Secrets (23 page)

There was a knock on her door and Cassie opened it without thought. When she saw Jeff, she tried to close it, but he put his foot inside.

“All right,” she said as he entered and she closed the door behind him. “What do you want?”

“Who told you to come here?”

Cassie went back to her suitcase and continued hanging her clothes up in the wardrobe. “I did,” she said. “I begged Althea to get me back with you, so she set this whole thing up.”

“Funny,” Jeff said as he moved farther into the room. “I see you have nothing but old clothes too.”

“If you can call Adrian gowns ‘old,' yes I do.”

“Adrian?”

“In his day, he was Balenciaga, de la Renta, and Tom Ford rolled into one.”

“I guess those are designers.” When Cassie didn't reply, he stepped toward her. “Cassie, I've been through a lot since you walked out on us. I—”

She turned toward him with a coat hanger padded in baby blue satin held in front of her like a weapon. “So help me, if you twist everything around so I look like I abandoned a five-year-old child and a man with heart disease, I'll make sure you never sleep quietly again. Do you understand me?”

Jeff stepped back from her. “Yeah, I understand, but—”

“There're no buts in this! I walked away from
you
, only you and no one else. Is that clear?”

“Very,” Jeff said, backing up more.

“I don't know what Althea and probably your father are playing at this weekend, but I can guess. I owe Althea a lot, so I'm going to continue this charade even if it means dealing with that slimy man, but you…
you
I don't have to put up with. I'm going to do what I have on my list and that's it. Then I'm going back to my life, which doesn't include washing your socks. Have you got that?”

“Completely,” Jeff said, his eyes wide. “Have you done something to your hair? You look different.”

Cassie went to the door, opened it, and pointed to the hall. “Out. Get out now and don't come back.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jeff said and put his hands in his pockets as he went past her. He grinned when the door slammed behind him. He grinned all the way down the hall to his room. He opened his bedside table drawer and pulled out his cell phone. He called his father's number and wasn't surprised when he got voice mail. “You're a coward for not answering,” Jeff said cheerfully, “but, Dad, I love you.” He closed the phone and kept grinning.

“
S
KYLAR
, I'
VE BEEN THROUGH THIS
a dozen times and I'm not going through it again,” Jeff said. They were alone in the room they'd been assigned and getting dressed to go down to tea.

“I'm Ruth, remember? Not Skylar. All I said was that your little Miss Cassandra has certainly gone to a lot of trouble to get you back with her.”

“She knows nothing about this,” Jeff said, taking a clean shirt out of the wardrobe.

“Yeah, and I'm a virgin.”

Jeff gave her a look that made her stop talking. In the months since Cassie had walked out of his life and disappeared completely, he'd had little to do with Skylar. He'd told his office that he was through using his personal life for work. If they wanted to get an escort for Ms. Skylar Beaumont while her father fed them information, they could find someone else. Jeff was ready to resign and get a job in a burger joint rather than continue as he was.

That day when Cassie left the cabin in his car, he'd wanted to go after her, but sheer force of will had stopped him. He told himself it was better that she left, that she would be safer away from him.

But by the next morning he'd begun to realize what it would mean to him to not see Cassie every day. He'd ridden with Brent and Skylar back to Williamsburg, and all the way there, he'd hoped Cassie would be at his house. If she was, he planned to go on his knees and beg her forgiveness. He should have told her everything, he'd say. And he'd defend himself by saying she should have been honest with him too.

But Cassie wasn't in his house. In fact, she was nowhere to be found. His office saw that she'd flown to New York, then had taken a plane to Miami, but there the trail grew cold. She was paying all her living expenses with cash, so there was no paper trail for her. Obviously, someone was helping her disappear. Althea? His own father?

For months he lived his life in silence, talking only when he had to. He was angry at himself for being such a fool for the entire year she'd lived with him. He'd taken her for granted, assumed that she'd always be there.

The only good that had come of Cassie's disappearance had been that Skylar had been removed from his life. For a brief time she and Brent were an item, but they called it off after just a few weeks, and Brent had gone back to overseeing Althea's house and life. He reported that Cassie had not been near Althea since the cabin.

It was Thomas who reminded him of the “mystery weekend” Jeff had committed to over a year before. He handed Jeff a thick envelope. “Get someone else to do it,” Jeff had mumbled, but his father had persisted.

