“If you say so.”
“The cat, Birdy, Bea, Bex, and Quinn have all gone to bed. The wind is blowing hard.” I looked up. “Maybe we’ll get rain. Is there rain in the forecast?”
“Davis, we spent half the day in jail and the other half working ourselves stupid,” she said. “Do you really want to talk about the weather?”
“Mother is airing out the house. ‘Pear tout spouse’ is ‘air out house.’ She’s closed the bedroom doors so she could open the windows, and she’s telling me to leave the windows open. ‘Leaf coping’ is ‘leave open.’”
“But you don’t have windows per se.”
“I think she means doors,” I said. “The French doors in the kitchen. The terrace doors in the living room. The balcony doors between the guest suites.”
“Go close your doors,” Fantasy said. “A plane could crash into your house.”
“Fantasy, glass doesn’t stop airplanes.”
I pocketed my phone. I chose slumping against the elevator wall over stretching out on the floor. We said goodbye on the lobby level. She was one foot in and one foot out of the elevator on her way home after one of the longest days of our lives when a security alert beeped on her phone. Just her phone. My phone, after one of the longest days of its life, and with the one last jumbled communiqué from my mother, had given up.
“What is it?”
She slipped her phone back into the pocket of her Elfin skirt. “Something about Animal Control. Let Baylor take it.”
“He’s asleep.” And that’s when I remembered. We’d forgotten the VIP weekender bag. It was in the conference center tournament room. “And we forgot the bag.”
Honestly, I thought she might cry.
“Go home, Fantasy,” I said. “I’ll get it.”
She blew me a weary kiss.
I stayed in the elevator. By the time I returned to the tournament room on the convention level, it was Elvii free. I spoke to every single person gathering linens from tables, filling bus carts with banquet dishes, and pushing brooms. No one had seen a Bellissimo VIP leather weekender bag. I was dead on my feet, and it wasn’t like anyone would have turned the bag into Lost and Found, so I gave up and went home.
To pigeons.
Hundreds of pigeons.
Pigeons who’d been evicted from between the condensers of Bianca’s former air conditioning unit and their former home. They’d sought refuge on my balcony, patio, and veranda. It was dark out, and my mother probably hadn’t noticed them when she coped the winders to pear tout the spouse before she went to bed—everyone in the world but me was in bed—and the pigeons had helped themselves. To my home. They’d dined on tomato plant leaves, built new nests from the upholstery of my furniture, and were all over the new casino carpet in my living room.
I flattened myself against the wall and backed out.
From the landline in Bradley’s office, because my phone was dead, I called Security.
“This is Mrs. Cole. I need Animal Control.”
“They’ve come and gone, Mrs. Cole. They cleared the roof of a massive flock of pigeons.”
“Yes, well, they cleared them to the twenty-ninth floor. My living room is full of pigeons.”
After a beat, he said, “Come again?”
“Pigeons,” I said. “In my home.”
“Inside?”
“In my living room,” I said. “All over my furniture, all over my floor, flying in circles, and I need help. I need Animal Control back, I need Maintenance, I need Housekeeping, I need everyone.”
I woke my mother first. We systematically woke everyone else. With the lights on and with all the activity, the pigeons flew unchecked through my home, leaving almost nothing unscathed. My mother chased them with spatulas in both hands. Bea Crawford, who shouldn’t have even been there, ran through trying to pop them with a dishtowel. My dog was losing her mind. My daughters thought they were in the coronation scene from Frozen, and all this around Birdy, who sat on a bench in the foyer stroking sneezing Mortimer.
I wondered where we’d go. There wasn’t an empty hotel room in the building.
Then I looked up.
We rode the private elevator in my foyer to the Penthouse.
Talk about breaking and entering.
But Bianca wasn’t there, nor, thankfully, was her creepy butler, her crooked attorney, or her terrible excuse for a celebrity double. I told everyone to find a bed. I would go on to seriously regret not assigning beds, but I was too tired.
I tried to sleep, still in most of my Elfin suit, between the twin beds holding my sleeping daughters, but I couldn’t, because I couldn’t sleep past Clone having Megan Shaw’s phone. I finally gave up, and at two in the morning, stumbled to Richard Sanders’s home office. I woke up his computer and hacked Megan Shaw’s phone to see who was on the other end of the call Clone answered.
Lost and Found.
Bellissimo’s Lost and Found.
From Megan Shaw’s phone, Clone took a call from Lost and Found and hadn’t been seen since.
I reminded the security detail at the elevator landing that no one was allowed in or out, then made the million-mile journey to Lost and Found.
I shot my way in.
I found her three hours later in the very last place left to look. The chest freezer was wedged against the back wall at the end of the last row of Lost and Found cages. And there was Clone. We finally met. Face to frozen face.
SIXTEEN
“Here’s what I know.”
Tuesday morning, bright and early, by Vegas clocks anyway, and far too early for me, my boss called. I accidentally took his call without checking the caller ID, because for one, my eyes were glued to computer screens, and for another, I was sure it was Fantasy. I found out too late it was No Hair.
“You stole a Mercedes SUV off the dealer’s lot, for which you were arrested.”
