“Come on, no way am I letting you go without me,” Gary said. “Dude, I’m totally helpful. I can be a great lookout.”
Considering he couldn’t see over my steering wheel, I wasn’t convinced of that. But at this point, it was clear we weren’t getting away without him.
“Fine. Let’s go break and enter.”
* * *
It was nearing eleven before we were standing in front of the gate to Don and Deb’s estate in Beverly Hills. All the windows were dark, the dozen darlings having been put to bed long ago. I’d parked my Bug around the corner, the three of us hoofing it in so as not to attract attention (well, as little attention as a dwarf, a girl with purple hair and I could attract). We paused, crouching in the bushes to the right of the main gate.
“Okay, boss, how do we get in?” Gary asked.
I glanced up at the huge iron fence running the perimeter of the property. A security camera sat every ten feet, sweeping the area for signs of intruders. Or overly curious tabloid reporters.
“There,” I said, spying a section of fence a few feet to our left. A large oak tree stood just inside the gate, its branches hanging low over the fence. Providing just enough cover from any security cameras. “That’s where we go up and over.”
“Awesome,” Tina said, breaking into a grin that showed off a mouthful of white teeth in the dark. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was enjoying this.
“Whoa,” Gary said. “You mean climb over the fence?”
“You have a better idea?” I asked.
Gary looked up at the fence. He looked down. “Fine. But I’m gonna need a boost.”
The three of us scuttled to the oak tree. Then Tina and I acted as one, lifting Gary—who was surprisingly heavy for someone so short—until his hands grasped onto the top of the fence, and he hauled himself over. He paused a moment at the top then fell forward, tumbling down the other side. I cringed as he belly-flopped into a bougainvillea plant on the other side.
“You okay?” I whispered.
“Peachy,” came his muffled sarcastic reply.
“I’m coming over,” I answered, quickly hoisting myself up, landing thankfully on my feet on the other side. Tina hopped over in a second, making me wonder if this was her first breaking and entering attempt.
The three of us (with Gary still wearing a couple of flowers stuck in his hair) ran up the expanse of lawn between the fence and the main house, thankful for our dark clothes to keep us in shadow. Instead of going to the front, we took a chance and circled around the back of the house, hoping for a less conspicuous point of entry.
We found one just behind the kitchen window: a back door leading into what looked like a laundry room. Predictably it was locked tight, but the lock was a far less sophisticated one than they’d employ in the front of the house. I quickly pulled my kit from my pocket, selected a pick and went to work.
“You carry a set of lock picks?” Tina asked.
I nodded. “Don’t you?”
“I will now,” she answered, and I couldn’t help feeling just a little pleased at the note of respect in her voice.
“How long will this take?” Gary whined, looking over my shoulder.
“Shh. I’m almost there.”
Which was true. Three short minutes later I felt a tell-tale click and the knob turned in my hand.
But before I could step through, Tina rushed past me into the house. “We have sixty seconds,” she said, charging through the laundry room.
“Until?” I asked, as Gary and I jogged after her.
She shot me a look over her shoulder. “Before the alarm system goes off and wakes the entire house.”
Right. Alarm system. I hadn’t thought of that.
But apparently Tina had, as she made a beeline through the laundry room, down the hall and straight toward the front foyer. A white panel hung just inside the doorway, and she quickly flipped it open, punching a series of numbers into a keypad. A moment later a green light flashed, giving us the all clear.
“Okay, I give up. How did you know the code?” I asked.
Tina grinned. “I watched the raw footage from the night Barker died. Don had to punch in the code when he got home.”
I blinked at her. “Wait—how did you get the footage?”
She shrugged. “I hacked your computer after you left today.”
If I wasn’t so impressed, I’d have been livid. As it was, I was totally glad Tina was on my team that night.
“Hey girls,” Gary said, hailing us from down the hall. “I think I found the wine cellar.” He pointed to a doorway under the stairs. Sure enough, as we looked through, a second set of stairs lead downward toward a basement area beneath the house.
