A horrible thought occurred to her: What if her father had had other children? From the way Myrtis talked, Iva Claire had assumed she was an only child, but what if she wasn't? With a trembling hand, she quickly turned the pages, skipping generations of Benedicts, until she reached the last entry. She breathed a sigh of relief. Myrtis hadn't had any brothers or sisters.
Except for me.
Upstairs there were five bedrooms, and the bathroom she'd already seen. She went through the bedrooms quickly, making note of things she'd have to go back and look at later: a fan that had been framed, a little music box that looked like it was handpainted, some old photographs. There was a child's picture that looked eerily like one of Iva Claire's old publicity stills. It had to be Myrtis. There were four more of Myrtis as an adult. As soon as she could, without making the maid suspicious, Iva Claire told herself she'd have to get rid of those. In the largest bedroom there was a canopy bed with big swirling Bs carved all over it.
Four of the bedrooms were not in use. She'd saved the front room—the one where she'd seen the light in the window—for last. The door was open. She paused for a second at the threshold and looked in. The lamp was still on, the way Myrtis had left it when she went downstairs to answer Iva Claire's knock at the front door.
Don't think about that.
Iva Claire drew a deep breath and went into the room. It was a mess. Clothes were stacked in piles; there was an open trunk on the bench at the foot of the bed. Myrtis had been packing. But what day was she leaving? What time? What was the name of her ship?
There was a desk in one corner. Iva Claire raced through the drawers looking for something—a calendar, an address on a scrap of paper, or please, please, a ticket that might indicate a time, a date, and a ship's name. She found stacks of old letters, postcards, and some stationery. But nothing to shed light on Myrtis's return trip to England.
She mustn't keep looking. A little china clock on the desk said it was four-thirty. It was time to make herself look like Myrtis Benedict—as much as she could.
She'd told Tassie she could wing it. But winging it meant risk, and she'd always been the kid who checked out each theater to make sure there were no surprises.
Just one nice safe distraction prop. That's all I need.
Nagging at the back of her mind was the thought that there was one, and it was right here in this house. But she couldn't slow down enough to think of it. The best she could come up with was dying her hair. She was going to have to change the color, because her shade of brown was noticeably darker than Myrtis's had been. Matching Myrtis's hair color would be impossible, so she'd do something totally different. Later in the day, as soon as she could get to the pharmacy to buy some peroxide, Myrtis Benedict was going to surprise everyone by becoming a platinum blonde. It would be a radical change from her ladylike light brown, and Iva Claire knew she'd have to find some way to explain it. A girl of Myrtis's class would probably think bottle blondes were cheap and brassy. Iva Claire was hoping the startling change would distract people from noticing that her eyes didn't look as deep-set as they had, or that her lips were a little too full. She would have preferred a better distraction prop but this was the best she could think of. Until she could get her hands on some peroxide, she'd wear a scarf or the big leghorn hat she'd seen hanging near the back door, or she'd wash her hair and wrap it in a towel.
The slight difference in height could be handled by wearing flat shoes. If there weren't any in Myrtis's closet, or if Myrtis's shoes didn't fit, she'd use the ones she had on until she could find better ones. But what she was really going to rely on to bridge the gap between herself and Myrtis was wardrobe and makeup.
She'd do it all with confidence; that was the first rule to any good performance, and she'd get away with it. Because she had to. Still, it would be better with a distraction prop.
Don't think about that.
There was a lipstick in Myrtis's purse and face powder on her vanity. It was a pity she hadn't worn more makeup, but at least the lipstick was dark. Iva Claire could make her mouth look thinner by putting on the lipstick inside the lip line. The dark color would show up nicely. But how far inside the lip line should she go?
She ran to get one of the photos of Myrtis so she could work from the original.
Still, I wish I had a distraction prop.
She went into the bathroom to cut her hair, the first step in her transformation. She took the scissors out of her pocket and looked into the mirror. And for the first time that night, she screamed.
