She took another look at my face and gave up the debate. “Keep telling yourself that.”
“I will.”
Both of us paused at the sound of a key twisting in the lock of the front door. Hans Gruber trotted over to investigate, and I followed. Skye was never up before noon, and besides, she used the back entrance. That left only one keyholder…but wasn’t he supposed to be working in Minneapolis? I gathered my wits for another showdown with the Man Who Didn’t Want To Talk About It.
“Oh,” said Sally Hutchins, yanking the door open just as I reached for the knob. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”
She swept past me with a weighty blue binder in one hand and a knock-off Louis Vuitton bag in the other. Behind her trailed a portly, puffing, middle-aged man. He mopped at his brow with the sort of white linen handkerchief you read about in Victorian novels.
He surveyed the barroom, taking in the moose head, the solid wooden stools, and the cheap paneled walls. “What’s the square footage?”
I marched over to Sally and cleared my throat. “We’re closed. We open at five P.M. Is there something I can do for you?”
Sally plunked the binder down on the bar and started flipping through it. She didn’t even glance at me. “What’s your name again? Faith?”
Four years of giggling at my thrift store sweaters in home-room and she didn’t even remember my name. I set my jaw. “That’s right.”
“Didn’t you move out to Miami or something?” She raised her head and looked back at the sweaty-handkerchief guy, looked right through me.
“Los Angeles. But I’m a co-owner of this bar, which is why I’m confiscating your key to the front door.” I held out my palm.
“Oh, it’s okay. I work for my dad’s real estate agency. I’m just showing it to Mr. Warton. He wants to buy it.” Her glance flitted past my face and landed on Rachel, who was a vision in soft chestnut curls and a duck-patterned sunsuit. She wrinkled her nose. “Is that a baby?”
“Mr. Warton can’t buy this bar, because it’s not for sale,” I snapped.
She finally deigned to look at me. “Of course it’s for sale. I’ve got the listing right here.”
I peered at the Xeroxed flyer she held out, and sure enough, it detailed a sales listing for the Roof Rat. “No one consulted me about this.”
“Bye! Got to pick up Rex from his play date! I’ll call you later!” Leah headed out the door with Rachel, Hans, and a voluminous diaper bag in tow.
“What’s going on?” demanded Mr. Warton, chugging up behind Sally. His eyes were small and shrewd.
“Nothing.” Sally patted his arm reassuringly. “Why don’t you take a look behind the counter? It’s very sturdy construction.” She turned to me and whispered, “Flynn gave me the go-ahead on this. I told him about this appointment last night, and he said it was fine.”
“He did?”
“Yes. So you better take it up with him.”
“I might just,” I said, stalking into the back room.
It took me two seconds to find Flynn’s cell phone number tacked to the newly de-cluttered bulletin board.
He answered his phone with a brusque “I can’t talk now, Skye.”
“It’s not Skye, and you’re gonna talk now,” I informed him.
There was a long pause. I could hear a phone ringing in the background.
“Would you like to know who is rifling through the bar right now?” I asked politely.
“Oh, God. Don’t tell me the fire inspector is citing us again.”
“Not quite.” I made a mental note to come back to that later. “Sally Hutchins is showing a potential buyer around the bar.”
“Uh-huh.” I could hear the faint taps of keyboard typing.
“She said she ran this by you last night and you said it was fine?”
“Uh-huh.” I recognized this tone of voice.
“Patrick Flynn, stop multi-tasking and tell me what the hell is going on.”
The typing stopped. “How did you know I was multi-tasking?”
“Please. It’s obvious. Now. What gives? You know I don’t want to sell it, but you just went ahead and okayed this appointment with Sally. They’re checking out the plumbing as we speak.”
I waited for him to deny this.
“Geary. Come on. You know the place is going down in flames. I’m just trying to get us all out while we can still escape with our dignity. It won’t be the kind of money you want, but it’ll be something. I already talked this over with Skye and she backs me one hundred percent.”
