Faking It

  He grinned a little to himself, thinking of Nadine’s curly hair and pale blue eyes; clearly she was somebody who swam in Betty’s gene pool. And Gwen, too. If you lined them up, all three of them with those weird eyes, they’d look like an outtake from Children of the Damned.

  “So I’ve met your granddaughter,” Davy said to Gwen, as they reached the top of the second set of stairs. “When can I meet your daughter?”

  “When you’ve had time to rest,” Gwen said without looking back. “My daughters can wear on a person.”

  More than one, Davy thought, and almost ran into Gwen, who’d stopped on the stairs above him.

  “How’d you know I have daughters?” she asked him.

  “Well, Nadine had to come from somewhere.”

  “Maybe I had a son.”

  “Lucky guess,” Davy said.

  Gwen did not look appeased, but she went up the next flight of stairs and gestured to the door on her left. “Four B.”

  Davy put the key in the lock and turned it, but before he could go in, the door to 4A opened and a ghost stood in the doorway, arms akimbo.

  “Dorcas,” Gwen said, smiling brightly. “This is Davy Dempsey, your new neighbor. Davy, this is Dorcas Finster.”

  Dorcas was tall, thin, patrician-looking, and smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, but mostly she was white: short white hair, dead-white skin, huge white artist’s smock. An equally white cat twined around her ankles and then sat down on the landing.

  “And Ariadne,” Gwen said, nodding to the cat.

  “Nice to meet you, Dorcas,” Davy said, not sure it was.

  Dorcas looked him up and down. She did not have pale blue eyes, Davy noticed, which was some relief. She shook her head. “Watch out for Louise,” she said, and shut her door. Ariadne sat on the landing, unperturbed about being stranded.

  “Louise?” Davy said to Gwen. “Who’s Louise?”

  “Dorcas likes to be colorful,” Gwen said, and Davy looked at her in disbelief. “So there’s your room.”

  The apartment held a shabby blue couch, a table painted in blue stripes, two blue chairs, and through an archway, a bed covered in a blue-and-purple crazy quilt with a framed sampler over it. When he opened the door next to the bed, he found a small bathroom with a shower. The place was small, shabby, clean, close to Clea, and even closer to Betty. “Perfect,” Davy told Gwen, who looked around at the room to see what she’d missed.

  “You’re easy to please,” Gwen said, heading for the door. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “I certainly will,” Davy said, as she shut the door, thinking, Send up your daughters, I think I met one of them last night. He dropped his bag on the floor and sat on the bed, expecting the rattle of ancient bed springs as he bounced on it and hitting a solid mattress instead. Bless you, Gwennie, he thought and then wondered again what he’d said to her to put her off. The bed quilt distracted him, and he tried to make sense of the pattern, a crazy quilt with lots of yellow lopsided diamonds lined with sharp white triangles that looked like teeth. Which meant that either he was deeply disturbed or the quilt maker was.

  He got up to unpack his bag and glanced at the sampler. It was worked in blues and greens, neat rows of alphabets and numbers and a scene of a house flanked by two trees. Davy looked closer at the lettering:

  “Gwen Goodnight. Her Work. 1979.”

  He looked at the blues and the purples in the quilt and then back to the blues and greens in the sampler. There was something around the base of the trees in the sampler, and he leaned in again to see it.

  Wolves. Little purple wolves with tiny, sharp white triangle teeth.

  Gwen was definitely Betty’s mother.

  He unpacked his duffel and went out to reconnoiter Clea’s basement windows, eat lunch, and call Simon, who was suspiciously absent. By the time Davy got back to the gallery, it was afternoon, and he stretched out on the bed to consider his situation and fell asleep. He woke up when someone knocked on the door.

  When he opened it, Betty stood there, holding out a stack of towels. “Gwennie thought you—” she said, and then her eyes widened, and he yanked her into the room.

  She tripped and lurched into him, and he stumbled backward and caught her as she lost her balance. She said, “Ouch!” and he slapped his hand over her mouth and pulled her with him onto the bed.

