A Veiled Deception (25 page)

“Detective Werner, can you make the introductions?” Cort asked, not taking his gaze from Amber’s, or her child’s.

Werner introduced us all around, names only, without titles or relationships. Amber’s name meant nothing to Cort. That was apparent.

He took control. “Come in then,” he said. “I had the small drawing room prepared. Plain. Comfortable. Nice view.”

There, Werner encouraged everyone to sit, though he remained standing. “I have information that I’d like Miss Delgado and Mrs. Vancortland to interpret.”

Deborah rose. “I have no connection to this girl and I don’t see the point of—”

Werner snapped his fingers and two uniformed officers flanked Deborah before she could say another word. “This is a murder investigation, Mrs. Vancortland,” Werner reminded her, “a murder for which you’ve been arrested.”

She sat down and turned to her lawyer.

“Don’t look at William, Deborah,” Cort said. “Look at me and cooperate.”

I wished I was anywhere but here. My heart never sped so fast. Well, maybe when I found Jasmine’s body, and at the police station when they took Sherry for questioning. What if the visions
were
figments of my certifiable imagination? Could they cause more harm than good? Fiona said I had a psychic gift, and I trusted her, but I didn’t trust my so-called gift. I wondered if I ever would.

Nick covered my hand and squeezed, sensing my nervousness, I suppose. We’d always been in tune. That’s why we sparked off each other.

“I feel like I’m in an Agatha Christie novel,” I whispered, “with all the suspects gathered in the living room.”

Nick leaned closer. “Except that in this version nobody has any evidence. Who’s Werner? Hercule Poirot?”

“He must be. I’m not old enough to be Miss Marple, and it doesn’t look like they’re serving tea.”

The look Werner shot us put period to our silly speculation. I was nervous, or I never would have given in to it. This was our only shot.

Werner’s men brought in a corkboard easel on which a couple of my drawings were pinned: the one with my first vision of Pearl in the gown, and the one where Deborah sent Pearl packing for good.

Cort sat forward as he examined them.

Deborah looked away and covertly covered one trembling hand with the other. Amber had style, though she had dressed in a plain black tube dress today, her pearl earrings a complement to the dark hair waving away from her ears, almost to showcase the earrings.

My heart stilled. Her
swan
pearl earrings. Pearl’s earrings. Cort’s gaze shifted from the picture of Pearl in her wedding dress, to Amber, and back.

Werner’s gaze encompassed everyone in the room. “I’d like Miss Delgado and Mrs. Vancortland, in turn, to each have an opportunity to speak. After they’ve both addressed the pictures, if they’d like to debate the implications, so be it. Miss Delgado, will you begin?”

Amber stood, cool, collected, in control, and gave her daughter, well-worn board book in hand, to her nanny. Good. The child was well occupied. Deborah controlled her slight tremble as she scratched the polish off her perfect manicure, her gaze darting about the room, a sign that her mind ran in every direction. Was she searching for an escape?

Amber pointed to the first sketch. “This is my mother, Pearl Morales Delgado. She worked here. She fell in love here and became engaged to the master’s son. This house is where I was conceived. Before her wedding, in this picture, my mother was told to go away from here.”

Deborah opened her mouth and Werner raised a hand to stop her. Amber eyed Deborah with a look that could kill, but she didn’t speak until she had all our attention once more. “My mother was sent away by the woman the master married. You, Mrs. Vancortland.”

Deborah couldn’t know that Amber’s words might exonerate her from a murder charge. It wouldn’t work if she did, and whatever the outcome, the cost to her could be life-altering.

“My mother,” Amber said. “She lived the last years of her life calling herself the throwaway bride. She mourned for her wedding gown, her wedding day, but more than anything, she mourned the loss of her bridegroom, the love of her life. She had no interest in getting up from childbed, so my aunt came to live with us and care for us. When I was seven, my mother died calling my father’s name. ‘Cort.’ Always, ‘Cort.’”

I squeezed Nick’s hand and swallowed my emotions. I didn’t know who looked more thunderstruck, Cort, Justin, or Deborah, though Deborah certainly looked the most frightened.

Amber’s daughter began asking for her mother, so Amber took her from the nanny, approached Cort, and handed him the child. “Here, Papa, your granddaughter. Her name is Vanessa. Vanessa Vancortland Delgado. I gave her the name that she would never bear otherwise. You will hold her while I explain the pictures?”

