“We’ve got a backup generator for emergencies,” Julie told him. “I don’t know if mixing drinks counts as an emergency.”
“The hell with the blender,” Stanley declared. “Who needs fancy drinks when we’re having such a unique experience?”
Julie sent a silent prayer heavenward that everyone would view the party the way Creighton and Stanley did. And indeed, the people around her seemed generally happy, dancing and talking and making the best of a difficult situation.
Surveying the crowd, she spotted Alvin Grote and his companion. Again she was stunned by the eerie resemblance between Grote’s date and Andrea Crowley, one of the girls she’d worked with at Glenn Perry’s agency. This woman was older than the Andrea that Julie remembered, her face a bit worn, her hair spiky and bleached blond at the tips. Her makeup was harsher than anything Andrea had ever worn back when she and Julie worked for Glenn; his agency had had a reputation for youthful, innocent-looking models, and he’d coached his girls to use cosmetics that enhanced that sweet, milk-fed look. Of course, they had been youthful and innocent, at least when they’d started working for him. By the time he’d been convicted, they might not have been that much older, but they’d sure been a lot less innocent.
But why would Andrea have turned up at the hotel’s Twelfth Night party, of all places and after all these years?
Julie eased her way around dancing couples, past a woman seated on a wicker chair, her shoe removed so she could massage her toes, past three men gesticulating with the skewers from their chicken satay hors d’oeuvres while they argued over the environmental impact of the rebuilt oil platforms in the gulf, and finally over to the pool, where Grote and Andrea’s look-alike stood near the wrought-iron fence.
The woman caught Julie’s eye and smiled slightly, but before either she or Julie could speak, Grote erupted. “Ms. Sullivan!” he bellowed, smiling as if he considered life utterly perfect and no complaint had ever sullied his lips. His ponytail trembled from his exuberance. Dressed in a dapper suit and smiling broadly, he looked almost handsome. “What an adventure!”
Julie said something she would never have imagined herself saying a day ago: “If everyone has your attitude, Mr. Grote, this party will be a triumph.”
“I’d like you to meet my friend, Maggie Jones. Maggie, this is Julie Sullivan, who keeps this grand old hotel chugging along.”
Maggie Jones? Julie accepted the name without blinking and extended her hand. The woman shifted her beaded clutch from her right hand to her left so she could shake hands with Julie. “I hardly do it by myself,” Julie said. “We have a large, hardworking staff. And my boss, Charlotte Marchand, is really the one who makes it all happen.”
“She owns the hotel, huh?” the woman called Maggie said. A decade had passed since Julie had spoken to Andrea Crowley, but this woman sounded an awful lot like her.
“Her family does. Her parents founded the hotel, and her mother still keeps her hand in it. Her sisters are involved in the business, too.”
Maggie looked less than fascinated. Her gaze drifted to her beaming escort. “Alvie, would you be a dear and get me a martini?” she asked. “On ice.”
Alvin Grote seemed surprised. “In the middle of a blackout?”
“They don’t need electricity to make a martini,” Maggie said.
“The ice cubes here aren’t the cylindrical kind with the holes in the center,” he warned. “The beverage doesn’t flow through them.”
“That’s all right. I’ll make do.” She sent him an adoring smile, and he seemed to melt like a praline in warm water.
“I’ll be right back,” he promised, then spun and hustled through the crowd, clearly eager to satisfy Maggie’s every whim.
Maggie turned back to Julie. Either this woman was Andrea or she had a punky twin sister. The moon shed enough light for Julie to recognize those pale, cool eyes, even though they were circled not just in inky eyeliner but in weary, wary shadow. “Maggie, is it?” she asked politely.
“For the time being,” Maggie replied with a smile. “Shouldn’t one of us say, small world? Or maybe long time no see.”
“Both work.” Julie relaxed. Now that she knew she was actually talking to Andrea, she wanted to give her old colleague a hug. But Andrea was sending don’t-touch-me vibes, so Julie restrained herself. “Why did you change your name to Maggie?”
