His eyes skipped around behind my head. There was something else. I waited. Finally, he said, “She made a couple cracks about my mother. Unkind things. It was all I could do not to say something. I didn’t exactly want to repeat what she said to your brother and then have it all be on the record.”
I couldn’t blame him, so I gave him a pass.
“It’s enough he knows someone’s out there impersonating you. What she said about my mother and the description of your tat isn’t really relevant to his investigation.” He paused. “Come on. Let’s get to your shop. You might feel a little better once we get there.”
He was right about that. Out here, I was a sitting duck. For some chick with a camera who had decided I was more interesting than she was so she had to take over my persona.
Good luck with that.
Bitsy’s eyebrows rose high into her forehead when she saw me come in with Jeff Coleman on my heels.
“Just a little bodyguard duty,” he quipped, flashing a grin.
Bitsy’s eyes skirted from him to me. “Your client is already here. She’s on the couch in back.”
I was happy for the distraction.
“Thanks for the escort,” I said to Jeff, wishing I could make some sort of joke or something, but my heart wasn’t in it.
This time he did lean toward me, his fingers brushing my cheek. “You know the number,” he said, then whirled around and walked out, a quick nod to Bitsy, who sat with her mouth hanging open.
“What’s up with you and Jeff Coleman?” she asked. “It’s like you two called a truce or something.”
“Or something,” I said absently, not wanting to get into it with her. I started back toward my client, so I could get to work, but then remembered and turned around. “Has Harry been in yet?”
Bitsy shook her head. “Haven’t seen him at all. This isn’t normal. I hope he’s okay.”
I had no idea what Harry’s reaction to the pictures of us would be, but I pushed everything out of my head as I went back to greet Katie North, my client. She’d come in two days ago and wanted a butterfly on her upper back. I’d drawn up a design that she loved: a classic Monarch, with orange and black markings, its wings spread wide to make a real statement.
“Come on back,” I said as I approached her. She was sitting on the black leather sofa, leafing through a tattoo magazine.
Katie jumped up with a wide grin and followed me into my room. I motioned that she should sit while I went out to get the stencil from her file in the staff room.
“You’ll be facedown,” I explained, showing her how the chair would lie flat, sort of like a massage table. It would be easier for me to tattoo her that way. It would also be more comfortable for her. It wasn’t her first tattoo (she had the Little Prince on her upper arm), but the butterfly was a lot larger and would take longer.
Joel was in the staff room working on a stencil for one of his clients. He looked up when I came in and gave me a concerned expression.
“Are you okay? We all saw the blog with the pictures of you and Harry.”
I caught my breath and bit my lip. He noticed, got up, and gave me a hug. “It’ll be okay. Your brother will find whoever it is who’s doing this. Don’t worry.”
I nodded and pulled away just as my cell phone started to ring. I still had my bag over my shoulder and I slung it onto the light table as I rummaged for the phone. I didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?” I asked tentatively, Joel watching.
“Brett? It’s Harry.”
“Hey there,” I said, uncertain what he was calling me about, and then wondered how he got my number. Bitsy, probably. “What’s up?” I tried to make my voice light, but it didn’t really work.
“That’s what I was going to ask you,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your message. You said you had something important to tell me, that I should call right away. What’s wrong?”
What was wrong was that I couldn’t have left him any sort of message. Because I didn’t have his number.
I sat, my heart back in my throat. It should just have been permanently lodged there, because it was popping up there all the time lately.
“I didn’t call you,” I said, forcing the words out. “Tell me exactly what the message said.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t call me?”
Couldn’t accuse Harry of being a Rhodes scholar. “I didn’t call you. Some woman is impersonating me. I bet it was her who called you. What was the number she called from?”
“Someone’s impersonating you?”
Was there an echo in here? I tried not to be impatient. I needed that phone number.
“Please, Harry, the number?”
“Okay, okay, hold on.” He was quiet a second; then he rattled off a number as I grabbed a pencil from Joel and jotted it down on top of one of the file folders on the table.
“Thanks,” I said. “What did the message say?”
“I told you. You said it was important. I should call you right away.”
“She sounded like me?” It was one thing to make herself up like me, but to mimic my voice?
“There were a lot of sounds in the background, like she was in a car or on a bus or something, but it sounded like you, I guess.” He was having doubts now. “Why do you think someone’s impersonating you?”
I told him about the Ink Flamingos blog and the pictures of the two of us. “She obviously was following us around last night,” I finished.
Bitsy was standing in the doorway, waving her arms around. Oh, shoot. I’d forgotten about Katie.
“Listen, Harry, why don’t you stop by later and we can talk about it. I’ve got a client.” And I hung up.
“Katie’s waiting,” Bitsy said.
“I know. I need to give Tim a quick call.” I grabbed Katie’s folder with the stencil in it as I hit the speed dial number for Tim.
“Kavanaugh.”
I quickly told him about my conversation with Harry and gave him the number for the mysterious impostor as well as Harry’s number, which I now had because he’d called me and it was in my phone.
“I’ll get on it,” Tim said, hanging up.
Katie accepted my apology for being away too long, and I pressed the stencil against her back and peeled it off carefully, leaving the markings behind that I would trace with the tattoo machine. I showed her what it looked like with a hand mirror, and she was thrilled. I told her to lie down as I pulled on a pair of blue gloves, slid a needle into the machine, and dipped it into a small pot of black ink. I spun my chair around so I had a good angle, put my foot against the pedal on the ground, and heard the machine whir to life.
As I worked, I felt my worries slip away, the tension in my shoulders ease. I lost myself in the zone, creating my art on someone’s skin, carefully moving the machine with the contours of her body. When I was in art school, I’d had no idea I’d trade a stiff, white canvas for this malleable one. The black heart on the inside of my wrist, which I gave myself when I was sixteen, had been only the beginning, and I should have known then, with each painstaking and painful stab of that needle, that this was what I was meant to create.
I had someone ask me once whether I’d get into other forms of body modification, but besides the tattoos and the piercings in my ears, I hadn’t considered it. Putting more holes in my body or stretching my earlobes or splitting my tongue just weren’t the same to me as using my body as a canvas. I was a walking art gallery, as much a gallery as Ace’s was out in the front of the shop. That’s not to say I judged anyone else who might want to pursue other types of modification. That was their business and their own journey. It just wasn’t mine.
I was finishing up Katie’s tattoo when something else hit me about what had been going on the last couple days. Daisy was the one who’d lost her life, but somehow this had become all about me. It was wrong.
