I reached the outskirts of Pottsboro. I doubted the main street—a straggle of small stores, a barbecue restaurant and several gas stations—had changed much in decades. And certainly not in the short span of years since the kidnapping.
I’d not found a phone listing for Johnnie Rodriguez. But I’d traced down an AP reporter in Dallas who had covered the kidnapping and learned that Rodriguez lived with his mother, Maria. I got her phone number and address. I debated calling. But I didn’t want to frighten Johnnie. No, I wasn’t going to take any chances. I was going to talk to him, whatever effort it took. And somehow, through threats or bribery or persuasion, I was going to find out what he told Richard.
I got directions at a gas station. Ten minutes later the rental car jolted to a stop at the end of a rutted, red dirt road in front of a small frame house.
There was no yard. Blackjack oaks crowded close to a dusty path. I slammed the car door and the sound seemed overloud in the country quiet. Crows cawed. Far above, a Mississippi kite, its huge wings spread wide, rode a thermal draft.
Just for an instant I paused. Six years ago Richard heard the slam of a car door, felt a cool lake breeze, faced this empty path. It was as if he stood beside me, just for an instant. “Richard…”
Then a crow flapped past and the sense of Richard’s presence was gone and I was left with a haunting feeling of unease. Richard walked this path and it led him to Kauai and his death.
I felt the faint warmth of the March sun and knew I did not want to die. Not now. Not yet. It’s hard to be frightened. It’s hard to find courage. “Richard…” I took a deep, ragged breath. I moved forward. Forced myself forward.
The house had a slovenly, unkempt air—paint peeling from the walls, untrimmed hydrangeas bulking up against the windows. A bicycle missing a front wheel lay on the sloping porch, along with a rusted bucket and an old car battery.
The sagging front steps creaked beneath my weight. Had this little frame house been so bedraggled, so forlorn when Richard came?
A thin, gray-striped cat bolted from behind a pile of firewood on the porch to block my way, hissing, ears flattened, tail puffed.
I heard a faint scrabbling sound and frightened meows.
“It’s all right, little mother,” I said softly.
I stepped around the cat.
The door opened. Grudgingly, slowly, with a mournful creak, as if it were an unaccustomed act.
There was no screen.
I looked into eyes as dark as my own, at a face wrinkled by time, dark hair streaked with silver.
We were probably close in age. But I’d been lucky, blessed with good health and excellent medical care. And she had not. Her skin had the waxen look of illness, pernicious and irreversible. Her arms had so little flesh, the bones protruded. Her blue cotton house dress hung in swaths.
She was staring at me, her eyes puzzled. “I thought you were the district nurse.”
“No. I’m Henrietta Collins. I know the Ericcson family.” That was not true. “I’m here to see Johnnie Rodriguez.” I tried hard to keep my voice even, undemanding, but I had traveled a long distance and all the way I kept thinking that if Richard had not come here, he might still be alive. And beneath my anger, fear pulsed. Yes, I was following in Richard’s footsteps.
A claw-like hand moved to her throat. She opened her mouth, but no words came.
“Johnnie Rodriguez.” I would not be stopped. My voice was harsh now. I couldn’t help it. “I must talk to him.”
Her head began to sway back and forth. “Oh, no. You can’t, ma’am. You never can. Johnnie’s dead. Dead and gone.”
We stood at the end of a rickety pier.
Gulls squalled. The sun glinted on the huge expanse of lake. A gusty south wind tatted lacy white swirls across the blue surface. A speed boat thrummed past. Water slapped against the pilings. The air smelled like fish and dust.
The shoreline boasted vacation homes ranging from trailers perched on concrete blocks to elegant multilevel retreats. I noticed the surroundings automatically, my mind cataloging, the beads slipping through my fingers even while I was struggling with shock. Johnnie Rodriguez dead! I’d come all this way. I’d counted so much on talking to him.
Maria Rodriguez pointed down at the roiled water. “That’s where I found Johnnie.” Her face reminded me of a Dorothea Lange photograph, misery and despair and mute acceptance etched in every crease and line.
“I’m sorry.” The words drifted between us like wisps from a cottonwood. Sorrow freighted the air. Her grief and mine. “What happened?”