She forced herself to look back in the mirror again. The side of her face where Myrtis had struck her had started to swell, and there was a large red bruise on her cheek. Sometime after Tassie left, she'd been aware that her cheek had started to throb, but she'd been so busy with other things she hadn't let herself focus on it.
I killed her and she left her mark on me. My face is blowing up and . . . Oh, my God! Suddenly the nagging at the back of her mind clicked in. Tassie had said she'd blow up like a balloon from poison ivy. And then they had covered her arms. . . .
Iva Claire found the calamine lotion and slathered it over her face. She cut her hair without worrying about matching Myrtis's fashionable shingle and bundled it up under a scarf so the difference in color wouldn't show. If anyone asked, she'd say she was keeping it out of the way so it wouldn't irritate the terrible case of poison ivy she had. She looked at herself in the mirror. It didn't matter how blue her eyes were now, or how deep-set. It didn't matter how full or thin her lips were. All she—or anyone else—could see was the thick pink mask that covered her face. It was a perfect distraction prop.
Chapter Fifty-seven
AFTER SHE COVERED HER FACE with the calamine, she washed it off her hands with Myrtis's soap and cleaned her teeth with Myrtis's tooth powder—but not her toothbrush; she couldn't make herself do that. She found a nightgown in Myrtis's closet and put it on.
Now she didn't have to worry about some unexpected meeting Myrtis was supposed to have. An attack of poison ivy that was so bad your face swelled up would certainly explain a lady's inability to keep a social engagement. No one would wonder why she was staying in the house. She'd bought herself the time and the privacy to figure out what she was going to do next.
The china clock said five-thirty. She'd had a long night, and she had an even longer day in front of her—a day when she had to be at her absolute best. She cleared the clothes off Myrtis's bed and made herself lie down. Making her racing mind slow down was harder. Images belonging to some nightmare newsreel flashed through it: Mama's grave in the pauper's field in Indiana, a little dog dancing with a gold collar, Mama's hand going limp as she died, Myrtis opening the door, Myrtis falling back onto the fireplace hearth. There was blood seeping into the hearth bricks and somewhere Tassie was banging on the door. Only it wasn't Tassie, it was someone who wanted to get into the house. Which was strange because Iva Claire didn't own a house. But then she remembered that she did, and she sat up fast in the bed that was now hers. Downstairs someone was calling out, “Miss Myrtis!” She looked over at the china clock; it said six-thirty. She'd been asleep for an hour.
She hurried downstairs to open the door to a Negro woman who was tall, slender, and probably in her late twenties. This had to be the maid, Sally. Thank heaven she was young. The last thing Iva Claire needed was a servant who had been with the family for years. Sally wouldn't be reminiscing about things her mistress should have known but didn't. Even so, it would be a good idea to keep her distance from the maid which was probably what Myrtis would have done anyway.
“Miss Myrtis, I'm sorry to wake you up, but you locked my kitchen door,” Sally said.
Of course, the kitchen door was left unlocked in this small town! Her first mistake. Meanwhile Sally was staring at her face.
“I seem to have gotten myself a bad case of poison ivy,” she said. It was her first attempt at Myrtis's Mayfair-tinged southern accent. Her voice sounded light and uncertain to her critical
ear, but Sally was still mesmerized by the pink mask.
“Don't stand out there gaping at me,” she said, biting off the words. The result was much better. “Come in.”
“In the front door, miss?”
Second mistake: Maids used the back door.
“You don't expect me to go racing around to let you in the back when I'm standing right here, do you?” She remembered to arch her eyebrow at the end of the sentence. It seemed to work. Sally said, “No, Miss Myrtis,” and came inside.
“I'm sorry about the door being locked,” she said to the maid. “I'm all turned around because of this poison ivy. I have a terrible headache.” Did you get a headache from poison ivy? “I'm going back to bed.”
“Do you want your hot tea, miss?”
She would rather have had coffee.
“I'll get it in a minute.”
“You don't want me to bring it to your room the way I always do?”
