“To tell you the truth, I lied a little.”
—PI J. J. “Jake” Gittes, Chinatown (1974)
The next few days zipped by like the monorail on an overcast day. If I wasn’t busy reading pregnancy books with Aunt Mona, I was researching what I could about the Seattle Opera and texting with Grandpa—who was returning home this weekend. And when I wasn’t doing all that, I was working at the hotel, trying to stifle the urge to throw my arms around Daniel every time he passed through the lobby.
During one of our post-work pie breakfasts at the Moonlight, I told him about Aunt Mona’s baby. I checked with her first, and she said it was okay to tell him, as long as he kept it secret until she was ready to broadcast it. He was happy for her, but also freaked out about how she got pregnant.
“Whoa,” he said. “I guess life really does find a way, huh?”
“I thought that was fate.”
“So did I,” he murmured. “Dear God, so did I. . . .”
I wondered if I should get on the pill. Just as a double safeguard. I could handle aunt duty, but that was my limit right now. Maybe my mom was made of stronger stuff than I was. “You don’t want to know what happens when someone gives birth,” I told him, thinking of everything I’d recently learned from all those books Aunt Mona and I read. At this point, I was wondering how any woman ever in the history of time had survived childbirth. Better Mona than me.
By the time Friday rolled around, I’d gotten more used to the idea of Aunt Mona having a baby. My sleep had been more erratic than usual that week, so I was extra spacey, constantly nodding off for several seconds at a time. I never had to lay my head down, or anything. I just kept zoning out, constantly missing several words of any given conversation, which made me frustrated and unusually cranky. And that crankiness is what I blamed when Daniel and I got in a small tiff about going to the opera.
He was getting cold feet about trailing Darke there. He even suggested we should just drop the entire investigation: “We can find something new to investigate. There’s always something weird going on at the hotel. What about the animal rights group? Joseph says he’s almost positive he’s seen SARG members sneaking around the parking garage. Maybe they’re planning another banner drop or some other kind of publicity stunt.”
I didn’t care about the animal rights group. That wasn’t half as interesting as Darke, and besides, we were already committed. “Detectives don’t just give up,” I told him. “We can’t move from case to case without solving anything.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “But if I had to choose between regular Nick and Nora and Nick and Nora Go Wild—”
“You know the real Nick and Nora had both, right?”
“Birdie, my Birdie. I love it that you think they were real,” he said, mouth twisting up. “Fine. We’ll go to the opera.”
Sometimes when people say things, it’s easy to see that their mind is on other things. And that’s what I saw in Daniel. It bothered me a little, but so did a lot of things, including that stupid red-and-yellow framed print I saw in Darke’s house. Where had I seen it before? My mind wanted to connect to something I’d seen when I was younger—at the diner? In our old apartment? That wasn’t quite right. At first I thought maybe it was a logo, but blindly searching for it online only made my eyes swim with beaches and palm trees. Then I thought maybe it was the words below the sunset that had my detective whiskers a-twitching. If I’d only had a few seconds to view the print from another angle, maybe I could have read those words.
I wished I could forget about that stupid framed print, but I couldn’t. And on the night of the opera, on the ferry ride over to the city, I fell asleep in my seat and dreamed that I’d gone back to Darke’s house alone—only to look inside his glass windows and see them turn into the glass of a Houdini water torture cell, and inside, Daniel was drowning. I broke the glass, and as the water streamed out, I caught a glimpse of Darke’s sunset poster again—and tried to focus on the black, swirly mark that was blocking the sun. I saw something in that black mark! But when a foghorn blew in the soupy night air hanging over the Sound, I woke up and couldn’t remember what Dream Me had seen.
Maybe I was just obsessing over something trivial. I tried to put it out of my mind, which was easy to do when I stepped out of the Seattle ferry terminal and saw Daniel waiting for me. He was right about that suit of his. It flattered him. He was polished and pressed, and the suit fit him like a glove. His tied-back hair gleamed under the streetlights.
He was dazzling.
“Jesus, Birdie,” he said with tender eyes. “You look beautiful. Like a dream. Oh shit. Is this a dream? Let me count; hold on.”
“I’ll join you,” I said, smiling, cheeks warm. And we both counted our fingers—one, two, three, four, five.
“All there,” he reported as he touched my flower. “It’s not a lily.”
“It’s a gardenia from our greenhouse. A hybrid called Mystery.”
“For real?”
I nodded. It was the only bloom on the bush, and the white matched my dress, which felt a little like what Daniel would call fate. “It’s my lucky flower,” I told him. “To go with your lucky suit. We should play the lottery tonight. Our chances of winning are astronomical.”
“I think I already won,” he said, kissing my forehead.
I could have stood there with him forever. But we nearly got bowled over by a rude hipster on a bicycle, so we decided to get our lucky selves far away from the terminal. We piled into his car, and he turned on David Bowie. And then we headed out of downtown.
