The Lucky Ones (20 page)

Astrid turned toward Cordelia expectantly, but she wasn’t looking at Astrid the way she usually did. Not with the usual friendliness—she gazed at Astrid as though at a stranger. She hesitated on the grass, her wet hair tucked behind her ears, taking in the scene. It was as though she’d been watching Astrid a while already, fierce as a hawk. Her eyes had none of the heat of Charlie’s, but they frightened Astrid anyway, because they seemed capable of clear vision.

Cordelia glanced at Charlie, and then her eyes rolled back to Astrid. “All right,” she said, sounding like herself again as she came and put an arm around Astrid’s waist.

In those seconds she felt that Cordelia had gleaned all that had passed between her and Victor, every word exchanged. What else could cause her to regard Astrid with such cold distance? And with a drop of her stomach, Astrid knew that her friend was deciding whose side to take.

21

TWO DAYS BEFORE THE LARAMIE–DARBY RACE, AND no one was fooled by the official line that it was “a friendly exhibition of skill between respectful fellow aviators.” Bets were being placed all over Long Island, with the odds in Max’s favor—although not so heavily as one might think, given his wider celebrity and greater experience as a pilot. Everyone had a proclaimed favorite, which often revealed a person’s true feelings about the modern world. But Max, for one, did not seem perturbed in the least by all the talk. In fact, he seemed to thrive on it—he had been uniquely focused over the last few days—and Cordelia, lying on the patchy grass on the far side of the airfield with her head in his lap, felt briefly calm as well.

“You think this weather will hold?” she asked, idly tapping the toes of her brown oxfords together. Streaky clouds obscured the blue sky, but there had been no rain since early yesterday.

Max, who had been scribbling in a notebook, paused and sniffed the air. “The newspaper said it might not, but I don’t believe it. I think it’s going to be clear and fine by race day.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” Cordelia replied, for she’d sworn off reading newspapers. They were full of bile about Max and his mother, which only made her angry, and she was additionally frightened that she’d come across some story about one of Coyle Mink’s former associates who’d been found floating in the river without his face. One way or another, trouble was coming to her family—she’d realized as much last night when she came up from the pool and saw Charlie and Astrid standing there looking so wrecked. But she’d have to leave the airfield soon enough—she could think about all those messes then.

“After you beat Laramie, I’m taking you for oysters at the St. Regis, and you’re going to ask me to dance in public.” She had spun this fantasy mostly to herself, but when he didn’t answer she sat up and faced him. “Max?”

“What?”

When she saw that he’d been contemplating the patterns in the sky and hadn’t really heard her, she slapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Is my hour up?” she asked, smiling.

Gently he placed his fingers around her wrist. “I don’t want you to go.”

“But you had better get back to work.
I
know when your mind is elsewhere, Mr. Darby.”

“I’m sorry, Cord, I—”

“Don’t be silly! I know what you’re thinking about, and I don’t blame you, and after you win the race we will have lots of time to talk about whatever I like. But just now I’ll go and let you concentrate.” She stood up and began to stuff the remnants of their lunch—wax-paper wrappers and the crusts of sandwiches—into their empty potato chip bag. But Max took them from her and pulled her to him by the waist with unexpected strength.

“What was that for?” she asked, smiling, when the kiss was over. He took her chin with his hand and gazed at her as though he were trying to memorize the architecture of her face.

“Just because.” With his arm still on her waist they began to amble toward the place near the hangar where Anthony had parked the Daimler and remained waiting at a respectful distance. As they approached, she could hear the blare of a radio, discussing the upcoming race, and couldn’t help but feel excited for Max, who seemed so sure that once he won nobody would ever question his capabilities as a pilot again.

“You know what I think would make an even better story?” she said, resting her head against his shoulder.

“What?”

“If you brought me with you. In the airplane, I mean. I’d be very good and quiet, and when we landed I’d—”

“No!” His answer was so forceful that it felt like a rebuke, and she had to step away from him.

“I’m sorry.” She blinked and glanced down at her shoes. “It was only an idea.”

“I can’t have you with me,” Max replied in a softer tone. “It might be dangerous, and I know Charlie won’t allow that.”

“When did you ever care what Charlie said! Anyway, you yourself said you’ve done this flight a dozen times, and it will only go to show how little Eddie Laramie knows about aviation. Didn’t you?”

“Yes, but…” Max trailed off and turned toward the south. “This flight—I just can’t take you on this flight, all right?”

“All right.” He was still looking away from her, so she drifted toward the car, feeling confused and hurt for reasons she couldn’t quite figure. When Anthony saw her, he came around and opened the back door.

