Babylon Sisters (20 page)

54

To say Amelia and Louis were happy that I had told B.J. about Phoebe doesn’t do justice to all the kissing and crying and backslapping and storytelling that consumed the rest of the evening. They were beyond delighted. B.J. was still a little overwhelmed, but he pored over the scrapbooks I lugged out as if he were in search of the secret of life, and maybe he was. By the time he left at midnight, we were both exhausted and exhilarated. There were no more ghosts in sight, but Phoebe was now a tangible presence in both of our lives, and until we got adjusted to it, our shadow dancing was on hiatus. That was fine with me. One step at a time.

The good thing was, our schedules were going to impose a brief cooling-off period whether we wanted to or not. B.J. was on a flight back to Miami this afternoon for an overnight trip to tie up a few more loose ends. He knew he was onto something when somebody left a message for him at the paper saying this wasn’t the sixties and he wasn’t Martin Luther King, so he’d better back off. B.J. said it was probably Quincy Davenport’s supporters, but Louis said that wasn’t their style. Whoever it was, both of them were fired up, and Miss Iona said it felt like the old days.

I had so much work to catch up on, I didn’t have time to worry about it. Miriam arrived bright and early, happy to see Phoebe’s pictures back, and full of praise for B.J. I didn’t tell her he was Phoebe’s father. It was okay for Louis and Amelia to know, but before I made a general announcement, I wanted my wild child to hear it from me. Along with my apology for making her wait so long. Thanksgiving seemed to me the perfect time to make the introductions. It was only a couple of weeks away, and she was coming home whether she was speaking to me or not. They could meet face-to-face.

I wanted it to be a special moment for them. I wanted it to be a moment they would always look back on with joy. A moment we could share as a family for the very first time. This was important, and it had to be
perfect.

Miriam was on the computer, so I answered the phone absentmindedly as I flipped through a stack of folders in seach of a long-lost invoice that was way overdue.

“Babylon Sisters. Catherine Sanderson speaking.”

“Catherine,” said that unmistakably high pitched voice that always surprised me. “Ezola Mandeville. Do you have anything to do with those articles the
Sentinel
is running about using refugees?”

She was abrupt as always, but she didn’t sound annoyed.

“I know the reporter and the publisher, but I don’t have any direct involvement in the stories themselves. Why do you ask?”

“Because if you had, I was going to offer you a bonus.” Her voice was practically lilting, it sounded so genuinely pleased.

“A bonus? Why?”

“Since that story said some companies are using illegal aliens as maids, I can’t find enough maids to fill all the jobs I’ve got! Everybody’s scared of getting busted for hiring illegals, so they’re coming to me because they know I’m legitimate. It’s been great for business!”

She sounded more like Sam every day. “That ought to help us in recruiting, too. Once people know that you’re treating people like human beings and paying them decent wages, the word will spread.”

“It already has,” Ezola said. “The phone is ringing off the hook. Come have lunch with me so I can thank you in person, and maybe I’ll give you that bonus after all. How soon can you get down here?”

I looked around at the mess on my desk. “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

“Don’t be late,” she said. “Bonus or no bonus, I still expect you to come on time.”

55

When I arrived at Ezola’s office exactly forty minutes later, she had the nerve to look at her watch before she got up from behind her desk and came around to greet me.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” she said, shaking my hand. As usual, she was wearing a dark dress, sensible shoes, and a string of pearls. “Please sit down.”

Lunch was already laid out, but hidden under silver covers for the moment. Ezola liked to talk first and eat later. She ushered me over to one of the love seats and sat down beside me. I was surprised to see the large throne chair covered with a piece of plain black drape that obscured its bright gold and tufted red presence.

Ezola saw me notice it and smiled. “That chair is ridiculous.”

I looked at her to see if this was another test, but I couldn’t lie. I smiled back at her. “Completely absurd.”

“I watched you the first day you came here, me in my great big foolish chair and you in that sawed-off one that made you have to look up to me even if you didn’t want to.”

