Hostile Makeover (26 page)

And possibly hated her,
Lacey thought. “There should be a large crowd.”

“Yes.” Zoe’s voice turned bitter. “You know,
The National Enquirer, Access Hollywood
, and
Entertainment Tonight
.”

A knock at the door startled both of them. Zoe peered out from behind the curtain to see who it was and then opened it. Yvette stepped in the foyer and threw a brief inquisitive glance at Lacey. She was wearing a brown tweed jacket, a camel-colored sweater, and matching slacks. She carried a rich brown leather tote bag from Coach, and her sleek blond hair was tucked into a chignon. She looked casually elegant and completely composed. Yvette eyed Lacey coolly.

“I’m just leaving,” Lacey said. To Zoe she murmured, “Thank you for seeing me. I’ll be happy to attend the memorial.”
What will I do with Mom and Cherise? Send them to the mall? Bring them along? Lock them in my apartment?

Yvette turned her attention to Zoe. “Oh, dear, you look terrible. Let’s go take care of you. You must do something with your face.”

“There were always the two of us, Yvette.” Zoe began to cry again. “We had our problems, but we were a team. I had a sister. I can’t be the only one left now.”

“You and I are still a team. You have to pull yourself together, Zoe. We’re picking up your parents in two hours. Go on up and take a shower. I’ll find something nice for you to wear.”

Zoe hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know what to do.”

Yvette hugged her and gave her a slight push toward the stairs. “Go, Zoe. I’m here now. I’ll take care of everything.”

A purple cab pulled up at the curb, and Lacey shrugged on her jacket. “Good-bye. Take good care of her.”

Yvette nodded. She held the door open and watched until Lacey climbed into the backseat of the cab.

Chapter 19

The knot in her stomach throbbed as Lacey waited outside the security gate at Reagan National Airport. She had driven like a maniac to arrive on time after picking up the pathetic rental car. She had been promised a midsize, but they were out, so she had been downgraded to a tiny Toyota Echo. It felt cramped and cheap, except for the daily rental rate, which was exorbitant. Compared with her late, lamented 280ZX, it felt like she was driving a tin can, a flimsy tin can that probably cost more than $15,000. What was worse, it was beige with a gray interior, but Lacey hoped this bland color scheme would be soothing to her mother.

She watched as the first passengers came out, followed by the middle-row passengers, before there was any evidence of her family. Finally Lacey’s mother bobbed eagerly into sight, looking cheerful in her neon-green nylon jogging suit, which featured hot-pink stripes up the sides. A huge purple-and-yellow tote bag hung from her shoulder, and her sunglasses perched on her head. Rose Smithsonian might just as well have worn a neon sign that spelled out TOURIST! in sequined letters. Lacey closed her eyes and made a mental note not to let any cabdrivers take her mother for a ride. They would take one look at her and charge her triple fares.

“There she is, Cherise,” Rose said. “Lacey! Lacey, darling, we’re here!”

Lacey opened her eyes and managed a weak smile. “Hi, Mom.” She offered a cheek for her mother to kiss. Rose left a lipstick print that Lacey had to smudge off with her hand. Her mother looked trim, fit, and attractive, and way too happy to have landed in Lacey’s life with both Nike-shod feet.

Her mother took a good look at her. “Dressed for a funeral, dear?”

Lacey looked down at her all-black ensemble. “I just wanted to be comfortable today.”

“You couldn’t just wear blue jeans?”

“I had to work this morning.” Changing the subject. “You look good, Mom.”

Rose smiled. “I have to keep up, you know.”

Lacey did know. Peer pressure to be fit was brutal in the Mile High City from whence she came. Denver, Colorado, was the thinnest and fittest big city in the United States, and no Smithsonian woman worth her mettle was going to endanger that record. “With you girls out of the house, I’ve been taking up sports,” she said. “A little golf. A little tennis.”

“We’re not girls anymore.” Lacey had been saying that since she turned eighteen.

Her mother gave her a quick hug. “You’ll always be my girls. Right, Cherise?”

