A guest with a torn dress leaps to her feet. She shrieks and points. “It’s her! That girl! She tried to kill Mrs. McLean!”
There, in the smallest circle of light, stands Kiyoko. She holds a large, brass candlestick. Evalyn Walsh McLean is sprawled on the floor, forehead split apart with an ugly gash. She is bleeding.
And the Hope Diamond is missing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
In those long, lingering moments, in that small circle of light from a matchstick, there is both silence (who could speak at such a moment?) and roaring (whose heart was not thrumming?).
My breath sharpens as I take in the full scene.
This does not look good for Kiyoko.
Someone at long last flicks on the overhead electrical light. The guests stumble over the rubble of the evening and rush to Evalyn McLean’s side.
“She’s alive!”
“She’s been beaten, not shot.”
“That was a gun that fired, was it not?”
“The bullet hole is there! In the ceiling!”
“Blunt force trauma to the front of the skull.”
That last statement was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He twirls his significant mustache between thumb and forefinger, and he lifts his eyes to Kiyoko, who still holds the candlestick. All eyes turn in her direction.
“Her,” Blanck says coolly. “Lock her up.”
My panic feels electric. NONE of this was a part of our plan. Our revenge is derailed.
But I cannot help but look at this scene and have doubts.
She certainly looks guilty, I think.I have only known her a handful of days.
No, I chastise myself. She is trustworthy. This doubt is the residue of the evil I unleashed.
“I’m calling the authorities,” Doyle says. He strides to the telephone nook. “No one leaves. No one touches anything until the police get here.”
Two of the hulking bodyguards grab Kiyoko’s elbows. She wriggles out of one of their grips temporarily, but they still lead her away, kicking and yanking about, to a bedchamber down a short hallway.
“I did nothing,” she says, her voice echoing back to the guests. “It wasn’t me!”
But these guests have decided she is guilty, and so now she is, in their hearts. Guilty until proven innocent.
I feel ill, sodden with confusion and worry.
The guests at last make eye contact with one another after that harrowing deception they collectively experienced. ThatIcreated.
But none of them speak of it now.
Even though they are torn, tattered, the apartment a wreck, no one says anything. Not a word about the fire, although we all experienced the same two minutes of terror. It is too horrifying. It will make them seem obscene, insane, if they ask questions. It would ruin them socially to admit what they saw.
Nowthey feel what I feel daily: Was that real? Who were those voices? What do those images mean? And it angers me, that they react the same way I do: They dust themselves off and deny it. They toss back their drinks to calm their frazzled nerves.
“Where is the gun?” they ask one another, once the events of the evening have replayed in their minds. “Who fired it?”
Doyle is at the telephone nook, holding the earpiece against his ear. Into the mouthpiece, he shouts, “Operator? Yes, operator. Send the authorities. Quickly! We have an attempted murder.”
