The Phoenix

by Sidney Sheldon

  ‘Who knows?’ Redmayne gave a nonchalant shrug. But Ella had picked up on the stiffening in his neck and jaw. He was unnerved by the question. ‘Perhaps she was confused by the poison. She was dying, after all.’

  Ella shook her head. ‘Perhaps. But I don’t think so. I think she meant it.’

  ‘Well, that’s also possible.’ Mark Redmayne leaned back in his chair and readjusted his cufflinks – nervously, Ella thought. ‘But just because Athena Petridis meant something doesn’t mean it was true. Don’t forget, this woman was a pathological, lifelong liar.’

  ‘Yes, but why lie about that?’ Ella pressed.

  ‘Why not?’ Turning around, Mark gestured to one of the waiting staff to bring a second round of coffees. ‘If I may say so, Ella – and don’t take this personally – you’re still new to this game, but you’re making the classic mistake of looking for rational reasons behind the words and actions of a psychopath. You know that Athena Petridis knew your mother.’

  ‘More than knew her,’ Ella corrected him hotly. ‘Athena was there in my mother’s dying moments. She stood by and did nothing while her husband drowned my mother like an animal.’

  ‘Quite.’ Mark Redmayne flexed his knuckles with an audible crack. ‘So what does it matter if Athena said otherwise? She wanted to deny you the satisfaction of an admission. Big deal. You killed her, Ella. You won. Ah. Coffee. Excellent. Will you have another cup?’

  Ella watched as Redmayne shooed away the waiter, picking up the silver coffee pot himself and pouring them both a fresh cup. Not a drop was spilled as the stream of hot, black liquid splashed down into the white porcelain, swirling in an elegant, circular motion to exactly three quarters of the way up the cup. He added the cream and sugar with the same care, the same controlled, elegant motions, performing the simplest of tasks as if it were a ballet.

  He’s too slick. Too perfect, thought Ella. He’s putting on a show. And I’m the intended audience.

  For the first time, she began to have an inkling that this ‘deception’, whatever it was, concerned both her mother and Athena. She decided to push things a little further.

  ‘Mr Redmayne.’ She leaned forward.

  ‘Mark,’ he corrected her.

  ‘Mark.’ Ella smiled sweetly. ‘Before I commit to returning to The Group permanently, I wonder, is there anything else you can tell me – anything at all – about my parents?’

  The nerve on Redmayne’s jaw was twitching rapidly now. I’m getting closer, thought Ella.

  ‘I’d like to know more about their lives in The Group. Other missions they were involved in. Their friends and colleagues. Right now I feel like I know more about their deaths than I do about their lives. I understand that the three of you were close once.’

  Redmayne took a long, slow sip of his coffee.

  Playing for time.

  ‘Who told you we were close?’ His voice was languid, studiedly casual.

  ‘A few people,’ Ella said vaguely.

  ‘Gabriel?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Ella shook her head convincingly. ‘Other people. At Camp Hope. Gabriel’s not what you would call a big talker.’

  She smiled conspiratorially and Redmayne returned the gesture. He was giving nothing away, but Ella was sure he was rattled.

  ‘So were you? Close to them?’ She pressed him.

  ‘Not really,’ said Redmayne after a pause. He appeared to be choosing his words carefully. ‘That’s the problem with rumors, you see, Ella. Things get exaggerated. I knew them, of course. And we did work together, your mother and I. But I wouldn’t call us close.’

  ‘No?’ Ella waited for him to elaborate.

  Redmayne cleared his throat and carried on.

  ‘There weren’t many married couples in The Group back in those days. Or today, for that matter. Your parents were one of the few, and they were certainly the most well known.’

  ‘Because of their intellect?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Yes. And because of you. Their grand experiment. The wonder child.’ Redmayne gave Ella a wry smile. ‘What I’m trying to say is, William and Rachel were close to each other. They were a team. Tightknit. Inseparable, some might say. There wasn’t really space for anyone else.’

  ‘Inseparable, eh?’ Ella cocked her head to one side. ‘Well that’s nice.’

  Liar! She remembered vividly Gabriel telling her the opposite. That her mother became senior to her father within The Group, and that they were regularly sent on separate missions as a result. And that it had driven a wedge between them.

