Raveled (36 page)

Lavitte, a
fragile house of cards that needed desperately to avoid a wayward gust of wind bearing the truth. If my count was correct, at least six people had known the truth of what happened to Shelby Anderson that night. Jasper, Smitty, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Mayor and Mrs. Kettrick. Even Jasper’s sickly mom, telling him to stay quiet with that one bad piece of advice she’d given him. Deception buried under selfishness, tied up with ego. Lavitte was no better than that pile of toxic waste behind Artie’s Auto, disguising itself as a hill.

All of them had
watched and waited, letting Shelby’s disappearance fester into an appalling sore, and then, when her body was finally found, they’d watched and waited again. Watched my parents suffer. Waited for my father to hang. Probably toasted champagne as the circumstantial evidence piled up against him
. He deserved to take the rap for Shelby
, they told themselves.
He killed Bobby, after all
. Just as Mrs. Anderson had suspected, they’d treated Shelby as a bonus. A little piece of insurance that if anything went wrong with the conviction for precious Bobby, then Artie Fennimore would surely hang for Shelby Anderson. They’d let Shelby’s family wonder if their daughter had suffered a slow climax of fear leading to her death. They’d watched Mrs. Anderson deteriorate into a brittle shell of a woman.

Who else knew? Did the investigating officers know? Did they cover up evidence? Just how deep did the sickness
run?

“
I did trick Jasper a bit, though,” Mrs. Kettrick said, lost in her own reflections. “Told him that Smitty had already spilled the beans and before you knew it, the little thing confirmed all my suspicions. So you see, Allison, Bobby never did know what happened to Shelby. No, instead, he fought to the death to get that rope so he could save her, and your daddy shot him. Shot him dead in cold blood and left the rats to gnaw on his body.” She spoke with a lilt in her voice that indicated a serious break from sanity.

“Mrs. Kettrick
, could we—”

“And now you’re
still here,” she said, tilting her head a few degrees beyond conversational, “trying to make it look like Bobby had something to do with that clumsy girl falling. Bobby would never have fallen. He was so coordinated and strong. Like a bull.”

“I need to go, Mrs. Kettrick. Detective Barkley
—”

She
cut in front of me as I stepped toward the door. We both stopped before our bodies collided but we held our positions.

“
Let me tell you something, young lady,” she said. “Jasper was not the good guy hero of that evening. He didn’t sacrifice his life the way Bobby did. Jasper was too smart for his own good. So literal. Almost autistic, really. Couldn’t accept a simple compromise in life. Couldn’t understand that we all repress our scruples for the greater good.”

The greater good?
Something in the way she said it made me shiver. A cold hand reached up from underground, wrapped itself around my spine, and shook hard, firing all my nerve endings simultaneously. My brain tried to receive the message that my body was sending, but failed. I could see the dots flying in front of my eyes but I couldn’t connect them.

“
All those years of paying for his mother’s treatments, his tuition, putting him through rehab, and how does he repay me? By spilling the beans, after I’d neatly eliminated all the evidence.”

“
You? It was you who burned down the barn?”

She scanned the room. Checking for recording devices
, perhaps. “Of course. With Elise’s help.”

It was too comical to imagine
. Two mothers in their name-brand clothes and expensive cars, stealing into the night, pulling out matches from their designer purses. Perhaps one of them carried the gas can with a monogrammed bathroom towel around the handle to keep from ruining a manicure. Had they whispered, worn blackface, donned hats? Did their husbands know? Did they stay and watch the barn burn, munching on toast points and caviar as it turned to ash? Did Mrs. Kettrick take a moment before tossing the match to gaze one last time at the breadth of Bobby’s genius in creating a rope swing? Perhaps she cut a small piece of rope for herself as a keepsake, ignoring the fact that it had killed an innocent girl. And what about the near-psychotic control it must have taken to go out within hours of her son’s death to destroy evidence in another tragedy because she was already obsessed with his legacy? What kind of sicko had raised Bobby Kettrick? I felt a twinge of pity for him. He hadn’t just jumped into a sour gene pool and come out with an explosive temper. He’d inherited a shitload of crazy.

Mrs. Kettrick
reached into her purse. I lunged and grabbed it before she got her hand all the way in. I threw it against the wall and watched it slide to the floor with a heavy thump. The metal buckle left an indent in the sheetrock that resembled the crossbones normally reserved as bow ties for skulls.

