On the Run (11 page)

I had to smile in spite of my fresh shock at this new revelation about Boone. A bad clip job on a hedge is
uneven
; Abilene’s hair looked like the graph on an earthquake. “Maybe you’ll want to let it grow again now.”

“Maybe I will.”

I handed her the glass of iced tea, and she pressed the cold glass against her forehead for a moment before taking a sip. Her driving without a license didn’t seem important now, but I did wonder why she didn’t have a license.

“You had a driver’s license, but . . . ?” I waited for her to fill in the blanks.

“No, I never had one. Boone wouldn’t let me.” Koop was already in her lap, purring madly. “He said I didn’t need to go anywhere without him, so I didn’t need to know how to drive.”

“So you didn’t even know how to drive when you took off in the middle of the night to get away from him?”

“Well, I kind of know how,” she said, her tone defensive. “I drove the old tractor we had for farm work lots of times. But Boone wouldn’t let me drive anything else, and driving a car out on the highway turned out to be different than driving the old tractor. A jackrabbit ran across the road, and I lost control trying to miss it. I ran off the road and hit a tree.” She smiled ruefully. “I think there was only one tree in that whole county, and I hit it.”

“The car?”

“I’m pretty sure it was totaled.”

“But you walked away.” Not unscathed, but walking. “The Lord must have been looking out for you.”

She lifted her head in surprise. “Why would he look out for me?”

“For one thing, he loves and cares about all of us. And maybe he appreciates what you did for three little kids.”

“I never took the kids to Sunday school.” Abilene shook her head, not one to take credit for something she hadn’t done. “I never read them Bible stories or said prayers or told them anything about God.” She hesitated a moment. “I don’t even know much of anything about God.”

“Could you have done any of those things if you’d wanted to?”

“No. Boone was dead set against anything to do with church.” But she still looked troubled that she hadn’t fulfilled her duties as a mother. Then her blue eyes brightened. “But MaryLou will! She said it was really her faith that got the kids back, and she’ll take them to Sunday school. And the dentist too, and give them birthday parties and shoes that fit.”

“So they’re in good hands and you’re free. Maybe it’s kind of a happy ending after all.”

Abilene managed a wry smile. “Except for Boone’s car.”

“Does he know it’s wrecked?”

“I’d planned to drive it maybe three or four hundred miles, park it at a mall or Wal-Mart parking lot or somewhere like that, and send him a postcard telling him where it was. I knew he’d be boilin’ mad, but I figured if he got his car back he wouldn’t care much about my leaving.”

“But you told him the car was wrecked, and he
was
boiling mad.”

“Maybe I should have told him it was wrecked, but I-I didn’t. I was afraid it would take too long for a postcard to get there, so I called and told him where the car was. I decided I’d just let the fact that the car was now shaped like a red horseshoe around a tree be a surprise to him.” Her smile was grimly humorless.

“You also figured when he got to the car and found it wrecked that he’d send the authorities after you. That’s why you’re so nervous around the police.”

She nodded. “But I was even more afraid if Boone found me there with the car he’d kill me on the spot. That’s why I started walking and hitchhiking. I know it isn’t safe. But I figured it was safer than being around when Boone got there.”

She pushed the curtain aside and peered down the road toward town.

“You think he might be trying to track you down now?”

“Boone gets even with people. Always. I know he slashed tires on the car of a guy he had an argument with. He got fired from a car repair shop one time. It burned down a few weeks later. Nothing ever came of it. But he did it. I heard him and his brother laughing about it. He wouldn’t mind killing me. He wouldn’t mind killing me at all,” she repeated with a tremor in her voice.

In some other situation I might have found such a statement melodramatic and unbelievable, but with what I’d already heard of Boone I had no doubt Abilene’s worries were justified. The man sounded capable of almost anything. A brother in kind, if not in blood, with the murderous Braxtons.

But still, the situations were rather different. The Braxtons’ brother had gone to prison because of me. “But it is just a car,” I pointed out. “Would he really try to track you down because of a car?”

“Not ‘just a car.’” Another of those grim smiles. “At least not to Boone. It’s a Porsche. And he’s had it less than a year.”

“A Porsche?”

