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What a —
I pushed the thought away as soon as it popped up. Mentally calling Melanie Knowles names wasn’t going to change the situation, especially since it was pretty obvious that she had no more intention of talking to me than she did to the police.
Instead, I stepped forward, smiled, and said, “Better get used to those bars, Melanie.”
And then I turned and walked away.
Of course, all the sordid details eventually came out, even though Melanie had refused to testify at her own trial, and all the evidence against her was information dug up by the district attorney’s office. By that point, it was almost December, and I was nearly six months pregnant…and no closer to finding someone to help me out at the shop than I’d been before Melanie arrived on the scene.
Once burned, twice shy, I supposed.
Anyway, it turned out that Melanie and Jeffrey had cooked up the plan to blackmail Archie after Jeffrey began digging into Archie’s background and found a few inconsistencies that he wanted to exploit. Luckily, the D.A. didn’t go too much into that, so my friend’s secrets remained secret, but it established a motive.
But then Jeffrey apparently let slip to Melanie that he planned to hand over a chunk of the blackmail money to NancyAnne Nielsen in order to pay off his back child support, and she seemed to decide she didn’t need him and would rather keep it all for herself, a not unreasonable decision to make, I supposed, considering she had almost a hundred grand of credit card debt thanks to her over-the-top shopping habits. She talked him into approaching Victoria, while at the same time answering my ad so she’d be close enough to assess the situation and figure out the best way to proceed.
Slipping the atropine into the creamer had been easy enough; she’d stolen the drug from a locker at the hospital where she worked — a hospital that hadn’t even realized it was missing, or that she was doing a little more with the time off she’d requested than simply spending a few weeks in Cancun. And once Jeffrey was dead, she’d stuck around because she’d realized she’d found a much bigger mark, one she was all too happy to steal from.
Namely, me.
It sounded as though Melanie’s plan had been to drain the other three accounts whose debit card information she’d also copied down. That would have given her hundreds of thousands of dollars in her pocket, plenty to allow her to disappear across the border and never get caught.
Except, of course, for the inconvenient way I’d discovered that my new assistant was much more than she’d pretended to be.
The jury had only deliberated for a single afternoon, and came back with a unanimous guilty verdict. And the day after that, the judge sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole, meaning she was now cooling her heels at the maximum-security facility in Florence.
I had to wonder if she and Miriam Jacobsen, the former Globe Chamber of Commerce president who’d been sent there after being found guilty of being an accessory to murder, ever met in the prison yard and shared notes on how Selena Marx was the person who’d been instrumental in sending them to rot in prison.
Under other circumstances, I might have been worried about that. But this was real life, and I knew there was absolutely no chance of either of them getting out of the Florence facility any time soon. Miriam’s sentence was much lighter, since she’d been an accessory to murder rather than the person who’d done the awful deed, but still, she had a good ten or so years to go before she could even think about applying for parole.
The day after the sentence was handed down, Calvin and I drove up into the mountains to cut down our holiday tree. It was a family tradition of his that we’d observed the first December after we were married, and I had to admit it was a little strange to think that next year, our child would share this same tradition with us.
“Feeling better?” he asked as he lent an arm to steady me as we made our way through the thick forest outside Payson.
I knew he wasn’t talking about the morning sickness that had reared its ugly head this past week.
“Much better,” I said. “It definitely helps to know that Melanie is locked up and far away from here.”
He nodded. “That woman was a sociopath if I’ve ever seen one. Not a single hint of remorse.”
That was for sure. Had she ever felt anything for Jeffrey Sellers, or was he only someone who’d been convenient to her for a while?
Hard to say, because, other than the bits and pieces the D.A. had pried out of her during the trial, she had said nothing else about the case.
“I can’t believe she fooled me like that,” I said, and Calvin gently pulled me to him so he could place a reassuring kiss on my cheek.
“Sounds like she fooled a lot of people,” he replied. “So don’t beat yourself up.”
I nodded, since that was only the truth. No one had seemed to sense what she was capable of, the lengths she’d go to in order to get her hands on a big stack of cash. All I could do was thank the Goddess that my auras had come to my rescue, or I still might not have believed the kind of evil she’d harbored in her heart.
They’d come and gone since then, not entirely absent, but also not as frequent as they’d been before I’d gotten pregnant. Which was fine — it was good enough for me to know they weren’t gone forever, and that they’d been there for me when I needed them.
“What about this one?” Calvin asked then, stopping in front of a perfect blue spruce. It was about six inches taller than he was, so just under seven feet in height, and perfectly proportioned.
“It’s wonderful,” I said, even as I told myself not to feel guilty about cutting down the pretty little tree. This area had already been tagged for thinning, and if we didn’t cut it down, someone from the Forest Service would have come along and removed it, anyway. “It’ll be perfect for that corner by the fireplace.”
Calvin nodded and unhooked the axe he had hanging from his belt. With the ease of someone who’d done this many times before — after all, this had been a tradition in his own family, and one we were carrying on — he cut through the tree’s trunk, then kneeled to tie it up with some twine so it would be easier to transport back to his Durango.
Even with the tree precariously balanced on one shoulder, he still held my hand as we made our way down the path to the trailhead where we’d parked the SUV. His fingers felt infinitely reassuring against mine, and I was happy in that moment, happy for the feel of the cold, fresh air against my cheeks, happy to know we were going back to the home we’d made together.
No more adventures, I vowed to myself. This one was too close.
I’d just have to see whether the universe would allow me to keep that promise.
