Rita Hayworth's Shoes

by Francine LaSala

  The diners regarded her with blank stares. She turned to Deck who urged her on with another friendly, supportive nod. A little too friendly for Amy’s tastes.

  “I guess first of all, you may be wondering what I’m doing with this guy?”

  “It had crossed our minds, yes,” Jane replied coolly.

  “Well, you know how I went on that expedition?”

  “Yes,” said Amy.

  “But you never knew why!” she sort of sang. “I mean really why!”

  “Okay…” Amy said, reaching for more.

  “Well, in my research on indigenous tribes in Amazonia, I started to see this weird pattern emerging. A peculiar rash of abductions, not at all typical to the region.”

  “Abductions?” said Amy, softly.

  “Just what are you getting at?” Joshua asked, protectively edging closer to Amy.

  “The more I looked into it, the more I began making all these weird connections to this tour company based right there in the rain forest,” she turned to Amy. “That’s when I asked you about—”

  “Jungle Jimmy’s,” Amy whispered, and there was a loud gasp from the table as everyone looked over at the placard of Eric and Shirley. Clarabelle made a strange attempt to try and cover their ears with her hands.

  “We don’t talk about that,” said Lauren, rising and standing on the other side of Amy, looping her arm around her.

  Hannah didn’t seem to get the message and kept talking. “Well,” she continued. “I always thought it was weird, the way your parents disappeared like that. How they were presumed dead and the case was just closed and all that.”

  “Be careful, young lady,” warned Joshua. “We’re all family here.”

  “No kidding. I know all about it,” Hannah rambled on. “I sit right over the wall from loudmouth over there,” she said pointing at Amy with her thumb.

  No one spoke, so Hannah continued. “Anyway, I started to put it all together. And I realized this company and the abductions were definitely connected and I had to find out why. So I secured a grant to head to South America to investigate it.”

  “You know what happened to my parents?” Amy gulped.

  “Better!” shouted Hannah, leaving everyone understandably confused.

  Deck stepped in. “Well, maybe not better,” he interjected. “But be patient. It all does add up.” He nodded to Hannah to continue.

  “So anyway, where was I?”

  Deck stepped in again. “Hannah got a grant and headed down to the Jungle Jimmy’s headquarters in Brazil,” he said.

  “And who do you suppose I found hanging out down there?” she said.

  “Oh, my God,” Amy gasped. “My parents!”

  “No, better!” exclaimed Hannah, pointing in the air. And then she caught herself. “I mean better within the context of the story. Just be patient. Please.”

  “Marny was there at Jungle Jimmy’s,” Ollie piped in. “And she wasn’t alone.”

  “Who’s Marny?” Mort asked.

  “That’s Deck’s estranged wife,” said Ollie.

  “Who’s Deck?” Morty asked.

  “You mean the leper over there?” asked Aunt Enid.

  “He’s not a leper,” said Amy, though looking at him, all red and bumpy, she couldn’t quite be sure she was right about this.

  “You’re Deck,” Lauren smiled, sizing Deck up.

  “You knew about this?” Jane accused Ollie. “Why didn’t you say anything—”

  Ollie shook his head at Deck. “Neither of them is very patient, are they?”

  Deck smiled, and looked at Amy, who was wearing a look of deep confusion as she hugged her arms around herself. “So, I don’t understand. Who was with her?”

  “A woman you might know, Amy,” said Deck. “A woman named Liz French.”

  “Liz French?!” Amy, Jane, and Zoë all shouted at once.

  “Yes,” said Deck. “It seems Marny and Liz had mended their old fences in interesting and, well, intimate ways.”

  “And they were hatching a plot!” said Hannah.

  “But how did you…”

  “Oh, I had no idea they were there,” said Hannah, “or that Liz was involved with Marny in that way. In fact it wasn’t until I friended Deck on Facebook that I even started to put it all together.”

  “I’m on Facebook,” gushed Aunt Clarabelle. “I’ll friend you!”

