by Julie Kramer
Vivian did not seem flattered by my interest, but gave a sigh of resignation. “All right, I’ll just be a minute.” She went back upstairs.
Malik and I looked at each other. “Money shot here we come,” he whispered, giving me a thumbs-up.
“Quick, Malik, get some tape of that old revolver picture while she’s gone. All we need is one shot we can freeze.”
He pulled the camera off the tripod and moved to the corner of the room while I stood guard at the steps. Twenty seconds later he had it, and was back in position at the interview site.
Another minute passed when he suddenly yanked the camera off the tripod, grabbed my arm, and told me to run.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “We’re not leaving until we get the good stuff.”
“We’re leaving while we still can, Riley. Hush.”
He said the words in an urgent whisper that frightened me more than if he’d shouted them. So I played along as he pushed me to the front door where we watched Roderick driving our van into the garage.
I wasted a few seconds berating Malik for always leaving the keys in the ignition, before realizing I’d left my purse—and cell phone—back by the interview chairs.
“Hush. This way.” Malik turned and we ducked down a hall in the opposite direction and found a small, cramped cubby in the kitchen. We crawled inside and shut the door. A dumbwaiter. Just like in the movies. Crouched, with the camera lodged between us, we rode up a floor because we didn’t know what else to do.
Malik took his audio earpiece out of his ear and held it up to mine. We could both hear Vivian on the wireless microphone screaming for Roderick to “grab some weapons. They’ve figured it out and we can’t let them escape.”
I looked at Malik and he summarized her earlier remarks. “She thinks we must know she lost her brooch after she killed Mark.”
Vivian killed Mark? Vivian’s brooch was the missing one?
I started to tell Malik how sorry I was for getting us into this mess. After all, he had a wife and kids and a perfectly fine life outside of work. Then we heard Vivian discover her microphone was live and realize we were listening. And probably rolling.
“Find them” was the last command we heard before the mic went dead.
“Let’s split up,” I said.
Malik turned off his camera, ejected the tape, and gave it to me. I put it in my pocket, then told him to stay in the dumbwaiter while I tried calling for help. I found a telephone down the hall, a land line, but it was useless. One of the Posts must have taken an extension off the hook. That meant I needed to retrieve my cell phone from my purse.
On the way, I ran into Vivian. She carried an old double-barreled shotgun from the display case downstairs. Not far behind her, Roderick brandished a large sword, likely a Civil War family heirloom. Unsheathed, the blade reflected the colors of the room like a glimmering mirror of death.
“Find her friend,” his mother instructed him. “I’ll guard her.”
I would rather be guarded by Roderick, but that didn’t seem up for negotiation. He had a don’t-blame-me-I’m-just-following-orders look on his mama’s-boy face, and didn’t even have the nerve to look me in the eye. Probably harder to do if you’re not face blind. He seemed relieved to leave his mother with me and hunt for Malik himself.
I was still absorbing Vivian as murderer and struggling to understand her reasoning. Even if Madeline and Mark’s marriage went south … with a prenup, how bad could things have gotten? She’d even made that point. Clearly, I wasn’t seeing the big picture in this homicide.
Vivian’s white-knuckle grip on her shotgun reminded me to keep my priorities in the present, not the past. Or I’d have no future. If Vivian was capable of killing Jean Lefevre to cover up one murder, she was certainly capable of killing Malik and me. I suspected I was still alive because pulling the trigger now would leave too much evidence too close to home, as well as ruining the priceless Persian rug under my feet.
Vivian’s eyes looked impersonal. Blind to my face. Blind to my fate. At that moment, I had no trouble believing she’d turned sociopathic, unable to bond emotionally because everyone looked the same. But while we waited, I tried to connect with her anyway. Because I really wanted to understand the choices she made. And if I was going to die, it seemed only fair to know why.
“Couldn’t you just boycott the wedding?” I asked. “Or refuse to pay for it? Why did you have to kill him?”
“He wasn’t a good match for Madeline,” she replied. “I need to protect my daughter from foolishness.”
