A Place to Call Home (53 page)

“We’re outta here, Sis.” I grabbed a piece of our gear and hoisted it to one shoulder. She turned to stare at me. Behind her, on tv, a paramedic bent over a bloody, limp little boy. “Oh, no,” she said brokenly. “Oh, Vee. How could anyone think we’d know anything about the person or the group who committed a horror like this.”

I forced myself to look at the unconscious child on tv. We had to share the blame for all the brutal crimes of all the vicious lunatics of the world, because to the world our own father would always be no better than the cold-blooded psychos who maim and kill the innocence in all of us.

And so we left.

We were always running from crimes we didn’t commit.

After that I perfected the art of disguise and outright evasion. For several years the plan worked fairly well. Until Chicago.

The marquee poster in the lobby of Hers Truly, the city’s priciest women-only nightclub, proclaimed Ella and me the Nelson Sisters. When I chose the name not long after my father’s death, I hoped the government would have a helluva hard time keeping track of two Nelsons, particularly two Nelsons named Ann and Jane. You couldn’t get more all-American ordinary than that.

The Hers Truly was a fern-draped art-deco show bar filled with women wearing formal gowns and tuxedos. On a small stage in one corner of the main room I played electronic piano keyboard in duet with my sister’s electric violin. We competed with the clink of bar glasses and the soft conversation of women seducing women. In that nightclub packed with women celebrating their true identities, we were the only ones hiding behind a lie.

I was Ann. Ella was Jane. “Next year we’ll switch and I get to be Jane,” I had joked when we split a lobster tail and champagne on my twenty-ninth birthday. Ella was three years younger. I’d been brooding about growing old. About dead ends and hopeless wanderings.

Ella and I kept a low profile by playing the kinds of hotel lounges and nightclubs where admirers don’t stuff the tip jars with ten-dollar bills because they love Rachmaninoff. You gotta have a gimmick. I added a three-foot-long synthetic weave to my hair and kept it in a mass of tiny corn-rows and braids dyed eye-popping golden-blond. I wore so
many rings and studs in my earlobes I could have picked up signals like the Hubble telescope.

I’d pierced my navel and decorated it with the glitteriest belly-button jewelry I could find at the flea markets and junk shops where Ella and I did most of our shopping. I had to be skanky enough for both of us, since Ella looked ridiculous in anything skankier than slim black trousers and sequined black tops. She kept her black hair dyed a demure honey color.

Our efforts were amateurish but they helped. We’d been the Nelson Sisters for ten years. We were professional, dependable, and honest, but reclusive to the point of oddity. We were the daughters of Max Arinelli, and even though Pop was dead we remained under scrutiny. So we kept to ourselves and moved on quickly each time government agents found us.

Which was often enough.

The stranger caught my attention like a trumpet player blowing a high C in the middle of a harp solo.

I always drew up in a knot when a certain type of man watched Ella and me in public. Over the years I’d developed a knack for pinpointing the kind who considered himself the guardian of truth, justice, and the American way. But this one stood out more than usual, particularly in the Hers Truly. After all, he was the only genuinely masculine patron I’d even seen in the audience. In fact he looked like the kind of man who’d been born with a more than ordinary share of testosterone.

I blinked, then stared again through the haze of stage lights and cigarette smoke. Holy freakin’ moly, as we used to say at St. Cecilia’s, when the nuns weren’t listening.

He was tall, dark, and yes, bluntly handsome. But badly
worn around the edges. His face was gaunt, his skin was pale enough to show a beard shadow even in dim light, his mouth was appealing but too tight. He was watching me as if I were doing a striptease and he were an off-duty vice cop.

He kept his hands in the pockets of khaki trousers. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. The throat of his collarless gray shirt was unbuttoned. I saw a hint of dark chest hair. The crowd at tables nearest the stage suddenly sensed manly pheromones, like the aroma off a toxic-waste dump, and turned to scowl at him as if he were about to ask the waitresses to fetch him a pitcher of beer and start the wet T-shirt contest.

“Hey,” a beefy redhead in leather shouted at him. “What d’ya think this is? A peep show?” He smiled thinly and nodded without taking his eyes off me. A dozen women began gesturing for the manager.

