I turned to a woman, the matriarch of this here hoity-toity club, if the pictures were any indication. By the upturn of her nose, she held herself in high regard. Either that, or she found my fascination with her drawing room distasteful.
I didn’t offer my hand. “My name is Charlotte Davidson, Mrs. Lowell. I’m here about Harper.”
“I’ve been told you are a private investigator?”
“Yes. Your daughter hired me. She believes someone is trying to kill her.”
A lengthy exhalation told me she probably didn’t care. “Stepdaughter,” she clarified, and my hackles rose instantly.
I wondered if my stepmother did the same with me. Corrected people when they called me her daughter. Cringed at the usage. The very thought.
“Has Harper mentioned the fact that she’s being stalked?”
“Fact?” she said, her expression full of a peevish kind of doubt. “Yes, Ms. Davidson. We’ve been through this with her ad nauseam. I can’t imagine you could bring anything new to the table.”
The woman’s indifference floored me. It was one thing not to believe Harper, but another altogether to be so blatantly unaffected by her stepdaughter’s distress. Then I got a clue that might shed some light.
“May I ask, is Harper’s brother your stepson as well?”
Pride swelled her chest. “Arthur is mine. I married Harper’s father when Art was seven. Harper was five. She didn’t approve, and these antics of hers began soon after.”
“Antics?” I asked.
“Yes.” She waved a dismissive hand. “The drama. The theatrics. Someone is always after her, trying to scare her or hurt her or kill her. You can imagine how hard it is to take this seriously when it has been happening for over twenty-five years.”
That was interesting. Harper hadn’t mentioned that part. “So this started when she was young?”
“Five.”
“I see.” I took out my notepad and pretended to take notes. Partly to look official, but mostly to give myself a minute to get a well-rounded read off her. From what I could tell, she wasn’t lying. She didn’t believe Harper’s accusations were real. She didn’t believe Harper’s life was in danger.
Then again, my stepmother had never believed a word I’d said growing up either. Mrs. Lowell’s indifference meant nothing in the grand scheme of things besides the fact that she was petty and vain.
“According to her therapists,” she continued, her tone waspish to the extreme, “seven therapists, to be exact—it’s not unusual for a daughter to feel neglected and crave attention when her father remarries. Her biological mother died when she was an infant. Jason was all she had.”
“Is your husband home? May I talk to him?”
She chafed under my forwardness. “No, you may not. Mr. Lowell is very ill. He can hardly entertain Harper’s delusions of doom, much less those of a hired private investigator.”
Mrs. Lowell’s expression would suggest she thought I was nothing more than a charlatan, out to take Harper’s—aka her—money. Since I was quite used to people believing me a charlatan, the snub didn’t irritate. But the slight to Harper did. She clearly harbored no genuine affection for her stepdaughter. She saw her as a nuisance. A burden. Much like my own stepmother thought of me.
“And,” Mrs. Lowell continued, a thought having occurred to her, “she disappeared for three years. Three! Off the face of the Earth, as far as we knew. Did she tell you that?”
While I wanted to say, I would have, too, with a stepmother like you, what I said was, “No, ma’am, she didn’t.”
“See. She is completely unstable. When she finally deigned us with her presence, she said she had been on the run for her life. Of all the ludicrous…” Mrs. Lowell shifted in irritation. “And now she hires a private investigator? She has gone over the edge.”
I wrote the word psycho in my notebook, then scribbled it out before she saw. I was letting my own biases guide me on this case, and that would get me nowhere. Taking a mental step back, I took a deep breath and tried to see this from Mrs. Lowell’s perspective, as difficult as that might be. I didn’t often identify with rich bitches, but they were people, too. Weren’t they?
So Mrs. Lowell marries a man, a rich man, only to find out the man’s daughter hates her with a passion and despises the relationship her new mother has with her father, so much so that she makes up wild stories about someone trying to kill her. To get back at her new mother? Her father for abandoning her?
Nope. I didn’t buy it. Mrs. Lowell was a cold bitch. She most likely married for the money, not that I could blame her entirely for that—a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do—but to dismiss Harper’s fears outright and so callously bordered on neglect, in my opinion. Jason Lowell was her meal ticket, and his daughter was part of the deal. I couldn’t help but feel a little ambivalent toward Harper’s father. Where was he in all this? Why was he not here supporting his daughter? Taking up for her?
I cleared my throat and said, “You mentioned drama. Can you give me an example?”
“Oh, goodness, you name it. One minute someone is leaving dead rabbits on her bed, and the next minute a party popper made her throw up all over her cousin’s birthday cake. A party popper. Then there were the nightmares. We used to wake up to her screams in the middle of the night, or we would find her standing beside our bed at three in the morning.”