The Arrangement (35 page)

“I had a video camera hidden in your room for years.” He taunted her with the singsong voice he’d used when they were kids. “I created a Web site devoted to porn shots of you. You’re a star, Alison. There are millions of men out there beating off to your pictures.”

“
Bret,
that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever done.”

She laughed, and that was the moment he believed her. She
was
Alison. His sister wouldn’t have given a shit about being the object of men’s masturbation fantasies. She would have dug it. God, what a slut she was. What a nasty, unrepentant slut. He could almost love her for that.

“You never could resist a picture of yourself.” He grabbed the snapshots and flung them at her.

She ducked as the pictures flew into her face. In the confusion, Bret sprang up and rushed her. There was a fight for the gun, and a shot rang out.

Bret felt a fire split his skull. It felt as if his brains were pouring out, but consciousness stayed with him for another second or two. As he slumped to the floor, he stared up at the woman who’d shot him. She was right. He had no chance against her in this life.

Darkness came at him like a hammer. But there was no pain as his eyes drifted shut, and his parting thought was a sweet one. Every man deserved a second chance, and Bret Fairmont would get his. He would be waiting for his sister, Alison, in the lowest level of hell.

A two-man SWAT team burst through the French doors that led to the deck, and at the same time, Tony Bogart came through the bedroom door. Andrew was right behind him.

One of the SWAT team knelt next to Bret’s body and checked his vital signs. “He’s dead,” the officer said. “Our sniper got him.”

His sister, who thought she had shot him, sank to her knees and stared in horror at the blood that was oozing from Bret’s head wound. Andrew lifted her into his arms and turned her away from the gruesome sight.

She
was
Bret’s sister, but she wasn’t Alison. It was Marnie, posing for one last time as the woman she’d always wanted to be. The sting operation had been Andrew’s idea, and his call to Tony had been to bargain—dropped charges in exchange for his and Marnie’s cooperation in a sting operation to get the real killer, Bret.

Andrew had also found the details of the trust fund’s succession in the safe in Julia’s dressing room. He’d gone to Mexico, thinking it was Bret who would take the bait and come down to identify his sister’s body. But LaDonna’s murder had brought Andrew back to the States before the trap could be sprung—and it had thrown him off Bret’s scent.

Bret had no motive to kill LaDonna, unless it was to frame Alison, and that made no sense. To claim the trust, Bret needed Alison dead, not rotting in jail for the rest of her life. What Andrew didn’t know was that Bret had discovered Marnie’s true identity. LaDonna had told him. The girl who made one mistake after another with men had made her last one.

Marnie was grateful not to have to watch as the emergency techs took Bret away. She honestly didn’t know how she felt about her brother. There was revulsion, of course, considering everything he’d done. But it was more complicated than that. She felt pity, too, and sadness. Maybe in time she would sort it out.

Time was what she needed, she realized as she met Andrew’s concerned gaze. She touched the penny ring, aware that she had never been more grateful not to be Alison Fairmont. Perhaps she’d had to go through the ordeal of the last months to realize how much she’d loved her life and her grandmother and everything that was Marnie Hazelton. She would take that knowledge with her as she faced the future, and if she ever had children of her own, she would do her best to teach it to them.

She had a realization as she looked down at the outline on the floor where Bret’s body had been. He may have thought he could get away with letting his sister drown. He may even have felt justified because of the way she and her mother had treated him over the years. But obviously he’d never heard the old saying that Marnie had learned from her grandmother all those years ago, and had seen for herself in the depths of the ocean as she looked down from Satan’s Teeth.

When you give things to the sea, be it trash, woe, prayers or wealth, the sea remembers.

“J
ust put me in a hospital,” Julia said, worrying the emerald-and-diamond ring on her finger, “and give me drugs, please. Strong drugs. Knock me out for a month, at least.”

The psychiatrist Julia had found through a friend sat in a high-backed chair next to hers, slowly nodding his head. He was large and bearded, a pleasant-looking man who reminded Julia of Sigmund Freud, and he’d been nodding sympathetically from the moment she entered his office.

“You’ve been through a lot,” he said, his tone soothing. “You just lost your son in a horrific way, your daughter is still missing, and now you’re dealing with this adult child, born out of wedlock.”

Julia’s heart felt heavy enough to crush her. She’d gone to the media room last night to watch a Padres game in honor of Bret. She’d sat in his chair, drank a beer from a plastic cup and wept through the entire game, wondering how she had so totally lost touch with her son.

Julia pulled a handkerchief of fine Irish lace from the breast pocket of her blouse and blew her nose. The doctor waited patiently until she’d composed herself. At least he seemed to understand how badly she hurt, that she
could
hurt.

“Is there anything else you haven’t told me?” he asked.

She thought a moment, trying to find her way through the fog of pain. “Yes,” she said suddenly, “there’s my
former
assistant, Rebecca. I just learned she has a six-figure contract with a big publisher to write a tell-all book about the prominent families she’s worked for. The Fairmonts will be featured, of course.”

Julia stuffed the hanky in her pocket, not caring if she wrinkled it. “The double-crossing bitch bugged our house. I’ll see her in court, I swear.”

