by Edie Claire
"Are you all right, ma’am?" the security guard asked Nikki tentatively, keeping his distance. He was still rubbing his head.
"I’m peachy," she snapped, feeling the long pink streaks across her cheek, compliments of Rochelle’s polka-dotted tips. Her voice softened a bit. "Sorry about tackling you like that," she said to the guard. "Nothing personal."
He threw her a skeptical look, then followed Rochelle silently out the door.
"We were just going, too," Warren announced, taking a firm grip on Leigh’s hand as she joined him at the bottom of the stairs. Jared had already started back to the basement, and only the three of them remained in the foyer.
Nikki shook her head in disgust, her arms folded tightly across her chest. "Do you believe that? Me, Lilah Murchison’s kid. Of all the stupid—"
"But how can you really be sure?" Leigh interrupted, careful to keep her tone in check. She was bigger than Rochelle, but she didn’t have any fingernails, either. "I mean, there’s a chance, isn’t there?"
"No!" Nikki answered immediately. "I do have a birth certificate. It says that I am proudly and officially the child of Wanda Loomis and a man both she and the state refer to as 'Unknown.' There, are you happy? Sheesh!"
Birth certificates can be faked, Leigh thought to herself, resisting the urge to make the statement out loud. "Listen, Nikki," she said instead, ignoring the paralyzing squeeze Warren was delivering to her hand. "Yesterday I found proof that Lilah Murchison gave birth to another child when everyone thought she was pregnant with Dean. She adopted him, and gave her own baby away."
Nikki stared at her blankly. "Say what?"
"I think she gave her own baby away because it was a girl, and her husband desperately wanted a boy. This house, her social standing—everything she had except her cash was tied up in her marriage, and she had to preserve it at all costs. I think the baby she had was you, and that she gave you to one of her only available relatives, Wanda Loomis, to raise."
The other woman’s blank look gave way to a slowly spreading, sarcastic smile. "Oh, please," she said with a laugh. "Is that why you keep coming over here and bugging me?"
Leigh didn’t answer.
"Well, forget it. For one thing, Wanda Loomis barely raised the brats she had. She wouldn’t take in so much as a gnat unless it came with regular payments, and I can assure you there was no money to spare in the Loomis house at any time during my so-called childhood. Secondly, if I was Ms. Lilah’s daughter, don’t you think she would have told me? You’d better believe if I did know, I’d be in Tahiti right now sunning my sorry butt on the sand."
She took a breath. "And even besides all that—I’m only twenty-three! Dean is twenty-five." She threw Leigh a withering look. "Got any other bright ideas?"
"No," Warren said loudly, moving Leigh bodily towards the door. "We’ve got to get back to work now. Thanks for your hospitality, Ms. Loomis."
He opened the door himself, but found he couldn’t go through it. Few people could, with Maura Polanski’s two-hundred-plus pounds filling the space.
"I should have known," the detective said heavily, glaring at Leigh. "Murder at the Murchison house—you’re here. A cat fight at the Murchison house—you’re here. Why do I carry a pager, anyway? It would save time if I just followed you around."
"Jared’s not talking to you," Nikki said to Maura icily. "We were just leaving."
"I don’t want to talk to Jared," Maura answered calmly, stepping inside. She introduced herself. "I want to talk to you. And I’m not here to talk about Mrs. Murchison’s murder—just some issues about her estate."
Nikki rolled her eyes with a groan. "You think I’m her kid, too? Get in line."
"We’ll catch up with you later, Maura," Leigh piped up, hurrying out. "I’ll call you in an hour or two. Okay?"
Warren followed, but received another elbow in the ribs on the way. "You’re fired," Maura growled.
"Hey!" he defended. "You know perfectly well what I’m up against."
"Yeah," the detective tossed back with a smirk, "But I’m not the one who married her."
Pretending to ignore the exchange, Leigh headed for the car. They could make fun of her all they wanted. She still had the oriental chest under one arm, and neither one of them had noticed.
