All for a Sister (25 page)

“Thank you, Werner,” Celeste said before dispatching Graciela to the kitchen.

Roland watched her exit with exaggerated interest. “Thirty years ago?” he said when she was out of earshot. “When she was a spicy
señorita
? I coulda made her a star.”

“She was a star,” Celeste said. “She told me she was a cantina singer and dancer.”

“Really?” Dana thought about Graciela’s familiar, dragging step. “What happened?”

Celeste craned her neck, making sure it was safe to share. “That limp? She was shot by a jealous lover. Here, too.” She ran her fingers along her pronounced clavicle. “A bullet went straight through her throat, and she could never sing again. If you ask me—” she pointed at Werner with her fork—“there’s your next story.”

A polite rumble of agreement followed.

“You know,” Celeste said, as if uncomfortable with the idea of silence or, even worse, the conversation veering away from her, “we’re actually on the set of my very first movie. Right out there. The little house? I played a girl hiding from her mother. Just an experiment, of course, with Daddy’s coloring. And it wasn’t my mother in the film. It was some other woman who—”

“If you don’t mind, sweetheart,” Roland said with fatherly indulgence, “maybe let’s talk more about the project at hand. What are you thinking, Ostermann? Going to give this project a go? Turn our little Celi into a proper leading lady? Because I’m lookin’ at ya—” his eyes darted between the two women—“and I know you’re not related or nothin’, but I can see it. Yes, ladies and gent, I can see it.”

Dana bristled under his scrutiny.

“You know it is not that easy,” Werner said, looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable himself.

“What? Easy. You produce, you direct, our Celi stars, and women weep in the seats.”

Werner met Dana’s eyes. “I have not yet heard the whole story.”

“Story.” Roland dismissed the idea. “You’ve got lady Lazarus, right? Locked away, come back to life. Bring her out into the sunlight and let her fall in love with a hero. What do you think of Eddie Boland?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Werner said as Dana pondered Roland’s idea.

Was that how people would see her? Risen from the dead? She supposed it wasn’t too far off the mark. There had been plenty of stretches of time when she’d been confined to the cold and the dark, though she had yet to share those times with Werner. It was those tomb-like times that made her feel most ashamed.

And had she emerged to fall in love? She studied Werner, as
did the others at the table, and felt something like a spiraling coil run the course of her breath. He wasn’t as handsome as a movie star—not like the few she’d seen, anyway. The question of whether or not he loved her seemed easy enough to answer. No. Doubtless he regarded her as an object of study. Curiosity, maybe, but most definitely not affection. Still, what more did he want to know? What did he think was missing?

“Your mother,” he said, directly to Celeste.

She’d taken a bite of salad and seemed poised to choke on it until she’d taken a generous swallow of water. “Mother? What about Mother?”

“To frame the story,” Werner said, “we need to start with that night. The night of . . .” His voice trailed off, and Dana felt the sting of everybody’s eyes darting toward her. “That night.”

“
She
was there,” Celeste said, an unfamiliar iciness to her voice. “Ask her.”

Not even Roland had a snappy comeback. He concentrated very hard on his salad.

“I would like to see from your mother’s point of view. Did she ever talk about it?”

Celeste gave a mirthless laugh. “Not really. My brother used to torment me, though, telling me I was nothing but the ghost of our dead sister come to life. That Mother found me in the back of the linen closet, where she’d left my poor, tiny, wrapped-up body. I remember being terrified of that closet. He’d lock me in and I’d scream and scream until Mother came, and then she’d beat him for going near it. I think, sometimes, she was as frightened of it as I was. And, oh, you can’t imagine, how horrifying to be locked away—” She brought a hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Dana. Seems I’ve always got a foot in my mouth.”

Dana said nothing, but sent a forgiving smile as consolation.
The casual observer might think they were just a group of friends—a family, perhaps—gathered for a luncheon on the patio. How easy it was to forget the grisly events that brought them together.

“Anyway,” Celeste continued, “to get back to your question. When Mother got sick, all she could talk about was going to heaven to see her precious baby. I don’t think she ever saw me as anything more than a replacement. And of course, I didn’t know anything about a murder.” She said the word in whispered apology. “Practically not until she showed up on my doorstep—rather,
our
doorstep, if the will holds up—and Roland told me all about it.”

Werner furrowed his brow as if figuring out a puzzle and looked to Roland. “How did that happen, exactly? That you knew?”

“As Miss DuFrane’s agent—” he spoke as if addressing a table full of strangers—“all legal matters necessarily go through me.”

Werner clearly wasn’t satisfied with the answer, and Roland squirmed under his gaze, making Dana and Celeste mere observers.

“So there was this document.”

“What document?”

“Like a confession, I guess.”

“Enough!” Celeste jumped up from the table. “Can’t we let the dead rest in peace?” She ran off, sobbing into her napkin, leaving an uncomfortable silence at the table.

“Sweetheart,” Roland said, taking a slim cigarette case out of his jacket pocket, “why don’t you go see if our girl’s all right.”

“No.” Dana felt immobile, lead-bottomed and lashed to the seat. “I’d like to hear this.” Although she didn’t need it, she looked to Werner for approval and felt a little less weighted when he granted it with a solemn nod.

“Suit yourself.” Roland lit his cigarette, then passed the case and the lighter to Werner, who, in turn, sought and received Dana’s blessing before taking one for himself. “I didn’t want to say anything
in front of Celeste. Poor kid, she’s got no one in this world. So when I get a call from Parker, and he tells me half of everything is willed to this Dana Lundgren—” he indulged her with a smile—“and on my client’s behalf I ask just who this person is, he hands me these papers. This thick. And what I read in them, you don’t want to know.” He looked at Dana, his eyes filled with something very close to compassion. “You hear me, baby doll? You don’t want to know.”

