Clara winced. There wasn’t a them anymore.
And yet she still felt she owed him something. “Parker, I don’t think I can do this to Marcus. I’m already going to ruin his wedding day. Do I really need to make things worse by showing up with an ex-con?”
“What makes you so sure he’ll even care?” Parker asked with a sneer. “I think he’ll be focused on the girl he’s marrying—not an old flame who always seems to want what she can’t have. When you were with him it was me, and when you were with me it was him. If I didn’t think this exposé would sell a heap of magazines, I’d tell Marcus he was better off with the lady criminal.”
Clara’s face flamed red. She glanced at Solomon, but his expression remained utterly blank as he lit yet another cigarette.
She pointed a finger at Parker. “A real man wouldn’t ask a woman he cares about to pretend to be an ex-con’s date at her ex-boyfriend’s wedding.”
Parker leaned back in his chair and gave her his best film-star smile. “That, my dear, is why I’m asking you. I’m over”—he looked Clara up and down—“ ‘us.’ Do you know how many women I turned down in the hope that you might come around? Real women, too, not immature girls still hung up on boys stupid and gullible enough to get themselves engaged to con artists.”
Clara stood in silent shock for a moment. How dare he! But then her lips twisted into a smile. “Well, I’m so sorry to have deprived the women of New York of a prize like you for so long. I hope none of them mind that you take longer primping in front of the mirror than they do.”
She turned to Solomon. “I’m sorry you had to witness this. I’m usually quite the professional.”
Then she flung the copy of the Manhattanite she’d been holding straight at Parker’s head.
One thing Clara loved about New York: It had endless sidewalks for a girl with too much on her mind to wander.
After she’d left the Manhattanite offices hours before, Clara had thought about going home to Brooklyn. But the lonely anonymity of the crowded city streets suited her frame of mind far better than an empty apartment. Here, among the thousands of people who walked the streets, Clara felt invisible. Hidden. The wind bit at her cheeks, and the fall leaves were scattered across the pavement in beautiful shades of reds and oranges and yellows. In a way, the colors reminded her of home—before New York, before Chicago. Home with her parents, when her concerns were so few and her life was simple.
Clara pulled her coat tighter around her waist, passing by shop windows full of furniture and clothing, and a bakery with the scent of freshly baked bread wafting through the door as customers entered and left.
Then and there, on the street, she made a vow. Marcus had been set on Clara’s going to college before she pursued her writing career. At the time it had made Clara feel like he wasn’t confident in her abilities. But now she knew that even the best writers in the business admitted that there was always more to learn.
She left the crowds crammed outside the string of theaters on Broadway, moved a few avenues east, and turned onto Park Avenue. She passed upscale shops and stopped walking when she found herself outside Sherry’s Restaurant. Bushes flanked the restaurant’s entrance, softening the skyscraper’s appearance. She knew that inside there was a huge ballroom with crystal chandeliers and enough linen-covered tables to seat hundreds.
A lifetime ago, she’d attended a charity gala there with Marcus. He’d only just found out that Clara had been keeping her job at the Manhattanite a secret from him. Marcus had still wanted to make things work with her.
She stood across the street from the entrance, letting the memories of being in love with Marcus fill her body and soul, warming her on this cold fall day.
And then, out of nowhere—
One of the large double doors opened, and Marcus and Deirdre walked out and stood under the entrance’s red awning.
At first, Clara was light-headed at the coincidence. Then she remembered: Not only was Sherry’s the site of the beginning of the end of Clara’s relationship with Marcus, it was also where Marcus and Deirdre’s rehearsal dinner was taking place.
Clara crouched behind a bush and peeked around the side. Marcus was devastatingly handsome in a traditional tuxedo. His hair was Brilliantined, and a handkerchief that matched his eyes peeked out of his pocket. Clara could remember the way the Brilliantine mingled with his spicy cologne, how she would practically taste it on her tongue when she kissed his neck.
