Scarlet Nights (37 page)

When her bike went down, Pru may have hit her head. That, mixed with the drink, would have made her fuzzy about reality. She saw a kilt such as Alex McDowell, the man she believed she loved, wore, and one thing led to another. She probably welcomed the man with enthusiasm.

No wonder Lang celebrated that day every year, Mike thought, and he wondered how Lang felt when, later, Pru had demanded that Alex marry her.

“Mr. Newland?” the nurse asked, “are you there?”

“Yes. What happened after my grandmother went hysterical?”

“We had to give her a sedative to get her to bed. That would have been the end of it if it hadn’t been for Hazel.”

“My guess is that she was very interested in what my grandmother had said.”

“Extremely. She had the late shift and everyone was talking
about it. Hazel asked everyone what had caused Pru to go crazy. No detail was too small for her. She said a most curious thing, something that I’ve never forgotten.”

“And what was that?”

“She said that old people knew many secrets, and if they were old enough, they’d forget what was supposed to be kept secret.”

“I think maybe you were being told the reason why Hazel was there,” Mike said, thinking that it might be why Mitzi had taken on a job at an upscale retirement home. When she’d fled, hundreds of police and Federal agents were searching for her, so she’d needed to lay low for a while. She must have been wary of restarting her usual scams on grieving women. After all, some of them had betrayed her.

So Mitzi had taken a job at a retirement home full of patients with relatives who paid a lot for the care they received. Maybe Mitzi had only been looking for jewelry, but she’d hit a gold mine with Prudence Walker.

“After that night, Hazel and Prudence were best friends,” the nurse said. “For over a week, Hazel neglected all our other residents to spend time with Pru. I should have stopped it but things were so quiet here that I didn’t. I still didn’t realize it was Hazel causing the turmoil. I thought the peace was due to Pru staying in her room, so I was glad to spare Hazel’s work for that calm.”

“What did they do?” Mike asked.

“Talked. Pru’s door was kept closed, but we heard them chattering away endlessly. I know they read all the letters from your sister because we had to get the box out of storage.”

“Did Hazel say what they were talking about?”

“No, not really. Oh! Yes, I remember. One time at lunch she said that she found some little town fascinating. It had an unusual name.”

“Edilean, Virginia.”

“Yes! That’s it,” the nurse said.

Mike figured that Hazel/Mitzi had read the letters to learn about Sara who, through her aunt’s will, owned the lost paintings. At the time the will was written, there’d only been the small watercolor of the purple ducks that hung on Sara’s wall. Mike wanted to kick himself for not paying attention when Sara told him that Stefan wanted that painting. At the time, Mike had been so enamored of Sara that he’d overlooked a clue that was right in front of him.

“And my grandmother died a few days after the incident with the TV?”

“Yes,” the nurse said. “She died in her sleep, and the next day a tearful Hazel quit. She said she couldn’t bear seeing the people she loved die.”

Mike wasn’t sure—not yet anyway—but he thought Mitzi had probably murdered his grandmother. After Mitzi had obtained all the information she needed from Prudence, she got rid of her so she couldn’t tell anyone what had gone on between them.

“Would you e-mail me a copy of Hazel’s employee photo?” Mike asked. “I’d like to see it.”

“Certainly, Mr. Newland,” the nurse said. “And please keep me informed of what happens.”

He told her he would, gave her his e-mail address, then hung up.

Next, Mike called Tess and asked her to start the paperwork of exhuming their grandmother’s body. They needed physical proof that she’d been murdered. “And do you have any of the letters Grans sent you?”

“All of them. I thought that someday you might want to see them.”

“Not me, but if the letters mention a nurse named Hazel, the AG will be very interested.”

If it could be proven that Hazel Smith was Mitzi Vandlo, and
if the body showed evidence of foul play, it meant that she could be tried for murder. At last, Mizelli Vandlo would be charged with something more onerous than fraud.

