“Hell I will.”
“You’ll come out on top. You always do.” He smiled proudly, and she realized where he’d gotten his impression of her: the papers.
The little sidebars that took up room on slow entertainment news days, when there wasn’t an actor banging up his Bentley or a real socialite getting married, were populated by people like her and Jeremy and made to be as lascivious and ugly as possible to draw eyes to stories that readers didn’t really care about. And she was the survivor, the scrabbler, the user, and the money-grubbing harpy. Of course he thought she had it coming on one hand and that she would survive whatever he threw at her on the other.
“Doesn’t this guy hunt small animals for a hobby?” Ruby asked. “Because I think he sees us.”
Indeed, the two men had picked up their pace. Laura, Ruby, and Dad were ten steps to the underpass, where they’d be exposed. It was about half a block long, well trafficked, well lit, and wet from ground to ceiling. They had to put as much room between them and their pursuers as they could, and there was no better time to dart into the walkway than right then.
Laura faced Dad. “Why did you leave?”
“You don’t know?” A car drove by in the far right lane and splashed them, catching the side of Dad’s head, streaking his Jobeth face and hair even more.
“Why would I know?”
Ruby cut in. “Laura, we really have to move.”
“Why, Dad?”
Ruby grabbed his arm to get him from behind the tree and into the underpass, but Laura got in the way, leaving them still hidden by the tree on the south side, as Soso and Salvadore approached along the north side of the street.
“Why?”
“For Chrissakes, Laura!” Ruby hissed.
But Laura didn’t move. “This guy can catch us, and he will, and then I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not just going to let this go unanswered. You say you loved us, but you abandoned us. Not a letter. Not a card. Nothing.”
“You wanted a card from a convict on a rock? Come on, Lala.”
“Yes. I wanted a card, and I would have come for you when I was old enough.”
“I didn’t want that.”
With his face dripping makeup and his hair flattened by street water, Dad looked more a man in that desperately honest moment than he would have in jeans and a beard. “I’m sorry, Lala,” he said. “There were things I was doing, and I have to finish them. Tonight.”
“I have a date!” Ruby shouted over the rumble of a passing bus. “Can we go?”
Laura thought the moment might never come again. It was her one chance to ask him what the hell he was doing, even right then, that was more important than his family. She wanted to know if she was that undesirable, or if he was so filled with self-loathing he thought she’d be better off without him, or was he of such a single mind during the past twenty years that the three women he’d left behind didn’t occur to him until he returned to New York?
Ruby, who was less curious, yanked Dad into the sidewalk on the south side of the overpass, keeping them shielded by the bus.
“We have to turn back the other way,” Laura said. “They expect us to come out the other side.”
Dad, however, didn’t seem to care. Whatever he was doing apparently needed to be finished on the west side. As the bus pulled away, he bolted to stay with it.
“This is not the meeting I imagined,” Laura said. She didn’t leave a second for Ruby to reply but took off after him in her Jose Inuego stilettos. The bus paused at the exit, then went right, exposing them to the two men chasing them, who stood on the far side of the 79th Street Basin, ahead of them.
“Crap,” Laura muttered.
The circular basin sat in the center of a two-lane, counterclockwise roundabout, sunk twenty feet below street level. During the warm months, a café operated down there, accessed from the dock or the grassy knolls of the Hudson River Greenway. Between Thanksgiving and early spring, it closed for business. That night, the Basin Café was a twenty-foot deep, fifty-feet-in-diameter ditch, with a four-foot stone wall. And it was in the way of the docks. It had to be gone around, one way or the other, and they were going to pass two men who were experts at finding quick little animals and shooting them with crossbows.
Dad walked straight and tall but like a woman as he went left out of the underpass and down the path that led through the park to the docks. Laura thought he might just get away with it if he was offered the right opportunity. The question was whether or not she was willing to just let him walk away when she still had so many questions.
“You’re letting him go?” Ruby asked. “Remember the whole Christmas ham thing?”
