The Shield of Darius (2 page)

TWO

Katherine Sager felt none of her husband’s amusement as she walked slowly through the ruins of Sherborne Castle. But she did feel the sadness. She could hear her grandfather rocking slowly in front of the fire in the parlor of his rambling red brick home in Endicott City just west of Baltimore, remembering the old country.

“I tell ya, Katie,” he would say, his brogue as musky after thirty years as it had been the day he stepped off the boat from Dublin. “It’s a sad day in Ireland!”

He would look wistfully into the orange glow of the growing pile of embers and draw long melancholy puffs of fragrant purple smoke from his gnarled burl pipe. “There’s naught left for a lad to do there, Katie. Such a lovely place, and it’s goin’ to ruin.”

This wasn’t Ireland of course, Kate thought as she pulled Jennifer closer to her side and looked up at the broken overhang of the ruin’s northwest tower. But it felt like it. Tuesday they would catch the Pembroke ferry for County Cork and she would finally see Ireland for herself. Times had changed for the better, but it must be like this. Strength given way to decay in a land of soft green fields and quiet streams.

“Mom, let’s sit down. My legs are killing me.” Jenn tugged at her arm, pulling her to a large flat stone that sat in the castle’s open courtyard. “Where’s PJ? I think he must be with Dad.”

“They’ll find us if we just sit right here. Let’s rest until they come. It’s almost time to go.”

Jenn seemed satisfied and plopped down on the stone, collapsing as though she might never move again. Kate smiled and stroked her daughter’s short-cropped dark hair. Jenn was more bored than tired. Somehow Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral hadn’t appealed to her in quite the same way they had to Kate. At Stonehenge, Jenn had circled the monoliths at a slow saunter, taking pictures with her iPhone and complaining that she couldn’t go into the circle, then sat in a moody funk until the rest of them were ready to leave. Getting to the sea tonight might bring the girl back to life.

Jenn rocked backward and laid her head in her mother’s lap, looking up at the woman’s face with unveiled admiration.

“Am I pretty as you, mom?”

Kate laughed and brushed a wisp of hair from her daughter’s cheek.

“Prettier. You were spared my freckles and big mouth.”

“Dad likes your mouth. One day I heard him say that you had hot lips.”

“You did, did you?”

Jenn nodded seriously and studied her mother’s features from below. “He was talking to Uncle Raymond and they were saying what they liked best about you and Aunt Mary.”

Kate arched her brows. “And what else did they say?”

“Nothing,” Jenn shrugged. “They saw me listening and shut up.”

“You know too much for your age anyway,” Kate said, thinking how much more quickly girls were growing up than when she was twelve.

“I know I want to look like you,” Jenn said. “You’re pretty.”

As Kate Sager sat on the rock in the courtyard of Sherborne Castle, she
was
pretty. The week in the camper had released the natural wave in her ebony hair, and she hadn’t put on makeup since Coventry. But her large eyes that tended toward an emerald green in the late afternoon light and her mouth that was more full than large, seemed to improve as they returned to their natural state. Jenn took after her, just as PJ was a clone of his father. Kate knew as she looked down at her daughter that Jenn would become a beautiful woman.

Kate had not grown up pretty. At Jenn’s age, Katie Fitzgerald had been awkwardly tall and gangly with wavy black hair that seemed to have an aversion for barrettes and was in constant disarray.  To the boys in the Dundalk neighborhood of east Baltimore where she had been raised as the youngest daughter of an Irish longshoreman, she had been “the scarecrow.”

“Don’t let the scarecrow touch you! She’ll give you the cooties,” the neighborhood boys shrieked and sent her running home in tears. Her mother would fuss and insist her father chase the hooligans down and throttle them. But the big dock worker simply wrapped his girl in his burly arms and assured her that someday they would be chasing after her. He saw in his daughter what the girls in the neighborhood sensed. Someday Katie Fitzgerald was going to be serious competition. By high school her classic features had grown into themselves, but it was too late for the boys of Dundalk. She dated only occasionally, and had decided she wanted college and a career.

