Now for a minute there I thought Hudson was going to keep right on holding her hand, but Grams shook free, then sniffed and marched over to the installation on her own.
There were only eight paintings on Diane's wall. And they weren't huge. Or trendy. And the signature in the bottom left of every one didn't jump out at you like, Notice ME! They were worked into the painting and, I don't know, quiet.
I went from one painting to the next, to the next. And I found myself moving slower and slower, because the more I looked at them, the more I liked them. They weren't flashy or stunning, they were more moody. And the longer I stood in front of them, the more their mood sort of replaced my mood. Kind of edged it out and left itself behind.
One painting titled Pool of Gold was of a woman gazing at her hands in her lap. That was it. But the way the light fell across her face and sort of collected in her palms, it looked like she was holding a little dish of liquid gold.
Then there was one that Hudson seemed to like called Resurrection. It was a painting of autumn leaves being stirred high in the air—the wind lifting them up, up, up. One tattered leaf was separate from the rest. Higher than the rest. And it seemed to glow orange and gold with two points like arms, spreading up and out, reaching for the sky.
Another, called Awakening, was just a sunlit field of young wild grass with a small tree off to one side. But it made me want to find that place. To sit and listen to the breeze rustle the grass.
But the painting I kept coming back to was of a little girl on her tiptoes, stretching up to whisper in someone's ear. The painting is mostly shadows, so you can't see the face of the person she's whispering to. All you really see is the girl's face and her sparkling brown eyes, lit up by the moon shining through a window.
“Whispers, is it?” Hudson said, reading the plaque. “Who do you suppose she's telling secrets to?”
“Her mother,” I answered without thinking, and suddenly there were tears in my eyes.
Now honestly, I was embarrassed. I mean, this was nothing to start crying over. So I hadn't seen my mom in a while. So the days of me telling her secrets were long gone. This painting wasn't me or my mom. As far as I knew it wasn't anybody real. It was just paint.
But Hudson put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I find them to be very moving, too. It's amazing what she does with light.”
And that's when everything kind of happened at once. I noticed Grams coming toward us from one side, Diane was moving toward us from the other, but just as they're about to reach us, a side door blasts open and the air petrifies with, “FREEZE!”
And standing there, twenty feet from me with the door wide open and the night sky behind him, is a bandit. He's wearing a black mask across his eyes, a faded blue bandana tight across his nose and mouth, a brown cowboy hat crammed down on his head, and jeans that make mine look dressy.
'Course he's also wearing a nylon jacket and running shoes, so he looks a little … goofy. Like he's part Zorro, part Jesse James, and part … Bill Gates?
And everyone in the Vault is sort of going, “Huh?” until he jabs the left pocket of his jacket forward and screams, “I said, FREEZE!”
And this time everyone does, because now it's easy to see—
This bandito's got a gun.
THREE
“Oh, lord,” Hudson whispers. “Let's just stay calm—see what he wants.”
The Bandit edges our way, shouting, “One move out of any of you and it's curtains, you hear me?” He keeps the gun in his pocket poked up and forward, and when he gets near us he locks eyes with Diane.
Diane wobbles for a moment, then her eyes roll up in her head and down she goes. And while Hudson's busy catching her and easing her to the ground, the Bandit gets busy yanking her paintings off the wall with one hand while he practically jabs a hole in his pocket with his gun hand. “Sit down! All of you! Right where you are! NOW!” Everyone drops to the floor, including me and Grams.
So while the Bandit's yanking down pictures and Hudson's cradling Diane's head in his lap, trying to get her to come to, Grams is flashing between Hudson and the Bandit like she's not sure who's committing the worse crime.
Me, I'm keeping one eye on the Bandit and one on ol' Jojo. He hasn't exactly pounced on his goalpost phone to call 9-1-1, so I'm hoping he's got a hot button for the police. But either Jojo's a really good actor or he doesn't have a hot button, because all he's doing is sitting on the floor, shaking in his platform shoes.
