Then, the oil truck is past and my windshield is full of corn. The car bounces, jounces, skids to a stop amid dead brown stalks, each a couple of feet high. The Firebird lurches and groans, shifts a bit, and finally stops.
Eve sits next to me wide eyed, clutching her chest. I grab her arm.
“Eve!”
She shrieks in alarm and throws herself at me. I stumble out of the car and around to her side, grab her and pull her to my chest. It feels like her heart is going to explode through mine. She takes quick breaths and I’m afraid she’s going to start hyperventilating. Jesus. I pull Eve closer and stroke her hair, smooth it to her head. I hear shouting and here comes the oil man in his coveralls, yelling.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“My brakes failed,” I shout back.
He stumbles to a stop. “No shit. How’d that happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah,” Eve manages.
“I’m going to take a look.”
“Careful now,” the oil man says.
I crouch down. I’m not going to try crawling under a car with no brakes and no way to chock the wheels, but it doesn’t take much looking. The master cylinder has been sabotaged. Somebody punched a hole clean through it. I rock back on my heels and stand up, my head throbbing.
“What is it?” says Eve.
“Hole in the master cylinder. It gave me pressure long enough to drive down here, then gave out when the last of the fluid leaked out. I have no way to tell when it was done, damn it.”
Oil truck me scratches his head. “Ya’ll need a ride?”
“No, thanks.”
“I should call the police, then,” he says.
Oh. Shit. I’m on parole, I’m not supposed to leave the fucking state, except on business. Great.
“No,” I say, quickly. “Thanks, we’ve got this. Right, Eve?”
She already has her phone out. Calling her assistant, I think.
I grin. Oil man hesitates, eyeing me. Please, just leave. Finally he turns.
“Okay then. Hell of a thing. I guess you’re just lucky, then. Freak accident.”
He turns and walks back up to his oil truck, gets inside, and drives off. It snorts diesel exhaust as it rolls away into the distance. I turn back to Eve.
“Yeah,” she says, reading the sign into the phone. “Hurry. I know, I’m sorry.”
She hangs up, and huffs.
“My assistant is coming.”
“Good. Just pray a cop doesn’t roll up. I’m not supposed to be here. A parole violation would ruin my day.”
“Oh. Great.”
I shrug.
Half an hour later, we’re sitting on the Firebird’s bumper and her assistant rolls up in a fucking Plymouth Voyager, I shit you not. At this point, I don’t care. It could be a goddamn Volkswagen Beetle, as long as I can get out of here. Eve makes arrangements for a tow.
I look back at my car. My Dad’s car.
Now it’s personal, motherfucker.
I crawl into the back of the van. Eve gets in with me, instead of riding up front, and settles against me, her arm around mine.
“Hey now,” her assistant says.
Eve snorts. “Alicia, this is Victor.”
“Hello,” she says, peering at me in the mirror. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“It’s all lies.”
She smirks. “I hope not. Guess I have to ride you all back up home, huh?”
“Yeah,” Eve yawns.
“I want pancakes.”
They both glare at me.
“What happened?” Alicia asks.
“Somebody punctured the master cylinder on my car. They wanted to catch me off guard. Make it look like the brakes failed.”
“You’re sure somebody did that on purpose?”
I nod. “Had to be. It’s a one in a million shot to…” I trail off.
“Victor?” Eve says, rising as I sit up next to her. She waits, biting her lip.
“My father died in a car accident,” I say, calmly. “His brakes failed and a milk truck from a dairy farm up the road hit him at an intersection.”
The whole car is quiet for a while.
“Victor,” Eve says, very softly. “Did I ever tell you what happened to my mother?”
“No. I never asked. I didn’t want to… I thought it would be painful.”
Eve stares at nothing and murmurs, “A car accident.”
I lean forward, fold my hands in my lap, and stare down at the floor. Fury burns in my lungs like hot smoke. I scrub my hands through my hair.
“I need access to Amsel’s personnel files. You can do that, Eve.”
“Yes. I just need a computer.”
She chews her lip. She always does that when she’s thinking, or upset. It’s cute. I pull her close to me and she starts shaking. She was in that trough between the adrenaline release and the crash, and now it’s hitting her hard. She squeezes me back, her eyes shockingly wide. Her assistant keeps eyeing me in the rear view mirror.
“Are we going back to the house? I’d like to go home today. I haven’t seen my family in over twenty-four hours.”
“We might be in a lot of trouble,” I say, calmly. “I think we should stay away from the estate.”
“Come with me, then,” she says, without missing a beat.
I shrug. Eve doesn’t protest.
Her eyes close, and she sleeps on my shoulder. She didn’t get much sleep last night, that’s for sure. After a rush like that, it’s natural to crash out. It hits me, too. After a few minutes of violent shaking as that I almost died realization settles in, I start nodding off along with her. The next time I open my eyes, Eve is still asleep, it’s mid afternoon and we’re caught in traffic. In the suburbs. This Alicia must live a ways away from the estate, closer to the city. I’ve never been overly fond of this place. It’s got all the crowding and congestion and stale air of the city and exactly none of the personality. It feels like a ten minute drive takes about two hours, and then we’re pulling into a driveway in front of a cookie cutter house in a newly minted subdivsion that wasn’t here when I went away.