“Hey, big sis!” Cherise said with feeling as she gave Lacey a smothering hug. Lacey focused on her sister, who was younger by just a year, but from a vastly different universe. An aura of well-scrubbed perkiness surrounded Cherise like a halo. She wore tight, faded jeans and a snug bubblegum-pink fitted T-shirt, in all her blond and tanned glory. Her longish hair was pulled back into a ponytail held by a pink fuzzy scrunchy. A dab of mascara and lip gloss was all the makeup she wore. Cherise was still single, though she was always on the lookout. Lacey remembered her as perpetually dating some athletic and respectable but slightly dull young man or another, who generally lived up to Rose’s expectations, if not quite up to Cherise’s.

Please be tired so I can just tuck you both into bed.
“I’m sure you’re exhausted after the flight,” Lacey said.

“No way, I napped on the plane,” Cherise said. “What is there to do in this town?”

“Oh, this and that. How about I take you home and get you settled?”

“Okay. Then we’ll go out, right?” Her motor was still running. “I want to see everything! It’s been ages since I was here last, visiting crazy old Aunt Mimi.”

“Cherise, we’re not here to run Lacey ragged,” her mother offered.

“Sure we are.” Cherise smiled deceptively. “It’s Friday; I’m sure Lace wants to get out and party. Girls’ night out, right? Look out, D.C.; here come the swanky Smithsonians!” There were aspects of the head cheerleader that would never desert Cherise. She would have a frantic agenda of whirlwind sightseeing planned. It was her nature.

Once a cheerleader, always a cheerleader.
If Lacey didn’t act fast, they would be racing from monument to monument, museum to museum, to coffee shop, to boutique, to dinner and dancing, and to utter exhaustion. “Let’s start with baggage pickup. This way, ladies. And then we’ll load up my rental car.”

“It’s so sad about your ratty old car, Lacey, but on the plane I was thinking,” her mother began. “Actually, Cherise and I were talking, dear, and we decided you should take her old car.”

“Her minivan?” Lacey nearly choked. The very idea of driving a minivan was deeply offensive to her. Felicity Pickles drove a minivan, for heaven’s sake.
And just look what happened to hers.

“You’ll like it, Lacey,” Cherise jumped in. “It’s big and roomy. You can haul the whole gang around. It’s like a dorm room on wheels. And it has a great sound system.”

“Every car you ever touched had the curse of the lemon,” Lacey shot back.

“All except the minivan,” she said. Lacey knew this was stretching the truth. “Anyway, I’m buying an SUV hybrid next.”

“How ecological of you. How did you ever wind up with a minivan, anyway?”

“It was Mom’s, before she got her SUV.”

“Mom’s minivan?!”
Do you hate me that much?

“It can pack a lot of equipment. You know, your skis, your bike, your golf clubs, your camping gear . . .”

“None of which I have, or need. Thanks for thinking of me, but I don’t require any more hand-me-downs from the Smithsonian lemon orchard of ungrateful automobiles.”

“But it’s the perfect solution, Lacey,” her mother said. “You don’t have a car; Cherise needs to get rid of this one. You could fly home and drive it back. We could even drive with you, make it a cross-country family vacation. Like when you two were babies. It would be fun.”

A perfect scenario for disaster.
“I’m sure you can pawn it off on some homeless person in Denver.”

“Well, we don’t want any unpleasantness now,” Rose said. “We’ll talk about the car later.” Her mother paused a beat before starting another thread of conversation. “But I do have a little bone to pick with you, Miss Lacey Blaine Smithsonian.”

The middle name. Uh-oh. Only criminals and little kids in big trouble ever hear their middle names.

Lacey figured the knot in her stomach could not get any tighter. “You might as well pick away, Mother.” They arrived at their baggage carousel, which was still empty. The Smithsonian luggage was nowhere in sight.

“What is this nonsense about your being involved with killers?”

“Killers?” Lacey wondered for a moment whether to just play dumb. She had hoped her stolen car was the only problem that Rose would plan to solve. She intended to keep Vic undercover—unfortunately not her own—and any and all of her friends and acquaintances as far away from her family as possible while they were in town. And she promised herself never to discuss her job.

Her mother always protested that she was proud of her daughter’s journalism career, but Lacey didn’t believe it. Reading newspapers only depressed and confused her mother, and when Lacey sent her clippings of her column, which was seldom, Rose was of the general opinion that Lacey was a little too judgmental, and who really cared about clothes anyway? Rose rarely bought
The Eye Street Observer
; it was carried only at a few out-of-town newspaper outlets in Denver, and always a few days late. The thought that Rose knew next to nothing about her eldest daughter’s life was comforting to Lacey. She actually had settled on two relatively benign subjects for discussion, movies and food, and she had stocked her apartment with both. But here was the
killer
question. “I don’t know, Mom. What do you hear?”

