Dream Life

by Lauren Mechling

  • • •

  When Sig called me with her report that night, her words chilled me to the core. It’s not that I was entirely surprised to hear that Sink Landon was the mysterious cigar box collector. Who else stood to benefit from holding up the platinum bridge fortification?

  Still, there was something irreversible about hearing her say his name out loud. This wasn’t just a competition between a couple of girls’ clubs. Sink was a dangerous guy, and not just because of his plan to diminish the prettiest city on earth. I was scared. Andy had hinted that Sink wasn’t above downright thuggery, and I had no reason to believe he had a policy of sparing half-French girl detectives.

  Anxiety coursed through me, but I tried to keep my tone even. “Does it say anything else about him?”

  “Just that his account at the auction house has been frozen,” Sig said. “Looks like somebody had a little case of bouncing checks. But that was after he bought the cigar box.”

  That got a chuckle out of me, though I was too scared to laugh heartily. Plus, there was still a major piece that didn’t compute: why was a member of Helle House talking on the phone to Sink? Unless …

  “Say, Sig.” I was feeling pretty crafty by this point. “Any chance I can convince you to check out one more thing?”

  “You kidding? I live for this stuff.”

  “Well, we still need to figure out—”

  “What a girl at Helle House was doing talking to Sink?”

  “Exactly.” I sat there breathing hotly into the phone while Sig surfed around and accessed a few more protected files. “Got your answer,” she said a few minutes later. “Check your e-mail. It’s all there.”

  I tapped my fingers and smiled into the phone while I waited for my in-box to refresh.

  • • •

  There was only one thing to do: share our findings with the other Moons, who were all at the Wiley Martins record party. Sig and I met up forty-five minutes later outside the Pickle Factory, the latest in a string of struggling old New York concerns to be appropriated by well-meaning hipsters. Like the old piano and hat-blocking stores that had recently been converted into nightclubs trafficking in nostalgia, the Pickle Factory relied on its old-world accoutrements for ambience: the black-and-white photographs of Frank the pickle man hung over the newly painted walls, and the original pickle barrels had been turned upside down and converted into bar stools.

  My Secret Girlfriend, Wiley Martins’s unfortunately named new album, was blasting on the speakers, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it. There was something far more interesting to talk about.

  Sills and Wiley were seated at a roped-off table, ignoring the masses that surrounded them and confirming the Moonwatcher.net rumors. They couldn’t have looked more ill-matched—Wiley was a big scruffy mess, and Sills was the epitome of old Hollywood glamour, with her long dress and her hair set in huge waves. And yet, they were also the picture of young love, stroking hands and nuzzling sweetly.

  “You know what this means, right?” Becca appeared at my side.

  “That the Helle Housers had it right about Sills and Wiley being a couple?” I asked.

  “Of course they did. Rumors are always true—except when they’re about girls and their effeminate opera coaches.” She cleared her throat. “But I’m talking about something different.”

  The answer hit me with a start.

  “Nuh-uh!” I cried, remembering the Moons’ house rule against cavorting with celebrities. “Sills is out of the Moons?”

  Becca nodded crisply. “Handed in her boat today. I guess she didn’t see much point in keeping her affair with Wiley on the D.L. when the Moons are falling apart at the seams.”

  “But I came—” Just then Reagan interrupted us from behind. She was wearing a transparent white button-down shirt over a long black dress. “You guys must be talking about Wiley and Sills. Isn’t it romantic?”

  “Sure,” Becca drawled. “For Sills it is.”

  She sounded uncharacteristically uncharitable.

  “What’s the deal?” Reagan said. “You could have any guy you wanted.”

  “Is that what you think is bothering me?” Becca was losing her patience by the second. “Earth to Reagan: we’ve lost one of our best members, and I just heard Diana’s thinking about dropping out too.”

  Reagan’s eyes widened. “Who’s her mystery celebrity boyfriend? Some horse?”

  “Marc Jacobs,” Becca whispered.

  “Isn’t he gay?” I butted in.

