Curse of the Kissing Cousins

by Kelner, Toni, L. P.

  “Do I look like an idiot? I’m not the hero around here.”

  “You are to me. You’re the one who figured it all out.”

  “And you’re the one who wore the outfit that might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted on it.” She inspected the right sleeve of the dress. “And tore it. Vincent will be very distressed.” She hadn’t asked Vincent why he had just happened to have an ersatz Mercy dress big enough for a man, and didn’t intend to.

  “It’s not my color anyway,” Nick said. “I think I’m more of an autumn.”

  Dom said, “Hey, Nicky, you coming with us? The cops are going to want to talk to you.”

  “Sure thing, Pop, there’s just two things I’ve got to do first.” He took hold of Tilda’s shoulders and kissed her thoroughly. “That’s to remind you that I’m secure in my masculinity, dress or no dress.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of arguing with you,” she said, a little out of breath. “What’s the other thing?”

  “I’ve got to take off this getup. If the cops see me in it, I’ll never live it down.”

  After making sure Nick and his father were on their way and agreeing to meet them at the police station, Tilda stopped to check on the other Cousins. Noel hugged her to thank her for catching the man who’d nearly killed him, and Cooper hugged her because they’d brought their scheme off successfully. Then Kat offered a quick prayer that everybody was safe, to which Tilda added a heartfelt amen. She even crossed herself for the first time in ages. The twins were more subdued, and Tilda suspected Lawrence had managed to bed at least one of them, if not both. It was another question she didn’t intend to ask.

  As for Vincent, Javier, and Rhonda, they were happily using their pocket electronics to get the word out to the fan world, so she didn’t bother them.

  When she got back to the security checkpoint, it was obvious that the reporters who’d hung on had scented blood in the water, but they didn’t know what had happened, and it was driving them crazy. Fortunately nobody recognized Tilda, so she walked on by.

  Chapter 29

  Episode 72: The Happiest of Endings

  (One-hour series finale.) When the two older boys graduate

  from high school, they’re surprised to see Brad’s father and

  Damon’s mother at the ceremony. The parents clash instantly,

  and both decide to take their kids away. The kids, now that

  they’re to be separated, realize they’ve become a family. Meanwhile,

  Pops “accidentally” locks the feuding parents in the garage,

  and by the time they’re found, they’ve fallen in love. Dad

  decides to leave the Army, and Mom announces that what she

  really wants is a husband and family. The Cousins are going to

  be step-siblings.

  —FANBOY’S ONLINE KISSING COUSINS EPISODE GUIDE, BY VINCENT PETERS

  THAT night Tilda enjoyed a festive dinner with Nick, Dom, Cooper, the Kissing Cousins, and the triumvirate of fans, followed by a more private, mutually satisfying affirmation of life with Nick. The next morning she finished up another story for Entertain Me! bowing to its inevitable title, “Reversing the Curse of the Kissing Cousins.” As soon as it was done and e-mailed to Jillian, she hopped onto a train to New York.

  In a near repeat performance of her last visit, Tilda arrived at Penn Station, directed the cab to the Palm, picked up two orders of prime rib with the appropriate sides, and arrived at Sophia’s condo, where Bill walked her up and picked out his tip from the cookie jar while Juan took the food and disappeared into the kitchen. At least Tilda was fairly sure it was the same Juan.

  Sophia, this time wearing glorious yellow-gold, smiled widely when she saw her. “Tilda, you’re exactly who I’ve been wanting to talk to. Tell me everything! How did you know that Lawrence White was the killer? What did he do when you caught him?”

  Tilda didn’t bother to ask how the older woman had gotten wind of it all. It had been over twenty-four hours, so there’d been plenty of time for the news to reach her by whatever mysterious methods she used. “I’ll give you every detail,” she promised, “but first I want to ask you a question.”

  Sophia arched one eyebrow, but said, “Ask away.”

  “Are you a lesbian or bisexual?”

  Tilda had expected shock, denial, or at least some small loss of composure. What she got was a belly laugh.

  “I knew you’d figure it out!” Sophia said with one last chortle. “Juan!” she called out, “I win! You owe me a week without pay.” If Juan was concerned about his loss, he kept it to himself. Her attention back on Tilda, Sophia said, “Bi, of course. I’m more of a gourmand than a gourmet when it comes to the bedroom. Why limit myself to pretty boys when there are so many pretty girls around?”

  “Was Mercy one of your conquests?”

  Sophia’s smile didn’t exactly fade, but it somehow became sadder. “No, not a conquest. I may actually have loved Mercy.”

  “Are you still together?”

  “No, that’s long since over.” The smile was definitely a sad one.

  “But you did help her disappear, didn’t you?”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “An educated guess. Lawrence was a little bit quicker than we expected, and he caught our faux Mercy giving me a kiss. Just on the hand, but from the way he freaked, you’d have thought we were dancing with a double-headed dildo. That’s when I started wondering if the person Mercy had left him for had been a woman, not a man.”