Cort nodded, barely, and Vanessa became quietly intrigued by him. Amber seemed to stand outside herself, while Cort held the child so he could see her face. He touched a tiny hand to his lips, his granddaughter’s, while tears slid down his cheeks and covered those small fingers. “What have I done?” he said to himself, though everyone heard.

At the easel like a robot, any passion long drained from her, Amber examined the sketch of my first vision. “This is well done, but whoever depicted the room forgot the Majolica jardinière on its matching stand. The colors run together, blues, yellows, greens, so bright and alive. I remember how much I loved it.”

She
remembered?

I sat straighter. Had she taken on her mother’s persona?

“In this picture, I’m trying on my wedding gown, hiding my work-worn hands, though I needn’t have bothered. I worked beside the seamstress fitting me. The people of Cort’s class, they hated me, though not as much as the people of my own class, but I put up with all of it to be with him.”

Amber studied another picture. “And this,” Amber said, “is where Deborah—” She stood straight, her stance aggressive as she turned and skewered Deborah with her gaze.

“You notice I do not call you Mrs. Vancortland, because you are
not
better than me, except perhaps at lies, deceit, and greed.”

Deborah raised her chin, but she couldn’t hide her trembling hands any more than Pearl had been able to hide her callused ones so many years ago.

“I remember everything about this day,” Amber said. “You told me to take off your gown. Cort would marry you because you were expecting his child. You put much effort into catching him that way. Before I left, the old lady you paid for the brew to put in Cort’s drink at the country club came to me. She felt bad that she’d played a role in my loss, and she told me everything. But I had more class than to try and trap a husband with a child.”

She gave Deborah a nod, almost of respect but not quite. “Congratulations. You knew the right words. You said Cort could take you to the country club but he could never take me. That was mean and bitter, but shrewd. That’s what broke me, that I
wasn’t
good enough for the man I loved. I can tell you this now; you don’t look good enough for him, either.”

Amber studied the faces around her. “Which is the child I lost Cort to?”

“I miscarried,” Deborah said, her face mottled. “I couldn’t help that.”

Werner got up, took Amber’s arm, and led her to a chair beside her father and daughter. Then he called for something more to be brought in by the officers. Another easel. This one with the drawing of Mildred Updike nursing Deborah, and a signed document of some sort, though it was impossible to read from here. Werner cleared his throat. “Do you have a quarrel with anything Miss Delgado said about the first drawings, Mrs. Vancortland?”

“Of course I do. Her accusations are ridiculous, all of them.”

Big mistake, I thought.

“Of course,” Werner echoed, acerbically, indicating the second easel. “Can you explain these sketches?”

Deborah went and pointed to the picture of the nurse. “This is the nurse who took care of me when I miscarried and this is a certificate of dead birth to prove it.”

“To prove it,” Werner repeated. “Most people don’t care to see proof. Would you like to elaborate?”

“No,” Deborah said. “I think it’s self-explanatory, and the memory is still painful.”

Deborah sat and held a regal pose.

“Fine, then, if you won’t elaborate, I will. Mildred Saunders is your old chum from Miss Finley’s Finishing School. And this
proof
is signed by her, for which she may lose her nursing license. She’s under investigation as we speak. This document is a fake, but you know that. An official certificate of death would have been signed by a coroner or the attending physician. No hospital within a fifty-mile radius has a record of your miscarriage that summer, by the way.”

“I miscarried at home.”

“That’s not what you told me.” Cort stood, holding the sleepy little girl against his shoulder. “You said you’d been rushed to the hospital. I’ve felt guilty for that business trip for thirty years.”

Werner went and looked down at Deborah, who suddenly appeared quite small.

“
Were
you pregnant at the time of your marriage, Mrs. Vancortland?”

Deborah’s mouth worked like a fish out of water.

“Your friend Mildred, who helped you fake your miscarriage, was Jasmine Updike’s mother. The fake miscarriage; that’s what Jasmine Updike used to blackmail you. Is that why you strangled her, Mrs. Vancortland?”

