Scarlet Nights (Edilean 3)

Until a few years ago, Mitzi was living in upstate New Jersey and commuting into New York City, where she worked scams on rich women. She lured them to her through a tiny office in the center of Manhattan with PSYCHIC painted on the window. Women in trauma, in grief, whose lives were in chaos, thronged to her, hoping to find answers about what they should do to solve their problems. Mitzi took the ones who were so desperate for relief that they were willing to pay all they had to get out of the turmoil their lives had become.

Mitzi’s code, refined through generations, was three part: trust, faith in The Work, and control. First, she spent months gaining the trust of the women. She was an expert at body language and could tell what someone wanted within minutes of meeting her. And she listened to them in a way they had never been listened to before. Mitzi heard what her victims said and remembered it. She understood; she championed the woman, was always on her side. Mitzi was the best friend anyone could imagine.

When she’d gained her victim’s trust, Mitzi started on making her believe in “The Work” and that she, Mitzi, was only a vessel being used by spirits/angels/God, whatever appealed to the victim. Believing that she was doing everything for a Higher Power made a person feel that she’d at last found her purpose in life.

Once the victim had faith, Mitzi would start working her way into controlling and completing the isolation that was necessary to pull off a major scam. She would meet the victim, looking red-eyed and haggard, telling her that she’d been up all night with The Work and had seen horrible things. By this time Mitzi knew what the woman’s deepest fears were, so she could use them against her. If she was afraid of her ex-husband, then Mitzi said he was plotting with friends against her. It was best to get away from them.

What Mitzi really gave her victims was hope. She promised love, children, fortunes—whatever was wanted—and the frightened women held on to it like a life raft. Hope became everything to them, what they lived and breathed for. And Mitzi made them believe that only she could give them what they needed—if she was given the money to create the energy to perform the task. But it was all right to pay because

Mitzi swore that when The Work was completed, every penny would be returned.

As in all abusive relationships, there came a time when the good ended. The listening disappeared, the feeling of deep friendship, when you were both dedicated to a purpose, stopped. The victim became so desperate for that time to return that she paid more and more money. By then she had no other friends, just Mitzi, so she worked hard to please her.

But, eventually, the victim would run out of money, and that’s when Mitzi would instantly and abruptly stop the relationship. Suddenly, Mitzi’s phone would be disconnected, her office empty. If the frantic victim was able to contact Mitzi—sometimes after months of trying—her desperate pleas for help would meet Mitzi’s coldness. Crying, devastated, the victim would ask for her money to be returned, as she had been promised. That’s when Mitzi would tell her that every penny was “gone,” used up by The Work. Without the slightest bit of compassion, Mitzi would hang up.

The victim would be left alone. She was usually nearly bankrupt, and under Mitzi’s tutelage, she’d cut herself off from everyone. She had no one to turn to for moral support as she tried to recover, and she was usually too embarrassed to go to the police and tell them how—as she saw it—stupid she’d been.

If the woman did screw up her courage and go to the police, she was usually dismissed. According to them, she’d given the money away of her own free will, so there was no crime. But the Fort Lauderdale Police Department had listened to one victim and after they’d subpoenaed some of Mitzi’s many bank accounts, they were shocked at the sheer magnitude of what they saw. Mitzi Vandlo had taken millions of dollars from many women.

Whenever there’s lots of money involved in a crime, the federal bureaus step in, and everything changes. It was soon found out that Mitzi was just a small part of what looked to be one of the largest organized crime rings in the world—and no one knew anything about it.

As the investigation went forward, fortunately, it was backed by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said the gullibility of a person didn’t eliminate the fact that a crime had been committed. People who did what Mitzi had done were as guilty as bank robbers.

State criminal law and federal law work in opposite ways. Criminals arrested by state law enforcement are incarcerated, then evidence is found. But the Feds will spend years gathering information before arrests are made. Unfortunately, the first time around, when they were ready to indict Mitzi and twenty-eight of her family members, she’d been told what was coming. She and her son had disappeared where no one could find them.

