Mrs. Lee turned to me. “I asked her if you might wear this tonight, and she said yes.” Nathan’s mother took the dress off its hanger and held it out to me.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Try it on,” Mrs. Lee insisted.
Nathan came into the room. Over his purple shirt, he wore a skinny tuxedo about two inches too short in the legs and arms. He held his hands out in front of him. “Is it a lost cause?”
Mrs. Lee flipped up the end of the sleeve. “Looks like it was altered for your grandfather. I can get more length out of it.” She stepped back to look at him. “You’re lucky the waist fits. Take it off and let me get to work.” She shooed me out of the room. “You, go try that on.”
I hesitated. So far, I’d seen visions only when I touched objects with my hands, but if I slipped this vintage dress over my body, touching all that skin, what would happen?
I walked down the hall to the bathroom. With the gloves still on, I removed the rest of my clothes and stepped into the dress, my eyes squeezed shut, bracing myself for the worst.
Nothing happened.
I cautiously opened my eyes and caught sight of myself in the dress. The waist hung a little loose, the bust cinched a little tight, and it wasn’t as long as it probably should be. But it was perfect. I didn’t have to see a vision to feel all the good memories attached to this dress.
There was a knock at the door. Nathan’s mother stood in the hall with a big rustling half slip in her hands. She looked me over. “Not bad.” She handed me the slip. “Try this crinoline with it.” I put on the stiff, puffy underskirt, and she fussed with the fabric at my waist. “We may need to adjust those darts a bit, but you look beautiful.” She slipped a straight pin into the fabric where my waist was narrowest.
I swallowed hard. “Thank you so much for this. I know how special it is.”
With a smile, she stepped out of the bathroom. “It’s good to see Nathan so happy.”
I blushed and shut the door. I smoothed my gloved hands over the lace, hating the thought of taking the dress off, even so she could alter it. But I brought it back to the bedroom, where Mrs. Lee sat at a table by the window, ripping the hems out of Nathan’s tuxedo pants.
I draped the dress across the end of the bed. When Nathan’s grandmother saw it, she asked Mrs. Lee another question in Chinese, and the two had a brief conversation. The older woman picked up the dress, turned it inside out, and started pinning.
Mrs. Lee turned to me, tears in her eyes. “She wants to do the alterations for you. I haven’t seen her this alert in quite a while.” We watched her deft movements as she found a white spool and threaded the sewing machine. “It’s amazing,” Mrs. Lee said, “the memories your body holds on to. Even when your mind forgets.”
She reached into the top drawer of a dresser and took out a long white box. Inside, wrapped in layers of tissue paper, was a pair of black elbow-length gloves. “I thought you might like something more formal than the ones you’re wearing.” She hadn’t even asked why I was wearing gloves in the first place, and I wondered what Nathan had told her. “If these will work for you,” she said, holding them out to me, “you’re welcome to wear them tonight.”
I took the gloves gratefully, but I didn’t put them on yet. I waited until the alterations to the dress were complete, until I was wearing it again with the stiff crinoline and a pair of borrowed, too-tight shoes, until the look on Nathan’s face as I came down the stairs made me feel like a kid on her first roller coaster, until all three of us stood in the entryway of Nathan’s house, ready to leave for the theater.
When we got to Nathan’s car, I peeled off the gloves I’d taken from Dr. Brightman and dropped them into my backpack. I slipped my fingers into one of the opera gloves, smoothing it up my arm and over my elbow. It was so long and graceful, the satin warm against my skin.
Then the lights began to flicker, and a bright burst like a camera flash dazzled my eyes. No, I thought. Not now. Not again. But the light carried me along like a wave, and I was helpless to resist it.
I found myself in the hallway of an office building, where a young couple argued in Chinese. The scene warped and burned around the edges, like rubber melting at the fringes of my eyesight. The woman—Nathan’s grandmother?—was wearing this same dress, with the same long black gloves. Looking back and forth between her and the women inside, I quickly understood her frustration. She’d made a cocktail gown, but the other women were wearing casual skirts and tops. Judging by her body language, she felt embarrassed and wanted to leave. But her husband only smiled. He pulled his fedora down low on his forehead and tugged her into his arms, leaning close to whisper in her ear. Her anger dissolved, replaced first by a giggle and then by a glow.
