Vigil (23 page)

It was a big change from the first article that he’d given back to me. This one only had three red marks on it. “Sure, I’ll get right on it.”

“One thing about you is that you take direction well,” he said. “I tell you what to do, and you take my advice. You rarely make the same mistakes twice.”

I ducked my head. “I’m a fast learner.”

“You are,” he said. “You’re a go-getter. You work hard. You don’t let obstacles stand in your way.”

“I try not to.”

“You’re a very interesting person,” he said.

“Me?”

He clasped his hands together in front of his body. “You know, I don’t want to bring up anything that’s too upsetting, Ms. Kane. I understand that you had to leave the office yesterday, and I can only assume that this was the cause.” He picked up a folded newspaper off his desk and showed it to me.

It was the article. The one about my stripping career. My stomach turned over. I’d hardly thought about it since yesterday. Finding the legs had been a wee bit traumatic. Then I’d had to work as quickly as I could on the article about it.

The article had to strike a delicate balance, accusing the police while not seeming to do so on purpose. It had to make them feel as if the people were clamoring for them to be transparent. It had to inspire them to do the right thing. And if it failed to inspire, it had to frighten them.

It hadn’t been an easy article to write. And the fact that Henry wasn’t picking up on my slant only meant that my hard work had paid off, and I’d managed to do what I set out to do.

But the article that outed me? I’d practically forgotten about it. Looking at it now, I felt like I’d been slapped back to reality.

“Shit,” said Henry. “This is too upsetting, isn’t it?”

I squared my shoulders. “No, I’m not upset.”

He laughed a little. “You’re not fooling me, Ms. Kane.” He sighed. “Listen, you’ve become something of a big deal in this city, and you haven’t been here for that long. I think you have a bright future. And I think that part of you wants to crawl under a rock and hide from this story about you. Your past obviously isn’t something that you’ve broadcasted, and I can understand why.”

I felt on the spot and uncomfortable. I never wanted to discuss this stuff with Henry. Never.

“Here’s the thing, Ms. Kane,” he said. “I couldn’t care less how you put yourself through college. I know what kind of reporter you are. I read your writing, and I know what kind of person you are. You’re the kind of person who can weather this kind of scandal. But not if you hide from it.”

I bit my lip. “I don’t understand.”

“I think you should write a feature story about your experiences. From the stripper pole to the front page of
The Sun-Times
. This is America, Ms. Kane, and you’re an inspiration.”

“This
is
America, sir,” I said. “And there’s a whole lot of Puritan values if you scratch the surface. Nobody finds strippers inspiring.”

He shrugged. “You might be surprised.”

“You’re giving me an assignment to write about this?”

“I’m not going to force you to do it,” he said. “I’m only saying that I think you should, and that if you did, we’d run that story. Don’t run from your past, Ms. Kane. Own it.”

* * *

“Cecily.”

I looked up to see that Callum was standing over my desk. I’d been staring at a blank document on my screen, trying to decide whether or not I should actually write about my past, like Henry had suggested. Thus far, I simply hadn’t been able to muster the effort to do it.

I gazed up at him. “What are you doing here?”

He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I, um…”

And I understood. “You read the article, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “I did.”

I took a shaky breath. I searched his face for some sign of what he thought. But his expression was guarded, blank. There was no sign of his emotional reaction.

He put his hand on the back of my chair. “We need to talk.”

Shit. That didn’t sound good. I looked back at my computer screen. “Look, if you’re done with me, I understand. We don’t have to make it a big production or anything.”

“Can you take lunch at some point?”

He hadn’t denied that he wanted to break up with me. The thought of losing him hurt me more than I thought it would. I thought of his telling me that he loved me just a few nights ago. I knew he shouldn’t have said it so quickly.

I wouldn’t look at him. “You’re going to take me to lunch and do it at a restaurant?”

“I don’t want to go to a restaurant,” he said. “Can you take lunch or not?”

