If You Ever Tell (5 page)

“I know that’s your favorite song, Teri. It was nice of Mac to request it for you on your birthday, but you didn’t look to
me
as if he were sweeping you off your feet. I’m sure not to anyone else, either. Some people just enjoy making others feel uncomfortable.” Sharon flung the words defiantly at Carmen.

Although Carmen clearly had gotten Sharon’s message, she relaxed in her chair and said casually, “I love that song, too. I used to have a cassette tape of it, but the tape snapped. I think I’ll order a CD tomorrow.” She paused, grinning without malice at Sharon. “When it comes in, I’ll ask Herman over to dance to it with me if he isn’t too busy with his knitting. Would you and Kent like to join us?”

Teri laughed and even Sharon smiled, breaking the strain at the table. A couple of minutes later, Sharon had begun talking about getting her son, Daniel, started on his riding lessons at Teresa’s school, reminding her of the family’s planned tour tomorrow afternoon, although the child had been to Farr Fields many times. “Teri, you do have a nice, gentle horse for him to train on, don’t you?” Sharon anxiously asked.

“I have one that’s perfect for him.” Teresa pictured the pony she’d chosen for the little boy who was becoming skittish because of Sharon’s constant hovering.

“I want your
most
gentle one,” Sharon ordered.

Carmen frowned in barely concealed annoyance. “Sharon, you act like Teri’s going to put Daniel on a raging stallion.”

Sharon’s cheeks grew scarlet under her freckles. “Horses can be dangerous, Carmen, or didn’t you know that?”

“Hey, girls, let’s not have a chick fight here in front of everyone,” Teresa said with artificial ease, trying to cut the sudden flashing hostility between the two women. “Sharon, I have students even younger than Daniel. I know how to train children and so do my employees, Gus and Josh.” She patted Sharon’s hand. “We’ll be extra careful with him. After all, he’s my nephew!”

Sharon gave Teri a weak smile, said nothing else, took two sips of her drink, and after ten minutes glanced at her watch. “It’s almost eleven,” she announced. “Time for me to go home.”

“But the party’s just beginning,” Carmen protested.

“I’ve been gone for hours. I need to check on Daniel. Teri, you and Carmen stay. Don’t let me interrupt your evening.”

“I think I should be leaving, too,” Teresa said in support of her sister-in-law, whose tension she saw growing. Sharon really just wanted to escape Carmen’s company. “I have to get up early in the morning.”

“Me, too.” Carmen was suddenly taking a last sip of her drink and reaching for her purse. “None of us need to be driving after more than two drinks anyway.”

Out in the parking lot, Sharon rushed for her car, but Carmen lingered near Teri’s. “I hope I didn’t offend you tonight, teasing you about Mac.”

Carmen’s tendency to tease about sensitive matters often irritated Teresa, but she always reminded herself what a good friend the woman had been to her mother. Carmen had befriended the lonely Marielle when Teri was thirteen and she’d been able to lift Marielle’s spirits like no one else could. After the murders, Carmen had taken in Teri and offered her reassurance and safe haven during that nightmare time, fending off reporters like a pit bull. Carmen had comforted her and never said, “I told you so,” after Teri’s breakup with Mac. Carmen still offered Teri emotional support and friendship without trying to act like a mother.

Suddenly, Teresa hugged Carmen. “You didn’t offend me with your teasing about Mac. I’m used to you.”

“Well there’s a compliment for you.” Carmen laughed. “I really did want you to see the club, Teri. It turned out beautifully. But I wasn’t trying to make history repeat itself. I can’t forget how you came crying to
me
when you caught him with that other woman.”

“I never told anyone except you why I ended our engagement,” Teri said.

“And I kept the secret, too. So, Mac aside, did you have a good time?”

“Mac aside, I had a great time except for you digging at Sharon.”

“Sharon needs a stern talking-to about her absurd overprotectiveness.”

“She’s the same way about Kent and about her father now that he’s a widower. I think the protectiveness is really a mask for possessiveness.”

“Goodness, my Teri is a psychologist now!” Carmen laughed. “Well, whatever it is, I chose the wrong time to call her on it, although there’s no good time to criticize Sharon. She doesn’t like criticism.”

