“Why not a priest? It would cost you a lot less,” the girl said, almost teasingly as she sat down again. Bear winced, but his father only chuckled.
“I knew you would say that. Blanche, I just don’t know. I’m one of those people who’s had bad experiences with priests.”
“Well, I’ve met a few good ones,” the girl said. Then she paused. “Did you know Father Michael Raymond?”
“Blanche, don’t even go there. I’m sorry, I can’t discuss this, even with you. It’s a shame he got killed, but I had one too many conversations with him. Plus, I heard a whole lot more about him than I ever wanted to hear from my sons, believe me. And—well, from Catherine, too.” The man sank back into the pillows, his face looking hollow. His good eye closed, but the other remained half-suspended between sleep and waking.
There was silence, and the microphone instantly sucked up the lack of sound into feedback.
The man spoke again, and the microphone rapidly adjusted, cutting off his first words. “—thing that bothers me—if you are dating Arthur, do you know why he won’t speak to me? You’d think that if he knew I was dying, he would show a little bit of concern.”
“I don’t think he knows,” the girl said.
“That’s impossible. Elaine told me she’d—”
The girl leaned forward. “I don’t think you should believe…” Then she rose. “Look. I’ve been in nursing homes this summer, Mr. Fairston, and you aren’t being cared for properly. Even the low-income homes make sure that…” Blanche had turned away from the microphone, and her last words were cut off.
Getting closer so he could hear, Bear took a step forward towards the monitor, bumping the settee that stood against the wall and putting a hand on one of its corner knobs to steady himself. It wobbled beneath his touch.
He looked down at it.
Acting on an impulse, he pulled the round knob out of the post and looked into the hole. Lying stacked one on top of the other in the small hole were several pastel pills. He could just make out the curlicue M of the one on top.
Suddenly, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and, before he could react, something was clamped over his nose and mouth. A sweet smell overpowered him and he dropped out of consciousness.
Chapter Twenty-Two
At last she had a chance to tell him everything she had been seeing that was wrong—the attitude of the nurses, the neglect of what should be basic hygiene…she rattled off her concerns, and ended, “I regularly visit a publicly-funded home where conditions aren’t the best, but you would be getting better care there than what I’ve seen here.”
Shaken by her diatribe, she sat down, her hands shaking uncontrollably. She rubbed them, and noticed, oddly, that they seemed to be rather numb. Being this upset is not good for my heart, she thought automatically, and took a deep breath, trying to relax.
Mr. Fairston was visibly thrown. He almost looked frightened, because only one side of his face could show the shock. “If you noticed this, why didn’t you say anything before?” he managed to say.
“I don’t know,” she said miserably, and wearily brushed back her hair. “I suppose I thought it wasn’t my business…I didn’t want to question your judgment…or Elaine’s. After all, Elaine and I barely know each other.”
“But sometimes someone coming in from outside can see things we can’t see ourselves,” Mr. Fairston said, his expression calming. “I know that wasn’t easy for you to bring up.”
“Just bringing it up’s not much good unless it will make a difference,” Blanche rubbed her hands again, and tried not to be worried about their coldness. “You need to get better care, and the sooner, the better. I just don’t know if—” The sheer persistence of Elaine in tracking down that medicine bottle told her that something was still very wrong. She wondered why Elaine hadn’t yet returned. Perhaps the friars managed to grab her, she thought hopefully. Perhaps it’s over. And Bear is back…but is he in jail? I really hope not. In any case, I should get going before Elaine returns…
“Are you feeling all right?” Mr. Fairston asked her, tilting his head to one side, which she recognized was his way of gesturing.
“Oh, yes.” She picked up the teacup with both hands, hoping the warm cup would heat her hands, and took a sip. But she could barely feel its heat.
“That’s funny, because I was just thinking you were looking worse.”
A wave of nausea passed over her, and she put a hand to her stomach. It’s just because I haven’t eaten much all day, she told herself. And my heart hasn’t been beating normally. Probably that sweet desert was the last thing my system needed after those pastries we had at the party.
She managed to take a long drink of tea, and the nausea passed, but a strange heaviness, like exhaustion, had started to hit her. It must have been her run from the friary to the subway, then running from the subway to here, all the while terrified of the specter she had left behind her. “I’m just tired, that’s all.” She could tell that Mr. Fairston was getting tired, too. She should let him sleep.
“How’s work been going? Have you been getting up too early?”
“I haven’t been going to work,” she said, yawning. “Actually…”
But she decided that she didn’t want to go into it right now. Brother Leon would be mad enough with her for leaving after she had promised to stay. “I’m sorry, I’m just so tired. I should get going.”
II
“How the heck are we going to find out which stop she got off?” Brother Matt asked as they stood on the subway train, having begged some tokens from passersby.
“I’m going to make a guess that she’s going to get off on 96th Street,” Leon said, scanning the subway map.
“You mean where Bonnie got off last time you followed her?”
“Yeah. After all, Nora went to the subway just like Bonnie did. How much do you want to bet they’re going to the same place?”
“And where are we going to go from there?”