  “Whoa there, partner! Start at the beginning. How did you put the two of them together in the first place?”

  Tilda sat down and reached for the glass of Dr Pepper Juan was handing to her. “I found a photo of Mercy and a very young Lawrence in a Palm Springs newspaper. It wasn’t a good shot, so I didn’t recognize him, especially since the caption said his name was Wallace Lambert, Junior.”

  “That’s the name I knew him under. I wondered if he might have changed it.”

  “My first thought was that Lambert might know where Mercy was, and I tracked down the society columnist who published the picture and got the lowdown on him. I was doing my best to glue on some fairy-tale ending until the society writer sent me a better picture from his father’s funeral. That’s when I realized that Wallace Lambert and Lawrence White were one and the same.” Tilda put down the Dr Pepper, reached into her satchel for copies she’d made of both pictures, and handed them to Sophia.

  Sophia held the pictures at arm’s length, then ruefully opened a drawer in the table next to her to pull out a pair of reading glasses to take a better look. “You’ve got a good eye,” she said. “I don’t know that I’d have realized it was the same man.”

  “I’ve made a career of comparing stars’ younger selves to their older versions—I think he’s had some work done, and of course he dyes his hair, but I knew it was him. Anyway, I was told that Wallace—or Lawrence—had been dating Mercy, but his father didn’t approve, so Daddy sent him to Europe to separate them. But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there?”

  “God, yes. Mercy met Lambert between the second and third seasons of the show, and she fell for him hard. He was cultured, educated, and from a good family—everything Mercy thought she wasn’t. Lawrence seemed to be just as in love with her as she was with him.”

  “So why didn’t this make the gossip columns?”

  “They worked hard to keep it secret. On her side, she knew the studio wouldn’t approve of her dating somebody who looked so much older, even though they were close to the same age. As for Lawrence, the one time they did go out publicly, his father threw a major tantrum. The snobby bastard didn’t approve of his son and heir dating a woman with no family connections, so he forbade him from seeing her again. Naturally, being young and in love, they took the relationship underground. Secrecy probably only added to the romance of it all, at least for a while.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Despite Lawrence
’s claims that he liked Mercy just the way she was, he started trying to remake her into his own image. Or maybe into an image of which his father would approve. Mercy was smitten, but she wasn’t smitten enough to let that happen. They argued, and one day he got physical.”

  “He hit her?”

  “He gave her a black eye you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Jesus,” Tilda said. The black eye Jasmine the makeup artist had had to conceal hadn’t been caused by a fall after all.

  “Mercy was no fool—she knew a black eye one day meant broken bones the next. So she told him she didn’t want to see him again. Between that and Lambert Senior keeping him on a tight leash, that worked for a few months. Then he showed up at her apartment one night, drunk and demanding that she start seeing him again. Mercy called the cops to chase him off. Even though she didn’t press charges, I heard about it through a snitch at the police department—I was still living in LA at the time, God only knows why. I went snooping to see if there was anything I could print and found her terrified that he’d come back.”

  “But you didn’t print anything about it?”

  Sophia looked affronted. “I’ve passed up plenty of stories, missy!”

  “Even when you weren’t hot for the subject?”

  Sophia allowed a small grin. “Not as many, but even then. Anyway, I took her in and . . . and comforted her.”

  “Was she bi?”

  “I was her first woman,” Sophia said with a hint of pride, but then admitted, “Honestly, I don’t think she would have wanted to be with me under other circumstances. I didn’t mean to take advantage of her—I don’t think I did, anyway—but she turned to me. It didn’t last long, just a couple of months. I wish it had lasted longer, for her sake.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “It was after she started work on that movie. She hadn’t heard anything from Lambert in such a long time that she decided it was safe to move back to her own place. That second weekend after she started filming—when she was so happy about working on an honest-to-God movie—she came home and found Lambert in her house, waiting for her. He was enraged. He said no cheap slut actress was going to turn him down. He’d heard about us too—I don’t think he knew it was me, but he knew Mercy had been seeing a woman, and it made him crazy.”

  The older woman took a swallow of her own drink, and Tilda was sure it wasn’t Dr Pepper. She both wanted to know and didn’t want to know what came next.

  “He beat her. Then he raped her. And beat her some more. He may have raped her again—she wasn’t sure what was happening by that point. Only that it hurt.”

  “Jesus,” Tilda whispered.

  “But she never stopped fighting,” Sophia said proudly. “She never stopped screaming. And finally, thank God, somebody heard her. A yardman was doing the grass next door, and when nobody answered the bell, he looked through the window and saw what that animal was doing. He broke down the front door and pulled him off of her. Lambert wasn’t armed and the yardman had pruning shears, so Lambert ran away.

  “The yardman called the police and an ambulance, and Mercy called me. I met her at the hospital, and once I was sure she was going to live, I went out into the hall and called the best doctors in town and made them come out immediately. Then I went out into the parking lot, crawled into my car, locked the doors, and cried.” Her voice broke. “She was so . . . She looked so . . . God, I’d never seen anybody hurt like that.”