The burning edges spread, until the whole image warped like melting film, distorting the figures of the man and woman. Holes opened in my vision, and beyond was only blackness. I found myself stumbling and falling, and I plummeted down into the dark, while somewhere, voices called my name.
CHAPTER 18
“MEGAN! MEGAN, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
I forced my eyes open, my throat screaming for water. I lay in the backseat of Nathan’s car. Outside the windows, everything was dark. I shot up, afraid I’d missed it all, afraid that the gala was long over, the derringer long gone. The rapid movement left me light-headed, and I crumpled down onto the seat.
“Whoa there,” Nathan said. “Take it easy.” He had been standing by the open car door, and now he climbed into the seat beside me, lifting my head and resting it on his lap. “We put Dr. Brightman’s gloves back on you, but don’t take any chances.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s barely seven thirty,” Nathan said. “Don’t worry. You didn’t miss anything.”
Eric spoke up from the front seat. “He started talking about the hospital again.”
“Can you blame me?” Nathan snapped. “You’re getting worse, aren’t you?”
I struggled to sit up again, and Nathan didn’t try to stop me. “Let’s just get to that gun before Dr. Brightman does.”
I forced myself out of the car, emerging into the sickly sodium light of an underground parking garage. I was grateful for the dim, since the dull ache behind my eyeballs seemed to have taken up permanent residence.
“Did you bring my backpack?” I asked.
Eric gestured to my vintage cocktail dress. “I don’t think it goes with your outfit.”
I glared at him. “I want the cigar box. Just in case.”
Nathan retrieved my backpack from the trunk, and I slung it over my bare shoulders and started walking. When Nathan and Eric didn’t follow, I turned to see them exchange a look that was all furrowed eyebrows and unspoken fears.
“We don’t have time for this! Let’s go.”
We emerged from the parking garage a block away from Ford’s Theatre—and directly across the street from a storefront exhibit of artifacts from the old National Museum of Crime and Punishment. A poster on the front of the building showed a car riddled with bullet holes, while lettering made to look like crime-scene tape announced For a limited time only! Here it was, a whole building full of blood artifacts.
I froze in my steps. Maybe I didn’t need the derringer to stop my visions. Maybe this would be enough.
I stepped off the curb and into the street, headed straight for the exhibit.
“Hey!” Nathan called. “What the . . .”
I could hear car horns and angry voices, but they didn’t deter me from my course.
I walked into the bright lobby of the exhibit, dizzy with fear and anticipation. Right there, by the lines of tourists waiting to buy tickets, was a car. Not the one from the photo out front, that sexy gangster sedan. This was a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle, its white paint spotted with rust. One door stood open. I moved slowly toward it. A sign above the car read Theodore Bundy’s Volkswagen: Instrument of Crime. It was, in its way, a murder weapon, the site of possibly dozens of deaths.
/> How could it be real? How could it be sitting here, in this crowd of bored and distracted tourists? It looked like art, like that Kienholz assemblage Back Seat Dodge, where he altered an old car and put a tangle of legs and arms in the backseat, creating something ominous and sexual and terrifying. But this was real. Almost unimaginably real. And we, the multitudes, had come to gawk and stare.
Eric and Nathan caught up to me. “What’s going on?” Eric asked. “I thought we didn’t have time for this.”
I stepped even closer to the car. Only a stanchion made of handcuffs separated us now. If I touched it, would it quiet my ceaseless thoughts? When I imagined the pain it would cause, I shook with a bone-deep fear that was almost . . . longing. Part of me yearned for it, for a pain strong enough to black out everything but itself, a pain that could wipe away everything crooked and sharp and struggling inside me. A pain that would end my grief.
But what if, as Dr. Brightman had suggested, I didn’t survive the experience? If I died, what would happen to all the things that I had marked? Would anyone find them? Would they have the power to tell my story?
