Modern Wicked Fairy Tales: Complete Collection (14 page)

“To be fair, it was a minor breach,”
Campbell pointed out. “The hacker found a back door in the system.
We’ve isolated and eliminated it.”

“That may be.” Wilhelm shrugged. “But it
certainly does make us concerned about other potential back
doors.”

“Real ones.” Otto, the middle Behr brother,
piped up. He was always getting in the middle, the mediator. “Mr.
Campbell, you came highly recommended and so far, you have proven
to be everything you were purported to be. However, given this
latest snafu, we thought it might be good to run a little
test.”

“A test?” Campbell braced himself.

“You have a competitor.” Rolf spoke up,
turning away from the window he’d been standing in front of. “I
assume you’ve heard of Saul Lax?”

Campbell’s jaw tightened. “You know I
have.”

“Until he retired, he was the best in the
business,” Otto interrupted, looking between his older brother and
his younger one. They all had strong German jaw lines and Aryan
features—blonde with ice blue eyes. “His company served our family
for generations.”

“I’m aware,” Campbell acknowledged.

“You only received this job because of he
got out of the business,” Wilhelm reminded him and Campbell gave
him another brief nod. He’d found it best not to supply the
youngest Behr brother with too much feedback or information. He
liked to use it as ammunition.

“But we hear his granddaughter has opened
Saul’s business doors again.” Otto sat forward in his over-sized
chair.

“Is she any good?” Campbell asked.

Wilhelm looked at him over tented fingers.
“We’re going to find out.”

“What are you proposing?”

“A test.” Rolf crossed his arms over his
chest. “You have assured us that our most prize possessions are
secure. Our systems are impenetrable.”

Campbell gritted his teeth. “They are.”

“So then you have nothing to lose,” Wilhelm
piped up.

“Are you proposing a wager?” Campbell walked
right into the trap.

“Just so.” Rolf nodded. “If Ms. Lax fails in
her endeavor, things will go on as they have been.”

Wilhelm leaned forward, grinning, hands
gripping the arms of his chair. “However, if she succeeds, we will
hire her as our new head of security instead.”

Campbell considered the proposition, as if
he had some sort of decision to make. Clearly, they had already
made up their minds. The Behr brothers weren’t just wealthy, they
were ghastly rich, and their estates spanned the globe. Besides
this one, there were two in California, one in Texas, three in
Florida, four in New York, thirteen total in Europe, and one in
Asia. That didn’t count the businesses, which were more numerous
still.

“That’s quite a wager.”

Wilhelm giggled. It was a throaty, gleeful
sound, and it made Campbell want to punch him and break his round
little glasses. “You’ve assured us that you’re up to the
challenge.”

“I am,” he snapped. “Have you engaged her
services? How do you know she even wants the job?”

Otto smiled. “Her family has worked for ours
for generations, Mr. Campbell. I’m surprised she hasn’t already yet
approached us for your job.”

“So…” Campbell spread his hands wide, giving
in. “Where? When?”

Rolf laughed deeply from his barrel chest,
shaking his head. “Ah, Mr. Campbell, we can’t tell you that. It
wouldn’t be a very accurate test of your abilities then, would
it?”

“Fair enough.” Campbell straightened,
looking between the three of them. “Is that all, gentlemen?”

Rolf gave him a nod, dismissing him with a
wave of his hand and looking back out the window. Campbell
swallowed his rage, turning to go.

“For what it’s worth,” Otto called as
Campbell opened the door. “I hope you win.”

Campbell glanced back and smiled grimly. “So
do I.”

* * * *

“He’ll be glad to see you.” Jenny, the aide
at the front desk, smiled and waved as Goldie passed carrying a
bunch of freshly picked lilacs.

“Do you have a vase?” Goldie stopped at the
desk, holding up the flowers. “I saw them in a field on the way
here and had to stop. I thought, you know, my grandmother loved
lilacs so much, and he used to cut some for her every spring. Maybe
it will help him remember…”

“I’ll find something for you.” Jenny was
young, just out of high school, and wore far too much makeup, but
she was a sweet girl and really seemed to care about the patients.
Goldie liked her. “They just finished lunch. He’s out on the back
porch.”