“Cord!” She turned to Max. The arc of his shoulders was rigid under his white T-shirt, and his hands were balled into fists at his olive work pants. His brow was tensed, and she realized that he must be nervous about the race after all. “Will you come bring me lunch tomorrow, too?”

“I guess you’ll have to just wait and see,” she replied with a wink. His shoulders relaxed a little when he heard the lightness in her voice. Then he returned her wink and headed in the direction of his airplane, just outside the yawning door of the hangar. By the time she was situated in the backseat, however, her sense of lightness had vanished, and she was instead beset with the notion that a heavy thing had gone unsaid between them.

The way to Dogwood was blocked by another vehicle; when Cordelia thought of all the things this might mean, her heart skidded. But then she recognized the driver—he was one of the caterers from the days when Darius was alive and threw parties—and saw that the bed of his truck was full of crates of oranges and lemons. He waved and drove ahead of them through the gates, up the gravel path that was lined on either side with lindens. In fact, the workers moving busily about the lawn on the south side of the house seemed to be in the process of re-creating Dogwood as she had first glimpsed it—they were erecting a white tent, the kind under which an epic summer party might be held.

“What’s all this?” she demanded of the guard who was standing at a remove, watching the goings-on with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He turned, and she saw it was Victor and remembered what she had seen in his face that night at the St. Regis.

“Preparations for Mrs. Grey’s birthday party.” The skin under his eyes was bruised, as though he hadn’t slept very much, and she disliked the way he’d said
Mrs. Grey
—it sounded strange, and she realized she’d never heard him, or anyone at Dogwood, call her that before.

“Does Charlie know about this?”

“It was Charlie’s idea.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Victor’s eyes flickered in her direction and away. “Afraid so. It’s a bad idea, if you ask me—”

“But I didn’t ask you,” she snapped.

“My mistake.” He didn’t meet her eye, but neither did he sound contrite, which only made her angrier. Until just that moment, she had been thinking of him rather pityingly as a lovesick boy who was going to learn sooner or later that the object of his desire was dangerous. But when she thought of him, standing there in the hotel room of the St. Regis, holding a vase of peonies while he gazed adoringly at Astrid, she remembered something else, which was what Astrid had been saying as he walked in.

Cordelia stepped decisively in his direction. “It was you who told the police.”

“What?” His head swiveled in her direction, and his eyes narrowed.

“Or maybe you told the Feds. What Charlie said right before he killed Coyle Mink’s man. You overhead her telling us at the St. Regis, and you passed it on.”

He turned so that he was facing her straight on and fixed his gaze on her.

“Who are you?” she demanded with what shallow breath she could summon. “What kind of make-believe have you been filling Astrid’s head with?”

At first he didn’t say anything, only scanned the surrounding area to make sure there was no one within earshot. “You know it’s a lunatic idea, to throw a big party right now.”

“That’s not what I asked, is it?” Cordelia crossed her arms over her chest. “Who are you?”

He sighed and after a long while said: “I’m not going to tell you that. It’s better this way. All you need to know is this: I love your friend, she loves me, and I can keep her safe. She’s already seen too much. The attention this party will bring, and the strangers it will allow onto the property—that’s not good for
any
of us. It’s going to blow up, Cordelia. Talk Charlie out of it. You can do that. If you don’t, well—he’s a bomb that’s going to go off sooner or later.”

She turned her chin at a sharp angle. “How do you know it will blow up?” she demanded.

His sigh was heavier this time, and without any denials he stepped back from her and turned his eyes on the busy scene under the tent. “Talk to Charlie.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” she replied hotly. As she moved toward the house she passed him too close, letting her shoulder knock into his without apology. By the time she reached the verandah, she was mouthing angry words to herself. Who was this person who had wormed his way into her family’s house and told lies and spilled their secrets and seduced her brother’s girl? Her anger had reached such a pitch that when Charlie came through the ballroom at a fierce gait she almost didn’t recognize him. “Charlie!” she exclaimed.

“What?” he shot back as he passed her by.

“Charlie,” she went on, twirling so that she could follow after him. “This is no time for a party! What’s gotten into you?”

“Why not?” He was almost shouting, and when he paused on the lowest step and turned around to look at her she saw that the whites of his eyes were tinged with red, as though he’d drank too much coffee and stayed up two nights in a row.

There were about ten reasons that she could think of why not, but the most obvious reason, the neatest one, was that Victor—who was new to the operation but nonetheless knew plenty—was working for someone else. But the mania in his face recalled Victor’s words—her brother was a bomb, and sooner or later he was going to go off.

“Have you had a conversation with Astrid recently?” Cordelia asked softly. “I don’t think she’s in any mood for a birthday party.”

“If you think that, you don’t know Astrid very well,” Charlie shot back.

