The Truth Hurts

  “One of those doors leads to another room,” I suggest to Steve.

  Although he hasn’t said so, I’m positive he has never been in a bed-and-breakfast lodging, any more than he had previously flown in an airplane. It’s possible this is his first hotel room of any sort. If so he’s starting high up the line; these are luxury accommodations complete with white eyelet pillow shams, white terry cloth robes hanging outside the armoire, and bottled water at bedside, the kind of inn that most women adore, but where burly men like Steve feel ill at ease. As I watch him move carefully around the room, opening doors, he does look rather like an ox in a linen closet.

  It may be beautiful, but it’s old, and everything creaks—the wide wood planks beneath the area rugs, the stairs we climbed, the doors he’s jerking open—not because the hinges need oil, but simply from the age of the wood. (I recall the ashtray tucked under the ledge of the reception desk and hope that our landlady doesn’t smoke in bed.) The furniture probably creaks, too. I envision the delicate chairs collapsing under his bulk every time he sits in one.

  The first door Steve creaks open reveals a small closet, the second one opens onto a huge bathroom, all porcelain and tile.

  He pulls open the final door.

  My cousin opens it from the other side.

  25

  Marie

  “Nathan?”

  I don’t know which of the three of us looks more startled—me, to find my cousin is here, Steve to confront a stranger in my suite—one so good-looking, tanned, and stylish he could pass for a movie star, no less—or Nathan, who has run smack up against the scary bulk of my bodyguard.

  “Nathan! What are you doing here?”

  “Who are you ?” Steve demands of him, looking ready to kill.

  “Are you kidding?” My cousin looks from me to Steve, then back again. “What do you mean, who am I? What do you mean, what am I doing here? I’m her cousin, asshole.”

  “Steve, it’s okay. This is my cousin Nathan from L.A.” And to Nate I repeat, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Very funny,” he says, moving cautiously away from Steve and closer to me. Behind him I see a second bedroom, smaller than the one we’re in, but just as pretty. “You send me an E-mail and tell me to get my ass to Sebastion, and I drop everything and pay full price to get here today and then Rocky Graziano here scares the shit out of me, and you want to know what I’m doing here? Which one of us has lost our mind, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  He’s close enough to reach for me, and with a grin, he does.

  I hug him fiercely, and we exchange cousinly smooches, but then I push myself back from him.

  “I didn’t tell you to come, Nate.”

  “Yeah, you did. You told me to come here and to get one suite for both of us.”

  “No, I swear I didn’t, but I think I can guess who did.” Glancing over at Steve, who is still glowering at the entrance to the second bedroom, I say, “Come on. Let’s sit down, and I’ll tell you about it.” I lead him over to the bay window and make him sit there with me. Steve comes only as close as the four-poster bed and takes a seat on the edge of it, as if he’s leery of getting any closer to us. But he leans forward with his elbows on his knees, to watch and listen to us.

  “Uh, Nathan, this is Steve Orbach. Steve, this is my cousin, Nathan Montgomery.”

  “We’ve met,” says my cousin, wryly.

  My cousin Nathan has a heart of gold; truly, he’s the kind of guy for whom other people would celebrate his good luck if only he had any, apart from being born looking like F. Scott Fitzgerald. But here’s this beautiful, sweet-natured man who is unlucky in his parents, his love life, and most of all, his career. Because of that, I know there is a certain conversation we have to get out of the way before we can go any further.

  “How’s your karma?” My lifetime of experience with Nathan has taught me that it’s always a good thing to find out as soon as possible what tragedy has recently befallen him. That’s so I don’t feel like a self-centered jerk after I’ve chattered on for an hour while he listens kindly, only to find out when I do give him a chance to speak that his cat died yesterday and he was just washing out the litter box when I called. Thursday, when I phoned him from my car, was an exception, an emergency, and so we have some catching up to do.