Her skeletal arms folded tight across her body. “Johnnie drank too much.” She said it matter-of-factly. “The deputy said he must have fallen. He was too drunk to swim. So he drowned.”
A matter-of-fact tone, but a tear edged down her sallow, wrinkled cheek.
The wind rustled her skirt, stirred my hair.
I looked back at the small wooden house where Johnnie Rodriguez had lived his whole life, then glanced at the end of the pier. How drunk would you have to be? “I’m sorry,” I said again. “When did Johnnie drown?”
“Six years ago.”
It wasn’t the wind skipping across the water that made me feel chilled. I jammed my hands into the pockets of my coat. My fingers clenched into fists. “And the date?”
“April sixth.”
Less than a week after Richard fell—was pushed—to his death.
If I’d had any misgivings about the truth of the poster, I could put them away.
She faced me. “Why did Miz Ericcson send you to talk to Johnnie?” She lifted a bony hand to shade her eyes from the sunlight.
I had the space of a breath to decide how to answer. It didn’t even take that long. She’d made the jump, according me legitimacy because I said I knew the Ericcson family. That gave me a lot of room to maneuver.
Was I willing to play the lie? Of course.
But I phrased my answer carefully. “Johnnie was working for Belle Ericcson when her daughter was kidnapped. I’m trying to put together the recollections of everyone who was at the house that weekend.”
She smoothed back a strand of lank hair. “Seems a funny thing to do. To want to remember the bad. Johnnie sure didn’t like to talk about it. It upset him too much. And Miz Ericcson, they say she still grieves something awful. That’s what I’ve heard. She’s never come back, you know. She sold the lake house and the boat to a rich oilman from Amarillo. They say she went off to Hawaii and built a house up on a cliff and she’s never come back to Dallas. Not once.” She turned her gaunt face toward me. “I thought Miz Ericcson knew Johnnie was gone. You’ve come a long way for nothing. There’s nobody here who was at the lake house that weekend except me.”
“You were there?” I managed to ask in a casual, even tone.
“Yes’m.” Her voice was tired but obedient. This was a nice woman, a sick woman, but she wanted to be helpful. “I got the call that Thursday to open the house, mop and dust and put on fresh linens and stock the kitchen. That was when I was still working, before I got sick. I had a big list, getting everything ready for Miss CeeCee’s birthday party. The party was going to be Saturday night even though it wasn’t really her birthday until Sunday.”
Sunday that year was April 1. So April 1 was CeeCee’s birthday. And the day that Richard would die one year later. No April Fool for the Ericcson family or for me. Not ever again.
I willed a pleasant expression on my face as I looked into dark, patient, sad eyes. “I understand CeeCee drove up from Dallas on Friday afternoon.” I’d done my homework, pulled up every scrap of coverage about the kidnapping.
Those thin arms slid to her side. The blue-veined fingers of one hand plucked at the ruffled pocket of her dress. “They say she must have come then.” Her voice was low and indistinct.
“You didn’t see her?” I moved a little nearer.
“No’m. I finished up about five and I wanted to get home and fix Johnnie’s supper. Johnnie lived with me. All my other kids got families. But Johnnie never married. Maybe…” She sighed.
“You went home,” I said gently.
She looked up at a dazzling white house on the bluff. “I walked home. It’s not even a mile if you go through the woods. Johnnie had the pickup. He’d been running errands all day, brought in fresh firewood and plenty of beer for the boat and he’d gone over to Pottsboro for barbecue. So, I left about five. And I locked up real good. I told them that.” She looked up again at the house on the bluff.
I spoke as if the facts were so familiar and they were. I knew them by heart now. “CeeCee stopped in town for gas. It was just getting dark.” The clerk remembered it clearly when she was interviewed by a television reporter. CeeCee paid for the gas and bought a bag of M&Ms.
“Josie Goetz was working at the station that night. She said Miss CeeCee seemed tired. She wasn’t as cheerful and friendly as usual.”
A crow cawed, sharp and strident.
