Thigh High

by Christina Dodd

  “What has that to do with anything?” In the back of her mind, Nessa had been afraid of this. Afraid that they were robbing Premier Central banks out of misplaced loyalty to her.

  “That made them the logical bank to rob.” Calista managed to make it sound like a sensible choice.

  “Why rob a bank at all?” Nessa asked.

  “Because of Daniel’s breasts, of course,” Hestia said.

  “Daniel’s breasts?” Nessa’s voice rose.

  From behind the screen on the front door, Maddy said, “Hush, Miss Nessa, you don’t want to tell the whole neighborhood.”

  Nessa whipped around. “Don’t tell me you’re in on this?”

  “Don’t yell at Maddy,” Calista chided. “She has had nothing to do with our little capers.”

  Nessa whipped back around. “Your little capers?” She couldn’t believe their insouciance. “Your little capers are federal offenses.”

  “Yes, but the Feds aren’t worried about us. Capturing bandits who steal such small amounts won’t win them any fame,” Hestia assured her.

  “Although Chief Cutter is getting irked with us,” Calista reminded her sister.

  “I know. He’s worrisome,” Hestia conceded. “We’re having to get more and more inventive every year. But since we have a whole year to plan, we use the time to work out the details.”

  Calista beamed. “The mice were my idea.”

  “And a good idea, too!” Hestia high-fived her. “But wait until you see what I’ve cooked up for next year.”

  “No. No next year! No! And…why?” Nessa spread her hands out, palms up. “Why? Why?”

  “I tried to tell you, honey,” Hestia said. “Because of Daniel’s breasts.”

  “But that was only the first year, sister.”

  Nessa whimpered in frustration.

  “Let me explain.” Hestia patted the spot beside her.

  “I can’t sit.” Nessa stood stock-still, her fists clenched at her side. “I’m too anxious.”

  “It’s all right, honey.” Calista took the other end of the swing and patted the same spot.

  Stiffly, Nessa lowered herself to sit between them.

  Lifting her voice, Hestia called, “Maddy, you might as well come out, too.”

  Maddy opened the screen. In slow motion, as if today she were truly old, she walked to a wobbly old rocker, her own rocker, the only thing saved from Katrina, and sat. “Nessa, child, you want me to fix you a hurricane?”

  Nessa knew good and well Maddy made her hurricanes with six different kinds of liquor. “It’s not even noon.”

  “Sometimes, where your aunts are concerned, a good, strong drink is the only way to go,” Maddy advised.

  “We could open the champagne early!” Calista said.

  “Champagne?” Nessa looked between the two of them.

  “After a successful heist, we always celebrate with champagne.” Calista’s eyes sparkled.

  “Not really champagne. It’s sparkling wine,” Hestia assured Nessa—as if that mattered. “But we have a reasonably priced brand dear Jacque Quinane recommended, which—”

  “I don’t care.” Nessa held up her hand. “I don’t care. I don’t care.”

  “Honey, we don’t want you to think we’re stealing the money for ourselves!” Hestia said.

  Nessa half laughed, but not in amusement. “Honestly, that never occurred to me. But right now, all I know is that it has something to do with Daniel’s breasts.”

  “Exactly. That first year, I was walking down the hall upstairs and I heard the most dreadful muffled sobs coming from inside Daniel’s room.” Calista’s lip quivered in remembered sympathy. “He had had an operation to give him breast implants. A backstreet doctor…honestly, I don’t know what he was thinking.”

  “A backstreet doctor? One of those guys who isn’t really licensed to practice medicine?” Nessa asked.

  “That is just what we mean,” Calista confirmed. “He’d paid most of it up front—“

  Hestia poked Nessa with her bony elbow. “Up front. Get it?”

  Nessa did not smile.

  Hestia subsided with a sigh.

  Calista continued, “Then he had a series of financial setbacks—remember when his father was institutionalized with Alzheimer’s and his son got accepted to Stanford, all in the same week? Well, he couldn’t pay the rest of the bill, and that horrible doctor turned him over to a collection agency. You know the kind I mean—like in Rocky, where they threaten to break your fingers if you don’t pay.”