* * *

We sat in one of the gardens behind the Rutherford mansion. I couldn’t even see the city. There was nothing around us but trees and flowers. We were in the shade of a tall oak, on a picnic blanket. There was a basket of food too—sandwiches and olives and fruit and a bottle of wine. But I wasn’t hungry.

Callum hadn’t touched any of it either. “I assume it’s true,” he said.

“Yes, it’s true,” I said. “I worked as a stripper after I graduated from high school. I did it for three years, until I was twenty-one.”

“But you never talked to me about this.”

I looked down at the blanket.

“A lot of things must have happened in three years. You must have met people and did things and had a whole life. But none of those things were things you ever talked about.”

“I was ashamed,” I said. “I
am
ashamed. It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“There are a lot of things about myself that I’m ashamed of,” he said. “And I’ve told you about them. Hell, Cecily, you know more about me than anyone. Even Nolan doesn’t know about my issues with sex. I’ve never had a reason to talk to him about them.”

“I know,” I said in a quiet voice.

“But you didn’t think you could tell me about this part of your life.”

“No,” I said. “Look, it isn’t like you think. I didn’t just decide on a whim that I wanted to take off my clothes for money.”

“What’s it like, then?” he said. “Tell me about it. Talk to me.”

I got to my feet. I went over to one of the bushes. I began to finger the leaves, stroke the flowers. And I started to talk.

“My mother was a drunk. Hell, as far as I know, she still is one. I haven’t seen her since I moved out after high school. I stayed with her until I turned eighteen, and then I got the hell away from her. She wasn’t the worse mother ever. She never hit me or anything. But she was a mess. She couldn’t hold down a job. She flitted from one thing to other, never managing to make much money before she got fired for being too wasted at work. She never seemed to really notice me much, I guess. Not when I was a kid. When I was older, I was able to get my own jobs to help take care of us. Well, then she noticed me. She used to steal from me, use my hard-earned money to get booze. It was a bad life, and I needed to get out of it.

“I wouldn’t have started stripping if I hadn’t known that I eventually did have a way out. See, I had grandparents. My mom’s parents were the best thing about my childhood. My mom didn’t take care of me, but they made sure that I was okay. They were the ones who remembered my birthday, who told me about Santa Claus, who took me out for breakfast on Sunday mornings. They were there for me in a way that my mother never was. I loved them so much.

“And then they died. First my grandmother. And then my grandfather six months later. My grandmother had a heart attack, and my grandfather had cancer, but I think he just wasted away without her. I know he wanted to stay for me, but I don’t think he could. They were close. They were a unit. And when they broke apart like that, well, there wasn’t much left for him.

“They had some money, my grandparents. They weren’t rich or anything, but they had a little nest egg left over. It was enough to live on pretty comfortably for about ten years. Or it was enough to buy a house and live on less comfortably for about that long. It was a significant chunk of money. And my grandparents knew that if my mother got her hands on it, she’d piss it all away. She wouldn’t have made good choices with it. It was enough money that it might have made things better for me, if she had it. But it wouldn’t have lasted, and they knew that.

“Besides, my grandparents didn’t trust my mother anymore. They pretty much hadn’t spoken to her in years. They interacted with me but not her. They made sure that I was okay, but they didn’t try to help her anymore. Because they realized that she was beyond help. She would spit on any attempt to change her. My mother was selfish. She cared about her addiction most of all. And if she cared about anything else, well, she hid it pretty well.

“Anyway, my grandparents didn’t want my mother to have that money. So they left it to me. But they knew that wouldn’t be enough. They didn’t want my mother to be given the money in lieu of me, since I was too young to inherit. So they made it so that I couldn’t get the money until I was twenty-one years old.

“I tried to hold on that long. But when I was eighteen, I couldn’t handle living with my mother anymore. She and I both worked crap jobs in food service. We were waitresses at this bar, and this girl who worked as a dancer used to come in. I’d talk to her while I was bringing her drinks or bringing hot wings to her table. And she told me that it wasn’t a bad job, stripping. She said it paid well, and it wasn’t hard.