“Oh, I just…” She glanced in the direction Alvin Grote had vanished. “Let’s face it, he picked me up on Bourbon Street. I wanted to come to this party, so I encouraged him, you know? But I didn’t think he needed to know who I really was.”
Julie supposed that made a kind of convoluted sense. “How have you been?” she asked.
“Hanging in there.” She swept her gaze the length of Julie’s body. “You’ve put on a few, haven’t you.”
Julie laughed. “And I’ve savored every single calorie. Are you still modeling? You look—” terrible, she thought but said, “—terrific.”
Andrea snorted. “No, Julie. I’m not modeling. The agency I used to be with went under. Maybe you heard.”
Julie detected a strong undertone of bitterness in Andrea’s voice. “There are other agencies.”
“Not for me, there aren’t.”
“So,” Julie said brightly, not wishing to rehash the ugly days after Glenn had been arrested and all his models had found themselves bereft of any support. “What have you been up to?”
“We’ve got some catching up to do.” Andrea slipped her hand around Julie’s elbow. “But not here. It’s too crowded.”
“I can’t leave the party,” Julie protested, although she was tempted to find a quiet corner where she and Andrea could talk over old times. She’d always been fond of Andrea and as protective of her as Andrea would allow—which wasn’t much. Although Julie couldn’t prove it, she suspected that Glenn Perry had taken particular advantage of Andrea, who had arrived in New York City from a blink-and-you’ve-missed-it Midwestern town, armed with big dreams but not much savvy. Though Glenn hadn’t gotten her a great deal of modeling work, he’d definitely kept her tightly under his control. At his urging, Andrea had dropped a lot of weight, and when Julie had pressed her, she’d admitted that he was supplying her with amphetamines. Julie had suspected she might be one of the girls sleeping with Glenn, too, but Andrea had been evasive about that.
Once Glenn had been arrested and Andrea had returned home to wherever she’d come from—Wisconsin or Indiana, Julie couldn’t remember—Julie had felt confident Andrea would put her life back together. She’d always seemed hard-headed and stubborn, traits Julie could identify with, given her own stubborn streak.
While she knew she ought to remain in the courtyard, doing her part to keep the party going, she was curious to hear about Andrea’s life and find out what had brought her to New Orleans. And really, the party seemed to be faring quite well without any assistance from her. So when Andrea gave her arm a little tug and said, “Come on, just for a few minutes,” Julie shrugged and strolled with her toward the lobby doors.
Through the glass she could see that the lobby was dark except for a few candles burning inside glass chimneys. Thank goodness the hotel had a supply of glass-enclosed candles. Open flames in a hotel crammed with antiques and high-energy revelers would have been hazardous.
She’d thought they could stand at the edge of the courtyard to talk—after all, Alvin Grote would be returning soon with Andrea’s martini—but Andrea swung open a door and led Julie into the dark, eerily quiet lobby. One clerk stood behind the check-in credenza in the amber glow of a hurricane lamp. He looked generally helpless with his computer out of commission, but except for him the lobby was empty. Andrea steered Julie away from the desk, toward one of the candles, and then released her arm. “I want to show you something,” she murmured, lifting her purse and popping open the clasp. She reached in and pulled out a silver pistol no bigger than her hand.
“Andrea! What—?”
“Shh,” Andrea s
ilenced her. “We’re going for a walk.”
Julie stared at the gun. Why the hell was Andrea carrying that—that thing? Julie had seen guns in movies and on TV, but the closest she’d ever come to an actual firearm was when she’d talked to police officers. People she knew didn’t own them. Or if they did, they kept them carefully locked up, not stashed in their elegant evening purses.
She forced her brain to stay focused. Andrea Crowley had a gun and she was taking Julie for a walk. Julie was being abducted. The hotel was without electricity, the party was gearing up again, and a woman Julie had once worked with and had considered a colleague and a friend was brushing the tip of her tiny, deadly gun against Julie’s back, exactly where Mac had brushed the tips of his fingers just minutes ago, when they’d been dancing and the hotel had been filled with light.
