Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver

'A fella owns a cabin on Lake Billings come forward a couple weeks ago and says he saw a woman with Mr. DuMont on that fishing trip of his back around Halloween. He couldn't see too clear but he said it looked like she was holding this club or branch. This fella didn't think nothing of it and left town for a spell. Soon's he comes back — last month — he hears about Jim dying and gives me a call. I checked with the coroner and he said that Mr. DuMont might not've hit his head when he fell. Maybe he was hit by somebody and shoved in the water. So I reopened the case as a murder investigation. We've been checking witnesses and forensics for the past month and decided it definitely looks like murder but we can't find the weapon. Then Mrs. DuMont calls me this morning about you two and this scam and everything. Seemed like a good motive to murder somebody. I got the magistrate to issue a search warrant. That's what we found under your porch, Loretta: the billy club Mr. DuMont used to kill fish with. It had his blood and hairs on it. Oh, and I found the gloves you worn when you hit him. Ladies' gloves. Right stylish too.'

'No! I didn't do it! I swear.'

'Read 'em their rights, Mike. Do a good job of it too. Don't want no loopholes. And get 'em outa here.'

Ralston shouted, 'I didn't do it!'

As the deputy did as instructed and, one by one, led them out, Sheriff Ogden said to Sandra May, 'Funny how they all say that. Broken record. 'Didn't do it, didn't do it.' Now I'm truly sorry about all this, Sandra May. Tough enough being newly widowed but to have to go through all this nonsense too.'

'That's okay, Beau,' Sandra May said, demurely wiping her eyes with a Kleenex.

'We'll be wanting to take a statement but there's no hurry on that.'

'Anytime you say, Sheriff,' she said firmly. 'I want those people to go away for a long, long time.'

'We'll make sure that happens. Good day to you now.'

When the sheriff had left, Sandra May stood by herself for a long moment, looking at the photo of her husband taken a few years earlier. He was holding up a large bass he'd caught — probably in Billings Lake. Then she walked into the outer office, opened the mini refrigerator and poured herself a glass of sweet tea.

Returning to Jim's, no, her office, she sat down in the leather chair and spun slowly, listening to the now-familiar squeak of the mechanism.

Thinking: Well, Sheriff, you were almost right.

There was only one little variation in the story.

Which was that Sandra May had known all along about Jim's affair with Loretta. She'd gotten used to the smell of turpentine on her husbands skin but never used to the stink of the woman's trailer-trash perfume, which hung like a cloud of bug spray around him as he climbed into bed too tired even to kiss her. ('A man doesn't want you three times a week, Sandra, you better start wondering why.' Thanks, Mama.)

And so when Jim DuMont drove off to Billings Lake last October, Sandra May followed and confronted him about Loretta. And when he admitted it she said, 'Thank you for not lying,' took the billy club and crushed his skull with a single blow then kicked him into the frigid water.

She'd thought that would be the end of it. The death was ruled accidental and everybody forgot about the case — until that man at Billings Lake had come forward and reported seeing a woman with Jim just before he'd died. Sandra May knew it was only a matter of time until they tracked her down for the murder.

The threat of a life sentence — not the condition of the company — was the terrible predicament she'd found herself in, the predicament for which she was praying for help 'from the sky.' (As for the company? Who cared? The 'bit of insurance money' totaled nearly a million dollars. To get away with that, she would've gladly watched DuMont Products Inc. go bankrupt and given up the money Jim had socked away for his scrawny slut.) How could she save herself from prison? But then Ralston gave her the answer when he'd picked her up. He was too slick. She'd sensed a scam and it didn't take much digging to find the connection to Loretta. She figured they were planning to get the company away from her.

And so she'd come up with a plan of her own.

Sandra May now opened the bottom drawer of the desk and took out a bottle of small-batch Kentucky bourbon and poured a good three fingers' worth into the iced tea. She sat back in her husband's former chair, now hers exclusively, and gazed out the window at a stand of tall, dark pine trees bending in the wind as a spring storm moved in.

Thinking to Ralston and Loretta: Never did tell you the rest of Mama's expression, did I?

'Honey,' the old woman had told her daughter, 'a Southern woman has to be a notch stronger than her man. And she's got to be a notch more resourceful too. And, just between you and me, a notch more conniving. Whatever you do, don't forget that part.'

Sandra May DuMont took a long drink of iced tea and picked up the phone to call a travel agent.

The Kneeling Soldier

He's out there? Again?'

A dish fell to the tile kitchen floor and shattered.

'Gwen, go down to the rec room. Now.'

'But, Daddy,' she whispered, 'how can he be? They said six months. They promised six months. At least!'

He peered through the curtains, squinting, and his heart sank. 'It's him.' He sighed. 'It's him. Gwen, do what I told you. The rec room. Now.' Then he shouted into the dining room, 'Doris!'

His wife hurried into the kitchen. 'What is it?'

'He's back. Call the police.'

'He's back?' the woman muttered in a grim voice.

'Just do it. And Gwen, I don't want him to see you. Go downstairs. I'm not going to tell you again.'

Doris lifted the phone and called the sheriff's office. She only had to hit one button; they'd put the number on the speed dialer ages ago.

Ron stepped to the back porch and looked outside.

The hours after dinner, on a cool springtime evening like this, were the most peaceful moments of the year in Locust Grove. The suburb was a comforting thirty-two miles from New York City, on the North Shore of Long Island. Some truly wealthy folk lived here — new money as well as some Rockefeller and Morgan hand-me-downs. Then there were the aspiring rich and a few popular artists, some ad agency CEOs. Mostly, though, the village was made up of people like the Ashberrys. Living comfortably in their six-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, commuting on the LIRR or driving to their management jobs at publishing or computer companies on Long Island.

This April evening found the dogwoods in bloom and the fragrance of mulch and the first-cut grass of the year filling the misty air. And it found the brooding form of young Harle Ebbers crouching in the bushes across the street from Ron Ashberry's house, staring into the bedroom window of sixteen-year-old Gwen.

Oh, dear Lord, Ron thought hopelessly. Not again. It's not starting again…

Doris handed the cordless phone to her husband and he asked for Sheriff Hanlon. As he waited to be connected, he inhaled the stale, metallic scent of the porch screen he rested his head against. He looked across his yard, forty yards, to the bush that had become a fixture in his daydreams and the focus of his nightmares.

It was a juniper, about six feet long and three high, gracing a small municipal park. It was beside this languorous bush that twenty-year-old Harle Ebbers had spent much of the last eight months, in his peculiar crouch, stalking Gwen.

'How d'he get out?' Doris wondered.

'I don't see what good it'll do,' Gwen said from the kitchen, panic in her voice, 'to call the police. He'll be gone before they get here. He always is.'

'Go downstairs!' Ron called. 'Don't let him see you.'

The thin blonde girl, her face as beautiful as Lladro porcelain, backed away. 'I'm scared.'

Doris, a tall, muscular woman exuding the confidence of the competitive athlete she'd been in her twenties, put her arm around her daughter. 'Don't worry, honey. Your father and I are here. He's not going to hurt you. You hear me?'

The girl nodded uncertainly and vanished down the stairs.