Valerie answered quietly. “Charles will need Amelia now, and she will be there to support and love him. Perhaps they will both grow up. At least he will know he is Porter’s son. I think it will be all right, Cecelia.”
In an unexpected way, my mother had comforted me. But there was more I wanted to learn.
“How did you know it was Evaline?” I asked her.
Valerie didn’t hesitate. “Daphne told me the day before she died. She’d been suspicious of Evaline for a long time. She guessed that Porter had given Evaline the silver lotus earrings similar to the ones Simon had had made for him, and that she’d lost one when she damaged Nathanial’s boat. That’s how it came to be tangled in the fishing gear. Daphne thought that if she could find the matching earring in Evaline’s things she’d know the truth.”
“But wouldn’t Evaline have thrown the other one away where it could never be found?”
“Not if she didn’t realize where she’d lost the first one. So that day, when Evaline was at the Hall, Daphne came back to the cottage to search. She went into Evaline’s bedroom and looked into the jewel box on her dressing table. She didn’t know I was in the cottage, and I walked in to find her holding the second earring. That’s when she told me all she suspected about Nathanial’s death. It was bad luck that Evaline came home unexpectedly and found her there. I stepped out of sight and she didn’t see me. But Daphne was holding the earring—and Evaline knew. She tried to put on an act of indignation, but Daphne only laughed at her and went off, taking the earring with her.”
I was beginning to understand. “Evaline got Daphne to meet her down in the temple area where they could talk?”
“I expect that’s what happened. It’s a pretty secluded place, and Daphne had been hunting for something down there. She wouldn’t have been afraid. Perhaps Evaline never knew she’d brought the earring with her. When she found an opportunity to push over that teetery marble column, she thought she’d made everything safe.”
Of course. I remembered the moment when the police officer had held up the earring he’d taken from Daphne’s fingers, and I understood why Valerie had screamed. She’d known exactly how Daphne had died.
The bench was small, so though Valerie and I sat near each other, we weren’t touching. Yet I could feel that all the distrust between us was melting away.
“Why did you stay at the cottage with Evaline after Daphne died?” I asked.
“She wouldn’t let me go. She kept telling me she was looking after me, helping me. She kept giving me pills. I wasn’t myself—I was terribly afraid. She kept me from talking to Porter or anyone else. Until I got away from her tonight.”
As Porter had said, murder became easier with practice, and Evaline, seeing only her single-minded goal, might have disposed of Valerie eventually too. She would have known that Porter, no matter what he suspected, would never give her away. I understood now why he had been afraid for me and hadn’t wanted me to stay in Charleston even one more day.
“Poor Simon,” Valerie said. “He must have known about Porter’s debt to the bank. He felt guilty, but he kept still to spare the family. Orva knew something too. Evaline walked into the music room that day and told Simon the truth. That’s why he had a heart attack. Orva saw her go in, but she never told anyone but me, and I didn’t have a clue as to what happened.”
So! I thought—that was why Garrett had gone to talk to Orva. This was what she had known all along.
Honoria, her phone call accomplished, returned to join us, her back to that length of brocade.
“Amelia is a hit,” she told us proudly. “She’s remembering her lines and carrying the whole thing off like a pro. Charles is playing up to her convincingly, and she’ll never believe he doesn’t love her.”
“He does love her,” I said. “I’m only a passing aberration.”
“Of course, he must be told about his mother as soon as the curtain comes down.”
I wanted to ask about Garrett—about how his role was going. My longing to see him had grown, and I still had a tendency to shake. I needed him just to hold me.
Porter had found us there. He hadn’t wanted to watch the whole play and had come looking for his wife. Honoria explained everything quickly—even what the police must be told—and he took charge calmly. In spite of the awfulness, he must have felt an enormous relief. Though his long years of suppressing all emotion stood him well now.
Much later, when the police were gone and Evaline had been taken away, I sat alone again in the empty dressing room. Amelia and Charles were somewhere together—perhaps finding each other for the first time. I hadn’t seen Garrett at all for a while, so I simply rested, trying to catch my breath, trying to regain some sort of equilibrium.
When Garrett found me, I was staring at my own reflection in the mirror, wondering in a confused way who I really was. He came quietly into the room and stood behind me, so that I looked up into his reflected face. He still wore his Union blue, and I my southern belle’s costume. Confusion prevailed and I could see my twin in the mirror.
