“What was that?” I asked. It came out in a more demanding tone than I’d intended. By that point, I suppose one could say I was invested in the story’s outcome. Teddy flinched at the sound of my voice, as if he’d gotten so lost in the telling of his story, he’d forgotten I was there. He turned and looked at me, and when he spoke again I spotted something in his innocent face I’d never glimpsed before, something sharp and incisive.
“The officer remembered something funny about Ginevra that night,” he said. “The accident had made quite a terrible picture, you see, and so he didn’t really remember or focus on this fact until later. It might very well mean nothing. But . . .” Teddy paused as though to consider. He cleared his throat. “When she gave her statement, Ginevra was wearing both bracelets.”
A chill raced down my spine. My mind had split itself into two halves—one half raced to list the coincidences, the other half raced along a parallel trajectory to refute them.
“Where is she now? Ginevra, I mean,” I asked once Teddy had reached the conclusion of his story.
“Missing,” he answered.
“How do you mean?”
“She left town shortly after the accident. Some people say it was because of the tragedy, some people say it was because of all the talk. Can’t say I blame her, but it was quite a disappearing act she pulled. Left in the middle of the night; didn’t even tell her parents where she was going.”
“Have they made . . . an effort . . . to find her?” I asked. My voice sounded very small in the back of my throat.
“Nice families don’t hire private investigators,” Teddy said in a flat tone. “At least, not any they’d admit to, and the lousy ones they might hire on the side are never going to find anything anyway. But I’d really welcome the chance to talk to her. There are things that just never made sense about that night, and I’d like to get some of that business cleared up. I’ve been looking for her for . . . quite a while. You understand how it is, of course.” He turned to me and held me in a long, meaningful stare. My body was almost completely dry by that time, and I could already feel the beginnings of a sun-burn. It was not the least bit cold out, but nonetheless I felt a cold shiver run through me, and suddenly my arms and legs bristled with goose pimples.
I started violently when I heard my name being called. I stood up a little wobbly-kneed on the raft and shaded my eyes, only to see Odalie calling to me from the shore. “Oh!” I exclaimed. I don’t know if she could see who I was with on the raft, but I recognized a certain urgency in her voice.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said to Teddy. He nodded and smiled, tight-lipped but knowingly.
“Of course.”
Forgetting completely about the tower, I made a shallow dive from the raft and began swimming diligently toward Odalie where she waited on the shore. I was a little overcooked by the sun at that point, and the water felt colder to me than I remembered it being during the swim out. As I swam I realized I had another sensation, too; I couldn’t help but feel the tiniest bit of threat emanating from somewhere behind me, somewhere still floating idly on the raft.
W
e spent the afternoon avoiding Teddy. It was like a game of cat-and-mouse: We settled into one location, and when Teddy came along Odalie made up a creative excuse to move on to the next. Odalie never said as much, but it was plain to me that Teddy had her unsettled and distinctly on edge. Her open aversion to his presence did very little to soothe the suspicions Teddy had raised with his story about “Ginevra.” I said nothing, but for the remainder of the afternoon I couldn’t help observing how Odalie’s jumpiness increased every time Teddy materialized and tried to join in one of our activities—and boy, did he: a round of golf (a game I had never played and found incredibly boring until he showed up), croquet on the lawn (Odalie taught me the rules of the game, and then promptly taught me how to cheat), even our afternoon tea. (
I
’
ll let you in on a little secret,
she leaned in and said to Teddy, who gazed at her as though in shock that she should finally speak to him.
Afternoon tea is meant to be enjoyed by the fairer sex, not by your lot
.) He was persistent. But Odalie was even more persistent in her evasions and her fevered attempts to display her indifference. Her wonderfully enchanting smile was stretched a little thin by the end of the afternoon, but she was bent on having a good time and not letting him ruin it, or else she had decided she would knock herself out in the attempt to show as much.
I, by contrast, had finally relaxed into having a reasonably good time. The focus of Odalie’s forced hilarity had landed on me, and suddenly she was absolutely breathless to know everything she didn’t already know about me. That afternoon, we sat around a tea-table joined by a handful of the Brinkleys’ other guests (mostly ladies and a few hen-pecked husbands). But despite the number of perfectly voluble and friendly guests at our tea-table, Odalie turned to me in an intimate way and started up a conversation in a confiding voice, as though we were alone. Even in my growing wariness, I couldn’t help but feel more than a little flattered by this turn of events. I answered her readily as she peppered me with questions about my upbringing, and I was surprised at my own eagerness to talk about the childhood I usually kept private. I recounted for her the names of all the sisters at the orphanage, their relative holiness, and some of their more secular flaws. For her part, Odalie seemed curiously delighted by this information, memorizing the statistics of each nun as though I had just handed her a pack of holier-than-thou baseball cards.