Deirdre’s coppery hair was expertly curled and pinned away from her face with diamond barrettes. She wore a sleeveless deep-green velvet gown. The top was sheer, but it became opaque at just the right point on Deirdre’s chest to remain respectable enough for the tables of old society biddies inside. The girl was positively glowing. And why wouldn’t she be? Half the Eastman fortune was about to be hers.
Marcus lit a cigarette and held it to Deirdre’s to light it. His hand lingered on her tiny waist as he did so. “I hope tonight hasn’t been too painful for you,” Clara could dimly hear Marcus say.
“Painful?” Deirdre gave a charming little laugh. “I adore your entire family. Your fazzer ees so kind and welcoming, and your muzzer ees beautiful! Zough zat ees not so surprising, you being as wonderful as you are.”
He tucked a stray curl behind her ear. “I’m glad you like them. They’ll be your family too soon enough.”
Clara looked away as the two leaned in for a big Hollywood kiss. Even though she’d heard the truth from Deirdre’s own lips, it was hard to believe someone so seemingly lovely was a con artist. And Marcus looked so happy.
She was beginning to understand what Marcus saw in his fiancée. Through all her lies and sneaking around, when was the last time Clara had remembered to tell Marcus something as simple as how wonderful he was?
As soon as she heard the door creak closed, she stalked away from the restaurant. It wasn’t fair—she should be the one standing across from Marcus on Saturday, telling him how much she loved him and how happy she would be to spend the rest of her life with him.
Instead, she’d show up to the wedding with a former criminal as her date, and would work her hardest to ensure that Marcus’s bride-to-be would be walking out in handcuffs rather than walking down the aisle.
Clara loved Marcus so much. And yet she was about to do something that would make him never want to speak to her again.
LORRAINE
Lorraine was sure the Eastman-Rijn wedding was the reason words like swanky and elegant existed.
Tramp though Deirdre was, it was kind of a shame such a gorgeous event was destined to go down in flames before it even began. It would be like that time Lorraine had dropped the latest issue of Vogue in the bathtub while she was still flipping through the ads in the front.
Melvin whistled. “What do you figure they spent on candles alone?”
Lorraine shook her head. “I don’t even want to think about it. I’m all for extravagance, don’t get me wrong. But spending a fortune on sticks that are just going to melt? That’s just applesauce.”
Though as Lorraine looked around the ballroom, she couldn’t deny the romantic, almost ethereal effect the dim lighting and hundreds of candles had. The candlelight bounced off the coffered ceilings and onto the enormous arched mirrors that lined the walls. The white linen canopy set up on the sleek wooden platform at the end of the aisle and draped with wisteria glowed with some sort of inner light.
Lorraine grabbed Melvin’s hand and pulled him deeper into the crowd. There must have been at least a hundred and fifty people milling around the rows of cushioned gold chairs, and probably twice that were still munching on hors d’oeuvres in the lobby downstairs. Lorraine had spied her own parents talking to Mr. and Mrs. Eastman in the lobby when she and Melvin had arrived—exactly why she’d hightailed it upstairs. She’d have to suffer through dinner with her mother and father later—she didn’t want to give them more opportunities to bore her than necessary.
Lorraine smiled with approval at the sigh
t of her pink lips and rouged cheeks in one of the mirrors. The low lighting made her look positively angelic. She looked around for Gloria. She hadn’t spied her old friend yet, and she wasn’t sure what she’d do when she did. Hide? Say hello? Apologize for everything, and ask if there was any way they could possibly start over?
She recognized more than one gorgeous heiress from the pages of society magazines, or from passing by them on campus at Barnard. Sure, they never actually stopped to speak to her, but … who cared about a silly little detail like that.
“Sabrina! Hello!” Lorraine waved to a girl she recognized from her European History class, who was sipping from a champagne flute. Her father was some oil magnate. Or was it steel? The details were always so confusing.
“Do you know her?” Melvin asked.
“Of course,” Lorraine replied, waving even harder. “She’s one of my dearest friends.”
Melvin coughed. “But she’s ignoring you … and now she’s walking away.”
