Pick Your Poison

27

I climbed back in the 4Runner and was back on the freeway heading toward Galveston seconds later. Why had Steven told Kate he needed the CD if the same program on disk had been here in his office all along? Unless he realized the CD contained important information.

Okay. So maybe Steven wanted to help me uncover the truth, and this was his latest attempt at inserting himself back into my life. Somehow he figured out before I did that the CD was the key.

My IQ through most of my so-called investigating had equaled my bra size: meager. But as blind as I’d been, believing for one nanosecond that Steven Bradley had borrowed the CD to help me find Ben’s murderer took the cake, the ice cream, and the hired clown.

Despite his newfound temperance, Steven still took care of Steven. If he wanted that CD, he had a damn good reason, one that didn’t involve helping anyone but himself.

Checking the rearview mirror, I watched the wake of dirty water, knowing I shouldn’t be speeding in this weather. I might pirouette straight into the hereafter on a highway so treacherously close to impassable.

But I didn’t care about my safety. Not anymore. I was dealing with the realization that I had badly misread every person in my life besides Kate. But folks were finished pissing in my boots and telling me it was rainwater. Feldman wouldn’t be tossing me out this time. Not before I had the truth.

An umbrella would have been useless with the wind commanding the rain every which way, so I settled for my purse, holding it over my head as I rushed to the Feldmans’ front door. My hand rested on the bell, but I didn’t press it. Why would Feldman or Hamilton ever invite me in? So I tried the knob.

The door opened.

“Anyone home?” I called into the chandelier-lit foyer.

No response.

I stepped inside, immediately creating a puddle at my feet. I looked around for a mat to wipe my sopping Keds and discovered that an unlocked door wasn’t the only thing out of the ordinary at the Feldman home.

A trail of what looked like blood meandered from the left and stopped at the front door. Some blood had even rusted the small pond around my feet.

I announced my presence louder. “Is anybody here?”

“What are you doing in my house?” called Helen Hamilton from the landing. She clutched a wad of lingerie in one hand and a hair dryer in the other and sounded pretty pissed off, but then, so was I.

“The door was open,” I said.

“It’s still open. Find your way out the same way you came in.”

“Do you know who I really am, Hamilton?”

She sneered down at me. “I know exactly who you are. Now get the hell out, and if you’re smart, you’ll get off this island.”

She disappeared into a room off the landing.

“If you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you,” I muttered, tackling the curving stairs. I hadn’t had one of those lovely pain pills lately and my thighs started aching again, making it seem like a very long climb to the second floor.

Hamilton was packing, if that was what you wanted to call it. Actually, she was throwing things into a suitcase as fast as I’d seen anyone move in a long time.

I leaned on the door frame. “Did you know there’s blood in your foyer?”

She ignored me and continued her frenzied raid of the dresser.

“Are you hurt? Did Feldman do something to you?” I asked.

She whirled. “You think that’s my blood down there?” She shook her head. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Then where did it come from?”

“I could make an educated guess, but I won’t.” She swiped the dresser top, clearing off hairbrushes and perfume bottles. After gathering them up, she stuffed them into the suitcase.

“Did you ask your husband what happened down there?”

“I don’t have time for your questions,” she said.

“Where’s Feldman? I need to talk to him before the police get here and arrest him.”

“He’s not here. And that’s the problem.” She paused, a hand on her hip. “You see, he never leaves. And I mean never. Samuel has this phobia about outdoors. It’s been three years since he’s even seen the sun. But I came home and bingo—he’s gone! No explanation except the blood.”

She closed her suitcase, retucked her blouse into her skirt, and slid her long, skinny feet into shoes retrieved from under the bed.

Those shoes. I’d seen them before, hadn’t I?

She glanced briefly into the mirror above the oak dresser and picked up the suitcase.

“Wait a minute. You’re leaving without even trying to find your husband?”

She pushed past me and I followed her down the stairs.

“I’m not waiting around for the cops to arrive or for someone to add my blood to that.” She nodded at the marble floor.

“Feldman was involved in murder, and I’m thinking you might know quite a lot about that involvement,” I said.

“I’m not saying a word without a lawyer. But they have to find me first.”

She hurried out before I could move, slamming the door after her.

Knowing I should call 911 and tell the police to follow her, I instead sat on the bottom stair, anger, fear, and confusion taking over. Maybe Jeff got my message. Maybe he was available.

I opened my purse to find my cell phone, but instead my fingers touched something at first unfamiliar. And then I remembered the small videotape from Hamilton’s office. I’d forgotten all about it.

I imagined myself huddled behind the door that day at Parental Advocates, holding my breath as Hamilton came in for the copy of the check.

And then it clicked.

Hamilton had come back to her office with a man that afternoon. I’d heard his voice. Probably wasn’t Feldman the Phobic, if what she said about him earlier was true. I had a sick feeling I knew who it was, though.

Hamilton’s shoes, the ones I’d seen her put on upstairs, were the same Pappagallo shoes tucked under Steven’s coffee table the night I went to his apartment about the canceled checks. Could the man who accompanied Hamilton to her office that afternoon have been Steven? Had I felt so guilty about rejecting him, been so worried he’d relapse into alcoholism, I chose to be blinded by his “I’m so in love with you” act? Hell, they write country songs more believable than the game he’d been playing with me.

The checks Daddy had written to Steven loomed large in this picture. My ex-husband had indeed changed in the last few months, but not in the direction I thought. When he stopped drinking, that conniving mind of his had kicked into high gear. And then the night Steven and Jeff had fought on my lawn returned like it happened yesterday. What if Steven had dismantled the attic looking for evidence connecting Ben and Daddy? What if he was leaving my house right after he’d done just that—and was not arriving, as I’d assumed? He probably spotted Jeff Kline’s car across the street, and knowing the neighborhood, correctly assumed that a stranger parked there at one A.M. had to be either a cop or private security. That was when he came back in the house and fabricated the blueprint cover story—after making enough noise to ensure that I awoke and investigated. I nodded, my mouth settling into a frown. Another betrayal, one I should have expected.

I stared at the tape I held. Here was the proof. When I had hidden behind the door at Parental Advocates, the camera was recording everything. With the door wide-open, it would have taped the outer office—and whoever was in the outer office.

I turned the tape over and over, eyes closed, jaw tight. “Don’t do this, Abby,” I said. “You don’t need to see this right now. Give the tape to Jeff.”

I was feeling what Steven probably felt every time he thought about taking a drink. I shouldn’t. This will hurt me. Don’t destroy what little hope you have left.

And like Steven, I couldn’t stop myself.

“There’s got to be a VCR somewhere in this mausoleum,” I said, rising.

After wandering through the lavish home, I found a room large enough to accommodate the Houston Rockets for preseason practice. Beyond the pool table and bar sat a big-screen TV. I supposed that if you hadn’t left your house for three years, it helped to have a few fancy toys to pass the time. Feldman had all the equipment I needed to confirm my suspicions about Steven, even an adapter for the smaller-size tape.

Not the greatest quality, I noted, once I got things working. The picture was huge, very grainy.

There I was, sneaking around in the hallway. And there I was hiding after I heard them arrive. The door opened and... yes! I could make out a man’s figure framed in the front doorway. But the daylight behind him made it hard to make out his features. In the next few frames, Hamilton walked back out with the paper in her hand and picked something up—her purse—then shut the door. I rewound, stopped the tape, and advanced frame by frame, then paused and took in the man’s poorly focused face. That hairline, the curve of those lips, God, I knew them almost as well as my own. Knew the face of a killer.