Silk Stalkings (12 page)

I backtracked over
the winding roads, got lost in a small development of pink and blue houses with flat roofs, and found my way back on the road that met up with San Ladrón Avenue. It took ten minutes longer to get home than it took to get there, but I made it. I drove down Bonita, slowing as I passed Charlie's Auto. The bays were closed but the lights in the shop were still on. I parked the car next to the Dumpster behind Material Girl, then went in through the back door and back out the front. Seconds later, I was knocking on the door to Charlie's office.

She opened the door and pulled me inside. “What took you so long? We thought you'd be here hours ago.”

I stumbled in, surprised to find Vaughn and Sheriff Clark already in the room.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“What's going on is that people are starting to talk and none of it's going to be pretty. The people in this room are the
people who matter to me, so I want to set the record straight before the rumor mill takes over the town.”

She opened the bottom drawer of her file cabinet and pulled out a bottle of red wine.

“Anybody interested?”

The rest of us nodded.

“Poly, go get some glasses from the top of the cabinet.”

I left her in her office and retrieved four glasses from the fixture below the Eddie Van Halen poster. When I went back to her office, her feet were up on the desk and her hands were behind her thick, dreadlocked hair. “Who would have thought. Me sponsoring a beauty pageant contestant.”

I glanced at Sheriff Clark. His face was serious, but not judgmental. He watched Charlie but didn't say a word.

Charlie poured a little wine into each of our glasses. She pushed one glass toward me and slid the second closer to her, but she didn't take a sip.

“Remember on Sunday how I told you about Ned?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn't know how much of the story the men knew, but for now it seemed as though Charlie was getting me caught up with details.

“What I didn't tell you—what nobody knows—was that I wasn't eighteen. I was younger. And Ned legally adopted me. I'd been in and out of so many foster homes by then that nobody questioned the paperwork. So even though he treated me like a sister, legally, he was my guardian.”

I looked at the faces of the men in the room. Vaughn stood still, his expression hard to read. I wondered what it was like for him to listen to Charlie talk about those days when he'd grown up here under the parental influence of the same people who had given her up for adoption.

Clark approached the back of Charlie's chair and put his hands on her shoulders. I expected her to fling them off but she didn't. She reached up and put her hands on top of his, where they rested.

“After Ned became my guardian, he wrote to each of my former foster parents to find out if they could tell us anything about my biological parents. Nobody wanted to talk to us. He left a letter with the adoption board saying if anybody wanted to get in touch with me—wanted to find me—that I was okay with it, and we left his address as my contact information. I remember feeling hopeful, like I was going to understand what happened, like there would be an explanation that I could accept. But there was nothing.”

She let go of Clark's hands and took a drink from her glass of wine. “Ned filed a petition with the Los Angeles County District Two courts for a copy of my original birth certificate. The judge denied the request. It was like nobody wanted to help me know where I was from. At that point I stopped looking. If my birth parents didn't care that I was out there, why should I care about them?”

“Charlie,” Vaughn started, but she held up her hand to cut him off.

“We grew up in different worlds, Vaughn. Don't pretend we didn't.”

The room fell silent. If Charlie was done talking, I suspected we'd all stand there for hours anyway. Her story felt incomplete, and I couldn't picture any of us getting up and leaving after what she'd said.

“And then Ned got a letter from the adoption agency. They said my first foster parents had sent them my birth certificate. The city of birth was listed as San Ladrón. I told Ned I didn't care anymore. But when I turned eighteen, he gave me two thousand dollars and told me to put it toward a new start. So I came here. As good as any place, I guess.”

My heart broke for the girl Charlie had been, the girl who had bounced around different families and went out on her own before she was legal. She could have fallen into so many bad situations, it was a testament to how strong she was that she didn't. Through all of that, she developed into a smart
businesswoman who learned a trade and ran her own auto shop. And she'd accomplished it all with two thousand dollars of start-up cash. No Vanguard account, no loan cosigned by Mr. McMichael. Pride and belief in herself had gotten her far.

“After I left, Ned married his girlfriend and they started their own family. Man, that was ages ago. I showed up on his doorstep almost a year ago and that's when he told me I had a sister.”

