Page 120 of The Other Lady Vanishes

“Yes, but at the time I didn’t know about the drug connection. When we got to Rushbrook, that bastard, Gill, was waiting for us. I was admitted under an assumed name. At the time I really believed that Zolanda was doing me a great favor. Gill gave me an injection, a strong sedative. I woke up in a room at the end of a long hall on ward five.”

“That’s almost exactly how I got to ward five, except that it was my fake husband who had me committed.”

“I still remember the screams at night,” Vera said.

“So do I. Nights were always the worst.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Eventually, Vera continued with her story.

“I’m not sure what they had in mind when I first arrived, but it didn’t take long for Gill and Ormsby to decide that I was an ideal test subject for Daydream. I wasn’t insane like the others on that floor,” she said.

“That’s how you became Patient A.”

“Gill planned to sell the drug to anyone who could pay the pricefor it. But Paxton had even greater ambitions. He hoped to use the drug to control powerful people—wealthy industrialists, senators, maybe the president.”

“Talk about hallucinating.”

“They weren’t altogether wrong about the drug, were they?” Vera said. “It does work as they thought, at least to some extent. In addition to being a strong hallucinogen, it makes a person susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. How do you think I got Zolanda up on that roof?”

“Did you push her off the parapet?”

“No,” Vera said. “There was no need to go that far. She started seeing things in the darkness. She panicked and fell. But in the end I made certain that she understood exactly why I was there.”

“What about the others? Ormsby, Leggett, Gill. Even Paxton is dead now. They went down like dominoes. In the end the entire drug ring was destroyed. That was not a coincidence, was it? You wanted revenge on all of them. You succeeded in destroying them.”

“I admit I owe you and Jake Truett for Paxton’s death. I had other plans for him but you took care of that problem for me. As for Ormsby, Gill, and Leggett, it wasn’t hard to convince Paxton that he didn’t need any of them. He was so sure that I wasn’t very bright. He was also convinced that the Daydream had left my nerves in a very fragile state. I let him think that I needed him in order to survive the stress of Hollywood.”

“He believed you.”

“Yes.

“Paxton was convinced that he was controlling you,” Adelaide said. “He never realized that you were manipulating him.”

“He was only too happy to get rid of the others. He had his own grand plans for Daydream.”

“I know what happened to Ormsby,” Adelaide said. “Tell me about Thelma Leggett.”

“Leggett called me after she went into hiding. She told me that shehad my Rushbrook records. She said she would release them to the press if I didn’t pay blackmail. I agreed. She ordered me to leave the first payment in an amusement park in a small town on the coast.” Vera gave an elegant shrug. “I sent Paxton, instead.”

“You knew he would probably kill her.”

“Yes, of course. I also knew that he would grab the stash of blackmail materials, including my records. But I knew he would keep quiet because he had as much to lose as I did if those records hit the headlines.”

“I assume it was also Paxton who talked Gill into drugging Conrad Massey and sending him to that pier to murder Jake,” Adelaide said. “Massey was supposed to shoot Jake and then use the gun on himself.”

“That was the plan. But I knew it would probably go badly for Massey and Gill.”

“Because the drug is inherently unpredictable?”

Vera smiled. “And because I had a hunch that Jake Truett was too smart to get himself killed at a late-night rendezvous with a drug-crazed man.”

“You were right,” Adelaide said. “But why did Paxton want to murder Conrad Massey?”

“Massey didn’t know much about Daydream but he knew enough to be dangerous. He could be counted on to keep quiet as long as he had control of your inheritance. But it had become clear that he had lost you to Truett, and that meant he would soon lose your money. That made Paxton very nervous. He became frantic when he found out that Massey had survived the meeting with Truett. He knew that if Massey pointed the cops at Gill, Gill would, in turn, point them at Dr. Paxton, diet doctor to the stars.”

“So Paxton got rid of Gill that same night.”

“And then he joined me at the Paradise,” Vera said. “He wanted to establish an alibi in case he needed one. After he left the Paradise I went back to my villa. I assumed Paxton had gone back to the BurningCove Hotel. But I got an uneasy feeling early this morning. I telephoned his villa at the hotel. When there was no answer, I suspected that he was up to something. I was worried that he had gone after you again.”

---