Mystery Heiress

by Suzanne Carey

  We ought to go home and let them confer, she realized, a little sliver of fear that the Todds might not let Chelsea donate inserting itself in her consciousness. Knowing Lindsay as she did, she guessed her friend wouldn’t hear of them leaving. “I think you and Frank ought to take a few minutes by yourselves, to talk over what’s happened,” she said at last. “Stephen and I can watch the children.”

  “Good idea,” Stephen agreed. “Take a drive, if you want. We’ll see that any scrapes get bandaged.”

  Exchanging a quick look and thanking them for their understanding, the Todds elected to walk hand in hand along the lakeshore. They settled on the dock, where they communed earnestly for a half hour or so, silhouetted against the lake’s late-afternoon brilliance.

  Unable to keep from glancing their way now and then, or stop herself from silently pleading with the spirit that ruled the universe that Annie would get the help she so desperately needed, Jess helped Stephen set up a children’s croquet game and took her turn with the mallet.

  At last Lindsay and Frank started back up the hill, their demeanor sober but unruffled, clearly united in the decision they’d reached. For Jess, the fate of the world hung on their answer. If Annie didn’t receive an infusion of healthy bone marrow, she might not make it to her sixth birthday. Catching hold of Stephen’s hand, Jess gripped it tightly, aware that she was all but holding her breath.

  “I know how tough this has to be for you, and we won’t keep you in suspense a moment longer than necessary,” Lindsay said when they arrived, her brown eyes grave but compassionate. “What we’ve decided is this. While we want very much to help, the decision isn’t solely ours to make. Young as she is, Chelsea should be consulted. We’ll explain Annie’s leukemia to her, and let her know what an important, unique contribution she can make. Of course, we won’t minimize the need for her to be brave, or the fact that some discomfort will be involved.”

  “If Chelsea’s willing to go ahead, once she understands these things,” Frank chimed in, “then we’re willing, too. We’ll talk to her about it tonight, and let you know what she decided in the morning. I’m sure you know that, in our hearts, we hope her answer will be yes.”

  As a parent, Jess understood exactly where Frank and Lindsay were coming from. Her fears for Annie’s welfare only partly eased, she murmured her understanding and assent. They would do their best for Annie as parents, friends and physicians—decent and caring members of the human race. It was the most anyone could expect.

  With so much hanging in the balance, the cookout on the Todds’ lawn turned out to be muted, at best. Jess barely tasted the American-style hamburger Frank grilled for her, or Lindsay’s excellent potato salad. Try though she would to keep up her end of the conversation, she couldn’t stop her gaze from resting on the blond baby fuzz of Annie’s head and praying with all her might that the salvation that lay just out of reach would be made available to them.

  Stephen suggested they call it an afternoon when the meal was finished and the paper cups and plates had been collected and dumped in the trash. Though Annie complained that she wanted to stay a while, Jess agreed with him. The sooner they left, the sooner Lindsay and Frank could talk to Chelsea. For her part, she doubted she could stand the strain of pretending she wasn’t on needles and pins for another moment.

  When they pulled up at her borrowed cottage’s front steps a few minutes later, she asked Stephen to switch off the Mercedes’s engine and come inside with them. “I hate to ask, because I know you have to be at the hospital very early in the morning,” she confided, as her precious child wandered off down the hall to conduct a doll-size tea party in her room. “But I wish you’d stay the night. I’m not sure that, without you, I’ll be able to stand the suspense.”

  Stephen didn’t hide his surprise. “I thought that, with Annie here…” he began.

  “We could sleep in our clothes, right here in the living room. If she wakes up, she won’t be scandalized.”

  As their afternoon at the Todds’ wore on, Stephen had begun to count the inherent complications in the situation for him. Though he’d bought Jess an engagement ring, he hadn’t been able to overcome his scruples about giving it to her yet. Now, with stunning abruptness, the chance to secure a marrow donor for Annie hovered on the cusp of realization. Either the opportunity to do a transplant—and possibly fail in the attempt—would result, or the Todds would refuse and Jess would be plunged into a despair of unimaginable depths. Either way, he could lose the woman and child he cared deeply about.

