Chapter 9

I was up in my office the next morning, hours before the first show, when I heard someone banging on the lobby doors. In my experience, someone banging on the lobby doors seldom led to anything good, so I made my way down with caution.

A moving van was parked in the loading zone, and a guy wearing shorts and carrying a clipboard stood next to an enormous box at the door.

I unlocked and opened the door. “I think there’s been a mistake.”

“Is there another Palace theater around here?” He thrust the clipboard at me. “Sign here.”

One box, the invoice said. From an address in LA. Ted’s address.

“Ooh! What is it?”

I jumped about a foot as I heard Trixie’s excited voice behind me. The delivery guy looked at me like I’d lost my marbles. Fair enough. I turned around and gave Trixie a “just a minute” look.

“What is it?” I turned back to ask the guy.

“I just move ’em,” he shrugged.

Again, fair enough.

“Can I ask you to bring it downstairs for me?” It looked like a wardrobe box, the kind you hang clothes in for a move. A few months ago Ted had paid someone to pack up all my possessions from the house I’d shared with him in wedded ignorance, and he’d had everything delivered to me here. This box had probably just been forgotten. It belonged with the rest of the them, still unopened, down in the basement prop room.

“Is there an elevator?” the guy asked.

“No, but there’s twenty dollars,” I offered.

“I’d be happy to.”

Fair enough.

  

“Open it! Open it!” Trixie urged as soon as I’d seen the delivery guy out and returned to her in the prop room.

“I don’t even know what it is,” I told her.

“That’s why you have to open it, you dope.”

“I do know what it is,” I reversed myself. “It’s clothes from my old life, and I don’t want them. I don’t want any of them.”

The prop room was downstairs, below the stage. The room was large, with high ceilings and brick walls, and was a gathering place for junk that had accumulated over the long history of the theater. Bits of sets and racks of costumes from the time when the Palace was on the vaudeville circuit, along with furniture and equipment that nobody had ever gotten around to throwing away. Since the delivery from Ted back in January it had also held twenty-two boxes containing the remnants of my former life. I hadn’t known where else to put that much stuff until I felt like I could deal with it. The new box fit right in.

Trixie put her hands on her hips and shook her head in exasperation. “Why, Nora Paige, you’ve been putting this off and putting it off and I just can’t see why. They’re your things. Don’t you want to go through them? Your clothes. Gee, if I could wear something new I’d jump at the chance.” She looked down at the wide-legged trousers of the snappy usherette’s uniform that she’d been wearing since 1937. “Not that I don’t look cute in this,” she dimpled.

“Cuter than anyone has a right to,” I assured her. Especially anyone her age. “But I can’t get wrapped up in all of this now. I don’t have the time. Tommy’s been arrested for murder, and—”

“And that has nothing to do with you, does it?” Her hands remained on her hips, determination written on her face.

Well, not really. Although it felt like it did.

“So open it!” She clapped in excitement. “At least open this new one.”

I wavered.

“Why, I bet the clothes in here are just grand,” Trixie said, passing her hand through the corner of the box. It was taller than she was. “And you know if they stay boxed up down here they’re going to start to smell all basement-y.” She wrinkled her pert nose.

That was a good point. However much my old wardrobe didn’t suit my new life, I didn’t like the thought of ruining good things just because I couldn’t face the memories they held. If I didn’t want them I should donate them. But first I had to steel myself to see exactly what Ted had sent before he’d sold my house.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if this is where that stinker husband of yours hid all the money?” Trixie asked.

“Hilarious,” I told her. “But let’s not get our hopes up.”

I started picking at the tape on the large wardrobe box. I assumed the clothes I’d last seen six months ago—designer jackets and chic sleeveless dresses more suited to power lunches at the Ivy than slinging popcorn and sweeping the stage—would be hanging neatly inside.

“Ooh, I can’t wait!” Trixie said. “I bet it’s something good.”

One satisfying tug and the top of the box was open. I folded down the front to see what was inside.

“Gowns,” I said. Maybe half a dozen, all carefully packed in tissue and hung on clear acrylic forms that gave them shape.

Trixie squealed. “They’re beautiful! Take them out! Take them out right now so I can see them!”

I pushed the tissue aside. One dress was red, with long sleeves and a deep V-neck, sequined to within an inch of its life. Another was sheer and white with elaborate crystal beading and an empire silhouette. The third was a pink satin strapless with a huge bow on the hip.

“Oh, Nora, they’re wonderful. I can’t believe you ever wore anything this gorgeous.”

My mouth had gone dry, so it took a moment for me to answer her.

“I didn’t.” I finally said. “These aren’t my gowns.”

  

Ninety minutes later I’d opened every box Ted had sent back in January. I’d found books, clothes, shoes, and handbags, all of them mine. There was a box with the wineglasses we’d gotten in Venice, and the silver coffeepot we’d picked up at a Paris flea market. One held the contents of my desk, including my lucky fountain pen and scripts I’d been working on a decade ago. There were a hundred things that might have made me break down with emotion, but nothing else that didn’t belong to me.

Why had he sent these? Why now? And what did they mean?