“Uh—we could just—walk around until we find her, I guess.”
“This is crazy,” Matt rubbed the stubble on his blond head.
“But it’s all we have to go on,” Charley rumbled.
Leon just prayed.
III
The dull taste on his tongue became unbearable, and he swallowed. There was a smell around him of carpet, plastic, perfume, and dust. Someone had rolled him onto his stomach, and his face was pressed into the floor. Bear rolled his head to the side and opened his eyes, blinking in the light, to see a spreading plain of orange and blue triangles on a nubby carpet. He was still in the office.
When he tried to get up, his muscles kinked in agony around his hands. He attempted to wrench them apart and winced at the pain. A smooth, thin plastic cord was bound tightly around his wrists and pulled into his skin. Turning his head, he saw the bun feet and dusty belly of the settee. His ankles were tied together and bound to one of its legs, which were wrapped with lamp cord. He saw that a small table lamp lay a few feet away on the carpet, its cord sliced off, and two small decorative speakers from the computer lay skewed beyond them, also cordless. He jerked his wrists apart again, trying to slip the knot, and realized he was only cutting himself. The slender cord had no give, and the knots were rock hard.
Foreboding swept over him. He twisted his head up and looked at the computer. The monitor flickered, as before, on the scene of his father and Blanche, though now without sound.
Slowly he looked over his shoulder. Above him, seated on the curved back of the settee, feet planted on the seat cushions, was a figure in a battered black trench coat with a witch’s face.
Withered cheeks were covered by a green eyeshade, and a wig of stringy black and silver served for hair. Perched upon the back of the couch as though seated on an exotic throne, its pose was so still, so bizarre that for a few seconds he thought it was a dummy someone had propped there. The eyes were glassy and empty, the limbs motionless.
He fought to master
himself in this swelling horror and forced himself to fix his eyes on the dead eyes of the mannequin.
“Elaine,” he said, and compelled himself to end the word with certainty.
There was a dead silence, filled by the whirring of the computer. He felt suffocated, suspended between reality and some dreadful insanity, but made himself wait, his cut wrists throbbing.
At last there was a faint rustle, and the figure on the back of the couch stiffly raised an arm, and removed its eyeshade. Then it touched its neck, lifted a corner of the mask, and pulled it away, taking off the wig with it. Rumpled golden hair cascaded out around a smooth ivory face with unusually bright blue eyes.
And the voice, very rich and full, spoke.
“Arthur,” it said, and the word was savored.
She was as beautiful as she had ever been, but he could tell she was older. Her looks were growing tired, sharper with age. Now she crossed her legs, and he could see that beneath the trench coat, she was wearing a black tank top and tight black pants. She tossed the clipped plug of the electric cord down at his chest, and despite himself, he flinched.
“So, Arthur, I wasn’t expecting to find you sneaking around my home office at this time of night, but as you can see, I was prepared to deal with you. Lucky for me I even had chloroform handy. Are you going to tell me why you’re here, or should I just call the police?”
“I came to see my father,” Bear shifted to ease the pinch against his wrists.
“Oh, really? This late at night? And after not contacting him for—let’s see—eighteen months? And instead of going to his bedroom, you wind up in my office. Hmm. Ulterior motives, anyone?”
She looked down at him spitefully. He tried to keep eye contact with her, but it was difficult, particularly as she wasn’t looking at his face. Feeling his vulnerability acutely, he managed to work himself up onto his elbows and inch further away from her.
“You’ve grown up, Arthur. You know, I always thought you had quite a bit of potential. Despite the fact that you were such a prig when we last met.”
“What do you want with me?” he demanded, his face reddening.
She chuckled. “Since you’re in my house, I should ask you questions, shouldn’t I? You and your girlfriend.” She said the last word with undisguised disdain. “If that’s what she really is, and not just some pawn in your master plan.”
The submerged fear, the same fear that had first appeared in the church of the martyred virgin, crashed over him now like a tide. “What do you have against Blanche?”
Now Elaine laughed softly as she stepped over him with a kick and crossed to a bar in the corner of the office. She poured herself a glass of soda, put something in her mouth, and swallowed it with the cola. “Oh, come on, Arthur. Can you really think I’m such a fool?” She squatted next to him on the floor, toying with her glass. “Let’s not play with each other this way. You lie. I’ll lie. Let’s be frank with one another.”
He didn’t like her being this close, and shrank back against the sofa. There was something about her—there had always been something about her—that made his hair stand on end.
“We know what this is really about, don’t we?” she lowered her chin and looked him in the eyes. “It’s a chess game. And you know what the goal of a chess game is, don’t you?”
He forced himself to talk, to keep the intellectual give and take going. “To take the king.”
“Right.” She kept looking at him steadily, a smile playing on her face. “That’s what this has always been about. From day one. But in all your calculations, you’ve forgotten the most powerful piece on the board.”
“The queen.”
“That’s right,” her voice dropped to a whisper. Now her chin hung swaying over his face.
“Elaine, get away from me.”
Her lips smiled, but she didn’t withdraw. “So the young upstart king went away and found himself another queen.”
