Belladonna, page 22
Bella noted a slight movement in her peripheral vision. With it came a cutting chuckle, one that emerged from a female throat.
“You lose, slut,” said the English-accented voice behind it. One of the darker shadows shifted. From the edge appeared a steady, black-gloved hand.
Florrie made a strangled sound. “She has a gun!”
“Yes, and it has bullets and everything,” the veiled woman mocked. “Hello, Bella. Long time no see. I wish it could have been longer, but that’s life.”
Bella didn’t move. Something about the woman’s voice gave her the spookiest feeling she’d ever experienced. “Go,” she whispered to the trembling Florrie. Using her elbow, she nudged the former captive in the stomach. “Go,” she said again.
Florrie hesitated, then, emitting a garbled sound, turned and fled.
The hand holding the gun took aim, but Bella stepped hastily forward.
“Don’t,” she ordered sharply. Then, curling her fingers into her palms, she said more gently, “Please let her go. She can’t do any more damage than has already been done.”
The eerie feeling heightened as the woman’s teeth flashed. “Damage done by you, right? Oh yes, I saw the result of your handiwork. I mean, it would have been hard to missall those women galloping down Stockton Street in the rain, in their underwear. Naturally, I thought of you right away. After all, who but you knew about our operation—except for maybe Rudge, and he wouldn’t have let them out.” She rubbed a gloved thumb and forefinger together. “Nothing in it for him.”
Bella couldn’t control her fear, so she buried it. “I guess greed does make people predictable.”
“So do scruples.”
Which this woman obviously did not possess. A series of chills chased themselves across Bella’s skin.
“No comeback for that, Bella?” the newcomer taunted. “What a shame. You used to be so good at it, too.”
A memory desperately tried to surface, yet every time Bella attempted to capture it, it slipped out of reach. Something about this woman, about the taunting edge to her voice. She’d heard it before, but where, when?
The picture of a mirror flashed in her head, followed by a younger version of that taunting voice. “I hate Belladonna!”
The woman hated her. Why? What had they been to each other? Friends? Cousins? Sisters… ?
The last thought forced a shudder from her. No, not that! she begged inwardly. Not a sister. Hobby’s daughter, a cousin—yes, that she could accept.
“Repartee,” the woman said now. “I’ve gotten better at it myself, but Charmaine’s still the queen of that social skill.” Her teeth glinted again. “Nothing to say to that, either? My, but you are a dull conversationalist, Bella. Or is it that you still don’t remember us?”
What could she say? “I don’t remember you.”
“Neither of us?” The woman sounded surprised, but that wasn’t what captured Bella’s attention all of a sudden. Something about the shape of the woman’s jaw brought her eyes into vivid focus and held them on that part of her face. Her mouth looked frighteningly familiar. Why frighteningly, Bella wasn’t sure, but tendrils of fear were definitely running around inside her now.
“Neither of you,” she said softly.
The woman thought for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I thought you’d have figured it all out by now.”
“That’s amnesia for you.” Bella couldn’t believe the flippant response that came from her mouth. “It isn’t as predictable as greed.”
“Still the same nasty tongue, anyway,” the woman observed sarcastically. She inclined her head.’ “Let’s get a move on, shall we? Before we’re…”
Bella’s ears separated a scratchy sound from the storm outside, which was quite loud at this point. When nothing came of it, she ventured a guarded, “Before we’re what?”
A second voice, this one completely disembodied, spoke. “Before we’re joined by Charmaine, I should think. Hello, Bella. You look rather different than the night we met on the Sun Sen. I hear you’re quite good with makeup these days. At least you inherited one good quality from your mother.”
Goose bumps spread over Bella’s skin like an army of ants. “You knew Amanda?”
To her shock, Charmaine Parret laughed, a full, throaty laugh of genuine amusement. The woman with the gun, Bella noticed, didn’t crack a smile.
“Oh, my,” Charmaine gasped at last. “I needed that rather badly, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t think it’s funny,” the woman said irritably.