“You’re dreamin,’ lass,” her mother said when Kate announced following a school career day that she intended to have her own business. “It’s hard enough for a girl to get a good teaching job here in Dundalk. You need to be thinkin’ about settling down and startin’ a family.”

“I’m not staying in Dundalk. And I can wait to have a family.”

“And who said you could be goin’ off somewhere else?” her mother retorted.

Again the big dock worker interceded.

“Don’t be placin’ your own burdens on your daughter, Elsie,” he said, and Kate’s mother fumed and spouted and left the two alone to talk.

“You’re bitin’ off a big bit o’ ambition,” he said, looking at her so directly that she knew this was going to be one of his serious talks. “There’s still not much room for a woman from Dundalk in the world o’ business, and it’s a mean one. You’ll have to fight for everything you get.”

“I don’t want to fight for it,” she said. “I just want to be good enough to deserve it.”

“You can be too. But you’ll still need to be plenty tough. Deserving it won’t be enough, and some bloke’s not going to move over and make room for ya’.” Until he died, her father had kept Elsie Fitzgerald from smothering the girl’s ambition, and Kate had remembered his warnings.

She found Ben Sager on the baseball diamond at the University of Virginia where her high school grades and SATs earned her a full ride in business. She was drawn to the field by her father’s obsession with the game, a passion he had passed along to Kate after her older brother rejected the American pastime for football. Together, Kate and her father had gone to every weekend Orioles’ game for four seasons, crammed into the right field bleachers where the Irishman recounted the exploits of Cal Ripkin Jr. and Frank and Brooks Robinson to anyone seated nearby who would listen. Kate shared his joys during the Orioles’ glory years, and his anguish when what seemed like a dream year ended in a stunning defeat in the play-offs. When his heart and liver finally succumbed to relentless abuse, she continued to go on her own, so captivated by the game that her passion prompted a teenage letter to the editor defending Earl Weaver when the Baltimore
Sun
lambasted the manager for moving Ripken to shortstop. The next season both she and Earl were exonerated when young Ripken won the MVP award. Kate loved the game and everything about it.  

Ben had also been in the College of Business, a second year MBA student who had tried his luck at professional baseball after a sparkling college career, but learned after three grueling years in the minor leagues that he had neither the talent nor the disposition for big league baseball. He had come to Virginia to pursue his second passion – information systems design. To the chagrin of the College of Business, Ben had declined an assistantship with the business school and accepted one with the baseball team coaching the infield. Kate came to the first few scrimmages to get a feel for the year’s talent and found herself watching the new assistant coach instead. He was exotically handsome with dark, deep set eyes, smooth well-defined features and black hair that seemed to naturally fall into place. His finely muscled body moved effortlessly in his uniform, and Kate watched him exercise the infielders with open admiration.

Her late teens had done wonders for her own face and figure. Gangling had become statuesque, and her mouth and eyes now turned the heads of every man she passed on campus. They also brought the infield coach out of the dugout for special fielding demonstrations, then into the bleachers to talk baseball, then business, and finally more personal interests with his most ardent fan. Kate found in Ben a man who thought she was beautiful, respected her independent nature, admired her business sense, and loved her companionship. She kept him a secret until her senior year, then took him home to meet Elsie. The rest – despite her mother – was history. A wonderful history.

“Mom! Jenn! You oughta see this hole in the ground over here.” PJ sprang around the corner of what remained of the west range of the castle and dashed across the lawn. “They’ve dug out this place and you can see old steps going down and everything!”

“Where’s your father?” Kate asked. “I thought you were with him.”

“He’s down by the river. I saw him a minute ago.”

“We’d better find him and get started. We want to stay at the seashore tonight, and it’s a couple of hours away.”

She eased Jenn up, and the three started for the small ticket booth that stood beyond the main gate.  

