Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Where is she?”

“Someone killed her.”

“Killed her?” He was incredulous. “Do they know who did it?”

“She knew lots of bad people. She sold me once to a woman, for drugs.”

“God, Amaryllis!”

“Toulouse — you’re not going to leave me, are you?”

“No! Why would I leave you?”

“Because of all the things that happened to me? And for what I did … back at the—”

“You didn’t do anything. I even liked it.”

“No you didn’t. I only thought that — I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s all OK. We’re going to help you. Edward and Lucy—”

“I don’t want anybody’s help!”

He knew it had come out wrong.

“Toulouse … do you love me?”

“Do I love you?”

“I want to know.”

“Well — yes!” It wasn’t as if he didn’t; he loved her with all his heart. It was just that he’d never said that to a girl before. “I love you,” he said, and it wasn’t so hard. Fun, even: “I do love you.” He put his arms around her and kissed her — rather professionally at that, thanks to the tutelage of Lucille Rose.

She started to cry. “I don’t want to go back to that place. To MacLaren …”

“You’re not , Amaryllis. You won’t . You’ll never have to go back, OK? I’ll get my grandfather to—”

A scattering of pebbles through dust as Pullman kicked past, barking. A shout from the maze’s entrance.

“Hey, Tull! Tull! Toulouse!” (People were actually beginning to call him that.)

“You in there?”

“Coming!” Then: “It’s my mother — just stick to the story.” But she’d already forgotten the story. “You don’t have to talk. You’re shy , OK? And you don’t speak English that well.”

Trinnie appeared at the end of the allée as a figure seen through the wrong end of an opera glass. “Ahoy!” The children walked toward her; Amaryllis smelled the familiar attar of myrtle as the lady approached. Her brown-speckled pants, white shirt, and orange hair made her look like a perfect cigarette.

“I see you have company!”

“What’s your name?” whispered Toulouse, a bit frantically; a detail he’d carelessly neglected. “What’s your name ?”

Amaryllis was truly stymied; by then, the woman was upon them.

“Well, hello!”

“Mom, this is— Amar . We met in Marrakesh.”

“I am so jealous!”

“She’s the consul’s daughter.”

“Hello, Amar! What a lovely name. She’s gorgeous .”

“She’s only here for a few weeks.”

“Well, we’re happy to have you! Diane has so many stories — she showed me a picture of you and Dex on an elephant. Did you know ,” she said to Toulouse, “those were the first pictures I’d seen of le grand tour ? My son , Amar”—turning her full charm on the orphan—“is not very interested in photo documentation, as you may or may not know. I got him a digital camera and it just sits. I was so brutally envious I wasn’t there — I love the Sahara — it was obscene the way I carried on, wasn’t it, Tull? But I was taking care of Lauren Hutton, a dear friend of mine, who got in a terrible crash. I adore Marrakesh! I was there with Donna Karan and Lee Radziwill — at Dar Tamsna — that’s in the Palmaraie, do you know it? Well, of course you do. Was that already eight years ago?”

The question was put to the social ether; Toulouse hated when his mother went on, dropping names like an idiot — hated that some horrible part of her was reflexively trying to impress “Amar” in order to actually insinuate herself into the exotic preteen orbit of an imaginary consul’s daughter. The humility she seemed to have acquired the last few months was falling away in noisome chunks; he wondered if she was stoned.

“Did you know I was there with your grandmother? Bluey, oh yes. And Truman — how they adored each other! You still haven’t read any of Truman’s books, have you, Toulouse? I’ll get you A Tree of Night … my God — I was about your age,” she said, looking at “Amar,” “when I first met that astonishing little man. So: your father’s the consul! Tell me everything .”

“Ma, don’t give her the third degree.”

“I’ve barely said a word to her,” she said, looking at him as if he were insane. She turned back to the girl. “We must have a dinner. Is your father here on business?”

Amaryllis stammered, but their attention was drawn to the puzzle’s entrance, where Pullman caracoled, playfully ducking his head. A man in a suit walked toward them. He did not recognize the girl in the demure princess-style spaghetti-strapped silk organza dress and matching bolero, which Lucy had bought for her birthday, at Saks — and not merely because her hair was shorn and she had fattened. Seeing her in context of the Trotter’s Bel-Air manse and being introduced to her, with such certainty, as the daughter of a Moroccan consul, was so wildly disparate from the circumstances of the dun-colored room in which he’d interviewed her last that Samson’s mind refused to make the connection. Luckily, the girl, though recognizing the detective, was too startled to betray herself and gave away nothing but a marmoreal calm. Toulouse braced himself for the treacherous shoals of banal conversational inquiry when fortune smiled on them again — a hideous, rhythmical scream penetrated the air, panicked and desperate, soul-rending.

“It’s Mother!” said Trinnie, and flew from the maze.

Samson jogged after, but when Toulouse began to follow, the orphan held him back.

†Because the children adored her and truly did mean well, they could not foresee that what began as derring-do, a “homeless project” if you will, could neither be sustained nor come to good end. But they had rescued her and were so fated, thus cannot be judged.

Bursting from the boxwood, this is what first Trinnie, then Samson, saw: Bluey, in favored negligee that unfavorably revealed her anatomy, sprinting past with spatula in hand, followed by a pink-faced Winter, the former shrieking like a parrot in maddening metronomic intervals while making a beeline for the Len Brackett — designed Pine-Lute Pavilion doghouse. Bluey clambered in double time.

“Mother! Winter, my God, what is going on?”

“I was helping with her album! She said she was hungry!”

The hyperventilating nanny looked close to collapse.

“Calm down, Winter,” said Samson.

“But what happened —”

“I asked if she wanted breakfast in the kitchen … she’s been locked in that bedroom for weeks … she said she did . I thought it’d be good for her!—”

“ Why is she carrying that fucking spatula ?”

“I was about to serve her eggs, and she grabbed … she—” (here, Winter began to lose it) “— threw the eggs in my face! Said I was trying to kill her!” The detective noticed some evidence of yellowish residue in her hair, which would support her assertions. “I was serving her breakfast !—”

The shrieks continued from the villa unabated, interrupted by an occasional bark.

Trinnie bent to her knees and looked in. “Pullman, you get out of there!”

“Why don’t we call a doctor?” offered Samson.

“Mother, would you come out, please?”

“I am an old woman!” Bluey shouted. “And I will not die today , whether Winter likes it or not!”