The Mirror and the Mask (4 page)

“Sure,” said Susan. “Leave the door open. And drive safely. I'll see you in the morning.”

Amy backed out of the doorway, pulling the hood of her coat up over her head. “If I don't end up in a ditch,” she called over her shoulder.

Susan stood behind her desk chair for a few seconds, thinking about the weather—if she should try to make a run for it. She sat down and opened her laptop, checking to see if the daily sales board was up. Finding that it was, she went through the motions, scanning the stats. In the mood she was in, it was impossible to concentrate. She was waiting, marking time.

“Susan?” Kristjan stood just a few feet away, smiling at her in his double-breasted tan cashmere sport coat, tight where it hugged his hips.

Susan cleared her throat. “I hear you just got back from showing a house.”

“Amy tell you that?”

She nodded, forcing her attention to his face.

He stepped inside, casually unbuttoned his jacket, and folded his tall frame into one of the two chairs in front of her desk.

“You think they're going to buy?”

“Way over their budget.”

“Maybe the seller will come down.”

“Not fifty thousand.”

“Stranger things have happened.” Her gaze strayed to the door. She wondered how long Bob, the last remaining agent, intended to stick around.

“If it's still on the market next spring and my clients haven't already bought something, we'll revisit it.” He nodded toward the window. “Noticed the weather? I was listening to the radio in the car on the way back. We've got a full-out winter storm brewing. They're telling people not to travel.”

She tapped a key on her laptop. “That right?”

“Hey, you two,” called Bob as he sailed past her door. His fur hat was pressed firmly on top of his head. “You better get out while the gettin's good.”

“We'll do that,” called Susan. “You be safe.”

“That's the plan.”

Neither of them moved until they heard the door close.

Kristjan waited a moment, then said, “It's not safe to drive back to Stillwater on a night like this.”

“No, you're probably right.”

“I called Barbara, told her I was planning to stay at a motel here in town.” He waited until she looked up at him. “I booked myself a room at the Country Inn. I also took the liberty of booking you one, not a room, but a suite. Space to stretch out. All the comforts of home.”

“Hardly.”

“All right, but they've got clean beds and hot showers. What else do you need?”

They gazed at each other, letting the delicious tension build.

“I guess I better call and make sure the kids stay put,” said Susan, picking up the phone. Her son, Curt, was twenty-six, in med school at the U of M. He lived in a condo near the university. Curt was sensible when it came to bad weather. Sunny, her daughter, was just about to turn eighteen, a senior in high school, and not the least bit sensible about anything. “I'll call Jack. He can track the kids down.”

“You know, Susan, he'll tell you the same thing I'd tell you given the same set of circumstances. You should stay in Hastings overnight.”

“You'd tell me that if you were married to me?”

He grinned. “As I think about it, it's never good to get too hypothetical. Let's just stick with the facts. The weather sucks and we're both stranded. Make the call.”

 

 

 

C
ordelia's chin sank into the bubbles. “Stop that infernal knocking. I'm not talking to you.” She was beyond pissed, and when she was in one of her moods, only a bubble bath helped. That and an icy cold can of black cherry soda. And tonight, not even
that
was working.

“Come on,” came Jane's voice through the closed door. “Don't be mad at me.”

“I'm not mad. I am deeply,
deeply
wounded. We are a
team
, Janey. Did you come to me, ask me to help you find that woman's father? No. You went to Nolan. Every time I turn around these days, you're talking to him, taking your cues from
him
.”

“He's a professional. An ex-cop.”

“I'm a professional.”

“A professional
director
.”

“What's your point?” She roared up out of the water and began to towel herself off.

“What are you doing in there? Why all the sloshing?”

Pulling on her bright red robe with the dragon embroidered on
the back, Cordelia picked up her can of pop and yanked the door open. She leveled her gaze on Jane. “I do not
slosh
. I occasionally splash around with childlike abandon, especially when I'm playing with my toy boats. Only boors with no manners
slosh
.”

Jane backed up and let her pass.

Barreling into the kitchen of her loft, Cordelia saw that Jane had brought along her laptop. She'd set it up on the kitchen table between two chairs. “What's that for?” She crushed the empty pop can in her fist. Silly, perhaps, but satisfying.

“Look, just calm down. Nolan showed me how to do an Internet skip trace tonight. I know it's late, but I came by to show you what I learned.”

Cordelia fluffed her short auburn curls. “Are you working the case with him?”

“It's not a ‘case,' and I'm doing this on my own. But I asked for his help, just like I've done dozens of times.”

“He wants you to cease being a restaurateur and work with him full-time.”

“It's not going to happen.”

“Never say never.”

“Cordelia, listen to me. You're the creative director of the most prestigious repertory theater in the Midwest. You're up to your ass in work. You're in demand for speaking engagements all across the country. You have a girlfriend who demands time.”

“She left for Kansas City this morning.”

“She did?”

“Everyone in her family was born in February. Except her. They call it Birthday Month. She'll be gone for ten days.”

“Okay, so Melanie's off your to-do list for the moment. But you're mounting that new show.”

Cordelia turned to glare. “If you paid even the smallest amount of
attention to your supposedly
best
friend's life, you'd know that the play is up and running, to rave reviews.”

“Great. Good for you. But my point is, you're busy. And you don't know anything about finding a missing person. Nolan does.”

“Nolan, Nolan,
Nolan
.” Scooping Melville, her smallest cat, up off the floor, she stood erect and attempted to look menacing. “He doesn't understand the creative temperament. He sees me as some kind of artistic flake. A dabbler. A ditz. What he doesn't understand is how much of your private investigative successes over the years has been due to my brilliant intuition—your brawn and general plodding nature, and my preternatural insights.”