The
incident didn’t faze her. She cocked her head at me and blinked, as if I were dust in her eye. “It’s just an envelope,” she said. “Stuffed with money. Enough to get your mother a nice place, put yourself through school and maybe straighten out your brother.” She bent down and picked up the purse from the floor, rising up to reveal a hefty envelope stuffed with cash.

So that’s why
she’d drawn the blinds, to conceal a payoff right here at the police station.

“It didn’t work with Jasper
,” I said. “It won’t work with me. What are you concerned about, anyway, Mrs. Kettrick? If you play your cards right, Bobby comes out of this smelling like a rose.”

A blast
of disrespectful air blazed from her nostrils. “But Bobby’s name will be associated.”

“
All this for a reputation?”

Did she have any clue as to Lavitte
’s insignificance in the world? No one cared about its asshole ex-quarterback from sixteen years ago.

She looked at me like I was the insane one “It’s all he has left.”

“It’s all you have left,” I said. “And it’s an illusion. One you’re living alone.”

Her eyelashes fluttered over her
remarkably azure eyes, their tint entrancing. The cold hand shook my spine again. The floating dots in front of me turned blue...
skull and crossbones
... my brain thrashed and wriggled…
Shawn Smart
… I put my hand on the wobbly conference table to fight my body’s desire to faint.

“Your mother’s done fine living alone all these years
, Allison,” Mrs. Kettrick said. “How is she, by the way?”

The merry-go-round stopped. The
earsplitting music ceased. The dots connected.
Tell your mother she needs more blue in her garden
…
Selena got me drinking wine again
.

I thrust Mrs. Kettrick aside and ran out the door.

Chapter 52

Allison… present

I leaped out of Detective Barkley’s car the moment he pulled up to my house. He followed a few steps behind as I sprinted to the door and crashed it open. “Mom! Mom! Everything okay?”

Silence. Except for the murmur of the television in the sunroom. I ran
at once to find Selena snoring heavily on the couch, her telenovela blaring in rapid Spanish. “Selena,” I said as I shook her, “where’s my mother?”

After mentally stumbling to a wakeful state, Selena sat upright and pointed
to the spare room. “Taking a nap. Like usual. She nap, I nap. It’s our deal. Something wrong?”

I raced
to the spare room. Everything should be okay. What were the odds—

My mother lay motionless on the bed, a near empty glass
of wine on her bedside table. I gasped, a shudder convulsing my body. No! I shook my mother but got no response. Detective Barkley stepped beside the bed opposite me and grabbed my mother’s wrist.

“Her pulse is weak,” he said. He tried to rouse her but failed. At least she was still breathing. “Let’s get her to
the hospital.”

He scooped her up
and half an hour later, my mother was checked in at the hospital, ensconced in its labyrinthine systems and procedures. As another hour ticked by, the shabby carpet beneath my pacing feet grew as worn as my nerves. Ignoring his resistance, I’d insisted Detective Barkley go take care of a few things to help prove my theory, but I regretted my decision almost immediately. While the guilt over what had happened to my mother fell squarely on my shoulders, I could really use someone to absorb the waves of worry that kept washing over me. Would she survive? How could I have been so stupid? What would I tell Kevin? Exhausted, I finally collapsed onto one of the itchy, orange cushions of the hospital waiting room. When the double doors opened, I never felt so happy to see anyone as when Enzo bounded through. He could have starred in a telenovela himself as he spread his arms wide and embraced me.

“Allison,
my cousin’s a paramedic. He told me you were here. What happened?”

I filled him in on
what I could. He listened and nodded patiently, covering my hand with his when appropriate, but he seemed burdened and distracted the entire time. When I finished the update on my mother, I told him some of what I’d learned about the night of Bobby’s murder, and suddenly, his half-present attitude collapsed and withered into a gulf of despair.

He placed both his hands on his legs
and looked up to the ceiling as if asking permission from a higher force. Then he clapped his hands together in startling fashion. “Allison, I have my own confession to make. I don’t care if you hate me. I don’t care if it brings down my family or destroys my business. I should never have let my uncle talk me into staying quiet.”

“
About what, Enzo?”

“I
was the one who tied Bobby up.”

