Chapter Twenty-Three
Mary Beth’s leg throbs where the bullet struck, even though it’s been a few months and the wound is nearly healed.
Stripped down and soaked in perspiration, she’s being roasted alive in a cinder block oven of a cell.
Lights out isn’t for another half hour, but she’s been lying here since she returned to the housing unit after a supper she hardly touched.
It’s much too hot to eat steaming food, much too hot to hang out in a common area with a bunch of sweaty inmates, too hot for reading, for lamplight, for sleep.
For her, there will be no reprieve from the heat, or the noise.
If days on the cellblock are loud, nights are far worse. The only real quiet comes in the hour or two before dawn, but even then, it can be fleeting. You never know when there will be a burst of commotion, some fresh hell playing out for everyone to hear.
After all those years in federal prison, Mary Beth became desensitized to it, but this time is different.
This time, despite her commitment to living a straight life, she’s being held on a felony she never intended to commit, and likely facing far more serious charges for murders she didn’t commit at all.
Midge and the others will never know that it wasn’t Mary Beth who posed as Caroline, luring them into the woods. That she was only back in Mulberry Bay this summer, back at Haven Cliff, because she, too, had been lured.
Yes, she was armed, but because she feared for her own safety, not because she wanted to harm her sister’s friends. Yes, she tried to go along with their assumption that she was Caroline. She was so filled with shock—and dread—that she didn’t know what else to do.
She realized then—realizes now—that only one person in the world would hold Mary Beth, Talia, Midge, Kelly, and Gordy Klatte responsible for what happened at Haven Cliff on that terrible summer night so many years ago.
Gordy, most of all.
Just as Mary Beth is being wrongfully blamed for his death, he died because he’d been blamed for something that wasn’t his fault.
The moment she learned he was dead, she knew who was behind it.
That’s when she snapped.
Once again, she’d been betrayed by the person she loved and needed most. She wanted to die. It wasn’t the first time she’d considered taking her own life, but until that night, she’d had something—someone—to live for.
Now there was nothing left. No one who mattered. No one to whom she mattered.
She was sure that Midge Kennedy was also armed. And that if she felt threatened, or if she felt that her friends’ lives were in danger, she’d have no choice but to turn her weapon on Mary Beth.
That’s how it was supposed to play out.
What happened instead . . . well, that was a blur.
Some of it still is.
She knows she was shot by a bullet that didn’t end her living nightmare.
Now she’s resigned to her fate.
Her court-ordered attorney, aware that she intends to plead guilty for the assault on Midge, has been working to ensure that she understands the consequences.
She understands. It doesn’t matter.
Very soon, she’ll also be facing charges for the murders of Gordon Klatte and the Walking Man, while the real killer is out there somewhere . . .
Where?
Hopefully, far from Mulberry Bay, no longer hungry for revenge.
If not, Mary Beth is certain the nightmare will continue to play out. Not just for her, but for everyone who ever played a role in the tragedy that befell Caroline Winterfield.