  “Okay, we’ve been here before,” he said to her, keeping his hand over her mouth as he pinned her to the quilt. “Unless you want everybody in this place to know you’re a burglar, keep your voice down.” She glared at him over his hand, and he said in a more conversational tone, “No kicking. No biting. And don’t have an asthma attack.”

  She brought her knee up and he rolled to avoid her, and caught sight of Dorcas through the open door, watching them, as unperturbed as Ariadne. Tilda shoved him away and herself off the bed with one motion, and stood out of arm’s reach, looking frantic. “How did you get here? How did you find me? What are you doing here?”

  “Renting a room?” Davy said.

  “No you’re not,” she said and shot out the door. He went after her, but she was fast on her feet, and Ariadne got in his way, so he didn’t catch her until they were on the ground floor.

  “This,” Betty said, as she fell through a door with him right behind her, “is the guy from last night.”

  Three people stared at him: Gwen, a pretty little blonde who looked a lot like Nadine, and a tall blond man who had clearly decided to dislike him on sight. Behind them, Steve the dog eyed him warily in front of a huge pink-and-orange bubbler jukebox playing some woman singing “I’m into Something Good.”

  “Hi,” Davy said, not sure what to do next.

  “You rented the room to a thief,” Betty said to Gwen.

  “Actually, I’m not a thief,” Davy said.

  “Oh.” Gwen nodded. “I knew there was something wrong with you.”

  “You’re the burglar in the closet.” The little blonde dimpled at him.

  “The guy who stole the wrong painting?” the tall guy said, hostile as hell.

  “The burglar thing was a one-time deal,” Davy told the little blonde.

  “Evict him,” Betty said to Gwen. “Refund his rent.”

  “We could use him,” the blonde said, and Davy thought, Whatever you want, honey.

  Then the other shoe dropped. “Wrong painting?” Davy said.

  The little blonde held out her hand. “I’m Eve.”

  I’m Adam. “I’m Davy.” He took her hand. “Very pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m Nadine’s mama,” she went on, more wholesome than he’d thought possible in a woman over twenty. “And Vilma’s sister.”

  “And this is Andrew, Nadine’s father,” Gwen said pointedly.

  Damn, Davy thought and let go of Eve’s hand. He nodded to Andrew who did not nod back, which made sense since he’d been ogling Andrew’s wife.

  “And you know Tilda,” Gwen said.

  “Tilda?” Davy said, turning back to Betty, starting to grin. “As in Matilda?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice like ice.

  Davy shook his head. “And you got mad when I called you Betty.”

  “I didn’t get mad,” she began. “I—”

  “How important is it that we get the painting back?” Andrew said to Tilda, and Tilda abandoned Davy in a nanosecond to focus on him.

  “Very important,” Tilda said. “But I can do it.”

  Andrew shook his head at her. “No. You stay out of there. Let this guy do it.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Davy said. “But no.”

  “No?” Eve looked crushed. “Can’t you wait to go to Australia?”

  “What?” Davy said.

  “Nadine said you were on your way—”

  “Oh.” Davy shook his head. “No, it’s not Australia.”

  It would have been fun to comfort Eve, but Andrew already didn’t like him. “I stole you a painting already, remember?” Davy said to Tilda. “Everything
you asked for, square board, night sky, stars ...”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Gwen said, her voice fair. “They do look—”

  “I said a city scene,” Tilda said. “The one you stole had cows in it.” Her tone was not warm.

  “Be nice, Tilda,” Eve said. “Describe the one you want him to steal and send him after it, and all our problems will be over.”

  “Honey,” Davy said to Eve, “if I could steal another painting, I would, just for you, but I can’t get back in there.”

  “Why not?” Tilda said, and he transferred his attention back to her.

  “Because there may be people in the house,” he said. “And I have recently learned that’s a very bad idea.”

  “So if there weren’t any people in the house, you could do it?” Gwen sounded as if she were heading for something, and Davy focused on her.

  “Yes,” Davy said.

