Chapter Sixteen

A smile playing on her lips, Honey moved along the hall, noting the way the light spilled through the multi-paned windows. She couldn’t quite work out why Brian wanted to meet her at this place—a disused old clothing warehouse that was part of Wheeler International’s holdings, and a building Craig had earmarked for re-development. They’d walked past it a few days earlier, and she’d noticed that some work seemed to have already started.


“That’s strange.”
“What is?” Brian asked.
“This is a Wheeler building.”
“Really?” Brian’s dark brows had lifted. “Does that mean you built it or…”
“Just own it,” Honey replied with a smile. “We’re good at owning things, we Wheelers.”
“So where does the strange come in?”
“Well….” Honey studied the three-story, narrow, brick building. “I thought we were still working on exactly what we wanted to do with it.”
“So?”
“The windows are all clean. There are even blinds on the upper levels. It looks—open, alive.”
“Alive?” Brian repeated.
“Abandoned buildings have a sort of closed, shuttered, dead look about them,” she explained. “I know it sounds weird, but this building looks as if people have been using it.”
“Could someone have sublet it?”
“Maybe,” Honey allowed. “I guess it’s possible.” Stepping up to the door, she rang the bell. A faint noise sounded inside. “The bell’s connected,” she said, knowing she was stating the obvious.
“Do you want to call your dad or Jim or someone?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. I don’t know why I’m even thinking about it. I’ll check it with Cilla when I see her. She handles some of our local real estate.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I am. It’s not important.”
“Nice building though. I wish mine were more like it.”
“Maybe I can get you a good deal,” Honey teased.
“Only if you come with the place.”




Maybe that was why Brian had sent the text. Cilla hadn’t got back to her yet about the place, but perhaps she’d spoken to Brian instead. She’d mentioned something about asking his advice about a project she was working on.  The building was open, just as the text had promised, and it hadn’t been the other day. The bottom floor was still untouched—an open space that had once held huge sewing machines where garments were brought together.
Narrow stairs led to the upper levels.
“Brian!” she called. “Brian, are you there?” She was anxious to see him. The note that Ford had given to her at the service had somehow lifted a huge weight. She and Craig had both moved on emotionally, but Craig’s words, thanking her for their time together, clearing her of blame for their failed relationship mattered—at least to her— though his warning, if it was a warning, to watch those around her made no sense.
The place was definitely in use. The stairs should have been dusty, but both the banister and treads were relatively clean. Someone must have been using the place, but for what? And who? Or was that whom? Honey shook her head at her inner grammar nazi. She was anxious for some reason, and her thoughts always randomised when she was anxious.
There was something about an empty house or building—a feeling of possibility, an echo of past and promise of future. Honey knew her father sometimes found her emotional way of responding to things and situations puzzling.
But it was innate, not a choice. And now, she felt, that this was not an empty building. She stopped where she was on the stairs, wondering why she had such a sudden feeling of dread.  Brian was supposed to be here so the place wouldn’t be empty, would it? But then why didn’t he answer her call? She might not have known him long, but she was certain that Brian Belden was not the sort of man to play games. Maybe he hadn’t heard her calls or maybe he was running late and hadn’t arrived yet….
“Stop it!” she hissed, almost under her breath. Craig had often laughed at her tendency to worry. In the early days of their relationship he’d called her his darling little neurotic. Maybe he was right, after all. “Get a grip,” she told herself sternly. Brian was probably out of earshot, on the phone, still on his way. She was letting her imagination run away with her. This building belonged to her family, and she was perfectly safe. Taking a deep breath, Honey resumed her ascent.
“Brian, it’s me. I got your text.” Having reached the next level, Honey found it was indeed empty--of people, anyway--and sparsely furnished. A sofa, table and lamp were in the centre of the room, and she crossed the bare wooden boards, her brows drawing together in a frown. Tucked in a corner by the windows was a basic kitchenette. It contained a single sink, small refrigerator, cupboard and microwave.  A kettle sat upon the bench, and opening the cupboard revealed plain white dishes and wine glasses. What the hell had been going on?
Reaching into her purse, she pulled out her cell. “I don’t care how neurotic I am. I am not that ditzy girl in the horror movie,” she said aloud, as she searched for Brian’s name and number in her address book.  She punched it in and waited as the phone began to ring. As she waited, she heard the ringing, not just from the phone in her hand, but coming from the floor above. He was here, and if this was his idea of funny, he was about to get a serious verbal beating from her.
She raced up the stairs, the ringing becoming louder as she ran. As she climbed the final stair, she stumbled over a workman’s hammer, catching at the newel post to regain her balance. “Brian Belden, this is so not funny, and don’t even pretend you couldn’t hear me….” She trailed off as she saw the object of her wrath, sprawled across the large bed that dominated the space. But he wasn’t laughing, he wasn’t moving and, as her heart caught in her chest, she realized she wasn’t sure if he was breathing.


