She stopped and I walked into her.
“Sorry.” I took her arm. “Just yanking your chain. It was Nick, as you thought. Thanks to you, we’re now working the Russian clown angle.”
“Did you say ‘clown’?”
“You didn’t hear that from me. No, you didn’t hear it at all. That was a bit premature. Stupid really.”
“It was a bit immature.”
Okay, she was nervous, and the old girl did rude so very well, you had to admire her for it.
I gave Dolly’s name at the patient information desk, main floor, and they sent us to the ICU.
We rode the elevator silent and tense.
I got Ethel settled comfortably—well, as comfortably as she would allow—in the waiting area near the nurses’ station.
The nurse on duty asked my name and I gave her Ethel’s, too, after which she consulted her computer. “Mrs. Dolly Sweet; we’ll have to see how the next twenty-four hours plays out. It’ll be touch and go, I won’t kid you. But she’s terribly agitated, and we don’t think she’ll rest until she sees the person she’s been asking for. And without rest, well…”
“Go ahead, Mad,” Ethel called, clenching both fists on the purse riding her knees.
I looked at the nurse.
She checked her list again. “Mrs. Ethel Sweet, please follow me.”
Dolly’s favorite sparring partner followed the nurse down the hall shocked out of her mind, she was the one Dolly wanted to see.
“Oh, my God,” Ethel wailed. “The old Doll’s gonna die!”
Thirty-six
Women are most fascinating between the ages of 35 and 40 after they have won a few races and know how to pace themselves. Since few women ever pass 40, maximum fascination can continue indefinitely.
—CHRISTIAN DIOR
Did I feel left out? Yes.
Was I worried sick about Dolly? Yes.
Was I glad she asked for Ethel, instead of me? You bet your sharp-edged seam ripper, I was. Ethel had needed the contact. She’d been languishing at home in fear for days. She loved her PIA mother-in-law more than she let on, Pain In the Ass or not.
So did I, but since I expressed my love—rather than my disdain—vocally, and in other ways, my worry hadn’t been fashioned with pinking shears and common pins. I did not get pricked with regret every time I moved.
Still, waiting drove me crazy. I went to the window to look down on the parking lot and speed-dialed Nick.
“I’m coming, Ladybug. But we knew that a world of answers would break forensics-wise today. This one’s like a new-hatched spider egg,” he said. “I’m covered with tiny answers; they’re crawling all over me, forcing me to make sense of them.”
I shivered a trillion nonexistent spiders off me, but I got the reference. “Like what tiny answers? Just talk to me for a minute, so I can stop worrying about Dolly.”
“Why? How is she?”
“The next twenty-four hours will tell. I haven’t seen her. Ethel is with her. But that’s good.”
“How can I help?” Nick asked.
My hero. “Give me a plummy little spider.”
“July 1944, a small plane transporting military caskets went down in Fishers Island Sound. Though the ones we retrieved from that cellar had been painted over, the barely visible serial number fits the manifest. I’m betting that only two washed up on Coffin Island—we have got to find that place a better name.”
“I’m with you on that one,” I said.
“I’m sure Long Island and Fishers Island got their share,” Nick continued. “At any rate, they were not stolen by Momo the red-nosed mobster or any of the other pups in Dogpatch.”
“That’s good. But, Nick? Why hadn’t they rusted?”
“Submarine paint.”
“Metal caskets. Electric boat. Transport plane in the vicinity, equals submarine paint. So how did the money get inside them?”
“That spider has not yet hatched.”
I sighed. “’Kay. I’ll take what I can get. Don’t worry about me. Just do your job.”
“You sure have a way of making a guy feel guilty,” he said, but my phone light had gone out.
I whipped around, squeaked in surprise at seeing him, stepped into Nick’s arms, and burst into tears.
I loved his lips in my hair, loved knowing they were his. “That happy to see me, are you?”
“That worried about Dolly. And yes, that glad you’re here.”