Eve stirs, holds my hand as we step out and stretch. Her assistant leads us inside.
Then the kids show up. They must be four and five, a boy and girl, tending towards chubby like their mother.
“These are my kids,” Alicia says, hesitantly. “Hunter and Ashley.”
The kids seem fascinated by Eve. They crowd around her.
“Are you mom’s boss?” the boy asks.
“Um,” Eve says, visibly nervous. Kids always rattled her nerves. “Yes.”
“Shoo, kids, mommy has work to do.” She turns to us. “I have a home office. We can access the personnel files from there.”
The home office turns out to be an unused third bedroom, half packed with school supplies and kid desks. Eve locks us in and Alicia sits down to bring up the corporate VPN, and switches seats so Eve could log in. I stand behind her as she waits for it to connect.
“What are we looking for?”
“Pull up your father’s personnel file.”
It takes her a minute to find it.
Of course, it’s blank. No commendations, no write ups, no notes, no evaluations, nothing. Fortunately that’s not what I’m looking for.
“Nothing here,” Eve notes.
“Everything is here,” I say, pointing to the screen with my finger. “Look. He came on board when I was…” I do some quick math in my head. “Nine.”
“So?”
“So, my father died in a car accident when I was twelve.”
Eve’s voice goes cold. “Vic, not everything bad in your life ties back to my father.”
“Your mom died in a car accident. What kind of car accident?”
“I don’t…” she trails off. “We never spoke about it. If I asked he’d give me a few sentences, and if I bothered him…”
My hands rest on her shoulders.
I can feel her shudder all the way up my arms. I squeeze, gently. She takes a deep breath. I can’t help myself and start playing with her hair. Annoyed, she tugs at my hand, but not very hard.
“That doesn’t mean much by itself,” Alicia says.
“Does he have a private office?” I ask. I leave out in my house.
“Yes, back at our house in Philadelphia. He never sold it. He lives there most of the time, now.”
I turn to Alicia. “Do you know where he is right now?”
“I’m not his assistant, but he’s going to some kind of a function tonight. He won’t be in town.”
“Okay,” I announce. “Just a little breaking and entering.”
Eve shrugs her shoulders under my hands. “I have a key.”
“Oh. Not so much the breaking, then. Just the entering.”
Eve giggles.
“Have you two eaten today?”
Eve starts snickering to herself. I can’t help it, I laugh a little, too.
“I’m serious. Kitchen. Now.”
There’s a command in her tone that I can’t ignore, for some reason. The two of us end up in her little kitchen, eating fresh pancakes while her kids watch cartoons in the next room over. They seem a little young to be on their own. Maybe half an hour later their father rolls up, and is startled to see Eve in the kitchen when he walks in. He doesn’t seem to know what to make of me. Alicia takes him aside to talk with him privately, away from us and the kids. I step away to make a phone call about my car. I have the towing company load her on a wrecker and bring her up to a garage I know that works on old General Motors cars. I’d do the repairs myself, but I don’t think I’m going to find the time in the next few hours. Once that’s done I sit at the table and feed Eve bites of pancake from my plate while she almost sits in my lap. We’re like teenagers again.
No matter what happens, at least I have this, right now.
It gets late faster than I’d like. I really don’t want Eve’s poor assistant tied up in this, so I ask her to drive us to a rent-a-car place where I pick up a nondescript Hyundai and we drive into the city. Eve’s old place isn’t actually all that far from mine, maybe a twenty minute walk, but a much nicer part of the city, all ancient row houses, big Victorians. True to her word, Eve has a key and we walk right in the front door. She locks it behind us and I lead the way, slowly. There’s no security system, or anything like that, but we leave the lights off anyway. It’ll be dark soon, and it’s already dark in the house. As I walk around, it strikes me how sterile everything is. This looks like one of those tour houses, where they invited people to walk through and gawk at old lamps. From the way Eve navigates the house, I’d say nothing has changed since she was a kid. She takes me around the corner from the entrance to a large room that takes up a whole corner of the house.
It reminds me, vaguely, of my father’s study, except the antiques are all fake. It takes a practiced eye, or growing up in a three hundred year old house, to pick up on these things. No computer, at least none sitting out.
“I was never really allowed in here,” Eve whispers.
I don’t know why she’s whispering, but I can see the fear making her tremble.
“What are we looking for?”
I shrug and start pulling at his drawers. Everything inside is inhumanly neat, like something out of an office supply catalog. Drawer after drawer.
The bottom one is fake, sort of. There’s a safe bolted into the drawer itself. I crouch down, poke at it. I have no clue what the combination might be. Damn it.
Eve taps my shoulder.
“Look.”
She’s pulled a scrapbook down from one of the shelves. She starts flipping through it.
Newspaper clippings?
I’m a little surprised to see anyone keeps stuff like this anymore. Eve whips through the pages in a flurry, skimming the articles glued to the pages. Finally she stops.
“This one is about my mother,” she says, calmly. “Here’s her picture.”
