Raveled (37 page)

“
I learned about it in high school biology,” I said. “My teacher told us that, disguised in a tincture of alcohol, the taste of monkshood is masked. As is the blue tint.”

Tell your mother she needs more blue in her garden
. That’s the phrase that fought for attention in my brain while Mrs. Kettrick was revealing her lunacy over Bobby’s legacy. It had butted up against the oddity of her giving wine to my mother when she knew I was the one who would drink it. She’d been trying to kill me.

“Did she leave any evidence of the wine in
Jasper’s room?” I asked.

“No bottle or glasses
,” Detective Barkley said. “She cleaned up after herself. But we found a few drops on Jasper’s sleeve.”

Part of me wondered if Jasper had drunk Mrs. Kettrick’s wine knowing it was poisoned. Spilled the drops on his sleeve as a final gift to Lavitte.
It’s time
, he had repeated.
It’s time
.

“Do you think she burned down Jasper’s trailer?” I as
ked. “I thought that was Smitty, for sure.”

The detective stuck out his chest. “I had people all over that site.
We found tire tracks nearby that matched her Lexus.”

“Too bad you weren’t there the
day before,” I said, “when Smitty’s cousin, Ervin, nearly wasted me in the woods.”

“Wasted you?
Officer Johnston? He was there on my orders. That night I saw you at Ravine, I knew you’d gotten something from Jasper but you sure weren’t going to trust me with it. I stationed Ervin there to keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”

“So that’s why he was there both times I was.”

Detective Barkley laughed aloud. “I nearly split in two when I saw what you did to him at the well.”

“
Where was he when Mrs. Kettrick set the trailer on fire?”

“Asleep in his cruiser. I didn’t say he was my first choice for the job.”

“I know one thing you don’t,” I said with a flick of my brows. “Mrs. Kettrick admitted to burning down the Hesters’ barn. With Smitty’s mom.”

“
I know. I’ve got it on tape.”

“
Tape?”

“Why do you think I was so eager for
the two of you to get in that conference room? Once I let it slip to Delorma that you were going to be arrested for withholding evidence, I knew word would get out and Mrs. Kettrick would come after you again. Thought it might be with a gun, not money, but she’d have eventually gotten you with the aconite if things had continued.”

“So you
allowed her in a conference room with me when you thought she had a gun?”

He grinned, proving his high school classmates correct. Definitely
Best Smile
material. “She went through the metal detector. And we were watching the whole time. Had a camera above the door, camouflaged by that ugly curtain.”

I bit down on my lip and gushed in
side. This guy was not only cute and clever, but sneaky, too. I liked it, a lot. “So if I have the timing right,” I said, “Mrs. Kettrick and Mrs. Smith didn’t start the fire until Saturday night, twenty-four hours after Shelby’s disappearance. Wouldn’t the police have searched the barn for Shelby that day?”

“
Chief Alesbury and two of his men were supposed to search it right after they checked out Artie’s Autos.”

“Oh,” I groaned, “I guess they got distracted.”

“They did send over some rookie to check the barn. He’s a sous chef now, but I spoke to him a few days ago. Said he was sick as a dog after seeing Bobby’s body and realized he didn’t want to be a cop after that. Spent half his time in that barn throwing up.”

“And he
was only searching for a missing girl, presumably alive,” I said, “not conducting a homicide investigation. He’d have been in and out of that barn in five minutes, not giving a second thought to some broken rope swing or a little ruffled hay on the floor.”

“Exactly.
” He smiled. “We may have to hire you.”

I’d
never before appreciated how all-American and apple pie this guy was, in the many positive ways Bobby Kettrick was not. He didn’t shy away from my oversized, grateful stare. “Thank you, Detective, for everything.”

“
You’re welcome. And are you ever going to call me Blake?” We hung out in each other’s eyes long enough to make Enzo fidget.

“Want to hear something really creepy?”
Blake said.

“Sure,” I answered.

“Mayor Kettrick’s been dead for almost three days. My guys found him stiff as a board in bed a couple hours ago.”

