by Carolyn Hart
Annie said quietly, “I saw Kyle this morning.”
Heather jerked to a stop like a marionette strung tight, her eyes pools of fear in a stricken face.
Upstairs the sound of the vacuum ceased. There was a murmur of women’s voices.
Annie said quickly, “He told me—”
“Shh.” The warning was swift. Heather looked past Annie, forced her face into a smile. “Hi, Mother. Georgia and I are going to take a walk on the beach. I want to show her the pier.” Heather’s fingers closed on Annie’s arm.
Lillian was at the top of the stairs. She gave her daughter a look of surprise, but quickly smiled. “It’s a lovely day for the beach. When you get back, I hope you’ll get started with your packing. Jon’s stayed home to help me. He says I always try to take everything I own. When you have time, please check with William and see if he’s had the car serviced.”
Heather forced a bright smile. “I’ll see to it.” She gave Annie’s arm a tug, then turned and hurried down the stairs. Annie followed. As soon as they were outside, Heather walked swiftly toward the path to the dunes. Annie hurried to keep up. As their steps thudded on the boardwalk to the beach, Heather asked sharply, “Why did you talk to Kyle?”
They stopped just past the dunes. The tide was out. Sandpipers skittered past. Wet sand stretched a hundred yards to a placid sea, green as jade. The gentle waves were shimmering lines of foam. A raft of snowy white herring gulls bobbed beyond the surf. Annie loved the fresh feel of the sea air. The onshore breeze plucked at their clothes, rustled the sea oats behind them.
Annie’s voice was measured. “I went to see him because I thought he might be the man the police are hunting for, the man who killed Vanessa.”
Heather lifted a hand to her throat. Wide eyes stared at Annie. “Not Kyle. He wouldn’t hurt anyone. He wouldn’t hurt anyone, ever. It has to be that man they arrested. Or some other man. Who knows how many men she slept with? That’s what she was like.”
“Kyle claims he didn’t kill her or have an affair with her.” Everything pointed to Kyle, but Annie was inclined to think he was telling the truth. “He said Vanessa tried to make it look as if they were having an affair and that was a lie. He said he told you he hadn’t made love to her. Why don’t you believe him?” This was the crux. Why didn’t Heather—who knew Kyle better than anyone, who was quick to insist he couldn’t be guilty of murder—believe him when he told her there was no affair?
Heather jammed her hands into the pockets of her shorts. She looked away from Annie, her face now as pale as it had been flushed. “There have always been girls for Kyle. Everybody knew it when we were in school. Vanessa was beautiful. He noticed her. I could tell he was flattered when she went after him. She tried to be as sexy as she could around him. She’d wear a low-cut blouse and then the shoulder would slip when she was close to him. She brushed against him in the pool. It was humiliating. After a while”—her tone was grudging—“he acted like he was irritated. He kept telling me he wasn’t interested. But”—she was angry and hurt—“he was lying.”
Annie moved nearer. “Why do you think so? This morning he swore that Vanessa was just trying to make it look as if he was involved with her.”
There was a flash of hope in Heather’s eyes, then her mouth twisted bitterly. “That’s what he kept saying, but I know better. I heard her talking to him. Last Friday. I was in the hall outside the library. Vanessa was on the phone. I almost went in, then I heard his name. Her voice was—oh, it was sickening. She said, ‘Come at midnight, Kyle. I’ll be waiting. I want you to—’” Heather broke off. She tried to stifle a sob as she whirled away, ran down the beach.
Annie knew that the words Heather overheard ripped and gouged deep within her, Vanessa describing in a throaty whisper just what she wanted Kyle to do in a lovers’ encounter.
As Annie walked back to the house, she balanced Heather’s stricken cry with Kyle’s sullen fury. This morning Annie had almost succumbed to Kyle’s undeniable appeal. More than that, she found it hard to correlate his prickly, defiant, take-me-as-I-am-or-leave-me, screw-you attitude with the meticulous planning that left Vanessa dead in a ramshackle fishing cabin and Max in the Beaufort County detention center. Or was Kyle’s apparent openness simply a cover for a devious and twisted personality?
