Sweet Liar Read online

  In the doorway stood a big, tall woman with iron gray hair and a look of fury on a face that had once been handsome. Holding aloft a broom as though it were a weapon, she was trying to discourage the watchers from climbing the front steps. Samantha saw two men get smacked in the face with the broom.

  Mike put his hand on her elbow. “I don’t think now is the time,” he said as he began ushering her back toward the car.

  Samantha twisted out of his grip. “No! I’m going to talk to him now. I don’t think I’ll have enough courage to come back here again.”

  “That’s the best piece of news I’ve heard yet.”

  “Mike, can you get me through that crowd? If I can get near enough to that woman, I want to tell her that I want to ask Jubilee about Maxie.”

  Mike thought about wasting time arguing with her, but the futility of the exercise didn’t appeal to him. Besides, the truth was, he wanted to meet Jubilee too and wanted to know if the old man knew anything of importance about Maxie and why she had left her family. Looking over her head, Mike nodded in question to the big black man standing by the car, and the man gave an answering nod.

  Within minutes, Samantha had her hand firmly clasped around the back of Mike’s belt as he plowed his way through the people, the enormous black man behind them. When Samantha got to the bottom of the stoop, the woman with the broom made for the three of them. But the black man caught the broom handle before it touched them, thus giving Mike and Samantha time to call out that they wanted to ask Jubilee about Maxie.

  From the look on the woman’s face, she had heard the name before. With a grimace, she nodded to a child standing behind her, and the boy scurried into the house. Moments later he returned and waved his arm for them to enter. Mike with Samantha close behind him entered the house while their driver returned to the car.

  The inside of the house had the used, worn look of houses that had been bought many years ago, decorated then, and not touched since. The baseboard and the ceiling moldings had been painted probably thirty or forty times over the years and were never washed in between, so the paint, over dirt, was peeling and flaking. The thickness of the paint hid most of the detail of the wood.

  They followed the child up steep, narrow stairs to the top of the house, where it was hot and sunny and looked as though it hadn’t changed since Jubilee was born. It was on the second landing that a man stepped out of the shadows and nearly frightened Samantha to death. He was a tall black man, extremely good-looking, and he had the angriest eyes Samantha had ever seen on a human being. He wasn’t just angry at the moment but angry for a lifetime, angry forever, angry at everyone and everything.

  After an arrogant, flared-nostril look at Samantha, he disappeared down a hallway. Swallowing, and after a reassuring glance back at Mike, Samantha continued to follow the child up the stairs.

  The child opened a door at the top of the house, allowing Samantha and Mike to enter, then left them alone in the room. The instant she saw the room Samantha loved it. Two walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with shelves containing hundreds of piles of what she knew to be sheet music. From the looks of the torn, yellowed covers, the music probably comprised the years from now back to the Flintstones. Dominating the room was an enormous grand piano, one of those black, glossy pianos that men wearing tailed tuxedos played. It was obviously an instrument that was loved, for it was polished and without so much as a scratch on it. A couple of old upholstered chairs with the stuffing protruding comfortably from the arms sat across from the piano.

  Both Samantha and Mike were so intent on looking about the room that they almost missed the tiny man sitting on the piano bench, his head barely visible above the music stand. The TV camera had managed to hide a few of Jubilee’s wrinkles and the lighting had softened the fact that there was no meat on his body, just dark, leathery skin over bones. He looked more like a mummy than a human, and his sparkling eyes were incongruous in his ancient body, as though some showman had found a way to make his mummy exhibit look more realistic.

  Samantha grinned at him and he grinned back, showing a rather fabulous pair of false teeth.

  “My name is Samantha Elliot and I’m Maxie’s granddaughter,” she said, extending her hand to him.

  “I would have known you anywhere. Look just like her.” His voice was good, and Samantha had an idea that he’d never stopped using it, but his hand felt as much like skin as a good-quality piece of leather did. As he spoke, his fingers played softly with the piano keys in an absent-minded way, as though he weren’t conscious of what he was doing; playing the piano was like breathing to him.

  Mike stepped forward and began to tell Jubilee why they were there, about Doc and Maxie, about Samantha’s father, about the biography he was writing.

  As Jubilee listened, he continued to tinkle with the piano keys, a faraway look in his eyes. When Mike stopped speaking, he looked at Samantha. “Maxie used to sing the blues. Sang them as well as any woman alive.”

  Smiling, Samantha sang the words to the song Jubilee had been playing, “Gulf Coast Blues,” ending with the words,

  You gotta mouth full of gimme,

  a hand full of much obliged

  The first look of disbelief on Jubilee’s face was replaced by joy, but a special joy, for here was an old man seeing something that he thought had gone from the earth. For just a moment there looked to be tears in his old eyes. “You sound like her, girl!” he said and turned to the piano fully, both of his old monkey hands going to the keys. “Know this one?”

  “Weepin’ Willow Blues,” she said softly as the man began to pound out the notes. There couldn’t be much strength in that frail body, but what there was, was in his hands.

  Samantha opened her mouth to sing, but closed it when, through the window, sounding like a ghost, came the mournful wail of a trumpet with a mute on it. For a moment she looked at Mike to reassure herself that she was still in the nineties, for a muted trumpet was not a modern sound.

  “Don’t pay him no mind,” Jubilee said impatiently. “That’s just Ornette. You know this or not?”

  Samantha knew without asking that the horn player was the ferocious-looking young man she’d seen on the stairs, and she also knew that she was being tested. If that young man could play something as old and obscure as “Weepin’ Willow Blues,” then he had to have learned it out of love, not to make money on it. She also knew without being told that he didn’t believe a little blonde woman could sing the blues.

  Opening her mouth, Samantha began to wail the old song about a woman who’d lost her man. At the end came the staccato verse:

  Folks I love my man

  I kiss him mornin’ noon and night

  I wash his clothes and keep him clean and try to treat him right

  Now he’s gone and left me after all I tried to do

  The way he treats me, girls, he’ll do the same thing to you

  And that’s the reason I got those weepin’ willow blues

  When she finished, Jubilee didn’t say a word, but Samantha could tell from his face that she had indeed sung the song correctly. There was that look that needed no words to explain it: You sound just like her, hung in the air.

  On impulse, while both Jubilee and Mike were staring at her in wonder, she went to the window and yelled angrily in challenge in the direction of the horn player, “Did I pass, Ornette?”

  At that, both Mike and Jubilee burst into laughter, Jubilee sounding like an old accordion that had a few holes in it.

  “Sassy like her too,” Jubilee said, nearly choking. “Maxie was never afraid of anybody.”

  “She was afraid of something,” Mike said soberly, “and we’d like to find out what it was.”

  Jubilee would tell them nothing about Maxie. He kept playing the piano, asking Samantha if she knew this song and that and repeating that he hadn’t seen Maxie since the night she disappeared. When Samantha asked him if he had any idea why Maxie had disappeared that night, he mumbled that no, he didn’t.