Resurgence: Book 2 of the Second Chances Trilogy

by M. M. Mayle

  She ends the stanza with an exaggerated what-do-you-think-of-that? expression and the younger members of the audience openmouthed and wanting more.

  In similar vein Laurel continues:

  One day old Jeremiah spied,

  A CooterSpoof with a tatter-proof hide.

  He did his best to make it smile,

  Have some tea and sit a while.

  She picks up the pace for the final stanza:

  I don’t fancy Cheshire cheese

  Or scones or tarts or camel’s knees,

  The pretend turtle ran away

  To tease again another day.

  She finishes on a breathless note that gains her extra applause and shouts for more. “Oh well, if I really must.” She lifts a tubesocked arm to her brow in mock weariness and surfaces another he hasn’t thought of since he wrote it down for her.

  All’s in a muddle on Goosemud Road

  Since tea was hurried with the stopover toad.

  That sparkly fellow was unable to tarry

  Displaced, as he was, by a cassowary.

  A musical creature, he pretended to be,

  Supposedly set for a jim-jamboree.

  By plucking his fiddle with one big claw,

  He thought he’d become a huge audience draw.

  But the bird never heard of the gutstringer’s code,

  That a fiddle’s usually bowed, and seldom ever toed.

  So he’s doomed to be known as crassly cassowarious

  For strumming with his foot on a prize-ed Stradivarius.

  This one she finishes with a big burst of laughter. The children join in, giggling and squealing without actually knowing what’s funny, only that glee is contagious.

  “Does anyone know what a cassowary is?” Laurel says when the laughter subsides a bit.

  “It’s a bird!” Callie, the oldest Thorne girl, answers, fixing Anthony with a know-it-all look for beating him to the punch.

  “It’s a plane, it’s Superman!” Anthony says with a sneer that gets him the regulation lifted eyebrow from Laurel.

  “Anyone else?” Laurel says. “No? We’ll go with Callie’s answer then, and she’s right.” Laurel detaches a string of beads from her hat and tosses it to the gloating girl. “Now then.” Laurel targets Anthony as though warning him to give the others a chance, “Who knows what a Stradivarius is?”

  “I do! I do!” Colin makes himself heard over the hubbub the question produces and ascends the last few stair steps.

  “No fair!” Anthony shouts.

  “A fiddle! A fiddle! A fiddle!” the others shriek.

  “Author! Author!” Laurel chimes in against a background of much jumping up and down and the upsetting of tea things.

  “Anyone here know how to play a fiddle?” Colin contributes to the chaos. “Can you give me a little air fiddle, then, maybe show me how to play one with my foot?” he says, turning them all into contortionists.

  Whilst they’re tying themselves into knots and Laurel’s pretending dismay at the disruption, he tears up the phony directive he’s been clutching all along, shoves the pieces into the sweated waistband of his bike shorts.

  “What the fuck, fulltime bodyguards it is,” he mumbles, safely unheard in the general uproar.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Morning, May 31, 1987

  On his second Sunday off in a row—reward for working twelve and fourteen-hour days as both janitor and handyman—Hoop sets out on the bike for a much shorter trip than last Sunday’s. He’s only riding to the storage facility a little ways down Route 22, and a good thing because his legs and hindquarters are still sore from the trip to Old Quarry Court a week ago.

  It’s early enough that traffic’s no particular bother, nothing like it was last week when he had to compete for space on the narrow roads of all the hifalutin towns between here and Glen Abbey.

  At the rented garage, as he now thinks of his share of the building, he works the locks, lifts the overhead door, and quick parks the bike in the stingy space alongside the El Camino. Before he does anything else, he drops the overhead and secures it. Then he switches on the caged light bulb you can’t see to read by, opens the custom cover on the load bed of the truck, climbs in and makes himself as comfortable as you can get sitting on bare sheet metal.

  After he’s talked to Audrey for a while, he forgets about the gloomy atmosphere and his aches and pains. She always did have that knack of making piddling complaints fade away, and she’s doing it now by listening to why he couldn’t be here last week.

