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“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, thelivingone—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 whatIexperienced.” 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.