Lipstick On A Pig

Chapter 20

The pounding in my head was the first sign that I’d woken up. Slowly, I opened my eyes. All I could see around me was darkness; I had no idea where I was. Moving my arms and legs I noticed my arms were tied behind my back and my legs were tied together. I was on my side, and in such an awkward position that it was impossible to sit upright.

“Oh great, you’re up,” said a vaguely familiar female voice from somewhere. I groaned slightly and tried to force my eyes to focus. A moment later I saw who was talking to me. It was Jonathan Cork’s secretary, Dorthy MacMillan.

“You,” I said, half accusatorily, half confused.

“Yes, me,” she replied.

Suddenly something clicked.

“Ohhhh,” I said. “Your car isn’t in the parking lot because you’re the one who tried to drive me off the road last night.”

The older woman smirked. “Yes, it was. I wrecked the front end of my Toyota, but told the body shop I simply hit the fence at my home. By the end of the day today there will be no sign that anything had ever happened.”

“So the Forrester brothers had nothing to do with the murders? It was all you?”

The woman barked out a laugh. It was a harsh sound, with no humor in it.

“Those morons? They’re too scared of Jonathan to ever do anything about his girlfriends. They don’t have the guts.”

“But you do,” I replied.

“Of course I do,” she said. “None of those women were good enough for him.”

Great. I was dealing with a crazy person here.

“But you were,” I said. “The loyal secretary.” I didn’t really know where I was going with this conversation, I just wanted to keep her talking while I figured things out. It looked like we were in her office, but with the blinds drawn and the door closed. I briefly considered trying to scream loud enough to get Jonathan Cork’s attention, but when I thought about the layout of this office, I realized his office was down the hall and around the corner with all the other executives—at least seven or eight offices down. There was no way he’d manage to hear me if I screamed, and then the secretary would kill me for sure.

“So you killed them all,” I said. “Jessica, Laura and Ella?”

The woman nodded. “Yes. You were the first one to link the three women. Even the police haven’t made that connection yet. The Portland police didn’t figure it out when Ella disappeared, and the Willow Bay police haven’t asked about the other girls either.”

“How did you know that I’d figured it out?” I asked. “Did Jonathan tell you about it?”

The woman laughed again. “No, of course not. Jonathan is terrified that he’s going to get arrested for all the murders, even though I always made sure he had an alibi. That’s why you’re still alive; we have to wait for him to leave work and go to the bar where he’s meeting Andrew and Lester Forrester in an hour. When he’s there, that’s when I’ll kill you, and that way there will be no way he can be blamed for your murder.”

“You will though. The police will catch you.”

“How? No one even suspects me.”

“My friends do,” I lied. “We’ve been trying to figure out who killed Jessica Oliver. We know it wasn’t Jonathan. We know that it was someone close to him, and you’re our prime suspect.”

“If that were true you wouldn’t have sounded so surprised when you woke up,” the woman replied. Damn it. She had called my bluff. I was really regretting not texting anybody to tell them where I was. I had been in the building with a murderer after all.

“Why don’t you just let me go and I promise not to tell anyone what you’ve done for a few days?” I offered. “I can give you a seventy-two hour head start, you can go to Mexico or something. No one will ever find you.”

The woman rolled her eyes. “I expected better from you, at least. You can’t bargain with me. You know my secret. I’m going to kill you.”

Great. I definitely had to get out of here. I needed a distraction, or something, but first I needed to get my hands free so I could use my magic if I absolutely needed to. I started asking questions, partly out of curiosity, partly just to keep her talking.

“When you killed Jessica, why did… ummm… a witness… report seeing a man near the area?” I asked, remembering the pigs. I imagined the woman wouldn’t have known anything about it, but she nodded.

“Yes, that was unexpected. Jessica had gone home after her day in Willow Bay, and I killed her there. I had heard about your encounter with her earlier that day from Jonathan, as she called him in a fit immediately after it happened. I thought I could move suspicion onto you by leaving the body with the pigs. Plus, by leaving her with the pigs I thought they might eat her and leave no trace she was killed at all. I was going to chop her up a bit before I left, when I heard a random drunk person nearby. That was why I left the body as it was.”

“You do realize pigs don’t actually eat people, right?” I asked as I began to fiddle with the rope tying my wrists together. If I could just get it a little bit looser, I knew I could possibly free one of my hands.

“Well, it was just a thought. It wasn’t a necessary part of my plan.”

“Not like Ella Port,” I replied. “They never found her body.”

“No, they didn’t. I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want them to link her disappearance to Laura’s murder. I wanted them to think it was totally separate. Just like I wanted them to think that you, or someone near you, had killed Jessica Oliver after her outburst.”

“Well that didn’t exactly go well for you.”

“No, it didn’t. The police chief here refused to even consider the possibility when I offered it up.”

“I’m shocked,” I deadpanned.

“Small towns are ridiculous. The loyalty you show for each other, it’s sickening.”

“I’m sorry you failed to frame me for murder. How did you find out we had made the connection between the three murders, anyway?”

“When you confronted Jonathan by his car, I was still here. I could see the three of you from my window, so I opened it, and your voices carried.”

