Time to do a little looking around. He scanned the foyer for interior cameras. He saw none, but that didn’t mean much. Knowing Francesca, they were probably hidden from view. His stomach growled. At the very least, maybe he could find some food. Francesca had allowed him to stay. Practically ordered him to. She wouldn’t mind if he helped himself to a snack while he figured out how to interview Isabella.
He’d enjoy an interview too, if he ever got her to talk to him. Even with the short, messy hair and the boyish frame, Isabella was gorgeous. He recalled seeing her in a movie or two years ago, but the cameras didn’t do her justice. Full lips, dark eyes, cheekbones that could cut glass. Her disdain only turned him on more, if he was honest. Most women threw themselves at Steele. She looked at him like he was gum under her shoe.
I’ll change her mind, he thought as he followed the curving parquet floor into like the belly of the house. Give me an hour to turn on the charm. Every door he passed was closed. He reached out and tried a few knobs, but the dusty brass resisted every time. Hell. Who lived in a house where all the doors were locked? He considered going into the library, the room through which Isabella had sprung like some kind of bizarre Athena on the half shell. He didn’t think Miles had locked it behind him. Maybe there’s a tunnel entrance in there. Maybe that’s how she got inside.
He pushed open the heavy door a couple of inches and got a whiff of mothballs. In the darkness, he could see nothing but bookshelves and lumpy, oversized chairs. He put the tunnel exploration on hold and let the door fall shut. Heading in the other direction, he finally found the kitchen. Gleaming cherry cabinets lined both sides of the space. China and glassware sat in perfect rows. Granite countertops matched the gray marble tile beneath his feet, and stainless steel appliances nearly blinded him.
“Holy shit.” He’d hit the mother lode. His stomach rumbled again, louder this time. He walked the length of the space, running one finger along the granite. Where it opened into an eating nook in the very back, floor-to-ceiling windows let in slanting light, and through filmy white curtains Steele could see the entire backyard. Trees dripped with greenery. Tiny, bitter-looking apples scattered under trees near the house. Beyond them, the lawn extended to the moat, a ribbon of blue in the distance. It was true, then—he stood inside an honest-to-goodness castle, complete with locked doors and fairytale elements. Only things missing were a fire-breathing dragon and an evil stepmother. He pulled open the nearest of two refrigerators and rummaged around.
“Or maybe there is a dragon or evil stepmother.”
Maybe that’s why Isabella had left in the first place. But then why come back at all?
TWO FLOORS UP, KIRA’S eyelids drifted shut as she curled into a ball in the middle of her childhood bed. Though the air downstairs hung like a quilt, palpable and suffocating, up here the air conditioning kept the room chilly. Too chilly. She shivered.
“Where are the blankets?” She sat up, dropped to her knees beside the dresser, and started opening drawers. The first two were empty. The third held silk scarves, from Francesca’s past obsession with fuchsia and gold. Like most of the fads in Francesca’s life, it had faded in a year or so. Kira shoved the drawer shut again.
Two left. She struggled with the first until she noticed a scrap of fabric caught in the corner. Carefully, she worked a piece of yellow satin free. She examined the design but couldn’t place it. It didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen Francesca wear. This time when she tried, the drawer slid open easily. But with one look at the contents, Kira sat back on her heels and gagged.
Masks. Handfuls of them, in garish colors and decorated with ribbons and sequins and feathers. She held one up, a striped cat’s eye mask meant to cover only the top half of a woman’s face. She dropped it and reached for another, this one a full face with empty eye holes above a mouth that stretched from ear to ear in a blood red grin. They hadn’t been here before. Francesca must have moved them in the years since Kira had left.
She shoved the drawer shut and stuffed her fists to her mouth as she dry heaved. Don’t remember. Don’t think about it. But she couldn’t stop the thoughts from coming.
“Let me tell you about the Parr Ball,” her father said. Six-year-old Isabella sat on his knee and wrapped her fingers in his hair. It was long and fell against his cheeks. She giggled; she loved him and the stories he told.
