Death of a Domestic Diva (31 page)

I watched Vivian, working at a door. Verbenia's room, I guessed. But Vivian wasn't using a key to open it. She was picking the lock—which meant for whatever reason she hadn't wanted to get Don's permission and the key to go to Verbenia's room.

I waited until Vivian got Verbenia's door open, glanced around, went inside. Then I opened the women's wing door, slipped through, and shut the door behind me very quietly.

I went on down to the door Vivian had just picked open. I didn't bother to knock. I just opened it, and stepped in.

Verbenia's room, like Guy's and all the other residents' rooms here, was small, but comfortable. It had a desk with some drawing paper, and a box of colored pencils, neatly on the desk's center. On a bulletin board over the desk were drawings—perfect still life copies of vegetables and flowers and fruits. The drawings were signed with a childish “V” that didn't match the sophistication of the art.

There were a few simple light fixtures, attached to the walls rather than freestanding. A private bathroom and a nicely sized closet. And a twin bed, made up with a cream crocheted coverlet and an assortment of pastel pillows.

Sitting on the end of the bed was Vivian, staring at me, her hands in her sweater pockets.

The way she stared at me should have been a warning—turn and run, Josie. But I'd come for some answers. So I started to speak—found instead my voice was suddenly gone and my mouth was hanging open.

So Vivian spoke first, in a very flat, very quiet voice, “You followed me. Why did you follow me, Josie?”

“I have a few questions, and I think I can help us both find our loved ones, and—”

Her right hand moved around in her sweater pocket. Then, suddenly, it emerged, holding a gun. Which was pointed right at me.

Oops. I'd identified my suspect, cornered her to ask questions, and managed to get myself cornered instead by being—I admit it—stupid in my overeagerness. That seems to happen to me a lot, and I get myself into messy jams. This was the messiest, though, I'd ever gotten into, seeing as how it involved a gun being pointed at me. Never follow your murder suspect into a closed room, especially if you have no weapon and if it stands to reason that she (being a murder suspect) might.

I swallowed, hard. “Don't you, um, don't you even want to know what my questions are?”

Vivian smirked. “You brought her here.”

“Tyra?”

“Of course, Tyra. And she's why Verbenia's missing.”

“Tyra's dead, Vivian. I don't think she could make Verbenia disappear after she's already dead. People don't just pop up again after they're dead and kidnap people.” I thought, for an uncomfortable moment, of Mrs. Oglevee, who did seem to keep popping up and bugging me. But only in my dreams.

“No. But if Tyra Grimes hadn't come back to town, then I wouldn't have had to—” Vivian stopped, shook her head. “Never mind. Her coming to town led to Verbenia leaving, and you're the one who got her to town. For that, you're going to die. I figured it could wait until I found Verbenia and carried out my plans for her, but today will do just as well.”

I crossed my arms, trying to look unconcerned by that last comment. Truth be told, I was about to pee my pants, and crossing my arms was an instinctive self-protection gesture.

“Just like you killed Tyra—and Lewis?” I said.

Vivian gasped. Her gun wavered. “I—I didn't kill Lewis. I would never have killed Lewis.”

That surprised me. Hole number one in my theory. “Okay—but you killed Tyra?”

“Yes.” She sighed as if she was bored. “You're really annoying, you know that? All I wanted to do was check whether Verbenia had taken the bag I'd packed for her with her, before I go out searching for her. Then you come in here, with all your questions, and I've got to deal with you now instead of later.”

“You didn't have to pull the gun on me now if you wanted to give me another day or so to live,” I said, starting to feel a bit annoyed myself. “And what bag are you talking about? Wait—did you have something to do with Guy and Verbenia disappearing?”

“No, you idiot!” Vivian snapped. “I was planning on moving her from here today! I had packed a bag of her essentials yesterday. It's still here. I wanted us to leave without anyone knowing ahead of time that we were going. I was going to take her with me, to move out west—” She stopped, shook her head. “Enough of this. We're going to walk out slowly because I obviously can't kill you here, but I will if I have to, so don't try anything funny—”

“No,” I said.

