The Storm King(42)
“And by ‘clients’ you mean…” Lucy affected a confused look. Nate lay back down next to her and ran his finger from her neck to her navel.
“Johns, tricks, transactional lovers. It’s the world’s oldest profession, but it’s a tough thing to make a career of. Terrible retirement package. June was smart and fierce, and for a while was Strong’s right hand, but she was mostly one of his whores. She’d pounded the sheets since her early teens by some accounts, and that kind of life takes its toll. Into her middle age, what’d been a flood of customers had slowed to a trickle. New, bright-eyed young things arrived to work the beds of the Century Room every season, and June couldn’t compete. No longer the bombshell with all the right moves and the body to pull them off, June was all but used up. Soon the only clients she could get were the strange ones, the ones with the weird fetishes and kinks.”
“I wonder what qualified as kinky back then?” Lucy asked. Her fingernail clicked along the zipper of Nate’s jeans. “I’ll have to do some research.”
“And she didn’t just have herself to worry about. Her twin sister was a few matches short of a box. May was her name. June and May, the prettiest months of the year. They were the Night Ship Girls. Strong could have used May as a prostitute, too, but maybe he had a scrap of humanity after all. She was paid a slave wage to scrub the kitchen and mop the floors. June was devoted to her sister. May was June’s heart. And they both relied on June’s usefulness to Strong. But June was no longer the draw she’d once been, and this hadn’t gone unnoticed by old Morton. The club had a reputation to uphold; the girls who worked there had to have a certain je ne sais quoi, and Just June had begun to look more and more out of place. ‘End of the summer,’ Strong told June one Memorial Day. Come September, she’d have to find some other place to sell what little she had left to offer. You can imagine how that must have felt for her. The Night Ship was all she’d ever known. She was afraid. And she was angry.”
“Hell hath no fury,” Lucy said. She was living proof of the phrase. The year and a half since Adam Decker’s house burned had marked a run of terrible luck for the enemies of Lucy Bennett.
“And it wasn’t just Morton Strong she was angry with.” Nate leapt back to his feet. “She loathed the younger girls who’d replaced her. Her clients filled her with disgust. In fact, she’d begun to hate just about everyone who had anything to do with the Night Ship. They all had to pay. But she was no dummy, our June. She was sweetness itself when Strong told her that her days were numbered.”
“They never see the sweet ones coming, do they, McHale?” Lucy rolled onto her stomach and kicked her feet into the air. It was a classic pose, but like everything else, Lucy found a way to make it her own. She pulled her journal out from under her crumpled tank top, but Nate knew her attention was still on the story. They were almost to her favorite part.
“So she plays nice, our June, right up until the big Fourth of July celebration. Independence Day is the centerpiece of every resort town’s summer, and the Lake goes all out. Fireworks are shot off from Blind Down Island. Sailboats festooned with lights bob on the water. Bands play in the bars and along the streets. Packs of children run along the shore trailing a wake of sparklers. The Lake is rocking, and no place rocks it harder than the Night Ship.” Nate moved to the scarred dance floor. “Men in linen suits dance with women draped in silk.” He shuffled his feet to the tune of an imagined song. If Nate tried, he could see others in their finery moving to the same rhythm. “The air’s thick with cigar smoke and the euphoria of a summer night. Elaborate centerpieces blazing with candles and sparklers erupt from every table. Punch overflows from two hundred glasses. The Night Ship is the place to be. And you know how things can feel on a night like that. The right place, the right time. The right music, the right clothes. The right girl.” Nate turned to Lucy. “Everything so perfect, you can’t imagine a future less golden than the present.”
Lucy smiled and looked down at her journal. She was as fearless a person as Nate had ever known, and he loved that he could still make her feel shy.
“But it wasn’t to be for the folks at the Night Ship that Independence Day. The backdoor operations in the Century Room were put on hold for big celebrations like this. No reason to flaunt their indiscretions in front of the town’s leading citizens. So the prostitutes worked as waitresses and played the role of eye candy. But Just June was relegated to the kitchens,” Nate said. “A final insult.”
“In more ways than one.”
“The Night Ship throws the best parties. But the best parties have the worst hangovers. Around midnight, some of the patrons begin to get queasy. Too hot, they figure. Too much smoke. Too much booze.”
“What was in that punch, anyway?” Lucy said. She wrote something in her notebook. She was always scribbling in it. In the fall, she’d be studying journalism at NYU while Nate would be just a subway ride away at Columbia.
“Indeed. The punch at the Night Ship was notoriously strong, but this year, Just June put her own twist on it. A one-of-a-kind blend of nail polish, antifreeze, rat poison, and who knows what else. At first only a few guests get sick, but within the packed hall, it soon becomes clear that something’s deeply wrong.” He jumped onto a table.