Pieces of You

by Campisi, Mary

  “Quinn?”

  Vanished . . .

  “Quinn?” Sylvia stood in front of him, eyes bright, plump fingers fanning her face.

  “Don’t tell me the Carlsons are back.”

  She shook her ginger-red head and the extra skin under her chin jiggled. “No. There’s a woman outside who says she needs to see you.”

  “You’ve got my appointment book.”

  “She says it’s urgent.” She pulled the words out like warm taffy.

  “Sylvia, they all say it’s urgent.” He checked his watch. “I was getting ready to leave.”

  His secretary leaned forward, her pink-tipped fingers gripping the edge of his desk. Sylvia was the “Queen” of secrecy and embellishment. “She says it’s about your family.”

  “Annie?”

  “No, not Annie, she would have said, I think. I tried to quiz her but she shut up tighter than a clam.”

  Annie was his only family, at least the only family he claimed. His father was dead, and the aunts and uncles were all back in Corville, but Quinn hadn’t thought about them since Rupe’s funeral.

  Sylvia appeared much more curious than he was to find out about the mystery woman. “Your horoscope today said, ‘Old paths cross with new ones.’”

  Quinn sighed. “Okay, show her in. But tell her five minutes because I’ve got a plane to catch.” He ignored the arched brow. “Just tell her.”

  Less than three minutes later, Sylvia ushered in a small built fifty-something woman, dressed in a beige, linen suit and fat gold hoop earrings. Her salt and pepper hair clung to her head like a curly cap and she wore dark glasses. Ah, the glasses are the reason she’s here.

  “Ms. Rita Sinclaire, Mr. Quinn Burnes. Quinn, Ms. Rita Sinclaire.” Sylvia sidled up to the second wingback chair as though she were going to settle in and ask her own share of questions. “Thanks, Sylvia. Go ahead and take off.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be leaving in a few minutes myself.”

  “Oh. Sure.” There was such disappointment in her voice Quinn almost told her to stay and take notes but that would only prolong the meeting.

  He waited until the door closed before he turned to the woman in dark glasses. “Sit down, Ms. Sinclaire.” He gestured to one of the chairs and pretended politeness. “What can I do for you?” The woman remained standing. And silent. “Ms. Sinclaire?” Just his luck she’d drag this meeting on with too many pauses and not enough answers.

  “The watercolors in the lobby,” she finally managed, “they were signed by a Burnes. Is that you?”

  “My sister.”

  She cleared her throat. “Do you paint?”

  “No.”

  She nodded slightly, moved toward a chair and sat down. “Painting is very soothing, but it can be very unsettling, too.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” He didn’t believe for a half second she had any information about his family. It had all been a ploy to meet with him.

  The woman clasped her hands together and continued as though she were a renowned art critic. “I’ve always loved oils myself, so much more vibrant, but painful. Some people avoid them, they say they reveal too much.”

  The eyes, tell me about the eyes.

  “Have you ever worked with oils, Mr. Burnes?”

  “I’m not trying to be rude, Ms. Sinclaire, but I really don’t think you came here to discuss my artistic abilities. It’s late and I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “Of course, you do. I know you’re a very busy man. And very well known, too.”

  Here it comes.

  “I read all about you. You’ve made quite a few headlines.”

  Which is why you’re here.

  “It isn’t every lawyer who can win cases against the likes of fast food chains and major department stores.”

  Quinn picked up his pen, turned it over between his fingers. “You told my secretary you wanted to talk to me about my family?” But we both know it’s really about your eyes.

  “That’s right.”

  “There’s just my sister and me.”

  “Oh. And your parents?”

  “Dead.” How far is this going to go before she takes off the glasses and exposes the real reason she’s here?

  “Dead.” There was the slightest pause. “How long ago?”

  “Look, that’s enough. Tell me why you really came here. It’s about your eyes, isn’t it? You’re injured and want restitution. You should have just been honest about it.”

