Virtue Falls (16 page)

“And thank God they’ve got you.” Elizabeth filled her own plate. “It’s good of you to accept us refugees.”

“The good people who work for me, and you, are a blessing on my house.”

“I don’t know how much of a blessing I will be. I don’t have any clothes.” Elizabeth settled in the chair, spread a slice of crusty bread with marmalade, and placed a slice of Brie atop.

“Guests leave things all the time, and sometimes they don’t want them back,” Margaret said comfortingly. “We always have a stack of clothes to go to Goodwill. We’ll find you something.”

Elizabeth chewed, swallowed, and said, “Thank you,” although whether for the food or the clothes, Margaret did not know. Then, as if she couldn’t drop the subject of Garik, Elizabeth said, “I mean, really. Did he have to always be the hero? Couldn’t he simply sometimes be a man?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Margaret sipped her mimosa and meditated on Elizabeth’s obsession with Garik. Promising. Very promising.

Elizabeth continued, “All I wanted was a man who I could love and who loved me, who I could share my secrets with and know his.”

“He is private,” Margaret acknowledged. “He doesn’t like to talk about things that hurt him.”

“But I’m not psychic. If he wouldn’t talk, how was I supposed to figure out what
did
hurt him?”

“He doesn’t like cruelty to those who are helpless.” None of that fancy French cheese for Margaret—she piled clotted cream onto her bread.

“Children. Yes.” Elizabeth leaned forward. “When he dealt with cases where a child was hurt, he got very quiet.”

“His own childhood was difficult.” An understatement. Margaret ate her bread and watched Elizabeth think.

“I gathered from the few tidbits he dropped that his father was an alcoholic?”

“Did you never ask Garik about his childhood?” Margaret countered.

“Every time I did, he led me to talk about mine.” Elizabeth leaned back with a sigh, and drank her mimosa with thirsty pleasure. “It took me a while to realize what he was doing, never allowing me to know him.”

“No matter how unreasonable it is, the boy blamed himself for what happened to him.” Margaret was sprinkling conversational bread crumbs, hoping Elizabeth would follow them back to Garik, and a heart-to-heart that would bring them back together.

“What
did
happen?”

“You should ask him.”

Like a stubborn mule, Elizabeth set her jaw. “He’s gone. We’re divorced. It was better that way.”

“Better for who? Not for him. He’s lost his wife and his job, and I think the two are connected.”

“Better for me. I may be selfish, but in the end, living with him was like being in a five-star restaurant”—Elizabeth waved at the tray—“watching the food go by, smelling the scents wafting under my nose, knowing I was so close to heaven … and starving to death.” For the first time, Margaret saw misery settle onto Elizabeth’s shoulders. “He wouldn’t talk, so I wouldn’t talk. So he stopped listening, so I … left.”

Margaret hurt for them both. “I had hoped you children would love and help each other.”

“We did love each other. So much. That made it all the more painful, to live together, yet be apart, only touching in our bodies, never in our minds.”

“In your souls?” Margaret leaned her head back and allowed herself the old-woman pleasure of reminiscing. “When I first married my Johnnie, he didn’t know what to do with me. He was older. I was very young. He was bone lazy. I worked like a dog. He wanted a playmate. I wanted a man. It took about ten years of me doing what I thought best and him thinking he could go on being the dilettante, but eventually we worked things out.” She smiled. “When I came to the United States with my dear Mrs. Smith, I saw Johnnie as a means to an end, a way to achieve wealth and security. And he was. That we became soul mates was an unforeseen bonus.”

Elizabeth took the bowl of blueberries and raspberries and ate as greedily as a child. “These are fabulous.”

“They’re local to Washington, best in the world.” Margaret waved a hand. “I don’t want them. Please finish them.”

Elizabeth obeyed in record time, and put the bowl down. She blotted her mouth, and said, “I don’t have your patience, waiting on a relationship that may never mature.”

“You’re not Catholic. Johnnie and I were married, and I was stuck with the man. We were like two angry cats in a burlap bag. We had to work it out.”

“Garik and I had very different careers pulling us in different directions.” A wisp of a smile crossed Elizabeth’s face. “We’re not stuck in the same bag.”

Yet.
Margaret chuckled. Because Garik was on his way.