Chapter 20
"What is it with you?" Leigh’s officemate Alice complained. "You’ve had your monitor on that same page for almost an hour, and you haven’t typed a word. Furthermore, your disgusted sighs every ten seconds are driving me loco. Why don’t you just go home? I hear Saturdays in the office are great for concentrating."
"I don’t have a car," Leigh lamented. "My smart-aleck, do-gooder of a husband stranded me here until five-thirty." Her eyes narrowed. "And confiscated my box besides."
Alice threw her a pathetic look. "I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. But I will float you cab fare if it’ll get you the hell out of here."
"Thanks," Leigh said genuinely. "But I do need to work. Maybe some more caffeine…" She started to get up, but her head swam a little, and she sat back down. Perhaps she had had enough caffeine after all.
She knew, logically, that Warren was right. There was no reason for her to continue to obsess over the threats to the clinic and their almost certain link to Lilah Murchison’s murder. Maura was on it, and the detective was perfectly capable of ferreting the matter out eventually, even if she was busy with other cases. Leigh should never have taken the box out of the Murchison house, and it needed to go either back there or to Maura ASAP.
But she still couldn’t stop thinking about it. She had been so sure that Nikki was the one. Furthermore, she had also almost convinced herself that Rochelle was behind the threats—that she had found a copy of the will before the reading and that she, too, had guessed who Nikki was. But the untouched box, and the women’s little tiff, had shot that theory all to heck.
Rochelle might be on the shrewd side, but she obviously lacked the subtlety necessary for an elaborate, anonymous extortion campaign. Subtle people didn’t generally confront their nemesis at the scene of a murder and threaten (in front of at least one known witness) to slit their throat.
No. Dean and Rochelle were responsible for Ricky Rhodis’s brush with the law, but that was about it. They probably genuinely believed that Nikki and/or Jared had killed Mrs. Murchison.
Someone else was the real heir. And someone else knew the whole story—without needing to attend the will reading. If Mary Polanski knew about the baby switch, who else might? And why would they have been let in on the secret in the first place?
Alice groaned out loud, and Leigh felt a sticky-note pad bounce off the back of her head. "I mean it, you," Alice warned. "One more sigh, and I’ll—"
"Mail call," their young receptionist twittered pleasantly, dropping a small stack of mail on Alice’s desk, and an even smaller one on Leigh’s. "I like that postcard," she said approvingly, pointing to the top of Leigh’s stack with a fake nail. "It’s so true."
She turned to leave, and Leigh picked up the card. It was addressed to her in plain printed letters, but the part where a message should be was blank. She turned it over curiously, and her blood ran cold.
Springtime in Pittsburgh.
She sat perfectly still for a moment, just looking at it. It could be a coincidence, perhaps. You could get such cards anywhere. But the lettering was familiar. And the two cards had arrived the same day.
It was odd that there was no message. But maybe the sender figured he didn’t need one.
She swallowed.
"You are here! Praise the Lord!"
Leigh looked up into the flushed face of Adith Rhodis, and her brain tried to shift gears. The older woman was dressed in a navy blue polyester skirt, which ended a good three inches above the rim of her knee-high stockings, and a matching polyester top and cardigan, which had probably not buttoned since the Carter administration.
"I’ve been trying to catch up with you all day, honey! To think that L
ilah Murchison really was alive all along, but now she’s dead anyway, and you were actually there when it happened—not that you called me, of course, but that’s okay—and now everybody’s wondering what’s going on and you didn’t answer your phone here, then they said you were at the clinic, but then they said you’d come back here, except you hadn’t, and—" She took a much needed breath. "I’ve got something important to tell you!"
Leigh dropped the card like a hot potato. She couldn’t think about it now. Why should she? Evidently, someone thought she was being a snoop. But they could rest easy, because they were going to get exactly what they wanted. From now on, she was keeping to her resolution of the morning. She was leaving everything to the police.
At least to all outward appearances.
She looked eagerly into Adith’s gleaming eyes. "What?"
"Excuse me, ma’am," Alice said to the older woman, standing up. "But did you, by any chance, come here in a car?"
