My heart raced because I’d been caught. As sure as the day was long, I’d been caught. My hands instantly went clammy—so clammy, I wasn’t even really feeling the hot coffee.
I didn’t need any explanation. I knew why Susie was looking at me the way she did.
Good gracious, how does this always happen to me? I mean, this time I wasn’t even really doing anything but paying a visit to someone I thought I was beginning to forge a friendship with, who was having a tough time. I wasn’t snooping or poking anything—well, not actively anyhow. I was just trying to be a good person.
And now this.
I mean, c’mon, universe! Give an ex-nun a break!
Susie eyed me forever as my mind raced, and I considered what had to happen next.
I had to get the heck away from Susie Masters, that’s what had to happen. I began to back away, inching toward the elevator, but she nipped that effort in the bud.
She shrugged as she closed in on me. “Don’t bother. I told you, it has a code to lock and unlock, one I can easily change and no one else but the doorman downstairs has it. And now, it’s locked. I pay a hefty price to live here, but sometimes, like this time, it pays off. Besides, there’s really nowhere for you to go. I’m on the top floor. That kinda kills all escape routes.”
My eyes flew to the panel of buttons on the buffet, and it was then I saw her blue square of a passport next to her big pink Coach bag.
I didn’t have to ask her anything; she provided it as easily as she’d told me everything about her life that night in the bathroom.
Susie shrugged with an easy nonchalance. “Morocco. Maybe Switzerland. I’m not sure yet. I was thinking whatever strikes my fancy in the moment. Neither country has—”
“Extradition treaties with the US,” I muttered. I don’t know why that bit of trivia popped into my head, but it did. Again, Universe, what the heck?
Where are you when I need to figure out a crime? Dead. That’s where you are. I get nothing but silence from you until the last second when my life is in imminent danger.
“Bingo!” she shouted into the suddenly very quiet apartment. “No extradition. Money’s not a problem, I have plenty of that. It affords me the opportunity to do whatever I want to do…and if you hadn’t figured it out, I would have left tonight without a single word. No muss, no fuss.” She sauntered over to a drawer and pulled it open, lifting a false bottom out of it.
Then she dragged something shiny out and, of course, I knew what it was.
A gun.
Okay, that’s just it, Universe. I want to lodge a formal complaint. You suck big, ugly, oozing pustule boils.
Indeed, it was a gun. A small, shiny revolver pointed at my face. I’m not sure what kind of gun it is. I’m still learning gun models. I do know, it doesn’t really need a label. It’s the kind that can kill me. ’Nuff said.
How did this keep happening to me?
“Aren’t you going to say something, Trixie?” she asked, using her other hand to steady her wrist.
I licked my dry lips. “I’m not sure what you want me to say. The gun says it all. You’re going to kill me because I know too much.”
Her sigh was long and deep and rattled with her congestion. “And I hate it. I hate that you were the one who found me out. I like you, Trixie. I was sure we were on the road to a blossoming friendship. But you gotta know I can’t let you live, right? I mean, you know…”
I wasn’t entirely sure what I knew. I was experiencing a little confusion I hoped she’d clear up. Swallowing hard, I looked around at her shiny apartment, with its marabou fur pink and white pillows on a stark white couch and its shiny silver tabletops, as I tried to parse my thoughts.
“I don’t understand. If you’re going to kill me, and I guess I can’t blame you, I’ve obviously figured something out, can you explain to me what your relationship is to Kelly Leigh?”
Because holy identical twins, Wonder Woman. That’s what had stopped me cold when I was exiting the elevator. How much Susie looked exactly like Kelly. But she was much too old to be her twin.
Maybe she was her older sister? But Susie had said she grew up without a father and Margot hadn’t mentioned a sister, but she had mentioned Kelly’s parents…
That meant she had to be…
Oh-oh-oh.
I blanched as I put it together.
“She was your daughter…” I murmured, my voice shaking, my hands clammy and cold as I gripped my coffee cup and the strap of my purse. “You put Kelly up for adoption, didn’t you?”
