Verity leaned into the stash of boxes and bags in the backseat and found a manila envelope. I wrote on the envelope and showed it to her. She laughed. “Perfect.”
As we rolled down the street, I prayed that the window of the news van would be open. It was.
Verity slowed the Tank. I tossed the envelope in, then we rolled toward Rabb’s Point.
Chapter 45
“I wonder who Chick paid off,” Verity said.
“Sorry?” Lost in thought, I stared at the sailboats on the bay as Verity steered the Tank into Rabb’s Point.
“It’s a conspiracy when you work together to kill someone, right?” she said. “We saw Chick’s accomplice, with the baseball cap. Same one Aunt Gully saw at the food festival.”
“I guess.” Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t explain it. I just felt more and more anxious. Where was Chick?
“Did I tell you Lorel left her scarf in Chick’s sports car? Her monogrammed scarf?”
“Ha! What a hoot if he’s at Gull’s Nest trying to return it to her,” Verity said. “You know, Chick’s red sports car’s easy to notice. You’d think someone would’ve seen it by now.”
“Chick used to summer here. He must have sailed. If I were Chick, I’d be getting away in a sailboat right now,” I said.
Verity considered. “Makes sense. But where would he get a boat?”
“He probably still has friends here. And even if they’re not here, he could always just ‘borrow’ a sailboat.”
“Oh my God, Allie! I’d better tell my uncle. This can’t wait. I’ll tell him about the video, too. Then he can look for Chick’s accomplice.” Verity pulled over and, for once, her uncle answered her call.
“Uncle M, my friend Allie and I have information that might crack the food festival case.” She told him about the video and my belief that Chick might escape on a boat.
Her uncle’s voice boomed from the phone.
Verity winced. “Okay. Bye.” She leaned her forehead against the steering wheel.
“What did he say?”
“He said to mind our own business. We have to let the police do their job. We have to stop playing Jessica Fletcher,” Verity muttered.
“Maybe when we’re done at Juliet’s, I’ll try to get Detective Rosato,” I said. “She actually listened about the Dumpster at the Ellicott house.”
We pulled into the drive of the Wells House. The house faced west. Red-tinged sunlight reflected off the windows. For a split second it looked as if flames sparked within the mansion.
Why did I feel so uneasy? I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d forgotten something. I threw a glance down the driveway, but no one was there.
“Buy of the century!” Verity said. Her enthusiasm was infectious. I shook off my unsettling thoughts and helped Verity grab some boxes from the trunk.
“More great stuff,” Verity said. “We just have to get inside.”
I remembered the angry red scratches on Susan’s cheek. “Let’s just hope Juliet’s not in a scratching mood.”
“She likes us. Remember? I give her cash”—she patted her purse—“and you play ballerina with her. If she does get crazy, just distract her with some fancy footwork until I can get the boxes outside.”
I pushed the bell.
Verity hummed as she bounced on her toes. Overhead, gulls wheeled, their cries loud in the leafy oasis of the Wells estate.
Verity pressed the bell.
“Hmm, wonder if Juliet drove the new nurse away.” Verity rapped loudly on the door.
“There’s a car over there.” A Volvo wagon was parked not far from the front door. “I think that was here this morning.”
Verity turned the knob. “What the heck? It’s open.” She pushed open the door.
“You can’t just walk in!” I grabbed her arm.
“Hellloooo!” Verity called into the house. “I’m not leaving until I get my stuff,” she whispered to me.
“Didn’t you say Juliet called you? The number must be in your phone,” I said.
“Oh, yeah.” Verity pulled the door almost shut, then dialed Juliet’s number on her cell. A shrilling came from deep in the house.
“It’s a house phone.”
The phone rang over and over. No footsteps hurried to answer. No voices called out. Verity ended the call.
“Maybe we should go in.” I pushed the door open. “The Volvo must belong to the nurse. If her car’s here, she should be here. Someone should answer.”
As we stepped into the foyer I trailed my fingers along the doorjamb. An additional lock, the type you can only open with a key, met my fingers. A large security system box on the wall was dark.
