by Carly Bishop
She looked away. She didn’t want to know anything about him. Not about the strength she kept testing, not the pain. Instead she stared out at the bleak winter landscape beyond the window with the iron bars that tried so earnestly to seem decorative but were intended to keep the residents of Chamberlain House from throwing themselves out of the windows to their deaths.
At last she faced Cy again. “Do you have any more questions for my grandmother?” she signed. “This was supposed to be a small celebration. It’s my birthday and I would like to spend some time alone with her.”
He gave her a look that might have hinted at small regrets. “Happy birthday, Amy.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry, but we do have a few more questions for Mrs. Reeves.”
She gestured that he should get it over with. He stood, and winced as he rose, stretched, then lifted the vanity bench in one hand and placed it in front of Fiona. Amy stood and went to sit on her grandmother’s bed, near enough to hold Granny Fee’s hand, and at an angle to lip-read Cy’s questions. Povich moved into place as well.
“Mrs. Reeves.” Cy smiled. “I understand you’re about to have a small celebration here.”
“Yes.” Granny Fee squeezed Amy’s hand and smiled at her fondly. “My granddaughter is famous now.”
Cy signed Fiona’s response for Amy’s benefit, then, “Is that right? Why?”
“She’s won a design award.” She turned to Amy. “Show him your blueprints, sweetling?”
Amy gestured “later.”
“I understand,” Cy went on, eyeing her blueprint case, “this is also Amy’s birthday.”
“Oh, my dear, yes! Her twenty-eighth.”
She knew exactly how petty it was, but Amy resented the small kindness he offered in interpreting for her, almost as much as she resented the reality check Cy imposed on Fiona’s mental status—and that Granny Fee had failed. “Twenty-nine,” she signed.
“Twenty-ninth, isn’t it, Mrs. Reeves? Amy’s twenty-ninth birthday?” he said, then signed, “Off by a year? Not an issue, Amy. She knew it was your birthday.” He turned back to Fiona. “Twenty-eight, twenty-nine. What difference does it make?” He smiled with Fiona, signing as he spoke to her, signing her responses. “She’s still a baby, isn’t she?”
“Not exactly,” Fee demurred softly. “But I remember quite clearly when she was.”
“What kind of mother was your daughter-in-law?”
“Julia?” Fee gave the question several long moments’ thought. Cy’s hands went still, waiting on her. “Irresponsible,” she said at last. “Resentful.”
He lowered his eyes, deciding in the split second to spare Amy her grandmother’s answer. “How did you—”
“Wait!” Amy interrupted him, leaning toward him, refusing to be spared anything. “What did she say?”
He wanted to make something up. He couldn’t. If he once began to lie to her, he would lose forever whatever ground he had gained with Amy Reeves. He spelled the words to eliminate any small matter of interpretation. “Irresponsible. Resentful.”
“What does that mean? Ask her,” Amy signed, “what does that mean?”
Fiona suddenly understood through the gentle haze of the hypodermic drugs what effect her unguarded answer had had on Amy. She closed both her gnarled hands around Amy’s. “Sweetling, do you remember that you could once hear?”
But Amy had never been able to read Fiona’s old lips well, and she turned to Cy, who repeated Fiona’s bizarre question.
“Granny Fee,” she signed, “what does that have to do with the kind of mother Julia was to me?”
Fee’s eyes swam in sudden tears. “You heard everything, sweetling. You were a difficult child to love. You heard everything.”
Cy cleared his throat. “Mrs. Reeves, do you know, did someone in the house cause Julia’s death?”
“Amy knows,” she uttered softly, so unguardedly Cy knew it could only be because she had been medicated beyond any discretion. He signed her response to Amy.
She stopped breathing. Her hands trembled. “How would I know that, Granny Fee?”
“You knew, sweetling,” Fiona insisted. “You... you heard,” she cried, a drop of spittle leaking from the corner of her withered old lips, “what terrible trouble there was in that house.”
