Kiss of Fate

by Deirdre Dore

  When he saw Brent, he smiled, flashing a pristine set of dentures, and waved him over.

  “Brent,” the old man called, “it’s been forever, man.” He stood with the help of the cane and embraced Brent as best he could.

  Brent hugged him back, bending down to meet the shorter man, seeming genuinely pleased. When they separated, the old black man glanced at her and his face froze, jaw dropping a little as he took in her face.

  “As I live and breathe,” he said. “I can see your momma in your face.”

  Raquel felt her smile stiffen, but she kept it on her face with an effort. “It’s nice to meet you, sir. I’m Raquel.”

  “Raquel.” He drew the name out so it had a life of its own. “Goddamn. I remember you put that in the documentary, Brent, but I never expected she would look so much like Belle.” Raquel thought about pointing out that she was standing right there, and that her mother didn’t deserve all this adoration, but she thought the better of it. She had a feeling that in this crowd, her mother had been appreciated, maybe even loved.

  “Well, come on, come on. Have a seat, here. Tristan, go get Gloria Belle’s daughter a drink. Brent, you want anything?”

  “Not right now.” Brent sat in another of the hard orange chairs, swinging his camera bag off his arm.

  “Raquel, what’ll you have to drink, honey?”

  Raquel didn’t want anything, either, but knew it wasn’t polite to refuse. Brent could get away with it, being a Yankee, but she couldn’t.

  “I’ll take a water, if you don’t mind.”

  “A water?” The old man sounded surprised, but he nodded to Tristan. “Hurry back with that water, and bring me another beer.”

  Tristan left to get the drinks, and they all settled into their seats, the rest of the crowd in the small eating area gathering at a respectful distance, their eyes bright and curious.

  Raquel didn’t like being so exposed, or having so many eyes on her. Her heart was racing a little, her eyes flicking to the back exit, to the bodies that stood in her way, to the weapons they had poorly concealed in their loose clothing. They wouldn’t get out of here in one piece, if it came to that. She wanted to curse Brent for getting them into this situation, but the truth was that she would have come by herself despite the danger. She’d heard of Bean, now that she thought about it, the “grandpa” of this area. An older man who handled much of the commerce—legal and otherwise. She wasn’t surprised that he’d known her mother, but she was surprised that Brent had found him. She supposed she shouldn’t have been. Brent had interviewed everyone connected to Gloria Belle when he’d made his documentary. Everyone. Even her, for all the good it had done him.

  “So,” Bean said, rubbing his ancient hands together as if they hurt. “You’re making a documentary about roller rinks? That right?”

  “That’s it,” Brent acknowledged.

  Raquel didn’t stare at him, but she thought about kicking his leg under the small table. What the hell?

  “Well, that’ll be fine, just fine. Why don’t you get the camera out and start recording. I’ll tell ya all about this place.”

  Brent opened the bag slowly so as not to make anybody nervous, his big hands removing the camera gently and unfolding the neck strap. He secured it and removed the lens cap, turning the camera on and checking what looked like readings complex enough to run the space shuttle.

  “Come up in the world, haven’t ya?” The old man nodded at the camera, smiling. “When we met last time, you had that old thing with the videotape. You had hundreds of ’em in that Jeep of yours.”

  “I’m still driving it,” Brent admitted.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” The old man laughed.

  “So, Bean . . .” Brent held up the camera. “Tell me how long you’ve been coming to this roller rink?”

  Bean started telling a story about the sixties, about how he and some of his friends had started hanging out in the rink after school. Somewhere in the middle of the story, Tristan returned with the drinks and sat down next to Raquel.

  “Thanks,” she said, accepting the Styrofoam cup of water.

  “Welcome,” the kid replied, turning his body slightly so that it was clear his attention was on her and not on Bean’s story. Brent kept filming, encouraging Bean with questions about names, details. He was good at that, getting people to describe things.

  Raquel matched Tristan’s movement, subtly distancing herself from the conversation between Bean and Brent, noticing that all eyes were on the camera. She and Tristan might as well have been invisible.

  “So.” The kid sprawled in the chair, but he kept his head ducked a little when he spoke to her. “Bean said I was supposed to tell you something I saw a couple weeks ago, something kinda bad.”

  He was talking in a quiet voice, but not whispering, and he was smiling and looking at her like he was playing, sidling up on her blind side.

  Raquel wasn’t sure if the flirting was an act or a cover, probably both, but she had to admire the brilliance of Brent’s plan. He’d boldly gone in, saying exactly who he was, and the whole time he’d set it up so that Raquel could get information without making it obvious. Of course, for all she knew, he actually intended to make a documentary about roller rinks. She didn’t doubt he found the subject interesting. As far as she could tell, the man found everything interesting.

  “Yeah,” Raquel replied, and faked a small pout. “What’d you see?”

  “There’s a lot of old houses in my neighborhood. There’s this one that I seen sometimes, where this thug Manbo T goes to get his shit, you know?”

  Raquel nodded. A distribution house, where the local dealers picked up the supply that they would sell in smaller pieces.