Maria shivered. “Mighty cold out here on the water. I’ve got some fresh coffee made…”
We walked slowly—it was an effort for her—back to the house. She brought me a white pottery mug filled with coffee as hot and black as molten tar. She settled into a rocker, then made a hopeless gesture at the dust-streaked floor. “I can’t clean no more. I used to keep everything neat as a pin.”
Dingy crocheted doilies covered the arms of the easy chair and couch. Handmade wooden soldiers crowded the mantel, the windowsills, a pine bookcase, spots of color in the dim and dusty room.
She followed my gaze. “Johnnie made them. Pretty, aren’t they?”
It was easy to see the same hand carved them all. Each blocky ten-inch-tall soldier stood on a two-inch base. The soldiers flaunted cockaded hats and brass-studded coats in vivid scarlet, cerulean, or tangerine.
Faintly, she began to hum “The March of the Toy Soldier,” her voice sweet and soft, and I knew where Johnnie had gotten his dream.
“Johnnie loved toy soldiers. From the time he was a little boy.” She picked up a Revolutionary War soldier with a musket. “He never learned to read real well, but all he needed was to see a picture. He spent all his free time carving. This was the last one he made. It was for Christmas.” She held it out to me.
I put down my coffee mug, took the carving. Gilded letters on the base read: TO MAMA. I handed the soldier back to her.
Her smile was full of love. She put the carving down gently. “Johnnie was a good boy.” The chair squeaked as she rocked. “And I know he never hurt Miss CeeCee.” She fastened mournful, puzzled eyes on me. “Maybe it was meant, you coming here to ask about Johnnie. I been thinking. If ever I was to tell anyone, now’s the time.”
The moment stretched between us. I wanted to grab those thin shoulders, grip them tight, shake out the truth.
“Please tell me.” I spoke as a supplicant.
Our eyes met and held and we each knew the other had a troubled heart.
She sighed and it was as light as the flutter of wings. “I growed up telling the truth. My pa said an honest heart was a gift to God. And I’ve grieved ever since because I lied about the night Miss CeeCee was taken. Johnnie was so scared the next week when the call come that the deputy wanted to see him and ask where he was when Miss CeeCee disappeared. Johnnie said I had to tell them he was home that Friday night, like he always was. He promised me he didn’t know what had happened to Miss CeeCee, but he was scared he’d be in big trouble if it come out what they’d done. They’d thought it was all in fun, but it was a trick. But they could never prove it, couldn’t prove anything. He swore to me he didn’t know anything that would help the police find her. And that was all he’d say—ever. But I know he didn’t do nothing bad. Not Johnnie. So I said I was here Friday night and Johnnie and me had supper and he was working on a soldier and didn’t go nowhere. And Johnnie had been working on a soldier, the parts were all out on his table. The deputy believed me because he and Johnnie went to school together and he knew Johnnie’d never hurt nobody. And Johnnie, he got out and searched till he was so tired he was ready to drop and he kept saying Miss CeeCee had to be somewhere.”
Johnnie joined in the search. Yet, obviously he knew something of what happened on Friday evening. But if he searched, he must not have known where CeeCee Burke was. Or he searched to show he knew nothing.
I smoothed the doily on my chair arm. “So Johnnie said ‘they’d thought it was all in fun’? They?”
“Yes’m, he did.” Her tone was sharp.
Was this really what Johnnie had said? Or was this his mother’s version to lessen Johnnie’s involvement? Or had Johnnie lied to his mother?
They? Johnnie and who? “Did he say who he was talking about?”
“No’m. He never said.” There was the faintest inflection on the last word.
“But you know?” I kept my voice undemanding, casual.
“Johnnie was working over there that day. It had to be that Mackey, that man who works for Miz Ericcson.” The bones in her face sharpened, and for an instant she had the predatory look of a bird of prey.
That was a familiar name to me. Lester Mackey was Belle’s jack-of-all-trades. Mackey had served her and her several husbands as a houseman, chauffeur and general dogs-body since Belle’s early days in Japan.
“That Mackey! I never did like him.” Maria Rodriguez’s mouth folded in a stubborn, angry line.
“Why not?” I asked mildly.
Her eyes slid away from mine. “Whenever they come up from Dallas, he always had Johnnie hang around with him. And there was no call for it.” Her bony face was both angry and anguished.
