Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy (18 page)

I sigh and say, “Well, I can.”

“You can? Tell me!”

“I think that whoever killed LeBrandi is someone who doesn't want Max to get married again.”

“But I'm not going to marry him! I
can't
marry him!” I jump up and start pacing around. “No one knows that! And
he
thinks you're going to say yes tonight.” I lean in and say, “The guy is bonkers in love with you, you know.”

She whimpers, “But why? I haven't given him any reason to fall in love with me. I'm not flirtatious, I'm not interested in his collections or travels…. I've focused solely and completely on my acting!”

“Well, it's too late. He is. And I think the only way out of this is to tell him the truth. The
whole
truth.”

She starts following me around. “But then… Samantha, you don't understand. I really believe that if I tell
him, he'll be so angry that I deceived him that he'll pull the plug.” She lets out a heavy sigh and says, “And then I'll never work again—his contract is—”

“I know, I know. Opal told me all about it.”

“There you go! You see?” Her face completely crinkles up, and just when it looks like it's going to shatter into a million pieces, she starts sobbing. “It's all over. The whole thing's shot. All that work, all that time …I was so close, and now I'll never know. Why does he want an answer tonight? Why couldn't he wait until… you know… later?”

I lean in and whisper, “I know you're concerned about your career, but hel-lo? Somebody tried to kill you? Wouldn't it be better to stand up right now and say, Hey! Everybody, listen up! I'm not gonna marry Max, so you can put your knives and guns and pillows away now.”

She sniffs at me through her tears. “Oh, Samantha …”

“I'm serious! There's a lunatic out there who wants the future Mrs. Mighty Max out of the picture, and the sooner you tell the world the truth, the longer you will live.”

She wipes away a tear and says, “But who? Who doesn't want me to marry Max?”

“Well, who else knows he's asked you? You told LeBrandi about it, right? Did you tell anyone else?”

“No.” My mother looks down. “But apparently
she
did.” She hesitates, then looks up at me. “Tammy knows.”

I threw my hands in the air. “Which probably means that everyone knows! So pretend it
is
everyone, okay?
Everyone
. And the sooner you tell Max you're not going to marry him, the better off you'll be.”

She sighs and says, “Okay, but it would be completely classless to take a megaphone and announce it, Samantha. I'll tell him at dinner.”

“Talk about classless! Someone did just
die
around here, and he's wanting to go out to some swanky dinner tonight? Can't you just tell him you're not up for it?”

“I already tried that, but he's insisting that LeBrandi's death is all the more reason to celebrate life.”

“No matter how
you
feel about it, huh?”

We were quiet for a minute, then my mother sighs and says, “I have to, Samantha. He finagled reservations at Trouvet's in Venice and—”

“You're flying to Italy for dinner?!”

“No! Venice down by the water. Near Marina del Rey? Never mind. It doesn't matter. The point is, Trouvet's is booked solid for nearly a year. It's impossible to get late-date reservations there unless you're a big-name celebrity, so I'm pretty sure Max shelled out a substantial bribe to get us in. He's arranged for a limo, and he's ordered in that gorgeous vintage dress and those shoes.” She picked up the red sequined shoes and held them out for me to admire. “Have you ever seen anything like them?”

I couldn't help it. I blurted, “Yeah—on Dorothy!” and I was on the verge of saying something snide about her skipping along the yellow brick road when she scolds, “Samantha!”

So I bite my tongue and say, “Sorry. But I would never embarrass my feet that way.”

She frowns at me but then forgets about the shoes and holds the dress up to her body. “Amazing, isn't it? I only
wish they'd cleaned it better. It smells …I don't know… peculiar.” She holds the skirt out for me to whiff. “Do you think perfume would cover this?”

Now, really, I couldn't care less. How could she stand there discussing the cover-up power of perfume when someone wanted to
kill
her?

Then I took a whiff.

It was like lightning shooting up my nose and into my brain. It was the same scent I'd smelled on the tapestry in Max's office—in his shrine to his dead wife.

In a flash I knew how Max had managed to get that dress delivered on a Saturday on such short notice.

It had been stored here all along.

And in a flash I knew why he'd been so pleased to find out that the dress fit and why he wanted her to wear it.

His other wife must have worn it the night she'd agreed to marry him.

My heart was racing. The whole situation seemed to have an unstoppable momentum—like a destiny I couldn't change. If I didn't do something to stop it, my mother was going to be the new Claire. Max was probably too far gone to even care if she wasn't who she said she was.

“Samantha?” It was my mother's voice, distant and soft. “Samantha, what's wrong?”

I snapped out of it and decided I had to try something, anything, to stop this. Even if it meant breaking my pact with Hali. “There's … there's something I've got to tell you.”

“Oh?”

“The trouble is, if I tell you and someone finds out,
then everyone else is probably going to find out about
you
.”

“About me? What about me?”

I just looked at her.

“Samantha!” she squealed. “You didn't!” Then she whispered, “Who? Who did you tell?”

I tried to sound confident. “Hali. Only Hali.”

“
Hali?
She's on the verge of a mental
break
down, and you tell
Hali
?”

“There's a reason she's been acting like that, Mom! Now, will you please just listen?”

My mother tosses the dress across the chair I'd been sitting in and flops into another. And as she's landing, she throws a forearm up to her forehead and whimpers, “I don't believe this!”

So while she's being all dramatic over there in an armchair, I tell her the story about Hali's eyes and how we figured out that she was Max's daughter, and how upset Hali was to find out who her father was, and how of course, after all of that, I had to tell her the truth about me.

When I'm all done, I've got her attention, all right. She is sitting bolt upright with her eyes
wide
open. And I'm really expecting her to say something like, His
daughter
? or That
scoundrel
! but instead she jumps up and cries, “You did not
have
to tell her. You
chose
to tell her. Samantha, I
trusted
you!”

