Scar Tissue Page 19

  We walked toward the door, past the statue of the Virgin Mary waist deep in weeds. The garage door was closed indicating that Gary’s beater was still running. Griff knocked on the weather stained, wooden door.

  “Somebody at the door.”

  It was Gary’s voice.

  “I’m busy. You get it,” Loraine said.

  I glanced at Griff.

  “Couple of socialites.” He knocked again.

  “Mitzi,” Loraine yelled. “Get the door.”

  After some shuffling the door swung open. Mitzi registered surprise at the sight of us standing on her steps. “What do you want?” she asked. “I already told you everything I know.”

  “From what we just read in Ashley’s journal, I’d say not quite everything. Do you want to invite us in or talk about it out here?” Griff asked.

  Mitzi glanced over her shoulder at her parents then grabbed a jacket off the coat rack beside the door and stepped outside.

  “What did you read in her journal?”

  “That you were blackmailing her. $8000 a month, I think it was? Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Mitzi didn’t answer. She dug the toe of her Nikes into the dusty July ground.

  “That guy that was coming to the track was supplying her with performance enhancers,” I said. “But you’d already figured that out, hadn’t you?”

  Mitzi nodded. “Last year,” she said.

  I was surprised that she hadn’t tried to deny the accusation, but she was still a kid, twenty-one at the most and out of her league when it came to extortion. Her shoulders drooped and she sighed. She almost seemed relieved.

  “We don’t have much.” She nodded toward the brown ranch. “My parents do the best they can. I’m on scholarship. That rich bitch had everything. At the top of her class and the number one women’s track athlete. When they first put us together I was a sophomore, she was a junior. I looked up to her, but by the end of the second term I resented the hell out of her. I started seeing that guy at practices. I thought it was a boyfriend at first, but when I asked she said he was just a friend.”

  “Didn’t the coach ask who he was?”

  “No, he probably didn’t notice him. Most of the time he came to our dorm room. Once I walked in on them counting out pills. Another time, Ashley had a rubber tourniquet around her arm. After he left she begged me not to tell anyone. She said she’d do anything I wanted. At first, I told her to forget it. I wouldn’t tell. But then I got the idea that maybe she should pay me not to tell. I know it was stupid, but she had plenty of money.” She shuffled her feet against the patchy, overgrown front lawn. “Look at our house.” She nodded again toward the brown ranch. “We struggle. My dad needs a new truck. My mom hasn’t bought herself anything in years. I saw a way to help. I knew the amount of money I was asking for wouldn’t make a dent in Ashley’s life. I told her she had to pay me or I’d go to the coach and the dean of students and turn her in. I never meant for her to freak out over it. I was gonna let it drop once she graduated. She’d be gone. I’d be number one on the track and have money to help my family. It all seemed pretty harmless until she killed herself.”

  I glanced at Griff and shook my head. This young woman’s life was about to be ruined. She’d be pulled out of college just before her senior year, pulled off the track at the peak of her athletic career and dropped into prison. All for less than $100,000. Mitzi had tried to help her family and give herself a step up. Not that what she did was right, but it was understandable.

  At first the crack didn’t register as a gunshot. I heard it but couldn’t place it so out of context. But when I saw the hole in Mitzi’s forehead I knew exactly what the sound had been. She stared into my face and I watched her eyes go from shock to understanding. Her knees crumpled and before her head hit the ground, she was dead.

  Griff was running toward the shooter.

  I knelt beside Mitzi and lifted her head onto my lap. The screen door banged.

  “Mitzi,” Loraine screeched.

  Feet pounded the ground behind me and a hand gripped my shoulder. Loraine dropped onto the grass and tore Mitzi from my grasp.

  “Give her here,” she said.

  But I was unable to tear my eyes from Griff, his arms wrapped around Gwen. The gun still dangling from her hand.

  “You son of a bitch,” Gwen yelled, straining against Griff’s straightjacket grip. “You nasty little whore. You killed my daughter.”

