Twenty-four
“Jane . . . ? Jane . . . ?”
A familiar voice, gentle, solicitous.
So hard to open my eyes . . . to rise out of this darkness.
“Jane, drink this. It will make you feel better.”
Vaguely she felt something with a hard rim being pressed to her lips.
“Come on now.”
Finally, with a supreme effort, Jane was able to open her eyes.
She was still in her car, still in the front passenger seat. But she was no longer in the parking lot of St. John’s. Outside the car window, not four feet away, stood a wall of grass—thick green stalks, easily six or seven feet tall, like cornstalks without the corn, densely packed and swaying slightly in the breeze.
She looked to her left. In the driver’s seat sat Laura. She was smiling at Jane, a gentle smile, the kind of smile one gives someone who’s coming out of an illness or awakening from unconsciousness, as Jane realized she had just done.
“Laura,” Jane said groggily. “Where are we? What happened? What’s going on?” She tried to sit up, but the grogginess was still thick in her head and she gave up, relaxing once more into the seat.
“You gave me quite a scare,” Laura said. “You fainted.” She raised a cup, a large cardboard one like the ones at the bazaar. “Please, Jane, have a drink of this. It will make you feel much better.” She brought it closer to Jane’s face.
“Where are we?” Jane asked again.
“In the Meadowlands, in Secaucus. We’re not far from Unimed, the company where I work.” Laura looked about them. “I know this area well.” She concentrated again on Jane. “Really, Jane, you’ve been ill. You’re still not yourself. If you’ll just drink this”—she raised the cup, her expression earnest—“you’ll feel well again.”
Jane watched Laura closely. “The way your father did?”
Laura’s look of solicitous concern abruptly vanished. “So you do know,” she said flatly.
“Yes.” Jane’s voice was sad, and now it was her turn to show sympathy.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Laura said contemptuously, “with such . . . pity. You don’t pity me. You don’t even like me, any more than I like you.”
“Why’d you do it, Laura?” Jane asked softly. “Why’d you poison your father?” She was taking a chance here, for this was only a theory, but she knew immediately from Laura’s reaction that her theory was correct.
Laura was breathing rapidly, clearly about to cry. Then her face contorted almost grotesquely. “So you’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you. Our very own Miss Marple, isn’t that what People called you? Damn them,” she muttered viciously.
“Your name is really Agnes, isn’t it,” Jane said calmly. “Agnes Oppenheim.”
Laura spoke as if she hadn’t heard Jane. “I loved him.” A large tear welled in one of her eyes, and Jane watched it roll down her cheek until Laura swiped at it with her hand, the hand that bore the ring.... “He called me the most beautiful girl in the world. . . .” Laura’s eyes unfocused, seeing the past. “And Daddy had met the world’s most beautiful women.”
“Of course he had,” Jane said. “Anthony Oppenheim owned luxury hotels around the world.”
“That’s right,” Laura said eagerly, as if a girl of thirteen again. “He took me to a lot of them. London, Paris, Rome, Madrid.... We had some of our best times in those places.”
“Until you realized you were expecting his child.”
Laura nodded, her gaze lowered to the console between their seats. “I waited until we were back in Sharon—Sharon, Connecticut—to tell him. I waited for a special moment, when Mother was out with Elaine. I thought he’d be so pleased.” She met Jane’s gaze, her eyes wide with horror. “He said it was impossible, that I was too young. But I wasn’t too young, I hadn’t been too young for two years! I explained this to him. I explained that I had always avoided him when I had my period because he wanted me pure, his beautiful little girl. But I wasn’t a little girl, I was a young woman, and I was pregnant.”
“He wanted you to get an abortion, didn’t he,” Jane said.
“Yes.” Laura’s face reflected the disbelief it must have reflected at that horrible moment so many years ago. “We had a terrible fight. He said awful things to me. He said he wasn’t about to give up everything he’d worked for and be a figure of shame around the world because of some kid. ‘Some kid’! But I told him I wanted the baby, our baby. I loved the baby, loved Daddy. It was part of us both.
“But he wouldn’t listen. Even as I was talking to him, pleading with him, he picked up the phone beside the bed and started calling someone. I looked shocked, then he smiled at me and said of course this was all terribly upsetting and I needed time to accept what had to be.”
Laura’s eyes came back into focus, fixing sharply on Jane’s face. “I knew what had to be. I knew what it all came down to.”
“Either you or the baby,” Jane said hollowly.
