Chapter 39
THIRTY-NINE
Except for the reporters, who were furiously scribbling into notebooks or mumbling into microphones, the crowd sat in stunned silence. Savilla’s mouth hung open in disbelief as she turned to Katie Gilman. From the front row of the audience, Mrs. Finch stood.
“Sit down, Gigi,” Katie hissed, her hands behind her back.
I scanned the stage, the crown in my hand, at first wondering to whom she was speaking. When the reality hit me, the last domino fell.
My eyes trailed to the banner on the far right wall, listing Mrs. Glenda Finch as the winner.
I thought of the wedding announcement that I’d found in one of the storage boxes, which had also named her as Glenda Finch.
Strangely, no maiden name had been used for Glenda—it was as if she’d forever and always been Mrs. Finch.
But in my first conversation with him, Mr. Finch had called his wife by the same name Katie had just used.
Gigi. At the time, I’d assumed it was spelled G-i-g-i, like the classic film, but on his to-do list taped to Katie’s bathroom door, he’d written that he needed to Ask GG to send thank you notes to sponsors.
The first G was for Glenda, and the second G was for… Oh Lord, how had I not seen it?
Glenda Gilman, sister to Katie Gilman. This was a family-friendly show, after all.
The women didn’t look alike, not even in the enlarged cutout from 2001 when they were both younger and thinner. They didn’t have similar personalities from what I’d seen, but neither had Momma and Aunt DeeDee. What both women shared was their connection to Savilla—and the deceased Mr. Finch.
“Are you two… sisters?” I stammered.
The two women, only a few years apart in age, stared at one another before turning to me.
“He got me pregnant and then stole my child from me,” Katie finally said, as the crowd gasped.
“What else were we supposed to do?” Glenda followed, as if whatever they’d done had been a foregone conclusion.
Katie Gilman and Glenda Finch, née Gilman, had sat side by side on and off all week, and they’d been together in the Finches’ apartment my first night there.
I wanted to hit myself for not seeing it earlier: their body language, the way they communicated so much in a glance.
I’d assumed it was a longtime employer–employee relationship, but this was so much more.
These were sisters who’d loved—and perhaps sometimes hated—one another over the years, but they were bonded, nonetheless.
Glenda looked protectively toward Katie, and the intensity of the look passing between the two women told me I’d guessed correctly.
“This isn’t her fault,” Glenda shouted across the aisle and to the audience at large.
Katie staggered slightly upon hearing her sister’s words.
“It’s mine,” Glenda insisted.
Katie’s eyes widened and she called, “Hush your mouth and sit down, Glenda. The police already have the culprit.” She looked at Charlie. “The person you want is Dr. Bellingham, and you already have him in custody.”
“We know he wasn’t working alone,” the sheriff said. “Now I’m wondering if he was even involved as much as I first thought.”
A universal shock went through the room.
Glenda almost seemed to bask in the surprise before continuing. “My name is Glenda Gilman Finch, and Dr. Bellingham and I are guilty of my husband’s murder.” She stared at the sheriff. “You can release Katie.”
“I’m afraid that’s not how this works,” Sheriff Strong said as he motioned for one of his men to approach Glenda as well.
Katie squared her shoulders, despite the handcuffs, making her appear more like the confident Miss 2001 she’d once been. Her eyes moved to her sister, and she spoke as if they were the only two in the room. “You don’t need to take the fall for me. You’ve… you’ve done enough.”
“It could never be enough,” Glenda countered. “After Frederick took everything from you. After he kicked you out of the estate. After he stole your child. He deserved what came to him.”
“Why?” I stepped forward, genuinely wanting to know what Mr. Finch had done to deserve death. Yes, he’d somehow tried to keep Savilla from Katie Gilman, but it obviously hadn’t worked, at least not completely.
Katie sniffled as she reopened her past. “I was trying to get a job and start a life when I took a position here as a maid. I was young and dumb and believed it when Fred said he loved me.”
“You weren’t the problem,” Glenda gently corrected before turning to the sheriff. “My sister couldn’t sue for custody. She had nothing, and Fred had everything. So we made another plan: she would compete and win the money in the 2001 pageant under a pseudonym.”
