Authors: Sally John
Yes?
“Sheridan, I needed help tracking you down—”
“Don’t patronize me! What else do you know about me? about Eliot?”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to hear it from you. How you are. How you really are.”
“Tell me!”
He gazed at her, expressionless.
“Luke Traynor, you owe me that much for coming here and tearing apart my so-called cocoon.”
“All right.” Still hunched forward, he spoke in a low tone as if that would cushion the emotional blows he was delivering. “I know that you regularly attend the village church. You give impromptu English lessons to local kids. You sign your paintings ‘SC’—I take it for your first and maiden names, Sheridan Cole. When Javier, the sculptor, is asked about the painter whose work he sells in his shop, he shrugs like he doesn’t understand English and says, ‘
El artista
, he live Las Trojes.’ You have caring friends, like Mercedes, like that posse who watched me walk up here earlier.”
Sheridan felt a warmth for those villagers who had begun to trust her in recent months. What would happen to that now that her past had caught up?
Luke went on. “Eliot is a recluse. You spend most of your time with him. You’re his nurse, secretary, chauffeur. He only comes out when you drive him down to Mesa Aguamiel once every four weeks or so. You go to the bank, shops, Internet café. You pick up mail at the post office.” He paused. “Mail that’s forwarded from a Chicago PO box number.” He stopped talking.
She pressed her lips together. They wouldn’t stay put. “You lousy scumbag.”
She shoved his knees aside and brushed past him, her wrought-iron chair clattering against the tiles.
“Traynor’s here?” Seated on the edge of his bed, Eliot slid his arm through the shirtsleeve Sheridan held for him. “I can hardly believe that.”
“Well, you may as well believe it.” She eyed his back, the visible ribs on his gaunt six-four frame, the nubby scar below his left shoulder blade. “He’s right outside in the courtyard, eating one of Mercedes’s egg burritos.”
Eliot placed his other arm into the short sleeve of the guayabera, an oversize white linen shirt with pockets at the hem. He worked on the top button.
“It means,” she said, “we’ll have to schedule exercise later.”
Nothing about him indicated that he’d heard her comment. He disliked physical therapy so much he wouldn’t even talk about it. She suspected his pride ached more than the legs she moved about in patterns doctors had designed for him.
Eliot said, “No surprise that he found us, though.” He was still on Luke.
“No. No surprise.” She clipped her words and squashed a complaint about being discovered. Like the exercise comment, it would fall on deaf ears. At least Eliot was handling the news with a trace of his old equanimity. Maybe it would carry them through the meeting.
He fastened the button and fumbled with the second.
Sheridan sat in an armchair and tried not to remember how she used to snuggle within the confines of his well-toned muscles. She tried not to recall the strong hands that gestured confidently and elegantly as he conferred with presidents and prime ministers.
Eliot said, “It would be easy enough to track us down.”
“I thought we made it difficult.”
“Any tourist could stop in at Davy’s cantina and learn, for the price of a luncheon special, something about the Americans living in the area.”
“But why does this hypothetical tourist choose Topala in the first place?” She spoke more loudly. It sometimes got his attention. “How does he get that close to us?”
“Perhaps through the banks.” He finished the third button, rested his hands on the bed, and twitched a shoulder. “Or they follow the mail from Chicago to Mesa Aguamiel.”
Luke had mentioned the mail. But— “No!” she exclaimed. “Malcolm would never tell! Would he?”
Eliot ignored the question, her second stupid one of the day.
She answered it herself. No, Malcolm Holladay, an old friend of Eliot’s father, would never tell. Ages ago Eliot Sr. convinced a district attorney to drop drug charges against Malcolm’s son. Later he pulled strings and the son was admitted to the Naval Academy. The boy was now a retired admiral.
Malcolm, a rich and powerful man, reminded Sheridan of a loyal bulldog. Short and thickset, he held an undying allegiance to the Montgomery family and still treated Eliot like a son. The legendary tales she had heard suggested he would endure torture before telling anyone that he arranged for her and Eliot’s mail to be picked up at a Chicago post office box, packaged, and sent on to another post office box in Mesa Aguamiel, Mexico.
