Truthseeker

by C. E. Murphy

  Kelly dug her heels in and pitched her voice low. “He’s into you, Lara! What the hell are you doing? He’s rich, he’s handsome, he’s famous, he’s got a well-made trench coat, what’s the problem? Let’s get coffee! You could get a date! I mean, sure, dating with you is a little weird, but you could give the guy a chance.”

  “His name’s not David Kirwen.” Lara’s answer cut across Kelly’s good-natured spiel so sharply they both flinched. Kelly came to a full stop, and Lara puffed her cheeks. “Sorry. That came out nastier than I meant it to.”

  Kelly flicked a glance toward the weatherman. “S’arright. Look, Lara, of course his name’s David Kirwen. He’s famous. He’s a TV personality. Everybody knows who he is.”

  “Everybody is wrong.” Cold water slid down Lara’s spine, highlighting the discomfort that slithered there as well. “It felt wrong. Can we just get in the car, please? I’m soaked.”

  Kelly scowled, first at Kirwen, then at Lara. “But everybody knows who he is. I mean, if you say so, but …”

  “I know. But have you ever known me to be wrong?”

  Kelly’s shoulders drooped and she slogged toward the Nissan. “Only when somebody was making a joke that you didn’t get. Lar, how can he not be David Kirwen? Who is he, if he’s not? What happened to Kirwen, if he’s not?”

  Lara shot her a look of horror. “You make it sound like he killed somebody or something.”

  “Well!”

  Lara slumped, blouse sticking to her skin. “I’m sure it’s not like that. His name is David Kirwen. It’s just … also not.”

  “How can his name both be and not be David Kirwen? You only get one name. It’s the rules. One name each. Well, unless you take a stage name. Maybe that’s what he’s done.” Fire sparked in Kelly’s gaze. “I’m going to go ask him. Wait here.”

  “Kelly! Kelly! Wait!” Lara broke into a run after her friend, who splashed through puddles and caught Kirwen’s elbow as he climbed into his news van. He came out of the van to look at her curiously, and Lara slowed to put the heel of her hand against her forehead, then gave in to a low laugh. Kelly was her perfect foil, acting on impulse where Lara overthought things. It seemed to be both a more interesting and more terrifying way to live. She wasn’t sure if she envied it, but their ongoing friendship suggested she at least admired Kelly’s madcap approach.

  David Kirwen lifted a complicated expression to greet Lara as she approached the van. Curiosity and interest enlivened his features, and he spoke diffidently. “You think my name’s not David Kirwen?”

  “Lara has this annoying knack of always knowing if somebody’s telling her the truth,” Kelly said blithely. It sounded almost ordinary the way she said it, so matter-of-fact as to be unquestionable. “So she got the heebie-jeebies when your name sounded wrong to her. I’m sure she’d like to go out for coffee if you’ll just explain.”

  Lara, despairing, said, “Kelly. I’m sorry, Mr. Kirwen.”

  Kirwen shook his head, complex emotions turning more toward hope. “No, it’s all right. In fact, my name isn’t Kirwen. It’s ap Caerwyn, Dafydd ap Caerwyn.” The difference in pronunciation was subtle, yet significant enough to send a rush of relief over Lara’s skin as the name rang true. Kirwen’s attention remained on her, intent, and she steeled herself against stepping back, out of his range of interest. “How did you know?”

  “Dafydd ap Caerwyn,” Kelly repeated. “It doesn’t sound that different. Why don’t you use it?”

  “The spelling.” Dafydd turned his TV-star smile on Kelly. A spark of envy startled Lara and she put her hand over her chest like she could push it down. “Americans usually pronounce it correctly if they hear it first, but if they see it written down they tend to call me Daffy-Did. It’s Welsh, by most accounts.”

  Kelly spun around in triumph, fists against her rain-soaked hips. “There! See? Nothing mysterious at all! I told you!”

  Astonishment dropped Lara’s jaw and she gaped at her friend, who had the grace to look mildly ashamed. “Well, all right, I didn’t tell you. But there was a simple answer! Now we can go out for coffee!”

