Текст книги "Night Night, Sleep Tight"

Автор книги: Hallie Ephron

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

Chapter 38

Later that night, Deirdre heard a canned laugh track rumbling from her father’s bedroom. Sounded as if her mother, who’d lived for the last ten years without television, was catching up on the latest sitcoms. Deirdre crept out into the hall and knocked lightly on Henry’s bedroom door. When there was no answer, she knocked again. “Henry?” she whispered.

“Go away. I’m sleeping.”

“Henry,” Deirdre said through the closed door, “I was there at the house the night Tito was killed, and I know you were there, too.”

No response.

“Are you listening to me? I know you were the one who was driving Daddy’s car. You may not want to talk about it, but—”

The door opened. Henry had a pair of earphones loose around his neck. “Shh,” he said. He let her into his room and pressed the door shut behind her.

“Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened?” Deirdre said.

Henry sat down on the edge of the bed, his shoulders slumped. “I had to get us both out of there. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry? Those were two words she never thought she’d hear coming out of her brother’s mouth, and certainly not with the kind of genuine contrition that seemed to fuel them now. “I thought Dad came to get me out of there.”

“I had no idea she’d even called him. I found you passed out on the floor in one of the upstairs bathrooms. I had to practically carry you down the back stairs and I was afraid I’d have to carry you all the way home. But when I got outside, Dad’s car was right there, with the keys in the ignition. The answer to a prayer. Or that’s what I thought at the time.” He gave a tired smile and shook his head. “I put you in the car. You were so out of it. I reclined the seat and you curled over on your side.”

“You said, ‘Night night, sleep tight’ and kissed me on the forehead. I thought you were Daddy.”

Henry blushed. “What I should have done is belted you in. Believe me, I wish to hell I had. And I wish to hell that I’d stopped long enough to put up the convertible top and calm down. But I was so angry and so—” He broke off, a guarded look crossing his face. “Anyway, I got behind the wheel and started the car.”

“Why did you drive up into the canyon?”

“I just drove. I wasn’t even thinking about where I was going. Before I knew it, I’d turned onto Mulholland. I was cranking, pushing the car, taking those turns just as fast as I could.”

Speed. Deirdre understood how it focused the senses. Obliterated second thoughts.

“I lost control. The car crashed into the guardrail. It was so weird, the car came to a dead stop but the engine just kept screaming. I thought I had my foot on the brake but I was practically standing on the gas pedal. The steering wheel was bent and my chest hurt so badly I could barely breathe. When I looked across to see if you were okay, your seat was empty. I’ll never forget that moment.”

“Then what? You thought you could just walk away and leave me there?”

“No! God, no. I was frantic. I heard you crying. I crawled through the underbrush and found you. Then I scrambled back and flagged down some bikers. Told them I’d been hitchhiking and witnessed a crash. I begged them to go call for help. All I could think was that you were going to die and it would be my fault. But then, when the ambulance got there, I hid.”

“You hid? Why?”

“They’d have—” Henry mumbled something.

“They’d have what?”

“Taken away my driver’s license.”

“Taken your . . . ? I’m lying there, I could have been dying for all you knew, and you were worried about losing your damned driver’s license?”

Henry looked down at the floor and swallowed. The years seemed to fall away and Deirdre could see the vulnerable sixteen-year-old he’d been: tall and charming, goofy and sweet. “I know. I was a coward. I was a jerk.” He looked mortified. “You should hate me.”

But Deirdre didn’t hate him. All she felt at that moment was sadness. “You were a kid. Kids do incredibly stupid things.”

“That was beyond stupid and then some. And it wasn’t just about losing my license. The truth is, I was afraid they’d find out where I’d been and what I’d been up to.” Agitated, Henry got up and crossed the room, then crossed back. He stopped and looked at Deirdre. “Did he write about me and her? Did he?” Before she could answer, he went back to pacing the room. “I knew I should stop seeing her. Tito threatened to kill me if he caught me there again. But she’d whistle and back I’d come. Like some kind of trained puppy. Sit up. Roll over. Sit in my lap. Give us a kiss.”

Deirdre tried to put together what Henry was saying. “You came to see her after the party?”

Henry stood still. “I did. She’d told me to meet her at the pool. I rode over on my bicycle. On my bike, for Chrissake. At the last minute, I grabbed a knife, thinking I’d flash it at Tito if he showed up. I got to the pool and waited and waited. She never came.”

