Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

Despair took her up and shook her as a terrier will shake a rat it has caught. She wanted to cry, but her eyes remained dry. She took up a Frederic Remington bronze sculpture of a cowboy on a horse rearing up at the sight of a rattlesnake, and raised it over her head. She felt a burning desire to smash it into a glass vase, but lowered it back onto the shelf.

She knew the noise would bring Rudy, who might decide to stay in order to ensure she didn’t commit more acts of vandalism. Being imprisoned again, even in her uncle’s study, was making her nuts. An icy ball of panic had sprung up in her gut, and with each rotation was increasing in size. She had to get out of here, and soon. She needed to find Jack, but she had no way of contacting him. There must be some kind of way out, said the joker to the priest. She laughed silently and grimly. Jack had told her there was always a way.

She looked around the study, inhaled the familiar scents of leather, her uncle’s cologne, the remnants of cigar smoke floating like dust motes in the air. Closing her eyes, she tried to recall afternoons when she was a little girl, curled up in this very chair, inhaling the same scents. She had often been left alone while the grown-ups had conversed as only grown-ups can. She couldn’t remember how that had occupied her time. Despite the changes in seasons and times of day, all the afternoons blended one into the other.

Abruptly, her eyes popped open. She had spent her alone hours exploring the nooks and crannies, drawers and shelves of Uncle Hank’s domain. Unfurling her legs, she rose from the chair and, taking small, silent steps, she approached the huge burl walnut desk. As a child, it had seemed as enormous as a battleship or a castle, and filled with as many secrets.

But what had seemed like treasures to a little girl—a box of matches, a handsome humidor, a photo of a little girl—didn’t now. She no longer played with the brief and tiny flames, the odors of cigars repulsed her, and the little girl in the photo was Caroline, Uncle Hank’s daughter from his first marriage, who was now either dead or alive, but was, in any event, as lost to him as if she had fallen off the edge of the world. She had known Caroline, if only briefly. Playing with her, she had seen a darkness in her eyes. Only much later, long after Caro had vanished, after she herself had gone through a period of fear and suffering, had she recognized the nature of that darkness. Caro had been consumed with an inarticulate pain and rage. She had hit her breaking point and was gone. After the disappearance, Uncle Hank had questioned her, apparently believing she might know what happened to Caro. After that day, Alli had never heard him mention her again.

With her fingertips caressing the desktop, she wondered what secrets lay within the depths of her uncle’s burlwood castle. She started from the bottom up, figuring that secrets were safest in the depths. The left lowest drawer held a strip of hanging files, all pertaining to InterPublic Bancorp—memos, letters, quarterly P&Ls, and the like. She pawed through them with little interest, the bottom of the file holders scraping against the bottom of the drawer. The drawer just above was not as deep. It contained the usual stacks of pads of various sizes, packs of yellow pencils, a red plastic child’s sharpener, gum erasers, and various sorts of tape. How very neo-Luddite of Uncle Hank, she thought. Save for some spent pencil shavings and a broken bit of pencil lead, the top drawer was entirely empty. The wide middle drawer directly above the kneehole was filled with the sort of accumulated odds and ends—paper clips, staples, rubber bands, and Hi-Liters in several colors—endemic to all offices. The three drawers on the right held, variously, stacks of political magazines like The Atlantic ; a half-filled bottle of single-barrel bourbon, along with a pair of shot glasses in a holder; a paper packet of cough drops; a metal flask, dry as a bone inside; and a grease-stained take-out menu from First Won Ton, in Chinatown. She scanned it quickly. One item, a Chef’s Special, spicy fragrant duck with cherries, was circled in pencil. Beneath the menu was a photo of Caroline and her mother. Caro was young, ten or eleven maybe, but already you could see that she strongly resembled her mother, Heidi, who was tall, slim in an athletic way, blond—pale as a ghost, really—with a high, intelligent forehead and light eyes; it was impossible to tell what color from the photo and Alli didn’t remember her well enough to recall whether they were blue or green or hazel. Mother and daughter looked like two equestrians, models out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Sad now to think of Heidi somewhere on the West Coast and Caro in the particular level of limbo reserved for the disappeared. Alli put the photo and the take-out menu back, and closed the drawer.

Perhaps there was nothing.

She sat back on her heels, rocking back and forth thoughtfully, as she stared at the desk. On an impulse, she pulled open the drawer with the hanging files. She pushed them back and forth on their metal tracks, listening to the scraping, dry as an insect’s chirrup. All at once, a frown creased her face and, pushing the files as far as she could to the rear, she peered down at the bottom of the drawer. Looking again at the outside, it appeared as if there was a two- or three-inch differential. Rapping a knuckle against the bottom of the drawer, she heard a hollow echo, but feeling around there was no way in. Pulling the files toward her, she drew the drawer out to its fullest extent. A tiny half-moon indentation in the wood presented itself.

Hooking her fingernail into it, she pulled and was rewarded with a meticulously milled rectangular piece of the drawer’s bottom detaching itself. Inside the hidden cubbyhole she found a cell phone, and that was all. She double-checked the space before fitting the cover back on, pushing the files back into place, and closing the drawer.

She walked to the study door, pressed her ear against the carved and polished wood, and heard the murmuring of her uncle’s voice as he talked with other men, then the muffled slam of the front door. Crossing to the window, she was just in time to see her uncle and Jenkins climb into the backseat of a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car, which immediately drove off in a spray of gravel.

Returning to the wing chair, she curled up and examined the cell. Though it was a brand she recognized, the model was one she had never seen before. She wondered whether it was an old model. Most people threw away their old cell when they got a new one; they did not hide it away in a secret compartment of their desk. She pressed the On button. The phone lit up immediately, connecting to a network. So it wasn’t an old phone, or, if it was, its SIM card was still active. Plus, the battery was fully charged.

She waited for the network to give her a signal, but nothing showed except a tiny red SOS.

“Shit on a fucking stick,” she muttered. She’d heard stories of certain hotel chains using wireless dampers to keep their clients from using cell phones in their rooms, forcing them to use the hotel’s more expensive wired system, but why would Uncle Hank employ one in his house, except as a security measure.

She stuffed the phone in her pocket and tried to get a grip on her rising panic.

INTERVIEWING ARJETA Kraja was proving frustrating, principally because she seemed to have vanished.

“It’s as if she never existed at all,” Pete McKinsey said when he, Naomi, and Jack rendezvoused in the small suburb closest to Fearington.

“Her name doesn’t come up in any government database,” Naomi said, consulting her PDA. “Nor does she possess a driver’s license, health insurance, or even a Social Security number.”