Ghost Flower (4 page)

“I’m sorry,” I told Mrs. Dockwood.

“I’m sorry,” I told my boss when he fired me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to Nina as she lay asleep in my arms in the emergency room waiting for someone to see us.

And when they did—

I shook myself out of the memory and realized I was gripping the silver picture frame so hard the edges bit into my palms.

I set it down carefully, in the exact spot I’d taken it from on the top of the piano, the way I would have if I’d been cleaning this house and not been a guest in it. Over my shoulder I checked on Bain and Bridgette and saw they were now leaning side by side against the railing. I raised the lacquered cover of the piano keyboard on its hinges, and my fingers tapped lightly across the cool smoothness of the keys.

“Do you play?” Bridgette’s voice startled me. The cover fell with a sharp crack as I stepped away from the instrument.

I hadn’t heard her—heard them—come in, but now she was standing right next to me. “A little. One of my foster parents…” I said.

“
One
of your foster parents?” Bridgette asked, her interest obviously quickening.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, poorly concealing that her interest unnerved me. “I don’t play much. It’s just this piano is so—pretty.”

“Yes,” Bridgette agreed. “It used to be in our grandmother’s house, but she decided she didn’t want to see it anymore. So we moved it up here.” She was watching me with an intensity and curiosity that made me feel like I was an insect pinned on a microscope slide.

I tried to strike a casual pose, moving to put my hands into my back pockets but remembering too late that one of them had been ripped off by Roman that afternoon.

Only that afternoon. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Instead I twined them behind me. “Do either of you play?” I asked to shift her attention.

“Bridgette is an accomplished pianist,” Bain said.

Her eyes didn’t leave me. “You don’t play at all? What about tennis?”

I frowned. “Tennis? Nope.”

“Horses? Do you ride?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Sure. There are a lot of foster homes with stables.” I tilted my head toward the balcony. “What did you decide out there?”

Bain and Bridgette exchanged a look, as though they were having a conversation without words. She said, “Let’s discuss it over dinner. I’m starving.”

M
y most recent definition of dinner had been eating things that came out of cans off of paper plates with a plastic spoon.

Bain and Bridgette’s version of dinner was a little different. As we sat down, Bain informed me that Bridgette had gone to Paris to attend culinary school the summer after her senior year of high school. She downplayed it—“It was mostly just basic sauces and knife skills”—but she was a really good cook.

Macaroni au gratin avec lardon
, I learned, was a fancy way of saying macaroni and cheese with bacon in it, but this wasn’t like any mac and cheese I’d ever had. Bridgette baked it in the oven, so it had a golden bread-crumb crust, and the saucy part managed to be delicate and smoky and cheesy all at once. I ate two plates of it, and Bain kept up. Despite saying she was hungry, Bridgette mostly pushed the pasta around with her fork while shooting furtive glances at me.

Finally I couldn’t take it. I stopped mid-bite and let my fork fall into my plate. It made a sharp noise, and Bridgette jumped slightly. “Why do you keep staring at me like that?” I demanded.

To her credit she didn’t deny it. She said, “I’m wondering how you digest your food hunched over, gulping it like that.”

I was eating like the people I knew ate, face close to my plate, left arm curved around it to protect it, fingers of my right hand wrapped around the handle of my fork. “What’s wrong with how I eat?”

“It’s not that something is wrong. It’s just—” She laid her fork down carefully, pushed her plate forward and crossed her arms in front of her. “I was just thinking about how much work this is going to take. Every detail is going to matter—how you use utensils, how you sit, how you talk. I hadn’t realized how many little things there were until I was watching you right now.”

I sat up straight and took my arm off the table. “Is this some kind of
My Fair Lady
thing where you win a prize by turning a guttersnipe into a countess?”

She smiled. “I love that movie.”

Of course she did. Girls like Bridgette always loved that movie because it made the world seem pretty and made them believe that even though they were rich and clean, they didn’t have to be morally bankrupt.

It was, in my opinion, a piece of shit. No one ever handed you a fairy tale.