“But Madeline loved him. Shouldn’t her wishes count for something?”
Vivian justified homicide with a shrug and I began to suspect there was more to her motive than protecting her daughter. Probably some twisted logic to protect the family image.
“Oh, I understood her attraction.” Vivian wore a mysterious Mona Lisa smile on her face. “How she was able to see him. Pick him out of a crowded room. Recognize him on the street.”
Vivian’s empathy seemed right on, probably because besides sharing a mother-daughter relationship, she and Madeline shared a bond of face blindness. But if Vivian truly appreciated how much Mark meant to Madeline, how could she have killed him?
“Vivian.” Softly, I called her by her name to try to create the impression she and I were friends. “Help me understand what happened.”
“Mark was too old for her.” That came out of nowhere. And a difference of ten years seemed a made-up excuse to me until she finished her explanation. “He was a better match for me.”
“You?” I regretted the word as soon as it left my mouth, especially the tone I used. A tone like that could get me shot.
“Now you’re the one who doesn’t understand, Ms. Spartz.” She called me by my last name, most likely to clarify that we weren’t friends. “You see, I was also able to see him.”
Now Vivian had a sensual manner about her. “The experience was, in my daughter’s words, intoxicating.”
he desired her daughter’s lover. And her eyes were wide open the entire time she seduced him. As she described their hasty affair, she looked homicidal. I wanted to say You can’t kill me, Vivian, we’ve had dinner together. But she’d killed Mark, and they’d had sex.
She described how she’d never been attracted to anyone like she was to him. Certainly not her dead husband. That’s why she’d never remarried. She had money. She had standing. She had children. What use did she have for a man when they all looked interchangeable?
Her philosophy held until Madeline brought Mark home to meet the family.
“He shook my hand and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Post.’” Vivian paused briefly, savoring the memory. “I didn’t realize how extraordinary he was until I left the room, came back a few minutes later, and there he was. I recognized him. I felt weak. And for the first time, I envied my daughter. She had something I’d never even known existed.”
Vivian didn’t seem to notice she was the only one talking. And as she rambled on, rationalizing her behavior, I thought of celebrities, politicians, and CEOs who risked everything for wanton desire.
“The Heart Wants What It Wants”—Woody Allen said it best to Time magazine, explaining his disgraced relationship with Soon-Yi, his lover’s daughter.
Vivian must have known no good would come from her affair with Mark. She’d alienate her family. She’d endure ridicule from her friends. But none of that mattered. Because the heart wants what it wants.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off his face,” she continued. “Not then. And not even later.”
Her voice dropped to a whisper, like she was confiding a dreadful secret.
“Sometimes, with a new lover, you sneak a peek below to look at him. With Mark, I didn’t bother. I only—”
I interrupted her, because Vivian talking dirty was enough to make me risk a bullet just to change the subject.
“Did you give him the cash?” I asked.
She nodded. “I pa
id him to call off the wedding. But he reneged.”
Even though she stood before me, holding an antique shotgun pointed at my heart, I had a hard time imagining a mother with so little love for her daughter. But Vivian continued to spin her tale like a politician defending a bridge to nowhere.
“He insisted he loved Madeline and wanted to marry her. And even threatened to tell her about us unless I tore up the prenup.”
“So he was blackmailing you?” I could play along; I was skilled at telling people what they wanted to hear. “You were the real victim.”
“Exactly.” She seemed pleased to have gotten that point across.
“But wouldn’t Madeline leave him then?” I needed to keep the conversation going. And honestly, I was no longer sure whether Vivian seduced Mark or whether he seduced her. Was Vivian an opportunity to be grabbed? Or was it the cash?
“Perhaps, but she’d also leave me. She was an adult with her own trust fund. Then I’d lose him and her.”
And face. She didn’t say the word aloud, but I’d have bet my life she was thinking it. The concept of social prestige can be a burden. Neither of us said anything, and for a second I thought Vivian had forgotten all about me as she seemed to be reliving those desperate days.
