Tangled Ashes

by Michele Phoenix

  There was a flurry of activity over by the sink.

  “There he is, there he is, there he is!” the twins whispered frantically, gesticulating with such force that they nearly fell off their footstools.

  The adults in the room tried to maintain a certain amount of dignity as they rushed to the window, but each one of them failed miserably. Thérèse let out a high-pitched peep and covered her mouth, trotting over to join the children, and Jade grabbed Beck’s arm with a hushed “Come on!” and moved in a mockery of stealth to the window. Much as he wanted to catch a glimpse of the château’s resident stalker, Jade’s hand on his arm took precedence in Beck’s mind. It hadn’t been that long since he’d felt a woman’s touch, so it wasn’t the contact that registered so fiercely. It was the person whose hand grasped his elbow who made the difference. The women he’d spent time with before arriving in France would have made of that touch something demanding and sordid, but with Jade it was as simple as it was unmeasured. He would have been more comfortable with the former.

  Beck heard Thérèse take in a shocked breath and turned his attention to the window. Jade had to let go of his arm to lean forward, but not for long. All five of them leaned back when Jojo passed in front of them—just a few feet away. He was small, probably no more than five foot four, though he was so stooped that he might have once stood taller. He wore a moth-eaten, dark-gray coat whose hem had apparently fallen out quite a while ago. The dark-blue sweatpants underneath were stained with mud and touched the ground, the elastic at the ankles long gone. But it was his face that made Beck catch his breath. From the silence around the sink, he knew the others were affected as well.

  Jojo’s face was so deeply lined that dirt had lodged in the crevices, making it look like he’d painted the wrinkles into his skin. His eyes were sunken, as were his cheeks, and his mouth was a hard, thin line surrounded by coarse bristles. His hair was long, pulled back with a shoelace, and nearly perfectly white—it might have been, except for the dirt. But the steel-gray eyes that peered out of that face, heavy-lidded and sunken, were sharp and piercing, fully alert yet somehow turned inward. This was a man whose life only prolonged his suffering and who suffered with utter, complete awareness.

  The five of them stood at the window long after Jojo had passed out of sight. Philippe and Eva had actually climbed into the low flat-bottomed sink and pressed their heads against the windowpane to follow his progress as far as they could. Thérèse fingered the pendant at her neck as if it were a rosary, looking spooked, and Jade’s eyes had a soft, sad look about them. She ran a hand over Eva’s hair before coaxing her down from the sink, then helped Philippe to jump out.

  As for Becker, he stood slightly back from the others. There was a tightness in his chest and a heaviness in his mind that begged for release. He reached out to get Jade’s attention, then withdrew his hand. His voice was gravelly when he said, almost too quietly to be heard, “You should bring him some food.”

  As he climbed the steps to his apartment, he could hear Thérèse cackling about how unsafe it would be to go near “that man’s” house and how setting a precedent could have disastrous repercussions. Jade’s calm voice followed. “We just saw him heading for the neighbor’s stables,” she said. “We’ll leave a plate on his doorstep while he’s gone. It will all be perfectly safe.”

  Beck closed his door and reached for the bottle in his closet.

  THIS TIME, he could see people. They stood against a charred wooden wall from which small flames still ribboned upward, and they stared at him through the eyeholes of black ski masks. He couldn’t see their faces, but their eyes . . . Their eyes were searingly familiar. He recognized the green of his mother’s gaze. The gray of his father’s. The blue of Gary’s. Eva’s deep brown. Jojo’s frozen gray.

  “Say something,” he said.

  They stared, immobile, expressionless, callous.

  “Mom?” He pleaded with the blue-green eyes. “Come on, Mom, speak to me!”

  She stared ahead without flinching.

  “Pops. You recognize me, right? Pops?” He tried to step closer to the masked figures, but there was an invisible barrier shielding him from them. He touched it, and a shock of electricity burned through his body. He cried out and fell back against a toppled tree trunk, his heart pounding from the shock. He looked into each pair of eyes again, a frantic pulse beating in his ears, searching for any form of recognition, but he saw none. Even Eva’s normally lively eyes were dim with dispassion and oblivious to his pleas.

