Birthday Girls (27 page)

She pulled the bedcover close against her and bit hard against the lace-edged hem. The frilly, frothy, little-girl-hem of the thick down duvet—made especially for Abigail when she was only ten. Made especially for Grandfather’s little girl—the little girl who once had lived in this room, who had believed that a grandfather’s love would compensate for the loss of a mother’s. And a father’s.

That love had never come. It had gone, instead, to her best friend.

And now there was no more little girl.

She pulled herself up slowly, reached for her cigarettes, lit one. Her mouth was dry and crusty; she exhaled; she coughed; she stretched for the pot of tea and poured herself a cup.

She thought about suicide.

For real.

She knew it wouldn’t matter.

Slowly she lifted the cup to her lips and tasted a small sip. It was cold, bitter, acrid. With a trembling hand she returned it to the saucer. Then she hung her head. Tears spilled onto the lace-edged comforter.

She parted her lips again and whispered into the empty, unfeeling room. “Did you really love her, Grandfather?” she asked. “Did you really love her … more than you loved me?”

And then she remembered the condoms, the package
she had stolen from Grandfather’s drawer, so she could have sex with … what was his name? The stable boy … 
Oh, God
, she cried,
What was his name?

But Abigail knew that didn’t matter either.

Nothing mattered.

Betrayal was all around her, had always been around her, as if she’d been born under a thick, gray cloud, as if she deserved nothing more.

Kris.

The name seared her tongue as an icicle in winter, branding to her flesh, burning to the touch. And then, in the muted darkness of her muted soul, Abigail knew what had happened: Kris had tried to steal Edmund in the same way she had tried to steal Grandfather.

But Abigail knew how to get back at her. How to get back at everyone.

It was colder
on the bridge than she had expected.

She set the note on the dashboard, slipped out of her shoes, and shivered. Then she let out a small, foggy breath and stepped into the inky night—the night lit by the stars and the tiny white lights that outlined the span from east to west.

Touching the locket on the bracelet that graced her wrist, Abigail looked down at the dark water of the slow-moving Hudson and knew that this was the only way.

And it would serve them all right.

Kris hadn’t
planned to come to Khartoum. But the first available flight out of JFK was KLM to Amsterdam, bound for Sudan. It seemed as good a place as any to set her
next Lexi Marks adventure, and the thousands of miles between Khartoum and New York were exactly what she needed. A pleading call to Devon’s friend at the United Nations had gained her an emergency visa; apparently her notoriety was good for something.

So here she was, an unescorted woman in a land that frowned on unescorted women, isolated in her hotel room trying not to breathe the dust that permeated the air, trying to block out the clamor of the honking horns in the bustling
sug al-arabi
—the Arabic marketplace—five stories below, and wondering why, after nearly ten days, she still felt as though she hadn’t left Manhattan at all.

She hadn’t even called Devon. No one knew where she was. And, in Sudan, no one knew
who
she was. The ideal place to work. The perfect escape.

But so far she hadn’t accomplished a thing. She’d given up trying, for each time she attempted to charge the battery of her laptop, the power went out. Out of frustration she’d decided to go down to the bar at her hotel one afternoon and have a stiff drink. Maybe two. Then she remembered that booze was illegal in the city, and her choice would be Pepsi or guava juice. Neither seemed appealing; either would wash down the dust, but neither would numb her senses.

And of all places, Khartoum was the last place where she could get laid. Too many Moslems, too many standards. Kris knew she should board the next plane out of here, but she had no idea where to go. She pulled her khaki camp shirt close around her, trying to erase her emptiness, trying to think of something productive, trying not to think about the loneliness—and the guilt—boring into her soul.

Get a grip, girl
, she chided herself, and sat up straight on the bed.
Get the hell out of this room and get a grip
. Kris Kensington was not going to give herself over to depression. Kris Kensington was stronger than that.

• • •

She stepped
off the elevator and breezed through the hotel lobby with determination. If nothing else, she would spend some money in the marketplace. Buy some trinkets. Maybe grab a sandwich of fava beans or a mango or two. She would do
something
. And she would get a grip.

The noise, the dust, and the chaos assaulted Kris when she opened the door. She turned back.

No.

She turned around again and stepped onto the hard-packed sand of the street.

Heading toward a string of shops, Kris sidestepped two small boys toting a bucket of dirty water, accosting the drivers on the street, begging to wash the grit from their cars. They were dirty and looked malnourished, slaves to the streets for their survival, candidates for countless worldwide charity organizations. They would not be that way in America, she reasoned. They would not be that way if they were her children.

Her children
. Like the child she’d aborted in a back-alley Harlem tenement, where she’d shivered and shuddered and suffered alone, a sixteen-year-old girl who had not even shared her pain with her mother, for her mother had been on a mission witnessing Martin Luther King Jr. accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. Kris may not have been poor or dirty or starving, but she had been alone. At least these kids were not.

She shook her head and moved on, down the sidewalks and past the litter of people: dark-skinned men selling fruit and nuts; small girls with bony legs weaving through the crowd, trays of nuts on their heads, pleading looks in their eyes. Everything, Kris noticed, was brown. Brown, beige, the color of sand, interrupted only by the colorful
thobes
of the women—the yards of fabric wrapped around their clothing, concealing their flesh from the intrusive world.

Brown. Beige. Sand. Abigail’s neutral-zone colors. Contrasted only by the thobes of her cuisine, the thobes of her color-splashed centerpieces.

The muscles of Kris’s stomach tightened. She ducked into a shop for distraction.

But the bleakness inside was pervasive. More sand. More dust. More brown. Except for one rack that stood along a wall: a rack filled with bright, colorful thobes.

