nineteen

“VINNIE!” The Snitch angled his head toward the dining room. “Get in here! And bring the broads with you.” He motioned Caroline farther into the lounge with the barrel of his gun. “So I got a question. If youse are dead, what are youse doin’ here?”

Vinnie bounded into the dining room with his gun at the ready, herding Nana and Jackie in front of him. “What?” he shouted at his brother. “Youse can’t step into the kitchen and ask me something in a nice tone of voice?”

“Get in here!” barked the Snitch. “Look whose come to visit.”

“We can’t be out here greeting guests,” Jackie argued as she and Nana marched into the lounge at the point of Vinnie’s gun. “My cake needs me.”

“Screw your cake,” snapped the Snitch.

“And I got pots on the stove,” protested Nana.

“Tough!” He tossed his head in Caroline’s direction. “Take a look at what the cat dragged in, Vin. She look familiar?”

After plopping Nana and Jackie into available seats, Vinnie gave Caroline a leisurely look up, down, then up again. “Never seen her before. Who is she?”

“How can youse not recognize her?” squealed the Snitch. “The dame from the surveillance video? The one who took all the money? The one we had the come-to-Jesus talk with?”

“That dame?” Vinnie scrutinized her more carefully. “Can’t be her. She’s dead.”

“She’s not dead. She’s standing right in front of us.”

Vinnie shook his head. “It’s not her. The other dame had black hair and glasses and was real…blubbery.”

“That is sooo politically incorrect,” chided Jackie. “To avoid hurting a person’s feelings, you should use terms like plus-sized or horizontally challenged or—”

“Zip it!” Snitch warned her before gritting his teeth at his brother. “Youse ever heard of hair dye, contact lenses, and a diet plan?”

“I like Weight Watchers myself,” Lucille volunteered. “It’s so user friendly. If you haven’t reached your goal for the weekly weigh-in session, no one wags a finger at you or makes nasty comments on your Facebook page about your epic fail.”

“I been thinkin’ about tryin’ that 360 diet myself,” said Nana. “I seen on TV where it’s the one all them cavemen used.”

“The Paleolithic diet,” Tilly clarified.

“Are you sure that’d be the best plan for you, Marion?” asked Dick Teig. “It didn’t work out real well for the cavemen. I mean, where are they now?”

“I’ve seen some of them on those insurance commercials on TV,” said Margi, “so it worked out pretty well for the ones who had acting ability.”

The Snitch panned his gun toward the gang. “The next one of youse who says somethin’…anythin’…is gonna get a bullet between the eyes. Youse understand?”

Heads nodded. Eyes rounded. Lips got sucked into mouths.

“Who are youse?” he bellowed at Caroline. “What’s your name?”

Paralyzed into statue stillness, Caroline stared at Maria and her sons wide-eyed. “C-Caroline Goodfriend.”

“Bzzzzz. Wrong answer. I want the name youse was usin’ when youse walked outta our joint with three hundred Gs.”

I shot up steeple-straight in my chair. Oh. My. God. This wasn’t right. Caroline couldn’t possibly be a thief. Could she?

“My n-name has always been Caroline G-Goodfriend.”

“I don’t think so,” snarled Snitch. He snapped his fingers at his brother. “What was her name? Youse remember?”

“Evelyn Friday,” said Maria, dropping her voice to a sinister whisper. “Her name was Evelyn Friday.”

“That’s not my name,” swore Caroline.

“You got the video on you?” Maria asked Snitch.

“I got it, Ma,” Vinnie preempted, whipping his cell phone out of his pocket before his brother could reach his. “Hang on. It’s in the Cloud.”

“What? You gotta check the weather report before you can—”

“Here you go, Ma.” He slapped the phone into her palm. “Tap the triangle.”

Maria studied the screen for a full minute before reaching into her fanny pack for her reading glasses. Tapping the screen again, she studied the image even more intently before glancing from Caroline to the screen to Caroline again. “You.” She jabbed her finger at Caroline. “Over here.” She indicated a spot directly in front of her.

Caroline inched forward.

