On Monday Colleen picked up the jewelry from the safe-deposit box. She had initially brought it in Grannor’s big walnut case. There had not been room for the case in the safe-deposit box, and she had taken it back to the lake, but she hadn’t thought to bring it with her this time. She had to ask one of the tellers for a shopping bag.
She supposed that Ben was right. Even if she did feel a connection with Autumn, she shouldn’t trust it. Of course, Autumn would feel familiar. When Colleen had to rest her ankle after hurting it in dance class, her mother had let her watch Autumn’s Disney movies. Reruns of M.J. had been aired often enough that Colleen supposed that she had seen all the episodes.
What if the meeting was awful? She had heard that meeting a celebrity could be disappointing. They didn’t make eye contact; you felt invisible. You might try to start a conversation, but any question you could ask, they had answered a million times. They weren’t going to ask you about yourself; they didn’t care about you.
But surely Autumn would care about Ariel.
Leilah hadn’t cleared out the basement, so Colleen hid the jewelry behind a pile of dirty Venetian blinds. She came upstairs, washed her hands, and started making dinner even though it was barely noon.
What was she going to wear on Tuesday? It would be nice to wear something of her mother’s. Why hadn’t she had the emerald suit altered to fit her? Yes, the color would make the rest of her look like an unbaked oatmeal cookie. The buttonholes would be too widely spaced when the jacket was cut down, and the yoke of the skirt would hit her at the widest part of her hips. But so what? It was her mother’s. She wouldn’t have to tell Autumn, but she would know herself.
But she hadn’t done it. She was going to have to wear her boring “back to school night” black pantsuit.
She could have at least gotten her hair cut, but she hadn’t. This always happened to her. Her hair was fine one day, fine the next, fine the day after that, and then suddenly it was awful, a scraggly nightmare. Why didn’t she schedule regular appointments?
Because she was a foreign language teacher at a parochial school. She wanted to get every last second out of a haircut. She supposed that if she did indeed get money from Grannor, she could get better haircuts. At least that wouldn’t be as complicated as having more money than your friends.
* * * *
It would take at least three-and-a-half hours to drive to DC. They were taking Grannor’s big Lincoln as it was more comfortable than Colleen’s little tin can of a car. Ben suggested that she pack a small overnight bag in case they wanted to stay over.
They were first going to drop off the jewelry at a place on Connecticut Avenue. Ben would call ahead. Someone would come out and escort Colleen and the jewelry inside while he parked the car. Then a limousine service would take them from the jeweler’s to the small hotel where Autumn was staying. It was in Georgetown, and Ben said that he didn’t want to have to find parking. It didn’t seem like him to worry about something like that, but she had agreed to let him do things his way.
Colleen insisted that they leave extra-early. It was a good thing as rain slowed the traffic on I-81. The rain let up as they headed east, but there was roadwork on I-66 and a stalled vehicle in the middle of Connecticut Avenue. They were going to arrive at the jeweler’s thirty minutes after they had hoped to.
Colleen started to fret. Ben assured her that they still had plenty of time, and even if they were a little behind schedule, the jeweler’s would be open all day, and Autumn wasn’t going to leave.
“I hate being late,” she said.
They finally pulled up to the front of the jewelry store. Waiting outside were a burly security guard and a middle-aged man in a neat pin-striped suit. The man introduced himself as Seth Robbins, the grandson of the founder and the company’s senior gemologist. He accepted the jewelry as unblinkingly as if clients always carried their jewels in a Forever Twenty-One shopping bag. He then directed Colleen through the carpeted retail space and into a back room, half of which was divided into three glass-walled cubicles with the rest given over to a conference table. Coffee and pastries were set up on a sideboard. Colleen accepted a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. Mr. Robbins began to unpack the jewelry, careful to keep his hands visible to her at all times. Two young apprentice gemologists took the pieces from him one at a time, going to glass-walled cubicles to examine the jewelry under a microscope, careful not to turn their backs or hide their hands. They were doing a preliminary examination of each piece, Mr. Robbins explained. Preparing the appraisals and lab certificates was much more time-consuming.
He didn’t say it, but they were probably checking to be sure that she hadn’t brought in any fakes. For all she knew, all the pieces might be fake. That would be an interesting twist.
