He hadn’t. Of course. The sealants Blake placed in his office were there to keep Otto from seeing his true identity. That he was Otto’s son. And that he had come to New York to put Otto away forever.
Secrets were here for the taking if I wanted them. I took a tiny taste of whatever would offer itself up to my fingertips. Blake ran his fingers through my damp hair as Bessie Smith crooned through the tiny but powerful speakers hidden around the room. Letting my fingertips graze across the textured upholstery, I searched for information. Anything interesting. Anything at all.
Scenes of Blake working late at night, pictures of him and Anya talking. He held her hand at one point, hugged her when she cried in another scene. Another woman sat on the couch with Blake. Beautiful, older, graceful, protective—his mother, Carolena. I was surprised she had been in New York. Maybe she had just been on the couch, wherever the couch had been at the time.
Blake tipped my chin and kissed my lips. Soft. Loving. Demanding. “Where did you go?”
“Not far.” My wine glass clinked against the top of the side table when I replaced it. My fingertips danced over the green marble and I wondered for a moment why the framed pictures weren’t sitting atop. It seemed the perfect place for them. The energetic groove of the captured memories spoke to me as my fingers traced the veins in the marble. Deep abiding love complicated by life.
“What do you see?” Blake pulled me back to recline on his chest.
“Secrets. Always secrets. Anything people keep tucked away or ruminate over.” Exhaustion gathered at the corners of my mind, I sighed into it, and let the tiredness sweep my body into its lull.
“Do you see my secrets, Sassy?” he asked.
“I see your secrets,” I answered confidently. Though the truth was that he could still hide what he wanted from me. It was possible for Blake to throw some sort of energetic shield around himself and I’d never be the wiser to what he held in the quiet. “I know you used to keep framed photographs here. They’re missing now.”
“Impressive.” He stood, opened the drawer from the side table and lifted two photos encased in silver frames. One of him and Anya, they sat with arms around one another at the edge of an infinity pool. Gorgeous mountaintops and an ice-blue lake served as their backdrop. Their deep familiarity with one another and their special bonded love were evident in their wide smiles.
The other photo was of Carolena and Blake, in jeans, cream-colored sweaters, and hiking boots, resting against a lush mountainside. She hugged his arm and laid her head on his shoulder. He looked as happy as I’d ever seen him.
“And yet in spite of the secrets you’ve discovered about me, you’re still here. Trusting,” Blake said.
“Well…love has a funny way of requiring trust as payment for its continuation,” I said, facing the photos. I thought of Carolena’a advice that people were often like faceted stones, with many sides. Not all of them positive.
The firewood crackled and popped in the silence.
“How did you learn about sealants?” Blake hugged me, then squeezed me close, bringing my attention back to him. Back to us.
“My grandfather. He learned it from his father, who worked in intelligence during the war.” Energetic sealing was a little-known method that got some publicity just after World War II. A true believer in the occult, Hitler had been afraid that gifted spies would learn his secret plans by touching his personal belongings. So he hired shamans to place energetic sealants around his things. The energy in the sealant was misleading, so that spies would see only what Hitler wanted them to see. Everyone had discounted the technique as rumor.
“How about you?”
“My mother. She said she learned it from a friend and taught me how to create them. You never know who’s watching.” He elbowed me and I laughed.
“Why didn’t you cover your pocket watch in a sealant?” I remembered touching his watch a long time ago and saw that it was the only object in his office that hadn’t been sealed energetically. Blake’s and my hands twined together, and I decided I ought to read the watch more fully at some point. Considering it held so much of Blake’s and my past in it.
“Sometimes I get impressions from it, and the sealant would keep me from reading it clearly,” Blake said, and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear.
“Do you keep any more secrets from me?” I tried to ease the question into the space, but it landed more harshly than I intended, with a heavy thud between us. “I mean, I just wonder. There have been so many secrets.”
Blake inhaled deeply, his chest and my head rising with it. “Not intentionally, Sassy.” He stroked my face gently. “Though maybe at least one more we can talk about tomorrow.”
I awoke in the dark, 3:00 a.m. The time when all those susceptible to magic and things generally unseen were awakened. Blake’s heated body pressed against my back, his leg nudged between my thighs, and his arm wrapped snugly around my waist. It was better than any fortress and I tried to fall back asleep. But Otto’s voice echoed in my head, along with memories of our narrow escape, and I decided to venture out to clear my head.
Once in the kitchen I poured a glass of chilled water, leaned against the marble countertop, and thought about next moves. With Blake’s resources it would be easy to get out of town. We’d have to disappear for a decade or more until Otto was gone and forgotten. Blake would have to work out his departure with William, since he was still under contract with the FBI to help find the Gardner art.
I considered contacting William directly to offer my assistance, with the condition that I receive his in return. I did think it was possible to help find the Gardner art by working undercover—Otto would lead me right to it. In the process I would find out where my father and grandfather were.
This could work. It’s not like Otto was ever going to leave me alone anyway. I thought it was better to meet this snake head on. With the FBI in tow, but still, head on. Blake would have to understand. I wasn’t the only person under this roof who needed to protect their parent from Otto.