“That’s right. You know what I decided.”
“How did you do it, Laura?”
Laura smiled, her gaze darting to the cup in her hand. “There’s poison everywhere if you know where to look. For Daddy I felt rat poison was appropriate. We had lots in the gardener’s shed. Daddy always had the same cocktail every evening, something called an imperial. The night after we fought, I told him I’d get his drink for him, and I added an extra ingredient.”
She frowned, remembering. “Oh, it was awful. Daddy on the floor, holding his stomach, vomiting, pleading with me to call a doctor. It was a shame, it broke my heart, because I loved him, loved him more than anyone in the world. But he’d sealed his own fate, hadn’t he?” she said simply.
“I just left him there on the floor. It must have been a good twenty minutes before Christine—she was one of our maids—found him and screamed. I was surprised he was still alive. The ambulance came, but he died in it.”
“And everyone blamed your mother,” Jane said.
“Well, I had to set her up for it, didn’t I?” Laura asked, as if this were obvious. “What would have been the point of killing Daddy if I’d gotten blamed and hadn’t been allowed to keep our baby? The baby was the one I’d done it for!”
“Your mother, Rosamond, was convicted.”
“Yes. I’d made sure of that. I put some of the poison in a little plastic bag at the bottom of one of her dresser drawers.” Laura looked vaguely regretful. “She loved Daddy, too, or at least she said she did, and her grief, combined with the thought of having to be locked away in prison the rest of her life . . . well . . .” She shook her head. “Before the police could come for her so that she could start serving her sentence, she took one of Daddy’s guns and blew her head off.”
“Don’t you also think,” Jane suggested gently, “that the truth—that you’d murdered your father—was too much for her to bear?”
“Oh, she never figured it out, I’m sure of that. She got me alone once and said she was sure Victor, our groundskeeper, had done it, and had I seen him in Daddy’s room, and to please think hard. . . .”
“That was ironic,” Jane said. “I mean, that your mother would suspect Victor. Since it was Victor Mangano and his wife who would take you in.”
Laura looked distressed at this memory. “Neither of my parents had any family. The Manganos volunteered to take me in, but they had two children of their own and said they couldn’t take Elaine too. So Elaine was put up for adoption.” She gave an empty laugh. “The Manganos thought they were doing me such a favor. I could stay right there with people I knew. Yeah,” she said with a disdainful chuckle, “in the caretaker’s cottage. From the window of my room there I could see the window of my old room in the big house....
“I wished I was Elaine. . . .”
“Who was adopted by Carl and Viveca Hamner, who named her Katherine.”
Laura laughed. “Later to become Goddess!” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. Our mother had been an actress—before she married Daddy. She was quite talented, actually, did a lot of stage work in New York. I guess Elaine inherited her talent. I’d say she’s quite an actress in her own right.”
“I’d say you were, too,” Jane said solemnly.
Laura just stared at her for a moment. “Elaine grew to hate the Hamners,” she said thoughtfully. “I see now why her films and music are so angry. She even rejected the name they gave her.”
“And you hated the Manganos, too, didn’t you?”
“No, not that way. I didn’t hate them. It wasn’t their fault they were poor. But I hated being poor. Funny, isn’t it? Elaine was only five when all this happened, young enough not to remember what her life had been like. If the Manganos had taken her instead of me, she wouldn’t have known the difference. I loved the life I’d been living—the beautiful big house, traveling around the world with Daddy to all those fabulous places. . . .”
Jane said, “But the Manganos’ taking you in turned out to be fortuitous for you, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” Laura said uneasily. “When Hannah was only a few months old, it was clear there was something wrong with her. Victor told me it wasn’t my fault, that he knew what Daddy had done to me and that this was God’s way of meting out punishment. ‘The sins of the fathers,’ Victor said. He was very religious.”
Jane nodded, remembering his room at the nursing home.
“Victor moonlighted as a janitor at a place called Whiteson Institute. Finally he and his wife convinced me Hannah needed special care. They were right. Hannah was unbelievably difficult; it would have been hard for a grown woman to take care of her, let alone a girl of fourteen! And Victor’s wife said she had her hands full with her two, a boy and a girl, and me.
“When Hannah had just turned two, Victor came to me one day and said he’d arranged with the people who ran Whiteson for them to take Hannah in. He never told me this, but his wife made sure I knew he was paying for Hannah’s care by working there.” Laura looked down into the cup in her hand. “I suppose it was all for the best. Now Hannah could be cared for by professionals, and Victor could keep an eye on her for me.”