“Our neighbor—Mrs. Dorfendraper, you remember her; she’s our precinct committeewoman? She found your name all over the Internet. I’m far too busy to fool around with your father’s computer, but are you aware that there is some sort of terrible thing called the Conspiracy Clearinghouse on that . . . oh, what is it called, Cherise?”

“That Web site?” Cherise said. “DeadFed dot com. It’s pretty wild.”

“Mrs. Dorfendraper has nothing better to do than Google my name on the Web? The woman needs a hobby.”
I forgot, she has a hobby: gossip.

“That Web site has the most unbelievable stories. Why, it’s worse than reading those crazy tabloids in the supermarket, and your name seems to be attached to some of them,” her mother continued. “I tell you, Lacey, there are days when I wish our family name were still Smith. I mean, just how many Lacey Smithsonians do you think there might be?”

“Good old Mrs. Dorfendraper, the eyes and ears of central Denver.” Lacey could picture Mrs. Dorfendraper. She was the very picture of a concerned neighbor, with her sensible shoes, her practical haircut, her old-fashioned glasses, and her nose in everybody’s business. What fun it must be to be able to do her busybody business in cyberspace now. Especially when she’d never worked a day in her life. “So she has a computer now? It must make spying on the neighbors so much easier.”

“Don’t be unkind, dear.” It was an automatic mother response. “She doesn’t have any family.”

“You know you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

“And I suppose that picture of you waving that sword thingy was phony,” Rose said.

Ah, the infamous picture, again.
Lacey shrugged and said nothing.
Actually, I was aiming the sword thingy, not waving it.
“We already talked about that, remember? It was all blown out of proportion—”

“It was a sword
cane,
Mom,” Cherise kicked in. “Like an antique, or something.”

“Thanks for the news flash, Lethal Feet.” Lacey made a direct hit with the lethal nickname. Cherise sniffed and backed off. “Really, Mom, the story was all about the dress I was wearing. Events just happened to . . . unfold.”

Her mother continued in a lather. “I couldn’t even read it all. It was just too upsetting. Did you really have to stab that poor man in the foot?”

“It was him or me. Don’t worry, Mom. He’ll walk again. In prison.”
Lacey caught with unsavory playmates; how fun.
“Those are really old articles,” Lacey said in her defense.
Almost a month ago. Ancient history. Thank you, Mrs. Dorfendraper, for bringing it up again; I’ll Google you sometime, too.

“You know that I don’t tell you how to live your life,” her mother continued. “I am not that kind of mother. But I will have none of this tracking-down-killers business while I am here.”

“We’ll only be here for a few days.” Cherise smirked. “How much trouble could she get into?”

“I don’t want my girls involved with any killers or murderers or kidnappers or politicians or any other unsavory characters.” It was the lament of mothers everywhere.

“At least not while we’re here,” Cherise said, and winked.

“We won’t be visiting my office then,” Lacey said, wondering how she could fit that in if it became necessary. She did not want to be involved with the aftermath of Amanda Manville’s death, but she had made a promise to the deceased. She had found that trouble didn’t always seek an appropriate slot in her agenda. What if the idiot who stole her car planned to send another message? “A quiet weekend is my fondest wish,” Lacey promised. “And where on earth did they send your luggage?”

“You were a police reporter in Sagebrush, which was bad enough, and you never got into these kinds of situations, at least not that I’m aware of. I may not know a lot, Miss Lacey.” Rose turned to scan the slow-moving baggage carousel for their tardy luggage. “But I do know that fashion reporters do not solve crimes or write about them.”

“Just ‘Crimes of Fashion,’” Cherise said. “And you know Lacey has an opinion about everything, Mom. She probably even has a snarky opinion about what we’re wearing.”

Lacey spied a tourist on their left holding a copy of
The Eye Street Observer
, its front page blazing with headlines about Amanda Manville—and Lacey’s latest “Crimes of Fashion” column. She moved to the right to draw their eyes away from the paper.