He looks back at Tegan, doing a quick but somehow still menacing pass of his gaze over her features, and says, “Nowyou. You may not look like her, but you’remuchmore like your mother in spirit.”
Whatever’s the biggest thing on the proverbial desk, The Cat has just swiped it off, and the crash is deafening. I catch Salem, her laugh trailing away, shake her head shortly at me. A warning, maybe, but I look away from it and focus on Jess again.
I’ve seen this expression on her face before—the storm behind glass—and I half expect her to stand up and walk away again, taking Tegan with her.
This time, though, she cracks the window.
“Let me ask you something, Mr. MacSherry.” Her voice is a pelting, icy cold rain. “How long did our mother stay in this house?”
It’s a good question, one Salem and I eventually planned to ask. But I’m pretty sure Jess doesn’t share our motivations, and she definitely doesn’t share our tactics. Still, if he answers, Salem will probably be thrilled.
MacSherry tilts his head at her. He’s probably thinking about another labyrinthine, obfuscating way to respond to a simple request.
But maybe he doesn’t enjoy being this close to a storm, because after a tense few seconds, he merely says, “Five days.”
No smile.
She nods coolly, then basically lightning-bolts his face off.
“Well, good for you. But my sister and I both knew—lived with—our mother for years, so I hope you don’t think yourfive daysprovides you some kind of special insight. If we have questions about her, we’ll ask you. For now, why don’t you answer the ones Adam has already put to you, and stop wasting our time.”
I know it’s MacSherry who’s been struck by this electricity from her, but I feel a current move through me all the same. In my gut, up my spine, buzzing in my chest. She sounds fierce, protective. Absolutely immune to bullshit. It’s somehow better than a stack of pancakes.
Also, she said myname.
Adam, she said.
I feel warm all over.
It’s so goddamned unprofessional.
The part of me that can still recognize this snaps back to attention, and I’m pretty sure it’s not self-preservation on my part. I don’t even look to see if my actual boss has noticed my reaction. Instead, I look to MacSherry, because Jess is trying to deflect his attention from her sister to me. It’s for her—not for my career and my future hopes for it—that I want to take it.
I expect to have to intervene, somehow—to see him having recovered his smile, readying himself for a smooth comeback. But watching him now, I can see that a tension has settled over him. He’s turning one of the rings on his hand; he’s flexing the foot of his crossed leg ever-so-slightly up and down.
I think of what Salem said to me back in the diner the morning after we first met Jess and Tegan: that Baltimore’s grifts are really about what women have been taught they need from a man.
But Curtis MacSherry looks like a man who’s just met a brick wall.
A wall that’s not impressed by or fearful of his charm, his power, his elusiveness. That cares nothing for what he has to say, that needs nothing from him. He’s clearly so unused to that.
He may not answer any of our questions at all.
“So Baltimore was your roper?” I say.
He meets my eyes, and it’s hard to explain what happens: It’s as though he’s deciding to rearrange reality so that I’m the only person here. Salem is desperate enough for information about Baltimore that she’d be the friendlier audience, but I guess it doesn’t matter to this guy. I guess she gets confined to the same box he’s now put Jess and Tegan in.
It’s labeled,People Who Don’t Think I’m the Most Interesting Man in the World.
I do my best to fake an interested expression.
MacSherry laughs, recovering himself.
“Oh, he’d hate to hear that. No, no, not consistently. Mostly, he worked alone. But this once, he’d done me a favor. It involved. . . ah. Chemistry, let’s say?”
He’s testing me, seeing what I know. Judging by the way he looks at me, and by thatteammateshit he said before, he probably thinks my brain is made of bricks.
But I know what he’s referring to. A few of MacSherry’s biggest grifts involved wine forgeries: brokering huge deals for what enthusiasts and collectors thought were rare, antique bottles. Apparently, these were pretty easy touches. Marks who wanted to seem sophisticated, elite. Marks who rhapsodized about vintages and blooms and flavor profiles. And the best part, for MacSherry, was that they were reluctant to admit it when they couldn’t tell the difference between an eighteenth-century red and a mixture of three different wines from a grocery store.
