The Last Will of Moira Leahy (14 page)

“What’s this?”

“Santa time.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s okay that you don’t have anything for me. Come on.”

“I do have something for you.” He tossed his napkin on the table. “It’s buried under a heap of clothes.”

I pushed the bag closer, persisted until he reached in and pulled out a leather-covered book. He looked through the pages, some lined, some blank. My muscles tensed when he said nothing.

“It’s an art journal,” I said.

“Thank you.” His smile seemed … sad. “I haven’t been drawing.”

My mood wilted a little more. “Oh. Bad gift.”

“No,” he said. “Perfect gift. I haven’t drawn, but I want to. I will.”

“No time?”

“Something like that.” He reached out and brushed his hand over my cheek. “You had a hair near your mouth,” he explained. “Friends help friends prevent hairballs, you know.”

I turned my head, and noticed that the television couple still writhed together on the table.

A WIDE WINDOW
and pair of rose curtains framed a segment of the city in my suite, a plush sage settee sprawled before it. The unconventional bed—two doubles separated by an inch or two but united by a single headboard—boasted a lavish display of pillows. The air carried a hint of lemon, a fan’s quiet purr. Kit had done well. I’d bring her back some good chocolate, enough to keep her blood sugar humming into the new year.

It finally hit me as I unpacked. I was sleepy. Dorothy-through-the-poppies sleepy. I attempted to calculate how long it had been since I’d had even a nap, and gave up, sinking into the delectable comfort offered by my mattress. All of my muscles cooed and sighed,
Yes, more
.

The phone rang. I growled at it. It rang again.

“Noel?” The door between our rooms stood ajar. “Do you need something?” He didn’t respond. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?” A long pause, then,

“Maeve Amelia Leahy, is that you?”

My insides went tight. “Mom? Everything okay? Did Dad make it home?”

“I just spent an hour on this phone trying to find you, because I wouldn’t believe what your father told me,” she said. “You left the country, but you wouldn’t come home? How much more untouchable can you become?”

My father shushed in the background: “Abby, don’t.”

Don’t listen to her
.

“Mom, I just—”

“I’m disappointed in you. In your choices,” she said, and I could almost detect honest letdown in her tone, simmering alongside her irritation. Of course she’d expect me to be in Maine, even if she’d spend her time ignoring me and the reasons I’d left. There was so much she’d never forgive. That she was wrong about nearly everything had probably never occurred to her, and I’d never bothered to set her straight—at first too stunned and hurt, and finally too proud to do so.

“Hey, did you say something?” Noel came through the doorway, but stopped when he saw the phone. “Sorry, I’ll go.”

“No, you don’t have to go anywhere,” I told him.

“Is that a man?” My mother’s voice cracked like thunder and brought with it a flash from my past:

A man? You disgrace this family. You’ve all left me, left me with—Find her! You have to find her!

Sometimes I still felt the sting of her palm on my cheek.

“Are you all right?” Noel again, and then my father. “Stop it, Abby! She went alone. Let me talk to her.”

“You’ve done enough, Jack! And she’s not alone, are you, Maeve?” More guilt. “How could you choose a man over your family at Christmas? How could you?”

It sounded like the phone knocked against something. I thought she’d hung up on me, until …

“Sweetheart?”

“Daddy?”

“I’m sorry, Mayfly. Is someone there? Noel?”

“Yes, Dad. Kit set it up. I didn’t know, but—”

Pots and pans banged in the background. I heard my father’s voice through a muffled phone. “Abby, go sit while I talk,” he said, then to me, “Did you get to your
empu?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Well. Go on and see Rome. Do whatever you’d like. Enjoy your time with Noel. Don’t worry about the rest of it.”

Stupidly, I nodded. “Good-bye, Dad.”

“All right, Mayfly. Bye now.”

Noel still stood before me. I couldn’t hold his gaze for more than a few seconds. All of me felt numb.

“I need some time before we go out,” I told him. “A nap.”

He nodded and left. The door between our rooms closed.

I hoped for a dreamless sleep.

