Fifty-Four

My head was buzzing with this new revelation. I needed to focus but I was too excited. I needed to walk this off. I changed into my yoga pants and T-shirt and slipped on my shoes. The same shoes I’d worn the day of my assault. A brief wave of panic moved through me. Calm down, you’ve been in Central Park thousands of times and were attacked once.

I slipped the small bag over my neck that contained my keys, phone, bank card, and pepper spray. I practiced reaching in and pulling it out, several times. Okay, perhaps I was getting paranoid. But it couldn’t hurt to practice.

We still had no idea where my attacker was, or if he was the same person who’d killed Justine and Jean.

He could still be watching me.

Waiting for me.

But would he attack in the same place twice? Would he have the audacity to show his face in Central Park after attacking me there so recently?

I sucked in air, trying to calm my racing heart.

I couldn’t let him scare me. Couldn’t let him rule my life. Being outside was one of the few joys I had. I’d not let him take it away from me.

I opened the door and pushed myself toward the elevator, “Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him.” It was my new mantra. It became part of my rhythm as I walked.

No running, though. Not today. My ribs were healing and I didn’t want to jeopardize it. It would be foolish. Besides, it was painful to move my arms. I knew better than to push it.

As I walked past a falafel vendor, smelling the spicy scent, I mulled over what we’d just learned and tried to piece it all together. Justine had been trying to help the look-alike. Evidently she had an inkling she was in jeopardy.

The look-alike probably gave Justine the ring for safekeeping. It made sense.

If Marino Bello had taken a baby to France, and it was Jean Harlow’s half sister, it also made sense that Harlow would send her the ring rather than take it to her grave. Although it was romantic to think she went to her grave with it, she’d swelled to almost double her size and couldn’t have kept the ring on her finger.

But why the secrecy about the baby? That was the big question.

I walked along the sidewalk and noted a shadow coming behind me. I stepped aside, trying not to panic. I stood in the grass and let the innocent passerby go along. I was paranoid. But who could blame me? I turned around and headed back to the apartment.

The air and sunshine were a healing balm. But it seemed just a little would suffice. My legs wearied and my mind and heart were healing, but slowly. Would I ever be able to walk or run here without thinking about that day? The way he snuck up behind me and pushed me? His hands on my back. My head hitting the bench. The feeling of helplessness. Of not being in control.

“None of us are really in control, hon. Consider it a good thing.”

I exited the park and stood at the corner, waiting for the walk sign. I was alone in the crowd of strangers surrounding me. I should be used to the feeling, but today it bothered me. Today, the awareness of it frightened me.

We crossed in unison, the strangers and me. I often pondered the orderliness of humanity in situations like this. What kept people from not obeying the signs? Oh yes, you heard about those who disrupted order—wild shooters, for example. But for the most part, most of us were content to follow signs, follow the rules. It might be our saving grace.

I ducked into a café. I didn’t want to go back in the apartment. Not yet. I paid for mint iced tea and a lemon scone and took a seat in the corner. I needed to think. Thinking had always gotten me where I’d wanted to be. My body sometimes let me down. And sometimes my mind was cloudy because of the Lyme disease, but when I was healthy and in control, thinking helped.

If Jean Harlow had a half sister in France, I’d write a new chapter. Maybe two. Depending on the reason the baby was taken there. People viewed babies and children differently back then.

“Children are to be seen and not heard” was the dictate of the day.

Adoption was hush-hush.

Babies out of wedlock were still scandalous.

Babies born with Down Syndrome, blind, or deaf, for example, were often shoved away in homes and schools for the “handicapped.”

Is that what had happened with the Bello baby?

Or had Hollywood gotten wind of it and deemed it bad for Harlow’s reputation for her fifty-year-old mother to have a baby?

This was the same studio system that probably covered up Paul Bern’s murder, by claiming it was a suicide because suicide was less scandalous. In the meantime, the woman who most likely killed him made off scot-free. Her name was Dorothy Millette and she was Bern’s common law wife, who he’d thought was safely tucked away in a hospital. She found out about his marriage to Jean and showed up in Hollywood to find him. According to Jean and Paul’s domestic help, there was a woman on the property that night. Many signs indicated Paul was murdered. They found Dorothy’s body a day later, after she took a river cruise, washed up on the banks. Either she’d killed herself or someone suspected she’d killed Paul. Her hotel room had been ransacked. Many items were stolen, including her personal journal.

Twisted.

So what did this have to do with the look-alike and Justine?

If the look-alike was descended from Harlow’s line, who would care?

Why would someone kill not just one but two women over it?

It made little sense.

But then again, the person who killed them wasn’t about making sense. The person was disturbed. A chill moved up my spine. I sipped my iced tea.