As Mike straightened the papers, he agreed with the captain that the only reason Stefan and his mother would come to a two-bit town like Edilean, Virginia, would be for something really big. And it looked like during the time Mitzi was missing, she’d found another way to extort money, and this time, it involved Miss Sara Shaw.

Mike put the papers in his bedside table drawer, making a mental note to take them out in the morning. He couldn’t risk Sara finding them when she snooped through his room.

As he closed the drawer, he couldn’t help but think of the irony of the evening. This afternoon, while he’d spent a couple of hours at Williamsburg’s outlet mall buying new clothes, he’d envisioned a nice, domestic evening with Sara. They’d have good food and the wine that was never opened. He imagined that after dinner he’d get his new clothes out of his car, and he and Sara would go through them. Since she was in the business, he’d ask her advice about what he should wear. And every scenario that he came up with ended with Sara telling him what it was that the Vandlos wanted. But, somehow, everything had fallen through.

As he turned off the light, Mike thought, Strippers. From now on, he was going to deal only with strippers. No more good girls who made no sense whatsoever.

5

THE NEXT MORNING, Sara awoke with what she knew was a hangover. Two margaritas wouldn’t be enough to make most people drunk, but Sara’d never been able to tolerate much alcohol.

As she splashed cold water on her face, she began to remember what she’d said to Mike the night before. Her excuse was that he’d asked too many questions about Greg, made too many insinuations, and added to all the other things going on now, it had been more than she could take.

She would, of course, have to apologize to him. Last night, it had seemed clear that … well, it was almost as though people were plotting against her—but that couldn’t be true. However, the idea stayed with her and began to grow.

As the day wore on and she worked constantly on the pile of sewing, she told herself that it couldn’t be possible that Tess had worked with the whole town to bring in Mike to get Sara away from Greg.

But there was an old murder mystery on TV, and as she sewed and listened, she seemed to see conspiracy in every second of the last few days. Greg abruptly called away; Luke taking over her apartment; Sara having to move into Tess’s place where the trapdoor was. Then Tess’s mysterious brother just “happens” to show up—and now he was living in the small apartment with her.

At one, Sara went to the kitchen to get lunch and saw that the refrigerator was full of the food Mike had cooked. What had he been planning last night with that delicious meal? She vaguely remembered accusing him of trying to seduce her.

Maybe she’d watched too many black-and-white movies, but she had an image of herself drunk and winding up in bed with Mike. Then two men with cameras with huge round flashbulb holders would burst in and take their photo.

Would they give the lurid pictures to Greg? For a sickening moment Sara imagined Greg’s rage if he saw photos of her in bed with another man. He went ballistic when she so much as laughed at a salesman’s joke. “It’s just because I love you so very much,” Greg’d said many times.

She got a plate from Tess’s cabinet, filled it with the food Mike had cooked, put a paper towel over the top, and microwaved it. She poured herself a big glass of iced tea and sat down to a feast.

As Mike left the title office with the fat portfolio in his hand, the closing complete, he was still shaking his head about Sara. He hadn’t been able to figure out what he’d done to make her so angry. Sure, maybe his arrival through her bedroom floor was a bit crude, but he still saw no other way to get close to her as fast as he did. If he’d knocked on the door and introduced himself, she would have been polite, but he would have been sent to a hotel and he wouldn’t have seen her again.

Truthfully, he thought the way the townspeople were ganging up on her against the man she wanted to marry was too much. While it was true that he knew Vandlo was a criminal, they didn’t. Where was all this “support” that women talked about all the time? TV from four until six was what Mike called the “Support Hours.” One time when Tess was staying with him—he was recovering from a bullet wound (his fourth)—and he was bored with being still, and sick of pain, he took his frustration out on the TV. He tossed a pillow at it and said, “If I hear the word support one more time, I’m throwing the thing out the window. No matter how stupid a person is, how bad a decision, all you women care about is that you ‘support’ each other.”

“So now I’m one of ‘you women’?” Tess asked calmly, not even looking up from her magazine. “I can assure you that never in my life have I supported a woman when she made a decision so stupid that she got shot.”