False Impressions (15 page)

“Or this woman,” I said.

“Right.”

We were at Lucy’s house, a mansion in Lincoln Park that took up three lots on Bissell Street. The house was L-shaped, with everything facing a large courtyard. That courtyard was mostly bare of bushes and grass now, but a number of pine trees held white lights, making the courtyard a glittering yet relaxing site.

We sat together in Lucy’s living room. Mayburn was waiting for Lucy to get home so he could watch the kids while she went to an evening yoga class. I’d insisted we meet asap so I could explain the latest.

“So, how do we smoke someone out?” I asked Mayburn. “Like a sting operation?”

“Yeah.”

“Ooh, exciting.” I held myself back from clapping. Not only was I excited to take part in such a thing, but I really wanted to figure out this situation for Madeline, sooner rather than later. It was taking too much from her, adding too much stress. And the whole thing was getting freaking scary.

Mayburn leaned back in the armchair where he sat and looked out the windows at the courtyard. “Clearly she has someone following her, and now threatening her. But before we can stop that, we need to know
who’s
doing this.”

“And why,” I added.

“Right,” Mayburn said. “So, Madeline is still into the clubs and parties and the art openings, I assume?”

“Yeah.”

“Any events coming up this week that you know about?”

“There’s an opening at some gallery and a party after at a club.”

“What club?”

I thought about it. “It’s on Hubbard. That place with the two floors at the top.”

“Near Dearborn?” Mayburn asked. I nodded. “That’s perfect.”

“Perfect for what?”

“You need to let Madeline move around, but stay close to her and find out who is watching her.”

“How am I going to stay close to her and find the person at the same time? Especially if they’ve been watching Madeline at the gallery lately? I’m pretty easy to spot.”

“Good point.” He furrowed his brow, thinking.

We heard the garage door open, and Lucy and her two kids came inside. “John!” Noah and Belle yelled, running at Mayburn and launching themselves onto his lap.

I watched with a smile as Mayburn hugged Belle and then tickled Noah, both of them crawling all over him.

I stood and hugged Lucy. “Hi, Iz!” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

“You, too.”

We stood and looked at Mayburn, still playing with the kids. “They love him, huh?” I asked.

“Love,”
she said.

“Hey, one second, one second,” Mayburn was saying to the kids. “I’ve got to say hi to your mom.” He looked up at Lucy and me, like he was about to extricate himself from the kids and stand. But then he froze for a second.

“I got it,” he said.

“What?” Lucy and I asked at the same time.

Mayburn directed his gaze at me. “You know the problem we were just discussing?”

I nodded.

“Have you ever wanted to be a blonde?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Now is the time.”

34

“S
o, how’s the dating going?” I asked my dad.

We were sitting at breakfast place called Toast in Lincoln Park. Across the table, my father wrapped his hands around a white coffee cup and blinked under his copper glasses. I had never seen him do that before, the quick blinking.

I was about to retract my question when he broke into a smile. Then he quickly dropped it, as if the expression had embarrassed him.

“What?” I said.

He seemed to not be able to help it—he laughed, then dropped the laugh just as quickly. But he answered. “It’s just so remarkable.”

“You met someone?” I hoped he didn’t hear the surprise in my voice.

“No, I mean, I’ve been out with a few people,” he said. “But they seem to expect me to…” He looked around as if searching for the word. “Well, they seem to want me to…emote.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, they want you to talk, to share yourself.” He said the word
share
as if it were something exotic.

“And you don’t like to share.” It was not a question.

He shrugged grandly, and I could see that he’d retained some of the gestures he’d acquired from his Italian mother and from living in Italy. Italians are masters of the grand shrug, one that can be used as a response to anything.

“Look, when your mom and I were young, nobody really
shared
—” he made air quotes “—as they call it. And then I was out of the country.”

“Yeah, you were out of this life,” I said. Sometimes when I was talking to my dad, I snapped at him out of the blue, as if some comment had formed at the outer reaches of my memory and came out of my mouth before the rest of my brain could process it.

“Sorry,” I said.

