'Til Death Do Us Part (39 page)

“Tell me what’s the matter,” I said as soon as I’d closed the door behind us.

“Trip didn’t do it. I’m almost positive.”

I felt my mouth fall open stupidly. “Then who
did
do it? Do you know?”

Tears welled up in her eyes and were quickly nudged down her cheeks by others. She caught one with her tongue and brushed at the rest with the back of a manicured hand.

“I—I’m responsible for Ashley’s death,” she said. “At least partly.”

I caught my breath, and involuntarily my eyes shot toward the door as I calculated how easily I could get by her and out of the room in case I was in danger. Phillipa realized in an instant what I’d just done.

“I didn’t
murder
her, if that’s what you think,” she wailed. “It was an accident.” She began to cry really hard, her shoulders bobbing up and down.

For a second I did nothing but stand there in total confusion. Then I stepped toward her.

“Here, Phillipa, why don’t you sit down,” I said, guiding her to a plump purple armchair. “Tell me everything.”

She cried some more, and as she swiped away the tears, she smeared her iridescent pink lipstick. I noticed a box of tissues in a rattan box on an end table and pulled one out for her.

“When you left the barn that day, did you go over to the silo?” I asked, trying to urge her along.

“Yes. Peyton said something so nasty to me that I thought I was going to cry. I sometimes hide out in the back kitchen, but I knew someone was in there putting groceries away. So I went over to the silo. I forgot all about the fact that Ashley was there.”

“And something happened with her?”

“No, I never even saw Ashley.”

“What do you mean? I—”

“I tried to get the door open, but it sticks. I was pushing on it and shoving on it with my hip, and when I threw my whole body into it, it finally gave way. At the same time, I heard this huge crash. I thought that I must have jarred something and made it fall—so I took off without even entering the room. I went to my car and sat there with the motor running. Later I slipped back into the barn through the back entrance.”

I stared at her incredulously, trying to make sense of what she had told me.

“So are you saying that the crash was Ashley falling?” I asked slowly.

“Yes, it must have been,” she said, her lip trembling. “I may have startled her when I kept shoving at the door. I swear I didn’t realize it at that time. Like I said, I thought I’d just knocked something over or made something fall off a wall. I thought Peyton would be furious and start yelling that it was because I was overweight.”

“How do I know for certain that you didn’t actually go in the silo and push Ashley over the railing?”

“What?”
she asked, aghast. “Why would I do that? Besides, I’m terrified of heights, and I would never go above the ground floor.”

I kept thinking, trying to get the whole thing straight in my mind.

“And while you were in your car, you never saw anyone enter or leave the silo?”

“No. And the way my car was facing, I would have seen someone coming or going.”

“So when did you finally put two and two together?” I asked.

“Not until after the police came. All you’d said when you came in with Peyton was that Ashley was lying dead on the floor. But from what the police were saying, I finally figured out that she’d fallen over the balcony. And all of a sudden, I realized that when I shoved on the door I must have startled her so much she fell off the stepladder.”

“Why not ’fess up
then
?” I asked. On the one hand, I felt sorry for her, blubbering pathetically in front of me, but I also was totally annoyed by her. She’d withheld the truth while I’d been stumbling all over the eastern seaboard trying to find answers.

“I should have, I know. But I was terrified. I caused the accident and then I left. If I’d opened the door, she might have been alive and they could have saved her. Only, I just let her die. I figured they’d arrest me if I confessed. But then you were asking so many questions, and I couldn’t keep it in any longer, knowing what I’d done. That’s why I called you. And now with Trip arrested, it’s even worse. Can you help me?
Please
.”

She began to sob and wail again. I half expected Clara to charge into the room with a stun gun.

“Look, Phillipa,” I said, resting my hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “I saw Ashley’s body. I doubt there was any way she could have been saved. The important thing is that you’ve told the truth now. Trip threatened me with a gun last night, and he’s been up to some bad things, but it sounds as if he wasn’t responsible for Ashley’s death. You have to call the police—okay? Even better, I think you should go there right away.”

“They’re going to think I’m horrible.”

I reassured her they wouldn’t and gave her Pichowski’s name. She knew where the station was, she said, and promised to drop by there immediately. She also begged me not to say anything to Peyton or David until she had had time to speak to the police.

On the way to the front door, she stopped off in the powder room to address her makeup meltdown. While I waited for her to emerge, I absorbed the full impact of what she had shared with me. Pichowski and company were right after all. Unless Trip had snuck into the silo before Phillipa fled the barn, there was a good chance Ashley’s death really was an accident. I remembered how jumpy Ashley had been that day. I could imagine her on the stepladder, fussing with the light bulb, when all of a sudden she hears an unexpected visitor trying to gain entry. She leans out, craning her neck in order to see down below, and with the final thrust that knocks open the door, she completely loses her balance. The next second later she’s toppling over the railing to her death.

But what about the other deaths? Just because Trip hadn’t murdered Ashley didn’t mean he wasn’t responsible for Jamie’s and Robin’s deaths. Trip admitted to me that Jamie had wanted to blackmail him. But what if he’d never taken the bait, figuring she didn’t have enough to go on? After all, David had made a surface check of the numbers and found nothing improper at the time. Trip’s words rang in my ears again:
You just don’t get it, do you.

