Molly patted the older woman’s hand in sympathy. “But you knew he asked you to lie, so he had to have been up to something that involved the shooting, right?”
The other woman bobbed her head up and down. “And he involved me. His only sister. His baby sister! But it was too late for me to tell the truth or so I thought. I wanted to talk to Paul first, then I was going to call the police myself.”
“Have you spoken to Paul since?” Ty asked.
She shook her head. “Not since he called and asked me to say the car was stolen.”
“Where is the car?” Lilly asked.
Anna Marie shrugged. “I don’t know. And I don’t know where Paul is. He left me here with all these unanswered questions and lies.” The woman broke down, her shoulders shaking as she put her head in her hands.
While Molly consoled her, Ty pulled Lacey aside and spoke quietly. “We now know Anna Marie gave her car to her brother. That means the police have probable cause to search his garage for the car.”
Lilly nodded. Her head was swimming with facts and disjointed pieces of info rmation. She wanted to talk it through with Ty and make the connections. “What else have you put together?”
He rubbed his hand over his unshaven face. He had to be exhausted from sitting up all night with his mother at the hospital and she felt awful he had to deal with her problems, too. But she knew better than to suggest he leave and get some rest.
“I can’t say I’m one hundred percent sure of anything at this point. But gamblers have to get their money from somewhere,” Ty said.
“Maybe Paul had enough money to cover his gambling debts,” Lacey said.
“He didn’t.” Anna Marie rose from her chair. “He’s been broke for years, spending everything he has. I don’t make enough to help him and my brothers even cut him off last year. But he always said he had a safety net.”
Ty narrowed his gaze. “Do you know what that safety net was? Where he got the money to pay for his habit?”
Anna Marie shook her head.
“I bet I do,” Ty said, suddenly. “For the last ten years, the man has had access to a trust fund that nobody could check on or look into until Lilly Dumont was declared legally dead or Marc Dumont claimed the money instead.”
“But I’m alive,” Lacey said.
“And Paul Dunne wanted to make sure you didn’t stay that way long enough to claim the money and find out he’d been stealing from it,” Ty said, his eyes blazing with certainty.
“No! Paul wouldn’t kill anyone. He wouldn’t hurt anyone,” Anna Marie insisted, her voice rising.
Molly held on to the woman’s hand. “Addiction does strange things to people,” she said softly.
Lacey’s head buzzed as she tried to process this theory. “If he’d succeeded in killing me, Uncle Marc would have inherited the money and he’d be the one to find out about the embezzlement.”
Ty nodded. “Exactly.”
“So maybe it never was Uncle Marc who was behind the attempts on my life.” Lacey couldn’t believe the relief she felt on voicing the possibility aloud.
Molly stepped forward. “Maybe Paul wanted you both dead,” she suggested.
“But Derek and I showed up in time to stop him,” Ty said.
Lacey felt light-headed and dizzy. “That still doesn’t explain why Uncle Marc would come to see me that day.”
Ty shrugged. “Some things we need him to answer for us, but in the meantime…..” He flipped open his cell phone and dialed. “Chief?” He spoke into his cell phone. “It’s Ty Benson.”
Ten minutes later, the chief of police showed up at Anna Marie’s house, the district attorney along with him. They listened as a crying but now calmer Anna Marie told the truth about her brother borrowing the car which they’d ID’d at the site of the shooting.
The police and the D.A. agreed they had enough proof to arrest Paul Dunne for a host of things, including the attempted murder of Marc Dumont and obstruction of justice in asking his sister to lie to the police about her car. They put out an APB on Paul Dunne.
In addition, the D.A. headed to court to obtain a search warrant for the man’s garage to search for Anna Marie’s car; and another warrant for his house and office to look at the trust fund files and documents. If Dunne had been embezzling from Lacey’s trust in order to pay off his gambling debts, his motive for the shooting and even the arson at Ty’s would be clear.
As for Anna Marie, no charges were filed against her because she’d come forward of her own free will. Knowing how much she loved her brother, turning him in was punishment enough.
Like her gossip, this lie had been told with no ill intentions.
But until Paul Dunne had been arrested, and he and Uncle Marc revealed their motivations and roles in each event, Lacey remained in the dark and confused.
Much like she was about her life and her future.
Sixteen
M arc finished giving his statement to the police. He’d left nothing out. He had nothing left to hide.
With a stenographer present in his hospital room, he’d admitted everything leading up to the moment of his shooting, from the day he’d fallen in love with Rhona, lost her to his golden-boy brother, Eric, and become guardian to their daughter Lilly.
He’d included his foster care scheme in the story along with his hope that by scaring Lilly, she’d return pliant and willing to sign her trust fund over to him. Of course in his recent sobriety, he’d realized that she probably couldn’t legally sign over anything until after she’d inherited at the age of twenty-seven, but alcohol had dulled his wits, and he’d believed in dreams of money coming his way. He explained how he knew Paul Dunne had embezzled, although not to the extent that he had.
And he admitted to getting trust money from Dunne to pay Flo Benson to take Lilly into her home and claim it was foster care. That one had elicited a shocked gasp from Lilly and a groan from Tyler Benson. Of course Tyler and his friend Hunter had been more than happy to hear him admit to using influence to have Hunter pulled from the Benson home after Lilly’s ‘death’. He’d neglected to go into detail about their role in faking Lilly’s death— info rmation he’d learned from Molly—because Marc had caused enough pain over the years. Everyone assumed she’d run away and as far as he was now concerned, that is what she’d done. Bravo for her.
Part of Marc’s AA program was about apologizing and taking responsibility. It looked as if he was doing it big-time today. He told the police about how Paul Dunne had been behind the near hit-and-run on Lilly as well as the fire at Ty’s apartment. He described the other man’s plan to have Marc do his dirty work and included Dunne’s threat to frame Marc either way. He’d refused, calling the other man on his cell phone the day of the shooting.