Smoke in Mirrors

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  Leonora made no effort to resist. She summoned all the strength and willpower that she had left and lurched to her feet.

  Simultaneously she clawed at Roberta’s face with her right hand.

  Roberta saw the long, jagged piece of broken mirror clutched in Leonora’s fingers. She shrieked in reflexive fear and fell back, putting up both arms in an instinctive move to protect her eyes.

  Leonora raked her glass claw downward, not caring what part of Roberta’s anatomy she struck. The shard bit into flesh.

  A keening scream reverberated in the library.

  Blood spouted. Not all of it was Roberta’s. Leonora felt the sting of glass slicing through the skin of her palm.

  The gun fell from Roberta’s fingers. She shrieked again.

  Leonora raised her bloody hand and tried another slashing swing. She missed this time because Roberta was reeling back down the aisle, her arms still raised to defend her face.

  Leonora dropped the shard and grabbed the gun with both hands. She swung around. The aisle of books looped and dipped like a roller coaster. She stumbled toward the far end.

  She knew now that she could not get to her keys, let alone try to drive a car. But if she could get as far as the concealed flight of steps that led to the third floor she might be able to barricade herself inside the narrow passage until help arrived. The entrance was just around the corner out in the hall. All she had to do was stay awake.

  A dark figure blotted out the light in the doorway.

  “Leonora,” Thomas said.

  A glorious sense of relief flooded through her. She lurched into his outstretched arms.

  “Knew you’d come,” she whispered.

  She was vaguely aware of Deke in the hallway. Claws clicked on the wooden flooring. Wrench.

  Behind her, Roberta screamed in raw rage. Leonora managed to turn her head.

  Roberta rushed toward the door, a huge chunk of mirror clutched in her hands.

  “Shit,” Deke said, “she’s gone crazy. Get out of her way.”

  “Wrench.” Thomas pulled Leonora out of the doorway, back into the hall, and motioned with the flat of his hand.

  Wrench flashed through the opening, utterly silent, a sleek, fast predator doing what came naturally.

  Inside the library, Roberta screamed.

  There was no place to run. Leonora heard a crash. Books tumbled from the shelves. A body hit the floor hard.

  She raised her head from Thomas’s shoulder and looked into the library. Roberta sprawled on her back in one of the aisles, sobbing in fear, her bleeding arm thrown across her face. Wrench stood guard over her, the wolf in his genes etched in every line of his taut body.

  “I thought you said he was a reincarnated miniature poodle,” Leonora whispered.

  “Must have been a poodle with attitude,” Thomas said. “Hell, you’re bleeding.”

  She wanted to smile, but she was so tired. He picked her up in his arms. It felt wonderful.

  When he swung around to carry her toward the staircase she caught a glimpse of a reflection in the strange mirror that produced the double images.

  For just an instant she thought she saw a familiar face, not her own, smiling at her from the other side of the antique looking glass.

  You can go to sleep now, he’ll be there when you wake up.

  We’re going to name our first daughter after you.

  I know. Thanks. Good-bye, sister.

  Good-bye, Meredith.

  The hallucination in the mirror vanished.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The next day they gathered together in Thomas’s living room. A cheerful fire blazed. The hearth tiles glowed in all their splendor. Deke and Cassie sat side by side on the sofa. Their knees touched.

  Leonora lounged in one of the recliners, feet stretched out toward the flames. She had bandages on her palms and she still felt wan and washed out, but the stuff they had given her in the emergency room had gotten rid of most of the drug in her system. She was feeling much better, all things considered.

  Thomas occupied the other recliner. Wrench napped on the floor.

  Ed Stovall sat very straight in an armchair. He did not take out his notebook. This was supposed to be a private conversation, he had explained. Off the record.

  “I’m no shrink, but I think it’s safe to say that Roberta Brinks must have started out warped and then got downright nutzoid over the years,” Thomas said. “Just your ordinary, garden-variety sociopath. The kind of freak no one even notices until after she’s murdered a few folks.”

  “You still haven’t explained how you and Deke realized I might be in major trouble yesterday afternoon,” Leonora said.

  “Thomas wanted to run down a few loose details,” Deke replied. He rested one hand on Cassie’s knee.

  “I just wanted to know for sure who was blackmailing whom.” Thomas steepled his fingers. “When Deke got into Rhodes’s bank records he discovered that a couple of large transactions had been made during the past year. They were credited to a numbered account in an offshore bank. At first we assumed they were the profits Rhodes had made from blackmailing Osmond Kern.”

  “But just to be on the safe side, Thomas had me check Kern’s bank records, too,” Deke continued. “He wanted to make sure the amount of the blackmail payments matched.”

  Cassie frowned. “I take it they didn’t?”

