by Josh Lanyon
“Not until—” He couldn’t finish it.
“I’m sorry, Rudolph. Really sorry.”
He nodded, reached into a pocket and withdrew a pristine silk handkerchief. He didn’t do anything so plebian as to blow his nose, but he did efficiently whisk away all traces of grief.
We gave him a couple of seconds to compose himself. I asked, “Did Anna tell you she was afraid someone was trying to kill her?”
“Not until last night.” There it was again. That tightness in his face when he referred to Anna. Something had happened between them. What?
Rudolph added, “I told her she was a fool for not going immediately to the police. I told her that Sara might still be alive if she had.”
Oh. Well, maybe that explained what had happened between them.
“Do you have any idea who might have—?”
He fixed me with a stern look. “Christopher, I know you’re trying to help. I realize that Anna roped you into this—and I’m aware of how difficult it can be to say no to Anna—but you should have told her no when she tried to involve you in this—this catastrophe.”
I glanced at J.X. Ignoring my silent cry for help, the bastard cut off a corner of French toast and chewed contemplatively while gazing out the grand picture window at the snowy day. I turned back to Rudolph.
He said, “Anna told me last night your theory that Sara was behind these accidents merely because she’d let Anna read Death and Her Sisters.”
“It wasn’t exactly a theory. More an…idea.”
“Anna has always been a little paranoid, but the idea that Sara would harm her is lunacy. It’s complete fantasy. First of all, Anna isn’t the only person Sara showed the manuscript to. I saw it months ago and on my recommendation Sara sent the book to Wheaton & Woodhouse. They’re publishing it this spring.”
“They’re publishing it?”
“Yes. The idea that Sara would try to kill Anna because Anna knew some terrible truth is not merely ridiculous, it’s offensive. That book is complete fiction. Sara’s twin sister died in an auto accident when they were eleven. There’s no mystery about it, let alone anything sinister. Sara took the pain of losing her sister and translated it into fiction. A wonderful piece of fiction.”
“Why didn’t you choose to publish the book?”
His mouth quivered. “I’d have loved to publish the book but I was aware that Anna might not be thrilled given the fact that she’s been suffering writer’s block for several years, and Anna is a dear friend. Also, I didn’t want there to be any suggestion that nepotism was responsible for getting Sara’s book published.”
“Nepotism?” J.X. rejoined the conversation.
“Sara and I plan—” He stopped. Steadied his voice. “Planned to be married in the summer. Which is another thing—the insulting notion that Sara would want Anna out of the way to rid herself of a romantic rival.”
“I never said that. I never suggested such a thing.”
“Anna suggested it last night when she accused Sara of murder.”
“She…” My eyes met J.X.’s. Apparently we’d missed one hell of a party the night before. I said carefully, “Anna came right out and accused Sara of trying to kill her?”
“Yes. She said she’d had time to think it through and she was convinced Sara was behind it all, and that Sara was the victim of her own machinations.”
“Rudolph, I admit I did wonder whether Sara’s manuscript could have been based on her own life, but the rest of it, no. I had no idea. And Sara was just one…possible suspect.”
He struggled to control his anger. “One possible suspect. You treated it like a game, like a puzzle, and now Sara and Nella are both dead.”
“No,” J.X. intervened. “Kit was trying to help Anna. Don’t put this on him. Anna should have gone to the police at the beginning. All Kit did was respect her wishes. The responsibility lies with Anna.”
“The responsibility lies with whoever killed Sara and is trying to kill Anna,” I said.
Abruptly we were out of things to talk about.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I’m not sure what transpired between Anna and Rudolph later that morning, but apparently they made up their quarrel of the night before because when I finally spoke to Anna they were about to leave for Nella’s funeral together. She didn’t invite me or J.X. along, for which I was grateful.
She stopped by to speak to us again a few minutes later. We were in the library. J.X. was on the phone to the Nitchfield PD—mostly to humor me, I think—when we both jumped at the sound of her crisp, “Christopher, darling.”
J.X.’s eyes messaged me in warning. I crossed the parquet floor to head Anna off as she entered the room on her crutches. She was dressed in a severely elegant black suit. Her auburn hair was coiled in soigné fashion on her head.
“Hey there. I thought you’d left,” I said brightly. Talk about sounding guilty.
Anna didn’t seem to notice. “We’re on our way out. I wanted to find out your travel plans.”
I hesitated. “Anna, are you sure you want us to go?”
She smiled warmly. “Yes, darling. I can’t thank you enough for all you tried to do, but it’s in the hands of the police now—where it should have been from the beginning.”
I resisted the temptation to look at J.X. He had turned away from us and was speaking very quietly into the phone. I said, “Have there been any developments since yesterday?”
“Our local police aren’t very forthcoming, but the impression I got yesterday was they were taking our theory about Sara very seriously.”
“Oh. Right.” Our theory. I knew I sounded tentative as I said, “We had breakfast with Rudolph. He was pretty upset at the idea that Sara was behind those attempts on your life.”
