Vows, Vendettas and a Little Black Dress Page 15

  “No! Wait, you don’t understand!” I urged Mary Ann to join me as we chased them down. I didn’t exactly know what was going on but I felt sure that there was safety in numbers.

  “They’re coming for us, Jerry!” I heard the woman cry and immediately their pace increased again. I panted after them, the sleeker and fitter Mary Ann easily keeping up with me.

  “Why are we chasing them?” Mary Ann asked between breaths.

  “No time to explain,” I panted. “Just come’n get them!”

  “Oh, my God, they’re coming to get us!” the man shouted and their running became even faster. These weren’t just joggers, they were frickin’ Olympic sprinters.

  But still I kept after them. I ran as if my life depended on it because I had a horrible feeling that it might. Now even Mary Ann was panting; sweat shone off her face, giving her that I-just-got-a-facial glow.

  And then, just like that we were out of the park and on the street. Of course we hadn’t come out the way I had hoped we would. Mary Ann’s car was parked blocks away. I paused for a moment, unsure if we were safe. Mary Ann bent over and put her hands on her knees.

  And that’s when I saw the police car. A huge rush of relief poured over me as I started to raise my hand to wave it down. But the joggers were faster. They descended on the cop car, waving their arms in the air as if they were on a runway directing an aircraft.

  The squad car slowed to a stop and one of the officers got out. I smiled at him; my knees now barely steady enough to keep me on my feet. But the cop wasn’t looking at me. He was actively listening to the joggers.

  By the time he did get to us he looked more irritated than helpful. “This couple says you jumped out of the bushes and tried to attack them.”

  “No!’ Mary Ann said quickly. Unlike me, she had caught her breath. “We didn’t want to attack them! We just wanted to get them, isn’t that right, Sophie?”

  I wheezed and shook my head. “Chase them then?” Mary Ann asked. She smiled at the police officer apologetically. “I’m sorry, but I don’t really know what’s going on.” She turned back to me. “Was this about the ladybug?”

  “No! Someone shot at us!” I gasped. Unlike Mary Ann I was not glistening. I was just plain ol’ sweaty. It was pouring from my hairline into my eyes.

  “They shot at you?” the officer asked skeptically. “These people?” He gestured with his thumb to the joggers who were carefully keeping their distance.

  “We never shot at anyone! We were jogging! Isn’t that right, Jerry?”

  “That’s right! I’ve been writing to my councilmen for years about how we need to make our parks safe but does he listen? No! And now look! We’ve been forced to outrun members of a girl gang!”

  “A girl gang?” I repeated. My voice was finally coming back. I grabbed the fabric at the bottom of Mary Ann’s baby-doll tank and held it out. “Since when do gang members shop at Banana Republic?”

  “Okay,” the officer sighed. “Why don’t we all just start from the beginning?”

  That of course prompted an explosion of chatter from all four of us with the joggers carrying on about ambush attacks, Mary Ann contemplating ladybugs and me screaming about fallen squirrels.

  Somewhere in the process of retelling our stories we all lost credibility. The police officer did eventually agree to send his partner out to see if he could find the murdered rodent but to no avail. It was gone as was all evidence that proved anything nefarious had ever happened. Well, that wasn’t quite true. It was painfully obvious that Mary Ann and I had come dangerously close to giving two joggers a heart attack.

  “It sounds like the two of you have been through a lot lately,” the officer said after I told him about Dena and how the sound of that gunshot mirrored the one I had just heard. “When we’re frightened and traumatized our brains play tricks on us. It’s absolutely normal.”

  “My brain isn’t playing tricks on me!” I insisted. “I swear it was the exact same sound I heard when someone shot my friend while using a silencer!”

  The officer regarded me carefully before turning to Mary Ann. “You were there the night of the shooting, too, is that right?”

  Mary Ann nodded. She seemed incredibly uncomfortable.

  “Did you hear a sound like the one you heard that night while you two were walking on the trail?”

