C, L, A…R, E.
The only letter I couldn't match was I.
And really, I shouldn't have been surprised, but for some reason piecing together Claire's name sent chills running all through me. And as I whispered, “Marissa!” and explained what I'd deciphered, those chills didn't go away. How could somebody live surrounded by the pain of what had happened so many years ago? How could somebody haunt himself this way?
And why—why—would he fall in love again now?
SIXTEEN
When my mother came bursting into the reception room, she had a ruby red dress slung over one arm, a pair of matching sequined shoes clutched in the other hand, and a forehead so full of wrinkles it was crying out for a steam iron.
“Where did you go? I couldn't believe you'd just leave like that!” She flung the dress and shoes on the chair, then smothered me in a hug.
All of a sudden I was eight years old again, home late from school after being sidetracked by a lizard. “I'm sorry.” I cleared my throat and pulled away. “It took a lot longer than I thought it would.”
“What did? Where have you been?”
So I rewound to when she'd sent Marissa and me to put the brooch back and told her all about finding the number in LeBrandi's sock and the Cosmo connection and how we'd talked to Opal at the Peppermint Peacock. And I was just about to tell her how I was sure that someone was trying to kill her, not LeBrandi, when she interrupts me with, “But why? Why did you do all that?”
I sputtered and stuttered and wound up saying a whole lot of nothing.
“Samantha! You're keeping something from me—what is it?”
“I…I… it's really not…”
“Samantha!” She looks at Marissa. “What is going on?”
So Marissa leans in and whispers, “She was trying to prove that it was Opal who killed LeBrandi, not you.”
“Me?” She turns to me. “You thought I killed LeBrandi?”
I cringed and shrugged.
“But why?”
“Because …” It suddenly seemed too convoluted and lame to explain, so I just threw my hands in the air and plopped down in a chair by the window.
Marissa says to my mother, “Because she thought you were desperate for the part of Jewel. You know, so you could get out of this whole mess with Max?”
My mother squints at me. “So I'm going to kill my competition? Is that it?”
I sit forward a little and say, “Well, you were also gone when I heard that banging next door… which is probably when she was getting killed. And you didn't want me to say anything about it, remember?”
My mother checks out the doorway to see if anybody's in the entry hall. Then she pulls the door closed and whispers, “It's a good thing you didn't, too. Apparently the coroner's determined her time of death to be around three-thirty, but, Samantha, that was just very bad luck on my part—it doesn't mean I killed her. Besides, Tammy was in the bathroom, too, so we have each other for alibis if it ever comes up.”
I slump back into the chair and cross my arms. “So what you're saying is, it's not something you bothered to mention when the police took your statement.”
She sits on the arm of my chair and says, “Tammy and I agreed that it would be better not to mention it. Samantha, why would I voluntarily put myself in hot water?”
I sit up and look her square in the eye. “Because it's the truth, and by skating around it, it makes it look like you're trying to hide something. And yeah, I went a little crazy and thought—really thought—that you'd killed LeBrandi, but that was because I don't even know who you are anymore! Do you know how many lies you've got going on here?” I start ticking off the things she's told me. “Your name, your age—your whole identity! Fake driver's license, fake newspaper articles, fake acting credits—”
“Shh! Samantha, stop it! Yes, I know…but murder?”
I open my eyes at her real big. “Why not? You said you weren't going to let anything stop you!”
She puts her hands in front of her face and just shakes her head. Finally I take a deep breath and say, “What's important right now, though, is why I don't think you killed LeBrandi.”
She peeks at me through her fingers and waits.
“Well, it's kind of hard for someone to suffocate themselves.”
Her hands whip off her face. “Samantha, I am not in the mood for puzzles!”
“What I'm saying is, I think that whoever killed LeBrandi thought they were killing you.”
Good thing she was sitting down. And while she turned pale as a polar bear, I told her my mistaken-identity theory, and how the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that there was somebody in the house who wanted her dead.
