No One Needs to Know (48 page)

She kept thinking about Joey. If she was implicated in this, they could take him away from her. For the last hour, she’d been reassuring herself that he was in good hands with Tammy and Hank. If they were at all involved in Cheryl’s insane scheme, Cheryl would have said something by now—using Joey as leverage to ensure Laurie’s full cooperation.

Her hands were shaking as she filled the plastic cup with tap water. She brought it into the living room.

Gil was still clearing his throat. She put the cup to his lips, and he drank greedily. Then he nodded and she pulled the plastic cup away.

“Thank you,” he gasped. “Are you—are you really my godchild?”

“Yes—”

“She had no idea I was going to do this,” Cheryl cut in. “The only reason you’re alive right now is because she agreed to help me get you here. I would have shot you in your kitchen an hour ago if she hadn’t cooperated. You owe her your life, Gil.”

He gazed at Laurie through those tinted spectacles with the missing lens. “Thank you,” he whispered. He cleared his throat again. “You know, your friend here is crazy. Why would I have killed Elaina? I was in love with her.”

“But she dumped you,” Cheryl interjected.

“Yes, we broke up, but it was amicable, goddamn it!” he said in his gravelly voice. “I still wanted to make another movie with her. We were discussing it. I even wanted her for
Lifetime of Chance,
the role my wife got the Oscar for. I offered it to Elaina first, only she was pregnant. Elaina and I were still friends. When she was killed, it fucking broke my heart . . .”

He started coughing again.

Laurie stood beside him with the plastic cup of water. She turned to Cheryl. “Isn’t it possible you’re wrong?”

“No,” Cheryl barked, pointing the gun in their direction. “He’s lying. Trent said it in the car on the way here. He said Gil had promised to get him in the movies if he just did him this one favor.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gil retorted. He was weaving slightly. His glasses sat crooked on his face. “I never even met the son of a bitch. It’s utterly ridiculous. I found out later that we were at the same party once—along with about two hundred other people. I was there with my wife. It was almost a year before the murders. That’s as close as I ever got to the sorry bastard.”

He went into another coughing fit, and started to teeter. For a moment, Laurie thought he might collapse. “I need to sit down, for chrissake,” he muttered. “I’m not well. I’ve got cancer. Take a little pity . . .”

Cheryl nodded at her. “Help him upstairs.”

Flustered, Laurie looked up at the darkness beyond the top of the curving stairway.

“There’s a chair in the second room off the hallway,” Cheryl said. “That’s where I want him. It was the baby’s room.”

Yesterday, during a lull in filming, Cheryl had snuck up the back stairs and peeked into what was once the nursery. Except for a few large boxes and a hard-backed chair, the room was unfurnished. It still had the light blue checkered wallpaper—slightly faded and dingy looking. But the white curtains were gone. Of course, so were the crib, bassinette, diaper pail, and the framed nursery rhyme cartoons on the wall. The baby’s room was just a shell of what it had been. But Cheryl could still feel Baby Patrick in there—forty-four years later.

She wasn’t sure if they would be filming in that room. Dirk and Elaina’s bedroom and the living room were where most of the important scenes took place. Yet whenever Cheryl thought of this house and the murders, she remembered that bedroom—and the way it smelled of baby powder.

Dirk and Elaina must have left some windows open that warm July night, because Natalie heard the music start up. It was loud enough that even in the Vista Cruiser, parked outside the front gate, she could tell it was Dirk Jordan singing his new hit single, “Elaina.”

At least the music helped pass the time while she waited alone in the car. But then it turned quiet again, and she got scared once more. Finally, she climbed out of the car and padded to the gate. JT had found a fat stick and wedged it in a spot by the post so the gate wouldn’t shut all the way. The gate hinges squeaked as Natalie let herself in. She carefully placed the stick back in its place, and started down the long driveway. She saw lights on in the front of the house—but the thin white curtains were closed. She couldn’t discern what was going on inside. All she could see were shadows moving about.

