I took a deep breath. “It was a cruel trick to play. We saw photographs of your grave.”
He seemed surprised. “Well, I thought that you would see them. I thought that the epitaph might amuse you, that it certainly would tell you that my death was a ruse.”
“It did, I guess. In the end.” I yawned. “Along with the Picardo and the roses.”
He looked baffled.
I told him about the half-full bottle and the flowers left on his grave. “You didn’t leave them, as a sign?”
“No,” he said. “I wonder who did.”
I had one more question. “May I tell Michael about Malcolm?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Ari. Not now, at any rate. The McGarritts deserve to know who killed her, of course, but think of the repercussions for us. We’d have that man Burton after us again. Arthur Pym would have to disappear or die, and I’ve already died once this year.”
I persisted. “When can we let them know?”
“When we’ve resettled,” he said. “I doubt we’ll stay here.” He frowned. “Xanadu. The place isn’t to my liking, at all. Once we’ve found a new home, then you can tell Michael the truth. Let Agent Burton sit on Malcolm’s back for a while.”
Keeping secrets isn’t hard for me. But I wanted to call Michael that night, tell him what I’d learned.
Instead I went to bed, but I didn’t feel sleepy. Outside, the wind moved like an overpowered locomotive, making the building creak and sigh as it passed. My mind raced in spirals. I wondered when my mother would arrive. Would I end up living with her or with my father? Was it possible that I’d ever live with both of them? What might that life be like?
When it came, sleep was uneasy. I dreamed of shadows tall as Xanadu, of eclipsed suns, of incense, ice, and music. Then of real things, mementos of Saratoga Springs: the lithophane lamp in my old bedroom, the grandfather clock in the library, the shadowbox on the wall. But in my dream, the birds in the shadowbox were real. I heard their wings beat against the glass.
I awoke in a room full of smoke. The room had no windows, and when I opened the door, smoke swirled even thicker in the corridor. It had a strangely sweet smell. A wave of heat stung my face. The air-conditioning wasn’t working, and the lights were out.
I called for my father. I could hear the pulse of flames, coming from the direction of the kitchen. I called him again, and then I began to cough.
In the bathroom I soaked a towel and wrapped it around my head. I gulped down some water. The faucet sent out a stream at first, but tapered quickly, then stopped.
The bathroom had no windows, either. The whole central part of the condominium was windowless — a common design in water-front condominiums, I’ve come to know since. A “direct water-view” is the selling point; aside from that, the units resemble kennels.
I took a deep breath and ran to my father’s room. Its door was open, and the room, as far as I could see it through the smoke, was unoccupied.
Holding my breath, I ran to the living room, unlocked the balcony door. I yanked its handle, but it didn’t budge. I pressed the button to open the hurricane shutters. Nothing happened.
Think, think slowly, I told myself. But my mind and my pulse were racing. My lungs burned, and I began to pant. On my hands and knees, I left the room and entered the study, and I tried to open the shutters there. Nothing.
We’ve lost electricity, I reasoned. It’s common in a storm, to lose electricity. To lose electricity is nothing unusual.
I crawled to the end of the room farthest from the door, holding my breath, my mind singing its little song. Nothing unusual. Nothing unusual. Nothing.
“We’re only born once.”
Mãe says those were my first words in the hospital. And she says she replied, “Didn’t he teach you about reincarnation?”
But I doubt that’s what she really said. It wasn’t a joking matter, really. I’d spent most of a week receiving hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT). The treatments were intermittent, and I was unconscious during the first two. I regained consciousness during the third treatment, waking up in what seemed to be a transparent cylindrical coffin.
My body was surrounded by 100 percent oxygen gas, dissolving in my blood and body tissues at concentrations much higher than normal — high enough to sustain life with no blood at all. I was told all of this during the third treatment by a nurse, who spoke slowly and clearly into a microphone connected to the HBOT chamber.
When I recovered the ability to think and speak, I thought, I’d ask a hundred questions about the treatment. I wondered if my father knew about it. Was it possible that we might not need blood if we had our own glass coffins at home? Then I wondered, where was home?
“Her eyes are open,” I heard the nurse say. “She’s trying to say something.”
And then my mother’s face appeared on the other side of the chamber.
Her blue eyes looked joyous and exhausted. “Don’t try to speak now, darling,” she said. “Just breathe.”
What happened? I sent the thought to her. Where’s my father?
There was a fire, she began.
I know that much! If she saw the words, they must be purple.
No need for sarcasm, she shot back. I guess you must be feeling better.
I opened my mouth, but she said, “Hush. Your father is alive.”
In what we call “The Movie,” Dr. Van Helsing makes a pronouncement found nowhere in Bram Stoker’s novel: “The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him.”
For many vampires, that statement is more than a favorite aphorism — it’s a central tenet of the philosophy of the undead. Despite all evidence to the contrary, humans are more comfortable with the most convoluted theories that contradict our existence than with the simple fact that we share the planet with them. We’re here, and we’re not going away.
