The Deception Dance (23 page)

He jumps up as we approach. He doesn’t wait for us to stop
before he calls out, “I’ve been trying to reach you.
Stephen thinks he found her!”

Linnie almost drives into Nicholas, squeezing the breaks and
screeching to a halt less than a yard from his legs. “Are you
serious?” Her words are all muffled through her face covering
helmet. She pries it off her head. “Where?”

“Near Berlin.” Nicholas skirts around the scooter and
marches past us toward a black Lincoln Town Car. He turns around at
the open door of the back seat. “I’m heading there now,
flying out in less than an hour.”

Linnie rushes toward the car and shouts, “I’m going with
you!”

“No.” Nicholas holds out a hand. “No, Linnie, you
can’t come. It’s complicated.”

She doesn’t stop. “But...”

“Stay here, in the guest house. Do not leave. If all goes well,
Chauncey will be back tomorrow, I promise.” Without another
word or look he climbs into his car and his driver races them off
down the drive, kicking up dust before ours has had time to settle.

Linnie whispers, “Complicated?” as Nicholas’s car
disappears from view. She stands motionless, just staring at the
closing gate.

I step in front of her. “Linnie, this is good news!”

“Good,” she whispers, eyes dazed.

I shake her. “Wake up! They found Chauncey. Be happy!”

She blinks. “Happy? They found Chauncey.” And then, the
waterworks start. I lead Linnie into our room in the guesthouse and
let her cry on my shoulder all her anxious sobs, and then relieved
tears, and finally contented snuffles. When her face is red and
splotchy and a smile (that has been absent for days) lights up her
features, I squeeze out of her grip to stretch.

I glance at my watch, five-thirty.

Linnie’s still breathing heavily from her cry when she says,
“She’s coming back tomorrow, isn’t it wonderful?”

“Perfect.”
In more ways than one.
Chauncey could
not have planned a better time to be found. Tonight, I will take
Linnie out to dine with Andras; he’ll convince her to depart
the
castle of killers
and by the time Chauncey returns we'll
catch the next train out of here.

Linnie lies back on her bed. “I feel like celebrating!”

Perfect
.

****

“So what do you do?” Linnie asks in a terrific impression
of my father.

I’m getting a little tired of the grueling interview, but I
realize, I have no idea what Andras does for work, I don’t
really know much of anything about him.

“Acquisitions,” Andras says with a little smile.

“Acquisitions of
what
?” Linnie asks rudely.

“Linnie!” I cut in, “enough with the third degree.”
I give her a ‘
be nice’
glare that she returns with
an ‘
I’m not doing anything wrong’
smile.

She gives in, “Okay, Okay, I’ll stop the protective big
sister act.” She takes a sip of wine then a bite of her pasta
puttanesca, chewing slowly. When she swallows she says in a
nonchalant voice, “So, your accent is hard to place; where are
you from?”

I can’t help it, I laugh. Soon the whole table is laughing,
including Andras’s good looking, soft spoken, Swedish friend
Peder. Linnie hasn’t spared a sideward glance for the
bright-eyed Swedish man sitting on her left; I guess she’s over
handsome foreigners.

Andras’s foot brushes against mine under the table. “Before
English, I spoke a dialect of Romani. And, I understand,” he
says while leaning across the table toward Linnie, “From your
perspective your sister and I barely know each other. You do not
trust me; you do not trust men; because, you have been hurt before.
You see how intensely Raven looks at me; you see her heart in her
eyes. But I am not going to do to Raven, whatever that man did to
you.” With complete sincerity he vows, “I will do
anything in my power for your sister.” He turns his twinkling
eyes on me and winks. “I promise.”

Linnie examines Andras, her weariness visibly diminishes from her
expression and she smiles. “Good. Okay then.” She laughs
and continues eating. She’s the only one not finished since she
used her precious time for the interrogation.

I’m about to prompt Andras’s ‘
ten reasons to
leave murder mansion’
argument but I’m distracted by
his fingers brushing across my palm under the table. He trails his
fingers up and down my palm stopping only to lace his fingers through
mine. I glance up at him and the corner of his mouth inches toward
the wood paneled roof. We're sitting in a small dining room.
Small
?
Jeez. I'm getting jaded. It's about the same size as our dining room
at home, and the furnishings are much nicer than ours.

