It was the look in Caroline’s eyes as much as the slight tremor in her voice that made Claire bite back the first words that came into her mind — words to the effect that if that was her attitude, perhaps Caroline should leave right now. But instead of uttering the words, she pursed her lips as she regarded the other woman more carefully. Though Caroline’s hair was covered with a scarf, it didn’t look quite clean to Claire, and though Caroline had put on makeup, she hadn’t taken nearly as much time with it as she should. Her complexion looked pale, even under the makeup, and her forehead was glistening with perspiration despite the fact that the city had cooled off considerably this morning. “Are you sure you should be here at all?” Claire asked, her voice carrying a far harder edge than she’d actually intended.
Her words seemed to unleash something inside Caroline. “Where else should I be?” she demanded. “I work here, remember? I—” But even as the words started to spew forth, Caroline realized how insane they would sound, at least to Claire Robinson. “Is Kevin here?” she asked, her eyes darting around the shop.
“H — He’s in the back,” Claire stammered, taking an unconscious step back from Caroline. “He’s unpacking a container.”
“Then Ryan can help him,” Caroline said, starting toward the door at the rear of the shop. “I’ll be on the computer for awhile.”
“I need you to—” Claire began, but Caroline didn’t let her finish.
“I don’t really care what you need, Claire. There are some things I have to do, and then—” She hesitated, and suddenly her shoulders sagged as if someone had opened a valve and let the steam out of some unseen engine inside her. “—and then I don’t know,” she finished.
Turning, she hurried through the shop to the back room, with Ryan half-running to keep up. As she pushed through the door, Kevin Barnes looked up from the small table he was unwrapping — a mahogany gateleg that only a few days ago Caroline would have instantly wanted to take a closer look at, but that this morning held no interest for her at all. “Hey,” Kevin said, grinning as he saw Ryan. “Look who’s here.” Then his grin faded and he added a heavy dose of severity to his voice. “Why aren’t you in school, young man? Don’t tell me, I know — you got kicked out. What did you do?”
“I only got suspended,” Ryan replied, emphasizing the penultimate syllable as if it were a completely different thing.
“Same thing,” Kevin retorted. “Just a shorter term out of the slammer. So are you going to tell me what you did, or do I have to ask your mother and get the nasty version instead of the fun version?”
“I got in a fight,” Ryan announced.
“Keep an eye on him, can you, Kevin?” Caroline broke in before Ryan could get up to full speed. “I couldn’t leave him at home and—” She spread her hands helplessly. “I’ll tell you later.”
As Ryan once more began telling the tale of how he had managed to get suspended from school, Caroline sat down in front of Claire’s computer. Until now she had used it only for things connected with work — hunting for specific pieces such as the Regency card table she’d located for Irene Delamond in a shop in London, which Irene had promptly air-freighted at a cost that was almost as much as the table itself. Though she was far from expert, she had a sense of how at least to start, and the first thing she did was bring up a site called AnyWho, which she’d come to depend on not only for her business, but for anything else she might be hunting for as well. She started out by typing Melanie Shackleforth’s last name into the blank on the “Find A Person” page, then tried to remember where Melanie had said she was from.
Had she said anything at all?
If she had, Caroline couldn’t remember. But she’d had a drawl — the kind of southern drawl you had to be born with. Georgia, maybe? Caroline typed the state’s abbreviation into the box, and clicked on the find it button.
Nothing. She tried Florida, then Louisiana, and finally went through every state in the south. Still nothing. No Shackleforths, Melanie or otherwise.
Could she have spelled it wrong? She tried a couple of variations, still found nothing, then switched to Google.
Typing in the name Shackleforth once more, she hit the search button. Most of the sites listed referred to an old Twilight Zone episode.
Which is pretty much where I feel like I am, Caroline thought. Giving up on Shackleforth — at least for the moment — she went back to AnyWho, this time typing in the name ‘Albion’ along with the state of New Mexico.
Nothing.
She swore softly, then decided maybe it was the site that was the problem. Going back to the main page, she changed the state to New York, and hit the button again.
A stream of Albions appeared, so she narrowed it down to New York City.
There was only one: Max and Alicia, at 10 °Central Park West.
So she hadn’t been able to find any listings for Virginia Estherbrook’s Shackleforth relatives, or Max Albion’s brother in New Mexico — but did it mean anything?
Now she shifted her attention to Virginia Estherbrook herself, typing the actress’s name into the form on the Google page. Dozens of pages came up, most with reviews of plays the actress had appeared in, and a half a dozen others that were sites maintained by fans. Clicking on one, Caroline found herself gazing at a picture of Virginia Estherbrook that had been taken at least thirty years ago, when Virginia Estherbrook had been in her prime. The resemblance to her niece was almost uncanny — change the hairstyle and the makeup, and she could have been looking at a picture of Melanie Shackleforth.
She scrolled down from one picture to another, then paused when she came to a brief biography of the actress.
Brief, indeed. According to this site, Virginia Estherbrook had appeared in New York seemingly out of nowhere. She had never divulged how old she was, and variously claimed to have grown up in Europe, Australia, and Argentina. ‘I am a simple player of roles,’ she had once been quoted as saying. ‘My life consists not of real people, but of made-up ones, and for my work to be believed, I, too, must be no more than a role. It is perhaps why my relationships have failed, but it is why my career has succeeded. I am nothing more than those I play on the stage; there is no one else. Do not search for my past nor predict my future, for neither of them exist. Nothing is real except what you see beneath the lights.’
Caroline read the quotation twice more, then began moving through the other sites devoted to Virginia Estherbrook. Everywhere it was the same — no hint of where she’d come from nor when, no mention of any family at all. But the quotation was always there.
’… do not search my past or predict my future…’
She went back to the search engine, this time broadening the search to the single name of Estherbrook. Other than Virginia, there were very few references at all.
Then the answer came to her, so obvious that Caroline felt like an idiot. If everything about Virginia Estherbrook was a fiction, then why wouldn’t her name be a fiction, too? She was an actress, for heaven’s sake — didn’t they all change their names? Or at least hadn’t they in Virginia Estherbrook’s heyday? Frances Gumm had turned into Judy Garland. What if Virginia Estherbrook’s real name had been something like Hortense Finkleman? Who wouldn’t have changed it? But even if she had, someone somewhere must have known. She went back to all the sites carrying information about Virginia Estherbrook’s career, not sure what she was looking for. One of the sites — by far the biggest — held not only all the information Caroline had seen half a dozen times before, but a compilation of reviews of nearly every play in which Virginia Estherbrook had ever performed. One of the earliest was a production of Romeo & Juliet from nearly fifty years ago: