Cloaked in Malice (28 page)

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

—COCO CHANEL

After an illuminating conversation with Dolly and her CIA agent, we left her to rest, him at her side. I stopped at the nurses’ station. “You said earlier that it was touch and go for Dolly. That twenty-four hours would tell. What did you mean by that?”

“Only what Dolly’s been talking about since they wheeled her in here. Twenty-four hours until we know if she’ll be released in time to attend her hundred-and-fourth birthday party. What did you…Oh no,” the nurse said. “Didn’t Dolly talk to you on the phone before you came?”

I stamped my foot, my gaze going from Ethel to Nick. “Were you two in on this?”

“Well,” Ethel said, her back going ramrod straight. “I went into her room promising every deity known to man that I’d do whatever Dolly wanted, if only she’d get better.” Ethel shrugged. “What she wanted was for me to shut up and let
her
tell you.”

“Tell me what? That she’s stronger than we thought?”

“Er, maybe. But I’m not…I mean, I’ll just go sit over there.”

“Nick?” I asked, eyeing him.

“I know nothing more than you, except that I read her chart. She’s dehydrated, a little malnourished, electrolyte imbalance, but she’s strong as an ox. I’m sure she’s only in ICU because she’s older than—”

“The earth’s core,” Ethel called.

The nurse giggled.

Nick slipped an arm around me. “I tried to tell you to play along.”

“Play along? How did you tell me that?”

“I winked.”

“You wink all the time, Jaconetti.”

“Yes, you do,” Ethel said, coming into step with us on our way out. The harmless stitch, she was flirting with my guy. I pinched Nick.

He pinched me back.

We dropped Ethel off at her house and went back to Nick’s to face the mayhem of spiders. A dozen or more eggs’ worth of answers waited, answers that begot more questions.

We sorted the information, and ate takeout on the run.

Yes, I had to get over the spider metaphor before I could swallow a bite.

“We need to talk to Paisley,” I said. “She has a right to the facts.”

“Let’s pack it up, then, for tonight, go back to your house, and sit her down.”

Paisley and Aunt Fiona were playing Twister and entertaining the whipstitch out of my staid father, actually working the spinner.

I took a picture with my phone.

They didn’t know we were there until my father looked up.

“Anybody want to run away from home?” I asked.

“Me,” my father said, raising his hand. He helped Fiona out of her twist and pulled her up and into his arms for a bit too long.

I winked at him as they walked by and he fake-socked me in the shoulder.

Aunt Fee chuckled. “Can I put my shoes on before we leave?”

Paisley pouted. “Mad, Nick, will you play with me? I love this game.”

“After we talk,” I said.

“About what?”

“Your past. The ongoing investigation has awarded us with a bit of knowledge to share.”

She curled up in my father’s chair, facing us. “I love the
smell of your dad’s tobacco,” she said, rubbing her cheek on the back of his chair.

She just plain loved the male species, I thought. Or…she suffered for losing the two men she loved, so early in life. Bepah had been her last link to a dwindling reality, to family.

Nobody’s personality was cut and dry, I should re-member.

“Okay, give it to me straight,” she declared, although she seemed a bit antsy because we were so quiet.

“There is no straight in this situation, Paisley,” Nick said. “Are we clear on that score?”

A shrug. “Can I ask questions?”

“If you’d be more comfortable,” he said.

“Who were Mam and Pap?”

“Wait,” I said, “though we know that answer.” I came from the kitchen eating a brownie and I passed the plate, something of a stall tactic. “First,” I said, “tell me what Mam looked like.”

“The ugly truth? She looked like she got her face caught in a meat grinder.”

Or barbed wire escaping Russia, I speculated in-wardly.

I regarded Nick. I realized now that I’d seen Mam in the nursery. I’d looked up the Russian word
privyet
. It means “hi” or an informal “hello.” She’d said, “Hi, pretty,” to Paisley herself. It turned out the nursery had been for Paisley after all.

“Nick, you tell Paisley what we know about Mam and Pap.”

“In the mid-1930s, Mam and Pap defected from Russia to France as children, with their sister Rose, their parents, and five male cousins. They were a family of Russian clowns.”

“No way. Mam and Pap couldn’t smile to save their souls. Them, clowns?”

“Mam and Pap were their stage names, and they did this ‘Mam clown and Pap clown, having a baby clown’ routine. They were headliners. Big names in the Russian Circus, and later in France.”

“My supposed parents—or I should say, the people who let me live in the same house growing up—were not only real live clowns, they were brother and sister?” Paisley pointed to her temple, making a gun of her hand, and she pulled the trigger.

I couldn’t help myself. I chuckled.

Nick didn’t appreciate my humor.

Paisley sat forward, like we might be deaf. “But they
never
laughed.”

“That’s okay,” I said, “because their audiences did.”

She got up to pace. “
That
must be why, growing up there, it was as if…they tried to keep me on a shelf…like for the next show. But it was my
life
, and I don’t think they understood that.”

