by Maureen Tan
Andrew Jax tucked a finger between his neck and the stiff collar of his shirt, gave the fabric a tug, then took another swig on his bottle of PeptoBismol.
Weddings and funerals should be banned, he thought. Damn priests should let everyone live in sin and die in peace.
The organ music, sweetly and softly insipid for the past half hour, swelled into the chords of “The Wed ding March.”
Jax glanced wildly around, seeking an exit.
Jamie McMurphy, Jax’s best man, gripped his arm with fingers strong enough to cling to vertical surfaces and pointed past the chapel’s half-dozen pews.
“Your bride.”
Millie stood at the end of the aisle, wide-eyed, waxen, not moving. Her eyes met Jax’s, and she managed one of her brave little smiles.
Jax forgot his own fear.
“Millie,” he said clearly. “I love you.”
The music reached crescendo.
She stepped toward him. Drew closer. And closer.
A shot rang out.
A red stain bloomed on the white lace between her breasts.
Slow motion.
Her eyes stretched wide with shock and fear. Her mouth moved wordlessly. Her body collapsed, crum pled forward.
Slow motion.
A shout groaned from his lips. He dove, like a diver through water, arms outstretched, hands grasping— His finger was still on the trigger of the gun he held. Smoke curled lazily from its muzzle.
Slow motion.
Millicent slipped through his arms, past the gun, hit the floor. Droplets of her blood drifted lazily downward, followed the path of her fall, spattered his shoes.
Jax gasped, woke up sweating.
He reached for the fifth of bourbon beside his bed.
* * *
Weeks turned into months.
The days grew cooler and shorter.
Alex officially returned to duty.
The list of suspects crept down to one, who was now in prison on other charges. No confession, but Tommy started to concentrate on other cases. And Joey seemed happier.
* * *
I had nightmares.
Every night, I awoke, perspiring and afraid. Every night, I sought Alex’s hand, threaded my fingers through his just as I had when he lay in intensive care. Then, I’d found more comfort in the warmth of his hand than in the electronics measuring his every breath and marking his every heartbeat. Now, night after night, I lay beside him in the dark, holding his hand and finding only fear.
* * *
Thanksgiving Day.
Tommy and his wife, Ginnie, had invited us for dinner. They lived in a sprawling Victorian on Habersham Street, overlooking Whitfield Square. Before we’d got out of the car, Ginnie was at the front door, waving to us. She was wearing an apron over a red blouse and black trousers, and had a baby parked on one ample hip. Another baby was clinging to her leg. She was a big-boned, dark-skinned woman with round cheeks, a cloud of curly hair, and a warm, practical nature. Tommy made no secret about adoring her and their ten-month-old twins, Zach and Tad.
That night, the babies had dinner first, entertaining Alex and me by spreading mashed sweet potatoes and bits of turkey dinner on themselves, each other, their parents, and anything else within range. Then Tommy put them to bed.
We had a delicious meal of turkey and dressing, candied sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and string beans. Afterward, we sat in the living room. I settled onto the camelback sofa beside Alex. Tommy and Ginnie sat opposite in a pair of overstuffed armchairs. Tommy leaned toward Alex.
“Did you catch the FBI bulletin on—”
Ginnie reached over and gave Tommy’s ear a quick twist.
“Don’t you dare talk shop in my house on Thanksgiving Day! Especially when we have company. You either, Alex Callaghan! Or there won’t be any dessert for either of you.”
Tommy rubbed his ear.
“Yes,’m.”
Alex wasn’t so easily cowed. He lifted an eyebrow.
“What’d you make?”
“Chess pie.”
Something nearing ecstasy touched Alex’s face.
“I’ll behave. I promise. Though I am obliged to tell you that blackmail is a crime in this jurisdiction.”
Ginnie laughed and told him he was impossible.
* * *
The three of them talked as old friends are wont to do, revisiting childhood, telling stories about youthful exploits and adult experiences, and chatting about events held in common. I listened, limiting my tales to a dozen years of childhood and a few more of university. Beyond that, I shared nothing. I had nothing to share.
