by Kylie Logan
“Of course you do.” Before she could bolt, I took her arm and piloted her to the chair between Margot and Sloan, where I figured she’d be most comfortable.
“So, it’s like one of those old mystery novels, right?” Homolka practically salivated. “You’ve got all your suspects assembled, and you’re going to reveal who done it.”
“Not all my suspects.” I mumbled these words and saw Kaz check the button-shaped clock that hung on the wall just above the doorway to the back room. He didn’t have to say a word. I knew Kaz was thinking exactly what I was thinking. Honestly, did I expect him to show?
A moment later, a sleek limo pulled up in front of the shop, and my hopes climbed. That is, until the shop door opened and Giant #1 and Giant #2 stepped inside.
Flashback! My breath caught in my throat. My heart thrummed. Instincts are a funny thing, and mine advised me to run. I tensed, and good thing I was standing right behind Kaz. He reached up a hand and grasped mine. Like I said, instincts are a funny thing. Just like old times, Kaz’s touch calmed and relaxed me.
At least until Roland walked in.
Even though I hoped he’d come, I can’t exactly say I was expecting him, so I was thrilled.
Everybody else? I think it’s fair to say they all just about dropped their teeth.
Except for Hugh.
He glared at Roland, who gave him a royal glare back. Right before he waltzed over to the last empty chair. No jeans and T-shirts for the prince tonight. He was dressed in a perfectly tailored suit, a blinding white shirt, and a dark tie, and yes, he did look smashing.
“I trust this will not take long.” Roland propped one royal arm casually over the back of his chair. He sized up first Margot, then Sloan. I guess it goes without saying that he passed right over Wynona without a second glance. “My private jet is waiting at the airport, and I am anxious to get home and put this unfortunate trip behind me.”
“I’ll bet you are,” Hugh growled.
And I knew I couldn’t let things get out of hand. I ignored the ugly undertone. “Now that we’re all here . . .” I looked around at the curious expressions of my guests. “Yeah, it does feel like a scene in one of those old movies, I admit it. Hugh, you, especially, should appreciate that.”
“I appreciate being out of jail.” He sat back and crossed his legs. Hugh’s complexion was pale; no tanning booths in lockup, I suppose.
“I’m not trying to be dramatic,” I told them. “And I apologize if that’s how this is coming across. But you’ve all got a stake in this case, so I thought you should all be here when I tell you what really happened.”
“You know?” Estelle’s voice caught. “But how—”
I held up one hand. “I’ll explain everything. You see, it all comes down to the buttons.” I signaled to Kaz, who handed me the photo of the Granny Maude button I’d found the day after the murder right about where I was standing now. I handed the picture to Estelle, who gave it a look and passed it around the circle. “Without that button, we would never have gotten on the right track, and we never would have found out who killed Kate Franciscus.”
“Well, it’s about damned time.” Hugh harrumphed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Better His Royal Highness here should be doing time than me.”
“Ridiculous!” Roland’s outburst was monumental. “I had nothing to do with Kate’s murder. Ms. Giancola, she knows this. And I have nothing to hide.”
“You’re right. You don’t. At least not from us.” I stepped into the middle of the circle, but I kept my eyes on Roland, the better to gauge his reaction when I said, “But Kate did.”
Homolka perked up, and the prince shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“Do you want to tell them?” I asked His Royal Highness. “Or should I?”
He, too, crossed his arms over his chest, the posture so like Hugh’s I wondered if the men knew they were mirror images of each other.
I guess I had the floor, and I glanced around.
“It’s like this,” I said. “Kate Franciscus wasn’t really Kate Franciscus. I mean, she was. Of course she was. But Kate Franciscus was nothing more than a wisp of beautiful imagination. A woman created out of necessity, a whole lot of cosmetic surgery, and the daydreams of a girl named Lois Buck.”
