Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Momma had been born with one blue eye and one brown eye, but after being diagnosed with ocular melanoma at seventeen, they’d taken her blue eye and replaced it with a glass one.
She chose to match the color to her remaining eye in order to draw less attention to her new disability but she told me that, even in her sixties, she’d never gotten used to looking in the mirror and seeing the same-color eyes on her face.
I liked what made me different, she would say. So should you.
Without the two distinct colors, Aunt DeeDee always forgot which eye was which. They did such a good job that I can hardly tell the fake, she’d say from time to time.
Momma’s cancer lay dormant for decades before roaring back to life with a vengeance.
After trying all of the mainstream options, she and Aunt DeeDee and I traveled to Oklahoma City for her last chance at a cure.
In those days, I often regretted not having a sibling, someone who would travel with us, be another pair of ears to hear the news with us.
Aunt DeeDee was great, but sometimes, despite her efforts, I felt like a third wheel as she and her sister—my mother—chatted in a kind of shorthand from their own childhood together.
During the week at the experimental treatment facility, the incessant drip of the IV and the beeping of the monitors became our soundtrack.
On our third day there, Aunt DeeDee walked in with an armful of magazines and game books—sudoku, crosswords, and word finds kept her mind young, she claimed.
Momma was fast asleep because the drugs they pumped into her were strong, and her body was exhausted.
I figured Aunt DeeDee would settle herself next to Momma and keep quiet until she awakened.
Instead, my aunt’s cheeks burned pink, and a bead of sweat broke out along her hairline as she started fiddling with the machines, pressing buttons and glancing at the emergency call.
I could practically see her heartbeat elevate as I thumbed through a Better Homes & Gardens someone had left in the lobby.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to press those,” I whispered as my eyes darted back and forth from her to Momma, who seemed perfectly fine from my vantage point and not worth Aunt DeeDee’s angst.
When Aunt DeeDee moved closer to my mother’s face, shining the light from her phone into Momma’s eye to better examine her, I knew what was wrong.
The eyelid covering Momma’s glass eye had popped open, and with the unmoving pupil, Aunt DeeDee had thought for a few terrifying seconds that she’d died.
“Allow me,” I said, leaning over my mother and shutting the eyelid with two fingers. “It’s a bit like a lever. Remember?”
Aunt DeeDee grabbed her heart in relief and rushed out of the room to find a bathroom and splash water on her face.
When Momma woke up, it tickled her to no end. Aunt DeeDee was appalled at our hilarity.
It’s not funny. I just… I got turned around and forgot which eye… I haven’t slept through the night in weeks… I thought you were dead and gone, she ranted, loudly enough that a nurse came to quiet the three of us down. I swear. You two will be the death of me, Aunt DeeDee said, pointing at us.
Momma and I guffawed. That was the kind of person Momma was—able to stare death in the face and keep in good spirits.
I didn’t inherit that trait from her.
That’s why I’d lain awake ruminating in my tiny cottage on the first night of the pageant, trying to put pieces together, trying to figure out how Mr. Finch’s disappearance could possibly relate to a stolen crown and my aunt.
But more than that, I feared that someone else—namely me or Lacy or even one of the Finches—might be next to disappear.
We were, after all, closest to the case.
Last night I’d grabbed my clothes from the bathroom and stolen back to the Finch apartments to place the ledger back in the liquor cabinet right before returning to my cottage.
Thankfully, I was still awake when Katie Gilman had swung by to check on me.
She’d given me a long hug from my aunt and encouraged me to get a good night’s sleep, so I’d be fresh in the morning.
I needed that sort of motherly advice and, after tossing my fancy romper onto the floor, I finally fell asleep for four or five hours before waking up to the screeching caw of peacocks.
If you think of peacocks as silent creatures of majestic wonder, the only way I can think to explain their early morning sound is like this: With one hand, scratch your nails against a chalkboard—hard, really dig in—and with the other, ring two discordant bells against your ear.
That’s how my eyes opened to my second day at the Rose Palace.
A puddle of drool had escaped the side of my mouth sometime during the night, and I creaked one eye open as I stretched out a hand, patting the empty side of the queen bed.
As I fondled the pillow, my fingers landed on something cool and plasticky.
I sat up and rubbed sleep out of my eyes before picking up the thin, square object.
