“Oh, God,” Holly said. “Oh, God, why?” She turned to me.
“How did this happen?”
I told her about the phone call, finding Nora unconscious, then the door being padlocked by Frank. A warning look from McManus silenced me before I said more.
Holly’s eyes filled with tears. “Where’s Frank now?” she asked.
“We’re looking for him,” McManus replied. “He’s not home. Not at his office. It’s starting to look like he’s nowhere in town.”
Holly frowned. “Why would he do this?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” the sheriff told her.
“Do you have any theories?”
“No. No, how could I?” Holly said. “It’s horrible! I can’t even imagine it.”
I wanted to end this miserable charade. “Sheriff—” I began.
He cut me off. “I have some theories of my own and would be interested in any ideas or observations you have, Holly.
Sometimes little things you notice can go a long way toward giving the big picture.”
“Things like what?” Holly asked.
“A statement someone made that gave you reason to pause. An argument you overheard. Anything that can help us piece this together.”
Holly stared at the floor, biting her lip, then looked up slowly. “Mother?”
Aunt Jule stopped pacing and came to stand in the doorway.
“Mother, what have you told them?”
“What do you mean?” Aunt Jule asked.
“I want to know what you have said to the police.”
“The little I know,” she replied, stepping into the room. “I was home. I heard Rocky barking, but didn’t pay attention.
Then I heard the sirens.”
There was a long silence.
“Holly, do you believe there is someone else involved other than Frank?” McManus asked. “Have you seen or heard anything to make you think that?”
“No — maybe,” she said indecisively.
“I’d like to hear about that maybe.”
Holly wrung her hands. “This is… really unpleasant.” She looked down at her hands and made them still. “I think that Nora wasn’t the one somebody was after.”
McManus leaned forward.
“I think it was Lauren my mother wanted dead.”
Aunt Jule’s face went white. “What are you talking about?”
she exclaimed.
Holly kept her eyes on McManus. “Before Lauren’s mother drowned, she wrote a will with the help of Frank. She left everything to Lauren, but if Lauren died before she was eighteen, everything would go to my mother.”
“Holly, what are you saying?” Aunt Jule cried She leaned on the wooden back of a chair, her arm rigid, the rest of her body sagging against it “Do you think I would hurt Lauren?
Do you think I would hurt anyone for money?”
Holly straightened her shoulders, steeling herself. “If her name was Sondra or Lauren — yes. I think that you killed Sondra first.”
“I did not!”
“You fought with her constantly that summer,” Holly said, her voice becoming stronger in response to her mother’s denial. “The night she drowned, the arguing was awful.” She turned to me. “Do you remember?”
I saw the curtains move and for a moment was afraid Nora would reply, but she remained quiet.
I looked from Holly to Aunt Jule, not sure whom to believe.
Each seemed shocked by what the other had said. Then suddenly the piece that didn’t fit, one tiny observation, slipped into place. Why would a person who planned as well as Holly use a traceable object to strike Nora? Because the lamp was Aunt Jule’s and would have her fingerprints on it What if it wasn’t Nora who was to be framed for my death, but Aunt Jule, who had the most obvious motivation?
“Yes, there was a lot of fighting,” I admitted, “but I know your mother wouldn’t have hurt my mother or me. And I can’t believe she’d ever hurt Nora. I won’t believe it,” I added, “not without some kind of evidence — stains or fingerprints.”
“Did you look for the weapon?” Holly asked McManus.
“What weapon is that?” he asked.
“I thought that Nora was struck—” Holly stopped midsentence.
She had been too quick to point the investigation in the direction of the lamp, too eager for the sheriff to follow the plan she’d laid out for him.
When she didn’t go on, McManus said, “I told you that Lauren found Nora unconscious. I didn’t say how she got that way. She could have fainted, could have been poisoned.”
I saw the curtain move again, its long cord swinging loose.
“She could have,” Holly agreed. “But I figured it happened the way it does on TV.”
The cord swung as if in a breeze. Nick turned his head slightly. Aunt Jule noticed it. But McManus’s eyes were on Holly, and hers on him.
“I’m not a detective,” Holly went on. “I’m not trained to think of all the possibilities. Like Lauren, I can’t believe my mother would do this. It — it horrifies me. It doesn’t seem real.”
The cord swung like a pendulum, closer and closer to Holly’s right arm.
“And Frank — he’s like an uncle to me. I trusted him! I trusted both of them.”
“Holly,” Aunt Jule cried, “why are you turning on me?”
The tip of the cord curled upward as if invisible fingers had twisted it.
“You’ve got it backward, Mother,” Holly argued. “ You turned on us. My sister is dead. And if I don’t say what I know, Lauren may be next.”
Tears ran down Aunt Jule’s cheeks.
Holly’s face hardened. “Stop faking it, Mother. Who else would want to kill Lauren?”
The moving cord suddenly twisted upward and snaked around Holly’s wrist. It coiled twice and knotted itself, tying Holly’s forearm to the wooden arm of the chair.
McManus rose from his seat, his notebook sliding from his lap. “Good God!”
Holly sat still and appeared perfectly calm, but her arms prickled with goose flesh.
There was a long ripping sound. The curtains on the other door fell and the cord flew across the room. It twined itself around her wrist. Holly’s skin paled, her eyes widened with fear. She struggled to get free of the rope, rocking back and forth in her chair, knocking into the glass door. “Stop it, Nora!” she screamed. “Stop it!”
Two officers stepped into the room.
“Move aside, Nick,” McManus said.
Holly’s eyes darted over the room, as if she expected Nora to come back from the dead.
“Nora, you can come in now,” McManus called.
Holly wrenched around in her chair and stared at Nora as she came through the door, then she turned to me. “Witch,” she said, with unnerving calm.
I didn’t reply. I had no answer for the hate in her eyes.
“You’re such a fool, Lauren,” Holly said. “Did you really think that anything had changed between us during the last seven years?”
“I hoped we had both grown up.”
“You will always be rich and stupid, just like your mother,” Holly said. “You don’t deserve what you have. You don’t deserve your money and you don’t deserve my mother’s sickening admiration. I have always hated you.”
