Marcia Talley - Dead Man Dancing

‘They look gorgeous,’ I commented. ‘And so happy.’

‘That was taken at the Internationals,’ Lorraine told me.

Other pictures showed Jay as a much younger man, posing in dance costumes with a woman I didn’t recognize. When I asked about her, Lorraine said, ‘That’s Jay’s first partner, Deborah Drew.’

‘Oh, right. One of the instructors at the studio told me that Jay had started out with another partner before he teamed up with Kay.’ Still holding the photograph of Jay with Deborah Drew, I glanced up at Lorraine. ‘Was Jay always interested in dancing?’

‘Oh my, yes. Mother taught dance, you see. She converted our two-car garage into a studio. She had quite a few students, too. There isn’t much else to do in Hard Bargain, Texas.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

When she nodded, I said, ‘I’ve always wondered about the name Giannotti. It sounds Italian. I don’t usually associate Texas with Italy.’

Lorraine laughed, a husky, resonate sound that would have made even the sourest of pusses smile. ‘Believe it or not, Italians are the sixth largest ethnic group in our state. We originally came from Sicily, settled down in the Brazos Valley to grow cotton and corn on the bottom land that nobody else wanted. After the Galveston flood, a number of our forebears moved to west Texas and eventually ended up working in the oil fields.’

‘Where exactly is the glittering metropolis of Hard Bargain?’ I smiled at the name.

‘About halfway between Odessa and Pecos, a little town about as beautiful as the name sounds.’

‘I’ve never been west of San Antonio,’ I told her.

‘What would be the point?’ she replied with a mischievous grin.

I set the photo down and picked up another one of Jay posing with a trophy several inches taller than he was. Looking over my shoulder Lorraine said, ‘Jay was twelve when that picture was taken.’

‘Did you dance, too, Lorraine?’

‘I tried ballet, but I just hated it. Not like Jay. Practically from the day he was born, he loved all dance… ballet, tap, ballroom.’ She turned to the buffet and picked up a 5 x 7 size photo album that had been lying there, balanced it on her left forearm while she leafed through it. ‘Here it is!’ She slid a photo out of its protective plastic sleeve and handed it to me. ‘Isn’t he the cutest thing?’ she cooed, slipping back to her roots and pronouncing the word ‘thang’.

The photograph showed a teenage Jay dressed in dancing tails, his dark hair trimmed short all over, with the exception of a rat-tail – a few strands braided in the back, like a Star Wars Jedi knight. Posing with him was a younger girl dressed in a Chiquita Banana costume. ‘You?’ I chuckled, tapping the elaborate headdress.

‘Guilty!’

There was something strangely familiar about the face of the young Lorraine in the picture, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. ‘You’re a couple of years younger than your brother, right?’

‘Two.’ She smiled sweetly and sadly. She handed me the photo album. ‘Here. Make yourself comfortable, Hannah. I’ll go look for Kay, then maybe I’ll rustle up some tea. Kay may be hiding out in the hot tub. She was all spun up this morning. The police showed up with a search warrant looking for the source of the thallium that killed Jay. They scooped everything out of both medicine cabinets and dumped it all into baggies. They rummaged under the sink. They even searched the tool shed, and went away with a bunch of stuff in paper bags.’

‘That must have been upsetting.’

‘Damn right!’ Kay appeared out of nowhere wearing a white terry-cloth robe, her fair hair nearly invisible under a turban-like towel. ‘They even took away my bath salts. Neanderthals!’

‘Lorraine was just showing me your family pictures,’ I explained. ‘I didn’t realize that Jay started dancing at such an early age.’

‘It was his passion,’ Kay said. ‘And mine, too. Now I have to figure out a way to go on without him.’ She pulled out a dining-room chair and lowered herself into it. Her eyes caught mine and stayed there, unblinking, as if challenging me to come up with an instant solution.

‘I really admired Jay,’ I said after a moment. ‘He made dancing lessons seem like fun. I’m glad I got to know him.’ As Kay watched, I paged backwards in the album, observing as Jay and his sister grew progressively younger. ‘Seeing these photos, I wish I’d kept up with my dancing when I was little, but my dad was in the navy and we moved around a lot, so dancing lessons and piano lessons were kind of catch-as-catch-can.’

I glanced up from the album to see Kay still looking at me intently, so I babbled on. ‘In my first dance recital – we were stationed in San Diego then – I danced the role of William Tell’s apple. I was only six, but I looked in a mirror at myself wearing that stupid apple costume, and I knew even then that some people don’t belong in leotards no matter what color they are.’

Kay managed a smile.

I paused at a picture of Jay and his sister dressed in dance tuxedos and top hats, leaning theatrically on canes, their fresh-scrubbed, pre-teen faces wreathed in smiles. Young Jay resembled the handsome man he had become, but little Lorraine had changed since then, metamorphosing over the intervening years from cute-as-a-bug child to Junior League matron with a dark helmet of Lady Bird Johnson hair. Nine-year-old Lorraine (or so the handwritten caption said) had an unruly tumble of dark curly hair, bright blue eyes, a slightly tip-tilted nose just like… my heart did a quick rat-a-tat-tat in my chest.

Little Lorraine was the spitting image of Tessa Douglas.

I swallowed hard, hoping Kay didn’t notice, and kept my eyes down. Had Kay ever seen these early family photos? If so, she could hardly have failed to notice Lorraine’s resemblance to the young Douglas girl. I leafed back a few more pages, casually, very casually, struggling hard to keep my voice even, my face blank. ‘I’ll bet,’ I said brightly, ‘that if I turn to the beginning I’ll see little Jay dancing a rumba in his diapers!’

Kay laughed. ‘Believe it or not, there are home movies something like that. Jay dancing a tarantella for St Joseph Altar. I think he was four. Jay’s mother dragged the movies out the Christmas just before we were married.’

‘St Joseph Altar? Help out a poor Episcopalian.’

‘Sorry. March 19, St Joseph’s feast day. It’s an old Sicilian custom. You decorate a table in the church and lay out pasta, cakes and breads to thank God for His blessings.’

I closed the little album, rubbed my hand over the embossed flower on the cover, and set it back in place on the buffet. ‘Do you find looking at the photos comforting or upsetting, Kay?’

‘A bit of both, I suspect, but I’m going to let Lorraine take care of it. I’m just too tired, and my brain isn’t functioning properly.’

‘I’m sure the police visit today didn’t help.’

‘You know what the cops told me? As little as a quarter of a teaspoon of thallium can kill a person. Did you know that?’

I did, but I wanted Kay to think that apart from what I read in Agatha Christie’s works, I didn’t follow the thallium issue all that closely. ‘My gosh.’

She nodded with authority. ‘It can. That’s why they took everything away, even the itsiest-bitsiest canister. I don’t know what I’m going to use to clean my sink because they even took away the fucking Comet.’

‘You can buy more Comet,’ I said reasonably.

‘I know, but it makes me so damn mad! Anyone would think the cops suspected me of giving Jay the poison myself! And if I did, it’s not likely I’d have left the evidence lying around the house, now, is it?’