“Why do you say that, Jack?”
He pressed his lips together, swallowed once more, and whispered, “He said he didn’t have enough money to go through with an operation, so he stayed home and died.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, reaching over to squeeze Jack’s arm lightly. “Perhaps the book was more important to him than his health.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head, still a little bewildered. “Like I said, he was pretty religious.”
“It’s obvious that he revered the book, so my hope is that you’ll be able to enjoy it as much as he did. It really is a work of art.”
“Oh, I will. The whole family will. It was a part of him and his father before him, so I’ll keep it as a centerpiece of our home.”
“That sounds wonderful.”
“But wow,” he said. “Forty-eight thousand dollars coulda put a lot of meat on the table, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
? ? ?
“It was definitely a rattlesnake,” Derek confirmed, and handed me a glass of red wine.
I couldn’t say anything to that, just clutched my wineglass and tried to keep from trembling again.
It took two glasses to calm me down. Derek shot back two fingers of scotch. We sat sprawled on opposite ends of the couch with our feet touching.
“Bruce informed me that snakes can be quite resilient,” Derek continued. “He’ll take the creature to a rescue facility he’s familiar with and it’ll be nursed back to health.”
“I’m glad,” I said, though my tone didn’t fit the words. It wasn’t that I wished the snake were dead. I just wished I’d never seen it before.
“The door lock had been switched out,” Derek explained. “So someone could lock it on the outside as usual, but anyone inside the room couldn’t open it.”
“Jeez.” I took another long sip of wine. “That took some time and planning. They would’ve had to do it overnight, because they’d have been seen during the day.”
Derek scowled. “I’m sorry I didn’t foresee this, but from now on I’ll have a team on duty at night. George and Barbara are staying there tonight, and Mindy and Steve will take tomorrow night. They’ll switch off as long as necessary.”
“Good,” I said. “I mean, too late for me and the snake, but good going forward.”
Derek moved to my end of the couch and wrapped his arms around me. He felt comforting and warm and I leaned into him.
“The peanuts were a dangerous threat,” he said, “but at least Randy had his EpiPen.”
“Yes, but now a rattlesnake?” I said, starting to shiver again. “What kind of lunatic brings a rattlesnake to work?”
Chapter Fifteen
A little while later, we were heading for bed when I realized I couldn’t sleep before reading some of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s biography. I took my phone to bed with me and vowed to stay up for fifteen minutes only.
Skimming through the pages, I read that Frances was born in England but lived for a long time outside of New York City. She was married, then divorced, then married again but for only two years. She had two children but one died at age sixteen. Did the child who lived go on to spawn the parents of Lug Nut and Grizzly? That was a long shot.
I shook my head. No, it wasn’t just long. This was the longest shot I’d ever taken. But I couldn’t afford to pass up a possible clue.
I found more references to Broadway shows and now the reason was obvious. Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances’s best-known book at the time, had been turned into a Broadway play.
Tucked into the anecdotal comments made by her contemporaries was one reference to another show she attended that starred a young Mae West. Frances had been amused by the bawdy young actress and had invited her and the other cast members to her Long Island home for tea. Frances’s friends also mentioned how they all enjoyed seeing George M. Cohan and an up-and-coming ingenue, Helen Hayes, on Broadway.
I thought it was charming that the creator of Little Lord Fauntleroy could also enjoy a risqué revue like the one that had featured Mae West. But I still couldn’t quite picture Mae West sitting down for tea with an English gentlewoman. They must have made quite a pair.
But so what?
“Have you found what you were looking for?” Derek murmured.
I flinched. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”
“No, darling.” He sat up and drank some water.
Glancing at the clock, I saw that it was almost two o’clock in the morning. My eyes were raw from reading off the little screen. “I’m probably wasting my time with this.”