Then I threw the shoes, too.
Now that it was daytime, or what passed for daytime in Iceland that time of year, I was as miserable as a human being could be. Whatever strength from anger I’d felt the night before was gone now. In its wake, only devastation.
And nausea.
I attributed the nausea to a combination of things: the drinking I’d done the night before, coupled with the excess of anxiety over all that had gone on afterward.
Last night, while in the daze of trying to explain to Dad and Sweet my bizarre behavior, he’d told me that, mission accomplished in telling me about their plans to wed, they were returning to Africa today. We’d said our goodbyes. This was good, I saw, because I wouldn’t have been able to bear witnessing their happiness just now. Right now, the happiness of others hurt too much. By the time their wedding rolled around, whenever that might be, I would be able to function like a proper human being, I would be able to smile and really mean it, but not now, not today.
I would have liked to pull the sheets back up over my head, declared the day over before it had even begun. But like mothers everywhere, you don’t get the luxury of indulging your own sickness when you have a small child in your care; there are someone else’s needs to attend to first. I may not have been Annette’s mother, would never be, but she was still my responsibility until circumstances finally changed for good.
So I dragged myself out of bed, brushed my teeth because that’s what people do even if a part of me no longer cared about living, put on clothes without taking any notice what they were and went down to breakfast.
“Isn’t it the most wonderful news imaginable?” Mrs. Fairly said upon my entering.
I looked at her quizzically.
“Papa is to marry Miss Bebe!” said Annette. “I will finally have a mother!”
So he had told them already.
Then Annette saddened a bit.
“Of course,” she said solemnly, “it is not so nice as if you were to be my mother, but I know now that was just a silly dream of mine.”
Mine, too, I thought, my heart breaking.
But then, as quickly as she had turned cloudy, she became sunny again. Well, Annette always was a resilient child.
“But I will have a mama!” she said.
“Yes,” I said, practically choking on the word as I touched her head lightly.
I wondered where he was, prayed I wouldn’t have to endure seeing him that morning.
It was as though Mrs. Fairly read my mind.
“The master left early this morning for America. He was called back on some urgent business but should be back in two days. I only knew about the engagement to Miss Iversdottir from a note he left me.”
What had he done—called that…blond woman the night before on the phone, after leaving me in tears, and asked her right then?
It hurt too much to think about it.
“Annette,” I said, “when you’re finished with breakfast, meet me in your room and we’ll get down to work.”
“Aren’t you going to eat anything?” Mrs. Fairly asked, concerned, as I moved to leave the room.
“No,” I said. “I have no appetite today.”
My work with Annette proceeded badly that morning.
I wanted her to work on her math—it was about time we each mastered that subject or at least tried to become less awful at it—but all she wanted to do was look over the scrapbook we’d started making for her weeks before.
She kept pointing to individual pictures of herself with her father.
“Here is where Miss Bebe’s face will be soon,” she said, pointing at a photo of the two of them enjoying birthday cake. “And she will be here, too,” she said, pointing to the strip of small black-and-white pictures that had been taken at one of those mall booths.
Yes, I thought, she will be in all those places and I will be…gone.
It was too hard for me, thinking about the day that was sure to come even sooner than I’d previously thought, when I’d be separated from Annette for life.
“You know,” I said, trying to distract her, “we don’t necessarily have to work on math this morning. We could work on reading or science. We could do an experiment!”
But even that didn’t distract her.
“Okay,” I said, trying one last resort, “we could just color all day!”
Nor that, either. All she wanted to do was look at her family pictures and dream about the day, soon, when her family would grow bigger.
And all I could do was sit by, helplessly, and watch her. Maybe I couldn’t have stood to see the happiness of my father and Sweet that day, but I couldn’t stand to get in the way of her happiness, either.
The morning passed.
Lunch came and went, with me still unable to eat due to the nausea of anxiety.
“If you don’t eat,” said Mrs. Fairly, “how will you work?”
“If you don’t eat,” said Lars Aquavit, “how will you drive?”
“I’ll be fine,” I lied, wondering if I would ever be fine again.
Afternoon started and Annette was still obsessing over the scrapbook. In order to protect myself from the pain of observing this activity, I gave my mind over to wondering what I was going to do with my future, now that it was obvious my services here would no longer be required.
Annette was busy enough in a self-contained way that I thought it okay to leave her to her own devices for a while. She hardly noticed my passing.
I went to my room, took out the manuscript I’d been working on, the roman à clef about Buster. Reading through the pages, I thought that some of it was good, but a large part wasn’t; mostly, it was just the bitter tale of a foolish girl. My feelings for Buster had stopped completely, at last, like a broken clock that could not be started again. What a different world it would be if one could enter an affair with the same wisdom one has after going out from it.
I’d thought for so long that I wanted to write, that perhaps my salvation lay there, but I saw now that this was untrue. Whatever I was going to do in life, it wasn’t going to be that.
