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In the old stories, this was the part when the heroine, overcome with terror, would faint, and the dastardly bastard would throttle her alabaster neck and leave her body for the wolves. Right?
No.
This was the part where Charlotte, heroine, remembered she was a twenty-first-century woman and a mother. This was Charlotte saying, Hell no!
Charlotte screamed.
But this wasn’t a scream for help. This wasn’t a plea, a panicked, earsplitting supplication for immediate rescue. Charlotte screamed the cry of attack.
Clearly, Mallery did not recognize the subtle difference. Showing no alarm, he was still on offense, and he knelt over her, his hands on her throat. That hurt, but her body, with or without her mind’s help, had a plan. She’d sat in on enough of Beckett’s martial arts classes to learn a few self-defense moves. When an attacker is strangling from the front, his hands are occupied, leaving every part of him open. Charlotte formed her fingers into spearhead shape and jammed them as hard as she could into his throat. He choked and his grip lessened. She took a deep breath and kicked him in the ’nads, as Beckett would say.
He was on the ground, and she stood up, but she didn’t stop kicking. A spare chair leg lay nearby, practically begging to be used as a club. Charlotte complied.
“You’re the ninny!” She hit him again. “You hear me? YOU’RE THE NINNY!” She hit him again and again. “No one just falls in love, you idiot. You chose to not love me anymore. You chose to leave me. You chose to leave the kids. One weekend a month and one month a year—that’s parenthood? You don’t go to marriage counseling, you don’t give me a chance to fight back. No, you sneak around. You sleep with Justice for weeks and come home to me all smug with yourself. You sick, sick, sick son of a—”
Charlotte gasped. She was solving more than one mystery. “It wasn’t just weeks, was it? That’s why you had me put your name on my accounts. You were already affairing around and preparing to dump me! You duplicitous, conniving, hardhearted, not-nice nincompoop. And you never even apologized!”
“Sorry,” Mallery mumbled desperately, one arm protecting his head, the other over his pummeled manhood.
“Not you, you idiot! Though you’re a ninny too.”
He made a scramble to get upright, and she cracked the chair leg on the back of his head. He crumpled with a groan. For an inherently dangerous man, he sure didn’t seem accustomed to getting beat up. She shoved over the tower of chairs, pinning him to the floor.
It took her a minute to push the highboy far enough from the wall to open the door and squeeze out.
“Help!” she screamed, running for the spiral stairs. “Bloody murder! Bloody, bloody murder! I’m on the second floor, and there’s been some seriously bloody murder up here!”
She was halfway down the stairs when Eddie reached her, followed by Colonel Andrews, Miss Charming, Miss Gardenside, and Mrs. Wattlesbrook.
“Are you all right?” Eddie asked.
“Mallery did it,” she said quickly. “He killed Mr. Wattlesbrook.”
“I say, Mrs. Cordial,” said the colonel, “you are spoiling the ending. We were supposed to go on this murderer hunt together, and I had prepared my own things to look remarkably guilty.”
Where had all the oxygen gone? Was she underwater? She looked to Eddie like a buoy in mid-ocean.
“He tried to kill me, Eddie. He’s in the secret room.” The air in her lungs seemed to be tied to a string and yanked out of her. She tried to grab hold of the end of that string, but it was getting so hard to see.
“I’ve got you,” she heard Eddie say before she straight-up passed out. And she wasn’t even wearing her corset.
Well, Charlotte, that was done like a true romantic heroine. You are on your way.
Home, six months before
Charlotte’s sister-in-law was responsible for Charlotte’s eighth postdivorce blind date, with a dentist called Ernie (a family name). They met at the bar of a restaurant for drinks and appetizers. They conversed easily, their sentences fitting together like one long monologue instead of disjointed back-and-forth. He looked at her more than at his drink.
Charlotte got a little light-headed and tickly-chested, though her drink was just a soda. Maybe she wasn’t quite as numb as she thought. Maybe she could thaw just a tad, just enough to know this Ernie, to dip her toes in this possibility. As they left the restaurant, Ernie asked her out to dinner. She said she’d like that, and that’s when he leaned in to kiss her.
Charlotte would replay the next few moments over and over again for months to come, usually while she held a pillow over her head:
• His lips touched hers.
• She recoiled.
• She said, “Ew.”
Had his breath smelled of calamari? Had his mouth been hot and dry like a shedding lizard’s skin? No. Nothing was wrong. Ernie kissed in a very reasonable and appropriate manner. But Charlotte felt repulsed—not by him, but by herself. It was disgusting, she’d thought as he leaned in, disgusting for a married woman to kiss another man. She’d felt like a dirty, horrid cheater.
