The Last Thing She Said Page 4

  “Yeah, it’s lots of fun.” Nikki gave Doris a hug before leading KitKat out the door to the pasture. “Maybe you’ll get good enough to enter the competition at the county fair.”

  “Wouldn’t that be awesome?” Leading Coco, Sierra followed Nikki.

  Helen cocked her head to look around Traveler at Chris. “Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

  “You’re beautiful when you’re sarcastic,” Chris said in a low voice before blowing her a kiss.

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “You’re right,” he whispered. “You should spank me.”

  “You think you’re so cute,” she hissed as the two girls returned.

  “I’m sorry about Ms. Shannon, Nonni,” Nikki murmured to Doris while giving her a warm hug. “She was a nice lady. I really liked her.”

  “We all did, sweetie.” Doris blinked away the tears in her eyes.

  Chris finished brushing down Traveler and led him out to the pasture. Doris and Helen waited for the girls to leave the barn to talk to him when he returned.

  “What did I do now?” Chris asked while coaxing Sterling to wake up with a treat from a jar in the feed room. “Besides mentioning barrel racing to Sierra?”

  “It could have been worse,” Doris said. “He could have mentioned trick riding.”

  “She’s got a point.” Chris tossed Sterling a second treat, which he caught in mid-air.

  Helen walked across the floor to hold out the evidence bag to him as he stepped out of the feed room. “We found this on Shannon’s desk. It’s addressed to you.”

  “Did you ask Shannon to order a book for you?” Doris asked.

  Shaking his head, Chris opened the bag and removed the hardback. The Last Thing She Said. “You have your own copy of this book. Autographed and everything. Why would I need to order it?” He opened it to reveal the front page, which was signed.

  He read the inscription:

  To My Dear Christopher,

  A Mystery for You.

  From Your Friend & a Fellow Mystery Lover,

  Mercedes Livingston

  Chris’s brows furrowed. “This is a joke.” He read the writing underneath the signature. It was that day’s date. He held out the book to Helen. “Did you see this?”

  As he asked, a white envelope dropped to the floor.

  “Yes, we did.” Helen knelt to pick up the envelope and held it out to him. “We also saw this. That’s why we’re here. It’s addressed to you and sealed. You have to open it.”

  “Are you thinking Shannon’s death was foul play?” Chris asked.

  “Chris, you left so fast with the girls, I didn’t get to tell you,” Doris said. “Shannon was acting weird this morning. She told me twice that she missed Billy and wanted to be with him. I think she committed suicide.”

  “We found no signs of foul play,” Helen said. “No obvious evidence of her taking an overdose or poison. Our forensics people have gathered up her teacup and things in her office, the library’s kitchen, and coffee station. We found this book and envelope addressed to—”

  “Why would Shannon leave a suicide note addressed to me? Mom was her best friend.” Chris shook the book in his hand. “This book is crazy. Shannon signed it. I recognize her handwriting. And she dated it today. Mercedes Livingston was murdered almost forty years ago. That’s just plain insane.”

  He went to Doris. “Mom, you said she was talking weird this morning.”

  “Yes, she was. She was talking about when we’d first met, but what she was saying was nothing like when we’d met. She said I was wearing my lilac pantsuit. I remember that pantsuit. I only wore it for special occasions. Well, it was not a special occasion when I’d met her. It was her first day of training at the library. It was August and we were in the middle of a heat wave. I don’t remember what I was wearing, but I know it would not have been that pantsuit. It would have been a sleeveless top, and light slacks or a skirt.”

  “She must have been suffering from dementia,” Chris said.

  “If she thought she was Mercedes Livingston then why was she saying that she wanted to be with Billy?” Doris asked. “The two don’t go together. She would have been wanting to be with George Livingston, who Shannon had never met.”

  “People with dementia don’t always make sense,” Chris said. “If people with dementia made sense, then there would be no problem with them.”

  “Chris, read the letter,” Helen said. “We need to know if it’s a suicide note.”

  Sitting in front of him, Sterling uttered a bark as if to back up her order.

  “Okay.” Chris dropped back against a stool next to the barn door. He slipped a finger under the flap and ripped it open. The envelope contained a handwritten letter that was several pages long. Chris recognized Shannon Blakeley’s elegant cursive script. “This isn’t a suicide note. It’s a novel.”

  “Shannon was a born writer,” Doris said. “She had an exceptional sense of observation and a way with words. If I’d told her once, I’d told her a million times that if she’d set her mind to it, she could have been a great novelist.” She let out a mournful sigh. “She’d tell me that all she wanted was to be Dr. William Blakeley’s wife and the mother of his children. I guess after their kids grew up and left home and he died, she lost all purpose for living.”

  “If she committed suicide, we need to figure out how.” Helen turned to watch Chris, whose brow furrowed as he rose from the stool and crossed the floor.

  “You never heard of dying from a broken heart?” Doris asked.

  “Only in the movies.” Helen stepped over to where Chris was slowly shaking his head as he turned to the next page in the letter. “What’d she tell you?”

  Chris’s mouth hung open. Slowly, he shook his head. “It’s … it’s an unbelievable mystery.”