“A Porsche 911 Carrera, to be exact. He loves that car like . . . like some men love their wife and kids, I guess. He was always polishing it. He had the whole door repainted when it got a nick you could barely see. Lily threw a ball that accidentally hit the car one time, and he grabbed her and shook her so hard her . . . her eyes rolled back in her head. I’d never have taken his precious Porsche if there was any other way, but I couldn’t get away from him on the tractor.”

“How did he manage to get a Porsche? They aren’t exactly cheap.”

“His dad died. Each of the sons wound up with quite a lot of money. I never knew exactly how much. But I was hoping we could buy a new mobile home, one of those nice double wides. So the kids could have bedrooms of their own, and we’d have a kitchen stove that worked. I thought we could get Randy’s teeth fixed, and take Alisha to an allergy specialist.”

“But Boone bought a new Porsche instead.”

“With all the options.”

My sense of Christian love and charity is sorely tried by someone like Boone Morrison. In spite of the afternoon warmth in the motor home, Abilene suddenly shivered, and I knew she was thinking about Boone coming after her. But a bright thought suddenly occurred to me.

“You said the car was less than a year old. Was it insured?”

“I don’t know. Boone took care of things like that. I couldn’t even write a check. My name wasn’t on the bank account.”

“So surely he’d insure his most prized possession. And now he can take the insurance money and buy himself a new Porsche!”

“I never thought of that. Hey, I guess he can!” Abilene’s back straightened as if the weight of the Porsche was sliding off her shoulders. Her eyes lit up. “By the time he gets a new Porsche, he won’t care enough to come after me. By then he’ll be saying ‘good riddance,’ happy I’m gone!”

Even though it was midafternoon, neither of us had been hungry before, but with this upturn in Abilene’s future prospects, I suggested sandwiches. Abilene was no chatterer, but she talked while we ate, about everything from the kids to people she’d gotten rides with while hitchhiking to the emus.

I was pleased that the insurance idea had relieved her worries about Boone coming after her with murder on his mind. But I wasn’t so sure everything was hunky-dory just yet.

Had Boone reported the Porsche stolen? What happened when Sgt. Dole ran Abilene’s name through official channels? And what about driving without a license and wrecking a car?

11

After we finished eating, I debated with myself about driving back to the house. I was curious about what Sgt. Dole and Deputy Hamilton were doing there, of course, but I didn’t want to expose Abilene to more of Sgt. Dole’s probing. I had the impression that the investigation into the murder of the sheriff’s nephew had considerably higher priority than Abilene’s lack of proper identification or even the Northcutts’ deaths, and maybe, if we kept a low profile, running her name through some “wanted” system would slip his mind.

I also considered just picking up and leaving. That had a definite appeal, and maybe it would work. Sgt. Dole might figure looking for us wasn’t worth the bother. But my ever-vigilant conscience nixed that. Sgt. Dole, the Law, had told us to stick around. Although I had to admit that another reason for staying was my curiosity about Frank Northcutt. He’d been ready enough to accept the possibility that his parents may have been murdered, with Ute a star suspect. Would he be as ready to accept the suicide-pact assumption?

So what we did was get out the lawn chairs, set them up on the shady side of the motor home, and wait to see what happened. Koop played mighty hunter chasing grasshoppers. A plane too high to see left a graceful jet trail across cloudless blue sky. Abilene and I sipped more iced tea. She seemed considerably more at ease now, probably because she no longer feared Boone might be coming after her. But also, I suspected, because she’d shared her secrets and had nothing more to hide.

It was almost 4:00 when a gray-haired man in a white car, two men in a van, and another police car drove by. I took this to be the medical examiner in the car, with the van for transporting the bodies. No sign of the son yet, which made me wonder just how far he had to travel.

We watched the entourage disappear around the bend in the green tunnel.

“What do you think?” Abilene asked.

The question came out of nowhere, but I didn’t have to ask what she was referring to. “I suppose it’s what it looks like. The Northcutts made a pact. Jock Northcutt shot his wife, then himself. Sgt. Dole doesn’t seem to have any doubts.” Although I wasn’t so certain about Deputy Hamilton. I gave her a curious glance. “Why do
you
think it might not be a suicide pact?”

