Firebird (13 page)

“Guilty.” 

She watched his eyes darken with shock as he made the connection.  “Dios!  The Marik sisters… 
You
are Eve Rhodes’ sister?”

She’d been waiting for this moment, wondering what he would say.  She nodded, watching his face.  “Once a Marik, always a Marik.  I took back my name after my divorce.”

There was a sudden blaze in the dark eyes.  “This just got much more interesting,” he murmured.  “Eve told me once about her baby sister - the New York artist A. K. Marik.”

“She called me an artist?”  She felt her face pale.  “I haven’t painted for several years.  I’m a curator now, Garcia.  I’m the guardian of
other
artists’ works.  My sister...  mis-spoke.”  She stopped.  “Why are you staring at me?”

“Just - looking for some family resemblance, I guess.”

“There
isn’t
any.”

“Now I understand why your niece looked so familiar.  I’m sorry about what happened to Eve.”  The gentleness in his voice surprised her.

I don’t know if I can trust him, Zan.

“Tell me how you knew my sister,” she said.

“I lived on this island for years with my Madre.  Summers, I used to bartend at the tennis club.”  He smiled, remembering.  “Eve had a killer backhand, that’s a fact.  We went out a few times when she first moved to Washington.”

“You
dated
my sister?”

His head came up as he heard the subtle shift in her voice, brow creasing as he saw the sudden distrust in her eyes.  “My Madre says a person can be a statue or a bird.  Eve was a wild bird, always needing to fly free.  Turns out I wasn’t her type.”

“Everyone was her type.  Are you in politics?”

“Law.  I work for the Justice Department.”

“A lawyer!”

“Clearly not one of your favorite professions.  But it’s not as if I work for Dewey-Cheatem & Howe.”

“I’d rather swim with a shark,” she muttered darkly. “What do you do at Justice?”

“Besides write 10,000 word documents and call them Briefs?  Criminal Division, Federal investigations, mostly.  Send bad guys up the river.” A smoky shadow skimmed across his eyes.  “If I’m lucky.” 

“Eve had more lawyers than shoes.  Did you ever represent her?”

He shook his head.     

“Did she come to see you here, on the island?”

He stared down at her, clearly surprised.  “Eve was here?  No.  Why the cross-examination?”

“Don’t like the tables turned, Counselor?”

“Look, Evangeline had her problems, I know.  But she was a breath of fresh air in a stuffed-shirt city.  I liked her a lot.  Her death seemed very wrong to me.” 

Something in his eyes, something he wasn’t saying. 
I’ve underestimated you, she thought.

He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she shied away.

“Sorry.”  Very deliberately he stepped away from her, his face dark and set.

Her eyes locked on Garcia’s dark Nikes. 
Too soon, too soon to trust anyone
.  “I’ve taken far too much of your time,” she said abruptly.

He stood very still, his face as rigid as granite.  “Right.”  His voice became distant - curt and professional.  “And a woman is waiting for me at the yacht club.  Vamos, Hoover.  See you around, Red.”

She turned away as the dog, clearly reluctant, left her side.

Behind her, the back door closed with a decisive crack.

She moved then, to lock him out.

CHAPTER 13

“Knocking on the moonlit door...”

Walter de la Mare

“Yes, Liv, I’ll be home late tomorrow.  I promised Ruby that I’ll wake her up when I get in, and we’ll read a story together.  Good.  Sleep well, and kiss my darling for me.”  In the dim bedroom, Alexandra turned off her phone with a deep sigh. 

She turned on the lamp and moved to stand, watchful and alert, at the window.  The fog was heavy and wet, carrying with it the sharp scent of the sea.  For a moment the wind tore open the curtain of grey, and the boats in the distant harbor appeared, wreathed in white mist, their ghostly passengers weaving across the decks.  Then the mist closed in once more and the boats disappeared.  Now her eyes could barely find the close, swaying shapes of the cedars.

The ferry, too, was locked in by the fog. 

Damn, damn
,
I can’t even kiss my child good night
...

On the road just below Cliff House, red tail-lights blinked like fireflies through the fog.  The young policeman, she hoped, keeping watch as he’d promised.  She owed him one, especially since they had to spend one more night here.  She’d checked the locks on all the doors and windows, and now rubbed a thoughtful hand over the huge shears she’d found in the kitchen.  If the intruder returned… she’d protect Juliet no matter what it took.

