Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 02 - The School for Mysteries (15 page)

She raised up off her seat and waved over the top of the windshield, making the special redneck call local women used to be heard across long distances or over the roar of farm equipment. A generic name for the sound might be a yodel or hog call, but it was mostly used to call men in from a field for their meals or to get someone’s attention if you needed to warn them.

Men tended to use the piercing whistle made by putting their tongue against their front teeth, but despite many years of trying Phoebe had never been able to lean to whistle like that. Lester and Fate waved back from atop the well-used yellow Caterpillar warhorses.

Phoebe was constantly amazed at the ability the men of her region to drive nearly anything. She had no doubt they could fly the space shuttle if necessary. All the local kids grew up learning to drive on tractors, but then the genders tended to split and the boys progressed until they’d mastered every conceivable sort of motorized transportation. Thinking about this filled her with pride.

Fate signaled for them to keep going and Nick shot through the gap between the roaring machines. The mechanized beasts clattered and growled and then closed the road behind Nick and Phoebe.

They wanted to stop and wait to see what was going to happen, but Fate signaled for them to keep going. If hand gestures could’ve spoken fluently, his said,
leave now and don’t look back.

They wouldn’t have been able to see much anyway because the machines were blocking most of the view, but before they went far, there was a terrible crashing and grinding noise behind them. It was followed by the loud revving of a diesel engine and a horrible pterodactyl-like screeching sound pierced the wilderness.

Despite his instructions, Nick slid to a stop and a cloud of dust boiled up around the car. Phoebe stood up in her seat and looked back in time to see the pinchers grab a black SUV by the roof and lift it off the ground. A hydraulic ax clipped the lower portion of one of the front wheels off, the boom tilted the SUV the other way, and the axe severed the other front wheel.

“My God, it’s like watching an Appalachian Transformer movie, but it’s
real
!” Phoebe said.

“Monster trucks meet mercenaries,” mumbled Nick.

There was a burst of automatic weapons fire, and some screaming.

“Should we go back? Do you think they need us?”

“Nope,” said Phoebe. “We better do as we’re told.”

After the first vehicle was disabled, the track hoe started making its way up onto the hood of the second SUV.

Nick floored the Rolls and tore off through the woods. He drove the little convertible like a professional moonshiner, obviously having a great time.

“Are you enjoying this?” Phoebe asked, incredulous. The escapades with the logging equipment had shocked her back into panic mode.

He nodded and smiled. “Yes! And you know why? Because I’m not dead!” he shouted. “That’s great news. And I’m over … I’m over ….”

He glanced at her, struggling for words.

“What?” she asked.

“Everything!”

“Like what?”

“I didn’t get out much. Before.”

She suspected that was a massive understatement.

He glanced at her again, clearly hoping for her understanding.

“I didn’t get out all, really. But I’m out now, and I’m still breathing, and I’m driving one of the greatest cars on earth, and you’re with me, … and it’s all good.”

When he put it like that, Phoebe had to agree.

Chapter  32

They’d made it maybe three miles further along the logging road when they were met by an old Toyota Land Cruiser painted matte black. The driver stuck his head out the window and waved.

“It’s Jakey,” Phoebe said, “I know him, he works with Lester and Fate.”

Jakey got out and walked to the Rolls. Phoebe was torn between shame and pride when she saw the look Jakey gave the car.

“It’s a Rolls-Royce,” she said proudly. “I stole it.”

He gave Phoebe an appraising look and laughed. “Girl, I underestimated you.”

He turned back to examine the car more closely. It was utterly incongruous for a vehicle like that to be sitting on a dirt road in the middle of the deep Appalachian woods.

“We thought it’d be best for y’all to switch cars,” Jakey said, “just in case. O’course I had no ideal what ye were drivin. Now that I see it, I’m gonna need to modify the plan.”

He walked around the car, inspecting it from all sides. “Sister, ye mighta overshot the mark with this’n.”

“Whaddya mean?” she asked.

“I’m impressed, I’ll give ye that. But a car like this’n’s pretty high profile. Ye did a good job gettin her, but we can’t let ye keep her. Don’t worry, we’ll git ya’ll outta here but then we’re gonna have to put this back where she belongs. I’ll wipe her down real good first.”

Phoebe glanced back the way they’d come.

“There was quite a bit of racket back there. I hope things are goin okay,” said Phoebe, still worried.

