Otis poured us each a cup of out of the bottomless Otis pot. “Seems like you might be a little bit late to the shoppin’ bus, girl. Especially that bus route you’re checkin’ out there. Louboutin is not for the recently financially demoted.”
There was a lot to ponder in that sentence. I sipped my coffee and pondered it.
Otis, you know I would never consciously stereotype anyone, particularly not you, but I would not have expected you and Christian to be acquainted.
This was true. I began again.
“Otis. I am reminded that you are a man of many surprises. So are you a fashion maven?”
I would have expected him to laugh. Or look offended.
He smiled that slow Otis smile I’d come to recognize as the presence of the True Otis. “Not what you’d expect from an overweight—formerly overweight—black, retired Cleveland cop?”
“Otis—”
“Allie. Cut that out. I know I’m the most unlikely fashion maven you ever met.”
I was nodding while trying to assimilate “fashion maven” into the vocabulary of the Otis who lived in my mind. I was picturing him at the first moment I ever saw him on the day he saved me from kidnapping and almost certain death.
To be perfectly candid, at that moment I was so busy watching my life flash in front of my eyes Otis registered mainly as a big, black, blue-uniformed blur. Truly, though, “fashion maven” would not have occurred to me, even if I had full access to my brain.
He brought his coffee around to my side of the island, sat next to me. Started scrolling, absently, down through the strappy sandals. Remembering.
“It was my mom got me interested in all that. She was smart, Allie. She wanted college so bad, but it wasn’t in the cards for her. My dad was Army because Army was a good, decent job for a guy like him in those days, but he ended up in ‘Nam after a while, and he didn’t come home from there. Not even in a box. MIA for a long time and then presumed dead.”
A tiny sympathetic sound got away from me, but Otis wasn’t having any. “Don’t. It’s not so sad anymore. I don’t remember him. He’d be in his seventies. She’s been gone a long time now too. Nobody is missing my daddy anymore.”
“That’s sad of itself, Otis.”
“I know. But I don’t dwell there. I don’t think he’d want me to. And I know she didn’t because she said as much.”
“Okay, then. Tell me more about how you got to be a fashion maven.”
“Yeah, well. My mother’s life was on hold for those MIA years. She went to beauty school so she could feed the two of us while we waited for him to be dead or be found, and eventually she had her own shop.
“I used to go there after school. Hang out until she was done for the day. That’s where I saw my first copy of Vogue. And Harper’s Bazaar. There were GQs too—though the few guys who got their hair cut there were not the GQ type—more Sports Illustrated. And there was always Ebony.
“I got to hand it to my mom, Allie. If I was interested in something and it wasn’t guns or drugs, she’d support me. She did not say ‘everyone will think you’re gay.’ She did say, ‘best not to discuss this with your friends at school.’ But I was already aware.
“She made a decent living, and I guess she had a good life after a while. She always was a big reader. She turned me onto all kinds of books and didn’t give me hard time, ever, about my choices. Even when I told her I was going to the Police Academy, which was really hard for her.” He paused, remembering, I assumed.
“Anyway. You can’t judge a book by its cover, Allie. You know? But my cover is a little more misleading than most.”
“What was her name, Otis?”
“Mae.”
We sat with that for a long moment.
He switched gears. All business. “Allie, you sell yourself short and you tell yourself that’s a virtue. Ain’t. You actually believe it’s a good thing Tom can’t see you. It’s time you gave that shit up.
“Okay. Let’s shop. We’ll do it online here. Then I’ll have Nordstrom pull the outfits and the shoes and the what-all you decide you like and then you can go try them on. I’ll lurk around in the “gentlemen’s waiting area” outside the dressing room and raise my eyebrows and nod my head, like they do.”
“Cool, Otis. The Nordstrom folks will think you’re my Sugar Daddy.”
He shook his head. Dropped his vowels down somewhere south of Birmingham.
“No, honey. I believe y’all already got yourself one of those. He’d sell the house to buy you some shoes. Now. Let’s go shoppin’.”