She moved towards him, her hand outstretched, the sight of him so still filled her with fear. Leaning over him, her trembling fingers went to his neck, feeling for a pulse.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Honey spun around and saw the other woman standing in a doorway that she could see led to a compact bathroom.
 Cilla’s voice was impossibly calm. She studied Honey’s expression, and a slow smile crossed her face. “He’s not dead, you know. Not yet.”
Honey knew she should do something—react, say…something. But her brain was still trying to make sense of what was happening. “Cilla?” she queried, a puzzled frown forming. “What’s going on? Why…?” She trailed off as light bulbs flickered and burned inside her mind. Fragments of memory and information wove themselves together and everything became clear. 
“How did you get him here?” she asked finally.
“I told you. I wanted his help with something and, trust me, he was very helpful. When you told me that the two of you had been past this place, I confess I was worried. It was meant to be for Craig and my new life together. Then I realised how perfect it was. And when I suggested to Brian that he come and take a look at the work we’d done here, because your father was considering using it for a free counselling service, connected to your precious Don’t Look Away, he jumped at the chance.”
“He has nothing to do with this,” Honey said fiercely, hazel eyes blazing. “You should never have….” she trailed off as for the first time, she focused on the small pistol in Cilla’s hand. She forced herself to speak calmly. “Why don’t you and I go somewhere and talk privately?” If Brian wasn’t dead, there was a chance she could save him. She couldn’t see any obvious wound. Maybe, maybe…
Cilla tilted her head from side to side. “I’m not sure that will work. I think before we’re done here, he needs to be dead.”
“Why?” Honey demanded, as she scrambled to work out her options. “You can kill me if you want. I suppose I can’t stop you.” Though I might just try anyway. “But Brian—it doesn’t make any sense.” The very thought of Brian being dead made her want to scream and scream—or kill—preferably the woman standing before her. She had never felt this for Craig. But Brian…she had to save him!
“You know I’ve never understood why your father, and even the board, consider you intelligent. You are very slow at putting the pieces together.”
“Why don’t you do it for me then?” Honey snapped. If she kept the woman talking, at least she would buy some time. “You’re obviously so much smarter than I am.” She moved away from Brian and back towards the stairs. If she lured Cilla away from Brian, surely that increased both his chances and her opportunity to take action.
“I am. I’m more everything than you are.” This time Cilla’s tone was shrill, and it gave Honey a small sense of satisfaction. She’d unsettled the blonde woman, and it felt good.
“Smarter, prettier, better in bed. The only thing I’m not is richer!”
Or saner, Honey thought.
“ Stop moving,” Cilla warned, taking a step towards Brian’s prone form. “You are just so…sweet and thoughtful and unbelievably pathetic! What Craig ever saw in you…. Well, we all know what that was.”
“We did care about one another,” Honey said evenly. “We even loved one another—for a while.”
“Oh, please, he loved your money, not you, never you.”
“That’s not true.” Honey thought about the note, tucked inside her pocket. She and Craig had drifted apart, and the man who’d left her a widow was a long way from the one who’d taken her hand in marriage, but he had—Honey knew that now. Some of it had been real, and he’d been sorry. In the end, he’d been sorry.
“He loved me!” Cilla insisted, eyes narrowing angrily.
“So why did you kill him?”
“It was an accident,” Cilla cried.
“Shooting someone three times…was an accident?” Honey raised her brows, and moved again, this time trying to position herself between Brian and this crazy person she had thought was her friend. “I’d hate to see how you’d kill someone if it were deliberate.”
“He’d said we’d be together, once he was free of you. But you, you just kept clinging on, and he felt guilty because we were friends.”
“I’m sure he did.” Honey actually believed this. Craig would have found fooling around with one of her friends awkward. And now, the warning actually made sense.
“And then he started to pull away. He was so caught up in this thing with Neil Richter. That man would have dragged him into all sorts of shady deals. And Craig wasn’t that smart. He’d have wound up in prison.”
“He might have preferred prison to death,” Honey said, suddenly angry for the man she’d once loved and still cared for.
“And getting in with Richter exposed Craig to something even worse, and that witch got her hooks into him. That was your fault, too.”
“And global warming? The latest world financial crisis?” Honey asked, surprised at her glibness.
Cilla’s eyes narrowed. “I suppose you think you’re funny! You always did have a bizarre sense of humour. Craig thought so, too.”
That might be true, Honey thought. But Brian gets my sense of humour—his whole family gets it. 