“Lucy?”

“Lucy.” She picked up her glass of wine and held it up to the light, then set it back down. “A couple of months later Ned called me. He knew I lived in San Ladrón and he wanted to know if I'd sponsor Lucy for the pageant. The rules say you must either be a resident of the town or have a qualifying relative. ‘Sister' is a qualifying relative. So here we are.”

“Not so fast,” Clark said. “You became her sponsor and she's living here. So why all the secrecy? Why have Ned drop her off in the middle of the night?”

“You know about that?” Charlie asked.

He leaned forward and put his hand on her knee. “Charlie, it's my job to know what's going on in the town. When I get a call about a stranger, I have to check it out.”

“Somebody called you about Ned?”

He nodded.

“Who?”

“You know I can't tell you that.”

She punched her fist down on the desk and the glasses rattled. “I knew this would happen. I try to lead a quiet life here and not get into anybody's business and the one time I do something nice for somebody, I'm grist for the rumor mill.”

I watched Clark watch Charlie. He must have felt my stare, because his eyes shifted to me. I didn't smile. I knew if Clark really suspected Ned of something, he would have knocked on Charlie's door, made a friendly introduction as the local sheriff, and found out what Ned's business in town was. The
fact that he didn't, but he knew about Ned's presence, told me an entirely different story. His job tipped him off that she had a strange man over at her shop late at night, but he wanted to respect her privacy. If those two were going to have any kind of a relationship, there were going to be problems.

“Charlie, why'd you keep it a secret?” Vaughn asked.

“You know why, Vaughn. If people go digging into my past, they'll find out that your parents are my parents. They'll wonder why you're the wonder boy who works with Old Man McMichael and what was so wrong with me that they gave me away. And then people will start rumors about Lucy. Why is she qualified to be in the pageant? Am I really her sister? And who's her father? A mechanic from Encino? She's a nobody from nowhere. They'll say she can't win a pageant. I wanted to shield her from that.”

Charlie stood up and glared at us. Fire lit her eyes. She turned away and looked out the window. Whatever sense of camaraderie had existed in the room when I arrived had shifted to her against us. I was afraid she had changed her mind about confiding in us, or, worse, she'd back out of her sponsorship of Lucy.

“She can win the pageant,” I said softly. “She's an amazing young woman. She's smart, kind, pretty, and gracious. Those are the qualities that win a pageant. It doesn't matter who her father is.”

Vaughn stood up and went to Charlie. “You never told me about the different foster homes or about Ned. You never talked about your childhood. I didn't know anything about what it was like for you growing up.”

“And you're not gonna find out any more about it.” She turned around and gave him a gentle push away from her. “Thanks for bringing me dinner. I'll do your oil change tomorrow morning. Now get out of here so I can talk to your girlfriend.”

I stared at Vaughn, who stared at Charlie. “Don't go
making Poly uncomfortable on my account, sis.” He punched Clark lightly on the arm. “Come on, Sheriff, I think we've been dismissed.”

The four of us left Charlie's office and walked into the open bay of her shop. The men left and Charlie and I stood next to her cabinet of tools.

“You're not going to distract me by calling me Vaughn's girlfriend,” I said.

“I underestimated the impact of the G word,” she said.

“Charlie, this is important. It's about you and Lucy. Where is she, anyway?”

“She's at my apartment. I told her I needed to run out for a while.” She stood by the window, staring out at the street.

“Is there more to the story? More than you told Sheriff Clark and Vaughn?”

“There's always more, isn't there?” She sat back down, and for the first time since I'd met her, I saw pain in her face. “Somehow Ned found out I was Vic McMichael's daughter. He said it was time to collect the interest on his loan.”

“The two thousand dollars was a loan?”

“Poly, I paid that money back years ago. Sent him a certified check. He never responded, never mentioned it. The check was never cashed.”

“Did you ask him about that?”

“Once. He laughed it off and said not to worry. He said if he ever needed money, he'd come to collect. And then the postcard came, and he showed up. He helped me figure out where my parents lived, but I don't even know how he found out who they were.”

