Fatal Trust (26 page)

Her brain admittedly wasn’t at its sharpest, but Trey’s
words made no sense. “Agreeing to marry Max caused Aunt Jessica’s stroke?”
Lexie asked.

“Of course not,” Trey said. “Her supposed stroke was caused
by an injection of a certain paralytic poison that she gave herself, thinking
it was her insulin. It took longer to work since she injected it
subcutaneously, but it eventually did the trick.”

The blood left Lexie’s head and the world seemed to recede,
as if she were looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. “You
killed Aunt Jessica because she was going to marry Max? For God’s sake, why?”

“Walk,” he said, gesturing with the gun.

Lexie slowly turned back around. She still felt dizzy, but
managed to resume walking.

“Jessica insisted on having a prenup. Faster.” Trey poked
Lexie’s back with the gun. “Jessica was successful, but nowhere near Max’s
league, and she didn’t want anyone thinking she’d married him for his money or
his family hating her for it. She insisted on an agreement that she wouldn’t
get a cent from him if they divorced or he died. Max had given her attorney
some accountings I’d prepared, but the attorney wanted copies of Max’s income
tax returns and financial statements as part of that damn full-disclosure
requirement before he’d let Jessica sign anything. By then I’d been stealing
from Max for a few years, so the accountings her attorney already had wouldn’t
jibe with the financial statements or tax returns. I realized I had to get rid
of Jessica so there’d be no need for a prenup.”

Lexie was having trouble breathing. “No one suspected? Even
though it happened right after Max asked you for the documents?” Her voice
sounded strained and an octave too high.

“Why would they?” Trey asked. “Max trusted me, and no one
knew what I was doing. Jessica had also suffered a small stroke a month
earlier. I think that’s why she finally agreed to marry Max. And Max was so
broken up by Jessica’s death that he convinced your mother to refuse to allow
an autopsy. He didn’t want anyone cutting up Jessica’s body, which is ironic
considering all the bodies Max has eviscerated in his books. Not that they
could have detected the poison I used anyway.”

Trey’s words and self-satisfied tone flicked a switch inside
Lexie. She was no longer scared, she was angry. Angry for Jessica’s sake, that
she’d been murdered when she still had so much to live for. Angry for Max’s
sake, that he’d never achieved his dream of marrying Jessica and had lost so
many years with her.

And Lexie was angry for herself, not only because she’d
loved and missed her aunt, but because her aunt had encouraged her to stand up
to her mother and live her own life. Who knows how different things would have
been if her aunt had lived—for one thing, Lexie probably wouldn’t have given in
to her mother’s pressure to marry Neil.

She whirled around.
“You bastard! How could you kill my aunt?”

“Did you hear that?” Cecilia asked, quickening her pace. “It
sounded like a woman.”

“She said ‘you bastard,’ but I couldn’t make out the rest,”
Jeremy said.

“Neither could I, but it must have been Lexie. Who else
would be out here? She’s in trouble.” Cecelia started walking as fast as she
could over the rough path. The voice had sounded too far away for comfort.

Jeremy pushed by her. He’d been holding the gun loosely at
his side but now had it raised. “Let me go first.”

Trey grabbed Lexie’s arm and squeezed it painfully. “Shut
up!”

Anger gave her the strength to disregard the pain and jerk
away from him. Ignoring the gun, she took off running.

Lexie immediately regretted her impulsiveness since she was
guaranteed to end up dead. But it was too late to back down. Not that the
adrenaline surging through her veins would have let her stop. She kept running,
bracing herself for a shot in the back.

It never came.

Suddenly she was out of the trees—and standing less than
twenty feet from the edge of a cliff overlooking Forest Lake. With nowhere to
run.

“I apologize for the fog,” Trey said, stepping out of the
trees. “It must have drifted in from Superior. I guess you won’t be able to
enjoy your final view after all.”

Lexie’s heart was hammering from adrenaline, exertion, and
fear as she analyzed her options. Even from here she could tell that the cliff
went straight down probably two hundred feet to the lake. Jumping was a
definite last resort.

She needed to get Trey talking again. Talking would
hopefully distract him enough that she could rush him and grab the gun, now
that they were in the open. She should certainly be able to take down a sixty-something
man who’d just gotten out of the hospital. If she tried now, he’d shoot her
before she reached him. If she waited, let him get closer—

“You know how this is going to end,” Trey said as he
approached her. “Why don’t you make it easy on yourself and jump?”

“Easy on you, you mean.”

“I’m actually thinking of you.” Trey gestured with the gun.
“Why incur a painful gunshot wound if you don’t have to?”

