by K.N. Lee
I went straight to Sarah’s work and took her to a nearby hotel for the night. I told her what had been going on and that I wanted to leave the UK, at least until the baby had been born. Thankfully, she agreed with me. I called Arcadia and asked if we could stay with her in Los Angeles for a few months. She was more than happy to let us, although more than a little confused. I told her that we wanted a new life in a new country. She seemed to buy it. I see no reason for telling her the truth. I don’t want to worry anyone else. The only other person I’ve told is Andrew. He agreed to go to the house and pack our stuff up and send it on to us.
Anais and Aethelu looked at each other.
“Andrew knew! Why didn’t he say something?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he forgot?” Even as Anais spoke, she knew that couldn’t be the case.
“It’s not likely, is it? I think we should go speak to him.” Aethelu made to get off the bed.
“No, not tonight, it’s getting late. We’ll both see him about it tomorrow. I want to see what else happened with my father.”
November 11th
I’ve just fallen in love. Nothing could have prepared me for how wonderful I feel right now. Sarah gave birth to our wonderful little angel three hours ago. Sarah was a trooper. She knew that she couldn’t go to a hospital, so she had a home birth with no pain relief. She’s taking a well-earned rest while I look after the baby. We’ve kept the tradition of naming her with an A. I wanted to name her Anna, after all she was the one for whom the tradition began. Sarah liked the name Nessa after one of her grandmothers. In the end, we compromised and put them both together. Annessa is a bit of a mouthful so we shortened it to Anais. It suits her somehow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such perfection. Her eyes are blue which the midwife tells me all babies eyes start out like. As long as they are not black, then I’m happy. She seems to have taken after her mother hair-wise too. There’s not much, but the few wisps that are there are dark. She seems so inquisitive. Only three hours old, and already she’s holding my gaze. The midwife says that her eyesight won’t be so great for a few weeks, but I swear she’s watching me intently as I write this. I can already tell she’s going to be one smart cookie!
I have no idea if she has any of The Light in her at all. I’ve turned all the lights off in the room to check, but I couldn’t see her. Perhaps she will be a perfectly normal human being (albeit a gorgeous and intelligent one!) I can’t guess what the future will hold for her or how long it will be. I know that she is safe and happy now. I haven’t received a single letter from Jago since we moved to LA all those months back. Perhaps he doesn’t know how to find us or perhaps he’s given up the idea of hurting us. Either way I’m glad we made the move.
Arcadia told me yesterday that she was thinking of moving to France. She says she can do all her movie deals just as well over there and that she’s bored with Hollywood. She’s giving us her house here, called it a baby present. Honestly, she is so generous I don’t know how we will ever repay her.
My job at UCLA is going very well and thank goodness, with another mouth to feed. Sarah is thinking about doing a course on stage and screen makeup as soon as she’s ready. I don’t think it will be for a while, though. I doubt she’ll be able to leave our little Bean with a nanny for a long time and I don’t blame her. I can’t stop looking at her myself. In fact, I’m going to end my journal for the day. It’s way past daddy cuddle time!
Chapter 21
Anais was amazed. She’d been totally wrong about her parent’s decision to move to the US. She’d got a lot more than she’d bargained for when she picked up that journal.
“What do you think?” Aethelu was just as shocked as she was, judging by the expression on her face.
“It looks like Jago has had a grudge longer than we knew. We should tell Aldrich about this.”
“Yeah, but let’s speak to Andrew first. He usually has breakfast early. We can catch him then.”
Anais looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. So much for plenty of rest! She quickly changed into her pyjamas and switched off the light.
A loud beeping sound woke her the next morning. At first, she thought a fire alarm was going off somewhere before she realised Aethelu had set the alarm on her phone the night before.
Aethelu was already half dressed by the time Anais figured out how to stop the alarm.
“It’s 6.30,” Aethelu said, “Andrew usually eats at seven in the dining room.
Anais dragged herself out of bed and had a quick shower before getting dressed for the day.
The clock read 6.55 by the time both girls made their way across the courtyard.
They found Andrew and Judith in the kitchen. Andrew was cooking breakfast for them both by the look of it. Judith looked up from a morning paper and smiled as they entered.
“Good morning.” Judith took a sip of her coffee.
“Hi, Judith.” Anais nodded her head. “Andrew, I was hoping to have a word with you about my father.”
“Yes?” Andrew turned over an egg and smiled at her.
“Well, it’s about why he moved to America.”
“Ah, I see. Judith, why don’t you take your paper up to the dining room so you can read in peace, and I’ll have your breakfast up to you in a jiffy?”
“Ok, my love.” She stood up and kissed Andrew lovingly before she headed up the spiral staircase, paper tucked under her arm and coffee in hand.
“Right,” said Andrew. “What is it you want to know?”
Aethelu took Judith’s recently vacated seat at the table. Anais stood where she was.
“I picked up a journal of my father’s from storage yesterday. It was from the year my parents moved abroad.”