  Out of nowhere Gary came running. He passed Loraine and I kneeling on the ground and ran straight toward Gwen. He planted his fist in her face. Blood sprayed from her nose onto his chest and down Griff’s arm. The gun fell from her grasp and landed at her feet. Gary drew his arm back ready to swing again. Griff twisted around and the blow caught him between the shoulder blades knocking the wind out of him. He and Gwen hit the ground.

  From across the street someone came running toward the house.

  “Gary,” a man yelled, coming into the yard. He headed straight to where Gary was kneeling alongside Griff and Gwen pulling at Griff’s shoulders trying to untangle them, wanting another clear shot.

  “Gary, buddy.” The guy shook the big man’s shoulders. “Gary, stop.” He tried to turn Gary’s face toward him and away from Gwen.

  “She shot Mitzi,” Gary said in a midst of snot and tears, wiping his face with the back of his forearm.

  “The police are coming. Let them sort it out, man, not you. You’re gonna get in trouble.”

  Gary sat back on his heels, dazed. He looked at his neighbor then across the yard. His eyes searching out his wife. On his hands and knees, he crawled over the burnt grass of his front lawn to his dead daughter. Laying his head in his wife’s lap beside his daughter’s he collapsed.

  My heart pounded in my ears, pushing Gary’s sobs and Loraine’s wails to background noise. Mitzi lay in her mother’s lap, dead by another mother’s hands. Loraine and Gwen were worlds apart, but strip away the money and they were one in the same. Mothers destroyed by their daughters’ best intentions.

  Two police cars and an ambulance pulled into the driveway as I was getting up and going to where Griff stood. Gwen still in his arms for protection or consolation. But Gary was no longer a threat, sobbing on the ground beside his daughter’s body. EMT’s attended to Mitzi while two uniforms handcuffed Gwen. Reading her rights, they escorted her to the back of one of the cruisers. After taking our statements along with the statement of Gary’s neighbor, we watched the convoy leave followed by Gary and Loraine in the rusty, blue F-150.

  The quiet Falmouth neighborhood returned to the way it had been when we’d arrived not more than thirty-minutes ago. Amazing how life can change in half an hour.

  Twenty-Nine

  A month had passed since the debacle at Mitzi’s house and we were both beginning to feel normal again. Well, Griff was anyway. I was still debating whether or not to come clean to him about Mike’s death. I knew at some point in my life I would tell him. I just wasn’t sure when that time would come and how much I’d lose when it did.

  I was sitting on the front porch in one of the Adirondack chairs enjoying the sun on my face and a Honey Berry on my lips when my cell rang.

  “Britt, I closed on the sale of the house this morning,” Rhea said. There’s a mover coming this weekend. Delia and I are leaving tomorrow.”

  I knew she had to go, but I was sorry to lose her. We’d been through a crazy amount of shit together for a friendship that had just started.

  “We’re heading to Bar Harbor this morning. We’ll be gone for the weekend,” I told her as Griff came out of the house with our suitcases.

  “Can you come by? Just for a minute, before you go.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  Griff looked at me and raised his eyebrows? “Rhea?”

  “She closed on the house. She’ll be gone by the time we get home.”

  He nodded toward the path. “Go ahead.”

  I jogged through the path wondering how long it
would take before it became overgrown. Until vines, branches and roots erased any trace of the footsteps it had fostered and the hands that had built it.

  Rhea was at the gate when I emerged from the woods and swung it wide. A bittersweet smile played on her lips. “Britt,” she said wrapping me into a hug.

  Her post-baby body was soft against me.

  “I’m really going to miss you,” I said. “I don’t have huge numbers in the friend department.”

  She laughed. “Their loss. I’ve never known anyone quite like you.”

  We looked at each other for a brief moment. Each of us acknowledging the depths our friendship had taken us to.

