Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (83 page)

“You’re sick, Norma,” Sybil whispered. “You need help.”

“Shut up!” Norma slapped Sybil across the face. Piper heard a bone in her face crack.

Moto said, “He’s been at the bottom of pool for a long time, I think she’s lying. Wait, he’s up. He’s signaling.” Moto opened the window and leaned out. He turned to Norma. “Wire cutters. He wants wire cutters. Where are they?”

“In the tool shed. Go help him. Hurry.” Norma waved him out.

Norma replaced him at the window. “Looks like we won’t need either of you anymore.”

Piper scanned the room for a weapon, something heavy to charge Norma. The knife lay on the nightstand.

Norma turned and saw Piper looking at the knife. She rushed to the nightstand. She snatched up the knife and came at Piper.

Piper pushed the chair back and scrambled to her feet, deflecting the first stabbing thrust with the outstretched pillow. Norma’s wild swing threw her off-balance, giving Piper a split second to shove her with all her might. Norma fell backwards over the chair. Her head hit the edge of the dresser with a thud. Norma tried to rise, but slumped to the floor, eyes rolling back into her head.

Piper snatched up the knife that had fallen from Norma’s hand. As she came around the bed to help Sybil, she checked out the window. Moto was coming out of the shed with the wire cutters.

Piper pulled Sybil’s legs to the side of the bed and lifted her into an almost standing position. Sybil was too weak and sank down on the mattress with a deep sigh. Sybil couldn’t stand and Piper couldn’t carry her. Piper had to get help. The phone on the nightstand was dead, the cord missing. Piper raced down the stairs to the phone in the kitchen. Keeping low so that Moto and Tony couldn’t see her, she grabbed at the wall receiver. The dial tone was like heavenly music. She dialed 911. It seemed a lifetime before someone answered. “What’s your emergency?” She gave them the address and said that she was being held hostage, someone was dead and the killers were about to take two more lives. Not waiting for a response, she turned and ran back through the house and up the stairs. In the bedroom she rushed to Sybil and kneeled at her feet. Something was wrong. It took her a moment to realize that Norma was no longer sprawled out on the floor.

“Where’s Norma?” Piper asked, taking the limp scarred hand in her hand. The hand was warm, the palm moist. Sybil’s head was bowed, her chin on her chest, her eyes closed behind an unruly mass of platinum hair. Then Piper saw it. Her gaze traveled downward to a naked foot and leg at the side of the bed, a foot with cigarette burns. She looked back at the woman whose hand she held. The woman lifted her head with great effort, turned her face toward Piper. Pale blue eyes stared into hers with pure loathing. Piper gasped.

Norma grabbed her around the throat and squeezed, pushing her down to the floor. Her body straddled Piper’s and her knees held Piper’s arms to her sides in a vise-like grip, her super strength fueled by rage. Amid screaming sirens, her thumbs pressed into Piper’s windpipe and Piper knew that in no time, police or no police, she would be dead. She stared into those pale blue eyes and watched the world around her go red, then white. A brilliant white, like a bursting nova, and at the core, a vision of her grandmother fading in and out.

Suddenly the pressure on her throat eased. With a grunt, Norma fell away from her and toppled to the floor at her side. Sybil bent over Norma, both hands still gripping the handle of the knife, its blade buried in her daughter’s back. Sybil’s legs wobbled violently, her daughter’s body the only thing holding her up. Sybil slumped to her knees. The two women, uncanny in their resemblance, seemed to embrace, bonding at last.

Piper eased out from beneath Norma and touched Sybil’s shoulder. She had wanted to save Sybil, yet in the end Sybil had saved her.

She pulled herself to her feet, leaving a fresh trail of blood on the bed sheets. The room shifted and rocked. A sudden dizziness hit her. Dizziness she quickly blamed on lack of oxygen from her near strangulation. She fell to her knees. When the ceiling fan began to sway and items fell off the nightstand and dresser, she realized it was an earthquake. The ceiling cracked. Directly over her head a thick wooden beam split. She screamed. Her own scream filling her ears shocked her into action. Panic propelled her toward the exit with one thought—to get out.

On hands and knees, she crawled to the doorway, pitching to the side as knick-knacks and paintings crashed to the floor around her. She saw Jason charging through the doorway from the back of the house. The trembler tossing him from side to side, slowing his progress.

“Piper, hurry!”

“The pool! Tony—”

“We’ve got them.”

She crawled another foot and stopped. The sight of Jason brought her to her senses.
Sybil
. She needed her help. She looked behind her. The beam creaked, shifted again, raining plaster down on Sybil’s head. Piper crawled back into the room, glancing at the beam as she inched her way across the floor in what seemed like slow motion.

She lifted Sybil under both her arms and tried to drag her away from her daughter. Norma reached up, wrapped her hand around the handle of the knife buried into her upper back and tugged the blade out. She twisted around. The crazed look in those ghostly eyes frightened Piper more than the earthquake or the beam overhead. Norma raised her arm to plunge the blade into her mother’s chest. Piper kicked at those wild eyes, her sandaled foot landing squarely across the bridge of her nose. She heard the crunch of bone breaking. With blood pouring from her nose, Norma pulled herself upwards, gripping the knife. Piper marveled at her superhuman strength. Norma turned to Piper, her mouth twisted into an ugly, triumphant grin. The blade rose above Piper’s throat just as the beam gave way and came crashing down, seemingly powered by invisible hands. Norma looked up as it struck her in the face, a long sliver of wood pierced through one of those penetrating pale blue eyes, obliterating it completely.

