“AURELIA? IS THAT you?” Claire singsonged into the dining room from the music room. After hearing Eddie, Cormac, Dr. Aldridge, and Marco come down to the casino, I’d assumed that Douglas and Claire had gone up to their rooms.
I sighed. I just wanted to put away the dinnerware and then go to bed, though I knew I wouldn’t sleep well. My head was spinning.
Claire persisted, “Aurelia! Come in here.”
In the music room, Claire and Douglas sat on the couch close to each other, but not in a romantic way.
“Aurelia!” Claire exclaimed enthusiastically, as if she hadn’t already called my name twice. “You can help us sort this out.”
Douglas frowned, the lines startling in his usually smooth, handsome face. “Claire, I don’t think we need to involve—”
“Oh, nonsense! Aurelia knew Rosita better than anyone, didn’t you?”
I shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “I thought so, but—”
“Great! I think Rosita would love it if we threw a party in her memory, once we’re back in Toledo.” Claire plucked at Douglas’s shirtsleeve. “Dougie will be quite the draw. We can do a few songs, say how Rosita was eager to be in a movie with us before her untimely death—”
I sank down on the chair across from them. “But she wasn’t. She—”
“Oh, no one needs to know that, Aurelia. It’s all about how things appear. The story we tell. So she was eager to be in our movie, and now we’re doing it—” Claire paused to switch her face from animated to morose. She forced tears and gave a big, fake sniffle. “In her honor!” She immediately re-brightened. “Isn’t that a brilliant idea?”
“No.” The word, leaden with disgust, fell from my lips.
Douglas arched an eyebrow and gave me a half smile. “I knew I liked you.”
Claire flopped back against the couch, rolled her eyes. “Well, Aurelia, thousands of girls would be jealous to know that the great Douglas Johnson likes you.”
Douglas snorted. “The once-great Douglas Johnson.”
“Right!” Claire swatted his arm. “Which is why we needed Rosita’s star power. But now that she’s dead, why not use the moment—oh, everyone will be so sorrowful!—to get some attention. Get in the newspapers. Get noticed. Then Hollywood will have to give us a chance.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. This was crass, even for Claire, who’d never hesitated to ride Rosita’s coattails in real life. Now she would use Rosita’s death for her gain if she could.
But I also realized that Claire’s and Douglas’s need for Rosita’s star power gave them powerful alibis. Unless one of them, incensed that she’d sworn she wouldn’t be in Douglas’s film, killed her in a moment of fury?
“And where will you have this attention-seeking shindig?” I asked. “At Mr. McGee’s Toledo mansion? I hardly think he’ll agree to that.”
Claire crossed her arms over her stomach, rolling out her lower lip like a petulant child. “But he promised. That’s why he brought us here, to lure Rosita back to her real life, so she’d give up the island to Marco. You know, he’s told me that Eddie’s in way over his head financially with some heavy loans.”
That confirmed what I’d overheard between Eddie and Marco, and I wanted to see if I could pry more details from Claire, but Douglas sighed. “Can’t we just put aside our worries about the film for now? Remember Rosita as she was before—before—”
Tears—real ones, I noted—sprang to his eyes. I knew what he meant. Before Oliver.
Though, he was an actor.
Eddie hadn’t said anything about a service for Rosita. Would he just have her put in the ground, no words spoken? Sorrow welled up and stuck in my throat. I should at least gather some winterberry and evergreen stems to make an arrangement for Rosita’s gravesite.
I looked back at Douglas. “You’re right. I only knew her a few years, but the two of you grew up with her. Someone should say a eulogy for her.”
Claire’s eyes widened. “Eddie hasn’t requested that. What if he doesn’t want—”
“To hell with that! It’s only right. Claire, you could—”
“Oh, I just couldn’t!” Another honking sniffle, more fake tears.
“What about you, Douglas? After all, you’re used to—”
“What, acting?” he snapped. “I don’t have to act. I loved Rosita.”
“Well, as a friend,” Claire said.
“Yes,” Douglas said. “As a friend.”
I focused on Douglas, asking softly, “What was she like?” Rosita had only rarely referenced her childhood. When she did, it was to talk about Trouble Island.
Douglas stared off. “She was quirky. Imaginative. She loved games of mystery—not just hide-and-seek, but also games she made up. And she was obsessed with this island. Talked about it all of the time, even when we were little.”
