Roan put his arm around me. There was no need to doubt the serenity in his eyes. He was happy. He’d come back to where we both belonged. He’d found his place. He touched just a fingertip to my lips. An old kiss, from childhood. In the slowly gathering dusk, the cool and ripe harvest time of the year, we sat down on the ledge close together. The wind rose gently, a pure song. We shared the view across land and sky, remembering, and looking beyond.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A former newspaper editor and multiple award winner for her novels and contemporary romances, DEBORAH SMITH lives in the mountains of Georgia, where she is working on her next novel.
Please turn the page for a preview of
Deborah Smith’s heartwarming novel,
WHEN
VENUS
FELL
On sale from Bantam Books
PROLOGUE
By the time Gib Cameron found us, my sister and I were failed southern belles who could no longer count on the kindness of strangers. We lived like gypsies. Home was a forgotten memory. Like lost birds, we had migrated to a cold climate. Our distant connection to Gib and his family was all we had left of an innocent and proud past.
“Pride and self-respect are earned, not given by birth,” Pop always told us, when we were growing up amid the gothic gentility of New Orleans. “Nothing else matters.” He had had more pride beaten into him than any man deserved, and it nearly destroyed us.
Ella had developed a chronic case of what would have been called the fancies in more polite eras, and I was well on my way to becoming what would have been deemed a pinched-heart hellion. In more polite eras, of course.
Purists might insist my sister and I were never southern belles to begin with. Pedigree alone should have disqualified us. Our steel-magnolia family tree included one Japanese grandmother and one grandmother of Swedish extraction, who was a truck-stop floozy. Our father was a California-bred Italian-Asian American, not to mention a Communist. He spent his childhood in a California internment camp during World War II. His Japanese mother—my grandmother Akika—died there, and Pop swore he’d hate the United States government for the rest of his life.
So maybe my sister and I were doomed from the start.
When I was a child my piano tutors told stories about the Phantom Alligator Lady of Bayou Caveaux. Rumor had it she was a failed concert pianist, though when I was a little girl none of my tutors would admit she existed except in self-serving piano-tutor mythology.
They claimed folks glimpsed her around one of the concrete-walled, rusty-roofed little houses off a swampy back road a few miles outside New Orleans. She had doomed her career, her youth, her very soul because she let worldly distractions steal her art. Thus she turned into a crazy, bitter old failure who lured children into her home and forced them to play an untuned upright until they died, mind you—and then she carried their bodies outside and fed them to her alligators. I guess you could say she was the ultimate music critic.
I not only believed in the Alligator Lady, I carried the fear of her into adulthood. I heard her whispering encouragement in the back of my mind like a ten-cent harmonica gone sharp.
I pictured myself growing old and mean, peering spitefully out my windows at strangers while I eked out a living, teaching piano lessons to nose-picking ten-year-olds who deserved no better audience than my asthmatic pet toy poodle—which I would name Dog, or Poodle, because my mind would be gone by then. And while my students practiced I’d drink iced tea mixed with gin as I apathetically watched the poodle hoist his tiny hind leg and pee on dusty scrapbooks filled with clippings that proved I’d been a child piano prodigy, once upon a time.
And those clippings might have been all that was worth telling about Venus Arinelli. Or about any Arinelli, I guess. We were culturally jumbled but southern clear through by the grace of a god who obviously knows where odd people will best fit in. Yet everyone is made up of parts and pieces of their family’s music. The saddest thing is to forget where our songs end and our parents’ begin, because each of us plays the next note for them.
For now, I was sinking into silence.
When the Oklahoma City federal building blew up, Ella and I had just signed a six-month contract to perform in the piano lounge of a hotel in New York. It was the best job we’d had in years.
“You and your sister are fired,” the manager announced. “Pack up your equipment and get out. I won’t have people like you working in my club.”
The tv sets above the club’s bar were turned to CNN, where a tape replay showed rescue workers carrying dead and injured children from the rubble in Oklahoma City. Ella had been pale and hollow-eyed for two days. I was scared and on alert, expecting trouble.
