Kiss Kill Vanish (3 page)

Tear-soaked and swollen, I stared at her. Did I look like I was trying to book an impromptu foreign vacation? On a one-way ticket?

“It's lovely this time of year,” she added.

Montreal. I'd never been. I didn't know anything about it, but in my mind it suddenly appeared as a glittering ice castle, a fortress to hide myself in. Maybe it was even better this way. My father would be looking for me under every rock in Spain—in Madrid, where my mother's cousin lives, or in Barcelona, where I always said I wanted to go after graduation. A few months in Montreal might be smart. I'd get to Spain eventually.

Two minutes.

And I remembered what Emilio had told me.

It was one of those Key West nights on the yacht, but we weren't on the deck anymore. We were in his cabin, tangled in sheets and talking about places we wished we could go. Alone. Together.

“Someday I'll take you to Montreal,” he murmured in my ear. “It's beautiful. You'll love it.”

“When did you go to Montreal?”

“I've been lots of times,” he said. “For your father. He hates it, so he sends me.”

“I didn't know he had business in Montreal.”

“He has business everywhere.”

Montreal. Of all the random places.

I bought the ticket.

One minute.

I forgot to ask why Papi hated it. Now I know.

It's only November, and I can't remember the last time I was warm. If someone had a gun to my head and was forcing me to choose between braving the five-minute walk to Soupe au Chocolat and murdering a kitten, I'd have to think long and hard. I'd probably end up under the frozen café awning, but only because I want to play Emilio's mandolin more than anything else in the world right now, and I don't even know where to find a kitten. In Miami they're everywhere, but here, I think they've all been murdered by the cold already.

I pull myself to my feet and gather the things I need for the next four hours: mandolin, hat, scarf, coat, fingerless gloves, mittens to go over the gloves. And then I turn off the alarm on my phone before it can go off and force me to leave. I'd much rather it be my idea.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“Y
ou're late.” Nanette's formidable uncle Jacques is standing under the awning with his arms crossed over his barrel chest. My eyes are drawn to the flaming orange sideburns glinting in the lamplight below the brim of his cap. He's bull-like, short and thick, all meat and muscles. Like my father.

I hate muscles.

But not Emilio's muscles, because Emilio is lean—not skinny, but taut and long and powerful, practically humming with energy.

I give Jacques a hopeful smile.

He shakes his head. “I already locked up.”

“I'm only two minutes late. You'd leave me to freeze to death for being two minutes late?” I let my teeth chatter loudly enough for him to hear the rattle.

He huffs.

Raw, red knuckles appear at the cuff of his jacket, and he pulls the key from his pocket. “Only if you're stupid enough to freeze to death instead of going home.” He pushes the heavy door open for me. “You smell like garlic.”

I don't deny it.

Jacques's English is technically perfect, but it lacks the easy lilt of most Montreal natives who came out of the womb bilingual. It's nasal and gurgling. It swallows entire syllables. It makes me constantly question if he's slipped into his native French, and right now it's making me annoyed that I still smell like
grr-lique
.

As for Jacques's lack of subtlety, I don't mind. There's never a malicious undertone, and it feels good to have a conversation with someone who doesn't give me the creeps. His occasional rudeness is counterbalanced by the fact that he's my father's age (old men are allowed to be cranky, aren't they?), and he's doing me a favor, and he has a slight limp. According to Nanette, he grew up on a farm north of Quebec City, and the limp has something to do with a combine.

Jacques flips on the lights, and I place the mandolin case on the closest of the tables. There are too many of them for a space this small—massive pearly white circles crammed in like soap bubbles. Every other color in the café is a glossy variation of chocolate. The floors are bittersweet, the walls are milk, and the countertops are deepest dark.

“Garlic,” he says again with a sniff.
“Terrible.”

I unwind my scarf. “All I can smell is chocolate. That's worse.”

He gives me a nasty look, all scrunched and incensed. “You don't like chocolate? What's the matter with you? Everybody likes chocolate.”

