Unforgettable

by Caroline B. Cooney

  He is seducing me, she thought, not through sex, but through wealth. Their way of life is beckoning to me. Their money is greeting me.

  “You were to be the fourth generation to wear it, Hope.” He was stricken by the loss, aching to see Hope wearing the beautiful piece of family history.

  “I don’t remember,” she whispered.

  “But you must at least remember the necklace itself! The thick gold chain? The heavy emeralds and diamonds? Slabs, almost. Immense stones. The necklace was a queen’s ransom.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You could not forget the necklace,” said Kender Senneth. “You used to love wearing it. We let you wear it for a few minutes at a time on special occasions.”

  She wanted to believe him. He was such a nice man, so distinguished. She wanted to agree to bring him the necklace.

  “I don’t remember,” she had said. Over and over. How could they argue with that? And she could never contradict herself.

  “We must have the necklace back, Hope. We’ve taken immense loans out against it. The necklace belongs to the bank more than to us, and we must have it.”

  She could see no way, now, to tell the truth. She could not risk admitting what had really happened to that necklace after it fell to the bottom of her linen drawstring bag.

  If he’s telling the truth, thought Hope, although truth seemed to be in very short supply, and if I tell the truth, too—I’ll go to jail! I’ll be the one who’s done terrible things. So I’ll stay with my two safe sentences: I don’t know. I don’t remember.

  “Edie wanted to sell it to support her drug habit,” he said.

  “Edie?” she repeated.

  “Another cousin,” whispered Kaytha. “The ship is full of them.”

  Hope shivered. Mr. Senneth had made Kaytha put the knife away. He was so casual about it, you would have thought Hope had been right the first time, and the ivory container held a comb.

  The ship is full of them. She had a vision of little cousins, scrabbling around like rats in the hold. “I don’t remember,” she said again, trying to hold onto that. That she did not remember.

  “I believe her,” said Kaytha finally. “She doesn’t know. She doesn’t remember.” Kaytha turned to leave the salon, and the forked tongue of the carved snake seemed to smile at Hope from the back of Kaytha’s skull. Kaytha had double faces, as unmatched as her head and body.

  But when Kaytha left from boredom, claiming she had more interesting things to do, Mr. Senneth continued interrogating from—what? What emotion pulled him on?

  His voice was smooth and flat, like the sea without wind. And like the sea, it had depths and currents of which she knew nothing. He ignored Billy when he came into the room.

  “You probably did see that shooting,” said Mr. Senneth, “and I suppose I could believe you’re blocking it out. Blocking out the moment in which Edie gave you the necklace. After all, there’s a certain similarity between the events.” He was trembling now, approaching some sort of emotional cliff.

  “Ken,” said Billy quietly. “Back off. The past won’t help. It has nothing to do with her.”

  “It has everything to do with her,” said Mr. Senneth.

  He hates me, thought Hope. Kender Senneth hates me. How can he hate a person who does not exist? What nightmares have I tumbled into?

  She had thought Mr. Senneth so kind and thoughtful, so courteous and distinguished, so articulate and urbane. He continued to be some of those: he remained distinguished and urbane and articulate. But the kind, the thoughtful, and the courteous were eaten away as if by rust and the sea.

  Hope began shivering uncontrollably, just when the thing she most needed was control. “You’re asking all the questions,” she said, playing for time and understanding. “It’s time I asked a few.”

  “You?” said Mr. Senneth. “Your job is to answer, not to ask.”

  “Why do you hate me?”

  Billy sucked in his breath and blew it out. “No, Kender, don’t discuss that,” said Billy, his voice nothing like a servant’s. His voice a commander’s. “This won’t help us. We need answers, not a verbal whipping.”

  Hope recognized him at last. The all too healthy-looking homeless man who had sat down on the bench beside her. When had that been? It felt like weeks before. It had been yesterday. And he had sat there—she had thought at the time—to rob her; to take her purse.

