Authors: Ava Parker

Enemies Closer (28 page)

Epilogue

I
t was a sunny Boston morning in the beginning of June and Clara stood surveying her nearly-empty warehouse in Somerville. Her woodworking equipment and all of her tools and materials had been packed up and loaded into a truck by professional movers. All that was left in the twenty-five-hundred-square-foot space was a mop and a now-empty bucket near the open loading dock.

“How does it feel?” asked Ben with a ridiculously happy grin.

She grinned back at him. “It feels right.”

She had already dropped off her keys with the landlord of her North End apartment, and she had a suitcase packed and ready to go in the trunk of her car. Ben had arrived in Boston two days before to help with the last-minute details of moving and to make the drive across country with her. As she’d pulled into the arrivals lane at Logan Airport Ben had done a double-take when he saw her in the driver’s seat. “No way,” he’d said when she had stepped out of the shiny black 1972 Chevelle. “You’re beautiful, brilliant, and brave,
and
you drive a bad-ass muscle car? Where did you come from, Clara Gardner?”

With an exaggerated wink, she said, “I came straight from heaven, baby.”

They had spent the next two days overseeing the final preparations for Clara’s move to the great state of Washington and saying goodbye to friends and family. Ben had already met her parents when they flew to Seattle to see with their own eyes that both of their girls were in one piece. Having saved one of their daughters and fallen in love with the other, Ben was already considered part of the family and the last two days of barbeque and beer with Clara’s dad had cemented the relationship.

The three months had been a whirlwind of confusion, anger, relief and utter joy. When Michelle Perkins had been arrested a lot of questions had finally been answered, but there were still matters of uncertainty. She’d admitted kidnapping Madeline and locking her in the old root cellar near her country house.

“I knew she couldn’t get out of there on her own, so I figured that I’d just leave her there until I decided.” She had said this with a smile and a wink in Maddy’s direction during her arraignment. When asked why she had locked her friend in a cellar with food and water, Michelle had claimed that initially, she hadn’t been sure whether or not to kill her business partner. “In the end, dead or alive, she had to disappear for a while. I couldn’t get anything done with Maddy around. In the meantime, I wanted her to suffer. I wanted her to have plenty of time to miss her mom and dad, her sister.” She grinned at Clara. “I wanted her to hope that someone would come rescue her.” Then her wicked smile had turned into a menacing scowl of resentment and rage. “And if I left her there to die, I wanted her to finally see that no one was coming. Burst the rose-tinted bubble she lives in.”

Michelle had also explained that when Susan had approached her after Maddy’s disappearance and tried to blackmail her, she knew immediately that she would have to kill her. “She wanted to become a partner in Dovetail in exchange for keeping quiet.” Michelle smiled incredulously, “What was she thinking? The whole reason for getting rid of Madeline and pinning it on Eddie was so that I wouldn’t have any more partners. Just me. Everyone always acted like Maddy was the sole owner and creator of Dovetail. Like I didn’t even exist.” She shrugged casually. “I wanted things to be different, but Susan threatened to ruin my plans.” And, looking directly at the judge, Michelle had said matter-of-factly, “She had to go.”

Friday afternoon, she had gone to Susan’s apartment on the pretext of striking a deal, but with the intention of killing her. Curling her hair up into a tight bun, lining the driver’s seat of her Subaru with plastic garbage bags in case she carried any trace evidence away with her, carrying a change of clothes in her capacious black hobo bag, she had also taken care to don latex gloves before bashing Susan on the head with the candlestick. “It was just dumb luck that Eddie’s fingerprints were all over it. Although they were probably everywhere else in her apartment,” she remarked with a twinkle in her eye. After Susan was dead, she had washed her hands and face, changed her clothes and left the door open an inch so that her former floor manager would be discovered quickly. “I’m sure I still had blood in my hair when I got back to the restaurant,” she laughed wickedly, “but there I was butchering pork shoulder for the evening’s special! Who would ever notice?”

It had also been Michelle who had deposited funds from Eddie’s account into Maddy’s. “It seemed like such an arbitrary amount of money,” she said by way of explanation, “and I thought that made it look more plausible. I just logged into my husband’s account, transferred the money, then logged into Maddy’s account and accepted it. Nothin’ to it.”

