Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy (17 page)

“How can you say that? You've just built her up to be the perfect suspect!”

“I know, but she didn't do it. I could tell.”

He frowns at me and crosses his arms. “You could tell.”

“Well, yeah. And besides, I don't think whoever killed LeBrandi was trying to kill LeBrandi.”

His frown digs in a little deeper. “You don't.”

“No. I think they were trying to kill my”— I caught myself in the nick of time—“aunt.”

He throws his head back and laughs, then tries to compose himself. “Oh, my dear girl. Why on earth do you say that?”

So I explain my theory to him. And pretty much I just give it to him in black and white. No sidetracks, no details—just the facts, ma'am. Then I shut up and wait.

And does he laugh at me or tell me I've got an overly active imagination? Does he tell me it's preposterous or implausible or just plain dumb?

No.

He says, “Well, now. This is serious.” Then he nods and says, “I'd better discuss these new developments with Officer Doyle. I'm sure he'll want to talk to you, but in the meantime, why don't you go upstairs and rest? You girls have had quite a day, and frankly, you look worn. I'll tell Dominique that you're fine.” He hesitates,
then says, “You will let me be the one to tell her about… things, won't you?”

“Uh… that depends. When are you planning to do that?”

“I've arranged a special dinner for the two of us tonight after LeBrandi's farewell service.”

“Her farewell service? When's that? And you're going to a romantic dinner afterward? Excuse me, but isn't that kind of… cold?”

“Young lady, if LeBrandi's death has taught me anything, it's that we must celebrate life. Every moment of it. So yes, I'll… I'll tell your aunt all truths tonight. And the farewell service for LeBrandi is just an in-house memorial to help us all deal with her passing.” He eyes me. “So, can you wait that long? It just wouldn't be right for Dominique to learn such delicate information from someone else.”

I nod and ask, “Where is she, anyway?”

“She's with Inga, trying on a gown.”

“With
Inga
?”

“Yes. Why do you look so alarmed?”

“Because … oh, please!” I head out of his office. “Where are they? I need to see her. Right now!”

Just then Inga walks into the reception room, her bandages looking a little droopy around the eyes and tattered around the knuckles. She says, “Did I hear my name?”

I look right into her yellow eyes and whisper, “Where's … where's Dominique?”

Tiger Eyes blinks at me with a strange sort of detachment. Like she's not sure if I'm a morsel worth munching. “She's changing clothes,” she says, then turns to Max and
smiles. “The dress fits beautifully—like it was made for her.”

He lets out a contented sigh, then asks, “And the shoes?”

“Perfectly. And now, if you don't mind, I'm going out to work in the garden. I found that policeman most unnerving.”

“Of course, of course. You go on. It'll do you good.”

“And you should take a swim, Maxi. You've not looked too well lately.” She stretches up to kiss him on the cheek, then turns and leaves without glancing back.

After she's gone, Max seems to pull himself out of a heavy thought. He locks up his office, then says, “If you'll wait right here, I'll tell Dominique to come see you.” He hesitates on his way out. “I implore you, though—don't mention the situation with Hali to her. Or the jewels—I don't want what's happened to tarnish their surprise.”

My stomach flutters a bit as I ask, “Well, what if… what if she doesn't accept them?”

“Oh, she will,” he says, then leaves the room.

The minute he's gone, Marissa whispers, “He's, like, head over heels for her.”

I plop down on the couch, groaning, “What a mess. What a monumental mess!” And what I'm thinking while I'm shaking my head is Why? Why couldn't she just have been herself instead of this stupid Dominique person? So what if she was a little bit older? So what if she had a kid? Why was she so afraid of being who she was? I mean, if she had just stuck to being Lana Keyes, someone, somewhere, would've liked her for who she was and what she could
do, and she wouldn't be tangled in this web of lies, with a tortoise-eyed geezer moving in from one end and a murdering maniac creeping in from another.

While I'm busy brooding about maniacs and geezers, Marissa's looking at something on the wall. She interrupts my thoughts with “He's going to have to pull all this stuff down if he marries your mom.”

“Shh! And she is
not
going to marry him!”

“You wait and see. I'll bet she does.”

“Marissa! Are you trying to kill me over here?”

She shrugs and says, “Love can be pretty persuasive,” then nods at what she's been looking at on the wall. “It's so sad.”

I get up and say, “What is that?”

“It's that newspaper article your mom was telling us about last night. What a tragedy.” She shakes her head. “Some valentine.”

“What do you mean, some valentine?”

“Here, look. She died on Valentine's Day.”

It
was
sad—from the headline
RISING STAR DIES
, to the story of Claire being run off the road at dawn by a delivery truck, to famous movie people calling her a “dramatic diva” and an “unparalleled talent,” to the closing paragraph about Claire being survived by “her grief-stricken husband, the renowned film producer Maximilian Mueller.” And then there was the last line, which seemed to drop the final curtain: “The couple had no children.”

Even behind glass, the article had turned brown from age. It looked brittle and old, and the photo they'd printed of Claire had become sort of hazy.

Marissa whispers, “Can you see him ever taking this stuff down or gutting his office?”

I look straight at her and say, “He won't have to, because she's not going to marry him!”

Marissa keeps right on whacking nails into my coffin, saying, “I mean, if it were me, I'd make him get rid of
all
Claire's stuff. You can't live like that! And this Egyptian stuff, too. What is up with all of that?” She plops down on the couch, then slaps the front cover of the Cleopatra coffee-table book. “Enough's enough, already! It's like living in a museum. I'd gut it and start over. This place should be Southwest or Spanish or Barcelona. Yeah! Barcelona would look great in here. You know, those cool couches that are kind of curved, with one arm up higher than the other and…”

Well. While Marissa's busy deciding that Early Bull-fighter would be the perfect substitute decor for Se≁or Mueller's abode, my eyes are stuck on that Cleopatra book jacket. And it's not the picture of Cleopatra that I'm staring at. It's the title.