  “Well, anyway, like I said, a couple weeks ago, I saw these two big white dudes hauling what looks like a body out of a car. She don’t look all the way awake; one of them is kind of holding her upright, but her wig was over her face. She’s skinny and dressed like a hooker, but I hear her sayin’ something—not sure what—and it sounds like ‘Gloria Belle.’ They took her in the house.”

  “What’d you do?” Raquel took a sip of her water to hide her intense interest.

  He grinned, a little slyly, and spread his arms as if to say, I’m the shit.

  Raquel was ready to agree that he was the shit, if he gave her some clue, any clue, to what happened to Gloria Belle.

  “I seen these two dudes before, but earlier, when I was visiting my girl across the street, I saw this other big white guy pull up in some shit that a white girl from the suburbs would drive, like a Nissan or something, and he gets out and goes in the house. I’d never seen that dude before, or I didn’t think so. He was fat, real fat.”

  “You see his face?” She smiled brightly at him. Across the table, Bean was laughing loudly at something Brent had said.

  “Yeah, I saw it, but he was just a fat white dude. He was losing his hair, but shit.”

  “What about a license plate?”

  “Yeah, I saw one a those, but it ain’t real. Looks like he switched it.”

  Raquel didn’t ask how he knew.

  “So you think this fat white guy in the Nissan maybe had something to do with Gloria Belle.”

  He shrugged and put his elbows on his knees. “The thing is, somethin’s fucked-up ’cause I know I rec’nized that guy, but I can’t say where, you know. It’s like mebbe I met him when I was high or somethin’.”

  “Yeah, that’ll do it,” Raquel agreed, and leaned in a little closer. “Can you tell me where this house is, Tristan?”

  He gave her a half smile and nodded. “Bean’s already givin’ it to Brent. He’s got it.”

  “Thanks.” She sat back a little but gave him a genuine smile. “I appreciate the help.”

  “No problem.” He sat back as well, nodding his head toward Brent. “You think he’s
really gonna do a document’ry about this place?”

  Raquel shrugged. “Probably. It sounds like something he’d make.”

  Raquel watched Brent. He was asking several young women wearing skates and brightly colored tights why they liked the skating rink. They seemed to have forgotten that he was a stranger to them, and they were talking and preening for the camera.

  The charade continued for a couple more hours, until Brent had talked to nearly everyone in the place. Raquel twitched restlessly as she watched him, wanting to head over to the address right away, but she knew they had to play the game for the sake of Bean and Tristan. Word got around too easily otherwise, and Raquel never forgot that she was a cop.

  Bean joined her at the rail, where she stood with a Coke, his long brown fingers loosely joined.

  “So, Ms. Raquel, do you like to skate?”

  Raquel shrugged. She and Tavey and Chris and Summer had gone skating in Rome once, when they were seven or so, for Tavey’s birthday.

  “You and Brent have been friends for a long time?” she asked.

  “Long time. He has a way of getting people to trust him. I always thought he’d a make a good politician, if he’d been of a mind, but thankfully for him, he chose this instead.”

  Raquel nodded. She could see Brent in a public office but couldn’t see him enjoying it. “You met when he filmed the documentary about my mother?”

  He shook his head. “We met a while before that. Gloria Belle would sing at this club I was running back then, the Lamplight Lounge, and she had quite a following. People came from all over to hear her sing. Rich people, privileged people”—he tilted his head, considered—“dangerous people. Her friend Charlie Collins would come to see her when they were both young. Sometimes he’d bring his friends. One of them, George Mills, was Brent’s uncle, and he just loved hearing Gloria Belle sing.”

  Raquel knew George Mills. He maintained a website about Fate, where he wrote a weekly blog about strange events that had occurred in the town. He even called Raquel, Tavey, and Chris the three Mistresses of Fate because of the way they’d kept looking for their missing friend. He was a strange bird, all right, but she hadn’t realized that he’d known Gloria Belle, hadn’t realized that he’d been connected to Fate long before he’d ever moved to town.

  “Have you seen George recently?” she wondered.

  “Nah, the Lamplight closed and Gloria Belle, well, she started doing her thing, you know.”

  Raquel knew very well. “She ever say anything to you about that, like what she and Charlie planned or anything?”

  “No, ma’am, she didn’t say a word about none of that, but she sure did love Charlie Collins. Woulda done anything for him,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I think people are worse for you than anything else.”

  Raquel didn’t disagree.

  8

  BRENT GLANCED AT Raquel sitting next to him in his Jeep. She looked tired, her eyes were dark circled and she kept blinking, but she gamely held on to her cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, her eyes focused on the house, which seemed empty. She’d suggested they wait another thirty minutes and go check to see if the door was locked . . . and she was a cop.

  It reminded Brent of the last time they’d done a stakeout together, when they’d watched Gloria Belle’s hideout right before she’d gotten kidnapped. They’d sat in his Jeep and watched Gloria Belle as she’d gone into a ramshackle old one-story house with a porch. She’d been dressed like a hooker and wearing a blond wig at the time. They’d intended to approach her, but then Raquel had seen her grandmother pull up and go into the house. Rather than confront them, he and Raquel had gone around the back to try to listen in on the conversation. They’d learned that Charlie Collins had been alive, at least in 1986, and that he’d been running drugs of some kind.