And, Jane thought, as a janitor with full run of the Insitute, he could empty Hannah’s file so no one would know her shameful, scandalous origin. But he didn’t know there was another file—the file for “highly sensitive” materials—into which the director had placed a newspaper story about the Oppenheim scandal.
“Having Hannah at Whiteson worked for you, too,” Jane said. “Now you could leave town without worrying about her.”
“That’s right.” Laura’s face was impassive. “I had to get away. Victor, with all his brimstone and Bible-thumping, sour Mrs. Mangano, always the martyr—I couldn’t stand it anymore. But I couldn’t leave yet, I was too young. I went to high school in Sharon. I used the Manganos’ last name so no one would know who I was—before then I’d always gone to private schools.” She frowned, remembering. “Two or three times Victor took me to the Institute to see Hannah, but I told him I couldn’t go anymore. The older she got, the clearer it was that something was terribly wrong with her. That was another reason I just had to get away.”
“So you left,” Jane said. “You enrolled at Yale.”
Laura let out a derisive laugh. “You need money to go to college. I didn’t have any, remember?”
Jane looked at her in puzzlement. “But why was that? With both your parents dead, their fortune would have gone to you and Elaine.”
“We were children, Jane. The money was put in ‘trust’ for us.” Laura laughed again, a sharp bitter sound. “ ‘Trust’—that’s a good one. Millions of dollars. Elaine and I were supposed to get it when we turned eighteen. Well, my father’s business judgment wasn’t always as good as it should have been, and his lawyer, who administered the trust, had gone through it all by the time I was old enough to claim my share. I considered suing him, but for what purpose? I looked into all my options, believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Jane said. “So you had nothing. Then how did you pay for Yale?”
“It took me five years to save enough money, five years of working two jobs at a time in towns you’ve never heard of in Connecticut, Massachusetts.... Once I was in college, I got financial aid and kept working. I’m older than you and Daniel think, Jane. Five years older. When Daniel entered Yale at eighteen, I was twenty-three. I’m thirty-one now, but I’ve always looked younger than my age. So has Elaine.”
She gazed out the car window at the high walls of grass flanking the narrow road. “I enrolled as Laura Dennison.”
“And you met Daniel.”
Laura’s smile was sly. “Met? You might say that. I’ve always been a good researcher. I started checking out my classmates, and bingo! Daniel Willoughby, son of Cecil Willoughby and heir to the Onyx magazine empire. So I made it my business to ‘meet’ Daniel.” She smiled. “And I liked him! I thought he was sweet. Better yet, his father had just had a heart attack that nearly killed him. He had quadruple bypass surgery. I figured it was only a matter of time before he kicked.”
“But that fortune was of no use to you unless you were married to Daniel,” Jane interjected.
“That’s right.” Laura suddenly looked weary. “And oh how I worked at him—all through school.” She shook her head. “Daniel was stronger-willed than I’d thought. I got him to agree to live together, I even convinced him we should get engaged, but I couldn’t get him to actually marry me. And all the while, old Cecil refused to die. Worse than that, he was getting better!”
Laura looked back at Jane, shrugged. “So I bided my time. After college, Daniel got his job with you and Kenneth, so we moved to Shady Hills, that godforsaken gossip cesspool of a town. And I . . . I got my job at Unimed. I figured the pharmaceuticals industry was just right for me.” She gave Jane a deadly smile. “I’ve always had a keen interest in . . . chemicals.”
Suddenly Laura seemed to deflate, her thin shoulders dropping. “Years passed,” she said despondently. “Daniel still wouldn’t set a wedding date. His father refused to die. And all the while, his empire grew, he got richer and richer, while Daniel and I struggled to get by because he was too proud to take a penny from his father.”
Jane said, “You must have hated me when Daniel turned down that job offer from Silver and Payne last fall to stay with me. That job would have paid three times what I pay him.”
Laura shrugged. “That kind of money doesn’t make a difference, Jane, not when you’re from the world I’m from. And as for hating you—I hate you anyway. I always have.”
Jane blinked. “Why?”
“Because you—and Kenneth, too, when he was alive—you encouraged Daniel to nurture his stupid little dream of ‘becoming an agent.’ ” Laura’s voice dripped with ridicule. “If it hadn’t been for you two, Daniel would have gone to work for his father. All those years—wasted.”
