“Hey, if we leave, we take our business with us,” Georgia One said, insulted. “And after what’s gone on here, you guys should be thanking us for even still thinking about renting this place.”
“Yeah,” Georgia Two chimed in. “You’re lucky we think a place where there’s been murders is cool.”
Maggie’s face twitched as she tried to calm down. “Let me try to explain this to you,” she said working to keep her tone even, despite the rage she felt. “Obviously we celebrate aspects of our Southern heritage here in Pelican, and especially here at Crozat. But there are many aspects of our history that we’re not proud of. There’s a saying, ‘To forget is to condone.’ We can’t acknowledge the good without paying homage to the bad—something your incredibly superficial event ignores. So we would never sanction it, no less let it happen on our property. Have I made myself clear?”
“I think she’s on her period,” Georgia Three whispered none too quietly to his cohorts.
Maggie had had it. “If you’re not gone in five minutes, I will find rabid dogs and sic them on you,” she screamed at the boys. She flung open the door and slammed it shut behind her. As she marched back to the shotgun, she saw the Butlers’ car pull out of the driveway. The Rykers were loading up their SUV. Then Maggie noticed Angela and Suzy carrying suitcases to the Cuties’ minivan. She ran up to them.
“You’re leaving too?”
“We have to,” Angela said. “We’d booked a return flight for tonight and it’s really expensive to change.”
“We’re on fixed incomes,” Suzy explained.
“We were going to stay here for Jan, but she wants us to get back to New York and post positive updates about our trip on our website. We need to do some damage control about Debbie and her plans and her murder.”
“Well,” Maggie said, trying to sound nonchalant, “we’ll miss you.”
She bid them good-bye, and then as she walked away, pulled out her cell and texted Bo one word: “HURRY!”
Maggie hastened into the shotgun, eager to update Gran’ on her theory, as well as the morning’s events. The living room was empty. “Gran’?” she called out as she went into the kitchen and got a glass of water. Her throat was scratchy from yelling at the Georgia boys, and the water soothed it. She heard muffled sounds coming from Gran’s room, and ran in. But the bedroom was also empty. “Gran’?” she called again.
“Help!” came Gran’s voice. Maggie traced it to the closet.
“What the—” She ran to the closet and pulled on the doorknob. “It’s locked.”
“I know. I was puttering around, minding my own business when someone threw a pillowcase over my head. They made me get the key to this door, then shoved me in here and locked it.”
“Was it a man or a woman?”
“I couldn’t tell. The voice was very low and rough. It could have been a man, or a woman disguising her voice.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll find the key.”
Maggie turned to start the hunt and screamed. Facing her was Emily Butler. She had a Crozat kitchen knife in her hand. Maggie recognized it as one of the sharpest.
“I don’t think you’ll be finding that key,” Emily said in a whisper. “But I’m guessing you did find the stupid drawing of the knight that my stupid husband made.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Emily poked Maggie with the knife and motioned for her to move into the living room. “I don’t want your grandmother to hear my voice,” Emily said in a venomous whisper. “She could identify me. Tell her you’ll be back when you find the key.”
With a knife jabbing painfully into her stomach, Maggie did as she was told.
“Thank you, dear,” Gran’ said from the closet. “And if you could hurry, that would be wonderful. It’s a bit stuffy in here.”
Emily prodded Maggie into a far corner of the living room, away from the windows. “So did you find it?” She stuck her with the point of the knife so sharply that Maggie felt it draw blood. “The sketch with the knight and his crest that Shane was supposed to throw away. Did you find it? Did you?”
“Yes,” Maggie said quietly.
“That idiot,” Emily said through clenched teeth.
Maggie winced as the knife’s point pocked her skin. The screw was now painfully on the other foot. “So thanks to him,” Emily continued, her tone aggrieved, “I had to figure out a way to fix this. Which, being a problem solver, I’m proud to say I’ve done.”
“Congratulations,” Maggie said. “Any chance it doesn’t involve my death?”
“Ha, ha. Nope. Now, step one—leave your cell phone on the table. And hand over the doodle.”
“That sounded kind of funny.”
“Do it,” Emily hissed with fury.
“And that didn’t.”
Maggie took the balled-up scratch paper and her phone out of her back pocket and placed both on the desk. Emily stuffed the paper into the front pocket of her pants and then took out a dog leash and attached it to Maggie’s belt loop. “This is to make sure you don’t run away.” She secured the leash and then used her weapon to steer Maggie down the shotgun’s long hallway. “Now let’s go out the back door into the woods.”
Maggie had always welcomed the shotgun’s slight isolation, but now she cursed it. The back door opened into the no man’s land of Crozat, a dense area of woods and thicket rarely ventured into by family or guests. “Please,” she said to Emily, “whatever you’re going to do with me, all I ask is that you don’t hurt my grandmother.”
“No worries. You’re a threat; she’s harmless. If she’s lucky, someone will find her before she suffocates in that closet. If not, well, she’s old. She had her life.”
Emily and her knife stayed so close to Maggie as they entered the woods that she could feel the girl’s warm breath on her neck. Twigs snapped and scraped her feet. She’d picked the wrong day to wear flip-flops. Then again, she hadn’t foreseen being the prisoner of a lunatic.
Her heart thumped so loudly that she could hear it. She needed to calm herself so she could think rationally. “It’s interesting how the mind works,” she said, keeping her tone as calm as possible. “My dad and I were talking about keeping secrets and it reminded me of something, but I couldn’t remember what. When I was looking at Shane’s sketch, it came to me. How he said at the Clabbers’ funeral that Mrs. C hadn’t even told Mr. C she’d lived here before. That’s a huge secret. Why would you not share that with your husband but tell a complete stranger? Unless the person you told wasn’t a stranger.”
“Shut up and keep walking,” Emily snapped. Maggie was encouraged by the undercurrent of nervousness in her captor’s rough tone. A vulnerable head case might be more malleable than a confident one.
“That’s why you were always in your room, wasn’t it?” she said. “You were planning the murders.”
“A little. And then we’d have sex. The planning got us hot.”
“Ugh, gross!”
“God, be a prude why don’t you?” Emily said with a smirk.
Maggie silently cursed herself. She’d shown an emotion and now it was advantage, Emily. “Whatever,” she said, resuming her casual tone. “By the way, nice move bringing up how the poison could have been planted earlier. Even when they found the old box of arsenic from the plantation store, that thought was still on people’s minds.”
“Thanks, but I really can’t take credit for that one. That moron Jan gave me a gift with her speech about how ‘no one here is a murderer.’ Which made it hilarious when the cops thought she was.”
“Hilarious. Not exactly a word I’d use in the situation.”
“Jesus, get a sense of humor.”
Maggie and Emily continued to trudge through the woods, but their psychotic chitchat had given Maggie time to think. She slowed down, forcing Emily to slow with her. “You know, there are snakes out here,” she told her captor, hoping to scare her. “Poisonous ones.”