Faye rose from her too-short nap, almost rested and almost sober. Her problems seemed far away, as if she were separated from them by a pane of bulletproof glass. She didn’t dread having dinner with Carson and his VIPs the way she had before her wonderful nap. Sleep truly was miraculous. So, apparently, were mind-altering drugs.
Floating in a golden numbness, she got on the elevator with Joe and they rode it all the way up. Cully had been so kind to host the dinner. She was looking forward to seeing how movie stars entertained.
Faye didn’t know what she’d expected, but when she got an eyeful of Cully’s suite, she knew for a fact that she had gone into the wrong line of work.
The suite took up the entire top floor of the Gershwin Hotel’s North Tower, so Faye guessed she should call it a penthouse. This must be where oil barons stayed when they came to Oklahoma City to do business.
The penthouse had a full kitchen, and she wondered why. Surely movie stars and oil magnates didn’t cook when they traveled. Then she noticed that the kitchen was a separate room with doors to close it off from the rest of the penthouse, and she understood. This layout was unfashionable in Faye’s world where open-concept kitchens were all the rage, but people who could afford caterers—or servants—didn’t want their guests to see how the party magic was made.
The living room was made for partying, with two huge leather sectional sofas, an abundance of cushy chairs, and a concert grand piano. A dining table sat sixteen, and its sideboard was fully stocked with liquor. A wall of floor-to-ceiling windows brought in a view of Oklahoma City’s single brightly lit skyscraper, looming over downtown and obscured only by patchy mist and light rain.
Through a doorway, she saw a plush conference room that also sat sixteen. It had a bar cart, also fully stocked, because heaven forbid that an executive be forced to walk into the next room to freshen his Manhattan. She would bet money that, somewhere down the long hall, a Jacuzzi also sat sixteen.
Cully greeted her with a kiss on the cheek. “Did you bring your flute?”
She began by saying, “I didn’t want to disturb people nearby,” but quickly converted it to an awkward “No, I didn’t” when she realized that nobody is nearby when your penthouse occupies an entire floor. Given the size of the piano, she guessed that the floor was soundproofed to stifle the noise from partygoers being serenaded by a pianist who, like the suite, was top-flight and rented for the evening.
“Don’t forget that your anniversary gift wasn’t just the flute, Cousin Faye.” Faye’s heart fluttered at Cully’s reminder of their tenuous family relationship. “It was three flute lessons from me. Come by tomorrow after the conference is over for the day and we’ll get started. Until then—” he said, grabbing a flute lying on an end table “—let me give you a taste of what you’ll be able to do. Put your fingers over the holes like this.”
He centered the middle three fingers of each hand over the wooden flute’s six holes, using his thumbs on the back to help support it. Then he placed his mouth over the whistle-like mouthpiece and blew gently as he put each finger down. Then he picked them up again in sequence.
There was nothing fancy about what Cully played. Faye recognized it as a pentatonic scale, no different from the same sequence of sounds played on a guitar or a piano, but the flute’s pure tone was so haunting that the room fell into silence.
He pulled a cloth out of his pocket to wipe the mouthpiece. “Your turn.”
Great. Now she was going to have to make squawky noises in front of a crowd when Cully Mantooth had just made the same flute sing.
When he saw that she had to stretch to reach the lowest holes, he said, “This is mine and it’s in G. Joe said your hands were small, so I made one pitched in A for you. Whatever you’re able to do on my flute, you’ll be able to do better on yours.”
She blew into the mouthpiece, embarrassingly aware that Cully Mantooth’s famous lips had just touched it. At first, she heard nothing but wind. Then she made a weird sound like two incompatible notes fighting with each other. This went on for a while until, for no reason that she could tell, the sound resolved into a birdlike tone. It was wavery but it was there.
She tried to do what Cully had done, putting each finger down and then picking each one up. Her tone would break at times and she’d have to struggle to get it back, but she loved the process of making the sound better. Faye wouldn’t mind if she never saw another sleeping pill, but she was as hooked by this flute as a newly minted addict who had just discovered heroin. If she’d been alone, she would have kept noodling until her lip muscles made her stop.
“That was lovely.” Cully’s eyes were smiling. “And you enjoyed it, didn’t you? I could tell. My flutes soothe my mind. They keep me sane.”
Faye heard Jakob snort and say, “Others might think different.”
Cully ignored him and kept his eyes on Faye. Joe, too, was watching her with the goofy grin of a man who is certain that no man will ever buy his wife such an awesome anniversary present.
“It’s like meditation, isn’t it?” she said to Cully.
“Playing the Indian flute is about the music, but it’s not just about the music. It’s about all the people who ever played it before you. But you know that already. I can tell. For now, pick up the flute every time you walk past it and do what you just did. I’ll teach you some more tomorrow.”
And then the moment of peace was gone and she was left with no comfort but the bleariness left over from her sleeping pill. The other partiers erupted into the kind of party talk that makes the air hum. Dr. Dell pushed her aside to take a look at Cully’s flute, exclaiming over its craftsmanship. When she finally gave the flute back to Faye and left to refresh her drink, Stacy Wong rushed up and resumed obsessing about the underground Chinese community.
“When I saw you this afternoon after you toured the underground city, there were wet splatters on the shoulders of your shirt, so I’m thinking hip waders. Is it flooded down there? God, I hope not.”
Faye wouldn’t have called what she did a “tour,” and she wouldn’t have called what she saw a “city.” Something about Stacy made Faye want to back away, but she resisted the urge. Maybe she was just suffering an emotional hangover from the day and a chemical hangover from the pills. She shouldn’t be hard on a woman with a quirky obsession, because she had a few of her own.
Stacy took a big step into Faye’s personal space and said, “They said on TV that you found some bodies down there. Children. Three of them. They’re asking for anyone with information about missing children from the 1990s to come forward.”