She could hear Juliet’s music throbbing in her bedroom, and she shook her head in frustration.  The girl had serious abandonment issues.  Her niece was defiant, angry, selfish, with a shell as hard as a shield around her - and yet…   She couldn’t seem to shake the image of the girl hunched on the beach, aching and alone.  Slowly disappearing.  The same child who had run with her, laughing, on a beach so long ago.

How did we get so lost, Eve? 

Mist ghosted like a face against the window and once more her sister’s voice, vivid and raw, rushed out of nowhere.
 You could be in danger, Zan.

Frightening blue eyes watching her for days, someone breaking into her apartment, her office – and now Cliff House.  A stranger’s fingers tangled cruelly in her hair while he searched her body.  What was he looking for?  What did he want?

I want what she gave you
.

What
she
gave you.

Jesus. 
It had to be Eve’s recording, still hidden in the dollhouse
.  All this is happening because of
you
, Eve
! 
What were your secrets
?

A fierce, reckless anger surged through Alexandra’s blood.  Her life wouldn’t be her own until she fought back.  She eyed the old shears.  Juliet had cut off her hair, hadn’t she, to feel as if she had some control over her life.  To be a new person.   

Maybe we do have more in common than I thought, Jules.  Alexandra reached for the scissors.  Statue or bird? she asked herself.  Bird, she decided.  Take control.  Be
free
!   The long hair had been her ex-husband’s choice, not hers.  Long hair that he would use to jerk her head back, hard, during sex.  Long hair that had been tangled, just hours ago, in an intruder’s filthy hands.  She pictured, suddenly, the bars on her apartment window in New York.  I
have
been hiding, she thought.  And the only way to get my life back is to
take
it back.

I won’t be a victim ever again.

The shears whacked with determination in the silence of the room
.

* * * *

In the shadow of the cedars, Jon Garcia sat in his SUV, waiting.  For what, he wasn’t sure.

On the leather seat beside him, his dog snored softly.  Wind parted the mist and Cliff House took ghostly shape above him.  In an upstairs window, a small lamp blinked through the fog.

Was she there?

Garcia flexed his large hands, still aware of the feel of her narrow body beneath his fingers as he’d pulled her off the cliff face.  Fragile and light as a seabird’s wing...

So maybe Alexandra Marik was attractive in a purely unconventional way.  Bohemian, he thought, picturing her in the oversized Berkeley sweatshirt and narrow jeans.  But she was too damned intense, too neurotic and prickly, too...
New York
.  And she carried more baggage than a bellhop at the Plaza on a Saturday night.

Hell, he’d been done with that for a long time.  Now he liked his women serene, sexy and uncomplicated.  Women who dressed in silk for dinner, who wore high heels, dammit, and
enjoyed
the touch of a man.  A woman who could cross a street without having a piano fall out of the sky and land on top of her.

This woman was guarded, obstinate, with a temper that flared bright as her hair.  And yet - she’d saved his dog’s life.

He’d known her for one day.  Less!  So why did he keep seeing her in his mind, framed by the light of the cottage window?  Why did he keep hearing the husky fear in her voice?  Why was he here, hunched in the dark, unable to take his mind off a grieving adolescent and a woman with the saddest, most haunting eyes he’d ever seen?  What the devil was wrong with him?

He looked down to see Hoover staring at him, his single liquid eye knowing.  “You think she’s a tough cookie, don’t you, Hoove?” he said to the Lab.  The tail thumped loudly on the leather of the SUV seat.  Garcia nodded.  “I think you could be right.”

If only she hadn’t told him she was Evangeline Rhodes’ sister…  He wasn’t a man who believed in coincidence.

Let it go, he thought.  Alexandra Marik has nothing to do with my investigation.  She’s just an innocent single mom trying to make a go of it.

Or was she? 

She’d shown up on his cottage doorstep out of the blue.  He’d gotten the distinct feeling she’d already known his name.  And then there was the shadow in the mist, the unmistakable sound of a Harley’s engine, roaring away from Cliff House.  Someone had attacked her on the terrace.  Someone had almost taken her life.

