Skirting the Grave (5 page)

When the train cleared the track, we watched its passengers crossing Broadway en masse.

“Did she get taller, decide to wear dresses, grow a Mohawk?” my father asked. “I don’t see her.”

“Heck,” I said. “She could have blue hair, for all I know.” My cell phone rang.

“Talk to me,” I said, having read Brandy’s name on the screen before I opened my phone.

“Sorry, Sis, I met an old friend I barely remembered from the Peace Corps, and she talked me into getting off in Philadelphia for lunch. I thought I’d catch the next train, but I missed it. Just a blip in my plans, really. I’ll be in around sixish tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“I’m sleeping in a bed tonight. I’ve had it with anything less, and sitting up in a train is way less. Look for me tomorrow, ’kay?”

Click. My phone went dead.

Look for her?

I’d look for her. With a basting gun, I’d look for her.

Eight

Fashion is at once both caterpiller and butterfly. Be a caterpiller by day and a butterfly by night.

—COCO CHANEL

In the wee hours of the following morning, I sat straight up in my bed, my heart racing like Amtrak’s Acela past a no-stop terminal.

It took me a minute to identify the sound; not steel wheels on steel track but a persistent and untimely intruder overworking our ancient door knocker, bound and determined to give our iron eagle a concussion.

I put on my robe and slipped my open cell phone in my pocket, my finger above the two, the speed dial number for Lytton’s private cell phone.

When I turned on the light in the front stairs, the knocking stopped. Dad came out of the gentleman’s parlor as I hit the bottom of the stairs, looking like he’d never gone to bed.

I checked the grandfather clock in the hall. “Did you just shave?”

“What makes you think so?”

I reached up to lift a smudge of shaving cream off his earlobe and showed him the evidence.

“I’m honing my sleuthing eye for detail. Plus, it’s three in the morning and you, who should be in your pj’s, reek of Old Spice.”

Both his earlobes turned bright red. Guilty. But of what?

“Well,” my father said, slipping his hands in the pockets of his well-worn smoking jacket, “I could say I’m going to school early today.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“I’m waiting for the morning paper?”

I might once have been the ten-year-old mother figure in this family, but I’d had this dear man, this knight in shining armor, at my back—or should I say his shoulder beneath my cheek. “Lucky for you, your Old Spice still makes the little girl in me want to crawl into your lap so you can make all my problems go away.”

“A daughter may outgrow your lap, but she will never outgrow your heart,” he said, slipping an arm around me. “Author unknown.”

“I love you, Dad.” I kissed his cheek and wished I could ease his burdens as effortlessly as he’d once eased mine. I also wished I had time to process the mystery of his middle-of-the-night shave.

Our neighbors had probably already reported us for disturbing the peace, and I had a vision of cop cars filling our drive. Again.

I opened the door to a woman I’d never seen before—though her features superimposed themselves on my frightful memory of a corpse—a doppelgänger who about made me jump from my skin: a dead girl, alive again.

Breathing hard and trembling on my doorstep. A fashionista with a full set—all eleventy-seven pieces—of Louis Vuitton luggage; a clone, scared, embarrassed, hopeful.

“Are you the Madeira Cutler? The one who worked for Faline? Brandy said you’d be here.”

Another reminder of Brandy’s effect on the household at large. “I’m Maddie Cutler. May I ask who you are?”

“Of course. Well.” The woman seemed lost as she fumbled to explain. “This is the right address. Let me start from the beginning.”

“I’d be grateful.”

“Someone stole my purse with my train ticket and paycheck in it—must cave and choose direct deposit. My assets are frozen because somebody tried to clean out my account. So I had to report the break-in to the police, which took forever, then I didn’t have the cash to take a train or the time to get money from relatives, so I borrowed a few dollars and got a ride from a friend . . . or five. Sorry I’m so late.”

“Late for what?” I asked. Could I still be dreaming? Subconsciously turning back time?

“Late for the job as your intern, of course. You still want me, don’t you?”

“That depends. Who are you?”

“Isobel York. Brandy said you were expecting me.”

“I had been, but . . . something . . . made me think you weren’t coming.” I looked at my father. “Dad, you wanna call Lytton? I’ll speed-dial Nick.”

