Chapter Fifteen

Sara was looking at the shelves in the Palm Room. There were many empty spaces and each one had a three-by-five card telling what had been removed. It looked like Lenny was right, that Dora and her team of cleaners could do a good job. Now all she had to do was go to Billy's place and organize it all. What was she supposed to tell them? To look for something, but she didn't know what? And be sure and tell her when they found whatever it was?

On top of that, what was she to do if they found out about Harry Adair's juvenile murder? Say she'd found proof that Barbara Adair had a reason to kill Derek Oliver? They already knew that.

Sara glanced at her notebook lying on an ottoman. It was so pretty. It was light blue leather from Smythson of Bond Street in London. It seemed to beckon to her. Many things had happened since she woke at 2:00 a.m., including a chimney nearly crushing Jack, but nothing had taken the dream she'd had out of her mind. The faces of the people haunted her. The not-pretty girl. The two young men who looked alike but obviously weren't in the same circumstances. Yet they appeared to be friends. It was up to her to create a story for them.

It was a story that she longed to get back to. But she couldn't. There was no way she could say, "You guys work on the skeleton and a psycho murderer who may or may not be here with us. I'm going to plot a piece of fiction. In my pretty blue notebook." Ha ha. Her fantasy.

With a sigh, she picked up one of Dora's cards. VHS The Way Out, 1951. "Too early and too late," she mumbled.

"Isn't that redundant?"

She turned to see a young man standing in the doorway. It was the lawn mower boy.

"Hi. I'm Troy."

"Sara," she said.

"The scary-looking guy downstairs sent me up here to help you. I have the great and wondrous talent of being able to hook up VCRs to a screen. I don't mean to brag, but I can also attach them to TVs, computers, and iPads. I can probably connect to other things if needed."

"How about a black-and-white TV that isn't a flat screen?"

"I'm your man."

She was smiling but also looking at him intensely. "You remind me of someone, but I can't figure out who."

"Roy Wyatt? Or Jack? Maybe Cal?"

"What does that mean?"

He went to a shelf and looked at the labels on a row of VHS tapes that had been left behind. "Mom tried to keep me from finding out that she was coming here, but I knew. Unfortunately, she saw me with the lawn mower. Sorry I didn't finish the job on the weeds. I found that old machine in the garage. Dad used one on a movie and he let me play with it so I knew—"

"Mom?" Sara interrupted.

"Barbara Adair. Big deal movie star but just Mom to me."

Sara was blinking at him. "And your father?"

"Harry Adair, the producer."

She frowned. "Then what did you mean by Roy and Jack and Cal?"

"Oh. That. Bio father. That's what Roy is. My real dad liked..." He waved his hand. "You know. So Mom met Roy and made me."

Sara dropped down onto the ottoman. "You're Roy's son and Cal's grandson?" she whispered.

"I am. And Jack's brother. When I saw the chimney coming down, I yelled at him. It's my fault he froze. He called me Evan."

Sara nodded. "He was Jack's half brother. You look like him but with lighter hair and eyes. And you're taller."

"California sunshine and all that healthy food. When I started school—private of course—I'd never even heard of a candy bar. Mom doesn't know it, but I made up for lost time. Why are you looking at movies my dad made?"

Sara was too stunned to think clearly. "Murdered somebody when he was eighteen," she said before she thought.

"What?!"

"Oh! Sorry." She tried to recover herself. She could not tell him about his father killing a man and getting away with it. Or that Derek Oliver found out about it and blackmailed him. No, no, no. Or could she?

Troy sat down on the couch across from her. "You have to tell me all of it."

"That's for your mother to say."

"I'm not a minor who has to be protected."

Sara couldn't think what to say, so she was silent.

"I grew up in LA, the sordid city of sin. I know things normal people don't. I know about my father's proclivities. More than once there were, uh, problems. Mom used her influence to keep things out of the tabloids. She's not easily upset, but when she got your invitation to come here, she nearly passed out. I know she was upset about my bio father, but I think it was more than that. I want to know everything."

Sara was still silent, trying to decide what to do.

"Okay, what can I offer in return? I am Harry Adair's biggest fan. If you're looking for something in his movies, I probably know what it is. So what is this about murder?"

"Which one?"

It was Troy's turn to be shocked. "This is getting interesting. If I take you to Joe's Crab Shack for lunch, then go with you to the home and set up the VCRs, will you tell me all of it?"

"I..." Sara hesitated.

"How about entertainment? I heard that my brother can sing. So can I. Think Jack would sing a duet with me?"

When she spoke, it was soft. "I think that meeting you will make Jack cry."

"Me too." He took a breath. "So how many murders are there?"

"Including the execution that may or may not have been of an innocent man?"

Troy's eyebrows went up. "Yes! Every one of them. I'm like my dad and I do love a good murder plot."

Sara knew she should probably keep her mouth shut, but the need to talk to someone about everything was overwhelming her—and this young man seemed like a good bet. He wasn't born when Derek was murdered, so he was innocent of the crime. She had to be cautious about Barbara's side of it all but... "Joe's?" she asked.

"My dad used to say, ‘Give a woman fried food and tequila and she's yours.' Of course he meant making them sign contracts that weren't to their advantage, but still..."

Sara laughed. "I'll pass on the drink, but I wouldn't mind a tubful of steamed seafood."

"I have a rental car here, and I know how to get there."

"That's all I can ask of life."

Smiling, they went downstairs.

Thanks to the wide, clean streets of Fort Lauderdale, they were inside the darkened Joe's Crab Shack just minutes later. They were seated and their order was taken.

"Start talking," he said.

