A Dress to Die For (19 page)

Ruby headed down the hall, and Laura had started to follow when her eye caught a glint of something orange. She dug it out of the corner—a teardrop-shaped cabochon bead. She held it up.

“Oh, my God,” Ruby said.

“It’s real,” Laura said. “The fake dress had acrylic beads. This is crystal. Feel it, the weight.” She dropped it in Ruby’s palm.

“It was here,” Ruby said.

“In Dad’s storage space. How Jobeth Chard-Fialla got it is another thing entirely.”

CHAPTER 13

They brought Mom some broth from Taormina’s to replace the gross dishwater the hospital gave her and cut it with hot water to reduce the sodium. Jimmy had gone back to Bay Ridge to shower and check the mail.

“Stop looking at me,” Mom said.

“I just don’t want you to spill,” Ruby replied, putting a napkin under Mom’s chin.

“Is this where it starts? First, you think I’m going to spill, then you’re hiring someone to wipe my bottom?”

Ruby took the napkin away and laid her head on Mom’s chest.

Laura stared at the muted TV and stewed. She’d wanted to go up to the Iroquois, bang on Jobeth’s door, and demand to know under what circumstances the woman had gotten the dress from Dad. She wanted to challenge Jobeth to prove she was Barnabas Chard’s sister, since her name wasn’t in his file, and also how it was possible that the princess had seemed to juggle three men on a tiny island: one monarch, one financier, and one homosexual. She felt herself getting wound up, with names and stories and new memories spinning as if they were in the last wash cycle. Something needed to break. Some piece of news had to make it all make sense.

She breathed, trying to wish herself calm. Much as she felt her presence in that hospital room was vestigial, when Mom put her hand on top of hers, she knew she’d made the right choice in coming.

“What was going on with Bernard and Henrietta Oseigh?” Laura asked. “Did you talk to them much? What was their deal? Did Bernard mention his sister’s name? Jobeth maybe?”

“Laura!” Ruby cried.

“My God, Laura. You want to give me another heart attack?”

“I’m sorry.”

Mom squeezed her hand. “I’m joking. Let me think. Barney and Retta. Nice people. He was from somewhere in the Midwest. Retta attended the princess hand and foot. Barney was more, I don’t know, intelligence muscle? If that makes sense. Spent a lot of time downtown in the financial district. Rarely went out with us. But it was clear from the beginning they worked for the high prince, so everything the princess did, they reported back. It got tense. And I didn’t know why. I guess I do now.”

“Honestly, Mom, at this point, I don’t know if Dad was having an affair with the princess, or if it was Barney, and something else was going on with Dad, like some sort of business arrangement.”

“Your father. A business arrangement. Right.”

Dad, the engineer, hadn’t been able to get them out of their rent-controlled apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and couldn’t have sent his kids to private school without Mom’s financial aid applications. He must have had the head of a scientist and the heart of an artist.

“Why would the princess be such a whore?”

“Laura!” Mom snapped.

“Well, come on! What kind of person was she?”

“A person who had to produce a male heir and whose husband wasn’t dishing it out, that’s who.”

Laura softened. She didn’t want Mom to have another heart attack because she’d called an old friend filthy names. “Why male?” she asked.

Mom sat up, wincing. “Can you get me some water?”

Ruby poured, and Mom drank.

“You don’t have to talk now, Mom,” Laura said. “You can tell me tomorrow.”

“I’m fine.”

Laura took her at her word. “So the high prince must have known they were planning some sort of coup or overthrow or whatever, so he had Barney and Retta watch them.”

“What would be the point?” Mom asked. “She couldn’t be high princess. They don’t have those.”

“Well, if there’s no man around, who else would it be? What’s the big deal? I mean, what if I assassinated Salvadore tomorrow? What would happen?”