  “I heard…something,” she hedged.

  “But was it the same sound?” the officer prodded. The clouds were moving over the sky and the panicked joggers were no longer panicking. Now they just looked pissed.

  “I can’t say it was the same sound,” Mary Ann hedged.

  “But was it similar?”

  Mary Ann shot me a slightly desperate look. “I’m so sorry but…I can’t really say that either.”

  The officer sighed. “Don’t worry about it.” He smiled sympathetically at me. “You shouldn’t feel embarrassed about this but it couldn’t hurt to talk to someone. There are lots of great psychiatrists who deal with posttraumatic stress. I’m sure your health-care provider could give you some names.”

  I shook my head. I was afraid that if I tried to answer him I’d end up screaming.

  The officer let us know that we were free to leave (much to the dismay of the joggers) and even gave me and Mary Ann a lift to her car.

  I let Mary Ann drive me back to my place and I even let her in but it was a full five minutes after she had been sitting on my couch, pulling on her fingertips and staring at me with those apologetic, worried eyes that I finally pulled it together enough to speak to her.

  “How could you not remember that sound?” I snapped. “You did hear it, right? The pinging sound right after you bent down to look at the ladybug?”

  “Like I said, I heard…something. I guess you could describe it as a ping.”

  “But to your ears it didn’t sound like the gunshot that got Dena?”

  Mary Ann looked away sharply.

  “Damn it, Mary Ann, answer me! I feel like I’m losing my mind here!”

  “I don’t know if it sounded like the shot we heard that night,” Mary Ann said quietly. “I don’t even know if I heard anything on the night Dena was attacked. Sophie…you’re not the one losing your mind. I am. I can’t remember anything about that night at all.”

  I stopped pacing and stared at her. “You can’t remember anything?”

  “Well, nooo, that’s not true. I remember telling you about my engagement and I remember going into my room to get the wedding magazines but after that…” She shook her head as she let her sentence trail off. She blinked quickly as if trying to check her tears. “It’s just a blur! I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”

  I sighed and sat down by her side. “You were hysterical and it was such a God-awful night. You blocked it out, that’s all. It’s normal.”

  “How can not remembering what happened three nights ago be normal?”

  I slipped my arm over her shoulders and gave her a gentle squeeze. This was the first time Mary Ann had ever been in a life-or-death situation. It was the first time that she had seen a human being lying immobile on the ground bleeding out of a fresh wound. Her inability to remember didn’t make her crazy or weak. It made her a survivor. This was how her brain had chosen to cope. My brain dealt with things differently. It had to. If I forgot every major traumatic event in my life I wouldn’t be able to remember the better part of the past four years.

  “Mary Ann,” I said calmly, “you shouldn’t feel bad about not remembering but I need you to trust me when I tell you that I am almost positive that someone shot at us today.” I swallowed and then brought my fingers to my temples. “God, this changes everything.”

  “How so?” She pulled a tissue out of her bag and dabbed at her nose.

  “It changes everything because now we know that Dena may not have been the target. The target,” I said as I struggled to keep my voice even, “might very well have been one of us!”

  CHAPTER 14

  It’s a woman�
�s prerogative to change her mind. Apparently it’s a man’s prerogative to not use his mind at all.

  –Fatally Yours

  “I still don’t understand!” Mary Ann said after I had finished explaining it for the hundredth time. “You were so sure it was Chrissie. Now you seem so sure it’s not!”

  “I’m not sure.” I had made tea at Mary Ann’s request but I was too agitated to drink it. Now I sat on the armrest of my sofa letting the steam from my oversize mug clear my pores. “I’m not sure of anything. But if you think about it, the whole Chrissie thing doesn’t really fit.”

  “It doesn’t?’

  “You said it yourself. Chrissie is a big one for planning and she’s all about biding her time. Starting MAAP just to put Tim in an awkward spot with his family and church…I mean it’s Machiavellian and twisted but it’s also kind of brilliant. And then the whole thing about waiting until she found someone to bruise her so she could accuse Tim of domestic violence…and that’s exactly what she did! She was totally provoking me and I just took the bait!”

