Page 119 of All You Want
And I’m coming, coming around Todd’s mountain, when I come. I’m coming around Todd’s mountain, when I come, wringing out every glorious spasm and riding the rapture of Todd’s mountain, when I come…
Forty
~ Todd ~
In the days and weeks that go by, I untangle the mess of lies and coverups on that fateful first Halloween at Tami’s Harrowing Haunts Hotel. By the time I finish, I, too, have become a dirty cop.
I destroyed evidence in the form of Tami’s naked pictures. I didn’t need them to convict Evan of Viola’s murder. His name was not Evan Graves, the world-famous ghost hunter. Yes, there was an Evan Graves, and he was the one who performed on Halloween night at the Tower of Reeds in San Francisco.
The man who showed up in Colson’s Corner to masquerade as Evan Graves was a fraud named Evan Sims. He’d victimized Tami when she was a sixteen-year-old college student, and when she advertised for a ghost hunter to help her renovate her hotel, he’d contacted her and told her his stage name was Evan Graves.
Evan Sims, whose mugshot was found by Viola Graham in her nosy diggings, was far more sinister—a con artist and child pornographer with a rap sheet a mile long.
During his trial, we discovered how wily he was. He’d hacked into Tami’s email and sent Molly a text message through email telling her the murder was a staged event. She’d dutifully programmed the announcement to go out into the hotel’s PA system. In the ensuing confusion with people taking pictures and touching the body, the crime scene was completely contaminated. Evan managed to mix himself in the scene and picked up a souvenir, the Bigfoot mask, to pretend he was innocent and framed.
After all, if he were guilty, his lawyer argued, he would not have planted evidence in his own room. The case, of course, fell apart when Molly testified that Evan told her to go to San Francisco to substitute for him. When she got there, she found another Evan Graves doing the show.
I suspect Molly always knew Evan Sims wasn’t who he said he was, due to her internet research, but as long as he paid her—we discovered payments sent to her bank account—she kept his secret for him.
Once he was arrested, the payments stopped, and Molly, being Molly the grifter, had no more obligation to keep up the ruse, so she exposed him.
Furthermore, as Diana suggested, the blood found on Viola’s baseball bat matched Evan Sim’s DNA. Evan was hit by Viola with the bat, but failed to retrieve it because he didn’t want to be caught with it. Later, when people took pictures with it, he didn’t realize his blood was on it, and was perfectly happy when the town initially believed it was the murder weapon.
The real murder weapon, a rusted pickaxe, was thrown into the same mineshaft Tami’s friends landed in. Evan must have been in glee when Diana stole a different pickaxe, confusing the townsfolk, although not the police.
At the end, the bat and pickaxe, as well as Molly’s betrayal nailed his coffin, or prison cell, shut.
Tami’s secret is safe. I burned the photos I found in my fireplace and let all the particles go up my chimney flue. I’ll never let her know I saw them, and I let her know Evan was lying and flinging mud, hoping to discredit her to distract from his own crimes. Once or twice, she asked if I’d found any of the mud, and I always acted innocent. When she quizzed me about the contents of Evan’s hotel room, I dutifully listed everything that was in my evidence bag and told her the room was combed over by investigators and forensics without finding anything pertaining to her—not even a hatpin.
I may be a dirty cop, but I’m one in secret and a piss-poor one. I’m not blackmailing or bribing anyone, but at the same time, I didn’t look too hard for the missing police reports that Diana claimed she lost.
If she’s making a separate deal with the Kings, the family whose founder, King Henry, murdered and stole a gold nugget from her ancestor, Wing Van Dirk, it’s none of my business.
All I know is that Tami’s father paid blackmail and child support all these years to Mooma Wolfe through Sheriff Bill Weaver who turned out to be Justin Jameson’s unacknowledged biological father.
I truly feel sorry for the guy. They named him after a whiskey they drank when he was conceived.
As for the accusations against Tami, they were moot.
Maybe Mooma was accidentally sickened by the horse chestnut powder mixed into the tea or maybe she was poisoned by the traces of the “medicinal” extract found in the teakettle. But her staying “dead” and abandoning Justin to foster homes was inexcusable in my book.
I recommended the maximum sentence for her for blackmail, insurance fraud, extortion, and conspiracy. Justin also got jail time for kidnapping Larissa and Tami and assaulting Rosalie and Suzette. Rosalie broke an arm, and Suzette had a concussion, so he was a one-man terror that Halloween night.
Tami’s parents have some work to do with their marriage, but I’m sure they’ll sail through the stormy seas. George has a lot of groveling to do, and Gracie is keeping herself busy with her bed and breakfast, as well as getting to know Cara, Tami’s half-sister, who is now living with them.
As for me and Tami? We’re good. Really good. We moved in together into Madame Goldilocks’s Boudoir and use my cabin as a weekend love nest. I still visit Miss Laverne and see that she’s safe and warm, and Tami’s still angling to get new businesses started in Colson’s Corner—although she’s nixed the big shopping center, preferring to keep the character of our small mining community.
I knew she’d see things my way.
I have a woman worth fighting for, but I’m too much of a man to talk about lovey-dovey stuff.
I am, after all, the upstanding and tough lawman of Colson’s Corner, and nothing gets by me—not even a bright-red speeding Datsun 280ZX with a flashy blonde behind the wheel doing sixty in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone.
* * *
~ Tami ~
It’s Thanksgiving Day, and I’m busy putting the finishing touches on my inn with cornucopia horns full of harvest gourds and Indian corn. My black cat, Spook, prances throughout the lobby, rubbing herself on the butter churns and broom decorations and looking completely out of place for my big Thanksgiving event.
