Page 108 of The Homewreckers
“I didn’t know.” She was crying now, her shoulders rising and falling with each sob.
“What did you do next, Mrs. Creedmore?”
“I… I called Holl. He was sound asleep. I told him something terrible had happened, and he had to come right away. I was hysterical. It was raining so hard. I unlocked the house, and I waited, in the dark, for Holl to get there.”
“You didn’t think to call the police?” Makarowicz asked. “You’d just found a dead woman, in your backyard, and you didn’t call the police?”
“I told you, I wasn’t myself.”
“What happened next?”
“By the time Holl finally got to the house the rain had stopped. I showed him the body. There was nothing we could do for her. She was dead. So we, that is, Holl, moved her into the old boat house. She was a tiny little thing.”
“Where was your son while all this was going on?”
“Turns out he was in the dock house. Sleeping. We found a nearly empty pint bottle of rum next to him. Holl said we should let him sleep it off. He’d spotted a car, I think it was a Nissan, parked behind some trees in our neighbor’s driveway. The house was for sale, and it was vacant. Holl got a flashlight from the house and looked around and he found her purse, in some bushes near where we found the body, and the keys were in it. Holl said…”
“Dorcas!” Holland Creedmore stormed into the room. He saw the nearly empty glass of vodka she was clutching. “Goddamn it. Be quiet. I talked to Web. He’s calling someone from his old firm. No more talking.”
Dorcas raised her glass in a defiant gesture. “It’s too late, Holl. I told him everything. He knows our boy didn’t kill her. And we didn’t kill her.”
Creedmore sighed. “Goddamn it.”
Makarowicz pointed at his cell phone, which was still recording. “Your wife is right. It’s too late. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube now. I already know enough to arrest both of you in connection with Lanier Ragan’s murder. I’d suggest you sit down and tell me exactly what happened next.”
Creedmore didn’t sit. He stood with his back to the fireplace, feet placed a few inches apart.
“We knew it looked bad for our son. He would never have hurt that woman, but there he was, passed out cold in the dock house, with her corpse a couple hundred yards away.” He rubbed his jowls. “I found the keys to her car. I drove and Dorcas followed in my car. We left the car at a shopping center. We went back out to Tybee, checked on Holland, who was still passed out—”
“I was afraid he’d been poisoned or something,” Dorcas interrupted. “But Holl said…”
“Let him sleep it off,” Creedmore said, picking up the narrative again. “We drove back home and waited.”
Makarowicz was watching Dorcas, who was watching her husband recount their night of horror with chilling, detached clarity. He kept thinking of four-year-old Emma Ragan, being awakened by the storm that night, discovering her mother was gone; forever traumatized by the sound of lightning.
“Home?” he said now.
“Here,” Creedmore said.
“Let me get this straight. You left your son, passed out in the dock house, and Lanier Ragan’s body in the boat shed?”
“I covered it with a tarp,” Creedmore said.
“And then you just… went home, and acted like nothing had happened?”
“It wasn’t our fault,” Dorcas said, her voice pleading, whining really. “We didn’t kill her. And we knew Little Holl wouldn’t have done it. But we had to save our son.”
Makarowicz crossed and uncrossed his legs, struggling to maintain his composure.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me how Lanier Ragan’s body ended up in that septic tank.”
50Nobody Knows Nothing
“We don’t know,” Dorcas Creedmore said. She turned to her husband. “Tell him, Holl.”
“As God is my witness, I don’t know how that body ended up there,” Creedmore said.
“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”