The anger felt good, she realized. Cleansing energy coursed through her, and she took a deep, calming breath, trying to remember if there was anything she hadn’t covered. She didn’t see the need to tell him that she had inadvertently kept Rebecca from bugging Marnie and Andrew.

He knew about Andrew’s grand plan to have Marnie pose as Alison, but to be fair she’d also told him about Bret’s insane maneuvers, including his plan to let his own sister drown and then frame Andrew for her murder. Julia had also had to admit that her son had dressed up in his sister’s clothes and killed LaDonna Jeffries. That had been terribly hard. It had all been terribly hard.

But it had surprised her that one of the most difficult things to confess was the affair she’d had over twenty years ago. She’d explained that her mother had discovered it, but instead of confronting Julia, Eleanor had gone to her husband. Eleanor and Grant had plotted together to catch her with her lover, and Grant had confronted them. He’d paid the man off right in front of her, forcing him to choose between the money or Julia. The man had taken the money, of course. And Julia had known exactly what she was worth to her lover
and
her husband.

She’d never forgiven Grant for that. She hadn’t felt a moment’s sadness when he died. She’d actually thought she might never feel sad again, over anything, anyone. She’d been wrong.

“How do you feel about Marnie?” the doctor asked. “Let’s go back to your decision to have Josephine Hazelton raise her.”

“I feel guilt, of course. I’m eaten alive with guilt. Always was. I can’t hear a baby crying without losing it. I see a fire, even in a fireplace, and I think it’s a sign that I’m meant to burn in hell for what I did.”

She hesitated, aware that these were the memories she’d been trying to block for two decades. “I named her for the Marnie in the Hitchcock movie. I really don’t know why, except that I love the name. I couldn’t tell the world about her for obvious reasons, but I didn’t abandon her because I was ashamed of her. I was ashamed of
me,
and horrified at what I’d done to her. The sight of her, even the thought of her, sent me to a terrible place.”

“Do you have a relationship with her now?”

“No, and I’m sure she wouldn’t want one.”

“Would you?”

“I don’t want to sound impossibly corny, but how could I expect her to forgive what I can’t? There’s no defense for what I did. If there’s a competition somewhere for the world’s worst parent, I must be in the running.”

She tried to adjust her wedding set, but couldn’t make it sit right. Why hadn’t she just taken it off after all these years? Why was she still trying to make it right? “Couldn’t you just hospitalize me?”

Tears burned like acid, and this time she couldn’t easily stop them. There was no composing herself with a deep breath, no anger to energize her. She bowed her head and cried. The doctor said nothing to comfort her, but she could see compassion in his expression when she finally took a breath. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for, certainly not your feelings. Julia, where do you think you got your poor parenting skills?”

The hanky was soaked and stained with her eye makeup. She would have to throw it away. “Shit, I don’t know. My mother, I suppose.”

“Your mother, indeed. She wins the worst parent award by a mile.”

“Really? And I grew up thinking she was perfect, everything I should aspire to be.”

“What a shame,” he said softly. “You had a mother who had no clue who you were and never bothered to find out. Eleanor’s obsession with doing good was about ego gratification. Her moral standards were a way to measure others and make them less worthy than her, including her daughter. She professed to want to make the world a better place, but she couldn’t take care of one little girl. She was too wrapped up in her own needs.”

He sat forward, as if to make sure Julia heard every word. “Your mother was a failure as a human being, but she was never able to acknowledge that. She couldn’t look at herself for who she really was. You, Julia, are more woman than she ever was.”

Julia was shocked at the doctor’s bluntness, but knew it was exactly what she needed to hear. Even the trust fund, Eleanor’s legacy, punished anyone who didn’t meet her standards.

“My obsession with my looks, even to the point of plucking every little hair?” she asked him.

“You were trying to meet her standards in the only way you still could. You’d failed all her other tests, so you struggled with physical perfection. I’m speculating, of course. You’ll have to decide if that answer feels right for you.”

Julia allowed herself a moment to try and digest it all, but it was too much. Some of what he was telling her she’d always known, even if not consciously, but other things he’d said were a revelation. She could never have imagined herself as more woman than her vaunted mother.

“Shall we set up another time to get together?” the psychiatrist inquired politely.

Julia took a moment, but finally shook her head. “I don’t think so. Thank you, though, you’ve been a great help. And no offense, but I know what I need to do.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

She managed a smile as she picked up her bag. “You wouldn’t approve.”

Tony Bogart pulled to the curb, parking down the street from his dad’s heavily fenced stucco house. This wasn’t a police maneuver. Tony was embarrassed at the outright flamboyance of his rental car. His dad would take one look at the sleek red Stingray and ask him how he got to be such a fucking big shot, and it wouldn’t end there. He’d probably go into a tirade.

Tony figured this was easier. He didn’t want any fights with the old man. He’d tracked him down only to let him know that Butch’s murder had been solved. Not that justice had been done. In Tony’s opinion, it hadn’t. Because she was key to the prosecution’s sting operation, Marnie had gotten off with a slap on the wrist. But at least she’d owned up to what she’d done to Butch. She’d confessed.