The woman never failed to surprise me. Of course she was conscious of what she was doing, but I never expected her to admit it.

“You didn’t need all that to impress me.”

She sat back and fingered her pearls with her stubby fingers. “I wasn’t interested in impressing you, Catherine. I intended to intimidate you.”

“Why?”

“Because I used to be a maid, remember? Every person who walks in that door for the first time thinks they know more about
everything
than I know about
anything.
If I’m ever going to disabuse them of that notion, I have to make them understand that there’s a whole lot of things that I know better than they do, and the sooner they realize that, the better.”

“I knew that before I walked in here. All that big chair made me do was wonder whether you knew it, too.”

She stood up and walked slowly over to her glass wall and looked out at the atrium, where her beautiful building was showing off its skylight with random rainbows.

“And what did you decide?”

“I decided that you did.”

“Good. It’s always dangerous to underestimate me.”

“I never do.” And that was the truth. I thought she was strange and eccentric and smart and clearly extraordinary. Once she really trusted me, I thought, working with her would be a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

She came back to sit beside me. “I’m talking about Sam.”

That came out of nowhere. “What about Sam?” Last time I checked, Sam was her personally designated eyes and ears and de facto favorite son.

“I know it’s hard to believe,” she said, her voice sad and light as a feather. “But some information has come to me that Sam may be all up in this business with Quincy Davenport.”

“With the slum houses?”

She nodded.

“Are you sure? He has always spoken of you and the work you’re doing here with great respect. I can’t imagine that he would jeopardize it for something like that.”

“I have considered him like my own,” she said, getting up again and pacing around the room a little, but not in a quick, agitated way. More like an angry lion in a cage. “He’s helped me build the business to what it is today. He brought you in when we needed someone like you to help us.”

She came back and sat down again. She was really upset about this and she couldn’t seem to light anywhere. “And now I need your help again.”

The expectant look on her face required an answer. “What can I do?”

Her whole body relaxed and her face softened immediately. “Oh, thank you, Catherine. Thank you!” She leaned over and took my hand. “I knew I could count on you.”

“What do you want me to do?” I said, feeling like my generic response had been received with a lot more enthusiasm than it deserved. I hadn’t agreed to anything yet. Her thick little fingers felt strong and strange around my own, and I willed myself not to wriggle my hand out of her grasp like a restless child forced to talk to old people.

“I want you to keep an eye on Sam.”

My hand withdrew of its own accord. “You want me to spy on Sam?”

I wondered if she usually recruited her spies this directly, and why she didn’t just give the job to whoever had been keeping an eye on B.J.

“I want you to think about what it would do to our project and our credibility, mine
and
yours, if it turned out that the man we put in charge of our project was a part of all the things we’re fighting against.”

She got up one more time and walked back over to the throne and pulled the black drape off. The chair looked even more ludicrous than it had the first time. She tossed the drape to the floor and sat down slowly, regally, her physical presence lending the chair a bit of dignity it did not deserve.

“What if it turned out Sam was a con man, or worse, and even though we talk a good game, neither one of us was smart enough to see it lying there stinking right under our noses?”

The image was effective, and she was right. That was the last thing we needed. We would lose all our political supporters, not to mention the nonprofits and social service agencies.

“If that happens, I would have sat on this throne and made a fool of myself for nothing. Trying to stare down the white folks and scare the hell out of my own people, so I could build a business and save some women from taking the stuff I had to take from everybody just because I was a poor black woman with nothing to say and nobody to listen. My business will never be able to survive something like that, and it all will have been for nothing. My reputation and my word are all I’ve got, and Sam Hall isn’t going to take them from me without a fight.”

She was working on my sisterhood, but I needed some specifics. “What can I do?”

“Just tell me what you hear.”

“What I hear about what?”

“About Sam.” She hesitated.

“And?”

“And let me know if his name is going to be in the paper.”

This was making me very uncomfortable. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s not my job.”

Ezola leaned back in her throne and looked at me. “Then think of it as a favor.”

