Ring of Truth

“It doesn’t help that my client won’t cooperate,” she says with wry anger. “If he weren’t already sentenced to death, I think I might strangle him myself.”

  Nor has any bear stepped into my trap with its shiny bait of rings.

  * * *

  The edited manuscript comes back to me, however, and I set to work to add the new ending on the Allison Tobias murder. Trying to figure out what to say now about Susanna’s death is more problematic. I don’t know what to do—what to write—about the turns in the story.

  One thing I can do is correct simple things like her place of birth.

  And so on a gorgeous day on which I have no intention of moving from my own sunny patio, I open the folder labeled “Susanna.” There’s the birth certificate. And there’s the photo of a teenage Susanna on a front porch with a blond boy and a white cat. And there’s the list I didn’t pay much attention to when Tammi and I were going through Bob Wing’s belongings. The only thing I remember noticing about the list is that it seemed to be a list of names and addresses.

  And that’s what it is, all right.

  But when I turn it over, I see handwriting that looks immature, unskilled. The words “My home sweet homes” are scrawled across it in pencil and underlined. Underneath there is a poorly executed sketch of a fist, but its meaning is very clear: the third finger is raised, pointing angrily up at the word “home.” It appears to me that I have in my hands a list of the various foster and group homes where Susanna lived when she was young. She didn’t live in California at all, it seems, but always in Denver. And who can blame her for not wanting anybody to be able to track her sad history. If she wanted to say she was from California, if she wanted to pretend that all of the records of her pitiable childhood were destroyed in a flood, then let her.

  Suddenly, the researcher in me kicks in. I cannot just reprint this list, I need to actually see some of these houses, take some photos, see if I can interview anybody still alive who will talk to me about her.

  Almost before I know it, I’m on a plane heading to Denver. In the luggage rack I’ve stashed an overnight case that’s big enough for boots, coat, gloves, and hat.

  * * *

  My first stop is at the house in the photograph, which is easy to match to Susanna’s list because I can see the numbers of the street address in the picture. It looks much the same as in the photograph: a medium-sized brick house with a front porch made of field stone,- two second-story gables; and painted wood everywhere there isn’t brick or stone. There is a small front yard with a slight incline and cement steps leading up to the porch. It’s all under fresh snow. The steps have not been cleared, so I leave the first footprints going up to the house. I don’t even see mailman footprints. What doesn’t show from the photograph—and may not even have been there then—is a chain-link-fenced backyard and a detached garage.

  The woman who answers the doorbell is elderly.

  “Yes?” she asks, guardedly through a locked screen door, wrapping a housecoat around her for warmth from the cold air my visit is letting into her house.

  I hold up the photograph for her to see. “I’m looking for information about this girl who may have lived here at one time.”

  The old lady unlatches the door and reaches out a hand for it.

  I place the photo into her palm, which she draws back inside again, though she doesn’t relatch the screen.

  “Who are you?” she demands, as she holds the picture up to examine it. But before I can tell her my name, she exclaims in an emotional voice, “Oh, where did you get this picture? I don’t even have a picture of her myself. It’s been so long since I’ve seen her—”

  When she looks at me, her eyes are wet.

  “You know the girl?” I ask her.

  “The girl? Oh, yes, I knew the girl, but it’s the cat I’m talking about. My precious Snowy. Sweetest cat I ever had. She was poisoned not long after this picture was taken.” With obvious reluctance she handed the photo back to me. “I could cry just thinking about her again. But I wouldn’t want that picture of her, not with who else is in it. That child was not one of my favorites.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Of course. She lived here for a good year and a half. Wouldn’t have been so long, except that midway through her parents died. Awful thing. Must have been drunk. One of them, probably him, left the car running in their garage one night. Asphyxiated them sure as somebody’d put a pillow over their faces and smothered them.” She gives me a hard look. “What became of the girl?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I’m not surprised, she was bound to go young.”

  “Murdered,” I say brutally to this hard old bat.

  “I’m not surprised by that, either. Most people get what they have coming to them. Some people think they don’t, they think there’s no justice in the universe, but I know there is, because I’ve seen it go to work time and again. Who killed her?”

  “Her husband’s on death row for it.”

  “Really. Now that’s a surprise. He was wild for Carly.”

  “Carly? Did you call her Carly? Her name’s Susanna.”

  “Well, maybe it was when you knew her, but when she lived here, it was Carly.”

  “Why was she staying with you when her parents were still living?”

  “Why? Because they wouldn’t admit the truth about their own family, so somebody wiser had to take her away from them before something worse happened.”

  “Worse than what?”

  “Worse than Carly killing her baby sister.”

  “What?”

  “Parents claimed it was crib death, but little Carly bragged about it to her school friends. Carly—why am I calling her that? That’s not what we knew her as. Carly Shugarz. We called her Sugar for short. Was there ever a child so badly misnamed as that? I’m trying to remember the name of this boy. Her boyfriend, the one she married when they were both too young. He was as bad as she was, if not worse. Lived in that group home for delinquents down the street. What was his name, started with an S . . .