  Raquel glanced at him, her dark eyes reading the look on his face. “Don’t go there,” she warned him. “I don’t want to talk.”

  Brent snapped his mouth shut; the irony was priceless. He was a documentary filmmaker, and she didn’t want to talk. She hadn’t wanted to talk about her mother back then, and she didn’t want to talk about her feelings for him now. He was fascinated by a woman who didn’t want to share anything with him.

  He considered asking why she’d decided to stop sleeping with him, but he had a theory about that, a theory he intended to share with her one of these days. In the meantime, he intended to make it difficult for her to keep saying no to him.

  “Tell me about Summer,” he suggested.

  Raquel paused with her coffee cup halfway to her lips. She wet them, and Brent helplessly followed the movement with his eyes. God, she was beautiful. She’d stood out in that skating rink like a candle flame, her fine face and form matched by a sharp mind and a good heart. He liked her. Shit, he’d always liked her.

  “It’s been a long time since anyone’s asked me about Summer,” she said finally, and the grief was there in her voice, in the soft catch when she said Summer’s name. “She was my best friend, but she was more than that, too. Summer was my heart.”

  “When you were nineteen, and I asked you if I could talk to you about your mom, you want to know what I thought?”

  “What?”

  “I thought you were angry.”

  “I was angry.”

  He waved that off. “Not angry with me. A little angry with Gloria Belle, but mostly you just seemed angry at the world.”

  Raquel corrected him. “I was furious with you for what I saw as exploitation. You were using my mother’s drug habit to get yourself famous. I did not approve.”

  “No, you didn’t,” he agreed. “But you want to know something else?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I almost didn’t ask you a single question about your mother. I almost walked up to you and just asked you for a date.”

  Raquel raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Sorry, Brent, I’m not buying it.”

  “It was worth a shot.” He shrugged, looking out the window to hide his expression. It had been the truth. He’d thought she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, but so young, and so hurt. So he’d made a choice, his documentary or the girl. He knew what choice he’d make now if it came to it, now that he’d actually spent time with her, actually held her.

  His fingers twitched on the steering wheel, but he brought himself back to the conversation. “You were telling me about Summer,” he reminded her.

  She was scowling a little, but she seemed to want to talk to him, at least about this.

  “She was distracted,” Raquel said, “quieter than usual. I thought she was upset about something to do with her sister, Jane, and her new husband, Mark. Now we know why,” she muttered darkly.

  Brent closed his eyes and pictured it. “I’m not sleeping, I promise. Do you remember anything else about that time?”

  Her voice continued, “Chris’s father, Robert, was in some trouble. People were starting to talk about this scheme he had going to sell the old Cherokee Paper Mill as a golf resort. He didn’t present the idea to anyone in town, but apparently he was bilking out-of-state investors. I never heard anything about drugs, though.”

  “I mean, what do you remember, not what you were told later.”

  She didn’t say anything, and he glanced over at her.

  She was silent, staring out the window.

  “You can tell me, you know,” he assured her, but she just sent him a withering look.

  “That’s the voice you use on people, that’s what you tell them, and they just”—she waved a hand—“tell you everything.”

  They did. And she was going to. She wanted to, he was good at recognizing that as well.

  RAQUEL THOUGHT ABOUT it. She remembered being concerned about Summer, remembered the last walk they’d taken through the woods together, but it was like trying to see through a sheet of rain.
Had Summer really seemed strange? Had she really been otherworldly, magical? Or had Raquel been imagining things that weren’t there? Had Summer really said that she was looking for a man who was supposed to be dead? Had it been Charlie Collins?

  Raquel had learned a long time ago that while everyone in Fate believed that the Haven family had magic, no one thought it had anything to do with them. It was like the Havens were foreigners. As far as the town was concerned, the fact that they believed in magic made them strange, but as long as they stayed strange where they belonged and didn’t cause too much trouble, nobody had a problem with that. The citizens of Fate took great pride in being colorful.

  Raquel had also learned, sometimes the hard way, that everyone outside the town of Fate found the idea of magic patently ridiculous. She didn’t know if Brent felt the same way, but she wasn’t ready to reveal the magic of Summer, not yet.

  “It was a long time ago,” she said instead and left it at that.

  Of course he wouldn’t. “What’s your favorite thing about her?”

  Raquel felt herself smile without thinking about it, both at the memory of her friend and his use of the present tense. He made it sound like Summer was still here. But it had been so long, and she had trouble pointing to anything specific, mostly just that she’d been Summer, and Raquel had loved her.

  “She liked rain,” she remembered suddenly. “She taught us how to close our eyes and listen to all the different sounds the rain makes.”

  “She liked the sound of rain?” Brent seemed charmed.

  “Pretty obvious, I suppose,” Raquel murmured, “since she couldn’t see, but she was always showing us these other worlds we missed. She could tell a type of tree by the sound the rain made on the leaves.” Raquel thought about it for a moment and said something she’d never put into words before, something she knew to be true. “She taught us to be brave.”