My mind raced with all the similarities between Mitzy and Susie, and Mitzy and Kelly. How ironic that Mitzy should steal Susie’s boyfriend…
But the thought of Luca reminded me of something. The baby. Susie wouldn’t want the baby hurt in all this, would she? Not if she loved Kelly as much as she had all these years.
“What about Luca, Susie? What about Luca and the baby?” I reminded her.
She laughed out loud, her peachy skin, scrubbed fresh, still perfect in the harsh end of day light. “There is no baby, Trixie! I made that up. I made it all up because the second you asked if I was pregnant was the second I realized it would remove some of the suspicion from me if I said yes. It was an easy distraction to make everyone feel sorry for poor cheated on Susie-Susie.”
Okay, well, that angle was three sheets to the wind. “And Luca?”
Susie used the gun to punctuate the air with a sarcastic smile. “Now that was the truth. What I said about him and how I felt about him was all true. He was young and gorgeous and easy to string along for a little fun. It’s ironic that Mitzy stole him from me, isn’t it? But he was a joke. A total joke, and when he cheated on me, I almost shook his hand and thanked him because I had a bigger plan. One I’d set in motion long before he’d made a move on her.”
“Your YouTube channel… Did you…?”
Now she smiled as though she had some sage wisdom to impart. “Did I become a successful makeup guru just to spite Mitzy? Is that what you’re asking? Nah. I’d already been around for a couple of years. Remember, I’m older? I’m actually one of the OG’s—”
I suddenly remembered her age and Kelly’s and that didn’t add up. She would have had Kelly at ten.
“You’re thirty, if I remember correctly, right? You didn’t have Kelly at ten…”
“Oh, that,” she said on a Cheshire grin. “I lied about that, too. I’m actually thirty-five. I figured I could get away with thirty, and I was right. But thirty-five? That might have been a stretch to get my subbies to buy product from me, no matter how good my makeup skills are. They want young, fresh, and trendy. Thirty-five is over the hill as far as they’re concerned.
“So it was just coincidence that you and Mitzy both chose the same profession and ran into each other this way?”
My gracious. There was that saying about six degrees of separation, and it certainly held weight in this situation. What a strange twist of fate that Susie should find Mitzy, of all the people to find, earning her living in the same unique way she did.
“Yeah,” she drawled with another sniffle. “Another irony, right? I took the money the Leighs gave me for the adoption and made something of myself. I invested in myself, always thinking someday I’d get to be with Kelly. Unlike that piece of trash, Mitzy, who stole deals left and right, I worked my butt off to get where I am today. To get all this.” She spread her arms wide. “And you know what? You know what else, Trixie?”
I shook my head, almost afraid to speak while I tried to take glances around the room to find anything that would help me get away from her. But there wasn’t much. Just a lot of pillows and big glass tables.
“What else?” I whispered as cold sweat trickled down my spine.
“I didn’t even hate her for knocking my position on the YT down a couple of notches when she came on the scene. I had no idea she was the same Mitzy Rawlins who’d killed my Kelly. Imagine my surprise when I found out she was using Cavanaugh, her mother’s maiden name, and she was the same Mitzy responsible for my daughter’s death. Convenient, right? That she entered my world?”
I hoped to redirect her thoughts to all the things she’d lose if she killed me. “Very convenient, but all this—all that you’ve worked for—is beautiful, Susie. You made something of yourself. You should be so proud.”
“You bet I did!” she shouted, her glassy eyes wide. Yet, then she appeared to sober, her face sad. “But I’m still all alone. I have no one to share it with. Someday, when Kelly was old enough and the Leighs said it was okay, I was going to reenter her life. I hoped…I hoped we could be friends. I hoped I could share this with her. But now we’ll never have the chance.” Tears began to flow down her face again, her skin going splotchy and red.
As she cried, I had the chance to recover some feeling in my fingers, and I realized, my coffee was still pretty hot… Even if my feet felt like two bricks of ice.
“So after you found out who she was, you plotted a way to kill her?”
Susie nodded and smiled. “Yep. I knew, like everyone else, she was highly allergic to peanuts and the rest, as they say, was history. I did some research on nut allergies, bought some peanut oil, rubbed it on my lips and made nice with her when I saw her for the first time since she’d slept with Luca. Oh, I made a big deal out of no hard feelings and all. Caught her just before she was going onstage after her break—because I’d read the allergic reaction can happen in an instant, and there was nothing I wanted more than for people to see her keel over right in front of them. She probably hated that.”
“I imagine, as horrible as she was, she liked for the world to view her a certain way. She probably did hate it.”
Susie took a small step closer to me, her fuzzy slippers softly scraping the
