Wall-To-Wall Dead (36 page)

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Mrs. Livingston said.

“Of course. I’ll just run upstairs and get my phone. Do you want to come upstairs, or—”

“I’ll wait down here,” Mrs. Livingston said, “in case she comes home.”

Fine with me. I’d be able to speak a little more freely to Wayne if she wasn’t listening to me. “I’ll be right back. One minute. Maybe two.”

“Take your time,” Mrs. Livingston said politely and backed out of the doorway. I let the door close behind her—she made no move to keep it open—and dashed up the stairs.

“Uh-oh,” Derek said when I’d let myself into the condo
and had told him who was downstairs. Not Candy’s mother, but Jamie’s. The one—if we were right—Jamie had killed two people to avoid seeing.

“I know. She didn’t seem bad at all, actually. Maybe it’s the father Jamie’s afraid of.” I hauled the phone out of my bag.

“You calling Wayne?” Derek said.

I nodded, dialing. “With any luck, Jamie’s still there and he can tell me what to do. What to tell this poor woman. I don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

Derek opened his mouth to answer, but Wayne picked up the phone first, and I held up a finger to stall Derek. “Wayne? It’s Avery. Is Jamie still there?”

“No,” Wayne said. “Why?”

No? “You’ll never guess who showed up. Her mother.”

“Jamie’s mother?”

“Looking for Jamie. She’s down in the parking lot right now. I didn’t want to send her to you before I knew what was going on. Where’s Jamie?”

“I had to let her go,” Wayne said. “She had an alibi for Saturday at noon. She and Candy had argued Friday morning, about David Rossini, and Jamie didn’t want to go home to more of the same. So she spent the night with another of the dancers and went right back to work on Saturday morning. She said several of the other girls can vouch for her being there.”

“Did you check with them?”

“Not yet,” Wayne said, “but if she says she was there, on stage, with people watching, I’m sure she was. She’d have to be stupid to lie about it, and I don’t think she is.”

“So where is she now?”

“No idea,” Wayne said. “Probably on her way home. Or maybe back to school. She brought Amelia Easton with her to the interview, by the way. I thought maybe she’d arranged with Francesca Rossini to borrow a lawyer, but no. She seemed pretty rattled. Very young and scared. Maybe Professor Easton is the closest thing to family she could come up with on short notice.”

Maybe. “Well, her mother is here now. What do I tell her?”

“You’re asking me? It’s out of my hands, Avery. I’m the chief of police. My job is to arrest whoever killed Miss Shaw and Candy. I’m not a psychologist or a family counselor. Tell her anything you want. And let Jamie deal with it. It’s her problem.” He hung up. I stuck my tongue out at the phone.

“Bad news?” Derek asked.

“Yes and no. Jamie has an alibi for Saturday at noon. She didn’t buy the wine and chocolates. The bad news is that Wayne had to let her go. She isn’t at the police station anymore.”

“So where is she?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “She could be on her way here. Or—if she did kill Miss Shaw and Candy, and she fudged that alibi somehow—she could be anywhere.” Once she dropped off Amelia Easton anyway. “I’d better go tell her mom that I can’t find her.”

Derek nodded. “Want me to come with you?”

“Of course not. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“I’ll be here,” Derek said, and went back to tiling.

So down the stairs I went again, this time with my phone in my hand. Through the door and into the parking lot, and over to the rental car, where Mrs. Livingston was waiting. “I’m sorry. I called around, but I couldn’t find her. I found where she was just a few minutes ago, but she’s left now. I guess she’s probably on her way back, either here or back to Barnham.”

Mrs. Livingston nodded.

“I guess you can either go back there and see if she’s there, or wait here.”

“I’ll wait here,” Mrs. Livingston said. “Sooner or later she’ll show up. If she lives here.”

I nodded. “I’m in 2A. If you need anything, just…” Ring the bell, I was about to say. But just then, a pale blue
nondescript compact came up the road and swung into the lot. “Here she is now.”

Mrs. Livingston looked up as the compact pulled in next to us. Jamie leaned across the passenger seat, across Amelia Easton, to stare. “Mom?”

“Hello, Jamie Lee,” her mother said, her lips stiff. She looked as if she’d seen a ghost. Either Jamie had changed a whole lot in the year and couple of weeks she’d been away at college, or something else was wrong.

And then Mrs. Livingston added, in a voice that barely carried the couple of feet to where I stood, “Hello, Nan.”

Nan?

I waited for Amelia to explain that Mrs. Livingston was mistaken; she was Amelia, not Nan. It had been twenty years and the girls had looked alike; it was a surprising, if not precisely earth-shattering mistake. Except Amelia didn’t. She just stared back at Mrs. Livingston, mesmerized.

“Nan?” I said.

Amelia—Nan?—snapped out of it. She glanced up at me, at Mrs. Livingston, and then over at Jamie. “Drive!”

“Wh…what?” Jamie stuttered.

Amelia didn’t repeat it, but the gun she pulled out of her purse had the same effect.

“Mom!” Jamie shrieked.

“No!” I threw myself at Mrs. Livingston and knocked her to the ground before Amelia—it was too difficult to think of her as anything else—could fire. At least in our direction. The compact bounced backward and then squealed forward, headed for the entrance to the parking lot.

“Jamie!” Mrs. Livingston screamed, and pushed me off her. I picked myself up and glanced around.

The compact was almost to the road. Derek’s truck was parked on the other side of the lot. We were standing beside the rental car.

“Give me the keys,” I said. “I’ll drive. I know the roads.”