“It is a masked ball, mia bella. That means everyone dresses up and wears costumes and covers their faces, so you can’t tell who is who behind the masks. You have to try and guess.”
He hadn’t told her that time. The truth had only come out years later.
“Let me tell you about the Parr Ball,” her father said. Eighteen-year-old Isabella sat on the bed beside him, heart in her throat.
“It was a masked ball, you know—you’ve heard the stories, the way it was back then—and sometimes we didn’t know until the next morning who we’d danced with, who we’d bought a drink for, who we’d—”
“Stop,” she said. “I don’t want to know the rest.”
But he hadn’t stopped. He’d told her the whole story from beginning to end. He thought she wanted to know—or rather, that she should know. He’d recalled every hour of that damn ball, what had happened to him and what that meant for her, years later. Pulling off his own mask had been a cleansing for her father, she supposed. For Kira, it had only launched a descent into hell.
She left the house the following day.
6:00 p.m.
Steele abandoned all rational thought when he saw the stocked kitchen shelves. Francesca may have lived in the place alone, but it looked like she was prepared to throw a dinner party for twenty. He checked the refrigerator, his mouth watering. Inside was a plate heaped high with sliced watermelon. Next to it, cold legs of fried chicken. Bottles of sparkling water, almond and soy milk, apples and oranges and fruits he’d never seen before. A dozen containers of yogurt. Three dozen eggs. Butter. Wine. Vodka.
I shouldn’t. Despite the situation, he couldn’t just help himself to Francesca’s food and drink. Could he? On one hand, he was a guest in her house, and she didn’t know he was back here. On the other hand, there was no way she’d ever consume all this before it went bad. In a way, he’d be doing her a favor.
His stomach growled again. Decision made. He helped himself to a chicken leg and a slice of watermelon and sat in the breakfast nook. The chicken was gone in a matter of seconds, the watermelon close behind it. Hope she won’t mind. Likely, she wouldn’t even miss the food. Juice ran down his chin and wrist, dripping onto his shirtfront. Outside, a low rumbling echoed. Clouds hovered in the sky, and he guessed the weatherman had gotten lucky and predicted right after all.
Steele leaned back and scanned the room. A collection of pictures hung on the opposite wall. Five photos, old black and white ones, arranged in a star pattern at eye level. Fascinated, he got up to inspect them. All but one featured the same distinct figure in different settings. Edoardo lounging on the beach. Edoardo sitting astride a black horse. Edoardo standing in front of the Sphinx. Edoardo waving at the camera while the pyramids rose behind him.
A throat cleared behind him, and Steele jumped.
Miles.
He wiped his mouth and glanced at the chicken bone and melon rind, still lying on the table. “I’m sorry. I was starving.”
“I doubt she’ll mind,” the old man said. “Miss Isabella asked me to come down and find out what you were doing. She’s afraid you’re looking into things you shouldn’t be.”
Steele’s face flushed.
“I’ll tell her you’ve been sitting in the parlor the whole time, minding your own business.” Miles winked. “Don’t think having a bite to eat really counts as looking into things.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” He looked back at the old photos. “Hey, do you know anything about these?”
Miles came closer and studied the center picture, where two masked faces stared out. “That’s the Parr Ball. Must-a been taken, oh
, twenty, thirty years ago.” He frowned. “Not sure who’s in the picture, though. They’ve all been hanging there as long as I can remember.”
“Probably Edoardo, right? He’s in all the rest.”
“Probably,” Miles agreed. “I couldn’t tell you who the woman was, though.”
Because the guy had about a hundred over the years. Or more than a hundred. Steele studied the picture. He’d heard enough about the famous ball’s debauchery. For fifteen years in a row, until he ended up in jail for tax fraud, mega-millionaire Alexander Parr had thrown an annual three-day soirée at his estate nestled in the hills of Egypt.
Only A-list film stars made the guest list. The annual event was rumored to have produced the most decadent parties of the century. With food and wine imported from half of Europe and access to the best drugs money could buy, the masked ball became known as an orgiastic bash that ruined more than one marriage and resulted in more than one illegitimate child.
