Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls (4 page)

Rachel, on the other hand, was beyond peeved to have landed such a meaningless role. Apparently she had decided that she was going to be a famous actress—never mind the fact that she had a face like a Thoroughbred.

She’d assumed all along that the lead was hers, no prob. But when the parts were posted, she hadn’t even gotten a speaking role. Rachel informed everyone that it was just as well, that she needed to save her voice for commercial auditions anyway, but you could tell she was crying on the inside.

Personally, I always sort of wished Rachel
had
gotten to be the star, because it would have been a riot watching her try to sing. Daisy and I listened at the door during her audition and it turned out that Rachel Buttersworth-Taylor was the only person I knew who could sing “The Wind Beneath My Wings” to the same tune as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

Anyway, Rachel hated me already, and she’d pretty much been shut out of her dreams of school-play stardom, so you can imagine her total rage when, somehow, I wound up with a line instead of her.

One stupid line! All I got to do was run across the stage, twirl, and shout, “L’chaim—to life!” during the wedding scene, but the fact that Mr. Milford picked
me
to do it was about as much as Rachel could take. If Mr. Milford had, you know,
asked me,
I would definitely have turned it down, but when I suggested that to Rachel, she looked at me like she’d caught me picking my nose.

So then, the day after Mr. Milford picked me, in the dressing room I opened up my backpack to find
a real live dead fish
in it.

It was jammed haphazardly into the math section of my binder. Seriously. It still had scales on it and eyeballs and everything.

There was a note too, written in red lipstick on my laboriously plagiarized precalculus homework:
LULU DARK SMELLS LIKE TUNA.

I was horrified, of course, but unfortunately, I had to admit, at that moment it was true.

The day the incident occurred, I clenched my fist with resolve and swore that nothing Rachel Buttersworth-Taylor ever did would make me shrink from conflict. Standing on her doorstep, however, I found myself reconsidering. If the girl had resorted to thievery, perhaps she was a person built without the limits of decency. Who knew what she would do if I set her off again?

Then I thought of my purse. Sure, it was only a fake Kate Spade, and I barely had anything in it when it was stolen—I’d been carrying my cell phone and cash in my boot because it had seemed like the tough thing to do—but I loved that bag more than anything in the universe! And then there was that phone number—
Alfy’s
phone number. The magical digits that were going to set my love life on fire.

The thought that Rachel might manage to sabotage my chance at true love made me so furious that all rationality gave way. I was going to get my purse back if I had to take a canoe to China to do it.

I marched up the stairs and jammed my finger into the doorbell, ready to face whatever Rachel could dish out.

But when the door swung open, I found myself faced not with Rachel, but the infamous Mrs. Taylor herself. She was wearing a pink designer sweat suit that was unzipped to display her suspiciously buoyant décolletage. Her yellow hair was piled on top of her head in a glamorous bird’s nest, and she was wearing high-heeled mules.

With her free hand Mrs. Taylor was clutching a large silver goblet that looked like it had been plundered from some South Sea pirate’s booty.

She didn’t seem surprised to see us. She flashed us a huge grin. “Please tell me you’re selling Girl Scout cookies,” she said in a lazy drawl. “Things just haven’t been the same since I ran out of Thin Mints in December. I told my daughter to find some more on eBay, but I’m afraid she’s just no good with computers.”

I blinked. I hadn’t considered the possibility that Rachel herself wouldn’t answer the door. Now, faced with a crazy woman, I had no clue what to do or say!

Desperate, I looked around for Daisy. I found her lingering by the azalea—setting herself up for a quick getaway. Luckily once she saw my panic, her sense of loyalty kicked in.

“Hi, Mrs. Taylor,” she said brightly. “We’re here to see Rachel.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Taylor’s grin turned quickly to a sad frown. “No cookies at all?”

“I’m afraid not,” Daisy apologized.

