Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
Hearing from this older woman made my mind flash to what Presley had said about her own great-grandmother, about her bisnonna seeing Brett with another woman.
Had that other woman been Mina Davis? It made sense, especially if she’d travelled to Italy with them as part of the film crew. A missing link melded into place.
Mina Davis had worked in L.A. for years.
She’d been on—or cut from—a variety of shows before getting behind the camera.
She’d been the interviewer on a popular show, which Brett had “won.” According to tabloids, even after Presley and Brett had decided to continue their relationship, Brett had kept his place on the West Coast, living separately from Presley most of the time.
Had Brett had a relationship with someone else on the side?
Could that someone have been… Mina Davis?
Mina had told me that she’d gotten the gig on this new show for her and Lee.
Had she asked Brett directly to let her work with him on this new reality show about Brett and Presley? To travel with him to shoot footage?
And if so, what might peering through the lens of a camera at the man you loved for weeks at a time do to someone, especially if that man was acting like he was head over heels for another woman? A woman like Presley Lombardi.
Silence descended on the room as we waited for Mina to speak.
When she didn’t, I looked at her directly. “You loved Brett, didn’t you?”
Mina, one hand on her gram, looked around at those of us assembled and let loose a heavy sigh. The shadows from the candlelight flickered across her face, and her eyes flitted to the floor for a few seconds before she began.
“I grew up hearing about Gram’s pageant adventures each summer, so I already felt like I knew this place.
After I graduated college and moved out of my mom’s house to get a place of my own, I was struggling to make any headway with auditions, so I came home to visit Gram for a couple of weeks in the summer of 2021.
Brett just happened to attend that same pageant.
” She took her grandmother’s hand, and I could see the love pass between them.
“Remember, I even wore one of your vintage gowns?”
Miss 1962 patted her, obviously remembering. “The robin-egg-blue taffeta.”
“Brett happened to be sitting in the audience next to me. We just…” Mina’s eyes welled. “We just clicked.”
I thought of the song lyrics, Brett singing about his girl with the frills and lace, his rose, full of love and grace. I’d thought at first that he must have meant Lacy, but that wasn’t it. He’d been referring to Mina. At the pageant, in her gram’s dress.
“Brett called me his…”
“… his dark lady, his rose,” I finished for her.
Mina blinked at me, obviously wondering how I knew those details. “Right. From Shakespeare. Brett wasn’t a scholar, but we did perform in a community theater production of Taming and we met here, at The Rose.”
I vaguely remembered that play from my sophomore year of high school English. The lead was basically an abusive asshole who tamed a woman into adoring him. That sounded about right.
“So the two of you were together?”
Mina nodded. “Officially, for two years—and, sort of, ever since.”
Their relationship must not have been a secret… at first. It must’ve been later that Brett tried to make it look like they’d never been together. But why?
Every eye was on Mina. Even those in the background and those who’d been waiting at the door seemed to lean in to hear that voice that now spoke with the same kind of authority as when she’d been the interviewer on Small Town, Big Romance.
“Our relationship was… challenging. We’d break up and then get back together the next day, but I always loved him.
Even when we were fighting.” A faint smile.
“Brett wrote the song for me after one of our biggest fights. He told me he didn’t want me to be the one that got away, that he didn’t want to lose me. ”
Mina sniffled. “I loved the song, thought it was the best kind of twist on a traditional love song. It fit our relationship perfectly. I was the one who told him he should record it, so we scraped together all of our savings and he hired musicians and a studio for a full day.” Mina put the back of her hand to her nose.
“No one wanted the song at first, but Brett told me he knew a way to get it out there. He spoke to Mr. Finch, who was excited to produce it himself.”
I noticed Savilla’s face fall. Both of us knew that her father hadn’t been excited about being blackmailed by Brett, but we didn’t interrupt Mina.
“We had no idea what a hit it would be. Brett got a manager who said that we should keep our relationship a secret, that fans love a good story. We told friends we’d broken up, and we took everything that made us look like a couple off social media.
Even in that dumb music video, he made sure that no one could see my face, could see who I really was.
He said it was romantic, that only he would know the identity of the one who got away, the one he still had a hold on. ”
I tried not to show how disturbed I was by that last phrase.
Mina met my eyes. “That summer while we were at The Rose, filming the video right before the pageant, I got to hold the diamond that he—and I—would someday inherit. He said that it would be for me, my engagement ring. I begged him to just give up the charade and marry me then, but he said that he had a plan. Mr. Finch was in his seventies, and when he died, he could get the ring without the tax burdens of being given it now. To prove he was committed to me, he even asked Mr. Finch to write into his will that the diamond would need to be used for Brett’s engagement. ”
That matched what Savilla had told me in his office, and though it seemed strange, I supposed Brett was nothing if not practical in his schemes.
“Brett had said all along that we were playing a long game. I know it sounds silly, but I got swept up in it,” Mina continued.
“I tried to see it as exciting too, like we were sneaking around and we were the only two who knew we were together.” Mina’s eyes grew distant for a brief moment.
“He would go do a gig and talk about the one who got away and then come back and sleep in bed with me that night.”
Mina’s face clouded. “He applied to Small Town, Big Romance without telling me, though. He thought it would make me happy, God knows why. He said I could get a job on-site and we could sneak away when the cameras weren’t rolling.
But it was awful watching him with different women each night before he finally ended up with…
” Mina pointed at Presley, hissing the final word. “Her.”
Mina’s nostalgia had quickly turned to frustration.
