The Witch and the Borscht Pearl (32 page)

Mrs. Risk stated, “Pearl’s told a great many lies. To everyone, not just to me, not just to the police, but to every single one of her friends. That’s a lot of lying.”

“Yes, and I heard Mrs. Harmon telling you—I wondered how long it would take someone to ask her. I lied, too.”

“You also heard her say that the police asked her before I did?”

“Yes. What of it? They haven’t said anything to me about it, maybe they don’t think it’s signific—”

“You’re too shrewd to believe that for a second. At this moment they’re digging through old French files, taking a second look at Stanley’s death—an unsolved murder, wasn’t it?”

“The French police were fools. He hit his head or got a cramp or something. His drowning—”

“He didn’t drown,” I interrupted.

Mrs. Risk’s eyes never left Bella’s face. Bella stared at me, her lips staying parted for a second before she closed them.

“No water in his lungs,” I added. “Maybe he poisoned himself from grief at having run off with the wrong sister, then fell in the water.”

She tore her gaze from me to stare then at Mrs. Risk.

“Melodramatic, but a possibility,” Mrs. Risk said. “Yes, you’ve also lied. And your lie is an important one. You knew you would inherit Solly’s estate. And with your past record of working cons, you’ve spent years developing a habit of not respecting laws—a habit of living that can be difficult to change.”

“A habit born of desperation,” said Bella intensely.

“Born rather, shall we say a bit more truthfully, of the arrogance of believing oneself not subject to rules, and of contempt for others’ rights and feelings,” corrected Mrs. Risk.

“Possibly. But if one finally … learns … and abandons that arrogance, the reputation is not so easily abandoned,” said Bella.

“Thus the lie, do you mean?” Mrs. Risk nodded. “Understandable, if true. However, the true reason behind the lie might still be to avoid rightful suspicion. So you had a motive, and Pearl had a motive. Both very good ones.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Bella said, “posing as some kind of detective. You’re just a frustrated woman, with too little else to occupy you. Sticking your nose into other people’s private affairs.”

I remembered my trouble with my now deceased husband. If she hadn’t interfered, I would’ve died. “No. Listen to her, Bella,” I found myself urging her.

Mrs. Risk flashed me a warm smile that was gone so fast that I wondered if I’d imagined it.

She continued, “So, knowing you would inherit, possibly you thought, why wait? Why not kill him now and proceed straight to your reward? Obviously you never succeeded in getting him to confess to you and restore the funds he’d stolen from Pearl.”

At Bella’s startled look, she nodded. “Oh, yes. I know all about your plan. Solly systematically stole from Pearl, skimming her income for twelve years.”

Nobody spoke.

Finally, Mrs. Risk continued. “Add to that what Pearl told me, that her present circumstances are a result of his advice to her.”

Bella’s gaze sharpened. “Circumstances? What circumstances?”

“Yes, I wondered if you knew. Evidently your sister hasn’t told you the entire truth either. Under Solly’s management, she received far less than she was entitled to from her work, and then lost even that to her failed projects, plus more losses from guarantees he had her give the other investors. I’d say she got some very bad advice. Amazingly bad, considering how skilled he was at investing for himself. Do you sense the pattern? A pattern of deliberate, guided disaster?” She examined Bella’s shocked look. “I see that you do.”

Mrs. Risk added, “Then Solly has the temerity to drop her in favor of her sister, repeating a traumatic event from her past.”

Bella rushed to say, “Pearl
wanted
me to become romantically involved with him.”

“Did she want you to marry him?”

Bella’s face paled. “I—” She looked away. As she moved, the lights from the chandelier reflected in her dark glossy hair, which she’d twisted into a simple French roll. It suited her. “He asked me to marry him. It just—happened.” Suddenly she considered Mrs. Risk. “How do you know all this?”

“I know many things,” said Mrs. Risk with a faint smile. “Did you love Solly?” Mrs. Risk’s tone had softened. “Zoë says you didn’t. That you never did. Would you have actually married him?”

Bella waved one hand in the air, as if warding off evil. “Of course I loved him. Why would I have—”

“Your posing is of no benefit to you now. You mustn’t defend Pearl any longer. You’ll end up taking the blame for her.”

“I’m not taking anybody’s blame. Pearl has done nothing to defend.”

“I don’t believe you. Neither will the police.”

Bella stiffened. “So it’s true. You’re here as a spy, gathering information to convict Pearl for something she didn’t do.”

Mrs. Risk made a noise of disgust. “What country do you think you’re in? Our police don’t operate that way. The police want what I want—the truth.”