I also recounted for her a random selection of memories from my time at the Bedford Academy—recalling how, for instance, all the buildings smelled like wet wool socks but that I’d secretly liked that about it, and how we all had to wear matching light blue dresses and I’d secretly liked those, too, despite the fact all the girls were socially required to act as though they detested them. I told all about the time I’d gotten an award for having the best penmanship in the entire school and how this meant I got to sit nearest the woodstove in our classroom, a position that was very coveted in the wintertime. I recounted how there had been a boys’ school down the road and how there was one boy in particular when I was fourteen who used to walk by the school gate and slip letters inscribed with my name written in very elaborate calligraphy through the bars. I never opened those letters to find out what they said on the inside, and when Odalie asked me why, I told her it was because I knew nothing that was written inside could be as pretty and as perfect as the calligraphy on the outside. When I said that, she turned and looked at me with an oddly appraising gaze, and curiously, I got the impression she approved.
All the while I talked, Odalie listened to my mundane stories as though enraptured. That is, she did until Teddy joined our tea-table. Once Teddy sat down, her mood abruptly shifted. Unexpectedly, Odalie began to volunteer information about her own childhood, which, this time around, she remembered as taking place in California.
“What part of California?” Teddy politely asked. By then, everyone at the table had joined in our conversation and was listening intently, mesmerized, as people so often were, by Odalie’s enthralling manner of telling a story.
“Santa Fe,” she answered.
“I see,” Teddy replied. Either no one wanted to confess they had not paid much attention to the geography teachers of their youth who had faithfully stood at the blackboard with pointer-stick in hand, or else no one wanted to contradict her, for all faces at the table remained pleasantly composed. “And how did you happen to visit all the way out there?” Teddy asked.
“Why, I was born there,” Odalie replied with a sweet smile. I glimpsed a tremor of surprise jolt through Teddy’s posture, but if Odalie detected it, she either did not care or else purposely ignored it. She continued on with her recollections.
Both the sun and the breeze were quite strong that day. As she talked, Odalie’s sleek hair swung under her chin, the fine cut of her bob ruffling in the wind. Little bursts of bright sunshine flashed along the high cheekbones of her face as the yellow-and-white striped umbrella overhead fluttered. Everyone else at the tea-table seemed to put complete credence in Odalie’s words, but this was not enough for her. She could not seem to ignore what she took to be a skeptical expression on Teddy’s face, and I caught the lightning-fast flicker of her gaze as it flashed hotly in his direction several times. I knew this much from my time with her: She was not accustomed to being doubted. Her mouth twitched at the corners. When a woman named Louise cut in to contribute a story about the honeymoon trip she and her husband had taken to the little seaside village of Santa Barbara, Odalie excused herself and stood up abruptly to leave. I watched her storm away, wanting to follow her but feeling compelled to offer a polite excuse to the table.
“Was it something I said?” Louise asked, her face screwed up in earnest puzzlement as she looked around the tea-table for someone to affirm she’d done nothing wrong.
“Heavens . . . isn’t Santa Barbara near Los Angeles? I only brought it up because I thought she’d be tickled to hear a story about her old stomping grounds. . . .”
I took this as my cue for a tidy exit. “I believe she said earlier she has a headache,” I explained to the group. “I’ll go check on her.” I scurried after Odalie, feeling Teddy’s eyes burning into my back as I hurried away.
When I got upstairs to our room, I found Odalie angrily brushing out the tangles the wind had knotted into her usually silky-straight bob. I hesitated. I wanted to ask her about the things Teddy had told me—mostly, I admit, because I wanted her to tell me none of them were true. I was beginning to comprehend just how little I knew about the woman I was now beholden to. I remembered the fragment of gossip I’d heard at the precinct about Odalie and Clara Bow dancing on a table in a movie. The California story, I tried to convince myself, could very well be part of that. So many of her stories
could
be true, if only they didn’t cancel one another out—that was the trouble.
If she looks me in the eye and promises me,
if she says it like she really means it,
I told myself,
then I will decide to believe her, right here and now.
I would believe her, and all the rest of it wouldn’t matter. Sometimes the truth of a situation was about more than simply uncovering the facts; it was about choosing allegiances. I screwed up my nerve and cleared my throat.
“Teddy said—”
But suddenly a hairbrush went flying through the air and smashed against the wall behind me. I followed its trajectory back to its original source and saw Odalie’s face exploding in anger. “Teddy! What does he know! About anything! He’s a pimply-faced undergraduate, for Chrissake! He’s practically in
diapers
!”
I had never seen Odalie unsettled, much less losing her temper. The sight of it was both terrible and beautiful, like an angry comet hurtling down from the sky.
I didn’t mention Teddy for the rest of the afternoon. I exited the room quietly, preferring an afternoon walk along the seashore to a pretended nap alongside a terrifyingly angry Odalie.