  “I understand.” Nessa did understand. The picture was becoming only too clear.

  “So those awful collection people were threatening to take his breasts back,” Hestia said.

  “Take them back?” Nessa was startled. “I thought you said they were implants.”

  “They were!”

  “Oh.” Horrible.

  “So of course I told him we’d lend him the money.”

  “You didn’t have the money.”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t believe in borrowing.” The only money the aunts had ever borrowed was to put Nessa through college, and they were still paying that back.

  “For dear, sweet Daniel, we were willing to put aside our scruples,” Calista said. “So we tried to get a loan.”

  “A loan? From whom?”

  Calista’s face set in grim lines. “Your bank.”

  “Premier Central?” Nessa heard her voice hit a new high. “Who did you talk to?”

  “To That Woman.”

  “Stephanie Decker?”

  Sitting straight and thin as a rail, Hestia took up the tale. “First, she asked why we wanted the money. When we told her it was a private matter, she asked all kinds of personal questions. Insulting questions. She made us fill out forms and—”

  “And what happened then?”

  “Then she looked at us and laughed—” Calista quivered with indignation.

  “In our faces!” Hestia interrupted.

  Calista continued, “And said the bank wasn’t in the habit of throwing their money away on bad risks, and we should be grateful that Mr. MacNaught agreed to keep our niece on after she messed up so badly, that you were a sort of charity case for him, but of course it was impossible for you ever to expect to get much of a raise since you could never advance, so we might as well resign ourselves to being objects of pity throughout New Orleans for the rest of our lives.”

  “That bitch,” Nessa said softly.

  “Exactly what I said.” Hestia nodded emphatically.

  “We knew then you would have to leave the bank, but that didn’t solve our problem of the money for Daniel,” Calista said.

  “We tried another bank, but while they were very polite, they wouldn’t lend us the money, either,” Hestia said.

  “So we were watching To Catch a Thief—” Calista said.

  “With darling Cary Grant. Marvelous man!” Hestia smiled.

  “And I said—” Calista said.

  “No, it was me,” Hestia said.

  “No, it wasn’t, because remember? There was the scene with the fireworks, then the part where he was on the roof, then I said—”

  “No, you forgot the part—”

  Nessa interrupted. “One of you said, ‘Let’s rob Nessa’s bank!’”

  “That’s right.” Calista clapped her hands in pleasure. “We knew you’d understand.”

  The aunts started to get to their feet.

  Catching them by their arms, Nessa brought them back down. “I don’t understand, and you can’t do this anymore.”

  “We’re careful,” Hestia assured her.

  Ruthlessly, Nessa reminded them, “If I hadn’t been there today, my best friend would have shot one of my aunts, maybe both of them.”

  That was the first Maddy knew of the details, and her hands trembled like leaves. “Miss Calista! Miss Hestia! I told you you’d stretched this stealin’ to its limit!”

  Very patiently, Calista said, �
��It’s like that movie says, ‘It’ll all come out in the end.’”

  “To Catch a Thief says, ‘It’ll all come out in the end’?” Hestia’s brow knit.

  “No, sister, Shakespeare in Love.”

  “That’s right, I forgot.” Hestia started to stand again.

  “No! Sit down! This is not a joke!” Nessa’s voice rose again. “This is serious. You scared me half to death, and look at Maddy! She’s afraid for you! Maybe you can think you were justified the first year, but what about the next year? And all the years after?”

  “Oh.” Hestia settled herself again. “We gave Daniel the money, and his whole face lit up, and it made us feel so good.”

  “But we weren’t going to do it again until the next year, the very day of our party, poor, dear Meghan Brownly came to the door with her grandmother’s canapés, the ones the Brownlys have been guarding the secret recipe for three generations like it was the gold at Fort Knox.” Calista was getting wound up. “And after all the years we’ve been friends—”

  Hestia patted Calista’s knee. “Hush, dear, Nessa’s getting impatient again.”

  Calista subsided.