  Leaning towards her, Redmayne bestowed his warmest, most charismatic smile upon Ella. ‘I lost my own parents young, you know,’ he told her.

  ‘Really?’ said Ella, wondering whether this too was a lie. Oddly, she thought not.

  ‘Yeah.’ He nodded somberly. ‘So trust me, I know what it’s like to lie awake at night, wondering. Poring over every detail. But the truth is, Ella, The Group has already shared all the information about your parents with you. William and Rachel were brilliant. They were devoted to The Group and our work. To justice. Ultimately, tragically, they died for the cause. But their loss wasn’t in vain. Because now we have you.’

  Standing up, he opened his arms wide and pulled Ella suddenly and unexpectedly into a hug. Ella allowed herself to be held. Closing her eyes she decided he smelled of expensive aftershave … and bullshit.

  ‘If I could tell you more, I would,’ he assured her, his breath warm against her ear. ‘But there’s nothing more to tell. You know what I know, Ella. Believe me.’

  ‘Believe me.’

  All the way to the airport for her flight back to San Francisco, Redmayne’s parting words rang in Ella’s ears. While she was waiting at the gate, and walking on to the passenger ramp, and taking her seat. And still now, as she sat with her face pressed to the plastic window, staring down at a blanket of cloud so thick it looked solid, like a celestial snowdrift, she heard them:

  ‘Believe me.’

  ‘Believe me.’

  ‘Believe me.’

  Then she thought about his emails with Katherine MacAvoy.

  In your view, then, the deception has been successful?

  Yes, sir. EP unaware, you are good to go tomorrow. Good luck.

  The bastard was going to need more than luck when she found out whatever it was he’d been hiding. Something about Athena. Or Ella’s mother. Or both.

  She would rejoin The Group. But from now on, until she learned the truth, Ella would consider herself a double agent. Her new ‘mission’ was to get to the bottom of Redmayne’s deception. And to find Gabriel.

  Gabriel.

  She missed him.

  Running a hand through her newly regrown hair, Ella felt immensely tired suddenly. Tired and sad and lonely. She tried to picture Gabriel in London – was he really there? In his hotel room or out pounding the streets? But his image eluded her. As if, even in her imagination, she was losing him.

  What if I never see him again?

  Closing her eyes, she pushed the thought away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘It’s good to see ya again, kiddo.’

  Jim Newsome warmed his hands around the steaming mug of coffee that the waitress had just poured him, still cold from the chill morning air outside, and beamed at Ella.

  ‘It’s good to see you too, Mr Newsome.’

  Last week had seen the first full frost in Paradise Valley, the landscape turned as stiff as the old rancher’s knee joints. Benny’s Diner, the only option for a hot breakfast on Prospect Road, was doing a roaring trade. Every booth was filled when Jim walked in, but a group of young ranch hands gladly gave up their seats for Mimi Praeger’s old neighbor. Everybody in the valley liked and respected Jim Newsome, even the ones who had fallen foul of his wife’s sharp tongue. When Ella walked in a few minutes later, greeting the rancher like an old friend, all eyes turned to look at the pretty, elfin young woman in black corduroy pants and a bottle green turtleneck.

  Ella
sat down and a second cup of coffee magically appeared, so thick and strong you could have eaten it with a spoon.

  ‘I was surprised to get your call,’ she told Jim.

  ‘Yes, well …’ Newsome muttered something incomprehensible and looked down awkwardly at his napkin. ‘Maybe I should-a called you sooner. I wasn’t sure what to do for the best, you see.’

  Ella reassured him that she understood his predicament perfectly. It turned out Mimi had written him a letter, which he received from her attorney about a month after her funeral, entrusting some ‘personal items’ to his care for safekeeping. ‘They were my son’s things, mostly,’ she wrote, ‘and though I wouldn’t want them destroyed, I also don’t want Ella to be upset by them. Perhaps, in the future, if Ella marries, they could go to her children? But I trust you to handle that, Jim. Just keep them safe and dry and use your best judgment. With all good wishes, Mimi Praeger.’