“Tell me again how you found out that Vic was your father?”

“I didn't find out until after I moved here. Asked around, dug around. Spent a lot of time at the library going through old newspapers, looking for something. I almost missed it. ‘Unnamed baby girl born to McMichael family.' The date
and time matched what was listed on my birth certificate. After I found out who Adelaide was, I figured it out.”

“You never told Ned?”

“I never told anybody but Vaughn.” She turned away from me and punched her fist into the dingy gray heavy bag that hung next to the tool chest. It rocked back and forth, spinning slightly. The word
Everlast
moved to the left and then to the right. We both stared at it until it stopped moving.

“How did Ned find out? I mean, did he know I had a rich father when he gave me the two grand to start a new life? Or before that? Maybe he always planned to tap me for money.”

“Have you asked him?”

“Why bother? He said now that Harvey Halliwell is out of the way, he wants me to pull some strings. I think the contest was just an excuse to get back in touch with me. He doesn't care about Lucy winning the pageant; what he really wants is a way to get to Old Man McMichael's money.”

“Do you think Lucy knows he's using her?”

Before she could reply, there was a click behind me. Charlie heard it, too. We both raced to the back door in time to see a figure run past the small shed that sat behind Charlie's shop, dark brown hair flying behind her.

Lucy had heard every word we'd said.

Charlie took off
after her. I stood by the door. Seconds later an engine started up and a car jumped out of the darkness. It was the abandoned pickup that Charlie left in the yard behind her shop. The truck tore through the grass until it reached the sidewalk. It slowed to navigate over the curb, and then it took off into the night.

I waited by the back door until Charlie returned. She cursed. “I should have expected this,” she said.

“You can't go through life expecting the worst of people. Ned did a very good thing for you when you lived with him, and there might be a valid explanation.”

“I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about trusting the daughter of a mechanic with a rusted-out, broken-down car. To anybody else, that truck was a piece of junk. To a mechanic, it's a getaway car hiding in plain sight.”

“Where do you think she'd go?”

“Who knows? The pageant rules say she's supposed to
reside with her relative. That's me. I doubt she'd go back to Ned, not after what she heard us talking about.”

“What was she doing here? I thought you said she was in your apartment?”

“My apartment's not far from here. She could have followed me, or worse, maybe she planned to take the car before she heard us.”

It was after midnight when I made it back to my apartment. So much had happened since this morning—Giovanni and the seamstresses arriving, Violet's angry outburst, Inez's story at Halliwell Industries, and Charlie's explanation of Lucy's relationship to her—that I couldn't believe it had only been a day. I took a quick shower, changed into a black cotton nightgown, and eased myself under the covers between Pins and Needles. Pins wrapped one of his gray paws over my leg and rested his chin on my kneecap. Seconds later we were all asleep.

•   •   •

The next morning, even the cats seemed to understand that I needed time to recharge. Neither of them was in the bed when I woke up. I pushed the covers back and walked through the apartment looking for them. They were in the kitchen, standing over their bowls, waiting patiently to be fed.

I opened a can of moist food for them and replaced yesterday's water with fresh from the tap, then raced through my morning routine. I expected Giovanni and company to arrive early and get started on the dresses. There was much work to be done, but I knew I couldn't expect them to stay over another night.

I emptied the residue from the coffee urns and refilled them with freshly brewed coffee from the modest Mr. Coffee in my kitchen. I'd place even money on the fact that Giovanni would have breakfast at the Waverly House and charge it to the pageant. So long as I kept him caffeinated during the day,
we'd get along fine. I drank two cups before he and the seamstresses arrived, leaving me jittery and anxious.

“What took you so long?” I asked when they showed up. “I've been expecting you for hours.”

“It's eight o'clock. We have plenty of time to finish the dresses before the girls arrive at noon.”

I saved the lecture on the “girls” versus “young ladies,” as it would be wasted on Giovanni. “I trust you left some food at the Waverly House for the rest of the patrons?”

He thrust a take-out bag at me. “I even thought to bring something for you. Egg, Swiss, and prosciutto on a toasted rye bagel.”