But then she astounded me … describing how she kissed Mark in the parking lot after the rehearsal dinner and whispered for him to meet her at Tamarack to sort things out.
“You kissed Mark in the parking lot?” Another plot twist, this story was turning into a Shakespearean classic of mistaken identity. “You know Madeline saw that kiss.”
“But she didn’t realize I was the other woman. That’s why Mark came to Tamarack. He wanted to get our story straight.”
“And did you?”
“That became irrelevant. He told me he’d made a mistake. Both with me and with the money. Claimed he wanted neither. Then he joked about our relationship and said he just wanted to call me Mom.”
Vivian’s voice choked. “He made it clear that it was over between us. Those were his exact words. ‘It’s over between us.’ I couldn’t have agreed more. So I shot him.”
Because I was looking at Vivian down the barrel of another gun, I kept my mouth shut. But something must have made her need to further justify pulling the trigger on Madeline’s fiancé. Her next words felt rehearsed, like she’d told herself the same thing over and over to solidify her talking points.
“I did it to protect my daughter. He couldn’t be trusted.”
She explained how Mark dropped to his knees, clenching his hands against his chest, blood spurting through his fingers in the moonlight. The point I think she was trying to make with all that vivid detail was that she was an excellent shot and I was doomed.
Then she described burying him in the woods, saving his face for the last shovel of dirt.
“I still can’t forget it.” She shook her head. “His face was amazing.”
I was about to ask her if she knew, or even cared, that Mark was still alive for that last ceremonial scoop of earth when we heard a loud noise outside, and she motioned me to move over by the fireplace. I pretended not to notice my purse lying on the couch because I didn’t want Vivian to notice my cell phone clipped to the strap.
“You’re the only one I’ve ever told this to,” she said. Great, I thought, a murderous gal pal. But the longer I kept her talking, the longer I stayed alive. Just call me Scheherazade—storyteller by exigency.
“But what about Roderick?” I asked. Clearly he was an accomplice tonight. How about back then?
“Yes, my sweet boy. I told Roderick that Mark tried to rape me. He agreed it was best to keep such unpleasantness from his sister.”
So Roderick helped his mother dispose of Mark’s Jeep. First by hiding it in a storage locker. Then, when the ice started freezing, they rigged the accelerator to drive onto a rural lake and watched the vehicle crash through and sink.
“So who killed Jean Lefevre? You or him?”
“Actually you did,” Vivian answered.
My stomach cramped slightly because I knew where she was going with this.
“You gave me the idea,” she said. “I couldn’t risk that Mark hadn’t left some clue in those boxes betraying our relationship.”
Maybe I had some culpability, but now was not the time to beat myself up. I needed to concentrate on the danger before me.
“He initially broke up with me in a note,” Vivian continued. “Imagine that. It read, ‘It’s over. This is the end.’ I thought it only fitting I leave that note by his mother’s body.”
That explained the blue “suicide” note in Mark’s handwriting. As I’d suspected, the second homicide was a cover-up murder. Just as mine and Malik’s would probably be. This was the part of her confession where Vivian seemed most proud and crazed. By making Mark a suspect, she explained, she ensured no one would consider him a victim.
“They could put his picture out on TV all they wanted,” she said. “They’d never catch him.”
“How are you going to stage it for me and Malik?” I whispered. “Make it look like an accident or a murder-suicide? Or are we both just going to disappear?”
Unexpectedly, Roderick entered at the far side of the room. Unarmed. I hoped that didn’t mean he’d used the sword on Malik. I was reminded of the similarity of their physical features. They were even wearing comparable dark jackets. But from the look on Roderick’s face, it was clear that this heir to the family fortune would never be an ally to me. And that represented an important difference.
An idea flashed in my mind and before Roderick could speak, I did.
“Malik, look out!” I shouted, purposely calling Roderick by the wrong name. “She has a gun!”
