by A. J. Chase
Daphne slid into the room and shut the door behind her with a decisive click. "Are you out of your ever-lovin' mind?" Daphne's accent had gone thickly southern, all attempts at hiding it had been forgotten in her horror. "What the Sam hill were you thinkin'?"
"I wasn't," she admitted bluntly, her voice still strained. "We'd better get out of the building."
Daphne glared at her, her hands on her rounded hips. "What? The fire? It ain't nothin'. Just a trash can with one of Charlotte's cigarettes in it."
A sudden laugh bubbled up inside of Fielding despite the general lack of humor about this situation. "Did you start a fire? Daphne, you little pyro."
Daphne flushed prettily. "I didn't know how else to get you out of here. For all I knew he was killing you." She surveyed Fielding with disdain. "Look at you. When Leslie told me you'd been in here for almost half an hour she was scared, and so was I but you were just in here…what? What were you doing? You look like a girl who's no better than she should be. Did you have sex with him?" She whispered the word like it was one not to be used in polite company.
"No." Fielding couldn't help the emptiness in her voice. Now she was more confused than ever, and she hadn't exactly been in control before nearly having Chandler for lunch. She ached with the battered feeling that always came with indecision.
She wanted out, and she wanted out bad, but she wanted to help Mac, too. She would not use the word love, not even in her head where no one could hear. Not in this place in the midst of all this madness. She wasn't that out of touch with reality. But the overwhelming feeling touched the edges of her senses before she brutally pushed it away.
"It was just a few kisses." Just the most incredibly erotic experience of her life, and she had been fully dressed the entire time. Sort of a sad commentary on both herself and Dale. "Please don't freak Josh out any more than he already is by telling him about this. I'm sorry I scared you. It was wrong of me."
What a general statement for everything she had done for months. It was wrong of her. She desperately wanted to run after Chandler and tell him the truth, but it was an impossibility. Just like fixing any of the other mistakes she had made in the duration of this assignment.
"Be careful of him."
This again. Josh had really done a number on the younger woman. "He's not going to hurt me." Not like that anyway. "He's not going to hurt anyone. I don't know what's going on here but I know that Chandler's not a killer. He's just a man."
A man who had been beaten down by the vagaries of fate, cheated on, and mistreated, and now she was going to be another name on the list of those who would use him. She hated herself right now. She really did.
She wondered what the chances were that she could wash this dirty feeling off herself and return to some semblance of normality. She had to do some seriously hard thinking about how important these two diametrically opposed missions were to her. But what it really boiled down to was thinking about how important Mac was as compared to Chandler. How could she ever make that kind of decision?
"I have to take a shower. See you around." She could feel the burn of Daphne's disapproving gaze follow her out the door.
She was still drying her hair when she heard people start coming back from lunch. She came out of the showers and ran almost directly into Kyle. "Oh, hey Ky. How was your last meal?" She strove for sounding perfectly normal.
"Kosher. And two martinis for good luck." He grinned. "I see you're still among the living." He eyed her sweater and pin-striped slacks. "You've changed. A girl as sweet as you should never change." He hung his jacket and scarf on the closest random hook. "So what should I expect from my session with the high master? What did he do to you?"
What had he done to her? There weren't even words to describe it. She hedged around the question. "He thinks that we aren't trying hard enough." She anticipated that he might be angry after their unexpected and interrupted rendezvous and the troublesome fire. "But I don't think he's in a very good mood, so tread lightly."
"Spot on Captain, oh my Captain, but he wasn't there when I went to his office."
Fielding glanced at her watch. A present from Mac, it twisted her gut when she looked at the face and even considered what she was thinking of doing. Mac had loved her for thirty years, and Chandler didn't love her at all. Yeah, tough choice. It had been thirty minutes since Daphne's distraction and almost ten since he was supposed to have met Kyle. Surely it hadn't taken him that long to put out a trash can fire. So where was he? Hopefully the fire hadn't spread and taken longer to get under control. Daphne would feel really guilty then.
