Bernard Cornwell - Stormchild

I drove a full mile before putting on my lights and slowing down. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt like a fool. I had not panicked like that in years, not since David had pulled me off a rock face in the Dolomites where I had frozen in absolute terror. That had been over twenty years ago, and then I had at least had real reason for the fear, while tonight the panic had been entirely self-induced. My imagination had worked on my fears, turning von Rellsteb’s sinister face into a devilish threat that had never existed. I was still shaking.

I slowed down, worried that the truck driver might have alerted the police with his CB radio, but no patrol car waited for me as I drove back to the warren of Key West’s streets, nor as I at last parked in the small driveway of Charles’s guest house. I turned off the engine, then sat in the car for a few seconds, feeling the jackhammer beat of my still frightened heart.

The revolver had fallen off the seat when I skidded onto the highway. I groped on the floor for the weapon then, wearily, I climbed out of the car. The guest house was dark, though I was sure Charles would be waiting up for me, even if only to reassure himself that I had not damaged his beautiful Austin-Healey. I closed the car door.

Then, from the deeply shadowed porch behind me, I heard the scrape of a footstep. I turned in a renewed and terrible panic, realizing that of course they would ambush me here, where else? If I died here it would be written off as just another street crime, and so I ripped the gun from its holster, then half fell against the car as I twisted desperately away from the threat of whoever had been waiting for me in the darkness. I used both hands to raise the Ruger and pointed dead center at the shadow, which now moved toward me from the porch.

“No!” It was a girl, who flinched away from the threat of the gun, and who screamed at me in a panic every bit as frantic as my own. “No! Please! No! No!”

It was the girl from the conference, the girl in the yellow skirt, the girl who had obscurely made me feel glad to be alive. And I had almost shot her.

“Ihate guns!” The girl was gasping in her panic. “I hate guns!”

“It’s all right,” I said with an urgency equal to her terror, “it’s OK!”

“I hate them!” Her fear seemed out of proportion to its cause. She had twisted away so violently from the sight of the gun that she had dropped her huge, sacklike handbag, which had consequently spilled its contents across the path. “Have you put the gun away?” she asked in a stricken voice. She was still shaking like a sail loosed to a gale.

“It’s gone,” I said.

She dropped to her knees to retrieve the slew of notebooks, pens, tape cassettes, lipstick, chewing gum, and small change that had cascaded from her enormous bag. “Are you Tim Blackburn?” She turned her anxious face up to me.

“Yes”—I stooped to help her collect her scattered belongings—“and I’m sorry I frightened you.”

“You didn’t frighten me, the gun frightened me. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why didn’t you ring the doorbell and wait inside?”

“I telephoned,” she explained as she grabbed coins out of Charles’s flower beds, “and someone said you were out, but would be coming back later, so I came straight round here, but there were no lights on downstairs. I thought everyone must be in bed already and I didn’t want to disturb anyone. So I waited.”

“A long time?”

She nodded. “Long enough.”

“I thought journalists didn’t care about waking people up?”

She blinked at me in gratifying astonishment. “How did you know I was a journalist?”

“I noticed you at the conference,” I confessed, “and saw you had a press badge.”

“Wow!” Her amazement seemed to stem from the fact that anyone might have noticed her. She retrieved a last pencil and straightened up. “My name’s Jackie Potten. Actually my name is Jacqueline-Lee Potten, but I don’t use the Lee because it was my father’s name, and he left my mom when I was kind of little, and Molly Tetterman says she’s sorry she wasn’t at home when you phoned, but she was away in Maine because her son is in college there and she was visiting him all week, and she only got home today, and I phoned her tonight and she told me about your messages on her answering machine, and she asked me to talk to you, which is why I wanted to see you, and I’m sorry it’s so late, but I’m leaving tomorrow…”

“Whoa!” I held up my hands to check the impetuous flow, found my key, and opened the guest-house door. “Come and have a drink,” I told Jackie. I did not yet know her connection with the Genesis Parents’ Support Group or exactly why she wanted to see me, but there was something in her disorganized volubility that I liked. Her presence was also good for me because her vulnerability forced me to control the panic that raced had my own heart and filled me with an inchoate fright.

“I don’t drink alcohol or coffee,” Jackie informed me in an anxious voice, as though I might be about to force those poisons down her throat.

“Come in anyway,” I said.

“Tim!” Charles, hearing his front door open, shouted from the private parlor upstairs. He was waiting up for me, as I had assumed he would, so I gave him the news he really wanted to hear, which was that his precious Austin-Healey was unscratched.

“I didn’t expect you back so soon.” Charles, who was splendidly dressed in a Chinese silk bathrobe, appeared at the top of the stairs. “What happened?”

“He was early,” I said, then placed the gun on the hall table. “I didn’t need it, but thank you anyway.”

“And who on earth are you?” Charles imperiously demanded of Jackie Potten who, faced with the ethereal creature on the stairway, shrank back into the doorway.

“My name’s Potten,” she said, “Jackie Potten.”

“I assume,” Charles said haughtily, “that you are the person who telephoned earlier. You may wait for Mr. Blackburn in the guest parlor, and he will help me make a pot of coffee.” Charles walked slowly downstairs. “Come, Tim.”

As soon as we were in the kitchen Charles dropped his absurdly pretentious manner. “So what happened? Tell me!”

“Not a lot. He was early, we spoke, he took the letter, and then vanished. I didn’t learn a thing.”

“Is that all?” Charles was disappointed.

“That’s all.” I sat on a stool and shook my head. “I don’t know, Charles. For a time there I actually liked the bastard, then at the end I thought he was laughing at me.” I had also thought that von Rellsteb had wanted me dead, so that Nicole could inherit, but there had been no ambush, so even that theory was wilting.

“You don’t need coffee”—Charles saw the weariness in my face—“you want something stronger. Your usual Irish?”

“Please.”

Charles pulled open a cupboard and sorted through the bottles. “What do you know about that creature?” He waved in the vague direction of the parlor where Jackie Potten waited.

“She’s a journalist,” I explained, “and I suspect she must be interested in the Genesis community because she said Molly Tetterman told her about me. You don’t mind her being here, do you?”

He offered me a dramatic shudder. “Of course I mind. She’s such a drab little thing.”

“Drab?” I sounded offended. “I don’t think she’s drab at all.”

“You don’t? That hair? And that awful blouse? And the skirt? That skirt wasn’t tailored, Tim, it was a remnant from a chain-saw massacre! Here!” He tossed me a bottle of Jamesons.

“I think she’s rather appealing,” I said stubbornly.