Saint eyed the quilt and confessed, “If this is our map, we’re in trouble.”
Narice was more optimistic. “We have to go to a bookstore.”
“Why?”
“There’s a book I need. If this quilt is our map, we have to learn to read it.”
She saw his eyebrow rise.
He said with an impressed tone, “You are getting good at this, aren’t you?”
“Just trying to keep up with you,” she tossed back easily.
He grinned beneath the glasses and she turned away because her heart was beating fast and she didn’t want him to know he’d affected her.
Willie was still peering at the symbols. “That looks like water there.”
Narice agreed. There were three wavy lines beneath what appeared to be a box within a larger box. “And a sun. This is a monkey wrench,” she stated proudly. She recognized the four-sided square with its signature half-triangle points on each corner. According to what she could remember from the lecture, the monkey wrench signaled potential runaways to gather their tools—escape would be soon. She explained this to Willie and Saint, then confessed, “But does daddy mean to literally gather tools?”
They didn’t know.
Saint had a suggestion. “Let’s do it this way. I’d think your daddy would try and keep this as simple as possible.”
Narice agreed.
“So, why does he want us to gather tools? What would we need them for?”
Willie shrugged and offered, “To tear something down—dig something up?”
Saint replied, “That’s as good a guess as any. We’ll stop at a hardware store and pick up some basic tools. Shovel, pickaxe—whatever else we think may come in handy.”
Narice wondered if her father had done the quilt himself? Her gut said, yes. During the Jim Crow years of the forties and fifties, Simon Jordan had been a very successful tailor. Not until segregation was broken did he get the chance to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a medical doctor. He’d always loved puzzles and rubrics and reading about ancient objects of mystery like the Rosetta Stone. It would be just like him to leave his behind. She smiled and looked up to heaven where she could just see him seated in a comfortable chair, kicked back with his feet up, watching and wondering if she’d be clever enough to figure it out. I’ll figure it out, daddy, just wait. And I’m going to find the arsonist, too, she pledged silently.
Narice rolled the quilt back up in the thick brown paper and retied the strings. “That’s enough drama for now. Uncle Willie, you go and watch your ‘Wheel of Fortune.’ Cyclops and I will clean up the dishes.”
Saint nodded.
Willie who loved Vanna White, grinned. “You’ll get no argument here. I love a good mystery, but I have to see my Vanna.”
He left the kitchen and Narice and Saint were alone. Narice suddenly felt very self-conscious. Truthfully, she knew the reason—it was the over six-foot-tall man with the dark glasses watching her so silently. Reminding herself she was way past the age of being turned inside out by a bearded stranger, she took a deep breath to regain control. Then she put the stopper in the large stainless-steel sink and turned on the faucet. I’ll wash.”
“I’ll dry.” He shrugged out of his trench coat and laid it over one of the kitchen chairs while she found the dish soap and put a few squeezes into the running water. She put the silverware in the water and washed them first.
“I always do the plates first,” Saint, said drying a bunch of the now-clean forks and knives with the blue stripped dish towel in his hand.
Narice glanced up at him and countered, “Well, when the silverware goes in my mouth, I want it clean.”
Saint guessed that made sense. “Never thought about it like that. Guess I’ll be washing the silverware first, from now on.”
She smiled then moved on to the plates and glasses. Very conscious of his silent presence, Narice rinsed the sudsy plates in the companion sink and put them one by one in the green plastic dish drain on the counter. He reached for a wet plate just as she was putting the last plate in the drain. Their hands bumped. The sizzle of the contact made them quickly draw back.
“Sorry,” he murmured.
“That’s okay.”
Their eyes met. She hastily looked away.
Saint could feel the heat rising between them; he was pretty sure she could feel it, too. He didn’t push it, however. He’d already told himself he wasn’t going to get involved, but he could still feel the electricity of her touch.
The rest of the dishes were finished without incident, and by the time “Wheel of Fortune” was done, so were they.