I led the way, slowly descending the dark stairway until it opened up into a small room containing a maze of wooden shelves, lined floor to ceiling with wine racks. I looked around, feeling my spirits sink. There must have been hundreds of bottles. It was going to take us forever to look through them all.
Gary took the fork to the right, I took the one on the left, and Tina snaked down the aisle in the center. We worked in silence, each isolated in our own section of the maze, checking the labels of each bottle for so long that my back started to ache from being crouched at the lower shelves. I was just about to concede that Felix was right about the harebrained quality of this plan when I spied a label on a bottle of white wine with the same grapevine logo as the Fleurie Vineyards website.
I quickly grabbed it, reading the label. Bingo. It was the chardonnay Don had purchased. I put it back, checking the next bottle. A Fleurie merlot. I quickly pulled the next few bottles out, counting off two chardonnay and three merlot. There was one bottle missing.
The one that had poisoned Barker.
I moved to go tell Gary and Tina we’d hit pay dirt.
But I never got the chance.
As I spun to my left, I caught only the slightest glimpse of a wine bottle flying toward my head before pain exploded at my temple, my vision blurring, and the polished hardwood floor of the cellar rushed up to meet me.
Chapter Nineteen
A heavy metal drummer had taken up residence in my head. Or at least that’s what it felt like when I finally came to. I had no idea how long I was out, but it was long enough for a whopper of headache to gain a foothold between my ears. I lay as still as I could, concentrating on not throwing up as I felt that drummer bang against my temples from the inside. After a few moments it subsided to a dull roar, and I braved opening my eyes. I blinked slowly, trying to get my bearings.
I was on the floor, somewhere cold and hard. It was dark and, if you didn’t count the pounding in my own head, silent. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the lack of light, I saw a mirror along one side of the room, my own reflection staring back at me beside a line of wooden props and judgmental dolls. The divas’ practice room. Don must have knocked me over the head and dragged me here. I wondered how long ago that might have been. Or, more importantly, how long until he came back to finish me off.
That thought spurred me to try moving, starting with my fingers. They worked, but I didn’t get further than a small wiggle because I quickly realized my hands were tied together behind my back with some sort of rope. I looked down, just barely making out the shape of my own feet in the dark. Yep, they were bound too.
Fabulous.
“Allie?” I heard a low whisper from somewhere to my right.
I squinted in the dark. “Gary?”
“Oh, thank God, you’re alive!”
“Where’s Tina?” I croaked out.
“Here,” another voice answered, just beyond Gary.
“What happened?” I asked, wiggling into a sitting position as I blinked through the blackness. I could just make out her form a few feet away.
“I don’t know. One minute I’m looking at cabernets, the next I’m on the floor.”
“Ditto,” Gary said, and I could hear him rubbing the back of his head. “Where are we?”
&nb
sp; “The Davenport’s basement,” I answered. “Don must have dragged us all down here.”
“Or Deb,” Tina said.
I turned to her. “Deb?”
“Yeah, you know, I’ve been thinking. Why not Deb? She had access to the bottle, access to the kids to trash your place.”
“No way,” Gary chimed in. “Hot chicks don’t kill people.”
Tina shot me look. “Where did you find this guy?”
“Hey. I’m right here!”
“Do you really think Deb is strong enough to carry all three of us down here?” I asked, ignoring Gary.
Tina shrugged. “Why not? I’m not that heavy. What are you, a size ten?”
“Six,” I shot back under my breath.
Tina’s snort said she didn’t totally believe that, but she let it go. “So, neither of us is that big, and Gary’s kid-sized—”
“Hey! I’m short, not deaf. I can hear you, you know!”
“—so it’s totally possible she could drag us down here one by one.”
“Possible, I guess. But my money’s still on Don,” I countered. “He had way more motive to want Barker dead than Deb. Besides, he lied to me about not knowing who his wife was sleeping with.”
“News flash, New Girl: lots of people lie to tabloid reporters. That doesn’t mean they’re killers.”