“Well, the truth is—”

“The truth is, Bella was trying to please me, as penance for a child’s foolish impulse.” Pearl walked in.

She smiled kindly at Bella, then stared coldly at Mrs. Risk. “I asked her for help and she gave it. In fact, she gave much more than I ever imagined would be required.”

“What kind of help would that be? To trick restitution out of a thief? To prostitute herself for money? Your money?” Mrs. Risk rose to her feet. Her eyes glittered. I stood also. I glanced from one woman to the other—three formidable females.

Pearl said, “Solly felt betrayed by me.” She raised one hand as if to stop Mrs. Risk from commenting. “I know that he was taking revenge on me for loving Bernie and not him. At the last, he couldn’t stand it any more.” She lowered her hand. “I became the enemy.”

She smiled sadly, “You talk about your irony. I, who’d felt betrayed by those who were supposed to love me, was betrayed again by one who also swore he loved me. I was the betrayed one, not him. But I can see how he thought differently.

“Actually, I owe this ability to see his side of it to you, Mrs. Risk. Over the past years of our friendship, I’ve learned a lot from you. To face the truth about myself. About other people. Before you, I’d pretended everyone around me was perfect, which is ridiculous. I was so afraid somebody might do something terrible to me again, something that would hurt as bad as … don’t worry, Hon,” she said to Bella, who’d lowered her head with a stricken look.

Pearl shook her head. “I admit it. Until I met you, Mrs. Risk, a lot of lying went on, by my friends to me, and by me to myself. Viv always told me I was a lousy judge of character. Bella agreed.”

“When she arrived August first she agreed?” asked Mrs. Risk.

Pearl nodded, then did a double take. “You even know the exact date. You’ve been busy.”

“Tell me about your plan. Yours and Bella’s. To turn Solly around.”

“Not much to tell. Nobody knew she’d come to town. We laid low, to stay private. She checked in at the Wyndham Bay Inn, but ended up staying with me most of the time until the party. Had a lot of lost years to make up.” Pearl gazed at Bella and her eyes glistened.

“She’d changed. Thanks to Bernie and you, I’d changed. I didn’t want any more dishonesty. Life might be a bit more painful, but I was tired of fooling myself. I had a lot of understanding to catch up on. And forgiveness. Oh, not for her stealing Stanley away. Like I said before, if it weren’t for Bella, there’d have been no ‘Pearl’. I might never have found Bernie.

“If she could forgive me for not reaching out to her all these years, I could forgive her for the same. It was so good, it was almost like God was bolstering me for what was to come. And what came was Stevie Graham. Poor kid, he was more petutsed than I was about those thefts.

“But I just couldn’t turn Solly in. He’d gone wrong in the end, but now I knew—we could all go wrong. Maybe in my new ‘understanding’ I kind of went overboard.” She sighed.

“That’s what the necklace theft was all about,” said Mrs. Risk.

Pearl nodded. “I left it out on my dresser. I didn’t worry, it was in my house, everybody there had been my friends for decades. Arlene, the caterer, wouldn’t steal a carrot stick.” She shrugged. “Bella was supposed to hide it in her handbag and take off. But as you probably figured out, somebody else stole it for real. The thing is, we were so preoccupied with Solly. I assumed Bella had done her job and we never discussed it. She thought I’d decided it was safer to hang on to it myself and just say it was gone.

“Anyway, the plan was, I’d ‘discover’ the theft and proclaim Bella as the thief, except I wouldn’t press charges because after all, she was my sister. We figured that was reasonable.” She shrugged. “We put the word out that I hated her and ditto right back, and she went after Solly. Romantically speaking, that is.”

Bella gave a wry smile. “I’d had much experience in this. He’d been wounded by my sister and his thinking was twisted. Like a ripe plum, he fell into my hands.”

Mrs. Risk said dryly, “I understand that he leaped into them.”

Bella shrugged.

Pearl said, “Please understand: she didn’t want to do it. She thought I should put him in jail. But I owed him everything.” Pearl’s expression was anguished. “You just don’t know what he did for me, those years before Bernie. He put my world together, and taught me how to make it work.”

Bella spoke up suddenly. “We made an agreement. If the plan did not succeed in a reasonable time, she would call the police. It was on that basis that I said yes. But then he asked me to marry him.”

Pearl said, “When Bella told me about the engagement, she wanted to stop then. She hadn’t been able to get anything but the most harmless statements out of him and she was upset that he had developed such a—a devotion to her. But I pushed. I promised that if he didn’t confess soon, we’d go ahead and blow the whistle, if she’d just keep it up. She didn’t want to, but …”

Mrs. Risk said, “But she did. To please you. And then he died.”

