Vixen (32 page)

“Do you know why your little boy crush Marcus will never want you?” Bastian gasped, still curled in a ball. “Because you’re easy, Lorraine. You’ve got easy written all over your face.”

Coming to Bastian’s had been a complete and utter mistake.

“You don’t deserve a girl like Gloria,” Lorraine said. “And I’ll make sure she finds that out. I’ll tell her everything you’re up to, and let’s see if she still wants to marry you then.”

“What makes you believe she’ll listen to you now?” Bastian asked. “She won’t even speak to you.”

Lorraine didn’t bother to answer. She turned and walked out the door.

Lorraine ran. She slipped off her heels and ran in her stockinged feet all the way up North Lake Shore Drive and didn’t stop until she rounded the corner onto Astor Street and spotted the Carmodys’ looming estate.

But the house was dark. Of course. Tonight was the seniors’ Honor Society induction ceremony, which Gloria was sure to be attending, along with her mother. Lorraine had
already gotten into Barnard; she didn’t need her Honor Society key. It didn’t unlock anything, anyway.

Maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

Lorraine wasn’t an avid reader of crime novels, but she had pieced together this much about the betrayer:

1. she had to be in Gloria’s inner circle;
   
2. she had to know Bastian Grey; and
   
3. she had to have a motivation to harm Gloria.
   

She, she, she …
What made her think the traitor was female? A man could easily have wanted to break up Bastian and Gloria’s engagement, if there was a romantic interest at stake. But this had all the markings of girl-jealousy. Lorraine had a gut instinct about it. Some might call it intuition, but Lorraine knew it was just one bad girl recognizing the work of another.

Since Lorraine was here anyway, she might as well take advantage of Gloria’s absence. She put her heels back on and straightened her dress. She needed to find something—a single clue, a smoking gun, a note about Bastian—anything to prove that Lorraine wasn’t the one who’d spilled about the Green Mill.

The Carmodys’ tired old French maid answered when Lorraine knocked on the door.

Claudine was a wispy slip of a thing who had a rodent-like distrust of everyone around her. Lorraine prayed that
the scandal between her and Gloria hadn’t filtered down to the hired help just yet, even though they usually seemed to know everything before anyone else.
“Oui, Mademoiselle Lorraine?”

“
Claudine, est-ce que je visite la chambre à Mademoiselle Gloria? Je
, um, forgot
mon
book there
le
other
nuit
and we have
un examen
tomorrow.”

Claudine regarded her suspiciously but let her in all the same.

The house was unnaturally quiet except for the sharp
tock
of Lorraine’s heels on the parquet floor. The grand hall was dark with shadow, the lights dimmed, and Lorraine was grateful when she reached the carpeted stairs. She glided up silently.

Just before hurrying into Gloria’s room, she paused. A door on the right, cracked open an inch, had caught her attention. The bedroom of Clara Knowles. Sweet, innocent, goody-two-shoes Clara Knowles. A girl who seemed to be so clueless, so harmless, yet had somehow managed to win over Marcus—and everyone else—as if she had cast a voodoo spell.

The spell had even worked on Lorraine, hadn’t it? When they had been getting ready for the club together, Clara had pretended she had never seen kohl before. And then with the help of a few tips from Raine, Clara had suddenly metamorphosed from dowdy caterpillar into va-va-voom butterfly? Fat chance.

That night, Clara had carried herself like a real flapper, as if it were second nature. Her confidence couldn’t have come from just a slash of red lipstick. Where was the quaint country girl then?

Something was wrong with this picture, and Lorraine was determined to find out.

Clara’s room looked surprisingly normal—and boring. A few snoozy clothes carelessly strewn on the bed, a few jars of makeup out of place on the vanity. On her nightstand was a copy of Fitzgerald’s
Flappers and Philosophers
, Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence
, and Edith Hull’s
The Sheik
—saucy! And, over her bed, a poster for Douglas Fairbanks’s
Robin Hood
. Fairbanks—now, there was a man.

Lorraine pulled her eyes away from the poster. What was she even looking for? If Clara truly had been so savvy as to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes, she certainly would know how to hide her tracks and burn the evidence.

The grandfather clock downstairs chimed ten o’clock. The Honor Society ceremony was sure to have ended, and the Carmodys would be arriving home any second. She had to work fast.

Nightstand first: vanilla body lotion, coconut cuticle oil, blemish cream, a playbill from the theater—boring, boring,
boring
.

On to the next: underwear. Lorraine felt no shame digging through Clara’s garters and her brassieres. Sometimes you had to stoop in order to rise. Probably too obvious a place
to hide anything important—what did Lorraine have in her own underwear drawers? A pair of BVDs from the beautiful actor she had almost lost her virginity to; a napkin on which Marcus had once sketched a drawing.

There! In the back right corner, amid a sea of bland cream and beige, was a pair of lacy fire-engine-red panties. Jackpot. Lorraine extracted them carefully. And what came fluttering out? A photograph worth a trillion words.

A flapper with some handsome swell in a speakeasy somewhere.