Then he spat on the grass and strode off in the direction of the tent, leaving Cordelia standing on the top step by herself. A wind picked up, pressing her skirt against her legs and sending an anxious current up her spine. For a while she remained there, wondering why she hadn’t told Charlie what she suspected about Victor. Maybe it was because of the sincerity with which he’d said he loved Astrid and that Astrid loved him. Still, she wasn’t sure she could trust Victor—but if she exposed him, it would be the end of Astrid, and as she turned back to the house she knew she couldn’t tell her brother about his duplicity. Not yet.

22

LETTY HEARD SOPHIA A WHILE BEFORE SHE SAW HER, but the sound caused no immediate distress. She and Valentine had filmed all day, and she was blissfully lounging in her dressing room at the studio, on a pink suede couch, gazing at the costume she’d worn for Marie’s final scenes. A good deal more had to be shot to finish the picture, but her part was complete. The eye mask she had been napping in was pushed back on her forehead. Lucien Branch himself had said that her reading of Marie was the most promising he had ever seen, and Letty knew from the way Valentine watched her, from the steady light in his eyes, that he was impressed by everything she did.

“Where is she?” Sophia’s voice was closer now, just outside the door. “Where is the little brat?”

Letty ripped the eye mask from her face when she realized that Sophia’s yelling was not benign at all and had everything to do with her. The reality of what she’d done, and all the ways that it should make her feel ashamed rather than proud, rushed over her. She was wearing a terry-cloth robe belted at the waist, which somehow enhanced her guiltiness. Furtively she moved back and forth across the room, without any clear idea of what she should do. The vanity mirror caught her reflection, and this gave her some confidence. The heavy makeup they had put on for filming was still highlighting her best features; she looked like a movie star now herself.

“Narcissus at his pond.” Sophia’s words were quieter now, but no less wrathful. When the door slammed shut behind her, Letty stiffened and waited. But Sophia didn’t say anything for several seconds, and the tension in the room became stifling.

“He told you, then?” Letty, who sang with such power, could barely give breath to these words as she slowly revolved to face the woman who had taught her how to pose on a red carpet. Sophia was still wearing her trench coat—the belt was undone, as though she’d begun to take it off but had been too overcome with fury to finish the job. Her cheeks were gaunter now than before she had gone away, but this somehow detracted from her prettiness. For the first time, Letty saw the flaws in her mentor’s beauty. That nose, which was so adorable on a child star, looked piggish on the face of a woman; and her eyes, which had winked adorably in her early pictures, were too small to convey real emotion.

Suddenly it was all so obvious why Lucien Branch had wanted to recast his Marie, and the obviousness made her pity Sophia even more. But then Sophia started toward her across the floor, her nostrils flared and her hand raised as though she might strike Letty, and Letty felt herself shrink inside. “I’m sorry,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry?” Sophia enunciated the word as though she were interrogating it. “You planned this all along.”

“I didn’t! I
swear
I didn’t.”

“To think I trusted you. And you betray me—like
this
. Me, who taught you everything!”

“But you see, it all happened so naturally…” The satisfaction that Letty had been basking in earlier was completely doused. It was impossible to go on feeling proud about her love for Valentine when the woman who was wronged by that love was standing right in front of her, especially when the whites of that woman’s eyes were tinged red. “And I thought that perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much to you in the end.”

“Matter to me? How dare you presume to know
what matters to me
.”

The anger that pulled at Sophia’s features aged her, too, and Letty remembered how many years were between them. That Sophia and Valentine had been married some time already, and that marriage was something that she herself knew nothing about. Letty tried to picture Valentine’s handsome face. She reminded herself that in a few hours she was going to meet him, at Frankie’s—
their
place. If she could conjure the sweetness that had bloomed between her and Valentine over the last few days, she thought, it would protect her from the mess she was now in. Even a whiff of that would do. But she couldn’t conjure it, not with Sophia looming over her.

“You see, since you and Jack Montrose have your, uh, arrangement, I guess I thought perhaps it would be all right—that you might even be happy about—about me and Valentine.”

“You and Valentine!” Sophia exclaimed contemptuously. Then she stepped back, exhaling like a bucking mare and lengthening her neck. “You and Valentine, an item?”

“Yes—I mean—” Letty’s cheeks had begun to burn, and she was afraid Sophia’s gaze might actually harm her. It was so lancing that Letty longed to crawl behind the couch and hide. “I mean—I assumed he told you.”

Slowly Sophia withdrew a cigarette from the pocket of her coat and lit it. Taking a first drag, she shrugged the coat off her shoulders and threw it over the couch. All the while she went on looking at Letty in that same excruciating way. “Yes, I suppose in his way he did,” she said eventually as she strutted over to the couch and sat down, crossing her legs with ladylike precision. “Letty, you little drip, you don’t really think I’m angry about that, do you?”

