Where Truth Lies (15 page)
A
s Matt had expected, Lucy had cancelled their lunch date, leaving only a brief message on his cell phone. He had debated between giving her time to cool off and showing up at the end of her last class. Feeling optimistic, he had opted for the latter.
A few students had already started to trickle out, and a few minutes later, Lucy appeared. This time she was alone and walked rapidly, with her head down. She didn’t look up until Matt called out her name.
Startled, she stopped. “Didn’t you get my message?” she asked. “I told you not to come.”
“I like to live dangerously.”
He failed to make her smile. “I already had lunch,” she said curtly.
“Then we’ll go for a walk.” He took her arm, cutting short her protest.
He led her toward the canal and towpath that bisected the town and ran parallel to the Delaware River.
“What’s so urgent?” Lucy asked.
The direct approach had always served him well. “I know about your affair with Steven.”
She threw him a panicked look and her cheeks turned red before she tried, rather ineffectively, to appear nonchalant. “What are you talking about?”
“I talked to Denise, and before you accuse her of betraying you, understand that I didn’t give her much of a choice.”
She waited a while before asking, “Were you shocked?”
“You can relax, I’m not going to give you the dreaded big-brother lecture.”
“Thank you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you wouldn’t have understood.”
“About a nineteen-year-old student having an affair with her professor? A man twenty-one years her senior? You’re right. I don’t understand. And if you had told me, I probably would have tried to knock some sense into you.”
“Because you don’t approve?”
“Because my first priority was always to protect you.”
“I don’t need protecting. I’m a big girl now. I can handle anything.”
“Maybe so, but it couldn’t have been easy finding out that the man you loved was your stepmother’s lover.”
She sat down on a bench and stared at the canal’s murky water, saying nothing.
“Look, honey,” he said, sitting beside her. “I can’t help Dad if you don’t level with me.”
She still wouldn’t look at him. “What do you want to know?”
“Tell me what happened the night Steven Hatfield was killed.”
“I don’t know anything, except what I heard or read in the papers.”
“Denise said that you stormed out of her shop after she told you about her and Steven.”
“I was mad.”
“Where did you go?”
“Why do you want to know?” Her tone had turned cynical. “You think
I
killed Steven?” She searched his eyes for an answer. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. “You do!”
“Don’t get excited—”
“Don’t you think I’m justified? When my own brother thinks that I’m a murderer?” She shrank away from him as if he had suddenly contracted the bubonic plague. “You actually believe that I took Dad’s gun, went to the gallery, shot Steven in cold blood and then dropped the gun so Daddy would be blamed? And that after I committed that evil act, I could still look you and Daddy in the face?” Her expression was a mixture of pain and disappointment. “How could you?”
“I didn’t want to believe it, but there are holes in the story you told Denise. That’s why I had to talk to you.”
She got fidgety again. “What kind of holes?”
“Do you remember the condition you were in when you finally went home that night?”
She let out a dry laugh. “Sure. I was a mess.”
“What did you do after leaving Denise’s store?”
“I drove all the way to Washington Crossing, crying my eyes out and feeling sorry for myself. I don’t even remember driving back home.”
“Do you remember Denise telling you that Steven had been murdered?”
“Yes.”
“It had to be quite a shock, yet you barely reacted.”
She looked down at her folded hands. “There’s a reason for that.”
Something about the way she averted her eyes told him he wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “I’m listening.”
“After Denise told me about her affair with Steven, something happened to me. I went a little crazy. I left Baubles and went home to look for Daddy’s gun.”
Matt tensed but didn’t interrupt her.
“Don’t ask me if I would have killed Steven or not, because I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to scare him, make him realize how much he had hurt me.”
A gust of wind blew her hair in her face. She pushed it away, tucking a long strand behind her ear. “Daddy’s gun wasn’t where he usually kept it, so I left and went to the gallery, armed only with my anger. I knew that Steven was working late that night.”
“What time was that?”
“A few minutes after six. Maybe six-fifteen.”
“Go on.”
