21 Shades of Night, page 452
At this hubbub of discord, more of Talcott’s men poured into the foyer. I picked up a wire roll and began to rewind it, but someone slapped it from my hand. Another man picked up the rest of the rolls, and a third grabbed Tim’s case and rifled through it.
“Gentlemen, I’ll handle these men,” Talcott instructed. “Just take the recorder and give me one of the spools.” He stuffed it in his pocket. “Lock the doors and windows and let us by. Go!” The red-and-white crush of men parted. We had little choice but to follow him up the stairs and see this fiasco out to the bitter end.
Talcott led us into a sitting room and bolted the door.
“You can’t legally hold us here,” Tim asserted, reaching for the sidearm under his coat. I shook my head at him, warning him not use deadly force. As much as this dreadful turn of events unnerved me, we needed to avoid violence. Tim was a bundle of loose wires whose impulsive behavior could spark and burn as hot as I imagined Talcott could.
“What do you want with us?” I glared at Talcott’s wide, almost frenetic, eyes, and hoped he couldn’t read the fright in my own face.
“What makes you think I want something from you? What do you want from the Circle?” He took a menacing step forward. “I could report you for blackmail.”
“Blackmail, ha!” My head was exploding from fury. “Your group has—”
“Peter, shut up!” Tim hissed at me.
Hard to believe I’d almost spilled out my hatred of the Circle, how they’d ruined my sister’s trust in humanity. I’d almost blown our cover. Balling my fists up and pressing them tighter was the only way to keep them from injuring Talcott.
Tim plastered on a fake grin. “This is all a big misunderstanding, bub. We were simply recording your reading out of pure curiosity and admiration.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Mr. um…”
I swallowed back an impending gust of nervous laughter at the fact that Talcott couldn’t recall Tim’s last name. “Look, what do you want from us?” I asked him again. “You must want something or you wouldn’t have cornered us up here.”
“Ah, the sand shark has a brain.” Talcott coiled over me as he fingered his bizarre medallion.
An instinctive suspicion told me it was really an evil eye casting a spell on me. In another moment, I shook myself out of that lunacy. Next, his hawkish nose seemed like a grappling hook about to pierce my forehead. What was wrong with me? Looking over at Tim, I saw he was standing slack-jawed as well.
“I do want something,” Talcott finally admitted. “Perhaps we can make a deal. Or…” he reached in his pocket and held up the spool, “this one gets crushed under my boot heel.”
Tim snapped to life. “You just wait a minute, mister, that—”
“Shut up, Tim.” It was my turn to keep the lid on our mission. “What kind of deal? Out with it.” My sharp tone matched the piercing force of Talcott’s stare.
“Information on Alyse Bone,” he said. “In return, you’ll get the recorder back in one piece. Those things are expensive to rent. Yes, that’s right. I know you’re working for a PI Joe in Manhattan. You get to take it back to your fat, flap-jawed Dickerson.”
Tim gasped at this; although I’d already half-determined our cover was up. It wasn’t that hard to get the lowdown on us if a fellow did his homework. Talcott might be humorless, but he was one determined con. He’d played dumb during the entire reading. Rotten bastard.
“What specific information on her are you after?” I asked him.
“Where her place is in Manhattan. Where she keeps a special book called a grimoire.”
“What’s a grimoire?” I asked. “And what does it look like?”
“It’s just a silly name for a book, that’s all,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand at seeing Tim frown in confusion. As for me, the term sounded vaguely familiar, but I had no clue what it meant. Filing it away in my memory, I planned to look it if we ever got out of here. “It’s green, made of unusual fabric, not leather, but thick,” Talcott revealed. “It has a star on the front with some symbols—a design of circles and signs.”
“What’s in the book and why do you want it so bad?” Tim asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing of any concern to you, nothing to bother your palooka little head with.” In a resolute tone, he added, “So, what’ll it be? We’re busy men, are we not?”
“We’ll do it,” I said. “We’ll get you information on Miss Bone, no questions asked.” I did have questions, of course—why Alyse? She must have some power that threatened him—in Belmar real estate, in her ability to ruin him? I would find out. But for now, I stepped forward again until our noses were practically touching. “Now, give me that wire recorder and those spools.”
