by Victoria Fox
‘That’s it, then—we’re cancelled.’
Barney was fielding a stream of calls. ‘Sorry, babe, it looks that way.’
The withdrawal was gutting but at least it meant she could get to Leon: Robin had planned to make it to the Regency when the night was over, in the hope of catching him there, but going now would be a sure-fire way of seeing him again. She didn’t know how she’d feel about it, and had to separate her emotions from the real purpose of her visit—easy to say and harder to do, especially when she had no clue what she would say to him.
I think Puff City were involved in your brother’s death…
No, that wasn’t right.
I know Puff City were involved in your brother’s death…
But he’d never even told her about his brother and somehow that stung like crazy. Then again, what had she ever told him of herself?
Robin took a car to the venue, where the guy on the door stood back to let her pass.
In the ballroom, guests were mingling. Formalities had finished. She didn’t know if he was still here, and, scouting the room, began to suspect he wasn’t. Then she laid eyes on G-Money, and in a flash remembered Slink and Principal talking about him.
G wants to fess. That means us, too…
What was he doing here? She knew what the gig was in aid of. Did G get some kick out of knowing something his company didn’t? Of pretending he backed their cause when in fact he was more implicated than he’d ever let on?
What did he have to confess to?
G-Money was chatting with a pretty brunette in a strapless dress, whom Robin guessed was his girlfriend. His face broke into a grin and he waved her over.
‘Robin! This is unexpected.’ He was wearing black-rimmed glasses and a geek-chic tartan tie beneath his suit jacket. ‘Did Leon invite you?’
The girl next to him bristled. ‘I’m Lisa,’ she cut in. ‘Did we miss you earlier?’
‘Oh, no,’ Robin replied. ‘I was meant to be doing a show at the Ring.’
‘You’re on tour,’ she stated matter-of-factly, as though Robin hadn’t known.
‘That’s right.’ There was a hiatus.
G-Money broke it. ‘Hey, brother,’ he said to someone at her back, ‘where you been at?’
She could feel his presence: the silent strength that came off him and the power he emitted. When she saw him, her tummy did a full-on somersault. Man, he could wear a suit. It hung off him smart and sharp, the angles of his shoulders and elbows and the clean line of his jaw above the collar. His aroma was deep. For a second she was speechless.
‘Hi,’ he said, coolly.
‘Hi.’
Another pause, before he put an arm round Lisa’s shoulders. The woman’s face tilted a fraction in satisfaction and Robin felt herself burn up. How could she have missed it? Lisa wasn’t with G; she was with Leon.
‘What brings you here?’ Leon asked. She didn’t like how he asked it, as if that night where they had laughed and talked like friends had been a dream. It was her fault. She had pushed him away, possibly the best person in her life, and this was the result.
All the things she had rehearsed escaped her. How could she ask for a private word without it sounding preposterous? But she’d never been a coward and wasn’t about to start.
‘Have you got a second?’
‘Sure.’
His agreement was a revelation—to save Lisa embarrassment, probably. He kissed his girlfriend on the cheek before steering Robin through the crowd and into an adjacent room. His face was stern, unreadable, as if she’d lost the part of him that had put up with her for so many weeks.
‘I can’t be long,’ he said.
‘Of course.’ Why was this so difficult? ‘I know I’ve turned up out of the blue…’
‘You could say that. Look, Robin, if this is about us, don’t waste your breath.’
His candour stalled her.
‘Actually, it isn’t.’ It came out hard, too easy to relapse, and even as she said it she saw the conflict in his eyes. Seeing Leon with another woman had rocked her. She couldn’t bear for him to think she had come to discuss their relationship: it was too humiliating.
‘As a matter of fact this is far more important,’ she retorted.
His face was inscrutable. ‘For a while back there I kinda thought you and me were important.’
‘Were we?’
‘Weren’t we?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’ve tried.’ He folded his arms. The movement prompted a scent of aftershave to wash over her, the same he’d been wearing on the night they’d spent together. ‘So you throw it back in my face and still I’m supposed to try harder?’
