“Make sure he didn’t spit in it,” she laughed. “Ed’s sweet on me.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“It’s my gift to boys,” she said, smiling, flirting, but shooting a look at Joe that had just a little bit of fear in it.
The deck was clear of guests because they were all in the great room meeting the vice president. Joe and Stella walked to the corner of the deck, out of the light. Joe followed the trail of her scent through the thin outdoor sweet smell of sage and pine.
“It’s a little cold,” she said, putting her drink on the railing and hugging herself with her arms. “Don’t you want to meet the vice president?”
“Maybe later,” Joe said.
“We’re going whitewater rafting tomorrow,” Stella said.
“It will probably be the last time we’re able to do it this year before the snow starts flying. The original plan was to take the VP as our guest so Don could sell him on the idea of buying a place in Beargrass, but the Secret Service saw the stretch of river this afternoon and all of the places somebody could shoot at him—not to mention the class four rapids—and put a kibosh on the whole idea. Would you like to come with us instead?”
“That’s a nice offer,” Joe said, “but I’ll pass.”
“You should come along anyway. It’s the last trip of the year. And maybe the last time for me for a long time,” she said ominously.
“What do you mean?”
He could see her eyes glisten in the light of the stars.
“Don’s about to replace me for a newer model,” she said. “I can just tell. The other day he looked at me across the table and said, ‘Did you know you have some gray hairs?’ He said it in the same tone he uses when he looks at the odometer and says, ‘Ninety thousand miles.’ That means we’ll have a new car within the week.
“He doesn’t have her in the wings yet,” she said, “but it won’t take him long. Don always wants the best, and, well, I’m getting up there in years. His trophy isn’t so shiny anymore. I always knew it would happen. That’s why he had the prenup, after all. I knew it would be a short ride. But I was determined that it would be a short, fun ride. With lots of whitewater rafting.”
Joe looked away, into the darkness of the trees beyond the deck. He could see very little, but he felt something inside him, a kind of warm surge. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.
“Who else can I tell?” she asked. “Ed? Pete Illoway?
One of the trophy wives in there? My mother would just say, ‘I warned you about him.’”
“But you never left him,” Joe said. “Instead, you had a fling with Will Jensen. I think maybe you like all of this”—
he gestured to the house—“a little more than you want to admit.”
“That’s cruel, Joe,” she said in a flat voice.
“Yeah,” he said, “it is. But I’m not in a very charitable mood right now. I’m missing my wife and my family more than I can tell you. I can’t wait to get back to them. Marybeth is my best friend. When I’m with you, I feel like I’m cheating on her. And I hate feeling that way. I’m no substitute for Will, Stella. That’s just one of the things I’ve figured out tonight.”
Joe stood in silence, not wanting to look at her. He knew she was crying, and it bothered him. But he couldn’t embrace her, not yet.
“Stella?”
She roughly wiped away the tears on her cheeks and looked up at him.
“Why did you murder Will Jensen?”
“Oh, God,” she said, as if he’d slapped her. Her eyes were wide now. She looked scared.
“I know it was you,” he said. “I knew it was someone, by the way the gun was fired. Then tonight, before I came out here, I figured out that Will had been drugged, and how it was done. I didn’t know it was you who killed him until I talked to some old guy walking his dog. He said he saw you enter Will’s house that night after he talked to Will. The neighbor didn’t hear the shot, but when he looked out on the street after midnight, your car was gone.”
She hugged herself tighter and rocked a little. The surge he had felt inside earlier got hotter. His arms and chest were tingling, and he was finding it difficult to concentrate.
Something was happening to him.
“Don’t hate me, Joe,” she said finally. “I loved that man.
I loved the fact that he was real, that he was ordinary. He was a good man, like you.”
Joe’s legs were getting weak. He leaned against the railing so he wouldn’t sway.
“I didn’t know they were drugging him. I didn’t know until this morning, when you told me at breakfast that the doctor found traces of drugs in you. Then I did some checking with my doctor. He said that drugs like Valium and Xanax can make someone who is already depressed turn suicidal, especially if the victim doesn’t know he’s being drugged. The doctor told me someone else had been asking about the effects of these drugs earlier in the year—
my husband. Don wanted to know what they would do to a person. Don told the doctor he suspected an employee, but obviously he had another purpose in mind. All I knew was that Will was getting worse, and acting out. He was humiliating himself. People were starting to make fun of him. He lost his family and he was about to lose his job, and it broke my heart. He was such a good man.
“When we were up at the state cabin,” she said, “he was normal again for a day. He felt guilty being there with me, but he was normal. I thought I had broken through to him.
Then he started to shake and get sick. I now know he was suffering withdrawal from the drugs, but he didn’t know that and neither did I.”
Joe felt hot fingers reach up through his neck, pictured his brain being gripped like a softball. He tried to focus on Stella’s words, but they kept slipping out of his grasp.
“When I found him that night he was in terrible shape,” she said, sniffing back tears. “His gun was on the table and he couldn’t even move. He had thrown up on himself. I guess he thought if he ate all that meat he would flush something out of his system, but it didn’t work. My heart was aching for him. He told me I was the only person he loved, but he couldn’t take it anymore. I begged him to let me take him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t go. He was pathetic, this fine, decent man. This man so unlike the men I had always known.”
Joe grabbed the railing with both hands to steady himself, looking out into the darkness. His eyes burned, Stella’s words suddenly loud, pounding against his head.
“Twice, he tried to put the gun in his mouth, but he was too far gone. I was crying hysterically, but I got the gun from him and I told him I loved him and I did it for him,”
she said, the words coming out in a rush. “If I’d known the reason he was in that condition was because my husband . . . that Don was shoving Will out of his way and getting back at me at the same time . . .”
She looked away from Joe and gasped. Groggily, Joe turned to see what she saw. He now knew that he had been drugged, that Ed, or the bartender before Ed, or Pete Illoway, had slipped something into his drinks. There was a roaring in his ears, and he couldn’t focus on what Stella was saying or on the figures who now stood at the sliding glass door. He heard Don Ennis say, “Stella!” very sharply and saw the vice president, who was next to Ennis, look from Don to Stella to Joe, his reticence causing the Secret Service agents surrounding him to shoulder their way through the door onto the deck.
Joe launched himself forward, nearly falling, and hit Don Ennis square in the nose with a looping roundhouse right, snapping the developer’s head back against the sliding door, which shattered, cascading glass onto the carpet inside and the deck outside. Just as quickly, Joe was tackled and overwhelmed. The last thing he saw was the redwood of the deck, winking with shards of glass, rushing up to meet him.
Two hundred and fifty miles away, under the same stars and slice of moon, an SUV with Virginia plates was aimed at the lip of a remote canyon called Savage Run. The driver, who had coaxed it up there over some of the roughest country he had ever seen, eased the gearshift into drive and stepped out as the vehicle rolled forward, picked up speed, and vanished over the edge. It took four full seconds for the sound of the crash to reach the top.