“Hold on.” Talcott stood unmoving by the locked door, his gangly limbs acting like boards nailed across the door. “I said after you get the goods on Ms. Bone.”
“I should blow your fool head off,” Tim muttered. He glowered at me to make it clear that it was not how he would have handled the mission.
But I knew the depths of depravity to which the Circle cult could go if provoked. Gertie’s hellish journey into depression and addiction at their cruelty was proof enough. Playing along was the best way to get the recorder back in one piece. Plus, I’d already determined to interrogate Alyse on my own.
Talcott unlocked the door, and we galloped down the stairs. Never was it more of a keen, dark joy to leap into Tim’s car, flick on his static-filled radio, and blast away from Belmar.
Chapter 17
OPAL AND I headed to the beach. This time, Dulcie couldn’t join us, to my secret relief. For the time being, I wouldn’t have to negotiate the tension-filled spaces between my two friends. Yes, Opal was becoming a friend. She was shy and unsure, awkward, and sometimes at a loss for words, yet she possessed a quiet wisdom. I guessed she was what people called an “old soul”. I felt it when she lovingly ran a damp cloth over Peter Dune’s leather-bound books, and when I caught her staring at me with her luminous eyes as if she saw something important in me that I didn’t even see in myself. I heard it when she offered a profound wisdom after a long silence. She’d impressed me first when she’d described so clearly Tim’s resentment of Peter’s power. She’d shown her insight when she insisted I had powers.
Funny, I felt her powers too.
We packed turkey sandwiches, and I splurged on cold Moxies and a bottle opener at Woolworth’s so we didn’t have to depend on Dulcie being there as a luncheonette waitress and top popper. Weaving our way through lounging young couples, mothers and their toddlers filling buckets with sand, and men smoking pipes, we spread one of the hotel’s thin blankets on a flat, dry expanse and settled in. After sandwiches and a bit of sunbathing, I was longing to leap into the surf again.
So far, I only knew how to swim well in still water. But oddly, I wasn’t scared of the ocean anymore. Something out in its depths was driving me on, a secret part of me, coming alive. Where the outer waves met my deep inner sea, I had no boundaries, no jetties to crash into, or possibility of drowning.
I stood and adjusted my swimsuit. “I’m going in, Opal. You want to swim too?”
Her face warmed into a gentle grin. “I’ll be here. I’ll keep an eye out for you, Fiera.” Darn if she didn’t sense correctly I wanted to explore on my own and was just being polite to invite her to swim.
“Thanks. Hopefully, I won’t forget my lessons and I’ll be good this time.”
“You’ll be good,” she echoed.
I walked to the water’s edge and strode in, feeling the foam curl around my ankles, then thighs. Twisting sideways when the waves barreled in, I broke their force against my willing hip. And then I was past the breakers and out into deeper, rolling water. I slid down until my chest was submerged, and I began to do the breaststroke, kicking my legs out and back, frog style. Only that first plunge was unnerving. I soon took to it, forging a path parallel to the surf. Before I knew it, I was further out than anyone else was. This felt so natural—why had I ever been scared? A breeze spiraled around me. Some uncanny sound was mixed up in it—like a flute, or a bell.
“Come, come, come,” an unseen maiden sang. Treading water the way Dulcie had taught me, I spun around to see who was behind me. There was no one.
The song again! I cocked an ear to the wind to determine where it was coming from. It wasn’t that I actually heard it out loud. It was inside me, in my head. Was I going insane? No. I felt fine; I’d woken with a clear head, and had a sane conversation with Opal earlier.
The singing was directing me down, underwater. I breathed in as much air as I could and dove. Propelling myself forward, I clasped my hands together as if in prayer, and scissored my legs the way Dulcie had instructed.
I wasn’t worried anymore. The invisible ocean lady called to me in buoyant song. “Come out, out to where you belong. Collect what is yours,” she appealed. If her voice were a color, it would be turquoise and the gleaming pink of scallop shells when they were dipped in water.