“No?” Vivian echoed, clearly disbelieving. She was standing now, waving the gun in my face. “You're saying no when I have this gun pointed right at your nose?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean yes, I'm saying no. No. No. No. I'm not going to be pushed around by you.”

“I killed Tyra. I'll kill you—”

“No, you won't. Because I know where Verbenia and Guy are.” I looked as confident as I could, considering I didn't really know for sure—I just had a pretty good theory—and considering the gun in my face.

“Then—you'd—better—tell—me—”

“No.”

“No?”

“That's right. No, I won't tell you. Not until you answer a few questions for me.”

For a long minute, Vivian and I just stared at each other, neither of us budging.

Finally, she sighed. “All right. We're going to my car. You're going to drive me to wherever they are, and I'll answer your questions—”

“Is it a stick shift?”

“What?”

“Your car—is it a stick shift?”

“Yes.”

“Then we'll have to take mine—actually my boyfriend's, since mine has a flat tire out on Sweet Potato Ridge, because I don't drive stick shifts, although I did manage to drive a bookmobile earlier in a high-speed car chase, and—”

“All right, all right. We'll take your boyfriend's car.” I think that's what Vivian said. Her teeth were gritted so hard, it was tough to be sure.

We got out to Owen's car without anyone noticing us, although Vivian stayed right behind me, gun in my back, sweater draped over her hand to hide the gun.

I was sweating and trembling and needing to pee and throw up, all at once.

I had Tyra's killer—well, she really had me—and she was going to answer questions for me, but then what? Then she'd probably kill me. Because I had no intention of taking her to the orphanage. If Verbenia and Guy were there, I'd be putting them at risk.

I got in the car, crawling over from the passenger's side, at Vivian's insistence, with Vivian right behind me. I got to the driver's side, strapped in, and waited for Vivian to do the same. She kept her sweater-wrapped hand pointed right at me.

Maybe, I thought, maybe after I got my answers I could drive us to Owen's. Owen wasn't there, so I wouldn't be putting him at risk. Maybe once I got there, I'd think of a way out of this. Or maybe I'd just get shot.

“Start driving,” Vivian said.

I put the car in gear, pulled out of Stillwater. I waited until we were out on the road to ask my first question.

“You and Lewis and Verbenia and Tyra—you're all connected somehow, aren't you?”

To my surprise, Vivian gave a sharp laugh. “That's not what I expected you to ask. I thought you'd want to know why I'd killed your poor dear hero, Tyra.”

“Well, I figure you're connected somehow, and so is Lewis, and that the connection is why you killed them both. Although you say you didn't kill Lewis—”

“Of course I didn't!” She sighed. “All right—here's the explanation. You figure we're all connected? Well, you're only too right. Verbenia and I—we're Tyra's daughters.”

I did a double take that made the car sway. Vivian laughed harshly. “Yes—dear Tyra was our mother. She's actually from around here. She got pregnant, years ago, by Lewis's father. Had us, dumped us literally on Lewis's father's doorstep, around the time Lewis was fourteen. About two years later, after Lewis's father—our father—died, Lewis's mother had us put off in an orphanage. It was terrible—especially after people began to be aware that Verbenia was—different.

“Then, for a long time, we were apart, Verbenia put in an institution, me going from foster home to foster home. Lewis, somehow, kept track of us. When his mother died, when he was in his early twenties, he tracked us down. Finally found a decent foster home for me, a decent place for Verbenia. Eventually, he got Verbenia into Stillwater, and I made a life up in Columbus. He has been a true brother to us. And everything was pretty good—until Tyra came to town.”

My hands tightened around the steering wheel. I resisted the temptation to look at Vivian—I knew she was crying just from how her voice sounded. I focused on the road—going just under the speed limit, taking a few back-country road detours to Owen's. She didn't live down here and wouldn't know the difference until we'd been driving for a while, when she might get suspicious about why it was taking us so long to get anywhere. I just listened to Vivian's story, which, now that we were on the road, she'd settled into telling. Maybe she needed to tell someone the whole story—even if she was planning to kill that someone (me) as soon as she could.

