Where Dreams Unfold Read online

  “Solicitous? Are there no ends to the wonders of Bill Cullen?”

  The receptionist actually snorted with laughter.

  Perrin shot her a smile, but she couldn’t stand up on her own just yet. Her head still whirled viciously.

  “I’ll try once more. Are you okay? Do you need to sit down for a moment? Can I get you some coffee?”

  “Coffee? Shit no. If I’m like this normally, can you imagine me on caffeine? So not a pretty sight. I need sleep and food, in that order.” Feeling a little steadier, she managed to stand on her own, brushing his shirt smooth as she did so. Nice chest. She wanted to pet it, but it belonged to another woman so she stopped herself.

  “How about we go to my office? We can talk over the schedule and then tour the scene shop so you can see the sets, to let you see the tone of the production.”

  “Uh, as long as we can sit down real soon. It’s been so long since I slept that I’m starting to hallucinate tiny conga lines of opera-singing mice swirling about my ankles.” She might have slept an hour or two last night, she usually managed at least that—even when a design bit her hard. If she had, she didn’t remember it. This design had been ripped out from somewhere deep.

  Bill offered his arm. She steadied herself with a hand on his elbow, the only thing that made her steady enough to walk. As he led her back through the offices, a ripple of whispers ran ahead of them and gawkers were soon lining the aisle. Bill was mumbling something about ticket sales department, production design, education…indicating one cluster of cubicles that looked exactly like the last.

  A guy walking along carrying a computer monitor actually ran into a wall while looking at her.

  By that time she was able to make some sense of the whispers. “The Empress!” said with a touch of awe that she found quite cheery. That was all that sustained her until she reached Bill’s office.

  It was a smallish space that had a window looking down over an old section of the warehouse district that now housed a Taco Del Mar fast food restaurant and an Asian furniture importer, despite the ancient paint on brick that declared it as “Johnson Expeditors 1914.”

  The office walls had drawings done by children. There were several framed photos of Bill with two kids, but she couldn’t seem to make her eyes focus on them well enough to even pick out gender or age. Then she spotted the couch along the side wall. The last thing she remembered was planting her face into one of the cushions.

  # # #

  “Hello, Ms. Thompson, my name is Bill Cullen. I’m with Emerald City Opera and we met last week at a board meeting. Do you by any chance know a woman named Perrin Williams?”

  He felt stupid for calling one of Seattle’s movers and shakers with such a dumb question, but it was all he could think to do. He’d had to shake Perrin fairly hard to rouse her at all. When he’d asked who he should call, she mumbled, “Cassidy or Jo.” At least that’s what he thought she’d said before collapsing back onto his office sofa.

  There were two women he’d met recently at a Friends of the Opera board meeting, where he’d gone to give a presentation about the new production. One of them had been Cassidy Knowles, a leading wine entrepreneur. And Jo Thompson who had replaced the powerhouse Renée Linden and appeared to be no less formidable. He couldn’t imagine the association a small-time fashion designer would have with these two, but the names were unique enough that he decided to give it a try.

  “Actually it’s Jo Parrano now, but yes, I know her. Is she okay?”

  “I’m not sure. She collapsed on my office sofa and fell asleep.”

  He heard a long-suffering sigh over the phone. “She does that. My recommendation is to make sure she’s comfortable, then throw a blanket over her.”

  “But she’s in my office,” Bill once again felt as if he were being dumb. And like he was whining, which was even more embarrassing. He took a breath and tried to calm down. “I don’t quite know what to do with her.”

  “Welcome to the club, Mr. Cullen. Well, I’m in Hawaii on my honeymoon and I think Cassidy is in France for a vintner’s conference. We closed the restaurant and gave the staff a week off, no idea where they will have scattered to. If she still hasn’t slept since before the wedding, she’ll be down until sometime tomorrow morning. My best advice is to just let her sleep.” The woman spoke as if this were somehow normal behavior.

  “But in my office?” It hardly seemed appropriate, or convenient.

