Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (11 page)

In the half-light, William watched as the American whipped off his own belt and shoved it first under a rung of the ladder, then knotted it through some sort of handle on the manhole’s underside. No sooner had he finished than a heavy footfall resounded against the steel slab.

There was barely enough light slipping in around the edges of the manhole to see the expression on the American’s face as he joined William in the tunnel. “I’m Jack. You hurt?” he asked, frisking William awkwardly.

The metal above groaned and a sliver of brighter light sliced down the access shaft. The belt was stretching.

A muzzle of a gun jabbed into the thin opening, and both young men moved. William was taller by an inch or so, but Jack was thicker, more heavily muscled. He led the way. As they slogged off down the dark tunnel toward a spot of wavering, green light, William was positive he heard him speak.

“
I’m getting good at this,” he muttered. “I can’t
believe
I’m actually getting good at this.”

*

William was a lifetime past that tragedy, more than a decade past the harrowing ordeal the papers had called an adventure, and he could still feel the cold, dark insistence of all that water. At least he hadn’t faced it alone, though his companion had been nearly as bewildered as the prince himself.

Would Jack fix this, or was he too far broken himself?

“God give us all grace equal to our day.” The king bowed his head and began to pray.

Her Father’s Notes

Forge, Idaho

8 AM

The cool morning breeze carried intimations of jasmine and pine needles through the open back door. Mercedes sat at the table in what had been her grandmother’s kitchen, peeling an orange and laying the triangles of curling rind on the marbled Formica. If she ducked her head just so, she could see into a robin’s nest outside the window. There were two light blue eggs in the nest, the parents flitting anxiously from branch to branch nearby.

Just then Diane came through the kitchen on her way to the pantry, a load of laundry balanced before her. “‘Morning,” she said brightly. Diane’s hair was still in curlers. “Oh, did Harry leave this open?” She set the laundry basket on her hip and levered the door shut.

“Sorry, Diane; I kept it open after he left. Can I give you a hand?” Mercedes started to rise.

“That’s all right, love,” Diane set the basket on the white drier that sat adjacent to the washing machine and came back into the kitchen. She wore a faded blue bathrobe and matching slippers. One toe peeked from a hole in her footwear. “I’ll get to these clothes later. I’ve got a house to show this afternoon before Neal gets home from work, then we’re taking you out to eat. Can’t let you and Irene waste away on vacation.”

Her cousin had become modestly successful as a real estate agent; Mercedes imagined that her salary, combined with her husband’s earnings as an engineer at the local power company, placed Diane’s family in the town’s upper middle class. You wouldn’t know it to look at her. She was still the same cousin. Same threadbare slippers.

A third voice sounded from the stairs. “Who’s wasting away? You cook as much as Grandma Britt.” Irene, still in her thick cotton pajamas, stepped into the room and folded herself into a chair. She took a section of orange. “You’re going to have me getting up before the roosters, like Mercedes here, to run off all the fat. Honestly,” she glanced at Mercedes. “Is this a vacation?” Under her breath she added, “Any luck at finding me a Starbuck’s while you were out running around?”

Diane set two plates in front of them. “Listen to that, Mercedes. My sister; she grows up to become a cop, marries a guy from L.A., and forgets how to have a real breakfast. Waffles, eggs, and bacon for the both of you!” It sounded like a threat.

Mercedes laughed. “I boiled myself some eggs while you were out, and Harry shared a bowl of oatmeal with me before he went to t-ball.” She handed her cousin a section of orange.

“You early risers,” Diane smiled, ripping a section of paper towel off the rack for their cousin. “Did you sleep okay?”

Irene shook her head. “Hard to get to sleep without a husband and a bed full of kids kicking around all night.”

It was Diane’s turn to laugh. I’ll send Harry and the baby in with you then tonight. I’m keeping my husband, though.” She took a sip of juice. “Serves you right for going on vacation without your family. How about you, Merce?”

“Like a rock. You guys put a new mattress on the old bed, didn’t you?”

Diane took an orange from the bowl on the table and began to work her thumbnail into the pored, pitted skin. “Neal and I bought a bunch of things for the place after Grandpa Max passed away.”

Though their relationship was a bit farther removed than grandparent and grandchild, Diane and Irene, like all the Bergstrom children, referred to Max Adams by the title he liked best.

“That reminds me,” Diane said. “We found some of your dad’s papers in the study, in Grandpa Max’s old desk. They were still in the FedEx box they came in.”

“Really?” Mercedes finished the orange and swept the peelings onto the paper towel. “A whole box worth?”

“Yeah. Neal went through them all; he said they were research or something. Maybe notes from when they taught at college.”

“Dad told me he sent a bunch of his notes and white papers up here for safe keeping. I must’ve forgotten.” She thought for a moment. One of her father’s old friends back in California might have a use for them. Mercedes didn’t care all that much for pieces of her parents’ professional lives. It had been the research, she sometimes told herself, the particle research and all the stray radiation that had caused her family’s health problems. Problems, hell; the weird, secret experiments for the government in lab after nameless lab had taken her parents and damn near killed her.

Mercedes gritted her teeth and then smiled. “Probably notes for their classes. I wish Mom and Dad had just stayed with the university.”

Irene made a sympathetic face and added Mercedes’ orange peelings to her own, sweeping the lot up and depositing them in the yellow trashcan beneath the sink. She worried at her lip with her teeth, and began pulling the curlers from her sister’s hair. “If they’d just been teachers you wouldn’t have to worry so much about your inheritance.”

“Oh, I don’t worry. My lawyer told me anything I inherited--including all the money the government forked over when Mom and Dad died--can’t be touched as long as I keep it in trust.”

“That probably made Bryce a little crazy,” Diane said.