  That’s what he did, she thought suddenly. That was his purpose. To take my purse. But of course I didn’t have it anymore. So instead …

  “Who shot at you, though?” said Susan. “Everybody heard a shot.”

  “Kender did. My own uncle. He didn’t actually aim at me, of course, he just wanted me to know he was serious.”

  Nice family, thought Susan.

  “I thought,” said Edie, “that since this was my uncle, my very own blood relative, he’d surrender to the circumstances. He’d say, Oh, well, you win some, you lose some. He’d give up on the Queen Isabella idea, and we’d go our separate ways, because obviously we can’t work well together, and that would be that.”

  “No, huh?” Questioning Edie was like questioning a three-year-old. You kept getting answers you didn’t care about, and having to be sweet, and offer a candy bar.

  “No,” said Edie. “Aside from the fact that he invested a great deal of time and money in this plan, Kender seems to feel that I will contact the authorities and discuss his past, present, and future and he will be ruined. You see, Kender makes a market in stolen art. He’s very clever. He’s pulled off thefts from the Louvre and the British Museum and the Metropolitan in New York City. Kender is a very elegant man, very distinguished, very, very wealthy. He frequents these circles. In fact, he is on the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum. Kender helped arrange for the Queen Isabella necklace to be taken to Portugal for a year on an art exchange. Of course, he also arranged to substitute a paste necklace for the real one. He has a buyer. There are always people willing to buy great works of art, stolen or not, and this necklace is a great work of art. They’ll get millions and millions for those stones.”

  Susan did not care about millions and millions. She cared about the span of her own life.

  “Let’s tell him you’d never turn him in,” said Susan, who was happy to bargain. Mr. Senneth was welcome to his future, as long as Susan could have one, too. “He wouldn’t actually hurt you, would he? His own niece?”

  “No, no, Kaytha will do it. Kender is not a violent man. Kaytha, however, is a violent woman.”

  Wonderful. Susan tested the plastic handcuffs again. They looked so fragile, like a cheap Halloween trick for a six-year-old. But the handcuffs were going to work for just as long as the owner of the keys wanted them to.

  Kaytha was the owner of the keys.

  “Her father is not happy with her tendency to hurt people,” said Edie. “He knows he should have had her locked up long ago, but he can’t face the explanations he’d have to make in order to do it.”

  “What explanations would he have to make?”

  “He’d have to start with what Kaytha has done in the past. He’d have to move on to what she did to her last roommate in her last boarding school. Very expensive payoff, that one. He’d have to end with—”

  “Enough,” said Susan. She didn’t want to know what Kaytha had done. Perhaps waitressing wasn’t so bad. There were worse things than grubby tourists. Boat-bottom prisons were one. Sea bottoms were another.

  She struggled with the chaotic story Edie was telling, the pieces that went here, and the parts that went there. She still could not figure out how she, Susan Nevilleson, fit into this.

  “I could not go along with them,” said Edie, rather prissily. “I wasn’t brought up that way. It seemed easy enough to ruin their little necklace scheme: I’d take the copy and toss it in some Dumpster. Unfortunately, my timing was off.”

  Most things about Edie appeared to be off. The bigger surprise was that the Senneths allowed
Edie to be close to any of this at all. But peculiar relatives plagued every family. Although the Senneth family seemed to be nothing but peculiar relatives.

  “Kender and Billy flung me back into the limousine. They hadn’t seen me drop the jewelry into the open purse of that girl on the sidewalk. They thought I’d stashed it somewhere in the hotel, or the parking garage, or somebody else’s car. And of course they had to find out where it was. They are going to do a quick substitution that nobody will suspect. So they have to have the fake necklace. And they have to have it on Tuesday, when the switch is arranged.”

  Susan made a considerable effort to arrange freedom for herself, but there was absolutely no way to get those plastic handcuffs off. Her short stature had not, unfortunately, given her starvation-thin wrists. She could not suddenly slenderize them and yank herself back out of the handcuffs.

  The necklace that all the fuss was about then, was not the real necklace. The real necklace was still in the museum. I’ve been kidnapped, she thought, to protect a fake.