It was a photo, a Polaroid, a blurry one that had a finger covering half of the frame.
I blinked as my eyes attempted to adjust to the muted sunlight streaming through a thin window that ran along the top of the loft wall.
I flipped on the lamp, but before I had the chance to look closely, a peacock shrieked again and a knock sounded at my door.
I threw the photo back onto the pillow and yelled, “Coming!” before stumbling down the stairs, my head still sloshy from last night.
“Delivery,” Lacy called from the other side.
When I swung open the door, she stood with a giant tote on her shoulder and her hand propped on a long metal rack filled with garment bags of all shapes and sizes. Aunt DeeDee’s pageant order had come through even though she was locked up.
“I brought coffee too.” Lacy handed me a hot to-go cup. “From the dining room bar. It’s pretty good.”
“I hope you’ve got a cyanide pill to go with it,” I said as I took a sip of the hot brew, and winced as it scalded my tongue.
“You and me both, friend.”
“Any news on Mr. Finch?” I asked.
“Not yet. Over breakfast, some of the contestants were whispering that he probably ran off with a previous winner, and others thought he must be dead in the woods at the edge of the estate.”
I tried to swallow another gulp of coffee but choked on it this time.
“DeeDee was on my mind the entire night, particularly since I was up until three making sure the missing tents arrived and all ten were properly erected.” Lacy pointed a finger at me.
“Did you just wake up? You haven’t showered yet?
Or attended Jemma’s Broadway Butt-Busting workout? ” She pretended to be shocked.
“I literally just got out of bed.” I went to the sink, set down my coffee, and splashed water on my face. “Did you work out?”
“I did, actually,” she answered, looking pleased with herself as she plopped on the couch.
“We listened to ‘Memory’ and crawled around like cats. It was surprisingly difficult to stay on all fours until the last note, but Jemma did a great job—showed us all the moves and yelled encouragement at us for the entire hour.”
The yelling part made sense, but the encouragement part, not so much.
“Well, best get to it.” Lacy nudged me toward the bathroom. “I’ve got stuff to do, but I know DeeDee would want me to oversee your hair and makeup.” She placed her tote on the two-person stained-wood kitchen table. “Do you have everything you need?”
“It’s all upstairs,” I answered, not wanting to think about possible beauty torture devices my aunt had packed for me.
The hot shower did wake me up, and the specialty lavender shampoo and mint body wash left me smelling like something Bella wouldn’t have recognized.
I thought about the stables on the Rose Palace property and wondered if I could sneak out and bribe someone into letting me go for a ride.
The blessed escape of riding through the foothills called to me, but instead I had two jobs to do: win a pageant and solve a mystery.
As I imagined exploring every inch of the grounds, searching for a man who may have left of his own accord, I used the brand-new loofa and scrubbed all the parts that one is supposed to leave bare and shiny at a pageant.
I peeked my head outside the door. “Do you have my outfit ready?”
“You’ll need to wait to dress until after we do hair and makeup. Just come out in your underwear and towel,” Lacy answered, as the stairs creaked above me.
I figured she was spying to see which shoes I’d brought. She would be disappointed.
I’d almost closed the bathroom door again when I heard Lacy scream.
I tightened the towel around myself as I rushed up the stairs, but when I got to the top, she hadn’t fallen or found a gigantic spider. Instead, she was standing next to the bed, holding the photo I’d found and promptly forgotten.
“That was here when I woke up,” I said, waving away her dramatic response. “The last person here must’ve left it.”
Lacy shook her head and pointed at the bedspread. “I saw it lying on the pillow and pulled back the duvet to get a closer look. Then I saw…” Her voice faded.
I went to stand next to her and lifted the covers gently, expecting to find a dead rat or a newspaper headline saying that all the coffee in the entire world had been depleted.
Instead, it was a handful of Polaroids with one word written in capital letters at the bottom of each of them. I read them in the order that they lay.
BOTH KILLED THEM OF SHE
“What does that mean?” Lacy asked. “I just saw the word ‘killed’ and freaked out.”
I studied the image in the photos: a close-up of a worn sash reading Miss 1990.
At the bottom of each of the photos on the white frame surrounding the image, as well as the one word, there was a number indicating the proper order in which to read them.
“Wait,” I said, shuffling the photos until all five were in order. The note now read: