Elixir

by Hilary Duff

  I enlarged the picture, zoomed in on the truck. There was an indentation along its side panel, the place where the hoses connected and the water valves turned on and off. The image was shadowed by something, but it was still too small and I couldn’t see it clearly.

  I enlarged the picture again, centering that one spot on the side panel. Now I understood; the shadow was from a man. He looked young, in his early twenties maybe, though it was hard to make out his features, since he wasn’t looking at the lens. He faced sideways, one hand gripping the ladder embedded in the panel wall. His head was downcast, and every muscle in his body seemed to coil with clenched tension.

  Could he be a firefighter? He was built like one, but he wasn’t in uniform. He wore a black leather jacket over jeans and a gray T-shirt. And though he had the facial scruff of someone who’d been on the job all night, he wasn’t engaged with the fire at all. He seemed wrapped in his own thoughts. His mane of dark, tousled hair, chiseled cheekbones, and thick eyebrows were stunning, but some inward pain twisted his eyes and mouth away from beauty and toward something more difficult and profound.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  I wondered what was going on in his head. Had the fire started in his apartment? I imagined him on the scene as the engines arrived, screaming at the flames as if sheer will could stop them. Or perhaps he was still inside when the firefighters came, raging against the growing inferno, coughing from the smoke as he defiantly pounded out licks of flame with blankets wet from his sink. I could see him struggling against the firefighters as they pulled him out of his apartment. I could imagine—

  The sound of the doorbell brought me back to reality.

  “Piri?” I called, then remembered our housekeeper wasn’t here today. I’d given her the day off so I could decompress on my own. Reluctantly I left my computer and went down to the front door. No one was there, but a large bouquet of irises, with blooms in all the colors of the rainbow, had been left on the stoop. They were beautiful. I carried them inside and placed them on the kitchen table, then opened the card.

  Welcome home! Sorry I couldn’t be there. I love you and I’ll see you next week when I get back from Israel. Love, Mom.

  That was it. Despite her choice of blooms, she didn’t mention Dad at all. She hadn’t since the day after he was buried: in a casket with no body, under a headstone that would never mark his final resting place. She had told me flat out that she couldn’t handle speaking about him, so we wouldn’t. Period. It was hard at first, but after she won her Senate seat and became a prominent member of the Foreign Relations Committee, constantly traveling around the world, we had so little time together that I didn’t want to ruin it with anything that would upset her. So I hold my tongue and keep our conversations light. It keeps a chasm between us, but since there’s no way for me to bridge it without breaking her, I let it go.

  But she had sent irises, my dad’s favorite flower. I touched the charm around my neck and felt happy and empty at the same time. I wanted to call my mom and tell her I understood what she couldn’t say. I wanted to pour out my heart about my nightmares and how broken I still felt inside, but I knew she’d find an excuse to get off the phone the minute I started.

  I couldn’t find comfort with Mom … but maybe I could with Dad. It wasn’t ideal, but it always seemed to help a little. I plucked one of the irises from the vase and walked upstairs to Dad’s office.

  Most people would think Grant Raymond, as the most renowned heart surgeon in the world, would take pride in keeping things clean. Pristine, perhaps. Even sterile. Those people would be wrong. My dad wasn’t sloppy or dirty, but he liked his surroundings to reflect his thinking: multibranched, creative, and divergent. In the operating room he needed absolute order; everywhere else he thrived on absolute chaos.

  Another quirk of Dad’s was that although he could remember an infinite number of intricate surgical maneuvers and enough random details and trivia to run any Jeopardy! champion under the table, he found it patently impossible to remember basic things like phone numbers, appointments, or what in the world he had actually walked into the room to do. To mitigate this flaw, he wrote everything down, usually on whatever was handiest. This left his office looking like the heavens had opened and rained leaves of paper for forty days and forty nights. Popping up from this churning ocean were models of the human heart, reference books, and notebooks full of inspired scrawls.

