So Hali pushes through the laundry room door, and all of a sudden we're like a rush-hour pileup. Hali screeches to a halt, Marissa plows right into her, and I bump smack! into Marissa.
And the reason we're all piled up is because standing there, blocking the road, is someone none of us is ready to see.
FIFTEEN
Hali must've decided that since there was no going around him, she'd put the pedal to the metal and go right through him. She gives him a sour look and says, “Hello… Dad.”
For a minute he just stares at her through his tortoise-shell glasses; then he nods very slowly and says, “This would explain your mother's disappearance.” He eyes Marissa and me while he asks Hali, “Who else have you told?”
“Oh, aren't you precious. Nineteen years of deception, and all you're worried about is who else knows? Well, the answer, my pathetic padre, is nobody. These girls do, but they're highly motivated not to talk.” She turns to us. “Isn't that right?”
Now, believe me, at this point I am sweating it out pretty good. I mean, she's driving this conversation like she drives her Bug, and any minute she's going to take a wrong turn and wipe us all out.
“Isn't that right?” she asks me again.
I swallow hard and nod.
Hali slaps back a braid that's fallen across her face. “And what's this about Mama?”
“She's nowhere to be found. We thought she might be with you, but obviously that's not the case.” He sighs and says, “I'm sorry things happened this way. Truly, I am. But right now Detective Doyle is anxious to speak with you, and I think it'd be a good idea if you'd go in there and dissuade his suspicions regarding you.”
Hali points to herself. “Me? He thinks I killed LeBrandi?”
“Your exit at their arrival did not exactly put you in a favorable light, Hali.”
“I went to get the dry cleaning!”
“Go explain that to Detective Doyle. He's in the dining hall. I believe he's finished interviewing everyone else.”
Hali grumbles a bit, but she takes off, and when she's gone Max looks at Marissa and me and says, “Dominique's been quite worried about the two of you, and I know she'll be greatly relieved to see you. However, this situation with Hali is personal and it's private, and I would greatly appreciate your not discussing it with Dominique.”
“But…it is her business to know, don't you think?” I look him right in the eye and try to forget the irony. “Wouldn't you want to know if the person you were thinking about marrying had a secret child somewhere?”
He freezes. “She's told you about my proposal?”
“Well, we could tell something was up, so we kind of talked it out of her.”
He closes his eyes and says, “Oh, heaven, what a mess.”
All of a sudden I realize that this is my chance. Maybe my only chance. I take a deep breath and say, “Mr. Mueller, there's something else that I really have to discuss with you, but not here. Can we go into your office?”
“My office? Why?”
“Because I …I can't talk about it here.”
He snaps, “Why not?”
Now, I could've talked about it right then and there, but I didn't know how else I'd ever get into Max's office. I mean, it was easy to see that something, somewhere, was going to give, and that my mother's whole world was about to come crashing down around her. And even though I hadn't really done anything to get her into the mess she was in—well, except for that little mistake of confiding in a girl who might've been trying to kill her— I still felt like I had to at least try to get her out of it. Because I was beginning to understand that if my mother did get kicked out of Max Mueller's agency, she'd never work again. Not as an actress, anyway. Not with the way Max's contract sentenced her to his little financial prison for eight years. If my mother thought she was old now, she'd be Fräulein Fossil by the time her contract with him ran out.
So I wanted to get inside the office again. And this time I wanted to look at more than just the weird decor. There had to be a filing cabinet. Somewhere. And even though I knew I wouldn't be able to get my hands on her contract with Max standing right there, maybe—just maybe—I could do something about it later.
So when Mighty Max tells me he doesn't have time to go to his office, I signal Marissa, who digs up the ring and hands it over to him.
At first he doesn't take it. Then he turns red, then completely white. “Where did you get this? Do you have the other pieces?”
“Like I said, we can't talk about it here. Can we please go to your office?”