“I know.” Her green gaze was rueful. “My poor Rudolph. I didn’t handle it at all well last night. She took him in completely—as she did me.” Anna made an engaging moue. For all the stress and the strain of the past few days, she seemed much less tense, less worn. The relief of believing the threat to her life was gone? “He was furious with both of us.”
I was pretty sure she didn’t mean her and Sara.
“Well, he was relatively calm at breakfast, but he doesn’t believe Sara was guilty, and he’s got some good points.”
She gave a short, slightly exasperated laugh. “Don’t you start. It’s bad enough with Rudolph defending her. The terrible truth is that Sara was a clever and talented sociopath. She took us all in.”
It was odd how broken up Anna had been over Nella, and yet she seemed almost indifferent to Sara’s fate. Granted, she was convinced Sara had been trying to kill her. That betrayal was bound to affect her feelings. I remembered what Dicky’s betrayal had done to me—let alone David’s.
But Anna didn’t seem hurt. She seemed… “How long did Sara work for you again?” I inquired.
“Nearly five years. But…as you know, we never really know anyone.”
You could say that again.
I said, “Did you know Death and Her Sisters is being published by Wheaton & Woodhouse?”
She blinked at me a couple of times as though she was thinking of something else. “Sorry?”
“Sara’s manuscript. Did you know she’d submitted it and it had been accepted?”
“No. Who told you that?”
So even last night when they’d been arguing about Sara, Rudolph had refrained from giving Anna that piece of information. Why? Sensitivity to Anna’s writer’s block? But Anna’s writer’s block was over. She’d told us all at the fatal dinner party.
The memory of Sara’s face at that announcement flashed into my memory. Anna’s news had come as a complete surprise to her. And how could that be? She worked with Anna every day.
So Anna’s writer’s block had not come to an end?
Or Anna had kept it secret from Sara?
I said, “What’s the name of this new project of yours again?”
Anna stared at me and then gave
her head a tiny shake as though a bug had flown into her ear. “What?” Her tone was sharp.
“You said you were writing again. That you had a new project. I was wondering what the title was?”
“It’s untitled, darling.” Her gaze flicked to J.X. who was still on the phone.
“Is it completed?”
“Yes. No. The rough draft is complete, but it is very rough.” Her laugh was devoid of humor. “So no. It’s not completed. It’s not ready for submission. Why the fascination? You haven’t shown this much interest in my work since you were taking my writing course.”
J.X. hung up the phone and came to join us. He slipped a casual arm around my waist. “We’ve got plane reservations for tomorrow morning.”
Through the police department? I opened my mouth, met his dark, meaningful gaze, and swallowed what I’d been about to say.
“Excellent. Well, I’m certainly going to miss you two.” Some of Anna’s tension had drained away at J.X.’s words. “We’ll have a lovely farewell dinner tonight.” She shifted her crutch and smiled at me. “I’m truly grateful for all you tried to do, Christopher. I know this hasn’t been easy for you. You’ve been a dear, loyal friend to me in my hour of need.”
I’m not sure what I said in response. I felt numb in the wake of appalling realization.
Anna checked her diamond-studded wristwatch. “I have to go. Rudolph is waiting. We’ll see you in a few hours.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I nodded.
J.X. nodded too. He was smiling but his eyes looked like chips of obsidian.
Anna turned, maneuvering her crutches with the speed and agility of a much younger woman.
Neither J.X. nor I spoke till the thump, thump of her receding footsteps died.
I turned to J.X. “You didn’t change our reservations did you?”
“Not yet, but we’re not having dinner here tonight. I’ll tell you that much now.”
“Tell me the rest of it too.”
“Nitchfield PD got the coroner’s report on Sara Mason. She died of a massive dose of Agrostemma githago.”
“Corncockle.”
“Bull’s-eye.”
“When you say massive dose…?”
“Try ten times as much as was found in the wine we all drank at dinner.”
My knees gave out and I sat down on the boulder-sized leather-covered ottoman. He squeezed my shoulder comfortingly.
“Sara was the target all along.”
“We don’t know that for sure.” He said it automatically. When I raised my head to look at him he didn’t bother to defend it.
I said dully, “I think Anna killed her.”
“Kit—”
“And I think I helped her.”
I could see he wanted to reassure me, give me some comfort, but he was too honest. He said, “You did the best you could with the information you had.”
“She used me.”
“Yes.” It was unwilling.
“Does Nitchfield PD know?”
“Know what?”
“That Anna was behind it all? That the attempts on her life were all bullshit and that she was plotting to murder Sara all along?”
“No. And neither do you. Not for a fact.”
I gave him a bitter look.
“You have a theory. You don’t have any proof, Kit. There’s no evidence—”
I stood. “Then we’ll get the evidence.”
Sara’s room was still sealed, and J.X. and I nearly came to blows over my determination to get inside.
“If they haven’t figured out who killed Sara, they’re sure as hell not going to figure out who broke into her room.”
J.X. was staring at me with horror—and remaining firmly planted in my path.
“Remember that little thing called forensic evidence? Hell, remember circumstantial evidence? Or how about standing here red-handed? Nitchfield PD is on their way right now.”
