“They’re already on their way.” Vic folded her into his arms. “I called the Park Police. They’re sending a helicopter. You did exactly the right thing.”
Lacey felt weak. Vic’s arms suddenly were the only things holding her up. “Can they take us out of here?” She sobbed into his shoulder and let him take Brooke’s gun from her hand.
“No rescue choppers for you, darling, you’re coming home with me. I’m your rescue team.”
Willow hissed at them from the red slush where she lay under Brooke’s watch. “You tried to kill me! You’ll go to prison! This is all your fault! How did you even know where we were? How’d that hairdresser hag warn you?”
Lacey crouched down and spoke low so only Willow could hear. “We have a secret code. Stella told me over the phone, right under your nose. If you were really part of our girls’ club, you would have known that. But you’ll never be a member of our club, Willow. You’re the one going to prison. You’ll be invisible again.”
Vic squatted beside Willow to look her over. The gunshot wound was in her abdomen and she was bleeding heavily. He took Willow’s right hand and pressed it firmly against her wound. She grimaced in pain.
Kepelov trudged up to the observation platform and grinned at them. He kissed Lacey on both cheeks and said he would help with Willow. Lacey suspected that aside from his questionable humanitarian instincts, Kepelov just wanted a closer look at the priceless pearls around Willow’s throat. He knelt down in the snow beside her and took over applying pressure on her wound to stop the bleeding. Willow spat at him like a snake.
“Is this a nice way to behave when people are saving your worthless life?” Kepelov pressed a bit harder on the wound and she turned her face away. “You remind me of Snow Queen. Heart of ice.”
“I think she’ll live. That was a pretty good shot, Lacey,” Vic said. “You been practicing without me? What did I say about waiting for me?” He held her tight and whispered something gently into her hair.
“I couldn’t wait any longer,” Lacey said. “I ran out of time.”
Marie Largesse brought up the rear, bright against the white landscape in a splash of red and purple, her long black curls dotted with snow. She carried a stack of colorful blankets in her arms. She walked right up to the railing with them and dropped a couple of them over the edge to Stella and Nigel.
“I had the worst feeling,” she explained to Lacey. “Cold to my bone. A vision of Stella in the icy river.” She wrapped Lacey’s shoulders in a blanket and hugged her.
Brooke stood over Willow, furiously keying away on her BlackBerry to Damon Newhouse. With his free hand, Kepelov took a flask from his jacket and offered it to Lacey.
“Hard day, Lacey Smithsonian? Have a drink. Warm you up.”
“You could say it’s been a hard day.” She took a sip of his vodka and coughed, but he was right, it warmed her immediately.
“We shall talk at length about this someday.”
“Over barbecue at your ranch in Texas?” Vic said.
“Excellent idea,” the old spy agreed. “By a roaring fire.” He turned his attention back to Willow and her gunshot wound (and her pearls), while Marie crouched beside him with her hand on his shoulder. She covered Willow with another blanket, and Willow stopped struggling.
The tableau suddenly struck Lacey as a scene from a fairy tale. Something that might be hand-painted on a set of Kepelov’s nested Russian dolls. The fallen snow witch, the big blond Russian spy, and the Gypsy woman kneeling in the drifting snow beside the river.
Chapter 39
“Tell me about the Pink Collar Code.” Vic nuzzled Lacey’s ear.
“You’ll have to subpoena me, copper,” Lacey said. The Code had become a little game between them. She nuzzled him back. She couldn’t resist him in a tuxedo. She couldn’t resist him in anything, she decided. Lacey wore a lipstick red crepe cocktail dress that had been her Aunt Mimi’s. She felt it suited the occasion quite as well as his tuxedo. “And I’ll never talk, not even under oath. I know nothing.”
“That’s not what Stella says.”
“Stella’s got a big mouth, or haven’t you heard? Ask her yourself. Stella will tell you everything. Except the Code.”
While the Park Service rescue team was loading her into the helicopter at Great Falls, Stella kept babbling about “the Code,” how Lacey and Brooke and the Code had saved her life, how they were now “the Sisterhood of the Pink Collar Code.” Lacey chalked it up to stress, and relief, and the painkillers the paramedics gave Stella for her broken ankle and the bumps and bruises from her fall into the rocks. And to Stella’s flair for the dramatic.
Vic and the other guys had heard plenty about the Code since then from Stella, but not the Code itself. The Code was too important to reveal to mere men, Stella said. “And like, what if we need to use it again? It’s totally top secret! The Sisterhood can’t have just everyone knowing our business!”
