The sweet golden parachute

CHAPTER 25

Inside the church, they could hear the first siren approach, coming very fast.

Des, most likely, Mitch reflected as he lay there on the floor, his arms lashed together beneath him. Not a very comfortable position-especially with Eric holding that sharp, cold blade against his throat. Eric was behind him on the floor with his back resting against the edge of the dais and his left arm wrapped around Mitch’s chest, hugging Mitch against him. Mitch felt powerless, utterly terrified. And, yet, strangely comforted. Being held this way reminded him of when he was a little boy and his dad would read him Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Although Nathan Berger had smelled much better than Eric Vickers. And he’d never held a knife to his only son’s tender young throat.

Danielle sat before them in the front row of pews, wringing her hands. Her eyes darted wildly with fear behind those wire-framed glasses.

Mitch heard the cruiser pull up outside with a screech. A car door open and shut. Footsteps. Her footsteps. A voice. Her voice.

“She’ll clear all of the Food Pantry people out of here,” he said hoarsely as he lay there, quaking with fear. “In a few more minutes the others will get here from Westbrook. They’ll close off this intersection and reroute the traffic. It’ll take another twenty minutes for the big boys from Meriden to show. We have some time, is what I’m trying to say. We could use it productively.”

“Or you could shut the hell up,” Eric growled.

“Don’t think I can, Eric. I chatter when I’m nervous. I know this about myself. I also know it’s not too late to make the best out of this situation. Why don’t you tell me how it happened? Maybe I can help you turn things around.”

“You can’t even save yourself. What makes you think you can save us?”

“Oh, what does it matter now, Eric?” Danielle demanded hotly. She wasn’t merely scared. She was pissed at him. Why, because it was his plan? “Tell Mitch how it happened. What can it hurt?”

In the distance, Mitch could hear the wail of the other sirens.

“Fine, then I’ll tell him,” Danielle snapped, heaving her chest. “It was just supposed to be about the Gullwing, I swear. We needed the money, Mitch. The farm is… we’re so strapped for cash. But the more we talked about it, the more it all grew into something…”

“Bolder,” Eric spoke up.

“That’s what you call it?” asked Mitch.

“Absolutely,” Eric replied, his voice brimming with pride. Which Mitch found incredibly bizarre-not that any of this wasn’t bizarre. “Let me tell him, hon. It’s my story.” Eager to share it now, Eric shifted himself around so that he was kneeling directly over Mitch, looking right down into his eyes as he held that knife to his throat. “See, I got to talking with this teamster-type guy at the Union Square green market last summer,” he began, blue eyes burning bright with intensity. “He drove a truck in from Long Island every Wednesday and Saturday for one of the old farmers out there. And he started telling me his brother had just gone to jail for stealing exotic cars for some shady dealer who’d sell them overseas. I immediately thought of Mom’s Gullwing, right? He put me in touch with them. At first, they only offered me a few grand for it. I dickered with them all winter. Held out for twenty thou. They finally caved since the Gullwing’s such a collector’s item. Gave me my choice of delivery dates. I picked one that coincided with the Kershaw brothers’ release from prison. That way absolutely everyone would figure Stevie and Donnie were behind it-especially if they had a reason to be at Four Chimneys Farm that same morning.”

“They were ideal fall guys,” Mitch suggested as more cruisers pulled up outside, car doors opened and closed. “Congenital bad boys who have a real grudge against your family.”

“They were perfect. And it was even recycling day.”

“Which gave you the perfect opening to take out Pete. Anyone investigating his death would assume that Stevie and Donnie bashed the guy’s head in so he couldn’t identify them to the police. But it was you and Danielle who stole the Gullwing, wasn’t it? You and Danielle who went looking for Pete. You didn’t have to go far either-you encountered him as soon as you pulled out of your driveway. If he noticed the Gullwing, he probably figured it was Poochie. Had no reason to think otherwise. Not until you two beat him to death with that length of pipe. One of you took a tumble in the process.”

“I tripped in the dark,” Danielle said miserably, seated there with her shoulders slumped. “I wasn’t hurt. It was nothing.”

