Once Upon a Grind (20 page)

“O
UT
of bed, sleepyhead! Your coach awaits!”

I opened my eyes.

I was no longer in my kitchen, where I'd bolted down a pot of Lake Tana coffee. I was lying on a dirt floor, dressed in a gossamer pink gown.

Rising, I looked for the promised waiting coach, but saw only earth-covered stone walls and prison bars.

“Am I in jail?”

“You're in the queen's dungeon.” The familiar voice came from the next cell.

“Gardner? Is that you?”

Dressed as a Renaissance troubadour, with an English bowler on his head, my jazz musician night manager began strumming a lute.

“Is there a way out?” I asked.

His only reply was a jazzy rendition of a children's song:
“Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques,
dormez-vous? Dormez-vous?”

I went to the iron bars and shook the cell door. It wouldn't budge.

“Aunt Clare! Are you there?”

“She's down there. I see her!”

Far up the high stone wall, the innocent faces of Jeremy and Molly Quinn were pressed against the iron bars of a tiny window.

Mike's kids!
“What are you doing here?” I shouted.

“We're here to help,” Jeremy told me firmly.

“How?”

Bark! Bark!

“Penny!” The little collie poked her head through a narrow gap in the dungeon wall. Squeezing through, she raced up to me. As I bent down to pet her soft head, she barked in greeting then set to work, digging a hole in the dirt.

“What are you looking for, girl?”

She dipped her head into the hole, and her teeth brought out something shiny.
The key—Anya's golden key!

When I tried the door, it opened, and Gardner's serenade finally stopped.

“Free me, too!” he called. “I'll show you a way out!”

I tried the lock on Gardner's cell. The door swung wide. He grabbed my hand, and we raced down a shadowy, torch-lit corridor, Penny at our heels.

When we turned the corner, fluorescent lights nearly blinded me. The dirt floor changed to linoleum, and we were running down a ground-floor hallway at St. Luke's–Roosevelt.

“There's the exit!” Gardner cried, tugging me toward glass doors. But before we reached them, they opened and a heavyset man with a ski mask stepped through. He aimed his gun and fired.

I was hit. Shocked at the blood seeping out of my lower left leg, I collapsed to the floor.

“Wake up, boss!” Esther called. “Wake up! Wake up!”

She's come back to us,
I thought groggily.
Esther's back!
Thank goodness!

I lifted my head from the kitchen table and realized I wasn't in my kitchen. I was lying on a cold slab of pavement outside that creepy Upper East Side club.

“Are you there, boss?”

“Esther? Where are you?”

“In here!”

I rose from the ground and shuffled over to the recessed brick wall. The diamond-shaped mirror was talking with Esther's voice. But I couldn't see her face. The glass looked cloudy, as if filled with smoke.

When the smoke cleared, I saw Red dancing like she had at the Poetry Slam, but not in her red leather dress. She was dressed in Anya's Pink Princess gown. Unlike my own gossamer gown, her fragile garment had lost its sparkle. It was dirty and ripped, and sadly soiled—the way I'd found it on Anya in the park.

As music played and Red rapped, waving flags appeared in a framed border around the picture.

I tried the door, but it wouldn't open. Then I stumbled backward, falling into a chair at a café table. I was in my coffeehouse. The tables around me were empty—and so was the cup before me. Coffee grinds showed my future, and I refused to look.

Then the cup turned into a laptop computer. The lid flipped open to show me a scene. It was the very same scene I'd glimpsed in the magic mirror.

I stared, mesmerized, at Red dancing in Anya's pink gown, UN flags around her. Then she stopped dancing and the laptop screen went black.

“Help! Please, someone! Help me!”

Red was calling out. Her voice was small, like a little girl's. She sounded scared.

I tried to move my arms, but couldn't. I was frozen in place. Looking up, I saw my master bedroom from a high vantage through a strange wood-lined window.

Not a window, a
picture frame
. I was trapped inside the
Café Corner
, the painting in my own bedroom.

I could see a fire blazing in the hearth, two bodies making love under the covers of the four-poster bed. I closed my eyes, hating the paralysis, wishing for freedom.

“Let me go! Please! Let me out of here! Help me! Someone, help me!”

“Clare?! What's wrong?”

“Let me out! Let me go!”

“Wake up, Clare! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes to find a frantic Matteo Allegro shaking my arm. I felt groggy and a little dizzy. When he saw that I was conscious, he peered into my face.

“You were raving like a madwoman. What's wrong? Did something happen?”

I spoke, my own voice sounding distant—

“I drank your coffee.”

“W
HY
did you do that, Clare?! And all alone?! You told me you were never going to drink it again!”

Matt looked less than steady himself as he ranted at me. His cheeks were ruddy from the cold, his brown eyes filled with fearful confusion.

“I'm okay,” I told him, “give me a minute to get my head straight.”

Matt shrugged out of his suede jacket and began to pace. “How do you sober someone up from
coffee
?” He stopped, took my hand, and patted it. “Do you want an aspirin? An antacid? How about some ice cream? Chocolate? A pickle and chipped ham sandwich?”

“I'm not pregnant, Matt, I'm disoriented. But it's nice you remembered.”

“Of course I remembered! I made enough trips to all-night delis. And I had to learn what
chipped
ham
was.”

“I appreciated it. If our daughter were here, she'd concur.”

