Bellweather Rhapsody (21 page)

“Are you, for your own obscure but surely logical-in-your-own-mind reasons, lying to me?”

“No.”

“Where is your sister now?”

“In the ballroom. Rehearsing with the chorus.”

“Whom did she tell about her roommate?”

“The hotel people. The concierge.”

“And what did they do?”

Rabbit swallows. “I don’t know,” he says. “Called the police.”

The orchestra is straining against itself. It wants to burst. It made war all morning and has now been thwarted from the promised release of sex. Brodie can feel it pulling away from him; Rabbit can see it on his face. He feels a little sorry for being the cause of all this, and, improbably, a little sorry he won’t get the chance to play that solo after all. It’s an incredible piece of music.

“Well, then. Everyone’s done what they’re supposed to do.” He pauses. “What else, Rabbit. I can see you’re dying to say something else. If you’ll pardon the figure of speech.”

“She was—” He clears his throat.

Floating-Rabbit and Rabbit-on-the-stage have merged back into one body. Rabbit, complete, knows he is standing on the edge of something large, already writhing with a life of its own. Bigger than he is, certainly, not remotely about him at all, and yet what happens next is entirely his doing.

“She was murdered,” Rabbit says.

Statewide erupts.

13

H
ASTINGS OVERSLEEPS.
He needed the sleep desperately, he knows this, and yet he’s ashamed to have missed his first chance with Viola Fabian. It’s ten-thirty in the morning when he finally inspects the glow-in-the-dark hands of his Baby Ben. The woman is probably up and gone, running a conference session or at least attending one. Hastings is unshaven, barely rested, and still wearing yesterday’s bow tie, his knees and ankles aching prophetically. He stops by her room and calls her twice but gets no answer. With any luck, the story of the disappearing girl hasn’t gotten out of control; with any luck, Hastings will catch her during lunch, in a manner timely enough to still be considered professional.

But his luck has left the building. By eleven-fifteen, when he rolls down to the lobby, the rumor is a living thing. Everybody knows about the dead girl. The kitchen staff, down to the new help brought in specially to work the festival, knows. The chambermaids and the check-in girls and the girls who push the vacuum around the lobby are blazing like firecrackers with every sordid detail. It changes every time Hastings overhears it. The girl was shot. The girl was stabbed. She hanged herself on the showerhead. She hanged herself out the window. She was dragged down the hall and the trail of blood disappeared at a locked door that hadn’t been opened in twenty years.

He tells them to remember themselves, that gossip is totally inappropriate. What he really wants to say is
Don’t you idiots know where you work?
Don’t you know every last closet, crack, and crevice of this hotel, and don’t you know there is no door like that?

He is straightening his bow tie with one eye on the clock—everyone will be recessing for lunch shortly—when the concierge phone rings. The woman on the other end doesn’t bother introducing herself, but Hastings knows instantly who it is.

Viola Fabian. And she’s screaming at him. About what a fool he is, what an incompetent moron he is to let the story spread all over the hotel. Now she wants to talk with the girl responsible, wants an opportunity to tell her, firsthand, what a miserable little shit she is. “Alice, her name is Alice,” she says. “I met her yesterday afternoon. I interrupted when she and my daughter were conspiring. She’s short. Dark-haired. Find her and
bring her to me.
”

Hastings finds he hasn’t the words to respond to that request.

“Are you deaf?”

“Dr. Fabian, I insist—I insist that we meet in the Bellweather’s front office. Behind the check-in desk. I’ll find Alice and her chaperone and we’ll meet there in, say, fifteen minutes.”

“Ten.” And she hangs up.

Helen Stoller, as always, included a copy of the concert program in the conference materials she sent to Hastings; he finds Alice’s name listed under the altos in chorus. He hates to interrupt rehearsal, but he hates more to imagine what will happen if Viola Fabian is kept waiting. Alice knows exactly what she is being called away for. As soon as the door to the ballroom shuts behind them, muffling the excited chattering of the chorus she’s left behind, she says, “It’s her mother, isn’t it? Her mother wants to see me.”

Hastings doesn’t like this one bit.

The lobby is full of children when they return; the orchestra must have ended its rehearsal early. An impossibly skinny man and a familiar-looking boy are waiting at the concierge desk—familiar because he must be Alice’s brother, Hastings realizes.

