“Listen, listen,” she said, angling to keep a broken sofa and a stack of boxes between her and Mallery. “I don’t want to die, so you have a lot of bargaining power.”
He came around the side. She fled again, kicking up dust on her way to the stack of chairs. She could see him through the cage of legs.
“You write up something, I sign it. A promise that I never speak a word about my suspicions. I know Mr. Wattlesbrook was an unpleasant man, clumsy with fire and sherry and probably very gassy …” What was she saying? Focus, Charlotte, don’t be a ninny. “You don’t hurt me, and I let you get away with murder. You see? We all win!”
She tried to smile. Still, he didn’t speak.
Nice try, said her Inner Thoughts. He already knows you’re too moral to do that.
Help me or shut up! she yelled back.
His hands flexed. Charlotte ran again.
The cat-and-mouse might have gone on much longer, but Charlotte stepped on her hem. It occurred to her, the split second before she hit the floor, that men invent fashion. Men who want women in ridiculously long skirts so just in case they murder someone and a woman figures it out, she’ll be so hampered by her ridiculously long skirts that she can be killed too.
She scrambled backward and blurted desperately, “I have kids. Two kids. Beckett and Lu.”
Mallery didn’t slow. He came at her like a man at work, his hands the tool to get the job done. He really was going to do her in. A small part of herself had been hoping she was wrong, but nope. Pessimism wins again.
Killing her would hurt her kids too. She knew this with the pain of a wound. It didn’t matter that Lu hadn’t wanted to talk to her on the phone or that Beckett had called Justice “Mom.” They would suffer if she died. They would cry and ache and need years of therapy, and would James pay for it? Probably not. So they’d have to submit to school counselors who might not be properly trained because of budget cuts, and what if that wasn’t enough and the grief sent them into drugs and alcohol and depression and meaningless sex and regrettable tattoo choices and petty crime leading up to serious crime and jail and shock therapy? What if lobotomies came back into vogue? And the surgeon messed up and they died?
And it would all be James’s fault. Wait … and Mallery’s too! It was as if Mallery had cornered not just Charlotte but also Lu and Beckett, as if he was coming at them with dangerous hands and intent to strangle, and they were scooting back and pleading for mercy, but he had none. No mercy for her children? That was so not okay.
In the old stories, this was the part when the heroine, overcome with terror, would faint, and the dastardly bastard would throttle her alabaster neck and leave her body for the wolves. Right?
No.
This was the part where Charlotte, heroine, remembered she was a twenty-first-century woman and a mother. This was Charlotte saying, Hell no!
Charlotte screamed.
But this wasn’t a scream for help. This wasn’t a plea, a panicked, earsplitting supplication for immediate rescue. Charlotte screamed the cry of attack.
Clearly, Mallery did not recognize the subtle difference. Showing no alarm, he was still on offense, and he knelt over her, his hands on her throat. That hurt, but her body, with or without her mind’s help, had a plan. She’d sat in on enough of Beckett’s martial arts classes to learn a few self-defense moves. When an attacker is strangling from the front, his hands are occupied, leaving every part of him open. Charlotte formed her fingers into spearhead shape and jammed them as hard as she could into his throat. He choked and his grip lessened. She took a deep breath and kicked him in the ’nads, as Beckett would say.
He was on the ground, and she stood up, but she didn’t stop kicking. A spare chair leg lay nearby, practically begging to be used as a club. Charlotte complied.
“You’re the ninny!” She hit him again. “You hear me? YOU’RE THE NINNY!” She hit him again and again. “No one just falls in love, you idiot. You chose to not love me anymore. You chose to leave me. You chose to leave the kids. One weekend a month and one month a year—that’s parenthood? You don’t go to marriage counseling, you don’t give me a chance to fight back. No, you sneak around. You sleep with Justice for weeks and come home to me all smug with yourself. You sick, sick, sick son of a—”
Charlotte gasped. She was solving more than one mystery. “It wasn’t just weeks, was it? That’s why you had me put your name on my accounts. You were already affairing around and preparing to dump me! You duplicitous, conniving, hardhearted, not-nice nincompoop. And you never even apologized!”
“Sorry,” Mallery mumbled desperately, one arm protecting his head, the other over his pummeled manhood.
“Not you, you idiot! Though you’re a ninny too.”
He made a scramble to get upright, and she cracked the chair leg on the back of his head. He crumpled with a groan. For an inherently dangerous man, he sure didn’t seem accustomed to getting beat up. She shoved over the tower of chairs, pinning him to the floor.
It took her a minute to push the highboy far enough from the wall to open the door and squeeze out.
“Help!” she screamed, running for the spiral stairs. “Bloody murder! Bloody, bloody murder! I’m on the second floor, and there’s been some seriously bloody murder up here!”
She was halfway down the stairs when Eddie reached her, followed by Colonel Andrews, Miss Charming, Miss Gardenside, and Mrs. Wattlesbrook.
“Are you all right?” Eddie asked.
“Mallery did it,” she said quickly. “He killed Mr. Wattlesbrook.”
“I say, Mrs. Cordial,” said the colonel, “you are spoiling the ending. We were supposed to go on this murderer hunt together, and I had prepared my own things to look remarkably guilty.”
Where had all the oxygen gone? Was she underwater? She looked to Eddie like a buoy in mid-ocean.
“He tried to kill me, Eddie. He’s in the secret room.” The air in her lungs seemed to be tied to a string and yanked out of her. She tried to grab hold of the end of that string, but it was getting so hard to see.
“I’ve got you,” she heard Eddie say before she straight-up passed out. And she wasn’t even wearing her corset.
Well, Charlotte, that was done like a true romantic heroine. You are on your way.
Home, six months before
Charlotte’s sister-in-law was responsible for Charlotte’s eighth postdivorce blind date, with a dentist called Ernie (a family name). They met at the bar of a restaurant for drinks and appetizers. They conversed easily, their sentences fitting together like one long monologue instead of disjointed back-and-forth. He looked at her more than at his drink.