“You have any idea what video I’m playing back?” asked Maria.

Caroline shook her head.

“It’s showing me a blubb—a plus-size woman with black hair and glasses sitting at a blackjack table in my casino, and she’s got a whole mountain of chips stacked in front of her. Three hundred thousand dollars’ worth. And you know what she does with them?”

Caroline was so unnerved, her knees were knocking. “She goes all in on a sure bet and loses them?”

“No. She cashes them in and waltzes out the door…with my money. That’s not supposed to happen, understand? I’m supposed to be the one who comes out ahead. Not the nickel and dimers playing the slots or the whales around the roulette table or the hopefuls playing blackjack. Me. It’s my organization, so I get to keep the profits. Except when someone cheats me.”

“I…I don’t know what you’re t-talking about,” stammered Caroline.

“Let me see if I can help,” said Maria in a chirpy tone. “Do you wear glasses?”

“Contact lenses.”

“Uh-huh. Natural blond? And don’t think about lying. I know where to look to find out the truth.”

Caroline shook her head. “It’s d-dyed. And frosted.”

“Uh-huh. Lost any weight recently?”

She hesitated. “How recently? I’m up and down a lot. You know how it g-goes. Gain weight over the holidays and lose it over the s-summer. I’m the thinnest I’ve ever b-been right now.”

Maria made a tsking sound. “Evelyn, Evelyn. And you were doing so well.” She returned her attention to Vinnie’s phone. “The woman in this video is wearing a very attractive tunic with a scoop neck. And the nice thing about the neckline is, it’s low enough to expose a funny mark on the woman’s collarbone. I don’t know what the mark is, but if Vinnie zooms in on it for me, I bet I’ll be able to tell.”

She handed the phone to Vinnie, who expanded the image. “Hey, it looks like a funny-colored wart growing on her skin, Ma.”

“Lemme see,” insisted Snitch, crooking his mouth in mocking disgust. “It’s not a wart, doofus. It’s one of those gross skin tag things like youse see growing on old people. This one looks like a raisin—more specifically, a golden raisin, like Ma puts in her Christmas fruitcakes.”

Maria nodded her satisfaction. “So, Evelyn, do you have a golden raisin growing on your collarbone? No need to trouble yourself. Elmo won’t mind looking.”

Dick Stolee exploded with laughter. “Elmo? You mean, like the Tickle Me Muppet character?”

bang! Vinnie blasted a hole in Dick’s suitcase.

I leaped a foot off my seat. Holy crap! They weren’t bluffing!

Elmo pulled the jewel neckline of Caroline’s top askew and grinned. “Look, Ma. A golden raisin. Youse want I should whack her now?”

“Have you heard her confess to killing your brother?” Maria asked calmly.

“Not yet.”

“then you can’t kill her.”

“I can explain,” whimpered Caroline.

Maria drilled her with a hostile look. “Why aren’t you dead? We read your name in the newspaper. You died in that commuter train wreck going into the city.”

Caroline bobbed her head convulsively. “I missed my train that morning because I was rattled. And maybe you can understand why since your two offspring paid me a late-night visit the evening before and gave me twenty-four hours to hand over my blackjack money.”

“Or boom,” boasted Vinnie, making a bull’s-eye of her head.

“It wasn’t your money anymore,” defended Caroline. “It was mine. I won it fair and square.”

“Did not,” said Elmo.

“Did so,” countered Caroline. “I used finesse and memory and excellent math skills.”

“To count the cards and cheat me out of my money,” accused Maria. “You’re a card counter! You broke the law.”

“I did not! Card counting is not illegal in New Jersey or anywhere else in the United States. It’s not illegal to use your brain.”

“Well, it’s illegal in my casino, and you broke my law.”

“Like you didn’t violate my rights when you sent Beavis and Butthead to my apartment to threaten me?”

“i’m killin’ her now, ma,” announced Elmo, trigger finger poised.

“You’ll kill her when I tell you to kill her. So tell me this, Evelyn. If you didn’t die in the wreck, why did the newspaper say you were one of the casualties?”

