Beverly Connor - Dead Past

It was a woman’s voice. The voice from the library, the jogger of twenty years ago, and Diane was willing to bet her name was Oralia Lee Parrish Rawson.

“Diane, we know you’re somewhere in the house, and we will take it apart to find you. We don’t want to kill you. We need information from you.”

They were silent. Waiting for an answer, she supposed.

“Diane Fallon. We know who you are. We know where you stashed Juliet. We can’t get to her now, but we will. We know you saw the code. You have resources that we don’t. You have computers. We just want to know what it says. It belongs to us. It belongs to my family. We won’t kill you, because we want the information from you. Come out. Don’t make this any harder.”

Diane wasn’t even tempted to answer. She stayed where she was and prayed they wouldn’t find her. She listened as they searched the other rooms, the closets. They called out to her several times. Then they came back to the kid’s room. She gripped her bat in one hand and her knife in the other as she heard the closet door open again. The sports equipment and toys banged against the wall as they rummaged through the closet.

“Here’s a little door,” said the female. “I think we’ve found her. Diane, are you in there? I betcha are.”

Diane heard them trying to get the door open. “It’s stuck.” This was a man’s voice. There was a loud pop; the wood splintered around the door and floor. Diane screamed.

“Burke, you fool, we need her alive.”

Diane heard them rip away the rest of the door. She was rolled up in a ball as they reached in, grabbed her legs, and began pulling her from her hiding place into the closet. Diane screamed again.

“Shit, Burke, you’ve killed her.”

“She ain’t dead, screaming like that.”

While they argued, Diane summoned all her strength and hit Oralia Lee in the nose with the heel of her hand and stuck at Burke with the glass knife. He hit her hand away. She dropped her makeshift knife and it shattered. Useless weapon. In the confusion, she lost her grip on the bat.

“Damn you, woman. You could’ve cut me.” Burke dug his fingers into Diane’s leg and pulled her out into the bedroom. Diane kicked at him and he twisted her leg. “Oralia Lee, get up off the floor and help me if you want this bitch alive.”

Oralia Lee didn’t answer. One down, thought, Diane. She kicked hard at Burke and hit him in the knee. He howled and fired his gun, splintering the floor near Diane’s head. Diane scrambled toward the door. He caught her around the waist and pulled her back into the room.

“I’m gonna kill you, you keep giving me trouble. The hell with the treasure. I’m gonna kill you.” He shoved Diane down and her head hit the floor with a thump. Burke aimed his gun at her. “Now, give me one reason why I shouldn’t just kill you right here and now.”

Diane didn’t move, feigning unconsciousness, trying to think. A moan came from the closet and Burke looked away from Diane.

“Oralia Lee, you…”

Diane didn’t hesitate: As he spoke she rolled toward him and grabbed both his legs and pulled. He hit the floor hard and lost his gun. Diane scrambled for it, but he reached it first and fired at her. Click. He fired again. Click.

Diane jumped to her feet and ran for the door, down the hall and down the stairs, and to the living room to Archie. His gun was just under his body. She pulled it out just as Burke came down the stairs.

“I got bullets now,” he said as Diane fired, hitting him in the neck.

She jumped up and ran out the door, leaving the two of them behind her. She thought she killed Burke, she didn’t know, but Oralia Lee could possibly be coming to by now. Diane sprinted through the woods toward her house as fast as she could run. It was dawn and the light was welcome. She was tired of the dark.

When she got to her apartment, she fumbled with the keys in her pocket. Her hand was bleeding where the glass shards of her knife had cut her. She managed to get the door open and closed it behind her. She ran up the stairs to the safety of her apartment and called the police.

Garnett sat in her living room on the couch with her while a paramedic bandaged her hand.

“Did you find them?” asked Diane.

Garnett nodded. “Archie and his sister are dead. I guess you know that. I know both of them. I would never have guessed it.”

“We all have our breaking points. Archie was sitting in the tent while we processed the charred remains. They turned out to be people he knew-Bobby Coleman, Izzy’s son, his own niece, for God’s sake. That’s hard. His sister lost her daughter-and grandchild-for what? Nothing. I understand their desire for revenge. I could have been there. What about the Rawsons?”

“Burke Rawson is dead. You were true with that shot. It hit the jugular and he bled out. Oralia… is that her name? She’s in a coma.”

Diane was afraid of that; she almost hesitated when she hit her. She had broken her nasal bone and had probably rammed a piece of bone up into her brain. She felt sick.

“You can wait and give your statement later this morning,” he said. “Get some rest.”

“I guess we’ll never know what they did with the bodies of the Sebestyen family-if they were the killers, if the Sebestyens were even killed.”

“Maybe the woman’ll come out of the coma-who knows,” said Garnett.

“How is Adler?” she asked.

“We looked in the basement. No sign of him. We’re thinking he got himself free and escaped,” said Garnett.

Diane nodded, leaned back, and closed her eyes. She sat back up so suddenly that Garnett jumped.

“What basement?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Which basement did you look in?” said Diane.

“The basement of the house.” he said.

“The meth house?” asked Diane.

“The meth house? No, the one last night… where Archie and Catherine were killed,” said Garnett.

“No. He was in the burned-out basement of the meth house next door.”

“Holy…” Garnett jumped to his feet.

Damn, she hadn’t been clear when she spoke with the 911 operator, and when the police arrived there was too much daylight to see the light in the basement of the meth house.

“My God, he was there all night in this weather. He’ll be frozen to death,” she said, rising from her sofa.

She grabbed her coat and rode with Garnett back to the scene of the crime. The paramedics were close behind.

They all ran from their vehicles to the edge of the gaping burned-out hole in the earth. Adler was still sitting with the ghosts of the dead students.

Epilogue

Diane ran along the nature trail behind the museum. She stopped when she got to the bridge and walked out on the small dock to watch the swans gliding in the water. The sun felt good on her bare arms. It had been a hard winter-too many funerals to attend, too many broken lives, too many unanswered questions.

Adler hadn’t died. But in the cold he lost two fingers, three toes, and his spirit. He resigned his council post and quit politics. His family wanted to blame Diane for his being left out in the cold, but the 911 tapes cleared her. Garnett never got to the bottom of the mix-up in directions.

The Indiana cold case squad traced the lives of the Rawsons. They were in Florida at the time the Sebestyens disappeared. There was evidence the Sebestyens rented a house on the beach near Ruby Torkel in the summer of 1987. But the detectives never got even a hint of where the bodies might be buried. Diane believed they were taken out to sea and dumped into the deep. Jin hoped that Juliet’s memories involved only dolls and that the Sebestyens found the treasure and were living happily and quietly somewhere mysterious.