“Something’s not right,” I whispered.
“There you are!” Juliet trailed her arm on the gleaming mahogany banister as she swept down the stairs. She paused halfway down. She had looped a white chiffon scarf over a worn sweatshirt embroidered with two cats in a teacup.
“Come on up, girls.”
Verity and I exchanged glances. Where was the nurse? I stepped slowly into the foyer. “Good evening, Miss Wells. We were here earlier and spoke to your nurse—”
“Oh, her. She’s having some Madeira by the fire.” Juliet started back up the stairs.
“We could come back.” Something felt so off. Verity turned to me, her eyes wide, but she went to the stairs. I followed.
“Madeira by the fire,” I whispered to Verity. “Isn’t that from the movie? The Gypsies drink madeira by the fire?”
“She’s just quoting the movie,” Verity said. “Listen, she’s an old lady. If she does anything weird we can take her, right?”
The banister gleamed under my fingers. “If we have to make a quick getaway, slide down the banister. It’ll be faster than running.”
“Come along, girls!” Juliet trilled from the top of the stairs. Her eyes were wide and glittering, circled with dark eyeliner. I tried not to stare, but Juliet’s wig was askew. Now I realized that what I’d thought was her real hair, cut into a sleek long bob, was a wig. Long tendrils of thin salt-and-pepper hair trailed from one side of the displaced wig.
A small overnight bag was open on a table.
“Just put the money in there,” she said. Verity complied.
I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry. “Miss Wells, are you going on a trip?”
Juliet laughed and waved us down the hall, her peals of laughter bright and brittle as broken glass.
“Start in there.” Instead of leading us back to the huge closet off the master bedroom, Juliet waved into the door she’d closed on our last visit. Verity and I walked past the fireplace under the gaze of the large portrait of Contessa Wells in her famous Gypsy costume. A small fire crackled within. Papers and letters littered the floor, spilled from two small boxes.
“All the things in the closet and the bureau can go. Clear it all out.” Juliet left the room.
Verity handed me two boxes. I set to work on the bureau while she went into the closet. Unlike our previous visit, Verity and I worked in uncomfortable silence.
I slid open drawer after drawer, but unlike the pristine silks we’d bought before, most seemingly never worn, the clothes in these drawers were faded and gray. A bottom drawer rattled as I pulled it open. It held dozens of bottles of pills. I slammed it shut.
I slipped into the closet with Verity.
“The clothes here aren’t like the others,” I whispered. “I think they’re Juliet’s, not Contessa’s.”
Verity nudged aside several pairs of worn sneakers. Then she walked deeper into the closet. She unzipped a dust-covered garment bag and a glamorous dress of gold organza spilled out. “Here toward the back, the clothes are nicer. It’s like she put the nicer clothes away and never wore them again.”
Verity dragged a finger across a dusty shelf. “We’ll start here and move into the other bedroom. I forgot trash bags. I’ll see if I can find some in the kitchen. We’ll bag up this junky stuff. Put the good stuff in the bo
xes.”
I returned to the bedroom as Verity headed downstairs. Instead of packing boxes, I stood before the portrait of Contessa. Why did Juliet have this portrait in her own suite, a portrait of her sister in her most famous role? The woman in the portrait was a force, a presence, vibrant as the red walls of the room.
The acrid smoke smell made me cough. I peeked into the hallway. No sign of Juliet. I took a packet of letters, tied with pink satin ribbons, and turned it over. “Contessa” was written on the envelopes in a heavy, masculine hand.
She was burning her sister’s love letters. That made more sense, given their relationship.
A gleam in the ashes drew my eye. A photo.
Using the black metal poker I dragged the photo from the hot ashes onto the marble surround of the fireplace.
Contessa’s face looked up at me from the melted remains of her food festival pass.
“What are you doing?”
I gasped and turned, stumbling back against the wall.
Juliet stood in the hall.
“Oh!” The poker slipped through my fingers to the marble with a clang. “I saw the photo—”
“My dear departed sister.” Juliet grabbed the ID badge and threw it back into the ashes. She picked up the poker.