“Holy shit.” Maybe this was a picture of Isabella’s birth mother? He looked more closely. The man behind the mask had dark hair slicked back from his forehead. The woman wore her tresses piled high atop her head. Each held a champagne flute and toasted the camera. They looked happy enough, though he couldn’t make out any features behind the empty eyeholes and false mouths.
“You have no idea who the woman is?” She looked dark-skinned, from the curve of her neck and the bare arm visible in the picture.
Miles shook his head. “I’m sorry. These pictures been hanging here so long, I haven’t looked at them in years. Francesca could tell you, though.”
But she won’t. Steele didn’t get why Francesca was so tight-lipped about Isabella’s biological mother. Even if she was a teenager, even if she was married to someone else, even if she lived in a trailer on the side of the highway, details like that hardly mattered these days.
“I’ll take care of things in here when you’re finished.” Miles said. He left without another word.
Steele stepped back and took in the five photos as a collection. They meant something as a whole. They had to. Why else would they hang in a place where Francesca was forced to look at them each morning? They weren’t professionally mounted. More like casual snapshots taken by someone close to the star, then blown up and framed. In the bottom corner of each photo was a date, the same year, penciled in. Steele did the math in his head. Edoardo would have been nineteen.
He looked closer. Maybe Isabella’s birth mother hadn’t been Greek at all, but Egyptian. Maybe she’d met Edoardo at the ball and then spent the next few months vacationing with him. Hell, there was a good chance she’d taken those other four pictures. And there’s the beginning of a real story. For the first time in his life, Steele felt like an actual reporter, investigating a truth, digging up possible leads instead of just regurgitating facts from a pre-written press release. Shit, his father would be proud.
His cell phone buzzed, and the screen lit up with his father’s number. Speak of the devil... “Hello?”
“Al Jazeera is releasing a video of Edoardo in fifteen minutes. The group’s issued a deadline. Washington agrees to a prisoner exchange by dawn, or they execute him.” David Walker paused. “They’re threatening a beheading on live TV. Everyone’s taking it pretty damn seriously.”
“Holy shit. They should. But there’s no TV here. I’ll have to get it on my phone.” Fuck. Twenty-eight thousand square feet to this mansion, and not one visual connection to the outside world.
“You get anything new from Francesca?”
“Nope.”
“Shit. We need something. Make up a statement. Put words in her mouth. I don’t care, but we need something to post.”
Steele opened his mouth and then shut it again. How about this news? Isabella Morelli’s here. Inside this house. After seven years of being MIA. He hadn’t yet decided how to tell his father about her reappearance. If he betrayed her confidence, she wouldn’t breathe a single word to him. He couldn’t just tell the world she’d showed up again. He’d figured that out in ten minutes of talking to her. He needed her to trust him.
“Give me a half-hour,” he finally said. “I’m working on something.”
Steele could almost hear his father doing the calculations in his head, judging whether the overtime he’d have to pay his son would be worth the chance of getting anything good on record. “Fine. Thirty minutes.”
Steele hung up without another word. Outside, the trees had grown shadowy fingers that stretched across the grass and hid the far edges of the lawn. The thunder had stopped, but the cast of light had changed, and he knew it would shift more rapidly between now and dusk, and between dusk and nightfall. His fingers itched to capture the movement of sun and moon, and he remembered that he’d left his camera in the parlor.
More than anything, he wanted to photograph this place. He wanted to photograph Isabella, and maybe her grandmother too. That’s it. Both of them together. His father would have a fucking stroke if The Chronicle could have an exclusive like that. Steele retraced his steps to the front of the house. Miles was sitting in a chair by the door. The old man snored, and wisps of gray hair fell over his forehead. They stirred like fine white feathers as he breathed.
