“I don’t know,” Ashlee replied. “But I’ve got the rifle, and I’m ready to use it!”
Daphne hesitated. “If I open the door to let you in, will you be quick enough to shoot him if he makes a lunge for us?”
“Oh, yes, Daphne! But I don’t want to come in. I want you to come out! Jim has come back with his snowmobile. He can get us out of here. It will fit all of us!”
“We’re rescued!” Christopher cheered, hearing the bit about the snowmobile.
“Thank God,” Daphne breathed, and feeling with her hand along the door, she found the bolt and pulled it back.
As she promised, Ashlee was standing guard with the rifle, looking around the corridor to make sure no one lurked in the shadows. A giant, industrial-sized flashlight stood propped on the floor. Daphne, and then Christopher, stepped gingerly out of the storage room.
“Come on,” Ashlee urged them. “He’s waiting outside.”
She picked up the flashlight in one hand, the rifle lodged under her other arm, and guided them through the dark. Yet as they headed down the corridor to the main part of the basement, something felt wrong to Daphne. Very, very wrong. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but suddenly she wished that she and Christopher had never left the darkness of the storage room.
They passed the clown suit on the ground.
And then it hit Daphne.
“Ashlee,” she said. “You told me the name of your friend with the snowmobile was John.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I said. John. He’s come back.”
“You said Jim.”
“I did not. I said John. You just misheard me.” She looked over at Daphne impatiently. “Come on. Let’s go!”
As they turned past a pile of old chests and boxes, Daphne gasped.
Ahead of them, Gabriel sat in his wheelchair.
“Gabriel!” Daphne exclaimed.
“Yes,” Ashlee said behind her. “I forgot to mention. Gabriel survived too.”
“Hello, Daphne, hello, Christopher,” Gabriel said, in a voice that seemed different somehow.
Daphne’s eyes dropped to the floor. Beside the wheelchair, she spotted something very odd. The feet and legs of a mannequin—a store dummy—dressed in men’s pants and shoes. In her mind flashed again the scene in the hallway when the clown had appeared at the door of the study. Gabriel’s wheelchair had been overturned, and from the darkness a pair of legs had protruded. Gabriel’s legs, they had presumed.
But no.
It was the mannequin’s legs.
“You look so surprised to see me, Daphne,” Gabriel said, smiling broadly. “I would think you’d be glad to discover that I was still alive.”
Daphne watched as he gripped the arms of his wheelchair.
Her mouth fell open.
Gabriel stood.
And then he began to walk—
walk!
Daphne’s eyes spun over to Ashlee, who, she saw to her horror, was now pointing the rifle directly at her.
Her gaze returned to Gabriel.
He was coming toward her, carrying in his hands the long, bloodstained razor.
TWENTY-TWO
“It was you!” Daphne breathed in terror. “It was you all along!”
“Yes, Daphne, I was the clown.” Gabriel had paused in his approach toward her, running the long, sharp razor between his fingers. “Gosh, it’s good to be out of that ridiculous suit and makeup and wig. You can imagine what a sweat I broke out in running around in that thing all the time!”
“How long have you been able to walk?” Daphne managed to ask. She realized Christopher was standing behind her, clinging on to her arm.
“Oh, years,” Gabriel told her offhandedly. “The doctors always said they were hopeful I’d walk again, and seemed perplexed when I couldn’t. I stopped going to see them, and practiced on my own. I got in good shape, too, planning for this day.”
“Why would you do all this?” Daphne cried. “Kill your whole family!”
“Because they killed me!” Gabriel shouted, the veins in his forehead suddenly standing out in relief, highlighted by the glow of the large flashlight Ashlee had propped once again on the ground. “Don’t you see? My whole life has been contaminated by these people. My cowardly uncle Pete, whose failure to turn in my grandfather meant that I’d forever be a pariah in this town, among my peers. His negligence meant my father was killed. And without my father, Uncle Pete was able to bully my mother into doing anything he wanted. And then to rub salt in the wound, he always preferred Donovan to me.”
“But Ben! How could you let your own brother die? Your brother who was always good to you?”
“Good to me? Ben was part of the problem. Did he ever stand up for me to Donovan? To Uncle Pete? Never!”
“I don’t think you’re remembering correctly,” Daphne told him.
His eyes blazed. “Why is that, Daphne? You think I’m crazy?” And he laughed. It was the laugh she had heard before, from the clown.
“Come on, Gabe,” Ashlee said. “Let’s get this over with.”
Daphne spun on her. “I thought you were my friend,” she said.