“Well, of course, you wouldn’t, seeing as it doesn’t pertain to you. But forgive me, I’m spoiling your party.”
“What party?” Bella and the woman asked in tandem. The echo of their combined voices set Bella’s nerves on edge. Who were these women? Why couldn’t she remember them?
Charmaine spoke to her companion rather than to Bella. “You surprise me. You’re dying to do it. Why don’t you just pull off the mask and face her? Do it. Show your big sister what you look like after all these years apart.”
MALONE SPOTTED THEM first—a gaggle of females, some clutching blankets, the rest clad primarily in their underwear, running along Stockton Street toward—he didn’t know what.
An idea—an unpalatable one he had to admit, but viable—came to him. He jammed on the brakes, almost catapulting Ronnie through the windshield.
“What now?” his cousin demanded.
“Wait here.”
Malone vaulted from the car into the rain and intercepted a thin woman with dyed blond hair and badly smudged makeup.
“Please, no,” she begged, but he reassured her with a lie.
“I’m a police officer. What’s going on here?”
She paused, but took him on faith. “We—we escaped from a place, a hellhole. Back there.” She gestured in the direction of the Birds’ fireworks factory. “We were held there for days, some of us for weeks. They were going to sell us.”
“Abroad,” Malone finished for her.
Obviously she mistook his meaning, because she drew back and looked as if she might slap him.
“I meant ship you overseas,” he clarified. “Look, did you see a woman who wasn’t one of you? Very pretty, dark hair and eyes, tall, slender, probably wearing a brown leather jacket, boots and jeans?”
The woman’s head bobbed. “She helped us get out, but we never saw her again after the guards came. I hope they didn’t catch her.”
Malone released her, raking his fingers through his hair and nodding. “So do I,” he said bleakly, then in a tone that boded ill for the Birds, he repeated, “So do I.”
“BIG…” BELLA’S HEART gave a sickening thump in her chest, then seemed to stop beating altogether. “You’re—my sister? My younger sister?”
In answer, and with the gun aimed squarely at Bella’s head, the woman reached up and started to remove her hat and veil. She might have also been planning to step farther into the muzzy pool of light, but a sharp crack like a gunshot stopped her cold.
Her head twisted from side to side. “What was that, Charmaine? Charmaine?” She swore violently and bared her teeth. “Bloody bitch, deserts at the drop of a hat. Charmaine!”
The sound came again, an echoing report that had the woman clutching her chest with splayed fingers. The barrel of her own gun dropped a notch. “What’s going… No, wait. Come back here!”
The last order was shouted at Bella, who, seizing the moment, bolted down the nearest corridor. To her shock, the next shot she heard came from directly in front of her.
She skidded to a halt, while behind her, the woman cried to any and all workers in the vicinity, “Get her! She’s here. Bella Conlan’s in the factory. I want her captured and brought to me.”
“Bella !”
Someone hissed at her from the shadows to her right. “Bella, it’s me, Florrie.”
Bella pressed the heel of her hand to her racing heart. For the second time that day relief all but overwhelmed her. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You should have gone to the police.”
“I didn’t think you’d last that long with her.” Florrie held up a string of fireworks and a torn pack of matches. “I found these as I was going for the door. I thought they might sound like a gun. I guess someone around here likes to make things go pop.”
“We’ll both go pop in a minute if that thunder back there is being made by as many feet as I think it is. Come on.”
Grabbing Florrie’s hand, she pulled her along the passageway. To her dismay, however, it led to a dead end.
“Wrong turn,” Florrie panted. “What do we do now?”
“Go back.”
“But they’re coming. They heard us. We’ll never get past them.”
No, they wouldn’t, Bella realized. Unless…
Her gaze landed on the firecrackers Florrie still clutched, then on a barrel of explosive volcanoes. Taking no time to think the idea through, Bella broke off half of the firecracker string and struck a match.
“What are you—oh, my God!” Florrie gasped. “This place’ll go off like my pirn—I mean, my boss when his fuse is lit.”