In the year two thousand. I was sure of it. I didn’t need her to confirm what Artur had drawn. He’d drawn the hospital where Kelly was born and the year she’d been born.
Susie’s eyes narrowed, gleaming with malice. “I sure did. I was just a kid when I had her, and I was alone. So alone,” she said on a raspy cry. “I had a crappy mother and an even crappier father ,who’d all but abandoned me when I was still in high school. I was living with friends just so I could finish school, sleeping on people’s couches, sleeping on a park bench, wherever I could just to get by. There was no way I could keep her, Trixie. No way!”
“But then you found the Leighs?”
“Then I found the Leighs,” she said almost wistfully, her voice softer. “The Leighs paid for my food, my medical care. They paid for housing. They took care of everything, but I didn’t have a choice, Trixie. I had no choice! I had to give her up, but I swear to you, I loved her from the moment I saw her sweet little face. I swear I did!”
But I held up a hand and nodded. “I understand. I don’t blame you. No explanation needed. You did the right thing, Susie.”
“Did I?” she yelled, waving the gun in the air. “Did I do the right thing, Trixie, when she ended up dead because of that nasty, entitled, selfish monster, Mitzy? If she’d stayed with me, I could have taught her how to be tough. I would have taught her how to take care of people like Mitzy who pushed and pushed and took whatever they wanted! I thought I left her with people who’d protect her, keep her safe. I loved the Leighs. But look what happened! Look what they let happen to my baby!”
I blew out a breath and forced myself to think. “What happened to her, Susie? I mean…I know she committed suicide, but why? Do you know what Mitzy did to make her do something so awful?”
Her face screwed up until she was almost unrecognizable. “Oh, I hate her! The mere mention of her name makes me irrational!” she sobbed. “She pushed Kelly to do it. I know she did! I talked to her friends at school, and they told me the things Mitzy did.”
“Told you what, Susie?” I asked, my voice quivering. “What did they say Mitzy did?”
She sucked in a deep breath, her chest rising and falling as tears fell down her face. “Mitzy’s boyfriend liked Kelly. Liked her enough to make a pass at her, but one of Mitzy’s spies caught it on video and sent it to not just Mitzy, but everyone at the school. And that’s when Mitzy went after her. Day and night. Night and day. She taunted her. Kelly’s friends told me she couldn’t walk down the hall without someone calling her a slut. They posted horrible, horrible things on her Facebook page. All sorts of dirty messages and pictures—until she broke, Trixie. She broke in two!” she said on a cracked sob. “They crushed her. I read the suicide note. Her mother let me see it. My God, it was hideous, and Mitzy didn’t feel an ounce of remorse!”
My heart broke for a young woman so tortured, she’d ended her own life. I fought the hot well of tears and the tightening of my throat “Oh, Susie…Susie, I’m so sorry. How awful. I understand—”
“No, you dooon’t!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, hurling the blanket from around her shoulders as she hacked a cough. “You don’t know what it’s like to have to stand on the sidelines and watch someone else raise your baby only to have her end up dead because a rutting pig like Mitzy’s allowed to do whatever she wants! But that didn’t work out so well for Mitzy, did it?”
I had to try and make Susie understand she didn’t want
to kill me. Or at least make her rethink killing me. “So Mitzy wasn’t ever punished, was she, Susie? And that made you angry.”
She gripped the gun with both hands now, to keep her hands from shaking. “It made me in-sane!” she sneered with a hiss. “Boy, her parents are really something else. Did you look them up, Trixie? Did you see how they hid their daughter’s insidious lies and paid people off to keep their mouths shut? Did you? Kelly’s adoptive mother told me. She told me what they did!”
I tried not to squeeze my coffee cup, but I had to hold it tight to keep my own hand from shaking. I wanted to appear calm in order to keep her calm.
“I heard a little of it. Margot told me what she read in an article. It was wrong, Susie. They were wrong.”
“Kelly never stood a chance. Never! Mitzy held all the cards…but I showed her. I showed her, because in the end, she’s the one dead, and no one knows who did it but you—and you’ll take that to your grave.”
