Vicious (22 page)

“Just give me another twenty minutes,” Jordan whispered. He clutched Leo’s hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. “Please, I need to hear him confess. Give me that much. I’ve waited ten years for this. Please, Leo.”

He stared at his friend for a moment and then sank down on the step again. “Okay,” he murmured. “Twenty minutes…”

From Tom Collins’s dock, Susan gazed down the shoreline at the rental house on Birch. But it was too far away to discern if there was any activity in or around the house. The place looked very pretty from where she stood right now, but Susan wasn’t eager to go back there—even just to pack up their things and leave.

Before stepping inside his house to make the lemonade, Tom had dug a twelve-inch plastic, multicolored beach ball and a plastic baseball bat out of a toolshed in the backyard. Mattie kept busy kicking and hitting the ball on the lawn.

Susan had offered to help make the lemonade, but Tom had insisted she and Mattie stay outside to avoid the construction mess in his kitchen and living room.

From the dock, she wandered over to the picnic table by the flagpole and sat down. The sun was just starting to set over the bay, and Susan felt a chill in the air. Above her, the Stars and Stripes flapped in the breeze. It was that magic time late in an autumn afternoon when the light made everything look beautiful and saturated with color.

Susan suddenly felt so lonely—and it didn’t really have anything to do with Allen’s unexplained absence. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Maybe she was just feeling vulnerable.

Tom brought out a tray with a pitcher of lemonade, a bag of Chips Ahoy! and three tall, ice-filled glasses that had
Cheers! Tom & Viv Collins
written on them in gold script. He sat down with her at the picnic table. He’d combed his hair and changed into a sexy black V-neck sweater while he’d been inside.

“Mattie, come get some lemonade,” Susan called to him. But he ignored her. He was having too much fun with the ball and bat. “Sweetie, did you hear me?”

Tom poured the lemonade. “Oh, let him play,” he said. “Looks like he’s having a blast.”

“I suppose you’re right. He’ll sleep better tonight.” She studied the inscription on her glass. “Did you get these in a divorce settlement or something?”

He shook his head. “No, I’ve never been married—engaged once, but never married. Tom and Vivian are my parents. They had a whole set of these cheesy glasses. I think the other ones said
Skoal
and
Salute
. My mom died in 2002. Dad moved to a retirement village in Arizona three years ago. He left me in charge of this place.” He glanced toward the house. “It’s been the family weekend and summer home ever since I was a kid. I used to hate coming here because all I ever did here was work on the yard and on the boat. Anyway, I teach high school in Everett. It gets a little crazy at times. I come here for a break—and once I set foot in the door, all I do is work. You go figure.”

Susan smiled at him and raised her glass. “Well,
cheers
. This is very good lemonade.”

“It’s a mix, Country Time,” he admitted, running the cool glass over his forehead. “So—be honest. Was I really that creepy at the restaurant yesterday? I mean, I was trying my best to be suave. On a scale from one to ten—with ten being I made your skin crawl—just how creepy was I?”

“You were about a twelve,” Susan replied, cracking a smile.

He laughed. “I may go back to hating you.”

Sipping her lemonade, she glanced over at Mattie while he chased the ball. “Can I ask you something?”

“Fire away,” he said.

“Earlier, when I mentioned that I was staying at the house on Birch Way, you got this funny look on your face. Why is that?”

He frowned slightly and then let out a sigh.

“Is it haunted or something?” she pressed. “I ran into this nice young man at Rosie’s yesterday, maybe you know him, Jordan Prewitt. His family has a cabin near here. When I asked him for directions to Birch Way, he got this strange, somber look in his eyes—sort of like you had when I mentioned I was staying there.”

“You asked Jordan Prewitt for directions to the house on Birch Way?” Tom asked, as if she’d committed a major faux pas. He ran a hand through his dark hair. “Oh, God…”

“What? What is it?”

“So Jordan’s staying at the family cabin this weekend? Is he here with his folks?”

“No, he’s with some friends, another boy and a girl.” Susan leaned forward, her eyes searching his. “And you’re changing the subject. What’s wrong with asking Jordan Prewitt for directions to the house on Birch Way?”