  “Stuart!” the old woman says. “That was it, Stuart and Sugar.”

  * * *

  For the rest of that day and the next morning, I pay visits to other homes where Susanna stayed, as well as dropping by the Denver police and the courthouse. Amazing, isn’t it, how much easier it is to find things out about someone when you know their real name? On my way back to the airport, I glimpse a billboard advertisement for the Denver Broncos. It’s bright with their team colors: blue and orange.

  Blue and orange bath towels and washcloths . . .

  You never know what will lodge in a person’s subconscious, as the colors of the hometown football team may have stuck in hers.

  Susanna/Carly/Sugar killed her baby sister. Did she kill her parents, too?

  Susanna has known Stuart since they were young teenagers. Married him way back then. When they “met” in Bahia Beach, at the Sands Gospel Church, they pretended not to know each other. She told everyone that her first husband died in a rock-climbing accident, leaving her rich. Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Stuart told everybody that his rich wife had died, too. Maybe that wasn’t an accident, either. Stuart and Susanna both showed up at the grief group at about the same time, and they both found themselves new, rich, lonely spouses. How many times have they married and murdered?

  My god, I know how many: all I have to do is count their trophies.

  Nine rings. That number must hold the key to their killings.

  I feel more chilled than a mere coat could ever warm.

  And then, when I’m belted into my seat and the airplane’s taking off, I remember Carl Chamblin’s offhand, mocking remarks: “You met Artie? Did she seem depressed, to you? Her husband says she tried to throw herself out of the tower . . .”

  Stuart McGregor has Artie’s power of attorney, giving him legal control over everything she owns. It is entirely possible that he has been spending it all along, but what will happen when he wants it all
? When he tires of this game? It appears that he is already setting the stage for her “suicide.”

  I cannot reach for the phone in the back of the seat fast enough.

  “Tammi, it’s Marie. Please listen to me—”

  * * *

  By the time I get into my car at the Bahia Beach International Airport, my cell phone is already ringing and the caller ID says it’s “Tamara Golding.”

  “I’m back,” I say into it.

  “Thank God. Marie, I can’t find them. Remember when you went up to the Tobiases’ house, and all you wanted to do was get your assistant out safely? That’s all I’ve been trying to do first, get Artie away from him, make sure she’s safe before we do anything else.”

  “No cops?”

  “Oh, we’ve got cops on it, all right. I can be damned convincing when I have to, but they’re not finding them, either.”

  “Where have you looked?”

  “There aren’t many places to look, Marie. Their house. The church. All of her work was volunteer, and so was his, although I found out that he has quietly dropped out of all church activity since the murder. I guess he was only doing that to make himself look genuine. The fact that he doesn’t consider that to be essential anymore tells me that he doesn’t consider her to be essential anymore. He’s going to kill her, make it look like a suicide, and cut and run, Marie. How could we all have been so blind?”

  “Tammi, that was their talent and their skill, and they were good at it.”

  “Why do you think he killed Susanna?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And we don’t care right now, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Tammi, did you check the old house?”

  “Of course! That’s where he claimed she was going to kill herself, so that’s the first place we checked when we found out they weren’t at home. Marie, the truth is, they could be out grocery shopping. They could be doing something perfectly ordinary, because she doesn’t know who he is and what he wants, and he doesn’t know that we’re looking for him.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to park where I can keep an eye on their house. What about you, Marie?”

  “I’m going to go home. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “I’ll call you if anything happens.”

  “Yes, do. Thanks, Tammi.”

  “How could we have been so stupid?” she wails, just before hanging up. “It was there to see, all along.”

  “Tammi,” I say, trying to make her feel better, “it’s a lot harder to read between the lines than most people realize.” And I should know, since the lines it was all between are the ones I wrote in my own book.

  * * *

  I’m exhausted, worried, fearful for Artemis, frustrated.

  And glad to be back to the heat, the humidity, the soft, heavy air. I can’t wait to walk into my own home. But on the way, I pull into Bayfield, the housing development where Bob Wing lived first with Donna and then with Susanna. We’ve been tearing it apart—Tammi, Artie, and I—in our futile search for the elusive exonerating evidence, and by now, by necessity, we’ve all got our own keys to it. It’s not just the house we’ve searched, either, but the garage, the two cars, the crawl space above the house and the tool shed behind it. It has become an obsession with us. We know it may be crazy, but once started, we can’t seem to give up on it, because giving up means giving up on a man’s life.

  As usual, there are cars parked all up and down the streets, because these homes hold growing families with multiple vehicles. There’s a snappy green sports car parked in front of the Wings, and a van, and I wonder which neighbor owns them. My own car I park right in the driveway. Then I walk up the front path and take out my key and put it in the lock.

  As usual, the door opens without resistance and I am here again.

  This is where I’ve put the pouch of rings that nobody seems to be interested in. Once I learned that Artie wasn’t the person who would be looking for them, I realized I didn’t know enough about what—or who—I was playing with. I had thought she might try to contact me about them, trying to disguise her identity. I didn’t want to endanger myself by keeping them at my house, and when I told Tammi about it, she suggested leaving them here, where nobody would think to look. But now that I know they were trophies of crimes, I want them closer to me, so I can hand them over as evidence of Stuart and Susanna’s crimes.