I waited for this little bit of news to sink in before I looked back at Roland. “That’s what it was all about, right? That’s why your buddies here . . .” I looked toward the bodyguards at the door. “That’s why they burglarized the shop. You knew that Kate, being as particular as she was, wouldn’t let the wedding go on if everything wasn’t perfect. If she couldn’t find just the right buttons, that would do it. And nobody but me . . .” I didn’t blush. Why should I? After all, it was true. “Nobody but me was going to be able to provide those buttons for her. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why you’d want to delay your wedding, especially when you claimed you loved Kate.”
Roland’s shoulders shot back. “Yes, this is true. I did love her.” He aimed a look at Hugh. “More than anyone else ever could.”
“But . . .” I wasn’t going to let him get away with it—not in the room where Kate had taken her last breath. “But you admitted to me last night that you loved your royal title even more. I have no doubt that your operatives checked into Kate’s background, and I bet they found out who she really was a lot faster than Kaz and I did. Once you knew that everything she’d ever told you about her life was a sham—”
Roland jutted out his royal chin. “What I knew did not matter.”
“Of course!” Homolka’s cackling laughter left His Royal Highness in the dust. “There was that lingerie model a couple years ago. And the rock star.” He rubbed his hands together. “Word on the street is that Prince Roland here made his royal papa very unhappy with his indiscretions. In fact, I have it on good authority that the king told him if he took up with another woman with even a hint of scandal to her name, he’d be disinherited, and Roland’s younger brother would eventually get the throne.” He swung his gaze to the prince. “You have anything to say about that? On the record?”
Roland sniffed. “This does not mean I killed Kate. On the record . . .” He drew out the words, as if Homolka might not be smart enough to understand. For all I knew, he wasn’t. “On the record, you can tell the common rabble who read your tabloids that I did not kill Kate. I simply needed to push back the day of the wedding. That is all. Until I could get things sorted out and decide how to break this news to my father. He would not be amused to find out that this wonderful actress with an impeccable background was not who she said she was. A girl from some little mountain town?” A shiver snaked over the royal shoulders. “Really!”
“Which explains the burglary. And why your goons . . .” Oh yeah, I looked at the two big guys when I tossed out the insult. For what they’d put me through that one terrible morning, I owed them. “That’s why they followed us to West Virginia and that’s why they picked a fight with Kaz at Home Days. They wanted us to leave town before we found out anything. When we didn’t up and run . . . When we got on the trail of Lois Buck, they had to destroy all the pictures of her. They didn’t want us to know who she really was and who she’d turned into.”
“This certainly does not make me guilty of murder,” Roland mumbled. “Even if it does mean I am guilty of having poor taste in women.”
“You son of a—” Hugh was out of his seat in an instant, and I swear, he would have had his hands around Roland’s throat if I didn’t stop him. The burly bodyguards might have been willing to put up with a lot, but when it came to their boss’s safety, I knew they wouldn’t fool around. By the time I clamped a hand on Hugh’s arm to hold him back, one of the bodyguards already had a hand inside the jacket of his dark suit coat. Good thing Hugh got the message and backed off; I didn’t want to see what the bodyguard was going to pull out.
Hugh was trembling when he glared at Roland. “How dare you say Kate wasn’t good enough? She was the most perfect
, the most wonderful woman. She was . . .” His voice broke, his shoulders slumped, and I handed him off to Kaz, who led him back to his seat.
“I guess you see what that proves,” I said to no one in particular. “Hugh couldn’t have killed Kate. He loved her too much. In fact, I’m betting he was the only one who ever really did. Too bad Kate wanted the publicity of a royal wedding and that title more than she wanted true love. She would have been better off with you, Hugh.”
“Yes.” He hung his head and wept softly. “Yes.”
Ever practical, Estelle refused to be caught in the undercurrent of emotion. “But how do you know any of this?” she demanded. “How can you prove it?”
“The proof? That’s easy.” I had the photograph I’d found in the briefcase with the buttons, and I held it up for all to see. “It all comes down to this one picture.”
“It’s me,” Wynona gasped.