The people around me seemed to fade, and all that existed was me and the car. It hunched there, terrible and tempting. I curled my fingers at my side. Thinking. Debating.
I pulled off one of my gloves.
Nathan took my bare hand in both of his and turned me around to face him. His eyes shone. “Please,” he said, “come back to us. Please don’t go.” He brought my hand to his lips and kissed my fingers.
I blinked at him, the spell of the car broken. “What am I doing here?”
“Scaring the ever-loving crap out of me,” he said.
“Me too,” I replied.
As the day sped toward its end, my fears only grew. I was losing control. Maybe even losing my mind. Certainly on the brink of losing everything. And Dr. Brightman had lived like this for years? My anger at him faded somewhat. But not my resolve.
I looked down at Nathan’s hand, still holding mine, skin to skin. It caused no pain, forced no memories on me. In fact, it did exactly the opposite: it pulled me into the present, grounded me in the right now. I sent up a silent thank-you for all the things I had in my life that Dr. Brightman did not.
“Can we go now?” Nathan asked. Eric nodded vehemently.
I backed away from the car. For better or for worse, this wasn’t my artifact. Mine was waiting for me a block away, at the social event of the season, along with the man who’d killed my brother.
As we moved down Tenth Street, heading toward Ford’s Theatre, the air turned electric. The sun was still up, but the street shone doubly bright with photographic lights and flashes as attendees walked the red carpet of the gala. People packed the sidewalk across from the theater, angling for a glimpse of the new arrivals, and security vehicles blocked the street from car traffic. Secret Service officers canvassed the area, muttering into their white earpieces, while other security personnel checked IDs and searched our bags.
As Eric spoke to a hostess about our tickets, I spotted a familiar car parked beyond the barricade—Dr. Brightman’s black sedan. I gripped Nathan’s arm. But it looked like the backseat was empty. Mr. Wendell leaned against a nearby building smoking a cigarette. I had a sudden memory, one not brought on by an object. The special glasses that Dr. Brightman wore, the ones that shielded him from the visions. He’d said he kept an extra pair in his car.
I took a step toward it, but Nathan held me back.
“No way. Not again,” he said.
“It’s okay.” I looked him in the eye. “I’m still here. Come with me.”
We walked over to the barricade, and Mr. Wendell quickly spotted us.
“Hey, Cool Hair Girl!” He crossed the street and met us at the gate. “The professor is inside. I dropped him off a half hour ago.”
“I don’t think he’d be very happy to see me, anyway.”
“You two have a fight?”
“You could say that.”
“Who’s this?” Mr. Wendell jerked a thumb at Nathan.
“Oh, sorry. Nathan Lee.” Nathan held out a hand.
Mr. Wendell shook it, but he looked Nathan up and down suspiciously. “Like Robert E. Lee?”
“More like Bruce Lee.”
Mr. Wendell hooted with laughter, then turned to me. “This your boyfriend?”
“I . . . don’t . . . ,” I stammered. I could feel my face heating up.
“I’m still working on that, sir,” Nathan said.
My brain hit overload, and my mouth gave up completely. He was?
“Good man.” Mr. Wendell cuffed him on the arm. Nathan staggered a bit, but he smiled.
“I came for Dr. Brightman’s glasses,” I said.
“His what?”
“His sunglasses? He has an extra pair in the car, and he said I could use them if I ever needed them.”
Mr. Wendell studied me carefully for a moment. “What did you two fight about?”
“He stole something from me, and I want it back.”
“He stole something from you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Wait right here,” Mr. Wendell walked over to the car, opened the passenger door, and leaned inside. Seconds later, he emerged with the glasses and put them in my hand. “You never saw me, okay? We never spoke.” He winked at me and walked off down the block.
I added the sunglasses to the growing collection of items in my backpack, and we rejoined Eric at the ticket table.
“Megan Brown!” a voice called from the crowd.
