Yesterday's Stardust (29 page)

Nicky tossed his jeans over a chair and flopped onto the bed. Five minutes later, he was still staring at the same spot of light on the wall. And thinking about the same girl.

So Todd’s e-mail earlier in the day hadn’t been just idle conversation. Sandwiched between the cost for an oil change for the Javelin and “Want to go out on the boat on Sunday?” was a seemingly casual comment: “Got a woman doing a ride-along tonight. Always makes me nervous.”

Mighty strange coincidence that Dani was working on a story in the middle of the night.

Let the battle begin, buddy. You may have sirens and flashing lights, but I’ve got a time machine.

He sat up, turned on the lamp, and grabbed the photo album he’d taken from the shelf in his grandfather’s room. A portal—for stepping into a simpler time. With a beautiful blond at his side.

He’d driven to the nursing home on Monday with an agenda, but it hadn’t been one of Nonno Luca’s better days. He was glad Rena hadn’t joined him. Nonno had yelled at him for not bringing the books for him to look over. When he’d explained, as he had often before, that they kept everything on the computer now, his grandfather had thrown a glass of water at him. “My sons I can’t trust. But you, I had hopes for.” The words stung, even if, like he’d told Rena, Nonno wasn’t always responsible for what he said.

He never got to voice the question about Francie Tillman he’d come to ask. But he did get pictures. He’d deliberately not mentioned them to Dani on Monday night. The timing had to be just right.

The first photos in the album were taken in 1924, the year his grandfather was born. One shot, of his great-grandmother holding her newborn, was taken from across the street from the restaurant. Renata Fiorini stood next to a Model T. She wore a dress with a low belt like the one Francie had drawn in her diary. Around her neck was a long string of pearls. It was the kind of scene Dani had described the day they’d stood on the sidewalk and imagined the street the way it had been decades ago.

Most of the girls he knew wouldn’t have a clue what life was like in the Roaring Twenties, but this girl wanted a time machine. He couldn’t do much better than that. When he got to the last black-and-white image, he yawned.

She might have spent the night cruising with Todd, but tonight she’d be all his, and that pale boy had nothing on him. He came from a long line of men who knew how to romance a lady.
And
he had pictures.

He turned off the lamp.
All’s fair, buddy.

“You gotta have some talent to start with.” Scope outlined an
H
in white on the brick wall and handed the spray can to Dani.

Evan looked on through the lens of his Nikon, laughing. “She’s got talent.”

Scope appeared skeptical. “It’s art, you know? Not everyone can do it.”

Dani slipped her digital recorder into her shirt pocket and took the can. She stepped back to take in the whole picture. Evan had set the tone by suggesting they create something upbeat and explaining that young children lived in the house. So far, a smiley-faced sun peered out of a swirling, Van Gogh-like navy background covered with stars and indecipherable letters. The boys claimed all of their names were written on the brick canvas, but Dani’s imagination didn’t stretch that far. Scope had decided it needed a “Happy Day” message—”like the hippies did.” She guessed this was a far cry from the masterpieces he once did.

“How did you learn?”

“I watched. I copied. I drew a whole lot of stuff on paper before I ever picked up a can of paint.”

“Let’s see if I’ve learned anything from watching you.” She outlined an
A.

“Not bad. Try a couple more.”

“Thank you.” She stepped back, thought it out, and painted the next three letters. “It’s fun.”

Evan coughed. “But not cool to do it illegally.”

Way to shut them up.
“Of course.”
But we could get to that part after we get them to talk.
She handed the can back to Scope. “You guys each do specific things. Does everybody know what his job is before you start?” She turned around to include the two who sat like mute, slouchy statues on a picnic table bench.

Back resting against the table, skinny legs stretched out, Broom stared at the wall. His face wore a mask of boredom. Next to him, Zip sat bent over, head down, with his arms folded across his belly. As close to a fetal position as a kid could get with his feet still on the ground. Dani waited for an answer. Finally, Broom nodded at Scope. “He’s the boss.”

He speaks!
He still hadn’t cracked a smile or made eye contact, but three words was a start.

Scope nodded. “I’ve been doing it longer, but they’re learning fast. I do most of the designing and outlining and they do fill-in.”

The kid was a strange dichotomy of tough guy and compassionate big brother.

“Do you have the whole picture in your head before you start?”

“Sometimes, but other times it comes to me while I’m doing it. The wall talks to me.” He finished the lettering and nodded to Zip, who somehow saw the signal even though he appeared oblivious to the world outside his small personal space. He got up, picked out a yellow can, and began filling in the letters.

Evan slung his camera strap over his neck. “I hear there’s food in the fridge. Anyone interested?”

Scope nodded. “Sounds good.”

As Evan headed for the house, Scope sat at the table and Broom, on some unspoken cue, turned around and faced him. Dani sat next to Scope. “You guys spend most of your time together, huh?” She looked at Broom.

“Yeah.” Not surprisingly, it was Scope who answered. “These guys are like my brothers, you know?”

“A lot of kids join gangs to get that sense of belonging, but you three seem to take care of each other.”

Scope looked over Broom’s head at the wall. Dani followed his gaze, watching Zip shadow Scope’s yellow sun with orange.

“Gang bangers say they protect you, but being part of a gang makes you a target. Might as well paint a bull’s-eye on your back.”

“You know people who are involved?”

“Sure.”

