The Guest List

by Michaels, Fern

  Abby melted into her chair. “The same way you did. Through the open, broken security gate. It’s about as useful as Olivia being a guard dog.”

  “What’d he want?”

  “You heard him. To stop us from publishing Proof Positive,” Abby said. She felt so miserable she wanted to cry. She was crying.

  Steve sat down and took Abby’s hand. “The book can’t really hurt him, can it, Abby? I mean you changed the names, the places, everything, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t know that. We wanted him to think the book would expose him, so he would make a stupid mistake and expose himself.”

  Steve frowned. “I may be out of my depth here, because all I really know are animals. I know what they are capable of. Like Olivia here. She’s a lover. Her greatest love is Beemer. She’s placid and lazy. You wouldn’t think she’s a scrapper, but she is. You put her in a situation where she has to fend for herself and she could do it, has done it. Now, Donovan, he’s a rugged, whip-cracking kind of guy. You know by looking at him that he makes people jump when he gives orders. But underneath that rough exterior, there’s a heart of gold. He could no more commit murder than I could abuse an animal. That’s just my opinion, of course, for whatever it’s worth, which probably isn’t much if your expressions are any indication,” he rambled.

  “I wish I could agree with you, Steve,” Abby said, then excused herself and went to her office to be alone. She kept to herself the rest of the day, reading her mother’s diaries. The first one began the year after Mallory had been born, and the last one ended just days before her death. Donovan was mentioned often, though always with anger. She wrote that she thought Donovan had far too much influence over John and wished she could do something to stop it. She often told her diary how unhappy she was and how she wished she had someone to confide in.

  Abby cried when she read the entries following her own birth. “She’s a freak. I can’t stand to look at her. This is God’s way of punishing me for what I’ve done,” her mother wrote.

  Abby cried until there were no more tears, then went back to reading. She was determined to finish the diaries no matter what it cost her emotionally.

  In the last diary, her mother wrote, “Donovan’s new womanfriend called on me today. I felt sorry for her, so I invited her in and fixed her a cup of tea. She seemed nice but naive, like I had been once. She told me how much she liked Donovan and that she hoped he liked her, too.”

  Abby read on; there were only a few pages left. “She came over for tea again today. It seems I have become her confidante though until today I never confided a single thing about myself to her. She told me she thinks Donovan is in love with her. I couldn’t help but laugh. She wasn’t amused and asked me why I laughed, and I told her …”

  The writings ended with a bold, slashing line across the page, as if something had startled her. Abby sat looking at that line for a long time, wondering what she would have written if she had continued. Wondering, too, who Donovan’s woman-friend was. Carol?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  It was late afternoon before Abby felt confident enough to take a break and relax. She had spent the whole day working on a synopsis for a new book—a murderless mystery this time. She’d had enough murder, real and fictitious, to last her a lifetime.

  She turned over the engraved invitation and smiled. “These really are pretty impressive-looking, don’t you think, Mallory?”

  Mallory gazed at her sister. “Not half as impressive as this guest list. There’s a cool fifty names here: local book reviewers, the head chain store book buyers, the local bookstore managers, Newsweek, USA Today, TIME magazine, your editor and publisher. Wow!”

  Abby set the invitation down on the kitchen table. “I’m also inviting all of Steve’s staff, some of the neighbors, Bobby, Bunny, and Mike. Maybe Mike will get the assignment for TIME.”

  “You’re not planning on inviting Donovan and Carol, are you? Please tell me that’s a no.”

  “I’ve been wondering what to do about that, then it occurred to me they wouldn’t come anyway. I mean, jeez! We’ve accused Donovan of murdering five people. I can’t imagine he would want to come. So the answer is no,” Abby confirmed.

  Mallory brushed her hand across her forehead. “I’m glad to hear that.” Her relief was palpable.

  “It’s been over a month since Donovan was here, and as upset as he was about the book, I thought for sure he would call or come by or something. He gave up too easy. It’s just not like him to do that. Donovan will fight till he takes his last breath if he thinks he’s right. He just isn’t the giving-up type, and that’s what’s worrying me right now.”