Minutes later, the nursing home e-mailed Hazel’s security photo to Mike’s phone. Curious, he studied the picture, noting the big nose and the small, lipless mouth. Mitzi wasn’t any better-looking now than she had been back in 1973 when she’d conned Marko Vandlo into making her his third wife. While it was interesting to see an older photo of the woman, he didn’t remember ever having seen her in Edilean. As he stared at the picture, he wondered what she’d look like if she finally had a nose job.

He called Captain Erickson and quickly told him what he’d discovered and asked that the IT guys work on Mitzi’s photo. “I want to see what she’d look like if she had about half of that nose cut off. Maybe we’re seeing her every day and don’t realize it.”

“We’ll get right on it, and, Mike, good work.”

“Think it’s good enough to get me a desk job? My wife wants me to stay home.”

Mike could almost see the captain smiling. “Yeah, I think we can arrange that. Along with a promotion and a pay raise.”

Mike groaned. “Just don’t put me in charge of the rookies.”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking of doing. I’ll send the photo as soon as the guys get it done.” He hung up.

Mike got in his car and drove straight to the fairgrounds without bothering to shower and change. He’d been gone too long, so he knew Sara would start asking questions—and she’d see too much.

“Poker face, Newland,” he said as he checked his mirrors, but no one was following him.

It was hours after Mike left the apartment that Sara made her way through the crowded fairgrounds and walked into her mother’s
tent. In front were long tables covered with produce and food the people who made up Armstrong’s Organic Foods had spent weeks preparing. This year Sara hadn’t helped, but next year she would. Maybe by the next fair she’d be expecting or would have a newborn in her arms. She and Mike hadn’t talked about children, but then, they hadn’t talked about much of anything serious—except the case.

She brought herself out of her reverie to look around. Her mother and two sisters were inside the tent, all of them wearing the medieval costumes Sara had made for them in previous years. Sara’s had a dark green velvet bodice and a plaid skirt that was said to be the old McTern tartan. Her sisters wore blue and burgundy, and her mother’s costume was in shades of brown and yellow. “The colors of the earth,” she’d told her daughter when Sara made it.

The inside of the tent was full of boxes and baskets of fruit. Coolers of cooked food were stacked high. Her mother said that even though it was a fair she refused to serve unhealthy food.

“She just rolls the fruit in batter, deep fries it, then coats it with sugar,” her doctor-father said. “Perfectly healthy.”

Sara thought she needed to send her father to Joce for a tarot card reading so he could hear what sarcasm
really
meant.

Sara was still standing by the tent entrance when her mother, a crate of cantaloupes in her arms, saw her. She smiled, but that expression turned to a smirk when she saw the faint redness on her daughter’s neck. Sara had covered it with foundation and powder, but the red still showed.

Ellie instantly knew what it was. “Ah, whisker burn. That takes me back. I remember the time your father and I—”

“Mother, please!” Sara said.

Laughing, Ellie left the tent.

“Wait until you have your first kid,” her sister Jennifer said. “You’ll be totally grossed out by the stories she tells you.”

“The sex sagas are my downfall,” Sara’s other sister, Taylor, said.

“Dad delivering you on a mountaintop didn’t do you in?” Jennifer asked.

“No. It was the details about Mom and Dad’s Scarlet Nights in Mexico. Even Gene turned red at that one.”

Sara was blinking at her sisters. For the first time ever, they were talking to her as though she were, well, like she was a grown-up woman.

Jennifer had a box of fruit pies in her hands, and she seemed to understand Sara’s puzzlement. “Didn’t you realize that Mother considers you a virgin until you’re married? That’s why she’s not told
you
any of her sex stories.” She left the tent.

Taylor had three boxes of cookies. “You’re lucky to have evaded her spicy little tales for this long.” She followed her sister out.

Sara stood looking after her two sisters in shock. She was still standing there when Mike came in.

