Bedtime Story

by Robert J. Wiersema

  He smiled. “Well, I hope we can see to it that it brings as much joy to other readers as it has brought to you.” God, sometimes the words that came out of his mouth made him sick. Why couldn’t he just say, “Sign on the line and we’ll all make a lot of money”? Wouldn’t that be easier?

  “Oh, Tony.” She jumped up from the table and before he knew it she was kissing his face, her arms around his neck. “Thank you. Thank you for doing this, for my grandfather. He’d be so happy.”

  After cleaning up the take-out containers, I sat down in the easy chair, listening to the faint sounds of splashing and Jacqui’s soft voice through the wall, trying not to envision the conversation that awaited on the far side of David’s bedtime ritual.

  When she’d gotten him settled in bed, she asked, “Where’s the book?” The words looked like they filled her mouth with poison.

  I picked up the papers from the desk and extended them toward her.

  “Don’t you want to?” she asked.

  “I’m going downstairs for a bit.” I grabbed my jacket from the back of the desk chair and got out of the room as quickly as I could.

  On the corner outside the hotel, my hands were shaking so bad it took me a second try to get my cigarette fully lit. The sidewalks were crowded: it was Friday night. People were going out for dinner, or to a movie, families and friends and people on dates.

  For a moment, I considered running. I probably had everything I needed in my pockets: notebook, cell phone, cigarettes. Keys. I could just go down to the parkade and be gone, back on the I–5 headed south before she even knew it.

  I stepped back to let a large group pass on the sidewalk, a wall of laughter and scrubbed skin, aftershave and perfume, then butted out my cigarette under my heel and walked slowly back into the hotel, steeling myself.

  When I got to the room, Jacqui was sitting in the desk chair, holding my notebook in her lap. She had turned off the bedside lamp closest to David so the room was dim, with only pools of faint light.

  “So is this it?” she said, holding up my notebook. “Is this where I’m going to find out what’s going through your head? What could possibly drive a man to kidnap his own son and flee the country?”

  “I told you,” I said quietly, sitting on the end of the bed near David’s feet.

  “But what about this?” she asked, gesturing at the hotel room around her. “Why are you here, Chris? Of all places?”

  “I told you about Matthew Corvin. He wrote his name in the book in 1976. Well, I met him today. Sort of. I met his mother. Because Matthew has been catatonic since 1976. Thirty years. He collapsed reading that book. God, Jacqui, can’t you see—”

  She was shaking her head. I doubt she was even hearing what I was saying.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Trust me—I thought it too. For a long time. But … dammit, watching David, watching him be fed and taken to the bathroom and put to bed like he’s an infant … If there’s any chance that any of this is real, I can’t ignore it. I have to do something.”

  “Chris—”

  “I can get it back, Jacqui,” I said, raising my voice. “I know where it is. I can get it back—borrow it long enough that Nora and Sarah can try to figure out what to do. That’s what I’m doing here. The book’s in Oregon, on the coast. I can get it back.”

  She had looked away, setting my notebook on the desk next to my laptop, maintaining an air of deliberate control.

  “I have to do something.”

  “Including kidnapping your own son,” she said slowly. “How did you get across the border?”

  “I told the guard that you were already down here,” I said. “For work. I said that we were meeting you.”

  “That easy,” she muttered.

  “How did you find us so quickly?”

  “Bank card,” she said. “I looked it up online. You took some money out in Bellingham last night, and we always stay here when we come down to Seattle, so I thought I’d try here first.” She shrugged. “Christopher Knox. Two nights. You’re going to have to try harder if you don’t want people to find you.”

  “I wasn’t hiding,” I said. “I’m not running. I just have to—”

  She cut me off with a wry smile.

  “Did you know that this”—she looked at the bed, at the notebook on the desk—“is the most involved you’ve ever been in David’s life?”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I’m there for him every day.”

  She laughed a little uncomfortably. “In a way,” she said, picking up the notebook again, “this kind of gives me hope. I mean, aside from it being completely crazy.”

  I smiled warily.

  She picked the keys up from the desk. “I’m gonna go down and grab my bag out of the car. Dale’s car,” she added. “He lent it to me.” She stopped. “Is that okay? If I bring my stuff up here? I don’t want to presume.”

  Tony Markus made a show of ordering the most expensive bottle of champagne the restaurant carried. “To celebrate,” he told Cat, who was still aglow with the discovery of her grandfather’s last book.

  “To Lazarus Took,” he offered by way of a toast.

  “To the beginning of a beautiful relationship,” she replied, clinking her glass delicately against his.

  Her eyes seemed to follow him with a mix of adoration and appraisal that he hadn’t, to be perfectly honest, encountered all that often in his life. And that was just fine with him.

  The champagne went down quickly, and Tony ordered a bottle of red wine to accompany their dinner. He felt a bit awkward about having ordered a bloody steak when she ordered a salad, but she didn’t seem fazed by it, and he let himself fall comfortably into the role of mighty hunter, powerful alpha male to this girl’s innocent naïf.