I chose to make my way back to Blake’s bedroom to see if I could slide into the vault-like spot I’d vacated earlier. Half-way there I paused in front of the dark-stained wooden door that led to the heart of his home. The door stood guard to something significant. Perhaps the last secret Blake wanted to share with me once the sun had risen. I bit my top lip, torn between two directions.
Of course I was sure he’d have more of that scotch that I’d tasted the day before. Yes, that would be my excuse, in case I was caught investigating the power center of his house. Scotch to put me back to sleep.
The unexpected antique brass doorknob wiggled from loose screws and creaked gently into the silence when I turned it. The moon was full and bright, its glow shone through the side window in beams that suffused the handsome study enough to reveal its picturesque, art deco glory. Much like the rest of the house this secreted room was drenched in rich, textured tones, deep leather hues, and cream-colored walls that felt thick and insulated from the real world. Unlike the salon, it wasn’t large, but the power and energy that emanated from it made me gasp when I walked in. Its pulse threaded through every fiber and wood grain, awakened a part of me to respond to its beat, and brought me into perfect measure with a life that only existed within these four walls.
The scotch brimmed with luminescence, rested elegantly on an antique glass beverage cart near the window, and I glided toward it mesmerized, not quite feeling my legs beneath me when I moved across the room. The glass decanter was cold and thick, heavy as they used to be made. Its grooves were surprisingly familiar, and yet agonizing with the same ache of loneliness I often felt after Jack faded from my dreams.
The glitter of gold jumped into the corner of my field of view, and I expected to see something typical of the era. A mariner’s scene or, better yet and knowing Blake, the unexpected—like the Canalettos I’d heard him reference several months earlier. Instead, it was a portrait which hung over the hand carved mantle—a
double gasp escaped when I saw the woman whose slight smile was at once familiar.
“Oh…this is…” My eyes fixed to the painting. It drew me to it, to touch it, to know it was real. I studied her blue eyes with the tiny white starburst around them. They stared back at me as they had my entire life. The woman in the portrait sat poised in the blue Delphos silk, just as I had in the dreams that began all those years ago. My blond hair was styled differently now, but it was light like her own. There I was, myself from another life. Looking remarkably the same.
I inched closer to it, examined her hands as they rested in sophistication on her lap, and there it was. As it appeared on my own hand today.
Her ring.
My ring.
A cushion cut sapphire surrounded by pave diamonds, nestled in platinum. Both ends of these unfinished lives were tying one into the other, each loop of the bow somehow bringing my lives closer to one another. No matter how I fought or craved it, it had its own momentum.
What was and what would be were simply coming for me.
Chapter 17
Grace tipped her head toward the wolf moon and bathed in its reflection. The ocean’s gentle waves poured onto the grassy edge and washed her bare feet. She could feel the course of the tides when they responded to the predictable but unseen forces, just as clearly as she could sense Otto’s next move.
“He’s gunning for Addie now, and with a ferocity I haven’t seen before.” She leaned back into the arms that wrapped securely around her. While their relationship had at one time been illicit, in the years since John’s disappearance, he stood with her and by her. His presence at once calming and complex. She’d always felt it as a mosaic of tones that leant comfort and strength. It spoke to places that no one else saw. And despite the fact that his appetite for risk far surpassed her own, he was still an unexpected comfort in this era of her life.
“Which means he’s not getting what he wants,” he said.
“I have very few moves left to help my own granddaughter.”
“You have one,” he said. “I’ve hung the Monet. From what you’ve told me I think she’d be—”
“No,” Grace interrupted. “It’s much too dangerous.”
He nodded and kissed her gently at the temple.
“Come on, then.” He guided her back toward the house. “I’ll make you some tea and a warm fire.”
Chapter 18
Ellen slipped the key gently into the lock. Though she knew at this hour no one listened or watched, and Otto had told her that Addie and Blake were held up at Blake’s apartment, there was still the illicitness of breaking into someone’s home and that was best done as quietly as possible.
She moved quickly inside and locked the door behind her and thought, oddly, she decided, of a poem her son had written in elementary school about marshmallow toes. The verses the result of his teacher’s effort to help the kids to walk quietly through the hallways. And now, years later, that’s how she walked through Addie’s townhouse—on marshmallow toes.
The letters and pictures were bound as they always were, in a blue satin ribbon that wrapped around all four edges of the papers. This time there was an envelope on top that was labeled: Read Me First. Because he needed to be made aware of what Otto planned next.
“Take heed,” she said, then kissed the small bundle and placed it inside the front cover of the book. Then she disappeared into the moonlit night as softly as she’d arrived.
Chapter 19
Unsure of what I'd see, I hesitated only slightly when I raised my fingertips to touch a bit of the elevated paint on the lower right hand corner of the canvas. Perhaps something similar to the horrifying story I’d begun inside of Blake’s pocket watch so many months ago. Its history, her story—the one whose imprints I felt determined my future, was inside this painting.