But she did. She wanted to know everything, and somewhere, in a file
this thick
, there were answers. Luckily, Werner wanted to know too, and he served as her voice saying, “She deserves to know.”

There was a rattle of glass as the French door opened and slammed behind a visibly irate Graciela.

“Matón!”
She smacked the side of Roland’s head. “You big bully! Our girl is crying her eyes out. What did you do to her?”

“Easy, easy.
Tranquilízate, mamá.
”

From Graciela’s stance, it didn’t appear she would be calming down anytime soon. “Tell me.”

Roland pointed the burning end of his cigarette in Werner’s direction. “Mr. World-Class Director started blabbin’ on and on about Mother DuFrane. And then it came out—”

Graciela gasped and buried her face in her hands. “
Ay! No!
You told her?” She peeked out from between her fingers. “You told
them
?”

“Just that there was a file.”

She continued to moan.

“Not what was in it.”

“We agreed.” She spoke through clenched teeth.

Years of bitterness, all wrapped up in a bundle of unsent letters, exploded within Dana’s core, and she pounded a fist on the table, causing the cutlery to jump in its place. Everyone grew silent.

“Tell me.” She eyed Roland Lundi. “You. Tell me everything.”

He exchanged a look with Graciela, who shrugged a halfhearted consent before collapsing in Celeste’s abandoned chair. After a final, long drag on his cigarette, he ground it out beneath the table and leaned forward, taking Dana’s shaking hands in his.

“She was sick, you know? Real sick. Like, I’d never seen anybody like that. Have you ever seen dried fruit before? Not rotten, where everything gets all mushed up, but dried. Like we did when I was a kid. We’d slice apples real thin and lay them out in the sun, and they’d just shrivel up. Then we could eat them all winter long. That was the way with Mama Marguerite. Dried up. Almost as if her body got a head start on dying. It was enough to break your heart.”

Dana’s heart felt far from breaking. It felt thick, like a mass of concrete, heavy on her lungs, making each breath fight its way around it. How well she knew what it meant to shrivel up to nothing.

“After she passed, we went to the reading of the will, and there you were. Your name. A complete mystery. So I tell Celeste, ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll find out what’s what.’ I go to the lawyer’s office and find out he has this file, a handwritten account, telling the whole story. Naturally I read it. You can see her handwriting getting weaker and weaker as it goes on, sometimes little more than a scribble. And in some places—” he looked hard at Graciela—“it’s like another person altogether did the writing for her.”

Dana turned her hands palms-up to grasp his and get his attention back. “What did it say?”

“I’m not at liberty to tell you.”

She released him and pounded her fist again. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means it’s a confidential legal document, and I’m sworn not to reveal its content.”

“Sworn by whom?” Werner asked, just shy of menacing.

“By him. Their lawyer. Mr. Parker.”

Werner balanced his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and squinted against the rising smoke as he dug into his shirt pocket for a small notebook and pen. “If it’s a part of her final will and testament, it’s a matter of public record. What is his name? I’ll pay him a visit myself.”

“Parker. Christopher Parker. Got an office up in . . .”

The rest of his words were lost as Dana’s ears filled with the sound of rushing blood. Not rushing exactly, but thick. The way the water came out of the faucets on the coldest of winter mornings at the old Bridewell, tumbling over chips of ice. The chill raced through her, clear to the tips of her fingers, causing Roland to pause in the middle of his directions and give her his full regard.

“You okay, baby doll? You’ve gone white as a sheet.”

Graciela, too, looked horrified at her appearance, and Werner dropped both his notebook and his cigarette en route to her side.

“Dana? Darling. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No.” She pushed the word out from the top of her throat. “I’ve only heard its name.”

TITLE CARD:
One year later, and most of it spent alone, locked up like a true prisoner, now. Long days spent with her own solitary company, seeking comfort when she can in the words of the Good Book. But with sunset goes the light. . . .

INTERIOR:
A cramped, dark cell, lit only by the light coming from a high, small window, its bars casting shadows. Our heroine, now clearly a young woman, reclines on the narrow cot that juts out of the sturdy wall. She wears a long-sleeved striped dress and is propped up on one elbow, reading a book carefully positioned in the sunlight.

CLOSE-UP:
A Bible, open to the book of Job, and these words:
“My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me.”

INTERIOR:
The room grows dim. The sun has set, the light is gone. Dana closes the Bible and lies flat on her back, clutching it to her breast. She stares openly at the ceiling above.

TITLE CARD:
“God in heaven, thank you for another day, and bring me safely through another night. And if it be your will, tomorrow, set me free. Do not keep me hidden away. Please, send someone to find me.”

1909

ANNIE, THE WOMAN IN
the bunk below, snored heavily, even though morning sunlight had been pouring through the window for at least an hour. Fine thing it was for her to sleep now, as she’d been awake half the night, forcing Dana to be an audience to her drunken rambling about the men who didn’t love her and the children who didn’t know her and the cops who had nothing better to do than keep a woman from earning a decent living.

Most nights Dana had the cell to herself, but she had long ago learned to keep the habit of sleeping on the top bunk, as the common factor among her infrequent guests was a moist, sour-smelling essence that permeated the thin mattress and lingered long after their dismissal.

She’d earned the privilege of having a small ticking clock, which she kept wedged between her mattress and the wall. A check of it showed there to be thirty minutes before she and Annie would be gathered and escorted to the dining hall for breakfast. It would be a kindness to wake her now and not subject her to the brutal rousing of a baton beating on the barred door, but she’d been such an unpleasant presence last night, Dana opted for peace.