‘I never asked you to try.’
‘You never ask anyone. You just keep going on your own because it’s easier not to let people in, and I don’t know if that’s because you’re afraid—you know what, I thought it was, but maybe that was giving you the benefit of the doubt—or maybe it’s because you just don’t need that in your life. Thing is, everyone needs it, Robin, that’s what I’m trying to say. I’ve been there, and it’s not easier—not in the long term. One day you’ll wake up and realise everyone’s stopped caring, because if you don’t care, why should they?’
‘You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know what I’ve been through.’
He pulled back so he could regard her directly. ‘Good excuse.’
‘What?’
‘That’s the one you use, right? Keep peddling out the same line and eventually you might get left alone. That’d be a happier life, wouldn’t it?’
She was shaking. ‘How dare you distil it to something so trivial?’
Leon relaxed the knot on his tie with a quick tug. ‘Wake up, Robin: you’re not the only one who’s had it rough. Look around you. Except instead of accepting it these people use what strength they have left to make something good. I saw that in you, right from when we met, and you chose to ignore it. That’s the difference between us, and I don’t know, perhaps I was kidding myself for thinking it was surmountable and the result would be worth it. Because it takes two people to want that, not just one.’
‘This is exactly the reason I don’t get into shit like this.’
‘Why, because you can’t handle what it brings out in you? If you faced that instead of hanging out with some loser with a jail sentence then you might meet the problem head-on and learn how to solve it for once in your life.’
She was stunned into momentary silence. ‘You’re telling me I’ve got problems?’
‘Go figure.’
Leon shouting at her was worse than anything. She realised in a horrid mix of anger and self-doubt that she wanted his approval, his protection, his shelter; she needed it.
‘So Lisa’s the answer, is she?’
‘Compared with you, yeah, damn right she is. You’re nobody’s answer, Robin, you’re just one big question I’ve given up trying to solve.’
His words hit her with the force of a slap. It was like being punched in the stomach.
You’re nobody’s answer.
Leon swallowed. He looked about to speak but she cut him off.
‘I guess that’s it, then. Good luck.’
He grabbed her wrist. ‘What was it you wanted to say?’
The touch of his skin burned. ‘Forget it.’ She shrugged free. ‘Just forget it.’
42
Ivy Sewell had always been a fast learner. Flipping burgers: how hard could it be?
The challenging part was putting up with the morons at the Palisades Grand’s premier fast-food joint as they sweated over grills and guffawed at each other’s jokes. It was fun to them—extra cash over the coming months and nothing more to it, maybe a few friendships to be nurtured over the years or buddies to join for a beer after hours. Ivy wasn’t interested in any of that. She was here for one reason and one reason alone.
Vengeance.
Working at Burger Delite! was an investment. Over the spring she wou
ld keep her head down, uncomplaining as she went about her tasks salting pretzels and seeding buns and dressing salads, biting her tongue whenever she was asked an inane question about herself and inventing her backstory as easily as she squirted mustard on a hot dog.
‘You wanna be manager of this place or somethin’?’ Her supervisor grinned. He was a fat old guy called Graham who needed to pluck the hairs from his nostrils.
‘Just doing my job,’ she replied.
‘You talk too nice to be doin’ this,’ Graham commented, coming close so that she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. ‘Here’s me thinkin’ you’re gonna wise up one day and not come in and then what am I gonna do?’
Ivy concentrated on not shuddering. His proximity was vile. And yet she had to abide it for the sake of the cause, because if Graham let her go she would lose it all.
She threw another patty on the grill and watched as sparks of hot fat spat and burst.
‘You’d survive,’ she countered, thinking that was the most truthful thing she’d said since arriving. If she decided to leave, if she turned her back on the plan, they’d all survive.
But Ivy had no intention of doing that.
