* * *
They ate dinner at a little restaurant in Blois that was better than almost anywhere Phoebe had eaten in her life, then went back to the Hôtel du Grand Saint-Michel. They went to their separate rooms after agreeing to nap until 2:30 in the morning and reconvene in the hall for their nighttime visit to the château.
Phoebe tried to stay positive but she was nervous about working in the dark while being held up in the air over J.J.s head. And she was literally sick over the idea of what amounted to vandalism and burglary. She was preparing to take a chisel to the most wonderful room she’d ever seen. Ugh. She didn’t want to do it.
She couldn’t go to sleep, so she tried to count her blessings. That’s what she always did when she was upset. She gave thanks for being alive and healthy. She had wonderful friends she loved and lived in a great part of the world. She reminded herself that she had a cozy little house and plenty of food and some really nice clothes she’d bought used off eBay. That was pretty good, so far.
She had a job—that was a biggie. It was interesting and mostly fun. It gave her the opportunity to see the world. For example, she’d always wanted to go to Hawaii, and now, she’d been! It would’ve been nice to have had more than half a day to look around, but Phoebe wasn’t greedy.
And this was her second trip to France in six months! She got to travel in a style she’d never imagined, and she was seeing a lot of famous places, but the tour was paced way too fast and there were constant distractions, to say the least. She strayed from thinking about her blessings and switched over to her worries.
This was a morally ambiguous project to Phoebe’s way of thinking. She was going to be chipping away at a wall in a UNESCO World Heritage Site. At best she was a high-class vandal, and it wasn’t spontaneous, it was premeditated. When she was inside these great monuments she acted like a tourist, but she was constantly dodging guards, guides, docents, and the real tourists.
In her previous mission, she’d done several questionable things and ended up running for her life from assassins!
Phoebe was more than a little wary of the people at The School for Mysteries, but she reminded herself that she desperately needed a job. At her age and in this economy she’d never get another one. And certainly not close to White Oak, Tennessee.
A walk through the monastery was like a living display of religions of the world. They seemed like wonderful people, but she wondered how much she really knew about any of them. Not much, if she was honest with herself.
Jobs were so scarce nowadays, Phoebe felt sort of guilty for having one at all, even a questionable one, because she knew there were so many people who needed money even more than she did. People with kids to feed.
After some reflection, though, she decided she didn’t have to feel too guilty for taking this particular job and ruining someone else’s opportunity. Most people wouldn’t want to do crazy jobs like this for a bunch of mysterious monks.
And who else would’ve had the bizarre skill set to have gotten this wacky assignment in the first place? You couldn’t exactly put an ad in the newspaper asking for a Christian Rosenkreutz cold nose tracker.
If Phoebe allowed herself to think about what the Boss and the people who worked for him were saying, it frightened her. But when she looked at how they behaved toward her and each other, and at what they were doing, even though she didn’t understand much of it, she trusted them.
Having a job was really important not only for survival. Phoebe wanted to help people and be part of something good. That was the most important thing in the world to her. That’s why she loved being a nurse. She was good at it because she cared about people. She knew she made them feel better. She was happy being a nurse, but then her new Boss told her he needed her other skills even more!
What was she supposed to do? Phoebe had been trying to move back to her childhood home for years, but there was never any way for her to make a living. Finally she’d seen an opening at a rural health care service that suited her perfectly, so she’d come home at last.
The little nonprofit had failed, though, in the wake of health care reform where the government continued to mechanize healthcare in favor of computerized record keeping systems. The new system optimized rigid scoring and payment structures for medical procedures rather than vague non-procedures like listening or caring or reassuring.
And yet that was what healed people—attention, concern, a kind touch, love—these were the things that enabled people to get well. The original meaning of the word cure was care of souls. It had a religious meaning. It was a spiritual activity, healing a person’s soul and spirit, not just performing procedures on a body.
Phoebe sighed.
Ultimately, that was why she hadn’t run screaming from The School for Mysteries, or as she thought of it now, The School for Psychics. She’d seen too many things herself and heard too many stories from others about events that didn’t fit into rational boxes.
Somehow, concerns about spirits and souls had gotten dropped in the modern world’s rush to build better machines. And now a growing segment of the population ridiculed anyone who thought there was more to life than rigid logic and blinkered science.
The Boss seemed to know more about this in-between world than anyone else she’d ever run into. And because of that she was willing to trust him until she was able to form her own judgments about what was what.
* * *
Phoebe must’ve finally managed to drift off to sleep because the next thing she knew, there was a soft tap on her door. She got up and opened the door to find J.J. dressed entirely in black standing in the dim hallway, wearing sunglasses.
“You don’t have to wear your sunglasses at night.”
“You shouldn’t have to look at the scars.”
“I’m a nurse. You don’t have to hide anything from me. I’m not gonna faint. Besides, it’s dark.”
“They also protect my face from falling debris.”
“In that case, you should keep them on.”
Chapter 16.
While they reviewed their plan Phoebe kept an eye on the château from her window to confirm the absence of any lights or visible activity. At 3:00 a.m. they left the hotel as quietly as possible.