I STOOD ON A GRASSY
knoll somewhere in Rome as cars battled for supremacy, and raced between statues of black and gray and red. I was not afraid. The
keris
lay across my back, and I knew what I had to do.

Find her, find her, you have to find her!

Find her, before time ran out.

“Moira! Moira!”

A huge bird hovered overhead, like a raven, but monstrous and deformed. It saw her when I did: the little girl with red hair atop a distant hill. Not Moira, but somehow, in this dream, she was. I ran hard, swerved around honking cars and frowning statues. Out of nowhere, a bus accelerated past me, headed for the crest.

“Moira!” I screamed. “Moira!” The
keris
on my back rattled in its sheath, and I pulled it free, ready to war with the bus.

I should’ve watched the bird. In one swoop, it seized the girl, clasped her in its hooked talons. I shouted Moira’s name again as the black-blood speck dissolved into the horizon, and everything—the cars, the bus, even the grass—vanished.

I stood alone in a void with a long, blue shadow. My own, I knew, but sickly somehow. I don’t know why I did it. I held the blade in both hands, pointed its tip toward the shadow, lifted my arms, and—

“Maeve? You all right?”

I opened my eyes. My throat felt raw.

“Hey, there.” Noel hovered close. “Have a nightmare?”

“Yeah.” I grasped at the edges of a lingering dreamworld. “I was just about to slay my shadow with the
keris.”

He chuckled. “The
keris
and the shadow. A Wareham favorite.” I pushed myself upright. “What are you talking about? Garrick never said anything about shadows.”

“It’s an old belief,” he said. “Stab the shadow of an enemy and he’ll die.”

“Oh.” Maybe I was still dreaming. “That’s true?”

“That stabbing shadows kills people? Of course it’s not true. It’s a myth, like all the other stories he told you.”

“I would’ve remembered if he’d told that one.”

“Maybe you read about it in that book or on your Internet.”

“I didn’t.” Questions about the
keris
mounded atop one another in my mind; I hoped I remembered them all when I met with the
empu
. “It’s late now,” he said, “and it’s the middle of the night back in New York. Let’s sleep and start over in the morning.” I wondered who he’d be in the morning—who we’d be. “Good night.”

“Good night. Noel?” He turned back to me. I twisted the sheet in my hand. “You think I’m crazy to come here, don’t you?”

“A little crazy.” He nodded. “But I think I’m glad.” I swore he mumbled something about inhibitions as he walked back to his room. Whether he meant his or mine, I couldn’t say.

Out of Time

Castine, Maine

OCTOBER 2000

Moira and Maeve are sixteen

The next day moved more slowly than even the one before, but eleven o’clock finally arrived. Moira waited again until the upstairs turned dark and quiet, then stepped outside. Ian didn’t say anything this time, just touched her hand. Not hearing Maeve’s name made it easier, somehow.

“I thought about you all day,” he said.

Moira staved off the impulse to bow her head; instead, she met his eyes, shadowed and intense. “I thought about you, too.” Some of those thoughts had lead to guilt, but everything—even her worst self-recriminations—faded at the memory of Ian’s kiss.

“So?” he said. “What are we doing?”

It would be easiest to show him her decision. Moira stood high on her toes and kissed Ian for long seconds. “My sister can’t know about this,” she said when she pulled back. “She’d be jealous.”

“No, she wouldn’t.” He kissed her neck. His lips felt warm.

Moira remembered the words she had to say. “I know her best. If this is going to happen, it stays secret. Never in front of my sister. I won’t hurt her that way.” She let the stranger within form these words and funnel them out of her mouth, and then followed the same alien instinct and pressed her hips against Ian’s. She felt only a little alarmed when he pulled her closer with his hands on her backside.

“We can meet every night after dark,” she said, eager to spill all the conditions. “But you can’t tell anyone, not even Michael. And when you see me any other time—at school or anywhere else during the day—you have to pretend we’re just friends.”

She missed the warmth of his mouth when he pulled back. “We’ve never been friends. And why not during the day? You don’t want to be seen with me? You embarrassed of me?”

“No. Oh, no. You’re perfect. You’re … charming.”

Ian laughed. “I’m not,” he said when Moira shushed him.

“You are to me.”

