A Deadly Draught (27 page)

I wrapped my arms around myself. My teeth hit against one another, and my body began a shaking that I couldn’t stop.

“Let’s get you home before you go into shock.” Jake draped his jacket over my shoulders. “Think you can make it back on foot?”

“I’ll be fine. I just need to get into a hot bath.” I turned to look back at the old mill as we headed down the path toward my place.

“It was our playhouse, a place of such romance and adventure when we were kids. No one else thought about it much, so we had it to ourselves to act out our fantasies. We had fun. Now, all I can think about is the look of despair on Michael’s face when he let go of my hand.”

*

“I’m coming with you to look for Claudia. I just need a quick shower and some dry clothes.” The negative look on Jake’s face said he didn’t want me along. “Okay, I’ll forget the shower.”

At the house I ran for the stairs before he could say no or leave. On the way to my bedroom, I heard Jake speak into his phone, although I couldn’t catch his words. I grabbed a dry pair of jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and my rain poncho.

“We found her. If you’re coming, get down here.” I was at his side before he could draw another breath.

“Where? At the motel with Ronald? He’s okay, isn’t he?”

“He’s fine. No, one of my men spotted her car in front of the Carriage Day Spa.”

I snapped my fingers. “Of course. Claudia was a mess when she left the mill. She had to know you’d be looking for her.”

“So she’s getting a massage? If I were in her shoes, I’d be in the next state.”

“Not if you’re Claudia Ramford, perfect wife and hostess. She knows this is the end. C’mon.” I was out the door and headed for the SUV.

“I guess the only way I’d get you out of the car would be to drag you out.” Jake started the engine, and we slammed down the drive.

A few minutes later, he conferred with one of his men who stood watch at the entrance to the Day Spa.

“I checked at the desk, and the woman there said Mrs. Ramford arrived about an hour ago. Tina had a cancellation and took her right in for a shampoo and blow dry, and now she’s in the back room having her nails done.” The young officer read these facts out of his notebook in a shaking voice. “You think she might be holding someone hostage in there, sir?”

I butted in. “No, I think Mrs. Ramford is more concerned with selecting the right color of polish.”

Jake shoved me behind him and entered the salon with his pistol drawn. The young woman at the desk pointed toward a hallway leading to the private rooms in the back, but the manager appeared at that moment.

“You can’t come in here with a gun. This is a spa, not a firing range.”

“One of your customers already came in here armed. Step out of the way, please.” She did as Jake ordered.

We proceeded down the hallway. Three doors opened off to the right. Only one was closed. Jake looked around the corner of the other two and proceeded on to the last door. I was right behind him as he moved on. At the closed door, he hesitated with his pistol held at face level in front of him.

“Police. Open the door.”

A dark-haired woman pulled the door open. Jake grabbed her and spun her around and out of the room, then entered with his weapon raised. I moved in behind him.

Claudia Ramford sat in an armchair. Her perfect fingertips shone red in the room’s light, and her feet rested in a bath of sudsy water. She was wrapped in a terry robe, and she looked nothing like the dripping wet killer I tangled with in the old mill. Her face had recently been made up, and her light hair had the finish of fine silver.

“Oh, dear, I wish you hadn’t arrived so soon. Now I’ll have to go to jail without my French pedicure. I don’t suppose you might wait another fifteen minutes?”

“Where’s the weapon?” Jake still held his pistol at the ready in front of him. If Claudia felt any threat from him, her face didn’t show it. It remained as implacable as the surface of a frozen lake.

“I checked it along with my wet clothes. My locker key is in the pocket of my robe, but I don’t want to ruin my nails. Could you get it for me, Hera, dear?”

Jake shook his head at me when I stepped forward. He nodded at the officer who had come back to the room with us. He removed the key from Claudia’s pocket and left to find the locker area.

In several seconds, he came back into the room. “It’s there.”

Jake lowered his weapon, and I sighed, my body suddenly freed of the tension it had held for several hours. Every muscle now ached with the release.

“Take over here,” Jake directed his man, then collapsed into my arms.