Ella and I were playing a k.d. lang medley. She pivoted and looked at me frantically, her violin quivering against the ashen curve of her chin, her short blond hair dancing as she sawed the bow across the strings. She’d spotted the stranger, too.
Trouble
, she mouthed like a plea. I nodded. We always had an escape plan.

I leaped up, grabbed her by one arm, and hustled her from the stage. As we hurried down a back hall the manager approached us. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “The set’s not half over.”

“Migraine.” I nodded toward Ella. “Jane’s about to pass out.” Ella clasped the left side of her head and moaned. She had no trouble faking the vicious headaches because she suffered real ones so often. She was, by nature, a bad actress but an elaborate fainter.

“Oh, dear, I see halos and sparkles.” She moaned again.
Levering an arm under her shoulder blades, I guided her over pockmarked floor tiles that caught on my stiletto heels and caused her smooth-soled flats to slip. I was strong and alley-cat lean; she was shorter and softer. “Try to breathe, hon. I’ll get you outside in the fresh air. Well, night air, anyhow. Can’t promise it won’t smell like a—”

“Fainting,” she mumbled. And then she went limp.

I caught her as she collapsed. I’d had a lot of practice catching my sister over the years, and more than average in the last couple. A failed romance with a smooth-talking Detroit nightclub owner had nearly destroyed her. It was why we had left Detroit for Chicago. Her health—physical as well as mental—had improved slowly. She’d only recently begun to smile like her old self.

We sank to the hall’s floor. Her eyelashes flickered. “Get me a damp cloth and a glass of water,” I called to the manager, a small crew-cut brunette in crisply tailored slacks and a man’s dress shirt, who hovered over us sympathetically.

“Be right back,” she said, then hustled toward the kitchen. I gently slapped Ella’s cheeks and rubbed her hands. She opened one eye, then whispered, “Do you see him heading backstage?”

“Not yet. We’ll hide here a minute and then we’ll run for the back exit.”

She sighed. “The other day when I really was sick I saw the most beautiful kaleidoscope aura before the pain started. I wanted to float away. I wish that rainbow place existed. You and I could go there and take every lonely, needy, homeless person in the world with us.”

That afternoon I’d caught her giving fifty bucks to a bum outside our camper. Ella didn’t give a dollar, or even five dollars, the way I did sometimes. No, she gave lifetime endowments, even when we could barely pay our own rent.
I yelled, “Give me that money back, you parasite,” then wrestled the fifty out of his hands. Ella turned white as a sheet. “He said he needed it for his baby,” she moaned.

Oh, God. I should have known. The nightclub owner in Detroit had proposed to my sister, given her a huge diamond ring, then skipped town with the IRS hot on his heels. The ring, as it turned out, had belonged to a former fiancée of his. That last bit of news made my sister scream and double over with cramps. I rushed her to the hospital. She lay on a gurney in the emergency room with blood and clotted tissue seeping between her legs.

She had miscarried a month-old fetus before she even realized she was pregnant. A loss that might have seemed like a practical blessing to some women was devastating to my sister. She’d grieved for that baby ever since.

“Rainbows,” she repeated now. This was a typical Ella reaction to stress—she went window-shopping for ethereal visions. “Just stay here on Earth,” I ordered wearily, then cradled her head on my shoulder. I smoothed her hair and rocked her as if she were a child. “Maybe the man out front just likes alternative nightclubs,” she murmured. “I hope we don’t have to pack up and leave. I like this job. Lesbians are so polite.”

I heard heavy footsteps striding along the tile floor in our direction. My stomach churned. I sat in the hallway of the Hers Truly holding Ella and feeling as if I’d lost the energy to get up again. I bent my head and whispered into Ella’s ear, “Let me do the talking.” She shivered inside my arms. Tears squeezed from under her closed lids.

“Let me help you with her,” a deep male voice said. It’d been years since I’d heard a southern drawl thicker than our own. The voice belonged to him, of course—the watcher. I glared at him but a knot of fear formed in my
chest as he dropped to his heels beside us. “She has a lot of these nasty headaches, doesn’t she?” he asked.

I went straight into my cornered-junkyard-dog-with-pups attitude. “You’re freakin’ brilliant. Let a woman faint in front of you and you deduce she’s sick. Great work, Sherlock. Get stuffed.”