“Then you got Tyra to come to town. I didn't know, of course, that she was my mother. I never wanted to know who our mother was—she'd abandoned us, knowing we wouldn't have much of a life. It was only thanks to Lewis that we each have decent lives at all. All I ever knew was that we'd been abandoned, and Lewis had rescued us.”

Vivian fell silent. Maybe she was thinking about Lewis, what he had meant to her and Verbenia. After a bit, I said softly, “So you haven't known all along about Tyra Grimes being your mother?”

Vivian stayed silent, and I thought maybe she wasn't going to answer my question. Finally she said, “No. Until a few weeks ago, all Lewis had ever told me was that our mother had left us with his father, that he was our half-brother, and that he wanted to make things right by us. Maybe it was because he and Hazel couldn't have kids. Or maybe just because he was a good man. Anyway, Lewis came to me shortly after you sent your letter to Tyra. He said Tyra had grown up here with a different name. That's when he told me about her being our mother.

“Then, after she got here, he came to her party at your apartment.” He must have come after I left, I thought. “He got her aside, told her they needed to talk privately. She told him to pick her up on the edge of town, after the party. She thought she could charm him—maybe pay him—into going along with her plan. You see, Tyra was having troubles with her company—and damaging news about her use of illegal labor to create her stupid T-shirts was about to break.

“So her plan was to donate a whole bunch of money to Stillwater, then have a press conference, announcing Verbenia and me as her long lost daughters. She was going to play on the sympathy factor—give her story a good spin, by presenting herself as poor Tyra Grimes, wanting to make things right for her daughters, that was the only reason she'd tried to make more money. Hah!”

Vivian was silent again, and I thought about what she'd said, as I turned down yet another country lane. “How did she know what had become of you and Verbenia?”

“She'd hired a private eye a few years back to find out whatever had become of us,” Vivian said, as if the fact meant nothing. I wondered, though. I thought about how Tyra had talked about relationships on the way to Stillwater. I thought about the pictures she had in her purse—especially the one of two young girls torn from a magazine.

Maybe she'd dreamed of having a family . . . or of the daughters she'd left behind. Maybe there'd been just a bit of her that wanted to know what became of the children she'd abandoned so long ago—before she even became Tyra Grimes. Maybe.

“Are we ever going to get to wherever we're going?” Vivian asked suddenly.

“Yes,” I said. “It's just, it's this place, out in the country that Guy likes to go to every time we have an outing away from Stillwater. So I'm sure he's there. With Verbenia. So, go on. Tyra comes to town with this plan—”

“Yes,” Vivian said. “And Lewis and Tyra get together. As she's telling him her plan, he drives her to this wooded land he owns. You know where I mean?”

“I know,” I said.

“He forced her out into the woods, she told me. His plan was to kill her. But the stress got to him. He started to have a heart attack, dropped his gun. She grabbed it and shot him. How could she? Why didn't she call for help?”

Because, I thought, Tyra was scared and knew she'd gotten into a situation she couldn't charm her way out of. Yes, she should have called for help when she saw Lewis was helpless. Instead, she'd panicked.

“Tyra threw the gun into the woods,” Vivian went on. “When she heard someone coming, she went back by Lewis and pretended to be knocked out until you found her.” Vivian gave a little sob.

Vivian's story made more sense than Elroy killing Lewis, though. Elroy must have found Lewis's gun, picked it up without thinking about what he was doing. And of course Chief Worthy had never bothered to check to be sure that the gun was Elroy's because it just seemed so obvious that Elroy had killed Lewis. And Tyra. . . Tyra had pretended to be knocked out the whole time I'd searched through her purse and used her cell phone to call 9-1-1.

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“She told me! After Lewis's funeral, after she had the nerve to show up and act that way, I followed her back to the apartment. I told her who I was, and she just stared at me a long minute, then laughed. I begged her not to do this to Verbenia. Not to get all this media attention pointed at her. I'd already told Verbenia we would be leaving today to go out west, that I'd find us someplace nice to live, and she was really upset. But without Lewis to protect us, I wanted to get us away, somewhere that Tyra could never find us. I told her that I was taking Verbenia away, and she got angry. She slapped me!