  “That’s not it at all.” Her next words sucked the air from the room. “I’ve come to tell you your mother’s not dead.”

  Chapter 6

  Rita Sinclaire’s words pushed him into a black hole, sucking the air from his lungs. He’d imagined these words thousands of times, feared the reality of them, and fought them for years. “My mother’s dead.”

  “No.” Rita Sinclaire shook her salt and pepper head. “She’s alive. I can prove it.”

  “She died eighteen years ago.” He willed her dead, wanted it with a fierceness that hurt.

  “She didn’t die, Quinn. She’s very much alive.”

  Obviously, the woman knew something. Alive or dead, he still hated his mother. “Okay, she’s not dead. Let me guess, she’s dying and wants to reconcile.”

  Rita Sinclaire shook her head again. “No, that’s not it.”

  “Of course not.” Memories flooded his brain, crashing together, spinning apart. “Let me tell you about the last time I saw my mother. It was hot that day, miserable really, with a heat that sucks the life out of you, where you step out of the shower and you’re already sweating.” He fixed his gaze on one of the woman’s hoop earrings. “I didn’t even know she was gone until dinnertime. There was a pan of potatoes on the stove. I guess we were having mashed that night, and green beans in a colander on the counter. I remember the angel food cake, because it was my favorite. My father was the first one to go looking for her but it was already too late. She drove to the grocery store and disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We never had a funeral for her.”

  “She loved you very much.”

  He ignored her. “I wanted the funeral but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He made us set a place at the table every night, leave the light on above the stove, even sign her name on Christmas cards.”

  “He knew she wasn’t dead?”

  “He didn’t know. He just couldn’t accept her being dead. I knew the truth though.”

  “How did you know?”

  A cold smile slipped across his face. “I found her notebooks.”

  “Notebooks?”

  Why had the woman’s face turned from tan to paste? “They were the black and white composition ones, the kind kids use in school. She found one of my old ones and started spilling her guts in it.”

  Rita Sinclaire gripped the edge of the chair and said, “I’m sure she never meant for anyone to read them.”

  “Certainly not her family,” Quinn added. “They wouldn’t necessarily like to hear about how she didn’t fit in, how she was living a lie, how she didn’t know who she was and nobody really knew her. She filled eight of them.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of discontent, don’t you think?” The pages were there in front of him now, as though they’d never been torched, line after line of despair, all in his mother’s cramped writing, words strung together, questioning existence, mourning a past, yearning for a future that was anywhere but Corville.

  “It must have been very painful for you to live with that knowledge.”

  “It would have been worse if my father had found out.”

  “I’m sure she never meant to hurt any of you.”

  As if this woman would know. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  “She loved you.”

  “She left me.”

  “Did you ever consider the possibility that maybe she had no choice? Maybe she couldn’t stay.”

  Anger festered in his gut but he tamped it do
wn. He didn’t want to feel anything. Evie Burnes didn’t deserve it. “Everybody has a choice. She chose to leave.” Why was he having this conversation anyway? He’d never told anyone about the notebooks. “If she walked in this room right now and stood in front of me I wouldn’t acknowledge her.”

  “You have a right to be angry.”

  “I’m not angry.” He drew in a calming breath. “I’m not anything.”

  “Don’t you want to hear her side of it?”

  “Her side? Are you her lawyer, come to plead her case? Listen, that’s a very gracious effort on your part and you must be a good friend, but the truth is, I don’t care where she went or why she left. It doesn’t matter. It hasn’t mattered in years.”

  “It matters to her.” She slid the dark glasses off her face. “It matters to me.”

  Quinn fixed his gaze on the silver-blue eyes staring back at him, the ones the town of Corville called “sky-dipped.” She’d been smart to wear the glasses. Age had transformed the hair and skin, and the voice sounded huskier than he remembered. But the eyes, they were the same. Just like his.

  “Look at me, Quinn. Please.”

  He dragged his hands over his face, a quick attempt to pretend she hadn’t affected him. “Why are you here?”