“Even now….” Cilla looked puzzled. “What does a man like him see in you?” She inclined her head in Brian’s direction as she spoke. “He’s a doctor. Okay, he works with the police, which is…odd, but he’s really good-looking and smart, so why you? Is it that wide-eyed, helpless thing?”
“Actually, he likes the way I think,” Honey said. “He thinks I’m smart and caring and very sexy. He definitely mentioned the sexy thing.” If one more person accused her of being wide-eyed and helpless, she was going to sock them! After all, it wasn’t her fault she had big eyes, and she Was. Not. Helpless. Honey virtually sounded out the last three words in her mind. 
Brian’s sister was a cop and a good one—hadn’t she said this crime was personal, set up to look like one thing, but definitely personal? She’d even said she suspected a woman. Of course, right now Trixie was probably talking to the wrong woman, but she was smart and she’d figure it out.
But would it be in time?
Think, Honey, she scolded herself mentally. Both Brian and Trixie said she was smart—saw something in her. Jim was one of her staunchest supporters, and Diana, her dearest friend on Earth, had always said that she was braver and stronger than anyone would know by looking at her. It was time she lived up to their faith in her. Diana, at least, knew where she had gone, and Brian was depending on her.
Cilla was glaring at her. “I liked you better when you were befuddled and confused.”
A switch went on in Honey’s brain. “I bet you did,” she flared, doing a little glaring of her own. “You were drugging me, weren’t you?”
The other woman laughed. “Yes. When Diana was away with her family. You always go on about what a wonderful cup of tea she makes. I knew with her out of the picture I could turn up and play at helping out. And then we’d hang out drinking wine—it’s even more effective in alcohol. I wanted to undermine you. Throw you off balance.”
“But why?” Honey actually wanted to know. She got that this woman, whom she thought a friend, was anything but…but how did drugging her help? Did it serve a purpose or was it just another cruelty?
“Why not?” Cilla returned, but she didn’t quite meet Honey’s, and all at once it became clearer.
“Did you hope I would sink into a depression? Become so unfocused that if I did something unexpected, like, overdose, that no-one would question it?”
Cilla pouted and Honey knew she’d hit a bullseye.
“You wicked creature!” Incensed, Honey closed the gap between them and slapped Cilla as hard as she could.
Her former friend was so surprised that she took several steps back and put her hand to her face. “You shouldn’t have done that!” she shrieked.
“I’d like to do a whole lot more. You tried to kill me.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic.  I didn’t really think that would happen. Though it would have been perfect if it had. Anyway, you got so involved in one of your projects that you kept missing our get togethers, and then Diana was back, and Jim was around all the time, and they were both so concerned. You went for a check up…I knew I had to back off.”
“How very disappointing for you.”
“I didn’t need to kill you to get rid of you, anyway. Craig was ready to leave you. We had fun when we were together. You were so boring. Always wanting to stay home and read and drink tea.”
“So what went wrong? If I was so boring and you were so happy together, how did you end up killing him?”  
 “He should have seen we were meant to be together. If you had died or just gone away, it would have been me he turned to, but instead you got better and he, he got confused.” 
Confused? Honey blinked at this, feeling her own brand of confusion, and slowly the truth dawned. So, Craig had been in love, but not with Cilla, and, if she was right, never with Cilla.
“I tried to tell him that I didn’t think you really loved him. You just didn’t know how to admit failure. I tried so hard to make him see, to get him to leave you. He didn’t love you. He didn’t!” Cilla was almost screaming.
Honey looked at the woman who had somehow secured a place in her life and knew she was seeing the embodiment of delusion. “Craig may have fallen out of love with me,” she said, finally, “but he didn’t want to hurt me.”
“Neither of us did,” Cilla said with false sweetness. “That’s why he kept saying we had to wait. For some reason he was still fond of you and he felt guilty about us. Guilty! I made sure he thought I felt the same way.”
“That was clever.”
“I told you. I am clever.”
“And yet,” Honey said slowly, still moving towards the stairs. She wanted to get this crazy person away from Brian. “Here we stand. Craig is dead. You killed him, and he and I were about to get divorced. How clever is that?”
“It’s all your fault. If you’d just let him go sooner, we’d have stayed together. Instead he was worn out and confused and that woman got her hooks into him. Made him believe that he’d have a better life with her than me. And he fell for it. He was quite gullible, Craig.”
“I suppose he could be.” Honey knew the longer she kept Cilla talking, the better chance they had of someone finding them. “You know, I imagine he did care about you,” she observed, keeping her tone even. “A great deal.” That might be stretching the truth, but somehow, Honey felt the key to surviving this was to keep Cilla off-balance as well as talking, and that mean changing her tactics.
“He did.” Cilla regarded her suspiciously.
