Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver

The Widow of Pine Creek

"Sometimes help just appears from the sky."

This was an expression of her mother's and it didn't mean angels or spirits or any of that New Age stuff but meant "from thin air" — when you were least expecting it.

Okay, Mama, let's hope. 'Cause I can use some help now. Can use it bad.

Sandra May DuMont leaned back in a black-leather office chair and let the papers in her hand drop onto the old desk that dominated her late husband's office. As she looked out the window she wondered if she was looking at that help right now.

Not exactly appearing from the sky — but walking up the cement path to the factory, in the form of a man with an easy smile and sharp eyes.

She turned away and caught sight of herself in the antique mirror she'd bought for her husband ten years ago, on their fifth anniversary. Today, she had only a brief memory of that happier day; what she concentrated on now was her image; a large woman, though not fat. Quick green eyes. She was wearing an off-white dress imprinted with blue cornflowers. Sleeveless — this was Georgia in mid May — revealing sturdy upper arms. Her long hair was dark blond and was pulled back and fixed with a matter-of-fact tortoiseshell barrette. Just a touch of makeup. No perfume. She was thirty-eight but, funny thing, she'd come to realize, her weight made her look younger.

By rights she should be feeling calm and self-assured. But she wasn't. Her eyes went to the papers in front of her again.

No, she wasn't feeling that way at all.

She needed help.

From the sky.

Or from anywhere.

The intercom buzzed, startling her, though she was expecting the sound. It was an old-fashioned unit, brown plastic, with a dozen buttons. It had taken her some time to figure out how it worked. She pushed a button. "Yes?"

"Mrs. DuMont, there's a Mr. Ralston here."

"Good. Send him in, Loretta."

The door opened and a man stepped inside. He said. "Hi, there."

"Hey," Sandra May responded as she stood automatically, recalling that in the rural South women rarely stood to greet men. And thinking too: How my life has changed in the last six months.

She noticed, as she had when she'd met him last weekend, that Bill Ralston wasn't really a handsome man. His face was angular, his black hair unruly, and though he was thin he didn't seem to be in particularly good shape.

And that accent! Last Sunday, as they'd stood on the deck of what passed for a country club in Pine Creek, he'd grinned and said, "How's it going? I'm Bill Ralston. I'm from New York."

As if the nasal tone in his voice hadn't told her already.

And "how's it going?" Well, that was hardly the sort of greeting you heard from the locals (the "Pine Creakers," Sandra May called them — though only to herself).

"Come on in," she said to him now. She walked over to the couch, gestured with an upturned palm for him to sit across from her. As she walked, Sandra May kept her eyes in the mirror, focused on his, and she observed that he never once glanced at her body. That was good, she thought. He passed the first test. He sat down and examined the office and the pictures on the wall, most of them of Jim on hunting and fishing trips.

She thought again of that day just before Halloween, the state troopers voice on the other end of the phone, echoing with a sorrowful hollowness.

"Mrs. DuMont… I'm very sorry to tell you this. It's about your husband…"

No, don't think about that now. Concentrate. You're in bad trouble, girl, and this might be the only person in the world who can help you.

Sandra May's first impulse was to get Ralston coffee or tea. But then she stopped herself. She was now president of the company and she had employees for that sort of thing. Old traditions die hard — more words from Sandra May's mother, who was proof incarnate of the adage.

"Would you like something? Sweet tea?"

He laughed. "You folks sure drink a lot of iced tea down here."

"That's the South for you."

"Sure. Love some."

She called Loretta, Jim's longtime secretary and the office manager.

The pretty woman — who must have spent two hours putting on her makeup every morning — stuck her head in the door. "Yes, Mrs. DuMont?"

"Could you bring us some iced tea, please?"

"Be happy to." The woman disappeared, leaving a cloud of flowery perfume behind.

Ralston nodded after her. "Everybody's sure polite in Pine Creek. Takes a while for a New Yorker to get used to it."

"I'll tell you, Mr. Ralston —"

"Bill, please."

"Bill… It's second nature down here. Being polite. My mother said a person should put on their manners every morning the way they put on their clothes."