“Yes, all those years,” Jane echoed, “during which your daughter was growing up.”
“Mm. I didn’t know Victor had shown her pictures of me, the sentimental fool. He would never have given them to her, of course, because if anyone at the Institute had found them, they would have figured out where Hannah came from. And he never told her who I was.”
“But then People ran its story on me,” Jane said. “On all of us.”
“That’s right. Hannah told me she couldn’t believe her eyes. She decided the moment she saw the photo of me that she would meet me, no matter what it took. So one day while she was out for her walk around the Institute, she went out into the woods and slipped through a tear in the chain link fence. She hitched rides all the way to Shady Hills. All she had with her was that article from People.
“When she got here she met Arthur, Doris’s nephew. She told him she needed a secret place to live until she was ready to reveal her ‘wonderful surprise.’ He brought her food, a map of town.”
“But someone found her in the cave,” Jane said.
Laura nodded. “Some hiker staying at the inn. Hannah begged him not to tell anyone she was there. He finally agreed, even brought her a blanket.”
Louise’s antique Irish Chain quilt, Jane thought, the first thing he saw to grab at the inn.
She shook her head thoughtfully. “Hannah wasn’t the only person to be taken aback by your photo in People. Goddess—Elaine, if you like—saw it, too, and though she didn’t recognize you—she’d been only five when you were separated—”
“She recognized my pendant,” Laura finished, fingering it at her clavicle. “I never take mine off. Daddy gave one to each of us when we were babies.”
Jane nodded. “So using the pretext of wanting to write a book, Goddess approached her only friend who worked in publishing, Holly Griffin, and asked Holly to introduce Goddess to me. Through me, Goddess could get to Daniel, and to you. It wasn’t Holly who brought Goddess to me, as Holly claimed. It was Goddess who asked Holly to introduce Goddess to me.
“And Goddess’s plan worked. At Carol Freund’s publication party, Goddess came face-to-face with you, had an opportunity to examine your pendant more closely than she could have done in the People photo.”
“I recognized her immediately.” Laura looked stunned even as she recalled that moment. “I—I couldn’t believe my eyes. My little sister Elaine was—Goddess! I couldn’t tell whether she recognized me, too. Later she told me that the Hamners had told her everything about her past. I didn’t know that then, but I had to assume the worst. I had to assume she knew enough to tell the world who I really was.”
Jane smiled ruefully, shaking her head. “And then poor, foolish, big-mouthed Holly, always wanting to be seen as an insider, made the mistake of telling everyone that Goddess had already told Holly everything—and thereby sealed her fate.”
“The idiot,” Laura said. “I followed her back to her office while Elaine was singing. Holly looked surprised to see me. I told her I was intrigued with publishing because of Daniel’s being an agent. We chatted for a moment. When she bent down to pick up the framed book jacket for Carol, I took her letter opener. I came around her desk, pretending to admire the view. Then I just spun around and stuck the letter opener right through her neck. It was harder than I’d thought it would be,” she said, looking uncomfortable; then she giggled. “She kind of . . . wiggled on it, like a bug pinned to a board.”
Jane recoiled. “That must have been difficult for you, stabbing her. After all, your first method had been poison.”
Laura laughed. “ ’First method’! You talk as if I’m some kind of serial killer.”
“You are.”
Laura shrugged indifferently. “The point is—no pun intended—that I couldn’t let Holly get in the way of all I’d worked so hard for, waited so many years for.”
“Some of Holly’s blood spattered on your blouse, didn’t it,” Jane said. “That’s why you spilled tomato juice on yourself at the bar—to cover the bloodstain.”
“Oh, you are good.” Laura giggled. “The poor bartender ! Who knows what he must have thought. He saw me do it to myself but didn’t dare contradict me.”
“So that was one down,” Jane said. “I was next, wasn’t I?”
Laura nodded. “I didn’t know how much Elaine knew, didn’t know how much of what she knew she’d told you. I couldn’t take any chances. I knew Daniel wouldn’t want me to go to Chicago with him for his father’s funeral. I followed you to the Waldorf . . .”
“. . . gave the desk clerk that phony note from Salomé Sutton, and bashed me over the head with a vase. But I didn’t die.”
“No,” Laura said pensively, then brightened. “That’s why we get second chances.”
“Hannah had no second chance,” Jane said, and Laura’s face grew serious. “She’d located you, hadn’t she, and approached you?”
