“Next to the pictures of the Murder Room?”
Sara gave a weak smile. She was telling herself she should be like one of her book’s heroines and demand, “How dare you say such a thing to me?” then she’d storm out in a dress with an eighteen-inch waist. But Sara just felt guilt. All the bad that was happening to Bella was caused by Sara’s boredom and curiosity. “Everyone will leave on Monday.” If the police let us, Sara thought. By then, the skeleton will be exposed and hell will have been awakened.
Sara stood up. “I need to...” She couldn’t think of anything she needed to do except escape. She practically threw herself out the door. She didn’t dare go to her room for fear Bella would find her. Instead, she ran up the stairs to the bleak servants’ quarters, then up to the attics. Dear, calm Kate would be there.
Sara smiled at the sight of Kate and Byon together, surrounded by an untidy pile of boxes and suitcases and trunks.
“I can’t find the box,” Byon was saying. “Nicky probably threw it away. Probably threw them in the manure pile.”
Sara rolled her eyes. The Enneagram divided people with nine personality types. Byon was a four. A true creative, but with extreme highs and lows. Just like me, Sara thought, and grimaced.
“We haven’t even begun to make a dent in all of this stuff,” Kate said. “It will take us days.” When she saw Sara, her eyes were pleading for help.
“What’s the box look like?” Sara asked. “And more importantly, what’s in it?”
Byon sat down heavily on an old chair and dust floated up around him. He gave a sigh that told of all life’s burdens. “Writing used to obsess me. It was like a disease that overtook my body and mind.” He looked at Sara for understanding.
“Been there,” Sara said. “And you kept every syllable you wrote, then put it all in a box?”
He nodded.
“The parodies!” Sara said. “You came here after that night. Did you write about that night?”
Again, Byon nodded.
“Hell and damnation,” Sara said. “Get up and start looking. Tell us the size and color of the box. Kate! Call Jack. He can help search.”
“He’s with Nadine. She’s up to something.”
“Probably getting his clothes off,” Byon said.
Sara and Kate turned angry faces to him.
“I’m in the midst of virgins. Stop the scowls. The box is about this big and it’s blue. Maybe green.”
“When did you last see it?”
“It...” His head came up. “I stayed in Nadine’s room after that night.”
“Of course you did,” Sara said. “Finest in the house.”
“Why not?” Byon said. “They all abandoned Nicky. I was the only true friend he had.”
Sara’s anger came to the surface. “Nadine left because she was pregnant with the child of a man who she believed abandoned her. Clive escaped years of bad treatment. Willa ran away because Nicky told her all of you were sick of giving her sympathy, no matter how much she paid for it. And Sean was gone because he was dead. Heaven only knows what happened to poor Diana.”
Byon was unflustered. “Whatever their excuses, I was the only one here.”
“You—” Sara took a step forward.
Kate placed herself between Byon and her aunt. “What happened to Nadine’s things? Did she ask for them to be sent to her?”
“She turned her back on everything,” Byon said. “Left her clothes and her friends. She—”
“Well, then, let’s look for them,” Kate said. “Find Nadine’s clothes and we’ll probably find your box of writing.”
“Unless you wore them out,” Sara said to Byon.
His lips twitched. “Only a few hats, darling. The rest didn’t fit.”
Sara laughed and the anger was gone.
It took them thirty minutes to find an old-fashioned trunk full of clothes fashionable about twenty years before.
“These are gorgeous.” Kate pulled out a sky blue cashmere dress and a Chanel bag.
“Only the best for our Nadine.”
Sara was leaning so far over the trunk she was half inside it. She was tossing clothes out to Byon and Kate. When she got to the bottom of the trunk, she had to brace herself at the side, but she came up with a red leather portfolio.
“That’s it!” Byon clutched it to his chest.
“A ‘box’ of papers?” Sara said. “And blue or green? That is from Asprey’s. So who gave it to you?”
“Willa for Christmas.”
“I could have guessed,” Sara said.
Byon sat down on the top of a trunk and opened the clasp of the beautiful portfolio and began flipping through the pages inside. “They’re all here.” He sighed. “That means Nicky never read them. No one did.” He looked like he might cry.
“Good!” Sara said. “Then no one can plagiarize them. We need to go over it all and see if there are any clues in there.”
“They’re all plays.” He sounded as though that was a superior form of writing.
“The easy way out,” Sara said. “No having to bother with scenery descriptions and literary glue.” At their blank expressions, she said, “You know, getting people from one place to another. Standing or sitting? I used to use toy figures to keep up with who was where. Sex scenes were like directing traffic on an eight-lane highway, with everyone moving at a hundred miles per hour.”
Byon’s eyebrows were raised high. “Really? Maybe I should read one. Just for reference, that is. I could—”
“So what is in your plays?” Kate asked.
“I tried to write everyone’s part in that night.” He paused. “But back then, I thought it was all a joke. Diana and the groomsman had run off together. Quite amusing but not new. But after the little photo display...”
“Now it’s different,” Sara said. “What you wrote back then is very important.”
Byon smiled at that.
“Willa said she’d walk us through what she did that night,” Kate said.
“Poor Clive,” Byon muttered. “She followed him endlessly. Today it’s called stalking.”
“She was trying to please Nicky,” Sara said. “Trying to please all of you. She was terrified of being thrown out of your nasty little group.”
“We couldn’t afford to toss her out,” Byon said. “Literally. She fed us.” His head came up from the case. “And she bought lovely things for us. If only we could look back at that time. We could—”