  And she was a girl, no question. She had a girlish enthusiasm for life, her hours spent walking in the woods near her home, getting closer to nature; her trips to large outdoor concerts where she could “float away on all the music and the people and the good vibes, you know?”; her “deep” interest in philosophy and alternative ways of looking at the world, “you know?”

  “Did you go to school for that?” he asked to keep the conversation going as he finished his steak.

  She looked at him like it was a ridiculous question. “Are you serious?” She shook her head, her hair tumbling and swaying. “I’ve never gone to school. Not university. I figure there’s nothing they could teach me that I couldn’t figure out for myself, you know? Or with some books, right?”

  He nodded as she started talking about Taoism, about how the secrets of the universe could be revealed with nothing more than a copy of Lao Tzu and a night spent on the beach, listening to the waves crash and recede. From there she went on to talk about Buddhism, about the hidden teachings of the early church. Tony didn’t even try to follow what she was saying, content to watch the gentle rise and fall of her breasts under her shirt as the steady warmth of the wine and the food rose within him.

  “You’re quite the free spirit,” he said when she was finally silent.

  She smiled, showing those pretty white teeth again. “Don’t you think that everyone should be?”

  “I suppose,” he said, draining his wineglass, then realizing sadly that the bottle was also empty.

  “No, really,” she said, reaching across the table and laying her hand over his. “I mean, why do you think people drink so much? It’s not like it’s being used for its ritual, sacramental purposes.”

  “No,” he said guardedly. Her hand was so soft, so warm.

  “No,” she echoed emphatically. “It’s so they can cut loose those shackles, so they can shake themselves free of all the expectations and restrictions that society heaps on them, even if it’s only for a little while.”

  She squeezed his hand gently, and he could feel it, like a convulsive ripple of electricity, through his whole body.

  “I mean, look at us,” she said. “We’re sitting here, we’ve had a good meal, we’ve had some good
wine, and there’s this, this energy that’s passing between us.”

  Tony had to stop himself from flinching.

  “You can feel it too, right? I felt it when I first met you. But we’ve been sitting here all this time trying to pretend that we’re not feeling it, trying to deny the fundamental truth of our bodies wanting to be together, and it’s all because of society. All those rules about how you have to pretend that you’re not feeling what you’re feeling, how you have to be polite and distant and detached, when what you really want to be doing …”

  Tony watched the words hanging in the air, wondering how he should finish the sentence that she had left there.

  “I mean, what would it take for us to shake off these old rules, these old roles? Some cataclysm? The news that we only had one hour left to live? Why can’t it be something simpler? Something natural?” She slipped her hand away from his and started to rise to her feet. The air between them was charged with the energy that she had been talking about. “I mean, what if all it took was me standing up. And walking over to you.” She edged around the table. “And kissing you?” Putting one hand gently on each of his cheeks, she brought her mouth to his, her lips cool and tasting of wine, her tongue darting against his mouth. He could feel the heat from her, and he brought his hands lightly up to her hips.

  “Do you think it would take any more than that?” she asked, mere inches from his face. “For us to put aside all those rules and expectations?”

  She kissed him again, before he could answer.

  “That was easy,” the captain said as they stood in front of the small stone building on the shore of the island.

  Easy for him, maybe.

  David agreed: the clues in the map had been difficult to work out, and without them they would still be on the shore, looking in vain for a building that they would never find.

  Not to mention almost drowning, almost burning to death, the chills, the pounding in his head.

  “Are you ready?” the captain asked.

  Looking at the building, David thought of what the magus had told him about the Brotherhood and their beliefs. The building was in a perfect location, a place of power near the water, and where the symbol on the door would catch the first rays of the rising sun every morning.

  He suppressed a shiver as he thought about going inside. What would be waiting for him? What traps?

  The captain was waiting for an answer.

  David coughed. “I suppose,” he said quietly.

  He shrugged off the blanket, letting it fall to the ground as he stepped toward the door.

  The captain remained in place, his face hard and expressionless.

  There were no handprints on the sidewalls of the doorway, as he had expected, but there was a faint handprint etched in the centre of the Sunstone itself.

  He took a deep breath before he reached out and fit his hand into place.

  He turned his wrist and tried to rotate his hand to the right. The metal plate at the centre of the Sunstone followed his motion, turning easily.

  David bit his lip.

  The plate turned a quarter-turn before David felt a moment of resistance. There was a click, and the door moved.

  He pushed lightly, and the door swung silently open, without any hesitation whatsoever, an effortless glide.

  Somehow, Tony Markus managed to unlock the door to his hotel room while still kissing Cat Took. He slammed it behind them, tossed the book onto the desk, then fell with her onto the bed. Cat’s breath was coming in short puffs of passionate intensity. Her hands were on his chest, fumbling with the buttons to his shirt, then tugging it free from his belt.

  He couldn’t decide where to touch her first. He slid one hand up her side, cupped her breast tentatively, and she made a small squeaking noise in the back of her throat. He ran his hand down her back, over her ass, and she pushed herself into him, grinding against his body. She slid her hand into the open front of his shirt, onto his bare skin, and he moaned at her touch.

