“How long's it gonna take?”
“Uh, I don't know… not too long.”
“Long enough for me to get a latte somewhere?” She had it floored, the little Bug heart fluttering along as fast as it could. “I could even go pick up the stupid dry cleaning, I suppose.”
I flashed Marissa a relieved look and said, “Yeah. That'd be fine.”
Hali downshifted into second, then rolled right through a stop sign.
And that was pretty much the way she powered through traffic, zigzagging around cars, beeping at pedestrians, grumbling about incompetent airheads and bank-boy yahoos, breaking every traffic law on the books—plus a few that lawmakers probably haven't even thought to write up.
And I was just thinking that Hali's little rumba through town made wobbling around on Marissa's handlebars seem like graceful ballet when she squeals around a corner and says, “Okay. This is the sixty-six-hundred block of Hollywood. What's the place?”
“Oh, just drop us anywhere. Right here's fine.”
She spots 6613 at the same time I do, then slows down and cranes her neck at the dirty black security shutters covering the store's windows. “Cosmo's Curios …who told you about this place?”
“Uh …” I look up and down the street at all the shop windows, covered in the same black diamonds of steel. “Dominique did.”
“Dominique? I can't see that china doll shopping down here.”
“Yeah, well…”
She saved me from myself, interrupting with, “Sorry. I know she's your aunt and all, but if you're looking to buy souvenirs, I can drop you somewhere a whole lot better than this.”
“No, that's okay. We'll be fine.”
She looks straight at me and says, “You really are from Kansas, aren't you?”
I tried to laugh, but it came out stalled and stuttery. “Are you making fun of us?”
At this point we're double-parked, holding up traffic. And while cars are zooming past us, honking and cursing, she stays put, looking at me and then Marissa. Finally she points outside and shakes her head. “Look around, lamb-chops. You see what's out there? Derelicts, deadbeats, and drug dealers.” She turns back to me suddenly, her eyes wide. Like she's trapped face to face with a carnivorous koala. “You're not here to score, are you?”
“Score?” I couldn't believe my ears. “You mean buy drugs?”
She's still looking at me like I file my canines into wicked little points.
“No!”
It takes her a second, but finally she lets out a big sigh. “Wow. For a minute there …” She smiles at me, and I smile back at her, and then all of a sudden her face falls.
“What?” I ask her, but I already know. She's looking right at my sweatshirt.
A bus swerves past us, blaring its horn, but Hali doesn't budge. She squints at me and asks, “What'chu got under there, girl?” and I can tell by the look in her eye that no little lie is going to get me out of this.
I am busted.
Busted big time.
ELEVEN
Hali didn't wait for me to try and explain. She tore at my sweatshirt until Claire's picture and the head shots were uncovered, then she snatched them from me and said, “You tricked me into bringing you down here so you could pawn these?”
“No! I just have to show them to him.”
“Him? Who's him?”
“I don't know… Cosmo! Or whoever runs the place.”
She looked in the rearview mirror as she ground into first gear, and my head whipped backward as she peeled back into traffic. At the first intersection she ran a red light turning right, then bounced up a narrow driveway plastered with ONE WAY and DO NOT ENTER signs. She squeaked to a stop, nose to nose with a parked delivery truck, then yanked up the brake and turned on me. “I am sick to death of being lied to! Mama told me you were hiding something. She said she could see it in your eyes. I told her it was her voodoo imagination again, but she was sure, really sure, that you were lying.”
“I did not lie to her!”
“You expect me to believe that after the way you tricked me into being your little Tinsel Town Taxi? And for what? So you could pawn some stupid photographs? Like anyone's going to give you a nickel for those.”
“If you would please just listen …”
She turns her back on me, looking out the driver's door window. And for a second I thought this might be her listening position, so I'm about to start explaining at least part of what I'm doing with the pictures when all of a sudden she whips around and looks me straight in the eye. “Where in Kansas?”
“What?”
“Where in Kansas are you from?”
