by Maureen Tan
“Don’t underestimate the damage that’s been done. That arm will take time to mend. If you’re careful, the stitches can come out in a fortnight. Then the muscles will have to be rebuilt. Plan on a month or two of physical therapy. After that, well, we’ll see.”
She’d wished me a Happy Christmas and gone home to her family.
Unfortunately, the nurse’s aide was still on duty. Exhaustingly maternal and chronically cheerful, she was much given to unnecessary plumping of pillows and smoothing of blankets. After refilling my pitcher with ice water, she shifted her attention to my dinner plate, measuring the leftovers with a practiced eye.
“Were the brussels sprouts too difficult for you to manage, dear?”
The brussels sprouts had been overcooked, mashed almost to oblivion, and studded with clots of margarine. A backward toddler could have managed them, but the poor little bugger would have been put off vegetables for life. I resisted saying so, simply shook my head.
The aide clucked sadly, clearly taking the rejection of the brussels sprouts personally. A silent moment or two passed as she figured out that I wasn’t going to eat them to make her happy. She tugged ineffectually at the upper edge of my blanket, finally cleared the tray-table.
“You’ll feel better after you’ve rested, dear. Is there anything you’d like before I go off shift? No? Shall I close the door?”
The room was a small one, with barred windows and a single door. Silly, but I didn’t want my escape route blocked.
“No. Just leave it.” I dredged up a smile. “And Happy Christmas.”
* * *
Past the meager distraction of supper, a tedious evening stretched before me. I considered how I might use the time productively, decided to nap. I pulled the chain that switched off the light above my bed, groped along the edge of the mattress until I found the buttons that dictated its angle, and lowered the head of the bed. I rolled onto my left side, rearranging the pillows to support my injured arm, and closed my eyes.
My arm ached. No combination of bed, body, and bedding offered relief. My mind darted restlessly from thought to thought, remaining long enough to create anxiety, never long enough to offer resolution.
I thought of Alex. Thought about calling him. I could wish him a Happy Christmas. Good excuse to hear his voice again. I could tell him—
Exactly what?
That I hurt, and I wanted him to hold me? That nothing had changed since I’d seen him last except I’d killed a few more people, and how was the weather in Savannah?
I shifted my right arm until the sling was taut and the bandages tugged at the edge of the wound. The pain was effective distraction.
My attention shifted to Winthrup Manor. I thought about what we’d encountered there, about the men who were now dead. Wondered what Hugh had gotten himself involved with. Unlikely that the men we’d killed were cronies of Hugh’s. Or merely thugs. They were too well armed, too well organized. Too professional. It was almost too bad that John had killed the last of them. Mac might have pried some interesting information from him.
That thought took me to the moments before I lost consciousness. Delirious, I thought. I had been pain-wracked and delirious when I’d claimed that Hugh murdered my parents. They’d died long before he was born. Undoubtedly, Mac would hear of my accusation during the debriefing sessions. He would dismiss it just as I had.
Still, the idea lingered, nagged at the edges of my mind.
It followed me as I slipped into the clutches of sleep.
* * *
Andrew Jax was driving the limousine, and the road was rough.
I sat beside him, jouncing on the leather seat, and my dream-mind knew I wasn’t really me. I was dressed strangely—a scoop-necked white blouse, a tight red skirt, nylons, and high heels.
The interior of the limo was hot. Not surprising. Flames consumed the backseat and in the midst of them—
I looked away, out at the road, at the canopy of moss-hung trees.
“Lock the door, Millie!” Jax shouted. “Lock the door!”
As I reached for the lock, the door flew open.
At the same time, hands from the backseat grabbed the back of my blouse, tried to pull me to them, drag me into the flames.
I screamed, threw myself through the open door, out onto the steep rooftop. I flattened myself against the wet slate shingles, but I slid downward anyway. My feet went over the edge.
I flung out my hands, caught the corner of the chimney. Dug my fingers into the line of mortar between the bricks. Stopped moving.