  He’d been specifically asked, from beyond the grave, not to show the things Mimi had entrusted to him to Ella. And though she hadn’t said it in so many words, he’d read it as implying that he wasn’t to open the boxes or look at the contents either, or at least not yet, but rather to squirrel them away until some unspecified time in the future.

  The problem was, how was he supposed to use his ‘best judgment’ when he had no idea what it was he was judging?

  Needless to say his wife, Mary, felt it was an open-and-shut case. ‘You have to honor Mimi’s requests, Jim. It’s not complicated. This was her property, after all. She trusted you to do what she asked.’

  ‘Yes, but what did she ask, exactly?’ Jim challenged Mary.

  ‘For you to put the boxes away and forget about them.’

  For a few months, Jim Newsome had managed the first part, putting the crates, unopened, into the rafters in one of his dry barns, far away on the part of his property where nobody ever went. But ‘forgetting about them’ was never an option. On the one hand, he naturally wanted to do right by his friend. But on the other, these things had in fact belonged to Ella’s parents. Wouldn’t they have wanted their only child to have them? Allowing her to make up her own mind about whatever it was that had been hidden inside? Jim Newsome felt guilty that he, a virtual stranger, should be in possession of things that, by all natural laws, ought to have been Ella’s. Mimi Praeger wasn’t infallible, after all. What if her desire to protect her granddaughter was unfounded in this case? What if the contents of the boxes provided a link to Ella’s parents, to her past, that would prove vital to her future happiness?

  What if …?

  There were too many ‘what ifs’ for Jim Newsome’s liking. So early last Sunday morning, he’d walked up to the barn, opened just one of the four boxes, and come to a decision. The next day he’d telephoned Ella and arranged today’s meeting.

  ‘I apologize for meeting you here and not at home,’ he said quietly, his thin lips barely opening wide enough to let the words out. ‘But I daren’t tell Mary I contacted you. She means well, but she doesn’t see this the way I do. I wouldn’t want to upset her none.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Ella. She didn’t want to upset Mary Newsome either, or risk having the meddlesome, disapproving old biddy looking over her shoulder when she read … whatever it was she was going to read. God, she was excited!

  It had been torture since she’d met with Mark Redmayne in the Hamptons a few weeks ago, exchanging polite encrypted messages about possible future missions and ‘next steps’ for her training with The Group, while being unable to discover anything further about the ‘secret’ being kept from her. (Or about Gabriel’s whereabouts, for that matter.) Ella had gone over every possible scenario in her mind that might conceivably have involved both Athena Petridis and her mother – anything that Mark Redmayne would want to conceal from her. But nothing seemed to stick. Besides, until she was summoned back to active duty with The Group, until she was in a position to intercept more data traffic on the matter, it was all conjecture anyway. Blind guesswork. Ella had been climbing the walls with frustration when she got Jim Newsome’s call. But how wonderfully ironic it would be if she learned the truth about her parents, not from the duplicitous Redmayne or his acolytes at Camp Hope, but from her parents themselves? What if Jim’s boxes, his precious papers, held the answers she was looking for? What if they’d been there all along?

  ‘I’ll drive out to the barn the back way like you suggested and park where I can’t be seen from the road,’ she reassured Jim. ‘I’ll spend a few hours going through what’s there, and take anything really important with me when I’m done. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mind holding on to the rest for now, just until I move into a bigger place with more storage.’

  Jim Newsome nodded. ‘Surely. Mind you, I don’t know myself what’s in all of ’em. Felt it wasn’t my place to pry more than I needed. So I’m not sure exactly what you’re gonna find.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ said Ella.

  ‘If you’d like me to keep you company, I’d be happy to.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She squeezed his hand, genuinely grateful. ‘That’s really kind. But I’ll be OK. This is something I need to do on my own.’

  Ella Praeger had changed since Jim Newsome last saw her, back at Mimi’s funeral. Physically: her hair was shorter and dyed a dark brown that suited her, and she looked fit and lean, like an athlete. But it was the personality changes that struck Jim the most. Almost all the rough edges were gone, all the weird, uninhibited behavior. Sitting opposite him now was a mature, rational, poised young woman. Confident and calm, the kind of person who could handle a lot more than her grandmother might have imagined. Jim wanted to tell Ella all this, but the words stubbornly refused to arrange themselves into the compliment he intended. Settling instead for an awkward hug, he handed her a hand-drawn map to the hay barn and a set of keys to the locks on all four boxes.