He smiled at the homily.

And speaking of clothes… Sandra May didn't know what to think of his. Bill Ralston was dressed… well, Northern. That was the only way to describe it. Black suit and a dark shirt. No tie. Just the opposite of Jim — who wore brown slacks, a powder-blue shirt and a tan sports coat as if the outfit were a mandatory uniform.

"That's your husband?" he asked, looking at the pictures on the wall.

"That's Jim, yes," she said softly.

"Nice-looking man. Can I ask what happened?"

She hesitated for a minute and Ralston picked up on it immediately.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I shouldn't've asked. It's —"

But she interrupted. "No, it's all right. I don't mind talking about it. A fishing accident last fall. At Billings Lake. He fell in, hit his head and drowned."

"Man, that's terrible. Were you on the trip when it happened?"

Laughing hollowly, she said, "I wish I had been, I could've saved him. But, no, I only went with him once or twice. Fishing's so… messy. You hook the poor thing, you hit it over the head with a club, you cut it up… Besides, I guess you don't know the Southern protocol. Wives don't fish." She gazed up at some of the pictures. Said reflectively, "Jim was only forty-seven. I guess when you're married to someone and you think about them dying you think it'll happen when they're old. My mother died when she was eighty. And my father passed away when he was eighty-one. They were together for fifty-eight years."

"That's wonderful."

"Happy, faithful, devoted," she said wistfully.

Loretta brought the tea and vanished again with the demure exit of a discreet servant.

"So," he said. "I'm delighted the attractive woman I picked up so suavely actually gave me a call."

"You Northern boys are pretty straightforward, aren't you?"

"You betcha," he said.

"Well, I hope it's not going to be a blow to your ego when I tell you that I asked you here for a purpose."

"Depends on what that purpose is."

"Business," Sandra May said.

"Business is a good start," he said. Then he nodded for her to continue.

"I inherited all the stock in the company when Jim died and I became president. I've been trying to run the show best I can but the way I see it" — she nodded to where the accountant's reports sat on the desk — "unless things improve pretty damn fast we'll be bankrupt within the year. I got a bit of insurance money when Jim died so I'm not going to starve, but I refuse to let something my husband built up from scratch go under."

"Why do you think I can help you?" The smile was still there but it had less flirt than it had a few minutes ago — and a lot less than last Sunday.

"My mother had this saying. 'A Southern woman has to be a notch stronger than her man.' Well, I am that, I promise you."

"I can see," Ralston said.

"She also said, 'She has to be a notch more resourceful too.' And part of being resourceful is knowing your limitations. Now, before I married Jim I had three and a half years of college. But I'm in over my head here. I need somebody to help me. Somebody who knows about business. After what you were telling me on Sunday, at the club, I think you'd be just the man for that."

When they'd met — he'd explained that he was a banker and broker. He'd buy small, troubled businesses, turn them around and sell them for a profit. He'd been in Atlanta on business and somebody had recommended he look into real estate in northeast Georgia, here in the mountains, where you could still get good bargains on investment and vacation property.

"Tell me about the company," he said to her now.

She explained that DuMont Products Inc., with sixteen full-time employees and a gaggle of high school boys in the summer, bought crude turpentine from local foresters who tapped longleaf and slash pine trees for the substance.

"Turpentine… That's what I smelled driving up here."

After Jim had started the company some years ago Sandra May would lie in bed next to his sleeping form, smelling the oily resin — even if he'd showered. The scent had never seemed to leave him. Finally she'd gotten used to it. She sometimes wondered exactly when she'd stopped noticing the piquant aroma.

She continued, telling Ralston, "Then we distill the raw turpentine into a couple different products. Mostly for the medical market."

"Medical?" he asked, surprised. He took his jacket off and draped it carefully on the chair next to him. Drank more iced tea. He really seemed to enjoy it. She thought New Yorkers only drank wine and bottled water.

"People think it's just a paint thinner. But doctors use it a lot. It's a stimulant and antispasmodic."

"Didn't realize that," he said. She noticed that he'd started to take notes. And that the flirtatious smile was gone completely.