  Behind them, the jukebox changed records and someone who was not Linda Ronstadt began to sing, “You’re No Good.”

  “Because I might be able to get them out of that house,” Gwen said. “Mason wants to look at the files. If we take out all the Hodge files first, I could invite him over, and Clea would follow him to keep an eye on him, and he could shuffle through the records as much as he wanted. And his house would be empty.”

  Tilda rounded on Davy, switching tactics so fast he was surprised she didn’t leave skid marks. “You didn’t get what you wanted, either. You could go in and get the painting and whatever—”

  “No.” Davy stared her down. How Eve’s pale blue eyes could be so sweet, and Tilda’s same blue eyes so icy was beyond him.

  “Why not?” Tilda said.

  “Because I’m not letting four complete strangers send me off to commit a crime for them,” Davy said. “That would leave me pretty exposed, don’t you think?”

  “You can trust us,” Eve said earnestly.

  “You, maybe,” Davy told her. “But your sister has conflicted feelings for me. She’s tried to maim me several times now, so ratting me out to the cops wouldn’t bother her at all. She goes with me.”

  “It’s okay,” Tilda said to Gwen. “I looked in most of the rooms already, it’ll only take a few minutes. I checked every place but Clea’s closet and the third floor.”

  “You didn’t check the closet?” Davy said.

  “I was attacked when I tried,” Tilda said.

  “Because I didn’t look there, either,” he said. “I found the cows on the next floor up. Big room, full of wrapped and packed paintings. I took the first one I saw that was the right size and shape and had stars.”

  “I would have done the same thing,” Eve said, nodding at him, and Davy thought, What a sweetheart.

  “So it’s probably in her closet.” Tilda took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

  “I’ll call Mason,” Gwen said and headed for the gallery.

  Davy smiled at Eve, and Andrew took her arm.

  “We have things to do,” Andrew said, keeping an eye on Davy as he dragged Eve from the room.

  Davy turned to look at Tilda, now standing all alone in front of the jukebox, eyeing him as though he were something hissing the dog had dragged in.

  “So, Betty,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s get to know each other.”

  “Oh, hell,” Tilda said, and collapsed onto the couch.

  Chapter 5

  THE LAST OF “you’re no good” tailed off, and Davy looked around to see what he’d gotten himself into. It was a medium-sized room filled to capacity by a huge old leather sofa and an equally huge old walnut desk that looked as though it might have once been valuable. They flanked the jukebox and a large round oak table with beat-up, mismatched chairs that didn’t look valuable at all, everything including Steve the dog sitting on a very beautiful and very worn Oriental rug.

  “Cash flow problem?” Davy said to Tilda.

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for me,” Tilda said. “It’s that I think it’s creepy that you know where I live.” She frowned at him, her blue eyes cold behind her bug glasses, her Kewpie-doll mouth flattened to a tense line.

  “I followed you home last night,” Davy said, and went over to a row of photos on the wall.

  “I’m supposed to be reassured by that?” Tilda said as he looked at the array of school portraits and holiday snapshots. “You stalked me.”

  “That’ll teach you to neck in closets,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something with files?”

  She was quiet behind him for a minute and he tensed, but then he heard a chair scrape as if somebody had yanked it across the floor and then a file drawer open, and he went back to the pictures, fairly sure she wasn’t going to attack him.

  The pictures must have been up in no particular order since there was one of an angelic-looking blonde baby next to one of three teenage girls in fifties bubble hair and big skirts, leaning together with their chins out, over a pen scrawl that said “The Rayons.” One looked like Eve, but that couldn’t be, she was much too young to have been a teen in the fifties, and on the other side—

  “My God, you’re wearing a poodle skirt and big hair in this picture,” he said, turning to look at Tilda. “How old are you?”

  “None of your business,” Tilda said, bent over a card catalog. Steve glared at Davy from her lap. “Get away from my family.”

  “There’s no reason to be bitchy,” Davy said. “If you’d told me your name when I asked nicely, I wouldn’t have had to stalk you.”

