“Where to now, Paris?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. We could wait for BB to call us and then ask him how a twelve-thousand-dollar piece of jewelry’s gonna be fifty thousand, or maybe what the Wexler kids had to do with it.”
“You think he’d tell us that?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe if we threatened to drag him out here if he didn’t.”
We were approaching Baloona Creek when a woman dressed in a long formal gown and carrying a small brown bag ran in front of Ambrosia’s car. Fearless hit the brakes and swerved to miss her. When she came up to the window I couldn’t speak for a moment because of the shock of almost running Rose Fine down.
“You okay?” Fearless asked.
“Yeah,” I said before realizing that he was talking to the crazy woman.
“Help me get away from here,” she cried desperately.
“Hop in,” Fearless said.
He jumped out and ushered her in through the rear door. Then he got back in the driver’s seat and drove off as if he were a chauffeur and I was his assistant.
“Fearless?”
“Yeah, Paris?”
“What are we doin’?”
“I don’t know. Where you wanna go, Miss Fine?”
“Anyplace not near that house, young man,” she said. “Anywhere I can get away from them crazy people.”
Fearless nodded slightly and continued on. I guess he figured that no matter which way he drove he’d be meeting her request.
“Miss Fine,” I said.
“Yes, young man.”
“I’m Paris. And I’d like to know why you want to run away from your own home.”
“Because it’s all gonna come out now. All of it. Winifred won’t be able to stop the walls of Jericho. No she won’t. But she’s just willful enough to believe that she can.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Everything we have will be squandered, stolen, and burned in hell,” she said. “Too many secrets, too many lies.”
“What kind of secrets?” I asked.
“I was a prisoner in there. No money and no car. And now not even no love.”
I had very little confidence in the mad-eyed woman’s ability to understand or communicate the truth. I had no idea what Fearless planned to do with her. But there we were, so I played the game as if I were privy to the rules.
“Who was Bartholomew’s mother?” I asked.
“That would be Ethel,” Rose said. She was staring out of the window, smiling at the passing strawberry farms as if they were strange new sights in a distant land.
“She’s the one that started the beauty business?”
“No,” Rose said, turning her cracked grin on me. “Our mother started the beauty product company. She named it after Ethel because Ethel was her firstborn and her favored girl. Ethel was the oldest, then came me, and then Winnie.”
“And so you all owned the business equally?”
“Oh yes,” Rose said. “Mama made sure that we were always equal. She had her favorites, but blood is blood.”
“And Ethel was the favorite child?”
“Oh no,” Rose assured me. “It’s always a boy that has his mother’s heart.”
“You have a brother?”
“Of course we do. I thought you knew. Oscar is our brother.”
“The butler?” Fearless asked.
“It’s his own fault,” she said, reciting a well-rehearsed speech. “When he was a young man he insisted to be paid for his part of the beauty supply company. We bought him out and he lost it all inside of three years. Winnie told him if he wanted to come back he had to work for us.”
“She made him a butler?”
“That was his idea,” Rose said. “Yes sir. He didn’t want to have anything else to do with the outside world. No business, no meetin’s, no bein’ in charge’a anything responsible. All he wanted was to work at home and hide away from how stupid he was. We didn’t want him to be our servant, but Winnie said that he had to work if he wanted to eat our food.”
“I know that,” Fearless intoned.