“You don’t need to kill me,” Lexie said. “You can take me
somewhere and make sure it will be hours, if not days, before someone rescues
me. I’m sure you’ve planned to make a quick getaway.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because you’re too smart not to have, especially once you
killed Max. You’ve got a plan to leave the country, and I’m sure your money
isn’t in U.S. accounts.”

“You’re right on both counts. My money’s in a country that
couldn’t care less how I got it. I’ve also had an escape plan in place for
years.”

“You claim you don’t want to disappear, but I’ll bet you
never planned to stick around Minnesota once you retired anyway,” Lexie said.
“The winters are almost six months long. Six cold and snowy months.”

“True. But if I kill you, I can leave on my own schedule.
What’s one more death on my conscience?”

Trey stopped a couple of feet in front of her. He hadn’t
lost a bit of his focus, his grip on the gun still sure.

“You’ve gotten away with the earlier murders, but you can’t
be sure you’ll get away with killing me,” Lexie said. “Someone might have seen
us leave Nevermore together. You were worried about Max pursuing you if he
discovered your embezzling. My father’s really rich, too, and he’ll spend
whatever it takes to find my killer. Don’t think that you’ll be safe even if
you’re in a country that won’t extradite you back here. My dad’s friends aren’t
all law-abiding.”

“You’re right that someone could have seen us together in
the house,” Trey said, although he didn’t sound concerned. “I’ll have to tell
the police that I saw you in my office. You seemed upset, although you wouldn’t
tell me why, just that you had some thinking to do and were going for a walk.
You walked with me as far as my car, and then I left. No one will suspect I’d
ever kill you, not the police, not your father. I don’t have a motive for doing
that or for killing Max. And Max’s murderer supposedly tried to kill me.”

She didn’t even see him lunge toward her. She dug in her
heels, fought him as hard as she could, struggled to keep her footing on the
cliff. She’d be damned if she’d let this monster who’d killed both Aunt Jessica
and Max kill her.

For someone who’d just gotten out of the hospital, he was
surprisingly strong. He muscled her over grass made slippery by the fog until
Lexie was at the edge of the cliff.

She pushed him with as much strength as she could muster.
Trey lost his footing and fell to the ground. The gun slipped from his hand
onto the grass.

Lexie grabbed for it, but he beat her to it. He picked up
the gun and got to his feet. “If you’re not going to cooperate, we’ll have to
do this the hard way.”

Lexie looked behind her. She couldn’t make out the water
through fog that had thickened in the last few minutes, but she knew it was
down there. Her only hope now was to jump. Maybe she’d be able to swim to
shore.

Trey raised the gun, pointed it at her.

She needed to jump.
But she couldn’t make herself step back and off the cliff. She could just as
well miss the water and hit the shore. Even if she made it to the water, the
impact would probably kill her. She closed her eyes, braced herself. At least
if he shot her, he’d have a better chance of getting caught.

The gun exploded, reverberating in her ears. But no pain.
She opened her eyes.

Trey wasn’t pointing the gun at her; he was pointing it at
the sky. “No, Max—”

Then a hand shoved Trey off the cliff.

Lexie’s knees gave out, and she collapsed on the damp
ground.

“Lexie. Are you okay?” Jeremy was there, a gun in his hand.

She was hyperventilating, could barely force out words.
“Trey was trying to kill me,” she puffed out. She focused on slowing her
breathing.

“Because he was embezzling from Grandfather.” Lexie
recognized Cecilia’s voice before she could see her through the fog. “Ben said
you figured it out.”

“How did he know?” Lexie asked.

“From what Jeremy told him about your conversation,” Cecilia
said. “That’s why Ben sent us after you.”

“You saved my life, Jeremy,” Lexie said.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“You pushed Trey. Thanking you for that seems a little
inadequate.”

“But I didn’t,” Jeremy said. “Trey was falling off the cliff
when I got here. I assumed you shoved him, which is why his shot missed and he
fell.”

“I didn’t do anything besides shut my eyes and wait for him
to shoot me,” Lexie said. “When he missed, he said something about Max, then
somebody shoved him. I saw a hand.”

“It wasn’t me,” Cecilia said. “I was behind Jeremy.”

“No one else is here,” Jeremy said. “Trey must have slipped.
Although I can certainly understand why you’re confused after what you’ve just
gone through. And the fog is damn thick. No wonder you thought you saw someone.”

“I swear—” Then Lexie broke off. They wouldn’t believe her,
not what she was beginning to think had happened. She wouldn’t have believed it
if she hadn’t been there.

Or maybe she
was
confused. “You’re right,” she
said. “He must have slipped.”

“Let’s get you back to the car so we can head over to the
jail,” Cecilia said. “Ben’s going crazy worrying about you.”

