there’d be a window open so Angel could hear if I got into trouble.
This was pretty close to having no plan at all.
My palms were sweating as I got out of the rental car. It was still raining enough to keep the tourists away, and the Bayou Cajun Boat Tour place across the road was deserted. I clamped my purse under one arm as if it were a friend, and I marched up to the cabin, creaked across the screened-in porch, and rang the doorbell.
I was prepared for the woman who answered the door to be tough, perhaps cheap-looking and foul-mouthed. Though very nervous, I was braced.
But I was not ready for the door to be answered by a dead woman.
“Yes?” said Charity Julius.
She thought much more quickly than I, no doubt about it.
The expression on my face and the gasp I gave left no doubt in her mind that she was recognized. She didn’t know who the hell I was, but she knew I recognized her.
About the time Angel was gliding around the side of the house on her way to the back, Charity Julius punched me in the stomach hard enough to double me over, and while I was bent, she brought her clenched fists down in a vicious blow to the back of my neck. By the time Angel was at the kitchen window listening, Charity Julius was dragging me to the bedroom and locking me into a closet where I suppose the owner ordinarily kept his guns; it was equipped with a very high outside padlock. At about the moment Angel began to be concerned at not hearing my voice, Charity was calling the ax-man at his job, and he was tearing home in his flashy truck.
I was sore but conscious in the dark closet, which seemed to be full of hard, lumpy things. I hauled myself to my feet, slowly and reluctantly, and waved my hand around above my head. I was rewarded with the feel of the string of the closet light. I gave it a tug, and looked around me in the sudden glare.
There were out-of-season clothes pushed to one side, and the other was occupied with fishing gear. The floor was covered with boots, from lace-up steel-toe leather ones to thigh-high waders.
I hoped Angel would come soon, but something might have happened to her, too. I had better find a weapon of some kind. The fishing poles refused to break into a usable length until I found an old bamboo one. With some effort, I shortened it to about a yard. The thick end was quite heavy, and I thought that if I had room to swing it, I could cause some harm.
“What are you doing in there?” Charity Julius asked from the other side of the door. It seemed prudent not to answer.
“We’re going to take care of you, whoever you are,” she said raggedly. “No one’s found us in all this time, and we’ll get the money in four more months. We haven’t waited all these years for nothing.”
I leaned against the door. “Who’s on the roof instead of you?” I asked. I was too curious not to.
“They found them?” It was Charity’s turn to be shocked. “Oh, no,” she said, so quietly I could barely catch the words.
I wondered why Mrs. Totino hadn’t called her granddaughter. She had to know Charity was alive; her live-in lover’s presence in the life of Alicia Manigault proved that. So why hadn’t Charity known?
I shifted uncomfortably in the cramped space. What was taking Angel so long? A glance at my watch said fifteen minutes had crawled by.
I had a feeling things weren’t going my way when I heard the male voice outside.
“Harley! She’s in the closet,” Charity Julius said, and another piece dropped into place. Harley Dimmoch only wanted his family to call at a certain time because then he, and not Charity, could be sure to answer the phone. He didn’t let them come visit without lots of notice because she would have to stay somewhere else.
“Let’s see who it is,” he was saying, and then I had only the quick rattle of the key in the lock to warn me. I raised the fishing rod and launched myself out of the closet, which almost got me shot dead. The young dark-haired man was holding a no-nonsense revolver in his hands, and at my appearance he fired. Fortunately for me, the fishing rod caught him in the stomach and the shot went high, but at least it settled matters for Angel, who came through the unlocked back door like gangbusters.
The small bedroom was full of shouting, moving bodies, and the fear of the gun.
Charity was so busy trying to grab me that she missed Angel’s appearance until Angel justified all her martial- arts training by kicking Charity in the side of the knee, a decisive move, since Charity shrieked and folded instantly, and thereafter lay on the floor moaning.
Harley Dimmoch had grabbed my arm with his free hand and was trying to aim the gun with the other when Charity shrieked. He saw her go down, and I watched his face twist with desperation. He had begun to swing his arm to fire at Angel when she seized it, twisted his wrist clockwise with a curiously delicate grip of her fingers, slid closer to him and under his arm, and then with his arm twisted and extended in what must have been an excruciatingly painful position, kicked one leg out from under him and kept on raising his arm while he was falling until his shoulder dislocated-or perhaps his arm broke.
He screamed and fainted.
The gun was lying on the floor beside his useless arm. With the end of the fishing rod, I poked it into the closet where I’d been imprisoned and shut the door. Angel and I looked at each other and panted and grinned.
“Idiot,” she said, “if the gun hadn’t gone off, I’d still be out there wondering what was happening.”
“Idiot,” I said, “if you’d known he’d come home, you could have jumped him out in the driveway and then he wouldn’t have had a chance to pull a gun on me.”
“What the hell happened to you? I didn’t hear a thing after I got around back!”
“She punched me in the stomach and then the neck,” I explained, pointing to the young woman clutching her knee on the floor. “That’s Charity Julius.”
For one second Angel’s face reflected the shock I’d felt.
“So the ax-man,” she said, “must be Harley Dimmoch?”
“Yep.”
Charity tried to get up, gripping one of the cheap pine night tables, but she collapsed back on the floor with a white face and sobs of pain. I was far from wanting to comfort her, and she would have been glad if I’d been in her place, but still, I felt uncomfortable, to say the least.
Angel left the room for a minute and reappeared with some heavy, silvery duct tape and a pair of scissors. She used the tape efficiently on Harley Dimmoch’s ankles and Charity Julius’s wrists. I held Charity up while Angel worked, shrinking from touching her but having to.
The gunshot had attracted no attention, apparently. No one pulled up, or called, or knocked on the door. We three women gradually calmed down. Charity regained control of herself. Her wide dark eyes stared at us assessingly.
“What now?” she asked.
“We’re thinking,” Angel answered. I was glad she had. I had no idea what would come next. But obeying an irresistible impulse, I leaned forward and looked into her face and asked, “Who is the third body?”
She closed her eyes for a minute. She must be twenty-one now; she looked older.
“My grandmother,” she said.
“Then who is the woman living in Lawrenceton?”
“My great-aunt, Alicia.”
“Tell me,” I said intently. “Tell me what happened that day.” Finally, finally, first among all the people who had wondered, I would be the one who knew. It was almost like being the only one to discover Jack the Ripper’s true identity, or getting the opportunity to be a fly on the wall on a hot, hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892.
“My aunt was visiting. She was staying over in Grandmother’s apartment with Grandmother.”
“How did she get there?”
“She came by bus. My dad picked her up in Atlanta. She had been there three days.”
“How come nobody knew?”
“Who was to know? Who was to care? We didn’t have many visitors, mostly because Mom was so sick. I didn’t talk about it at school. Why would I? And Daddy had been working on the roof for three days, trying to get it finished. Going to pick her up was a pain in the butt, an interruption, but since Mother and Grandmother wanted her
