Bellweather Rhapsody (31 page)

Ruby Falls.

He flips back to the student participants. He runs the pad of his right index finger down the list until he finds them. The Hatmakers . . . also of Ruby Falls.

Hastings stands up straight. His eyes hurt and he rubs at his brow. This has to mean something. Natalie was Viola’s student. Natalie’s student was Viola’s daughter’s co-conspirator. An old grudge, an old wound. Drops of sweat bead at his hairline, moisten his upper lip. He has to talk to Jess. He has to tell her what he’s found. She’ll know what kind of sense to make of it.

He’s about to ask Sheila to keep an eye on his desk when two people approach. He recognizes them both. One is Alice Hatmaker, with a swollen black eye; on anyone less pugnacious, he would wonder how she got it. Standing beside her is the blurry girl, the large blurry girl who checked in with her dog on Thursday.

“Hello,” says the blurry girl. For a woman who occupies so much space, her voice is tiny, soft, the voice of a young girl.

“Hello,” he replies. “How may I help you?” He nods at Alice. “Hello, Miss Hatmaker.”

“Hey,” Alice says. She thrusts her chin up. “What did you do with my stuff?”

“Pardon?”

“What my sister is asking—”

Sister? But Alice has a brother, a brother named—he scans the program—Bertram.

“My sister had a very special item stolen from her room.” Hastings simply can’t help himself: he stares at the girl. He knows her.
How?
“It’s a terrible violation of privacy to have your belongings stolen from a hotel room.”

He nods. “I agree,” he says. “I—I’m so sorry. I will absolutely make this right. Could you describe what was taken?”

“My tarot cards,” Alice says. “They were a gift from my grandmother. Who
died.
”

“Cards? A deck of cards?” Hastings asks.

“Not just a deck of cards, a deck of
tarot
cards. I’ve spent a lot of effort making them
mine,
you know, that’s how tarot works. They were in my room when I left yesterday morning and they were gone when I came back at night. Someone from housekeeping took them.”

Hastings blanches. “I assure you, no one on my staff would ever steal.”

“Well, someone from your staff is the only other person with a key.” Alice crosses her arms over her chest.

Hastings inhales a long breath through his nose. “What about your roommate?” he says, though he knows precisely how the girl is going to respond.

“My dead roommate, you mean? Jesus!” Hastings flinches; he has never gotten over all these young people cursing, especially the girls. “How many times do I have to tell you? She is dead. Dead girls don’t steal.”

“But you must admit, the fact that the cards are missing suggests—” He waves his hands in the air. “It suggests she may not be dead.”

“Sir,” says the other girl, her supposed sister, “Alice is a bit upset.” She puts a hand clumsily on Alice’s shoulder. Hastings looks from one girl to the other. When he saw Alice’s brother for the first time, he knew beyond a doubt they were related. These girls look nothing alike.

These girls are lying to him.

“Alice, honey. Can you give us a moment?” The big girl nods and Alice rolls her eyes way, way back in her head and walks away. “To tell you the truth, she’s upset about the cards but she’s
really
upset about the girl. About Jill. Is there anything else you can tell us? Any news? What about her mother?”

Hastings gathers the papers on his blotter without looking away from the girl’s face.

“You’re not her sister,” he says.

She looks away. “No,” she says.

“Who
are
you?” And as he says it he knows exactly who she is: Alice’s missing chaperone. Natalie Wilson, née Wink, of Ruby Falls Central.

“I don’t know what you’re playing at,” he says, taking a step forward, “but this is my hotel. These are
my
guests staying under
my
roof, and if we weren’t in the middle of a blizzard I would throw you both out this instant.” It’s so obvious now, it’s so clear: his gut has been telling him not to trust her from the minute she checked in. At first it had felt like déjà vu. But it was never recognition, it was
pre
cognition. She was trouble. She was the trouble at his Statewide, the cancerous ghost in his hotel. With her milky forgettable face and her unfixable gaze and her
dog
—wherever the hell he was, whatever the hell part he played in this ridiculous charade.

“I don’t know what you think—” she says.

“I think you are a liar, Mrs. Wilson.”