“In the end I went along with it, just like I did with anything Brett wanted. The director saw that I had some experience but told me my face was ‘better off camera.’ It was humiliating.” Mina scoffed.
“We officially broke up the night before he asked Presley to be his girlfriend, though no one else even knew we were together. If anyone saw us, they probably thought Brett was asking me to grab him a coffee.” Mina was crying now, her anger and longing on full display.
“That night I told him I was tired of sneaking around and that I couldn’t bear to see what came next. ”
Presley reached toward Mina, who shook off her touch. “I had no idea,” Presley said softly.
Mina blinked at Presley as if she couldn’t quite register the words, and then she finally let out a long breath.
“I know. After Mr. Finch died, I told him it was time to come back to me, but Brett decided that he needed to get ahead just a bit more with you. He swore that it wasn’t true love, that after he got the press he needed, he would leave you and come back to me, but then he released that tape of the two of you and… ”
Presley put a hand to her stomach and looked as if she might be sick. She turned to Joe. “I knew it was Brett. He told me that some hacker had broken into his computer, but when I asked why he had the video in the first place, he couldn’t give me a straight answer.”
“Brett had recordings of him with every woman he’d ever slept with.
” Mina crinkled her nose in disgust. “It was, like, his thing. I told him to delete them, but he wouldn’t, and he convinced me…
” She swallowed as if she couldn’t believe what she was about to say.
“Somehow, God knows how, he convinced me that it was funny. Until he finally broke up with me. When I threatened to go to the network, to tell them that Brett was a fraud, he told me that he would send a video of us to TMZ and say that I’d blackmailed him with it.
He would claim that I’d told him I wanted to break up him and Presley. ”
Mina’s face fell and she hung her head, obviously ashamed at how far she’d let her relationship with Brett descend. “It was so… twisted.”
Twisted was the right word.
Mina lifted her head and stared into her grandmother’s eyes, taking a deep breath that shuddered her body. “That last night on set, that’s the first time I wanted to kill him.”
“But you didn’t,” Miss 1962 said, seeming frailer than ever. It was as if she were willing the statement to be true.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Charlie take a step forward. He hesitated though, listening for more.
“No. Or, at least, not yet. And then when it happened, I… I didn’t mean to.
” Mina’s voice was growing louder as she finally told the whole truth.
“I didn’t know how or when I would do it, but I took this job with every intention of getting Brett to come back to me or…
” Mina glanced at the far wall with the gargoyle, where I’d spotted the tuft of fake fur.
“We talked in the parking lot right before the reunion party last night. He said that he’d spoken to Lacy and wanted me to get footage of Presley bursting in on the two of them together.
I told him that he could go to hell, but he reminded me that he and Presley were all for show.
Told me that he wanted to be with me again.
After all of this was over. He reminded me about the diamond from the music video, the one I’d held, the one he’d promised me. ”
“She’s right.” Miss 1962 spoke as if I was the confessor in the room. “Mina told me about the diamond and the engagement and how much she loved him, so… I hid the diamond. Two years ago, when I was judging the pageant.”
I studied Mina’s grandmother, confused. “You did what?”
“I convinced Glenda to show me some of her favorite pieces of family jewelry during the 2023 show—she always loved gloating—and while she was studying a ruby necklace, I swiped the diamond. It was almost too easy.” Miss 1962 smiled softly at the memory, as if it’d been nothing more than taking a pack of gum from the grocery store.
“But why would you…?” I couldn’t even finish the sentence, so confused was I by Miss 1962’s admission.
This time she addressed Mina rather than me, clenching her hand around her granddaughter’s as she tried to convey the urgency behind her actions.
“That diamond had been promised to you, and I didn’t want either of those stupid men—Frederick Finch or Brett Brinkley—to change their minds at the last minute.
But if they did, Mina and I would be the only ones who knew where it really was. Besides, it wasn’t really stealing.”
I raised my eyebrows and Miss 1962 caught my look of disbelief.
“It wasn’t,” she protested. “I didn’t even remove it from the palace. I put it down here. In the gargoyle’s hands.”
Every eye peered past me to the end of the room where the gargoyle was mostly cloaked in darkness. Without turning around, I could envision the gargoyle’s unfurled wings, the empty hands, and the velvet with the indentation the size of a child’s palm. The size of the Rose Diamond.
“Brett didn’t know the Rose Diamond was missing, but Gram had told me where she’d hidden it.
No one ever came down here,” Mina admitted.
“So, last night I came down here to see if for myself. I lugged my gear with me so I could say I was filming if anyone saw me. After that conversation with Brett in the parking lot, I don’t know what came over me, but I knew I had to do something. So, I took it.”
Realization spread like a fine mist hanging over the room, and that’s when I noticed an object sticking out of one of Mina’s bags of gear at her feet. It was a boom mic covered in tufts of fake fur, the same one that she must’ve been carrying when she came down here and swiped the diamond.
“When I got upstairs to the ballroom and everyone arrived, I pretended to be checking the lighting on Brett when I dropped the diamond in his drink, but I swear, I didn’t think…
” Mina hung her head and began to cry. “Brett had put me through so much.” Her voice hardened.
“I thought if he swallowed the stone, the diamond intended for me, he’d understand what it felt like to choke on his own promises.
I didn’t mean to…” Mina’s voice broke. “I just wanted him to hurt like I was hurting.”
I took in that last sentence with the heaviness that she meant to convey. Perhaps she hadn’t meant for it to happen, but Brett had died.
And Mina Davis was responsible.
The same wave of realization seemed to wash over Mina again as she began crying harder, hunching forward as grief wracked her body for the first time since her lover’s death.