Cloaked in Malice (13 page)

Home is a place not only of strong affection…it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind…cast-off and everyday clothing.

—HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

“Paisley,” Nick said, “you weren’t so much branded as you were brainwashed by professionals.” The somber statement, and its repercussions, rattled me as much as they did Paisley.

She bit her lip and frowned. “Probably happened somewhere between the shack and here. Because I remember
being
there. But I only remember
finding
myself here.”

Nick made a note of that.

“That’s quite the handy bit of perception,” I said. “How old were you when you
found
yourself here?”

“About twelve,” she said.

“Yep,” Nick muttered. “Brainwashed.”

“That sounds awful,” I said.

Paisley snorted inelegantly. “Try living it.”

“It’s not much different from PAS,” Nick said. “Parental alienation syndrome,” like in a nasty divorce where they use the kids as pawns, but in this case, Paisley ended up believing that her past never happened.”

“How?” we asked, Paisley and I.

“If and when she referred to her past, she would have been distracted, or told she was mistaken, maybe punished for mentioning it, belittled, anything to get her to stop thinking about it. She would have been taught over and over again that she would be safe only here. Brainwashing goes on all the time in the real world, especially to children in dysfunctional families.”

“Are there any functional families, really?” I asked. “Or are they part of the same myth that created Santa Claus?”

Nick chuckled as he opened a wood bin, a bread box, and rummaged through the cupboard beneath the sink.

“Seriously, though, brainwashing is awful,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “And it scars the child.”

Paisley frowned. “How scarred am I, do you think?”

Nick bit the inside of his lip, but I noted his eye twinkle as he turned away so Paisley wouldn’t be insulted by his amusement.

I huffed, miffed at Nick. “Your lack of memories, Paisley, for one thing, right, Nick?”

He nodded as he checked cupboards and kitchen drawers, but he didn’t look back at us.

“I gotta get my memories back,” Paisley said to herself. “This place is old-fashioned, isn’t it? Way different from the Carriage House Bed-and-Breakfast, where I’ve been staying. I like it better there.”

“Get a load of the old linoleum in here,” I said, “gray with yellow and red confetti. It matches that creepy clown cookie jar with the red and yellow trim.”

“I hate it,” Paisley said. “Those royal blue eyes follow you around the room.”

I didn’t want to know that, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings again. “Ugh! Melmac dishes. Orange, gray, lime, and dark green in the same set. I thought they were hideous in my grandmother’s cupboard; I think they’re hideous now. And for me, things usually get more beautiful with age; I mean I get to appreciate the history in their
raison d’être
, but this particular set of Melmac? Double barf.”

Paisley shrugged and went to the room off the kitchen, in the back left corner of the downstairs, probably once a borning room. Living in Connecticut most of my life I was familiar with these rooms common in old houses and once used for births, illnesses, and deaths. “This was my playroom. See my toys.”

“Who made them?” I asked.

Her face flamed. “
I
made them when I was small.”

I tried to apologize, but she shrugged me off and left the room.

“Don’t belittle her childhood,” Nick warned.

“I thought Mam should have made her a nicer doll with a nicer dress, that’s all, but I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I get it; she may not like her past, but nobody else had better say how awful it was.”

I’d been there. When I was ten, people couldn’t hide the pity in their eyes when they called me “little mother” as I herded and coddled my three motherless siblings. I hated it.

“This was Pap’s room,” Paisley said. “First line of defense,” she added, as if daring me to make a crack about the room fronting the house.

“First line of defense?” I asked.

She traced a butterfly on a bureau scarf. “That’s what he always said.”

The round-edged, blonde furniture made of diagonally opposing veneer strips with inlaid bands were forties pieces. Blue tufts dotted the light green chenille bed, and on the wall, a crucifix under a curved glass cover on a cloudy blue background sat in a gold frame.

It made me think of a stage. Every room. And yet Paisley had lived here.

“Where did your Mam sleep?”

“Upstairs, across from me, but she moved down here after Pap died. Upstairs, that’s the sewing room now.”

We left the front bedroom via the hall, passed the front door at the stairs, to get to the living room, opposite. This, too, like the kitchen and the big bedroom, had a fireplace. But this room also had a piano.

“Who played the piano?” I asked.

“Mam and Pap,” Paisley said, which seemed normal to her and odd to me.

Central chimney, three main rooms, upstairs and down, not to mention the borning room and its upstairs counterpart. Add a basement, attic, summer kitchen, two bathrooms, and a well house. If not isolated, and surrounded by an electric fence, this would have been a great place for a child to grow up…with her real parents. In the real world.

“Here, at the top of the stairs,” Paisley said, “is the padlocked closet I broke into.”

I followed her up with trepidation. Panic rose in me and I didn’t know why. If I’d been her, carrying a big old pair of metal cutters to open a forbidden room, after just burying my supposed mother, I might have wet myself.

