Act of Darkness(94)

What she had done was to take the heart-shaped ruby brooch off her chest, look it over, fix it up, and put it back again. Then, when she had been sure it was secure, she had gone to work on her face. Now she was presentable, and calmer, and ready for action. When somebody died, there was always so much that had to be done.

Before she’d come down here, she’d told Dan Chester she was going to need him at eight fifteen or just before. There were details that needed to be decided on. She thought they ought to be decided on immediately. She just needed a chance to collect herself a little first. She thought it had to be close to eight fifteen already, that the fireworks would start at any minute. She wondered where Dan was.

I am not sorry about any of them, she told herself. I will never be sorry about any of them.

There was a knock on the door and she said, “Come in.”

Dan Chester came in, looking just a shade drunk—which, as Victoria knew, meant he must have drunk a great deal indeed. She turned away from him, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to give him a. lecture on his responsibilities. It was the sort of thing she didn’t need to say and he didn’t need to hear. Not now. She looked up at the shelves above the mirror and said, “I wanted you to help me get some boxes down. Boxes of things that belonged to Stephen.”

“Here?” Dan Chester said.

“They’re clippings mostly. Of the wedding and the years just after. I put them here right after Stephanie died, so that Janet wouldn’t see them, and then I forgot all about them.”

“And they can’t wait until morning?”

“No.”

“They can’t wait for one of the yardmen to help you with the heavy lifting?”

Victoria turned away from the shelves and looked at him and now she was smiling, the malice clear and plain, everything out in the open. “Some of them are from—you know what. Would you really want that, for the box to maybe fall and scatter clippings everywhere for any stranger to see?”

“All right,” Dan Chester said. Then he gave her a smile, hot and vicious, and kicked the door shut behind him. “If we’re not going to have strangers see, we might as well keep the relatives out of it, too.”

Victoria turned back to the shelves and looked at the two cardboard boxes pushed well to the back of the top one. Dan had come up behind her, surveyed the situation, and started to climb on the chair. “You should have gotten one of the tall people to do this for you,” he said. “I’m going to have to stand on the desk.”

“It’ll hold.”

“I’m sure it will. Stand on the chair and prop up my back. I don’t want to break my skull falling backward.”

Dan got up on the desk and Victoria got up on the chair. He reached for the closest of the boxes. She reached for her shoulder and began to play with the great heart-shaped ruby resting there. When she felt the clasp come undone, she stopped.

“Down,” he said.

She got down, and then he did, with the box in his hand. It was heavy and awkward, so heavy and so awkward he couldn’t keep himself from swaying under it. He motioned her away and dropped to the floor, teetering. Then he dropped the box on the desk and turned to say something to her…

… and found her standing there, right next to him, with the needle-pointed back pin of the heart-shaped ruby held between her thumb and forefinger of her right hand. He started to move away but got caught. The desk was behind him and he had nowhere to go. She reached out and stuck him, firmly, in the throbbing artery under his chin.

Barely a second later, he was on the floor, limp but conscious, and she was standing over him.

She reached into her sewing basket and came out with a pair of pantyhose. They belonged to Patchen Rawls. She had taken them out of the top drawer of Patchen’s bureau—the place where the maids always packed pantyhose—the afternoon of the day Patchen arrived. At the time, she’d thought it was great good luck that Patchen had arrived so early.

“What I just gave you,” she told Dan Chester, “is called succinylcholine. I got it out of Kevin Debrett’s medical bag. It’s what Kevin used when he killed Stephanie. To keep her still while he suffocated her. You probably know that. Stephen wouldn’t know, even though he was part of it, because Stephen couldn’t keep things straight. He was never very bright. But you would probably know. You were the one who thought the whole thing up.”

She unfolded the pantyhose and leaned closer to him. She stuffed wads of pantyhose into both nostrils and then began to stuff a bigger wad into his mouth.

“I heard the three of you talking, just after she was born. I was supposed to be down in Janet’s room, but Janet was asleep. So I walked up to see Stephanie, and I stayed to listen to you instead.”