Then Hang All the Liars (2 page)

Felicity did his bidding, and soon the electricity between them grew, and the plastic marker began to circle. She watched it slide around and around on the slick board. Was she really making it move, or was Randolph? Who knew? Who cared? It was a metaphor, she thought, for the dance that took place between a man and a woman when they stripped off their clothes, the dance that, when it was good, assumed a life of its own.

“Oh, Johnny,” she began to sing. “Johnny be good to me.”

“Hush now. You're interfering with the Ouija. You can't make it speak. You have to trust it.”

“Oh, I don't have to make Johnny come to me.” Felicity's voice grew huskier. It was a very sexy sound.

No wonder she was still in demand as a voice coach. She might be a little dotty, though that came and went, but to Randolph, her voice was a rush as thrilling as a bugle, as mournful as a dove. It was bright lights and promises and magic. It was rumpled sheets and fog horns and shiny golden rings.

“I just snap my fingers and Johnny's right there. There.” She pointed.

Then Felicity stood—scattering the Ouija—and began to sway around the room, dancing to music that Randolph couldn't hear. But he could tell that in her mind someone was holding her, someone whom she loved.

“Yes, darling, anything you say,” she trilled. “I'd go anywhere, do anything, if you play it for me. Pretty please. Play ‘
Embraceable You.'”

Randolph could almost hear the horns in the background, that brassy sass of a big band.

He was tempted to get up and join Felicity—wherever she was. For a moment, he wondered if he really could.

He tucked the last piece of ham around the remaining bite of mushroom and washed it down with sherry from a crystal decanter on the sideboard helping himself.

Could he whistle Felicity's tune? Wouldn't it be something if he could come in on the same note she was hearing out there in the ozone?

“Oh, Johnny,” she cried in a long, slow moan, and the sound was royal blue flashed with fire-alarm red. Then it darkened through midnight blue, faded to purple. She flung her arms around her body as if she were holding together two halves that had been sliced apart.

“Johnny, Johnny, Johnny,” she moaned. As the tears began to fall, her face crumpled. Fifty years twisted across her skin like a shroud.

“No!” Now her voice shrilled. It was an ugly sound. “No, no, you can't. I won't let you!” Then the back door slammed, and the no-nonsense tones of Emily Edwards boomed through the house.

“What in the hell is going on?”

*

“Out.” Emily pointed with one arm as she threw the other around Felicity's shoulders.

“I don't think it was anything I—”

“Mr. Percy, I'm sure that you're a perfect gentleman at all times. But my sister is ill. She's not herself these days and I must ask you to leave.” She pointed again with a finger that would brook no objection. “Now!”

Randolph Percy had little choice but to grab his hat.

*

Felicity pulled away from her sister and resumed her dance. It was a tearful fluttering now like a butterfly trying to get back outside a pane of glass.

“Embrace me,” she whispered, a husky-voiced little girl. Then she hummed the song's old familiar tune.

“Felicity. Come sit down, darling.” Emily patted the settee beside her. She reached out to her sister, but Felicity pulled away, needing both hands for her finale. She stood on an invisible stage, her arms raised beneath an imaginary spotlight that played across her lovely, ruined features.

“Don't be naughty. Baby, baby. Momma. Come to Momma.” She faltered over the song's words, mixing them up, missing her cue.

“Oh, Felicity,” Emily cried as the last note faded. “Poor Felicity.” She enveloped her sister who relaxed—like a child who needed nothing more than a comforting hug. But only for a minute.

Then Felicity pulled back and spat, “You had to come in and ruin it, didn't you? You
always
do that. You
want
Randolph.”

“Easy now. Easy.
Shhhhhh
.”
Emily hadn't worked nearly fifty years as a nurse not to know how to deal with hysteria, though she knew this was only a symptom; Felicity's real problems were much more complex.

“No! There's nothing to talk about. You always send my boyfriends away. You're just jealous. You
hate
it that I'm the pretty one.”

“I'm glad that you have admirers. I just wish you didn't get so upset.”

“I'm
not
upset.” Felicity flung out a hand, and a teacup crashed. “Look what you made me do!” Fresh tears flooded. “I don't know why you want all my boyfriends. You have plenty of your own. Too many.” Then she lowered her volume to a whisper, a seething damp of menace. “Be careful, Emily. People are going to find out you're a slut.”

Emily stood and smoothed her skirt. “I think, my dear, I'm going to get something to calm you.”

“No!”

Felicity screamed and flailed with both fists now. The tea tray smashed onto the pink and green Chinese carpet.

“No! No! No! No! No!”

*

Emily made her way back to the little refrigerator in the pantry where she kept an assortment of medications for her spaniels, her own insulin, and, recently, Felicity's tranquilizers. Kneeling before it, she let her eyes unfocus, and there was Randolph Percy's face—the profile as handsome as a Roman coin, the still-full head of white hair. He was a handsome man with charm to burn. She could see why Felicity was so attracted to him, why she'd chosen to ignore the fact that he was about as trustworthy as a snake.

She unlocked the little refrigerator and reached inside.
What in heaven's name was she going to do about Felicity?

And what the hell was she going to do about Randolph?

She stared at the giant economy-size pharmacy bottle of Valium, which didn't need to be refrigerated but which she'd placed there for safekeeping. Then another handsome silver head swam into focus. George Adams. He was the man to call in a tough spot. She'd talk to her friend George. His niece Sam, too. Now she was thinking. Since Samantha Adams's series on the
Constitution
's front page about that north Georgia sheriff, she'd been the talk of the town. Yes, Sam was what in her day had been called one smart, not to mention tough, cookie.