Uh-oh. I blinked at her, then tried to put up a convincing scowl. “What's that matter? Would you let me explain about the pictures?”
“What city? I want to know. Now!”
“Wichita.” It was the only city I could think of. I glanced at Marissa, who was crammed in the back with her eyes pinched closed, praying for deliverance. Hali had turned back to the window, so I tried, “Look, I don't blame you for being mad at me, but—”
She whips around again. “Where in Wichita? What street?”
“What street? Hali, would you please let me tell you why I've got—”
She leans in closer, her eyes blazing. “Just tell me this— do you like living in a capital city?”
“A capital—”
“Answer me!”
If my brain hadn't been so tied up trying to get out of the mess I was in, I'd have said, I hate Kansas—all of it, or something else vague like that. But I wasn't quick enough. “Sure,” I said. “It's great. Now—”
The side of her fist slammed against the steering wheel. “She was right!” She turned back to me, her eyes like cold, hard emeralds. “The capital of Kansas is Topeka, and you're nothing but a punk liar! Get out of my car!”
“No, Hali, wait!” I grabbed the picture of Claire and tapped on the glass. “See this brooch? We found it in LeBrandi's dresser. It was hidden in a sock along with a scrap of paper that had 77CURIO written on it. We figured out that it was a phone number, and when we called it we got connected to Cosmo's Curios.”
Our eyes were locked together, but I could see the hardness in hers being chipped away by curiosity. “What were you doing nosing through LeBrandi's dresser?”
So I told her about searching around for something to break into the other room with, and how the brooch jabbed me through the sock.
“So where is it now? You got it on you somewhere? Is that what you're here to pawn?”
“No! We put it back in her sock drawer!”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“We're here because all the jewels are missing!” I point them out on Claire's picture. “The necklace, the ring, and the brooch.”
“What? Pedal back now, girlie. How do you know all this? Who told you so?”
“I was in Max's office this morning when he discovered they were gone. He called them the Honeymoon Jewels, and he got mad. Really mad. And then he said something about Opal.”
“Opal? What's she got to do with this?”
“She's the one who stole them—at least that's what Max seems to think. And what I think is that LeBrandi— being Opal's roommate and all—found out she was going to pawn them and blackmailed a piece from her.”
Hali mutters, “Just her sort of MO,” then adds, “But why are you so bent on getting yourself raveled up in it? So you found the brooch; it's not like you stole it.”
“I…we… well, it's real important, okay?”
Hali's expression made it clear—this was not going to cut it. She picks up the other three head shots and flips through them, murmuring, “LeBrandi, Opal, and Dominique.” She hesitates, then looks over her shoulder at Marissa—who's still praying for deliverance—and back to me. “You two are trying to protect Dominique somehow, aren't you?”
I hesitated, then my head bobbed. Barely, but it bobbed.
“Which brings us back to y
ou being from Kansas.”
Looking at her seemed painful. Blinding.
“That was Dominique's idea, wasn't it? You don't seem blond enough to say you're from some state you've probably never even visited. What's the deal? What are you hiding? What's she hiding?”
By now my heart's going ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-BOOM, because I know I've got to find some way to stop her, and I can't for the life of me think of a thing to say. It's like I'm lie-shy. All the ones I've told have somehow come back to bite me, and I'm scared to try another.
And I'm telling myself that if I do lie to her about it, she'll probably see right through me and blab everything to the others anyway, but if I tell her the truth, well, I might as well forget about ever patching things up with my mother. She would never forgive me.
So there I am, caught in my mother's Dungeon of Deception, staring down at my high-tops, not knowing how to escape, when a little voice from the backseat says, “You're the one who's hiding something, Hali.”
Hali whips around to look at Marissa. “Don't you start messing with me, girl.”
“Well, it's true! You've got some terrible secret, and it's killing you to keep it.”
I jerked around because I couldn't believe my ears, but Hali did more than jerk. She cried, “Shut your mouth!”