Chapter Three
Amy stood, bow and arrow in hand, in Hank Takamura’s barn, which had been converted to a practice hall. At the far wall was a bank of sand, and mounted in it, the circular target batt. She had been trained to become as one with the target. To disregard herself, her wishes, even her intent to hit the bull’s-eye.
Her breathing slowed; she felt herself struggling to keep other thoughts at bay, other feelings that had no place here. Hank Takamura bowed toward her, then attached a target face to the tied-grass batt.
Backing away, he more closely resembled an ascetic Zen monk than a wealthy business magnate. The nearest neighbor to her father’s property, Hank presided over the largest privately held electronics company in the world.
Hank was a nisei, born in America of Japanese immigrants. He had returned to Japan for his education, and become a master in the art of kyudo archery. He considered himself an American though, and when he uttered some unanswerable Zen koan, it was with tongue in cheek.
More grandfather than neighbor to Amy, he had troubled himself far more than her uncle or brother to learn ASL, and far surpassed even her father’s ability to appreciate nuance and complexity. In short, he had learned to understand her.
An hour ago, seated near the waterfall in Takamura’s rock garden, she had relayed to him the gist of her encounter with Cy McQuaid and Fiona’s drug-induced revelations. Takamura watched her closely, so closely that she was reminded constantly of McQuaid, but it was clear to her that her beloved aging mentor did not approve of the emotional turmoil she was experiencing.
“What is it that you want, Amy?” he had asked. “To find the kernel of truth, or to undo what has happened?”
She had felt chided as she hadn’t in many years. Scolded like a stubborn child. Nothing could be undone or unsaid. The question was not meant to remind her of so simple a truth, but to demand she reach deeper. Even if she could stop McQuaid’s probe, would she do it?
“If he continues—”
Takamura had cut her off with a slicing motion of his arm in the air. “Can you stop him?”
She swallowed. Shook her head. “No.”
“Then to rail against what will be is a self-indulgence unworthy of you.”
Watching the koi swimming about in the deep heated pond at the base of the waterfall, she felt so shaky that she was unable to think even what it was she feared from Cy McQuaid or his investigation. It was true that she had discounted all her life what had happened that day, made light of it, made the accident seem less than it was even if ever after she could hear nothing.
It happened.
She had lost her hearing. So what?
The truth was that she had never really looked the enormity of her loss in the face. She had lost her mother as well, but it had taken Cy McQuaid, almost twenty-five years later, refusing to let her belittle her losses, to shake her up.
And then Granny Fee had driven home the point. You knew...you heard what terrible trouble there was in that house.
Takamura, flat-footed but crouched deeply beside her, his arms about his knees, had touched her arm to regain her attention, his expression softer, gentler. “Are you fearful that your father will be proven to have murdered your mother?”
“No. He is a good and honorable man. He couldn’t have had anything to do with her death. I believe that with all my heart.”
“It is a dangerous thing,” he warned carefully, “to believe with your whole heart in another human being. You must be prepared to deal with the truth as it is, Amy, and not as you wish it to be.”
She rose then, and led the way onto the path away from the garden through the winter-bare aspen trees and enormous S
cotch pine to the barn. At the door, held shut by a couple of bolts, Takamura stopped her. He had waited until he had her full attention again. She wouldn’t set foot inside quite yet.
“If not for your father, then what it is you fear?”
“Only this,” she signed. “If McQuaid continues, if it matters somehow whether I knew what was going on in the house in Steamboat, then...I don’t know what will happen to me.”
“Then you have nothing to fear. The worst has already happened.”
“What do you mean?”
Takamura said nothing. His face remained impassive. He believed she did know.
“It’s not a matter of whether my mother found me a difficult child to love. I don’t even really remember her. But for Fiona to suggest I knew what terrible things were going on in that house—”
“Consider, please,” he interrupted, brooking no protest, idle or otherwise, “the possibility that you did know. And then, please, consider what must occur. When a child hears what no child is meant to hear, when she knows what she knows yet is told she knows nothing of the sort, what do you think becomes of such a child?”