That was right, the window in the secretary’s office overlooked the parking lot.

“Why was I the only one you tried to kill?”

“I thought the dumb Asian one was in the car with you. I saw the two of you following the Forrester brothers after the funeral, though you left pretty quickly. Still, the fact that you were there at all meant you were still trying to investigate the murders. I had to get rid of you. You’d already made the connection with Ella.”

“Sophie’s a lot smarter than you are,” I retorted, pretending to try and get up to attack the woman, and using the movement to try and force my hand out of the rope. I got about halfway there; if I could just get my knuckle over about an inch further I’d be golden.

“See what I mean about small town loyalty?”

“And yet you killed three women because you’re in love with your boss and he chose them over you,” I said. I wanted to get a rise out of the secretary. It was a risk; I knew she might bump up her plan to kill me, but I also knew that if I got her a bit more agitated I might be able to take the chance to get my hands free and escape. I didn’t want her to be able to see what I was doing. “You’re so loyal you even followed him when he moved his office from Chicago to Portland.”

“They weren’t good enough for him,” she snapped at me. “His wife isn’t either. She’s nothing more than a vapid cow. He doesn’t realize that he should be with me, that I’ve been doing this for him.”

“Why haven’t you killed his wife then?” I asked.

“They have children; it would break their heart. I’m not a monster,” Dorothy MacMillan replied without a hint of irony.

“You realize Jonathan’s never going to be with you, right? He likes them young, hot and blonde. You might be blonde, but you don’t fit either of the other two demographics.”

“Stop talking,” the secretary ordered. “You’re wrong. He does love me; he just knows he can’t be with me.”

“Just like he knew he couldn’t be with those other women?”

“I didn’t kill those women because I was jealous. I killed them to protect him, damn it!”

Dorothy MacMillan slammed her hand on the table, and I took the opportunity to yank my hand out of the ropes. It worked, my hand slipped free! I tried to act like nothing had happened, keeping my hands behind me until I saw the right opportunity.

“That’s a lie you tell yourself to feel better about being a psychopath,” I retorted. I wanted to engage her. I wanted her to lose control, because only then could I cast a spell without her knowing about it.

“I’m not a psychopath,” the woman hissed at me.

“You absolutely are. You killed three women because they were sleeping with the boss you’re secretly in love with, and you’re about to kill me because I figured it out. But what would you do if I screamed right now? What if Jonathan heard me? What would you do then? Would you kill him, too?”

I opened my mouth as if to cry out, and MacMillan ran toward me. As soon as she was near me, I kicked out with both my legs and kicked her right in the stomach.

I could feel the breath escaping from her.

“You little bitch,” she screamed at the same time as I whispered “fortitudoroa,” pointing at myself. I felt that familiar release of energy passing from me as I cast the spell, but then I felt something more.

It was like every muscle in my body was alive. I could practically feel every individual muscle fiber in my body, and every one of them was tensed, like it was ready to go. I pulled my feet apart and the rope holding my legs together broke apart like it was a piece of thread.

As MacMillan got up to her feet, she launched at me. I waited for her to hit me, then hit her in the face. I’d never hit anyone so hard in my life. It was like my hand was like a slingshot; my muscles tensed then released at a speed I could never have fathomed. I heard the crack of her nose, and blood began to spurt everywhere.

“You broke my nose,” she cried, and I could tell she was starting to panic. I looked at the door and decided to run for it. If I could make it outside, there was no way she could kill me there.

The secretary noticed me running toward the door and grabbed a crowbar from under her desk. That must have been what she was planning on using to kill me. I tried to make it there faster, but she threw the crowbar in between my legs and I tripped.

With a speed I had never imagined she had, MacMillan ran up and grabbed the crowbar from between my feet and brought it down on my head.

I grabbed it, and with my magical strength it felt like it weighed nothing. I picked up the crowbar, with Dorothy MacMillan still holding on to one end, and she began to scream. With all of my newfound strength I threw her and the crowbar back into the wall behind her. Her head hit the wall with a sickening thud and she fell to the ground, knocked unconscious.

“Nonfortitudoroa,” I whispered quietly to myself, just as Jonathan Cork entered the office.

“What the hell?” he asked when he looked inside.

“Call the police,” I ordered. “Your secretary just tried to kill me.”

Jonathan just stared at me with a blank look for a while.

“Do it,” I ordered forcefully, and he grabbed his phone and fumbled with it for a minute as he called nine-one-one. I found my purse in the corner of the room and dug my phone out of it. The first person I called was Jason. I explained to him what had happened as quickly and succinctly as possible.

“I’ll be right there,” he told me straight away. “I’m so glad you’re ok.”

The next person I called was Sophie, then Charlotte, who was already in Portland and promised to come over straight away.

“I knew I shouldn’t have left you at home by yourself today,” Charlotte muttered into the phone.

“It’s not like I was asking for this to happen,” I replied.

“Stay there. I’m coming.”

I didn’t manage to stay strong for that long. As soon as I hung up the phone with Charlotte, as I looked at the secretary who had tried to kill me, I broke down into tears.