  Illustrious hospitals and medical journals from all over the world had begged to send experts to sift through everything, just in case Dad had left notes that might lead to major leaps forward in cardio health. Mom paid no attention to these requests, but someone had to deal with them. That left me. I saw the experts’ argument. I even knew logically that they were right—the world deserved to benefit from Dad’s knowledge. If something in his office could save or improve a single life, Dad would want that information available. But strangers going through this room seemed like the ultimate degradation. Like an autopsy. I knew it made no sense, but it was how I felt. Maybe in a few years I’d change my mind. Or maybe never.

  I picked my way to Dad’s desk and sat down in his chair. Mimicking his favorite pose, I leaned all the way back, surveyed the glorious chaos, and waited for that feeling of his presence to settle in like it always did.

  But it didn’t.

  Something was wrong.

  Something in the room was different.

  I couldn’t place it exactly, but I could feel it. Things had been moved, or altered somehow. Placed back afterward, maybe, so it wouldn’t be so obvious, but there was an ineffable change in the room. I felt the edge of panic hit—this office was the closest thing I had to my dad. Changing anything in here changed him, or what was left of him for me.

  Was it Piri? Had she tried to clean in here? Impossible. Piri revered Dad. Despite her overwhelming belief in the cleanliness/godliness connection, she would defend to the death his right to make any choice … even one she found personally heartbreaking. The few times Dad had left the door open and Piri saw inside, she held her breath and crossed herself for protection, but she walked right by.

  But if it wasn’t Piri, then who? Who else had access to the house while I was away? Mom? She would never step inside here. Ben had keys. He loved my dad. He might have come inside to see him, like I do, but he would never move anything. He wouldn’t do that to me. Same with Rayna’s family.

  Could it be someone without keys? Someone who’d broken in while I was gone? Someone who waited for Piri to leave at the end of the day, then slipped inside and snooped through my dad’s things, opening drawers, moving things, changing them around …

  “Stop!” I said it out loud. I was being ridiculous and jumping to conclusions. I’d done that a lot this past year. “Extreme Thinking,” my therapist called it. Not uncommon in people who have been through an unexpected tragedy. When it happened, I was supposed to step back and look at things as rationally as possible.

  So, rationally then … what specifically was different in here? I didn’t know. Maybe nothing … except I still felt the cold sense that something was wrong.

  I rose, shaking my head. This was crazy. I had to let it go. Yet even as I left the office, I couldn’t help staring and trying to pinpoint what had changed.…

  Then a low voice murmured in my ear. “Clea.”

  I screamed and shot an immediate hammer punch to the side.

  “Whoa!” cried Ben. He reeled back to avoid my fist and tripped over the rug, tumbling to the ground and spilling a fresh mug of coffee over his gray shawl-neck sweater.

  “OH!” he gasped. “Hot. Very, very hot. Oh, not good.”

  “Ben! Oh my God, wait—” I darted into the bathroom and grabbed a hand towel, then raced back to him, knelt down, and sopped the spilled coffee from his chest. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were there! You didn’t say anything!”

  “I yelled from downstairs … I thought you’d heard me.”

  A strange smell tick
led my nose, and I bent closer to Ben, just inches from his face. “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “Cardamom clove coffee,” he said, gesturing to the now empty mug on the floor beside us. “I thought you might like it.”

  “I like the smell. Maybe you should wear it as a cologne.”

  “Could work,” he agreed. “You could give a testimonial that it makes women crazy.”

  “Not crazy—nimble. Ten years of Krav Maga gives you catlike reflexes. If you’d been an intruder …”

  The idea brought back all my questions and I quickly got up and led Ben to my dad’s office. “Do you see anything different in there?”

  Ben looked, then shook his head. “It looks the same to me. Did you change anything?”

  “No! I wouldn’t!” I retorted. “Someone did, though, I think. It feels different in there. Tampered with.”

  Ben nodded, hands in his pockets—his thoughtful mode. “Okay,” he said, “what is it that feels different? Has anything moved? Is something missing?”

  “I can’t tell,” I admitted. “It’s not like I see anything specific. It’s just a feeling.”