  And what else was fake?

  Miss Amnesia? Was she fake? But why? For all the answers Edie was dealing her, Susan still understood nothing.

  “But Kaytha was in The Jayquith watching from the seventh floor, where actually, of course, for that price you get a fabulous view, and Kaytha saw the whole thing. She could identify the girl into whose bag I had dropped the necklace. Of course nobody thought they’d ever see the necklace again. They were all stunned when the girl reappeared a few hours later. Just wandered out onto the plaza like a lost kitten waiting to be adopted.”

  That’s exactly how she looked, thought Susan. Miss Amnesia was a lost kitten. The most beautiful kitten in the world, waiting to be adopted.

  Edie smiled a crazy smile at the low ceiling above her bunk. “Or drowned,” she added.

  Susan did not like hearing the word drowned when she herself was prisoner on an oceangoing vessel.

  Susan wanted to be prepared. If by any remote chance she was able to free herself, she wanted to have her next moves in mind. “Can we make a getaway on the Wave Runners?” Susan asked Edie seriously.

  “I doubt it. They’re three stories above the water, remember. You can’t just throw them off. You’ve got to hook them onto the davit, and wind it up, and direct it up and over the rails and out over the water, and then unwind them down into the water. It’s very time-consuming.” Edie returned to the subject of acting. “Now, Kaytha loves drama. She is a very dramatic person herself, you know.” Edie paused. “Killers are.”

  Susan lost her grip. “How can you be so relaxed about this?” she screamed. “Kaytha may slit our throats and weight our ankles with cement and lower us overboard and you just lie there and discuss it like overdue library books?”

  Edie was twitching up and down the whole length of her body. “To Kaytha,” said Edie, “we are nothing but used library books. Once we are no further use to her, she’ll toy with us for a while, but then she’ll get bored. Or it will get too messy. She’s really quite fastidious so it won’t last as long as it would if she liked blood.”

  “But why my blood?” cried Susan. “What does Kaytha think I can do for her?”

  “You told her you knew about the necklace.”

  “Well, I do,” said Susan. “It was in the newspapers. It’s a big diplomatic deal. People are saying the Queen Isabella necklace really belongs to Portugal anyway. It’s an interesting argument, who owns what in antiquities.” She was beginning to sound like Edie, blathering away on useless side issues. The point was to get away from here. Who cared if she understood what was going on?

  “People are easy for Kender to fool,” said Edie, rather proudly. “He’s so dignified and attractive. You want him to be in charge, because he’s so civilized. Kender really is a brilliant actor. It’s a shame he never went on stage. Of course, there’s so much more money in what he really does.”

  “How much money?” said Susan.

  “I think they expect about ten million for the necklace. If you hadn’t said you knew about the necklace, Kaytha wouldn’t have misunderstood. She thought you were Susan Nevilleson, and she could make you give it to her. So Kaytha stuck a knife in your side, and she and Billy brought you here to get the information out of you.”

  “I am Susan Nevilleson,” said Susan. “Though why that is such a key point, I cannot imagine.”

  “Her boyfriend was looking for her,” explained Edie, as if Susan Nevilleson was somebody else entirely, and not strapped to the bunk next to her.

  Susan Nevilleson’s boyfriend? thought Susan Nevilleson.

  “He asked that gorgeous T-shirt seller if he’d seen her, and of course, the T-shirt kid had. Obviously Miss Amnesia had something to do with, or was, Susan Nevilleson. Naturally Kaytha and Billy looked Susan Nevilleson up in the phone book and went to see if she had gone home after she cracked her head on the sidewalk and left the necklace there where they could just retrieve it.”

  Mitch McKenna, you did this to me! You put me here. You couldn’t make up a name for your script, oh no. You couldn’t say the nonexistent boyfriend was looking for Gwendolyn Carlough-Simms, oh no. You had to use a real girl’s real name. Mine. You rotten egg, Mitch McKenna. I hate you.

  She really did.