Jeremy chuckled. “For the first time in his life, I think
Ben’s going to be happy to see me.”

“Do you really believe that Jeremy was trying to help Olivia
get back together with me because he felt guilty?” Ben asked.

Lexie moved from beneath Ben’s arm and rolled over to face
him. She’d spent several hours helping get him released, then they’d come back
to his house—a Victorian-era place he was remodeling—and made love with an
intensity that made her appreciate that truism about soldiers and danger and
lust.

She lightly slugged his bare shoulder. “You make love to me,
and your first thought is getting back with your ex-wife?”

“You know that’s never happening. I was talking about
Jeremy.”

“I think he meant it when he said he was sorry he broke up
your marriage,” Lexie said.

Ben rose up on his side, resting his head on his bent arm.
“You don’t think it’s more likely that he knew about Olivia’s problems with the
SEC and wanted to stick me with them?”

“No, I don’t. Can’t you accept that Jeremy did something
nice for you? Even after he risked his life to save me because you asked him
to? I think you should make peace with him.”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Next you’ll be trying to get me to
make peace with my father.”

“You do have two stepbrothers you’ve never met,” Lexie said,
treading carefully. “I know it’s none of my business, but I nearly died today.
It makes you realize that life’s too short to hold grudges.”

“So you’re going to make nice with your mother?”

Touché.
Lexie had called her dad—whose
friends were all law-abiding, to the best of her knowledge—and told him what
had happened, asking him to relay the information to the rest of her family.
She didn’t think her mother deserved to learn about it from the news or, worse
yet, Bitsy Davenport, but Lexie hadn’t wanted to talk to her herself. After
escaping death, she was feeling so glad to be alive that she loved the world.
Talking to her mother might ruin that.

“I’ll probably call her in a few days.” By then real life
was bound to have killed her post–near-death euphoria. “I guarantee she won’t
have forgiven, let alone forgotten, the way I told her off the last time we
spoke. Holding grudges is her specialty, not mine.”

Ben reached out and twirled Lexie’s hair around his finger.
“Maybe the fact you nearly died will have changed her attitude, too.”

“Maybe,” Lexie said, then shifted to a topic that wasn’t
such a buzz kill. “You know, I never found out who lost that button. I guess it
really doesn’t matter, but it still bugs me.”

Ben released her hair, his forehead furrowing. “What
button?”

“The one I found under Max’s bed when I searched his room.
The one I was positive was a clue to who knew he was still alive,” Lexie added
when Ben still looked confused. “I thought I mentioned it to you.”

“You didn’t. Was it a white shirt button?”

“How did you know?”

He smiled faintly. “Because I assume it’s mine. One night
when I was changing out of my dress clothes after sherry hour and dinner, I
noticed I’d lost a button. I didn’t bother looking for it since the shirt had
spares. But I’d just done my after-dinner check of Grandfather’s room for
messages, so I’ll bet that’s where it fell off. It must have rolled under the
bed.”

Lexie shook her head, feeling like an idiot. “I can’t
believe I agonized over that button but forgot to ask you about it. Some Nancy
Drew I turned out to be.”

“You did figure out the important thing, who killed
Grandfather,” Ben said. “I can’t believe Trey had us fooled all these years.
It’s a good thing Grandfather never found out that he killed Jessica. He’d
definitely have killed Trey as painfully as possible. And Grandfather had quite
an imagination for brutal deaths.”

Lexie stared at the stained glass window over Ben’s dresser,
thinking. She probably shouldn’t bother mentioning it since Ben wouldn’t
believe it anyway. On the other hand, he might help her figure out a logical
explanation for what had happened.

Lexie turned from the window to Ben and plunged. “I think
Max got his chance after all.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll probably think I’m losing it,” she said. “But Trey
was aiming the gun directly at me. I shut my eyes and prepared to die. Only he
ended up shooting into the air. When I opened my eyes, I swear I saw someone’s
arm shove him off the cliff. I’ll admit it was foggy, and I’ve never believed
in ghosts before, but I think it must have been Max. Trey even said Max’s name
before he fell.”

She expected Ben to agree she was losing it or at least
laugh. Instead he looked thoughtful. “So Walt was right,” he said. “Since
Grandfather got you into this, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let you die,
especially not on his property. Just like when he made sure you weren’t hurt
when your brakes went out.”

Lexie had rejected Walt’s theory before, but now she smiled
faintly. “I guess if anyone could figure out how to come back as a ghost, it
would be Max.” Then her smile faded, replaced by a hollowness in her chest. Max
had saved her, but she’d let him down twice, not only by failing to prevent his
murder but also by screwing up the trust. “If it was Max, it’s too bad he
didn’t stick around long enough to get rid of the requirement that you spend
every night in Nevermore to inherit,” she said. “I’ll do my best to find a way
around it.”