“Once Pete was dead you delivered the Gullwing to the truck that was waiting in the commuter parking lot.”

Eric nodded. “I did that while Danielle ran back up to our house, quick as a bunny, for my truck. She grabbed up Pete’s re-turnables, then picked me up at the commuter lot. It was still dark out. No one saw us.”

“On your way home, you dropped Pete’s bottles and cans off at the Kershaw place, the better to incriminate them. Then you returned home to your morning chores and no one was the wiser. Everyone figured Stevie and Donnie were the culprits. Everyone except for Des. She never fell for it. Not that she had the slightest idea it was you. No one did.”

“How did you figure it out?” Eric demanded, crouching over him with that damned knife.

“You told me,” Mitch replied, swallowing carefully. “The other day in the coal cellar, when you were being all jealous and paranoid about Danielle and Mark.”

“What did I?…”

“You said that madness runs in your family. A very odd admission for you to make, considering how you won’t side with Claudia’s attempt to have your mother declared legally incompetent. You won’t even acknowledge that your mother has a problem. So what was I to make of that remark? I didn’t know. Not until this morning when Des and I were doing damage to some doughnuts. I always think best when I’m having a sugar rush. And here’s what I came up with: You knew that crazy old Pete was your uncle. That he was worth millions. You weren’t supposed to know. Claudia didn’t, but you did. How, did Glynis tell you?”

“John J. did,” Eric replied. “Grandfather wanted me to know the truth, one man to another, so he wrote a letter to me before he died. Gave it to his lawyer, Glynis’s dad, and instructed him to hand it to me on my twenty-first birthday. It was our secret. Strictly a guy thing. Grandfather never wanted Claudia to know. She was a girl, therefore he regarded her as a delicate flower.” Eric let out a harsh laugh. “Not a keen judge of character, old John J.”

“Why now, Eric? What made you decide to kill Pete now?”

“That’s all Claudia’s fault,” Eric answered bitterly. “She’s determined to seize power over the family pursestrings. And believe me, Mitch, the day Claudia gets Mom declared crazy is the day she puts Four Chimneys Farm out of business. She hates us. That’s why the twisted bitch wants control-so she can plow us under. That’s why we came up with this plan. She has her plan, we had ours.”

“Small difference,” Mitch argued, hearing the whirring of a helicopter in the distance. “Hers doesn’t involve killing anyone.”

“Doesn’t it? She wants to take away Mother’s control over her own life. Isn’t that as bad as having her killed? So what if the old girl likes her brandy? So what if she hoards candy bars? You’re supposed to make allowances for the people you love, not destroy them. Besides, this has never been about Mother. It’s about how Claudia wants to ruin us. We had to fight her.”

Many more vehicles pulled up outside now. Doors slammed. Voices shouted. Boots pounded on the pavement. The hostage unit from Meriden. They sounded like an invading army. As Mitch lay there on the church floor in terrified silence, blood pounding in his ears, he wondered if they would try to negotiate with Eric. Or would they just blow him away? So far, Mitch’s cell phone had remained silent. No one had called yet to establish contact.

Danielle started toward the windows for a look, the floorboards creaking under her feet.

“Stay away from those windows!” Eric cried out, his knife blade nearly pricking Mitch’s skin. “Are you nuts?”

She halted in her tracks. “I-I’m sorry. Just wanted to see…”

“Sit back down, you idiot!”

Danielle returned to her pew, cowering.

Ordinarily, Mitch might have felt pity for her. But he was well past the point of extending any human kindness to Danielle Vick-ers. “Your farm matters that much to you?” he asked Eric.

Eric blinked at him in surprise. “Well, yeah. Small farming’s our mission. We bring something vital into people’s lives. We connect them to the land. If we lose the farm that connection will be gone forever. And we’ll go under by next winter without help. We need more land, more sheep, more money. Lots more. Mother won’t loan it to us. She’s into the whole Yankee self-reliance thing.”

“And the banks won’t extend us another penny,” Danielle added woefully, her eyes searching Mitch’s for understanding. “We’ve devoted our adult lives to Four Chimneys Farm, Mitch. We can’t go under. We just can’t.”