“If he hired Johnnie to work around the place—”
“He’d keep Johnnie late. And what for?” she demanded. “Can’t work after dark. But he’d invite Johnnie to his quarters, show him art books.” She stared down at the floor. “I didn’t like it.”
“But on the Friday that CeeCee disappeared, Johnnie was in and out of the Ericcson place working for Mackey. Is that right? And Johnnie didn’t come home for supper?”
“No’m. He come in about seven and said he was sorry but he’d had to work late. He was kind of excited.” She finally looked up, her eyes dark with pain. “But I thought it was just because that Mackey was down here. Johnnie always liked to hang around with him. Johnnie was in a real good humor, kept grinning to himself. ’Course this was before we knew Miss CeeCee’d been taken.”
CeeCee Ericcson had stopped for gas in Pottsboro at a quarter to six.
No one ever admitted seeing her after that.
Lester Mackey later told police he’d found CeeCee’s Mercedes a few minutes before seven o’clock on Friday night in the drive in front of the lake house. Mackey said the driver’s door was open and the keys were in the ignition. CeeCee’s purse lay in the passenger seat.
Mackey moved the car around to the garage. The house was locked. He opened the front door, went inside, turned on the lights. He put the keys in a wooden tray on a side table. He said nobody was in the house. As far as he knew. He didn’t go upstairs, but he said no lights were on.
It was dark by then.
Mackey later told police he’d had a few drinks so he went around to his quarters and fixed himself some dinner and watched TV and didn’t think again about the car. He said he figured CeeCee had gone off to dinner with someone else in the family and they’d be coming in later.
It was a large family with members who came and went, of course, as they pleased. No one had any particular schedule that weekend, no set time to appear at the lake.
The alarm wasn’t raised until Saturday afternoon.
Maria reached out for her coffee mug, stared down into the dark brew. “I was there when Miz Ericcson got the letter. On Saturday. It come in a mail truck.”
Express Mail. The police traced it to a Gainesville Express Mail receptacle. It was processed shortly after 8 P.M. Friday. The return address was a downtown business, an insurance company. No one there had ever had any contact with CeeCee or any of the other family members.
On Saturday afternoon, Belle was carrying a pile of brightly wrapped birthday presents into the living room of the lake house when the mail truck arrived.
“I took the envelope from the postman.” Maria hunched over her coffee mug. “One of the boys—I think it was Mr. Joss—said something about his mama never getting away from work. Miz Ericcson laughed and said she did too get away from work, and whatever it was, Elise could see to it. That was her secretary. So I carried the envelope over to Miss Elise. She said, ‘I’ll take care of it, Belle. This is your weekend to enjoy.’ She opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper. Then her smile kind of slipped sideways and she made a gasping noise and said, ‘Oh, my God. Oh, my God.’”
Maria put down the mug, the coffee untasted. “It got real quiet in the room. Real quiet. We all knew it was something awful. Miss Elise tried to talk, she opened her mouth and finally, her hand shaking, she took the sheet over to Miz Ericcson.”
“Who was there?”
“Miz Ericcson’s husband, Mr. Scanlon. He’d just come in the front door. He was carrying a big white cake box. Miss Gretchen was sitting on a bench by one of the windows, reading a book. Miss Megan was out on the terrace in a hammock. Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Anders were playing checkers. Mr. Joss was picking out a tune on the piano. He can play real well, but he was just doing one note at a time.” Her eyes squeezed in remembrance, and now her voice was cold. “That Mackey, he was bringing in suitcases.”
“And Stan Dugan?”
“Miss CeeCee’s young man?” Maria shook her head. “No, ma’am. He wasn’t there.”
I made a note of that. It surprised me a little.
Maria Rodriguez shivered. “When it got quiet, everybody looked at Miz Ericcson. She’d been so happy. And she still had that armload of presents. She looked at the paper and her face got old right in front of our eyes, old and pinched. She looked at each one in turn and her voice was as cold as a blue norther. She said, ‘This isn’t funny. This isn’t funny at all.’ Then she looked around, like it would all be all right. ‘Where is CeeCee? Where is she?’”
But CeeCee was nowhere to be found.