I spoke my thought aloud. “Who am I?”
He smiled, a new tenderness in his face. “You’re Molly Hunt and you’re Cecelia Mountfort. Not everyone can have two identities. What you’ll never be is your sister Amelia.”
That wasn’t altogether true. There had been moments tonight when we’d communicated with each other in a way that only identical twins could.
As I watched Garrett in the glass, he touched a place between my brows. “There’s a frown line there. Just a small one that comes when you’re worried. Amelia’s beautiful face wears very little of life—because she hides everything inside and pretends to be happy and carefree. You let yourself frown, and you let one corner of your mouth droop a little, because you don’t pretend, the way she does.”
His finger smoothed a corner of my mouth and my skin tingled beneath the slight pressure.
“But your eyes tell me something else. There’s an eagerness or new experience. There’s a clear-eyed reaching out. You want to know. You want all the things the women in your books experience, and you’re not going to shut yourself off any longer. You’ll deal with what’s happened to you tonight, and for the last weeks. And you’ll go on from there.”
I watched the woman in the mirror shake her head. “You don’t know any of this about me.”
“Maybe not. But I think I’m guessing right. From the first day in Daphne’s bookstore, I wanted to know more. You must have seen how I watched you. But I couldn’t reach for you suddenly—you might have run. You had your own unhappiness to move away from, so I had to wait and give you time. It wasn’t easy. How could I know that a feeling like this could hit me suddenly—without warning? I didn’t ask for it. Even now I’m not sure about anything. Least of all about how you might feel.”
“I’m sure,” I said.
He leaned over my shoulder and kissed my cheek. “Come away from there. I can’t hold a woman in a mirror.”
I went into his arms so easily—as though I belonged there. All the heavy questions I’d carried around for so long dissolved and fell away.
“You’ve been cheated, of course,” he said when he’d stopped kissing me, teasing me a little. “In your books the hero comes riding up on his white horse to rescue your heroine in the climax scene. But I wasn’t even there.”
“It wasn’t then I needed you. It’s now that I want to be rescued.”
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
The theater had become a haunted place, and I, too, wanted to be free of it.
We went out through the door to the alley, where we could look up at that magical spire standing against a sky that carried the reflection of Charleston lights.
From the street that ran past the theater we could hear voices, and we walked toward them. I fitted very well into the circle of Garrett’s arm as we moved away
from the past and into a future we would learn about together. I felt light enough to float. Not lighthearted—too many terrible things had happened—but as though there in the dark, we moved into a beam of Charleston moonlight that felt warm and strong and very real.
A BIOGRAPHY OF PHYLLIS A. WHITNEY
Phyllis Ayame Whitney (1903–2008) was a prolific author of seventy-six adult and children’s novels. Over fifty million copies of her books were sold worldwide during the course of her sixty-year writing career, establishing her as one of the most successful mystery and romantic suspense writers of the twentieth century. Whitney’s dedication to the craft and quality of writing earned her three lifetime achievement awards and the title “The Queen of the American Gothics.”
Whitney was born in Yokohama, Japan, on September 9, 1903, to American parents, Mary Lillian (Lilly) Mandeville and Charles (Charlie) Whitney. Charles worked for an American shipping line. When Whitney was a child, her family moved to Manila in the Philippines, and eventually settled in Hankow, China.
Whitney began writing stories as a teenager but focused most of her artistic attention on her other passion: dance. When her father passed away in China in 1918, Whitney and her mother took a ten-day journey across the Pacific Ocean to America, and they settled in Berkley, California. Later they moved to San Antonio, Texas. Lilly continued to be an avid supporter of Whitney’s dancing, creating beautiful costumes for her performances. While in high school, her mother passed away, and Whitney moved in with her aunt in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from high school in 1924, Whitney turned her attention to writing, nabbing her first major publication in the Chicago Daily News. She made a small income from writing stories at the start of her career, and would eventually go on to publish around one hundred short stories in pulp magazines by the 1930s.
In 1925, Whitney married George A. Garner, and nine years later gave birth to their daughter, Georgia. During this time, she also worked in the children’s room in the Chicago Public Library (1942–1946) and at the Philadelphia Inquirer (1947–1948).