Narice dried her hands and took off the apron. Fending off Saint’s growing nearness made her want air. Maybe a walk in Aunt Pearl’s garden would help. Aunt Pearl was Uncle Willie’s late wife. She died a few months after the death of Narice’s mother. The double passings hit both husbands hard; each had lost their loves at an early age, but that mutual grief made them blood brothers forever.
Before Aunt Pearl died however, she’d had the mother of all gardens. Narice said to St. Martin, “I want to see if Aunt Pearl’s garden is still here.”
Saint didn’t know why that was important to her, but he didn’t want her going anywhere alone, so he followed.
Outside, Narice felt like she’d stepped into paradise. She hadn’t been to visit in over a decade. In her absence the garden had grown and spread like a tropical forest. Narice had been nine years old when she helped Aunt Pearl put in eight Rose of Sharon plantings along the yard’s left fence. Now those plants looked to be twelve feet high and were covered with glossy green leaves and blooms of white, red, and pink. Crowding the remaining three fences were more Rose of Sharons, towering lilacs, and stands of green forsythia bobbing in the evening breeze. There were red and white daisies, purple coneflowers and in the back of the yard, a stand of milkweed in full bloom. To her delight, orange and black monarchs were fluttering around the milkweed’s blossoms, searching out the nectar.
Saint couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a monarch butterfly in the States. He’d grown accustomed to seeing them on his visits to Central and South America, but here—he hadn’t seen one in an urban neighborhood for years. He could tell the sight made Narice happy. She was smiling. That was a good thing. The last couple days couldn’t have been easy for her; she’d earned these few hours of peace.
Narice took Saint on a tour of the garden, pointing out different species of flowers, clueing him to the fact that monarchs rarely fed on the milkweed plants they were born on.
“How do you know so much about monarchs?”
She answered easily, “Aunt Pearl and Uncle Willie have always had milkweed in the yard, and I learned from them. Aunt Pearl was a science teacher.”
“She and Willie divorced?”
“No, she died when I was young. A drunk driver hit her on her way to church one Sunday morning.”
Narice watched a robin land on the edge of the birdbath, dip his beak to drink, and fly away. The peace and quiet was a sharp contrast to all she’d been through; she didn’t want to leave. Thinking about Aunt Pearl made Narice realize that Uncle Willie was the only person in her life now with a direct link to her past and to her parents. She turned to ask Saint about his past, when the silence exploded with what sounded like a cannon fire going off in the house, followed by Uncle Willie bellowing, “Cyclops! Get in here! Now!”
But Saint was already running towards the patio—gun drawn, coat flying behind him. “Hide!” he barked back at Narice.
He vanished into the house and Narice took off for the far end of the yard. Shaking and scared, she fought the mosquitoes for a hiding place amongst the tall, wide-leafed milkweed. Slapping at the bloodthirsty insects, she huddled and waited.
After what seemed like an eternity, she saw Saint step out onto the patio. The sunglass covered eyes swept the yard for her. “Narice!” he yelled.
She heard the anxiety in his voice, but it took her a moment
to beat back the insects. “Down here.”
When she stood, he seemed to visibly relax. “You okay?” he asked walking to meet her.
“I’ve been bitten a million times, but I’m all right. What’s going on?”
“Come on in. Uncle Willie caught some cockroaches.”
Inside, the two foreign born men seated in the front room on the blue sofa looked scared to death. Narice didn’t blame them; the huge gun Uncle Willie had leveled on them had a barrel large enough for her to crawl in and go to sleep. She’d be scared, too. Only then did she see the dead man on the floor in the foyer. She quickly averted her eyes from the disturbing sight. “What happened?” Narice whispered.
“You okay, baby girl?”
“Yes, Unc.”
“Wanted to make sure. These two, well three, came to my door posing as Jehovah’s Witnesses, only they weren’t carrying Bibles.”