  “Uh…sure…” Hannah said, and turned back to the group. “Anyway, Marny was after a map, a map of a very sacred place in Amazonia. A map that could only be found in one place.”

  “And I knew where,” said Deck. “Well, I didn’t know exactly. But Chuck told me something about my uncle, something special he had. Something…”

  Grant looked at Hannah. “Something that…”

  “His uncle had the map,” Hannah said.

  “Yes, we get it. But the map to where?” asked Lauren.

  Everyone looked around at one another, both impressed by the mystery and confused as to how any of it related to them or the celebration lunch that had been interrupted before the main course had been served.

  Deck looked at Lauren, and then at Amy. And then he smiled at Hannah again, which made Amy’s heart sink.

  “The map to El Dorado,” he said.

  Amy gasped. Aunt Enid shook her head. “I don’t get it. Why would anyone go through all that trouble for a car?” she asked.

  Amy shook her head. “No, not a car. A mythical city of incredible riches, thought to be located deep in the rain forests of South America. But no one ever knew where it was. No one ever found it, so people just assumed it didn’t exist. Kind of like Atlantis.”

  “Well, missy. Apparently, it does exist,” said Hannah.

  “And apparently a famous French author knew exactly where it was,” said Deck.

  “You don’t mean?” Amy asked, and he nodded his big bald bumpy red head wildly. He was about to tell her everything when Ollie jumped into the conversation.

  “Marny planted the seed that Deck was abusive towards her, and that she feared for her life so she could create a distraction to find what she’d come back for, and then have a clean-cut way to disappear without Deck coming after her to get it back.”

  “Marny wrote that horrible note and passed it to Liz,” Hannah added, “who passed it to me. Then I passed it to the detective over there because quite frankly, I never trusted this guy,” she said, pointing with that thumb again, this time to Deck. “Seriously. I always thought he was up to no good,” she said, shaking her head. “Oh, and I’m so sorry about that now,” she said directly to Deck, now tearing up. “Because this guy,” she choked up as she tried to wrap an arm around him. “This is a good guy.”

  “Well, so far it seems like you’ve pretty much made up for it,” Grant piped in, nodding to Hannah.

  She cocked her head curiously at him and smiled. “Have we met?”

  Zoë let out a loud, exasperated sigh. “Grant, Hannah. Hannah, Grant. Grant’s divorced and a total wet blanket.

  “Hey!” he objected.

  “And Hannah’s also single and kind of a nosy-body who—”

  “Hang on,” said Deck to Zoë. “Just wait till you see what else she uncovered. You might start to think her being so nosy is not such a bad thing.”

  “Uh, thanks. I think?” said Hannah.

  Zoë looked Hannah up and down. “I’m not so sure I—”

  “Zoë, nice girls let people make their point and then judge them for it,” instructed Jane. Everyone turned in her direction and stared blankly at her. “I mean, you never judge anyone. But—”

  Then everyone was uncomfortably quiet until Ollie spoke again. “We finally started to piece it all together after Liz took off,” said Ollie. “But it wasn’t un
til we had the dolls back that we knew for sure.”

  “The dolls?”

  “Yep. It was all about Heimlich’s dolls,” Deck said.

  “You gave me some dead guy’s dolls to play with, Auntie Amy?” shrieked Zoë. “That’s so gross.”

  “So what’s the big deal about the dolls?” Mort wanted to know.

  “Well, as some people know, Heimlich and I weren’t exactly buddies,” Deck said. “But does anyone know why?”

  “Sweetie, we don’t even know who the hell you are,” said Enid, taking a sip of her wine.

  “Heimlich was my uncle,” said Deck, as a collective gasp rose from the table. “His brother, now also dead, was my real father. Not the guy who raised me. That was Chuck,” he said, as if that last bit of detail mattered to anyone present but him.

  “The photograph,” Amy warmed slightly.