Deborah looked at Cort, but he ignored her as he returned to rocking the sleeping child, his gaze only for Vanessa, his hand clutching Amber’s at her child’s back. I felt bad for Deborah but I felt worse for Amber, who’d been riddled with emotional pain since childhood.

But which of them killed Jasmine? We still didn’t know.

“I didn’t kill Jasmine,” Deborah said. “I’m all the rotten things you’re all thinking, I guess—”

She guessed?

In her pregnant pause—a rather large slap of poetic justice—she waited for someone to refute her statement.

No one did.

Quizzing the silent faces around her, she sighed. “I
don’t
deserve you, Cort, nor you, Justin. But I’m not a murderer.”

“In a way,” Cort said, looking at her. “You killed the woman I loved. In another way, I helped you. I should have taken
Pearl
to the country club that night. I had just enough doubt in me to let you talk me out of it. I’ll never forgive myself.”

Cort looked up at Justin. “I love you, son. No regrets there.” He cupped Amber’s cheek. “I wish I could have raised you both. Will you let me make it up to you, Amber?”

“There is no going back,” she said. “Our time has passed.”

“Think about it,” Cort said, with raw emotion. “You and your daughter can come and live with me.”

Deborah squeaked, but Justin squeezed his mother’s shoulder and she shut up. Cort barely spared Deborah a glance.

Werner nodded to the psychiatrist, who came forward. “Miss Morales,” he said, addressing Amber as if she were Pearl. “Did you strangle Jasmine Updike?”

“No, I did not,” Amber said, holding her head in the exact way I’d seen Pearl hold hers. “I never heard of anyone named Jasmine Updike.”

That might have been true the night of the murder. In fact, Amber might have kept to herself to the point that she didn’t realize she’d killed the wrong woman. Only when Sherry had arrived on her doorstep had she realized the true identity of the next Vancortland bride. After a night of questioning about Jasmine Updike’s death, though, she had certainly heard of her by now.

Amber had, I thought, but maybe not Pearl.

“Did you strangle the Vancortland bride?” Werner asked her.

“No, I did not.”

I stepped forward with a thought that had only come to me as I donned my mother’s treasured pearl earrings this morning. “Pearl, did you use olive oil to polish the pearls Cort gave you?”

Amber smiled. “How did you know?”

Everyone but the psychiatrist stilled.

Amber beamed. “Aren’t they beautiful?” She touched her throat. “But where are they?” She thought for a minute. “Oh, I used them to turn Deborah Vancortland into a throwaway bride like me. I’ve been waiting to do that for years.” She smiled. Werner waved his hand to halt the vocal reactions. “You didn’t use only the pearls, Ms. Morales.”

Amber looked Deborah’s way. “I knew the pearls wouldn’t be strong enough alone, so I braided them with several of the pretty twines I use to tie my pastry boxes.”

She shook her head as if rethinking her words.

“Wait. No, that can’t be right.” Amber, or Pearl, licked her lips, and reconsidered.

“I used
my mother’s
bridal pearls with
my
twine to strangle the woman who ruined my, no,
my mother’s
life.”

She turned on Deborah and narrowed her eyes. “Why aren’t you dead like my mother?” She leapt at Deborah before Werner, or anyone, could anticipate her. That fast, her hands were around Deborah’s throat, her thumbs pressing so hard, I backed into Nick’s chest, his arms coming around me.

Justin got to them first.

“Amber!” He pulled her hands from his mother’s throat. “You’re my sister. I’ll help you.” He captured Amber’s hands and crushed them against his chest as he held her, while Werner’s men escorted Deborah to the far corner of the room. Amber struggled from Justin’s hold and reached for his throat. Sherry screamed.

Amber stopped, her hands in midair. “I have a brother?” She turned to Cort, her daughter asleep in his arms. “Papa, help me.” Amber Delgado covered her face with her hands and wept.

The knot in my throat hurt too much to contain.

Cort got up and gave the sleeping Vanessa to Sherry. “Take care of your niece until we get back, will you, sweetie?”

Sherry nodded and kissed the sleeping child while Justin comforted his sister. When Cort reached them, Amber sobbed once and threw herself into her father’s arms.

“I’m so sorry. I . . . always hoped to make you proud, not shame you.”

Cort consoled her. “I’m glad you’re my daughter. We’ll get through this. We’re family.”

Werner put Amber’s arms behind her back to handcuff her.