Raiders of the Lost Corset (43 page)

“Lying bitch!” Natalija cried. “I’m going to kill you.”

Lacey managed to grab onto the railing and pull herself up by one hand, directly above the huge red paddle wheel steadily slapping the water with its long, flat blades. The roar was deafening.

Dazed, Lacey shook her head. Vic seemed to be punching the hell out of Kepelov, but Kepelov was still standing. Natalija coiled like a cobra, nursing her injured hand, eyeing Lacey venomously.

Lacey leaned back against the railing and tried to catch her breath.

She watched Natalija warily as the woman crouched across the deck from her.

Lacey looked over at Vic. He shoved an exhausted Kepelov to the deck and then raised his head to look at her. He shouted.

“Lacey! Look out!”

Lacey glanced down. Natalija uncoiled and sprang at her in a running leap. Somewhere nearby a woman screamed. Lacey in-stinctively hit the deck and clung to the bottom railing. She saw sudden fear in Natalija’s eyes as the woman realized too late she had miscalculated, that a body in motion stays in motion. Natalija Krumina hurled herself over the railing where Lacey had just stood, clawing at it, unable to catch herself. She screamed as she fell, and the heavy thud as her body hit one hard red paddle and then the next seemed to repeat and repeat, until the paddle wheel plowed her down, under the muddy waters of the Mississippi, and she disappeared beneath the riverboat’s churning wake. Her screams stopped, but the sound echoed on in Lacey’s head.

Vic abandoned Kepelov and ran to Lacey, lifting her up and holding her so hard she could hardly breathe. “My God, Lacey, I think my heart stopped when she came at you,” he whispered. He held her tight as they leaned over the railing to look for the woman in the river. They never saw her again.

Kepelov’s nose and lip were bleeding and his clothes were torn and dirty, Lacey saw as he stumbled up to them. Vic lifted a weary fist at him, but he held up his hands in surrender. “No more, no more! I wasn’t going to hurt her. Not Smithsonian,” he said. He turned back to Vic. “Why did you stop me, Donovan? I was after that scheming bitch Natalija Krumina!” He pointed at the river.

“She’s the one who shot me.” Vic unclenched his fist and clasped Kepelov’s shoulder.

Trujillo strolled around the corner of the deck, a drink in his hand and a pretty blonde on his arm. He stopped dead in his tracks.

“Oh, man! What did I miss? Mac’s gonna kill me, isn’t he?”

Chapter 39

Lacey didn’t quite know why she invited
everyone
, including Kepelov and Griffin and Stella and Trujillo, to the Passion Flowers boutique on Royal Street the next day.

Maybe she wanted a sense of symmetry for her story, or possibly to suppress the men’s raging testosterone levels in that exces-sively girly dress shop, or maybe she was tired of being stalked and this might end it once and for all. But she invited them all, even the jewel thief and the ex-spy. Turtledove’s cousins tracked them down, and they promised to behave, even when she explained over and over that not only was there no Fabergé egg to find, there might very well be nothing at all. She took the precaution of enlisting Turtledove and his cousins to stand guard over the Russian and the Brit, not to mention the excitable Stella, while Lacey made one last search for the corset.

Nicole Demaine was gracious and pleased that her shop would merit a prominent mention in a story that might go around the country, even the world. With some gravity she read aloud the note from the crypt for the assembled group, while Trujillo took photographs. And on behalf of her mother, Madeline Demaine, she was delighted to turn over to Lacey Smithsonian and
The Eye Street
Observer
Lacey’s prime suspect: the antique dressmaker’s dummy that had been on display in her shop for decades.

Lacey had realized where she had to look when she finally stopped shaking from the deadly encounter with Natalija, and they had made their statements to the police. She waited to tell Vic until they were finally alone. He said it was ridiculous, it wasn’t logical.

How could she be sure? She told him she wasn’t sure of anything, and it didn’t make any logical sense, just intuitive sense. But finding Magda’s note hidden in her corset told her to keep looking for the truth hidden inside. Magda had shed a drop of her blood to wish Lacey luck. And now she kept hearing two dead women saying the same word over and over, Magda and Natalija, both of them descended from the two Latvian soldiers who had stolen the corset in Ekaterinburg long ago. They were both saying the word “dummy.”

Nicole brought a step stool and lifted the dummy down from the ledge near the ceiling, where it had been keeping company with antique hatboxes and other forgotten decor. She set it on a low table in the center of the shop, which she closed for the occasion, and whisked off decades of dust with a feather duster. She stepped back and nodded to Lacey.
Prick a finger for me, Magda, wherever
you are,
Lacey thought.

