Chapter 33
“After you, ladies,” Ellie said, gesturing for them to head up the stairs with the gun in her hand.
“No! You’re going to shoot us and bury us in those holes!” Liddy cried, hugging Hayley.
“I can just as easily shoot you down here, it honestly doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m just trying to save Boyd the trouble of having to lug your bodies up those flimsy old stairs and I don’t want him straining his back!”
“You’re so cold, Ellie,” Hayley whispered, shaking her head.
“You said it yourself, Hayley. I take after my grandfather. Now move,” she seethed, losing her patience.
“Come on, Liddy,” Hayley said soberly, leading her by the arm past Ellie, who kept her gun trained on them, and up the stairs to the outside of the cellar.
When they reached ground level, both Hayley and Liddy squinted from the blazing sun and covered their eyes, after being trapped in a dark basement.
Ellie looked around for Boyd, but there was no sign of him.
“Boyd?” she hollered. “Boyd, honey, where are you?”
They noticed the two holes that had been freshly dug on the far side of the property near a thicket of trees but the shovel had been left lying on the ground.
“Boyd!” Ellie yelled, slightly nervous.
A couple of small birds rustled some tree branches as they flapped their wings and flew away, and then there was stillness again.
Hayley saw Ellie gripping her gun tighter as her eyes darted around, suddenly suspicious.
And then they heard a low, even voice directly behind Ellie.
“Put the gun down.”
It was Sheriff Daphne Wilkes, and she held her own standard-issue police pistol, pointing it right between Ellie’s shoulder blades.
Ellie hesitated, her mind racing.
“I’m not going to tell you again, Ellie. Do it now,” Sheriff Daphne said.
She wasn’t kidding.
She was fully prepared to shoot.
And Ellie knew it.
She slowly bent down, set the gun on the ground, and then raised her hands in the air.
Within seconds Daphne had her weapon holstered and Ellie’s hands cuffed behind her back.
Sheriff Daphne’s squad car was parked in front of the main house. Hayley could see Boyd locked in the backseat, his own hands cuffed behind him, a subdued, sad look on his face. Mona and Corey were positioned behind the car, out of harm’s way, undoubtedly at the behest of the Salmon Cove sheriff, who clearly didn’t want to endanger them until both suspects were safely in custody.
Ellie appeared to be in a trancelike state, emotionally shut down, as Sheriff Daphne escorted her over to the squad car. After all her herculean efforts to keep a lid on her family’s secret, she just couldn’t believe her single-minded mission had failed so miserably and spectacularly.
Once Ellie was placed in the back of the squad car with Boyd, Sheriff Daphne gave Mona and Corey the all clear, and they raced over to Hayley and Liddy, who was still a little light-headed and wobbly from the entire ordeal so Hayley kept her hands clasped firmly onto her shoulders to keep her steady.
“So my call to you got through! Thank you, Jesus!” Hayley cried.
“At first we thought you had just accidentally butt dialed me, but then we heard Boyd and Ellie talking and put two and two together, and that’s when we called the sheriff, jumped in Corey’s truck, and raced right over here to meet her,” Mona said.
“If you had gotten here just a few minutes later, it might have been too late,” Hayley said, glancing at Liddy, whose eyes were heavy, like she was in a state of shock.
“Well, I got to say, I know we’ve had a few run-ins with that sheriff, but she arrived on the scene before we did, and let me tell you, that woman is fearless. I bet she can kick some serious ass!” Mona said, impressed.
“Are you okay, Liddy?” Hayley asked, still holding her up.
Liddy nodded, forcing a smile on her face. “Yes, I’m fine.”
“Really? Because you look a little pale,” Hayley said.
“No, seriously, I’m good,” Liddy said.
“I’m going to let go of you now, okay?”
Liddy nodded again, and Hayley slowly removed her hands from Liddy’s shoulders. Her eyes rolled up in the back of her head and she promptly fainted and dropped to the ground in a heap.
Corey rushed in and scooped her up in his arms. “I’ll take her over to my truck. Sadie’s waiting in the back and that dog is real good at waking people up with a lot of sloppy wet licks to the face.”
Corey carried her off like some romantic hero from a Nicholas Sparks novel.
Hayley turned to Mona. “He’s a really good guy.”
“I know,” Mona finally admitted.
Sheriff Daphne ambled over to them.
“Sheriff Wilkes, I just want to say—” Hayley said.
Daphne held up her hand. “There’s no need to say anything. I acted irresponsibly and unprofessionally, and that’s on me. I just want you ladies to know I’m going to drop the breaking and entering charges.”
“Thank you,” Hayley said, smiling.
“But you still have to pay the parking tickets,” she said, not cracking a smile.
Mona opened her mouth to protest, but Hayley elbowed her in the rib cage and she shut it again.
“So I guess everything’s all wrapped up now,” Hayley said.
“Not quite,” Daphne said. “We know Ellie hoodwinked Boyd into strangling that journalist at the clambake, but there is still the matter of Rufus, or as we now know him, Enos O’Shannon.”
“Wait, you said you believe he died of natural causes,” Hayley said.
“I did. In fact, I was sure of it, but Sue pressured me into shipping the body to the county coroner’s office for an autopsy, and I did just to prove her wrong so she’d stop hassling me. They just called me with the results,” Daphne said, pausing, not for dramatic effect, but because she was ashamed she had been so adamant and yet so wrong. “He was poisoned.”
Hayley gasped. “Poisoned?”
“By a pretty hefty dose of it too. Someone was really determined to knock him off,” Daphne said.
“How did they get it into his system?” Hayley asked.
“I asked myself the same thing, and so I asked the doctor to list all of the stomach contents that were in his report, and he told me that all he found was traces of blueberry pie.”
“Blueberry pie?” Mona asked.
“Polly Roper,” Hayley said in disbelief.
“What about her?” Daphne asked.
“She told me she regularly baked blueberry pies for Rufus because he loved them so much,” Hayley said. “But why? What motive could she possibly have to murder Rufus? Unless . . .”
“Unless what?” Mona and Daphne both said at the same time.
“Polly was somehow aware of Rufus’s true identity, that he was in fact Enos O’Shannon, and you can be sure a violent and murderous mafia crime boss like O’Shannon has a long history of ruining people’s lives along the way, and there has to be more than a few of them who might be willing to do anything to exact revenge.”