“House could burn to the ground and he’d never know,” Steele muttered. He’d only brought one camera inside, which didn’t have a terrific zoom lens, but it was better than nothing. Maybe he could set up the two women in front of the fireplace, Christmas-card style. Or on the staircase, with Isabella standing in front of Francesca.
Amazing, if he could get the first photo of grandmother and granddaughter reunited after years apart. Brought together again by the horrific news of Edoardo’s kidnapping. His pulse quickened. His father was right. Sometimes stories did come out of nowhere, and when you least expected them. This could make my career. Get his father to take him seriously once and for all.
Steele stopped. On a side table near the fireplace sat a black photo album, nearly three inches thick and worn at the edges. Fingerprints marred the dusty cover. Had Francesca been looking through it?
He set down his camera and opened the album. A sheaf of papers fell from the front pocket and littered the floor. Looked like reviews from old newspapers. He picked up the fragile documents and glanced at the dates, which ranged from two decades earlier to this year. The most recent was from last month, a glowing review of Edoardo in Coming Home. Unlike his other films, this one had already generated some Oscar buzz.
Some of the cellophane had torn off the pages, leaving the pictures spotted with fingerprints and discoloration. It looked to be a chronicle of Edoardo’s entire career, beginning with the orange juice commercials he’d filmed as a toddler and moving forward through time.
Here was On Angels’ Wings, when the boy was barely ten. A clipping showed him standing in the center of the red carpet, giving the camera a thumbs-up. A glamorous, bare-shouldered Francesca stood behind him and smiled proudly. One hand rested on his shoulder. Fast-forward through a half-dozen pages, and there was a teenage Edoardo accepting some kind of award. He smiled into the camera while a shock of dark hair fell over one eye.
Steele flipped more pages. Edoardo as a renegade stockbroker in Meet Your Maker. Edoardo as a vampire in the paranormal smash hit At Dawn. And so on. Each film had two or three pages devoted to it, with pictures from the premiere to multiple reviews to programs from awards ceremonies. Francesca was in almost every photo, usually off to the side.
In the back pocket of the album, he found another handful of loose photos. He pulled them out and studied each one, looking for something new, something he might turn into a story that hadn’t already been told. At first, he found nothing. Even the ones with a young Edoardo leaning on crutches were only variations of ones that had already been published.
But then he found something new.
Tucked far into the back pocket, folded in half so that he’d almost missed them, were two pictures nestled inside one another. He eased them
out and held them to the fading light of the nearest window. Edoardo stood in Egypt again with the pyramids rising behind him. This time, though, he was holding an infant. Isabella? Steele couldn’t tell. It was just a swath of blanket with a tiny pinched face sticking out.
The second picture was both more revealing and more frustrating, because a woman looked over Edoardo’s shoulder at the baby. The mother? The masked woman from the picture in the kitchen? Steele squinted, trying desperately to make out her features. Almost the same height as Edoardo, she leaned over his shoulder with her face away from the camera. She appeared to be light-skinned and slender. But she was wearing a traditional Egyptian hijab, and all he saw was a hand reaching down to touch the blanket that held the baby.
“What the hell are you doing?” Isabella’s voice, throaty and suspicious, shattered the silence.
Steele glanced over his shoulder, lost his balance, and fell backwards onto his ass for the second time that day.
7:00 p.m.
Steele lay in front of her, splayed on the carpet and trying to work his features into some semblance of innocence. He’d gone backwards over one of the ottomans, and Kira would have laughed at him if she hadn’t been so pissed. She grabbed the album. “You have no right to go through this.”
He scrambled to his feet. “Francesca left it for me to look at.”
“I doubt that.”
He held up both hands in what seemed to be his universal sign of apology. “Listen, I’m sorry. I won’t touch it again.”
“You’re right. You won’t. You won’t touch a damn thing in here.” She slid the album inside the top drawer of the nearest table. She wasn’t sure what it held, but the thought that he’d been rifling through it, his grubby reporter fingers touching pages and pictures, turned her stomach. There’s nothing incriminating in there. Not anywhere but upstairs—and he’d never get into that room.
Countdown: Steele Page 6
