The Impersonator (21 page)

“Pa! Pa!” A tousled-haired boy of about fourteen burst through the screen door, letting it fly shut with a bang. Panting and sweating, he pulled the cap off his head and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “There’s a coroner from Portland going t’come identify the bones!”

“William! Hold off, son, I’m with a customer! Excuse me, Miss Carr, but—”

“What bones?” I asked, seized by a premonition of disaster.

“There was a warehouse fire last night,” said the storekeeper. “You know the empty Kelsey building back of us on Second Street? It half burned down before the volunteers could put it out, but they found a body—or the remains of a body—inside.”

“It was hidden,” said William, flush with the importance of a boy who knew something the adults didn’t. “Under the stairs to the loft was a room … not a room, a closet, a little place with a door that was locked. They hacked into there with their axes and found a body. Doc Milner said it was a girl with a broken neck. Deader than a dodo’s grandfather. Not killed by the fire. He said she’d been dead five or ten years. Nobody knows who it was, and Doc Milner’s not a real coroner, so they called for a real coroner to try to tell who it was.”

The bones in my knees dissolved. Ross slid a stool behind me not a second too soon.

They’d found Jessie.

27

I have never suffered from stage fright and refused to start now. Finding Jessie’s body required ad-libbing and steady nerves, like the time the orchestra played Offenbach instead of Gershwin, or Darcy upchucked on stage, or the costumes went to St. Louis while the show went to St. Paul. My cue card said “Exit Stage Left.” Not in some panic-stricken flight but calmly, in a dignified manner. The circumstances were so dire that even Oliver’s threat to ruin my career no longer deterred me. Unemployment was preferable to prison.

To be honest, part of me was relieved the charade was over. Another part felt a sense of grim satisfaction that Oliver’s grand scheme had failed. I’d have loved to see his reaction when the news hit, but I’d be long gone by then.

There was no need to rush. Coroners don’t issue same-day rulings. It would be days, weeks perhaps, before his medical investigation was finished and he presented his findings to the police. He would correlate the details of the girl’s remains—hair, clothing, jewelry perhaps—with the list of young females missing between roughly 1914 and 1919. The authorities would note that the reappearance of Jessie Carr involved some initial doubts as to her identity, and they would put two and two together. By the time they reached four, I’d be gone. Toronto, I thought. I had already chosen my new name. I should have gone straight to Oliver to warn him that the game was up and that I would be leaving soon, but the scene in the library had cost him any loyalty I might have owed him.

My conscience pricked. In the short time I’d been at Cliff House, I had come to care for the girls, and I would miss Aunt Victoria’s peculiar mixture of flightiness and competence. Grandmother’s protective love felt better than a warm blanket on a cold night. Pretending they were family had started to make it seem so. They would be hurt when they learned about my deception, then angry at having been suckered. Henry would crow. Ross would say he knew all along I wasn’t Jessie.

The gig was up. Professionally speaking, I think I would have succeeded had not fate lit a fire in an old warehouse. I would miss the ironed sheets and swell food. But the worst would be never knowing the whole truth about what had happened to Jessie. I had come to think of myself as her stand-in, her understudy, called up to take the part she couldn’t finish. Jessie had crept under my skin. I cared for her. I wanted to know who had killed her. I wanted someone to pay for the crime.

On the drive home, the possibilities ran unbidden through my head. One, Jessie had crawled into the space below the stairs to hide from someone, been accidentally locked in, and starved to death. I gave that low marks. It didn’t explain the broken neck. Two, Jessie had been the victim of a kidnapping gone wrong. Oliver had expressed that opinion when we first met. The theory had one glaring defect—kidnappers kidnapped for money. Killing the kid benefited no one. Perhaps her death was accidental—she had stumbled down the warehouse steps trying to escape and broken her neck before the kidnappers had had the chance to send their ransom note. Well, it was a possibility.

Three, someone strangled her and stashed her body in an abandoned building, where, absent the fire, it might never have been discovered. The same Jack the Ripper madman who had killed the other girls?

The young Chinese woman had died on the docks just a couple blocks from the warehouse where they found Jessie. The incidents had to be related. Surely Lizzette and the Chinese woman had been killed by the same person—someone who strangled first and then cut off a lock of hair as a keepsake. If the coroner’s report on Jessie’s body showed a lock of hair missing, that would clinch it.