  “You were emotional,” Mary Ann said sympathetically.

  “Well, yeah! That’s the whole point! She saw that I was emotional and she used it! And she knew that Tim would come off as guilty because he’s, like, supersensitive about the whole domestic abuse thing. That’s probably due to his family history. He slapped her and he still hasn’t forgiven himself for that so when the police came with handcuffs he just sort of went with it. She knew that would happen! It’s like she’s the evil supervillain or something but she’s a Superman Returns or Batman: The Dark Knight kind of supervillain, the kind of villain that is almost impossible to beat because she always thinks things through.”

  “So she’s evil,” Mary Ann said. She glanced nervously at the window. She wasn’t a hundred percent convinced that we had been shot at but even being fifty percent convinced was enough to make her a little jumpy. “Shouldn’t being evil make her seem even more guilty?”

  “Anyone with half a brain could have told Chrissie that the article she was publishing was enough to make her the prime suspect if something were to happen to Dena. And Chrissie has a lot more than half a brain.”

  “Okay, she has a whole brain,” Mary Ann said as she tried her best to keep up.

  “Right. So why would a woman who always bides her time, who always covers her bases, why does someone like that shoot her rival two weeks after she published an article letting the whole world know that she was indeed her rival? And then she decides she’s going to shoot at us in a public park where any hiker might happen upon her? That’s not just stupid, it’s impulsive. Chrissie is totally whacked but she is absolutely not impulsive. Not even a little bit.”

  “So then who? You said that you think one of us could be the target instead of Dena. But who would want to hurt us? We don’t have any enemies.”

  I laughed so hard I almost spilled my tea. It was a full minute before I realized that Mary Ann was actually serious. “Mary Ann, I have more enemies than Bernie Madoff. I’m responsible for the arrest of at least seven people. I have exposed people’s secrets, and in case you haven’t noticed, people try to kill me on a biannual basis.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Not by much,” I insisted. I glanced at Mr. Katz. He was sitting on the window seat and the leaves of the tree outside cast an intricate pattern of black shadows across his glossy gray fur. “It’s true you don’t have a lot of enemies. I mean there are probably some ex-boyfriends…”

  And now, despite the warmth of my tea my hands suddenly felt icy cold.

  “Sophie, are you all right?”

  “He came to see her in the morning. In the morning!” I muttered.

  “Sophie?”

  “I didn’t think about it but… Oh, my God, how could I not have thought about it!”

  “Sophie, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Rick was at the hospital early the morning after Dena was shot.”

  “I know. He shouldn’t have come but why is that strange?”

  Slowly I put my cup of tea down on my coffee table. Mr. Katz flicked his tail in anticipation. “Mary Ann,” I said quietly, “the police didn’t release Dena’s name to the press until the afternoon. Even if Rick heard about the shooting from the news on the night it happened he couldn’t have known that the victim was Dena. Not unless he was there.”

  Mary Ann didn’t move. Even Mr. Katz took on the demeanor of a statue. “Rick wouldn’t do that,” she said in a voice that was barely above a whisper.

  “Mary Ann, I was behind a tree. If they were aiming at me they would have waited until I was at least visible. And Rick had a key to your building.”

  “He gave that back to me!”

  “Yeah, but who’s to say he didn’t make a copy?”

  “He wouldn’t do that!” She jumped to her feet and glared down at me. “Rick is a cheater but he isn’t a murderer and even if he was a murderer he wouldn’t murder me! I’m special!”

  “You are special, Mary Ann,” I said cautiously. “But if Rick is really crazy enough to start shooting people your…specialness isn’t going to protect you. Killers shoot special people all the time.”

  “But Rick wants me back!” Mary Ann shook her head and her curls fell forward, perfectly framing her face as her big brown eyes nervously darted around the room. She looked like an angel who wasn’t sure if she had fallen to earth or hell. “How can he possibly have me back if he kills me, Sophie? It doesn’t make sense!”

