by Alice Quinn
Lani had left the room to take a bag of garbage out. She didn’t come back through the same door. She had a weird expression on her face—I’d say a slightly guilty expression. She caught Humbert’s eye but avoided mine. I wondered where she’d been. Maybe she’d left to have a smoke? Or to use the bathroom? But there didn’t seem to be any obvious reason why she should look so shifty.
“Did you make a call?” Sabrina asked her.
“You know we got rid of all our cell phones, Sabrina,” I said as Lani answered at the same time: “No. No phone,” she said, her cheeks reddening. She was so shy! Speaking in front of everyone made her look like she was going to pass out with embarrassment.
Sabrina stuck out her lower lip. It was trembling. Simon studied her closely.
“I’m not a liar-panth-on-fire! Lani hath a thell phone.”
“No, no!” Lani cried, her voice full of panic.
“I know you’re not a liar, my little love bug. Anyone can make a mistake. That’s all it is. You just got it wrong.”
To everyone’s total amazement, Lani burst out crying. Humbert stared at her, all kinds of mixed emotions showing on his face. Attraction, mistrust, anger . . .
“You phoned somebody?” he asked her.
“No, no, no, no . . .” she kept repeating, tears dropping down onto the table in front of her. It was the first time I’d seen her without her famous smile. I felt so awful for her. So sad.
Humbert clearly had an overwhelming need to console her, but he ignored it. He stood up and grabbed a book of Gaston’s poetry. He stormed off into the living room and plonked himself down in an armchair. What a sulky baby. I could understand how he might be jealous. He believed what Sabrina had said. He believed that Lani had a cell phone with her.
“You don’t underthtand. You’re tho thtupid. Why don’t you believe what I’m thaying?” cried Sabrina.
I went to defend Lani. “Because Lani isn’t stupid. She knows it would be too risky for us to have our cell phones here. I explained it all to you, didn’t I? We’re playing hide-and-seek from the Witch. The Witch knows how to detect cell phones. OK. I think it’s getting too late for little children to be up and about. It’s sleepytime now. Véro, what are you doing?”
“I’ll take them home!” exclaimed Ismène, jumping out of her seat.
Lani was inconsolable, but the story of the phone was forgotten by all of us almost as quickly as Sabrina had brought it up. I say ‘brought it up,’ but I guessed it was more ‘made it up.’ It was what it was. When you’re innocent, you’re more likely to protest than cry, aren’t you? Well, maybe it was a cultural thing. I had no idea how people from the Philippines reacted to being falsely accused of something. Maybe I didn’t have a clue how most people reacted to accusations—only how I would react.
A few visions flashed through my mind: Lani suddenly appearing out of nowhere in the basement . . . that workshop down there . . . the way she got all hot and bothered when the brothers were talking about how skilled her Asian compatriots were . . . It was a series of flashbacks, just like the one I’d had about the missing painting a couple of days earlier. What was happening to me? Was I becoming clairvoyant like my momma? I could feel things . . . see things . . . before they happened.
No, that wasn’t true. I was just remembering things I’d forgotten. Big difference. Still, it was a skill all the same. Glass half-full, right?
67
I faced Lani, trying to act nonchalant.
“Hey, Lani, do you still have the keys to the basement at Max’s place? There’s something I need to check out down there.”
Well, this bit was surprising. What a reaction! She started screaming and shouting like a maniac. “No keys! No keys!”
But I remembered her mentioning having the keys! I know she did! So this time I’d caught her in an out-and-out lie. Unless she’d given the keys to somebody else. But who?
The brothers came rushing into the room. They were really charging, obviously expecting to find someone strangling the lovely Lani what with all the racket she was making. Théodore placed himself directly next to me, whereas Humbert threw me a disgusted sneer.
“Why are you shit-eyeing me like that? I didn’t do a thing to her! All I did was ask her for the keys to your father’s basement.”
“Why do you want to know that all of a sudden?” asked Théodore. This time, he was the one who gave me the disgusted look.
“I think I remembered something. I had a kind of flashback. It was like the last time when I thought I saw a gap in the paintings on your father’s office wall. I remembered it. When I went to check, the little painting was missing. I’ve just had the same kind of memory-weirdness happen now. I can see the corner of the basement. It’s not as clear as you’d see something in reality. I have to go back and see what’s what. I was stuck in that place for almost a whole day. Why can’t I get a clearer picture of it? What am I supposed to do? Lani says she doesn’t have the keys, but I know for a fact she does!”
“No! No!” hollered Lani.
“Now you listen here. You can see she doesn’t have them!”
I sighed exaggeratedly. “It’s no big deal. But you know what? You three are really getting on my nerves right now. I’ll go back to your father’s house and break the lock, or . . . I don’t know. I’ll think of something. But I’ll get into that place. You’d better believe it!”
“I have a key,” Théo replied.
I gazed at him, my guardian angel. He smiled back at me and pulled a key chain out of the right-hand pocket of his pants. He handed it over, and I shoved it into my own pocket with one swift movement. He smiled again. I melted. He took me into his arms, and I almost forget where I was. What was happening? Oh . . . no . . .