I nodded. “I found it in with the buttons I’d given Kate to show her designer. You know that, Wynona. You’re the one who put it there. And you were the one who was trying so hard to get it back. That day outside the mansion where the movie was being filmed, that was you on the bicycle that slammed into me. You were hoping to snatch the briefcase, and you missed. So you had to try and break in here. News flash: if you’re looking for burglary lessons, these guys . . .” Once again I looked toward the bodyguards at the door. “They’re way better at it than you.”
“But why . . . ?” Margot looked from Wynona to me. “Why would Wynona give Kate a picture of herself?”
“I think Wynona’s the only one who can answer that.”
Wynona’s face flushed a color that rivaled the pink in Estelle’s print dress. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, so gosh-gee honest, I would have believed her if I didn’t have that picture in my hands. “I didn’t put that picture in with Kate’s things. How could I? And I didn’t hop on a bicycle and knock you down. Ms. Giancola, you know I’d never do anything like that.”
I wasn’t about to argue. But then, I didn’t have to. I strolled over and handed the photo to Wynona. “Then explain.”
She didn’t bother to look at the photograph; her eyes were filled with tears. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
I pointed. “I’m talking about the buttons.”
Wynona froze and I took the opportunity to pluck the photo out of her hand. One by one, I took it around to each of my guests. “Notice anything?” I asked. “About the buttons on the girl’s blouse?”
At that point, Hugh had the photograph and he squinted at it. “They’re small and dark,” he said. “But other than that . . .”
“They’re little plastic raisins.” I had a magnifying glass on my desk and I handed that to Hugh, too, who peered through it, checked the picture, then handed both the glass and the photo to Estelle, who did the same thing. “California Raisins, to be exact. Those of you who are a little older than Wynona here will remember—”
“They were a huge hit, back in the eighties,” Homolka piped up. “Animated raisins that sang and danced and sold raisins. It was pure advertising genius. Everybody knew the California Raisins.”
“Even some button manufacturers,” I added. “There weren’t many made, but there were actually plastic buttons made to look like the raisin cartoon characters. Now, Wynona here is maybe what, twenty-three or -four? And the girl in the picture is thirteen or so. Which means if that’s a picture of Wynona—”
“There’s no way she’d be wearing a blouse that old. Or one with buttons on it that were that old.” This from Kaz, who, although he’d been a good enough sport to say he’d be there that evening, didn’t know the ins and outs of what I had planned. “I tell you what, folks, Jo may think I don’t pay attention when she talks about those buttons of hers, but I hear plenty. I know that if that photo is only a few years old and that girl is wearing those raisin buttons, they’d be collector’s items and worth a mint. Nobody would use them on a kid’s shirt. That means—”
“The picture is old.” Estelle nodded. “And the girl in it—”
“Is Lois Buck,” I said.
“But she—” Never one to waste time, Estelle popped out of her seat and took the picture from Margot. “This Lois Buck is the spitting image of Wynona.”
“Actually Wynona is the spitting image of Lois. But that’s not surprising, is it, Wynona?” I stared her down. “The girl who used to be Lois Buck transformed herself into Kate Franciscus. She was your mother.”
If everybody wasn’t so busy talking all at the same time, we might have heard Wynona start to sob. The way it was, it wasn’t until my guests settled down before we heard her whimper. “I didn’t know,” she said. “Not until just recently. My mama got sick, and she died, and at the funeral, one of the neighbors, she told me my mama loved me like I was one of her own.” Wynona raised shining eyes toward me. “Like I was one of her own! It was the first I knew I was adopted.”
So far, so good. “How did you put the pieces together?” I asked her.
“It was that button. The one made by that Granny Maude lady. I . . . I had it since I was a baby, and once I found out I was adopted, I got to wondering and I did some looking and some digging, and I knew my parents—my adoptive parents—I knew they lived in Bent Grove before I was born.”
“So that’s how you ended up where we did.”
Wynona bobbed her head. “I talked to everyone about that button, and I ended up talking with Rand Jones, and from what everybody told me about him and Lois . . .” At least Wynona had the sense to shiver when she spoke. “I was pretty sure he was my daddy. Only he insisted he didn’t know what I was talking about. But I didn’t believe him, and that night when I went to see him and he told me he couldn’t help me find my mother, I . . . I waited outside the house instead of leaving right away. He . . . He thought I was gone, and he made a phone call. I heard him leave a message that said, ‘Our baby girl is all grown up, and she’s looking for you.’ That’s when I knew for sure.”