  “Yep,” he nodded to her. “Me and the old bastard. When he was still young and kind of nice to me. Anyway, the dolls—my dolls now, I guess—are actually quite valuable.”

  “Because they’re antiques,” said Jane.

  “Kind of, but the real value lies in what the dolls are keeping under their clothes.”

  “Their clothes,” Zoe mused. “Of course…”

  “Under their dresses are the pages of a short, never-published section of a very important piece of literature,” he said as he looked at Amy. “A section actually missing from Candide.”

  She smiled.

  “And in that section is the map.”

  “Not the car again,” said Enid, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth and rolling her eyes. Everyone shook their heads.

  “I don’t understand,” Mort said.

  “Voltaire held back a section of Candide because it featured an actual map to the city of El Dorado, and he didn’t want it ending up in the wrong hands. That section of the book had been kept hidden with the dolls for years.”

  “The dolls belonged to Voltaire?” Grant asked.

  Amy laughed. “That would be impossible considering Voltaire died in 1778 and bisque dolls weren’t around until the nineteenth century!” she exclaimed, proud to know all this. Though the looks around the table were more like “Is that really necessary?”

  “No, not his dolls,” Deck said. “The pages were put there by his descendants and passed down through the ages. Heimlich, crazily enough, was one of those descendants. So I guess it follows that, well…”

  “So is Deck!” Hannah beamed.

  Amy felt like she was going to faint as a gigantic “Wow!” rose from the table.

  Deck looked at Amy, but neither spoke.

  “So, you’re saying you’re an heir to some literary fortune?” asked Grant.

  He brushed it off. “It’s not that important.”

  Jane looked at Amy. “Kind of a literary prince,” she said, but Amy was too stunned about everything to respond to Jane, or even to hear her.

  “Unbelievable, right?” Hannah asked.

  “This does seem a little bit far-fetched, now that you mention it…” said Joshua.

  “Just wait,” said Hannah. “Because it just gets better.”

  “So Marny somehow found out about the dolls and the secret, and realized she wasn’t ever going to get them unless I fucked up big time. So she set out to make me look like a killer.”

  “You can’t fuck up worse than murder,” Clarabelle mused.

  “I don’t understand. You knew all this when I found the dolls?” Amy asked, starting now to absorb the situation. “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “All news to me. I swear it. I happened to casually mention the trunk and the dolls to Chuck one day and he told me there was a rumor. But if it was true….”

  “How did she know about them?” Amy asked.

  “Because when I stopped having a relationship with Heimlich, Marny continued hers,” Deck explained. “She got it out of him in just the way she does this kind of thing.”

  “But how was she going to get the map? How was this woman, this Marny, going to get the dolls if she was missing?” Aunt Clarabelle demanded, dramatically. “If she was dead!”

  “Aha!” said Deck. “Now that’s where Liz fits in to the plan. Marny could not have made it work without Liz.”

  “Marny needed someone to make sure her note fell into the right hands, but she also needed someone to get those dolls out of Heimlich’s hiding spot,” said Hannah. “So while she was hiding out, Liz was supposed to be tracking down the dolls.”

  “But they weren’t there anymore because I had them.”

  “Yep.”

  “So that’s why Liz helped David move my books?”

  “Probably.”

  She gasped. “And that’s why David…”

  “No, Amy. That was all David wanting to get back with you. And who could blame him really,” he said, and she looked away. “You aren’t still…”

  “Oh, God, no. That was just temporary insanity.”

  “Oh? Good,” he smiled. “Did he take the snakes?”

  “Can we get back on point here? I think I see what’s going on now,” said Joshua, looking back and forth between Amy and Deck, and stopping on Deck. “But who are you again?”

  “And where on earth did you contract leprosy?” asked Mort.

  “Deck, sir. Decklin Thomas,” Deck said, extending a hand, and ignoring Mort. “And you must be Joshua?”