The look of exquisite confusion on her face is almost enough to convince him of her innocence. Then he remembers Alice, the little actress, and wonders if they aren’t sisters after all.

“I think,” he continues, “that you had better go back to your room and not cause one more second of trouble. Not for me, not for my staff, not for any one of my guests. Am I being clear?”

She nods.

“Good. And now that I have your attention, I must—I do not
understand
you. Why would you use—why would you exploit such a terrible tragedy to—to what end, exactly? What is the point of all this? Of covering for Jill and terrorizing her mother, of questioning me as though I had anything to do with it? When Doug Kirk was here—when Doug Kirk
returns
as head of Statewide, he won’t stand for this . . . this bullshit.” The curse surprises everyone within earshot, most of all Hastings himself. His voice isn’t his own. It’s far away and tight and five times louder than it ought to be, rising with every word. “This tawdry, disgusting plot of yours makes me ill. Do you want revenge? Do you want justice? Do you want to know peace, after whatever hell you believe Viola Fabian put you through? You’re not going to get it from me. You’re not going to find it here. It hasn’t been here for a long, long time.”

“Mr. Hastings, please.” Her eyes look so kind and sad. They can’t possibly be telling him the truth and he hates them for it. “I never meant.
We
never meant to—”

“Who gives a good goddamn what you meant.”

Then Sheila is at his side. She isn’t speaking, she’s taking his arm. She’s leading him back behind reception, to the quiet of the office with the door shut. The world is quiet. The only light is on the desk. Hastings, who can barely stand to think anymore, sits on the couch and watches the clock on the opposite wall. The second hand sweeps the face clean, remaking one minute after another, after another.

20

I

F
ISHER WAS THIRTEEN
when he decided to run away. He was in New York—not for the first time, but for the first time as a teenager. Around the age of twelve, life had begun to feel like a knife in his side: sharp and insistent, a constant pain that couldn’t be ignored, and never more so than when he’d been booked to perform in American cities. New York cut him so deep he wanted to lie down and die. Life was larger here, dirtier and busier. Fisher had a vision of himself disappearing into the crowd that surged to meet him and his mother whenever they crossed the street. New York was the only place she physically held on to her son; she grabbed his arm as soon as the walk sign flashed and didn’t let go until their feet were safe on the opposite curb. Gorgeous young girls on their way elsewhere, businessmen in crisp pinstripes, students with ratty hand-knit stocking caps, old toothless men who looked like they were crossing the street simply to have something to do, all touched Fisher, brushed by or banged into him, and each time they did, if not for his mother’s fingers locked around him, he thought he might stick to them like a piece of lint and be carried away.

He had hated his life for quite some time. New York when he was thirteen was the first time he considered he might be able to change it.

Fisher Brodie, fantastic teenage prodigy from across the bloody great Atlantic, had been invited to perform with the New York Philharmonic during its regular season. He was an add-on, a treat. Tickets to see him didn’t come with the normal season subscription. “You’re extra,” his mother cooed. “Special!”

Nothing about the performance felt extra or special to Fisher. He walked onstage, bowed to the conductor, played Chopin, stood and bowed to the audience, played more Chopin, stood and bowed, and then left the stage. He had done the exact same thing in San Francisco a year earlier and would do the exact same thing in several months’ time in London. The only thing special about this performance happened when it was over, after they took a taxi back to their hotel and Fisher’s mother realized, as the elevator doors were closing, that she’d left her gloves in the cab.

“I’ll go check,” he said, and darted out of the elevator.

It hadn’t been a thoughtful gesture. It had been pure instinct, and Fisher didn’t recognize it for what it was until he was standing at the curb, the cab he’d shared with his mother long gone, alone. He was never alone. And now he was alone in the greatest city in America, at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night. He had twenty U.S. dollars in his pocket, no sense of direction, and no other chance but this. He could disappear. Right now, tonight. This city would swallow him. He would never have to perform if he didn’t want to; he could play whatever and whenever he wanted. He would never hear his mother and father talking as if he were sitting in another room. (They didn’t speak to him so much as around him, and always, always about him.)