The men’s heads dropped in what appeared to be both embarrassment and shame. “They asked if they could come in for water. I told them no. I went to sit back down and they slit my screen, reached in, and unlocked the door. I calmly pulled Arnold here out of the grandfather clock, and when the first one crossed my threshold, I blew him away. These two I invited in for tea.”
Narice knew this was a serious matter, but…“The gun is named Arnold?”
“Yeah,” Willie replied with pride. “After the Terminator.” He never took his eyes off of his guests. “Minute I saw it in the catalogue—knew I had to have it. Knew what I was going to name it, too.”
Narice shook her head and scanned the big gun. “Is that thing even legal?”
Uncle Willie said, “Cyclops, what do they teach you in the military?”
Saint didn’t miss a beat. “Don’t ask. Don’t tell, sir.”
“Exactly.”
Narice smiled. “Never mind. What are you going to do with, them?”
“Already had Cyclops call the cops. My buddies should be here momentarily. In the meantime, Cyclops, search ’em. Let’s see who they are.”
Saint said, “I think we already know,” but he had the two men stand up one at a time. From the anger in their eyes, it was plain they didn’t like it, but with Arnold still trained on them they had no choice but to cooperate.
The two men and their dead friend had on them passports verifying that they were indeed from The Majesty’s country of Nagal. Saint also found enough fake ID in their wallets and suit-coat pockets to supply the entire senior class at a local high school. Saint laid the passports in a line on the carpet. While Narice looked on, he produced a camera from the recesses of his magic coat and photographed the faces and information on each one. “Get me an envelope, angel, if you would please?”
“Look in the desk in my bedroom,” Willie told her helpfully.
Narice returned and Saint stuffed the passports, the fake social security cards, and driver’s licenses into the large manila envelope. He licked the top and sealed it. He then asked the visitors, “You guys ever been to Guantanamo Bay? The U.S. government has a five-star bed-and-breakfast you’ll really like.”
One of the men spit at Saint.
Uncle Willie warned ominously, “Do that again, and you’re going to join your boy over there by the door.”
The man’s eyes blazed, and he sneered. “There are more where we came from. Thousands more. We will not rest until the Eye is found.”
Saint cracked, “Glad to hear it. Just tell your buddies not to forget their Bibles.”
Uncle Willie’s booming laugh filled the room.
Ten minutes later the authorities descended on the house with siren screaming police cars, helicopters, ambulances, and swat teams. The neighbors lined the streets trying to see what they could see; TV people were running up and down the block, microphones in hand, attempting to find and interview someone who’d seen something—anything so the station could be first with the breaking news.
Narice was in one of Willie’s upstairs bedrooms watching the circus through the curtain-framed window. Now that the police knew Uncle Willie had everything under control, they were trying to clear the street.
She turned away and flopped down on the bed on her back. The bedroom was the smaller of the two guest bedrooms in the house. It was the room she’d always slept in whenever her parents spent the night. Back then, the young Narice would never have imagined that in this house there would be a day like today. Never. The dead man’s tarp-covered body had been taken out on a stretcher by the EMS and driven to the morgue. It would take a while for her to forget how he’d looked lying there on the floor. She shuddered involuntarily and turned over. She was tired. A heartbeat later, her eyelids closed.
Downstairs, Saint and Uncle Willie were finishing up their statements to the police. Uncle Willie took great delight in telling his former colleagues how he’d personally thwarted the band of foreigners who’d he said, targeted him as just another helpless senior citizen. Uncle Willie told the detectives he was convinced the foreign thugs had intended to rob him, “But I put a stop to that!” he boasted proudly.
In the end, the police believed the men were robbers, too.
Saint didn’t say a word.
When the police were gone, Willie got himself a Molson out of the fridge, then gestured for Saint to sit, so they could talk.
Willie’s first words were, “Man-oh-man. Haven’t had that much fun in a while.” He then asked, “How do you think they found you?”