Tom sighed. “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything, since you’re staying there. I don’t want to give you nightmares, but—well, ten years ago, Jordan’s mother was abducted from the dock behind that house. Jordan was out on a boat in the bay when it happened. He saw the whole thing, the poor kid.” Frowning, Tom glanced down at the picnic table top. “Anyway, they found his mother’s body in the woods nearby. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Mama’s Boy murders from about ten years ago, but Jordan’s mother was one of the victims. Her name was Stella Syms. She dropped the
Prewitt
when Jordan’s dad dropped her.”

“My God,” Susan murmured, shaking her head. “I knew one of the women was killed up here in Cullen, but I had no idea it happened at that house….”

“The place belonged to Stella’s family,” Tom explained. “They wanted to unload it after that. But they had a hard time selling it, because of the murder. This local couple ended up buying it and turning it into a rental.”

“Lord, no wonder Jordan reacted the way he did when I asked for directions. I feel like such an idiot….”

Tom shrugged. “You couldn’t know.” He nodded toward his own house. “We used to have a landline phone here, but my dad had the service stopped a few years ago. When Mama’s Boy came to the house on Birch, he cut their phone lines. Poor Jordan ran all the way here—through the woods. My folks weren’t here that weekend. He broke that second window from the door there, climbed in, and called the police.”

Susan just kept shaking her head. She felt so horrible for that sweet, handsome young man.

“He had a real rough go of it for a while after that,” Tom said soberly. “I got a lot of this secondhand through my mom. But Stella—Jordan’s mom—she had some psychological problems. I think she might have been bipolar. Apparently, that’s one reason Jordan’s parents split up. After she was killed, Jordan went a little crazy himself. Not that anyone could blame him, considering what he went through….”

Susan felt a chill and rubbed her arms. “What do you mean when you say he went
a little crazy
?”

“Well, he tried to commit suicide. Eight years old, and he swallowed a bunch of pills. Can you believe it? His mother had some medications for her various conditions, and I guess he’d gotten ahold of them before they’d collected all her things. They put Jordan in the hospital for a while, but it really didn’t take. After they let him out, on two different occasions, he attacked two different men on the street, both total strangers. He kind of hurt one of them, too. In both cases, Jordan was utterly certain the guy had killed his mother. I think he was about ten at the time. They put him in some private care facility after that, and I think he came out okay. But I hear his dad was really beside himself for a while. It wasn’t just Jordan’s breakdown after losing his mom that way. They were worried Jordan might have inherited some of Stella’s disorders. Anyway, he got better, and the Prewitts moved from Bellingham to Seattle, where not so many people knew about them.”

Tom sipped his lemonade. “Of course, my source for all this inside information was my mom and the local ladies she spoke with. But I think it’s pretty reliable.”

“Do you know Jordan at all?” Susan asked.

“Just enough to say hi,” Tom replied. “He’s a good guy. But I’m around teenagers all the time for my job, so I don’t exactly seek them out when I come up here. All of us are kind of isolated in this section of Cullen.”

“Tell me about it,” Susan sighed. “I’ve been going stir-crazy from the isolation today—ever since my fiancé disappeared. I’m glad I didn’t know earlier about the Mama’s Boy connection to that house. My day there has been bizarre enough. Shortly after Allen—that’s my fiancé—shortly after he left for Rosie’s, I spotted this strange character in army fatigues lurking around the place. It scared the hell out of me….”

“Well, not to downplay it, but that house is kind of a local landmark for the morbidly curious. When I see boats sailing around this section of the bay, about eight times out of ten, it’s someone wanting a peek at the old dock—y’know, the scene of the crime and all that. They’ll hover near the shore with their binoculars or their cameras for a good look or a good picture. I’m not surprised they’re getting some foot traffic over there, too.”

“Sheriff Fischer seemed to think it was a hunter,” Susan said.

Tom ate a Chips Ahoy! and nodded. “Maybe. So—you had the police over there?”

“Yes, and the good sheriff decided to take a souvenir of his visit.” Susan leaned across the table. “Do you know anything about him? Have you heard anything?”

“About the sheriff?” Tom shrugged. “Well, he’s kind of a good-old-boy chauvinist. He’s been the sheriff here forever. What do you mean he took a ‘souvenir’?”

“He stole a pair of panties from my laundry basket,” she whispered.

“He did? Are you sure?” Tom began to laugh.

She slapped his arm. “It’s not funny. I was really upset! It was incredibly creepy.”

