Curse of the Kissing Cousins

by Kelner, Toni, L. P.

  “Did Wallace Junior obey his father or did he continue dating Mercy?”

  “The rumor was that he snuck around and went to Los Angeles to see her, but nobody ever caught him at it. All I know is that something happened nine or ten months later—I never could find out what—and Mr. Lambert sent the boy to Europe. No farewell dinners, no explanation, no forwarding address. Wallace Junior was just gone, and word came down not to ask questions.”

  Tilda hesitated, but then risked it. “Surely a strong-willed journalist like yourself wouldn’t stand for that.”

  This time it was definitely a giggle, a surprisingly sweet sound. “We do think alike, my dear. I did do my best to ferret out the story, as a matter of fact, but I didn’t have much success. There were so many rumors flitting about—that Wallace Junior had killed somebody in a duel, or that he wanted to become an actor. Somebody swore he’d been seen dressed as a woman in some disreputable bar! Those are just the theories I remember—there were many more.”

  “Did you have a favorite?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t expect it from a hard-bitten reporter like myself, but I’m quite the romantic at heart. I wondered if he’d proposed to Miss Ashford, and perhaps planned to elope with her.” She sighed. “He was quite a charming young man.”

  “What happened to him? Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know. He only came back to Palm Springs once, when his father died four or five years later. Wallace Junior attended the funeral, collected his inheritance, put the family home up for sale, and went away. I never heard anything else about him. Does this help you any?”

  “You know, it just might.” Maybe Tilda was a romantic at heart too, because she couldn’t help wondering if he’d gone looking for Mercy to rekindle their romance. Even better, since she’d disappeared from sight around the same time as he’d been sent to Europe, could she have followed him? Could they be there now, living happily ever after? “I may take a shot at tracking down Wallace Junior to see what he can tell me. Do you have any background on the family you could send me? By fax if you don’t have Internet access.”

  “Of course I have Internet access—I just upgraded from DSL to a cable modem, as a matter of fact, and the increase in speed is positively invigorating.”

  “That would be perfect,” Tilda said, and gave the woman her e-mail address. “Thank you so much, Miss Flax. You’ve been an enormous help.”

  “My pleasure, dear. I’d love to know what you find out about Wallace Junior. I think all reporters just hate it when they don’t hear the end of a story, don’t you?”

  “Miss Flax, I agree completely.”

  Rush hour was still going strong, but Tilda just didn’t care. Though she was eager to get the e-mail from Miss Flax, for the moment she was content to imagine happy endings for Mercy and Wallace Junior and their bevy of children while she drove. Of course she didn’t necessarily approve of a woman giving up her career for a man, but she was sure Mercy had found some outlet for her talent. Maybe she’d assumed a new name to perform quirky roles in foreign films or avant-garde theater. The couple could have forged such a happy life for themselves that they felt no need to return to the old one, even after Lambert Senior was safely in his grave.

  She finally made it back to Malden, gave Heather a cheery greeting on the way to her room, and booted up her computer to see what Miss Flax had sent her. It was an embarrassment of riches. She had upwards of thirty items waiting in her mailbox. Tilda made a note to herself to send a thank-you note to Miss Flax, the old-fashioned handwritten kind. Then she opened the first file.

  She quickly learned that the Lamberts had been extremely socially active, despite Wallace Senior’s unpleasantness. At first there was no mention of Wallace Junior, just the mister and missus, who attended any number of cotillions, debutante balls, charity fund-raisers, mixers, and other varieties of soiree. The only slow spot in the couple’s social career was when Wallace Junior was born. According to the birth announcement, he was a year older than Mercy. There was a few months’ gap, presumably until little Wallace—Tilda felt sure that they’d never called him Wally—started sleeping through the night, but then the merry antics started up again. Then came the last mention of Mrs. Lambert: her obituary. She’d fallen down a flight of stairs at her house and had broken her neck. Tilda suspected she’d slipped because she was worn out from all those parties, but after all her thoughts about murder, she briefly speculated about a more sinister explanation.

  After a year’s worth of mourning, Mr. Lambert started showing up at parties again, and the first mention of Wallace Junior joining the fun came a few years after that. He followed the family tradition of never staying home a night that he didn’t have to, and escorted any number of debutantes, heiresses, and suitable young ladies. The last articles Miss Flax had sent were Lambert Senior’s obituary and coverage of his funeral.

  Now that she had the background, Tilda hit the Web to find more mentions of Wallace Junior. There were a few, but all from his sojourn in Europe, which was mostly spent in Paris. If he’d been mourning his forced separation from Mercy, it didn’t show—he attended just as many parties as he had in Palm Springs, and went back to escorting suitable young ladies. There were, however, no permanent attachments. When his father died, the Paris papers took note of Wallace Junior’s return home for the funeral, but that was the last mention of him. Just as Miss Flax had said, once he got his hands on his father’s estate, he disappeared.