After the party. That was when Deirdre and Joelen were making themselves sick gorging on leftovers, finishing off drinks, and smoking cigarette butts. “She didn’t come because we’d gotten smashed. Threw up. Passed out.”

“You and Joelen?” Henry blinked. Then he barked a laugh. “You thought I had a thing for Joelen?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I . . . I guess I did. Sort of. But not like that.”

Not like that? Then she got it. Of course it hadn’t been Joelen. A wave of pity and disgust came along with the realization. “You were meeting Bunny Nichol?”

Henry put his hands to his face and closed his eyes. An image of him came back to her. Onstage with his guitar and a microphone in front of him, an ambitious kid swaggering with unearned experience. And Bunny, twenty years older. Queen of wanton amorous fire, as her father had described her in his memoir. “What a sleazy—” She couldn’t finish.

“I guess that’s how it looks now. At the time, it was amazing. I thought I was such a big deal. Supersuave. In charge.”

“Oh, Henry. She seduced you. She was glamorous. A famous movie star, for God’s sake.” Deirdre could only imagine what would have happened if people had found out. Bunny Nichol, involved with a younger man—that might have made a few waves. But that she was sleeping with a sixteen-year-old kid? A tsunami of bad press and ill will, and probably the end of her career. “Did you come up to the house looking for her?”

Henry looked sick. “I did. Even from outside the house I could hear them arguing. She was shouting. Tito bellowing. Then just her, screaming and screaming.

“I ran into the house. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but I ran inside. I can remember standing at the base of the stairs, looking up. They weren’t arguing anymore. Now there was complete silence, so quiet I could hear my own heart pounding.

“Then Bunny was there, like she’d just materialized on the upstairs landing, cold as ice. She came down and took away the knife. I didn’t even realize I was holding it. She told me to get the hell out of there, to take you with me, and not to even think about coming back. Ever. So that’s what I did. Except the not thinking part. It took me a long time to stop doing that.”

Deirdre felt ashamed that for all these years she’d just assumed Henry was Teflon, holding every girlfriend who came along at arm’s length emotionally. They came and then they went at his whim, or so it had seemed. This, at least, explained why.

“Did you know why they were fighting? That she’d told him she was pregnant?”

Henry narrowed his eyes. “How do you know that?”

“Sy told me.”

“And he knew because . . . ?”

“Bunny told him. He came over later and she had him call the police.”

“No. I didn’t know that.” Henry shook his head.

“But you did know she was pregnant.”

“I didn’t find out until later, when the baby was born and she came to Dad to negotiate terms and Sy set up the trust. She said the baby was mine. All you have to do is look at Jackie to know that’s true.”

Of course. She’d seen the resemblance too. She’d felt that frisson of recognition when she first saw Jackie Hutchinson standing on the stairs. There had been something about him. The way he carried himself, his sardonic smile, his hair—all of them echoes of Henry.

“Jackie knows you’re his dad?”

“He thinks I’m a friend of the family, and that’s what I’ve tried to be. It’s the one good thing that came out of that mess. He’s a great kid, even if he is a little lost right now.”

That made two lost boys, Deirdre thought as she looked around the room. Henry’s prized electric guitars were once again lined up against the wall. Above them on the shelf stood the Battle of the Bands trophies he’d won. Best Band. Best Guitar. He and his buddies had taken top prizes. Henry had had real talent. Looks and charm, too. And he’d been on his way.

But by his senior year of high school, his grades had slipped. He’d stopped playing in the band. Never applied for summer jobs, just hung around, got high, and slept. Gloria and Arthur, distracted by their own unhappiness and Deirdre’s surgeries, had barely noticed. After a few months of college, he dropped out and moved home. And he was still there, lost on the way to a real life.

Now Deirdre understood why her father had kept the mysterious baby announcement that she’d found tucked in with his manuscript. Jackie Hutchinson had been the unnamed baby whose arrival was heralded in the card mailed in an envelope postmarked twenty-one years ago. Of course her father had saved it. He was the baby’s grandfather.

She also understood one of the notes that her father had jotted on the last page of the manuscript: Sy trust. Her father hadn’t been paying Bunny hush money. It had been child support. And Arthur had been bound and determined to write about it. He was going to blow the story wide open, and blow away Bunny’s reputation in the process.

WEDNESDAY,

May 28, 1985

Chapter 39

The next morning, the dull roar of a vacuum cleaner reached down and hauled Deirdre from a deep sleep. She lay in bed, listening to the nozzle bang against the baseboards in the hallway outside her bedroom. Sounded as if her mother still hated housekeeping and was taking it out on the house.