My mind raced with all the similarities between Mitzy and Susie, and Mitzy and Kelly. How ironic that Mitzy should steal Susie’s boyfriend…
But the thought of Luca reminded me of something. The baby. Susie wouldn’t want the baby hurt in all this, would she? Not if she loved Kelly as much as she had all these years.
“What about Luca, Susie? What about Luca and the baby?” I reminded her.
She laughed out loud, her peachy skin, scrubbed fresh, still perfect in the harsh end of day light. “There is no baby, Trixie! I made that up. I made it all up because the second you asked if I was pregnant was the second I realized it would remove some of the suspicion from me if I said yes. It was an easy distraction to make everyone feel sorry for poor cheated on Susie-Susie.”
Okay, well, that angle was three sheets to the wind. “And Luca?”
Susie used the gun to punctuate the air with a sarcastic smile. “Now that was the truth. What I said about him and how I felt about him was all true. He was young and gorgeous and easy to string along for a little fun. It’s ironic that Mitzy stole him from me, isn’t it? But he was a joke. A total joke, and when he cheated on me, I almost shook his hand and thanked him because I had a bigger plan. One I’d set in motion long before he’d made a move on her.”
“Your YouTube channel… Did you…?”
Now she smiled as though she had some sage wisdom to impart. “Did I become a successful makeup guru just to spite Mitzy? Is that what you’re asking? Nah. I’d already been around for a couple of years. Remember, I’m older? I’m actually one of the OG’s—”
I suddenly remembered her age and Kelly’s and that didn’t add up. She would have had Kelly at ten.
“You’re thirty, if I remember correctly, right? You didn’t have Kelly at ten…”
“Oh, that,” she said on a Cheshire grin. “I lied about that, too. I’m actually thirty-five. I figured I could get away with thirty, and I was right. But thirty-five? That might have been a stretch to get my subbies to buy product from me, no matter how good my makeup skills are. They want young, fresh, and trendy. Thirty-five is over the hill as far as they’re concerned.
“So it was just coincidence that you and Mitzy both chose the same profession and ran into each other this way?”
My gracious. There was that saying about six degrees of separation, and it certainly held weight in this situation. What a strange twist of fate that Susie should find Mitzy, of all the people to find, earning her living in the same unique way she did.
“Yeah,” she drawled with another sniffle. “Another irony, right? I took the money the Leighs gave me for the adoption and made something of myself. I invested in myself, always thinking someday I’d get to be with Kelly. Unlike that piece of trash, Mitzy, who stole deals left and right, I worked my butt off to get where I am today. To get all this.” She spread her arms wide. “And you know what? You know what else, Trixie?”
I shook my head, almost afraid to speak while I tried to take glances around the room to find anything that would help me get away from her. But there wasn’t much. Just a lot of pillows and big glass tables.
“What else?” I whispered as cold sweat trickled down my spine.
“I didn’t even hate her for knocking my position on the YT down a couple of notches when she came on the scene. I had no idea she was the same Mitzy Rawlins who’d killed my Kelly. Imagine my surprise when I found out she was using Cavanaugh, her mother’s maiden name, and she was the same Mitzy responsible for my daughter’s death. Convenient, right? That she entered my world?”
I hoped to redirect her thoughts to all the things she’d lose if she killed me. “Very convenient, but all this—all that you’ve worked for—is beautiful, Susie. You made something of yourself. You should be so proud.”
“You bet I did!” she shouted, her glassy eyes wide. Yet, then she appeared to sober, her face sad. “But I’m still all alone. I have no one to share it with. Someday, when Kelly was old enough and the Leighs said it was okay, I was going to reenter her life. I hoped…I hoped we could be friends. I hoped I could share this with her. But now we’ll never have the chance.” Tears began to flow down her face again, her skin going splotchy and red.
As she cried, I had the chance to recover some feeling in my fingers, and I realized, my coffee was still pretty hot… Even if my feet felt like two bricks of ice.
“So after you found out who she was, you plotted a way to kill her?”
