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“I then went looking for Virginia. I found her hanging in there.” Lenora nods toward the kitchen doorway and the ballroom down the hall just beyond it. “She was hanging from one of the chandeliers. Ishould have tried to take her down. I realize that now. But I thought she was dead, just like my parents. Faced with such an irrational situation, I could only behave in an irrational manner—I went out to the terrace and screamed. Out of fear and grief and confusion. I screamed until my throat seized up and I couldn’t scream anymore. That’s when the police arrived.”
Lenora traces the rim of the wineglass with her index finger as she tells me about the cops finding her family presumably dead and no one else in the house but her.
“They looked at me like I was a maniac,” she says. “Even though I’d done nothing wrong. The first words I told them were ‘It wasn’t me.’ Which only made them suspect me more. The complete opposite of what I intended. They sat me down in the dining room and asked me all sorts of awful questions. Who else was here? Did I have a reason to want my family dead? And I just kept giving them the same answer: ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’ ”
I get déjà vu listening to her, thinking about me in a featureless interrogation room, Detective Vick’s accusatory stare, the reels of the tape recorder going round and round.
“Then a miracle happened,” Lenora says. “One of the cops yelled from the ballroom that Virginia was still alive. It turns out the noose around her neck wasn’t much of a noose at all. That haphazard tangle of rope is likely what saved her life. It allowed just enough oxygen in to keep her alive. Barely. No one expected her to live through the night, which was why she was taken upstairs to her room instead of to the hospital.”
She tips back her glass and empties it before filling it again and taking another sip. Steeling herself for the rest of the story. Because despite being horrible already, I know much worse is about to come.
“Dr. Walden, the family physician, was summoned,” she says. “He said Virginia was brain dead and that the rest of her body would soon follow suit. Only it didn’t. She hung on for days, weeks, months. It turned out Dr. Walden was wrong in every way. Virginia’s mind wasvery much alive. She seemed to comprehend whatever was said to her. It was her body that had died. She was paralyzed, motionless, unable to talk, unable to do anything.”
“So what you told me about the strokes and the polio were—”
“All lies,” Lenora says. “To cover the fact that the hanging had damaged her larynx, leaving her unable to speak, and snapped her spinal cord, leaving her mostly paralyzed.”
“Why lie about that?” I say. “Why go to all that effort to cover up everything?”
“You don’t understand what it was like for me. I was only seventeen, scared and alone. I had no other family and no one to guide me. My parents were dead. My sister was basically comatose. And suddenly I was in charge of Hope’s End, my father’s business, everything. My father’s attorney came to tell me the market crash had reduced the family business to ruins. My mother’s attorney then came to tell me I’d inherit millions from my grandparents when I turned eighteen and that Virginia would, too, if she managed to live that long.”
Lenora stares into her glass like it’s a crystal ball. But instead of the future, all she can see is the past.
“Meanwhile, the police kept coming around with their suspicions and insinuations,” she says. “The servants quit in droves. I had the others fired, worried they thought the same way as the police and might take matters into their own hands. My friends dropped me immediately. As did Peter.”
“Peter Ward?” I say, picturing the portraits in the hall, black silk crepe now hanging from three of them like party streamers. “The painter?”
“We were in love,” Lenora says. “At least, I was. After the murders, he wanted nothing to do with me. I never saw him again. Then there was my sister to care for and an estate to run and no one to help me but Archie, who did it solely out of devotion to Virginia. I knew he didn’t give a damn about me. And all I wanted was to be somewhere else—and someone else.”
Lenora looks up from her glass, seeking sympathy.
“Certainly you can understand that. You know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do. To have everyone leave, to grapple with fear and grief alone. In the past six months, haven’t you wanted to change everything about your situation?”
I have. And I did. I came to Hope’s End.
“Yes,” I say. “But my options were limited.”
Lenora flinches, as if this is the first time someone has pointed out that people like her have advantages people like me can only dream about.
“Mine weren’t,” she says. “When six months passed and it became clear the police had no proof to charge me of any wrongdoing, I realized how I could escape.”
“You had Virginia declared dead,” I say.
“It was easy,” Lenora says with a nod. “Especially with someone as corruptible as Dr. Walden. I took him to the garage, showed him my father’s remaining Packards, and said he could take his pick if he declared Virginia legally dead. I threw in another car for his wife if he also claimed that my health depended on getting rest and relaxation far away from Hope’s End. That settled it. Virginia was dead, I turned eighteen and inherited not just my share of my grandparents’ inheritance but hers as well. Then I departed for Europe on my doctor’s orders. Right before I left, though, I made sure to become Mrs. Baker. And Virginia—”
I exhale, astonished not just by the craftiness of her plan but by its cruelty.
“Became Lenora Hope,” I say.
I see you nodding, Mary.
You knew, didn’t you?
Good girl.
I had a feeling you at least suspected it.
Yes, my real name is Virginia Hope, although she’s officially been dead for decades. In that time, through my sister’s sheer force of will, I became Lenora.