  Mallory’s expression went from questioning to apprehension. “He knows the book isn’t coming out until March. He’s probably trying to establish an alibi for each murder. That’s what I would do if I were walking in his shoes.”

  “Umm. Maybe so,” Abby said, looking out the window to see Harry digging a hole. “Something’s been nagging at me, Mallory. Remember the day we went to the dedication ceremonies for Donovan’s retirement community? Both of us were looking forward to seeing Mrs. Lascaris and asking her if she would bake us her famous raisin cookies.” Abby turned her gaze from the window to Mallory. “We went back to the clubhouse ahead of Carol, and Donovan introduced us to Mrs. Lascaris. She was so glad to see us, remember? She had a big smile on her face. Then Carol came and Donovan introduced her, and Mrs. Lascaris’s smile disappeared. She said something to Carol like, ‘I didn’t realize it was you,’ or ‘I didn’t realize you were the one.’ Do you remember?”

  “That doesn’t stand out in my mind. What’s the importance of what she said?”

  Abby looked deep into Mallory’s eyes. “I remember wanting to get her alone to ask her if something was wrong, then she turned to Donovan and told him she needed to sit down. He spirited her away, and I never got another chance to talk to her.”

  “What do you think was wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if anything was wrong. She just looked so … strange.” Abby shook her head. “It was probably just all the excitement or maybe … Let’s think about this. She was just fine until Carol came on the scene.”

  “Well, I was, too, until Carol came on the scene. Then I turned into Monster Mallory, the evil one!”

  Abby waved her hand. “Would you be serious, please? I’m trying to play detective, and you’re making jokes. Why would seeing Carol frighten, alarm, or unnerve that sweet old lady?”

  Mallory pondered the question, then rattled off an answer. “Because she remembered Carol from the old days in New Jersey, didn’t like her then, and was disappointed to learn Donovan had married her. That would also explain what she said.”

  Abby favored Mallory with a look of disgust. “Take it a step further and tell me why Mrs. Lascaris didn’t like Carol.”

  Mallory looked up at the ceiling. “Because … Because Carol is controlling and manipulative.”

  “That works,” Abby agreed. “And she said what she said because until Donovan introduced Carol as his wife, she didn’t know he had married her.”

  “All right, now that we’ve got that settled …”

  Abby waved her index finger. “There’s something else. You said Donovan’s motive for murdering Mrs. Lascaris was because she must have known something about our parents’ deaths that could hurt him. You said you thought he brought her here to keep tabs on her. Come on now. If she knew anything, If she suspected him of something as sinister as murder, don’t you think she’d be afraid of him? She wasn’t afraid of him. She was afraid of Carol. And why, if she thought he was a murderer, would she let him move her here? She wouldn’t, Mallory,” Abby said, getting into Mallory’s face. A moment later she sat back looking smug. “Now, turn all that around and look at it from Donovan’s standpoint. If indeed Mrs. Lascaris knew anything about the murders, she’d kept it to herself for over twenty years. Why wouldn’t he let sleeping dogs lie? Why would he
want to visit her, bring her here … stir things up?”

  Mallory squeezed one eye nearly closed. “So what you’re saying here is … that you don’t think Donovan murdered Mrs. Lascaris, that she died of natural causes?”

  “I don’t see a motive, Mallory.”

  “What about our parents, Connor and Dr. Oldmeyer? Do you see motives there?”

  “Yes and no. I think there are a lot of ways of looking at a situation, and your anger toward Donovan has prejudiced you.” She reached across the table and took her sister’s hand. “Why don’t you feel that same prejudice against Carol? She was the one who pushed Donovan into putting you in Argone. Why don’t you suspect her?”

  “Because she didn’t have the motives.”

  “Are you sure? How long were Carol and Donovan an item before our parents’ deaths? Weeks? Months?” She told Mallory about the last entry in their mother’s diary. “What if Mama laughed in Carol’s face and told her she was crazy to think Donovan loved her? What if Mama told Carol Donovan loved her, had loved her for years? And what if she told Carol about you? That would certainly explain why Carol hates you so much. It would also give her a motive for murdering Mama,” she said, surprising herself that she was actually making sense.

