I hadn't bothered to turn on the heat in my bedroom—a good motivator to dress fast. I slipped into the black velvet gown with the three tiny little straps from shoulder to derriere and felt a hit of satisfaction. The zipper sailed up as smooth as silk. Once I'd donned my glittery stockings and sexy black heels, I took a moment to admire the results. Too bad I hadn't had time to get my hair done. But I pulled up the curls with a few rhinestone combs and set to work on makeup. Even though I was working and didn't have a date, I wanted to look my best.
Makeup is a woman's best defense against lack of sleep, fatigue, stress, and the other evils of aging. I had a deft hand with base and eyeliner. It took only a few moments to change from tired and pasty to cool beige with highlighted lashes. I bent toward the mirror to apply my Show Girl Red lipstick. A movement in a corner of the room made me pause.
It was almost as if I were dreaming. Lean and lithe, Brianna Rathbone stepped out of the shadows and toward me. In her hand was a short-bladed knife stained a brownish red.
"Sarah Booth, this isn't what you think."
It had the vague ring of something Harold had kept saying—"you don't understand." I wondered if speech patterns were genetic. On a more important level, I wondered if she was going to hurt me. A tube of lipstick is not a good defense weapon. I lowered it slowly to the dressing table, aware of Sweetie's frantic barking in the kitchen. She'd been trying to warn me all along.
As Brianna came closer, I realized that Sweetie Pie hadn't fallen on something sharp. She'd been stabbed. The crazy woman slowly headed my way had stabbed my dog. Any lingering doubt that she might try to hurt me vanished.
"Don't make any sudden moves," Brianna said, her voice so soft it was hardly more than a whisper. "I'm not alone."
Right. She was not only mean, she was crazy. My gaze dropped to the knife. Yeah, and that was just a big, old, sharp letter opener.
"All I want is Lawrence's manuscript. I know you and Harold found it. Give me those things and we'll leave."
She was within ten feet of me, and I could clearly see the manic light in her eyes.
"Your mistake was killing Lawrence. Leaving might not be as easy as you think." I slowly stepped away from the dressing table. If there was a chance of dashing out of the room, I was taking it. It was eleven o'clock.
No one would even think to get worried about me for another hour. It was up to me to figure out an escape route and to use it.
"I didn't kill the old pack rat. But it doesn't matter. He's dead. That's that."
Give her credit, she'd learned to tidy up her past, at least in her own mind. I had to keep her talking. "It matters to me, and a lot of other people. You poisoned him."
"Just enough to make him sick. I wanted him weak. I had to make him dependent on me. Yes, I was giving him blood thinner in his bourbon, and it was working just fine. He thought he was dying, that he was slipping into senility and infirmity. I'd come over and have a drink or two with him and wait. When he slipped into a nap, I had free rein to go through his papers. I was going to make us both rich and famous. I didn't have a thing to do with the idiot cutting himself."
"You can't begin to understand what you've done." I was sincerely at a loss. Lawrence was dead, and Brianna's take on the matter was that it was an inconvenience to her. That she'd been a contributing factor to murder—that she'd framed Harold and Madame— didn't even register. But it did make me wonder if she was crazier even than I thought. Or less guilty. If Brianna hadn't cut Lawrence's hand, who had? I had to probe.
"Everyone he knew was terrified of what secrets he might reveal. Did you find any of them, Brianna?" I inched a little closer to the door.
She hefted the knife and widened her stance. "You're not going anywhere, so just relax. Lawrence really was an old pack rat, wasn't he?" She shook her head. "So many, many secrets. There was no way I was going to confine the book to his Paris years. What stupidity. Sam Rayburn was correct. It's the broad scope of an artist's life that shows his development. I wasn't going to cheat my readers."
Brianna had crossed the line into The Twilight Zone. Somehow, she'd begun to believe that she was a writer. She'd even begun to talk like one, and it gave me another avenue of buying time. "Where did you get the idea of using Lawrence? It was his life, not yours. Why would you think—" And then I knew. Joseph Grace. A chill ran up my nearly naked back.
"Of course I don't have the literary ability of Lawrence."