  “This goes along with making up my mind to cover where I’ve been, so I went back to the lawyerwoman’s house to clean up what was spilt that day when I had to watch the rock star rut with her. At first I wasn’t gonna bother because I got to hoping someone would find it there and think bad of the Chandler woman. But that didn’t work so well when I hid drugs in the rock star’s toilet bag, did it?

  “Anyway, I went in the regular way, through the garage. I didn’t take any tools, only a bottle of cleaner I borrowed from the motel supply room. The plan was to wash the stuff away instead of trying to sweep it up or suck it up, so I poured the cleaner all around this platform thing in the attic and let it go at that.

  “The trouble didn’t kick up till I’d left the house and wouldn’t you know, the crazy neighbor woman I told you about came at me right when I was gonna bring the bike from the bushes where I left it. She came at a run, hoo-hooing all the way. When she caught up with me she yammered on and on about how thrilled she was to see me back on the job, and how glad she was I’d happened along just when she needed some help.

  “I could’ve jumped on the bike right then and gotten away, but how would that’ve looked? It would’ve looked shady and that’s what I’m tryin’ to avoid. I didn’t want any more doubts raised about what I was doing there, so I went along with the old biddy. I went along with her, pretended I was back on the job she made up for me, and went on pretending I was Cuban and didn’t speak much English. That was her idea too—taking me for a Spic. But I’m gettin’ off the subject, aren’t I?

  “What she wanted was for me to help her with a stuck window. She told me this slow-like and real loud the way people talk to foreigners and those they think are dumber than they are. She kept up a steady stream of this kind of talk while she led me through her house and up the stairs to where the stuck window was.

  “I sure didn’t have any trouble understanding when she said the man that had been lookin’ for me must have found me—a man that supposedly stole the invented caretaker job away from me and turned sorrowful about it afterward. And I got the gist plain as day when she took credit for this mystery man being able to track me down because she’d furnished him with my license plate number and a drawing of me I’ll guess was like one of those police sketches they do. She told me this while I was prying at the window that was painted shut, freein’ it up with the paring knife she provided. I was listening close to her every word when it came out that the nice man with my license plate number had been there only the day before, asking all kinds of questions about me and where I came from.

  “When I got the window open, I invited her to have a look out and smell the fresh air. While she was leaned out taking a deep breath, I cut the sash cord with the paring knife. The window, once the extra paint was scraped off, was loose enough in the frame to crash down on her back so hard I knew she wouldn’t feel much when I arranged for the window to fall on her neck the next time. I did think to rough up the ends of the sash cord so it wouldn’t look cut, and I left everything else the way it was even though there was a plate of food in the room that looked like it was on the edge of spoilt.”

  No weight is lifted off him when he finishes. He hasn’t confessed, he’s only explained where he was last week and at the same time confirmed that he’s no jackassed-fool when it come to loose ends.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Late morning, June 23, 1987

  Although Laurel lost her concert cherry—as Susa Thor
ne put it—at the memorial for Rayce Vaughn, she didn’t fully grasp the phenomenon that is live rock ’n’ roll until she experienced a performance from backstage.

  Helsinki, where the European tour kicked off, features a commanding waterfront, dominant white cathedral, and fine examples of Art Nouveau architecture. But Laurel will remember it as the place where she unconditionally surrendered to the raw sensations generated by the testosterone-saturated atmosphere behind the scenes at a rock concert.

  That was not a onetime occurrence; two nights backstage in Stockholm produced the same effect. In Copenhagen, she had scant memory of a whirlwind visit to the Tivoli Gardens and a windshield inspection of Amalienborg Palace once that night’s concert started with her installed in the wings to hear the first chords struck and watch for the first beads of sweat to fly.

  In Hamburg, Anthony’s good behavior earned him a backstage pass, his first ever. He didn’t want to wear gun muffs to protect his hearing—totally uncool, he said—but when it was pointed out that even the roadies wear plugs, he gave in and was no less transfixed than she to see his dad from this new angle.

