“There’s a bit left,” I told her, just as Katie reappeared.
“Now, Mrs. Finch, you always say that eating sugar makes you anxious,” Katie advised, slipping Mrs. Finch’s feet into the fuzzy pink slippers. The gesture was surprisingly intimate.
“Never mind, then.” Mrs. Finch sighed, seeming frustrated by my slowness as much as by the advice that Katie had offered. “I’ll take it neat.”
I poureda smidgeas fast as I could. As I handed it to her, I decided to go with a direct approach. “Mrs. Finch… if your husband left of his own accord, where do you think he might go? Does he ever walk the grounds?”
“Not during pageant week. He’s either here with me or downstairs with the contestants.” Mrs. Finch took a sip. “The library and the solarium are his favorite places—besides our apartment—but security would’ve found him if it was that obvious.”
“What about the gardens? I’m only asking because I may join the search party,” I semi-lied. “I spotted a hedge maze in the center. Perhaps he… got lost?”
“I ordered the team to search high and low, to check every inch of the gardens. I also contacted the front gate, and I called all of our friends in New York as well as the firm that handles our money. No one has heard from him, and he left his phone, wallet, and keys here. It’s like he vanished into thin air.” She took a swig of her drink and then stared at me over the lip of the glass before continuing: “My husband is aging. He just turned seventy-five, and even though he doesn’t look it, he has a list of ailments a mile long. Gout, diabetes, high blood pressure…” She realized to whom she was speaking and trailed off. “Regardless, he doesn’t just”—Glenda raised a hand in the air—“wander off without letting me know his whereabouts. You may not realize this, but a twenty-five-year age difference at this point in our marriage means I play nurse far more often than I play wife.”
“Of course, Mrs. Finch,” Katie said, trying to mollify the woman’s mood as she pushed a wingback chair closer to the settee and sat on the edge with her ankles tucked out of the way. “I’m sure Mr. Finch will reappear any minute. Dakota doesn’t mean to pry.”
But that’s exactly what I meant to do. It was the only way to find evidence to get my aunt out of jail and ensure that the show continued so I could have a chance at winning the prize money. I needed those things to happen as soon as humanly possible.
Mrs. Finch ran a finger around the outside of the glass before handing it back to me. “Another, if you don’t mind.”
I did as bid and gave it back to her.
“That man has loved every minute of his life. Every event, every trip, every woman.” Here, she took another long gulp. “If he’s gone, there’s a reason.”
“But there was no sign of a fight. Or of a break-in,” Katie said, patting Mrs. Finch’s hand in a calming manner. “You really should try to think positively.”
“I know my husband. He wouldn’t fight. He would use his charm—or his money—to get himself out of a scrape. He may be negotiating with his captor at this very moment.”
A sudden possibility hit me. “You said that when you left him this afternoon, Mr. Finch was finishing a glass of whiskey and about to take a nap, right?” I held out the bottle. “He’s a relatively small man. What if—what if the whiskey is drugged, and someone carried him out?”
Mrs. Finch held her glass to the light, looking through it as if she might see particles of husband-disappearing molecules inside. “If the whiskey is drugged, I guess we’ll soon find out.” Then, she took the final sip.
I was concerned as she held out the glass for another. Did this woman have a death wish? Or was I so off the mark that she was mocking my conjectures? Either way, I was obviously doing great in my first few minutes as an amateur detective.
I refilled her glass and handed it back. Glancing around the room, I tried to keep my itching fingers away from the ledger in my pocket.
A moment later Savilla entered. She’d taken off her hat and outfit from earlier, and she’d changed into a plush pink robe and wound Velcro curlers through her hair. Her face was caked in some kind of mint-green mask, so only her eyes, now makeup-less, were visible. She carried a plate of toast as well as an assortment of tea cakes and scones that I was almost certain no one would eat.
As she served her stepmother, I felt entirely unnoticed, which allowed my eyes to roam to the art hanging around the room.
There were four paintings, each an abstract of a faceless woman wearing a sash and crown. I moved closer to the piecenearest me while Savilla and Katie continued to fuss over Mrs. Finch. In the corner of the first canvas, I caught the name of the subject and the painter.
Miss 1990 by Frederick Finch.
Miss 1990. That was the year that my aunt had won. I inched nearer to the picture to find any defining features of Aunt DeeDee. Beyond the blond hair, which each of the women in the paintings seemed to have, I couldn’t find anything… except for… my eyes scanned the subject until they landed on my aunt’s collarbone.
There it was. The faintest purple smattering of paint on the right side of her clavicle. My aunt’s oval birthmark.A hemangioma, my mother had said, telling me the technical term the first time I could remember asking about it as a child when I pointed to a similar mark, this one heart-shaped, on my forearm. It was another physical trait that Aunt DeeDee and I shared. But I knew for a fact that she always disguised hers with makeup; she would’ve never let her birthmark shine brightly during the pageant, as Mr. Finch had suggested in his painting. I squinted at it again before moving on to the next one.
Miss 2001 by Frederick Finch.
The year of the missing winner and now the stolen crown. There was no way I could determine the person in that painting. No special marks and, like all the others, the subject was blond with a blurred face.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to wonder because Mrs. Finch caught me studying the painting and volunteered the information.
“That’s me. In my younger years. What do you think?”
Before I could stop myself, I asked, “How do you know it’s not the original Miss 2001?”
The three other women in the room halted in mid-motion.