The note was quite simple:
IF YOU WANT CEECEE BACK ALIVE,
DO PRECISELY AS INSTRUCTED.
CALL THE POLICE AND SHE DIES.
FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS.
So Belle refused to call the police. Or to reveal the instructions on a folded sheet of paper.
That came later.
“Miz Ericcson made each one of us promise not to say a word to anyone. But she asked me to go get Johnnie to help Mackey and the kids search around the place. They’d pieced it together by then that Miss CeeCee had come to the lake the night before, on Friday. Mackey told them about finding her car. I run home to get Johnnie. When I told him what had happened, he shook his head back and forth real puzzled. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand. Listen, you wait here a minute. I got to see about something.’ He jumped in the pickup and went off. He come back in about ten minutes and his face was like the ashes in the fireplace. ‘Mama, I got to go over to the Ericcson place.’ I asked him what was wrong, but he said he couldn’t tell me nothing now.
“He didn’t come home till late that night and then all he’d say was that they hadn’t found no trace of Miss CeeCee and they all was wanting Miz Ericcson to call the police but she wouldn’t and she was going to do what the letter said to do and she wouldn’t tell anybody what it said. And she got on the phone and called some man to come and help her. And that made Mr. Scanlon mad.”
Yes, Belle had called Richard and he’d gone to National to catch the next flight to Dallas.
“Did you ask Johnnie where he drove in the pickup after you came home to get him? Before he went to the Ericcson place?”
“No’m.” She made no explanation, no defense. But the limp and sagging skin of her face was a study in fear.
Denial takes many forms. One is a refusal to ask questions that need to be asked.
I worried at her pallor. But I couldn’t let her rest. Not yet. “When the deputy called, was that when Johnnie asked you to say he’d been home on Friday night between six and seven?”
She nodded wearily. “But the truth is he didn’t come in until right after seven o’clock. I fed him then. But he did work most of the evening on the soldier.”
Funny how you can pick up a little nuance. “Most of the evening?”
“Johnnie liked to walk out after dark. Sometimes late at night. He liked to find a place and stand real quiet and watch the raccoons. Sometimes a cougar’d pass by.”
I waited.
She picked up the last toy soldier her son had made, gently touched the little wooden musket. “Johnnie thought he’d been part of a joke. Her brothers were big to play jokes. And ’specially since Miss CeeCee’s birthday was April Fool’s Day. Oh, they always had big jokes going on. Johnnie might have wanted to know more about it and maybe he went somewhere late that night to see what was happening. And he would’ve just stood quiet and watched. But I know he didn’t see nothing terrible. He would’ve gone to the police if he had. Then Saturday when I come home and told him about that letter, he went back and Miss CeeCee wasn’t there. And he didn’t know what to do.”
Somewhere nearby.
“Why didn’t he tell the police?”
“He was scared.” She pressed her hand against her lips to keep them from trembling.
“What do you think happened, Mrs. Rodriguez?”
She turned dark, haunted eyes toward me. “Just ten minutes. That’s all he was gone Saturday afternoon. I think he went to where he thought Miss CeeCee was—but she wasn’t there. And Johnnie was scared to death. Kidnapping!” She leaned forward, her face angry and vengeful. “That Lester Mackey, I never liked him. Talked so soft you’d think it was a rattlesnake slithering by. Not like a man. You talk to him.”
The road was twisty but well-graded and the underbrush was thinned on either side. I pulled into a turnaround drive in front of the white two-story vacation home that had once belonged to Belle Ericcson.
The drive was empty except for my rental car. The blinds were closed. Nobody home. That wasn’t surprising on a cool March weekday afternoon. It was nice for my purposes, though I couldn’t expect to learn much after all this time.
I pictured a Mercedes curving up the drive, pulling to a stop, the door opening—
Although the house crowned a bluff, it was well screened from the road by a tall, thick hedge. It was extremely secluded here. The stucco home had clean, spare Mediterranean lines, a red tile roof and windows, windows, windows.
I followed a flagstone path along the east side of the house to the terrace that overlooked a private bay. Canvas covers shrouded the deck furniture. The patio umbrellas were tucked shut. A steep path led down the bluff to a boathouse and pier.
