by Carly Bishop
As her grandmother flinched with the needle stick, now crying out with no more energy than a mewling kitten, Cy could feel the force of Amy Reeves’s will as she touched, then silenced, in turn, each music box that gave itself away to her by the tiny vibrations on her fingers.
He watched her long, slender hands flit over the music boxes, her fingernails coated in a striking iridescent mauve like sparkling amethysts at the center of a Colorado geode.
Because of Seth, Cy had reason to suspect the extreme sensitivity of her hands. But the stray and licentious notion that popped into his head about her hands shook him to his righteous, straight-arrow, lawman core. He cleared his throat, thrust his own hands into his pants pockets and turned to Povich.
“Not playing out as a run-of-the-mill investigation, is it?” Povich muttered.
Cy exhaled sharply and shook his head. “Give me the hard-asses from hell any day.” It should have been a cakewalk. “Fiona Reeves doesn’t have it in her to swat a fly.”
“Still, she’s no lightweight.”
Cy agreed. Despite having lived for so many years in what, despite its gracious appointments, amounted to an insane asylum, he couldn’t fault Fiona Reeves’s memory. Names, dates, places, events—Fiona Reeves could not be tripped up.
But the summa cum laude Radcliffe graduate, class of ’30, was also known to suffer acute recurrent auditory delusions, a classic symptom of paranoid schizophrenia.
About to make some other idle remark, Cy stopped short. Povich was nodding almost fearfully at Amy.
Cy turned. She stood with the now silent music boxes at her back.
Her eyebrows were shiny and dark, perfectly shaped over her deep, angry hunter-green eyes. Signing, she demanded, “What is this about? What gives you the right to upset my grandmother so badly?”
He looked directly at her, chilled by her expressive eyes and the body language meant to establish herself, and though he knew she could lip-read him, he signed to establish with her his competence in her language. Against her strength, what he knew she must have been through in her life, he felt like a wad of putty.
“I have a job to do whether you like it or not, whether you approve or not You are welcome to stay if you will not interrupt.”
Her chin went up. “Do all FBI agents sign?” she asked.
Her hands were exquisitely inventive, conveying much more than the letter of the words. He gave a half-amused smile though he nearly choked. “I’ve never seen sarcasm—” he spelled the word, then brushed the backs of his fingers off his chin in an internationally recognized gesture of rudeness “—quite so cleverly done.”
Amy stared at him. If she’d assumed he’d learned to sign for reasons as simple as a job requirement, she must know now his reasons were personal, even...painful. But she obviously resented his intrusion, the disruption, that because of him Granny Fee sat glassy-eyed, rocking her chair back and forth, and her cold eyes told him she rejected out of hand any need to know the smallest detail of Cy McQuaid’s pain.
“What did you say to my grandmother,” she signed, “to upset her?”
“Enough that she would turn on all the music boxes at once?” he responded, speaking now. “Why don’t you tell me about the last time she pulled this?” Instinct led him to the question. He had no idea whether Fiona Reeves had ever used her music boxes to drown out voices—or anything else for that matter—before this day.
He had only the smallest of cues to go on, her swallow, the slide of her throat, the barest flicker of pain in her eyes, but adding them all, he had his answer. It had happened before, and Amy Reeves remembered it. Was it the night, he had to wonder, that her mother died?
She recouped with uncanny speed. “You’re outside your milieu, Mr. McQuaid—”
“My what?”
“Milieu.” She spelled the word at a pace a kindergartner could follow. “My mother’s death can have nothing to do with a background check meant to clear the way to my father’s nomination.”
“The background check is over. That’s not our purpose here.”
“Then,” she signed dismissively, “you have no business here at all. Get out. Get out,” she gestured powerfully, “now.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. A week ago, noon Friday, your father turned over to the FBI an extortion attempt alleging that your mother’s death was not an accident.”
Amy shivered involuntarily. “That is absurd.”
“Nevertheless, the allegations are there,” he countered. “As you must know, even the appearance of impropriety must be dealt with.”
“What impropriety? My mother’s death was an accident.”
“Was it?”
“Yes. My mommy... my mother fell and hit her head. It was as simple as that.”
Her use of “mommy” didn’t escape him. “Did you see her fall?”
“No. It...it happened to her outside, very late at night.”
“Were you up late at night, or in bed?”
“I don’t...I don’t remember.”
“Did you see your mother after she died?”
“No.”
“Do you know what led up to her fall?”
She crossed her arms, her meaning clear enough. I can’t help you. Her hands flew again. “This is all ludicrous.” She spelled the word so he would not mistake her opinion, but he had to guess anyway because her fingers flew and he didn’t catch anything after 1-u-d-i. “My mother,” she went on, “died in a fall outside the house. No one saw her fall.”
“That wasn’t my question.” He felt outwitted only because he fell behind her signing so fast that he had to fill in the blanks himself, and his delay in responding gave her a certain advantage. “My question was, what led up to her fall?” She shrugged, implying, he thought, that it didn’t matter. “Amy, I need to know what you remember, what your grandmother remembers of the night your mother died.”
