Consumed by Fire (The Fire Series)

by Anne Stuart

  “I wanted to ask if you’d had any messages for me from Mr. Bishop.”

  One elegant eyebrow rose, and with a weary sigh he went over to a computer station and began typing into it. “Your name, miss?”

  “Morrissey. Evangeline Morrissey. We’ve been staying in the suite on the second floor.”

  That caught his attention, and he let his superior gaze run up and down her rumpled appearance. He was clearly not impressed, and suddenly Evangeline longed for Silvio’s cheerful presence. “The Emperor Suite. Yes, I see. You’re paid up till tomorrow. But there are no messages. And no Mr. Bishop is currently enjoying our hospitality.”

  “Then who have I been sharing a room with?” she snapped, her annoyance finally trumping her desperate anxiety.

  “The suite was registered to a Monsieur Pierre Boussan, but he retrieved his passport this morning and checked out. He left no messages and no forwarding address.”

  She just stared at him, his words not making sense.

  But they did. She’d been a complete and utter fool, prey to the oldest con in the world, and she didn’t grieve the loss of her great aunt’s famous diamonds nearly as much as she grieved the loss of her heart, her soul.

  “Miss Morrissey, may I do something for you?” The man suddenly sounded concerned. She must have looked like she was about to faint on his polished marble floor, she thought grimly.

  “Just give me my passport. I have to leave.”

  “But you’re paid up through tomorrow.”

  And who knew if the credit card was real? It almost certainly wasn’t, and she’d end up in jail until she could get through to her father to cover the bill. That was one conversation she wasn’t going to have. She summoned a calm smile. “And it’s been lovely, but I really must leave. There’s been a family emergency.”

  “I am sorry to hear that, Miss Morrissey,” he murmured, all polite manners since he’d discovered which room she’d used. He was rifling through something, and belatedly Evangeline remembered how things worked in the US. He probably hadn’t even run the credit card yet, waiting for any last minute room charges, and he would call the police . . .

  “Here it is,” he announced, her battered blue passport in his hand. “We hope you will return to the Danieli, Miss Morrissey, you and Monsieur Boussan.”

  Monsieur, he’d said. So presumably the passport he’d handed him was a French one, and he was no more French than she was. Out of the deepest, darkest part of her she managed to produce a tired smile.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.”

  “We will always be at your service. May we call you a water taxi? Our own launch to take you to the airport?”

  She shook her head. The sooner she got away from them the better. “I have things to do in the city. I’ll take the vaporetto.”

  “As you wish, miss.”

  She’d thought that she could find an empty spot in the vaporetto, duck her head, and cry. She didn’t. She stayed dry-eyed and calm, through the interminable wait at the airport for the next empty seat. Through the short flight to Berlin and then the overseas flight to Boston. She didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, she just sat utterly still, utterly calm. If the authorities had the ability to recognize a human time bomb, they would have isolated her.

  She reached her tiny house running on coffee and fumes. It smelled musty from being closed up for so long, and she moved across the living room like a zombie, opening the window to let in the muggy air. She turned and saw the beautiful copy of the David her parents had given her for her birthday. She picked it up and hurled it across the room, smashing it into pieces.

  She went through the place methodically—the living room, tiny bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. She broke everything she could find, she threw things, ripped things, smashed things, yanked her bookcases over, ripped her clothes out of her closet, upended her bed so that the mattress lay haphazardly on the box spring. And when there was nothing left to break, nothing left to destroy, she dropped down on the lopsided mattress and wept.

  PART TWO—FIVE YEARS LATER

  Chapter Five

  Evangeline Morrissey Williamson pulled her battered pickup off to the side of the road, carefully maneuvering the ancient Airstream trailer into a stable position before switching off the motor. Merlin, her German Shepherd, cocked an ear but otherwise stayed up on the bench seat, used to her ways. She leaned her head back and took a few deep breaths, dragging the calm around her. She didn’t want to go back. She’d spent the last three months in the Canadian wilderness, documenting the ruins of the luxurious lodges and railway hotels that had been built well over a hundred years ago, making sketches of what they once must have looked like, serving as an amateur archeologist when she came across shards of dishes, tools, abandoned detritus of a long-vanished lifestyle. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know where she was going next. The Laughing Moose Lodge near Glacier Park in Montana had stopped operating in the 1930s, and very little of it remained, much lost in the encroaching wilderness, and she’d allotted a full two weeks to study it during her sabbatical, with more time available if she needed it.

  Changing areas of study had been easier than she’d thought. She’d lost her interest in ancient church architecture. When she’d told her department head and nominal boss, he’d looked at her, appalled. “You have all your research done!” he’d cried. “And you did it on your own dime, not even with a grant. You just have to write something, and we both know that writing comes easy for you. Don’t throw all this work away.”

  But she’d been obdurate. She’d wanted to burn her research, but her friend, Pete Williamson, had simply taken the boxes and boxes of papers away from her. He was only five years older than she was, one of the university’s shining stars, and he’d made it his mission to guide her through her new area of study.