“Your mother sent me in here to get a couple bags of potatoes. And why the hell are your relatives asking me so many questions about my beard? I meant to shave, but—” Pausing, he looked at her. “Are you okay?”

“My sisters were
nice
to me.”

“Sisters are supposed to be nice.”

“Not mine.”

Mike picked up a fifty-pound bag, slung it over his left shoulder, then squatted down to get a second bag. When he had one over each shoulder, he walked back to Sara. “So what did they say to you?”

“They said my mother is going to tell me sex stories.”

“I know I didn’t grow up here, but, Sara, isn’t that a little …”

She came back to the present and looked at him. He looked great! He wasn’t in a kilt as she’d thought he’d be but was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. But it looked as though her mother had been
working him hard, because his shirt was drenched in sweat and it clung tightly to his body. She could count his abs.

In the next moment she realized that every other female there could also do the arithmetic. “I think I’ll get you a clean, fresh shirt.”

Mike’s eyes told her he knew exactly what she was thinking. “A shirt that’s twice as big as this one?”

“I was thinking three times.”

“Gimme a kiss.”

She turned her head to maneuver through the bags, but Sara’s mother called, “Mike! Where’re those potatoes?”

“Add a mother-in-law to the list of relatives I now have,” he mumbled as he left the tent.

“Think of our nice, quiet apartment in Fort Lauderdale,” she called after him.

“Yeah, there we’ll only have crooks living upstairs.”

And a baby or two downstairs? she wondered.

For the rest of the evening, Ellie kept her daughter so busy that Sara saw little of Mike. When she did catch a glimpse of him, he was on his phone, so they couldn’t have talked anyway. Plus, he spent so much time with Luke that Sara thought that if she were a different person she might have been jealous.

She saw Ariel once, chomping away on a big caramel apple. When she saw Mike walk past in his clinging T-shirt, Ariel’s mouth fell open so far a sticky piece of fruit fell down the front of her gown. If she’d been wearing something Sara had made, she would have helped her clean it, but Ariel had ordered her medieval-style dress from a place in New York. Sara’d been told the sleeve seams had ripped out twice.

When Ariel looked up again, Sara was smiling, and she hurried forward to hook her arm around Mike’s. Maybe she wouldn’t change his shirt after all.

“What are you up to?” Mike asked.

“Girl stuff. So where’s Greg now?”

“He just left a filling station. Bought some Twinkies.”

“Is that your ultimate condemnation? What state’s he in now?” she added quickly.

“What kind of underwear do you have on under that thing?”

“None whatever. Why don’t you point out who in this crowd is with you and who are just tourists?”

“Did you see Lang snooping around Joce’s tent?”

“Are you ever going to directly answer one of my questions?” she asked.

“Not if I can get out of it.”

“Want me to introduce you to your cousins the Fraziers?”

“Tomorrow I’m to fight them with broadswords, so I’ll meet them then. I already know two of them. How many more are there?”

“The big three. Colin is the oldest, then Pere, that’s for Peregrine—the same name as his father—and Lanny, which is for Lancaster.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t named by their parents.”

“They’re old family names. The Fraziers stick to them.”

“Sara!” her mother called, and she groaned.

“More work to do. See you tonight?”

“Yeah.” He kissed her cheek. “I have some calls to make so I might be late.”

He started to turn away but she saw a glint in his eyes that made her catch his arm. She studied his face. “What’s happened? You’re excited about something.”

“Nothing. It’s just the anticipation of tomorrow.”

“No. There’s something else. You look … happy.”

“Of course I’m happy. Beautiful day, gorgeous girl, good food thanks to your mother, and—”

“There’s something else in your eyes. And I think I saw the same look on Luke’s face. What are you two up to?”

“Little girls who ask questions don’t get surprises.”

“Are you trying to make me believe you and Luke are planning a surprise party for me?”

“Sara, I need to go.”

She kept hold of his arm. “I want to know what’s made you happy.”