Читать книгу The Notorious Pagan Jones - Nina Berry - Страница 10

As Devin Black held Pagan’s own front door open for her and she walked into the high-ceilinged entry, three women with perfectly coifed hair and identical black pumps bustled down the stairs to introduce themselves.

So much for ghosts. The house was full of actual people. Pagan was too overwhelmed to catch their names, but she did hear the words manicure, makeup, and haircut, and that was enough to distract her from the sight of Ava’s grand piano draped in a huge white cloth in the music room, from the gilt-framed photos of her mother, father, and sister on the mantel.

The beautician, who had very shiny red hair, didn’t give her time to dwell on anything, guiding her into the master bedroom, where her father had slept, and stepping into the master bathroom before pausing to look expectantly over her shoulder.

Devin Black was there ahead of them, by the side of her father’s bed, squinting up at the small, brilliantly colored painting of a woman in a garden that her mother had hung in a place of honor on the wall.

“Do you like it?” Pagan asked. That painting was one of her favorite things in the world. The dazzling smudges of scarlet, violet, and orange flowers led to a path strewn with lilac and golden sunlight where the suggestion of a woman in a dark blue dress stood, holding a white parasol.

It reminded Pagan of her grandmother Katie, her father’s mother, and her vibrant garden in Maine the last spring they visited, shortly before she’d died of stomach cancer.

“Exquisite,” Devin said, peering closer at the thick swirls of paint. “It’s a Renoir.”

Pagan was surprised. “That’s what the man who gave it to Mama said.” She paced closer to it. “I figured he had to be lying.”

Devin’s eyes continued to travel over the intricacies of the painting. “Was this man a relative of yours?”

“I don’t think so.” Pagan frowned, trying to remember. She’d been eight years old when the man had come to visit. She’d forgotten about him until just now, but he could be a link to her mother’s past, back in Germany. “Doctor somebody. He was very tall and commanding. But his voice was nasal and whiny. He stayed with us for a couple weeks, so Mama must’ve known him well.”

“Where did he go after he left here?” Devin asked.

“I don’t know. He was waiting here till he caught a boat somewhere,” she said. Devin was staring at the painting again. It was mesmerizing. “I love it, but it’s got to be fake.”

“No.” Devin’s voice was meditative, almost dreamy. “Renoir painted it the summer of 1873 when he was staying with Monet.”

Pagan stared at him. How could a studio publicity hack know so much about art? “Are you an artist?” she asked.

“What? No!” He laughed. “I’ve just been fortunate enough to see a number of works by the great Impressionists up close.”

“Did you work in a museum?” she asked. “Or do you moonlight as an art forger?”

The laughter in his eyes died, replaced with a wariness and something that almost looked like pain. She was about to apologize for she knew not what when he gestured toward the bathroom and the sleek redheaded stylist. “Linda, my dear, do what you can with this creature.”

Devin vanished, and Pagan was left in her parents’ bathroom, made unfamiliar by a large hair dryer set up over a hard chair next to a serving table covered with rollers and twelve different shades of pink nail polish. Linda was already mixing something that smelled like peroxide in a little bowl.

“First we make you blonde, then we do a wet set, and Carol can do your nails while you dry,” Linda said. “How’s that sound to start?”

Pagan caught sight of herself in the mirror—the stiff, bedraggled, ash-colored hair, the unruly eyebrows, the chapped lips and too-big brown eyes that looked lost without mascara. Her mother would never have approved.

“That sounds like heaven,” Pagan said.

Linda, who couldn’t have been much older than Pagan, popped her gum and offered her a pack of Fruit Stripe. “The studio told me to do your hair exactly the way it was in The Bashful Debutante, just so you know. Chin length, curled under and blondest of the blond. Sorry if you were hoping for something else.”

Pagan unwrapped a cherry-striped stick and bit down on it slowly. The sweet, fake-fruit flavor flooded her mouth. She would have killed to have a pack of gum just a few hours ago in Lighthouse, and here it was now, offered to her freely. Funny how reform school made you appreciate things everyone else took for granted. “Anything will be better than how it is now.”

Linda chewed her gum with a casual sassiness that was fun to watch. Maybe Pagan could use the mannerism for her character. “No offense,” Linda said, “but it’s a mess. So you just relax. Magic Linda can fix anything.”

“Oh, so you’re my fairy godmother,” Pagan said. “I’ve been waiting for you to show.”

“Bippity boppity shampoo,” Linda said with a grin, pointing at a tube of Lustre-Crème. “Right after we make you a real blonde again.”

As Linda brushed and sectioned off Pagan’s hair, readying it for the peroxide, Carol came in and lifted Pagan’s right hand to examine her fingernails. “I like to keep them short,” Pagan said. She probably wouldn’t need to scratch anyone’s eyes out on the movie set, but prison habits died hard.

As Carol set her hands to soak and Linda began painting peroxide into her hair, it took her back to being in the makeup chair early in the morning before the day’s shooting began on a film. Makeup artists knew everyone’s secrets—who had acne and who had a toupee, whose red eyes were due to too many uppers and whose were caused by an all-night argument with their spouse. All the best gossip happened there.