Deirdre propped herself up on her elbows. It was half past nine already. Rain beat steadily on the window. After her talk with Henry, she’d gone for a drive to clear her head and to find an all-night drugstore where she could buy a disposable camera. Even though she hadn’t gotten to sleep until well past midnight, it was the best night’s sleep she’d had since she found her father’s body floating in the pool.

All these years she’d blamed her father for crippling her when it was Henry who’d been driving. In the end, Henry had been crippled, too, in his own way. The two of them had more in common than she’d ever have imagined.

She got out of bed and took a quick shower. Toweled her hair dry and ran her fingers through it. Her new cut didn’t need more than that.

Beyond her trench coat, she hadn’t thought about what she had to wear to the funeral service. She couldn’t go swanning about the chapel in leggings and a long silk shirt. Her Xeno Art T-shirt was out, too. Ditto her father’s chambray shirt. Which left . . . she poked through the old clothes hanging in the closet and pulled out the navy blue, swingy tent dress that she’d worn in college before abandoning dresses for long paisley skirts or hip-hugging bell-bottoms with embroidered peasant blouses.

She slipped the dress on. It was a little tight on top but it would do. She draped her new scarf loosely around her neck and checked herself out in the full-length mirror. Innocuous. Unremarkable. Perhaps even a little retro chic. The skirt length was the only problem—it was ridiculous how short hems had been back then. But she could live with it. Besides, she’d be wearing a coat over it, so it hardly mattered.

She got her crutch and made her way out into the hall. Gloria was dusting the living room. She was wearing a dark straight skirt and matching shell she’d taken from Deirdre’s closet. Too small for Deirdre, they fit her mother with room to spare.

“Would you stop!” Deirdre said. “No one’s going to expect a perfectly clean house.”

Gloria gave Deirdre an appraising look. “We bought that dress at Robinsons. I like it with that scarf, but—” She came over and removed the scarf from around Deirdre’s neck, then redraped and tied it. “Better.”

Deirdre smiled. There was the shadow of the old Gloria Unger, the woman who had a subscription to Vogue and bought her shoes at Delman’s.

“Why don’t you go wake up your brother,” Gloria said.

Henry’s bedroom door was closed. Deirdre rapped on it. “Henry? Henry, wake up!”

“Go away.” Henry’s voice was a barely audible croak.

“The car is coming for us in an hour.”

“I’ll drive myself over.”

“You will not. Now get up!” She waited. Didn’t hear anything. “Henry, are you getting up?” She pushed the door open and looked in.

The covers heaved and she heard the bed creak. “All right, all right. I’m up. Now go away.”

“I’m not going until you’re up up.”

Henry picked up his head and glared at her. “I’m not getting up until you get out.”

By the time a dark limousine pulled up, Henry looked sober and handsome in a dark shirt and tie and pressed jeans. Gloria looked oddly chic, certainly striking. Her growing-in hair framed her face like a dark shadow, and she wore her turban unraveled and tied loosely like a cowl around her neck. A pair of Deirdre’s thick, red enameled hoop earrings gave her an exotic, Caribbean look. Her shoes were the only off note—battered black Birkenstock sandals.

Gloria stepped out into the rain, raising the cowl to loosely cover her head as she walked quickly to the car. Henry followed. Deirdre locked the door and carried a large envelope out to the black Cadillac limousine.

The driver in dark livery, the brim of his cap pulled low over a pair of wraparound sunglasses, held the door open for them. The dark interior of the car was cool and smelled of leather and Old Spice. As the car pulled away from the curb, Deirdre leaned forward and gave the driver Sy’s office address.

“I see you’re going incognito,” Henry cracked, a comment on Deirdre’s belted trench coat, head scarf, and dark glasses. Deirdre ignored him. Henry ignored her ignoring, instead practicing the informal tribute he planned to give, using notecards and talking about what Arthur had taught him to do. Play guitar, drive a car, mix drinks, pick up girls, and take all the fun out of TV movies by providing a running critique of the dialogue. By the time the limo turned into Westwood Village and pulled up in front of the three-story, pink stucco office building that housed Sy’s office, Deirdre was wiping away tears.

“That was perfect,” she told Henry. She was glad she’d had a chance to hear his speech.

“I don’t know why you have to take care of this right now,” Gloria said.

“Sy made me promise I’d leave Dad’s manuscript in his office this morning. It’ll just take me a minute.”