Marissa's voice stays low. Calm. “Look at you, Hali! You're furious with your mother, but you're still trying to keep it all inside. What's she done to make you so mad at her?”
“It's none of your stinkin' business, so just stay out of it!”
“Well, we know it has something to do with Max….”
“This is none of your business. I'll work it out on my own, in my own time, and I don't need no sneaky school-girls interfering in my pain.”
While Marissa's talking to her, little picture cubes are pushing and spinning around in my brain, landing one on top of the other: thump, Reena's eyes, so dark and intense, looking into mine; thunk, the cool and cocky Hali who'd come out of the cottage to needle my mother about Max's proposal; thwack, the angry Hali who'd attacked her the next morning about the very same thing; smack, the way she'd spit out insults about Max like she was dying to be fired; and then smack, thunk, thwack, the way she'd ignored her mother, run from her mother, yelled at her mother.
And looking at Hali, I realized that it was her eyes that kept these wobbly blocks from tumbling. They were like the crowning arch connecting the columns. They're mine, and they're blind. All these years she hadn't been able to see it herself. All these years she'd lived as a servant in that house without knowing.
The mortar set. And for a second I thought, No! It can't be! but the longer it sat, the firmer it cured. It had to be true. It explained everything.
I touched Hali's arm and whispered, “Max … is he your father?”
Her eyes got huge. Then she gripped the steering wheel with both hands and shook it so hard I thought she was going to rip it right out.
It was scary. Like raw hatred erupting from her soul. The whole car shook like we were in an earthquake, and then suddenly she collapsed onto the steering wheel, buried her head in her arms, and sobbed, “I hate him! I hate him!”
Marissa's looking at me with her eyes and jaw cranked completely open. She mouths, “No wonder!”
Hali comes off the wheel and wails, “Mama's going to kill me!” Then she goes back to sobbing into her arms.
I whisper, “We won't tell, Hali. I swear.”
Marissa leans forward and says, “Really, Hali, we won't.” It didn't make her stop crying, and I could tell that nothing but time would. It was like being in a room with a pinched hose—we'd unkinked it, and now it was going to whip around soaking things until the pressure had gone down.
When she'd petered out to a trickle, I asked, “When did you find out?”
“Last night! After you two and Dominique left. Mama finally told me. She was so upset that Max wanted to marry Dominique that she couldn't keep it inside anymore.”
“But why didn't your mom tell you before?”
“Max made her promise not to.”
“Why?”
“Something about the scandal ruining his reputation in the industry.” Anger rolled across Hali's face like thunder. “The stupid godforsaken industry! Everything they do is based on appearances. Nothing beneath the surface matters to any of them. It's all just how it looks.”
Marissa whispers, “But I don't get it—if Max has you, he already has an heir, so why's he all of a sudden want to get married and have a baby?”
“Mama says men want sons. Or at least offspring that look like them.” She snorts and says, “I don't fit either bill, now do I?” She shakes her head, and her voice starts trembling as she says, “All my life I trusted them. All my life they lied to me.” Then she breaks down, crying into her hands.
I whispered, “Hali, I'm so sorry,” and I was. I felt miserable for her, and in a way for me too. I mean, I couldn't help thinking about my own mother, not wanting to tell me who my father was, and me, in my heart of hearts, always having been a little afraid to pull it out of her. Would it be like this for me? Where knowing was worse than not knowing?
Gently, I asked her, “So what are you going to do?”
She smeared the tears across her cheeks. “I'm going to start by moving out. It's bad enough being a servant, but to your own father? Maybe Mama's got no pride, but that's not me. I am out of there, first chance I get.” She takes a deep breath, then lets it out, long and choppy. “You know, I feel better. All day I felt like I was going to explode, but now I know what I've got to do. I've got to get a move on. Ready or not, honey, I am gone.” She gives Marissa and me half a smile and says, “So there. That's my secret. What's yours?”
I looked away. How could I tell her? My mother would kill me. And yet it felt so unfair not to. There was so much about what my mother had done—and was doing—to me that would make Hali feel like she wasn't alone. But what would happen if I told Hali the truth and she blabbed?