  As he paced in front of them, begging for connection, a door opened in a large tree next to him, its elevator chime dissonant in the walled forest in which he stood. Philippe stepped out. Then Jade. They looked him in the eye and knew him. These two, he could connect with. These two, he could embrace. But as he opened his arms to draw Philippe to him, he found that they weren’t his to control. It was as a spectator that he watched himself taking a black ski mask from his pocket and slipping it over Philippe’s head.

  “No!” he screamed, ashamed and appalled. “No! Stop! Stop!”

  But he couldn’t stop his own body from performing the obscene task. He tried to warn Jade to escape. “Run!” he yelled at her. “Jade, get out of here! Run!” But even as his mouth said the words, his hands pulled a mask over her face. Over her dark hair, over her walnut eyes.

  “No!” he screamed, the tortured sound of anguish pouring from his throat like blood. “No,” he cried again, as Jade and Philippe were sucked into the row that lined the burning wall. “No . . .” It was a sob. A plea.

  The flames grew brighter—bigger. They licked at the clothing of the masked lineup, burning their bodies until they turned a gruesome, charred black, then sifted to the ground, reduced to ashes. Beck sank to his knees, unable to breathe. Unable to breathe. Unable to breathe.

  Becker woke with the feeling that his lungs were exploding. He rose onto an elbow and gulped in a deep breath. It rasped past his constricted throat, making him cough so hard that he could taste the bile in his mouth. He rolled out of bed and tried to make it to the door, but his legs buckled beneath him. It took several more breaths on his hands and knees before he was able to muster the strength to make it to the bathroom. He retched into the commode, then sat back against the wall, depleted.

  An hour later, lamplight shone out the window of his office and cast a rectangle of light on the grass outside. Beck held a long, curved piece of wood in his hand, its shape becoming the swirl of the staircase’s design. The hand that held the wood was fairly steady, but the one that held the razor-sharp lathe was not. Beck pressed his lips together and willed his fingers to obey his mind’s commands. He shaved off one fine layer of wood after the other, a little less shaky when he exerted pressure, and slowly saw a form emerge.

  The element of the staircase wasn’t finished yet when the castle awoke in the morning, and, truth be told, it had taken him much too long to make the small amount of progress he had. But he’d made it through the night without a drink, scared dry by the dream that had shaken his equilibrium. Those few hours of sobriety were a significant accomplishment.

  There was a light tap on his door. “Come in,” he called out, his rough voice betraying his sleepless night.

  Jade poked her head around the door. “Thought you might want to know that the plate I dropped off at Jojo’s yesterday was waiting for me at the kitchen door when we got here.”

  It took a moment for Beck’s mind to catch on. When he finally remembered yesterday’s meal, he asked, “Was the lasagna still on it?”

  Jade smiled. “It was all gone.” She frowned at him. “And no, I don’t think the neighborhood cats ate it!”

  “Well done,” he mumbled, getting back to work. “You’ve saved a perpetual trespasser from starvation.”

  Jade cocked her head and stepped all the way into the office. Beck glanced up, irritated by her lingering presence. She was wearing her hair down more these days, and its slick lines accentuated her features. Her ey
es seemed wider set and her jaw sharper. Her skin, he noticed, looked paler. But that might merely be the dreary winter months taking their toll. “Been burning the midnight oil?” she asked.

  He grunted his response and reached for a rag to dust off the fruit of his labor.

  Jade stepped closer to his workbench and inspected the graceful arches and curves of his handiwork. “Becker, that’s exquisite,” she said, sounding surprised that a man like Beck could produce something so fine and artistic. “I had no idea I was feeding Rodin!”

  Another grunt.

  “Speaking of waiting on you, I was just coming by to let you know that we’re having an English breakfast this morning. I’ll still make coffee for you, of course, instead of tea,” she added hastily, “but there will also be fried eggs and bacon and sausage and potatoes.”

