Chapter 15
Fifteen
"I’ve figured all of it out," Allison said, and then, because apparently once wasn't dramatic enough, "All. Of. It."
She was in her lounge pants, hair scraped back into a knot that had given up sometime around the ouija board, and she had that legal pad clutched to her chest like a shield.
“Can we eat while we hear this?” Maggie asked hopefully. “I’m honestly starving. We need brain power.”
“Yes, absolutely. Of course.” Allison looked flustered. “Wait, there’s food?”
“You’d better place a second order,” I told Maggie. “Reginald isn’t even back yet.”
It took us ten minutes to get situated at the dining room table with plates and chopsticks and napkins. There was sweet tea and a pitcher of water on the table.
“Let’s hear it,” I finally said to Allison.
"Evelyn Carrington faked her own death."
Taylor choked on his spring roll.
Vivienne set her Pad Thai container down and cleared her throat. She reached for her sweet tea.
"Well," I said, in the tone I usually reserved for guests who wanted to know if the ghost could be summoned on demand for an extra fee. "I’m not sure that’s possible?”
"Allison," Vivienne said carefully. "We all saw her collapse. She went unconscious. There was blood."
"Staged." She held up one finger. "Think about it.
A woman that controlling, that obsessed with the narrative, with truth coming to light, doesn't just die in front of two hundred witnesses by accident.
She stages her own murder to fake her death, disappears with a new identity, and comes back in a year to expose everyone who wronged her from beyond the grave.
Metaphorically. Or maybe literally. I haven't worked out the mechanics. "
"The mechanics," Taylor said, "being that she is currently at the morgue."
"Was she, though? Did any of us see a body?"
"I saw the blood trickle out of her mouth," I said. “The doctor who was there seemed genuinely concerned.”
“Does anyone know he was actually a doctor? Maybe he was an actor.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s a member of the Society. I don’t think Evelyn could have faked her death.”
Allison waved that off. "Fine. Fine, maybe not faked, maybe I'm — there's a lot going on tonight, okay.
I found a code word on the ouija board that I am choosing to interpret as either a warning or my own subconscious trying to tell me something important, and I've been putting pieces together for three days and some of them might be a little—" she exhaled, "—loose. "
"A little loose," Vivienne echoed, not unkindly. “Wouldn’t there be some concern if a body went missing from the hospital?"
"There's a secret society," Allison pressed on, undeterred.
"The Magnolia Heritage Society isn't just garden parties and silent auctions.
I think it's older than that. I think there's a whole other layer, initiations, blood oaths, that kind of thing, and Evelyn ran afoul of them somehow, and Dorothy Perrault knows more than she's telling, and honestly I wouldn't rule out that man with the microphone at the reception either, he had shifty eyes. "
"Just looked like he had an eye lift to me,” Taylor commented, jamming his chopsticks back into his takeout box. “Would it kill them to include a plastic fork? Can’t use these things to save my life.”
“I can get you a fork,” I told Taylor. I didn’t think I was going to miss anything important. Allison hadn’t “got it” if this was any indication and I did have to be a good hostess.
Undeterred by the interruption, Allison kept rolling.
“I think whoever's behind it has been in this house.
I think that's what the chandelier was. I don't think that's wiring, Harper, I think that's a sign, and I think it's connected to whatever's happening with the McClintock family, and I've written down every detail I could remember, times, sounds, the exact words Evelyn spoke. "
She flipped the legal pad open and thrust it at me. I braced myself for something out of a true crime forum at three in the morning.
What I got, underneath a full page of underlined half-theories about blood oaths and secret societies and a diagram of the parlor with an arrow pointing at the chandelier that just said ?
?? — was one line, near the bottom, boxed in twice like she'd circled back to it and decided it mattered more than the rest.
Spring mechanism. Micro-hinge. That's not hardware store work. That's restoration work. Jewelers use tools like that. So do people who fix antique silver. Small hands, precise, slow. Someone who's used to working on things that are old and delicate and worth more broken correctly than fixed badly.
I read it twice.
