“I beg your pardon!”
“It’s not a criticism of you, dearest. We just don’t actually know what they planned to do with the tattooed corpse. Was Mavis supposed to find it or not? Maybe Mavis was supposed to panic and contact her people in Damascus for intel. Or it was supposed to ruin our efforts to assist the Syrian rebels.”
“I still think you people are overthinking this,” I insisted, my hands holding my coffee cup. “Sometimes a black crayon is just a black crayon. Maybe this is personal for Yuri. Bad blood and a family feud. Very Shakespearean.”
Mavis poured herself another cup of coffee. “We have an informant who says that Yuri believed his mother deserted him, that she never cared.”
“He probably never dared to hope. His father punished him every time he spoke her name,” Uncle Edward pointed out.
“Aversion therapy, if ever I saw it,” Mavis decided. “I assume Yuri checked out the vehicle before forcing you to drive to the train tracks, Bea. That’s what I would have done in his shoes. He probably even wanted to make sure the back door of the car was unlocked. Are you certain you lost that knife in the woods?”
“Positive. It fell into the bushes after I punctured the rear tires on their SUV.”
“It would be most unusual for Yuri to do what he did out of the goodness of his heart.” Ben was adamant.
“Planting that knife in the car suggests advanced planning,” Uncle Edward replied. “Maybe the Russians decided to strap Bea to the train tracks, reprising the specter of the old operation in Hungary. Maybe they’re worried Yuri is going soft on them, and they deliberately forced his hand to prevent it.”
“To send him a message that they own his ass?” Ben asked.
“If he had orders to kill Bea, this might have been a Russian power play,” Mavis decided, “to pay the CIA back for rolling up Petra and the boys in the woods.”
“Could be,” Ben agreed. “He wouldn’t have dared to refuse the kill order, but he might have deliberately slipped up, to give Bea a fighting chance, hence the knife in the cup holder.”
“Maybe they thought Ben and Yuri have a relationship, and that’s why Petra and the boys got caught, because they’re in cahoots.” Uncle Edward, Mavis, and I all turned to Ben as the reality of that possibility sunk in.
“Oh, come on! I was on the train with Mavis, for God’s sake! You saw me get the call,” he reminded her. “I let you read the text!”
“Yes, you did.” Her big brown eyes lit on Ben and didn’t let go. “But the Russians don’t necessarily know that. They might believe you and Yuri conspired to stage the scene.”
“Those plastic straps were pretty tight,” I reminded the crowd. “I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get that knife out of my bra and use it in time. And you only turned up as I got one hand free. I still say that Yuri didn’t decide to help me until after he walked away. Coming back to collect Wardah and lead her away from the tracks was an afterthought. He had the decency to take her far enough away that she wouldn’t, couldn’t see the train hit my car. And when he knew I was rescued....”
“Ha, you heard her. ‘Rescued.’” My husband gloated over my slip of the tongue.
“May I continue?” I glared at him across the table. “As I was saying, when he knew I was free and the train hadn’t hit me, he let her go. Why would he conceal a motorcycle in the vicinity for his escape if he was going to snatch her? It would have been better to have an accomplice or to use an SUV. Kidnapping Wardah was never in the cards.”
“She has a point,” Mavis nodded.
“It could be all about Marina and Colonel Demitrov. Yuri’s father was obsessed with revenge. That can cause severe emotional and mental anguish for the son who is forced to pay for his mother’s sins.” Uncle Edward tapped on the dining table as he pondered the possibility. I took advantage of the moment to explain my version of events.
“The guy found out his mama really did love him. Uncle Edward had the evidence in his safe and now Yuri has seen it for himself. Somewhere inside Yuri, the killer, is Grigoriy, the little boy who got the crap kicked out of him by a real bastard. I think he saw Wardah as a child and connected with her. I begged him, begged him, to take her away from the scene, so she wouldn’t have to live with the memory of seeing me killed.”
“What if Yuri is trying to decide whether or not he wants to accept the truth that Marina loved him?” Mavis asked. “What if he’s beginning to wonder what his life would have been like if Demitrov had been stopped sooner? What if he blames the Russians for what happened to him. No one protected him from that monster. Someone should have.”
We all sat in silence, thinking that through. The truth was we had no way of knowing what was going on inside Yuri’s head. Maybe he was just messing with us. Maybe he was trying to fool us. Maybe he was killing us with a moment of kindness, lulling us into a false peace. How could we truly be sure we understood the man?
“Maybe Yuri wants to meet his mother before it’s too late,” Mavis wondered.
“Who also happens to be your mother,” I said, turning to Ben. “Maybe Yuri has been watching you for a long time. What if the Russians have been pressing your half-brother to get more involved because of you? What if the Russians have assigned him the task of getting close to you because they want to get at you and he’s balking? He spent a lifetime being indoctrinated in hate, bitterness, and rage. What if Yuri is experiencing an awakening, a realization that he’s been manipulated as a human being because of who his parents were? Maybe this is the one last finale from the old timers and Yuri is deliberately gumming up the works.”