The Seattle Center was home to the World’s Fair in the 1960s. Now it was a sprawling complex that was half grassy pavilion, half tourist attraction—museums, live concerts, and, of course, the Space Needle. The Seattle Opera’s official home, McCaw Hall, was also here, and it looked beautiful at night, its modern glass exterior lit up in purples and blues. And when Daniel and I parked in a garage across the street and strolled over a connecting skybridge that overlooked throngs of people, I was just so happy to be doing something special, I forgot all about everything else.
So much so, in fact, that when we walked under scrims of glass and peered into the entrance—with its enormous modern sculptured chandeliers hanging above operagoers dressed to the nines—I was completely caught up in the fantasy that this was a date. A beautiful, happy date. Prince and princess, out doing glamorous things. It wasn’t until Daniel pointed to a VIP sign that it hit me like a ton of bricks we weren’t on a date at all: We were committing a crime.
Okay, maybe not robbing a bank. I wasn’t even sure if it was considered illegal or just in poor taste to take someone else’s free tickets. But we certainly didn’t belong there, and we were lying like cheap rugs to get inside.
The VIP entrance was segregated in its own little portion of an interior promenade; this was where the big-money patrons entered, the ones who donated large sums of cash to the opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet. They had their own ticket window, coat check, and ushers.
We did not belong here.
You’re undercover, I told myself. Stay calm.
Daniel blew out a long breath and headed straight to the woman running Will Call, confidently informing her that we were part of Bill Waddle’s party, and were we the first to arrive? While they talked, I stood frozen, half zoned out, telling myself that sometimes even the best detectives must bend a couple of small rules to ferret out clues, and this might be the last clue we got on Raymond Darke. So, we weren’t going to waste it, and it was fine. It was all fine. And WHAT WAS I THINKING, COMING OUT HERE? We were going to end up in jail, and who would bail me out? Mona? Cherry?
But I was freaking out for no reason: Daniel turned around with his hands full of tickets and printed opera programs . . . and a look of victory on his face. “I can’t believe they fell for it,” he whispered.
“Did you have to give our names?”
“I just made them up. We’re Nick and Nora Washington.”
“Washington?”
“I couldn’t remember their last name!”
“Charles. But I’m glad you didn’t remember. Might as well have signed in as Sherlock Holmes and John Watson!” I said, lightly slugging his arm.
“Ow!” he whispered, trying not to laugh. “Does it matter? She entered it in the computer and didn’t blink. Must have been the suit. Told you it was lucky.”
Indeed. All praise the suit. Maybe now I could relax and things would go smoothly.
We were the second to arrive in Darke’s party, Daniel confirmed with the ticket agent, and there was still plenty of time before the opera. After noticing some of the guests strolling through a preshow art exhibit that had been set up in the lobby, Daniel asked if I knew anything about the opera being performed. I opened the program and skimmed the introduction. Tonight’s show was a production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly—the story of an underaged Japanese geisha named Butterfly and a jerky US naval officer who gets her pregnant and runs off to marry an American woman. Devastated, the geisha kills herself.
“Jesus. This is . . . heavy,” Daniel said, reading over my shoulder.
“It’s pretty horrible,” I agreed. “Why would anyone want to see this?”
I didn’t want him watching a teen girl offing herself onstage. I didn’t even want him knowing about it, but it was obvious when he spotted it in the program, because his shoulders stiffened.
“We’re not here to see the opera. We don’t even really have seats,” I reminded him. “Let’s go try to find Darke.”
“Yeah,” he said coolly. “Let’s do that.”
We headed past concession stands selling wine and Madama Butterfly T-shirts. Daniel’s strides were purposeful and angry, and I struggled to keep up in heels that I wasn’t accustomed to wearing. Why couldn’t the production have been something nice and easy? What about Carmen? Doesn’t everyone love Carmen? Was all opera problematic? I wish I’d spent more time researching tonight’s performance than what clothes to wear to it.
Or maybe the whole thing was a dumb idea. The hall was filling up with people, and that made it harder to spot someone. We couldn’t find Darke, not in the lobby or on the promenade. Not sipping on wine or chatting with other people in his circle, the ones who were wearing tuxedos and long evening gowns.
“It’s getting swamped in here,” Daniel said. “Let’s split up. You make a pass back to ticketing, and I’ll go upstairs to the mezzanine. We’ll meet back here in five?”
I didn’t want to split up, but one moment Daniel was squeezing my hand and the next he was slipping through the crowd.
Every detective has setbacks. That’s what I tried to tell myself as I wandered through the crowd, eyes peeled for any sign of Darke or Ivanov. But after I’d covered all the ground we’d already walked, circled back around, and stopped at our designated meeting spot, I began to worry less about finding Darke and more about finding Daniel.
Five minutes passed. Ten . . .