  “Oh, you can work. Nothing much on the planet will wake her. And she’ll wake very hungry, so having some food around would be a kindness. She eats anything. Sorry I can’t be more helpful.”

  “Uh, I guess she’s okay as long as I don’t need to rush her to the hospital or back to the mothership or something.”

  Jo Thompson had the decency to laugh. “That latter option wouldn’t surprise any of us even a little bit. Is she okay there? I could try to rally some troops… ”

  Her voice was very tentative.

  “No. I’ll take care of it from here. Congratulations and thanks.” He hung up the phone wondering what in hell he’d just signed up for. Well, one thing was for damn sure, he couldn’t just leave her there like that. For one thing, his hormones would kill him looking at her in that amazing dress for hour after hour.

  He picked up the phone and buzzed downstairs. Then he sat back to wait and allowed himself just a moment to admire the revelation of such exceptional beauty of the woman who wore that amazing dress.

  Jaspar and Tamara arrived about the same time that Jerimy, the head of the Costume Shop, arrived from the floor below. The kids ran in and gave him huge, after-school hugs. Whatever else he was messing up, he was doing this right…mostly. Tamara was drifting away and he had no idea what to do about it. She still hugged him when she wasn’t really thinking about it. Other times it was suffered, and recently she’d avoided his hug a few times. As a single dad, she often left him with his moorings cut loose and no channel markers on where to go from there.

  Jaspar was just gone ten, a cocky, know-it-all, splendid fifth grader. Dark-haired like his dad, but with his mother’s wide eyes. Tamara was a sophisticated thirteen-year old acting like she was in high school rather than tolerating the last months of middle school, and who thankfully hadn’t yet decided her dad was a crime against nature. She looked so like a young version of her dead mother—a thick mane of dark red hair, and pale, pale skin—that she broke his heart every day, though he would never let it show.

  They waved hello to Jerimy and turned for their usual after-school-debrief hangout of the couch, then stumbled to a halt.

  “Who’s she?” Jaspar tipped his head sideways to study Perrin sort of right side up. “Is she real or a mannequin?”

  “She’s breathing, dummy.” Tamara tipped her head so like her brother that Bill had to cover his mouth to not laugh at them.

  He shared a smile with Jerimy over the kid’s heads.

  “Wild dress,” Tamara’s voice was filled with a bit of wonder.

  “Yeah,” how in the hell was he supposed to explain this one? He almost went with spaceship alien as being the most plausible. No, he’d better go for the simple truth, that was bizarre enough on the credibility scale. Jerimy was leaning comfortably against the door frame enjoying the whole scene.

  Tamara brushed Perrin’s crazy hair back from her face. “I like her hair.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, kiddo. No crazy dye jobs.”

  Tamara squinched her eyes shut and stuck her tongue out at him. He did the same right back. A good moment. When had he started hoarding those?

  “She’s our new costume designer, but I think she was awake for five days straight or something.”

  “She okay?” Jaspar was whispering. They all were.

  “I called a friend of hers who assures me that she just needs to sleep. Jerimy, I’m going to take the kids out for some ice cream,”
there was a small round of quiet cheers. “Before they start their homework,” a chorus of less soft boos.

  He stood up and grabbed Jaspar around the waist and held him upside down until he was giggling. Been a long while since he’d been able to do that with Tamara. Probably since Adira’s death when Tamara had decided she had to become the lady of the household. Hell of a burden for a then nine-year old girl. He and Tamara had both grown up a lot that year. Jaspar had been six, too young to do more than be in shock.

  “Ms. Williams,” he figured remaining formal in front of his kids was a good thing. “She was modeling a costume design for me when she fell asleep. Jerimy, I was hoping that you could gather some more comfortable clothes, arrange for a discreet change, and then toss a blanket on her. I’m assured that she will be almost impossible to wake for some time yet.”

  Jerimy nodded. “I’ll go gather some supplies, and help.” He tickled Jaspar’s belly button where being held upside down had made his shirt pull out of his pants. Jaspar squirmed and giggled harder as Jerimy left.

