Walking on Sunshine

by Jennifer Stevenson

  Our coffee waited at our booth. Sophie chattered of how marvelously I had fooled her attackers. “That was a vodou demon thing you did, yes? You looked so fierce! And the spectacles—” She leaned forward and touched my face. “They are not there!”

  “They?” I remembered the illusion of horn-rimmed spectacles. I banished it. When I reached for my coffee, I saw that the tattoos had reappeared on my arm.

  This would take some explaining.

  But Sophie was off on another topic already. “I’m so glad I found you first, before my papa!”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that he sent thugs after you?”

  She shrugged. “It shows he cares.” She seemed alight with satisfaction.

  We drank our coffee and watched one another, she no doubt thinking like a string of firecrackers going off, and I assessing the way she weighted the dim, noisy room like a cannon in a garden, so heavy that I felt anchored to her.

  She wasn’t lying about one thing.

  Her springy black curls were mussed from her struggle with the detective, but they were beautifully cut. Her simple gray tee shirt, which exposed a strip of her exquisite belly, had no sparkles or insignia or extravagances of style such as betray cheap clothes. Her blue jeans fit every inch of her perfectly. Expensively.

  She was rich.

  I said, “What makes you think my shoes are custom-made?”

  She reached under the table and put her finger on the toe of my wing-tip brogue, then sat up and smiled at me. “The shoemaker owns the patent on this pattern of airholes. My papa gets his shoes there.”

  I knew they were the most expensive shoes money could buy. “Your daddy must be very rich.”

  She smiled. “And my maman was good looking.” Her teeth were perfect. Trust fund baby. Child of privilege.

  She’d been raised like me.

  She set her chin on her hand and her elbow on a spot of beer on the table. “You can’t come from such humble origins as your tattoos suggest. Yet you work in that grubby botánica.” I opened my mouth, and off she went on another tangent. “That was not Jake at the end. I thought you had to do a thing with chicken blood and the drums and things, to make the gods possess you?”

  I frowned. “Not for some. Some are natural serviteurs. That was Baron Samedi, Jake’s met-tet.”

  “Natural?”

  I pushed back with my own question. “Does he do this often, your father? Send detectives to kidnap you?”

  She shrugged. “I have run away from school five times now. He can’t stop me. Are you on the run from the authorities anywhere?”

  “No!”

  She put her head to one side like a hunting kitten. “It doesn’t matter. It’s enough that you’re a troublemaker.”

  “You won’t report me?”

  “To my father? Of course not!” she said indignantly. “I’ve come to find the long-lost vicomte so that I can help him! Last night I copied all my father’s files. Tomorrow we will see where you might need coaching. He must not meet you until we are ready.” She clapped her hands. “Oh, this will be fun!”

  “I thought you said Jake was the long-lost vicomte. Jake is no more.”

  “It is a problem, not insurmountable. But we must work systematically. My father is only days behind me. Perhaps hours.”

  “I see. It is you who have escaped the authorities.” I gave her my best sex-demon look, appraising, flirtatious, questioning.

  She slapped the table. “Pay attention!” She leveled her forefinger at me. “You must pose as the lost vicomte. My papa filed a suit claiming he is dead. So. We have two weeks to get you to Paris, where you must file a countersuit, or you forfeit the title.”

  The air stopped in my lungs. Two weeks!

  “My papa has come to find the American vicomte-claimant, to prove that he is an impostor. Hélas, Jake is dead. So now you are going to help me convince my papa that you are he.” She sat back triumphantly.

  I had only two weeks? My eighty-year waiting game with the family had become suddenly a bomb on a very short fuse. If this child hadn’t turned up, I would never have known. I’d have sent my own claim to the Ministère de la Justice too late.

  My brain churned.

  I had to get control of her, to neutralize her hold on my leash. And I must keep her away from Yoni for Baz. And I must learn everything she knew about her father’s case. And I had to bury Jake—and deal with this priestess! I gnawed my lip.

  I said, “Why would you want to cheat your papa of his claim?”