  “And Daddy?”

  Abby shrugged. “Daddy got in the way. Carol shot him and made it look like suicide.”

  Mallory crossed her arms. “Okay. Fine. I agree you’ve presented a good case, Sherlock. But what about Connor?”

  “All right,” Abby said with more bravado than she felt. All she wanted to do was prove her point … that there was more than one way of looking at a situation. “As it stands right now, we have Donovan’s motive for murdering Connor as jealousy. But we also know that Carol felt the same way. She admitted it.” She took a deep breath and said the first thing that came to mind. “I remember Connor didn’t like them, either. He was sure Carol hated him. He told me he had a gut feeling that something about her wasn’t quite right.” Her voice dropped an octave when she said, “He never did figure out what it was.” She stopped to think and had a mental flash of the last time they’d all been together at the hotel café. She saw herself getting out of her chair to walk Connor to the door so he could get his cab. Donovan stopped him, handed him a small paper bag with a Danish and some coffee to take with him. Abby felt her breath catch in her throat. It was Donovan who gave him the bag with the Danish and coffee. If there was poison in the coffee, then it had to be Donovan, not Carol. Right? But wait a minute. Donovan never paid attention to who ate and who didn’t. That was the kind of thing Carol did, always knowing who did what and what they needed. That was part of her controlling, her method for manipulating people. So even if Donovan gave the bag to Connor, that doesn’t mean Donovan was the one who killed him.

  “Mallory,” she said breathlessly, “that day you told me Donovan murdered Mama and Daddy, you said you thought Donovan might have poisoned Mama … poisoned her with something that would simulate a heart attack.” She got up, ran to her office, and came back with the two books Bunny had given her. The cover illustration on the writer’s guide to poisons was of a hand dropping a teacup. Abby went to the back of the book, checked the appendix, and found a section that listed the poisons by the symptoms they caused. “Heart attack,” she said, flipping pages. It wasn’t there. She went back to the beginning and read, “Blood. Brain. Ah, here, Cardiovascular.” She went down the list to find the symptom. “Cardiac arrest,” she said, then in a column to the right were the poisons that could cause it. She read off the ones she recognized. “Cocaine, ergot, insulin, oleander, sodium …”

  “Oleander?” Mallory cut in. “I didn’t know oleanders were poisonous. What a shame. They’re so pretty.”

  Abby looked up oleander in the index and turned to that page. “It says here it’s a cardiac stimulator. All parts of the plant are poisonous, the leaves, the nectar from the flowers, even the twigs.” Marking her place with her finger, Abby closed the book to look at the cover. “Would you know a dried, crushed tea leaf from a dried, crushed oleander leaf, Mallory?”.

  “No.”

  “But Carol would. She knows all about teas and tisanes. Doesn’t it make sense she’d know which plants are poisonous?” She stared at her sister, her eyes narrowing as her thoughts compounded. “Donovan gave Connor a cup of coffee for the road the morning he died, but I’ll bet Carol was the one who gave it to Donovan to give to Connor. And according to what we read in Mama’s diary, Mama and Donovan’s new womanfriend had tea together at least …” She placed her hand over her eyes as she saw a scene out of the past … Mama and Carol sitting at the dining-room table sipping tea. “It was Carol having tea with Mama. It just came to me in a flash. I could see Mama pouring the tea and Carol looking up at her.”

  “If murdering someone is as easy as using oleander leaves to make tea or squeezing the nectar of the flower into coffee …” Mallory took a quick breath. “Carol and Donovan have oleander bushes all over their yard. And when you and I were little, we had an oleander bush at our house in New Jersey.”

  “Where?”

  “Under my bedroom window, on the sunny side of the house. Daddy had to cut it down so it wouldn’t cover my window.”

  “My God,” was all Abby could say.