So I'm crouched down, thinking someone's got to make a move to stop this guy, when I notice a dark spot in the corner of the Bandit's gun pocket.
A dark spot that wasn't there before.
At least I think it wasn't there before.
By now the Bandit's got four of Diane's paintings stacked and crammed under his arm, and he's screaming, “I said, SIT DOWN!” across the room. And he's sounding really jacked up and desperate, and I know I shouldn't even be thinking about it, but my mind can't stop asking, Can it be?
Then he starts backing away, poking his pocket across the room, shouting, “Don't move. None of you!” and that's when I know it's true.
I mean, it must be true.
Why else would the dark spot on his jacket be growing? I didn't have time to talk myself out of it. He was making his getaway and I had to do some thing. So before Grams could finish shouting, “Samantha, NO!!!” I was tackling the guy like I played for the 49ers.
I grabbed him around the legs, and the paintings spilled out from under his arm and crashed onto the floor. Trouble is, as he was coming down, his shoe whacked my jaw and snapped my tongue between my teeth. And since it really, really, really hurt, well, I let go.
The Bandit rolled away from me and jumped to his feet. His mask stayed on. His bandana stayed on. Even his hat didn't really come off. It came loose, but the minute he landed he crammed it right back on his head.
But the paintings were scattered, and since he knew I was on to him, he didn't even bother trying to reach them. He just turned around and ran.
I tried yelling, but it came out, “As sas a swurcun!” because my tongue hurt so bad. And everyone was either shrieking or frozen, and no one was understanding me. “A swurcun! As jus a swurcun!” I yelled, but he got away. Just giddy-upped out the side door and into the night.
And then, after he's totally gone, someone finally says, “Did she say squirt gun?”
I nod my head like crazy and yell, “Id was jusd a squird gun!”
All of a sudden, everyone starts charging everywhere. Miss Kuzkowski and a bunch of other people dash for the exit. Some men go tearing out the side door after the Bandit. Jojo does sort of a flying stumble halfway across the gallery, before fluttering around in a circle and clip-clopping through the archway and out of sight. And Grams, well, she charges me.
And does she say, “Samantha! Are you all right?”
No. She lays into me with, “Child, are you out of your mind?”
I flex my tongue from side to side, trying to make it work right. “He only had a squirt gun, Grams.”
“How do you know that? Did you see it? Samantha, he could have killed you!”
“It was dripping, Grams.”
She hesitates. “Dripping? Are you sure?”
“Uh-huh.” I look over at Hudson, who's helping Diane into a chair. “I see she's come to.”
“Hrmph.”
“Give him a break, Grams. He's just being chivalrous.”
All of a sudden Jojo's all over me. “Oh! Oh! You plucky little tiger. You're all right, aren't you? Please, please, tell me you're all right.”
I laugh and tell him, “I'm fine.”
“And the paintings?” He swoops down on them and checks them over quickly. “Oh, thank heaven! Oh, thank God. It's only the frames. The art is fine. Fine!” He races over to Diane and skids to a halt on one knee in front of her. “Di, darling! Di, they're fine. Perfect! Not a scratch.”
“Joseph, what did I tell you about security?”
“But Di, in my wildest dreams … !”
All of a sudden the man with the big black bag is there, too, and now he's got a camera with a lens the size of a salad plate hanging around his neck.
Diane asks him, “Did you manage to … did you get any pictures of what just happened?”
“Only one as he was fleeing.”
Diane takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and says, “I don't suppose that'll show us much, do you?”
“No, but it'll still be dynamite in the article!”
“The … the article?” Diane asks.
He puts out a hand and says, “T. William Huffer, Los Angeles Times. I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to introduce myself before the … well, that was a holdup, wasn't it?” He turns to Jojo. “What's the condition of the paintings? Were they damaged?”
“No,” Jojo says. “They're perfect. Perfect! One or two may need new frames, but the canvases are fine!”