  It all sounded good to Beck. “And you felt the need to warn me because . . . ?”

  “Because I saw your light on when I arrived and I figured you’d been working most of the night. I thought you might enjoy having something to look forward to.”

  “Huh.”

  “Well, good. I’m glad we shared this moment,” she said, exiting the office.

  Becker smiled as he brushed wood shavings onto the floor.

  He waited for nearly an hour for Jade to return bearing his tray. He fiddled on the Internet, sending Gary an update on the progress so far, entering new figures into his budgeting spreadsheet, and jotting down items he’d have to discuss with Fallon when he dropped by later in the day. He’d made it through the night without a drink, shielded from his cravings, in part, by his focus on his woodwork, but with the brutal light of day, his throbbing head and upset stomach were doing their best to foil his midnight resolutions. He felt weighed down and sluggish.

  Jade’s soft knock came as a relief. “Yes!” he shouted, probably more loudly than necessary.

  She opened the door and gave him a questioning look. “Are you coming to breakfast? It’s been ready for going on twenty minutes, and I’m afraid it’ll be ruined if you don’t come quickly. . . .”

  “I thought you were bringing it to the office,” Beck answered, a little put out by the assumption that he’d eat his breakfast in the kitchen.

  “I . . .” Jade raised her shoulders in an apologetic gesture. “I’m so sorry. I just assumed . . . after yesterday . . .”

  “Just because I eat one meal in the kitchen doesn’t mean I’m changing my habits,” he said, eyes narrowed.

  Jade moved into the room and propped a hip against the backrest of the couch, crossing her arms and eyeing Beck as if she were assessing one of Thérèse’s antiques. “You know, Beck,” she said, for once leaving the Mr. off his name, “some people actually find it enjoyable to spend time with others.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I think you’re the only person I’ve ever met who equates sociability with some sort of Chinese water torture.” She smiled, her expression less pleasant than self-congratulatory, and Beck wondered how long she’d been practicing that line.

  “Are you finished?”

  She looked at the ceiling as if evaluating the necessity for further statements. “Yes,” she finally said. “I’m finished.”

  “Best news I’ve gotten all morning.”

  “So are you eating in the kitchen—where the coffeepot is, by the way—or am I bringing you your breakfast on a tray?”

  He would not be swayed. He leaned forward at his desk, eyebrows raised in something he hoped resembled disdain, and answered, “I’ll eat it here.”

  Jade’s eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips, looking as if she wanted to retort but was restraining herself out of deference for his position on the renovation team. “Fine. I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, her smile more forced this time. “Over easy all right?”

  “Over easy’s fine.” His eyes were on his computer screen.

  He heard the door click softly as Jade left.

  Half an hour later, he was still sitting at his desk, staring out the window as he finished a sausage link and wondering what the payoff of his stubbornness had been. He’d spent the better part of the past two years being mostly alone and enjoying the benefits of his choices, but there was something about the banter reaching him from the kitchen that made him wonder if his self-imposed reclusion was entirely a good thing. He shook his head and dismissed the thought. No, this was what he wanted. Total independence. No one to tell him what to do or how to do it. This was the life he’d crafted for himself, and he was satisfied with it. It was simple. Straightforward. No excess baggage required.

  The throbbing in his head and the shake in his fork betrayed his convictions. He took another slug of coffee and hoped it would still his nerves. Some heavy-duty labor might too. He’d join the carpentry team in the dining rooms this morning and exorcise his demons with some physical exertion.

  Beck was just getting back to his breakfast when the door to his office burst open and Thérèse stormed in.

  “Someone has destroyed the well!” she shrilled, pointing back in the direction from which she’d come.

  Beck raised an eyebrow. “And that’s my problem because . . . ?”

  She squinted. “I understand that the cosmetics of this renovation are mostly my purview, Mr. Becker, but if you’ll follow me, I think you’ll see that there is little I can do alone to resolve this matter!” Her voice rose to new heights on the last word.