“I thought you didn’t care.”
“I got my licks in. Now I kinda feel sorry.”
“Then let’s play. They don’t know he’s in drag.”
“I can’t think of anything.”
Laura raised her arms to Salvadore and Soso and jumped the short stone wall to get to the street. “Over here!” She ran over with Ruby right behind her. “I saw him! He looks just like Ruby.”
“Does not!”
“Where is he?” Salvadore asked, hands in his pockets as though he was fingering something in there. Laura was sure it was something metal and sharp, but she really didn’t want to know.
“He was on the bus!” she said, feeling the lie like a physical, viscous thing as it exited her lips.
Salvadore’s gaze followed the grinding bus as it drove around the circle… on its way back to them. Probably the worst lie she’d ever told, and she’d told some real clunkers. The bus would pass them, and they could just get on it.
Soso tilted his head as he watched her expression turn to dismay. “She’s lying.”
“Am not!”
“You totally are,” Ruby said, then turned her attention to Soso. “She doesn’t want you to hurt him, but I don’t give a crap. I want to go out. He went through those trees over there.” She pointed at the northern path to the lower level of the park. It led to the docks, the mirror image of the path Dad had really taken.
Salvadore looked into the dense blackness of the park.
Soso chimed in, “I saw something that way.”
“I didn’t,” Salvadore said as he seemed to scan what looked like every nook and cranny in every stone, without taking a step in any direction.
Soso stood, hands in pockets, looking like the concerned right-hand man, but his gaze was fixed on the woman who had just exited to the level below them, to the docks. When he saw her, Laura could have sworn he knew it was Dad, and she stiffened. But then he pointed to the path Ruby had promised Dad had used and said, “I don’t see another possibility.”
“I hope you said your good-byes,” Salvadore said.
“Gut him,” she said.
“You come to Brunico any time,” Salvadore said through the cruelest grin she’d ever seen. “We’ll treat you like a queen.”
She nodded and stepped closer to Ruby, who linked arms with her as they watched Soso and Salvadore cross traffic and disappear into the darkness. Only then did she risk looking at the docks. Dad was on the southernmost pier, still using his Jobeth walk as he walked the lines of boats. Laura saw someone get off a small boat and greet Dad with a hug. It was only a few steps, and it was dark, but the walk was very distinctive, so ramrod straight it could only be one person.
“Oh give me a break,” she said. “That’s Bernard Nestor.”
“No,” Ruby said.
“I know that walk.” Laura pulled off her shoes and held them by the heels as she ran on the cold ground as fast as her bare feet would take her.
The dock was forever away. Between going back around the circle and over the wall and through the park and down the steps and over the cold, cold asphalt of the bike path and onto the concrete dock where water lapped the boats as if they were lollipops, she didn’t have a breath left in her when she got to Dad and Bernard.
“What the…” she gasped with the
last molecule of oxygen she had, then put her hands on her knees and stared at the dock. Her feet were black.
“Lala, you have to go,” Dad said.
She pointed at Bernard, whose open trench coat revealed a three-piece suit. She wanted answers. She couldn’t live not knowing what Dad and Bernard were doing on that goddamn dock, holding hands. If only she could get a word out. If only her lungs could get some air in them. She stood straight and stared at Bernard. “Speak.”
He just glanced at Dad, then back at her.
“I will get that bastard here if he isn’t on his way already. I’ll put a hole in your boat. I’ll scream.” She didn’t feel as threatening as she sounded, but she couldn’t let up, because Bernard didn’t look like he had a word to say.
“To hell with you,” she said, then pushed past them. She took two big steps across the pier and stepped onto the boat.
“No!” Dad shouted.
She ignored him. She hadn’t been on a boat as far as she could remember. There might have been some Dalton School outing at some point that had involved a boat, probably off that very pier, but the moment she stepped onto the deck of Bernard Nestor’s boat, she felt the sea under her and lost her balance. She spun and fell backward into the cabin, bonking her head. She fell to the wood, and she felt nothing but her feet, which were freezing cold, the wet wood on her cheek, and the ebb and flow of the boat as it obeyed the demands of the tide.