“What’s so funny?” Elizabeth asked.

Margaret lied easily; at her age, she had plenty of experience with it. “I was merely remembering my own refugee experience. Very different from yours, and linked to the Smith family heirloom.” She gestured to the case in the corner. “It’s called the Singing Bird, bought by Mr. Smith for the first Mrs. Smith to express his joy at the birth of his first child, a son. He commissioned it from Tiffany’s when the Smiths were at the height of their wealth and power.”

Elizabeth set her plate aside, and walked over to the case where the exquisite piece of jewelry rested against a black velvet background. Clasping her hands behind her back, she leaned forward slowly, her eyes fixed on the piece. “A mythical bird. A phoenix.”

“Exactly. The plumage is emeralds and rubies, the eyes are aquamarines, and the bird stands on the justly famous seventeen-carat Smith emerald.” Margaret had been familiar with the piece for seventy-six years.

“Whoa.”

“That is exactly what I thought when I first saw it. I was a chambermaid in Dublin at the time. I had no idea then I would be traveling back to the United States with her.” Actually, the Singing Bird had been Margaret’s ticket out of Dublin and poverty, but she had no intention of ever telling the truth of that story. “I keep it on display here. You’ll note the earthquake didn’t shatter the glass in that case. Nor will any earthquake. The glass is bulletproof, and that brooch is protected by the most up-to-date security in the world.”

“Why not place it in a museum?”

What a ripe old disaster that would be.
“I’m a selfish old woman. I like to look at it in the morning, when I rise, and at night, before I go to bed. Johnnie and I had four children, and they all went on to do God’s will and populate the earth, and some of my descendants say that with the brooch up here, it’s safe enough and I shouldn’t bother paying the security firm to protect it. Those are the same members of the family who, when they visit, I lock up the silver.”

Elizabeth looked startled, then horrified, then, when Margaret laughed, she laughed, too.

Droll and amused, Margaret said, “We like to say they must be in-laws, but in fact, every large family births a few of the light-fingered folk. It’s inevitable.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” With a last glance at the brooch, Elizabeth returned to her seat. She took another sip of mimosa and nibbled on a cookie. “Some people envy whatever others have, be it belongings or intelligence or happiness.”

Margaret put her plate aside. “You sound as if you have some experience with that envy.”

“Yes.” Like a tired child, Elizabeth fretfully rubbed her forehead. “I don’t understand how it happened. One moment I was that poor, awkward kid who saw her father kill her mother. All the adults felt sorry for me and all the kids made fun of me, and my cousins beat up on me. The next moment I was fast-tracked for college, guys were hitting on me, and I got a gig in modeling.”

“Sounds like quite a successful puberty happened.”

“Yes.” Elizabeth’s mouth quirked. “But my cousins still made fun of me.”

“That seems cruel.” More than cruel, considering the circumstances. “Didn’t your aunt stop them?”

“My aunt was frustrated with me. I never did what she wanted.”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted me to remember the murder.” Elizabeth put down her mimosa, stood and stretched. “Thank you, that meal was good and I was hungry.”

“I like to see a girl with appetite. Now—help me make my weary way to the powder room.” Margaret gathered herself to stand. “Then you can have Miklós take the tray away.”

Elizabeth moved immediately at her side.

“Give me a little push.”

Elizabeth pushed.

Margaret strained. Between the two of them, they managed to get Margaret on her feet and into her bathroom.

God, she was tired. After this, she had to send Elizabeth away and stretch out for a nap.

But when she came out, the tray was gone and Elizabeth was on Margaret’s private balcony, leaning over the rail, head tilted, wearing a frown. “There’s debris down there from the tsunami, a whole pod of it sloshing on the swells in that inlet. I can’t figure out what that one object is. It looks vaguely…” She tilted her head the other way. “Vaguely … maybe human.”

Margaret made her way to Elizabeth’s side, and followed Elizabeth’s pointing finger. “Yes. You’re right. Get the binoculars, dear—they’re in the drawer—and take a look.”

