Damsel Under Stress (13 page)

There was a snuffling sound, and soon a black Lab came into the foyer from an adjacent room. It breathed as though it was running full speed, but moved at a snail’s pace, its tail wagging feebly. The white around its muzzle indicated that in dog years it was about as old as James was. The dog made a painfully slow beeline to Owen, who moved to meet it halfway, then knelt and scratched its head fondly. “So you do remember me, Arawn,” he said.

James sniffed. “Of course he remembers you. When you leave he’ll stare out the front window for a couple of days like he’s hoping you’ll come back. You spoiled him when he was a puppy.” It was the first hint of the disapproval Owen had mentioned when he told me about his strained relationship with his foster parents, but I thought James’s tone was more fond than critical. Judging by what I knew about how long dogs like that lived—I’d had one very much like Arawn when I was growing up—this one must have been a puppy around the time Owen was in his late teens, maybe just before he went off to college.

The dog finished greeting Owen and came over to investigate me. Even if I managed to screw up with Owen’s foster parents, I was pretty sure I could make a good impression on his dog. I bent and patted his head the way my old Lab used to like. This one increased the speed of his tail wagging, which I took as a sign of approval.

Then a voice rang in from another room. “James? Are you back from the station already?”

Both James and Owen automatically snapped to attention. Even the dog moved into the position you’d expect him to assume if you shouted, “Sit!” and faced in the direction from which the voice had come. I started to get a sense of why Owen was so nervous.

Eight

“W
e’ve just arrived,” James called out, then he said more quietly to us, “This way.” Owen followed him, looking like he was heading to his own execution, and the dog trotted faithfully at Owen’s heels. I grabbed the tin of homemade cookies I’d brought as a hostess gift from my bag, then brought up the rear, feeling more than a bit nervous, myself. I’d seen Owen in all kinds of scary situations, including an all-out magical battle involving monsters out of my worst nightmares, and I’d never seen him look this anxious.

The woman who stood waiting in the parlor was certainly formidable. She looked like the kind of character Katharine Hepburn played in her later years—the crusty, sharp-tongued, aristocratic octogenarian who turned out to have a warm, gooey center. It remained to be seen how gooey this woman was inside. She was tall—almost as tall as Owen, even with the shrinkage and slight stoop of age—and angular, with almost no hint of softness anywhere on her body. She had the kind of white hair that looks like it once was red, pulled up in a tight bun on top of her head, and her blue eyes were so sharp and piercing that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find that one of her powers was X-ray vision.

She swept those all-seeing eyes past each of us. I got the sense she was collecting data to analyze later. The whole time, she stood totally still. If it hadn’t been for her eyes, I might have thought she was carved from granite. Or maybe ice.

But then she suddenly melted as her face softened into a smile. She stepped forward, took Owen by the shoulders, and kissed him on the cheek. He looked like he might faint at any moment, while James did the kind of double take Bob Hope built a career on. Even the dog made a funny little “whuh?” sound.

Just as abruptly, her eyes focused on me. It took every ounce of will I had not to step backward. “You must be Katie,” she said, clipping her words brusquely.

“Yes ma’am,” I said, fighting off the urge to curtsy. “Thank you so much for having me.” I thrust my tin of cookies toward her and tried to keep my hands from visibly shaking. “These are for you.”

“You’re quite welcome,” she said as she took the tin from me. “And thank you.” I wished I could tell if her tone was particularly frosty or if that was the way she always talked. I’d felt warmer right after I fell through the ice than I did with her looking at me like that. She turned back to Owen and softened again. “Did you have a good trip?”

“It—it was fine.” He darted a glance at his foster father, and the two of them exchanged baffled looks.

She didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she pointedly ignored it. “You’ll want to get settled in. Lunch will be in half an hour.” Then she swept out of the room, and Owen gestured with a twitch of his head that we should follow her. Out in the foyer, he picked up our bags and had to hurry to catch up with Gloria, who was halfway up the stairs. Arawn settled himself at the foot of the stairs. I had to step over him to run up after Gloria and Owen. I now knew where Owen had learned his rapid walking pace.

