Darynda Jones - Second Grave on the Left

“I was shaking so hard, I could barely breathe,” she said, shaking almost as hard right then. “And you were right about the bullying.” She looked up at me. “They got more and more brazen, and it just became unbearable. I stopped going to school and then finally begged my parents to let me live with my grandmother here. I just couldn’t live there any longer. I couldn’t look at Mr. and Mrs. Insinga any longer, knowing what they must have been going through.”

“Did they offer Janelle the same treatment?” I asked.

She looked up at me, confused. “Janelle?”

“Janelle York.”

Her face morphed from sadness to disgust. “She became nothing more than their lapdog. She was a part of it, a part of them.”

“I don’t understand.” I rose to my feet. “You two were hiding—”

She frowned at me. “I wasn’t hiding with Janelle in the bathroom,” she said, almost appalled that I would even think such a thing. “She’d been in the room with them, making out with Tommy on a beanbag in the corner. She would’ve done anything for him. When he freaked out about his parents finding out what happened, it was her idea to bury Hana underneath that grave.”

I turned up my palms. “Then who was hiding with you? And who was having sex with Hana?”

She swallowed hard. I could tell she didn’t want to tell us. “It was Jeff. Jeff Hargrove was … on her.”

“Wait, Jeff Hargrove was having sex with Hana?”

“Yes, well, at that time. I think … I think they took turns.”

“And who were they ?”

She thought back with a helpless shrug. “Besides Jeff, there was Nick Velasquez and Anthony Richardson.”

What the hell? “Mimi, who was in the bathroom with you?”

She lowered her head. “This is confidential, right?”

I kneeled down and peered into her eyes. “I can’t promise this won’t get out, Mimi, but we need to know who was there.”

With a heavy sigh, she said reluctantly, “Kyle Kirsch.”

Her answer knocked the wind out of me. “You mean, Kyle had nothing to do with Hana’s death?”

She seemed surprised. “No, not at all. They treated Kyle almost as badly as they treated me. Only he was the son of the sheriff, so they didn’t go quite so far with him.” She gripped my arm, her fingernails sinking into my sleeve. “You would have to know Jeff Hargrove. He’s crazy. Sheriff or no sheriff, he would have killed us both.”

I fell back on my heels. “Okay, so then what?” I asked, thinking aloud. My incredulous gaze landed on Cookie. “Kyle, what? He didn’t want all of this surfacing, so he’s killing everyone?”

“What?” Mimi almost screamed, her fingernails digging in, setting up shop. “Kyle would never do that. He would never hurt anyone.”

“Mimi,” I said, my voice sympathetic, “everyone started dying about two seconds after Kyle Kirsch announced his intention to run for a seat in the Senate. That’s a little hard to explain away.”

“I know everyone started dying, but nobody knows who’s doing it. Even Kyle. He’s scared shitless.” She glanced at Cookie. “Hired all kinds of bodyguards.” After a moment lost in thought, she shook her head. “It has to be Jeff Hargrove. He was always nuts.”

Cookie leaned forward. “Mimi, Jeff Hargrove drowned in his swimming pool two weeks ago.”

Pure, unadulterated shock overtook Mimi’s features. She was just as confused as the rest of us. And I was utterly lost.

“And Nick Velasquez allegedly committed suicide three weeks ago.”

“I knew that. Anthony Richardson did, too, but I didn’t know about Jeff.”

“Sweetheart, they’re all dead, everyone who was in that room, except for you and Kyle. There’s no other explanation.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head in denial, “that’s just not possible. If you knew Kyle.”

“Were you two involved?” I asked her. Love was not only blind, it often careened into Blithering Idiotsville as well.

She cast me another one of her looks of incredulity. She was really good at those. “No, we weren’t … You don’t understand.” She stopped and bit her bottom lip, then said with an acquiescent sigh, “Nobody knows this, nobody, but Kyle is gay. We were in the bathroom talking about boys.”

Oh, for the love of hush puppies. This just got better and better. “Okay, let me think,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Tell me again, why did you have dinner with Tommy Zapata the other day?”

Her brows crinkled. “He asked to meet with me. I was kind of scared not to. He said he was being blackmailed and he just couldn’t live with himself any longer.”

Blackmail tended to convince people they could no longer live with what they’d done. It was amazing.

“He said he’d met with Kyle and told him he was going to step forward and confess everything, take responsibility for his part in all of it. He asked me if I would back him. He was going to tell the authorities how they threatened Kyle and me, how they forced us to go with them.”

This was still not making a lick of sense. “Kyle’s family has money and you are married to a wealthy man, yet neither of you were being blackmailed?” I asked, incredulous.

“No, but we think we know who was doing it.”

“Really?”

“Tommy thought it was Jeff Hargrove.”

“Wait, the guy voted most likely to go to prison for rape and murder? That Jeff Hargrove?”

“Yes. Tommy thought he’d gotten into some financial trouble and decided Tommy, who owned a car dealership, would be an easy target. And Tommy was right. I checked into Jeff’s financial records—”

Dang, she was good.

“—and he’d made deposits on the same days as Tommy’s drops. Three of them.”

Wow, and yet both Tommy and Jeff were dead.

“Kyle called me later,” she continued. “He told me Tommy had actually apologized because he was likely going to ruin his political career.”

“That’s a pretty good reason to kill, Mimi,” Cookie said.

“No, Kyle didn’t care. He was going to step forward with Tommy. He was going to give a speech today with Tommy by his side and announce what happened.”

Gutsy. “Maybe he changed his mind.”

She sighed in frustration. “You would have to know Kyle. What you’re implying is so against his character, it’s unreal. He felt like he was living a lie anyway, hiding his homosexuality.”

I ran a hand down my face. My head hurt and not entirely because of the concussion. I thought I had this thing figured out. That’s what I got for thinking. “Okay,” I said, my voice airy with frustration, “so after you left for Albuquerque, what did Kyle do? Did they ease up on him?”

She shrugged, her mouth a grim line. “Kyle’s a good actor. He eventually convinced Jeff he was on their side. Then when school was out, he did the same thing I did. He left and spent the whole summer with his grandmother.”

“So, after you met with Tommy Zapata, did someone threaten you? Is that why you ran?”

“It wasn’t long after that I realized everybody was dying. I knew that my family was in danger. As long as I was a target and they were around me, they would not be safe. So I just got in a cab one day and ran. If not for that fire, I’d be in Spokane right now.”

“You kept yourself alive,” Cookie said. “Now we need to get you to safety.”

Yeah, while I figure out what the hell is going on.

The lights flickered out, and an eerie silence fell over us. I shushed everyone, then squatted down and peeked out the office door. An emergency light down the hall showed a large body, most likely belonging to Hulk, sprawled on the floor.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, unable to quite believe it. “They followed us?” I totally needed to pay more attention to who was on my ass. This was getting ridiculous.