“That’s right. She actually came to our house, rang our bell. Thank God Daniel wasn’t home yet. She was so happy. I was horrified.”
“You thought you’d rid yourself of her eighteen years ago.” Jane shook her head in wonder. “Years ago you chose the life of this child over that of your father. Now . . .”
“I couldn’t afford to have her jeopardize my plans.” Laura spoke as if her words made perfect sense. “Besides, I hadn’t seen her since she was a little girl. She was a stranger to me.”
“You told her you’d meet her later in the cave, didn’t you?”
“Yes. She took me there so I’d be able to find her. She said I was beautiful. She must have noticed I was wearing makeup, because she asked me to bring some when I came back to the cave.”
“Which would be that night. You slipped Daniel something to knock him out, right?”
“That’s right, my own little Mickey Finn. I just dissolved some sleeping pills I’d taken from work in his coffee.”
“So Daniel thought you were in bed with him all night. He was your alibi.”
“Right again.”
“But you slipped out of bed and went to the cave to meet Hannah as planned.”
“Mm. She was so excited. She wanted so badly to look pretty for her introduction to the people of Shady Hills. You should have seen her trying to put on the makeup I’d brought. She’d never worn makeup before. She made herself look like a clown.”
“You wouldn’t help her.”
“What would have been the point? She was about to die.”
“What did you give her to make her cooperate?”
“Would you recognize the name if I told you? It was a hallucinogen. I put it in a Coke I’d brought her. Then it was easy. I led her through the woods to a tree behind the inn, hauled her up, and tied the rope to another tree.”
Jane regarded her with horror. “And to pin the murder on Ernie, you stuffed one of his handkerchiefs into the pocket of Hannah’s dress.”
Laura gave a simple nod.
“You took it from the clothesline behind the inn,” Jane said, and Laura nodded again.
“And when we went to New York to pick out your wedding dress, you told me you’d heard gossip about Ernie having extramarital affairs.”
“I really had heard it,” Laura said.
“I believe you,” Jane said, thinking of Dara.
“In fact, hearing the gossip was what made me decide to frame Ernie in the first place. I wanted the cops to think she was one of his girlfriends.”
Jane sat thoughtfully, pondering this horror. “So you returned home, where Daniel was still sound asleep.”
Laura smiled slyly. “Not so sound asleep that I couldn’t get him to make love to me.”
“Ah,” Jane said, eyes widening, “so it was then that he made love to you without protection.”
Laura looked sickened. “He told you about that? You two have a twisted relationship, you know that?”
Jane ignored this remark. “If I’d known that was when it happened, I could have told him it was too soon for a home pregnancy test to be reliable.”
“But you didn’t know.” Laura laughed disdainfully. “Men. They really are so naive about such things. The important point is that he believed me.”
“So drugging him served a dual purpose. It gave you an alibi—how could you have been in the woods behind the inn hanging Hannah when you were in bed with Daniel all night?—and it allowed you to announce believably that you were pregnant.”
“You got it,” Laura said brightly.
“But you weren’t, were you.”
“No. But how else could I get him to marry me? You know how traditional he is. I knew that if he believed I was pregnant, he’d finally agree to set a wedding date.”
Jane nodded. “Hannah’s appearance in Shady Hills had unnerved you, given you a new sense of urgency.” She shook her head, remembering. “But even as coldhearted a murderer as you had a trace of conscience. Daniel said you cried off and on after Hannah’s body was discovered. You were crying at the realization of what you’d done. You’d murdered your own daughter.”
For several moments the two women sat silently, Laura staring vacantly out the windshield at the gently waving grass.
Jane broke the silence. “But marrying Daniel wouldn’t have done you any good if his father was still alive.”
“That’s right,” Laura said. “And as far as I was concerned, he couldn’t die a moment too soon.”
“What better place to kill him than at your own wedding ?”
Laura said nothing, watching Jane.
“You called Daniel’s father and told him about the wedding, didn’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“What did you say to him—that Daniel would be upset if he knew you’d called, so you’d rather keep it your little secret?”
“Right again.”
“And at the wedding you slipped a poison into Cecil Willoughby’s champagne, a poison you knew would cause him to collapse as if his heart had finally given out. After all, everyone knew he had a bad heart. He’d already cheated death for years. It was only a matter of time. And you knew no one would request an autopsy if he appeared to have died of a heart attack.
