Chapter Thirty-Three
By the time Charli and the kids left for church I felt like I'd ran a marathon and rode in the Tour du France all in the same day. As soon as they were all in the van I collapsed on the sofa for about an hour, trying unsuccessfully to sleep. Nothing doing. Not with Vanessa still missing and that photo of Nancy and Fred on my mind.
I decided to go home, change clothes, and then see if I could find out if Nancy and Fred were having an affair. How I was going to find out, I didn't know, but surely I'd think of something. The drive home was uneventful. No wrecks, no fires, no good songs playing on the radio.
I parked the big black pickup in front of my building and picked up the kitty carrier. Delbert seemed pretty happy to be getting away from all the kids. He'd been rubbed and petted a whole lot more than normal the last couple of days and had developed a nervous twitch whenever he heard Jaelyn's voice. I shifted his carrier to my left hand and unlocked the apartment door.
It looked okay, nothing really out of place, but it definitely made me feel uncomfortable as hell when I realized that my shower was running. I certainly hadn't left it that way and, as far as I knew, Zach was still tucked away in the Lake County jail.
I know I should have called Tim, but the water cut off just then. I set Delbert's cage down on the floor and rummaged around in the coat closet for a weapon. The only thing remotely suitable was a tennis racket.
My heart pounded and my knees shook. I crept over by the bathroom door and positioned myself for attack. This stuff was really starting to get on my nerves. I heard the water faucet in the sink come on and the sounds of teeth being brushed. The water went off. A few seconds passed.
The doorknob turned. I held my breath and raised the tennis racket. The door creaked as it swung open. I let out my breath and got ready to bean whoever came out. The tennis racket just missed her.
"Vanessa! It's you! We've been looking everywhere for you!" The tennis racket clattered to the floor.
She jumped back and screamed. "Jesus Christ, Marty! You scared the hell out of me!"
She wore one of my t-shirts -- my favorite George Strait one -- and a pair of shorts, which she’d cinched up with a belt. She looked exhausted.
"You've been here the whole time?"
"No. I was going to leave town, but that damn car Nancy gave me started acting funny. I left it in the Kroger parking lot and came up through the woods. I was just so damned tired and I didn't know where else to go. I sort of thought I might hide out in the clubhouse for awhile. When I realized you weren't home, I got your key out from under Rowena's mat and let myself in."
She looked around nervously. "Is anybody with you? Tim, Charli, your mom?"
"Just Delbert. Weren't you afraid I'd come home and find you here?"
"No. I, look, I'm sorry about everything, but I gotta get out of here." She pushed past me and went in the bedroom.
The gun. She had a gun. Where was it? I followed her in the bedroom. She sat on my bed and put on her tennis shoes. The gun wasn't anywhere in sight. Her purse was on my dresser, next to the shoe box. I slowly circled over toward it. She leaped off the bed and beat me to it. I was surprised when she grabbed the shoe box and left the purse sitting there.
I picked up the purse and looked in it. No gun.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Marty?"
I turned around to face her. "Where's the gun?"
"Gone." A nervous glance around the room.
"Gone? Gone where?"
"Just gone. Look, thanks for everything, I'm sorry about all the trouble, but I've really got to go."
"What about your kids. Aren't you worried about them?"
Tears welled up in her eyes. "Of course I'm worried about them. What kind of person do you think I am? It's just, well, I need some time to figure some stuff out. I've got problems, big problems, that I need to solve. Once I take care of everything, I'll make it all up to them."
"What sort of problems?"
"Just problems. Listen, Marty, this is none of your business, you know?"
"Yes, Vanessa, it is my business. You've made it my business." I put my hand on her arm. "Honey, please. Let me help you."
"No. No one can help me." She shook her head sadly. "No one."
"Why don't you let me try? I'm a good listener."
She shook her head again and walked over to the door.
I was getting desperate. "Is it about O'Del?"
She turned around and glared at me. "O'Del? How could it be about O'Del? He's dead."
I pulled the newspaper clipping out of my tote bag and unfolded it. "No. I don't think so. I don't think O'Del is dead."
I held the clipping up so she could see it. She sank to the floor, looking defeated. "How much?"
"What? How much? What the hell are you talking about?"
"How much do you want to keep quiet?"
"Oh, sweetie, no. I don't want anything from you. I just want to help you. Why would you think I'd want money?"
"Everybody else does."
"Everybody else? Like who?" I went over and knelt down beside her. "Who, Vanessa? Who wants money from you?"
