I'd called in every favor, pressed every button, pulled every lever. I'd helped Oscar find a lawyer in Los Angeles who'd never lost a case in his life until the salacious end of the silver starlet, the "Platinum Pussycat," in West Seattle. The solicitor had returned to California in a rage, his perfect record ruined.
He blames me; he might as well, and he can go to the back of the line.
Oscar's loss was bad enough, but I wished to God that I could quit thinking about little Priscilla. She'd followed me around the house like a duckling every time I came to visit, and I loved her. I would have done anything for her. I would never have harmed her or allowed any harm to come to her.
But not everything is up to me.
The child was dead. She was the first small domino to fall, dragging her parents behind her with such terrible gravity.
I was so frustrated, so angry at myself for telling Venita to do her worst—though I never could have known how literally she'd take this challenge or how thoroughly she would rise to it. Rationally, I was aware of the perilous fury of a mother who'd lost a child; realistically, I could have never imagined her capacity for retribution.
She should've taken it out on me. Just me.
She should've left Oscar out of it. He'd been utterly blameless in his daughter's death, blameless in his wife's death, and blameless of anything except believing too much in a bad man who couldn't help him.
If I'd possessed a second soul to sell, I would've pawned it in a heartbeat to spare Oscar. To spare any of them. All of them.
Starting with that child.
But I didn't. I stood alone in the parlor, surrounded by beautiful things. A glorious round mirror with a gold frame, a marble bust of an esteemed ancestor, curtains made of chartreuse velvet that dripped and pooled across the floor. A rug imported from thousands of miles to the west, furniture carved with whorls and elegant feet shaped like the paws of lions.
There was a fireplace, ornate and sooty despite the regular cleaning. There was a bar cart, but it sat beneath the mirror, and I hated the mirror. I could not look at the mirror.
But I needed a drink. I kept my head down.
The crystal decanter was filled with amber-brown hooch, and the sparkling glasses beside it were covered with a fine layer of dust. The bottles on the bottom shelf were all Canadian; legal booze from the north always tended to be of better quality than the bathtub stuff you found downtown with a soft knock on a door and a password.
I crouched beside the cart and used the back of my hand to brush the dust from the labels. My preferred gin was not empty, for I was the only one who ever drank it—and I hadn't been inside the Amundson house in months. No one had. After all the investigators (myself included) had finished combing the place for clues, it'd been locked up by order of the city police.
But now it belonged to me, and I wished with all my life that it didn't.
It had been a mistake to accept Oscar's overtures of friendship. It had been a terrible idea to become a regular guest, a friendly visitor beloved by him and his wife—to say nothing of my duckling: the dear Priscilla, whose demise I caused, if inadvertently.
After the child died, Oscar supported me and struggled to defend me against his wife's wrath.
God, but she became a monster in the end, didn't she? A living wraith, a raging poltergeist with a stained silk smock and bloodshot eyes. Always seething, never resting. Never relenting. Determined to burn down the whole world if that was what it took to punish the men
who'd failed her so.
No, I was being unfair.
It was unfair of me to call her monstrous—the pot calling the kettle black, at bare minimum. Even after I'd finished two fingers of my favorite gin, I could see that much.
God, I hated that mirror.
I couldn't help but stare at it anyway, taking in the gold frame, its lovely, delicate design circling the round sheet of glass. But I avoided my own face. I already knew that it was gray and sunken. I hadn't slept through the night in weeks, and it showed in every sallow pore. I let my eyes trace the leaves, the feathers. The bits of moth or butterfly—which was it? Hard to tell. In my determination to avoid my own expression, my gaze fell to the bottom of the glass, where I spied a small series of smudges.
Dots. Fingerprints left behind by someone too small to reach any higher.