She watched blankly as the gemologists worked. Shouldn’t she be feeling something more? She might never see any of this jewelry again. When she was a little girl, she had been dazzled by the five-strand topaz choker with its pave diamond bars. Now she knew that she would have to be at least six inches taller to dream of wearing it. And even if she were taller, where would she have worn it? The last charity gala that she had attended had been a pancake supper at the elementary school.
She looked at her watch. They were to meet Autumn in sixty-seven minutes.
Mr. Robbins told her that the pearls needed to be restrung. She said that she knew that.
Sixty-six minutes.
“Mr. Robbins, could you please come here?” It was one of the apprentices, speaking from the entry to her cubicle.
Mr. Robbins signaled to the security guard to come stand closer to the shopping bag. With another gesture, he encouraged Colleen to come to the cubicle with him. It seemed rude not to go. The breath-mint tin was open on the apprentice’s worktable. Two rings were still in it; the third was under the microscope.
He bent over the microscope. Colleen looked at her watch again. Fifty-nine minutes.
“Oh, my,” Mr. Robbins said. “This is unusually fine.”
Apparently the diamonds in all three rings were not only large, but had remarkable clarity and unusual cut. The gemologists exclaimed over them to one another. Mr. Robbins asked her what she knew of their history. “Do you know when they were purchased?”
“No.” Their history was lost.
Another three minutes had passed.
The sapphire earrings were taken out…the garnet bracelet…forty-eight minutes…a single ruby earring, its mate long missing…two gold pocket watches…the cameo brooch…the cloisonné bracelets…finally, finally they were done. Mr. Robbins signed a receipt, which Colleen put in her purse without looking at it. The security guard told her that the car was out front.
Ben was waiting for her near the retail counters. “Any surprises?” he asked, slipping his phone in his pocket.
“Are we going to be late? Do we have enough time?”
“We’ll be fine.”
The car waiting for them was black and quietly luxurious. The back seat was more spacious than the front, and there were, as in airplanes, drop-down trays that could be used as desks. The windows were tinted. Colleen could see out, but it was hard for other people to see in.
Colleen noticed Ben looking at his phone. “What’s wrong? I thought you said we were okay.”
“We aren’t going to be late,” he assured her. “The publicist was supposed to text me the suite number, and he hasn’t.”
“Is that a problem? Should we do something?”
“If we don’t hear by the time we get there, we’ll ask at the front desk.” He was calm.
Colleen looked at the window. She had no idea where they were. The street was wide; there were businesses on both sides, small boutiques and chic-looking bistros. They came to a traffic circle, then a stoplight. The driver had to stop. Colleen leaned forward and looked ahead. There seemed to be a stoplight at every single intersection.
They were never going to get there.
The driver turned off the wide street onto a narrow one, then again onto one that was narrower still. The street was lined with brick row houses. The street must have once been residential, but the houses now had small brass plates or discreet signs identifying places of business.
“The hotel is up ahead,” the driver said. “I’m going to have to pull up ahead of the entrance.”
Colleen looked around. She didn’t see anything that looked like a hotel, but on Ben’s side of the car, one building had a maroon awning covering the passage to the curb. A cluster of people were standing under the awning as if to escape the rain.
But it hadn’t rained here. The pavement was dry.
She reached into her purse, wanting to check her phone to be sure that the ringer was turned off. The purse tilted, spilling out half of what was inside. Her lipstick fell to the floor. As she bent forward to retrieve it, she heard Ben opening the car door. The lipstick had rolled farther than she had thought, and she had to undo her seat belt in order to reach it. She was putting it back in her purse and sliding across the seat when suddenly Ben was back in the car, shouldering her aside. He slammed the door.
“Go, go,” he yelled at the driver. The car shot ahead, then stopped so quickly that Colleen jerked forward, falling against the back of the front seat.
The car’s horn blared. Someone was pounding on the car. Ben had his hand on her, pressing her down. She turned her head so she could see out the side window. Someone was trying to look in. It was a woman. She had her face close to the window, her hands forming a tunnel as she tried to block out the glare of the sun.
Colleen tried to sit up. Ben used his forearm to force her to lie on the seat. “Stay down,” he ordered, then he twisted in his seat, doing something, and an instant later she was swaddled in darkness. He had thrown his blazer over her head.
She tried to throw it off. “Don’t,” he said. “We can’t let them get your picture.”
“What on earth is going on? You have to tell me.”
“I can’t move,” she heard the driver say. “Someone’s right in front of the car.” He started honking the horn again, over and over, a fast, rhythmless tattoo.