Nick cupped his neck. “No one ever said that clowns had great capacities to love. They were actors in costume.
And actors who become clowns are often hiding behind the color and makeup.”

I, too, sat forward, clasping Nick’s hands. “I kept thinking the farm was like a stage, remember? Did I mention that? Paisley’s right.”

I turned to her. “That’s exactly what they did, they used you like a prop. And yet, they kept you safe.”

“And imprisoned,” she added.

“Alive,” I countered.

She digested that with a hard swallow of brownie. Wait. She held out her brownie-filled hand. “Did you say my grandmother had five cousins? Please don’t say I was related to—”

“Yep. Scar, Tuna, Smoots, Teets, and Momo.”

Thirty-eight

You wouldn’t know me to see me dressed.

—JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

“What were my cousins’ real names?” Paisley asked. “I’m disowning them if I don’t know.”

“Second cousins, at least.”

“Yeah, that makes it better.”

I bit my lip on her sass. “No records of real names have been found yet. Only of their defection from Russia, the number of people who successfully got out, and the relationships.”

“Your grandmother Rose, their younger sister, came to this country first, and she married Dolly’s brother, your grandfather.”

Heavy sigh. “I still miss my Bepah.”

“Rose became your grandmother, and your grand-father,
Bepah, is your link to Dolly, which is why you look a bit like her,” Nick said. “Dolly recently informed the State Department that you were alive and well. You were a missing person as far as our government was concerned.”

“But Dolly went to Paris. Did she do that for the State Department? Isn’t she kind of old for that?”

“Kind of?” I cleared my throat. “When Dolly gets something into her head, ain’t nobody gonna get it out.” For the love of Gucci, she even has her afterlife planned.

“Yes, in Paris, Dolly definitely acted as a facilitator for the State Department, a surprised and grateful State Department.”

“How is Dolly?”

“On the mend, believe it or not. She’s a regular Wonder Woman.”

“I don’t really know her, but good. Okay, back to my childhood. Why did they take me to that farm?”

“You need more background on the defection before we get to that point, okay?” Nick asked.

“If I must.” Paisley huffed, and I could empathize.

“Your Russian ancestors, grandmother Rose, Mam, Pap, and cousins, joined the French Circus hoping to make their way to the U.S., but the troupe, grateful to the country that gave them asylum, agreed to become spies for France.”

“But,” Nick said, taking over, “Russia caught them spying,
so it was become double agents, spies for Russia and France, or become dead.”

“I see,” Paisley said. “That’s why they worried about me. Is somebody still after me? They are, aren’t they?”

“Because of something you were supposed to have seen as a child but you have no memories of that time.”

“Ain’t
that
just my life?”

“Meanwhile,” I said, “your grandmother, Rose the spy, managed to get here to the U.S., but she fell in with the wrong crowd, a get-rich-quick gang of counterfeiters, who promised her big money for the acrobatics she pulled off to steal printing plates for them. Fortunately or unfortunately, they were so greedy, they killed each other off and left Rose holding the bag of money, shall we say.”

“Ooh, intrigue. My ancestors have a checkered past. I’m guardedly fascinated, the guarded part being whether I get to survive all this.”

Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. Not sure how she could joke, but I thanked the stars that she could.

Nick simply firmed his lips.

“Grover Wylde, your grandfather and Dolly’s brother, saved your grandmother Rose’s skin by hiding the counterfeit money on a private island he bought before he met her. So, you were right. After the investigation is over, the island is yours.”

“Hah. Ask me what I want
least
in the world.”

We ignored that.

“Rose,” I continued, “agreed to marry Grover, but the Russians chasing her got word of the wedding, which is why she and your grandfather skipped it and went to the island. They were followed, however, and your grandfather grappled with them, lost a finger, but he won the fight. Eventually they got to France and safe haven.”

Paisley’s head came up. “Am I illegitimate on top of everything else?”

“No. They married in France,” I said. “So did your parents.”

Paisley lost her color, like we’d just hit the wall she’d been trying to avoid. “What happened to my mother and father? Never mind. I think I know. They’re dead, aren’t they? The memory, I think, of my father facedown in the snow; that’s real, isn’t it? And my mother got shoved into that car. I’ll bet she died that night.”

I squeezed her hand and nodded.

She closed her eyes against the tears, but it was healthy for her to finally be able to mourn them.

Nick got up to pace, to give her a minute, and when she wiped her eyes, he continued. “Your grandparents had one son.”

“My father. Somehow that memory survived.”

I rubbed my temple. “I’m surprised you remember anything.”

“Well, my name is—” Going white, she pulled her legs from beneath her in the chair, stood, and rubbed her arms.
“My name isn’t Paisley Skye. My last name is Wylde. It has to be; it was Bepah’s last name.”

“Do you remember your real first name?” Nick asked.