A Dress to Die For (22 page)

“You’re from New York, dear?” Soso asked.

“Manhattan.”

“And if you could never return?”

“People leave. Happens all the time.”

“Would it happen to
you
?”

“No.” Her honesty was abrupt, and she thought it might have cost her the conversation, but it loosened him.

He slid his chair from behind the desk and pulled a fat book from a shelf behind him. He slapped the tome on the table and opened to a seemingly random page. Jeremy leaned forward to look, and Laura was comforted that though he was quiet, he was attentive.

Soso pointed to a postcard-like photo of a beach. “This is Brunico.” A strip of sharp rocks separated a stone mansion of a hotel from the soft sand by the water. He flipped the page to show rivers and streams surrounded by craggy rocks and sheets of sticky moss, more snowcapped mountains than you could shake a stick at, and then a bridge, also stone, built with the same design eye as the hotel. The bridge spanned a wide tributary, becoming part of the landscape. She glanced at Jeremy, wondering if he noticed the similarities between the two or if he’d ever seen a less appealing vacation spot. She couldn’t read his expression.

“Do you have pictures of the Inaugural Ball?” Laura asked. “Were you there?”

“I was. Henrietta and I were members of the court since we were children. This is me with the princess.”

The princess lit up the picture. Even though Soso and another woman that looked like Henrietta stood with her, it was as if she couldn’t even see them with the light coming from Philomena. She wore a blue gown that looked like nothing special, rolling at the edges of the neck and puckering at the front of the side seam.

“Where did she have that gown made?” Laura asked.

“That was made on Brunico. The Saffron gown required a special dispensation. We stick to our own craftspeople for just about everything.”

Laura glanced at Jeremy again. He was looking at a picture at the top of the page of the high prince and Philomena. Again, the princess took up half the page with her long black hair and sunlit smile.

Then Soso pointed out a stone cottage surrounded by trees and bushes. “My home. That’s my wife. My youngest son is two now. I haven’t seen him in eight months. I want to go home.” The place stood on a rain-drenched piece of rock under low, grey skies. Crows perched in a black line in the edge of the roof. It was a home only a Brunican could love, though maybe Soso thought the same thing of Manhattan.

Laura flipped to the bridge, the hotel, then to the stone cottage. “You guys have some sort of work camp for prisoners or something? Public works?”

“There’s a very small prison population.”

“And you had my dad build you a house?” She indicated the house, which had the same style as the bridge and the hotel.

“He wanted to do it. And I want to return to it.”

“Your son is two. You applied for refugee status fifteen years ago.”

“One can get in and out if one is secretive, knows the routes, and has a boat.” Soso closed the book and placed it back on the shelf. “I want to see my children and my wife again. If I have to lie to do it, I will. I could use your support, and your mother’s, as well. But if you can’t or won’t, I understand. I ask only that you don’t get in my way.”

“I’m going to tell you something,” Jeremy interjected. “I have as much to gain from that dress being real as you do, but you don’t want Laura lying for you. The mother either. Sob story or no, I’ve never met a Carnegie who could lie worth a damn.”

Jeremy hadn’t seen Laura get into a restaurant without a reservation or a storage facility without a compartment number. One day, she was going to have to tell him that under the right circumstances, with Ruby’s presence, a good story, more acting and less outright falsehood, she could lie herself into all kinds of trouble.

Soso, who had been dutifully ignoring Jeremy, regarded him seriously. “And you? How do you lie?”

“Very well, thank you, but only when it counts. My word means nothing here.”

“I am very sorry then,” Soso said. “We don’t have much more to discuss. Come any time you’d like Brunican wine. The boat comes with new bottles every other week. I intend to be gone very soon.”

**

Laura thought she was walking at a normal pace, but when Jeremy pulled on her hand and said, “Slow down, tiger,” she realized she’d been storming down the street.

