The devil laughed, p.26
The Devil Laughed, page 26
His body sagged with a groan and a symphony of farts while I jumped his body into the church. Lake was beside me. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I said, heart hammering. “He’s out there.”
“Let’s do something about him.” He raised his gun and stuck his head outside the door frame. ”Police! Show yourself!”
I heard the yell. “It’s me! Sonny!” He ran inside talking into the radio hugging his shoulder. He held a shotgun, his forty-five in its holster at his waist. Ending the call, he hurriedly said, “State’s coming. Sorry if I scared you. No time to let you know I was here. I shot and ducked. You looked deadly with that gun.”
“That was pretty good shooting,” Lake said.
“Been toting all my life. Dang it, I missed Orell with the first shot.”
Right then, I wanted to know one thing. “Where’s Scully?”
He shook his head. “When Orell left the store, I followed him here. Scully was not with him.”
The screech of the winch intensified. “Scully’s opening the hole,” I said.
Lake moved toward me, and, like a lover’s graceful shift, he touched my shoulder and then extended his arms around my back. Tugging gently, he urged me to move ahead, further inside the church. Golden light through the blown front door illuminated a bizarre scene. Lake moved up the aisle, me at his shoulder, guns in position. A man was tied to a wooden arm chair that lay on its side. The man was gagged.
Sonny flicked on his flashlight.
“Scully,” I said.
At his feet lay a rolled up rug.
“Cover me, Dru, Sonny,” Lake said.
I aimed at the office door. Sonny had my back while covering the front door. Lake untied the gag.
Scully’s naked eyes were popping out of his red face. “Get her—in there,” he said, signaling with his head toward the rug.
“Hang on, man,” Lake said.
“She’s suffocating,” Scully said his voice like a frog’s. “Don’t bother with me.”
“Dru, I got the doors covered,” Sonny said, shotgun in one hand, a forty-five in the other. “Help the lieutenant.”
Lake took one end of the large carpet, and I the other, and we rolled it over and over until the body of a woman fell free. Lake turned her face up. She looked absolutely and positively dead. Skin dead white, hair matted with blood, her blue eyes half closed. By the bruises on her neck, she’d been strangled. Still, I recognized her. Blood powered through my vessels. Evangeline. I loved her at that moment for never giving up.
Lake checked Candice’s vitals. “Alive, barely. Get an ambulance.”
“I’ll make sure, but everything we got is on the way.” Sonny was keying his radio when a truck engine fired up from in back of the church. “Who the hell is that?” Sonny said.
“Gussie,” Scully said.
“Gussie?”
“The worst of us.”
“Anyone else out there?”
“Just her.”
I said to Lake, “Back door.”
Lake sprinted past the altar into the office. Scully tried to raise his body and the chair at the same time. Sonny finished the call, and, picking up the shotgun went after Lake. I raised my automatic ready for anyone that came in either door. I said to Scully, “Sorry I can’t untie you right now.”
“How’s my wife?” Scully asked in a froggy whisper. “She going to be all right?”
I bent to flick Candice on the cheek. Her eyes began to flutter and she gasped air. I looked at Scully. My wife. “I think she’ll be fine.”
“Thank God, thank God,” he said, laying his cheek on the floor.
I contemplated Scully tied to the overturned chair. I longed to untie him but I wasn’t laying my gun down. This wasn’t over just yet. I said to him, “I know what they had in mind for Candice, but what about you?”
“I told them to put me in that hole with Candy,” he said, his anguished eyes biting into mine. “They tied me up to keep me from getting away with her.”
“They wouldn’t put you in the hole, and you wouldn’t tell on them for throwing Candice in, am I right?”
He didn’t answer.
Shots boomed from outside, into a firefight so fierce I couldn’t pinpoint the direction for the echoes.
Fearful but bold, I leaped to the front of the church and rammed my back against the wall. Anyone coming in would get a bullet in the temple. I kept my sight on the office door, too.
The shooting stopped and a heavy truck engine revved. Six second later it slammed into something, metal on metal. Lake’s automatic fired several more shots. An immense quiet packed the atmosphere. Then Lake called from the back door. “All clear. I’m coming in.”
He looked at me. “Gussie’s dead.” He went to Scully and untied him.
