The Impersonator (Leah Randall/Jessie Carr Novels)
Page 32
But Grandmother was waiting for my reply. I put the locket back beneath my clothes against my breast before someone could ask about it. “Thank you, Grandmother. I’d be grateful for a place to stay while I mend. And Rainy—I’m sorry my leaving puts you out of a job. I wish I could take you with me.”
“Never mind that, miss. Mr. Ross offered all us who wanted to go to California a job but…” She looked shyly at Ross. “But … well, Doc Milner said he could use a quick girl like me to help him with his patients, and, well, I’d rather stay in Dexter where my family is than go to California.”
“Oh, Rainy, that’s wonderful! You’ll make an excellent nurse.”
Pink with pride, she fussed. “Now, there, let me put this extra pillow behind you, miss, so you can sit up a little and eat.”
Ross got to his feet. “If you leave before Mother and I return, I’d like to say…” Whatever it was, he couldn’t say it. “Well … good-bye.” His Valentino eyes held mine for an awkward moment, then we both looked away, embarrassed.
He got as far as the hall before turning around. “Oh, I almost forgot … the storm that blew through the night of the party? It was brief but violent. A day or two later—we’re not sure which day—a large section of the weak south cliff collapsed into the sea.”
I didn’t have to ask which section.
Jessie had known. Hurry! Don’t leave me. Time was short and she hadn’t wanted to be lost forever when the crevice that opened into the cave finally split off and that giant slab of rock crumbled into the churning sea.
POSTSCRIPT
How much of The Impersonator is true? The short answer is: a lot. Of course, the story is fiction and the main characters—Jessie, the Carr family, and David Murray—are products of my imagination. However, most of the vaudeville references are historical fact. The Kanazawa Japs, the Seven Little Foys, Cats and Rats, Baby Silvia, Houdini, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, W. C. Fields, the Venetian Masqueraders, and so forth were acts that played the Big Time circuits in 1924. Some of the names are familiar today, especially to movie buffs, because most early radio and film personalities started in vaudeville—people like Milton Berle, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and Jack Benny left vaudeville for long careers in radio, film, and television.
And while the little town of Dexter is fictional, the other locations mentioned are real and their descriptions as accurate to the time period as I could make them. The hotels are genuine (the Benson is still one of Portland’s finest hotels and the Blackstone in Omaha has been rehabbed into an office building), as are the theaters, although, sadly, many were casualties of urban renewal.
Almost no one alive today has been to a vaudeville show. While minstrel shows, circuses, and other sorts of variety performances existed before the Civil War, vaudeville is usually considered to have started in the 1870s. The genre peaked in the 1920s and declined in the early 1930s, usurped by radio and the movies. To see what real vaudeville, and its risqué cousin, burlesque, looked like, check into some of the short features on www.youtube.com, including some of my favorites:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZo4imTt4Og
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVQ9e8nWx0
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ6Zh6UbQ-I
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA6wYvVnq4g
www.youtube.com/watch?v=49B3ZnxibTQ&feature=related
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Particular thanks go to my mentor, Donna Sheppard, who taught me how to write better than any English teacher ever could, to Tom Fuhrman of my critique group who provided technical know-how when it came to sabotaging antique cars, to Dr. Mark Pugh, a pharmacist who listened to my questions about how to murder people with drugs and deadly herbs and did not alert the police, to Erica Gilliam, a master gardener who made sure I got the horticulture right, to my critique group (Marilyn Mattys, Vivian Lawry, Kathleen Mix, Sandie Warwick, Susan Campbell, Linda Thornburg, Josh Cane, and Libby Hall), and especially to my editors at Minotaur, Kelley Ragland and Elizabeth Lacks, and their awesome copy editor, Ragnhild Hagen, whose sharp eye saved me from several embarrassing mistakes.
I have always been intrigued by stories that involved memory loss, impersonation, and look-alikes. My favorites include Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar (1949), the novel that served as the inspiration for this story, as well as Mary Stewart’s The Ivy Tree (1962), Joy Fielding’s See Jane Run (1991), and Sebastien Japrisot’s A Trap for Cinderella (1963).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARY MILEY is the winner of the 2012 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition. She has worked at Colonial Williamsburg, taught American history at Virginia Commonwealth University for thirteen years, and has published extensively in the areas of history and travel. This is her first novel. Miley lives in Richmond, Virginia.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE IMPERSONATOR. Copyright © 2013 by Mary Miley. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph © GettyImages
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Miley, Mary.
The impersonator / Mary Miley.—First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-02816-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02817-4 (e-book)
1. Heirs—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 3. Missing persons—Fiction. 4. Substitution of heirs—Fiction. 5. Impersonation—Fiction. 6. Fraud—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.I532244I47 2013
813′.6—dc23
2013013931
eISBN 9781250028174
First Edition: September 2013