She sounded like the Godfather, but this was different. There was nothing she could do to force me to spy, but was it really spying? I didn’t want Mandeville Maids to get burned because Sam was more interested in profits than people. This was a great project, and I wanted it to happen as much as Ezola did. I hadn’t come to work here because of him. I’d come because of her. Because as crazy as she was, she was doing something positive for some hardworking women who needed all the help they could get.

“I’ll keep my ears open.”

“Good.” She stood up immediately, her smile back in place to show that the conversation was officially over. “Now we can eat.”

56

Sam sent me an e-mail telling me how much he had enjoyed the interview with B.J. and promising to call when he got back from a two-day trip to Columbus. I wondered what he would say if he knew Ezola had such serious doubts that he was who he said he was. He didn’t really seem capable of that kind of duplicity, especially since he was next in line at Mandeville Maids, but money makes people do strange things, and my ears were still ringing with his
greed is good
lecture, so who was I to doubt Ezola’s instincts?

Louis and Amelia had gone to see another big, bad Hollywood movie, and I had just put my work problems out of my mind and was curling up with last Sunday’s
New York Times
when B.J. called from Miami to ask me when I was going to tell Phoebe he was her father.

“Thanksgiving,” I said. “She’ll be home from school, and you can spend some time with her then.”

“Do we have to wait that long?”

He sounded so disappointed, I almost said,
We’ll call her as soon as you get back,
but that’s not the way I wanted to tell her. It made me feel good that he was anxious to establish contact, and I was even more determined to make that first meeting a magic moment.

“She’s wanted this for a long time,” I said. “I want to make it special for her.”

“Sort of like the father holding his baby up to the heavens at the beginning of
Roots
?”

“She’s a little too big for you to hold her up over your head,” I said, not ready to be teased. Everything was too new for me to laugh at us yet. I was still trying not to cry. “I just want it to be
perfect
.”

“It is perfect.”

I smiled at the love already in his voice—and he hadn’t even met her yet. “You know, she thinks that getting to know you can protect her from getting her heart broken.”

“What do you think?”

There was no reason to lie. “I’m hoping it can do the same for me.”

And he answered my truth with one of his own. “I love you, Cat.”

“I love you, too, B.J. Good night.” And I clicked off before he could say more.

It was important for me to understand that his love for me right now was all tied up in his love for Phoebe, and that was a good thing. It was even more important for me to be able to distinguish between his
father love
and
mother-of-his-only-child love,
and that other kind that exists between a man and a woman just because they are a man and a woman, not because they share a child.

But I wasn’t required to do all of that tonight. How and why we loved each other would be a mystery we’d have to work on. Tonight, the fact that we did was good enough for me.

57

The issue of the
Sentinel
with B.J.’s Miriam story on the front page sold out before noon the day it hit the stands. People were moved by her story, outraged by her sister’s plight, and anxious to help. Louis was printing another full run that he planned to have on the street by midnight. If pimps needed the cover of darkness to thrive, the
Sentinel
was about to put some people out of business. The phones at the paper were ringing nonstop, and Miss Iona drafted one of the interns to help her field the offers that were pouring in for everything from free clothes to free housing.

Miriam had generated an outpouring of attention and outrage, but she didn’t want to talk to a lot of curious strangers, so two days before the story appeared, she moved some of her things into the upstairs bedroom next to Phoebe’s. Staying with me for a couple of weeks would put her in a safe zone without making her feel like she was under house arrest. She had the run of this place, and Amelia was right next door. Louis and B.J. lived around the corner, and Blue Hamilton’s presence guaranteed her safety on the streets anywhere in West End. She had come a long way from the days she spent hiding behind that horrible wig, and she was getting stronger by the day.

Tonight we were going to Miss Iona’s for a dinner in Miriam’s honor. I hadn’t seen B.J. for more than a few minutes since he got back from Miami, and I was looking forward to seeing him and to toasting the
Sentinel
for reclaiming its place as Atlanta’s most-read newspaper. I had just changed clothes and persuaded Miriam to shut down the computer and go upstairs to get ready if she didn’t want to face Miss Iona’s wrath for being late, when the doorbell rang.