“Poisoned?” I asked, fighting
an inkling of disappointment that I hadn’t been the one to kill him.

“All signs point to a heart attack, but who knows with Arsenic Annie running around
? We’ll find out after the autopsy.”

“If it
was
a heart attack, wouldn’t Mrs. Kettrick have called it in like a normal person?”

Both
Enzo and Blake looked at me like I was thirteen eggs short of a dozen. “Oh,” I said. “Got it. Not normal.”

“What about Bobby, though?”
Enzo said. “We still don’t know what happened there.”

“No, we don’t
,” Blake said. “But at least we know the truth about Shelby. The negative aura that rubbed off on the Bobby Kettrick case no longer exists.”

“A little late for it to matter,
” I said.

The detective
shifted forward so that our knees almost touched. “Not to a girl who needs a last name.”

He waited a moment, then addressed both
Enzo and me. “The fact is, Bobby broke into the shop. If you ask me, when you read the report carefully, Mr. Fennimore looks more like the victim of some bad choices and some really bad luck.”

The lack of surprise on my face spoke volumes about the Fennimore side of the rainbow.

Chapter 53

Allison… present

My mother smiled politely when she saw me. The vacancy behind her eyes meant I could be any random nurse in the hospital for all she knew. Between the dementia and the drugs they had her on, it promised to be a strange visit. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my hand over hers. She waited a gracious moment before pulling it back under the covers. I was nothing but a somewhat familiar stranger, after all.

“Well, Justine,” I said,
purposely avoiding the
mom
moniker, “we knocked it out of the ballpark this time.”

“My Kevin was a good baseball player,” she said. “Good shot, too. Had 20/10 vision like those major league pitchers.”

“That’s great,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t launch into a similar monologue about her daughter. I prepared myself to be bored as she sometimes went on for quite a while when she got like this.

“
Kevin was such a sweet boy. Used to protect me like a guard dog. Smart, too. Wanted to be an engineer. Not his fault he was a good shot,” she said, her voice tensing up. “You sound like a rat, you get shot like a rat.”

I was no longer bored. My engine revved at full bore and I suddenly wanted her to stop talking. I didn’t want her to say it. Please, let her say anything but that.

“That Bobby, he was a rat.”

Something snapped in my head. Hard
and fast, like a rusty, old mousetrap in a dark basement. You reach out to grab it so you can toss it in the trash and it springs to life, slamming down on your finger. You hear the crunch of your bone before the pain signals for your mouth to scream.

She’d known all along. No wonder her mind had turned on itself.

“One night, I remember, my Kevin came home,” she said. “I could tell by the sound of him parking his car that he shouldn’t have been driving. He made such a racket coming through the door, too. I went down to the kitchen to fix him a bite to eat, you know, put something in his stomach to sop up that alcohol. Thought his daddy might be with him, but no, he was alone. Stumbled in, smelling like a distillery and looking all a mess, mumbling about a great shot he’d gotten off. I used to beg him and his dad not to shoot those gophers out back, but they treated the land behind the garage like their own personal hunting ground and they’d always get those guns out when they got to drinking. Bad combination, I used to say, but Artie—that’s my husband—he wouldn’t listen. Said he could shoot better drunk in the dark than sober in the daylight.”

She laughed a bit. I didn’t
remember my dad talking like that, but then again, I didn’t remember him and my mom talking much at all.

“Kevin
went on about shooting a big rat.
Inside
the garage. Can you imagine? The way he was talking, it didn’t make much sense. Something about the rat knocking over a canister. I don’t know. I asked if it was safe to shoot into a garage full of gasoline-filled automobiles, but by the time I got my question out, he was passed out on the table. Can’t remember how I got him to bed that night, but I did. Never saw anyone so blind drunk in my life.”

Bobby Kettrick must have jerked in his sleep, his foot lashing out and knocking over something
in the garage. An empty gas can? A toolbox? It didn’t matter. One unconscious movement had cost Bobby his life.