I bit my lip. “You know, I really hate it when you call me New Girl.”
“Oh yeah? Well, you know what I really hate?” Tina asked, inching closer to me. “Being knocked over the head and tied up!”
“Don’t tell me you’re trying to blame me for this?” I shot back, scooting toward her.
“Um…duh! This whole thing was your idea.”
“Well, at least I had an idea. At least I had a lead to follow.”
“I have plenty of leads of my own!” Tina shouted back, getting right up in my face now.
“Yeah, ones you stole from my computer.”
“Oh, you’re one to talk! I know you were looking at my coroner’s report.”
“Dude,” Gary piped up. “Cat fight. Hot.”
“Shut up,” we both yelled at him in unison.
“Wow, and people say I have anger issues.”
“Gary, I swear to God…” I started.
“Quiet, someone’s coming,” Tina interrupted me.
I shut my mouth with a click. She was right. I heard footsteps on the stairs above us. I bit my lip, listening in the dark, feeling Tina and Gary do the same as Don…or Deb…came closer.
At any other time, three on one odds were pretty good. But when all three were tied up, I didn’t like our chances of making it out of this estate alive.
A door at one end of the room opened, and light suddenly flooded the room. I blinked against it, feeling my pupils contract painfully as I squinted to see which Davenport was shadowed in the doorway.
It wasn’t until the door shut again and the overhead lights turned on in the practice room that I saw which one of us had been correct about the killer’s identity.
And was shocked to realize we were both wrong.
“What a terrible nuisance you all have caused,” Nanny Nellie Mc Gregor said, her lilting voice taking on a sinister tone as she held a gun straight-armed in front of her.
“Dude. The hot nanny!” Gary said. “Totally didn’t see that one coming.”
I’ll admit, neither had I.
“Wait, you killed Barker?” Tina asked. And I was glad to hear my own surprise mirrored in her voice.
Nanny nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, I did.”
“But why?” I asked.
She cocked her head at me. “He was evil. What he was doing to the family, to the children, it had to be stopped.”
“What was he doing to the family?” Tina asked. I felt her twisting her body toward Nellie, her hands coming up against mine. Or, more specifically, the ropes holding her hands together. Instinctively I backed up, my fingers exploring the knots at her wrists. If just one of us could get free, we might have a fighting chance.
“The children’s lives were being torn apart by that beastly show,” Nellie went on. “Cameras everywhere, paparazzi stalking them,” she said, spitting out the word as she sent an accusatory look Tina’s way.
Tina shrugged. “Sorry?”
“Sorry is right! Sorry is what their lives had become. A sorry excuse for a childhood.”
I felt my fingers slip beneath the first knot, slowly loosening it as Tina shifted closer.
“So what did you do?” Tina asked, clearly trying to keep Nellie talking, trying to buy us some time.
“I did the only thing I could do! Deb and Don didn’t care about the girls. All they cared about was the money and the fame. What their poor excuse for parenting had bought them. Their children became a distant second to their careers.” Nellie snorted. “As if they’d even have careers without those poor girls.”
“Hey, Deb has a lot on her plate right now,” Gary piped up, defending her.
Nellie spun the gun his way.
Gary squealed.
“So you had to protect them,” I asked, getting us back on the path of distraction. I could feel the first knot slip loose. A couple more minutes, and Tina would be free.
“Yes,” she answered, an eerie calm coming over her voice as she turned back to me. “I had to protect them. I’m all they have. I did the best I could to shield them from the craziness, but when I saw Deb in bed with Barker, I knew he had to be stopped. And there was only one way.”
“So you killed him,” Tina said.
Nellie nodded. “It was easy, really. All I had to do was inject some of Deb’s anti-depressants through the wine cork. I told Barker it was a gift from Deb.”
“And once he was dead, the filming stopped,” I noted.
She nodded, her face breaking into a smile. “Everything has been so nice. The children have been so happy these last few days. So normal.”
“Except for you taking them to trash my place. That’s hardly normal kid stuff,” I pointed out.