  * * *

  Early the next morning Mallory caught the thirty-eightminute flight out of Charleston to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. She didn’t really expect to find her records, as she was sure Donovan or someone had taken them and destroyed them, but she had to know for sure. All she could hope for was that one of the staff would remember who they had been given to.

  Abby spent the day puttering around the house, getting ready for the new carpeting that was to be installed the following day, along with the new draperies and furniture the day after that. Throughout the day, every time she thought up a new reason why Carol might want to murder anyone, she wrote it down. She also wrote down things Carol had said and done over time that now seemed suspicious.

  At the top of her list was what Donovan had said to Carol on Christmas Eve before last … the night they’d broken into her house. Abby remembered his words verbatim. “You thought that damn birthmark of hers would tie her to you for the rest of her life, didn’t you? You didn’t think any man would ever bother to look beyond that birthmark to find out what kind of person our Abby was. When things looked like they were getting serious between her and Connor and that Abby might move to New York, you started pressuring me to build this house.”

  Abby chewed on the end of the pen as another flash of memory rose to the surface. She committed it to the paper in front of her. Carol not delivering her mother’s urn to Mallory and hiding it in the top of Bobby’s closet. Then she asked herself a question: What kind of person would do something that mean and cruel? “A sick person,” she jotted down in answer.

  She scribbled, “Mallory’s flat tire” and put a question mark next to it. And last, she made a note about the day she and Mallory had delivered Christmas presents to Carol’s house. Carol had said she was upset about Donovan’s absence, but she didn’t act upset.

  Did any of these things mean anything? Or was she doing the same thing she’d accused Mallory of doing—speculating and conjecturing?

  By the time she was ready for bed she was exhausted.

  “This is ridiculous, Donovan,” Carol said. “Why you want to go to Abby’s party is beyond me. Abby and her crackpot sister think you murdered their parents, and Abby is going to tell the world in that damn book of hers. Did you hear me, Donovan?” Her face contorted in rage, Carol threw a heavy cut-glass bowl across the room. She didn’t blink when it shattered into hundreds of long, slivered shards.

  “We have to go,” Donovan said tightly. “I’ve never run from a fight in my life, and I’m not going to start running now. I’m going with or without you.”

  “This is all Mallory’s doing. Plain and simple, all she wants is revenge. First, she wormed her way into Abby’
s house, then ingratiated herself into Abby’s life, and now she’s convinced Abby … Oh, God, how I hate that girl! There are no words to tell you how much I hate and despise her. We should have sent her to another continent. She’s going to stand there in front of all those newspaper and magazine people and tell how she solved an old murder case. What the hell are you going to say to that, Donovan?”

  “The burden of proof is on the police and the district attorney,” Donovan said. He watched his wife out of the corner of his eye as she put on the diamond earrings he’d given her on their fifteenth anniversary. “Furthermore, we don’t know she’s going to do that, now do we, Carol?”

  “This is going to destroy Bobby, not to mention us and everything you’ve worked for your entire life. Is it because Mallory is your own flesh-and-blood daughter that you refuse to see how evil she is?”

  Donovan stopped in mid-stride before turning around to confront his wife. “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me. Don’t pretend you didn’t hear what I just said, and don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about either.” The ugly look on Carol’s face told Donovan his ears hadn’t deceived him. “I’ve known about Mallory for years. When we first got married, you talked in your sleep,” Carol stormed as she stomped across the room to her dressing table. She sat down at the table, her shoulders shaking with rage.

  Donovan stared at her back, his thoughts ricocheting inside his head. He may have talked in his sleep, but not about that. He hadn’t known about his paternal bond with Mallory until little more than a month ago. Finding out Carol had known from the get-go supported the conclusions he’d finally come up with. “You knew all these years and never said anything? Is that why you hate Mallory so much, Carol, because she’s my daughter?”

  “I won’t even dignify that with an answer. Not now, not ever,” Carol spit. “It’s not too late to change your mind, Donovan. You said you’ve never run away from a fight in your life. So let’s fight. We’ll get you a lawyer and fight this thing tooth and nail.”