“No problem.” My father looked at his coffee cup, nonchalant, then continued, as if eager to talk. “The thing is, when I left the country, when I was…as you said, out of this life, I kept a low profile. I never ‘shared’ with anyone. I never talked to anyone.”

“Except for Elena,” I said, referring to my dad’s sister.

He gave a single nod. “Yes, with the exception of Elena. But I never did know everything about her, did I? She never fully shared with me.”

Our waitress put our meals in front of us—oatmeal for me. I looked at my father’s plate, which held something called a pesto scramble. “So, you know,” he continued, “I have an entire protocol in my head for determining whether or not something is classified. On a number of different levels.” He shook his head now, as if not wanting to bore me with the details. Meanwhile, I stared at him, rapt. Every once in a while, he let me behind the curtain of Christopher McNeil, and as Madeline had once said about art, it dazzled me.

“The thing is…about the sharing…” His words died away and he stared at the ceiling as if searching for his words there.

“They want you to share, and when you don’t, they get annoyed at you?”

“No.” He looked at me with a big smile. “They all seem to think, in one version or another, that I’m slow to love. And maybe I am.”

“
Maybe
you are?” I said, intentionally letting the sarcasm leak in this time.

“Okay, I’m agreeing with you.” Another Italian shrug. “But they
like
it.”

I laughed at the surprise in his voice. He talked some more, then we ate for a while in companionable silence, a new thing for us.

“Did Mayburn tell you his idea about me as a blonde?” I asked.

My dad nodded. “I think it’s worth a shot.”

“I wonder if people will buy me as a blonde.”

“Only if you like it,” he answered quickly. “You can’t just sell it. You have to be it. And
you
have to like it.”

“Why is that?”

“Because if you enjoy it, then you’ll have credibility.”

I wondered how much my father knew about being someone else. I couldn’t help but return to the topic of his dating, and a question I wanted to ask. “Is Cassandra, Mom’s friend, one of those people who thinks, and likes, that you’re slow to love?”

A couple beats went by. “She is, in fact.”

“You felt okay having Mom set you up with her?”

He put down his fork. Paused. “I did, in fact.”

“Huh,” I said. The wonders never ceased with my parents. “You know, Dad, anyone would be lucky to go out with you.”

He had been picking at his scramble, lifting up pieces of vegetables and inspecting them. He put his fork down and looked at me. “Thank you.”

“Sure.”

Stirring brown sugar into my oatmeal, I noticed he’d stopped talking, hadn’t continued with his food. I looked up at him. I wanted to ask him if he was still considering leaving Chicago, but I didn’t want to press him too much.

“Thank you, Isabel,” he said again. “Very much.”

And that was all I needed to hear for now.

35

A
few days later, I got out of a cab on Hubbard Street, right behind another cab that happened to hold Madeline Saga. I handed my cabbie a bunch of money, told him to keep the change and then said I’d be sitting in the cab for a minute or two. I had to watch Madeline closely, and I didn’t want to get into the club before her.

I had thought about bringing Jeremy, someone I could talk to. But I had the distinct feeling that I would want to kiss him.

I liked kissing him. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with him because I hadn’t ruled him out as the source of the forgeries. But the kissing was great. I also needed to keep an eye on Madeline. Plus, Jeremy had told me that he was seeing the Fex tonight to discuss custodial arrangements and ‘more financial bullshit.’ Things, if they had been amicable, didn’t seem to be so any more.

Madeline must have been paying with a credit card in her cab or getting change, because it took her a moment to get out. We’d already been to the gallery opening, where I stood far apart from Madeline, watched her work the room. There was no one obviously following her.

I glanced out the cab window at the brick building painted black. The club took up the top two floors. Through the snow that was starting to come down, I saw red lights flashing from those floors. When I opened the car door, I heard the music pulsing from within.

I saw Madeline get out of her cab, wearing a blue fur over a black dress. She was stopped by a guy I’d seen at the opening. They began talking.

“Can I hang here just another minute?” I asked the cab driver. He nodded, apparently pleased with my tip.