The conversation shifted to Christmas plans.
Ginnie, who knew only that I lived with Alex, came from England, and wrote novels, said: “How about you, Jane? Will you spend the holidays with us or go back home?”
I sidestepped the unintentional land mines.
“I don’t know yet. Depends more on schedule than anything else.”
“It must be hard to juggle friends and family when they’re spread over two continents.”
I nodded, hoping she was satisfied, hoping to avoid—
“Your folks must miss you,” Tommy said.
Too late.
Memory provided razor-sharp fragments from childhood. A foot clad in a polished leather boot, jamming down on an accelerator pedal. A silver crucifix dangling from a rearview mirror, glinting in the sun. Twisted, clawing branches. Sticky blobs of crimson sliding slowly down the windshield, blotting out a cloudless sky.
A long, dark glimpse down the barrel of a gun.
Then, as it had since the day my parents died, memory ended.
“Do you have any other family?” Ginnie asked.
Innocent assumptions were turning ambivalent responses into lies. Lies that I would have to remember and sustain. It was easier in the long run to tell the truth.
“In fact, I don’t have any family. My parents died when I was six.”
Alex stirred beside me, reached out and briefly caressed the angle of my jaw with his fingers. Love and sympathy from a man who valued family above all else.
“I’m so sorry,” Ginny said. “How—?”
Another fragment sliced its way to the surface.
Try to remember! the men kept saying. They spoke quietly, but I knew they were angry. I must have seen something, they kept saying. Didn’t I want to help them catch the bad people?
I shook my head, forcing away memory, discouraging more questions.
“Just like Alex’s parents. In a driving accident.”
* * *
Later that evening, I returned from the bathroom to find Alex standing in the living room, holding a fussing baby. Alex’s head was bent, his attention completely on the child. He shifted his weight from foot to foot and sang a lullaby softly and unselfconsciously, his usual drawl overlaid with a hint of brogue.
“Sure a little bit of heaven fell from out the sky one day,
And it nestled in the ocean, in a spot so far away.
And when the angels found it, sure it looked so sweet and fair . . .”
I lingered, unseen, in the dark hallway, thinking of home and family, of love and belonging. For a moment, perhaps two, I imagined a future. Then I remembered how quickly it could be taken away.
4
Three-forty A.M.
Two days after Thanksgiving.
I lay in bed, wide awake. Again.
Beside me, Alex snored softly, his naked body snuggled against the curve of my bare back, his breath tickling the nape of my neck. Through the balcony windows opposite our bed, the sky was clear, the stars bright. I watched the sky until the threat of dawn diluted the darkness. Exhausted, I nestled my head into the pillows, still reluctant to close my eyes. I was afraid of the images sleep would bring.
Against my will, my eyelids drooped. I slept.
The ringing phone awakened me before another nightmare did.
Eight A.M. on Alex’s day off.
Alex muttered something obscene, untangled an arm from the sheets, and nuzzled my cheek as he reached past me. He snagged the receiver from the nightstand, then propped himself up on an elbow.
“Callaghan here.”
He stretched the second word into two syllables. Heah. For months, I’d resisted the instinct to imitate his cadences, mimic his speech. This was not an undercover assignment. Survival didn’t depend on my ability to vanish, chameleon-like, into another identity.
I sighed, switched on the bedside lamp. Early-morning phone calls to the chief of police generally signaled disaster.
“Hang on,” Alex said. “It’s for you.”
But instead of handing me the receiver, he held it for a moment against his bare thigh.
“A relative. Cockney accent. Young, perky, and female. She giggled, then asked for Cousin Jane. Y’know, it’s a real pity to waste that kind of talent on a sleepy cop.”
I grimaced.
“Probably a trainee. Practicing.”
He shook his head as he gave me the phone. Then he settled back into the bed.
I put the receiver to my ear.
“Jane Nichols.”