“Thanks.” Goldie flashed her a grateful
smile and pushed open the double doors. They were locked from the
inside, and when her grandfather was lucid, he called himself an
inmate, not a patient, and the nurses and health care aides
wardens. A life lived picking locks had left him seeing everything
as a prison.

She found him, as promised, on a patio they
called “the back porch.” The ratio was one aide to every three
patients, so her grandfather was lined up next to two other people
in their wheelchairs, brakes locked, all of them just sitting, as
if waiting for something to happen. One of them was a woman, her
hair in a long, thin white braid down her back. The other was a man
much younger than her grandfather and much less mobile. His
multiple sclerosis had left him unable to move his limbs or control
his bowels and she could smell him even in the fresh outdoor
air.

The aide was reading a magazine and when the
doors to the patio opened, she folded her issue of
People
and tucked it under her. “Here to see your grandfather?” the woman
asked, shading her eyes against the sun as she looked up at
Goldie.

This aide was older, middle-aged, with
crow’s feet around her eyes and a broad, red lipsticked smile.
Goldie couldn’t remember her name. She hadn’t been around long, and
unfortunately the turnover for health care aides was enormous.
Goldie didn’t like this one much—too negligent, as far as she was
concerned—although she was better than some. Even if she didn’t
know them, all the aides knew her. Goldie came every Sunday to
visit for a few hours, usually in the afternoon because her
grandfather seemed a little more aware between lunch and
dinner.

Goldie wrinkled her nose as she got near her
grandfather’s chair—the smell of the man sitting in his own
elimination beside him was overpowering—and grasped the handles.
“I’m going to take him for a walk. Do you mind?”

“Go right ahead.” The woman smiled, standing
to look busy, tucking a blanket around the old woman’s legs. She
didn’t even look up. “Oh goodness. Mr. Benedict needs some
attending to, doesn’t he?”

Goldie made a face behind the aide’s back as
she unlocked Mr. Benedict’s chair brake and began to wheel him
backward, turning him around to head inside. Who knew how long the
poor man would have sat there like that if Goldie hadn’t arrived?
She didn’t want to think about it.

“Hey Poppy.” She squatted down in the space
left by Mr. Benedict’s chair, between the old woman and her
grandfather. He was dozing, his chin to his chest, snoring lightly,
the breeze blowing wispy strands of the white hair that was left
above his ears. She couldn’t see any resemblance anymore to her own
father, although everyone said and pictures confirmed that the two
could have been twins in their youth with their blond hair and blue
eyes and imposing height.

“Poppy?” She nudged the old man’s knee
gently with her forearm, not wanting to jolt him too much. He
snorted, snoring momentarily louder, and then lifted his head,
staring at her with rheumy blue eyes that looked right through her.
For a moment she thought it was going to be a bad one, one of those
days when he called her Raisa and mistook her for her grandmother,
but then his gaze shifted to the lilacs and his eyes focused and he
smiled.

“Spring already?” His voice was hoarse. “How
long did I sleep?”

“A hundred years.” She returned his smile,
putting the lilacs on his lap. He fingered their stems as she
stood, taking a step behind him and pushing his chair off the patio
and onto the concrete path. It was a nice facility, her father had
made sure of that, with an acre of rolling, manicured lawn and
private rooms but she still felt the institutionalization of the
place, no matter how nicely they trimmed the hedges.

“How’s your father?” Poppy inquired,
glancing over his shoulder at her.

The pain twanged like a guitar string wound
too tightly in her chest. “He’s dead, Poppy,” she reminded him
gently. “Remember? Three years ago—a heart attack.”

She didn’t envy Poppy. He’d outlived them
all. Not just his wife—Goldie’s grandmother had died over ten years
ago, a few days after Goldie’s sixteenth birthday—but his children
too. When no parent should ever have to bury a child, he’d buried
three. His only daughter he’d buried as an infant, back when SIDS
was called crib death. That had been her namesake, Golda Sisel Lax,
a family name passed on, that of her great-grandmother. That
particular Goldie, Poppy’s mother, had been in a concentration camp
with him. He’d told her the stories many times, although they all
ran together these days, about how his mother had died.