She goes deaf....
Her throat locked. She felt unable to breathe or think or examine the metaphor, if it was one at all, but he gave her no time even to think. He had opened the barn door, in a clear signal to her that the discussion was over. The issue was not to be brought into his practice hall. She must put it all aside now, and become one with the instruments of her art, for to do so was a true test of her resolve and her art.
She stood poised to shoot, distanced from the target by twenty yards. She adjusted her leather arm guard, then drew a breath deep into her lungs. The question Takamura had raised went to the core of her being; she feared Cy McQuaid for what he was prepared to do to her life on behalf of her father’s nomination. But Takamura would end her practice before she began if he thought her mentally unfit.
One after another, she plucked arrows from the quiver, and shot. After every sixth time she collected her arrows while Takamura replaced the target on the tied-grass batt. At her sixtieth arrow, she sensed, by some altered quality of light, that the door of the practice hall had opened. That someone had entered and now stood, unmoving.
No one who knew Takamura would have dared enter uninvited. He ignored the intrusion; he expected the same of her. She emptied her quiver again. Collecting her arrows, she returned to her mark, battling the temptation to turn and peer into the darkness, to confirm what her own wary instincts told her, that the intruder was McQuaid, half hidden in the deep shadows behind her.
She knew by his careless, arrogant trespassing, and by her intuition. Her heart beat hard. The air around her seemed fraught with tension and despite her effort, her composure fled. Takamura ignored all that. Taking the arrows from her hand, he set each with infinite respect into the ground quiver, and by his care, she knew he had found nothing to praise in her shots. Though each arrow found its mark within the bull’s-eye, the faulty angles reflected the tension riding every nerve in her body.
“You are distracted, Amy.” This was not an accusation, but an observation. “Accept a thing as it is,” he commanded, “and you will recover.”
She straightened. Such a remark was a gauntlet from Hank Takamura. His advice went far beyond her next shot to whether she would finally turn and face her past. To confront the emotional danger Cy McQuaid represented to her. She had no choice. She would not hide. She nodded.
Takamura inclined his head toward her in an abbreviated, Americanized gesture of great honor and respect; Amy mirrored his motion. Then he took a taper from a box, lit the wick and placed it in a pottery candle holder on the floor so that the circle of its glow fell well short of the target.
Takamura backed away from the target. When he doused the lights, he would expect her to draw the bow spiritually, effortlessly, then let loose her arrow into the dark, like an infant letting go of a finger, trusting. Trusting. Without effort or conscious thought, her shot must show Cy McQuaid what Byron Reeves’s daughter was made of.
LEANING AGAINST the back wall of the remodeled barn, Cy crossed his arms over his chest. An outbuilding on the forested ten-acre property—by covenant the smallest parcel of land in this ritzy Evergreen development, the barn had been built for very expensive, very pampered horses, and it was large enough to serve as a small indoor arena. The roof had to be thirty feet above the wooden flooring.
The loft was truly impressive. A rich man’s indulgence. At one end deep enough to serve the usual purposes, the loft continued around all sides of the barn in what he imagined must have served the owner as an observation deck.
Cy’s foray into Amy Reeves’s territory had upset her. He could feel her anxiety. He suspected she knew he stood behind her. Knowing nothing of archery, watching her shoot, he took her disciplined refusal to acknowledge his presence as a bid for dominance in a struggle neither of them had quite yet defined.
She discarded a windbreaker. He knew from her dossier that she always wore black. Always, as if in perpetual mourning, just as she devoted every Saturday morning to her archery practice with Henry Takamura.
This morning she wore a black tank top and sweatpants that more molded to her long, lean haunches than masked them. He could see the tension in her slender, powerful shoulders and in the sleek muscles of her back. Despite her awareness of him, or perhaps because of it, shot after shot flew absolutely true to his untrained eye, cleanly piercing the bull’s-eye.