“You'll find what you want here,” Thomas said, his eyes boring into Jeff's.

“The only thing I want,” Jeff began, “is—” He broke off as he looked into his father's eyes. As Jeff looked at his father, a lifetime of communication passed between them. He wasn't sure, but he had an idea that his father and Althea had somehow managed to get Cassie to that weekend. Jeff wouldn't ask his father if this was true for fear he'd say no.

For weeks, Jeff did little but read about Hinton Landau and the murder that ruined his career—even though he was innocent, Althea said. Jeff memorized the timeline of the second day of the weekend, and he opened the sealed envelope that contained a paper with some facts that were known only to Althea.

Four days before he was to leave, he went to dinner at Althea's. It was difficult to get over his anger at her because he knew that Cassie's involvement with the woman was what had caused the end of his comfortable life. And, indirectly, it was because of Althea that Cassie had left him.

But if Althea knew anything, it was about men. It didn't matter that she could be Jeff's grandmother, she knew how to get 'round his anger, his sullenness, and his lack of conversation. After dinner, she had him in her attic trying on clothes that Dana Andrews could have worn in the movie
Laura.
By the end of the evening, Jeff was smiling and looking forward to the weekend—and although no one had come out and said it, he was sure Cassie would be there.

In the first hour after he arrived at Charles Faulkener's house, Jeff wished he hadn't come. Faulkener was a jerk, and, worse, Skylar was there and had been assigned the role of Jeff's wife, Ruth. He wanted to call his father and Althea to tell them what he thought of them, but he didn't.

It had been a month since he'd even seen Skylar, but she kept making innuendoes that said she thought Jeff was trying to get them back together.

“We never were together, and you know it,” he said, but she just smiled.

When Jeff saw Cassie on the stairs, he wanted to grab her, hug her, and kiss her face. But the look she gave him almost singed his hair. Obviously, she hadn't known he was going to be there.

But later, when he'd seen her in her room, she'd given him hope. No one could be that angry and not still have feelings about a person, could they?

Now, if he could just keep from doing anything to make her hate him, he'd do fine. He promised himself that this time, he wouldn't screw it up. This time he was going to…He wasn't yet sure what he'd do, but he hoped to win Cassie back.

 

“Would you please stop following me?” Cassie said, turning around to glare at Jeff. It was night, after dinner, and they were outside. She'd wanted to get away from Jeff's eyes, which always seemed to be on her, but he'd followed her.

“Cassie…”

“I'm Althea,” she said. “For two whole days, until you're dragged off for murder, I am Althea Fairmont, the world's greatest actress, and I have no idea who Cassie is.”

“All right,” Jeff said, moving to stand before her. Around them were flowers lining the paths of Faulkener's lush garden. The scent wafted around them. “You're Althea and I'm Hinton, and we're in love with each other, remember?”

“Vaguely. I do remember that in spite of what Charles says, you and I never touched one another off the set.”

“Would you like to rehearse our next movie now?”

“No, I would not. I think I see your wife's face at the window. You'd better go in.”

“She can wait. Cass—I mean, Althea, I'd like to talk to you. I think it's time I tell you the truth.”

“That would make for a change.”

“I'm…” He cleared his throat. “This is difficult for me to say. I'm not a structural engineer.”

She blinked at him. “But I've seen the plans you've drawn. You love bridges.”

“I hardly know one end of them from the other. Those drawings were found by the department and my name put on them. I brought them home because I wanted to impress you.”

“Me? Why would you want to impress me? And if you aren't an engineer, what are you?”

“I've been involved in the CIA since before I finished college.”

Cassie took a step back from him. Her mind was whirling with the significance of what he was saying. “You're saying that the entire year I lived in your house was a lie?”

“No, not at all,” he said as he reached out to touch her, but she pulled back. “Cassie.”

She took another step away from him. “I don't know how to make myself more clear. I don't want to have anything to do with you. Every time you open your mouth, you make things worse. I promised Althea that I'd participate in this weekend, so I'll do it. And you can be sure that I'll tell her what I think of her inviting
you
. Now, your wife is watching and I think you should go to her. There's supposed to be only one murder here this weekend and I don't want it to be mine.” With that, she turned away from him and walked quickly back into the house and went to her room, where she locked the door.