"Jim sells…" Her voice faded. "The company sells the refined turpentine to a couple of jobbers. They handle all the distribution. We don't get into that. Our sales seem to be the same as ever. Our costs haven't gone up. But we don't have as much money as we ought to. I don't know where it's gone and I have payroll taxes and unemployment insurance due next month."

She walked to the desk and handed him several accounting statements. Even though they were a mystery to her he pored over them knowingly, nodding. Once or twice he lifted his eyebrow in surprise. She suppressed an urge to ask a troubled What?

Sandra May found herself studying him closely. Without the smile — and with this businesslike concentration on his face — he was much more attractive. Involuntarily she glanced at her wedding picture on the credenza. Then her eyes fled back to the documents in front of them.

Finally he sat back, finished his iced tea. "There's something funny," he said. "I don't understand it. There've been some transfers of cash out of the main accounts but there's no record of where the money went. Did your husband mention anything to you about it?"

"He didn't tell me very much about the company. Jim didn't mix business and his home life."

"How about your accountant?"

"Jim did most of the books himself… This money? Can you track it down? Find out what happened? I'll pay whatever your standard fee is."

"I might be able to."

She heard a hesitancy in his voice. She glanced up.

He said, "Let me ask you a question first."

"Go ahead."

"Are you sure you want me to go digging?"

"How do you mean?" she asked.

His sharp eyes scanned the accounting sheets as if they were battlefield maps. "You know you could hire somebody to run the company. A professional businessman or woman. It'd be a hell of a lot less hassle for you. Let him or her turn the company around."

She kept her eyes on him. "But you're not asking me about hassles, are you?"

After a moment he said, "No, I'm not. I'm asking if you're sure you want to know anything more about your husband and his company than you do right now."

"But it's my company now," she said firmly. "And I want to know everything. Now, all the company's books are over there." She pointed to a large, walnut credenza. It was the piece of furniture atop which sat their wedding picture.

Do you promise to love, honor, cherish and obey…

As he turned to see where she was pointing, Ralston's knee brushed hers. Sandra May felt a brief electrical jolt. He seemed to freeze for a moment. Then he turned back.

"I'll start tomorrow," he said.

Three days later, with the evening orchestra of crickets and cicadas around her, Sandra May sat on the porch of their house… No, her house. It was so strange to think of it that way. No longer their cars, their furniture, their china. Hers alone now.

Her desk, her company.

She rocked back and forth in the swing, which she'd installed a year ago, screwing the heavy hooks into the ceiling joists herself. She looked out over the acres of trim grass, boarded by loblolly and hemlock. Pine Creek, population sixteen hundred, had trailers and bungalows, shotgun apartment buildings and a couple of modest subdivisions but only a dozen or so houses like this — modern, glassy, huge. If the Georgia-Pacific had run through town, then the pristine development where Jim and Sandra May DuMont had settled would have defined which was the right side of the tracks.

She sipped her iced tea and smoothed her denim jumper. Watched the yellow flares from a half dozen early fireflies.

I think he's the one can help us, Mama, she thought.

Appearing from the sky…

Bill Ralston had been coming to the company every day since she'd met with him. He'd thrown himself into the job of saving DuMont Products Inc. When she'd left the office tonight at six he was still there, had been working since early morning, reading through the company's records and Jim's correspondence and diary. He'd called her at home a half hour ago, telling her he'd found some things she ought to know.

"Come on over," she'd told him.

"Be right there," he said. She gave him directions.

Now, as he parked in front of the house, she noticed shadows appear in the bay windows of houses across the street. Her neighbors, Beth and Sally, checking out the activity.

So, the widow's got a man friend come a-calling…

She heard the crunching on the gravel before she could see Ralston approach through the dusk.

"Hey," she said.

"You all really do say that down here," he said. "'Hey'"

"You bet. Only it's 'y'all.' Not you all.'"

"Stand corrected, ma'am."

"You Yankees."

Ralston sat down on the swing. He'd Southernized himself. Tonight he wore jeans and a work shirt. And, my Lord, boots. He looked like one of the boys at a roadside tap, escaping from the wife for the night to drink beer with his buddies and to flirt with girls pretty and playful as Loretta.

