8. Chapter 5 | Elle
Nightshade.
Just a word. Just a purple flower filled with poison.
Dom whispered it, her face six inches from Elle's, and it worked the way poison does — not all at once, but spreading, the dark closing in from the edges of her vision.
Heat rushed up her neck, an old reflex she hadn't felt in months — the particular blaze of a boom mic swinging wide, forty crew members turning to look at once.
Except there was no crew. No set, no director calling cut, nowhere to walk to that wasn't still inside the scene.
Just Dom, four inches away, watching her come apart in real time.
She had been found out.
Except that wasn't right. Found out implied something hidden.
What Dom had done was worse — she'd recognized who Elle used to be.
She'd raised the dead. Underneath her skin, Elle Brown felt the ghost of Thelma Blake rising to the surface.
She sang in public. Where anyone could hear, where anyone could recognize her, and it had felt good.
Dom tried talking to her on the walk home.
Elle couldn't hear a word of it. Every time she looked at Dom's face — those eyes, still seeing her — the world went soft at the edges again, so she fixed on CJ instead, asked about the sit-ins, his sketchbook, anything that wasn't the sidewalk between herself and the most inconvenient woman in New Orleans. CJ's face was safe. CJ didn't know.
When they got back she put on her apron and went straight behind the bar.
Dom kept trying to catch her eye. Elle kept hers on the copper, polished like it had personally offended her, because looking up meant feeling it again — that specific, unbearable heat, like a key light finding her mark, every pore suddenly visible under three thousand watts.
She used to chase that feeling. Now it just meant she'd been found.
I have to leave now, don't I.
One call was all it would take. One person in this city who watched television, one phone call to a reporter, and by morning there'd be a van from CBS outside and a man from the network's legal department off a flight from Burbank by noon. Her carefully built nothing of a life, gone.
A few regulars drifted in. She poured drinks, smiled — the same smile she used for eight takes running, easy, easy, nothing behind it. Maybe moving to Houston, she thought. Good barbecue there. That was something to think about.
A drop of water landed on the bar, and she was surprised to find she was crying.
The smile hadn't moved. She'd gotten good enough at it that her own face didn't tell her anything anymore.
She'd let herself get comfortable here faster than she meant to — the copper, the jukebox, Papa Louie smoking in his corner booth. She would have to leave all of it now.
When the last customer left, Elle turned the sign, wiped down the tables, ran the last glasses through the sink. Dom counted the register. The ordinary machinery of closing, same as any other night.
They didn't talk.
CJ had gone up at nine with his sketchbook under his arm, so the bar was theirs — the ceiling fan creaking rhythmically in tune with the jukebox.
Elle picked up a glass. Put it down. Her hands needed something to do that wasn't reaching across the bar and grabbing Dom by the collar.
Ray Charles crooned low on the jukebox.
"Nightshade. Is it really you?"
Dom's voice was low, full of wonder. Elle had braced for accusation, for leverage, for the dozen varieties of human awfulness she'd catalogued these past months in exile. She kept polishing instead, throat working around a lump she refused to let worsen. Her hand slipped on the glass.
Dom saw it. Of course she saw it. Her shoulders dropped, just slightly.
"When CJ first came to me, he was thirteen."
Elle's hands slowed on the glass.
"His father had—" A gesture closed the sentence for her. "He didn't speak the first week. Barely ate. Just sat there with that sketchbook and a pencil, shaking. Then one night the show came on, and he sat down in front of it like church was starting."
"The TV makes a great babysitter," Elle joked.
"No, Nightshade was a great babysitter," Dom said. "When she came on in the first scene — gloves to the elbow, walking through the room like it owed her something — CJ sat straight up and said, 'She's incredible.' First full sentence I'd heard out of him. I didn't move. Didn't want to break it."
Elle's hand stilled on the glass.
"Then the three men in suits close in on her, and she lets them. Lets them think they've got her. Then she slips away effortlessly, leaps out the window, laughing, like the whole thing's a joke."
"That part was scripted. I didn't write my own lines."
