In This Skin (11 page)

    ”Where's Mom?”

    Emerson padded out of the house to block her way as Robyn headed to the patio at the rear. Mom all but camped out there with Minute Maids and a stack of novels when the sun shone.

    ”Never mind your mother, Robyn. We have important matters to discuss.”

    Sunday. And Emerson stood there in a gray business suit and striped tie.

    Through the thin hair weave, his bald head shone glossy as an egg in the sunlight. Robyn blinked at him. She had the most important news a daughter could share with a mother, and yet Emerson blocked the path that ran through the gap in the hedge. This she didn't need. God, she had to see her mother now while she had the courage to get the words through her lips. Mom. I'm pregnant. Now Emerson stopped her.

    ”Emerson, I've got to see Mom. I need to speak with her: ”Later”

    ”No, I need to-”

    ”Robyn, listen to me. You've lived at my expense for the last three years. I haven't complained. I'm not complaining now”

    ”At your expense? This is my mothers house.”Her stomach fluttered. Those weird spasms were coming. Jesus, it was like a war being fought in that area between her hips. Did all women get these sensations when they were pregnant?

    I feel so weird. Lightheaded. I need to sit down.

    But all Emerson did was block her path while jabbering away about family responsibilities. He pointed his finger at her like it was a gun. Jeez, what was wrong with the man? Come to that, what's wrong with me? I feel so hot I could explode. My stomach's really hurting. This wasn't pregnancy, this was torture.

    ”So, Robyn, what's your answer?”

    Dear God, what was the question? Robyn's head swirled. The sun blazed into her eyes. At the edge of her vision green streaks flowed by as her eyes blurred. Emerson's face loomed at her, swollen-looking, angry. Even the man's eyes bulged.

    ”Don't be evasive, Robyn. I've run my own company for twenty years. I know when people are shitting me.”

    ”I'm not shitting you.”

    ”Give me an answer then. Will you permit your mother to liquidate your trust fund?”

    ”That money's mine. Dad left it for me.”

    ”Robyn. We are going to be homeless. Understand that, you silly selfish child. For your mother's sake allow me to invest that money for you, so this family can live as it has always done. In comfort… with dignity Robyn nearly lost her balance as vertigo took hold. ”No. It's not yours.

    My father left me that money when-”

    She didn't get any further. Emerson's full-blooded slap drove her back against the wall of the house. Standing there, gasping, her hand held to her cheek, she stared at Emerson in horror. The look of fury in his eyes told her he was going to strike her again. She even saw him bunch his fists and take a pace forward. Then, at the last moment, he slammed his fist down against the side of his leg and walked back into the house.

    

    

    ”My name is Benjamin Isiah Lockram. I am eighty-four years old. For the last half of a century I have been the owner and manager of the Luxor Dance Hall. Seventy years ago I walked through those doors back there… through the turnstile and onto the dance floor where I'm standing now.

    That's when the Luxor stole my heart. The look of the building, the sounds, smells, the feel of the place fascinated me. Obsessed me might be a more apt description. It's still got my heart. I'll never leave…”

    Alone in the gloomy living room, Benedict West watched the video. It had been recorded back in 1979, according to the date on the cassette label.

    He knew it by heart, he'd seen it so many times. Why had the owner of the dance hall gone to the trouble of making the homespun TV documentary? At first Benedict had dismissed it as a hobby thing. A way of passing time on a wet Sunday Using what must have then been a sparkling new invention. Home video equipment had been in its infancy then. The shot of Lockram standing there on the dance floor sparkled with flashing dots, courtesy of the ancient tape, while the soundtrack had a back fizz of static. Every so often the entire image would take a little walk offscreen before bouncing back as the tracking mechanism took control again. Benedict sipped his coffee while watching the Luxor's then-owner talk. The old guy wore a sober suit in a dark material with a white shirt and plain blue tie. A sharp-dressed man. For an eighty-four-year-old he looked fit, with a wiry frame that crackled with an energy all its own. The body language could have been poached from a younger man, too. When he talked he moved lightly on his feet, gesturing with his arms. The face was pure giveaway though. Deep lines etched the forehead. More lines radiated sunburst patterns from his eyes to a hairline that, although it hadn't receded, had turned pure white.