“Of course I like chocolate. But just smelling it is torture.” Reflexively, I sniff. Molten chocolate with roasted coffee bean undertones. I'll be practically delirious from it in a few hours.

He motions for me to hand him my coat and my scarf. I do. He hangs them on the elaborate iron coatrack by the door with branches that curl like an unruly tree, then stands at the window, lifting the edge of the blind to peer out. “Don't open the door for anyone.”

“I won't.”

“And why did you walk here alone? That's not safe to do at night.”

He said the same thing last time. And the time before. I fiddle with the zipper on the case and bite my tongue, because the parental concern doesn't feel bad. But I don't need someone to walk me here, and I don't need someone to walk me home. Montreal in the dead of night is ten times safer than Miami at noon.

“Do you have someone you can call to walk you home?” he asks.

“Sure.”

He looks at me doubtfully. “Nanette said you have no friends.”

“I'll be fine.” So much for thinking Nanette is my friend.

“I'll go turn on the lights in the back for you,” he says, and inches past me.

I rub my nose. It's still cold and rubbery feeling, like I'm touching someone else's face. “I have friends,” I call after him.

“Maybe I heard her wrong. Maybe she said you're not friendly.”

I watch him limp his way through tables and disappear into the back. A light goes on, followed by the scrapes and thuds of drawers and cupboards opening and closing. He reappears with a box under each arm. “Estelle will be here at four thirty to start the baking.”

“Just like last time.”

He puts one of his boxes beside the mandolin case. It's plain brown, the size of a small shoe box. “So I'll lock you in. If you leave, you won't be able to relock it, though.”

“Right. Just like last time,” I repeat.

“I guess I'll go then,” he says. “No smoking. Or any sort of fire. Don't use the stove.”

“I got it. Thanks.”

He nods. “Good night.”

He's one foot into the cold when I notice the brown box still sitting beside my case. “Are you forgetting this?”

“No, it's for you,” he answers over his shoulder, the other box still tucked between his arm and his body. He closes the door behind him, and I listen to it lock from the outside, a metallic scrape followed by a clunk.

I run my hand over the box, warmed by the anticipation of a gift. It's been a while. Papi used to give me gifts, extravagant gifts, gifts that make me squirm with guilt when I think of them now. And sometimes Lucien gives me things—weird things like a book about pointillism, and old-fashioned opera binoculars, and a CD of cello music even though I told him I don't have a CD player—but none of these has felt like a real present. They've felt like wages.

The lid slips off easily, and I peer inside to see three perfect stacks of foil-wrapped bars. Chocolate. Quick inventory reveals two milk, four white, four dark, four hazelnut, two almond.

I'm shaking.

I slide onto the table, pull my legs up so I'm sitting cross-legged, and inhale half a bar of dark chocolate with my eyes closed, sucking on each precious square until I'm cocoa drunk and feeling too nostalgic to think about anything but what I shouldn't think about.

Last summer. Key West. That first night on the yacht, when the stars were like scattered diamond chips and Emilio showed me how to hold his mandolin.

Papi had gone to bed first. Then Lola. Then Ana. But I wasn't tired, because Emilio kept playing song after song and I couldn't stop watching his fingers tug and slide over the strings. Wistful. That's what he seemed, and I remember thinking it was so odd. How had I never noticed that possibility in him before? But I'd barely noticed him at all. Not because he wasn't good-looking—he was—but because he'd always seemed so stiff, just another of Papi's eager protégés with slicked hair and designer suits.

That night he was different, though, and it was more than just his wind-mussed hair and T-shirt. Everything felt fated. Him. Me. It was supposed to be a family vacation, just Papi and us three girls and the yacht, but then some business crisis—an authenticity issue with an auction piece, a sculpture—meant Emilio had to drive documents down from Miami.

Authenticity issue. Ha.

But when you've known something forever, you don't see the evidence against it, not even when it's sprouting all around you, blooming and strangling like noxious weeds. Really. You don't. It's only after, looking back, that you see the choking innocents, and then you hate yourself.

