Benedict touched her arm. “Merida?”
She flung him away. Her hands moved violently and her lips moved, too. “Leave me alone!” She turned to the door of her rooms, fumbled with the key. Her hands shook.
Everyone was looking at her. She could feel them looking at her. She tried the key again. That lock was open. She touched the right sequence of numbers on the keypad.
She was in! She stepped over the threshold, slammed the door behind her—and saw Susie, looking horrified and guilty, the open laptop on the table before her … the laptop Merida had so carefully hidden an hour before.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Susie’s fingers were on the keyboard.
Merida grew cold with fear. She signed, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing, miss!” Susie answered as if she could read sign language. “That is … I thought you’d be longer. At dinner.” She saw Merida looking at her hands and slammed the laptop shut.
“Where did you get that?”
Again Susie answered as if she could read Merida’s hands. “I … I … I … found it when I went to get a new tablecloth for your parlor.” She picked up the computer and offered it.
Merida advanced on her, took it, backed away.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it, miss! My boys need a new computer for school. I don’t know nothin’ about them and I was just wonderin’ whether this kind would do.”
Merida stared at the woman with new eyes. Susie still looked thin, she still looked careworn, but her eyes held intelligence and cunning. And lies?
“Please don’t tell Miss Phoebe, ma’am, she’ll fire me for sure and I need this job. My husband will beat me if I don’t bring home the money! He drinks, you know, and when he does that, he beats the kids. I put myself between ’em until he tires out. Please don’t tell her!”
Merida nodded. Susie’s story was all possible. Even probable. But Susie’s use of a country accent had intensified. Maybe from nerves. Maybe to disarm her. As Merida observed her with more care, she saw a box knife connected to Susie’s belt and a kitchen knife and a screwdriver in her carry caddy. Those weren’t standard supplies for a cleaning woman, at least not one she had ever met.
“I’m almost done, miss. All I have to do is change that tablecloth”—she put her hand on the folded linen on the table beside her—“and dust in here. Then I have to go upstairs to the attic, up to clean for them Cipres.”
Merida pointed up at the ceiling. They were above her?
“Yes, and that woman—she is the very devil for being fussy.” For one moment, Susie looked dangerously peeved. “Can I finish with you now?”
Merida nodded again.
Susie shook out the tablecloth and brushed past Merida on her way to the parlor.
Merida stood where she was, the computer pressed to her chest, feeling suspicion crawl up her spine. For the first time since Nauplius had died, she felt … watched, as if someone knew more than she did and was spying on her.
The Cipres. Sean Weston. Susie. Everyone seemed corrupt. Even Phoebe’s exuberance rang false.
And Benedict. Most of all, Benedict … was he here because she had somehow betrayed herself? Had he tracked her not to use her for sex, as he had suggested, but to at last wipe her from the face of the earth? Because he knew … who she was. Because he remembered … what he had done. Because he was afraid of her … as he should be.
She glanced at the video camera she had set up, the one that looked like an antique mirror. She had placed something similar in every room she occupied. She would review the videos and see exactly what Susie had been doing, and if she was telling the truth.
Susie hustled back into the dining room. “There you go, miss. The parlor’s ready if you want to sit in there and wait for me to finish. I won’t be ten more minutes!”
Merida went into the parlor and sat. She opened her laptop and surveyed the screen. As it should be, it was blank, with no way in without a password.
She looked at the key click history.
Susie had been typing nonsense words. Code? Merida saw no pattern, but she knew the basics and no more, and computer science progressed at the speed of light. If Susie was secretly a hacker …
But what should Merida be looking for? Who would Susie be working for? Benedict? His aunt and uncle? Or for herself because she knew anyone who had the cash to take half this house for a year must be rich?
Merida had made a mistake. She knew that now. She’d lived with so much money for so long, she had thought only of privacy, not that she had placed herself as a target to be hit up for money.
She used her handprint to get into the password screen, then used her password to advance to the security viewer.
*
She had always wanted to fly. With a name like Merry Byrd, that had seemed a natural. She didn’t remember the mother who had given her the name and there was no father listed on her birth records, yet she confidently told the other children at the orphanage that Amelia Earhart was her aunt and on the day of her birth Aunt Amelia had taken her on a flight into the clouds. Merry told them she was fated to be a famous pilot.
That worked until one of the older kids scornfully informed her, and everyone else, that Amelia Earhart had been dead for about a hundred years and anyway she flew off course, crashed somewhere, disappeared forever and was a major loser.
To Merry Byrd, that made Aunt Amelia even more brave and romantic, and at night she made up stories about Amelia and how she had never meant to fly around the world at all. Instead she had deliberately landed on a remote tropical island and lived there forever with her foreign lover, and took him flying whenever he wanted.
Merry made the mistake of telling one of the other kids about that, too, and for that she was teased mercilessly. Then she stopped telling everyone about her destiny and began to quietly plan how to get what she wanted—to fly as far away from this place as possible and disappear forever.
Be careful what you wish for, Merry Byrd.
By the time she was eleven, she’d been working in the nursery as long as she could remember. Babies loved her because she sang them nonsense songs. Little kids loved her because she told them stories that took them far away to a mythical place where their parents lived. And she loved the little ones because they didn’t mock her dreams. Merry didn’t realize anyone had noticed, but when one of the men on the orphanage board heard that one of his rich friends was looking for someone to help his wife with his newborn triplets, he recommended Merry.