“You’re not angry?”

“Oh, yes.” Sophia nodded vigorously. “Very angry. Though
angry
doesn’t even really begin to describe it.”

“But you just said—”

“You nitwit! Not angry about Valentine. I don’t care what Valentine does. I haven’t since we were children. In fact, I’m always quite relieved when a little nothing like you comes along and distracts him for a while so that I won’t have to be always attending to his
feelings
.” Sophia hissed this final word and rolled her eyes as she put her cigarette out, into the couch cushion. “Oh, well, what’s this? You thought you were the first?”

Letty hoped the tears would hold back just a few minutes. But of course that was a foolish wish. Another moment passed, and she realized that what she really should have prayed for was that Sophia would say no more on that topic.

“Did he tell you he loved you?” she sneered. “Did he take you to Frankie’s?”

This final bit was hurled with special bitterness, and Letty winced at its force. Meanwhile the notion of her and Valentine began to crumble. Slowly, at first, but once she began to think that way the whole structure looked flimsy, and she knew that Sophia was telling the truth: Valentine had done this before. He had swept girls off their feet by promising them the whole world; she had been a sucker for a story that was too good to be true. As she wiped the wetness away from her nose with the back of her wrist, she realized that she had been unbearably stupid.

“No, my darling ingénue.” Sophia’s eyes softened, as though she knew she had struck the fatal blow and no longer saw any reason to tire herself out. “You can have Valentine if you want him. But he won’t want
you
long. He never does. He just likes a distraction now and then, and if there’s an opportunity for him to hurt me in the bargain, all the sweeter for him.”

“I wasn’t the first.” Letty squeezed her eyes shut.

“No. Not even the first this
summer
.” Sophia turned down the corners of her lips in an exaggerated frown. “But you know, unlike Valentine, I actually thought you were special. I knew you were better than the others. I was going to see that you didn’t get the usual bad treatment when his affection moved on.”

Timidly Letty raised her eyes to meet Sophia’s, but she immediately regretted this act of courage. Sophia leaned forward, eyes narrowed, her sharp elbows propped against her thighs.

“I was going to teach you to be a star,” she spat. “But you couldn’t wait! You had to have it all right now. You took my
part
, sugarplum. That’s what has me in such a temper.”

“Oh.”

“Yes—
oh
. Oh, my. Oh, dear. Oh, no. That’s what I care about. That’s what I lay down on those casting couches for. That’s why I go to the parties. That’s why I laugh at all those tedious jokes the moneymen tell. It’s because the thing I most want, have always wanted, was to be in the pictures, and stay in them, forever. You. Took. My. Part.” She laughed, but there was no humor in the sound, and she drew back her upper lip so that Letty could see her teeth.

The terrible smile Sophia was wearing made Letty feel precisely three inches tall. In the handful of beautiful days when she had existed only in Valentine’s adoring gaze and in an imaginary future where he brought her roses every night, and they lived in charming garrets and read each other poems before they fell asleep, she had forgotten that she could feel this way. But that sense of her own insignificance had never really gone away. It had just been lurking, waiting for the right moment to remind her that she was nobody.

When Sophia stood up, she did so in a slow, showy manner, making her way to the door with exaggerated elegance. On her way to the door she snatched her coat by the neck like a naughty kitten. Letty remained as she had been, frozen in one spot, watching Sophia’s mannered movements. At the door she paused and let her eyes pan up and down Letty’s figure, and Letty realized how ghost-like she must have appeared in her white robe and with her pale skin.

“You see,” Sophia went on grandly, “I’m a real star; my light will never go out. Watch your step, honey.”

Then abruptly she was gone. Letty was quaking like a mouse the cat has got in a corner. The room was the same—there was only that burned spot on the pink suede, and what did that matter? The costume was still hers. But she no longer felt proud about any of it, and the idea of standing in front of a camera, with dozens of people breathing around her in the dark, seemed frightening rather than exciting. She had gotten the part of Marie by playing opposite Valentine, the man she was in love with. But they hadn’t been in love. That had just been a lie too lovely for her to see through.

At first she thought she was imagining the laughter. But when she peeked her head out of the dressing room, she saw that it was real—Sophia was standing with a cluster of women Letty had met briefly while she was being fitted for her costume. They were from the hair and makeup department, and though they had been mostly kind, Letty had not bothered to learn any of their names. She had been too overwhelmed with her new life to think about much at all, and she’d acted under the vague belief that a star should not interact with the staff. But Sophia was smiling and talking to them like old friends. Then the woman in the formless black dress and the tight bun glanced up and saw Letty, and her laughter got louder, so that it was obvious what they were all laughing about.