No, wait—the flapper was
Clara
, with … Harris Brown. Lorraine gave a low whistle. Clara had been a full-on flapper. She was in a beaded headdress displaying a pixie bob, her vampish face tipped back in drunken revelry. He was kissing her neck, holding a cigarette. She was leaning across him, her bare legs splayed out across the booth. The table was littered with bottles of booze. On the back of the photo, written in tiny black lettering:

Oh! Clara
wasn’t
a rube from some little town in the middle of nowhere. She’d been to New York. She was a party girl—a flapper supreme. And judging from the looks of things, she’d had some sort of romantic tryst with Harris
Brown. Country Clara was just an act—a good one, Lorraine admitted to herself, but an act nonetheless.

What would everyone think when they found out that Chicago’s newest, sweetest socialite was a boozer and a woman of the world? What would Mrs. Carmody think when she found out her niece was taking her for a sucker?

Lorraine knew that where you uncovered one lie, others were sure to be lurking: If anybody was down and dirty enough to tell Bastian about Gloria and the Green Mill, it was the vixen in this photograph. Lorraine did a little jig for joy. Clara thought she could outsmart Lorraine Dyer, leave Lorraine taking the blame for everything. Well, Clara’s show was finished.

What would Marcus think when he learned that the pure, virginal maiden he’d fallen for—a girl he’d originally meant to compromise—had seen more scandal than he would in his entire lifetime?

“Mademoiselle?”
Claudine’s mouselike voice squeaked from the doorway.

Lorraine clasped her hands together in prayer, the photograph between them. “
Je pense que
Gloria gave
le book
to Clara,
parce que
I did not find it in
sa chambre.”
She pointed nervously to the stack of books on Clara’s nightstand.
“Quel dommage!”

“Oui, dommage,”
Claudine repeated, not budging from the
door. “You know, my English, it is better than your French? You may speak in the English to me. I understand.”

Claudine escorted Lorraine all the way down the grand staircase to the front door. “Oh, and Claudine!” Lorraine exclaimed on the front step. “Don’t worry about telling Gloria I was here. I’d rather tell her myself,
non?
I mean,
s’il vous plaît
.”

Claudine blinked. “As you wish,
mademoiselle
. Gloria, she doesn’t listen to me when I speak to her anyway.”

As soon as the door shut behind her, Lorraine peeled the photograph off her sticky palm and slipped it into her purse.

The temperature had dropped significantly, and a November wind sliced through the night air. The moon was full and fat and orange, and as she walked the few blocks home, Lorraine felt the first hint of winter rattling in her bones. Yet there was a strange heat boiling within her: the picture of Clara in her black-fringed purse.

Her encounter with Bastian tonight had left
him
—not Lorraine this time—the hurt one. Her visit to the Carmodys’ had left
Lorraine
—not Clara this time—with the upper hand.

And so with each step toward home, Lorraine made her plans and swore on the harvest moon: She would never be anyone’s fool again.

GLORIA

It was lunchtime at Laurelton Prep, and Gloria was sitting by herself, picking at a chicken croquette. She wished she’d joined geriatric Miss Tucker in the home ec room, learning how to sew a button, instead of forcing herself to endure the dining hall: the tables around her, packed with gossiping, chewing girls, now seemed unbearable.

Over the past two weeks, she had made a habit of hiding out in the library during her lunch period, a much-needed forty-three-minute respite from the unending cattiness of her fellow students. Today the library was closed for some reason, and because of the rule that kept students on school grounds during lunch, Gloria’d had no other option.

She was trying to read but for the past ten minutes had
been stuck on the same line from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s
A Few Figs from Thistles
.

Every line sent her mind spinning off with thoughts of Jerome. She spent her days thinking about him.
Obsessing
over him. How she hadn’t seen him since that night at his apartment, a week before. How the longer she was apart from him, the more she doubted what had transpired there: Had those words—that she
wanted
him—really come out of her own mouth? Had they really, finally kissed? A kiss that was so perfect and so pure that even now the memory of it made her weak.

If only tonight, at seven-thirty sharp, wasn’t the engagement party that her mother had been planning since the day Gloria met Bastian.

Gloria felt something hit the back of her head, followed by obnoxious snickering. She froze.
Don’t stoop to their level and turn around
, she told herself.
Keep your eyes on your book
. But then she felt it again.

Spitballs.

Gloria turned, her cheeks warming, to face her nemeses: Anna Thomas, Stella Marks, and Amelia Stone. Those braided, brunette prom-trotters were out to make Gloria’s life a living hell. She was in no mood for this today.

Gloria extracted the two gooey white wads of paper from her bob. “I think you lost something,” she said, flinging the spitballs back at them.

“Oh no, those are yours to keep,” said Stella, her thin lip curling up and revealing the gap between her front teeth. “But
speaking of losing, I think I saw your dignity sitting in the lost and found? You might want to consider picking it up.”

The girls broke into another round of laughter.

“I guess you aren’t going to audition for the school musical anymore?” Amelia asked.

“Of course I am,” Gloria retorted, though she knew she probably wouldn’t. All through high school, it had been her dream to star in the musical, open to seniors only. This year Laurelton was putting on Rogers and Hart’s
Poor Little Ritz Girl
. But if she couldn’t have Jerome at the piano, she didn’t want to sing at all. Still, she wasn’t about to tell the girls that. “Why wouldn’t I audition?”

“Well, there aren’t any roles for
colored
boys,” Anna said, with a slurp of her milk. “Since we know how much you love them.”

This was just too much. Gloria closed her book. “You’re right,” she said, her face growing hotter by the second, “I do
love
them.”