“We have a contract,” I reminded the manager, a burly man whose suits cost more than he paid us in a month. “And we haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I know about your old man,” he replied, jerking his head toward the tv, his face as red as the rare prime rib served in the bar’s dining room. “A couple of federal agents are in my office. They want to ask you and your sister some questions. They say you’ve got connections to antigovernment groups.”
“They always do. If a kid throws a rock at a government building, these guys show up wherever we are and ask us if we know who did it. But we have nothing to do with that. We never had anything to do with it. We just want to be left alone to earn a living.”
“Government agents don’t ask questions unless they think you know something. I was in the Army. I believe in this country. I don’t want my business associated with a group of immoral fanatics.”
“Neither do I, but they show up more often than a government holiday.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The FBI. Government men. It was a joke.”
“You think our government is a joke?”
“Not at the moment. Look, my sister and I need this job, but I won’t apologize for my father. He wasn’t a monster.”
“That’s enough! Get out of my club. You’re trouble.”
This wasn’t the first time Ella and I had been fired because the Feds dropped by to tell our boss we were Max Arinelli’s daughters. I dragged myself back to our dressing room. Ella was watching CNN on a portable tv and crying softly.
“We’re outta here, Sis.” I grabbed a piece of our gear and hoisted it to one shoulder. She turned to stare at me. Behind her, on tv, a paramedic bent over a bloody, limp little boy. “Oh, no,” she said brokenly. “Oh, Vee. How could anyone think we’d know anything about the person or the group who committed a horror like this.”
I forced myself to look at the unconscious child on tv. We had to share the blame for all the brutal crimes of all the vicious lunatics of the world, because to the world our own father would always be no better than the cold-blooded psychos who maim and kill the innocence in all of us.
And so we left.
We were always running from crimes we didn’t commit.
After that I perfected the art of disguise and outright evasion. For several years the plan worked fairly well. Until Chicago.
The marquee poster in the lobby of Hers Truly, the city’s priciest women-only nightclub, proclaimed Ella and me the Nelson Sisters. When I chose the name not long after my father’s death, I hoped the government would have a helluva hard time keeping track of two Nelsons, particularly two Nelsons named Ann and Jane. You couldn’t get more all-American ordinary than that.
The Hers Truly was a fern-draped art-deco show bar filled with women wearing formal gowns and tuxedos. On a small stage in one corner of the main room I played electronic piano keyboard in duet with my sister’s electric violin. We competed with the clink of bar glasses and the soft conversation of women seducing women. In that nightclub packed with women celebrating their true identities, we were the only ones hiding behind a lie.
I was Ann. Ella was Jane. “Next year we’ll switch and I get to be Jane,” I had joked when we split a lobster tail and champagne on my twe
nty-ninth birthday. Ella was three years younger. I’d been brooding about growing old. About dead ends and hopeless wanderings.
Ella and I kept a low profile by playing the kinds of hotel lounges and nightclubs where admirers don’t stuff the tip jars with ten-dollar bills because they love Rachmaninoff. You gotta have a gimmick. I added a three-foot-long synthetic weave to my hair and kept it in a mass of tiny corn-rows and braids dyed eye-popping golden-blond. I wore so many rings and studs in my earlobes I could have picked up signals like the Hubble telescope.
I’d pierced my navel and decorated it with the glitteriest belly-button jewelry I could find at the flea markets and junk shops where Ella and I did most of our shopping. I had to be skanky enough for both of us, since Ella looked ridiculous in anything skankier than slim black trousers and sequined black tops. She kept her black hair dyed a demure honey color.
Our efforts were amateurish but they helped. We’d been the Nelson Sisters for ten years. We were professional, dependable, and honest, but reclusive to the point of oddity. We were the daughters of Max Arinelli, and even though Pop was dead we remained under scrutiny. So we kept to ourselves and moved on quickly each time government agents found us.
Which was often enough.
The stranger caught my attention like a trumpet player blowing a high C in the middle of a harp solo.