“But your sister—Goddess—saw you slip the drug into Mr. Willoughby’s glass—that’s why she suddenly spilled it onto the ground, pretending she’d seen a caterpillar in it.” Jane shook her head. “But she only postponed Mr. Willoughby’s murder. You managed to slip the poison into his drink again later. I’m curious about where you carry your poisons, Laura. My guess is it’s in that big ring you always wear.”
Laura held up the ring, gold with a filigreed dome top. “Very good,” she said, flipping open the lid to reveal a compartment inside.
“Just like Lucrezia Borgia. . . .”
“What?”
“Never mind.... So now poor Mr. Willoughby was dead, and you were Mrs. Daniel Willoughby, the wife of a millionaire.” Jane shook her head. “But it still wasn’t to be smooth sailing for you. You must have suspected that Goddess had seen you slip the poison into Mr. Willoughby’s drink, and during the private screening of Adam and Eve, you sneaked out and went to speak to Goddess in the lounge down the corridor. Goddess must then have told you she knew you were sisters and that she knew you had murdered Mr. Willoughby.”
“She threatened me,” Laura said. “She said she’d tell the police what I’d done if I didn’t disappear. She said she was giving me a chance because we were sisters, because blood is thicker than water.” She snorted. “I told her I had no intention of ‘disappearing,’ and that if she said a word to anyone about what she thought she knew, I’d kill her, too.”
“Which you intended to do at a later date anyway.”
“Yes . . . but that wasn’t the time.”
“Goddess must have sensed your plans for her, because it was she who disappeared, afraid for her life.”
“Right,” Laura said. “I’ll find her eventually. But in the meantime I have another problem. You, Jane. I’m curious . . . How’d you figure it all out?”
Jane frowned in thought. “Goddess made a strange comment to me, a comment about dreaming of someone and then meeting the person she’d dreamed about.
“Last night, while I was trying to sleep, I remembered this comment. Suddenly all the pieces came together for me. Goddess was five when you and she were separated—too young to remember you clearly, but old enough to have residual memories that came to her in her dreams. It was you she was referring to. Without realizing what she herself was saying, she was revealing that she knew you.
“Goddess didn’t dream about you and then meet you. She vaguely remembered you, thought she was dreaming about someone she’d never met, and then she met you again. It was only a matter of time before she realized who you were.
“It gave me terrible pain—on poor Daniel’s behalf—to believe my theory possible, but I was pretty sure of it. I just had to be certain. If I was right and you were a killer, I would still be a target for you. So I decided to flush you out before you could get me.”
Laura looked amused. “And how were you going to do that?”
“I went to the cave in the woods and smeared everything in it with a hand cream that contains a chemical that drives my cat Winky crazy. Then I called Daniel and told him the police had found a clue the killer had left at the place where the murdered woman was living. I knew he would share this information with you. If I was right about you, you would visit the cave before going to the church bazaar.”
“Right you are. I told Daniel I had an errand to run and that I’d meet him at the church.”
Jane nodded. “I intended to hold Winky, my ‘murderer detector,’ close to you to see if she reacted. If she did react, I would know it was you who had been in the cave, searching the objects there.
“It hadn’t occurred to me that you already had plans for me. You’d slipped something into the Diet Coke Daniel brought me, hadn’t you? It made me so dizzy I had to sit for a few minutes in the car. Then I passed out.”
Laura nodded. “I saw you go to your car. I told Daniel I was tired—in my condition—and would meet him at home.”
“You got into my car and drove us here.”
“Yes,” Laura said, pleased. “Your final resting place.” She gazed out into the tall grass. “It could be years before they find you.” Swiftly she reached into the back pocket of her jeans and produced a switchblade. Expertly she flicked it open, its six-inch blade gleaming in the sunlight. She held it a few inches from Jane’s neck. “Now, as you know, Miss Marple, I much prefer poison to stabbing. But you also know I’ll stab you if I have to. So you choose. The knife, or”—she lowered her gaze to the cup in her hand—“the drink.”
“Another of your potions?”
Laura nodded. “It will work quickly. Why not take the easy way out?”
Jane didn’t want to take either way out.
At that moment she remembered Winky in the backseat.
“Winky,” she called, and the cat seemed to appear from nowhere, jumping onto Jane’s lap and nuzzling her face, oblivious to the blade at Jane’s neck.
Laura let out a little cry of surprise. “I didn’t know she was in the car.”
Jane had an idea. “Laura, I think I will choose the drink.”