Beneath the word
Cleopatra
are hieroglyphic symbols. Nine of them. Under the
C
is a triangle—like a pyramid that's been cut from the tip straight down to the base. Under the
L
there's some kind of lion or cat or something, crouched down on all fours. And every one of the letters in
Cleopatra
has its own symbol. Well, except for the
A
's. They both have the same symbol—a profile of a standing bird.

And I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to the hieroglyphics at all, except that I had just seen most of these symbols on the tapestry in Max's office.

I closed my eyes and tried to remember the order of the big shapes woven into the cloth. On top there was a triangle, and under it was a lion, then a bird….

I opened my eyes and looked back at the book. It began just like the tapestry, with a triangle and a lion. The next symbol under the title—the one under the
E
—was a robe, just like the bottom symbol of the tapestry.

Once I made the connection, it didn't take me long to piece together what was written down the length of the tapestry in Max's office.

C, L, A…R, E
.

The only letter I couldn't match was
I
.

And really, I shouldn't have been surprised, but for some reason piecing together Claire's name sent chills running all through me. And as I whispered, “Marissa!” and explained what I'd deciphered, those chills didn't go away. How could somebody live surrounded by the pain of what had happened so many years ago? How could somebody haunt himself this way?

And why—
why
—would he fall in love again now?

SIXTEEN

When my mother came bursting into the reception room, she had a ruby red dress slung over one arm, a pair of matching sequined shoes clutched in the other hand, and a forehead so full of wrinkles it was crying out for a steam iron.

“Where did you
go
? I couldn't believe you'd just
leave
like that!” She flung the dress and shoes on the chair, then smothered me in a hug.

All of a sudden I was eight years old again, home late from school after being sidetracked by a lizard. “I'm sorry.” I cleared my throat and pulled away. “It took a lot longer than I thought it would.”

“What did? Where have you been?”

So I rewound to when she'd sent Marissa and me to put the brooch back and told her all about finding the number in LeBrandi's sock and the Cosmo connection and how we'd talked to Opal at the Peppermint Peacock. And I was just about to tell her how I was sure that someone was trying to kill
her
, not LeBrandi, when she interrupts me with, “But why? Why did you
do
all that?”

I sputtered and stuttered and wound up saying a whole lot of nothing.

“Samantha! You're keeping something from me—what is it?”

“I…I… it's really not…”

“Sa
man
tha!” She looks at Marissa. “What is going on?”

So Marissa leans in and whispers, “She was trying to prove that it was Opal who killed LeBrandi, not you.”

“Me?”
She turns to me. “You thought
I
killed LeBrandi?”

I cringed and shrugged.

“But why?”

“Because …” It suddenly seemed too convoluted and lame to explain, so I just threw my hands in the air and plopped down in a chair by the window.

Marissa says to my mother, “Because she thought you were desperate for the part of Jewel. You know, so you could get out of this whole mess with Max?”

My mother squints at me. “So I'm going to
kill
my competition? Is that it?”

I sit forward a little and say, “Well, you were also gone when I heard that banging next door… which is probably when she was getting killed. And you didn't want me to say anything about it, remember?”

My mother checks out the doorway to see if anybody's in the entry hall. Then she pulls the door closed and whispers, “It's a good thing you didn't, too. Apparently the coroner's determined her time of death to be around three-thirty, but, Samantha, that was just very bad luck on my part—it doesn't mean I
killed
her. Besides, Tammy was in the bathroom, too, so we have each other for alibis if it ever comes up.”

I slump back into the chair and cross my arms. “So what you're saying is, it's not something you bothered to mention when the police took your statement.”

She sits on the arm of my chair and says, “Tammy and I agreed that it would be better not to mention it. Samantha, why would I voluntarily put myself in hot water?”

I sit up and look her square in the eye. “Because it's the truth, and by skating around it, it makes it look like you're trying to hide something. And yeah, I went a little crazy and thought—really thought—that you'd killed LeBrandi, but that was because I don't even know who you are anymore! Do you know how many
lies
you've got going on here?” I start ticking off the things she's told me. “Your name, your age—your whole identity! Fake driver's license, fake newspaper articles, fake acting credits—”

“Shh! Samantha, stop it! Yes, I know…but
murder
?”

I open my eyes at her real big. “Why not? You said you weren't going to let anything stop you!”

She puts her hands in front of her face and just shakes her head. Finally I take a deep breath and say, “What's important right now, though, is why I
don't
think you killed LeBrandi.”

She peeks at me through her fingers and waits.

“Well, it's kind of hard for someone to suffocate themselves.”

Her hands whip off her face. “Samantha, I am
not
in the mood for puzzles!”

“What I'm saying is, I think that whoever killed LeBrandi thought they were killing
you
.”

Good thing she was sitting down. And while she turned
pale as a polar bear, I told her my mistaken-identity theory, and how the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that there was
some
body in the house who wanted her dead.

“But
who
?” she whispered.

“Exactly, Mom. That's what we've got to figure out. So you've got to tell me—who could possibly be that mad at you? Have you done anything to any of the people in this house to make them mad enough to kill you?”

“No!”

“Don't just say that…
think!
”

She thought a minute, then gave me a completely bewildered look. “I can't think of
any
thing!”