“Who does?”

“You’re right. Anyway, I’m sorry. I’ll apologize to Sharon if it’ll make you happy.”

“It will.” Teri smiled in relief. “I’m glad you suggested we come to the club.”

“I thought a visit was due because you’ve never been here and you did the lion’s share of designing it. I wanted you to see the finished product. Sure you’re all right to drive?”

“My drinks were mostly cherries, so I think there’s very little alcohol in my system.”

Carmen laughed. “You and sweets. I’ll never know how you can eat so many of them and stay so thin. You have your mother’s slender frame. And her beauty. Except for your dark eyes, you look so much like Marielle, it’s almost uncanny.” Sadness shone in Carmen’s gaze for a moment. Then she smiled and began walking away, throwing a cheerful, “Happy birthday, kiddo,” over her shoulder.

The club had been busy and the parking lot was still almost full. Teresa glanced at all the cars, thinking that most of them wouldn’t be leaving for another hour, then opened the door of her white Buick Lucerne. As soon as the interior lights came on, she saw papers lying on the driver’s seat. She wondered if Mac had left a note in her car until she saw that the top sheet was a newspaper clipping dating from eight years ago. The headline seemed to scream at her:

“Oh no,” Teresa murmured, a chill running over her in spite of the warmth of the June night. She picked up the papers and glanced at the article, a few phrases jumping out at her about Hugh’s and Wendy’s deaths by stabbing and the injury of little Celeste, who according to the newspaper was in stable condition in spite of a knife wound to her abdomen. The paper also emphasized that Teresa had sustained only “a superficial wound to the left arm,” a fact that had fueled some people’s belief that Teresa had wielded the knife the night of the murders.

Feeling slightly dizzy, Teri let the newspaper clipping flutter to the asphalt. Then she read the computer-printed note:

T
ERESA AWAKENED HEAVY EYED
and sluggish. She wondered what was wrong. She’d only had two drinks at Club Rendezvous last night and been in bed before midnight. Then the memory of the parking lot flooded back to her. Finding the newspaper clipping and the note. No wonder she hadn’t slept well, Teresa thought.

She groaned and rolled onto her side. At the bottom of the bed slept her dog, Sierra, a fifty-pound mixed breed with short, gleaming chocolate brown hair, white hind paws, and pointed ears a bit too large for her delicate face. Teri smiled as she looked at the dog deep in sleep, untroubled by old tragedies and frightening new threats.

Teresa’s gaze slowly drifted away from the peaceful dog to the rest of her bedroom. Sunlight poured through the window facing east, highlighting her pale buttercup walls and shining on the simple engraved pine furniture she’d placed throughout the large bedroom. Some people told her the room looked almost Spartan—she needed more than a dresser, a nightstand, a cedar chest, and an overstuffed chair covered in ivory linen striped with moss green.

Teresa loved the room, though. The unfussy furnishings did not detract from the fireplace across from her bed with its creamy tiles hand-painted with green ferns and a few small butterflies and hummingbirds. She especially liked the décor so radically different from the garish pink and cerise room in which her father and Wendy had been murdered, a room that still appeared in Teri’s recurring nightmare.

She’d had it last night—the same nightmare she’d had a hundred times of walking into her father’s darkened room, of slowly approaching Wendy’s side of the bed and stepping on soaking-wet carpet, of turning on the light and seeing her father’s and Wendy’s dead bodies, their many stab wounds oozing blood. Her screams. That’s where the nightmare mercifully ended. For years she’d become accustomed to having the nightmare at least once a week. Then, when she was twenty-two, it had abruptly stopped. She was disheartened by its return.

Teresa realized the note had prompted the dream. Almost against her will, she rolled over, opened the drawer of her bedside table, and withdrew the half page of typing paper left in her car last night. The words seemed to jump out at her in the bright morning light:

Teri laid down the paper and stared across the room into the fireplace. Roscoe Lee Byrnes. The serial killer the police had apprehended attempting to escape a grisly crime scene in Pennsylvania just two weeks after the Farr murders. The man scheduled for lethal injection in a few days who had confessed to killing Hugh and Wendy Farr and twenty other people. Teresa thought of how easily Byrnes could have added two more victims to his list if he’d murdered her and Celeste.