  She shook her head gravely. “It would be very bad for him. He becomes more unstable every day, yearning for the title. My great-grandfather was only heir-apparent all his life. He didn’t care. Then he died and his son was the heir, and he didn’t care. And now my papa is the heir and he wants the title more than anything. He has too much power already. It’s going to his head. He’s cracking up. I think he will go insane du vrai if he can make himself Vicomte Montmorency.”

  Now it came tumbling out, the angry teenager’s resentment, her absentee father, his efforts to control her, then, how he inexplicably gave that up, as if he no longer cared what trouble she might get into. Why? Why? she wailed, an abandoned child.

  I knew her story already—the high birth, the mother dead young, the correct upbringing, the cold, powerful father, the loneliness—and then, rebellion.

  It was my story too.

  “—never listens, he merely ordains! He thinks he knows everything! But he doesn’t care! And—and I fear for his sanity.” Sophie caught herself up on a gasp. Her composure returned. “No matter.” She gestured to me. “Now tell me what you plan to tell him.”

  “Why must I tell him anything?” But I had to tell her the truth. The leash was shortening.

  “I know! Pretend to be the vicomte. Tell me his history. It must be perfect. When you sent the letters, where the postcards came from, what papers you signed, everything.”

  I stared at her, feeling odd. No one had ever heard this story. Not my roommates—we slacker demons kept our histories to ourselves. Not Jake—Jake had been my only companion all those years, so he hadn’t needed to be told. But now it would be said aloud to a bratty poor little rich girl, out to ruin her father’s claim on my title, either from revenge, or in an effort to seize his attention.

  She would be easy to control, if I made the effort. Not for nothing had I served as Jake’s tame sex demon. I knew what buttons to push.

  They were just like mine, after all.

  And then I could find the leash and destroy it.

  The waiter came again. “More coffee?”

  Sophie said saucily, “I’ll have a vodka tonic, twist of lime.” To me she continued, “When were you born, and where?”

  She was too young to drink. I didn’t say so. I ordered two vodka tonics.

  The waiter left.

  “I was born in France in nineteen-seventeen.”

  “Your parents?”

  “My father was second son to the Vicomte of Montmorency. He was living in New Orleans with my mother, where he had married her. Then he learned of his father’s death and his brother’s illness. He took his pregnant wife back to France to await his brother’s death and his ascension to the title. This occurred within weeks of his return.”

  “And your mother?” Sophie said avidly.

  “My mother was a mambo. A vodou priestess.”

  Sophie gave a shudder and then wriggled, as if to enjoy the thrill a little more. Tourist, I sneered mentally. Little white day-tripper in the dark world of your dusky ancestors. She was remarkably pretty, for an idiot.

  “Bon. Now, your upbringing. Where were your homes, your schooling?”

  I looked at her with growing dislike. “I was born on the family estate in the Vendée. My mother died four days later. My father was the vicomte by then. He consigned me to the care of a nurse.” Into her shining sapphire-blue eyes I said deliberately, “My first memory of him is of him beating me for wetting myself. I was three years ol
d. I had been standing in a corner for two hours already, being punished for something I cannot now recall.”

  Sophie’s smile faded.

  “Until I was ten I was educated at the Montmorency estate, in the nursery in the east wing of the chateau. Every two months I had a new tutor.” I showed my teeth again. “My father sent my old nurse away also. He did not like me to become attached to servants.”

  Sophie shuddered again as if she understood.

  So that hadn’t changed. Montmorency still forced haughty isolation on its children.

  I took her vodka tonic from the waiter. As I handed it to her, I made certain passes over the lime with my left forefinger, transforming it into a love philtre. She looked a featherweight. It should affect her quickly.

  I put the charmed drink in front of her.

  “At ten, I was sent to Eton, across the Channel. At fourteen, I was admitted to Cambridge. When I turned fifteen, I ran away from university.”