  ‘You know where I am if you need me,’ he told her. ‘Good luck.’

  Jim’s map was excellent and, despite the winding, single-track roads, Ella found the hay barn relatively easily. She vaguely remembered seeing it during her childhood on one of her long, aimless rambles around the valley, but she’d never been inside the traditional red-timber structure with its pitched roof and wide-plank doors. Other than the addition of electricity – no heat, but three bare light bulbs operated from a single switch located by the door – it had been virtually unaltered since it was built in the late 1800s, although, like everything else on the Newsome ranch, it was in excellent repair; as ‘safe and dry’ a storage solution as Mimi could have wished for.

  It was cold though, bitterly cold, and Ella was glad of her fingerless gloves and her expensive goose-down puffa jacket as she climbed the wooden ladder into the loft where Mimi’s boxes were lined up like soldiers against the back wall of the barn.

  Fumbling for the keys with half-numb fingers, she crouched down and unlocked all four in turn before lifting the lid of the first box, slowly and with infinite care. The boxes themselves were identical, antique, mahogany by the looks of them, and with a simple but pretty gilt inlay forming a border around the lids. Each one was about two feet wide and perhaps ten inches tall, so clearly there were no large objects inside. Some books maybe, or jewelry, or a few small items of clothing folded up. Hopefully some photographs. Unearthing Redmayne’s secret was important, of course. But there was more to Ella’s excitement than the chance to outsmart The Group and play them at their own game. That was only one piece of her life. The thing she longed for above all else were more images of her parents: fresh pictures with new and different expressions, to breathe new life into her stale fantasies. Letters would be wonderful too, or keepsakes, trinkets; anything truly personal that could form a bridge between the dead and the living, spin a gossamer spider’s web to connect the present with the past, what was still here with what was forever gone, never to return.

  The first box, the one Jim had opened, was a surprise and a delight. There were no dark secrets here. Inst
ead it contained what must have been Rachel’s wedding veil, simple netting trimmed with antique lace, as well as an order of service from the church, some dry pressed flowers, presumably from the bouquet, and an entire small album of photographs from Ella’s parents’ wedding.

  Ella’s stomach lurched with emotion, as if someone had thrown a medicine ball at her stomach. There was her mother, laughing, her long, wild blonde tresses tumbling over her face and shoulders beneath the veil as she leaned in towards Ella’s father, towards William, her naughty, intimate expression completely belying the demure look of her floor-length gown. Where was that dress now? Ella wondered.

  Her father’s face was equally mesmerizing, lit up with love and adoration. How young and happy and certain they both looked. Equally interesting was Mimi, in the front pew of a church Ella didn’t recognize. She looked small and out of place in her staid cotton dress with the high collar, and later at the reception with a glass of champagne in her hands that almost looked as if it might have been Photoshopped on. She had a sour look on her face, likely brought on, Ella mused, by her having to mingle with the sort of people she would usually have avoided like the plague. Bohemians. Fashionable types with flowing robe-like dresses and tattoos, many of them smoking what looked suspiciously like joints. My parents’ friends, thought Ella. Scientists and doctors, presumably, letting their hair down at a party. But it was crystal clear from the pictures that Mimi didn’t approve.

  Had her parents already joined The Group by then, or did that come later, after their marriage? Ella scanned the faces of the guests for anyone else she recognized but there was no one she knew. Putting the album carefully down to one side, so she would remember to take it back with her to the city tonight, she gingerly closed the lid of the first box and opened the second, then the third, alternately amused, touched and entranced by what was inside. So much so, she almost forgot about Mark Redmayne and his ‘deception’. A lot of what was in the boxes was junk – old books and clothes and tax returns, carefully filed for a future that never came. But here and there were nuggets of pure gold; priceless treasures from a childhood lost. There was the hospital bracelet Ella had been given at her birth, and a tiny heart-shaped box containing what must have been one of her baby teeth. An engraved watch, its strap broken, that had been given to her father as a college graduation present. A notebook of her mother’s with some doodles in it and what read like snatches of song lyrics.