Page 99 of Evil at the Essex House

“I,” Wolfgang said coldly, “amGrafWolfgang Ulrich Albrechtvon und zuNatterdorff?—”

“Sure you are,” Myrtle said.

“He really is,” Christopher told her, “and as for Pippa living off our money, of course she is. She’s family!”

“But I have no designs on the title or fortune.”

Nobody said anything, and I added, “Tell her, Christopher. Tell her that I have no designs on St George or his money.”

Christopher rolled his eyes. “Of course you don’t, Pippa.”

Myrtle rolled her eyes, too. “Could have fooled me.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I only took him away from you because it’s inappropriate for an unmarried young lady to be snogging an unmarried gentleman in the lift.”

Sarah made a distraught little moan, and Myrtle snorted. “Considering that particular gentleman’s reputation, kissing a woman in an elevator is hardly the worst thing he’s been accused of.”

“Fine,” I said. “I took him away from you because none of us wanted him involved with you. Even when we thought you were American heiress Florence Schlomsky, you weren’t good enough for him. You were cheap and common and ill-mannered then, too, even when we thought you had money.”

“But you believed me!” Myrtle said triumphantly. “You believed I was an American heiress.”

I could hardly deny that, much as I would like to.

“Only because you were American,” I told her bitterly. “Everyone knows that Americans are—” I hesitated, “different.”

“But I fooled you.” She sat back with a smirk. “I fooled all of you.”

“Until this weekend,” Tom said. “What happened?”

Myrtle scowled. “The telegram arrived. Miss High and Mighty Darling over there delivered it. You always have to stick your nose into other people’s business, don’t you?”

“I was doing Evans a favor,” I protested, “bringing it upstairs so he didn’t have to.”

She snorted. “So you weren’t interested in what was in it?”

Of course I had been. Although there was no part of me that wanted to admit that.

“So the telegram arrived,” Tom prompted when I didn’t say anything, “from Miss Schlomsky’s parents, informing you that they had arrived in England and would be in London in a day’s time.”

Myrtle nodded, and shot them a resentful glance. “No warning, nothing. No ‘dear daughter, we are thinking of coming to visit.’ One day, they were just there. On English soil, a few hours away, and threatening to destroy everything we’d worked for for almost a year.”

Everything they had worked for? It didn’t seem to me that there had been much honest work involved, but what did I know? I arched my brows at Christopher, who arched his right back. Ruth sniffled.

“What did you do?” Tom wanted to know.

“Rang up Sid,” Myrtle said, with a glance at him, “and had him fetch me, and then we spent the rest of the night figuring out what to do about it.”

“And the plan you came up with involved a false kidnapping, a ransom, and murder?”

“Well, we couldn’t let them show up and see me pretending to be Flossie, could we?” Myrtle asked. “And we couldn’t show them the real Flossie, either. So we had to come up with a reason why their daughter couldn’t be there to meet them.”

And they had settled on kidnapping. Which made a horrible sort of sense in the scheme of it.

It also explained a few things that had bothered me.

“So on Wednesday night, when Crispin dropped you off on the Strand…”

Myrtle smirked. “I walked across the street to Charing Cross and boarded a train for Thornton Heath.”