Siren Queen(49)

I remembered Mrs. Wiley’s words, Mrs. Wiley’s price, and I felt sick. I wanted to reach for Greta, but she was too far away, a river of ink between us. I wasn’t in the room at all.

That had Wolfe’s attention. He licked his lips, and licked them again. The thing that was using him as its face grew hungrier.

“Yes. Yes. Give it to me.”

I couldn’t watch. I covered my face as Greta’s knife rose up and came down. She didn’t make a sound. I imagine she hadn’t made a sound either when they cut off her tail.

I thought I would faint, but then Wolfe turned to me.

“Take her out of here. I can’t stand the sight of either of you.”

I hesitated, and he sneered at the unspoken question in my eyes.

“Oh, someone else will take care of you. Now get the hell out.”

The right side of Greta’s face was raw meat. She had missed her eye, but it was not for a lack of ferocity. I put my arm around her, but she walked as steadily as I did, even if I was not walking particularly steadily. We went by the receptionist, who refused to look at us, and then we were out in the street again, under the bright, bright sun.

“Greta…”

She grimaced with pain, and then I realized she was smiling.

“Should have done it months ago,” she said. “Should have done it then, but now I get a baby and a man out of it. That’s good. That’s a bargain.”

To her it was, but that feeling of dread sat in my belly like a cut-glass ink bottle, holding something dark and screaming inside.





XI


Greta didn’t let the sand shift underneath her shoes. She was on a flight back to Stockholm inside of a week, a boulder-like girl in a long blue coat with half her face bandaged up, obviously pregnant and cranky about the heat and her itchy healing wound. Lawrence followed her with their single bag clutched in his hand and a slightly stunned look on his face. Once or twice, when he looked at her, you could see the seed that Wolfe had used to grow the stunningly handsome Brandt Hiller. Besides that, however, no one who passed them recognized them as the stars of The Belles of St. Desmond, which was still playing to sold-out movie houses across the country.

A week after that, I hired a cab to take me to the Palisades late one night, where Emmaline lived. The rain had finally come to the coast after one of the driest summers on record, and as I got out of the car and walked up the long drive to Emmaline’s hacienda-style bungalow, the earth opened up a thousand mouths to drink down the water.

At the door, Mari, Emmaline’s girl, shook her head.

“Miss Sauvignon is not present. I will tell her that you have stopped by.”

No invitation to come in and wait, no offer to call my cab back. I gritted my teeth.

“I know she’s here. I want to see her.”

Mari used to work for those actors that rotated through the historical dramas and mysteries and kept a stiff upper lip throughout. She gave me a beautifully cold look that would have gotten her an immediate spot on a Victorian drama if she weren’t Black and Mexican, and shook her head.

“I am afraid that will not be possible.”

“Her damn car is in the drive, you can tell her…”

“If you can see her car, Miss Wei, surely you can see the one next to it?”

I had been so focused on Emmaline’s sleek little Nash coupe that I didn’t see the custom forest-green Le Baron roadster just beyond it. That shut me up, because everyone knew that that car belonged to Cassidy Dutch.

I went silent, and Mari nodded. She changed Emmaline’s sheets and cooked her meals; of course she knew about us, and in the end, she had no true interest in unkindness.

“I’ll tell her you came by,” she said, and she closed the door in my face.

There was a moment where I might have selected a handful of round stones from the graveled drive and slung them at those flashy cars until every window was as shattered as I felt, but I turned and walked away. I ended at the bottom of her drive, sitting on a boulder just inside the gate. I knew I needed to find a place to call for a cab to at least get out of the rain that was soaking me. I was wearing a light silk dress in deep blue, and it slicked to my skin, heavy and cloying.

I sat at the base of her drive until the rain let up and the acrid scent of water evaporating off of asphalt rose into the air. I had no real interest in calling for a cab or getting food or doing anything else at all. Helen Martel was rumored to have a garden full of cast-off lovers, all transformed to stone. That day, I learned that it wasn’t a sudden strike of heartache that had done it; it was a slow petrifaction of things I no longer wanted because Emmaline refused to look at me.

Close to dawn, Emmaline came down from the house. The first light of sunrise turned her hair bronze, and she had a voluminous silk robe wrapped around her so thickly she looked mummified.

“I’ve called a cab for you. It should be here in twenty minutes or so.”

“Did Cassidy Dutch tell you to do that?” I asked, and she gave me an impatient look.

“He don’t—doesn’t tell me anything. I tell him. And I’m telling you. Leave me alone, Luli.”

“Just like that—”

“Yes, just like that, Christ. Do you know what you did? Did you know what you could have done? To me? To all of us?”

“I helped my friend! Greta needed help, she was all alone…”