Trinity Harbor 3 - Along Came Trouble (38 page)

“That’s a waste of time,” King said, his disgust plain. “He’s even more tight-lipped about police business than you are.”

“A trait I sincerely respect,” Tucker said. “Now if you’l excuse me, I think I’l go wish Frances luck. She’s going to need it.”

“What about me?”

“She said yes. You’ve already had better luck than you deserve,” Tucker told him, then gave him a hug. “Congratulations, old man!”

King regarded him slyly. “You hurry things along with Mary Elizabeth, and we can make it a double ceremony.”

“You worry about your own love life. Leave mine to me,” Tucker retorted as he walked away.

“Must mean you final y have one, at least,” King cal ed after him.

“I’m not talking,” Tucker said emphatical y.

His father’s laughter fol owed him inside. Tucker wished he could be as cheerful about his prospects for the future. Instead, al he could think about was what Mary Elizabeth intended to do once she sold Swan Ridge and no longer had any ties to Trinity Harbor.

Liz needed some space. Every time she walked through the rooms at Swan Ridge, she was fil ed with an almost unbearable sorrow at the thought of leaving it behind. But there were almost as many sad memories here as good ones. And most of the good ones had to do with Tucker. She could make new memories with him, wherever they were.

Assuming he wanted a future with her. She didn’t think that was an unreasonable leap of faith to take after what had happened last night.

She slipped out of the house, leaving Daisy and Frances pondering an idea she had had about turning Swan Ridge into the proposed youth center. Granted it wasn’t in the center of town, but they could always offer a shuttle service, if need be. And the spacious, tree-covered grounds were perfect for running and playing. A basebal field and basketbal courts could be carved out of the nearby land. There was already a pool in back, and there were more than enough rooms inside for crafts and other activities, even for classroom space. She had a feeling even her grandfather might have approved of that use for the stately old home that was far too big for a woman alone, or even one with the sizable family she contemplated having with Tucker eventual y.

She glanced up at the cloudless sky as she strol ed beneath the shadowy trees toward the Potomac. “So, what do you think, Grandfather? Would you mind very much if I did this for the town and for me?”

The wink of sunlight on the river seemed to answer her, or at least she chose to think it did. “Al right, then. If everyone agrees, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“They say that talking to yourself is a sign of madness,” a chil y feminine voice said from somewhere in the shadows.

Liz’s nerves jumped, but she tried very hard not to react visibly. She recognized the voice, even though she hadn’t heard it in years.

“Hel o, Arlene,” she replied evenly, as if she were welcoming company to her home. “Why don’t you come out where I can see you?”

“I think I like this better,” Arlene said. “I have the advantage, for once.”

The unconcealed bitterness in the remark threw Liz. She couldn’t ever recal being in competition with Arlene Wil is, or Arlene Hathaway, as she had been back in high school.

“Is that why you set the fire?” she asked, amazed at how calmly she could ask the question. “To get even for some old slight?”

Arlene’s laugh was brittle. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Why, then?”

“It was just a little reminder,” she said, final y confirming that she had, indeed, been the arsonist. “Something to make you sit up and take notice that I was going to take everything from you, the way you took it from me.”

Genuinely puzzled, Liz said, “What did I ever take from you, Arlene?”

“My future,” she replied with total seriousness.

“I don’t understand.”

“Ken and I had it al mapped out. He was going to go to law school, then run for office. He would have owned this county—if
you
hadn’t ruined everything. Do you have any idea how I hated you for that? Instead of being important, the way we’d planned, people looked at us as losers after Larry trounced Ken in that first election. That destroyed Ken’s self-esteem—he hasn’t been the same since. And it’s al because of you.”

Alarm began to make Liz’s palms sweat. Funny how she hadn’t been scared at first, but now, hearing Arlene’s crazed thinking, she realized she wasn’t dealing with an old classmate who was rational, but one who was genuinely disturbed and dangerous.

“Tel me how I ruined things,” Liz suggested, praying that if she kept Arlene talking, Tucker would eventual y notice her absence and come looking for her. “What did I do?”

“You married Larry Chandler, an outsider with absolutely no ties to this region,” Arlene said with the disdain many people felt about the “come-heres”—everyone who hadn’t been born and bred in the Northern Neck and couldn’t trace their ties back at least a generation or two.

