The Chocolate Cupid Killings (26 page)

Sure enough, Joe's head emerged—more slowly than mine had. He pulled himself out on the lawn. He twisted around and stuck his head back down the tunnel that led to the window. For a moment I thought he was going back inside. Then he was on his feet, waving my jacket in one hand. He staggered through the snow.

He'd almost reached the trees when headlights turned into our lane.

Talk about heart palpitations. Mine was racing with the same irregular rhythm of Joe's limping run.

Patricia Youngman had obviously been waiting for something or someone. This car had to be her appointment.

I didn't even care who it was. I was only afraid that Joe would get caught in the headlights.

Joe obviously saw the danger. If you can stagger and run, he did it. By the time the lights reached the lawn, he was nearly to the trees. He fell down on my jacket and lay still. He told me later he was trying to visualize himself as a log.

Apparently his effort worked, because the vehicle drove slowly by. Of course, it had so far been only a set of headlights to me, but as it drew up opposite our front door, the porch light abruptly came on.

Now I could see the vehicle. It was a white Cadillac Escalade.

Rhett?

The Escalade stopped, and a window went down. Sure enough, after Patricia Youngman said something indistinguishable, Rhett's voice came wafting over the snow. “Around to the side? Okay.”

He drove on. I plunged out from behind my bush and helped Joe to his feet. I tugged at him, trying to get him into the trees.

“Not so fast,” he whispered. “I nearly did my knee in with that belly flop.”

He got into the trees somehow. I found a log and dusted the snow off of it. Then I draped my jacket around his shoulders and tried to get him to sit on the log.

But Joe was fumbling in his pocket. “Here.” He thrust his cell phone into my hand.

“You had a cell phone all the time?” My whisper was angry.

“Yes. I tried using it as soon as I fell down the steps. No service.”

“Oh.”

“It didn't seem tactful to bring it up when we couldn't use it.”

Shielding the phone from the house—I didn't want Patricia to look out and see suspicious lights in the woods—I checked. Still no service. I silently cursed our cell phone carrier. Our phones worked reliably only from the second floor. Why, oh, why hadn't Patricia Youngman locked us upstairs?

I whispered again. “Can you walk over to the Baileys' house?”

“Not the Baileys'. That's the wrong direction. We'd have to pass the living room windows. You'd probably better go without me. Go to the Garretts' house. If they're not home and the cell phone won't work there, Dick told me there's a key wired to that little holly bush by the step.”

“But—”

“When you get to a phone, call the cops. Then call this number.” He repeated it twice.

I parroted it back. “Who's that?”

“It's the FBI.”

“Joe, how did you just happen to know the FBI's phone number?”

“I'll tell you later. The faster you can get the cops here, the sooner we'll be safe. I'll follow you, but I can't hurry. You've got to do it.”

I did it. I left the shelter of the trees, and I ran alongside them until I got to the drive. Then I ran down the drive—or I tiptoed beside the drive. It had been plowed, but there were still icy patches. A bad fall could be deadly.

I got to Lake Shore Drive, crossed it, and did my tiptoe act down the Garretts' drive. It was longer than ours. And darker. And just as slippery. There are streetlights here and there in our part of Warner Pier, but the darn trees keep the light from reaching the ground, even in the winter, when most of the trees are bare.

Periodically, I checked Joe's phone. There was still no service.

The Garretts have a security light in their drive, and the snow around their Craftsman-style bungalow sparkled like diamonds in its glare. Their walk had been cleared, and their porch swept. There was a light in the living room.

But no one answered the door.

I pounded on it three times, but no one came to greet me. No one moved across the living room.

The holly bush. I turned to it, but before I tackled searching it for a wired-on key, I tried Joe's phone one more time. There was one bar of service.

If only I were a little higher up.

I jumped off the porch and went racing around the house, plunging through the snow. When Garnet and Dick Garrett took over her family's summer cottage, they remodeled it. One addition was a second-story deck on the back of the house, a deck that was higher than the trees blocking their view of Lake Michigan. Joe and I had attended the party they held to inaugurate that deck.

There was snow on the steps, but I was able to brush it off and climb up. I checked the phone one more time. Oh, glory! Three bars.

I called the Warner Pier police dispatcher. After five o'clock, 9-1-1 calls were handled by the county sheriff's office, thirty miles away. But I stayed on the line until I was sure the dispatcher grasped the situation, and until I was sure she understood that I was asking that no sirens be used.

“We want to catch these people,” I said. “Not let them get away.”

“Right. Now, stay on the line.”

“No. I have to make another call.”

The FBI. Joe had told me to call the FBI. I didn't understand why. But he had even known the number.

I called it.

The voice that answered was curt. “Yes.”

“This is Lee Woodyard,” I said. “Joe Woodyard's wife. He told me to call.”

“Yes?”

“Patricia Youngman is in our house. Joe and I managed to get out. Joe is hurt. Youngman is meeting with Rhett Spivey. He just drove up.”

“What are—”

“I can't talk anymore. The cops are on the way. You're invited, too. No sirens! I've got to get back to Joe.”

I punched the phone off and started back down the snowy steps of the deck. I skidded down the Garretts' road, across Lake Shore Drive, and back down our drive. I kept a close eye for a vehicle coming toward me—whether it was a Cadillac Escalade or my van or Joe's truck, I didn't want to get caught on that drive.