  “Sucks as bad as ever,” he says, sounding casual, like somebody who’s used to misfortune.

  “Oh, dear. Well, tell me the worst of it.”

  “Now? The whole sad litany?”

  Nate knows this routine, too, and he’ll play his part until we run through it. This is our script, in which the facts change, but the general tenor, unfortunately, does not.

  “Every sad morsel,” I assure him. I glance over at the man sitting on the bed. If Steve’s face weren’t so naturally impassive, I’m sure it would be reflecting disbelief right about now. How can we talk about anything else, he must be thinking, when lives are at stake? He doesn’t know Nate, that’s all I can say. “You still dating that actress person?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “She left me for another actress person.”

  “Oh, Nathan. Are you sad? Should I pretend I’m sorry?”

  “You never did like her,” he accuses. “It’s okay, I’ve had distractions.”

  “Oh, dear, that sounds bad.”

  “It is. Marie, my agent died!”

  I grab for one of his hands. “No! Not again! I mean—”

  “Yeah, different agent. Same fate.”

  I have to laugh, as people who love him always do. He’s so damned funny about being cursed. “You’re not joking, right?”

  “This is the problem with writing comedy. People can’t tell when to take me seriously.”

  “Oh, stop it. But that’s terrible, Nate! I’m so sorry.”

  He writes screenplay after screenplay and they get “optioned,” which is Hollywood-speak for “going nowhere,” and he earns thousands of dollars from them. But in the ten years he’s been trying to get a film produced, not a single script of his has made it to the big or the little screen. I don’t know how he keeps going, but he does. Sometimes I worry that my success must stare him in the face like an evil queen in a mirror, though he has never once made me feel that way.

  And now his agent’s dead. Poor Nate.

  It always seems so ironic to me that Nathan looks the very picture of success, much more than I do, but then he claims that’s what you have to do in Hollywood. In the New York publishing world that I inhabit, they’re accustomed to writers looking like ordinary people, or like tweedy college professors, or even slobs. In this as in many things, it’s different in L.A.

  Today, my cousin is elegant in soft summer slacks and a short-sleeved silk shirt, both a gorgeous pale gray, with soft gray loafers that look as if they had to have been made by a little Italian shoemaker in a small shop on the Ponte Vecchio. By comparison, I’m rumpled and gritty in travel slacks and shirt. I’ve often thought that Nathan missed his calling in Hollywood by about fifteen years, because he might have made a beautiful child star. Instead, he’s a ne’er-do-well, grown-up screenwriter. It’s funny, I’m the one with the Hollywood screenwriter grandparents, but it’s Nathan who followed in their footsteps, though he’s no blood relation to them, but only to me and my mother. When I look at him, I wonder if I’m seeing a bit of her. But then, I wonder that, too, whenever I look at myself in mirrors.

  Knowing better, I still hope for the best in this latest bad situation of his. “Did she leave you with one of her associates?”

  “Well, she probably would have, but it was that associate who killed her.”

  “You’re making this up!”

  “Okay.” He grins. “That part I made up. But my agent really did die. And no, the sucky answer is no, she didn’t leave me with an associate, because it was a one-agent shop—who else could I get in L.A.? No big agency will have me. I think her poodle inherited me. I’ve finally done it, I?
??ve officially got a dog of an agent.”

  “Oh, God.” I have to laugh, though I want to cry for him.

  “But, hey, it’s a really smart poodle. Hell, it can’t be any less successful with my stuff than she was.”

  “And so, anything happening with your scripts?”

  “Yeah, well, like a farmer who is land rich, cash poor, I am option rich, movie poor. I’m all hat and no pony. All scepter and no crown. All crust and no filling. All—”

  “All talent and no audience.” I refuse to laugh at his schtick when it degrades his own ability. “No audience yet, that is. Yet.”

  “No sightings of the Loch Ness monster. Yet.”

  “What did she die of, Nate?”

