Sweet Liar (41 page)

At that Mike took her in his arms. “Ah, baby, that's not what I meant. Of course you have rights. If you want all of them, cousins, whatever, here, then you can have them.”

Looking over Mike's shoulder, Samantha winked at Kane. She may have played dirty in the fight, but she'd won, and wasn't that what counted? Kane raised his cup to her in silent salute.

A
fter Samantha got over her initial qualms about the feasibility of trying to recreate a moment of the past, she went to work with a vengeance. The first thing she did was invite everyone who was to be involved in key roles to the house for dinner and a planning meeting.

“And I will cook,” she said, to which Mike began to guffaw, saying that to her cooking probably meant punching the telephone buttons until her fingers were sore. Ignoring him, Sam gave Mike and Kane a very long grocery list that included such things as fresh cilantro, green chilies—“not those awful canned kind”—cumin, piñon nuts, and posole.

By the evening, when Mike's relatives arrived, the house was redolent with smells of chili, corn, and beef. Mike, Kane, and the twins had spent the day being ordered about by Sam as though they were in the army, as she gave them onions to chop, chilies to roast and peel, and, for the boys, bread to tear into pieces for bread pudding.

Everyone arrived hungry. While Mike poured margaritas they began to organize the recreation of the long-ago evening.

Jubilee with his mean-looking gray-haired granddaughter in tow came, but Jubilee sent her home after the first five minutes, leaving Ornette to stay with his great-grandfather.

It was as everyone was eating plates full of enchiladas, relleños, posole, and pinto beans, exclaiming with every bite about how hot the food was and saying they couldn't eat it even as they reached for more, that Samantha began to believe that it was really going to work, because people were already talking of revealing secrets. Jubilee said that whoever was going to be directing Scalpini's men had better talk to him first. And H.H. (only the older children had been allowed to come and they were fascinated with H.H.'s tattooed hand) said he'd need to talk to Samantha/Maxie.

Halfway through the meal, when it was so noisy they could hardly hear each other, the front door opened and in came Blair, and she had Maxie on her bed, tubes connecting her to the machine rolling beside her.

“I tried to talk her out of it,” Blair said, wearing her doctor face. “But she begged me. Well, is there any food left?”

For a moment, everyone gave Jubilee and Maxie some time alone as they held hands and looked into each other's eyes, sharing secrets that the others could only guess at. To the surprise of Mike and Sam, H.H. seemed to know Maxie very well. What's more, his respect for her seemed to be something that was usually reserved for overlords or, at the very least, great wizards.

“Who's going to play Doc?” Sam asked loudly, her hand on her grandmother's shoulder, wanting to break the somber mood the evening had taken, for Maxie looked weaker every day. “Of course it would help if we knew what Doc looked like in those days.”

With those words Maxie became involved. All the way over in the ambulance that held Maxie's bed and machines, Blair had told her about what they planned, so Maxie knew what was needed.

Blair reported to Mike that the bloodstain on Maxie's dress was A positive, the most common type of blood. It could have been the blood of any number of people who were shot that night. It was not Michael Ransome's blood, which was O positive.

After Maxie arrived, Daphne entered with six of her friends. The sight of Daphne brought a hush over the crowd, for she was dressed as gaudily as a Texas tourist in Santa Fe, dripping sparkling fringe, with black and white feathers sprouting from her shoulders. After Samantha introduced her to Mike's family, Mike told them that Daphne and her friends were going to be the chorus and backup singers for Samantha. One of Mike's teenage cousins gaped at Daphne. When he recovered his powers of speech, he asked Vicky if they could measure Daphne and her friends for their costumes. Vicky rolled her eyes skyward, but one of Daphne's girls, looking at the clean-cut young men, said they'd not mind at all if the boys measured them—it would make them feel like schoolteachers.

When Samantha showed Maxie's clothes to everyone, Raine said, “Nice shoes,” and they all laughed. Asking about the joke, Sam was told that Raine's mother loved shoes so much that she had a room full of them. Straight-faced, Sam asked, “What size?” which caused more laughter.

They ate bread pudding and bowls full of flan as they assigned roles and figured out how everyone was to rehearse. Some of them were to help the principals, such as Vicky, to make clothing, then later they were to be in the audience. Jilly was to be the resident historian, giving answers on any and all questions about what to wear, how to act, and what slang was to be used. Slang study was considered necessary after one of Mike's young cousins said he was sure the word
groovy
came from the twenties.

Only once did Samantha think of calling the whole thing off, and that was when Mike's dad, Ian, talked of arranging for machine gun practice. He saw Sam's face and told her the guns wouldn't be any more real than they were in the movies, but she remembered the death not too long ago of an actor who was playing with a pistol loaded with blanks.

It was late when everyone left, and there was lavish praise of Samantha's cooking.

“I haven't been in Santa Fe for years,” Ian said as he stood at the front door, “but I remember it as being a rather sophisticated little town.”

“I wouldn't say it's exactly unsophisticated,” Samantha answered without a hint of smile, “but the brides there do register their china and silver at Wal-mart.”

