Chapter 17
Whitney couldn’t meet until late that afternoon.
As a result, I spent a lot of time fretting. I worried. I generated some significant dread. I tried doing useful things like resting and researching and even, God help me, writing. But there was a lot of staring off into space.
Maybe the only productive thing I managed was to review Phil’s feedback on Julian’s offer. The short version of it was: grab it with both hands.
Eventually, though, I made my way to Testing Grounds.
The coffee shop was on the far side of Arcadia’s campus—about as far as you could get from the conference center, as a matter of fact.
It had exposed brick walls, sagging leather sofas, and driftwood accents.
It smelled like coffee—like good coffee—and the click of balls on the pool table broke up the background jazz.
I got there early, and I was watching the door when Whitney came in.
She didn’t look anything like that ultra-filtered author photo.
Or, for that matter, much like the younger woman I’d seen in the photo of her and Simona.
White, thirtyish, she had her dark hair half up, and her upturned nose made her look younger than she was.
She wore a fuzzy sweater and jeans and cute little boots. And I’d seen her before.
It was the same sense I’d had when I’d seen her photo: that I recognized her.
But now, seeing her in person, I knew it hadn’t been a passing glance, the coincidence of being at the same conference.
This was the same woman who had stopped and stared at me and Vivienne during our brief—and only—conversation.
My stomach started to squirm, but when she glanced my way, I raised a hand.
“Mr. Donaldson?” she asked. A slight vertical line appeared between her eyebrows as her gaze morphed into a stare.
Without meaning to, I raised one hand to cover the bruising on my neck, but I kept my voice even as I said, “Whitney?” When she nodded, I added, “Please, have a seat.”
But she didn’t. Her hands tightened around the back of one of the chairs. “What’s going on? The Housekeeper’s Mistress had a single print run and barely sold a thousand copies. I’m having a hard time believing you want to turn it into a feature film.”
But—you’ll notice—she’d still come. Just in case. Hope is like that.
“I’m sorry for the deception,” I said. “I actually wanted to talk to you about Simona Wolf—”
Her face shuttered. She gave the chair a shove, so that it banged against the table. “You have got to be kidding me. Don’t you people ever give up? You have no right to tell any part of that story. And if you try, I’ll sue.”
Then she spun and started for the door.
“Ms. Smith—wait! Whitney!”
I caught up to her before she reached the exit. A few of the other patrons were staring: a young man watched, his phone forgotten in one hand; a woman with a child in a stroller had frozen, a spoonful of baby food hanging in midair; another woman had stopped in the middle of stirring her latte.
“Get out of my way,” Whitney said.
“Is everything okay?” the guy said.
“We’re good,” I said. “All good.” In a lower voice, I said, “I’m not going to do anything without your permission. I wanted to talk to you. There’s nobody else left to talk to.”
“Nobody needs to talk to anybody,” she said. “It happened a long time ago, and it was horrible, and there’s nothing to say about it.”
“Please,” I said. And then I played my trump card—the one I had waited to play, because I needed to see her face when I did it. “Forget what I said in my email. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think whoever killed Robert Kessler killed Vivienne Carver and Steven Block.”
Shock.
Pure and total shock: wide, empty eyes, and then incomprehension slowly fragmenting into confusion, the labored effort to understand. Her cheeks reddened. And then tears welled in her eyes.
It might not have been real, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t know how to tell.
“Please,” I said again. “Even if you can only give me five minutes.”
She nodded and swallowed. “Let me—ah, let me get a coffee. Just a minute.”
I returned to my table—and to my marshmallow crème shaken espresso, which was exactly as delicious as it sounded, and which I was going to recommend to Tessa as an immediate addition to the menu at Chipper.
At the counter, Whitney stumbled through her order, still blinking rapidly to keep tears from falling.
When the barista asked her something—if she was okay, I guessed—she shook her head and then nodded and laughed.
After paying, she waited while the barista prepared her coffee.
It wasn’t until she had it in hand that she made her way over to me.