  “Where will you go?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking Paris, maybe. I’ve never been out of the states.”

  I remembered her telling me that Jonathan had been adopted by a European family. Maybe she knew more about his whereabouts than she’d let on. I didn’t ask. “I’m happy for you, Rhea.”

  I really was happy for her. Happy that Mike was dead and that she and Delia could go on and have a life together where she wouldn’t always be looking over her shoulder.

  “Thank you, Britt.” Her voice broke and she hugged me again. “No one has ever gone to the lengths you did for me. Will you be alright?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Did you tell Griff?”

  I shook my head. “Maybe someday.”

  “I know what you risked. And what you still risk.”

  “It was worth it.” I leaned in and gave her a final hug then stepped back still holding her hand and wiping the tears off my cheeks with the other. “Good luck, Rhea. Please stay in touch.”

  “I will. You can count on it.”

  I went out the gate and back down the path toward home feeling the loss in the pit of my stomach. I stopped mid path, took a pack of Honey Berries from my back pocket and lit up. Rhea wondered if I’d tell Griff. So did I. It was too big a secret to keep from him forever. I already felt differently about myself. He’d notice the change. My hands had taken on a slight tremor, a manifestation of my inner world. I could not fall asleep at night without replaying the image of myself bashing Mike’s helmet against the rocks, battering his bicycle with the shovel and kicking his beaten body into the ravine. Every time I passed the pool I thought of the evidence buried beneath it. I’d saved a life. Two lives. For that, I wasn’t sorry. But, who was I? What was I? I took another drag from the cigar and without an answer emerged from the path into our driveway. Griff was stretched out in one of the Adirondacks as I approached. The suitcases beside him.

  “No smoking in the car,” he said, standing.

  “That’s why I’m having it now.”

  “Rhea doing okay?”

  “She’s good. They’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll put the bags in. You ready?”

  I stamped out my cigar. “Yeah, just let me make a quick run through the house to be sure.”

  I checked the windows and their locks and looked in the bathroom to see that I’d packed the essentials, make-up, toothbrush and hairdryer. My cell phone was in my bag with a charger. I grabbed a bottle of wine from the rack on my way through the kitchen to have when we got to the hotel.

  The back of the Rav was open and Griff was leaning against the door when I stepped outside. Our suitcases stood in the driveway in front of him. It was clear from his face something was wrong. And then I saw it. Mike’s ID band in Griff’s hand. Rhea had said that he wore it whenever he went for a ride, so we’d made sure he had it on when I loaded him into the back of my car.

  “Found this in the underneath stowaway. How’d it get into your car?” He twirled the band around his fingers.

  I didn’t answer. I knew someday this moment would come. I just didn’t think it would come so soon. I thought I’d be the one to bring it up and have time to prep.

  “Have a seat,” I said and motioned to the back bumper on the Rav. I sat beside him and lit another Honey Berry. “The night Delia was born Mike didn’t go for a ride on his bike. He went for a ride in the back of my car. It must have fallen through the crack in the cargo space floor.”

  Griff looked at me. “I’m not following.”

  I started at the beginning with Rhea’s phone call telling me to come quick. I told him how I’d arrived at McKenzie’s house and seen it torn apart, Mike volatile, telling me to get out and then admitting to giving Ashley drugs, but not to blackmailing her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

  I held up my hand. “Let me finish. Anyway, we’d pretty much already figured out that he was Ashley’s supplier at that point. We just didn’t know who was blackmailing her.”

  I went on and told him how Mike had hit me and I’d been knocked out. When I woke up Mike was dead. Rhea had killed him. Unintentionally at first, but when it felt so good she’d kept at it.

  Griff shook his head. “Jesus.”

  “This is the part I’m not real proud of and the part you might rather not know ‘cause if you do, you might feel like you need to do something about it.”

  “Like, tell the truth and turn you in?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, ‘cause that’s the kind of guy you are. It’ll torment you trying to decide between me and what’s right.”