  “I get that,” Ben said. “I trust your feelings. Just … maybe some of it comes from being away for so long. Three weeks. It’s your longest trip since …”

  His voice trailed off, but I knew what he meant. It was my longest trip since the funeral. It was true. It was also true that I’d been up since six in the morning Paris time, and it was now six in the evening in Connecticut: midnight Paris time. And of course there was my propensity for Extreme Thinking.

  “You’re right,” I said. “And I’m exhausted. Maybe I should take a nap.” Though even as I said it, I thought about the pictures waiting on my computer screen and knew they’d be far more likely than sleep to get my attention.

  “Actual likelihood of that?” Like Rayna, Ben knew how to read my mind. I smiled at him.

  “I missed you,” I said.

  “Missed you, too. Welcome home.”

  We moved in to hug each other, then I sprang back seconds before getting smushed against his still-sopping-wet sweater.

  “Ben!”

  “Ooh, poor form on my part,” he said, and peeled off his sodden sweater. He wore a thin white T-shirt underneath. The coffee spill had left the shirt a bit damp, and it clung slightly to his chest in a way that made me stare and caught my voice in my throat.

  That was ridiculous, of course. Ben and I had the kind of friendship where we talked about things like that. I could tease him about his suddenly well-toned body; he’d make some kind of self-effacing joke and parry by bringing up something absurd he’d seen about me in a magazine …

  But I didn’t say a word. And I didn’t stop looking. Clearly I was in a sleep-deprived haze.

  “You could still try the coffee,” he offered. “There’s plenty in the sweater. I can just wring it right into the mug.”

  I shook off my reverie. “Tempting offer, but no thanks. You really need to give up on the coffee thing. I’m never converting from tea.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. He set the wet sweater on the hand towel, then turned to me with his arms out. “Better?”

  “Much,” I said, and closed the distance between us so he could fold me into his arms.

  “Hel-lo! Pleeeeeease tell me I’m interrupting something!” It was Rayna, and at the sound of her voice, Ben and I sheepishly pulled apart. Again, ridiculous. Hugging was nothing unusual for us. Granted, Ben was usually wearing more than a thin T-shirt at the time.…

  “Why is it I’m hearing no one when they come into the house?” I asked.

  “Big house,” Rayna said. “Come on—my mom’s throwing us a welcome home party at our place.”

  “Tonight?” I asked.

  “Immediately. Unless I can tell my mom there are … extenuating circumstances.”

  She said the last part with a leer that lingered on Ben’s chest and made him blush. Rayna’s entire family had spent the last two years dying for Ben and me to get together. They seemed to be under the impression that my parents hired him to be my boyfriend, not my international adviser.

  It’s hard to believe that I’ve known Ben for only two years, and even more bizarre that at first I wanted nothing to do with him. Mom and Dad hired Ben without my knowledge soon after I started getting photojournalism assignments around the world, including some less-than-savory locations. I was furious, imagining a brainless meathead of a bodyguard who’d hang like an albatross around my neck.

  I should have given my parents more credit. Their main worry wasn’t that I’d be physically harmed. We’d had a lot of long talks, and they trusted me to avoid any obvious danger. They also reserved the right to veto any assignments they didn’t think were appropriate until I turned eighteen. So my parents didn’t hire Ben for his brawn, they hired him for his brains. At twenty, he already has a doctorate, speaks more languages than should be humanly possible, and knows something about pretty much everything, though his specialties are world history and mythology. His knowledge keeps me safer when I travel than any ham-fisted tough guy.

  But to Rayna and Wanda (and probably George, too, since he always follows the women in his life), Ben is my soulmate.

  “No extenuating circumstances,” Ben said. “Sweater malfunction. Let’s go to the party.”

  Fifteen minutes later we were all at Rayna’s house, where Wanda had created an all-American feast. Her dining room table groaned under red, white, and blue plates of hot dogs and pigs-in-blankets, hamburgers, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and of course apple pie à la mode for dessert. It was an insane amount of food for just the five of us, and we ate until we nearly burst. Then afterward Ben reigned supreme in a marathon game of charades. I didn’t get back home until midnight: six a.m. Paris time. I had been up for twenty-four hours. My eyes burned with fatigue, and every muscle in my body screamed for rest.

