A Winsome Murder Read online

  You will write again.

  Just write one true sentence.

  She couldn’t think of a single true sentence.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  Was this even really happening? It was an actual nightmare, she felt, she was living in a nightmare and needed to wake up. It had all sounded so easy at first. She’d thought it was going to be fun and she’d make some money. She would write something really shocking and try to make it controversial, and maybe if it were gruesome and raunchy enough people might even buy it. She would put a hot sex scene in it and violence, and use words like fuck and Jesus and cunt, and if she got really lucky, maybe the church would ban it—and oh, God, if she could only get the pope to denounce it, she just might make a fortune. And why not? Other writers did it all the time, laughing all the way to the bank.

  Jillian wasn’t laughing now.

  She wiped her eyes, wishing she’d never had the idea to write about Deborah Ellison. She tried to stop thinking about the murders, but she couldn’t. Horrid, horrid images kept running through her head, like a movie reel looping the same gruesome shots over and over again—hacked and mutilated bodies, shattered skulls oozing brain matter and—

  So she stopped.

  She changed her mind and just stopped.

  And decided to start over.

  Jillian grabbed all the research books stacked around her desk and her notebooks, and she threw them in the garbage. She opened the files on her computer and deleted everything that had anything to do with Deborah Ellison’s murder, every draft, every piece of research, every saved image. She deleted all of it and emptied the trash folder—click—gone. She never had to look at another word of it again. Ever. She opened a new document. It snapped up fresh and clean and white.

  She stared at the blank screen.

  She waited.

  She waited longer.

  Nothing.

  She read the quote on her wall again.

  Just write one true sentence.

  She wrote, “I don’t know what to write.”

  And that was true …

  And that truth led to another.

  And that led to another, and the ideas began to come to her, and she started writing about the fact that she wished she’d never written about this poor girl’s murder, and that she wanted to be writing children’s books again where the bad guys always got caught, and children always survived, and she wrote and wrote and wrote, and she couldn’t stop, no, no, she couldn’t stop, because she knew what she had to do now. She had to write herself out of this horror.

  She would write herself clean again.

  Detective Mangan and Detective Eagan watched Lachlan through the two-way mirror. He was sitting in the interrogation room. Eagan had interviewed him at the American Forum building, asking about Mara Davies and how well he’d known her. Lachlan had seemed completely forthcoming, but then Eagan stumbled across something while interviewing the other employees, information that Lachlan had failed to disclose. He’d had an affair with the murder victim, Mara Davies.

  They let Lachlan squirm another five minutes.

  “You ready?” Mangan asked Eagan.

  “Let’s do it.”

  “I’ll take the lead.”

  “I’ll listen.”

  He and Mickey Eagan walked into the room.

  “Well, we meet again,” Mangan said, coming through the door. “Mr. Lachlan, this is Detective Eagan.”

  Eagan nodded at him.

  “How long are we going to do this?” Lachlan asked. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. I canceled the series in the magazine. I’ve told no one about the note. I’ve told you everything I know. I’ve been—”

  “Well, now, now, you didn’t quite tell us everything, Mr. Lachlan,” Mangan said. “I’ve come to realize that you have a habit of doing that. First the prostitute in your apartment, then this little thing about Ms. Davies.”

  “Yes, I—all right, you’re right, I didn’t. Okay, you’re right, I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry. I didn’t think it pertinent.”

  “Didn’t think it pertinent?” Mangan said. “Having an affair with a woman who winds up murdered would be the definition of pertinent.”

  Mangan sat at the table and read through Lachlan’s statements again. He took his time. He looked up afterward and studied the man a moment, as the phrase an infinite and endless liar, came to him, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of not one good quality. There was still something Lachlan wasn’t saying. He was hiding something.

  “So,” Mangan said to him, “one more time. Why didn’t you tell us about this affair?”

  “It wasn’t an affair. It was one time. I was drunk and we wound up at my apartment.”

  Mangan turned to Eagan, “It’s always the boyfriend.”

