Let Slip the Dogs of War: A Bard's Bed & Breakfast Mystery #1 (13 page)

On the Tuesday after I returned, Uncle Edward
took a call at ten in the morning. He was rather subdued by the
time he hung up. While I waited to pump him for information, Mrs.
Gillman called to me.

“I’m sorry to bother you, my dear. There
seems to be a delivery for you at the front door,” she said kindly.
“I think you should come and see to it. It’s really not something I
feel comfortable handling.”

I walked to the front hall with her. There,
sitting on the old oak church bench Uncle Edward found at a
second-hand shop up in Montreal, was a young girl no more than
seven or eight years old. Her hair was a mass of brown curls the
color of warm mahogany. Her eyes were almost turquoise. She wore a
flower print dress with a white pinafore, red Mary Janes over
crisp, white socks, and the saddest expression I had ever seen on a
child’s face. As much as my heart ached, I had the ability to
reason through my pain, to embrace those around me and find some
semblance of courage, fleeting though it might be. Looking at the
forlorn figure now sitting in the hallway, I instantly recognized a
kindred spirit, whose wounds went far deeper than my own. She was a
stranger in a strange land, far from family and friends, cut off
from everything she had ever known. As miserable as I was, Wardah
suffered more than I, and I hadn’t thought that possible. I knelt
before the child, studying that tiny face with great intent.
Looking past the deep sadness, I found myself comparing her
features to those of Fatima’s. Something didn’t fit. Something
wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew it all the
same.

The humorless middle-aged woman who brought
the little girl to the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast introduced
herself as Mrs. Warrent. Never before had I seen someone so
ill-equipped to handle a child. Mrs.Warrent was devoid of any
smidgen of mirth. Not once did she gaze down compassionately at the
child and offer a reassuring smile. She resembled a pork sausage in
her dull brown, no-nonsense gabardine suit, with the thick-heeled
orthopedic lace-up shoes. Faced set in a constant sneer, she looked
like she had spent a lifetime smelling bad fish, and she had a
perpetual frown etched into her brow that I thought was almost deep
enough to drive a bus through. For a child already traumatized by
war, Mrs. Warrent’s company must have been frightening. She handed
me a stack of papers that needed to be signed, stating I was
accepting responsibility for the child as a temporary legal
guardian. I hesitated briefly, thinking I must be out of my
pea-picking mind to take on this task, but then my eyes went from
that tense, tragic girl on the bench to the rather dour, taciturn
Mrs. Warrent. If I said no, was I condemning the child to a future
with a crotchety adult who would stick her in some dreary
Washington office by day, where the little girl would never see
sunlight again or hear the sound of laughter? Hadn’t little Wardah
had already experienced more than enough horror? Who was I to send
her off with a woman who clearly had never experienced anything in
life that tickled her fancy? I was pretty sure Ms. Warrent had
never been in love with anything, be it a well-baked apple pie, a
great book, or a lover whose touch sent her senses reeling. I
shuddered at the thought of what Mr. Warrent was like. I wasn’t
sure if I should pity him or slap him for being dumb enough to
marry this so-called woman. They probably slept in twin beds and
she wore curlers to bed with her sensible flannel nightgown, a
baseball bat under the bed to deter nightly visits from her
spouse.

She handed me a complete dossier on the child
that contained her health records, Wechsler test results,
psychological evaluations, and an assessment of her likes and
dislikes, including a list of the foods the child was known to
willingly eat. I glanced over it. It was a very short list. Peanut
butter and jelly. Pancakes and doughnuts. Oreo cookies. She was a
“sweets” girl.

There were two suitcases of clothing, but no
toys or books. I shook my head in disgust. I resolved that the
first thing I would do as her guardian was give her back her
childhood. One way or another, she would be returned to the world
of innocence that had so rudely and brutally snatched from her.

As much as I had fought this intrusion on my
life, I now welcomed it, for in Wardah I found someone whose heart
had been injured even more gravely than mine. I suddenly understood
Ben’s need to go to Damascus. I didn’t like it. In many ways, I
didn’t even want to accept it. But I finally understood it. That’s
what a few hours in the woods with Yuri will do for you.

