Chapter 40
I got the band set up at a table near the stage to start getting comfy while I fetched my song notes from upstairs. The ones I could bear to share with anyone. First, I’d grab a round of conciliatory drinks for them.
At the bar, the Jims—well, Quin, I guess, and his two co-drinkers, not friends—were holding down their usual coordinates. Quin, at the far end, wore a tweed jacket, elbow patches.
“Teaching a class today, professor?” I asked. “Running for office?”
“Playing us a surprise Sunday show?” he asked.
“Doll, you’re not turning off the TVs, right?” Lumpy Jim said. “Don’t make me watch the Bears lose from home.”
“Right you are, uh, sir,” I said. Knowing Quin’s real name had broken me. I couldn’t be sure any of them were named Jim. “No show today. We’re just working on a new tune.”
“A new tune?” Silent Jim said.
“An original,” I said.
“You’re writing a song?” Quin said. “Are changes afoot?”
Behind Quin, the front door opened. Edith Maxwell walked in, a manila envelope in her hand and her tear-down gaze roving all over the room.
“You have no idea,” I mumbled.
Edith strode in our direction and inserted herself at Quin’s elbow. How could such a small woman take up so much space? MAXimum space. “I’d like to speak to Alex, please,” she said, as though she were ordering a drink. Quin looked down at her and then away.
“It’s Sunday. He’s busy. Edith,” I added, weaponizing it. Hey, I had so far kept my promise not to call her what Sicily did.
But at the reminder of Sicily, I experienced another wave of feeling, this one of regret. All this talk about family and I was letting my sister down. My actual sister. “Have you found Marisa yet?”
“Do you expect me to be out searching for her?” Edith said, smiling.
Weren’t they supposed to be good friends?
I had been searching for Marisa—and I hadn’t even wanted to see her.
I recognized something sharp in Edith’s features now that I hadn’t before: a stone-cold fox of many decades, top dog at the front of boardrooms. Something with too many teeth, in either case.
Where was Marisa? It was a problem of whereabouts, and Edith was, after all, in the business of location, location, location. She held the keys to a hundred places where someone might hide away or be hidden, and she was the person who had left Marisa on the street—
Or said she had.
“Do you know where Marisa is?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?” Edith said, the grin dropping away. “Of course not. If I knew where she was, I’d be having her deliver this.”
She dumped the envelope on the bar. It was thick, and I felt the thump of its weight in my bones. All the Jims turned to look.
“If I’d wanted no assistant, I could have saved myself the trouble of hiring one,” Edith said.
I’d ignored the fact that Marisa had picked up a job with Edith. When Marisa marched across the pub the night she’d disappeared to grab at Alex’s sleeve, had she been here on Maxwell Realty business?
It made sense to me now, why she’d been here at all, after all this time, and why Alex had lied about what Marisa wanted. He hadn’t wanted me to know he was considering selling the place yet. He hadn’t wanted me to know she hadn’t been here to see me.
“And anyway,” Edith said, “since when do you care where your mother is? She’s been within reach this whole time.”
“I was a kid. I’m not the one who should have been reaching.”
“You’re not a kid, Dahlia. You haven’t been a kid in a long time.” Edith leaned lower over the bar. “And have you asked yourself yet, whether it’s likely she really never tried to reach you? In twenty years? And what would have happened, if she had? Who might have stopped her?”
Alex. But he was only trying to keep me safe from—
The pink cocoon of Sicily’s princess room inserted itself into my mind. Then the photo on Marisa’s dresser of her arms around baby Sis. That closet full of Christmas gifts, years and years of wrapping paper growing brittle.
“These thick tavern walls have been quite the fortress,” Edith said. “Keeping people out, keeping people in.”
I checked through the pass-through, but I couldn’t see Alex. “He was just protecting me,” I said.
“You sure?” she said.
I remembered the fleeting fear across Alex’s face the night Marisa had showed up at McPhee’s.
Fear of what? I had assumed he’d worried that Marisa’s mess would tumble back into our lives and be his to clean up again.
Or he thought that his recovery could be endangered if subjected to Marisa’s.
But that was the entire deal with recovery, wasn’t it? All those meetings.
He was just scared I’d be hurt again. And I would be his mess to clean up. Again.
It was the same as barring Joey from the pub, hurrying him away so I wouldn’t have to deal with him, right? Deleting the security footage so I’d never even know he’d come to bother me.
Protecting me.
Infantilizing me.
I wasn’t a kid anymore. I had a right to make my own messes and the duty to clean them up, myself. It was selfish of Alex to keep me from …
And then I got it. I understood. He was being selfish. We were all of us selfish creatures, including Alex.