“Not true, No Hair. I stole a Mercedes SUV from our parking garage. Not the dealer’s lot. I don’t know who stole that car from the dealer’s lot.”
“Comforting, Davis. So comforting.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s keep going.”
Let’s not.
“A child was left at Play for almost three days,” he said, “and instead of alerting the authorities and shutting down the daycare, you took the baby. From what I understand, you still have the baby you took from the daycare.”
“It’s a childcare center, No Hair. Not a daycare. And for your information, I do not have the baby.”
“You’ve lost the baby?”
“July has the baby.”
“Moving on,” he said, “as if that’s not enough.”
It was quite enough.
“Is it true that seven of our restaurants, in addition to Plethora, don’t have desserts because you haven’t bothered to make the ten-minute phone call it would take to have the ovens at Danish repaired?”
“Did Colleen tell you that?”
“No, Davis. The internet did. People are twittering photographs of Plethora’s dessert line piled high with Snickers candy bars.”
“People who live their entire lives on social media need better things to do.”
“With all your spare time, since you’re apparently not working, why don’t you Twitter that to them?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Davis, are you harboring Birdy James?”
“Define harboring.”
“Hiding.”
I’d seen Birdy in plain sight not fifteen minutes earlier. “I’m not hiding her.”
“Is she a guest in your home?”
“Not at this very minute.”
“From what I understand, no one is a guest in your home at this very minute,” he said, “and we’ll get to that in a minute.”
I could wait.
He said, �
�Let’s keep going.”
Let’s not.
“Davis, four Magnolia Suites have been evacuated to the tune of almost fifty thousand dollars.”
“To where? Kensington Palace? The Lincoln Room? Arendelle Castle?”
“I’ve never heard of that last one.”
“That’s because you don’t watch Frozen, and that’s a ridiculously expensive evacuation.”
“You think? Do you want to guess why?”
I did not.
“Because the Bellissimo is completely sold out, Davis. I don’t know if you’ve poked your head out of your own little chaotic world far enough to see that the Bellissimo is wall-to-wall Elvis fans. We had nowhere to put the evacuees. Guest Services had to buy out the top floor of Hard Rock, our competitor, to accommodate them.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, “but I didn’t make those arrangements, so what does that have to do with me?”
“That’s what I want to know,” No Hair said. “The suites we had to evacuate are directly below your home.”
“I’ll look into it and get back with you.”
“Am I to assume you don’t want to talk about it?”
“You assume correctly.”
“Then how about we talk about a consumer complaint filed with the Federal Reserve against the Bellissimo by Branch Banking & Trust in Philadelphia for failure to notify them we received a five-million-dollar wire that wasn’t ours. Do you want to talk about that?”
I cleared my throat. “Not particularly.”
“Do you want to talk about four Vault employees who called in sick after eating too much of a wedding cake you sent to the vault? Do you want to talk about that?”
“No.”
“Then let’s switch gears,” he said. “You want to switch gears, Davis?”
“Yes.”
“This morning, Bianca Sanders found your ex-ex-mother-in-law, and what she’s doing there, I’d surely like to know, sleeping—” he paused for dramatic effect “—sleeping in her bed. In her bed, Davis.”
“I never told Bea she could sleep in Bianca’s bed. I am not responsible for that woman,” I said. “I’m not responsible for Bea, for Bianca, for Casino Credit cashiers, for vault guards who eat too much cake, for picky guests in Magnolia Suites, for any Elvii, not a one of them, not any of them, No Hair.” I’d had about all I could take. “You know who I’m responsible for?” I didn’t give him time to answer. “Me. I’m responsible for me. I answer to my husband, to my daughters, to my immediate extended family, and to myself. I am not responsible for everyone else on the planet, their actions, their tomatoes—” that was when I started crying “—their attorneys, their employees, their cats, their—”
“STOP.”
I stopped.
Talking.
I didn’t stop crying.
“You are.” No Hair’s voice softened. “But you are, Davis. We all are. We’re all responsible for everyone around us. Regardless of how someone treats you, or how you think you’ve been treated, if your feelings are hurt, if it was all their fault or all your fault or no one’s fault, you can’t say it’s not your problem. Davis, you’re responsible, and not as an employee of the Bellissimo, but as a human.”
Neither of us spoke for a full minute.
“I have one last question, and I want a straight answer.”
I sniffed.
“Did you stuff Clone in a freezer?”
Finally, an easy question for which I had a truthful answer. “No.”
“Do you have anything to say, Davis? Anything at all?”
“I have a question.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
“I have two questions.”
“Go ahead.”
“Does Bradley know any of this?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Baylor.”
I’d about had it with Baylor too.
“You know why?” he asked.
I did not.
“Because he cares about you, Davis. We all do. You’re in over your head and you’re dragging Fantasy down with you. You need help. Start with helping yourself. Sit down with Bianca and work it out.”
I turned off my phone.
I didn’t want him to remember something else and call again.
I couldn’t take anymore.
I’m not sure how long I stared at the three computer screens in front of me contemplating all No Hair said. Facial recognition software was hypnotic, the flashing morphing faces, but I sat there long enough to realize I had to call my husband and to get a hit.
