The Last Refuge

by Marcia Talley

  I lay flat on my back, staring at shadows dancing on the ceiling. Damn, the bed was uncomfortable. I wasn’t as sensitive as The Princess and the Pea, but something was digging into my back.

  I hopped out of bed and knelt on the floorboards, lifted the mattress off the rope webbing that supported it. Nothing was underneath. I untucked the sheet, moved the candlestick closer so I could examine the mattress ticking. Horsehair was poking out through a four-inch slit in the seam.

  Eureka!

  I eased my hand through the slit, feeling around gingerly in the stuffing until my hand encountered the object that had disturbed my royal slumber – Amy’s iPhone.

  I extracted it from the stuffing, pushed the ‘on’ button. When the screen lit up, I could see that the battery indicator was a thin line of red – almost exhausted – and the signal strength indicator read NO SERVICE. ‘Bummer,’ I muttered, and returned the useless lump of metal, silicon chips and microprocessors to the mattress, tucking it well to one side where it wouldn’t bother me.

  That done, I crawled back into bed and pulled Amy’s coverlet up to my chin. Using my thumb and forefinger, I reached over and pinched out the candle.

  Immediately, the room was plunged into a darkness so absolute that I felt as if a black velvet bag had been drawn over my head. It was a moonless night, and no streetlamps – ancient or modern – shone into the room from the garden side of the house. The Naval Academy had even been persuaded to turn off the floodlights that usually illuminated the Chapel dome. After straining for a moment to distinguish something, anything – the bulk of a dresser, the outline of a chair – in the profound darkness of the room, I closed my eyes and fell instantly asleep.

  Paul is wearing a midshipman’s uniform. We’re having a race, and I struggle to keep up. As Paul runs he glances over his shoulder, signals with his arm – C’mon Hannah! – laughing like a boy. He’s leading me … where? Suddenly, he flings up his arms and disappears. I follow, panting. Wait for me! Wait! Then I’m falling, falling into darkness, suffocating darkness.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  A hand was clamped over my mouth, pressing hard against my nose. I flailed against it. Oh my God, I’m being raped! Desperately, I tried to remember what I’d learned in self-defense class: Scream. Scream bloody murder. But I can’t scream, I can’t even breathe with his hand pressing down like that, hard then harder.

  Relax, don’t fight. Not now. You need air.

  ‘Shhhh, shhhh,’ his breath, rancid with coffee, hot in my ear. ‘It’s me, Amy, it’s me. Please don’t scream.’

  Beneath his hand, I nodded. Mumpf.

  I gulped air as his hand slipped away, traced my arm and found my waist, circling it, drawing me closer.

  I breathed into the dark, eyes straining to see. ‘Alex?’

  He stiffened, his cheek, rough with bristles, pressed against mine, his erection hard against my back. ‘Who’s Alex?’

  ‘I …’ I began.

  But he didn’t wait to hear. ‘Shhhh, shhhh.’ His mouth wet against my neck, his lips seeking mine. ‘Oh, God, Amy, God.’

  ‘I’m not Amy!’

  He froze, then catapulted out of the bed as if I had morphed into a bolt of lightning. ‘Christ!’ Stumbling in the dark, feeling along the walls for the door.

  ‘Drew?’ I stammered, heart still thrashing. ‘It’s Drew, isn’t it?’

  He paused, breathing hard.

  I had no way to relight my candle, but what kind of SEAL doesn’t come prepared? ‘Do you have a flashlight?’

  A barely audible rustle of cloth, a click, and a thin beam of light wavered across the floorboards, touched the foot of the bed, moved along the coverlet and found my face. I put up a hand to shield my eyes.

  ‘You’re the woman in the front bedroom.’ A fact, not a question. ‘Married to that flaming asshole.’

  For a moment I was puzzled, then I realized he meant Jack Donovan, not Paul. ‘No, he’s supposed to be my brother-in-law.’ I wondered how long Drew had been watching me, and fought down the creepy feeling that crawled over me.

  ‘Where’s Amy?’ Where his wife was concerned, Drew had a one-track mind.

  ‘She’s asleep in my bedroom with the two children.’

  ‘I need to see her.’ The beam snaked across the floor, searching for the door.

