I knew, at least I hoped I knew, who she would choose. The loudmouth, the antagonizer, the one who wouldn’t leave well enough alone and let an innocent man go to jail in her place. Not to mention, the one closest to her and easiest to hit.
Her arm shifted toward me.
“Don’t let her get away!” I yelled, and tried to dive out of the way as she fired two shots in close succession. I’d gambled on her fumbling or hesitating, but time slowed and I could almost see the bullets carving a tunnel through the air toward my heart. Dying was not an option, but I couldn’t find a way out of it, couldn’t run fast enough this time.
“Millie! No!”
Someone knocked into me from the side, and we skidded together on the rug. I registered Marion’s golden-brown curls scattered across my chest and shoved at him, but my hand slipped in something slick. “Marion?”
He didn’t answer. My hand came away red. “Olive! Help!” I screamed, but she’d dived on top of Symphony and pinned the gun arm under her knee. A quick slice with Olive’s switchblade across her thumb made her release the gun and scream like a devil on ice.
Then, like an angel, Lewis ran through the door, with my mother and Cal in tow, and then a man—Detective Sabatier? How? I didn’t care right then. They helped Olive take charge of Symphony, and Lewis skidded to his knees beside me. He hauled Marion off me and laid him flat on the rug.
“I think he’s been shot.” I rolled to my knees and knelt over him, scanning his body for wounds. A flower of dark blood bloomed on the sleeve of his bright red sweater. His favorite color.
“Oh God,” he moaned. And the very sound of it filled me with relief. He was alive. His eyes flickered open and squeezed shut again, and he clutched at his shoulder. “That witch shot me! Please tell me she’s dead now.”
A hysterical laugh bubbled up in my chest. “No, but she won’t be shooting anyone else. Lewis—grab me something to make a tourniquet.”
Lewis, his face stunned and stricken, bobbed his head and disappeared.
“Marion,” I said, touching his hair. “You’re gonna be okay. It’s just your arm. We’ll get you to Charity.”
“But my new dress is sleeveless,” he managed, trying to get a smile out of me. Then his pain-clouded eyes softened. “Are you okay?”
I swallowed down the sudden ache in my throat. “Thanks to you.”
“It was nothing.” He tried to shrug but winced.
“Don’t start acting modest now,” I said. “You still have to be our star.”
“I know.” He let his head sink back to the floor, and his eyes fell shut. “But not today, okay?”
I laughed and dropped onto the floor beside him, the coppery smell of blood filling my head. Tears filling my eyes. “You saved my life.”
He smiled without opening his eyes. “Guess that makes us even.”
CHAPTER
32
CHARITY HOSPITAL SMELLED of alcohol and sweat and positively rang with noise. Pretty much like a speakeasy, only with more nuns in giant white habits.
Marion sat upright in a narrow bed, tucked under a crisp white sheet, a bandage on his arm and his face pale. Everybody in our small universe had gathered around him like funeral attendees, though the sisters said he was going to be perfectly fine after a couple of weeks.
“Marion,” my mother said from the foot of the bed, “next time you go to a shoot-out, do it in your own sweater.” She held the stiff, bloodied sweater up to the light, so we could all see the small circular hole through the fabric.
“I’ll be sure of that next time, Gladdie,” Marion sniffed.
“Let’s hope there won’t be any more bullets,” Cal said, patting Marion’s leg through the sheet. “Detective Sabatier took that girl off to the jail, so at least she’s out of our hair now.”
“And so’s he,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Mama said, batting her lashes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Mama studied her fingernails. “Well . . . there’s a reason Larry was there tonight. He and I have been seeing each other some, since that little incident at the police station. We’ve been keeping it low-key because of the case, but now that that’s over . . . well.” She wriggled a little, beaming.
“But what about the club?” Cal said. “You do know he’s a cop, right?”
Mama waved a hand. “Oh, Larry doesn’t care about Prohibition, only murderers.”
“So he says until you break up with him,” I said. “Then he’ll want revenge.”
Mama scowled at me. “Why you gotta be such a pessimist, Millie?”
“I’m not, I’m just—”
“Can you two hush?” Marion said peevishly. “You’re making my head ache. I don’t want to hear about Gladys and the cop’s torrid romance. I want to know what happened tonight. How did you all get to the apartment? How did you know what was going on?”
Mama and Cal both looked at Lewis, who was standing by the bed, holding Marion’s hand. He blushed. “It was me, I guess.”
“You guess?” Cal said. “Don’t be so modest, kid.”