  “I’m not her boyfriend.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Nothing. I wasn’t anything to her. It was one time.”

  Eagan searched through the employees’ statements, picked one out, and slid it in front of Mangan. He studied it for a moment, shook his head, and looked up at Lachlan. “You’ve got some very unhappy employees. This one here says that Mara Davies was promoted very soon after her arrival at the magazine. Seems you passed over a number of people who were in line for the job, who had more experience and were more qualified.”

  “I can explain that.”

  “Oh. Well. Please do.”

  “She—”

  “Did you promise her a position in exchange for sex, Mr. Lachlan?”

  “I did not.”

  “That’s illegal, you know.”

  “Of course I know. I would never do that.”

  “That’s not what your employees think.”

  “I don’t care what they think.”

  “Well, you should, because we’ve got a number of statements here that say—”

  “Mara’s the one who forced me to—!” Lachlan stopped short.

  “What? What’d she force you to do? To have sex with her?”

  “No. She—all right, look, I can explain.”

  “Yes, you were saying that earlier.”

  “I was with her one night. A couple of days later she walks into my office and suggests to me that she’d make a really good submissions editor, a position that had just opened up, and, uh … I felt, I was pretty sure, that it was more than a suggestion. I have a family. I didn’t want to take any chances. So I gave her the job.”

  “So she was blackmailing you?” Mangan asked.

  “I’m not saying that. It’s just—one could certainly interpret it like that.”

  “Yes, one certainly could.”

  “None of this would even have happened if she hadn’t pushed her friend’s story about the murder on me. That’s what started the—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Mangan said. “What friend?”

  “The writer. Jillian McClay.”

  “Mara Davies knew the woman who wrote those articles?”

  “They were best friends.”

  Mangan leaned back in his chair, thinking at length, the truth will out.

  “Well, now,” he said to Lachlan, “this is a whole other kettle of whatever. Mara Davies threatens to expose your affair with her if you don’t promote her. Then she forces you to hire a friend of hers. So you’re not actually interpreting this as a possible blackmailing situation, you’re actually saying that that’s what was going on. Yes?”

  “Um …”

  “She was blackmailing you.”

  “If you want to call it that, yes.”

  “Well, yes, I think I do want to call it that.”

  “Well, then, yes, she was.”

  “Well, now that’s very interesting,” Mangan said. “A woman who was blackmailing you winds up murdered. That, Mr. Lachlan, is not only pertinent, but it’s what, in police parlance, we call motive.” Mangan gathered up some of his papers. “A little reminder, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you—”

  “I swear t
o God, I had nothing to do with this!”

  “A dead woman’s severed hand was found in your apartment. How’d it get there?”

  “I have no idea. I get dozens of submissions every week. I’m a publisher! I have a slush box filled with submissions dropped off in the lobby of my apartment every day. Anyone could have left it there.”

  “Anyone? Including you?”

  “What the—? No.”

  “Did you use Deborah Ellison’s murder to cover your own?”

  “My own what?”

  “Did you try to make it look like Mara Davies was killed by the same person who killed Deborah Ellison?”

  “What are you talking about? No!”

  “Did you kill Mara Davies?”

  “No! ”

  “Did you—”

  Lachlan suddenly reached inside his jacket. Eagan leaped across the table and grabbed his arm. Mangan was on him just as fast, wrestling Lachlan into a headlock. Eagan wrenched Lachlan’s hand out of his jacket and pried open his fingers. He was clutching a cell phone.

  “What the hell are you guys doing?” Lachlan yelled. “I was calling my lawyer.”

  Mangan and Eagan backed off.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Mangan said. “Don’t bother calling him. I’m done with you for now.” Mangan knew he had nothing to hold him on.

  Lachlan stood up and straightened himself out. “I had nothing to do with this,” he said, and left the room.

  Mangan waited a moment and then asked Eagan, “You believe him?”

  “Yeah,” Eagan said. “It’s a stretch, what you’re saying.”

  “I was just trying to think outside the box a bit.”

  “You succeeded.”

