“Anyone else smell smoke?” Joanna asked. The scent was thickening.
“Maybe it’s the projector,” Callie said.
“I smell it, too,” Howard said.
Joanna threw open the basement door. “We’ve got to get out of here. It’s Carol. The neighbor. She’s Meredith, the producer’s wife, and she wants to burn the house down with us in it.”
That was it. Pretending he was Bradley Stroden, Luke had blackmailed Meredith Sipriano. Luke didn’t know what she looked like, though. Both Callie and Mary Pat had mentioned how jealous the Big Sip’s wife was. To shut down the blackmailer, she’d moved in next door. That’s how the pastilles and Luke’s coffee were poisoned, and how the memoir was stolen, shredded, and returned. It was easy. She knew who was home and when. The neighbor gate made access to the mansion a cinch. Roscoe had been right to focus on means all along.
The neighbor also knew they were watching Starlit Wonder, and she wanted to make sure the movie was destroyed, along with anyone who had seen it.
“What are you talking about?” Howard said, but he’d stood and dragged Callie up with him. The movie flickered on the screen behind them.
Mary Pat was trembling. “She’s right. I hadn’t thought about it, but she’s right. I told Carol about the movie, that Howard had it. I even invited her to come, too.”
Joanna grabbed Mary Pat by the shoulders and pushed her toward the door. “We’re going. Now.”
Carol—Meredith, rather—might try to keep them from leaving while the house burned. She’d probably start the fire at the exits. They had to hurry.
“Everyone, out!” Joanna said.
They rushed up the stairs and burst into the rear salon. Fire already raced across the deck and darted up the wood framing the French doors. Old growth fir went up like balsa.
“The front door,” Mary Pat gasped.
For their age, the guests moved with remarkable speed. They pushed through the central hall to the front door.
“The door’s on fire, here, too!” Callie said. Smoke poured through the doorframe.
“The library. Quick,” Joanna said, already running toward it. She stopped at the phone and lifted the receiver. The line was dead. “Does anyone have a cell phone? Call 9-1-1.”
She threw open the window. On this side, the house hugged the embankment, making it impossible for someone to start a fire here. It also meant a long drop to the driveway beneath.
Howard stuck his head out the window and withdrew it just as quickly. “It’s a long way down.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Joanna said. “We’re going to have to climb out.” She tore the drapes off the window and ripped down the sheers behind them, knotting them into a rope. They’d have to do. “Anchor this to the desk and use it as a ladder.” She turned and ran again for the central hall.
“Where are you going?” Mary Pat said. “You can’t go in there. The fire’s already spread!”
“I have something I have to do. Go. Get out while you can.”
Was she completely stupid? Was this a suicide mission? She took the stairs two at a time and ran into Bradley’s dressing room. Quick, quick. Where was the key?
The smoke was beginning to rise, but she could still breathe. She knew enough not to open the window, because air would only feed the fire. She rushed next door to ransack the desk. Ah, here it was.
Her fingers palsied with adrenaline and nerves. She jammed the key into the wardrobe and bit off a curse. “Turn!” At last, the door opened.
She rummaged through the rack, yanking dresses off their hangers until she got to the negligee. Here was the proof she needed. The silk was soaked with DNA. If she had a say, Meredith would be put away for a long time. That is, if Joanna survived to tell about it. She turned for the hall.
The smoke was now too thick to navigate. Going down the back stairs was impossible. She shut the dressing room door and winced as she shoved the skirt and jacket of a Head-designed day suit under the crack. “Sorry, Edie.”
Now she could open the window. She yanked up the sash and leaned out. The cul-de-sac lay three floors below—she was directly over the library.
“Joanna!” Howard stood in the backyard spraying a garden hose at the flames. It had all the effect of spit on a wildfire. Sirens shrieked in the distance. Would they be too late?
She couldn’t throw the negligee out the window. It was too light and would catch in the fire. Jumping was impossible, too. Not only was it too high, she’d be jumping straight into an inferno.
She ran into the adjoining bedroom and shut the door to the hall there, too. Smoke closed her throat and burned at her eyes. She ripped the top sheet off of Bradley’s bed—good Irish linen, she wasn’t too impaired to note—and tied it to a bedpost. She tested the knot. Secure. She could do this.