  “I,” she paused and he braced himself for the tears, the self-incrimination, the pleas for forgiveness. They would start now, years of them, a barrage of futile attempts to gain his forgiveness. He would scorn them all.

  “I need your help.”

  This, he had not expected. “My help?”

  She looked away, her gaze flitting across the room, to ceiling, floor, desk, before finally settling back on him. “I’m in trouble.”

  Laughter exploded from his mouth like a giant gusher and sucked the oxygen from his lungs. She needed his help? That was hysterical, wasn’t it? Was that why he was laughing? Maybe the sound spilling from him wasn’t laughter, maybe it was something else altogether, something so raw it didn’t have a name. The mother who deserted them needed his help. That’s why she’d come back, not to reunite, or apologize, or explain, but for his legal services. “You need to leave now.”

  “Quinn, do you think I would have come here if there was any other way?”

  “I can’t help you.” By God, I won’t help you.

  “You can. You’re the only one who can.”

  “Okay, then, I can, but I won’t. Now, I’ve got a plane to catch.” What was one lie compared to the hundreds she’d told them? He pushed back his chair and stood. “Nice seeing you again.”

  “Please help me.”

  He ignored her words and yanked a phone book from the bottom drawer of his desk. “Here, take this. Look under A for attorney. I’m sure there are hundreds who’ll be willing to listen to you.” Quinn grabbed his jacket and walked around the desk to where she sat. He shoved the phone book in her hands and said, “I’ve got to go.”

  “My life’s in danger.”

  “All the more reason to use that book.” He shrugged into his jacket and reached for his briefcase. “I’ll walk you out.”

  She stood, clutching the book to her stomach. “Does Annalise know the truth about me?”

  He couldn’t resist. “She hasn’t been Annalise in years.”

  “She thinks I’m dead, doesn’t she?”

  “Of course she does. That’s why she still loves you.”

  “What would she think if she knew I was very much alive, have been for years and you’ve known all along?”

  He didn’t like her discussing Annie as though she had a right. “I don’t know what she’d think but it doesn’t matter because she’s never going to find out.”

  “I’m not trying to jeopardize your relationship with her. God knows, she must have needed you all these years. But now I need you and I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “You’re trying to blackmail me?”

  “I’m sorry, Quinn. More than you’ll ever know.” Her voice held a remnant of the mother he knew long ago. “Just help me, please, and then I’ll leave.”

  ***

  Within ten minutes, Quinn knew more than he wanted to about the tangle of lies that tied the real Rita Sinclaire to the woman he’d once called “mother”. The real Rita was dead, but Evie Burnes had been using the woman’s identity for the past eighteen years. The new Rita was a thriving artist in Ogunquit, Maine and signed her assumed name to paintings, checks, even credit cards. For all practical purposes, she’d become Rita Sinclaire. There was just one glitch. The real Rita had been an inside accomplice to a $250,000 armed robbery at First American Bank that left a security officer dead and Rita’s partner, Pete Muldaney, serving time in Attica State Prison. Until his release two weeks ago.

  Evie sipped her scotch neat and settled in the chair across from Quinn’s desk. “This man just showed up and started treating me like I should know him.”

  “You must have looked like the real Rita.”

  “There was a resemblance. Of course, eighteen years changes people’s memory, everything gets a bit muted and fuzzy.”

  “Not everything.” He wanted to tell her he remembered the exact instant he discovered she’d run away. It was Saturday, July 24th, late afternoon, probably 3:00 or 4:00. Scorching hot too, ten degrees hotter in the attic. He wore jeans and the Rolling Stones t-shirt she hated with the signature tongue. It was dead quiet. Rupe was sleeping. Annie was playing two doors down at the McPherson’s. There were eight notebooks, black, college composition, smooth to the touch, crammed with enough poison to destroy every Burnes in Corville.

  “ . . . I guess it’s God’s way of smoothing out reality, don’t you think? After a while, it tends to blur, the edges get dull, until one day, you can’t bring it back into focus. So you leave it that way and that’s how you remember it.”

