by J. D. Robb
She still had Janice’s cell in her hand. As she stared at it she realized she was trying to remember the number that all her phones had on speed dial—Joe’s number.
She dropped the phone in her lap, covered her face with both hands, and growled with her teeth clenched. She didn’t want to be the first to give in, the first to break, the first to admit that she couldn’t handle her life without him—not that her life ordinarily involved situations like this, but still…He was the one who had left, he had to be the one to come back.
“He just has to be,” she murmured as though in prayer.
Stretching her stiff neck from side to side, she tried to quell her impatience with Janice for taking so long. She was sure Pim was doing her best to remember—she always did. Her best, that is. A thousand images of Pim coming to aid and rescue her over the years rushed to her mind…and then it went blank as something else, completely unrelated, tried to surface.
It came slowly as she studied the dark border around the edge of the carpet. At first it looked like part of the design, it was so well-blended in the weave of the rug, but on closer examination she could see that what looked like boxes all around was actually a series of lines and dashes placed high, low, and in between: vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. Some repeated, but there was no pattern to the order.
“These are your instructions, aren’t they?” She spoke more to herself than the carpet. Really. “This is some sort of language, but it doesn’t look Asian like the rest of you or even Middle Eastern. Not as fancy as hieroglyphics. Not runes either.” She’d come to the end of her knowledge of what foreign and ancient languages looked like, but she’d bet her life she was right about it being some sort of message. “Jan’s the brainiac, she might know.”
She sighed in frustration. “God, I wish you were in English.”
And then it was.
“Oh. Thanks.”
She knew she should be frightened, hysterical even, at least disbelieving, but the plain fact was, she wasn’t. She didn’t foresee any imminent danger: It wasn’t trying to hurt anyone and there wasn’t a single reason not to trust her own eyes.
She looked at the words alter and change, end and make, trying to figure out where to start. After several minutes she had it.
For one day one second will alter the years.
Change sorrow to laughter and joy to tears.
Wishes alone can’t make it right.
And dead of night will end the flight.
“Dead of night.” Definitely Pim’s magic carpet. She knew about it, must have known about it for years. But what did it mean? Did Pim want a ride on it…or was she already on a ride…one that would end at dead of night?
“So when the hell is dead of night?” She repeated Janice’s question from before and, still speaking to the rug as if it had ears, she added, “She’s in no shape to travel right now, so can we renegotiate this dead of night thing? Does it matter which night it is? Or can it be just any dead of night?”
Oddly enough, she got no answer.
Feeling a little desperate now, knowing that if she didn’t figure the carpet out it could affect Pim in some way, she started over, reading the directions again.
They didn’t make sense.
“What did I do? What did I do?” she chanted as she tried to remember what she’d been doing, what she had said, what she’d been touching or thinking when the rug came to life. It had to be her or the rug would have scooped up Janice instead, right? “What did I do?”
She recalled Janice’s stupid dinner party and asking Janice not to meddle with her marriage, rubbing the carpet, and wishing it was real and saying…
“I said, ‘I sometimes wish I’d never gotten married’.” She waited for the carpet to acknowledge her revelation. “That’s a horrible thing to say, I know. But I do sometimes. I wish I’d never gotten married.”
Tremors vibrated beneath her. “Uh-oh.”
A ripple started at each corner of the rug and worked its way along the fringe toward the opposite end, causing the carpet to turn slightly to the right. As the rippling picked up speed so, too, did the circling, until the rug had turned a full rotation and was starting on a second, a little swifter this time.
“Jan?” Something was very wrong and she was getting dizzy. She wanted off, but not by being thrown by a high-speed, centrifugal force. “Janice! Abracadabra! Okay, I take it back—Actually, I didn’t mean it anyway. I love Joe. I’ve always loved Joe. I’m glad we got married. Stop. Shit. Shazam! Jaan-ice!”
