Faking It Read online

  He grinned a little to himself, thinking of Nadine’s curly hair and pale blue eyes; clearly she was somebody who swam in Betty’s gene pool. And Gwen, too. If you lined them up, all three of them with those weird eyes, they’d look like an outtake from Children of the Damned.

  “So I’ve met your granddaughter,” Davy said to Gwen, as they reached the top of the second set of stairs. “When can I meet your daughter?”

  “When you’ve had time to rest,” Gwen said without looking back. “My daughters can wear on a person.”

  More than one, Davy thought, and almost ran into Gwen, who’d stopped on the stairs above him.

  “How’d you know I have daughters?” she asked him.

  “Well, Nadine had to come from somewhere.”

  “Maybe I had a son.”

  “Lucky guess,” Davy said.

  Gwen did not look appeased, but she went up the next flight of stairs and gestured to the door on her left. “Four B.”

  Davy put the key in the lock and turned it, but before he could go in, the door to 4A opened and a ghost stood in the doorway, arms akimbo.

  “Dorcas,” Gwen said, smiling brightly. “This is Davy Dempsey, your new neighbor. Davy, this is Dorcas Finster.”

  Dorcas was tall, thin, patrician-looking, and smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, but mostly she was white: short white hair, dead-white skin, huge white artist’s smock. An equally white cat twined around her ankles and then sat down on the landing.

  “And Ariadne,” Gwen said, nodding to the cat.

  “Nice to meet you, Dorcas,” Davy said, not sure it was.

  Dorcas looked him up and down. She did not have pale blue eyes, Davy noticed, which was some relief. She shook her head. “Watch out for Louise,” she said, and shut her door. Ariadne sat on the landing, unperturbed about being stranded.

  “Louise?” Davy said to Gwen. “Who’s Louise?”

  “Dorcas likes to be colorful,” Gwen said, and Davy looked at her in disbelief. “So there’s your room.”

  The apartment held a shabby blue couch, a table painted in blue stripes, two blue chairs, and through an archway, a bed covered in a blue-and-purple crazy quilt with a framed sampler over it. When he opened the door next to the bed, he found a small bathroom with a shower. The place was small, shabby, clean, close to Clea, and even closer to Betty. “Perfect,” Davy told Gwen, who looked around at the room to see what she’d missed.

  “You’re easy to please,” Gwen said, heading for the door. “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “I certainly will,” Davy said, as she shut the door, thinking, Send up your daughters, I think I met one of them last night. He dropped his bag on the floor and sat on the bed, expecting the rattle of ancient bed springs as he bounced on it and hitting a solid mattress instead. Bless you, Gwennie, he thought and then wondered again what he’d said to her to put her off. The bed quilt distracted him, and he tried to make sense of the pattern, a crazy quilt with lots of yellow lopsided diamonds lined with sharp white triangles that looked like teeth. Which meant that either he was deeply disturbed or the quilt maker was.

  He got up to unpack his bag and glanced at the sampler. It was worked in blues and greens, neat rows of alphabets and numbers and a scene of a house flanked by two trees. Davy looked closer at the lettering:

  “Gwen Goodnight. Her Work. 1979.”

  He looked at the blues and the purples in the quilt and then back to the blues and greens in the sampler. There was something around the base of the trees in the sampler, and he leaned in again to see it.

  Wolves. Little purple wolves with tiny, sharp white triangle teeth.

  Gwen was definitely Betty’s mother.

  He unpacked his duffel and went out to reconnoiter Clea’s basement windows, eat lunch, and call Simon, who was suspiciously absent. By the time Davy got back to the gallery, it was afternoon, and he stretched out on the bed to consider his situation and fell asleep. He woke up when someone knocked on the door.

  When he opened it, Betty stood there, holding out a stack of towels. “Gwennie thought you—” she said, and then her eyes widened, and he yanked her into the room.

  She tripped and lurched into him, and he stumbled backward and caught her as she lost her balance. She said, “Ouch!” and he slapped his hand over her mouth and pulled her with him onto the bed.

  “Okay, we’ve been here before,” he said to her, keeping his hand over her mouth as he pinned her to the quilt. “Unless you want everybody in this place to know you’re a burglar, keep your voice down.” She glared at him over his hand, and he said in a more conversational tone, “No kicking. No biting. And don’t have an asthma attack.”

  She brought her knee up and he rolled to avoid her, and caught sight of Dorcas through the open door, watching them, as unperturbed as Ariadne. Tilda shoved him away and herself off the bed with one motion, and stood out of arm’s reach, looking frantic. “How did you get here? How did you find me? What are you doing here?”

  “Renting a room?” Davy said.

  “No you’re not,” she said and shot out the door. He went after her, but she was fast on her feet, and Ariadne got in his way, so he didn’t catch her until they were on the ground floor.

  “This,” Betty said, as she fell through a door with him right behind her, “is the guy from last night.”

  Three people stared at him: Gwen, a pretty little blonde who looked a lot like Nadine, and a tall blond man who had clearly decided to dislike him on sight. Behind them, Steve the dog eyed him warily in front of a huge pink-and-orange bubbler jukebox playing some woman singing “I’m into Something Good.”

  “Hi,” Davy said, not sure what to do next.

  “You rented the room to a thief,” Betty said to Gwen.

  “Actually, I’m not a thief,” Davy said.

  “Oh.” Gwen nodded. “I knew there was something wrong with you.”

  “You’re the burglar in the closet.” The little blonde dimpled at him.

  “The guy who stole the wrong painting?” the tall guy said, hostile as hell.

  “The burglar thing was a one-time deal,” Davy told the little blonde.

  “Evict him,” Betty said to Gwen. “Refund his rent.”

  “We could use him,” the blonde said, and Davy thought, Whatever you want, honey.

  Then the other shoe dropped. “Wrong painting?” Davy said.

  The little blonde held out her hand. “I’m Eve.”

  I’m Adam. “I’m Davy.” He took her hand. “Very pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m Nadine’s mama,” she went on, more wholesome than he’d thought possible in a woman over twenty. “And Vilma’s sister.”

  “And this is Andrew, Nadine’s father,” Gwen said pointedly.

  Damn, Davy thought and let go of Eve’s hand. He nodded to Andrew who did not nod back, which made sense since he’d been ogling Andrew’s wife.

  “And you know Tilda,” Gwen said.

  “Tilda?” Davy said, turning back to Betty, starting to grin. “As in Matilda?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice like ice.

  Davy shook his head. “And you got mad when I called you Betty.”

  “I didn’t get mad,” she began. “I—”

  “How important is it that we get the painting back?” Andrew said to Tilda, and Tilda abandoned Davy in a nanosecond to focus on him.

  “Very important,” Tilda said. “But I can do it.”

  Andrew shook his head at her. “No. You stay out of there. Let this guy do it.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Davy said. “But no.”

  “No?” Eve looked crushed. “Can’t you wait to go to Australia?”

  “What?” Davy said.

  “Nadine said you were on your way—”

  “Oh.” Davy shook his head. “No, it’s not Australia.”

  It would have been fun to comfort Eve, but Andrew already didn’t like him. “I stole you a painting already, remember?” Davy said to Tilda. “Everything