Now for the bottom sheet. Her yank met resistance. She snapped her head up. Standing at the foot of the bed was Meredith Sipriano, hefting three film cans in one arm and holding the sheet with the other.
“Trapped now, aren’t we?” she said.
“How did you get up here?” Joanna held the sheet tight.
“The kitchen door is so old it opens with a skeleton key. Can you believe it?” She yanked the sheet again.
“Let go!”
Surely Meredith couldn’t hold the heavy film and the sheet at the same time, but the sheet didn’t give. She seemed to have superhuman strength. In the near distance, something exploded, rippling a boom through the house and feeding the flames’ roar.
“Why did you have to get involved? You did this to yourself, you know,” Meredith-Carol said. She let go of the sheet and flung a canister of film like a discus through the heat-weakened bedroom door. Flames whooshed from the hall.
Joanna backed toward the window, her bundle clutched firmly under an arm. “Why are you doing this?”
“We have a good marriage, me and Sip. No one can take that away. No one.” Whether she was yelling from anger or from the need to be heard above the roar of the fire, Joanna couldn’t say. “She didn’t understand. She had to die.”
“He’s dead, do you hear me?” Joanna shouted in reply. As she talked, she knotted the sheets together. The rope she’d constructed would give her only a dozen feet’s advantage, but she had no choice. She might survive a fall, but she wouldn’t live another three minutes in the house. “We’re getting out of here. The window.”
“No!” Meredith yelled. The remaining film cans hit the floor with thuds barely audible above the flames’ thunder.
Pulling her shirt over her mouth to breathe, Joanna grabbed the woman’s elbow and yanked her toward the window.
Meredith jerked back. “You don’t know what love is! You don’t know what a good marriage is!”
“Come on! You’ll die if you stay.” As soon as the words left her mouth, Joanna understood. Meredith never planned to live through this. “He isn’t worth all this. Sip is dead. It doesn’t matter if he murdered Brigid Blackburn. You don’t have to save his reputation anymore.”
Meredith began to scream. At first, Joanna thought it was panic, but she realized the woman was laughing. “Sip? You don’t get it, do you? I don’t care about that cheating bastard. He didn’t kill her.”
“What?”
Meredith widened her face in a smile more chilling than any killer’s scowl and mouthed, “It was me.” She ran for the shattered door and leapt into the hall’s pulsing orange glow.
No time to think. Joanna heaved herself out the window with her bundle under her arm and a vice-like grip on the sheet. She gulped air as she lowered herself inch by inch. Her throat burned. She heard nothing but the pounding of blood in her ears and saw nothing but the linen that dug at her palms.
All the while, Meredith’s ash-stained face mocked her. It was me, she’d said. She’d killed Brigid Blackburn. Her husband was not the murderer. Peter Blackburn and Bradley Stroden had been wrong. Everyone had been wrong.
Down the makeshift rope Joanna climbed until she had no more rope left to give. Her feet dangled, and her arms and shoulders quivered with effort. The drop would be more than twenty feet, straight onto concrete.
She let go. And fell all of one foot, into the iron grip of a fireman. She flopped as she’d seen Pepper do on his more ambitious naps. “Thank you,” she whispered as they descended the ladder.
She was handed off to another fireman, then to a paramedic a safe distance away. Above her, the house howled with red and orange flames and fireflies of cinder scattering at its edges. The window she’d crawled out of was now a sheet of fire. She counted five fire engines below the mansion, two of them arcing thick streams of water at the blaze.
“Are you all right?” the paramedic asked. He clipped something onto her finger, then slipped an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose.
She nodded. She pulled the mask away to say that Meredith Sipriano was still in the house, but a glance toward the mansion told her she couldn’t have survived.
“What’s that?” He pointed at her bundle, still clamped beneath her arm.
For a moment, she’d forgotten about it. “Oh. This is evidence in a murder.” She coughed and took another draught from the oxygen mask. The negligee was wrinkled, but the crime lab wouldn’t care.
“What about this one?” The paramedic lifted a strapless gold silk gown.
Joanna wiped the grime from her eyes. “Careful. That, my friend, is a masterpiece.”