Faster and faster…the carpet was in full spin. And so was she. Her stomach roiled with nausea and her eyes couldn’t focus on anything; she wanted to close them but it just didn’t seem like a good idea. She needed to stay aware, watch for opportunities to save herself, maintain what little control she had left.
“Jan! Help me! Anyone! Jaan-ice!” Her scream rang in her ears as she drew her legs to her chest and buried her face in the small space between them. Her heart throbbed in her throat and she fervently wished she’d spent more of her life in church.
A whirring noise grew louder as the whirling accelerated, so she didn’t hear Janice holler, “What? I’m here. I’m coming,” from the bottom of the attic steps or see her arrive at the top and mutter, “Holy shit.”
Four
The caller ID displayed her sister’s name as Bonnie scurried across the polished hardwood floors of her upscale condo in her stockinged feet, very late for work.
Great. Can this day get any better?
She flipped open her phone and put it to her ear as she lowered herself to the floor to look under the couch. “Jan. Jan. I love you. You’re my favorite sister. But I don’t have time to talk right now.”
Her hand slid across the Chinese silk the sofa was covered in and she remembered why she loved it.
“You sound out of breath. What are you doing?” Janice asked.
“I’m looking for a file that I brought home last night to review for a very…” She scrambled over the plush area rug to the wing chair she paid too much for at a White House auction—even with photo verification of it in Lady Bird Johnson’s bedroom—and looked under the cushion. “…very important investment meeting this morning. Shit!”
“What?”
“I snagged my panty hose.” She looked behind pillows, on top of shelves, in drawers, and along ledges as she made her way back to her bedroom to change. “I also got up thirty minutes late and my hair dryer blew up…After five years, out of the blue, it picks today to die. Think it’s an omen?”
“Of what? The coming of the Antichrist?”
“Maybe. I’ve heard that the man I’m meeting with this morning can be a little…not devilish, but…prickly.”
“Maybe it means the man you’re meeting with this morning is…the man.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Hang on.” She tossed the cell phone on the bed, smoothed down her slim, navy, same-size-she-wore-in-college skirt, and adjusted her white silk blouse—no synthetic fibers for her…She picked up the phone again. “Have you told me why you’re calling yet? I can’t remember. And I’m in a hurry so it better not be about some man you think I have to meet. I meet plenty of…Oh, thank God!” She whipped the Watson folder off the shelf in her bedroom closet, as confounded as she was relieved, and focused next on shoes. On the bed disheveled sheets began to undulate slowly and with purpose as her overnight guest came awake. “Ah…I meet plenty of men on my own. I do. I’m thirty-nine, almost forty years old, and I have a great job that I love, a great car, a great condo. I’ve traveled all over the world and I can’t think of one single thing a man can give me that I can’t get on my own.”
Tony, a thirty-two-year-old magazine ad for healthy Italian living, cocked his manly brow at her in a lustful challenge. Clearly he thought he knew at least one man who could give her something special. Silently, she laughed at him with mild affection and opened the drawer in the bedside table to enjoy the expression of deflated fascination on his face as he
peered in.
“Me either,” Jan said. “Not one single thing. Which is why I haven’t set you up with anyone for almost two years. No one I know needs that kind of a hammering.”
Hammering? She glanced at Tony and touched the side of his face, and when he looked away from the drawer she smiled at him. Pressing the cell phone against her thigh, she kissed him softly on the lips and whispered, “None of that stuff in there is as good as you are.” His dark umber eyes twinkled knowingly and she turned to leave the room…so much for hammered.
“So why are you calling me?”
“Just to hear your voice?”
“Jan. I have my jacket, my purse, and my briefcase. I’m walking toward the door. Speak.”
“I know you were just out here Sunday, but I was wondering if you could come again this weekend.”
“Is it Pim? Is she still loopy and confused?”
