by Mary Bowers
Bernie followed my gaze and said, “It’s not just them. Everybody’s playing a part here. Actors, every one of them. Everybody wants to be somebody they’re not.”
I gave her a smile. She was tired, and it showed.
Michael said, “All of them are looking for a higher purpose for themselves. Nobody wants to think they’re just common rats, caught in a rat race, like everybody else. This is how they escape all that.”
She nodded. “I suppose you can’t blame them for looking for a little fun, as long as they don’t lose themselves along the way. This kind of thing can be dangerous. Remember that cult that decided they were going up to join the crew of a starship, which was waiting for them behind a comet? They all ended up dead.”
“I remember,” I said softly.
Sparky was still talking animatedly to the crowd, and Phineas was standing behind him in an elegant pose, surveying their audience and looking amused. The two of them did seem unreal. Sparky was all dyed, styled, polished and packaged for TV, and Phineas had gone beyond mere packaging; he was living a role and no longer needed a script.
Only Ricky seemed like a normal young man, though even he seemed too good to be real. Too perfectly cast. The earnest look he had assumed for Purity’s benefit was gone now, and I noticed that he was focused on a particular point in the crowd. Michael noticed it the same time I did.
He leaned forward. “Isn’t that . . . ?”
“Yep,” Bernie said. “That’s Cindy Shortner.”
“The alien abductee,” I said, shaking my head.
“She of the raging hormones,” Bernie agreed. “Looks like she was a fan of Sparky’s reality show. And pretty-boy Ricky brought in the share of the audience he was there to attract: teenaged girls.”
“It looks like the attraction is mutual,” Michael said with a grin.
About that time the lecture came to an end and the crowd began to break up and walk away. Before it could dissolve completely, though, somebody shouted, “When are you guys going to be back on TV again? That show was bitchin’!”
The question seemed to hit Sparky and his friends hard. Like all redheads, Sparky had a tendency to blush, and his pinky skin clashed with his fiery-red hair. He took a heartbeat to recover, then called out, “Soon! Keep checking our website for updates.”
The young man who’d asked the question gave them a thumbs up and walked away.
I bit my lip and gave Bernie a rueful look. “Is there anything to that? Is a comeback in the works?”
She lifted her shoulders. “Like the man said, keep checking their website. Look – the scene shifts to a new and more sinister character. Here comes the Prince of Darkness.”
I followed her gaze and saw Gavin Lovelace walking up from the chancel area. He had apparently just come from Orwell’s dressing room. I looked away quickly, not wanting to catch his eye, but I needn’t have bothered. He walked right by and went toward the back of the room. Sparky’s was the first booth in line on that side of the room, and Gavin started to walk by without looking at them, but Phineas approached him and held out his hand.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was a kind of pantomime between two men of similar type, meeting and paying respects to one another. Gavin shook Phineas’s hand, and they said a few words.
“Like father and son,” Bernie commented. “Or maybe master and wannabe.”
The thought startled me, and I took another look. “Well . . . only superficially. I think it’s accidental. It comes from both of them assuming personas from the same era: Gaslight London. Gavin’s choice is Dracula, and Phineas looks like he belongs in The Time Machine.”
“Which proves my earlier observation,” she said. “Everybody here is playing a part, only they’re all in different movies.”
“Yeah,” I said, watching the two tall, dark men parting ways again. Gavin went off purposefully, seeming to forget Phineas immediately, but Phineas stood in place for a while, gazing after the older man. I turned back to the larger crowd spread across the old church and had a moment of disconnection. Here was a church playing background to a paranormal convention, filled with people looking for a bigger role in life, and finding it in – what? A fantasy? A reality beyond the reach of most people? Mass delusions?
Nostradamus put his velvet cap back on and stood up, nodding regally to a lady who happened to be passing by. He was a tall man to begin with, and his robes made him seem larger than life. He seemed to unfold rather than stand up.
“Come on, Michael,” I said. “It’s time to go home.”
* * * * *
We had stayed at the conference much longer than we intended, and it had gotten dark outside. I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye to Ed, so we went looking for him.
We found him staring around pop-eyed. The moment I saw him, something came over me – that feeling that something cold and wet had just slid down my back.
“Still haven’t found her?” I said, coming up to him at the same time as Sparky and his two sidekicks. I looked back to see that Nostradamus had taken over their booth. Gavin and Pixie joined us at exactly the same time, coming from the other direction. We all stood in a circle staring at one another, and finally Phineas said, “Okay, it’s time to get serious. We need to find her. It was fun for a while not having her around, but let’s face it: she’s always keeping an eye on Orwell when he’s in public, and for her to be AWOL for hours while he’s wandering around a conference is totally out of character.”
“In fact,” Sparky said, “nobody’s seen her since just before the speeches, when the two of you had your, um, discussion.” He leered at me.
I ignored him and looked at Pixie. “You might have been the last person to see her. You said she was setting up The Questian Society’s booth, as I remember. Only she wasn’t, was she?” I stared hard at her, and she looked like she wanted to scurry away and hide under a bush.
“I’m sorry,” she whined.
“Never mind that now,” Gavin snapped. “When did you see her last?”