  “Anyway, the reason Beth Brownly couldn’t come was because she broke her top plate and she wouldn’t be seen in public without her teeth, which I so sympathize with, even though I have all my teeth—”

  This time, Calista patted Hestia’s knee.

  “Oh. Right.” Hestia took a breath. “Poor Beth didn’t have the money to pay the dentist, even though he was giving her a fifty-percent discount.”

  “It’s that nice boy Grey Linney,” Calista told Nessa. “He’s always good to his elderly patients.”

  Hestia continued, “That same night, That Woman—”

  “Stephanie?” Nessa clarified.

  “Yes, Stephanie. She came to our party and she treated you like dirt,” Hestia said. “At that moment we realized—God wanted us to rob the bank.”

  “God wanted you to rob the bank!” Nessa shouted. “Of all the absurd—”

  “Hush, Miss Nessa. Hush, child.” Maddy leaned way forward to pat Nessa’s hand. “The neighbors’ll hear.”

  “Have you been in on this the whole time?” Nessa demanded. “Because I expect more sense from you, Maddy!”

  “Don’t you sass her, Nessa!” Calista said sternly. “She didn’t know anything until we gave her the cash to get her favorite chair fixed.”

  Nessa took in Maddy, rocking in the one chair that had been saved from the flood.

  “She needed to have something of her own,” Hestia said gently.

  Like so much about Nessa’s great-aunts, the whole explanation made horrible sense. And yet—“You have to stop.”

  “We’re not hurting anyone,” Calista said.

  “We’re helping dear people who need help,” Hestia said.

  “And besides, what are you going to do about it? Tell the police?” Calista shook her head in polite disbelief.

  Of course, they had her. Nessa wasn’t going to tell anybody.

  This time, when the aunts stood up, Nessa didn’t stop them. They went into the house while she sat limply, staring at Maddy, her eyes filling with tears.

  Maddy dug in her apron pocket and handed her a soft, worn handkerchief. “I know, child. When I realized what they were doing, I cried, too.”

  “They could have been killed. When I saw Georgia aiming at them, and Hestia aimed back, all I could imagine was the two of them in their coffins….”

  “I said that to those two girls. I said they would likely get shot if they didn’t stop. And Hestia said, ‘Miss Maddy, you’re old, too. Would you really care if someone shot you dead today and ended all the aches and miseries?’ And child, she had a point. Gettin’ dead would sure beat this slow decline where I got to get up four times a night to pee and my belly growls like it’s hungry, but I can only take three bites, and my knee swells in the summer, and every time I look in the mirror, I wonder who that old woman can be. It’s lousy, I tell you, Nessa. When I lost my home, I thought I’d die. Not a thing left, barely a memory of my husband or my boy…” Maddy shook her head in sorrow. “When they gave me my chair back, my squeaky old chair, better than new, I know it’s silly, but I felt like I could live the years the good Lord had assigned me.”

  “At least I understand why now.” Nessa lifted her hands, looked at them as if they were a stranger’s, and lowered them into her lap again. “They’re stealing money and it’s like a scholarship fund for the ones in need.”

  “That it is,” Maddy agreed.

  Out of the corner of her eyes, Nessa caught sight of a man standing at the end of the porch. She jumped; subconsciously she’d known Jeremiah would show up soon.

  But it wasn’t Jeremiah. It was a tall, blond stranger.

  Then as he walked toward her, she knew him.

  It was Daniel. Daniel, dressed as a man in jeans, a T-shirt, and a vest. A vest that covered his paid-for-in-crime breasts.

  The truth hit Nessa like a blast. “You’re helping them.” That was how the aunts managed the masks and the makeup and the…the…Nessa didn’t know what he’d been helping them with. She only knew that this was the final blow.

  He hung his head. “I am so sorry.”

  She didn’t give a damn about his contrition. “How could you? How long have you…?”

  “Since the second year.” He pulled up a chair, sat down close enough that his knees touched hers, and tried to take her hands.

  She pulled them away. “I thought you were my friend.”

  “Don’t, Nessa. I am your friend. When I realized what they were doing, I tried to talk them out of it, too.” He glanced toward the end of the porch. “But I had about as much luck as you just did.”