  They wrestled there for a long time, wriggling and thrashing, her mostly atop him. And then she pulled away.

  “Oh God,” she muttered, her eyes half closed, her hair dishevelled.

  “I know,” he said, breathless, his hands again on her hips, but heavy this time, exerting a force to pull her closer to him again.

  “That’s what it feels like to break some of those shackles,” she said, grinning. She sounded out of it, drunk on wine and passion.

  “I feel the same way.”

  She giggled.

  “Just a second,” she said, rolling away from him and grabbing her purse from the floor. “I have to—” She pointed at the bathroom. “I’ll be back in a sec.” She turned on the light. “Why don’t you”—she gestured at his open shirt—“get rid of some of those clothes before I get back.” She smiled a coy, dirty smile that made his cock throb, and then she closed the bathroom door.

  “Oh,” she called out. “Why don’t you find some music or something on the TV, so we don’t disturb the neighbours.”

  He could hear the water running in the bathroom. “Oh fuck, oh fuck,” he muttered, not able to believe what was happening. Maybe there was something to this West-Coast, tree-worshipping thing after all.

  He tugged off his clothes and scurried over to the door and flipped the dead bolt into place. He thought of calling down to have more champagne sent up, but there would be time for that later—probably best not having to worry about waiting for someone to come knocking at the door at this point.

  At this point!

  Markus felt giddy as he scanned through the TV channels, eventually settling on some music station—nothing like this had ever happened to him before. It wasn’t quite a barroom pickup, but it was close. He just hoped that it wasn’t going to end up as a one-night stand; already he was thinking about ways he could get accounting to foot the bill for more trips out here, or to bring her to New York: editorial meetings, publicity, lunches … the possibilities were nearly endless.

  Excitedly, he pulled the covers of the bed back, preparing a soft nest to crawl into as soon as she came out of the bathroom.

  And then—the sound of the toilet flushing.

  He hurried back around to the end of the bed so he would be close when she came out of the bathroom. For the briefest of moments he felt a little embarrassed about how he looked—his hanging gut, his pudgy legs—but he decided that it didn’t really matter. She clearly liked him, and it was obvious that she wasn’t the sort of person to get hung up on appearances.

  He opened his arms as she opened the bathroom door.

  She was still dressed. Her face was set, without a trace of the heady, drunk feeling they had been sharing a few minutes before.

  His arms fell.

  “What—?” he said, stumbling in surprise when he saw the gun in her hand, watched her bring it up and, without a moment’s hesitation, fire.

  While Jacqui was down in the garage getting her bag from Dale’s car, I dialled Cat Took’s number on my cell phone.

  The phone rang three times before she picked up.

  “Cat? It’s Christopher Knox calling.”

  “Mr. Knox,” she said. “From Victoria.” Her voice was low, but touched with a youthful quality, and the faintest sound of pleasure, as if she was glad to hear from me.

  “Yes, from Victoria.” I stopped myself. “Actually, I’m just outside of Seattle right now.”

  “Seattle?” There was a hollow clarity to the line: a cell phone, probably.

  I looked over at David, asleep on the bed. “I’m on a bit of a vacation with my family.”

  “That’s lovely.”

  “It is,” I said. “We thought we’d get away for a few days, make a long weekend of it, maybe head down to the Oregon Coast for a couple of nights.”

  “You’ll be right in my neck of the woods.”

  “That’s why I’m calling, actually. I thought that while we were in the area … Would you have time to get a cup of coffee or s
omething?” I quickly calculated what the next day might look like, driving times and possibilities. “Maybe tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Tomorrow afternoon’s not good for me.”

  My heart sank.

  “But what about Sunday?”

  “That would be terrific.”

  “Good,” she said. “Where are you staying down here?”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I think we’re just going to find a place once we get there. There are a lot of motels in Seaside.”

  “That there are,” she said. “There’s also a coffee shop …”

  I flipped open my notebook as she gave me directions. We settled on four o’clock.

  “How will I recognize you?”

  She laughed, a surprisingly delicate sound. “This is starting to sound like a blind date,” she said. “Let’s see. I’ll wear a purple scarf.”

  “And I’ll—”

  “I’ll recognize you, Mr. Knox.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “I found some publicity photos of you on the Internet.” Of course. “Well, add a decade or so to those and there I am.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “And I guess I’ll see—”

  “Cat, do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “You are a journalist,” she said. “It would be out of character if you didn’t.”

  “I was just wondering if you had been contacted by anyone from Davis & Keelor, in New York.”

  “Someone named Terry or Tony called me a week or so ago.”

  “Tony Markus?”

  “That sounds right. Why do you ask?”

  I forced myself not to panic. “But you haven’t spoken to him in the last couple of days?”

  “No, no,” she said thoughtfully. “It was definitely before last weekend.”

  “That’s good,” I said, more to myself than to her.

  “Is there something going on, Christopher?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I’ll explain more when I see you on Sunday, but until then, if you wouldn’t mind, could you please let me know if he tries to get in touch with you? It’s very important.”

  “It sounds like it,” she said. “There isn’t anything else you can tell me?”