Mrs. Livingston didn’t waste time arguing, just dug in her purse for the car key. I slid behind the wheel and shoved the key in the ignition while she got into the passenger seat. Up on the road, the compact didn’t even slow down before it squealed onto the road toward Augusta. I wondered whether that was Amelia’s instruction or Jamie’s choice.

“Keep an eye on the car,” I told Mrs. Livingston. “I’ll watch the road. And use this”—I dug in my pocket and pulled out the phone I’d, luckily, brought with me downstairs—“to call my boyfriend and tell him what happened.”

Mrs. Livingston stared at the phone as if she’d never seen one before. Maybe she hadn’t. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”

“Derek will do that. He’s upstairs. We need him to follow us.” I plucked the phone out of her hand, punched in the number, and hit Speaker before I handed it back. “Hold on to it. I need both hands on the wheel.” The compact was booking it at twenty miles per hour above the speed limit, and if I had any hope of keeping up, I’d have to concentrate.

The phone rang a couple of times, then—

“What happened?” Derek’s voice said from the phone, sounding resigned. “Avery?”

“You have to call Wayne. Amelia took Jamie’s car and Jamie.”

“What?” It wasn’t a request for information, it was an exclamation of shock. His voice wasn’t resigned at all anymore, it was quick and sharp.

“Follow us in the truck,” I said. “We’re on our way up the Augusta Road. They’re ahead of us and I don’t want to lose them. Get Wayne and tell him to come, too. She’s got a gun.”

“Why?” Derek said.

I wasn’t entirely sure. Not until I’d had a chance to talk to Mrs. Livingston. But I knew enough to hazard a guess. “I don’t think she’s Amelia Easton. She’s really Nan. And Jamie’s mom recognized her.”

“Shit,” Derek said. “I’m on my way. I’m gonna hang up and call Wayne now. Stay in touch, Avery, OK?”

I promised I would.

“And don’t do anything stupid!” was the last thing I heard before he was gone. Mrs. Livingston watched as the display changed and showed that Derek had ended the call.

“Just hang on to it,” I said. “If he calls back, hit the button that says Speaker.”

Mrs. Livingston nodded and stared at the phone as if she expected it to ring right away.

“So that was Nan?” I said.

She glanced over at me. “Nanette Barbour. We grew up together.”

“Jamie told me. I thought her name was Amelia Easton.” I wondered if Jamie knew the truth, or if she’d been as surprised as I was. “Are you sure?”

Duh. Of course she was sure. If she hadn’t been right, Amelia—Nan—wouldn’t have made a run for it.

Mrs. Livingston nodded. “I grew up with the both of them. Amelia and Nan. I was a couple years younger, so when they left for college, I was still in high school. Or the commune equivalent. I was fifteen or sixteen.”

“And then word came back that Nan died.”

“Amelia called first. To say that Nan wasn’t behaving. The elders discussed it and decided to bring them both home.”

“What did you think of that?” Up ahead, the compact kept going, straight up the road. I concentrated on keeping it in sight, and did my best to focus on what Mrs. Livingston had to say. Hopefully Derek was raising Wayne while at the same time hotfooting it down to the truck.

“I was excited,” Mrs. Livingston said softly. “I missed Amelia. Nan was always more brash, more likely to get into trouble, but Amelia was a good girl.”

“But instead of coming home, Nan died,” I said. “Or so you thought.”

“The police called. To say that Nan had committed suicide. We couldn’t bring her body back, she had broken the commandments. I thought Amelia would be coming home, but she didn’t. She never did. I never understood why. Until now.”

“Because that isn’t Amelia up ahead.”

Mrs. Livingston shook her head. “That’s Nan. They looked alike, but not to someone who knew them. Amelia’s hair was curly, Nan’s was wavy. Amelia’s eyes were dark blue, Nan’s were a little more gray. And Nan was the one who pierced her ears with a sewing needle when she was seventeen. Amelia wouldn’t have done that.”

“She could have changed her mind later,” I said, the same way that she’d changed her major from home ec to history. Except of course she really hadn’t. Nan had changed Amelia’s major to history, because history was what Nan wanted to study.

Mrs. Livingston shook her head, adamant, back on the pierced ears. “The sight of blood made her sick. Physically sick. And she said once that because Christ’s body was pierced on the cross, she would never willingly pierce her own.”

It made sense, in a strange sort of way. Not that I really needed Mrs. Livingston to prove anything to me. If she said it was Nan up ahead, I was willing to take her word for it. Nan herself—Amelia—had proven that pretty much without a doubt when she’d taken off and taken Jamie with her.

“So I guess Nan started acting out once they got to college, and Amelia called home. And then Nan killed Amelia and somehow managed to make everyone believe it was Nan who was dead…”

“They looked alike,” Mrs. Livingston said. “Cousins. We were all related. That’s one of the reasons the Mississippi government refused to allow the commune to continue operating. That and the fact that the children didn’t
get immunized or properly educated or even registered with the state. Up until ten or fifteen years ago, there were no real records of any of us.”

So Nan could have gotten away with killing Amelia, and no one would have known the difference. No DNA, no fingerprints, no dental records. No visual identification other than Nan’s. The girls had only been at college for a week or so—not much time to make connections with other people. And if they looked alike anyway, that would have helped. Slap some lipstick on Amelia while making herself look sweeter and dowdier…

So for twenty years, Nan had pretended to be Amelia Easton. That explained why she’d never gone back to the commune after “Amelia” died. If she was Nan, not only wouldn’t she want to, but she’d also have known she’d be recognized if she did. In fact…

“Shit,” I said as the metaphoric lightbulb flickered on above my head. Mrs. Livingston winced, and I added, “Sorry. But I just realized something.”

“What might that be?”

“Two people have died in the building in the past week. Both of them were threatening to call you. We thought maybe Jamie—”