He didn’t argue further when she kissed him again.

Later, she snuck into bed, careful not to wake Maeve. She settled under her blankets and glanced out the window at a perfect full moon. Just as beautiful as her sister, the sun, but more … welcoming. Touchable. And the moon never burned the eyes of people who looked at her.

Moira slept as the moon shone on in her borrowed light.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MOUTH OF TRUTH

I
knocked on Noel’s door the following morning to no response, and then I tried the handle. It turned, but the only thing inside his suite was his suitcase. Maybe he’d gone for coffee.

Back in my room, I opened the map, lay it on the mattress. I hovered over it, lazily stroking the
keris
with one hand and sketching a path to Sri Putra’s with the other. Noel might not want to join me, but I intended to make my way back to the
empu’s
apartment and get answers to my growing list of questions ASAP.

What about pizza and gelato and mangy dogs and sheets on the line? What about getting a picture for your hall? What about culture and
avventura
? What about—

My eyes stumbled over the familiar:
Santa Maria in Cosmedin
. Why had Putra wanted me to see that place? Could it be that he worked there? Or maybe the place held answers and I’d have to puzzle them out like my own personal da Vinci code.

With a quiver of excitement, I grabbed my guidebook and looked up
Santa Maria in Cosmedin
. A church. Featured in the film
Roman Holiday
. A fountain and some temples sat across the street. The church had a famous drain cover shaped like a god’s face—
Bocca della Verità
, the Mouth of Truth. Well, there went my workplace theory; it seemed unlikely that a Javanese
empu
would choose to work in a Catholic church.

I read on, hoping to stumble over some form of illumination, until the phone rang.

“How’s the country?”

“Kit!” I smiled into the receiver. “How are you?”

“Buena!
That means ‘good,’ right?”

I laughed, sat on the bed by my map. “You got it.”

“Did Noel meet you?”

“Yes, and remind me to kill you.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“The single room. Not a good plan.”

“The hotel dude said there were two beds to a room. I just thought … well, never mind.”

“Exactly.” I looked at the bed beside mine—so close but still distinct—and wondered if I’d overreacted. “How are things there? Did you find your present?”

“Love the massage certificate, thanks!” she said. “Clever leaving it under Sam’s food. Don’t you trust me?”

“Nope. Are you going home to feed him?”

“Well,” she said, “I left a really big pile of food.”

“He’s going to leave you a really big pile of—”

“All right, all right. What about you? What have you seen?”

A comely Italian wielding a sledgehammer
, I thought, but Kit’s response to that would’ve been all too predictable. “Took a tour of Trastevere,” I said instead. “Lots of delicious smells and old buildings and people kissing on cheeks and all that.”

“And Noel? How is he?”

“Good.”

“Just good?”

“He’s … distant.” I flopped down on my back. “This whole thing caught him by surprise.”

“So go and buy something decent to wear. God knows your wardrobe couldn’t entice a man out of gentlemandom.”

“Who says I want to entice anyone?”

“I do, but you won’t do it with your clothes.”

She’d been such a polite, quiet girl growing up. No hint of the rottweiler she’d become. “All those long hours without sleep have turned you mean.”

“It’s called tough love, sweetie. Seriously, do you own anything that might not have been purloined from the closet of a ten-year-old boy? Or purchased at Unisex-R-Us?”

“Do we have one of those in Betheny? Cool,” I said, glancing down at my prone torso. Sure, today’s oversized cotton top was figure filtering, but I had a nice set of breasts in there somewhere. Thankfully, she changed the subject.

“How are you doing? Any weird noises?”

“Nothing weird.” I hadn’t even been aware of the music looping through me until she’d asked. Quiet, smoky blues.

“I found another neurologist for you. Hotter than the last one, just in case things don’t work out with Noel.”

“Kit—”

“Oops, gotta book.
Buenas noches!”

“That’s Spanish! For good night!”

My smile lingered even after I heard the dial tone, until I heard Noel’s phone ring.

“Oh no, you don’t.” I leaped from the bed, and ran to his room. I couldn’t give my matchmaking friend the chance to leave even a five-second message. “Kit—”

“Sorry, must have the wrong room,” said an unfamiliar male voice. English.