“I would love to help you.” Everything about her body language contradicted her silently effusive remark. “But I can’t. My grandmother can’t help you, either. I’m deaf. She’s crazy.”
Wildly out of context she elaborated on “crazy,” forming then holding the signs for “brick” with her right hand and “bat” with her left so he could read them left to right and make no rookie mistake about it.
Crazy as a brick bat.
Even Povich got the essence of the brutal characterizations Amy made of herself and her grandmother.
Cy yanked on the knot in his tie, loosening his collar. He’d known Amy Reeves less than an hour but already she had the knack for jerking his chain. He didn’t like it. The conversational landscape felt strewn with explosives she scattered, clearly intending to maim him long before he got across. If she wanted to get down and dirty so soon, he’d accommodate her.
But if she thought he would buy into her calculated invitation to dismiss her in some asinine belief that being deaf somehow equaled being stupid, she had another think coming.
Slowly he shook his head. “Sorry, Amy, but as my Arkansas grandfather would have said, that dog won’t hunt.”
Again the faint slide of her throat, her hands flying to distract him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re a liar. Worse, a bad one.” He reverted to signing again to keep it between them. “The allegations made against your father are serious, so don’t waste my time. And don’t insult my intelligence again.”
She would not flinch. He’d seen the same deathly still control in Seth. Her careless shrug denied even the remote possibility that she had underestimated him. He watched as she shoved the weight of her hair over her shoulder.
The movement, natural and wholly unconscious, gave him the barest glimpse of the lace and silk of a mauvecolored camisole beneath the black lapels of her suit coat. His eyes lingered an instant too long, and when he met her gaze, he found her regarding him steadily.
“Do you like it?” she signed, letting her fingers hover near the delicate lace of the camisole,
her small wrist cradled between her breasts.
His lungs ceased, the breath in him froze. Had his pupils flared? He imagined they must have. He’d forgotten what terrible intimacy was required to speak to the deaf. Like Seth, Amy missed nothing, gauged every nuance of expression, caught every telltale sign. He understood perfectly that she wasn’t coming on to him with her gesture or her question.
Quite the opposite.
She had not intended to set him up, but she moved with a blinding speed to press any advantage. To make him pay. To embarrass him by drawing attention to a ridiculously small indiscretion.
To make him back off.
He got it. Daring and brazen and tough as a winterstarved she-wolf, Amy Reeves would strike at any vulnerability he was dense enough to show her. But if she truly believed her mother had died as the result of an accident, what was there to defend so fiercely?
Despite her clear advantage in the pace of the interview, she hadn’t met her match. Yet. And Cy had a job to do.
Her gaze was still locked on his. Povich cleared his throat nervously, excluded by the silence from this subtle clash of wills. Maybe Povich would have backed off.
Cy refused to give in. As with a wild horse, if he cut her so much as an arm’s length of slack, he’d lose. Period.
Her hand had fallen away from her breast, but he let his gaze drift down again and signed, “I like it. Yeah.” He let his hand suggest the shape of a caress, let even his gaze linger before finding its way back to hers.
Her throat clutched. He saw it. She hated him for the havoc he had caused but she could so nearly feel the caress his hand intended from five feet away that her heart sped as if she had never been touched there before.
For one wild and improbably long moment, before God and Granny Fee and Agent Povich, she wanted the caress of his hand more than she wanted him to leave and take the havoc with him.
And Cy saw it.
He had only meant to fight her fire with his. To play her game and beat her at it. To let the weighty pause suggest, with sarcasm as deep as her own, that he would in fact prefer the camisole off her altogether. Instead, the unguarded look in her eyes stormed the root of him.
He put his hand away, first into his pocket and then in a single word. “Truce?”
Amy broke off, staring instead at her own hands. Instinctively, he knew what she was thinking. She had underestimated Cy McQuaid. A hearing man who read her innuendoes so unerringly, who met her every deadly thrust with an equal or superior parry, deeply unnerved her.
She would not make the mistake again.
On the other hand, he had been sent on a fool’s errand. The sooner he understood that, the better. “Maybe you should just leave and take your investigation where it needs to be. Out doing whatever it is you do to put an end to lies and vicious rumors.”
Her hands flew so quickly that he only caught “rumors,” but it was enough. “If this were a matter of squelching rumors, Amy, I wouldn’t be here. The President himself wants an answer. The charges are not without foundation, and they bear investigation whether the subject is painful to you or not.”
“The President should have the courage of his convictions. And you don’t have the least idea what is painful to me.”
Cy shoved his hands into his pockets again. For a moment, the ache in his chest to do with Seth reared its ugly head again. For the first time in what seemed hours, he took his eyes off Amy, looking instead at Fiona Reeves sitting patiently in her rocker, a sweet smile on her face, as placid as if she were the deaf one.
He had only caught “you” and “least” and “painful,” but she was wrong. He had more reason than a deaf kid who broke his heart to know exactly what hurt Amy. He was more or less a motherless child himself. He let it go and turned his attention to Amy.
“I don’t understand your opposition. I would think, Amy, that you would want to help me lay the allegations to rest. Your grandmother is very pleased...” thrilled, he signed, “that your father may well be the next man seated on the bench of the Supreme Court.”