A woman leaned over her. Her hair was short, but her voice, which was muffled with the sound of the ocean in Laura’s ears, tinkled on light waves and sparkles, and she loved her immediately. She was mother/sister/wife, utter perfection, an angel of grace in a trench coat and three-piece suit.
“Princess?” Laura said.
“You have a good eye,” Philomena said, dropping Bernard Nestor’s stiff, snappy intonation. “Are you all right?”
“What’s happening?”
Ruby’s voice cut the night like a battle-ax. “Get off her!”
Laura got her wits about her right away, because if she was grasping the situation correctly, Ruby was about to sock Princess Philomena, which would have been wrong in every way imaginable. She got on her knees and held her hands out to Ruby. “I’m good, Rubes. I’m good.”
Ruby’s fists were clenched, and her feet were planted far apart. She handled the rocking deck like a barfly on a mechanical bull, perfect hair flying in the wind as if she were at the climax of a movie about gorgeous badass secret agents.
Dad stood behind her, his hands in his old-lady-jacket pockets. “I told you,” he said. “My daughters are not to be trifled with.”
Philomena stood and adjusted her jacket, then held her hand out to Laura. Laura let the princess help her up.
“We have to spill it, Philly,” Dad said, “or she’s going to swim across the ocean to find us.”
Princess Philomena sighed. “No, darling. We cannot risk it.”
Laura noticed a police car up on the bike path. It slowed as it passed the piers. She wondered if the boat, like the one on Chelsea Piers to the south, was being watched. Then the thought left her mind when she looked inside the cabin and caught sight of the Brunico Saffron gown.
“I knew it!” Laura shouted.
Ruby came over and gasped. “It’s gorgeous.”
Laura turned to Dad. “If you’re Jobeth, and you have it, that means it’s with the rightful owner, which means we get our bond back!”
“No, Lala,” Dad said, “it’s not that simple.”
“Why is it complicated? You own the dress. You have it. So you did a funky switch with a fake dress to get away from Salvadore.” She pointed at Philomena. “So she’s supposed to be dead, and she’s not. But I don’t see why you have to screw me over once when I was a kid and again as an adult.”
“We’ve been planning this for twenty years.” Dad reached over and held Philomena’s hand. “We need the insurance money, and we need to sell the dress when we get to London. When we do, the interior of the dress will be revealed to the world. Philly’s secret will be out, and the Brunican monarchy will be discredited. She and I will be far away. She’ll be presumed dead, and I’m about to get lost at sea. Please, if you knew what went into this…”
“I don’t care, Dad. I have a life to live, and you’re messing with it.”
Dad seemed to be at a loss, with his shoulders hunched and his eyebrows arched. Philomena put her hands on Laura and Ruby’s shoulders, looking more like a princess in a Bernard Nestor suit than one would have thought possible. “We didn’t count on you being so clever,” she said. “Your father built my country above ground for the Brunicans, and below ground, he put tunnels and easements we used to see each other and plan this night. I used the tunnels to come to New York unseen and begin this career as a curator so I could place the gown. I taught your father to be a woman in his heart so he could pass unseen. For you, it’s money. For us, it’s our life. From the minute we met, we only wanted to be together. Why do you want to destroy it?”
Laura couldn’t argue with the princess, not because she had such a compelling argument, but because her voice was so soothing and her touch so soft.
Ruby, however, never had to be impressed with another woman’s beauty because she had it on all of them. “Give us the dress.”
“I’m sorry,” Dad said. “I can’t.”
