The Arrangement (34 page)

His hands rested lightly on the wheel. “I’d go insane if I couldn’t get out on the water.”

She could hear the conviction in his voice. He actually meant it, and that concerned her, because there was nothing she could do to ensure that for him. If he’d really been her husband, he would have reached for her, and she would have gone to stand beside him. But they hadn’t touched other than when he’d offered a steadying hand as she came aboard. It was almost as if they had never touched.

“Do you want to take the wheel?” he asked.

“Yes.” The boat rocked as she went to join him.
Yes, she did.

He stepped back, giving her access, but he stayed behind her as she slid between him and the teak and stainless steel steering mechanism.

“What do I do? This boat is huge.”

“Technically,” he said, “it’s a yacht.”

Laughter fizzed up. “Is that supposed to be helpful?”

“Someone once described sailing as half ecstasy and half abject terror,” he told her. “You decide.”

“It feels like freedom to me,” she said without hesitation. She tried the wheel, surprised at how sensitive it was, even to the lightest touch. Odd that a caress was all it took to control such a huge vessel. It was a lesson some CEOs and politicians could learn.

“Do you think she’s still alive?” Marnie asked him. The question came with no preamble, but he seemed to know what she meant.

“Someone pushed LaDonna off that cliff, and according to Bogart, the perp looked just like Alison.”

“Why would she do it?”

“To get rid of you, I’d guess.”

“All she had to do was come forward and expose me.”

“Ah, but then she couldn’t get
me.
If Alison were alive, I would no longer be the prime suspect in her death. She’s a mastermind, Marnie, as cunning as she is seductive. She befriended Regine for the sole purpose of getting rid of her.”

Marnie studied him. “Do you have any proof of that?”

“Nothing that would hold up in court. Alison didn’t show her true colors until after we were married. That’s when she started pressuring me to get her a record deal and to let her open shows for some of my big names.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I couldn’t. She had no fire, no stage presence. I tried to tell her, but she went nuts. She shrieked obscenities and accused me of sabotaging her because I was still in love with Regine. She ransacked my office, destroying everything she could find of Regine’s, records and posters, smashing awards. It was childish, but I could see how destructive she was.”

Marnie was trying to imagine the Alison she’d idolized flying into a rage that way. “What do you think actually happened the night Regine died?”

“Alison played bartender, and I believe she put something in the drinks. That would explain why I passed out and why Regine drowned, probably with a little
help.
Autopsies are rarely done on accident victims. Obviously Alison knew that. She also knew exactly how long she’d been away from the pool, talking on the phone, which seemed odd.”

Marnie wanted to ask what he would do if Alison was alive. Given how he felt, she couldn’t imagine he would ever want her back. But she also sensed his obsession with her, his churning conflict, and she didn’t understand it. Either he did want her back or he wanted her dead, but he wanted something.

Once again, Marnie forced the gnawing doubts from her mind. She couldn’t go there again, no more gut-wrenching questions. She had no idea how much time she and Andrew had, but she didn’t want to waste any of it. As the silence built, so did another thought that had been on her mind since they got to the beach house.

“What’s going to happen to us?” she asked him.

His sigh could be heard over the noise of the sails. “I wish to hell I knew.”

His hand dropped over hers on the wheel, and the unexpected contact set fire to her imagination. Every sense flickered and lit. She could feel the sun-baked deck beneath her feet and smell the damp musk of wet canvas. But mostly, it was the tactile sensation of his palm, his flesh, that she responded to.

He moved closer, hot against her shoulder blades.

She leaned back until they were touching. Full contact. Her breathing trembled. It was thrilling to be so close. And bizarre that it could be so powerful.

“I know what’s going to happen to us,” he said.

She tipped her head to look up at him. “What?”

He turned her around and kissed her. “This.”

The boat rolled beneath them. Marnie fell against the wheel, and it began to spin. Andrew caught her around the waist and clamped a hand on the wheel at the same time, fighting to steady it. He pulled her against him hard, and she felt the air expel from her lungs.

It was strange to be held so tightly. She was pinned by his arm, and his thigh had slipped between her legs. He was trying to brace them both, but the intimate contact was wildly stimulating. She softened against him, melting, moaning in her throat.

They rocked that way until the seas calmed, and he kissed her again. His mouth was luscious, as smooth and strong as good liquor. She could get drunk on him. She
was
drunk.