“I wouldn’t work too hard on it.”

“Why? You’re opposed to inheriting a fortune?”

“No, but I happen to know Grandfather drafted an amendment
that eliminates that requirement completely if and when his murderer is
identified,” Ben said.

Lexie rolled back up onto her side, her eyes wide, her
temper flaring. “You didn’t tell me about it? Even though you knew I was
worried to death about it?”

Ben held up one hand. “I didn’t know until this afternoon.
He had a lawyer in New York draft it and told him to let me know about it only
when the condition had been satisfied.”

“I can’t believe Max did that,” Lexie said, shaking her
head. “Knowing him, I’d have assumed he’d be positive he’d identify his potential
murderer and still be around to amend the trust afterward.”

“Actually, the provision was my idea, although Grandfather
claimed it was unnecessary, and I had no idea he’d done it,” Ben said. “I
pointed out to him that unthinkable things sometimes happen, and he must have
realized he was in no position to disagree. Look at his books.”

Max’s trust would be distributed the way he’d wanted. In
addition, even though he was dead, he was finally reunited with Jessica, and
Ben agreed that he’d gotten his revenge against the man who’d killed both of
them. And she’d been the one who’d identified Max’s killer—and she hadn’t ended
up another victim.

Lexie had felt good before, but now she felt terrific.

Until Ben ruined everything. “With that resolved, I assume
this is where you say your work here is done and head back to Philadelphia.”

“I guess it is, since my work here is done.” Her words came
out slowly, forced out, even though she knew this had been coming. “I’ve got a
huge backlog of work waiting for me.”

“What does that mean for us?”

The hollowness that had previously filled Lexie’s chest had
been replaced by a vise that was squeezing her heart. But this is the way it
had to be. “We agreed this was only a vacation fling. Vacation is over.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” Ben’s eyes were fixed on hers. “We
could do a long-distance relationship.”

Lexie refused to let herself even consider that. “A
long-distance relationship is the same as a fling when there’s no way the
people will ever end up living in the same place. We won’t, since you’re happy
being a Lakeview mechanic, and I’m happy being a Philadelphia attorney.”

“Are you really?” Ben asked. “You seemed to enjoy being
Lexie.”

“It was fun for a little while. Being here has also made me
realize I need to stand up to my mother and live life on my own terms, not
according to her rules. But I can’t change who I am. It’s time for me to go
back to being Catherine.” She got out of bed and pulled on her clothes, needing
to get out of there before she started crying. Although she knew it was for the
best, this was harder than she’d anticipated.

Which forced her to acknowledge something she’d tried hard
not to. Despite her best intentions and that she knew it would never work,
she’d fallen in love with Ben, fallen for his brains, his perceptiveness, his
sense of humor, his basic decency. Shallow though it was, she’d fallen for the
handsome, sexy
GQ
Ben and the equally handsome, sexy
NASCAR version, had fallen for the way he made her feel when they made love.
She even loved him for his damn decision to leave a high-paying career for a
life that was more fulfilling in small-town Minnesota, the very thing that
guaranteed they’d never have more than a fling.

Her red tank top, skirt, and underwear were scattered on the
maple floor beside the bed. She didn’t look at Ben as she threw on her clothes,
and then sat down on the bed to fasten her red sandals.

She got to her feet, took a deep breath, and finally faced
Ben. He was lying on top of the sheet, his hair in sweaty spikes, looking so
hot Lexie had the urge to hop back into bed again and put off leaving until
tomorrow. But that was just more of that post-danger lust. She’d miss him, but
things had to end, and there was no point in dragging it out. She’d always been
a rip-off-the-Band-Aid kind of girl anyway. “I’d better go,” she said,
delighted her voice was level. “If I drive to Duluth tonight, I can get a
flight out first thing tomorrow morning. Good luck with expanding the garage.”

“Thanks.” Ben’s face was expressionless, probably because
this wasn’t a big deal for him. He had a lot more experience ending things than
she did. Like he’d said, he enjoyed variety when it came to women. He was no
doubt looking forward to replacing her with a younger, sexier model. “If you ever
want another vacation fling, I’ll be here,” he said.

Maybe he meant it; maybe he was just being polite, like when
he’d suggested a long-distance affair, knowing full well she’d never agree. It
didn’t matter. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Rule one forty-nine, you
know.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were done following
your mother’s rules.”

“That’s one of mine.” Lexie swallowed hard. “Catherine
doesn’t do flings.”

Because they hurt so damn much when they ended.

She turned and walked out of the room.