OUR SECRET BABY

by Paula Cox

  She leans back in her seat and closes her eyes. Sixty-three. Sixty-four.

  I can still feel the coolness of her fingers. Something tells me I’m going to remember that touch for a long time.

  Chapter 9

  “Mr. Tolliver, I’m very sorry if I’ve woken you.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “Good. We’ve had a situation. I’ll need you to take Maya away from the estate just for a few days until Mattias and I can settle this.”

  “What’s happened?” I say, trying to keep the concern out of my voice.

  “A situation, as I’ve said.” Theo sounds tired, like a man who has spent the whole day making sure his orders have been fulfilled.

  “Is Maya in danger?”

  “Good Heavens, no. This has nothing to do with Maya. I’d simply prefer for her not to see this.”

  A few muffled voices say something about a mess.

  “Only for a few days, maybe a week. We’re not expecting any danger in the slightest. How soon can you be here?”

  I take the highway thirty miles over the speed limit—it’d taken me a week of experimenting to realize that on the road, Theo’s Mercedes was virtually invisible— and get to the mansion in ten minutes, just a little after midnight. The butler shows me in, looking appropriately grave, and directs me straight to Theo’s room. There are no guards around.

  Theo is behind his desk, which looks as though it’d been clubbed several times with an ax. He’s got a phone balanced between neck and shoulder. He looks just as tired as I’d imagined him looking on the phone, maybe even more. He’s still wearing an evening shirt and tie but the tie has been loosened near the throat, and the shirt is crumpled. His eyes are bloodshot, and the wrinkles beneath them are etched and steely—he wears them like some kind of uniform. The cuffs of his shirt are covered in blood.

  He waves me inside but makes no motion for me to sit, so I don’t. “Whatever you wish to say to him you may say,” Theo says into the receiver. “It doesn’t change what we both know must be done. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve long since said everything we need to say.”

  I look away from Theo and try to form an idea of whatever the hell’s happened in the room. Someone has clearly gone to work on the place. Theo’s desk is split almost in half, and there are bright chunks of missing mahogany like bits of flesh from where the ax or whatever weapon was used, ripped out stray pieces. There are the same notches in the walls too. The two velvet chairs on either end of the door have been done in completely, but what I notice most are the cages, lying in crumpled shards on the floor. Like a giant smashed them together between his hands. Bright feathers peek out from between the crushed bars. There’s blood everywhere on the carpet.

  “As long as we understand one another,” Theo says. “Tomorrow morning then. Get some rest.” He hangs up the phone. “Mr. Tolliver. You’re certainly timely.”

  “Thank you,” I say and shake the old man’s hand. “I’m sorry about your birds.”

  “Yes. Me too.”

  He stares at the wreckage, and I can see the twitch in his eye as he looks on. “A great loss,” he finishes, “though I regret what’s to come more than what’s happened. You can’t at all imagine how much it pains me to do what I have to do.”

  “So you know who it was?”

  “Yes,” he says, biting the inside of his cheek in the way people do when they know something but don’t want to say it. “Might have seen this coming, too. That’s the real tragedy of it. We’ve all lacked foresight, and now we must pay for our mistakes, young Kit in particular.”

  “Kit Holcomb?”

  “You know him? But I introduced you two, that’s right.” Theo picks up a busted picture on his desk and tries to distract himself. Then he seems to remember something. “I’m sorry—I’ve been very rude. Would you care for a Scotch?”

  “It would choke me.”

  “Not much of a drinker, eh?” Theo smiles conspiratorially and orders two anyway, saying nothing until the butler brings them in.

  “Kirill’t refuse a mobster’s generosity, young man,” Theo urges when he sees me hesitate. I take the glass with absolutely no intention of doing anything with it apart from holding it there in my hand. Theo sucks at his greedily.

  “Kit Holcomb, I’m afraid. He seemed a shaky one to you when you met him, didn’t he?”

  “I just thought he was nervous.”

  “We thought the same. Some of the men even took to calling him ‘Kitty’ because they wanted him to loosen up. Even Michelangelo took up the call. My parrot, you know.”

  He sucks the Scotch dry like a man in the desert. I’ve never seen someone go through a hard drink so quickly.

  “We were wrong as things turn out.”

  “What do you mean ‘wrong’?”

  “Kit Holcomb’s a manic-depressive. He has been seeing a shrink since he was eighteen and never breathed a word about it to Mattias. About four hours ago I was out with my driver, we don’t keep guards here at night, but all of my associates have keys to the place in case of emergencies. Kit must have just snapped. Maybe it was a long time coming or a sudden break. Maybe just got tired of being called Kitty. We don’t know. Anyway, he broke into my office with the hatchet and went to town on the place. Best as we can figure out his target was my parrot.”

  “Jesus.”

  “If you’re not going to drink that,” he adds. I hand him the Scotch. “It’s been a long day,” he says after another drink. “Long story short one of my guards came back for a missing wallet or something and found the room in the state you see now. Kit was hiding out in the greenhouse out back, two barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun in his mouth. Kirill’t know how long he was sitting out there before someone found him.”