“I’m sorry. But on a scale of one to ten, with ten being it made your skin crawl—”

“It was a seventeen, okay?” Susan said, cutting him off. Then she found she was laughing, too—for the first time today. She slapped him on the arm again. “It’s not funny!” she insisted, still grinning.

“I know it isn’t,” he said, a bit more serious now. “I’ve never heard anything like that about Sheriff Fischer. He’s been married to the same woman for twenty-some odd years, and they have two children in college. But you never know about some people. One of the guys in my dorm quad at Western Washington University was this ladies’ man jock named Ron, and he now lives in Portland and goes by the name Vanessa. You just never know.” He shrugged. “Anyway, considering what you’ve been going through, it must have been the last straw to discover the person representing the law around here had stolen your underwear.”

Susan nodded. “Yes, it was pretty disturbing.” She rubbed her arms from the chill again and then glanced over at Mattie. He was still batting and kicking around the multicolored ball, but just starting to slow down. She could tell, soon he would be very sleepy or very cranky.

She thought about the house again, about waking up last night and going downstairs to find Allen on some kind of guard duty with a gun. Did he know the history of that house? In Seattle, Realtors were required to divulge if there had been a murder or suicide in a dwelling for sale or lease. Did that same rule apply to rental houses in Cullen? Maybe that explained why he’d seemed so on edge last night. But it didn’t make sense that he’d stay someplace where he wasn’t comfortable, where he felt on his guard all the time.

She wondered once again: Why that particular house? Why that particular boat with the Internet connection?

Mattie tossed aside the bat and wandered over to them. Susan was surprised that he sat down next to Tom and started talking to him as if they were old friends. Tom poured him some lemonade, and Susan said he could have only one cookie. She smiled across the picnic table at the two of them. It felt very comfortable here. Suddenly, she remembered Allen and felt very guilty.

So she announced they had to get going.

As Tom walked them to her car, he pointed out the main road to his house—by a blue mailbox at the end of his driveway. The paved road would take her all the way to Rosie’s, but even with her having to backtrack a little, it was still quicker and less chancy than the winding gravel trail she’d taken earlier. He offered to follow her back to the house and keep her company until Allen returned.

“Can’t he come?” Mattie asked, while she strapped him into the car seat. “Can Tom sleep over? There’ll be lots of room in your bed if Allen doesn’t come back.”

Susan glanced over her shoulder at Tom, who was shaking his head. “Out of the mouths of babes,” he murmured. “I swear to God, I didn’t tell him to say that.”

She cracked a smile, then turned to Mattie and wiped some chocolate from the corner of his mouth. “No, sweetie, Tom can’t spend the night. Now, watch your fingers and toes.” She shut his door.

“My offer still stands,” Tom said. “Sure you don’t want me to follow you back—just to make certain you’re all right?”

“Thanks,” Susan said. “But if Allen isn’t at the house, I’m packing up our stuff and relocating to one of the inns in town. And if Allen’s there, I don’t want to show up with this—this good-looking guy, and have to explain how I just had a lovely time sipping lemonade with him in his backyard.”

“Well, thank you,” Tom said. “You know, I just might go into town tonight, and if you’re staying at one of the inns—well, they have better cell phone reception there in town. Would it be okay if I called you—just to check in?”

Susan shrugged uneasily. “I’m afraid not. I don’t think Allen would like it. But thanks.”

“I understand,” he said, opening the car door for her. “So long.”

Susan got behind the wheel and started up the car. He shut the door for her, and she smiled at him through the window. Shifting to drive, she headed toward the blue mailbox at the end of his driveway. But when she glanced at him in her rearview mirror, she moved her foot to the brake. She rolled down her window and then ducked her head outside. “Tom?”

He hurried toward the car.

“My cell phone number is 206-555-1954,” she said. “Can you remember it?”

Stopping just shy of the car window, Tom nodded. “Yes, I’ll remember that.”

“Good,” she said.

Then Susan rolled up the window and headed out of the driveway.

Sitting on the basement stairs, Leo rubbed his forehead and watched his friend question Allen Meeker. He still couldn’t get over Jordan’s expertise on the Mama’s Boy murders and the way facts and dates just tripped off his tongue. It was a whole side of his friend he’d never known about—and he was learning a lot more about those serial killings, too.