  Beck knew that no amount of sarcasm or soothing would talk Thérèse down, so he heaved a deep sigh and levered himself to a standing position. “Show me,” he said, his voice that of a lamb being led to slaughter.

  Thérèse preceded him briskly out the door at the bottom of the stairs, under the overpass outside the kitchen and into the parking area flanked by the carport and the old carriage courtyard. The children, who had been finishing up their breakfast in the kitchen, came running out to see what all the fuss was about, followed by Jade, who had been washing dishes and still sported pink rubber gloves.

  Just outside the kitchen wall was a waist-high stone well, its wrought-iron tripod uprooted from the stone to which it had been anchored. Beck had passed by the well before, but had never paid close attention to it. This morning, however, he knew at first glance that the damage had been intentional and had probably required some effort. The heavy cement-and-stone slab that had covered the well’s opening had been painstakingly pushed to the side, using something like a crowbar to displace it one inch at a time. There were sharp indentations where a hard object had scored the stone. The slab had been displaced so far across the well that, Beck suspected, it had teetered over the edge, dislodging one foot of the tripod in its fall. It had landed on the stone apron around the bottom of the well and shattered into several pieces.

  Beck tested the solidity of the wrought-iron elements that rose like a teepee above the well, supporting in their center a pulley from which a bucket had once hung.

  “Philippe,” he said to the boy, whose eyes were wide and excited. “Run to my office and get the flashlight off my desk, will you?”

  Philippe’s little chest swelled with pride at his mission, and he took off running in the direction of the back door.

  The wrought-iron tripod hadn’t bent permanently when the cover plate had dislodged it from the stone. Beck quickly pulled the leg back to the hole from which it had been torn and dropped it into place.

  “There,” he said, casting Thérèse a “what’s the big deal?” look. “Tragedy averted. Any other cataclysmic destruction I need to know about?”

  Thérèse pointed at the well with both hands. “But don’t you find it odd that—”

  “Yes.”

  “And don’t you wonder who would possibly—”

  “Yes.”

  Thérèse’s shoulders slumped, as if Becker had disappointed her dramatic expectations. In a much calmer voice, she said, “Well, I guess there wasn’t any lasting damage done. Except to the cover plate.”

  Philip
pe came running back with a large black flashlight he held by its yellow string. “Here it is,” he said breathlessly, holding the flashlight out to Beck. “Are you going to go down the well?”

  From the look on his face, Beck could tell that the boy really considered Beck rappelling down the narrow well to be a possibility. “Not if I can help it,” he said, shining the powerful beam down the three-foot opening. The shaft of the well was only about twelve feet deep, and there appeared to be a collection of debris sitting in a shallow puddle at the bottom. What caught Beck’s eye was not the rotting wood and rusting bits of metal. It was the bright-blue nylon rope coiled on the mound of refuse.

  He looked at Thérèse and Jade. “You sure this well was completely covered until this morning?”

  “Yes, of course,” Jade said, leaning over the edge and following the beam of Beck’s flashlight to the blue rope at the bottom. “That rope looks new.”

  “Well, new or not, it’s not part of the original design.”

  Jade peered more closely into the well. “Why would anyone want to go exploring in an old, dried-up well?”

  “Jojo,” Thérèse declared. “He’d do something like this.”

  Jade ignored her, taking the flashlight from Beck’s hand and aiming it more specifically at a portion of the well floor. “Do you see that?” she asked.

  Beck leaned in closer, a little uncomfortable at the proximity, but his curiosity was aroused by the surprise in her voice.

  “What am I looking for?” he asked.

  “That,” Jade answered, circling an object on the well floor with the beam from the flashlight.

  Eva, who had shuffled over to Jade, pulled on her arm and asked, nearly in a whisper, “Is it Jojo?”

  The question made Becker smirk and Jade momentarily straighten to lay a hand on the six-year-old’s head. “No, Eva, it’s not Jojo.” Eva seemed immensely relieved. “What I think it is, however,” she said, leaning in again to get a closer look, “is a flashlight. And the flashlight appears to be tied to the end of the rope.”