My mother
had realized what Kevin had done as soon as the police arrived at our door the next morning, but she’d kept her mouth shut. She’d roused her son from bed, listened to the police, and never even flinched. She’d put on her make-up, primped her hair and gone straight to the police station to tell her husband he was taking the rap for their son. And Artie Fennimore had done it. That’s why he’d suddenly refused to engage in his own defense. If he was found innocent, his son might have been found guilty. Artie knew Justine could survive the loss of a slow-to-improve husband, but she’d never have survived the crucifixion of her only son. Artie Fennimore had made the ultimate sacrifice.

That Bobby, he was
a rat.

And Kevin had shot him.

Chapter 54

Allison… present

I cleared Drywaters’ security layers robotically, my mind still juggling the options of what to tell my brother. For him, it might be as he’d suspected: an outcome worse than he’d imagined.

“Alley Cat,” he said
upon seeing me. This time, he stood and opened his arms. With a glance at the guard, I checked to see if an embrace was permissible. Half asleep, the guard either nodded his assent or adjusted his head as he fell into a dream. Either way, my brother and I hugged. It felt strange and I let it go for as long as Kevin wanted. By the time we were done, he’d need it more than me.

We took our assigned seats. “So tell me everything
,” he said. “I swear, we’re gonna have to call
you
Detective Barkley cuz you were like a friggin’ bloodhound on this thing.”

My heart did an unexpected flutter at the mention of Blake’s name, but I stilled my insides and tried to prepare Kevin with a somber expression.

“Kevin, I’m not sure you’re going to like what I have to say.”

“Say it anyway. Please.” He was like a kindergartner
eager to hear the ending of a swashbuckling, pirate story.

“That night… t
he whole thing, from Bobby to Shelby and everything in between, it was all an accident. A horrible series of individual events. Three people lost their lives that night, including Dad, who was completely innocent.”

Kevin crinkled his eyes. I could see his pulse speeding up in the ve
in of his strong neck. “So then… who shot Bobby?”

I looked
straight at him, my eyes imploring him not to ask anything more.

“Oh my God,” he said, real
concern in his voice. “Allison, you’re crying. You’re… crying.” The repetition of the phrase served mostly to convince himself that the tears weren’t a mirage. When I didn’t wipe them from my face, Kevin sensed the truth. He gasped, slowly, as if he were an old man and the effort drained him. He knew, but I said it anyway so there’d be no misunderstanding.

“You shot him, Kevin. You thought he was a rat.
” I struggled to speak but I had to finish. “You took out the shotgun, killed the rat, and drove home, somehow without killing yourself.”

He sat like an ice sculpture, melting at the eyes, his own tears
trickling down.

“You told Mom about it when you got home. She knew as soon as the cops showed up that the rat you’d bragged about
killing was actually Bobby Kettrick.”

He sprang back to life.
“If she knew, why’d she—”

“They both knew. Mom told Dad after h
e was arrested.”

“Dad took the fall for me?”

“You wouldn’t have survived. The Kettricks would never have forgiven you. Even though it was an accident, they’d have seen to it that you spent the rest of your life in prison.”

“If I thought he was a rat, how the hell did I tie him up?”

I explained the whole story, from Enzo’s offering to Shelby’s water burial. During the story, Kevin went from cradling his head to looking skyward, from letting his head droop to punching his fist on the table. He cried most over Bobby’s treatment of Shelby.

By the time
we hugged good-bye, both our eyes rimmed in red, he actually seemed okay.

“I’m glad I know,” he said. “I am.
” He tapped his head. “It’s what was rattling around in here. I don’t know how to thank you, Allie.”

“I do.” A minuscule
, pleading smile crossed my lips. “You do, too.”

“You’re right,” he said. “
I’ve wasted the shit out of the sacrifice Mom and Dad made for me. Not gonna happen anymore.”

I departed with a promise to return when he stood for sentencing in two months. The severity of his punishment depended a lot on his performance and reviews at Drywaters.
As he walked away with the guard, he gave a nod of encouragement to a scared-looking guy coming in. I felt hopeful.