The Warning Sign

by Mia Marlowe

  The Warning Sign copyright © 2014 by Diana Groe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  For my dear daughter, and for all who struggle with hearing impairments. I wish for you what I wish for myself, to understand and to be perfectly understood.

  The Warning Sign

  By Mia Marlowe

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Excerpt: Once Upon a Plaid

  Prologue

  Twenty-three perfect hits and no questions asked. The Valenti job had seemed flawless too.

  Anger crept up Neville Rede’s neck like a rash. Anyone could whack a guy. Give a sixteen-year-old a Glock and a couple hundred dollars and you’ve got yourself a hitter.

  But to engineer an accident takes an artist. And the Valenti job was a work of art.

  A bloody Sistine Chapel.

  Until the deaf girl turned up.

  Neville leaned on the cold metal rail and looked down at the Orange line platform. His nose twitched. The air in the T station was always a stale fug of diesel fumes and too many bodies in a confined space, not all of them terribly clean. A good-sized crowd was beginning to gather for the outbound subway train.

  A flat smile tugged at Neville’s lips. Picking the right location was the first task in the art of an accident.

  Irritation fizzed along his spine. This was a waste of his talents. Unfortunately, it was his fault. He drew a deep breath and shook off the anger. There was nothing personal about what he was about to do. This was about pride of workmanship.

  He’d been careless. He had to clean it up.

  A hit was like a tapestry, his mentor always said. Leave a loose thread and sooner or later someone would notice and give it a tug. The entire work could unravel. He’d left something dangling in an otherwise perfect job.

  Neville scanned the commuters below. There she was, right on time, her scarlet trench a dash of color among the blacks and grays. Whoever said redheads couldn’t wear that shade had never seen Sara Kelley on a rainy day. Even though her figure was a little too round for high fashion, she was still the best looking bitch he’d ever off.

  A tingle of desire rippled through him. He tamped it down. He wasn’t some freak with a fetish. He was a professional.

  But he understood the compulsion.

  It wasn’t dominance or some other kind of kinky sex that drove him. It was the connection with his victims, that delicious moment when the soon-to-be dead recognized Neville as the harbinger of the great dark.

  Even in this crowd, he hoped to see that glint of terror-filled awe in Sara Kelley’s green eyes before the spray of blood and crunch of bone and squeal of the train’s emergency brakes.

  In that slice of a moment, Neville would feel like God Almighty.

  “Outbound train approaching,” a computer-generated voice squawked. “All trains terminate at Oak Grove Station.”

  “And some commuters terminate sooner,” he murmured.

  Sara Kelley shifted her weight, edging closer to the yellow caution line.

  The air stirred in anticipation of the coming train. Neville descended the stairs, his tread silent.

  Even if she wasn’t deaf, she’d never hear me coming, he thought, pleased by the symmetry. This was art, after all.

  Time to tie up his little loose thread. Permanently.

  One week earlier

  Chapter 1

  Sara Kelley stomped on the accelerator, but her car died again. The guy behind her glued his palm to the horn.

  “Yeah, right,” she said to the jerk in her rear view mirror. “Like that’ll get us moving.”

  He blared his displeasure in another long blast.

  Sara’s right hearing aid whined. The air conditioning had made her car over-heat in this pile-up so she’d turned it off and rolled down the windows. Boston didn’t get too many 90 degree days with matching humidity, but this was one of them. The heavy air made her hearing aid batteries short out intermittently. Sara slipped off her right one and stowed it in the empty cup holder. She didn’t want to risk losing it. The darn things were so expensive.The horn’s blast faded to a tolerable level.

  She started her car and goosed it forward, almost rear-ending the white cargo van ahead of her. The honker started a rap-beat on his horn again.

  Rather than flip him a gesture that wasn’t listed in the American Sign Language manual, she slipped off her other hearing aid too. Sometimes, it was a blessing to be able to tune out the world around her. Sara sank into a soft hum of unintelligible sound, the white-noise of her uncorrected hearing.

  Profound loss, her audiologist described it.

  “Not always.” Sara eyed the guy in the mirror. A bead of sweat ran down her spine as she craned her neck out the window.

  Must be an accident on the Zakim Bridge.

  She’d ducked out of her last class a little early in order to meet with a new speech pathologist. Not that her summer school students minded. A sub was always easier on them than ‘Ms. Kelley the Hun.’ Sara wouldn’t use her impairment as an excuse not to excel. She wouldn’t let them either.

  Now she’d be late for her appointment, if she made it at all. The check engine light blinked menacingly.

  In the side mirror of the van ahead of her she caught a glimpse of the driver’s square jaw and thin-lipped mouth. A cell phone was plastered to his cheek. He was talking a blue streak.

  Sara wasn’t going anywhere, so she decided to practice her speechreading.