“Because in the aftermath, there were a number of passengers whose bodies were never identified. They were crushed beneath tons of twisted steel, and when the fire started, their remains were charred beyond recognition. I had no way of knowing the devastation would be so extreme, but it worked in my favor in the end. After the derailment the whole railway system shut down, so I was stranded at the station with no rail access to get me to the office. And that started me thinking about your goons and my newly acquired nest egg.”

“Are youse gonna let her talk about us like that, Ma?” huffed Vinnie.

“Quiet!”

“I thought about contacting the police, but what were they supposed to do? Slap a restraining order on you people? I could be dead before the ink dried. Give me my own security detail? Like that was going to happen.” Caroline sucked in a breath, on the verge of hyperventilating. “As awful as the accident was, I felt like I’d just been handed a Get Out of Jail Free card. Could I disappear in all the confusion? Could I escape with my nest egg that very minute, before your goons tracked me down again? My car was parked in the commuter lot. If I left it there, the authorities might think I’d been on the train that derailed. I always took the early train. My officemates knew that. If I didn’t show up at work, they’d think I’d been involved in the wreck. That’d give me time to get out of Dodge.”

“Shame on you,” scolded Maria. “You’d do that to your mother? Let her think you’d been in a train wreck and not let her know you were still alive?”

Tsking from the assembled guests.

“Look, my mom and dad died a few years ago. Cancer. Both of them. So there was no one to wring their hands over my death. I left my car where it was parked, hoofed it home on side streets, crammed my money into a backpack, and boarded the next regional bus leaving town. I didn’t even stop long enough to pack a toothbrush.”

More tsking from the crowd, who, at their age, understood the ramifications of poor dental hygiene.

“And ended up where?” asked Maria.

“A little Podunk town in South Carolina, and that’s where I’ve been ever since.”

“Back up,” ordered Maria. “You just left out a whole slew of chapters.”

“Yeah,” agreed Vinnie. “Youse can’t just become someone else unless youse go into that witness protection program.”

“Yes, you can. Especially if you know the ropes. That was my job in New York. I worked for an organization called the Woman’s Domestic Care Network, so I knew the ropes. I checked into a woman’s shelter once I got into town, told them I feared for my life—which was the absolute truth, by the way—and they helped with everything else. They found me a job as a live-in companion to an elderly woman, and they gave me all the information I needed to establish a new identity. And once I settled in, I learned that New Jersey was just too far away for anyone in rural South Carolina to notice what happened there, including train derailments where bodies had been too mangled to be identified. So I became Caroline Goodfriend, home companion and budding genealogist, which is something I’d always wanted to pursue. And here I am.”

Maria nodded. “Here you are in Cornwall at my boy’s inn. How’d you know he was my Anthony?”

“The photo, Ma!” Vinnie ran into the dining room and ripped the photo off the wall, delivering it to his mother. “It was hangin’ right there in the open. She must of recognized me and Elmo.” He smiled at the image. “See? Youse can tell in this picture that I’m way taller than the rest of the family.”

Maria blessed herself with a quick sign of the cross. “I remember the day this was taken. Your Uncle Carmine had just poured concrete for the new stadium and told us that Fat Joey Bananas wouldn’t be skimming any more money from our accounts. Such a happy day.” She glared at Caroline, steely-eyed. “And you take my happy day and use it against me. You use it to kill my son!”

Oh my God. Caroline killed Lance?

“I—” Caroline stirred the air with her hands in what looked like a futile attempt to provide an explanation. “This wasn’t an easy choice, okay?” she said, voice trembling as she gave in to the inevitable. “His family—you guys—wanted to kill me. What if he recognized me?”

“Ma never showed him the video,” taunted Vinnie.

“Well, I didn’t know that, did I? What if he told you I was here? Are you going to tell me you wouldn’t have told him to take me out?”

Elmo frowned. “Youse mean like a date?”

“No! I mean like knocking me off.”

“Oh, okay, because in case youse missed it the first time, Anthony batted for the other team.”