I pulled myself together and said, “That’s enough! I’m getting out of here.”
As soon as I said those words, Lani stopped the waterworks. She looked out of her wits with fear. “Dangerous, dangerous,” she mumbled sadly. She shuffled into the living room and fell into one of the armchairs. She was done for, like she’d given up.
“I’m coming with you,” said Théodore. “Let’s take the Jaguar. I don’t want the cops, if there are any in the area, to recognize my Mercedes.”
It was tempting.
“Will you take care of the twins?” I asked the room, not addressing either Lani or Humbert directly.
And off we both went into the night. The bitterly cold night.
I didn’t get the feeling we were being watched. Since Mademoiselle Kessler had also croaked, I guessed there weren’t enough officers to police every street. Once inside the house, we noticed that the office was blocked off with yellow plastic crime-scene tape.
Théodore guessed my thoughts. “Yes, there’s tape outside Mademoiselle Kessler’s room too. That’s where they found her.”
I turned in the direction of the pantry and the trapdoor to the basement. Théodore stepped into my path and gathered me into his arms.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
He walked me up to the second floor. Really, he swept me up there—my feet didn’t even touch the ground. At the top of the stairs was a never-ending corridor. He stopped in front of a door, laughed, put me down, and pushed me through into a bedroom. It was a little boy’s bedroom, very old-fashioned, like it hadn’t been redecorated in decades. Stuck over the classy wallpaper were dozens of rock-group posters.
I understood what he wanted to happen when he threw me onto the bed.
“Hey! What’s with you?” I was just about to push him away when “Kiss Me” started playing in my head.
The make out session that followed would have put any teenage couple to shame. I was trembling from head to toe. Was I nervous? Inside my head, I heard: Go on! Go for it. It’s not every day you get passionately thrown onto a bed like this. But my inner good-girl voice was contradictory: You’ve time for all the naughty stuff as soon as you’ve finished what needs to be finished. Go and check out the bas
ement! That’s why you’re here. Get to it, girl!
I jumped up and sprinted through the bedroom door into the ten-mile-long corridor and down the majestic stairway. I’d just got the trapdoor to the cellar open when Théodore appeared standing above me with an expression of confusion, sadness, and resignation across his face. There was also a hint of something wild about him. This is too much, right? There’s no need to go all over the top like this.
He followed me down the steps. We found ourselves in the dark basement among all the crazyass stuff down there. I started flittering from wall to wall, displacing things, picking them up and putting them down. The image I’d had in my mind earlier wasn’t as clear now. I didn’t know what I was looking for.
Théodore was begging me to leave, putting even more pressure on me. He became very ill at ease. He was having some kind of panic attack by the look of him.
“Come on Rosie! Hurry up! This is really risky!”
“Just leave me alone a second, would you?”
We went into the room where I’d first seen Lani. The workshop. I could see that Théodore was throwing a couple of furtive glances toward a shelf. He was coming across as very shifty. What was going on? I stopped. He was trying to pull my attention away from the room. Pawing at me, kissing me . . . He was hiding something. I was sure of it.
“What’s the problem here? What are you hiding from me?”
“Me? Nothing!” he said in a sweet and innocent voice that didn’t ring true. He stomped off to a corner of the room.
God! I was sick and tired of it all! I’d found myself a new lover boy here, but he was a fakeass! Typical! The circumstances were too strange—this just couldn’t be true. The probability was high that this guy wasn’t a keeper. Sky high.
“Fine.”
I looked over to the shelves where he’d been sneakily glancing. I couldn’t see anything up there. They were too high up. I took a ladder and climbed up six or seven rungs. It was well hidden, but it was there all right. If I wasn’t so good at observing people and their behavior, I’d have never even thought to go rooting around up on those shelves.
I found a dirty pair of rolled-up curtains. I lifted up a corner and discovered the curtains were full of canvases. Beautiful old canvases that looked like they should have been on their way to some top-notch museum somewhere.
I wanted to climb back down to let Théodore know what I’d found, but when I looked to check where he was, I could see he was having a fit or something. He was in a state of extreme agitation. He was pacing up and down a wall of the workshop, like a lion trapped in a cage, going stir-crazy. Just as I was about to climb down to comfort him, he started off on a mad dash around the room, knocking things over, flipping things upside down . . . Objects were flying everywhere. He was muttering something, but I couldn’t make out what it was. To be honest, he came across demented.
I called out to him from on top of the ladder. “What are you doing down there? What are you playing at? You’ve lost it! You’ve totally lost it!”
“Just watch what you’re saying, Rosie, and I mean it. You shouldn’t have insisted on coming down here. There’s no need for you to be hunting for things that don’t concern you. You’re too nosy for your own good. And it’s a real shame, because I’m crazily, madly in love with you.”
“Just calm your ass down now! What are these canvases here? Huh? Did you steal your father’s paintings? You wasted your own daddy, didn’t you?”
He looked terrified. “Who do you take me for? I’m neither a thief nor a killer. All I’ve done is take what was owed to me. I have nothing to do with the death of my father whatsoever.”
“Really? If that’s true, why are you threatening me? What did you do?”