  “No,” Thomas said. “In fact, we found no large transactions at all in Kern’s account. But we discovered a lot of smaller payments going into that same offshore account. They transferred like clockwork on the first of every month.”

  “We followed a hunch and went upstream in Kern’s bank records,” Deke said. “Those payments stretched back for years. The offshore account number didn’t appear until three years ago, though. Before that the money went into a bank in California. The account was in the name of a trust, but we were able to get a social security number off some tax records.”

  “Roberta Brinks?” Leonora asked.

  “Yep.” Thomas put a hand on top of Wrench’s head. “Osmond Kern paid blackmail, all right. For nearly thirty years.”

  “But to Roberta Brinks, not Alex Rhodes,” Cassie concluded.

  “Rhodes’s two large payments into Roberta’s offshore account this year had nothing to do with blackmail. They were to cover the cost of the two shipments of drugs that he bought from her,” Ed said.

  “But as soon as we saw the thirty years’ worth of payments to Roberta Brinks,” Thomas said, “we knew the situation was a lot more complicated than everyone assumed.”

  Leonora rested her head against the backs of the cushions. “Because it was clear that Osmond Kern had been paying blackmail to Roberta since shortly after the death of Sebastian Eubanks. And there was only one logical reason why he would do such a thing.”

  Ed nodded his head once. “Roberta Brinks knew that he had murdered Eubanks and that he had stolen the algorithm.”

  Roberta had babbled freely when Ed Stovall had arrived at Mirror House to take charge.

  Thirty years ago she had been a grad student in the English department. She had struggled hard to put herself through school. In addition to teaching classes, she had taken on a part-time job working for Sebastian Eubanks.

  “He was so paranoid at that point that he wouldn’t allow any math or science majors into the mansion,” Deke said. “But he figured an English Lit major wouldn’t understand any of his work even if she did see some of it.”

  “Always a mistake to underestimate the liberal arts crowd,” Leonora said.

  Deke nodded. “You can say that again.”

  “Roberta was there the night Kern came to see Eubanks,” Leonora said. “Kern didn’t see her, but she witnessed the quarrel and the shooting.”

  “What did they fight over?” Cassie asked.

  Ed looked at her. “As Andrew Grayson said, Kern knew enough about Eubanks’s work to recognize its potential. He claimed that, because he and Eubanks had collabor
ated for a while, he had a right to have his name attached to the algorithm. He demanded that it be published under both of their names. Eubanks didn’t want to publish at all. He had convinced himself that the algorithm was only the first step to more important work. He pulled out a gun. There was a struggle. Eubanks died. Afterward, Kern was stunned and confused. Roberta took charge. She told him she would take care of everything.”

  “And that’s just what she did,” Thomas said. “She got him out of the mansion and drove him home. The next day she went to see him in his office. He was still badly shaken. Panicky. She pointed out that there was no reason not to publish the algorithm under his own name. It would make him rich and famous. Secure his academic reputation forever.”

  “And Kern went for it,” Deke said grimly. “But when the paper was accepted for publication, Roberta paid him another visit. This time she laid out the terms of the deal. She would protect him and his reputation as long as he paid blackmail. She protected herself by putting an incriminating account of Eubanks’s death and copies of his early notes on the development of the algorithm in a safe-deposit box.”

  Cassie nodded. “In other words, if anything happened to her, Kern would also go down in flames.”

  Thomas scratched Wrench’s ears. “In the end, the college administration was so eager to keep things quiet that neither Kern nor Roberta were even questioned. Things went smoothly for nearly thirty years. Kern got rich and famous. Roberta dropped out of the graduate program and married a chemist.”

  Leonora sighed. “Another ABD type gone bad.”

  Ed frowned. “ABD?”

  “All But Dissertation,” Leonora explained. “A little academic joke.”

  Ed did not smile.

  Thomas cleared his throat. “Roberta decided to forego a career in English Lit in favor of running Mirror House and organizing alumni events. Meanwhile she built up her private retirement fund with Kern’s blackmail payments.”

  “And then she struck it rich a second time when her husband developed a hallucinogenic drug a few years ago,” Leonora said. “Ever the opportunist, she saw the possibilities immediately. But she knew nothing about dealing illegal drugs. She was lucky she wasn’t caught running her little experiments on some of the students.”

  “Meanwhile Bethany was deep into her work on her Mirror Theory,” Deke said. “In the course of her research she came across notes that convinced her that Eubanks had done the early work on the algorithm, not Kern. She confronted Kern, demanding an explanation. Kern panicked. As soon as Bethany left his office, he called Roberta.”

  “Who understood immediately that Bethany’s work might expose Kern and thereby ruin her retirement plan,” Thomas said. “So she invited Bethany into her office, served her some of the drugged coffee and then arranged the so-called suicide.”

