When I finally made it to my feet, I tucked a dishrag under my shirt to absorb the steady trickle of blood. The room swirled. I hung on to the counter while I tried to think clearly. The vase—it didn’t just slip off the counter. Someone—something—pushed it.
It was the snow globe all over again. I looked around the kitchen. Nothing moved except for the spreading pool of water. The only sound was the slow, rasping breath coming from the unconscious man on the floor. The back of his head was bloody and his normally swarthy face looked pale. Just get to your car. You can make it to the hospital.
I spotted the syringe on the soaked carpet. I picked it up and examined it. Victor told me it would put me to sleep. He weighed at least twice as much as me, so maybe it would give him a nice nap—at least long enough so he couldn’t follow me.
My hands shook as I positioned the syringe an inch away from his bicep. I counted to five and plunged the needle into his arm, right through the wet shirtsleeve that clung to his skin. He didn’t flinch. I pushed down on the plunger until the barrel was empty.
I threw the spent syringe in the garbage can under the sink and grabbed the Ferrari keys. The James Bond theme song suddenly blared behind me. Victor’s phone. I bent down and gingerly pulled the phone out of his back pocket.
The caller ID said NASTIA. I hit the mute button with my blood-streaked fingers and threw his phone into my duffel bag. Then I grabbed my backpack and stumbled outside.
***
The cold morning air clung to my wet t-shirt. The black Lamborghini with the SAVITCH 1 plates was pulled up right behind my Golf in the driveway.
Then—the sound of a car driving up our street. The engine slowed. Tires crunched up our driveway.
In an instant, I was sprinting towards the trees lining the driveway. I flung myself down with my bags behind some thick bushes, just as the other car pulled up. I made my body as flat as dirt. The driver cut the engine and both doors opened. Leather round-toed boots emerged. Arkady and his short friend with the long ponytail stepped into view. They strolled casually to the porch steps. The short one whistled loudly. Arkady hissed, “Sergei!”
They both stared up at the front door.
I had left it wide open.
“Victor! Victor, ya zudez!” Arkady called.
There was no answer from the house. They looked at each other. Sergei pulled a handgun out of the back of his pants and nodded to Arkady. He ran up the stairs and disappeared into the house. Arkady lit a cigarette and stood on the bottom step.
The James Bond theme blared again. Arkady’s head snapped towards me. No no no no! He peered into the trees and stepped down off the steps. I pawed desperately through my bag to find Victor’s phone. I turned the volume off, buried my face into the dirt, and prayed.
Footsteps crunched through dead leaves on the driveway. Arkady was heading straight towards me. It felt like every muscle in my body had liquefied into useless jelly. His boots were just a few feet from my head. I could smell his cigarette smoke.
“ARKADY! ARKADY!” Sergei shouted from inside the house. Arkady turned his head and yelled something back to him. Sergei screamed back. Arkady muttered something in Russian, threw his cigarette down, and jogged into my house.
As soon as he was gone, I ran faster than I have ever moved, powered by a tsunami of adrenaline. Holding both my bags with my good arm, I darted towards the barn. Shaking, I punched in the key code and pulled the sliding barn doors open just enough to squeeze through before sliding them shut again. My left arm throbbed.
I switched the lights on and ran to the Ferrari. An imaginary alarm blared in my head, drowning out all other thoughts: GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!
I yanked the car door open and threw my bags inside. Then I ran to the back of the barn and pulled the old back door open. Its rusty hinges resisted. We hardly ever used it, since it led to a short, steep dirt driveway that you would bottom out on no matter how slow you drove. I had sworn never, ever to use it.
The door was stuck. Come on, come on! I imagined dying on the floor of the old horse barn. Hot, wet tears slid down my face.
Finally, it budged—just as I heard pounding and shouts outside. My heart was going so fast I was sure it would burst. I flew back to my car, climbed in, and turned the key, nosing it toward the back of the barn. Gunshots rang out. I glanced in the rearview and saw hands reach into the jagged hole and start pushing the double doors apart.
