Very Veggie Murder: Book 3 in Papa Pacelli's Pizzeria Series Page 7

  “Three… no, four years,” Kathy told him.

  “When did you last visit?”

  “I made it up for Pa’s funeral,” she told him. “Toby couldn’t. His father had just had surgery, and he wanted to stay close.”

  “When’s the last time you managed to get up here?” Russell said, turning to Toby. Ellie watched the exchange, wondering what the sheriff was getting at.

  “I haven’t,” Toby said matter of factly. “Not since we moved.”

  Russell took another serving of lobster and shot Ellie a meaningful glance. She pondered everything that had been said, trying to figure out the significance. When it struck her, she felt like a complete idiot. If Toby had been in Florida for the last four years, then he obviously hadn’t been in Maine to kill her grandfather just a few months ago. It didn’t clear him of Danny’s murder, though. She wondered how to bring up the subject of blackmail naturally, then decided to just go for it. She was just opening her mouth to speak when her phone buzzed in her pocket. Out of habit, she pulled it out and glanced at it, and was shocked to see a text from Darlene.

  R u alone?

  Ellie glanced around the dinner table. She was far from alone. What on earth did her cousin want?

  “Excuse me,” she said, pushing away from the table. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Taking her phone with her, she made her way to the kitchen and sat down at the breakfast nook.

  I am now, she texted back. What’s going on?

  Need u 2 meet me, came the reply.

  Where? She asked.

  The mill Danny used 2 work at. I know y he died.

  Ellie stared at her phone’s screen. Darlene was at the paper mill? Had she been investigating Danny’s murder the whole time?

  Her phone buzzed again. Come alone.

  Why? She texted back, feeling the first threads of suspicion.

  Her phone was silent for a long time. At last it buzzed, and a sinister message popped up on the screen.

  Come alone or your cousin dies.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ellie was frozen to her chair. It wasn’t Darlene texting her. It was someone else. Someone who had her phone.

  “What do I do?” she whispered. She could hear laughter from the other room. It would be so easy to go back in there and get the sheriff. Whoever was texting her would have no idea. Or would they? What if they were watching her? Anyone could be lurking outside, gazing in through the windows. If she brought the sheriff along with her, she might end up getting her cousin killed, and she would never be able to live with herself if that happened.

  Knowing that she was making the stupidest decision of her life, Ellie grabbed her purse from the counter and slipped down the hallway, past the dining room, and toward the front door. She paused at the threshold, waiting for some sort of common sense to kick in, but it didn’t. She was doing this, and she was doing this alone.

  She knew, roughly where the abandoned paper mill was. The drive to it was a dark one, with the moon hidden behind the trees, and left Ellie a lot of time to think. If she wasn’t careful, both she and Darlene might very well disappear for good tonight. But how could she save them both, without alerting the person or people that were texting her using her cousin’s phone? How do I even know that Darlene is still alive? Shaking her head, she forced the thought away. If she thought like that, she would lose her courage before she even got there.

  The mill was eerie at night. The stacks were visible before Ellie even turned onto the private drive. She paused at the turn off and pulled her phone out—she had a plan, and she had to put it into action now. Any closer to the mill, and she ran the risk of someone seeing the glow of her phone’s screen. Scrolling down her recent calls list, she found the sheriff’s number and hit the call button. Turning the speaker volume down as far as it would go, she slipped the phone into her pocket. She could only hope that Russell would answer and keep listening as whatever events were about to happen unfolded. If he let the call go to voicemail, he was going to find one heck of a message waiting for him in the morning.

  She turned onto the driveway and drove up it slowly. One light was visible in the mill, oddly bright against the otherwise dark building. Her heart beating harder than ever before, she parked near the first door that her headlights illuminated and shut the engine off. It was nearly impossible to resist the urge to check her phone and see if the call had actually gone through or not, but she knew that anyone looking out from inside the building would easily be able to see her phone’s screen light up. The last thing that she wanted was for them to realize that she was calling the police.

  Ellie got out of her car and pushed her way through the mill’s doors. The interior was dark, and nearly impossible to navigate. She began heading in the direction that she thought the light had come from, only to trip over some sort of metal contraption. Landing on her hands and knees, she gasped in pain.

