Али Брэндон - Double Booked For Death

“That’s not true! I might have tried it once, but—”

“Can it, Hillary. You’re hooked, and you know it. But your drug of choice doesn’t come cheap. So you’ve been digging in other people’s pockets to support your drug habit.”

Darla shot an astonished look in Jake’s direction, wishing she could make out the other woman’s expression in the dark. So it wasn’t only money, but drugs that made Hillary’s world go around. Maybe this explained the agent’s apparent affection for her old rich boyfriend at the memorial service. She’d found yet another cash cow—or, likely in the old man’s case, cash steer—and was going to hang onto him for as long she could, no matter what it took.

Darla swiftly turned her attention back to the scene before her, however, as the phantom Valerie continued speaking.

“Your habit and your greed made you stupid, Hillary.”

The ghost gave a disgusted snort as she stood again and paced, walking through the velvet chairs now. The odor of cigarette smoke was growing stronger, and Darla could swear this part of the basement was growing even colder.

“You forgot that Morris was my brother—my twin—and I would do anything for him. I wasn’t going to let you hurt him. I even grabbed that stupid sign some girl left lying in the trash bin so that he wouldn’t accidentally see it. You were surprised, weren’t you, when I pulled off my hood and you saw it was me and not him out there on the street with you. And then when I told you I didn’t care about keeping Morris’s identity a secret anymore, that I was going to have you arrested for attempted blackmail, you were furious.”

Her voice lowered, she finished, “Furious enough to . . . kill.”

“The whole thing was your fault!” the agent wailed, sinking back onto the sofa again. “You said terrible things to me. You said you were going to fire me. You said you’d have your lawyers break our contract so I wouldn’t get any more money off your books. It wasn’t fair! You were rich already anyway, and you kept getting richer. I wanted that. You were my way to the big time!”

“The big time,” Valerie echoed, her light voice filled with disgust. “I guess we were, weren’t we? And I have to give you credit. You were lucky enough to be the agent’s assistant who found Morris’s manuscript in the slush pile, and you were clever enough to talk your boss into promoting you to a full-blown agent because you knew you’d stumbled over something good. And Morris was so thrilled that someone wanted to represent him—someone who didn’t know our family, someone who valued him for his work and not his bank account—that he barely even looked at the contract. He didn’t notice that you’d changed the commission rate from fifteen percent to twenty-five, or that you had locked him into a five-year agreement.”

“That’s not my fault,” Hillary huffed. “You could have said no.”

“I signed it because he asked me to. I’d already promised him that he could submit his manuscript under my name. He knew that if it sold, he could never deal with the pressure of doing all the things an author is forced to do these days to get his name out there. But I’d done it before and liked it, and so I agreed to be his public face. We made a good team, don’t you think?”

“You wouldn’t have been anything without me. I worked hard for my money.”

Hillary had regained her earlier aggressive attitude and was pushing back—at least, as much as one could against a phantom. “Everyone wanted vampires. No one wanted ghosts. That book was a hard sell, and I—”

“You had four major publishers bidding for it the first week,” Valerie cut in, “and it was a free ride for you from there on out. But you weren’t satisfied, were you? You thought you deserved a bigger piece of the Valerie Baylor action, and when I wouldn’t give it to you, you tried to poison my brother against me. That’s how you found out that he wrote the books and not me, wasn’t it? You thought you’d hit an even bigger jackpot then, until you found out we weren’t going to play your game.”

The ghostly author’s voice dropped now to a purr. “So tell me, Hillary, had you planned to kill me off all along, or was this one of those spur-of-the-moment things?”

Hillary shifted guiltily in her seat now. “It was an accident, all of it. I, I wasn’t in a right frame of mind!”

“Tell it to the Janitor,” the author softly said. “You see, Morris and I aren’t going to let you get away with what you did to me.”

At that, the remaining lights flickered out.

They flashed on again a few heartbeats later, illuminating the area where Hillary huddled on the love seat. Darla gasped despite herself as she saw that the phantom Valerie now loomed over the frightened agent. Then the ghost leaned closer, and in a scathing voice demanded, “Oh, for Chrissakes, Hillary, just admit you deliberately shoved me into traffic and killed me.”

“All right, I did!” the young woman shrieked. “You deserved it for the way you treated me, and if it makes you feel any better, I’d do it again just to shut you up. The only thing I’m sorry about is that you died right away. I would have laughed to see you squirming around on the street for a while before you croaked!”

The distant roar of applause from the theater above greeted her confession as the agent cowered in her armchair, her head covered with her hands as if to ward off a ghostly attack.

The second act must be over , was Darla’s first irrelevant thought as she stared wide-eyed through the fake foliage at the scene before her. Her second, more pertinent realization was that the phantom Valerie now looked as real as she had the night of the autographing. She stood preternaturally still, her visage twisted into a look of horror and outrage as frightening as anything Darla had ever seen. The figure slowly raised a fist over the huddled woman, and Darla saw something else she hadn’t noticed before.

The phantom Valerie wore a large gold puzzle ring on her right hand.

“Don’t do it, Morris.” Jake’s voice, clear and firm, rang out from beside her. “You don’t need to do anything more. You’ve got two other witnesses here to Hillary’s confession.”

“I didn’t confess to anything!” the agent shrieked, even as she crouched lower in her seat. Darla heard a faint intake of breath from the ghostly figure hovering over her. And then, a man’s familiar baritone replied, “I’ve got videotape as well. Come out, please, and make yourselves known.”

Morris’s voice sounded weary as he lowered his hand and tugged off his long black wig, revealing spiky blond locks beneath. He raised his other hand, which had been concealed beneath his cloak, and Darla could see he was holding what appeared to be a remote control. He gave it a couple of clicks, and the remaining basement lights flared on again.

Darla stiffly rose from her crouched position and gratefully slipped on her shoes. She and Jake came out from around the bush. Morris gave a small sad smile as he caught sight of them.

“Darla, Ms. Martelli,” he greeted them with a formal nod. “I rather expected I might see you two tonight. Mrs. Gleason told me that she’d seen two women enter my apartment before I arrived. Since she was watching through the peephole, she’d thought the tall one was Mavis in a curly black wig. It wasn’t until a bit later that she wondered if she’d been wrong. Her description of you two was quite accurate.”

“But how could you know that we knew you were meeting Hillary here tonight?” Darla asked in confusion.

He shrugged. “The two of you had been painfully persistent in questioning me when I stopped by your store the other day to see the lighter—which was just a ruse to get me there, I presume? Since you said Ms. Martelli used to be a police officer, I made the leap and assumed she looked about my place for some obvious clues. As you know, there were a couple of saved voice mails from Hillary that confirmed our plans for tonight.”