Cloaked in Malice

by Annette Blair

  I squeezed her hand and nodded.

  She closed her eyes against the tears, but it was healthy for her to finally be able to mourn them.

  Nick got up to pace, to give her a minute, and when she wiped her eyes, he continued. “Your grandparents had one son.”

  “My father. Somehow that memory survived.”

  I rubbed my temple. “I’m surprised you remember anything.”

  “Well, my name is—” Going white, she pulled her legs from beneath her in the chair, stood, and rubbed her arms. “My name isn’t Paisley Skye. My last name is Wylde. It has to be; it was Bepah’s last name.”

  “Do you remember your real first name?” Nick asked.

  She opened my father’s humidor, uncovered his to-bacco jar, hugged it, and inhaled. “Madeira, you lived such a normal life. I envy you.”

  “My mother died when I was ten. Yours died when you were two. Yes, I still have my dad and three siblings, and I’m so grateful for my family. But normal? Not so much.”

  Paisley’s eyes filled. “Sorry, Mad. No, Nick. I don’t know my first name.”

  “You will.”

  “Can’t you tell me what it is?”

  “Psychologists say not to.”

  She put my father’s tobacco away. “Are you taking me to a shrink now?”

  Nick cleared his throat. “Are you watching too much TV now?”

  Paisley made the face of a chastised kid, except that she was twenty-six.

  “As it happens,” Nick said, “your parents didn’t know about Rose’s membership in the spy game. Your grandparents tried to keep their son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter—you—safe and out of it. When you were all still living in France, your extended family gave your grandparents a surprise twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party, and invited you and your parents.”

  “If my grandparents had known, they wouldn’t have let us come, right?”

  “Exactly,” Nick said.

  I got up to pace while Nick continued. “Mam and Pap were at the party, too. They escaped like you and your grandfather, but the adults split up, so they’d be harder to follow, though your grandfather kept you, and they all met on the island, even Rose, which is how her gown made it there.

  I touched Nick’s arm so I could take over. “Rose drowned shortly after arriving,” I said. “She was going back to the mainland, and got caught in one of those whirlpools.” I thought that was the best way to say it. “And well, you’ve seen Bepah’s grave.”

  “Why were my parents killed?”

  “Their enemies were not double agents. They were Russians who resented all double agents. They attended the party, too, of course, sweetie. One of them, we now know, is still looking for anyone left who can identify him.”

  “Not me?”

  Neither Nick nor I said a word.

  “How can I identify the people who killed my parents? I remember so little. I don’t know my own name.”

  “Your enemy doesn’t know that, does he?”

  “He? Should I be afraid of all men now?”

  Thirty-nine

  To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never…this is my symphony.

  —WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING

  “An hour until Dolly’s birthday party,” Paisley said. “What is she wearing to this Philadelphia Story/forties-type event?”

  “Tracy Lord’s wedding gown. A reasonable facsimile that I gave her a year or two ago. She adores it.” She wants to die in it, but that’s a story for another day.

  Paisley looked like a cross between her grandmother and Dolly herself in the vibrant Oleg Cassini gown we found behind the closet wall at the farm.

  We’d painstakingly restored and hand-cleaned the dress, using every trick I learned in fashion school, and on the job in New York, turning it into a brilliant vintage heirloom.

  She looked out the second-floor window, down toward the parking lot.

  My upstairs had finally been plastered, wired, and de-corated. I still liked my sewing area in the wide-open room full of windows, so for tonight, it was hidden by a set of four strategically placed art deco room dividers.

  And that was not all that was hidden back there.

  “You look like a dream,” I said, twice as nervous as she, but it was better she didn’t know why. Bait usually squirmed when they knew they were on a hook being dangled in front of a deadly predator.

  “What better place to wear it than to Dolly’s party,” she said, “since she lent it to my grandmother? I can’t believe I’m wearing my grandmother’s wedding dress. How cool is that?”