“I’m not a crazed killer,” defended Caroline, “but I’m not a victim either. What was I supposed to do? Wait around until he ambushed me with a carving knife in my back? I was petrified. Can you understand that?”

“How did you kill my son?” Maria asked in a near sob.

“I pushed him down the basement stairs.”

“No one heard you? No one saw you?”

“I…everyone was distracted. A pipe burst in one of the rooms, so most of the guests were gathered down there trying to record the chaos. My roommate and I went back to our room to work on our blogs, but she said my keyboard was too noisy so she decided to work in the bathroom with the fan on—kinda like creating her own white noise. So while she was in there, I sneaked out the back door and ran around the side of the inn to the kitchen. Lance lived in the kitchen, except when he made time to come out and terrorize the guests, so I figured he’d be in there.”

“His father’s temperament, the no-good SOB,” sniped Maria.

“I didn’t have a plan. I had no idea what I was going to say or do. I was operating on fear and adrenaline, but when I saw him on the stairs, I didn’t stop to think. I just…pushed.”

I thought about my frantic sprint through the kitchen and frowned with the memory. Something didn’t square. I shot my hand into the air.

Maria fired an irritated look at me. “Another question?”

“Just a teensie one.”

“Make it fast.”

“Caroline, your shoes had to have been wet. The lawn was soaked from all the rain that day. Why didn’t I see your footprints on the kitchen floor? Because if they were there, I would have to’ve been blind to miss them.”

“I wasn’t brought up in a barn,” she defended. “I wiped my feet on the mudroom floor mat.”

“A girl who’s built like a beanpole now has the strength to push my big strapping boy down a flight of stairs?” Maria flung her arm toward Caroline’s torso. “What? With arms like sticks?”

“I used my foot.”

Elmo redirected the barrel of his gun. “Youse want me to shoot her foot off, Ma?”

“Look at her shoe,” jeered Vinnie. “What size is it—5? 6? How’d a foot that small take out someone the size of Anthony?”

“Soccer,” said Caroline. “Compliments of the Federal Government and Title IX.”

Seemingly satisfied, Maria leaned back in her chair and nodded to Elmo. “All right. You can kill her now.”

Spencer leaped out of his chair with his hands up. “Please don’t shoot but—”

bang! Vinnie squeezed off a shot that lodged somewhere in Spencer’s vicinity.

Screams. Shouts. Shrieks.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” wailed Nana as she leaned forward to eye a gaping hole in the upholstery. “He killed my armrest.”

“Something’s happening!” yelled Spencer, ducking behind a chair. “Listen! It’s happening right now!”

“Is he talking about the gunshot?” asked Margi. “Because I’m pretty sure we all heard that.”

And that’s when we began to hear faint rumbling sounds, like an approaching thunderstorm. Only the sounds weren’t coming from above.

They were coming from below.

“Omigod!” cried Margi. “It’s the dragon!”

The rumbling grew louder, as if the earth had suffered a deadly wound and was rupturing like a breached levee. The floor vibrated. Dishware rattled. A vase wobbled off the mantel and crashed to the floor.

“We’re all going to die!” howled Helen.

Vinnie charged toward the bank of windows in the dining room. “I can’t see nothin’! The glass is all crudded up on the outside.”

“Then open a damned window!” ordered Maria.

He looked left and right, shrugging helplessly before driving the butt of his gun through a pane of glass. Peeking through the hole, he let out a terrified yelp. “It’s crumblin’, Ma! The whole cliff’s giving way!”

I launched myself out of my seat. “run!”

They popped up en masse and started to stampede toward the front door, dragging their spinners with them.

“Leave your suitcases,” I cried. “Save yourselves!”

“What am I supposed to do, Ma?” Elmo waved his gun toward the stampeding crowd. “They’re getting away. I don’t got enough bullets to shoot ’em all!”

Dick Teig rammed his spinner full force into Elmo’s legs, sending him flat on his rump.

“You won’t need that anymore, young man,” said Tilly, raising her walking stick and arcing it downward in a mighty wallop across Elmo’s wrist. The gun flew from his hand, skidding along the floor where Wally snatched it up.