Twenty-Seven

“He’s got a concussion. He was hit on the head and lost consciousness. He’ll be lucky he doesn’t have permanent damage.” The doctor spoke to me as if I were Jake’s mother and should have known better than to let him play with his criminal friends. “He needs rest, and we’ll be monitoring him closely. You can stay for a few moments, then out you go.” The doctor left the hospital room, white coat flapping behind him.

Jake smiled at me and gave a little wave from his bed.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s what you said when I found you at the pond. You lied to me. You were not and are not fine.” I took the chair beside the bed.

“I lied then, but now I am fine.”

“How do I know when to believe you?”

He looked at me with both eyebrows raised and delivered a zinger. “Now you know how I felt.”

“Don’t get cheeky with me, or I won’t bring you your bedpan.”

The door swung open, and Rafe entered.

“Rafe. I’ve been wanting to see you.” I arose from the chair and approached him. I reached out and touched his arm.

“And me, you.” Rafe took both my hands in his and squeezed them gently.

“Would you like me to leave so the two of you can work out everything?” Jake flipped the sheet to one side and made as if he were going to get out of bed.

“Sorry, old man. I just wanted to stop by and see how you’re doing.”

“I’d be okay, if I had more sympathetic visitors.”

“Aha. On that note, I’d better leave, but before I do, I just want to apologize for not taking you into my confidence about Bernie. I guess he’s going to spend some years in prison for blowing up the well.”

“And for breaking into your brewery and locking poor Henry in the fermenting room, planting the yeast in my place, and slitting Francine’s malt bags open. He’s a real whiz at picking locks, isn’t he?” Rafe didn’t reply to my question, just shook his head and had the good manners to look embarrassed.

“I don’t quite get why he did all that. He couldn’t have had anything against me or Francine. He didn’t know us,” I said. One of my hands rested on Jake’s arm, the other was still captured in Rafe’s.

Jake pulled the pillows higher behind his head. “Why don’t you tell her, Rafe?”

Rafe looked down at the floor, then back up at me. He cleared his throat. Before he could offer an explanation, the doctor stuck his head into the room, gestured with his thumb toward the hallway, and mouthed the word, “Out.”

Rafe shook Jake’s hand, and I kissed his mouth, fussed with his pillows, and then followed Rafe out into the corridor.

“Well?” I stood with my hands on my hips, awaiting Rafe’s explanation for Bernie’s shenanigans.

“Bernie knew I’d get the message. Once he made himself known, I put it all together, as he knew I would. He didn’t have to threaten me for more money. His activities made it clear to me what he was capable of. All of my friends were in danger unless I came through, and I did. Then I stopped paying him, and he blew your well, another demonstration of his seriousness about being paid. By then, I knew the only way to handle him was to get Jake to put him behind bars. So I came out with the truth, knowing it might put me in prison, too.”

“Let’s get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria,” I said. As we walked toward the elevators, I tucked my hand into the crook of his arm. “It must have been awful living in fear of Bernie appearing in your life.”

“To be honest, the guilt over what I had done, taken a man’s life, was often overpowering, but Bernie had my number. He knew I was a weakling, that I hadn’t the integrity to turn myself in. He counted on my cowardice.”

“In the end, you weren’t a coward. You did tell him no.”

“And look what he did. Blew up your well.”

We paused in front of a window.

“Will you look at that? It’s still raining. So you see, I really don’t need that well after all.”

He reached out and touched my cheek, a gesture my father often used when we were making up after a fight. “You’re being terribly nice about that, you know.”

“I know, so I guess you owe me a favor.”

“Anything.”

“Be a reference for me when I go to the bank for a loan, will you?” I held up my hand as he tried to speak. “Uh, uh, no loan from you. I want to do this on my own.”

*

Ronald demonstrated his gentle and giving nature by using the land and the insurance on the brewery house to post bond for Claudia. We never discussed whether he believed his mother murdered his father or his father’s story that he wasn’t Michael Senior’s son. All he said to me about the situation was that he’d lived all his life believing he knew his family, and he owed his mother his allegiance now. How ironic that all these years, the community thought this sensitive individual was the black sheep of the family, the pyromaniac, the son who ran off and left his mother and brother to cope with a controlling and philandering father.