“Linnie, do you like violin music?” Andras says while
lightly squeezing my fingers.

She swallows her final bite and sets down her fork. “Um, yeah,
I guess, sure.”

“Then I will play for you.” He lifts my hand to his mouth
and gives it a peck before breaking contact to scoot out his chair.
“I will fetch my instrument; Peder will lead you to the living
room.”

This house is quaint compared with the living accommodations we’ve
been living in, but, I honestly appreciate its lack of grandeur. As
in everywhere else I’ve been in Sweden, the interior is almost
entirely wood. Peder points out different aspects of his home, but
from the glances I’m getting from Linnie, I can tell she’s
not understanding anything he’s saying in his soft-spoken
thickly accented English either.

We settle onto a plush striped love-seat, I kick off my shoes and
curl up my legs. I’m wearing the red dress; the one Andras
saved me in.

Andras descends a narrow staircase and stops with Violin and bow in
hand. As he starts to play, igniting the air around him with sound,
all the worries that have been nagging me singe into to ash and
scatter to the floor. All that is left is the music and me to consume
it.

I lower my head to rest on Linnie’s shoulder and we lie
entranced by the hectic dizzying notes that dance their way around
the room. Andras moves with his bow, bends, sways, is lost in the
music that holds us all. We don’t seem to breathe until the
song is over then he plays us another.

Perhaps we would have never moved if the banging on the door didn’t
jolt us from our trance, but it does.

Andras pulls one final long note and, like the rest of us, peers over
at the door. He sets down his violin on a chair and says something to
Peder in (what I’m pretty sure is) Swedish while raising a
hand. To us he says, “Stay here, I’ll check who's at the
door.”

We stay quiet as Andras exits to the hall and out of sight. Excited
voices explode out from the unseen front door, one of which is
Andras’s, but the other is also familiar. I’m torn
between wanting to check what the commotion is about and not wanting
to face who I’m pretty sure stands at the front door.

Linnie does her usual brow furrow. She whispers, “Is that…?”

I nod and say with a nervous laugh, “Oh, shit.”

I start to rise but she grabs my arm and nervously giggles. “No,”
she whispers, “stay here.”

I shake my head, bite my lip, and rush to the front door arriving
just in time to see Andras slam the door in Nicholas’s face.

Day Twenty-Nine
(continued)

“Hey,” I say for lack of anything else coming to mind as
I reopen the door. But no words or excuses are needed, because
Nicholas stands frantic and bloody on the doorstep. I gasp. “Are
you hurt?”

“We need to go. Now.” Nicholas says pleading, “Chauncey
is in the hospital...”

“In Berlin?”

“No, here. Six blocks up, right, six blocks then to your left.”
This he says to Linnie, who I didn’t know was behind me until
she barges past. She’s on the Vespa and gone before I think of
a response.

“Do not leave.” Andras’s hand caresses down my
back.

I step out of the door and peer over my shoulder. “I have to
go.”

Nicholas already stands at the open car door.

Andras takes his leather motorcycle jacket from a hook and wraps it
around me. "It’s cold tonight. I will wait for you, at
Kullenberg.”

“No...”

He leans down and before I can stop him, he kisses me.

For an instant I forget about everything else and lean into his kiss,
but it’s not a long instant and I yank back remembering the
rush I’m in and who’s watching. I run through the grass
barefoot and climb into the car as Nicholas holds the car-door open.

When Nicholas jumps in beside me, I say, “Please, tell me what
happened.”

Nicholas reverses the car out of the drive, turns and accelerates. He
says, “Stephen found Chauncey before my plane touched down.
A...”
pause
, “...man had taken her to Berlin.”

“A kidnapper?”

He says, “I don’t think it started out that way, but in
the end he was guarding her hotel room door.”

“Guarding?”

“Yes. Stephen fought the man, by the time Stephen got inside
the hotel room Chauncey had slit her wrist.”

“Slit her wrist?” I choke out, and then cough. “You
should have taken her to a hospital in Berlin!”

“She refused," he says.

“You could have forced her...”

