Chapter 18 #2
Jesse closed her eyes, forcing herself back to the afternoon her dad disappeared.
“But how? My dad was still at the courthouse with his lawyer when I returned to the bar. There’s no way he could have been attacked on his way home and carried down to the cellar without me hearing them. Unless …”
“What?”
Jesse pictured herself grabbing her purse and charging out the front door to retrace her steps back to the courthouse.
“I left to go search for him. I wasn’t gone that long, but if someone had already killed him and was waiting for an opportunity to hide his body, they might have had time to carry him downstairs. ”
Bea studied her with a confused expression. “But I thought he was found behind the wall of the foundation?”
“True. They could have taken Dad down to the cellar, but there wouldn’t have been time to remove the bricks and replace them that quickly.
” She tried to calculate how long it would take to accomplish the gruesome task.
It seemed impossible, but then again, the foundation was in bad shape even back then.
Her dad was always complaining the building needed to be refurbished from roof to cellar, and she hadn’t gone back down there.
Not until days later. “They could have carried him into the cellar while I was gone, and then taken the entire night to hide the body before creeping out while I was asleep,” she decided at last.
Bea shook her head. “But why? Why take the risk of being caught when they could have taken him anywhere?”
She was right. It didn’t make sense. Still, Jesse wasn’t ready to give up. This theory was as reasonable as any other.
“Maybe he came home shortly after I left to search for him.”
“Wouldn’t you have seen him?”
“Not if he had to run a couple of errands,” Jesse insisted.
“Or went to visit my mother’s grave. He usually visited the cemetery at least once a week.
He would have missed going there while he was in jail.
That would mean that he was coming from the opposite direction of the courthouse when I left the bar. ”
“I suppose,” Bea grudgingly conceded. “That doesn’t explain what happened to him.”
Jesse took time to envision her dad walking back from the graveyard. He would have been distracted. Not only by his release from jail, but from his conversation with his dead wife. Sometimes he would be preoccupied with his faded memories for hours after he’d been to her grave.
Plus, this was Canton. People never considered walking down the street might be dangerous.
“Someone must have been waiting for him. He always used the alleyway, so they could have stayed hidden until he was stepping into the building and then attacked him from behind. From there, it would have been easy to drag him down to the cellar.”
“Hardly easy. Mac was a big man.”
“Not after his time in jail. He’d lost a ton of weight. Besides, there might have been more than one person involved.”
Bea studied her with a worried expression. She seemed more concerned with Jesse’s obsession with solving the mystery of the past than with what happened to Mac Hudson. Probably a good thing. One of them needed to keep a firm tether to reality.
“You were gone for years, Jesse. Isn’t it possible he wasn’t … you know …” The older woman struggled to say the words. “Put there until later?”
“You mean someone moved his body there after I left town?”
“Or he wasn’t killed until later,” Bea suggested. “Maybe he came back to Canton after you moved out and—”
No.” The denial came out with a fierce anger that made the older woman blink in shock. “I’m sorry, Bea, but I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That he was dead.” Jesse pressed her hands against her churning stomach.
As horrifying as it was to think her dad was trapped in the cellar for all those years, there was also a sense of peace.
As if one ghost that was haunting her had been laid to rest. “Deep in my heart, I’ve always known.
I might have clung to the futile hope he was out there somewhere.
And made up a dozen reasons why he might be hiding from me.
But they’d never felt right. He would never have abandoned me. ”
“He might have if he feared he might put you in danger. Maybe Victoria got him in debt and there were bad people chasing him.”
“No, not for any reason,” Jesse adamantly insisted, beginning to understand her aching emptiness and inability to settle down.
Mac Hudson was a huge part of her life. His death left her floating in a sea of uncertainty.
Bea continued to look concerned. “Even if you’re right, it doesn’t change anything, does it? He’s gone. Time for you to move on.”
Jesse clenched her jaw. She might have solace in knowing her father could finally be laid to rest, but the acceptance that he was dead only made her more determined to discover exactly what had happened.
“I’m not moving on until whoever killed him is rotting in jail.”
“What choice do you have? If you’re right, then his death happened almost a decade ago. There’s no way to discover what really happened.”