"Brought some wine," he said.

"Well. How 'bout that."

"I love your accent," he said.

"Hold on — you're the one with an accent."

In a thick mafioso drawl: "Yo, forgeddaboutit. I don't got no accent." They laughed. He pointed to the horizon. "Look at that moon."

"No cities around here, no lights. You can see the stars clear as your conscience."

He poured some wine. He'd brought paper cups and a corkscrew.

"Oh, hey, slow up there." Sandra May held up a hand. "I haven't had much to drink since… Well, after the accident I decided it'd be better if I kept a pretty tight rein on things."

"Just drink what you want," he assured her. "We'll water the geranium with the rest."

"That's a bougainvillea."

"Oh, I'm a city boy, remember." He tapped her cup with his. Drank some wine. In a soft voice he said, "It must've been really rough. About Jim, I mean."

She nodded, said nothing.

"Here's to better times."

"Better times," she said. They toasted and drank some more.

"Okay, I better tell you what I've found."

Sandra May took a deep breath then another sip of wine. "Go ahead."

"Your husband… well, to be honest with you? He was hiding money."

"Hiding?"

"Well, maybe that's too strong a word. Let's say putting it in places that'd be damn hard to trace. It looks like he was taking some of the profits from the company for the last couple of years and bought shares in some foreign corporations… He never mentioned it to you?"

"No. I wouldn't have approved. Foreign companies? I don't even hold much with the U.S. stock market. I think people ought to keep their money in the bank. Or better yet under the bed. That was my mother's philosophy. She called it the First National Bank of Posturepedic."

He laughed. Sandra May finished her wine. Ralston poured her some more.

"How much money was there?" she asked him.

"Two hundred thousand and some change."

She blinked. "Lord, I sure could use it. And soon. Is there any way to get it?"

"I think so. But he was real cagey, your husband."

"Cagey?" she drew the word out.

"He wanted to hide those assets bad. It'd be a lot easier to find if I knew why he did it."

"I don't have a clue." She lifted her hand and let it fall onto her solid thigh. "Maybe it's retirement money."

But Ralston was smiling.

"I say something silly?"

"A four-oh-one K is where you put retirement money. The Cayman Islands isn't."

"Is it illegal, what Jim did?"

"Not necessarily. But it might be." He emptied his cup. "You want me to keep going?"

"Yes," Sandra May said firmly. "Whatever it takes, whatever you find. I have to get that cash."

"Then I'll do it. But it's going to be complicated, real complicated. We'll have to file suits in Delaware, New York and the Cayman Islands. Can you be away from here for months at a time?"

A pause. "I could be. But I don't want to. This's my home."

"Well, you could give me power of attorney to handle it. But you don't know me that well."

"Let me think on that." Sandra May took the barrette out of her hair, let the blond strands fall free. She leaned her head back, looking up at the sky, the stars, the captivating moon, which was nearly full. She realized that she wasn't resting against the back of the porch swing at all but against Ralston's shoulder. She didn't move away.

Then the stars and the moon were gone, replaced by the darkness of his silhouette, and he was kissing her, his hand cradling the back of her head, then her neck, then sliding around to the front of her jumper and undoing the buttons that held the shoulder straps. She kissed him back, hard. His hand moved up to her throat and undid the top button of her blouse, which she wore fastened — the way, her mother told her, proper ladies should always do.

She lay in bed that night alone — Bill Ralston had left some hours before — and stared up at the ceiling.

The anxiety was back. The fear of losing everything.

Oh, Jim, what's going to happen? she thought to her husband, lying deep in the red clay of Pine Creek Memorial Gardens.

She thought back on her life — how it just hadn't turned out the way she'd planned. How she'd dropped out of Georgia State six months before she graduated to be with him. Thinking about how she gave up her own hopes of working in sales. About how they fell into a routine: Jim running the company while she entertained clients and volunteered at the hospital and the Women's Club and ran the household. Which was supposed to be a household full of children — that was what she'd hoped for anyway. But it never happened.