“Well, that’s okay.” Mrs. Taylor sighed. “Come on in, gals, I just love meeting Rachel’s schoolmates.” She beckoned to us, and as we followed, she danced peppily from the foyer into the living room. She plopped herself down on a lavish, velvet-looking couch and threw her high heels up onto the coffee table, which was downright covered in fancy knickknacks. As we watched in a daze, she wedged her feet, crossed at the ankles, in between crystal swans and little jewel-encrusted eggs and candle-less candlesticks and beckoned for us to sit. Daisy and I exchanged a look and gingerly lowered ourselves onto adjacent throne-like seats. I felt weird; the room reminded me of a much, much fancier version of my nana Dark’s good living room, which no one was allowed to use and where all the furniture was perpetually covered in plastic. For a moment I had a good mind to reprimand Mrs. Taylor—to tell her to for God’s sake take her feet off the coffee table. But I held my tongue.

We sat there in uncomfortable silence for what seemed like forever, while Mrs. Taylor just sipped her drink and smiled at us expectantly. Finally Daisy spoke up.

“So,” she said, “can we talk to Rachel?”

“Rachel?”

“Yes, Rachel. Your daughter,” I said pointedly. Mrs. Taylor looked hurt and I kicked myself for letting my sass show. Why couldn’t I ever get a handle on it?

“Rachel’s not here,” Mrs. Taylor said. She seemed confused that she had to explain such a thing. “Today is Saturday. She’s at her father’s. Now tell me about yourselves, girls. What did you say your names were?”

“Um.” I could feel myself blushing. “I’m Lulu Dark.”

“I’m Daisy.” Daisy reached out a hand to shake, and bafflingly, the woman took it and gave her a regal peck on the knuckle.

“Well, hello,” she said with mild surprise, as if she had just realized that we were there.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Taylor,” I said.

She winked. “Please. No need for formalities among friends. You can call me Tupper.” Then she stood. “What’s your pleasure, ladies?” she asked, placing her hands on her hips. “A little sherry, perhaps?”

I cleared my throat. Didn’t she know that the drinking age had been twenty-one for like a million years? It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried my share of alcohol, but it was still totally bizarre for someone’s mother to be offering it—at one o’clock in the afternoon.

“I’d love a Diet Coke,” Daisy spoke up.

“Me too,” I quickly offered.

“You young people and your soft drinks.” Tupper laughed. “They get you all sugared up, you know. They make you wacky. Rachel’s the same way, of course. She thinks it helps maintain her figure. But girls like you don’t need to be thinking about that.” She was still talking to us even though she’d moved on to the kitchen.

“I think she’s tipsy,” Daisy whispered urgently.

“No!” I gave Daisy my
duh
face. This lady was drunk as a skunk. It was kind of embarrassing. The only time I’d ever seen my dad drunk was a few Thanksgivings ago at Nana Dark’s house. He’d ended the dinner going on and on about the aesthetic perfection of stuffed turkey. “It’s just so unspeakably gorgeous,” he kept saying over and over. I wanted to crawl under the table and hide till Christmas. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if he was that way all the time.

“Now I know why Rachel got so upset last night,” I said.

“I told you. Sometimes I think you have Tourette’s syndrome, or ESP, or some kind of evil combination of the two. I don’t know how you know exactly the worst thing to say at any given moment, but you do.”

I grimaced and decided to take Daisy’s advice under consideration. Maybe it was time for some self-improvement. While I was at it, I could join a gym and stop eating fast food, too. But none of that was going to happen until I got my purse back.

As I was setting my mind on my real goal—handbag retrieval—Tupper skipped back into the room, carrying two more goblets, which she handed to me and Daisy. I got straight to the point.

“The reason we’re here, Tupper,” I said in my best grown-up voice, “is because I think Rachel may have picked up my purse last night. By accident, of course. Did you see her with it? It’s a Kate Spade knockoff with an incredibly loud pink-and-yellow pattern.”

“Oh no, dear,” Mrs. Taylor said, looking thoughtful. “She got home so late, you know. But I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you took a little peek in her room. I know how it is for a lady to lose her handbag. Just pulverizing, really.” She sat up straighter and smiled, obviously happy to be helpful.

I nodded seriously. I saw Daisy open her mouth to speak and—certain that she was going to decline the offer—rushed to cut her off. “I’d love to take a look,” I said sweetly, then added with somber meaning: “I’ve got all my important lady things in there.”

Daisy looked at me with reproach, but it was too late. I waited for Mrs. Taylor to lead the way to Rachel’s room, but she had settled in on the couch again—this time sprawled out lengthwise. “By all means, go ahead,” Mrs. Taylor said. “It’s the first door on your left on the third floor. I’d show you, but I just hate climbing all those stairs.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

I hadn’t come all this way just to kibitz with Tupper Taylor, so I hopped out of my seat and headed for the foyer with Daisy trailing.