“Got it,” he said, raising his cell phone and walking down the hall into the ladies’ parlor to talk on the phone in private.

I slipped my phone from my pocket. A simple “Get over here,” did it for Nick. He didn’t care why.

Meanwhile, our front door stood open, our middle-of-the-night caller wilting on the front stoop.

Did I believe her foolish story? If the dead girl had been wearing this outfit, I would never have doubted her identity. Isobel York Two sported a sixties short-sleeved tent dress in beige, the neck and single pleat both piped in black, with a single black frog closure across the pleat at the bodice. Beauty in simplicity. She carried a simple black patent clutch to go with her sixties slingback pumps.

That’s why I should believe her story. She dressed the part. But seriously, one could as easily hide beneath an outfit as make a splash and be “seen” in it. I hated keeping her on the stoop.

I hated the thought of letting her inside.

“May I come in?” fashion-plate Isobel asked, and I feared it wasn’t safe to say yes. I mean, she was posing as a dead girl. That had to be some kind of offense, though I didn’t know how you could arrest someone for having a dead person’s face.

Identical. The word I’d spoken earlier today reverberated in my mind as I selected and tossed scenarios. Maybe in the light of day, she would be—a dead ringer. I winced at my mental pun too late to edit my thoughts, their poor taste notwithstanding. Obviously tired, she leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms. “Did you get Grand-mère’s trunk?”

The word “trunk” hit me like a suction cup–tipped arrow between the eyes. I mentally yanked it off my brow, imagining a cartoonish “slurp” so I’d have time to form an answer.

“Madeira,” my father said, “she hasn’t pulled a gun on us; I think we can let her inside until the police get here.”

“Police?” our visitor asked, though she seemed grateful to accept the chair my father offered in our keeping room, first room off the front hall, to the right, across from the kitchen, and about two feet from the front door.

I took the chair across the table from her. “This will come as a surprise to you,” I told her,

“but someone else came to town today, with your wallet and driver’s license.”

“Oh. So you doubt I’m me? That explains your reaction. Sorry I can’t prove who I am, unless

. . . Did you look at the label on Grand-mère’s trunk?”

“I did, when I thought you weren’t coming and I considered sending it back.”

“So you saw you couldn’t because the return address is this address, right? Who else would know that? Other than the person who addressed it?”

“True.” I sure wished the cavalry would get here. I wanted to keep the imposter talking—maybe she’d incriminate herself—except that I was beginning to like her. If only she didn’t remind me of a certain corpse.

My father set down a cup of hot chocolate in front of her. Thoughtful man.

“Thank you, Mr. Cutler. At least, I assume you’re Brandy’s father. I didn’t borrow enough money to eat dinner.”

My dad crossed to the kitchen, again and came back a few minutes later with a cheese sandwich and a plate of Aunt Fee’s famous cinnamon rolls.

I whipped my gaze his way as he straightened the logs in the basket beside the keeping room’s people-tall fireplace, complete with cast-iron kettle and built-in brick oven.

“Did Aunt Fiona come home and stay long enough to bake?”

“No, she left enough frozen buns to keep me supplied until she gets home,” he admitted, entirely too focused on his task.

I rubbed my face with a hand and released a sigh. How could he not know how Aunt Fiona felt about him? Worse, how could he not know how he felt about her?

“Feel better?” I asked the stranger after she’d inhaled the sandwich and a cinnamon bun. I followed our guest’s surprised gaze and saw Nick standing by the front stairs, watching us.

“Nick! Did you climb up the getaway tree instead of coming to the front door?”

“Call me crazy, but I just assumed, when you said ‘Get over here’ at this hour . . . Evening, Mr. Cutler.”

My father gave Nick his most professorial expression of disapproval. Sore subject, the getaway tree outside Brandy’s room. Every one of Dad’s four children got caught at one time or another sneaking a special friend in or out that way.

Nick had his eye on that last cinnamon bun, but our visitor picked it up, so I presume that he went into the kitchen for another.

Werner knocked twice and walked in. “Late nights are getting to be a habit,” he said. I swallowed hard, fast, and wrong, and about coughed up a lung. Good thing I’d told Nick we’d had dinner a few times.

“Too late to be shy,” Werner said, sounding a bit like the grammar school brat who’d provoked me into calling him Little Wiener.