Elizabeth fetched the binoculars and trained them on the mass of floating debris. “I can’t tell for sure. It looks like someone in an orange life vest, bobbing in the water. Dark hair, head drooping.” Abruptly she pulled the binoculars away from her face, blinked, then brought them back. “I think … I think that’s Kateri.” Her voice rose in excitement. “That’s … Kateri!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The wind blew, waves crashed at the base of the cliffs, a smear of pink clouds glowed against a pale blue sunset sky. The vapor trail of an airplane passed from east to west, leaving the continent and heading for the lush tropical islands or the structured orient, or beyond. The universe was indifferent to the small group of people who lined the cliffs beside Elizabeth, who prayed or cried, and watched as if Kateri’s life depended on it.

It didn’t. Elizabeth knew Kateri couldn’t be alive. Not after being rolled by the tsunami, snatched out of the cutter, and sucked out into the ocean. Not after so many hours in the frigid Pacific. But if they could at least recover her body, what a relief for her family and friends. Friends like Elizabeth.

Elizabeth used the binoculars to watch three of Margaret’s bravest employees motor through the tsunami debris field in a tiny launch. Massive logs, floating coolers, overturned boats were in constant motion, the ocean swells lifting them up … and dropping them down. A dislodged forest of kelp bound everything together. And in the middle, a bobbing piece of jetsam that looked so much like a human floating in a life vest …

Kateri. Could it really be her?

Elizabeth glanced up at Margaret, standing on her fourth-floor balcony watching intently. The old woman nodded encouragingly at her.

Elizabeth put the binoculars back to her eyes.

The crew signaled to Margaret—it was indeed human, a body. Then as they used the grappling hook to catch the life vest, the head rolled back.

It
was
Kateri.

Thank God. They had found her, and she wouldn’t be a name lost forever in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

Elizabeth scrubbed her tears away—it was not yet time for that—and focused again on the recovery.

All of a sudden, the launch was a flurry of activity.

Elizabeth stared harder, trying to figure out what had happened. Then someone shouted, “She moved. She moved!”

The crew now spared no attention for the onlookers, but grabbed Kateri’s arms and tried to pull her on board.

Even from this distance, Elizabeth heard her scream. The horrific cry made the horizon waver, and brought Elizabeth to her knees.

The crew had no choice. They had to bring her to shore. So they dragged her up and over the side into the launch.

Another of those screams reached across restless space.

Elizabeth experienced an anguish and a pity that almost broke her. Almost.

Instead, she found herself shouting, “We need a stretcher. Blankets. First aid. Down at the dock.” She glanced back at Margaret’s balcony.

Margaret had disappeared.

Elizabeth knew why—at the first sign of life from Kateri, Margaret reached for the ham radio to call in the helicopter and medics. “We’ve got to keep her alive until help arrives,” Elizabeth said to the circle of people around her.

They broke then, running toward the hotel, all of them showing the innovative attributes Margaret required of her staff.

When at last the launch escaped from the debris field and headed toward shore, Elizabeth hurried toward the crooked wooden stairway that led down the cliff to the dock. At the top landing, she met Harold Ridley, directing traffic. He handed her a blanket and the first aid kit and waved her on.

She ran down, two steps at a time, and got there as the launch was pulling up. Even as the crew was securing the boat to the dock, Elizabeth crawled aboard and tucked the blanket around Kateri’s shoulders.

Slowly, Kateri turned her head.

She looked as if she’d been beaten, slashed, and mangled. Her swollen, bloody lips were twice their normal size. Her bronze complexion had taken on a bluish cast. She must be suffering from hypothermia, and that perhaps was a good thing, sparing Kateri the worst of her pain.

But she saw Elizabeth, and recognized her, for her eyes blazed with unexpected, intense need. Her lips moved, and she whispered … something.

Elizabeth knelt beside Kateri and opened the first aid kit.

Kateri’s hand latched on to Elizabeth’s wrist. “Not yet. I’m not going to die. Not again.”

Elizabeth paused.

That voice. It was so changed. Kateri sounded like a longtime smoker, like someone whose voice had been taken by torment and returned in some different, ruined form.

The crew slowly climbed out of the launch and up the steps.

“Can I give you water?” Elizabeth asked.

“They gave me … now I want to tell you … I want to tell you what happened.”

But you’re hurt, maybe dying …
“Yes. Tell me,” Elizabeth said. For these might be Kateri’s last words.