Not a simple robbery
.

All his instincts told him that Alexandra Marik was as dangerous as a grenade with the pin already pulled.  He rubbed a hand across his bruised jaw.  She was ‘peligroso’ all right. 
Muy
peligroso.     

“Greta Garbo,” he said into the darkness.  Beside him Hoover opened his single eye, raised his sleek head and waited.  Garcia smiled grimly as he scratched the soft ears.   “Remember that old Garbo movie we watched last weekend?  ‘A woman in distress, there’s nothing more irresistible,’ he quoted softly to the Lab.  ‘A woman with a secret, there’s nothing more deadly.’” 

He waited.  Hoover stared back at him, for once having no advice to offer.  “Just don’t come to me later saying I told you so,” muttered Garcia.  Esta bien.  Let Alexandra Marik and her niece go back to New York.  He’d had enough heartache over a woman and child to last a lifetime.

He wasn’t about to mess up any more lives
.

But still he couldn’t leave the cliffs.

“Amigo, you are heading for trouble,” Jon Garcia told himself bleakly.

Once more the mist opened like a curtain, and he looked up, oddly touched by the single lamp that burned gold in the high window.  What the hell was he waiting for?

* * * *

One fierce, final chop. 

A tangle of bright bronzed hair lay curling at her feet.  She turned slowly toward the mirror and was stunned by the stranger with enormous eyes and hollowed cheeks staring back at her.   Alexandra drew a shaky hand through her wispy, shorn locks.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, pulling frantically at the two inch spikes, “what have you done?”

It will grow back, she consoled herself.  Someday.

And in the meantime - she had promises to keep.

And questions to answer.  Eve had heard a man with a familiar voice tell Charles Fraser, “
Ivan is the key to Operation Firebird.   We’ve got to find Ivan before he...”

“Damn you, Eve!” muttered Alexandra.  “Before what?  You
knew
I’d try to help you.  Knew I’d try to find Ivan for you...”

Ivan had to be the missing piece that would explain the mystery of her sister’s death.  She could not identify Charles Fraser’s visitor –
yet
, she told herself – but her sister had given her three names.  Ivan, Fraser - and Jon Garcia.

The questions crashed around her in the shadowed room.  Who were these men?  What was Firebird?  What was going to happen if it was not stopped?  And how,
how
was Eve’s death connected to it all? 

Her sister’s last message had given her the place to begin – with Dr. Charles Fraser, Intelligence Advisor to the President.  The trail to Operation Firebird began in the very heart of the White House.  She’d call her brother-in-law Anthony in the morning and tell him she’d be coming back to Washington. 

If you take the feather, you will know trouble
.  The words from the Firebird legend, spoken in a dark wood to the mysterious Prince Ivan, slid into her head.

Alexandra reached for the yellowed childhood sketch pad and chalk, lying forgotten on the window seat.  Could she?  She hadn’t drawn – or painted – in years...

The chalk felt familiar against her skin, an extension of her hand.  She flexed her fingers and then, with a quick breath, set the chalk to paper.  The first mark was hesitant.  Then her fingers were flying across the blank page.  God, it felt so good.  So
right
.

Moments later she sat back.  Raising a hand to the unfamiliar spikes of her hair, she stared down at the drawing in her lap.  Captured in bold charcoal strokes, a faceless hunter moved through a shadowed forest.  Just a few lines of chalk now.  But she would find a way to complete the portrait. 

I’m coming after you, Ivan,
she told him.

She was just closing the pad when her cell phone rang.  “Marik.” 

The accented voice was sickeningly familiar, low and close to her ear.  “Shura.  I  knew you would survive the fall.”

Jesus God
.  She forced herself to breathe.  “You bastard.  You almost killed me!  Get the hell out of my life.”

“But we have unfinished business, my beautiful Shura, do we not?”

“I have nothing for you, you coward.” 

“You have a beautiful little girl,” the voice whispered.  “I saw her in Washington Square park.  Hair the color of rubies…”

Hot rage, fierce and burning, blazed in her.  “I’ll kill you before I’d let you hurt her.”  She slammed the phone down and closed her eyes.   The fear rushed at her, threatening to overwhelm, but above it all was the anger, savage and primal. 
Use it!