Chapter 16
Sixteen
I hated hospitals. The smell, the silence save the constant beeping of equipment. It also had occurred to me that it was just a few days short of the first anniversary of Aunt Odette’s passing and I was feeling a wild range of emotions surrounding that.
I strode down the hallway at Touro on Monday morning, determined to not lose it.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking his head. “Terrible circumstances. She’s really okay?”
He was wearing a suit and he tugged at his tie. “They say she is. She gave me a hell of a scare though. Thank you for being there for her.”
I didn’t think I deserved any accolades considering all the mean girl thoughts I’d had about Hyacinth over the years. “Of course,” I murmured.
“Come in.” He said it like a man used to controlling rooms.
He honestly had controlled the room the night before. I could see why Hyacinth had fallen for him.
When I went into the room she looked smaller than I remembered.
That was the first thing. All the polish that usually sat on her like a second skin — the highlighted hair, the practiced tilt of her chin, the jewelry — had been stripped away by a hospital gown and a bandage wrapped high around the back of her skull.
What was left looked like a tired, frightened woman who hadn't slept properly in longer than the concussion could explain.
"Thanks for coming, Harper," she said. Her voice was thin. “Robert said you and your friend jumped right in to help me last night.” She reached out for his hand.
Robert sat next to Hyacinth in a plastic chair and took her hand. “Do you want me to leave so you can catch up with Harper?”
She shook her head, then winced. “No. I want you here.”
"What do you need to tell me, Hyacinth?" I asked, pulling another vinyl chair closer to the opposite side of the bed.
"I don't have the energy to be clever, Harper, so I'm going to just say it.
Someone hit me. In the powder room. I didn't fall, I didn't faint, nobody's precious little theory about stress and dehydration is worth the paper it's written on.
Somebody came up behind me while I had the water running and hit me on the back of the head hard enough that I don't remember hitting the floor. "
I sat with that for a second, feeling the shape of the whole case shift under me like a porch board about to give. “That’s…awful. The door wasn’t closed?”
“It was but I didn’t lock it. I never lock doors because I’m claustrophobic.”
“That is true,” Robert confirmed.
She gave him a soft smile. “Robert thinks I fainted because I’m pregnant but that’s not what happened.”
“You’re pregnant?” I glanced at the bandage on her head and winced. “Good grief, congratulations but how scary.”
“We’re very excited,” Robert confirmed.
Interesting. Most likely not relevant but good for Hyacinth and Robert. Hopefully their second time around would last.
“Which is why I’m going to find out who did this to me and I’m going to string them up by their balls,” Hyacinth said. “They could have killed me and our baby.”
I appreciated her vehemence.
"You're sure," I said, because I had to ask.
"I have a concussion and four stitches, Harper. I'm sure." She closed her eyes briefly, like even talking cost her something. "I heard the door open. Right before it happened. I've been right to be terrified ever since the gala and nobody believed me."
"I didn't say I didn't believe you," Robert said, gently. "But you always kept the truth from me."
She let out a breath that was almost a laugh, except there wasn't anything funny in it. “I know, but I was scared.”
“I’ll always protect you.”
“You divorced me. I was just trying to protect myself this time around with a little nest egg.”
I would have clapped if we weren’t in a hospital. Good for Hyacinth.
“What about the bracelet?" I asked.
"I know how it looked. Sneaking around a hedge at midnight, burying jewelry like some madwoman in a gothic novel.
Believe me, I've had plenty of time lying here to appreciate how insane it looked.
" Her eyes were wet now, but her voice held.
"The wire transfers were real, Harper. Fifteen thousand, then two thousand more three days before the gala. That much is true."
"But it wasn't blackmail," I said slowly, watching her face.
"The way everyone assumed I was blackmailing her.
" Something bitter crossed her expression.
"That's what you all decided? How insulting.
Hyacinth's got some dirt on Evelyn, Hyacinth's squeezing her for cash, Hyacinth's the villain in her own little subplot.
" She shook her head, and even that small motion made her wince again.
"Evelyn was paying me freely and of her own will. "
"Why?"
"So I’d keep my mouth shut. Evelyn Carrington was dying, Harper.
Pancreatic cancer. Stage four. She'd known for months. And out of everyone in that entire city who worships the ground she walked on, she told exactly one person, because I’ve been like a granddaughter to her. We both regretted our falling out."
I felt something cold settle low in my stomach. "She was dying?”
"Evelyn found a private oncologist in Houston so no one here would catch on. She needed a second set of hands she could trust to help manage things quietly. She trusted me."
"The money was payment."
"It was a gift,” she corrected. “She knew she could trust me and she wanted to help me out.
It was for my time, for my discretion." A tear finally slid free, and she didn't bother wiping it.
"She didn't want pity. She didn't want the gala postponed, or her legacy rewritten into a cancer memoir before she'd even decided how the story ended.
She wanted to control it. Every single thing about that woman, right up until the end, was about controlling the narrative. "
Truth coming to light.
"The straws," I said carefully. "The night of the gala. Your hand, on the footage. What was that?"
Hyacinth's jaw tightened, and for a moment I thought she'd stop talking altogether.