Nick grabbed a small box of tissues from a supply cart.
“May I?” I asked.
“You cry over a patient, they’re yours to use. I’m a Fed, I know these things.”
Ethel cleared her throat behind us, and we parted as if she’d caught us thirteen years ago in her backyard.
Her eyes were full to overflowing and my heart thumped a good one. I heard and felt it slap the side of my ribs, and echo in my head. But that didn’t bother me half as much as the seemingly endless time span before the next beat.
When my heart finally rebooted, my knees about buckled.
Had Dolly already left us? “No,” I whispered to a universe that ran my psychic life but would hardly listen to my plea.
“Not what I expected,” Ethel said. “Not at all. You and Nick can go in now.”
“Both of us?”
“Mama will play the boss until she has the last word. You know that.”
Despite Ethel’s emotion, those words sounded almost heartening,
Now that I’d steadied, I moved forward like a robot being driven by the pressure of Nick’s hand at my back.
Ethel didn’t follow. She sat where I’d left her when we got there.
Dolly looked small in the bed. Frail.
As I got closer, I stopped. “Dolly, are you wearing makeup?” Flirty Dolly, until the end.
She caught my hand and squeezed with way more pressure than I’d expected, though certainly she’d lost weight on Dolly’s Wild Ride.
Nick picked up her chart, glanced at it, and flipped to the next page.
The door to an adjoining room opened, and an old man came in. He made a slow approach toward Dolly’s bed with a cane and a twinkle in his eyes.
He kissed her brow, sat beside her, and she reached for his hand.
“Chérie,” he said. Then he looked at each us. “Bonjour, mademoiselle. Monsieur.”
Wooly knobby knits, at a hundred and four, and on her deathbed, Dolly Sweet had taken home a Parisian lover?
Dante would be crushed.
Nick gave the elderly man’s hand a firm shake.
I nodded from across the bed, concerned about a language barrier.
“Madeira, Nick,” Dolly said, the strength of her voice unexpected. “This gentleman is from the CIA. You need to sit down and listen to what he has to tell you.”
Nick returned her chart to its proper location, pulled a chair up to Dolly’s bed for me to sit on, but not without a “just between us” wink.
Why? Was she okay? Was she playing us?
It would be so like Dolly to bring us all to our knees for loving her.
Nick arranged his own chair on the opposite side of the bed from me, but on the same side as Dolly’s friend. He sat facing the gentleman and set his FBI badge on the bed between them.
Nick nodded. “Go ahead, sir. We’re listening.”
Thirty-seven
Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.
—COCO CHANEL
After an illuminating conversation with Dolly and her CIA agent, we left her to rest, him at her side. I stopped at the nurses’ station. “You said earlier that it was touch and go for Dolly. That twenty-four hours would tell. What did you mean by that?”
“Only what Dolly’s been talking about since they wheeled her in here. Twenty-four hours until we know if she’ll be released in time to attend her hundred-and-fourth birthday party. What did you…Oh no,” the nurse said. “Didn’t Dolly talk
to you on the phone before you came?”
I stamped my foot, my gaze going from Ethel to Nick. “Were you two in on this?”
“Well,” Ethel said, her back going ramrod straight. “I went into her room promising every deity known to man that I’d do whatever Dolly wanted, if only she’d get better.” Ethel shrugged. “What she wanted was for me to shut up and let her tell you.”
“Tell me what? That she’s stronger than we thought?”
“Er, maybe. But I’m not…I mean, I’ll just go sit over there.”
“Nick?” I asked, eyeing him.
“I know nothing more than you, except that I read her chart. She’s dehydrated, a little malnourished, electrolyte imbalance, but she’s strong as an ox. I’m sure she’s only in ICU because she’s older than—”
“The earth’s core,” Ethel called.
The nurse giggled.
Nick slipped an arm around me. “I tried to tell you to play along.”