  After two performances in Amsterdam and a single concert in Brussels, her fascination was still in crescendo and Colin was ribbing her about it—the whole band was ribbing her about it and threatening to leave instructions for venue security to hose her down if she attempted to put a move on any of them.

  Now, on the short flight from Brussels to Paris, Rachel adds a few more details to the narrative begun on one of the longer flights when Laurel didn’t have the heart to tell her the Colin Elliot biography project is on indefinite hold. Nothing Rachel provides is new in the sense of being revelatory, but the loving anecdotes she tells about Colin’s awakening are easy to listen to if only for being positive and uplifting.

  As if she needed more buoyancy. Laurel smiles as the plane approaches Orly; her spirits could not be higher as she recalls Colin’s multiple references to Paris the day of their art-association crawl through New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

  She looks across the aisle, where Colin is coaxing Simon to sip water during descent. He catches her glance and evidently reads her thoughts.

  “That mini-museum at the one end of the Tuileries—the l’Orangerie’s on the list,” he says. “And we’ll be sure not to stand too close to the Nympheas.”

  He refers to Monet’s monumental water lily installations by their given name and causes her heart to swell by remembering her long-ago advice about viewing them from an adequate distance.

  “Time and security issues permitting, I’d like to see what inspired those paintings now that Monet’s gardens have been restored.”

  “Giverny. An hour or so out of Paris,” Laurel says.

  “Yeh, and I’d like to pop round to the new museum, the one across from the Louvre.”

  “The d’Orsay,” Rachel says.

  “Yeh, that’s the one. Converted railway station it is. Fantastic Beaux-Arts architecture and full of the great impressionist stuff salvaged from the Jeu de Paume.”

  “Know-it-all.” Laurel makes a face at him.

  “Know-nothing’s more like it,” Rachel says. “He’s quoting direct from that Michelin guide he doesn’t want us to know he leans on.”

  “Is that the guidebook that says there’s this underground place you can go to that’s got gazillions of bones and skulls stacked up to the ceiling?” Anthony perks up. “Is that true?”

  “Yeh, number one sprog,” Colin answers, “and if that’s not gross enough for you we can tour the sewers.”

  “Tour the sew’r! Tour the sew’r! Tour the sew’r!” Simon delights in the crude rhyme, drops his half-consumed cup of water to spill where it may, and claps along with his antic chanting until wheels are down and they’re taxiing toward a debarkation point.

  Tolerant good spirits prevail on the ride into Paris. With three consecutive down days before the concert schedule resumes, Colin has the most reason to be lighthearted, with Rachel a close second for admitting she could afford to slow down a bit.

  Laurel feels no strain as yet; the rapid pace hasn’t gotten to her, nor has assuming primary responsibility for keeping the two boys occupied—three boys if she counts those times when Colin was at loose ends. The only thing she could remotely complain about is difficulty recalling even the highlights of the six cities visited so far. That’s not just because of her emergence as a rabid fan of Verge; time has gone by faster than she can ever remember—in a proverbial blur. She’ll have a lot of catching up to do when things get back to normal. If they ever do.

  The other occupants of the limousine are rubbernecking while she muses. Exclamations from all are heard when the Eiffel Tower comes into view, and awe is expressed in hushed tones when Sacre Coeur is briefly glimpsed through a heat haze. The Louvre goes on for miles or so it seems before they cross the double spans of the Pont Neuf to the Left Bank.

  According to this morning’s handout, they are headed for the district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and a small boutique hotel chosen for its superb location and low profile.

  Amanda was part of the advance party and is in the lobby to greet them when they file into the exquisite refurbished mansion.

  “Seventeenth Century,” Colin whispers without bothering to conceal his Michelin cheat sheet.

  Room keys are distributed and it’s quickly agreed that Rachel will take the afternoon shift and order up a room service lunch for herself and the little boys. After baggage is accounted for, the concierge herds the group to a miniscule elevator situated in an alcove next to the reception desk. They can’t all get on at once, so Laurel hangs back, giving Amanda the opportunity to draw her aside.

