Anna Leonard - At Your Command

“But pretty,” she said, picking it up and holding it in her palm. The metal felt warm against her skin, and the diamonds seemed to flash even in the dim light still coming in from the windows, while the sapphire drew the eye into its depths, the color turning darker the longer you stared into it.

Should a brooch this small be so heavy?

Forcing herself to look away, Susannah found a cream-colored envelope in the white box: the kind you didn’t see any more except on wedding thank-you notes. Inside the envelope was a folded sheet of stationery, with a note written in ink, in beautiful, if shaky, script. “Your grandmother disagreed, but this belongs to you, now.”

Huh. “I suppose it makes sense,” Susannah said to Max, her thumb running the length of the pin thoughtfully, as though petting it. “Great-Aunt Zannah didn’t have any kids, never even married, so I’d be the only one to inherit, if this was a family heirloom. I suppose the money went to a charitable cause, or something. But why wouldn’t Grandma want me to have it?”

Max’s ear twitched in his sleep, but he had no answer.

A quick Internet search had turned up no information about the brooch, which had no markings on the back to indicate marker or origin. She fell asleep with it resting in its box on her night table, and dreamed of rain-slicked streets she had never been to, old-fashioned automobiles and faint hints of music, and under it all the sound of a voice in her ear, whispering something important that, when she woke up, she could not remember.

Susannah wasn’t at her best in the morning, and the dreams had left her even more muzzy-headed, as though she hadn’t slept at all. Coffee and a hot shower helped, but she got dressed by rote, sliding into a pair of gray pinstripe slacks and silk top with a Mandarin collar—slightly dressier than she normally would wear to the office. A quick glance in the mirror as she fixed her hair into its usual neat ponytail, and she stopped for a long moment, considering.

“I shouldn’t, until I have it appraised,” she said to her reflection. “I really shouldn’t.” But even as she was debating, her hands were taking the pin out of the box where it rested on her dresser, and attaching it to her collar, fastened at her throat.

She had never been the wear it immediately sort, but the desire to use the pin was too strong to resist, as though it were a crime to leave it hidden in the box a moment longer.

The whispers started almost immediately after.

She noticed it first in the car. Barely audible; she had thought at first the open window had picked up a man’s voice outside when she stopped for a light, but then it happened again, when she was parking outside her building, and a third time riding up in the elevator to the ad agency where she worked. People were talking, the usual low murmurs of the day starting to roll, but none of it matched the voice in her ear, soft and male, and saying something she couldn’t quite make out.

The same voice, she realized, from her dream.

That realization made her edgy and paranoid, to the point where she was jumping every time someone spoke to her.

“Less coffee,” she told herself, straightening the pin at her collar.

The paranoia made her convinced that she’d seen the same man twice during her lunchtime walk around the building, standing by the grease truck in the parking lot, watching her. But when she looked back, he was gone.

“You need more sleep,” she told herself. “Time to switch to decaf.”

Be careful, she thought she heard the voice whisper to her. Be careful.

“Zan? “Rose, who worked in the cubicle across the hallway from her, was staring at her as though she’d just done something unexpected. “You okay?”

She put her sandwich and soda down on her desk, then looked over at her friend. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

“You just told me to shut up, and I hadn’t said anything.”

Mortified, Susannah clapped a hand over her mouth, then dropped into her chair, and apologized. “I’m so sorry I was … talking to myself. I’m totally stressed over the campaign, and the stupid e-mails keep coming …”

Rose laughed, turning back to her own computer terminal. “Yeah, everyone’s got their tighty-whities in a twist. Hang in there. When they finish this assignment it will be all highfives and cocktails—until it starts up again.”

“Gee, that makes me feel ever so much better …”

Her sandwich tasted like dust, and she put it aside. By midafternoon, the whispers were a near-constant; never again loud enough to be understood, never intrusive and, after that one time, never enough that she was tempted to talk back, but it was keeping her from concentrating.

The dreams, the weird whisper… Rose was right, it would all go away once they put this project to bed, and she could take a few days off.

By the time she got home that night, it was well past dusk, and all she wanted to do was collapse. Thankfully, Max had been a good boy, so there was no unpleasant surprise waiting for her on the floor.

“As much as I love you, boyo,” she said, sinking onto the sofa, his large brown eyes intent on hers, “sometimes I think a cat would have been a better choice. Or a goldfish.” She groaned, leaning back and wiggling her toes, freed from her heels, and reached up to touch the brooch again, meaning to unhook it from her blouse. “And I really wish we had someone else around to make dinner. That would make me happy.”

“Your command, Madame .”

Her startled yelp could probably have been heard through the walls of her unit, all the way down the block, and she wouldn’t even pretend that her scramble off the sofa was anything close to dignified, but the man standing in front of her didn’t seem to notice anything was wrong. He stood there in her living room like it wasn’t a problem at all, as cool and calm as if he were an old friend who’d been invited in.

Susannah looked around wildly. The door was still closed, a dozen paces behind him. She had not heard him come in, had not seen him—had he been there all along? Had he broken in, been waiting? Why hadn’t Max alerted her?

Susannah stared at the stranger, her heart pounding a hundred miles an hour, her previous exhaustion gone under the rush of adrenaline and fear. The fact that he didn’t look like a psychotic rapist/murderer wasn’t at all soothing; she’d watched enough crime drama to know that it was always the decent-looking ones who were really dangerous. And the figure in front of her was more than decent: taller than she was, so he had to be at least five-eleven, and dressed in a sober, almost old-fashioned looking brown suit that showed off broad shoulders and slender hips, all the way down to spit-polished leather shoes and up to sleekly-styled brown hair over a face that was just a shade too rough to be called handsome, with impossibly long lashes over dark blue eyes. If she’d seen him in the street she’d probably wonder what commercial she’d seen him in; he had that kind of not-handsome-but-interesting face.

All that ran through her head in an instant, a purely feminine assessment, even as she was trying to decide if she could get past him and out the door, having rejected the cell phone as being out of reach and therefore useless. Would anyone hear her or come investigate if she screamed?

“Would you prefer red meat or fish?”

The question was so absurd, she forgot about screaming and stared at him.

“What?”

He tilted his head, as though surprised at having to repeat such a basic question. “Your dinner, Madame .” He had a hint of an accent, but she couldn’t quite place it. “Would you prefer red meat or fish? Or perhaps coq au vin, although it is a bit late in the evening to begin …”