  “Well,” I said, “she was supposed to wear it to get married. Whether she did or not, I couldn’t say. But I do know that you were born to wear it.”

  “Maybe wearing it will bring me good luck and I’ll find that bachelor you’ve been talking about.”

  “Honey, you get any more guys interested in you, and there won’t be enough days in the week for you to date them.”

  Dante appeared, leaning on the wall a distance away. “If only I were young, and alive again,” he said. “And she was Dolly.”

  I was glad he added the last part.

  “I like your detective Werner,” Paisley said, reclaiming my attention.

  “Here,” I said, miming a presentation. “This is me, handing him to you on a silver platter.”

  “Oh, look!” She shook her head in regret. “He jumped off the platter and is clinging to your leg.”

  I shook my leg as if to dislodge him.

  “Yes, he’d better let go,” Nick said, his arms coming around me from behind.

  “One of our first guests is arriving downstairs,” Paisley said, turning from the window.

  “Well, I’ll go down for a meet-and-greet and send them up here to you. You’re the second-floor hostess, don’t forget. Stay up here now. We can’t neglect our guests.”

  “Ah, here’s my brother, Alex. He’ll keep you company. Oh, and he’s got Ray Scanlon with him. Hello, so glad you could come,” I said, purposely not using Scanlon’s official title as Assistant Director, FBI office, Washington, DC. I guessed that Alex and Nick thought they needed reinforcements and Scanlon’s been in on this case since before the island evidently.

  “Alex, where’s your wife?” Paisley asked while the sound of shattering glass turned me around before I got to the stairs to go down. The enemy we expected had come in through the second story window from the roof. And now he stood with a gun pointed straight at Paisley, while Scanlon seemed to have disappeared.

  “Why, Mr. McCreadie,” she said to the man who’d rescued her from the island. “That’s an odd way to arrive at a party.”

  White Beard. McCreadie, it turned out, was White Beard from the Eiffel tower. A lot older. A different look. Or he was White Beard’s son, a clone off the old block. I knew we waited for McCreadie, but not that I’d seen him or an ancestor in a vision.

  “I know this is a costume party,” Paisley told him. “But I don’t think that’s a forties gun.”

  Great that she played it cool.

  We expected him to come in downstairs through one of the side dressing room windows, where a contingent of Feds waited. Instead he’d likely cooled his heels on the roof, probably for hours, far side of the cupola. The Feds had lost his trail yesterday.

  “I didn’t expect a crowd,” McCreadie said. “The party’s not till eight.”

  “But the trap’s at six, and you took the bait, early.”

  “Don’t make it sound like you have the upper hand here.” McCreadie focused on Paisley while he answered me. “You’re the last witness,” he told Paisley, aka the bait.

  “Why didn’t you kill me in the boat when you had the chance, instead of taking me to shore?” she asked.

&nbs
p; I cleared my throat. “You could have thrown her overboard like you did her grandmother Rose,” I said, surprising a few people, but I could call my knowledge evidential speculation, rather than a vision.

  Scanlon re-appeared, now the apparent head of DC FBI, his gun aimed at McCreadie. “Anatola Bardzecki, also known as Stewart McCreadie, son and grandson of Russian circus performers, turned spies, turned counterfeiters, a man who carries a grudge,” he said.

  “Scanlon,” McCreadie acknowledged. “I didn’t know you knew.”

  “The FBI knows every detail of your felonious past. Then, years ago, during the resurgence of counterfeiting in the area, we figured that making you think you were on our side could work for us. But while we were trying to figure out a way to recruit and use you to get to the counterfeiting ring leaders, you came to us.”

  McCreadie mumbled something beneath his breath, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t tuck.

