Diane Vallere - Style & Error 03 - The Brim Reaper (28 page)

When it stopped and the doors opened, a very angry, very blonde woman in a beaded dress stood in front of me.

“I’ve had just about enough of you. You’re coming with me.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the elevator.

And just like that, Hedy London kidnapped me from the gala.

35

Her hand landed on the fresh puncture wounds on my palm, and I cried out and doubled over. Blood seeped through the bandages the security officer had applied.

“Ow! Please, let go. My hand is hurt,” I said.

 “Don’t play the victim,” Hedy London snapped. She repositioned her hand to my wrist and yanked me forward. “I’ve known for a long time that you and your friend are trying to sabotage my launch. I’m not giving you a chance to undermine what we’ve accomplished.”

We turned down a dark hallway that ran under the gallery. I’d never been in this area before. There were no offices here, only concrete floors below our feet and exposed pipes above our heads. I yanked my hand back but her grip on me tightened. This woman was twice my age. How tough could she be?

“Let me go,” I said.

“Not until you tell me what you did with Christian.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ms. London.”

“You and your friend have been trouble from the start. I
will not
allow you to get in the way of this opportunity. I know you’ve been spying on us and listening to our plans. I’ll ask you again. What did you do with him?”

As lost as I was between both our location and the conversation, her accusation meant one thing: Christian Jhanes was missing.

“Eddie hasn’t been trying to do anything other than pull off—I mean establish—this exhibit, Ms. London. I’ve been helping. I don’t know where Christian is. Eddie’s been working here night and day to make sure everything was properly installed.” I paused, gauging whether or not my panicked stream-of-consciousness was having any impact on the hostile environment.

“For God’s sake, stop calling me Ms. London. You’re making me feel ancient.”

No way to interpret that other than hostile. That’s how I reacted to “ma’am.”

She pushed me along the underground path in the dark. My eyes sought something—anything—familiar. We passed metal shut-off valves attached to pipes on the wall, square-cut openings above us that dangled ropes over our heads, and supply closets labeled in stenciling that had faded and chipped over the years. We turned a corner, and she pushed me toward a flight of stairs. I stumbled, falling down. She pulled me back up and kept going. Hedy London may have been an aging film star, but she was proving to be a tough old broad in a lot better shape than I was. Maybe Eddie was on to something with the carrots and the brown rice.

We reached a heavy metal door. Hedy put both hands on a vertical bar and moved it from flush against the door to out at an angle. I heard the locking mechanism of the door shift. She threw her hip into the door and pushed on the spring-loaded bar in the center. It swung open toward the grounds behind the museum.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

She grabbed my arm and flung me past her. I stumbled in too-high heels, lost my balance, and landed on my hands and knees. I felt a breeze by my shoulder and high up on my hip and knew my dress had torn.

“It’ll take you time to get back to the front of the museum, past security. Time is what I need to find Christian and make our announcement to the media. Once we do that, you can’t stop us.”

“I’m not trying to stop you. I’m trying to help Eddie with the exhibit. I’m trying to impress Tradava enough to get a job.”
And I’m trying to find a killer,
I thought.

Hedy leaned down, her face very close to mine. “Christian and I were lovers before we were partners, and this collaboration will make it official. He’s finally ready to announce our engagement to the world. I will not let you take this moment away from me.”

She stood back, smoothed her dress with gloved hands, and stepped into the dark interior of the museum. I pushed myself up and reached for the door. My fingernails scraped against the metal as it closed.

I pounded my fist on it. There was no answer. I turned around and leaned against the utilitarian door, bending forward with my hands on my thighs. My ribs felt cold. I wrapped one arm around my body and felt a split in the fabric along the side seam of the dress.

After my breathing and my heartbeat calmed down, I scanned the grass for my handbag. I found it a few feet away from where I’d left a Samantha-shaped depression in the grass. The contents of my handbag had scattered.

Hedy London and Christian were announcing their engagement? What did that have to do with anything? And why would it have to be kept a secret?