I nosed the Ferrari out the back door and gunned it hard down the steep grade to the street.
The chassis scraped and bounced as it bottomed out, but then the tires caught solid asphalt. I jammed my foot on the gas and I was gone.
19
Mare Austral ~ Southern Sea
I CRINGED WHEN I SAW myself in the elevator’s mirrored ceiling. My t-shirt was tie-dyed with caked blood and brown mud. I zipped my jacket up the neck to hide my injured arm. Trails of dried blood stained my left hand. The knuckles on both hands looked raw and chewed. I stuffed my hands in my pockets.
A young nurse I didn’t recognize stopped me outside my dad’s room. “Oh, hello! You’re coming to see your father? You were here yesterday, right?”
Yesterday was a thousand years ago and I was a thousand years old.
“Um, yeah.” She smiled warmly at me and laid a rubber-gloved hand on my left shoulder. I winced in pain.
“You and your sister are so good to visit him. I think you might have just missed her.” My sister? Confused, I walked into my dad’s room expecting to see Maya or Piper, but it was empty except for my sleeping father.
He was pale and gaunt, but alive. He still had that going for him.
I took his hand and squeezed it gently.
“Dad, it’s me. Can you hear me?” He took a deep rattling breath, but his eyes stayed shut. “Listen, Dad, something happened at the house.” His machines beeped. I saw the EKG line on the little monitor jump. Don’t tell him. Not now. I muffled a sob and one of his eyes opened. His lips moved, but no sound came out. “What did you say, Daddy?” As I leaned closer, I took a step forward and heard a loud creeunch under my foot. I knelt and picked up the shards of the thing I had just crushed.
It was a long acrylic fingernail with a leopard-print design.
“Lana…” His voice was a guttural whisper. I stared at the broken fingernail.
“Dad, was anyone else in this room?” I asked. Both of his eyes snapped open.
“Lana,” he whispered. “You have…to go….right now. Run.” His eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.
For once I did as I was told.
I bolted down the hallway. When I passed a cart filled with supplies, I helped myself to as many bandages as I could fit in my jacket pocket. A quick stop by the ER was out of the question. Was Nastia still in the hospital? Had she done something to him? What had they said to him?
When the elevator doors opened, I half expected Nastia to jump out with a butcher knife, but it was empty. I got in and pressed P1. On the second floor, an orderly pushing a young woman in a wheelchair got on. A giddy younger guy followed them. The woman held a tiny pink-faced baby swaddled tightly in a blanket.
The man grinned at me. “It’s a girl. Eight pounds, six ounces,” he announced.
“Congratulations,” I said. We hit the lobby floor and the doors opened. The new parents rolled out and a crowd started to push in. A tall guy in sunglasses stood at the back of the crowd. Shiny bald head. Police uniform.
Wade Jenner.
He saw me and his body went rigid.
I started frantically hitting the Close Door button, but a lady yelled “Hey!” and held the doors open. An old man was slowly inching towards the elevator using a walker. A hundred years passed. Jenner stared at me the entire time.
Just before he could step in, two young paramedics darted in front of him and squeezed in. The lady who had been holding the doors open put her hand out and stopped him. “Sorry, we’re full.”
The doors slid shut inches fro
m his face.
Down in the dark parking garage, people fanned out to their cars. Next to the elevator bank, the big glass sliding doors to the ER swished open and a nurse went in. An ambulance was parked nearby. The paramedics from the elevator stood around it chatting.
I glanced around. No Nastia. No Russians. I considered going into the ER for my bleeding arm, but then the sliding glass doors swished open and Jenner emerged. He pulled off his sunglasses—his eyes were all business. Calm down. It’s just a coincidence. He’s not looking for you. Just ignore him. I took a deep breath and headed to my car.