Annie moved swiftly across the terrace, entered the back door. The long hallway was dim and shadowy. The rumble of the vacuum cleaner was louder. As Annie moved toward the front of the house, the roar increased in volume. She caught a flash of movement and stopped just past the archway to the library. She moved back to the opening.
The library was a dramatic room, bookshelves and floor of mahogany, richly red as sunset. Tartan cushions were a cheerful contrast to the white furniture. A hooded computer sat atop a sleek metal desk in one corner. A golden ceramic dragon looked regal on a rustic wooden bench in front of the fireplace. A massive mirror hung above the fireplace. The movement she’d noted had been her image reflected from the mirror as she passed the archway.
Annie pictured Heather walking up the hallway on Friday. When she heard Kyle’s name, she stopped to listen. Annie walked into the library. The phone sitting on the desk was portable, of course. Annie walked to the desk, picked up the receiver. As she did so, she looked up at the mirror. Because she was standing at an angle and the mirror reflected yet another mirror in the hallway, the reflection included a narrow portion of the hall. Even if Heather stopped short of the archway, she could have been seen by Vanessa.
If Kyle was telling the truth, Vanessa’s pursuit was spurious. If on Friday Vanessa was still intent upon creating this false image and if she saw Heather approaching in the mirror, how easy it would have been to pick up the phone and hold it as Annie was now holding it and talk into it as if addressing her lover. How easy and how cruel.
How impossible to prove.
Annie replaced the receiver, turned toward the hallway, face furrowed in a frown. The conversation overheard by Heather seemed to confirm that Kyle was Vanessa’s lover. But wasn’t it just as likely Vanessa once again had been a willing conspirator in spinning a web of duplicity, a web that would ultimately trap her as well as Max? If Kyle was innocent, that left Sam Golden or Jon Dodd. If one of them was the unseen killer, how could Annie prove a deadly connection?
The vacuum cleaner’s roar was louder now. Annie walked swiftly toward the hall. Maybelle was looping a cord over one hand. She pushed the machine toward the archway.
Annie gestured to Maybelle to come near.
Maybelle clicked off the sweeper. Her round face was wary and she darted quick glances toward the hall to the kitchen.
In the sudden silence, the hallway seemed long and empty and forbidding. Annie moved quickly toward the maid. “Maybelle, we didn’t finish our talk yesterday.”
Maybelle backed away, glanced nervously around.
Annie wondered why. Had William told Esther about the Evil Eye? Had Esther ordered Maybelle to avoid that kind of talk?
Maybelle’s eyes shifted like a horse ready to bolt.
Annie stepped toward her. “Come into the library.” It was a direct order given in a pleasant but firm voice. “Mrs. Dodd said you could help me.” Indeed she had, but perhaps not in the fashion Annie intended.
Henny maneuvered her old Dodge past the Hummer. The squat monster vehicle was parked between the front steps of the house—Henny gave the structure the benefit of the doubt—and a burbling fountain. Henny continued on past a saucy red Mustang convertible, dwarfed by the Hummer, to a patch of shade beneath a gnarled live oak. She rolled down the windows but in a few minutes stepped out of the car, which was beginning to heat up like a potter’s kiln. She moved deeper into the shade, watching the entrance. Rita Powell had promised to look at the pictures—Henny glanced toward the car where a folder lay on the passenger seat—as soon as she finished showing prospective buyers through a house that not only was the talk of the island, but carried a hefty price tag of almost two million. Th
e hope of receiving the reward for information relevant to Vanessa’s murder ranked a definite second to Rita’s intense desire to sell the house and get the commission.
Henny squinted her eyes, a necessity because the house glittered bright as a nickel in the sunlight. The front door led into a three-story silo-shaped structure that looked like it was made of a silver metal. The remainder of the house, much more sensibly finished in stucco, spread in a batwing design behind the entrance. The house was designed to avoid contamination by materials with toxic components, such as particle board treated with formaldehyde, carpet adhesives that exude chemicals, and oil-based paints containing volatile organic compounds. Henny had read all about it in a feature in the Gazette. Presumably the house avoided the need for air-conditioning by using ceiling fans and taking advantage of cooling winds both through open skylights and sill-vent windows. At the moment, Henny would have traded the decidedly hot breeze rustling the nearby palmettos for a large waft of icy air. If she had two million dollars, she could think of better uses than the house with the shiny silo….
