“You should have stopped him,” I say, speaking despite the sudden tightness in my chest. “You should have defied his orders.”
“I wanted to,” Lenora says, her voice cracking. “Truly, I did. But you didn’t know my father. He was capable of great cruelty. I worried he really would murder that child if given the chance. And I was certain he’d go through with his threat to disown me. I wasn’t his daughter. Not really.”
“But she was your sister!”
“In name only. We were never close. Virginia and I were as opposite as summer and winter.”
The comparison is apt. Looking at Lenora Hope, all I see is frigid coldness. Upstairs lies Virginia, as warm and restless as a July afternoon. Two sisters who, like the seasons they represent, never connected. Something always stood between them.
So Lenora took the baby into what was Miss Baker’s room but is now mine. She cradled him and shushed his cries by letting him suckle her pinkie finger. She waited for her father to return and tell her what to do.
According to Lenora, he never did.
“Miss Baker eventually came into the room and began packing up her things,” she says. “When I asked what she was doing, she said, ‘Leaving, of course. With the child.’?”
Lenora registers my surprise and shakes her head.
“It’s not what you think. For all her faults, Miss Baker was a good woman. She convinced my father to do what he always did—use money to make the problem go away. In exchange for some money and one of his Packards, she’d take custody of the baby. Her plan was to be a temporary mother to him until he and Virginia could be reunited. I agreed to help as long as my father never learned of my involvement. Then she drove off in the night, taking the baby with her.”
“Do you know where she went?”
Lenora nods. “Canada.”
I spare a thought for Carter, who was mistaken about his true heritage. There’s no way Virginia’s baby is the same one left on that church doorstep on Christmas morning. He’s no more related to the Hope family than I am.
At the same time, it appears to exonerate Lenora, the person I thought was responsible. Since Carter isn’t related to Virginia, he’ll inherit nothing. There was no reason for Lenora to keep him and Mary from finding that out.
“Miss Baker wrote to me a few weeks after the murders,” Lenora says. “She’d heard what happened and said that, under the circumstances, it would be best if she continued to raise the child as her own. I didn’t protest.”
I stare at her, shocked. “But he was your nephew.”
“What do you think I should have done?”
“Kept him!” I cry. “Raised him. Loved him. And you damn well should have let Virginia love him.”
“And what kind of life would that have been? For both Virginia and the child? She couldn’t hold him, let alone feed him. She couldn’t talk to him or play with him or do anything for him.”
“You would have figured out a way.”
“How?” Lenora says. “I was seventeen. I knew nothing about taking care of a baby.”
“That’s still no reason to keep your sister and her child apart!” Anger churns in my chest, crashing inside me like the waves smashing against the cliff directly below us. “How could you be so cruel?”
“Cruel?” Lenora says. “It’s quite the opposite, I assure you. Keeping that child away from this family was the ultimate act of kindness. Because of me and Miss Baker, that child grew up never knowing that his real mother was a murderer.”
“And you’re punishing Virginia because of that fact.”
“She deserves punishment! After what she did, a price needed to be paid. But I’m protecting her, too. I always have. Think about what would happen to a woman in her condition if the police learned what she’d done.”
I shake my head. That’s not a good enough reason. Especially when, other than trying to hang herself, there’s nothing to suggest Virginia killed her parents.
“Why are you so certain she did it? What about Ricardo Mayhew?”
“What about him?”
“He and Virginia were having an affair,” I say. “He was the baby’s father. And Berniece Mayhew followed him here that night.”
Lenora laughs. The last reaction I’d expected. There’s nothing remotely funny about the fact that she’s blamed her sister for murders she might not have committed. Yet Lenora keeps laughing, a low chuckle that’s more disbelieving than amused.
“That’s impossible,” she says.
“Why?”
I hear footsteps on the service stairs. A second later, Archie emerges into the kitchen. I have no idea how long he’s been there or how much he’s heard. All I know is it was long enough for him to answer my question.
“Because Ricardo was with me that night.”
It takes me a second to understand what he’s getting at. When I do, all I can say is, “Oh. The two of you were—”
“Lovers,” Archie says, sparing me from having to say it.
In the span of seconds, I think of a dozen follow-up questions. Archie doesn’t give me time to ask a single one.
“I was as surprised as you are now,” he says. “For one, he was married, although in those days and in my limited experience, that was usually the case. It’s not like today, which allows for slightly more freedom. Back then, it had to be kept secret. Especially for someone like me. I was barely eighteen. One wrong move and my whole life could have been ruined.”
Archie tells me how he and Ricardo met in secret, sneaking away whenever they could. It wasn’t easy. Ricardo shared the cottage with his wife. Archie lived in one of the rooms over the garage, which is where they usually met.
“We called it our love nest.” Archie allows himself a brief smile of fondness before it fades into a frown. “It’s where we were the night of the murders.”
It turns out Berniece had been wrong about her husband trying to throw her off his trail by going to the garage first before sneaking into the mansion through the front door. Then again, Berniece had been wrong about many things, including who her husband was really having an affair with.
“Since everyone had been given the night off and Berniece had gone to the movies, we knew we had a few hours just to ourselves,” Archie says. “But Ricardo was upset. He said Berniece confronted him about having an affair with Lenora.”
Lenora chimes in. “Which was utterly ridiculous. I didn’t even know who he was.”
“She told him he had to end it,” Archie adds. “After they blackmailed Winston Hope. Ricardo wanted nothing to do with the plan. It was wrong, both morally and factually, and he feared it would eventually lead to the truth about the two of us getting out. A disaster for both of us. But he had a plan of his own. He asked me to run away with him.”
“That night?”
“Immediately. He wanted to head west. Maybe to California. He said he heard people there were more tolerant. He said there was a chance we could be happy there. But I knew better.” Archie shuffles to a stool. He sits, slumped, as if the sad memories he’s recalling are literally weighing him down. “Running away is never as easy as it seems. I know because I’d already done it, fleeing a family who hated me because I was different, because I wasn’t like most other boys. But I found my way here—and to Virginia.”
“Did she know?” I say.
Archie responds with a nod. “It’s one of the reasons I loved her so much. She didn’t judge me. Or shame me. Or, thank goodness, try to change who I am. She simply accepted me. And I couldn’t leave her. Not when she was pregnant. Not when she needed me. Because that’s another thing Ricardo told me—that Berniece had spotted her the night before and knew of her condition. That meant everyone would soon know. When that happened, Virginia would need me more than ever.”
“So you stayed,” I say, meaning not just that night but all the ones after it. Decades of nights in which he’d sneak into Virginia’s room to check on her and wish her pleasant dreams.
“I stayed,” Archie says. “Ricardo left. I never heard from him again.”
The sadness of his story leaves me convinced that Hope’s End is cursed in some way. Maybe it was merely bad luck. Or perhaps because of Winston Hope’s hubris in building a mansion at the edge of a cliff despite knowing it was only a matter of time before it crumbled into the ocean. Whatever the cause, no one here got the life they wanted. No one was granted a happy ending.
Not Archie. Not Lenora. And certainly not Virginia. Yet despite now knowing all their tragic tales, one question remains unanswered.
“Then who was Ricky?”
“One of the local boys hired for seasonal help,” Archie says. “A bunch of them came and went all the time. Virginia never told me his last name. Or his first. She just used the nickname, making it impossible to track him down after the murders. I suspect by that point, he didn’t want to be found.”