“Oh yeah. And she’s still harping on that carpet or whatever in the attic. She says you have it and that your life is in danger. I told her I’d call and check on you and she got very agitated. She told me to tell you that ‘dead of night will end the flight.’ That’s what she said. And you have to set things right again before that.”
“Before dead of night…which is when exactly?”
“How should I know? You’re the one with a nightlife.” Bonnie rolled her eyes, but didn’t correct her. If Jan knew how many early mornings and late nights were business-rather than pleasure-related she’d be…Well, Bonnie didn’t like to burst anyone’s balloon.
“I was going to call and let her talk to you herself—”
“Thank you, so much, for rethinking that one.” She pushed the button for the elevator to the parking garage. “I just don’t have time this morning. But I’ll drive over early Saturday and spend the night with her. Tell her I’ll bring everything I need to make her one of those chocolate soufflés she likes.”
“She’s not supposed to eat a lot of chocolate.”
“She’s eighty-eight years old, Jan. She can eat whatever she wants.”
“I’m just saying…”
The elevator doors slid open. Bonnie would lose reception when she stepped inside, so she stood on the threshold and held the doors open with one hand. “Sure you are, and I’m just saying there will be plenty of soufflé for all of us to have some. How’s that?”
“That’s better.”
“I thought so. I’ve got to go. Tell Pim I love her. I love you. See you Saturday.” She stepped back into the elevator, flipped the phone closed, and started looking for her keys as the elevator doors shut.
Ninety-six minutes later, the rapid tapping of her low-heeled shoes announced her arrival at the business offices on the fourth floor of Superior Atlantic Bank—one of the largest independent banks on the East Coast.
Her spine always stretched and straightened with pride when she walked through the waiting area and down the hall to her office because…well, she didn’t like to brag but she knew she belonged there, she deserved to be there, she was good at the work she did there. It was her bank. She came to Superior Atlantic right out of college with an MBA and a few courses in economics, political science, and commercial law—and with a burning compulsion to excel. Which she did, from the bottom up—from a brief stint as a teller to loan officer to operations. And when the opportunity arose to move upstairs and have her own office—with a view of the nation’s Capitol building—as a trust officer, she grabbed it. That was eleven years ago.
Her secretary, Angela, knew her step and raised her head from the task on her desk like a doe sensing danger. Sensing but not fearing. She and Bonnie were a team, had been for almost eight years, and they knew each other well.
“Please,” she whispered to Angela when she was close enough to be heard. “Don’t tell me the Watsons arrived early.” Looking around for her clients, she marched straight past the outer desk through the open door to her office. “You won’t believe the morning I’m having. The only thing I’ve escaped so far is a bomb in my underwear drawer.”
“Actually, Mr. Watson just called to say they were running about twenty minutes late.”
“Bless him. That’s my first lucky break today.” She set the briefcase on the shiny cherrywood desk and stashed her purse in the right-hand bottom drawer. With a weary sigh she fell back in the big, soft, red leather chair and stared at the large, brightly colored carpet she had framed over the alpine green sofa in the seating arrangement across the room. She usually found it refreshing, energizing. Today it made her nervous. “I locked my keys inside my condo…” She decided to omit the part about having to call the doorman to let her in because Tony was in the shower and couldn’t hear her screaming and beating on the front door. “And when I finally got to my car, one of the tires was flat. I had to take a cab to work.”
She swiveled in her chair and extended one of her legs.
Angela dutifully obliged and leaned over the desk to take a look.
“I was wearing my new Ferragamos this morning to impress Mrs. Watson, but then I changed to these at the last minute. I thought she might be more impressed if I didn’t fall off my shoes and break my neck today. I’m serious.” Angela’s skeptical smile made her feel foolish, like she was making up absurdities. “But she’ll be even more impressed if I don’t sound like a raving lunatic when she gets here, won’t she?”
Angela nodded, but her expression was sympathetic. “But after the Watsons leave we’ll bite the heads off live chickens and burn smelly candles. We’ll make all your bad luck go away.”