  “Ah,” nodded Joshua, as he tentatively shook Deck’s red meaty paw. “You’re ‘the boss’,” he said, looking to Amy for confirmation.

  “Was, and that’s relatively speaking, sir,” Deck smirked and nodded towards Amy. Joshua smirked back. “I know just what you mean,” he intimated.

  Lauren glared at them and shook her head. “So what you’re saying is…?”

  Deck looked directly at Amy, now beaming. “What I’m saying is something you’ve always known, Amy,” he said as he gleefully looked back and forth at everyone present, appearing as though he would burst at any moment.

  “That Liz French is…?” Amy tried.

  “Is the Missing Link!” squealed Zoë.

  “Indeed,” Deck smiled.

  “Yes!” Zoë said and slammed down a tiny fist. “I’m back!”

  “Huh,” said Amy, a bit overwhelmed. “I was going for something else,” she said, as her mouth curled into a smile, “but I kind of like that.”

  “I thought you would,” Deck grinned. “Marny has always preferred women. I thought I could change her, but… Anyway, I guess after a few months of your ex, Liz remembered that indeed, so did she.”

  “So when Marny left the first time, she left you for Lee…”

  “I didn’t tell you it was another woman she left me for?”

  “No. You kind of skipped that.”

  “Huh. Well, I guess it didn’t seem that important at the time.”

  “My husband left me for another man!” Jane proclaimed, almost too proudly. “What?” she looked at everyone, now a bit self-conscious. “Well, he did. You hadn’t figured that out, yet? Come on!”

  “We all knew it, Mama,” said Zoë, poking the new space in her teeth with her tongue.

  Ollie gave Jane’s hand a gentle squeeze and he twitched his moustache affectionately at her. “So now both women are in custody, being charged with attempt to defraud, embezzlement, and, well, kidnapping.”

  “Kidnapping?” Mort shouted.

  “Yes,” said Joshua. “Let’s get back to that.”

  “Kidnapping,” Hannah confirmed, looking at Deck, who seemed to blush even past his high-voltage redness. “It seems Marny was in cahoots with the Pygmies.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Amy. “There are no Pygmies in Ama
zonia. They’re in Africa.”

  “There you go again, Amy,” said Hannah, with an exaggerated shrug of her shoulders and a light giggle. She shook her head. “You don’t know everything.”

  “But I know—”

  “Remember that I told you there were more than forty tribes in Amazonia that had never had contact with the civilized world.”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, guess what? Not only does El Dorado really exist, but there are Pygmies in South America. The rash of abductions clued me in to the possibility and now I’ve proven it.”

  “Cool,” said Zoë.

  “Okay, but I don’t understand how this Marny had anything to do with the abductions,” said Mort.

  “And Liz,” said Amy.

  “Not Liz, at least not the whole time,” said Hannah. “But Marny. The first time she disappeared, with Lee, they were armed with the knowledge that El Dorado did indeed exist, and they headed straight for Brazil.”

  “And took over Jungle Jimmy’s,” said Ollie.

  “Marny believed she could win their secrets,” said Deck. “That she could get the natives to lead her to the city without the map.”

  “She even tried to bribe them with the promise of riches of their very own for their help,” said Hannah. “But of course they weren’t interested.”

  “So that’s when she started to offer up the tourists,” said Deck, carefully.

  “Captives being a much more appealing prospect than riches,” she said.

  “And the more they got, the more open they became to sharing the secrets of the jungle with her,” said Deck.

  And Hannah steamrolled on. “But it was slow going, and Lee got bored finally and left,” said Hannah.

  “And then Marny found out from Liz that Heimlich was dead, so she decided to come back to New York,” said Ollie. “She figured if she could get her hands on the map, she could find the city herself and get out of the tourism business once and for all.”

  “Such a horrible industry,” Jane mused. “What? I once worked as a travel agent. I know.”

  “Anyway,” said Ollie. “They never made any kind of release deal with the Pygmies for the tourists, so their captives were essentially theirs for good.”