Lacey examined the dressmaker’s dummy carefully. Nicole Demaine had supplied her with a pair of thin white cotton gloves to wear. The cloth covering the dummy had aged to a deep ivory, smudged with dust, rust-stained around the metal neck plate, but it was intact, its front seams straight and neat. But on the back of the dummy Lacey saw a jagged seam, crudely sewn.
“Secrets between
the stitches,”
she said to herself,
that’s what Magda wrote inside
my corset.

With trembling fingers, Lacey opened the jagged seam with a seam ripper borrowed from Nicole. She slipped her gloved hand inside the dummy and felt a flat wad of some material. She drew it out slowly while the others held their breath. It was heavy. The material was folded over and stiff with age and heavily stained.

Lacey carefully unfolded it: It was a small corset. It would fit a very small-boned young woman, perhaps a teenager. There was a hush of expectant silence. She wondered what color the corset was originally, perhaps even pure white, in a finely woven cotton or linen with a quilted covering. Now it was aged a dark yellow, smeared and spattered with the brown of long-dried blood, its laces cut. The corset was torn and gashed, some of the rips mended by hand with irregular patches of a rougher homespun material.

Some were loose, their stitches brittle with age. The darkest brown stains seemed to radiate from beneath the largest patches.

Lacey delicately lifted one of the loose patches with the seam ripper to expose a long gash through which something gleamed.

She turned the corset toward the light. It flashed brilliantly, and someone gasped. Through the gash Lacey saw large diamonds set in platinum, perhaps a bracelet or a necklace. It was dazzling.

“Holy cow, Lacey,” Stella blurted out, “what the hell is it?”

“A treasure, a dream, a nightmare,” Lacey said. “Or all those things.” She lifted another loose patch: More diamonds glittered in the shop lights. And then rubies. Vic gave a low whistle.

“My God,” Kepelov said slowly, “it can’t be real, can it?” He reached out to touch it, but Turtledove cleared his throat gently. He pulled his hand back. “But the corsets don’t exist. They were all cut apart and the jewels were taken by the Bolsheviks.”

“Nothing’s real till you bloody find it, mate,” Griffin said. “The Romanovs’ bones didn’t exist either. And then they dug ’em up a few years back.”

“This is incredible! It belongs to Russia,” Kepelov proclaimed.

“To the Russian people.”

“Ha! Finders, keepers, mate. But just wait till the live Romanovs hear about this.”

“I feel an international incident coming on,” Lacey said. Vic hired Turtledove and his cousins on the spot to provide security all the way back to Washington.

Lacey let everyone gaze at the corset and its contents, under Vic and Turtledove’s watchful eyes. She and Trujillo took endless photographs. Nicole posed with the dummy and the corset, a little breathless, and then Lacey, and then Stella too. Lacey called Mac at
The Eye
and listened to him laugh and yell for someone to get the presses ready for a special edition. She even called Brooke at her law office and listened to her squeal with joy. She let everyone in the little dress shop marvel and wonder and speculate and talk.

And talk and talk.

Finally she put the corset in an archival document box lined with acid-free paper and the dummy in a similar but larger box.

Handling them again would be a job for experts in historical garment conservation, and in Romanov jewels. And probably international diplomacy.

“Isn’t it funny,” Nicole Demaine said to Lacey as she packed it all up. “I wanted to get rid of that dusty old thing years ago, but Mother would never let me. She said it brought her good luck.”

“Your mother was the only one,” Lacey said. “It’s brought everyone else bad luck.”
Including Magda Rousseau,
Lacey thought.
But
Magda brought me good luck. Maybe this will break the chain.

Vic held her close. “What about us, dragon-slayer? We never get enough time, do we? Well, this is your lucky day. You just proved it. So come on, make a wish. I’ll make it come true.”

Lacey looked at Vic, wondering. She thought perhaps they were both finally making the same wish. But then she shook her head, reluctantly.

“This dragon-slayer has to write a big story, fly home, and bake a cake for Thanksgiving, remember?” She sighed. “Will you help me, Vic?”

Vic kissed her and picked her up and spun her around until she laughed and begged him to stop. “Let’s go home and bake that cake, sweetheart. I’m all yours.”

“Good to know, cowboy.” She kissed him again, and she kissed him so he’d never forget it. “Now we just have to tell that to your mother.”