Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [85]
That, however, wasn’t what had my heart pounding out of control in my chest. No, the absolute stunning part was when I saw the list of names of the other attendees of the big birthday party. And when I saw the group picture accompanying the article.
There were two familiar names in the article. And two familiar faces in the picture. One of those people was alive and sitting in a jail cell in Charleston.
The other had fallen to her death one hot night in June.
The Harringtons were the great-grandchildren of Josef Zangara. And the siblings of Mrs. Louisa Mitchell.
The mysterious Lou had been their sister. The identical twin of the woman Simon had killed.
THOUGH STUNNED by what I’d realized, I somehow managed to keep my head together. I felt certain I had figured out the whole sordid story of what had happened to Simon and to his uncle. I had no idea why, but Josef Zangara’s great-grandchildren apparently shared an obsession with Seaton House.
When they couldn’t get Roger Denton to sell it to them, they’d killed him. Perhaps they’d assumed Simon would sell right away, not wanting to bother with a broken-down old hotel far away from his busy lifestyle. Or, perhaps the Harringtons hadn’t done their homework very well and hadn’t realized Roger had an heir. I couldn’t imagine how furious they must have been, not only when they made that realization—but also when Simon proved as stubborn about selling as his uncle had been.
Having murdered once, maybe it had been easier to plan it a second time. Louisa had done the dirty work here at Seaton House, but she’d let her twin sister and their younger brother go after Simon in Charleston.
“Oh, God, Simon, where are you?” I asked as I went to the front window, staring outside for probably the twentieth time in an hour. I’d tried his cell phone but either he had it turned off, or else the whole town of Trouble was buried under a cellular curse.
Finally, knowing I’d lose my mind if I didn’t keep myself occupied, I decided to go back to the attic, to see if there was anything more I could find out about Zangara and his family. There were still trunks I hadn’t gone through.
Careful to take the key Simon had given me, I propped the door open with a chair. Our prankster hadn’t taken out any lightbulbs since my attic adventure, and it was broad daylight, so I felt pretty comfortable about being up here alone. My only fear was that I might be too far away to hear if someone tried to sneak into the house. I made a point of going down and checking every ten or fifteen minutes.
Working my way farther back into the attic, I sat in the dusty cavern, going through yet another trunk of old records. The place was utterly silent, not a pipe rattling or a hint of breeze blowing under the eaves. And I began to feel a little more anxious. I was, after all, alone on the top floor of an immense building where a murderer had recently been lurking. And that building stood alone near the top of a mountain.
“Wish I’d told Mark to bring on the cavalry,” I whispered, my own voice sounding awkward in the silence.
A few seconds later, however, the silence was broken. I heard a strange sound. Strange, and yet familiar just the same. It sounded electronic, a quiet double ding that was totally out of place in this setting. For a second, I had a mental lapse and thought I’d brought my laptop with me. Because the sound was reminiscent of the one my e-mail system made when I had incoming messages.
My laptop, however, was downstairs, on the first floor. I hadn’t brought it up here. There was no way in hell that’s what I had heard.
Genuinely curious, I walked toward a shadowy corner of the attic, certain the noise had come from an area behind a huge sheet-draped piece of furniture. Tugging the sheet off, I shrieked a little bit when I caught sight of my own reflection in a warped mirror on the front of an old-fashioned armoire.
Dropping the sheet to the floor, I walked in a circle around the piece. It wasn’t until I’d stepped all the way behind it that