“This is Noel Ryan’s room,” I said.

“That’s who I’m looking for. Is he there?”

“No. No, I’m sorry. Can I tell him who called?”

“Jakes. He can reach me at—”

“Hold on.” I opened the desk drawer. Inside, a FedEx envelope bearing Garrick’s familiar bold penmanship seized my attention. Unopened. Unopened? I moved it aside, found paper and pen, jotted a phone number.

“It’s important he call me back,” the man said.

“I’ll be sure he does, Jake.”

“Jakes. As in
Mister
. But Jakes is fine.”

“Okay, Jakes. Mister. I’ll give him the message.”

I hung up and touched the envelope. Addressed to Noel in Paris. Sent weeks ago. Why hadn’t he opened it?

There was a knock at my door—a fervent one. “Maeve. Maeve, you there?”

Noel. I opened his door and peered down the hall at him.

“What’s up?” I asked, when relief flooded his face.

“Nothing.”

“Where were you?”

“Nowhere,” he said with a strolling tone as he stepped into his room. “Why are you in here?”

I squinted at him, not buying his sudden nonchalance but distracted by that FedEx package.

“I was here playing secretary. You just missed a call from a guy named Jakes.” I handed him the note, which he took and crumpled without even a glance. “Hey, he wants you—”

“I know what he wants.”

I put my hand on my hip. “What does he want?”

“For me to call him. I have his number. He knows it.”

“Who was he?”

“My bloody investigator. How the hell did he find me?”

A dozen questions leaped to mind, but Noel’s stone-cold expression warned I shouldn’t ask any of them. Besides, I didn’t like anyone prying into my secrets, so I’d try to honor his. I couldn’t deny wanting to pry a little, though. Okay, a lot.

I tried for levity. “Well, he
is
an investigator.”

“Remind me to fire him, will you?”

“He sounded nice enough.”

Noel grunted. “Enough about Jakes. Let’s forage for food. Breakfast or lunch.”

“You didn’t eat?”

“Nope, and I’m starved.”

“Then where did you—”

“You must be hungry, too,” he said. Getting better at evasion.

“Food first,” I agreed, “then let’s go to Putra’s. I think I’ve figured out a shortcut and—”

“Maeve.”

“What?”

“I thought you were going to wait to hear from him.”

“I’m impatient.”

“You’re also in Rome, and not Rome, New York. Rome flipping Italy. Go see some of it.” He paused. “Unless you’re a fraud. Maybe your Italian’s not as good as you say.”

I delivered him a long Italian monologue about his everlasting snit, and promised that if he didn’t get over it soon, I’d out him to his investigator and throw him into a Roman cab. I knew he didn’t understand a word of it.

“You can’t spend all your time chasing after that guy, and that’s the truth,” he said when I finished.

Truth. A Machiavellian thought took shape. All right, I told him. I knew just where I wanted to go.

WE STOPPED AT
a bistro filled with tall tables and stools, and gorged ourselves with chicken
panino
, roasted red pepper, mozzarella, and pesto sandwiches. It would be an understatement to say that Noel seemed distracted.

“Sorry?” he said for the fifth time during our conversation. I’d never had to repeat myself so much or had a companion look so often out the window. It wasn’t lost on me, either, that I should be pleased he wasn’t using his X-ray vision on me today, but that I wasn’t.

I rapped the table with a sugar packet, aggravated with us both. “What’s up? Worried your investigator will find you?”

“Jakes?” He made a face. All right, so that wasn’t it.

“Worried about wasting your time today? You have somewhere else to be? Maybe you don’t want to hang out.”

“Sure I do.” His eyes darted to the sugar packet, back to the window.

“Worried about letting me guide us through Rome? How about we hit a few antiques shops first?”

“What?”

I sighed—“C’mon”—and prodded him off his stool. “Let’s go.”