"Where did you get this?" I asked, and I must have said it in a different voice than everything else that night, because Allison actually stopped talking.
"I looked it up," she said, a little defensive now, like she expected me to laugh.
"After breakfast, when Hollis said mechanism, I went down a research hole.
For the book, originally, and then just because I couldn't stop.
There's a whole world of antique restoration forums, and the way they talked about fitting tiny working parts into old pieces without ruining the patina, well, it's not that different from what a locksmith or a watchmaker does, except slower, because you're not allowed to leave a mark.
You have to work invisible. That's the whole discipline.
Make the fix disappear into the object so completely that nobody can tell it was ever touched.
" She shrugged, deflating a little. "I don't know.
It felt important. Probably it's nothing, like the rest of it. "
"It's not nothing," I said.
Taylor gave up on his chopsticks. "You're telling me the theory about the secret blood-oath society was garbage but the little handwritten footnote about jeweler tools is the good part."
"That does track with the rest of my career," Allison admitted.
Vivienne looked at me carefully, the way she looked at everything, like she was already framing the shot. "Where’s Reginald?”
“Must have found a filly at the Celebration of Life to go home with,” Taylor said.
There was so much wrong with that sentence I didn’t even know where to begin.
Maggie, bless her, changed the subject then, asking rather pointedly when everyone was leaving New Orleans the next day for their respective homes.
There was chatter about carpooling to the airport and the quality of the Thai food, and then thankfully, the three guests all headed off to bed, Allison still clutching her notebook.
Maggie departed with a wave and a warning. “Sometimes where there is smoke, there’s fire. Sometimes the fire is already out.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked. “Guru doesn’t work on you.”
She cracked a laugh. “That was trying too hard, wasn’t it? Just chill. That’s what I’m saying.”
As she left, I took Teddy to the porch.
It was just the two of us in the cool night, the neighbor’s wind chimes tinkling.
I laid everything about the weekend out loud to Teddy, because apparently my process required narrating my own detective work to a skunk like he was Watson and not just a small striped animal with a taste for shrimp.
"Means," I told him, and he chittered like he was taking notes.
"Somebody built a spring-loaded spike narrow enough to fit inside a hollow silver straw, precise enough to fire on pressure, and delicate enough that nobody noticed anything wrong with it until it was already in Evelyn's mouth.
That's not a butter knife and a prayer, Reginald said so himself, sitting right there at my breakfast table like he was quoting somebody else's crime instead of his own.
That takes real skill. The kind of skill you get from decades of working tiny mechanisms into old, breakable things without leaving a mark.
The kind of skill a restoration architect has. "
Teddy settled onto the porch boards, listening, or at least pretending to, which I appreciated either way.
"Motive," I continued. "Evelyn Carrington built her whole reputation on being the last honest voice in a city that likes its history pretty.
Right before she died, she stood up in front of two hundred people and said something about the truth coming to light.
And Belle Rêve's provenance — the letters, the Civil War pedigree, the whole reason that house gets called historic instead of just old — might not be as solid as everybody's grant applications say it is.
Somebody signed off on that history a long time ago.
Somebody with a license and a reputation to lose if it turned out to be fabricated.
And Evelyn, being Evelyn, wasn't going to let that stay quiet.
Not once she decided the truth needed to come out.
She said it herself, right before she lifted that cup. "
I thought about Reginald at Dorothy's, standing at the fireplace, watching the rotation of Evelyn's photos. Not grieving. Studying. The way you study something you're trying to make sure has actually, finally, stopped being a threat to you.
"Opportunity," I said. "Reginald had weeks.
Everyone agreed on that, that night at breakfast, that this wasn't something you rig the morning of.
He's the one person in this whole cast who'd have a legitimate reason to be handling antique silver, examining heirloom pieces, being trusted around Belle Rêve's most valuable and fragile things without anybody blinking twice.
Nobody questions the preservation architect for wanting a close look at a hundred-and-fifty-year-old julep set.