  The guidance hadn’t been necessary, but she’d appreciated the thought. She’d thrown herself into her new work on ancient Adirondack lodges with complete abandon and eventually gave in and married Pete.

  It was supposed to be the perfect marriage. Pete already had a book deal, he was handsome and charming, and half his students, male and female, were in love with him.

  She’d always known he was too susceptive to flattery, to adoration, and she had no illusions about his fidelity. He needed that adoration to breathe, like air; she knew he took graduate students to bed during the time he was seeing her, while making her all sorts of promises, but having no illusions meant there were none to be shattered. As mistakes went in her life it was far from her worst one—that last summer in Italy won the prize. The following year, before she married Pete, was in its own way even worse. And after nine months of marriage, she and Pete had parted amicably enough. At the time.

  The year before they’d married had been bad. She’d fucked anything in pants, trying to get James Bishop out of her system. It hadn’t worked, but at least marrying Pete had put a stop to that. Once settled into the safety of a seemingly stable relationship, she found she could let go of her past.

  She found she could let go of Pete, her safety net, quickly enough as well, and her work, so different from her previous area of study, was enough to finish the rest of her healing. She got grants, a quietly respectable book deal, then a job teaching at a small school in northern Wisconsin, and by the time three years had passed, she’d made a peaceful, if slightly wary, life for herself.

  She’d never planned on getting a dog. They were too much trouble and her parents had never let her have one when she was growing up, even though she’d begged. But Merlin had found her, and he wasn’t interested in her doubts. He’d just shown up on campus one day, was fed by everyone from the kitchen staff to the maintenance people to half the students, and wandered around with perfect manners, seemingly at random, until he happened to come across Evangeline walking to class.

  He’d followed her. At fi
rst the large dog made her slightly nervous, but he simply kept at her heel, almost like a guard dog, and when she went into class he waited outside, lying down peacefully until the students left and she emerged. And he followed her to the library. To her car.

  It took her three days before she began bringing dog treats, telling herself she would toss them to him to drive him away. He’d simply catch the treat midair and continue to follow her. She held out eight days before she let him in the car.

  “This is a short-term thing,” she’d advised him as he sat beside her, panting cheerfully. “Just till I find you a good home.”

  But there’d been no good home, and in truth, she hadn’t made much effort to find one. She called him Merlin, because he was so damned smart, and he seemed to take it as his role in life to be her protector. He must have had some training at some point in his puppyhood, but if he missed his earlier home he made no sign of it. He took care of her. He wouldn’t let her leave the house without him, or with her laptop and lunch still on the kitchen counter. He’d wormed his way into her life and her heart and she couldn’t imagine life without him.

  His overprotectiveness wasn’t a particular problem. He was perfectly well behaved, even with someone he perceived as a threat. He never barked; he just bared his fangs and growled low in his throat and people backed off from her, from her car. Oddly enough, he seemed to know who was harmless. Children, slightly disorganized students, the dean were no imminent problem. He despised the college president, though Evangeline thought he must have picked up on her own antipathy, but what had really surprised her was his furious dislike of Pete the one time he’d visited her.

  She’d asked for her research back. He’d told her he’d lost it. She’d said, “Find it.” He’d told her he’d burned it. She’d told him he lied: he’d never burn original research. He’d finally showed up at her door one day, without warning or any boxes of notes and research, and Merlin wouldn’t let him in, even though Evangeline had shushed him and calmed him. When Pete had tried to walk in, Merlin had lunged at him, and Evangeline had had to drag him into the bedroom, shut the door, and try to ignore his furious and unexpected barking.

  Merlin was smarter than she was. Pete was there to confess his sins, his eyes full of crocodile tears. His new book was coming out, detailing his journeys through the walled towns of Italy, complete with her original drawings, and her name was nowhere on it.

  “I’ll pay you your share of the royalties, of course,” he’d said eagerly, while she sat like a stone. “Not that these books ever make much, so it probably won’t even earn out its advance. And if it goes into a second printing I’ll make sure I put you in the acknowledgments, but you know that’s unlikely as well. I feel just awful about this, Vangie. It was a moment of weakness. I needed something for the new book—you’re at this shit backwater school, but I’m at Harvard now. Publish or perish is a serious business, and I was at my wits’ end when I remembered your papers. You’d told me you wanted to destroy them, so I didn’t think you’d care.”

  “Wouldn’t care that you stole my research and put your name on it?” she’d said in a deceptively mild voice.

  He’d winced. “It sounds so sleazy when you put it that way.”

  She said nothing, letting him make the obvious inference. “Listen,” he went on, “I can cut you a check for five thousand dollars, just as a gesture of good will. I know it might not seem like much, but remember, I compiled all that raw research, organized it, wrote the narrative. It’s really my book.”

  “With my research. What did you get for an advance?”

  “That’s not a fair question. The advance was based on my name, and how well the last book did, and of course for travel and living expenses . . .” his voice trailed off.

  “The travel and living expenses that came out of my pocket,” she supplied. “And your previous book didn’t do that well. What was your advance?” He still hesitated, and with Merlin barking in the background it was hard to be subtle. “I can always call your publisher and explain the situation. They’ll tell me how much they paid you.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” he muttered.