Deirdre got out and speed-walked—as fast as she could with her crutch—out of the rain and in through the arched doorway marked PUBLIC PARKING. The interior, with its gated entry and ramp to upper parking levels, smelled of rubber tires and warm, moist pavement. She wondered if this had been the spot where Sy was attacked.

She pushed through a door to the building’s lobby and made her way up a flight of tile-covered stairs, holding on to the wrought-iron railing. Sy’s office was halfway along a shadowy, second-floor corridor that was lit by metal sconces with orangey, flame-shaped glass shades. She took off her sunglasses and unlocked the door with the key Sy had given her.

The moment Deirdre pushed open the door and set her crutch in the dark room, an alarm started to beep. She’d known it would, but still the piercing sound rattled her. She turned on the overhead light and hurried over to the wall where Sy told her she’d find the security panel, though with its flashing lights, she’d have easily found it on her own. She punched in the code and the alarm fell silent.

Deirdre turned on the lights and looked around. On a corner table, a copper lamp with a golden mica shade gave off an eerie glow. This outer room where Vera presided—Arthur used to say she was like a lioness guarding the gate—seemed smaller without Vera in it.

On the wall behind Vera’s desk were two doors. One connected to Sy’s office. The other was a louvered door to a walk-through supply closet. When Deirdre was little, before she started kindergarten even, she often came here with her father. While Sy talked with Arthur, he’d leave both supply closet doors and the connecting office door open so Deirdre could ride her tricycle from Vera’s office to Sy’s and around through the supply closet on her own miniature speedway.

Deirdre stepped into the supply closet, letting the door click shut behind her. Lines of light shined through between the slats in the door on the opposite side. Through the openings she could see Sy’s massive desk, large enough for a pair of law partners to work facing each other. Behind it a pair of casement windows overlooked the street. No coats hung from a coat stand made of deer antlers, the perfect foreground for a large oil painting of a Hollywood western landscape, complete with a cowboy astride a stallion that reared against the sunrise.

At the funeral, Deirdre would let everyone she talked to know exactly where she’d left the memoir. She hoped that the person who’d been looking for it would hear. The closet would be the perfect vantage point from which to watch and see who took the bait. Deirdre slipped the disposable camera that she’d picked up the night before from her pocket, held it up to her face, and aimed the lens through an opening between the louvers. Through the viewfinder she had a perfect view of Sy’s desk. She pressed the shutter. Click. Whirr. The film wound itself.

Deirdre left the camera within reaching distance on a shelf and pushed her way through the door at the back of the closet into Sy’s office. A glass bowl filled with cellophane-wrapped peppermints was on the desk. She put her hand into it and felt around for the desk key. It was there, right where Sy said it would be. Then she unlocked the desk’s wide center drawer and placed in it the envelope she’d brought with her. The words, written on the front in dark marker, would be hard to miss: One Damned Thing After Another by Arthur Unger.

With that, Deirdre locked the desk, just in case someone got there before she got back. She took the key with her and left, rearming the alarm on her way out. When she got down to the lobby, she put her sunglasses back on and tightened her head scarf. Then she exited through the parking garage and out into the drizzling rain. The limo was waiting at the curb.

The driver got out and opened the door for her. “All set?” he whispered.

Even she wouldn’t have recognized Tyler in that uniform and sunglasses.

Chapter 40

The cemetery and funeral chapel were just minutes away. The limousine turned in through a driveway between buildings. Hidden behind them was an oasis of green lawn and flowers, a true secret garden that was Westwood Memorial Park. The limo pulled up in front of the path to the chapel. Its sides were lined with benches, tidy flower beds, and shrubs clipped into perfect circles and domes. It struck Deirdre how much effort had gone into controlling the outdoor space—ironic, given that death was so not something that humans could control.

The three of them got out of the car. Deirdre hooked her arm in Henry’s, held her crutch in her free hand, and started up the path, through the misty rain, thick with cigarette smoke and crowded with umbrellas.

Arthur would have been pleased by the size of the crowd that overflowed the narrow A-framed chapel. Gloria embraced a man in a dark suit who greeted her and drew her over into a group. Among them, Deirdre recognized Vera, Sy’s secretary. Deirdre waved, but she didn’t follow. She had a mission, to get out the word that her father had written a memoir, that it had survived the fire, and that it was in Sy Sterling’s office even as Sy was in the hospital recovering from being attacked.