He stepped in front of me, stopping me in my tracks. “Well, there you are, Miss Goodwin.” My blood turned to ice. “We’ve been looking for you.” I was suddenly having a hard time swallowing. He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder and I winced. “Condolences about your dad. A real shame. Now, you need to come with me. You don’t want to miss the boat,” he said, his lips curling into a twisted smile.
I gasped and jumped away from him. Trying not to run, I backed away and went over to the two paramedics. They were standing at the back of their ambulance loading in supplies.
“Hey, can you guys please help me?” I asked. They both turned and looked at me, surprised.
“You okay, Miss?” the young guy said. I recognized him as the one who helped pull my dad out of the car the other day. “Hey, it’s you! Your dad—how’s he doing?”
I looked behind me. Jenner was still there, watching me with dead blue eyes.
“Uh, he’s good, but…I think someone is following me.” The woman, short, thin, with a pageboy cut, snapped her head up from the clipboard she was writing on.
“Really? Can you describe him?” she asked.
“He’s…tall. Dark hair, buzz cut, dressed all in black. I think he has a Russian accent. I saw him on the fourth floor.” The woman was already barking my description into her walkie-talkie. The other paramedic spotted Jenner and waved him over.
“Hey Officer, got a sec?” the paramedic called to him. A flash of anger crossed Jenner’s face before he pasted on a bright smile.
“Sure thing! What seems to be the problem?” he said. An overweight security guard ran out of the ER and huffed over to us.
“Mike, this young lady here says she’s being followed by a man in the hospital,” the woman said to the security guard. She looked up at Jenner. “Officer, can you help Mike look for the man that fits the description? I’ll stay here with her.” The woman looked at me kindly. “Don’t worry, hon. You’re safe here.” Jenner’s eyes narrowed at me. He reluctantly followed the security guard into the ER.
I was about to try and sneak away when the screech of tires echoed through the garage. Our heads swiveled to the entrance and we watched an enormous black SUV hurtle towards us. It parked at a crazy angle, right next to the ambulance.
The side doors flew open.
Arkady jumped out and, shouting things in Russian, helped Sergei pull an unconscious Victor out of the backseat. There was a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his head.
It was one of the towels from my bathroom.
Arkady shouted to her, “Hey, you! Help, please!” The female paramedic looked up at me, stunned. I realized that the man I had described was somehow standing right in front of her. I ducked behind the ambulance and watched the other paramedic pull a stretcher out of the back. He pushed it over to the SUV and they lifted Victor onto it and wheeled him towards the ER. Arkady and Sergei followed them.
They hadn’t noticed me.
I had already wasted too much time at the hospital. It was time to go. I got in my car and sped away.
***
When I got on the highway, I floored it. I had to slow down at one point when some fire trucks overtook me. I was overwhelmed with my absolute aloneness at that moment. What I really wanted was go home, but I knew I couldn’t.
There was only one other place I could go. Then I’d make a plan and figure out what to do. I took the exit for downtown Sonoma. When I stopped at the red light at the bottom of the off-ramp, I heard the sound of a supercar.
There it was, in my rearview mirror: a black Lamborghini Aventador with a SAVITCH 1 license plate. I slid down in my seat and willed the light to turn green. The Lamborghini swerved out from behind my car and pulled up alongside it. A hand popped out of the window and waved.
I counted four leopard-print talons.
I looked both ways, jammed my foot onto the gas, and blew through the red light. Nastia did the same. I made a few sharp turns as I headed east through downtown, trying to lose her. Finally, I turned up the hillside road that through Mountain Cemetery and sped along the road through the quiet graves until I came to our usual parking area. But instead of pulling in, I carefully eased the car off the road and parked behind a crumbling marble mausoleum overgrown with blackberry bushes. The car was almost completely hidden from the street.
I picked up my phone and started dialing.