The Chicago address was not secret. They had made far too many acquaintances over the years to not keep in touch, however superficial their communication might be via e-mail or on paper. There were the foundations and charities with which they remained involved monetarily. But no one received their true address in return. How, then, had Luke found them?
Third stupid question of the day. If Luke was involved, then the vast resources of the federal government were involved. Anything was possible. Find a needle in a haystack? No problem. Find a man with no forwarding house address or phone number? Easy.
Eliot’s eyes, the solid blue of a Mexican summer sky, shone with creative energy. He was lost in his make-believe scenario.
“You know,” he said, “not that many viable roads lead from Mesa Aguamiel. A question here, a question there. Money changes hands. ‘When do Señor and Señora Montgomery pick up their mail?’” He paused. “Maybe we were followed from there to here.”
She shuddered. The last couple of times they’d gone to town, she had felt distinctly less jittery. Driving thirty minutes from home on the old highway, sharing it with several tourist buses, had seemed almost routine. She had taken it as a hopeful sign that she was making progress in the emotional department. Maybe she owed an apology to that counselor after all.
“No matter.” Eliot reached for the next shirt button. “The fact is, we just hoped they would leave us in peace. We never expected them not to be able to find us, not if the need arose.”
“I expected the need to never arise.”
His rare smile creased his cheeks. “The naive princess reigns.”
The old nickname surprised her. It felt like a butterfly wing brushing the tip of her ear. A tickle played down her spine. He used to have a whole litany of playful endearments.
Naive princess. My touch of sparkle. Sher the sure thing. Miracle whiz woman. Miss Why Not?
Those were B.C.E., though. Past tense.
Eliot said, “Is he in the front or back courtyard?”
“What? Oh, uh, the back.”
“He probably flew into Mazatlán.” The coastal city was about a ninety-minute drive from them. “Did he drive up from there this morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you talked to him?”
“Yes, we talked.”
“About?”
“Coffee. Mercedes. Acrylics on Masonite.”
“Ah.”
Sheridan’s jaw went rigid. She made a conscious effort to loosen it by reminding herself that Eliot was alive. His peculiar mannerisms should not be sources of irritation.
But they were. They drove her up the wall. His personality quirks had lost their endearing quality. Like now. Instead of being simply thorough about Luke’s visit, he obsessed over inane details and pulled her along with him down rabbit trails that would whirl them into tail-chasing circles.
Eliot took his horn-rimmed glasses from the nightstand. With both hands he carefully put them on, their dark frames a contrast to the gray-blond thatch of curls. Then he grasped the sides of his walker and struggled to his feet, huffing softly with the effort.
“All right.” He exhaled the words. “Let’s go see what old Traynor has to say and get this over with.”
Sheridan and Eliot went out through the French doors of his first-floor bedroom and followed the walkway toward the center of the courtyard. Like in the front, bougainvillea cascaded down rock walls that enclosed the back patio. The house bordered the fourth side. Orange, lemon, and lime trees grew in the dirt yard, fruit burgeoning on their limbs. Other flowering plants thrived in pots.
Eliot clunked his walker in a steady rhythm along tiles designed with intricate swirls of bright reds and blues. The squares of concrete provided a fairly smooth surface, an important plus in a flood-prone town.
Luke stood as they approached. His jacket hung on the back of his chair. His long shirtsleeves were rolled up.
Since calling him a scumbag earlier, Sheridan had avoided him, staying indoors and helping Eliot with his morning routine. Mercedes had seen to Luke’s needs, giving him food and drink, old newspapers, and a tour of the kitchen.
“Mr. Ambassador.”
Smiling, Eliot let go of his walker and shook Luke’s outstretched hand. “You always were a charmer, Traynor. I’m just Eliot now. Welcome to casa de Montgomery.”
As they talked, Sheridan watched Luke’s face closely. She discerned no overt reaction to the radical changes in Eliot that he must certainly be noticing.
Except for deepened crow’s-feet, her husband’s face at fifty-two remained as youthful in appearance as ever. She’d always been enamored of the attractive blend of teen and maturity in his fresh face. But his body carried the trauma in shuffling feet and hunched shoulders. From a side angle one might guess he was eighty. Even his voice weakened after too much use. He was putting up a strong front at the moment, but he would most likely tire soon. Sometimes his thoughts wandered off and never came back.