Here's what I'd known forever: My father bought and sold priceless art. His clients were the wealthiest of the wealthy from all over the world. He worked miracles for them, procuring the rarest masterpieces for their eccentric collections, so there were always emergencies to be handled. Emilio was simply his latest lackey in a string of rotating men who handled them.

When Emilio showed up with whatever documents he was supposed to be bringing, the earnest assistant or minion or whatever you call a twenty-four-year-old slave, Papi insisted he stay for the weekend. It was a reward for his diligence, this invitation into our lives. And then everything changed.

It was the first of a whole summer of weekends, Emilio driving back and forth from Miami doing Papi's bidding, then, at Papi's insistence, staying in the guest cabin. Some nights he'd play his mandolin for everyone. And some nights just me. I'd pretend to go to bed, because I was only seventeen and Ana and Lola were nineteen and twenty, which gave them first dibs on Emilio and on life in general.

But it was my door he'd knock on.
Valentina, come look at the stars. They're so much brighter down here than in Miami.
Not Lola and her relentless supply of push-up bras. Not Ana with her fawning. He came to me. I was the one he taught to play his mandolin, with his arms draped around me, still smelling just a little like cigar.
You have to pull the bowl of it against your body, no, like this, so your fingers are free to play.
Emilio with his light-brown eyes and loose brown hair and long brown limbs.
Here, feel my hand. See how relaxed it is? Yours is too tight. You'll strangle the music.
Emilio who, after Papi went to bed, actually smiled and melted into a real person.
Valentina, you have the most beautiful neck I have ever tasted. What? Why is that funny?

It's been three months. Remembering shouldn't still sting so much.

I leave the box of chocolate, take the mandolin to a chair in the corner by the radiator, sit, and cradle the rounded back against my belly. Those simple Spanish folk songs aren't hard like they used to be. When I first arrived in Montreal and it was still warm enough to play outside, I spent hours by the Metro station, practicing over and over the few things he'd taught me. The wandering melodies. The tremolo. The finger patterns. If we'd had more time, he could have taught me more.

My fingers are stronger and more agile now, better able to control the tiny movements, and the patterns have sunk into my hands so the right notes sound at the right times. But still, I don't sound like him. I play too deliberately, which makes the music plod when it's supposed to trickle and flow. I play with too much guilt.

But if I play with guilt, why doesn't he?

I discovered there were two Emilios. There was the serious one for my father, and the real Emilio who emerged slowly after everyone else went to sleep and we were two lone bodies on the deck, curled around the mandolin, night fog curling around us. It was the music that coaxed him out. After a few songs he would start to laugh at my jokes. He'd look out across the black waves all full of nostalgia and tell me the things you tell someone to make them yours: about when he was nine and his father left; about the soccer scholarship he gave up in Colombia to come work for Papi.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

He only shrugged and said, “Money. My mother and sisters don't have much.”

At the time, I thought sending his paychecks home to Colombia was gallant. But his gallantry is just as bloodstained as my luxury-filled childhood. We're both guilty.

Time vanishes like it has during the other nights I've spent at Soupe au Chocolat. I don't know how long I practice for—hours? days? years?—but there's sweetness in losing time. My fingers ache, and my eyes burn, and I'm so tired I hurt, but right now I can remember the Emilio I want to remember. The one who played melodies for me and the stars.

Not the Emilio with dead eyes.

“Encore? N'avez-vous pas un appartement?”

I'm startled. I'm awake. It's a woman's voice. I'm still curled around the mandolin, my fingers half gripping the strings. I taste bitter cocoa, and I don't know where I am, or what the voice is saying, or why my brain is stretching tentacles into the Spanish places and finding nothing.

“Mademoiselle, pourquoi dormez-vous ici encore?”

Estelle. French. Soupe au Chocolat. I pull myself out of my slump and twist around to see her kicking the snow off her boots. The clock says four thirty.