Free Faking It (d-2) by Jennifer Crusie Page A

can wear on a person.”
    More than one
, Davy thought, and almost ran into Gwen, who’d stopped on the stairs above him.
    “How’d you know I have daughters?” she asked him.
    “Well, Nadine had to come from somewhere.”
    “Maybe I had a son.”
    “Lucky guess,” Davy said.
    Gwen did not look appeased, but she went up the next flight of stairs and gestured to the door on her left. “Four B.”
    Davy put the key in the lock and turned it, but before he could go in, the door to 4A opened and a ghost stood in the doorway, arms akimbo.
    “Dorcas,” Gwen said, smiling brightly. “This is Davy Dempsey, your new neighbor. Davy, this is Dorcas Finster.”
    Dorcas was tall, thin, patrician-looking, and smelled of turpentine and linseed oil, but mostly she was white: short white hair, dead-white skin, huge white artist’s smock. An equally white cat twined around her ankles and then sat down on the landing.
    “And Ariadne,” Gwen said, nodding to the cat.
    “Nice to meet you, Dorcas,” Davy said, not sure it was.
    Dorcas looked him up and down. She did not have pale blue eyes, Davy noticed, which was some relief. She shook her head. “Watch out for Louise,” she said, and shut her door. Ariadne sat on the landing, unperturbed about being stranded.
    “Louise?” Davy said to Gwen. “Who’s Louise?”
    “Dorcas likes to be colorful,” Gwen said, and Davy looked at her in disbelief. “So there’s your room.”
    The apartment held a shabby blue couch, a table painted in blue stripes, two blue chairs, and through an archway, a bed covered in a blue-and-purple crazy quilt with a framed sampler over it. When he opened the door next to the bed, he found a small bathroom with a shower. The place was small, shabby, clean, close to Clea, and even closer to Betty. “Perfect,” Davy told Gwen, who looked around at the room to see what she’d missed.
    “You’re easy to please,” Gwen said, heading for the door. “Let me know if you need anything.”
    “I certainly will,” Davy said, as she shut the door, thinking,
Send up your daughters, I think I met one of them last night
. He dropped his bag on the floor and sat on the bed, expecting the rattle of ancient bed springs as he bounced on it and hitting a solid mattress instead.
Bless you, Gwennie
, he thought and then wondered again what he’d said to her to put her off. The bed quilt distracted him, and he tried to make sense of the pattern, a crazy quilt with lots of yellow lopsided diamonds lined with sharp white triangles that looked like teeth. Which meant that either he was deeply disturbed or the quilt maker was.
    He got up to unpack his bag and glanced at the sampler. It was worked in blues and greens, neat rows of alphabets and numbers and a scene of a house flanked by two trees. Davy looked closer at the lettering:
    “Gwen Goodnight. Her Work. 1979.”
    He looked at the blues and the purples in the quilt and then back to the blues and greens in the sampler. There was something around the base of the trees in the sampler, and he leaned in again to see it.
    Wolves. Little purple wolves with tiny, sharp white triangle teeth.
    Gwen was definitely Betty’s mother.
    He unpacked his duffel and went out to reconnoiter Clea’s basement windows, eat lunch, and call Simon, who was suspiciously absent. By the time Davy got back to the gallery, it was afternoon, and he stretched out on the bed to consider his situation and fell asleep. He woke up when someone knocked on the door.
    When he opened it, Betty stood there, holding out a stack of towels. “Gwennie thought you-” she said, and then her eyes widened, and he yanked her into the room.
    She tripped and lurched into him, and he stumbled backward and caught her as she lost her balance. She said, “
Ouch
!” and he slapped his hand over her mouth and pulled her with him onto the bed.
    “Okay, we’ve been here before,” he said to her, keeping his hand over her mouth as he pinned her to the quilt.