Susie nodded and smiled. “Yep. I knew, like everyone else, she was highly allergic to peanuts and the rest, as they say, was history. I did some research on nut allergies, bought some peanut oil, rubbed it on my lips and made nice with her when I saw her for the first time since she’d slept with Luca. Oh, I made a big deal out of no hard feelings and all. Caught her just before she was going onstage after her break—because I’d read the allergic reaction can happen in an instant, and there was nothing I wanted more than for people to see her keel over right in front of them. She probably hated that.”
“I imagine, as horrible as she was, she liked for the world to view her a certain way. She probably did hate it.”
Susie took a small step closer to me, her fuzzy slippers softly scraping the marble floors. “Know what I said to her just before I kissed her on the cheek and she went out onstage?”
“Wha…what?” I stuttered.
“This one’s for Kelly.” And then Susie grinned so wide, so Joker-esque, I thought I might pass out from the evil she oozed. “She knew just before she died exactly what happened, and she knew why, and I’ll go to my death with no regrets because of that. Because she deserved to die for ruining my baby’s life.”
Out of nowhere, I remembered two things. The text from Mitzy to her volunteers and what Mickey had said about the argument Mitzy had with someone in her hotel room, and while I was running out of things to talk about, it helped me to extend our conversation.
Running my tongue over my dry lips, I asked, “The text to her volunteers? You cloned Mitzy’s phone didn’t you?”
Susie winked and nodded. “Easy-peasy.”
“What about the argument you had with Mitzy the night before in her hotel room? One of her volunteers heard someone arguing with her about Kelly.”
Susie’s eyes looked confused when they popped open wide. “That wasn’t me. The first time I saw Mitzy was the night of her event.”
“And the EpiPens? You locked the volunteers in the janitor’s closet and swapped her purse out for an empty duplicate?”
“Yep. And I dumped it in a dumpster a couple of blocks away. Then I bought myself an ice cream to celebrate,” she said snidely. “Aaaand I took the EpiPen from Margot’s purse, too. All I had to do was put on a maintenance uniform sneak in, make the swap and voila. It was easy-peasy,” she said, sounding so pleased with herself.
Welp, I think that covered everything. So, as my mind decided I’d hit all the bases, I realized I had to act—and act fast. We’d run out of things to talk about, and Susie was going to want to get rid of all the
evidence and get out of town.
But how do you come to a gun fight with a cup of coffee and a phone?
My heart began to clamor in my chest with such ferocity, I heard it in my ears. “Susie?”
“Yes, Trixie?”
“You don’t really think you’re going to kill me and get away with it, do you? People know I was coming to see you today.”
She shrugged, moving in closer, until she was only a couple of feet from me. She waved the gun at my face. “It won’t matter, Trixie. Don’t you see? By the time they find your body, I’ll be long gone. There are two flights that leave the country tonight, in about two hours. All I have to do is choose one. By the time they realize you’re missing, I’ll be long gone.”
In that moment, when all the people’s faces I loved flashed before my eyes, when the thought of never seeing them again really hit me, I knew I had to make a move.
“Susie? One last request?”
She made a face and sighed. “I really liked you, Trixie. You were so different from those juvenile, over-privileged jerks. The least I can do is grant you one last wish. What is it?”
My heart crashed against my ribs, my pulse slammed like high tide in my ears, but I had to go for it. “This!” I screamed, lobbing the cup of hot coffee at her with everything I had in me.
It hit her face and the floor with a splash, but it was just enough to create a bit of havoc so I could grab for the gun.
Susie screamed out her pain at the heat of the coffee on her skin, but it didn’t loosen her grip a whole lot on the gun. And when I say Susie’s pretty strong, I’m not joking.
Droplets of coffee flew everywhere as we struggled, a push and pull that left me sweating and breathing heavy, each of us clinging to the gun, moving closer and closer to the edge of the room.
“Susie!” I screamed. “Stop! Give me the gun! Let’s work this out!”
She yanked even harder and shook her head, spraying me with more coffee, her hair plastered to her head. “No! Mitzy deserved to die! It was meant to be. I’m not going to jail because of her—she will not win!”
What a Nunderful World Page 16
