He stared at her. “Let me get this straight. You killed Dixon.”
“Yes.”
“Why would Charlotte lie about it?”
Elaine sighed. “I’m not sure, but you know that Birdie Malone is in town looking for her father’s killer. Birdie saved Charlotte from Boyle. Maybe she thought by confessing to the murder, she was paying Birdie back. I don’t know. Who knows what makes Charlotte do what she does?”
She had him there.
“Maybe she also lied to protect me,” Elaine said.
“Protect you? Why would she do that? I didn’t even realize that the two of you were...acquainted, really.”
“We’re friends,” she said with a lift of her chin. “I’ve been trying to get her and Holden back together for years.”
The sheriff shook his head in surprise. “Maybe you’d better sit down and tell me how it is that you killed Dixon. Did Charlotte hire you to do it?”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I just told you. We’re friends.” She took a seat. “Don’t you want to record this?”
“Sure,” he said and turned on the video recorder.
Elaine cleared her throat and began. The sheriff had heard this confession already from Charlotte, only in her story, Charlotte had done what Elaine was now confessing to. What the hell was going on?
“I was at the ranch alone that night when Dixon Malone came by. He wanted to see Holden. I told him he was out of town. He was very agitated, said he had to see him, that he needed money, he was leaving town.”
Stuart waited while she took a breath, reminding him that Elaine would have been in her early twenties when this happened. Her mother, newly widowed, had taken the McKenna Ranch housekeeper job when Elaine was a baby, with Holden providing a home for both of them. Elaine had grown up on the McKenna Ranch and gone away to college, returning to the ranch when her mother got sick and taking over the housekeeping job. She’d been at the ranch ever since.
“Dixon had been drinking.” She hesitated, tears pooling in her eyes. “He said he knew things that Holden would pay to keep quiet. He demanded I give him money, said he needed it to start over, just him and his daughter. When I tried to throw him out...” She looked away. “He got rough. Said he wasn’t leaving without something. He grabbed me. I told him he was hurting me. He backed me into the wall by the fireplace. I picked up the poker and hit him. The first time only stunned him. I hit him harder. He went down hard, striking his head on the hearth, and didn’t get up.” She wiped her tears. “That’s it.”
“Not hardly,” the sheriff said. “What did you do with the body? And how is it that Charlotte told this same story with just a few minor changes? Not to mention your statement that she might have lied to protect you. How about the whole truth here?”
Elaine swallowed. “I panicked when I realized I’d killed him. I...I called Charlotte to tell her what happened and ask for her help. We’d become friends when I tried to get her to forgive Holden and Margie. She and Margie had been such good friends before...” Elaine shrugged.
He knew where this story was going. “She helped you get rid of the body and cover up the crime.”
“Yes.”
“The two of you kept this secret all these years,” the sheriff said. “So what changed?”
“I didn’t know Dixon had a daughter who would someday come looking for the truth.”
“Also, Birdie Malone saved Charlotte the other day,” Stuart said. “I suspect that’s why Charlotte confessed.”
Elaine nodded. “And forced us both to finally face the past.”
“Here’s what I want to know,” the sheriff said. “After you struck Dixon the second time, did you stay there in the room?”
“No, I went outside to make the call to Charlotte. I didn’t want to go back inside by myself, so I walked down the road to meet her. Then we both went back to take care of him.”
“Take care of him?”
“You know, wrap him up and dispose of his body. She’d brought a pickup. He was very heavy.”
“Did either of you have a gun?”
Her expression was his answer, and yet he needed it on the video.
“A gun. No.”
“You didn’t shoot him to make sure he was good and dead? Charlotte didn’t?”
“No.” She looked horrified. “Why would we do that? He was dead. There was so much blood...” She swallowed.
He read Elaine her rights, then turned off the video and had a deputy take her down to a cell.
Then he sat mulling over everything he’d heard from the two women before calling the county prosecutor and telling him that they had a problem.
BRAND CALLED BIRDIE the moment he heard that Elaine had turned herself in for Dixon Malone’s murder.
He’d wanted to believe Charlotte hadn’t done it, even knowing that she could have. He realized that he’d been waiting for the other boot to drop from the moment Dixon’s body had been found in the well so close to Stafford Ranch property.
The coroner had said the body had been in the well for years—probably since the night Dixon had stormed out of the ranch house and was never seen again. At least, that had been his mother’s story—that Dixon had stormed out, and that was the last she saw of him.
Right now, he was more concerned about what this meant for Birdie. She’d come here to get justice. It had appeared that she was finally getting it. But now her reason for coming to Powder Crossing was over. There would be nothing keeping her here.
He didn’t want her to go, but he wasn’t sure he could make her stay. When he mentioned it to Ryder, his brother laughed.
“Seriously? How long have you known her? A week?” Ryder shook his head. “Don’t you dare tell me that you’ve fallen in love with her.”