No answer.
"Vanessa," I said again, louder this time, "who wants money from you?"
"I can't tell you," she whispered.
"Please, Vanessa. You've got to tell me. What the hell's going on?"
She hugged the shoe box to her and just sat there staring at the floor. Finally, she looked at me and started talking. Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"It all started when O'Del lost his job. He looked real hard at first, but after a couple of months he started getting discouraged. We fought constantly. He'd lay on the couch all day, watching TV, eating junk food, and not doing a damn thing to help with the kids. I guess it was about six months later that I realized he was gambling."
She shook her head. "I don't know, maybe I should have noticed it earlier, but that's when it started getting bad. I tried to use a credit card to buy some shoes and they wouldn't accept it. I tried another one. Same thing. I started checking and found out he'd maxed out all the credit cards getting cash advances. Cashed in our insurance policies. Used all our savings. Even the kid's savings bonds. We'd gotten an equity line on the house when we bought the van and he even maxed it out."
Her voice grew louder with each word. I sat down on the floor beside her and leaned back against the wall.
"He ruined our credit rating. Spent everything we'd worked so hard for, and when I confronted him, he had the nerve -- the damned nerve -- to blame it all on me. Can you believe it?"
I didn't say anything, just waited for the rest.
"Anyway, there I was, working my ass off, taking care of the house and the kids, and he starts this crap. Calling me frigid, screaming at me all the time. Stuff like that. I finally told him to either shape up or get out. I even went to see a lawyer.
"That seemed to shake him up. He found a job. It wasn't much -- he was going to be selling industrial cleaning supplies on a commission only basis -- but it was a start. He went up to Michigan for training. At least that's what he told me."
She stopped and stared down at the shoe box for a long time. "That's when it happened," she said, so quietly I could barely hear her.
"What happened, hon?"
Tears dripped down her face. I went in the bathroom and grabbed a box of tissues. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
I asked her again. "What happened, Vanessa?"
"You know."
"The only thing I know is what you've told me and what I read in that article," I said.
"Promise you won't tell anyone. Please, Marty! You have to promise."
I didn't want to promise, but what choice did I have? "Okay. I guess I promise."
"Well, you know about the wreck. O'Del wasn't even hurt, much less killed. The police arrested him, but he pretty much got off with a slap on the wrist. I went up there. Tried to talk to him. And you know what
the bastard did? He ran off with that seventeen year old hooker. I didn't know what to do. Then I thought about just killing him off.
Shock. "You what?"
"Not literally. I don't even know where he is. I just came back here, told everybody he'd been died, and had the memorial service. No one asked any questions or anything. It was perfect. The way I figured it was that if I could pull it off, the kids wouldn't find out what a louse their daddy turned out to be."
She wiped at her eyes with the tissue. I took one from her and wiped mine too.
"Anyway, it was okay for a couple of months. I kept waiting for somebody to find out. I couldn't believe no one ever checked my story. It took a while, but I started to feel safe. I was really struggling with all the bills and everything, but I was making it. I thought it was all going to work out okay. Was I ever a fool."
She shredded her tissue. "It was back in June. One night Warren showed up at the house with this shoe box full of stuff. He made a great production out of it all. Betting slips, IOUs, pictures of O'Del getting coked up. Then he pulled out the newspaper clipping. Wouldn't you know it, his Grandma Turner used to live in that little town in Michigan and she still took the paper so she could keep up with all her old friends. He knew everything, Marty, absolutely everything.
"It started off small. At first, he just came over to talk. Then he started wanting sex. Eventually, he demanded money. Lot's of it. More than once, I thought about just telling everybody the truth. But I couldn't. I just couldn't."
"Of course you could have. Nobody would have blamed you." I regretted those words as soon as I said them.
She snorted. "Get real, Marty. Everybody in town would just ignore the fact that I pretended my husband was dead, held a memorial service, and went around pretending to be a widow. I don't think so."
She had a point.
"So, Wart was blackmailing you." I tried to think of a delicate way to ask her if she'd killed him. Finally I just blurted it out.
She looked appalled. "Kill Warren? You think I killed him?" She stood up and paced around the room.
"God, what a mess. What am I gonna do? If you think I killed him, everybody else will too!"
"But you didn't."
"No. I didn't." She sat down next to me and grabbed both my hands. "Marty, you have to believe me. Please."
I believed her. I told her so.
"Thanks. I really needed to hear that."
