Kingsley shrugged and said, “If the Velascos had caught up to her, we would’ve known by now.”
Dead. She’d be dead. Could still be dead.Chin to his chest, Cal refused to voice the possibility.
“Look, the motel clerk is making progress,” Kingsley said. “His doctors think he might pull through. If he does and can place Amelia at the motel that night, my office will open an investigation into her disappearance. Those pliers I mentioned are with the lab. We’ll see if they hit for prints or DNA. In the meantime, I know an investigator in Vegas PD who can help us. He’s a little out there, but he’s got a beat on the Moriartys.”
“A dirty cop?” Cal snickered.
“Not quite.” Kingsley glanced at the jukebox still singing and lights still whirling. Rudy paced behind the bar as if he sensed some trouble ahead. “Here’s the deal, though. You can’t stay here.”
Cal waved off the notion and drained the last of his beer. He also couldn’t live his life on the run. A drunk stumbled from the bar and his stool crashed to the floor, but the two strange men weren’t watching the commotion. They instead exchanged a glance with the man at the jukebox.
“These people know who you are,” Kingsley whispered. “There’s no obscurity in a town like this. Let’s get your things and get you out of here.”
Cal surveyed his surroundings with fresh perspective. The bar lost its charm and gained an abrupt hostility. The walls looked sallow in the ghastly light, and the floors seemed stickier when Cal went up front to pay.
The two men watched as he waited for his change, and the jukebox fired up again as Cal and Kingsley headed for the door. Kingsley pressed on, but Cal’s legs refused as a guitar strummed its melody. A week ago, that tune had brought him comfort.
Cal locked eyes with the man at the jukebox. With a smile, he raised two fingers to his forehead in sinister salute as “Wish You Were Here”filled Rudy’s bar.
TWENTY-FIVE
AMELIA
On the third floor of Mr. Moriarty’s mansion, a shuttered room held many splendid things, most notably a finely wrought table with iron legs and a green marble top. Gold-vein ran through the slab, but the crown jewel sat atop—a black rotary phone.
The sleek thing teemed with temptation, and Amelia admired it at first because there was no harm in just looking. The cord had coiled on itself, so she righted it, but her fingertips caressed the handset, and the dial tone purred in her ear.It’s just a touch,she thought, but that touch longed for more.
Amelia dialed the first five digits of her father’s number, but there were too many sevens and nines, so the mechanical churn cranked on her heart, and her nervous breath hitched with no words to say.
Hi Dad. I’m alright. I’m doing just fine.
In the end, she didn’t complete the call. Shuttered spaces were abandoned for good reason, so Amelia left it alone and straddled a divide bridged by shame. Shame she dialed the first half of her father’s number. Shame she couldn’t dial the rest.
Four days passed since the abandoned call, and the mansion stirred with Gio’s funeral preparations. Each day brought new faces—men with strained eyes and deep scowls; elegant womenand their cherub-cheeked children. The men nursed their grief in the basement with cards and booze. The women gathered in the kitchen for white wine and gossip. Amelia roamed the liminal space between.
Most funerals these days were couched as a celebration of life. The dead didn’t need anyone’s sorrow, and perhaps the living didn’t know how to cope with it. Night after night, mourners celebrated Gio’s life but ignored the grisly circumstances of his death. In the basement lounge, the men undoubtedly picked it apart and examined it fully. The women, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge it altogether.
“Gio was murdered, and we almost died too,” Amelia had reminded Mirabelle. “Are we supposed to just forget?”
“The men haven’t forgotten,” was her reply. “It’s not our place to nag them about it.”
Their place, apparently, was to arrange charcuterie boards, chill the wine, light the candles. They created an illusion of normalcy for men who lived in a world that was anything but.
Those first few nights, Amelia obliged the invitation to socialize and smiled with timid grace as she tried to fit in. Most of the women regarded her with staid aloofness that didn’t reject her outright but still held her at arm’s length. Many already knew who she was, and her story passed on red lipstick whispers when they thought she couldn’t hear.
She heard just fine.
The men weren’t much better. Their verdict of her was gaussian. The majority middle were apathetic, but a handful paid her hostility that silently warned her to fall in line. The other minority pitied her, but from some distant shore like onlookers to a shipwreck. Then there was Emory. These days, chaos and duty nipped at his heels. He’d linger long enough to tell her hello and ask how she was before something else demanded his attention.
Amelia thought of him in peaceful moments where her heart hurt less. Of all her daydreams, the ones of him were the most comforting and sweet. By night, she thought of him in other ways—rough palms parting soft thighs, kisses lush as he filled herup, warmth as he came inside her. Amelia would fall asleep soaked between the legs but never quite satisfied with her own touch.
As Mirabelle tended to the day’s festivities, Amelia shirked her own duty to fit in and curled up with a book in the room of splendid things. When the black phone rang, it scared her half to death only because she still didn’t have any words to say.
Hi Dad. I miss you. I dreamt of Mom again.
It wouldn’t be him. Of course not. But temptation and guilt were strange bedfellows, and Amelia felt she ought to atone for her dalliance with the phone. She put on a poppy-colored sun dress and made herself pretty for the judgmental shrews downstairs.“Hold your head high, sweet baby,”her momma would have said, but Amelia only ever saw her mother in dreams. In the waking world, she carried on alone.
She crossed the foyer where the stained-glass dome above dazzled in a kaleidoscope of color. The parlor clock kept time with her steps, but music pulled her into the hall of photographs where Bob Dylan drifted from the basement lounge.