“Tracking device maybe. Probably planted somewhere on Narice.”
Willie took a draw on his beer and nodded. “You have a way of checking?”
Saint nodded.
“This is turning out to be pretty nasty. You’ll keep her safe, won’t you?”
“And have you coming after me with Arnold if I don’t? I’ll keep her safe, don’t worry.”
“And keep your hands off her?”
Saint assessed the old cop for a long moment, before saying, “That’s between me and Narice.”
Willie smiled, “Good answer. I respect a man who’ll tell an old man to butt out. Break her heart, though, and it’ll be me, you, and Arnold.”
Saint didn’t doubt that for a minute. “I’m going up and see if I can’t find the tracking device.”
Saint entered the room quietly when he saw her asleep on the bed. He didn’t want to wake her but he needed to check out the contents of her purse.
He crossed over to the bed and stood over her for a moment to watch her sleep. Inside of himself, something was up. Earlier, after he’d run into the house to answer Uncle Willie’s call then come back out to the patio to tell her the coast was clear, not finding her where he’d left her had scared him to death. In the space of those brief seconds while he visually and frantically scanned the yard, all kinds of bad scenarios concerning her whereabouts raced through his head. Finally when he saw her stand and fight her way out of the milkweed, no words could describe the flood of relief he’d experienced. That’s when he knew something was up. Although he’d only been around her a few days, he’d never been so concerned about a woman before. Sarita, his foster sister, yes, but not anyone else. Saint figured he could deny everything and chalk it all up to reactions to the drama surrounding the Eye, but that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth—Narice Jordan was getting to him and he didn’t know how to make it stop.
The shadows of dusk were creeping into the bedroom. Saint checked his watch. In less than an hour it would be dark. Willie had graciously offered them a bed for the night, but the cheetah in Saint was restless; he wanted to get on the road and drive. They’d hole up for the night in Detroit with family. They’d be safe there, and in the morning see about deciphering the quilt.
To Narice it seemed like a mere second had passed when she heard a soft male voice, “Hey, angel, wake up. We need to go.”
Narice really wanted to sleep. “Five minutes,” she croaked.
She heard him laugh gently, “Come on, baby doll. Time to roll.”
Narice opene
d her eyes to see Saint seated on the bed beside her. Dark glasses on. Beard on. Lord he is gorgeous. She scanned the faded green coat. “Do you ever go anywhere without that tacky coat?” she asked, humor lacing her groggy tone.
He drew back in mock offense. “No dissing the coat, woman. We could live on a deserted island for years with the stuff I carry around in this so-called tacky coat.”
The still sleepy Narice pondered living on a deserted island with him. He’d keep her safe, that she knew. She also knew that without him, this adventure would be a whole lot scarier. She slowly sat up. “I’m ready.”
Their faces were only a few inches apart. Time slowed. He ran his eyes lingeringly over her face, her mouth.
Seeing him, feeling him, Narice trembled with anticipation.
Saint had to call upon every discipline he’d ever learned to keep from reaching out and tracing his finger over the sultry shape of her mouth. He vowed to leave this woman alone, and he thought he’d meant it. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Before getting her degree in childhood education, Narice’s job on Wall Street had put her in contact with some pretty powerful men, yet none of them exuded the intensity and purpose pulsating from inside this shade-wearing man. Just being near him made her dizzy. He was dangerous in so many ways. Grabbing hold of herself she scooted away and off the bed. Standing now, she croaked, “I’m ready when you are.” Feeling self-conscious, she cleared her throat.
Saint smiled to himself. She was shaking like a virgin at a Thai whorehouse. He found that surprising. Since hooking up with him, she’d been all business. He was now even more curious about the woman lurking beneath the iron maiden exterior. “I think you may be bugged. Let me see your purse a minute.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, that might be how the cockroaches tracked us here.”
“Where might it be?”
He smiled.
Confused, she asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just love the way you speak. ‘Where might it be?’”