  I watched her openly now. Her skin was unbelievably white. She looked like a cartoon girl, with a child’s face and the full breasts and rounded bottom of a cartoon woman. My gaze lingered on the dimpled knee she was hugging, those blue eyes fixed on me, her lips open in a perfect red O. The very rich can afford to select such genes for their bloodlines.

  Her breasts rose and fell. Yes, she was still attracted. I could tell her anything I liked.

  “Then what happened?”

  I opened my mouth to lie, and truth came out.

  “I ran away to my mother’s family, to New Orleans.”

  The leash again. I had forgotten.

  “When I was seventeen I wrote to my father, telling him I was living in the United States.” She hadn’t touched her drink yet. I tasted mine and smacked my lips. “He sent money. I was welcome to stay here, far away from my lily-white aristocratic family. I moved often. The money didn’t always reach me. I didn’t need it.”

  No, don’t tell her that. Don’t tell her anything she doesn’t ask for.

  My throat was barely wide enough to let out words. What had she asked for? Letters and postcards. “When my father died, I had recently sent a postcard with my address, so the news reached me promptly.”

  “Wait, what was the postcard? What picture was on it?”

  “Yosemite,” I said after some thought. Jake and I had worked in the lodge kitchen all summer, got paid in meals, and slept in the woods. “A redwood tree.”

  “And what year was this?”

  I thought. “I was nineteen. July, nineteen-thirty-six.”

  She nodded. “Go on.” Her bright, fleshy lips parted and the tip of her tongue showed.

  I felt hot and swollen, as if that Yosemite summer heated me.

  “Within a month the patrimony papers came for me to sign.” I snorted. “No doubt the fact that there were no new photographs of me misled the lawyers into supposing I could not be as black as I had been painted.”

  I stretched out my hand to show her, the hand holding my cocktail, and clinked it against her glass. Drink, damn you! So near her pale hand, mine looked like outer space.

  “Their letters in return were much friendlier for a while.”

  “You are very good,” she said with approval. “How do you come to know all this?”

  My throat tightened further. “It’s a really long story.”

  “Jake told you so much!” Her sunny smile warmed me. “You will baffle my father!”

  I realized now why she was taking my claim to be ninety-six so calmly.

  She thought I was reciting Jake’s history. She believed I was an impostor.

  Looking at her, a teenaged, black-haired Jessica Rabbit bouncing on the booth cushion, I didn’t feel like a century-old sex demon. I felt like a teenager myself, emotionally and sexually on edge, vulnerable, hungry, full of longing.

  My eye fell on the vodka tonic glass in my hand.

  Merde. I must have switched the glasses somehow.

  That explained why I was so light-headed.

  I’d drunk my own love philtre.

  o0o

  Suddenly Sophie squeaked. She was staring behind me.

  I looked around. Amid the murk and noise of some two hundred barhopping conventioneers and concert-goers, a man in a gray suit stood thirty feet away. With his lean face and perfect grooming, he looked like a greyhound in a room full of crossbreds.

  I glanced at his feet.

  He wore black custom-made brogues pierced in a distinctive pattern.

  Sophie’s papa! The man who would cheat me of my title in two weeks.

  I dematerialized. My vodka tonic tipped over. I was thankful to be vapor, so that it couldn’t drip onto my linen trousers.

  Sophie looked back to me—and looked right through me. Her eyes widened.

  I was almost sure she couldn’t see me.

  “Well, daughter?” The bon papa stood by our table now. He calmly took her purse off the table, picked up my napkin, wiped the spilled vodka tonic off the booth bench, and slid in across from her.

  Invisible, I flew upward, out of his way.

  He wore the family cologne, designed by a Parisian parfumeur exclusively for one of my ancestors in the mid-eighteenth century.

  That scent gave me the horrors.

  Sophie seemed to be speechless. Her gaze darted left and right, as if she were looking for me. Her lips shaped the words, Sex demon.

  “Where is your companion?” her papa demanded.

  She bristled. “What do you care? I’m allowed to be here.”

  “Drinking under age?” Her papa clicked his tongue. I could see that he didn’t care if she was drinking. “Your hair is disgraceful.”