I looked upward.
A man stood at the peak of the roof, staring at me, his yellow eyes set in a face of swirling darkness. He pointed. Down. Past my feet.
“Remember, damn you! Remember!”
I turned my head. Saw below me a shattered window. Its ragged teeth glittered with blood.
The chimney crumbled beneath my hands. Disappeared.
I began sliding again.
Legs, hips, torso, out over the edge. I scrabbled at the wet slate with my fingers, left bloody trails as my nails tore away.
I slid. Screamed. Fell down and down and down and down.
* * *
Falling.
I jolted awake, gasping, heart pounding.
A dream. It was only a dream.
I groped for the light, switched it on.
I breathed. I forced emotion away. I watched the second hand sweep the face of the clock a half dozen times. I examined the room’s floral wallpaper and identified ten species of flowers in the printed bouquets. Eventually, I was calm. But lingering fear and too much adrenaline made sleep impossible.
I searched for distraction at the nurses’ station just beyond my room. There, a miniature Christmas tree and a few brightly wrapped packages vied for counter space with file baskets and a couple of telephones.
Behind the counter, a burly male nurse with dark beetle brows and chronic five o’clock shadow sat with his back to me. His name was Sid, and his attention was absorbed by a bank of twelve television monitors decorated with red velveteen bows and loops of evergreen garland. Only two of the tiny black-and-white screens glowed on. They showed the interiors of the wing’s two occupied rooms.
Earlier, I’d wondered aloud about the other patient. The nurse’s aide—eager, perhaps, to convince me that I was quite well off—shook her head, clucked her tongue, told me the patient down the hall was in a coma. So tragic, she said. Such a young man. With a lifetime ahead of him. She couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking when he swallowed those pills.
I could.
It was not a train of thought I cared to pursue.
I slid from the bed and, wheeling my IV stand with me, wandered the small room and looked out the barred windows, killing time.
* * *
The magazine rack behind the bathroom door finally provided the distraction I needed. As I sat on the stool, I sifted through the contents of the rack. I took a stapled report back to bed with me. Patterns of Global Terrorism was issued annually by the U.S. State Department and generally made for boring reading. But scrawled on the pages of this copy were scathing comments, pointed corrections, and rude cartoons. Handwriting varied and ink colors changed throughout, but the editorial perspective of the added comments was distinctly British—or at least distinctly MI-5.
I had gotten as far as the section on state-sponsored terrorism, was smirking over a colleague’s comment on American paranoia over Cuba—“You Yanks might try living next door to Ireland”—when there was a tap at the door.
I lifted my head, put the report aside.
Mac stood in the doorway, the knuckles of his left hand still on the doorjamb, his right hand fisted at his side. He wore a navy blue sweater and dark trousers. His eyes were on me, his expression unreadable.
He crossed to my bedside.
“Happy Christmas, Janie.”
He opened his right hand, held it palm upward, offered me a tiny box wrapped in silver paper and tied w
ith a fine gold cord. Every Christmas for as long as I’d known him, he’d given me a package much like it.
We’d known each other for a lot of Christmases.
Mac had been a frequent and welcome visitor to my grandfather’s home. When I was eight, Mac taught me to play chess. At ten, he stopped letting me win. On my fourteenth birthday, he gave me a BRNO .22 caliber semiautomatic rifle, then coached and cajoled me until my accuracy rivaled his. When I was almost nineteen, he stood with his hand on my shoulder and tears on his cheeks. Together, we watched as my grandfather’s coffin was lowered into its grave.
I took the silver package from Mac’s outstretched hand.
For a moment, I held the small box enclosed in mine.
For a moment, I wished for things I didn’t have.
Then I gave the gift back.
“Thank you. But I can’t—”
Trust you. That’s what I intended to say. I can’t trust you. But it was Christmas, and I was tired and I hurt and I wanted to believe, at least for this day, that Mac’s manipulation of me hadn’t begun in my childhood, that he really had cared about me.