“There’s someone in town who knows.” Jesse paused. It was more dramatic than she intended, but she knew she was going to sound like she’d lost her mind. “Victoria.”
“Victoria?” Bea blinked. “Are you talking about your stepmother?”
“Yes.”
“Jesse, I think you’re in shock.” Bea grabbed her hand, trying to pull her toward the covered sofa. “Sit down and I’ll pour you a drink.”
“This isn’t shock.” Jesse pulled out of her friend’s firm grip. “I’ve suspected that Victoria is still alive for days. And yesterday I found the proof.”
“You have proof that Victoria is alive?” Bea sounded unconvinced.
“Yes.”
“You saw her? I mean, with your own eyes?”
“Not her face, but I heard her voice last night.”
“I don’t understand. She called you?”
Jesse made a sound of frustration. She didn’t know why Bea was acting so confused. Okay, wait. She did know. She just didn’t want to admit that she might be grasping at straws. If only she had something tangible to show her.
Wait. She did have something. Well, it wasn’t proof that Victoria was in town, but that there was a very real chance that she was still alive.
Stepping toward the coffee table, she grabbed her purse, which she’d tossed there earlier, and dug through the junk that’d managed to accumulate since she’d last bothered to clean it out. Tissues and ChapSticks and a dozen pens cluttered the bottom, but not the picture.
Someone had stolen the photo of Tegan, probably when she’d been knocked out. But who the hell knew that she had it? Had they been watching her while she searched the storage unit? The thought made her skin crawl.
“It’s gone,” she muttered, dropping her purse in disgust.
“What’s gone?”
“The picture I found.” Jesse shook her head. “Look, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have everything worked out,” she admitted, “but I’m certain that Victoria was once Sylvia Fulton, from Little Rock, Arkansas, who married a slumlord named Larry Maitland and had his baby. Tegan. My stepsister.”
“I thought she was married to a surgeon—”
“No,” Jesse interrupted, abruptly turning to pace through the narrow space. “Her husband was in to drugs and money laundering before he conveniently died from a bullet in his brain.”
Bea sucked in a sharp breath. “Murder?”
“They labeled it a suicide, but I have my doubts. Just as I have my doubts about the death of her second husband.” Jesse continued her story, knowing her nerves were making her babble but unable to stop the flow of words.
“Or at least the next husband that I know about. He died in a fire while Victoria and Tegan’s bodies were never found.
Then, a few years later, she’s in a car crash outside of Canton, and once again there are no bodies. Oh yeah, and her husband is dead.”
Bea held up a hand, as if needing a second to absorb the full extent of Jesse’s accusations.
“She killed her husbands?” The older woman shivered. “That sounds like something on one of those true crime shows. What do they call them?”
“A black widow?” Jesse waited for Bea’s hesitant nod. “You’re right. That’s exactly what Victoria is. She sucks men dry and then disposes of them before moving on to her next victim.”
“Could she really have been that evil? I mean, she lived here for what … three years or more without us suspecting anything.”
Jesse clicked her tongue. “Don’t pretend you liked her, Bea.”
“No, no, I didn’t like her,” Bea readily admitted. “Or, more specifically, I didn’t like how she treated your father. She broke his heart. And then she broke his spirit.”
Those were the perfect words to capture what had happened to Mac Hudson.
She broke his heart and then she broke his spirit.
“And then she killed him,” Jesse added in a sad voice.
They shared a moment of regret that the woman had ever stepped foot in Canton before Bea was lifting her hands in confusion.
“Why? I mean, if you’re timeline is right, then she’d already disappeared with Tegan months before Mac died. Why come back to Canton?”
“My guess is that Dad figured out the truth about her past and intended to expose it. He’d been doing a lot of research, and I know for a fact that he’d discovered she’d lied to him both before and during their marriage.
” She shrugged. “Or maybe he managed to track her down and demanded she reveal that she was still alive. If she had a new husband lined up, she wouldn’t appreciate being exposed as a liar. ”
Bea pursed her lips. “It does make sense.”
“Yes.” Jesse tried to sound confident despite the worry that niggled on the edge of her mind.
A worry that whispered she was missing something.
“Of course that still doesn’t explain why she came back to Canton all these years later.”
“At first I assumed it was someone trying to stop me from poking into the past. But now—”
“Jesse?”