“Oh, sweetie, I
was
your friend,” Ashlee said, sighing impatiently. “Look, I tried to get you to leave here many times. I encouraged you to go off with Gregory Winston. I gave you several opportunities to hightail it out of here. Neither Gabe nor I originally planned to include you in any of this. You just would never leave!”
“I tried scaring you,” Gabriel said, “like that very first day you came to Point Woebegone. Ashlee deliberately didn’t write your arrival in Axel’s log until he was already gone, so that we could meet you at the train. On the deserted platform, I’d appear in my clown suit. A little ghostly vision for your first introduction to the place!”
“But Gregory Winston beat us to you,” Ashlee grumbled, “and so we decided on a last-minute change of plans. Actually, it worked out to our advantage, didn’t it, Gabe?”
“Yeah, it was perfect,” he said. “I got to kill Maggie and give you a little glimpse of me in my clown suit at the same time!”
“Why would you want to kill Maggie?” Daphne asked. “She had nothing to do with your family.”
“Yeah, but she had everything to do with me, see?” Ashlee said. “She was my friend. She knew too much. So ... she had to go.”
“Besides,” Gabriel added, “we thought witnessing a murder on your first night here would definitely send you running back to Boston.” He sighed. “But you just wouldn’t leave! I tried again, scaring you that day in the village, when I jumped out of the Dumpster at you. Now,
that
was a filthy chore, believe me! But I figured if I got you to quit and go running back to Boston, it would have been worth it!”
“You see, sweetie, we really tried our best to not involve you in all this,” Ashlee said, smiling over at her wistfully. “But you just never took the hint! Really, if you had left that time when you said you were going to, I’d have happily driven you to the train station myself and given you a big hug and wished you well on the rest of your life. You would never have been dragged into any of this messiness.”
Ashlee’s face turned hard.
“But then, a couple of days ago, Pete gave me a bit of news that convinced me that it was better that we kill you, too.”
“Yeah,” Gabriel agreed. “I already had too many cousins anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Daphne asked.
“Sweetie, come on! I know you figured it out! You’re Pete’s daughter with that tramp Maria, the great love of his life!” Ashlee frowned. “He told me the truth the other night. He was going to tell you himself. He figured it was time.”
“So that’s when we knew it was time to put our final plan into action,” Gabriel continued. “And wow, this blizzard couldn’t have been more timely!”
“So Gabriel was the one I saw you with earlier,” Daphne said, looking over at Ashlee. “There was no man on a snowmobile.”
“Great deduction, Sherlock!” Ashlee said, laughing at her. “Yes, that was my sexy, adorable Gabe I was kissing. Shit, that was a close one. We thought you’d caught us.”
“Ashlee, I salute you on your fast thinking,” Gabe said, gesturing toward her with the razor in a kind of perverted honor. “The lover with the groceries on the snowmobile ... brilliant!”
“I learned pretty early in life how to think up lies on the spot to get out of trouble, or to get what I wanted,” she said. “I didn’t grow up with all the luxuries the Witherspoons enjoyed in this house.”
“How could you do this?” Daphne asked her, still trying to make sense of this creature that stood before her, to reconcile her with the Ashlee she’d thought she knew. “How could you allow all these people to be killed in cold blood?”
“I hated them!” she shouted, her own rage now obvious. “From the moment I walked into this house, they all judged me, looked down their noses at me! And Pete ...” She laughed bitterly. “Maybe, just maybe, for a minute, I could have loved him. But it was clear his heart was with that damn Maria. How could I compete with a memory? I understood what made sweet, sainted Peggy jump out that window!”
“Now, now, babe,” Gabriel said. “I made you feel welcome, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did, sweet’ums,” Ashlee cooed back, making kissing sounds with her lips. “Really, Gabe was my salvation here, Daphne. I don’t know how I’d have survived this crazy old house if not for him. We’d meet in secret ... oh, it was so romantic!”
“Maybe you hated the people in this house, but why kill your friend Maggie?” Daphne asked.
“I told you,” Ashlee said. “She found out too much. One night, she came up to Witherswood, and found Gabe and me together. And I knew how that girl thought. We grew up together, remember! She came up here with me when I married Pete. She hoped to snare one of the sons. Look, we were both poor girls from the wrong side of the tracks. But Donovan was with that bitch Suzanne, and Ben was gay. So that left Gabe, and I remember Maggie said, ‘Okay, so I’ll take the cripple.’ But in fact, I’d already taken Gabe, and Maggie got pissed. I knew she couldn’t be trusted, that she had knowledge that could blow our whole scheme open. So, she had to go.”