“What’s mine?” I asked her, not with my voice, but with an inner questioning. I know she heard me because she answered me.
“It’s been yours since you were thirteen. We’ve been keeping it safe for you, locked away from thieves who would try to steal it before you could claim it. We’ve hidden it from everyone, even your family.”
“But I don’t have a family.” Tears pricked my eyes, even underwater.
I couldn’t see her, but I sensed a female presence gazing at me with compassion and sadness. “Yes, you do.”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
“My mother?” I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. “Who is she?”
“She’s quite powerful,” was the woman’s cryptic answer. I asked her again, but she gave me the same response.
“What is it you have hidden for me?” I sent her this question as I shot forward, still not needing to take a breath. Still lost in a whorl of briny magic and periwinkle bubbles.
The strange emerald glow I’d seen from a distance that first time when I almost drowned shimmered up ahead—alluring, hypnotizing. What could it be? As I darted forward, my lungs began to burn. Still, I persisted, cutting smoothly through the water, as if it were honeyed air, honeyed everything and more.
I was closing in on the otherworldly lantern when I saw her—what was she—the ghost of a drowned swimmer, an apparition, a mermaid, or ocean goddess floating by the light? Her whole being was glowing green. She wore a long, gauzy gown, and her lovely, heart-shaped face held dancing eyes and a warm, beckoning smile. She waved me on as she hovered by the light set in the rocks beside her. My chests tightening, I slowed my pace to keep from crashing into a rock formation rising from the ocean floor. Strange, it wasn’t a manmade breakwater; it looked more like a castle made of dark coral. Now that I was only yards away, I saw it was a construct of boulders that were jagged and jutted out at all angles.
“Come closer,” sang the beautiful green apparition, half solid, half transparent. Her seaweed hair coiled and danced around her shoulders, side-lit by the glinting beam. She beckoned to me again with an elegantly turned hand. “Come here, sweet Fiera.” Was she truly friendly or some devious Greek Siren luring me to my death? My chest seized up in terror.
As if waking out of a profound sleep, I remembered how very deep underwater I must be. Looking up, I saw only a tiny globe of sun undulating miles away, above the surface. My heart stuttered. And I faltered, as I’d done that perilous time before. I struggled not to gulp in cold, briny water. Taking in only a few drops, even that froze and then seared my lungs. Before panic took complete hold and I inhaled a pitcher’s worth of deadly water, I shifted upward. I pumped my limbs like mad, starting the long, desperate journey to the surface. Halfway up, an unaccountable calm spread through me.
“Come back, come back,” the sea goddess sang ruefully from below. I could see her in my mind’s eye as clearly as if she were swimming right in front of me, leading the way to the surface.
Next time, I promised her without words.
This was what life was all about, my real life, I realized. Everything else before this was a sun-bleached preface. I wasn’t sure how I knew this, but I was certain of it.
When my head burst above the waterline, I gulped in air, shaking out my hair and dripping eyelashes like a sea otter that had always lived in water.
My strokes were sure as I swam in, curving my body like a smile over each breaker.
In two separate rowboats, lifeguards rowed swiftly toward me, concern on their tanned faces.
“Are you all right, missy?” a lifeguard asked as his vessel reached me. He stretched out his hand.
I nodded but didn’t take it. Bobbing slightly over the next wave, I said, “I’m fine.”
“Don’t you need a ride the rest of the way?” he asked with raised brows.
“I can manage. Thanks.”
The second lifeguard had muscles that flexed with each stroke. “Your friend said she lost sight of you for ten whole minutes,” he called. “What happened?”
I had no answer for him. Looking over his shoulders, I realized Opal was standing on shore, urgently waving. Her reddened cheeks showed she’d been crying. A pang of guilt went through me. How could I have forgotten my dutiful friend out there on the beach? How could it be the ocean had called to me so strongly that it had erased everything else?
“I’m okay, Opal,” I yelled and waved to her. Leaping over the last breaker that separated us, I ran to her and practically crushed her in a hug.