  “What kind of mystery?” Doris asked.

  “Remember the Mercedes Livingston kidnapping?” Chris asked.

  “Of course,” Doris said with a scoff. “Shannon and I were talking about that just this morning. That’s why I brought my book home. She told me it wasn’t safe at the library.”

  “Everyone knows about the Mercedes Livingston case,” Helen said. “It happened at Hill House like ten minutes from here.”

  “Her husband was kidnapped, too,” Chris said.

  “What does the Livingston case have to do with Shannon Blakeley’s suicide?” Helen asked.

  “I attended that conference,” Doris said. “Suddenly, out of the blue, Mercedes’s agent had called the organizers for what was usually a small mystery writers conference held at Hill House. Mercedes Livingston offered to appear and asked for nothing. Of course, the conference organizers jumped at the offer. Some folks in the know speculated that Robin Spencer, who was also appearing, had talked her into it. Robin Spencer was truly the grande dame of mystery writing and I’d heard rumors that she had taken Mercedes under her wing.”

  “I bumped into Robin Spencer at that conference,” Chris said.

  “Quite literally,” Doris said with a frown. “Practically knocked her over.”

  “She gave us an advanced copy of her next book,” Chris said.

  “Can we get back to Shannon’s suicide novel?” Helen tapped the letter in Chris’s hand.

  “Mercedes Livingston’s literary agent stated Mercedes had left the hotel to go meet her husband for cocktails,” Doris said. “He was speaking at a business networking conference going on at the Bavarian Inn that same weekend. She didn’t show up later to accept an award after the banquet. Meanwhile, in Shepherdstown, George had told some friends that he was going out for dinner with his wife. When he didn’t return for that evening’s presentation following their banquet, friends and associates went looking. Mercedes’s rental car was gone from Hill House. George’s was still in Shepherdstown. The police were called in.”

/>   “Mercedes’s father got a ransom demand for half a million dollars,” Helen said with a nod of her head. “Horace Billingsley paid the ransom, but they never let either of them go. George Livingston’s skeletal remains were discovered buried in some thick woods in Kearneysville a decade later when the highway crews were building the bypass to Martinsburg. No one knows what became of Mercedes.”

  Chris held up the letter. “Until now.”

  Chapter Three

  My Dear Christopher,

  Well, my dear boy, I am sure this is a traumatic time. My death, whatever the circumstances they may be, maybe I have passed in my sleep—I am not sure. One thing I am certain about, I will have passed in peace and am now with Billy. Tell your mother not to be sad. I am not like her. Billy and the kids have been my whole life. My children are now grown. They need me no more. I can’t live without Billy. I’ve experienced that before, which I will tell you about. It is not living.

  I am certain that, if anyone can understand, you will. You see, Billy is to me what Helen has always been to you.

  I have made the decision to die to go be with him. No, it will not be a suicide in the traditional sense. It won’t be suicide at all. The mind is a powerful thing. My plan is to simply will myself to death—will my heart to stop beating—let go of life—and go to be with my Billy.

  Tell Helen that it is death by natural causes.

  Still, you have a lot of questions. Foremost, why am I writing this letter to you? It would be natural that I would write my final thoughts to one of my children—not the son of my best friend.

  The answer—I have told the kids everything that they need to know—the answers that I do have. My will and final wishes have been expressed and written down.

  However, there is one thing I have left to pass on and that I am giving to you, my boy.

  It is the mystery as I have noted in my inscription to you in my book. It also has today’s date.

  Now, I am certain that you are wondering how a woman who was abducted forty years ago and is presumed dead could have signed a book to you and dated it today.

  It was Mark Twain who said, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

  No, Christopher, I am not delusional. The inscription in this copy of my book The Last Thing She Said is correct. The kids will find a box of first editions that I have saved in the back of my walk-in closet when they clean out my house. I signed and dated them yesterday. Considering that they are first editions, they should add significantly to the estate. Don’t you think?

  Knowing you, you are anxious to move on to the mystery.

  Here is the solution to half of this mystery:

  The Disappearance of Mercedes Livingston.

  I was born Mercedes Billingsley in upstate New York. The biographies about my life got that part right. I had a privileged upbringing to say the least. Old school money. My father, Horace Billingsley, was a multi-millionaire. Mother was high society. Private schools. Europe in the summer. Skiing in the Swiss Alps. Debutante ball at sixteen. Hanging out with the Kennedys and movie stars.

  I confess, I had a lot of fun growing up. Who wouldn’t love living in a fantasy world?

  Mother loved to read. I think a few of my biographies mentioned that to explain how I became a novelist. I read some. I was a big fan of Nancy Drew. What those biographies failed to mention was that I thought Nancy Drew was a little lame. By the time I was thirteen, I’d have the mysteries figured out by page thirty. Delighted with how clever I was, I would read every mystery I could get my hands on and then dissect them.

  Eventually, I bored with this exercise and moved on to boys.

  George Livingston was the same age as me, and we were good friends. His father had done a lot of business with mine. His mother was besties with Mother. Our families traveled a lot together. I remember overhearing our mothers planning George and my wedding when I was only sixteen years old.

