Last Girl Dancing

by Kate Aeon

  And it had been for nothing. Ginny was still gone. Out there somewhere, maybe, but if she was, she was nowhere that Jess could reach.

  Someone knocked on her door. She jumped a little, and yelled, “Who is it?”

  “Jim!”

  And her heart clogged her throat. Here it was, then. Hank had passed on whatever he’d discovered to Jim, Jim had put everything together, and now he was going to give her time in private to explain.

  She opened the door and let him in, and for a moment he stood there staring around the single dimly lit room with an expression of horror on his face. “Gracie,” he said, and his voice was a croak, “we gave you enough money to get something better than this.”

  She shrugged. “This was the best of the places that would let me in today. Besides, it’s temporary.” She suspected as she said it that the place was going to be a lot more temporary than either of them had planned.

  “It’s horrible.” He turned to his right. “Good Christ, the linoleum is piss yellow with bloodstains.”

  “It is not. That rusty brown is actually part of the pattern. Though I did get down on hands and knees to check.”

  “Did you wash with Lysol afterwards?”

  “Thought about it.” And then, because she wanted to get everything over with, she said, “What brings you by?”

  “Hank told me which place you’d chosen, and gave me your room number — which is lucky, since you haven’t reported in yet — and told me you two got some good work done today, but that I ought to come by here and tell you to move out immediately.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “He didn’t like this place any better than I do.” Jim gave her a stern, fatherly look, then walked past her to the daybed, and leaned across it to look out the room’s one window. He said, “This place is a nightmare. That fire escape looks like it’s about to rust right off the building, and the alley below is completely unlit. And all this window has to keep it shut is a thumb-lock.” He turned to her. “You know how often patrols have to come out here to deal with problems?”

  “I figured frequently,” Jess said. She was realizing that Jim probably hadn’t come to grill her about any questionable use of police resources, and she started to breathe a little easier.

  “Three or four times on an average night.”

  “Jim, while I appreciate your concern, this place was on your list.”

  “I didn’t know it was this bad. I don’t want to take the call on an officer raped and murdered where she slept.” Jim sighed. “And as someone who likes you on a personal level, I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “I’ll be okay, Jim,” she said, and smiled. “I’ll do a little work to beef the place up. Add some motion sensors to the door and the window, peg the window into place. I won’t get hurt.”

  He sighed. Then he turned back and said, “So what did you think of Hank?”

  “He wasn’t what I expected.” She thought about it for a moment, then added, “I liked him a lot more than I thought I would.”

  “He’s a good man. I’d trust him with my life. You can trust him with yours.”

  Jess nodded slowly. “I’m sort of figuring that out,” she said at last.

  Jim spent a few more minutes talking with her, but when he realized that she was tired, he made a polite excuse and left.

  And Jess thought, Whatever Hank figured out, he hasn’t talked to anyone else about it.

  She realized she was going to have to be interviewed the next day, and she didn’t know what would be required of her. So she spent a little time working out a dance routine, in case she was asked to audition. Showered, dressed in her own pajamas, flopped on the hard mattress, and at last drifted into uneasy, restless sleep, and a dream in which she was searching for Ginny again.

  Hank stood in the dark hall, clutching two bags of breakfast, two cups of coffee, and a third bag containing the neat, James Bond-ian wire Bill the Tech Guy had dropped by Hank’s place, along with the paraphernalia Jess would need to use it. Hank now knew how to wire an exotic dancer so she could strip down to nothing and no one would be the wiser. Which was kind of cool. Certainly more fun than learning how to place semtex for best effect, and maybe almost as useful.

  He kicked at the door with his foot. Not too hard — it was a cheap, crappy door, and he wasn’t quite scared enough yet to break it down. Didn’t look like anyone had broken in. He knew that Jess had her gun with her in case someone tried. But she wasn’t answering the door, and the place was too small for her not to hear him out there.

  Then he heard fumbling with the lock, and after a moment she pulled the door open. She looked like she was sleepwalking.

  “Deaf? Drugged? Or dead?” he said, feeling irritated that she’d been so slow to answer when his hands were full. But less irritated as he saw her.

  “Bewildered, confused, and caught in the middle of a nightmare,” she said, letting him in. She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her fists like a little kid, and yawned, and turned away from him to wander back into the ratty little studio. Her hair stuck out at all angles, and she wore a black T-shirt and a pair of honest-to-God flannel pajama bottoms with little duckies or something on them, and for a second his heart thudded stupidly to a standstill.

  He’d managed to get through that dreary house-hunting trip with her the day before with nothing more than his hormones reacting. But looking at her, sleepy and scruffy and vulnerable, his heart and his body made all the wrong connections. That she was — or could be — someone special. That he might dare to risk himself again.

  Thank God his brain was still functioning, and he recognized them as the wrong connections.

  She went into her bathroom, but didn’t close the door. He dumped the things he’d brought on the dinette and for half a second watched her putting toothpaste on a toothbrush. That was too intimate. “I’d tell you to get yourself something out of the fridge, but I don’t have anything yet,” she called, and leaned over the sink to brush her teeth. He noticed the way her breasts moved beneath that T-shirt, and the fact that her nipples were already wide-awake even if the rest of her wasn’t.