Fire seemed to stab through my heart. This is the thanks I got for choosing her over Hali? “Yeah?” I said. “Well, so did Hali! I swore to her that I wouldn't tell anybody, and the only reason I told you was so you'd be able to turn
things back on Max—so you could buy yourself a little time! He
says
he's going to tell you over dinner tonight, but you know what? I don't believe him. He's so bent on getting you to say yes that I can just see him conveniently forgetting to tell you until after you say yes.”

“I am
not
going to say yes!”

I plop down in the chair that's got the stupid red dress draped over the back of it and say, “Yeah, well, he seems to think you are, and so does Marissa. Huh, Marissa?”

My mother and I both look at her, but all she does is put both hands up and take two steps back. “Don't bring me into this!”

I shove the dress aside, saying, “This whole thing's
insane
! Do you realize—”

“Careful with that dress!” she says.

“Oh, please!” I take it off the back of the chair, and I'm about to toss it at her and say, Here! Take your precious dress, when the smell from it wafts up my nose.

It snapped in my brain like a wet towel. Yes, I'd smelled that smell in Max's office, but
before
that I'd smelled it somewhere else. And even though I hadn't been able to remember where when I'd been Dustbusting Max's tapestry, now I knew.

I flipped around in my chair and looked out the window, then jumped out of the chair and checked along the window wall, all along the floor.

My mother whispers, “What are you
doing
?”

“I've … I've got to go outside. I … I'll be right back!”

I raced out of the reception room and through the front door, propped the front door open a crack with the floor
mat, then ducked behind the hedge like I'd done hiding from Tweedledee. I scooted along the house and peeked in the window, and there was my mother, talking to Marissa real intently.

I figured that the distance from the far edge of the reception room window to Max's office wall was about six feet. So I took two pretty big strides, then drew a line in the dirt with the heel of my high-top. Then I closed my eyes and tried to picture Max's office. It felt like it was only about ten feet deep, but with all that furniture crowded inside, it might have been more. Maybe fifteen. At the most.

So I took five more giant strides, then made another mark in the dirt and looked back at the wall between me and the reception room window. Smack-dab in the middle was the fan vent that had spooked me so badly when I'd been scooting away from Tweedledee, and right above it was a big square window with a heavy beige curtain over it.

It was definitely within the walls of Max's office, yet I hadn't seen a window or heard a fan when I'd been snooping around with Marissa.

I got down on my knees by the fan, but I didn't even have to sniff. That same woody, sweet smell was being blown right up my nose.

I stood up and tried to peek inside the window past the edge of the curtain, but it seemed to be tucked in and around something at the sides. I couldn't see past it at all.

Then I looked up and saw that above the curtain rod were a bunch of evenly spaced black rods. I looked closer,
and then down, past the curtain's hem, and that's when I realized that right on the other side of the beige curtain, on the inside of the house, were burglar bars.

Burglar bars.

On the
inside
.

Suddenly I knew why Max's office seemed so small. It
was
small. He had converted part of it into a secret room. A secret room where he could store his valuables.

Valuables like Claire's jewels and her sentimental gowns.

And, if I was lucky, something worth a lot more to me than those.

It was like a five-million-to-one shot. How was I going to break into Max's office, anyway? I mean, maybe I can pop a privacy lock with a pin, but that wasn't going to get me anywhere with a Schlage deadbolt. No, it would definitely take a key, and Max wore the stupid thing around his neck.

Still, I couldn't shove the thought completely out of my brain. To me it wasn't just any key. It was the key to my mother's freedom—and somehow it felt like the key to mine, too.

Not that getting my hands on her contract with Max would bring her back home. If anything, it would keep her in Hollywood longer. Maybe forever. But at least I had to
try
to stop this avalanche of mistakes from completely crushing her.

From crushing us.

When I got back inside, I closed the reception room door tight and told my mom and Marissa what I'd discovered about the secret room in Max's office. “That's where he keeps the contracts, Mom. It must be!”

“Oh, Samantha, how can you be so sure? He could keep them anywhere. Besides, what are you thinking? That you can just climb through that window and steal them?”

“That would be a really great idea, but it won't work because he's got burglar bars inside.”

“Inside?”
Marissa asks.

“Yeah. I could see them around the curtain. None of the other windows have them, and he probably didn't want it to look conspicuous.”

My mother looks over her shoulder and, even though the door's closed, she whispers, “This talk is making me very,
very
nervous.” She grabs the dress and ruby slippers and says, “I'm going to go upstairs and I'm going to pretend we never had this discussion, you hear me?” She opens the door and adds, “And I expect the two of you to do the same!”

No one can kill a conversation quicker than my mother. No blood, no guts, it's just over.

As the three of us made our way upstairs, we ran into Tammy on her way down. Tammy says hi and gives my mother a wink that she thinks we don't see. Then she stops and says, “Oh, by the way, Dominique, they've cordoned off your room, so if you want to change before LeBrandi's service you can borrow from me.”

My mother grabs her by the arm and says, “Cordoned off? You mean I can't go in there? For anything?”

Tammy wrinkles her nose like she's going to sneeze but doesn't. “That's right. Police tape is slapped all over it.”

“Can't I even go in there for some new underwear?”

“Are they worth going to jail for?”

“But—”

“The crew this morning made assumptions, and honey,
from what I overheard earlier, some heads are going to roll downtown. Meanwhile, you can't get your underwear.” She leans in cautiously, like she's transporting plutonium. “It's a murder,” she whispers, “remember? And Dominique, they think it's one of
us
. God, everywhere I go now, I'm looking over my shoulder!”