  ‘Wait!’ I whispered. ‘If you show up suddenly like this, you’ll give her a heart attack. Amy believes that you’re dead.’

  ‘I sent her …’ Drew began, then clammed up.

  ‘She had an iPhone, but it was, uh, confiscated,’ I lied. I had promised not to rat Amy out, and even though Drew was her husband, I didn’t plan to make an exception. ‘No electricity in Paca House anyway,’ I said, pointing out the obvious.

  Drew’s face, lit from beneath by the flashlight, stared back at me ghoulishly, like a creature out of Friday the Thirteenth. ‘Look, I’m sorry about what just happened here,’ he said contritely. ‘I didn’t know …’ He paused, as if considering how much to tell me. ‘I’ve been watching the house for days. I thought this was Amy’s room. Obviously I made a mistake.’

  While he talked, I scooted into the corner at the head of the bed and drew my knees up to my chin, the coverlet along with them. If Drew was begging for forgiveness, he was standing on the wrong street corner.

  ‘Fuck. Why am I telling you this? I need to see Amy. Your room, then?’

  The light flicked off.

  I heard the door creak. ‘Drew! You can’t! Not if you don’t want to be seen by a couple of million people when Patriot House goes on the air.’

  Another creak. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘You picked a hell of a night to break in, Drew. George Washington is sleeping in Jack’s bedroom and they’ve got extra cameras set up everywhere. How did you get in, anyway?’ I asked, knowing as the words left my mouth how dumb it was to warn Drew about the cameras and to ask him such a question. SEALs knew one hundred ways to get in and a hundred-and-one ways to get out of any dangerous situation, without being seen.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Don’t answer that. But, you should understand that Amy is here because she really wants to be. She’s signed a contract. If she breaks the rules, she’ll forfeit fifteen thousand dollars as well as opening herself up to the possibility of a million-dollar lawsuit.’

  ‘She doesn’t need fifteen thousand dollars.’

  ‘I didn’t get that impression.’

  ‘Well, that’s crap. Amy’s getting my pay and benefits now, but soon she’ll receive a tax-free death gratuity of one hundred thousand, and there’s a four-hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy, too. I’m married to a wealthy woman.’

  A light bulb flicked on in my brain. ‘As long as you stay dead.’

  Drew was quiet for so long that I was afraid he’d used his super stealth skills to slip silently out of the room. ‘Drew?’

  ‘I’m here.’ The straight-back chair next to Amy’s dresser groaned in protest as Drew sat down in it. ‘It’s better to be dead. Better for me, less embarrassing for the Navy.’

  ‘Why on earth would you say that?’

  ‘I screwed the pooch.’

  Screwed the pooch. A term from the Mercury days of the U.S. space program. Like Gus Grissom, Drew must have screwed up, big time. ‘I understand, honestly. If it’s important that the Navy doesn’t find out Drew Cornell’s not a pile of ashes in Swosa, then I’m sure we can figure out a way for you to talk to your wife about it, if she wants to.’

  ‘What do you mean, “if she wants to?”’

  I thought about Amy and Alex, but wisely kept my mouth shut. ‘Ten months is a long time, Drew. If you didn’t die on that helicopter in Swosa, where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Getting myself out of a sticky situation.’

  ‘Can you tell me about it?’

  ‘Why should I trust you?’

  ‘Because my Dad is retired Navy? Because my husband teaches at the Naval Academy? I know
what it means to be a SEAL, Drew. Just to be selected for SEAL training is a major accomplishment, but to successfully complete the training, be sent on dangerous missions …’ I paused, choosing my words carefully. I needed Drew to trust me. ‘You’re DEVGRU,’ I said. ‘Elite among the elite, but the stress has to be enormous.’

  Drew caught his breath. ‘DEVGRU,’ he repeated, then he laughed.

  ‘DEVGRU’s less of a mouthful than the Naval Special Warfare Development Group,’ I said, ‘but you gotta admit that the old name, Seal Team Six, sounds a hell of a lot sexier.’ I thought about Drew’s key role in the mission to extract a high-value target like Nazari from Swosa, and it hit me like a thunderbolt. ‘You’re Gold Squadron, right? It doesn’t get any more select than that.’

  When Drew didn’t respond, I said, ‘Amy and I have become close over the past several weeks. She’s very proud of you, you know.’