Jason pulled Piper to her feet, lifted Sybil, and together they made their way down the stairs and out of the house.

The piercing sounds of sirens and car alarms filled the air. The neighborhood was alive with people running into the street, shouting. The entire world had suddenly gone mad.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Los Angeles Times
.
AWARD-WINNING ACTRESS VICTIM OF ABUSE
: Eighty-five-year-old Sybil Squire is recovering from injuries sustained at the hands of her daughter and grandson. The film star’s daughter, assumed murdered years ago, resurfaced, and in a bizarre bid for revenge…

Sybil Squire was again headline news after nearly forty years. Three people were in the morgue, one was in the hospital, and two were in the county jail awaiting arraignment for a number of charges, Murder 1 heading the list. The earthquake made the front page as well, but took a backseat to the scandal involving the once-famous screen idol.

When Jason and Piper had exited the Squire house with Sybil, the ground stopped trembling as abruptly as it had started. Piper didn’t remember much of what happened, or in what sequence, except that she was never so glad to be outside and to see the West Hollywood police.

Jason took Piper to the emergency room at County General where the cuts on her hand were stitched and bandaged. As he stood by, holding her other hand during the procedure, Piper thought how easily she could completely fall for his guy. Was he the one, Piper asked herself. The conversation with Belle played in her head: “Do I have a type?” “Yes, you just haven’t found him yet.” Maybe she had.

The police removed the body of Luke Monte, handyman, from the Vogt’s freezer. A cadaver dog detected cadaver scent in Sybil’s rose garden. Tony had killed the man, buried him, dug him up, and placed him in the freezer. To throw off suspicion from himself or maybe hoping to frame Piper for the murder, she wasn’t sure which. The reference to the Rose Garden in Sybil’s journal had been a clue to the whereabouts of the handyman’s buried body.

The police found the key to the safety deposit box chained to the drain at the bottom of the pool. Suspecting something sinister was about to happen, initiated by the unexpected visit from Mr. Moto and her grandson, Sybil had transferred a good deal of her fortune—cash, jewels and negotiable bonds—to a new safety deposit box the day of the fire.

Avidon died from his leap off the roof of the Tropical Palms. The envelope left with the desk clerk contained a written confession to the murder of sanitarium nurse Judith Neely.

The body in Norma Knoller’s gravesite was exhumed. Through DNA testing, it was determined to be the body of Judith Neely and not Norma Watson Knoller.

With his mother no longer alive to oversee his life, a devastated Tony Avidon—a.k.a. Anthony DeMille and more recently Luke Monte and Arnold Copeland—confessed to killing the Vogt’s handyman on the day of the earthquake and conspiring with Jack Ling and his mother in the injection death of Sybil’s longtime friend and housekeeper, Vera Wade. He went on to confess to charges of forgery, elder abuse, financial exploitation, and intent to kill his grandmother, Sybil Squire.

Sybil went to the private hospital in West Hollywood where a contrite Dr. Lowdell treated her for malnutrition, neglect and the physical abuse she had sustained while under her daughter’s care. Her chances for survival were fair. When Piper visited her, a frail Sybil told her that to protect Piper, she had tried to discourage her from getting involved. “I should have known you wouldn’t be deterred by anyone or anything. Your grandmother had those same strong principles. She would have been proud of you. As I am.”

The earthquake, although it felt strong, of a magnitude that kills, was only 5.2 on the Richter scale—anything under 6.0 was considered a mere nuisance to Angelenos. Yet the quake’s damage to the Squire house had been devastating, and it did kill. Investigators speculated that the structural damage had occurred during the earlier quake, weakening the overhead beam. The final quake had been significant enough to bring it down.

Sybil swore that only something as formidable as an earthquake could stop her crazed and obsessed daughter. If the beam had not fallen when it had, and where, Norma might have succeeded in killing her and Piper.

Piper had another theory about what happened that night. In part, she agreed with Sybil. She had seen that savage look in Norma Knoller’s eyes. The beam’s timely descent, in her opinion, was nothing short of a miracle, but the hand was guided not my God, but another. Piper didn’t believe in guardian angels—until that night. She didn’t tell anyone about the apparition that had hovered over her when Norma was squeezing the life out of her and again when the knife blade was poised to plunge into her throat. No one would believe her. They’d say she had been hallucinating. But she saw what she saw and she believed.

“I saw them. I did,” Nana Ruth told her that day in the clover patch.

“I know, Nana. I know.”

EPILOGUE

In the black-and-white scene unfolding on the pearlescent screen of the small theater in Beverly Hills, Sybil Squire’s flawless features literally glowed in the close-up. Young, beautiful, those pale blue eyes…

She lifted the lid of the jewelry box. From beneath the small pistol, she slowly lifted the gold locket by the black satin ribbon. She opened the locket and gazed at the tiny photographs inside the oval frames. Tears welled up. Piper waited to hear Sybil deliver those final lines from
Black Ribbon
.

“Your light has gone out, my shining angels, and soon there’ll be nothing left of you or me. Nothing.”

The music keyed up and the screen darkened from the edges in, forming a circle that gradually swallowed the silver screen until there was only a pinpoint of light in the center. Then it too blinked out with the sharp crack of the gunshot. The credits of Mick Vogt’s,
The Greatest Classic: Film Noir
, began to crawl up the dark screen.

Sybil’s outstanding performance in Black Ribbon, showcased in the documentary, outshined her real life role as a tragic leading lady. Piper felt proud to have a part in that piece of history.