“You sound better. More lucid.”

“You can stop patting my hand now—I need it back. Thanks.”

I rubbed my eyes and tried to stand. Seeing me wobble, Matt grabbed my waist. But after a glass of cold water, and a few minutes on my feet, I felt back to normal.

“What time is it?”

“Four in the morning. I just got back from Astoria, Queens.”

“Any luck?”

“Very little. People knew about Red. She performs in clubs there, but they had no idea where she lived or how to reach her.” He looked defeated. “Come on,” he said, putting an arm around me again. “Let's go to bed.”

“Whoa, there, Charming, I'm not that disoriented. I still remember the divorce—and your remarriage.”

“I didn't mean we should go to bed together . . . unless you
want
company?”

I flashed on that scene at the end of my vision: two bodies making love under the four-poster's covers.
No, no, no!

“Joy's room is open,” I told my ex. “If you want to crash here tonight, that's my best—
and only
—offer.”

*   *   *

T
HE
next morning, Matt shocked me by sneaking into my bedroom very early. (No, not for that reason.) He turned off my alarm, went down to the shop, and opened the Village Blend.

“I wanted you to get some rest,” he confessed a few hours later. “You really worried me last night.”

“You don't need to worry.”

“Yes, I do.”

Yawning, I sat up in bed. Before I could say another word, Matt pressed a freshly made cappuccino into my hands.

“I didn't know what you'd want to eat, so I brought up a couple of choices: the Corn Muffins with Caramelized Bacon. We're almost sold out, but I snagged one along with that low-fat chocolate muffin you're always eating during your afternoon break, the one with ricotta and virgin coconut oil, what do you call it at the shop?”

“Chocolate Ricotta Muffins.”

“You want that one?” He held it out.

“That's really sweet, but I don't have an appetite yet. I'll just sip the capp. Have you heard anything?”

Matt's shoulders slumped. “I'm sorry. No word yet.” Silence fell between us, and then he met my gaze. “So? Do you want to tell me about it?”

“I don't know.”

“There could be something in it, Clare, something that could help us.”

With a sigh, I slid over a little to make room on the mattress.

“It was so bizarre,” I began as Matt sat down and tucked into the corn muffin.

“Another Fellini movie?”

“More like David Lynch. Near the end of it, I was trapped in your mother's Hopper painting and before that Esther spoke to me through a mirror.”

“Was Red in the dream?”

“She was the star of it, dancing and rapping to music, but wearing Anya's pink gown. And all these flags appeared around her—”

“Flags? What sort of flags?”

“National flags from dozens of countries. Like the flags on my scarf—”

“The one Joy gave you.”

“Then the magic mirror changed into a laptop screen.”

“That's funny,” said Matt.

“What's funny?”

He shrugged. “Sounds like you were looking at an amateur music video, something Red's fans might edit with an app, throwing on some hokey flag border before uploading it to YouTube.”

YouTube
, I thought.
Of course!

“Where's my laptop?”

“I'll get it.”

Ten minutes later, Matt was looking over my shoulder as I searched online for videos tagged with
Red in the 'Hood.

“There are too many. Pages and pages of them!”

“You need another search filter.”

“Let's narrow it by date.” I typed in the parameters. “Okay, now the list has Red's most recent appearances on top. Before Esther's Fairy Tale Slam last night, she appeared in Brighton Beach twice.”

“Yeah, but look at the next five.” Matt pointed. “They're all in Queens. I was at a few of these Astoria clubs last night.”

Many of the videos were too long to view fully, so I sampled. And then I saw it—the
bowler
. Red was wearing the hat in one of the videos, dancing around tables at a restaurant. A party was going on, and when the camera panned the room, I recognized the flag hanging on a wall: a yellow triangle on a field of blue with a line of white stars.

“There's something here.”

Matt read the video's title. “Eldar's Birthday.” He looked at me. “Who's Eldar? Do you recognize the name?”

“No, but Red was very friendly with the livery driver who drove her and Esther away last night. He wore a bowler. The same man picked up Red here the night before.”

“Who uploaded this video?”

“A car service company: Zenica Limousine—and I'll bet if we can find this bowler-wearing driver, he'll tell us where he drove Red and Esther last night.”

Matt agreed. “Search for the address of the car service.”

“I'm doing it—oh my God, Bosnia!”

“Bosnia?”

I pointed at the screen. “It's the first entry that came up.”

Matt read the screen. “Zenica is a city located about seventy kilometers north of Sarajevo and is situated on the Bosna River. I don't get it—why are you so excited?”

“That's why I didn't recognize the flag!”

“What are you talking about?”

I typed in another search. “Look!”

“The Bosnian flag?” Matt stared at the yellow triangle on a field of blue with a line of stars.

“I memorized every flag on Joy's UN scarf. This one wasn't there, and it was driving me crazy. Now I know why. When Joy was in grade school, Bosnia didn't have a flag! It wasn't adopted until 1998!”

“Are you going to call these people?”

“No. I don't want to risk spooking Red's driver.” I threw off the bedcovers and headed for the shower. “I'm going to Queens myself.”

“You need backup, Clare. I'm coming with you.”

“No, Matt. These guys are Eastern European. They're more likely to trust me if I have a young male émigré with me. I'm calling Boris. He'll come with me. You keep the coffeehouse going, okay? That's the biggest favor you can do for us all right now.”