“God,” Laura said, “you suck as a father. I can’t believe I ever wanted anything to do with you. What kind of dad sells his own daughter up the river so he can get laid in peace and quiet? I mean, you made me, and then you ditched me, and now you want me to worry about your happiness? And also, you’re supposed to teach me stuff and pave the way for me, and you didn’t do any of that, and I promise you it is not your job to show up in a pair of cheap pumps and make things harder. And by the way…” She snapped up the Jose Inuegos that she’d dropped when she fell onto the deck. “There aren’t enough of these in the world to buy me.” She threw the left one at him. He ducked. It bounced off his shoulder and landed in the Hudson River. She threw the other one, and it missed by a mile. It arced upward to the level of the pier, where it hit Salvadore Forseigh square in the face.
CHAPTER 21
Salvadore seemed as affected by the pump’s contact with his face as he might have been by a mosquito bite. He brushed it off but concerned himself with other matters, to wit: his dead wife dressed to match her secret anatomy and his wife’s lover dressed as a woman. Laura could see him doing the calculations in his head, trying to match up what he knew with what was true and finding gaps and puzzle pieces he couldn’t smash together.
“Your boat… you kept it.” He said it as if that mattered at all, which it didn’t, because the person he was talking to looked as though she’d just had her world pulled out from under her.
“No!” Philomena shouted in a third type of voice, that was neither female nor male, but a force of nature.
Salvadore, still shocked but gathering himself and naturally afraid of nothing, stepped onto the edge of the boat. Philomena screeched as if he’d made an unwanted advance. She picked up an orange life ring and flung it at him. He dodged to one side, and it glanced harmlessly off his forearm. He was neither on nor off the boat, but on the raised part, which was precarious already, and since dodging the lifesaving device and with the boat rocking already, he was bound to fall.
Yet Laura still found it surprising when he did, maybe because it was such a spectacularly acrobatic fall, or maybe because it happened so fast. The high prince slipped, legs and arms splayed like a kid in a snowsuit, and twisted, hitting his head on the edge of the pier. His skull bounced, and he struck the water not with a splash, but a plop.
Laura and Ruby ran to the edge of the boat and looked into the water to find neither hide nor hair.
“Who’s going in after him?” Ruby asked, clearly broadcasting that it wasn’t going to be her.
“Get out of the way,” Soso said. He was already out of his coat and hat. Wearing only his
leather pants, he jumped into the freezing water of the Hudson River.
Dad and the princess had disappeared, but a second later, a head-splitting alarm rang out. Three honks, then three whistles, over and over. A light flashed into the clouds like the Bat Signal.
Laura stood on the edge of the boat, but Ruby grabbed her arm. “Are you kidding me? You could drown in a bathtub.”
Soso came up without the prince and went right back down. He seemed to do this an infinite number of times, until Laura was sure he would rise like a block of ice in a glass of whiskey.
The police came in five minutes, and the Coast Guard followed in ten. They pulled Soso out of the water and deposited him onto the princess’s boat, covering him with silver blankets and cutting off his Brunican leathers.
Still, there was no sign of Salvadore.
Philomena sat by Soso and held his hand for a while, whispering in Portuguese. Laura watched them from a bench on deck. They were close. Closer than two people who hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years. Certainly closer than a wife would be to someone loyal to a hated husband. Once the princess left to sit with Dad, Laura took her place.
“Soso,” Laura said, “you helped Dad get out?”
“The tunnels go right under my house.” Soso had been given a paper cup of hot something, and he sipped it gingerly. Around them, the Coast Guard still searched. Lights swung across their vision, and alarm bells rang. But no Salvadore.
“Thank you,” Laura said. “I’ll die angry at him, but you were a good friend.”
He shrugged. “It’s hard to deny love when you see it.” He indicated Dad and Philomena, who sat in the back of the boat. Philomena cried, and Dad stroked her short, Bernard-Nestorized hair.
“You wanted us to say the gown was real,” Laura said. “What was the difference?”
“Your father found out you’d be hurt if the bond was lost. He was trying to find you a way out. If you claimed it was real, you could make a case after Jobeth had her check.” Soso unscrewed a flask and took a hit. “It was a ridiculous idea, but he was very definite, desperate for you not to be hurt.”
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