“Did you see the letters?” She didn’t seem upset that I’d been digging in the fireplace. “All these love letters.”
She picked up a packet and held it to her chest, closed her eyes. “My husband was quite a letter writer.”
Juliet’s mascara spilled toward her cheeks like black tears. “And then she took him from me, too.” The edge to her voice, the crazy makeup, the oversharing. I tried to tamp down the panic that rose inside me. She’s only an old lady. A crazy old lady holding a poker.
“She seduced my husband.” Juliet dropped the letters. “She wanted to crawl inside my skin and become me. And she did. My sister was a monster, a horror.” Juliet lifted the poker with two hands and slammed it on the ID badge, swinging wildly, over and over.
I yelped and stumbled back against a side table, throwing my arms up to protect myself. Juliet threw more letters into the fireplace, her chest heaving, then grabbed the mantel to steady herself.
I was too shocked to move and was even more shocked when she turned to me. I edged away, my back against the wall until I bumped into an antique wall mirror.
She looped her thin hair behind her ear, pushing the wig farther out of place.
I remembered pushing aside Contessa’s hair, her hair tangling in her scarf, when I helped her at the food festival.
Suddenly I knew why Juliet kept the portrait of Contessa in her room.
Chapter 46
“You’re not Juliet,” I whispered. “You’re”—I pointed at the portrait—“Contessa.”
Her shoulders heaved, mascara streaked her face. “I am Contessa Wells. I am Contessa Wells.”
I looked away from the crumpled face of the woman in front of me, fearful of what I saw in her eyes. Hatred. Insanity. Self-pity. Her hand still gripped the fireplace poker. Reflected firelight sparked on her rings. Rings on her hands, bracelets on her wrists. No earrings.
Suddenly I was back at the food festival, looking for Aunt Gully in the church hallway. That rhyme Aunt Gully had hummed now made sense. Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes. Aunt Gully had noticed, unconsciously, this woman’s rings when she saw her leave the kitchen at the food festival.
“You were at the food festival.” I pointed at the ID badge smoldering in the ashes. “You wore your sister’s security badge. No one noticed because you looked alike and wore a hat.”
She snorted. “They barely looked. The badge came in the mail. My sister never saw it. But I had things to do at the food festival. I helped Susan take a nice nap that day. I have so many lovely pills to choose from.”
My mind whirled. I remembered the Contessa who danced in the The Gypsy’s Daughter. Her magnificent spins around the campfire. I had recognized her when the woman here, calling herself Juliet, had spun aside on my last visit with Verity. The way she moved, even decades later, in a body changed by time, was unmistakable. Somehow, on some level, I’d recognized her.
“What happened?” I whispered.
“Everyone said I’d be a star after The Gypsy’s Daughter,” she spat. “But when my sister ripped the earring from my ear it was clear that her jealousy would consume us both. If I’d left then, I would have been free of her. But I was a fool. I tried to help her. Kept her close. Hah! Close enough for her to start drugging me. I’d be high for days. She told people that I was Juliet, the unstable one, the jealous one. The addict. She made me an addict. Everyone saw me, everyone believed it.
“We always looked so much alike. The only thing she couldn’t do was dance like me, so she told people she’d been injured. Oh, the sympathy poured in. She could still dance well enough, but never like me. She left Hollywood and moved to Broadway. Fewer people there knew her.”
“And she put you away,” I whispered.
“She put me away. After all, I was crazy. Different institutions, all across the country. Nice ones, only the best, but still. In every place, they nodded with sympathy but I knew how I sounded. Crazy. Always going on about how my sister had stolen my life. How my sister had stolen my identity. How I was the real Contessa Wells. The ravings of a madwoman.”
“She kept you drugged?” I whispered.
“I’ve had every drug you can imagine.” The real Contessa’s voice rose. “The only time it’s bad is when I know what’s going on. When the drugs stop. When I know what she took from me. What she stole!” The last words were a scream.
“I want to smash her face!” She swung at the mirror. I dodged aside as the poker shattered glass and clattered to the floor.
I backed along the wall toward the door, my heart hammering in my chest.
