After the meal, she drank a thin tea with a flowery aroma that filtered up her nose and brought back a memory-harsh and ugly. The night of the attack, she’d smelled something sweet as this blend-the underlying scent of jasmine. Her fingers slipped. The cup slid to the table and rolled, spilling tea across the varnished surface. Hot tea dripped from the table to her thighs.
“Adria?” Zach asked.
She knew the instant the smell of jasmine reached her nostrils who had attacked her.
“What is it?” Zach demanded, staring at her with harsh gray eyes.
“Everything.” She started wiping up the tea, refusing to look at him, telling herself over and over again she had to be wrong. But she knew. She knew. He grabbed her hand, squeezing it, refusing to let her keep mopping the spill with her napkin.
“What?”
“I think I know who attacked me in the motel,” she said unevenly, wishing she didn’t know the truth.
“What?”
“The person who sent me the nasty notes.”
“How?”
“This tea.” She motioned to the cups on the table. “It’s jasmine, the same scent that was on the person who attacked me.”
A knot formed at the hinge of his jaw and he sniffed the brew. Denial seemed about to fall from his tongue before he shoved the cup of tea away, sloshing hot tea onto the table. “Eunice,” he bit out, his eyes mere slits.
Adria nodded mutely, unable to form the words that hovered between them-that Zachary’s mother had killed Ginny Slade.
“I need to speak with you. Alone.” Eunice left the message on Zach’s cell phone. “There’s something important I need to tell you and the only way you’ll ever learn the truth is to talk to me. Please, Zach, I know you think awful things about me, but they’re just not true. Let me explain what really happened. You’re the only one I can trust.” She slid the receiver into the cradle of the wall phone in her kitchen and didn’t doubt for a minute that Zach would show up.
Soon.
As she sat at the kitchen table and read the newspaper article about Ginny Slade’s murder, Eunice knew that it was only a matter of hours before Zach would come and accuse her of killing Ginny.
He wouldn’t believe her when she denied it.
Frowning, she glanced through the paned windows to the greenish waters of Lake Oswego, as if in looking at the murky water she could figure out what to do. Few times in life had Eunice given up and she wasn’t about to start now.
But who had killed the wimpy little nursemaid? Surely someone associated with the family; perhaps even a family member.
One of her own children?
Someone clever enough to know that Zach, and probably the police would accuse her. Someone, perhaps, who knew that Kat’s death hadn’t been a suicide, that Eunice had played a vital role in the second Mrs. Witt Danvers’s demise.
“Bloody hell,” she muttered, angry that her plans had gone awry. Why hadn’t that little money-grubbing bitch left town? Why hadn’t she backed off from her claims to be London, Witt’s most precious baby?
It made her sick. Even now her stomach roiled and filled the back of her throat with a horrid taste and the rage she felt, the white-hot fury, pumped through her blood. She’d borne Witt four fine children. Four! And he’d turned away from them when that gold digger had batted her fake eyelashes at him.
Foolish, foolish old man.
He’d gotten what he deserved by losing his special child and finding his arm-candy wife in bed with his son. Her knees buckled at the thought of Zach and Kat. Sick, that’s what it had been. Dirty. Incestuous; and now…now he was taking up with that horrid woman’s child.
It was unthinkable.
Eunice had no doubt that Adria was London; the girl’s resemblance to Kat was eerie. It made Eunice’s skin crawl. If only Zach had been sired by Anthony Polidori, everything would have been better. So much easier. Cleaner.
As it was…
Eunice shivered and rubbed her arm where a huge bruise had formed when she’d tackled Adria in that horrid dive of a motel. She was sore and still limped because of the attack that hadn’t quite worked. She’d been so angry, so worked up, so frenzied. She remembered lying in the dark, waiting, knowing that Adria, like Kat, was with Zach.
Jesus, why didn’t he learn? Why was he drawn to his own stepmother and her daughter? His half-sister? Eunice thought she might throw up at the thought and she began to shake violently.
Calm down…you must remain calm. That’s the only way. You need to deal with Zach. Soon. And possibly London! God, why hadn’t Ginny Slade kept her end of the damned bargain. No doubt Zach knew all about the kidnapping and he would have deduced his own mother’s part in the crime.
For a second, she considered running. There might still be time to get to Canada or even Mexico.
And then what?
Katherine will win.
London will win.
“No!” she ground out, her fists clenching so hard her fingernails dug deep into her palms.
She had to finish what she’d started.
The next step was facing Zach.
She knew her children well and understood Zach better than the others. By now, he would have figured out that she was behind the attacks against his precious Adria and he’d want a face-off.
Well, he’d get one. She walked from the kitchen to the master bathroom and opened the medicine chest. An array of vials and bottles were lined up on the slim glass shelves, the result of her complaints of nagging aches and pains that no one doctor could pinpoint. Because there had been no pain. Despite her claims to the medical profession, she felt as fit and able as she had at thirty-five, perhaps even stronger, but she’d managed to collect samples and prescriptions from nearly a dozen doctors and combined with her own basic knowledge of chemistry, anatomy and medicine, she was able to create her own little “cocktails.”
She remembered slipping a mixture of Valium and sleeping pills into Kat’s vodka in her hotel room on the night of her death. While Kat had been out, Eunice had slipped into the room, compliments of a key she’d lifted from Kat’s purse while Kat had been in the hotel bar. She’d entered the room while Kat was still ordering drinks. It had been so easy to doctor the bottle in the room, then wait on the balcony while Kat poured herself another drink and eventually ended up in the shower.
Kat had been weak.
Losing London had nearly killed the bitch. But not quite.
She’d needed another push. Literally.
And Eunice had only been too glad to give it to her. It had been too easy to entice the pathetic woman onto the veranda.
“Mama,” Eunice said now, in the same little girl’s voice she’d used to lure her nemesis onto the balcony. “Mama.” Kat had been so disoriented, she’d never realized the trap until it was too late and then her eyes had widened in terror and surprise just before Eunice sprang and pushed her over the edge.
Eunice had thought she’d gotten away with murder.
Kat’s death had been written off as suicide due to depression and an unfortunate overdose.
But someone had known the truth, Eunice deduced as she picked up the vials and hypodermic needle she wanted and closed the cabinet door. The mirror slammed into place and she was suddenly staring into her own haunted eyes.
Yes, she’d wanted Kat dead.
But she’d had to live with the guilt.
And now, she suspected, someone else had known she was a murderer and was hoping she’d take the fall for Ginny Slade.
Who?
If not one of her own children, which she couldn’t accept, what about Anthony or someone from the Polidori clan? Maybe this was payback for Ginny letting them take the heat for London’s disappearance…no…