“I can’t—unwrap it myself,” I said.
* * *
Just a few steps from my bedside was a maple occasional table topped by a stubby porcelain lamp and flanked by two overstuffed chairs. After switching the lamp on, Mac extinguished the overhead light, then settled into one of the chairs. A tiny silver fox, forever poised and alert, stood on the polished tabletop beneath the lamp. The light, which etched dark lines on Mac’s face, glinted brightly off the fox.
I lay against the pillows, relaxed and quietly admiring workmanship that could breathe life into metal. The fox was a lovely addition to the menagerie of silver animals Mac had given me over the years. I kept them in a carved rosewood box, tucked into a bureau drawer in my London flat.
“It’s beautiful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Jane.”
Mac pulled his pipe and tobacco pouch from a pocket, then dug around in the drawer of the table until he found an ashtray. In defiance of the signs posted all about the clinic, he lit his pipe.
I watched him, enjoying the familiar ritual.
For years, Mac kept a supply of his favorite tobacco on a shelf in my grandfather’s study. Each Christmas, my grandfather would take me into the tobacco shop in the village where I would buy enough Black Aromatic Cavendish to fill Mac’s humidor to the brim.
I still gave him tobacco for Christmas. It had become a token gift, ordered by phone months in advance, paid for with plastic, wrapped by a stranger, delivered by messenger. Efficient. Impersonal. Cold.
A sudden ache in my chest brought tears to my eyes. I turned my head away from the lamplight, not wanting Mac to see them. They were nothing more than convalescent tears, I told myself. Quick to flow. Meaningless.
I cast my mind back through childhood, searched for a memory that would reawaken humor. I found it, found the energy to grin as I faced Mac again.
“Do you remember the Christmas when I made you tobacco?”
“Oh, yes.” Mac smiled, crossed his long legs at the ankles, took a long drag on his pipe, exhaled. “An intriguing blend of chopped purple medic, ground apple, and molasses.”
I laughed.
“I worked hard to achieve the proper color and texture. Bobber approved the flavor.” Bobber was my fat Welsh pony. “And it did pack well into your humidor.”
That memory led to others, and we talked for a time about Christmases long past, recalling the people and animals populating my grandfather’s country estate. When the discussion turned to cats, I said:
“Kitty-mou was always my favorite.”
“A more self-satisfied cat I’ve never met. Wasn’t she a Christmas kitten?”
I nodded.
“From Grandfather. My first Christmas in England.”
My first Christmas without my parents.
11
Mac was telling me about a Christmas decades in the past.
“I looked into my Christmas stocking, fully expecting, and bloody well deserving, nothing more than lumps of coal. It was filled with gob stoppers. Certain that a mistake had been made and the candy would soon be whisked away, I stuffed as many pieces as I could into my mouth. Just then—”
I was grinning at the image of a young Mac with bulging cheeks when Sid interrupted us. A holstered semiautomatic hung from his belt, a gaudy Father Christmas tie was vivid against his white uniform. He checked my temperature and blood pressure, announced that the first was too high and the second too low, and made notes on my chart. He left the room briefly, then returned with two pink tablets in a tiny paper cup and a hypodermic filled with a clear yellowish liquid.
I wrinkled my nose.
“More antibiotics?”
He nodded, poured me some water, handed me the tablets, watched me swallow them, then emptied the contents of the hypodermic into my IV.
Mac followed him into the hallway. As Mac lingered by the door, Sid walked out of my line of sight. Minutes later, he returned, accompanied by a stranger.
Mac showed the man into my room and pulled the door shut behind them. They approached my bedside, the stranger remaining a half step behind Mac.
Mac began introductions.
The stranger stepped forward, leaned over my bed, and smiled.
Yellow eyes stared down at me, trapping me against the pillows.
