The Other Lady Vanishes - Softcover

Quick, Amanda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0399585346 ISBN 13: 9780399585340

Publisher: Berkley, 2019

Synopsis

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Quick conjures up a celluloid world that will be catnip to fans of that era evoking the sensation it was plucked straight from the Warner Bros. vault."--Entertainment Weekly

The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Knew Too Much sweeps readers back to 1930s California--where the most dazzling of illusions can't hide the darkest secrets...

After escaping from a private sanitarium, Adelaide Blake arrives in Burning Cove, California, desperate to start over.

Working at an herbal tea shop puts her on the radar of those who frequent the seaside resort town: Hollywood movers and shakers always in need of hangover cures and tonics. One such customer is Jake Truett, a recently widowed businessman in town for a therapeutic rest. But unbeknownst to Adelaide, his exhaustion is just a cover.

In Burning Cove, no one is who they seem. Behind facades of glamour and power hide drug dealers, gangsters, and grifters. Into this make-believe world comes psychic to the stars Madame Zolanda. Adelaide and Jake know better than to fall for her kind of con. But when the medium becomes a victim of her own dire prediction and is killed, they'll be drawn into a murky world of duplicity and misdirection.

Neither Adelaide or Jake can predict that in the shadowy underground they'll find connections to the woman Adelaide used to be--and uncover the specter of a killer who's been real all along...

About this title

About the Author:

Amanda Quick is a pseudonym for Jayne Ann Krentz, the author of more than fifty New York Times bestsellers. She writes historical romance novels under the Quick name, contemporary romantic suspense novels under the Krentz name, and futuristic romance novels under the pseudonym Jayne Castle. There are more than 35 million copies of her books in print.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2018 Amanda Quick

Chapter One

The screams of the patients on ward five told Adelaide Blake that time had run out.

She stopped searching for the key to the file cabinet and went to stand at the door of the small office. She had not dared to turn on any lights in the laboratory. There was enough moonlight spilling through the high, arched windows to illuminate the long workbenches and create ominous silhouettes of the equipment and instruments.

The wails and shrieks and howls from the floor below were escalating rapidly. Something or, more likely, someone was agitating the patients. The ward on the fifth floor was reserved for the most hopelessly mad and insane. The locked rooms housed those who were forever lost in their own private hells. Some of the patients were afflicted with violent, paranoid visions and hallucinations. Others battled fearsome monsters that only they could see.

Soon after she had been locked in one of the cell-like rooms on ward five she had learned that the patients provided an excellent alarm system, especially at night. Nights were always the worst.

The nerve-shattering chorus of the damned echoed up the stone staircase. There was no one around to calm the inmates. The orderlies on the locked ward had been given the night off.

She could not delay any longer. If she did not escape now she might not make it at all. She would have to leave the file behind.

She left the doorway of the office and started to make her way cautiously through the maze of workbenches. She had plotted her exit strategy down to the smallest detail but the last minute decision to look for the file had put the plan in jeopardy. She had to get out of the laboratory immediately or she might not escape.

Originally, the Rushbrook Sanitarium had been the private mansion of a wealthy, eccentric industrialist who had intended to entertain on a grand scale. The result was a gothic nightmare of a house with five floors, endless hallways and the tower room that now served as a laboratory. The single redeeming architectural virtue as far as Adelaide was concerned was that there were a number of discreetly concealed staircases intended for the use of a large staff.

Most of the servants’ stairs had been permanently closed and sealed long ago. Others had disappeared under various waves of renovations and remodeling projects. But a few were still accessible. She had the key to one of the little-used staircases.

She was halfway across the lab when she heard the panicky footsteps on the tower stairs. Someone was coming up to the laboratory. Whoever it was would see her as soon as he turned on the lights.

There was nowhere to hide except behind Ormsby’s desk. Discovery spelled doom. Dr. Gill would order increased security for her. She might never have another chance to escape.

A cold sense of certainty sliced through the fear. If necessary, she would try to fight her way out of the sanitarium. She could not—would not—go back to the cell on the fifth floor. She would rather die.

She turned quickly, searching the shadows for something that could function as a weapon. She knew the lab all too well because it was where they brought her when Gill and Ormsby decided to give her another dose of the drug. In her desperate attempt to hold onto her sanity by focusing on an escape plan she had memorized every inch of the tower room.

She went to the nearest cabinet, yanked open the door and pulled a couple of glass jars off the shelf. She had no idea what she grabbed –it was too dark to read the labels—but she had seen Ormsby take a variety of chemicals out of the cabinet. Many were flammable. Some were highly acidic.

With the two jars in hand she hurried back into the office. Dr. Ormsby’s desk was neat and tidy. He was a fussy little man who was obsessed with his research, but orderliness was high on his list of priorities.

