PTI: Part 25? By Bubba
"This is all some kind of crazy joke, isn't it? I mean it has to be," Anna cried.

"To be, or not to be...that is the quartet of merry making and pancake flipping..." At that point John began to ramble on in a quiet voice. "This guy isn't all together there anymore," Anna thought to herself.

"I know what you're thinking," said the hooded man. "And your right, he's not all together there."

"How did you know...?" Anna began before being cut off.

"I'm paid to be intuitive. Listen, some of the stuff he just told you is true. The rest was made up in his head to fill in the pieces he couldn't solve. He's been trying to figure this thing out for years and it, along with dementia, has driven him a little batty."

"Thank God! I was this close to puking my guts out at the thought of having to go on Jerry Springer and tell the story of my inbred primate family," Anna sighed and looked over at John who was counting the flowers on her living room curtains while singing "Lady Marmalade" in French.

"Sorry, I like to let him finish before I tell it like it is. Here's the truth, or at least the truth so far as we found out. Can I get you anything before I start a cup of tea maybe?"

"Who's "we"? And why the hell are you still pointing a gun at me?"

"I'm sorry, my manners are bad, I'm used to busting knee caps and making people dig their own graves. Not so used to being around ladies. "We", is the umm, how do I put it, "private agency" hired by Mr. Luc to figure out who killed Rose, who the body was left by her side, and where Sara and Anthony are. We've been looking for the answers for decades." The hooded stranger got up, put a kettle on the stove, and sat back down across from Anna.

Anna realized, for the first time in days, that she had no idea why any of this was so important. "Great, but why?" Anna asked in her best hoity voice.

"What do you mean why?"

"Why is all of this so important? What's the importance of this stupid pin? It's just a pin once owned, or not owned as it now seems, by a dead lady."

"Because that crazy old man counting flowers is worth half a billion dollars, and who ever is related to him, inherits all that. Whoever has the pin has the prize. The pin rightfully belongs to Rose's heir, and we're just trying to figure out if there is still an heir."

The kettle whistled, which startled them both. The hooded stranger laughed, and then got up to make them tea. "He's making me tea," Anna thought to herself, "There's a hired killer in my kitchen making me tea."

"You mean, my mother is going to inherit half a billion dollars?" Anna yelled into the kitchen. When he didn't answer her she started to think about her mother having half a billion dollars to do with as she pleased, and it pissed her off. She had never really gotten along with her mother; in fact, she hated her guts. She blamed her mother for her dad's death and for making her childhood seem to last a century. They had what the southerners call "a tolerable relationship." Anna had grown up in a small town about thirty minutes away from Opelika. When she had discovered that her mother was having an affair with the county sheriff, she told her father. He had simply folded up his newspaper and said, "Your mother has a great many secrets and she is not the kind of woman whose secrets you want to get involved in." And that was that! He never mentioned it again. He just lived his life normally, until he died unexpectedly six months later. On the day that he died of an unexplainable stomach ailment, he said to Anna, "I married a ghost." Anna was twelve at the time, and the day after the funeral her mom sold everything and took Anna across country. She would pick up and move after picking up a new boyfriend, using him, and then leaving abruptly.

Anna sat lips pursed and forehead furrowed thinking over her past, and somehow she slipped out, "He married a ghost." The hooded man set two cups of tea on the coffee table between them and looked at her confused. She glanced at him and said, "She's not Sara, is she?"

"You mean your mother? No, we found Sara in 1960. She was dying in a hospital in Lawrence Kansas. She had run away after her mother's death because she was afraid of the killers. It seems that she was in the house at the time of the murders, saw everything, and left before they could find her. When we told her that she was the daughter of another man, she just smiled and said that she had always known that she couldn't have been the daughter of such an evil man." As he talked, Anna noticed that he flipped the safety switch on his gun on and off, over and over. He seemed nervous, and kept looking out the window, as if he was waiting for something to happen.

"But how did my mother get into this mess?" Anna said, hoping to distract him from his nervous habit.

"Sara had been living in an apartment in Lawrence with a young woman who happened to look almost exactly like her. They became very close, so close, in fact, that Sara finally broke down and told her roommate the entire story...the murders, the money, the involvement by both the police and the bank, and of course the story of the pin. She had never known the true story of the pin, or the fact that there was a copy, but she knew that it was the only way she could prove herself as being Rose's daughter. She could perfectly describe the pin that her mother loved so much."

Anna began to feel a sickening feeling in her stomach; she knew how the story of the real Sara would be finished. She didn't want to hear the ending, but she couldn't move her lips to speak.

"Sara came down with a horrible case of the flu, at least that's what the doctor's back then thought it was. They couldn't figure out how to treat it, and she just died. We thought that that was the end of it, Sara was gone. But then in 1982 we hear about a woman whose husband died unexplainably from a stomach problem, and that her name is Sara. Mr. Luc knew that there was going to be trouble. He hired a doctor to figure out how the real Sara had died. He came back with an answer...ricin poisoning. We then found out by shear luck and a good paper trail that Sara's friend from Kansas had ordered a large amount of castor beans shortly before her husband's death. Ricin poison can be made from castor beans."

"My mother killed my father," Anna whispered.

"Yes, and Sara. And, we think she got Mark at the Opelika Inn since that is where she's been staying. We don't know why she killed him, but he probably stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time and saw the person she's been working with."

"What about Lily? How does she fit into this?"

"She's eight. Easy to bribe. She'll probably just sell the pin on EBay."

"Oh, my god! The pin is gone! I didn't even think about it!" Anna scrambled to find her keys and jacket, and then realized there was no reason to go get the pin back at that moment. Since she knew exactly where it was, it was safe. Everybody else thought that she was in possession of it, and in the meantime, she could just use the fake pin that was resting in the pocket of a man pretending to fly fish on her Persian carpet. Lily could hold on to the real one for now, Anna had bigger fish to catch. And fake bait, if well presented, is just as tasty. Anna sat back down, and rested her head on her knees. All at once, she had a whole new bag of questions she needed to open.


"Why did you shoot Kaelin?"

"Hey, you're intuitive too. Maybe you should ask yourself why he keeps following you around like a puppy." As the thoughts began racing around Anna's head like a dog on a track, she noticed that they had been talking into the evening, and that the headlights of a car had pulled into her driveway.

"I think it would be a good idea if you and Captain Cuckoo left out the back door."


Too be continued...