Schooled In Lies (31 page)

“Naw, I’m not sorry I killed either one of those nosy bitches. Actually, I’m sorry for what I’m about to do to you.” Then he lunged at me.

I threw my little flashlight at him and watched as it bounced off his big chest. I tried to jump back out of his reach and slipped on the grass, falling on my ass. Dennis grabbed one of my legs and I kicked out of his grasp and managed to get to my feet. I took off running towards the pool but didn’t get far when something hard slammed into the back of my head. Everything went black.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I WOKE UP IN the dark. Confused and disoriented, I lay still for a few seconds and tried to get my bearings and figure out where I was. I tasted blood in my mouth. Tentatively, I touched my lower lip and discovered it was split. There was also an egg-sized knot on the back of my head causing pounding that made even thinking painful. Curled into a fetal position on my side, I slowly turned onto my back and reached out my hand hitting something hard and unyielding mere inched from my face. I tried to straighten out my cramped legs but couldn’t. Where the hell was I and why was it so dark? Then another sensation cut its way through the mind numbing pain in my head. Movement. I was moving.

A familiar smell filled my nose. Exhaust fumes. Car exhaust fumes. I was in a moving car. Judging by the enclosed space I was in, I quickly realized I was in the trunk. Panic welled up inside me and I started screaming and frantically beating on the inside of the trunk. But the car didn’t stop and after a few minutes both my throat and my hands were sore. I was feeling around the trunk for something to pry open the lock with when the car came to an abrupt stop. I heard the opening and closing of the car door and footsteps crunching on gravel.

Fumbling around in the dark, my hand came to rest on a hard, round, plastic cylinder. It was a large flashlight. I felt for the switch to the sound of a key being inserted into the trunk lock. When the trunk flew open, I flashed the light into my captor’s face. When I saw who it was, memories suddenly came flooding into my head, jolting me back in time, making me remember how I came to be in the trunk of a car with Dennis Kirby staring down at me. He effortlessly knocked the flashlight out of my hands, grabbed me by the front of my shirt, hauled me out of the trunk, and shoved me onto the ground.

I frantically looked around and saw that we were in the gravel driveway of an old dilapidated white house that looked like it was in the process of being renovated. We were at the old Bridges place. The house that Dennis’s cousin Julian had bought and was renovating when he fell to his death from the roof. I started screaming and then grabbed a handful of gravel and threw it in his face. Dennis was blinded briefly, then swore and came at me. I took off running towards a nail gun lying in the grass only to trip and go sprawling, scraping up my hands and forearms. I felt my head being tugged painfully back as Dennis grabbed a handful of my hair. He started dragging me towards the cellar door on the side of the house. I struggled and kicked along the way to no avail as he wrestled one side of the heavy cellar doors open.

He proceeded to drag me backwards down the cellar steps. I could feel cool air and smell dank earth. I felt like I was being put into a grave. I started screaming louder and Dennis slung me hard against the cellar’s far wall. I slid into a heap on the dirt floor and started to sob. My head already felt like a bomb hand gone off in it. So being dragged by my hair had only added to the agony.

“What the hell did you hit me with?” I clutched the back of my head. He was panting so hard that I thought he wouldn’t answer me.

“Hey, I couldn’t let you get away. I threw one of the flat rocks edging the flower bed at you. I’m still a pretty damned good pitcher, wouldn’t you say?” he said between breaths.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“It’s nothing personal. I actually kinda like you. But I really don’t have a choice. You’re a big problem.” He grabbed a nearby shovel and thinking he was about to hit me with it, I threw up my arms up to shield myself. Instead, he started digging a hole. Three guesses on who it was for.

“Like Clair Easton and her dog?” I looked around wildly for a way out. I soon realized Dennis was between me and the only exit. The cellar was dimly lit. But I could see the floor was strewn with tools. There was a pick ax on the cellar floor. If I could get to it I might be able to use it as a weapon, but unfortunately I’d have to get past Dennis first as it was on the other side of him. Dennis didn’t answer my last question. So I asked again.

“Were Claire and Jeeves problems, too?”

He sighed and stopped digging, running the back of his arm across his face to wipe sweat from his eyes.

“I’d just finished burying that stupid cat under a tree when Jeeves got into our backyard and dug it up again. What I didn’t know at the time was that Jeeves hadn’t been alone. Clair had been in the backyard, too, watching me when I chased Jeeves away and reburied what he’d dug up in the azalea bed. I didn’t mean to kill my old man’s stupid flowers in the process. I had to replace them with another color. Clair must’ve been out walking Jeeves and he got away from her again. She’d followed him into our backyard. When my old man asked me what happened to his flowers, I told him Jeeves did it, not knowing Clair had been there too. I never thought he’d actually go and confront the crazy old bitch about her dog and threaten to call the humane society to have him taken away.”

“Then she came to see me and told me that she saw me that night and if I didn’t tell my father that I was the one who messed up his flowers, she would. So I killed her damned dog with rat poison thinking: no dog, no problem. But it sent her over the edge instead. She kept hanging around our house threatening me and saying she was going to call the police on me because she knew I was up to no good. Wanted to know what I had buried in my backyard, anyway.”