And now Sandra May DuMont was just a childless widow…

That was how the people in Pine Creek looked at her. The town widow. They knew that the company would fail, that she'd move into one of those dreadful apartments on Sullivan Street and would just melt away, become part of the wallpaper of smalltown Southern life. They thought no better of her than that.

But that wasn't going to happen to her.

No, ma'am… She could still meet someone and have a family. She was young. She could go to a different place, a big city, maybe — Atlanta, Charleston… hell, why not New York itself?

A Southern woman's got to be a notch stronger than her man. And a notch more resourceful too…

She would get out of this mess.

Ralston could help her get out of it. She knew she'd done the right thing, picking him.

When she woke up the next morning Sandra May found her wrists were cramping; she'd fallen asleep with her hands clenched into fists.

It was two hours later, when she arrived in the office, that Loretta pulled her aside, gazed at her boss with frantic, black-mascaraed eyes and whispered, "I don't know how to tell you this, Mrs. DuMont, but I think he's going to rob you. Mr. Ralston, I mean."

"Tell me."

Frowning, Sandra May sat slowly in the high-backed leather chair. Looked again out the window.

"All right, see, what happened… what happened…"

"Calm down, Loretta. Tell me."

"See, after you left last night I started to bring some papers into your office and I heard him on the phone."

"Who was he talking to?"

"I don't know. But I looked inside and saw that he was using his cell phone, not the office phone, like he usually does. I figured he used that phone so we wouldn't have a record of who he called."

"Let's not jump to conclusions. What did he say?" Sandra May asked.

"He said he was pretty close to finding everything. But it was going to be a problem to get away with it."

"'Get away with it.' He said that?"

"Yes, ma'am. Right, right, right. Then he said some stock or something was all held by the company, not by 'her personally.' And that could be a problem. Those were his words."

"Then what?"

"Oh, then I kind of bumped into the door and he heard and hung up real quick. Seemed to me, at any rate."

"That doesn't mean he's going to rob us," Sandra May said. "'Get away with it.' Maybe that just means get the money out of the foreign companies. Or maybe he's talking about something else altogether."

"Sure, maybe it does, Mrs. DuMont. But he was acting like a spooked squirrel when I came into the room." Then Loretta brushed one of her long, purple nails across her chin. "How well do you know him?"

"Not well… Are you thinking that he somehow arranged this whole thing?" Sandra May shook her head. "Couldn't be. I called him to help us out."

"But how did you find him?"

Sandra May grew quiet. Then she said, "He met me… Well, he picked me up. Sort of. At the Pine Creek Club."

"And he told you he was in business."

She nodded.

"So," Loretta pointed out, "he might've heard that you'd inherited the company and went there on purpose to meet you. Or maybe he was one of the people Mr. DuMont was in business with — doing something that wasn't quite right. What you were telling me? — about those foreign companies."

"I don't believe it," Sandra May protested. "No, I can't believe it."

She looked into her assistant's face, which was pretty and demure, yes, but also savvy. Loretta said, "Maybe he looks for people who're having trouble running businesses and moves in and, bang, cleans 'em out."

Sandra May shook her head.

"I'm not saying for sure, Mrs. DuMont. I just worry about you. I don't want anybody to take advantage of you. And we all here… well, we can't hardly afford to lose our jobs."

"I'm not going to be some timid widow who's afraid of the dark."

"This might not be just a shadow," Loretta said.

"I've talked to the man, I've looked into his eyes, honey," Sandra May said. "I reckon I'm as good a judge of character as my mama was."

"I hope you are, ma'am. For all our sakes. I hope you are."

Sandra May's eyes scanned the office again, the pictures of her husband with the fish and game he'd bagged, the pictures of the company in the early days, the groundbreaking for the new factory, Jim at the Rotary Club, Jim and Sandra May on the company float at the county fair.

Their wedding picture…

Honey, don't you worry your pretty little head about anything I'll take care of it everything'll be fine don't worry don't worry don't worry…

The words her husband had said to her a thousand times echoed in her head. Sandra May sat down in the office chair once more.

The next day Sandra May found Bill Ralston in the office, hunched over an accounting book.

She set a piece of paper in front of him.

He lifted it, frowning.