Luckily, we were in
a hospital. If I fainted, they could scrape me up and lay me in a bed next to my mother. Dark thoughts ricocheted inside my head. In a voice devoid of all emotion, I managed to give voice to my fear. “Enzo, please tell me you’re not confessing to murder.”

“No, no, no!” he said, jumping up and continuing the rut in the floor I’d begun earlier. “God, no. I only tied him up.”

“Why in the world would you randomly tie him up?”

“I was getting ready to leave
the garage when I heard him break the window. Your dad and brother were passed out in the office. Without even thinking, I conked him on the head with a wrench—the same wrench he’d stolen from your dad a couple weeks earlier, by the way.”

“Poetic justice,” I mumbled, questioning if I could process any more information.

“Anyway, he must have been drunk ‘cuz he went out cold, seemed almost content to be unconscious. Snoring when I left.”

“Yes, but by the time you left, he was
also tied to a car bumper. How did that happen?”

“I was giving him like a gift to your dad.
Serving him up on a silver platter. You gotta remember, I’d been drinking that swill, too, and my brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders.”

Enzo
was speaking so excitedly, his faint Mexican accent grew stronger with each sentence.

“I figured if
your dad finally had the bastard red-handed, he could call the police in the morning. We had the broken window and we had Bobby himself. Even if your dad didn’t press charges, he could teach Bobby a much-needed lesson when he woke up.”

“By shooting him?”

“No! I mean… that’s not what I was thinking. But I don’t know what happened after I left.”

“So you tied him up to the bumper of
a car and left him as some kind of warped gift?”

“
Yes. Exactly what your dad had wished for earlier that night.”

“Where’d you get the rope?”

“Bobby’s trunk. He had it in a burlap sack back there. I’d seen it earlier when I was checking for other stolen stuff.”

“The same rope Bobby was on his way to get.”

Enzo cringed. “By the time my uncle woke me at 5 a.m. to help him with some stupid project, I’d come to my senses. I made him drive by the garage so I could untie Bobby and straighten the whole thing out.”

“You never
told anyone you went to the garage that morning.”

“’Cuz I saw Bobby
lying there dead before I ever went in. I panicked and ran back to get my uncle.”

“And your uncle did what every other adult in this town does,” I said
, resigned. “He told you to keep your mouth shut.”

Enzo
aged ten years before my eyes.

“I
begged my uncle to let me call the police. But you know how my family was. The police were our enemy. He wanted me as far from that situation as possible. I tried to go back in so I could at least make sure your dad was okay, but my uncle caught me by the back of the shirt. He used to be a boxer. Punched me harder in the gut than anything I’ve ever felt, then he dragged me back to the truck and hit me so brutally in the face, I started seeing double. Shoved me in the passenger seat and peeled out of there. Kept me away for two days. By the time we got back, he had me convinced my whole family would go to jail if I said a word.”

“Of course, by then, my dad had been arrested and the hot news around town was Shelby’s disappearance.”

“I swear, I still don’t know what happened that night. But I’m going to tell the police everything. I can’t tell you how miserable I’ve felt all these years.”

I thought about the money coming in for my mother. At least
Enzo hadn’t been able to buy off his conscience. A rare, redeemable quality here in Lavitte.

“No point,
Enzo,” I said, shaking my head. “It won’t change anything, and your family will get screwed. I don’t mean to add to your guilt, but you prepped Bobby for death, left him vulnerable to that bullet. That’s how the Kettricks would spin it, and trust me, at least one half of that couple is certifiable.”

H
is shadowed eyes gave off an abysmal misery and I realized it had been there since our first meeting. I’d mistaken it for a successful businessman’s indifferent confidence. But no, it was a deep, unshakable sorrow that would never find relief. It was the price Enzo had to pay, like Kevin’s recklessness and my aloofness. Wounds left marks. And Enzo had left Bobby the same way Bobby had left Shelby—roped and exposed.

We sat
peacefully for twenty minutes, both our minds churning, all our requests for updates on my mother denied. The occasional nurse or doctor passed through, using the waiting area as a shortcut to the cafeteria, but no one seemed to know anything. The smell of salty, overcooked food remained constant but offered little in the way of temptation. Enzo and I made do with burnt coffee in lightweight Styrofoam cups. I kept quiet about the instinct that had driven me home in such a mad rush because I lacked the nerve to voice it aloud—except to the one person I already had. That person breezed into the room now like a welcome blast of wind.