Colleen lifted the edge of Ben’s jacket. Spurts of light, sharp little bullets, were flashing in the car window. They were from cameras. People were trying to get a picture of her. She heard a clicking near the door handle. They were trying to get in.
Ben’s cell phone rang. Colleen felt his weight shift as he pulled it out of his pocket.
“I’m not saying one word,” he snapped, “until you get these people off of us…no…no…I don’t want to hear it until the car can move…I’m turning off my phone.”
The driver had stopped using the horn. Colleen could hear the pounding on the car and the voices… “Ariel, Ariel. Ariel, please. Roll down the window.”
“How many are there?” she asked.
“Not sure.” Ben was trying to keep out of view too. “Eight…ten…but two people are in front of the car, and one in back. We can’t move.”
“Jesus,” the driver swore, “someone’s climbing up over the hood. What’s wrong with these people?”
“How good are their pictures going to be?” Ben asked.
“Awful. We can’t have a lot of tint on our windows here, but there’s enough that they’re only going to get their own reflection, especially the idiots who don’t know how to turn the flash off on their cell phones.”
“That seems to be most of them.”
“No, there’s at least one professional,” the driver said. “There’s also a guy with a sound boom. This was planned.”
“You’re with a big outfit, aren’t you?” Ben asked him.
“Biggest in DC.”
“Then call your boss and tell him to tell the hotel that if they don’t get some staff out here, you’ll never pick up anyone at this hotel ever again. And you’ll get the other services to blackball them too.”
Colleen lifted up the edge of the jacket again. “Shouldn’t we call the police?”
“No, ma’am. Not yet,” the driver said. “We’ll be here all afternoon if we have to explain ourselves to the cops.”
“And they’ll only care about your safety,” Ben added, “not your privacy. First thing they’ll have us all get out of the car.”
And then everyone would take her picture. They would want to get close to her, they would want to…actually, Colleen had no idea what they could possibly want.
The driver was still on the phone, not using his horn, so there was nothing to block out the pounding and the voices. “Ariel…Ariel, please…” It was like being in some horrible zombie-attack movie.
In a market in Egypt…or had it been Cambodia?…she had once been surrounded by a swarm of beggars’ children, but a tiny bit of money had gotten her out of that.
“Please, Ariel…come out…” The voices, the pounding continued.
“I think I can back up,” the driver said. Colleen felt the car move a foot or so, then stop. “Nope. Damn these people. They’re crazy. They deserve to be run over.”
At least they were in the car. It was protecting them from this frenzied little mob. What if they had been on foot, walking from wherever Ben had parked?
“Okay,” the driver said in another minute. “Got a text from my boss. Some publicist is going to come out with the hotel people.”
“Then get away as fast as you can.”
“Do you want me to go around to the delivery entrance? Hotel security could meet us there.”
“No.”
“The suits are coming out of the hotel now. I’m putting the car in gear.”
The pounding on the car instantly lessened, and a moment later the car shot forward. Colleen felt a pressure on her covered head; it was Ben’s hand, still keeping her down. She felt the car turn, then turn again, and she sat up, pulling his jacket off her, running her hands through her hair.
“Are you okay?” Ben asked.
“I’m fine.”
“So where to?” the driver asked.
Ben gave him the address of the parking garage.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “We need to talk about this. Are we giving up? What about the delivery entrance?”
“We are not giving up,” Ben snapped. “This is not giving up. This is us not putting up with their lying bullshit. Do you honestly believe that we can get out of the car, up the elevator, and into her suite without being besieged again? Or that there will only be two people in the suite? They weren’t going to tell anyone about this, and yet all those people were there. How do you think that happened?”
“I don’t know.” Colleen hated the idea that Autumn hadn’t kept her word. “Maybe the publicist—”
He interrupted her. “It doesn’t matter to us how it happened. It happened. We can’t trust them.”
“Let’s at least give them a chance to explain and see if we’ve got other options. Call the publicist, and put your phone on speaker. I want to hear.”
“Okay. As long as you don’t grab the phone and say, ‘Hi, this is Colleen.’”
As soon as he turned the phone, it began ringing.
“Yes?” he said curtly.
“Oh, Gary, thank you.” It was a man’s voice. “Let me try and explain what happened out there. I didn’t know until yesterday that some of Autumn’s new supporters were coming, and I apologize for that. She feels a tremendous obligation to them. Apparently she felt that she couldn’t tell them not to come.”