Lorraine’s shoulders slumped as Sabrina shot her a confused look, then continued across the room. “Oh, that’s just a game we play. She pretends to ignore me, I pretend to ignore her … hysterical, don’t you think? That Sabrina is such a hoot.”
Just then, another girl passed them by—Lorraine had to stop Melvin from stepping on the velvet train of the blonde beauty’s dress. The bodice was completely covered with intricate gold embroidery, and Lorraine was instantly envious.
The girl was hanging on the arm of a handsome fellow in his mid-forties. He wore a midnight-blue double-breasted suit. He laughed uproariously and squeezed the blonde closer to him.
“You see the man in blue?” Lorraine whispered. “That’s Senator Jimmy Walker—people are saying he’s going to be our next mayor. He’s also sugar daddy to just about every chorus girl in town.” She pulled Melvin away from that couple before he could react. “Oh, and there’s Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt! Doesn’t she look beautiful? Gloria, hello!”
Old Reginald Vanderbilt, heir to the family’s railroad fortune, stood beside his new bride and smoked his pipe. His raven-haired wife wore a royal-blue satin gown that dipped scandalously low in the front and back. A pin inset with diamonds was fixed to the front of the dress and Gloria Morgan wore a necklace and earrings to match.
“I think you look beautiful,” Melvin said, surveying Lorraine’s pale green silk charmeuse gown.
Lorraine smiled. It was the most formal dress she’d ever worn, and it had the longest hemline she’d worn since puberty. It was sleeveless and was embroidered with gold thread. There were deep aqua panels on each side, and a seashell-shaped gold pin gathered the fabric before it draped into a train in the back. Lorraine hadn’t expected to love the long Callot Soeurs number as much as she did when she’d tried it on in the store, but it made her feel like some kind of mermaid princess.
Even Stella Marks, one of the Laurelton girls who’d tortured Lorraine after she’d made a drunken scene at Gloria and Bastian’s engagement party, had gushed about how much she loved the dress when Lorraine and Melvin had arrived in the ballroom. “I wish I had one just like it,” Stella had said.
Lorraine had given Stella her brightest grin. “For your sake, Stella, I wish you did, too. Then you wouldn’t be wearing that puke-colored monstrosity.”
“Thank you,” Lorraine said to Melvin now. “You don’t look too shabby yourself.”
To think Melvin had said no when she’d first asked him to come today! “I told you I don’t want to get caught up in any more of your wild shenanigans, Raine,” he’d said.
“This isn’t anything like that!” she’d replied. “I just … I’d like you to come. With me. I’ll have to deal with all these Chicago bluenoses, and it’ll be nice to have a friendly face around. Plus I bet you’ll look absolutely dapper all dressed up.”
She’d been right. Melvin’s traditional tuxedo with its too-wide lapels wasn’t going to start any fashion trends, but at least it fit. He was even wearing some classy silver cuff links that his grandfather had given him when he graduated from high school. Lorraine had been surprised—Melvin was from Wisconsin; she hadn’t thought anything classy existed there.
“Raine—” Melvin began, the candlelight doing his cheekbones and strong chin all kinds of favors.
But Lorraine saw two more familiar faces over Melvin’s shoulder, and she knew them from more than just the society pages. She pointed toward the entrance to the ballroom. “What do you know? Clara and her editor are here to put their plan into motion.”
There was an unspoken rule that women needed to look their very best when there was a danger of running into an old flame. And boy, was Clara abiding by that rule. She wore a sleeveless floral-print silk voile dress. Beads and sequins dotted the print and caught the light beautifully. A beaded belt sat low on Clara’s hips, and she wore a long pink beaded necklace. Gold heels peeked out from under the dress’s long, artfully uneven hem.
Parker wore a gray pin-striped suit with a matching waistcoat. In his pocket was a delicately folded green handkerchief, which matched the color of his tie. A gray bowler hat covered his dark, wavy hair.
The two of them stood with two middle-aged men, neither of whom was dressed formally enough for a wedding. One was overweight and dressed in a tweed suit. Half his shirt was untucked under his jacket. The other was a nondescript fellow with wrinkled worry lines crawling across his forehead, wearing an equally nondescript brown suit.