“The princess would marry someone who would rule.” Mom gave the cup back to Ruby. “These people were raised in a bubble, and the things they were told from birth, they believed. Everything they thought about themselves and their possibilities in life were shaped by being in the Brunican court. You couldn’t get them out of it. They couldn’t imagine a life away from it, even after being here for a month. I remember talking to Samuel for hours about having a life outside the island. He kept using this excuse that the Brunican dollar didn’t trade internationally, and he’d lose all his money. He’d be exiled. I sat with him all night once while you girls were in bed. I pleaded with him. ‘Be poor for a while. Don’t keep your talent in a box.’ But he simply couldn’t hear me. The way they thought, it was incredible.”

Laura remembered the album, the lyrics, and the sorrow and pain in every chord. “He was in love with you, Mom.”

“You know, I thought so, too. And the feeling was mutual. Then your dad said they were a couple, and I believed him. Stupid. He was covering for the princess. Samuel let it be said to protect her, too. Brunican to the core.” She sighed. “Doesn’t matter anymore.” Her head dropped back onto her pillows.

“That’s too much talking already,” Ruby said, tucking Mom in. “We’re leaving. Come on, Lala. Let’s go.”

Laura shot her the dirtiest look she could muster but got up and kissed Mom good-bye.

When they stepped out into the damp December night, she checked her phone and found a text from Jeremy.

—
I’m at Narita.
—

Ten minutes ago. She could catch him during his layover in the Tokyo airport.

“You coming back with me?” Ruby asked.

They stood at the curb, shuffling their feet in the cold, pulling on gloves and tying scarves.

“I think I’m staying in the city.”

“He’s not even here, so I don’t know why you’d go over there. And I’m awake now.”

“I have an idea. But I have to call Jeremy before he gets on a plane.”

“Fine.” Ruby pointed at a coffee shop across the street. “I’m going in there. Come in when you’re finished.”

Laura nodded and made her call as Ruby walked away. As soon as she heard his voice, she missed him. It wasn’t something she would’ve allowed herself if he hadn’t been on his way home already or if Mom had been well.

“I haven’t been to the office all day,” she said.

“Everything’s fine. We’re on top of it. How’s your mother?”

“I have no idea. The doctors say she’s stabilizing after the surgery, and she seems okay. I mean, she just got out a few hours ago, so she was weak. She talked a few minutes about the Brunican entourage, then she was wiped out.”

“Where are you now?”

“On the curb on the corner of Seventeenth and First. Ruby’s waiting for me. She wants me to go back with her, but I want to go hug your pillow. I miss you. It’s so stupid. Four months ago, it wouldn’t have mattered where you were, and now it’s like I can’t sleep without you. I’m sorry. Am I being gushy?”

“I like you gushy. Fifteen hours and I’ll be home. We can do it different next time. I don’t sleep so great without you either.”

She was relieved to hear it. In all the running around and with Mom sick, she’d managed to cover up the emptiness where he lived in her. His physical presence, his breath on her shoulder at night, his feet entwined with hers, his complaining about the strength of her coffee, and his voice over breakfast as they talked about factories and trims—those were things she owned. And when he was gone, it was as if someone had moved the train station across the street or hid one shoe. She could walk across the street or find a full pair, but it created a skip in her mind, the feeling of something not right, not where it should be. A puddle to be jumped. A broken pencil lead. A tangled bobbin thread.

“Are you going straight to the office?” she asked. “I have a lot to review with you. The missing dress, you know I didn’t keep my hands off it.”

“Of course,” he said with a little laugh. “And have you talked to Barry?” He slipped it in as if it were just another talking point, catching up on a friend’s breakup or a news story about a celebrity, but there was a tightness about the way the question started that told her Barry’s offer had been weighing on him.

She took in a sharp breath, as if she’d been caught at something. “Yeah. Same deal.”

“Okay. We can talk about it when I get back. I’ll call you from JFK. Don’t forget to love me.”

“Couldn’t if I tried.”

**

Laura slid into the booth across from Ruby with her own cup of coffee.

“He’s coming?” Ruby asked.

“At Narita right now.”

“Good. That’s very not-dickey of him.”