“What about the professional camera crew? Don’t tell me that wasn’t your deal.”
“I will take responsibility for that, Gary, and I apologize. It may have seemed like poor judgment to you, but once you understand how many people will care about the meeting between Autumn and Ariel, people who truly wish them both well, you will be able to see it from our point of view.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“Gary, if your friend is indeed Ariel, she will have some very exciting opportunities open to her. Why don’t you and I sit down, just you and me, and talk about this. We’ve never discussed any compensation for all your efforts, but there is room—”
Ben turned off his phone.
The man had offered Ben money. That had been the worst possible thing to say.
So it had been Autumn who had told all those people about the meeting. Telling her fans was more important than keeping her word.
Maybe she didn’t understand. Colleen wanted to find an excuse for her. She had been a celebrity for so long that it must feel normal to have cameras stuck in her face, to have to do her hair and makeup every time she left her house. She must not realize how uncomfortable that would make normal people. Perhaps breaking her promise on this was no big deal, like bringing chicken sausage when you said that you would bring turkey sausage.
Except how could anyone think that?
Colleen felt betrayed.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “She always seems so sincere about everything.”
“She did, but she’s an actress. She could make us believe that she was sincere.”
The driver pulled into an underground parking garage, and Ben directed him to Grannor’s car. The driver got out to help put their overnight bags in the truck.
“That’s what famous people have to deal with, isn’t it?” she said as soon as Ben got in the Lincoln. The late Diana, Princess of Wales, had spent the last moments of her life waiting outside an elevator in an underground garage. She hadn’t been able to eat in restaurants, try on clothes in stores, or even walk in front doors. Why would anyone want to live like that?
“What’s our plan now?” she asked. “Go back to the lake?”
“If that’s okay with you.”
She said that it was.
I don’t need her. I’ve never needed her. I have a family. I have a great family. She’s the needy one, not me.
And Autumn was the one who had screwed this up. Colleen had played by the rules. Colleen always played by the rules, and she didn’t like people who didn’t.
There wasn’t much to say. After they were out of traffic, Ben turned on the radio, but Grannor’s car didn’t have a satellite hookup or a Bluetooth connection, so after a while he turned it off.
They were still on I-66 when Colleen thought to ask about their hotel. “Do we need to cancel the reservation?”
“Good point, but I’m going to need to turn on my phone to get the info.”
There was a big semi passing on their left. Ben glanced in the rearview mirror and passed his phone to her. “Too much traffic. You’ll have to do it.”
She turned the phone on. The screen showed that the publicist had called him again and again. She ignored the messages and looked for the email from the hotel. It had buttons for confirming or cancelling a reservation so she could cancel without having to call. As she was confirming that cancelling was really what she meant to do, the phone rang again.
“It’s the publicist. Do you want me to turn it off?”
“He’ll keep after me until I answer. Put it on speaker.”
Colleen did so and held up the phone between them.
“What is it?” Ben snapped.
“Gary, thank you for answering. I need to apologize again on Autumn’s behalf. She is so distraught about what happened after you left.”
“After?” Ben looked across the car. Colleen shrugged. She didn’t know what happened after they had left Georgetown any more than he did. “Well, you’d have to be pretty damn distraught to have done that,” he improvised…without knowing what “that” was.
“Her heart is broken, Gary. Truly broken. She didn’t intend to say your name—”
“What?”
“She says it just slipped out. She wanted so badly to get in touch with you, and she thought if her fans knew…They have been so helpful in the past.”
“Her fans are looking for me? Are you fucking kidding?”
“She admits that she might have been too impulsive. She really does want to apologize as well. I’m sure that she will make you understand. She’s not available just at the moment. Can we call you in an hour or so?”
“No, you can’t.”
“But, Gary, we truly want—”
“Whatever you truly want had better not involve talking to me.” Ben started lowering his window. “Because the next thing you hear is this phone going into the Shenandoah River.”
He grabbed the phone from Colleen’s hand and as the car passed over the bridge, he flung the phone out the window. Colleen twisted in her seat to watch its flight.
“That might not have been so smart,” she said mildly. “You could have simply turned it off.”
“You have a point there.”
“And it didn’t go in the river. It landed in the road.”
“Oh, crap…we need to go back and get it. I don’t want someone else using it.”
“You don’t need to worry. A chicken truck crunched it.”
“I guess that’s a good thing,” he groaned.