  Tilda continued working the Web for all she was worth, but found nothing later than Wallace Junior’s appearance at his father’s funeral. She even hunted for “Mercy Lambert,” but found nothing that could be her Mercy. She rubbed her eyes from frustration and not a little eyestrain. Mercy dated this guy, then disappeared. He went away, then came back and disappeared. Could it be a coincidence that both of them had disappeared? Could they be living together somewhere? Could Mercy have completely abandoned acting, and could Wallace Junior have abandoned all the parties he was apparently addicted to? It didn’t make sense.

  Tilda had told Nick how she would take the same set of facts and slant it to match the audience. When Jim Bonnier died in an overdose, it could become a cautionary tale about drugs, a warning about the costs of fame, or a character assassination of Bonnier for being weak. With Holly Kendricks’s shooting, she could slant it as an indictment of crime in suburban areas or a warning to working women, or even imply she’d brought it on herself by not staying at home with her children. But she had to have facts to work with. This time she didn’t have enough facts—all she could come up with were fantasies.

  What if Lambert Senior had had Mercy killed? Then, when Wallace Junior came back, he found evidence of the murder in his father’s safe deposit box and killed himself so he could rejoin his love in the afterlife? And what color straightjacket would they give Tilda to wear if she tried to print that?

  Okay, what if Mercy followed Wallace Junior to Europe, and all those European heiresses he squired around were actually Mercy in disguise? She was an actress, after all. How hard could it be to come up with alternate identities and wardrobe, and then infiltrate society without anybody noticing? About as hard as it would be to swallow that shit.

  Then there was the paranoid version. A crazed fan saw Mercy with Wallace Junior just before Mr. Lambert separated them. As Mercy cried her eyes out, the doorbell rang, and she rushed to answer it, hoping without hope that her love had returned. Instead the crazed fan came in to profess his undying love and, when she refused him, killed her in a jealous rage. Still raging jealously, he hid the body someplace where it would never be found. Flash forward to Wallace Junior’s return to the U.S., and the killer decides to kill him for being the man Mercy had loved instead of him. He’d have done it sooner, but couldn’t afford the plane ticket to Paris. Flash forward many years, and for no rational reason, he starts striking out at the other people in Mercy’s life, starting with her former costars.

  Tilda decided that even Vin
cent couldn’t have come up with that tangle of bad movie plots.

  That was when she realized it was after midnight and she had yet to polish off the article and sidebar that were due on Monday. After all that effort, she still hadn’t found Mercy, and it was time to put the quest aside. Maybe later on she’d get Vincent to do some Web hunting—he had sources she didn’t. Maybe she’d come up with some more ideas. Of course, she had a lot of articles to work on, so it might be a while. She sighed, knowing that, realistically, it would probably be ages before she tried again.

  She was about to shut down when her computer sounded the alert that she had more e-mail. Miss Flax, bless her heart, had tracked down some photos of the Lamberts and thought Tilda might like to see them.

  Tilda decided that a gift to accompany the thank-you note would not be amiss. Then she pretended that she hadn’t already decided that this was a waste of time and looked at the first photo. Mr. Lambert might have been a tyrant, but he was an attractive one, and Mrs. Lambert was even more so.

  There were later shots, with Mr. Lambert getting more distinguished over the years and Mrs. Lambert starting to look worn, probably from all the parties. Then she got plump, and a few months later, there was the baby picture from Wallace Junior’s birth announcement. Tilda thought most newborns looked like Winston Churchill, and the appearance of the little Lambert did nothing to convince her otherwise.

  More parties for the parents, then a shot of Mrs. Lambert’s funeral, with the mourning father and son. Next came Wallace Junior’s entree into society, standing next to his father in what was probably his very first tuxedo—a proud moment for any parent.

  He was a good-looking kid, Tilda decided. He reminded her of somebody, somebody who had that clean-cut look. Tom Cruise? Brad Pitt? She opened the next file and looked at a shot of Wallace Junior alone. He looked even more familiar. She barely glanced at the next few, of the young heir with various candidates of the apparently endless supply of suitable young ladies, going past the fuzzy shot that had included Mercy and finally getting to the last picture—a clear shot of the mourners at Wallace Senior’s funeral.

  Tilda stared at the screen for what seemed like an hour. She finally had her fact, but she didn’t know how the hell she was going to slant it.

  Chapter 26

  Jumping the Shark: It’s a moment. A defining moment when

  you know that your favorite television program has reached its

  peak. That instant that you know from now on . . . it’s all downhill.

  Some call it the climax. We call it jumping the shark.

  —JON HEIN, CREATOR OF JUMPTHESHARK.COM

  TILDA knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep, so she went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee and gathered cheese and crackers to keep herself going. Then she used every bit of will-power she had to ignore the implications of that picture long enough to finish her Kissing Cousins article, including the sidebar about Rhonda’s collection. Once she had the article out of the way, she focused her attentions elsewhere.