Lewis cleared his throat. “Well. I. Uh. I saw that Symphony person had a gun, and I didn’t have a weapon, so I knew I’d be no use in there. So, I decided the best thing I could do was go call the police. I thought since Symphony was there waving a gun around, they’d figure out she was the bad guy and not Marion. I didn’t notice there was a telephone in the hall; I just ran back to the place I knew had one—the club.”
“But when he got there,” Cal said, “we’d just arrived, and he told us what was happening instead of calling the cops. Gladys’s new cop boyfriend was meeting her outside, so she went and rounded him up. And we got there as fast as we could.”
“Could’ve been a little faster,” I said, gesturing to Marion’s bandaged arm.
“It was fast enough,” Marion said, squeezing Lewis’s hand. “Thanks for your quick thinking.” He looked at me and Olive and grinned. “And for you two, diving in there with those little toothpicks you call knives.”
“Toothpicks!” I cradled my knife and crooned, “Don’t listen to him, Pearl.”
Olive rolled her eyes.
“So, what happens now?” Mama said.
“I get my star back, I hope.” Cal squeezed the toes of Marion’s foot and beamed at him. “Didn’t want to tell you, but even before it got busted up, the club was hurting without you. The Red Feather Boys keep asking when you’ll be back.”
“They do?”
“Course. And these days, Lewis plays the piano likes he’s tickling a dead animal.” She winked. “Needs his inspiration back, I say.”
Lewis turned positively fuchsia. Marion laughed, color creeping up his neck, too.
“Well, Marion’s free to come back now,” I said. “He doesn’t have anything to fear except a sleeveless dress.”
Marion groaned, but he was still smiling. “And I’m free of that apartment. No offense, ladies, but I’m ready to luxuriate in the company of my own self for a while.”
“And I’m ready to have my bed to myself,” I said. “No more sharing covers!”
Amid the gentle razzing directed at Marion, I realized this meant I was free, too. Free to stop spending every waking hour hunting down leads and making up stories and getting in knife fights. Free to go back to cooking Cal’s books and mopping floors and flirting with Olive and scrapping with Duke over who Cal left in charge.
Free. Huh. I’d never known freedom could feel so hollow.
But what else did I want?
* * *
The Cloak and Dagger club was still a grimy, low-ceilinged dive. Smoke still hung over the tables and clung to our clothes and our hair.
But here—here, at least—we were not outcasts or funny dressers, pickpockets or dope fiends or burglars or whatever the rest of the c
ity believed of us. We were together. We were royalty.
Two weeks after Marion left Charity Hospital, Marion-the-glamorous took the stage at eleven sharp, clad in her new beaded costume, which Mama had added sleeves to so the bandage wouldn’t show. The room full of loud talkers quieted down when the spotlight stopped and settled on her, turning her blue eyes translucent, her skin pale white under the dragonfly necklace resting against her collarbone. A whistle sailed up from the two tables packed full of Red Feather Boys at the front, and Marion’s teeth flashed brighter than ever. Both versions of Marion were eighteen years old tonight, and they were free from the cops, and free of any chance Philip Leveque could control them again.
Lewis’s fingers dragged music from the piano keys; his mouth smiled a secret smile at Marion. Cal perched on a barstool in her tuxedo and top hat with Rhoda behind her, arms around her, chin resting on her shoulder. Mama leaned against the bar next to Sabatier, their hands twined together. With her other hand, she held a long cigarette holder, from which she was vigorously smoking. Duke slid Sabatier a glass of something, and he lifted it in my direction. I raised my brows, and he chuckled and mouthed, Water.
I laughed out loud. He’d returned my beret the first night after arresting Symphony Cornice, and I figured that counted for enough to give him half a chance.
“What’s so funny?” Bennie said, sidling up next to me like a stray dog.
I took a step away from him. “You’ve got some nerve coming in here.”
“Millie, I’m—”
“A weasel? I know it.”
Bennie looked down into his glass. “You didn’t tell Cal what I did yet. I’d hoped that meant you forgave me.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “It means I’ve decided it’s more useful for you to owe me one.”
Bennie blinked, wide-eyed. “What do you—”
But Olive slid between us, cutting him off, and nudged me with the tray propped on her hip. “Birthday boy’s about to start your favorite song. What do you say, Millie? Want to dance?”
I turned as if Bennie hadn’t said anything at all and took Olive’s hand. “I sure do.”
Lewis played the intro to the first song Marion and I sang together, when he was still an Uptown kid and I was teaching him how to wring out the mop, how to swish it on the floor.
You wink, dear, and make me trip over my feet
You smile and I fall on my face
But falling is easy when you hold my hand
For you I’d fall anyplace
The Red Feather Boys stared up at Marion with devotion. But on every other line, Marion’s gaze slipped toward stage right, toward Lewis, and Lewis’s gaze met his, steady and true.
