We hadn't killed Oswald. If anything, I only wished he were alive every second of every day so he could tell me what the hell was going on.
Leon snatched the paper, his face a mask of cold fury. "How could she think—" he snarled, his voice a viper's hiss. "She thinks we're murderers?"
Viktor's hand clamped on his shoulder, a grounding force. "We need to find her," he said, his voice firm despite the tremor in his hand. "We need to know where she's gone before she gets into deeper trouble. I don't?—"
He didn't finish the sentence, but the unspoken understanding hung heavily in the air, a silent specter of doubt and regret. Was that the reason behind Dessie's abrupt departure? The thought that she might have seen us as liars, as manipulators, churned in my stomach. No wonder she had that look of utter misery etched on her face when she left. In her eyes, we were probably just users, poised to discard her when convenient.
"We need to find her," I muttered, urgency threading my voice, "before she's gone for good." I straightened up, determination steeling my features. "Search the room," I commanded. "Anything that might tell us where she is now."
The next hour saw us turning her room inside out. We emptied drawers, flipped through books, and sifted through every crevice of her closeted space. My frustration mounted with each passing minute, the room becoming a testament to our desperation. I was teetering on the edge of a full-blown tantrum when Leon's voice cut through the chaos.
"Guys, over here!" he called from near her bed. We rushed over, finding him kneeling, holding a notepad he'd found tucked against the pillow. The front pages were raggedly torn off, hinting at hasty action. But there, on the back cover, was a little note, scribbled in Dessie's unmistakable hand.
Ms. Wainwright knows something.
Oswald's housekeeper. It was a thin lead, but it was all we had.
"We need to go," I said with absolute certainty. "Now."
32
Dessie
"Ihoped there would be a better end for you," Letitia Wainwright drawled. "In spite of your enormous proclivity for being a troubled child, I must say I took a shining to you."
My breath snagged on frozen air, lungs refusing to function in the face of Letitia's confession. "You?" I croaked, my voice a rusty hinge struggling to open. "You killed Oswald?"
Her smile, sharp as a shard of ice, glinted in the pale moonlight. "Someone had to, darling. After all, he couldn't just keep rejecting me, could he?"
I was bound to a chair, I realized, as my surroundings came more into focus. I'd just recovered from what must have been a heavy blow. The taste of iron was rife on my tongue, salty to the point of being nauseating. The world seemed positioned on a see-saw, the portraits on the walls leering at me like grotesque puppets. This woman, the epitome of warmth and dusty teacups, had taken a life?
"Why, Ms. Wainwright?" I choked the words out. "And why—" I spared a glance at the room's other occupant. "Her?"
Lila Monroe smiled serenely at me as she raised a glass holding amber liquid. "I'll wait for her to tell you that."
"Well, there was the thing about his rejecting my advances," Ms. Wainwright confessed. "It was quite wounding."
It made no sense that someone who was usually so practical would kill a man only because he had rejected her sometime in her past.
"You really want me to believe you murdered my father because of a spurned love affair from decades ago? I rasped, clutching at sanity frayed at the edges. "It's over for me, isn't it? Then why bother with the half-truths, Ms. Wainwright?"
Ms. Wainwright hummed thoughtfully before dragging a chair with surprising strength, given her spindly libs, in front of me. It was just then that I noticed how lifelessly cold her eyes looked.
They mirror mine,I suddenly thought.Hollow. Bereft of any love or anything joyful.
Letitia's smile softened, a predatory sheen lurking beneath. "Ah, Dessie," she sighed, her voice a silken snare. "You were always the little thorn in my side, weren't you? Always defying, disrupting. I thought Oswald would tire of you soon, like the others. Then, it would be just us, as it was meant to be."
"Did you find the newspaper clippings in the file with your name on it?" she asked in a matter-of-fact tone.
My mind reeled, piecing together the fractured fragments of truth. "That was you?"
"Oh, darling," she cooed, barking out a short laugh. "I was in this game long before you came. My husband and I practically began the service as our brainchild. It was how we built our fortune before the authorities got to us. When that happened,I was able to play damsel-in-distress and earn Oswald's sympathy."
"Why would he believe you?"
"Well, if you've noticed, he has a kink for fixing broken women."
My throat felt drier than it had before.