My jaw dropped. “Skye said you should go ahead and sell?”
“Yep. Yesterday afternoon.”
“She did not.” She had better not.
“She did. And together, she and I are two thirds of the ownership. So calm down. And don’t screw up this deal. I’ve got to go.”
“Flynn, I am not—”
“I mean it. You better not screw this up.” And then he hung up.
I stared at the receiver in my hand for a long moment, then hurried back to the barroom. I had a real estate deal to screw up.
“So that’s the grand tour.” I smiled at Henry Warton and did my best Melanie Wilkes impression. “What do you think?”
“Well…” He frowned and rubbed his chin. “The corporate records are a mess, but I might be able to do something with the building. It’s a good location, and that young fellow I talked to—what was his name?” He turned to Sally.
“Patrick Flynn.” She smoothed her skirt.
“He seemed very knowledgeable. He explained the taxes and the distribution of assets, and it sounds like a good prospect.” He paused to give me a smirk that was part peacock, part jackal. “In the right hands, of course. You and your sister are lucky you have such a smart young man to help you out of all the trouble you’ve got yourselves into. He’s quite a smooth talker, isn’t he?”
“That he is,” I agreed, wondering if we were talking about the same Patrick Flynn. “That he is.”
“You should hold on to a man like that.” Henry fished a cigar out of his suit pocket and lit up. He puffed away in my face and looked over the barroom as if it were his newly conquered kingdom, then turned to Sally and nodded. “Well, I’ll have to talk to your father and make sure everything is inspected, but you can tell Mr. Flynn that I’ll definitely be making an offer.”
I smiled still wider and fell back on the most basic rule of business: when in doubt, bullshit like there’s no tomorrow.
“Great!” I grabbed his hand and shook vigorously. “That’s such a relief to hear. I’m so glad they finally got all of Bob’s lawsuits taken care of.”
Sally Hutchins shot me a look of pure cyanide.
Henry Warton frowned. “Bob?”
“My sister’s husband.” I shook my head sadly. “They’re not divorced yet, but he did some terrible things. He ruined the whole deal with the last person who wanted to buy the bar.”
“What ruined the deal?” Henry harrumphed.
“Oh, you know, just business stuff.” I fluttered my eyelashes innocently, à la Skye. “Like, this one time, Bob claimed that when we borrowed money from him, his collateral was the assets. Does that make any sense to you?”
“Yes.” Henry loosened his tie as his face reddened.
“I’m sure everything’s fine,” soothed Sally.
I went for broke. “This divorce has just gotten so vicious. My poor sister. Her husband just ruins every offer we get. But he won’t scare you off, will he, Mr. Warton?”
“I’m sure they’ve got everything cleared up,” Sally said, hooking her hand through Henry’s elbow and tugging him toward the door.
“They must have,” I agreed. “If they’re showing it to you, it must be all taken care of. I hope.”
His mouth twitched under those beady eyes. “So where’s this Bob character now?”
“We’re not exactly sure. Vegas, maybe? But don’t worry, we definitely know where his lawyers are because we hear from them all
the time.”
He was out the door in seconds, leaving only a cloud of sweat, cigar smoke, and muttered obscenities. Sally flounced after him, stopping to glare at me. “My father’s going to kill me for this.”
I watched the back of her green skirt and crimson ponytail swish out the door. Then I headed upstairs to find the girl who had dragged me all the way back from Europe, only to back Flynn up “one hundred percent” in his decision to sell me—and the Roof Rat—up the river.
As usual, confronting Skye was easier said than done.
She’d left a note on her apartment door saying she’d gone to get a manicure, and I finally tracked her down at the Upsy-Daisy Beauty Salon, curled up in a battered wicker chair in the salon’s waiting area. She barely glanced up from the latest issue of Us when I arrived.
“If it isn’t the elusive Skye Geary. At last we meet.” I had fallen asleep last night on the couch at four A.M., waiting in vain for any signs of Skye, Lars, or karmic reversal. “Did you ever come home last night?”