Jakey smiled and held up a walkie-talkie and said, “I can guarantee things are goin just fine. Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll do a little bit of tidyin here up and then we’ll be right behind ya.”

“Fate told me to give you this,” Jakey said, and handed Phoebe an M-1 carbine loaded with an extended clip. Then he held out two more clips.

“He’s so sweet,” Phoebe said, and got into the passenger side of the Land Cruiser with the rifle and set the extra ammo in the floor at her feet.

The outside of the Toyota was low-key in the extreme, but it was quite the opposite on the inside. It was pristine.

Nick got in on the driver’s side and said, “Where do you people get all these vehicles?”

“It’s just part of the local lifestyle. It’s how we entertain ourselves. This Land Cruiser is nice, but you haven’t lived til you’ve ridden in an amphibian. Daddy used to have a six-wheel drive ATV called a
Buffalo
– an amphibious vehicle the military uses in the Arctic. That thing would go anywhere.”

Jakey waved
bye,
and they waved back.

Nick shook his head as he did a neat three-point turn in the Land Cruiser. Phoebe studied his determined, no-nonsense profile. This was a different guy than the one she’d met the day before. Getting out of the house, or, more specifically, the basement, was good for him.

“Nick nodded toward the rifle and asked, “Do you know how to use that?”

“Very well indeed,” replied Phoebe.

“Could you really shoot someone with it?”

“I honestly don’t know. I don’t think anybody can say ahead of time what they’d do. I know it would be a lot easier to shoot somebody in defense of someone else than it would be to defend myself. But here, when a man hands you a gun, you take it and say
thank you
. This isn’t the sort of place where you can have a sane discussion about guns or whether and under what circumstances you might find yourself able to use it.”

“You have quite the cadre of friends,” Nick said. “Who are they, some sort of militia?”

“Honey, the whole southern Appalachian highlands is one big militia. It always has been. We’re born into it. We serve on active duty all our lives—men, women, children, and dogs.

“We don’t start wars,” she added, “but we do love to participate.”

“Do you hear anything?” Phoebe asked.

Nick stopped the car, rolled his window down, and then when he thought he might be hearing something in the distance, switched the engine off.

At first all he heard was wind in the trees, then he began to make out a familiar whomp-whomp-whomp.

A helicopter was coming.

“Oh,
hell
no,” he said. “Not again.”

He cranked the Land Cruiser and drove it off the road and into the woods, hiding it as well as he could.

The chopper flashed by and kept going without a pause. “Reckon they’re lookin for their friends?” Phoebe asked.

“I’d say so.”

“
They know not what they do
,” Phoebe quoted.

A few moments later there was an explosion, followed by a shrieking sound, and then another, even bigger explosion.

“What was that?” Nick asked. “Could they have shot the helicopter down?”

Phoebe shrugged.

“Wouldn’t you’d have to have a rocket launcher to do something like that!”

Phoebe shrugged again.

Nick said nothing, just pulled out from between the trees and continued down the dirt road headed toward White Oak.

Chapter  33

Jill had brought her television into the café and set it up on the counter so everyone could watch it. It was tuned to CNN. “You’ve gotta see this,” she said to Phoebe. “You’re not gonna believe it. You two are on the national news. They’re talkin about Nick’s book.”

“Book?” Nick said. “There’s no book.”

It should’ve been impossible for the media team to have produced a book in the brief time since he and Phoebe had left Chateau St. Cloud. When he’d been kidnapped from his basement office in Cleveland two days ago, he’d had half a dozen filing cabinets filled to bursting with research notes, countless teetering stacks of paper covering every available surface, and a 2,000 page rough draft manuscript.

Even if the St. Cloud people could’ve reached Tommy the pizza guy immediately, which was only a few hours ago, all he’d had on the flash drive was the same 600,000 word draft. The greatest editor in the world couldn’t have cleaned that manuscript up in a few hours.

“There’s no book,” Nick repeated adamantly.

“It was on cable first,” said Jill, “but now it’s on all the regular networks, too. Ya’ll have gone viral. They’re usin that video of you everywhere like they did that Chinese fella who stood in front of the tank.”

“What video?” Phoebe asked. “What’s gone viral?”

Doc, the retired local physician, pointed at the screen and said, “That.”