She frowned, my accusation of being a bad influence on the kids clearly digging deeper than that of being a murderer. “I told them it was a game. They had a wonderful time smashing your dishes.”
I’ll bet.
“Then smashing me over the head?” I asked.
“Certainly not!” She shook her head emphatically back and forth. “I had them wait in the car for that.”
“Well, aren’t you a model caregiver,” I couldn’t help saying.
“I am! I take care of those girls and anything else that needs taken care of around here!”
“Like us?” Gary squeaked out.
“Yes. Like you. Like you nosey, no-good tabloid reporters digging where you have no business being.”
“Technically, I’m no longer on the Informer’s staff,” I pointed out.
“Shut up!” she shouted. And since she punctuated it by shoving the gun in my face, I did.
“So now you’re going to kill us too?” Tina asked. I could feel her hands slipping from the knots, wiggling free. “Kill us right here in the girls’ rehearsal room?”
Again, the frown settled between Nellie’s eyebrows, as if appalled that we’d even think such a horrible thing of her. “Of course not.”
“Oh, thank God,” Gary sighed.
“I’m going to take you into the closet and kill you there. I don’t want to wake the girls.”
I think I heard Gary squeal again
“And,” Nellie went on, looking right at me, “I’m going to start with you.”
My heart leapt into my throat as she pointed the gun at my head and took a step toward me.
Then everything happened at once. Nellie’s hand clamped around my arm, I felt Tina’s hands slip free, and then Tina jumped up from the floor like a jack-in-the-box, hurtling herself straight into Nellie.
Surprise registered on the nanny’s face for a split second before she toppled backwards, the gun going off in her hand as she fell, taking
out a Barbie and a chunk of the mirror with her.
Gary screamed, crawling into a fetal position.
I dove for the weapon but considering I was still bound, couldn’t do much with it. I twisted onto my back, trying to fit my fingers around the trigger as I watched Tina wrestle on the ground with Nellie. Tina had the element of surprise on her side, but Nellie had the advantage of having both her hands and feet free. One she used to the fullest, wrapping one leg around Tina’s middle and pinning her down.
“Grab the gun!” Tina yelled, pulling at Nellie’s hair.
“I’m trying!” I shot back. I had my fingers around the pistol, but with my hands behind me I couldn’t very well see where I was aiming. I twisted, contorting my body until I thought I had Nellie in my sights, and pulled the trigger.
A shot rang out, accompanied by a piercing scream. It took me a second to realize it was not Nellie’s.
“Oh my God, you shot me!” Gary yelled.
Oops.
“Sorry! Gary, are you okay?” I asked, twisting to face him. A thin trickle of blood oozed down his right arm. If I had to guess, it was a minor flesh wound. But Gary took one look at it, saw the blood, then his eyes rolled up into his head and he promptly fainted.
Great. Some bodyguard he was.
“A little help here!” Tina shouted. She was still grappling on the floor with Nellie, and if I had to guess I’d say Nellie was winning. Tina had a chunk of Nellie’s hair still twisted in her fingers, but Nellie had her hands around Tina’s neck. And Tina’s face was quickly turning the same shade of purple as her hair.
Chucking the gun, I inch-wormed across the floor toward them, bringing my legs up to my chest and shoving my bound feet toward the nanny as hard as I could. She grunted, falling to the side, her grip loosening enough that I heard Tina suck in big gulps of air.
I pulled my feet in close, coming in for another attack again, but Nellie was faster, rolling to the left before I could connect.
Tina moved to grab her leg, but the lack of oxygen slowed her reflexes and before she could even make contact, Nellie was on her feet again.
And reaching for the gun.
“That’s enough!” she yelled, all semblance of British propriety gone as she stood over us, pointing the weapon our way. Her hair stuck up in tufts, missing a small section on the side. Her cheeks were flushed, eyes wide, breath coming in pants. “I’ve had enough of all you tabloid reporters!”
Hollywood Confessions Page 20