She bit her lip and decided to fight her demons, slay her dragons, put all that clichéd crap to rest once and for all. Thobes, after all, would make great Christmas gifts for Devon’s kids. Thobes, and maybe a
hijab
headdress, traditional wear of the Moslems, their black brothers and sisters.

Without hesitation she grabbed some items from the rack, as if the faster she moved, the faster everything would fall back into place, the faster her life would become hers once again.

After paying she exited the shop, wondering if this was why Abigail was always in motion—for fear that if she took too long or stopped too long, the world around her would explode.

Kris clenched her teeth and rounded the corner, determined to purge Abigail from her mind.

Then she saw the newsrack.

Numerous papers with Arabic headlines were carelessly stacked on the ground. But something had caught her eye. One thing. Not the words, for Kris knew no Arabic. It was a photo.

She stopped.

Her stomach lurched.

Her hands began to shake.

The photo was of Abigail, and it was front-page news.

Kris clutched her sack of purchases, grabbed a newspaper, and flung some currency at a man squatting on the sidewalk. Then she ran back to the hotel, flew into the lobby, and raced to the front desk.

“Help,” she said to the man behind the counter. “I need someone to translate. Please, does anyone speak English?”

The man nodded, then disappeared.

Kris studied the paper, as if the longer she stared, the sooner the words would begin to make sense. Dark suspicion coursed through her. Why would Abigail’s picture be on the front page of a newspaper in Sudan? She was hardly of interest to Arabic women … or was she?

She tapped her foot. She rubbed her neck.

Finally the man at the desk returned. A woman followed. A foreigner, a white woman.

“May I help you?”

“Yes, yes.” Kris thrust the paper at her. “Can you translate this? Into English?”

“The entire newspaper?”

“No. No. This article. The one with the picture …”

Suddenly she felt the heat of someone’s skin close to her.

“I can translate,” a familiar voice said. Kris turned sharply and looked into Devon’s eyes. “It’s about Abigail Hardy,” he said. “She’s dead.”

“What the hell
are you doing here?” Kris demanded. Her breath came in short, jerky gasps.

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Her eyes jumped from Devon to the newspaper, then back to Devon. “Abigail?” she asked. “Is she really …”

“Dead,” Devon confirmed. “So the media says.”

Red lines skittered across the whites of his eyes, his skin was more muddy than brown, his hair seemed tinged with more gray. Devon looked as if he’d been up all night.

“Do you still need a translator?” The woman behind the desk asked.

Devon shook his head. “No, thank you.” He took Kris by the elbow and steered her toward the lounge.

“What happened to Abigail? How did you find me?”
How could she have faked her suicide without me there to help?
she wanted to add.
Unless she had not faked it at all. Unless because of all that I did
 … Her mind swirled with the heat and the dust and … 
Oh, God. Abigail. Was she really dead?

“Finding you was easy,” Devon said. “But I thought
you’d stay at the Hilton; that if you were running away you’d at least want a view of the Nile.”

They entered the lounge and he guided her to a small table. Kris sat on the faded cover of an old rattan chair. Her legs had gone numb.

“I had a call from my friend at the UN,” Devon said. “It’s not like you to run away. Without any word …”

She shook her head. “Things happened.”

“You didn’t know about Abigail until … now?”

“No.” She curled the edge of the beverage napkin on the table before her. A chill shivered through her. She looked up at the lazily moving paddle fan and knew the cold had not come from that. “Did she … kill herself?”

Devon scowled. “Then you aren’t surprised.”

She shrugged, trying to act nonchalant, trying to act uninvolved. “She was terribly unhappy, I know that.” She wished she was not so aware that Devon was watching her. She wished he did not know her so well. “How … how did she do it?”

“She jumped off the Tappan Zee Bridge.”

A low moan escaped from her throat. “Oh, God,” she cried. She really had done it. Of course she had done it. Abigail had really killed herself and it was all Kris’s fault. She ripped the napkin into shreds of guilt.

“Of course,” Devon continued, “chances are they won’t find the body until spring.”

The air seemed to stand still. The paddle fan droned overhead. Kris swallowed a fine mist of dust. “You mean they don’t have her body?”

“Nope. Officially she’s missing and presumed dead.”

Suddenly her guilt began to lift. The feeling returned to her legs. She stared past Devon at nothing in particular—the brightly colored paintings that hung on the walls, the beige tiled floor, the bamboo-shaded lamps.
Missing and presumed dead
.

Was it possible?

Had Abigail gone through with her plan?

New energy sparked in Kris’s brain. Her heart began to pound. She moistened and remoistened her desert-dry lips, wanting to ask if Devon knew what jewelry Abigail had been wearing—if it was the heirloom brooch and bracelet and earrings worth over a million dollars that would be the seed money for her new life.

She wanted to know how Abigail had managed without Kris to drive the “getaway” car, and if she had left a note.

She wanted reassurance that Abigail had faked her suicide, that she was not dead.

Devon, however, would not have known the answers.

A waiter arrived; Devon ordered guava juice. Kris declined.

He hoisted one leg onto his knee. His dark eyes grazed her face. “So, are you going to tell me?”

“What?” She turned sharply back to him, wondering if he had read her mind.

“What the hell you’re doing in Khartoum?” Khartoum?

Oh. “Research,” she replied. “I’m doing research.”

“Bullshit. You’d have let me know.”

“I thought you were my agent, not my keeper.”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “I thought I was your friend.”

Friend. Abigail had been her friend. Until …

And now …

From out of nowhere, tears filled her eyes. She did not dare look at Devon; she did not dare respond.