Claire snorted. “Ain’t that the truth! I came with Rosita because otherwise we’d spend the summer apart. And Grandfather was nice enough. But this island—it’s always given me the creeps. Too remote. But she loved hiking in the woods. Making all those trails. Clearing them with Grandfather. Helping him take care of the lighthouse. Listening to his stories for hours about the island’s history and shipwrecks. Which made her terrified of the lake itself, and yet she loved the stories and the island.” Claire was teary-eyed again. This time, I thought, genuinely.
“Did you ever come here, Douglas?” I knew he hadn’t as an adult. That would have made the gossip columns. “As a child?”
For the first time since he arrived, Douglas laughed, a lovely deep laugh, yet tinged with bitterness. “I would have loved to. Begged to, once. But no. Even though we were all on the wrong side of the tracks, my family was too low even for the Byrnes.”
The biography I’d read of Douglas Johnson in the fan magazines was that he’d grown up modestly, yes, but as the son of a Methodist preacher, an only child, whose mother had died when he was young. Why wouldn’t Claire and Rosita’s parents have wanted him along?
Claire rolled her eyes again. “Yes, yes,” she said in a mimicking tone, as if she’d heard this before, “Rosita’s parents and mine were awful, awful people, even though they were very involved in the Catholic church in our neighborhood. And they didn’t want the son of the neighborhood drunk—especially a boy—coming with us to the island.”
“I thought your father was—”
“A preacher, beloved by his flock, raising his only son on his own after his wife tragically died in childbirth?” Now Douglas’s voice took on a mocking strain. “Don’t believe everything you read in the celebrity rags, kid,” he said. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, crossed his legs, and gave me that trademark smile, complete with a twinkle in his eyes.
“What was the truth, then?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Well, she’s a curious one, aren’t you, Aurelia?” Claire said. “She was always asking us questions about our childhood, or Trouble Island, or what we thought about this or that, back when she and Rosita were friends, and she’d hang out by the pool.” She smirked. “Irritated them to no end when I’d interrupt. I think that’s why Rosita sent me off to Hollywood in the first place.”
Douglas arched an eyebrow, gave me a curious look, and I realized he didn’t know anything about me other than the same story everyone had been given for my presence on the island.
I cleared my throat, choosing my words carefully. I, too, had been telling tidied versions of my truth. At what point, I wondered, did cleaned-up truth become a wholly different truth—and thus a lie? But I wasn’t about to confess my whole past to this man—or to Claire.
“I met Claire and Rosita at their first Sweetheart Cousins comeback performance. That was—” I paused, choking up on the memory of Oliver.
“About a year after Oliver was born,” Claire jumped in, with no compunction. Disgust rose in me. Even when she’d come with Eddie and Rosita to the island to bury Oliver, she’d looked bored most of the time. Did she feel no sorrow for her nephew’s death? “Eddie thought even then that if Rosita could rise to fame, that would be a path for him to eventually go legit.” She shrugged. “That’s what he wanted for Oliver.” She gave me a hard look. “Did you know he blamed you for Rosita changing her mind about going back into performance?”
I frowned at her. “But Rosita told me that she didn’t want that life. She wanted a quiet life—”
“And what about what I wanted, huh?” Claire exclaimed. “You took my place as her confidante, and encouraged her in this silly notion of a quiet life, which meant she wasn’t willing to perform with me—”
“She and Eddie footed the bill for you to go to Hollywood!” I snapped.
Claire recoiled, hurt flashing across her face, and I immediately regretted my comment. About a year after Pony and I got caught up with the McGees, we were at their house for a Christmas party. Claire had gotten outrageously drunk, dancing around, flirting, laughing, and when other partygoers started to become uncomfortable and distance themselves from her, she’d opened Largo’s cage. The bird, a Christmas gift for Oliver that Eddie had disapproved of, had flown out and escaped the house; little Oliver, then a few months shy of three, had run out after the bird. I’d spotted him darting outside, and I ran out after him, grabbing him just as he was about to get hit by an automobile zooming up the circular driveway. I’d carried the wailing toddler back inside, and somehow one of Eddie’s men recaptured Largo.
