The Impersonator (40 page)

Maybe I’d continue south, to Hollywood, that town at the edge of Los Angeles where all the moviemakers had gathered after the Great War. I’d heard that life was glamorous in Hollywood, and the weather was always lovely. Everyone knew that Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, lived in Hollywood in a grand mansion with its own swimming pool—imagine that! Mary Pickford had been my idol forever. She and her husband had started their own film company, United Artists. Maybe I could get some sort of job with them. Any sort of job—I wasn’t too proud to sweep floors. And I had friends, vaudeville performers who had gone over to moving pictures, who might be able to point me toward work.

“Jessie? Did you hear me?”

After all that had happened she still called me Jessie. A lifetime of borrowed stage names had left me indifferent to what I was called. No one used my given name. Without a father, I had no real family name, and my first names had always mirrored the parts I played. No longer. I knew who I was now and how I fitted in. I had found a name that belonged to me, the one that kept my cousin Jessie close to me, and I would keep it, if my grandmother had no objection.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Grandmother. I was thinking.”

“I said, you should come home with me until you are restored to health. I hope you will, child. It will give me the chance to show you some pictures of Clarence—your father—and to tell you what he was like as a child and a young man.”

“Of course, Grandmother. That would mean a lot to me.”

“I failed both my granddaughters. I should have done more for Jessie, but I thought she was better off living with a family than a crotchety old lady. I didn’t take her unhappiness seriously. And I failed you. If I had not allowed excessive pride to keep us from writing to your mother, I would have learned about Clarence’s daughter. I am not a wealthy woman, but I could have provided you and your mother a decent home. Perhaps I still can, for you, at least.”

When all was said and done, I didn’t get Jessie’s money, but I did get her family. The Beckett half, anyway. Knowing that my father had loved my mother so much he intended to go against his parents’ wishes to marry her erased some of the bitterness toward men that I had carried around all my life. Knowing something about my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins, living and dead, gave me a sense of belonging I had never before experienced, a definite place in the great scheme of things. For the first time in my life, I felt part of something larger than myself. It felt good.

Just then Rainy came into the room carrying a tray of soup and crackers, and my stomach growled in appreciation. As she helped me sit up against the pillows, I shifted my shoulders and felt something hard and warm fall to one side against my breast. Dumbfounded, I groped for the object and pulled it from beneath my nightgown. A gold locket, just like the one David’s mother wore. I pressed the pinhead spring and it popped open to reveal the photographs of young David and his mother. It
was
David’s locket. What on earth was it doing—

Then it came to me like a great wind blowing up the coast. David’s mother had valued her locket more than any other object she’d owned, and it served as his messenger, conveying the words he couldn’t write down or pass along through anyone else. He must have slipped it around my neck while no one was watching. He trusted me to understand what it meant, that in leaving me with his mother’s necklace he was making a promise:
I will see you again. I will find you somehow and reclaim my mother’s locket.

But Grandmother was waiting for my reply. I put the locket back beneath my clothes against my breast before someone could ask about it. “Thank you, Grandmother. I’d be grateful for a place to stay while I mend. And Rainy—I’m sorry my leaving puts you out of a job. I wish I could take you with me.”

“Never mind that, miss. Mr. Ross offered all us who wanted to go to California a job but…” She looked shyly at Ross. “But … well, Doc Milner said he could use a quick girl like me to help him with his patients, and, well, I’d rather stay in Dexter where my family is than go to California.”

“Oh, Rainy, that’s wonderful! You’ll make an excellent nurse.”

Pink with pride, she fussed. “Now, there, let me put this extra pillow behind you, miss, so you can sit up a little and eat.”

Ross got to his feet. “If you leave before Mother and I return, I’d like to say…” Whatever it was, he couldn’t say it. “Well … good-bye.” His Valentino eyes held mine for an awkward moment, then we both looked away, embarrassed.

He got as far as the hall before turning around. “Oh, I almost forgot … the storm that blew through the night of the party? It was brief but violent. A day or two later—we’re not sure which day—a large section of the weak south cliff collapsed into the sea.”