“I’ll let him know you spoke so highly.” Laura took a deep breath to let Ruby know she was about to change the subject. “What if I stopped working with Jeremy?”

Ruby picked at her croissant. “What do you mean?”

“If I took a job elsewhere?”

“Like that would ever happen.”

Laura’s silence was heavier than anything she could have said.

Ruby pushed her plate away and leaned forward. “You’re serious?”

“My whole life revolves around him. He was my first boss, my first love. And now he backs my company and runs my days and owns me at night. It’s uncomfortable for me. No, I’m sorry. It’s not uncomfortable. It’s very comfortable. Too comfortable.”

“He’s going to flip out.”

“I know. And here’s what else I know. If Gracie had pulled backing at any point, he would have left her. So I’m scared.”

“If he’d do that to you, Laura, then he’s doing you a favor.”

Ruby was right, of course, because she wasn’t in the middle of it. It was easy to talk about ripping off the Band-Aid when it wasn’t your knee that had been skinned, when the brain was functioning on all cylinders and there weren’t a hundred chemicals in her body saying,
Don’t let him go! Don’t let him go!

“Besides all that,” Laura said, “there’s the issue of Sartorial. He loves the line, but if he gets pissed enough and pulls backing, we’re back to square one. And if my new gig makes it hard to manage without his staff—”

“I’m back at Tollridge. Or worse.”

“I’m sorry. We can get Pierre on it.”

Ruby waved her hands and bowed her head. “Stop. Are you leaving JSJ or not?”

“I haven’t decided. And don’t try to do it for me.” Her coffee was cold, and she knew Ruby was going to try to convince her to go one way or the other. Though she was curious what her sister would say, the idea of splitting off from Jeremy was so nascent, she didn’t want to air it out too much. It needed a home in her mind first, as something for her to put in the Accept or Reject pile. The limbo it hovered in was her limbo. She owned it, and she wasn’t going to let anyone batch it for her.

“It’s nine o’clock,” Laura said, picking up the check. She worked twice the hours as Ruby and made three times as much, so she picked up every check. “Can we drop it? Let’s make another little run before we get swallowed up into work tomorrow. It’ll be fun.”

“Fine. I’m awake now. Where are we going?”

“The Iroquois.”

**

The real dress had been in Dad’s storage space, and Jobeth had acquired it, which explained exactly nothing at the moment. But she knew Dad, and that was something. Laura was getting itchy to find him, because as the days went by and the real dress wasn’t found, Jeremy got closer to losing his bond, and her father’s trail got colder.

Ruby wrapped her scarf tightly around her neck when they got to street level. “I think Dad wanted to be high prince.”

“Maybe that’s what the princess wanted, but Dad doesn’t seem like Mr. Alpha. Would he dump everything to marry a person of the wrong gender to be the ruler of a small island nation? Nah. We would have grown up on Park Avenue if he was that type.”

“Wouldn’t you want to be a princess?”

“No way.”

“Normal people wish they were royalty. That’s why they’re royalty. Everyone wants to be them.”

Laura wanted to tell her that argument was falling in on itself, but there was no point. If Ruby wanted to believe Regular Dad aspired to be High Prince Dad, Laura would be happy to play along until Ruby was proven wrong.

They accessed the building the same way Laura had before, through the parking lot and down a hallway. She got lost, found her way, and knocked on the door. When there was no answer, she put her ear close and knocked again. The sound on the other side was hollow and echoey.

“Let’s try the other side,” Laura suggested.

Ruby followed along, padding across the carpet, probably zombied out on the tail end of her second wind. They found 7Da. The door was ajar.

“Not good,” Ruby said, touching the door and pushing slightly. The lights were out inside.

“Maybe she collapsed or something,” Laura said.

“Right.”

With their excuse lined up, Laura pushed the door all the way open. The room was lit by light from the streetlamps coming through the bare windows, making dull trapezoids on the ceilings and walls. The moon amplified those shapes by angling them sideways in triangles on the floors. It looked like the inside of a huge kaleidoscope.