  “He didn’t kill himself then?”

  “No. The gun wasn’t even loaded. Can’t tell what the man was thinking, but he’d have saved us an awful lot of trouble if he’d just gone through with it.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “He’s made more trouble for me than I’d care to have to deal with. If he’d gone ahead and blown his brains out in the greenhouse, we might all have dismissed him as a tragic lunatic beyond help. Now I have to be the bad guy.” He drained the second scotch as easy as the first.

  “Where is he now?”

  “At Mattias’s estate. He’s one of his men after all. You know, we don’t trespass on each other’s ground. Not even when the men we’re dealing with are straight criminals.”

  “That sounds very noble.”

  “No, not noble. It keeps things easy. The simple fact of the matter, Mr. Tolliver, is that I’m a bad man who is about to do a very bad thing to a man with a serious chemical deficiency in his brain. And because it is business, I mustn’t feel any remorse about doing it because I know the alternative will put not just my life, but also my daughter and my associates’ lives in jeopardy. That’s the position I’ve been put in.”

  “Has Maya seen any of this?” I ask.

  “No. Thank God. She loved those birds, and she cared deeply for Mr. Holcomb. It would destroy her having to see all of this, which is why you’ll be taking her out of town for a few days.”

  He reaches into his crumpled suit pocket and takes out a sheet of paper with a phone number written on it.

  “I’ve called an old friend at the Four Seasons near Westtown. You’ll have two rooms for the week. Do whatever you want—galleries, film. Drive to New York if you want and take her to a show. Just make sure she doesn’t come back here. A week should be plenty for us to take care of this whole matter. Maya will be out by the car to wait for you.”

  “Okay.” I slip the paper into my pocket.

  “Good man. Trust me when I say, Mr. Tolliver, I wish it wasn’t the case. I was really beginning to sympathize with poor Mr. Holcomb. But you see these are the duties required of a man in my position. And a damned shame it is.”

  “I understand.”

  “Yes,” Theo sighs. For a mo
ment he doesn’t look like the proud mob boss and single most powerful figure in town. He looks like a very old, very sad man facing a duty he would do anything in the world to avoid.

  I wait for something more, but there is none. Theo lapses into contemplating whatever unpleasant thoughts he’s contemplating, and I leave the room quietly, crumpling and uncrumpling the paper in my pocket.

  Chapter 10

  Maya is waiting inside the Mercedes when I get there. She looks like a vet suffering from PTSD. Her eyes are wide with shock, but her lips are tight and focused. She also looks extravagantly dressed up, like someone about to go to the opera rather than a hotel room. Just from what she’s told me, and from the time we spent going through shopping malls, I know her black dress alone is probably worth my days’ salary. I don’t factor in the diamonds around the throat or on her fingers or in her ears.

  She stares hard at me when I get inside the car. It suddenly seems to me that after everything that has happened, and after being forced to spend the whole day alone in her room while her father negotiated the killing of another man, she’s probably got a lot she needs to get off her chest. When I look at her, though, the tight purse of her mouth shows absolutely no signs of opening. I’ll need to do the talking, and so I start by saying the first thing that comes into my mind. “Maya. You are absolutely beautiful.”

  I don’t know why I choose now to say this. Over the past two months, there have been hundreds of opportunities to tell her that she was beautiful. But all of those times she must have known it herself because it just seems like the kind of thing girls recognize. Except now I don’t know. I don’t know how she thinks or if she’s even thinking of herself. She has this icy, faraway separate thing about her, almost martyr-like. Her hands are shaking.

  “Thanks,” she says, clipped and sharp like she’s cutting and throwing away an old nail.

  I start the car and blast the heater and wait for the defroster to defog the window. Maya is rigid as a statue, and she’s got her purse clasped like a baby on her lap.

  “You can put that on the ground,” I say gently. She rounds on me like I’ve just suggested she jump out of a moving car. “Why?”

  “You don’t need it right now. Everything’s fine.”

  She holds on to the purse, frowns, and then drops it onto the floor. Her wallet, phone, and makeup utensils all spill out, but she doesn’t see them. She’s looking at the nails of her left hand, which are shaking and trying to tear off the tip of her forefinger.

  “Are you cold?” I whisper.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Give me your hand.”

  She drops it into my lap like a dead animal. The fingers are even colder than last time. They feel like tiny, frozen sticks, like the kind I’d seen before on the cold, dry days in winter at the parks on the… whaddya call them… Persimmon trees, which had these thin knobby branches that would freeze all the way through and click against each other when the wind blew. Sort of like wind chimes but without any tones or notes, just that dry sound of frozen wood that was like the muffled clack of a woman walking on floor tiles.

  “Your fingers are frozen.”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” she says without any emotion.

  “Sure you did.” I’ve got big, boxing hands. Maya’s fingers against my palm come up just at the point where my fingers begin. So I sandwich her hand in between mine and just rub a little back and forth without applying much pressure at all, and I’m hoping that my callouses aren’t too rough because she’s got the softest hands I’ve ever felt. Especially given how scared and upset and weak she is, I’m worried that just by touching her I’ll damage her in some way and the last thing I want to do, right now sandwiching her hand in mine and trying to work some heat back in, is hurt her.

