I thought of Juliet’s mother compared with my mother, Margie Connor. Different times, different mothers. He was right. I was different from Juliet and yet we shared the same memories. “What do you do? While you’re waiting for me.”
“I don’t do anything,” he said.
“Where are you in the world while you wait for me?”
“You wouldn’t understand.” He laughed. “I’m not in the world as you know it. My purpose is to wait for you. And when I know that you are reborn again, I know that it will be about twenty years or so before you call me into service for you. I set up my next life… finances, homes. I will everything to my son… Lucian Varnier. I’m Lucian Varnier the Fourth. And then I wait until I see you again.”
But it had been much longer than twenty years this time. I was nearly thirty-four. “Luke.” I closed my eyes absorbing the reality of his life, the cruelty of it. Malique had described Luke as a damned creature—a soldier in the employ of a demon. He was being punished for something and his punishment was—me. His employer had been that demon—that thing—that I had seen crawl into Juliet’s mother that evening on the kitchen floor. The entire thing was madness.
“You told Juliet you were in the employ of her mother, but that isn’t true. Is it?”
“Depends on how you look at it.”
From Malique, I had a sense of the basic structure of the curse. “Juliet’s mother called on a demon to help her get revenge on Marchant. That is your real employer, isn’t it?”
“It is.” He purposely changed the subject. “Let’s just go away somewhere for a few days while you’re working through all of this.”
I’d been warned against confiding in him and telling him about traveling to Challans, so I hoped he wouldn’t sense the lie I was about to tell him. “I have a business trip in London tomorrow. Three days.”
“We only have twelve days until your birthday. Do you have to go?”
“I do.”
I looked down at my hands and what they’d just managed to do. This was true, all of it. Luke Varner’s crazy story. “I’m going to die on my birthday, aren’t I?” My voice cracked a little. “That’s why you keep saying we’re running out of time, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said softly.
“Do you know what will happen to me?” If I failed in France, I needed to know what would happen.
“It isn’t always the same.”
“And what will happen to you?”
“I disappear again… and wait.”
“Is that what happened to you in Paris? After Juliet… after I jumped off the bridge?”
“Yes. You are my purpose. I have no other reason to be here than looking after you.”
“Can I ask you something personal?”
“Of course.”
“Is part of your purpose, as you call it, loving me?”
“No,” said Luke. “I went to extraordinary lengths to distance myself from you in Paris. I told you it wasn’t possible for me to love you. I was new and I didn’t know how to handle you. As I told you, I failed her.”
“What changed?”
“I did.” He took my face in his hands and kissed me, slow and deep. The part inside me that belonged to Juliet was brought to tears. My forehead touched his.
“We have so little time now, Red. All I ever want is time with you.”
17
Nora Wheeler
New York City, 1932
Clint was taking his time tonight. Norma wished he’d finish so she could send him off. Of course, that wasn’t happening until she got him off, so she refocused her energies, hoping this wouldn’t be one of the nights he needed his hands around her neck to come.
Norma and Clint had an arrangement. She didn’t think about how his short stature and pale stocky body repulsed her at times. He made sure her rent was paid. Before Clint brought her to New York City, Norma Westerman had been on her own—and being on her own at nineteen had been scary. Theater—at least the kind she was doing—didn’t pay, and the numbers never added up until Clint. Now they did. Lately, though, this arrangement was messing with her head, blurring the lines between what she was becoming and who she wished she was. It was hard to imagine another year, let alone a lifetime of wearing her legs out dancing all day and Clint wearing out the rest of her at night.
Clint was a theater fixer who took care of “problems” including scandals, abortions, and drunk husbands. He’d found Norma in Akron—where her mother had run a boardinghouse on Dixon Street that catered to musicians.
Norma’s mama had an old out-of-tune upright piano in the dining room. Occasionally a boarder with tuning skills would cycle through the house, giving the instrument a new life. After dinner, the boarders would gather around it and Norma would sit in wonder at the singing and tap dancing that would break out, each boarder trying to outshine the last for the paltry audience. Norma got cheap tap lessons out of it. Something about the instrument haunted her. She showed no interest in playing the piano, even despite her mother’s prodding that she could get extra money playing at the Methodist church in town. Norma needed to move—tap and ballet lessons were all she could think about. In New York, those skills were nothing special. Clint found her at a regional theater show.
With her look, he found her a permanent job at the Winter Garden Theatre where he’d placed her as a chorus line girl and set her up in a small apartment. He’d made the terms clear from the beginning, and Norma had wanted out of Akron enough to accept them. In all honesty, she’d had worse terms offered to her by her mother’s boyfriends over the years.
But now, Norma wanted more. Clint had contacts at the Hollywood studios and he’d promised her that he’d set her up for a screen test at MGM, but each time she asked him, he said the time wasn’t right. Now, nearly two years into their “arrangement,” she knew that Clint was happy with things the way they were. There would be no introductions, and the timing would never be right.
Two years had been the longest Clint had ever stayed with a woman. Norma kept hoping he’d move on to a younger girl, but he remained steadfast that Norma was his. At his drunkest, he would unfurl the things that would happen to her if she left him—she could fall in front of a cab, he could cut her insides out and blame it on a crazed lunatic, the accounting went on and on as he got drunker and Norma had no doubt he was creative. Even after his cruelest moments, Clint never apologized. From what Norma had gathered, he’d had a rough childhood—his father abandoned him and his mother when he was a baby. He took care of his mother in an apartment he paid for—for all Norma knew, he could fill up an entire apartment building with the women he paid for in one way or another.
Clint rolled onto his back, pleased with himself. “Get me a drink.”
She didn’t move fast enough.
“I don’t ask you twice.”
Norma sighed. Clint was already half drunk, so sex had taken forever with him tonight—a trait he seemed to prize. She was exhausted.
Norma sat up in bed and reached for the black silk robe, but Clint grabbed it from her. “I want to watch your ass while you walk.” She knew where this would lead, but she slid out of the bed and walked to the door.