Aside from the usual desk accessories—telephone, blotter, and inkwells—there was one other object on the desk. The black velvet box looked as if it had been made to hold a woman’s collection of jewelry. But Adelaide knew there were no necklaces, rings or bracelets inside. The velvet box contained a dozen elegantly cut crystal perfume bottles.

She made it behind the desk with the jars of chemicals just as Dr. Harold Ormsby staggered into the darkened laboratory. It sounded as if he was gasping for air. He did not turn on any lights.

“Get away from me,” he shrieked. “Don’t touch me.”

Adelaide heard other footsteps on the stone staircase, the slow, steady, determined tread of a predator stalking prey.

Ormsby wasn’t trying to catch his breath, Adelaide realized. The doctor was in the grip of raw panic.

Ormsby’s pursuer did not respond, at least not verbally. Crouched behind the desk, Adelaide removed the tops of the jars. The acrid odors that wafted out made her gasp and turn her head away. She hoped the screams of the patients covered the small sounds she made.

She tried to keep her breathing as light and shallow as possible but it wasn’t easy. Ice-cold perspiration dampened her skin. She shivered and her pulse skittered wildly.

Ormsby screamed again, louder this time. The high, unnatural screech affected Adelaide like a bolt of lightning. For a few seconds she wondered if it had stopped her heart.

And then she wondered if lightning actually had struck the laboratory. A narrow beam of fire blazed in the darkness. Peering around the corner of Ormsby’s desk she watched the glow move past the office doorway.

Orsmby’s piercing screams rose above the cacophony from the fifth floor patients, the cries of a man who is being sent into hell.

Running footsteps reverberated in the tower room. Heavy glass shattered. Night air flowed into the laboratory.

Ormsby’s hopeless cries echoed in the night for another second or two. The suddenness with which they were cut off told its own story.

Adelaide froze as she realized what had just happened. Dr. Harold Ormsby had leaped straight through one of the high, arched windows. No one could survive such a fall.

In the shadows of the lab the fiery light winked out. It dawned on Adelaide that someone had lit a Bunsen burner and used the flame to drive Ormsby out the window. That didn’t make sense. He had obviously been terrified, but she knew something of the man. It was easy to imagine him pleading for his life or cowering in a corner but jumping to his death seemed oddly out of character. Then, again, she was not the best judge of character. She had learned that lesson the hard way.

The screaming from the fifth floor ward got louder. The patients sensed that something terrible had happened.

Adelaide heard rapid, purposeful footsteps crossing the tile floor, coming toward the office. She gripped the containers of chemicals and waited, aware that the only thing protecting her now was the noise from the inmates down below. The shrieks and cries would make it difficult if not impossible for the killer to hear the sound of her breathing.

The intruder stopped directly in front of the desk. A flashlight came on briefly. Adelaide prepared to fight for her life.

But the intruder turned and hurried quickly out of the office. A few seconds later footsteps sounded on the stairs.

The keening of the agitated patients rose and fell but there were more shouts now. They came from the courtyard below the broken window. Someone had found Ormsby’s body and was sounding the alarm.

Adelaide waited a few heartbeats and then got to her feet. She was shaking so badly she had a hard time finding her balance. She thought briefly of trying once again to find the key to the file cabinet but common sense prevailed. Escape from the sanitarium was the first priority.

She reached up to adjust the nurse’s cap pinned to her tightly knotted hair. When she glanced down at the desk she saw that the black velvet box containing the perfume bottles was gone. The intruder had taken it.

She selected one of the two open jars of chemicals to use as a weapon and left the other one behind on the desk. She picked her way through the moonlit lab. When she got to the staircase she descended cautiously.

At the foot of the stairs she paused in the stairwell and looked around the edge of the door.

The inmates continued to howl and scream through the grills set into the locked doors but the hallway was empty. There was no sign of the intruder.

Her room was located at the far end of an intersecting hallway. There were no other patients in that corridor. Earlier she had arranged the pillows and blankets on her bed in an attempt to approximate the outline of a sleeping figure but it looked as if the ruse had been unnecessary. The agitation of the other inmates and the commotion in the courtyard were providing sufficient cover to conceal her movements. The white cap and the long blue cloak, familiar elements of a nurse’s uniform, would do the rest. With luck anyone who chanced to see her from a distance would assume she was a member of the hospital staff.

The entrance to the old servants’ stairs was in a storage closet on the opposite side of the hall. She was edging out of the stairwell doorway, preparing to make a dash for the closet, when the patients’ screams rose in another hellish crescendo. It was all the warning she got. It was just barely enough to save her.

She retreated to the shadows of the stairwell and waited. When the screams faded a little she risked a peek around the doorway.

