Ghost Flower Page 3

  Suddenly I felt cold. I moved my eyes from the photo to the real thing outside. Bridgette and Bain walked up and down the balcony, so I could only catch snippets of their conversation. At first they went in jerks, a few steps forward, then a stop to argue, then a few more steps. Bain seemed angry and shrugged Bridgette’s hand off, but then his posture changed, got straighter. I made out the words “fool us” and “leverage,” before they moved on and the conversation got indistinct. Bridgette was clearly in charge. Soon they were strolling up and back in sync, heads close, him nodding at her. I caught something about “makes her dependable,” before they wheeled away again. Watching them was like watching two predatory fish in a tank swimming slowly back and forth. Circling.

  “What if they don’t know they’re in a tank?” I could hear Nina asking in my mind. I pictured her sitting on top of the washing machine, leaning out as far as she could to look through the door of the laundry room across the kitchen to the massive fish tank that separated it from the dining table at the Dockwood place.

  I had been working for a cleaning service. No benefits, no questions asked about my age or ID or why I wasn’t in school. $7.25 an hour plus tips. Although, despite spending my days inside houses with inlaid marble floors and walls of books that had never been read and built-in safes and ornamental bowls casually used to throw all the remote controls into, there were rarely tips.

  Nina was fascinated by the fish, and I felt bad making her stay in the laundry room. But she wasn’t supposed to be there, even though the Dockwoods weren’t home. I knew they had security cameras, and I couldn’t risk her being seen. “You mean, what if we’re the ones in the tank and they’re watching us?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she squealed.

  “How do you know we’re not?” I asked her.

  I knew the question would keep her for awhile. She liked to work things out and come up with concrete answers and often got exasperated by my high tolerance, maybe even preference, for not knowing. I was upstairs polishing the handles on the his and hers vanities—vanity indeed—in the master bedroom when I heard the patter of Nina’s footsteps behind me.

  “I figured it out,” she said, sounding so excited I couldn’t chastise her for coming to find me. “If we were in the tank, we wouldn’t have to worry about what we were going to eat for dinner. We’d never be hungry. So we’re not in the tank.”

  “No,” I agreed, and the polish cloth in my hand started to tremble. I kept my head down, working the cloth in smooth circles and avoiding looking at her so she wouldn’t see my struggle to hold back tears. “We’re not.” I was trying so hard, but it wasn’t enough. I took a deep breath, put a smile on my face, and raised my eyes to hers in the mirror.

  And froze.

  There was a trickle of blood running from her nose down her face. “Sweetheart,” I said, turning to wipe it, but it kept coming. “What happened?”

  “What?” she looked at me blankly. Then she saw the blood. “I don’t know. It just started.”

  “Has this happened before?” I asked.

  She looked away. “No.”

  “How often?”

  She shrugged. “When we were still with Mrs. Cleary, it was maybe once every week or two?”

  “And now?”

  Her eyes met mine and filled with tears. “Mostly maybe every day.” She started to cry. “I’m so scared.”

  I got on my knees and hugged her, and that’s where we were when Mrs. Dockwood came in and saw us and the two spots blooming like bloodred flowers on the edge of her white hand-loomed carpet.

  “Not only does she have a girl with her, she has a sick girl,” she screamed into her phone at my boss. “This is completely unacceptable. Bringing something like this into my house. The carpet is ruined. Ruined,” Mrs. Dockwood moaned. “We’re going to have to replace the whole thing, and it will cost a fortune. I hope you have good insurance.”

  I stared at the floor, squeezing Nina’s trembling hand to reassure her.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said to Mrs. Dockwood, and to her credit, Mrs. Dockwood smiled at her and said, “It’s not your fault, dear.” Her eyes came to me. “It’s hers. What was she doing here? This isn’t a day care.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told Mrs. Dockwood.

  “I’m sorry,” I told my boss when he fired me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to Nina as she lay asleep in my arms in the emergency room waiting for someone to see us.

  And when they did—

  I shook myself out of the memory and realized I was gripping the silver picture frame so hard the edges bit into my palms.

  I set it down carefully, in the exact spot I’d taken it from on the top of the piano, the way I would have if I’d been cleaning this house and not been a guest in it. Over my shoulder I checked on Bain and Bridgette and saw they were now leaning side by side against the railing. I raised the lacquered cover of the piano keyboard on its hinges, and my fingers tapped lightly across the cool smoothness of the keys.

  “Do you play?” Bridgette’s voice startled me. The cover fell with a sharp crack as I stepped away from the instrument.

  I hadn’t heard her—heard them—come in, but now she was standing right next to me. “A little. One of my foster parents…” I said.

  “One of your foster parents?” Bridgette asked, her interest obviously quickening.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, poorly concealing that her interest unnerved me. “I don’t play much. It’s just this piano is so—pretty.”

  “Yes,” Bridgette agreed. “It used to be in our grandmother’s house, but she decided she didn’t want to see it anymore. So we moved it up here.” She was watching me with an intensity and curiosity that made me feel like I was an insect pinned on a microscope slide.