Worse, the film star had acted like I was the one who was causing
her
trouble, not the other way around. She had shown genuine concern over Christian’s absence. If she’d been behind any of this, I doubted she would have sounded so sincere. And if she was in love with Christian, was she blind to the fact that he was taking advantage of her?

Or what if he simply
was
a man in love, who knew the day was coming soon when he could let the world know how he felt? That he was helping the love of his life realize a new set of dreams that included him?

And if all of that was the case, then who would be the person to sabotage those plans?

I patted the grass and crawled in a slightly larger circle, making sure I’d found everything. I felt something sharp jab into my shin. I rolled over and felt the area, revealing a set of keys.

But I already had my keys. Whose keys were these?

I hooked the ring over my index finger and held them up against the moonlight. They were museum keys, like the ones Eddie had clamped onto his waistband the first day I’d helped him.

It was a sign.

I didn’t have to go back around front. I could let myself back in the way Hedy had brought me.

I stood up and dusted off the pieces of grass sticking to my fishnets. The fourth key I tried fit the lock. I turned it and pulled on the handle. Something clicked and the door opened.

I tried to remember the path Hedy London had pulled me through. Three right turns and some serious pain later, I was back where I’d started. I sat on the steps again and massaged my ankle.

I pulled myself up and rested against a valve cover. The electrical panel was only a few feet ahead of me. A screwdriver protruded from it, the occasional spark snapping from it like a Fourth of July sparkler. Otherwise the catacombs of the museum were dark.

I crept toward the sparks, feeling my way along the wall. A figure stepped out from the shadows. His face was distorted by a mask made from Bubble Wrap, with cut out openings by his eyes and nose. He was wearing the navy jumpsuit, like the night Thad had been stabbed. He swung something cold and thick at me, hitting my midsection. I fell.

My face hit the floor. Fabric ripped. I gulped for air. I lifted my head and stared at a pair of dusty brown construction-worker boots in front of me. A fire extinguisher dropped on the concrete next to my head. The clang echoed through the dark hollow passageways. The tank rolled in a semicircle and came to a stop next to my head.

I couldn’t move—or didn’t want to. I blinked back tears of pain. Through blurry vision I watched the boots turn around and jog away from me into the darkness. The last thing I thought was,
there’s
only one person I know who would wear those boots to this event…

Then I passed out.

36

I woke up in the darkness of the gift shop. The museum was empty and silent. My left cheek was swollen, making it hard to see. My tongue flicked over my upper lip and I tasted blood. My hands were bound behind my back, and my ankles were taped together in front of me. The only thing I could do was tip over.

I didn’t know how I’d gotten here. Or how long I’d been here. Or what had brought me back to consciousness.

“Come on, Samantha, wake up. Come on,” said an urgent whisper behind me. I tried to turn my head but the pain assaulted me

“Samantha, wake up. Please.”

“Rebecca?” I tensed.

“Shhhhh. Be quiet. I don’t know if we’re alone,” she said.

“What happened? Where is everybody?”

“The party’s over.” I heard a
glug-glug-glug
sound behind me, and Rebecca held a Dixie cup of water to my lips. “Here,” she said.

I tried to drink. Water dribbled down my chin and down the front of my dress. I struggled to hold my head up. I felt like a rag doll with too little stuffing.

“It’s been you all along, hasn’t it?” I asked quietly. When she didn’t answer, I continued. “The boots. I saw them when you knocked me down with the fire extinguisher. They’re the ones from Christian’s office. You told me you wore a man’s size shoe when we were talking about the moccasins. You wore his boots so nobody would ever suspect a woman.”

She stood up straight and backed away from me. In addition to the boots I’d recognized in the catacombs, she wore a nondescript navy-blue jumpsuit.

She reached inside one of the deep pockets to her shapeless garment and pulled out a gun. It couldn’t have appeared bigger if it had been designed by Claes Oldenburg.

“You don’t want to do this,” I said. “No matter what you’ve done already, you can stop it here. Now.”

