The Only One Left by Riley Sager

THIRTY-SEVEN

I find Mrs. Baker in the kitchen, corkscrew in hand, opening a bottle of Cabernet on the counter. She looks up, surprised to see me enter from the hallway and not the service stairs.

“Is everything all right with Miss Hope?”

“Yes, Lenora,” I say. “Virginia is fine.”

The corkscrew goes still. Just for a moment. Then she yanks, uncorking the bottle with a whisper-like pop.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Her denial, ironically, confirms my suspicion. The rigid way she stands, her forced smile and her steely blue eyes are an exact re-creation of the uncovered portrait in the hall.

“Maybe this will help,” I say, removing Mary’s alleged suicide note from my pocket and slapping it onto the table.

The woman pretending to be Mrs. Baker scans it, cool as a cucumber, before filling a glass with wine. As she does, I swipe the corkscrew from the counter. Considering the conversation we’re about to have, I don’t want a sharp object within her reach.

But I do want one in mine.

The corkscrew goes into my pocket as Lenora Hope—the real one—takes a sip of wine and says, “Am I supposed to know what this is?”

“Mary Milton had it in her pocket the night she died. Detective Vick thought it was a suicide note. But no one types that way. No one but your sister. Who typed it after she revealed to Mary who she really was, apologizing for pretending to be someone else for so long.”

Whether Virginia—the real one, the living one—planned on officially revealing it to me is unclear. I think she wanted to. After what happened to Mary, I suspect she feared doing it. But she never lied to me. Nothing she typed was untrue. When I asked who’d been in her room at night, she provided an honest answer.

Virginia.

Her real name.

When I asked who’d used the typewriter during the night, she gave the same truthful response as when I asked her who Mary was afraid of.

Her sister.

The woman standing directly across the counter from me.

“But you already know this,” I tell her. “You knew it when you shoved Mary off the terrace.”

Lenora grips her wineglass so tightly I fear it might shatter. “I did no such thing! She killed herself.”

I pat my pocket, feeling the corkscrew’s curved ridge and the knifepoint sharpness of its tip. “We both know that’s not true.”

“Whatever happened to that poor girl has nothing to do with me.”

“But it does,” I say. “Because she knew you’ve been hiding the fact that your sister is alive and that you’re really Lenora. How long has it been going on?”

“A long time,” she says, admitting at least one thing—Mrs. Baker, she of the unknown first name, is indeed the infamous Lenora Hope. “Almost all the way back to the murders.”

Fifty-four years. A staggering amount of time.

“Why did you do it?” I say. “And how?”

“Which part?” Lenora says between giant swallows from her glass. Already, the wine is doing its job. She’s looser now, and far more forthcoming. “Faking my sister’s death or forcing her to assume my identity?”

“Both,” I say, my head now spinning from literally all of it. “What really happened that night?”

“I can only tell you what I experienced.” Lenora climbs onto a stool and sits across from me, elbows on the counter. As if we’re best friends out for a drink. As if any of this is normal. “I was upstairs in my room, sitting at my dressing table and listening to my record player while pretending I wasn’t hiding from everything going wrong in this house.”

It’s easy to picture because I spied on her doing exactly that last night.

“It had already been a long, terrible night,” she says. “Things happened. Awful things. And then it escalated. And then everything went quiet. Eventually, I decided to go downstairs and see if everything was okay.”

“It wasn’t,” I say.

When Lenora shakes her head, I spot a glint of moisture in her telltale blue eyes. Tears that she refuses to let fall.

“I found my mother on the Grand Stairs. Dead, of course. I knew that right away. There was blood . . . everywhere.” Lenora pauses, shuddering at the memory. “I started screaming and running through the house like a chicken with its head cut off. My God, that’s a terrible saying. Still, it fits my reaction that night. Running and screaming. Screaming and running. Right into the billiard room, where I saw my father.”

As she takes another sip of wine to fortify herself, I think about how it must have felt to walk into that room, to see her father slumped over the pool table, to notice the blood trickling into the table pockets.