That's not suspicious. That's Tuesday, for him. "
Teddy chittered again, softer this time, and shifted his weight against my ankle.
"But there's Hyacinth," I said, and here was where it got messier, where the thread I'd been so sure of at that café table on Royal Street started fraying in my hands.
"Hyacinth's hand is definitely the one on Vivienne's footage.
Hyacinth's the one who buried the bracelet in the hedge.
Fifteen thousand dollars from Evelyn, and then two thousand more, three days before the gala, and a fight where somebody said you can't keep doing this to me and somebody else said you knew the terms. That's not nothing.
That's a woman who did something for Evelyn, or to her, right at that table, ninety seconds before Evelyn ever lifted the cup.
" I exhaled. "But Hyacinth didn't build that mechanism.
I don't care how well she did or didn’t do in school.
Nobody develops that kind of precision metalwork alongside a full committee calendar and a divorce and salon appointments.
She might even have a job for all I know.
Whatever she did with her hand on that table, it wasn't engineering.
It was placement. She swapped something, or set something down, or moved something into position.
Somebody else built the thing she was moving. "
I sat with that for a second, the whole shape of it finally sliding together in a way that made my stomach hurt more than the vague, formless dread had.
"Means and motive and knowledge. That's Reginald," I said.
"Access to Hyacinth, and whatever leverage got her hand moving on that footage, that's still a gap.
But it's a gap, not a wall. Evelyn paid her.
Somebody else could have too. Or threatened her.
Or both." I scratched the top of Teddy's head, and he leaned into it, unimpressed by the fact that I'd just built a fairly credible murder case out loud on my own back porch at one in the morning.
"The bracelet, the tools, the identification of whose hand that was — none of it stands alone.
But put it together, and it stops looking like Hyacinth acting alone and starts looking like Hyacinth acting for somebody. "
The porch light buzzed overhead. Somewhere down the block, a dog barked twice and gave up.
"I don't love where that points," I told Teddy.
"Because he corrects everyone's grammar and reads architecture magazines at breakfast like they're scripture and once told Taylor that straws don't spontaneously develop sharp ends, which, in retrospect, was a weirdly specific thing to be so confident about. "
Teddy chittered his agreement, or possibly his opinion on the dog down the block. Hard to say with him sometimes.
My phone buzzed against the porch boards, and I nearly knocked over my glass of sweet tea reaching for it, some part of me already braced for Hollis, or Maggie, or another disaster wearing the shape of a text message.
It was a number I didn't recognize, though the name that came through with it stopped me cold.
This is Robert McClintock, forgive the late hour and the imposition.
I understand you and Hyacinth are acquainted.
She's awake, resting comfortably, doctors are optimistic.
She's asked for you specifically. She'd like to see you tomorrow morning, if you're able. Room 412 at Touro. She was quite insistent it be you and not the police, said it’s urgent.
My first reaction was relief. I let out a deep breath, happy to hear that Hyacinth was going to be okay.
Then I read the text three times, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less loaded on the fourth pass.
Insistent it be you and not the police.
That wasn't a woman who wanted a friend to pop by. That wasn't even a woman who wanted to explain hiding a bracelet in a hedge, or for lying about an earring, or for whatever falling-out had frozen her out of Evelyn's good graces three years ago.
That was a woman who'd had a very long, very long night to think about exactly how much trouble she was in, and had decided the only person she trusted to hear it first was the amateur with the skunk and the B&B, instead of the detective with the badge.
But probably knowing that I would tell Hollis, since she thought he was my boyfriend.
I looked down at Teddy, who looked back up at me with the particular unblinking patience he saved for moments he sensed were important, even when he had no idea why.
"I think," I said slowly, "we're about to get a confession."
He didn't disagree.
A car pulled up and Reginald got out. I shivered involuntarily when he passed me.
“Goodnight, Harper,” he said, pleasantly enough.
He didn’t look like a killer.
“Goodnight, Reginald.”
But sometimes they do.
And sometimes they don’t.
I groaned and looked at Teddy. “I think I need some sleep.”
He practically ran to the front door.