“Mmm,” Andrew didn’t look at her; instead, he flipped the bacon on the grill.
“It said Jago sent him threatening letters. He killed his cat.”
“Really?” Andrew looked surprised. He turned down the heat on the stove and turned his attention to her. “What else did it say?”
“Well, it said that you packed up my parent’s house and that he told you about Jago. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“He never mentioned Jago to me!”
Aethelu spoke up. She had Alistair’s journal opened in front of her. She read verbatim “The only other person I’ve told is Andrew. He agreed to go to the house and pack our stuff up and send it on to us.”
“Yes, yes, I remember packing up the house for them. It was in a right mess. Furniture upturned everywhere. Everything slashed. Now that you mention it, I do recall cleaning up the blood of the cat. Alistair had already disposed of the body. I got everything sent out to America except the broken furniture, which I threw away.”
Both Anais and Aethelu looked at him, waiting for him to continue.
“He never mentioned Jago. He just told me that he’d been broken into and that he was worried for Sarah and the baby, so he was moving to America. I assumed it was a burglary of some sort. He asked me not to mention it to the rest of the Guardians, as he didn’t want to worry them. I kept my promise. This is the first I’ve spoken about it in nearly 20 years. I can’t believe he didn’t tell me it was Jago. I suppose he had his reasons.”
“It looks as though Jago has had a vendetta for much longer than we thought. We are planning to tell Aldrich as soon as he gets up.”
“Are you sure it’s necessary? It was a long time ago.” Andrew arranged the food on two plates.
“Of course it’s necessary! The more information we have on Jago the better chance we have of getting him,” Aethelu answered him forcefully.
“I suppose you are right,” said Andrew picking up both of the plates. “I believe Aldrich is already awake and working in the surgery if you need him. Now if you’ll excuse me, my breakfast is going cold.” He made his way up the spiral staircase.
“Well, that’s a dead end. I was hoping he’d be able to give us a clue of some sort as to Jago’s whereabouts.” Anais sat down next to Aethelu.
“We already have a bit of a clue from my father’s journals anyway.”
“Do we?”
“Yeah. If you remember the letters we’ve been receiving recently, apart from the one that was hand delivered, they’ve arrived from all over the world. We know that from the postmarks. My father said that his letters all arrived from the York district.”
“You’re right. So it looks like he was based in York or at least living nearby at the time of your birth and now he’s more multi-national. What does that really tell us, though? That he can afford holidays now?”
“Not much but it does tell us he was living in the York district in the year I was born. It’s not much, but it’s something to go on. I wish I’d told Andrew when he was here. It might help with his investigations.”
Aethelu was unconvinced. “Maybe. I think Alex has taken over the lion’s share of the investigating. Andrew is too busy with Judith. I caught them three times making out with each other yesterday! I mean, seriously, get a room already!”
Anais laughed.
“Yeah. He does seem very loved up at the moment. I’ll tell Alex when I see him” She knew she would have to go and speak to him soon enough anyway to apologise for her outburst from the day before.
“Come on let’s go see Father.”
They found him in his surgery as Andrew had said.
He was looking at a slide under a microscope when they entered.
He looked up. “Good morning ladies. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“We have some information about Jago.”
“Really? Come in, sit down! What have you learned?”
Anais sat on the only other available chair. Aethelu perched herself on the surgery bed.
“I got a journal of my father’s the other day.”
“Mmm, yes,” interrupted Aldrich. Winifred mentioned you had gone AWOL for the afternoon. She was very worried, you know!”
Anais blushed “Yeah, sorry about that.”
“Never mind. Tell me what you found in Alistair’s journal.”
“Jago was sending threatening letters to him twenty years ago. It was the reason he moved to America.”
Aldrich sat up with interest.
“Please, may I see this journal?”
Aethelu hopped down from the bed and passed the journal to her father.
“I turned down the corners of the pages which mentioned Jago.”
They sat and waited whilst he read the relevant passages.
Finally, he finished and handed the journal back.
“I always wondered.”
Anais wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to himself.
He continued. “It explains why he left so abruptly. I do not see how it helps us in any way, though.”
Anais explained about the postmarks and told him that she planned to tell Alex about it.
“Yes, that seems like the right course of action. Thank you for letting me know. Do any more of Alistair’s journals mention Jago?
“I don’t know. I only picked one up from storage. He had hundreds of them. The rest are in boxes in York.”
“It might be in our best interests to organise a trip to pick the rest of the journals up. I trust I can leave that up to you both?”
Anais was excited at the prospect of leaving the manor again, this time with Aethelu.
“Yes, sir!”
“Just let me know when you are planning to leave, so I can sort out some security for you both.
Anais wasn’t sure that she liked the idea of security, but she knew better than to argue.
They bade farewell to Aldrich and made their way back to the kitchen for breakfast.
Winnie was there cooking up a storm. She offered to make breakfast for Anais and Aethelu, an offer which neither could refuse. Andrew appeared before Anais finished her breakfast. He was carrying his and Judith’s dirty dishes.