“Play along? How did you tell me that?”
“I winked.”
“You wink all the time, Jaconetti.”
“Yes, you do,” Ethel said, coming into step with us on our way out. The harmless stitch, she was flirting with my guy. I pinched Nick.
He pinched me back.
We dropped Ethel off at her house and went back to Nick’s to face the mayhem of spiders. A dozen or more eggs’ worth of answers waited, answers that begot more questions.
We sorted the information, and ate takeout on the run.
Yes, I had to get over the spider metaphor before I could swallow a bite.
“We need to talk to Paisley,” I said. “She has a right to the facts.”
“Let’s pack it up, then, for tonight, go back to your house, and sit her down.”
Paisley and Aunt Fiona were playing Twister and entertaining the whipstitch out of my staid father, actually working the spinner.
I took a picture with my phone.
They didn’t know we were there until my father looked up.
“Anybody want to run away from home?” I asked.
“Me,” my father said, raising his hand. He helped Fiona out of her twist and pulled her up and into his arms for a bit too long.
I winked at him as they walked by and he fake-socked me in the shoulder.
Aunt Fee chuckled. “Can I put my shoes on before we leave?”
Paisley pouted. “Mad, Nick, will you play with me? I love this game.”
“After we talk,” I said.
“About what?”
“Your past. The ongoing investigation has awarded us with a bit of knowledge to share.”
She curled up in my father’s chair, facing us. “I love the smell of your dad’s tobacco,” she said, rubbing her cheek on the back of his chair.
She just plain loved the male species, I thought. Or…she suffered for losing the two men she loved, so early in life. Bepah had been her last link to a dwindling reality, to family.
Nobody’s personality was cut and dry, I should re-member.
“Okay, give it to me straight,” she declared, although she seemed a bit antsy because we were so quiet.
“There is no straight in this situation, Paisley,” Nick said. “Are we clear on that score?”
A shrug. “Can I ask questions?”
“If you’d be more comfortable,” he said.
“Who were Mam and Pap?”
“Wait,” I said, “though we know that answer.” I came from the kitchen eating a brownie and I passed the plate, something of a stall tactic. “First,” I said, “tell me what Mam looked like.”
“The ugly truth? She looked like she got her face caught in a meat grinder.”
Or barbed wire escaping Russia, I speculated in-wardly.
I regarded Nick. I realized now that I’d seen Mam in the nursery. I’d looked up the Russian word privyet. It means “hi” or an informal “hello.” She’d said, “Hi, pretty,” to Paisley herself. It turned out the nursery had been for Paisley after all.
“Nick, you tell Paisley what we know about Mam and Pap.”
“In the mid-1930s, Mam and Pap defected from Russia to France as children, with their sister Rose, their parents, and five male cousins. They were a family of Russian clowns.”
“No way. Mam and Pap couldn’t smile to save their souls. Them, clowns?”
“Mam and Pap were their stage names, and they did this ‘Mam clown and Pap clown, having a baby clown’ routine. They were headliners. Big names in the Russian Circus, and later in France.”
“My supposed parents—or I should say, the people who let me live in the same house growing up—were not only real live clowns, they were brother and sister?” Paisley pointed to her temple, making a gun of her hand, and she pulled the trigger.
I couldn’t help myself. I chuckled.
Nick didn’t appreciate my humor.
Paisley sat forward, like we might be deaf. “But they never laughed.”
“That’s okay,” I said, “because their audiences did.”
She got up to pace. “That must be why, growing up there, it was as if…they tried to keep me on a shelf…like for the next show. But it was my life, and I don’t think they understood that.”
Nick cupped his neck. “No one ever said that clowns had great capacities to love. They were actors in costume. And actors who become clowns are often hiding behind the color and makeup.”
I, too, sat forward, clasping Nick’s hands. “I kept thinking the farm was like a stage, remember? Did I mention that? Paisley’s right.”