Ian chuckled all the way down the stoop while Pat and Samantha arranged for her and Ian to move into Mike's house the next day. When she left, she kissed Sam's cheek.

When everyone had left, Maxie with Blair back to the nursing home, Kane with the boys to the hotel to return in the morning with their clothes to move in, Samantha looked at Mike. And Mike looked at Samantha.

In the next minute they were on each other, making love on the foyer floor, then moving into the living room, then to the library, both of them feeling as though they hadn't seen each other in six months. In his exuberance, Mike began to bend Sam's body into unnatural shapes, but she was so limber from years of aerobics classes that she bent easily, her legs twisting about various parts of him with ease. They fell asleep on the floor of the breakfast room and woke in the wee hours, to feel bruised parts of each other's bodies. Mike, yawning, said they ought to go to bed, but Samantha said that she just had to have a bath—a nook and cranny bath. Grinning, Mike picked her up and carried her up to the bathroom.

Hell, Samantha thought, was rehearsing with Ornette Johnson. Never in her life had she met such a bigot, and when she called him that—after he'd told her for the fourth time in three hours that she was too white to sing the blues—a hush came over the room. According to Ornette, only white people could be bigots, and that idiocy sent Samantha into a rage.

When Mike entered the nursing home recreation room, he found Samantha standing on a chair shouting into Ornette's handsome face while he yelled back at her. Maxie and Jubilee sat to one side, looking on with expressions of adoration.

“So who's winning?” Mike asked, taking a seat next to Maxie.

“I'd say it was a draw, wouldn't you, Jube?”

“A draw, yes. I think Ornette's met his match.”

Leaning forward, Mike quietly told them that he had arranged for a record producer to attend the night Ornette was going to play. “Who knows what will happen, but at least he'll be heard.”

Smiling and nodding, Jubilee nudged Maxie to tell her that Samantha had just called Ornette a racist and that they should watch the show the way the other residents of the nursing home were doing.

One morning, two days before the performance, Samantha threw up. “Nerves,” she said as Mike handed her a washcloth. As he'd done before, Mike held her head while she heaved, then smiling mischievously, he suggested breakfast, which sent Sam back to the toilet.

By midmorning she felt better, ate some toast and juice, and took the vitamins Mike handed her. With a wicked grin, she said, “How's the dancing coming?” It had taken her four days of badgering to get Mike to tell her what he was doing to prepare for his role of Michael Ransome. When he'd at last told her, he'd had such a look of martyrdom on his face that she couldn't help laughing. Mike was taking lessons in ballroom dancing.

At eleven Mike went with Sam to Maxie's, then waited outside for what turned out to be three hours while Maxie told Samantha everything she knew about that night in 1928. When Samantha came out, she was white-faced and drawn looking.

“Find out?” Mike asked, taking her hand.

“Yes,” she answered. “Most of it, but not all.” Looking at Mike, her mouth was a hard line. “That corrupt old man,” she said, and Mike knew she was referring to Doc. He also knew that Sam would have cursed, but there were no words to describe what she felt about the man.

Everything had gone so perfectly that there had to be something that went wrong, and it did. On the morning before the day of the performance, after Samantha had thrown up for the third time, Kane called and said that one of his sons was sick. He said it was nothing, but Samantha could hear the worry in his voice.

“Blair's with him and she says it's nothing to be concerned about, but I don't want to leave him. Could Mike get Dad or Frank to go with him to…”

“To get Doc?” Samantha finished for him.

“Yes,” Kane said with a sigh, wishing Sam didn't know so much. “Dad will know what to do.”

After Samantha hung up, she called Mike into the library and told him what Kane had said.

“Sure, I'll get Dad,” Mike said as he moved toward the door, but Sam put her body in front of it.

“I
am going with you.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,” Mike's humorless voice said as he reached for the knob.

Samantha put her hand over it. “Mike, listen to me, it makes sense. I know what you and Frank have done, and don't even think of lying to me about it. Your brother thinks money can buy anything.”

“For Frank it usually does.”

“I know that this time his money bought the guards at Doc's place.”

“It wasn't too difficult since they haven't been paid in weeks. Doc holds them off with promises of big money coming in from Europe, but I think he's broke. Frank could find out nothing about any money coming in from anywhere.”

“Who did he ask? His Wall Street friends?”

“Money is money everywhere. Frank asked in places you don't want to know about.”

“Simple little Sam, too dumb to hear all the facts.”

“Dear little Sam whose life is in danger,” Mike shot back at her.

Calming, Samantha looked at him. “How many of Doc's guards were you able to bribe?”

“Most of them. Okay, okay, eighty percent. There were three of them we couldn't get to and there's the house staff, such as it is. It's going to be dangerous getting in there.” He leaned toward her. “Samantha, those guards carry guns.”

She took a deep breath. “Mike, I'm small. I can go places you and your muscled brothers can't. I can climb fences and trees. What if you and your dad have to climb a fence? Who lifts whom? You can toss me over like a javelin if you need to.”

“And land on your pretty head?”