The judge set bail, because the case against Claudia revolved around her confession, which she altered in every interview with the police. We never found the recorder I’d thrown at her. Perhaps she took it, threw it away, hid it, or didn’t remember where it was. I would have to testify against her, an act I approached with great confusion. I believed the part of her story where she claimed she killed Michael Senior. The rest of it puzzled both Jake and me. When I used the word
crazy
to describe her behavior, we both knew how the lawyer would present her case.

The only constant part of her story was her denial that anyone helped her dispose of the shovel, a statement contradicting what she had told me about Michael’s involvement. At times, she seemed lucid, and in some of those moments, she claimed that her husband fathered both, one, or neither of her sons. We never found the letters she wrote to my father. In fact, she never mentioned him in any of her dialogue with the authorities.

Claudia moved into one of the newly constructed condominiums in town. I thought she would fill the spare bedroom with her quilting work and take up stitching together her works of art while she awaited the trial. Against Jake’s wishes, I visited her several weeks after our struggle in the old mill to ask about the recorder. I hoped to catch her in a mood for truth telling. She swept me into the spare bedroom to show me a new project. Piles of yarn, along with stacks of baby clothes, toys, a crib, stroller, and playpen, filled the room. She had gotten wind of Sally’s pregnancy and put two and two together.

“I’m going to be a grandmother.”

“Does that mean I’m about to become an aunt?” She gave me a sharp look and ignored my question.

“It’s going to be such fun.” She wandered around the pastel yellow bedroom touching the tiny clothes and moving baby objects from one location to another and then back again.

“Does Sally know you’re doing this?”

A ripple broke through her calm. “Get out. Get out! You’re here to ruin everything for me,” she yelled. I ran for the door, fearing the reappearance of the Claudia from the old mill.

I hoped it wasn’t my question about Sally that sent Claudia down to the café the next day, where she threatened to try and take the baby away from Sally. Sally called me on my cell.

“Get over here quick. Claudia’s in the front of the shop and spinning out of control. She just swept an entire shelf of teacups onto the floor.”

“Call the police. I’ll be right there.”

By the time I arrived, Sally was out in front of her shop, and we heard the police sirens heading toward the store. When the police stormed the bakery, they didn’t find Claudia inside but at the back door, a gasoline can in one hand and a Bic lighter in the other.

“A passion for fires must run in the family.” I tried to joke with Sally after the local cops took Claudia off to jail. Then I realized I was also talking about the baby’s father. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know you’re trying to make me feel better. Sometimes I wonder if having this baby is such a good thing, but then I think there are my great genes and maybe some from your family, too.” I hugged her for that. I felt like an aunt whether the biology said I was or not.

I left Sally up to her elbows in flour just as Jake arrived at the bakery. “Work makes me feel better. How’s the head today?”

Jake touched the spot above his neck where Michael had hit him.

“Not there anymore and no permanent damage, unless you count occasional waves of passion for a local brewer an issue.”

I punched him in the arm. “You think Sally’s safe here, or should she come home with me?”

“Bet on it. The judge will revoke Claudia’s bond any minute now, and I think she’ll be sent off for observation and kept someplace away from society for a long time.”

Sally gave us both a floury hug and continued with her kneading as we left the shop.

Jake and I stood in front of my truck.

“DNA would tell us something,” Jake said.

“I thought about that, but Ronald says he’s just not interested in knowing who his biological father is. He asked me if I was okay with that. I don’t know if I am, but it’s up to Ronald.” I hesitated, knowing I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I knew I had to find out. “No body yet?”

Jake shook his head no.

“When you do find, uh, him, is there any legal reason why you need to know Michael’s parentage?”

“Not unless the lawyers think it’s relevant. With Claudia’s latest escapade, I don’t think the case is likely to be tried anytime soon. No, I was thinking of something else, your DNA and the baby’s.”