His tongue breached her lips, sliding along the side of hers. It made her wild, that feeling.

“You kiss like a woman who means it,” he whispered.

She nipped him. “I do. Mean it.”

The ocean swelled, lifting the bow. She lost the fit of his mouth for a second, and moaned. She wanted it back.

“This
yacht
of yours is coming between us,” she complained.

“We can’t have that.” He drew back to look at her, and his face changed as he saw her limpid eyes and passion-swollen lips. He touched her mouth and felt its wetness. He knew immediately what that meant.

“Nothing is going to come between us,” he said. “Give me a minute?”

She nodded, and he left her to go the pilot house, mysteriously saying that he had to make some adjustments. When he came back, he clasped her hand and started toward the companionway that led to the lower deck. “You’re coming with me,” he said.

Apparently he’d accomplished what he wanted with the wheel.

“Who’s going to steer the boat-uh, yacht?”

Some time later, as she lay next to him, dozing and pleasantly spent, she noticed a darker, richer light filling the windows. Absently, she realized the sun was setting.

“Should we go above?” she asked him.

He cupped her breast as he was pulling her to him. “Not quite yet.”

She met his advances with a hissing sound—and a kiss that felt as if it could explode like firecrackers on a string. Suddenly they were rolling again, slipping and sliding. She stopped him, but had to catch her breath before she could talk.

“How are we doing, timewise?”

“If we wind up in Mexico we’ll know we missed our dinner reservations.”

They made love again, coupling in the near dark—and Marnie couldn’t imagine how sailing could be half abject terror. It felt like ecstasy to her. Her only fear was that it would end.

At two in the morning, they were jarred awake by bullhorns. Someone was yelling that they were about to be boarded.

“Stay here,” Andrew told her. “It’s the Coast Guard.”

W
hen Tony Bogart checked his voice mail that afternoon, he found a message from Andrew Villard. Tony listened to it with a smile. Villard was being held without bail on murder and fraud charges, and he wanted to talk. Since he wasn’t actually married to Marnie Hazelton, he could testify against her, and by the sound of his message he was ready to make a deal to save his own skin.

Tony sipped iced coffee, basking in the glow of his latest coup. He was parked in his Corvette outside a Starbucks. He had the ragtop down and life couldn’t get much better. Finally he had the bastard where he wanted him, down on his knees. Alison had eluded him, but he’d tagged Villard, and that was almost as good.

Almost.

He hit a couple buttons and surrounded himself with music—cool, soothing jazz, designed to drown out bad vibes. But his sense of satisfaction evaporated anyway, gone before he’d finished his coffee. Marnie Hazelton was in jail, awaiting trial for the murder of his little brother, but Alison was still out there. Somewhere. Haunting him, taunting him. There wouldn’t be closure for Tony Bogart until he’d dealt with
her,
with Alison. She would live on until he saw her dead and rotting body with his own eyes.

And if it wasn’t Marnie in the guise of Alison who’d killed LaDonna Jeffries, then who the hell was it?

By nightfall a thick, dank fog had settled over the coastline, and the woman who picked her way through it was disheveled and exhausted. Her hair was matted and stuck to her head like yellow brambles. Her face was a grid of white scar tissue. She looked like a vagrant, but she knew exactly where she was going and what had to be done.

Tonight an old score would be settled. There would be no more betrayals, no more bloodshed. She would be avenged. Everyone who had been hurt would be avenged.

Through the mists, the house on the cliff glowed like a medieval fortress. Her legs burned with fatigue, but she climbed relentlessly, guided by the lights. The small, sharp-edged object she held cut into the skin of her palm. It was a key to the house, and when she entered, she would announce herself, and the lady of the manor would gape at her in shock. That lady was her mother.

Bret Fairmont was entertaining himself with his online porn collection when he heard the door to his room open behind him. “Who’s there?” he said, without bothering to close the screen.

“Surprise.” The answer was soft and raspy. “Look what the tide washed up.”

The familiar voice caused the skin on the back of Bret’s neck to prickle. He swung around and sprang out of his chair. The woman standing not ten feet from him looked like a skid-row vagrant. Her gallows grin revealed cracked lips and rotten teeth. Her skin was pimply and pitted. Still, he recognized her immediately—or who she was
supposed
to be.

It was the same woman he had up on his computer screen, but this one looked as if she actually had drowned and floated back up to the surface.