  “Old age. Sitting by telephones waiting for producers to call. It’ll kill you.”

  “I believe it. Listen, Nathan,” I say, taking his other hand, too.

  “Excuse me,” Steve interrupts from the bed. “I’m going outside.”

  Apparently, he’s had all he can take of this brother-sister act.

  We watch until the door closes behind him.

  “Who’s Bruto?” Nathan immediately demands. “Where’s Franklin?”

  “Franklin’s fine, he’s back home in Bahia, taking care of business and his family. Steve is my bodyguard.”

  When he sees that my mouth quivers on that word, he turns my hands over so that now he’s the one who’s doing the holding. As long as Nate’s on this earth, I can never ever claim that nobody loves me and that I might as well go eat worms.

  “So it’s true,” he says, looking worried, “and it’s bad.”

  I can only nod while I try to keep from crying. “It got worse last night, Nathan. This Paulie Barnes sent me an account of what he claims is the murder of my mom and dad.”

  My cousin’s mouth drops open, closes, opens again.

  “You look so flummoxed,” I tell him, half-smiling, half-laughing, “it’s almost funny.”

  “What does he say, for God’s sake? Who does he say did it? Do you believe him, Marie?”

  “I’ll let you read it, and you tell me what you think.”

  “Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to you, Marie, they’re only supposed to happen to me. I thought I had the exclusive contract on disasters. When you lost your parents, that was supposed to use up your entire quota of calamity for one lifetime.”

  I find a smile for him again. “I forgot to read the fine print.”

  “I’ll say. Wait a minute! Did you say Orbach? Wasn’t that the name of the guy in your last book, the one you saved from the death penalty?”

  “I wasn’t the only one who helped him—”

  “It’s him ? Let me get this straight, Marie. You protect yourself from one psycho by inviting another one to live with you? Are you crazy ? Have you lost your fucking mind ?”

  “He’s not a psycho, Nate.”

  “He murdered his mother.”

  “Yeah, well, she had it coming.”

  Nathan laughs a little wildly. “Well, aren’t we getting relativistic in our old age?”

  “Nate, he’s okay, trust me, okay?”

  He shakes his head, looking disgusted with me.

  “Look,” I argue, “I can understand why somebody who doesn’t know Steve might hesitate, but he’s tough and he understands the criminal mind and he’d do anything for me.” A niggling thought sneaks into my brain: actually nobody really does know Steven Orbach all that well.

  Suddenly Nate is pulling me over into another warm, hard hug.

  “God, this stinks, Marie. This is awful, even worse than dead agents.”

  “Don’t be silly.” I laugh a little against his shoulder. “Nothing’s worse than a dead agent.”

  Nate laughs, too. “Well, that’s true. But this is pretty bad.”

  I pull back from him. “But none of this explains why you’re here, too.”

  “You sent me an E-mail, or I thought you did.”

  “What did I say in it?”

  “You said, Dear Nate, I need your help. Please meet me at the Southern Inn in Sebastion tomorrow.”

  “You sweetie! You dropped everything to come.”

  “Of course, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. Why didn’t you call me and ask me about it?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to, remember? We were trying to hide the connection between us, to protect poor little Deborah. Who is a sweetie, by the way.”

  “I thought you’d like her. What do you think of Erin?”

  His expression turns wry. “Sweet is not a word I’d use to describe that woman. Interesting, sexy—”

  “No, Nathan,” I say, alarmed. “You don’t want to mess with her.”

  He grins at me. “You have no idea what I want to mess with, Cousin.”

  I make a face at him. “Well, don’t even tell me.”

  “So I guess we think your Paulie Barnes sent me the E-mail?”

  “I guess we do. Do you remember the address on it?”

  “No, sorry, although I do remember thinking it wasn’t your usual one. I thought maybe you’d switched servers, or something. So we think he sent it, but we don’t know why?”

  “We haven’t a clue.”

  “There’s one thing to be said for it.”