  “What did he do to her?”

  “Broken arm, cracked cheekbone, and I don’t know how many broken ribs. Bruises everywhere, cigarette burns, tears in . . . She was torn. Her chin was split open, but at least he didn’t use a knife.”

  “Then he never went to Europe. He was in prison.”

  “The bastard never saw the inside of a cell!” Sophia snapped.

  “By the time Mercy’s ambulance arrived, Lambert’s daddy had him lawyered up. They spun an alibi for him and spent enough money to make sure that the cops didn’t poke too many holes in it.”

  “But Mercy could have testified against him.”

  “Her word against his. Who would they believe? An actress, or the ultrarespectable heir to a fortune?”

  “What about the yardman?”

  “He was willing to be a witness, but he was illegal. He nearly got deported.”

  “What happened to him?”

  To Tilda’s bemusement, Juan answered, having just come in with fresh drinks. “Miss Sophia got him a green card,” he said. “He is my uncle.” He replaced their glasses with full ones, and left again.

  Tilda turned to Sophia, and realized the woman looked almost embarrassed. “It was the least I could do,” she muttered. “He saved her life.”

  “You’ve been getting green cards for his family ever since, haven’t you?”

  Sophia ignored her. “Anyway, I wanted to see that bastard in prison for the rest of his natural life—I called in every outstanding favor I had—but I couldn’t make it happen. Finally I realized that there was no way Lambert Junior was ever going to trial. The best I could manage was to insist that Lambert Senior send him away and keep him away. I told him that unless he did, I’d spread the real story to every gossip columnist in the country. If he wanted to try to sue me, he could go ahead and try, but that would only make it a bigger story. Lambert Senior was desperate to keep the lid on, so he agreed. Junior was on his way to Europe days later, and I transferred Mercy to a private hospital under an assumed name for the next two months. Of course, she had to give up the movie role.”

  “Why didn’t she go back to work after she recovered? I know her reputation must have suffered, but with your connections, she could have started over.”

  “She thought about it,” Sophia said, “but how long would it be before Lambert Junior came back? We knew his father couldn’t keep him in Europe forever. Besides, there was nothing to stop him from hiring somebody else to finish the job he’d started. We even caught a guy snooping around the hospital and knew he had to be hired muscle. That’s when we got full-time security and when Mercy realized that Lambert was never going to give up on her. She decided that the only way to escape him was to disappear. I had the money and the friends to help her.”

  “You saved her life,” Tilda said.

  “I have no doubt of that,” Sophia said. “I kept an eye on Lambert Junior as best I could, but I had to be careful to make sure I didn’t draw attention to myself.”

  “I don’t blame you—I wouldn’t want him coming after me, either.”

  “That, and I was afraid he’d beat Mercy’s location out of me. I’d seen what he could do, and I had no illusions that I could stand up to that.”

  Tilda wasn’t so sure—she thought Sophia was one of the toughest women she’d ever met, and she’d learned nothing so far to change her mind.

  Sophia went on. “After Lambert Senior died and Junior got his hands on the family money, I lost track of him.”

  “That’s where I picked him up,” Tilda said. “When I realized that Lawrence White was Wallace Lambert, I knew he was the killer. Why else would he have lied about knowing Mercy? So I did some research. He must have bought himself a new identity, because he showed up as Lawrence White in Los Angeles a few months after his father’s funeral. I suspect he pulled the old trick of using a dead infant’s name to get a birth certificate and social security number.” Actually it had been Nick who speculated that, and Vincent who helped her find the man’s tracks on the Web, but like Sophia, she preferred not to give up all her secrets. “With his privileged upbringing, and a veneer of European styling, he had no trouble getting himself invited to the right parties to start covering the industry. But he never gave up searching for Mercy—in fact, that may be why he got into the business in the first place.” For a moment, Tilda considered the idea that Lawrence’s and her motivations hadn’t been all that different—her affection for Mercy’s character had been why she’d started writing entertainment features too. The dif
ference, of course, was that she hadn’t wanted to kill her idol. “Anyway, once I made the connection between Lawrence and Wallace Junior, I decided to lay a trap for him.”

  “Why the play-acting? Why not just set the police on him?”

  “One, it made for better copy.” Tilda knew that Sophia wouldn’t question that. “And two, we did get the cops. Dom Tolomeo had a connection on the Weldon police force, and they tried to find evidence that Lawrence had been in town the day Holly Kendricks was killed. There was none. Maybe they could have found some eventually, but our way was quicker, and safer for the rest of the Kissing Cousins. We didn’t want to risk Lawrence finally finding Mercy, or going after Noel again, or Kat, or the twins.”

  “What set him off anyway?” Sophia asked. “Why did he strike at the other Cousins now? Tilda, I swear I’d have said something if I’d thought it was him. Sure, I knew he was capable of murder, but I didn’t see what his motive could be.”