“Are you Mr. Hastings?” says the tall man. He has an accent, and Hastings remembers Helen’s prep packet: he’s Fisher Brodie. Conducting the orchestra. Scottish child prodigy who’d destroyed his own career rather spectacularly, according to Helen’s usual gossipy annotations. “Master Hatmaker here opened his big bloody mouth and I’d like to direct him in a slightly more responsible direction. We were told you’re the man in charge.”

“No,” Hastings says. “She’s coming.”

“She’s here,” says Viola Fabian from behind him.

Hastings asks Sheila, at the front desk, to reach the Hatmakers’ chaperone—call her room, stop by any sessions she was scheduled for—and politely invites the Hatmakers, Viola Fabian, and Brodie to step into the office. Viola immediately perches, half standing, against the wide aluminum desk Hastings bought secondhand from the high school when they refurbished their classrooms. Rabbit and Alice jostle together on the old couch, looking down at the floor, and Brodie sits on one of the couch’s arms.

Hastings opens a folding chair and sets it by the couch.

No one speaks.

“Are we waiting for someone?” asks Viola.

“The children’s chaperone. Sheila’s tracking her down.”

“I’d rather do this without witnesses.” Viola smiles as if she’s kidding. “Alice?”

Alice looks up at Viola.

“Do you remember what I said to you yesterday?”

Alice flushes. “You said I was nothing special.”

“I did indeed. Nothing special.” Viola shrugs comically. “How was I to know you would take that so personally? Or rather, how did my saying that grant you and my daughter the right to be such entitled little brats?” She nods at Fisher. “Oh, it’s true, Fisher. When I stopped by my daughter’s room during yesterday afternoon’s rehearsal, I found her and this Alice. They were clearly planning something, at the time I had no idea—”

“That’s not true!” Alice says. Her voice is a squeaky half laugh.

“But you admit you skipped yesterday’s rehearsal, that you were in your room with my daughter. You admit we were all there.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Alice. Dear girl.” Viola taps a red-lacquered fingernail against her mouth. “As I told the police, my daughter is not dead. She is not.” She exhales. “Dead.”

Alice glares at her.

“Jill is troubled,” Viola says. “She’s an extraordinary girl, with an extraordinary amount of potential and promise. And pressure. She’s difficult. She’s dramatic. She
does
this.”

“Hangs herself?” Alice says. “Then cuts herself down?”

“Oh, Alice,” says Viola. “Shut up.”

Alice’s face roars with silent indignation. Hastings is beginning to believe her spunk isn’t an act at all.

“Jelly is theatrical. She knows how to frighten people. She knows how to frighten me. Which I will ask you to remember: this is between my daughter and myself. Wherever she is, she’s laughing at
me
. All of you—Alice especially—just happened to get in the way this time.”

“There have been other times?” Brodie asks.

Viola nods. “She disappeared for an entire night in Tokyo, showed up the next morning stinking of Sapporo. I’ve lost her for hours at a time in New York, in Dallas. London. Boston. Los Angeles. She trashes hotel rooms like a coked-out rock star. Like a Manson. She’s ripped up duvets and pillows, and written notes on the wall in sweet-and-sour sauce. ‘Do not call police.’ ‘We have her.’ ‘You will pay.’ Et cetera, et cetera.”

“Sounds like a fun girl,” Brodie says.

“She’s a frustrating girl, Fisher.” Hastings catches an odd note in Viola’s tone, an overfamiliar note. “I honestly wish I knew how to make her take her life more seriously.”

“She
does
take her life seriously,” Alice says.

“Does? Not
did?
I thought you said she was dead,” Viola says. “Come on, tell us where Jill is hiding. How did it work? Did she tell you this morbid story, or did she give you license to make something up? If the latter, bravo. You’ve a twisted mind hiding in your pretty little head.”

“That isn’t what happened. That isn’t what I saw,” Alice says. “I don’t know how to make you—” She looks hard at Hastings, at Brodie, at her brother. “I don’t know how to make you believe me.”

Viola shrugs again. “You are free to believe me or to believe this girl. You can’t believe both.” She looks to Fisher. “What are
you
doing here, anyway? I only asked to talk to Alice.”

“She isn’t the only Hatmaker with a big mouth.” Fisher sets his hand on the boy’s back. “Her brother just about turned my orchestra inside out by telling everyone your daughter had been murdered.”