Maya picked up on the first ring. “Lana! Are you okay?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’ve been trying to call you all morning! When no one answered, I went to your house. There were so many fire trucks.” Her voice broke into hysterical sobs. “Oh, Lana!”
“Fire trucks?” I remembered passing fire trucks on the highway.
“I thought you were inside, Lana! I thought you were DEAD. They wouldn’t let me up your driveway. Your house—oh my God. There were so many flames. I’m so sorry.” She broke off and sobbed loudly into the phone.
Arkady. He had done this. Was it revenge for knocking his boss unconscious, or was it on Victor’s orders? I thought about all we had in the house—all the photographs. All the memories. But there was no time to mourn them yet.
“Maya, I need you to pull it together.” I tried to think. I had to protect my dad. I had to protect Maya’s family. But I was being chased at the moment by one of the Real Housewives of Moscow in a three-hundred thousand dollar car, along with her buddies, the crazed Russian assassins. It was time to let Alexander in on my secret—his long-lost cousin was not only a deadbeat who owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Russian gangster, but she was also being chased by armed thugs who wanted to kill her. And her dad. But maybe he could help me.
“Okay, here’s what you’re going to do. You need to call Alexander Ambrose, the guy from last night. He’s my cousin, he’ll help me.” It was only last night. It felt like a million years ago. “He said he’s staying at the Carneros in Napa, so just call the hotel. Then, tell him everything, and tell him to call me. I need his help. Maya—someone’s trying to hurt me and my dad. He’s in a lot of danger.”
“Okay, okay, but we first need to call the cops.”
“No! No cops. Please, Maya. Just find Alexander, and it’ll be okay.”
“What about you?”
I had no plan. I needed to get somewhere I could hide, but without Nastia following me. “I am going to lay low until it’s safe, I guess. Then I’ll just…I don’t know.”
“Come to my house.”
“What if they follow me? No way.”
“You’re right. I know! Go to Barstow. My cousin Angelica lives there. She and her husband are in the Air Force. They have guns and stuff. I’ll call them and let them know you’re coming.”
It was better than sleeping in my car at the cemetery. “Where’s Barstow?” She rattled off a few freeway numbers and then read me their address but a loud engine growl echoing through the empty woods drowned out her voice. The growl became a roar in the stillness of the graveyard. I ducked down in my seat as a black Lamborghini shot past me and disappeared down the road. A tornado of leaves exploded in its wake.
When I could breathe again, I picked up my phone, but it was dead.
And my phone charger was still in my Golf.
And my Golf was parked in front of my house.
What was left of it.
***
The road was quiet again. It was time to go. But I had an overw
helming, urgent need to see her and say good-bye. That grave was the only mother I had.
I took a deep breath and opened the car door, dragging my backpack with me. My shoulder throbbed every time I took a step. The cold morning mist was rising up from the ground and it hung in the air as high as my waist. The boughs of the oaks that dotted the hillside swayed in silent gusts of wind. Sunlight glinted through clouds streaking east over the valley.
At her grave, I dropped to my knees in the damp dirt with my chest heaving. The adrenaline drained away and I was filled with an inexplicable sense of calm. It’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay. A cloud passed overhead and a shadow swept across the Abbott plot.
My eyes were drawn up to the inscription on Caroline and Bart’s pristine white headstone.
My dove in the clefts of the rock,
in the hiding places on the mountainside,
show me your face, let me hear your voice;
for your voice is sweet, and your face is lovely.
I suddenly remembered something Señora Isadora said, in French. Something besides the part about my marraine. What was it?
Cherchez. She wanted me to cherchez something. But find what?
I closed my eyes and it was as if I was listening to a perfect playback in my head. I heard the Señora’s voice as though she was whispering in my ear: “Cherchez la colombe!”
Find the colombe. But what did “colombe” mean? I wracked my memory. Come on, French class!
Colombia?
Column?
Colony?
Maybe a colony. No, an animal. Maybe a bird.
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