She fluffed her hair. “Of course I did.”
“Well, did you go to the doctor yet?”
She suddenly became engrossed in an article on celebrity beachwear trends. “Tomorrow.”
“Way to procrastinate.”
“They didn’t have any open appointments.” She couldn’t even look me in the face while telling this blatant lie. “And anyway, where were you all morning?”
“I was working,” I said. “Speaking of which, missy—”
“I know, I know, I’m going to work harder.” She smiled sheepishly. “You’ll see. I’m going to be slaving away at the bar from now on.” She glanced down at the magazine in her lap. “Ooh, is that angora? Anyway, I’m running late today because the answering machine broke and I had to fish it out of the toilet.”
I blinked. “Uh-huh. And how did the answering machine get into the toilet?”
“Well, I threw it in there, obviously. The message light was flashing after I got out of the shower, and I thought Lars might have called. So I hit the ‘play’ button.”
“And?”
She crossed her arms over her miniscule baby-blue T-shirt. “I forgot that the first message on there was from three weeks ago, from…from Bob. It was from right before he left, and you could totally hear Mitzi in the background.” She narrowed her eyes into dark-fringed slits of sparkling contempt. “She was in my bar, prancing around with my husband, and she was laughing.”
“So you threw the machine in the toilet.”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
The receptionist cleared her throat. “We’re ready for you.”
Skye traipsed ahead of me and pushed through some slatted yellow doors. These swung back and hit me in the shoulder as I asked, “So who was the new message from, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I never got that far on the tape. But Lars, probably.” She glanced around the small room filled with aproned beauticians and acrid hair product fumes, then headed for a little table in the corner.
I made a mental note to ask Leah about possible replacements for my sister’s latest suitor, but Skye’s next words chilled me to the bone.
“And by the way, now the toilet’s clogged. I think a wire got stuck in there. I’ll have Flynn take a look at it later.”
I tried to keep my tone even. “You cannot call Flynn to deal with our toilet.”
“Why not? Lars is in St. Paul ’til tomorrow, and Flynn’s really good with mechanical stuff.”
“No.” I pictured Flynn filling up Skye’s tiny purple and white bathroom with those shoulders of his. He’d fish a thin gray phone line out of the toilet bowl—the horror, the horror—dangle it, dripping, over the white wicker trash basket, and give me the same scornful look he’d given me last night.
I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “Speaking of Flynn. Guess what I did this morning.”
She gasped. “You kissed him!”
I frowned at her. “No. Why the hell would I kiss him?”
“I don’t know. You used to kiss him all the time.” She took a look at my expression and briskly moved on. “So what did you do?”
“I fended the Roof Rat off from a potential buyer. And can you guess who arranged for this buyer to come in?”
Her guilty eyes were wide as saucers. “Um…Flynn?”
“That’s right.” I didn’t even have to ask her if she’d known about this. “Skye, why did you agree to let him sell the bar? I thought I came back here to bail you out.”
“Well…” She twisted the thin silver chain around her neck and chewed her bottom lip.
I sighed. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, covering both eyes with her hands. “Flynn was here first, and he’s pretty smart, and he thinks I should do what he says. But then you came out…”
I dug my nails into my palms. “Forget about me and Flynn for a second. What do you want?”
“I don’t know! Maybe I should ask Lars and see what he thinks.”
I managed—barely—not to strangle her on the spot.
“Hi.” The manicurist sat down on the other side of the table. “Choose a color and I’ll be right with you.”
“We’re not done with this discussion,” I hissed.
“No, let’s be done,” Skye pleaded. “I’ll do whatever you think.” But I knew she couldn’t be trusted to stay loyal to a voting bloc. I also knew Skye wasn’t the real problem here. I needed to somehow convince Flynn to do things the right way—a.k.a. my way.
After sitting through thirty minutes of moisturizing, cuticle-trimming, and top-coating, I had devised a brilliant new strategy for dealing with Flynn. Now I just had to work up the nerve to broach the subject with my sister.