She carried Melville into the living room and dropped him on one of the many IKEA chairs. She'd grown to loathe Scandinavian modern but refused to change a thing in the loft until her niece, Hattie Thorn Lester, came home. Cordelia steadfastly refused to entertain the notion that Hattie might never come home. And frankly, at this moment, it was all too much. Jane's betrayal. Hattie's loss. Melanie leaving her.

Jane came into the room, carrying the laptop. “Let me show you what I learned. It's fascinating.” She set the laptop on the coffee table in front of one of the couches and switched it on.

Reluctantly, Cordelia lowered her majestically plus-sized frame down next to her, batting at the tears streaming from her eyes.

“Oh, Lord,” said Jane, turning to look at her. “Are you actually crying? I didn't mean for any of this to hurt your feelings.”

“I am . . . overwhelmed.”

“Because I spent a few hours with Nolan?”

She sniffed, flopped back against the couch cushions. “That. And Hattie. I was so sure she'd be back by Christmas.”

Cordelia's wicked stepsister—actually, she was Cordelia's real sister, but “wicked stepsister” was more emotionally accurate—had stolen
Hattie away eighteen months ago. Hattie was Octavia's natural child, but Cordelia had been the one who'd raised her during the two most important years of her life. She expected that Hattie would live with her until she went off to Juilliard. But now, here she was, five years and two months old and living with Octavia and her umpteenth husband in England, of all the cold, dreary, Oliver Twistian places, being raised by dour nannies and exposed to Octavia's temper, her self-centeredness, and her general disdain for anything that stood in the way of her film career. She might be younger than Cordelia, but she was aging every second of the day, and for that, Cordelia silently cheered. “May her magic mirror crack,” she said out loud.

“What?” said Jane. “Oh, you mean Octavia?”

“Who else?”

Cordelia had tried everything to get Octavia to listen to reason. Lawyers. Private investigators. Friendly intermediaries. Not-so-friendly intermediaries. She'd even flown to England to have it out with her in person. When Octavia slammed the front door in her face, Cordelia had been forced to climb a trellis on the outside of the house in a last-ditch effort to get to Hattie's room. It was thoroughly disgusting how insubstantial they made trellises these days. Nothing like the ones in old movies. She'd ended up in the bushes, sustaining many excruciating cuts and bruises. And still, Octavia would not budge.

For the last few months, Cordelia had been reduced to letter writing. She composed missive after missive, night after night, employing gripping, utterly captivating logic, explaining with great care and detail how Octavia simply wasn't mother material. Sure, perhaps Cordelia had never thought of herself that way either. Maybe she had been a tad negative on occasion about children, sometimes even leaving restaurants in a huff if one happened to be seated next to her. But then, kids could be so loud and sticky, with no sense of proportion. Hattie had changed Cordelia's opinions.

The real reason Octavia had swooped in like a vulture and whisked
Hattie off to England was that her new husband, an English film producer named Radley Cunningham, liked kids. Couldn't Octavia see that Hattie was the one who was suffering? Standing in the early morning light of a drafty, dreary kitchen, asking politely, in a tiny frightened voice, for another cup of gruel? Locked daily in the cellar with rats and spiders?

“I thought you told me that Octavia and Radley were having marital problems,” said Jane, screwing the cap off a bottle of Moose Drool beer she'd taken from Cordelia's refrigerator. “That it was only a matter of time before they split.”

Cordelia sucked in a deep, cleansing breath. When she started thinking about Hattie and Octavia—the entire outrageous situation—she'd get so worked up she'd start to hyperventilate. “That's what one of the English PIs I hired told me. But I haven't heard from her in ages. Who knows? Maybe Octavia had her whacked.”

Jane took a sip of beer. “Your opinion of your sister has sunk to a new low.”

“For good reason.”

“I know, I don't disagree.” She took another swallow. “Look, maybe this isn't the best time to show you what I learned.”

“No, no. I need diversion.”

Stoically, girding her loins, putting on the face of a tragic survivor, a true heroine—in other words, doing her best impersonation of Joan Crawford in
Mildred Pierce
—she leaned forward. But before she could focus on the screen, a soft pinging noise caused her to look over at the wall of factory windows in the living room. “It's sleeting.”

“Yeah, we're supposed to get a major storm tonight,” said Jane. “Up to half a foot of snow. We're actually having a winter this winter. Not like last year.”

Cordelia groaned. “Take me away, Janey. If I can't be on a beach with white sands and blue water, then drop me into a mystery, something that can be
solved
.”

“I wouldn't go quite that far, but I'll bring you up to speed.”

For the next few minutes, Jane explained everything she knew about Annie.

“I had to call her to get more info,” said Jane. “I now have her father's date of birth and place of birth. John William Archer, born August 23, 1954, in Savannah, Georgia. He had two older brothers, both of whom died in Vietnam. His father was a teacher. Don't know about his mother. His parents moved a lot. What I ended up trying to focus on was his time in Traverse City. Annie said he had a business partner, although she couldn't remember his name. Archer was apparently a loner. He never talked much about his past, so Annie didn't know a lot of specifics.”

“She didn't find that strange?”

“Not when she was a kid. She simply took it as a given. But she does wonder about it now.”

Jane ended by saying that a friend of Annie's had sworn she'd seen Archer in a bar on West Seventh in St. Paul in late January. “Annie arrived in town a week later. That was six days ago. The first thing she did was to check every bar on West Seventh, but nobody recognized her father from the photo she'd brought with her.”