Alex wasn’t afraid of Marisa or her choices. He was afraid of mine.
If Alex kept me from Marisa, he never had to worry I’d choose her over him. He couldn’t be on the losing side of any decision I made.
I thought he’d been protecting my heart from being broken again, but he would have been protecting his own, too.
I always gave Alex so much credit for heroics, for strength, for keeping that little blue room for me, for being able to fix anything, withstand anything.
But he was just a man. More than what some people saw when they looked at him, less than I’d built him up to be.
A man who had built me a world here at McPhee’s Tavern I would never need to leave. That I would never want to leave.
And no one could convince me that Alex wanted to leave it, either.
I looked at the envelope on the bar. “You’re a vulture,” I said.
Edith’s chin jutted out. “I’m sorry?”
“Swooping in here to buy up the bar the second you smell blood.”
Quin and the Jims snapped to attention. They’d all been pretending not to listen, but only Silent Jim could pull off the act. Now Quin leaned on the bar with open interest while Lumpy Jim mooned into his beer, stricken at the news that the pub could be sold out from under him.
“If there’s blood, I didn’t draw it,” Edith said.
“This neighborhood was bleeding out before I turned it around. This tumbledown tenement is the lone holdout for the entire block, bringing down property values for everyone else.” She tapped a finger on the envelope on the bar.
“This is the best offer, maybe the last good offer, Alex is likely to get. We could make something of this place.”
“I like it the way it is,” Lumpy Jim mumbled.
“It’s already something to plenty of people,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Edith said. “To miserable drunks. To those who’d rather be here than with their families.” She looked at me. “To those who need a stage they can’t get anywhere else.”
Ouch. MAXimum damage.
“And ghost hunters,” she said with derision. “Treasure seekers. And those who would prey upon the delusional, who believe these fairy tales.”
Suddenly Alex was behind me.
“The treasure is real,” he said.
Quin studied the bar, Lumpy Jim his beer. Silent Jim looked up at Alex as though he’d never quite noticed him before.
“Mr. McPhee,” Edith said, her posture loosening and the all-new smile on her face so wide I thought her neck must have hinges. “I’m sorry to bother your staff on a busy day—”
“Dahlia is not my staff,” Alex said.
“Oh, of course, of course,” she said soothingly. “I’ve hand-delivered those papers we discussed. Now, I’ve marked the spots where I need your signature with the littlest yellow flags to help you find—”
“Thanks.” Alex slid the envelope off the bar. “I think I get it.”
I wanted him to drop the package into the bin with the lemon peels and coffee grounds, but he didn’t. Or into the lost-and-found box under the bar, Alex, do it!
That’s when I remembered that I had acquired something that had gone lost, too. I went to the far end of the bar and reached into the bin, sifting tentatively through the orphaned gloves and stuff. Quin stretched his neck to check my progress.
I retrieved the red package, tiny snowflakes, that Marisa had left behind and put it into Edith’s hands.
“You shouldn’t have,” she said.
“Return that to Marisa when you see her,” I said. “She dropped it on her last visit.”
“This is probably for—”
“I’ll be in touch,” Alex said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
Edith’s grin dropped a bit at the edges, but she recovered.
“I could wait if you wanted to grab a pen … No? Well, you shouldn’t wait too long.
These lingering deals have been known to fall through.
Well, then … Go Bears!” She made a little fist like a pom-pom and shook it.
No one joined in. She dropped her hand and strode toward the exit.
The door banged shut. The TVs blared.
Lourey, across the room, mouthed something at me and mimed drinking a beer. Oh, right. This was probably my last shot to prove to them that I was serious, and I meant to do it.
I slipped out from under Alex’s hand. I was a little sore with him about keeping Marisa away from me. Another decision that had been made without consulting me—and this one was certainly my business.
I poured out the beers I’d started pulling for the band before Edith had walked in and started over.
“The treasure’s real?” Silent Jim finally spoke up.
Quin gave him an odd look I couldn’t read.
“If you know where to look,” Alex said simply.
“You say things like that, McPhee,” Silent Jim said, “and you’ll have the hordes prying up the floorboards the second your back is turned.”
Little did he know.
I sensed the Jims turning my way for some kind of translation. “He means the pub,” I said. The paperwork to sign over the place was still in Alex’s hands. Just because I wasn’t sure I wanted to run the pub—did that mean he had to sell it? “The pub is your treasure, right, Alex?”
“No,” he said. “I meant the treasure.
“But not the ghost,” Alex said after a second of thought. “Ghosts aren’t real.”