  Becca rolled her eyes at me. “It’s not like that. He wants her to be the poster girl for his new cruelty-free clothing line.”

  “Too bad clothes aren’t her thing,” I muttered.

  “Meanwhile, I know what the, like, two remaining Moons can do,” Becca said. “Write up an obituary for Vertigo Girl. And for New York as we know it.”

  Reagan tried to comfort Becca with a halfhearted back rub. “It’s not the end of the world. We’ll come up with something good.”

  I could barely speak and Sig elbowed me in the side, reminding me of my mission. “Guys,” I said. “We might not have to come up with something else after all. I have some good news about the Al Capone mystery.”

  Reagan looked at me like I was crazy.

  “What is it?” Becca asked.

  “Let’s go somewhere quiet,” I suggested, scanning the room. My eyes stopped at a storage door in the back of the club. “Follow me,” I told them, weaving my way through the crowd.

  “You can’t just barge into restricted areas,” Reagan said from behind. “When I got the publicist to put our names on the list I promised we’d lay low.” Contempt colored her voice, and I knew she hadn’t forgiven me yet.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her as I lifted the velvet divider. “I won’t light anything on fire.”

  We found ourselves in a storage room crammed with boxes of paper napkins and beer. Everything was new, but the smell of dill and brine still lingered.

  “It’s like a sauna in here,” Reagan moaned. She removed her jacket and set it on top of a pile of boxes.

  We heard the creaky sound of a door opening and Reagan put the heels of her hands to her eyes. “What did I tell you?”

  But it was just the other Moons. I was surprised to see them there.

  “Get over here and close the door,” Becca instructed them. “Claire has something to share with us. She knows where the iPod is.”

  “Well, not precisely, but we’re getting warmer.” Careful to keep my voice low, I told them all what Sig and I had discovered. “The only thing left from Christie’s Al Capone auction is his cigar box. And it sold for a hundred grand to Sink Landon.”

  Becca paled. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “That’s only the half of it,” I said. “Ever heard of Violet Gore Landon?” My mouth curled into a smile. “She’s Sink’s fourteen-year-old daughter. Once I realized the box was his, I had to place the girl from Helle House he’d been talking to on the phone. And I figured it was either his daughter or his girlfriend. And since he’s, like, fifty … Sig went through all the private school directories until we found her. She’s a freshman at Regents Academy and her yearbook picture matches the face of the girl I saw that night.”

  “And that’s not all,” Sig added. “She’s also an awesome web designer. Regents Academy’s site was made by VGL Designs.”

  I looked around the circle and waited for it to sink in. “If you add it all up, it looks like we got played. Violet must’ve been talking to her father that night. And she must’ve been the one to post all those taunting clues on the Helle House Web site, like the one about the ‘bridge to paradise’ and making ‘movie night’ vague enough to throw us off. She wanted us to believe it was a Helle House project.”

  “You don’t think she told her fellow club members?” asked Becca.

  “No way,” I said. “Those girls are as unsubtle as bad body spray. She had to be tight-lipped. There’s too much at stake.”


  “Nice work, Voyante!” Reagan clasped my shoulder. “I thought your skill was curtseying and minding your p’s and q’s. I had no idea you were also a little conspiracy theorist.” She let out a weird guffaw and it suddenly dawned on me she wasn’t so nice after all.

  My palms were getting wet. “There’s no conspiracy,” I told her. “It’s just facts. Can’t you see? Sink owns the Al Capone cigar box and he’s been using his daughter to keep us distracted by trying to make it seem like the Helle Housers are the ones out to get us. The only thing we don’t know is how he knew there was an iPod in the first place. The only people who were clued in to any of this were Mayor Irving’s people and the club members, right?”

  I could tell something was clicking inside Becca’s head. “Sink’s the biggest developer since Donald Trump. He probably knows somebody in City Hall. We have to trip him up.”