I examined each person as they came into the café, searching for a familiar face, a face with a scar. Would I always be searching for him?

After going back to the apartment and showering, I sat down at Justine’s desk, surrounded by all those books. They were calling to me—my writer’s monkey mind. Once it settled, focus was my bitch.

I pulled up the manuscript and re-examined the places I’d marked in the text. The note about Bello and Paris. I added space and more notes.

My cell phone buzzed. I picked it up. It was Lou from the French embassy.

“Hi, Lou, how are you?” One must always be polite to the French.

“I’m well, and yourself ?”

“I’m fine,” I replied. Those formalities out of the way, I wanted answers. “So what do you have for me?”

“I’ve been able to verify that Bello brought a baby into the country.”

“Good. Can you email me the documentation on that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you have anything else for me?”

He hesitated. “How much would you like to know?”

“Everything.”

He laughed, then quieted. “It’s not pleasant.”

I think my heart jumped into my throat and squeezed. “What? What do you have for me?”

“The baby was taken to the St. Agnes Home for Orphans.”

“Orphans?”

“Yes, Charlotte. The man who brought her to France—Marino Bello—signed her over to the sisters.”

My heart split. “But there must be more to the story.”

“Yes. The child, a girl, had a disease.”

“So they gave her up? That’s ludicrous.”

“In the 1930s, many people didn’t know how to handle children with what is now called cystic fibrosis. It didn’t even have a name. The nuns took children in with these and many other conditions.”

“Do you have any documentation about the baby? Who the parents were?”

“I’ll have that soon. The papers are being faxed. I’ll forward them to you.”

“Thank you, Lou.”

“Certainly.”

After we hung up, I sat for a few moments in disbelief. If this was the truth—that the baby had Jean Harlow’s DNA, along with cystic fibrosis—this news would take more than a chapter in the book.

My mind circled back to the ring. Pieces were falling into place. If Jean Harlow sent the ring to her half sister, in care of the nuns for safekeeping, and it was handed down through a few generations, it might be one of the few items proving the Harlow line had continued.

Who would be threatened by that? The look-alike’s father? But why? It made no sense. After all this time, who cared?

It was a legacy of shame, certainly, to have given up a child because it was ill—and to secretly have taken it out of the country. But the people who were involved were all long gone. And Harlow, the person I assumed Hollywood and Mama Jean were trying to protect, had outclassed them all by her final gesture.

What gives?

Okay, perhaps my imagination was running away with me. Maybe this was all a set-up by some crazed Jean Harlow freak. I needed to calm down. I needed the proof.

The door buzzer interrupted my thoughts. I pressed in the button. “Yes?”

“Officer Brophy here to see you.”

“Send him up, please.” I was finding this procedure annoying. Den had been here countless times, and he was a cop, for God’s sake. Why did they have to ask every time?

When I opened the door to Den dressed in his uniform, all angles and solid maleness, a fluttering in my belly awakened. “Come in.” I gestured with my arm toward the library.

Den had a briefcase hung over his shoulder and a huge sparkly handbag in his hand.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the bag.

He freed himself from the briefcase, placed it on the chair. “This belonged to our Jean Harlow impersonator. There’s nothing in it except an envelope addressed to you.”

“Me?” I clutched at my chest. “Really?”

“Makes me wonder.”

“What?” I reached inside the bag and pulled out the envelope.

“Maybe she wasn’t stalking you in the way we thought she was.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe she was trying to give you the envelope.”

Something in my chest cracked, filled with a fluttery lightness. The look-alike had been trying to give me something, and that something was in this envelope. She wasn’t chasing me to kill me. She was trying to find a good time to deliver it without being seen. Her odd gestures, especially in the hallway of the apartment, made sense now. She was watching to see if anybody was around to witness her handing the envelope to me.

I stood in the moment, feeling a shifting sensation. A paradigm change. Could it be?

The envelope had my name written on it. In Justine’s handwriting. I lifted the envelope to my nose and breathed in the scent. Cotillion.

“Charlotte? You okay?”

I turned to face him. “I’m good. I’m very good.”

“Why were you smelling that envelope?”

“It smells of Justine’s perfume.”

He was quiet as I ran my fingers over the handwriting.

What was in here? Was this going to solve the mystery of the ring and our Jean Harlow impersonator? Was it going to help us solve the murders? I didn’t know. I was transfixed. This envelope had been held by Justine and she’d written my name on it. Oh, Justine, I miss you.

“Are you going to open it or what? I’ve got to make a copy of it and get it into evidence. Pulled strings to get it to you.”

I tore the envelope open and pulled out the papers. I spread them out on the desk, with Den at my side. They didn’t answer all of our questions, but they answered most.