“I hope so,” Bella said sincerely. She tossed the firecrackers into two separate barrels, took Florrie by the wrist and tugged. “Let’s get out of here, fast.”
Florrie offered no protest. In fact, she matched Bella stride for stride, back to the junction.
“There!” a wiry, bearded man yelled. “That’s her.”
Workers poured like rats out of the woodwork. Go off, Bella prayed of the fireworks. Please, don’t be duds.
The two women switched directions. Florrie raced along behind Bella. “I think they’re-”
The rest of her sentence was drowned out by a series of blasts. At first Bella thought it was the workers shooting at them, but when it continued and actually grew louder, she realized it was the fireworks exploding.
“Down here.” She pushed Florrie into a narrow passageway.
Florrie glanced back, shouting, “Did you do that? Sounds like an earthquake.”
Bella could barely hear her. The corridor echoed like a cavern. Unfortunately, between the explosions and the storm, she could no longer hear their pursuers at all.
They ran full speed along the passage and would have kept going if the entire darkened area ahead of them hadn’t suddenly erupted with a blinding flash of light.
After that, Bella wasn’t exactly sure what happened.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spied three workers, armed and charging toward them. Except there was no “them” anymore, she realized, dodging both fireworks and men.
“Florrie!” she cried into the glittering darkness. “Flor… Oh, my God!” She ducked swiftly, going down on all fours as a rocket whizzed past her head.
That rocket set off a chain reaction. Fireworks flew in all directions and at all angles. Bella had to dodge, dart and scramble her way through the maze of passages. She only prayed there would be an escape at the end of it all.
Thankfully, through the smoke and sparks, she spied a narrow door marked Exit.
Choking from the toxic smoke, she made a dash for it. Her hands located the knob and twisted.
At first it refused to open, but three hard shoves later it gave way and she was free, back in the soggy alley with a black cloud of smoke mushrooming out around her.
“Stop!” yelled a voice behind her. Bella’s heart lurched. She hadn’t escaped, after all.
Fireworks continued to bang, sizzle and roar as she ran through the streaming rain for the nearest shelter—a dismal obelisk of a building next to the factory. Like most of the alley entrances, the rear door wasn’t locked. Yanking on it, Bella raced inside, her hair and clothes soaked, her ears smarting from the combined boom of fireworks and thunder.
Sheet lightning illuminated the room before her. Except for dust and cobwebs, it was empty. No refuge here. Her frantic eyes located a staircase. She’d have to go up. And pray.
Amazingly, no one followed her in, or if they did, she couldn’t hear them.
Lightning flashed crazily as the storm center moved inland. Cobwebs became tangled in her long hair. Rain beat against the sloping roof in a fierce staccato rhythm. She could hear fireworks exploding and beyond that the sound of fire-engine sirens cutting through the wet gloom.
Her boots echoed on the metal stairs. Her head ached from trying to remember things she sensed she didn’t really want to know. A parrot on a stick—what did that mean? In her dream it had changed into a skinny pink knife, the knife that had stabbed her father.
Mirrors, silver rings, denim, dressmakers, ponies, bicycles, Romaine, Lona—the images burned in her mind. But above all of them, the imprint of Malone’s face stayed with her, touching her deeply. She’d come here alone because she loved him. That love was something she would never forget.
She’d forgotten her sister. How had she done that? Why had she done it? Her younger sister. God help her, she had no recollection of a sibling, no impression of a name, nothing. Unless she’d been called Romaine…but, no, that didn’t make sense. Well, it might, but only if she took into account Hobby’s cryptic computer message. “Romaine lives,” he’d said. But he’d also said that Belladonna was mad, and that, Bella knew, was untrue. She might be many things, but crazy wasn’t one of them. Yet.
The staircase wound upward to a second floor filled with crates, barrels and cartons. She could have hidden there, but her instincts urged her to go higher, up the next set of stairs to the door. If she could bolt that door from the other side, and if there were no other entrances, she might be safe for a time, at least long enough to think things through. Maybe a miracle would happen, and she would remember everything about her past.