Lacey wasn’t about to break the Sisterhood of the Code, not even for Vic. And she certainly wasn’t about to hand over Brooke’s top-secret document, the one she and Stella never quite got around to reading. Vic would find it all way too hilarious. Something he and the guys would chortle about at the next meeting of the No-Girls-Allowed Boys’ Club. He and Nigel Griffin even tried to puzzle it out together from Stella’s cryptic message to Lacey. They didn’t get very far. They got about as far as “curly pink hair.”
Nigel seemed different now, after that day at Great Falls. He suffered a wealth of scrapes and lacerations himself, but no broken bones. He and Vic were not quite as antagonistic. Not exactly old friends either, no matter how much Nigel tried to play on their prep school ties, but not quite enemies anymore.
“Come on.” Vic was at his seductive best in a tux. “You can trust me. Besides, I’ll bribe you. I’ll buy you dinner after this thing is over. I’ll even go dancing with you. That’s a serious bribe, darling.”
Laughing, Lacey broke from his embrace to admire another display in the Cecily Ashton exhibit at the Fashion Museum. It was the opening night reception and there were champagne and music and beautiful things, and she wanted to see everything.
She ran into Mac and Kim, resplendent in their evening attire, though Mac kept tugging at the collar of his starched tuxedo shirt. Mac had astonished Lacey at the newsroom the day before with the announcement that he wouldn’t dream of missing the exhibit. “After all the trouble that woman caused,” he grumbled. “Almost lost me a reporter. I’m not about to miss seeing that stuff!”
Mac and Kim took her aside at the reception. Mac had a gleam in his eye. “Kelly Kavanaugh’s been sniffing around your beat, you know,” he said.
“Kavanaugh of the cops beat? Khakis and sneakers, more freckles than sense?” Lacey was taken aback. “She’s interested in the fashion beat? What for?”
“She says she thinks it might be interesting, all those weird crime stories you work. Says maybe she could bring something new to the fashion beat.”
Lacey knew Mac was baiting her, but she bit anyway. “Well, what she brought wouldn’t be any fashion sense! Kelly Kavanaugh wouldn’t know extra-fashionary perception if it bit her in the—” She caught Kim’s amused expression. “Kavanaugh couldn’t write her way out of a Wal-Mart shopping bag.”
Mac lifted one woolly eyebrow. “She gives me column inches on deadline, what more could an editor ask for? And if you took her on as a junior, it would take some of the load off you. I’d still need a fashion column from you, say half the time. The other half, you could tackle some other kind of stories, whatever you want to tackle. Write your own beat. After this story? You get a free pass. Within reason, of course.”
Is this really Mac? Are we really having this conversation? “Give me a break, Mac. Trying to run half a brand-new beat while I train a junior fashion reporter, one without a stylish bone in her body? In what universe? Ask me again Monday morning. I’ll have a list of demands. We’ll talk.” Mac just laughed.
She found
Vic again and led him to the one thing she most wanted to see. It was Cecily’s Rita Hayworth makeup case by Louis Vuitton, safe within its Plexiglas enclosure, illuminated like the rare treasure it was. The fine tooled red leather and brass fittings gleamed beneath the spotlights. The case was propped open and tilted forward, so the mirrored panels could reveal all of its many velvet-lined drawers and hidden compartments. Rita Hayworth’s priceless pearls spilled out from their red velvet-lined secret drawer and hung free in the light like a frozen waterfall. Beside the case lay its small jeweled skeleton key on its own pool of red velvet, reunited at last.
Lacey turned at the sound of crutches tapping on the polished wooden floor.
“Stella, look at you! You’re mobile! And indomitable!” Stella wore a very sleek little black dress, cut just a little too low and a little too tight to be perfectly classic. Thinking herself, no doubt, Audrey Hepburn, but with boobs. On crutches, with a cast.
“Damn straight I’m indomitable, whatever that is.” Stella’s cast was hot pink and covered with rhinestones. “Mobile? Not so much.”
“The rhinestones are a nice touch. Very sparkly.”
“Totally! I did it myself. I’ve spent so much time on my ass with this cast, I had to do something. And you don’t think I’m gonna miss my chance to see this fancy-schmancy Louis Vuitton makeup case, do you? I overpaid my dues for this thing.”
Stella swung herself right up to the Plexiglas enclosure on her crutches. She stared quizzically at the case and shook her head, which was now a mass of tousled cupid curls in a lovely mahogany brown. The blond “Gidget Gone Wild” look was long gone.
“I like your hair.” Lacey gave her a quick hug and ruffled her curls.
“Yeah, well, the blond thing wasn’t working for me, you know what I mean? You’re born to be a blonde or you’re not, Lacey, and I am so not a blonde.” Stella’s smile was almost impish. She tilted her head at the Rita Hayworth case. “I don’t know, Lace, I thought this thing would be lots bigger somehow. Like a whole freakin’ steamer trunk or something, you know? We nearly died over that thing.”
