Finding North

by Christian, Claudia Hall

  “They are so happy,” Rebecca said. “I didn’t expect it.”

  “They are such easy-going babies,” Alex said. “We’re lucky.”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “Listen, Mom . . .” Alex started.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Rebecca said. “I promised Cian I’d help with Sunday dinner, plus . . .”

  Alex raised her eyebrows and wondered what Rebecca wanted.

  “Your nanny is leaving, and you need your antibiotics.” Rebecca got up and followed Alex into the hallway. “You need my help.”

  Alex’s head went up and down to agree with her mother, but, inside, she sneered. She was definitely going to regret letting her mother in the door. Truth be told, if she hadn’t had her morning brush with death, her mother would not be sitting here right now. Rebecca smiled as if she had heard Alex’s thought.

  “Where’s Max?” Rebecca asked.

  “He and Wyatt went skiing,” Alex said. “They’ll be here for dinner.”

  “I’m sure you have some work . . . or . . .” Rebecca said.

  A shadow of sadness moved across Rebecca’s face, and for the first time, Alex realized that her mother had aged. They had been at odds most of her life. Whatever semblance of peace and understanding they’d gained in the last few years had been lost when Alex and Max kicked their parents out of their lives. While her father was robust enough to get past it, she’d clearly broken her mother’s heart.

  “Why don’t you come down?” Alex asked. Rebecca’s face brightened. “You can play with the twins in the basement. We’ll be right there if you need help. I mean, if you don’t mind.”

  “It sounds fun,” Rebecca said.

  “Great,” Alex said. She turned to head down to the basement.

  “But first . . .” Rebecca started.

  Alex turned to look at her mother.

  “Patrick told me why you did what you did last Christmas,” Rebecca said. “And, while I don’t like what you did or how you did it, I wanted to say thank you. Those men who broke in a few years ago . . . and I had to . . .”

  Her mother sucked in her breath and swallowed hard at the memory of being attacked in her own home. Alex put her hand on her mother’s arm to steady her.

  “They were looking for the book I gave you,” Rebecca said. “Weren’t they?”

  “I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Alex said.

  “Please don’t do that,” Rebecca said. “I need to know. Plus, it’s the only thing that makes any sense. We had a wonderful Christmas Eve party. You went home with everyone. I talked to Sami before going to bed. She was laughing and happy. She said you were excited about Christmas, and then . . . A few hours later, and . . .”

  “Mom,” Alex said.

  “I wanted to tell you that . . .” Rebecca nodded. “I don’t care if they kill me. Being away from you kids and my grandchildren, especially now that we’re home in Denver . . . Well, I may as well have been dead.”

  Rebecca nodded.

  “I say, ‘Let them try,’” Rebecca said. “Because . . .”

  Rebecca’s large hazel eyes filled with tears. Seeing Rebecca’s sorrow, Máire put her tiny hand on Rebecca’s face. Rebecca smiled at the baby.

  “I understand,” Alex said. “And I’m sorry. We were really trying to . . . protect you, mitigate the damage.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Rebecca said. “I don’t like it, but I do understand it.”

  “I’m sorry to have caused so much pain,” Alex said. “Pain seems to be the currency in which I trade.”

  Rebecca smiled. She took Máire from Alex.

  “Yes, I can see you’re suffering,” Rebecca said.

  Alex smiled. She stuck her head into the living room and waved for Raz to come with her. He looked up from Joey and smiled.

  “Shall we?” Rebecca asked.

  Raz got up and followed Rebecca to the basement stairs. Alex quickly tidied the living room. She grabbed the twins’ changing bag and the blanket from the floor. She opened the chest near the end of the room and stuffed the blanket inside.

  Closing the lid, she saw her mother’s handbag. She’d never seen her mother without her handbag tucked on her shoulder. Even when she was with Grace or Paddie, Colin’s son, her mother’s handbag was never far from her. The fact that this handbag was sitting next to an armchair in her living room meant that, for the first time in Alex’s life, her mother was not thinking of the next social event or photo op. Her mother was truly present with the twins.