  Scanlon firmed his spine. Having the upper hand could do that. “You thought you were using us when it was the other way around. I like that. No, Bardezecki, counterfeiting was your father’s talent, and we figured it ran in the family. You couldn’t afford to live like you do, otherwise. But like your father, you’d made watching that island a top priority—and we gave you carte blanche to do that, with the occasional assignment to throw you off the scent. Your father watched the island because he wanted those caskets of money back—Rose and Grover double crossed him way back when and hid the money there. I can see why they’d have been enemies. Why it would have come down to one killing the other.”

  “Should have been the other way around,” McCreadie/Bardzecki snapped.

  Scanlon shrugged. “And you, in addition to avenging your father’s death, I think you wanted the money, too. So you became FBI. You must have thought your past was erased clean. Not. You were a Fed, and we tracked your every move. You gave us some good leads over the years, and we made quite a few arrests because of them. So you used us to get to Paisley and vengeance, and we used you to make some arrests, put a few snags in the counterfeiters operation and get its leader to prison.”

  “But you didn’t get them. You don’t know who they are,” McCreadie said, with satisfaction, his gun and focus possibly more firmly aimed at Paisley.

  Her sudden shiver caught our attention. “Bardzecki,” she said. “I know that name. You could easily have murdered me in cold blood—you’re good at it. You’re the man who murdered my parents. You are, aren’t you?”

  “You mean, you don’t know?”

  “Just now, when I listened to you talking, your accent brought some of it back. My name is Anya Wylde, and I come from…a courageous family, who were your enemies. So why let me live?”

  “For one thing,” Scanlon said, “he didn’t dare hurt you because we were watching him. He picked you up on FBI orders.”

  Aha, I thought. Puzzle pieces fell into place, and yet they were there all along, hiding in plain sight.

  “You were my bait. You were supposed to bring your grandfather back. He would have come the minute he knew you were off island. He would have escaped anything to get to you.”

  “Unfortunately, monsieur,” Paisley said. “Grover Wylde the First has been dead for years.”

  McCreadie laughed. “That’s not true. I just got word that he died three days ago in a Paris prison.”

  Paisley almost lost it then. Her eyes overflowed, but she disregarded the tears slipping down her cheeks. “But there’s a grave. Why did my grandfather leave me?”

  “Twenty years ago, my late partner took your grandfather off the island, but he couldn’t find you. Somebody there shot at him, a whole damned army. He killed a few of them and got away with Wylde.

  So, I thought, that’s how half the Dogpatch gang died of gunshot wounds. The rest must have passed of old age when Paisley was too young to remember. Or she got brainwashed out of remembering.

  “I tried to stop my partner, the bastard,” McCreadie continued, “but he shipped Wylde back to Paris, then, of course, I had to stop him for good. The best I could do was inform the authorities in France through a crooked ambassador that Wylde had been spying for Russia, so the old man went to prison. But he stayed too long. It didn’t make sense.”

  “What does?” I said to break the tension.

  McCreadie ignored me. “I waited for Wylde to get out and come back for you. Then I waited for you, Miss Prim, to come off the island. I didn’t know if you were alive, but I made it my business to find out. I provided your keepers—who never knew I killed their sister, Rose—with generators, freezers, all kinds of supplies. And last year, on order of the FBI, I gave Pap two computers, which I fitted with cameras that I was sure would catch sight of you, but the old man never did take that laptop to the house as I hoped. You, they protected with their lives.”

  Paisley emitted a half sob. “I played into your hands when I left the island, didn’t I?”

  “I wanted both of you dead, you and your grandfather. A double win, like your parents.”

  “Why? Why do you hate us so much?”

  “Your grandfather killed my father.”

  “And my parents? What did they ever do to you?”

  “They got in the way, kept me from killing your grandfather. You’re in the way; you know too much.”

  Paisley laughed. “I never saw you that night.”

  Fury rose visibly in McCreadie, and he cocked the trigger.

  The double doors to my storage area opened, revealing an eighty-eight-year-old marksman, a U.S. CIA agent, whose appearance disoriented McCreadie.