“You want me to believe my half-brother wants to save me, out of the goodness of his heart? And maybe pigs fly,” Ben sneered.
“Maybe blood really is thicker than water,” I shot back.
“It’s a risk to trust Yuri, Bea. He was trained to take advantage of opportunities. He could be pretending to change in order to exploit this for the Russians, so I’ll let my guard down. He’s a predator.”
“There’s the pot calling the kettle black. What makes you more noble than your half-brother?”
“I choose to be a decent human being. I choose to act for the greater good.”
“Exactly!” I cried. “You know there is an intrinsic reward for your sacrifice. For someone like Yuri, who has never really been challenged to engage his conscience, who’s been punished for loving his mother, who’s always been driven by rage, it’s a new experience.”
“Every man has his breaking point, Bea, even Yuri. You can never completely trust an animal who has been brutalized. It can turn on you at any time. Fear can override reason in the blink of an eye. A simple trigger can cause a deadly reaction and you won’t always recognize the trigger. Once the humanity has been forced out of a man, he rarely ever completely recovers.” Ben’s eyes met mine across the table, and I could see his very real concern. His half-brother had been made a killer and one act of kindness did not a reformed man make.
“True,” I agreed with my overly-cautious husband, “but sometimes love really does conquer all. And sometimes the bad guys can do so much harm that a man is finally forced to choose his own course in life. Isn’t that what sometimes happened with the Nazis?”
I turned to Uncle Edward for his opinion. He pursed his lips, gently letting out a deep breath, almost hesitant to answer.
“It was my experience on a handful of occasions to see the most brutal of men experience a change of heart and switch sides. I did, in fact, flip one man to our cause. It came after he was forced to take the life of a friend by his superiors. But it was a very rare event, Beatrice.”
“Even so,” I shrugged, turning back to Ben, “maybe Yuri wants what you have, what you grew up having. Maybe that opportunity to save another child from the kind of torment he suffered allowed him to see himself as a better man than his father and, in that moment, it mattered, he mattered. He rose above the brutality of his father. No one forced him to help Wardah. He didn’t have to do that.
Every man has the opportunity to embrace redemption, Benedick. We are all born creatures with free choice, even when we don’t realize it, even when we deliberately reject it. When we recognize that we are more than just individuals, when we come to recognize the humanity in our fellow man, we rise above and reach for something that is eternal and greater than the sum of our parts.”
“In the trenches, with war raging all around you, Bea, it’s easier said than done. When your life teeters on the decisions you make, it’s sometimes easier to just act without thinking. We’re all human, love. None of us is perfect.”
“But the more practice you have in engaging your conscience, the better the decisions.”
“Maybe,” Ben conceded. I could tell he was mulling over the possibility that his half-brother wasn’t the epitome of evil, even if he was a dangerous man. I wondered what it was like, growing up with the mother Yuri had been denied. Perhaps there was regret somewhere inside Ben, that his mother was never able to have both of her sons, that she had been forced to leave one behind. And yet, I saw Ben’s point. Yuri was like a grizzly bear, and trusting him could prove deadly, as much as I might want to believe. You never wanted to turn your back on him.
“Time will tell,” decided Uncle Edward. “At some moment in the future, Yuri will show his hand and we will know. Love is a potent thing, so powerful that it can motivate a man to change. It happened with the Dukes in ‘As You Like It’. It may yet happen with Jamil and Hashim in Syria, especially now that Hashim has lost his own daughter to the war. I know that Marina has never stopped believing her sons would someday come together. Who knows? She may live to see it happen, even if it is merely a temporary truce.”
“Indeed. Wouldn’t that be nice?” I asked, looking across the room at the doubting Mavis and my disbeliever of a husband. They were too immersed in world of deception, where smoke, mirrors, and shadows concealed the truth, and it was hard to know who to trust. I understood that because I knew how often they had been deceived by the very people they trusted and I knew they had lost colleagues and friends as the result of such mistakes. But I still was convinced that I had seen something in Yuri when he returned to collect Wardah. My eyes moved across the room to the open French doors of the dining room and the night beyond. There were crickets chirping outside, and their rhythmic symphony was soothing. For a brief moment, I thought I saw a furtive shadow rise up behind one of Uncle Edward’s rose bushes and disappear into the darkness beyond. A light breeze moved through the open doors and I caught the fragrance of his prized “4th of July” blossoms. How appropriate, I smiled to myself. Maybe there was hope yet.
Coming Soon! Enjoy an Excerpt from Another Bard’s Bed & Breakfast Mystery:
A Plague on Both Your Houses:
A Bard’s Bed & Breakfast Mystery
by Sara M. Barton
Published by Sara M. Barton at Smashwords
Copyright Sara M. Barton 2012
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Chapter One –
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a messy guest at the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast. Oh, I’m not talking about the people who leave wet towels on the floor of the bedroom, when there’s a perfectly good linen hamper in the ensuite bathroom, any more than I’m talking about the guests who like to spice up their romantic interludes with whipped cream between the Egyptian cotton sheets I launder for them. I’m talking about the visitors who bring their plug ugly baggage with them when they come to stay.