“I ran to the kitchen, phoned the police, and told them my parents had been murdered.”

I nod, because it tracks with what Detective Vick told me about the police getting the call shortly after eleven.

“I then went looking for Virginia. I found her hanging in there.” Lenora nods toward the kitchen doorway and the ballroom down the hall just beyond it. “She was hanging from one of the chandeliers. I should have tried to take her down. I realize that now. But I thought she was dead, just like my parents. Faced with such an irrational situation, I could only behave in an irrational manner—I went out to the terrace and screamed. Out of fear and grief and confusion. I screamed until my throat seized up and I couldn’t scream anymore. That’s when the police arrived.”

Lenora traces the rim of the wineglass with her index finger as she tells me about the cops finding her family presumably dead and no one else in the house but her.

“They looked at me like I was a maniac,” she says. “Even though I’d done nothing wrong. The first words I told them were ‘It wasn’t me.’ Which only made them suspect me more. The complete opposite of what I intended. They sat me down in the dining room and asked me all sorts of awful questions. Who else was here? Did I have a reason to want my family dead? And I just kept giving them the same answer: ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’ ”

I get déjà vu listening to her, thinking about me in a featureless interrogation room, Detective Vick’s accusatory stare, the reels of the tape recorder going round and round.

“Then a miracle happened,” Lenora says. “One of the cops yelled from the ballroom that Virginia was still alive. It turns out the noose around her neck wasn’t much of a noose at all. That haphazard tangle of rope is likely what saved her life. It allowed just enough oxygen in to keep her alive. Barely. No one expected her to live through the night, which was why she was taken upstairs to her room instead of to the hospital.”

She tips back her glass and empties it before filling it again and taking another sip. Steeling herself for the rest of the story. Because despite being horrible already, I know much worse is about to come.

“Dr. Walden, the family physician, was summoned,” she says. “He said Virginia was brain dead and that the rest of her body would soon follow suit. Only it didn’t. She hung on for days, weeks, months. It turned out Dr. Walden was wrong in every way. Virginia’s mind was very much alive. She seemed to comprehend whatever was said to her. It was her body that had died. She was paralyzed, motionless, unable to talk, unable to do anything.”

“So what you told me about the strokes and the polio were—”

“All lies,” Lenora says. “To cover the fact that the hanging had damaged her larynx, leaving her unable to speak, and snapped her spinal cord, leaving her mostly paralyzed.”

“Why lie about that?” I say. “Why go to all that effort to cover up everything?”

“You don’t understand what it was like for me. I was only seventeen, scared and alone. I had no other family and no one to guide me. My parents were dead. My sister was basically comatose. And suddenly I was in charge of Hope’s End, my father’s business, everything. My father’s attorney came to tell me the market crash had reduced the family business to ruins. My mother’s attorney then came to tell me I’d inherit millions from my grandparents when I turned eighteen and that Virginia would, too, if she managed to live that long.”

Lenora stares into her glass like it’s a crystal ball. But instead of the future, all she can see is the past.

“Meanwhile, the police kept coming around with their suspicions and insinuations,” she says. “The servants quit in droves. I had the others fired, worried they thought the same way as the police and might take matters into their own hands. My friends dropped me immediately. As did Peter.”

“Peter Ward?” I say, picturing the portraits in the hall, black silk crepe now hanging from three of them like party streamers. “The painter?”

“We were in love,” Lenora says. “At least, I was. After the murders, he wanted nothing to do with me. I never saw him again. Then there was my sister to care for and an estate to run and no one to help me but Archie, who did it solely out of devotion to Virginia. I knew he didn’t give a damn about me. And all I wanted was to be somewhere else—and someone else.”

Lenora looks up from her glass, seeking sympathy.

“Certainly you can understand that. You know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do. To have everyone leave, to grapple with fear and grief alone. In the past six months, haven’t you wanted to change everything about your situation?”

I have. And I did. I came to Hope’s End.

“Yes,” I say. “But my options were limited.”

Lenora flinches, as if this is the first time someone has pointed out that people like her have advantages people like me can only dream about.