  “Your detectives mauled me,” she chirped, “and they bruised me, and they struck me on the head.”

  Her papa went very still.

  “Have you come to drag me to the airport yourself, then?”

  Her papa looked at her. There was something unsettling between them. He frightened her, but she also frightened him. I wanted to continue eavesdropping, but the noise and smells of the crowd were battering my demon senses.

  It was a mistake to look at her face again.

  Her expression was brave and calm, but in my etheric form I could see her distress like a red cloud around her.

  I made another mistake.

  Don’t panic, Sophie, I thought. I laid one invisible hand on her shoulder and sent her comfort. Be brave. He can’t hurt you.

  Her face quieted. Her pulse slowed.

  Her father must have seen her expression change. Swiftly he looked behind him.

  Unsettled, I fled, immaterial and confused, my head full of the scent of my own father’s cologne, and in my chest a gaping hole where Sophie had fluttered in and snatched up my heart.

  In some distant, rational part of my mind I thought, That’s going to be inconvenient.

  SOPHIE

  I think my papa tried to drug me, when we were back in his suite at the Four Seasons. He called room service for coffee and stood by to make me drink some. I pretended to sip, and when the house telephone rang and he turned away to answer it, I poured the coffee onto the carpet.

  “Good. Send her up.” My papa hung up. He seemed feverish again. He put his hand into his coat pocket and looked keenly at me. “You look sleepy. Go to bed now.”

  Something was definitely up. What luck that Veek had frustrated his attempt to force me out of the country! I yawned and went to my room.

  A knock came at the suite’s outer door. My papa went to answer it. I shut my own bedroom door, then eased it open a tiny bit. Voices came, becoming clearer as my papa returned to the suite’s lounge with his guest.

  “I came because you sent men to question me. It’s late,” said a woman’s rich voice. “State your business.” Her accent was American, perhaps southern American?

  “Madame Vulcaine, it concerns your kinsman—and—and mine,” he was saying with constraint. “M’sieur le Vicomte Montmorency. You perhaps knew him as Clarence
de Turbin.”

  “Indeed?” That voice gave nothing away. I risked a peek through the door crack and saw a middle-aged woman with a face like weathered bronze, gorgeously dressed in flamboyant African dress that made my father’s Savile Row suit fade to invisibility. Something in her expression made me jerk my head back, certain I had been seen.

  Heart pounding, I lay my ear against the crack.

  After a pause, the woman said, “You are keeping me from an important funeral.”

  “Je regrette,” my papa said politely. I could hear the excitement trembling under his smoothness. “Perhaps this funeral is also the end of my own search. Who has died?”

  “A kouzen,” she said, offhand. “He was much loved in my family. Every hour of delay dishonors him,” she added in a pointed tone.

  “I would—it would be of great assistance to me, to my business, if I could have a tissue sample of your honored cousin.”

  His guest drew in a hissing breath. I peeped. She looked shocked and dangerous. “That is impossible.”

  My papa gave a light laugh. “Oh, no, no, you mistake my purpose. We do not practice vodou. I am French, of good family.” Ouch, Papa. “My need is for a sample of DNA—genetic material, you see. I am seeking to determine whether our joint relative Clarence de Turbin is living or dead. It is a matter of the most urgent to my family, to know if the head of our house lives, or if his dignities have at last passed to his heir.”

  “His tissue sample will be dead, regardless.” I thought she was willfully misunderstanding him, perhaps taunting him. Not wise, I thought.

  “Madame, who has died?” my papa demanded, as if his store of courtesy had burnt up in his madness.

  “How should you know Jacob Pierre?” she said.

  “Are you sure—did this man also—was he also called Jake? Was he born in the United States or in France? Is he the man who traveled so long with the Vicomte Montmorency?” My papa’s voice rose. “Or was it he himself who was the vicomte? Answer me!”

  I peeped again. His hand was in his pocket again. The two of them stared one another down like a pair of angry swans.