ourselves a genuine mystery here, and that TV chick is gonna love that. Bet those rich ladies, they don’t got a treasure like this in their section.”
As if his words were the magic abracadabra that made them appear, we heard rustling through the weeds and the sound of Greer’s squawking as she instructed her cameraman to start filming.
“Let’s not tell them. Not yet, anyway.” Making sure that fat spider was long gone, I retrieved the faded orange fabric, wrapped the coin in it, and tucked it all back in the box. I dropped the whole thing in an especially dense patch of spiny weeds behind Absalom’s voodoo altar headstone, and fluffed the taller weeds so that they wouldn’t look as if they’d been disturbed.
“I’d rather do a little research before we let anybody know what we’ve found,” I said, when what I meant was that I wanted to talk to Jefferson Lamar before I showed the coin to anyone else. “That way when we reveal we have the coin, we can show how good we are at research, too.”
I don’t think any of them agreed with me, but I never had a chance to find out because just then Greer and her cameraman showed up.
“Keep doing what you were doing.” She gestured in a way that told us to get busy and act natural all at the same time. “We just came to see what Team Two is up to.”
She wasn’t kidding when she said
“Not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as the section we’re working on,” Lucinda Wright commented as she adjusted her picnic basket over one arm. She shook her head sadly.
“Not nearly as promising,” Katherine Lamb said to Gretchen Hamlin.
Bianca didn’t speak a word. She just gave me a look, head to toe, that said she was assessing my fashion sense.
It was the first I realized there were bits of rotted wood and a streak of dirt across the front of my emerald green scoop-necked tee.
“Well…?” Her top lip curled, Greer gave my team a collective look that clearly said we were a disappointment. “You’re supposed to be doing something. Anything. Anything?” This time, her gaze fell on me.
“We were just-”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” She waved away whatever explanation I was about to give as inconsequential. “We need a scene where we introduce both teams. I thought we could do that now. You know, like you’re working in this section over here…” She waved my team to one side. “And Team Number One…” When she turned to the other team, she smiled in a way she didn’t when she looked at the rest of us. “You’ll come through over there, between that mausoleum and that headstone there with the angel on top and-”
“I thought this was reality TV.”
Greer laughed. Not in a that-was-funny way. More like in a you’re-incredibly-stupid way. She rolled her porpoise eyes. “Get real, Ms. Martin. The appeal of reality TV is that it’s real without being too real. You know what I mean?”
Before I could tell her I didn’t and I never wanted to, she dismissed whatever answer I might give.
“So let’s get you over here, Team One. Mae, you’ll be telling your team all about the cemetery. That way, we’ll be able to provide our viewers with some historical background without hitting them over the head with it. So you’ll want to mention that Monroe Street was officially founded in 1841, but that burials have taken place here since 1818. And remember to say something about how it was an ideal spot for courting. Couples walked the grounds arm in arm!” She sighed. “It was all very beautiful, and very romantic.”
“And yuck!” Really, I was supposed to keep quiet when this sort of nonsense was about to be filmed? “That’s sick and twisted.”
“It’s history.” If Greer’s eyes were lasers, they would have cut right through me. Not so the look she turned on Mae Tannager. “So you’ll be doing all that, and Team Two, you…” As if she hadn’t given any thought to what she was going to do with us, she glanced around. “Over there.” She waved toward the falling-down mausoleum. “Once Mae is done with her background information, that’s when you’ll walk over and we’ll do shots of each of you.” She glanced over my team, and when she got to Sammi, she leaned closer to her cameraman. “Careful with that one,” she said quietly, but not quietly enough. “Better just keep the camera on her face.”
Good thing that camera wasn’t on Sammi right then and there; she gave Greer the finger.
As ordered, we trudged over to the mausoleum to wait. Well, some of us trudged over to the mausoleum. I noticed that Absalom kept his distance, just like I saw that in spite of her one-finger salute, once she was away from the group, Sammi didn’t look as angry as she did upset.
Remember how I said that I knew better than to go chasing after ghosts? Well, I knew that having a heart- to-heart with Sammi was not in my best interests, either. Still, I couldn’t help myself. There was something about seeing tough Sammi with her eyes bright with unshed tears that made me feel like it was my duty, as team captain, to say something to cheer her up. I walked over to where she was leaning against the mausoleum, her leg (the one with the electronic monitoring device on it) bent and one foot against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest.
I smiled, but since she refused to look at me, it didn’t much matter. “Don’t pay any attention to Greer. She obviously wouldn’t know fashion if it came up and bit her in the butt.”
She snorted. “And you would?”
I tried not to take the comment personally. I mean, coming from a woman in red shorts and a purple shirt with a saint on it, how could I? “I know a thing or two about the way to dress.”
“For an old-folks’ country club, maybe.”
“How can you-” I bit off the rest of my comment. Sammi’s opinion was just that, an opinion, and dead wrong, besides. She only said what she did because she was itching for a fight. I refused to be the one to give it to her. I didn’t care enough, in the first place. Plus fighting teammates would make Greer salivate, and who knows what Bianca would think of me if she saw me duking it out with Sammi.
I held my arms at my sides, the better to control my temper. “Greer doesn’t shop where I shop, or where you shop.”
Sammi’s top lip curled. She plucked at her purple top. “You think this kind of quality comes off the rack? I make my own clothes. I design them, too.”
OK, so we didn’t share one iota of the same fashion sense, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t impressed. Suddenly, the whole saint-on-the-shirt thing made sense, too. “You’re name is Sammi Santiago. And Santiago, that means-”
“St. James. Yeah.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “That’s how you can tell it’s one of my own designs. I put St. James on all my stuff somewhere. You speak Spanish?”
“Nah. But I know that much. I know creativity when I see it, too. You making your own clothes, that’s really cool.”
She controlled a smile. “You think so?”
“I think that’s more than I could ever do. It’s way more creative than Greer in that gray suit of hers.”
“Yeah.” Sammi looked toward where we heard the sounds of genteel laughter coming from the section where Greer was filming. “She needs to get rid of those man shirts. If she wore that suit with a bustier-”
“That’s too scary to think about!”
We shared a laugh.
It wasn’t much, but it was a small inroad. Feeling more comfortable with Sammi than I had since she stepped out of that van and into my life, I did my best to make small talk. “You ever think of selling your clothes?” Believe me, I was in team-captain mode here, I wasn’t interested in buying. “There are some boutiques over in the Tremont neighborhood that-”
I guess that was the wrong thing to say. Sammi grumbled a curse and walked away.
As it turned out, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing after all. It meant I didn’t have to deal with Sammi or with introducing anybody to anybody else when Quinn showed up.
“I thought you’d be working.”
I gave him a look that told him I was. “Didn’t think I’d see you today.”
“Hey, I’m a man of my word.” He was carrying a slim file folder, and he held it up for me to see.
“Is that-”