Okay. Julie took a deep breath. Okay. She was being kidnapped. She had to stay alert. She had to save her life. “Put that away,” she whispered. “I’ll go wherever you want, but put that thing away.”
Andrea smiled. Her teeth were still model white and even. “No, Julie. You don’t get to tell me what to do. I’m the one with the gun. Let’s go.” She used the weapon to nudge Julie toward the door to the street.
Julie moved stiffly, under no obligation to act as if everything was normal. Her fingers fidgeted so intensely with her boa, a feather came loose in her hand. An idea sprang to her mind. She discreetly dropped the feather. It landed on the carpet just inside the door.
The street outside the hotel was a scene of festive bedlam. Thousands of people milled around on the sidewalks and in the streets, where cars, trapped in gridlock without traffic lights or police officers to guide them, blared their horns. Their headlights slashed the night, but they were aimed straight ahead, not toward the dark, crowded sidewalks and shrouded buildings.
The French Quarter always teemed with people, but tonight the throngs stared at one another rather than the historic buildings. The neon signs of fortune-tellers weren’t flashing, and the display windows of jewelry stores and souvenir shops remained dark. Upstairs, people gathered on the balconies overlooking the street, singing, shouting, drinking and viewing the blackout as an excuse to party—as if folks in New Orleans ever needed an excuse.
Julie wondered if she could lose Andrea in the crowd. She felt the pistol’s barrel jab her spine and decided not to risk it. If she broke free, Andrea might fire and hurt someone else. The better choice was to argue some sense into Andrea, to learn what she was up to and talk her out of it.
Meanwhile, she plucked another couple of feathers from the boa and let them fall. They landed where the front facade of the hotel met the sidewalk. Julie prayed they wouldn’t blow away or get trampled. Surely if someone found a trail of pink feathers, they’d think to follow it, wouldn’t they?
Mac would. That understanding was so forceful, so irrefutable, she nearly smiled. Mac would follow the feathers and find her.
After he was done getting the hotel’s generator up and running, she reminded herself. And double-checking the gallery to make sure the Wyeth painting was safe. And returning to the party and discovering Julie was gone. By which time God knew how far Andrea would have dragged her. Would she run out of feathers before he found her?
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, trying to keep her tone even. She refused to let Andrea know she was frantic, her heart thumping against her ribs at twice its normal tempo. As long as she remained outwardly poised, she had a prayer of keeping Andrea calm, as well.
Andrea’s voice barely carried over the din of horns honking, engines rumbling and people shouting and, in a few inebriated cases, singing off-key. “You ruined everything,” Andrea told her. “You destroyed my life.”
“Me?” Julie laughed, even though nothing about this situation was funny. She was keenly, painfully aware of that gun poking the center of her back. She tugged a wad of feathers from the boa and let them fall to the sidewalk.
“Where’s your car?” Andrea asked.
Julie gave her a sharp look. “You must be joking. We can’t drive anywhere tonight. The neighborhood is blacked out. Look at the traffic!”
“I don’t care. Where’s your car?”
Sighing, Julie turned left at the corner. The side street was marginally less crowded. She plucked another bunch of feathers from the boa and dropped them. “Andrea, I always liked you. I worried about you in New York. It infuriated me that Glenn took such advantage of you. How did I destroy your life?”
“He didn’t take advantage of me,” Andrea snapped. “I loved him.”
Julie wanted to give Andrea a good shake, but she didn’t think that would be a wise idea, given that Andrea had a gun. Instead she helped the boa shed a few more feathers. “How could you love him? He was twenty years older than you, and he was pumping you full of drugs.”
“I liked those drugs,” Andrea muttered. “You think getting off the drugs was easy? I went nuts, thanks to you. You were so self-righteous, Julie. You knew what was right for everyone. You took Glenn out of action because you knew better than the rest of us. So we all lost Glenn. We lost our chance to model. We lost our chance to make it. And Glenn—I lost Glenn.”