When I got to our lawn, I took off through the snow, following my own tracks back to the spot where I'd left Joe. I wasn't surprised when he wasn't there. After all, he had said he would follow me as quickly as his knee would allow.

Feeling like an Indian tracker, I tried to figure out which way he had gone by looking at footprints in the snow.

I didn't think Joe would have gone through the woods. The terrain was simply too rough for that to be practical. So I looked in the snow between the trees and the house. For one thing, the porch light and what little light there was from the sky gave me a slight amount of visibility there.

And sure enough, I saw Joe's tracks coming out of the trees. I expected them to turn toward the drive, basically taking the same route I had taken.

But they didn't. They went straight across the yard and back to the house.

At first I thought I was imagining that. It seemed ludicrous. But I kept looking. There was my set of tracks, running from the house with toes pointed toward the trees. There were Joe's tracks, following the same route. And there was another set of Joe's tracks, headed back to the house.

Nose to ground like a bloodhound, I moved across the yard. Joe's second set of tracks led right to that window he and I had used to escape. Light was pouring out of it, logically enough, since we hadn't turned out the ceiling bulb when we climbed out.

My jacket was back on the window frame. I flopped down and looked inside.

I could see Joe on the other side of the basement. Joe had gone back inside.

Why had he done that? I could have wrung his neck.

Well, I wasn't going to find out lying on my stomach out in the snow. I turned around and scooted into the window feet-first.

Finding the bedstead we'd used as a ladder wasn't too easy, but I managed to get my feet on it without knocking it over with a clang.

I turned to see Joe at the other end of the cellar, glaring at me and motioning me back outside. I ignored his actions. I tiptoed toward him. He made the universal signal for silence, putting his finger to his lips. Then he pointed above his head. And I heard Patricia Youngman's voice.

I realized Joe had come back inside the cellar so he could eavesdrop on Patricia and Rhett.

But the voice I heard wasn't Patricia's. It wasn't Rhett's either.

It was a gruff, angry voice. It took me a moment to identify it as the voice that had answered the mysterious number someone had called from TenHuis Chocolade, the long distance number I'd never been able to identify.

I looked at Joe. Maybe he knew who that person was. I'd given the mysterious phone number to Hogan, telling him I suspected that Pamela—now revealed in her true identity as Patricia Youngman—had called it. He'd never told me what he found out.

“And just how many copies of it have you made?” the gruff voice said.

“None. I'm dealing openly here.” That was Patricia Youngman.

“Sure you are.” The words were sarcastic.

“We'll just have to trust each other.”

The gruff voice gave a gruff laugh.

“Why shouldn't we trust each other?” Patricia sounded completely calm. “We did for years.”

“Until you stabbed me in the back.”

“Until I discovered I had been picked as the one to be thrown to the feds. When I was the only one who hadn't gotten a slice of the pie.”

Patricia's voice had grown angry, but she stopped and when she spoke again she seemed to have regained control of herself. “But now you realize just how much I know. And that I can prove it. Do you want the records or not?”

“I don't have much choice.”

“I'm glad you recognize that. As soon as the money is in my account, you'll receive the evidence.”

“How will you get it to me?”

“Don't worry. You'll get it.”

“The damn FBI has me completely sewed up. My mail, my telephones . . . I had to bribe Rhett to sneak me out of the house tonight!”

“Don't worry! You'll get the evidence.”

“But how?”

“What you don't know, you can't mention on a tapped phone. I'll get it to you!”

There was a long silence—well, about thirty seconds. But it seemed long. Then the gruff voice spoke. “Okay.”

“Then I think we're through here. You have the account number. As soon as you take action, I'll deliver the records. You can leave the way you came.”

The guy with the gruff voice didn't reply. We heard his footsteps cross the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. He slammed the back door angrily.

Patricia Youngman stayed in the living room. She crossed to the front door.

I whispered in Joe's ear, “What's she doing?”

He whispered back, “I don't know, but it's time for us to get out that window again.”

“Where are the cops I called?”

“I don't know that either.”

We started for the window, and I heard the motor of a car outside. It must have been Rhett leaving. Then Patricia Youngman's steps strode through the living room and across the dining room.

I was sure she was headed for the basement door.

Was she going to simply unlock the bolt, so we could leave? Somehow I didn't think so.

“Turn off the light,” Joe said.

I ran for the light switch. The darkness was absolute at first. Then I could see the faint light from the hot water tank's burner.

“Get to the window,” Joe whispered.

I held my hands straight out and walked across the basement until I hit the wall. I almost tripped over the bedstead propped up under the window. I expected to run into Joe at the window, but I didn't.

“Where are you?” I whispered.

The darkness was slightly less dense by then, and I saw movement under the basement stairs. It had to be Joe.

“Joe!”

“Get out, Lee!”

Patricia Youngman was at the basement door. I could hear the bolt slide back.

Maybe I should have obeyed Joe and climbed out the window. But I knew Patricia Youngman was going to hit the light switch at the top of the stairs any second. Then, as soon as she took two or three steps down, she'd be able to see the whole basement, and she'd be holding Sarajane's pistol.

I had only a moment to get out the window. It wasn't long enough.