He began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. “Let me guess…Alison? What is this? Some kind of sick joke?”

“No, my
brilliant
brother.” Her grin stretched into a grimace. “It’s no joke. Your master plan failed. But then you were up against me. You never stood a chance.”

His plan? This
was
sick. Bret couldn’t decide whether to throw the imposter out himself or call the police. “Who the hell are you? No, fuck, I don’t
care
who you are. Who put you up to this?”

She reached into her grimy clothing, as if to scratch herself, and the stench she gave off made Bret’s stomach turn over. He broke out in a sweat, fearing he was going to be sick as she pulled out an automatic weapon.

“You’re supposed to ask where I’ve been all this time,” she said. “Isn’t that what a brother would ask a sister who’d been missing for six months?”

“My sister is fucking dead. Now get out of here—”

Laugher ripped out of her. Sharp and savage, it nearly pierced his eardrums. Jesus, who was this bitch?

“Ask me where I’ve been, you
asshole!
” she shrieked. “Ask me!”

He covered his ears, protecting them. “Where have you been?”

She sucked in a breath, as if to calm herself, but her knuckles were white against the trigger of the gun.

“I was waiting for the right time,” she said, “and this is just about perfect, wouldn’t you say? I got rid of Andrew and his weird little girlfriend, and now there’s just you left.”

Bret still didn’t believe she was actually Alison, but he was going to play along, anyway. The psycho bitch had a gun. Besides, he wanted to know who was screwing with him now. Andrew and Marnie Hazelton were behind bars, but someone was messing with Bret Fairmont’s head. Was this another one of his mother’s crazy ploys? Why would she do it?

“Where’s Julia?” he demanded. “Our mother—where is she?”

“She’s downstairs, pouring herself a drink, a big one. She knows all about our plan, Bret.”

“Our plan? Which plan was that? There are so many.”

Her dark eyes glittered. “The plan to fake my death and split the trust-fund money.”

Sweat drenched him. No one had known about that but Alison. The Alison who was actually dead. He hadn’t told another living soul about their scheme to get around that fucking morals clause.

“How could our mother know about that?” he asked her.

“I told her, you idiot.”

“No way. This plan you’re talking about,” he said, speaking as casually as he could, “
our
plan—it wouldn’t work. The trust-fund money goes to the next surviving female. That’s the way our grandmother set up the trust. It wouldn’t come to me under any circumstances.”

“Bret, for Christ’s sake. You’re talking to me,
Alison.
You know as well as I do there’s a provision in the trust that says the money goes to you if I should die without female issue. I guess Mom never intended to tell you about that, even after she thought I was dead and the money
should
have come to you. She really doesn’t give a shit about you, does she, baby brother?”

Bret knew about the trust’s actual line of succession only because Alison had told him about it six months ago, when they came up with their plan. But how the hell did this woman know? “Who told you about the succession? Julia?”

“No,
I
told you that—six months ago. I broke Mother’s silly code, opened her safe and found the papers. That’s when I came up the plan, which would have worked if you hadn’t gotten greedy and fucked it up.”

She repeated the nine-digit combination to his mother’s safe, and Bret’s stomach heaved. He really was sick then, all over himself. Wretching and coughing, spewing up the remains of his dinner. He wished she would shoot him.

“You are fucking
not
Alison,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. The stink was unbearable, worse than hers. “I watched her drown. I saw the current sweep her away. She’s
dead.
”

That laughter again, slicing at him like razors. She wouldn’t stop! The bitch was trying to blame him for the screwup, but the goddamn plan had been Alison’s idea, and no one could stop Alison once she got a hair up her ass. She actually thought she could jump off Andrew’s yacht in a storm and make it look like he’d pushed her.

She’d done all the prep work earlier that day, gone down to the boat, hidden the life jackets and loosened the lifeline. She was a strong swimmer and she’d researched the currents. Plus, she’d stashed an inflatable device in the lining of her cover up, but she’d totally overlooked the fatal flaw in her plan: her rat-fink little brother, Bret.

He was supposed to wait in a skiff in a protected area on the far side of the reefs where the currents would carry her. He was also supposed to throw her a lifeline and pull her in before she was swept out to sea. Poor stupid Alison. Why would anyone split a trust fund when he could have it all?