  To make himself stop watching her, he walked over to her front door to make sure she’d locked it — which she had — and, suddenly curious, he reached for her doorknob.

  I’m not prying. I’m not.

  And his fingertips touched metal, and he was drowning in a cold, empty sea. A girl, scared and desperate. Darkness. Endless, aching darkness, and no direction that offered the faintest hint of light.

  Jess’s nightmare ran through him, somehow tied into her waking reality. Hank couldn’t let go of the doorknob quickly enough. The residual of Jess’s dream left a foul taste in his mouth.

  “I brought food,” he yelled over the sound of running water. “Must have been some nightmare for you not to have noticed.”

  “Always is,” she called back, though she did it with a mouth full of toothbrush, so it took him a second to figure out what she’d said. She rinsed out her mouth and spit in the sink, and that was no more attractive than when anyone else did it, and splashed water on her face, which was sort of cute, and turned off the water. “Nasty night.” And she sighed, and came back out, rubbing a towel over her face. “You brought breakfast? Really? What’s in there?”

  “Ham biscuits. Cinnamon-and-raisin biscuits — you looked like someone who would like them. Couple of cups of coffee.”

  She grinned at the bags. “Hardee’s. God, I love a Hardee’s breakfast.”

  “None of this stuff is good for you.”

  “Not for the body, maybe. But it’s damned good for the soul.”

  They sat down, and she polished off two ham biscuits and two cinnamon-raisin biscuits, and the entire huge cup of coffee, and leaned back and closed her eyes with an expression of ecstasy on her face. And sighed.

  And some perverse little troll in the back of his mind saw her pleasure in food as sexual, and whispered, You could make her feel better than that.<
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  So he asked the question guaranteed to make her stop looking so tempting. “Who was the girl in your nightmare?”

  And her eyes flew open and her entire body stiffened. “What?”

  “The lost girl. Who was she?”

  Jess’s gaze froze the air between them; her withdrawal from him had weight and shape, and flavored the air like bitter smoke. “I didn’t tell you what I dreamed.”

  He looked down at his hands.

  She said, “The touch thing.”

  “The touch thing,” he agreed. “I touched the doorknob, checking to be sure that you’d locked the door. And I got pieces of your nightmare.”

  “You got more than you needed, then,” she said, and started to back away from the table.

  “The reason you hate psychics so much has something to do with that girl,” he told her. “And with her being lost. It’s all tied together in one ugly mess, and if we’re going to work together effectively, and if we’re going to trust each other — and you know we need to be able to do that — I have to know at least the bare bones of what happened. We’re stuck in this minefield together, darlin’, but you’re the one with the map. At least tell me where the land mines are so that I don’t step on them.”

  That steady, cold gaze of hers never wavered. “She was my sister. Identical twin sister. Eight minutes older than me. Her name was Virginia Woolf Brubaker.” And he thought, Oh, fuck. That’s the Virginia — not the state. “Everyone called her Ginny. She was my best friend in the world, and then one day she disappeared.”

  She stopped looking at him. Stared down at the table instead, at the wrappers and bags piled there. She started playing with a wrapper, folding it, smoothing out the creases, folding it again. “When she and I were twenty-one, my father apparently decided that he was ready to be twenty-one himself. He emptied out my parents’ joint savings account, took off to Mexico with his secretary, and left my mother a complete wreck. Ginny and I were both in dance schools. I was going to Harrt on full scholarship. She was in the dance program at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and my parents had been mostly paying her way. Which my mother couldn’t afford to do once my father took off.”

  Jess looked out the window. “Ginny, being Ginny, came back to Atlanta to offer support to Mama. She was always resourceful, and when she couldn’t find a job with a local troupe, she started stripping on weekends. Making good money, which she needed if she wanted to be able to pay her own tuition to get back to NCSA. She didn’t like it much, but she would have done anything legal to get back to school.” She looked down at the table again, and played with a biscuit wrapper, folding and unfolding it.

  “She was working as a stripper when she disappeared,” he said.

  “Yeah. One day she was there; the next day, her apartment was empty and she was gone. She vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “So in a way, the case we’re working right now is personal for you.”

  “As personal as it gets. Once I got my cop’s shield, I spent eight years looking for her, trying to find an answer for my mother. And for myself. Even once I realized that I was never going to find her again, I still checked databases from time to time to see if she’d resurfaced. And now...” She shrugged. “I couldn’t bring her home. But maybe I can do something for these girls.”

  “She’s the reason you became a cop. And then a detective.”

  Jess wouldn’t look at him. He wanted to see her eyes, but she kept staring at the table. “She’s the reason I did a lot of things. She’s always been classified as a missing person. Back then, no one paid much attention to missing-persons files. The police couldn’t find her, but she was an adult and had every right to take off — so they didn’t look very hard.”

  “No signs of foul play?”

  “No. She’d paid all her bills, given notice to her landlady, moved out. Some of the people she worked with said she’d gotten an offer to do a movie out in California.”