“Wait! Wait!” she beseeched, hands clasped.
“You are Contessa Wells,” I whispered. “I believe you.”
* * *
“No one else does,” she whispered.
Hurry, Verity. Where was she? Maybe Verity’s presence would make this woman, Contessa Wells, stop.
“I’ve told nurse after nurse after doctor after doctor who I really am. ‘Sure, lady, you’re Contessa Wells.’ They never believed me. And if one did, they were soon gone.”
“But now you’re free.” I didn’t want to move, to set her off further. Curiosity vied within me with disgust and pity. “You painted the red X on the sign at Kahuna’s. It’s the same paint as this room.”
She nodded. “That place’s ruining the town. I had Susan take me to the town meeting. I saw Ernie Moss. Ernie Moss is a bully. The way he talks to his wife.” She shook her head.
“How did you do it? At the food festival.”
“Easy.” She laughed. “Walked in, flashed my badge at some dumb kid who had never heard of Contessa Wells. No one noticed me. You’re a performer. We know how to stand out, how to blend in. When they announced the show was starting, everyone streamed out of the kitchen. I hung back. Lifted the cloche. Sprinkled some of my secret ingredient”—her lips curled—“on the lobster rolls. My, they looked delicious. I headed out just as some woman came running in.”
Some woman. Aunt Gully.
“You used monkshood,” I said.
“My nurses always encouraged my gardening. It’s good therapy.” She smiled. “When I heard my sister was a judge at the festival, I saw a way to get rid of her and that awful bully at the same time. Two birds with one stone.”
My mouth was so dry I could barely speak. “Other people were hurt.”
Contessa waved her hand. “Only one person really mattered. My sister.” She moved to the shattered mirror, her face reflected in the remaining shards. “It doesn’t matter that I killed her. I still see her face in the mirror. The hate lives.”
Shock rendered me immobile. It doesn’t matter that I killed her. Did she really just con
fess?
Behind us, through the open window, came the sound of car doors slamming. A police radio squawked. Contessa ran to the window.
Verity peeked around the corner of the door frame, her eyes huge, her chest heaving.
Contessa whirled and ran to the doorway. Verity jumped back.
“What did you do? Why did you call the police?” she shrieked. Verity flinched. “Stupid, stupid girl!”
The woman I now knew to be Contessa Wells ran into the hallway. “Enough! I’ve had enough! It ends now.”
For a moment my body refused to move. I stepped shakily toward Verity. “Did you call the police, Verity?”
Verity panted, a hand to her side. “The nurse. I found her. In the kitchen. On the floor. She won’t wake up.”
Enough, I’ve had enough, rang in my ears. It ends now. Contessa hurried down the hall away from us. She ran through a narrow door in the wood paneling at the end of the hallway.
“Did she just say she killed her sister?” Verity said.
I nodded. “Verity, let the cops in. I think she’s going to the roof.”
I hurried through the same door Contessa’d run through. A narrow, steep spiraling cast-iron stairway curled upward toward a dim square of light. I ran up. My boot caught on a step, knocking me to my knees. I ripped off my boot and kicked off my flip-flop. I hurtled up the rest of the stairs, suddenly very afraid. The Wells House was famous for its architecture, especially its ornate widow’s walk at the top of the house. That’s where this led, I was sure. Three stories up.
Enough, I’ve had enough, rang in my ears. It ends now.
At the top of the stairs, I pulled myself up on rusty metal handles into a small, glass-windowed cupola. A twinge of pain shot through my ankle with each step.
High above Mystic Bay, the first embers of sunset smoldered along the horizon to the west.
Contessa’s figure was silhouetted against the reddening sky, standing at the low cast-iron railing that ran around the edge of the roof. The widow’s walk.
Contessa reached out her arms to the sky, her scarf streaming behind her. I thought of how her sister’s scarf had streamed behind her also, in the gentle morning breeze at the food festival. But tonight, stronger wind gusts from the bay buffeted us. I leaned forward into the wind, fearing that I’d see her body cartwheel into space.
Curses, Boiled Again! Page 22