“I’m not asking you to break the law, just let me do what I need to do.”
“What is it you think you need to do?” The question had to be rhetorical because it was clear he wasn’t letting me in that room while he was capable of preventing it.
“I need to find something. Some…proof.”
“Like what?” He glanced automatically down the hallway, and I saw a maid carrying a stack of linens on her way to Anna’s room. The maid politely ignored us though we couldn’t have been easy to overlook whispering and arguing in front of the clearly marked door to a crime scene.
What did I think I might find inside? Evidence of other projects, works in progress. No one got to be as good a writer as Sara without a lot of practice. Her rough drafts and first efforts might easily provide the basis for new work from Anna. Not that I believed Anna had killed Sara for her works in progress. There was the morbid fantasy of an aspiring writer, for sure. No, I had a feeling Anna’s motive for turning on Sara was more complex than ending her own case of writer’s block. The lure of a new manuscript had perhaps been the final incentive, but I didn’t think that was the first, let alone only reason.
“How should I know?” I groaned. “I fed the cops that whole line of Anna’s bullshit about those attempts on her life. Anna faked it all. No wonder it all sounded like a figment of her imagination. It was.”
J.X.’s eyes were sympathetic, but his tone was brusque. “You don’t know that for sure.”
“The hell I don’t.”
He caught my arm, forcing me to pay attention. “You don’t know any of this for a fact.”
“Do you think I’m right?” It really did matter to me.
“Yes.” He said it without hesitation.
“Then?”
“It’s beside the point. I think you’re right because I know you. And I know Anna. I know her enough, anyway. These cops don’t know you. Anna is a big fucking deal in this town, and no one is going to accuse her of killing her secretary without substantial proof.”
I yanked my arm away. “Then let’s find some goddamned proof.”
“Like what? A note from Anna saying she did it? Because that’s about what it would take at this point.”
There was something else he wasn’t telling me. I could read it in his eyes. What? Something he didn’t want me to know.
“I’m willing to bet money that this new as-yet-untitled project of Anna’s is one of Sara’s first efforts. Or maybe an earlier draft of Death and Her Sisters. Anna looked ready to faint when I said the book was going to be published.”
“Okay, but Sara’s laptop has already been confiscated by the police.”
“She had to have back-up files. Someone as methodical as Sara? No way did she trust it to a cyber-data backup and recovery site and let it go at that. She’ll have made copies, maybe even disks.”
“She probably used an external hard drive, which the cops will have.”
A brilliant idea struck me. “We could search Anna’s office. We might find what we need there.”
J.X. was not impressed. “And what do you think is going to happen if you’re found searching Anna’s office or trying to break into her computer? The cops aren’t going to understand what you’re doing and they aren’t going to have any sympathy with it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s going to matter when they arrest you.”
I turned on him in exasperation. “So we should just leave it alone? We should just let her get away with it? Let her get away with murder? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying you do not want to get caught trying to make off with evidence from this crime scene. Kit, will you please listen to me? It’s already on record that you came here to play amateur sleuth. Yes? That’s not an endorsement of your overall credibility—or stability. I’ll tell you flat out there is a perception that you’re a flaky-writer type. Wandering around the hospital half-naked and crocked on pain meds didn’t help your image.”
I felt myself turn scarlet with recollection. But it was just fo
r an instant. “Oh screw them all,” I snarled. “Screw their small-town minds and mores. Their lack of imagination isn’t my problem.”
J.X. ignored that. “You’re on record saying you thought there was a plot against Anna. Now you want to go on record saying you think Anna is the plot mastermind, that she killed her PA. Think about how that’s going to sound.”
“I don’t care how it’s going to sound.”
“I do. I care for your sake how it’s going to sound because if this gets into the papers and there isn’t any proof against Anna, you’re going to sink your career for nothing.”
I stood still.
He said quietly, “Think. I know you’re upset, but stop and really look at this objectively.”
I felt my resistance start to crumble in the face of his unshakable and calm certainty. As angry and betrayed as I was, I wasn’t ready to destroy what was left of my career, especially knowing that Anna would remain unscathed and unassailable.
“She used our friendship. She used me. She used me to commit murder.”
He pulled me into his arms. “I know.” He kissed my temple. Kissed the bridge of my nose. The warmth was real and tangible. I felt an unfamiliar and alarming desire to howl my anger and hurt and guilt onto his broad and capable shoulder. It was almost liberating to know that I could have a moment of weakness and it would be met by sympathy and that J.X. wouldn’t think anything the worse of me for breaking down.
I didn’t break down although I closed my eyes. Let myself be comforted for a few seconds. “God knows how long she planned it. Weeks. Maybe months.”
“I know.” He nuzzled my ear.
“I fell right into it.”
He was nibbling my earlobe.
“Your timing is off.” I pushed him away.
J.X. sighed and raked a hand through his hair. “I know. Speaking of timing, we need to get out of here.”
I nodded reluctantly. “And speaking of getting out of here, see if you can get us on a plane tonight. I don’t think I can face Anna again and not do something you’ll regret.”
He scanned my face. Nodded grimly.