I didn’t have to ask which section.

Jessie had known.
Hurry! Don’t leave me.
Time was short and she hadn’t wanted to be lost forever when the crevice that opened into the cave finally split off and that giant slab of rock crumbled into the churning sea.

POSTSCRIPT

How much of
The Impersonator
is true? The short answer is: a lot. Of course, the story is fiction and the main characters—Jessie, the Carr family, and David Murray—are products of my imagination. However, most of the vaudeville references are historical fact. The Kanazawa Japs, the Seven Little Foys, Cats and Rats, Baby Silvia, Houdini, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, W. C. Fields, the Venetian Masqueraders, and so forth were acts that played the Big Time circuits in 1924. Some of the names are familiar today, especially to movie buffs, because most early radio and film personalities started in vaudeville—people like Milton Berle, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and Jack Benny left vaudeville for long careers in radio, film, and television.

And while the little town of Dexter is fictional, the other locations mentioned are real and their descriptions as accurate to the time period as I could make them. The hotels are genuine (the Benson is still one of Portland’s finest hotels and the Blackstone in Omaha has been rehabbed into an office building), as are the theaters, although, sadly, many were casualties of urban renewal.

Almost no one alive today has been to a vaudeville show. While minstrel shows, circuses, and other sorts of variety performances existed before the Civil War, vaudeville is usually considered to have started in the 1870s. The genre peaked in the 1920s and declined in the early 1930s, usurped by radio and the movies. To see what real vaudeville, and its risqué cousin, burlesque, looked like, check into some of the short features on
www.youtube.com
, including some of my favorites:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZo4imTt4Og

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVQ9e8nWx0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ6Zh6UbQ-I

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA6wYvVnq4g

www.youtube.com/watch?v=49B3ZnxibTQ&feature=related

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Particular thanks go to my mentor, Donna Sheppard, who taught me how to write better than any English teacher ever could, to Tom Fuhrman of my critique group who provided technical know-how when it came to sabotaging antique cars, to Dr. Mark Pugh, a pharmacist who listened to my questions about how to murder people with drugs and deadly herbs and did not alert the police, to Erica Gilliam, a master gardener who made sure I got the horticulture right, to my critique group (Marilyn Mattys, Vivian Lawry, Kathleen Mix, Sandie Warwick, Susan Campbell, Linda Thornburg, Josh Cane, and Libby Hall), and especially to my editors at Minotaur, Kelley Ragland and Elizabeth Lacks, and their awesome copy editor, Ragnhild Hagen, whose sharp eye saved me from several embarrassing mistakes.

I have always been intrigued by stories that involved memory loss, impersonation, and look-alikes. My favorites include Josephine Tey’s
Brat Farrar
(1949), the novel that served as the inspiration for this story, as well as Mary Stewart’s
The Ivy Tree
(1962), Joy Fielding’s
See Jane Run
(1991), and Sebastien Japrisot’s
A Trap for Cinderella
(1963).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MARY MILEY is the winner of the 2012 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition. She has worked at Colonial Williamsburg, taught American history at Virginia Commonwealth University for thirteen years, and has published extensively in the areas of history and travel. This is her first novel. Miley lives in Richmond, Virginia.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE IMPERSONATOR.
Copyright © 2013 by Mary Miley. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph © GettyImages

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Miley, Mary.

    The impersonator / Mary Miley.—First Edition.

            pages    cm

    ISBN 978-1-250-02816-7 (hardcover)

    ISBN 978-1-250-02817-4 (e-book)

  1.  Heirs—Fiction.   2.  Inheritance and succession—Fiction.   3.  Missing persons—Fiction.   4.  Substitution of heirs—Fiction.   5.  Impersonation—Fiction.   6.  Fraud—Fiction.   I.  Title.

    PS3613.I532244I47 2013

    813
′
.6—dc23

2013013931

eISBN 9781250028174

First Edition: September 2013