Which could only be locked from the outside.
“No! Please!” I said, unable to get the words out before my sister left the room. I rushed to the door, feeling the brush of swift air on my face as she slammed it shut behind her. By the time I reached for the doorknob, it was too late. The key clicked in the lock just before I could grab it. I twisted the knob anyway. It didn’t budge.
The door was firmly locked.
I caught sight of the door on the other side of the room, the one that led to Miss Baker’s room. Unfortunately, my sister had also thought of it. I heard the key turning in that lock as I burst into the room.
I was completely trapped.
Still, I threw myself against the door and began pounding on it. On the other side, my sister’s evil laughter echoed down the hall as she ran to tell my father what I was about to do.
“Let me out!” I screamed after her. “Please let me out.”
I slammed into the door again and felt something inside me give way.
Liquid.
Gushing from between my legs onto the floor.
Panic flooded my body, for I knew it meant the baby was coming.
Early.
And fast.
Terrified, I pounded on the door, calling for my sister.
“Please!” I screamed. “Please, Lenora!”
THIRTY-SEVEN
I find Mrs. Baker in the kitchen, corkscrew in hand, opening a bottle of Cabernet on the counter. She looks up, surprised to see me enter from the hallway and not the service stairs.
“Is everything all right with Miss Hope?”
“Yes, Lenora,” I say. “Virginia is fine.”
The corkscrew goes still. Just for a moment. Then she yanks, uncorking the bottle with a whisper-like pop.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her denial, ironically, confirms my suspicion. The rigid way she stands, her forced smile and her steely blue eyes are an exact re-creation of the uncovered portrait in the hall.
“Maybe this will help,” I say, removing Mary’s alleged suicide note from my pocket and slapping it onto the table.
The woman pretending to be Mrs. Baker scans it, cool as a cucumber, before filling a glass with wine. As she does, I swipe the corkscrew from the counter. Considering the conversation we’re about to have, I don’t want a sharp object within her reach.
But I do want one in mine.
The corkscrew goes into my pocket as Lenora Hope—the real one—takes a sip of wine and says, “Am I supposed to know what this is?”
“Mary Milton had it in her pocket the night she died. Detective Vick thought it was a suicide note. But no one types that way. No one but your sister. Who typed it after she revealed to Mary who she really was, apologizing for pretending to be someone else for so long.”
Whether Virginia—the real one, the living one—planned on officially revealing it to me is unclear. I think she wanted to. After what happened to Mary, I suspect she feared doing it. But she never lied to me. Nothing she typed was untrue. When I asked who’d been in her room at night, she provided an honest answer.
Virginia.
Her real name.
When I asked who’d used the typewriter during the night, she gave the same truthful response as when I asked her who Mary was afraid of.
Her sister.
The woman standing directly across the counter from me.
“But you already know this,” I tell her. “You knew it when you shoved Mary off the terrace.”
Lenora grips her wineglass so tightly I fear it might shatter. “I did no such thing! She killed herself.”
I pat my pocket, feeling the corkscrew’s curved ridge and the knifepoint sharpness of its tip. “We both know that’s not true.”
“Whatever happened to that poor girl has nothing to do with me.”
“But it does,” I say. “Because she knew you’ve been hiding the fact that your sister is alive and that you’re really Lenora. How long has it been going on?”
“A long time,” she says, admitting at least one thing—Mrs. Baker, she of the unknown first name, is indeed the infamous Lenora Hope. “Almost all the way back to the murders.”
Fifty-four years. A staggering amount of time.
“Why did you do it?” I say. “And how?”
“Which part?” Lenora says between giant swallows from her glass. Already, the wine is doing its job. She’s looser now, and far more forthcoming. “Faking my sister’s death or forcing her to assume my identity?”
“Both,” I say, my head now spinning from literally all of it. “What really happened that night?”
“I can only tell you what I experienced.” Lenora climbs onto a stool and sits across from me, elbows on the counter. As if we’re best friends out for a drink. As if any of this is normal. “I was upstairs in my room, sitting at my dressing table and listening to my record player while pretending I wasn’t hiding from everything going wrong in this house.”
It’s easy to picture because I spied on her doing exactly that last night.
“It had already been a long, terrible night,” she says. “Things happened. Awful things. And then it escalated. And then everything went quiet. Eventually, I decided to go downstairs and see if everything was okay.”
“It wasn’t,” I say.
When Lenora shakes her head, I spot a glint of moisture in her telltale blue eyes. Tears that she refuses to let fall.
“I found my mother on the Grand Stairs. Dead, of course. I knew that right away. There was blood . . . everywhere.” Lenora pauses, shuddering at the memory. “I started screaming and running through the house like a chicken with its head cut off. My God, that’s a terrible saying. Still, it fits my reaction that night. Running and screaming. Screaming and running. Right into the billiard room, where I saw my father.”
As she takes another sip of wine to fortify herself, I think about how it must have felt to walk into that room, to see her father slumped over the pool table, to notice the blood trickling into the table pockets.
“I ran to the kitchen, phoned the police, and told them my parents had been murdered.”
I nod, because it tracks with what Detective Vick told me about the police getting the call shortly after eleven.
“I then went looking for Virginia. I found her hanging in there.” Lenora nods toward the kitchen doorway and the ballroom down the hall just beyond it. “She was hanging from one of the chandeliers. I should have tried to take her down. I realize that now. But I thought she was dead, just like my parents. Faced with such an irrational situation, I could only behave in an irrational manner—I went out to the terrace and screamed. Out of fear and grief and confusion. I screamed until my throat seized up and I couldn’t scream anymore. That’s when the police arrived.”
Lenora traces the rim of the wineglass with her index finger as she tells me about the cops finding her family presumably dead and no one else in the house but her.
“They looked at me like I was a maniac,” she says. “Even though I’d done nothing wrong. The first words I told them were ‘It wasn’t me.’ Which only made them suspect me more. The complete opposite of what I intended. They sat me down in the dining room and asked me all sorts of awful questions. Who else was here? Did I have a reason to want my family dead? And I just kept giving them the same answer: ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’?”
I get déjà vu listening to her, thinking about me in a featureless interrogation room, Detective Vick’s accusatory stare, the reels of the tape recorder going round and round.
“Then a miracle happened,” Lenora says. “One of the cops yelled from the ballroom that Virginia was still alive. It turns out the noose around her neck wasn’t much of a noose at all. That haphazard tangle of rope is likely what saved her life. It allowed just enough oxygen in to keep her alive. Barely. No one expected her to live through the night, which was why she was taken upstairs to her room instead of to the hospital.”
She tips back her glass and empties it before filling it again and taking another sip. Steeling herself for the rest of the story. Because despite being horrible already, I know much worse is about to come.
“Dr. Walden, the family physician, was summoned,” she says. “He said Virginia was brain dead and that the rest of her body would soon follow suit. Only it didn’t. She hung on for days, weeks, months. It turned out Dr. Walden was wrong in every way. Virginia’s mind was very much alive. She seemed to comprehend whatever was said to her. It was her body that had died. She was paralyzed, motionless, unable to talk, unable to do anything.”
“So what you told me about the strokes and the polio were—”
“All lies,” Lenora says. “To cover the fact that the hanging had damaged her larynx, leaving her unable to speak, and snapped her spinal cord, leaving her mostly paralyzed.”