“Very good. I'll need access to them—I want to photograph the whole collection.” He looks at Diane. “With your permission, of course.” He turns back to Jojo. “And a time to interview her. Can we set that up?”
“Certainly, certainly!”
By now everyone has pretty much congregated around us, including Austin Zuni and Tess Winters. And when Tess hears ol' T. William Huffer say all that about Diane's collection, her big red lips push way out for a minute, and then she says, “So this is how it works, huh?”
Everyone turns to her, and from the look on her face it's easy to see—she's as ticked off as a whacked wasp.
Jojo puts his arm around her and says, “There, there.”
She throws his arm off. “Don't there-there me, Jojo! Can't you see what's happened here?”
No one says a word.
Tess points a bony finger at Diane and screeches, “She set this up!”
“Set this up? Are you mad, woman?” All heads whip around to see who's just called the Splotter mad, only I don't need to. I'd recognize Hudson's voice anywhere.
I check Grams, and sure enough, she's steaming like a baked potato.
“You!” Tess snaps at Hudson. “You and that … that ragamuffin girl!” She points at me. “You're part of this whole performance!”
“Plucky tiger” was bad enough, but “ragamuffin girl”? I looked at her and shook my head. “What are you, jealous ?”
“Of you? Ha!”
“No, you sloppy splotter! Of the fact that someone wanted to steal her stuff and not yours!”
“Sloppy splotter? Sloppy splotter ? Jojo, did you hear what that insolent little brat just called me?”
Jojo just stands there with half a smile plastered on, his eyes big and kind of roving around the crowd like, Tell me this is not happening … Tell me this is not happening …
“Throw her out,” she screeches. “No, have her arrested!”
Jojo cringes. “Arrested? For calling you a … splotter?”
“No! For being part of this charade!”
Diane says, “There is no ‘charade' or conspiracy or anything else involved here, Tess. That man tried to heist my paintings, this girl stopped him. That's all there is to it.”
Tess looks around the crowd. “Doesn't any one else find this a little bit coincidental? Think about it! A reporter from the Los Angeles Times actually comes to this wretched town with the promise to do a piece on one of us … what better way to make a media event of it than stage your own robbery? Of course he wants to cover her now! It's got everything he could want in a story … even though none of it has a thing to do with art!”
Austin Zuni steps forward and says, “Now that you mention it, it is a bit convenient to have a robbery—”
“I didn't have a robbery!” Diane turns to Jojo. “What utter nonsense is this?”
“Yeah,” I tell ol' Splotty. “If anyone hired that guy, it was probably you.”
“What?”
“Well, you can't exactly put paintings in the L.A. Times if they aren't around, right?” I shrug. “It's one way to cut down on the competition.”
“Saaaay,” Austin Zuni says. “I hadn't thought of that … !”
Tess snaps, “Oh, shut up, Austin. That's ridiculous.”
“I don't know,” I tell her. “You seem pretty desperate to me.”
“Jojo,” she says through her teeth. “Get her out of here.” And yeah, it probably would have been polite for me to keep my mouth shut, but I was mad at her. Mad because she'd been so rude to Hudson. Mad because she'd looked down her nose at me. Mad because that's how I get when I hear glass scraping glass, and that's exactly what she sounded like to me.
So I tell her, “Well, you do. I mean how can your paintings possibly compete with hers? Anybody can dump a bucket of paint on a canvas. Anybody can take a big ol' fat brush and slash it across something and frame it. You don't need a Ph.D. to know it's ugly.”
“GET HER OUT OF HERE!”
“I'm goin', I'm goin'!” I tell her. “Just next time watch who you call a ragamuffin.”
Grams is hurrying along beside me as I make for the door, only Jojo runs in front of us and blocks our path. “Wait, wait! You can't go! The police are going to want to talk to you!”
Well, I didn't exactly want to talk to them, so I said, “Look. You know everything I know. The guy tried to rob the place with a squirt gun. He didn't get anything, and now he's gone. End of report.”