I believed the look on Otis’s face was relief that we all could dress up and go to a party without wearing bulletproof vests.
The dress we picked out was totally the prettiest, sexiest, twenty-five-hundred-dollar dry-clean-only dress I’d ever owned. From Day One, I thought of her as “Dry Clean Only.” The shoes didn’t suck either.
Chapter Fifty
Saturday, June 23
Cleveland Museum of Art
7:05 p.m.
Light. Color. Music. Solstice!
Tom, Otis, and I walked out the south entrance of the museum into a lush June evening at the center of a kaleidoscope. Projected geometric designs—shifting shapes, changing colors—chased themselves around the building’s Ionic columns and marble façade. Towering eerily-human balloon creatures swayed, hovering low to search the faces of the crowd with large, round, wistful eyes. The steps leading down to the main outdoor stage—where a band was blazing Latin rock y alternativo—were jammed with partygoers. Sitting, standing, dancing in place, all of them caught up in the wild beat of frenetic energy. Electronic. Exotic. Erotic. Hypnotic.
I couldn’t see the rest of our party at the moment, but they were all here, eating, drinking, smiling. Lisa, Margo, and Jay all admired my outfit before they drifted off for more eating, drinking and smiling. Olivia and Valerio were “semi on duty.” I breathed in the magic moment unfolding below us and slapped down my unwelcome awareness of Atelier 24, hovering over the far end of the party, a small bank of thundery-looking clouds at its back. Not raining on my parade tonight.
Done with all that.
Deep breath, Allie Harper. Stop borrowing trouble.
Party on, Lee Ann!
Tom was missing out on the light and color but I could tell his other senses were fully engaged. The sultriness of the sun caressing us. The smell of fresh-cut grass, mingling with a thousand carefully chosen fragrances in the heat of a thousand bodies. The seduction in the beat. His close proximity to me. He put his warm hands on my bare shoulders and his mouth against my ear.
“We invested quite a bit of our working capital in this dress, Ms. Harper, and I notice there’s not much dress here. I’m wondering if it was a wise choice.”
“I wasn’t going for wisdom.”
“Ah. Excellent. What would happen if I undid this little bow at the back of your delicious neck?”
“Just to be clear, Dr. Bennington. You’re blind and no doubt haven’t realized we’re in a huge crowd on the front porch of a venerable institution. Or that Otis is standing three feet over.”
“Maybe he could be bribed to look the other way.”
“Which brings us back to our money problem.”
“No babe. I think our money problem has been solved.” He abandoned the tiny knot that stood between me and total toplessness and pressed closer. “I feel I’m missing a lot here, due to my being a person with a disability. Describe all this for me? Can you?”
Could I? This magnetic mix-up of melody and chaos? The strange and yet unmistakable yearning of the luminous balloon beings. The shared spell of “your pulse is my pulse” in the insistent drums. The flush of euphoria. Oh yes. I could describe all this to my blind man.
“Uh huh.” My Louboutins had raised me up to his level. I turned under his hands so I could whisper.
/>
“It’s the Twenty-first Century Confetti Globe of Hot Sex.”
“Thought so. I bet you have never danced with a blind man in such an globe as this.”
“True. I bet you’ve never danced with a woman wearing almost three thousand dollars’ worth of not-much and perilously tall shoes. Will I require any special instruction?”
“Nothing to it. See if you can get us to the dancing without stepping on anyone with those lethal shoes. Find us a small space to bob around in. No worries. These people are intoxicated by the beverages, the music, and the pheromones. The only person I need to impress with my dancing skill is you.”
With one hand on my back, he let me guide him. I picked our way down to the dancers. Found us a spot, wrapped my arms around his neck, and gazed into his beautiful eyes. Seven hundred seventy-five dollars’ worth of shoes raised me four inches closer to his mouth. “I’m impressed already, Tom. We’re here. We have a dance floor big enough to stand up in and wiggle around. We’ve got this.”