  Hank said, “You found that out when you went to your one and only strip club.”

  She nodded. “From the couple of people who were left who’d actually known her.” She still wouldn’t look at him. “I should have gone sooner. Most of the people who’d worked with her had moved on by the time I went. But I was young. What did I know? I didn’t start looking on my own until everything else had failed. The private detective my family hired. The psychic I hired.”

  Well, yeah. Considering her feelings about psychics, he had a good idea what had happened there. “So how much did he take you for?”

  "She. She took me for about six thousand dollars. Everything I’d managed to save over the years; my parents had always been emphatic about the importance of saving. Worse, though, was the endless stream of hope she kept feeding me and my mother, telling us we were getting closer, that we were going to get Ginny back.” She looked out the window, lips pursed.

  He sat there, putting things together. Playing with the pieces, seeing how they fit. “So then you turned your life upside down. Became a cop. Made detective. And... then what?” He rested his hand over hers, and her humiliation and anger and self-hatred poured into him. “Never told any-goddamned-body about your sister, that’s for sure. So what did you do?”

  He patted the back of her hand, a little gesture of comfort, and backed off.

  “I stayed in Atlanta so she could find me if she came looking. Kept myself in the phone book under my own name. Kept hoping that she’d show up one day with a nice husband and a station wagon full of nieces and nephews for me to get to know. That at least one of us ended up happy. And I looked for her. Used every resource available to a cop to find her.”

  “You still looking?”

  “Not so much. I still check databases. But I ran out of leads a long time ago. I’ve finally convinced myself that she’s gone. That I’ll never know what happened to her.”

  “You’re carrying so much guilt. Her disappearance wasn’t your fault, though, you know?” Hank said.

  And she looked down at the table again. “I think a lot of it was. I think if I’d come home, too, she would have had a backup. Someone to watch out for her. She was the more reckless one of the two of us. I was... cautious. I would have seen something going wrong, maybe. I could have saved her from... whatever it was.” She bit her lip. “But I didn’t. I had my full scholarship, and Ginny had always been Mama’s favorite anyway. So I let her go home and deal with Mama and all the fallout from that. And with finding her own way to pay for her school. I was upset about my father. Because I had been — or thought I was — his favorite, I was too busy being selfish and sulking. When he left without saying a word — even to me, or maybe especially to me — I blamed my mother.”

  He took her hand again, this time holding it, stilling it from its restless fidgeting. This was the pain. It poured from her to him, unfiltered. This was anguish and guilt and grief and loss. Enough to crush anyone.

  But Jess had taken all that awfulness and worked around it. Maybe even used it to make herself stronger.

  Jess’s voice got softer. “I keep hoping that if I don’t give up, someday she’ll come home. God knows, he never did.”

  He wanted to pull her into his arms and hold her. Wanted to kiss her, and smooth her hair. Wanted to tell her that everything would be all right, that he was with her, that he’d make everything better.

  But he wasn’t going to make anything better. He was going to do this mission with her, and then he was going to get out of her life because he’d promised himself after Liseé’s betrayal that he was never going to risk himself in the emotional war of involvement with a woman again. “I hope you find her,” he said. “You deserve to.” And then he changed the subject. “I brought the new wire. You don’t by any chance have your belly button pierced, do you?”

  She gave him an odd smile. He felt her gratitude for his abrupt change in the direction of their conversation. She said, “Not a chance.”

  “Bill said you’d have a lot easier time
with this if you’d get it pierced. But in the meantime, he sent along some special glue, and a solvent to remove the glue when you’re done with it. He told me to tell you not to sniff the glue or the solvent. Also, keep your window open when you use either, and put the wire on at least an hour before you need to be in public, because that’s about how long the glue smell will linger on your skin.”

  Hank handed her the brown paper lunch bag, which looked like it had been used for lunch a few times before it made its transition to carrying important things. Jess pulled out the new receiver, and her eyebrows rose. It was a sparkly sapphire-blue gemstone, with little metal loops and curlicues around the edges and a smooth metal back.

  “Bill was excited about this; apparently he’s been wanting to try making a mike like this one for a while. He said for today your transmitter can fit into your purse. Keep the purse in the same room with you, and the guys in the van will be able to hear you. I’ll plant a couple of the signal boosters while you’re interviewing. Once they’re in place, the guys will be able to pick you up about fifty feet in any direction from any of them. I have some standard bugs for you to plant, too. Bill said you should make sure you put them in the dressing room, but also to put them anyplace else backstage where you think they might hear something useful.”

  “Haven’t been able to get backstage at all, huh?”

  “Not even once, I hear.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” She nodded, staring at the gemstone. “And I just... glue this to my navel?”

  “So he says. He said the glue is waterproof, sweat-proof, and jiggle-proof, and that unless you want to leave bloody holes in your skin, you should always use the solvent to remove it. And that he thinks you’d be a lot happier if you got your navel pierced and let him solder a jewelry wire on for you.”

  He liked her derisive snort. “I’ll pass on punching holes in myself, thanks.”

  “Didn’t sound fun to me, either,” he agreed. “I’d stick with the glue if I were you.”