My stomach twisted in a painful, icy spasm. I gasped, raised my bandaged arm defensively, pressed my body into the mattress, clawed at the bedclothes with my left hand.
Sir William Winthrup hastily stepped away from the bed.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Nichols. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Unrestrained emotions revealed too much, betrayed weaknesses, vulnerabilities. I couldn’t afford them. I lowered my arm, unclenching my fingers from the bedding, forced myself to look straightforwardly into Sir William’s face.
He was sixtyish, of average height, substantial rather than overweight. Thoughtfully styled reddish-blond hair shot through with ash camouflaged large ears and minimized the length of his face. A ginger-colored mustache separated thin lips from an aquiline nose. And his eyes were like Hugh’s. Pale brown, liberally flecked with gold. Not feral yellow.
That was irrational. Childish and irrational.
Didn’t matter. I stared at him wide-eyed. Terrified. Unsettled enough that the sound of Mac’s voice startled me.
“She recognizes you, William. From Greece.”
Sir William’s florid face went pale.
“After all these years?”
Mac nodded.
“She made the connection when she saw Hugh. First time she’s shown any hint of remembering that whole affair. She thinks you killed her parents. I believe that it’s essential to clarify the situation, don’t you?”
Mac didn’t wait for Sir William’s reply.
He retrieved the fox from the table and held it out toward me. It stood on tiny silver feet in the palm of his hand.
“The fox is pretty, isn’t it, Janie? Bright and pretty.”
I couldn’t help myself. I nodded.
Mac brought his hand closer, held the fox inches away from my face, let his hand drift slowly right, then left, then right.
“Watch it carefully. You don’t want it to get lost.”
Part of my mind was shouting, demanding attention. I ignored it, followed the fox with my eyes.
“Relax, Janie. You’re safe here. Safe and secure. Relax.”
I continued staring at the fox.
“Who are you afraid of, Janie?”
Against my will, I looked away from the fox. My gaze traveled to Sir William. Yellow eyes stared back at me from a blank mask of a face.
Something was wrong. I was losing control.
I found a coherent thought, willed myself to hold on to it, managed to gasp it out.
“You drugged me?”
Mac didn’t answer. My question slipped
away into the fog that had become my mind.
“You’ve seen those yellow eyes before, Janie. You were just a wee lass, sitting in a tall chair, your legs dangling well above the floor. You were wearing a sundress. White, with tiny navy blue dots. And the room, Janie. A table at its center, a mirror along one wall. I want you to remember that room, Janie.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. My pulse raced, my heart pounded.
“Mama! Papa! Make him go away!”
The cry, shrill with terror, came from my lips. But the voice was that of a child. I tried to slide off the big chair—
No! Madness! I was in a bed, in the organization’s clinic. I tried to struggle up from the pillows.
Mac reached out, brushed damp tendrils of hair away from my face. His gentle touch and the comfort of his familiar voice soothed away panic.
“You’re safe. Don’t be afraid. Just relax. I’ll protect you. Go back to that time, Janie. Go back . . .”
* * *
I was a big girl.
Mr. Bennet told me that. Six years old was big enough to answer important questions properly. Big enough not to cry.
I wasn’t crying.
I sat quietly, sandaled feet dangling above the floor, hands folded in my lap. He sat across from me, asking the same questions the other men had asked. Between us was a heavy metal table with two neatly tucked-in chairs on either side.
Mr. Bennet’s tall, shiny forehead was wet. The bright, bare bulb above the table made the drops glisten.
“You saw an old, black car.”
“A Mercedes.”
Whenever Mama was very busy, Stavros and I would wait at a sidewalk café, sipping lemonade, naming the different kinds of cars that passed by. I was good at the game.
“A Mercedes pushed you off the road?”
“Yes. We crashed.”
Mr. Bennet put his hands, palms down, on the edge of the table and leaned forward. He raised an eyebrow.
“And then?”
I pressed my lips into a tight line, spread my fingers wide, looked at my fingertips.