Adith looked at her oddly. "Well, sure, honey."
"Excellent," Alice exclaimed, plopping back down in her seat. "Leigh—go get in it."
***
The ancient sedan rattled like a peddler’s cart as Adith weaved fearlessly in and out of the North Side traffic. "I’m afraid I made a mistake the other day," she said regretfully. "I told the girls what I told you and they all told me I was crazy. Course, I never claimed to have known Albert all that well, I just figured he was like a lot of old fuddy-duddies his age. Sexist and all. And I still think I could have been on to something, but that Lois, she’s just always so blasted smug about everything, like the time when she told everybody her cousin had had a thing going with Elvis—"
"Mrs. Rhodis," Leigh cut in as politely as possible. "What exactly are we talking about?"
"Oh, sorry," she apologized, narrowly avoiding the rear fender of a white Cadillac, whose blue-haired driver appeared equally competent. "I mean why Ms. Lilah would have switched those babies. The girls—they seem pretty sure that Albert would have doted on a baby daughter just as much as he would have on a son. I guess he had a sister he was pretty close to once, and they just couldn’t see him dumping his wife on account of her not having a boy."
Leigh sat back a little, though she kept a tight hold of the hand grip on her door. "Really?"
"So they say," Adith continued. "And I’ll tell you what we all agreed. There’s only one good reason why Ms. Lilah would give up her own flesh and blood for somebody’s else’s baby."
Leigh waited. Adith never gave anything away without a suitably dramatic pause.
"There must have been something wrong with it."
She stared at the older woman for a moment, digesting the thought. Something wrong with it.
"You got to remember that Lilah was at least forty when she had the baby," Adith continued. "So it wouldn’t be too surprising, right?"
Leigh’s mind traveled back to the conversation she had had with Dean’s biological mother, Becky. She had said that her grandmother had actually encouraged her to keep her baby—right up until the week before it was born. Which would not coincidentally be the week that Lilah’s baby was born. The week when a desperate Lilah enlisted Peggy’s aid in a hastily hatched scheme.
"So we were thinking maybe the baby was deformed or something," Adith continued.
Leigh’s stomach had already settled deep into her shoes. Of course. She had been so focused on finding a female heir, she had overlooked the obvious. It was Jared, not Nikki, who was the same age as Dean. It was Jared, not Nikki, who had inspired a job offer from Lilah. It was Jared, unlike Nikki, who was blond and blue-eyed, even though the hair he had been born with was black. And it was Jared who formed the link to the Koslow Animal Clinic. He was Lilah Murchison’s true heir—and it was this fact that someone wanted so desperately to conceal.
"If the baby was in real bad shape," Adith prattled grimly, running an orange light without blinking, "I bet she put it in an institution. Not everybody kept babies like that back then, you know."
Leigh was only half listening. Did Maura suspect Jared already? She might. Did Nikki know? She couldn’t. She was probably Jared’s legal guardian already, and if she had so much as an inkling she could and would have gone straight to the lawyer’s office to stake her brother’s claim—and no creepy little threats would have swayed her, either.
But if neither Nikki nor Jared knew, how did Ms. Lilah expect them to find out? And how were they to prove his identity as the will stipulated?
There was still a missing piece.
"Mrs. Rhodis?" Leigh asked tentatively. She was far too distracted now to pay much attention to the older woman’s driving, which, if the object that had just grazed the side-view mirror was indeed a mail box, was a good thing. "You knew Mary Polanski, didn’t you?"
"Of course!" Adith piped up quickly. "Sharpest woman alive. Pity about—well, you know."
"Yes," Leigh agreed. "What I want to ask you is, how well do you think she knew Lilah Murchison?"
Adith’s brow furrowed. "When?"
"In the late seventies, when the baby was born."
The older woman quickly shook her head. "Oh, I’m sure Lilah wouldn’t have given a woman like Mary the time of day then. She was already a socialite. La, ti, da!" She made a loopy gesture with her left hand, which resulted in the car swerving wildly over the center line. Gesture over, she swung the car back—and overshot onto the curb.