I heard a click. The woman with whom Alex had spoken was no longer on the line. The voice was Douglas MacDonald’s. Very proper. Very British. Very familiar.
“I could use you here, Janie. Will you come?”
The decision was made in the space of a heartbeat.
“Yes,” I said.
I desired Alex. Perhaps even loved him. But I didn’t have the innocent optimism that life with him required. I doubted I’d ever had it. For months, I’d pretended. For Alex’s sake. And mine. I’d tried to believe in happily ever after. But I knew better.
* * *
Mac spoke for a few minutes, gave me some preliminary instructions. Then he said: “I’ll put Miss Marston on the line to make the arrangements.”
A stranger’s voice with a strong hint of north London and an efficient, unemotional delivery gave me numbers and departure times of flights from Atlanta to London. Computer keys clicked in the background as we spoke.
“Your reservations are confirmed,” she said finally, and told me to pick up the prepaid tickets at the counter.
I thanked her, returned the phone to its cradle, and turned to Alex.
Tiny lines had formed between his eyebrows and wrinkled his forehead.
“Leaving again?”
I nodded.
“This afternoon. My flight’s at two forty-five. Out of Atlanta.”
He began to speak again, hesitated. Then he looked squarely at me and said what was on his mind.
“Are you coming back?”
Once again, he surprised me with his perceptions. A dangerous man. One best left behind. Forgotten. I considered how to answer him and settled on the truth. Cruel, but there was more cruelty in expressing an ambivalenceI didn’t feel, in offering hope where I knew there was none.
“No, I don’t think so.”
Pain crinkled the corners of his eyes.
“That’s kind of what I thought.”
Resignation in the quietly spoken words.
He turned away, pulled the blankets up over his shoulders.
I wanted to wrap my arms around him, to tell him I was sorry.
Instead, I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
A faded indigo shirt lay in a huddle beside my pillow. Embroidered at the top of each sleeve in violet, purple, and white was the shield-shaped insignia of the Savannah P.D. Comfortingly soft, the shirt was one of my favorites. Alex’s, too. He liked to reclaim it in the middle of the night. I tried not to think about that as I pulled on the shirt and buttoned it. When I stood, it hung well below my hips.
I left the bedroom, padded down the back stairs to the kitchen, put on a pot of coffee, and felt more alone than I had in a long time.
5
The airport clock read 6:45 A.M.
I stood at the edge of the holiday crowd gathered around the luggage carousel, watching an elderly woman. Her tweedy outfit, in shades of heather and cream, was shapeless and practical. Although she was not particularly small, her posture suggested fragility. She and I had met at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport and spoken briefly.
“Grammy Wiggins,” she’d said, her voice touched with a Scot’s burr. “Everyone calls me Grammy Wiggins.”
In Atlanta, she’d talked to anyone within earshot, repeating what she had told me. She’d visited a new grandchild in Bermuda, then spent a few days in Atlanta with an old friend, and wasn’t the sunshine just lovely. Now she was going home to England. To Brighton, actually. She carried a photo of a fat-cheeked infant, halted the movement of passengers in rows 10 to 27 onto the plane by showing the photo first to the steward posted by the open cockpit door, then to the stewardess standing at the curtain between first and second class.
We’d shared the flight, but not adjoining seats, to Heathrow. She’d preceded me off the plane and positioned herself beside the luggage carousel, between and slightly in front of two middle-aged men. They were executive types, distinctly American, traveling together. They probably had mothers her age.
Grammy Wiggins was not so unsubtle as to actually ask for their help.
Her lips came together in a tight line, her jaw clenched. She made a valiant effort to retrieve her own bag, reached out with hands gloved in buttery calfskin, grabbed at the handle of a battered, hard-shelled suitcase, and held on to it for two shaky steps. The maneuver ran her into the businessman on her left. She released her suitcase with a little cry that was equal parts frustration and pain. The carousel carried her suitcase out of reach.
On its next trip past, her suitcase was snagged by one of the Americans. The two men retrieved their own luggage, then moved toward customs with the elderly woman installed protectively between them.
