A Dress to Die For (27 page)

“I’m sure it’s safe.” She tried to sound like her most reassuring self. “He’s a prince. And Ruby has something to do right after, so I won’t be long.”

“That’s fine,” he said.

But it wasn’t. Not at all.

**

Ruby knew the Iroquois quite well, having traveled in its circles for so many years.

“And so,” Laura babbled, “I’m figuring Jobeth knew from her brother that Brunico owned the apartment. So she kinda crashed it with the whole ‘cute old lady’ thing. She must have had enough information to get in, and possibly her brother had told her where he had the keys. I don’t know. And then she must have gotten wind that the high prince was coming, so she bailed. Now the question is, did she find the dress here and then decide to donate it when she heard there was a show curated at the Met? Or did she bring it from somewhere else?”

“I thought it was in the storage room,” Ruby said as they opened the bronze and glass doors to the lobby.

“I know. I can’t figure it out. How she would have gotten access to the storage space?”

“Maybe she had a set of keys, too.”

“You think they know each other? Jobeth and Dad?”

“Why not? Dad had the dress in storage, and she donated it. I mean, Dad knew Barnabas, right? So why not his sister?”

The doorman sat behind a desk with a book so fat it might have served as a doorstopper. She peeked at the cover.
The Sable City
. She hadn’t read it, so no point of connection there. Ruby, who had that
thing
that let her see everyone as an equal, even people with royal-sounding names, approached the desk as though flirting with it. She motioned to Laura, who handed over her wax-sealed letter. “Can you announce us to 7Da and b please?”

The doorman put down his book and picked up the phone. “Can you stand so the camera can see you?” He pointed at the orb on the ceiling. Ruby and Laura stood in front of it while the doorman spoke softly into the phone. He hung up and pointed at Laura. “You only.”

“No,” Laura said. “She needs to come. It’s important.”

“Why?”

She glanced at Ruby, then at the doorman. It was important because she’d promised Jeremy that Ruby would be there, which wasn’t going to wash with security. “We’re sisters,” Laura said. “What could happen?”

“I could send you both up there and they send you both back down because there’s an extra one. Personally, I don’t care, but whenever we get politicos or his royal this or that in here, it turns into a real nightmare. Trust me. You’re safe.”

Ruby put her hand on Laura’s forearm. “It’s fine. Whatever. I think you’ll be okay.”

The doorman pointed down the hall. “Elevator’s that way.”

Laura held her tongue the whole way up, eyes flicking to the camera in the elevator. There she was, in the elevator alone, pretending she hadn’t broken a promise. She’d sent Jeremy home sick when he was trying to do his job. They needed rules, the two of them. Boundaries. That was what the time between the first kiss and the exchange of house keys had been for, and they’d bypassed it.

A man in a blue uniform waited outside the apartment. He checked her bag and opened the door to 7Da.

The smell of incense was thick—not just sandalwood or potpourri but the acrid stuff they burned at church. Curtains had been added, and they were drawn across the windows, cutting out the streetlights and the glare on the polyurethaned wood floor, which was bare, corner to corner, without a stitch of furniture. With the darkness, it felt a little like stepping into a void.

“Hello?” she called.

It was too dark. It was too quiet. It smelled like a cathedral. She felt a creeping sense of impending doom. From the hall, she saw a flickering blue light. It took her a second to identify it as the fluorescent in the closet.

“There’s nowhere to sit on this side, I’m afraid. And the other side is off limits.” The prince stopped on the threshold. His black suit fit well enough, but Laura could tell it was made with five-thread overlock and home-drawn patterns. Brunican workmanship again. The toes of his shiny shoes were at the very boundary between the room and the hall.

“That’s okay,” Laura said.

“You’re his daughter?”

His?
“Yes. Joseph Carnegie is my father. I... um. I didn’t really know him.”

“You’re the younger?”

“Not by much.” The conversation had nowhere to go but down, so she might as well get on the spiral. “Can I ask what this is about? I mean, I do have things I’m doing, and you know, it’s America, so we don’t actually
have
to trot all the way uptown just because a prince leaves a fancy envelope at the door.”

He turned slightly to the left, and Laura saw both sides of his face for the first time. He was in his mid-sixties, handsome, and well-kept, with a flaw that clarified why he’d been in profile on the TV. The left side of his face was deeply scarred from the half-closed eye to the corner of his mouth in a long line, as if from one stroke of a sharp blade.

“Then why did you come?” he asked.

“I’m a curious idiot.”

“Indeed. What are you curious about?” He smiled, but only one side of his face made the change completely.

She cleared her throat. Had he dragged her all the way uptown to torment her? “Why you’re dropping envelopes at my door and if you’ve ever done that before. Like this past Monday maybe? Did you have my father write some stupid notes and leave them?”

“I did not. However, we followed him to your house, and we made note of where you lived. Then we lost him.” He looked away as if thinking of something for the first time. “Do you like it here? In New York?”

“I love it here.”

“It’s very difficult to find someone. Very crowded. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. How do you think?”

“Quite clearly, thank you.” She started for the door. The guy was creeping her out, and she started to feel a tingle of uneasiness.

“You’re wearing her shoes,” Salvadore said.

Laura tilted her heel. Was it a bad idea to wear Philomena’s shoes? Had she just added insult to injury? “I don’t think Philomena wore them more than once. They’re brand new.” Her vision had adjusted to the light, and she could see pretty clearly that his eyes narrowed.

“That’s Princess Philomena to you.”

“She was beautiful.”

“I have her dress,” he said. “I understand you’re looking for it.”