Leigh took a deep breath. It was a good thing the clinic was only a few blocks away, or she would be forced to ask for a barf bag. "So, you don’t think Mary would know any of her secrets? I mean, about the baby? Could Lilah have called Mary and asked for her help in secretly getting it into an institution, or anything like that?"
"Lord, no!" Adith insisted. "Nobody would ever tell Mary anything that was even halfway shady—she was married to the chief of police, for heaven’s sake. And everyone knew she wouldn’t tell a lie. She’d be the last person Lilah would tell anything!"
"I see," Leigh answered, but she was lying herself. She didn’t see—not at all. How could Mary have known about the baby?
It was time for one more visit to Maplewood.
"That’s Warren’s car there," Leigh directed, pointing Adith towards the blue Beetle that was parked at the curb. The sedan missed clipping it by no more than ten inches.
"Are you sure there’s nothing else we can do to help?" the older woman asked as Leigh got out. "Should I talk to the detectives myself, you think?"
"I’ll tell Maura Polanski everything you told me as soon as I see her," Leigh promised, happy to have her feet back on the nice, safe cobblestones. "Thanks for the lift."
Adith was none too anxious to end their conversation, but Leigh was anxious enough for both of them. As soon as her ex-chauffeur was out of sight, she hoofed it down the street and into the clinic, making a beeline for the phone in the treatment room.
Unfortunately, Detective Polanski was unavailable. Leigh cursed under her breath, then left a rambling message on the detective’s voice mail. She confessed about the postcard and the oriental chest—though the latter, she still had plans for. If she knew her hardworking husband, the chest was probably still sitting on the front seat of her Cavalier in a particular downtown parking garage. And there it would stay until Warren knocked off for the day. Unless, of course, she got to it first.
Which she fully planned to do, just as soon as she had resolved the Mary issue. She would then have the rest of the afternoon to peruse the box at her leisure, and when Maura caught up with her that evening, she could happily turn it over—like the good little citizen she was.
She wanted to talk to Nancy again, but gave up after waiting five minutes for her to get off the phone with an obviously panicked bird owner. Whether Nikki or Jared was the real heir was immaterial to Nancy’s situation—she might very well still be the person for whom the threats were intended. Whoever wanted to keep Jared’s parentage a secret knew a lot, and it would be no stretch to assume they knew
about Nancy’s past as well.
And if the person who was sending the threats was the same person who killed Mrs. Murchison, and possibly Peggy Linney…
She shook the thought from her head. Whether Nancy knew something or not, she had every reason to look over her shoulder.
And so do you.
Leigh’s teeth clenched as she attempted to placate her little voice of reason. It was true that anyone who knew the identity of Mrs. Murchison’s real heir could be in danger, including her. But it was also true that once that secret got out, the threat to everyone would be over for good. And thanks to her, the police—as of ten minutes ago or whenever Maura picked up her voice mail—were already in the loop.
No one could possibly fault her for going on an innocent visit to a nursing home.
***
Mary Polanski was sitting this time, which was unusual. She was reposing calmly in an arm chair in the small lobby immediately outside her room, where another woman and a much older man sat ignoring a soap opera on a large-screen TV. She smiled as Leigh approached.
"Hello, Virginia," Mary said pleasantly.
"Hello, Mary," Leigh answered pleasantly back. She pulled up another arm chair and sat down. They ran through their usual topics of conversation; the chief, Maura, and a new favorite—the evils of war. Mary’s chatterbox was in fine form.
"I never liked Lilah Beemish," Leigh said finally, keeping her voice sympathetic. "It was so awful what she did to that baby."
Mary’s gray eyes turned intent, just as they had earlier that morning. "Yes," she said gravely. "It was."
Leigh took a deep breath and prayed that the direct approach was a good one. "Now tell me, how exactly was it that you came to know about it?"
For a long moment, Mary didn’t answer. Her eyes darted rapidly back and forth in their sockets, and Leigh had the helpless feeling that the older woman’s memories were playing before her like a movie on a screen—a screen no one else could see.