The 1990s. So Ahua had found out some things while she was asleep. Good. That’s what he was supposed to do. And somebody had told the press about the children, so she was apparently now released from secrecy where they were concerned. Still, she figured it would be wise just to tell people to watch the news if they wanted answers.
“Did you see the bodies up close, Faye? Can you tell me anything at all about them?”
This time Faye couldn’t help herself. She did take a step back from Stacy and her ghoulish questions. Maybe the drug had addled Faye’s brain, but she began to wonder whether Stacy had arranged for a man to kill himself with a bomb so that she could have access to the place she’d obsessed about for years.
Stacy didn’t seem to notice Faye’s step back. “I’m so intrigued that you found bodies from the 1990s down there. Do you think maybe that room was built later by somebody else entirely?”
Faye was asking herself the same questions, now that she knew that the children might have been left there in the 1990s. Nevertheless, she wasn’t about to share her thoughts with Stacy.
She closed her lips over the things she might have said, like: “I’m not sure why there were colorful drawings on the walls of that room” or “I’m curious about whether they cut that door into the sanitary line as a place to dump their sewage.”
Instead, she said, “I don’t have a lot to tell you, Stacy,” and escaped to the dining room. There, she ransacked the ridiculously overstocked bar for something nonalcoholic that wouldn’t fight with the remnants of her sleeping pill.
* * *
The party didn’t last long. Faye wasn’t the only one who had started her day with mental and physical trauma. After an hour or so, Faye saw Jakob settle into one of the cushy chairs and doze off.
Cully was still proving his acting chops by playing the part of a gracious host, but there was a sag to his shoulders. His smile, though still infectious, was slower to come. His charisma might be boosting his guests’ spirits and his showman-like ability to draw energy from an audience might be boosting his, but he was headed for a crash. His guests all needed to leave so that their host could stop pretending he was still thirty-five. Joe could see how things were, and he rose to his feet to signal their departure. Faye was so grateful.
Stacy, Dr. Jackson, and Sadie Raincrow had missed the morning excitement. Faye could see that they were far from ready to go. Dr. Dell practically ran to the bar when she heard Joe and Faye make their goodbyes. Faye had known people who saw open bar situations as a challenge to drink up. Some of them were alcoholics and some of them were just cheap, but few people over thirty were this obvious.
Faye, on the other hand, had been nursing a Coke for the entire party and wanted to be rid of its watery dregs. The golden-haired young man who had been bussing their glasses was nowhere to be seen, so she headed for the kitchen.
Pushing open the swinging door, she saw someone at the sink, a woman wearing the hotel’s navy-and-white uniform and an air of authority. On the countertop were neatly arranged trays of hors d’oeuvres, ready for her assistant to whisk off the plastic wrap and carry them into the party. At her elbow was a tray of empty glasses, waiting to be washed.
Faye knew that she must have seen this woman throughout the party, making sure things ran smoothly, but her presence hadn’t registered in Faye’s mind. Service professionals were trained to be invisible, and this woman had paid attention to that part of her training.
Faye lingered for an awkward moment and listened to a sink full of glasses clank as the woman washed them. She felt terrible for having ignored a human being for at least an hour. The least she could do was say thank you.
“You did a wonderful job with this party. I really appreciate it.”
The woman half-turned in Faye’s direction, somehow accomplishing this without taking her hands out of the suds. She turned just far enough to reveal the name tag pinned to her uniform, and Faye saw that it read Lucia.
“Thank you, Lucia,” she said.
Lucia’s black hair was twisted into a large knot at the nape of her neck and covered by a hair net. Her thin face was dominated by prominent cheekbones and a pair of wary eyes that took in information while giving none away.
She said only “Thank you, ma’am,” then she turned back to her dishwashing.
Lucia’s accent was faint, as if she had learned English as a young child or perhaps had been raised by Spanish speakers, but Faye recognized it as Mexican. Faye read Spanish well and had even done some translation for her work, but she wouldn’t consider herself a fluent speaker. She toyed with the idea of speaking to Lucia again in Spanish, since she was always looking for an opportunity to practice, but Lucia had made it clear that she didn’t want to chit-chat. Faye knew she should respect that. She just set her glass at Lucia’s elbow with the other dishes waiting to be washed.
As the glass clinked on the counter, Lucia flinched, and Faye said, “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to put my glass someplace that was easy for you to reach.”
Lucia didn’t answer and Faye said no more, but she didn’t even try to stop staring. She kept her eyes on Lucia from that moment until she pushed her way back through the kitchen’s swinging door.
Lucia’s narrow shoulders, slim hips, and long thin legs were familiar and they were unmistakable. Faye had seen her just that morning, crumpled on a floor she’d just mopped while it was heaving beneath her.
* * *
Faye shed her clothes as soon as the hotel room’s door closed behind her. She did all the usual going-to-bed stuff, from showering to toothbrushing, before she took the other half of the sleeping pill. Apparently, though the doctor had told her it was only a mild sedative, this particular chemical spelled instant unconsciousness for Faye.
Ready for sleep, she washed the pill down with tap water. It was only then, when she left the bathroom and stood by her bedside, that she saw her pillow. Grace had left a fistful of the mints that Faye liked.
Maybe Grace was thanking her for the big tip, and maybe she was angling for another one. But Faye liked to think of the mints as a statement of solidarity, a hand reaching out to hers. She liked to think that Grace was saying, “I know what you went through this morning, because I went through it, too. We both could have died today. Here’s a bit of comfort.”
Faye picked up a piece of candy and listened to its foil crinkle as she unwrapped it. She laid it on her tongue and let the dark chocolate coating melt off of its cool, creamy mint filling, and she spent that moment of sweetness thanking God that she was alive to taste it.