"I know," Dom said. "CJ didn't. CJ watched the screen. 'The sable will never catch her,' he said. Not a hope. A fact — said flat, the way you'd say the sun comes up. Said it twice, like he needed to hear himself believe it. 'They're never going to catch her.'"
Elle had nothing to say.
"I sat on the floor next to him. Told myself I was keeping him company." Her mouth moved, just slightly.
"Nightshade saved him," Dom said. "She wasn't a hero, but she saved him. That boy needed to see someone who couldn't be cornered. I can't explain how much."
Elle's throat closed. She was supposed to be nobody. Yet here was Dom — black suit walk, a familiar set to his jaw — telling a story about the woman Elle had buried, as if she'd been worth more than a few cheap laughs on a TV show.
She looked at Dom's hands on the bar. Broad knuckles, the left still faintly swollen from her last fight. Motionless. She looked away.
"We watched every week after that," Dom said. "Never missed one." He paused. "That was a lie about the company. I watched it for him at first. Then I just watched it."
Elle stood in the quiet, thinking about a boy finding something true in a sparkly costume, a woman who'd pushed her own car off a cliff. The car had landed in a ditch. She'd landed here, behind a bar in New Orleans, trying not to fall apart where anyone could see.
"Can I ask you something?" Dom said.
"You knowing who I am doesn't mean I owe you a single word about how I got here, or why. I've been very careful. Months of very careful, and thirty seconds on Canal Street does not mean—"
"Elle."
"What?"
Dom just looked at her. The particular quality of attention Elle had been trying not to notice since yesterday morning, turned all the way up.
"Are you safe?" Dom said, quietly, like she already knew the answer and was asking anyway.
Elle had braced for interrogation. Not this.
She looked at the bar instead of answering. Truth was, she hadn't been brave enough to ask herself that question since California — not straight out, not like this. She'd gotten out. She'd let herself believe that was the same thing as safe.
One look at Dom's face said it might not be.
She didn't say any of that.
Dom let the silence sit, then tried a smaller question instead. "How did you do it? The car."
That, Elle could answer. Facts, not feelings.
She was Elle Brown now— practical, no-nonsense Elle Brown, who did not explain herself and did not need to. Thelma Blake had talked to everyone — had filled every room she walked into, because she knew how, because it was the thing she'd always had. Elle had not talked. Not once, not really.
Until now, apparently.
She set the glass down.
"Weeks of planning. Long enough to choose a night with no moon.
I moved things out of the apartment in small amounts, into a storage unit off Cahuenga under a different name.
Cash, in small increments, for a month before that.
" Her voice was even; she'd made it that way a long time ago.
"The car was already running when I pushed it.
I stood at the top and watched it go, then walked two miles to a bus stop and waited for the 5:40 to Burbank. "
"What did they find?"
"The car. It burned. I was careful about the rest." A pause. "It was reported as an accident. A tragedy. There was a tribute segment on the six o'clock news. I watched it in a motel in Sacramento."
Dom just stared at her. "You faked your own death."
"I didn't, technically." Humor touched her lips. "I pushed a car off a cliff. That's all I actually did. The studio did the rest. The papers did the rest. I just gave everybody a shape and let them fill it in themselves."
"Why?" Dom asked it plain, no cushioning.
Elle grew quiet.
"My brother was a dandy." Her expression shifted — not grief exactly, more the memory of a specific light.
"That's what Mama called it, like it needed managing.
But he just loved to look good — real money on his shoes, his ties, the way a shirt sat on his shoulders.
He thought you should take up space like you meant it.
" Her mouth moved. "He was twenty-six. He walked into a department store in Greensboro and they decided he'd taken something.
He hadn't. But there was a trial anyway, the kind of trial it was, and they sent him to a prison in Guilford County. "
Dom became very still.
"One morning I opened a letter and it was from the prison, not from him." Her voice stayed even. "They said he'd had a heart attack. Very sudden. They'd already buried him — by the time the letter reached me, he was already in the ground, and I never got to see him."
Dom's face hardened — not pity, which Elle would have shut against like a fist. A flash of anger on her behalf, quick and involuntary, gone before it settled.