She took a moment. "It's like we have pieces of a puzzle but we don't know how they fit together. We don't even know the picture they'll make when we complete the puzzle."

"My dad would have used that line in a movie."

"Thanks," she said.

"Okay. Start with Derek Oliver. I've picked up enough to know you found his body."

Sara hesitated. What should she tell him and not tell him? Certainly nothing about the jewels and the hedgehog. "Basically, the man threw a week-long party and invited people he was blackmailing."

Troy's eyes widened. "And he was threatening my mother about some long-ago murder?"

"Yes, but she didn't know that. Sorry, but your father played a dirty trick on her. He told her he was being blackmailed but for another reason."

"You don't have to tell me for what," he said. "So Mom got here and was told Dad murdered someone when he was very young?"

"That's what we think. Derek Oliver said there was a movie and a script involved. We assume that was his proof."

"No," Troy said. "Maybe there's a script but there's no movie of that."

"How can you be sure?"

"I know all his movies."

"This happened in the forties when Harry was still a teenager," Sara said. "It would have taken him years to get where he could make his own movies. If it's a film you don't know about, maybe it has a forbidden subject. Do you think it might have been two gay men? If so, would it have been shown in the fifties? Sixties? No. The seventies might have done an art house showing. Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast was ridiculed then, because we knew the truth about the Beast."

Troy leaned back against the booth. "What do you achieve if you prove that my dad murdered someone then turned the whole thing into a movie? You'd learn my mother had a strong motive for killing the man to shut him up?"

Sara wasn't going to be coy. "We already know that she does. But then, they all have motives."

Their food came and for a while they were silent. "Mind if I take on the job of proving that my parents are innocent?"

"I would love that!"

He smiled. "You're on. So tell me about this execution."

"We know next to nothing, but we keep running across it. James Lachlan willed his house and grounds—that used to be worth a lot of money—to his oldest living descendant. The poor man died alone because of the rotten year of 1944. Billy used to light candles and tell it as a ghost story."

"I don't have candles, but I'd like to hear it. Know any available storyteller?"

Sara smiled. "I might be able to tell a bit. It's a very simple story. James's nephew killed a man and was hanged for the crime. James's son was so upset that he ran away and was never seen again. In that same hideous year, James's wife ran her car into a tree and died. Three deaths in one year. I can't imagine. The poor man never remarried, just spent most of the rest of his life in his Palm Room." Sara's head came up. "Although, I just found out that Mr. Lachlan liked Cal a great deal."

"My grandfather."

"He was. Oh, but I wish you'd met him! He was the kindest, smartest, most wonderful man who ever lived."

"You were in love with him?"

"With all my heart," she said.

"So why didn't you marry him?"

"Think I could get a refill of iced tea?"

Troy saw her shut-down look and didn't push further. "That makes three murders. The question is: How are they connected?"

"We have no idea—or even if they are connected. Derek Oliver and Lachlan House. That seems to be where the tie is."

"Why did Oliver want to meet at Lachlan House?" Troy asked.

"He was hitting up Billy's brothers for money, and they sent him to the house to spy on Billy. While he was there, he found out about the murder Harry committed."

"And was never charged with, nor was it spoken about. He got away with it until Oliver found out about it. Somehow. Do I have that right?"

"Yes," Sara said, smiling at his grasp of it all.

"Dates?" he asked.

"Nephew executed 1944, Harry allegedly murdered a young man—a would-be, nobody actor according to your mother—in '45."

"Interesting that the dates are so close together." He took a drink of water. "I don't see a connection, but still, James Lachlan amassed a roomful of my dad's movies. I guess it's too much to hope he was just a rabid fan."

"As I said, maybe one of those films tells the story of the murder Harry committed. As a writer, I'd never forego telling a good story that I had experienced. I'd just hide the truth in the plot."

He gave a small smile. "Does that mean that in one of your books is the story of why you didn't marry my grandfather?"

"Yes," she said. "It's there, but no one knows which story or what book."

"And no one knows that one of my father's mystery movies is a true story."

"Aren't some of them about rage that drives a person to insanity?"

"‘Passion' is what Dad called it. If it was a story about two gay men, as you said, the world then wasn't ready for a movie about it."

"So we need to look for a story that might have different genders."

Troy nodded, but then looked up. "Or we could skip it altogether. We could forget the faraway past and just look at that one week. Oliver was blackmailing them, so we try to find out which one of them killed him to shut him up."

"So who?" she asked. "Which one of these very nice people is going to have his or her life ruined by an evil man like Derek Oliver? Lea? Your mother? Rachel, who wasn't supposed to be there? Reid? He seems mostly to have cut the grass." Sara wasn't going to tell that Reid would own the house until it was made public.

"I get your point. Something really big drove one of them into a killer rage." He paused. "It looks like we need to try to find out anything that is remotely related to this. Maybe there will be clues that lead to a solution."

Sara smiled widely. "I think you might have inherited Cal's brain."

"I'll take that as a compliment. Tell me about my dad."

That caught her off guard. "Oh. Well. Uh." She quit talking.

"How can I tempt you? How about I do what I used to do for Dad? While I take care of all the people at the retirement home, you can stay in a room alone with your notebook for one whole hour."

"Ninety minutes," she shot back.

"You're on. Now tell me about Roy."

"Sugarcoated or the truth?"

"One hundred percent true. I can take it."

"Jack has Roy's motorcycle, and when your mom saw him on it, she fainted."

Troy looked at her in surprise.

When the waitress returned and took their plates, Troy made two orders of three scoops of ice cream. Sara protested. Too many calories.

"I'll eat them if you don't want yours. What kind of motorcycle is it?"

"A huge Harley. Really big. Very noisy."

"More," Troy said.