The doctor said it was all to be expected, of course. Eliot’s body had sustained an incredible amount of damage, most of it irreversible. His mind had to make adjustments. The chronic pain and the loss of his work took a toll on his personality, once the most pleasant she had ever met and, unlike Luke’s, genuinely gracious.
Luke said, “I must say you are looking fit, sir.”
Eliot chuckled. “Now you’ve crossed that vague line between charming and outright lying.”
“I disagree. The last time I saw you, you were in a hospital bed, bruised from head to toe, all but buried under tubes, IV lines, and beeping machines.”
“Ah, I stand corrected, then. It’s all relative.” He gestured toward the chairs at the table, and the two of them sat. “I can’t recall much from those foggy days of morphine. Did I ever thank you for rescuing my wife?”
“Yes, you did most definitely. And I said, ‘You’re welcome,’ and then I believe you fell asleep.”
“Passed out, more likely.” He shook his head. His ghosts were of physical agony and a brain fogged with drugs, not images on a sidewalk. “I’ll ring Mercedes for some iced tea.”
Sheridan took a step toward the house. “I’ll go in and tell her.”
“I’ll ring. Please, join us.”
“No thank you. I need to take a walk. You two can discuss business while—”
“Sheridan.” Luke’s charming tone turned solemn. “I wanted Eliot in on this because it will impact him. However, the ‘business’ concerns you more directly than it does him.”
Her husband removed a tiny pewter bell from his shirt pocket and gave it a quick shake. “I feel ridiculous using this thing. At least they don’t make me carry around the cowbell. The house isn’t large enough for either, but I suppose that’s relative too. It seems enormous to me because I can’t easily move through it. I’ve been upstairs only once since we moved in, to take in the view. These few meters between here and that kitchen door seem absolutely insurmountable.”
As Eliot rambled on, Sheridan saw Luke aim a questioning glance at her. She imagined that he wondered if Eliot had heard him or if Eliot was still lost in a medicated haze.
Yes and no. No and yes. It depended on the day.
She merely blinked in reply.
Welcome to my world, Luke. Casa de not what I signed up for.
* * *
After Mercedes had served them tea and gone back into the house, Eliot ended his polite chitchat. “Well, Traynor, what brings you all this way? What news do you have for my wife?”
Luke eyed both of them from across the table before replying. “I want you to know, Eliot, that I would not have come if it weren’t necessary.”
“I presumed that, of course.”
“But it’s personal. The fact is, I’m not here as an employee of the government.”
Sheridan flinched. Luke was all about government. He worked as a diplomat in foreign embassies. He most likely did all sorts of dirty work for the government. If the government hadn’t sent him, then who?
He was watching her closely. “Calissa.”
“My sister?”
“She asked me to find you. Your father suffered a stroke.”
“When?”
“Ten days ago.”
“I was in Mesa Aguamiel a week ago yesterday. There was no e-mail from her.”
“She didn’t want you to read it in an e-mail.”
“Ask me if I care.”
“That’s what she said you would say.”
“Ask me if I care if he’s even dead. Go ahead. Ask me.” Sheridan put a hand to her mouth and shut her eyes. When had it become so easy for her to spew out such filth?
That was an easy one. The seed was planted just before moving to Topala, the last time she spoke with Harrison Cole, her so-called dad. Hidden away inside of her, the seed grew, nourished by a constant diet of stress. Now she was giving birth to a vileness she never would have imagined possible.
She looked at the men and lowered her hand. “The last thing he said to me was that I’d gotten exactly what I deserved. That if I hadn’t insisted on doing my own thing in Caracas, if I had just stayed put and stuck to the wifely script, Eliot never would have been shot.”
Her husband’s mouth was a grim line. “You cannot, absolutely cannot, give any credence whatsoever to his words. I’ve told you that time and time again.”
She nodded. Still, she and Eliot had been at
her
place of business when the attack occurred. How could she ignore that fact? They weren’t anywhere near the embassy. They weren’t at some state affair. They weren’t at the airport. They weren’t doing any sort of government business whatsoever. The United States ambassador to Venezuela was with his wife in a seedy neighborhood, doing what
she
wanted to do.