“But who?” she whispered.
“Exactly, Mom. That's what we've got to figure out. So you've got to tell me—who could possibly be that mad at you? Have you done anything to any of the people in this house to make them mad enough to kill you?”
“No!”
“Don't just say that…think!”
She thought a minute, then gave me a completely bewildered look. “I can't think of anything!”
I sigh and say, “Well, I can.”
“You can? Tell me!”
“I think that whoever killed LeBrandi is someone who doesn't want Max to get married again.”
“But I'm not going to marry him! I can't marry him!” I jump up and start pacing around. “No one knows that! And he thinks you're going to say yes tonight.” I lean in and say, “The guy is bonkers in love with you, you know.”
She whimpers, “But why? I haven't given him any reason to fall in love with me. I'm not flirtatious, I'm not interested in his collections or travels…. I've focused solely and completely on my acting!”
“Well, it's too late. He is. And I think the only way out of this is to tell him the truth. The whole truth.”
She starts following me around. “But then… Samantha, you don't understand. I really believe that if I tell him, he'll be so angry that I deceived him that he'll pull the plug.” She lets out a heavy sigh and says, “And then I'll never work again—his contract is—”
“I know, I know. Opal told me all about it.”
“There you go! You see?” Her face completely crinkles up, and just when it looks like it's going to shatter into a million pieces, she starts sobbing. “It's all over. The whole thing's shot. All that work, all that time …I was so close, and now I'll never know. Why does he want an answer tonight? Why couldn't he wait until… you know… later?”
I lean in and whisper, “I know you're concerned about your career, but hel-lo? Somebody tried to kill you? Wouldn't it be better to stand up right now and say, Hey! Everybody, listen up! I'm not gonna marry Max, so you can put your knives and guns and pillows away now.”
She sniffs at me through her tears. “Oh, Samantha …”
“I'm serious! There's a lunatic out there who wants the future Mrs. Mighty Max out of the picture, and the sooner you tell the world the truth, the longer you will live.”
She wipes away a tear and says, “But who? Who doesn't want me to marry Max?”
“Well, who else knows he's asked you? You told LeBrandi about it, right? Did you tell anyone else?”
“No.” My mother looks down. “But apparently she did.” She hesitates, then looks up at me. “Tammy knows.”
I threw my hands in the air. “Which probably means that everyone knows! So pretend it is everyone, okay? Everyone. And the sooner you tell Max you're not going to marry him, the better off you'll be.”
She sighs and says, “Okay, but it would be completely classless to take a megaphone and announce it, Samantha. I'll tell him at dinner.”
“Talk about classless! Someone did just die around here, and he's wanting to go out to some swanky dinner tonight? Can't you just tell him you're not up for it?”
“I already tried that, but he's insisting that LeBrandi's death is all the more reason to celebrate life.”
“No matte
r how you feel about it, huh?”
We were quiet for a minute, then my mother sighs and says, “I have to, Samantha. He finagled reservations at Trouvet's in Venice and—”
“You're flying to Italy for dinner?!”
“No! Venice down by the water. Near Marina del Rey? Never mind. It doesn't matter. The point is, Trouvet's is booked solid for nearly a year. It's impossible to get late-date reservations there unless you're a big-name celebrity, so I'm pretty sure Max shelled out a substantial bribe to get us in. He's arranged for a limo, and he's ordered in that gorgeous vintage dress and those shoes.” She picked up the red sequined shoes and held them out for me to admire. “Have you ever seen anything like them?”
I couldn't help it. I blurted, “Yeah—on Dorothy!” and I was on the verge of saying something snide about her skipping along the yellow brick road when she scolds, “Samantha!”
So I bite my tongue and say, “Sorry. But I would never embarrass my feet that way.”
She frowns at me but then forgets about the shoes and holds the dress up to her body. “Amazing, isn't it? I only wish they'd cleaned it better. It smells …I don't know… peculiar.” She holds the skirt out for me to whiff. “Do you think perfume would cover this?”