“You legitimized him, you and your grandfather,” Arlene went on. “He had money and charm, and after the wedding, he had the Swan family power behind him. Ken and I never stood a chance after that. I knew then that the only thing left to do was to destroy your marriage, the way you’d destroyed mine when you ruined our dream.”

“How? By having an affair with my husband?” Liz said. “Were you one of the other women, Arlene? Was that part of your revenge, sleeping with my husband? How was that supposed to help Ken?”

“It was too late to help Ken. I wanted Larry for myself. I wanted to go al the places he could take me. I wanted what you’d stolen from me—the power, the success, the money.”

Now Liz was total y confused. “Then why did you shoot him? You did kil him, didn’t you, Arlene?”

Rather than replying, Arlene laughed. The sound was oddly shril . It sent a shiver of foreboding chasing down Liz’s spine.

Then Arlene stepped out of the shadows, and the day went from bad to worse. A bright glare momentarily blinded Liz, and the first hint of panic made her breath freeze in her throat as she tried to understand what had sent the blinding light into her eyes. Arlene shifted her stance until Liz could catch a clear glimpse of her.

The woman was holding a very deadly-looking gun, aimed directly at Liz’s chest. Given what she had almost certainly done to Larry, Liz hadn’t the slightest doubt in her mind that Arlene was perfectly capable of pul ing the trigger.

24

E
ager to offer his congratulations to Frances and bored with his role of observer rather than investigator, Tucker went inside and found Daisy and Frances had been joined by Gail Thorensen and Anna-Louise. They were deeply engrossed in an excited discussion about something. Normal y he would have been curious about that, but he was more concerned because there was no sign of Mary Elizabeth. She’d been in an odd mood ever since she’d seen the destruction in her grandfather’s library. He didn’t think she ought to be left alone.

“Hey, ladies, where is Mary Elizabeth?” he asked, interrupting the conversation.

“She said she needed some space,” Daisy told him. “Which probably means she headed down to the river, just the way she always used to.”

Tucker stared at his sister with dismay. “And you let her go off by herself? How long ago?”

Immediately Daisy regarded him with the kind of concern that came from years of reading his moods. “Of course alone. She went out about twenty minutes ago. Why? Is there a problem?”

“There’s a damned kil er on the loose,” he retorted. “Yeah, you could say there’s a problem.”

“I’l find Walker,” Daisy said at once.

Tucker was already running, cursing Mary Elizabeth’s stubborn determination to go on as if nothing were amiss. What had she been thinking?—

especial y after that fire during the night. She had to recognize the danger.

Praying that he was being unnecessarily cautious, he stayed in the shadow of the trees, final y slowing his steps so that he wouldn’t sound like a herd of elephants crashing through the woods and give himself away if a kil er was with Mary Elizabeth. He was halfway to the river when he heard Mary Elizabeth’s quiet, reasonable voice counterpointed against Arlene Wil is’s desperate, shril tones.

“Hang in there, darlin’,” he murmured to himself. “You’re handling her exactly right.”

He reached behind him and took his gun from the waistband of his jeans, even as he moved closer to the sound of their voices. When he final y caught a glimpse of the two women, his heart leapt into his throat. The heavy gun Arlene was pointing at Mary Elizabeth was beginning to waver in her increasingly unsteady grip. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes fil ed with the primal desperation of a trapped animal.

Worse, Mary Elizabeth was smack in his line of fire, and he had absolutely no maneuvering room. From this point on, any move he made was likely to be spotted by Arlene, who was facing directly toward him.

If only he could somehow signal his presence to Mary Elizabeth alone, he thought without much hope. He wasn’t a great believer in the power of ESP.

“I real y have no choice, you see,” Arlene said to Mary Elizabeth, as if reasoning with a recalcitrant child and trying to explain why a spanking would hurt her more than the kid. “I have to end this here and now. You have to understand what you did to me, to my marriage. You were the one who drove me into Larry’s arms. When Ken found out, he threatened to divorce me. That would have been the perfect solution, if only I could have talked Larry into marrying me, but he said he wouldn’t, that he only loved you.”

“But I was divorcing him,” Liz said. “You would have had your chance, Arlene.”

Arlene shook her head. “Don’t you see, it didn’t matter. He stil loved you. He told me so that last night. He said he’d come back to Swan Ridge to convince you to try again. Even after he made love to me right there in your house, he stil wanted you.”