Rebecca’s blonde curls spilled around her face in a frizz of platinum. “You would have been found in the morning,” she said, “but now I have to kill you too. If I leave you alive, you’ll tell the police that I killed Dirk and stabbed Thad. I sold off two of the collectible hats, and I have enough cash to get to Canada tonight. To start over. There isn’t any other way.” Tears streaming down her face belied her tough-girl talk.

“Rebecca, this isn’t the only way.” I forced myself to maintain eye contact instead of looking at the gun. “You won’t get away with it.” I wondered if I had the energy for a fight if that’s what it came to.

“Hedy London will get her publicity.” She spat out the actress’s name and spittle flew from her mouth. “That’s’ what she wanted. She won’t come after me.”

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? Christian and Hedy. And your relationship with Christian in college.”

Rebecca set the gun on the glass counter and unzipped the front of the navy jumpsuit and stepped out. She was wearing a camel suit like the rest of the Hedy London impersonators. With her platinum-blonde hair, she had probably blended in with the crowd. Nobody had noticed her being anywhere unexpected. She balled up the blue overalls and shoved them into the depths of a camel handbag and picked up the gun.

“He was one of your professors, wasn’t he?” I asked softly.

“He was more than that. He was my mentor. He saw what I went through when my father died. I hated being at college, and my father told me if I applied myself, everything was going to be okay. He died from a heart attack the next month. Christian was the only person at I-FAD who cared about what I was going through. We had a brief …” Her voice trailed off.

“You slept with your teacher?” It flew out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

“He was my first.” Tears flowed down her cheeks. “I almost failed out of school when my dad died. My advisor told me to take a year off and get my head together. Christian encouraged me. When I excelled in his film-editing courses, he taught me things. Special skills. He knew what I was capable of. He saw in me what my father saw in me, and I paid him back the only way I knew how.”

The surveillance video. It made sense. She’d learned the same skills that Dante had learned. I didn’t know what she was saying about her relationship with older men, but whatever had happened, the repercussions had left her with a lot of damage and had left me with a very large gun pointed at my chest. I tore my gaze from the gun and focused on her face.

“Rebecca, having a crush on your college professor is no reason to kill anybody.”

“The money ran out, and I had to drop out anyway. He promised me everything was going to be okay. He told me to get myself together and come back to the college and he’d make sure to help me get back on track and graduate. He was going to wait for me and give me a future.”

“He left the college before you returned.”

“He met that woman at the graduation ceremonies. He never looked back. I followed his career, tracked him on the Internet, and tried to keep in touch with him, but he never returned my calls or e-mails. They tried to keep their relationship a secret, but I found out.” Her head bent down and tears dripped onto the floor.

“Why would they keep it a secret? If two people are in love, wouldn’t they want the world to know it?”

“He wanted his own identity. He wanted to be known as Christian Jhanes, not the man who married Hedy London.”

“Did he tell you that?”

She put her left hand on top of her right, steadying the gun. “He didn’t have to. I understand him. I know what he needs.”

“What happened in the admissions office with Dirk Engle?”

“When he found me in the admissions office with the hats, he tried to—he thought I was interested in him. I turned him down, told him I was with Christian. He called me a stupid girl and said Christian was only in Ribbon to do this exhibit for Hedy. He said Christian and Hedy were together, and if I wanted to get back at Christian, maybe I should get together with Dirk. He said Christian was a two-bit hack, and only a desperate loser would waste her time pining away after him.” Her face twisted like she’d taken a bite of rotten fruit.

“Rebecca, I think Dirk was telling the truth. Christian was using Hedy London. That’s why he wanted their relationship to stay a secret.”

“No! I knew if I could destroy the exhibit I could make Christian see Hedy London wasn’t worth it, but I had to get rid of Dirk. It was easier than I thought. I made things go wrong around here. Accidents. And I took the hats out of their boxes and resealed the empty boxes and sent them up to the exhibit so it would look like Dirk stole them.”

“What about the hat with the knife through it?”