  “Mary Ann, you said Rick called the night you got engaged. Did you tell him you were engaged?”

  Mary Ann nodded.

  “Well, that was one night before Dena was shot in your apartment. He should have recognized that it wasn’t you but if he didn’t expect anyone else to be there and he was nervous and he knew he had to act quickly—” I shrugged “—he could have screwed up.”

  “But even when I told him that I was getting married he still said he wasn’t giving up on me,” she said doubtfully.

  “Yeah, that’s called obsession. Not a good thing. Besides, his words aren’t exactly matching his actions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mary Ann, he came to the hospital with his girlfriend in tow! The girlfriend who he once cheated on you with! I mean if he was really so anxious to get back into your good graces don’t you think he might have…oh, I don’t know, stopped dating Fawn?”

  Outside we could hear the staccato hum of a helicopter flying by. It was a rare enough occurrence that it might have become the topic of conversation in other circumstances but not now. At that moment an asteroid could have crashed through my ceiling and neither one of us would have been distracted from the topic at hand. “Rick doesn’t like being alone,” Mary Ann said weakly. “I don’t think he really cares about her.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t care that much about anybody. Maybe he just can’t accept being dumped by anyone, especially some one as special as you! Maybe he has some kind of misguided need for revenge!”

  “Or maybe she does!” Mary Ann suggested hopefully. “Couldn’t she be jealous of me? Could that be a motive?”

  I glanced over at Mr. Katz, who had curled himself up into a furry kitty ball with his face neatly tucked under his front leg. He clearly didn’t want any part of this argument. Fawn had been there at the hospital the morning after the shooting. I had assumed that Rick had told her what had happened and upon learning of his plans to visit Dena she had insisted on tagging along. I would have done the same thing in her shoes, particularly if I thought my boyfriend was really going to the hospital in hopes of bumping into his ex. But of course it was possible that Fawn had been the one to tell him Dena had been shot. Why exactly would she do that, though? I tried to remember how she was acting that morning. The word that popped into mind was normal. When I thought of Rick’s behavior I’d have to go with not normal. Not normal at all.

  “It’s true that Fawn has a motive to hurt you,
” I said tentatively.

  “You see! And if Rick did have an extra key to my place she could have easily taken it from him.”

  “It’s possible—”

  “If someone’s after me it’s got to be Fawn!” she insisted. “And it totally makes sense! You know she skins animals! That means she’s used to blood and guts!”

  “I don’t think there’s a lot of blood and guts when you skin a freeze-dried animal.”

  “But the animals are dead! She chose a job that requires her to work with dead things all the time. She likes things when they’re dead!”

  I raised my hand to stop Mary Ann before she finished articulating her chain of (what could only charitably be called) logic. “Mary Ann, I’ll admit that Fawn has a motive but if she was going to shoot you she probably would have done it before you got engaged. You’re less of a threat to her now than you ever were.”

  “Well, then maybe you’re wrong about what happened in the park. Maybe the shooter really is Chrissie and the squirrel fell out of the tree because…because it got dizzy.”

  “It got dizzy?”

  “It’s possible, right?” She tugged at her index finger and shifted her weight from foot to foot.

  “No, it’s not possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a squirrel! Squirrels climb! They do not fall. Not falling is, like, one of their defining characteristics.” Mr. Katz lifted his head and purred in agreement. He should know, he’s watched squirrels intently through the window on more than one occasion.

  “But maybe this squirrel had challenges,” Mary Ann suggested.

  “Oh, I see. So you’re suggesting it was a klutzy squirrel.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Mary Ann?”

  “Yes?”

  “The squirrel was shot.”

  Mary Ann bit her lip and looked away. “It can’t be Rick,” she said, but she had lost some of her earlier volume. “I can’t have gone out with someone who would do this. That can’t be.”