CIA agent indeed, she said to herself as she showered and got ready for bed. Really! The things men come up with to try to impress a woman. “Does he think that I am a little girl and need the excitement of a CIA agent to turn me on? A plain ol' structural engineer isn't enough for me?”

By the time she got into bed, she was glad she'd run away from Jefferson Ames. She might have thought she knew him because she'd lived in his house for a year, but she was finding out that she didn't know him at all.

She spent thirty minutes going over the notes she'd made from Althea's packet about what had actually happened that weekend so long ago. Tomorrow morning Jeff's—Hinton's—wife, Ruth, was to tell Althea that she had something to show her, then she was to look through a peephole and see Charles in bed with Florence Myers.

Cassie wondered if Althea had given Skylar a set of instructions. If she hadn't, it didn't matter because Althea had sent a diagram of the house that showed how to find the peephole. Of course there would be nothing to see, as she doubted if old, fat Charles would be in bed with anyone, but Cassie planned to look through the hole anyway.

C
ASSIE WASN'T SURE
what happened during the night, but it was as though everyone in the house had been coached except her. The evening before, people had been themselves, but today, they were fully in character.

That morning she had checked her notes and read that she was to wear a pale pink charmeuse outfit that had trousers that fit tightly over her newly firm rear end, then flowed out until they were wide around the ankles. When she walked, the slinky fabric clung to her body, exposing every line of it. On top was a matching belted jacket that covered but showed everything.

She looked at herself in the full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door and her eyes widened. Six months ago she wouldn't have fit into the sexy outfit, but now she did. She couldn't help smiling. Skylar had always made nasty little comments about Cassie's weight, but she couldn't now.

When she went down the main staircase, she felt as though she were floating. The silk pajama set made her feel like Carole Lombard. Her hair was smooth about her head, styled in a way that Althea had had a hairdresser teach her to do, even down to two Chinese pins stuck in it. Her earrings were little pink pearls, and her shoes were white kidskin.

When Cassie walked into the dining room, she was happy to see that everyone, six men and four women, paused, plate in hand. Only Charles was missing. She pretended not to notice that they were staring and went to the buffet to pick up a plate.

“Get a load of those gams,” one man said.

“Must be a hoofer,” said another one.

“A spiffy Sheba,” said a third.

Skylar looked over her plate. “A Dumb Dora, if you ask me.”

“Someone's been studying the slang list,” Jeff whispered into Cassie's ear, and she tried not to laugh.

Cassie took her plate of scrambled eggs to the table and sat down. Jeff as Hinton sat down across from her. He wore an open-throated shirt that clung to his muscular chest. Beside him sat Skylar as his wife, Ruth Landau, and she had a sour look on her face. Cassie didn't know if she was acting or if the look was sincere. And she wondered what Skylar had been told about her part in the coming drama.

The person Cassie was most interested in was the young woman who was playing Florence Myers. Althea had written that Charles always cast this woman himself, and he prided himself on finding girls who looked a great deal like Miss Myers. She had enclosed a studio portrait of Florence, which showed a rather ordinary-looking woman. She was pretty, yes, but not beautiful, and she had the kind of face that wouldn't age well. She would only be pretty when she was young. Her face was too flat to have any lasting beauty. And there was a look in her eyes that seemed to be desperate—or maybe Cassie was reading that into them, since she knew the fate of the young woman.

The actress Charles had chosen to play Florence was the same type as the original, in that she was pretty, but not especially so. Her blond hair was a bit thin and her neck too short. She looked like someone who had just got off the bus from the Midwest and thought she wanted to become an actress, but was now wishing she was back home with her family. Cassie had an idea that this was her first role, and it was upsetting her that she knew that in just a few hours she was to pretend to die a horrible death.

Cassie ate in silence as she listened to the others around her chattering in what they assumed was correct speech from the 1940s. It was mostly colloquial, and they seemed to work to make up sentences that contained as many slang words as possible. She heard “giggle-water,” meaning an alcoholic beverage, at least six times.

Jeff sat across from her and kept looking at her. She wanted to avoid his eyes, but the script of the day called for her to “steal passionate glances at him across the breakfast table.” How could you look at someone with passion when all you wanted to do was get away from him? she wondered.

