Deja Who (Insighter #1)(22)
“She means Silence of the Lambs.” Oh how I wish that Archer had killed me.
“But that’s horror, or a thriller—not a Western.”
“You know, Wild Bill,” It interrupted, excited. “The bad guy.”
“The bad guy was Buffalo Bill, you silly twat,” Leah corrected. “Remember? ‘It puts the lotion in the basket or It gets the hose again’?”
“That’s why you refer to yourself as—that’s a little weird.”
“We know,” mother and daughter replied in dulcet unison, then glared at each other.
“Because . . . um . . . it’s kind of silly. And maybe even immature.”
“That’s what she’s like,” Leah said, irritably gesturing at her mother.
“I meant you.”
Leah thought about it. It was wonderful to be in a room with Archer and her mother and have his attention on her and hers on him and It—Nellie—was where she belonged: out of the conversation. “Well, ‘Mom’ is inappropriate because there’s not a drop of maternity anywhere there. And ‘Nellie’ is just silly.”
“But ‘It’ is a shining beacon of good sense and subtle humor?”
“Point,” Leah admitted.
“It makes an impression.” Nellie bulled her way back into the conversation by reciting her favorite catechism after “it’s worth it to be famous.”
“Okay, this explains all the strange pics of you and Leah in all those costumes. Why didn’t you tell me you were a child star?”
“Because I’ve been too busy repressing my entire childhood.” She jerked a thumb at him. “Pay attention, Nellie. Archer is off the payroll. And the next time you put a dog on my back trail, they’ll find pieces of your wardrobe all over the North Side.”
Nellie shrugged. “Fine. I could use some new—”
“All of it. The costumes, the gowns you wore to the Oscars, anything that ever touched your skin during your so-called career, not to mention mine: shredded. If your clothing was people, family members would not be able to identify them, you understand? Closed casket, you understand?”
“No!”
“Ah, good, It’s catching on.” Wow, that was going to be a tough one to break. “Nellie Nazir is catching on.”
“At least hear the pitch,” her mother coaxed, spreading her arms wide like a preacher about to give a blessing. The effect, with the robe and feathers, made it look like she had big pink wings: a sentient flamingo obsessed with its comeback. “It’s a hot new series about a mother and daughter who are both prostitutes.”
Leah turned on her heel.
“They’ll get into all sorts of wacky situations together.”
Leah walked faster.
“It’s like a buddy movie, with whores. Think of all the sidesplitting situations the mother-daughter hooker team could get into. Hilarity will ensue! I promise you! It will!”
“Yes,” she replied, “but not for the reason you think. Good-bye, Nellie. We won’t meet again.”
Nellie rolled her beautiful brown eyes, naturally luminous and always emphasized with lots of blue and purple shadow and liner. “Even you can’t hold a grudge that long. Or are you still determined to be murdered?”
Leah bit her tongue, hard. Some things should never be said, because they could never be unsaid. It was a near thing. Her mother had always been ashamed of her daughter’s a) plain looks, b) Insighter ability, and c) indifference to the Oscar race. At age four, Leah had explained to her babysitter that he was afraid of dogs and water because in the last four hundred years he’d died of rabies half a dozen times and ended his life foaming, shrieking, and thirsty. “Just leave strange dogs alone, how many times do you have to get chomped before you internalize that?” the exasperated kindergartener had asked the astonished teenager. And Nellie had been less than pleased: “A near-genius IQ and this is what you use it for? Stop that and help me figure out how to seduce the new VP at MGM!”
Nellie considered her daughter’s Insight to be at best embarrassing and at worst something Leah did on purpose for attention. Neither were acceptable. And thus, she had no interest in Leah’s predictions of her own murder.
“Being murdered,” she managed as the room doubled, then
don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry DON’T YOU DARE CRY
“—will come as a great relief.”
She walked out of her house—not a home, it was never a home—determined never to return.
ELEVEN
Archer, who had felt out of his depth the moment the weird little crying (or did he have allergies?) guy answered the door, was slow to follow. Shock had held him in place for those few seconds.
Now he could see it; now he knew why he had the nagging feeling he’d seen Leah somewhere. Somewhere? Everywhere: when she was little she had hawked everything from diapers to Dentyne, juice to jeans, back-to-school to prom fashions, and everything in between. The Girl Next Door, if the girl next door could take one look at you and tell you all the mistakes you made in the fifteenth century.
Her mother had done plenty of TV work, too, but never made it out of the B-list section of Entertainment Weekly . . . which still rankled, clearly. Add that to the average American’s five-minute attention span for all things TV, it was no wonder he hadn’t recognized Nellie—or Leah—during his last visit.