by Mike Nappa
“Well, you still look like him.” Trudi had been surprised at how quickly she could jab that knife into her ex-husband’s heart. But it was the truth, and in a way, it felt good to talk about it openly with him for once.
“I know we’ll never be together again,” he’d said slowly, “not as husband and wife, at least. This is my punishment, and it’s just. But I want you to know there’s no one else for me. Never will be.”
Trudi tried not to grimace. She’d felt a familiar pain welling up within her rib cage. “Samuel, you have another wife. A secret lover hidden away somewhere in the Middle East.”
“No, not her either. I told you, we married just to protect her safety. We’ve never been together since she got pregnant. I see her when I visit my son, but there’s nothing going on between us. That’s the truth. We both learned from that mistake.”
“It’s hard to believe you, Samuel.”
“You don’t have to believe me,” he’d said. His chin dipped, watching his feet shuffle uncomfortably on the floor. “I’m not asking you for anything. I just wanted you to know.”
She stared at his eyes and saw truth in them, but she also knew the facts. He’d made a vow on their wedding day and broken it. And what about Eulalie?
“I saw you, Samuel,” she’d said. “At Eclipse di Luna. I know about you and Eulalie.”
The look on his face had been one of pure confusion.
“I see the way you flirt with her around the office. And I saw you two on your date three weeks ago.”
The corners of his eyes had wrinkled merrily at that, and his lips teased a brief smile. “Trudi,” he said, “there’s nothing going on between me and Eulalie. She’s almost a decade younger than me.”
Trudi had felt mildly embarrassed.
“If you saw Eulalie and me together last month,” he continued, “it was homework. She was writing a paper on the Distinctive Psychosis of Law Enforcement Personalities or something like that. I had to take a written survey and then let her ask me a bunch of strange questions about my mother. I told her she had to at least buy me dinner for that.”
Of course! Trudi thought all at once. She asked me to take a survey for her too, but I passed it off. Maybe she got Samuel to take it instead?
A sober look had reappeared on Samuel’s face. “Listen, because I need to tell you this now. I love you, Trudi Sara Coffey. All of me loves all of you. I always will, whether you want me to or not.”
It’s crazy when a man’s words both hurt and heal you, she’d told herself. She blinked, then sighed.
“So why are you telling me this now?”
“For a long time, I thought I could never love anything as much as I love you. And then he came along.” He’d picked up the picture from the desktop. “I’d do anything for you, Tru-Bear. And I’ll do anything for him.”
“I understand,” she had said. “And I’m here to help you. What do we need to do?”
“That’s the thing. You can’t do anything. But I’m going to have to leave for a few days. And if I don’t come back, well, I wanted you to know that I love you. Always.”
She had felt an all-too-common frustration. “I can help you, Samuel. If you love me, let me help you.”
“Trudi,” he’d said, “this picture was taken outside my son’s home in—well, in an unnamed country in the Middle East. The home is guarded day and night. I saw to that. It has electronic security as well as armed guards. But these people still got close enough to take a picture of my boy in his backyard. That means they know me, they know how to get to me, and they’re dangerous. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing I’ll let you do.”
“So I’m just supposed to sit here and worry about you?”
“No, I want you to sit here and solve Nevermore for me while I’m gone. Figure out what’s going on so we can stop it when I get back.”
If you get back, she’d thought. Then, Wow, I’m such an optimist.
“What are you going to do?”
He’d stood. “Thanks to my old buddies at the CIA, I’m on the international no-fly list, so it looks like my first stop will be Langley, Virginia, to get that obstacle taken care of.”
A new concern had wrinkled his face then. “But I’ll be back in time to be your date for Max Roman’s fundraiser. Promise you’ll take me.”
“Samuel, don’t worry about it. I’ll take Eulalie with me. We’ll check things out for you and let you know if we uncover anything.”
“No, Trudi.” His voice had been insistent. “I’ll be back. Promise me you’ll take me as your date.”