  “Yes?” Laurel says, smiling her receptivity.

  “David asked me to pass this on to you,” Amanda replies in a chill manner. “Although he said it was for your eyes only, he did fill me in on the contents.”

  Amanda hands over an envelope imprinted with the return address of an independent chemical testing laboratory. Unsettled by Amanda’s atypical behavior, Laurel rips it open on the spot. She reads from a one-page report that the area of her attic alleged to contain an unidentified contaminant had been polluted with an industrial-strength cleaner prior to the attempted analysis, so no determination was possible.

  “What?” Laurel says. “I don’t understand. Who would do that?”

  “The same nutcase that spilled the coke in the first place, this Hoople Jakeway guy, who by now has to be considered extremely dangerous even if it’s only Nate and I who think so, because you apparently think this is over, you think just because you tricked Colin into accepting bodyguards twenty-four-seven you can just look the other way because you just don’t want to believe there’s a threat and you even enlisted David to make it go away and make Nate look bad and—”

  “Amanda!” Laurel cuts in. “Take a breath while I find someplace less public to get this straightened out. Can we go to your room? You are staying here aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m staying somewhere else because—”

  “You needn’t spell it out. Nate’s in town, right?”

  Without waiting for affirmation, Laurel steers Amanda toward a pair of doors leading to a courtyard furnished with widely spaced tables and chairs, and plenty of potted greenery to hide behind. Ideal for her purposes, especially now that she notices the bill of fare propped on an easel at the entryway.

  “No.” Amanda resists for no apparent reason. “No, you don’t understand” she continues. “We can’t go in there, they’re not ready yet. They’re late. No, we’re early.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Laurel urges her on. “The placard says they open at eleven-thirty and it’s past noon. They’re already serving lunch and I can’t imagine I won’t be able to order you a drink at this hour. This is France, after all.”

  Amanda hears no humor in the remark. “I don’t need a drink. I don’t want a drink. Please!” she all but pleads.

  “You are making no sense what
soever.”

  “And you’re not making it easy for me to complete the arrangements for . . . dammit.”

  Amanda’s expression is such a contradictory mixture of resignation and alarm Laurel swivels in all directions to see what new menace might be edging over the horizon. In the process she very nearly collides with her brothers, Benjamin and Michael, and her sister, Emily, who appears as overwrought as Amanda.

  But Emily’s only suffering from excitement that now comes out in shrieks and squeals. Which is more than Laurel can produce. Speechless with surprise and delight, impervious to the scene they’re creating, she gives and receives hugs and kisses and wonders how this miracle came about.

  She’s releasing her sister, backing off a little to admire the lovely young woman she is, when Emily’s wide-eyed openmouthed expression indicates someone else is creeping up on her.

  “There you are.” Colin appears at her side, gives her shoulder a squeeze. “I was beginning to think you got lost.” He turns to the others. “And who do we have here?” He feigns utter amazement. “Bloody hell, I do believe it’s Laurel’s family. Imagine that, will you.”

  “You did this.” Laurel finds her voice.

  “Well yeh, I did. Always lookin’ to increase my entourage, aren’t I then? Now, if little sister will pucker up we can get on with where we left off.”

  He kisses Emily the way he did the only other time the two of them met—thoroughly—then confronts her brothers, who are showing none of the immunity to fame they flaunted on that Connecticut Sunday when Colin Elliot was the surprise.

  Colin cuts through their awe with questions about what they’ve been doing since yesterday’s arrival and, more importantly, what they thought of the Concorde.

  Laurel moves to the sidelines to monitor the resulting competition for the zaniest description of supersonic flight and only then realizes that Amanda is still hovering, still agitated.

  “I really have to go,” she says. “I have to follow through on the baggage distribution and double check the room assignments, then I’ll be leaving the hotel. But before I go . . .” Amanda draws closer. “I want to say that I should have realized there wouldn’t be time to discuss what needs to be discussed with all this other stuff going on. I should have waited until later to give you the report. Or maybe not given it to you at all. It’s not like you’ll ever do anything about it and—”