I tried to duck behind Nathan, but my mother’s coworker Maureen was making a beeline straight for us. She wrestled a large, unwieldy cardboard box with one arm and wheeled a dolly with the other.
“You here with your mom tonight?” she asked.
“Um, yeah. Just helping out.”
“You’re like a gift from God.” She thrust the box she was carrying into Nathan’s arms. “Extra programs. We’re so packed in there tonight, we had to dip into the archive copies.”
I looked around. Getting stuck with Maureen would be a disaster. There’d be no way I could avoid my mom, and we wouldn’t be free to look for Dr. Brightman. “I don’t know if I can carry stuff in this dress. . . .”
“Oh, this strong young man and I can handle it.” Maureen smiled at Nathan. She pulled a set of keys out of a pocket in her evening dress and held them out to me. “Can you go back over to my office and get the seating chart for the dinner tonight? I left my clipboard sitting on my desk.”
The key chain dangled from her fingers, exactly what I hadn’t known I needed. With those, we could go anywhere in the building. Access any place we wanted.
“Absolutely.” I snatched the keys and tugged Eric with me toward the administrative offices across the street. “See you in there, Nathan!”
Nathan gave me a wide-eyed abandoned look as he followed Maureen into the theater.
I left Eric in the entrance hall of the Center for Education and Leadership while I took the elevator to Maureen’s office. I returned to find him staring up at the massive tower of Lincoln books, three stories tall, that dominated the central atrium. He shook his head. “I did not know that there was so much to say about Abraham Lincoln.”
“Tell me about it.”
With Maureen’s keys heavy in my hand, we walked back across the street to the theater. Before we crossed the threshold, Eric stopped me. “Are you feeling okay?”
I took stock. The pain in my head and neck wasn’t diminishing, but so far, it wasn’t getting worse, either. “I’m fine.”
“Given the history of this place, I hope those gloves you’re wearing are industrial strength.”
As soon as we were inside, I dropped Maureen’s clipboard on a table full of silent auction items.
Eric pointed to it, horrified. “Wait, what are you doing? Doesn’t she need that?”
“Yes, but if I give her the clipboard, I also have to give her back her keys.” I held them up an
d jingled them. “Which I’m not planning to do.”
Eric whistled. “It’s been nice knowing you.”
I let my hand drop. “Even if I make it through tonight with my brain in one piece, I’m totally screwed, aren’t I?”
“Totally and completely,” he agreed.
Eric and I moved along the outskirts of the lobby, where the atmosphere sparkled with wealth and privilege. Even though sunlight still glowed through the glass doors, evening gowns and tuxedos were out in full force, and I boggled at all the false eyelashes and real furs. I craned my neck, trying to spot Mrs. Herndon, terrified I might catch sight of my mother or Dr. Brightman.
I saw Emma instead.
She parted the crowd like a boat through water, moving with the poise of someone twice her age. Her dress was strapless, black, and unadorned. She was alone. Neither of her parents was in sight, and if she had a date, he wasn’t with her.
“Did you know she would be here tonight?” Eric asked.
“No, but this is even better than finding Mrs. Herndon,” I said. “Emma already knows what happened. Maybe I could win her over, convince her to confess.”
Eric cracked up. I stared at him until he stopped laughing. “I’m sorry, were you serious?” he asked.
“She’s alone now.” I tugged Eric along with me. “You keep watch for my mother.”
Emma’s cool facade slipped when she saw us coming, and I could tell her veneer of control was paper-thin. She abruptly changed course, heading toward the ladies’ room, but we intercepted her.
“Megan, hello.” One trembling hand flew up to smooth the already perfect twist in her hair. “That’s an amazing dress.” She took in my battered backpack, the short black gloves that were slightly too big for me. “You really do make a statement.”
“I have something for you.” Shifting my backpack onto one shoulder, I pulled out the Lincoln cigar box and held it out to her. “Told you I’d return it.”
Emma made a sound like the air had been knocked out of her. She staggered forward, all her poise gone—she moved in fits and starts like a frightened child. “Why would you bring that here?”
The Hidden Memory of Objects Page 24