The first night, Wardah never stirred from
her chair at the dining room table. She picked at her macaroni and
cheese, moving it about the plate until she saw us eating. I had
tossed baby spinach with some sliced strawberries and tossed it
with strawberry vinaigrette. We adults talked as we ate, often
smiling at the child. I realized that she had been treated as a
separate dinner guest wherever she had been, and I wanted her to
feel she was a part of the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast. When we had
cleaned our plates, I served vanilla ice cream, Uncle Edward’s
homemade caramel sauce, and whipped cream for dessert. Uncle Edward
regaled us with tales of his Parisian days, when he worked in a
hotel kitchen while assisting the French resistance. One of the
chefs had taught him to make pastries. I promised I would put him
to work as dessert chef and let him have at it as soon as we had
guests again. Despite a residual limp, he was itching to get back
into the kitchen. Who was I to refuse him?

At bedtime, I led Wardah up the long
staircase and showed her into the one accommodation that seemed
best suited to a child, the Messina room, right next to the room I
shared with Ben. Soft yellow walls and white moire window shades
gave it a warm glow. The brass queen-sized bed was covered in a
colorful cotton quilt and lots of pillows. It was the most cheerful
room we had, and I hoped some of that would rub off on the little
girl.

She sat on the bed silently while I unpacked
her suitcases and hung the little dresses in the closet. I found a
long nightgown among her wardrobe. She didn’t fuss when I removed
the flowered dress and pinafore, nor did she protest when I pulled
the gown over her head. I thought she would drown in all that
fabric. No doubt it was a hand-me-down from Mrs. Warrent’s
collection of fetching lingerie from Frederick’s of
Hands-Off-Me-You-Brute.

Settling Wardah in for the night was like
putting a doll to bed. She allowed me to brush her teeth and wash
her face without fidgeting, rarely making any eye contact. When I
finally tucked her between the sheets, those turquoise eyes finally
looked up at me with a silent plea I could not ignore. Sliding onto
the bed, I curled up next to her, propping myself up on the pillows
and wrapping her in my arms. We lay there together for the better
part of an hour, not speaking. Oberon joined us, parking himself on
the foot of the bed for a bath. Titania padded in on her little cat
feet, took one look at her vain consort and snuggled up in the
narrow space between me and the young girl, contentedly purring.
Wardah’s little thumb went into her mouth and she sucked on it
rhythmically, desperate for nurturance from her absent mother,. I
considered pulling her finger from her mouth, but thought better of
it. Let her teeth go crooked if it helped her to self-soothe.
Wardah needed all the comfort she could get. I stroked the top of
her head, trying to wipe away at least some of the accumulated
sorrow, but I wasn’t sure I had any success. My thoughts were with
Ben, so far away, as I lay on that bed. Eventually the thumb
slipped out of her mouth, her breathing became regular, and before
long, she was asleep in my arms. Ten minutes later, I extricated
myself carefully, reluctantly, and turned on a little night light
for her before padding down the hall. As I left, I heard the sound
of cat feet following me down the hall. It was Titania. Oberon had
stayed behind, no doubt to cast his faery spell upon the sleeping
child.

Those unusual eyes continued to haunt me well
into the next morning. I remembered Fatima’s face and I found it
difficult not to compare the two girls. From their coloring to
their facial features, nothing seemed to match up. It was hard to
believe these two were sisters.

I mentioned it at breakfast to Uncle Edward,
who was reading the newspaper while he consumed the first of two
blueberry muffins and his first cup of coffee.

“Perhaps she has a different mother,” he
suggested.

“No, Fatima and Wardah are sisters,” Mrs.
Gillman said. She had read the entire dossier, cover to cover.
“Jamil and Azeezah are their parents.”

“I don’t think so,” I continued to insist.
“Something is just not right about this.”

“You only saw Fatima briefly,” Uncle Edward
pointed out, as if to dismiss my concerns as being of no
importance.

“That’s not technically true,” I confessed,
explaining that she actually first appeared in the Ephesus Suite,
which led to Ben and I moving her to the car. Yuri snatched the
body and moved it to the cabana, where it was officially found. “I
actually had an opportunity to study her face when we wrapped her
up and swung her over the balcony.”

“You never told us,” Uncle Edward said with a
slight air of disapproval.

“We didn’t want to upset you two,” I
explained. “Besides, we had a guest coming and we were trying to
avoid a calamity.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Mrs. Gillman. “This could
be a complication. What if they sent the wrong child from
Damascus?”

“What if there was a bigger security breach
than the CIA knows? What if that’s why she was killed, to cover it
up something even bigger? Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard from
Ben yet -- because it was more than just a trap to lure him to
Damascus to take out the CIA station chief? What if that was just a
distraction to deflect attention from the real game?”