Marissa whispers, “Tell her, Sammy!”
I look at her like, Marissa, I can't!
She looks right back at me like, You have to!
I glanced from one to the other, then closed my eyes and took the first step out of Dominique's Dungeon. “Hali, I swear myself to secrecy about Max. Nobody's going to find out from me. Or Marissa—right, Marissa?”
Marissa nods and says, “I swear.”
I look straight at Hali and say, “But you've got to promise that what I'm going to tell you stops with you. It has to stay inside these Bug walls.”
Hali looks at me, then Marissa, then back at me. And for a second there I'm afraid she's going to laugh at us, but then she nods, raises her right hand, and says very seriously, “I swear.”
I watch her for a few seconds without saying a word.
“I do! You have my word. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“It's important, Hali.”
She looks at me and says gently, “I know.”
I take a deep breath and say, “Okay.” Then I let it out and take the next step up. “My name is Sammy Keyes, I am related to Dominique, but…”
Hali just looks at me, waiting.
I turn to Marissa, and her eyes push me up the next step. “But she's not my aunt.”
Hali searches my face for the answer, and apparently it's written all over it. She whispers, “She's your mother?”
I nod and look down.
“But… why is she …? What is she …? She can't be!”
I let out a little groan. “Oh, she is, all right.” So I explained to her about my mother leaving me at Grams' so she could go off and make it as a movie star, and how she'd changed so much in a year that I felt like she was someone I didn't even know anymore.
Hali was quiet for a minute, then asked, “Her real name's Lana?”
“Yeah.”
“I love that name. Way better than Dominique.”
I shrug. “Yeah. Forget I told you what it was, thou
gh. You've got to keep calling her Dominique.”
“So where's your dad in all of this?”
So I had to tell her about that. And when I'm all done, I sigh and say, “And after what I've seen you go through, I'm thinking that maybe I don't want to know who he is. Not ever.”
We all sat there, quiet. And I felt strange. Like I'd climbed out of Dominique's Dungeon, only to be petrified by the light.
Finally Hali says, “Wow.”
I look her right in the eye. “You swore. You can't get mad and blurt it, you can't tell Max or your mother…. It stays right here, no matter what.”
She nods and says, “I won't break your trust,” then puts her right hand up, palm out, steady, waiting.
Her hand is not there to be slapped, I can tell that much. But I'm not sure what it is doing there, until my left hand kind of floats up to meet it. And when I press my palm against hers and hold it there flat and still, Hali says, “You have my word.”
I nod and tell her, “You've got mine, too.”
It was a promise I was about to regret.
TWELVE
Marissa watched us make our little palm pact, then cleared her throat and said, “Hey, aren't you two worried about me?”
So we press palms with Marissa, laughing and promising to keep each other's secrets, and then Hali says, “Now fill me in on these pictures you stole.”
“Borrowed,” I corrected her. “I'm just going to go in and ask the guy some questions, then I'm going to return them before Max even knows they're gone.”
“But why do you have them?”
“I want to find out if Opal's been to Cosmo's Curios.”
“So what if she has? Why are you so interested?”
I take a deep breath and say, “Because I think maybe Opal is the one who killed LeBrandi.”
“Opal? Hmmm….” She seemed to like the idea. “Wouldn't that be classic.” She frowns at me and says, “But there's a house full of cops back at the mansion. Why not just tell one of them?”
Marissa pipes up with, “Because Sammy can't go anywhere without cutting through a briar patch, that's why.”
“Marissa!”
“It's true. Here we are in Hollywood, and what am I doing? Walking down the Avenue of the Stars? Touring celebrities' homes? Checking out a movie studio or spotting movie stars? No! I'm in the back of a beat-up Bug— excuse me, Hali, I don't mean any offense—parked in a service alley behind a pawnshop.” She rolls her eyes. “If this isn't typical, I don't know what is.”
Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy Page 9