    Ohhh, Benedict. Why do you do this to yourself? Switch off. Drive the car. Sit on the shore. Find a diner. Eat lunch… He always ran through the mantra as soon as he watched Lockram's tapes. He didn't need to do this. Mariah Lee had gone. She wasn't coming back. He'd tried to trace her. Failed. There was no shame in that. He should let go.

    But I can't, he told himself grimly. Just like the Luxor claimed the heart of a fourteen-year-old Benjamin Isiah Lockram all those years ago, its got its hooks into me. There's something about the place.

    Shit.

    When Lockram held out his hands on the flickering screen and uttered the melodramatic words, Benedict found himself mouthing them with him.

    ”Behold the Luxor!”

    In a few moments Lockram would begin a tour of the Luxor. A detailed tour that took in every passageway, storeroom, closet and office, as well as the dance floor and stage area. He filmed architectural details in close-up, revealed carpentry techniques. The voice-over also compared the Luxor to the great Chicago dance halls of the Jazz Age. The Paradise. The Aragon. The Trianon. Huge pleasure palaces for the working man and woman that could hold eight thousand people. Magnificent buildings designed in imitation of Moorish castles with full-sized palm trees in the lobby and maple dance floors that rode on cushions of felt and springs so the clientele would feel as if they literally danced on air. Those were smart places where tuxedoed floorwalkers patrolled to make sure that people didn't dance the forbidden jitterbug, or scandalously dance too close. The Luxor, though splendid in its Egyptian tomb get-up, was smaller, lay further out of town, and was a ”come let your hair down” kind of place. If you wanted to jitterbug the night away or dance cheek-to-cheek with the warm flesh of your choice, why, then, you go straight ahead and do it.

    Almost ten years ago Benedict had watched these videotapes for the first time. What unfolded wasn't an old man's bit of hobby program-making, it was something else. The description had eluded Benedict for a few moments as all those years ago he'd sat in this very room watching the screen in a half-doze, not considering it to be of any importance at all.

    It was only when Lockram (who must have been operating the camera by himself) filmed a sequence of shots in an apartment with a ”This is where I live. The apartment lies directly over the lobby and ticket office…”that Benedict lurched up straight on the sofa. A ghostly sense of premonition warned him he was nearing a significant part of the video. The camera floated through the apartment, a kind of ghostly eye, seeing everything. A sequence of views: the kitchen with brass pans hanging from a rack; the living room with a big old hunky TV in the corner and a radiogram beside it. Van Gogh prints of cornfields and starry nights on the walls. A hallway. A glimpse of an open bathroom with a shower. Then a shot straight into a wall mirror that proved Lockram operated the camera. His deeply lined face appeared like some ravaged landscape behind the camera. And what a camera! A huge twin lens monster that trailed cables down to the videotape deck that Lockram carried slung over one shoulder on a strap. The manufacturer must have been straining the word ”portable” to near destruction when they applied it to that fifty pounds of hardware the old man hefted around.

    As the screen revealed a traveling shot of the hallway toward a half-open door at the end, Lockram spoke the commentary live. Exertion forced him to take deep breaths between sound bites. Respiration came as a whoosh. ”People tell me… that the Luxor is haunted… they're afraid to be alone here… after dark… No… No… there aren't any ghosts here in the Luxor. There is something else, though… far more powerful… far more destructive… infinitely more dangerous than shades of past lives… This TV recording is… my testament… Now… this is the nursery…” A shot of a room containing a crib in the corner and a bed in the center. Toys lined a shelf in a neat row. They looked as if a child has never played with them. Pristine. Barely touched. ”This is the bedroom. And this is Mary, my wife…”

    That was the moment of revelation for Benedict. There on the bed lay Benjamin Lockram's wife. Benedict had sat up straight, heart thumping, nerves jangling. His eyes widened as the shot went into close-up on her face. When Lockram had filmed this, the woman was dead. From the appearance of the deeply sunken eyes, she'd been dead a while. The videotape ended with a click.