“Shush,” I said.

“You don’t have pepper spray or a Taser on you, do you?” he asked. “Tear gas? A grenade in your pocket? You’re making me nervous,” Werner said, so focused on me, he hadn’t yet noticed my father or our visitor.

“Good evening, Detective,” my father said, stretching to his full height from the fireplace behind my chair. “Has my daughter been terrorizing you?”

“Since the first time I saw her.”

“That makes two of us,” Nick said as he reentered the room, eating a cinnamon roll. Werner did a double take, then he recaptured his equilibrium. “Heard you were on your way, Jaconetti. Welcome home.”

The detective turned back to me. “What’s the rush that couldn’t wait until morning?”

“You might not have noticed that we have a visitor,” I said, indicating our midnight caller, seated out of range.

Werner turned his head, stilled, then leaned my way. “Cadaver clone, twelve o’clock.”

“Uh, yeah. That’s why I called.”

“Leave it to me, kiddo. I’ll protect you.”

Nick cleared his throat.

Nine

Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while their wearer is speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters.

—ANNE HOLLANDER

Our doppelgänger stood, all five feet eight or nine of her, in classic vintage—though her Manolo Blahnik booties were very today at about eight hundred-plus dollars. She was in her mid-twenties, dark hair and doe eyes, looked a little lost, a lot frazzled, uncomfortable in her surroundings, at the mercy of strangers, and trying not to reveal her panic to the odd lot of us.

That I sensed it, I blamed on my years as New York fashion designer Faline’s first assistant when I worked with newbie runway models. Now, that was a lesson in hidden panic. Also, panic had become a frequent visitor of mine since I got my first psychometric reading.

“If you didn’t want me to work for you, Ms. Cutler,” our visitor said, her perfect chin rising, her pride a bit of a sham, “you should have said so right away. And, Detective, I don’t appreciate the name-calling. Cadaver clone? Am I so pale I look dead to you? Frankly, I went through hell after having my purse ransacked.”

“A lot of that going around today,” I said. “Can you ID your mugger?”

“No mugger. A thief. In my apartment. But still, even after losing my ID, money, and train ticket, I busted my buttress to get here on time. So I don’t appreciate being made to feel like a two-headed giraffe in Gucci at a Quant exhibit.”

“Now that’s what I call a fashion intern,” I said, impressed by the accuracy in her statement. I mean, who else would know Mary Quant, inventor of the miniskirt, these days, except a student of fashion? And just look at the way she’s dressed.

“I meant no offense,” Werner said. “Miss Cutler and I speak with a kind of shorthand. We’ve been, ah, frenemies, since third grade. I’m Detective Lytton Werner, by the way,” he said, offering his hand. “And you are?”

“Isobel York.”

Werner did a double take, gawked, and shut his mouth, though it fell open again. Still, he tried to compose himself, too late. “Was anything besides your purse stolen from your apartment?” he asked.

“Actually, my Coach purse was found in the stairs outside my apartment, for which I thank the stars, since it cost an arm and a hoof.”

“A giraffe hoof, one presumes?” Werner said. “Can you come down to the station in the morning so we can get your fingerprints?”

I silently questioned the weird request with a look.

“You were right this morning,” he said. “Peach peasant blouse and socks do not a correct identification make, not for a fashionista.”

Could our middle-of-the-night visitor conceivably be Ms. York, in the flesh, then? “The resemblance is uncanny,” I said.

“Resemblance to who and fingerprints why?” Isobel asked, looking from one of us to the other. “I didn’t steal anything.”

“No,” I said, making the save, “but if your wallet is found, they’ll need to know which prints are yours.” If Isobel was related to the deceased—which she certainly appeared to be—we couldn’t break the news until we confirmed the relationship.

“I was visiting family at my apartment in D.C. when I lost my wallet, actually, though I spend most of my time at my apartment in New York,” Isobel said. Werner made a note of that. “Can you tell us who knew you were coming here?”

“My friends, my family, and likely my father’s workers, you know, the people who keep his family straight because he doesn’t have time.”

“Maybe we should save the third degree for daylight?” I suggested. Werner turned to our guest. “If someone broke into your apartment before you left home,”