She twisted the iced-tea glass on her jeans. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing?”

“I could never go to the library in town, but twice a month a bookmobile came out to the rural areas. I read some classic stuff that Mrs. Burton—she’s the one who drove the bookmobile—said I should. And I like books on interesting places and people. But what I really like best are mysteries.” Sounding guilty, she added, “Murder mysteries.”

“Me too.”

“You?” She turned in the lawn chair to look at me as if I’d just confessed to a secret vice, maybe a hobby of pickpocketing in my spare time. “Really?”

“Really. I’ve been reading them for years. Cozies. Suspense. Thrillers. Hard-boiled detectives. Lady sleuths. Everything from Nancy Drew, way back when, to Mrs. Pollifax in the seventies to Kinsey Millhone now. And now there are even some great writers doing Christian mysteries and suspense.”

“Did you ever read one where murder had been set up to look like suicide?” she asked.

“Oh yes. I remember one called
The Noose Knows
. That was a murder, a hanging, made to look like suicide. Very cleverly done, as I recall.”

“Hey, I read that one!” Abilene sounded astonished at this unexpected meeting of the minds. “And it worked too, until the guy’s fiancée figured it out. Remember? Something about one of his shoes.”

“There was another one, I don’t remember the title, but it was a drowning set up to look like suicide. And one had a husband who pushed his wife out a tenth story window and made it look like she’d jumped.”

“Oh, I remember that one. He did it at a masquerade party, and she was wearing a Wonder Woman outfit. He tried to claim she was high on something and thought she could fly. It was by, oh, what’s her name, the same one who writes those Jetta Diamond mysteries—”

“Samantha Kruger,” I said.

We looked at each other in unexpected delight, two people who’ve just discovered that, in spite of major chasms in age, background, and beliefs, they’re sisters under the skin.

Abilene settled back in the lawn chair, frown lines between her eyes. “But those were all made-up stories. Maybe things like that don’t happen in real life.”

“From what I’ve heard, fiction writers often use a real situation as the germ of a story and then build on it. And you know the old saying: truth is stranger than fiction.”

“But is it?”

“You see in the news every once in a while how someone has tried to disguise a crime as something else, usually an accident. Some people get quite creative. So who knows how many times disguising a murder as suicide in real life has worked, and the truth was never discovered?”

She nodded slowly. “The authorities decided the fire Boone set was an accident.” She gave a snort of humorless laughter. “Of course, since his cousin the sheriff was the one doing the investigating, that wasn’t any big surprise.”

“Boone didn’t mind your reading mysteries?”

“Boone didn’t like my reading
anything
. He said it was a big waste of time. Unlike his boxing, football, hockey, car racing, and every other sport on TV, of course. He didn’t even like my reading to the kids.” Her eyes unexpectedly glinted with mischief. “But I think he objected to mysteries most of all because he was afraid they’d give me ideas about how to kill him.”

“Did they?”

“Well, I read one about using rat poison that sounded workable,” she admitted. “But there’s a big difference between thinking about how something could be done and actually doing it.” She was smiling when she mentioned the rat-poison book, but suddenly her jaw hardened. “But if I’d
had
to do something desperate to protect the kids . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and I figured this was a good time to let this subject drop. She hadn’t done Boone in, and the kids were safe with their mother now.

We had to move our chairs around the motor home as the shade shifted. Koop gave up on grasshoppers and found a cool spot under a bush to snooze. Finally, after an hour and a half, the vehicles exited. Sgt. Dole and Deputy Hamilton brought up the rear of the parade. Sgt. Dole stopped the car beside the motor home.

“Everything okay?” I inquired.

“We may need to talk to you again after the autopsy, so you’ll have to stay in the area. There are several RV parks out around the lake. You can call the office and leave word where we can reach you.”

“But the emus need to be fed and watered,” Abilene said.

“We were thinking we might park in the yard until the Northcutts’ son arrives. We can keep an eye on things and feed the emus,” I added.

Sgt. Dole’s quick glance suggested that leaving the two of us to guard anything was probably as effective as building a fence out of spider webs, but all he said was, “I can’t give you permission to use someone else’s property.”