“Smart choice,” Laura said and, smiling sweetly, brought the cup to Jane’s lips.
Suddenly Winky bristled and let out a wild yowl, lashing out at Laura’s hand that held the cup. The liquid in it splashed into Laura’s face. Laura let out a cry of horror.
Seizing her moment, Jane opened the car door and, still holding Winky, scrambled out. But Jane realized she was still a little groggy and couldn’t move as fast as she wanted to. Laura, wiping hard at her face and mouth with her T-shirt, had also gotten out. She ran around the car toward Jane.
“Winky, run!” Jane cried, and the cat jumped from her arms and ran into the tall grass an instant before Laura came around the back of the car. Her face the very picture of loathing, she brandished the knife and with a fierce grunt lunged at Jane. The knife went into Jane’s side, but not all the way because Jane jumped back, even as she felt the sting of the blade. She spun around and dashed headlong into the sea of grass, knowing it was her only hope of escape.
Running through the tall heavy stalks was like running through mud in a nightmare. As Jane rushed forward, madly parting the grass before her, she heard rustling behind her and knew Laura was gaining on her.
“Jane, come back here,” Laura said fiercely. “Jane!”
Jane kept running. She felt the ground begin to slope gently upward.
“Jane, you come here,” Laura commanded again, but her voice was different now—tired, weaker.
And then all at once the tall grass ended, and before Jane was trim green grass that rose on a steep embankment about eight feet high.
Suddenly, not five feet to the right of where Jane stood, Winky shot out of the tall grass. She looked straight at Jane, let out an exceptionally loud meow, and ran up the embankment. Halfway up, she stopped, looking behind her, waiting; then Laura burst from the grass, and apparently not seeing Jane, stumbled up the embankment after the cat.
Now Jane was aware of a whooshing sound, and in that instant she realized what lay at the top of the embankment: one of the highways that crisscrossed the Meadowlands.
Laura was about three-quarters of the way up the embankment. Winky stood at the very top.
“Winky!” Jane cried out, wanting to stop the cat from running out into traffic; but Winky kept going.
Laura, looking dazed, her skin a sickly white, glanced quickly at Winky, then down at Jane. For a moment she simply wavered, as if unsure whom to pursue, Jane or Winky. Then suddenly she made a horrible choking sound, her face contorting, and collapsed out of sight onto the highway.
Jane ran up the embankment. Halfway up she heard the long insistent blare of a car horn, then the sickening screech of brakes; it seemed to go on forever.
Panting hard, Jane finally gained the top. Before her, a dark-colored car stood slanted across the highway’s nearest lane. Laura lay beneath the closest front tire, one arm outstretched as if in supplication, a river of dark red running from her crushed head.
“Oh!” Jane cried out, clasping a hand over her mouth, and looked away.
Then she noticed a tiny movement far across the wide highway. There, at the road’s edge, sat Winky—solemn as a statue, unharmed, her face inscrutable.
It was a few hours later. Jane sat in one of Greenberg’s visitor’s chairs, Daniel in the other. He was perfectly still, his face expressionless, as if all that Jane had told him he could simply not take in . . . as if it were all a bad dream.
“It was the issue of adoption—of learning from Carl Hamner that Goddess was adopted and had rejected her adoptive parents—that first got me thinking,” Jane said. “Do children put up for adoption always end up in happy situations? How do they react to these situations ? This line of thought enabled me to put together the many pieces of a rather complicated puzzle into a theory.” She looked at Daniel, her heart breaking for him. “A theory I was later deeply saddened to learn was correct.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?” Greenberg demanded.
She gave him a skeptical look. “Would you—would anyone—have believed such a far-fetched story?”
“No,” he admitted, “I suppose not.”
“So I had to find out on my own.”
“And almost got yourself killed,” Daniel said hollowly.
She cast sad eyes on him. “I’m so sorry, Daniel. When Winky bristled at the smell of the cream on Laura’s hand, the poison splashed into her mouth. I hadn’t meant for that to happen; I only wanted to distract her so Winky and I could get out of the car.” She shook her head, remembering. “If she hadn’t been killed by the car on Route Three, her own poison would have done her in.”
The room was silent, everyone looking at the floor. When Jane glanced up, a tear was running down Daniel’s cheek.
“You asked me if I loved her. I did,” he said.
Jane took him in her arms, held him tight. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
And you, you poor, trusting, innocent man—how long will it take you to realize that you would probably have been Laura’s next victim?