“I’m so relieved.” She hugged me back with her skinny arms. “I knew you’d be okay, Fiera. I knew it.” Her terrycloth robe was sopping by the time I let go.
“I’m more than okay,” I admitted to her after the lifeguards returned to their wooden platform and the shocked crowd went back to their beach doings.
“What happened out there?” Opal asked when we were once again sitting on the hotel blanket.
“Something important, Opal, something grand and mysterious. I’ll tell you all I saw.” My spirit was soaring. Could she see it written on my face the same way I’d heard the sea goddess’s silent words? “I don’t pretend to know what it is yet.” I gave Opal a mischievous grin that matched the happy flutter of my heart. “But I’m going to find out.”
Chapter 18
I HURRIED DOWN the trash-laden Philadelphia street and up the splintered tenement steps, letting myself into my sister’s apartment with the key she’d given me years before. The only way to see clearly how she fared was to make a surprise visit. I clenched my jaw, hoping against hope that the Circle folks were wrong, and Gertie wouldn’t be nodding out from a dreadful narcotics-filled syringe sticking out of her pocked arm… or worse. I stood for a moment in the foyer, my ear cocked for sounds of movement. It was far too quiet. Oh, God, no.
I tiptoed into the living room. Peered around at the clothes flung in places they didn’t belong. My gaze drifted to the couch. There she was. One arm hung down toward the floor, and her head tilted at an awkward angle toward the backrest. Was I too late? Oh, Lord! I rushed forward and shook her.
She shuddered, and her eyes blinked open. They stared at me without recognition, shot through with tiny, broken veins. Her hair was unkempt and her cheeks were a bit sunken. But she was alive, and that was all that mattered. “Peter?” Her gaze gradually focused on me, and her brows lifted. “Peter?”
I leaned over and hugged her. “Dear Gertie, you’re all right.” She’d merely been asleep.
In about ten minutes' time, I’d made us tea from the stale bags in her kitchen. She sat up, sipping it in a chipped family cup strewn with violets.
She’d managed to pull a natty shawl around her shoulders and arrange her hair with some clips. I had no intention of telling Gertie all the gory details of the Circle’s dire reading, or my present trouble in Asbury with Dickerson. Clearly, she had enough troubles of her own. I reassured her I had gainful employment and I’d simply found time and money to take the train down from New York and pay her an overdue visit. She seemed satisfied with that information, nodding and sipping her tea.
“Would you like to move up to Jersey? Why don’t you let me set you up in an apartment there?” I asked her for at least the tenth time. “It would be much easier to see you. I could keep an eye on your welfare, make sure you have food in your pantry, and—”
“No!” Gertie practically shouted. She might be half-disintegrated, but she was still stubborn as all get out. The drugs hadn’t taken that from her. “I like living in Philadelphia,” she said. “We grew up here, Pete. I can’t leave.” Now she looked on the verge of tears.
I patted her bony shoulder. “Don’t worry, Gertie. I won’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go. This place is all paid up, and I’ll make sure the money keeps coming in.” I sighed, afraid of her answer to my next question. “So, um… how are you spending your days?”
She shrugged. “I sit here. I knit socks.”
“You’re not doing any more… things you shouldn’t, are you?”
Gert beamed as she shook her head. “No, Pete. No more opium. No morphine. No more anything. I’m clean.” She held out her arms. They were blessedly clear of marks, other than her old scars.
“Oh, thank, God, Gertie.” Another worry drifted in. “Do you have a friend here, someone to talk to?”
Pride brightened her face. “The lady down the hall is very nice. She brings me dinner.”
“Oh, that’s marvelous, Gert, really.” It was more than I had hoped for, another soul caring about her welfare. “What’s the nice lady’s name?”
“Miss Aberdeen.”
“Well, you tell Miss Aberdeen I truly appreciate her generosity. Will you?”
Gertie nodded.
I pulled out my billfold, counted out one hundred dollars, and separated them into two piles. “Keep this eighty for yourself,” I said, tapping the larger stack. “Give Miss Aberdeen the smaller amount, you hear? Make sure she gets twenty dollars for her efforts.”