“So I’m dying to know what’s hot on the radio now,” Pagan said. “Last new song I heard was ‘Georgia on My Mind,’ for crying out loud. What’s Ray Charles’s latest?”

Carol shrugged. “Search me, but that Pat Boone is dreamy.”

Linda made a face. “I like that Bobby Lewis song you hear all the time now, ‘Tossin’ and Turnin’,’ even if he can’t move like Jackie Wilson.”

“Nobody moves like Jackie Wilson,” Pagan said. “Elvis tries, but…”

“Oh, Elvis!” Linda wiggled happily, snapping her gum. “That boy is killer diller. I’d play backseat bingo with him any day of the week.”

“Linda!” Carol admonished with a grin and began filing Pagan’s nails.

“What’s the latest from Nicky Raven?” Pagan asked, her voice bland, her face a study in casual.

Linda inhaled sharply, her hand with the peroxide-loaded brush stopping in midstroke. Carol’s grip on Pagan’s hand tightened.

“Nobody cares about that guy anymore,” Carol said a bit too forcefully, and ducked her head down to keep filing.

“Yeah,” Linda chimed in. “He’s no Elvis.”

So much for any attempt to fish news of Nicky out of them. She had thought they’d be eager to get the “real” story on her famous thwarted romance, but that pesky Devin Black must have given them a gag order. Fine. She could play that game.

Carol gestured at the bottles of nail polish and said into the awkward silence, “I hope you like pink, ’cause that’s what they told me it had to be. But you can pick which one.”

“That one’s pretty.” Pagan pointed to a rosy shade with her free left hand. “So, was it Devin Black who told you how to do my hair and nails?”

“No.” Linda had finished applying the peroxide solution and was folding Pagan’s laden hair into a plastic cap to sit until it lightened. “It was the head of makeup at Universal, Josie McIntyre. She said she’d discussed your look with Bennie Wexler.”

“Oh, of course,” Pagan said. “I remember Josie.” She did, too—a nosy, middle-aged woman with an amazing ability to make your nose look slimmer or your eyes bigger. Pagan had been hoping these girls could give her more insight into the role Devin Black was playing in her life. But it sounded like Neither Here Nor There was being handled like any other movie.

So the evidence continued to support the fact that Devin was just a junior publicity flack charged with ensuring Pagan didn’t make any trouble for the film. But Pagan had met a lot of executives in her time, and Devin Black was from a different planet entirely.

“Oh, my God, have you seen the clothes Helen is laying out for Pagan to try on?” Linda took the cap off Pagan’s hair and prepared to wash out the peroxide and apply the toner. She placed a hand on Pagan’s shoulder and looked at her in the mirror. “The studio got some special designer things for you. I heard Helen telling Devin. Didn’t hear which designer, but he told her to get something specific for you, and the head of costume pulled a lot of strings to get it.”

Carol let out a little squeal. “Oh, can’t wait to see what it is.”

“Oh, me, too!” Pagan widened her eyes to look excited and kept her fingers splayed so as not to mess up her manicure as Linda guided her to stand and go over to the sink.

The next couple hours with Linda and Carol crawled by as Pagan racked her brain, trying to figure out why Devin Black would ask for a particular outfit for her, and what it could be. If it was from a well-known designer, it couldn’t be something too strange or revealing, though her mind went to all sorts of weird places trying to picture what sort of clothes a sleek, well-dressed man like him would have demanded for her. She tried not to tap her fingers and ruin the polish as she sat under the dryer with her newly platinum hair pinned up in big rollers.

Finally, her eyelids were lined with winged black and her eyebrows were darkly penciled high at the arch over her wide brown eyes. Dots of foundation and blush had been blended over her moisturized face, then a quick fuss with the contouring brush, new pink coral lipstick from Lournay, and lots of powder.

Pagan stared at herself in the mirror. It was as if she’d gone back in time. Her cheeks had lost some of their baby roundness in the past year, but they were gently flushed, and once again her hair glowed softly white gold against her pale face, setting off her dark eyes and brows.

It all looked so natural, so real. All the illusion needed now was the right clothes. She thanked Linda and Carol, then let them follow her toward her own bedroom, where Helen waited with a movable rack of clothes on hangers and several things laid out on the bed.

Pagan glanced around the familiar room. She hated its pale lilac walls, the high white canopy bed piled with pillows and stuffed animals, the shelves lined with pretty dolls in frilly dresses, classic children’s books, and official portraits of the family taken over the years.

What if I just painted everything black? she thought, and immediately felt guilty. How disrespectful to wipe away all of Mama’s efforts to showcase the perfect little girl’s life.

Her eye landed on the last family photo Mama had been in. They were all smiling dutifully in front of the Christmas tree. Next to it was a framed shot of Pagan, grinning on Clark Gable’s arm as she held up her Golden Globe award.

Mama had died shortly after that Christmas photo was taken, and Pagan had been so tipsy at the Golden Globe Awards that she’d tripped over her long gown and was hustled into a limousine by her publicist, sent home before the parties were over.