  Drew snorted. ‘In the early days, maybe. When I was everyone’s hero, quietly picking off Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea. Now? I’m shit under their shoes.’

  ‘Just a moment ago you said that it would be less embarrassing for the Navy if you stayed dead. I’m trying to work that one out. The mission to capture Nazari was fully-sanctioned by the U.S. government, right? That’s what they kept saying on CNN.’

  ‘Capture, not kill. They wanted Nazari trussed up and delivered to the ICC for crimes against humanity.’

  ‘ICC?’

  ‘The International Criminal Court in the Hague. In March of 2009 Nazari was indicted by the ICC on eighteen counts of genocide, torture and rape. He’d been a fugitive ever since.’

  ‘A monster,’ I said. ‘Not fit to breathe the same air as the rest of us.’

  ‘Yeah, but the brass thinks that I stepped over the line. We broke into the compound, cornered Nazari in an upstairs bedroom. The bastard was unarmed. We could’a taken him alive, easy. Just one sorry excuse for a human being hiding behind a curtain with his wife and children. He massacred millions of his own people, sure, I could deal with that, but when he grabbed one of his daughters and tried to use her as a human shield I looked the son of a bitch straight in the eye and said to myself, screw it, you’re a waste of space. You’ve forfeited your right to live. I double tapped him. End of story.’

  ‘But it wasn’t, was it? The end of the story, I mean.’

  ‘Fuck, no. All hell broke loose. Women crying, children screaming, guards popping up out of nowhere. We killed a bunch of guards on our way out, and I covered for my team as they ran to the chopper, but I missed the guy with the rocket launcher.’

  ‘We saw the explosion on CNN. Everyone assumed you were aboard, too.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I had been.’

  ‘But it’s better to be alive, Drew, surely. What’s the worst thing that can happen to you if the Navy finds out you’re not dead?’

  ‘After being AWOL for almost a year? Let’s just say that I’m not planning on doing any time in Leavenworth.’

  ‘So, what happened next?’

  ‘After the explosion, I took out the guard, borrowed his clothing and got the hell out. It took me a while, but I’m here.’

  ‘How did you get out of Swosa with no passport, no money?’

  ‘It helps to be fluent in the language, and …’ He paused and we both heard the door across the hall creak open. There was a light tap on the door.

  ‘Amy? I heard voices. You OK in there?’

  Alex.

  I wasn’t sure I could imitate Amy’s Yankee twang, so I mumbled sleepily, ‘Fine. Just a nightmare. Sorry I woke you. G’night.’ I held my breath, fearful that Alex might decide to comfort Amy in person, but after a few seconds, the light pad of stocking feet confirmed that he’d returned to the room he shared with Michael.

  As much as I wanted to hear the rest of Drew’s story, I knew it could be dangerous for everyone if he stuck around much longer. ‘We’re going to church at nine o’clock tomorrow,’ I whispered. ‘Amy and I will figure out a way for the two of you to talk.’

  ‘St Anne’s, you mean? On Church Circle?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘The restrooms are through the door to the right as you enter the narthex. Nobody should be using them during the service, so you can wait for Amy there.’

  A slight creak of the chair, a whispered, ‘Thanks.’

  For several minutes I remained huddled in my corner, arms wrapped around my knees, imagining I could still hear him breathing. ‘Drew?’

  But Amy’s husband was gone. And I’d never even seen his face.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘I’ve never been a morning person, so waking up at 5:30 a.m. to start cooking breakfast for a whole houseful of people is a real chore. It’s getting so I don’t mind eating porridge, but the next time one of the cameramen sashays into my kitchen with an Egg McMuffin, I’m going to kill him.’

  Karen Gibbs, cook

  After Drew left, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed with my heart pounding, trying to calm it. Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat. But my heart still pulsed hot in my ears like a piston.

  I lay shivering in bed until dawn’s pale light began to filter in, giving shape to the room’s spare furnishings. I got up, pulled Amy’s robe off the hook on the back of the door, wrapped it around my shift. Leaving my ball gown lying in a heap on the floor, I crept from Amy’s room, tiptoed into the hall and down the stairs, through the hyphen into the main house where the occasional wine glass abandoned on a window sill or on the steps of the Chippendale staircase were reminders of the excesses of the previous evening.