“I guess you could say it’s a little like that,” Bridgette went on. She started twisting the triple gold ring she wore on her pointer finger. “We want you to pretend to be someone else, and if you pull it off there will be a lot of money in it.”

I think I had known all along, somewhere in the back of my mind, where this was heading, but I let myself say it aloud for the first time now. “You want me to be your cousin Aurora.”

Bridgette sat up straight, and her perfectly shaped brows snapped together. “How do you know about Aurora?”

“Bain told me. He said she loved thunderstorms like the one we drove through. Because she was like them.”

She shot him a confused look, then came back to me. “Yes. I guess—” she stopped. “That doesn’t matter. Three years ago Aurora ran away and disappeared. We want you to impersonate her for a few weeks.”

“A few weeks?”

“A month or two.”

“Why?”

“Our grandmother is very ill, and it would make her last days—” Bain started to say, but Bridgette interrupted.

“Don’t be an idiot. She’ll never believe that.” She looked at me. “For money. On her eighteenth birthday, Aurora was supposed to inherit a lot of money. We want you to impersonate her until then, stay around long enough to get the money, and then give it to us. We’ll give you one hundred thousand dollars, and you’ll be free to do whatever you want for the rest of your life.”

One hundred thousand dollars to walk in someone else’s shoes for three months. Mrs. Cleary, my foster mother, would have been so proud of me. I glanced toward the photo I’d been looking at on the piano. I bet they were nice shoes too.

“Why wouldn’t you do it?” Bain said when he thought I was hesitating.

“Because it’s stealing?” I said.

“Not really.” Bridgette shook her head. “In her will, Aurora left the money to Bain and me, so technically it’s ours. But if she’s not there, we have to wait another four years until she can be declared dead.”

“Is she dead?”

“She’s either dead or uninterested in the money because otherwise she would have been back by now,” Bain explained. He spread
his hands wide. “See, no one will get hurt. All you have to do is spend a few weeks playing dress-up and living like a princess, and at the end you get a fortune. Most people would jump at this chance. Or are you worried it will interfere with your career advancement up the Starbucks ladder?”

If I had seen then what this single-minded focus on money was really about, I would never have agreed to their offer. But at the time, everything they said made sense. And it all led to one conclusion. I said, “I’ll do it.” Bain started to smile, but Bridgette’s face remained impassive. “For two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

The smile froze on Bain’s face. “You’re crazy.”

Bridgette’s arm came up in front of him, like a mother protecting her child, and she stared at me. Her gaze was precise and appraising, and I wondered if I’d blown it. I really hoped not—“The best hiding place is in plain sight” was the advice a friend had given me once, and this seemed like the plainest possible. I forced myself to keep meeting Bridgette’s eyes.

The tiniest hint of a smile appeared on Bridgette’s lips. She said, “Okay. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

In a distant corner near the back of my mind, a warning whistle shrilled that this had been too easy. That “dependable” sounded a lot like “expendable.” And that I was missing something crucial.

Then my eyes went back to the photo. From a distance, it looked like just a nice family, the tensions I’d seen at closer range invisible.
Family
. That word was so foreign to me, and yet, suddenly, dangerously desirable.

I said, “How do we start?”

I
t took less than an hour for them to explain what they had in mind. Fifty-three minutes to outline what would change my life and the lives of a dozen people irrevocably.

The plan was well-thought-out—Bridgette was an excellent organizer. Each piece clicked against the next with the precision of well-set-up dominoes. But the problem of being a good organizer is it gives you the illusion you know what is going on everywhere. It’s the periphery that will get you every time.

It was simple: I would spend the next month living there in “the cabin” and learning everything they could teach me about Aurora. A month before Aurora’s birthday, I would move to Tucson and take my place in the family. Once I had the money, they figured it would take me three weeks to get my affairs in order, and then I’d disappear. The way they made it sound, it was like being Cinderella: Girl goes from pauper to princess, only in this modern version she doesn’t even have to tie herself up with a dubious prince at the end.

“The fact that Aurora took off once will make it easy for people to believe she’d do it again,” Bridgette said.

“But everyone will think she just came back for the money. That she’s opportunistic,” I said.

