A Match Made for Murder Iona Whishaw (pride and prejudice read .TXT) 📖

feet and found she could. “It’s okay. I think I can walk,” she said. Her mouth felt unfamiliar, as if someone else was talking. She instinctively put her right hand to her left side, and then pulled it away, whimpering at the pain. She tried to focus. She was with a cowboy and a woman going somewhere. It was coming back. She could hear angry male shouts nearby. The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

She’d been running from someone with that woman from the hotel. She suppressed an instinct to look back, as her memory came swooping home. Meg should be there, hiding, Lane thought, her heart sinking. Meg wasn’t hiding. She was helping her limp across the desert to the road, and she was saying something shrill and very ill-considered to the man with the gun.

Lane tried to turn her head to see where he was, but it hurt. She thought she could hear him walking behind them. The angry, “Would you shut up?” confirmed it.

“Meg,” she tried. “You should have stayed.”

“You’re right about that! But I just got sick of Idaho beating up on people who can’t fight back. Look at you. He shot you for no good goddamn reason!”

Lane could see the car she’d been kidnapped in parked up on the road, Paul Galloway leaning on it watching, a cigarette in his hand, a gun trained on Darling, and she was overwhelmed with dread. It had all been for nothing, just like Meg had said.

Amy Watts stood in the woodshed dangling the letter in her hand, looking out the door at the utter dreariness and cold. She’d have to burn it, of course, though she had an impulse to keep it. It had proved her right, which made it kind of a prize. What had Barney sent to get a response like this? And to whom? Sighing, she lifted it up and reread it. He must have been trying to get money out of him. He’d been gambling his paycheques away steadily. She’d known about the gambling. Had fought with him, had cajoled him, had begged him. But this, and those . . . well, she didn’t even know what to call them. Prizes? Tokens? A change purse, a ribbon, a chain bracelet. She walked slowly back to the house, which now had a strangely hollow feeling as if it had been wilfully deserted by Barney. He’d finally left her after all, just as she’d feared all those years.

She thought of him opening the envelope, being disappointed by its thinness, and seeing these words: “Don’t you dare communicate with me again. I was prepared to forget how I protected you from that Tina, but now it’s come up again, hasn’t it?” And then an incomprehensible signature. When Amy had first found it, she had turned it over and over, trying to understand who sent it. Barney must have destroyed the envelope. Now it didn’t matter. All that mattered is that it had to be burned, just like the clothes and everything else she’d burned to free herself from Barney Watts. She opened the grate with the lifter and watched the flames dancing inside the stove. She dropped the letter in and closed the grate.

“What do you want?” Tina stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips. This was all she needed.

“Hello, Tina.” Amy got out of the car and looked around as if she were a big-city buyer. “I guess you heard, Barney’s dead.”

“I heard, yes. I wish I could say I was sorry. I know you have a little girl. It must be hard. I am sorry about that.”

“Thanks. That means nothing, coming from you. You were planning all along to take him from me.” Amy cocked her head sideways and looked at Tina. “I never did understand what he saw in you. Look at you. A grease monkey with a floozy’s hair.”

Tina frowned, feeling like the ground was sliding underfoot. “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, Amy. I told you ten years ago that I hated him. I still hate him, even dead as he is.”

Amy sneered. “Right. That’s why he came here the other day, I suppose. That’s why he kept that little memento you gave him. He tried to hide it, but I saw it one day stuffed at the back of a shelf in the woodshed.”

Tina knew instantly. The purse. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head. “Look, Amy, I never told you this. I should have, but I was young and frightened. He raped me. I was sixteen, and he drove me up some dark road somewhere and he raped me. He had his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t breathe or scream. I was sixteen, do you understand? I didn’t even know if he was going to kill me. He drove me back and pushed me out of the car at the top of that drive,” Tina said, pointed angrily toward the road, “and left me like a piece of garbage he was throwing away. I wouldn’t run away with him for all the tea in China. I’d as soon kill him. I never gave him that purse. I thought I’d lost it, but it must have fallen out of my pocket and he kept it. Anyway, he only came here to find out if I’d ever told anyone about the rape. Why would he think, after all this time, I would have told anyone?”

Amy nodded, her lips clamped together. “What a liar,” she said. “What an unbelievable lying bitch you are.”

Tina glanced at the bay doors and turned back. “It was you.”

“Of course it was me. As soon as I learned he’d come here. Then I took care of him.”

Tina backed away, slowly. She felt as if her insides had melted. Where was her father? She wanted to close her eyes, to think. Amy had just said she’d “taken care” of Barney. Had she killed him? If