A violent clap of thunder accompanied Bella as she raced across the upper landing and slammed the door. It did have a bolt—not a strong one, but better than nothing. All she needed now was a place to sit and steady her frazzled nerves. If only she could talk to Malone.
Darkness broken only by a glimmer of light enveloped her. The rain still beat an angry tattoo on the roof, and the fireworks exploded at a fast and furious rate. For some reason, she found that rather comforting. There must be solace in chaos, after all.
Her cold fingers groped for a light switch. She found one, but not before locating several sticky spiderwebs. Unfortunately, when she flipped it on, the bulb was scarcely strong enough to illuminate the center of the room, let alone the corners.
Not that she probably wanted to see the room’s contents clearly. The floor was a sea of mannequins, hundreds of them—some with heads, some without, some with heads but no faces, some with faces but no hair. It was ghastly, like a scene out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The eyes that stared at her had a weird, vacuous quality about them, and the myriad shadows only heightened that ambience.
Bella sidled cautiously along the wall. She felt dizzy for some reason. Jumbled thoughts and pictures kept colliding in her mind. She heard Malone’s voice repeating Lona’s last words: Amanda’s not...
She closed her eyes briefly against the brilliant kaleidoscope of color stamped over the blackness. A breath of wind on her cheeks had her glancing upward, but all she saw was a dark shape in the rafters. A sparrow, perhaps, or possibly—she flinched—a bat.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was Malone and the shocking discovery she’d made only moments before. She had a sister. Moreover, she had a sister who was a Bird.
Thunder rumbled, shaking the building. More air passed over Bella’s face. Ghastly painted eyes stared at her out of shiny faces. Her own eyes closed again. The room spun. “Why can’t I remember her?” she whispered out loud.
“Because, Bella,” a sarcastic, English-accented voice remarked, “that’s how it goes sometimes for people like us.”
Bella’s eyes flew open. She hadn’t heard anyone enter, and the door to her left was still bolted. But there the woman was in her black netted hat and sunglasses, so she’d gotten in somehow.
Her sister moved closer, a wary motion that brought her to within ten feet of where Bella stood plastered to the wall.
“What do you mean, people like us?” she managed to ask. It was hard to be defiant with a gun pointed at your throat.
“Time for the unveiling, Bella,” the woman answered mockingly.
She took another step forward, and this time when she reached up to strip off her hat and glasses, there was nothing and no one to stop her. The disguise flew across the floor, landing on a mannequin’s outstretched hand. The woman’s head rose slowly, until Bella could see every line, curve and angle of her face, every feature in its entirety. Too shocked to respond, she merely stared in mute disbelief.
The woman’s smile came slowly, a grim little smile that contained just a hint of malicious mischief. In a high, childish treble, she warbled:
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, Belladonna has it all. But Bella left; she could not reign. So Donna thus became Romaine….”
Chapter Eighteen
For the life of her, Bella couldn’t think of a single thing to say. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t think at all. A thousand thoughts rushed at her, the most prominent being Belladonna.
Just like Romaine, Lona had said. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Ro-maine, a combined name. And just as Romaine was a blend, so too was Belladonna.
Dear God, she remembered now, at least that part of it.
It was as if a curtain had parted in her head. “Arabella,” she whispered. She could hardly bring herself to utter the name, the one she’d been given at birth. “Arabella and Madonna. Bella and Donna—Belladonna.” It was, as Amanda had said, “just like Romaine.” “Romaine,” she breathed. “From Robert and Charmaine.”
“Give the woman a cigar.” Her sister applauded sarcastically, then commanded bitingly, “Now open your eyes and look at me. Let me look at you.”
Stunned beyond her capacity to endure, Bella complied. One and only one thing registered in her mind: she should have feelings for this woman, overwhelming feelings of love and loss, of sadness and sorrow. But there was nothing, not a single flicker of emotion inside her. This woman—Madonna, as she’d been christened—was a complete stranger to her.