She'd been right, there were routines in this house—and every one of them was a potential for disaster. “Yes, I'll get the tea when you bring it to my room,” she said. “That's what I meant.” And then, before she trapped herself further, she ran up the stairs.
Inside Myrtis's bedroom she leaned against the door and tried to assess her performance. Clearly, it needed work, but for the first time in front of an audience it hadn't been half bad. If her luck would just hold. But hoping for good luck was like asking for a reward, and after what she'd done, how could she? What if, instead of a reward, she were to get what she deserved?
But suddenly, inexplicably, she was furious.
Exactly what do I deserve? She looked around the pretty bedroom in the house Myrtis had said could rot, for all she cared. I never had my own room. I never even had my own bed. She went to a fancy school in England. He threw me out of his hotel room. She got everything. And I didn't mean to kill her. She was the one who hit me. It wasn't my fault, and I'll be damned if I'm going to go to jail or feel guilty. I'm the one who had a hard life, and— She stopped herself.
“No!” she said out loud.
That was the way Mama thought. It was never her fault. She never did anything wrong.
She sat on the bed and took a deep breath. “I killed Myrtis Benedict,” she said to the empty room. “I don't want to be caught and I'm going to do whatever I can not to pay for it. But I killed her. And I have to live with it for the rest of my life.”
And someday I'll find a way to make up for it.
She climbed into bed and pulled up the sheets. That was when she saw it. And she knew her luck had held after all. Sitting on the bedside table was a little leather-covered book with M B embossed on the front. Myrtis Benedict had kept a diary. Iva Claire grabbed it and began to read.
Myrtis was scheduled to sail from New York to England the following week on a ship called the Rex. Her ticket and passport were tucked into the back of the journal. As for people who should be contacted about the change in plans, Myrtis didn't appear to have had many close friends. She seemed to have a pattern of meeting people, finding them delightful, and then discovering some terrible flaw and dropping them. There was one girl she seemed to like; her name was Allison Stanton-Jones. She and Myrtis had gone to school together, at a place called Gracewood, and Allison's family had a house in London where Myrtis seemed to spend a lot of her time. Myrtis had a small apartment of her own—a flat, she called it—but she was not happy with that arrangement. She wanted control of her money so she could afford to buy her own house in the city.
The only other person who appeared with regularity in the diary was someone Myrtis called the hateful Mr. Jenkins. How or why he was hateful was never made clear. However, there were references to frightful rows she'd had with him.
Iva Claire let herself relax against the pillows. She'd cancel the booking on Rex immediately, and as soon as she'd taught herself how to imitate Myrtis's elegant handwriting, she'd send a note to Miss Stanton-Jones saying Myrtis would be staying in America after all. She still had to go through the contents of Myrtis's desk drawer, and she wanted to practice Myrtis's strange accent some more. But for the first time in hours she felt safe. Until she saw the note Myrtis had made on margin of the last page of her final entry: Luncheon with Mr. J, it read. The note was underlined several times, circled heavily, and there was a string of exclamation points after it. Clearly, luncheon was going to be a momentous occasion. Added as an afterthought was a date. Iva Claire read it and sat upright in horror. She had three days in which to get ready for this meeting with the enemy, Mr. Jenkins. Whoever the hell he was.
Chapter Fifty-eight
SHE COULDN'T ASK SALLY outright about Mr. Jenkins. She racked her brain, but she couldn't come up with an indirect way to get the information out of the maid. She spent two days and nights reading every scrap of paper in Myrtis's room, looking for something that would shed some light on the man's identity, but she came up empty. She wanted to scream in frustration. She couldn't even figure out where she was supposed to meet him for the damn luncheon!
Finally, in desperation, she accepted the fact that she'd have to bluff her way through. And it had better be the bluff of a lifetime. On the morning of the luncheon, she put on one of Myrtis's oldest dresses, and applied her calamine thickly. She was now a white blonde—she'd sent Sally to the pharmacy for the peroxide and more calamine lotion—and the bleach had made her hair dry. If she didn't curl it, it looked awful. Which was what she wanted. Because she was going to miss her appointment with Mr. Jenkins—there was no way to avoid that—and she needed to look believable when she claimed that her physical discomfort had pushed the whole thing out of her head.