I zoomed for the beeping screen.
Nathan Z. Stone was the Wire Department Manager for Branch Banking & Trust on Hillcrest Road in Mobile, Alabama. He was Sara Z. Stone’s brother—the “Z” was Zion for him and Zada for her—he was one of Megan Shaw’s BB&T bosses for the six years she worked there, and he looked familiar. The more I studied his face, the more I realized I’d seen him before. A one-year-old version of him anyway. Ten minutes later, I connected Clone. The photograph above an article on NOLA.com titled BANK ON THEM! showed Sara Z., Nathan Z., and Clone at a Wealth Management and Trust Conference, and the Clone on my screen looked far different from the Clone I’d found in the freezer. Even unfrozen, there were very few recognizable features. The conference I found the Stone siblings and Not Clone was held at the Lindy C. Boggs International Conference Center on Lakeshore Drive in New Orleans. Not Clone was working the conference, passing out printed coin pouches, the squeeze kind made of rubber. They were bright red and said BANK ON ME. The conference dates were October tenth through the thirteenth of the previous year. As in exactly when Hurricane Kevin hit.
It all went back to the hurricane.
The hurricane I thought we’d all survived, but then again, maybe we hadn’t.
SEVENTEEN
Homeless, because mine was still hard on the comeback trail from bird sanctuary status and having been unceremoniously evicted from the Penthouse by Lurch, of all creepy people, my entourage and I moved to an evacuated Magnolia Suite on the twenty-eighth floor. We went from ten thousand square feet to twelve hundred square feet in an elevator ride.
With two animals.
One of them sneezing its head off.
There was no kitchen.
“How long?”
Every fifteen minutes, my mother asked how long it would be before we could go home. So she could cook.
Every ten minutes, Bea Crawford, who shouldn’t have even been there, came lumbering through the front door on her way out the patio doors with another rancid tomato bucket, leaving both sets of doors wide open every time, and I had to stop what I was doing and close them behind her because not only was the smell atrocious, Bea was—truly, she was—raised in a barn, where it was fine to leave doors open. She was at five tomato buckets and climbing, and the odor, along with the temperature in the suite, with her running in and out, was climbing too. She said, pouring sweat, “Davis, did you pick somewhere to put me up that’s even hotter than your house?”
Every five minutes, Birdy James asked if anyone knew if her wingback chair had survived the pigeons, and if so, could someone please help her get it.
Every four minutes, Bex asked when she and Quinn could swim in the private pool on the Magnolia balcony that didn’t have a drop of water in it after being drained of Black Kow crud contamination. If they couldn’t swim, could they please watch Frozen.
Every three minutes, Candy barked.
Every two minutes, Mortimer sneezed.
And every single minute, I wondered where Casino Credit cashier Megan Shaw was and if, by the time I found her, I’d still be married.
Not necessarily in that order.
We were packed in the parlor between the two bedrooms, everyone but Qu
inn talking at once, along with Candy barking and the cat sneezing, when I climbed the furniture. From the coffee table, I let out a two-finger siren of a whistle. Everyone except the cat and Quinn piped down, because Quinn stayed piped down, and when everyone else joined her, we could hear a persistent tap on the door. From atop the coffee table, I yelled, “Come on in. Whoever you are, you might as well come in.”
It was July. With Baby Oliver on her hip.
She surveyed.
I pointed at the half of the sofa Bea wasn’t on.
She sat.
I addressed my rapt audience. “Let’s talk,” I said. “And by that, I mean I’m going to talk, and you all are going to listen.”
The cat sneezed.
Baby Oliver said, “Baa, baa, baa, baa, baa.”
I said, “The door to the guest hall upstairs at my house was miraculously closed.”
Bea waved. “You can probably thank me, Davis.”
“Bea,” I turned to her, “I seriously doubt it, because you don’t know how to close doors. And you shouldn’t even be here to leave doors open. Did you hear me say be quiet and listen? Zip it up.”
She snarled at me.
I picked up where I left off. “The pigeons didn’t make it down the guest hall or into the rooms. The four guest bedrooms escaped. As soon as the rest of the house is pigeon free, and by pigeon free, I mean sanitized and inhabitable, we can move into the guest rooms. It could possibly be late tonight. It will most likely not be until tomorrow morning. In the meantime, we’re here, make yourselves as comfortable as you can, and make the best of it. And by make the best of it, I mean understand that I’m only one woman, I can’t solve every single problem, and I want to go home too.”
I turned to my mother. “Mother, what desserts can you bake that you don’t need an oven for?”
A finger disappeared deep into her curls as she tapped open the cookbook she kept in her head. “Davis, you can’t ‘bake’ anything without an oven. Are you asking me for my no-bake dessert recipes?”
For the first time in my life, I think I actually was asking her for a recipe.
“Let me see.” I heard the opening strains of a greatest hit from Mother’s no-bake repertoire. “Cowboy cookies,” she said, “I don’t need an oven for those. I make miniature cheesecakes that I don’t bake. Peanut butter bars, strawberry icebox cake, fried apple popovers, banana pudding squares—”
Double Trouble Page 17