His sisters would never smack him or call him names or trip him when he walked down the hall; his mother would never shout “Mind his hands!” as though it were perfectly all right for them to break every other bone in his body. He could meet people who had no idea who he was, who might like him in spite of what he was.
He
had no idea who he was, outside this life. He could find out. Tonight.

Thoughts of his Auntie’s golden teeth in their lozenge tin, squirreled beneath his mattress back home, gave him a moment’s pause. They were valuable. It would be stupid to run away without them. Then again, it would be stupid to not run away when he had the chance, because who knew when he’d ever have the chance again. It was late January and unseasonably warm, but Fisher didn’t have the proper wardrobe to withstand a winter on the streets of New York. Was that what he was thinking—that he’d scavenge and scrounge? Sleep under bridges? What if he got frostbite, what if he lost his ears or his toes or, God forbid, his fingers? Would that honestly be any better than the life he was living now?

Yes.

Maybe.

He looked down the street to his right. The road glowed, full of orangey-yellow cabs and red taillights like hot coals. The hotel was on a corner. A crosswalk led across the street, its white ladder lines beckoning him to climb to the other side, to another life. The walk signal glowed and Fisher’s breath fogged the air before him and the signal began to blink and then it was red and Fisher was not going to run away. He was only thirteen and didn’t know where to go.

His mother was waiting in the lobby when he came back. She had been watching him through the glass entry doors. She knew—she always had a way of knowing—and she gave his arm a good hard squeeze as they walked side by side to the elevators, looking like any other mother and child made unusually close by the circumstances of their lives.

Fisher, grown, an adult conductor, remembers her words as if she’d spoken them on the telephone last night; as if she weren’t dead and buried somewhere in Scotland; as if, after emancipating himself three years after that night in New York, Fisher ever saw his mother again.

“Good lad,” she said. “It’s a nasty old world out there. You wouldn’t like it.”

Fisher still wonders whether he would have all ten fingers if he’d run away when he had the chance. When he had the
chance
—that was the key. He knows he can’t do anything about what wasn’t done, just as he knows it would be equally foolish to pass up the opportunity to run, should another present itself.

Natalie is another chance. Fisher cannot believe she is real, that she is an actual person. For the first time in his life, he is in love. He has never felt so necessary to another person, or so in need. The ability to forgive—and he did forgive her; he had no idea he had such capacity for forgiveness, but there it was—Christ, it was an intoxicating kind of intimacy. She’d confided the worst thing she’d ever done in her life (and it was horrible, all right), but all Fisher could feel was gratitude that she’d thought him a worthy confidant. He, placed in a similar situation, could’ve done the same thing and would’ve felt like the same piece of responsible shit as she overwhelmingly did, but he didn’t dare tell her; she didn’t want to hear that. She didn’t want to hear words of any kind on the subject. She only wanted to be heard and to be held, and Fisher only wanted to listen and to hold her.

And they were so alike, so similar, so mangled in their own peculiar ways. Twinned. When he woke up beside her, the last thing he expected her to do in an hour’s time was leap up on her seat to rain fire and brimstone on Viola Fabian. Fisher had felt drunk (and inspired—it could have come straight from his own de-brainwashing playbook!), and he wasn’t doing anything more than steadying her leg, hugging her thigh, and pressing his face against her to stop from laughing out loud. She’s traumatized, overcome by guilt. She’s unstable and violent and broken, and he hasn’t any illusions of saving or fixing her. He only wishes to be with her, to spend the rest of his life knowing her, reflecting her. Running with her. Away from this hotel. From this world.

He bounces to the conductor’s podium, lighter than air. “Right, everyone! What a lovely start to our day, eh? Nothing wakes you up like a little drama.” Fisher hasn’t felt like this . . . ever. This is love. His heart could be made of spun sugar.

The orchestra looks sluggish and perturbed, which is reasonable considering they’re trapped here in the middle of a storm and have just been told there’s to be no audience for their concert. Well, no audience but one another. Fisher claps his hands to get their attention. “Oi, lovelies! Remember when I made that disparaging crack about your mums and ‘Jupiter’? I was lying. Again. Hope you kept your parts.”