  “This way,” a voice said from directly ahead of her. “He wants to talk to you first.”

  A flashlight clicked on, illuminating her path. She followed the beam, trying to see who its owner was. The male voice was familiar, but she just couldn’t place it. Well, at least I know it isn’t Toby, she thought, wanting to kick herself for every bad decision that she had made over the past week.

  “Who are you?” she asked. The person said nothing, just kept leading her through the dark halls with the bright beam of his flashlight. Remembering her plan, Ellie raised her voice slightly and spoke as clearly as possible “Why did you make me come to the paper mill?”

  Once again, there was no answer, but Ellie was okay with that. She hadn’t been speaking for his benefit anyway, but rather the benefit of the man that she hoped was listening in through her phone. She tried to ignore the fact that she very well might not even have any bars of service out here—the call could have been dropped before it connected.

  At last they came to a door with light behind it. The person who was guiding her opened it and stepped through, leaving her to follow. She blinked against the glare—the light was some sort of super-bright industrial lamp—and looked around. Immediately she recognized Terry. She gasped. He had been the one guiding her through the halls.

  “It’s you,” she said, aghast. “You’re ‘T’ after all.”

  “Huh?” the young man said, looking at her blankly. “I’m Terry. Why’d you call me ‘Tea’?”

  “She’s talking about my letter,” a second voice said from behind her. She spun around and found herself face to face with Jack Evedale.

  “Your letter?” she said. “Why did you sign it with the letter ‘T’?”

  “I’m not going to sign it with my real name, am I?” he said, chuckling. “It stands for my nickname back when Art and I were younger. When I first got into business management, people called me Tiger because I was so driven and brought so many people down on my climb to the top. It stuck.”

  “I don’t understand. How did you know my grandfather?” she asked. “And where’s Darlene? You promised she’d be here.”

  “I promised no such thing,” he said coldly. With a chill, she realized that she hadn’t even asked him if her cousin was there before rushing out of the house to meet him. “But you’re in luck. We kept her alive just in case you decided to ask for some sort of proof.” He gestured to the corner, where Darlene sat on the floor, bound and gagged. Ellie made a move toward her, but Terry came up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulder.

  “How did you know my grandfather?” she said again, talking to Evedale, but keeping her eyes on her cousin.

  “We were friends,” the old man said. “He was the general manager here for nearly twenty years. I handled the accounts. We got along famously until he discovered that I had been siphoning money off for years, making myself quite wealthy. He had the nerve to blame me for the mill shutting down and all of the workers losing their jobs.”

  “So he began blackmailing you? Why didn’t he just turn you in?”

  A
t this, Evedale gave a sharp laugh that turned into a cough. “If he reported me, all of the money would just go back to the owners of the company. Instead, he forced me to make payments to the workers that had been laid off, and donations to charities. He did that for twenty years, and was sucking me dry. I’m getting older, and as you can imagine, my medical bills have been racking up. I couldn’t afford his charity cases anymore.”

  “So you killed him,” Ellie said flatly.

  “No,” the old man said with a note of hurt surprise in his voice. “I simply told him how it was. I asked that he stop for the sake of our past friendship. When that didn’t work, I sent Terry with another message, this one a bit more intimidating. Terry has a way with locks, you see. Didn’t you wonder who broke into your grandmother’s house? Anyway, I pointed out that if he turned me in, he would end up guilty too, as an accomplice. He’s known about the stolen money all these years, and has done nothing.”

  “But he died,” Ellie said, aghast. “My grandmother said she heard voices that night. You must have been there.”

  This time it was Terry who answered, surprising her by sounding almost regretful. “The old guy had a heart attack,” he said. “I was talking to him, and he just keeled over. I didn’t mean to kill him. I don’t even know that I did kill him. He might have just… died.”

  “It was unfortunate,” Evedale said, not sounding like he thought it was unfortunate at all. “But it did solve my problems. At least, until Danny boy asked me about the note. I hadn’t realized it had been found. I knew then that my troubles were far from over.”