She had explained how she’d drugged Maddy after picking her up on Monday night. “After I got her text message about having a business meeting, I made some arrangements and then sent her a text saying I’d found some discrepancies in our books and needed to talk to her right away. She fell for it. Easy.”

When Maddy had gotten into Eddie’s car Michelle had handed her a bottle of water so thick with Rohypnol she was surprised it still poured. “Maddy drinks water constantly.” Another wink in Maddy’s direction. “So I put enough roofies in it to knock out a bull elephant. One sip and she’d forget her own name. When we got to my house up north, she walked right along beside me to the root cellar, as if it was the natural thing to do. She even climbed down the ladder herself.” Another devious smile. “Although she missed the last few rungs.” She had put smaller doses of Trazadone in the bottles of distilled water she had left her in the cellar. “I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t get frisky. Keep her docile,” she added, with another smile in Maddy’s direction.

Michelle had sent the text to Ben on Monday night. Using Maddy’s phone, she had assured him that she was fine before tossing it out the window along with Maddy’s purse, somewhere on the highway from La Conner to Seattle. She had also communicated with Gemma Kincaid about selling Dovetail, using her husband’s email account and thus pointing the investigation further in Eddie’s direction.

She never admitted to having a hand in Eddie’s death, though police theory was that she had laced his vodka with a cocktail of prescription drugs and replaced the tainted bottle on the nightstand with another empty bottle she’d brought home from Dovetail. Denver police had taken another look into the murder of her first husband, Roy Harrelson, but after so much time had passed, they hadn’t found any more evidence now than before of Michelle’s involvement in his death.

In the end, Michelle Perkins pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder but she was yet to be sentenced.

Baffled by Michelle’s behavior on the stand, Clara had asked Carlisle and Kincaid, “Is she a psychopath?”

Kincaid had just shaken his head, but Carlisle said, “She doesn’t have enough sentiment to be a psychopath. She just doesn’t care at all.”

Maddy Gardner was despondent over the betrayal, delighted that she had survived, and determined to go on with her life.

She had closed Dovetail and after liquidating its equipment and assets and paying off its debts, the remaining money was divided between Maddy, Eddie’s estate, and Michelle’s defense attorney. She had received multiple offers for head chef positions all across the country, including a very generous offer from Gemma Stein and her restaurant group, but had graciously declined them all.

She’d also been invited as guest chef on a number of talk shows and had accepted those offers, finding that she was a natural on television. “Michelle always said I could be a celebrity chef,” she had once said to Clara, the irony evident in her tone.

Maddy’s story had made national news and she’d been interviewed saying, “Right now, I’m going to focus solely on the pursuit of happiness. Wherever that may lead.” After the interview first aired, her telephone had begun ringing.

“I hope I’ll be the first stop on that journey.” She and Jack had reunited shortly after Michelle was arrested and had been almost inseparable since.

“You’d better believe it, Jack Duvall.”

Clara had remained in Seattle for another week after Michelle’s arrest and divided her time between Ben’s and Maddy’s condos. When it was time to go home to Boston, Ben had sat her down in his palatial living room and said, “I was thinking, there are a lot of antiques in need of restoration in the Pacific Northwest. Why don’t you pack up your things and show off your talents in Seattle?”

Clara herself hadn’t been sure she could leave Ben behind, and Maddy had been trying to get her to move out here for years, but she managed to give him a convincing list of reasons why she couldn’t just pack up and move. “I would have to find a space to rent, an apartment, I would have to rebuild my reputation. Most people won’t just pay a girl a pile of money and entrust her with their family heirloom because she says she can do it. Besides, I have some savings, but not enough to relocate.”

“Clara, you have a rich boyfriend who loves you. You can do it.”

She looked at him. “You love me?”

“I do.”

“I love you too,” she said, leaning into his kiss. After a moment she pulled back from him and looked deliberately around his enormous penthouse. “Wait, did you say you’re rich?”

That night, instead of brooding over her departure, Clara and Ben had celebrated.

Now, with everything packed, keys returned, mail forwarded, gas tank full, Ben looked at Clara and jingled her keychain. “Ready?”

She snatched the car keys out of his hand and beamed. “As I’ll ever be.”

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