  He’d heard it all, or at least enough of it to know she’d been soundly ignored.

  “They won’t stop,” he said. “They were going to get caught or killed, and I knew they didn’t have a chance with the wigs and the hats out of the attic.”

  Nessa kept her gaze level and cold. She folded her arms across her chest.

  “Okay. You can be mad if you want. But, Nessa, those women have saved my life. I couldn’t stand by while they were arrested or killed.” Daniel looked wretched and guilty…. And defiant. “So I got my friend that makes masks for films—he’s good, he works with Spielberg—and told him they were for a special Mardi Gras celebration at the club. When Miss Hestia and Miss Calista tell me it’s time, I help them get ready, and then I go and do whatever needs to be done to distract the security guard.”

  “I saw you. On last year’s security video. I couldn’t quite place you. Because you were a man.” Nessa pinched the bridge of her nose. “Don’t you realize that you could get arrested or killed?”

  “The thought has crossed my mind.”

  She lowered her hand. “So first Daniel figured it out, then Maddy. Any others?”

  They shook their heads.

  “But it stands to reason that if we put two and two together, sooner or later other people will, too,” Maddy said.

  “Especially with the pressure Mr. MacNaught is putting on the police chief.” Nessa closed her eyes as she remembered. “Jeremiah is probably watching the video right now. If he figures out why I knocked Georgia down, I’ll be arrested as an accessory to the crime, and who’s going to believe me when I say I didn’t know it was going on? I work for the bank. I know a lot about the security and the shifts for the guards. I have reason to hold a grudge. And I—”

  “You what?” Maddy prompted.

  “Nessa, you didn’t sleep with Mr. Mac, did you?” Daniel sounded horrified.

  Now it was Nessa’s turn to be defiant. “Why not? Isn’t that what everybody wanted? Was for poor, lonely Nessa to get laid?”

  “Not me.” Maddy glared in old-lady indignation. “I wanted you to have some good man court you. I didn’t want you to sleep with him. I still have some morals.”

  Nessa scrambled to make an excuse. “I didn’t me
an to do it, Miss Maddy. I just couldn’t…”

  “You couldn’t help it?” Daniel grinned. “I’m glad to hear that. It’s about time you had some passion in your life.”

  “That’s not all I’ve got in my life.” Nessa’s low voice was tense and furious. “I’ve got two aunts who rob banks for excitement, and if I get arrested with them, who the hell is going to get them out?”

  Twenty-six

  Mac strolled up the front walk of the Dahl House. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the porch and looked toward Nessa, rocking on the swing. “I’m beginning to know my way around New Orleans. I took the cable car from the bank, expecting to find you here…. And here you are.”

  “You could have called my cell.” Nessa looked cool and composed. If he hadn’t seen the video he would never have believed she had witnessed a robbery.

  Maybe…planned a robbery.

  “But I wanted to see you.” He prowled up the stairs. “Wanted to see if you were all right after your harrowing experience.”

  She didn’t say What harrowing experience? But she looked at him so blankly, she might as well have. “I never expected to see it happen right before my eyes.”

  “You were so surprised you foiled the officer who would certainly have ended the crime spree.”

  “Is one robbery a year considered a crime spree? I suppose it is, if it continues unabated.” Nessa gestured to the chair opposite her. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “I talked to Officer Able, and she said she told you not to follow her.” He sat on the swing beside Nessa, deliberately crowding her.

  Nessa didn’t react in any way. “I didn’t listen. Maybe because I know the manager and the whole bank crew. Maybe because if I witnessed one of the crimes in person, I could solve it, spit in Mr. MacNaught’s face, and get a new job. Mostly because I am so sick and tired of being the model employee and the model citizen.” Nessa closed her eyes as if the tiredness had bled into her bones. “It’s gotten me nowhere. So I ran after Georgia and into the crime scene.”

  “I watched the video repeatedly. You screamed about a mouse and jumped at Georgia. But I didn’t see the mouse that scared you.” He’d looked, too. Watched that moment on the security tape over and over again.