“We had a doctor with us, but it didn’t matter, she
didn’t just cut open her wrist, she mangled it. She’s
dying, Raven. She made me promise to fly her back to Linnie before
she fell unconscious.”

We bump up onto the driveway, driving into the well lit parking lot.
I examine the blood still on his navy suit. A mysterious kidnapper?
Chauncey taking her own life? That adds up like two plus two equals a
thousand. They want us to stay, to stay at their mansion, at any
cost...

Does my scream exist if it’s not released? I think so. It
amasses and lodges in my chest, throbbing with every inhalation of
breath, fighting to be set free. But I don’t let it; I imprison
the scream behind grinding teeth. I keep my jaw clenched as I ask,
“do you expect me to believe that?”

“What?” Nicholas asks, but I can’t manage another
response.

My scream lingers in the silence that follows, not because it escapes
me but because I am so aware of its unexpressed potential. The moment
he parks I swing open the car door releasing the charged air into the
misty night.

Nicholas sprints toward the hospital and I am not far behind, I catch
up as the front glass doors slide open. I take short inhalations of
sterilized air; the smell always reminds me of death. Nicholas’s
soles squeak against the white linoleum of the hospital floor, my
dirty bare feet only make a soft patter. We weave through halls until
we see Stephen standing guard at a door, just as the man he
supposedly fought, how ironic.

“How is she?” Somehow, still after everything I know, I
can’t muster the same scathing tone for Stephen. Unlike
Nicholas, he has a look of true remorse on his face; but like
Nicholas, his suit is covered in blood.

“Alive.” His gaze doesn’t lift for us. “Linnie
is in there with the nurse.”

“Did she tell you why she did it?” My voice breaks,
surprising me. “Did she say why she tried to
kill
herself?”

Nicholas cuts in with, “no...”

While Stephen responds, “she didn’t try to kill herself.”

Nicholas shoots Stephen a narrowed eyed glare.

“She was confused.” Stephen wipes his face, as if to
dislodge some of the misery there. “She didn’t know that
I was the one outside her door. She just heard the fighting and knew
the man guarding her was distracted. She tried to cut off her
tattoo.”

I shudder, I can’t help it. “Because her tattoo was
infected?”

Nicholas cuts in again with, “Yes...”

But Stephen shakes his head. “No, I think the infection had
cleared. By the time I got in there, she had hacked her arm up and
bled out...” Stephen’s voice breaks. “I was too
late, seconds too late.” He steps away from the wall. A tear
drops off his cheek, a tear for Chauncey.

I have no tears, I never do.

Stephen doesn’t say anything, he just walks away.

I don’t know why the question is important or why I ask, but I
call after him, “Did she cut her tattoo all of the way off?”

Stephen glances over his shoulder, adorned with a phosphorescent halo
on his blond head. “Yes,” Then almost too quiet to hear
he says, “But the
mark
is still there.”

“What
mark
?” I whisper, and without meaning to I
gaze up at Nicholas.

The ‘wrinkled brow and pinched lips’ look he’s
giving me could only be called darkly contemplative so at odds with
his angelic features. Then another expression sets on his face, his
eyes pinch closed and he inhales through his nose. Resignation,
that’s what his expression is, a gloomy acceptance, and it
scares the hell out of me.

He opens his mouth but before he can tell me whatever he has resigned
to, I back into Chauncey’s sick room. Avoidance, avoidance is
good.

I don’t take another step in when I enter, though; I peer
through a space in a floral curtain circling Linnie sobbing into a
limp hand; the color of those fingers is all I need to see. I listen
to the rhythmic beeping of machinery, yes, she’s still alive. I
don’t want to breathe in the scent, the static hygienic smell
which bothered me in the hall but suffocates me here.

"Raven," Nicholas’s breathy whisper brushes across my
ear.

I turn, choosing the lesser of two evils and follow him into the
overly bright white deserted hall.

“Raven,” he repeats outside Chauncey’s room before
closing her door. “I need you to come with me; there is someone
you need to talk to.”

We walk a few paces and when we’re out of earshot of the room I
round on Nicholas. I just can’t keep the fury inside any
longer. “Did you have something to do with
that
? Did you
do that?” I point to Chauncey’s room.