Mercedes grimaced at the name of her ex husband. “He was a little crazy to begin with.” She’d been divorced nearly eight months. “But my trust fund wasn’t much compared with the allowance and portfolio his parents gave him. What bothered him most was the fact that I didn’t want any of
his
money when we split.
That
made him a little crazy.” Mercedes slipped her feet out of her sandals and put them up on the chair opposite her.

Irene stood. “I’ve heard this part of the story. Want some tea, Diane?” She fished a copper teakettle off its hook by the stove and began filling it with water.

Diane took a piece of the orange. “Sure. Get Merce some too.”

Mercedes held up her hand. “No thanks.”

Diane was curious. “I always thought Bryce married you for money. Isn’t that the way rich people think?”

“My inheritance was small potatoes compared with his family’s money. He liked to think he was taking care of me, even when he’d be gone for days, sailing. All the time I’d be gone on a photo shoot, or running around L.A. setting up business, he’d be out on his boat with whatever silicone-pumped bimbo he could pick up. He never figured I’d start having enough success taking pictures that I wouldn’t have to rely on him.”

Diane shook her head. “But with the money your parent’s left you, that’d never be the case.” She took another piece of orange. “So he honestly figured you for the ‘defenseless little wife?’”

“That’s where Bryce was odd. Always two versions of reality. I still think he doesn’t know I found out how much he was sleeping around.”

Irene brought her sister a steaming cup. “How
did
you find out?”

Mercedes smiled humorlessly. “I actually dreamed about it. Then he left some stuff at home one day when a shoot was canceled, and I followed him.” The smile dropped from her face. “When I tried talking to him about it, he . . . started yelling. Broke a lamp, then he started hitting me.” Before her cousin could say anything, Mercedes looked up fiercely. “Irene knows. I filed a police report through her when it happened. You’re the only other person I’d tell this to, Diane.”

The other woman bit her lip, orange forgotten. “I’m so sorry.” She seemed about to ask a question, then thought better of it. “But you were okay. He didn’t—”

Now Irene grinned. “She gave him a black eye, honey.”

They both laughed. Mercedes found she couldn’t join them.

“I had a doctor’s appointment a few days afterwards, and had him check my ribs and arm. He said I was all right.”

They were quiet a moment. Mercedes placed a section of fruit in her mouth and chewed slowly. Irene finally spoke up. “It was bizarre to see how quickly Bryce changed after that.”

“Yes, he seemed to be happy for the divorce. Anything to get me in a courtroom and drag out a simple procedure. I’m sure he thought I’d try to punish him somehow, and he’d get a chance to sic his lawyers on me, have them paint me as a gold-digging harpy.”

“Harpy?” Diane raised her eyebrows.

“His word, not mine. You should have seen his face when we met with our lawyers–so they could at least make this pitiful offer to settle--and I turned down everything. Alimony, the works–except for my house in Studio City. I was entitled to more under California’s community-property laws–half of what we made together while we were married.”

“And that was a lot?”

“Enough to matter to Bryce, and he’s always been bored with money. Between his portfolio and my business, we did pretty well.”

Irene frowned. “I remember when you called last month, right after you’d been on the phone with him.” She looked at Diane. “It’s why I asked Mercedes to come up here with me.” To Mercedes she added, “You really needed a vacation from that guy.”

“Yeah, it’s pathetic. He still keeps trying to get us back together. Our old friends do, too.”

Diane said, “He’s a pretty big guy to be calling pathetic. I still say you should get a restraining order.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “I just don’t want to be one of those women they find murdered with their restraining order the only thing still in their purse.”

The teakettle whistled, steam escaping. Diane, closer to the range, moved to get it. “Are you sure you don’t want some tea or coffee?”

“No, thanks,” Mercedes also stood, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles out of her blue t-shirt and jeans. “Not supposed to drink coffee. Doctor’s orders. ‘Sides, I don’t think I should think about Bryce and have a bunch of caffeine racing around inside me. I might do something desperate.”

Irene met her grin. “I’ve always thought of you as a desperate woman. Your dad’s papers are on the desk in Grandpa’s study.”

*

He’d been such a careful man. It was so like her dad to have sent copies of his research to his own father for safekeeping. Mercedes read through the titles: “Wave Stochasticity and Linear PlasmaMaser Effect.” “Electromagnetic Forces on Plasma Particles in the Presence of Controlled Resonant Plasma Turbulence.” Et cetera. Mercedes would need a doctorate in physics herself just to understand the titles.

That wasn’t entirely true. As the only child of two brilliant minds, Mercedes had picked up quite a bit. Her parents had never been reticent about their work in front of their daughter, and had always treated her as if no subject was beyond her comprehension. The three of them had discussed everything from whether or not a certain purple dinosaur had three green spots or four to the basics of superconductivity.

She knew her father had received his greatest acclaim for inventing a method for feeding energy to satellites from the earth’s surface. The patent for that contraption had taken care of college and the down payment on Mercedes’ bungalow in Studio City. Though she’d donated most of her parents’ white papers and research documents to people who could actually make use of them, such as the men and women at California’s Intercampus Institute for the Research of Particle Acceleration, she kept a few—for nostalgia, if not for recreational reading. From time to time one or another of her parents’ colleagues would call and ask to review a fine point of data. She’d kept all their phone numbers, with a promise to pass along anything new she discovered.

“Let’s see,” Mercedes said to herself, flipping through pages of her address book. “Vernon Eby, Manal Teobi, or Mitch Fenn.”

She decided on the latter. With his floppy haircut and dimpled chin, Mitch reminded her of the actor Chevy Chase. Fenn had been as close a friend as any to her family, and still sent her a card with a handwritten note every Christmas.

Mercedes picked up the phone.