  “Is that what you did with us? Let us fall out of focus?”

  She looked away, downed the rest of her scotch before speaking. “It was the only way.”

  “So you wouldn’t feel guilty?” He had to know.

  “So I could survive. I left because I couldn’t be the kind of mother you and Annalise needed. Or the kind of wife your father wanted. Staying would have destroyed us all.”

  “What a convenient statement.”

  “It’s true. You would have ended up hating me more than you do now.”

  He didn’t answer, but then, he didn’t need to.

  “I couldn’t go back, though I was close several times.” Her silver-blue eyes tried to look into him, through him. “When I first left, I went to a roadside diner and a young boy walked in. He was about your age, same wavy hair, same height. For one tiny second I thought he was you and almost went after him. Instead, I went into the bathroom and threw up. That’s when I knew if I was going to do this, I had to forget everything except starting over. No more thinking about birthdays, or Annalise’s fat braids, or your father’s laugh, or how you loved angel food cake. I had to let it all go, right then, or I’d go insane.”

  “I’m glad your plan was so successful.” It didn’t make him feel any better that she remembered scraps of their lives. Actually, it only made him feel worse. She’d had a family who loved her and she’d left anyway.

  “Not entirely.”

  He wasn’t going to give her an opportunity to unload her conscience so she’d feel better and he’d feel worse. Quinn opted for polite disinterest. “And you found what you were looking for.”

  “In measures, yes, I did.”

  “Good.” He should just leave her alone. What did he care? But something pulled at him, forcing him to say, “Dad was the one who never got over it.”

  She sank back in the Queen Anne chair and pressed her fingertips to her temples. “He was a good man.”

  “He was a great man but he was never the same. He and Brenda Coccani were the only ones who never gave up on you. They became friends, imagine that.”

  “She was a good friend.”

  “She died a year before Dad. Ova
rian cancer.”

  Evie closed her eyes.

  “So, enough of that. You’ve got an ex-con who wants money from Rita Sinclaire, who he thinks is you. Why did you come to me?”

  “To prove I’m not her.”

  “I see. And how will I do that?”

  “By proving I’m really Evie Burnes.”

  Chapter 7

  He’d only come to Arianna’s because she’d invited Annie and Michael for a small get together and it would be rude to not show, considering he was the link between the parties. Annie couldn’t wait to see Arianna’s home; the red wall in her living room, the zebra stripes in the guest bath. It was the last thing Quinn wanted to do on a Saturday night, especially after the week he’d just had. There was the mystery woman and her sketchy tale, the Carlson’s and the toilet seat, and the coup de gras, Evie Burnes and her disappearing, reappearing act.

  Saturdays were made for quiet dinners and intimacy with the opposite sex, no pleasantries, no fakeries, no extra effort at conversation. It was a day for dumming down and Quinn kept a long list of females willing to play dummy as long as the restaurant was five star, the wine three hundred dollars a bottle, and the after sex gift, jewelry. Easy, Noncommittal. Exactly where he wished he were right now.

  Instead, he sat in an overstuffed pink and green floral chair, nursing a scotch neat and trying to remember the name of the pony-tailed, old coot slouched in the matching chair next to him. Howard? Howell? Harvey? Why had Arianna done this to him? She knew he wasn’t part of this group, had no desire to mix with any of them, artists, writers, sculptors. He’d told her several times, so many she’d stopped inviting him.

  So why did she back door it and extend the invitation to his sister? Did it have anything to do with Danielle? Speaking of, the mystery woman sat at the opposite end of the room, by design most likely, talking to a woman wearing a turban and a caftan. With the exception of the initial introductions with Annie and Michael, she hadn’t spoken to Quinn, probably because she’d have to work too hard to keep her stories straight. Shot in the stomach. Right. The guy probably deserved the bullet, but she’d insulted Quinn’s intelligence with a story even a first year law student wouldn’t buy.