I rolled a costume rack over and unceremoniously dumped everything it held onto the floor. Then I carefully, carefully, carefully took each of the gowns out of the wardrobe box and hung them on the rack.

“Nora, you’re right.” Trixie shimmered with excitement. “These gowns are famous.”

“These gowns are iconic,” I said. “Every damn one of them.”

Both the sequined red and the strapless pink had been worn by Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, Marilyn and Jane Russell), and the white was what Audrey Hepburn had worn to the ball in My Fair Lady (1964, Hepburn and Rex Harrison). They were joined on the rack by an ethereal blue chiffon number in which Grace Kelly had wafted around the South of France in To Catch A Thief (1955, Kelly and Cary Grant), a short red flapper dress slit to the waist that Cyd Charisse had used to lethal effect in The Band Wagon (1953, Charisse and Fred Astaire), and a lavender-gray ballgown in which Judy Garland had left it all on the stage in A Star is Born (1954, Garland and James Mason).

Trixie stood behind the rack, her head just visible over the neckline of Judy’s ballgown. “How do I look?”

“I’m not sure it works with the hat.”

She laughed and cocked her little round cap further to the side, curls bouncing as she did so. “Nora, this is amazing! Why didn’t you tell me you had all these dresses?”

“Because I didn’t,” I said. “I’ve never seen them before. Except in the movies.”

I stared at them, biting my lip and trying to figure out how six of the most stunning costumes in movie history had wound up in my prop room, while Trixie chattered on about how beautiful they were. “Gee, I wish I could wear them,” she said, sweeping her arm through them all. She turned to me. “Did they come with gloves and shoes and things?”

I shrugged, still thinking. She gave up on me and went to the large wardrobe box, peeking inside. “No gloves,” she announced. “But, say, Nora, there’s an envelope down there.” She disappeared into the box. I peeked over the top and saw her crouching at the bottom, unable to pick up a thick white envelope.

“Careful, I’m going to tip it over,” I said, although it wasn’t as if I could hurt her.

As soon as the envelope was in my hands I recognized the stationary. There was a whole box of it with the things from my desk. I tore it open and stared in disbelief at the three words above Ted’s signature.

  

“I need you.”

I was still clutching the note from Ted. I’d clutched it all six blocks from the Palace to Monica’s shop. I’d clutched it as she’d taken one look at me and ushered me through the back lounge and into her private office. I’d clutched it as I told her about the gowns.

“That’s all it says?” She’d settled me into a chair in the soothing saffron-colored meditation nook of her office and was now making me a cup of herbal tea. For once I would have liked her to offer something stronger. “He just sent you six famous dresses and a three-word note?”

I held the evidence out to her. “‘I need you.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

Monica opened a jar of honey. “It might mean he needs you.”

“He’s insane,” I said. “First he hides all my money and then he sends me a fortune in costumes?”

“Is it a fortune?” she asked.

I blinked. “Probably. I mean, if they’re genuine, which they seem to be, and if I could sell them, auction them off or something, which I could assuming I had a receipt or paperwork that proved—” I stared at her. “He didn’t send receipts.”

“So he doesn’t want you to sell them.” She handed me a steaming mug, a thoughtful look on her face. “Why dresses?”

Suddenly I was stabbed with a memory. “We were going to go to an auction,” I said, blinking. “Back before I found out about the affair. Ted and I were planning to go to New York for a movie memorabilia auction. But that was going to be in November and everything blew up in October, and I didn’t even think…I never even remembered it until just now.”

“Drink your tea,” she advised. “And maybe breathe.”

I couldn’t do either. “I had my eye on a Bette Davis broach,” I said. “Not on six whole gowns. What in the hell was he thinking?”

She tilted her head. “At a guess, I’d say he was thinking he needs you.”

“Of course he does,” I fumed. “He hasn’t done anything for himself in years. But he doesn’t get to leave me and take all the money and still expect me to drop everything just because he doesn’t know how to order a damn pizza!” I might have been yelling by that point.

“He doesn’t know how to order a pizza?”

I wafted my hands and slumped, exhausted. “That’s what assistants are for.” I thought about it. “He must need me for something big. Something specific. He wouldn’t have thrown Marilyn Monroe’s gowns at a problem he could solve with an assistant. He’s too cheap for that.”

Monica nodded. “He’s also emotionally stunted and weirdly controlling, from the looks of things.”

“In other words, an actor,” I said darkly.

“Maybe the gowns are an apology,” Monica suggested. “Remember back in January when he sent out that tweet? He called you his best friend.”

I remembered the tweet. He’d encouraged his millions of followers to come see a movie at the Palace. It had boosted our attendance when we’d needed a boost the most. I stared at Monica.

“Maybe,” she suggested, “in some weird way, he thinks you are friends.”

“Let’s add ‘delusional’ to the long list of things he is.”

“Are you going to call him?” Monica asked. “At least find out what he needs your help with?”

“Well, I might,” I said. “If he weren’t a scheming, lying, cheating liar.”

“Sure.” She pushed the tea toward me, nodding. “You’re better off with a text.”