“Okay.” Bonnie slowly sat up, turned her chair to the desk, and took the Watson file from her briefcase, along with a folder full of preferred investment interests. “But you have to do the explaining if we get something nasty on the carpet.”
“Deal.” Angela’s good-natured smile was a comfort. “Do you need coffee now or do you want to wait for the Watsons?”
“I’ll wait, thanks, but I think I might take this opportunity to use the ladies’ room, freshen up a bit, so I don’t feel so frazzled.”
“Don’t be long. Your twenty minutes are almost gone.”
“Check. I’ll be back in two seconds.”
She felt better now that she was in the bank where she belonged. In fact, she’d often thought that the atmosphere of the bank was a huge part of what she loved about her job. The dustlessness, for instance, was always the first thing she noticed in every bank she visited, how dust-free they were…and not just the teller stations and desks, but the picture frames and plants as well. And the quiet—even when people were talking it was quiet. Even when they weren’t speaking in the hushed tones that might be respectful, or might be secretive, or might just be laryngitis, it was quiet.
Taking a deep breath as she crossed the large elevator bay toward the ladies’ room, she murmured a polite good-morning to a man about her age waiting for an elevator and inhaled again. Angela said she couldn’t smell it. Actually, most people she mentioned it to thought she was nuts, but what she loved best about banks was the smell of the money. She gave herself a reassuring nod as she passed by the mirror in the restroom—like now there were two of them who wished for the scent of money in an aerosol can.
She was almost finished when she heard the door to the hall open and close. Half hoping it was Trudy Campbell, who’d recently returned from an island cruise with her husband of twenty-five years, Bonnie opened the stall door with a tell-me-everything grin on her face…and froze.
The man who’d been waiting for the elevator a few minutes ago was now in the ladies’ room. He was tall, built rugged and lean, and that’s about all she noticed because he was also holding a gun, aimed straight at her chest. The sight of him was so unexpected, so outrageous, so terrifying that for some reason that had nothing to do with her high-level cognitive processes, she stepped back into the stall, then closed and locked the door.
“Oh, come on,” he said, with no small amount of scorn and disbelief in his voice. “What’s tha
t? You can’t see me now so I don’t exist?” She could tell by the sound of his voice that he was walking in front of her door. “That a bank policy or something? Pretending not to see people?”
A disgruntled customer. Clearly angry, but he didn’t sound flat-out crazy.
“Or are you thinking I can’t shoot you through the metal door?”
Not so much can’t shoot as won’t shoot through the metal door, she calculated, because he couldn’t see where she was standing exactly so he’d have to shoot more than once to make sure he hit her—and it would only take one shot to alert security to her situation.
Her heart was beating so fast she was afraid it would burst.
She pressed her lips and held her fingers together as she leaned from side to side to see what she could through the small spaces on either side of the door. Suddenly, loud and furious, the toilet flushed when she triggered the motion detector. She released a startled, high-pitched gasp, and he…chuckled.
“Nervous?” There was a taunting amusement in his voice that he’d regret when she testified against him in court. “You don’t need to be. I don’t want to hurt you.”
That’s when she realized he could tell where she was by simply looking under the stall at her feet. Feeling frazzled and vulnerable, she hiked her skirt up to micromini level, reached up to hold on to the top of the left-hand side of the stall, then awkwardly planted both feet on the toilet seat. She needed to stay low so he couldn’t see her over the door.
How on earth had he gotten a gun past security? Man, that was maddening! They’d spent several million dollars on security and this wacko just breezed in with a gun, waltzing around like…Well, crooks could be very clever sometimes.
She felt tapping on the fingers of her left hand and looked up into his face over the left wall of the cubicle. Instinctively, she pulled her hand away as if he’d burned it and immediately lost her balance on the slippery lid. Desperate, she grabbed the wall with both hands, this time to keep from falling, and he grabbed one of her wrists to make sure she wouldn’t.