“So she can join the club.” He laughed wryly.
Gabrielle sucked in a surprised breath. “You were the mayor’s assistant, too?”
He shook his head. “No, she’s just had a long line of fired assistants before one of her granddaughters was old enough to work with her. That family carries power throughout the line, you know. Especially those witches named Mary. They continue the legacy throughout the generations. Make no mistake. One Mary is as evil as the next.”
It seemed a ridiculous notion to think any Perkins woman named Mary was a witch, just as it seemed silly to believe the Corwin men were cursed by them.
Gabrielle thought about the mayor’s assistant and the obvious flaw in Harry Winters’s reasoning. “Mayor Perkins’s granddaughter’s name is Elizabeth.”
He nodded. “Mary Elizabeth Perkins. She goes by her middle name so as not to be confused with her grandmother.”
Suddenly the note on the mayor’s door made sense. It had been signed “M” and Gabrielle had thought Mary Perkins had signed it. But then the mayor had told Lauren that Elizabeth had left the note for her. Of course the sisters would use their given names with each other. And besides, Mary Perkins would probably have signed “Grandma” when leaving a note for her granddaughter.
But just because the women had a similar name didn’t make Elizabeth evil. She wasn’t going to argue with a man who’d been driven to living in isolation by his demons.
“Nobody knows what Mary Perkins is capable of better than me,” he continued. “I had the misfortune to run against her in one of her early mayoral campaigns.”
“What happened?” Gabrielle asked.
He settled his back against the house.
Sensing the man was caving in, Gabrielle joined him, ignoring the dull throb in her ankle. She’d deal with it later. Derek remained standing, more of a lookout than a participant.
“Campaign issues happened. I tried to run a clean campaign on the issues that should have been important to the community, but Mary Perkins didn’t play by anyone’s rules but her own. Everything came back to her status and power. Power she had no intention of losing.”
“I don’t understand,” Gabrielle said.
“Obviously you do understand or you wouldn’t be here. She went after me. And now she’s going after you. Mary Perkins doesn’t care about fairness. The only thing that’s important is power and winning at any cost.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GABRIELLE STARED AT THE MAN in disbelief. “Mary Perkins wants me gone? She’s behind everything?” She shouldn’t be surprised and yet…“Tell me more.”
“She never fails to remind people of the family curse, but not in public. Not in her speeches. In private. When asking for donations. When she’s trying to push her own agenda on town council. She achieves her goals by frightening people into submission. And as you’ve no doubt seen and heard, people need only look to the Corwin men as proof of her point.”
Gabrielle winced, not looking at Derek. “Go on.”
“I tried to bring her dirty dealings out in the open. There was a Fourth of July gathering in the center of town and we were each making a speech. All I did was say that votes must be earned, and curses were only in people’s minds.” He cleared his throat, glancing out in a fog once more.
Gabrielle waited him out.
Finally, he continued. “My life went downh
ill after that. A picture surfaced of me and a prostitute. At first, it came to me alone with a note threatening to reveal it if I didn’t drop out of the race. It didn’t matter that I swore up and down it wasn’t me, I couldn’t prove it any more than I could prove Mary Perkins was behind it. But I knew.”
Gabrielle shivered because she knew, too. And now she knew who was behind Sharon’s pictures reemerging. Mary Perkins had somehow gotten ahold of them. Sharon and Richard were off talking to her ex-boyfriend. If he hadn’t sold them to Mary Perkins, she’d found another way to get her hands on them.
“So what did you do?” Gabrielle asked. Because she knew this man hadn’t gone from being a mayoral candidate to a hermit over some photographs. There had to be more.
“I refused to give in to the blackmail, of course. I was young and brash and I believed in integrity. I thought I could beat her despite it all. I never got that far. Shortly afterward, my wife had a car accident. It looked like she lost control of her vehicle, even though it wasn’t raining and the roads were in good shape.”
“You don’t believe it was an accident, do you?” Gabrielle asked soberly.
From everything Gabrielle had heard so far, Mary Perkins wasn’t just arrogant, she was evil. And that scared her. Not because Gabrielle believed in witches or curses, but because she feared what the woman was capable of if her power was threatened.
He shook his head. “The police said they didn’t find anything and I had no choice but to believe them. Personally, I think someone sabotaged the car. At the time, though, I was too busy with my gravely injured wife to give much thought to the car. She recovered eventually, but was left with tremors and paralysis on one side. I stayed by her through the whole ordeal, but she never forgave me for not dropping out of the race and preventing the whole thing.”
Gabrielle shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry.”