It was all so far away, as if it had happened to someone in a book, not to her. Clark Gable had died of a heart attack last year, and the attorneys had put her Golden Globe and BAFTA in a vault.

The fake glossiness of it all made her a little sick. Then she caught sight of the creation laid out on the foot of her bed and gasped.

Helen, a tall former model type dressed in a sleeveless red shift, clapped her hands together in delight. “Yes! It’s the Dior suit dress Mister Black insisted we get for you. Isn’t it spectacular?”

It was more than spectacular. It was perfection. Somehow Devin Black had obtained a brand-new suit dress from the house of Dior. The rich dark brown wool was sewn to look like two pieces—a full flared skirt that hit around the knee belted wide and tight at the waist, and a body-hugging bolero jacket with a crew neck, two almost invisible chest pockets, and three dark shell buttons down the front. But it was really all one piece, a dress so chic and modern she could barely breathe.

She watched Helen unbutton and unzip the dress for her and remembered now. She’d mentioned the Dior suit dresses offhand to Devin Black when they’d first met. The design was new that year, available only to the very rich and privileged. Soon they’d be copied by the department stores, but for now they had to be special-ordered from Dior at an exorbitant cost. It hadn’t occurred to Pagan to request one for herself. She couldn’t imagine how Devin Black had gotten it here in just a few hours.

As she pulled on the girdle—Lord! How she hated those things—and clipped her stockings to her garters, she couldn’t figure out how to feel about the dress. Was it a kindly gesture, meant to welcome her? Or was it a display of power, a sign that he was paying attention to her every word and could conjure anything he desired at a moment’s notice?

Knowing what little she did of Devin, it was both of those things. And more.

She didn’t look at herself in the mirror until the dress was fully zipped, her feet were slipped into a pair of kitten-heeled Dior pumps, and soft black leather elbow-length gloves were slid on over the dress’s tight sleeves.

The women were shaking their heads in appreciation, eyes wide. She stepped up to see her reflection and stilled. The dress was more than flattering—the warm brown complemented her eyes, the skirt tapered to make her waist look impossibly slender, showing off her calves and knees, and the bolero jacket widened at the bust to give her curves where it counted. This was a dress meant to make things happen, to let her move through the world with confidence and grace.

Her throat tightened. Could she ever be that girl in the mirror again?

Something dark moved in the reflection, and she whirled. Devin Black was leaning against the bedroom doorway, arms crossed, regarding her. One corner of his mouth deepened admiringly. “Glad to see it fits.”

Pagan opened her mouth, not sure what to say, gratitude and resentment battling inside her.

Helen made a tsking noise. “Mister Black, please! Girls only in the bedroom!”

Devin gave her a little bow and faded down the hallway.

Pagan’s eyes filled up, threatening to send mascara dripping down her cheeks.

“Excuse me,” she muttered, and ran into her bathroom, shutting the door and grabbing a tissue. The girl in the mirror looked uncertain now, overwhelmed, and not nearly mature enough for her outfit.

She took another tissue out of the box sitting on top of the toilet tank and had a sudden memory—of sliding a half-empty pint of vodka into that tank, about a year ago. She had concealed bottles all over the house, but that was one of her best hiding places. However much the maid scrubbed the bowl, she never bothered with the tank. No one did.

I’m not going to take it. I’m not going to drink it. I just need to know if it’s still there. That’s all.

Breathing a little harder than she should, Pagan removed her gloves and lifted the top off the toilet’s tank.

Nothing. No bottle of vodka. Just clear water, rods, valves, and the float.

She let the tank lid fall back into place with a clang, then her knees buckled and she sat down on the lilac bath rug.

Someone had found the bottle and taken it away. After the accident and the discovery of her ridiculously high blood alcohol level, her father’s attorney had probably had a team go through the entire house to get rid of any damning evidence.

She wiped her eyes carefully and blotted her wet cheeks with some toilet paper. She looked down at the fluffy lilac rug and a tiny laugh escaped her. How ridiculous she must look.

Get off the floor in that Dior, Mama would’ve ordered, and then would have looked blank when Pagan laughed out loud at the inadvertent rhyme.

She climbed carefully to her feet, smoothing the skirt of her splendid new suit dress. It was unblemished, beautiful.

She looked at her face in the mirror. If she schooled it just right, she almost looked happy.

And she had a job to do. Mama would approve of this refusal to give in to insecurity. Where had Mama gotten that strength, and why had it crumbled so disastrously?

She threw away the tissue and put her shoulders back, chin up. She looked good, strong, thanks to the perfect structure of the dress.

Clothing wasn’t magical. There were no fairy godmothers, and she hadn’t been transformed. But no way was she giving up the Dior suit dress. One day she’d make it fit, inside and out.

In Daddy’s office there was a safe. Once Devin left for the night, Pagan would see what she could find inside. She was on a mission in Berlin. Not only to revive her career, but to learn more about Eva Jones, and maybe, just maybe, feel as happy as she looked.