Over Her Dead Body(81)
Brando barks like a banshee when I leave the house, and I didn’t want to wake Jordan, so I took him with me when I slipped out in the dead of night with that baseball in my gloved hand. I’ll always wonder why he ran back there the next morning. Had he sensed I was drunk with rage and had done something dangerous? Or was he just being a dog obsessed with a ball? As for Jordan, I don’t know why I’d vented to him. Maybe I’d needed him to agree that Louisa was a vile old troll to spur me to go through with it, because I knew if Jordan doesn’t like someone, they must be bad. I stopped short of telling him about the bomb shelter because, if there was a murder investigation, I didn’t want him to have to say I knew about it.
The police eventually determined that the baseball was “at least a decade old” and had “probably been in there for years.” They had ample eyewitness testimony to charge Marcela with two counts of attempted murder, so were content to rule Louisa’s death an accident—she had gone down there willingly, after all, and unlike Winnie and Charlie, had an unobstructed exit if she’d wanted to leave. While the coroner was able to determine she had only been dead a few hours, they had no way to calculate how long the door had been closed and her oxygen cut off, which was a lucky break for someone who, until that day, hadn’t gotten very many.
We often say that life imitates art, but sometimes, art also infiltrates life. People watch a movie about a dramatic comeback (Rocky) or unlikely hero (Erin Brockovich) and become inspired to pursue their dream or fight for a cause. No, I didn’t do the script as written, or even play the part that was offered to me. But in the end I think all will agree that the good guys won, and the true villain got what she deserved. As for whether I deserved to be punished for taking matters into my own hands? Well, that was for my angels to decide.
CHAPTER 68
* * *
JORDAN
“What do you have there?” the detective said to one of his investigators, who was standing at the threshold of the dead woman’s living room. I didn’t have to stay for the whole interrogation, but I didn’t want to abandon Ashley, so I stuck around. Hearing the story of what that old woman had done made my face burn with rage all over again. Besides the psychological pain she’d inflicted on Ashley this past weekend and her kids over a lifetime, faking your own death is a crime, and an insult to doctors and the hardworking end-of-life professionals who devote their lives to giving the deceased a dignified passing.
“It was in the vent,” the investigator said as he held up a clear evidence bag with a baseball in it. “Completely blocked the airflow in and out.”
Those standard nine-inch MLB-regulation balls are ubiquitous. Half the neighborhood kids probably had ones just like it. I figured it had gotten lodged in there during someone’s backyard batting practice. I once hit a line drive that got stuck in the O in “OUTS” on our scoreboard; it’s still there to this day. Yes, there was a big box of them on my living room floor, but I didn’t see any reason to mention it. At least not yet.
“Could it have gotten in there by accident?” the detective asked.
And the investigator shook his head. “The vent has a little roof over it.”
“Prints?”
“Nope.”
Ashley was sitting next to me. As my backyard batting practice theory went up in smoke, I forced myself not to look at her. I didn’t want to see her fingers threaded together to keep her hands from shaking, or the pink stain that was spreading across her ears and neck.
The fact that Ashley was named in the will made her an obvious suspect, but—as she’d already explained—she hadn’t known she was Louisa’s heir until the will reading. And by that point she’d thought Louisa was already dead. Yes, she’d impersonated Louisa’s nurse, but she’d thought it was an audition. And Louisa had long since disappeared when she’d found out that it wasn’t. Plus Louisa was the one who wrote the copy and left the recording on Nathan’s voice mail, so it was clear who the mastermind was, and that it wasn’t Ashley.
“How old do you think that ball is?” the detective asked, peering into the evidence bag.
“Old,” his investigator replied. “We’ll send it to forensics, but I betcha ten years at least.”
The detective let us go with a promise to follow up in a day or two. Ashley and I drove home in silence. The rain had slowed to a gentle drizzle. When we got to the house, Brando jumped out of the car and trotted up the front walk with his nose in the air like a show pony who had just won the blue ribbon. And why not? He certainly deserved one. His timely disobedience had saved two lives. I shuddered to think how much worse this would have been if he had been a good boy.
“What a surreal morning,” Ashley said as I opened the front door for her, then followed her and Brando into the house.
“Horrifying,” I agreed, not elaborating on what I thought was the most horrifying part.
“Crazy how there was a baseball in there,” Ashley said, as if there weren’t an open box of them right by her feet.
“Sounds like they think it might’ve been in there for a long time,” I said.
“Well, it did look old.”
“Is that what you think?” I asked. And she kind of shrugged.
“It makes sense, I guess.”