For one desperate second, Tucker wondered if there was time to get Wil is in here to try to reason with his wife, but Arlene’s obviously precarious mental state suggested there was no time to be lost.

“I can make it right,” Mary Elizabeth was saying. “I can help you now. I can campaign for Ken, tel people that he’s the man Larry would want to replace him.”

“You’re lying,” Arlene scoffed. “You would never do that.”

“Of course I would,” Mary Elizabeth said quietly. “I’ve known both of you practical y my whole life. Why wouldn’t I help you? Put the gun down, Arlene, and let’s talk about this, see what we can work out. Maybe we can be a team.”

If anything, Arlene tightened her grip on the gun. “No way,” she said. “It’s a trick. Why would you do that when you know I came back that night and kil ed Larry? I’m not stupid, you know.”

“I know that,” Liz said. “Weren’t you the kid with the four-point average al through school? I know how smart you are, Arlene.”

For an instant Tucker thought he detected a hint of uncertainty in Arlene’s eyes, but then she shook her head. “No. I have to do this my way. It’s too late now. Everyone’s going to know I shot Larry. I’l go to jail. It’s over for me, but at least I can make sure that you’l never get what you want again.”

“It’s never too late,” Mary Elizabeth insisted, as if Arlene hadn’t just revealed herself as a murderer. “I ought to know. I’m getting a second chance with Tucker, a chance I didn’t deserve. You and Ken can have a second chance, too.”

Tears began to rol down Arlene’s cheeks, but she remained stubbornly defiant, utterly determined to complete the mission she’d set for herself of making Mary Elizabeth pay for some perceived hurt. Tucker hadn’t pieced together al of it, but it was obvious that Arlene saw herself as being in some sort of competition with Mary Elizabeth, a competition in which she had repeatedly come out the loser.

Come on, Mary Elizabeth, he thought. Keep her talking. With luck, this would drag on, Daisy would locate Walker and Tucker would have the backup he desperately needed.

In the meantime, though, the clouds that had been gathering on the horizon for the past hour turned darker. The wind kicked up, churning the river into a white-capped froth. They were in for a doozy of a storm. Tucker couldn’t decide if that would work to his advantage or against him.

A sudden flash of light split the sky, and a rumble of thunder answered him. Already jumpy, Arlene whirled as if there had been a shot fired, her own gun shooting wildly, then fal ing from her hand. Mary Elizabeth instinctively dropped to the ground and rol ed, grabbing the gun almost before Arlene realized she had dropped it. When she saw that Mary Elizabeth was holding the weapon, a resigned look spread across her face.

“Kil me,” she pleaded. “Go ahead and shoot me.”

Tucker stepped out then, handcuffs in hand. “No one’s going to shoot anyone,” he said, snapping them on her wrists, even as he surveyed Mary Elizabeth from head to toe to reassure himself that she was okay. She stil hadn’t lowered the gun, and her gaze was locked on Arlene.

“Darlin’, give me the gun,” he said quietly. “It’s over.”

Mary Elizabeth blinked as if coming out of a trance and handed him the gun, visibly trembling.

“Arlene set the fire,” she told him, her voice unsteady. “She kil ed Larry, too. Al because she wanted to get even with me for ruining Ken’s political aspirations by marrying Larry in the first place.”

Clearly shaken, Mary Elizabeth met his gaze. “How could anyone think that a
job
is more important than a human life?”

“She’s obviously not thinking clearly,” Tucker said. “The courts wil make sure she gets some help.” He spotted Walker and another deputy approaching the scene from opposite sides. “You can take over now,” he told his brother-in-law. “Arlene’s confessed to everything.”

“You hear her?” Walker asked.

“I did,” Mary Elizabeth told him. “She wanted me to know before she kil ed me.”

“And I heard most of it,” Tucker added.

Walker nodded, then glanced at Tucker. “Can you take Liz to the station to make her statement?”

“Wil do,” Tucker said.

Through al of this Arlene hadn’t said a word. Tucker looked into her eyes and saw…
nothing.
It was as if a light inside had gone out. If he hadn’t seen her leveling that gun directly at Mary Elizabeth, he might have felt sorry for her. As it was, he knew he would carry that image and his utter feeling of helplessness with him forever.