“Mine weren’t,” she says. “When six months passed and it became clear the police had no proof to charge me of any wrongdoing, I realized how I could escape.”

“You had Virginia declared dead,” I say.

“It was easy,” Lenora says with a nod. “Especially with someone as corruptible as Dr. Walden. I took him to the garage, showed him my father’s remaining Packards, and said he could take his pick if he declared Virginia legally dead. I threw in another car for his wife if he also claimed that my health depended on getting rest and relaxation far away from Hope’s End. That settled it. Virginia was dead, I turned eighteen and inherited not just my share of my grandparents’ inheritance but hers as well. Then I departed for Europe on my doctor’s orders. Right before I left, though, I made sure to become Mrs. Baker. And Virginia—”

I exhale, astonished not just by the craftiness of her plan but by its cruelty.

“Became Lenora Hope,” I say.

I see you nodding, Mary.

You knew, didn’t you?

Good girl.

I had a feeling you at least suspected it.

Yes, my real name is Virginia Hope, although she’s officially been dead for decades. In that time, through my sister’s sheer force of will, I became Lenora.

How this happened requires skipping ahead, I’m afraid. Don’t worry. You’ll get the full story about the murders soon. But for now, I must jump to six months after that night.

I’d been confined to my bed that whole time, unable to speak, incapable of moving anything but my left hand. Useless Dr. Walden had declared me brain dead, when the truth was my brain was one of the few things about me that actually worked. I knew from Archie, by my side more often than not, that my parents were dead and that my sister had them cremated the moment the law allowed it. I also knew that she was the one everyone blamed for their deaths, although there was scant evidence to prove it.

And I knew that my name had been changed.

Not legally, of course. That would have left a paper trail, which is the last thing my sister wanted. This was a more informal change, slipped into my life as quickly as a knife to the ribs.

One day, she strode into my room without warning and said, “Your name is Lenora Hope. Mine is Mrs. Baker. Never forget that.”

At first, I was confused. Even though I was at my weakest and most addled, I knew I was Virginia. Yet my sister kept calling me Lenora, as if I’d been mistaken. As if all my life I’d been wrong about something so defining as my own name.

“How are you, Lenora?” she said every time she peeked into my room to check in on me.

At night, she told me, “Time for sleep, Lenora.”

At meals, she announced, “Time to eat, Lenora.”

One morning, I awoke to her sitting beside the bed, my hand in hers. She stroked the back of it gently, the way our mother had done. Without looking at me, she said, “I’m leaving for a while. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Archie will take care of you until I return. Goodbye, Lenora.”

Then she was gone.

For years.

How many, I’m no longer sure. Time passes differently when you don’t speak, barely move, spend most of your time watching the seasons gradually change outside your window.

She returned as suddenly as she had departed. Marching into my room one day, she said, “I’m back, Lenora. Did you miss your beloved Mrs. Baker?”

Again, I was confused. The whole time she was away, Archie had called me Virginia. Yet here was my sister, back to addressing me as Lenora. It went on like this for months.

“How are you, Lenora?”

“Time for sleep, Lenora.”

“Time to eat, Lenora.”

I surrendered eventually. I had no choice.

I was Lenora.

The physician who replaced Dr. Walden called me that, as did every nurse I had. I got so used to it that sometimes even I forgot who I really was.

And what of the real Lenora?

She was fully Mrs. Baker, of course, taking the place of the real Miss Baker, who’d fled Hope’s End just before the murders. The only time she ever acknowledged what she’d done was one night a few months after her return. She crept into my room and gathered me into her arms. A sure sign she was drunk. My sister never touched me when she was sober.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to do it. I had to have a life of my own. Just for a little bit.”

Since then, it’s been a game of pretend. That I’m Lenora. That she’s Mrs. Baker. That we’re not sisters but just an incapacitated boss and her devoted servant. And it’s how things will remain until one of us Hope girls dies.

I know she thinks it’s me who will go first.

Now my only goal in a life that had once been filled with many dreams and desires is to make sure that doesn’t happen.