I peeked inside the bag. “I'm surprised you remembered what I liked for breakfast.”

“I didn't. The girls told me. And before you say anything, you spend a night with them and tell me if they acted like girls or women.”

I flashed back to the giddiness I'd seen yesterday when they left the store. “They're still women, Giovanni. Happy women who had a chance to step out of their lives for one night.”

He shook his head at me.

The ladies took their spots at the sewing machines and started where they'd left off the previous day. I pulled my bagel sandwich from the bag, sniffed it, and savored the scent—melted cheese, caraway seeds on the bun, the saltiness of the prosciutto—before I bit into it. I hadn't had a bagel sandwich since moving from Los Angeles, but now that I knew the Waverly House made these, I had a feeling I'd be developing a new habit.

Jun Wong arrived shortly after Giovanni and company did. She hugged each of the other ladies one by one, then took her seat at her makeshift station. The sewing machines started buzzing, slowly mounting to a dull roar of stitches being sewn. As the clock approached noon, I grew more anxious. Would Lucy show up for her fitting? If not, where was she?

The answer wasn't the one I'd hoped for. A couple of young women arrived at eleven forty-five. I asked them to wait out front. At precisely twelve, I allowed them in. The early birds had been joined by the rest of their group—minus one. Lucy. I looked across the street and saw Charlie looking back at me. I shook my head and she went back inside.

I wasn't sure what to make of Lucy's disappearance. Was it embarrassment over her father having asked Charlie to sponsor her? Or was it guilt over expecting Charlie's familial connections to open doors for her? Lucy hadn't acted like she wanted preferential treatment. In fact, it was quite the contrary. She had waited on the stairs and let each of the other young women go first. She had chosen her fabric from what was left, taking the transfugitive silk that many others had rejected. She hadn't even shown up on that first day to check in. That was why Sheila, who'd stood in as the twentieth contestant that first day, had been able to go unnoticed.

In hindsight, Sheila's timing seemed odd. How had she known that Lucy wouldn't be at the store to check in? Surely she must have expected someone to at least take a head count. If we had come up with twenty-one young women instead of twenty, there would have been a roll call, which would have resulted in her being outed as the one person present but not expected. Wouldn't that have been more embarrassing than not showing up? So why risk it? Unless she knew Lucy wasn't going to show.

Sheila hadn't tried to hide her tears on Tuesday night. In fact, she was the one who had told me she needed to talk to someone. What if her tears were caused by something much worse than not getting into the pageant, like a confrontation with Harvey Halliwell that resulted in his murder? Would she invite me into her confidence in order to feed me a story that would send me off in a different direction?

“You're doing an excellent job of not getting involved,” Giovanni said, jostling me out of my thoughts. It took me a
couple of seconds to justify what he said with how I was feeling, considering I was pretty certain trying to figure out who killed Harvey would be considered “getting involved.”

“You mean with the seamstresses and the fittings?”

“Of course. I expected you to be right in the thick of it.”

“I don't think that would be fair. Part of this challenge is to allow them to come up with their concept and have it executed. We're here to advise, but that's it.”

He studied me for a second. “You've grown up a bit since leaving my workroom. You're more confident. Your store just might make it after all.”

Giovanni left me standing by the wrap stand, shocked into silence. He refilled his coffee and wandered the perimeter of the shop. He had told me a little about the beginning of his business. Had he started out like me: idealistic, loving fabric, viewing the world as my oyster? If so, when had he started catering to the disposable prom and pageant circuit? I could have joined him as he walked around and studied the fabrics that had survived the ten years when the store was closed, and those that I'd purchased more recently to round out my inventory, but I didn't. I sensed that he was having his own moment in time and I wanted to let him.

Try as I did, I couldn't shake my concerns over Lucy or my questions about Sheila, and the more I thought about each contestant, the more I tried to fabricate a connection between them. I wanted to know more about their pasts. But with Lucy missing in action, Sheila made the obvious choice of where to start. I needed an excuse to spend some time at the Waverly House. Too bad I hadn't thought of this when the ladies were staying there.