He appeared done in, his eyes glazed over. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I . . . I won’t let you ruin all this for me, Rosie. I worked damn hard for it.”
“I don’t know how many times I’m supposed to tell you that it’s Cricri!”
“Yes, Cricri . . .”
“And that’s what you call hard work? Stealing your father’s paintings?”
“Exactly so.”
“You’re all a bunch of nuts in your family. That’s all I know. If that’s what you call working hard for a living. Listen up—I bet you won’t believe me, but the other day was my first-ever job interview. I bet you didn’t know that!”
I was trying to draw his attention away from whatever it was he was mulling over. He seemed surprised by my admission. It worked!
“Really? I couldn’t tell. You came across as very sure of yourself.”
“Thank you.” The truth was, I’d come across as a dick.
There was a spell of silence. He hesitated. I don’t think he knew what to say or do. What would his next move be? Then I saw it. He made a move toward me. He clearly wanted to take me up into his arms again. But then he changed his mind and busted stuff up once more. He was destroying the place. Trashing it!
“Get down from there, Cricri. Get down before I pull you down myself.”
“No. I’m not coming down, and you won’t be pulling me down from anywhere. I can’t believe you said that. Don’t you dare threaten me!”
“Watch yourself. I’ve been known to be violent if need be. I could . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Finish your sentence. You could what? You’re not a thief. You’re not a killer. You said it yourself. Do you think I could fall in love with a killer? Come off it! A woman can sense these things.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d just said. It didn’t hold up. Some of the blanks needed filling in if I was to successfully distract him. I could see that he was confused by my declaration.
68
Everything happened so quickly. Well, I climbed down from the ladder very slowly . . . and then it all happened quickly. When I got to the bottom rung, he stopped his madass ransacking and flew over to me. He jumped on top of me, knocking me to the floor.
He could have really hurt us both, the idiot. We both struggled on the dusty floor. He tried to grab me from behind, holding on to my back. He was a giant of a man, over six feet tall, so he managed it easily. He dragged me over to an old chair, grabbing some cord on the way, and firmly tied it around my wrists. I could barely move. He then started to play with my hair, nibble my face, kiss and suck my neck, massage my lips with his own passionately, our eyes closed . . .
I don’t know why but I started calling him Monsieur instead of Théo. We were back to being a boss and an employee again. Stress. That was the only reason there could have been. This whole business was messing me up, and it was pretty clear why!
“Oh, Monsieur, this is screwy. Untie me.”
“No. I don’t want to. I have to get out of here. I have to get as far away as I can. And I want to take my things with me. As soon as I’ve found a safe place, I’ll call the police, and they’ll come and get you, Mademoiselle Maldonne.”
So he was playing the formal game too. I didn’t like it! Not one bit. This formality wasn’t a game. It put distance between us. It was the beginning of our tragic end.
“Monsieur, you know me well enough by now. You know I won’t say anything. What do you plan on doing? What have you done that’s so wrong, anyway?”
His face turned sullen. “I had all the paintings in my father’s office copied. Then one by one, I replaced the real ones with forgeries, all in the same frames. I’ve got all the real ones. The genuine articles. They’re over there, Mademoiselle Maldonne. You’ve already seen them, haven’t you?”
“No shit! Did you really do that?” I was impressed. It showed.
“Yeah. Not bad, huh?”
“But Humbert told me you were loaded already.”
“I was! I lost it all on the markets. I invested in incompetent traders. They promised me the world, of course, and I fell for it. I lost everything. My friends lost everything too.”
“Rough.”
“Yes, and Father didn’t want to hear anything about it. And I did
n’t dare tell my siblings—it’s not the sort of thing you go around bragging about. Father wouldn’t help me work my way out of it all. I would never have even dreamed of doing any of this had I not overheard a conversation between him and Mademoiselle Kessler. I learned he had another son and that this boy stood to get the whole lot when my father passed. He was very unfair, my father.”
“He was only doing to you what he’d already done to your brothers and sisters. He was treating you the same as everyone else. That is fair. No need to make such a song and dance about it all.”
“No. I’m nothing like the others. I know how to take care of myself—that’s the difference.”
“OK. How long did it take you to get all the paintings copied?”
“It’s been almost two years.” He looked livid.
“You know what? Your father was old. He was losing his mind, the poor man. He was an easy target for you.”
His expression changed to one of sadness. “Yes, you’re right. Too easy, in fact. And then he died. It was unexpected. I didn’t have time to finish what I’d started.”
“Is that why you had to take the little painting? Were you the one who hid it in my trailer?”
“No. That wasn’t me.”
“And, correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t know who killed your daddy, right? Come on, please let me go. We’ve had a little fun with this, but I want you to untie me.”
I’d slipped this last request into the conversation, hoping he wouldn’t think about it too much. He didn’t. He obeyed me instead.
He undid the knots, then stared deep into my eyes, followed by a long, slow kiss. “I would never have left you here on your own in the cold.”
“In the cold? I’m right next to the boiler! I’m sweating my ass off here.”
“It wasn’t meant to be taken literally. I couldn’t have left you here. That’s all I’m saying.”
I freed myself, and he sat down on the floor next to me.
“Tell me what I should do,” he said.