  It might be a little rude. Almost like eavesdropping. Since she had some measure of hearing, about 60% of normal with the aids, she didn’t rely entirely on speechreading. She worked hard to stay ahead of her Deaf students in this area.

  So who would it hurt if she ‘listened’ in?

  She stared intently at the mouth in the mirror.

  “…how you want…very well, I’ll do…”

  Sara wished he’d hold still. His mouth moved in and out of the mirror’s range.

  “…a professional…If I…the job…”

  The tanned, male arm propped on the driver’s side door slipped inside the van and the window scrolled up. The man’s mouth disappeared entirely.

  Sara sighed and inched her car forward, crowding the lines on the pavement to get a better view.

  White cargo van. No lettering on the back. Probably in a service business, lawn care or something, trying to negotiate with a new client.

  The bottom half of his face came into sharp focus in the mirror.

  “No, no.…there�
�ll be no mistakes,” the lips formed. “If you require an accident, you…an accident.”

  What on earth is he talking about?

  “Once…funds deposited…,” the lips said, “Valenti…dead.”

  Sara blinked hard. Surely she was mistaken. Several words look relatively the same if a speechreader was forced to focus just on someone’s mouth with no auditory or context cues. And there were times when he spoke so fast, she missed a number of words completely. Some of the usual markers were off. She wondered if he had an accent. British maybe.

  His lips pressed into a hard line for a moment, then started moving again.

  “… your call,” she thought he said. “Fine…tonight.”

  Traffic started moving. The van surged forward and slid into the left lane to inch around the accident that caused the bottleneck in the first place.

  Accident. That might be why she thought she read the word. She must’ve made errors in the rest of the conversation as well.

  But what if she hadn’t?

  Sara tried to squeeze in behind the van, but an electric blue Honda rushed forward to keep her from easing into the lane. She only managed to see the last couple of digits on the plate.

  She flipped on her turn signal and babied her Taurus toward the left lane, still straining to read more of the swiftly disappearing number. The car behind her plowed into her rear bumper with a sickening thud.

  Her head snapped back and then forward, narrowly missing a knock on the steering wheel. When she looked up, the white van was long gone.

  “Great, just great,” she mumbled while she put her hearing aids back in. They crackled with static, but she’d need them to deal with the man who was already climbing out of his car, mouth running and arms flailing.

  ‘Valenti…dead,’ the lips in the van had said.

  She pulled her registration and insurance information from the glove compartment. The other driver stomped toward her vehicle. Once he realized she was hearing-impaired he’d probably fall all over himself trying to be nicer.

  Pity the poor deaf girl.

  He could keep it for someone who needed it. If he was going to be mad, she wished he’d stay mad. The rear-end collision was his fault anyway.

  She pawed through her purse and realized she’d left her cell phone at home. She should be texting the police right now.

  Over more than just her fender-bender.

  Sixty-seven. The only numbers she could see before the van pulled away. Lot of good that’ll do. I can’t even be sure it was a Massachusetts plate.

  She shook her head in disgust. How many times had Matt complained about how unreliable eye witnesses were? He’d be ashamed of her.

  At least it’ll be for a different reason this time.

  ~

  Sara pushed through the brass-studded door of Clear Speech Associates hoping the practice was running behind on their clients as well. She introduced herself to the receptionist with an apology for her lateness.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Kelley.” The woman had been well trained, looking straight at Sara and speaking slowly and distinctly.Some people thought they had to shout in order for her to understand them. All they had to do was face her squarely and not mumble. “Dr. Tanaki has left for the day. If you like, his intern is still here. He may be able to help you.”

  “Fine.” Sara forced herself to return the woman’s smile. She’d short-changed her students by skipping out early, let the humidity do a number on her hearing aids, speechread one side of a very disturbing conversation, and got rear-ended so she could waste her time with an intern.

  She decided she must have misread the guy in the cargo van. Not being able to rely on her speechreading made her irritable. There was nothing so frustrating as misunderstanding someone. She knew it shouldn’t matter, but it bothered her beyond measure.

  It made her feel…less somehow.

  The receptionist led her into one of the small rooms in the back and left her with the promise that Dr. Tanaki’s intern would be with her shortly.

  The room smelled of the lemon-scented oil used to keep the rich patina of the old oak wainscoting bright. The Clear Speech office was in a historic building, a crenellated monstrosity with brickwork that would cost the earth to duplicate today. Circa 1871, according to the brass plate beneath the sepia-toned photograph of the brownstone hanging on the wall. In the photo, the imposing edifice was shown surrounded by open fields. Now it stood cheek-by-jowl with its neighbors on the crowded Back Bay street.

  Everything changes.

  “Guess I should cross-stitch that on a pillow,” Sara murmured.