“By taking the Gullwing we squared away our cash flow problems until green market season,” Eric explained. “By eliminating Pete we’ve added nearly twenty million dollars to the family piggy bank.”

“You make it all sound like sensible financial planning,” Mitch said in disbelief.

“We were responding to Claudia’s provocation,” Danielle insisted. “If she hadn’t been so greedy, none of this would have happened. It’s all her fault.”

“Guy Tolliver’s death was her fault, too?”

“Tolly was nothing more than a sleazy opportunist,” Eric said disgustedly. “He didn’t deserve to inherit the family’s art collection. “That’s ours.”

Mitch considered their words for a moment as the helicopter drew nearer and the edge of that knife remained poised to sever his jugular vein. How long would he last if Eric used it? How many minutes before his life would bleed right out of him-five, ten? “Did it ever occur to you two that Claudia might be genuinely concerned about Poochie’s health? She refuses to see a doctor. If Social Services launches a mental competency investigation then she’ll be forced to see one. What if that’s why Claudia is doing this?”

“Not possible,” Eric responded. “You don’t know my sister like I do.”

“Here’s what I know,” Mitch said. “I know that you’ve never been the happy, smiling people who you appeared to be. You’ve fooled pretty much everyone in Dorset. You sure fooled me. Danielle, that way you cozied up to Mark was really smooth. Plus you are truly gifted at dishing up vicious, untrue family gossip. First you convinced me that Claudia drove Mark away by being such a greedy bitch. Then you told Des he might have stolen the Gullwing to get back at her. None of which was real. Mark is just a middle-aged guy going through a rough patch. It’s you who planted the idea that he left her over her so-called power grab. Which I’m still not convinced was ever any such thing. I think Claudia loves Poochie and is trying to do right by her. You convinced people otherwise. But let me ask you something stupid-if you guys were so desperate for money why not just kill Poochie from the get-go?”

“She’s my mother,” Eric said simply. “I could never kill her.”

So he’d been wrong about that part. So had Des. Not that it mattered anymore. Staying alive mattered. Seeing Des again mattered. “But you could savagely kill Pete and Tolly,” he pressed on, fighting the fear in his voice. “And be damned calculating about it, too. You made it seem as if someone not too bright had done both killings. First by planting Pete’s haul at the Kershaw place. Then by making Tolly’s death look like a clumsily staged suicide. Although that didn’t exactly stick. People like Des have a lot of experience with this kind of thing.”

“Maybe they do,” Eric admitted. “But they’re under enormous pressure to crack a case like this. If you hadn’t shown up here I guarantee you they would have dragged the Kershaw brothers away today and interrogated them day and night until one of them signed a confession.”

“Des doesn’t do things that way.”

“She’s just the resident trooper. It would be out of her hands.”

Eric wasn’t totally off base, but Mitch wouldn’t admit it to him. “I’ll concede that you successfully drew the law’s attention away from yourselves. You even have a back-up fall guy waiting in the wings.” He turned his attention back to Danielle. “Last night at the Mucky Duck you told me Mark withdrew his last five grand so he could run off with you. Was that for real?”

“I let Mark believe it was,” she answered in a tiny voice. “He thinks that… that we’re involved.”

“He’s not alone. When I saw how you looked I figured you and he had just had a tumble upstairs on his office sofa.”

She shot a nervous glance at Eric. “That’s never happened.”

“Of course not,” Mitch said. “The reason you looked that way was because you’d just dragged Tolly’s body into the woods and poured lye down his throat.”

“It’s true,” she admitted. “We took care of him as soon as we left Claudia’s house. Poochie didn’t make it easy for us, returning to Claudia’s for dinner the way she did. That was why we had to carry him down to the woods.”

“Meanwhile, Mark makes for a great suspect. He’s a family insider, broke, emotionally troubled. I can see why you’d point the law right at him.”

“Not exactly,” Eric said darkly.

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

“That wasn’t our intention. We had long-term plans for Mark.”

“I don’t understand, what did you?…” Mitch’s voice caught in his throat. “My God, you weren’t done, were you? You were going to kill her. That’s it, isn’t it? Claudia was next.”