  “It was a high school talent show.” Tilda slammed the drawer and opened the next one. “Nineteen eighty-five. Retro kitsch.”

  “And your talent was ...”

  “Singing. And no, I’m not very good at it.”

  “The Rayons?”

  She took a deep breath. “Gwennie raised us on girl group music like the Chiffons. You know, this is really creepy, having you here.”

  “Vilma, you frenched me in the dark, and now you’re upset I followed you home?”

  “You didn’t follow me home for that,” Tilda said, looking at him over her glasses. “You’re up to something.”

  “You know me well.” Davy went back to the pictures. “Who’s the third girl? Louise?”

  The silence behind him was deafening.

  “Louise?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Davy said. “Dorcas warned me about Louise. Who is she?”

  “My... cousin,” Tilda said. “She works with Andrew at the Double Take. She’s not here very often. She doesn’t live here.” She was close to babbling, which meant she was lying. Again.

  “What’s the Double Take?”

  “Andrew’s club,” Tilda said. “The floor show is impersonators, all kinds, and people come dressed up like other people, and there’s a Karaoke Night on Tuesdays that really ...” Her voice trailed off as if she’d realized she was talking too much. “You should go there sometime,” she finished. “Nobody there is what they seem to be, either.”

  He turned back to the Rayons photo. “Louise doesn’t look much like you and Eve.”

  “That’s not her,” Tilda said. “That’s Andrew.”

  “No, the girl in the middle.” Davy looked closer. It was Andrew. A teenage Andrew in big hair and a puffy skirt, but still Andrew, looking prettier than either Eve or Tilda. “Oh. He makes a really good-looking girl.”

  “He makes a really good-looking guy,” Tilda said.

  “So, does your sister know you have a thing for her husband?” Davy asked.

  “Had,” Tilda said.

  “No, it’s still there.” Davy moved down to look at a more recent picture of Andrew, this time dressed as Marilyn Monroe.

  “She had a husband,” Tilda was saying. “They’re divorced. And I had a thing, but it’s over.”

  “I don’t think so,” Davy said, moving on to one of Na-dine’s grade-school pictures. Very cute. “Why’d they get divorced?” He went down the line of photographs until he found their we
dding picture. “Did you get grabby?”

  Tilda opened the last file drawer. “Andrew fell in love with somebody else.”

  “Andrew has no brains,” Davy said, looking at Eve, smiling like a dewy angel, her face fresh and clean under her blonde curls.

  “Andrew is gay,” Tilda said, “and Jeff is a great guy.”

  “Andrew didn’t know this before he married Eve?”

  “He says not. He says it was God’s way of making sure there was a Nadine.” She took a card out of the last drawer and tipped Steve gently to the floor as she stood up. “That’s it for here. I have to go downstairs. You are not invited, and you can’t stay here.”

  “Tell me about this painting.” Davy swung around to confront her. “Why are we stealing it?”

  “You do not need to know that,” Tilda said, starting past him.

  “Oh, yes,” Davy said, catching her arm. “If I’m stealing it, I need some information. Who painted it?”

  Tilda took a deep breath and then turned those eyes on him, glaring with intent.

  “What?” he said.

  “You know,” she said coldly, “there are people who are afraid to cross me.”

  “And what a shame none of them are here,” Davy said. “Who painted it?”

  She sighed. “Scarlet Hodge.”

  Davy looked at her, dumbfounded. “Somebody named a helpless baby Scarlet Hodge?”

  Tilda pulled her arm out of his grasp.

  “Of course, Gwennie named you Matilda,” he said, reflecting.

  “My father named me Matilda,” Tilda said. “After my great-grandmother, so show some respect.”

  “Uh-huh. And your middle name?”

  “Veronica.” When the silence stretched out, Tilda added, “After Ronnie Spector. ‘Be My Baby.’”

  “You have my sympathies,” Davy said.

  “It was almost Artemesia Dionne,” Tilda said. “You may keep your sympathies.”

  “Okay,” Davy said. “So Scarlet painted them and Clea bought one. Where’d the other one come from?”