  I tried to strike a casual pose, moving to put my hands into my back pockets but remembering too late that one of them had been ripped off by Roman that afternoon.

  Only that afternoon. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  Instead I twined them behind me. “Do either of you play?” I asked to shift her attention.

  “Bridgette is an accomplished pianist,” Bain said.

  Her eyes didn’t leave me. “You don’t play at all? What about tennis?”

  I frowned. “Tennis? Nope.”

  “Horses? Do you ride?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Sure. There are a lot of foster homes with stables.” I tilted my head toward the balcony. “What did you decide out there?”

  Bain and Bridgette exchanged a look, as though they were having a conversation without words. She said, “Let’s discuss it over dinner. I’m starving.”

  CHAPTER 6

  My most recent definition of dinner had been eating things that came out of cans off of paper plates with a plastic spoon.

  Bain and Bridgette’s version of dinner was a little different. As we sat down, Bain informed me that Bridgette had gone to Paris to attend culinary school the summer after her senior year of high school. She downplayed it—“It was mostly just basic sauces and knife skills”—but she was a really good cook.

  Macaroni au gratin avec lardon, I learned, was a fancy way of saying macaroni and cheese with bacon in it, but this wasn’t like any mac and cheese I’d ever had. Bridgette baked it in the oven, so it had a golden bread-crumb crust, and the saucy part managed to be delicate and smoky and cheesy all at once. I ate two plates of it, and Bain kept up. Despite saying she was hungry, Bridgette mostly pushed the pasta around with her fork while shooting furtive glances at me.

  Finally I couldn’t take it. I stopped mid-bite and let my fork fall into my plate. It made a sharp noise, and Bridgette jumped slightly. “Why do you keep staring at me like that?” I demanded.

  To her credit she didn’t deny it. She said, “I’m wondering how you digest your food hunched over, gulping it like that.”

  I was eating like the people I knew ate, face close to my plate, left arm curved around it to protect it, fingers of my rig
ht hand wrapped around the handle of my fork. “What’s wrong with how I eat?”

  “It’s not that something is wrong. It’s just—” She laid her fork down carefully, pushed her plate forward and crossed her arms in front of her. “I was just thinking about how much work this is going to take. Every detail is going to matter—how you use utensils, how you sit, how you talk. I hadn’t realized how many little things there were until I was watching you right now.”

  I sat up straight and took my arm off the table. “Is this some kind of My Fair Lady thing where you win a prize by turning a guttersnipe into a countess?”

  She smiled. “I love that movie.”

  Of course she did. Girls like Bridgette always loved that movie because it made the world seem pretty and made them believe that even though they were rich and clean, they didn’t have to be morally bankrupt.

  It was, in my opinion, a piece of shit. No one ever handed you a fairy tale.

  “I guess you could say it’s a little like that,” Bridgette went on. She started twisting the triple gold ring she wore on her pointer finger. “We want you to pretend to be someone else, and if you pull it off there will be a lot of money in it.”

  I think I had known all along, somewhere in the back of my mind, where this was heading, but I let myself say it aloud for the first time now. “You want me to be your cousin Aurora.”

  Bridgette sat up straight, and her perfectly shaped brows snapped together. “How do you know about Aurora?”

  “Bain told me. He said she loved thunderstorms like the one we drove through. Because she was like them.”

  She shot him a confused look, then came back to me. “Yes. I guess—” she stopped. “That doesn’t matter. Three years ago Aurora ran away and disappeared. We want you to impersonate her for a few weeks.”

  “A few weeks?”

  “A month or two.”

  “Why?”

  “Our grandmother is very ill, and it would make her last days—” Bain started to say, but Bridgette interrupted.

  “Don’t be an idiot. She’ll never believe that.” She looked at me. “For money. On her eighteenth birthday, Aurora was supposed to inherit a lot of money. We want you to impersonate her until then, stay around long enough to get the money, and then give it to us. We’ll give you one hundred thousand dollars, and you’ll be free to do whatever you want for the rest of your life.”

  One hundred thousand dollars to walk in someone else’s shoes for three months. Mrs. Cleary, my foster mother, would have been so proud of me. I glanced toward the photo I’d been looking at on the piano. I bet they were nice shoes too.

  “Why wouldn’t you do it?” Bain said when he thought I was hesitating.

  “Because it’s stealing?” I said.

  “Not really.” Bridgette shook her head. “In her will, Aurora left the money to Bain and me, so technically it’s ours. But if she’s not there, we have to wait another four years until she can be declared dead.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “She’s either dead or uninterested in the money because otherwise she would have been back by now,” Bain explained. He spread his hands wide. “See, no one will get hurt. All you have to do is spend a few weeks playing dress-up and living like a princess, and at the end you get a fortune. Most people would jump at this chance. Or are you worried it will interfere with your career advancement up the Starbucks ladder?”

  If I had seen then what this single-minded focus on money was really about, I would never have agreed to their offer. But at the time, everything they said made sense. And it all led to one conclusion. I said, “I’ll do it.” Bain started to smile, but Bridgette’s face remained impassive. “For two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  The smile froze on Bain’s face. “You’re crazy.”