“But, Cilla, you must know that Craig was someone who found it hard to trust. If he got involved with you, it was because you mattered to him.”
“Of course I mattered to him.”
“And I imagine you had a lot more in common than he and I did.”
“That’s for sure. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that you come from so much money.”
“My mother has the same problem,” Honey answered, not entirely untruthfully.
“You could have anything you want. Do anything you want. You’re such a small-time thinker. Craig had big ideas.”
“And you shared those.”
Cilla started to nod before narrowing her eyes and crossing her arms over her chest. “I know what you’re doing, and it isn’t going to work!”
So much for sympathy and understanding. Honey desperately wanted to check on Brian but feared that even a glance in his direction might remind Cilla that she had all of the power in this situation. “I’m trying to figure out what’s gone on in that whack-job head of yours,” she said, opting for an insult, knowing that it would get some sort of reaction.
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
“Well, pardon me. But I’ve heard all about how much you loved Craig and that you were meant to be together, blah, blah, blah. So, why did you kill him?”
“You poisoned him against me. He was so guilt-ridden that he was afraid to give into his feelings, and then he saw a way of getting away from you, without, as he called it, ‘betraying’ you.”
If they both ended up getting out of the place alive, Honey couldn’t help but think that Cilla was going to make for a very interesting psych patient.
“He told me we couldn’t be together. That he couldn’t do that to you. Start a life with one of your closest friends. I told him that you didn’t matter. That I didn’t even really like you anymore.” She shook her head. “But he wouldn’t give in. And then I found about that bitch Richter.”
So why isn’t she here instead of me? Honey thought.
“How did you find out?” she asked. Cilla was becoming more and more unstable. She had to keep her talking, even if the gun in her hand was being waved around a lot more than Honey would like.
“I followed him. More than once. Got close enough to be sure.”
“And that’s when you decided to kill him.”
“Well, yes. Of course when all of this is over, it will be you, sick of being cheated on, already emotionally unstable, who simply cracked and killed your husband in a moment of madness.”
“You do know there’s not a lot of evidence to support this theory of yours, don’t you?” Honey realised that there was a lot Cilla didn’t know.
 “There will be. You wore gloves, of course, and I get the feeling they are going to turn up, and then there’s the fact that you killed your new lover in exactly the same way. I’m guessing that might sway the cops, especially considering that one of them is his sister.”
The last thing Honey wanted was for Cilla’s attention to be back on Brian.  Her brain scrambled to untangle the series of events that had led to her husband’s death. “Craig didn't want me to know you visited that night, did he?,” she asked, eyes narrowed. “My guess is you were threatening to tell me about the two of you and he really didn't want to hurt me.”
The expression on Cilla’s face told her her guess was spot-on. “And somehow, you finally realised you’d never get him back. But you were prepared for that. You had the gun with you.”
“I’ve always been a good analytical planner.” Cilla’s tone was almost smug and Honey fought the urge to wipe the expression from the woman’s duplicitous face.
“But not being very original, you decided to drug Craig before you killed him?” 
“Originality is overrated,” the other woman snapped. “He might have had time to react if I hadn’t put the pills in his drink. And he never suspected a thing, right up until that very last moment.” Her lips curled in a satisfied smile.
Slowly an image of Craig, trusting, bewildered, slowly realising what his affair with this woman had cost him, formed in Honey’s mind. No matter what he’d done, who he had hurt, he had not deserved to die like that.
“You are a despicable human being,” she said, continuing her retreat towards the stairs.
Across the room Brian stirred on the bed, moaning.
“I told you to stop moving!” Cilla snarled. “If you try and run for help, you little coward, I’ll shoot you, then I’ll shoot him.”
“That order works for me,” Honey returned, flinging herself onto the bare boards and sliding.
Cilla raised the gun and came towards her, but before she could take aim, Honey snatched up the workman’s hammer, she’d stumbled over when entering the room, and hurled it directly at the other woman. It struck her full in the forehead and she slumped to the floor, the gun slipping from her hand. Honey scrambled to it gingerly pushing it aside.
“That was a very dangerous thing to do.” Brian lifted a hand to his head as he struggled into a sitting position. “And a very good throw.”
Honey ran to him, falling onto the bed and reaching for him. “I was aiming for the gun,” she confessed.
Brian managed a weak smile. “We might want to work on your aim then.”

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Author's notes: Dana had her hands full with this chapter, and I have had to tweak it rather more than usual, so there are bound to be more errors, too. I thank her for her dedication and you, the readers, for sticking with me. And congrats to those who picked Cilla. You can join Belden-Wheeler Investigations in any uni .Trixie Belden et al belong to Random House and not to me. No profit is being made from these scribblings.