A man dressed in a doctor’s coat, a white cap and a surgical mask emerged from the hallway that led to her room. The black velvet box was in his left hand. In his right he gripped a syringe.

The only thing that saved her from being seen was that the masked doctor was intent on rushing down the hall in the opposite direction. He disappeared through the locked doors just beyond the nurse’s station.

She did not think it was possible to be any more terrified but the sight of the masked doctor leaving the corridor that led to her room sent another shock of horror across her nerves. Maybe he had intended to kill her, too.

With an effort of will, she pulled herself together. She certainly could not continue to dither in the stairwell indefinitely. She had to act or all was lost.

She took a deep breath, clutched the jar in one hand and rushed across the hallway. She opened the door of the storage closet.

A bearded face appeared at the steel grill set into a nearby door. The insane man stared at her with wild, otherworldly eyes.

“You’re a ghost now, aren’t you?” he said in a voice that was hoarse from endless keening and wailing. “It was just a matter of time before they killed you, just like they did the other one.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Hawkins,” she said gently.

“You’re lucky to be dead. You’re better off now because you can leave this place.”

“Yes, I know.”

She slipped into the storage closet, closed the door and turned on the overhead fixture. The door to the service stairs was at the back. It was locked. To her overwhelming relief, the key she had been given worked.

By the time she made it downstairs to the darkened kitchen on the ground floor she could hear sirens in the distance. Someone had telephoned the local authorities. The sanitarium was located a couple of miles outside the small town of Rushbrook. It would take the police and the ambulance several minutes to arrive on the scene.

There was no one around to see her when she slipped out of the kitchen. She inserted another stolen key into the lock on the massive wrought iron gate that the delivery vehicles used.

And then she was free, hurrying down a rutted lane with only the light of the moon to guide her.

She was not at all sorry that Ormsby was dead but his death could complicate her already desperate situation. It would be so easy for the authorities to conclude that the patient who had escaped the secure grounds of the Rushbrook Sanitarium on the night of the doctor’s mysterious demise was, in fact, a crazed killer.

She had to get as far away as possible from the asylum before the orderlies realized she was gone.

It occurred to her that one person already knew she had disappeared—the doctor in the surgical mask who had gone to her room with the syringe.

She wanted to run but she did not dare. If, in the darkness, she stumbled over a rock or a fallen tree limb she could twist an ankle or worse.

The emergency vehicles passed her a short time later. They never noticed her hiding behind the heavy shrubbery at the side of the lane.

Dawn found her standing on the side of a highway hoping that a passing motorist would take pity on a nurse whose car had run out of gas in the middle of nowhere.

She raised her hand to wave down a truck. The gold wedding ring on her finger gleamed malevolently in the morning light.

Chapter Two

Two months later

Burning Cove, California . . .

“Your new neighbor is back,” Florence Darley said in a low voice. She plucked the kettle off the stove and poured hot water over the leaves in the teapot. “That makes eight days in a row except for Sunday.”

Adelaide did not look up from the small scale she was using to measure a quarter pound of Tranquility tea. “We’re closed on Sundays.”

“Which only goes to prove my point. Mr. Truett has become a regular. I see he’s reading the morning edition of the Herald, as usual. Five will get you ten he’ll order the same thing—a pot of that very expensive blend of green tea you convinced me to order from the San Francisco dealer, no sugar, no teacakes, no scones, no cookies.”

“Mr. Truett does seem to be a man who likes to keep to a routine,” Adelaide said.

She did not add that Truett’s apparent preference for keeping to a schedule made it easy to time his morning walks on the beach. He never failed to show up at seven-thirty. He always walked for precisely thirty minutes. It was June and there was often fog in the mornings at this time of year but that did not stop him.

She was the one who was annoyed by the fog, she thought. It meant that she could only catch fleeting glimpses of him taking his daily walk. And she had to admit she had come to look forward to watching Jake Truett in the mornings. He might be a man of strict habits but he did not move like a man who was a stickler for rules and regulations. He did not march across the sand like a martinet. Instead he prowled the beach with the easy physical power of a large hunting cat.

Florence chuckled knowingly. “I don’t think he’s here every day because of your fancy tea. And he doesn’t come in because we’re fashionable these days. He’s not the type to care one bit if the customer at the next table is a celebrity or a garbage collector. Got a hunch you’re the reason our Mr. Truett has developed the habit of stopping by.”

Adelaide flushed. She was very fond of her new boss, not to mention extremely grateful for the job, but Florence’s newfound determination to play matchmaker made her uneasy.

After two months in Burning Cove, she was just starting to breathe more easily. No manhun...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0399585346
• ISBN 13: 9780399585340
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 448