But an heiress’s murder is unlikely to be the result of random violence. The first thing to ask is who stands to inherit. Jessie’s death shifted the Carr fortune to Jessie’s cousins. Could the late Uncle Charles, the invalid, have hired someone to kidnap Jessie and kill her so his children would inherit what he had been denied? It was all too preposterous. People didn’t murder children for money.

And then I remembered Shakespeare’s
Richard III.

There was a fourth possibility. Anticipating their own eventual inheritance, Henry and Ross could have arranged Jessie’s death. But although my close encounters with Henry and Ross at the cliff edge left me in no doubt that they would kill me today if it could be made to look an accident, their killing Jessie seemed unlikely. Henry would have been only seventeen and Ross fifteen—surely too young to actually murder a young girl cousin.

I remembered Jessie’s last letter to Grandmother. Was there another reason Henry might have wanted Jessie out of the way? What was Henry’s secret? What hold did Jessie have over him? Something serious enough to make him kill her? And Ross. He had tried to lock her in the basement once—but surely that was just a childish act of intimidation. Wasn’t it?

I cast back to our first encounter and replayed that scene through my head. That pasty pallor. The ready-to-run stance. Henry had been terrified that Jessie really had returned. I was certain of it, then and now. If he or his father had caused Jessie’s death, he’d have known I was an impostor, yet, at least initially, he had showed doubt. Days later, at the dinner table with David, he’d said, “I know you’re not Jessie.” At the time, I hadn’t given his choice of words much thought, but looking back, the significance of the verb crashed over my head like thunder. Not “I
think
you’re not Jessie,” but “I
know
.”

All at once, I knew what had happened.

Henry hadn’t physically killed Jessie, he had locked her in the warehouse closet and left her to die. When I showed up seven years later claiming to be Jessie, he had to face the real possibility that Jessie had somehow escaped and run off. That day I met him, he was expecting me to rat on him and was ready to hightail it out of Oregon the moment I accused him of attempted murder. When I didn’t accuse him of anything, he was pretty sure I was an impostor. So he went back to the scene of the crime to check whether Jessie’s body was still in the warehouse. It was. So now he
knew
I wasn’t Jessie, as he said to me at dinner that night. By setting the building on fire, he made sure Jessie’s remains would be found. As soon as the body was identified, I would be exposed. He’d be rid of me. He and his siblings would reclaim the Carr fortune.

That was the worst part, that they would get Jessie’s inheritance. They would win. She would have hated that. And I hated it too, more for her sake than for mine.

Word of the body spread faster than the fire, reaching Cliff House before Ross and I returned with our supplies.

“It’s horrifying,” proclaimed Aunt Victoria as we carried our paint cans up to the ballroom. “Simply horrifying. Soon we’ll all be murdered in our beds! A nice town like Dexter and two murders in two weeks!”

The ever-practical Ross pointed out that the murders were separated by many years. “The woman in the warehouse was probably killed before we ever moved to Dexter, Mother.” I refrained from adding anything about the strangled Chinese girl. No need to add to my aunt’s anxieties.

Henry was absent from the dinner table that night, which meant we could skip the speechifying. Aunt Victoria, who had kept all news of the body in the warehouse away from the twins, kept up an inane prattle designed, I was sure, to divert our thoughts. I was toying with my food when she resurrected the shopping trip to Portland. Caroline’s cold had mended, she said brightly, and the original plan was back on schedule. It made my flight simpler.

“We’ll catch the first train tomorrow morning. Jessie can drive us to the station and leave the runabout there overnight, can’t you, dear?”

“We’ll all go,” said Oliver. “Mother and I have outstayed our welcome”—he held his hands up to ward off the vehement protestations that they were welcome at Cliff House until Doomsday—“and we can catch the train to San Francisco the next day.”

As long as I was leaving, it didn’t matter who was coming with me as far as Portland. Once I got there, I’d say I was going to stay an extra day and then disappear.

I spent my last night at Cliff House wishing I didn’t have to leave. The worst of it was, I’d let Jessie down. Like everyone else in her life.

