Jane felt her knees buckling, but she braced herself with a hand against the open door.
“Come in,” Robert said. Then he offered, “Stand by the fire and get warm.”
Jane had forgotten she was wet and cold. Forgotten, at least for an instant, that she had just shot her husband. She stood where she was, blinking incongruously, trying to make sense of the people she was facing—Bill’s dead wife and the business partner who had covered up her murder.
It wasn’t Selina Royce she had seen in Paris. It was Kay. William Andrews had gone to see the wife he had buried eight years ago. And maybe Leavitt hadn’t been lying when he said he had never heard of Selina.
“But then who …” Jane tried to ask. “Who …”
“Who was murdered here?” Kay asked, putting into words the question Jane couldn’t manage to ask.
“Selina Royce,” Jane mumbled, beginning to work her way through the puzzle. Then she found another answer. “You killed her.”
Kay smiled as if she had been complimented. “She was stealing my husband,” she explained. “I couldn’t allow that.”
Jane still wasn’t able to make complete sense of the images that were flashing through her mind. “Then all these years, you were in hiding. Using her name …”
“Where’s the gun?” Robert Leavitt interrupted.
Jane heard the question, but it didn’t register.
“You buried Selina in your place …” Jane went on.
“And I took her place,” Kay Parker said. “It wasn’t much, but it was better than going to prison.”
Leavitt was agitated by the small talk. “Where’s the gun?” he repeated. “What did you do with the pistol?”
Jane tried to remember, but the question seemed unimportant. “I dropped it,” she said. “Outside in the snow.”
“Dammit!” Leavitt hissed. He reminded Kay, “We need that gun. It has to be the same gun.” He pushed past Jane and rushed outside, where he followed her footprints back toward the forest.
“Your whole life … in hiding …” Jane shook her head sadly.
“Oh, not my whole life,” Kay corrected. “Not anymore. Those days are over. Now I’m the wife of the new chairman of the board. Everyone knows that Robert is the heir apparent.”
“But you can’t…just… come back to life.” It still wasn’t making any sense to Jane.
“No,” Kay told her. “But Selina Royce can come out of hiding. A touch of plastic surgery. Colored contacts. After all these years, no one would recognize me anyway. Then the only person who will know is Bob. And he’s in love with me.”
“Then Bill wasn’t lying to me,” Jane said with a sense of relief. “He wasn’t going to get rid of me.”
“No,” Kay answered from her comfortable seat on the sofa. “No, that’s something we’ll have to do right now.”
She was Robert’s lover. So then, it was Bob Leavitt who wanted to get rid of Jane. But why? He was Bill’s friend. Why would she be a threat to him? The answer was there in a flash, so obviously simple that she should have seen it from the beginning. Leavitt’s whole career was as William Andrews’s alter ego. His authority derived from his closeness to the seat of power. His wealth was Bill’s gift. But then Andrews had turned to her. Jane became the center of his world, and Bill was hoping to move her to a throne next to his own. Her presence was a threat to everything Leavitt had and wanted.
“Why did you want me to kill him?” Jane asked.
Kay nodded to acknowledge the question. “Just before you killed yourself. The dramatic ending of a woman betrayed. You went to Paris, saw him with his mistress, then came home and killed him in a jealous rage. Then, with nothing left to live for …”
Jane understood the script. She could reason her way through Leavitt’s motivation. But why was Kay involved? What did she expect to get from Bob that William Andrews wasn’t already giving her? Bill was paying for lavish life in Paris. Why would she want him dead?
Her thoughts were shattered by the sound of a gunshot—a crack that rattled the windowpanes and then carried through the mountains. Kay jumped, her color instantly draining. It took Jane a second to realize what she had just heard. Robert had found the gun and then fired at something. What? Had he found Bill alive? Had that been the coup de grâce? She rushed to the window. She could see her own tracks and then the second set of footprints where Leavitt had walked in his search for the pistol. But he was nowhere in sight. He had gone into the woods.
Jane heard a metallic click behind her, a sound she didn’t recognize. She wheeled. Kay had gone to the fireplace and taken down the shotgun. She had snapped it open and was in the process of loading shells into the double-barrel. She looked up from her grim work, made eye contact with Jane, and closed the gun. Slowly, she raised the barrel into Jane’s face.
Jesus, it’s going to happen again. She was going to be the headless wife, killed in a massacre just like the one that had killed Selina Royce.