  Bridgette’s arm came up in front of him, like a mother protecting her child, and she stared at me. Her gaze was precise and appraising, and I wondered if I’d blown it. I really hoped not—“The best hiding place is in plain sight” was the advice a friend had given me once, and this seemed like the plainest possible. I forced myself to keep meeting Bridgette’s eyes.

  The tiniest hint of a smile appeared on Bridgette’s lips. She said, “Okay. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  In a distant corner near the back of my mind, a warning whistle shrilled that this had been too easy. That “dependable” sounded a lot like “expendable.” And that I was missing something crucial.

  Then my eyes went back to the photo. From a distance, it looked like just a nice family, the tensions I’d seen at closer range invisible. Family. That word was so foreign to me, and yet, suddenly, dangerously desirable.

  I said, “How do we start?”

  CHAPTER 7

  It took less than an hour for them to explain what they had in mind. Fifty-three minutes to outline what would change my life and the lives of a dozen people irrevocably.

  The plan was well-thought-out—Bridgette was an excellent organizer. Each piece clicked against the next with the precision of well-set-up dominoes. But the problem of being a good organizer is it gives you the illusion you know what is going on everywhere. It’s the periphery that will get you every time.

  It was simple: I would spend the next month living there in “the cabin” and learning everything they could teach me about Aurora. A month before Aurora’s birthday, I would move to Tucson and take my place in the family. Once I had the money, they figured it would take me three weeks to get my affairs in order, and then I’d disappear. The way they made it sound, it was like being Cinderella: Girl goes from pauper to princess, only in this modern version she doesn’t even have to tie herself up with a dubious prince at the end.

  “The fact that Aurora took off once will make it easy for people to believe she’d do it again,” Bridgette said.

  “But everyone will think she just came back for the money. That she’s opportunistic,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Bridgette sat forward. “And that’s precisely why it would be credible, her coming back right now after all this time. Otherwise we’d need some elaborate story.”

  “People like to believe the worst, especially about families like ours,” Bain said. But his voice held no bitterness—he almost sounded proud. Bridgette, though, didn’t feel the same way. Her neck went pink, and she fiddled with her ring.

  I tried to think of the right questions to ask in the right order.

  “Why would your grandmother still let her have the money? Wouldn’t she get mad and cut Aurora out of her will?”

  “It’s not a will,” Bain said. “It’s an estate.” Bragging again. It struck me that he was trying to impress me.

  “She can’t,” Bridgette said, ignoring him. “The money Aurora inherits when she’s eighteen is from her parents. They’re both dead.”

  “What was Aurora like?” I asked.

  Bain frowned. “Why does that matter?”

  “I want to know if I’m going to like being her.”

  “She was nice,” Bain started to say, but Bridgette cut him off.

  “She was spoiled, conceited, and wild. She never thought about anything except pleasing herself and having a good time.”

  “She doesn’t sound anything like me.”

  “All you have to do is ask yourself, ‘What should I do to be the center of attention?’ And then do it. I’m pretty sure that was Aurora’s only guide to her behavior,” Bridgette said.

  “It sounds like you weren’t exactly friends.”

  “Just because I’m frank doesn’t mean I wasn’t fond of her,” Bridgette said. “She was careless, but she could be a lot of fun. And she was my cousin. Family. I loved her.”

  Wow. I wondered what Bridgette said about people she only liked.

  “What about DNA?” I asked. “Won’t it be easy to show I’m not your cousin?”

  “They tried to take DNA samples when she disappeared. But there wasn’t anything to take, so there’s nothing to match it to. Her toot
hbrush and hairbrush were gone, and our grandmother has a very efficient cleaning staff. In terms of the rest of the family, her father was adopted by our grandparents, so she wouldn’t match any of us. There were a few fingerprints, but we have a solution for that.”

  “A solution?” I echoed, curling my fingers into balls. “If you want me to burn the tips of my fingers off, it will cost extra.”

  Bridgette laughed. It was the first time I’d seen her laugh, and it seemed to surprise her almost as much as it surprised me. “We’re not thugs,” she said.

  “It’s simple,” Bain told me. “If someone wants to check your identity, they’re not going to look up your name; they’re going to run your prints against the police database. So if your prints are already in the computer as Aurora Silverton, that’s what will show as a match when the cops check. The fact that there’s another Aurora Silverton with completely different prints never comes up.”

  “Okay,” I nodded slowly. “How do you get my prints into the police database as Aurora’s?”

  Bridgette got up and started to clear the table as she spoke. “The Silverton Child Safety Project is sponsoring a tent at Old Phoenix Days next week where parents can bring their kids to have them fingerprinted and the prints stored in the police database. I’m running the event. It will be no problem for me to slip a card with your prints into the pile to be scanned.”

  Bain and I moved to help her clean up. As I rinsed the plates, I said, “You two have really thought of everything.”

  “I’m the big picture man, the brains of the operation,” Bain explained, taking a plate from me and putting it into the dishwasher. “Bridgette takes over the details.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” Bridgette said, throwing a handful of soap suds at him.