I stood next to Lake and we both watched Scully lift Candice’s torso and caress her. She buried her head in his neck and whimpered.
“Boy I never would have guessed that,” I whispered.
Lake looked at me and winked. “Evangeline told you her mother was alive.”
Oh, please.
*****
“I told you my mother was alive,” Evangeline crowed sitting next to her mother’s hospital bed.
“And I told you I would find her if she was, or if she wasn’t,” I replied.
“It’s better that she was,” Evangeline said, rubbing Candice’s arm.
I thought Candice feigned sleep, which I would have, too, had I the decisions she had to make.
Earlier this morning she was well enough to relate the terrible events.
We’d surmised right that Johnny owed both Bruntys several thousand dollars for grapes. It was Orell’s grapes that he considered inferior. The idea, thought up by Gussie, was to take the cabin cruiser to where Johnny and his friends were on a sailboat. They would put the fear of God into Johnny. Waving shotguns, Gussie and Orell demanded payment. Johnny told Orell and Gussie they were stupid redneck fools and he’d pay them when he pleased, or never. Gussie knocked him down with the butt of the shotgun. He landed on a cleat and sliced his skull. Gussie hit him again and Orell chucked him overboard. Janet started screaming. Orell took hold of Janet and they marched her down into the salon where Laurant and she sat smoking and drinking, unaware of what had happened on deck. With Gussie holding the shotgun, Orell tied the three up.
Orell sailed the Scuppernong and Gussie piloted the cruiser to the deepest part of the lake, where they sank the sailboat. They took their three captives ashore in the cabin cruiser because they didn’t want accidental witnesses at the marina, or bodies washing up. They knew a place where hidden bodies would never be found, and besides, their boat needed cleaning.
Enter Scully who got a call from Orell to drive the double cab pickup to Landing Creek Park and help trailer the cruiser. According to Candice, he was appalled to find three tied-up people in the boat. They drove to Orell’s place, unloaded the three doomed people from the boat into a pickup truck outfitted with boulder-moving tackle on the bed and took them to the Devil’s Arse.
Candice knew she was going to die. She said, “It’s a numb feeling, a feeling of inevitability and acceptance that life is over. Gussie promised us we wouldn’t suffer.” She swallowed a few times, shuddered and went on, “Gussie said since we knew what happened to the grape thief and despite our promises not to tell, she couldn’t take the chance.” Candice stared into my eyes. “Would you take the chance we wouldn’t tell?”
“No,” I said. “But sane people don’t let bill collection get that out of control.”
She cried when she told the last of it. “She dumped Laurant in first, into that awful hole. She just pushes him in. He’s alive and he screams until we can’t hear him anymore. She shot Janet, she said, for the hell of it, and kicked her in.” I handed her a hospital towel.
“But you were saved,” Lake said.”
Wiping her face and cheeks, she said, “By Scully. He told Orell and Gussie, ‘I won’t have this one going down that hole.’ Gussie laughed like the devil herself, and said, ‘My my.’”
The devil laughed to see such sport and the spoon ran away with the dish.
Candice whimpered while I held her hand. “I’ll never forget that—My, my. She taunted him. ‘Scully has fallen for a pretty face, but you can’t keep her, cousin.’ Scully said, ‘I am keeping her. You want to go in that hole, try to drop her in it.’”
“Did he make you marry him?” I asked.
“No,” Candice said. A sad sweet smile formed on her lips. “I fell in love with him.”
“What?” Lake blurted, startled as I was.
Lake had been thinking the same thing as me. She had to marry him to stay alive.
Candice paused to stare across space, and then looked at us. “I had internet access. I learned captives fall in love with their captors if they’re treated right. Scully was a gentleman, the best man I’d ever met. He never so much as touched me until we were falling in love. We talked many times of leaving Yarrow. Things were getting dicey especially with Gussie. I knew she wanted me dead. I was never far from a shotgun when Scully wasn’t around. Secretly, we’d gotten passports to emigrate to Australia.” She took a deep breath. “Then the Scuppernong was found. We knew … I knew it was going to be over.”
“Who killed Linette?”
“Orell, and rowed her out onto the lake.”
“Why didn’t he push her into the Devil’s Arse?”