“She said the biggest key was to have an exit strategy. She said it was like gambling. It was a little too easy to make the money. It was hard to quit. But if you didn’t, she said the life would eat you alive. All the gutter feeders. All the drugs. All the disrespect. All the objectification.

“And one day, I’d worked really hard. I’d pulled a double, and I’d made good tips. I had them in my pocket. I had planned to transfer them someplace safe when I got home, someplace where my mother wouldn’t find the money. But she pick-pocketed me. And when I confronted her about it the next morning, she had spent all of it.
All
of it.

“I couldn’t handle it anymore. I had to get away from her. There were probably other ways. Maybe I could have kept waitressing and saved up the money. Slowly. Carefully. And I’m sure that I could have supported myself waitressing. Once I was on my own. I would have been able to live off the money I made doing that.

“But it was getting out that was hard. That was what cost all the money. Getting an apartment. All the places required a security deposit in addition to the first month’s rent. That was quite a lot of money to have lying around. More than a thousand dollars. I didn’t have that kind of money. And I needed to get away from her. I
needed
it.

“So that was why I starting dancing. I was desperate. And I didn’t do it forever. It was never the plan for it to last forever. The plan was for it to be temporary until I got the money from my grandparents. And then I’d go to college. So that was what I did. I worked in different clubs in different places during those three years. I shook my ass on the stage, and I took off my clothes. And I got my money. And I bided my time.

“I worked here for a while. In Aurora. That’s how I met Darlene Perry. I don’t know if you recognize the name.”

Callum shook his head. He was staring at me with rapt attention as I spun this little tale for him.

“Well, she was one of The Phantom’s victims. And she was my best friend. We were both strippers, and we both did most of our work at a place down by the docks called The Crazy Horse. That was where we met Hayden Barclay for the first time. He liked both of us. Paid us for private lap dances more than once. Invited us to go with him after hours to party.

“I didn’t do stuff like that. I didn’t want to get sucked into that world. I didn’t date while I was a stripper. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone what I did for a living. And I certainly wouldn’t date any of the people that I met in the clubs. That was sordid to me.

“But Darlene didn’t care about things like that. She didn’t have an inheritance from her grandparents waiting for her on the other side. She didn’t have a way out. I told her I’d take care of her, but I don’t think she believed me. Most of the other girls thought that I was just making up stories when I talked about my inheritance, or when I told them I was only doing this for a few years, that I was saving up money for school.

“Eventually, she saw that it was true. But I let her down. I let her die.” Tears were beginning to form on the inside of my eyelids. I wiped at them.

And I kept going. “Darlene started dating him. She kept up with Barclay for ages. She went all over the place with him. He didn’t think of her as his girlfriend or anything. She was just some stripper chick he fucked sometimes. And Darlene didn’t care about that. She just knew that he was rich, and that he bought her drinks and drugs, and that he was exciting to be around.

“But then I turned twenty-one, and I got my money. I quit stripping. I went to college. I left Darlene behind. I tried to get her to come along with me, but she didn’t. She didn’t have the same kind of dreams as I did. I’ve always known what I wanted. I’ve always been driven. I could make it through anything, because I knew where I was headed. And Darlene didn’t have that. All she saw was that I was in a strange, new world, and that she didn’t belong there.

“It was this spring that she finally came to see me. She said that Barclay had gotten weird. She said he was scaring her. He wanted to play these violent games when he fucked her, and she didn’t like it. She wanted to stay with me, figure something out.

“I let her. Of course I did. She stayed with me for almost a month. And I kicked her out.

“I did it.” Tears again. I swiped at them.

“She was blowing it for me, you know,” I continued, tears filling my voice. “I got away from those parties and those kinds of people. And she was staying at my place. And she was bringing them all around. They were in my living room, doing lines of coke on the coffee table. And I couldn’t handle that. I needed that out my life. So, I told her to leave.” Tears were streaming down my face now. I didn’t bother to wipe them away. “And two weeks later she was dead.”

Callum got up off the blanket. He came to me and put his arm around me.