I took the uncompleted manuscript down to the library where a fire was always lit midday and fed the whole lot in at one go. It made a bright flare.
Let someone else tell the stories, I thought. I had already told mine.
Late afternoon was usually the time of day Lars Aquavit reserved for teaching me to drive, or attempting to. Even though Annette was too old now for naps, after a full day’s schoolwork she usually needed some downtime and Lars claimed that worked best for him.
“I am exactly between meals,” he liked to say, “so there is no risk of losing my lunch, and even if I do lose my appetite, there are enough hours left before dinner that I can regain it in time.”
Usually, he made me laugh when he said this, but not today.
And now, not only did I feel nauseous, but I was also feeling light-headed, as well, perhaps from having skipped two meals.
“I don’t think I should be driving today,” I told him.
“But how can you learn,” he said, “if you don’t practice?”
I was tempted to point out that if my driving talents were any indication, I hadn’t been learning anything at all. Then there was the matter of my no longer really needing to drive at all, with me leaving here soon. Once I was back in Manhattan, I could spend the rest of my life on public transportation whenever I needed to go anywhere.
“I’m just tired today,” I finally said. “Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll learn how to drive.”
Having neatly gotten out of taking yet another driving lesson I suppose I could have sought out Annette and played away her downtime with her. But I really was exhausted and decided instead on a nap.
By the time I woke up, Annette had disappeared.
I looked for her everywhere, having seen by the clock it was time, past time, to get her ready for dinner.
But she was nowhere to be found.
How would Nancy Drew go about fi
nding a missing child?
I hunted down Mrs. Fairly, the woman who usually knew everything.
“Oh,” she said, laughing, “you were sleeping, so of course you don’t know. Miss Iversdottir stopped by. She said she wanted to take Annette for the evening, something about doing something ‘spiritual’ together.”
“And you let her take her?” I demanded.
“Why wouldn’t I?” She was surprised. “Miss Iversdottir said she’d spoken about it with Ambassador Rawlings last night when he phoned to ask her to marry him and that he must have forgotten to tell me about it. And, of course, Annette was thrilled at the idea of just the two of them doing something together, just her and her future mama. So why wouldn’t I let them go?”
There was no logical answer I could give. Maybe it was just that I had hoped to keep Annette with me, if only for a little while longer.
“Now, then,” Mrs. Fairly said brightly. “About dinner. You haven’t had anything to eat all—”
“I think I’ll go back to bed,” I cut her off. Since there was no one here who needed me any longer, there really was no reason left for me not to declare the day over and done. “I’m still not hungry and I’m still exhausted. Must be a bug coming on.”
I really must have been exhausted, because it was the middle of the night when I finally came awake.
What had awakened me?
That sound, that wretched eerie sound that I’d occasionally been bothered by in this house, the one that sounded like laughter.
“That’s it!” I finally cracked, speaking the words into the silence of my room. Ever since I’d come here, from time to time I’d been plagued with that annoying noise. Well, no more. I’d be leaving here soon. What was to stop me from breaking into that locked room and seeing just what the hell was going on? It was what Nancy Drew would do. She certainly wouldn’t just lie here, staring at the ceiling while a madwoman cackled down the hall. I’d been subservient here for way too long, even if at times I tried to tell myself I wasn’t. Coming to this house had screwed up my life and now it was trying to screw up my sleep. Enough was enough.
I cast about for something to break into the room with, knowing that Nancy Drew would never try something so foolish as throwing herself at a solid door. I finally settled for a credit card I hadn’t needed to use once since coming here—good thing, I saw, since it had expired—and a needle from the traveler’s sewing kit I traveled with, but also never used.
An expired Amex credit card, not even gold, and a sewing needle. Well, I certainly felt armed.
This time, I felt no need for tiptoeing as I had during the course of my amateur investigations. With Annette out of the house, and Edgar out of the country, there was only Mrs. Fairly, who could sleep through anything. The need for discretion had flown the coop and all that remained was the need for valor.
I strode boldly with my weapons down the hall. First, I tried the needle. It would have been so nice, so convenient if that worked right away. But the needle was too short, too skinny, and I only wound up dropping it, losing it down the hole.
Okay, I figured, taking a deep breath. It was the expired Amex or nothing.
I slid the credit card down the seam of the door, at the same time turning the handle, just as I’d seen detectives do on TV. Apparently, I wasn’t quite as slick as Columbo or Dennis Franz—well, they’d have probably just shot the lock out anyway—because it took me three tries before I heard the magic click that told me I’d achieved sleuthing success.
I’d never understood much about physics, having never understood much about math, but I knew enough to know that it was the counterforce created by the tension of me holding the doorknob just so that caused the door to swing open with such force, taking my arm with it, once I’d freed the lock.
Gasping for breath after my exertions, as I finally burst into this room that had been secret from me so long, I saw…
A fax machine?
Oh, there was a lot of other office equipment in there too, most of it looking old-fashioned. But the centerpiece and what really drew my attention was that fax machine.
