again. If not physically, then morally. This man was evil.

He kept his eyes on me as he began to walk clockwise around the pool. Ingrid reached for him. He batted her hand away impatiently.

“I have to kill her,” he said again, his words as cold as my soggy clothes. “If you want to help me, Ingrid, I would appreciate it. But just don’t hinder me.”

“How about Clara?” Ingrid demanded.

She was trying to distract him, I realized. She had been all along. Trying to save my life.

“I kept the bat,” he told her without turning. “Her door was unlocked. It was even ajar.”

Had Clara left the door open for Wayne and me?

“I slipped in and hid behind a couch. When she came into the room, I stepped behind her. She must have heard me. She cried out. I hit her with the bat before she could turn and see my face. But I didn’t kill her.”

“I know you tried to get her out of the state first,” I said, keeping my tone as sympathetic as I could. “To Arizona—”

“Yes, yes,” he interrupted. He kept walking around the pool. I began to circle clockwise too. He stopped for a moment.

“I had to do something about her. She knew. All her talk about genetics and eye color. She looked right at me and said a brown-eyed father and blue-eyed mother might give birth to a brown-eyed child. She knew I was Wayne’s father. And she was going to tell everyone. She wanted me to lose respect. I’m a respected man, a dean. I couldn’t risk it.”

As we stared at each other across the pool, I remembered Lori telling me the murderer was a type three, a status seeker. Had she been thinking of her father then?

He began to circle the pool again. “Clara was whispering to you last night,” he accused.

“But she didn’t know!” I shouted angrily. God, what an ego this man had. An ego that had cost at least two lives. “She
told
me she didn’t know who the murderer was. She was just making conversation with Eric.”

He continued to circle. Had he even heard what I had said?

“Trent, stop this,” Ingrid ordered, trailing behind him. Then she turned her head to look at me. “Can’t you let it go, dear?” she begged. “No one else knows. Just us three.”

I shook my head. Her body collapsed inward, as if I’d punched her. Damn. She had to know I couldn’t let it go. Or was she as crazy as her husband?

“Trent, you have to stop this right now,” she admonished him, using the voice you’d use with a child.