  “Kelly! No! We can’t! For one thing, I’m soaking wet, and for another, I have to go back to work! And for a third I don’t need you to—”

  “Matchmake?” Kelly asked archly. “You need somebody to. Can you come out for coffee, Mr. Kirwen? You and maybe your …” She leaned past Kirwen to peer into the van. “Your cameraman?”

  The van’s door slid open to reveal a broad-shouldered man whose short hair was so wet and plastered to his head its color was indistinguishable. “If you don’t say yes, David, I’m going to drown you in one of these puddles. I was gonna have a barbecue tonight, man, and look what the weather’s doing.”

  “You should know better than to trust a weatherman, Dickon. And I’m afraid we really can’t, Miss Richards. We’re expected back at the studio in less than half an hour. Maybe I could make it up to you by taking you out to dinner tonight? Miss Jansen?”

  Lara jolted, taken aback at being addressed. “What? Oh. No, really, you don’t ha—”

  “We’d love to.” Kelly put her hand on Kirwen’s arm and squeezed, then tilted to smile brilliantly at the cameraman. “You’ll come, too, won’t you? Since it’s not barbecue weather?”

  “Damn straight I will, especially if David’s paying. C’mon, Kirwen, let’s get back to the studio before they send an ark to pick us up.” He slammed the sliding door closed and Kirwen got into the van as Kelly turned back to Lara, triumphant.

  “There, see, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Now we have dates for tonight!”

  “Really?” Lara watched the van drive away. “Because I didn’t notice any exchange of telephone numbers or a decision where we’d be eating.”

  Kelly’s jaw snapped shut. “Well, we know where they work.”

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding.” Lara looked to the heavens, beseeching, then spluttered and wiped rainwater from her eyes. “Seriously. Thank you for trying to salvage my love life, but I’m not quite that desperate. Look, I took a long lunch so I could go car shopping with you, but since we mostly skipped lunch, could you drop me off at St. Anthony’s before I go back to work?”

  Kelly sent another glance, this one defeated, after the van. “Yeah, okay. No dinner date and I pulled you out of the diner before we finished lunch. I’m the worst friend in the univ—” She broke off under the sound of Lara’s laughter. “Okay, fine, maybe not the worst. But I’m up there!”

  “I think you’d have to do considerably more than leave me hungry to qualify as even a moderately bad friend, much less the worst in the universe.” Lara threaded her arm through Kelly’s and tugged her toward the Nissan. “You can buy me lunch on Saturday. We’re helping Rachel move, remember?”

  Kelly kicked spray in the gutter puddles like a gloomy four-year-old. “Rachel’s supposed to buy us pizza.”

  “For dinner! We’re not supposed to be there till one. You can buy me lunch first.” Lara knocked her hip against Kelly’s, sending her around to the driver’s side door. “This, by the way, is how I stay skinny. I never get to eat a whole meal at once.”

  “You’re not skinny.” Kelly unlocked the doors, dismayed as they got in. “My nice new seats, all wet!”

  “It’s your own fault,” Lara said heartlessly. “You’re the one who wanted to go chasing men in the rain.”

  “Just for that, I take it back. You are skinny.” Kelly pulled out of the parking spot, shaking her fist at a pedestrian who walked into the street in front of her without acknowledging the car bearing down on him.

  “As opposed to what?” Lara twisted water from her hair onto the Nissan’s floor, where it puddled on the rough carpet.

  “To slim. There’s a difference. Are you soaking my new car on purpose?”

  Amused guilt surged through Lara and she rubbed at the pool of water. “Not exactly. I was just trying to dry off a little. What’s the difference?”

  Kelly eyed her. “You kno
w I have to believe you when you say that, even though I wouldn’t believe anybody else, right?”

  “It’s one of the perks of being friends with me.”

  Kelly laughed out loud, sound filling the small vehicle. “I guess that’s true. Anyway, skinny doesn’t look good on anybody. Slim looks good on everybody. And you’re slim.” She glanced sideways at Lara and added, “David Kirwen thought slim looked good on you,” in a sly, hopeful tone.

  “We have no dinner date, and even if we did, we wouldn’t.” A mis-tuned chord warbled through her own words. Lara said “Hush,” as much to herself as her friend, and tugged her seat belt on as Kelly plunged them into afternoon traffic.