I always drew up in a knot when a certain type of man watched Ella and me in public. Over the years I’d developed a knack for pinpointing the kind who considered himself the guardian of truth, justice, and the American way. But this one stood out more than usual, particularly in the Hers Truly. After all, he was the only genuinely masculine patron I’d even seen in the audience. In fact he looked like the kind of man who’d been born with a more than ordinary share of testosterone.
I blinked, then stared again through the haze of stage lights and cigarette smoke. Holy freakin’ moly, as we used to say at St. Cecilia’s, when the nuns weren’t listening.
He was tall, dark, and yes, bluntly handsome. But badly worn around the edges. His face was gaunt, his skin was pale enough to show a beard shadow even in dim light, his mouth was appealing but too tight. He was watching me as if I were doing a striptease and he were an off-duty vice cop.
He kept his hands in the pockets of khaki trousers. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. The throat of his collarless gray shirt was unbuttoned. I saw a hint of dark chest hair. The crowd at tables nearest the stage suddenly sensed manly pheromones, like the aroma off a toxic-waste dump, and turned to scowl at him as if he were about to ask the waitresses to fetch him a pitcher of beer and start the wet T-shirt contest.
“Hey,” a beefy redhead in leather shouted at him. “What d’ya think this is? A peep show?” He smiled thinly and nodded without taking his eyes off me. A dozen women began gesturing for the manager.
Ella and I were playing a k.d. lang medley. She pivoted and looked at me frantically, her violin quivering against the ashen curve of her chin, her short blond hair dancing as she sawed the bow across the strings. She’d spotted the stranger, too. Trouble, she mouthed like a plea. I nodded. We always had an escape plan.
I leaped up, grabbed her by one arm, and hustled her from the stage. As we hurried down a back hall the manager approached us. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “The set’s not half over.”
“Migraine.” I nodded toward Ella. “Jane’s about to pass out.” Ella clasped the left side of her head and moaned. She had no trouble faking the vicious headaches because she suffered real ones so often. She was, by nature, a bad actress but an elaborate fainter.
“Oh, dear, I see halos and sparkles.” She moaned again. Levering an arm under her shoulder blades, I guided her over pockmarked floor tiles that caught on my stiletto heels and caused her smooth-soled flats to slip. I was strong and alley-cat lean; she was shorter and softer. “Try to breathe, hon. I’ll get you outside in the fresh air. Well, night air, anyhow. Can’t promise it won’t smell like a—”
“Fainting,” she mumbled. And then she went limp.
I caught her as she collapsed. I’d had a lot of practice catching my sister over the years, and more than average in the last couple. A failed romance with a smooth-talking Detroit nightclub owner had nearly destroyed her. It was why we had left Detroit for Chicago. Her health—physical as well as mental—had improved slowly. She’d only recently begun to smile like her old self.
We sank to the hall’s floor. Her eyelashes flickered. “Get me a damp cloth and a glass of water,” I called to the manager, a small crew-cut brunette in crisply tailored slacks and a man’s dress shirt, who hovered over us sympathetically.
“Be right back,” she said, then hustled toward the kitchen. I gently slapped Ella’s cheeks and rubbed her hands. She opened one eye, then whispered, “Do you see him heading backstage?”
“Not yet. We’ll hide here a minute and then we’ll run for the back exit.”
She sighed. “The other day when I really was sick I saw the most beautiful kaleidoscope aura before the pain started. I wanted to float away. I wish that rainbow place existed. You and I could go there and take every lonely, needy, homeless person in the world with us.”
That afternoon I’d caught her giving fifty bucks to a bum outside our camper. Ella didn’t give a dollar, or even five dollars, the way I did sometimes. No, she gave lifetime endowments, even when we could barely pay our own rent. I yelled, “Give me that money back, you parasite,” then wrestled the fifty out of his hands. Ella turned white as a sheet. “He said he needed it for his baby,” she moaned.