“He let me win, was baiting me, but I couldn’t be that close to Savilla…” Katie turned to look at her now-grown daughter. “I was impulsive. When Fred said I’d never be with her, even if I won all the money in the world, I took her and ran.”
“But you didn’t get far,” I added.
“I had a backup plan,” Glenda broke in. “I would marry him and hire Katie as the nanny. Then I would divorce him and take half of everything.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, he was one step ahead with a watertight prenup.”
“But when I told him I would go to the tabloids, tell them everything, he did allow me to return as Savilla’s nanny,” Katie said, her voice quiet, as if to show her own weakness. “For that I’m grateful.”
Sheriff Strong couldn’t keep from asking the question that was on all of our minds. “How could you kill the father of your own child?”
“It wasn’t hard,” Katie answered, looking at him as if he was an imbecile for not realizing such a thing.
“It was time. I knew that according to his will, Savilla would be free to inherit at twenty-five. It just took me a few years longer than I’d expected to figure out how to do it without getting caught. ”
“And how’d that work out for you?” the sheriff asked.
“It would’ve worked if—”
“Mother,” Savilla said, extending a hand in Katie’s direction. “That’s enough. You don’t need to discriminate yourself.”
I had no time or energy to address that one. None of us did, and besides, maybe discriminate was exactly what she’d meant.
Sheriff Strong turned toward Savilla now, and I could see he was trying to discern whether he needed to take another member of this family into custody. His voice was heavy with authority as he asked, “Savilla Finch, do you have anything to say about these recent confessions?”
Glenda spoke for her. “Leave her out of this. She only found out that Katie is her biological mother a few months ago.”
“Before or after Savilla took out a life insurance policy on him?” the sheriff asked.
Kudos to him. I wondered if he’d also been poking around the Finches’ liquor cabinet to find this detail—but he likely had more official means of gathering intel.
“I was a witness to that,” Aunt DeeDee said, bravely stepping forward. Even though my instincts were to tell her to keep quiet, I was proud of her for being willing to help after all she’d been through. “Despite how it might look, the policy was a simple practicality.”
“That’s right. Daddy said it never hurt to have more money. I signed the policy, but I had no idea they were planning to kill…” Savilla was shame-faced and vulnerable, like the child I’d grown up with.
Her expression and Aunt DeeDee’s testimony were convincing. I’d been wrong about Savilla’s involvement in all of this. She hadn’t killed her father, and she couldn’t control her mother or stepmother. Her only fault was trying to live up to all of their expectations.
Savilla turned to Katie. “You never said anything about”—her arms flailed wildly in the air as if the gesture could encompass the events of the past few days—“any of this.”
“You must understand. Your father wasn’t a person,” Katie calmly told her before turning to the audience. She wanted all of us to feel her justification. “He was a monster, a baby stealer, a narcissist that everyone loved because he had money and power.”
“And… what about StepMommy?” Savilla asked. “Why would you want to… to poison her?”
“Oh, baby. I would never… That was all Jim’s doing,” Katie said. “I had no idea. We asked him to help ensure everything ran smoothly, but apparently, the money we’d promised him wasn’t enough. He wanted a chance at killing Glenda and seducing you for the entire inheritance.”
Glenda stared at Savilla as if willing her to believe them. “What happened to me had nothing to do with your mother, and after I came to, I was afraid that you might be next.”
So, Dr. Bellingham’s greed had gotten the best of him, and he’d gone rogue, sneaking those toxic honey jars into the Finches’ liquor cabinet to get rid of either or both of them.
Katie’s eyes filled with tears as she looked from her sister to her daughter. “Savilla, we just… we just wanted you to have the family and the resources you deserve. The three of us, together.”
As I thought about my own mother, about what she would’ve done to stay with me, tears sprang to my eyes, and that’s when a photographer snapped a picture that would appear on front pages of newspapers everywhere the next morning. The ugly cry of the beautiful new queen.
“Now I’ve lost Daddy and both of you…” Savilla’s voice trailed off as she choked out the words. “All because you wanted to be filchy rich.”
“Filthy, darling,” Glenda corrected, almost sounding like the kind of uppity woman I’d assumed she was for most of the show.
“No,” Savilla blurted. “You tried to filch everything, to steal, to take it all for yourself.”