  She stared at him. That was a monumental sum for an academic treatise, but Pete would have turned it into a cocktail table book, with glossy photos and his own leonine good looks on the cover.

  “And you offer me five thousand dollars of hush money? I suppose you’d have me sign something attesting to the fact that I had nothing to do with the book?”

  “I said I’d put you in the acknowledgments. Come on, Vangie, you know how the world works. Be reasonable.”

  She smiled sweetly and rose from her seat. “I’m going to let Merlin out now. I would suggest you be long gone before I get to the bedroom door. He’s smarter than I am, and he seems to dislike you even more than I do, which seems impossible but there it is.”

  “Vangie, don’t be difficult . . .” he began, but she ignored him, reaching the bedroom door. Merlin hit the front door just seconds after Pete had closed it, and she could see Pete running for his rental car, a Lexus of course, like he had hellhounds on his heels. He would have had one after him, if she’d given in to temptation and opened the door.

  “Fucking men,” she’d said to Merlin. “Next time one comes around, remind me how much I hate the whole breed.”

  Merlin had looked up at her with his wise eyes, and she rubbed his head. “You’re a very smart dog, you know that? From now on I’m going to let you tell me who’s worth spending time with.” He’d ducked his big head beneath her caress, making that whining little sound of pleasure. In the last two years he hadn’t let a presentable male anywhere near her.

  Merlin seemed to love camping and life on the road just as much as Evangeline did. Every night he would disappear for a half an hour or so, and it took her a while to realize he was patrolling the perimeter, even if they’d been in the same place for weeks. “You must have been a police dog,” she told him, feeding him a slice of bacon. “Or part of a military canine unit. You are one damned fine guard dog.”

  He’d taken the praise and the bacon as his due, flopping down beside her, his big warm body pressed up against her leg, his work finished for the night; and she’d wondered what she’d ever done without him.

  This sabbatical had been everything she’d dreamed of, with the slight hassle of dragging the damned Airstream everywhere she went the only downside. But she’d even gotten good at that, able to back it into a proper spot with only two or three attempts, and she loved it. It was small—a dinette at the back with all her research material spread over it, a bed at the front, a tiny kitchenette, and even a toilet with a shower. She loved her compact, solitary, happy life wandering around the Canadian wilderness where she had no cell phone coverage and no Internet. That part could be a pain when it came to research, but she worked her way around it, finding Internet cafes or campgrounds with Wi-Fi, and most of the time she found she could live perfectly well without it.

  The path to success in research of any kind was to specialize, and if you managed to find something that sparked public imagination so much the better, as that dickwad Pete Williamson knew. In the increasingly stressed, urbanized world, the fantasy of remote frontier living with the luxuries of the Titanic and no danger of drowning was powerful. She’d had to pick and choose among the grant offers, and she’d let go of Pete’s perfidy.

  She’d had to. Not long after Pete’s book had came out, he’d been mugged, beaten to an inch of his life, his perfect looks ruined; and his career had tanked when other instances of academic plagiarism had cropped up. Karma was a bitch, just like she was, and she could let go of it. She didn’t even need to waste her time thinking about him.

  “I’m not ready for this to be over, boy,” she said to Merlin as she sat in the truck. “I don’t want to go back home.” It wasn’t that her work and time were done. She had another six weeks on her sabbatical, and
there were two sites in Montana, as well as one in northern Minnesota, that she had yet to study. But crossing the border between Alberta and Montana meant accepting the fact that her time was coming to an end, and sooner rather than later she’d be back in the classroom.

  She liked to teach, she truly did. She liked the small, shabby Victorian house she’d bought and fixed up almost as much as she loved her tiny vintage Airstream with its silver bullet contours. But Wisconsin didn’t feel like home. Nothing did, and the nights when she woke up sweating and shaking she knew she’d been dreaming of James Bishop, even though her conscious mind refused to acknowledge it.

  She sighed, shoving her hair away from her face. She kept it short nowadays, and it had a ridiculous tendency to curl, making her look like a pixie, but at least it was out of her way and fit under her beloved Grumpy ball cap.

  She yanked the cap back on, shoving her hair beneath it. It was a midafternoon in August, and the border crossing, while it was a small one, would be busy. She hated crossing borders—they always wanted to poke through Annabelle, her private name for the trailer, mess with her papers, hassle her about Merlin, observe her dirty laundry, and question her for hours. Merlin was always a perfect gentleman about it all, and she suspected he recognized a uniform as a sign of authority. As for her, she’d learned to pee before she got to the crossings, because God knew they wouldn’t let her near a bathroom until they were convinced she wasn’t carrying something dangerous in her vagina.

  Nothing was going in her vagina but her battery-powered BFF, and chances were they’d come across that too if they searched intently. She was counting on this smaller crossing to be more laid-back, but there were no guarantees.

  She looked at Merlin. “Do you ever get the feeling that something isn’t right? Of course you do—one look at Pete and you knew he was a shithead. You’ve got better instincts than I do.”