My father, recovering from third-degree burns, was given a tracheotomy and skin grafts he didn’t need. The doctors couldn’t accept what their eyes told them: despite being found unconscious and badly burned in a raging chemical fire, he’d suffered minimal damage to his lungs and skin, and he was healing rapidly. Yet they kept him under observation in the intensive care unit, and they didn’t allow visitors.
I celebrated my birthday in the hospital. A candlelit Twinkie was delivered on a tray.
My gift was seeing my father for the first time since the fire. My mother wheeled me into his room, littered with monitoring devices connected to his body. The outline of his body beneath the sheets was slight for such a tall man. He was sleeping. I’d never before seen him asleep. His eyelashes, long and dark, lay against his cheek — like butterfly wings, I thought.
He opened his eyes. “Butterfly wings?” he said, his voice incredulous.
Mãe and I laughed, and he smiled — his real smile, not the scholarly one. “Happy birthday,” he said to me. His voice sounded soft. “Your fireworks arrived a few days early.”
I tried not to ask questions, but my brain generated them anyway.
“I don’t know,” he said, when I asked, Who started the fire?
“I don’t know,” he repeated, when I asked, Who rescued us?
“Well, I can answer that one,” Mãe said. “I did. Along with the help of Siesta Key’s finest fire squad.”
Mãe had been driving down I-4 in what she called “hideous rain,” when she picked up my first “distress signal.”
“You couldn’t breathe,” she said. “It came through to me as clearly as if you hadn’t been born yet.” She turned to my father. “Remember that time when her heartbeat increased, and you thought she was in fetal distress? And I told you no, I’d know it if that happened.”
“Isn’t the idea of knowing such a thing a bit of a cliché?” My voice was as innocent as I could manage.
She rubbed her eyes. “You must be feeling better.”
My father put his hand in the air — then looked at the intravenous needle taped to it. He thought about
ripping it out, and my mother and I both said, “No!”
“All right,” he said. “The needle stays. But only so long as Sara tells the story in a linear fashion, without a thousand digressions. Is that possible?”
She tried.
She’d arrived in Sarasota to find the traffic lights out, and only a few streetlights working. Her truck was the only vehicle on the road, and she blazed through intersections, feeling like an anarchist.
She apologized for the digressive simile. But she’d always wondered what it would feel like to be an anarchist.
When she arrived at Xanadu (my father shook his head at the name), flames coming from unit 1235 were visible from the street. The elevators weren’t working, and in any case she knew the door to the condominium would be locked. She didn’t have a key, or a cell phone, but she remembered seeing a fire station at the intersection of Midnight Pass and Beach Road. So she drove there.
“They were sitting in the station watching the Weather Channel,” she said. “They’d put out a fire about an hour previously —” She looked at my father. “All right, I won’t tell you about that.”
When the fire trucks arrived at Xanadu, she said, a ladder truck drove to the back of the building, and another crew went up the stairs, carrying extinguishers, a hose, and other equipment. They told her to stay behind, but she trailed after them.
“Ever the obedient one,” my father said.
Then a nurse walked into the room, wearing a brightly patterned smock. My father shuddered at its design and closed his eyes.
“Time for visitors to leave.” The nurse smiled at us, most insincerely.
My mother sighed, and abruptly hypnotized her.
“Only for a few minutes,” she said. “Let me finish telling this. So, they were trying to get in through the metal shutters at the back, and the others used axes to break down the front door. I am very impressed with the Siesta Key firefighters, in particular the ones from Station 13. They pried off the shutters somehow and found Ari in the study, and carried her down in the basket thing. Or is it a bucket? What do you call it? Never mind.
“And you were the first one we found.” She looked at my father as if she might cry. “You were in bad shape. Much worse than you-know-who, and much worse than Ari. You were black with soot, and oh, the burns on your back —”
“Who’s you-know-who?” His shoulders moved off the pillows, as if he were trying to sit up.
I’d never known my father to interrupt anyone. He’d always said that, no matter how dire the situation, rudeness is inexcusable.
“Lie back.” My mother stretched her hands as if to push him, and his shoulders fell back. “Malcolm,” she said. “You-know-who is Malcolm. You’re too weak to read my thoughts.”
“He was there?” I asked.
“They found him in the entryway, not far from your father.” Her eyes were on his face, not mine. “Didn’t you know? Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“How did he get in?” my father asked no one in particular.
“He must have made himself invisible,” I said. “He might have come in when I put out the trash. Then, when the fire got to him, he would have lost the concentration and become visible again. But Father might not have seen him in the smoke.”
“I’d thought Raphael must have let him in.” Mãe pushed her hair back, straightened her shirt.
“I saw no one.” He lifted his hand again, looked at the IV with disgust. “I awoke with smoke in my room. I found the fire near the kitchen and tried to put it out, but it moved too quickly. The smoke was overwhelming.”
“Ethyl ether,” Mãe said. “That’s how it started. The firemen found a canister in the kitchen. Whoever planned it did a thorough job. He even took the batteries out of the backup switch for the hurricane shutters.”
“Malcolm started it,” I said. “It makes sense.”
My father said, “It could have been Dennis, I suppose. But I tend to agree with you — Malcolm’s more likely. Why didn’t he leave, after he set the fire?”