I turned to her. “That’s exactly what they did, they used you like a prop. And yet, they kept you safe.”
“And imprisoned,” she added.
“Alive,” I countered.
She digested that with a hard swallow of brownie. Wait. She held out her brownie-filled hand. “Did you say my grandmother had five cousins? Please don’t say I was related to—”
“Yep. Scar, Tuna, Smoots, Teets, and Momo.”
Thirty-eight
You wouldn’t know me to see me dressed.
—JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
“What were my cousins’ real names?” Paisley asked. “I’m disowning them if I don’t know.”
“Second cousins, at least.”
“Yeah, that makes it better.”
I bit my lip on her sass. “No records of real names have been found yet. Only of their defection from Russia, the number of people who successfully got out, and the relationships.”
“Your grandmother Rose, their younger sister, came to this country first, and she married Dolly’s brother, your grandfather.”
Heavy sigh. “I still miss my Bepah.”
“Rose became your grandmother, and your grand-father, Bepah, is your link to Dolly, which is why you look a bit like her,” Nick said. “Dolly recently informed the State Department that you were alive and well. You were a missing person as far as our government was concerned.”
“But Dolly went to Paris. Did she do that for the State Department? Isn’t she kind of old for that?”
“Kind of?” I cleared my throat. “When Dolly gets something into her head, ain’t nobody gonna get it out.” For the love of Gucci, she even has her afterlife planned.
“Yes, in Paris, Dolly definitely acted as a facilitator for the State Department, a surprised and grateful State Department.”
“How is Dolly?”
“On the mend, believe it or not. She’s a regular Wonder Woman.”
“I don’t really know her, but good. Okay, back to my childhood. Why did they take me to that farm?”
“You need more background on the defection before we get to that point, okay?” Nick asked.
“If I must.” Paisley huffed, and I could empathize.
“Your Russian ancestors, grandmother Rose, Mam, Pap, and cousins, joined the French Circus hoping to make their way to the U.S., but the troupe, grateful to the country that gave them asylum, agreed to become spies for France.”
&
nbsp; “But,” Nick said, taking over, “Russia caught them spying, so it was become double agents, spies for Russia and France, or become dead.”
“I see,” Paisley said. “That’s why they worried about me. Is somebody still after me? They are, aren’t they?”
“Because of something you were supposed to have seen as a child but you have no memories of that time.”
“Ain’t that just my life?”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “your grandmother, Rose the spy, managed to get here to the U.S., but she fell in with the wrong crowd, a get-rich-quick gang of counterfeiters, who promised her big money for the acrobatics she pulled off to steal printing plates for them. Fortunately or unfortunately, they were so greedy, they killed each other off and left Rose holding the bag of money, shall we say.”
“Ooh, intrigue. My ancestors have a checkered past. I’m guardedly fascinated, the guarded part being whether I get to survive all this.”
Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. Not sure how she could joke, but I thanked the stars that she could.
Nick simply firmed his lips.
“Grover Wylde, your grandfather and Dolly’s brother, saved your grandmother Rose’s skin by hiding the counterfeit money on a private island he bought before he met her. So, you were right. After the investigation is over, the island is yours.”
“Hah. Ask me what I want least in the world.”
We ignored that.
“Rose,” I continued, “agreed to marry Grover, but the Russians chasing her got word of the wedding, which is why she and your grandfather skipped it and went to the island. They were followed, however, and your grandfather grappled with them, lost a finger, but he won the fight. Eventually they got to France and safe haven.”
Paisley’s head came up. “Am I illegitimate on top of everything else?”
“No. They married in France,” I said. “So did your parents.”
Paisley lost her color, like we’d just hit the wall she’d been trying to avoid. “What happened to my mother and father? Never mind. I think I know. They’re dead, aren’t they? The memory, I think, of my father facedown in the snow; that’s real, isn’t it? And my mother got shoved into that car. I’ll bet she died that night.”
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