“Yes. He died,” said Pearl. A tinge of blue appeared around her mouth. “We talked it over and decided our plan looked too much like a good motive, so we kept quiet about it. I never would’ve hurt Solly, that was obvious to us, but we worried that it wouldn’t seem so obvious to the police. And then Bella didn’t know she was going to inherit—”

“She knew,” I interrupted. “Solly informed her in early November. The police’ve found out that she knew, too.”

Pearl looked puzzled. She faced Bella who couldn’t quite manage to meet her eyes.

“Not to belabor the obvious,” put in Mrs. Risk, “but you may have been assuming that Bella was keeping quiet to protect you. It may have been herself that she was protecting.”

Pearl said softly to Bella, “Is that why you haven’t been talking to me? Is that why you wouldn’t move in with me, stay with me through all this? I thought you were just keeping to the scheme we set up.”

I couldn’t let Bella off the hook. “Did Bella ever tell you about her police record as a con artist? That’s one of the reasons she’s a suspect. That, and because she lied about knowing the contents of Solly’s will. Pearl,” I urged her, “I wouldn’t wait much longer before telling the police about your plot. Their experts are digging into Solly’s finances right now. They’ll know the truth before long, because they’re good at their jobs.”

Pearl’s face twisted and she gazed oddly at her sister. When Bella, who gazed back with an imploring expression, opened her mouth to speak, Pearl hushed her with a gesture. She then turned and said fiercely to Mrs. Risk and me, “Get out. Both of you. You’ve given me more ‘help’ than I can stand, and I don’t want to ever see you again, either of you.”

Mrs. Risk took a half step forward, saying, “Pearl, please, don’t let your fears cloud your thinking.”

But Pearl raised a hand, warding her off. “Leave me alone, do you hear me? Leave us alone.” Pearl’s face had no color left in it, as if her rage had left her bloodless.

The pleading in Bella’s eyes urged us towards the front door.

“Come, Rachel,” Mrs. Risk said, her tone full of misgiving.

We were nearly outside when a subdued Mrs. Risk turned and said, “Call if you need or want me. At the very least, I’ll be there for you at Krasner’s, Pearl.”

From inside the dining room Pearl’s voice rang out, shaking and intense, full of tears. “Don’t you dare show up there. I never want to see you again. And leave my friends alone.”

One of those friends must’ve stolen her necklace, would she remember that too late? What else had her friends done? Killed Solly, setting her up to take the rap? We left.

“W
HAT DO YOU SUPPOSE
will happen Saturday night at Krasner’s?”

Charlie had finally asked it—the question foremost in our minds.

Creamy plump candles of different heights blazed in clusters from the twin oak side boards, the top of the corner china cabinet, and from spaces among the now empty serving bowls on the linen-draped table. An enormous fire crackled and leaped cheerfully in the grate directly behind where I sat at Mrs. Risk’s polished oak table. Earlier, while still unsmudged by buttery fingers, her collection of lovely old crystal and silver had glimmered, bright with reflected flames, in the candlelight. Unfortunately, the frame of mind shared by us twelve celebrating Thanksgiving with Mrs. Risk wasn’t nearly so bright. The flames around the room fought valiantly to lift our spirits and ward off the dreariness of the rain that pounded at the windows. In spite of it all, we sat, logy from the finished meal and moody.

Before Charlie had expressed what preyed on our minds, Detective Michael Hahn had asked us each to name what we were grateful for. The real Thanksgiving question we’re meant to dwell on. My answer had been Daniel, no question. Privately, I was also thankful to be sitting here for the third Thanksgiving in a row, rather than resting six feet under in the cemetery of my dead husband’s choice.

“What’s the matter, Rachel? Someone step on your grave?”

I blinked at Black Dan Harrington, but he’d already turned to his wife to discuss the pies waiting in the kitchen.

The LeFarge twins, Byron and Allyn, the famous artists—particularly Allyn, who’d painted my portrait that hung in my shop—had joined us. Neither were married. In their early forties, they were small, with thinning hair, and looked more like kindly bus drivers than artistic types. The rotund Byron chased women with a steadfast commitment to non-commitment. Allyn, thinner and an indifferent dresser (unlike his brother who was tremendously vain of his wardrobe), also adored women but with a different perspective. He longed intensely for a wife and tended to get teary at weddings. However, Allyn’s anal housekeeping and his devotion to art above all else kept him as single as his brother.