“He was an asshole,” Julie retorted, forgetting for a moment that she was supposed to be trying to keep Andrea calm. “He used you, he exploited you—”
“He loved me,” she insisted. “And I waited for him. I waited. He got out of jail and I flew back to New York to be with him, and…” Her voice faltered slightly, and a quick glimpse informed Julie that Andrea’s eyes had teared up. “Prison changed him. He didn’t love me anymore. God knows what happened to him while he was there, but he didn’t want me. And it’s all your fault.”
“All right—so this romance didn’t work out,” Julie said, once again placating. She tried not to choke on the word romance. A forty-something businessman having sex with his teenage models hardly qualified as a romance. “I’m sorry, Andrea. I really am. I was only trying to keep you and the other girls from getting hurt.”
Andrea said nothing. They reached the corner near the lot where Julie had parked. She couldn’t imagine where they’d drive. The intersection was jammed with more vehicles, some abandoned, others with their engines still running and the drivers shouting at each other through their open windows. A helpful volunteer wearing a Cat-in-the-Hat striped stovepipe hat stood at the center of the intersection, alternately swigging from a bottle of gin and attempting to direct traffic.
“Glenn was the only good thing that ever happened to me,” Andrea said, shoving Julie across the street. “He cared about me. He gave me what I needed and he told me he loved me.”
“Did you send me the e-mails?” Julie asked suddenly. For some reason, as they inched their way through the crowd and across the street, her brain started clicking.
“Did you like those?” Andrea giggled, sounding for a moment like the sweet young girl she’d once been. “Did they scare the hell out of you?”
“No.” It didn’t add up. Andrea couldn’t have been the source of the e-mails. Alvin Grote had met her two days ago, and Julie had gotten all those messages from around the country yesterday. How could Andrea have sent e-mails from Dallas and Detroit when she’d been in New Orleans?
“You’re lying—you were scared,” Andrea insisted.
“All right. I was scared.” They’d reached the parking lot, and Julie dropped another handful of pink feathers. She was desperate to slow Andrea down, to keep from getting into her car. Once they were in the car, her trail of feathers would end. “How did you send e-mails from around the country when you were in New Orleans?”
“I was in New York for a while,” Andrea said. “I sent those. I had a friend who’s a flight attendant send the others from around the country. Pretty clever, huh?”
Actually, Julie recalled that the e-mails that had come in a bunch yesterday had been much less subtle than those sent from New York. She should have guessed they’d been written by a di
fferent person. “That’s an awful lot of trouble to go through, just to spook me.”
“Not as much trouble as pulling this trigger,” Andrea pointed out. “Which car is yours?”
“That one.” Julie pointed to the decrepit old car. “I don’t have my keys with me.”
Andrea whacked the gun against her back, bruising her. “Damn it! Where are the keys?”
Julie blinked back the tears that sprang to her eyes from the pain of the blow. “They’re locked in my office,” she said.
“You’re lying!” Andrea began pawing her, searching the layered fabric of her dress’s skirt for a pocket. Julie bit her lip. She’d locked her purse in her office, but her office key was on the same ring as her car key—and that ring was nestled in the discreet pocket in the side seam of the dress.
Unfortunately, Andrea found it. “You effin’ liar,” she muttered, then whacked Julie’s back again, banging the butt of the gun against her ribs and causing Julie to wince. “Get in the car.”
Julie clung tenuously to hope. She dropped another few feathers and nudged them under her car with her foot, then let Andrea push her behind the wheel. She started the engine before Andrea climbed into the passenger seat, entertaining the thought that she could drive away before Andrea got in, but her hands were shaking and she couldn’t shift into reverse and back out of the space quickly enough. Andrea stumbled in as the car lurched backward, then she smacked Julie’s arm and rammed the gun’s muzzle into her side.
“Drive,” she ordered.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, the generator won’t start?” Mac growled at Eddie, one of the two maintenance men who’d met him in the furnace room, where the emergency generator shared space with the furnaces, central air conditioning units and hot water tanks.
In the Dark Page 18