Graham wasn’t the first man to want to get close. Her hair, tucked beneath her cap but escaping at the nape, was bright as a handkerchief in snow. Her eyes were feline and her lips were scarlet red. She knew she looked good, her similarity to Robin playing in her favour.
You know who you remind me of? they’d say, one after the other like clockwork, thinking they had landed the hot ticket needed to get in her knickers—and then when she feigned surprise, C’mon, you must’ve heard it before…
‘Am I gonna get any service round here?’ A guy with his teenage sons was hollering over the counter. They’d be watching the sell-out comedy gig, stopping by to get refreshments because that’s what people did: eat, shit, and get entertained.
Grudgingly Graham sloped off. ‘Yeah? What can I get you?’ His eyes kept sliding back to his employee, scoping Ivy’s figure, her still profile and her private smile.
Ivy pressed the back of her spatula on to a new burger, enjoying how the meat popped and fizzed like flesh under a boot. Pieces of meat, that’s all they were. She thought of her mother, a sack of blood and bones by the end, waiting to die. Everyone was waiting to die. She had the power to bring that reality close, a quickening of the inevitable.
This was the place to do it.
The Palisades Grand was LA’s chief venue. Come July the arena would welcome the biggest event in the music industry calendar: the ETV Platinum Awards. Everybody who was anybody would be there, and that meant Robin Ryder. Robin would be on a high, fresh from her tour, on top of the world. And then she’d be walking straight into the scene of her assassination.
Ivy had been keeping an eye on her sister. Nothing could compare with having come face to face with her in San Francisco, but scoping all she could on the web—every update, every development—was like foreplay. The anticipation was exquisite, the purest agony, knowing as she did that the countdown had begun. Following an aborted bomb scare in New York, Robin’s name was hot on the media’s lips.
Just wait until they saw what was next.
Ivy laughed. She hadn’t meant to do it out loud and it was enough to spark Graham’s renewed attention.
‘Somethin’ funny?’ he leered, coming over to renew the flirtation.
‘Nothing that you’d understand.’
He took her response for playful banter. ‘Why’n’t you explain it to me over a drink?’
Men were such pathetic, predictable creatures. ‘I don’t think so.’
Graham chuckled. ‘Give me time,’ he threatened. ‘I’ll have my wicked way yet.’
Ivy grimaced. If it wasn’t Graham in pursuit of her attentions, it was Connor—except while she could leave her supervisor at the end of the day, Connor was hanging around like a dick in the wind the minute she returned to the apartment. It was a miracle she had managed to secure all she needed amid the incessant knocks on the door. On one occasion she had opened it, the computer tucked just out of sight, its screen boasting rifles and semi-automatics and charges of ammo, an order of arsenal enough to supply an army, so that all Connor would have had to do was to peer over her shoulder…
Connor was blind, as blind as Graham, as blind as them all.
This summer, at last, they would meet the truth.
It was the end of her shift. Ivy pulled off her cap and pushed through the exit.
‘Your time’s up,’ she called, letting the door swing shut behind her.
PART 3
43
It took a long time for Turquoise to surface. She felt herself swimming from a deep-sea bed, up and up through the fathoms towards a distant light that kept moving further and further beyond her reach. Every part of her ached, her limbs heavy and dragging her down, and it was hard to see and harder to breathe. She couldn’t get a lungful; the water was too close, all around, above and below and everywhere, holding her in. On a blink it rushed in, black and cold, stinging her lids and splintering a piercing agony through her skull.
Pain shoved her into consciousness. Her eyes opened to darkness, swollen and sheer, a thick curtain she could reach out and touch. The world was invisible. Nothing could ground or place her, no light, not even a shadow, to guide her vision. Was she dead?
A rising tide that built in her chest till she wanted to scream told her she wasn’t. She was alive. The scream didn’t come, just a muffled cry that hit an impenetrable wall. Her lips were fused, suffocated, zipped together. Gingerly she brought her fingers up, both hands at once because she could not separate them, and missed her face as disorientation played tricks and spots burst behind her eyes. Finally she met her skin, wanting to weep at the company of it, because she was here, she was whole…and the band of tape still soldered to her mouth.