Twice, she tried to look at Jeff, but each time, Skylar was glowering at her. Cassie wondered what Skylar's script said. That she was to glare at Cassie/Althea with hatred?

When Jeff finished breakfast, he walked around the table to Cassie, lifted her hand and kissed it. “You are indeed a star,” he said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. What they didn't know was that he slipped a piece of paper into her hand.

She didn't watch him and Skylar leave the dining room arm in arm. As soon as breakfast was finished, she looked at the paper.
Meet me in the conservatory at ten
, she read.

Upstairs, she crumpled the note and threw it in her bedroom trash bin. Her first impulse was to not meet him. As far as she could tell, this wasn't part of the script. In Cassie's version, Althea had written that after breakfast, she had read a magazine for thirty minutes, grown bored, then gone downstairs, and that's when Ruth, Hinton's wife, told her she had something she wanted her to see.

But maybe Jeff had been told things she hadn't. Sighing, she left the room. When she got to the conservatory, she didn't see anyone.

“Here,” Jeff said from behind one of the potted palms, then reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her into hiding with him.

“I'm supposed to meet your wife,” Cassie said, trying to pull away.

“Change in plans.” Jeff held her to him loosely, his hands behind her back. “You really do look different. What have you done to yourself?”

“I had sex and lots of it. Now let me go.” With one quick yank, she got out of his grasp, but because they were pressed between the glass and the plants, she was still only a few inches from his body. “Althea and Hinton didn't meet before she saw Ruth—”

“Ssssh,” Jeff said as he peered through the palms, then looked back at her. “I thought I heard someone.”

“It's probably your CIA training,” she said, dripping sarcasm. “No doubt it's made you suspicious.”

“You don't believe me, do you?”

“Is there any reason I should?”

Jeff's face lost its humor. “Would you like me to tell you how Elsbeth cried after you left?”

“No,” Cassie whispered, her own eyes filling with tears. “I'm sorry for that, but you…”

“Yeah, I know. I was a jerk. An idiot. You can't say anything to me that I haven't already said to myself.”

“I'd certainly like to take a stab at adding to whatever you said,” Cassie said sweetly.

Jeff smiled. “When we get this stupid weekend over, I'd like to give you the opportunity to do anything you want to me, but now we have to get this over with.”

“I guess you're here on CIA business. So, are you the spy or is someone else?”

“For your information, I was assigned to attend this weekend over a year ago. Charles Faulkener is—”

“So help me, if you tell me that dirty old man is a spy, I'll never speak to you again.”

“Okay, I won't. I'm not allowed to tell you anything, but that old man has been involved in some horrible things in his life, and he still knows some people who are doing things they shouldn't.”

“You are truly disgusting, you know that? Next you'll be telling me Althea is a spy.”

“One of the best.”

At that absurdity, Cassie turned and took a step away from him, but he caught her arm.

“Okay, believe what you want to, but I was told to meet you here.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a piece of paper that was folded in the middle. “Look at this. It says, ‘Ten
A.M
., secretly meet Althea behind the plants in the conservatory.'”

She took the paper from him and read about his kissing her hand at breakfast, then giving her the note. When she started to unfold the paper to read what came after the conservatory, Jeff took it from her.

“No, you don't,” he said. “The rest of it's just for me to know. But I can tell you that it's been changed in that I'm to go with you when you sneak around Faulkener's bedroom.”

“I guess that's because you're more practiced as a spy. Tell me, is Skylar in the CIA too?”

Jeff gritted his teeth. “One of my assignments was to keep Dave Beaumont's spoiled daughter happy while he fed information to a department that I can't even name. And I moved into Hamilton Hundred to watch over Althea.”

“Oh, yes, Althea the spy. But why does she need guarding, other than for her ex-husband shooting at her? And to protect her from ancient jewel thieves, of course.”

Jeff opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. “Come on,” he said as he glanced at his watch, “let's go to the peephole. It's time.”

She followed him out of the conservatory. He looked up and down the halls, but saw no one, then they ran up the stairs and took a right.

“I think this is it,” Jeff said in front of a door.

“To the right and fourth one from the stairs,” she said from memory. “At least that's what it says on my script. I have no idea what yours says, since we seem to have been given completely different stories. Isn't that amazing? Life imitates fiction. I have no idea what you're doing in your life, and I have no idea what is supposed to happen in this old mystery. A truly astonishing similarity.”