But he couldn’t possibly have been trying to kill me, Teresa admitted reluctantly to herself as she had hundreds of times. That awful night, amid all the carnage he’d wrought, why had he been content just to cut her arm? Teresa glanced down at the narrow nine-inch scar stretching from her bicep almost to her wrist. The wound had been so shallow the scar now was barely visible. Her attacker’s action didn’t make sense, and for eight years Teresa had obsessed over why her life had been spared when the other people in the household had been so viciously torn and gashed.

After Byrnes’s confession, local police and the FBI decided Teresa’s screaming had saved her life that night. The neighbors said that through their open bedroom windows facing the Farr home, they had heard her wild shrieks. The husband had immediately turned on a bright bedside light and called 911. Meanwhile their Great Dane, spending the night on the porch, had begun howling and set off every other dog near the Farr house.

From the Farr bedroom, the police reasoned, Byrnes must have seen the neighbor’s glaring bedside light and guessed someone was reaching for a phone. He had also heard the strident howls of at least five dogs and he’d been frantic to escape the house. He’d probably thought police would answer alarm calls quicker or that maybe they even made routine passes around the homes of the affluent. That was the answer, most of them decided. Byrnes had been too intent on flight to waste time killing Teresa. He’d merely slashed at this unexpected impediment between him and escape.

Still, the Farr house security alarm hadn’t gone off and none of the locks had been picked. That fact the police couldn’t understand until Teresa told them that her father had been “upset” with her when she’d come in late. He’d lectured her, sent her to bed, and almost immediately she’d heard his heavy footsteps climbing the stairs. He often forgot to turn on the alarm when he was distracted, she’d told them, and had no qualms about giving the police this expurgated version of the scene that night because her conscience was clear when it came to Hugh’s death. Actually, she’d been terrified that if the police knew about the violence between her and Hugh that day, both before and after her night excursion, she’d be an even more likely murder suspect.

After his apprehension in a small Pennsylvania town, police had presented a scenario of the Farr murders to Byrnes, one in which he’d perhaps seen a pretty girl, followed her home, waited a couple of hours, decided to go in after her and whomever else he could find, and luckily discovered the front door unlocked. They went on to add that because of all the noise and the lights next door, he’d been in such a hurry to escape, he hadn’t taken time to kill a teenage girl who might put up a struggle.

Later the cops had allowed Teresa to see a video of them presenting Byrnes with their theory of the crime, then waiting anxiously for his reaction. Byrnes had stared expressionlessly at them for almost a full minute with his pale, yellow-tinged blue eyes, then nodded his unusually big head with its sparse hair, fat red cheeks, and receding chin. Finally, he’d said, “Yeah, that’s what happened,” in the rumbling monotone that was his voice. The police had been satisfied. Teresa hadn’t. They had not seen the killer calmly descend the stairs, open the front door, and close it behind him. To her, that escape didn’t seem to be one of a man frantic with fear, frenziedly trying to flee.

She had never described the killer’s unhurried “getaway” to anyone, though, because too many people already believed her unstable mother had killed her callous ex-husband and his new, pregnant wife. Nor had Teresa mentioned the whiff of sandalwood she’d caught that night when the killer bumped against her. She’d read that sandalwood was used in both women’s and men’s colognes, but she was certain someone would mention that Marielle Farr always wore the scent of sandalwood, pointing toward her as the possible murderer.

Teresa sighed and muttered in frustration, “It was eight years and two months ago. Enough of the tragic replay.”

She climbed out of bed, managing not to disturb a snoring Sierra. Teresa went into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her complexion was paler than usual and she had dark shadows beneath her eyes. “You have one birthday and you look ten years older,” she told her reflection, but she knew she didn’t look tired because she was officially a year older than the day before yesterday. She’d had a bad night because of the chilling note left on her car, a night torn with nightmares of the murders, and a heartbreaking dream about her lost mother.