“Do you believe the nerve? First of all, showing me what my father’s been doing in the past twenty years, while he was in prison for what I
still
don’t know, and then asking us to lie, when he has the real dress himself, in his freaking possession, or in his sights at the very least. So the high prince can destroy it? I mean.... I have no words. Do you hear me, Jeremy? No words.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and took her toward the train station at a normal pace. “We can’t go see your mother like this. You’re going to give her another heart attack.”

“I’m not going to the hospital. I have a fitting.”

He stopped her in the middle of the street, causing a traffic jam of people hauling colorful bags of Christmas goods. She got a stroller in the ankle, and he pulled her toward the curb. “You have one mother, and she needs you.”

“You don’t even speak to yours.” She was sorry almost immediately. He hadn’t elaborated too expansively on his parents and his sister because it was a sore spot, and there she was, bringing it up in the middle of the street.

He put his arm around her shoulders again and walked north. “We’ll get a cab to the hospital.”

“No, Jeremy. I’m not missing delivery so we can sit in a room and do nothing. Ruby’s up there anyway, which also means I have to do her job as well as my own.”

“Would it make you feel better if I did the fitting?”

“You didn’t come back early to do my fittings.”

“No, I came back to sit in a hospital with you. But if me working makes you a little less crazy, I’ll do that. Come on.” He stepped into the street and hailed a cab. A cab always appeared for Jeremy. It was his personal magic. He opened the back door. “Thanks for the Brunican wine, by the way. I have a headache already.”

“You’re welcome, and thank you,” she said, getting in the backseat.

He closed the door and waved as the cab pulled away.

**

Besides her brief stints recovering from getting beat up by a mobster and breaking her humerus, Laura had spent very little time in a hospital. Mom had already been there two days, and it felt like a month. Jimmy and Ruby sat on either side of the bed, Ruby tapping on the phone and Jimmy holding Mom’s IV-poked hand while he talked about something on the television. The cross-stitch of the yellow bird sat on Mom’s lap, half done. Her wheelie tray was full of cups, plates, wrappers, crumpled plastic, and her empty Jell-O container.

“Hey, Mom.” Laura kissed her mother on the forehead. “What’s happening?”

“They won’t let me out tomorrow.”

“Did they say when?”

“No. I’m going crazy in here.”

“Here.” Laura fished the Christmas tree embroidery kit out of her bag. “From Cangemi. The detective.”

“She’s making us crazy,” Ruby said, looking up from her phone. “Did we get a package from New Sunny? I have some development coming in.”

“No, but I got us some prints. Do you want to go back? I’ll hang out up here. Jeremy’s doing our fitting for the March delivery.”

Ruby crossed, then uncrossed her legs, looking over at Mom, then pocketing her phone.

Mom waved a hand. “Go already. I’m sick of that phone tapping.”

Ruby kissed Mom and said she would be back later.

Laura followed her sister into the hall. “What do the doctors say?”

“Coming along fine. She’s making me nuts. She keeps making up theories about the Brunican entourage from like twenty years ago. Reminds me of someone.”

“Did you say anything about the storage space?” Laura asked.

“No! Do you want her to have another heart attack?”

Laura sighed and leaned on the wall. In the whirlwind of Brunican intrigue and job offerings, she’d almost forgotten that Mom had almost died. She stayed in the hall after Ruby ran off and stared at the green and yellow checks of the floor tiles. If Jeremy hadn’t done her fitting, she would have casually stopped by for an hour at dinner and gotten thrown out by the nurses at nine o’clock, then she would have just gone back to the office and shown up at the hospital the next morning for an hour before work. Yet she would have given Mom nothing, not a minute of her time unless it was utterly convenient and easy. Even Jeremy the workaholic knew the point was to sit in the room.

She moved to the doorway. Jimmy had fallen asleep in his chair with his head propped on one hand. Mom had dropped off in a sitting position, mouth open a little, hands drooping at her sides with the palms up. One hand held a stack of playing cards, and a game of solitaire was spread on her lap.