“
Allison!” Detective Barkley said. “There you are. Good news. Your mother’s stable.”

“
How do you know? I haven’t been able to find out anything.”

He flashed his badge at me. “This thing comes in handy once in a while. You’ll be able to see her soon.
”

“
Thanks,” I said. “And here I was thinking you were still hand-roasting beans for Mrs. Kettrick’s coffee.”

He
grinned conspiratorially, and I knew he was the master of his own Rube Goldberg contraption. He plopped himself down on the small table in front of Enzo and me. “There’s no hand-roasted coffee where she’s going. You didn’t really fall for my sycophantic act with Mrs. Mayor at the station, did you? Or the bad-cop one before that?”

“
A little, yeah.”

He
held a hand out to Enzo. “Hi. I’m Detective Blake Barkley.”

“Sorry,” I said
to excuse my lack of manners. “I feel like you two know each other from the files.” I pointed my thumb at Enzo and kept it light so Enzo would know I forgave him. “This guy used to work with my dad. Good with numbers, bad with mufflers.”

“
Ah, Enzo Rodriguez,” Detective Barkley said as they shook hands.

“Nice to meet you
, Detective.”

“
You may not have known it, but you were a serious suspect years ago. When they couldn’t track you down, they thought maybe you’d shot Bobby and skipped town.”

Enzo
glanced at me. His eyes asked permission to confess, but I denied him.

“
I didn’t know you guys had officially reopened the case,” he said.

Barkley winked. “
We didn’t.” He swiveled and faced me. “We won’t have the analysis back for a couple days, but I’m sure you were right. And… ”—he opened my laptop, which I hadn’t noticed beneath his arm until this point—“I shouldn’t do this here but we wouldn’t be anywhere in this case without you.”

He
summoned to the screen the fuzzy photograph that Ray had sent, the one of the faulty front door showing the arrival of the mysterious Shawn Smart. “As you instructed, Allison, I went down the rabbit hole and paid a visit to the mad hatters of VideoMagic. Despite copious amounts of the good stuff fogging their brains, they did pull off some high-tech sorcery.”

The verbose detective
, clearly on a sleuth’s high, clicked on the photo once. It improved the image about ten percent. “See that whitish light we thought was the flash of the camera?”

“Yes.”

“News flash. It’s no flash.”

I didn’t look, but surely the measured
Enzo was repressing an eye roll on that one. As for me, I found the detective’s enthusiasm catching.

“
Well then, Detective,” I said, even though I knew the answer, “what is this whitish blur of which you speak?”

He clicked the photo again and
flaxen hair came into view. I started, convinced for a split second that Bobby Kettrick had risen from the dead. Enzo leaned forward, his interest piqued.

Detective Barkley
clicked again and the hair and face of a woman became evident. One final tap of the mouse revealed the pretty profile of Mrs. Georgia Kettrick, mayor-spouse extraordinaire, as she pulled into Ravine Psychiatric on the morning of Jasper’s sudden illness, after Smitty’s visit and prior to mine.

“Let me guess,” I said. “
After sneaking in as Shawn Smart, she gifted Jasper with some wine to celebrate his rehabilitation.”

Detective Barkley
confirmed my suspicions with a nod and a point. “Apparently, she was let in by this crooked Julia who works behind the front desk. She came in carrying what looked like a cooler full of pharmaceutical samples but actually brought in an entire picnic complete with wine for her and Jasper to celebrate his recent good reports. Guess he didn’t have a problem with alcohol.”

“
Just a predisposition for other assorted mental issues,” I said. “Still…”

“
What was he supposed to do?” said the detective. “Refuse the hospitality of the lady paying his bills? From what I knew of her, she could be quite persuasive. Did you know she had a degree in horticulture?”

Enzo
must have found the question irrelevant and random, but it made perfect sense to me. The detective explained. “When I read first read the files on this case, the incompetence of the investigation and the unanswered questions kept me up well past the end of my shift. That’s why, when Jasper Shifflett turned up dead, I dug in my heels. Privately. The public word is that he died of a heart attack, but he was poisoned. Aconite. Ever heard of it?”

Enzo
spoke up, no doubt drawing on knowledge he’d gleaned from his uncles’ moonshine recipes. “It’s monkshood,” he said. “Wolfsbane. Pretty blue flower, but very toxic. Most people would run away from its taste, though. They’d never ingest enough to die.”