“When everybody else did. You know – when she went up and started being sarcastic with Taylor.”
“I mean before that,” he thundered.
She shrank. She stared up at him wide-eyed and said, “It was just after you gave me the cake box and told me to put it someplace safe. I carried it back to the kitchen because Vanessa said that’s where she was going to bring Orwell after the speech so he could relax and enjoy his cake in peace; nobody would be looking for him there. But when I got there, the door was locked.”
“The kitchen is off-limits,” Ed said.
Pixie shrugged. “That dressing room you assigned to us has an old desk, and we found a lot of keys in a cigar box in the bottom drawer. They’re all marked. Vanessa found the one for the kitchen and put it in her pocket.”
“Really!” Ed said indignantly.
“So when you got to the kitchen the door was locked,” Gavin prompted. “Then what?”
“I was standing there wondering what to do next when all of a sudden Vanessa came up with the key and unlocked the door. Then she grabbed the cake box. Really rude! I nearly dropped it. Then she turned and whacked into me with that big shoulder bag she’s always carrying around. When she went into the kitchen, I tried to go in with her but she told me to get lost and shut the door in my face. Then I heard a click and I knew she’d locked the door. Anyway, later when we were all going out I knew if I mentioned it to Orwell he might decide to go to the kitchen instead, and I wanted to go out with all of you, and besides, I thought it was about time somebody taught Vanessa a lesson. She’s so mean! Look at how she treated Taylor. I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
Ed and I looked at one another. Then he slowly turned to gaze toward the back of the room and quietly said, “I guess we’d better check the kitchen.”
* * * * *
It was locked, of course. But in a building full of part-time magicians, getting somebody to pick the lock was easy. In fact,
Phineas did it in about ten seconds. It was one of those locks that are built into the handle, not exactly worthy of Fort Knox, and the door was a plain wooden panel that would’ve popped open if a little girl had kicked it. Sparky went back to his booth and came back with enough small tools to build a small empire. He rummaged around and came up with a thin, flat blade of some sort and handed it to Phineas, who fiddled around inside the hole in the handle for a moment and we were in.
She was on the floor, on the other side of the cooking island. On the island itself was a cake box from The Bakery with the front panel unhitched and laid down flat. Vanessa had put the cake on a dinner plate, and streaks of frosting along the edge of the plate showed that she had spread an extra layer of it as neatly as she could around the sides and along the top before she had cut two slices out. I went up close and could clearly see two different shades in the layers of frosting along the edge of the slice. Together they must have been three-quarters of an inch thick.
There were two plates on the counter, each one holding a wedge of chocolate cake. Vanessa had been eating one of them. Sitting on the back counter by the sink was Vanessa’s designer purse, the one she’d pulled Michael’s yearbook out of at the diner, and next to it was a 2-cup plastic container with a bit of frosting left in it, along with a dirty cake spatula.
She’d been lying there for quite some time, from the look of her. When I touched her to try to find a pulse, she was cold. I pulled my hand away again, as if she’d been hot instead. I stood up slowly, using the cooking island for support.
Michael said, “Why would anyone want to poison Orwell Quest? I thought everybody loved him. Because that cake was intended for Orwell, not Vanessa.”
Nobody answered.
Ed had dialed 911 and was explaining the situation, and I looked at Michael feeling a kind of despair. I wished now he’d never come to ParaCon. He was the only one in the room who had known Vanessa all his life, and who had no interest in the paranormal, and therefore no other excuse to be there. The police would connect him to Vanessa immediately, of course. The woman had just broken into his house. And then there was that yearbook inscription . . . .
I looked at Michael again, confused, wishing he’d gone golfing with a bunch of alibi witnesses instead of coming to ParaCon.
* * * * *
Ed had recommended The Bakery to Gavin, who had picked the cake up after checking in at the conference and, incidentally, after meeting me. Ed immediately tried to distance himself, emphasizing he’d only recommended the twins’ bakery because he wanted to do them a good turn, and after all, their cakes were wonderful. Really. He hadn’t been with Gavin when he’d picked it up. He didn’t even know what kind of a cake it was. He had nothing to do with the blasted cake. If he’d known that Vanessa was taking it into the kitchen, he would have stopped her. The kitchen was not included in the lease agreement. What’s that? Oh, yes, Officer, some of us left the premises for a while – let me see – Miss Verone, Bernie Horning, that person Pixie and Orwell Quest. And me. Five. Right after Orwell’s speech. Vanessa was already missing, but we weren’t worried yet. Honestly, I know nothing about that cake. Didn’t even know it was here. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I told Detective Frane (we’d met before, and his creepy, colorless eyes still made me uneasy) that I hadn’t known about Orwell’s fixation on cakes until just that morning. I made the mistake of saying, “Cake, or whatever it is he actually means by cake,” and had to fumble around trying to explain what I’d meant by that. I ended up making myself both look and feel like a fool. How do you explain an Orwell Quest to a police detective? They don’t come from the same planet, and I’m just a simple girl from Earth.
Michael got the same endless stream of questions, but managed to keep his cool. He’s a lawyer. He’s used to interrogations, although he’s usually the one asking the questions.