  “She’s beautiful,” Tamara was still studying the sleeping Perrin Williams.

  “She’s even prettier when she’s awake.”

  His daughter eyed him with a far too thoughtful look.

  He shook his head, a clear “no way!” Tamara had alternated over the years between trying to matchmake him, and assuming that he no longer loved Tamara’s mother if he even glanced at a woman walking down the street.

  Well, she didn’t need to worry. This woman was nuts. Not no way. Not no how.

  He herded the kids out of there before there were more questions.

  But Bill could still feel the outline of where Perrin’s palm had rested over his heart. The touch of the Empress, a great curse or a great blessing in the new opera’s story. Always unknown, but always powerful.

  Chapter 3

  Perrin woke slowly. She always enjoyed the crawl back from her “hibernations” as Cassidy had dubbed them. She didn’t do it often, but when a design really grabbed her, like Jo’s wedding dress, or that outfit for the opera, she just had to chase it until it was done and purged from her system.

  She became aware of voices as she languished beneath the warm blankets.

  A deep voice rumbling that she recognized easily. Mr. Bill Cullen. He had such a great voice, a far-off thunderstorm brushing soft sounds across an otherwise peaceful summer evening.

  A higher voice, still male, but with a definite swish to it. “This is amazing work, Bill. I’ve been doing costumes since I was a teen, and I can barely tell how she did it. And the hand dyeing here from the white to gold, it’s just magnificent. That’s a technique that I’d like to learn.”

  She opened her eyes and looked through the brush of hair that had slid over her face. Black. When had her hair gone black? Last she remembered it was blond.

  Oh, the costume. What had people called it? “The Empress.” She liked the sound of that.

  Peeking through her hair, she could see two men closely inspecting the costume where it hung by itself on a rack. One was showing the inside of the seams to the other. The second one was Bill Cullen, in his classic, arms-crossed Overlord pose that made her smile.

  Further inspection revealed that she was on an office couch and it felt as if she’d been here quite some time. But she’d arrived wearing the dress. She was fairly sure of that. So, she lifted the blanket. A black Emerald City Opera t-shirt, with a lemon-yellow stylized ECO logo over one breast. She brushed her legs together under the blanket. Sweats and bare feet.

  Then the last of her came awake and she smelled sugar. That got her upright. Bill and the other man whirled to look at her, but all she cared about was the large cheese Danish that had been placed on the low table in front of the couch she’d apparently slept on.

  “Good morning.”

  “Uh, hi!” she mumbled around a mouthful. “Morning, huh? How long… Never mind. Overnight. You have milk or tea or something?”

  Bill moved to a small fridge and pulled out a carton of chocolate milk. “After school treat for Jaspar. Tamara is now above that, so I also have ginger ale.”

  “How old are they? Milk’s fine.” She took it from him, and knocked back half a carton to clear the Danish so that she could speak properly.

  “Ten and the oldest thirteen there ever was.”

  She hoped not, for the kid’s sake.

  By thirteen the world had held no more illusions for Perrin at all.

  “And you give her ginger ale? You’d get way more dad-points if you stocked in some caffeine-free diet Coke or Pepsi. Trust me on that.”

  He opened his mouth, clearly to say something about knowing his own kids well enough. So, she cut him off by holding out a hand to the other man.

  “Hi, I’m Perrin.”

  “Jerimy. I’m the manager of the costume department for ECO, I hope you don’t mind that I changed you yesterday. You were really out of it, honey.” Jerimy was a trim man with a shock of bottle-red hair moussed up into a chaotic hairstyle that suited his blue eyes and narrow features. He wore a very tailored white shirt and black pants with lines that narrowed the hips, and good shoes. He looked sharp, standing hipshot like a runway model.

  Bill was wearing jeans and an open white shirt from some off-the-rack store, Sears probably. Bought at the same time he was buying a reciprocating drill or a forty-two tooth screwdriver or somesuch.