"What's this?"

"The power of attorney you were talking about. It gives you the authority to find our money, file suit, vote the company's shares — everything…" She laughed. "I must say I was having some doubts about you for a bit."

"Because I'm from New York?" He smiled.

"That War of Northern Aggression, why, it does rear its ugly head sometimes… But, no, I'll tell you why I'm giving it to you. Because a widow can't afford to be afraid of her own shadow. People see that and they sense blood in the water and next thing you know, it's good-bye. No, no, I looked you in the eye and I said to myself, I trust him. So now I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Or, should I say, my husband's money. The hidden variety." She looked at the document. "Before Jim's accident I would've run to him with a problem. And before Jim I would've run to my mother. I wouldn't've made any decisions. But I'm on my own now and I have to make my own choices. One of those choices was hiring you and trusting you. This is something I'm doing for me. Now, use that and find the money and get it back."

He read the power of attorney carefully once more, noted the signature. "It's irrevocable. You can't withdraw it."

"The lawyer said a revocable one is useless for tracing money and filing suits if you need to."

"Good." He gave her another smile… but it was different from earlier. There was a coldness to his expression. And even a hint of triumph — like you'd see on the face of a redneck Pine Creek High tackle. "Ah, Sandy, Sandy, Sandy — I'll tell you, I thought it'd take months."

She frowned. "Months?"

"Yes'm. To get control of the company, I'm talking about."

"Get control?" She stared at him. Her breathing was fast. "What're you… what're you saying?"

"It could've been a nightmare — and the worst part was I'd have to stay in this hellhole of a town for who knew how long… Pine Creek…" He put on a hillbilly accent as he said sarcastically, "Lord above, how do y 'all keep from going stark, raving mad here?"

"What are you talking about," she whispered.

"Sandy, the whole point of this was to get your company." He tapped the power of attorney. "I'll vote myself in as president, pay myself a nice, big salary and bonus, then sell the place. You'll make some money — don't worry. You're still the owner of the stock. Oh, and don't worry about that hidden money. It wasn't hidden at all. Your husband put some company money into overseas investments, like a million other businessmen last year. He got hurt a little when the market dipped. No big deal. It'll come back. You were never even close to bankruptcy."

"Why…" She gasped. "You goddamn bastard! This's fraud!" She reached for the power of attorney but he pushed her hand away.

Ralston shook his head sadly then he paused, frowning. He noticed that the rage on Sandra May's face had turned to amusement. Then she started laughing.

"What?" he asked uncertainly.

She stepped toward him. Ralston grabbed the power of attorney and eased back warily.

"Oh, relax, I'm not going to slap you upside the head — even though I ought to." Sandra May leaned past him and pushed the intercom button.

"Yes?" came the woman's voice.

"Loretta, could you come in here, please?"

"Sure, Mrs. DuMont."

Loretta appeared in the doorway. Sandra May's eyes were still on Ralston's. She said, "That power of attorney gives you the right to vote all my shares. Right?"

He glanced at his jacket pocket, where the document now rested. He nodded.

Sandra May continued, speaking to Loretta. "How many shares in the company do I own?"

"None, Mrs. DuMont."

"What?" Ralston asked.

Sandra May said, "We thought you were trying to pull something. So we had to test you. I talked to my lawyer. He said I could transfer my shares to somebody I trusted so that I didn't hold any of them. Then I'd sign the power of attorney, give it to you and see what you did. And I sure learned that fast enough — you planned to rob me blind. It was a test — and you failed, sir."

"Goddamn it. You transferred the shares?"

She laughed and nodded to Loretta. "Yep. To somebody I could trust. I don't own a bit. That power of attorney is useless. She owns a hundred percent of DuMont Products Inc."

But Ralston's shock vanished. He began to smile.

The explanation for his good mood came not from him but from Loretta. She said, "Now you listen here. You'll never guess. Bill and I own a hundred percent of the company. Sorry, honey." And she walked forward and put her arm around Ralston. "I don't think we mentioned it but Bill's my brother."

"You were in it together!" Sandra May whispered. "The two of you."