There wasn’t an energetic sealant on the painting. Just its raw story, and I tumbled into it, fell through time into an onslaught of images and their conflicting attachments.
A warm breeze gently caresses my face with the fragrance from the roses that climb the wall of the house just a few steps away. Jack and I sway in one another’s arms to the beat of a small band in the distance, the rounded tan and white gravel crunching beneath our feet. Deep green hedges have been crafted into geometric shapes and are large enough to hide us from the rest of the party.
“Our train leaves in forty-five minutes,” Jack says and he snaps his pocket watch shut. “It’s time to go. Did you get everything you need? We won’t be back.”
“I have everything I could ever want right here,” I say with both hands on his cheeks. I kiss him soft and slow, with the taste of forever on my mind.
Jack leads us through the side entrance of the house. The painting of me wearing sapphire-blue silk hangs on the wall to the left. “It’s too bad we can’t take it with us,” I say.
Jack squeezes my hand. “We’ll have another one painted. Come on, let’s leave through the kitchen.” He picks up two brown suitcases.
“Or maybe we’ll just stay right here,” says a man who bursts through the open doorway with two large men in tow. His black hair is slicked in a severe side part as if his mother forced him to style it that way. His dark navy suit owns the man, a dire effort to appear respectable.
“Gary,” I say, my stomach hollowing at the sight of him.
He raises a gun to quiet me, walks to the beverage cart, and pours himself a shot of whiskey. He taps his gold ring against the rocks glass three times. “Where have you been, doll face?”
“I was on my way home.” I press a hand against the nerves that jump in my stomach.
He nods to the suitcases in Jack’s hands. “Seems like you might have had the decency to tell me if you were taking off somewhere.”
“Jack is going out of town. I was just saying good-bye.”
“I see. You’re next.” He says with a pointed finger toward me.
“You’re first,” he says, and fires a bullet into Jack’s thigh.
The hard-bodied suitcases thud to the floor and Jack gasps in pain. A red blotch spreads on the leg of his cream-colored suit.
“Jack!” I scream. I try to run to him but I struggle in the grasp of two large hands that hold me in place.
“I’ve waited a long time for this, Jack. You fucked around in my business, and with my girl, and now…I get to fuck with you.”
Jack swallows hard against his constricted throat, his face red from the pain. “Gary, we can work this out,” he says.
“I’ve already worked this out.” Gary Walker bites the words out with sweet venom. Most of the joy he gets from killing someone comes from toying with them ahead of time.
“Gary, don’t,” I plead and I struggle against the heavy hands that keep me anchored, captive. I fight the panic that claws at me and I try to come up with a plan. “He’s nothing to me, baby. Just let him go and I’ll come home. Gary!”
“Oh, now you’ll come home, Sarah? Or shall I call you Sassy? Isn’t that the nickname he gave you? Sas-sy,” he mimics in a child’s voice. “After today you might wish it was you who died instead of your…lo-ver,” he says the last word in his flat, sociopathic way.
Jack opens his mouth to speak and raises his hand to stop him, but Gary just smiles. He’ll not only deny the man the rest of his life, but also his final words.
The gun fires a deafening blast. I scream the only word on my lips, to stop the unthinkable. “NO!”
There’s a laugh from the owner of the oversized hands when I thrash to get away. My lover in the cream-colored suit falls to his side, red blood leaking a wide stain onto the carpet.
“Jack!” I cry.
Gary strolls to where I stand, his rage visible only in a cruel sneer. “How about this, doll? I’ll not let him go and you’ll still come back to me.”
When his knuckles hit my cheek, the sting and the shock of it hurts today as it did then. I know that it is just the beginning of what life will be like from now on, a contin
uation of the abuse that began a long time ago.
“Give me twenty minutes to get out of here,” Gary says to the bodyguard. “Then bring her to me. Clean up the mess.” He waves his hand toward Jack’s dying body.
Gary lights a cigar and glances at me. “You should make better choices.” The gravel crunches under his fading steps.
Whether it is his pity or just his desire to watch me suffer, I don’t know, but Gary’s bodyguard releases me.
“Oh, Jack. Don’t leave, don’t leave. Jack!” I yell for him through his fading consciousness, and cradle him gently on my lap.
“You are mine, always, Sassy,” he says and he chokes on blood that spatters my dress and stains his lips.
“Oh, Jack,” I lower my lips to his. “I can’t bear life without you.”
“I’ll come back for you, Sarah. I promise.” His breathing slows, and gurgles through the liquid.
“Jack!”
Chapter 20
The sobs welled up. I lost contact with the painting and that removes me from the scene. Though Jack’s death happened a full lifetime ago, at least, the grief was raw and fresh, the deep ache of it too familiar, a shadowy fear of loss that came and went over the years. Now it raged with a new life.
It felt silly to cry and yet simultaneously uncontrollable. I put my head on my knees and let the tears from another time have their day. They would, anyway.
“You read the painting.” Blake kneeled next to me like shelter, a safeguard against suffering.
“This painting has been in my dreams all my life. She’s the mirror image of me and—you realize that’s my ring?”
Somewhere in Time Page 9