  “Are you coming, Alex?” Rebecca asked.

  Alex smiled and left the living room.

  FFFFF

  Sunday afternoon

  May 15 — 5:17 p.m. MDT

  Denver, Colorado

  “Where did you get this?” Alex asked.

  Rebecca sat with Máire on her lap, and Raz held Joey. They sat on a loveseat near the gas fireplace in Alex’s office. The babies had fallen sound asleep in the warm safe room. Trailing an IV bag on a metal stand, Alex took her antique map off the wall.

  “I’m not sure,” Rebecca said. “My father had one on the wall in his library.”

  “Really?” Alex asked.

  “He was very interested in cartography,” Rebecca smiled.

  “Really?” Alex repeated. She took the map from the false wall covering the gun safe and looked at her mother.

  “Yes, really,” Rebecca said. “I think that’s why I never thought it was weird that you and Max were so interested in maps. It wasn’t until you were in base schooling that I realized it wasn’t quite normal for your four-year-old children to draw a detailed map of the base. Certainly, that’s what the principal thought.”

  Alex set the map on the floor. She unhooked her IV bag from the stand and dropped it next to the map. She sat down and turned the map over to get access to the back. The cheap frame bent with pressure.

  “I’ve never known anyone — besides Alex and Max, of course — who draws maps,” Raz said. “Did your father draw maps, too?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know,” Rebecca said. “I didn’t know him well, and I never spent any real time with him. I was never alone with him, not once. Alex, do you remember that caliper I gave you and Max when you were . . . gosh, I think you were eleven? It belonged to my father.”

  “I have it this year,” Alex said. She took her Spyderco folding knife from the band of her pants and used it to flip back the inexpensive aluminum stays that held the thin cardboard backing to the map.

  “What does that mean?” Raz laughed.

  “There’s only one, so we switch off having it,” Alex said.

  “Since you were eleven?” Raz asked.

  Rebecca shot Raz an amused look, which Alex caught. She shook her head.

  “We’ve each had it thirteen times,” Alex said. “Next year, Max will have it one more year than me.”

  “Don’t forget — you’ll have it again the following year,” Rebecca joked.

  “Max is older, so he gets to go first,” Alex said. “I have it in my safe with a bunch of other precious things. I’ve used it a few times. It’s fun to feel the history.”

  Alex turned her attention to the map in her hands. She used her knife to lift up the thin cardboard backing. Carefully, she peeled the cardboard from the map.

  “There’s nothing written here,” Alex said. “There’s a kind of mark, but . . .”

  Alex pulled up an edge of the map.

  “There are three maps here,” Alex said. “No, four — not counting the one facing out. The paper they are on is very thin and looks old.”

  Alex carefully pulled a map from the stack of maps inside the frame. She lay it face up on the floor and removed the next. She did the same until all five maps were face up on her floor. The map that had been facing out was not the same quality or age as the other four.

  She got up and put the IV bag back on the stand. She picked up one of the four maps and brought it to her map table. She pulled her adjustable round magni
fier over the map and turned on the light.

  “Be right back,” Alex said.

  She jogged into the bathroom to wash her hands. When she was walking back, she heard Rebecca ask Raz about Alex’s weight. Raz told her mother that everyone was concerned but that John was monitoring it. She cleared her throat so they knew she was coming.

  She went directly to her map table. Looking through the magnifier, Alex ran her fingers over the map’s lines. Alex scowled and picked up the next map. She went over the surface of each of the four maps with slow, deliberate purpose.

  “Ok, I’m dying from the suspense,” Raz said. “What’s going on?”

  “They’re definitely copies,” Alex said. “Not cheaply made. The paper is old, possibly from the time of the original maps. The copies are hand drawn, which could imply that whoever made these copies had access to the originals, which would be . . .”

  Alex shook her head and looked at the ground.

  “Which would be?” Raz asked.

