She leaned forward and dropped her voice an octave, getting serious. “You know what someone said to me? They said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but your sister is a narcissist.’ That’s what they said, a narcissist. I’d never heard the word before, I had to look it up in the dictionary. It’s a mental illness, is what it is. Narcissists are selfish and controlling, just like Laura. They’re outrageous liars too, you can’t believe a thing they say, and they don’t care about anybody but themselves. They use you and use you and use you, and then they throw you away.”
Her voice had taken on a corrosive bitterness. “When Laura was eight, she made Daddy take her to a kid’s modeling agency. Oh, she knew the effect she had on men, she knew they’d want her. They did too, snapped her right up, and after that, the whole family lived on the money she made. Needless to say, all the photographers were men. Even then, she was using men to get what she wanted. We moved to a big house, my parents got new cars, and neither of them ever worked another day. Laura was their princess, like she’s been ever since.”
I clamped my teeth tight to keep from reminding her that Laura’s mutilated body lay in the county morgue no longer a princess. No longer anything.
She said, “Laura drew in every man she ever knew. Teachers, neighbors, every man around. She was just naturally seductive, even when she was little. She was a bad seed, depraved, no morals whatsoever. She even seduced Daddy. That’s how low she was.”
With tears glistening on her cheeks like snail trails, she peered at me to see how I was taking what she said. Increasingly willing to give her every opportunity to sink to her lowest self, I gave her my best I’m listening look.
“We were still young enough to sleep with our bedroom doors open. Laura’s room was directly across the hall, and there was a night-light in the hall in case we needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. One night I woke up and saw Daddy in my door. He was so big he blocked out all the light from the hall. He pulled my door shut, and then I heard Laura’s door close too. I knew she had got him to come in there, and I knew what was going on. Can you believe that? She was that depraved. After that he went in her room almost every night. She had him under her thumb but good.”
My stomach lurched. Celeste Autrey was not only viciously disloyal to her sister, she had a maggot-ridden mind.
“How old was Laura then?”
“Nine or ten. Our mother knew what she’d done, too. She turned hateful to Laura, really spiteful and mean, but Daddy was so much under her spell that he went out of his way to let us know that Laura could have anything she wanted.”
She gave a short bark of a laugh. “It backfired on her, though. It always does, doesn’t it? Like they say, what goes around comes around. Daddy managed Laura’s career, getting her modeling jobs, making sure she got attention, handled all her money. But he wasn’t very good at it, and when he and Mama were killed, Daddy had run up huge debts that he’d expected to pay with Laura’s earnings.”
“Your parents are dead?”
“Killed in a car wreck when I was in college and Laura was seventeen.”
So much for the story Laura had told about parents in Connecticut who owned her house.
With a hint of satisfaction, Celeste said, “By that time, Laura was past the adorable-kid stage, and the catalog ads and magazine cover jobs weren’t rolling in anymore.”
With a mental image of two young sisters left alone with a mountain of debt that one of them was expected to pay off by being beautiful, I did some figuring.
“You were twenty-one then, right?”
She colored. “The older one, the one who should have helped Laura out, is that what you mean? I suppose I could have, but I had to survive too. I wasn’t making much money, and I had rent to pay and car payments and clothes. I couldn’t afford to support her too.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that you should have.”
“Well, plenty of other people suggested it, and I know Laura thought I should. She’d always got whatever she wanted, so she couldn’t imagine somebody else not rushing to her side to take care of her.”
“What did she do?”
She shrugged. “She had high school friends who took her in, first one and then another until she graduated. Probably seduced all their fathers while she was at it. That’s what she did, seduced men. Every boyfriend I ever had, she took. I could have done the same thing to her, but I had morals. Not Laura. She never thought twice about seducing men. She still got some modeling jobs after high school, so it wasn’t like she was destitute. And anyway, I had my own problems. I had to support myself, and I had to do it with my brains.”
“Unlike Laura.”
“You bet, unlike Laura. Not that I wasn’t pretty.” She looked intently at me. “I’m quite good-looking, you know.”
She wasn’t, but I nodded.
“I’m not saying Laura was dumb, but she wasn’t the brightest bulb on the string either. She didn’t have to be, all she had to do was smile pretty and men handed her money on a platter.”
She smiled grimly. “And if they didn’t, she just helped herself, like she did with Martin Freuland.”
“She took money from Freuland?”
She gave a tense laugh and erased the air in front of her face.
“Listen to me! I sound like somebody on a talk show airing the family’s dirty linen. All I wanted to ask you was if you know anybody who’ll take that cat?”
It took a moment to realize she meant Leo. With a sense of relief, I said, “You’re not keeping him?”
“Oh, God, no. I hate cats. Laura was always begging for one when she was little, but I won that battle. Not that anybody really cared how I felt, but my mother hated cats too, and she put her foot down on that one.”
I’m always confused when I hear somebody say they hate any kind of pet. I can understand that a person might not want one, but I can’t fathom hating an animal just because it isn’t some other kind of animal.
She said, “I hate dogs too. If you ask me, it’s plain stupid for human beings to walk behind a dog, waiting for it to pee and picking up its shit. It must give dogs a big laugh to know they’ve got humans to be their servants.”
I said, “I took Leo to the Kitty Haven. That’s a boardinghouse for cats.” My own voice had picked up its pace as if it wanted to keep up with hers.
“I suppose the Sheriff’s Department authorized that too. My God, they must have sent out invitations. Take the cat, come in the house, take her things. If any of her jewelry is missing, I swear I’ll file an official complaint.”
Stiffly, I said, “Ms. Autrey, nobody will take your sister’s jewelry. And Leo couldn’t be left in the house after Laura was killed there. Now if there’s nothing else I can do for you, it’s time for both of us to leave. As I said before, this is not my house, and I’m not authorized to invite strangers into it.”
She shot to her feet and stalked to the front door. “And your time is so valuable.” She laid heavy sarcasm on valuable, intent on letting me know that she thought my time was worthless, and slammed the door behind her.
With the echo of the door still reverberating, I deliberately closed my eyes and relaxed my fists, forcing myself to breathe slowly and deeply—a trick my old shrink had taught me when I wanted to go yank somebody bald-headed.
A little whining noise made me open my eyes. Mazie and Pete stood looking at me, Mazie with a quizzical tilt to her head.
Pete waffled his eyebrows. “Holy smokes! That woman could talk the balls off a pool table.”
I said, “She’s rabid, absolutely rabid.”
“You can tell that, just by listening to her yak, yak, yak. What the heck was she talking about?”