“I am thrilled for him as well. I would help you if I could. My father is a great man, a wonderful judge. He deserves the nomination,” Amy signed, and for once he felt marginally sure that he had followed her signing accurately. The feeling didn’t last. “My point is not that I don’t want to help you, or that I don’t want my grandmother to help you, but that there is nothing to be helped. Nothing. People make mountains of molehills.”
Seeing that she had lost him, she backed up, slowed down, elaborately spelled out “molehills.” “You asked me to tell you about the last time my grandmother began to turn on all the music boxes, as if that had some deep, dark significance.”
“Can you be so sure it doesn’t, Amy?”
“Yes. It’s simple. My grandmother is old, was old, even then. She is also schizophrenic.” Her hands mimed her grandmother’s brain splitting in two, each half falling away from the other. He doubted the sign would be found in any ASL text, but it made her bitterly eloquent point. “She hears things,” Amy went on, “voices, God knows what. I was five then, and I had accidentally fallen into a mine shaft—”
“You what?” Cy interrupted.
“I fell down a mine shaft. A—” her brows drew together, then she corrected herself, spelling the word “—a ventilation shaft to an old silver mine. That’s when I went deaf.” She shrugged as if it were nothing. “You didn’t know?”
Cy exchanged sharp looks with Povich. “No. We didn’t know. Go on.”
She drew a deep breath as if to go on.
Cy swore under his breath.
“What is it?” she signed. “What?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head. “I just should have - known.”
Her hands hung at her sides, waiting.
She wouldn’t go on until he’d explained. He still had a lot to learn about the willfulness of Byron Reeves’s daughter. “It’s your breathing, Amy.”
“What of it?”
“No one who has been deaf from birth takes a deep breath before they begin to speak. They don’t need to. You still do it. I, uh...” He frowned. “I should have known. I’m sorry.”
Her hands hung more limply than before. She had nothing to say. She turned away, went to the small fireplace in the corner. She sank to the tiled hearth, and turned on the gas log fire.
She stared into the flames, deeply confused by a man who would purposely shove her grandmother to the very brink of hysteria, dare to take her on over his own faux pas, admitting that he liked what he saw, and then...then what? There were no words to describe the quality of Cy McQuaid’s attention to her. It was simply, far and away, light-years, quantum leaps beyond her experience of a hearing man in all her life.
And yet he’d apologized for having failed to notice when and how and why she took a breath.
At last she turned back, aware herself now, of the breath she took, forcing herself beyond wonder to chalking it all up not to the quality of the man but the practice of his profession. She went on signing, picking up where she had left off. McQuaid was waiting patiently.
“I had fallen into the mine shaft earlier that day. My brother Brent was out of control, blaming himself. My mother was angry that it had taken my father so many hours to get up to Steamboat from Denver. My uncle had spent the day working with a mountain rescue team to get me out. And then my mother tripped in the dark and hit her head and died. Is it any wonder,” she demanded, pausing for emphasis, “that my grandmother just went over the edge? Is there some evil slant that could be put on any of this?”
Cy sank down onto a small, delicate bench at Fiona’s vanity. She had been crystal clear, waiting after each statement to be certain he understood, clarifying when he did not. He answered her question with one of his own. “Two deadly accidents in one day, Amy? It kicks the hell out of any theory of a random universe.”
She swallowed. “How is it possible,” she signed, “for you to notice every breath I take and still
so completely miss the point?”
He shook his head. “Your point isn’t lost on me at all. And I don’t think mine is lost on you.”
She sighed deeply. “I don’t know what you want from me. I’ve told you everything I know.”
“How old was your brother?”
“Twelve.”
“Did your father blame your fall on your mother?”
“My mother wasn’t there when it happened. Why would he—”
“Isn’t that the point? Why wasn’t she there? What kind of mother expects a twelve-year-old kid to keep his little sister safe from harm?”
“Most mothers,” Amy signed, her hands conveying clearly how badly he needed a reality check if he believed otherwise. “I had been out with Brent dozens of times. Nothing bad had ever happened to me.”
“Until that day.”
She stared at him. “This is the case you want to build against my father? That in his anger at my mother over what had happened to me in my brother’s care, my father flew into some homicidal rage?”
She had made no effort to make her syntax easy to follow, or tone down the complexity of her protest, and he understood that was also a measure of her anger. Her nuance suggested his thinking, his “case” against her father, was on the same scarcely competent level as his ability to follow her meaning.
And by extension that he was hardly man enough to deal with her.
She expected him to turn tail and run. She didn’t have his measure yet. It shouldn’t have mattered to him, but it did. He let his silence, his unbroken gaze, grow uncomfortably long.
“I’m not interested in making a case against your father, Amy. The country loses out if your father isn’t vindicated. But if you think things can’t go so bad between a man and his wife when something like this happens—so bad that one of them winds up dead—you’re wrong.”
Heat and anger flared in her cheeks, but she was too focused, too keenly observant because she depended on visual cues, to miss either his refusal to back off—or the faint tremor at the cleft in his chin. She guessed his experience of things going so wrong between a man and his wife was deep. Personal. Nearly buried, but not quite.
