Now You See It (24 page)

It stood there, reversed, for several moments.

Then a curl of white smoke drifted upward from behind its back.

Cassandra gaped at it. I gaped at it.

How could Max possibly be alive?

The chair turned back.

My brain felt numb.

Sitting in it, smoking a cigar, was Sheriff Plum.

Cassandra made a sound of dazed confusion. She could make no sense whatever of the Sheriff’s appearance. Nor could I.

Still, he might save her life!

“Help me,” she asked in a feeble voice.

The Sheriff only stared at her.

“Guess you won’t be going back to Harry Kendal now,” he said, “or letting your brother drown at sea.”

She obviously didn’t comprehend what he was saying.
“Please,”
she begged.

“Looks like you and the Mister have killed each other off,” he said.

His eyes were like stones.

“Leaving everything to
Padre,”
he said. “And to whoever takes care of
Padre.”

He rose from the chair and walked around the desk.

Cassandra gasped.

From the waist up, he was wearing Sheriff Plum’s clothes.

From the waist down, Cassandra’s
.

Her mouth fell open as she understood.

Too late.

Brian came over and, kneeling, checked for her pulse beat.

There was none; she was gone.

He put her hand back down on the floor and stared at her.

Then sobbed.

“Did you ever care for
anyone?”
he asked.

He pressed his left hand over his eyes and began to cry harder.

I don’t know how long he wept. It was a good while, though.

Finally, rubbing dry his eyes and cheeks, he drew in a long, bracing breath of air and stood.

Moving to the desk, he picked up the telephone and pressed the Operator button.

As he waited, he began to peel away his Sheriff disguise.

“The Sheriff’s office, please,” he said. “This is an emergency.”

He continued peeling off the disguise while he waited again.

Finally, the Sheriff’s office answered. Brian asked for Plum and was connected.

“Sheriff Plum,” he said. “My name is Brian Crane. I’m calling from the house of Maximilian and Cassandra Delacorte on Medfield Road. Can you come here right away?”

He looked, stricken, at his dead sister.

“There’s been a tragedy,” he said.

Brian sat in silence for at least ten minutes, idly picking at the remainder of his Sheriff Plum facial disguise. He seemed to stare into his thoughts; never had I felt more invisible.

Rising finally, he took off the Sheriff’s shirt, revealing, underneath, Cassandra’s pink blouse, which he also removed, revealing a sweat-laved T-shirt underneath. He took off the skirt he’d worn, the shoes and stockings. Beneath the skirt, he wore the trousers of Sheriff Plum.

Still, he did not look at me, his face expressionless. Whatever thoughts he had were so buried, they were not reflected, even for an instant, on his face.

Barefoot, he moved to where Cassandra lay and looked down at her.

Abruptly, his face revealed all: incredulous sorrow, anguish so complete it appeared as though he might lose control.

He slumped to his knees beside her, taking hold of her
limp right hand. The sob that broke in his chest wracked his entire body.

“Why?”
he asked, scarcely able to speak the word.

His head bowed and he wept again; for the sister he had loved so deeply, yet had made no effort to save.

At last he raised his head and looked at me, eyes glistening.

“You never knew about us, did you,
Padre?”
he said. “You only knew what Max told you and what little you saw.”

Slowly and gently, he stroked his sister’s hand as he spoke.

“Our father was an alcoholic,” he said. “A failed vaudevillian who didn’t mellow with inebriation but turned vicious instead. Abused our mother and us.” He bared his teeth momentarily. “And, in Cassandra’s case …”

He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to; I understood.

“When I was ten, my mother hanged herself,” he went on. “Cassandra took her place in my life, the only person in the world I could trust.

“She took me away from our father when she was sixteen and I was thirteen. By then, she’d made up her mind to follow no rules but to do anything she could to get ahead.

“I didn’t blame her; I don’t blame her now. We were two of a kind—angry, vengeful, pitted against a world which had given us nothing but pain.

“So we became what you saw and heard about from Max—a pair of icy opportunists. Not that he knew it at first. Cassandra was too good at pretending to allow him to see what she—and I—really were.”

He stopped speaking and lowered his head again; I thought he was finished.

He wasn’t. Rising, he retrieved the skirt he’d removed and lay it across Cassandra’s still features.

Then he moved to the picture window and stared out at the lake, a faint smile on his lips.
Is he thinking
, I wondered,
that the view he sees is only a reflection?
I had no way of knowing.

Finally, he turned and walked to the desk, sitting on its edge.

“We have a little wait, don’t we?” he said.

“Where was I?”

He stared at me bleakly; then, after several moments, he spoke again.

“She had an affair with a stage magician when she was seventeen. She used him to learn his trade and she taught me what she’d learned.

“Then she dropped him, and it was the two of us again, together in … every way,” he murmured.

His smile was bitter.

“Several other ‘status-enhancing’—as she called them—relationships followed before she met Max and set her cap for him. Moving in after Adelaide’s death. With me, as always, trailing behind, her faithful lapdog … slavish to her every demand.”

He sighed heavily.

“Things changed after they were married,” he said. “My closeness to her gradually deteriorated. She was—without my knowing it—scheming toward a future which did not include me.

“I tried not to notice it. I’d been trained to trust her totally, believe her every word. I
loved
her,
Padre
—” His voice broke, and he had to pause to regain himself.

“But in spite of that,” he said, “I had to recognize, eventually,
that I was living—in her life, at least—on borrowed time.”

“It all came to a head when Max demanded that I help him eliminate her because of what she was doing to him.”

The bitter smile again.

“How clever she was,” he said. “Until that moment, I’d had no idea that she was plotting either Max’s dissolution as a performer or—if that didn’t work—his death.

“Discovering that was a traumatic blow to me,
Padre,”
he went on. “Putting aside everything we’d meant to one another, she was planning to betray me.

“I saw the cabal; Cassandra and Harry versus Max, with me completely out of the picture.

“It was then that the lapdog planned his revenge.”

“I pretended to agree with Max. Even signed that stupid murder contract with him; of course, I planned to destroy it later.

“Then I told Cassandra what he was planning to do: drug her with the blowgun dart and have me hang her in the freezer to die slowly—as she planned to let
him
die slowly from arsenic poisoning.”

Once more, that bitter smile.

“She pretended, of course, that she’d always intended to tell me what she’d been doing,” he said.

He turned his head and looked at Cassandra’s body, his expression once again unreadable. He stared at her for more than a minute.

Then he murmured,
“Right,”
and moved behind the desk. Sitting, he took a sheet of paper from the drawer and began to write on it.

“They all misread me,
Padre,”
he said. “Brian the pathetic gofer. Nothing but a pawn to be moved around their murderous chessboard.”

His expression was hard now, his voice angry.

“They should have given me more credit,” he said.

“I made fools of them both
.

“Pretending to help each one separately, I played my game and stood by while they contrived to murder one another.”

He shuddered.

“Not that I intended for her to die,” he said. “Max surprised me there. And my own anger at what I heard her say while I was behind the wall panel—that she might let me drown at sea—so enraged me that …”

His breath faltered.

“I might have saved her,” he said. “Then again, maybe there wasn’t time; I’ll never know.

“So—in my total rage—I let her know what I’d done. Then I let her die.”

Another faltering breath. He had to stop writing, his hand shook so badly.