I watched Madeline and the guy talk. He didn’t seem threatening. If I remembered correctly from meeting him at the opening, he was an interior designer. A man came up to them and the designer introduced Madeline. The three of them stood under the outdoor heat lamps and seemed in no hurry to get inside, so I sat back in the cab seat. And I couldn’t help it—I played with my hair. My new blond hair.

I’d refused to cut and dye my hair the way Mayburn had wanted me to.
Are you insane?
Lucy had said when she’d overheard.
Izzy McNeil does not color that red hair!

So I’d gone to a stylist recommended by my mom, who’d custom-fitted me with a wig that was white-blond, chin length and wispy.

In order to complete my transformation as someone who was…well, someone who was simply not me, I’d bought a dress I probably would never have worn before—a thin, yellow sweater dress with a peek-a-boo cut-out over the chest. I wore it with camel patent-leather boots. It was all very seventies mod, and they seemed like blonde clothes.

Madeline’s eyes had gone big when she spotted me at the gallery opening. I saw her smiling as she turned away. And the time or two I caught her glancing at me, she was beaming. I think she saw me as a changing art installation.

It had been hard to keep an eye on Madeline, though, because my new blond self kept getting hit on by men who would never had noticed me before—Euro types, hipsters in skinny jeans. I had no idea what kind of slogan they were reading from me as a blonde—
Easy but not cheap?
—but in the hour we were at the opening, one of the guys had offered to buy me a featured sculpture—a graphite hand that was part silver, part black with colored finger nails. I hadn’t liked the sculpture very much (and I knew that it would freak me out if it lived in my house) so it was easy to say no. When I got a look at a price list, I almost choked on my champagne. Thirteen thousand dollars.

“Hey, ya using this cab?” It was a bouncer from the club, opening my taxi door farther and gesturing for me to get out.

“Yes, I am using it. I’ll just be a minute.”

Madeline was accepting a business card from the second guy, and again, they didn’t seem in a hurry to move.

The bouncer pulled the cab door open more. “Let’s go, lady.”

“‘Let’s go, lady?’” I repeated, my blond hair making me feel a little frostier than usual. “I have paid this gentleman—” I held my hand toward the cab driver “—to wait for one moment.”

The driver smiled and nodded.

“One.” The bouncer held up his index finger. “There. Your one moment is up. I got customers I have to put in this cab if you’re not using it.”

“
I’m
about to be one of your customers,” the blonde said.

“That remains to be seen.”

I huffed. Or the blonde did. One of us was really pissed off.

I started arguing with the bouncer, using legal terminology to explain the concept of sales transactions as they pertained to my paid use of the cab. I was no dumb blonde.

But then I looked away from him. And Madeline wasn’t there.

“It’s all yours,” I said, stepping out of the cab.

I hurried toward the club door. No sign of Madeline. The club had to be reached by elevators, and yet no one was at the elevator bay. Clearly, she had already gone upstairs.

Another bouncer inside studied my ID intently. “This is you?”

“Of course,” I said, somewhat distractedly, hoping to nonchalantly draw him away from the fact that the person in the ID had deep orange-red hair. “Hey, I have a question for you,” I said. “What floor is the entrance to the club? Three, right?”

“Or four,” the bouncer said. “Doesn’t matter. There’s entrances on both.”

“Damn.”
How was I supposed to tail Madeline if I didn’t know where she was?

“Damn what?” the bouncer said.

“What?”

“What are you saying ‘damn’ for?”

“What is this, church?” Geez, the blonde was sassy. “I’ll talk how I want.”

The bouncer frowned. Waited. Then finally, slowly, he handed me my ID.

“Thanks.” I snatched it from him and half jogged to the elevator, wanting to see if I could read the display that indicated the floor where the elevator had stopped.

Right then, though, the elevator dinged and the door opened. I dodged inside.

“Hey, there’s a fifteen dollar cover!” I heard the bouncer say.

“I’ll get you on the way down!” the blonde yelled, right as the elevator doors closed.

36

I
got off at the third floor, and thankfully I saw Madeline immediately, still with the two guys she had been speaking with outside. The designer held her blue fur coat over his arm, looking gallant.