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“You hired her?” Dani asked. “Why?”
She was wringing her hands now, her voice shaky. “For publicity. For the book.”
“I’m Not Me, the story about Didi?” Martinez jumped in before Settler could ask.
She nodded. “It was my idea. I thought it might add a little interest in the book if there were ‘Didi sightings’ like there are Elvis sightings, and it was a good idea.” She glanced at Settler. “She wasn’t supposed to die!”
“What went wrong?” Martinez asked at the same time Dani queried, “Did you run this by Trudie Crenshaw?”
“Trudie knew. She even had some of Edie’s . . . Didi’s old things. She was close to her, when they both were in Las Vegas, and sometimes Didi would crash at Trudie’s, you know, if she was too drunk or too stoned to go home, or if she had a fight with her current boyfriend.” Her face pulled into an expression of disgust.
“Did Ned Crenshaw know, too?” Dani asked.
“Yes, he was a part of the book, of course. Edie’s first husband.”
“And Trudie, his second wife, was the author,” Martinez clarified.
“Whose idea was the book itself?” Dani asked, but she suspected she already knew.
“Mine,” Vera said with a bit of remembered pride, but then her face fell. “But Trudie was a better writer, and I didn’t want anyone to know that I was connected. I’m a respected member of my church and . . .” She shook her head and sniffed. “If anyone found out who Maryanne Osgoode was, it was better if it wasn’t me. I’d tried to sell the idea years before, but nothing had happened, and Trudie knew this agent who was connected to an editor at Stumptown, who bought the book. The advance was small. They thought that, other than a few true-crime buffs, who would buy it? So, we decided to stir up some interest. Since no one knew if Didi was alive or dead, why not create a publicity buzz?” She looked at Settler as if she expected the detective to understand. “The only way to make a lot of money was if the book’s sales really got going.”
“How did you find Karen Upgarde?” Dani asked.
“Milo had seen her in some bar in the Seattle area. He’d gone in for a beer, and she was up on stage, and he thought she looked a lot like Edie. He was right. With the right makeup and wigs, and dresses, she could pull it off. It turned out she could use the money—well, who couldn’t? So they struck a deal.”
Vera’s lips started to tremble, and she swallowed hard. “She was just supposed to walk through a crowd, hope someone would see her, catch someone’s eye. Even though Didi Storm wasn’t exactly a household name, Marilyn Monroe still was.”
“How did you expect someone to make the connection? That she was really trying to act like Didi, not Marilyn?” Martinez asked.
“The book was just out. We thought if we called some reporters . . . you know, nudged them in that direction, someone would get interested in what had happened to Didi. But Karen wasn’t supposed
to commit suicide. No, no, no! It was supposed to be kind of a guessing game. She’d show up at a mall. Or a bar. Or walking through a hotel, y’know. It’s the holidays, and TV cameras are filming events everywhere. Karen was supposed to show up; then one of us would call the television stations anonymously and say we thought we saw Didi Storm, and the reason we thought she was Didi was because of her hands, the fingernail thing that Edie always thought was so cute, one nail different from all the others.” Vera pressed a finger to her trembling lips. “We thought we might be able to make some real money from it.”
“From your sister’s disappearance.”
“I didn’t know if she was really dead. I expected it, of course, but . . . well, I figured Edwina, she owed me.”
She glared at Dani, her deep-down jealousy, rage, and moral superiority on full display.
There it is, Dani thought. The true motive.
Vera went on. “We knew my sister as Edie, short for Edwina. She and I never got along. She was always so . . . outgoing. She always got the attention. Edie thought the world revolved around her, even as a child. She was beautiful,” she added grudgingly. “And, of course, she caught the eye of every boy in school, but she did terrible things. Smoked, drank, and did drugs, I’m pretty sure. Anything for a good time. And she had the loosest morals of any girl I knew! We were brought up by good Christian parents, but it just didn’t take with Edie.” She glanced at her son, who had listened silently to his mother’s take on her sister. “She even went out with your father, did you know that? Milo and I were nearly engaged, and she and he . . .” She shuddered. “Well, anyway, it was a short period, and he begged me to come back to him, begged. So I forgave him, and we got married not long after. Moved away from Anderstown.”
Dani silently questioned whether the philandering Milo had ever been truly forgiven but kept her own counsel.
“You think your husband might have done something bad?” Martinez reminded her.
“Well, yes . . . I mean, I really don’t know. But . . .” She glanced back at her son for encouragement, and Jensen, sober, nodded. Vera’s eyebrows drew together, the lines on her forehead deepening, the turn of her lips downward. “A friend of mine was in San Francisco the day Karen jumped, and . . . Milo was supposed to be in eastern Oregon, selling hay balers, or tractors, or whatever. I just wanted to make certain he was where he was supposed to be, so I checked with a couple of equipment dealers in Bend and Prineville and Baker City, stores on Milo’s sales route.” She began to wring her hands, unconscious of her actions, Dani was pretty sure. “And no one had seen him. So I checked a little farther east into Idaho, but no . . . and he wasn’t in Washington, either. Everywhere I called, they said he wasn’t scheduled for another month or two weeks or whatever. It was obvious he’d lied to me. And then . . .” She blinked rapidly, her expression even more pained. “I checked his cell phone. He was definitely in San Francisco.”
“You think he was with Karen Upgarde?” Settler asked.
A whimper escaped her throat. “I don’t know! But he did say once that she was unstable, had tried to commit suicide or something like that, and, you know, with the right urging . . . Oh, sweet Lord.” Tucking a lock of hair around her ear, she added, “I thought he was joking, you know, just kidding around.”
“And now?” she pressed.
“I don’t know. We’re kind of in a bad way. A lot of bills, and we paid Karen a lot of money to impersonate Didi, so . . . I don’t know what to think. And now . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I just know that he lied. Again. Just like before. When I was in college and he cheated on me.”
Martinez asked, “Do you know where he was when Ned and Trudie Crenshaw were killed?”