"The thing is, if you didn't kill him, who did?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. To be honest, I don't really care. I know that sounds cold, but I'm glad he's dead. He made my life even more hellish than it already was. I ended up having to sell my furniture to pay him off. And it didn't stop. The more I paid, the more he wanted."
"Is that why you took the watch?"
"That's part of it. He owed me, you know. At least that's the way I saw it at the time. I mean, I barely had enough money to feed my kids and there he was wearing a damn Rolex watch. I gotta tell you, when I looked in that trash can and saw that it was Warren, I felt so relieved. It didn't last though."
"Why? What happened?"
"Nancy cornered me at the funeral home the other night. She said she had something to talk to me about. I couldn't imagine what it was. We walked out to the cemetery and she said that she had found something that might interest me."
"The box?"
"Yes. She wanted seven thousand dollars to keep it all a secret. I flipped out. I didn't have seven thousand dollars. She said she'd work something out."
"Your van! That's why she has your van."
"That's why she took my van. She gave me that raggy old T-bird."
"When did you make the trade?"
"Thursday morning. Before the funeral."
So Charli was right; Nancy had lied. No surprise there.
"That's why you were at her house Friday? So she couldn't blackmail you anymore?"
"She came over Friday morning and demanded that I give her another five thousand dollars, otherwise, she'd go public. She said she was going to give it all to Giselle St. James. I decided to try and find it. It was pretty easy. She left her back door unlocked. The box of stuff was in her bedroom closet. Along with the gun."
"But I still don't understand why you ran off."
"I couldn't take the chance that Nancy would find me and get the box back. That's why I took the gun. She scares me. I think she killed Warren." She hesitated. "Are you mad at me for locking you in the shed?"
"Weren't you afraid Nancy would come home and find me in there?"
"Come on, Marty. I didn't tie you up that tight. I figured you'd be out of there in about ten minutes. All I wanted was a head start. Forgive me?"
"Yes. No. Oh hell, Vanessa, I don't know. I guess I forgive you."
She smiled. "That's all I can ask for."
I stood up and reached down toward her. She took my hand and I pulled her to her feet.
"Come on in here and I'll make some coffee. Maybe we can figure out how to get you out of this mess."
I let Delbert out of his cage and went in the kitchen. She sat on my sofa, absentmindedly rubbing Delbert's head while I made the coffee. I stood in the doorway and watched her while it brewed.
"Are you hungry?" I asked.
"Starving."
I scrounged in my freezer and found some frozen waffles. I toasted them, dumped some syrup over them and took them in to her.
"Here you... "
Vanessa pointed the gun at my chest. "I'm sorry, Marty. I really hate to do this, but I've got to go. I need to take care of this once and for all." She grabbed one of the waffles off the plate and stuffed it in her mouth. "Remember, you promised not to tell anybody."
I guess all those years of hanging around Tim finally sunk in. I opened and closed my mouth several times, not able to say a thing.
"Give me your keys," she said.
I shook my head.
She bobbed the gun up and down. "Give me your God-damned keys. And your cell phone."
I handed her the keys to the truck and my phone.
"Thanks for listening," she said. "You helped me figure out what I need to do. And, tell the kids I love them. I'll be back as soon as I get this mess all straightened out."
She backed out the door, then turned and ran down to the truck. I finally got my brain to make a connection to the rest of my body and ran over to the phone to call Tim, once more grateful I had a land-line. He didn’t answer. I tried Charli. Ditto. I ran out the door. John's truck disappeared out of sight.
"Damn! Damn, damn, damn!"
I turned to go back inside.
"Hey, Marty," Tim called out.
He pulled into the parking space the truck had been in. I ran over and jumped in the passenger side. "Drive!"
"Drive? Where?"
"Go out to Main Street. Look for John's truck."
He backed out and drove toward Main. I told him what had happened. Sort of. In spite of everything, I'd made a promise to Vanessa, and besides, Tim is a cop. No sense making things worse.
"See if you can catch up and follow her."
When we got to Main, the truck was nowhere in sight.
"What do we do now?" Tim asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I just don't know."
We spent a couple of hours driving around, looking for Vanessa. She wasn't at Nancy Winslow's. Neither was Nancy. Beth Turner said she hadn't seen Vanessa since the funeral home visitation. Vanessa and the black truck seemed to have disappeared into thin air. It looked like we were back to square one. Or maybe negative one.
One good thing did happen, though. I yelled at Tim for not getting to my place sooner. He yelled at me for leaving my apartment key in such an obvious place. Things between us were blessedly back to normal.