It was a five-minute walk to the château. On the way, Phoebe caught herself thinking, this is fun. That surprised her. She wondered if maybe she was a born criminal who’d never had the opportunity to explore her inner felon.
J.J. had her arm and was walking easily at her side. She glanced over at him and he was smiling broadly. “Your teeth are showing in the moonlight,” Phoebe whispered. He closed his lips immediately, but was still smiling. Obviously he was enjoying himself, too. They were both crazy.
It was below freezing. Occasional gusts of wind made the cold even more penetrating. Thank goodness they were dressed like mountain climbers. Phoebe snorted softly at the image of them buying a thousand dollars worth of new clothes for the ten-foot climb she was about to attempt.
Their feet crunched on the packed pea gravel road. As they crossed the stone bridge across the wide moat, the clouds moved across the moon and the château loomed huge and not a little menacing.
The cold night air sinking toward the ground brought with it the smell of wood smoke from the banked fireplaces inside Chambord. The ticket booth was shuttered, but the gate across the wide entrance to the courtyard stood wide open. Good, they wouldn’t have to break in. A three-wheeled maintenance truck sat parked to one side of the courtyard. Phoebe scanned the area again for any lights or activity and saw nothing.
The made their way up an open-air staircase to the second floor, the premier étage, as the French called it. The guardrooms were lit only by a dull red glow from coals in the dying fires and moonlight that shone through the windows. They crept to the north tower. The château stood vast, silent, and empty. They encountered no hindrances. They were lucky and the studiolo was not as dark as some of the rooms on account of its small size and large number of window
s.
J.J. confirmed where they wanted to focus their investigative efforts. Phoebe scaled the front of his torso again until she was standing on his shoulders. She grabbed hold of the crown molding to steady herself. She removed a small LED flashlight and screwdriver and set them carefully on the ledge.
She would need to work as fast as possible for this last bit because J.J. would have to hold her in a standing overhead press the entire time. Except in this case there was no bar stabilizing the weights on either side. The weight was in two separate pieces—her feet—and each of them weighed over seventy-five pounds.
“Ready,” she whispered. It was the only word they’d spoken since leaving her room. As soon as he lifted her, she discovered the flaw in their plan. When she was high enough to see over the molding, she was also at the intersection between the wall and the curved ceiling.
It put her into an awkward position, literally. With J.J. standing close to the side wall, the curve in the barrel vault forced her into a backbend. She’d never be able to see what she was doing in that posture. She whispered a request for him to move a couple of short steps away from the wall, slightly out toward the middle of the room. Losing the support of the wall made his job a lot more difficult, but he didn’t complain.
Phoebe stood as still has she could and somehow he managed to hold her steady. She shined the flashlight along the part of the wall he’d indicated. If she hadn’t been ten feet in the air, at point blank range, and holding a very bright light she never could’ve seen it. “You’re good,” she mumbled. “I see something.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said in a strained voice, “get it open as fast as you can.”
Phoebe held the little flashlight in her mouth and jabbed at the crumbled mortar with the screwdriver. She tried hard, but her progress was virtually undetectable. This was going to take too long, she thought, but didn’t dare say. J.J. slightly adjusted his stance and the small movement threw Phoebe toward the wall.
She put out a hand to brace herself, dropped her flashlight and gouging tool, and fell hard against the stone just above the one she was working on. It was one among many hundreds of deeply carved stone Fs that covered the ceilings and doors of the palace lest you manage to forget François Premiere even for an instant.
“Sorry,” J.J. whispered. “Are you okay?”
But this F wasn’t just any F. It was the F. The stone sprang out toward her slightly. She braced herself against the wall with her other hand and when she let go of it, it swung open like the door to a safe. “Oh my gosh!” she blurted out at a decidedly non-stealthy volume. She reached into the dark hole and felt a bundle of something wrapped in cloth. She grabbed it and in her excitement let go of the wall with both hands. That was a mistake.
She began to fall backwards. She clawed the air for a handhold, but instead of managing to grab hold of the protruding stone door, she succeeded only in slapping it closed. She saw it slam shut as she fell. Since all he had hold of were her feet, there was no way J.J. could prevent her from falling. So he let go of her and held out his arms instead. He managed to catch Phoebe and turn her clumsiness into a perfect cheerleader dismount.
He held her in his arms for a few seconds until they both recovered from the scare and then lowered her feet to the floor. He kept a secure grip on her until he was sure she was able to stand.
Whew. They’d found something and there’d been no need to vandalize the place. What a relief! Just as Phoebe started to explain to J.J. what had happened, they both heard multiple footfalls.
By the sound of it, several people were coming. Phoebe unzipped her jacket partway, stuffed the parcel down the front, and zipped it back up. The screwdriver and flashlight had rolled away into the darkness somewhere. She couldn’t see them and didn’t want to take the time to look.
She grabbed J.J.’s hand and led him through the door at the far end of the room. She closed it behind them as quietly as possible. They found themselves on the long ramp that sloped gently down to a lower level of the château. They were headed away from the closest staircase, the one they’d used to enter, but Phoebe knew there was another one in a nearby tower.