  Ellie stared at him for a long moment, taking in his frail frame and the cane that he was leaning on. “There’s no way you killed Danny,” she said. “He would have overpowered you.” She realized with a shiver who must have done it; the same man who had killed her grandfather. She twisted out of Terry’s grip and took a step backwards, away from both of them.

  “I didn’t want to,” Terry said in a small voice. “I didn’t. But he said I was in it too deep, and if he went to jail, then so would I.”

  “And what about Darlene and me?” Ellie asked, tremulous. “Are you just going to kill us, too? Can you live with that?”

  She forced herself to meet Terry’s gaze, despite her revulsion toward him, trying to appeal to whatever sense of human decency was left in the young man. He opened his mouth, then hesitated, glancing at the old man beside him.

  “Of course he can,” Evedale said. “He’s a strong boy.”

  “Killing two women isn’t strong. It’s cowardly,” Ellie countered. “Please, Terry. We never hurt you. Don’t listen to him anymore. I’ll even testify in court that you saved us. Darlene will too.” She glanced toward her cousin in the corner, who nodded, terrified.

  “I don’t... I don’t know…”

  “Take out that gun I gave you, boy, and do it!” the old man snapped. “We need time to get rid of the bodies before people start looking for them.”

  “I don’t… Mr. Evedale…” Terry looked frantically between her and his boss, torn.

  “Do you remember Danny’s memorial service?” Ellie asked desperately. “Do you remember how crushed his mother looked? Can you really do that to our family too, Terry?”

  The young man met her gaze, then took a deep breath. “No. Mr. Evedale, I quit.”

  “You can’t quit,” the old man snapped. “I have dirt on you. I’ll tell the police everything. You’ll rot in prison for life.”

  He began hobbling toward the young man, who looked terrified. Ellie screwed up her courage, took a step forward, and kicked the cane out from Evedale’s grip. Evedale stumbled, reaching out to Terry for balance, but his assistant recoiled, letting the old man crash to the floor. Darlene gave a sob of relief as Ellie rushed over to untie her.

  EPILOGUE

  “I can’t believe my plan worked,” Ellie said, feeling almost giddy as the realization sunk in that everything was going to be okay. She really had thought that she was going to die for a while there. “I didn’t think you would get the call, or if you did, everything you heard would be all garbled since the phone was in my pocket.”

  “You shouldn’t sound so proud of yourself,” Russell said. He looked angry, and Ellie decided to avert her gaze and focus intently on the paramedics examining Darlene. “Your plan didn’t actually work, since we didn’t get here in time to save you. If Terry hadn’t had a change of heart, things would have turned out very differently. You could have gotten yourself and your cousin killed. What you did was dangerous.”

  “They would have killed her if I had told you anything,” she said, lifting her chin slightly, but still refusing to meet his gaze. “They told me to come alone.”

  “An old man and his twenty-year old assistant? They had no way of knowing what you were doing. You could have called the entire United States Marine Corps, and those two still wouldn’t have known a thing until the tanks rolled up to the mill.”

  “Well I didn’t exactly know it was them, did I?” she asked, finally getting upset enough to face his anger head on. “I risked my life for a family member, and I ended up saving her. No matter what you say, you won’t be able to convince me that it was the wrong thing to do. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if she had died, not if it was my fault.” She wrapped her arms around herself, realizing for the first time that she had left her jacket at home.

  Russell stared at her for a moment, his jaw muscles flexing. At last he sighed, evidently deciding to give up on their argument for the moment. “You’re shivering,” he said, removing his sports coat with a shrug and handing it to her. “It would be a bit too ironic if you managed to survive this fiasco, only to die of pneumonia a week later.”

  She was still hurt by his reaction to everything that she had done, but accepted the jacket anyway. She was cold.

  “I’ll admit one thing,” she said. “I was wrong about Uncle Toby. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have relied so much on hunches and guesses. I’ve learned that there’s a good reason to do things your way. It saves you from embarrassing mistakes.”

  “I’ve learned something too,” he said. She looked up, and was surprised to see his lips twitch up in a smile. “Never trust one of your hunches.”