But there were other excuses for spending time there. I called Vaughn's office and asked his secretary to put me through.

“I'd like to make an appointment with you.”

“I thought we'd bypassed the appointment phase of our
relationship. Should I reconnect you with my secretary? She has my schedule.”

“I'm hoping she doesn't book your nighttime schedule. I'm calling to invite you to dinner.”

“Hmmm, dinner. I seem to recall you inviting me to dinner a few months ago. So, Tea Totalers? What time?”

“Dinner at Tea Totalers has to wait. I want to take you to dinner at the Waverly House.”

“Considering my mom runs the place and lets me eat for free, I think you might find a better place to spend your money,” he said.

“No, it has to be the Waverly House. And it has to be tonight. If you're busy, I can make other plans.”

“I'm not busy.”

“So it's a date?”

“Is it?”

I considered the question. Was I asking Vaughn on a date? It seemed as though I was. Denying it wouldn't serve any particular purpose. Plus, I rather liked having taken charge like this.

“Yes, it's a date.”

“Good to know. Are you going to pick me up?”

I stifled a giggle at the thought of me driving to wherever Vaughn lived just to drive him back to a restaurant that was two blocks from my house.

“How about we meet at the Waverly House at seven thirty?”

“Perfect.” I hung up the phone and smiled to myself. Giovanni was right. I did have more confidence than I had in Los Angeles. Maybe there was something in the San Ladrón water.

When I turned around, the pageant contestants and the seamstresses were watching me. The machines had gone silent. As I looked back and forth among their faces, I realized they'd heard the majority of my conversation.

Jun Wong spoke up. “You make date with Mister Vaughn?”

I nodded. She clapped twice and the other women joined in. The young women looked around like they didn't know what it all meant. I flushed to a particularly hot temperature and fanned myself with my hand. Giovanni handed me a mug of coffee and clinked it with his own.

“You're the one who's always defending them,” he said.

•   •   •

Nineteen dresses were completed by five thirty. Short of carrying them up to my closet, I didn't know where to hang them. I went next door to Flowers in the Attic to see if either Violet or Lilly had an extra fixture in storage that I could borrow for a few days.

Lilly Garden stood inside a large white metal birdcage that had been positioned at the front of the store. Tufted stools of varying heights were clustered together, each holding a metal tray filled with vintage jewelry. One held brightly colored flower pins from the sixties. Another held multifaceted rhinestone brooch and earring sets. A third held strands of wooden beads that had been threaded onto thin twine and tied into necklaces. Above the baskets of jewelry, she'd positioned a colorful toy parrot that had been wired to a swinging bar.

“Hi, Lilly,” I said. “I haven't seen the birdcage before. Is it new?”

“It's been in storage. Violet thinks it's awful but I disagree.”

“It's perfect for the jewelry display,” I said. “Too bad the parrot doesn't talk.”

She picked up a plastic remote from the counter and aimed it at the parrot. His swing started to move to and fro and his beak clacked mechanically. “Polly want a cracker,” he said. Six times. Considering my name was Poly, I tired of it after one.

Lilly laughed. “Oh, he's going to be lots of fun. Just imagine how I can scare people when they're inside the cage rooting through the merchandise.”

I thought about saying that maybe scaring off the customers wasn't a wise marketing strategy, but didn't. Instead, I moved into my request. “Speaking of fixtures in storage, that's why I'm here. Do you happen to have any extra rolling racks or merchandise grids?”

“I think so. Why?”

“The seamstresses have finished up with the dresses for the Miss Tangorli contestants and I don't have any place to hang them. If you have something you're not using, I thought maybe I could borrow it.”

Her eyes grew wide and she gestured with her hand for me to keep my voice down. “I have a collapsible rolling rack that you can borrow, but you can't tell Violet. This pageant is hard enough for her.”

I looked around. “Where
is
Violet?”

“She went out of town for a few days. Probably for the best.”

On one hand, it made sense that Violet would go out of town to avoid the reminder of the catalyst for her daughter severing ties with her. On the other, if Violet had something to do with Harvey Halliwell's murder, it was awfully suspicious timing to take a vacation.