  “There is? What?”

  “We haven’t been in Sebastion together since we were kids,” Nate comments. “And now we’re back.”

  “Is that supposed to be the good news?” He laughs. “I don’t remember this town at all.”

  “You were too little.”

  “You weren’t exactly large, yourself. What do you remember?”

  “Practically nothing.” I stare out at the branches of the nearest oak tree. “I just think I remember things, because of what other people have told me.”

  “Like what, Marie?”

  “Like about my mother and my father. I have some notes I took from a conversation I had with a woman named Eulalie Fisher.” I turn and look at him. “Do you want to read them?”

  BETRAYAL

  By Marie Lightfoot

  —•—

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  She lifted a slim silver case from the antique table beside her, and opened it. The first time I ever met Eulalie Fisher was the first time I saw her smoke. I tried to hide my surprise at the sight of the pristine white cigarettes lined up in a single row within it. “I allow myself one a day,” she told me, “never with a drink, and I never allow myself more than one drink on any occasion. If I drank more than one, I would probably smoke. If I smoked more than one, I might drink. I don’t suppose you smoke at all?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Thought so.” She plucked one out with her fingernails, clicked the case shut, and put that down, and then picked up a little silver lighter, and lit up. She took a delicate drag, then gazed at me curiously through the bit of white smoke that hung between us now. “Did you ever?”

  “Cigarettes, no. Drink, yes.”

  “Um. Your mama smoked like a chimney, course your daddy did, too, course who didn’t back then? In many ways it does seem to me that life was a lot more fun back then, at least for the rich white folks like us. Nowadays there areso many belts to strap us in and bags to suffocate us, and helmets to keep the wind from blowing in anybody’s hair. So many dreadsome deaths to fear. Not that people didn’t go on ahead and die back then, and often dreadfully, but it was easier not to have to worry so dang much about it all of the time.”

  “It’s not much fun anymore? Even for rich, white folks?”

  She smiled a bit. “Not so much, but at least now there are more rich black folks to share the misery. I suppose we have to call that progress.” She took another delicate drag, closed one eye against the smoke. “Has anybody ever—I mean really ever described your mama to you?”

  “Well, I—I don’t know, if you put it like that.”

  “You’ve seen pictures.”

  “Sure.”

  “What did you think?”

/>   “Of her? I guess, pretty and she looks like fun.”

  “You don’t know the half of that,”she tells me, arching her eyebrows in emphasis. “Sit down and I’ll explain your mama to you. No picture can ever capture any of us and certainly not Lyda Montgomery Folletino. What I can tell you is that most of the boys and men in Sebastion were in love with her. She was a natural-born flirt, not so serious as you are, and of course, males respond to that. Most of the time, Lyda didn’t mean nothin’ by it, but I do believe she paid a high price for it in the end.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, because it encouraged her to believe she was invincible. I would bet you any amont of money that up to her dying day Lyda believed to her toes that no man alive would ever, could ever possibly hurt her.”

  I thought that over, trying to relate. “Did it make her—daring?”

  “Daring! I should say! A thing like that, a conviction that you are safe in the company of men, will make a girl takerisks she oughtn’t. It’ll fool her into thinking every man’s a bit of a fool in general and a fool for her in particular. I don’t believe it will give her a high opinion of women, either.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because she’ll observe that other women aren’t so daring, she’ll draw the conclusion that they’re timid little mice by comparison with herself, and she might begin to preen a bit.”

  “You say she didn’t think any man would hurt her.”

  “I believe that’s so, yes.”

  “Do you think that she hurt any of them?”

  “Darling, of course she did, how could she not, a girl like that?”

  “Eulalie—” She had invited me to call her that instead of Mrs. Fisher. “You’re not intimating, are you, that my mother had affairs?”

  “Before or after she was married, do you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled slightly through the smoke. “Yes is your answer, yes is mine. Would you mind very much?”