Famous Last Words

That line wasn’t in the script. I looked up at him. “What?”

“Not ‘Marge’ — Madge. Attention to detail, Willa.”

“Right, right, sorry,” I said. “Um … Marge didn’t have the taxi fare.”

“Madge, Willa.”

I was trembling all over.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t you dare cry. It’s a five-letter word. Say it — Madge.”

“Madge,” I whispered. “Madge didn’t have the taxi fare.”

“Madge was never good for anything.” He picked up his wine glass and swirled it. “She was a hanger-on, a second-rate back-row chorus girl.”

“We used to have fun, though. She was nice, in her own way.”

“If I hadn’t shown up, you two would have spent the night in debtors’ prison.”

“I suppose so.”

“When I handed you your bag … the look in your eyes … I’d never seen anything like it. I’d never seen someone who looked so alive, from the inside out.”

The script said, Charice smiles into her wine glass, pleased.

I looked down at the table. No way was I going to be able to force a smile.

Reed leaned forward, getting into the dialogue. “On our honeymoon, in Namur … those were the happiest days of my life. I felt that I’d plucked a jewel from the night sky, and there you were — all mine.”

“I remember Namur,” I read. “The little boy who sold apples next to the hotel, and that old woman who kept offering to tell our fortunes.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I wonder what she would have seen. I wish I had known.”

“You do?” He set his wine glass down. “I don’t. I’m glad I didn’t know. At least I had some happiness before I figured out who you really were — why you’d married me.”

“Oh, no, Henry —”

His voice sank to a growl. “Days of happiness — followed by years of misery. The peculiar misery of a man whose wife sees him as a sucker. Someone to steal from, lie to. A plain old mark to be cheated and cheated until he has nothing left to surrender.”

“But that’s not true. I cared about you from the begi

Reed closed his eyes. A small, rueful smile came over his lips. “You may love me now, Charice, but I’m afraid you never did back then. If you had … why, life would have been so beautiful. Such a dream.”

“It can be one now,” I said. “The way I feel about you now …”

He looked up at me, and I met his eyes. I didn’t need the script. I knew this line by heart.

“This is the kind of dream you don’t wake up from, Henry.”

There was a long, heavy pause.

“Maybe for you it is, my darling. Maybe for you.”

The script said, Charice hears everything that’s missing from his voice — mercy, hope, and most of all, love. She fights to keep tears from her eyes.

The next line was Reed’s. “I suppose we oughtn’t to continue this charade any longer. I’ve lost my appetite anyway.”

“Please stay, Henry. Please let’s give it another try. I’m so different now. We’re both so different.”

“No, my dear. It’s no good trying to keep a thing alive once it’s gone. One last toast? Raise your glass to what we might have been. In another world, another life.”

Reed raised his glass.

“It says I raise mine,” I said. “But I can’t.”

“No, of course not,” he said, snapping out of character. “We’ll get to that after we run the lines a few more times. All in all, I’d say you did okay. I think we can work together and get a performance to be proud of.”

Charice raising her wine glass was the last thing on the page — on any of the pages I had.

The footage flickered in my memory — Diana standing and turning away from the table, her wine glass slipping from her hand, her slow descent to the floor as she realized what was happening. She had tried to grab hold of a little table. There was no little table in this room. So what if I tried to grab hold of the sideboard instead? What if I could reach the knife?

But what if we were only going to run that part of the scene once — and what if the poison Reed used to kill his victims was already in my body at that point?

Something inside me turned to stone.

If I had to die, at least I could try to take Reed out with me.

“So what did Paige do wrong?” I asked.

Reed snapped to attention. “What do you know about Paige?”

“Nothing.”

“Paige Pollan could have been a great actress.” He practically spat the words out. “But she couldn’t take direction.”

“So what did you do to her?” I swallowed hard. “She never finished the scene. You … you drowned her, didn’t you?”

Reed’s stare was perfectly emotionless. “She deserved it.”

“You did it here?” A horrible thought occurred to me. “Did you bring them all here?”

Was Marnie somewhere on the property at that very moment? I thought of the locked door in the corner of the screening room.

He frowned slightly, in a way that answered my question. “Whenever Jonathan went out of town, I would come here and explore. It’s a great house, you know. There’s an unfinished cellar off the chauffeur’s quarters that leads all the way to the guest house. That’s how I found Diana’s studio. How I found her movie.” He sat back, and his voice turned cold. “Paige refused to learn her lines. She kept messing up. I could tell she was doing it on purpose, trying to buy herself some time. You wouldn’t do that, would you, Willa?”

I shook my head.

“Finally I’d had enough. It was my third time — I knew how things were supposed to go. She was being difficult just for the sake of making me angry. So I gave her something, took her out to the pool, and then I … took care of her.”

“You drowned her … in Jonathan’s pool. And then moved her back to her apartment and made it look like a suicide.”

Reed smiled a ghastly, demonic grin. “Yes. But I took my time with it. I made sure she knew that she’d made me angry.”

A coating of cold fire spread over my skin.

“You made me angry, too, Willa. So I’d advise you to be as well behaved as you can for the rest of our time together. Because I can say with complete certainty that you’d prefer the easy way over the hard way.”

Part of me couldn’t even catch my breath. The other part of me was finally soaking in the idea that this was really happening.

I was caught by a psychotic serial killer.

If I couldn’t find a way out of this, I probably had two hours left to live.

And now he was telling me in fairly clear terms that I had two choices: one, cooperate, and make my death relatively easy. Two, fight back … and risk dying horribly.

It was as though Reed could tell what I was thinking.

“Want to know how I did it?” he asked, leaning forward. “I waited until the pills made her sleepy. Then I took her out and pushed her into the pool. She managed to get herself to the edge. And then I peeled her hands off the side and pushed her back out into the water. She was so tired she couldn’t swim anymore, so she tried to float … and I took the pool skimmer and pushed her down. But only for a few seconds. Then I let her float back up and try to catch her breath. Then I pushed her down again.”

As he spoke, my lungs burned and my stomach went sour. I felt as though I was there with Paige, being pushed underwater. I remembered the feeling, from my first night here, of not being able to surface. My whole chest ached – and my heart ached, now that I had a sense of the fear and pain she’d experienced in her last moments.

No wonder she was an angry ghost.

But where was Paige now — when I needed her? Why wasn’t she here, helping me? She’d been so eager for me to uncover her killer’s identity … but what if that was all she’d wanted?

I’d thought having a ghost in the house was scary. But that didn’t compare with the paralyzing fear of her having abandoned me.

Reed stood up and walked toward me. In my panic, I struggled in my chair and bumped the table, nearly knocking over the wine glass at my place setting.