  By that time it was nearly three, and maybe parts of Boston were still hopping, but it was deathly silent in Malden. Tilda purposely moved away from her keyboard so she could sit and think through what she knew and what she thought she knew and how she was going to be able to use it. By five o’clock she thought she had a way to pull it all together, but before she could get started, she needed sleep. She fell into bed.

  She jerked awake as soon as the alarm went off at eight and, moving much more quietly than Heather ever did, she showered and put on fresh clothes. Then she headed for the subway, stopping briefly at Dunkin’ Donuts for a fresh coffee transfusion and a bag of bribes.

  Though she had a plan, or at least the bare outline of one, for it to work she was going to need help and lots of it. So her first step was to enlist Cooper. Since the situation wasn’t something she wanted to discuss on the phone, at nine-thirty she rang his bell, fresh doughnuts in hand.

  After administering CPR to help him recover from his heart attack at seeing her so early on a Saturday morning, she started explaining the whole mess to him. He wasn’t easy to convince and had to have some points made more than once, but Tilda didn’t mind. Every time she went through her reasoning, she became more and more convinced that she was right. Finally he was willing to say, “Okay, I think what you’ve got is solid. But you don’t have it all.”

  “I know that, but I’ve got as much as I’m going to get without doing something drastic.”

  “Entertainment reporters don’t do things—you report things.”

  “Yeah? Then why did Entertain Me! have a cocktail party? Are you saying they weren’t hoping some of the guests would have too much to drink and do something reportable? Why do we have the phrase ‘media event’ if we don’t make our own news?”

  “You’re saying this is a media event?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He thought about it, then said, “I see your point. If you really can’t get any further without doing this—”

  “I can’t. I’ve tried to come up with another way, believe me.”

  “Then I’m in.”

  “I won’t even bother to tote up how many I’m going to owe you—can we just assume that I’ll owe you forever?”

  “That should be about right.”

  They spent the rest of the weekend making detailed plans, calling around to see if what Tilda had in mind could be arranged in time, getting price estimates, and talking to the other people she needed. Tilda never went home—there was too much to do to waste time going back and forth—she just sacked out on the couch and borrowed T-shirts from Cooper as needed. Afterward she wasn’t sure when or if she’d slept but was sure that she’d gone through a towering amount of takeout food and gallons of coffee.

  On Monday morning they faced their last and most important hurdle. Tilda walked Cooper most of the way to the Entertain Me! office but ducked into the closest Dunkin’ Donuts to sit and wait to hear from him. Never had she been so grateful for the chain’s relentless market penetration—by that point there was considerably more coffee than blood in her veins.

  Cooper was hoping to get to Jillian without Nicole being there to interfere—Jillian was due back from the editors’ meeting, and since she usually came in early, his chances were good. Tilda almost wished she’d stayed where she could watch the front door, but she didn’t want to risk being spotted.

  By a few minutes after nine, when Tilda had read both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, had completed both papers’ Sudoku puzzles, and was trying to remember how to fold the sports section into an origami swan, her cell phone rang.

  “Tilda? It’s Cooper.”

  “Well?” she asked breathlessly.

  “It’s in the bag.”

  “You rock! How did you manage it?”

  “Simple. When it looked like Jillian might turn us down, I told her that I’d talked to Bryce first, and that he hated the idea. Naturally she decided that she loves it.”

  “What about Nicole?”

  “She’s late! She called in with car trouble—she’s still not here.”

  “There is a God.”

  “Jillian wants to talk to you, and I said you’d be here as soon as you finished your article for this week’s issue.”

  “My article!”

  “Tell me you didn’t forget to write it.”

  “No, it’s written—I just forgot to send it.”

  “Then bring your laptop and yourself over here.”

  “I’ll be there in a few!”

  When she walked into the Entertain Me! office, she swept past Nicole, who had apparently just arrived, to go to Jillian’s desk.

  “You look like shit,” Jillian said.

  “I know,” Tilda said cheerfully. “But I got the story done.” Jillian nodded, acknowledging the fact, but not wasting any words on congratulation or thanks. “Cooper told me about this promo idea you two cooked up. I think it’s a winner.”

 
; “Great.”

  “What promo idea?” Nicole said, hopping up to hover over them. “Tilda didn’t tell me about any promo idea.”

  “We didn’t come up with it until this weekend,” Tilda said truthfully, “so of course it only made sense to wait until Jillian got back to put it through channels.” She smiled at Nicole. Or perhaps it was more of a smirk. To Jillian she said, “Are the numbers I sent you about right?”

  Jillian pulled out a printout. “They look doable. I see you included a fudge factor.”

  Tilda nodded.