  “But in those last moments before the drug overwhelmed her,” Deke said, “Bethany managed to leave behind some clues to her killer’s identity. She must have been hallucinating wildly, but there were mirrors all around her and she had been thinking in metaphorical and mathematical terms about mirrors for several months. She was no doubt beyond being able to write anything legible. So she picked up the catalog of antique mirrors and circled the picture of the looking glass that reflected her killer. Then she hid it together with the clippings behind the catalog in the library.”

  “Alex Rhodes witnessed Bethany’s so-called suicide,” Ed said. “He figured out that Roberta Brinks was the source of the drugs and he formed the partnership with her.”

  “All went well for a while,” Deke said. “Because no one was paying any attention to the crazy Walker brothers and their demands for another investigation.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Cassie offered thoughtfully. “The fact that you were pushing for answers was what inspired Roberta to start those rumors of Bethany’s drug use. She thought it would serve as a simple, believable answer that would put to rest any murder theories.”

  “But I didn’t buy it,” Deke said.

  “No,” Leonora said. “That must have made her nervous. Then, six months later, Meredith arrived on the scene to start her endowment scam. She got involved with Thomas for a while and in the process learned that Deke had major questions about the circumstances surrounding Bethany’s so-called suicide.”

  “Meredith and I weren’t involved,” Thomas said evenly. “We had a few casual dates, that’s all.”

  “Meredith and Thomas stopped seeing each other after a few casual dates,” Leonora said smoothly, “and Meredith went on with her project to rip off the endowment fund. She had a few casual dates with Alex Rhodes, probably because she figured he would be a good source of local information. She found out he was dealing drugs and stopped seeing him.”

  “At some point she found the catalog and the envelope full of newspaper clippings,” Thomas said. “She guessed that Deke and I would want to see them. But she didn’t want to jeopardize her own scheme, which was nearly completed. So she put the clippings and the book into a safe-deposit box.”

  “And then she made her fatal mistake,” Deke said. “She had worked with Roberta Brinks for six months. Long enough to know that Roberta had been around at the time of the Eubanks murder. So she tried to pump her for information. As soon as she started asking questions, she was doomed.”

  “Roberta pretended she didn’t know anything about the murder except the old gossip, but she got very nervous,” Leonora said. “First, Bethany had become suspicious and now, only a few months later, another woman was probing into the past. She waited until Meredith had left Wing Cove. Then, one day, she contacted her via email saying she had learned something very interesting about the old Eubanks murder.”

  “She met Meredith in Los Angeles. Had dinner with her, fed her the drugs and then arranged the accident,” Leonora said. “When the news of the funeral reached Wing Cove, she learned that Deke was trying to weave new conspiracy theories.”

  Ed nodded soberly. “So she started the second round of rumors, hoping to deflect any serious murder investigation.”

  “In the end, it was the fact that none of us believed the rumors that ruined her scheme,” Thomas said.

  They all sat in silence for a while, letting the details settle into place.

  Eventually, Ed pushed himself up from the chair. “Appreciate the conversation, folks. I’ll be on my way. Got a lot of paperwork waiting for me.”

  Thomas got up to see him to the door. He took Ed’s jacket out of the closet.

  Ed studied the tile work in the hall with an approving eye while he zipped up his jacket. “First time I’ve seen this place since you bought it, Walker. You did a real fine job with the remodeling.”

  “Thanks,” Thomas said.

  “Let me know if you decide to sell,” Ed said. “Elissa Kern and I will be getting married in the spring. We’re looking for a place. Elissa doesn’t want to live in her father’s old house and my apartment is too small.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Ed.”

  Ed went out onto the porch. Thomas closed the door and went back into the front room. Leonora looked at him. He spread his hands and smiled.

  “I told you my houses always find the right owners,” he said.

  “What about us?” she asked. “Where are we going to live?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He looked around. “But it won’t be here. At least not for long.”

  “Why not? I love this place.”

  He grinned. “It’s not big enough. We need more room. For the kids.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  A week later Leonora sat in front of the fire with Thomas and Wrench. There was a bowl of freshly made popcorn on the table. Wrench was eating most of the popcorn.

  “Something I wanted to give you before we pick up your grandmother and Herb at the airport tomorrow,” Thomas said. He handed her a small box.

  She studied it closely. “Very tiny tools?”

  “Not exactly.”

  She fed
Wrench the last of the popcorn, wiped her hands on a napkin and opened the box.

  A ring sparkled against dark velvet.

  Happiness shimmered through her. “The answer is yes.”

  He grinned. “I haven’t asked the question yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The answer is still yes.”

  “I like a woman who knows her own mind.”

  “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

  “Neither have I,” he said.

  He kissed her.

  The thing about Thomas Walker, she thought, was that you never had to worry about illusions or false reflections in a mirror. Thomas was for real.

  And so was his love.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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