Mãe said, “I suspect he wanted to watch.” Her voice was bitter.
“Where is he now?” I hoped that he was dead.
“Who knows?” Mãe’s face looked far away. “They put him in an emergency van to take him to the hospital, but somehow or another they lost him. When they opened the doors, the van was empty.”
“He escaped.” My father sank into his pillows and closed his eyes.
“You need to rest.” My mother woke up the nurse, and we said good-night.
Back in my room, I told her about the argument the day of the fire — and about the expression on Malcolm’s face as he left.
She didn’t show surprise. “Yes, he loves Raphael,” she said. “I’ve known that for years.”
And her face, and her voice when she said his name, told me that she loved my father, too.
Chapter Nineteen
On a sweltering afternoon about a month later, Harris and I were lounging at either end of a hammock on the front porch of a house owned by Mãe’s friends in Kissimmee. The friends were in Orlando for the day, so we had the place to ourselves. An overhead fan kept the air circulating enough to keep us tolerably cool, and we drank lemonade in tall glasses through long, bendable straws.
I was writing in my journal. Harris was thumbing though an art book: The World’s Greatest Paintings.
Hurricane Barry had not been kind to Homosassa Springs. Blue Beyond was no more. A storm surge from the river had destroyed most of the house, Mãe said, and the trees and gardens had been shredded by tornadoes. Luckily all of the animals had been evacuated safely — even the bees, whose hives had been moved off the property to higher ground and secured, before the storm. The statue of Epona also survived intact, and currently guarded the front door of the house where we were staying.
Mãe and Dashay sat up late, talking about whether the structure could be rebuilt. They’d been back to Homosassa twice, and each time they returned to Kissimmee with rescued items and more stories. Flo’s Place and the Riverside Resort were ruins, missing roofs and walls, their windows smashed despite plywood nailed up to protect them. Monkey Island was nothing but a rock, its trees and rope bridges gone. Its lighthouse had been found floating in the river several miles away.
Today they’d left an hour before, to make another assessment of the damage and do some cleaning up. They’d invited me to come along. I declined. I didn’t want to see the destruction.
My father was in Ireland. He’d sent me a postcard of an island in a lake; the message read “Peace comes dropping slow,” a line from a Yeats poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” After his too-lengthy convalescence in the hospital, he decided he’d had enough of Florida. Root went on a summer vacation, and my father flew to Shannon to explore, possibly to find a new home base. He’d invited me to come along. That offer, too, I declined. I needed time to sort things out.
For the first time in my life I wondered about my future life. Would I go to college? Get a job? It had been months since I’d spent time with teenagers. In becoming other, I’d lost my contemporaries, my friends.
Human friends, at any rate. At some point Harris nudged me and pointed at a painting in his book — John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. It could have been a portrait of my mother, I thought, and Harris thought so, too. Pleased that we agreed, he settled back into his end of the hammock again, and I returned to my brooding.
I wondered if I’d have a boyfriend. Michael and I had talked on the phone a few more times, but we found less and less to say. I couldn’t tell him I knew who killed Kathleen, and that knowledge constrained my end of our conversations.
And I wondered if Malcolm was out there, somewhere. Would I spend my life being stalked by him?
Or would I spend it trying to reconcile my parents? I didn’t know how things stood between them. My father had left for Ireland without confiding in me. When I asked my mother, her face was enigmatic. “The summer’s not over yet,” she said.
The front gate’s buzzer rang, and I was glad to stop my thinking.
“Stay here,” I told Harris. He’d been allowed to remain with us for the summer, as a gift to me. And in truth, he seemed to like Florida more now. Joey had been sent to the rehab center a few weeks ago, and early reports from Panama claimed his personality had blossomed.
I went down the driveway to the gate, not resentful at all about being disturbed, waving at the horses grazing in the paddock as I passed. Grace emerged from beneath a sweet olive shrub and followed me after a fashion, pausing frequently to sniff the ground or wash herself.
But my heart sank when I saw the man at the gate. Agent Burton stood in the road, talking into his cell phone. His suit was too dark for a Florida summer, and his forehead glistened with perspiration. A white Ford Escort idled behind him.
In the space of ten yards, I formed a strategy.
He put the phone in his pocket. “Miss Montero!” His voice boomed. “Long time, no see.”
I kept walking toward him. I opened the gate.
“Do you want to come up to the house?” I said. I made my voice young and perky. “My mother’s not here, but she’ll be back later. We’re staying here with friends. We lost our house in the hurricane.”
I should mention that I was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, because he noticed it. Kid is growing up, he thought.
He smiled. “I was visiting the area, you know, and I heard you were here —”
“Where’d you hear that?” But his thoughts told me: he’d traced one of my calls to Michael.
“Somebody told me. And, uh, we thought you might have some further insights into the death of your friend Kathleen. You left the Saratoga area very suddenly.”
“I needed to visit my mom.” I held the gate half open.
He was thinking it might be strategic if he came to the house, but it also might be risky. Better to do it with an adult present.
“Sure you don’t want to come up? The house is cooler.”
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