Now, really, I couldn't care less. How could she stand there discussing the cover-up power of perfume when someone wanted to kill her?
Then I took a whiff.
It was like lightning shooting up my nose and into my brain. It was the same scent I'd smelled on the tapestry in Max's office—in his shrine to his dead wife.
In a flash I knew how Max had managed to get that dress delivered on a Saturday on such short notice.
It had been stored here all along.
And in a flash I knew why he'd been so pleased to find out that the dress fit and why he wanted her to wear it.
His other wife must have worn it the night she'd agreed to marry him.
My heart was racing. The whole situation seemed to have an unstoppable momentum—like a destiny I couldn't change. If I didn't do something to stop it, my mother was going to be the new Claire. Max was probably too far gone to even care if she wasn't who she said she was.
“Samantha?” It was my mother's voice, distant and soft. “Samantha, what's wrong?”
I snapped out of it and decided I had to try something, anything, to stop this. Even if it meant breaking my pact with Hali. “There's … there's something I've got to tell you.”
“Oh?”
“The trouble is, if I tell you and someone finds out, then everyone else is probably going to find out about you.”
“About me? What about me?”
I just looked at her.
“Samantha!” she squealed. “You didn't!” Then she whispered, “Who? Who did you tell?”
I tried to sound confident. “Hali. Only Hali.”
“Hali? She's on the verge of a mental breakdown, and you tell Hali?”
“There's a reason she's been acting like that, Mom! Now, will you please just listen?”
My mother tosses the dress across the chair I'd been sitting in and flops into another. And as she's landing, she throws a forearm up to her forehead and whimpers, “I don't believe this!”
So while she's being all dramatic over there in an armchair, I tell her the story about Hali's eyes and how we figured out that she was Max's daughter, and how upset Hali was to find out who her father was, and how of course, after all of that, I had to tell her the truth about me.
When I'm all done, I've got her attention, all right. She is sitting bolt upright with her eyes wide open. And I'm really expecting her to say something like, His daughter? or That scoundrel! but instead she jumps up and cries, “You did not have to tell her. You chose to tell her. Samantha, I trusted you!”
Fire seemed to stab through my heart. This is the thanks I got for choosing her over Hali? “Yeah?” I said. “Well, so did Hali! I swore to her that I wouldn't tell anybody, and the only reason I told you was so you'd be able to turn things back on Max—so you could buy yourself a little time! He says he's going to tell you over dinner tonight, but you know what? I don't believe him. He's so bent on getting you to say yes that I can just see him conveniently forgetting to tell you until after you say yes.”
“I am not going to say yes!”
I plop down in the chair that's got the stupid red dress draped over the back of it and say, “Yeah, well, he seems to think you are, and so does Marissa. Huh, Marissa?”
My mother and I both look at her, but all she does is put both hands up and take two steps back. “Don't bring me into this!”
I shove the dress aside, saying, “This whole thing's insane! Do you realize—”
“Careful with that dress!” she says.
“Oh, please!” I take it off the back of the chair, and I'm about to toss it at her and say, Here! Take your precious dress, when the smell from it wafts up my nose.
It snapped in my brain like a wet towel. Yes, I'd smelled that smell in Max's office, but before that I'd smelled it somewhere else. And even though I hadn't been able to remember where when I'd been Dustbusting Max's tapestry, now I knew.
I flipped around in my chair and looked out the window, then jumped out of the chair and checked along the window wall, all along the floor.
My mother whispers, “What are you doing?”
“I've … I've got to go outside. I … I'll be right back!”
I raced out of the reception room and through the front door, propped the front door open a crack with the floor mat, then ducked behind the hedge like I'd done hiding from Tweedledee. I scooted along the house and peeked in the window, and there was my mother, talking to Marissa real intently.