Maybe Marion was falling, like the song said. I hoped so. He deserved this kind of fall.
Olive set her tray on the bar and led me out onto the dance floor, and her eyes on mine made me forget there’d ever been any eyes but hers. Maybe this time, I wouldn’t push her away. Maybe this time, I’d let myself fall, too.
As we swept around the floor together, a red hat bobbed through the crowd, and then a face appeared at the edge of the dance floor. The girl was wearing a purple dress and sparkling heels, but in her hand she held a notebook, and she’d tucked a pencil in that red confection of a hat.
Kitty Sharpe gave me a small wave. And after the song, when Olive had given me a lingering look that promised more dances later, I went and found Kitty.
I touched her arm, and she turned around, red lips smiling like a cat’s. She leaned close to be heard over the jazz. “Congratulations, Miss Coleman.”
“For what?”
“You solved the crime.” She took the pencil out of her hat. “Now you owe me a story.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Over the years it took to write The Boy in the Red Dress, I fell in absolute love with these characters (even Gladys!) and had multiple false starts trying to find the story that felt like their truth and mine. But lucky for me, I didn’t have to search for that truth alone.
A galaxy-size thank-you goes to the team of professionals who guided this book (and its anxious wreck of an author) to publication. Thank you to my agent Victoria Marini for fighting hard for me, and to her assistants Lee O’Brien and Maggie Kane for helping make it all happen.
Thank you to my editor Maggie Rosenthal, who has always understood this book and where it needed to go, and helped steer it there with a masterful hand.
Thank you to my brilliant copyeditors Janet Pascal, Krista Ahlberg, and absolute queen Anne Heausler, whose knowledge of New Orleans took the authenticity of The Boy in the Red Dress to a new level. Thank you to my sensitivity reader Jonah Mosher, whose insights brought this book closer to what I wanted it to be in so many vital ways, and to the team who made this book so pretty—jacket designer Kelley Brady, jacket artist Freya Betts, and interior designer Nancy Brennan.
My writer friends also deserve personalized trophies for putting up with my whining and middle-of-the-night brainstorming texts while I wrote (and rewrote) this book.
Thank you, Tia Bearden, for loving my characters as much as I do, and never giving up on them or me. Thank you, Sasha Peyton Smith, for always being confident I could do it, especially when I was least confident.
Thank you, Kris Waldherr, for the insightful readings (both beta and tarot), and Heather Webb, for your generous advice. Thank you, Sarah Lyu, for being a trusted voice of reason, and Anna Birch, for commiserating as we travel this debut year together. Thank you, Amy Oliver, for boosting my mood even when I wanted to lay my head on the Panera table and give up writing forever.
Thank you to the Black Warrior Writers, who were the earliest readers of The Boy in the Red Dress and showed me I had something worth pursuing, and to the writers of Pitch Wars 2017 and Class of 2K20 Debuts, who gave me so much advice and sympathy. Thank you to my Pitch Wars mentors Heather Cashman and McKelle George; I was at a low point when you chose me, and your encouraging words made all the difference.
Thank you to my friends Amanda Mulkey, for helping me celebrate every milestone; Wendy Long, for being on my team since the actual ’90s; and Kristen Mullins, for donating a little piece of your gorgeous smartassery to Millie’s character. Thank you to my Egan’s people; you were the inspiration for the Cloak and Dagger, a place where, even in 1929—or in Alabama—people outside the mainstream can find family.
Thank you most of all to my family for always believing I’d someday be a published author, even when it took longer than we expected. To my sister Kelly Lambert, thank you for sharing my vision for this book and always having my back, even when a trampoline fight turns ugly. Mom and Dad, thank you for giving my girls safe arms to snuggle in when Mama was busy writing. To my husband, thank you for acting out scenes with me, putting up with my crankiness when I’m stuck, and cooking all those dinners by yourself when I’m supposed to be helping but “just have to finish this scene.”
To my two sweet girls, I’m not going to lie—you didn’t make writing this book any easier! But you made me laugh even when I was stressed and refused to let me withdraw completely into my work cocoon, which was probably a good thing. Thank you for all the elaborate hairstyles, the pretty drawings, and most of all the hundreds of hugs and kisses you give me freely every day. I love you both so much.
To my dear, wonderful readers, the password is I LOVE YOU FOREVER. You’re welcome in the Cloak and Dagger Club anytime.
About the Author
Kristin Lambert has a BA in journalism and creative writing. She lives in the South with her husband, two daughters, two cats, a sewing machine, and a truly absurd amount of creepy old dolls. The Boy in the Red Dress is her debut novel.
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