Despite the fact that Clara and Parker were possibly one of the best-dressed couples at the wedding, neither looked happy. They seemed to be in the middle of an argument.
“C’mon,” Lorraine said. “I smell trouble.”
Melvin allowed her to pull him toward Clara and Parker. “That could just be the potpourri. There’s one crystal bowl too many of that stuff here, if you ask me.”
“What’s the rumpus?” Lorraine asked once she reached Clara and Parker.
But they were still in heated conversation. “It’s all up to you,” Parker said to Clara. “There’s no one else. You have to stand up when they ask and accuse her.”
“I can’t do that!” Clara exclaimed. She was getting into a lather. “I can’t cause a scandal and ruin Marcus’s big moment!”
Lorraine cleared her throat loudly—Clara and Parker finally looked at her. “Cause a scandal? That sounds like my cue.”
“You must be Lorraine,” the overweight man standing with them said. “I’m private detective Leonard Solomon”—he gestured toward the man beside him in the brown suit—“and this is Lieutenant Robby Skinner.”
“Well, my, my.” Lorraine reached out to shake their hands, incredibly flattered that they knew who she was. Clara probably bragged about having a friend as intriguing as Lorraine all the time. “Nice to meet you, gentlemen. So what are you two talking about?” Lorraine looked back and forth between Clara and Parker. “And where’s that hard-boiled character you were supposed to sneak in here?”
Clara let out a heavy sigh, looking close to tears.
“Benji missed his train,” Parker explained. “And now Clara’s going to have to accuse Deirdre during the ceremony.”
“Except I can’t.”
“Except you have to,” Parker fired back. He smoothed his dark hair and turned back to Lorraine. “Without Benji, we’ve got no one to identify her. The police won’t arrest her without a positive ID.”
“So what will you do?” Melvin asked.
Parker shrugged. “Hope that Deirdre will slip up when Clara confronts her in front of all these people.”
“She’s a hardened criminal, Parker,” Clara said. “I don’t think a roomful of senators and socialites is going to scare her.”
Lorraine nodded. “She is a pretty tough cookie.” She glanced at Clara. “You said he was a tall, skinny guy, right?”
Clara nodded.
“Have you got a picture of him on you?”
“I do,” Detective Solomon said. He opened his black leather briefca
se, pulled out a thick manila folder, and withdrew a booking photograph. “Here’s Benji.”
Lorraine studied the photo: The skinny man had beady brown eyes and dark hair, a dusting of freckles across the bridge of his long nose. She turned back to Melvin. “Take off your glasses!”
His face scrunched up. “But you’re always telling me not to!”
“Just this once,” Lorraine replied. Melvin reluctantly took his glasses off and put them in the pocket of his jacket, and Lorraine tried not to cringe. Melvin’s poor eyesight really was a blessing—for his face.
She looked at the photo again: In it, Benji was wearing a newsboy cap. Lorraine plucked Parker’s bowler hat off his head, eliciting an angry “Hey!” from him. She ignored it and started banging the hat hard against her knee.
An older woman in a lavender suit walked in on the arm of her son and stared at Lorraine questioningly.
“Love your suit!” Lorraine called, still thwacking the hat against her leg. “What is that, Chanel?”
The woman shook her head and hurried away.
Once the hat was shapeless, she plopped it on Melvin’s head. It mostly hid his flaming-red hair. “Perfect,” she said.
Clara looked at the photo as well, with a small, wondering smile on her face. “He has a mustache and a mole, though,” she said, referring to the picture.
Lorraine fished around in her gold, shell-shaped purse. “I can fix that!” She withdrew her black eyebrow pencil.
Melvin stepped backward when she aimed the pencil at his face. “You’re not even going to ask my permission first?”
Lorraine threw her hands up. “This is a life-or-death situation, Melvin!”
“No, it’s not!” Melvin replied. “Why would you even say that?”
She paused. “Okay, but a friend of ours, the man Clara loves, is about to ruin his life. Are you really going to let him do it, knowing you could’ve done something to help?”
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