Linda Romano was one of those who managed to both fascinate and repel me at the same time. Squat, cantankerous, and physically unappealing to all but the hardiest of souls, she arrived with a black cloud above her head and a trail of stink that permeated my guest house long after her body was removed in a body bag.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking -- that yet another guest was murdered at the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast in some foul plot to rule the world. Hardly the case here, my friend. No, Linda died of natural causes -- she needed hospice care at the end of life and the CIA was concerned that some hostile intelligence service would take advantage of a dying woman to extract national security secrets from her as she took her last breaths. That’s how she came to be a guest. The CIA used Ben as both watch dog and wet nurse. He oversaw her nursing care team, vetted each Florence Nightingale and Dr. Kildare that came to the house, checked her medical equipment for signs of tampering, and supervised her round-the-clock palliative care.
I once met an old woman who shared her New England folk wisdom over a cup of tea one day as she fretted about her problematic adult son. She explained that people just got “more so” as they grew older. If you were kind and good as a child, with a sense of humor, you kept going down that road as an adult. If you were given to temper tantrums and stubborn as the day was long, you became a royal pain in the arse as you aged. Linda fit the last description. She was bitter to the end.
As a chemist, she was brilliant. She had a knack for discovering synthetic and natural compounds that could be mixed to create biological and chemical weapons ranging from the harmless to the most potent of toxins. Her actual job was to develop antidotes, but in order to do that, she needed to know how to manufacture them.
A lifelong spinster, Linda lived alone right up until the time she arrived at the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast. In other words, she was an unyielding, demanding, self-absorbed curmudgeon. And before you go putting your fighting armor on and getting on your high horse to defend the dying, lance in hand, save yourself from embarrassment. We care for all our guests, from the very genteel to the very grouchy. We make them comfortable and see to all of their needs and demands. That doesn’t mean I have to love each of them, does it? And let’s be honest, while we’re at it. Not everyone is noble when facing a certain death. Some remain in denial right up to that last breath. Some rage at the injustice of having their lives cut short too soon. Some discover God or find inner peace, spending their last moments in gentle goodbyes and healing old wounds. Linda spent hers trying to find ways to punish those who had crossed her in life. It was her final mission to impede the lives of those who got away from her, who fled her tyranny and thrived as a result.
“Bea, can you please make a pot of tea and take it up to Linda? I’ve got to call the on-duty nurse,” said Ben as he passed through the kitchen. My husband ignored my rolling eyes and grabbed the medication box from its shelf. “She seems to be hallucinating. I’m hoping it’s just a matter of dehydration.”
Six minutes later, mug in hand, I trudged up the long staircase of the Bard’s Bed & Breakfast and headed down the hall to the Padua Room. The antique English oak bed had been temporarily replaced by a motorized hospital bed with adjustable sides, rubber bed sheets, and more suitable lighting. No longer one of our most romantic accommodations, the room still had plenty of charm. The soft blue walls and floral window treatments were still elegant, but the Aubusson rug Uncle Edward found in a little Montreal shop had been rolled up and removed, to make it easier to care for the patient.
The CIA, in its infinite wisdom, had the good sense to send Ben a certified licensed practical nurse to help out with the sponge baths and the effort to soothe the savage breast in the form of Manie, a six-foot-tall, dark as night Jamaican woman with a great sense of humor and a laugh that echoed through the house. As much as Linda was a dark cloud that came to rest on the Bard’s, Manie was the clean breeze that blew in after a terrible storm. I liked her so much, I put her in the Milan Suite. It was, like Manie, full of life -- colorful, sumptuous, I thought it the perfect choice for a woman who spent her days wiping the ornery chin of a cantankerous woman. The attached bathroom o
ffered a rather large soaking tub, in addition to a shower, perfect for a long, hot bubble bath when the day was through. There was a small sitting area with a plump loveseat, a flat screen TV that hung on the wall above an antique writing desk, and a balcony with a view of the distant Adirondacks, where Manie could sit at the end of the day and enjoy a sunset. I deliberately put her on the third floor, despite the extra flight of stairs, because I knew that it would make it harder for my noble husband to assume Manie would handle every little crisis that popped up. Had she been in the Padua Suite, she would have never had a moment’s peace, and I knew caring for the dying was hard work. I had no idea it would prove dangerous for Manie.
I once heard a spy say that if you want personal information on a target, just chat up the hairdresser. People reveal a lot when they’re in the chair. They gossip. They confess. They ramble on about what their spouses, kids, and bosses do to annoy them. They rant and rave about hearth and home, about the jungle they call work. Poor Manie was a captive audience, and when Linda decided to get things off her chest, she used her licensed practical nurse as her witness.
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