It took Tony only a couple minutes to get to his dad’s place. Once he’d jimmied the lock on the chain-link fence and let himself in, he saw the run-down condition of the small, one-story house. His dad had sold cars for as long as Tony could remember, but he could be retired by now and living in reduced circumstances. Not that the Bogart family had ever had a lavish lifestyle.

Tony knocked on the front door and heard someone inside bellow, “Stop making that fucking noise!”

“Dad? It’s me, Tony. I need to talk to you.” He tested the knob and the door opened.

“Get the hell inside and shut the door,” his father snapped.

Tony entered the bare-bones living room, feeling as awkward as a kid when he met the old man’s questioning glare. His father was sitting in an upright recliner, watching something on an old nineteen-inch television set with rabbit ears on the top. On the table next to him was an empty long-neck beer bottle, a rotary dial telephone and the remote. There was not another stick of furniture in the room.

“Are you okay?” Tony asked. “It’s been awhile.” He didn’t add that his father had never bothered to give him his new address when he moved away from Mirage Bay.

The old man lifted a shoulder, as if to say it wasn’t important.

Already Tony could feel his blood rising. It didn’t take much. He really did hate his father’s cold indifference.
Hated it.

“Butch’s killer confessed to the crime,” Tony said, wondering why he’d bothered to come. “It’s a local woman named Marnie Hazelton.”

“I know,” his father said.

“You know she confessed?”

“I know it was Marnie Hazelton.”

Tony nodded. “Yeah, it’s probably been on the news. Sounds like they’re going to let her off with a slap on the wrist, when they should be throwing away the key. Christ, she stabbed him
seventeen times.
That’s not self-defense. That’s something else.”

“It’s rage,” the old man said. “It’s hatred. She didn’t have that kind of hate in her.”

Tony felt something go soft and slimy in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t a good feeling. He focused in on his father. “Did you know her?”

The old man looked up, his face as hard and eroded as the rock reefs in the bay. “Well enough to know she didn’t stab him seventeen times. I did that.”

Tony stepped back, bracing himself against the wall. There was nowhere to sit, and his legs wouldn’t hold him. “You don’t mean that, Dad. Butch was your boy. You loved Butch.”

His father sat forward, crossing his arms over his legs as he stared down at the floor. “I never said I didn’t love him.”

Tony’s throat felt like it was lined with rust and corrosion. Somehow he managed to ask his dad to tell him what had happened.

“I got a call one day from one of Butch’s friends,” his father said. “The kid was worried that Butch was headed for trouble, said he was obsessed with some girl, but in a bad way, harassing her, stalking her.”

“Marnie?”

The old man nodded. “When the kid told me the girl’s name, I didn’t believe him. I knew who Marnie Hazelton was, everybody did. She was deformed. I laughed and told the kid that Butch would never be interested in a freak like that. I told him somebody should put the ugly slut out of her misery, and if it was Butch, more power to him.”

He exhaled heavily. “Butch heard me say it, and we had a good laugh. We were kidding each other. It was a joke, that’s all. People don’t really do things like that.”

“Like what, Dad?”

“Like kill a girl because she’s ugly.”

Tony slid down the wall to the floor and sat there in stunned silence. He didn’t know what to say. It sounded as if his father had unknowingly provoked Butch into the attack on Marnie.

The sound of the telephone being dialed brought Tony back. “What are you doing?” he asked his father.

“Calling the police. Butch was alive when I found him in the pool. Just barely, and he was a raving maniac, but he was alive. The girl was unconscious on the ground, and he was trying to get to her with the pitchfork, trying to get enough leverage to kill her. When I heard the filth coming out of his mouth—about the girl, even about his own mother—I picked up the pitchfork and clubbed him over the head with it.”

His voice was giving out, and he seemed to sag forward with every word. “Even that didn’t stop him, nothing could. I had to kill him to shut him up.”

“You killed him to shut him up? What was he saying?”

“He was saying I told him to kill the ugly slut and put her out of her misery. He was saying I told him to do it. I had to shut him up.
I had to stop him.
”

Tony could hardly grasp it, a father stabbing his beloved son repeatedly. Where did that kind of blind rage come from? But his father had already said it. From hatred, the kind that sprang from ignorance and fear.

“What happened to Marnie?” Tony asked.

“At some point I realized she was gone. She must have come to and made a run for it. I had a hunch she’d gone to the cliffs, and that’s where I found her.”

“You followed her?” Had his father killed Marnie, too?

The old man closed his eyes. “I was too late.”

“She’d already jumped?”

“She didn’t jump. The rocks gave out from under her. There was nothing I could do.”

Tony sat there in silence and let his father call the police. He knew the howling ache inside him would never go away. He also knew that he came from a family where insanity reigned, and he couldn’t possibly be fit to serve in the FBI or any other organization that protected people. He was insane, too. All the signs were there—the guns, the firing range, the obsession with Alison, the intermittent explosive disorder. He was sick. It was a virus he’d caught from the man crumpled in the chair across from him, and it had infected Butch, too.