  On the second floor I paused, smiled demurely at the camera. So what if future viewers thought Hannah’d been bed-hopping? It might even juice up their ratings.

  When I let myself into my room a few seconds later, everyone was still asleep, but sometime during the night, Amy had awakened and pulled the bedcovers over Gabe and tucked him in.

  I approached the bed and shook Amy gently by the shoulder. ‘Amy,’ I whispered. ‘Wake up.’

  There was no response, so I shook her again until she stirred.

  One eye opened. ‘What?’ As if suddenly realizing who she was and who she was supposed to be, she propped herself up on one elbow and said, ‘Oh, Hannah, I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?’

  ‘Dawn. Sunday,’ I said. I needed Amy wide awake before I told her about Drew. ‘We need to talk, but not here.’ As Amy climbed out of bed and began tugging at her corset, smoothing her rumbled clothing, I slipped out of her robe and began rummaging in the half-light through the chest at the foot of my bed, coming up with one of my everyday gowns, a simple linen frock – could have been blue, could have been black – that laced up the front.

  ‘In the kitchen?’ Amy asked, sounding worried.

  ‘No. Meet me inside the summer house. There are no cameras there. And go quietly. I’ll join you in a few minutes.’

  In the garden, dew glistened like cobwebs on the grass. To save my shoes, I kept to the terraced walkway that bisected the garden and led straight down to the two-story summer house that had been William Paca’s pride and joy. A statue of the god Mercury balanced on tiptoe at the peak of its octagonal roof.

  I crossed the Chippendale bridge that spanned the fish pond and found Amy sitting on a bench inside the folly. I sat down next to her and took her hand.

  ‘It’s bad news, isn’t it?’ she said.

  I squeezed her hand. ‘Honestly, Amy, I don’t know. You’ll have to be the judge of that.’ I’m not one of those break-it-to-’em-gently kind of people. Best to dive right in, get it over with. ‘Drew’s alive.’

  Amy covered her mouth with both hands and screamed into them. She turned to face me, eyes wide and dry. ‘No, no.’

  ‘It’s true. Last night I slept in your room, and sometime in the middle of the night, Drew broke in. He expected to find you there, of course.’

  ‘Why didn’t he …’ Amy fumbled for the words.

  I finished th
e sentence for her. ‘Why didn’t he simply knock on the front door, say, hey, it’s me, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Drew believes it’s important that he stay dead for a while, but he wants to see you very much.’

  ‘I don’t understand. The helicopter …’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand either, Amy, not entirely. Drew will have to explain. He knows that we’re going to church this morning, and is going to wait in the restroom. During the service, we’ll have to figure out a way to get the two of you together for a talk.’

  Amy didn’t look happy at the prospect of seeing her husband again, which puzzled me until she said, ‘But, I don’t want to leave the show.’

  ‘Why would you have to?’

  ‘You don’t know Drew.’

  That was true. I didn’t even know what her husband looked like, since carrying wallet-sized photographs of loved ones in our handbags had been forbidden, too. And nobody had any Hans Holbein miniatures, either. But I figured if Drew had been trained to extract a foreign dictator from his armed compound in a foreign country, surely he could extract his wife from a historic home in Annapolis, Maryland. There must be something holding him back. ‘You’ll need to talk to him, Amy. Then you can decide what you need to do.’

  Jack Donovan was out of sorts at breakfast Sunday morning. Not long before dawn, George Washington (Founding Father informed us) had been whisked away. Not the way he had come – on horseback – but in a black limo, in order to make an early morning flight from BWI to New Orleans, where he would be shooting an episode of Treme.

  Jack took Washington’s desertion as a personal insult. ‘Inconsiderate,’ he sputtered as he stood at the buffet heaping smoked bluefish on his plate. ‘Especially when we went to all the trouble preparing this spread.’

  We? What do you mean, we? Jack’s sole contribution to the breakfast feast spread out before him had been the bluefish itself, a ten-pound beauty given to him by one of his Middleton Tavern cronies at their last meeting. Karen – who had smoked the fish, scrambled the eggs, pickled the herring, sliced the ham and balled the melon that Jack was busily tucking into – Karen was the only individual with any claim to being put out, in my opinion. Or possibly French Fry, who stood behind Jack’s chair at that particular moment, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue.