31
That day, Kellen didn’t return to the resort. If they had needed her, she would have gone, of course. But with a skeleton crew and few guests, she was able to handle the couple of crises from her phone. She wasn’t avoiding Max; she was taking some much needed downtime.
Besides, a new memory was nudging itself up from the depths of her brain…
A park, trees bare of leaves, openmouthed pedestrians running. A man with a thin, familiar face who spoke with an Italian accent. He held a Beretta Pico to her forehead…
In the background, a man raced toward them and…
And nothing. Whatever happened then…was gone.
But that explained her scar, and why she woke up in the hospital that was maybe a mental ward and maybe not, and why when she woke, she was afraid someone was trying to hurt her. Maybe she wasn’t crazy. Maybe if she knew all the facts, she would at least understand what had happened.
Maybe Max could tell her.
She should ask him.
Instead, Kellen pulled up her laptop and went to work, approving menus, viewing the employee roster with an eye to who might be the biggest baddest importer/murderer in the world, studying the resort’s blueprints and wondering where Priscilla could have stashed the tomb art. The architect had designed the resort for visual impact, not working efficiency. Storage closets hid in absurdly inconvenient locations, narrow maids’ stairways twisted and turned behind the walls, old-fashioned dumbwaiters that had once lifted and lowered linens and plates from level to level… Even if Priscilla Carter had hidden the tomb art somewhere in the resort, one of the housekeepers could have found that gross figure of a man with his massive penis, shrieked in horror and tossed it all in the garbage.
Kellen sighed.
The phone rang.
It was Annie. Her warm voice asked, “How are things going?”
My friends are mad at me.
I’m being haunted by a ghost or tormented by someone who knows my past, and I’m not sure which is worse.
Nils Brooks wants to kiss me.
Your stupid nephew thinks I’m a delicate flower. Or a quitter. I don’t know which is more insulting.
“As well as can be expected. Employees are jumping ship at an alarming rate. I hope you’re all right with this, but I’m approving every unexpected request for vacation and leave, and offering a bonus when they return.”
Annie’s voice grew somber. “You’re doing exactly the right thing. They’re nervous about the murders?”
“Add to that the weather.” Kellen glanced at the radar. “We’ve got another big storm coming in. It’s four in the afternoon and like midnight out there. You know. The darkness is difficult even without finding a corpse or two.”
“When I get back, I’ll send you on vacation whether you want it or not!”
“I wasn’t hinting!” Kellen remembered Birdie, and no matter what Kellen felt right now, Birdie needed time off. “But Birdie and I would like to go somewhere sunny.”
“I’m glad to hear you’ve relented at last. Do we have enough employees to keep the resort running?”
“Yes, but only because we have so few guests.”
“I never thought I would say that’s a good thing.” Pause. “Did Max make it?”
“Yes.” Kellen inserted a pause of her own. “He’s gone to acquaint himself with his security team, for what they’re worth.”
“What did you think of him?” Annie sounded anxious and nervous.
“I barely met him.” Already she’d spent too much time with him. “He seems fine. He knows the sheriff, and that’s good.” I knew him before, didn’t I?
“Max is a Renaissance man. He knows about security and resort management, and wineries and… Well, he’s very accomplished.”
“So you’ve said.”
“Am I overselling him?”
“A little.” And that makes me wonder why.
“I simply want you to feel as if you can trust him to do his job.”
That was a good reason why. “Thank you, Annie. I’m glad to turn security over to him.” In the background, Kellen heard a burst of noise, children’s voices shrieking in wild delight as they ran through. “You need to go and enjoy your vacation. I’ll talk to you later!” She hung up before Annie could say goodbye, sat and looked at the telephone. She should be asking probing questions, asking for honesty.
Maybe later, when the murders were solved, the Librarian arrested, winter had ended, world peace had been declared…
She wanted to know, but she didn’t. Ignorance was comfortable, safe, without challenge. She was, in fact, tired of standing tall and facing all confrontations with her chin up. She wanted to slump for a while.
Although she and Max did sort of click. Until he thought she’d be glad to run away from her responsibilities. Damn him. Until that moment, he was doing so well.
That evening, she sat with all the lights in her cottage dimmed and watched out her bedroom loft window, watched to the west and the way leading up from the dock.
She saw nothing.
That meant nothing.
The smugglers could be out there with special lights and drones that allowed them to see in the dark, with guns and bombs and traps, and all to bring a few bloodstained relics to a greedy smuggler and his wealthy, grasping collector of illegal goods. Kellen thought about Afghanistan, the battles she had fought, the deaths and destruction she’d seen, and fury held her in its grasp. She hadn’t carried a rifle through the treacherous mountains so Americans at home could break the law and fund the very terrorists she’d fought.
Fate led Cecilia in a straight line from the hospital to stand in front of an Army Recruiting Station. She looked in the window at the two people in uniform seated at desks inside. She looked back in the direction of the hospital, looked around at the busy streets, the indifferent people. Danger stalked her here. She didn’t know what danger, but she knew something terrible had happened and she needed to get out of this town. What better way to disappear than into the massive organization called the US military?