  The downpour had increased dramatically by the time they got back downtown. Wisdom said she should have Kelly drop her off at work, but she still had time on her extended lunch hour. Lara ducked out of Kelly’s car and ran for Saint Anthony’s Shrine, stopping beneath its arched entryway to wave as Kelly drove off. Then she slipped inside, bobbing toward the altar and crossing herself before scurrying down to a meeting room.

  A dozen or so men and women were already there, gathered in a loose circle of chairs and listening intensely as a woman in her mid-thirties spoke. Lara offered a brief smile and took a seat, trying not to interrupt, but the speaker murmured, “Hi, Lara. Glad you made it,” before continuing. “It’s the credit cards, you know? They make it so easy. I only have one left, I cut the rest of them up—”

  She broke off with a contrite look toward Lara, and one of the men—Matt—chuckled quietly. “Aw, hell, caught you out, huh? You know she don’t mean to.”

  “I didn’t catch anyone out. Go on, Paula.”

  “I’ve got one in the freezer,” Paula muttered. “In a big block of ice. For emergencies, Lara, I swear.”

  “Hey.” Lara shook her head. “I’m not judging you. You should know that by now.”

  “Not judging, just keepin’ us on the straight and narrow. You know, I’ve met a lot of head doctors in my time, but nobody’s as sharp as you, Lara. Donno how you do it.”

  Lara brought a finger to her lips in a shush motion. “The floor is Paula’s right now, Matt. Let’s let her talk.”

  She barely remembered the first time she’d been to a self-help meeting with her mother. It had only been a few months after her father’s death. Her hazy memories of him were of a man outrageously boisterous at times and inexplicably sullen at others. It wasn’t until she was ten or eleven that she’d really begun to understand that his moods had been exacerbated by alcohol, but in the aftermath of his death, her mother had started attending Al-Anon meetings. Lara, joining her, had found a certain relief in people trying so hard to tell the truth. They hadn’t always succeeded, but their presence at the meetings showed a kind of dedication to truth that she found almost nowhere else. Her own life hadn’t been badly set awry by substance abuse issues, but as a survivor, she’d been able to find a place in Alateen groups, and as an adult could hardly imagine her life without at least one weekly meeting.

  “It’s for emergencies,” Paula was saying. “It’s been in there two months and I haven’t taken a hair dryer to it once. The other one has a really low limit.” The woman’s gaze came back to Lara. “I’ve got it all set up with the credit card company; I’m only allowed to make a payment once a month, so I can’t pay things off and pretend I’m not spending, which is what I used to do. And yesterday I saw this pair of earrings …”

  She trailed off into waiting silence, then knotted her fingers together and frowned at them. “I know it doesn’t sound as bad as the alcohol or drug problems some of us have. I mean, it’s just shopping, right? It’s not like gambling. People think gambling is destructive, but shopping, everybody shops. Everybody’s got a credit card. And it’s not even like you can stop shopping if you want to, because you still always need food and sometimes you really do need clothes. Maybe not sixteen pairs of Jimmy Choos, but shoes, anyway,” she said to her lap, then looked up. “The woman behind the counter was really nice, too. She even let me try them on. They were these little moonstones with diamond drips. You would have liked them, Lara. They looked like something you’d wear.

  “But I put them back.” Paula loosened her fingers and sat up straighter, color burnishing her cheeks to a warm dark brown. “I put them back, and I swear to God my hands were shaking and I almost cried when I was leaving the shop, but I put them back, and when I got outside it was like this one little tiny chain had broken and I felt so much better. That was three hundred dollars that was going to go into paying off a debt instead of making a new one. I don’t know, maybe it isn’t a lot, but to me it felt like everything.”

  “Hey, babe, sometimes not a lot is everything.” Matt leaned forward to clap a big hand against Paula’s knee, then sat back again, folding his hands behind his head. “Three years, three months, twenty-six days, and …” He moved one arm to look at his watch, then said, “And seventeen hours drink-free,” before shooting Lara a sly glance.

  She laughed as wrongness jangled over her skin. “I know the years and months are right, Matt. It must be the days or hours you’re fibbing about.”

  “Fourteen hours.” He shook his head, grinning broadly. “Uncanny knack, uncanny knack. We gotta be the straightest, narrowest meeting in the city, with you keeping us on the line.”