Jeff rolled his eyes as he opened the door and looked inside. It was a linen closet, both sides of it lined with shelves full of folded sheets. He went in first, waited as she got in, then closed the door. It was very dark in the closet. Jeff flicked open then lit a cigarette lighter.

“I guess you've taken up smoking now,” Cassie said. “Or have you always smoked but I didn't know about it?”

“Neither.” He was looking up at the ceiling. “A lighter is more in keeping with the period.” In the next second, he reached behind a shelf, flipped a switch, and a light came on.

“So much for secrecy,” Cassie said, and Jeff grinned.

But in the next second he said, “Oh, applesauce!” as he looked up at the ceiling.

She smiled at his slang. Obviously, he too had read the slang list. “What is it?”

“The string to pull down the stairs is looped up high. I'm going to have to climb up to get it.” But when he put his foot on the wooden shelves that held the linen, they wobbled. “Damn things aren't fastened to the wall!” Turning, he looked at Cassie.

She backed against the door. “Oh, no, you don't.”

Jeff made his hands into a step. “Put your cute little foot in here and I'll give you a boost up. You get the string, then I'll pull the stairs down. Simple.”

She didn't see any other way, so with a grimace, she put her foot in his hands and he launched her upward. She grabbed the string and he let her down—slowly, her body moving against his.

“That wasn't so bad, was it?” Jeff said as he pulled the stairs down.

“Let me go first. These things probably haven't been used since the last time Althea went snooping up there, so let me see if they're safe.”

“With your wife.”

“What?” Jeff asked as he started up.

“Althea went up these stairs with your wife.”

“Yeah, and she saw the man she was living with in bed with Florence Myers.”

“Poor kid,” Cassie said under her breath as she went up the stairs behind Jeff. She could hear him walking around.

When she got to the top of the ladder, she stood still for a moment. Before her was the huge, empty attic to the house. It was dirty, filled with cobwebs, and not a place where she wanted to go.

“Look at this,” Jeff said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I was wrong about no one having been here. Someone's been here recently. Look at these prints.”

“It was probably Skylar. I'm sure she got some instructions from Althea.”

“No, she didn't,” Jeff said, looking about him with the cigarette lighter. On the floor was a candle on a plate, and he lit it. “Not a good idea to have an open flame up here.” He moved the candle about and looked at the floor. “I don't see evidence of anyone having been here in years, but these prints are brand-new.”

Cassie climbed fully into the attic, trying to keep the beautiful charmeuse of her trousers out of the dust. She rolled them up to the knee as Jeff pulled up the stairs behind her. “Why did you do that?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Just habit, I guess.”

“Oh, right, you're a spy.”

“No, I'm not. I never had the nerve for it. If you want to know about spying, you'll have to ask Althea.”

Jeff began to slowly walk into the blackness they were now in. With him went the light. Cassie looked about her as the darkness closed in, then she hurried after Jeff, staying close behind him.

“I don't like this place,” she whispered.

“Neither do I. Look.”

She looked where he held the candle and saw the footprints. “Do you think Charles knows that you and I are plants? He asked me if I knew Althea, but I skirted the question.”

“Nice to know that you can lie when necessary.”

“What does that mean?”

“That you know that sometimes a person needs to have secrets,” he said.

“I don't have any secrets as big as yours.”

“Oh? What about the fact that you arranged for me to hire you and that you were living under my roof under false pretenses?”

“Under—” She didn't like what he was saying and she would have turned around and left if they weren't surrounded by utter blackness. “Nothing I have ever done is as bad as what you did to me.”

“I'm not so sure of that.” He held up his hand. “Do you hear that?”

“Voices,” she whispered.

Jeff started walking again, then motioned for her to follow. They had come to a wall. “That peephole should be around here someplace. See if you can find it.”

After a grimace of distaste at putting her hands on anything in the dirty old attic, Cassie reached out and started feeling along the wall. “What I don't understand is how Hinton's wife knew about this peephole. I hadn't thought about it before, but now that I see this place, I could imagine that not even Charles knew of the holes. Althea said he bought the house when it was nearly derelict, but it had once been a great estate. I wonder what he changed when he remodeled it? Did Charles put the peepholes in or were they already here?”