Laura remembered something like a slap in the face. She was in second grade. Their apartment was freezing cold because the landlord hadn’t turned on the heat yet. She ran down the hall from something. Maybe Ruby. Maybe another hour of homework. And she knocked down the laundry line. It was all her underwear, and she had to put it back up before Mom saw. Mom was mad all the time. Mom was scary.

She hadn’t ever remembered Mom as scary until she stood in the doorway of the hospital room. The playing cards had jogged the memory. When Laura was in second grade, Mom had begun playing solitaire and yelling a lot. One morning, Laura got up, tiptoed to the kitchen, and found her mother sleeping with her head on the kitchen table and the playing cards folded into little boats. They were all over the table, the counter, and even on the chairs. Failed attempts covered the floor. Laura tried to set up her cereal quietly, but she knocked over a row of cards that had been on her chair. Mom awoke and roared like a lion until Laura ran back into her room, determined to go to school without breakfast, again, rather than upset Mom with her presence.

The memory of those little boats brought back some questions she should have asked earlier, and since her mother was sleeping anyway, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to keep her mind occupied. Laura sat in the empty chair against the wall and kicked Jimmy’s leg lightly.

He snorted, looking around and reaching for his belt, which she figured was where he’d kept his gun. “Nice of you to come,” he said, sarcasm unbridled.

“What precinct did you work?”

“All over. Red Hook, West side, all up and down.” He put his head back in his hand.

“When did you retire?”

“You’re going to wake your mother.”

“I saw Soso again.”

That woke him up. He sat straight in the chair and glanced at Mom. She didn’t stir.

Laura leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I went to the café. Jeremy came with me.”

“Fat lotta good.”

“Soso knows where the dress is. He’s having it shipped back to Brunico.”

Jimmy did not change his relaxed, half-asleep posture, but he looked at her pointedly.

Laura nodded. “He said so, and he wanted someone to back up that the dress at the Met is real. Then he said the Brunican wine comes in once a week by boat. And so I’m thinking, we don’t have a trade agreement with Brunico. This must be some kind of private boat. And if it brings the wine here, it’s probably taking the dress back.”

“You ever give it a rest?”

“She’s sleeping. What do you want from me?”

He sat up and fished his phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to pick up dinner. Should be back before she gets up.” He tapped something into the phone. “She’s going to tell you to go to work. Don’t, okay? She’s soft for you. She thinks you love your job more than her and that it’s not a problem.” He slid his jacket off the back of the chair. “I got a text in to a buddy with the Harbor Police. He’ll see if we have any private ships registered to Brunico docked right now. I’ll tell you what they say at nine when they kick us out. Fair enough?”

“You don’t trust me to stay?”

“Am I picking up dinner for you, too?”

Laura sighed. “Sure. I’ll be here.”

CHAPTER 16

Laura had no idea how hard it would be to sit and do nothing. She tidied, played on her phone, and looked out the window. She played out the month of the Brunican entourage in her head a hundred times. She wondered if she had any illegitimate royal brothers and sisters. As much as she was sure Dad had been in jail all those years, he was also out building roads and bridges, so he probably wasn’t in a super-max or even behind bars most of the time. He had to have been on some kind of minimum-security work detail, which might have allowed for princess-type visiting and the creation of siblings. Maybe that was what the prince had in mind: to get an heir he might not have been able to make himself.

She felt a pang of pity for Dad, stuck in a foreign country, manipulated into doing something he didn’t understand against a man he didn’t know, put into jail for two decades, forbidden from communicating with his family, and forced to build up a place that had stolen his life.

Feeling anything at all for Dad besides anger and hate was uncomfortable. She didn’t want to take him out of the box she’d built for him. It fit perfectly in a little black compartment in her heart, and without it there, a piece of ugly emptiness took its place. He could have found a way to contact them. He could have traded a letter in exchange for Soso’s house. He could have worked just a little harder to love her and Ruby, but he hadn’t. He’d failed. She despised him.