“Katie, you’ll be in the blue guest room,” Gloria said as I reached the top of the stairs. Without waiting for me to respond, she turned to the right and led me down a short hallway to a room that overlooked the front lawn. “You have your own bathroom through that door. Towels are laid out for you. There are empty hangers in the closet, and you may use the top drawer of the bureau. Let me know if there’s anything you need.” I was still opening my mouth to respond when she left the room. Owen set my bag down in front of the bureau and then followed her. I could hear her voice in the hallway, sounding softer and gentler now, as she said to him, “You’ll be in your old room, of course. I have it ready for you.”

The room I’d been assigned was furnished in delicate, feminine antiques, with pale blue floral wallpaper, white lace curtains, and a blue-and-white quilt on the four-poster bed. Because I had a feeling Gloria would check, I unpacked my bag and arranged everything as neatly as possible. Then I freshened up a bit to make myself presentable for lunch.

It was still about fifteen minutes before the appointed lunchtime, so I left the room in search of Owen. His room turned out to be almost directly across the hall from mine, and I noticed that the hallway floorboards creaked loudly. I doubted it would be a factor in this visit, but any nighttime crossing of the hallway would require great caution. We had a similar squeaky spot in our house back home, so I was used to treading carefully.

Owen’s room looked less like a showplace out of a bed-and-breakfast in a travel magazine and more like a room someone had actually lived in. There was a twin bed shoved into a corner. Most of the walls in the room were covered in bookcases, some of them with trophies lined up on top of them. Several books were already scattered on the bed and on the floor by the bed. Sometimes I suspected books automatically jumped off the shelf whenever Owen entered a room.

Owen sat on the bed, looking at two of the books as though he was cross-referencing something. His overnight bag stood open on the floor in front of the closet, a shirt hanging halfway out of it, like he’d been sidetracked while unpacking.

I tapped lightly on the door frame, and his head snapped up guiltily. Then he saw me and relaxed. “Oh, I thought for a second you might be Gloria. I guess I’d better finish unpacking.”

He got up to get back to work, and I took his spot on the bed. I glanced at the books he’d been reading, but neither was in English. From inside the closet he said, “I’d tell you not to worry about Gloria because she’s not always this way, but it wouldn’t be true.”

I knew I should tell him that there had been nothing to worry about, but that wasn’t true, either. Instead I said, “It seemed like she gave you a bit of a shock.”

“A big shock. She may have kissed me one other time in my life, but I can’t think of a specific incident.” He came back out into the room, his face stark white. “Oh God, you don’t think she’s dying, do you?”

As old as Gloria seemed to be, that probably wasn’t entirely out of the question, but the idea here was to reassure him. “I’m sure it’s nothing. You said things were better at Thanksgiving.”

He sat heavily on the bed, a necktie hanging from one hand. “Maybe that’s when she got the diagnosis.”

“Or maybe it’s what I said after Thanksgiving, that she knows how to deal with you now that you’re an adult.”

“You don’t know how weird this is.”

“I got the picture when James looked like he thought she’d lost it. And if he thinks this is odd, then surely there’s not something seriously wrong with her. He’d know, wouldn’t he?”

Some of the color returned to his face. “That’s true. She might not tell him everything that’s going on, but she doesn’t drive, so he’d be the one taking her to any doctor’s appointments.” He glanced down at the necktie he held, as if just realizing that he’d let himself be sidetracked again.

While he returned to the closet to finish unpacking, I decided to distract him. “Your dog seems like a real sweetie.”

“Yeah, we got him not long before I left home, when he was only a few weeks old. James is right, I did spoil him then, and they were stuck with a very attention-hungry puppy when I left.”

“He’s a Lab. He would have been attention-hungry no matter what you did. But he does seem a lot smarter than the dog I had. Cletus was as dumb as a box of rocks.”

He came back out into the room, grinning, and sat beside me on the bed. “Cletus? Seriously?”

“Seriously. Remember, I am from Texas, and that name really fit that dog.”

Still grinning, he stood and extended a hand to me. “Want the grand tour before lunch?”