She hugged her sweater more tightly around herself, a useless shield of protection against her internal turmoil. If she closed her eyes she could still smell Chandler on her skin, feel the pressure of his fingertips. She was seriously considering proclaiming herself too unwell to finish out the afternoon. She wasn't sure that she could bring herself to step back into that costume. Not until she'd had time to separate herself.
"There was a fire, a small one, but maybe it took a little time to put out. You should probably just go wait by his office. I…I'm not feeling too well. I think I'm going to have to go home."
He gave her a sideways look. "I thought you'd been a little…off today. If you want I can tell the high master if you'd like to avoid having to face his wrath again today. Go, save yourself."
She smiled slightly. "It's okay. I'll just look around. If I can't find him I'll just tell someone else like Armand or Liz." She had no intention of talking to Chandler anymore today. "Go on. God be with you." She mimicked.
He saluted her and ambled off towards Chandler's office leaving her blessedly alone in the hallway. She debated for a second then decided that the one place she was not going to see Chandler, or any other man, the women's dressing room. She might, however, find one of his female counterparts.
She crossed into the right hallway and found it swarming with the dancers from the line who had not been assigned extra time to practice for Profundo and were leaving for the day and the principles who were just on their way in.
She didn't immediately see someone to whom she could report, so she opened the door to the dressing room and found it shrouded in darkness. For a moment, she paused, feeling a sudden buzz of fright. Then she called herself an idiot and turned on the light. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was no danger here.
At first glance, she thought that the room was empty, but it wasn't. It wasn't empty at all.
"Oh, dear God." Her voice came out in a whisper.
She pressed her hand to her mouth to keep herself from senselessly screaming or throwing up. She backed up, unable to take her eyes off the floor, and ran into the door frame. She shook her head stupidly while the tears she'd been holding off all day filled her eyes. She couldn't just run away. Maybe she could help.
She ran to Charlotte's side and dropped to her knees, sliding a little on the thick pool of blood under her body. "Charlotte, oh God." She thought about pressing her hands to Charlotte's neck to look for a pulse but she could not bring herself to touch that neck with its raw, gaping wound. She pressed her fingers, instead, to Charlotte's wrist. Her skin was still warm.
But there was nothing that Fielding could do to help her now. She should have known right away from her sightless, staring eyes. Cunning eyes that belonged to a beautiful cunning woman who would never tell the others Chandler's secrets. She was dead, her throat slit. Her life snuffed out so easily. It was clear that there had never even been a struggle.
Fielding stumbled to her feet sliding on the slick floor, slamming into the wall carried on what remained of Charlotte's life. All that blood. Fielding's clothes were wet with it, her hands. There were small bloody foot prints on the floor; handprints on the wall where she had caught herself. She stumbled out the door and fell to her knees, no longer able to hold back the vomiting.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The cops showed up quickly. Fielding knew that it hadn't been her, but beyond that
she had no idea who had called them. One of the dozens of people, no doubt, who had been alarmed to see a blood soaked woman being sick in the hallway just feet from them.
People had come along almost immediately and surrounded Charlotte's body. Bob even tried CPR, as useless as that was. Fielding knew without looking when Chandler arrived behind her, she could feel his presence. She glanced behind her, but his expression was unreadable, his facial muscles seemingly frozen in place. He didn't move into the room. He didn't do anything except stand in the door, as if he were locked in a moment.
Until someone moved Charlotte's other hand. The one Fielding had not lifted to check for a pulse. Every one of them could easily see the words penned onto Charlotte's palm with a thick black marker.
"Take her up tenderly."