I glanced at giant red banners cascading from the second floor. They were red and black, a dark silhouette of a woman in front of a red Japanese parasol that fanned out like the sun.
Like a sunset. Huh.
Something fired inside my head, and I remembered where I’d seen it before: at Mona’s place, on her wall of Broadway posters. It was from a play.
But that wasn’t why it was important. Because it wasn’t the only place I’d seen it.
I pulled out my opera program and quickly thumbed through it, stopping when I got to right page.
It was suddenly clear to me now. That framed poster I’d spied inside Darke’s house, with its yellow sunset inside a red border and its swirly, black shape blocking the sun . . . I was looking at it right now, reprinted in the opera program. The black shape I couldn’t quite identify when we were spying into his windows was clear now: It was a collection of brushstrokes, a vague Asian-inspired script that also doubled as a sketch.
A sketch of a helicopter.
Cherry’s words came back to me from when she was telling me about auditioning for a dancing role in an off-Broadway production at 5th Avenue Theatre: Miss Saigon has a real helicopter that hangs from the rafters and descends onto the stage.
Nerves jangling, I skimmed the text of the opera program as tuxedos and gowns passed me. The program said that Miss Saigon was a Broadway musical set during the Vietnam War, a tragic tale of a doomed romance between an American GI and a Vietnamese bar girl who has his child after he abandons her.
Based on the opera Madama Butterfly.
Everything swirled inside my head: Madama Butterfly. Miss Saigon. Raymond Darke’s framed print. Cherry’s story of meeting Daniel’s father while she was auditioning for Miss Saigon at 5th Avenue Theatre—I pictured myself living in his big mansion that overlooked the city.
My heart raced wildly. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. It could all be a coincidence.
It had to be . . . right?
Then where was Daniel now?
I glanced upstairs, where he said he’d be looking—which also happened to be where the private opera boxes were located. . . .
Hiking up the hem of my gown, I raced up the staircase and glanced around the mezzanine, where patrons clustered around a cocktail bar, drinking and chatting. No Daniel.
I spotted a side hall. An usher stood outside, but when she turned her back to help someone, I slipped past her and immediately found myself in one of the curving halls at the rear of the private boxes.
Red doors lining the hall. The performance hadn’t yet started, but most of the patrons seemed to either be drinking at the bar outside or already in their seats. A lone woman was walking toward me, and as she approached, I recognized her face.
The interior designer, Darke’s wife.
Her head was down as she strode past me, talking rapidly on her phone in a hard-to-place accent. She didn’t even spare me a glance. I rounded the corner and peered through the open door of the first private box, seeing down into the theater below. An expansive curtained stage sat in front of an empty orchestra pit. The seats in front of it were buzzing with people, standing and talking, coming and going. The atmosphere on the floor was much livelier than it was up here. But because the private hall was so quiet, it made it easy to spot the only person standing in front of the door to the next booth. And easy to spot the only man strolling out of it.
I came to a stop a few strides away from Daniel and whispered, “Wait!” But he didn’t even notice me. His gaze was squarely fixed on Raymond Darke, who stilled in the opera box’s doorway, hands on the lapel of his tuxedo.
Darke looked at Daniel. Looked at me. And then he sputtered, “You’re the goddamn kids who went through my trash!”
Words . . . I didn’t have them.
Darke pointed an accusatory finger at Daniel. “Yeah, that’s right. I’ve got you on video, you little delinquent. Perfect shots of both your faces looking straight into the window of my house.”
Cameras were inside the house? Why had we been so reckless?
I was going to have a stroke.
“That’s trespassing,” Darke said. “What are you doing here now? Trying to rob me?”
“I don’t want a damn thing you’ve got, old man,” Daniel said.
No, no, no! Why was Daniel confronting him? We should run now, while we could get lost in the crowds and escape. THIS WAS NOT PART OF OUR PLAN.
“Call the cops, then,” Daniel said, defiant. “I’d expect nothing less from you, hiding in your big house, paying other people to take care of all your problems. Pretending to be someone else. Do you even write your own books, or do you hire someone to do that, too?”
A low-level panic prickled the back of my neck. I’d never seen Daniel act like this. He was inordinately aggressive, and Darke was teetering on fury, and I was on the outside of it all, overflowing with information that I could barely comprehend.
“Daniel,” I pleaded, but he ignored me.
“Should I call you Bill or Raymond?” Daniel said to the man. “Or maybe you have another name you prefer?”
The author’s neck and shoulders visibly stiffened. He waited until an extravagantly dressed couple passed, nodding politely when they greeted him. When they stepped into another box, he squinted at Daniel. “Do I know you?”
Daniel snorted. “Do you?”
“I’ve seen you before,” the author said, his brow a ledge that shadowed his eyes. “Where?”
“Take a good, hard look, motherfucker,” Daniel challenged. “Strain that memory. Strain it all the way back, twenty years ago, to the face of the girl you knocked up.”