  “Was he here?” She nodded toward Bill and took another bite of the Danish. Weird combo with a swirl of chocolate milk, but okay.

  His jaw dropped to protest his innocence. He must really be gone on his wife to have passed up on the opportunity to see her mostly naked. The bra had been built into the dress after all. Not that Perrin really needed one very often; the one and only advantage to never really growing breasts. Well, that and she could get away with wearing almost any high fashion design.

  “Just me and Patsy, she’s straight and I’m so not, so your secrets are perfectly safe with both of us,” Jerimy offered her a broad wink. She liked him, and not just because he appreciated her dress.

  She eyed it critically as she continued to chew.

  “The Empress?”

  “Yes. You really captured her,” Bill turned once more to the dress.

  “Wow! You actually paid me a compliment there, Mr. Cullen. You may want to go easy on that. Making my head spin. You, uh, told me about the Empress?”

  Bill looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. Well, what did he expect? She’d been asleep on her feet during their visit to her shop—even before she’d started this dress.

  “It just sort of came together from the other two designs I drew.” Perrin remembered Bill rambling on at some length about the opera’s story, but she couldn’t remember a word. This design had simply been a natural extension of the story about the first two male characters. Maybe the tone of Bill’s deep voice as he’d described the character was in there somewhere, but she couldn’t pick it out.

  The dress’ lines were good, the balance of sex and power.

  “Is the Empress good or evil?”

  “No one is sure. Even at the opera’s end, she is still enigmatic. The powerful unknown.”

  Perrin cocked her head trying to see the color and tone without wholly discounting shape and line.

  “I think it needs a blood-red lining then, to balance the hope of the gold.”

  Jerimy caught his breath and she knew it was right.

  But it had come out well for not knowing anything about the story. She remembered Bill’s eyes going dark with heat as he’d first looked at her in the Opera’s lobby.

  Yes, the dress had come out very well.

  # # #

  Jerimy had spread out Carlotta Gianelli’s watercolors along the Costume Shop table. They really had quite an amazing setup here. He’d given her the full tour.
/>   “A really major production can have three hundred costumes, which is easily over a thousand pieces not counting shoes and accessories. And sometimes we have two casts for the leads, that means building some costumes twice, in two different sizes.”

  There was a sewing area that had a dozen machines. Perrin’s studio had one four-by-eight foot cutting table. The opera had two matted tables, eight feet wide by twenty-four long. A dozen people could work at each table, though only a half dozen people were in the entire room at the moment.

  They had a vented paint booth where red shoes were repainted as blue, fabrics were sprayed with texturing, and papier-mâché headdresses were magically transformed into golden crowns, bishop miters, and magician hats. There were boxes and boxes of shoes simply labeled: Men’s 9, Women’s 8, Child’s 6. Each was a treasure chest filled with shoes, boots, sandals, platforms, and more of almost every imaginable type.

  What had surprised Perrin about the costumes themselves was the way they were constructed. Only rarely were they of the fine-finished construction she was used to.

  “We only do that for the most special pieces,” Jerimy had informed her. “And we never manage anything as spectacular as the one you built.” The more typical costumes were well-built, but with massive six-inch seam allowances. They must be uncomfortable for the singers but allowed for the costume to be adjusted to different-sized singers without rebuilding them each time. Take out a couple seams, fit, and restitch.

  “The typical costume will last through twenty or more productions, each of perhaps a dozen performances. They’re used for a dozen years or more at ten or twenty different opera houses. So, we try to make the costumes as adjustable as possible.”

  Perrin looked down at Carlotta’s drawings. They were little more than blurs of colors. They were cohesive in their color palette. The lines were dramatic. But they didn’t relate. It was like a runway collection that really didn’t work. Each piece would be fine, but it wasn’t a whole story.

  Perrin hadn’t really understood that until she started doing weddings. For years she’d made couples’ clothing, that told a story of two people. But a wedding told the story of the main couple, with their friends supplementing that, and family the next layer beyond that. All of them designed and built to focus back on the couple.