“Good old Rand.” Thinking back to the surly man at the Dew Drop, I made a face. “The guy who barely works and has all the money in the world. He obviously had Kate’s number. In more ways than one. He called her because my guess is that she was paying for his silence.”
“As was I.” Roland nodded. “Even once Kate was dead, I couldn’t let the truth be known. Not about who she was, where she came from. When her payments to this Mr. Jones ended—”
“Yours started up. He’s got quite a nice little racket going there!” This from Kaz, who, of everyone in the room, surely knew the most about a nice little racket when he heard about one.
“That explains about the pearls!” Margot stopped just short of slapping her forehead and looked to Sloan for confirmation. “We found them! The pearls Kate said Wynona had stolen? We found them when we were cleaning up Kate’s things. They were in a purse she used the morning she died. So we figured she must have known they weren’t stolen. Even so, she fired Wynona. That didn’t make sense. Until now.”
“Because Kate saw that Wynona looked just like her. At least just like her before the cosmetic surgeons took over,” I added, for those who weren’t quite getting it. “That’s why Kate needed an excuse to get rid of Wynona. She realized the girl who was working for her was her daughter.”
When he looked at Wynona, Hugh’s top lip curled. “Kate used to look like that?”
“Impossible!” Estelle snorted.
“But think about it, and it makes perfect sense,” I pointed out. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure, but my guess is that Lois had her baby . . .” I looked at Wynona. “And maybe she left that button with her as some sort of souvenir, something to tie the two of them together. Lois abandoned the baby and left Bent Grove, and the only one who knew her secret was Rand. That’s why Lois had to pay to keep him quiet. She was a smart girl, and she knew a thing or two about chutzpah, that’s for sure. My gue
ss is she had a string of lovers who paid for this cosmetic surgery and that cosmetic surgery, and before anyone knew it . . . voilà! Kate Franciscus was born. It’s exactly what your version of the Secret Service found out, wasn’t it, Your Royal Highness?”
“Yes.” Roland’s jaw was tight. “Yes, you have the story essentially correct. How the woman could have had the gall to lie. To me!”
“The only one who really knows what happened after that . . .” I swung around the other way, “is Wynona.”
“Yes.” She was crying all-out now, great big tears slipping down her ruddy cheeks. “I waited until the next day, after that night I went around and talked to Rand. I waited until he was out of the house, and nobody in Bent Grove locks their doors, so I went in and I checked the redial feature on his phone. And I got . . .” Even now, she could barely believe it. Wynona choked over the words. “I got Kate Franciscus’s private line. She said she was in Paris with . . .” She glanced at the prince. “With him. She said she was buying a gown for the Oscars and . . .” Wynona’s chest heaved. “I just couldn’t believe it. Kate Franciscus! I loved her movies. She was so beautiful and so glamorous. She . . . She was my mother!”
“So you tried to get in touch with her.” Another right-on point from Kaz.
Wynona nodded. “Well, sure I did, because I was sure she’d be thrilled to find me, just like I was thrilled to find her. I even had proof, see, because I found that picture of her . . .” She looked toward the photo of the girl wearing the blouse with the California Raisin buttons on it. “I found that picture at Rand’s, and I knew right away that it proved Kate was my mother because we look so much alike. So I . . .” She gulped. “I admit it. I stole the picture. And because I knew there was no way Kate could deny our relationship once she saw it, I starting calling and leaving messages, and well, I guess she never got them because she didn’t return my calls. So I wrote her letters.”
“Well, that explains the beefed-up security,” Sloan muttered.
I’m not sure Wynona heard. Then again, the kid was on a roll and so upset that her words combined with her tears and fell like rain. “I read about the movie in the newspaper, the one that was going to be filmed here in Chicago, and I came here, and I . . .” Her cheeks were ashen when she looked at me. “I did a terrible thing,” she said.