From the look on her face I can see she hasn’t seen many photographs of her mother.
“Police said it was a freak accident,” she says. Her voice tightens. “Her brakes failed and she hit a tree.”
“Her brakes,” I say.
“Jesus Christ,” Eve murmurs.
It startles me. She’s usually so proper in her speech, at least when we’re not, ah, in flagrante dilecto.
“Do you think…”
“That your father murdered your mother, then my father, and then tried to kill me, or us, the same way? Yeah, I do.”
“These articles don’t make any sense,” she says, sitting in a side chair to go over them. “I mean, the articles make sense but they’re randomly chosen. They’re from the business section, obituaries, there’s an article here about a missing person…” she trails off.
“It’s not a scrapbook,” I say, softly. “It’s a trophy case.”
She looks up. “What? Oh my God, what?”
I swallow. “Eve, I think we better get out of here. Bring that.”
She nods and tucks it under her arm.
A shadow passes by the window. I grab Eve and pull her down to her knees with me, and creep along the floor. I can feel her heart hammering against me and she presses into my side. Just someone walking outside, I think. Then I hear the front door open and freeze.
Whispers pass back and forth. I can’t understand them.
Oh, they’re loud enough, but they’re in Russian.
I look at Eve. She looks at me. I motion for her to wait, and she goes stock still. I listen to the creak of feet on old floorboards. Three shadows, three men. I edge closer to the hallway, ready to spring.
All at once there’s a gun in my face, a sleek black automatic with along cylindrical suppressor.
“Stand up,” the gunman says, in lightly accented English. He’s wearing a ski mask, as are his two friends. One of them aims at Eve.
I put my hands up and stand.
“Put the book on the desk,” the other one says, indicating with his gun.
Eve rests the scrapbook on the desk and puts her hands up.
“Very good. You are coming with us now. Quietly.”
One walks in front and holds the door while the other two walk behind. I can practically feel the guns pointed at my back. There’s a nondescript gray van sitting out front, idling on the street. If somebody would just look they’d see three men with very illegal guns leading us outside, but in cities people have a way of not seeing, if there’s anybody to see at all. The street looks deserted. They push Eve in first, then me. I sit next to her and two gunmen sit a cross from us, pistols resting on their laps, ready to shoot us. The third drives.
“So,” I say. “Your place, or mine?”
“Shut up.”
Turns out they’re going to my place. I don’t mean the apartment. I know as soon as I realize the route we’re taking.
They’re taking us back to the estate.
Chapter Twenty
Evelyn
Oh God, oh God, Oh God.
Victor doesn’t move. His face is a frozen mask. I know my own is just as still, but I’m losing my mind. Please, not now. Don’t let me have so short a time with him and take him away again. I press against him as much as I can.
I don’t remember the ride back to the estate being so short. It feels like five hours. It feels like five minutes. When the van doors open into the dark and they push me out I stumble up the front steps, along with Victor, and into the house.
My father is sitting in a side chair in the foyer, as still as a statue. He might as well be cut from marble. Seated across from him, smoking a cigar, is a massive slab of a man, bald but with hairy hands and thick sausage fingers. Every one has at least one ring, and he’s wearing gold chains around his neck. Big, ostentatious ones. From the description that Victor gave me, he can only be this Vitali person. He looks at me with something his eyes that makes me shiver. I feel like I’m being undressed. His expressi
on goes flat when my father turns and looks at him over steepled fingers.
“There you are,” Father says, in his usual expressionless tone.
“Hello, Martin,” Victor says, his voice edged with malice.
“You,” Father says. “You don’t know how to behave, do you?”
“Out,” says Vitali.
His three men leave, but Vitali pulls out a gun and rests it on his thigh.
“Do not be getting any ideas, boy.”
“What’s going on here?” Victor demands. He looks from one to the other. “What the hell?”
“You’ve been played,” Vitali chuckles.
“I was willing to let this farce continue. Now it must come to an end. This is your fault, Eve. I want you to understand that.”
I swallow.
“What is?”
“If you’d done as you were told, I’d have been willing to let you run off with him, until he was dealt with. Now you go behind my back, and force my hand.”
“You two are working together?” Victor says, incredulous.
“No,” Father says. “Vitali works for me.”
There’s something wrong with his voice. Father’s diction and enunciation were always so perfect, so practiced. He sounds like a voice coach when he speaks, but his voice… slips.
He says something to Vitali in Russian and they both start laughing. When he switches back to English, he has an accent.
“You,” he looks at Victor. “You are no end of trouble. So unpredictable. I should have known giving you two any time alone was a mistake, yes. I cannot have you two going behind our backs, trying to stop me. I had planned a more sophisticated means to deal with our problem, but you force my hand and brute force will have to do.”
I feel my legs shaking, trying to collapse under me.
“The problem is this. When Karen died, everything passed to you, as per her will, as Victor had been disinherited. Somehow she grew…” his eyes roll as he searches for the word, “Disenchanted with me and decided she would rather pass all the Amsel holdings to you. Necessitating that I waste years of time working through you. I had hoped to make better use of you. Perhaps even come to trust you, but like your whore mother you are useless and must be gotten rid of.”
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