Why did Edgar keep office equipment up here, I wondered, when his embassy office was downstairs? And why hadn’t he told me what was in this room? Why, above everything else, was that fax machine so old? Couldn’t the U.S. government afford better? Or was it just that Iceland was considered to be such a lesser embassy posting, not being as important as either Paris or London or Bonn, that it got dumped with all the leftovers?
For, surely, this ancient fax machine I saw now was the source of all the weird noises I’d heard. I saw that now, because I heard it make the very same noise as a new message came in, adding to the one I’d heard come in just a short while earlier, the paper scrolling out to add some more to the scroll already there.
I tore the sheet off, feeling Drewishly curious to see what had disturbed my sleep, what was so important it had to be communicated this way in the middle of the night.
The “From” part of the first fax read “Robert Miller.” The body read:
Edgar: our suspicions have been confirmed
It ended there. Apparently, the earlier transmission had been cut off.
What had been confirmed?
I scanned down quickly to the second fax to find out.
This one also started out “From: Robert Miller”—must have been a permanent letterhead, I thought. But then my blood froze, clichéd as it may sound, my blood froze as I read the contents:
Bebe Iversdottir is a spy with the Russian mafia. You must protect Annette from her at all costs.
The words danced in front of me, as though I were trying to make sense out of some foreign language. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. How was this possible? What was going on here?
But I realized there was no time for me to question the how or why of anything. So what if I felt like Nancy, jumping the shark in #56, the final book in the original series, The Thirteenth Pearl. I had to assume the paper I was holding was the truth, in which case Annette, having gone willingly with Bebe, whom Annette believed to be her future mother but who was in fact a spy with the Russian mafia, was in grave danger. I had to find her before Bebe did whatever she was going to do to her for whatever reason. It might not make much sense to me, none of it, but I had to save Annette.
Bebe had told Mrs. Fairly she was taking Annette overnight to do something “spiritual.” What could she have meant by that?
Making the same kind of leap of logic I’d read about Nancy Drew making countless times, the kind that made the reader think, Whatever made her think of that?, until she proved to be right, I thought of the only spiritual place I knew of in Iceland: the church.
I raced down the hall, down the stairs, had the door open and was outside before I realized I was barefoot. This wouldn’t do at all, I thought, going back for my boots that were near the hall tree. I wouldn’t get very far if my feet got frostbite. Nancy Drew might be impulsive, but she was always prepared.
And my feet wouldn’t do, either, I realized.
The church was far enough away that it was too far to walk. And, anyway, enough time had been lost already. Annette had been gone for about eight hours, I figured. The thought of taking any more time to get to her than was absolutely necessary made me want to scream.
That was when I did the bravest thing I could remember ever doing in my entire life.
I hurried to the kitchen, where there was a wooden board on the wall with keys hanging from it. It was where Lars Aquavit kept the keys to the car. Without a second thought, without thinking once about how scared I was to drive that car alone, that car I couldn’t even drive when someone was with me and telling me what to do, I reached for the keys, snagging them in my hands.
Then I was back in the hall, almost out the front door a second time, when Nancy Drew screamed in my brain, “A weapon! How are you going to defend yourself, if the need arises, without a weapon?”
Gee, she’d never talked directly
to me like that before. And who would have imagined her voice would be so deep? She sounded just like Adriana Trigiani. She was an alto!
She was right, of course.
But, I wanted to scream back at her, I didn’t have time for this! There was a little girl who needed saving. I didn’t have time to pretend I was a young sleuth, going through the house stealthily to see if Edgar had conveniently left a gun or a sabre lying around that I could use in an emergency.
And then there it was.
On the same rack, from the bottom of which I’d grabbed my boots, Mrs. Fairly’s black umbrella hung from a hook. I had never bothered to get my own umbrella, a fact Mrs. Fairly endlessly teased me about every time I got wet, which was often here. And whenever she used it and I saw her coming up the walk, I thought of Mary Poppins, about to fly away. I could probably poke someone in the eye or stomach with it if need be and, in a pinch, I could always just open it up; the sheer size of it popping open would confuse anybody.
I snatched it off the wall, sending up a prayer of thanks to Mary Poppins, the Patron Saint of Nannies everywhere, as I finally made it out the door.
I may have been in a rush to get to where I was going, but with my limited driving skills—okay, my nonexistent driving skills—it would have been foolish to rush too much and take the risk of killing myself before accomplishing whatever good I was supposed to accomplish in the world on this night.
Plus, I still wasn’t sure how to get the damn car out of the driveway.
“Come on, Charlotte,” I said, pep-talking myself, “you got the key in the lock, you got the door open. It’s a start.”
My fingers trembled a bit—from the cold? From fear?—as I fit the key into the ignition.
“Cut it out!” I yelled at myself. “You’re supposed to be being brave and intrepid right now. So stop being unbrave and unintrepid.”
How Nancy Drew Saved My Life Page 22