  Picking them up now seems like the responsible thing to do.

  I walk through the living room, toward the kitchen, where I have stored them in a container that holds artificial sugar packets.

  As I am reaching for the jar, I hear a click.

  The hair rises on the back of my neck as I realize what it is: the turning of the dead bolt on the front door.

  Without even stopping to think about it, I drop my purse and move as quickly as I can toward the back door in the kitchen. As I reach to unlock that door, a man’s hand comes down upon my wrist and Stuart McGregor turns me around violently to face him.

  “Where are the rings, Marie?”

  “Where is Artemis, Stuart?”

  “That’s right. A lot of people are looking for her right now, aren’t they? And whose fault is that, I wonder? Could it be yours, Marie? Nosy little Marie. You had to go to Denver, didn’t you? Had to check things out. And now there’s nothing left for me to do but clean up here and go so far away that nobody will ever find me.”

  How in heaven’s name does he know all this?

  He is at least ten inches taller than I and more than a hundred pounds heavier. It takes very little pressure of his body on mine to get me to move in the direction he wants me to go—out of the kitchen, which I scan frantically for potential weapons, and down the hallway, toward the bathroom. He pushes me into it, where I see Artemis crouched on the floor of the shower stall, her mouth taped, her hands and feet taped, her eyes wide and terrified when she sees us. He has wrapped an electric cord around her neck and flung it up over the shower head. All it will take is for him to lift her a little higher, just high enough to keep her from getting a grip with her bound feet or hands.

  I put all of my sympathy for her into my eyes, which he can’t see.

  “You won’t make anybody think she killed herself,” I tell him, keeping my voice as cool as I can make it, hoping there’s no tremor in it.

  “Maybe not, but I can confuse them long enough to distract them. And you, Marie, you’re another distraction of a different kind.” He turns me to face him, grabs me by my hair, and pulls my face up toward his, intending to force me to kiss him. I let him do it. Let him feel hard resistance at first, then a melting in my lips and my body as I seem to acquiesce to him. As I slip in-finitesimally in his grasp, I bring up my hand that holds the keys and attack his face with them, aiming for his eyes.

  He yells in pain, releases his grip just enough to let me gouge him harder. I squirm in his arms with all of my strength until I’m managing to kick and shove him. When his upper arm brushes my mouth, I sink my teeth into him, and he screams and curses me. By now he’s desperate to regain control over the demon he meant to rape and kill, but I don’t stop. My life and Artie’s and Bob Wing’s are at stake in these horrible few seconds, and I am a woman infused with power and strength I didn’t even know I had. I am only vaguely aware that I am screaming. When I can, I pound him in his groin and only then does he fall back away from me, gagging and clasping himself. I follow him as he stumbles as far as the kitchen, where I grab a long-bladed knife out of a countertop holder.

  As he falls backward, I drive the knife into his upper arm, pinning him to the wall of the house. He screams, seems almost to faint, grabs his upper arm and attempts to wrench out the knife, but he can’t do it. Stuart stares out at me from eyes that shine with agony and hatred.

  I am panting and in pain myself. He slammed me against the bathroom door and doorsill, against the toilet and the sink, and I hardly felt any of it at the time, but now I f
eel almost as bad as he looks. I’m pretty sure I’m only bruised, though, and that nothing’s broken. “Nobody’s going to die on my watch today,” I tell him as I call 911. “Not even you, if I can help it.”

  I hurry back to free Artemis.

  Together we use the electrical cord to secure him so he can’t hurt us, and then we find an extension cord to use as a tourniquet to stop his bleeding. I don’t have the stomach to remove the knife from his arm and the wall. So that’s how the paramedics find him, when they arrive five minutes later.

  And all the while, even in the worst of it, there is a cool, detached part of my brain that is taking notes on everything . . .

  Anything to Be Together

  By Marie Lightfoot

  EPILOGUE

  They were a matched pair: evil for evil, no holds barred.

  If the devil had split himself into male and female he could hardly have done a better job of creating malevolence.

  They felt their attraction instantaneously when they met.

  To hear him tell it—finally, and much later—“like” attracted “like” as surely as hydrogen bonds with oxygen. It was like a sharp jolt of electricity that entered through their eyes and traveled at light speed down through their breath, hearts, minds, groins. It was love—or lust—at first sight. What did they see in each other? The devil knows his own. At a dark, submerged depth below the light of consciousness, they recognized each other. Surely there was something ancient, wicked, and intimately familiar for each in the other’s eyes.

  Before long, they knew they could do anything together, even murder—especially, and most deliciously, murder.

  * * *

  They met when they were both thirteen years old.

  The first time Stuart ever saw Susanna was unforgettable for him, as it probably was for her. He was walking past the foster home where she was living at the time in Denver; that’s all, just walking past on his way from middle school to his own group home.

  When he turned his head, he instantly met the girls eyes. She was looking at him. He had a feeling she’d been looking at him ever since he came into her line of sight.