No Place Like Home Part 29

I was starting to fall asleep again. I had to fight it. I bit my lip so hard that I could taste blood, but the pain helped keep me from losing consciousness. "Jack, help Mommy," I pleaded.

He lifted his head. I sensed that he was looking at me.

"Jack, climb...into front seat. Take...car key...out."

He was moving. He sat up and slid off my lap. "It's dark, Mommy," he said.

"Climb...in...front seat," I whispered. "Climb..." I could feel myself sinking slowly into unconsciousness. The words I was trying to say were disappearing from my mind....

Jack's foot grazed my face. He was climbing over the seat.

"The key, Jack..."

From far off, I heard him say, "I can't get it out."

"Turn it, Jack. Turn it...then...pull...it...out."

Suddenly there was silence, total silence in the garage. Followed by Jack's sleepy but proud cry, "Mommy, I did it. I have the key."

I knew the fumes could still kill us. We had to get out. Jack would never be able to open the heavy garage door by himself.

He was leaning over the front seat, looking down at me. "Mommy, are you sick?"

The garage door opener, I thought-it's clipped onto the visor over the driver's seat. I often let Jack be the one to press it. "Jack, open...garage...door," I begged. "You know how."

I think I slipped away for a minute. The rumbling sound of the garage door slowly rising woke me up for a moment, and it was with a vast sense of deliverance and relief that I finally stopped fighting and lost consciousness.

I woke up in an ambulance. The first face I saw was Jeffrey MacKingsley's. The first words he said were the ones I wanted to hear: "Don't worry, Jack is fine." The second words seemed filled with promise. "Liza, I told you everything was going to be all right."

Epilogue.

We have lived in the house for two years now. After much thought, I decided to stay there. For me it was no longer the house in which I had killed my mother, but the home in which I had tried to save her life. I have used my skills as an interior designer to complete my father's vision for it. It is truly beautiful, and each day we are building happy memories to add to the ones of my early childhood.

Ted Cartwright accepted a plea bargain. He got thirty years for murdering Zach Willet, fifteen years for killing my father, and twelve years for causing the death of my mother, the sentences to be served concurrently. Part of his agreement was that he would confess that he came to the house that night intending to kill my mother.

He had lived in the house while he was married to my mother, and he knew that there was one bas.e.m.e.nt window that for some inexplicable reason had never been wired into the security system. That was the way he got in.

He admitted that he had planned to strangle my mother as she slept, and if I had awakened while he was there, he would have killed me, too.

Knowing that the impending divorce would make him a suspect in her death, he had placed a call from our bas.e.m.e.nt phone to his home and waited an hour before starting upstairs on his murderous journey. He had planned to tell the police that my mother had asked him to come to our house the next day to discuss a reconciliation.

But that planned explanation for the phone call had to be changed when I awoke and the confrontation and shooting occurred. Instead, on the witness stand at my trial, he testified that my mother had called him late that evening and pleaded with him to come to the house while I was asleep.

Once he was in the house, Ted got the new code out of my mother's address book and disarmed the security system. He unlocked the kitchen door, again planning to make it seem that my mother's carelessness had allowed an intruder to sneak in. At my trial, his story was that my mother had disarmed it and unlocked the door because she was expecting him.

Ted also indicated that the other "moving man" was Sonny Ingers, a construction worker on his town-house project. His identification of Ingers was corroborated by Rap Corrigan's description of Ingers's strawberry birthmark and partially missing index finger. Since there was insufficient evidence linking Ingers to Zach's murder, he pled guilty to the burglary of Zach's apartment and got three years in prison.

When Ted's plea was entered in open court, and he related all of these details to the judge, I think that a lot of people in the community were ashamed that they had fallen for his story, and had condemned a little girl.

Henry Paley emerged from the investigation without any criminal charges. The prosecutor's office concluded that Henry's conspiracy with Ted Cartwright was limited to trying to convince Georgette Grove to sell the Route 24 property. None of the evidence indicated that he knew about or was involved in any plan to harm anyone.

It will be many, many years, if ever, before either Robin Carpenter or Alex Nolan will be released from prison. They are both serving life sentences for the murders of Georgette Grove and Charley Hatch, and for the attempted murders of Jack and me.

Robin admitted that she had been the one who shot both Georgette and her half brother Charley Hatch. She had taken from Georgette's shoulder bag the picture of Alex and Robin that Georgette had found in Robin's desk. She had placed my picture in Georgette's shoulder bag and my mother's picture in Charley Hatch's pocket.

So many people stopped by our house during those first weeks after Jack and I were nearly killed. They brought food and flowers and friendship. Some of them told me how their grandmothers and mine were schoolmates. I love it here. My roots are here. I've opened an interior design shop in Mendham, but I've had to limit my clients. Life is very busy. Jack is in the first grade and plays on every team he can find.

In the weeks and months following Alex's arrest, my relief over Ted's confession was overshadowed by my sadness at Alex's betrayal. It was Jeff who helped me to understand that the Alex I thought I knew had never existed.

I'm not exactly sure of the moment when I realized I was falling in love with Jeff. I think he knew before I did that we were meant to be together.

That's another reason why I am so busy. My husband, Jeffrey MacKingsley, is getting ready to run for governor.

end.