Nick kicked the cut lock on the polished wood floor aside and opened the darkened closet. Empty. The downer left my heart palpitating, though it picked up speed when Nick stepped inside.

He pushed on the back wall with both hands.

Thump, thump, thump went my heart into overdrive.

The wall didn’t budge.

Nick turned to face us, reached to push on both side walls at the same time, and nearly fell into the well of darkness at the left.

He caught his balance as the wall flipped and a figure hovered over us.

Paisley screamed.

Seventeen

A woman should be less concerned about Paris and more concerned about whether the dress she’s about to buy relates to the way she lives.

—GEOFFREY BEENE

“It’s not alive,” I snapped, trying to stop Paisley’s scream.

Nick aimed the small flashlight on the back end of his stylus at the figure to clear our misconceptions.

“See,” I said. “It’s people sized but I think it’s a garment bag of a sort.”

On the top center of the wall—the opposite side from the one we’d first seen—a vintage leather garment bag hung on a brass hook. “I don’t think a moth could get in here if it tried,” I said to no one in particular.
But why the side zippers?

Paisley unzipped the bag center-front—she had a right, though her move shot me with terror—the sheer size
and composition of the Bakelite hanger gave away its age. Bakelite items were popular from about nineteen ten to the forties.

But screw the forerunner of plastics, I nearly lost my breath when Paisley removed the dress from its supple leather skin of timeless protection, a leather garment bag showing the patina of age without showing the signs. Ageless.

But the dress: “What an outstanding piece from the golden age of textiles. Like a social-event in chiffon, it’s a cross between a Jacobean and Persian burst of warm, slightly muted earth tones—from creams to reds—on a cool mixed field, featuring turquoise to royal blue forget-me-nots. Most important, it looks like an Oleg Cassini.”

Nick checked the label. “You got that right.”

“Cassini, and only Oleg Cassini, dressed Jackie Kennedy, as First Lady. OMG, we’re in the presence of greatness. That dress survived the test of time. It’s flawless, and look at the colors. Have you ever seen a more beautiful marriage of textile dyes? It’s a classy, spectacular blend of fine lines, flowers that breathe, and impeccable color choices.”

“Don’t you say that about all your vintage clothes?” Nick asked.

“Well, this is a new high for me. And I gotta tell you, I’ve never seen a garment bag like this one. It’s probably worth as much as the dress. I just figured out the side zippers.
Look, it folds up to look like a vintage handbag, while hugging the dress and protecting it from anything you put in the bag. It could be a Hermès. It’s that brilliant.”

“Bepah used to paint this dress.” Paisley took the amazing Cassini off the hanger, and held it up to herself, shook her head, then held it up to me, as if for a better effect.

I squeaked but to no purpose and I could not,
not
, move my legs to step away from its universal pull.

The shiver that ran up my spine had nothing to do with spinning out of my own skin, which I was, but stepping into a smoldering sexual haze. It had to do with the lowering of a zipper, my own, the one down the back of my brilliant Cassini, a dress so fine, it felt like I wore a swath of couture-designed tropical air rather than fabric.

My lover turned me to face him, and I lost my ability to speak. Dante, alive and well, heart beating beneath my hand. He was all rogue, sexual energy radiating off him and warming me, readying me to be his.

Ack!

He took me in his arms to waltz me across an art nouveau bedroom, the shadows alive, giving life to the light, the room bright, and airy, romantic, seductive. A Tiffany glass–type window—likely real Tiffany—stood guard over a satinwood four-poster.

The bed was the centerpiece of the room. Leave it to Dante.

The Waverly fabric, at its peak in the forties, printed in muted art nouveau colors, bloomed on curtains and spread.

I was so busy looking at the room, and wondering how to get away, that I got a second shock when we passed the satinwood trifold floor mirror and saw exactly
whom
he danced with—the woman I had become—Dolly.

A series of panicked questions, and an urge to run, rushed me, taking my heartbeat with it…for so many reasons.

One, how had
Dolly
owned the brilliant print Cassini we found in a creepy closet on Coffin Farm?

Two, given the way my surroundings dated themselves, at Dante’s and the farm, Dolly had clearly been the dress’s first owner. So how did Paisley’s family end up with so treasured a memento that Bepah would spend his twilight years painting it?

Three, if Dante’s hands continued on their current course, I did not want to see, or
experience
, what happened next.

By sheer will, I closed my mind to the incarnation I’d found myself in, to the touch I rejected—I’d certainly gone far enough here—and begged the universe for a reprieve.

When my knees turned to mint jelly, and Pucci help me, someone—
please
not Dante, not Dante
—lifted me into his arms and set me down on a bed—
oy, it was Dante
—I got my wish, more or less, because I went reeling through the ether, a bit nauseous, a lot scared, dizzy, and disoriented.