Trouble in Transylvania (35 page)

Lulu went on to detail the means by which Simone was caught. The bottle of rat poison in her hotel room. Her fingerprints on the pen. “All because,” Lulu wrote, “Simone was afraid I was going to finally expose the secret she’d hidden for so long. Her lesbianism.”

Again I heard footsteps in the corridor, but this time I wasn’t fast enough. I was on my hands and knees by the bed when Lulu came in. She immediately spotted the paper in my hand.

“I didn’t mean to kill Olga,” she said, edging toward me while she kept the door well blocked. “Nobody can accuse me of premeditated murder. That editorial is proof. The poison was meant for me. That’s not a crime, is it?”

“No,” I said. “Not if you really meant to commit suicide. But you miscalculated the dose; you only thought you’d get ill and that Simone would be blamed. It was a big risk to take, Lulu. And Olga took the consequences.”

I couldn’t see any way around her body to the door.

“No one’s going to know,” she said, coming closer to me. “I’ve still got some strychnine here and, as we both know, it doesn’t take much.”

“I’ve always thought,” I said calmly, “that all those scarves were a big fashion mistake.” I grabbed the ends of one of them and started twisting.

The door behind her burst open.

“KGB!” said Felicity Horsey-Smythe playfully, and then gasped. “Oh my, Cassandra dear, whatever are you doing to poor Lulu? She looks as if she can’t breathe very well like that.”

“Be a good girl, Felicity,” I said, still keeping a firm grip on Lulu, “and call the police, dear.”

A half hour later Simone had retrieved the bottle of rat poison Lulu had planted in her room, and we’d presented it together with Lulu’s editorial to the Soviet police. I had no idea what would happen to Lulu now; whether she’d be tried and punished, sent to Siberia, or locked up in the Lubyanka. Whatever her punishment, I suspected it would be milder than what some of Lulu’s victims would have meted out if they’d had the chance.

Still, I suppose some good did come out of it all. Felicity Horsey-Smythe had a wonderful subject for her next novel, and Darcy Joanne said she’d publish it in the States. They signed a contract at the Vladivostok Airport and agreed to move quickly on the project. They did want, after all, to get the book out in time for the next international feminist book fair.

“Tierra del Fuego!” said Dee when I told her. “I can hardly wait.”

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The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman
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Barbara Wilson is the pen name under which Barbara Sjoholm has published the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries and the Pam Nilsen Mysteries.
Gaudí Afternoon
, of the Cassandra Reilly series, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film by the same name. Like her detective Cassandra Reilly, Sjoholm is a translator, but of Norwegian and Danish books. In addition to her fiction and the memoir
Blue Windows
, Sjoholm is the author of the travel books
The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea
,
Incognito Street
, and
The Palace of the Snow Queen
. Her essays have appeared in the
American Scholar
,
Harvard Review
, the
New York Times
,
Smithsonian
, and Slate, among other publications.

For more about Barbara Sjoholm, please visit
www.barbarasjoholm.com
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1994 by Barbara Wilson

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

978-1-4804-5518-4

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com