"That's probably the most profound understatement of your career." I decided to goad. I'd calculated the dimensions of the room and my only chance to make it to the door was to get her to move toward me. I already knew she had a bad temper; she shouldn't be hard to bait.
"I don't need writing talent. Joseph is helping me. In fact, he's waiting for me at the Jackson airport. He designed that little page you found in Harold's briefcase. Pretty effective, wasn't it?" She laughed. "Joseph's interested in the project as a literary work, but his participation isn't completely voluntary. He has to help, unless he wants me to tell about his little peccadilloes with his students. He's so close to retirement, and so attached to the state tit. Wouldn't it be a shame if he got canned now for sexual misconduct?"
There were things about Brianna I could learn to admire. Like her use of the present tense when she was speaking of a dead man. It was to my advantage, though, that she didn't know Joseph Grace was dead! And I had no intention of clueing her in. But I still had a few buttons I could push.
"Lawrence was murdered, Brianna. His hand was deliberately cut. And the poison you were giving him was the agent that made him bleed quickly. That makes you an accomplice to murder, at the least." I had her attention. Fully. "If Grace killed Lawrence, you don't have to take the fall for it. Just let me call Coleman. He'll come over and you can explain. We'll find Grace and arrest him. You can clear all of this up."
For a split second, I thought she might listen to me. Then she shook her head. "You are sincerely stupid. You made that up. You've always been a liar, Sarah Booth. I want that manuscript and the rest of his journals, and then I'm leaving. I can't afford to leave that stuff lying around."
I'd known rational thought wasn't going to work. Brianna was crazy like a fox, and like a cornered fox, she wasn't going to give up without biting off a few chicken heads.
Time for a new tactic. "Maybe we should have a drink." I checked my watch. "It's almost New Year's. I hate to bring this up, but I'm late for a party. In about five minutes, someone will come here looking for me. Stabbing the dog was a big mistake, Brianna. Coleman is keeping an eye on me and my house, and he's looking for you." God, I wish I'd called Coleman.
"Chill out, Sarah Booth. You aren't going anywhere and neither am I, until I get what I came for. I didn't stab your ugly hound. She tried to attack us. There was no help for it." She motioned to the chair by the dressing table for me to sit.
Once I was seated, I knew it would take even more precious seconds to get to the door, but I had no choice. Sweetie's barking had become more frantic, and I heard her body slam against the door.
"Daddy doesn't like dogs in the house, Sarah Booth. Dogs weren't meant to live inside. People don't live with animals. That's what Daddy says. If that hound doesn't shut up, he'll kill her. He has no patience for such behavior."
I was trapped in my bedroom with a Daddy's Girl holding the bloody knife she'd used to stab my dog and babbling about her daddy's likes and dislikes. It reminded me of a sorority party/slasher movie. It was exit time. Brianna was taller, but I was probably stronger. I gathered myself. Sweetie's frantic barking increased in tempo, and then I heard something else. Footsteps coming up the stairs.
Somehow, I knew it wasn't the cavalry.
It was now or never—I darted past Brianna, through the doorway, and onto the stairs, hoping like hell I could get up enough speed to bowl over whoever it was on the stairs.
"Hey! Don't do that!" Brianna made a grab for me as I darted past her. Her fingernails caught at my dress but not go
od enough to hold me. Velvet, thank God, is a sturdy fabric. High heels, though, are not designed for speed. I made it into the upstairs hall before I stumbled.
Just as I felt myself going down, I saw him. Layton Rathbone was slowly ascending the stairs.
My forward momentum was too great to halt. I plowed into him with all of my weight and heard the whoosh of air being forced from his lungs. Together we tumbled backward down the stairs, landing in a heap, with me on top.
He was an old man and I was glad to see him. If anyone could control Brianna, it was her daddy. I scrambled to my feet. "Mr. Rathbone," I whispered urgently, glancing up at the top of the stairs where I knew Brianna would appear at any moment. "Mr. Rathbone." I shook his shoulder and felt relief as his eyes opened.
"Sarah Booth," he said. "Why couldn't you mind your own affairs?"
"Sir?" I thought the fall had scrambled his brain. In the kitchen I could hear Sweetie Pie pounding against the door. She was going to damage herself after all that surgery.