Then Takamura spoke almost soundlessly to her, so that she could read his lips but Cy could not hear him. Cy had no basis for understanding the old man’s gestures of displeasure with her. The near-silence unnerved Cy as well, and he was not a man to tolerate such weakness in himself. For years, with Seth, he had seen firsthand the paranoia of not hearing. Now, for the first time, because of Amy Reeves, he began to feel it.
He fought the awareness of his attraction to her. She was a beautiful woman. Sleek, controlled, dangerous, and for all that, still vulnerable. He knew the force of personality, the strength of character it took to thrive, deaf, in a hearing world.
He couldn’t afford to be drawn to her, to admire her, to understand her, to cut her any more slack than he would an unbroken filly.
He suspected the investigation would cost her dearly.
He couldn’t afford to care that Amy was the sacrificial lamb on the altar of an answer the President himself wanted—yesterday.
But Cy was already in deep trouble with this investigation. He hadn’t slept last night. That was a first. He could always sleep, even when he had lain half paralyzed for months on end in rehab. He had schooled himself in the ability.
He straightened his slumped shoulders. He hadn’t expected to be as disarmed by Amy Reeves as he’d been by Seth, but the stricken look in her eyes when her grandmother alluded to trouble in her childhood, when Fiona had said what a difficult child she was to love, when she maintained Amy knew what had happened the night Julia Reeves died, was enough to make him sick.
And leave him sleepless.
He was no rookie in the dirty-tricks department He had a job to do and he did it. His conscience never bothered him. But Amy Reeves was tailor-made to make him despise the callous disregard of it all.
Under the influence of the hypodermic drugs, calmed out of her usual wariness, Fiona Reeves had spilled her guts where her daughter-in-law was concerned. Amy had been blindsided, and Cy couldn’t even comfort himself that he had had no reason to know it would happen.
That kind of thing happened all the time.
So his conscience hacked away at him now, even as he understood that he couldn’t endure the slightest emotional investment in another deaf human being.
Despite all this, his sex, not his heart, had hardened. And that hadn’t happened in all the months—forty—six of them—since his right leg had been nearly blown from his body...
It was a brass-jacket hollowpoint, Cy, ripping through your groin. You’re luck
y to be alive. You’re damned lucky to be walking. Give it some time.
He gritted his teeth, clenched his fists. Relief swamped his soul.
He watched Takamura nod to her, and Amy acknowledging with a nod of her own. Takamura backed away, lighted a long, thin candle and placed it ten feet to the side and fore of the target.
Cy’s gaze caught on Amy. She stood stock-still, her shiny black bow raised, her arrow nocked, her stance open and to the side.
He held his breath. He felt something extraordinary happening. The silence was complete now; Takamura approached Cy soundlessly. His obsidian eyes glancing neither left nor right, he passed by as though Cy existed in some other reality. The old man stood by a bank of light switches, crossed his arms and closed his eyes.
Amy breathed. Cy watched the torturously slow rise and fall of her rib cage as his own stiffening eased. He thought her respirations were easily under five per minute, signaling exceptional focus. As if at some indiscernible signal, Takamura reached for the light switches and flicked them all off, plunging the practice hall into darkness pierced only by the light of one thin candle.
Cy heard the sharp whap of the bowstring slapping the leather arm guard Amy wore, the arrow sundering the air, the deadly thud of the arrow piercing the target.
Seconds passed. Minutes, he’d have sworn, if he hadn’t his own heartbeat to gauge the time. He heard her draw another arrow from the quiver. He imagined her nocking the arrow. He couldn’t see her.
Irrationally, he felt...fear. He imagined that she was his judge and jury, that she had found him accountable, that she had turned toward him to exact her revenge.
That her next arrow would penetrate his heart.
That he would die in this dark, too-silent hell.
His fists balled up again and his heart hammered. Not now, he thought. Not now. He wanted to live long enough to make love to a woman again.
Too late to move he heard the whap, the air sundered, the lethal thud.