  She was furious with him—carrying his acting into real life. Acting belonged on stage—that was why they built stages! That was why they had films and movies! For acting!

  Ben Franklin wouldn’t have been a jerk like that! she thought. He wouldn’t drag me into something that could mean my very own death! He—

  The door was opening.

  Whoever came in could only be the person who had brought Susan here to start with. Kaytha of the knife.

  Mitch, Mitch, how could you have put me in this position? And how will I ever get out?

  Chapter 10

  SHE TWISTED HER BRONZE hair in her hands, to give herself something to do as she stared at Mr. Senneth. Beautiful though it was, it was remarkably thick, as if like the hull of Lady Hope, it had extra coats of polish. As she, herself, at this moment, was coated in layers of falsehoods.

  For she knew exactly who she was. She had known every moment. And she was not Hope Senneth.

  How had she gotten here? And how, at this point, was she going to get out safely?

  Her mother and father, ordinary unsophisticated people, wanted her to be just like them: living in the same small town, being just as dull and ordinary. They kept saying that every high school girl who’d ever had the lead in her high school play was convinced she had a future on stage. It didn’t mean a thing, they kept saying, that the local paper gave her rave reviews. It wouldn’t count in New York.

  “Then let me go to New York!” she cried out. “Let me find out if I can really act!”

  They wouldn’t let her apply to drama school and, as for New York City, they regarded that as the most dangerous terrifying grim place on earth. Not only did they refuse to let her go to college in New York, they didn’t even want her to get on a train that went through New York!

  You have to go to New York to be an actress! their daughter cried, sobbing and blackmailing and pleading and coaxing.

  You’re not going to be an actress and you’re not going to New York and that’s that, was the answer.

  What they finally agreed to, was letting their darling girl interview at little New England colleges. Sweet isolated campuses studded with stone walls and maple trees.

  She didn’t get off the train in New York. She didn’t even really see New York; the train was mean and unfair and stayed underground for the good parts. And then the train stopped in Boston. And Boston, too, was a city. A real city. Filled with colleges. It occurred to her that she could get accepted at a college in Boston, get accepted there, act there, and surely in a semester, or even a week, prove herself to be New York material. She would tell her parents about the old historic houses and somehow convince them that Boston was a dear little city with no threats.

&nbs
p; She wandered the streets of Boston, with half a day to kill before her first interview, daydreaming of cities, and city women, and city life, and city money, and, most of all city theater—when Edie happened. She fell backward, and cars missed her, although they did take time out to roll down their windows, let all their air-conditioning out, and swear at her. She hit her head, cracked her elbow, and felt equal parts a fool and a target. She ran ten blocks before her lungs and her calves hurt so much she had to stop. And there, in her bag, was the exotic, incredibly heavy, ridiculously bejeweled necklace.

  It was like being handed half a script. The most intriguing improv class a high school girl ever had! Immediately she wanted to go back to that fabulous rich-people hotel, The Jayquith, from whose underground parking the limousine had crept, and meet society people and gangsters. The part of her that was sane knew perfectly well that nothing would happen at all, let alone anything exciting or wonderful or crazy. Far from proving to her mother and father that she really was the world’s greatest actress, she’d just end up standing around on the pavement while the traffic ignored her just as much as it had the first time. Heck, the first time, she hadn’t even figured out how to cross the street! So she knew that although it was a dumb idea, it was also a safe idea, because nothing would happen. It was just a silly girl’s silly way to spend an hour.

  She had the advantage of her beauty—or what, in a small town, people claimed was beauty. Perhaps it was like acting: She was lovely only as long as the competition was limited. But at home, people did things for her that they didn’t bother to do for other women. She was sure that she could talk her way into the hotel.

  It was a minor blow to her ego when the doorman wouldn’t let her near it, let alone in it. Who was she visiting? he said. She made up a name, thinking that there must be far too many people in The Jayquith for him to recognize one from another, but it turned out that tourists were always trying to use The Jayquith like McDonald’s, for the bathroom, and he turned her away.