Layton pushed himself up to a sitting position and reached inside his coat, feeling his ribs.
"Are they broken? Do you need an ambulance?"
"Hardly." His hand came out with a gun. The barrel swung to point directly at my heart. "You're going to learn that meddling sometimes carries a very high price."
I wanted to believe that he was protecting his daughter, but deep in my gut, I knew it wasn't true. A lot of things suddenly became very clear, and I didn't like a single picture.
"Daddy," Brianna called down to us from the top of the stairs. "What are you doing?"
"Stay out of this, Brianna."
"Daddy, we need to go." She came down two steps. "Harold has the manuscript. I can get it from him. Sarah Booth doesn't have anything." She twisted her hands in front of her. "Daddy, she's lying and saying someone deliberately cut Lawrence."
"Don't pay her any attention, baby. We'll go in a minute. But not until we get that book. If Lawrence wrote about Moon Lake, we have to find it." Layton spoke softly to his daughter, but his eyes were trained, along with the gun barrel, on me. "There's more at stake here than you realize, Brianna. Just let me handle it."
I was afraid if I drew a breath he might pull the trigger, so I did my best impersonation of a tree, rooted and still.
"Daddy?" Brianna's voice was lost and childlike. "We should leave now. She said Lawrence was murdered, that someone cut his hand deliberately. Everyone thinks it's me. We have to go."
"We can't just leave her, Brianna. She knows. She knows about Moon Lake."
"No I don't! There's nothing in the book about it, I'm telling you. Lawrence had no intention of writing about Moon Lake," I said. "I saw the manuscript. His book is about his years in Paris. It's called The Romantic—My Life as a Writer, Artist, and Spy. There's nothing in there—nothing about Lenore." If I had one ace, it might be that he wanted to protect Brianna from the truth of her heritage.
"Lawrence has been a thorn in my side for years." Layton held the gun on me as he got slowly to his feet. "He should have kept his mind on writing, but he was always sneaking around, eavesdropping, snooping, prying into things that didn't concern him. He hoped that if he caught me, Lenore would stop loving me. But he was wrong. She didn't believe him. Instead of killing her love for me, the things he told her only made her more determined to love me. So determined that she thought a baby would force me to marry her."
The anger in his voice stung me like a whip, and I dared a look at Brianna. She was looking at him as if he spoke a foreign language. "What are you saying? What baby?"
Uh-oh. I held my breath. He was going to tell her!
"It's time you knew this, Brianna. You're my girl, my only child. More mine than anyone else's." His smile was tender and loving. "All mine. My beautiful, perfect daughter."
"Layton, maybe this isn't the time." They were both unbalanced. There was no telling what Brianna might do.
He continued as if I'd never spoken, as if he didn't see the pain blooming in his daughter's eyes. "Pamela couldn't carry a child to term." His tone grew more conversational. "Lenore figured it out. She thought she'd finally come up with a way to trap me. She arranged to meet me, seduced me again, and a few months later presented me with the knowledge of my heir, the baby she carried inside her. She had the one thing I wanted more than anything else. My beautiful daughter." His voice was now almost a caress. "She gave me you, Brianna, but then she wouldn't let us go. So I had to kill her."
I listened to him, but it was Brianna I was watching. She sank down on the top step and put her face in her hands. She hadn't known.
"Daddy," Brianna said softly through her hands. She finally lowered her fingers revealing confusion and fear. "My mother is—"
"She was a selfish, conniving—"
"She was Lenore Erkwell," I interjected as gently as I could. Brianna hadn't grasped the fact that her father had killed her mother, making it appear to be a suicide. I chose not to belabor that point, since he had a gun.
Sweetie hit the kitchen door again, this time with a howl. I was afraid she'd torn her stitches out, but there wasn't a thing I could do, except keep talking.
"Brianna's right, Layton. You should make an escape while you can. Whatever went on at Moon Lake, Lawrence took those secrets to the grave with him. There is nothing in the manuscript about what happened at the lake."
"Yes, those secrets are buried with Lawrence. And Joseph. Except for what you know." Layton pulled back the hammer on the gun. "I'm sorry, Sarah Booth. I just can't trust you."