“And you couldn’t have that, could you?” I inched my way closer to the pick ax.

“I tried to reason with her. She wouldn’t listen. I had to do something. Even if I moved the cat, I couldn’t have the police snooping around our property and asking me questions. I had complaints against me in California for suspicion of distributing drugs that my folks didn’t know about. Then my parents came home from their walk the other day and told me they saw her yelling and screaming at some woman who’d been at her house. I didn’t know it had been you, but it gave me an idea.

“You killed Clair hoping the police would think it had been the woman Clair was screaming at?”

“It was easy. I snuck into her backyard through that back gate. Her door was unlocked. I went inside and saw her walking into her living room. There were hedge clippers on the floor by the front door. I just grabbed them, waited, and stuck them in the side of her neck when she came back out of the living room. She never even knew what hit her. Didn’t even scream.”

“Was it that easy with Ms. Flack?”

Dennis laughed out loud. “Now, that was one crafty bitch. Acting like she was a victim like the rest of us when she was the one behind it all. She deserved what she got.”

“How’d you find out it was her?” Dennis wasn’t paying any attention to anything but the hole he was digging. I was almost poised to make a lunge for the pick ax but wanted to keep him talking and distracted.

“My mother sent me to tell her she’d be willing to donate money so we could still have our reunion. I went to her office. She was busy talking to her secretary and I started flipping through a magazine on her desk and noticed it was cut up and had letters missing just like that threatening note she claimed she found in the cafeteria. But it wasn’t until I went to her house to give her the check that I realized she was the blackmailer. All her bags were packed. She was ready to skip town with our money. She’d be out there somewhere free to blackmail me for the rest of my life.”

“What did you do?”

“She was running bath water when I got there. Told me to wait while she turned it off. I followed her into the bathroom and knocked her out then turned off the water and put her in the tub. Then I plugged in her blow dryer and dropped it in. You should have seen the way she twitched.” He laughed again. I inched closer to the pick ax while he continued to talk.

“Then her damned cat attacked me when I came out of the bathroom.” He pulled the bandage off his wrist revealing several long deep-looking scratches. “I wrung its neck good.”

“And you couldn’t leave it behind because then everyone would know she’d been murdered,” I said. He grinned and I took that as a yes.

“But one thing I could never figure out is how she found out about what I did,” he shook his head in confusion.

“All anyone would have to do is call your former employer to find out about the allegations about you giving steroids to the student athletes you worked with. It wouldn’t be hard to find out at all,” I pointed out.

Dennis stopped digging and looked at me strangely. He immediately realized I wasn’t against the wall where he threw me. He followed my gaze to the pick ax and we both dove towards it at the same time. I got there first, grabbed the handle, and swung out wildly, missing him by a mile. He knocked the ax effortlessly out of my hands with one vicious chop to my sprained wrist and backhanded me across my face, sending me flying back against the wall. Then he picked up the pick ax and drove it hard into the ground in a corner out of my reach

I felt something warm trickling down my face and put a hand to the wetness. My nose was bleeding. Dennis picked up the shovel again and continued to dig. How was I going to get out of this? No one would ever find me down here. I’d go missing, never to be found again.

“She wasn’t in on it alone. She had a partner. If you let me go, I’ll tell you who it is,” I said, desperately trying to buy some time.

“You’d say anything right about now, wouldn’t you? I’m not that stupid. You were probably the one in on it with her. But, don’t worry, babe. You won’t be down here in the dark all by yourself. You’ll be in excellent company.”

I looked around the small dank cellar trying to figure out whom he could be talking about. We were the only two people down there. Was he hallucinating?

“Dennis, what are you talking about?” I asked slowly. “Who else do you think is down here?”

“Shut up! I gotta get this hole dug. I don’t like being down here any longer than I have to. Brings back bad memories.”

“What bad memories?” I asked. But clarity was beginning to dawn on me. This wasn’t about steroids or being fired from his last job. He’d done something else, something much worse, and that’s what he’d thought Ivy Flack had found out about.

He didn’t know that Cherisse had been the one making the phone calls to the reunion committee telling them how much they needed to pay to keep their secrets buried. Only Dennis’s secret was buried in this cellar—literally—and that’s what he thought he was being blackmailed about. That’s why he’d killed Ivy Flack.

“Dennis, my God, what did you do? Who else is buried down here?”

Dennis turned abruptly and came at me with the shovel. “I told you to shut up!”

Before he had a chance to get to me, however, I heard a loud clicking noise, followed by a soft thud, like someone pounding a steak. Dennis screamed and dropped the shovel. He twirled around desperately grabbing at his back. When he turned I saw a large nail sticking out of his back just above his shoulder blade. He grabbed the nail and pulled it out with a loud grunt and threw it against the wall. I looked beyond Dennis and saw Cherisse Craig standing at the bottom of the cellar steps holding the nail gun in her badly trembling hands. She was sobbing.

“He killed my sister, Kendra. He killed Serena. Didn’t you, you sorry motherfucker?” Cherisse squeezed the trigger on the nail gun again firing another nail, this time deep into Dennis’ left shinbone. He fell to the floor of the cellar screaming.