  “Don’t you think we’re getting ahead of ourselves?” Reagan said. “You have a link between some developer with a lisp and an overpriced piece of gangster memorabilia. But where’s the smoking gun?”

  “What else do you want?” Becca came to my defense. “A videotaped confession? There are too many clues pointing to Sink. It has to be him.”

  “Then tell me this,” Reagan said to me. “Have you actually seen him with the pink iPod?”

  “Not exactly, but—”

  “And you hacked into all these private networks?”

  My head bobbed up and down.

  “You are naive, aren’t you,” Reagan muttered. “Sneaking into some girls’ clubhouse is one thing, but Christie’s is a multinational company. They probably have ways of tracking this stuff down. If there’s one thing my dad has taught me, it’s don’t do anything incriminating on a computer. It’ll come back to bite you in the ass.”

  “All we did was—” Sig started.

  “I don’t want to have to give up my spot at Dartmouth because some new blood got it in her head to do something this stupid.”

  Speaking of blood, mine was boiling. Becca and I exchanged confused glances.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Reagan narrowed her eyes at me. “Hacking is illegal. It’s larceny.”

  “Burglary,” Sig corrected her.

  “Whatever.” She grabbed an industrial-sized jar of maraschino cherries from a shelf and pried off the lid. After downing a dozen or so cherries, Reagan licked her fingers clean. “As much fun as hanging out in this old pickle barrel is, I have a party to return to.”

  I could hardly comprehend what I was seeing. Reagan, who was usually the picture of composure, was going bananas. “I’ll see you back out there,” she said, and stormed off without even remembering to take her jacket.

  “Dude,” Poppy said after Reagan had left the scene. “That was some freaky stuff.”

  Sig said something about filling an IV drip with maple or strawberry syrup—I’m not quite sure. My mind was stuck on something far more disturbing to follow anything else closely. I remembered an image from that dream I’d had about trying to find a bathroom in that long corridor. Not only had the girl been wearing a long black dress, like Reagan, but she’d been washing her hands in a sink.

  And then I replayed Reagan’s words. Some developer with a lisp.

  “Guys, how many of you knew that Sink Landon had a lisp?” My question earned a ring of shell-shocked expressions.

  Becca’s lips were shaking. “Wait—how’d she know?”

  “I’m no expert on speech impediments,” I said after a loaded moment, “but it would follow …”

  “That the two of them have been talking,” Sig completed my thought.

  Hallie was incredulous. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would she do that?”

  “Maybe it’s something to do with her daddy issues?” This was Diana.

  Poppy cast her a dark look. “Maybe we can save the psychoanalyzing for later? We need to stop her.” She started for the door then turned back to make sure we were following her. “Let’s get Reagan. Now!”

  Like I needed any encouragement. I’d only been waiting for this moment since the beginning of time.

  { 23 }

  Hook, Line, and Sink Her

  We ran through the party and burst onto the street. It was empty except for a pack of smokers milling around outside of some bar called the Mermaid’s Foot. My pulse quickening, I looked both ways, then up at the fancy apartment building across the street. Nothing helpful there, just a whole lot of televisions tuned to the same cheesy dance competition. Exhaling in desperation, I looked higher up. The moon seemed to be taunting me from its perch five million miles away. I didn’t know if I’d ever felt smaller or the world had ever felt bigger, but this much was sure: my chances of finding Reagan were shrinking by the second.

  Sig was spinning around in circles. “Now what?”

  “She’s got to be calling him now,” said Diana. “Sink gets the heads-up, he hides the iPod somewhere safe, and just like that, we’re toast.”

  Becca dialed a number on her cell phone and frowned a moment later. “No answer.”

  “She left her jacket at the party,” Sig remembered. “Her phone must be in it.”

  “She must have gone to find him in person,” I reasoned.

  “If you want to call him a person.” Poppy played around on her PDA’s Web browser, and came up with the addresses for Sink’s home and office.

  “And don’t forget about that steakhouse that he was bragging about being his second office in that Post article,” I said.

