But my mind was also waterfalling with questions. Was there a world in which any of this was even remotely coincidental? And if it was not, how could Jack have predicted or arranged a barroom brawl?
And though I was frightened—of course I was frightened—I was also increasingly flooded with the fury reporters have felt since the first guy walked through the town yelling out the local news: We are only writing about things that happened, not making them happen, so don’t blame us when the light turns on you.
Of course, there was no reason for Jack to be in favor of this story. Although it wasn’t about him and would touch on his strip club only tangentially, Felicity was an escort who’d worked at his strip club, a brilliant fallen angel, accused of killing two people who were apparently loyal customers. I couldn’t prove, and wouldn’t write, that he and Felicity had ever been lovers but... even if Jack was married only “in the Catholic way,” could he really believe that his wife knew nothing of any of these shenanigans? Further, sure, okay, he was a “businessman,” but would Jack’s kind of business be damaged by a story like mine? That is, could he actually believe that he operated in anonymity, if, as Sam had pointed out, some of the mishaps he was connected to were a matter of public record?
Theories were not facts, of course, but if Jack was so adamant about suppressing a story about Felicity, why had he agreed to talk to me? Was it because he was smart enough to know that refusing to talk to me would make him look even worse?
Neither was the stupidness of my own position lost on me.
Here I was, risking my own life, or at least my sanity, certainly my job, to try to help someone so unconcerned with her own fate that she wouldn’t even tell her own lawyer the truth of what happened. If Sam wasn’t lying, Felicity refused to cooperate in her own defense. So why was I bothering? And speaking of Sam, even if he had been the love of my life, and who knew if that was true, that was over, and I’d surrendered my deepest secrets and my peace of mind only to be kicked to the curb for my honesty. Emil Gardener and Cary Church were dead. Nothing could change that. The judicial system was doing its job on their behalf, and Felicity was either stone guilty or content to go to jailfor something she didn’t do. All this was true, so making this my personal crusade for curiosity’s sake was curious to say the least.
Rolling along on those fancy new Firestones, Nell and I headed for her place, grabbing some bagels on the way. We then loaded them with cream cheese and sat dolefully at her kitchen table, watching yet more stupid Wisconsin spring snow feather down on the crumbling back steps. Afterward, I went into my closet at Nell’s, hit the bed, and fell unconscious for eight hours before getting ready to go back to Ophelia for a final time, to pick up my check and have a last word with Lily.
When I stepped through the door, back at Ophelia, I would not have recognized the place—or rather, there was a hallucinatory quality to how much I did recognize it. It looked exactly as it had looked before the bar fight: spick-and-span and orderly, all the bottles, glasses, and pitchers tidily lined up in their places, the ice bins filled. You could never have detected signs of a scrap, much less what my dad, who loved this word, would have called a “brouhaha.” It was only because I knew where to look for it that I was able to find a chip of a couple of millimeters, about the size of a two-carat diamond, in the left lower corner of that vast expensive antique mirror behind the bar. I’d seen that happen when someone nailed the mirror with a full bottle of beer. And still, even with the witness of my own sound memory, I wasn’t sure it hadn’t been there before.
Lily came out of the dressing room. She looked as though she’d been drowned and resuscitated.
“I’m getting too old for this,” she said in lieu of a greeting.
“I was born too old for this,” I said.
“You said you wanted to ask me something, Reenie. What was it? Forgive me for being so blunt but I’m worn-out.”
“Okay, I’ll cut right to it. Why did Felicity leave Jack?”
Lily blew out breath gustily. “Maybe I should quit and get a real job,” she said finally. “Except that real job wouldn’t come with somuch real money, probably. All those lovely tips from the regulars.” I didn’t say anything else, remembering the power of silence, letting the question sit between us. “You can’t quote me on this or even refer to it because I’m one of only three people on earth who knows this.”
“Okay.”
“Promise.”
“I promise. But why?”
“You’ll know when I tell you,” Lily continued. “She left because she overheard Jack talking to another guy one day.”
“She overheard what he said to somebody?”
“I heard it too. It wasn’t so much what Jack said as what the other guy said. And it wasn’t that so much as the way the whole thing felt.” It was early afternoon on a Saturday and Felicity was with Lily in the dressing room. “We were sitting in those big chairs back there behind the costume racks?” I nodded. “We were reading, just us two, when it started. If the door hadn’t been open a crack, I never would have known anyone was out there. But I could see this tall, thin, young blond guy and he was sobbing, he was saying, ‘Please no, please, Jack, no,’ and Jack was showing him a photo. It was a real photo, not on Jack’s phone, a color photo about three by five inches.” She made a box with her hands.
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. If this was a movie, it would have been a photo of the guy’s kid swinging on the swing at his preschool. Maybe it really was that, or something like that. Jack was speaking so quietly, just completely calm, I could barely hear him. He was smiling. He said something like, ‘You knew better than to try this. I always get what is mine. Always.’”
“How come Jack didn’t know you were there?”
“My car wasn’t in the lot. It was in the shop. I gave Felicity a ride from her place that day. It was cold, but it was only a couple of blocks, so we walked from the oil change place to the club. We went in the back. He always comes in the front.”
“What day was it?”
“I’m not sure of the date. It wasn’t really cold yet. I could probably look it up on my credit card bill."
I imagined the scene as the two women listened, as their eyes met, everything clear, no need for a single speculative sentence about what would come next, then Felicity getting up, gathering her things, and leaving, intending to quit not only club, but also leaving Jack, unsure whether he would grasp that, but also how he would take it if he did, if he would try to find her no matter how fast and how far away she went. I pictured Lily staying behind, trying to get her nerves under control. Her position was not nearly so dire despite what she’d witnessed because she didn’t have an intimate involvement with Jack, never suspecting until much later that the next time she saw Felicity, nothing would ever be the same again.
What was Felicity’s actual plan? Did she intend to get not only out of the state but perhaps out of the country too? How long did she think she would have before Jack realized that she was finished with him? A week? A month? If he had bought the penthouse for her, did she want to sell it? She would have wanted to gather up as much ready cash as she could, to make arrangements (with whom?) to have more money sent to her. She was certainly by then fully entrenched as an escort, with clients of long standing, as Finn Vogel had told me. Did she ask others for help, before all her prospects went dark? Did they all turn her away? I couldn’t be sure.
What I was sure of was that, by that point, fate was starting to close in on Emil Gardener and Cary Church.
At last, I began to guess what might have motivated Felicity, which was fear, although that didn’t entirely make sense to me.
