“You can let go now,” I say, twisting my arm. “I’m not going to run back inside and bother Berniece some more. Although I highly recommend you do. You’ll want to hear what she has to say.”
“The police talked to Berniece Mayhew fifty-four years ago.”
“So you looked at the case file from back then?”
“I did. Berniece didn’t have anything to say other than that her husband hadn’t come home.”
“She was lying,” I say. “And you’d know that if you went back there and did your goddamn job.”
Detective Vick finally releases my wrist when we reach my car. From the pissed-off look on his face, I expect him to up the stakes and put me in handcuffs. Instead, he says, “Go back and do your goddamn job. Leave the investigating to me. Better yet, quit that place and go home. Your dad misses you.”
I blink, surprised. “He said that?”
“No,” Detective Vick says. “But I assume it’s lonely for him now.”
“Trust me,” I say. “It’s not.”
“So you decided to bother an innocent old lady instead?”
I stifle a harsh laugh. Innocent is the last word I’d use to describe a woman who’s collected money for decades to stay silent about what she thinks was a quadruple homicide. Then again, that’s nothing compared with the crimes Berniece says her husband and Lenora committed.
“I was here asking about Ricardo Mayhew,” I say. “His wife thinks he did it, by the way. With Lenora’s help. And then she killed him.”
“And what do you think?”
I lean against my car, mulling over the question. “I think something happened that night beyond the murders of three people and the disappearance of another. Something that either instigated the violence or was the result of it.”
That Lenora was part of it is a given. What I struggle with is deciding how big of a role she played. Is it all her fault, as both Berniece and the mystery typist who came into Lenora’s room claim? Or was she swept up in events beyond her control? Did she toss the murder weapon to try to mitigate the damage but ended up being blamed for everything?
I hope it’s the latter. I fear it’s the former.
“What else did the police reports say?”
“They got a call a little after eleven p.m. on Tuesday, October 29,” Detective Vick says. “The caller told them two people were dead at Hope’s End.”
I cock my head. “Two?”
“That’s what the report says.”
But three people were murdered that night. The only way that can possibly be right is if the person who called the police did so after finding only two of the bodies.
“Who was the caller?”
“Lenora Hope.”
It makes sense she’d be the one to call the police. It’s naturally the first thing Lenora would do if she was innocent—or trying to make herself look innocent. But in both cases, she’d surely know the number of victims. Either Lenora lied to the police—or someone else was still alive while she was on the phone.
I reach into my memory, summoning the first few pages Lenora had typed. They’re easy to recall because she stressed how it was the moment she remembered most. The thing she still had nightmares about.
Her on the terrace.
Bloody knife washed clean by the rain before she tossed it into the ocean below.
Her sister screaming inside the house.
Virginia.
That’s who was still alive. And then Lenora went to the garage to fetch some rope.
I’m hit with a headache as I consider what that means. And it doesn’t look too good for Lenora. In fact, it looks like Virginia was collateral damage, stumbling into the wrong place at the wrong time. And someone decided she had to die, too.
That someone was most likely Lenora, who no longer had the knife that killed her parents and needed a new weapon. As for who did the hanging, maybe that was Ricardo, who either fled afterward or, if Berniece is right, was then shoved off the terrace by Lenora.
The same terrace Mary was pushed from.
“Police responding to the scene found the front gate open,” Detective Vick says. “When they entered the house, they discovered Evangeline Hope on the staircase landing. The officers then fanned out through the rest of the house, finding Winston Hope in the billiard room and Virginia Hope hanging from a chandelier in the ballroom.”
“Where was Lenora?”
“On the terrace.”
So she went back out there after Virginia was killed. My headache gets worse. Because the more I hear, the more I think that Berniece is right.
And that Lenora is guilty.
“Mr. and Mrs. Hope were declared dead at the scene. Virginia was taken upstairs.”
“Also dead,” I say.
Detective Vick shakes his head. “Not for another six months.”
A shock.
I’d assumed Virginia died the same night her parents did. Instead, she clung to life for six more months. I’m not sure which is worse—going instantly like her mother and father or lingering at death’s door that long before finally slipping through.
“Why did no one suspect Ricardo Mayhew?”
“They did,” Detective Vick says. “Once everyone realized he was gone and not coming back, he was the prime suspect. Especially when it was discovered that one of Winston Hope’s Packards was missing from the garage. It was possible he killed them, stole the car, and drove as far away as he could. But there was nothing to prove that’s what happened—or that he was even in the house at all.”
“Did someone at least ask Lenora about Ricardo?”
A car pulls into the parking lot, its headlights skimming the Ocean View’s fa?ade before landing on the weathered face of Detective Vick. Usually, he looks flinty. Tonight, he just looks tired.
“As a matter of fact they did,” he says. “She claimed she didn’t know who he was. One of the cops had to clarify that he was the head groundskeeper at Hope’s End. The cop made a note that she genuinely seemed to not know the man’s name.”
“How many times did they talk to her?”
“Multiple times over several weeks,” Detective Vick says. “Her story was always the same. She didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything, never saw a soul inside that house other than her family.”
That’s at least one lie on Lenora’s part. She saw Berniece, who caught her in the kitchen with blood on her hands as she grabbed a knife.
Yet that doesn’t make sense. If Lenora was indeed guilty, how could there be blood on her hands before she fetched the knife? That’s only possible if more than one knife had been used.
“What about the weapon?” I say. “They never found it, right?”
“Correct.”
“Were the police certain only one knife was used?”
“As certain as they could be,” Detective Vick says. “No other knife seemed to be missing from the kitchen, and the stab wounds on both Winston and Evangeline Hope were roughly the same width, suggesting only one weapon was used.”
“Did they notice anything out of the ordinary about the place? Anything at all?”
“Just that Virginia Hope’s room had recently been cleaned. One of the cops smelled floor polish when they brought her upstairs.”
I touch my temples, the headache growing. It’s so bad I’m surprised my skull hasn’t fractured yet, forming a crack as big as the one now running across the terrace at Hope’s End. “Since they couldn’t prove—or disprove—that Ricardo did it, and since they couldn’t do the same with Lenora, the case just stalled?”
“Correct,” Detective Vick says. “Sound familiar?”
Anger flashes through me like lightning. Electric. Searing.
“Fuck you,” I tell Detective Vick, which might be illegal. I’m not up to date on laws against swearing at police detectives. If it is a crime, Detective Vick makes no move to do anything about it as I yank open the door to my Escort and slide behind the wheel.
“I don’t blame you, you know,” he says before I can slam the door shut. “Your mother was suffering. I understand that. My own parents suffered when their time came. But I didn’t break the law to try to end it.”
“Neither did I.”
I’m on the verge of tears, and I don’t know if it’s from rage or grief or the fact that everything about the past six months has been too damn much. When I got to Hope’s End, I threw myself into learning Lenora’s story because I was desperate to change my own pathetic existence by focusing on someone else’s. But then I found Mary dead, and things have only spiraled since then.
“I didn’t make my mother take those pills,” I say, swiping at a tear before it can fall because I’ll be damned if I cry in front of Detective Vick. “She killed herself. Mary didn’t. And someone smarter than you would understand that.”
The detective’s nostrils flare. The only sign I’ve gotten to him. Unlike me, he knows how to keep his emotions in check.
“Kit, for the last time, Mary Milton wasn’t murdered.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
Detective Vick removes a piece of paper from inside his jacket. A photocopy of a page made ragged and faint from water damage. Thrusting it at me, he says, “Because of this.”
My hands go numb as I read the single sentence typed across the page. “What is this?”