Confused, as well as face blind, Vivian pointed the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The blast hit Roderick full in the face and he collapsed. He could only moan and bleed and thrash around on the floor.
Vivian resisted firing the second chamber into the body of her wounded son. Not because she realized she’d shot the wrong man but more likely because she was saving that final round for me.
Amazingly, Roderick was still alive, but barely. If the shot had been fired any closer, he’d be dead. “He won’t die if we call for help.” I tried to explain who she’d actually wounded. But she wouldn’t listen and screamed for me to stop talking.
She picked Madeline’s wedding gown off a chair and shook it so angrily I thought the sparkles around the bodice might fall off. “This is what started all the trouble.” She threw the dress in the fireplace and tried igniting it with a fancy long-handled butane lighter.
Besides trying an awkward maneuver while balancing a shotgun, Vivian was having other problems. I’d done enough consumer investigations to know that most fabrics these days are flame retardant, so I wasn’t surprised when the dress stubbornly refused to burn.
Vivian grabbed a bottle of booze from a built-in liquor cabinet and doused the gown with alcohol. A flick of the lighter. Flames. She waved the gun and burning dress in my face like the scene in The Wizard of Oz when the Wicked Witch asked, “How about a little fire, Scarecrow?”
She laughed when I backed up a couple of steps to escape the satin heat. I grabbed the glass of water she’d left on the table during the interview and threw it on the dress and on Vivian, hoping to douse the blaze. But the glass must have contained vodka, because the gown exploded, along with the shotgun and the mother of the bride.
While Vivian didn’t cry out “I’m melting,” her dying screams were horrible to hear.
Like Dorothy regarding the Witch, I didn’t mean to kill her. But I had no time for pangs of guilt. Though the wedding dress had been slow to burn, the old house was not. The velvet drapes, lace tablecloths, polar bear skin, and dry timber ignited like priceless treasures in many a gothic mansion.
Flames blocked my escape route and smoke filled the stately room. I hoisted a fancy antique chair and threw it out a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the lake. The good
news, the glass shattered; the bad news, the sudden influx of oxygen fueled the fire.
I dropped to the floor because it’s easier to breathe down low. I know because I once did a fire-safety story called “Getting Out Alive.” But this was no staged drill. My left hand felt sticky and I realized the window glass had cut my palm; my face felt sticky and I realized I’d also been hit by scattered shotgun pellets. I ignored the blood. As I stretched my arm around on the seat of the couch, I found my purse and unclipped my cell phone.
I speed-dialed Garnett and reached … his voice mail.
“Help!” I cried. “The Peninsula House is burning! And I think I love you.” Then I started coughing, so I crawled back to the window, stood, and jumped.
The water was cold and dark and deep.
My muscles contracted as I fought to break the surface. When I finally crashed through, I gasped for air as debris from the fire hit the water around me. A figure appeared at the window, crouching, seemingly burning alive, before falling forward like a human torch. Roderick or Malik? I couldn’t be sure. They were the only ones inside still alive.
Please God, let Roderick have had enough life left to meet his death by fire and water instead of a mere gunshot wound. Please, I prayed, don’t let the flaming silhouette be my cameraman coming back to look for me.
I dove under and swam toward the center of the lake as far as one breath would take me. Then another. And another. Treading water, I watched the Peninsula House burn. And listened. I heard no other splashing, no sound of anyone else in the water.
My clothes started dragging me down. So I kicked off my shoes. Then unbuckled my belt and wrestled out of my jeans, leaving bikini briefs.
My sweater, a pricey cashmere, not an ugly wool, was harder to let go. Luckily, I wore a bra, so even if I didn’t survive, at least my nude body wouldn’t wash up on White Bear Beach or be discovered by one of my TV competitors during the bass fishing contest tomorrow.
I was also thankful sharks were not native to White Bear Lake because my hand was still bleeding. I floated on my back and tried to calculate the temperature of the water and how long before hypothermia might claim me. Flames shot through the roof of the crumbling mansion. The fire lit up the entire shoreline—like Manderley along the horizon in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.