The Other Lady Vanishes (Burning Cove #2)(27)

The turban that Zolanda had worn during her final performance sat on a coffee table. It looked as if it had been tossed there in a careless manner. A tuxedo coat was draped over the back of a chair. It looked too small for a man. Adelaide concluded it was probably the jacket that Thelma Leggett had worn in her role as Zolanda’s assistant.

For some reason Adelaide found herself drawn to the turban. She studied it for a long moment and thought about Zolanda’s last prediction. Mark my words, someone in this theater will be dead by morning.

There was an empty glass next to the turban, a small residue of what looked like whiskey inside.

She could hear cupboard doors opening and closing overhead. Jake was making his way very quickly through the upstairs rooms.

She wandered around for a time with absolutely no idea what she was looking for.

She was about to give up on the living room and try her luck in the kitchen, when she caught the glitter of what looked like a chunk of broken glass on the floor beneath the bottom shelf of the liquor cabinet. The shard was a deep blue color.

There was a lot of glassware in the cabinet but none of it was cobalt blue.

She took a handkerchief out of her handbag, crouched beside the cabinet, and started to reach for the piece of glass.

She froze when she realized that she was not looking at a shard of blue glass. She had been about to pick up the elegant stopper of a cobalt blue cut crystal perfume bottle.

She stared at the stopper in disbelief. All she could think about in that moment was the black velvet case on Ormsby’s office desk, the case containing a dozen cut crystal perfume bottles. She had been trapped at Rushbrook long enough to learn a number of things about the inner workings of the asylum. She knew that Ormsby didn’t distill perfumes—he crafted illicit drugs. Some of those drugs ended up in elegant crystal perfume bottles.

She reminded herself to think logically. Zolanda had done very well in the psychic business. She had no doubt owned several bottles of expensive perfume.

She used the handkerchief to pick up the glittering crystal object. She brought the stopper close to her nose and sniffed very cautiously. There was no scent, no trace whatsoever of perfume. How long did the fragrance of a perfume cling to crystal? She had no ready answer. But she knew a lot about the drug called Daydream. It was odorless and tasteless.

She took another look around the living room. There was no sign of the other portion of the perfume bottle. Only the stopper remained.

It could not be one of the bottles in the black velvet case, she told herself. How could a fake Hollywood psychic possibly be linked to the Rushbrook Sanitarium?

She had to get control of her growing paranoia. She was starting to sound a lot like the other inmates on ward five. The blue perfume bottle stopper was just a blue glass object. It had obviously been part of a very expensive bottle of perfume, but there were probably thousands of bottles just like it.

However, if the police concluded that Zolanda had been murdered, and if they discovered a link between the sanitarium and the psychic to the stars, and if they discovered that there was an escaped mental patient working as a tearoom waitress in Burning Cove, said escaped patient would probably become the number one suspect in the murder.

There were a lot of ifs involved, but if they proved to be true, she would have to be prepared to disappear again.

She put the stopper back down on the floor beneath the cabinet where she had found it. The police might notice it but she doubted that they would see it as significant. It was just part of a perfume bottle.

Shaken, she went down the hall to the large kitchen.

There was a half-full sack of Enlightenment on the tiled counter. A teapot and a kettle stood beside it. Zolanda had not run out of her special blend.

“Damn,” Adelaide said softly.

A movement in the doorway made her spin around. Jake stood in the opening. He looked at the tea things.

“Can I assume that bag on the counter contains Zolanda’s special tea?” he asked.

“Yes,” Adelaide said. “What’s more, there is plenty of it. Why would Thelma Leggett lie? Why would she call me this morning and insist that I come over here immediately?”

Jake met her eyes. “You know the answer to that as well as I do.”

“She was trying to set me up to take the fall for the murder of Madam Zolanda.”

“Obviously,” Jake said. “And I can think of only one good reason why she would do that.”

“She’s probably the person who is responsible for Zolanda’s death.”

“If I were the detective investigating this death, I’d certainly consider Leggett my number one suspect,” Jake said. “However, it’s possible that she simply got scared when she found the body, and decided to run. Regardless, I think she took Zolanda’s secrets with her.”

“You didn’t find the diary you are after, did you?”

“I didn’t find it or anything else that looked like blackmail material.”

“Maybe Thelma Leggett murdered Zolanda for her stash of extortion secrets,” Adelaide said.

“At the moment Leggett is at the top of my personal list. But if I’m right about Zolanda collecting blackmail secrets, we’ve got a long list of mostly unidentified suspects. She was playing her psychic games with some of the most powerful people in Hollywood. The studios employ fixers whose job it is to get rid of extortionists like her.”