“Fine,” she’d said at last. She knew he was thinking something he wasn’t saying, but she decided to let it go. “It’s a date.”
“Okay.” He had scooped up the photo and returned it to the FedEx envelope, then tucked it all underneath his arm. He paused.
“I heard you the first time,” she’d said. “Just go and save the world already.”
He’d grinned, and then she’d watched him go, first through the door to her office, then on the security camera feed from the reception area, and finally on the security feed from the parking lot.
A week later, he still wasn’t back in Atlanta, but she’d gotten a phone message from him saying he’d meet her at the dinner party tonight, that he’d be coming straight from the airport but would dress appropriately before boarding his flight so she wouldn’t be embarrassed by his beat-up old boots.
It almost felt like a real date, a long-overdue reunion. She was actually excited.
“You’re right,” she said to Eulalie. “He said he’d be there, so he’ll be there.” She smiled at her assistant and felt the glow returned to her in Eula’s face. “Come on,” she said. “Want to help me pick out shoes to go with my red dress?”
39
Raven
Atlanta, GA
Downtown
Friday, April 14, 5:29 p.m.
Two hours and fifty-eight minutes to Nevermore
Mama Bliss is alone when I return to Room 614 of the Ritz-Carlton.
Even though I have a keycard, and even though we’ve spent the last two days as de facto roommates, I still stop to knock before entering.
“If I know you,” she shouts, “you’ve got a key.”
I slide the card through the lock and walk in, finding Mama organizing her diabetic instruments in a drawer of the dresser. I reach out stealthily and scoop my cell phone off the end table. One button-push shuts everything down. She glances up at me.
“Thirty minutes on the dot,” she says. “I do appreciate a timely magician.”
Deception specialist, I tell myself, but at this point I’m not going to correct Mama Bliss.
Mama had been as good as her word. The Monday after I broke into her office, I went to Sister Bliss’s Secret Stash and found a job waiting for me. Her manager, Darrent Hayes, took me down to the warehouse and told a beefy, friendly-faced man named Sam that I was his new security guard. Give him the one-day orientation, he’d said. Mama doesn’t want him in the warehouse yet, just wants him to know the basics of being a security guard. She’s got a special assignment for him.
That special assignment had turned out to be the easiest job of my entire life. She set me up in Room 614 at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, started loading it with valuable antiques to be sold in her charity auction, and told me just to sit here and make sure nothing got stolen.
This is the life, I’d decided. Watching TV, playing video games on the hotel network, taking breaks from time to time to go down to the lobby to eat gourmet food, all paid for by Sister Bliss’s Secret Stash. I could live like this for a while.
That’s not to say there hadn’t been any excitement. The whole Samuel Hill/Scholarship confrontation in the hallway had made me jittery and nervous for at least a day and a night. But nothing had happened after that, and I returned to my life of ease.
At one point, on Tuesday I think, Mama came by with a few guys from the warehouse to take some of the auction items s
omewhere else. She told me to take a break while they sorted through things, and when I came back from the lobby, one row of boxes had disappeared, along with Mama and her workers. I noticed the long, canvas bags that had occupied the far corner of the room were also gone, all five of them. For some reason, that made me feel relieved. Those bags had made me nervous.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mama had called and informed me she was moving into the hotel room with me for the next few days, to coordinate the final preparations for the Max Roman gala onsite. She didn’t want to have to travel back and forth from her house to the Stash to the hotel. She just wanted to have a place close by where she could go rest if she got tired. So I had a roommate.
Sharing a room with a seventy-one-year-old woman is not without its adventures. For starters, Bliss Monroe snores like a cyclone on holiday. Even foam earplugs were no match for her, so eventually I just turned up the music on my cell phone, stuffed my earbuds in, and hoped that exhaustion would make up for lack of peace at night. Mama Bliss is also not shy about things like dressing and undressing or going to the toilet. After a few pleas, she finally conceded to closing the bathroom door when she was doing her business in there, but when it came to changing clothes, she was unfazed.