He’d waited for her to be halfway out the door before showing his hand. He must have known she’d do just about anything to get the dress back. “What do you want?”

The high prince stepped into the room. Laura took half a step back. His move wasn’t threatening, but she wasn’t ready to have him so close. Not when his relationship with her father had likely been fraught with betrayal. Not when that scar remained unexplained.

“The dress,” she said. “I know what the interior should look like now. So I’ll know if you’re passing me another fake.”

“We destroyed the form you saw. If you told anyone, they wouldn’t believe you.”

“I’m not telling anyone. At least not anyone who would care to tell
everyone
.” She paused and said, “Philomena was more woman than I am if you want to know the truth.”

The prince seemed pleased with her comment. “I never saw anything like her in my life. I knew exactly what she was, but right down to the size of her shoes, she was perfect.”

He looked at her with meaning, as if she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know, which she guessed she did. He didn’t want to say it out loud. He didn’t want to speak the loaded, multisyllabic words: transvestite or transsexual or whatever it was that went on under her dress.

“I understand,” she said, trying to put the same set of unsaid things in her voice as he had in his face.

“I had never seen a more perfect thing than she was. Did you know how we met?”

“I heard she was Argentinian.”

“She was a tour guide at the
Museo Nacional
in Buenos Aires. My father took us on a trip. I was a boy in my twenties. She was, well, you’ve seen her. But to know that I could be what I was, and she could be what she was. Together. I never had to tell my father.”

He seemed shorter to her then, and pear-shaped. She knew nothing about the man’s father, but apparently he would have been difficult to come out to, difficult enough to stay in a glass closet.

“Even years later,” Laura said, “it was too late to come out. You’d already done so much lying.”

He took another step into the room, out of range of the fluorescents, letting the darkness take over. “She was fed up by the time she went to New York. And she brought your father back. Joseph. She was whispering his name when I found them in the staff kitchen on my inauguration night. I almost killed him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Then she did something as if she were someone else, someone taller maybe, and more confident, someone who wasn’t terrified of monarchs and rich people. She reached out and touched his face. “My dad did this?”

“That night.”

“Why didn’t you kill him?”

“My wife agreed to stay with me if I didn’t. But she’s dead now.”

She’d known from Soso’s conversation that the high prince was looking for Dad, but she hadn’t known why. Until she looked at the high prince’s blue-cast eyes, she hadn’t understood the lengths he’d go to find her father. “It happened twenty years ago,” Laura said.

“No. It’s been happening since. And right under my nose.” Salvadore leaned on one leg and tilted his head. “I don’t want to hurt him. When she died, I just… I stopped caring so much about the past. I remarried. Your father acquired more than a few of my wife’s things over the years, not just the dress, and I want them back.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

“But he knows where you are. And if he sees me with you, he’ll come out.”

CHAPTER 19

Laura didn’t believe in God. She didn’t even believe that people had a tiny spark of the divine in them. She never described herself as “spiritual, not religious,” and she wasn’t a seeker of meaning. She believed she was meat, and her personality, skills, and everything that made her Laura was the product of complex neurotransmitter and myelin patterns in her brain; patterns that could not be replicated from person to person, that were determined by a combination of her genetics and the very specific things that happened to her in her life. She respected the beauty of that. She respected life. She didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

But when the high prince of Brunico revealed that he was going to use her to bait Dad, she considered prayer. She even tried it but found it difficult to manage without a God to pray to. She did imagine herself talking to Mom, but Mom just gave her a hug, which was not what she needed.

“We discovered your father escaped by boat,” the high prince said. “My wife’s boat. He stole it. He has no passport to travel. We’ve alerted the authorities that he’s here, and he’s a murderer.”

“He’s a what?”

“Who do you think killed Princess Philomena?”

Laura felt her jaw drop, and she snapped her mouth shut.

The prince just smiled. “You thought I did it? You thought I killed the love of my life and left
him
whole?”

“You did. You needed to marry a woman… with female parts, so you could make an heir.”

“I didn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He put his hand on her arm and leaned down as if he wanted to express his complete sincerity and openness. “We’re not going to hurt you or your father. I wouldn’t want to run afoul of the law here. It would be inconvenient. You need to be seen with my entourage. We need to announce a plan to go to Brunico. Maybe you’ll make another gown there.”

“Fat chance.”

“He’ll find you before you get on a boat.”

“Your plan stinks. He ditched me twenty years ago. Why would he come and find me now?” She figured a quick call to Cangemi from the bathroom and it would all be over. She’d be at Jeremy’s side, wondering how to tell him Sheldon Pomerantz was in the process of drawing up a contract.

“He’ll find you because you’ll be with me.”

“You’re not high prince here. You’re nobody. You can’t tell me to do anything I don’t want to do.”

“I believe your boyfriend put up some sort of bond for the dress? Maybe you want it back undamaged? We’ve replaced the interior, and the shell is stunning. So it can be returned to its owner any time.”

The choice was between Dad and Jeremy. Between the man who left her twenty years ago and the man who could tomorrow. She wanted to tell them both to go to hell. Men were trouble, and she didn’t need it. She should just go back to Mom, say goodnight, and take the train home to Brooklyn. But then, if the high prince’s plan worked, she’d get to meet Dad, and though she didn’t know what she wanted out of such a meeting, she still wanted it. And she might get the dress back for Jeremy, who might rise above her expectations and stay with her even if she resigned. The odds of things going that well were slim, but she couldn’t resist taking the chance that they might.

“I drink gin,” she said. “Good gin. Don’t try and slip me anything from the well.”

The high prince held out his hand. “Your phone. You can give it to me, or we can take it away.”