The front door opened.
A burly man in a white polo, sagging khaki shorts, and scuffed leather loafers held the elbow of an elegant, model-thin blonde in a crisp white linen dress and matching sling sandals. A thin woman carrying a clipboard followed them outside and turned to lock the door. The trio stood for a moment next to the Hummer.
“…eager to sell.” A vivacious smile was at variance with the realtor’s thin, anxious face. “I can give them your best offer—”
“Bucky, it’s too damn hot to stand here and talk.” The blonde’s tone was pettish.
“Okay, okay, Cindy.” He helped her up into the Hummer, gave a negligent wave of his hand toward the agent. “We’ll be back in touch.”
The agent stood slump-shouldered, the vivacious smile gone, as the Hummer roared away.
Henny held her breath to avoid the cloud of dust roiling over her, then moved to the open window of her car, leaned through to pick up the green folder. She walked quickly toward her quarry. “Mrs. Powell?”
The thin face that turned toward Henny was tired and hopeless.
“Henny Brawley. We spoke last night.” Henny spoke as she would to a lost child, her voice kind and reassuring.
“Oh, yes.” Rita gave a tired sigh. “I’ve been thinking about it. I mean, I’m pretty sure that girl I saw was the one who got killed, but I can’t afford to get mixed up in anything. I’m a single mom and I can’t lose my job.”
Henny’s smile was warm. “You don’t need to worry for a minute.
If you can help catch the murderer, you’ll not only receive the reward, I’ll see to it”—she hoped Vince Ellis would help her out here—“that there’s a very positive story in the Gazette about how you stepped forward to protect the community.”
Despite the heat that rolled against them, intense and suffocating, Rita shivered. “The night that I saw her, I was terribly jealous.” She looked embarrassed, defensive. “She was so pretty and she looked like she had everything going for her. She had on a beautiful dress and she was young. I wished I could be young like that and sitting with a man who loved me. There was something about the way she threw back her head and laughed. It was as if she was telling the world she was special.” Rita’s faded blue eyes were mournful. “I wanted to be her for a night. A few nights later, she’s dead. God, that’s scary. I’ll look at the pictures. I have to, don’t I? I have to help if I can. I feel so bad that I was jealous.”
Henny patted a bony shoulder, then opened the folder, rested it atop the trunk of the Mustang. The very first photograph was a studio shot of Vanessa, dark hair gleaming, eyes smiling, lips half parted.
“That’s her.” There was no doubt in Rita’s voice. “God, she was pretty.”
Henny fanned three photographs on the hot metal: Sam Golden with his craggy good looks, Jon Dodd with gleaming dark hair and red cheeks, Kyle Curtis with his insouciant, rebellious, devil-may-care grin.
Rita pointed, her finger unwavering. “That one. He’s the one.”
Maybelle’s eyes were huge and staring in her plump face. She stood reluctantly in front of the fireplace in the library. “Excuse me, miss, I got to finish sweeping before lunch. Esther will have my hide if I don’t get to the kitchen quick as I can.”
Annie’s face was stern. “You know how the police are looking for the man involved with Vanessa.”
Maybelle evinced no surprise. Annie hadn’t expected that she would. The staff of a house always knew what was happening within a house. Maybelle simply hunched her shoulders and looked uneasy.
Annie spoke with conviction. “You know who he is.” Maybelle would have pushed past her, but Annie blocked the way. Annie reached out a beseeching hand. “Please, Maybelle. You must tell me. Who looked at Vanessa with the Evil Eye?” Annie’s world dismissed superstition, but she knew there was another world where a hank of hair could be used to cast a spell and pins poked into a wax figure could spell death.