“You don’t want to see,” she’d said while swapping a shirt and pants for a nightgown the first night, “then don’t look.” So we reached a tacit agreement. When I saw she was getting ready to change clothes, I’d find a reason to spend some time in the bathroom. Then she’d holler a few minutes later, “Safe for young eyes,” and I’d come out again. I think she enjoyed making me feel a little embarrassed, but otherwise we got along fine.
Mama Bliss was busy most of the day on Thursday, working downstairs getting things ready in the Grand Ballroom, but she still came back and took a nap in the afternoon. Then she went back downstairs and worked late into the night. On Friday, she slept in, almost until noon. When she woke, she still looked tired, and she asked me to go get breakfast for her even though it was basically lunchtime already. When I came back with her eggs and toast, I found a parade of about half a dozen warehouse workers taking boxes and artifacts out the door in assembly-line fashion.
“Getting close to the end of this business,” Mama had said to me then. “Why don’t you help the boys take these things down to the Grand Ballroom on the lower level? They need to be set up so Max Roman’s guests can inspect them before the auction starts.” So I did that, and by the time I was done, it was close to four o’clock and I’d missed lunch. I snacked on a candy bar and decided that was going to have to be enough.
Back at the room, Mama was going full steam again, full of energy, barking commands into the hotel room phone, laying out clothes for the evening, and generally running the world the way she wanted it.
Just before five o’clock, she started to put on her velvet pantsuit in preparation for the evening’s festivities, so I went in the bathroom and tried on the rental tuxedo I’d gotten to wear for tonight. If I was to be table entertainment for the rich and famous, I wanted to look the part. Mama had been appropriately admiring when I stepped out of the bathroom.
“You clean up all right,” she’d said, grinning.
I needed to add a few little surprises to my pockets, so they’d be ready to magically appear at tonight’s party. I’d stashed them inside a small drawer in the end table near the hotel room door, along with my wallet, keys, and cell phone. I started lining my pockets with items from the drawer while Mama busied herself with some paperwork. Then I heard a knock at the door.
“Pizza delivery,” a deep voice said.
I froze. My left hand started trembling, and I must’ve looked kind of doe-eyed in Mama’s direction. She laughed out loud.
“Open the door,” she’d said. “He’s just doing that ’cause he knows you’re here.”
Sure enough, Scholarship was on the other side of the door, along with Viktor Kostiuk. The football player was grinning at me like he was a stand-up comedian who’d just delivered the perfect joke. I wasn’t laughing. The scarred spot on my left hand tingled like it’d been poked with needles.
What does Mama Bliss have to do with these guys? I had asked myself, and even in my head my voice was shaky. These are Max Roman’s guys.
“Can I help you?” I said. I stood in the doorway, blocking them from coming in. I’m not any kind of bodyguard, but I knew personally what these men were capable of doing, and I wasn’t about to let them work their trade on an old woman in a wheelchair. At least I wasn’t going to make it easy for them. Fingers to the throat, I coached myself. It worked before, right?
Scholarship had raised his eyebrows at me. “You have a new bodyguard, Mama?” he’d called out over my shoulder. “’Cause this tuxedo kid of yours is scaring me.”
“Leave him alone and come in,” Mama said.
I didn’t know what to make of that. She’s expecting them? This is getting strange. I stepped aside, and they both pushed past me and exchanged greetings with Mama Bliss.
I turned back to the end table and started reorganizing my pocket contents again. I set my cell phone on the corner of the table, then noticed the Voice Memo app on the home screen. I wonder what would happen if I recorded this conversation, I thought.
Just then I heard Mama give me an order. “Why don’t you take a break, Raven? Go downstairs and get yourself a snack.”
I had looked up to see they were all settling into chairs at the little round table that Mama used as a desk, over at the foot of her bed. It looked like a business meeting was about to begin.
