“OK,” I said, bracing myself for the worst, because things were trending down so it was only fitting he would have more bad news.
“The person who called to tell me Louisa had passed, well, we’re not sure she was who she said she was.”
I shook my head dumbly. “What does that mean?”
“We found out that Louisa had passed in a voice mail left by her nurse. But when I played the message for Winnie, she didn’t recognize the voice. So we called the nurse. She had no idea Louisa had died. Winnie was right; it wasn’t her. Which means the person who called us . . .”
His voice trailed off, like he was expecting me to finish the sentence for him. So I asked: “What about the person who called you?”
“She was an impostor.”
My brain was spinning. My throat felt dry as hay. “Did you speak with this . . .” I stumbled on the word. “Impostor?”
“No. She just left a message on my voice mail.”
“Can I hear it?”
“Sure.”
He took out his phone and hit play. “This is Silvia Hernandez . . .” And of course I recognized the voice immediately.
Because it was mine.
CHAPTER 41
* * *
NATHAN
I watched her face as I played the message. “Tu tía está muerta. Your aunt is dead.” Panic spread up her neck like a bad rash. If she didn’t want me to know it was her, then she wasn’t a very good actress.
“Nathan,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this . . .”
My heart was pounding in my ears. Is she actually going to admit it?
“But that’s me.”
Her confession was like a dam breaking—shock, disappointment, rage, terror rolled over me like a torrent of icy water. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a single reason why a person in the sane universe would do something so inexplicable and diabolical; so I had to ask, “Why? Why would you do that?”
“I didn’t know,” she insisted. “She tricked me!”
“Tricked you how?”
“It was a script,” she said. “I thought Silvia Hernandez was a character in a TV show.” She explained how Louisa had given her a half dozen roles to read, how she’d played them with different accents, how it was all supposed to be an audition for some “crime procedural” that Louisa had offered to submit her for.
And I wanted to believe her. But it still didn’t make sense. Why would Louisa trick an actress to impersonate her nurse? Why would she want to obscure how she died? If Silvia hadn’t called the morgue, who did?
“What about the texts?” I asked.
“What texts?”
I took out my phone and showed her the text chain I’d just read to Winnie and Charlie. She shook her head. “I didn’t write those.”
I got a prickly feeling up the back of my neck as a hypothesis popped into my brain. It was positively insane. Which meant I had to do something equally insane to see if it was right.
CHAPTER 42
* * *
WINNIE
You would think exhuming a body would be difficult—that there would be police and lawyers and reams of paperwork involved, and that you’d need to have a good reason, like evidence of a crime or valid, verifiable religious grounds. But as it turns out, all it takes to dig up a grave is a shady funeral director and a thousand bucks. Given how cheap and easy it is, it’s a wonder people don’t do it more often.
Charlie and I waited in Mom’s parlor for Nathan to pick us up. We could have dug our mother up during the day, under the guise that we had found a plot we liked better, or had environmental remorse and wanted to save the earth and have her cremated. But instead we went full spooky and scheduled it for that night at midnight, after the groundskeepers had gone home and only the grave robbers and ghosts were about—because why miss an opportunity to make something ghastly even ghastlier? I was buzzing pretty good on my four-finger pour of Jack Daniel’s as Nathan’s car purred up the drive. If digging up a body in the dead of night wasn’t an occasion to get wasted, then what was?
“You ready?” Charlie asked as Nathan’s car pulled up, and I nodded, even though it was a stupid question. No, I wasn’t ready to peer into the casket of my dead mother—that’s what the damn whiskey was for.
We all three had agreed that we needed to find out why someone who wasn’t Silvia would pretend that she was, but there was a little bit of friction as to how to go about that. Charlie wanted to call the police “immediately,” but Nathan begged us to hold off until we’d seen the body for ourselves. “It was irresponsible of me to have let them take her before I got there,” he’d said. “We need to know what we’re dealing with before we report it to the police.”