  “Keep an eye on him anyway,” Mangan said. “I still don’t like the guy. Run another check on his alibis.”

  Eagan walked out and Mangan tried to sort through the new information. Mara Davies was apparently murdered by the same person who killed Deborah Ellison. Davies was also friends with Jillian McClay, the woman writing a story about the Ellison murder. The killer leaves a note to stop writing about it, but if he wanted to stop the writing, why kill Mara Davies? Why didn’t he kill the writer? Or the publisher? And why were the murders so horrific? So much bodily damage inflicted postmortem, as if their deaths were not enough.

  Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,

  And makes it fearful and degenerate.

  Grief, Mangan considered, the poison of deep grief. It would make sense, but grief over what? Mara Davies’s murder was in direct response to the articles being written, a reprisal killing. But why the first murder victim in Wisconsin? Why was she killed? What had she done?

  Who was Deborah Ellison?

  Mangan took out his cell phone and called the Winsome Bay police station.

  “Wesley Faber, please,” he said. “No, I’ll hold.”

  Officer Tom Ellison, father of the Wisconsin murder victim, grasped the back of the oaken pew and knelt, easing his knees into the cushioned, soft-leather kneelers of Saint Francis church. They reminded him of his daughter, the kneelers did. The church had originally been built without them, a modern design for its day, and Saint Francis had functioned that way for almost fifteen years until the new bishop, who listed heavily to starboard, ordered the town to kneel once again. Saint Francis parishioners had to raise fourteen thousand dollars to do so, in the same year in which the town was trying to raise money for Melissa Becker, a young girl from Winsome Bay who had lost her leg to cancer. Deborah had asked Father Ryan if the church might be able to donate the fourteen thousand dollars to help buy a prosthetic for Melissa. But Father Ryan said it was impossible to divert the funds: the bishop wanted kneelers. So Deborah wrote to the bishop herself, respectfully asking for help. There was no reply. She wrote again. No reply. Disillusioned, and more than a little angry at the absurdity of it, she and her mother decided to take on the project themselves. They organized “A Day for Melissa,” a fund-raiser held in the local park. There was a 5K Run, raffle tickets, silent auctions, the Lion’s Club and the KC’s worked side by side selling beer and burgers, bands played for free, people came from other towns and other churches, and everyone gave what they could.

  They raised thirty-eight thousand dollars.

  The bishop failed to make an appearance.

  Or a donation.

  Shame, shame on him, Tom thought, remembering what a sweet girl Melissa Becker was. She had been Deborah’s friend. No, no, they’d been more than friends. Tom knew that. They had been so close, so happy when they were with each other. That was the last time he could remember seeing his daughter as his daughter, unpierced, undrugged, unhesitatingly her own self.

  Undamaged.

  And now they were gone. They were both gone.

  Tom sat back in the pew and looked around at the church, cavernous and hollow. He placed his hand on the seat to the right of him, remembering when his daughter had sat there, wiggly during long homilies. He would place his hand on her leg, and that would be enough to still her. Sometimes they sat with Melissa and her family. Those were good memories, before Melissa had gotten sick, before they had found out what was going on between the girls.

  He had acted so horribly, and he knew it. Why, why had he done it? It racked his thoughts. That’s where it all started, he thought. It never would have happened if he hadn’t pushed Deborah away in the beginning—and for what? He’d handled everything so badly. He wanted it back, wanted time back, he wanted his daughter back, so he could do it all over, and do it differently. He would be better, he knew he would. He would be a better man.

  But it was too late now.

  His daughter was gone.

  That thought was still unthinkable.

  Tom slid forward on the pew, kneeled again, and clasped his hands together, but he would not pray. He could not. The ever-widening gap between him and what he once believed was now a gulf unnavigable.

  It was quiet in the church. Immeasurably quiet. A quiet so full, so absolute and pure that it was deafening. The world had never known such silence.

  Never, never, never, never, never.