  “Silty’s,” Becca remembered. “Definitely worth a shot. You and Hallie can go there. I’ll go to his real office. Poppy, you take his apartment. Sig, you can check out Reagan’s place. If all else fails, she’ll go home at some point.”

  Our plan settled, everyone set off. Well, with one exception.

  “You coming or what?” Hallie asked me.

  I hesitated. My throat was burning up. Great. I’d developed a lethal case of tonsillitis at the very moment I was most needed. But then I swallowed and realized I was perfectly fine. It was the gold around my neck that was on fire.

  My necklace was trying to tell me something.

  “Okay, okay,” I said more to myself than Hallie, surveying the scene one last time and looking for a glimmer of hope. All my black-and-white dreams were pinwheeling through my head.

  C’mon, c’mon, will something please fall into place?

  “Dude, she’s not coming back here to find us.” Hallie reached out and started to pull me down the block. I shook free of Hallie and took a step backward. The throat stinging let up—and no prescription painkillers were involved!

  And then it clicked.

  The problem with the plastic mermaid outside the Mermaid’s Foot was that it was so big I’d nearly ignored it. Of course—it was related to my mermaid dream. The connection snapped through me like a rubber band and I bolted across the street.

  I spotted Reagan through the window, leaning over the bar and playing with her hair.

  “What the hell is—” Hallie stopped speaking when she caught up to me. She saw what I was looking at.

  “Take that and stay out here.” I pointed to a cracked hockey stick that somebody had put out with the trash. “If she tries to make a run for it, it’ll come in handy.”

  “Huh?” She stared at me. “Can I fly with it?”

  “No, but if you trip her, she’ll fly.”

  I opened the door and approached the bar just in time to see Reagan and the bartender exchange a one-dollar bill for quarters. “Phone’s in the back.” He pressed the change into the palm of her hand. “It’s a little glitchy!” he added a moment later. “If the service goes out, just knock ‘er around a little.”

  The back corridor smelled like old lettuce and vinegar. I leaned against a dark velvet curtain and watched her punch in a number. Her eyes darted over to the main room, then she turned away.

  Excited beyond belief, I stuffed my fingers in my mouth.

  “Sink?�
�� she said after a tense silence. “It’s me.”

  And even if I’d misheard it, I would’ve known I was nearing my victory lap. My necklace shifted by a millimeter and snuggled perfectly against my collarbone.

  I could take a hint.

  I sprang out of my hiding spot and reached out to press down the phone’s receiver.

  “Hello?” Reagan must not have seen me come up from behind. “You there?” she hissed into the phone.

  “Sink isn’t, but I am,” I rasped.

  She pivoted around to see my stubby little hands cutting off the connection.

  “I hear this phone’s a little glitchy,” I murmured and waited for her to come up with a response.

  “It’s not what you think.” She could hardly get the words out.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think. I heard you say his name.”

  A look of panic crossed her face and she glanced at the door.

  “Don’t even try it.” I grabbed her elbow. “I’m not flying solo here. The outside’s covered.”

  I was feeling surer of myself by the second.

  Her face twitched and she tottered back to lean against the wall. “Fine. I’m the bad guy and you’re the little miss perfect who saves the day. Happy?”

  “I’ve had worse days.” I smirked.

  My euphoric victory was undercut by the tear that came rolling down her cheek. And then she started with the full-fledged crying. I looked away in disappointment. I wanted things to be cut-and-dry

  “If you want to paint me as the villain, go ahead,” she spluttered through a torrent of tears. “But you have no idea what a madman he is. He’s totally sick. He found out all this stuff about me and he threatened to—”

  “Save it, Ray.” I could feel my resolve starting to go soft and I didn’t trust myself. “I wouldn’t waste your breath on just me. Let me see the rest of those quarters you’ve got. There are a few people we need to call.”

  She bit down on her bottom lip and relented.

  After I’d made the necessary phone calls, I brought Reagan out to the front of the bar and we joined Hallie at a table. While we waited for the gang to show up, our silence was palpably uncomfortable.