“Fifteen minutes,” I said, heading downstairs. “We’ve got to be walking out that door or Miss Iona will want to know the reason why!”

“I’ll be ready.” She laughed, and I heard the shower splash into life.

I opened the front door to find Sam standing there with a scowl on his face. The man never tired of arriving unannounced. This time he didn’t have a bottle of wine tucked under his arm. He had a copy of the
Sentinel,
which he held up as if he were showing it to me for the first time.

“Have you seen this?” His voice was one loud boom of indignation.

“Of course I have. Come in.”

He stepped inside, but stayed near the door like he was too pissed off to come in and sit down. “Do you see any reference in here to Mandeville Maids?”

“Of course not.”

“Then please tell me why I spent two hours with your friend B.J. talking about our expansion project and our refugee outreach plans and our scholarship program.”

He must have forgotten that he had already told me the scholarship program wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

“This is a multipart series, Sam. This is not the last one that will appear. The programs you talked about will probably fit in a story that runs later.”

That calmed him down a little, but he was still annoyed. “Then why did he talk to me now?”

“Because they have to work ahead,” I said, not feeling nearly as patient as I sounded. “I told you that, remember?”

He looked at me. “I guess you did.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, but I remembered my meeting with Ezola, and the word
spy
might as well have been tattooed across my forehead.

“Is there anything wrong, Sam?”
Other than that the boss thinks you are a slumlord and is probably getting ready to cut you loose?

He ran his hand over his bald head. “No sense pretending, Catherine. I’m feeling some distance between me and Miss Mandeville.”

“Distance?” Now I felt as though my
spy
tattoo was flashing like a neon sign.

“Nothing I can put my finger on. She’s just not confiding in me like she used to. Like I’m out of the loop.” He paused again, then looked up at me sharply. “Did you see her while I was in Columbus?”

Too late to lie. “Yes. She invited me to lunch to tell me that the
Sentinel
’s story had been good for business.”

That drew a smile. “I showed her the figures. She couldn’t believe it.”

“Well, then,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

He shook his head. “It’s a matter of trust, Catherine. I don’t feel that she trusts me like she used to.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“I was hoping Mr. Johnson’s story would project me in a positive light and put me back in her good graces. When that wasn’t the case, I guess I was just disappointed.” He gave a little bow and tucked the
Sentinel
back under his arm. “My apologies for interrupting your evening, and thank you, as always, for your wise counsel.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, opening the door for him and wondering if I was supposed to report this to Ezola as I watched him get in his car and drive away.

It was too late to report anything now. Miss Iona said eight thirty sharp, and she’d blame me if the guest of honor was the last to arrive.

“Miriam!” I called from the front of the stairs. “Time to go!” I listened, but she didn’t say anything.

“Miriam?” I called again. The shower had stopped and she hadn’t come downstairs. Where would she be?

I took the stairs two at a time and called her again as I peeked into the open bathroom door, glanced in my room, then Phoebe’s, then the one where she was staying. Her dress was still laid out on the bed. “Miriam?”

Nothing. Something was wrong, and I had no idea what, but it was making the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I leaned down and looked under the bed, then behind the big chair in the corner. Finally, I opened the closet door slowly, suddenly, sickeningly, unsure of what I might find, and there she was, sitting in the corner, curled around her knees in a tight little knot.

“Miriam, what happened?” I said, going to put my arms around her. “What’s wrong?”

She was shaking like a leaf. “It’s him.” Her voice was a whisper of wind through dry grass.

“Who?”

She nodded, rocking back and forth in my arms like it was all she could do not to run over to the window and jump out. “The man downstairs.”

“Sam? He’s gone. Do you know him?”

“His voice,” she whispered. “I remember his voice.”

“When?” Now I was whispering, too.

“The night before they took Etienne.”