  I nearly made it. I’d washed up and was about to stagger into bed … when I let my eyes drift to my computer. My screensaver flashed a slide show of my favorite pictures, but all I could think about was the tortured man from the fire and the other nineteen images I’d chosen so many hours earlier.

  I sat at my desk and pressed a button to clear the screensaver. I stared a moment at the man in the fire truck again, so fascinating in his torment. I wanted to print out his image and add it to my portfolio, but I’d had to enlarge the picture so much just to see him, I’d never be able to get more than a granulated print.

  I reduced the picture to the bottom of my screen and scanned the other nineteen images, waiting to see which would demand my attention first. I clicked on a picture of Rayna in front of the Parthenon in Athens. She was in a flowing white dress, her arms raised in a goddesslike pose as her long red curls blew behind her. The setting sun lit her whole body aglow, and the effect was absolutely magnificent … except for a small knot of tourists I couldn’t frame out of the shot.

  Time to start cropping.

  I reframed the image, but as I did I noticed something strange in the crowd of tourists. A familiar cheekbone and a hard-set jaw.

  No. It was impossible.

  Instead of cropping out the tourists, I enlarged them to twice, three times their size. They were six members of a single group, all in matching powder blue T-shirts that read IT’S GREEK TO ME TOURS. Every one of them stared at the monument, pointing or taking pictures.

  Then there was the seventh person, who stared directly at the camera. He was obscured by three of the powder blue shirt crew, so I could only see half his face: a sweep of hair, one carved cheekbone, one piercing brown eye … but there was no doubt it was him.

  My heart started thumping as I moved the Parthenon photo to one side of the screen and pulled up the Paris photo next to it, both enlarged to focus on one man. It was the same man; the man whom I now realized had been with Rayna and me not only in Paris at the end of our trip, but also in Greece three weeks before.

  Panic welled up
in me. How had I not noticed him? Ever since the summer camp photo incident, I’d prided myself on being constantly alert, aware, and vigilant about just this kind of thing, and yet I’d had no idea this man was stalking us through Europe. And he was stalking us. Why else would he be at both ends of our trip? It couldn’t be coincidence. That wasn’t possible … was it?

  I stared again at both images. The lone civilian among the firemen, the outsider amid the tour group … this man was completely out of place in both pictures. Alone, either could easily be explained away, but together they pointed to something more sinister.

  My eyes ran over the other thumbnails I’d pulled aside, and I felt a chill race over my body. If this stalker had been with us at both the beginning and end of our trip … was it possible he was with us the whole time? The very idea made my skin crawl, but didn’t it make sense? And what if these pictures had reached out to me not because of their artistry, but because I’d sensed the danger I’d somehow missed in real life?

  Any exhaustion I’d felt was now gone. My skin prickled with fear as I reduced both images on my screen and pulled up another thumbnail. This one was the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Montmartre. I enlarged it and scanned for that face. I didn’t see it, but I hadn’t seen it right away in the other pictures either. I enlarged again and kept scanning, my knuckles white as I gripped the mouse.

  There.

  A shadow on one of the highest parapets.

  I zoomed in closer, and my forehead broke out in sweat.

  He was there. His back was turned, but I saw the hair, the leather jacket, the jeans, the muscular build … it was him, and he stood in a spot I knew was absolutely off-limits to tourists.

  So how did he get there? And why?

  My first thought was actually comforting. He could be a government bodyguard Rayna and I weren’t supposed to have noticed. That had happened before—Mom had made people upset enough that they’d threatened our family, and there had been times when she’d put a tail on me, but kept it a secret so I wouldn’t get scared. If that’s what this man was, it would certainly explain his access to the parapet. It was still weird that I hadn’t seen him, since I’d always pegged the “secret” bodyguards before, but maybe he was just better at his job than the others.