Fielding hadn't even realized that she'd spoken the words aloud until Chandler suddenly recoiled as though he'd been punched. The color drained from his face, and his breath caught in his throat. The words meant nothing to her, but to him they were clearly horrifying. If a moment of doubt had suggested him to her mind, she had another moment of clarity that he was not guilty of Charlotte's death or any of the others. He had not expected those words. Not even for a second. They were an assault on him. And whoever had killed Charlotte had intended it that way. As a message to him, a warning or an accusation.
The police questioned them for hours. All of them separately and some of them together. They spent the longest time on Fielding and Chandler, questioning each of them more than once. No doubt because she had found the body and because he was the prime suspect in a murder with a similar M.O.
She resisted the urge to make things up to account for the time that he had disappeared, no doubt the time during which Charlotte had been killed. Who knew what he had told them, and she didn't want to make him appear any guiltier by faking an alibi for him. They had asked him point blank, right there in front of everyone, if he knew what the words on Charlotte's hand meant, but he had flatly denied it, his toneless voice pretty much making it impossible to argue. She knew he was lying and dreaded finding out why.
The cop that took her to Chandler's office to be interviewed alone was an incredibly good-looking, dark haired, roman-nosed detective with the name Z. Wallace on his badge. If she was in her right mind she might have been attracted to him, as it was, she merely made the detached observation in her mind that he was beautiful in a masculine kind of way. First, he had seemed sympathetic. Then he dug into her, insisting that she must know who had murdered Charlotte. Finally, after about an hour of relentless, mostly unanswerable questions, he abruptly changed the subject to Chandler.
"Do you know your producer well?" He asked casually.
"As well as anyone I guess," she hedged.
"Well enough to know if he was intimate with Charlotte Wiseman?"
Fielding had to brutally tamp down a spurt of hysterical laughter. "Never in a million years." She was sure Detective Wallace could hear her confidence on the subject. "He would never have gone in for a girl like Charlotte. I mean I'm no psychologist but she's just too…I mean she was just too rough around the edges. She was…" She searched for a word that would encompass what she wanted to say. "Shrewd. You know, always scheming."
She didn't add that his late wife had been the same, and he would have set himself on fire before taking up with a girl like Charlotte. But they probably knew what Helena had been like. They were the cops after all.
Wallace nodded, tapping his pencil against his notebook. "What about you? Would he get involved with a girl like you?"
This time her hysterical laughter actually escaped. Here she was in the room where, just hours ago—had it really been just hours, it seemed like just minutes and days at the same time—she and Chandler had been on the verge of…what? She thought that the term making love didn't seem quite appropriate. Maybe Daphne's hastily whispered word, sex, was more point on. But even that didn't seem quite right. Whatever it had been in a moment more, if not for the fire, he would have been inside her to her great relief. But that chance was behind them now.
She thought Detective Wallace's question might have been better phrased as, "Why would he get involved with a girl like me?"
Wallace's eyebrows peaked, and she realized that she had spoken aloud. But the question was a somewhat pertinent answer to his. She continued, "He's a jet setting millionaire, an international theater God, at least ten years older than me, and a Duke. Believe me, I'm not Duchess material. I don't even own a tube of mascara."
Wallace leaned back in Chandler's chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He didn't seem bothered that she had again evaded the question, although she was sure he had noticed. He gave her an appraising once over. "I don't know. I think I can see a few things that might interest a red-blooded man. Hell, even a blue-blooded one."
Her nose wrinkled. He wasn't hitting on her. He was trying to keep her off balance. She sighed. "I'm not hiding some deep knowledge of the crime, detective. There's really no reason to try and bait me."
He sighed, too. "Do you know what 'take her up tenderly' means?"
"No," she answered honestly. "But I'd really like to."
Chandler disliked Detective Stan Pettigrew on sight and was fairly certain that the feeling was intensely mutual. He had, in his years, met many officers of the law and Pettigrew was of the ilk he hated the most. Pettigrew was the arrogant sort that abused the power given to him by standing in a position of authority. Chandler recognized himself for arrogant and demanding, but those who couldn't deal with it could choose not to talk to him. Pettigrew was clearly delighted his victims didn't have that right and he could be as rude as he wanted. He was a cop.