Tomorrow, Emily promised herself, she'd give the Adamses a jingle. Or maybe, with luck, she'd run into George tonight at Margaret Landry's party.

Two

In the middle of an opening-night party at the Players, a theater in Sweet Auburn just across the street from the Ebenezer Baptist Church and down the block from the first home of Martin Luther King, Jr., Sam Adams hid behind a potted palm. She was pretending to be a wallflower—actually more like a wall poppy in a bright red silk dress that did nothing to hide any of her considerable charms. She was sucking on a Perrier while she eavesdropped on two young girls.

“So when's Chill coming back from New York?” The blonde who was asking had a lot of vinegar in her voice.

“Friday, Saturday—I suppose.”

The
I suppose
was to let the blonde know she didn't really care, didn't give a hoot if Chill, whoever he was, was here or gone, and especially didn't care that this little bitch with the twenty-four-karat hair was getting to her. But she cared all right. This long, tall drink of iced café au lait cared a lot. She tossed her head, and her wavy mane of brindled brown and russet did a flip over a golden shoulder.

“So, what's the story? I thought you two were something, an item, you know, and here he's gone off to New York for three weeks.”

“I told you already he's up there getting a gig together.”

“A
what
?”

“A gig. A date at a rap club.”

“Well, I guess I don't know about all that kind of thing, Laura.”

Sam shot a quick look back to Laura, the one she was rooting for. The girl was some black, some white, maybe a tad of something else exotic, the kind of mix that comes out gorgeous, which is what she was. Green-eyed, golden-skinned gorgeous, and so slender in a chartreuse silk slip of a dress that Sam dropped the last bite of a cheese hors d'oeuvre she'd been holding into the potted palm.

“I know you don't know,
sugar
,”
Laura said, getting into it now. The blonde was about to get burned. “They don't teach you Scotties nothing about
show
business, do they?”

The girl's range was something—from miming this little blue-eyed belle's upper-class mush mouth to street talk without a bump.

“Why, no, they don't.”

“Just teach y'all napkin folding and thank-you note writing?”

“They most certainly do not! I'm an econ major.” The blonde straightened her back and jiggled her shoulders. “And I don't know why you're being so mean. Acting like you went to public school or something. I just asked you about Chill. I don't know why you're so upset.”

But whatever Laura had stuck in her craw, she wasn't giving it up so easily.

“They teach you other stuff when you take your field trips over to the Squeeze?”

Her tone was light, as innocent as cotton candy.

Sam jerked and almost dropped her Perrier atop the discarded cheese puff.
Incredible.
Here she was lurking on deb types on the off chance she'd pick up some skinny about the joint on Peachtree at Tenth, and this pretty thing just fired its name like a bullet. She couldn't believe her luck.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Uh-huh. I bet you do.”

“I do not.”

“Get real, Miranda. I know all about you.”

“You do
not
!”

With that, Miranda, finally realizing she'd bitten off more than she could chew, stomped away, flouncing the pink skirt of her party dress, just exactly the same shade, Sam bet, she'd worn when she was four. Showing a very neat little pair of legs.

Certainly neat enough to shake up the dirty old men who were paying for peep shows and perhaps other kinds of extracurriculars staged by young girls of a certain station over at the Tight Squeeze.

*

Sam hadn't been able to get the tip off her mind, the one her plainclothes friend Charlie had handed her over a beer last week.
His
beer. She'd been off the sauce for almost a decade.

“Funny, ain't it?” he'd asked, sliding an eye for the thousandth time over a badly painted nude hanging in Manuel's front room. Sam's favorite hangout was an old-fashioned place known for its camaraderie rather than its interior decoration.

“What?”

“I was just thinking, for all of its Bible-thumping, Atlanta's one of the few places in the country where it's legal for strippers to fraternize. Peel all the pretties off and shake it right in a man's face.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Strip joints.”

“And why to me?”

“Hold your horses.” He took a long sip of beer. “Now about these strippers.”

Sam couldn't hold them. “You think this ace investigative reporter gives a damn about peelers? Ecdysiasts?
Stripteuse
?”
She leaned back in the booth and dragged that last one out through her elegant nose, then slurped up another oyster.

“You punch the button on your thesaurus?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But you didn't say the magic words.”

“So?”

He reached under his badge and ID for his pen, then grabbed one of Manuel's napkins. Charlie had a flair for the melodramatic, spent his nights off playing in amateur Gilbert and Sullivan productions. Sam had caught his not-bad baritone in
H.M.S. Pinafore,
which is why he said he kept doing her favors—so she wouldn't tattle on his secret life. The truth was, she'd cozied up to and disarmed a shooter in a shopping-center parking lot the second week after she'd moved back to Atlanta and, in the process, saved Charlie's life. It wasn't the sort of thing that slipped his mind.

She'd turned the napkin around. “I can't read your writing.”

“Society strippers.”
He said it louder than he meant to, and a passing waiter shot them a look that Sam ricocheted back at Charlie.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You're repeating yourself. Sure you don't want another soda? No? Well, I'm talking about little girls in special, live-and-in-color performances over at Tight Squeeze, the strip hole. Talking doing the hootchy-kootch, then sometimes joining the clientele later for private parties—if you know what I mean.”