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With that she was gone, swirling off into the crowd of well-wishers, and Bree felt like a spell had been broken.
“Is she always like that?” she asked Luster. “Overwhelming?”
“Always,” Luster said, seeming amused by her reaction. “It is why ordinary people can’t see the cracks in the empress’s armor. So, you were saying something about business at the store on Fifth? Something funny?”
Bree studied him a moment. “I don’t know. There just weren’t as many customers as I’d thought there would be in her flagship store.”
Luster smiled. “Because all the customers are over at Tess’s new flagship store on Lexington, putting on dresses of our design.”
All right,she thought.Mr. Luster is a constant surprise. Keep the man talking.She said, “The flower arrangements were a little wilted too.”
Luster sniffed. “Not surprising, given Frances’s ballooning debt.”
Someone rang a bell, calling the crowd to dinner.
“She’s in trouble financially?” Bree said.
Now Luster studied her. “That’s the rumor.”
“Do you have plans to sit with anyone for dinner, Phillip?” Bree asked.
He paused and then smiled. “You are more than you seem, I think, Evelyn Carlisle. I would love to break bread with you. And I just might know where some of the skeletons are alleged to hang in dear Frances’s closet.”
CHAPTER 28
Washington, DC
EARLY SATURDAY EVENING, NANA MAMA, Ali, John Sampson, Willow, and I were watching Jannie fidget as she stared at her laptop; on the big screen across the room, the weekend anchors of ESPN’sSportsCenterwere engaged in witty banter about the unfolding baseball season.
Lucille Jones, one of the anchors, shifted in her chair, looked to another camera, and said, “But enough about baseball. Let’s talk a little track-and-field, shall we?”
Evan Kincaid, her partner, adjusted his glasses and said, “She’s so fast.”
“So fast,” Jones said, admiring.
“How fast is seventeen-year-old Jannie Cross of Washington, DC?” Kincaid said to the camera.
Jones said, “We thought we had a sense when we featured thisfilm three years ago, when Jannie was fourteen and a freshman in high school.”
The screen cut to a much thinner and smaller version of my daughter in the blocks against much older girls. She rocketed out of them at the crack of the gun but stumbled and fell while her competition roared off into the first curve.
Instead of giving up, Jannie jumped back to her feet and took off. She didn’t win, but she caught up to and passed every competitor but one.
“I don’t care who you are, that was fast,” Kincaid said when the camera returned to him. “But you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
The screen jumped to today’s race. Jannie exploded from the blocks while the anchors kept talking.
Jones said, “For ten years, the record stood. A decade passed after a San Diego runner shattered the women’s U.S. national high-school record in the four-hundred-meter track event by two seconds, breaking the tape at fifty point seventy-four seconds.”
Kincaid picked up the narrative as the racers ran the first curve and into the backstretch, saying, “For ten years, that record was considered unassailable. For a decade, no U.S. female high-school athlete came close to that blistering time. Until Jannie Cross ran today in an invitational meet on the track at Howard University.”
On-screen, Jannie and the other athletes were close to the far turn.
Jones said, “The rest of the field is looking competitive at this point in the race. But watch what happens when Jannie Cross enters that turn.”
The screen showed Jannie hitting fourth gear and going into her bounding gait, then hitting fifth gear and running down the straightaway and through the tape.
Kincaid said, “How fast was Jannie Cross today?”