  A light tap on her shoulder interrupted her thoughts. She turned to look up into an open, even-featured male face. His sandy blond hair was slightly disheveled and his eyes were the color of the waves off Cape Anne on a summer day.

  “Cross-stitch what on a pillow?”

  He flashed a smile at her, waiting for her reply. She resisted naming the ache lodged in her chest.

  Everything changes.

  Sara wasn’t ready to recount the upheavals of the last three years to a total stranger, even a friendly, good-looking stranger. He didn’t need to hear about the way her life had been squeezed into a narrow space just like the old building now wedged between its neighbors, pressed so tight sometimes it was hard to breathe.

  So she said the two little words every hearing-impaired person hates most from a hearing one. The words that mean ‘Communicating with you is too much trouble.’

  “Never mind.”

  He seemed not to be offended. “Please have a seat then, Ms. Kelley and we’ll get started. I’m Ryan Knight.”

  He pulled a pair of designer frames from his shirt pocket and slipped them on before glancing at her chart. Lean and broad-shouldered, he was already terminally attractive. The glasses raised his IQ about 20 points.

  “I’ll do your initial assessment,” he said. “Then next time, you can work with Dr. Tanaki.”

  “That’ll be fine, Dr. Knight.” Hot or not, he still wasn’t the highly recommended pathologist she’d hoped to work with.

  “I haven’t finished my doctorate yet. Call me Ryan.” He hooked an ankle over his knee and jotted a quick note on the pad resting on his khaki-clad thigh. “From the quality of your speech, I’m assuming your loss was post-lingual.”

  Long after she learned to speak, thank God.

  “Summer of my sophomore year in college,” she said. “Meningitis.”

  He nodded, acknowledging the cause of her impairment without pity. His demeanor was text-book clinical—approachable, but detached.

  He studied her records and his pale eyebrows shot up. “According to the chart your audiologist sent, you stayed on at Boston College and graduated with honors.”

  “You seem surprised.” Sara bristled slightly. The college bent over backward to accommodate her. She was allowed to copy lecture notes from another student. She used internet chat rooms to participate in class discussions. BC offered to provide an interpreter, but she resisted learning ASL at first, making do with her hearing aids and speechreading and lots of independent study. She was a good student. She adjusted.

  What she didn’t adjust to was the isolation her impairment forced on her.

  “My hearing loss didn’t affect my intelligence.” Maybe he wasn’t as smart as those glasses made him look. “Deaf doesn’t mean dumb, you know.”

  He frowned. “I meant no insult. I’m just surprised you didn’t decide to transfer to Gallaudet. Their academic program rivals any hearing university.”

  “I couldn’t sign well enough,” she admitted. Even now, she lacked the grace and fluidity that characterized the signing of those who were Deaf from birth. ASL wasn’t her first language. She still thought in English and signed with a hearing accent.

  He nodded again. “So you hear too well for the Deaf culture and not well enough for the hearing.”

  Sara flinched. No one had ever put her situation so baldly before, but he was right. She st
raddled two worlds, not quite comfortable with either of them. She felt the tension keenly, but never expected anyone else to realize what she struggled with on a daily basis. Ryan Knight had cut to the heart of her life within ten minutes of their meeting.

  What else might he see with those ocean-blue eyes of his?

  “Exactly,” she said. “My impairment puts those who can hear on edge and the Deaf resent me for thinking I have an impairment.”

  Her stomach fluttered. She was grateful that he understood. At the same time, she felt unduly exposed, as if he’d accidentally seen her naked.

  “Your speech is excellent,” he said. “What can we help you with?”

  “I know I’m understandable,” she said. “What I want is to speak well enough that my impairment isn’t obvious. I’m afraid I’m losing my natural inflection.”

  It was easy to forget to change pitch when she was concentrating so hard on making sure she formed her words correctly. She wanted to pass as hearing, to blend back into the world she was born to.

  “We can help you with that,” he assured her. “But it’s not really necessary. You communicate quite clearly for—”

  “For a Deaf person,” she finished for him.

  “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say ‘for conversational purposes.’ If you want to embark on a public speaking career, we might work on a thing or two.” He leaned toward her. “What is it you really want?”

  She blinked in surprise. He was speech pathologist, not a priest. This was no time for true confessions. She settled for something he might be able to help her with.

  “I want people to listen to what I say, not how well I’m saying it for someone who’s Deaf. I don’t want my impairment to be the first thing someone notices about me.”

  He cocked his head at her. “My vision isn’t perfect unless I wear glasses. Is that the first thing you notice about me?”

  She couldn’t admit the first thing she’d noticed was his startling blue eyes, whether they were behind lenses or not.

  “No, but—”

  “But what?” he said. “Without my glasses, you could say I’m impaired.”