He perked up a little in the shops. One, spanned with brick columns and arches, looked like an extreme makeover of a former aqueduct. Gilded frames held tight to paintings hung on columns; and tables of all shapes and varieties were home to small vases, books, miniature statues, and silver pieces. There were wood-framed couches, children’s rockers and large dressers, standing mirrors and lamps. He was lost to it all, gathering finds and arranging to have them sent to Betheny. He came back to reality eventually, seemed to notice my twitchy legs and me.

“Sorry,” he said. “This isn’t exactly seeing Rome, is it?”

“No, not really.” I looked at him through the lattice framework of an old folding screen. “But I have a cure for that, if you trust me.” He was quiet for so long that I thought I’d have to repeat myself again.

“Noel?”

“Should’ve brought my sketchbook,” he muttered, and I took a big step back from the screen. He shook his head. “All right, Maeve.

Cure away.”

WITH THE MAP
in my hand and a fledgling’s confidence, I led us to Aventine Hill, where I was steeped in surreality. Here stood republican temples and kids tossing pebbles into the Tiber. I lay back in yellowing grass atop one of Rome’s seven hearts and admired riverbank trees—pines with sprigs just on top, pointing toward the sky as if paying homage to a sun god. Helios? No, he was Greek.

“Who’s the Roman sun god?”

Noel shrugged, his face framed in the long rays of some god whose name neither of us knew. Still distant. Still different. Maybe he’d understood my Italian diatribe after all.

“Come on.” I nudged him with my knee. “You’re Garrick Wareham’s grandson. Don’t tell me he didn’t make you take a class or two in mythology.” I thought I remembered him studying this at Betheny U, along with ancient civilizations and art history. Thinking back to those days always took me too close to the edge, though. Too close to Before, to the days of plenty and daydreams and hope and wholeness, when I’d pretended to be Alvilda, daughter of the king of Gotland.

“Why haven’t you done this before?” Noel asked, and I felt momentarily disoriented. I ran my palm over the grass.

“What?”

“Come to Rome. Gone anywhere. You speak so many languages, so why not?”

“I don’t know.” Clouds drifted in flocks today, and I found myself hunting for Alfred, the dragon who always eluded me. Maybe he only came out in Castine, for believers like Moira. “I guess I didn’t want to go it alone.”

A pause, then: “Sol.”

“What’s that?”

“The Roman sun god.”

I stood along with him, though I felt a little thrown, like a pebble skipped over the Tiber. “Thanks.”

We walked in silence until I knew my sense of direction hadn’t failed me again. There stood a fountain, a high bell tower, a church lined with archways and medieval windows.
Santa Maria in Cosmedin
. I knew
cosmedin
meant “decorative,” ornamental like cosmetics, but Santa Maria looked rather plain to me.

“Let’s stop here,” I said, trying for casual.

“Where’s here?”

“Let’s find out.” I led us past a sophisticated nativity scene to a portico and columned walk. There, at the end of it, sat a large, round, ancient face.
“Bocca della Verità,”
I said, like an introduction. “The Mouth of Truth.”

“Hmm,” he said.

I smiled. “Anyone who puts his hand into the mouth and tells a lie will have it snapped off by marble jaws.”

“Hmm.”

“Talkative today.”

“I never should’ve gotten out of bed this morning. I see that now.”

“So, go stick a hand in.”

“For what? I’m an open book.”

I clucked at him when he pocketed his hands.

“That’s mature.”

But it worked, because he stepped up to the mask, shot me a doleful look, then placed his hand inside the mouth. I wanted to know so much. Why was he ignoring his investigator? Why didn’t he open that FedEx? Why had he stopped sending me postcards?

“Why didn’t you finish my painting?” I asked.

“Your painting?”

“The one in your studio. Why didn’t you finish it?”

His jaw slackened. His hand fell.

“Hand in.” Good heavenly Sol, I couldn’t believe I’d asked about that. Still, now that I had, I would have my answer. I recalled the half-finished work, my frustration over finding it abandoned. “You’re speechless.”

“Just about.”

“That’s not an answer, you know.”

He hesitated. “I needed more material.”

“More paper? More paint?”

“More knowledge.”

“What—”

“Uh-uh.” He withdrew his hand. “You’ve had two questions already. My turn.” His smile expanded and drew up on one side—a man who knew the game now and wanted to play.