After scouring the castle grounds for more than an hour searching for her husband, Kate drove to the constabulary in Sherborne village. The constable, a ruddy-faced man with a thick rusty mustache and bushy brows, was polite and sympathetic, but didn’t seem overly concerned.

“Oh, I suspect he’s just wondered off. Got himself a bit turned about and soon he’ll find his way back to the castle. You’d be surprised how many tourists we lose for a few hours. In fact, he’s probably back there now waitin’ for ya.”

“Ben’s not a man who gets himself ‘turned about,’” Kate said emphatically. “He’s lived all over the world and has been through Dorset before. He didn’t just get lost. And we looked over every inch of that castle grounds before we came here.”

“So what do you think happened?” The officer’s unruffled good nature added to Kate’s frustration.

“I don’t
know
what happened. That’s why I’m here. He just…disappeared! I’d insisted he leave his cell phone in the van so he wouldn’t be tempted to be on it all the time we were at the castle, but he was expecting a couple of important calls this afternoon. It was still in the van and he wouldn’t have taken off without it.”

“And just before you got ready to leave the castle, your son saw him standing by the river. Was he alone?”

“Yes. We didn’t see anyone else the whole time we were there – except the woman in the ticket booth.”

“Well, if you’re concerned he fell into the river, I wouldn’t be worried about that. As shallow as it is there, he wouldn’t get more than his ankles wet.”

Kate hesitated. “Could someone have taken him?” she suggested, trying to mask the quiver in her lip. “He wouldn’t just disappear like that.”

“Taken him
?
” The officer’s smile was patronizing.

“Yes. Something like that.”

“But you said no one else was at the castle.”

“I said we didn’t
see
anyone else. But the little woman in the ticket office said she heard another car come into the lot. She couldn’t see it from where she was, but said it stayed about ten minutes, then drove away.”

“Did she see your husband get into the car?”

“As I said, she didn’t even see the car! The booth doesn’t face the lot and she was watching something on TV. We had to get her attention to even buy our tickets, but she did say she heard it. Wondered why no one came to buy tickets.”

“Could someone have gone around the ticket booth without being seen, kidnapped your husband and dragged him back to the car?”

“Oh I don’t know.” Kate felt her throat tighten and tears begin to well in the corners of her eyes. “I just know he wouldn’t wander off. And whoever stopped didn’t come into the castle grounds. What were they doing there?”

“They may have taken a look at the ruins and decided it wasn’t worth paying to go inside. There really isn’t much you can’t see from the lot. And do you know of a reason someone would want to kidnap your husband?”

Kate shrugged. She wasn’t sure herself. “We have a successful business that deals in high tech development...,” she offered

The constable scratched his chin in an exaggerated show of thoughtfulness. “If I were a kidnapper, I think I would have taken one of the children. That’s more often the pattern. And why in England? Does anyone here know you have this successful business?”

“Some of the people at our Leeds office….” The whole thing didn’t make any sense to her either, and the more she talked about it, the less clear it all seemed.

“And isn’t it a bit odd that someone would follow you all the way down here from the north to kidnap your husband?”

Kate slumped forward with her face in her hands, feeling as though someone had pulled a plug at the bottom of her feet and drained her energy and will. They had stayed at the castle until almost five-thirty, searching until they were all exhausted, then driven into the village to the station. By some stroke of luck, Kate had driven to Sherborne from Salisbury and had the van keys in her purse.

“I don’t know what happened to him,” she sniffled. “I just know that he isn’t lost.”

The constable stood and walked around his scarred oak desk, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Leave a picture with me if you have one, and I’ll send it to the villages about. Then go back to the castle. He may have found one of the pubs nearby and was with some lads havin’ a pint. If he hasn’t shown up there, find a place to stay. There’s a caravan park a mile past the castle on the other side of the road, and I’m certain he’ll be back soon. Men sometimes have a way of taking a bit o’ time off by themselves. There’ll be some simple explanation.”