  “You keep yourselves on the line,” Lara disagreed. “I just drop by to make sure you’re doing all right. How’s it going?”

  “Not too bad. You ever get a day when it’s not so much the booze you want as it’s boredom driving you to do something?” He raised his eyebrows and received a murmur of recognition from two or three of the others. “Sunday got bad enough I found myself another meeting to drop in to. Funny thing is I met a real nice girl there, and we went out to dinner after. I’m a cynic and I hate to say it, but maybe sometimes the Lord provides.”

  Lara, smiling, listened a while longer, then slipped out again, hurrying through the rain back to work.

  Three

  “And how is the suit for the button man?” Steve Taylor poked his head around Lara’s open office door, startling her and garnering an embarrassed smile.

  “Mr. Mugabwi’s suit is coming along nicely. You’re not supposed to know I call him the button man.” Lara lifted one of the buttons in question, an antique ivory beauty with subtle age striations. “I can’t help it, though. I get a thrill every time I work with these.”

  “Well, it’s not every day we have a client arrive with a jar full of buttons as our starting place.” Steve came in to sit on the edge of her sewing desk—Lara was on the floor like a proper tailor, legs folded as she judged one button’s pattern, then another’s, against the suit fabric—and grin down at her. “You did a good job, you know, convincing him to the browns.”

  Lara shook her head. “You convinced him with this fabric. I didn’t even know we had it in.” The brown wool weave was silken under her fingertips; yellow and red threads gave the fabric incredible rich depth. Mr. Mugabwi, in Lara’s private opinion, should always wear browns; his skin tones were suited for it, and the sepia-tinged buttons he’d brought in would have been jarring against a black or gray suit.

  “It was new,” Steve said deprecatingly. “You would have selected it for him if you’d seen it.”

  “Only if I’d seen his bank book first.” The fabric was a special blend, the makers having produced only enough for perhaps ten suits, and was priced accordingly. Not that anyone came to Lord Matthew’s without deep pockets: bespoke tailoring was unabashedly expensive.

  “Ah, yes.” Steven nodded, expression deadpan. “After all, he came with hundred-year-old buttons. If he’s recycling that much, he must be very cautious with money, indeed.”

  Lara laughed and mimed throwing one of the buttons at him, though she kept it safe in her palm. “The buttons are from his grandfather’s suits, and you know it. It’s not nice to tease me.”

  “I tease all my girls.” Steve shifted off the desk and cr
ouched in front of the suit, flicking away imaginary bits of lint as he examined her handiwork. Lara sat back, smiling. He was a master tailor and had four daughters of his own, ranging from a few years older than Lara to several years younger. That, more than anything, was what he meant by “my girls”—she had worked for him since her second year of college and, having watched her grow up, knew he half-thought of her as one of his own. She loved the sense of belonging, and worked harder than she probably needed to, wanting to make him proud.

  “This is master class work, Lara. I’m sure you know that, but it’s worth mentioning.” Steve stood up again, lips pursed as he studied the suit. “Mugabwi’s ordered three suits. I’ll want you to make them all. But I also want you to discuss linen with him, when he’s in for his final fitting. These will be perfect for corporate meetings, but a lot of his charity work is done in Africa. He’ll need cooler material, even just for the high-level glad-handing he does.”

  “Maybe silk dupioni, not linen.” Lara got to her feet, examining first her employer, then the suit before them, dubiously. “Linen’s crisp and cool, but Mr. Mugabwi’s job is asking corporations for huge amounts of money. I think his suits need a visual warmth that I’m not sure I’d get satisfactorily from linen. I mean, this cloth …” She brushed her fingertips over the fine wool and shook her head. “The depth of color and the elegance of the buttons, when combined with the suit’s fit, are going to warm people toward him instinctively. Wool can do that. So can silk. I’m just not convinced linen’s the right fabric.”

  Steve was beaming at her. Lara trailed off, then ducked her head to stare at her feet a moment. “That was a test.”

  “And you passed with flying colors. I’ll leave the design of the summer suits entirely in your hands, Lara. You can consider it your master test.”

  Heat rushed her cheeks and she put her hands over them. “Two years early?” Tradition expected a seven-year apprenticeship, and she’d only worked for Lord Matthew’s for five.