  Griff drew his mouth in a line and stared at the ground. “You really think that? You really believe I’d turn you in?”

  “You haven’t heard the whole story.”

  “Go on.”

  I told him every detail and my stomach twisted and churned as I explained adjusting the strap on Mike’s helmet and pushing his body off the edge. I told him my relief when I saw the cement being poured into what was now a glistening blue pool at Royal Oaks, hiding forever any evidence of Mike’s bloody uniform. And then I looked at him, my heart bruising my rib cage.

  “You should have called me.”

  “You’re a by the books kind of guy. You’re honest to a fault. If I’d pulled you into it, it would have gone against everything you stand for and everything I love about you. I didn’t want to get you dirty.”

  “But now I know. Makes me dirty by association.”

  I looked at him. “Unless you do something about it.”

  He was quiet, staring at his hands folded together, one thumb rubbing the knuckle of the other. “Let’s go.” He stood, tucked the ID bracelet into the front pocket of his jeans, got into the driver’s side of the Rav and turned the key. The engine responded. We turned onto the main road in silence.

  After about an hour of my stomach doing backbends, I looked at him. “You angry?”

  He shook his head, but didn’t speak.

  I watched the pine trees sweep past and tried to calm my heart. Griff would never turn me in, but was he regretting the house and the deeper commitment between us that buying it symbolized?

  “I don’t know how I feel, Britt,” he said. “I’m disappointed that you felt you couldn’t call me for help, but I’m touched that you hold me in such high regard. Yeah, I try to be an honest person, but maybe it’s to a fault. It’s not worth it if it means when you’re in trouble you can’t come to me.”

  He reached over and took my hand and my stomach unclenched a little.

  “I’m sorry you had to go through all that alone. It must have been awful.”

  Tears burned my eyes and I turned again to look at the trees.

  “I’m proud of you for being so brave, for doing what you had to for Rhea’s sake. I’d like to think I’d have done the same had I been in your position. I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I would have called the police. Let the justice system take over.”

  “That was my fear,” I said. “That justice would never be done if I gave it a chance.”

  We drove on in silence. I kept weighing the pros and cons of honesty and assumed Griff was doing the same. A gas station appeared ahead and he flipped the blinker on. We pulled up alongside the pumps. Griff got out. Reaching into his pocket he took out Mike’s ID brac
elet, turned it over a few times in his hand then tossed it into the trash receptacle.

  When we pulled back onto the road, he reached over and entwined his fingers through mine. “We’re a team. Next time you’re in trouble, call me.”

  “I don’t want to change who you are.”

  “You won’t. But relationships are about having each other’s backs. And you need to know I have yours. No matter what.”

  “Even if I get you dirty?”

  He smiled, looking pensive. “A little dirt never hurt anyone.”

  THE END

  Acknowledgements

  A huge thanks to the incredible team at Intrigue Publishing, Austin Camacho, Denise Camacho and Susan McBride. You have been my support throughout this journey. I am indebted. A heartfelt thank-you to my editor, Melanie Rigney, for your enthusiasm, guidance and for cleaning up after me. My deepest gratitude to my readers, Eric Poor and Tina Perry Buckley for your time and for seeing the things I overlooked. As always, my love and thanks to my family, from my mother to my grandchildren and everyone in between for all your encouragement and faith. And lastly, but mostly, to Mike, Enya and Muddy, who despite all the missed walks and late dinners, keep wagging their tails.

  AUTHOR BIO

  Patricia Hale received her MFA degree from Goddard College. Her essays have appeared in literary magazines and the anthology, My Heart’s First Steps. Her debut novel, In the Shadow of Revenge, was published in 2013. Scar Tissue is the third book in her PI series featuring the team of Griff Cole and Britt Callahan. Patricia is a member of Sister’s in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, NH Writer’s Project and Maine Writer’s and Publisher’s Alliance. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and two dogs.