He pulled me tight against him. Positioned his hands on my hips. Cinched me in tighter. “Indeed, we do.” For a blind man in a cramped space with a girl wearing “lethal shoes,” he moved us with perfect confidence and skill.
So we danced. Celebrated the coming of summer and our wide open future in which the streets would never again be paved with gold. I let myself revel in my one fabulous dress-of-a-lifetime, and closed my mind to any awareness that we were dancing a stone’s throw from the Wade Lagoon, Severance Hall, Atelier, the Holy Oil Can, and the benches by the water. We earned this night.
Let the past be past and the future be free.
I was still savoring the moment and remarking to myself that—no surprise at all—Tom could move his body with compelling grace and sensuosity even when he was standing on a two-by-two-foot square in the midst of thousands of strangers, when Otis tapped on Tom’s shoulder. Tom said, “Hey, Otis. Cutting in?” I opened my eyes.
“Not this time. Sorry to break it up, but there’s a young lady up there who says Ms. Cecelia Southgate, Deputy Director of the Cleveland Museum of Arts would like to see you all. In the Armor Court.” He raised his eyebrows. “Command performance. Time to pay for the tickets.”
Tom winced. “I hope she’s not looking for a big bunch of cash.”
* * *
Even the horses wore armor.
A setting dominated by knights and their weapons, the Armor Court stood at attention. The knights—mounted and on foot—waited like statues, frozen into a state of perpetual preparedness. The big room’s sky-lit stone walls, the soft luster of its floors, and the subdued beauty of its tapestries lent it an aura of quiet order. The weapons told a different story: broadswords, small swords, half-handed and two-handed swords, rapiers, daggers. Crossbows. A battle-axe. And much, much more. These people lived in a continual state of DEFCON 1.
In spite of the festive spirit of the evening—the noisy presence of happy museum-goers, dressed to the nines, saying “What’s up?” to the knights, and the musical turmoil bleeding into our lofty space from the lawn below—a somber state of readiness prevailed in here.
Or maybe that was just me. I wanted to get back to the party. ASAP.
Otis had scanned the knights and was now focused on the doors in and out. He’d positioned himself at the edge of the rotunda with its figure of Terpsichore holding her lyre. I figured she was waiting for some knight to ask her to dance, secretly tapping her marble toes.
Cecelia—“Oh, please. Call me Cece.”—Southgate waited for us in a less-traveled spot beneath one of the tapestries and next to a plume-hatted guy on a horse. Her dress was ivory. Matching shoes. I estimated her ensemble to be twice as pricey as mine. It was a sculpture of the perfect dress. I bet she couldn’t sit down in it. Worth it though. Flushed with the exuberance and the tension of a massive evening, she looked like a goddess.
A long-haired man wearing trendy owlish glasses and one of those many-pocketed vests every woman should own at least three of stood by with a camera. Cece embraced us both.
“Thanks for taking time to do this. We like to get photos of honored guests. Allie, that is a fabulous dress. Who?”
She goes by ‘Dry Clean Only.’
I blocked Lee Ann and answered the question.
Ms. Southgate nodded approvingly. She spoke quietly. “Off the record, we’re marking the happy ending of everything that happened—and didn’t happen—in March.”
I bet Kip Wade would be tickled pink to hear her say that.
Cece either read my face, heard the same voice I did, or brought herself back to a hard memory. She sighed and shook her head. “Not everything, of course. You know what I mean. Anyway, Tom, one of the PR guys wanted us to get a photo with you in the armor court. Because you’ve been ‘our knight in shining armor.’” She smiled at Tom, a well-orchestrated mix of amusement and admiration.
Tom heard the finesse of the smile and chuckled appropriately. “Sounds fine.” He raised our clasped hands. “May I bring my lady?”
“Oh, of course. I meant to say you and Allie. Come stand together right over here—” The photographer was clicking away. Not good. “Candid” is not my best side.
She was interrupted by the sound of someone rolling a bushel of potatoes out onto the skylight above us.
“Oh dear. I certainly hope that storm passes us by. I’ve been checking the weather every fifteen minutes since last week and they promised—” She cast a look of dismay around the room, which had darkened noticeably. A flash illuminated the skylight. Another clap of thunder came close on its heels.