It felt awkward at first, approaching people she recognized from the parties her parents had thrown, people who’d come over to dinner. “Yes, it’s very sad. And so unexpected,” she said, trying her story out first on Milton Breen and his wife, Anne. He’d been a screenwriter, now a director, who had a house with a pool up in the canyon. Arthur and Gloria had taken Deirdre and Henry there to swim before they built a pool of their own. “And then on top of everything else,” Deirdre added, “the garage caught fire and we lost all the papers Dad had up in his office. Fortunately we were able to save his memoir. In it, he sets the record straight.” She added, even though it sounded a bit lame, “I left the manuscript in Sy’s office for safekeeping.”

The Breens didn’t ask which record got set straight. When she ran the same tape by Lee Golden and a man Lee introduced as another set designer, the reaction was more one of surprise. A little glee, perhaps, at whose secrets might be revealed.

As Deirdre worked her way through the crowd, she noted how each of Arthur’s friends reacted to her announcement that Arthur had written a memoir. To one and all, she added that Sy would be handling its publication as soon as he was released from the hospital.

A blond woman Deirdre didn’t recognize put her hand on Deirdre’s arm and air kissed both her cheeks. Along with the kisses came a familiar blast of rose and jasmine mixed with musk. Probably Joy. “Deirdre darling, I was so sorry to hear about your dad,” she said. The voice Deirdre knew: this was once-upon-a-time brunette Marianne Wasserman, her high school’s queen bee. “You haven’t changed a bit,” Marianne added.

Deirdre wondered how Marianne could tell since Deirdre had on a coat and head scarf and sunglasses. The crutch, probably. “Marianne,” she said. “It’s so sweet of you to come.”

“You remember Nancy Kellogg?” Marianne said, indicating the woman standing behind her. Deirdre never would have recognized the once-chunky redhead who was now a blonde, too, and skeletal.

Deirdre slapped down the bitchy voice in her head. It was nice of the two of them to show up, even if they hadn’t known her father at all and even if they hadn’t seen or talked to Deirdre since high school.

Nancy gave Deirdre’s hand a wooden shake. “We thought Joelen might be here,” she said, rising up on her toes and looking around. We. That made Deirdre smile. Apparently she and Marianne were still attached at the hip.

“Oh, there’s Henry,” Marianne said. “Hi!” She waved at Henry, who was on his way over to join them.

“Joelen Nichol,” Deirdre said. As Henry joined the group she shot him a look that she hoped conveyed don’t contradict me. “Gosh. I haven’t heard from Joelen in ages. No, I doubt very much that she’ll be here. But you are, so you never know.”

“Hello, Henry,” Nancy said.

Henry colored slightly. “We should go in,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get out of the rain. The service is supposed to start soon.”

Henry started to pull Deirdre up the path to the chapel. Deirdre waggled her fingers at Marianne and Nancy and mouthed See you, even though she knew that was unlikely. “Sounds like they know you,” she said to Henry under her breath.

“Knew me. Briefly. Nancy wanted to be in pictures.”

“Polaroid pictures?”

Henry chuckled. “I told you, I was an asshole. Where’s Mom?”

Turned out Gloria was already inside. She was sitting in the front row, which was cordoned off for family. Mourners had already filled about half the chairs in the chapel. Some Deirdre recognized as family friends. Others anyone would recognize. Gene Kelly. Ernest Borgnine. Ray Bolger. They’d all worked with her dad.

As Henry walked Deirdre down the aisle, simple piano chords accompanied Ella Fitzgerald’s sweet, silvery voice on the sound system. “With a Song in My Heart.” Deirdre’s eyes teared up. She’d helped pick the music.

Henry walked her up to the casket. Deirdre ran her hand lightly over its smooth coffered lid. The words I’m sorry echoed in her head. For blaming him all these years. For not accepting him for the complicated human being he was. For not getting down off her high horse, as he’d have put it, and just enjoying their time together. And for what she was about to do: run out on his funeral service. She knew it wasn’t respectful, but respect had never been her father’s strong suit either. Besides, she was sure he wouldn’t have wanted whoever killed him to get away with it.

She sat between Henry and her mother. A movie screen was set up in the front of the chapel. When she turned to look behind her again, the rows had filled and people were standing at the back. Frank Sinatra was on the sound system now, crooning about how he’d done it my way. Her father might have argued with that choice—he’d always said Sinatra was a thug and a bully. But the lyrics were perfect for a man who, facing the final curtain, would have thought he’d been king.