  He was attractive, came from a good family, and the object of many of my friends’ affection. Admittedly, he was quite dashing. I don’t recall ever objecting to the match up. In our social circle, that was what we did. I don’t even remember the big deal of dating. George and I would go to parties and dinners as a couple without my even realizing that we were a couple.

  Openly, our parents talked about their plans for our future marriage and children. George would go to work for my father. I would take my mother’s place in high society.

  We graduated from school. George went on to Harvard. I went to Penn State University because that had been my mother’s alma mater. She had selected an English and literature degree for me. She thought it would be useful with all the reports and letters and press releases I would need to write in my role as society matron.

  My entire life was planned for me.

  That was okay … until I met and fell in love with Billy Blakeley.

  We had met my first day of college in my history of American literature class. A group of freshmen football jocks strutted into the classroom. Spotting me, they immediately began hitting on me and making bets on which one of them I was going to go to the homecoming dance with. I was immensely flattered by their attention.

  Then, Billy walked in. Unlike the football players, he was lanky with long thin arms and legs. His hair was long, and he wore glasses. He carried a scuffed-up briefcase.

  I still have that briefcase.

  He stepped up to the podium and set the briefcase down.

  I was shocked. He was much younger than I expected any professor to be. It turned out that since this was a required freshman level class, the university had chosen for it to be taught by an associate professor—William Blakeley.

  One of the football players sat back in his seat and propped his foot up on the seat in front of him. “What a geek.”

  I could tell by the arch of Billy’s eyebrow that he’d heard him. “How many of you have traveled through pre-colonial America?”

  Every student in the class raised their hand.

  “No. I don’t mean how many of you have been to Williamsburg and rode in one of those horse-drawn carriages assembled in a factory in Ohio.” He stepped around the podium to the front of the classroom. “I want to know how many of you have hiked on foot with all of your worldly possessions strapped to your back”—he stepped up to where I was sitting—”through uncharted mountain terrains with only the sun and the moon and the stars as your guides”—his eyes met mine—“knowing that most likely your bed was going to be the cold hard ground—not certain if you would make it through the night without being killed by a wild hungry animal or a blood thirsty enemy? Have you ever met a Mohican? I’m not talking about in a movie. It is through literature, through books, that you are truly transported into a different world to experience it in a way that movies and tourist traps can never take you.”

  By that time, I wasn’t hearing a word he was saying. I was lost in his dark penetrating eyes. It was as if they alone reached deep into my soul and grabbed my heart—making me his and his alone.

  All of this happened without him even touching me.

  It was love at first sight.

  Of course, since Billy was my teacher, we could not go any further than exchanging furtive glances with each other. I scheduled several meetings with him to discuss the books we were reading that semester.

  Billy made it very clear that we could not see each other as long as I was his student. He was not going to jeopardize his career by dating a student—especially Horace Billingsley’s daughter. Besides, there were plenty of female students who liked his studious demeanor.

  It was calculating on my part that I devoured the novels that he assigned to our class. The more I learned, the more time that he would spend with me talking about books. The more time he spent with me, the better shot I had at winning his heart.

  It worked, but not in the way I expected.


  Not only did I fall in love with Billy, I fell in love with books.

  Through books, Billy took me into many different worlds—I experienced life in a way that I had never done before. I thought that since we had traveled to so many countries and met so many people that I was quite worldly.

  Man, was I wrong! The authors of these books opened my eyes to so many things, so many experiences, so many viewpoints that I had never dreamed existed. The world that I had been raised in was nothing more than a cocoon in which I was protected from anything that threatened our decadent existence.

  As I fell head over heels in love, I began to lose interest in those things that my family and friends had insisted were essential in our world. For example, my hair was not the acceptable golden color of my mother’s. It was dark. Worse than that. I also had this strange lock of white that shot out from the left side of my forehead. From the age of thirteen, I made monthly trips to the salon to have my hair colored to a lush bronze shade.

  Imagine my mother’s shock when I went home for Thanksgiving break with my hair an ombre mixture of bronze-alabaster-and-white streak.

  She wasn’t as freaked out by that as much as she was my lack of enthusiasm about seeing George. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy to see my good friend. I loved George. I’d always loved George. He just wasn’t the one.

  They didn’t have to be rocket scientists to figure out that I had fallen in love with another man. They saw it in the glow on my face when I talked about Billy.

  They didn’t try to squelch my enthusiasm for Billy. They didn’t encourage it either. This was a schoolgirl crush. There was nothing wrong with broadening my mind with books. Books were good. It was okay for me to be educated. I could spend the next few years enjoying the company of my literary friends.

  Then, when George graduated from law school and took his place with Father’s company, then we would get married. Everything would go according to their plans.

  Maybe that is how things would have turned out if it had not been for Lacey Woodhouse’s murder.

  Lacey had been my best friend. She had been homecoming queen during our freshman year. But she was so sweet—and smart, too. We met working part-time at the campus library. We both loved—I mean loved books. During my sophomore year, we became roommates.