“Did you manage to find Aldrich?” he asked as he put the plates into the dishwasher.
“Yeah, thanks. He didn’t think it would help much.”
“No, that’s what I thought.” He closed the dishwasher door and headed back up the stairs.
“What did you need to see Aldrich for? Is everything ok?” Winnie had a concerned look on her face.
Anais filled her in on everything they had learnt from her father’s journal. She was surprised when Winnie burst into tears.
“I thought he’d had enough of us. I can’t believe it was Jago the whole time. Why didn’t he tell us?”
“I think he didn’t want to worry you, that’s all.” She put a comforting arm around Winnie.
When Alex appeared a few minutes later, Winnie wiped her eyes and dished him up a huge breakfast.
He seemed a little wary around Anais. She waited until Winnie was busy doing something on the other side of the kitchen before asking Aethelu to make her a coffee. When Aethelu had moved over to the kettle, she quickly sat next to Alex.
“I’m sorry about yesterday. Of course, I want you to be in the babies’ lives. I don’t know what made me say that.”
“It’s ok. I get it. I’ll help out where I can.” He held out his hand and Anais held it. They were sitting like that when Aethelu came back with three cups of coffee. She placed one in front of each of them. Her eyes flicked down to Anais and Alex’s hands, but she didn’t say anything about it.
“Has Anais been telling you about Alistair’s journal?” she directed her question to Alex.
“The one you picked up from storage? What about it?”
Anais repeated the story for the fourth time that morning, careful to mention the details of the postmarks.
“Interesting! I’m not sure how much help it will be, but knowing that he was probably living in York twenty years ago certainly narrows it down a little.”
“Do you really think it will help?”
“I’m not sure how much, but let’s go have a look.” He quickly downed his coffee and headed to the larder with Anais and Aethelu following closely behind.
As they closed the door and pressed the button that would see them descend to the lower floor, they heard Winnie shouting,
“Don’t you want to finish your breakfast first?”
Once they were past the keypad and thumb scanner back into the room with the screens, Alex logged on to the computer.
The screens showed a hive of activity in the house, but nothing unusual. Andrew and Judith were once again walking hand-in-hand in the grounds, stopping for a stolen kiss. August was walking Baker in another part of the grounds. Anais wondered if the cameras had captured her and Aethelu the day they climbed the branch over the fence. She watched the screens a bit longer and was relieved to see that part of the grounds not covered by a camera. She might want to use that way out herself someday. Mind you, she’d be too big to climb anything in a few months’ time.
Images of her heavily pregnant trying to climb a tree were interrupted by Alex’s voice. He was showing something to Aethelu on the computer screen. She went over to see what he was pointing at. It was a bit of a squeeze, three of them around one screen, so he pressed something and the image he was seeing on his computer appeared magnified over all sixteen of the large screens.
“See here, I’ve mapped out where all the letters we’ve received were originally posted from.”
Anais looked at the screen. A map of the world showed with dots to represent the letters. They had been posted from as far away places as Rio, Paris, Canberra, Manila and Rome. As she watched, Alex added a few more dots to represent the letters to her father all those years before.
“Can you put the dates the letters were sent beside each dot? Otherwise, it makes no sense.”
“Yeah,” said Alex “Let me see. I think I’ve got the dates here somewhere.”
He copied and pasted each date next to its corresponding dot on the map. He had to do each one individually, so it took him a few m
inutes to go through the list. Anais watched as each date appeared on the map. It was only when Alex had finished that she noticed something.
“Are you sure these dates are correct?”
“Yes, I have the original envelopes if you want to check, but I’m pretty sure they are right. I typed them in myself.”
He opened a drawer and pulled out a bundle of letters and envelopes with an elastic band holding them together. She pulled the band off and sorted through for the envelopes, discarding the letters as she went. She searched through the envelopes and finding what she was looking for handed them to Alex. Aethelu stood over her brother’s shoulder and looked at the two envelopes her brother had been passed. Aethelu was confused, as was Alex, as he said “what am I supposed to be looking at?”
“Look at the dates.”
They both checked the dates. “One was sent the day after the other.”
“Look where they were sent from.”
A look of comprehension was beginning to dawn on Aethelu’s face, but Alex still didn’t know where she was leading.
“One was from Canberra, the other Oahu. I admit they are far apart, but it’s not impossible to post a letter in Hawaii, get straight on a plane, and then post another in Australia when you land.”
“That’s true, but you are forgetting the International Date Line, which would have to be flown over. These letters were posted on the same day!”
“Is there any way he could have posted one really early in the day and then one late at night on the same day?”
“It’s possible but highly unlikely. It takes about twelve hours to fly from Hawaii to Sydney and then you’ve got the flight from Sydney to Canberra.
Have a look on the internet to see if there are any early morning flights, which will allow someone to post both letters within the given time.”
He typed away on his computer, coming back minutes later.