As Scope answered, Broom raised his head. Dani watched the muscles in his neck tighten and relax as he swallowed. “Scope got me out.”

The Hallelujah chorus burst forth in Dani’s head, but she switched the volume off, took a slow breath, and calmly asked. “You were in a gang?”

Scope raised and lowered one shoulder. “Almost. They tried conning him, but I knew their scams. My dad and me and some of my dad’s friends stood up for him.”

Broom nodded. “The Vamps got a freaky way of recruiting. They beat people up then send one of their guys to beat up their own guy like some superhero.”

Icy fingers slithered along Dani’s spine. “Good cop, bad cop.”

“Yeah.” Broom held out his arm and showed off a diagonal scar. “I got jumped after school a couple years ago. While one guy’s poundin’ on me, another one suddenly shows up and smashes the first guy, then tells me I can’t be alone in that part of town, ever, and I need to join his people so they can watch my back. I just moved here. I was one scared kid, so I said I wanted in. Scope lived next to me and somehow he heard about it, and he and his dad went all Batman tough and got me out.” A slight smile rippled the skin on one side of his mouth.

The slithering cold on her back and the sick feeling in her gut overrode the sense of victory over getting the boy to talk. She’d heard another version of his story in Rena’s voice.

Scope’s hand had been clenching and unclenching the whole time Broom talked. “Once somebody gets jumped in they can’t get out without getting hurt bad…if they’re lucky.”

Evan appeared with a tray of sandwiches, chips, and a pack of soda. As Scope reached for a sandwich, Dani caught a glimpse of a tattoo on the inside of his right arm. It appeared to have been created in two stages. Bluish-black lines formed a shape she was familiar with. A stylized number. But darker ink formed two bars, one sticking out of the top of the 7, the other at a right angle to it.

Forming a cross.

Nicky spread a damp towel over a bowl of dough as he waited for Dani’s head to bob up with another nugget from the diary. He didn’t have long to wait.

“Francie wants to know who came up with ‘When the cat’s away, the mice will play?’ Her cat is away for three days and she’s playing.”

Nicky touched the tops of two cake layers cooling in pans. He wiggled an eyebrow at the girl who sat at the end of his server counter then set a plate on top of one of the layers and turned it over. “You may have to bleep out parts of this.”

“Nooo. Our Francie isn’t like that.”

“Right. She’s a nice girl who just happens to hang out with gangsters.” His chest tightened. “Speaking of which, what are you learning from my sister?”

Dani’s gaze dropped to the bruschetta she’d been nibbling on. “She’s opening up.”

“Good. What can you tell me?”

“If I want her to keep talking, nothing.” Her nose crinkled as she gave what seemed to be an apologetic smile.

He eased the second cake layer onto a plate then washed his hands and took the photo album off a top shelf. He sat down across from her. “Guess I’ll have to trust you.”

She looked into his eyes with a steadiness that made his throat constrict. “I guess you will.”

The air conditioner was worthless tonight, and he hadn’t even turned on all of the ovens yet. He handed the album to her. “I can take a break for a few minutes. I wanted to show you this.”

She ran her fingers across the worn suede cover and the tooled letters spelling out P
HOTOGRAPHS.
She sat back and looked at him. Waiting for an explanation. Not asking questions.

“My grandfather is in a nursing home in Milwaukee. I went up there on Monday to ask him about Francie.” He pressed his lips together to dampen the Fiorini charm rising to the surface. It scared him to realize how much like his father he could be if he didn’t rein it in. But there would always be one significant difference.

Dominick Fiorini, unlike his father, was a one-woman man.

“Go on.”

He could almost hear the interrogation wheels grinding under the force of her restraint. He hated to disappoint her. “I didn’t get a chance to ask. My grandfather has good days and bad days, and this wasn’t a good one.”

“Well, we know that Francie was here in 1928. When was your grandfather born? Would he even have been old enough to remember her? And if he did, is there a chance—”

Once again, he stopped the flow of questions with the tip of his finger. It gave him a strange sensation…not of power, more of awe that she so readily responded to his touch. What would their relationship look like if he exercised no control on the charisma embedded in his DNA, and she let loose every question that crowded her mind? “If we keep reading we just might find the answers to all our questions.”

“I suppose we might. But pictures first.”

He walked around the counter and sat beside her. As he opened the album, Dani pressed her hands together as if she were praying.

Black corners fastened the photos to black paper. Captions were written in white ink.

“Aww. What a cutey.” Dani pointed to a picture labeled “Luca Fiorini, August 1926.” “I see the family resemblance.”

“All Italians look alike.”

She laughed and turned the page. She commented on hats and dress styles for two more pages then stopped at an over-exposed picture of two men and a woman sitting on bar stools. Each had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. The caption underneath read “Stardust 1928.”

“Either they were drinking root beer, or that place was illegal.”

“I asked my grandfather about that one years ago. I don’t think I got a straight answer. My great-grandmother was an activist in the temperance union, and family legend says she kept a pretty tight leash on my great-grandfather. I don’t think he would have been allowed in a place like that.”

“I’ve read some taverns switched to soda and ice cream to stay open.”

Nicky pointed out the row of bottles in front of a massive mirror behind the bar. “This doesn’t look like an ice-cream parlor.”

“Sure it does. That one’s chocolate syrup and that one’s butterscotch.” She nudged him and turned another page.