Dead Man Waltzing

while I went to school and then did an apprenticeship with a fashion house in Paris-and I had almost convinced myself that the attacker had done me a favor. One can work as a designer, you know, for far longer than one can be a competitive athlete of any sort.”

“Absolutely,” I said, as if my reassurance mattered to her one little bit.

She gave me a wry look, acknowledging my intent, I thought, and picked up a sketchbook. Her pencil whisked over the page and a dress began to take shape. I peered over her shoulder.

“I should not have burdened you with my sad history,” she said, concentrating on the page. “It’s not something I think about normally. Just with Corinne’s death…”

“It’s like part of your history has died,” I said.

“That’s it,” she said, arching thin brows. “Ricky died years ago-lung cancer-and Donald passed away four or five years back. Now it’s like I’m the only one left who knows that part of my story. Memory is a slippery thing, Stacy. When we’re young, we’re sure that things happened as we remember them, that our recollection is true. As we age… well, I think most of us trust our memories less and, maybe, if we’re honest, admit that ‘truth’ depends on one’s perspective. Now my memory of that time is the only truth left. It’s a strange feeling.”

I didn’t answer, feeling completely incapable of saying anything worthwhile in the face of her nostalgia and grief. I thought I understood a little of what she was saying, though, since I’d had similar feelings since Rafe’s death. After a respectful moment, I said, “You know, the police arrested Maurice Goldberg for Corinne’s murder.”

Lavinia’s pencil clattered to the floor. “What?”

I picked up the pencil and handed it to her. “They’ve released him for now and he’s got a good lawyer, but-”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said angrily. “Maurice! Why, he’s the best thing that ever happened to Corinne. I let her have what-for when she told me she was divorcing him, but she’d made up her mind.”

“You knew her better and longer than anyone,” I said. “Did she have any enemies that you know of?”

“Not before she started writing that memoir,” Lavinia said. “The police asked me the same thing.”

“So there was no one…?”

She hesitated, doodling some background around the sketch. “Well, Greta Monk won’t be grieving about Corinne’s death.”

“Who’s she?”

“She calls herself a patroness of the arts,” Lavinia said in a tone that conveyed what she thought of such pretension. “She and Corinne ran a dance scholarship charity for several years. It dissolved when Corinne caught her embezzling.”

“I never heard about that.”

“The board kept it hush-hush, made a deal where Greta repaid the money and avoided prosecution. Something like that. Anyway, the timing of Corinne’s tell-all couldn’t have been worse for Greta, because she’s in line for a position on the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, something she’s been lobbying for for decades. A scandal now would mean she could kiss that good-bye.”

“And Corinne was including the embezzlement story in her book?”

“She was never happy that Greta got away with it in the first place.”

Hm. And if what Marco Ingelido said was right, Corinne would’ve made a point of “warning” Greta that she had a starring role in the upcoming book.

“There.” Lavinia thrust the sketchpad toward me.

The dress was perfect: tight through the bodice, with off-the-shoulder straps and a skirt that floated away from the body like mist. “It’s divine.”

“I’ll work something up for Vitaly.” The suggestion of a grin erased years from her face. “That man! Can you pick the pink dress up Sunday afternoon? I know you’re dancing on Monday, but I can’t have it any earlier.”

“Sure,” I said, straightening. “Thank you, Lavinia.”

“Of course, Stacy. Always a pleasure.”

I left, shutting the door carefully behind me to keep the air-conditioning in. Turning to wave as I passed the display window, I saw that the seat by the drawing table was empty.

Chapter 12

Danielle lived in a block of apartments west of me, in a quiet area off of Taney Road. The complex was spread over several tree-lined streets and consisted of rectangular, yellowy-tan brick buildings so alike that Danielle had once tried to get into her apartment well after midnight and found herself confronting a pissed-off man holding a baseball bat. She’d been in the wrong building. She never admitted it, but I thought too many margaritas might have been a factor. Parking in the lot outside her building and double-checking to make sure it was her building, I trotted up the stairs to her second-floor apartment and rang the bell.

“Come in!”

I pushed open the door, saying, “Good grief, Dani, this is D.C. Don’t you keep your door locked?” I stood in the two-foot-square foyer delineated by faux-wood flooring to distinguish it from the attached living room, which had the kind of pale brown carpet apartment managers think won’t show dirt or damage. There was a gaping hole where the sofa had sat against the far wall, and the walls themselves were a deep aqua green that made me think of mermaids for some reason, instead of the boring taupe they’d been last time I visited.

“This is a safe neighborhood.” Her voice came from the kitchen and I tracked her down. She sat on the vinyl floor surrounded by images torn from various decorating magazines and looked up when I came in. With her red hair in a ponytail and no makeup, she looked about fourteen.

“I am not, not, not going through home fashion magazines,” I said. I’ve never been much of one for obsessing over fabric swatches or room layouts or the kind of makeovers they show in such magazines. Dani, though, has always loved poring over the pages, even as a teenager, when the most she could hope to talk Dad into on the redecorating front was a new bedspread for the room we shared.

“Just look at this…”

I scrunched my eyes closed as she held up a page with a jagged edge where she’d torn it out of some magazine.

“Fine.” She sounded disgruntled but not surprised. Rising from her cross-legged position, she preceded me back to the living room, nudging magazines out of her path as she went.

We spent forty-five minutes rearranging furniture and talking about possible color combinations before her phone rang and she trotted to the bedroom to answer it. I sat in the worn recliner I’d been urging her to get rid of so she didn’t have to match her new couch to its beige-and-maroon-striped upholstery- ick-and picked up an open photo album from the end table. It took me only a second to realize I was looking at pictures from our last family vacation to Jekyll Island. Mom’s invitation had obviously started Dani on a trek down memory lane.

Flipping through the pages, I paused at a photo of me and Dani and Nick crouched over a dead jellyfish on the beach, the backs of our legs covered with sand. We’d been arguing about whether the creature was dead or whether we should “rescue” it. Nick’s idea of rescuing it was to put it in the bucket and keep it forever, despite Mom telling him it would die in the car halfway home, and she wasn’t having a bucket of water sloshing around in the backseat, anyway. Dani wanted to return it to the ocean. I was convinced it was already dead and said so repeatedly. In the end, we scooped it up on a shovel and plopped it back in the water, on the off chance. As I looked at more photos, I saw signs of parental tension I hadn’t noticed at the time. In all the family photos, Mom and Dad were at opposite ends, with us three kids between them. We had plenty of photos of Dad reading on the beach or showing Nick how to snorkel, and Mom building sand castles with me or inspecting a butterfly with Dani, but no pictures of the two of them together. I hadn’t thought anything about it at the time, but Dad had slept in the hammock outside, saying he wanted to enjoy the stars, while Mom had the bedroom to herself.

I felt tears welling and sniffed them back. We’d gone through a couple of hard years after Mom left, but we were fine now. If this album proved anything, it proved that we weren’t by half as happy as I’d thought we were