Viola blinks. Then she throws her head back and laughs. Hastings finds nothing more beautiful than a woman laughing—even now, he can see and hear Jess, her eyes shut but her heart wide open, burning with life. Viola Fabian, no matter how cold she may be, possesses a certain beauty, an evil sort of glamour. When she laughs, for a moment you forget she has her cool and perfect hands wrapped around your throat.

“Jesus!” she says. “I asked the police to respect my family’s privacy, but I didn’t realize I needed to ask the same of my students.”

“I’m not your student,” says Alice.

“You’re a Statewide student. You
are
my student. And you’ll do as I say: you’ll keep your mouth shut. You’ll stop spreading disgusting rumors that have nothing to do with you.”

“Is this the longest she’s ever been gone?” It’s the first the brother has spoken since the meeting began.

“She’s been gone this long, and longer,” says Viola. “But she’s never missed a concert. Not that
this
concert holds a candle to any of the others she’s played.” She shakes her head. “I should have known she had some ridiculous plan to humiliate me. She was far too eager to tag along, after Kirk’s heart finally gave out and Statewide came crawling to me.”

Hastings stiffens. With every word that falls out of Viola’s mouth, he dislikes her a little more. She is, as his mother would have said, a piece of work. Listening to her on the other end of the telephone was painful; standing in the same room with her is atrociously uncomfortable. She has blood in her eyes and violence in her heart. If she’s correct that her daughter is alive, that this is an elaborate prank designed to hurt Viola, then Hastings can’t say he blames her daughter one bit.

“As head of ASM,” Viola says, “I could suspend you both from participating in the rest of the festival.”

Panic glimmers in the boy’s eyes even as icy resolve chills his sister’s. Hastings feels ill when he hears her refer to herself as head of the ASM.

“Oh, come on, Viola,” Fisher says gently. “Don’t be cruel.”

Viola grins. Hastings bends toward her in spite of himself.

“Don’t give me another reason,” she says, and pushes herself off the desk. When she leaves the room, shutting the door behind her, Hastings sways, woozy.

Fisher Brodie stands, sighing. “Word of advice,” he tells the Hatmakers. “Keep your wits about you. Go to your rehearsals. Rehearse. Get low and stay low.”

“Why does everyone believe her?” Alice says. “She’s obviously lying.”

“A good lie is only obvious to the person telling it,” Fisher says.

“It’s not right. Jill is—someone has to find her, we can’t just—”

“You really don’t know where she is?” asks Fisher.

“No!” Alice stands up. “Screw this. Come on, Rabbit.”

Rabbit doesn’t move. “I don’t want to get kicked out,” he says. “I think—I agree with Mr. Brodie. She seems.” He licks his lips. “Dangerous.”

“She is,” says Brodie.

“Yeah?” Alice pushes past Hastings, heading for the door. “I can be dangerous too.”

As soon as she’s gone, Brodie laughs.

“Sorry,” he says, covering his mouth. “I shouldn’t laugh. It’s just . . . I found that hilarious for some reason.”

Hastings looks to Brodie, who looks to the Hatmaker boy, who looks back to Brodie, who looks back at Hastings. Hastings straightens his bow tie.

“In any case,” he says, “lunch should be out in the ballroom any minute now. I hope the rest of your stay is . . . pleasant.”

They all laugh, even though it isn’t funny.

There were three places where Hastings felt most like himself, three places where he knew he belonged. Only one of them remains unchanged: standing behind the concierge desk. The swimming pool on the roof, beneath the beautiful glass dome, where Jess and Caroline used to spend their summer days, was the second. He would visit on his breaks and show up in his trunks after his shift. Jess, always with a book, some hardboiled detective story, double-glassed: sunglasses pushed up into her blond hair and reading glasses on her nose. Caroline would be pruney, exhausted, glowing from her own hard day’s work of diving for treasure at the bottom of the pool, but she’d perk up when Hastings turned on the radio. There were speakers in the big potted ferns around the water. Hastings would wade into the shallow end and sing to his daughter, sing inside the echoes of Sam Cooke and Diana Ross and Dusty Springfield. When she’d float up beside him he’d lift her by her middle, she’d brace her foot against his thigh, and Hastings would call on every muscle in his arms, his legs, his entire body to propel his daughter up. He’d fling his rocketship daughter high in the air and she’d laugh until she fell, sucked into a terrific splashdown. Even now, even in November, the lounge silent and the pool full of nothing but water, Hastings visits and remembers what it feels like to be in the right place with the right people.