  Wesley Faber got the call about four o’clock in the morning. He’d been having coffee with Vern Stenghal at the all-night Stop ’n’ Shop out on the highway. The 911 call came over as “man with a gun” at Saint Francis church. Officer Michele Schaefer called him seconds later on his cell phone to tell him that Tom Ellison had broken into the church. He had locked the doors behind him. And he had a gun. Faber jumped into his cruiser and floored it, red lights and sirens. He called Father Ryan on the way and told him to get his keys and meet him at the church. He called the county for backup and got the fire chief on his walkie-talkie and told him to station himself at a safe distance.

  Wesley Faber prayed as he sped back to town.

  He pulled up behind the fire and rescue trucks that were just arriving, training their powerful spotlights on the building. He was radioing the county to report that he was on the scene when he saw someone running toward the church.

  He flung open the door of his cruiser, screaming to know who the hell it was.

  Inside Saint Francis church, Tom Ellison stopped to breathe a moment in the same spot where he’d stood so many times before, a lifetime ago, as an altar boy. His hands were bleeding. He couldn’t feel them. He raised the heavy pry bar again and slammed it down over and over and over into the church altar, a flurry of blows, mindless, blurred, uncountable, knocking the great granite table off its pedestal. He straddled it, swinging the pry bar maniacally, clubbing off large chunks of stone and disintegrating others into clouds of dust. He swung at it till he couldn’t swing anymore, picked up a large slab of the shattered altar and heaved it, spinning, through the window of the sacristy. He followed after, pry bar in hand, pushing over the lectern on his way, and knocked away whatever glass and leaden strips still dangled in the panes. He stepped through and smashed at the collection of sacred vessels, pulling over the tiny
golden temple, in which, as a boy, he had believed God slept, and spilled the hosts across the floor. He kicked at them with his boots and trampled on them. There was nothing in his mind. Nothing coherent at all. Only a vague sense of heat. His thoughts felt like heat.

  He ran along the walls, clubbing, tearing down the gilt-framed icons that hung there. Sounds were coming out of his body, sounds he had never made before, wolfish, otherworldly sounds, like those his wife had made when she was giving birth, sounds perhaps like those his daughter had made as she was being murdered. His mind screamed at the thought. He ran between the pews, striking at them, gouging out large splinterings of oak. He ran to the other side of the church and raked the wall, punching at it, clawing at the icons mounted there.

  It was inconceivable. This could not be.

  The world was awry, tilted. Gravity was gone.

  There was just sound and heat, his own sounds, which did not seem as if they were coming from him; they were someone else’s, some other being’s, not his. And yet they were his, and he knew this, and he also knew, in some excruciating piece of his brain, that everything was true, that what had happened to his daughter had actually happened.

  The Earth no longer existed. There was no God. No wife, no daughter, no son. No Winsome, no world. He clicked the safety off on his .45 automatic and stood at the top of aisle looking down at the wreckage where the altar had been, the rescue lights outside illuminating the stained glass in a confusion of colors. The dust in the air gave the shafts of light a solid look, as if massive I-beams, crayon colored, had smashed through the windows.

  The crucifix, large and indifferent, hung squarely and serenely above it all.

  Tom Ellison stared at it and felt nothing. He believed nothing. He was nothing. He raised his gun and fired ten shots, fast, into the figure on the cross, into its chest and stomach and neck, pieces flying in spinning chips through the streams of tinted light. He reloaded and took the figure at the neck, firing until the head and crown collapsed and dropped to the rubble beneath, then he fired mindlessly, unfeelingly, until nothing remained affixed to the crucifix but a single crumble of pierced palm.

  He reloaded again and walked up to the lobby where he had soaked the carpet with gasoline, the new carpet that he’d helped raise the money for last summer at the Saint Francis Fun Fest by sitting in the Dunk-A-Deputy machine all weekend. He tossed a match to the floor and watched as a ripple of low flames slowly crawled across the lobby, much slower than he thought it would. A movement caught his eye and he swung his gun to the left. Father Ryan was at the front of the building. Tom walked over to the glass doors. He knelt before the priest and put the barrel of the gun into his own mouth and pulled the trigger.