  I’m not sure I could survive a replay of what I endured when David died, he thought. It would kill me to lose Annie. Doubly so if, in the process, I failed Jess, the way Brenda accused me of failing her. Since he’d purchased the ring, it had occurred to him that Brenda had it easy with Tom McCaffrey. Unlike Jess, the Wayzata internist didn’t have a sick child who might die and leave them tearing each other apart.

  For the first time since Monica Malone had phoned so many months earlier and demanded he come by her house to discuss a matter of mutual interest, Jake’s steady diet of calamity and mistakes was served with a side dish of good news. According to Aaron Silberman, who dropped by the jail to visit him, though there were plenty of fingerprints and bloodstains linking him to her murder—and none to incriminate anyone else—something curious had turned up. In going over the crime scene with their state-of-the-art equipment, the Minneapolis Police Department’s physical evidence investigation unit had turned up some unidentified shoeprints in the dust of Monica’s five-car garage. They’d found similar prints in the soft earth of a flower bed, together with several smudged examples of the same pattern, which was characteristic of a particular brand of running shoe.

  “You own a pair of shoes like that?” the defense attorney asked. “Now or in the past?”

  Jake shook his head. “I’m partial to Nikes. I doubt if I’ve bought another brand of athletic shoe in twenty years.”

  “What kind of shoes were you wearing when you went to Monica’s house on the night of her murder?”

  Stumped, Jake had to give the matter some thought. “My tasseled loafers, I guess,” he said at last.

  The attorney informed him with undisguised satisfaction that a print matching the loafers he’d been wearing when he was first arrested had been documented near where he’d told police he parked his car that night. The anomalous shoeprints hadn’t matched any of the shoes investigators had found in his possession—or any foot-gear owned by Brandon Malone or any of the servants.

  He quickly set Jake straight when the latter bemoaned the fact that the prints couldn’t be used to incriminate Monica’s son. “Don’t you get it?” he asked. “Brandon Malone has witnesses who will swear he was in California that night. Provided they don’t lead to your walk-in closet, prints that have no business being in Monica’s garage, her flower beds, her living room…in other words, that don’t belong to anyone with an established right to be there…strengthen our argument that an unknown killer waited for you to leave the house, then slipped inside to do his or her dirty work.”

  Jake’s head was reeling. Was it possible that he’d be exonerated by the evidence?

  “In fact, there may have been two killers,” Aaron Silberman speculated, his curly hair bristling atop his celebrated think tank as if it were drawing energy from favorable developments. “There’s an unidentified partial in the garage that may have been originated around the same time, made by a woman. Like the athletic-shoe prints, it doesn’t seem to belong to anyone known to be connected with Monica…or the murder case.”

  For once, Jake wasn’t bemoaning the depredations of an uncaring fate as he listened to his defense attorney. Instead, he was seeing light at the end of the tunnel. “How did you find out about all this?” he asked.

  Aaron Silberman grinned outright. “A nifty little rule called discovery,” he said. “The prosecution has to inform us in advance of the evidence they plan to use against you. That goes double for us, of cou
rse. We have to let them know if we uncover Monica’s real killer first!”

  Jake realized his whiz-kid counselor had made a little joke. “We’d damn well better,” he replied, smiling for the first time since being returned to jail. “This place isn’t exactly the Taj Mahal, you know.”

  As he was about to leave, the defense attorney mentioned that he’d asked Gabe Devereax to redouble his efforts to find someone in Monica’s neighborhood who might have seen someone else leave Monica’s residence around the time of her murder.

  “There has to be someone in the neighborhood who saw something, other than that crazy old broad with the dog who placed your sister near the scene. A description and a time frame from a credible witness might be enough to constitute reasonable doubt and get you off the hook.”

  After a night of sleeping in a cramped, semierect position on one of the lattice-print sofas with her head pillowed on Stephen’s shoulder, Jess was pacing the living room. If only he hadn’t had to leave for the hospital so early, she thought. Just having him here made the waiting easier to bear. Without him, it’s become excruciating.

  Surely Lindsay would call soon!