“Exactly.” Bridgette sat forward. “And that’s precisely why it would be credible, her coming back right now after all this time. Otherwise we’d need some elaborate story.”

“People like to believe the worst, especially about families like ours,” Bain said. But his voice held no bitterness—he almost sounded proud. Bridgette, though, didn’t feel the same way. Her neck went pink, and she fiddled with her ring.

I tried to think of the right questions to ask in the right order.

“Why would your grandmother still let her have the money? Wouldn’t she get mad and cut Aurora out of her will?”

“It’s not a will,” Bain said. “It’s an estate.” Bragging again. It struck me that he was trying to impress me.

“She can’t,” Bridgette said, ignoring him. “The money Aurora inherits when she’s eighteen is from her parents. They’re both dead.”

“What was Aurora like?” I asked.

Bain frowned. “Why does that matter?”

“I want to know if I’m going to like being her.”

“She was nice,” Bain started to say, but Bridgette cut him off.

“She was spoiled, conceited, and wild. She never thought about anything except pleasing herself and having a good time.”

“She doesn’t sound anything like me.”

“All you have to do is ask yourself, ‘What should I do to be the center of attention?’ And then do it. I’m pretty sure that was Aurora’s only guide to her behavior,” Bridgette said.

“It sounds like you weren’t exactly friends.”

“Just because I’m frank doesn’t mean I wasn’t fond of her,” Bridgette said. “She was careless, but she could be a lot of fun. And she was my cousin. Family. I loved her.”

Wow. I wondered what Bridgette said about people she only
liked
.

“What about DNA?” I asked. “Won’t it be easy to show I’m not your cousin?”

“They tried to take DNA samples when she disappeared. But there wasn’t anything to take, so there’s nothing to match it to. Her toothbrush and hairbrush were gone, and our grandmother has a very efficient cleaning staff. In terms of the rest of the family, her father was adopted by our grandparents, so she wouldn’t match any of us. There were a few fingerprints, but we have a solution for that.”

“A
solution
?” I echoed, curling my fingers into balls. “If you want me to burn the tips of my fingers off, it will cost extra.”

Bridgette laughed. It was the first time I’d seen her laugh, and it seemed to surprise her almost as much as it surprised me. “We’re not thugs,” she said.

“It’s simple,” Bain told me. “If someone wants to check your identity, they’re not going to look up your name; they’re going to run your prints against the police database. So if your prints are already in the computer as Aurora Silverton, that’s what will show as a match when the cops check. The fact that there’s another Aurora Silverton with completely different prints never comes up.”

“Okay,” I nodded slowly. “How do you get my prints into the police database as Aurora’s?”

Bridgette got up and started to clear the table as she spoke. “The Silverton Child Safety Project is sponsoring a tent at Old Phoenix Days next week where parents can bring their kids to have them fingerprinted and the prints stored in the police database. I’m running the event. It will be no problem for me to slip a card with your prints into the pile to be scanned.”

Bain and I moved to help her clean up. As I rinsed the plates, I said, “You two have really thought of everything.”

“I’m the big picture man, the brains of the operation,” Bain explained, taking a plate from me and putting it into the dishwasher. “Bridgette takes over the details.”

“You have got to be kidding,” Bridgette said, throwing a handful of soap suds at him.

“You can’t spell BRAINS without BAIN,” he told her solemnly.

“You have been using that joke since junior high school.” She leaned toward me. “Sadly he is the only one who ever found it funny.”

“At least I know how to load a dishwasher. If you put the pot in like that, it will block the water flow to the rest of the dishes.” He tapped his nose and said to me, “See? Big picture.”

I rinsed, and they argued about putting knife points up or down, crystal yes or no, the right place for the spatula; making fun of one another. I found myself getting pulled into the easy rhythm of their back and forth, of their banter.
This is what it’s like to be part of a family,
I thought.
To belong to people who care about you
. As we laughed together, some part of me that had been inert suddenly flamed into life, filling me with the joy and wonder of a child reaching through a crowd for a favorite toy she thought was lost forever.