“I was a few feet from the gallery when I saw a man run out the front door.”
Matt almost jumped off the bench. “You saw someone and didn’t tell the police?”
She looked miserable. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not? When you knew it could have cleared Dad!”
She suddenly seemed very small, and very vulnerable. “Because,” she said under her breath, “the man was Daddy.”
“What?”
“I recognized his Eagles jacket, the one he always wears to the games. And his Eagles hat.”
“Half the men in this town have Eagles jackets and Eagles hats.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Did you see his face?”
“No. He was running in the opposite direction.”
“Then how can you be sure that it was him?”
She turned to look at him. “I just know.”
“Describe him.”
She looked confused. “You want me to describe Dad?”
“Describe the man you saw.”
“Well, he looked just like Dad, same height, same broad shoulders. And he ran fast, like Dad.”
“Honey, that description could fit a lot of men.”
“What about the gun? I saw it, Matt.”
“What do you mean you saw it?”
“After I saw…Dad.” She stumbled a little on the word. “I had a premonition that something was wrong, so I went to the gallery.” She closed her eyes. “The door was open and I saw Steven, lying on the floor, in a pool of blood. When I backed away, I saw the gun at the edge of the flower bed. Daddy’s gun. I didn’t know what to do, where to turn. I had all those thoughts going through my head at once. I didn’t want to call the police because I would have had to tell them that I saw Daddy run out of the gallery. So, I got back into my car and started driving until I reached Washington Crossing. I stayed there for a while, then I remembered about the gun. I kicked myself for not taking it with me. I started to go back, but by the time I got there, several police cars were surrounding the gallery, so I went home.”
“Oh, Lucy.” He pulled her to him. “You poor kid.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. “You understand why I couldn’t say anything? I would have been the noose around Daddy’s neck.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t him you saw, Goldilocks, just someone
meant
to look like him. It was all part of the setup.”
She looked up. “What setup? What are you talking about?”
“The killer—the
real
killer—framed Dad. He took his gun, went to the gallery, killed Steven and threw Dad’s gun in the flower bed where he knew the police would find it.”
Her young face was filled with outrage. “But that’s a terrible thing to do!”
“Yes, it is.” He smoothed down her hair. “Are we friends again?”
She threw herself into his arms. “Yes.” After a while, she looked up. “How are you going to prove that the man I saw wasn’t Daddy?”
“I don’t know yet, but while I try to find out, I want you to do one thing for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Go talk to Denise. She’s worried sick about you.”
“W
hat can you tell me about Ellie Colburn?” Matt asked his father when he stopped by the jail after his meeting with Lucy.
“Dusty’s mother?” Fred looked surprised. “What do you want with her?”
“I have reasons to believe that Steven Hatfield may have been digging for information regarding Felicia’s disappearance.”
“What would he want with a twenty-year-old case? A closed one, at that.”
Fred wasn’t going to like this part. “He and Denise talked about it. She told him how she and her family were still not convinced that the police had done all they could to find Felicia, or the real kidnapper.”
Fred hit the bars with his fist. “Like hell we didn’t! My men worked their asses off, looking for that girl and trying to find who had abducted her. I even brought
you
in for questioning. My own son.”
“But isn’t it true that Dusty was charged based solely on circumstantial evidence?”
“Sometimes that’s enough. I explained all this to Denise. She has no business bad-mouthing me to you.”
“Wait a minute, Dad. She never said a cross word against you. On the contrary.” What was he doing defending Denise?
Fred waved his hand, signaling he had heard enough. “Why don’t we get back to Steven? What exactly was he looking for?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
“By talking to Ellie?” He chuckled. “Remember that old shotgun of hers? She still has it, and she’s not afraid of using it.”
“I’ll take my chances. If our theory is right—”
“
Our
theory?”
“Denise has been helping.”
“Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I needed her to tell me what she remembered about Steven and his habits.”
“Leave her out of the case, son, before she screws it up permanently.”
“Pop, come on. She wants you out of here as much as I do.”