Phoebe watched in amazement. What appeared to be a hodgepodge of amateur footage of the chateau and clips from security cameras had been cut together to make a short film that painted the story of their adventure as well as any big-budget Hollywood production ever could have. In fact, this was all the more riveting because it was obviously spontaneous and real.

First there was a wide shot of the chateau to help people understand the size and scale of the place. Then there was the hair-raising scramble out the first window and Phoebe and Nick’s walk along the high exterior ledge. It must’ve been taken by a tourist standing on the front lawn.

Nick’s athletic leap and scramble onto the observation platform and subsequent hoisting of Phoebe after him was astonishing, if not exactly flattering to Phoebe. Next came footage of them running through the house while being chased by men wearing body armor.

The footage of their terrifying transit of the ledge inside the Banqueting Hall, first on one side of the long room and then the other, would’ve been unbelievable, except that it was obviously real. The nearly unbearable tension of the situation was temporarily alleviated by the comic relief of the feisty little gray-haired docent using a mop handle to trip the soldier who was attempting to run the length of the dining table.

There were shaky images of Nick and Phoebe clambering out onto the greenhouse roof, again making Nick look like James Bond’s father and showcasing a not very flattering view of Phoebe’s backside.

Then there was a gap in the chase that was obvious to Phoebe and Nick, but not to anyone who hadn’t seen it in person. The film jumped to footage of Phoebe and Nick leaping into the Rolls and racing away. This time Phoebe thought she came off looking pretty good. Seeing the people chasing them down the driveway in their glamorous antique motoring costumes made her feel terrible. Stealing the car had been sort of fun in the life and death emergency, but now she felt guilty.

Obviously the
Archangel’s
media guys were behind this. They’d somehow collected the snippets and edited them all together to display the whole narrative arc from its startling inception, initial panic, brave and determined flight, to the victorious and stylish escape. Phoebe was forced to congratulate herself for driving away in that antique Rolls Royce. It really put the most elegant possible cap on the entire escapade.

Jill changed the channel and they watched it all again, this time with some of the footage missing from the previous version. Phoebe saw the shadows she and Nick had cast onto startled tourists below as they raced around the glass roof of the Winter Garden before tearing through a series of grandly furnished rooms, leaping red velvet ropes. Then, when you thought it couldn’t get any better, they slid three or four stories down a drainpipe, and raced away in the coolest car
ever
.

What helped make the film so riveting was that the heroes were obviously
not
actors or athletes, but instead, a real-life middle-aged man and woman who were clearly running for their lives in a unchoreographed panic. Phoebe had to admit they’d put on quite a show. It was fabulous—even inspiring.

Then an impressive-looking book cover flashed on the screen. The title was
The Last War
and the author was Nick Ph
é
lypeaux. “Is
that
your last name?” Phoebe blurted.

Nick nodded.

“How do you even
say
that?”

A ticker tape ran across the lower part of the screen with the name Frederic Nicolas Fulk Phélypeaux-Blaxland de Lalande, Prince de Mars, Duc de Mercœur.

“Uh oh,” Nick murmured.

Phoebe looked at the long row of names and the funny mark over the
e
and the hyphen, but she couldn’t take it in. The best she could come up with was something like Freddie Mercury. She said, “Your name’s got two letters that’re stuck together.”

He sat stone-faced, staring at the screen.

“How do you say letters when they’re stuck together?” Phoebe struggled to make sense of this new development. “Fulk sure sounds like one terrifying kicker of asses.”

“He was.”

She looked at him, baffled, “Are you really a Prince?”

He didn’t respond.

“Of
Mars
?”

Nothing.

“Is that the planet Mars or somewhere else?”

Nick covered his face with his hands.

“And a Duke?” she said, pronouncing it
dooook
in the local dialect with the vowel sound drawn out. The more agitated Phoebe got, the deeper her natural speech went into the archaic dialect. “Whut’s zat mean?”

“It indicates that a thousand years ago I had a male ancestor who was remarkably ill-tempered and extremely well-armed.”

Phoebe burst out laughing. “Got any castles … on Mars?

Nick still couldn’t pull his eyes away from the televised feed, but he said, “Mars is the Roman god of war. His essential characteristics are virility and virtue.”

“Virility and virtue, that sounds like a painful combination,” Phoebe said.

He pretended not to hear her. “We have half a dozen crumbling piles of stone back in the old country. That would be France, not the planet Mars. They’re called
chateaux
as you would know if you’d bothered to read your brochure during our tour of St. Cloud.”