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“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I just nodded and left. I was too scared to do anything else. But I knew something awful was happening inside that house. It wasn’t until the police came that I realized just how awful it really was.” Berniece looks down at her lap, ashamed. “I think about that moment a lot. If I’d refused to go, maybe Lenora would have killed me on the spot. Or maybe the other killings wouldn’t have happened. Maybe some of them could have been saved. Especially the younger daughter. Virginia. The poor thing. In such a state, too.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police any of this?”
“Because I wanted to protect Ricardo,” Berniece says, a catch in her throat. “I knew it wasn’t just Lenora responsible for those murders. Ricardo was part of it, too. He had to be. Because he never came back to the cottage. Not that night. Not ever. Once he disappeared, I knew deep down what had happened. That he had helped her kill that family.”
“Why would he do that?” I say. “You said yourself he wasn’t mean.”
“But he was easily swayed. My assumption is she tricked him. I’d seen how manipulative she could be.”
There’s that word again. The same one Mrs. Baker had used to describe Lenora.
Manipulative.
“I bet she gave him some sob story about her cruel parents and her awful life and how she was a prisoner in that big old mansion. And I bet Ricardo believed it. After a few months of hearing bullshit like that, he was probably brainwashed into thinking the only way they could be together is if the rest of her family was dead. So he helped her kill them.”
“Then he ran away,” I say.
“No, sweetie,” Berniece says, her voice so vicious it’s practically a snarl. “Lenora killed him, too.”
I remain completely still in the chair, incapable of movement. I tryto imagine Lenora doing any of this. Killing not just her father, mother, and sister, but her lover as well. Only a monster would do that. And the Lenora Hope I know isn’t a monster.
Not that I thought she was completely innocent. She told me so herself.
I wasn’t a good girl.
Not in the least.
You’ll see for yourself very soon.
I also knew she had gotten rid of the knife used to kill her parents. Lenora made no attempt to hide that from me. Even so, I’d started to think she was innocent of the actual killings. In my mind, the only thing she was guilty of was covering for the man who really committed them, out of a misguided sense of love and loyalty.
But what Berniece is telling me shatters all my assumptions. If what she’s saying is true, then Lenora is just as guilty as Ricardo Mayhew. Probably more so, since she’s still alive and he’s... gone.
Unless Berniece is lying.
Not an impossibility, seeing how she just admitted to taking money for decades from the woman she says killed her husband.
“If Lenora murdered Ricardo,” I say, “why wasn’t his body found with the others?”
Berniece has a simple answer for that. “She shoved him off that terrace. You’ve seen it. That’s a long drop to the ocean.”
Yet that still doesn’t make any sense. Why would Lenora make her accomplice disappear? Especially when it meant all suspicion was directed at her? Either Berniece is making all of this up—or she misunderstood what she saw. And judging by her silence all these years, she doesn’t care about that as long as she’s getting paid.
“I don’t think this is about protecting your husband,” I say. “After the murders, you realized you had a new way to get your hush money.”
“And good thing I did, too,” Berniece says. “Because sure enough, we were all fired within the week. Those of us who were left, anyway.Half the staff quit as soon as they found out what happened. Lenora was too busy being questioned by the police to do it herself. She sent the kitchen boy to do it.”
“Archie?”
“That’s his name,” Berniece says with a nod. “I never could remember it. Poor kid, though. Barely eighteen and being told to fire everyone he worked with. When he got to the cottage, he could barely look me in the eye. He just handed me a check for a thousand dollars, written out by Lenora Hope herself.”
I check my watch again. Five minutes has turned to ten. And the man waiting for my return is the same person who first paid off Berniece.
“Did he tell you it was hush money?”
“He didn’t need to, hon,” Berniece says. “Paying off people was the Hope family way. They did it to get what they wanted, whether it was that concoction Mrs. Hope was always drinking or the pretty young maids Mr. Hope was always screwing. And it was how they kept people quiet, like whenever one of those pretty maids found themselves in trouble.”