Earlier, she’d watched her mother, Trent, JT, and Moonbeam head down the driveway toward the back of the house. She followed the same path, hoping they’d left a door open. A dim light coming from one of the side windows made it easier for her to see her way around. Natalie noticed a screen leaning against the house. The window above it was open. Someone must have gotten a boost up, because the window was pretty high—too high for Natalie to reach. Not far from there was a door—with a crack of light along the edge. She gave it a gentle push, and it creaked open.

She found herself in a small hallway—with a powder room at her right. She moved on into the kitchen. It was very tidy—except for a box of Ritz crackers left out on the counter. She heard people talking in another room—and farther away, a baby crying.

Natalie crept toward the front of the house. She could hear someone sobbing, someone besides the baby. Moving toward the voices, she passed through the large foyer and spotted all of them in the living room. A chair and a tall potted plant had been tipped over. Trent, JT, and Moonbeam stood over three people, who were hog-tied on the shag carpet. The man was shirtless, and wore blue pajama bottoms. Natalie could see he was handsome—even though his mouth was bleeding. A brown-haired girl in yellow pajamas was the one crying. She looked about twenty years old. Crouched down toward the floor, Natalie’s mother was propping a Union Jack throw pillow beneath Elaina Styles’s head. Natalie recognized the movie star—so beautiful with her long red hair and the lacy lavender nightgown.

“Oh, shit,” Moonbeam said, gaping at her. “Brandi, your little brat is here . . .”

Her mother straightened up. “For God’s sake, you were supposed to stay in the car!”

“Hey, it’s cool,” Trent said, brandishing the gun. He flicked back his dirty, tangled blond hair. “Go upstairs and see if you can’t shut that baby up.”

Natalie hesitated.

“Go on,” Trent said.

“Please!” Elaina said, her eyes pleading with Natalie’s. “Promise me, you won’t let anyone hurt my little boy.”

Natalie stared back at her, mesmerized. “I promise,” she whispered. Then she hurried upstairs.

She followed the sound of his crying and found the baby in the second room off the upstairs hallway. It was strange to see how a pampered baby lived—in a clean bed, in Snoopy pajamas, with a big picture of Humpty Dumpty on the wall. He had brown hair and blue eyes—with a small birthmark over the right one. He was just about Buddy’s age. It broke her heart to be this close to a baby again.

She could feel his diaper was damp. He stopped crying as soon as she picked him up. At that moment, Natalie knew she would keep her promise to Elaina Styles.

Hunting around the nursery, she found what she needed to change him. While cleaning him up, she kept thinking about how scared those people must be downstairs. Just last year, some hippies had killed a movie star and her friends down in Los Angeles. Those poor people in the living room had to be thinking about that right now.

“Natty?”

With the baby in her arms, Natalie turned toward the nursery door.

Her mother looked anxious. “Trent wants you to take the baby and go wait in the car—now.”

Natalie quickly finished pinning on the clean diaper.

“Take the backstairs and go out the kitchen door. C’mon, hurry up . . .”

The music started up again with lush bells ringing and Dirk crooning about how insane he was for Elaina.

Natalie grabbed the Snoopy pajamas and wrapped the baby in his blanket. She hurried along the corridor until she found the back stairs. She glanced over her shoulder at her mother at the other end of the hallway. Then she raced down the stairs. In the kitchen, she flung open the refrigerator and found a baby bottle. She grabbed it, and closed the refrigerator door with her hip. Clutching the baby in her arms, she hurried out the back door.

As she headed up the driveway, she could still hear the music—and screaming.

It sounded like Elaina.

Natalie waited in the car with the baby. Like Buddy, he was old enough that he could hold things. So he only needed a little help drinking from his bottle. She wasn’t sure how long they waited before she caught a glimpse of her mother staggering up the driveway. She climbed behind the wheel, and faced forward. She was crying.

“Where’s everybody else?” Natalie asked, rocking the baby in her lap.

“They’ll be out soon,” her mother replied, her voice hoarse. She didn’t turn around. “Trent says we’re going to keep the baby for a while.”

Natalie couldn’t believe Elaina would so easily give up her baby like that. “What are they doing to them?” she asked.

“They’re just scaring them—like Trent said. That’s all. Now, just—just be quiet and look after the baby, okay? I don’t feel like talking for a while . . .”

Natalie didn’t believe they were merely “scaring” those people in there.