He blinks twice behind those glasses, then marches off. And while we trail after him, I whisper my plan to Marissa. I can tell she thinks I'm losing it again, but she can also tell that it's very important to me. She hisses, “If this lands us in jail…”
I try to kid her with “Maybe there'll be some drunk and disorderly movie stars in the cell next to us,” but she just hits me in the arm.
When we get to Max's office, he unlocks the deadbolt, whisks us in, and says, “So. Here we are.” He sits on the edge of his desk and unfolds his hand, showing us the ring. “Now. Where did you get this, and do you know where the brooch and necklace are?”
His eyes are looking glossy and hard. But in the center there's a soft spot, and to me, they don't look stern and fierce like he wants them to. They look like two kiwiflavored Tootsie Pops under glass.
“Well?” he demands.
“Well,” I say, “actually, it's sorta hard to talk about— and there's a lot to talk about—but since I know you're worried about your Honeymoon Jewels, I'll start at the end and work back, okay?”
The crunchy candy outside starts to crack. “Yes. Please.” He puts a hand toward two carved ebony chairs. “Would you be more comfortable sitting?”
Marissa takes a seat, but I start moving around a little, saying, “No, actually—”
Marissa pipes up with “Actually, Sammy has trouble talking and sitting. Actually, she has trouble thinking and sitting, or eating and sitting, or…”
I pull a face at her and say, “He gets the idea, Marissa,” but when I'm sure Max can't see, I wink at her so she knows I know she's doing me a favor. Then I say, “Yes. I know where the necklace and brooch are, and yes, you'll get them both back today.”
He springs up from the corner of his desk and says, “But how did you find them? Who had them? Where are they now?”
“Like I said, it's pretty complicated, and we'll tell you the whole story, but first, I'm confused about a couple of things. You called these the Honeymoon Jewels. Is that because you're planning to give them to Dominique?”
He blinks at me a minute, then sighs and says, “From your vantage point, I'm sure I appear to be a real cad.” Then he looks up toward the ceiling and proceeds to talk about good intentions and human frailties, and how he hopes he'll make fewer mistakes the next time around.
Now, while he's musing about his mountain of mistakes, I'm checking out furniture, lifting table skirts, moving slowly away from him and Marissa to the other side of the room. And I'm in the middle of finding a whole lot of nothing when he swivels on his desk to face me and says, “So yes, I was planning to present them as a token of everlasting love.”
I scratch my neck and signal Marissa to start snooping. “Who knew this?”
“No one, really. I had only recently taken them out of…of storage.”
“You didn't tell Reena? Or Inga?”
He frowns. “Inga knew nothing of the jewels, and discussing a gift of this kind with Reena would have been most insensitive.”
“But they both knew you wanted to marry Dominique?”
“Yes. I tried my best to explain it to Reena, but she didn't grasp the concept.”
So Inga did know! My heart was kicking and bucking, but I tried to hold the reins tight. “The concept?”
He looks at me and sighs. “Yes. I'm afraid it's something that's beyond Reena's grasp, and at this point it's too late for me to do anything about that.?
??
“But what concept?”
“The concept of Claire. Now please. You were telling me about the jewels?”
I still didn't understand what he meant, but I had to concentrate on keeping his focus away from Marissa. I mean, I was afraid she wouldn't do anything, but there she is across the room, moving around like Super Snoop. It's amazing—she's not biting a thumbnail or doing the McKenze dance. She's being nervy. Very nervy. It's like she's whipped on a mask and double-S cape.
So I start maneuvering myself around the room in such a way that Max's back is always to Marissa. And while she's busy sliding open his desk drawers and checking inside boxes, I'm telling Max the story, handling his knickknacks and artifacts just enough to make him nervous so he won't take his eyes off me.
I'm dragging the story out, too, telling the tiniest little details about the brooch and how we'd figured out Cosmo's phone number, and about going to the curio shop and confronting Opal at the Peppermint Peacock.
Finally he interrupts me, saying, “She admitted it?”