“They wanted her body to wash up for a burial, for Diane’s sake. She’s his kid. Decent of them, huh?”
“Four years is a long time without someone besides Orell and Gussie knowing about you,” Lake said.
“I never left the house, except to go in disguise to Ringgold to marry Scully and to get a passport in Atlanta. That was the deal. Gussie promised if she ever saw me outside the house she would kill me. I lived with the idea of her laying in wait.”
I recalled how Scully hovered over Diane that first morning we came to his diner. I said, “But there was someone else who found out about you. Diane.”
Candice nodded. “She and her dog wandered all over the county. No one thought much of it. One day her dog crawled under our house to escape some animal. She came for it and saw me through a window. It was my fault for watching outside.” Candice had tears in her eyes. “She was just a kid and I put her in danger.”
“She told her mother. Did Linette get in touch with you?”
“No, but she was brazen, always dropping hints about the woman in Scully’s life.
Lake said, “Thus dooming Linette once the Scuppernong case was back in the news, Diane knew who you were when she saw pictures in the newspaper.”
I was still trying to sort through all that I had thought and felt. “Scully protected two maniacs.”
Lake said. “Kin.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
Candice said, “I imagine he’s waiting for you to take him away.” The tears ran down her cheeks. “He always said our time together would be short.”
“Who killed Scoggins?”
“Orell. Because of the drought. Orell kept a close eye on the place where they’d sunk the sailboat. He knew if it didn’t rain soon, the boat would be exposed. They even talked about dynamiting it.”
Better sense, it appeared, had prevailed.
Lake reasoned, “And if the sailboat surfaced, Scoggins account would be given more scrutiny since it was found not far from the park.”
“That’s it,” Candice said.
“Are you going back to North Carolina when you’re out of here?”
“You bet,” she said, squeezing Evangeline’s hand. “I’ve missed my darling E so very much.”
“I’ll see you there,” I said. “I have unfinished work.”
“E told me about Emile. Pity. If I can help find his killer, I will.”
“Me, too,” Evangeline said. “I show up and they’re goose is cooked.”
Brother.
We left Candice in the arms of Morpheus with Evangeline fluttering over her like a wizened Florence Nightingale.
Waiting at the elevator, Lake asked, “You mean it? You’re going to find Emile’s killer?”
“The shooter’s probably on another continent. I’m going to prove that the sheriff and the banker were behind it. Avlon certainly stole his safe and injected the drug that killed him, just minutes before I visited. I take it personally.”
“Why would they want him dead?
“Emile was about to go down. I don’t think he would have gone quietly. Once Interpol gets onto you, your goose is cooked.”
Lake shrugged. “So I’ve heard.”
I walked out of the hospital alongside Lake, feeling my composure starting to splinter.
Lake said, “You always feel let down after a case.”
“This one was uglier than most.”
“Ah, Dru, they’re all ugly.”
My cell played the concerto. It was Portia. “Yeah, Porsh.”
“The hemp man was Janeway. The kids saw a video with him speaking. He’ll be in prison for a long time for that and his part in with-holding evidence in the murders.”
Suddenly my chest filled like a helium balloon and I felt if I spoke I’d sound just as giddy. Fortunately Portia didn’t give me a chance to respond before she was gone.
I fixed my clever eyes upon Lake. “There was just something about Janeway.” I flipped my hand back. “I knew he was the hemp sheriff.”
“You did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“Too.”
“Not.”
“I’m hungry. Let go eat.”
“Trader Joe’s is closed.”
About the Author
Retired journalist for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Gerrie Ferris Finger won the 2009 St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel for The End Game. The Last Temptation is the first in the Moriah Dru/Richard Lake series published by Five Star Publishing. The Devil Laughed is the second. She lives on the coast of Georgia with her husband, Alan, and standard poodle, Bogey.
www.gerrieferrisfinger.com
www.gerrieferrisfinger.blogspot.com
Moriah Dru, Child Trace
By Gerrie Ferris Finger
The End Game
The Last Temptation
The Devil Laughed
Murmurs of Insanity
Running With Wild Blood
American Nights
Wolf’s Clothing
Colors of Blood
No Stranger to Murder
Available in paperback
and electronic editions from
Bold Venture Press
Gerrie Ferris Finger, The Devil Laughed
