“No need to be,” Adelaide said. “Sit down. Why did you try to call?”
Jake did not take his attention off Vera. “Luther told me that the reason he found out that Paxton had stolen a car and slipped out of town was because someone on his staff received a mysterious phone call from a woman. When Luther got the message, he immediately phoned the Rushbrook police. Can I assume it was you who made that call, Miss Westlake?”
“Yes,” Vera said. “I owe you a debt of gratitude, by the way. I am very glad that Calvin Paxton is dead.”
“It was an accident,” Jake said without expression.
Vera smiled. “Of course.”
“Sit down, Jake,” Adelaide said. “We’ll all have tea, and Miss Westlake can tell you her story.”
Jake hesitated and then he put the gun back into the holster. “I assume Miss Westlake’s story in an interesting one?”
“Oh, yes,” Adelaide said. “You see, she was Patient A, the other one who vanished.”
Chapter 54
“She’ll be gone by morning,” Adelaide said. “Soon there will be a headline in the press about a brilliant actress who took a sailboat out alone and never returned. She will be presumed lost at sea. It’s rather fitting that her last film, Lady in the Shadows, was about a woman who vanishes under mysterious circumstances.”
“The nation will be distraught for a couple of weeks and then a new Hollywood scandal will hit the papers,” Jake said.
Adelaide nodded. “Yes.”
She and Jake were sitting in front of the fireplace, feeding blackmail secrets to the flames. Before they began the ritual, Jake had opened a bottle of champagne that Luther and Raina had dropped off earlier.
We’ve all got something to celebrate, Luther had said. Adelaide had noticed that he was looking at Raina when he said it.
“I still can’t believe you invited Westlake to stay for tea and then sent her off with two large packages of her special blend,” Jake said. He tossed some letters into the fire. “You even told her to telephone you when she ran out so that you could put some more in the mail for her.”
“For the bad nights,” Adelaide said.
Jake exhaled. “I get it.” He fed a photograph of two men engaged in a sexual act into the fire. One of the subjects was a famous star. “For the bad nights.”
“Everyone has them occasionally,” Adelaide said.
“True,” he said. “But you and I have each other now.”
She smiled. “For the good nights and the bad nights.”
“Yes.” He looked down into the empty hatbox. “That’s the last of it. Ready for your file?”
“Yes.”
She opened the file marked Patient B and fed the contents to the flames. It was good to watch the papers go up in smoke. By the time the file was empty, she felt free.
She reached across the short distance between the chairs and took Jake’s hand.
“It’s nice to know that the next time we check into an auto court I won’t be a fake wife,” she said. “It will make a pleasant change of pace.”
Jake laughed. He got to his feet and pulled her into his arms.
“It’s good to be home,” he said.
She framed his face with her hands. “Yes. It’s very good to be home.”
Author’s Note
The hallucinogenic drug Daydream is fiction, but I took my inspiration from the fact that lysergic acid diethylamide—LSD—was discovered by a Swiss scientist in 1938. Over the years many researchers have been convinced that it has genuine medicinal properties. Others believed that it could be used to brainwash captured soldiers, implant hypnotic suggestions, or function as a truth serum.
Several sources claim that decades ago some famous Hollywood celebrities used LSD in conjunction with psychotherapy. And, of course, legends of secret government experiments abound . . .