Keep calm.
Breathe.
The words looped in her head, insufficient to betray the isolation and terror of her situation. Hostage. Helpless. Hopeless.
But inhaling through her nose, unable to take in the oxygen her body craved, only exacerbated her fear. Her heart catapulted as she attempted to lift a corner of the tape but couldn’t get the angle, because she had no strength and her wrists were tied so tightly that the cords burned and every twist arrived with a fresh bolt of agony. With a whimper she tried to sit, pushing herself up on her elbows, her stomach muscles cramping as her legs failed to deliver. Reaching her ankles, she found them bound as well. Picking frantically to free them, blind and bewildered and her lungs on fire as she fought the desperation to take a throatful of air, she accepted it was no good. I’m going to die here. I’m going to die.
In tantalising drips, images seeped through, half remembered, half dreamed.
The letters ANGEL RESIDENCE, gleaming in the light…
A glittering glass of water, freezing cold, and the crack of thawing ice…
Ava’s smile…
The word, one word…‘Surprise’—
Her vision was assaulted by light. A shaft came pouring in, brighter than the sun, pursued by footsteps. Turquoise squinted through the haze, willing herself to focus: the throb at the back of her head was disabling. The door closed and a softer glow was switched on.
‘Hello, again,’ said Ava. She was sitting primly against the wall of what Turquoise saw was a small, cell-like room. It was about twelve feet by ten, white-polished marble, bright and clinical as a hospital waiting room. Ava’s legs were crossed and her hands were linked primly at the knees. Through a vapour of confusion Turquoise went to speak, before remembering she was gagged. Her tongue was woollen and stuck to the roof of her mouth.
‘You’ve been asleep for a while. I tried to rouse you but you must have been very tired. Do you think we can talk now? Are you up to it?’
Turquoise trembled. What are you doing? Why aren’t you setting me free?
‘I know this is a shock.’ Ava’s voice was as
calm and cool as her surroundings, and as unruffled as if the women had been catching up over lunch. Nothing about her demeanour betrayed anything out of the ordinary—just the eyes, which had lost the Ava sparkle and were now as flat and unfeeling as a reptile’s. Which was the real Ava, that one or this?
‘You’re going to live,’ she said. ‘Do you hear me? Do you understand?’
From the mattress she was confined to, a single cream pad that smelled of plasticky, floral antiseptic, Turquoise nodded. She stared up, wild-eyed, at a woman she did not know.
‘But first we need to teach you a lesson. You’ve been a bad girl. Do you know why?’
Dumbly she shook her head.
‘Have a think,’ Ava encouraged, leaning forwards, her almond eyes glittering with false reassurance. A plait of white-blonde hair was draped over one shoulder and she wore a familiar pantsuit—the last one Turquoise had seen her in. In pieces she recalled the journey to Cosmo’s house and the alarm she had felt when her friend had opened the door.
Her friend…
‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ Ava pressed, with the soft insistence of a parent wheedling confession from her child. ‘When you’re ready I’ll let you speak, but I want you to be ready, Turquoise, because if you start screaming I’m going to have to punish you and you won’t like that.’ A beat. ‘Even if you do, your cries for help will be a waste of energy. No one will hear you because we’re soundproofed. You could cry until your throat burst and still they wouldn’t come.’ She smiled kindly. ‘All right?’
Turquoise closed her eyes, tentatively stepping through the twisting corridors of memory until she landed on it. Her only defence: the tape. Awkwardly she lowered her bound wrists, fumbling towards her jeans pocket and diving into it. She found it empty.
‘Looking for something?’ Ava held up her own hand, between the fingers of which the evidence shone blackly as a jewel.
Injustice hit Turquoise in a red cloud, dazzling her vision so that when she rose and stumbled towards the other woman it was useless: she went crashing down, unable to break her fall, her knotted fists slamming against the waxy floor.