“I told mother about the rest of it, too,” she said. “How we tried to frame Andrew for my death, how you were able to get an insurance policy on me, using just the phone and the fax, pretending to be Andrew.”

“That’s insanity,” he whispered. “Why would you tell her any of that?”

“Because I want her to understand why I have to kill you.” She reached into her putrid layers of clothing again and drew out a silencer for the gun, a modern gleaming high-tech silencer.

“Are you totally psychotic?” Bret hissed. “There are witnesses downstairs. She knows you’re up here!”

He covered his ears, terrified she would start shrieking again. This couldn’t be Alison. This was too insane even for her.

“Are you forgetting Mother’s obsession with me?” she pointed out. “She’d never turn me in, no matter what I did, especially if I did it to you. She hates you now, anyway. You left her precious daughter for dead.”

He believed that. His mother
would
feel that way. “What do you want from me?”

“I’m giving you a choice. Either confess or I’ll shoot you through the heart where you stand. That’s assuming you have a heart.”

Now he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t have the strength. “Nice try, Ali
suck
, but a coerced confession won’t stand up in court.”

She let out a ghoulish cackle. “You should live that long! You’re not going to make it to court, genius. I just want to hear you confess. I want to hear you grovel.”

She pointed the gun dead at him and fired. The computer screen exploded behind him, and Bret dropped to the floor, covering his head and cowering. She continued firing until she’d pulverized the machine, and then she reloaded.

“You’re next, asshole. You’re next!” Her shriek nearly split his eardrums.
“Talk!”

Bret crouched in abject terror. If this was Alison, he had no doubt that she would shoot him—or that their mother would protect her. That’s exactly how it would go down. If it wasn’t Alison, he didn’t have a clue what kind of crazy he was dealing with. But now he did want to know who she was.
And he wanted to live.

“What do you want to know?” He’d decided to talk about anything, everything, give her what she wanted. It would buy him some time until he could figure out a way to turn this around and kill her. He would make it look like suicide, or even self-defense. Christ, it
was
self-defense.

She prodded him with a question. “You double-crossed me because you wanted the fifty million for yourself, right?”

He sighed. “That was the original plan, but you came back from the dead—or someone who looked like you did—and I had to regroup.”

“Regroup?”

Bret was still crouched down, but he’d spotted a pile of photographs. They were of Alison, and they’d fallen to the floor when she was firing. They were almost within reach. He shifted and groaned, as if his legs were aching.

“I sent Andrew a front-page story about your disappearance, marked up with a threatening message, to motivate him to get you back to Mirage Bay,” he told her. “Anonymously, of course. I also left Tony Bogart several anonymous voice-mail messages to make him think you’d killed Marnie Hazelton. It was working until LaDonna told me the imposter
was
Marnie.”

“What was the point of framing the imposter?”

“To expose her. I wanted to prove she wasn’t you. Getting her out of the way brought me one step closer to the money. Then, all I had to do was finish the job of framing Andrew for your death.”

He swallowed back the urge to laugh, afraid he’d sound as psycho as she was. “It would have been a slam-dunk, sis. What jury wouldn’t convict Andrew of murder after they found out that he had his girlfriend pretend to be you? What more proof would they need that he was after the money?”

“And now Marnie’s in jail and LaDonna’s dead.”

He wasn’t admitting to LaDonna’s death, even if she shot him in the balls. When LaDonna had told him the imposter
was
Marnie, he’d quickly come up with a plan to deal with both women. LaDonna was out of control anyway. She’d become so jealous and possessive that she actually snuck into Sea Clouds during Alison’s reception to spy on him. Somehow she got herself trapped on the third floor and came up with the bright idea of dropping a pot on Alison to create a distraction so she could escape.

LaDonna had to be sacrificed in order to frame Marnie, who had a motive to kill her because LaDonna had discovered her true identity. He didn’t care whether or not Marnie took the wrap. He just wanted her exposed as an imposter without exposing himself.

When he’d searched the guest room he’d found sleeping pills, as well as the gun Andrew had left in the nightstand drawer. He’d used the pills to drug his mother’s and Marnie’s drinks the night of the Padres game, and he’d TiVo’d the second half of the game while he was out on the cliffs. Bogart had scared the shit out of him, but Bret had been too fast for him. He’d been too fast for everyone until tonight.

Bret massaged his thigh and inched closer to the pictures. As long as he was confessing his sins, he might as well reveal another one to his she-wolf of a sister.