“Oh. I’ve got to—We always put together a plan for fitting everyone inside but we almost never—Tom, Allie, let Simon get a couple of nice shots of you two. Oh. And stand close enough to get the Mercury tapestry in the picture. The PR guy thought that would be appropriate—Allie?”
I was looking up at the woven scene on the wall above us. A figured floated in midair above a downcast-looking man. “That’s Mercury? What’s he doing? Who’s the other guy?”
She was walking, wanting to play the good hostess, but needing to be gone. “The god, Mercury, is telling Aeneas he has to get out of Carthage. Story ends badly, but it’s a great tapestry. Have a lovely evening, Allie. Tom.”
The camera guy was carefully packing up his gear as if death hadn’t entered the room.
“Allie? He’s here?” Tom’s voice was a miracle of self-control. “This is not just a crazy—”
“Coincidence? No. It can’t be. We have to get out, Otis!”
I raised my voice, but he was already closing the distance. “I saw her take off. What is it? The storm—?”
“It’s him, Otis. It’s Mercury. Shadow Man must have told him about the code name. The tapestry above us. It’s the god Mercury delivering bad news. Telling somebody to leave. He’s playing with us. We need to go. But where?”
Otis pointed toward doors at the far end of the room. “Out through there. Upper walkway. The rain is starting. People will pour in from outside—Let’s move.”
“Otis. We’ll never make it—We have to—Where can we hide?” Tom’s face was rigid with fear, but his voice was steady.
“We’ll make it up as we go. I have my gun but it’s worthless in this crowd. Come on.”
Chapter Fifty-One
That was how I found myself once again on the walkway above the atrium, even more heavily flooded with the museum’s guests than it had been on the last night of February. This time I was traveling in a river of people who were not the least bit scared. Laughing, hanging onto their drinks, jostling casually in the spirit of adventure. “Remember that Solstice Party at the art museum when it stormed? Craziness!”
The atrium floor below us was jammed. End to end. Edge to edge. Wall-to-wall dancers had barely room enough to bob up and down. The indoor band’s music was as insistently driving
as the one outside. Patterns of light raced bright colors along the marble front of the vintage building, the entrance of which was spilling more happy guests into the mob scene.
I was plenty scared enough for all up-to-5,000 of us. Dizzied by panic. Above the skylighted arc, thunder rolled more potatoes. Drops of rain, or maybe a scattering of small hail, pinged its surface.
This time, at least I was not alone. Tom had my arm. I had Otis’s arm, and I could feel him putting the brakes on, slowing us down, melding us into the unhurried pace of the lighthearted mob. Leveling out my panic. Setting our rhythm to “going with the flow.” I didn’t bother to look back.
When we made it to west end of the atrium, he bypassed the route Gloria had taken to the restroom that first night. At the next opening off the walkway, though, he made a quick right and led us into a hall with absolutely nobody in it.
“Elevator back here. For staff, mostly. Safer than an escalator, that’s for damn sure. We’d only be able to hide ourselves in this mess of folks for so long before we’d get stuck. Or seen. We’re a danger to bystanders. He won’t care who he shoots. We need to not forget that.”
We’d come to a halt in front of a big, tall elevator door, “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum.” Giant-size. It loomed.
“They bring stuff up and down back here. Heavy stuff. Big. I’m gonna take you all the way down to the lower level. See if we can find a spot for you to disappear while I start looking for him. Alert security. Get Olivia and Valerio. As soon as we can figure a way to take you out of here without getting you or anybody else hurt, I’ll come back. It could be a while. You’re going to need to stay put. Like it was your job.”
Even for its size, the elevator was painfully slow. We rode, vibrating tension but without speaking as it clanged and thumped its way past the first floor without stopping and then down to the lowest level. Slowly. If a snail were an elevator—I used the time to lean against the wall and remove the Louboutins. My feet were on fire. I thought about tossing them into a corner of the elevator.
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