She'd gone through all this for Sally's benefit. Servants noticed everything, she was learning, and they could be a scary source of gossip. She was very careful to cover her tracks with Sally. She wasn't expecting to see Mr. Jenkins that day, although it never hurt to play it safe. He might come over to the house when she didn't show up at their meeting place. She was living in the sticks and it might be considered the neighborly thing to do. She was hoping he'd just telephone the house, and she could simper some apologies and try to get some idea of who he was.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She certainly looked like a girl with no social obligations for the day. What she needed now was a cup of coffee to steady her nerves. The only beverage Sally ever served was tea, hot and cold. She'd never drunk it before she came south; the stuff tasted like dishwater as far as she was concerned. But southerners liked iced tea and Myrtis had lived in England, where hot tea was the national drink. Iva Claire figured she'd be stuck drinking the swill for life. But not now. Now what she needed was a good strong cup of joe. There had to be some coffee somewhere in the kitchen.
Before this, Iva Claire had avoided the kitchen. It was Sally's domain, and she wasn't sure about the proper etiquette for invading your servant's turf. Or for dealing with a servant. But now she was desperate. To her dismay she found Sally sitting at a table, mixing up something in a large bowl. The maid was on her feet in a shot.
“Something I can get you, miss?” she asked.
Mr. Jenkins's life story and the name of the restaurant where I'm meeting him.
“Nothing, thank you.” Sally was looking at her quizzically. She had to think of something to say. “Please go on with what you were doing. What are you cooking?”
“That's the chicken salad you wanted me to fix for your lunch with Mr. Jenkins.”
She couldn't believe it. He was coming to the house! Her luncheon was happening at home!
“Right. Well, do get on with it.”
She raced upstairs. She grabbed one of Myrtis's black mourning dresses out of the closet and yanked it on with shaking hands.
I've got stay calm. I can do this.
She put a ribbon in her hair. She was about to smear some more calamine on her face when she stopped. The bruise was gone, and the swelling had gone down. If you really looked at her, you could see there was no rash. He w
on't look that closely.
He might.
She ran back downstairs again.
I can do this. I can do this.
She went into the sitting room, got her scissors out of the sewing kit, and sailed through the kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I'm going outside to pick some flowers for the table, Sally,” as she went out the back door.
She found the patch of poison ivy Tassie had fallen into. The leaves were shiny and evil looking. The rash was going to drive her crazy. She hated it when she got a mosquito bite.
Don't think about it.
She reached out, picked several of the shiny leaves, and carefully, thoroughly, rubbed them over her face. For good measure she rubbed one over her neck as well. In for a penny, in for a pound. She checked her watch, hoping she'd react as quickly—and violently—to the nasty weed as Tassie did.
Thankfully, by the time she'd cut an armful of daisies, her face was already starting to itch. She couldn't wait to get into the house to smear more soothing calamine on it.
An hour and a half later, with a pounding heart and a face that was now covered with red blotches, she was greeting her mystery guest at the front door. Mr. Jenkins was well dressed. A preacher? A doctor? A lawyer? He looked like the kind of person who was very sure of himself and expected people to listen to him, but at the moment he was frowning. Which could be explained by the “frightful row.” Or her calamine coverup. He was trying not to stare, but he couldn't help himself. He was fascinated by her distraction prop.
Or maybe he hadn't been distracted at all. Maybe—please God, no—he had noticed that Myrtis was suddenly slimmer and taller than she had been.
“Mr. Jenkins, do come in,” she said, in her new accent. “I apologize for my appearance, but I'm afraid I have a dreadful case of poison ivy. I haven't been out of the house in three days.”
She held her breath and waited.
The Ladies of Garrison Gardens Page 23