    Then Benedict had understood. This was Lockram's confession.

    

    

    The clock ticked. In a neighbor's yard, kids were fooling around with lawn sprinklers. Robyn could hear excited squeals as they ran into the icy spray. She listened for a moment, catching some half-vanished recollection of herself screaming with delight as she squirted a hose at her father. She'd have been five then. By Christmas he and Mom had split. He joined a dental practice way down somewhere in Florida. Within a year he'd wound up dead from an embolism developed after scuba diving.

    It was only in her mid teens she'd learned about the trust fund he'd created for her before he died. Maybe she could have talked to him about all the problems she faced now. He'd have been a much-needed confidant.

    Robyn touched her face where it still burned from Emerson's slap. Her other hand rested on her stomach, which fluttered and twitched. This weekend I've lurched from disaster to disaster, she told herself. Mom dismissed Emerson striking me as hysteria on my part. When she heard about my being pregnant she sniffed as if she'd half anticipated that eventuality all along and merely asked if I was going to keep it. Now I've got to tell Noel. From the roll I've been on this is going to be a disaster, too).

    Even as Robyn picked up the phone she could imagine Noel telling her they were finished. He was at college. He planned to travel the world.

    No way was Noel going to be tied to a wife and kid in some two-bit apartment with wall-to-wall rot and roaches.

    She raised her eyes to the mirror. ”You've got to do it, girl. There's no putting it off any longer." Thumbing the call button, she heard ringing, followed by a click and Noel's voice.

    ”Noel? There's something I've got to tell you…”

    

    

    Noel drove. Robyn sat in the passenger seat staring forward as the April sun dipped toward factory smokestacks.

    ”Robyn,”he said after a long silence. ”You're pregnant. I'm going to stand by you, but you shouldn't-”

    ”I've made up my mind,”she told him. ”I'm not going back.”

    ”But you can't just walk out of your home like that.”

    ”Just try and stop me.”

    ”I'm not suggesting you stay there forever; take a few days to think it over. It's a big step to-”

    ”Noel. Listen. Years ago my dad set up a trust fund for me. When I'm twenty-one I can access it, only Mom and Emerson want to crack the trust. When they do, Emerson's gonna blow it all on a stupid business venture.”

    ”Robyn, he-”

    ”That guy couldn't make money out of a dog that shits gold.”

    There was a pause. Then Noel glanced sideward a couple of times at her before asking, ”What happened to your face?”

    ”Nothing.”

    ”A red, sore-looking nothing.”

    ”Sunburn, that's all.”

    He glanced again. She kept her face turned away, unable to meet his gaze.

    ”Did you fight with your mom?”

    ”What do you expect? She was shocked to hear she's going to be a grandma.”

    ”She shouldn't have hit you.”

    Robyn kept her lips together. Telling Noel what Emerson had done would only complicate things. As it was, she found herself on the brink of crying again. Noel had been so sweet when she'd told him that she was pregnant. He hadn't questioned the whys. He accepted it as a done deal.

    He promised to stick by her, that this wouldn't come between them. What had troubled him most was Robyn's decision to leave home there and then.

    There was no way on God's earth she was going to endure another argument today So she'd written a note for her mother and left it on the kitchen table.

    Only it's one thing to walk out of a home, she told herself. It's another thing entirely to find a new one.

    

    

    After a break for a sandwich and more coffee, Benedict West eased tape number two of Lockram's video testament into the machine. Outside, the setting sun cast a blood red flame against the blinds. Benedict sat on the rug with his back to the wall to watch the TV. This time Lockram stood in the same dark suit in front of the Luxor's art-deco entrance.

    He'd been explaining how the pillars had been cast from concrete and that while the lotus blossoms had been carved from wood, the pharaoh's faces set above the entrance were plaster casts. Then they'd been painted to resemble a creamy white marble. A wind blew, tugging the man's hair into rippling strands of white.