«How did you do it, Mabel?»
«Go home, Myron.»
Myron lifted the muzzle and poked her forehead with it. Hard. «How?»
«You think I’m scared of you?»
He poked her again with the muzzle. Harder. Then again. «How?»
«What do you mean, how?» She was spitting words now. «It would have been easy, Myron. Anita was a mother. I would have quietly shown her the gun. I would have told her if she didn’t do exactly as I said, I would kill her daughter. So Anita, the good mother, would have listened. She would have given her daughter a last hug and told her to wait in the lobby. I would have used a pillow to muffle the shot. Simple, no?»
A fresh flash of rage surged through him. «Then what happened?»
Mabel hesitated. Myron hit her with the gun again.
«I drove Brenda back to her house. Anita had left a note telling Horace she was running away and that Brenda wasn’t his child. I tore it up and wrote another.»
«So Horace never even knew that Anita had planned on taking Brenda.»
«That’s right.»
«And Brenda never said anything?»
«She was five years old, Myron. She didn’t know what was going on. She told her Daddy how I picked her up and took her away from Mommy. But she didn’t remember anything about a hotel. At least that’s what I thought.»
Silence.
«When Anita’s body vanished, what did you think happened?»
«I figured that Arthur Bradford had shown up, found her dead, and did what that family always did: threw out the trash.»
Another rage flash. «And you found a way to use that. With your son, Terence, and his political career.»
Mabel shook her head. «Too dangerous,» she said. «You don’t want to stir up those Bradford boys with blackmail. I had nothing to do with Terence’s career. But truth be told, Arthur was always willing to help Terence. Terence was, after all, his daughter’s cousin.»
The anger swelled, pressing against his skull. He wanted so much simply to pull the trigger and end this. «So what happened next?»
«Oh, come now, Myron. You know the rest of the story, don’t you? Horace started looking for Anita again. After all these years. He had a lead, he said. He thought he could find her. I tried to talk him out of it, but well, love is a funny thing.»
«Horace found out about the Holiday Inn,» Myron said.
«Yes.»
«He spoke to a woman named Caroline Gundeck.»
Mabel shrugged. «I never heard the woman’s name.»
«I just woke Ms. Gundeck out of a sound sleep,» Myron said. «Scared her half to death. But she talked to me. Just like she talked to Horace. She was a maid back then, and she knew Anita. You see, Anita used to work hotel functions to make a little extra money. Caroline Gundeck remembered seeing Anita there that night. She was surprised because Anita checked in as a guest, not a worker. She also remembered seeing Anita’s little daughter. And she remembered seeing Anita’s daughter leave with another woman. A strung-out drug addict is how she described the woman. I wouldn’t have guessed it was you. But Horace would have.»
Mabel Edwards said nothing.
«Horace figured it out after hearing that. So he came charging over here. Still in hiding. Still with all that money on him – eleven grand. And he hit you. He got so angry that he punched you in the eye. And then you killed him.»
She shrugged again. «It almost sounds like self-defense.»
«Almost,» Myron agreed. «With Horace, it was easy. He was on the run already. All you had to do was continue to make it look like he was in hiding. He would be a black man on the run, not a homicide. Who would care? It was like Anita all over again. All these years you did the little things to make people think she was still alive. You wrote letters. You faked phone calls. Whatever. So you decided to do the same again. Hell, it worked once, right? But the problem was, you weren’t as good at getting rid of the dead as Sam.»
«Sam?»
«The man who worked for the Bradfords,» Myron said. «My guess is that Terence helped you move the bodies.»
She smiled. «Don’t underestimate my strength, Myron. I’m not helpless.»
He nodded. She was right. «I keep giving you these other motives, but my guess is that it was mostly about money. You got fourteen thousand from Anita. You got eleven thousand from Horace. And your own husband, dear, sweet Roland whose picture you wept over, had an insurance policy, I’d bet.»
She nodded. «Only five thousand dollars, poor soul.»
«But enough for you. Shot in the head near his very own home. No witnesses. And the police had arrested you three times the previous year – twice for petty theft and one for drug possession. Seems your downward spiral began before Roland was killed.»
Mabel sighed. «Are we done now?»
«No,» he said.
«I think we covered everything, Myron.»
He shook his head. «Not Brenda.»
«Oh, right, of course.» She leaned back a bit. «You seem to have all the answers, Myron. Why did I kill Brenda?»
«Because,» Myron said, «of me.»
Mabel actually smiled. He felt his finger tighten on the trigger.
«I’m right, aren’t I?»
Mabel just kept smiling.
«As long as Brenda didn’t remember the Holiday Inn, she wasn’t a threat. But I was the one who told you about, our visit there. I was the one who told you she was having memories. And that’s when you knew you had to kill her.»
She just kept smiling.
«And with Horace’s body found and Brenda already a murder suspect, your job became easier. Frame Brenda and make her disappear. You kill two birds with one stone. So you planted the gun under Brenda’s mattress. But again you had trouble getting rid of the body. You shot her and dumped her in the woods. My guess is that you planned on coming back another day when you had more time. What you didn’t count on was the search party finding her so soon.»
Mabel Edwards shook her head. «You sure can spin a tale, Myron.»
«It’s not a tale. We both know that.»
«And we both know you can’t prove any of this.»
«There will be fibers, Mabel. Hairs, threads, something.»
«So what?» Again her smile poked his heart like a pair of knitting needles. «You saw me hug my niece right here in this very room. If her body has fibers or threads, they’d be from that. And Horace visited me before he was murdered. I told you that. So maybe that’s how he got hairs or fibers on him – if they even found any.»
A hot bolt of fury exploded inside his head, almost blinding him. Myron pressed the barrel hard against her forehead. His hand started quaking. «How did you do it?»
«Do what?»
«How did you get Brenda to leave practice?»
She didn’t blink. «I said I’d found her mother.»
Myron closed his eyes. He tried to hold the gun steady. Mabel stared at him.
«You won’t shoot me, Myron. You’re not the kind of man who shoots a woman in cold blood.»
He didn’t pull the gun away.
Mabel reached up with her hand. She pushed the barrel away from her face. Then she got up, tightened her robe, and walked away.
«I’m going to bed now,» she said. «Close the door on your way out.»
He did close the door.
He drove back to Manhattan. Win and Esperanza were waiting for him. They did not ask him where he’d been. And he did not tell them. In fact, he never told them.
He called Jessica’s loft. The machine answered. When the beep sounded, he said that he planned on staying with Win for a while. He didn’t know for how long. But a while.