Silence crackled for what seemed a long time. “Well, people have been called phonies less politely. You know, you could have had what you wanted just by blowing smoke up my skirt until I kicked the bucket.”
“I admit the idea was discussed, but I couldn’t live with it. I’d have gotten a bad case of hives every time Nothing Sacred played on TCM.”
“Bill Wellman directed that one at the top of his lungs. I waited until we wrapped, then got the crew to tie him up in a straitjacket.” She exhaled, probably blowing smoke. “Toodle-oo, kiddo. Drop reel three by anytime.” The line clicked and the dial tone came on.
Gloria Voss answered the door. She looked as trim and elegant as ever, but her eyes were red. “Jane passed early this morning, in her sleep.”
“I’m sorry.” He truly was, somewhat to his surprise. He gripped the film can he was holding so hard his fingers went numb.
The nurse excused herself and went into the bedroom. She came out carrying the rest of A Perfect Crime in a stack. “She asked me — told me — to give you these in case she missed you. ‘Tell him to go to hell, and no hard feelings,’ those were her words. It was the last thing she said before she went to sleep.”
“But that wasn’t the deal.”
“I know. We had no secrets. She liked to come on as a tough old broad, but she had a heart as big as L.A. She ordered me not to see her films because they might corrupt me. Once, she said, she altered a contract with her agent so he owed her ten percent of everything he made instead of the other way around. He signed it without reading. She had him over a barrel, but she laughed and tore up the contract and had him draw up another.”
“I’ve heard that story.”
“I think she was testing you. Congratulations. You passed.” She held out the stack of cans.
His cell phone rang. He apologized and answered. It was Kyle Broadhead. “Listen, my whiz kid found a great-grandniece of Lombard’s in Fort Wayne, that’s where Lombard was born. She’s agreed to provide DNA samples.”
“Kyle—”
“I’m not finished. I talked to Ted Turner’s people. He’ll finance an exhumation in return for distribution rights to A Perfect Crime. We’ve got the niece’s permission, and Turner already owns everything Lombard did for MGM. He wants to put together a box set with her debut film included.”
Valentino explained the situation.
“Doesn’t change a thing,” Broadhead said after a pause. “You can’t buy publicity like this, but thank God Ted Turner can. People love a clever fake. The attention will bring in donations to the program like — like—”
“Lemmings,” Valentino finished. “Tell Turner no deal.”
“I heard some of that,” Gloria Voss said, when he flipped shut the instrument. “It means you don’t believe her, but it was a wonderful thing to do.”
“I don’t know what to believe. Whichever way it went, it would have spoiled a beautiful story.”
“Grandma would say, ‘Thanks, buster.’ ”
He reacted after a beat. “Grandma?”
“She’s the one who talked me into becoming a nurse. She had a soft spot for them.”
“So you’re the granddaughter of—”
“Jane Peters and the owner of Buffalo Shipping. That’s what it says on Mom’s birth certificate.” She thrust the cans into his arms, smiling with Carole Lombard’s cheekbones and Clark Gable’s mouth.
Limpopo
by Sheila Kohler
© 2007 by Sheila Kohler
O. Henry Award-winner Sheila Kohler makes her EQMM debut this month in a painfully suspenseful tale set in her native South Africa. Her seven novels and three collections of short stories have brought her worldwide recognition and translation into many languages. Her most recent book is Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness (Other Press, 2007).
Amy stares at the marks of the tires in the red dirt and the shiny bumper of the blue car, which glints in the light as it goes down the long driveway under the trees. It rained the night before and the earth is wet. She can hear the sound of the river running through the bottom of the garden in the distance. Always, there is the sound of the river running, even in her dreams. She likes to say the funny name over and over again: “Limpopo, Limpopo, Limpopo,” she says. She wonders what the name means.
Her mother has told her she is just going up to the farmers’ co-op for a minute, she’ll be as quick as she can, and Amy is to be a good girl now and mind the baby, who is sleeping like an angel, and the dogs, who are lying under the tree. From the swing, Amy watches the pale blue car go down the muddy driveway and out the gate. She swings back and forth through the blue air, going higher and higher. She stares at the tracks the way she does when her father takes her walking with him in the bush and they are looking for animal spoor. Her father is very good at spotting leopard tracks. There are still a few leopards in the hills, her father says, and he doesn’t want them coming down and stealing his game.
Sometimes her father lets her walk with him, if she walks very quietly at his side and is careful to look for ticks in her socks on their return, when he goes out with the dogs looking for game to cull. Amy’s father, Mark, runs a game farm on the border which he inherited from her grandparents before Independence. Amy is not quite sure what Independence is. All Amy knows is, her father gets up very early in the morning and leaves the house before anyone else is awake, and when he comes home at night, she is sometimes already asleep.
Amy swings through the air, throwing her head back and forth, and stretching out her legs. They look longer, and she feels taller, more grown up, watching the back of her mother’s car disappear and the big garden that stretches away toward the river, which she can see glinting invitingly in the distance like a chocolate brown ribbon. Her mother has never left her alone with her baby brother before, though the co-op is not far from their house. In fact, she has never left her alone, even for a minute, even to go to fetch the eggs in the henhouse, which is right near the house.
But Amy is eight years old now, what her father calls the age of reason, the age when they shipped him off all on his own to boarding school, he says, and it is her father’s birthday today. Her mother is making him his favourite cake, with granadillas and granadilla icing, and she has forgotten something she must have. Amy is old enough to remain with her brother for half an hour, surely, with the dogs to guard them, the two big ridgeback dogs they keep, called Dale and Tony, who are now asleep as the baby is, lying in the shade just outside the house under the seringa tree.
Gladys, the old nanny who works for them and helps her mother in the house, the one who brought her mother up, is too sick today to come in to work. She is lying in her small, smoky room, which is some way from the house. Amy’s mother doesn’t trust anyone else, these days, she says.
Her mother was in a hurry, and the baby was sleeping so soundly, which is such a rare thing; her brother is a colicky baby, her mother says, and anything wakes his lordship. He still wakes up in the night again and again and screams for her mother to come and pick him up and breast-feed him, which wakes Amy, too, sometimes, and makes her mother sleepy and cross during the day. Her mother stumbles around the house in her funny bra, her stained blouse half open, half-asleep. Her mother says she feels like a “zombie” half the time.
Today her mother had forgotten something she really needed for the special cake. Amy heard her say, “Oh dammit!” in the kitchen and slam a cupboard door shut and then step outside and look down at the sleeping baby. Then she looked up at Amy, who was swinging back and forth through the air in her light-blue sundress with the little sleeves like wings, her hair tied back from her face in a ponytail with her favourite blue bow. Such a good girl, my good girl, my angel, her mother often calls her.