Gee. That worked out well. “Change of plan!” I yelled in a major flipflop. “Take your suitcases and run like hell!”

Osmond raced toward the exit, face-planting on the floor when his pants dropped to his shoes. Alice paused to help him up, falling backward over George, who was struggling on his back like an upended turtle, entangled in his own pant legs.

Oh, God. I peeled them off the floor and shooed them toward the door.

Jackie grabbed my shoulders in an all-out panic. “What about my cake?”

“Forget your cake!”

“But the timer’s about to—”

The floor began vibrating with earthquake ferocity.

“I’ll leave it.”

“Grab Maria!”

“With pleasure.”

As the gang practically climbed over each others’ backs in their rush toward the front door, Jackie hoisted Maria out of her chair. “Hi there. My name’s Jackie. I’m a six-foot transsexual who believes that people who abuse their second amendment rights should have a brain-eating amoeba shoved up their nostrils. So I’m warning you, don’t give me any lip.”

I glanced toward the dining room. No Vinnie. Where was Vinnie?

Heart thundering, pulse racing, I rushed toward the foyer, wheeling around at the last minute to retrieve Osmond’s suitcase with its cache of cell phones from the dining table. I ran out the front door and into the parking lot to the deafening roar of two hundred feet of cliff collapsing into the sea, devouring the bluff to within spitting distance of the inn. We stood with mouths hanging open as a plume of debris shot into the air, creating a smothering brown cloud that muddied the sun and the sky—but not the sight of Vinnie pressing his gun to Helen’s head.

Five feet away, Wally had his weapon pressed against Elmo’s earlobe. “Let Mrs. Teig go,” he ordered Vinnie.

“Let Elmo go first.”

“You go first.”

“No, you go first.”

“Be strong, Helen,” encouraged her husband. “Someone’ll save you.” He looked around desperately. “Anyone seen Marion?”

“Mexican stand-off!” whooped Dick Stolee.

Better a Mexican stand-off than circular firing squad.

“It’s over, Vinnie,” warned Wally. “Drop your weapon.”

“Youse drop yours.”

“You first.”

“No, youse first.”

One thing was becoming crystal clear about this stand-off: they could both use a good dialogue coach.

“I swear I’ll waste her,” threatened Vinnie.

“Then I’ll waste him,” lied Wally.

“Ma!” whimpered Elmo. “Youse gotta do somethin’, Ma.”

“Don’t whine to me about someone wanting to blow your stupid head off. The loony I’m with wants to shove a worm up my nose!”

The debris cloud drifted overhead and began to settle over us like coal-blackened smog. I swept my arms through the grit, trying to clear a path, but it enveloped us like a fog bank, masking sound and movement and breath.

I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. Voices grew muffled. Coughing. Spitting. More coughing. “Don’t anyone move,” I called into the darkness. “Stay right where you are until the dust settles. And hold your pants up!”

I heard a sudden oooffff, followed by a scream and a muted whomp.

“What’s going on?” I cried. “What’s happening? Geez, somebody say something.”

The debris cloud dissipated as quickly as it had appeared. Wally still held a dirt-covered Elmo captive, but Vinnie was spread-eagled on the ground with his face pressed to the parking lot pavement. Nana stood over him, saturated in dirt, looking like a half-smoked cigar as she leveled his gun at his left foot.

“I never shot no firearm before, but you so much as wiggle them ears of yours, I might have to give it a try.”

“Aim for his brain,” shouted Dick Teig, showing no mercy as he wrapped his arm around a sobbing Helen.

Nana frowned. “I thought I was.”

As we crowded around our captives, Alice assessed the situation with a charitable heart. “Do you think you should be magnanimous and give him at least one chance before you shoot him, Marion? You could follow the example he set when he fired that warning shot into Dick’s suitcase. Considering the circumstances, it was quite a thoughtful gesture.”

“I wasn’t aiming for the suitcase,” snarled Vinnie. “I was aimin’ for his head!”