  With that thought, the phone rang and Jess snatched up the receiver. “Hello?” she said tremulously.

  “Jess, it’s Lindsay,” the brown-haired pediatrician’s sweet voice announced. “I’m happy to report that the transplant’s a go. Chelsea wouldn’t hear of anything else once we’d explained the options. I’d have called last night but, given the fact that she’s not quite eight, we insisted she sleep on it….”

  Jess felt as if her feet were suddenly floating several inches above the ground. Yessss! Annie’s going to be all right! she exulted in a torrent of relief. The fact that, by themselves, bone-marrow transplants could be fairly risky hadn’t entered into her thinking yet.

  “Dearest Lin…how can I ever thank you enough?” she cried in a shaky voice, utterly frustrated by the inadequacy of language to express what she felt. “Because of you and Frank and Chelsea—” her voice broke “—Annie won’t be lost.”

  If she was thinking of the remaining hurdles that had to be crossed, Lindsay didn’t allude to them. “I ought to mention that, though the transplant should be done as soon as possible, while Annie’s still reaping the benefits of her recent treatment,” she continued, “we want to wait until after Chelsea’s birthday, which is coming up next week.”

  It was little enough to ask. “Lin, you know that’s just fine!” Jess exclaimed. “I’m just so grateful I want to hug you until I crush your bones.”

  Lindsay laughed. “You can do it over an early dinner,” she suggested. “I have abbreviated office hours today, while Frank has to work late. Rebecca and I decided to snatch the opportunity…meet, eat and brainstorm about what we can do for Jake. Since you’re family, we’d like to have you join us. I’ve already arranged it with Mrs. Larsen…you can drop Annie off at our house on your way to meet us.”

  At Rebecca’s suggestion, they got together at Lord Fletcher’s, a Minnetonka lakefront establishment reminiscent of an old English tavern. Charmed by the British decor, the sweeping lake view and the crackling fire that warded off the evening chill as it lit a massive brick fireplace, Jess felt she was being treated to a glimpse of her native turf.

  It didn’t bother her that the fare was mostly steaks, chicken and seafood—typical of stateside menus. Thanks to Lindsay and Stephen, I’m becoming quite Americanized, she thought, and then frowned slightly. The only off note in what had been a strongly upbeat day for her had been Stephen’s guarded optimism when he returned her call at midmorning. Undeniably happy as he’d been about the Todds’ decision, he’d warned her that they weren’t out of the woods yet. It’s almost as if he thinks I should continue holding my breath instead of celebrating, she thought as she raised her glass for a toast Rebecca was about to propose.

  “To Annie, with fond wishes for a quick recovery…and to Chelsea for helping save her life,” Rebecca said, smiling at Jess and Lindsay in turn. “And to our brother, Jake…Jess’s uncle, in my book, whoever his father was. Here’s hoping we can hit on a plan to help him out of his current situation.”

  Unfortunately, try as they would over steak-and-shrimp combos, the best they could manage was to re-hash what they knew of the evidence to date.

  “I know,” Rebecca, who was well known in the family for her emphasis on right-brained thinking, exclaimed. “Why don’t we hold a séance and and try to contact her? By coincidence, I have a medium lined up! Her name’s Irina Ivanova, and she lives in St. Paul. I interviewed her about how séances work for one of my books, and she offered to let me sit in on one. I haven’t had the time to take her up on it yet. We can have her do one for us as a group…contact Mom for us!”

  When Lindsay, with her physician’s pragmatism, pooh-poohed the notion, Rebecca dug in her heels. “It’ll be fun, whatever happens,” she said. “Jess…you must attend, too. We can hold it at Mom and Dad’s former home on the lake, for atmosphere. Jake isn’t there right now, so it should be available. I’m sure I can talk Sterling into it.”

  Though Jess wasn’t related to Kate, and didn’t put much stock in attempting to contact the spirit world, she was keen on seeing the Fortune mansion from the inside. After all, it had been built by her American grandfather. He’d lived there for many years. According to something Lindsay had let drop, it contained several fine portraits of him. “I’d be happy to come along for the ride,” she answered, “if I wouldn’t be in the way.”