The terrace was in shadow, the late afternoon sun blocked by cedars to the west.
I walked across the flagstones, occasional leaves crackling underfoot. The floor-to-ceiling windows were masked by interior blinds, now closed.
I found a space at the end of one set of blinds and peered into the huge living room. The dusky, untenanted room gave no hint of the life and death drama it had seen.
I continued around the house and saw, on the west side, garages and separate quarters.
Anyone wishing to wait unseen could easily park on the west side of the house. Cedars screened a large parking area from the front drive.
Seven years ago CeeCee had arrived, opened the car door—and the kidnappers appeared.
There was no evidence of a struggle, no blood, her purse in the passenger seat apparently untouched.
Were the kidnappers armed?
Either armed—or armed with a story plausible enough to persuade her to come with them.
That was possible, of course, could account for the lack of struggle. A report of an emergency, an illness. “Your mother’s been hurt in a car wreck. She’s in the hospital in Denison…”
CeeCee had not—at that point—resisted.
The Mercedes—door open, keys in the ignition—was the closest link to her, made this driveway the last certain place she’d been.
The sun slanted through the blackjack, touched an early-blooming redbud. It was lovely and peaceful—and unutterably sinister.
Deputy Dexter Pierson drew in a lungful of smoke, coughed, and rasped, his voice hoarse and rough, “It stank. The whole damn thing stank. Worse than fish guts in August.”
He glared at me pugnaciously from behind a paper-laden desk, his pockmarked face dangerously red. His office was small, four fake knotty pine walls and an old wooden desk. The grainy computer screen looked out of place.
“What do you mean?” I edged my chair a little closer to the open window and the small stream of fresh air.
His quick green eyes flickered from me to the window. “Yeah, smells like shit in here, don’t it? I keep trying to quit.” He stubbed the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and the acrid smell of burning joined the fuggy odor of smoke. “Yeah. My wife says nobody smokes anymore but butts.” He gave a whoop of laughter that ended in a cough. “Used to be the big clue, didn’t it? A cigarette butt. Or maybe a button. Or a strand of hair. What was it in the Lindbergh kidnapping? A piece of a ladder? Well, nobody left anything around for us when they grabbed CeeCee Burke—if anybody grabbed her.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Her car was found with the door open, her purse on the passenger seat, a ransom note came the next day. What else could it be?”
He clasped his hands behind his head, tilted back in his swivel chair, and stared moodily at a lopsided bulletin board decorated with a half-dozen yellowed Far Side cartoons. “We got crime around here. Sure. Guy gets drunk, beats his wife. Kids break into a store, steal cash and cigarettes and beer. We keep a close eye on some dudes, the ones who watch and see when the city people are gone, then break in and loot the houses. We smashed a pretty big burglary ring a couple of years ago. Every few years, we get a run of rapes. That don’t happen too often. Country people have dogs and guns. But big-time kidnapping for ransom? No, ma’am.”
He jolted forward in the chair, grabbed at his cigarette pack. “That whole deal was as fishy as a bass derby. I kept trying to tell the feds it didn’t compute—but would they listen to a hayseed deputy? So”—he lifted his round shoulders in a sardonic shrug—“so screw ’em.”
“I’ll listen.”
His red cheeks puffed in a pugnacious frown. “Okay. I got a theory. ’Course, I’ll be up front with you. There’s a big damn hole in it—because somebody picked up the ransom money and if my idea’s right, that shouldn’t’ve happened. But here’s my take. She did it herself.”
I suppose my face reflected utter surprise.
“I’ll tell you, lady, suicide takes a funny tack now and then. A lot of times people’ll go to a hell of an effort to make it look like an accident. I think that’s what happened here. Because I been a deputy for twenty-two years and my brother’s a homicide cop in Dallas, so I’m not the new boy in town when it comes to murder. Even if we’re not talking murder and kidnapping. But I’ve never known anybody to be snatched—then murdered with a painkiller. Never.”
“Painkiller?” I was learning one new fact after another. “But I understood her body was found in the lake, two days after she disappeared.”
“Yeah. She drowned. But she’d had enough narcotic to drop an elephant.”
“That wasn’t publicly revealed.”