Within a few weeks, Rosita had Largo’s wings clipped. And then she sent Claire off to Hollywood to make it on her own, telling me she’d put her cousin in touch with their childhood friend Douglas Johnson, the heartthrob famous actor. That was the first time I learned that Rosita and Claire knew Douglas.
But, come to think of it, I hadn’t heard much about Douglas in the press since then. A younger actor, Curtis Langly, had risen to prominence in the heartthrob magazines.
For the first time, I wondered if Claire arriving in Hollywood on the McGees’ dime and wanting help from Douglas had any connection to Douglas’s fading from popularity. No, surely it was coincidence.
“Well,” Claire said, “my first trip to Hollywood didn’t work out swell, but now, with Eddie’s backing, even without Rosita, we can make a comeback.” She leaned toward Douglas, twirled one of his dark curls in her index finger.
He swatted her hand as if it were a fly. “Or in your case, you can just make it for the first time,” he said. “Unless what you really want is to again be a Girl Friday for producers and directors?”
Claire looked down, sipped her drink. So that’s what she’d done with her time in Hollywood, before coming back after Oliver’s death. I felt sorry for Claire, and decided to steer the conversation back to Douglas. I asked him, “So how did you become friends with Rosita and Claire, then?”
But Claire jumped in. “Remember how I said Rosita loved adventures, in the woods here? Well, she was no different in Toledo. She’d convince me to go along with her, to run off from our houses. But she was too wild for most of the kids in the neighborhood. She’d concoct some game—looking for pirate’s treasure, like she said could be found on this damned island—though we never found any.”
I shifted in my chair, as if its contours were making me uncomfortable, but the lockbox and its contents flashed before my eyes—followed by the image of Rosita’s body.
“Or that we were on a safari. Or trekking up Kilimanjaro.” Claire laughed. “Never mind that our streets in Toledo are as flat as pancakes.”
“Rosita did have a grand imagination,” Douglas said. “One day, she and Claire found me in the middle of a street fight.”
And rescued him. I could see that. Rosita had commented once to me that she always had a soft spot for lost causes—a notion that made me uncomfortable then as it did now. I’d wanted to be her friend, not a pet project. Maybe Douglas had felt the same way.
A thin smile tweaked Douglas’s lips. “Oh, I can see you’re thinking what most people would—jumping to the conclusion that I needed rescuing. No. It was the other kid who did. I’d learned how to give a beating by getting plenty of them from my father. And the kid had called me—well, it didn’t matter what he called me—I wasn’t going to stand for it.”
“I thought we should go back home,” Claire said, “but Rosita jumped into the fray.”
Now tears glistened in Douglas’s eyes. “Rosita grabbed me by the collar, pulled me from the kid, and slapped me—hard. She shouted at me—‘Stop being a bully!’” He chuckled. “From that moment, I knew we’d be friends.”
My eyebrows went up. “That made you like her?”
Douglas nodded. “She was … a force.”
Claire went to the sideboard to refill her glass with whisky. “Only Rosita could pull that off.” She took a sip, and twirled, pointed at Douglas, her hand shaking. “She was smitten with you.” She turned to me, mimicked Rosita’s lower register. “After that, it was always, ‘We have to go see Douglas. Douglas will love the new game I’ve come up with! I’ve saved some biscuits for Douglas…’”
“You stayed close until Eddie came along and stole Rosita’s heart?” I said to Douglas.
“It wasn’t like that. Rosita and I were good friends. She understood me. And I understood her. At least, I thought I did, until I heard she was marrying Eddie. I never understood what she saw—” He shook his head. “Not jealousy. Concern. Eventually, I went on—found my own way in Hollywood. We all just drifted apart.”
Had they, though? Or had they remained close, and Eddie had not liked that?
“No, you drifted away,” Claire said. “And after all she did for us!” She looked at me. “She got us gigs, the ‘Sweetheart Cousins,’ so we could leave my parents’ house—” Claire paused, a look of terror passing over her face. I wondered what horrors had driven the cousins away. “—and have our own apartment. Our independence. It was going brilliantly, until Dougie here abandoned us!”
“I went to Hollywood,” he said flatly. “I told everyone I was going. It wasn’t a secret. And besides, by then Rosita was dating Eddie.”
“And Dougie became a big famous star and forgot about us!”
“I wrote—”
“To Rosita!”
He didn’t try to deny it. “Yes, for a while, and then, well, life got busy.”