A little while later, the lights dimmed in the chapel and the hum of voices went silent. The screen at the front of the room lit up with the words ARTHUR UNGER 1926–1985, white lettering on a royal-blue ground. There was a long pause to allow stragglers to file in, and then the back doors shut and the slides began. First was a stiff, old-world portrait of Arthur as a baby in his bearded father’s arms, surrounded by his mother and three older brothers. Then, Arthur sitting on the front stoop of a New York City brownstone with one of his brothers. Arthur, handsome and muscled in bathing trunks at a pool where he’d spent summers as a lifeguard and sometime emcee at a resort in the Poconos. As a bridegroom in a dark suit, Gloria in a tailored suit, too, carrying a bouquet of roses. Both of them looked impossibly young and handsome and—Deirdre tried to find the right word—tentative.

Silence, piano chords, and Nat King Cole’s smoky voice began singing. “Unforgettable” . . . Her father would have found the choice entirely too mushy, but it was Deirdre’s cue. She made sure that her scarf and sunglasses were secure and leaned over to her mother and then to Henry. “I’ll be right back,” she told each of them. Without waiting for a response, she grabbed her crutch and made her way to the back of the chapel.

With her sunglasses on and the lights low, the audience was pretty much a sea of indistinct faces. But when Deirdre pushed into the lobby where it was brighter, she recognized the one person still out there: Detective Martinez. She appreciated that he was keeping a respectful distance from the mourners, and fortunately he was preoccupied writing some notes and didn’t notice her until she was nearly to the ladies’ room.

“Miss Unger?” She heard his voice as the restroom door closed behind her.

The white-and-blue Mexican-tiled room with gleaming brass fixtures was empty. No one stood at the sinks. No feet were visible under the doors to the stalls. Music from the service was muted but still audible.

Deirdre really did need to pee. While she was in the stall, she heard the door to the room creak open. Deirdre raised her feet so they weren’t visible. It wouldn’t be Detective Martinez. All he had to do was wait for her to reemerge. She hoped it wasn’t Marianne Wasserman, concerned as she was about Deirdre’s mental status.

Then she heard a woman’s voice. “Zelda?”

“Thalia?” Deirdre lowered her feet. “Hang on.”

“There you are,” Joelen said when Deirdre opened the stall door. “How do I look?” She turned around to show off a tan raincoat over a short black dress. Her hair was done up in a French twist. She turned her toes out and gave the black umbrella she was holding a Charlie Chaplin twirl.

“Perfect,” Deirdre said. “But better when you’re wearing this.” Deirdre took off her coat and gave it to Joelen. Joelen took off hers and they swapped. Deirdre unwound her scarf and tied it around Joelen’s head. Dropped her sunglasses into the pocket of the coat that Joelen was now wearing.

“Thanks for sending Tyler over to get me,” Joelen said. “He’s pretty cute, though I can’t say I remember him.”

“Well, he remembers you.”

Joelen smiled. “Story of my life, but never with a happy ending.”

“So far.”

Joelen opened up her large black leather handbag and pulled out a blond wig. Deirdre took it from her, shook it out, and started to put it on her head.

“Wait. First you need to put this on.” Joelen took out a net cap with banded edges. She snapped it over Deirdre’s curls, then tucked in stray strands of hair, just like in a bathing cap.

Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were playing on the sound system now, singing a soused duet and proclaiming What a swell party this is. That meant the slide show was past its midpoint.

“Hurry up,” Deirdre said, “before they send someone in looking for me.”

“Don’t have a cow. Hold still.” Joelen eased the wig over the cap and tugged it a bit sideways, then back the other way. “There. Done.” She stood back and assessed.

Deirdre turned to face the mirror and considered her own reflection. Blond bangs and shoulder-length curls framed her face.

“How do you like it?” Joelen said. “Seriously, you should consider going blond.”

“I look like me with a wig on.”

“That’s because you know you.” Joelen got out a comb and teased some of the hair on top, then smoothed it all around with her hands. “There. Fabulous.”

Deirdre looked into Joelen’s reflected eyes. Suddenly she was right back in Joelen’s bathroom, sitting on the fluffy pink fur-covered stool and watching Joelen do her hair and makeup for Bunny’s party, just hours before both of their worlds imploded.

“What?” Joelen said.

“Why did you confess if you didn’t do it?”

Joelen’s eyes widened. “I thought you wanted me to hurry and get back in there.”

“Was it to protect your mom? Or my brother?”

After a few beats of silence, Joelen gave a tired laugh. “Does it matter at this point?”

“I don’t know. It might. What if what happened twenty-two years ago isn’t finished playing out? What if my father’s murder is connected to what happened to Tito?” Deirdre turned to face Joelen. “So please, did you kill him?”