Poppy had asked his son to pass the name
down and so she had become Golda Sisel too—Goldie for short—upon
her birth. But Poppy had no other grandchildren to pass any other
names on to, because he’d buried his other son, dead of an overdose
in his twenties. Goldie was his only heir once her father, Saul
Lax, Poppy’s last remaining son, had died in his kitchen at the
ripe old age of fifty-seven. She had been there at the time,
helping him recover after knee surgery, and she would probably
always wonder if he’d still be alive if he hadn’t stubbornly
insisted on getting up to fetch a soda from the kitchen himself
while she was in the shower.

She remembered the whole thing, although she
didn’t let herself think about it often—calling 911, doing CPR,
willing him to breathe,
breathe
, worried she was hurting him
as she locked her elbows and did chest compressions, knowing
already that this was one safe she couldn’t crack, one lock that
wasn’t going to be undone. He was gone and she was all alone in the
world, except for Poppy.

“How’s business?” Poppy inquired as she
rolled him along. The day was bright and fine, the air redolent
with freshly cut grass.

“It’s good,” she assured him, not wanting to
say much more. Goldie’s father had been the only one interested in
the family locksmith business, continuing on in his father’s
footsteps before him. Poppy claimed Saul was better at it than even
he had been, although she had worked with the old man in her teens
and thought, perhaps, he was being generous to his only son. Saul
had been good—very good—but the ability to crack a safe with just
the senses had skipped a generation from Poppy to Goldie herself.
“I just came back from a job in Brazil. I’m consulting all over the
world.”

She parked the wheelchair near a bench and
took a seat across from her grandfather, who looked at her fondly,
his withered chest puffed with pride. She liked telling him about
the work, knowing how much he missed it, at least on the days he
was lucid, and there were precious few people she could share the
experience with.

“Do you remember the Ursas you told me
about, Poppy?” She saw the old man’s eyes light up with a fire she
rarely saw in him anymore and knew he did. “I’m going to get them
back.”

“How?” His eyes narrowed and he looked at
her shrewdly. His mind was working just fine today, she
thought.

She shrugged, unable to conceal a smile. “I
have a plan.”

“Goldie.” He reached a hand out to touch her
arm, his skin as thin and soft as tissue paper, the veins on the
back of his hand a blue roadmap. “Don’t you do anything to get in
trouble. You’re all I’ve got left.”

“Have you ever been to Brazil?” she asked,
changing the subject. “It’s like this all the time. Lovely weather.
I think you’d like it.”

He eyed her, skeptic. “Is that so?”

“Oh, Poppy, I didn’t tell you.” She patted
his hand, still smiling. “I found out about your friend, the one
you told me about.”

He sat back in his wheelchair, frowning.
“Daniel?”

“He’s still alive,” she assured him, seeing
the anxiety on his face. “Still living in Europe. Want to know how
he’s doing?”

“Probably same as me.” Poppy grinned, his
teeth yellow and small. “Everything hurts—and if it don’t hurt, it
don’t work.”

She laughed. “I talked to him on the phone.
He’s a very nice man.”

“Did you?” He blinked at her.

“He’s working as a museum curator,” she told
him. “At seventy-four. Can you believe it?”

“He’s just a young pup.” Poppy’s gaze went
far away and she knew he must be remembering.

“His son, Jakob, mostly runs it for him,”
Goldie explained. “But Daniel is still very much involved.”

“He named his son Jakob?” The sad look in
Poppy’s eyes made her want to hug him, and it made her miss her
father, which she knew he was doing too. “And did he tell you about
the Ursas?”

Goldie nodded, her face grim. “He told me
the whole story.”

“Here you are!” The aid from the front desk
had found them and Goldie startled. “I found a vase for those
flowers.”

The aide held up the vase as proof,
smiling.

Poppy looked down at the flowers in his lap.
They’d both forgotten them. “Your grandmother loved lilacs.”

“I remember.” Goldie nodded. Her own mother
had walked out on them when she was just a baby, but her
grandmother had tried to make up for that and had mostly
succeeded.

“He’s having a good day,” Jenny whispered,
nodding at Poppy like he couldn’t hear her.

Goldie nodded again, reaching for her pocket
as her cell phone rang. When she saw the Caller ID, her heart
nearly stopped.