Pushing open the door, she walked in. Her mind immediately assembled a catalog of data on the officers:
ARMY RECRUITERS:
ONE MALE, ONE FEMALE, PLEASANT AND BRISK, SKEPTICAL WHEN LOOKING ME OVER, DISCOURAGING ABOUT MY CONDITION AND ABILITY TO PASS THE STRINGENT PHYSICAL. PRODUCE STERN WARNINGS ABOUT DRUG USE. IMPRESSED BY KELLEN’S DEGREES, SATISFIED BY PHOTO ID.
The male recruiter, Sergeant Barnes, said, “With these credentials, we’ll send you to Officer Candidate School.”
“If you pass the physical,” Sergeant Rehberger snapped. She was more realistic, less hopeful of Cecilia’s chances.
Cecilia nodded at her. “I’m good with numbers, data structure, patterns.” As she spoke, her mind was collecting more information about the recruiters, this station, how to turn the details of this situation to her advantage. She could give answers that they wanted to hear, because by their body language and by logic, she could anticipate their needs.
She had never had this gift before, but she knew how to use it now.
They put the paperwork in front of her. She filled it all in without hesitation, using Kellen’s New York address, Kellen’s birthday, Kellen’s degrees. She was, she realized, being Kellen Rae Adams in every way. She got ready to sign and date the forms. “What day is this?” she asked.
Sergeant Barnes said, “May twelfth.”
Then she scrawled Kellen’s signature and passed over the paperwork.
The recruiter ran through it all, asked a few questions, got to the end and laughed, scratched out the date and passed it back. “I know—I still get the year wrong, too. Initial the change, then we’re on to the next stage.”
That was when she discovered she’d lost more than a year of her life.
Lost it, apparently, forever.
Someone knocked on her front door.
She clutched the arms of her chair. She knew who was there.
Another knock. The bell rang.
“Bastard.” She stood and clattered down the spiral stairs. She looked through the peephole, then flung open the door. “What a surprise,” she said in a voice heavily laden with irony.
Nils Brooks stood on the porch. “May I come in?” Like a vampire who had to be invited to cross the threshold.
“If you must.” She backed away.
He dusted a few flakes of snow off his shoulders. There, in the porch light, his disguise was stripped away. He looked like a dangerous man, strong, wiry, with a determined jaw and a fake pair of eyeglasses in his pocket. He came in, flung off his Burberry coat and hung it on the rack. “The weathercasters got it wrong again. The main thrust of the storm went south to Oregon.”
She didn’t answer, and she didn’t turn up her lights.
His conversational tone changed. “What do you know?” He demanded information as if he was in charge.
“Lloyd Magnuson is dead.”
He dismissed the information with a wave of the hand. “We already had that figured out. What else do you know?”
“You don’t give a damn, do you?” She looked at him in the dim light and saw a man driven by ambition. “Someone trapped Lloyd Magnuson by using his own weakness and now he’s dead.”
He seated himself in the easy chair beside her front door. “Gossip at the resort says he used heroin.”
“Exactly.”
“Then why was he trapped? He was simply weak.” Nils couldn’t have sounded more indifferent.
“I don’t like you.” She had never meant anything so much. “Do you have no weaknesses?”
“Yes.” He came to his feet, caught her shoulders and kissed her.
She didn’t punch him in the ribs or use the serrated edge of her flashlight on his face. She let him kiss her, mouth to mouth, breath to breath, and as the moment stretched out, she relaxed, accepted the sensation, lived in the moment…and when he lifted his mouth from hers, she said, “I’d give it a B plus.”
“Are you frigid?”
She laughed in his face. “Because I don’t want to sleep with you? I suspect if you looked around this world, you could find a great many people, both women and men, who don’t want to sleep with you.”
“I’m only interested in the one.”
Most of the time, she didn’t like him. Then he was charming and self-deprecating, and she did. “You can leave now.”
He pulled on his winter gear. “Let me know if you remember anything I need to know.” At the door, he turned and asked, “Who’s the guy with the big feet?”
Your competition. But he wasn’t. She didn’t want to kiss him, either. “Max Di Luca. He’s come to handle security. He’s smart, he’s tough and he’s fast. You’d better figure out this investigation quickly, or he’ll figure it out for you.”
Nils took a step toward her.
For the first time since that first night, she pulled her pistol and pointed it at his chest. “Don’t.”
“This is not a game,” he said. “Let’s end this before it gets deadly.”
“Priscilla Carter is dead. Lloyd Magnuson is dead. Your Jessica is dead.” She slapped him with words, with truth. “How much more deadly do you want it to be?”
“I want it to end with the good guys alive.”
“Then you’d better go out there and see that they do.”
* * *
Kellen barricaded herself in her cottage, set a trap beneath every window and in front of the door and slept the sleep of the pure.
In the wee hours of the morning, her phone vibrated and lit up, and she woke from a dream of something about sex and Max and…sex.
Caller ID placed the number inside the resort, and for one moment she couldn’t imagine who among the guests would have her number, and who among the staff would call her when they could text.
Then she knew. She leaped to her feet, swayed as she fought for her equilibrium. “Mr. Gilfilen?”
No sound. Only the faintest breathing.
“Mr. Gilfilen?”
His voice was almost nonexistent. “Depend…you.”
“I’m coming,” she said. “Hang on. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”