I figured that the distance from the far edge of the reception room window to Max's office wall was about six feet. So I took two pretty big strides, then drew a line in the dirt with the heel of my high-top. Then I closed my eyes and tried to picture Max's office. It felt like it was only about ten feet deep, but with all that furniture crowded inside, it might have been more. Maybe fifteen. At the most.
So I took five more giant strides, then made another mark in the dirt and looked back at the wall between me and the reception room window. Smack-dab in the middle was the fan vent that had spooked me so badly when I'd been scooting away from Tweedledee, and right above it was a big square window with a heavy beige curtain over it.
It was definitely within the walls of Max's office, yet I hadn't seen a window or heard a fan when I'd been snooping around with Marissa.
I got down on my knees by the fan, but I didn't even have to sniff. That same woody, sweet smell was being blown right up my nose.
I stood up and tried to peek inside the window past the edge of the curtain, but it seemed to be tucked in and around something at the sides. I couldn't see past it at all.
Then I looked up and saw that above the curtain rod were a bunch of evenly spaced black rods. I looked closer, and then down, past the curtain's hem, and that's when I realized that right on the other side of the beige curtain, on the inside of the house, were burglar bars.
Burglar bars.
On the inside.
Suddenly I knew why Max's office seemed so small. It was small. He had converted part of it into a secret room. A secret room where he could store his valuables.
Valuables like Claire's jewels and her sentimental gowns.
And, if I was lucky, something worth a lot more to me than those.
SEVENTEEN
It was like a five-million-to-one shot. How was I going to break into Max's office, anyway? I mean, maybe I can pop a privacy lock with a pin, but that wasn't going to get me anywhere with a Schlage deadbolt. No, it would definitely take a key, and Max wore the stupid thing around his neck.
Still, I couldn't shove the thought completely out of my brain. To me it wasn't just any key. It was the key to my mother's freedom—and somehow it felt like the key to mine, too.
Not that getting my hands on her contrac
t with Max would bring her back home. If anything, it would keep her in Hollywood longer. Maybe forever. But at least I had to try to stop this avalanche of mistakes from completely crushing her.
From crushing us.
When I got back inside, I closed the reception room door tight and told my mom and Marissa what I'd discovered about the secret room in Max's office. “That's where he keeps the contracts, Mom. It must be!”
“Oh, Samantha, how can you be so sure? He could keep them anywhere. Besides, what are you thinking? That you can just climb through that window and steal them?”
“That would be a really great idea, but it won't work because he's got burglar bars inside.”
“Inside?” Marissa asks.
“Yeah. I could see them around the curtain. None of the other windows have them, and he probably didn't want it to look conspicuous.”
My mother looks over her shoulder and, even though the door's closed, she whispers, “This talk is making me very, very nervous.” She grabs the dress and ruby slippers and says, “I'm going to go upstairs and I'm going to pretend we never had this discussion, you hear me?” She opens the door and adds, “And I expect the two of you to do the same!”
No one can kill a conversation quicker than my mother. No blood, no guts, it's just over.
As the three of us made our way upstairs, we ran into Tammy on her way down. Tammy says hi and gives my mother a wink that she thinks we don't see. Then she stops and says, “Oh, by the way, Dominique, they've cordoned off your room, so if you want to change before LeBrandi's service you can borrow from me.”
My mother grabs her by the arm and says, “Cordoned off? You mean I can't go in there? For anything?”
Tammy wrinkles her nose like she's going to sneeze but doesn't. “That's right. Police tape is slapped all over it.”
“Can't I even go in there for some new underwear?”
“Are they worth going to jail for?”
“But—”
“The crew this morning made assumptions, and honey, from what I overheard earlier, some heads are going to roll downtown. Meanwhile, you can't get your underwear.” She leans in cautiously, like she's transporting plutonium. “It's a murder,” she whispers, “remember? And Dominique, they think it's one of us. God, everywhere I go now, I'm looking over my shoulder!”