I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet. He led me, still holding my hand, out into the hallway and toward the stairs. “Over on that end of the house is James and Gloria’s room and the other guest room,” he explained. Arawn perked up and started wagging his tail when he saw us coming down the stairs. “You’ve already seen the parlor.” At the bottom of the stairs, the dog joined us as we went to the back of the house. “And this is James’s study.” The study door was open, and I saw that James was in there, reading by the fireplace. The room looked a lot like Owen’s office, cluttered with books and papers.

James looked up at us. “Ah, you’re all settled in, then?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He addressed Owen, a slight twinkle in his eye. “I trust everything was the way you left it at Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t let her put away those books because I had a feeling you were onto something.”

“I appreciate that,” Owen said. “It wasn’t anything important, though, just a passing thought.”

“Some of the greatest innovations come from passing thoughts.”

With great fascination, I watched the two of them talk. They might not have been blood relatives, but they were very much alike. It was a good argument for the “nurture” side of the nature vs. nurture debate. Still, there was something odd about their interaction. James was certainly friendly enough to Owen, but he regarded him more the way he might a work colleague he was on good terms with than he would someone who was the closest thing he had to a son. It was a miracle Owen was as sane as he was, having grown up in a home where he was treated like a guest, even if he was a welcome guest.

James glanced at the clock on the mantel and said, “Lunchtime. Let’s not be late.” He appeared to struggle a little to get out of his chair, but he shook his head firmly when Owen moved to help him.

Arawn followed us to the dining room, then sat in the doorway without entering the room. “He’s not allowed inside,” Owen explained. “He used to beg at the table, so he was banished.”

“And who taught him that habit?” James muttered with a hint of a smile. I had to bite my lip to hold back a giggle as I recalled the way Owen was always giving his cat food off the table. He apparently hadn’t learned his lesson.

The dining room almost took my breath away. It looked like a room on display in one of those historical homes, preserved the way the famous family had once lived there, complete with antique period furnishings and museum-quality china. The china wasn’t just in a display case, either. It was set on the table in place settings right out of an Emily Post book. I got the feeling this wasn’t going to be a soup-and-sandwich lunch. Rod had warned me that the Eatons were formal, but this was more than I expected. My mom certainly had nice china, but it came out of the china cabinet only on major holidays. I wondered if they ate like this all the time.

“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Owen said. I could see the struggle in his face as he tried not to sound critical.

“Nonsense,” Gloria replied in a tone just short of snappish. “You’re company, and you’ve even brought a guest. I don’t get to entertain often these days, so I may as well take advantage of the opportunity.” Then she turned to me and I caught myself popping to attention. “Sit wherever you like, Katie. We don’t have assigned seats in this house.”

I noticed James edging toward a particular chair, so I hesitated and dawdled long enough to get a sense of where the others wanted to sit before I chose a chair. As I looked at the array of dishes, glasses, and silverware, I was glad my mom had taught me all the table rules. Once we were all situated, James said a quick grace, and then Gloria began passing serving dishes around the table.

Before I took my first bite of roasted chicken, I steeled myself for the interrogation I was sure was about to begin. There was a tense atmosphere in the room. In spite of the formal antiques, I had a sense of cold, bare cement, one of those harsh spotlights, and an inquisitor pacing the room in jackboots while slapping a riding crop against her palm. I tried to remain calm and remember the answers I’d mentally prepared about my background, my family, and my plans for the future.

But when the interrogation started, it wasn’t directed at me. “Work is going well?” Gloria asked Owen.

“Well enough,” he replied evenly.

“So Idris and his ally getting away isn’t causing you too many problems?”

Owen exchanged a glance with me. “You know about that?”

“We’re still in the loop, even out here.”

“Then, yes, it is causing us some problems. We’re working to track them down or figure out what they’re up to, but leads are scarce at this time.” He looked down at his plate and picked up a forkful of food.

As soon as Owen turned his attention from her, Gloria’s face softened. There was real concern in her eyes. “I’m sure you’ll catch him soon enough,” she said. “When you do, will you be up to dealing with him?”