Maybelle’s hands came together. She shuddered. “Esther tells me it’s the Devil’s work. But there’s people that has the power and when they have the power, they can work bad things. In the old days, they’d take a doll and call it by name and poke it with pins and pretty soon that person got sick and shriveled up and died. Sometimes, all it takes is the Evil Eye. I saw it. He looked at her and then she died. She didn’t know. She’d gone on into the cottage when he looked at her like that—”
Annie glanced past Maybelle into the mirror. She saw, like a tiny puzzle piece, the curved fronts of a man’s shoes. Just that. Nothing more. The front of two unmoving brown loafers. Horror crawled over Annie as if a cottonmouth had dropped from a tree limb to coil around her arm.
“—and she never knew. But I saw—”
Annie broke in. “Mr. Kyle, wasn’t it?” She spoke loudly as she reached out, gripped Maybelle’s arm, her fingers tight as clamps.
Maybelle looked startled. “Why—”
Annie whispered, “Hall.” She felt frozen in fear, those unmoving brown shoes symbols of threat and danger.
Maybelle stared toward the hall, her eyes glazed with panic. Her plump face suddenly looked shrunken. Her lips parted, but no words came.
“You saw Mr. Kyle.” Annie’s voice rang out. “He was very angry, wasn’t he?” Annie watched the mirror and the reflection from the mirror in the hallway. The shoes were no longer there.
Maybelle struggled to speak. She trembled like the top of a pine in a storm.
Annie bent forward to whisper, “He’s gone.”
Eyes wild with fear, Maybelle stood frozen.
“I’ll go see.” Annie turned and walked swiftly to the hall. It was empty. She waved a reassuring hand toward Maybelle.
The maid slipped to her side, looked fearfully into the hall. She turned to Annie. “I got to go home. I’m sick.” And she broke into a heavy trot, running toward the kitchen.
Annie finished coiling the cord on the sweeper, pushed it along the hallway, left it out of sight behind the stairs. She felt certain the eavesdropper had been Jon Dodd. She had no idea how much he had overheard. She made no effort to go after Maybelle. Home was probably the safest place for her now.
Annie unfolded cardboard boxes, taped them into shape. When several boxes were ready, she carried them into Vanessa’s bedroom and started packing, working fast but carefully. She took no chances that she might miss Vanessa’s diary. Every piece of clothing was shaken, every shoe box checked, every moderate-sized container opened. When drawers were emptied, she turned them over, looking to see if a diary might be taped to the bottom. As she worked, she struggled against the growing conviction that there was no way to prove that Jon Dodd was the man behind Vanessa’s death and Max’s involvement.
Who would believe that smiling Jon Dodd had persuaded Vanessa to pretend that Kyle was her lover? Who would believe Jon had coached Vanessa in the story she offered to Max? Who would believe Vanessa had drugged Max at Jon
’s request? Who would believe Jon’s sillver car had followed the red Jaguar to the fishing shack?
Jon would profess amazement at such claims, point out that Vanessa had flirted with Sam and obviously been involved with Kyle. If the car was ever tied to the vicinity of her death, he would shrug and say everyone knew the keys were at hand in the garage. If shown the photograph where Vanessa looked toward him with possessive triumph, he would shake his head, point to Kyle’s presence.
What suggested his guilt? Nothing substantive, Annie knew. Every pointer was intangible:
Sam’s geniality seemed genuine. Even though Martha was angry because her husband was attracted to Vanessa, there was no indication she intended to leave him, nor did Sam appear devoured by jealousy over Vanessa’s focus on Kyle.
Kyle’s up-front, open quarrelsomeness didn’t square with the devious planning that had resulted in Vanessa’s death. It would have been odd to go to the effort to ensnare Max yet be openly seen as angry with Vanessa.
Vanessa’s pursuit of Kyle was blatant. She could not have expected to hold on to her job. Why hadn’t she cared when obviously she cherished the lifestyle that it offered? Why, in fact, had she made her interest in Kyle so obvious? It was the magician’s trick, directing attention away from reality.
Jon was the only man with whom Vanessa had frequent contact who appeared uninterested in her. This would be expected of the shadowy figure who orchestrated her murder.
In that telling photograph, her face trumpeted triumph. Whatever her relationship with Kyle, it could not be called triumphant. He had publicly rebuffed her. He swore to Heather that the pursuit was all on Vanessa’s part. If there was triumph, it had to be evoked by Jon.