  “I can shoot you to make you hurt and linger,” the old man said, cocking his own gun. “Or—”

  Werner, also armed, stepped into view beside him, further distracting McCreadie.

  Nick took the trained-in-combat fast track to rearranging the bones in McCreadie’s gun wrist.

  McCreadie fell to his knees at the pain, his gun hand going limp. “Why didn’t you stop me years ago?”

  “We wanted the ringleader, of course,” Scanlon said. “You’re not in this alone. You’re not smart enough.”

  McCreadie snarled. “Ring leader! We’re not in the circus anymore. And I’m not talking.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Alex reached for his weapon but Paisley touched his hand to stop him. “For my parents, please,” she said, and he nodded.

  She picked up McCreadie gun then handed it to Alex. “I can and will identify you now, Mr. McCreadie, but so will we all.”

  The old man chuckled. “Go quietly with these nice gentlemen, McCreadie.” The old man uncocked his gun. “Go and let my granddaughter have her party…and her life.”

  Paisley turned on her heel, gasped, as if it couldn’t be. Her emotions ran rampant across her features. At first she looked confused, curious. She examined the lines in his face, until her gaze whipped to the hand he raised.

  “I know that hand,” she whispered. “It gentled the baby girl who adored you.” She wept as she spoke.

  “I love that little girl with all my heart,” her grandfather rasped.

  “Bepah?”

  “You look like your grandmother on our wedding day.” His voice shook.

  “Bepah!” She was in his arms, a hug worth a life-time.

  Werner and Scanlon took a sneering McCreadie away.

  “I never thought I’d see it,” Dolly said, her voice un-steady.

  Dante stood very close to her, hand-holding close, their clasp hidden behind her skirts. With her lover’s help, she composed herself.

  “I could not come back for you,” he whispered against Paisley’s hair. “I got life in prison for being a spy. At one point I nearly died but Dolly sent money for my care and against all odds, I recovered. It took years for my wife’s country, and my own to trust me again. Dolly began to send money to keep my life bearable. It turned out that I could serve my country well from prison, acting as a spy on other inmates, but the job I signed on for took years longer than expected. Th
ere was always a reason that I could not come for you. But you were with your great aunt and uncle, so I knew you were safe. I arranged for you to be whisked away at times of danger, and hidden in the tunnel nursery. All these years, I prayed with every breath to see you again.”

  “I can’t believe I helped bring my brother and his granddaughter together at last.”

  “Aunt Dolly, why couldn’t you get him out sooner?” Paisley asked.

  “Grover wouldn’t let me. He stayed away to protect us both, served two countries by spying on other prisoners, and over the years, he earned his freedom. But it took me going there with someone from the State Department to point that out to the right people.”

  Grover chuckled. “Like a little schnauzer, my sister nipped at their heels to make them move faster. They feared our Dolly, I tell you.”

  Paisley giggled.

  Dolly smoothed Paisley’s hair. “I met you, sweetie, and I moved on it. Just like Grover told me years ago to do if evidence of you ever appeared. But you were such a shock after so long. I never thought it would happen.”

  “You frightened me, running like that,” Dante said. “I thought you’d given birth to our baby after I passed, and that Paisley was our granddaughter.”

  Dolly laughed, ’til Ted Macri offered to get her oxygen.

  “My concern for you both is not a laughing matter.” Dante tried to move away, but Dolly won that fight, too. To anybody but me, because Dad and Aunt Fiona hadn’t arrived yet, she must have looked like she was grabbing at air.

  “Mama,” Ethel said. “Our house is gonna burst at the seams.”

  “Let her rip,” Dolly said. “We have a family, Ethel. Now we have Madeira and more loved ones to cook and bake for.”

  “Mad,” Paisley, or Anya, said. “Tunney was right. You are good. You looked at those clothes and helped me find my past and my future.” She didn’t mention the way she grew up. She wouldn’t want to hurt her grandfather. How could he help going to prison, after all?