  “There you go.” I give her hand back, trading her for the left one, and repeat the process. By now there are big, clear splotches in the windshield and I can see the street. I warm her hand quickly and put the car into action and drive. Drive and drive until we’re out of the city and going along the same highway route we took to reach Sunrise Apartments.

  Westtown is Portsmouth’s business sector, but it’s not much. A few semi-tall skyscrapers and some decent restaurants, all of them closed by now, and some overpriced bars and our hotel. That’s it.

  I ask Maya if she wants to get a drink or a bite to eat and get silence. Stone cold, angry, hurt, weird silence. It’s not like anything I’ve ever experienced with her before. I knew she could be moody, but I’ve never known her to be a robot. Whatever’s happened with Kit Holcomb, whatever she knows, has got her riled up.

  So instead of going anywhere, I pull us into the valet of the Four Seasons and open her door and get her bag from the trunk. The driver takes my keys and hands me a number.

  “Sleeping it off will be the best thing for you,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond.

  It’s around one thirty in the morning, and there’s some perky blonde at the desk. She confirms our reservation with smiles so big they take up half her face and even some of her upper body. They don’t go at all with the late hour or how both Maya and I are feeling. After a few curt answers, she stops smiling and runs through the reservation information as blandly and quickly as possible.

  “Two fourth floor suites with views?” she says.

  “Actually,” Maya interjects, her eyes sliding to the receptionist’s nametag, “Sara, we were actually hoping to upgrade to a single grande if possible,” Maya interjects. “Even if it’s not possible. Maybe you could just kick somebody out.”

  Sara laughs, but Maya doesn’t. I’m not convinced that she said it as a joke.

  What are you doing? I mouth at her.

  Protection, I’m pretty sure she mouths back. That makes sense, but only in a scared and paranoid “they-are-gonna-get-me-in-my-sleep” kind of way. From what I’ve learned of Maya, she’s not the kind of girl to get scared easily. What the hell has happened?

  “Sure is.” Sara clicks away at the keyboard and pulls up the results for vacant rooms. “Seventh floor okay?”

  “Sure. What room?”

  “Seven…twenty…three”

  “Okay.”

  Another two minutes. Sara prints our room cards and directs us to the elevator where a tired lift operator wearing a red uniform presses the button for us.

  It’s not until we actually get to our floor that we have a chance to talk to each other in private. Maya’s behavior, the shared suite, and the situation with Kit—all of it has made me just as nervous as her. My heart’s going a mile a minute. My fingers trail along the barrel of my glock as I work my keycard out of my pocket. When the lift goes back down, I tell Maya to wait by the lifts. She obeys without any questions. It would have made me a lot more comfortable if she’d had objections.

  My fingers trail the barrel of my glock, and I get my keycard out of my pocket and press it into the lock, but instead of opening the door I put my ear against the wood and listen. If anyone were hiding out inside, there would have been movement from the sound. Nothing so far. My heart eases but only for a second as I swing the door open.

  The light is dim and golden, with the suite bright and sumptuous, which puts me more at ease but not by much. Sure you worry more if the place you’re going into is as dark as the Godfather’s office, but the light is unsettling. You don’t expect as much in the light.

  I take out the glock and flip off the safety and hold it stretched out and comb through the rooms three times before I’m satisfied.

  “Can I come in now?” Maya asks after ten minutes.

  “Yeah.” I set the gun down on the bedside table and put my coat over it, making sure it looks natural so that she won’t suspect anything.

  “Force of habit,” I say. I’m really hoping the whole inspection hasn’t frightened her. From the looks of things, she seems about the same as before. Maybe even a little calmer. She takes off her fur and sets it on the zebra-skin sectional sofa and sits down as straight
as a razor.

  “Look,” she says like she’s beginning a speech. Her bottom lip starts to shake, but she holds herself steady. “I’m exhausted. I feel like someone’s gone through me with a fucking leaf blower and now there’s nothing left inside of me. And I think I’ve never hated Daddy more than I do today, and that it’s my fault he’s going to kill Kit Holcomb even though everyone has already told me it’s not but what the hell do they know anyway? And now part of my brain is terrified—just morbidly fucking terrified—that I’m going to walk into a room, and Kit’s just going to be sitting there waiting for me. He might even say something creepy like, ‘I’ve been expecting you, Maya,’ like horror movie bullshit because I was the one who was always nice to him and never called him Kitty or any of that bullshit like Andrei and Ikov or fucking Michelangelo. You can say all the rational stuff you want, but it’s just how I feel—like my brain is just gone, just rooted out because I’m done thinking, and I’m just tired tired tired. And it has just been the longest day in the world, and when we got to this hotel I started asking myself how was there any way in hell that I was going to sleep in my own bed tonight? So if you’re wondering why you’re here, that’s the reason, and you can sleep on the sectional or wherever you want, but I just need you in the same room with me, for God’s sake. Just tonight, Quinn. Just until things are better.”