“Sorry you couldn’t keep the key.”
Stella had been happy in the end to part with the key, much to Lacey’s surprise. “Are you kidding me? That key is totally cursed, like the Hope freakin’ Diamond.” The beautiful golden key had caused her and Nigel quite enough trouble, and she wasn’t about to wear it ever again.
“Totally okay. I got something lots better in trade.” She lifted her left hand off her crutch and wiggled her fingers.
“Oh, my God, Stel, a diamond? A big diamond!”
“And you know, he picked it out himself.” Stella started laughing. “Can you believe it? It’s humongous! One point seven-five carats. I counted ’em personally.”
Lacey heard the sound of laughter behind them. More of their party had arrived. Marie Largesse and Gregor Kepelov, hand in improbable hand, and Nigel Griffin, in a tux and hobbling along on crutches with considerably less grace than Stella. He had twisted an ankle and torn a knee tumbling down the rocks at Great Falls.
It was still a minor mystery to Lacey just who had managed to retrieve the case for the Ashton estate before the police got around to searching Willow’s apartment. It might easily have ended up in a police evidence locker, never to be seen again. Lacey thought it was much more beautiful right where it was, where people could marvel at this relic of legendary Hollywood glamour. Perhaps Griffin was a better stolen jewel retriever than Lacey had given him credit for. He, unlike Stella, wasn’t talking. And Lacey suspected Kepelov, Griffin’s now-and-again partner, was a key player in the retrieval of the lost goods.
Brooke and Damon hadn’t arrived yet, but they were on their way. The plan was to see Cecily’s memorial exhibit and be seen at the reception and then go to dinner. It had been Stella’s idea originally, but everyone wanted to go. “It’s a celebration, get it? We’re celebrating being alive,” Stella had said. “And it’s an order!”
They could always leave early, Vic promised Lacey, if she really couldn’t stand this motley company. But she knew she would tough it out, for the sake of her last guest, Cecily’s friend Simon Edison, who finally appeared in the exhibit hall, a little dazed by the glittering crowd. His rented tuxedo looked like it was trying to climb right off his back. He spied Lacey and marched straight up to her at the display case as if they were the only ones in the room.
“I want you to see something,” he said. He grinned and led her to an exhibit in a far corner, one of the mannequins wearing Cecily’s beautiful face. She was gowned in a simple vintage halter top dress in ivory. Over her outstretched hands was draped a length of shimmering gold material, a metallic mesh shawl. “What do you think?”
Lacey looked at Simon and then back at the shawl. “They recovered the fabric? The Celestine fabric?”
“Yes, it’s the Celestine. It’s for our girl.”
Lacey kissed him on the cheek. He blushed. “Let me introduce you to the others.” She handed him off to Stella, who happily latched on to him and chattered away like a magpie. Simon wouldn’t have to say another word all night.
“Alone at last.” Vic swept her away to a dimly lit corner with a glass of champagne.
“I can’t believe Nigel gave her the ring,” Lacey told him, thunderstruck. “He must really love her. Is that even possible? I mean Stella’s pretty lovable, but Nigel?”
“Danger makes the heart grow fonder, darling. Haven’t you learned that yet?” He leaned toward her, his green eyes alight with amusement. And something else. “Reminds you of what’s really precious to you. Shows you what it would feel like to lose it. Makes you willing to make a commitment to keep it.”
“Like hurling yourself over a cliff?”
“Like that. And that’s what I’m talking about. Hurling myself over a cliff.”
Lacey’s breath caught in her throat. “Is that what it feels like?” Are we really talking about what I think we’re talking about?
“Sometimes. A little. Sometimes it’s like climbing a mountain. Or flying high above the clouds. But it’s quite a ride, either way.”
“Don’t worry, cowboy, I’ll catch you if you fall.” She held his tuxedo lapels and pulled him closer.
“You promise? I’m already falling.”
“Promise.” Lacey felt her eyes filling up. “Whether we’re falling or flying.”
“I’ll never let you fall. I promise. You’re dangerous, Smithsonian, and danger makes the heart—”
“Love longer.” She sealed the deal with a kiss.
By the time they finally left the reception, the champagne was all gone and the crowd had thinned out. The party was winding down. As Lacey took Vic’s arm to leave, she looked back into the hall, nearly empty now but for the beautiful things Cecily had loved, floating in their pools of light.
Lacey hadn’t seen Philip Clark Ashton there that evening. She had never expected to see him again. But there he was. An elderly man sitting alone on a bench, staring at the lovely mannequins that still wore his wife’s face.
Armed and Glamorous Page 33