After the release of her first novel, A Place for Ann (1941), a career story for girls, Whitney turned her eye toward publishing full-time, taking a job as the children’s book editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and releasing three more novels in the next three years, including A Star for Ginny. She also began teaching juvenile fiction writing courses at Northwestern University. Whitney began her career writing young adult novels and first found success in the adult market with the 1943 publication of Red Is for Murder, also known by the alternative title The Red Carnelian.
In 1946, Whitney moved to Staten Island, New York, and taught juvenile fiction writing at New York University. She divorced in 1948 and married her second husband, Lovell F. Jahnke, in 1950. They lived on Staten Island for twenty years before relocating to Northern New Jersey. Whitney traveled around the world, visiting every single setting of her novels, with the exception of Newport, Rhode Island, due to a health emergency. She would exhaustively research the land, culture, and history, making it a custom to write from the viewpoint of an American visiting these exotic locations for the first time. She imbued the cultural, physical, and emotional facets of each country to transport her readers to places they’ve never been.
Whitney wrote one to two books a year with grand commercial success, and by the mid-1960s, she had published thirty-seven novels. She had reached international acclaim, leading Time magazine to hail her as “one of the best genre writers.” Her work was especially popular in Britain and throughout Europe.
Whitney won the Edgar Award for Mystery of the Haunted Pool (1961) and Mystery of the Hidden Hand (1964), and was shortlisted three more times for Secret of the Tiger’s Eye (1962), Secret of the Missing Footprint (1971), and Mystery of the Scowling Boy (1974). She received three lifetime achievement awards: the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1985, the Agatha in 1989, and the lifetime achievement award from the Society of Midland Authors in 1995.
Whitney continued writing throughout the rest of her life, still traveling to the locations for each of her novels until she was ninety-four years old. She released her final novel, the touching and thrilling Amethyst Dreams, in 1997. Whitney was working on her autobiography at the time of her passing at the age of 104. She left behind a vibrant catalog of seventy-six titles that continue to inspire, setting an unparalleled precedent for mystery writing.
A young Whitney playing with her doll in Japan.
Whitney with her family in Japan, where they lived for approximately six years. From left: Lillian (Lilly) Whitney, Charles (Charlie) Whitney, Phyllis Whitney, and Philip (Whitney’s half-brother).
Thirteen-year-old Whitney dancing in the Philippines.
Twenty-one-year-old Whitney at her graduation from McKinley High School in 1924.
Whitney worked at the World’s Fair in Chicago, Illinois, in 1933. She was pregnant with her daughter, Georgia, at the time.
Frederick Nelson Litten, Whitney’s mentor in writing and teaching, in Chicago, 1935.
Whitney’s first publicity photo for A Place for Ann, 1941.
Whitney, forty-eight, in her first study in Fort Hill Circle at her Staten Island house, where she lived with second husband Lovell Jahnke, 1951.
Whitney at sixty-nine years old with Jahnke in their home in Hope, New Jersey, 1972. Behind them hangs a Japanese embroidery made by Whitney’s mother.
Whitney at seventy-one years of age with Pat Myer, her long time editor, and Mable Houvenagle, her sister-in-law, at her house on Chapel Ave in Brookhaven, Long Island, New York, 1974. After her husband died in 1973, she lived close to her daughter, Georgia, on Long Island.
Whitney at eighty-one years old on a helicopter ride over Maui, Hawaii, to research the backdrop for her novel Silversword, 1984.
Whitney giving her acceptance speech for her Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1985.
Whitney rode in a hot-air balloon in 1988 to use the experience for her novel Rainbow in the Mist.
Whitney ascending in the hot-air balloon, 1988.
Whitney in her study in Virginia in 1996 at ninety-three years old, looking over her “Awards Corner,” which included three Edgars, the Agatha, and the Society of Midland Authors Award.
Whitney at ninety-six years old with her family in her house in Virgina, 1999. From left: Michael Jahnke (grandson), Georgia Pearson (daughter), Matthew Celentano (great-grandson), Whitney, and Danny Celentano (great-grandson).
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Phyllis A. Whitney
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-5040-4591-9
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
PHYLLIS A. WHITNEY
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