“You’re ... both ... reprehensible,” Daphne managed to say.
Ashlee had moved over to stand beside Gabe, still pointing the rifle at Daphne and Christopher.
“What do you say, Gabe?” Ashlee asked. “How about if we just shoot them? It’ll be quicker. And all this blood is getting me a bit queasy.”
“No, dear, it has to be the blade,” Gabriel replied. “Because the police have got to believe it was an intruder, a copycat killer, trying to re-create dear grandfather’s crimes. Ben took a bullet, it’s true, but we’ll just tell the truth on that one. Uncle Pete was a lousy shot.”
“So ... you plan to tell the police that you survived the massacre?” Daphne asked.
“Of course, sweetie,” Ashlee said. “We’re going to hide in the storage room and wait out the blizzard. We’ll tell the police we were hiding from the killer. It’ll be just like you were going to do. But we’ve got some provisions to make it less of an ordeal.” She nodded at a burlap sack beside Gabriel’s wheelchair. “The sandwiches cook made for us, plus plenty of water bottles. Even a box of chocolate chip cookies. It will be kind of fun!”
“You’re monsters,” Daphne said, as Christopher’s little hands dug deeper into her arm, his face buried in the back of her blouse.
“Of course, as Pete’s widow, I get the whole estate,” Ashlee said, “providing that little cretin behind you is dead. Oh, how that little brat annoyed me from the very first day I walked into this house, always whining about his sainted mother.”
“You’re cruel as well as monstrous,” Daphne said.
“Not really,” Ashlee said. “Gabe and I decided that after we get married, we’ll name our first son Christopher. Didn’t we Gabe?”
“I don’t recall that,” Gabriel replied quietly.
Ashlee laughed. “Oh, sure, we did. Christopher Peter Witherspoon. The town will find it so touching.”
Gabriel looked over at Ashlee and smiled. “Actually, my dear, I don’t recall ever deciding that we’d get married.”
“Oh, but we did,” she told him, an expression of confusion replacing her smile. “We talked about getting married many times.”
“You talked about it,” Gabe replied. “Not me.”
“Well, we can discuss it later,” Ashlee said, suddenly unnerved by the way Gabe was looking at her.
“No, we really can’t,” he told her, “because you see, there’s not going to be a later. At least, not for you, Ashlee.”
Her eyes widened in horror as Gabe took a step closer to her, the blade raised.
“Gabe, stop it!” Ashlee screamed. “You’re scaring me!”
“I’m good at scaring people, it seems,” he said, grinning wickedly. “You stupid bitch. Why would I share my inheritance, as Pete’s only surviving heir, with such a common whore as you?”
Ashlee began to blubber, her words incoherent.
“Don’t you understand?” Gabe asked. “I only loved one woman! And she’s all I ever
will
love! Kathy Swenson! And this family took her from me!”
He lunged at Ashlee with the long blade. She lifted the rifle and pointed it at him, pulling the trigger and bracing for the blast.
But nothing happened.
Gabriel laughed. “You stupid, stupid bitch! Did you really think I’d hand over the rifle to you without first taking out the bullets?”
He whacked the weapon out of her hands. It went clattering across the concrete floor.
“I figure Daphne deserves to see you die before she does,” Gabriel said, “since, after all, you were
such
a bad friend to her.”
Ashlee screamed.
The blade swung.
Blood sprayed into the air like red paint thrown at a moving electric fan.
In the chaos of that fleeting instant, Daphne shoved Christopher away from her. “Run!” she shouted at the boy. “Run! Get out of here!”
The boy obeyed, his frantic footsteps echoing away in the dark basement.
But that was only part of Daphne’s plan. She lunged for the large, heavy flashlight that was propped on the floor. Gripping it in her hands, she turned quickly and swung it at Gabriel’s head—but found herself slipping in the pool of Ashlee’s warm blood. Her swing went astray, and she toppled to the ground, falling over Ashlee’s body. Her face came to rest only inches from her former friend, whose dead eyes stared at her.
Gabriel reached down and took hold of Daphne’s arm. “I’ll find the boy,” he said calmly, seeming unperturbed by her attempt to overpower him. “Don’t you worry about that.” He flipped Daphne over so that she faced up at him. He was smiling. His smile chilled her to her soul.
“But first,” Gabriel said, “it’s finally time for you to die, Daphne. Pity, really, because you were the only one who was halfway decent to me in this house. But you’re a Witherspoon, my dear. So that means you have to die.”
He raised the blade over her throat.