She found it and looked off the balcony and down into the courtyard. This exit wasn’t going to work either. Two men carrying flashlights were running across the open space heading for the ground level entrance to the same staircase. The lights danced across the wall beneath the balcony. Phoebe immediately veered toward Leonardo’s massive double helix stair in the center of the main part of the building.
They were moving fast and their rubber soled shoes made little noise. She hoped they wouldn’t be intercepted on their dash through the open guardrooms that ringed the stairs. They nearly made it to the main staircase before they were seen.
One man was behind them and the other was in front, between them and the stairs. Phoebe stopped. She looked over at J.J. and saw that he’d lost his dark glasses during the chase or maybe she’d knocked them off in her fall. A blinding flashlight played over her face and then his.
The men came closer, trapping J.J. and Phoebe between them. The one holding the light said something in French about J.J. and laughed.
J.J. stepped toward him and said, in English, “What did you say?”
The man replied in a heavy accent, “I say, ‘You are bl…’.”
Before he finished the sentence, J.J. punched him hard in the face. The man went down and lay in the floor without moving. His friend looked to see what had happened and the instant he took his eyes off Phoebe she balanced on her left foot and swung her right leg in a high arc, connecting her heel to his temple.
The second man went down, too. And stayed there.
“Phoebe?” J.J. whispered, obviously worried. “What’s happening?”
“You knocked that guy out!”
“I figured that,” he whispered. “What about the other one?”
“I kicked him in the head. Haven’t tried it in twenty years, but apparently it’s like riding a bicycle, once you’ve kicked a man in the head, you never forget how to do it.”
J.J. snorted. Phoebe took his hand and started down the stairs but he arrested her movement with a painfully tight grip on her hand, whispering, “No, this way.”
She could see him in the moonlight that was streaming through the high windows of the Guardroom He was turning his head back and forth slightly, like he was trying to understand what he was seeing with his inner vision. He pulled her back up the steps and made a gesture indicating that she should go around to the opposite side of the double helix and use the other staircase instead.
She understood him. He must be able to tell that someone was coming up the same arm of the double helix she was about to go down. They had to make the right decision, or they’d never get out of the château.
Phoebe realized she was running for her life, following a blind man. But she did as he suggested and took the lead. She guided him around to the other side of the central stairwell and headed down again. It was dark in the stairwell between floors and half way down she lost her footing. She was so clumsy. It was maddening. J.J. kept hold of her hand so she didn’t fall headfirst, but when she tried to stand, she felt a horrible pain. She’d twisted her ankle. It hurt like hell.
Now she was suppressing a scream. Before she had time to think what to do, he picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and continued down the stairs. It was quite a ride, upside down in the dark, facing into a blind man’s back as he ran down one of the most famous staircases in the world, away, they hoped, from serious trouble.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and swung her off his shoulder and into his arms. Now that he was carrying her crossways in front of him she could see again. She directed him to the exit by whispering into his ear. When they’d made it out into the courtyard he walked quickly, carrying her toward the exit, staying in the shadows close to the interior wall.
Chapter 17.
The wind had pic
ked up and snow was starting to fall. Unbelievable. This was adding insult to injury. Phoebe mumbled. “I wanna go back to Hawaii.”
“Perfection gets boring,” J.J. whispered back, he was smiling again.
They were passing the old stables. At Phoebe’s instructions, J.J. ducked into an area with a long row of stalls, which seemed to be occupied with actual live horses. “Do you ride?” he whispered.
“Are you joking?”
“Just evaluating our options.”
“I’ve done it a few times, but there’s no way I could ride one bareback or even stay on an English saddle, since I can’t use the stirrups with this ankle.”
She peeked out of the stables and said, “I don’t see anybody yet. They must still be looking for us inside. There’s a car parked out there now. Looks like a Range Rover. What are the odds they left the keys in it?”
“Not good enough to bet our lives on.”
“There’s another option.”
“What?”
“There’s a little three-wheel utility truck sitting a few feet away. If you can get me in it, I can drive you outta here.”
She directed him to the vehicle, but when he stooped to set her into the driver’s seat she saw the clutch. “Uh oh. You’re gonna have to drive.”
He froze for a single beat, then strode around the truck and set her in on the passenger side. Then he got into the driver’s seat. The odor made it clear that the little truck was used to haul manure from the stables. “I’ll steer,” Phoebe whispered, “if you’ll work the pedals.”
“The long skinny one on the right is the accelerator,” she said. She watched him feel for it with his foot. “Keep you right foot on it or hovering above it all the time. The harder you mash down on it, the faster we go. The one in the middle is the brake. It’s sort of square. That stops forward motion. If you stomp on it hard, we stop much faster than is comfortable. The one on the left is the clutch. It’s sort of square, too. When we’re ready to start, you’ll have to press it all the way to the floor, and then let it out real slow and smooth until you feel it engage. Then we’ll start moving forward.
Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 03 - The School for Psychics Page 10