By the time Michael and I got home it was after midnight, and I found out later that some of the ParaCon attendees got back to their hotels even later than that. Without discussing it, we headed for the living room and sat down. We knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep, and we hadn’t been able to talk to one another privately since before we’d found Vanessa’s body.
“Poor Ed,” I said. “ParaCon is a disaster.”
“It’s one to remember, that’s for sure,” Michael said.
“More like one to forget.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
Across the room in front of us was a row of French doors leading out to the covered porch, with its rustic rocking chairs and its wide view of the river. At this time of night, the windows were a wall of shiny black, reflecting our images back at us. I gazed across at Michael’s reflection and found unwelcome thoughts worming their way into my consciousness. I began to wonder again what it was that Vanessa had wanted the night she broke into Michael’s house. With the ascendance of Pixie, she may have begun to feel insecure in Orwell’s world. Women had come and gone from his entourage before, apparently, and she must have known that Gavin would be only too glad to give her the boot. Any hint from Orwell, and she was finished.
Then what? She had no other job, she was too old to start over in the news-media, and she probably knew that Michael’s wife had passed away a few years back. He was wealthy, locally respected and still good looking. The fact that he was now living with another woman probably wouldn’t have fazed her.
“What are you thinking?” Michael asked suddenly. Before I could think of something to say, because I sure wasn’t going to tell him what I was really thinking, he said, “From the look on your face, you’ve figured out the same thing I have: that it had to be a pretty deadly poison to kill Vanessa after taking only one bite. My best guess is cyanide.”
A vision of the cake suddenly came into sharp focus in my mind. “Something was wrong with that cake.”
He snorted. “You can say that again.”
“No – I mean – did you take a close look at it?”
“You mean somebody substituted a poisoned cake?”
“No. That was their cake all right. Hang with me now, because this is going to get kind of screwy: Orwell has some concept of life that involves cake, representing the travails of living or some such thing, and after the cake comes extra frosting. Like a reward, or something. Nobody seems quite sure just what it means, but part of the equation is extra frosting. Apparently, it got to be taken literally, and lathering on the extra layer was Vanessa’s job, or maybe she got somebody else to do it. The most likely person was Pixie.”
“But Pixie said she never went into the kitchen.”
“Exactly. Pixie said she never went in.”
He stared at me. “You think Pixie poisoned the frosting and smeared it on the cake?”
“I don’t know what to think. If so, the intended victim was Vanessa all along. Otherwise . . . maybe Orwell. Would buttercream frosting hide the taste of cyanide?”
“I have no idea. From what little I know, cyanide kills so fast the taste wouldn’t register. And nobody lives to describe it, obviously.”
I was suddenly struck with another vision: that of Vanessa, alone in the kitchen with the door locked, cautiously tasting the cake. Even if somebody else had put the extra frosting on, Vanessa would’ve gotten rid of them before cutting the cake. Otherwise, naturally, she would have had to offer them a slice, and cake had come to represent something in the Orwell Quest entourage. It was a privilege eagerly sought and not willingly shared. Which made me remember . . . .
“Michael, didn’t you say Vanessa made eye contact with you before she passed you by before the speeches?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. I wonder why she didn’t invite you into the kitchen with her. It would have been a good opportunity to get you alone.”
He shuddered. “And offer me a piece of cake?”
“Oh, God. Well, I can’t figure out why she didn’t take you with her into the kitchen, but thank heaven she didn’t.” I frowned. Somethi
ng there didn’t make sense. In fact, nothing made sense. “I’m going to bed,” I said mechanically.
I had gotten up stiffly and was walking out of the room when Michael caught up with me and turned me around to face him. Holding me by both arms, he stared into my eyes and said, “Taylor, you don’t think I had anything to do with this, do you?”
I could feel my face fall. I fell into him and wrapped him in my arms and with my lips pressed against his shoulder managed to say, “Of course I don’t! You didn’t even know about Orwell and his stupid cakes.”
I felt him stiffen. I moved back and looked at him again. I said, “What?”
“Actually . . . I did. Vanessa was telling me all about Orwell’s quirks before you came into the diner, and one of the things she made a good story about was the cake fetish. He made some kind of a construct out of it in that book of his, but actually, it goes back to his childhood, when his socialite mother only bothered with him on his birthdays. Then she’d throw huge parties with ponies and clowns, really big productions, way over the top. And there would always be a great big cake. The rest of the time she was off somewhere playing with her boyfriends. She treated him like a minor acquisition, and if he wasn’t actually in the room, she seemed to forget he existed. But on his birthday, it was all about him. At least that’s what he thought. Somehow he fixated on cake as a symbol of his mother’s love and the only happy times of his childhood. Vanessa told me all about it.”
“Don’t tell the police you know that!” I blurted before I could even think.
“Good God, Taylor, you don’t think that means anything, do you? Anyway, the diner was nearly empty, and DeAnn was standing at the table beside us laughing right along with us. I wouldn’t lie to the police anyway, but with a witness . . . .”
“No. No, of course you can’t lie. I guess I’m not myself right now. Let’s just go to bed and try to get some sleep.”