Obviously determined to keep up with her companions, she lifted her chin, bravely struggling to match their pace. One of her hands clung to the arm of the man on her left. The other hand clutched a voluminous tapestry bag overflowing with knitting needles, skeins of bulky forest-green yarn, and a half-finished sweater.
With a heartfelt sigh, I readjusted my carry-on bag so that its strap wouldn’t bite into my shoulder. Then I pulled my suitcase from the rotating belt.
English customs was a madhouse. Lines of squalling children, exhausted parents, and long-suffering business travelers stretched raggedly from each station. The Americans, compelled to abandon their charge for their own queue, first bullied her to the front of the line reserved for British subjects. She smiled gratefully and went so far as to pat one of the men gently on the cheek.
The customs agent should have been alarmed by such overt grandmotherliness. Instead, he waved her through his checkpoint with little more than a cursory glance at her possessions.
I shook my head and sighed again. There were officials in Atlanta and London who had much to answer for. An elderly woman, traveling on a crudely forged passport, had boarded an international flight carrying the components of a bomb.
X-ray scanning in Atlanta should have caught her. But she understood the system, knew its flaws. More important, she understood human nature and knew that the very old and very young are generally treated with indulgence and condescension.
She had waited until the security area was mobbed, its personnel pressured to move passengers efficiently through the checkpoint. Then, as she’d stepped forward in the long line, she’d deliberately snagged her toe on the suitcase in front of her and sprawled headlong, flinging balls of woolly forest-green yarn from her open tapestry bag.
Passengers and security officers scrambled to rescue her, helped her to her feet, examined her for damage, and watched solicitously as she made her way through the checkpoint. Most of her escaped yarn was retrieved, returned to her bag, and x-rayed.
My job was to stand on the far side of the security gate, thumbing through my ticket folder, waiting to act as a helpful bystander if
no one else volunteered. I wasn’t needed.
One fuzzy ball had rolled through the walk-through security gate, passing below the level scanned by the metal detector. A security officer wielding a hand-held metal detector paused in his examination of a lean, bowlegged man wearing jeans, pointy-toed boots, and a saucer-sized silver belt buckle. In one smooth movement, the officer bent, scooped up the ball of yarn with his free hand, and affected a posture that suggested the presence of a basketball hoop. As the open tapestry bag cleared the scanner, he made the shot and landed the yarn in the bag. The cowboy said, “Two points.”
Grammy Wiggins’s tumble had propelled another ball of yarn through the narrow space between the walk-through security gate and the bag scanner. It rolled along the linoleum floor until it bumped up against the foot of a grey-haired Atlanta cop. He sat at a small table near a frozen-yogurt stand, cardboard coffee cup in hand, watching the people passing through the security area. He abandoned his coffee, picked up the yarn, walked over to the elderly woman, and leaned in close. After a moment of conversation, he tucked the yarn into her bag, showed her to the chair he’d just vacated, and spoke into his walkie-talkie. Within a few minutes, Grammy Wiggins was settled into a wheelchair and whisked to the departure gate.
She boarded the airplane and, throughout the flight, added row after row of stitches onto the tubular body of the bulky sweater she was knitting. Beneath the first row of yarn was a thick needle made from a length of flexible linear charge. At the core of one of the balls that had rolled through security was a timing device. The lethal combination—minus a key step—was assembled within minutes in the privacy of the washroom, taken back to the cabin, and set.
The elderly woman disembarked in London, but left the bomb beneath her seat. The aircraft and many of its passengers continued on to Copenhagen. If she had been a terrorist, the flight would not have reached its final destination.
* * *
As Grammy Wiggins cleared customs and hobbled out of sight, I joined the only short line in the complex. Though a half dozen pilots and stewardesses were ahead of me, the line moved rapidly. Within minutes, I handed my passport and foreign-office-issued identification to a young man. He had the muscles of a bodybuilder, close-cropped ash blond hair, and a smile that conveyed more enthusiasm than his job required. He looked as if he might be old enough to shave.