And Pettigrew had been plenty awful over the last two hours. He had gone from ridiculously unsubtle prodding, that Chandler assumed was supposed to be gentle, to aggressive accusations. He wanted to know what the words on Charlotte's hand meant and seemed unwilling to believe Chandler's assertions of ignorance. But it was true. He wasn't exactly sure what the words meant, but he was sure that they were meant for him.
Meant to make him suffer guilt, meant to make sure he knew that Wiseman had died because of him. So far Pettigrew only seemed to know about Helena. He was playing on the similarities between her and poor, stupid Charlotte Wiseman who had left herself open to an attack in the one place where she probably should have been safe.
That was the part that agitated Chandler most of all. There had been no cause for the Wiseman girl to be killed. He would have to have been a fool not to notice the similarities between the others, Dora, Helena, Lisa, Elizabeth, and Giette. He had slept with all of them. Had a relationship with them, really. He was cautious about sex. He had been born that way, and made all the more so by his mistakes with Helena. He needed a fairly strong motivation to engage in a romantic relationship, and Charlotte Wiseman had in no way even begun to provide that motivation.
But Fielding…The events of the afternoon had proven to him more than ever that even a casual affair was out of the question. And in the deepest reaches of his brain he could admit that nothing Fielding aroused in him was casual. The way she had felt under his fingers, his mouth, had been one of the most drugging sensations of his life, and if Daphne Buhler hadn't interrupted them he would have taken her there, in his office against a wall and been absurdly grateful for it. That was danger speaking in his ear. Death whispering its approach.
Because it was very possible that if Daphne hadn't interrupted them, it would have been Fielding lying in that room, her life drained out around her. He knew the bitter truth. He had killed all of them. Dora, Helena, Lisa, Giette, Elizabeth, even Charlotte. And if she let him, he knew that he would end up killing Fielding, too.
No matter what she did, Fielding could not seem to lose the sensation of being cold. Hours after the police had driven her home and she had spent an hour in the shower washing off the horror of the day, she was still freezing. Of course it was December in Manhattan, so it was cold outside. But
this ice was in her soul. Even with the heater on, her freeze felt bone-deep. She curled up in the window seat wrapped in the green shirt she had stolen from an uncaring Bob because it now reminded her of Chandler, and she tried not to think of him.
But that had been pretty much impossible before she had learned the addictive taste of his mouth, before she had felt his solid heat. Now it was as if she had no control over the direction of her thoughts. And when she forced them away from him, and her overwhelming and under-explored feelings, all she could see was Charlotte. On the floor staring, reproving them all for not stopping her senseless death. Frozen forever in her eternal youth with her beautiful, mostly naked, body never to grow old.
Fielding felt like she was going insane. Her wildly circulating thoughts confused and agitated her, and not one of them added to any sense of peace. She went to her computer and pulled up a search engine, typing in the words, "take her up tenderly." She used quotations, feeling strongly that the words belonged together, and if she was to find them it would be just in that form.
Getting a basic answer was not that difficult. The first hit, as well as many that followed, was a quotation resource page. There were those hideous words again, painfully aggressive in their black and white glory. She read the words aloud, not certain they made sense to her. "Another unfortunate, weary of breath. Rashly importunate, gone to her death. Take her up tenderly, lift her with care. Fashioned so slenderly. Young and so fair."
She shook her head and read it again more slowly, still not sure she understood the full import. The words had a distinctly menacing feel, even without the story she would forever associate with them. The poem was The Bridge of Sighs by Thomas Hood, a writer with whom she was marginally familiar. But not with this piece. She read the entirety, surprised to find that it told a different story than she had anticipated. The words were indeed about death, but in reference to suicide and not murder. There was certainly no way that Charlotte had killed herself, not like that. So what did those words mean?