28

The next morning Aunt Victoria put her foot wrong and slid down three steps in the cellar, spraining her ankle. Dr. Milner hurried over, wrapped it in stiff bandages, and gave her aspirin for the pain and swelling.

“No trips for you, Mrs. Carr,” he pronounced.

“I’m terribly sorry, girls,” she said sadly. “Our shopping trip seems cursed! The doctor says I must sit with my foot raised for several days to rest this sprain. How silly of me to be so careless. We’ll go next week, I promise!”

But the twins, in a now-or-never frame of mind, whined that it wasn’t really for them, it was for poor Jessie who was growing weak from lack of exercise, and if she didn’t go shopping for a riding habit and a tennis costume soon, she would have to take to her bed.

“Why don’t Mother and I supervise the girls?” asked Oliver. “We’ll ride into Portland tomorrow morning as planned and stay the night with the young ladies at the Benson. The next day, Mother and I can leave for San Francisco and the girls can return home.”

“Yes, yes!” The twins were ecstatic. Aunt Victoria graciously consented, and the trip was back on.

I walked Doc Milner to his sedan so I could snatch a private moment.

“Any developments in the death of the Indian girl?” I began.

“Nope.”

I could hear Ross telling me, “No one will care.”

“Do they know who she was yet?”

“Some girl off the reservation. Killamook, someone said. Strangled, and her head cracked by a club or something.”

As if she were stunned first and then throttled. I winced. “Have they found her killer?”

He shook his head. “And they never will. It was probably a lover’s quarrel turned ugly. Or tribal vengeance. The Killamooks hate the Umpquas or the Chinooks, or maybe it’s the Chinooks who hate the Killamooks. I can’t keep track of such folderol.”

“I heard about the body they found yesterday,” I said to him.

“You and everyone else in town. A shame good news doesn’t travel as fast.”

“I suppose it will be a long while before the coroner rules on the cause of death. Any idea who she is?”

“No one from these parts, that’s for sure,” he said. “Unless I’m badly mistaken, however, the girl’s death was caused by strangulation. Her neck was broken, which doesn’t happen in strangulation unless the violence is extreme. As for who she was, no one can name any young woman with dark hair who’s gone missing in the past few years.”

“Dark hair?” I blurted, my heart in my throat. Dear God, it wasn’t Jessie after all! It couldn’t have been Jessie, not with dark hair! Only my grip on the stair rail kept me from melting to the ground.

A great wave of relief washed over me when I realized what this meant. I was safe. I could stay. I was still Jessie.

“Yes, dark brown. Why the surprise?”

“I—well. I heard different, that’s all.” I was flabbergasted almost beyond speech. “And … and someone said you put her death at five or ten years ago.”

“That was my first thought when I saw the remains, judging from the state of decomposition. Now I think her death took place in late September of 1919.”

“How on earth did you arrive at that?”

“For one thing, the color and weight of the fabrics did not suggest spring or summer, and there was no coat, which would have suggested winter, so that leaves autumn. But before you admire my Sherlock Holmes powers of observation, let me confess that when the remains were taken up later that day, there was a scrap of a Portland newspaper in her handbag dated September 17, 1919. Makes me wonder if she wasn’t from Portland.”

“Was there anything strange about her hair?”

“Not that I noticed,” said the doctor, “but I did not conduct an examination. Her hair was in disarray.” His bushy eyebrows met in disapproval. “You sound like the sheriff with all these questions.”

Before I had to respond there came a shout from the front steps. “Hey, Doc!” It was Ross. “Hilda just telephoned to tell you Mrs. Beazley’s baby has started to come and to meet them at the house.”

“Damnation,” he muttered. “Six weeks early … and Dexter with no incubator. I was hoping she—never mind. Now you keep your aunt off her feet or that ankle will never mend.”

My explanation for Jessie’s death was so much horse manure. The flaws in my theory had been right in front of me all along. For one, why would Henry have waited so long to check the warehouse? Why not do it before I had even arrived at Cliff House, instead of attempting to expose me with tricks and delaying for a couple of weeks? And the warehouse girl had been strangled, so there could have been no uncertainty about her death that would have drawn Henry back to check. No, Henry hadn’t killed Jessie. I didn’t like him, but that didn’t mean he’d killed anyone.