  “Oh, sorry,” Alex said. “This kind of copy is something you do when you own something that’s truly too valuable to display. They’re sometimes called insurance copies. I mean, you don’t want to risk something so precious to a fire or earthquake or whatever. I don’t think they’re made as often now, but in the early nineteenth century, every painting, map, even books, anything of great value had this kind of copy made — one to display and one to pass to your children. Do you recognize these, Mom?”

  Rebecca came to the table to take a look. She shrugged.

  “I know that I’m a huge disappointment, but maps look like maps to me,” Rebecca said. “Especially the old ones. I don’t have your eye for them.”

  Alex scowled.

  “Don’t worry,” Raz smiled. “She gives me the same look when I can’t tell one map from the other.”

  Rebecca and Raz laughed. Alex gave them a disgusted look, which made them laugh harder.

  “Yes, yes, very funny,” Alex grinned.

  She turned the map over and leaned in closer.

  “This mark is familiar,” she said.

  She pointed to a sixteen-point compass rose on the back of the map. The longest spines of the star were black and designated the cardinal directions — north, south, east, and west — and the four ordinal directions — north-east, south-east, south-west, and north-west. Spines that were shaded on one side and blank on the other marked the secondary-intercardinal directions. There was a circle in the center of the compass rose. The very center of the star was an oval shape that looked like a human eye with a swoop of an eyebrow. The entire compass star was about the size of a US quarter. Rebecca turned over a corner of another map to look at the mark.

  “It looks like a compass rose,” Raz said.

  “This is an old one,” Alex said. “They would have called it a wind rose or a compass star. See how it’s formed in the shape of a star?”

  She held up the symbol for them to see.

  “It’s probably the mark of whoever copied the maps, like my fairy,” Alex said. “They indicate that these duplicates were created at the behest of the owner of the original maps.”

  Alex lowered the magnifying circle over the mark.

  “Compass Rose,” Rebecca said. “Isn’t that the name of your health insurance company?”

  “It is,” Raz said. “All the intelligence community and civilians in the Department of Defense and the Department of State.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, without looking up. “We have a different plan because I’m not a civilian. But Col and Raz, they have that insurance, plus the supplemental we carry.”

  “And it’s called Compass Rose?” Rebecca asked. “Weird coincidence.”

  “I guess,” Alex said.

  “Are you finding anything?” Raz asked.

  “I’ve seen this mark before,” Alex said. “In fact . . .”

  Alex went to the safe and opened it. She looked around for a moment before finding Rebecca’s father’s caliper. She took the cartography tool to the table and held it under the magnified light.

  “The same mark is on the side of the caliper,” Alex said. “Even the eye.”

  So as not to disturb the babies, she held the caliper in front of Rebecca. She pointed to the mark and held it out to Raz.

  “I’ve seen this mark . . . somewhere else,” Alex said. “For the life of me, I can’t place it.”

  “My father had a ring with the symbol on it,” Rebecca said.

  “Any idea what it means?” Alex asked.

  “No,” Rebecca said. “He had cufflinks and a tie tack with the symbol on it, too.”

  “I wonder if it’s his symbol,” Alex said.

  “I’ve seen this mark before,” Raz said.

  Alex looked at him. His face had drained of color.

  “Are you all right?” Alex asked.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Rebecca said.

  “I think I have,” Raz said. “You remember me talking about my NYPD partner?”

  “Dexter Zeno,” Alex said.

  “Great name,” Rebecca said.

  “He goes by Dex,” Alex nodded. “Dex Zeno.”

  “That’s an even better name,” Rebecca said.

  Alex nodded.

  “He was obsessed with this symbol,” Raz said. “Or really two symbols — the outer star and the eye with the eyebrow. See how the eyebrow goes up in the middle? That’s what makes this eye unique. What made this particular compass rose unique was the use of both symbols. I never paid that much attention, but . . .”

  Raz shrugged.

  “But?” Alex asked.