Oh, God. I should have known. The nightclub owner in Detroit had proposed to my sister, given her a huge diamond ring, then skipped town with the IRS hot on his heels. The ring, as it turned out, had belonged to a former fiancée of his. That last bit of news made my sister scream and double over with cramps. I rushed her to the hospital. She lay on a gurney in the emergency room with blood and clotted tissue seeping between her legs.
She had miscarried a month-old fetus before she even realized she was pregnant. A loss that might have seemed like a practical blessing to some women was devastating to my sister. She’d grieved for that baby ever since.
“Rainbows,” she repeated now. This was a typical Ella reaction to stress—she went window-shopping for ethereal visions. “Just stay here on Earth,” I ordered wearily, then cradled her head on my shoulder. I smoothed her hair and rocked her as if she were a child. “Maybe the man out front just likes alternative nightclubs,” she murmured. “I hope we don’t have to pack up and leave. I like this job. Lesbians are so polite.”
I heard heavy footsteps striding along the tile floor in our direction. My stomach churned. I sat in the hallway of the Hers Truly holding Ella and feeling as if I’d lost the energy to get up again. I bent my head and whispered into Ella’s ear, “Let me do the talking.” She shivered inside my arms. Tears squeezed from under her closed lids.
“Let me help you with her,” a deep male voice said. It’d been years since I’d heard a southern drawl thicker than our own. The voice belonged to him, of course—the watcher. I glared at him but a knot of fear formed in my chest as he dropped to his heels beside us. “She has a lot of these nasty headaches, doesn’t she?” he asked.
I went straight into my cornered-junkyard-dog-with-pups attitude. “You’re freakin’ brilliant. Let a woman faint in front of you and you deduce she’s sick. Great work, Sherlock. Get stuffed.”
The worry lines deepened across his high, pale forehead. I noticed a slip of gray in a forelock of his dark brown hair. He didn’t look old enough for the gray or the lines. He clucked his tongue at me. “You were raised to behave better than this. You could at least tell me to get stuffed in French or Italian. You speak both.”
He continued absurdly, “Or you could at least make a curtsy when you tell me to get stuffed. Your dad taught you when he put you onstage. You weren’t more than four years old. Barely out of diapers. You could play Mozart and you could curtsy.
Now all you can do is bang out mediocre pop songs in an all-girls club and tell people to get stuffed.”
“Okay, you sonuvabitch. What are you? FBI? Justice Department? Is there ever going to be a day when you people stop dropping into our lives for these little chats? It must be a slow day in the goon-squad headquarters. I’d think my sister and I would rank below your fun cases—like harassing old dopers and trying to catch congressmen taking bribes.”
“I was in the Boy Scouts once,” he said sarcastically. “Does that count as a fascist arm of the government, too?”
“It’s a paramilitary organization designed to indoctrinate children, so yes, it counts.”
Ella moved weakly in my grasp. “Who?” she moaned. I smoothed a hand over her forehead. “Sssh.”
He nodded toward Ella, frowning. “She needs help. I can carry her out to your car. It’s running today, isn’t it?” He arched a dark brow. “You know, I never thought a car that old could start without a crank on the front.”
He even knew about the ancient, undependable car. My mouth went dry. “I don’t need your help. Or your bullshit. Just go back and report that as usual, we’re minding our own business and trying to get along. We pay our bills, we pay our taxes. Believe it or not we are still not consorting with the type of people you government SOBs assume we might consort with. So leave us alone.”
“I wish to hell I could leave you alone, but it took me months to find you. I give you credit—you’re an expert at keeping out of sight. You were a challenge, even for me. And I have sources most people don’t have.”
The implication made me stare at him in genuine fear. The manager ran back with a washcloth and a cup of water. I helped Ella sit up and wiped her face, then forced myself to speak calmly. “It’s okay, El. Relax, I’ll get your pills.”
She sipped from the cup, then coughed and gagged. I guided her head off my shoulder. I gave him a frigid stare. “I know you guys get your jollies bullying innocent citizens, but would you mind coming back when my sister feels better?”
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