Fred pretended not to have heard that last comment. “Ellie’s all right,” he said, addressing Matt’s earlier question. “She did the best she could raising Dusty under the circumstances. Her husband was a boozer and walked out on his family when he found out that Dusty was mentally retarded. Ellie didn’t have enough money to put him in a specialized facility, so she homeschooled him herself. He was a good kid, never gave anyone any trouble. Then in his midteens, he hit puberty and started noticing girls. I guess he liked what he saw because he became quite a nuisance, but you know all that.”
“It doesn’t hurt to refresh my memory.”
“He was particularly taken with Felicia,” Fred continued. “Ellie tried to get him interested in other things. She found him a few odd jobs, and for a while he did okay. He liked having money of his own. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very reliable.
“The night of Felicia’s disappearance, he was seen talking with her. Well, you couldn’t exactly call it
with
her, because most of the time it was just a one-way conversation, with Dusty doing all the talking. Felicia never paid much attention to him. When she did talk to him, it was always to say something nasty. Anyone else would have given up long ago, but not Dusty.”
“Who saw them together?”
“Old Cliff Barnard. He’s dead now, but he made a sworn statement at the time.”
“No one else saw Dusty and Felicia together?”
Fred shook his head. “There weren’t too many people out in the streets that night, if you recall. Everybody was too busy celebrating about one thing or another. You had just graduated from Penn State. George had been accepted into Harvard Law and Josh was yahooing about his army discharge. And we can’t forget Eddie, who had just signed a five-year contract with the Reading Phillies and was feeling no pain.”
Matt chuckled. “I never knew he could drink that much.”
“That’s what I mean, the bars were full and the streets empty.”
“Who reported Felicia missing?”
“Her mother, the following morning, when she realized that her daughter never came home. Everyone, including my department, assumed the girl had skipped town again. She had a habit of doing that. Then a week later, she’d reappear, with a swagger in her hips and a contrite expression on that pretty face of hers.
“Julia Newman accused us of not looking very hard for her daughter because of Felicia’s past antics, but she was wrong. We had divers from three counties searching up and down that river for days. More than a hundred volunteers participated in the search, and it pisses me off to no end that Denise has the audacity—”
“What tipped you off that Dusty was your man?” Matt asked, quickly changing the subject.
Fred waited for the anger to pass. “Five days after Felicia’s disappearance, we found him sitting on the side of the road, at the same place where he was last seen with her. In his hands was the scarf she had worn that night.
“He wouldn’t talk to us, or to anyone. A doctor later explained that Dusty was experiencing a form of post-traumatic shock, not unlike those suffered by some war veterans. No one was ever able to extract one single word out of him since that day.”
“Could he have
witnessed
something traumatic rather than caused it?”
“He could have, and don’t think we didn’t consider that possibility. But Cliff was a very credible witness.”
“What exactly did he say?”
“That Dusty seemed rather agitated that night, even rude to Felicia, to the point that Cliff felt it necessary to get out of his car and intervene.”
“How?”
“He told him to leave her alone and go home.”
“Did he?”
“As far as Cliff could tell. He saw Dusty start down the road, back toward the center of town. Then Cliff drove off and he couldn’t be absolutely sure that Dusty didn’t turn around and come back.”
“What about Felicia? It was late at night. She was on a deserted road. Why didn’t Cliff give her a ride?”
“He offered. She turned him down. You know how she was, snooty and unpredictable.”
He walked back to the door and wrapped his hands around the heavy metal bars. “I did everything I could to make that boy talk,” he said. “I used any kind of psychology I could think of. It got me nowhere. Dusty remained totally uncommunicative. Two weeks later, he was found incompetent to stand trial and was sent to a mental facility.”
“And he’s still not talking?”
“I haven’t kept up with his progress, but I’m sure Ellie would have said something if he was.”
“Does she still live on Lower York Road?”
“Yes, but as I said, don’t expect too much from her, son.”
“Why?” Matt gave him a grin. “You don’t think the old Baxter charm will work on her?”
“Get out of here, you clown.”