The thick, wet summer heat smacked us in the face as we left the salon and headed for Skye’s apartment.
“Oh, the humanity!” I struggled to draw breath in the super-saturated air. “And the humidity!”
She raised her hand to her mouth and blew on her nail polish. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s like living in a big bowl of chowder.”
“Hang on a second.” She frowned, stopped to examine her reflection in a storefront window and gasped, “I’m bleeding!”
“You are?” I scanned her ashen face and her thin trembling limbs for any sign of injury. “What happened?”
“No, I’m bleeding, Faith!” Her eyes were huge and terrified. “Look at the back of my skirt! Oh my God. The baby!”
8
My mother wasn’t answering her cell phone. She was off with the new boyfriend, gallivanting through the wilderness, where they probably didn’t even have cell phone service. And my father was dead, and my sister was in some antiseptic enclave of the Raylor Memorial Clinic, bleeding and sobbing as the doctors tried to calm her. I was out in the waiting room. Waiting. Alone.
The only other member of our family—the unofficial member—was an hour away, in Minneapolis. But I couldn’t call him. The sharpness of his tone and the anger in his face were too fresh in my mind. I’d disappointed him too many times to ask him for anything more than forgiveness.
So I was out of people to call. This was where running away from my problems had gotten me. I had to face this agonizing uncertainty all by myself.
Part of the problem was I’d seen too many episodes of ER. I had no idea what was wrong with Skye, but every time I thought about the blood seeping through her white cotton skirt, my mind flashed to an image of Noah Wyle screaming, “We’re losing her!” She hadn’t gotten any pre-natal treatment that I knew of, and instead of marching her over to the nearest physician the minute I hit town, I’d been whining about money and trying to placate my ex-boyfriend. Bravo.
When at last the attending physician emerged, I was heartened by the fact that her pale blue scrubs weren’t drenched in crimson. I opened my mouth to ask, but I couldn’t force the words out.
The doctor seemed accustomed to this response. She cl
eared her throat. “You’re Skye Geary’s sister?”
I nodded, searching her expression for clues.
“Okay. What I’m going to tell you may come as a bit of a shock.”
The look on my face must have alarmed her, because she hastened to add, “No, no, it’s fine. Skye’s fine.” She tilted her head. “It’s just that she’s not pregnant.”
I felt no shock or relief at this news, just sorrow that my sister had been suddenly wrenched away from yet another person she loved. I studied the anti-smoking poster on the far wall. “So she lost the baby?”
“There never was a baby. She didn’t miscarry; she just started her period. I know she assumed she was pregnant, but…”
“But she got a blood test,” I protested. “At the doctor’s office. I’m sure of it. She missed her period, they did a blood test, and it came back positive.”
The doctor rolled her eyes. “Probably some lab tech screwed up. You’d be amazed at the stories we hear. I have to tell you, the clinics out here aren’t exactly Mount Sinai. Lab guys get the sample labels mixed up, they confuse your first name with someone else’s last name…they should have to pay malpractice insurance.” She gave me a tired smile. “Not, of course, that I’m bitter.”
“But she missed her period,” I croaked again.
The doctor sat down next to me. “It’s my understanding that she’s been under a tremendous amount of stress lately. And she’s lost some weight?”
I nodded.
“Well, those factors can affect your menstrual cycle.”
“But she was never pregnant? At all? Are you sure?” I tried to realign my sense of reality to fit these facts.
“Very sure. Sometimes these things just happen. We tested the betaCG levels in her blood serum—the hormone that the placenta would be making if she had a placenta—and the levels were so low that we know she was never pregnant. It’s unfortunate, but mistakes were made.” The doctor stood up as a nurse entered the waiting room, pushing my sister in a wheelchair. Skye looked drawn and gray, as if the last two hours had sucked out half her soul.
“If nothing’s wrong, why is she in a wheelchair?” I asked.
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