• • •
BY EVENING TIME,
Odalie appeared to have returned to her customary cool state of being. Refreshed by her afternoon nap (evidently the sleep I would not have been able to achieve had been a total success for her), she was once again pink-cheeked and even hummed to herself as we dressed for dinner. She seemed to be in great spirits, and her energized mood was reflected in her selection of a bold red dress for the evening. I can still remember how the vibrant hue of the dress contrasted crisply with her dark hair, it made her bob appear as slick and shiny as a pool of spilled ink. She was a picture to behold, and a very striking one at that. Perhaps it’s rather revealing to say so, but while I cannot for the life of me recall what I was wearing that evening, I nonetheless remember every little stitch of black embroidery on her red dress.
The stars were out in full force that evening; they appeared early—as though the Brinkleys had paid them to put in some overtime—showing up as bright points of light punched into the eerie bluish glow of the twilit sky. Dinner was served on the terrace just as it had been the night before (and this time consisted of rack of lamb with mint jelly), and the evening air was pleasantly tepid and salty. With some relief, I noted Teddy was not seated among our particular party. Once we’d come downstairs and Odalie had had a chance to survey the place cards that ringed our table, she became visibly more relaxed. Louise, the same woman who had been unintentionally snubbed earlier that afternoon when Odalie had bolted from the tea-table, was seated on Odalie’s left, and this time Odalie made an effort to listen to Louise as she prattled on. In no time at all they were as thick as thieves, and I had to settle for staring at Odalie’s back as she and Louise chattered and laughed. Of course I was annoyed, but I said nothing. Odalie was making up for her earlier trespass, I figured. So much the better.
Charity takes many forms, you see. And Odalie’s particular form of charitable expertise was to make less attractive girls feel they could, by learning some secret trick, obtain at least a fraction of Odalie’s inherent fluency in charm. But charity, when performed by such jolly unfeeling sharks as Odalie, is not without a sense of irony. Odalie could take a wallflower and flatter her into feeling like the belle of the ball. Just as chance plays no favorites, she sometimes did it for no reason at all, and with nothing to gain from it. Of course, I abhorred all these girls, never realizing I myself was one of them. But (lest we forget too quickly!) Odalie
did
stand to gain something from me. Quite a lot, actually, as it eventually turned out. But I’ll get to telling about that soon enough.
The main course was served, and the air filled with the buttery musk of lamb. I had never tasted such tender meat before; my experience with lamb was limited to its much older relation, mutton, and as the soft morsels of lamb melted in my mouth, I temporarily forgot my irritation over Louise. But by the time dessert was cleared away, it had returned. I had become quite a snob during my months with Odalie, you see, and now I turned my newly haughty gaze on Louise. Despite being quite young, Louise was an annoying, prematurely ancient specimen, with her lackluster dark brown hair piled on top of her head with such a dismal air, it was as though some variety of backyard bird had begun construction on a nest and halfway through gave up on it. Each time she laughed hysterically at something Odalie said, which was obnoxiously frequent, she revealed a top row of slightly crooked teeth. Even her clothing offended me—an offense I could’ve never afforded prior to Odalie’s sponsorship of my own wardrobe. Louise was wearing a dress that would’ve been hopelessly out-of-date if it had not been for the beaded chiffon overlay, and even with the overlay was only slightly fashionable. It was simply not possible Odalie could be genuinely interested in anything Louise had to say, I decided. Perhaps Teddy’s presence set her on edge more than I realized, and now Odalie was trying to fortify her position by acquiring new friends.
“You know,” Louise said, laying a hand on Odalie’s upper arm (as though I weren’t sitting right there to note her bold advances!), “I really ought to visit the city more often. All the best shops, all the ones that carry the chicest merchandise, are there, like you say. Do you know what? I’m going to ring you up, that’s what I’m going to do!”
“Oh yes, please do,” Odalie exclaimed. I scowled an invisible scowl to an audience who, evidently, was beyond perceiving me. Louise extracted a tiny pencil and a little address-book from her purse and took down our number at the hotel.
“Do you really think you could?”
“Could what?”
“Dress me to look like a movie-star?”
“Oh! Are you kidding me? Why, that’d be easy as pie!”
“Here’s my card,” Louise volunteered, extracting a white rectangle from her clutch. Quickly and upon instinct, I intercepted it.
“I’ll take care of that,” I said with a wide, generous smile. “For the life of her, Odalie can’t help but lose every single calling card that comes into her possession!”
Odalie nodded kindly at Louise. “It’s true,” she said. “I’m afraid it’s in better hands with Rose here.”
“Oh,” said Louise as her hand went limp, being more than a little reluctant to relinquish the card to my custody.
“There now,” I said, taking the card and slipping it into my own satin-trimmed clutch. “Safe and sound.” Odalie looked at me and raised an eyebrow. We both knew I would lose the card, but not by accident.
Without a second look at Louise, I snapped my clutch shut and surveyed the scene around us. Dinner and dessert had long since been served and cleared. Abandoned linen napkins littered the table like miniature deflated teepees, strewn amid empty champagne glasses and the stains and scraps of an evening’s feast. From out one corner of my eye I perceived a male figure rapidly approaching our table, and from out the opposite corner I saw Odalie bristle.