“Lulu,” Daisy whispered as we made our way up the wide, spiraling stairway, “this is totally uncool. We don’t have any proof that Rachel took your purse. We can’t just go snooping around in her room like we’re the KGB. Stalinism is
so
not okay.”

“If you’re too chicken, you can wait outside,” I told her, flinging open the door and marching into the enemy’s lair.

Daisy grumbled, hovering on the threshold. “The only reason I’m up here is to keep an eye on you.”

I glanced around Rachel’s room, which was spotlessly clean and decorated in funky, bright colors. I didn’t see my purse anywhere, but that didn’t mean anything. If she was smart, she would have hidden it. I made a move to open her dresser, but that was where Daisy drew the line. Quick as a flash, she flung herself in front of me, arms spread, blocking the drawers.

“Lulu,” Daisy said firmly. “That’s going too far. Even if Rachel did steal your purse, we can’t take the law into our own hands.”

I shrugged. “Fight fire with fire.”

“Sometimes you have to fight fire with water. Or with, um, a fire truck. If you don’t learn that now, you never will.”

I was annoyed, but I wasn’t going to take the time to argue with her. “Fine,” I finally grunted. “We’re obviously not getting anywhere here. Let’s go see if Marisol’s home. Maybe we can scare
her
into telling the truth.” I imagined poor, shy Marisol in an interrogation room with a single lightbulb suspended over her head. Daisy could be the good cop since she was so hot for it. I planned on being the relentless one.

Mrs. Taylor was sound asleep when we got downstairs, so we silently headed out and hit the subway again, this time bound straight downtown.

 

Marisol’s neighborhood couldn’t have been more different from Rachel’s. Instead of greenery and town houses, the place was a jumbled, jumping morass of power lines, slender apartment buildings, and bodegas. You had to be careful not to get run over by the packs of little kids who were zooming around on bicycles or Razor scooters, and every storefront had a card table out front, with old men sitting around it playing dominoes. I felt my stride opening as Daisy and I headed from the subway exit up the block, feeling the life of the neighborhood pulsing through me. After the too-perfect atmosphere of Dagger Park, this place was a relief.

When we rang up to Marisol’s apartment, they didn’t even bother asking who was at the door—just buzzed us right in. There was no elevator, so we made the hike up to the fifth floor, where Marisol’s mom was waiting with the door open, in a sporty black tank top and tight, casually torn jeans. She had graying blond hair that hung unfettered almost to her butt and a tanned, pretty face, even with no makeup.

“Hey,” she said, in a low, friendly voice. “Are you guys friends of Marisol’s or something?”

Daisy and I introduced ourselves, and I noticed a flicker of recognition in Marisol’s mom’s eyes when I mentioned my name. She didn’t say anything, though, just let us in and told us to have a seat. I heard a high-pitched whistling noise in the background.

“I was just brewing some tea,” Marisol’s mom called over her shoulder, heading through the tiny living room into the kitchen. “I hope Oolong’s okay.”

“Thank goodness it’s not cocktail hour here too,” Daisy muttered to me under her breath.

“I don’t think hippies have cocktails,” I whispered.

Marisol’s parents were definitely hippies, from the looks of the place. It was covered in dream catchers and Native-American-looking tapestries and hanging plants. There were crystals everywhere. It smelled pleasantly of incense, which, when I looked around, I saw burning on a table in the corner.

Mrs. Bloom emerged from the kitchen carrying a wicker tray bearing four terra-cotta mugs. A solidly built, gray-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard followed. “I’m Sunny and this is my husband, Bruce,” she said easily, setting our tea on the coffee table in front of us. “Marisol’s just down at the corner getting some groceries. You guys can wait here for her. She should be back in a couple of minutes.” The two then disappeared into another room, leaving Daisy and me alone again.

“They’re such good hosts,” Daisy said. “I wish my mom was that laid-back.”

Daisy’s mom, Svenska, was the most tightly wound woman I’d ever met in my life. One time, when Daisy had left a pair of underwear on her bedroom floor, Svenska had gotten so mad that she’d ripped it right in half with her bare hands, cursing furiously in Swedish.