I'm pretending to be interested in the big hieroglyphic shapes that are woven into the tapestry that's hanging on the wall, kind of fingering them as I say, “Well, she couldn't exactly deny it…,” when all of a sudden I get this vague, heady feeling of déjà vu. And that's when I realize that something — the tapestry? I'm not sure — smells familiar. So I sniff. And it's coming back to me, but not quite, so I stick my nose right into his woolly woven heirloom and take a good hearty whiff.
Well, I guess he didn't appreciate me Dustbusting his tapestry because he comes over, takes me by the shoulders, and steers me into a chair, saying, “You have no idea of the value of some of these items. Please, try not to touch, or sniff, anything else, would you?”
Marissa's already slid back into her chair, twitching and shaking a little beside me as she recovers from her adventure as Super Snoop. She shakes her head just enough so I know she wasn't able to find anything, and really, I can't think of an excuse to stall any longer. So I signal Marissa to give him the necklace, and when she does I say, “The brooch is in LeBrandi's dresser. In a pair of olive green socks.” Then I stand up and say, “You've got the jewels back now, so… well, I hope you don't do anything to Opal. I know she was wrong to steal them—which is why we're giving them back to you—but she was upset about, you know, about how she was fired and everything. And besides, she didn't kill LeBrandi.”
“How can you say that? You've just built her up to be the perfect suspect!”
“I know, but she didn't do it. I could tell.”
He frowns at me and crosses his arms. “You could tell.”
“Well, yeah. And besides, I don't think whoever killed LeBrandi was trying to kill LeBrandi.”
His frown digs in a little deeper. “You don't.”
“No. I think they were trying to kill my”— I caught myself in the nick of time—“aunt.”
He throws his head back and laughs, then tries to compose himself. “Oh, my dear girl. Why on earth do you say that?”
So I explain my theory to him. And pretty much I just give it to him in black and white. No sidetracks, no details—just the facts, ma'am. Then I shut up and wait.
And does he laugh at me or tell me I've got an overly active imagination? Does he tell me it's preposterous or implausible or just plain dumb?
No.
He says, “Well, now. This is serious.” Then he nods and says, “I'd better discuss these new developments with Officer Doyle. I'm sure he'll want to talk to you, but in the meantime, why don't you go upstairs and rest? You girls have had quite a day, and frankly, you look worn. I'll tell Dominique that you're fine.” He hesitates, then says, “You will let me be the one to tell her about… things, won't you?”
“Uh… that depends. When are you planning to do that?”
“I've arranged a special dinner for the two of us tonight after LeBrandi's farewell service.”
“Her farewell service? When's that? And you're going to a romantic dinner afterward? Excuse me, but isn't that kind of… cold?”
“Young lady, if LeBrandi's death has taught me anything, it's that we must celebrate life. Every moment of it. So yes, I'll… I'll tell your aunt all truths tonight. And the farewell service for LeBrandi is just an in-house memorial to help us all deal with her passing.” He eyes me. “So, can you wait that long? It just wouldn't be right for Dominique to learn such delicate information from someone else.”
I nod and ask, “Where is she, anyway?”
“She's with Inga, trying on a gown.”
“With Inga?”
“Yes. Why do you look so alarmed?”
“Because … oh, please!” I head out of his office. “Where are they? I need to see her. Right now!”
Just then Inga walks into the reception room, her bandages looking a little droopy around the eyes and tattered around the knuckles. She says, “Did I hear my name?”
I look right into her yellow eyes and whisper, “Where's … where's Dominique?”
Tiger Eyes blinks at me with a strange sort of detachment. Like she's not sure if I'm a morsel worth munching. “She's changing clothes,” she says, then turns to Max and smiles. “The dress fits beautifully—like it was made for her.”
He lets out a contented sigh, then asks, “And the shoes?”
“Perfectly. And now, if you don't mind, I'm going out to work in the garden. I found that policeman most unnerving.”
“Of course, of course. You go on. It'll do you good.”
“And you should take a swim, Maxi. You've not looked too well lately.” She stretches up to kiss him on the cheek, then turns and leaves without glancing back.
