Fifteen
"I’ve figured all of it out," Allison said, and then, because apparently once wasn't dramatic enough, "All. Of. It."
She was in her lounge pants, hair scraped back into a knot that had given up sometime around the ouija board, and she had that legal pad clutched to her chest like a shield.
“Can we eat while we hear this?” Maggie asked hopefully. “I’m honestly starving. We need brain power.”
“Yes, absolutely. Of course.” Allison looked flustered. “Wait, there’s food?”
“You’d better place a second order,” I told Maggie. “Reginald isn’t even back yet.”
It took us ten minutes to get situated at the dining room table with plates and chopsticks and napkins. There was sweet tea and a pitcher of water on the table.
“Let’s hear it,” I finally said to Allison.
"Evelyn Carrington faked her own death."
Taylor choked on his spring roll.
Vivienne set her Pad Thai container down and cleared her throat. She reached for her sweet tea.
"Well," I said, in the tone I usually reserved for guests who wanted to know if the ghost could be summoned on demand for an extra fee. "I’m not sure that’s possible?”
"Allison," Vivienne said carefully. "We all saw her collapse. She went unconscious. There was blood."
"Staged." She held up one finger. "Think about it. A woman that controlling, that obsessed with the narrative, with truth coming to light, doesn't just die in front of two hundred witnesses by accident. She stages her own murder to fake her death, disappears with a new identity, and comes back in a year to expose everyone who wronged her from beyond the grave. Metaphorically. Or maybe literally. I haven't worked out the mechanics."
"The mechanics," Taylor said, "being that she is currently at the morgue."
"Was she, though? Did any of us see a body?"
"I saw the blood trickle out of her mouth," I said. “The doctor who was there seemed genuinely concerned.”
“Does anyone know he was actually a doctor? Maybe he was an actor.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s a member of the Society. I don’t think Evelyn could have faked her death.”
Allison waved that off. "Fine. Fine, maybe not faked, maybe I'm — there's a lot going on tonight, okay. I found a code word on the ouija board that I am choosing to interpret as either a warning or my own subconscious trying to tell me something important, and I've been putting pieces together for three days and some of them might be a little—" she exhaled, "—loose."
"A little loose," Vivienne echoed, not unkindly. “Wouldn’t there be some concern if a body went missing from the hospital?"
"There's a secret society," Allison pressed on, undeterred. "The Magnolia Heritage Society isn't just garden parties and silent auctions. I think it's older than that. I think there's a whole other layer, initiations, blood oaths, that kind of thing, and Evelyn ran afoul of them somehow, and Dorothy Perrault knows more than she's telling, and honestly I wouldn't rule out that man with the microphone at the reception either, he had shifty eyes."
"Just looked like he had an eye lift to me,” Taylor commented, jamming his chopsticks back into his takeout box. “Would it kill them to include a plastic fork? Can’t use these things to save my life.”
“I can get you a fork,” I told Taylor. I didn’t think I was going to miss anything important. Allison hadn’t “got it” if this was any indication and I did have to be a good hostess.
Undeterred by the interruption, Allison kept rolling. “I think whoever's behind it has been in this house. I think that's what the chandelier was. I don't think that's wiring, Harper, I think that's a sign, and I think it's connected to whatever's happening with the McClintock family, and I've written down every detail I could remember, times, sounds, the exact words Evelyn spoke."
She flipped the legal pad open and thrust it at me. I braced myself for something out of a true crime forum at three in the morning.
What I got, underneath a full page of underlined half-theories about blood oaths and secret societies and a diagram of the parlor with an arrow pointing at the chandelier that just said ??? — was one line, near the bottom, boxed in twice like she'd circled back to it and decided it mattered more than the rest.
Spring mechanism. Micro-hinge. That's not hardware store work. That's restoration work. Jewelers use tools like that. So do people who fix antique silver. Small hands, precise, slow. Someone who's used to working on things that are old and delicate and worth more broken correctly than fixed badly.
I read it twice.
"Where did you get this?" I asked, and I must have said it in a different voice than everything else that night, because Allison actually stopped talking.