“But …”
Just then some men come shuffling in, all out of breath and windblown. They shake their heads when they see Jojo. “Couldn't find him. We searched blocks in all directions. He's just gone.” Then one of them adds, “What's taking the police? How long's it been since you called?”
“Oh!” Jojo cries, and holds his cheeks. Then he turns beet red and runs toward the scary table.
“Brother,” I grumble, and head for the door. And Grams is right there beside me, only she keeps looking over her shoulder at Hudson, who's hanging on Diane's every word.
“You want to walk home, don't you?” I ask her when we get outside.
“I most certainly do,” she says.
“Well, at least let me leave a note on his windshield.”
“He doesn't deserve a note.”
“Grams,” I say, digging through her purse for a scrap of paper and a pencil, “he's just being attentive to a damsel in distress.”
“And what were you in there?”
I look up at her. “Me? A damsel ?” I get back to digging. “Never!”
“He's being an old fool,” she says with a scowl. “It's those Liz Taylor eyes.”
“Who?”
“Elizabeth Taylor. The actress? Don't tell me you've never heard of her?”
“Nu-uh.”
“Well she had eyes just like those. Brought men to their knees just as quickly, too.” She hrmphs and then waits for me as I snap a “We walked home” note under Hudson's windshield wiper.
I put my arm around Grams, and as we start down the street she looks from her feet to mine, saying, “I guess it was a good night to wear high-tops after all.”
I grin at her. “Every night's a good night, Grams.”
She laughs, then says, “I'm glad you didn't want to stick around and talk to the police. I was more than ready to get away from those people. What a wretched bunch!”
We turn the corner toward Broadway, and suddenly the wind gusts up and whirls around us. Like it's dancing with us for a minute before moving on.
Grams starts walking a little faster, saying, “I just love this weather, don't you, Samantha? It makes me feel … electric.”
“Electric?” I laugh and say, “I would've guessed you wouldn't like it.”
“Oh, no. I've always loved the wind. Mind you, not the steady ones—they're draining. But gusty winds? Oh, I adore them.”
Now it's funny. I'd never seen my grams act like this before. She was practically skipping along the sidewalk, practically flinging her arms around in the air. She wasn't actually skipping or flinging,
but I could tell that in her heart she was feeling young and happy and defiant. Like she was as free as the wind and no starstruck senior citizen was going to get her down. She was going to fly instead.
Then Grams says, “That Tess Winters may be a real pill, but I have a hunch she's right.”
“About … ?”
“I'll bet she set the whole thing up.”
“Who? Purple Eyes? You really think so?”
“I do.”
“But Grams—”
“There's something about her I don't trust, don't like, don't … believe.”
“But—”
“I swear that fellow smiled at her.”
“The Bandit did?”
“Well, he had that whole getup on, but just for a moment, I swear he did.” She seemed to think about this a minute, then nodded. “I think that whole fainting routine was just to draw attention away from him.”
“But Grams, why?”
“For the publicity! It's all about publicity.” She kicks a stone and says, “Oh, I would love to prove it. It would serve him right, for being such a fool.”
I grin at her and say, “Grams!” because really, even though I'd seen her mad about things before, I'd never seen her on fire like this. I mean, for the first time in my life I could see her using binoculars and hiding in bushes, chasing after bad guys.
This was a brand-new side of Grams.
One I'd soon learn a whole lot more about.
FOUR
I'm not supposed to be living in the Senior Highrise. It's illegal. But I'm there anyway, on what I call a permanently temporary basis, while my mother gets her act together in Hollywood.
Don't get me started.
So since I had to sneak up the fire escape while Grams could just waltz inside and use the elevator, she was already in the apartment when I slipped through the door. I found her sitting stiff in a chair with her arms crossed, watching the phone ring off the hook.
“You're not going to answer it?” I whispered.
She shook her head.
“Ever?”
Shake, shake, shake.
“What if it's not him?”
“It is.”