  Approached by Rebecca about the proposed séance, Sterling turned to Kate for advice. He broached the topic during lunch at a small, out-of-the-way restaurant in the quaint Victorian town of Stillwater on the banks of the St. Croix River, after giving her a rundown on the latest evidence to surface in Jake’s case.

  “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to indulge her in this foolishness,” he grumbled, digging into his cheese-and-ham soufflé. “Yet I don’t really like it. If word leaked out that Jake’s sisters were attempting to contact you through a medium on his behalf, the press would have a field day. His trial hasn’t even started yet. And it already rates as first runner-up to the Simpson case.”

  Her eyes unreadable behind the oversize sunglasses she’d adopted with gray wool slacks, a jewel-toned ruana handwoven in Peru and a slouchy felt hat, Kate was deeply touched. Quirky, precious Becky missed her and longed for her advice. So did sweet, levelheaded Lindsay, or she wouldn’t have agreed to go along with such a scheme. How she longed to enfold them both and tell them of her narrow escape, confess that she’d been hiding out in Minneapolis all along—right under their noses.

  To turn up among the living too hastily could prove disastrous, if Sterling was to be believed. Whoever had wanted her dead might try again if they realized their first attempt had failed. She could be putting herself in mortal danger.

  Yet maybe there was a way for her to communicate with them.

  Always a quick study, Kate put two and two together and came up with six, including several bonus points. According to Sterling, Jake’s defense attorney believed that some footprints the police had found would turn out to be those of the real killer or killers. He’d charged Gabe Devereax with reinterviewing Monica’s former neighbors, on the theory that one of them had seen the person or persons in question near Monica’s property on the night of the murder.

  Yet he hadn’t thought of everything. Neither he nor anyone else seemed to have paid any attention to the one witness who claimed to have seen Lindsay in the area!

  In a way, Kate could understand it. Lindsay had been able to offer an airtight alibi. However, if I’m not mistaken, Kate thought, that woman who claimed to be Lindsay’s lost twin—wrong sex, but only I and the FBI know that—bore a striking if somewhat superficial resemblance to my beautiful, brainy daughter. With her designs on the Fortune money and her determination to force her way into the family at any cost, this Tracey Ducet, or whatever her name was, might have been intent on blackma
iling Jake, too. It’s altogether possible she went to Monica’s house that night to steal the affidavits regarding his parentage, in order to use them as a club over him.

  She could share her speculation with Sterling and let him pass it on to Aaron Silberman, Kate realized—if she could get him to take it seriously. Yet, with a séance in the works, it would be a whole lot more fun to reward Becky’s initiative by contacting her in person, so to speak. Kate’s thoughts flew to some twenty-something friends she’d made in her undercover role as benevolent, eccentric patron of the arts Kate Anderson. Several of them worked as sound and light technicians with a local theater company.

  Across the table, her old friend and attorney had stopped eating to stare at her. “Say something,” he demanded in his gravelly voice. “Your expression is making me nervous.”

  Her slow smile raised his hackles even further. “Contrary to your take on the situation, old dear, I approve wholeheartedly of Becky’s plan,” she informed him. “In fact, I’ve decided to reward her ingenuity by putting in a holographic appearance. Some technical people I know with the St. Paul Laser Theater have the know-how and the necessary equipment to pull it off. I’m certain I can count on their help and discretion.”

  Like Kate, Sterling knew that holography was a technique of producing moving, three-dimensional images by means of wavefront reconstruction—essentially a process of using lasers to record, on a photographic plate, a diffraction pattern from which such images could be projected at a distance. He didn’t doubt for a moment that her scheme could succeed technically, greatly enlivening the proposed séance for everyone present.

  It was the chance of her getting caught in the act that so disturbed him. “This is harebrained thinking, Kate,” he chided her. “However successfully your friends carry out this plan of yours from a technical standpoint, the chance of your being caught red-handed is astronomical. For all her writer’s dreaminess and right-brain activity, Rebecca’s no fool. And Lindsay’s sharp as a tack. Young Jessica Holmes will be there, too, and she has a good head on her shoulders. You might as well run an ad in the local newspaper, announcing a comeback!”