My entire life didn't pass before my eyes as they say it does when confronting death. I had the most irrational thought—that I didn't want Fel Harper touching my dead body and that I hoped Coleman would see to it that he didn't.
I closed my eyes and waited for the bullet.
"Daddy!" Brianna rose to her feet. "You can't just shoot her. Let's get out of here."
I thought of pointing out that he'd already killed Lenore, Lawrence, and Joseph Grace, but it wasn't in my best interest to play scorekeeper. "If you leave now, you have a chance of getting away. You can go out of the country. With your money, you can buy a country. But I'm not kidding, Coleman will be here any minute."
"Daddy?" Brianna descended a step or two. Confusion had been replaced by the first hint of anger. "Why did you want me to help Lawrence with his book? You encouraged me to do this, and all along you knew I'd find out about . . . Mother. This book could have ruined me. I'd be a laughingstock, a bastard."
"You're my daughter. You're a Rathbone. I loved you enough to steal you, enough to kill anyone who threatened you. Threatened us. Lawrence knew too much. As long as you were working with him, I could control what he wrote. But when he broke the contract . . . well, I didn't have a choice. It's one thing for us to know, but not the world. You're famous, Brianna. My beautiful daughter, the model. Everyone would forget that and remember only that I wasn't married to your mother. I didn't want Lawrence to write about you in that way. I couldn't allow him to write about Moon Lake."
Sweetie Pie slammed into the door again. Hard. She gave a cry of pain that tore at my heart. I started instinctively toward the kitchen.
"Hey! Get back over here."
Layton's shout stopped me cold, just in time to see Sweetie Pie, her white bandage soaked with blood, flying through the air in a direct trajectory toward Layton. She hit him with all seventy pounds of hound.
The sound of the shot echoed in the foyer, a reverberation that was punctuated by Brianna's scream and Sweetie Pie's howl.
The gun flew out of Layton's hand and skittered on the black and white foyer tile. Though Brianna leapt to her feet, she didn't have a chance. I scooped up the weapon and turned it on them both.
In the distance was the sound of a wailing siren. At my feet, Sweetie Pie lay in a bloody heap.
28
Coleman wrapped me in a comforter as I sat on the floor holding Sweetie Pie's head in my lap. Layton and Brianna, cuffed and Miranda-ize
d, sat on the sofa.
"She's torn her stitches open, Sarah Booth, but she wasn't shot," Coleman reassured me. "Dr. Matthews is on the way, sutures in hand."
"She saved my life. Again." I was pretty certain Sweetie had been the hound who knocked Pasco Walters over in my last case. I'd begun to recognize her MO—the Baskervillish leap out of the darkness. This time, though, she might pay with her life. Her white bandage was saturated with blood.
Coleman knelt down beside me. "She just popped a couple of stitches. I've never heard of a dog more determined to protect her mistress. She may be ugly, but she's loyal."
"Yeah." I rubbed her silky ears and got a warm tongue.
"Here's Dr. Matthews," Tinkie called from the doorway. She was all dressed for the ball, her white gown glittering in the lights of the foyer candelabra.
As soon as Dr. Matthews arrived, Coleman lifted me to my feet and pointedly handed me over to Tinkie. "Make some coffee," he suggested.
Tinkie led me into the kitchen. Instead of coffee, she pulled the bottle of champagne from the refrigerator and popped the cork. "It's still forty minutes until midnight, but I think we need a head start."
I accepted the champagne and got out a stainless steel pot. I'd forgotten to put my black-eyed peas on to soak. I didn't need any more bad luck—I'd eat them tomorrow if they were hard as rocks.
"How did you know to call Coleman?" I asked her.
"I called to check on Sweetie, and Dr. Matthews asked me if I knew of anyone who might want to hurt either you or Sweetie. He said he thought the dog had been stabbed, but he didn't want to upset you until he was certain. I just put two and two together. And then Oscar, who has been absolutely spilling his guts to me ever since we had our little, uh, midday rendezvous, made the comment that Layton was about to lose Rathbone House and how appropriate it was since it had been bought with blood money. I put it together about what you told me about Moon Lake and the past. I wasn't certain how Layton fit into it, but I knew his hands were dirty."
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