“Busy?” Claire snorted. “Rosita told me you wrote to her that you had to cut things off. Your career couldn’t afford being associated openly with a man like Eddie, a man in his business.” She looked at me. “He meant bootlegger. Gangster. Mob. Thug. Too many people getting killed in the streets in the crossfire.” Her voice had gone slushy, and was teetering toward resentful.
I said, “But you came to Trouble Island with Claire, hoping to get Rosita to start a new life in a film with you after all.” If Douglas thought so negatively about Eddie, he surely didn’t come just as a favor to him. “What changed?”
“I felt really badly about Oliver. I should have reached out, but I didn’t.”
Claire and I exchanged looks. We understood that sure, Douglas would have felt badly about Oliver, but that also wasn’t his reason for coming on this visit.
And then something quick flashed in Claire’s eyes, something she wanted me to understand. Our gaze held for a second, but I couldn’t pick up on what she was trying to tell me, and a twitch of a frown crossed my brow. Claire looked down, disappointed.
Douglas cleared his throat. “And then Eddie reached out to me. He sent a, ah, representative to tell me that he needed my help, he said, to get Rosita to let go of the island, to get back to her original love of performance.”
Something didn’t sit right with me. How long had it been since I’d seen Douglas in the movie magazines? Mentioned as top billing in a film? Even before I’d come to Trouble Island, I’d stopped seeing his name plastered across the covers of the magazines.
“He needed your help? Or you needed his?” I asked.
“Look, I have been taking a bit of a break, it’s true. For personal reasons. But I’m ready to get back, and yes, I could use Eddie’s help, just as he could use ours. What of it? We needed Rosita’s help—” He stopped, blanching, realizing the grotesqueness of what he’d just implied. That they’d only come for selfish reasons, not out of any genuine concern for Rosita.
Claire snorted. “Aurelia is just trying to save her own skin, asking all these questions, trying to dig up something to put the blame on anyone but her. But we’re in the clear, right? Because why would we want Rosita out of the picture? We needed her to get a fresh start in Hollywood.”
Unlike Douglas, Claire didn’t appear to have any shame at her admission that needing to use Rosita was her big alibi.
“Rosita also turned you both down flat, in front of everyone, that first night,” I said. “I saw how upset both of you were. And anger is a powerful motivator. It can lead someone to—”
Claire sneered, and I stuttered to a stop. I wondered—did she know? How anger and fear and self-defense had led me to kill my own husband? Had Rosita told her? Rosita swore she never told anyone. But then, Claire had been her confidante before I came along. Maybe after I came to Trouble Island, Claire had become her confidante once again, until Oliver’s death.
I pressed on. “It can lead someone to do … the unthinkable. Did either of you go up to Rosita’s suite, any time after midnight the first night you were here?”
Claire barked out a laugh. “What, you think we snuck up? Forced her out of her suite, and brutally killed her? Strapped up her body in such a cruel way?” She plucked at Douglas’s hair again. “That’s not our way, is it, Dougie? We’d have poisoned her, made it look like suicide.”
Douglas recoiled, and both of us inhaled sharply.
Claire rolled her eyes. “Oh come on, I don’t mean that. But no, we didn’t kill her. Or at least, I didn’t. How about you, Dougie?”
Douglas dropped his head to his hands. “Of course not.”
“I was thinking,” I said, “more along the lines that you might have gone up there, either together or separately, to plead your case about being in the film. Might have overheard someone else in her suite? Maybe someone you’ve been afraid to mention?”
Douglas looked up, shook his head. “No. I went straight to my room after we all left the casino. I was exhausted, and in any case, I wouldn’t bother pleading with Rosita. It wouldn’t have made a difference. Once she made her mind up about something, she didn’t budge.”
Claire stared down into her glass, swishing around the liquid. “And you saw me as I was coming out of the bathroom. I was a bit drunk, and ill, and went to bed after that. Slept through the night until Eddie woke us up.”
Yes, I had seen her, and I could believe she was so drunk that she’d passed out in her room. Yet her tone was so uncustomarily meek that it raised the hair on the back of my neck.
Suddenly, Maxine burst into the music room, panicked and out of breath. “I—I’m looking for the doctor. He’s not in the casino—it’s Henry! He just fell to the floor, saying his heart was seizing up. He needs help!”