The worry lines deepened across his high, pale forehead. I noticed a slip of gray in a forelock of his dark brown hair. He didn’t look old enough for the gray or the lines. He clucked his tongue at me. “You were raised to behave better than this. You could at least tell me to get stuffed in French or Italian. You speak both.”

He continued absurdly, “Or you could at least make a curtsy when you tell me to get stuffed. Your dad taught you when he put you onstage. You weren’t more than four years old. Barely out of diapers. You could play Mozart and you could curtsy. Now all you can do is bang out mediocre pop songs in an all-girls club and tell people to get stuffed.”

“Okay, you sonuvabitch. What are you? FBI? Justice Department? Is there ever going to be a day when you people stop dropping into our lives for these little chats? It must be a slow day in the goon-squad headquarters. I’d think my sister and I would rank below your fun cases—like harassing old dopers and trying to catch congressmen taking bribes.”

“I was in the Boy Scouts once,” he said sarcastically. “Does that count as a fascist arm of the government, too?”

“It’s a paramilitary organization designed to indoctrinate children, so yes, it counts.”

Ella moved weakly in my grasp. “Who?” she moaned. I smoothed a hand over her forehead. “Sssh.”

He nodded toward Ella, frowning. “She needs help. I can carry her out to your car. It’s running today, isn’t it?”
He arched a dark brow. “You know, I never thought a car that old could start without a crank on the front.”

He even knew about the ancient, undependable car. My mouth went dry. “I don’t need your help. Or your bullshit. Just go back and report that as usual, we’re minding our own business and trying to get along. We pay our bills, we pay our taxes. Believe it or not we are still not consorting with the type of people you government SOBs assume we might consort with. So leave us alone.”

“I wish to hell I could leave you alone, but it took me months to find you. I give you credit—you’re an expert at keeping out of sight. You were a challenge, even for me. And I have sources most people don’t have.”

The implication made me stare at him in genuine fear. The manager ran back with a washcloth and a cup of water. I helped Ella sit up and wiped her face, then forced myself to speak calmly. “It’s okay, El. Relax, I’ll get your pills.”

She sipped from the cup, then coughed and gagged. I guided her head off my shoulder. I gave him a frigid stare. “I know you guys get your jollies bullying innocent citizens, but would you mind coming back when my sister feels better?”

“I want to get this over with. I have to leave town tonight.”

“Forget it. You can talk to me when hell freezes over.” Ella groaned, leaned her head back on my shoulder, then shut her eyes. I dabbed her forehead. He waited patiently through all this, and I noticed he had the good grace to avoid looking at her. I could have done without his narrow-eyed scrutiny on me, however. “You know,” he said evenly, “it’s not that much fun tormenting somebody who’s already got so much trouble on her hands. Even if you do fight back pretty well.”

“What a compliment.”

“Look, let’s stop this. I’m not what you think I am. I’m not a friend, but I’m not an enemy, either.”

“Oh, really. How mysterious. Look—either tell me what you want or get out of here.”

Frowning, he pulled a dog-eared black-and-white photo from his shirt pocket and held it out. For the first time I noticed his right hand. I froze. Whoever he was, something godawful had happened to him.

His ring finger and little finger were gone, as well as a deep section at their base. His middle finger was scarred and knotty. Lines of pink scar tissue and deep, puckered gouges snaked up his right forearm. Grotesque and awkward, the hand looked like a deformed claw.

Suddenly I was aware of my own fingers, flexing them, grateful they were all in place. He wasn’t an invincible threat. He was very human, and more than a little damaged.

“Enjoying the view?” he asked tersely. I jerked my gaze to his face. Ruddy blotches of anger and embarrassment colored his cheeks. He quickly transferred the photo to his undamaged left hand and dropped the right hand into the shadows between his knees. “Have you ever seen a copy of this picture before?”

I took a deep breath and looked at the photo. A solemn, handsome young boy gazed back at me from my parents’ wedding picture. There was only one copy of the picture, I thought, and I still had it. “Where did you get that?”

“It’s been in my family.”

“Who? What family?”

“The Camerons.”

I leaned toward him. “Who are you?”

He pointed to the boy. “Gib Cameron,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

My head reeled. When I was a child I’d decided I’d never meet Gib Cameron in person but I would love him forever. That childhood memory had become a shrine to all the lost innocence in my life.