After she's gone, Max seems to pull himself out of a heavy thought. He locks up his office, then says, “If you'll wait right here, I'll tell Dominique to come see you.” He hesitates on his way out. “I implore you, though—don't mention the situation with Hali to her. Or the jewels—I don't want what's happened to tarnish their surprise.”
My stomach flutters a bit as I ask, “Well, what if… what if she doesn't accept them?”
“Oh, she will,” he says, then leaves the room.
The minute he's gone, Marissa whispers, “He's, like, head over heels for her.”
I plop down on the couch, groaning, “What a mess. What a monumental mess!” And what I'm thinking while I'm shaking my head is Why? Why couldn't she just have been herself instead of this stupid Dominique person? So what if she was a little bit older? So what if she had a kid? Why was she so afraid of being who she was? I mean, if she had just stuck to being Lana Keyes, someone, somewhere, would've liked her for who she was and what she could do, and she wouldn't be tangled in this web of lies, with a tortoise-eyed geezer moving in from one end and a murdering maniac creeping in from another.
While I'm busy brooding about maniacs and geezers, Marissa's looking at something on the wall. She interrupts my thoughts with “He's going to have to pull all this stuff down if he marries your mom.”
“Shh! And she is not going to marry him!”
“You wait and see. I'll bet she does.”
“Marissa! Are you trying to kill me over here?”
She shrugs and says, “Love can be pretty persuasive,” then nods at what she's been looking at on the wall. “It's so sad.”
I get up and say, “What is that?”
“It's that newspaper article your mom was telling us about last night. What a tragedy.” She shakes her head. “Some valentine.”
“What do you mean, some valentine?”
“Here, look. She died on Valentine's Day.”
It was sad—from the headline RISING STAR DIES, to the story of Claire being run off the road at dawn by a delivery truck, to famous movie people calling her a “dramatic diva” and an “unparalleled talent,” to the closing paragraph about Claire being survived by “her grief-stricken husband, the renowned film producer Maximilian Mueller.” And then there was the last line, which seemed to drop
the final curtain: “The couple had no children.”
Even behind glass, the article had turned brown from age. It looked brittle and old, and the photo they'd printed of Claire had become sort of hazy.
Marissa whispers, “Can you see him ever taking this stuff down or gutting his office?”
I look straight at her and say, “He won't have to, because she's not going to marry him!”
Marissa keeps right on whacking nails into my coffin, saying, “I mean, if it were me, I'd make him get rid of all Claire's stuff. You can't live like that! And this Egyptian stuff, too. What is up with all of that?” She plops down on the couch, then slaps the front cover of the Cleopatra coffee-table book. “Enough's enough, already! It's like living in a museum. I'd gut it and start over. This place should be Southwest or Spanish or Barcelona. Yeah! Barcelona would look great in here. You know, those cool couches that are kind of curved, with one arm up higher than the other and…”
Well. While Marissa's busy deciding that Early Bull-fighter would be the perfect substitute decor for Se≁or Mueller's abode, my eyes are stuck on that Cleopatra book jacket. And it's not the picture of Cleopatra that I'm staring at. It's the title.
Beneath the word Cleopatra are hieroglyphic symbols. Nine of them. Under the C is a triangle—like a pyramid that's been cut from the tip straight down to the base. Under the L there's some kind of lion or cat or something, crouched down on all fours. And every one of the letters in Cleopatra has its own symbol. Well, except for the A's. They both have the same symbol—a profile of a standing bird.
And I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to the hieroglyphics at all, except that I had just seen most of these symbols on the tapestry in Max's office.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the order of the big shapes woven into the cloth. On top there was a triangle, and under it was a lion, then a bird….
I opened my eyes and looked back at the book. It began just like the tapestry, with a triangle and a lion. The next symbol under the title—the one under the E—was a robe, just like the bottom symbol of the tapestry.
Once I made the connection, it didn't take me long to piece together what was written down the length of the tapestry in Max's office.