"She told me to switch them," she said finally.
"Two days before the gala, she called and told me exactly which straw would be laid at her place setting, and she asked me to make sure a different one ended up there instead.
She said it was sentimental. Her grandmother's, she said, something about wanting the real one at the toast instead of whatever the caterers had polished up.
" Her voice cracked. "I didn't ask questions, Harper.
Why would I? She'd asked me to do a hundred strange, specific things over the past six months, and I'd stopped questioning any of them a long time ago.
I walked past the table, I made the swap while everyone was distracted with the receiving line, and ninety seconds later she was dead in front of two hundred people and I understood, all at once, exactly what I'd done. "
"You think she rigged it herself," I said. It wasn't really a question by that point.
"I think that a woman who had months to plan her own exit, who wanted the narrative under her control right up until the last second, who spent her whole life making sure the story was always told the way she wanted it told decided how the final chapter went, too.
On her terms. In front of everyone." She swallowed.
"I think it was a suicide, Harper. I think she asked me to help her stage her own death, and I did it, because I loved her, and because I didn't understand what I was actually holding until it was already too late to put it down. And now I feel guilty as hell."
I sat back in the vinyl chair, the machines humming their quiet, indifferent hum.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “It wasn’t your fault. You were being a good friend.”
"I kept asking myself how I missed it. She used to say all the time, ‘People never listen until someone dies.’”
The line the server had overheard her saying at the gala. "Because you trusted your friend."
It was clean. It was almost elegant. A dying woman orchestrating her last, most dramatic exit.
It explained the wire transfers. It explained the swapped straw.
It even explained, in its own twisted way, why Evelyn would stand up in front of two hundred people and talk about truth because she'd known, standing there with the cup already in her hand, that the truth was about to come to light.
It explained almost everything.
Except…
"Hyacinth," I said slowly, "who built the mechanism inside that straw?"
Her eyes came up to mine, and for the first time since I'd walked in, something in her expression looked less like grief and more like fear.
"I don't know," she said. "I never asked."
I looked over at Robert. His jaw was somewhere down around his waist at this point. It seemed obvious he’d known nothing about any of this.
"A spring-loaded spike, fine enough to sit inside hollow silver and fire on pressure, doesn't come from a hardware store.
That's not something Evelyn built at her kitchen table between chemo appointments.
That takes tools. That takes a very particular kind of skill.
" I kept my voice even, watching her. "If she planned all of this the way you're describing she didn't just decide to die with a sharpened toothpick and hope for the best. Somebody made that mechanism.
Somebody with hands trained for exactly that kind of work. "
Hyacinth didn't answer right away. Her fingers had gone still on the blanket. “I don’t know. I have no idea.”
“Thank you for being honest,” I told her. “About all of this.” I did believe her.
I also knew who had to have built the mechanism.
Reginald.
“I’ll leave you to rest. Nice to meet you,” I added to Robert, before getting the heck out of that hospital room.
Immediately, I realized I should have asked her about him. I turned and rushed back to the bed.
"Did Evelyn ever mention Reginald? In all those months. Any conversation, any favor, anything about the julep set, the silver, the restoration work on Belle Rêve?"
"Who?”
“Reginald St. Clair.”
“No. She talked about the house constantly. The provenance, the letters, the grant paperwork. She was obsessed with it near the end, more than usual, like it mattered more the less time she had." Hyacinth's brow furrowed, chasing something. “I really can’t remember any Reginald."
I felt the whole shape of the case tilt again, the way it kept doing lately, every time I thought I'd finally gotten it to sit still.
Because if Hyacinth was telling the truth then this wasn't just a grieving woman helping her dying friend stage a dramatic exit.
This was Evelyn Carrington, months from death, reaching out to someone with a skill set that happened to match exactly the kind of precision, hidden work that had killed her.
Which meant either Reginald had built a suicide device for a woman he had every reason to hate, not knowing what she intended. Or he was thrilled to help advance her death.
Both of which could land him in prison.
"Somebody hit you in that powder room," I said quietly. "If this was really just a woman helping her dying friend die on her own terms, and you were the only other person who knew, why would anyone still need you silenced?"
Hyacinth's face went pale in a way that had nothing to do with blood loss.
"I don't know," she whispered.
"Get some rest," I repeated, and meant it, even though every instinct I had was already halfway out the door and back toward Belle Rêve. "I'm going to find out who was in that powder room with you. And I'm going to find out if Reginald was involved."
"Be careful," she murmured. "Whoever it is knows how to make things look like something they're not. Making everything look perfectly fine until it's already too late."
It occurred to me as I left that whatever Evelyn had done or not done, asking Hyacinth to keep her secret was a lousy thing to do.
If she had forced Hyacinth into assisting her suicide without knowing, well, then that was truly evil.
I texted Hollis.
I need your brain.
I can think of better things for you to need.
That stopped me dead in my tracks.
I was racing to the parking garage, hot on the trail of a potential murderer and Hollis chose to flirt now? In the most heavy handed manner possible?
Your little pumpkin patch isn’t in the mood. Come over when you have time. I need you there when I confront Reginald.
Oh, Jesus.
I could practically hear his sigh through my phone.