“Another queen?”
“To replace your mother. And I’m sure you planned it that way. Why else would your father form such a quick, strong attachment to a girl he didn’t know anything about?”
Her red lips were still smiling, but the blue eyes were hard. “I underestimated you, long ago, Art. You’re just as calculating as I am. I knocked your mother out of the contest once, and cancer took her out of the match completely. Things looked set for an easy win. But now, late in my game, you send in another queen. You picked a pawn, put a crown on her head, and then you sent her in because she looks just like your mother.”
The coincidence was striking. He couldn’t deny that he had been raised by a beautiful, quiet woman with dark hair and fair skin, and now he was dating a girl with the same features and a similar personality. Some men tended to marry women who resembled their mothers, didn’t they? How could he argue that it wasn’t by design—at least not by his design—that Blanche had found herself in the midst of this deadly family battle? He had tried to shield her from it completely, but through some crazy chance the man she had befriended was his own father.
The blue eyes were sparking with anger now. “So you see, Arthur, I know what you’ve been up to. But these sorts of games—‘who is the fairest in the land’ games don’t always end up so nicely.”
“And you really think I planned it all?” Bear returned in disbelief.
She sat back on her heels and drained her glass. “You knew I owned the Mirror Corporation. After all, I started it back when you were still living with us. Your father was vice-president. And you must have known that we always used Reflections for our functions. It must have been too convenient to have your princess connive her way into a job and meet your father. I admit I was taken in, especially since she always used a cute nickname to refer to you. Until I saw the letter in her purse addressed to you, I had no idea who she really was. But I’m pretty quick on the uptake.”
So Elaine planted the drugs in my apartment to get rid of me, and Fish, and Blanche. He suddenly remembered Mr. Russell’s words that Dad “…would cut off all monetary help or any posthumous share of his assets to you if there were a second drug charge.”
“Elaine,” he said quietly. “When did you plant the Ecstasy pills in our apartment? Before Blanche started visiting Dad, or afterwards?”
“Ecstasy? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” she said airily, tossing her golden hair. “I haven’t been in that apartment in years. Though of course I used to go over all the time when your father still owned it.”
And of course she would have passed beneath Ahmed’s radar because of that. She had used pills from the same cache she was concealing here—but of course, it would be difficult for him to prove that now, and she knew it.
She leaned her elbows on his chest as she watched him, apparently amused at finding out how little he had known. “Do you expect me to believe that you’re just the clueless victim of circumstances? Poor Arthur. And I have you just where I want you, and there’s no way out. But you know I’ve always had a soft spot for you. We could replay that scene from four years ago, if you want.”
Four years ago, she had refused to leave his room, and had whispered an offer, “Kiss me, and I’ll make your dad give you your money back…”
“No,” he said evenly, and tried again to push himself out of her reach. But he couldn’t move any further from her and they both knew it.
“But this time you can’t run away from me, can you, young king?” she whispered, leaning closer. Her breath was stale, and terrifying.
He somehow managed to press himself further back without moving down, but he couldn’t go very far. The cord was biting into his wrists with a vengeance.
“Elaine, cut it out. Leave me alone!” he jerked away unsuccessfully as she took his face in her hands.
She laughed and stroked his cheek with her fingers. “Why are you so nervous? Can’t we be friends? This is a perfect opportunity to get reacquainted while we wait for Blanche to finish in there.” Her eyes flickering to th
e screen, he saw the jealousy burning there. “This queen of yours is a piece of work.” Now her face dropped closer once again. “Do you really love her, or is it just an act?”
He ducked his head sharply and hit her chin so that her teeth clacked together. She swore, and slapped him across the face.
“Don’t fool with me, Arthur. I don’t have the patience I once had,” she warned. “You’re still my delinquent stepson, just a few steps away from the police and a five-year prison sentence. If you can use her to play chess games with your dad, you can certainly play chess games with me.”
“It’s not a game,” he whispered, his face stinging. “It never was.”
Her eyes sparked. “Then how about I go and get Blanche and have her join us?”
No. He tried to keep his face blank, but she had already caught sight of his expression.
She grinned. “Sounds like a plan. I wonder what she’d think to see her prince now? And I’m dying to see how she behaves once she’s in your position.” Elaine got to her feet, pulled out a pair of scissors from her pocket, and traced the silver blades with her fingers, an odd smile on her face. “I believe this could be fun. And informative. I might not have to call the police after all.”
Setting the scissors down, Elaine pulled a dark handkerchief and a baggie out of her pocket and a perfume bottle. Pulling out the stopper, she doused the cloth with liquid, folded it, and stuffed the wad into the baggie and back into her pocket. Then she picked up another lamp, unplugged it, and sliced off its cord. All this time her jaw was working itself back and forth, and he realized she was grinding her teeth. He knew what it was. Ecstasy.
At last she thrust the scissors back in her pocket and leaned over him. “Too bad you couldn’t learn to play the game better, young king,” she said with a strange smile, rumpling his hair. “It’s time to take out your queen. Be back soon.”