Eventually, the others wandered down the driveway. Trent was carrying his duffle bag. He tossed it on the floor of the passenger seat, and Natalie heard the knives clanking. “Wash off what’s in there when we get back to the farm,” he grunted at her mother. The car shifted as he jumped in the front passenger seat. “We’ll give you our clothes to burn, too. Got that, Brandi? Make yourself useful.”

JT and Moonbeam lagged behind. He gave her a boost and she fixed something to a pointed bar at the top of the gate. It was Elaina’s lacy lavender nightgown. There was blood on it.

Cheryl remembered knowing right then that her mother had lied to her.

She had the same certainty about Gil’s lies. He’d manipulated Trent into committing those horrible murders—and then he’d arranged for the carnage that would follow a week later at Biggs Farm. She would get him to confess to it—or he would die in this house like so many others before him.

With the gun aimed at Gil Garrett’s back, she followed him and Laurie up the stairs.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
FIVE

Saturday, July 12, 4:29
P.M.

North Bend, Washington

“W
ell, I don’t understand where we’re going.”

His father’s voice was muffled and distant. It came over Adam’s phone, which was still on speaker mode, and wedged in the console’s cup holder.

“Don’t you recognize the landscape, Dean?” the woman asked him. None of his father’s friends ever called him that. He was Dino to them. “We’re not too far from Biggs Farm, where those hippies died a long, long time ago. I hear your memory’s failing you, but you certainly remember that, don’t you, old man?”

“I—I’m sorry,” his father stammered. “I thought my wife was coming here to pick me up and take me home . . .”

Adam’s heart broke as he listened to his father, so helpless and confused.

For the last hour, Adam had been following the woman’s instructions, which had taken him off I-90 onto the rural roads. The delay-wipers kept sweeping away the dull, steady drizzle from his windshield. Adam wasn’t sure if Biggs Farm was really their destination—or if the place even still existed. He’d just passed the Twin Peaks Café in North Bend. They were headed toward Snoqualmie Pass and the national forest.

He couldn’t help thinking that he and his father would be killed somewhere in those woods. He imagined the two of them kneeling over an open grave—and the execution-style shooting. At least there was a chance his father wouldn’t understand what was happening.

For a while, Adam had tried flashing his brights at oncoming cars, hoping they’d figure out that he was in trouble. But it had been pointless, and the woman in the SUV had caught on anyway.

Outside of North Bend, they passed fewer and fewer cars. The surrounding woods were getting thicker. He braked for a stop sign at an empty intersection. Across the street was a small timber mill that looked as if it had been shut down for years.

Adam glanced at his gas gauge—half full. Maybe he could get some help at a gas station—if there was even one between here and Snoqualmie Pass. “Listen,” he said, moving through the intersection. “If you plan on making us go much farther, I’ll need to stop for gas. I’m almost empty.”

“Well, that may just pose a problem for you—”

A loud, brief wail from a police siren cut the woman off.

In the rearview mirror, Adam saw the squad car peel around from the cross street with its strobes flashing. It came up right behind the dark blue SUV.

“Goddamn it,” the woman hissed. “Okay, friend, pull over up ahead. I don’t want to hear a fucking peep out of you . . .”

Adam veered over to the shoulder of the road—by the deserted timber mill. The car tilted slightly on a slope that led to a small ditch off the shoulder. He could see the SUV had pulled over, too, just a few car lengths behind him.

It seemed to take forever for the cop to get out of his patrol car, parked in back of the SUV. The siren was off, but the strobe was still flashing.

“I know what you’re thinking, Adam,” she said over the phone. “Here’s your big opportunity to get some help from the police. Well, it’s just a flunky traffic cop, and he can’t help you worth a damn. In fact, his life is in your hands. He’s as good as dead if you try anything. So just sit still there and let this good old boy write us a ticket . . .”

Adam watched the policeman amble up to the SUV driver’s window. He couldn’t quite see the cop’s face. But he had a lean build, and from his gait he seemed pretty young. Adam remembered what Aunt Doris had told him about Dean and Joyce’s killer—that it had to be a professional. The woman was right. A young, rural traffic cop was probably no match for the two killers in the SUV—then again, neither was he.