  “It was some kind of family thing,” Raz said. “We’d been friends for a long time, partners for almost ten years, when his father died suddenly. His father passed to Dex something that had to do with this symbol. I don’t know what. Dex said that his father had learned about it only upon his grandfather’s death; his grandfather learned of it upon his grandfather’s father’s death, and so on, all the way back to the middle ages.”

  “He could trace his family that long?” Rebecca asked.

  “It was in his father’s belongings,” Raz said. “After his father died, Dex became obsessed with this compass rose.”

  “Compass roses are in the legend of every map,” Alex said. “The eye and star on this one makes it unique but not unusual.”

  “It was the whole thing,” Raz said. “The compass rose with the eight dark points, eight shaded points, and the eye. Or one and not the other. The compass rose is special in some way. Dex used to see the symbols all over the city — on buildings, churches, everywhere.”

  “The eight-pointed star with the eye?” Alex asked.

  “Both, and sometimes just the eye. After his father died, Dex received a file from his father’s lawyer,” Raz shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a lot going on then, stuff with Vicki, work . . . I didn’t have that kind of family so, honestly, I didn’t really understand his fixation. It seemed insane. He seemed kind of . . . nuts. I thought he was upset because his dad died so suddenly. But, one night, just before I started working with Ben, he told me that his father had been collecting all of this . . . stuff.”

  “Stuff?” Alex asked.

  “That’s what I remember him calling it,” Raz said. “‘Stuff.’ I guess after Dex’s grandfather died, his father became obsessed with this ‘stuff.’ Dex didn’t know what to do with all of it. Throw it out, and he might miss something of value. Keep it, and get lost in it. I asked if I could help, but he didn’t want to ‘get me involved.’”

  “And it had to do with this symbol?” Alex asked.

  “Yes,” Raz said. “This exact symbol.”

  “Is this Dex still living?” Rebecca asked.

  “I think so,” Raz said as he looked up at Alex. She nodded.

  “Looks like we’re going to New York,” Alex said.

  “Sounds fun,” Rebecca said.

  Raz looked at Alex, and she shrugged.

  “
I don’t think it will be very fun, Mom,” Alex said.

  “You’re right,” Rebecca said. “How could being away from these gorgeous babies be fun?”

  “Exactly,” Alex said.

  F

  Chapter Six

  Sunday evening

  May 15 — 7:27 p.m. MDT

  Denver, Colorado

  “Samantha,” John said from where he was sitting at the dining-room table, working on his laptop. His London accent made the sound of her name seem like a proper invitation. “I was hoping to catch you.”

  “I was looking for Alex,” Samantha said. Uncomfortable with her own lie, she shifted from foot to foot. Maggie got up from her dog bed to say hello. Samantha bent down to cuddle the dog.

  “She’s speaking with your father,” John said. “Max, too.”

  Samantha looked up at him. She went over to pick up Joey, who was sleeping in a bassinette on the table.

  “I heard she’s leaving,” Samantha said. She kissed Joey’s cheek.

  “Tomorrow morning.” John looked up at Samantha. “She and Raz are going to New York for what we hope is only a week.”

  Samantha nodded.

  “You knew that,” John said.

  “Colin told me,” Samantha said. “He told me that I should talk to . . . well, you know.”

  “I do,” John said. “That’s what I was hoping to catch up with you about.”

  “Oh?”

  “I wanted to show you these photos,” John said.

  He turned the laptop around so the screen was facing her. She set Joey in his bassinette and took a few steps closer to the table. There was a picture of Alex with a man. He was a few inches taller than Alex. He had brown hair about her color and similar skin tone. They looked like they were going to a party. The man seemed enraptured with Alex.

  “That’s Alex,” Samantha said. “Who’s the guy?”

  “Her first partner,” John said. “Notice anything?”

  “They look like they . . . belong together,” Samantha glanced at John and bit her lip.

  “They do,” John said. “She was assigned to him a couple months after we got married. You can imagine how awful that was for me. When she wasn’t working with her hunky team, she was wandering the globe with . . . Mr. Awesome. That’s what I called him — ‘Mr. Awesome.’”