Uncle Edward said nothing, but his face
settled into a grim countenance that was unusual for him. It was
easy to forget that he had once served in the OSS as an
intelligence officer. Long ago, he had adopted the mantle of ivy
league college professor, embracing the role of Shakespearean
scholar, but he was still, first and foremost, all about national
security. Looking at him now, I saw another, darker side of him,
one that was at once dangerous and foreboding. Uncle Edward was no
pushover.

Chapter Fourteen --

Because of Wardah’s delicate psychological
state, we were focused on getting her settled in the first few
days. She had yet to speak a word, despite best efforts by Uncle
Edward and Mrs. Gillman to speak and read to her in Arabic, and the
consensus was that she was significantly traumatized by what she
endured in Syria. It was as if she had withdrawn into herself,
sitting and staring all day long, lying awake for hours at night.
Not a whimper came from her, something I found quite troubling. And
then Titania and Oberon got into a tizzy one morning at breakfast,
Puck joined in, and I chased the three of them around my kitchen.
At least that was my intention when I started waving my arms and
stomping my foot. Mr. Darcy had the good sense to park himself on
the sidelines and observe the three-ring circus.

“Bloody hell! Bloody, bloody hell! Bugger it,
you little bastards! How dare you!”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I
realized to my horror that Wardah was watching me, eyes as big as
saucers. I was about to reassure her that everything was fine when
Titania took a swipe at Oberon, who leapt straight up onto the
kitchen island to escape her feline wrath, saw Wardah’s plate of
pancakes, and began to share them. Puck, seeing the airborne cat,
began to bark like a maniac. Titania, seizing an opportunity,
swatted Puck’s exposed backside. Startled, the apricot poodle
yelped and jumped into the air, aiming to find solace in my arms.
Unfortunately, I was not expecting to catch a flying dog, so I went
reeling backwards, my left foot sending the dog’s water dish
flying. The contents went everywhere, and in my useless attempt to
avoid the spill, so did I. Next thing I knew, I was stumbling
across the kitchen floor and out into the hallway, all the while
trying to right myself. That’s when I heard a stifled giggle.
Grabbing the errant Puck, I poked my head into the kitchen. Wardah
was laughing and pointing to Oberon, now contentedly having a bath
on the top of the commercial refrigerator.

“Down, you little bastard!” I waved my arms
at the obstinate Oberon. “We have health laws!”

Titania, knowing full well that she was being
a very naughty cat, straddled the chair next to Wardah and began
helping herself to the pancakes I had made the child, the same ones
Oberon had sampled moments before. This delighted the little girl
no end. That’s when I knew Wardah was going to be okay, that I was
going to be okay. We would manage to muddle through the long,
horrible wait for our loved ones to return to us.

Wardah became my little shadow, following me
wherever I went throughout the day. I noticed that she was paying
attention to her new world with what appeared to be a growing
interest. That was in no small part due to the antics of the
constant dog-and-cat show she witnessed daily. No doubt Wardah was
afraid she might miss some of the action next time Puck got himself
into trouble in an ambush or one of the felines decided to wreak
havoc with a paper bag.

Mrs. Gillman went to a great deal of trouble
to make the little girl feel at home. The first thing she did was
instruct me to call her Lorna.

“I can’t have you calling me Mrs. Gillman and
have the girl call me something different, Bea.”

“Lorna is it,” I agreed.

“I shall need some picture books, drawing
paper, crayons, paint, board games....” Lorna had such a long list,
we spent a morning in Williston. We started at Walmart, picking up
some school and art supplies. I selected a couple of pairs of
pajamas to replace Mrs. Warrent’s ridiculously oversized nightgown.
When I offered Wardah a choice between a sensible pink cotton pair
or its equivalent in blue, she looked at me blankly. Lorna spoke in
Arabic, explaining that she could have either of the two, but
Wardah just stared. That’s when I saw her eyes shift to a bright
orange and raspberry set smothered in cat images of every shape and
size. When I held it up, she quickly nodded. Realizing that she was
beginning to bond with Titania, Oberon, Mr. Darcy, and the rascal
known as Puck, I kept digging until I found a wild pair of lime
green poodle pajamas that looked like they were out of a French
cartoon from the fifties. As I held them up, she gave me a a
definite nod.