“The money wasn’t the thing for us,” Katie cut in. “Savilla, you have to believe that we did all of this because we wanted you—and we wanted you to have it all.”
Emotions ran across Savilla’s face: confusion, hope, longing. All of it was on display, and I knew it would take a long time for her to unpack what her family had become.
Aunt DeeDee stepped forward, her brows drawn together as if she was in physical pain. I ached for the betrayal she must have been feeling. “But we’ve known one another for years… We’ve worked together; we were room moms together; we’ve been at every pageant together. Why would you frame me?”
Katie’s eyes widened, the hint of tears as she was confronted with the extent of what she’d done.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what to do, and Jim suggested you as the perfect decoy.
I panicked.” She swallowed. “The police were supposed to take you in and question you for theft, not murder.” She bent forward at the waist as if she wanted to plead for forgiveness despite the sheriff’s handcuffs.
“The letter wasn’t supposed to implicate you, but then Jimmy got it into his head that you could take the fall for everything.
He’s the one who took the Polaroids and put them in Dakota’s room before she even arrived.
I swear I didn’t know he was planning to do that until after… ”
Aunt DeeDee’s eyes darted to me. She hadn’t known about the photos with the implicating message under my duvet and, for a moment, the idea of Dr. Bellingham being in my room was more concerning to her than anything else.
“I’m good,” I told her. “Nothing happened.”
“Please, forgive me,” Katie said to Aunt DeeDee, her eyes pleading. “I… I knew they would eventually let you go.”
That wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. No one could know that.
As silence settled again, I stepped forward. I couldn’t keep quiet. I needed to know one more thing.
I looked directly at Katie and asked my question. “Mr. Finch died in the middle of the night, so where was he during the evening before his death? And how did you hide his body in the 1950s tent?”
“He was with me,” Katie answered, showing all her cards now that it was too late to refuse to play the game.
“We’d reached a truce years ago, but he was still nervous that I would blow his cover, let the world know what kind of man he really was: one who had slept with a maid and then stolen her child.
That kind of reputation could ruin his beloved pageant.
I’d told him that with Savilla now grown, I wanted to talk to him about me leaving Aubergine for good, and to meet me at the back of the property during the meet and greet one last time to discuss a final payout.
Stupid man. He waited and waited for me, spending time with his bees and his honey while I planted the note in his apartment and the crown in DeeDee’s room.
” Katie looked sheepish for the first time, but she continued.
“I told Fred to leave his phone, his keys, everything. I said I didn’t want us to be interrupted, that if he would do this one thing, he would never hear from me again after this week.
He did everything I asked—that’s how much he still despised me.
When I got to the back of the property late that night, Fred and I took a walk.
” Katie swallowed. “I talked about his plans to build a museum memorializing the pageant. He joked about making an exhibit that would honor me. He thanked me for my service, for giving him our daughter—as if I’d had a choice.
He thought he was actually getting rid of me as we started back through the tunnel in the early morning hours. He had no idea what was coming.”
Glenda spoke now. “I helped move his body sometime after two a.m.”
“That’s right,” Katie added. “In the dark of the night, she and I hauled him up the stairs and onto a rusty old cart. We did what we had to do, and Dr. Bellingham met us in the 1950s tent and helped shove him into the kitchen cabinets.”
My eyebrows rose clear to my brow line and another photo snapped.
I considered the image of the three of them working collectively to hide Mr. Finch’s body.
I wondered, only for a moment, why they would hide him there, in a place where he would be found in such a public way.
But then I looked at them and understood: it was poetic justice.
The sisters wanted the man who had controlled and dictated their lives to be discovered in the most domestic part of the home in the most housewifely era.
The Gilman sisters also needed him to be found.
If he’d simply disappeared—like Miss 2001, aka Cathy Peabody, had done so many years ago—then his estate and his money would be in limbo for what could be years.
Katie and Glenda had wanted everything finished as soon as possible.
They’d waited long enough for what was due to them and Savilla.
I tried to blink away the image of the two women hauling him up from the underground tunnel and through the opening in the heart of the fake rose-hedge maze, but the thought of these two sisters working together one last time stuck in my mind.
The evening had been full of reveals, but this was my primary takeaway: Dead bodies were heavy, but angry women got things done.