“So,” she said as she settled into the seat opposite me. The color was still high in her face. “You’re not trying to make a TV show about—about all of it?”
“Uh, no. Sorry. I didn’t know how else to get you to meet with me.”
“You could have tried asking.”
I could have. But then I wouldn’t have gotten to see her face.
“What do you want?” she asked. “Really?”
“My name is Dash Dane. I’m an author—”
“Oh God, I know who you are. I knew I’d seen you before. In the lobby, remember? When you were talking with Vivienne?”
I mean, seriously—was it everyone?
She took a sip of her coffee—which, from the label turned toward me, I discovered was a soymilk latte without sweetener. (Blech.) “I don’t understand. You think…what happened has something to do with Simona?”
“I do. In fact, I think it has everything to do with it.” I paused, trying to read her face, but it was still that superficial mixture of disbelief and tears. “Do you believe Simona killed Robert Kessler?”
She set her coffee down. And then she turned the cup in the circle of her hands. In a quiet voice, she said, “She was convicted.”
“But do you believe she did it?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. The great Vivienne Carver solved the mystery.”
“Whitney.”
She stilled. The soft rasp of the paper cup between her hands died away. At the billiard table, someone broke the next set of balls, and a woman laughed.
“No,” Whitney said—even more quietly now. “No, I never believed she did it.” Her gaze came up to me. “And that’s what I said at the trial.”
“But you were the one who provided the motive.”
“The motive?” Whitney made a little scoffing sound. “Simona never would have killed someone over bad reviews. Certainly not Robert.”
I frowned. “Then why did Vivienne assume she did it?”
Whitney laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “You’re the one who caught her, right? Didn’t she bang you on the head with a frying pan or something?”
“Uh, no. She got banged—”
Which, I realized in that moment, was not my favorite way to put it.
“So, you never went through something like this with her,” Whitney said. “An investigation. When she was the detective, I mean.”
I shook my head.
“It’s hard to explain.” Whitney turned the cup again, more carefully this time.
“She was like a force of nature. She was so smart. So charming. So…sure of herself. And what made it all the more powerful was that you could see when she made a mistake, when she focused on the wrong person, when she realized she’d gotten something wrong and corrected course.
It was like being inside one of her novels.
That probably makes it sound like we were all having a psychotic break, but—but that’s how it was.
I’ve never been through anything like it.
” She paused to smile. “Of course, I’ve never been through any other murder investigations, so maybe they all have that same surreal quality to them. Like a fever dream.”
The creak of leather from the sofas. The woman talking to her baby. The smooth jazz fading out.
“I never believed Simona did it,” Whitney said again. “But Vivienne had a way of pulling on every thread, tracking down every rumor, poking and prodding into the darkest and most painful moments of everyone’s life. Margaux’s affairs. Block’s drunk driving arrest.”
“The reviews,” I said.
Whitney shook her head, but the gesture seemed directed at the fresh surge of tears.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Simona told me that she’d found out Robert was leaving those reviews.
She was upset at the time, understandably; later, she begged me not to tell anyone.
But Vivienne—sometimes it was like she was psychic.
Like she already knew. She asked me, and the words started spilling out of me.
And when it was done, I told her that Simona never could have hurt Robert.
Simona never could have hurt anyone. She was such a good person.
And she was so happy—her book, you know?
And Robert was her hero—everything he’d done to make it happen.
He’s the whole reason she ended up at Langstaff and Lock, you know. She called him her lifesaver.”
“I don’t understand. If that’s all true, then why did anyone believe Simona did it?”
Whitney gave that unhappy laugh again. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Simona and Robert had a public argument—I should call it a fight because it was so ugly.”
“About?”
“The book, of course. Simona’s work was…
challenging. She wanted it to be challenging.
Robert liked that, up to a point, but he also wanted a book that would sell.
He’d paid a lot of money for the rights.
It was a big gamble; when Simona pushed back on his edits, he started to worry that the gamble wouldn’t pay off. ”
Something was wrong with that statement.
“What else?” I said.
Whitney looked down into her coffee again. “Simona was…missing.”
“What?”