“Nope. The sheriff sat on that. Thought it might be useful.”
“Maybe the kidnappers fed her something with a narcotic. To keep her quiet.”
“Lady, this wasn’t just a tablet or two. She’d had a bottle’s worth. No way it wouldn’t kill her. And that’s a weird way to kill somebody. Most kidnappers shoot somebody, crack ’em over the head, hell, bury ’em alive. No, the minute we got the autopsy report, I told ’em it was suicide. She dropped the Express Mail envelope in a slot on her way here. When she got up here Friday night, she set it up to look like she’d been kidnapped, then took a rowboat out on the lake, drank a bottle of wine laced with the stuff, waited till it spaced her out, then rolled overboard.”
“Was a rowboat missing from the Ericcson dock?”
“As a matter of fact”—his voice oozed confidence—“there was a boat missing. It was found drifting near a public ramp.”
“But the ransom money was picked up.”
“Picked up? Maybe. Maybe not. Look at it this way, lady. The money was gone by the time cops checked it out.” His tone was sardonic. “Listen, how do we know any of the crap the family told us was true? Did they call us in when they got the ‘kidnapper’s’ note? Hell, no. We didn’t even know there’d been this ‘kidnapping’ until a fisherman pulled her body up on Monday. She had on a silver bracelet with her name and it rang a bell with one of our troopers. He’d given her a ticket once. We ID’d her quick. We went out to the house and got this cock-and-bull story. I never did believe it.”
“But the money.” I wondered about Pierson’s blood pressure. His entire face glistened like burnished copper.
“Yeah.” His tone was grudging. “The goddamned money. Two hundred thousand in fifties and hundreds. In a shoe box. Miz Ericcson followed the directions. She got this dude out of the east to take the shoe box to the old cemetery in Gainesville. I mean, can you believe that? A cemetery! If they’d called us, we could have sewn it up tighter than a bulldogged calf. But no, they don’t call anybody, they get the cash from a bank in Dallas and give it to this dude to deliver to the cemetery at midnight that Sunday.”
I’d not known the details. As I said, Richard and I never discussed it. The news coverage didn’t include information about the ransom drop.
When the story broke, Richard was identified simply as a friend of the family who had delivered the ransom.
“Midnight!” Pierson snorted. “Why didn’t she throw in clanking chains and a buzz saw!”
“But the money was taken.”
“Sure. Hell, yes. The dude tucked it behind the Beckleman mausoleum and the cops got there on Monday afternoon. More than twenty-four hours! Sure, it was gone. Anybody could have gotten it. Kids out there necking and they see this dude hide a shoe box at midnight. Or next day somebody drops out there to decorate a grave. Somebody in the family, for that matter. Those damn people. Nobody’d look at you straight.”
“They didn’t need the money,” I said dryly. There are people to whom two hundred thousand is pin money. Belle’s family members fit that description.
He shrugged. “Maybe not. But who the hell should be surprised when we check it out after the body’s found and the shoe box is gone! Plenty of candidates. Maybe the dude who delivered the shoe box came back. Maybe he never left it.”
“No.” My answer was swift and harsh.
He looked at me sharply. His green eyes brightened. “Oh, hey. Collins. You’re Mrs. Collins. That was the dude’s name.”
“Yes.” My throat felt tight. Yes, that was the dude’s name.
“So what’s your game, Mrs. Collins?”
I gave him stare for stare. “My husband Richard came here six years ago to talk to Johnnie Rodriguez. Then Richard went to Hawaii to see Belle Ericcson. He fell to his death from the terrace of her home. On April first.” I stopped, bent my head. It still hurt so damn much and the pain throbbed anew, as if Richard had just died. I took a deep breath. “This week I received an anonymous message saying he was pushed.”
Pierson kneaded his hand against his red cheek. “And Johnnie drowned that year.” His tone was speculative. “So, what are you going to do?”
“Go to Hawaii.” Yes, I was going to go to Kauai and claw my way into Belle Ericcson’s home, do whatever I had to do, fight whomever I had to fight.
Pierson shook loose another cigarette, lit it, but his eyes never left my face, calculating, bright, hard eyes. “You know something, lady? If I was you, I’d be damn careful.”