“Sure thing, Mama,” I said, returning a few items to the drawer and replacing them with my wallet. “You want anything?”
“No, you go on. Come back in thirty minutes. We’ll be done by then.”
“Okay,” I’d said.
“Wait,” she told me. She pulled a small padded envelope off the desk and tossed it to me. “Mail this for me,” she said. “Important that it goes out today, okay?”
“Sure,” I’d said. The padded envelope was flat, but thick, like it held a notepad inside. A logbook, I thought. The logbook? I noticed the address on the envelope. It was being sent to the Atlanta Zone 6 police station. I turned the padded envelope over in my hands, determined not to ask questions.
They had all turned their backs on me then, ready to get down to their business. I was invisible, it seemed. I took the opportunity and tapped the app button on my cell. The Voice Memo function kicked in. I secretly hoped it’d keep recording until I got back.
“I’ll see you in a half hour,” I’d said. Then I went downstairs—tuxedo and all—and treated myself to a couple of chicken biscuits at the Atlanta Grill. When I came back to the room, Mama was all alone.
“Thirty minutes on the dot,” she says when I come in. “I do appreciate a timely magician.”
“Everything okay, Mama?” I say to her.
“’Course it is,” she says. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well . . .” I shrug. “My experience with those guys has never been pleasant.”
She gives me a look that says she hadn’t thought of that. “Don’t you worry, sugar,” she says. “Those men won’t ever bother you again. Understand?”
I nod. I think she’s telling the truth, and I feel almost relieved. “Besides,” she continues, “they like you. You won them over.”
“Thanks?” My phantom pinky burns like a bee sting.
She’s not talking anymore, but she’s still looking at me. Staring. Thinking. Studying me with those all-seeing onyx eyes of hers.
“What time do you want to head down to the ballroom?” I say, trying to change the subject. “Doors open at six-thirty, so I thought maybe we should get down there around six o’clock? Be there when people start coming in?”
“Tyson,” she says to me, and it’s jarring to hear her speak my real name. She notices me flinch. “What, I’m not allowed to call you by name? You gave it to me when you broke into my office and told me your tr
oubles, remember?”
“No. Sure. Yeah. You can call me by my name, Mama. It’s just been a long time since anyone actually used it.”
Tyson.
I hear a faded version of my mother’s voice and suddenly feel tired.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll call you Raven. That’s what you go by now anyway.” She sizes me up again, and then she says, “I got four things for you, Raven. Four things I want to give you, okay?”
“Sure, Mama. But you’ve already given me—”
“Hush. You let Mama talk for a minute.” She rolls her wheelchair over to the dresser and opens one of the middle drawers underneath where the TV sits. “First,” she says, “you’re fired.”
Fired? “Wait, what? Did I do something wrong, Mama? If so, I can fix it. I’ll do better.”
She’s grinning. “No, let me say it differently. You’re not fired. You’re free. Your debt to me is paid. You got no more reason to stay.”
“I don’t understand. I’ve only been working for you two weeks. You said I had to stay for a full month.”
“Just wanted to make sure you were who I thought you were. But two weeks is enough. You’re free to go.”
“What about the table entertainment at tonight’s banquet? I can finish out the night. I’ve got all my tricks ready. I’m happy to do it for you. You don’t even have to pay me.”
“No, honey. I don’t want you for that anymore. You’re done. You can go.” She looks kind of somber now. “I need you to go. Do this for Mama Bliss, okay?”
I have no real idea what’s going on, but I know what the right answer is. “Okay, Mama. If you say so.”
“Second,” she says quickly, and I think she’s glad that part of the conversation is over. “I want you to have this.”
She reaches into the drawer and pulls out a puffy manila envelope. I can see from here that it’s been stuffed full of something. She tosses it to me, and I catch it in my right hand.
“There’s ten thousand dollars in there,” she says. “Your severance package. Use it wisely, and you’ll be fine. Understand?”