"Jim died and didn't leave me a penny!" Loretta snapped. "You owe me that money."

"Why would Jim leave you anything?" Sandra May asked uncertainly. "Why would…" But her voice faded as she looked at the knowing smile on the thin woman's face.

"You and my husband?" Sandra May gasped. "You were seeing each other?"

"For the last three years, honey. You never noticed that we were out of town at the same time? That we'd both work late the same nights? Jim was putting money away for me!" Loretta spat out. "He just never had a chance to give it to me before he died."

Sandra May stumbled backward, collapsed onto the couch. "The stock… Why, I trusted you," she muttered. "The lawyer asked who could I trust and you were the first person I thought of!"

"Just like I trusted Jim," Loretta snapped back. "He kept saying he'd give it to me, he'd open an account for me, I could travel, he'd get me a nice house… But then he died and didn't leave me a penny. I waited a few months then called Bill up in New York. I told him all about you and the company. I knew you were going to Pine Creek Club on Sunday. We figured he should come on down and introduce himself to the poor widow."

"But your last name, it's different," she said to Ralston, picking up one of his business cards and glancing at Loretta.

"Hey, not that hard to figure out," he said, lifting his palms. "It's fake." He laughed. As if this were too obvious to even mention.

"When we sell the company, honey, you'll get something," Loretta said. "Don't you fret 'bout that. In recognition of your last six months as president. Now, why don't you just head on home? Oh, hey, you don't mind if I don't call you Mrs. DuMont anymore, do you, Sandy? I really hated —"

The office door swung open

"Sandra May… you all right?" A large man stood in the doorway. Beau Ogden, the county sheriff. His hand was on his pistol.

"I'm fine," she told him.

He eyed Ralston and Loretta, who stared at him uneasily. "These them?"

"That's right."

"I come as soon as I got your call."

Ralston was frowning. "What call?"

Ogden warned, "Just keep your hands where I can see them."

"What the hell're you talking about?" Ralston asked.

"I'd ask you to keep a respectful voice, sir. You don't want to go making your problems any worse than they already are."

"Officer," Loretta said, sounding completely calm, "we've been doing some business dealings here and that's all. Everything's on the up-and-up. We got contracts and papers and everything. Mrs. DuMont sold me the company for ten dollars 'cause it's in debt and she thought me and my brother here could turn it around. Me knowing the company as good as I do since I worked for her husband for so many years. Her own lawyer did the deal. We're going to pay her a settlement as a former employee."

"Yeah, whatever," Ogden said absently; his attention was on a young, crew-cut deputy entering the office. "It matches," he told the sheriff.

Ogden nodded toward Loretta and Ralston. "Cuff 'em both."

"You bet, Beau."

"Cuff us! We haven't done anything!"

Ogden sat on the chair beside Sandra May. He said solemnly, "We found it. Wasn't in the woods, though. Was under Loretta's back porch."

Sandra May shook her head sadly. Snagged a Kleenex and wiped her eyes.

"Found what?" Ralston snapped.

"May as well 'fess up, both of you. We know the whole story."

"What story?" Loretta barked at Sandra May.

She took a deep breath. Finally she struggled to answer, "I knew something wasn't right. I figured out you two were trying to cheat me —"

"And her a poor widow," Ogden muttered. "Shameful."

"So I called Beau before I got to work this morning. Told him what I suspected."

"Sheriff," Loretta continued patiently, "you're making a big mistake. She voluntarily transferred the stock to me. There was no fraud, there was no —"

The sheriff held up an impatient hand. "Loretta, you're being arrested for what you did to Jim, not for fraud or some such."

"Did to Jim?" Ralston looked at his sister, who shook her head and asked, "What's going on here?"

"You're under arrest for the murder of Jim DuMont."

"I didn't murder anybody!" Ralston spat out.

"No, but she did." Ogden nodded at Loretta. "And that makes you an accomplice and probably guilty of conspiracy too."

"No!" Loretta screamed. "I didn't."