That would mean, then, that he had attacked and threatened me not because I was snooping around about the murders, but because I was looking into the wedding weekend. He’d clearly heard from David that I had vowed to turn over every stone, and he was worried that I might recall the flap between him and David in the church and decide it was significant. It could force David into digging deeper than he had the first time.

If Trip had come after me simply to scare me off from opening a Pandora’s box, had someone
else
killed Jamie and Robin? Or had their deaths really been accidental and I’d been on a wild-goose chase for the last two weeks? Something Cat Jones said to me flashed across my mind. She’d told me that she didn’t necessarily believe the girls had been murdered, but she thought the deaths were connected. Were they simply some kind of weird chain reaction—Jamie dies, and Robin, distraught, doesn’t pay attention to what she eats and dies, too? Then Ashley, on pins and needles, is startled by a noise and falls. Knowing all that I currently knew, part of me felt like a fool for having thought there was a serial killer, yet in my gut I still believed Jamie and Robin had been murdered. Their two deaths just seemed so improbable. Who was the killer, though? I was all the way back to square one. Maybe finally showing the pictures to Peyton would offer a clue.

Phillipa emerged at last, and I walked her to the door. It was mild but overcast out, and there was still a light fog on the ground. As we said good-bye, I made her promise that she would drive directly to the police station. I also told her that I would call Detective Pichowski and let him know she was coming. I didn’t trust her not to chicken out.

I’d no sooner closed the door than Clara entered the hall with a phone in her hand. It was Mrs. Slavin, she said, holding it out to me.

“What’s going on?” Peyton asked after I’d said hello.

“Not much,” I replied. I wished that I could share Phillipa’s secret, but I’d assured her I wouldn’t. “I’m just cooling my heels here, waiting to find out if the police need me anymore. Have you heard anything?”

“David spoke to Trip’s lawyer. He says he had nothing to do with any of the deaths—but then, what would you expect him to say.”

“Are you out at the farm now?”

“Yes, but I’ll be home in an hour or so. Mary is supposedly handling the party tonight. I was furious with her about last night—we had an important party and she never showed. She left me totally understaffed and unprepared. She claimed she had a personal emergency.”

“Well, unless I’m at the police station, I’ll see you in a little while.”

“Why don’t we take a walk? The property is beautiful and I’d love to show you.”

“Great, I could use the fresh air. Oh, listen. There’s something I’d like you to do for me. I have some photos of your wedding reception that Jamie apparently gave Robin for safekeeping. I’d like you to look at them for me.”

“What on earth for?”

I was stymied by the fact that I couldn’t tell her about Phillipa’s confession, couldn’t share with her that Trip might very well be innocent. “I think they might have some significance in all this—though I better wait till later to explain it all to you.”

“All right,” she said, as if her mind were no longer on our conversation. “I have to go now. I’ll see you later.”

After she rang off, I phoned the police. Pichowski was “unavailable,” but I left a message saying Phillipa was coming down there with important information and that I would follow up later.

I returned the phone to Clara in the kitchen and asked for a cup of tea. She offered to bring it to the library when it was ready. There was no fire in there today, and the room felt drafty and unwelcoming. While I waited, I moved idly around, surveying the leather-bound books, the pieces of Asian sculpture that were probably centuries old, the photographs of Peyton and David on the mantel. I picked up their silver-framed wedding photo, studying it. And suddenly something hit me like a blow to my head.

I set the photo back down and tore out of the room, nearly colliding with the tray-toting Clara.

“Just leave it on the table, thanks,” I yelled. I raced up the stairs to my room, grabbed my purse, and hurried back down to the library again.

Like a maniac I dug the envelope of wedding photos out of my purse and spilled them onto the coffee table, rifling through them until I’d found the one of Peyton kissing David. They were locked in an embrace, and you could see only the far left side of his face and body, but it was easy to assume it was David—he was dark haired, dressed in a tux, and kissing Peyton as if the future of the American Stock Exchange depended on it. Yet there was a discrepancy. In the photo on the mantel David was wearing a boutonniere. In this shot, he didn’t have one on.

I took the photo with me to the mantel and held it up next to the other. David’s hair looked shorter on the sides in the mantel photograph than in the picture Jamie had taken. I squinted, gazing down at the photo in my hand. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band in this one.

The man Peyton Cross was kissing so passionately in the arbor wasn’t her husband at all.

CHAPTER 20

T
HEN WHO
WAS
this guy? The embrace was far too passionate to have been given by a guest wishing Peyton well on her wedding day. Was this someone Peyton had a fling with up until her marriage, or was it a guy she was
still
hot and heavy with?

It almost didn’t matter. Because regardless, the end result if David saw the photo would be disastrous. According to Mandy, David couldn’t tolerate the idea of being cuckolded, and if he found out about the kiss—and the relationship—he’d have Peyton’s head.

Jamie had not only witnessed the moment that gave new meaning to the phrase
You may now kiss the bride
, but she had also documented it. This was the reason she was hiding the photographs at Robin’s. This was the reason she had guarded her camera with her life during her shag session with Kyle, he of so little brain mass.

And was this why she was dead? Had Peyton killed her? And then Robin?

I took a deep breath and urged myself to think calmly. The thought of Peyton as a murderer—a murderer of two of her closest friends, no less—was overwhelming, and I didn’t want to just hysterically take off in that direction. I slipped the photos back in the envelope on the coffee table and roamed the room, cogitating.