“Nine-one-one, what is your—”
“My friend! She’s been stabbed! Please—”
“All right, ma’am, calm down. You say your friend has been stabbed?”
“Yes! Oh, Kay . . . No . . .”
“Is your friend breathing?”
“I think so . . .” Landry reaches out and touches Kay’s neck, feeling for a pulse below her ear. It’s there, but faint.
“Ma’am—”
“She’s breathing,” she tells the operator. “Hurry. Please hurry.”
“They’ve already been dispatched, ma’am. Who stabbed your friend?”
“I don’t know,” she says helplessly, staring down at the tortoiseshell knife handle protruding from Kay’s abdomen. “I honestly don’t.”
As the flamboyant movie director Wesley Baumann, clad in what appears to be a brocade smoking jacket and an ascot, steps up to the televised podium, Crystal shakes her head. Crazy Hollywood people. Can’t the guy just wear a regular old suit and tie like a normal businessman?
“Thank you very much for being here, and good afternoon,” Baumann says to the array of microphones and cameras in an affected accent that’s far closer to Britain than the Bronx, where he was born. “It gives me great pleasure to announce my newest project, which has been many years in the making. Part of the reason for this is that I could envision only one actress in the lead role—but first, I had to track her down, and then, I had to convince her. Neither proved to be an easy task.”
Dramatic pause.
Rolling her eyes, Crystal half expects him to thrust a lit pipe between his lips.
He refrains, going on to talk a bit about the film, and it turns out to be a biopic about the life of Ingrid Bergman.
Okay, now it makes more sense. Jenna Coeur is a dead ringer for the late Hollywood legend. Casting someone so notorious in such a high profile project is bound to be controversiaclass="underline" added appeal for an unconventional, media-courting director like Baumann.
“The script calls for a versatile actress with the range to depict Bergman from her early years in Stockholm through Hollywood’s golden era to middle age and her valiant seven-year battle with breast cancer.”
Those two words hit Crystal like a punch in the gut.
Coincidence? Or . . .
“And now,” Baumann continues, with a sweeping gesture as he looks stage left, “I’d like to introduce the extraordinarily versatile, extraordinarily lovely . . . Miss Jenna Coeur.”
As she steps up to the podium, her head is bowed. Her shoulders rise with one deep breath, as if to steel her nerves, and then she looks up, directly into the cameras.
It’s her.
Not just Jenna Coeur, but her—the woman she saw at Meredith’s funeral.
“Hang on, Kay . . . just hang on . . . help is coming . . .”
Kay can’t see Landry and she can’t answer her but she hears her voice loud and clear.
The hearing is the last sense to go, she recalls the hospice nurse saying years ago, when Mother lay dying. Go ahead and talk to her. She’ll hear you.
Perhaps. But Mother was listening to someone else.
You came back for me, Paul! I knew you would. . . . yes, I’m ready. I’m ready. Let’s go.
That was when Kay realized that death would not be the dark, lonely moment she’d feared ever since that long-ago day her doctor’s receptionist, Janine, had called to tell her the test results were back.
Life—it was life that had been dark and lonely.
Not death.
When you die, there’s light—bright, beautiful light. Mother talked about that. And there are people there, waiting; people you love, and they’ll never leave you. You’ll never have to say good-bye again.
Kay’s parents found each other again on the other side, this time forever, and Meredith . . .
She knows Meredith’s beloved mother had to be waiting for her when she crossed over.
And now it’s my turn, and Meredith is already there.
She’ll be waiting for me.
She’ll be coming to find me, any second now . . .
“And you’re sure your husband wouldn’t have picked this up somewhere else—” The homicide detective studies the plastic-wrapped guitar pick. “—maybe not from the sidewalk that morning, but the day before? Maybe he bought it, or someone gave it to him, or—”
“No.” Sheri shakes her head firmly. “That’s impossible.”
“Impossible is a strong word, Mrs.—”
“But it is impossible. Trust me.” She’d already told him about Roger’s germaphobia; how he would never in a million years pick up a filthy guitar pick from the sidewalk.
Now she explains, “He would have taken those jeans, clean, out of his drawer that morning. He never wore something two days in a row. That’s just how he was. Everything went into the hamper at night when he took it off.”
Sitting back in his chair, the detective—in his quintessential rumpled shirt—nods thoughtfully.
“I do all the laundry,” she goes on, “and I always check the pockets, so it wasn’t there when I washed the jeans. It got there that morning. Someone else put it there. Not Richard.”
“Okay.” The detective leans forward, looking again at the guitar pick. “I don’t know what this means, but for starters, we’re going to look for prints, and I’m going to see if I can use it to link any other recent murders here in Indianapolis.”
Stumbling along the waterfront path as it winds past the outbuildings of the Grand Hotel property, Elena spots a long wooden fishing pier ahead. Two men are there despite the thunderstorm, standing side by side along the railing holding bamboo rods above the water.
Elena stops running, clutching her side, panting hard.
“Help!” she calls. “Please, please . . . someone is trying to kill me . . .”
They don’t turn their heads toward her, can’t hear her voice above the hard summer rain.
She looks over her shoulder, still expecting to see . . .
Landry, Jenna . . . whoever slaughtered Kay in the picture-perfect teenage girl’s bedroom decorated in seaside colors.
She tries to catch her breath, shouts again, “Help! My friend . . .”
My friend is dead.
I went to tell her that I thought we should get out of that house before something terrible happened, and . . .
And it already had.
I found her, and . . .
And I panicked, and . . .
And I didn’t stop to help; I didn’t even stop to grab my cell phone to call for help.
I just ran. Ran away, ran for my life.
Again she looks over her shoulder.
No one is chasing her.
But I know what I saw. I had her blood on my hands. Dear God . . .
Kay. Poor Kay.
Blinded by the glare of flashbulbs, Jenna is transported back to that day at the courthouse, the day the verdict was read.
“We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty . . .”
Not guilty.
Stunned, she turned to her legal team, certain she must have heard wrong. She hadn’t. Her attorneys had never let on to her that they anticipated any other outcome, but relief was evident in their faces and posture. As for her . . .
Not guilty?
She clearly remembers what happened that night at her mansion in the Hollywood Hills.
Olivia, the daughter she’d given up for adoption, had found her way back into her life—
Just as Steven once had, about seven, maybe eight years after she left Minnesota and transformed herself into Hollywood royalty. Of course, she saw him for what he really was, and had been all along: a dirt bag nobody. The irony: he didn’t even want her back. He wanted money. He’d gotten himself into trouble. Loan sharks, drug dealers . . . something like that.