"A fella owns a cabin on Lake Billings come forward a couple weeks ago and says he saw a woman with Mr. DuMont on that fishing trip of his back around Halloween. He couldn't see too clear but he said it looked like she was holding this club or branch. This fella didn't think nothing of it and left town for a spell. Soon's he comes back — last month — he hears about Jim dying and gives me a call. I checked with the coroner and he said that Mr. DuMont might not've hit his head when he fell. Maybe he was hit by somebody and shoved in the water. So I reopened the case as a murder investigation. We've been checking witnesses and forensics for the past month and decided it definitely looks like murder but we can't find the weapon. Then Mrs. DuMont calls me this morning about you two and this scam and everything. Seemed like a good motive to murder somebody. I got the magistrate to issue a search warrant. That's what we found under your porch, Loretta: the billy club Mr. DuMont used to kill fish with. It had his blood and hairs on it. Oh, and I found the gloves you worn when you hit him. Ladies' gloves. Right stylish too."

"No! I didn't do it! I swear."

"Read 'em their rights, Mike. Do a good job of it too. Don't want no loopholes. And get 'em outa here."

Ralston shouted, "I didn't do it!"

As the deputy did as instructed and, one by one, led them out, Sheriff Ogden said to Sandra May, "Funny how they all say that. Broken record. 'Didn't do it, didn't do it.' Now I'm truly sorry about all this, Sandra May. Tough enough being newly widowed but to have to go through all this nonsense too."

"That's okay, Beau," Sandra May said, demurely wiping her eyes with a Kleenex.

"We'll be wanting to take a statement but there's no hurry on that."

"Anytime you say, Sheriff," she said firmly. "I want those people to go away for a long, long time."

"We'll make sure that happens. Good day to you now."

When the sheriff had left, Sandra May stood by herself for a long moment, looking at the photo of her husband taken a few years earlier. He was holding up a large bass he'd caught — probably in Billings Lake. Then she walked into the outer office, opened the mini refrigerator and poured herself a glass of sweet tea.

Returning to Jim's, no, her office, she sat down in the leather chair and spun slowly, listening to the now-familiar squeak of the mechanism.

Thinking: Well, Sheriff, you were almost right.

There was only one little variation in the story.

Which was that Sandra May had known all along about Jim's affair with Loretta. She'd gotten used to the smell of turpentine on her husbands skin but never used to the stink of the woman's trailer-trash perfume, which hung like a cloud of bug spray around him as he climbed into bed too tired even to kiss her. ("A man doesn't want you three times a week, Sandra, you better start wondering why." Thanks, Mama.)

And so when Jim DuMont drove off to Billings Lake last October, Sandra May followed and confronted him about Loretta. And when he admitted it she said, "Thank you for not lying," took the billy club and crushed his skull with a single blow then kicked him into the frigid water.

She'd thought that would be the end of it. The death was ruled accidental and everybody forgot about the case — until that man at Billings Lake had come forward and reported seeing a woman with Jim just before he'd died. Sandra May knew it was only a matter of time until they tracked her down for the murder.

The threat of a life sentence — not the condition of the company — was the terrible predicament she'd found herself in, the predicament for which she was praying for help "from the sky." (As for the company? Who cared? The "bit of insurance money" totaled nearly a million dollars. To get away with that, she would've gladly watched DuMont Products Inc. go bankrupt and given up the money Jim had socked away for his scrawny slut.) How could she save herself from prison? But then Ralston gave her the answer when he'd picked her up. He was too slick. She'd sensed a scam and it didn't take much digging to find the connection to Loretta. She figured they were planning to get the company away from her.

And so she'd come up with a plan of her own.

Sandra May now opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out a bottle of small-batch Kentucky bourbon and poured a good three fingers' worth into the iced tea. She sat back in her husband's former chair, now hers exclusively, and gazed out the window at a stand of tall, dark pine trees bending in the wind as a spring storm moved in.

Thinking to Ralston and Loretta: Never did tell you the rest of Mama's expression, did I?

"Honey," the old woman had told her daughter, "a Southern woman has to be a notch stronger than her man. And she's got to be a notch more resourceful too. And, just between you and me, a notch more conniving. Whatever you do, don't forget that part."

Sandra May DuMont took a long drink of iced tea and picked up the phone to call a travel agent.